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David Foster Wallace once famously told the story about how two young fish are swimming
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along merrily when an older fish passes them.
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The older fish, as it passes, asks, Morning boys, how's the water?
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The two young fish keep swimming for a while and then one of them turns and asks the other,
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What the hell is water?
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The point of Wallace's story was to point out that in his words, quote, the most obvious
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important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.
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And I want to talk today about something that is all around us in India.
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And unlike water for the fish, actually makes our lives harder in countless ways.
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And yet it is normalized and we don't talk about it at all.
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I'm talking about the Indian state.
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Our status is functional and fails us in a million ways.
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It doesn't do the things that are supposed to do.
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It gets in our way when we try to make our lives better.
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It has hobbled India's progress and its failure has a humanitarian cost.
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And yet we ignore all this and keep turning to the state for solutions.
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I have long said, in fact, that India's biggest religion is not Hinduism, but the religion
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No matter what problem we are faced with, we turn to our Maibab Sarkar for solutions.
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Even when the Maibab Sarkar caused the problem in the first place.
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Welcome to the seen and the unseen.
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Our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral science.
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Please welcome your host, Amit Barma.
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Welcome to the seen and the unseen.
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My guest today is Subhashish Bhadra, author of a brilliant new book called Cage Tiger,
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How Too Much Government Is Holding Indians Back.
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This is a book that needed to be written and I classify it as an essential book to read
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if you want to understand India today.
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I love reading the book.
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I love the talk I attended where Subhashish spoke about this book.
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And I thought this episode would be mainly about the subject of the book.
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But when we recorded, I found Subhashish to be reflective and wise.
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And the first hour and a half is an intimate conversation about his life that made me reflect
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I loved all of this conversation, the personal, the political, the philosophical, and I think
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But before we get to it, let's take a quick commercial break.
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For most mothers, there are so many silences that deserve to be held together and vocalized
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in safe spaces free of judgment.
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I'm Priya, a stay at home mom of two.
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One day, I decided to call two of my most amazing friends who also happen to be psychologists
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And we decided to chat about just the stuff that goes into being a mom.
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I am a clinical psychologist by profession and a mom of twins.
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It is my deep passion to change conversations around parenting, about parenting within parents.
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My name is Bakul, a clinical psychologist and therapist, and I'm also a mom.
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So what is being a mother like?
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I think these are discourses of the complexity of and richness of being a mom that also needs
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to occupy space to visualize the being of motherhood.
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The Mommie Mixtape is a podcast that attempts to start conversations around motherhood and
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maternal mental health.
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Listen in on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Perspectives from moms who are winging it and winning.
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Subashish, welcome to The Scene on the Unseen.
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So, you know, I'm so delighted that you've written this wonderful book, Cage Tiger.
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As I was telling you over lunch, and I'll tell my listeners again now, circa 2007,
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8, 9, around that time, I wanted to write a book about how India only has political
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freedom, not social and economic freedoms.
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And I even thought of a name for the book, like this is classic book by Lapierre and
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Collins called Freedom at Midnight.
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So I thought I'll call my book Freedom After Midnight and talk about how we don't have
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freedoms after midnight.
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All we got in 1947 was political freedom and not the other kinds and then lay out a litany
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I even sent a proposal to the New India Foundation, Ram turned me down with a very polite letter.
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And that was one of like 50 projects I never got down to doing.
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And I'm so glad, so glad that you've written your book because now that guilt is off me.
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I don't have to write that anymore.
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So thanks a lot for that.
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You possibly should write that book anyway, given that there's so much more to be said
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I don't think one book does justice to that.
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What we were discussing over lunch is kind of incredible how there aren't enough books
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There are barely any books on it or barely anything kind of documenting this period and
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But before we start talking about the book, which I do want to dive into in detail, I'm
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just interested in knowing more about you.
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So you know, tell me a bit about your childhood, where did you grow up?
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Sure, happy to do that.
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So my childhood is an armed forces childhood.
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So my father was in the Navy and for some strange reason, we were able to manage being
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in Delhi for all of that period, most of that period.
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So I grew up fairly living kind of the armed forces life, going to doing the things that
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armed forces kids do and unfortunately or fortunately with a lot of focus on just academics.
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So I come from that kind of a family where the way you were perceived within the family
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was really determined by the kind of academic scores you had.
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In fact, I remember my grandfather when he was on the verge of his last few years and
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when I last went to meet him, he forgot my name, but he remembered my high school grades.
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You're the kid who got that much, right?
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So that was my background, which was a lot of just the usual things that people who call
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themselves the Indian middle class do, which is focusing on academics, extracurriculars
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and all of that, was fortunate to be able to go to St. Stephen's in Delhi study economics.
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At the end of those three years said, I can't do this anymore, I can't study anymore.
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So I decided to work in a McKinsey and company where I worked on projects ranging from pharma
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to steel, et cetera, after which I went to Oxford on the Rhodes Scholarship, studied
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And I think for me that was the life changing experience because at the time I went there,
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the Rhodes must fall movement was at its peak.
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A lot of my peers in the Rhodes Scholar community were involved in all of that.
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So that I think was the transition for me personally from going from being someone who
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really was on that treadmill thinking about academics, thinking about getting ahead in
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life, to thinking about social justice, thinking about things that you don't think about.
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Looking at these peers that I had from other parts of the world who maybe studied physics,
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but were now suddenly studying history of the Middle East and saying that, okay, you
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can kind of open your brain in this way.
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But at the end of those two years, I said, look, India's at a great inflection point.
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I need to come back and participate in this.
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And so that's when I came back, I started working at Omidyar Network, which is a global
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philanthropic organization, helped them set up their vertical on digital identity, data
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privacy, and these kinds of issues.
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One thing led to the another then leading kind of to this book, which we'll talk more
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So if I have to kind of summarize all of that, I'm basically someone who spent almost his
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entire life in the corporate world.
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I am, I belong to that world.
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That's where I've spent eight or nine years of my life, but someone who on the side has
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had a lot of interest in the bigger questions of nation building, which then kind of led
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So you know, I'm going to double click on separate parts of that and kind of dive in
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deeper and I want to double click into your childhood and I'm struck by the word you use
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right at the end where you stressed on belong, where you said you belong to the corporate
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world and we'll talk about your corporate experiences later.
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But I'm curious about that childhood when you're living the army life, you're going
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from place to place and you're meeting different people.
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And you know, an earlier guest on my show, Chuck Gopal or Gopalakrishnan once told me
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that when he was in school, he really wanted to belong so badly.
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And he realized that this was in college, actually, and he realized that for him, the
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way to belong was to be the funny guy, to be the guy with the vice cracks and the jokes
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And I realized that people can find different ways of belonging, even when you might feel
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you don't belong, but maybe you get good in a sport and OK, you've got some kind of tribe
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happening there or you get good and really good in studies and you're in the front
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And like, I'm not sure how much self-reflection any kid does.
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But like today, when you look back, when you think about sort of that shaping of yourself,
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what was that process like?
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Because I would imagine that process comes with two simultaneous anxieties.
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And one is that anxiety of fitting in.
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You want to fit in, you want to be popular in the context of your family.
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The way to get that validation was by academics and etc, etc.
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And so, you have to find yourself, you also got to figure out who you are, what you want
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in life, which is never easy, which sometimes can take a lifetime.
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So what were these two for you?
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Very deep question and certainly things that I have thought about and specifically the
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word belonging, as you rightly said.
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And for me, I always articulated it as this notion of home.
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I still don't have the answer to that.
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And for me, one of those moments when this really hit me home was the place where we
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used to live in Delhi had a five-star hotel right in front of it.
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And for seven, eight years, we never had the wealth to be able to afford that five-star
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In fact, once when I tried to enter, we were blocked by the guards saying that, hey, you
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obviously don't look like people who can afford this place.
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And then when I started working at McKinsey, one of the first things they did was we were
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going kind of for a company offsite and finally happened to live in that hotel.
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So they put us up there and I was actually up all night, not doing anything, but just
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thinking maybe I've made it in life.
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But then I kept going back to that hotel because then I realized, you know what?
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Now I can't go back to that place I used to call home because it's a defense colony.
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So now that I'm out of the defense, my father's retired, et cetera, I can't go back there.
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So for me, therefore, this notion of belonging, I've really struggled with it.
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Places I grew up in in Chanakya Puri in Delhi are places which are obviously not open to
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people who are not from the defense background.
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So I can't go back there.
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For the longest time as a management consultant, I used to travel a lot.
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I used to say my home is my suitcase, right?
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Wherever my suitcase sits is home for me.
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But I have over time at least come to realize that I think belonging for me is a set of
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people and a set of values and where I can find those that resonates with me and that
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feels like I can start putting down roots there.
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So right now I live in Bangalore and I've spent about seven years there and I have
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built an entire life there.
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So for me, that has now become an aspect of belonging.
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But I do believe that for especially people whose kind of parents have grown up with
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transferable jobs, et cetera, that notion of home and belonging, et cetera, can be
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I mean, on the one hand, there is, of course, a romance of, you know, I think it was a
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Marvin Gaye song, wherever I lay my head, that's my home, you know, the constant
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itinerant traveler, as it were.
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And like, I've actually asked this question to many of my guests.
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What is the notion of home?
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And I remember Max Rodenbeck, who used to be the editor of The Economist here.
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So he said, my home is Cairo, but it's not the Cairo of today.
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It's a Cairo of when I grew up.
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So it is really a place in memory, in a sense.
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And I feel conflicted about this, that on the one hand, I can't identify home.
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I can't answer that question.
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You know, Sugata Srinivasaraju uses beautiful phrase on my podcast, rooted cosmopolitanism.
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And I have the cosmopolitanism, but I'm afraid I lost the rootedness.
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And I think it can cut both ways, that in one sense, it can be liberating, that you
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can go anywhere and you can find people like yourself and you can make a comfort zone.
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But on the other hand, for a lot of people, it can take away so many of the anxieties
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of where you are in life and where you belong.
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If you just kind of have that, you know, that rootedness, a place where you are, even if
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it, you know, imprisons you in grooves that were not necessarily of your making.
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And I think therefore finding that anchor in life becomes really important.
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I've seen a lot of my peers find that anchor in professional fulfillment.
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So, you know, they kind of go for it, right?
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And they're working really hard and whatever it be, either recognition or money, whatever
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gives them that anchor.
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For me, that anchor becomes people around me.
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It becomes, for example, in my current life becomes my dog, right?
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You keep something that keeps you anchored in that moment, anchored in what you want
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So I think now my thought in life has shifted from roots and home to anchors and putting
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down these big and small anchors everywhere that on the day you're not feeling at your
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best, still you can go back and say, okay, this is my temporary home.
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There's a lovely Instagram post where you're playing with some dogs.
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And I think the caption is something like never happier than when I'm with dogs.
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And I wanted to ask you about these anchors.
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I mean, I didn't have the word then, but just like, what is your comfort zone?
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Who is a you outside of the work you do in the corporate world or the work you do in
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writing a book or whatever, what is that comfort zone?
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So for me, that comfort zone is the pursuit of happiness.
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What I mean by that is, for example, I have an image in my head that my ideal life is
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where, for example, I'm lying on the couch, reading a book, sipping a warm beverage with
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The pursuit of that idea is honestly what gives me that anchor in life.
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I, again, just to be clear that this whole, my affinity for dogs also comes from a place
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of trauma as while I was growing up, I had a dog and we kind of moved cities and the
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We were moving back to Delhi.
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We couldn't take her with us.
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And of all things I've experienced in life, that's my most traumatic moment was the moment
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of having to give up that dog.
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So this, the ability right now to fulfill that childhood dream of having a dog and taking
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care of it is what really drives me.
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So every day, even after a hard day at work or if things haven't gone right, et cetera,
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to come back and be with that dog is great for me.
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And as you rightly said, right, these are the kind of the smaller things of life.
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Yesterday, when I checked into my Airbnb here, it had an aqua guard.
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And I don't know how many of the people from 20 years ago might remember that tune of the
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aqua guard and you're kind of filling that water.
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And I heard that tune after 20 years.
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And it brought me so much joy to just listen to that and go back in time to some place
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that I perceive to be happier in the rear view mirror.
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So I think for a lot of people my age, I'm 31 at this point, it's that phase in life
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where I think you kind of come to the conclusion that quote unquote, some part of your youth
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is over and now you have to kind of build a life that you want to live for the next 20,
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30 years. And I think people struggle with that.
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And for me, therefore, the change has been in finding a partner, a community,
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whatever else that I can really get along well with.
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And you mentioned when you heard the aqua guard tune, you felt joy.
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And I'm wondering about that because, you know, music from the past may bring back
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memories, may make me feel wistful, may reproduce the emotion of that time and so on and so forth.
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Like, why joy? Do you feel that that past is something beautiful, which has lost forever?
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Look, I think to be fair in the rear view mirror, everything seems good, right?
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So I think it's coming from that place that even when things might have been traumatic,
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things might not have been that pleasant, A, there's obviously selective amnesia that
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you forget the bad parts and you remember the good parts a lot more.
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But more importantly, even things that I believe that you did not have such fond
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memories of in that moment, you still feel a certain amount of ownership.
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You feel a certain amount of ownership over your traumas, over your inadequacies,
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over your mistakes, et cetera. And I think what people go back to is typically
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that place where they have a lot more familiarity. So I think it's that familiarity
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which probably brought the joy listening to that aqua guard music.
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And to take another digression, that term ownership is interesting because
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most people, when you look around them, they don't take ownership. In fact,
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they're not even aware of what they may be feeling at a particular point in time and all
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of that. And I have been more and more in the last few years, perhaps being intentional about
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taking ownership of who I am without being judgmental. So if something makes me sad,
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it makes me sad. If I love something, I love something. And just accept that and don't always,
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this is who you are. And of course you control the ways that you behave, but you are what you are.
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And is that a process that kind of took time? Because some of the things that
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you are claiming ownership of are not easy to, many people would forget them.
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Like I remember, just speaking of trauma, like Amitav Kumar told me a story I keep going back to
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where there was this village he had gone to where at one point there were communal riots
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and every Muslim in the village was slaughtered except one. And there was a guy who kind of
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ran off in one direction. Everybody else went to the fields, including his wife and kids,
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and they all got slaughtered. And I think a few years later Amitava goes back there to see what's
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happened to this guy. And he's got another wife and he's living there and it's a completely normal
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life. And it's like that shit never happened. It's like a defense mechanism. It's perhaps
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something adaptive that we managed to compartmentalize, managed to completely cut it out.
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And I think a lot of people, when they look back on their own lives, whatever
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traumas might have been, or even less wrong words, whatever they might have gone through
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at different points in time, whatever they might have felt, which objectively they are supposed to
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feel ashamed about, they would never have actually owned up to it. Either they don't think about it
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or they think about it in a different way. And I just find that there is a lot of self-awareness
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and courage that it takes to actually take ownership. So can you tell me about that process
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for you of reflecting on yourself and figuring out all of this and saying, yeah, okay, you know,
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I'll own it. Got it. So here's how I think about it. I mean, all of us have skeletons in the cupboard.
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All of us have done things, experienced things that we're either not proud of or we would rather
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forget. And same with me. I think for the longest time at the end of just beat myself up over some
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of these issues. And it kind of sent me in a downward spiral where at some point I reached
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a point where I was self-harming, where I had to seek professional help. And this was fairly early
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in my life, which was in the early years of college. The way I would think of it is that
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I think we all are fairly good at being kind to others, especially people that we love.
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We forgive their mistakes. Something I also write about in the book about how we as a culture,
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as a community are taught about being forgiving, about being accommodative, et cetera. But sometimes
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we're not that accommodative for ourselves. So in my, again, in the world that I come from,
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which is more of the corporate world, I think a lot of people really have so much anxiety about
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their careers. Sometimes they beat themselves up. Did I make a wrong move? Should I not have taken
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this job? Should I have taken that job? Should I have prioritized money? Should I not have
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prioritized money? And people really take all of these questions and think about it a lot more in
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a way that affects both their quality of life, but more importantly, their ability to do what
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they're doing in that moment. So the past several years, at least the way I have found my comfort
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zone through all of that is to be extremely intentional and be extremely accommodative
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of my challenges. So obviously like anyone else, I've also made lots of career transitions,
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career choices, et cetera. And I try not to beat myself up over them, but rather take them as
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at the very worst learning experience. Fortunately or unfortunately, most of the people who, for
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example, you will be listening to this podcast in a country like India come from extreme privilege.
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Fortunately, I think the worst case scenario for many of us is actually not that bad in the grand
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scheme of things. So I try to think about how can we use that privilege both for our own happiness,
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that look, we have the risk appetite to be able to experiment, but at the same time,
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how do we channelize it in a way that we're not beating ourselves over something that happened
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in the past. So for me, therefore that journey honestly took many years. I remember the first
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time I probably had to see our go on medication was about 2009 and it was almost a decade long
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journey. It came up out in little bouts, but thankfully what I've also had the fortune of
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turn to, I think the conversation around mental health over the past few years has become far
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more mainstream than where it was, nowhere close to where it should be. But if I look back at how
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people in my community, my family, et cetera, approach in 2009 versus how they approached it
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maybe two months back is extremely different. So I think we kind of getting there and from a very
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personal point of view, I just feel that sometimes being stuck in the past is nobody wins. You
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traumatize yourself. So I'm sure that gentleman would have thought about that a lot when he
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decided to start a new family, but if there's nothing he can do about it, there's nothing he
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can. And this process that you describe of beginning to love yourself, and I guess it
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can happen in two ways. And one is that you lift yourself up and you do everything with
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intentionality and you become the person you want to be. And then you can love yourself. And
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then the loving is easy, but the doing is hard. And the other way, and I'm just sinking aloud here
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is that the doing is so hard that you don't really manage to do it, but you love yourself
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anyway, because you're like, okay, with all my flaws and fucked upness and whatever,
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you know, I'll take it. I'm trying my best and that's all I can do.
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Was it easy for you to arrive at that space where you could love yourself?
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It's very difficult because so much of what my community's image of me was rooted in very
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tangible achievements. So I had, for example, in 2009, I stood first in the boards, right? And
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that was the watershed moment of my life. Suddenly I have like 10 media channels in my house fighting
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to interview me and I'm going in a car and being chased by another journalist's car and all of
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that. And throughout all of that, I'm thinking, you know, when am I ever going to experience this
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in life again? This is like the peak fame that I will probably ever experience. I'm not going to
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have like 10 news channels chasing me. And I remember that evening, one of the news channels
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that I was giving the interview to at that point, the journalist said, Oh, you must feel like Brad
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Pitt. And I said, unfortunately, yes, but only for a day. And for me, therefore my, and then other
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things happened. I also did, I stood first in the CAT exam. And then again, that show happened all
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over again, getting the Rhodes scholarship and all of that. It's a lot of kind of type A things
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plotted all over my CV. So society's image of me was that, which is why when I've, I have made
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somewhat unconventional choices, which was for example, to move into the social impact space
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early in my career, et cetera. It's left people around me a lot more confused. A lot of people,
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in fact, recently I posted something on LinkedIn and the gentleman commented that it's tragic to
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see you waste your life like this and waste your potential like this. And that gets, I mean, those
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voices do get to me at some point, but I think the way to, that I have at least thought about it is
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that whatever you might have achieved in life would have, is an outcome. It's not the input,
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right? So whatever good things happened in my life, and if I even look back to them happened
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because I was a certain way. So I think it's that way of life that one has to preserve a lot more
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than the actual external markers. And so for me, it was important to identify what are these value
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systems that have given me joy in the past and then saying, okay, I'm going to think a lot more,
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I'm going to be a lot more intentional about these value systems rather than the outcomes that those
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value systems led to. So to summarize all of that, I think what's really important, at least
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my reflection of what is really important is to not let yourself be defined by things that are
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less in your control, but to define yourself through a set of values that then are far easier
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for you to measure and far easier for you to control. So if I measure myself or my self images
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based on my professional successes, it's largely not in my control. Most of those things were a
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chance of pure luck, but I can control things like, you know, how I interact with those around me.
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How do I spend my days? What are the, you know, how do I approach my relationships? What are
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the values I hold here? And those are things within my control. And I think that gives me a
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lot more agency in all of this, because I watch a lot of Bollywood movies. I go back to this
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Bollywood movie, which I watched in mid 2000 called Door by Nagesh Kukunur. And in that,
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there's a dialogue that look, if you have the, and I'm doing a very poor translation, but if you have
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the guts to make choices, you should also have the guts to live by the consequences of those choices.
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And I think that is something I keep reminding myself of, that we make so many choices every
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day, which friends to keep, which jobs to take from the consequential to the trivial.
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And I think what becomes really important is for us to say, you know what, I'm going to
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see this through, and I'm going to stick by the consequences of these choices that I make.
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Wise words. And, you know, speaking of memories, you mentioned Door and that song,
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A Hoseala just started playing in my head. Such a beautiful song. I love that song. And
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that kind of brought a little bit of joy to me. One of the phrases I learned in my recent episode
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with Gurvinder Bhogal, though it's not his phrase, but it's a psychology phrase, is the looking glass
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self where, you know, we form ourself based on the reflections that we see from other people of,
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you know, what they are seeing of us and all of that. And, you know, getting past that and
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finding yourself is tough. And I'm very intrigued by, you know, what you said about deciding that
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this is my value system and I will stick to my value system and I will live my life this way.
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And whatever happens happens because that's not in your control, but this is how I'm
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kind of going to live. So can you elaborate a bit more on the value system, sort of your,
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whether it's in terms of, you know, your ethical system or how you live your life,
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how you relate with people, how did you arrive at that firstly? And, you know, what is it?
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Got it. So I think for anyone growing up, their parents become the first point of reference.
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And I certainly, I think most of what I learned was just by observation, right? So I observed
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my parents and obviously there was a ton that I saw, which was amazing, right? My father,
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for example, comes from this deep sense of loyalty and belonging both to his family and
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his community. And in our political views, it might've taken us in opposite directions,
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but I thought that was something great to learn from him. For me, thankfully, very early in my
#
life, I read Gandhi and that's where I kind of got into thinking about life as a series of
#
questions and experiments rather than outcomes, constantly questioning my own value systems
#
and trying to grapple with the complexities of things. So for example, if I'm doing charity,
#
am I doing charity because I'm a nice person and charitable, or am I doing it because after
#
doing charity, I feel good about myself. I'm actually selfish while doing charity. So these
#
are, that's the kind of method that I adopted probably in high school or sometime is to kind
#
of start questioning all of this, a friend. Am I being nice to the friend because being nice is
#
a good thing? Am I being nice to the friend because somehow in the back of my head, I have
#
an ulterior motive? Am I being nice because I have some kind of professional thing to gain from them?
#
So that's the methodology that adopted in terms of thinking about this value system a lot more.
#
At least where I've arrived is that there are certain things that I believe in which
#
which given my context are the right things seem to me like the right things to do and bring me a
#
lot of joy, right? So I get excited by this notion of service of being used to someone,
#
that service might be a dog, that service might be another person. But where it comes, I also
#
acknowledge that it comes from a great sense of privilege that I am financially in a comfortable
#
position so I can do all of that. I've built up a career which I think makes things a little simpler
#
for me and therefore I'm able to do all of that. Not everyone will be able to do that. So therefore
#
my second value system becomes one of what Gandhi called reducing yourself to zero.
#
Starting from the point of not making assumptions, not making judgments. So even things like if
#
someone makes a different choice in their life, including for example going, you know, maybe
#
taking political or social views that I might not fully agree with but approaching that with a
#
certain amount of kindness and curiosity rather than judgment becomes kind of that second value
#
system. The third value system honestly is to look after yourself that I feel like if you cannot look
#
after yourself then you cannot look after the world around you. And as much as people might think
#
there's a certain amount of selfishness attached to that, I do not think that's true. I think
#
you have to, if you want to be, you know, some sort of change in the world, you have to
#
yourself be equipped to create that change in the world. So I think it's fairly important to be
#
selfish. I think a good selfish is one word but a good metaphor for it also is that warning they
#
give on airplanes when the air pressure goes down and they say when the oxygen mask drops,
#
put your own mask first because you're not equipped to help the other person unless you
#
help yourself first and you make sure you're kind of there. And you spoke of non-judgmental
#
like one of the qualities I like most about our mutual friends Ajay and Susan and in fact we first
#
met in their office when you gave a presentation about your book and one of the qualities I love
#
about them is they're so non-judgmental that once they have accepted you into their fold
#
they will simply just sit and listen and you can tell them the worst things about yourself and
#
think that oh my god you know this is going to change this person's opinion of me and no no
#
they still have just and I thought I should mention that because it's personally sort of
#
meant a lot to me and even that notion of reducing yourself to zero reminds me in a
#
different context a writerly context of the story I've shared a couple of times on this podcast but
#
I'll share it again for my listeners and for you because it's such a lovely story and this is
#
something Prem Panicker once shared in a workshop he was doing for my writing students where Prem
#
spoke of this interview with this writer who was once asked how does he find the focus to write
#
and that guy said that what I do is I go inside a room and I make sure I'm the only person in the
#
room and I shut the door and then I sit down so the interviewer asked so is that when you start
#
to write and he said no because physically there's no one with me but there are all these people
#
watching me with expectations and this and that and I wait for them to leave and then I and I
#
wait for them to leave and the interviewer says oh then you start to write and he says no because
#
there's still one person in the room and that's me and I wait for myself to leave and then the
#
story tells itself and and I think that's so beautiful but there is perhaps even in that
#
concept of reducing yourself to zero a sense of vanity because it's almost impossible to do right
#
so it's you know that's kind of the weird thing there take me back then to that period where
#
you're getting to college you're going to Stevens like at this point I'm guessing that there you're
#
still not settled on a sense of self like what do you want to do who are you what do you want to
#
be all of those things tell me a bit more about that shaping what were those years like did you
#
feel that you fit in naturally with your peers or did you appear to fit in with them did you have to
#
you know what was that whole period like for you got it so my high school happened to be in one of
#
the posh south delhi schools and finally at some point we weren't sure whether we could afford to
#
send me there but my parents still decided to kind of take the punt and do that so for me a lot of
#
my high school actually in retrospect now comes with a lot of trauma of feeling like not belonging
#
there because we didn't come from as much wealth as most people in school did we didn't have access
#
to the spaces to the resources etc that people did I remember when I was trying to apply for
#
admissions to foreign universities the counselor kind of laughed on my face and said there's no
#
way you're going to get in which was true I mean I actually didn't so she was she was right but in
#
in a very demeaning way so when I was going to college for me finally I was actually going
#
getting to hang out with people who I felt a lot more belonging and attachment to because St.
#
Stephen's like kind of many public universities in India tend to be a lot more multicultural than
#
than for example posh south delhi school so for the first time I started then
#
finding people who felt like me who I felt like I could have a conversation with as
#
as equal as people who believed in a similar set of things so in terms of finding that identity
#
St. Stephen's became for me the place where I built a community of built the safe home I'm still
#
very very close to friends that I and those are my closest friends and even when I don't speak to
#
them much I know that if something's going wrong in my life they are the ones who are going to
#
show up right and so for me that part of my life became home and everything that I've gone on to
#
achieve after that has been because I finally found a home in a certain group of people
#
and yeah that's that's where it was and of course came with its own set of challenges
#
which was that you know it is Delhi University tends to be a fairly political space as well
#
and I don't think at that point I had had the maturity to grapple with a lot more that came
#
later in my life but for me that sense of home is something that started there
#
and I at this point when you looked out in the future what did you see yourself doing like what
#
did you want to do at this point you're studying economics but you said you really hated it and
#
all of that so what were you good at what did you think you're going to end up doing
#
so like many people who study economics I had studied views that I'll join a multilateral
#
institution and be a global development list and I learned and I'll travel all across the globe
#
and I think for most people who probably studied economics back in that time probably even now
#
that is the idea that they have in mind somewhat I might argue in retrospect simplistic but
#
you want to you know work in the social development space probably a multilateral
#
institution earn decent money but still kind of make social impact etc so that is the notion that
#
I had while being there finally ended up at a management consulting firm because that was the
#
best option out of college but I think that also took me to places which I'm really fortunate to
#
have gone to just to give you an example the first project that I did under that in that consult
#
in at McKinsey was a project in rural Gujarat and as much as in the classroom I had sat and
#
read about labor laws and how they're good or bad to actually go there and be in a factory setting
#
and then see people make these daily trade-offs about should I hire this person should it be a
#
contract wager etc that for me brought economics to life we might have studied so much globalization
#
and good bad ugly whatever in the textbook but when McKinsey took me to a steel plant in Europe
#
and there we saw what goes into really building a global organizations not just kind of from the
#
mundane stuff of just setting up the factory and running it but also the cultural aspects of it
#
or how does how does power dynamic in these kind of settings look like that brought it all to life
#
so for me therefore McKinsey in a very funny way ended up being almost like taking my economics
#
learning into a lab and saying okay now things are starting to make sense and that's when I
#
decided I need to go back and study this again to figure out what I figured was right in whatever
#
I figured out and that's fascinating it reminds me of an experience I had maybe five years ago
#
where my friend Varun Mitra took me to a place near Nasik where there was a congregation of
#
farmer leaders and politicians and all and many of them were from the Shetkari Sangatana which
#
had been founded by Sharad Joshi and it was really interesting and even inspiring to sit there and
#
hear all of these people share the same ideas as I had which is you know freedom free markets
#
liberty all of those things but which to them had not come from books in a top-down way and
#
not come in a theoretical way but which had come from their lived experiences that what happens
#
when there are MSPs what happens where there is you know a monopoly on the agricultural marketplace
#
and so on and so forth and they've lived through that world and it's coming from there and to watch
#
sort of those ideas come from the ground up is really interesting and segueing from this I want
#
to ask about the frames through which you look at the world and how those frames formed like this
#
is almost one interesting example of economics in the classroom actually going becoming economics
#
on the ground and I love your phrase it came to life and so tell me a little bit about how the way
#
you look at the world began to form from there because you know what you've done in your book
#
is sort of brought a lens to it which unfortunately not many Indians have you know the default
#
thinking here is statist and my bap knows best and command and control and all of that
#
and that is a conventional thinking and yet you found it in yourself to build a new frame for
#
yourself which challenges that thinking and then kind of act on it and build cogent narratives
#
around that which eventually culminated in the book but we'll come to the book later but tell me
#
about this process of frame building and was it challenging given that most young people even when
#
it comes to economics tend to be rather on the left and at the same time you were seeing all of
#
this play out on the ground and realizing the importance of freedom so tell me a bit about that
#
so two or three things right I think the first and most important thing to get to this frame is to
#
to cultivate the ability to deal with complexity and ambiguity deal with a lot of gray so for
#
again just going back to the example of labor laws and there are people who take strong positions
#
on either side but the truth is somewhere in the greater to making trade-offs in fact all of public
#
policy is about making trade-offs if it was obvious then we would have most likely already done it
#
so for me developing that ability to keep that complexity within myself and keep thinking about
#
it became a useful thing because I was obviously interacting on one hand with my friends and peers
#
in the corporate world and they would come with certain frames of reference but I was also
#
interacting with people in academia people who've kind of been in social change movements etc and
#
this obviously went into hyperdrive at oxford but that ability to just say this is complex I do not
#
know the answer and this is how I'll walk a little bit towards getting the answer became the first
#
frame of reference so that thing that I referred to initially which was my own value system just
#
having a very questioning and a curious attitude towards things was also something that I think
#
became important in forming my lens of the world to constantly say maybe I'm wrong maybe there's
#
a lot more gray let me figure out what are the grays here that became one frame of reference for
#
me the second frame of reference for me became essentially to think about
#
who makes choices and who makes decisions so when we're making a decision about labor laws
#
are people who are going to be most directly affected by it are they going to be in the room
#
or not do they have a voice or not who's making decisions about them and there's obviously a lot
#
of debate someone say hey look a bureaucrat sitting in delhi cannot be making decisions
#
about people in rural gujarat but neither can someone who probably grew up in delhi in wealth
#
in all of their life and is now in academia also is probably somewhat detached from the reality
#
of those people and obviously in any kind of democratic setup you have to use approximations
#
while decision making and though your representatives become those approximations but how well does that
#
process of decision making work so that I think helped me shift my mindset from thinking about
#
outcomes to processes that wherever we land the person who's going to be most affected by
#
did that person have voice or not so therefore I think of freedom not in these absolutist terms of
#
hey if you have less government we are more free but I think of freedom as agency
#
that have I had the ability to participate in the decision so if I come if I go through that
#
consultative process and I come up with a government where I decide look you know
#
all of us democratically put together have decided to create let's say more government
#
let's say universal basic income or whatever else and some people might say look that's too
#
much government and too much taxation etc but I think of because I think of freedom as agency
#
for me I think that is a relatively free society they've chosen where they want to land up so
#
to that extent I you know I would say countries which have chosen to have more interventionist
#
governments but have done that in a consultative and participative way are relatively free countries
#
as well I think you know something that makes me a little uneasy is a phrase countries that have
#
chosen you know because China can choose something but has a country really chosen the state has
#
chosen India can choose something but it could be the majority which has chosen or the majority
#
community which has chosen and not necessarily others you know that's what makes like if you
#
just look at if you just if one just defines democracy in terms of electoral democracy it's
#
like that famous cartoon of two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner and obviously
#
the lamb is fucked and there's no freedom there right it's it's it is what it is but that's an
#
aside I get the nuance that you're pointing to and and that's an aside I was also struck by the
#
fact that you topped the board exams and you topped cat and I feel like immediately withdrawing my
#
invitation to you to come on the show because I have never had toppers on the show as far as I
#
know and I have always not liked toppers I was a quintessential backbencher as it were
#
but what strikes me as interesting is that to be a topper within the Indian education system
#
I guess what you would require is a certain doggedness in and this is my stereotypical
#
view but a certain doggedness in absorbing facts and you know seeking certainty and answers in
#
everything that you do and yet this mindset that you point to which is actually a really outlier
#
mindset very few people have it where you're questioning everything where you're embracing
#
complexity and nuance and multitudes and all of that because that takes a lot of intellectual
#
energy as well to be able to sort of grapple with that rather than you know be satisfied with the
#
simplistic view of the world seems and this seems completely at odds with you know the topper
#
mentality as it were so you know what is like how were you topping all of that was it a drive
#
to excel and you know topping these things was one way to do it or you know well obviously it
#
doesn't plan for it right because in a country like India there are enough even there are probably
#
hundreds of thousands of people who probably worked as hard and equally adept at that exam as
#
you are I wouldn't even call them smart I think then I'll go back to this question of being able
#
to handle those complexities in thought and in process so even now for example there is
#
I have half a leg in kind of the policy non-profit think tank space and then half of world in the
#
VC space and these worlds are diametrically opposite the way they react to the same piece
#
of news could you know just completely different approaches so for me therefore even as I was
#
studying one was just taking a very cold-blooded calculative approach to that that hey look I need
#
to do well here to be able to kind of get sufficient resources etc in life because I
#
didn't come from a place of abundance in my career but also making sure that that kind of
#
doesn't go to your head in for example I actually topped cat and then I chose not to go to any of
#
the IIMs I said this is not the life I wanted to live sure I've done all of that but kind of let
#
me put that it's sunk cost right so let me put all of that aside and actually look at my decisions
#
up front and I think that's that's primarily where it came from and to be to be fair I think
#
my approach in some of these things was also different and that's when I realized that this
#
whole notion of pursuit of happiness is what kind of leads to success and again going back to a
#
Bollywood film but what 3d itself like you chase excellence and then success comes on its own
#
what I mean by that for example is that when right before the cat exam St Stevens in about 2011 was
#
when we introduced LAN so suddenly all the boys hostel and girls and everything have LAN and now
#
this is two months before my cat and we are actually spending all night playing computer
#
games so two months before my exam and leading up to the exam actually stopped studying completely
#
and I just found myself in this very blissful position that everything else just it just
#
happened right I think I went to the exam with the with just being extremely happy about life
#
and the same thing happened with my boards where my parents had decided to move to Calcutta so I
#
spent the last year of my high school being alone in an army guest house and it was an extremely
#
traumatic period for me but right before my boards the last two months at schools are on vacation I
#
spent at home and I just felt so happy that everything else just happened on its own so
#
that's the that's what I advise to people so I write a lot about careers and ways of living
#
on LinkedIn and I try to kind of post every week or twice a week and this is what I write to people
#
about that at some level it's only when you're really happy when you really enjoy what you're
#
doing are you able to unlock some of these successes for yourself so for me that's where
#
it came from and therefore for me it never felt much of a challenge to have this side of almost
#
like a left and the right side to my brain didn't feel that difficult and even with happiness I
#
mean it's such a complicated term in the sense that if you are too intentional about happiness
#
you can overthink it and therefore it just becomes out of reach right because like the moment like
#
if you're having an ice cream and having an ice cream makes you happy are you happy in the moment
#
you're having the ice cream or are you having in the moment that you decide you are happy because
#
you're having the ice cream and if you decide to decide that you're happy having the ice cream
#
then you might start overthinking it and try to force yourself into feeling an emotion which you
#
don't and meanwhile the ice cream is gone so but I'm guessing none of these complications were ever
#
and sort of like I think they do happen right and at those points I just think of it as an
#
iterative process maybe I really like ice cream but at some point I have seen a pattern of maybe
#
three times back to back that I haven't enjoyed the ice cream and maybe that's when I know that
#
there's something wrong in my approach towards the ice cream I mean there's one alternative
#
which is to fix the approach of you having the ice cream or the other is to just look for other
#
sources of joy so I chose the latter part it's much easier I just believe maybe there's something in
#
my approach towards having ice cream which no longer brings me joy so let me shut that path and
#
move on to something new. Marvelous so tell me about the road scholarship like how did that
#
happen like that's another like grade A academic achievement like you top the boards you top cat
#
you don't go for him you don't go to the IIMs and then the road scholarship so at the time you
#
applied for the road scholarship what was that process like and what were you planning to do
#
with it like you know one thing many students may want is okay I want to go abroad and I'll do
#
whatever it takes and that is the aim but for others I want to get better at this and I want
#
to study this so this is something I'm really interested in and then going abroad or even
#
getting the road scholarship becomes a means to an end as it were so how are you thinking of it
#
all of this? So for me firstly one of the things I wanted to do was to study abroad I wanted to
#
experience living in a different country I wanted to experience a different kind of educational
#
system for example not too many people realize this in India but in Oxford actually more than
#
half your academic year is vacation so and even when you're not on vacation when you actually
#
have your academic terms going on they spend less than a couple of hours a day in class and compare
#
that and there's no kind of attendance you walk in when you want you walk out when you want
#
assignments are voluntary there's no exam this is one exam at the end right so
#
that is something I knew about and I wanted to experience because obviously despite having
#
an education system like that obviously the university is done very very well so there must
#
be something in that approach to life that makes that happen the second thing was that
#
the road scholarship at that time used to have its motto as fighting the world's fight
#
and I'm like hey what is this scholarship which equips you to fight the world's fight what does
#
it do to enable you to to do all of that so I said looks like a useful experiment and the fact
#
that I don't have to pay a penny probably doesn't hurt so that's that's why I went for it
#
so tell me about Oxford like what did you do there and what was it like like what did you expect
#
and then when you landed up what did you find like how easy or difficult was it to sort of to
#
make friends to belong as it were and to figure out what you were doing there and what was your
#
place in the world and all of these things so when I went to Oxford it was a very difficult
#
and tumultuous time for the entire Rhodes Scholar community because that was the time when the Rhodes
#
Must Fall movement was at its peak there was a college in Oxford which had a statue of Cecil
#
Rhodes and Cecil Rhodes comes with a very not I wouldn't even say it's a contested legacy comes
#
from a bad legacy right he's someone who's exploited people in southern Africa etc so that
#
was the point we were there for us as Rhodes Scholars that became a point of conflict that
#
here we are benefiting from the wealth of this person and that wealth has been built on the back
#
of exploitation so a that was the context in which I was in Oxford and that was honestly
#
throughout my two years we used to kind of keep thinking about this issue especially those of my
#
peers who were actually the forefront of that movement and how do you reconcile that with your
#
own identity and that I think led me to think about and try to answer a lot of questions around
#
privilege the second thing was obviously there was an academic line I was doing the MPhil in economics
#
and it is an academically a very very rigorous course so how do you kind of
#
embrace that academic rigor of that space while also doing this on the side but most
#
importantly for me I think it was a period which taught me how to think what I mean by that for
#
example is that in India the for me my sexuality was a question in Oxford it wasn't I was I came
#
out to people literally the second day I was there and that for me flipped that mental model
#
where I finally started thinking about hey you know there are obviously all these mental restrictions
#
you kind of put on yourself but it's only when those restrictions go away that you're able to
#
be a far fuller version of yourself even if that may not be necessarily a happier version of yourself
#
but you are able to emote express yourself a lot more and so at this point I was again just leading
#
up to a lot of these ideas that I explored in the book which was around how do we start
#
dismantling some of these notions that are built within us so for example another one is that
#
in the UK when you I voted there twice one during kind of Brexit and one during the general election
#
the process of registering as a voter and voting is so simple I just had to send a fill up a form
#
and I got my voter or whatever the registration done in the in a week and when I went to the
#
voting booth I did not have to show any ID card I could just say hey I'm Subashish they ticked
#
off my name and I went and voted does that mean there's no fraud in voter elections there obviously
#
there is fraud in voter elections there but is there consequential fraud in voter elections or
#
not and that's the question they grapple with whereas in India the debate we have around voters
#
ID for example should we link it to Aadhaar so that it's completely deduplicated the question
#
is not to cut down fraud in electoral systems to zero but the question is how do you reduce it to
#
extend that is does not affect the outcomes of those elections so these are the kind of questions
#
that just the experience of living there made me think for example also should an ID card be
#
mandatory to get a SIM card connection now in India we always make a law and order argument that hey
#
look you need to catch the thief so therefore you need to provide your ID card while getting a SIM
#
card but out there I didn't and that made me question hey was my way of what I was assuming
#
as truth is that really true or not so I think that for me became the really important part of
#
my Oxford experience which was to start thinking about a lot of these issues in a lot more detail
#
and I kind of find it heartbreaking that you only came out when you went to Oxford and not
#
in all your years in India you know and I don't even know what to ask about that it just it just
#
feels heartbreaking to me that you know it kind of worked out like that how much did that sense
#
of being an outsider in one particular sense and one can feel like an outsider in many ways
#
one can feel one doesn't fit in across many different margins like in your South Delhi school
#
you felt that you know you were from a different class you didn't fit in with all these elite boys
#
and this is another way of sort of not fitting in though I would have imagined that in elite Delhi
#
in the late 2000s this would not have been an issue but I guess it was how does that sense in
#
all of these different contexts of you know being there but not quite there then affect
#
the way that you look at the field that you're studying and you look at the
#
things that you're doing because even earlier in the context of the labor laws you mentioned that
#
why should a bureaucrat in Delhi decide you know what about the guy actually in Gujarat who's
#
getting affected by it whether it is a factory owner or the laborer right and those are the
#
stakeholders who have skin in the game so why the bureaucrat in Delhi so do you feel that that
#
kind of affects the way you look at every issue where you don't have to take the default point
#
of view where you can take a different point of view like even within college I'm guessing that
#
there would have been academic fashions or ways of thinking and there would have been the pressure
#
to conform or whatever and were you you know that have you always been the kind of person or did
#
you become the kind of person who could take a step back and you know choose to look at things
#
differently and if so was it easy or hard to articulate them or are there some things you
#
had to keep to yourself so Amit I think to a large extent it wasn't a choice for me
#
having to take a different point of view or experience and difference just came relatively
#
natural for a couple of reasons for example when I was at Oxford one of the things all of my peers
#
said is hey you've worked at McKinsey you've been bitten by the corporate devil so you don't have a
#
voice right and that feeling of being othered and let's be clear like I come from great privilege
#
my father again in his office was an officer in the armed forces I come from that great privilege
#
and despite that great privilege I had the sense of being othered being silenced and also obviously
#
my my own identity so for me at least that produced a greater sense of being able to empathize with
#
people that otherwise wouldn't have I wouldn't have felt because I know that all of us carry
#
lots of unsaid experiences which you don't wear on us please and there's no way to figure out
#
and the last thing that we should be doing therefore is to be judgmental
#
and that is that's kind of the mental shift that happened with me in those years and in fact in the
#
years preceding that as well so if you think for example even within the LGBTQIA community
#
there are people who are prominent who are kind of going there and fighting these battles and
#
more power to them but there are also there's a lot of people who come are part of the community
#
but actually come from very very different contexts so how do you make sure their voices
#
and their experiences and their preferences get reflected in all of this as well
#
well that's what I've been thinking and I obviously have no good answer right
#
this question of privilege is obviously a very very contentious one if you come to think of it
#
Gandhi was an extremely privileged man for his age Ambedkar was obviously extremely privileged
#
Dalit of his age so even within these communities we you know come from these these privileged
#
backgrounds but that discovery of truth by trying to kind of talk to people by trying to give voice
#
to people by listening to people a lot more intently I think has has been critical which is
#
why as you can imagine most of my friend circle leans a certain way politically which can sometimes
#
be feel intimidating for people who don't subscribe to that point of view or that value system
#
the key is how do you you know at least engage in that kind of conversation I've been in the
#
U.S. where I've seen on dating apps people saying not dating Republicans
#
right and I think when we as society descend to that I think that becomes
#
really challenging because then we kind of stop having conversation almost stop being less human
#
so these are the kind of thoughts that were playing out in my head I was as I was hurtling
#
towards this book and I almost make it seem like this was the end objective of my life
#
but yes that's what was going on in my head yeah I mean if you if one looks back in hindsight
#
everything seems kind of teleological and you can say this was the end point curious also about
#
what you mentioned of all your friends being predictably of a certain political bent and I
#
also wonder about political bends in the sense that there almost seemed like these sort of
#
hard-coded templates that are made that if you are for example for freedom socially you would
#
probably not be for economic freedom and vice versa so most people like you and I I think would
#
agree that if two consenting adults should should be able to interact in any way as long as they
#
don't harm anyone else that holds true both in the bedroom and in the marketplace but there is one
#
political tribe that will stand for freedom in the bedroom only and another that will stand for
#
freedom in the marketplace only and every political tribe in India is frankly against both
#
right so how how is that then because not only are you moving in different circles entirely
#
your corporate McKinsey circle your VC circle and all that plus your academic circle and your
#
non-profit circle who are obviously thinking in different ways but there often seems that there
#
is almost no common ground where they should be got it so the way I think of it is a starting
#
with an acknowledgement that all sides and all perspectives are valued and are necessary I think
#
of it as some kind of orchestra symphony like in isolation they might be somewhat jarring and
#
pointless but it's only when you put them together in this crucible of public policy processes
#
does something great happen so even though I might for example I might think that I'm centrist but
#
unless there's someone to the left and unless there's someone to the right who are also battling
#
these battles I don't think I'm going to be effective so the first and most important thing
#
is to say that and understand that public policy processes do not start with everyone agreeing to
#
the same thing because then you don't need a process at all it is about people coming with
#
different perspectives at different spectrums and being able to come to a conclusion that at
#
least feels some sort of a happy middle ground right so that's that's point one of kind of
#
coming to this consensus or kind of understanding this better the second thing is that as you
#
go to these various aspects and these various perspectives there's I think something that they
#
have to offer because none of us have really had the experience to be able to really think
#
about things very conducively what I've found lacking for example in a lot of people that I
#
interacted with in think tank space is a genuine appreciation for how businesses work
#
if you know we might say that look you must have data privacy and the right for deletion etc
#
how many startups are actually able to invest and build their tech systems in such a modular way to
#
be actually have the right to deletion and I think that kind of appreciation can only come if not
#
by working in those spaces by at least keeping that conversation open and I think one of the
#
tragedies in public policy in India at least as I have experienced it is our willingness to take
#
positions but our unwillingness to understand positions of of those other people and to an
#
extent that's also true for the you know the policy making process itself that given we've
#
not had a very good record of keeping those very consultative I think we struggle to get all of
#
these viewpoints heard in that same conversation and isn't a part of the problem of the policy
#
making process like isn't it in a sense orthogonal to this that it's really a battle for accommodation
#
of different interests some of which might conflict and some degrees but not necessarily all
#
and it isn't really about the truth or what will work or it isn't about some ideology coming into
#
play but when you get down to the nitty-gritty of making public policy you've got different people
#
with different kinds of skin in the game and then it's a negotiation and whatever happens happens
#
and often very little movement is made because you will reach so many sort of standstills so
#
couple of things one is that I believe at least all public policy not even getting to the truth
#
because what is the truth right it's always a trade-off what is the right point in the trade-off
#
becomes the question mark and as you rightly pointed out it is about these interest groups
#
as well and this is what we study in economics 101 which is that for example if you have situations
#
where a large mass of people are affected but by only a little bit so that they don't have the
#
incentive to act but there's a small group which is affected so much that they have an incentive
#
to act it's most likely the latter which is going to win so obviously public policy processes come
#
with their own challenges but I think we have such basic things to fix in the way India approaches
#
public policy that those almost seem like second order questions if you look at for example laws
#
and how many of those laws that parliament passes are preceded by public consultation
#
89 percent are not when regulators pass regulations how many of them are preceded by any kind of public
#
consultation in the case of sebi and rbi more than 90 percent are not so I think some while some of
#
these questions are important we do also need to put the basic structure and the foundations in
#
place before you even start answering those higher order questions yeah and sometimes you know the
#
processes are the basic plumbing if you put the processes in place in a democracy then you know
#
things can at least sort of flow take me to the next stage in your career because you've written
#
in this instagram post about how you know after your oxford stint got over you gave 50 interviews
#
and were rejected in all of them and then eventually had to kind of go back to mckinsey and
#
explore stuff there so what was that process like because up till this point you seem to have
#
gotten whatever you wanted you know you board exams you topped cat you topped and rejected iims
#
a road scholarship you got you're there in oxford you've done everything suddenly right left and
#
center they are just rejecting you what was this phase like in retrospect it was a great phase
#
where at some point i said look i'm going to i'm okay we're doing a sales job i'll call up the
#
phone and try to sell people things and that's okay and i think it was really humbling initially
#
as those rejections started coming in there was certain amount of how dare they like who do they
#
think they are right rejecting me have they looked at have they looked at my profile etc
#
but that went on for about a year so one is this is my final year at oxford so obviously
#
won't have a good time there as well so how do you balance a the sadness and anxiety in
#
one part of your life and you try to balance that with making the most of those few precious
#
moments that you've got left in that place so a that was where i was but secondly just saying
#
look i'm going to keep keep looking for a job keep trying to get some place good and at that
#
point i'd actually needed to be in england because i had a life-threatening condition so
#
and the medication for that or the proper treatment for that was available only in the
#
uk so i was actually desperate to stay in the uk so that's just compartmentalizing life and
#
being able to have some moments of joy in an otherwise miserable situation was something
#
that i had learned at that point the second thing that i learned at that point was
#
the value of community and the value of networks so i went my whole process with mackenzie in
#
those days was in fact brexit had just been announced obviously mackenzie was in a very
#
uncertain situation in london as well about for how much they'll hire how many people they truly
#
need etc but i went back to a partner who was from the community and i said look i need i need
#
to be in england and obviously i've spent two years at mackenzie do you think i can have a
#
chance and he really guided me through the process so for us to be able to turn to people who as such
#
we don't share much in common with but something right and this case we shared our experience as
#
member of the community that is something that that experience taught me as well so
#
i'm glad that happened in retrospect it ended up well i ended up in a place i really had a great
#
five-year stint in at omedia network but failing and failing repeatedly just
#
set me up i think for being a more well-rounded person a person i would say
#
and i wonder to all of these experiences being an outsider in different senses these 50 rejections
#
all of these complications do they make you more empathetic like somewhere if there is in a parallel
#
universe if there's another subashish who hasn't been an outsider in any sense who's gone through
#
life smoothly who's you know topped the board exam stopped cat gone to iam gone and done whatever
#
got the first job he applied for is that person fundamentally a different person and perhaps even
#
fundamentally a less rounded person because that person will not have the humility and the empathy
#
and the compassion that only life can really teach you i would believe so but i also believe that
#
each of us probably in our life undergoes enough of these experiences to imbibe that i think we
#
just have to keep our eyes and ears open as to what that teaches you my experience was that yes
#
it made me a very different kind of personality it finally also helped me up it helped set me up
#
for success or more success than i would have otherwise had in the corporate world which is i
#
was it was far easier for me to build bridges with people who i whose working styles of philosophies
#
i did not agree with but it helped me develop that muscle to be able to reach across the aisle it
#
helped me be a lot more contemplative about my own actions and be less certain but i feel that
#
most of us undergo enough experiences in our lives to be able to develop that perspective we
#
just need to keep our eyes and ears open and think about what we learn from these processes
#
and what was the time at omedia network like like what were those years like what were you doing there
#
is it what you wanted to do you know did you find during that time that hey this is not really my
#
thing i want to do more things just take me through that journey those are the best years of my life
#
because we decided that at that point this is 2016 where adhar has been around for about seven
#
or eight years at this point but adhar is now picking up it's now becoming far more
#
integral part of an indian's everyday lives other countries are looking at it it's leading
#
to this question on data privacy for me to find myself in the right place at the right time was
#
amazing so omedia network at that point was setting up their vertical on digital identity
#
and i became employee number one so along with the partner who set that up
#
i was actually working on these set of issues and for me that was interesting because suddenly i was
#
participating in something that's really an inflection point for india and i think adhar
#
obviously has set a whole bunch of conversations that's had a ripple effect both positive and
#
negative on how we experience our lives as indians but to be there in 2016 and think that you can
#
participate in that became really important so for those who don't know omedia network india
#
is a philanthropic organization which does both for-profit and non-profit investing i was helping
#
build out this vertical digital identity which means that a we funded a lot of non-profits who
#
are working on these questions we funded a lot of large-scale surveys that hadn't existed
#
but you're also looking at companies which are working in the privacy tech space which are helping
#
make indians more capable of controlling their data privacy so for me that professional experience
#
of being at a place where you're actually having consequential and tangible impact yet dealing with
#
the complexities of that time and being in a somewhat unique position because even the adhar
#
debate was extremely polarized there were some people said this is man god's gift to man and
#
this is india's gift to the world and this is the best thing that's ever going to happen to india
#
and then there are those who said look this is the start of a dystopian future
#
how do you try to kind of keep both of these perspectives in your mind and i think that's
#
we ended up building a fairly substantial body of work we funded something called the state of adhar
#
report which is the largest survey on digital identity anywhere in the globe that was used both
#
by the critics who said look here's now the true extent of exclusion that we have and that was used
#
by the government which said that look there is broad-based support for this program so
#
that experience helped me be far more comfortable in being in that middle ground which is at one
#
at some level comforting but at some level discomforting because both sides kind of abuse
#
you why are both the polarized positions on adhar wrong i don't think they're wrong and i
#
think in fact in the public policy space they're absolutely important if those didn't exist then
#
i think we would have been or rather to paraphrase to rephrase my question what do they miss
#
each of them okay i think on what the people who kind of oppose adhar in its entirety i think
#
do miss the question that look there is we in india are in a state of very selective state
#
capacity i think our state capacity is effective only in those kind of big projects we have to do
#
elections every year if we have to organize the kumbh mela and all of that and that's where the
#
indian state shows great state capacity but into the day-to-day experience of citizens has relatively
#
poor state capacity one way to increase state capacity is technology and adhar being one of
#
those tools that helps increase state capacity i do think that those who were fundamentally opposed
#
to other at some level miss that inevitability of that happening at some point in this age in
#
the age of technology the state is going to build state capacity through these tools and perhaps
#
instead of opposing it it's in its entirety what we should perhaps potentially look at is how do we
#
build societal capacity to be able to balance that state capacity as well how do we how do we
#
a reduce the flaws of the system but also build civil society capacity to be able to do so i think
#
that's where those who opposed adhar lock stock and barrel missed and for those who were like on
#
the adhar bandwagon that this is the greatest thing to happen to humanity i think what they
#
definitely missed was a greater appreciation of how the dynamics that work out at the ground level
#
so while one of the big planks of adhar was hey this is going to disintermediate and take
#
intermediaries out of the equation i think what they missed was intermediaries actually had a
#
dual role they weren't always these extractive people who are taking money and getting your
#
job done but they were also people who were helping others navigate otherwise complex systems
#
so and once you take the intermediary out and when there is a villager or someone in a remote area
#
directly trying to interface with a centralized system somewhere in delhi or in the state capital
#
and they have no way to bridge that gap that becomes a challenge so i think these nuances of
#
the everyday realities of india was something that people who came at this with a very technocratic
#
lens were missing and during this experience you must have learned a lot about how we talk to each
#
other like if anything the world has got more and more and more polarized today right and the
#
question then comes is number one how do we talk to each other and how do you enable that if you're
#
someone in the middle like you were and number two where the policy is actually being made
#
is there more talking happening there because one impression that you know one could have
#
is that a lot of the polarized shouting is on social media and it's just for posturing and
#
there's a lot of loudness there but when actual serious people get to the table it's more
#
consultative and they're more accommodative so is that true what's your sense of that how do we talk
#
to each other got so two or three things that are very personal level those first few years
#
especially as someone in their mid-20s was fairly difficult for me because again we were some people
#
were saying hey you know you guys are committing crimes against humanity by supporting adhar which
#
i don't know what that meant but things like that again a lot of people who were anti-adhar
#
refusing to even talk or at least even in their talk that you know kind of taking a very aggressive
#
perspective and aggressive approach to even interacting with me and at some level i felt
#
like look i'm still a human at the other end of the table can you kind of speak human to human
#
but i think what that taught me was a being empathetic to their situation just having a
#
thick skin right so a lot of the people that i met who had been in what one might call the anti-adhar
#
camp were initially very standoffish but i think over time some of them have become some of my
#
best friends and mentors right and they've been really supportive including in kind of contributing
#
their time to this book so at a personal level that was you know unfortunately we live in an area
#
in an era of polarization where it's really important to develop a thick skin but now to
#
your more important question about the policy making process itself and let's remember that
#
adhar was something that was introduced as a it did not have a legislative backing from 2009 to
#
about 2016 and even when it was introduced introduced as a money bill which basically cuts off the
#
rajya sabha from that entire conversation that was also a point where one starts then thinking
#
about hey what was what would have been in retrospect the right way to actually implement
#
this and that's when i kind of got attracted to this work that ajay shah and his group were doing
#
which was around regulatory governance that either has to be a legal basis you cannot have
#
a system rolled out for seven years in the large and consequential system like this without a law
#
but even when you decide to introduce a law you have to have public consultations on that
#
i don't think what people showed on social media was necessarily posturing maybe for some of them
#
it was and maybe to some extent it was but i am privy to information where i know that even in
#
closed circles those conversations became contentious very quickly in a way that
#
even both sides where they felt like they could acknowledge the merits of the other side's
#
argument refused to speak about it because they're like if we start speaking it is going to become
#
really emotionally draining and i think that's where this conversation adha then started taking
#
two tracks and then kind of started reconciling once the supreme court hearing started so
#
so we are not getting away from that right the age of polarization is upon us it is going to get
#
worse and worse what we need to start doing is a culture and systems and processes to actually
#
hear the other side culture is a long-term project maybe we'll get there maybe we won't but at the
#
minimum let's start talking about the systems and processes that at least these voices kind of get
#
heard in the process that's where for example should the adhar bill have been open for public
#
consultations once they got input should they have published the inputs should they have responded
#
to each of the major inputs that they receive these are the questions that i think as a country
#
that we should be asking especially as you rightly said in this age of polarization
#
and do these systems and processes lead to the culture changing it's a very complex relationship
#
because if you look at what the existing literature institution says that is typically
#
the informal institutions the cultures the social norms etc which influence the formal
#
institutions not necessarily the other way around but let's also then go back to the
#
indian experience itself like while we might believe that we are the mother of democracy
#
etc at least in the middle ages that wasn't our experience that we've been coming off
#
a lot of monarchy which wasn't on its way to being changed so democracy itself
#
was a formal institution that was imposed and now one might argue that even despite its limitations
#
at least as an electoral democracy that has seeped into the culture of our country
#
so i do believe that in fact india's own experience shows that once you set the formal
#
institutions in place sometimes it does percolate down to the informal institution as well and then
#
starts becoming more of a virtuous cycle and therefore i do think that as we start getting
#
into this notion of doing more public consultations etc it is going to lead to
#
differences in the way people approach this the reason for example one might argue that
#
at this point a lot of young people don't participate in the policy process is because
#
they might think of it as an exercise in futility why should i do it if my voice is not going to be
#
heard anyway but if they know that for example there's either going to be a bureaucrat or a
#
bot sitting somewhere that's going to read my comments maybe they will feel more engaged so
#
i do think that these changes in these formal institutions do eventually at some level come
#
back and change the informal institutions as well yeah that makes a lot of sense to me and
#
another way in which i speculate that culture can be determined by institutions and tell me
#
what you think of it is really comes from an observation i think jagdish bhagwati made a
#
long time ago about circa 2000 i think i forget when that china he described china as having a
#
profit-seeking mentality and indians as having a rent-seeking mentality you know a zero-sum kind
#
of exploitative mentality and i i can't speak about china as well but india even today it's
#
certainly kind of true that many people when they think of doing a business when they think of doing
#
a project it's an exploitative mindset key you know let's go out there and make some money at
#
someone's expense let's pull a scam let's do whatever you know at a lower level of thinking
#
you might not have come across much of that in your elite vc circles but that's almost a
#
default sort of mindset with many people and me and a friend of mine kumaranand were once
#
speculating about why it is not necessarily ingrained in indian culture but the way it
#
might have come about is because of the institution set in place after independence where the state
#
has so much power and the one way to make money is by exploiting others by rent-seeking and so on
#
and so forth and then automatically that shapes your behavior and that shapes your behavior across
#
generations and will perhaps take generations to change right so what do you think of that
#
absolutely and in fact we go back much before independent in india's institutions and go back
#
to even colonial institutions and of course there's been enough empirical work which shows
#
that in colonies that the europeans said look we are going to settle they set up different kinds
#
of institutions which were far more inclusive institutions and whereas in africa and asia where
#
they knew that they're not going to settle in the long term they set up extractive institutions
#
now those extractive institutions are not only in the economic sphere but also for example in
#
the way that the police was set up the way the police was set up in india for example was that
#
there is a central command which basically takes this force and then deploys it to control the
#
population that continues to affect through the 1861 police act which has now been replicated in
#
many different states and is still the kind of where we get most of our police laws from
#
that ideally the police that is that we see on the street should be someone that should have some
#
kind of local ownership should have local oversight but no for our states it's always kind of responding
#
to that center or in this case a state capital that is sitting far away from people so i think
#
this notion of not extractive to some extent with this notion of controlling institutions is something
#
that we possibly inherited from the british who kind of set it up as a way of controlling their
#
population and as folks like gotham bhati and others have written as well that the constitution
#
we adopted at the end of the day was a 75 just a cut copy paste of the government of india act
#
that the british has brought about so we did take that structure and once we even as we put
#
new people and indian people in that structure but very soon the structure took over and then
#
resulted in a lot of the control that we continue to experience in our economic political and social
#
lives yeah and that's a great point about you know where are the colonial powers decided to
#
settle and where they weren't settling and it reminds me of manker allsons great phrase you
#
know roving bandits and stationary bandits where roving bandits were bandits who would just go
#
you know rove into a village and then rob it and then leave and they had no plan to stay there so
#
they would leave nothing they would destroy everything take everything scorched earth but
#
stationary bandits were bandits who actually would invade a village and they would stay there
#
so it was there it was in their interest to build institutions to build a system
#
to make sure that you know even if they take the golden egg the goose that lays a golden egg
#
kind of remains and i think in a sense like i'd once written a column about
#
naxalism in the northeast and it struck me while reading about you know places in the northeast
#
which are you know or the east of india which are naxal areas that there is no stationary
#
bandit the state is effectively absent and both the state and the naxalites are effectively
#
roving bandits and sometimes the naxalites will actually set up little institutional things and
#
play the part of the stationary bandits so a really sort of interesting battle there absolutely
#
and i think that is the path dependency that i think a lot of people especially a lot of
#
young people are not necessarily aware of right i mean we think of whatever problems we see now
#
as problems of here and now but i don't think we think as deliberately about how these problems
#
have a certain part dependency and context behind that so recently for example rahul gandhi's
#
disqualification because of criminal defamation became a big thing kind of what's you know what
#
is the path that led to this why do you have why do you even have criminal defamation in in our
#
laws right what's the history and what's the context and therefore how do you make the case
#
that it should be changed i think those kind of stories enough people don't know about when they
#
speak about you know we see enough of sedition cases these days what's the history of sedition
#
how was tradition used against gandhi and tilak and all of that those are parts of our history
#
that in a way have become absent and i think it becomes therefore important for us to really
#
talk about these issues and these contexts a lot more yeah and and just to sort of double click on
#
this addition law which is you know being so successfully used by this government successfully
#
for them and i did an episode with ripur daman singh where we spoke about the first amendment
#
of course 16 stormy days which was brought in by nehru and was a severe sort of curtailment of
#
free speech and you have a great para in your book which i'll read out in may 1950 nehru himself
#
introduced the first amendment which added to the constitution three more restrictions to free
#
speech public order friendly relations with foreign states and incitement to an offense
#
all of them especially the first one provided a lot more discretion to governments to restrict
#
voices of citizens the amendments were heavily contested in the constituent assembly but passed
#
because of the government's brute majority the prophetic words of shama prasad mukherjee the
#
founder of bjp's predecessor summed up the concerns well he said quote maybe you will continue for
#
eternity in the next generation for generations unborn that is quite possible but supposing some
#
other party comes into authority what is the precedent you are laying stop quote which are
#
such precedent words because some other party has come into power and now you know it's being
#
used against the congress and of course the first amendment drastically reduced free speech in india
#
and enabled the return of sedition it didn't bring the sedition law back but it enabled it
#
after that and the sedition law had actually been struck down by the courts before this
#
so for a lot of the absence of free speech in the country and just continuing the colonial
#
apparatus we do have nehru to blame except that mr modi shouldn't blame nehru because he is
#
benefiting from nehru's largesse to him over time as it were and i think that's true across
#
this spectrum right and i think of it as the great continuity of the indian state that irrespective
#
of whose in power i think there are a lot of these common patterns a lot of the people for example
#
recently have criticized the office of the governor in fact i feel like every year the
#
supreme court has one or two judgments where it criticizes the role the government governors
#
have played at the state level but again let's go back to the time a that misuse of the governor's
#
office was a started with nehru with the dismissal of the kerala government but also peaked during
#
indira gandhi's time and if you go back to the constituent assembly that was the only major
#
decision of the constituent assembly that was reversed so in all their wisdom our lawmakers
#
thought that it is a better idea to have the central government just freely appoint a governor
#
rather than have people locally elected so that's that's kind of one of those aspects of the great
#
continuity the the second aspect of the great continuity for example is the restrictions on
#
art and a lot of people obviously now feel that hey look the government is kind of interfering and
#
there's this culture and there's this atmosphere of fear but the first book that was censored in
#
india was again by nehru and it was a book where basically it was a retelling of the ramayana and
#
then he's you know his government came in and banned that book so clearly whatever we experience
#
right now and whatever be our dissatisfactions not just with the central government but even
#
with the state governments which have a whole set of powers of their own we will find some
#
historical precedents that is not to say that things are exactly the same and things haven't
#
gotten worse or haven't gotten better one might argue that hey look the sedition cases have gone
#
up from i think it was somewhere around in the mid 30s per year in 90 in 2014 to about almost
#
tripled over the years and that might be true and there might be places where things have
#
possibly gotten better so for example dismissal of state governments after the 19 mid 1990 judgment
#
of the supreme court has come down a lot a lot so things get worse things get better but i think the
#
very crux of the structure of the indian state has remained the same and people might argue that
#
in the economic sphere for example we have changed we've gone from a socialist economy
#
now to a free markets economy but let's be clear that we have been in consonance with the great
#
consensus of that era even when we were a socialist country socialism was a very popular economic
#
system so it's not like we've taken some dramatic shift where the rest of the world hasn't
#
most of the world moved towards globalization in the 1990s and free markets and we just
#
followed them or we let them or whatever else that i think is something that we miss and certainly
#
what Shyamaprasad Mukherjee said has turned out to be true not just with regards to the first
#
amendment but with regards to so many other things and this is what even today when we have
#
discussions on public policy one of the things that we must remind each other is that if we set
#
up a new regulator you and i are not going to be people who are going to be banning a regulator
#
it will be a bureaucrat who's sitting in Delhi distant from all of us so let's think about the
#
structures and processes rather than about the people and their motivations yeah and we tend to
#
forget how uncertain and fragile are so many of these things which you take for granted like a
#
phrase that you've used in your book you've quoted gotham patya constitutional morality right but the
#
point is these guys have or will have the numbers to change the constitution and and therefore then
#
what happens to your constitutional morality right you can't treat something as a holy book
#
and the constitution of course is itself incredibly imperfect in terms of the protections it gives to
#
individual freedoms and so on and we'll discuss that more but then you know to treat something
#
as a north star when it is itself imperfect and when it itself may not necessarily have
#
legitimacy very soon just because it's your preference seems kind of weird and i often say
#
you know harking back to the point of how it's not necessarily the people in power but the system of
#
government i often say that to me there are three things that worry me about india and the first is
#
subjective the first is a party in power i don't like them that's my personal view you can disagree
#
that's perfectly fine that's the first of the three and i think it's the least important of
#
the three to me the second is our fractured society and especially how it's getting more
#
and more fractured today and that worries me a great deal and it is a very big deal and especially
#
in the context of the anti-muslimness that we see around us in the hatred that is spread and i don't
#
even know if that's reversible but it's it's a hugely worrying deal and the third one is really
#
what your book is about the dysfunctional state that a lot of the things we blame on this government
#
or that government or whatever flow automatically from this beast that is a state that is how the
#
incentives are power corrupts absolute power corrupts absolutely they are all playing that
#
game they will all be the same it is so easy to appear virtuous when you're in opposition
#
especially when you're there for a long time but when you come to power you're going to start
#
behaving the same way as we've seen with all these parties i completely agree with that i mean but i
#
take a slightly more optimistic point of view that at the end of the day we are still a very very
#
young republic we only have a history of about seven or eight decades of having tried to do
#
this and try to do it better and things do improve the rta movement is a great example of that of
#
course one might argue that it's one of the few examples of that but if you look at the history
#
of the u.s as well that they've had so many decades and centuries to be able to do this better
#
the the british have had many more centuries to be able to do that so i take a little bit of
#
optimism from the fact that we are a young republic and to that extent a lot of the problems
#
that we experience and see are the birthing pangs of a relatively young country as well
#
and these are not necessarily issues that are unique to india but i do think the indian context
#
like any other country the indian context you experience is unique so we will take some time
#
to think through this what becomes important however it's not going to obviously happen on
#
its own and this is what in the book the narrow corridor the authors write very powerfully is
#
that it's a constant battle to be able to stay within that narrow corridor of economic prosperity
#
and liberty and civil liberties and it therefore becomes incumbent on on people on the citizens to
#
be able to kind of get into this habit of questioning this habit of holding people to account and
#
there's been economic or there's been quantitative evidence that shows that
#
even in monarchies where obviously civil liberties are extremely curtailed
#
a more complaining citizenry actually leads to better outcomes so i have hope i think it's going
#
to be an interesting few decades to come but our ability as a community as a group of citizens to
#
be able to get better at asking for these kinds of safeguards changes etc will become fairly
#
important there's a phrase pessimism of the intellect optimism of the will that kind of
#
defines me like i see myself playing the long game even though in the long term i know i'll be dead
#
but it's good to see you know optimism of the intellect as well and we'll celebrate that by
#
taking a quick commercial break and on the other side of the commercial break we'll talk finish
#
off a little bit of your personal journey and then talk a lot more about the book
#
have you always wanted to be a writer but never quite gotten down to it well i'd love to help you
#
since april 2020 i've enjoyed teaching 27 cohorts of my online course here out of clear writing
#
and an online community has now sprung up of all my past students we have workshops a newsletter
#
to showcase the work of students and vibrant community interaction in the course itself
#
through four webinars spread over four weekends i share all i know about the craft and practice
#
of clear writing there are many exercises much interaction and a lovely and lively community
#
at the end of it the course cost rupees 10 000 plus gst or about 150 dollars if you're interested
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head on over to register at india uncut dot com slash clear writing that's india uncut dot com
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slash clear writing being a good writer doesn't require god-given talent just a willingness to
#
work hard and a clear idea of what you need to do to refine your skills i can help you
#
welcome back to the scene in the unseen i'm chatting with subashish bhadra on his wonderful
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book cage tiger and so far in fact on his life in times more than the book but we'll get to the
#
book soon enough but let's finish that part of the journey where you're at omedia network you're
#
doing all of these interesting things and you know where do you go from there and eventually
#
where does the idea of the book come from what what compels you to write it
#
so while i was at omedia network we started funding a lot of think tanks in this tech
#
policy space so we were funding organizations in delhi banglore etc group of india's leading
#
thinkers to think about issues around data around digital identity both from a very
#
technocratic way of how do you think about data privacy what are the systems and processes etc to
#
also around more societal ways or what does it even mean to be a citizen in an increasingly
#
data-fying country what does it what happens when your identity becomes a set of data points rather
#
than who you are as an individual does it take away individual autonomy liberty etc so these are
#
bunch of interesting questions on which we've funded a whole bunch of think tanks
#
some of those then started also researching around regulatory governance how do you set
#
up a data protection authority of india what should be the powers of this data protection
#
authority that was my initiation into thinking about regulatory governance as a space because
#
again a lot of people come into this saying look i know what the right answer is i know this is
#
how the data privacy law should be i know this is how you should think about ai regulation but
#
not enough people are talking about what is the process through which you get to that what is the
#
systems that you follow to be able to get to an answer and that's when when we funded things
#
around regulatory governance i got interested in this set of questions and once you adopt that
#
lens to life it's very difficult to look away then you start seeing institutions behind every
#
headline that you see so for example i was reading the india today magazine and it had something
#
around the state of tamil nadu and how they are reforming their department which handles temples
#
then you start thinking about hey under what law is this why do we why do you have the state
#
regulating temples what processes and systems do they follow what checks and balances do they have
#
so i think thinking about institutions was a new lens to life which i got at the time that i was
#
working at omeda network india but at the same time i was also funding startups that were working
#
in the data privacy space who were building technologies that can be adopted by by by companies
#
by individuals etc and again that exposure to both sides one around the policy and the thinking
#
side one around the implementation side was something that was at least in my world view
#
giving me somewhat of a more holistic point of views on some of these issues
#
that's when i started reading a lot more about regulatory governance around institutions and
#
also thinking about its interface with our day-to-day life so while enough has been written
#
about institutions all of them have done fantastic work around public institutions but
#
when i when i was speaking to my brethren in the vc space in the startup space i don't think there
#
was as much of an appreciation for these things it was either seen as too boring dull dry whatever
#
or it was being seen as something that here somehow doesn't concern me because that's something the
#
academics and policy wonks are going to take care of the idea behind the book was simple which is
#
can we at the same level maintain the rigor that was being discussed in these academic circles but
#
make this far more understandable for a gen z and a millennial audience and that's when i started
#
writing this book so this book is almost written in a conversational style and when i was writing
#
this book the pen picture i had in my mind was that of my brother again my brother also comes
#
from a very similar community he's a startup founder in mexico and i was writing as someone
#
something that would resonate with him that he could understand that he could read without it
#
feeling too heavy for him so that's what that's the attempt and that's the fine walk that i've
#
tried to do in this book that's a you know fascinating insight about you know keeping
#
your brother as a tug like many of my writing students often ask that who am i writing for
#
and sometimes it's easy to define like if you're writing for the times of india or the world street
#
journal you have a broad sense of who your audience is but sometimes it's not and one
#
proxy that i can tell them is imagine someone who is as intelligent and knowledgeable as you with
#
the same sensibilities as you but they don't know that particular thing you're writing about
#
and that's perhaps a good starting point and you kind of went one step ahead and just picked your
#
brother who i imagine is a lot like you really smart guy but won't know the stuff that you're
#
talking about exactly in similar cultural context similar exposure etc but has built his life and
#
expertise in a different way the other thing that's that i find very useful is to just prioritize
#
there was a version of writing this book which would have appealed more strongly to people in
#
the think tank space and the intelligentsia and the ability to say look that's not the book i'm
#
writing was also for me a big part of that so it's deliberately written in a language that may not
#
appeal to that audience as much but i think at least with audience i'm writing it for hopefully
#
works for them did your process of writing it improve your thinking about it and your thinking
#
in general absolutely and i think it in that sense is a two-way process and not just the book
#
even writing on linkedin which i do far more frequently something that helps me start
#
articulating things better and i learned this from some of my peers and my managers so someone i
#
worked with and looked up to would actually spend a lot of time even thinking about a linkedin post
#
that you know what is the main point of that am i getting that across or not am i using the fewest
#
number of words to get that across is it readable is it interesting etc and that i think in a way
#
also once you start thinking about am i communicating clearly or not it helps you
#
start unpacking the arguments that you are trying to make in a way that then also helps you strengthen
#
them so as you start right trying to force yourself to write clearly and as you start you know writing
#
those arguments and you realize hey look this argument is not actually making sense when i
#
break it down so let me not have it or let me refine it so that two-way process between the
#
writing of of the book as well as articulating your thinking a lot better i think certainly
#
helps so even this framework that i've come up with the book about what are good institutions
#
the process of writing it and applying it to these different areas at some point it is you know
#
actually in this context it's not working so let me go back to my assumption and or change the way
#
i think about good institutions was part of the process and obviously when i did your writing
#
course as well this is something that you explicitly spoke about a lot more about
#
being a good writer forcing you to be a good thinker and vice versa
#
wow yeah and and where does Rex Accord like your colleague working so hard on his LinkedIn posts
#
and i think of Paul Graham's essays and i love his essays and they are written with such clarity
#
that you imagine that it must have flowed out of him out of him at one go but he actually spends
#
weeks on each essay and he'll show it to people and he'll get their feedback and yet when you
#
see the final product not a word is out of place everything just makes sense it's like a miracle
#
of craft and which is why i believe even tweets for example can be extremely difficult to write
#
if you come to think of it but the clearest writing the simplest writing is often the most
#
difficult thing and i i still think i'm just scratching the surface of good writing
#
because i still think it feels to me not as clear as it should be
#
and that's the that's the challenge it's it's really really tough to really be a very clear
#
writer no man you're being hard on yourself i enjoyed reading the book thoroughly tell me a
#
bit about your figuring out the craft and the voice for the book like were there any models of
#
similar books where you said aha you know seeing like a state or this or that and it should be
#
like this were there any models you looked at that you said that okay this has the right kind
#
of voice so the right kind of clarity or you know a book on a similar subject what do you look at
#
and then when you start writing you know did it fall into place right at the start or was
#
there a process of iteration and finding your tone and voice got it so the first and foremost
#
thing that i came up with the book was the title and i first thought of the title because this
#
very instinctively and intuitively appeared before me once i got that i think the first the
#
most important thing was go back and understand what is the lay of the land what are other people
#
saying so while i did not find anything that was in the tone that i wanted to write my book in but
#
i understood what were the other tones and narratives that were there and most importantly
#
in engaging with what one might think is the quote unquote other side so on one hand i read
#
kapil komaredi's work and that is obviously written in a far more evocative way right it's
#
meant to provoke you and to think wake you up and make you think about india very differently
#
and be concerned and then at the other end i read a new idea of india which many people argue are
#
like the intellectuals of the right side and it says look we are now entering this a much better
#
age the golden age the revival of the indian republic for me i think a the level at which
#
the books stood those two books for example became inspirations in the sense that they were
#
talking in completely opposite ends of the political spectrum about the grand narratives
#
of nation-building so it was not in the weeds we're just talking about something that's
#
very kind of fundamental and ingrained to what we're doing but at the same time at the other end
#
i was reading a lot of book around around the kind of the nitty-gritties of public policy so
#
ajay shah's book in service of the republic then the transformative constitution the book
#
on the great repression so reading all of these obviously gave me a lot more contextual knowledge
#
but in terms of the tone i wanted to aim for something that's that's kind of sits in the
#
grand narrative scheme of things rather than in the in the nitty-gritties and that's what i've
#
tried to create here and given that you have a day job like how how did you manage the aspect
#
of discipline like when did you work did you have particular times of working was it hard
#
to motivate yourself because it must be really tempting after every hard day at work to say
#
fuck it or even if you wake up early in the morning to write to look ahead to the hard day
#
and say oh man yesterday was tough let me sleep for one hour more how do you manage that got it so
#
the great thing that happened to me was in the middle of the pandemic our office decided to
#
give us one week off for diwali so that was the time when i just went i went to a remote place in
#
kurk and i wrote and i wrote without thinking where is it going to publish i wrote without
#
thinking is this making sense or not i just brought 30 000 words on and in a word document
#
so at least that gave me the sense that look there's something i can do right it doesn't
#
seem that intimidating so in a week i kind of just wrote those 30 000 odd words eventually i
#
rewrote all of them after those first 30 000 were done it was a process of doing this every weekend
#
as you rightly said after a long day at work even if you motivate yourself you just won't have the
#
clear mind to be able to write really well so for me the writing process therefore happened
#
primarily over weekends so i would write about four or five hours every weekend and just keep
#
chipping away at it and i think just that compounding works very beautifully where within a year
#
i was able to get through the entire book including the actual you know process of getting
#
an agent getting a publisher etc all of that very beautifully just happened within a year just by
#
working over weekends yeah and for people listening to this if the 30 000 words in a week is
#
intimidating which it sounds even to me but the advice i give my writing students as you would
#
have seen in the course is just write 200 words a day right 200 words is nothing that's how much
#
we speak in a minute you know you can do it in your mobile phone while you're on your way to the
#
airport but the power of compounding works 200 words a day can come to approximately 75 000
#
words in a year that's a novel length thing and of course you don't necessarily have a novel
#
but you've written a lot of words you've gone to the writing gym and you won't just write 200
#
every day you know if the 200 word is and you won't be like you know sometimes you'll go with
#
the flow and you'll go on and whatever so you know my advice to anyone who wants to write something
#
is that just start a writing habit just write 200 words a day 300 words a day it doesn't matter
#
how much you fall off the wagon it's easy to get back on you know don't sort of read about writers
#
like simenon would write 7 000 words a day for seven days you know that's how all his romana door
#
his serious novels came about or you writing 30 000 in a week which is ridiculous i'm so jealous
#
but you know you can set smaller targets and the power of compounding completely takes over
#
absolutely and i think the key part to what i was saying was the fact that i actually rewrote all
#
of it so it was actually really in in retrospect now not very good quality writing but just putting
#
it out there let your hearts and your emotions or whatever you feel just free and put it on paper
#
i think then gives you a lot of room and gives you a lot of confidence so i think most people
#
that have spoken about writing the book typically whenever they think about writing a book get
#
intimidated by having to churn out those 50 70 90 000 words and as you rightly said it's the it's
#
just you know that first few thousand words that feel difficult at the end by the end of the year
#
i actually have to limit myself saying i can't write anymore it's already a 90 000 word book so
#
that we stop writings and i had more to write than i could actually fit into the book
#
and where is the balance between the grand narrative and the weeds because you've got
#
both in the book you've got the grand narrative you've got the first principles you've got the
#
historical antecedents of everything as it were and at the same time you've got specific policy
#
examples at specific things happening some of which you personally experienced and how does
#
one balance that because there is always a danger of being too abstract at one level but there is
#
also a danger of getting too much in the weeds and getting too concrete so at least again i just
#
thought of my audience in mind and what works for them is my audience going to really care about
#
the unsubstantiated opinions and hypotheses of a 31 year old i don't think so what i believe
#
the audience that i'm writing for wants to see is what's in it for me how does this affect my day
#
to day life why should i care and therefore for me writing about specific instances that they would
#
have heard of cultural thing context that resonate with them was very important which is why i also
#
avoid for example talking about things in the 70s and 80s because most of the audience that
#
i've written this book for did not were not born then so i'm writing about things that have happened
#
in the last decade two decades and how do we capture that at the same time i had to link it
#
to the grand narratives because i think that's what motivates people about this larger notion
#
of contribute like something that's contributing to to nation building and i was very keen that
#
people see the intersectionality between this but because as you rightly said a lot of people
#
while they might be socially liberal are suddenly economically conservative or whatever or vice versa
#
and it's important for people to understand that as Hayek wrote at the end of the second world war
#
that our economic liberties our political liberties social liberties are all interlinked right and he
#
wrote this in his book the road to serfdom and i wanted my audience to see this so therefore
#
i would say i almost follow the 80 20 principle where the 80 is the weeds it is about things
#
people experience in their daily lives it's their interaction with the police their interaction with
#
regulators etc but at the end of all of it coming back and saying guys why should we care about this
#
why is this important this is not just about changing some law this is about changing the way
#
we run our government so i followed in that sense the 80 20 principle yeah and even though you know
#
like you spoke about how you didn't use examples from the 70s and 80s because you wanted you know
#
people to relate to stuff that personally experienced but firstly there is some good
#
stuff from the 70s also there like all the indira gandhi period stuff the emergency and i'm going to
#
read out those parts later because i think it's important to invoke that the period we're going
#
through is not really unique it's it's actually been worse in some ways and what i also really
#
liked was that sense of going back into history and sort of talking about the path dependence of
#
many of these things you know and i'm going to ask you to elaborate on that especially in the
#
context of you know what you call each country's unique Leviathan why do we have the state that we
#
do right and it is not that some random bunch of people got together around a table and said
#
but there is a reason the us is the way it is there's a reason india is the way it is
#
and you know just to set a foundation for the conversation i'd like you to elaborate on that
#
so this is something that people have said for a long time in kind of recent history about
#
path dependence about how it's difficult to create change once you're on a certain path because there
#
are too many vested interests that build themselves around it right we talk about it in the context of
#
for example the farm laws and you know the whole msp system and how now there are too many
#
intermediaries and there's too much path dependency there as you start kind of peeling the onion back
#
and going further back in time that's when i started realizing that hey look this path
#
dependency has obviously existed for a very long time it's probably the circumstances of a country's
#
birth which affected the most i go in the book into a lot of the theory behind this which is
#
what even is the government right the government at the end of the day why do we why does the
#
government exist why could we not exist without a government and that's where we when we start
#
talking about this model about that hobs has kind of written about in his book leviathan where he
#
says in the absence of the government there's a lot of in economic terms what would be called
#
market failures but there are obviously there are analogies to that in our social and political
#
lives there would be especially a country of india size there would obviously be a lot of
#
chaos we'd probably not have a country of this size we'd have like villages and couple of villages
#
being smaller units the government is essentially an entity to which we give up some of our rights
#
in order to get the security the order the benefits etc that a government provides so i think of the
#
government in that sense that's a trade-off that citizens make with the entity that is regulating
#
their country in all and we give away our rights in order to get order in order to get
#
deal with these market failures if you go back to the u.s the u.s at the end of the day was born
#
in essentially an anti-tax moment there was the boston tea party wherein they kind of obviously
#
protested the tax on that particular commodity but i think there had been a several century
#
several decades leading up to that moment where there was a power sitting far away that these
#
guys felt exploited by and they said look therefore we are going to build a constitution which in that
#
sense is very skeptical of concentration of power and therefore the way they set up their entire
#
apparatus is around checks and balances so we see that they have an executive and a legislature
#
which draw their power independently from the people which means that for example in the last
#
several decades the presidency and the u.s congress have been run by the same party less
#
than one third of the time which means at any point in time there is a check on the president's
#
power which is the legislature the president of the u.s might be thought of as the most powerful
#
man on earth but is actually not cannot appoint his own cabinet cannot declare war cannot declare
#
taxes so it is actually some list of some 10 15 powers that a president has that's what they
#
designed because they were skeptical of the concentration of power they were skeptical
#
about people's abilities to kind of regulate themselves which is why they built a constitution
#
which was fairly rigid in that sense and they were very skeptical or scared of someone kind
#
of corroding that so they built a constitution which is fairly inflexible has in even the 250
#
odd years has been amended very few times and that was the circumstance of the country's birth
#
highly devolved where all the federal pieces have a fair amount of autonomy and that's the
#
federal architecture that they set up whereas you compare that to india now the context of our birth
#
was that there was social chaos there was economic stagnation and therefore the architecture that we
#
built up was an architecture that was designed for the 1940s for the late 1940s which was that
#
there was a socialist bent in the way that we thought about things we created a government
#
which was going to use its interventions in the economy as a way of economic liberation we had a
#
country or we had a set of constitution writers who believed that we must use the constitution as
#
a transformative document that while people have their liberties those liberties have to be
#
restricted so that we can for example deal with untouchability so that we can deal with property
#
access so they designed the constitution in such a way that the government had a lot of leeway to
#
be able to deal with the chaos of that time for example something like preventive detention
#
the there was a lot of debate in the constitution writing process about that particular clause but
#
they decided to retain it because they felt that that was required at that point in time and in
#
fact patel comes on the floor and says that look it has given you many sleepless nights but i think
#
this is something that's necessary so that's what we created for the late 1940s and 1950 in particular
#
but just that once you have created it and once you've let the genie out of the bottle no matter
#
what you do it's going to come back in some form or shape or manner and the same decisions that
#
were debated and done away with have now crept back into it because of those choices we made
#
sedition which was explicitly debated and explicitly removed from the constitution made the back door
#
entry through the first amendment and we had preventive detention which has now stayed with
#
us in many forms in many of our laws so i think that's something that people don't
#
necessarily recognize as much and part of the writing of this book was to bring forth that
#
path dependency obviously one might argue that then that's an exercise in futility which means
#
that there cannot be any change that is possible and which is why i also write that hey look the
#
change is going to come in little bits and pieces but unless we know this entire context we might
#
not be able to create that change yeah wise words and and just to kind of sum up and i've discussed
#
this seem in many episodes but to kind of you know paraphrase this for my listeners and you can tell
#
me if i'm doing it right is that one we centralized power at that time because when the framers of
#
our constitution were sitting in that room in delhi the country was basically falling apart the
#
country wasn't what it is today we didn't have all of these states that process was still going on
#
sadar patel and vp men and trying to bring everything together it seemed that the center
#
would not hold so therefore they centralized the power to make sure the center does hold
#
and they kept many of the powers of the colonial state because those powers helped the colonial
#
state keep you know all their sort of all the people together and and and therefore it seemed
#
to make sense for that reason so if reason number one is that the center must hold reason number two
#
was that society must change because you know there were so many social evils all around and
#
it's okay to say that you've like today i can look in i can speak in the abstract and say we
#
need complete decentralization complete local government but as ambedkar at that time said
#
something to the effect of what is a village but a den of localism ignorance and why so i forget his
#
exact words but to that effect and therefore it would not have worked and therefore there is that
#
other impulse that you centralize power and then you use that power to design society redesign
#
society from the top down even though ambedkar knew the dangers of that he called the constitution
#
nothing but a top soil and realize the extent of realize what society was really like underneath
#
that and today in hindsight it's really easy for someone like me to look back and say that that
#
project has failed and was always bound to fail because you cannot do that change from the top
#
down it has to be from the bottom up that if we wanted to build a liberal society it had to come
#
from the bottom up it could have come from the bottom up that task is before us that task is
#
possible but at that time it was understandable to think otherwise and to centralize all the
#
power and when you centralize all the power we know power corrupts absolute power corrupts
#
absolutely all these vested interests and build around that all these bad practices get institutionalized
#
and and we are kind of struck with it and you know gyan prakash in his book on the emergency and in
#
his episode with me spoke about how you know the emergency of 1975 was not an aberration it was not
#
anti-constitutional you know the constitution allowed you to do all of those things because
#
it centralized power for a reason those reasons might have been understandable in hindsight they
#
led us to disaster and we are stuck in this moment and it isn't really fair for us therefore to sit
#
and look at to just criticize these decisions in limbo if you take that entire social and historical
#
context they made sense at the time and yet look here we are and i think there are two ways to
#
think about this one is is that Nestle and either or right top down bottoms up this espousal of
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liberty i don't think it's either or in an ideal state we would have done both and in fact when
#
they were writing the constitution i mean bottoms up espousal or growth of liberty liberty and those
#
kind of values is going to take time if you're writing a constitution and you have a two-year
#
deadline you have to do something that's that you can actually achieve within those two years which
#
was to have this top down i don't think they had any choice right they wrote the kind of constitution
#
that in that time made sense where we probably went wrong or whereas a country we lost was we
#
never had a very strong kind of classical liberal political party and as we were discussing over
#
lunch that very often the classical liberal political parties or people who espoused all of
#
that came with kind of social conservatism about the kind of princely states and all of that so
#
somewhere along the lines we've had the death of a classical liberal alternative in it so we
#
have 50 shades of left as far as our social and economic policies are concerned so i don't think
#
it was neither or i think they made the choice which was the only choice they could have probably
#
made at that time but there's somewhere along the way are you know someone needed to have picked up
#
the mantle of actually making the case for it much stronger the second point that the way that i
#
would possibly think about it is that at the end of the day as we discussed early in this podcast
#
probably a two-way street between formal and informal institutions and the hope was that as we
#
start putting some of these structures in place that they would affect the way people lived their
#
everyday lives and i think that somehow that hypothesis is not not played out either so
#
again i would encourage all of us to kind of go back to what the book the narrow corridor says
#
they made the choices that they had to made in that in that time period but the the burden of
#
ensuring that we stayed within the narrow corridor stayed with each of the generations to kind of
#
keep chipping away at it see you and i have read the narrow corridor but just for the benefit of
#
my listeners can you kind of sum up the main thesis of the book yeah so the main thesis of
#
the book narrow corridor is that if you plot and i'm glad that there isn't a very graphical manner
#
if you plot the capacity of the state on the y-axis and you plot the capacity of the society
#
on the x-axis then the path to economic prosperity and individual liberties is basically
#
that narrow corridor which is a line that's originating from the original kind of slanting
#
upward if you have a state that is far more powerful than the society then you go in the
#
direction of totalitarianism which is where one might argue china is heading if you have a society
#
that is far more powerful than the state then you will have chaos you will have uncertainties you'll
#
have kind of smaller communities you'll have tribalism etc it is only when state and society
#
evolve in conjunction where their capacities increase together that you really stay within
#
that narrow corridor the authors of that book argue that india has a more powerful society than
#
it has state and their argument is primarily around the caste system and other such social
#
limitations but i think a lot of people might argue and i do subscribe to that point of view
#
that in india in fact the state is probably more powerful than society because of the way we've
#
written up our laws and therefore what we need to do is to get more people involved in this these
#
discussions around politics and policies for us to be able to balance that imbalance yeah i agree
#
with you and even your fellow bangalorean ashwin mahesh has made this point that the balance
#
between state and society in india is you know shifted far too much towards the state and that
#
too in an interesting way that our state really isn't a big state in that sense our state is a
#
state that does many things badly while an ideal state should do a few things really well and those
#
few things are you know the rule of law and national defense and all of those basic things
#
but we don't do we mess up on the basic things and we do a lot of things badly and act as an
#
impediment to society solving its own problems which is basically what all market interventions
#
absolutely and which is why when i wrote this book it wasn't necessarily coming only from the
#
point of view of a small government or a more restricted government is better for rights etc
#
a more restricted government is probably just going to be a more effective government
#
i believe that the indian state is selectively high capacity it has ability to do a few very
#
important things really really well unfortunately the kind of policy making paradigm that we have
#
come to in india is around kind of mission modes so we have the elections we run it as a mission
#
mode we have such a bharat abhiyan people debate whether it was useful or not but it is run in
#
mission mode so everything that we have done very successfully polio eradication etc has been done
#
in mission modes it's only when we put our entire mind space to a particular problem are we able to
#
do a very good job of it but what determines the kind of lives we live as individuals is what
#
happens when it is not being run as mission mode when the prime minister is not driving it
#
when the chief minister is not driving do things still happen and that's the kind of capacity we
#
need to build and we will be able to build that capacity only when we start doing fewer things
#
if the police person is a constable is too busy filling his diary and reporting on what he did
#
on a day-to-day basis obviously that person is not going to have time to do a very good job of
#
policing if we have a judiciary system which is catching people who have consumed alcohol and
#
filing cases against them obviously we will have the situation in bihar where in the judiciary
#
suddenly clogged with these kind of cases it's only when we really cut it down to what is most
#
critical do we start building more state capacity and in fact this is what justice shri krishna
#
and ajay shand others have written in their paper about building state capacity and i think ajay
#
has written much more about this in his book which is that because we have limited state capacity
#
outside of these projects the way we should run it is first take those limited tasks do them really
#
well in the process build state capacity and then start taking on more and more tasks so therefore
#
throughout the book i keep making this point that guys this is not just a human rights issue this
#
is not about just individual liberties if we really want a country a state that delivers on
#
the basics on the everyday requirements of what we want being corruption free having good air
#
quality having good water supply we need a smaller state that is only going to focus on these things
#
rather than policemen who are going and catching the buffalo of a minister yeah there's a hilarious
#
story in your book about seven buffalos of some important guy gets stolen and hundreds of policemen
#
carry out this mad dragnet and all this shit happening you know and you could actually make a
#
large-scale cartoon where there are murders and rapes and robberies happening and policemen are
#
looking for you know who stole these seven buffalos and our friend roben abraham also once wrote a
#
piece about a case for limited government based not on ideology of freedom or anything like that
#
but based on opportunity cost that if you have limited state capacity you want it to be put to
#
the right users and therefore you need a limited government because that's the size you have and
#
you want them to do the right things and not spread out into doing things where they don't need to be
#
and another point about this mission mode is that often a lot of great tragedies and inequities
#
get normalized like when covid had happened i had written a column for times of india which
#
are linked from the show notes called something like a tale of two disasters where i said that
#
we are facing two disasters and one is the disaster of covid which is an immediate disaster
#
it's a big deal we'll fight it we'll win it it's a time-bound thing but the other is a continuing
#
ongoing disaster of the dysfunctional indian state i mean the fact of the matter is that at
#
that time the stat i used was that around 3000 people 3000 children die in india every day from
#
starvation one in four indian children are malnourished if a natural disaster like a
#
hurricane was killing 3000 children a day like the freaking world would be jumping to our aid it
#
would be an incredible crisis but we've normalized it the children are dispersed we don't see them
#
they're unseen and we have to make them seen in a sense and that is you know that is one of the
#
tasks before us exactly and the the classic problem of collective action which is when the
#
tragedies are dispersed such as this it becomes very easy to unsee that right even kind of number
#
of children who are dying due to air pollution and a whole bunch of these issues i think as you
#
rightly said there has to be a different lens to approach some of these problems that you're facing
#
so let's go on to talking about what you call india's three original sins and and and we've
#
you know i completely agree with you that at the time what we are calling sins in hindsight
#
they're understandable at the time we totally get that if we were in their shoes and we are
#
not as great people as they were but if we were in their shoes we would have gone down similar
#
parts but yet these are sins and these are the original sins and we still kind of suffer from
#
them so tell me a bit more about this so these original sins are what are at least categorized
#
in three categories the first one as we have discussed is this notion of an extremely extremely
#
centralized state we see in the years leading up to independence that there are these promises of
#
federalism there are these promises that hey we'll create powerful states these states will be
#
around certain lines etc but just those couple of years before and during partition and independence
#
when there's so much chaos i think there's a lot of walking back on a whole bunch of these promises
#
we spoke earlier about how the governor's office was meant to be directly elected by the people of
#
the state but that was changed to be a pure representative of the center we also have nehru
#
going back on his promises around linguistic states till his hand was forced on the issue
#
so a lot of these centralizing tendencies of the indian state come from that time and which is and
#
they have perpetuated over time so for example in the recent set of fiscal reforms that we have
#
taxation reforms that we have seen the fiscal autonomy of the states get eroded a lot and now
#
states have even despite the gst and all of those other promises that were made to them now have to
#
rely on a lot of these centrals kind of transfers from the center there are a lot of centrally
#
sponsored schemes which are seen to be good things because here you're kind of bringing
#
these programs and helping people but because these centrally sponsored schemes are now taking
#
away from the fiscal resources of the state you actually have to now have greater fiscal dependency
#
on the center so i think we then reach the position where we saw there was a great
#
centralizing tendency in the indian state which has increased and now with the spread of technology
#
and adhar and all of that we will see that go up so that's one original sin the second original sin
#
of the indian state was to create a somewhat more limited set of fundamental rights so we see in
#
if you compare again with the u.s the u.s fundamental rights don't come with ifs and buts
#
each of the indian fundamental rights probably has like five or six bullet points under that some
#
of those specificities but some of those things hey this is not going to apply to this and this
#
is not going to apply to that and this can be overruled in this case etc and while in the u.s
#
because it's written in this kind of absolutist fashion i think scores have by and large upheld
#
those and have said there has to be some very compelling reason whereas in india we have that
#
kind of attitude where even judges have come and said hey this is like a most abused right and you
#
know what this is creating problems so that second thing has been watering down of the fundamental
#
rights of the citizens which again made sense then but we are seeing the negative implications
#
of that even today and the third one is around the economic choices that we made that we decided
#
that look we need to have a government driven project which will deliver value for our citizen
#
uplift their lives we created the five-year plans we created the planning commission we said
#
socialism is going to solve that we had the industrial policy of 1948 come and nationalize
#
a whole bunch of industries over time that became even more corrosive whereas this
#
graduated into the license permit raj nationalization became far more prevalent etc
#
a lot of people might believe that 1991 was a break but i do not think so 1991 was a metamorphosis
#
of that system which moved from a centrally planned economy to a regulatorily planned economy
#
so it's a little bit like you're driving a car and i remember when i was driving
#
learning how to drive a car i had the steering wheel in my hand but the brakes and accelerator
#
still controlled by my father and it feels a little bit like that where the government
#
has handed the steering wheels to the private sector but very often the brakes the accelerator
#
the clutch everything is controlled by the government which again is not unusual but the
#
extent to which people believe we have gone on to free markets is actually possibly not true our
#
regulators still continue to have a lot of power and therefore that notion of a centrally planned
#
economy that we have in some form shape or manner continues to be part of a life india continues to
#
be one of the most over-regulated economies of the world and even the way we have set up our
#
regulators is very different from the way that other countries have set up their regulators
#
in india regulators such as an rbi a sebi or even kind of trei typically have a legislative and
#
executive and a judicial arm all fused into one whereas regulators in most other countries at
#
least keep the judicial arm out of it so the way we have structured our regulators also gives them
#
an excessively high degree of power in our life so even that economic freedoms that we think we
#
might have received in 1991 is actually not that true so these are what i call the original sins
#
of the constitution writing process which we continue to have in our lives today in some form
#
shape or manner yeah well sir and i love the metaphor of the car where you have the wheel
#
but not control of the brakes and the clutch and that expresses it so well you know i written a
#
piece in i think circa 2004 for wall street journal where i'd argued that the 91 liberalization
#
was half-baked and incomplete and of course i celebrate the 91 liberalization it got hundreds
#
of millions of people out of poverty nitin pai once estimated that for every one percent growth
#
in gdp you know something like two million people come out of poverty which is just you know a
#
mind-blowing number and and speaks of the moral force of economic growth you know all the way
#
down the line and so but so little was done and we we did that we got complacent we had you know
#
20 great years between 91 to 2011 and then it's kind of not been great puja mera had a great book
#
on what went wrong around 2011 and you know ajay shah etc have also spoken at a great length
#
on this show and that let's elaborate a bit on what is the subject of the first chapter in your
#
book and by the way i'll just tell everyone like of course all my listeners are going to pick up
#
your book they're better it's a must read it's a classic book and the introduction to me is just
#
brilliant it's one of the great essays that you should all read but i'll also talk about the
#
individual chapters and your first chapter is on economic restraints and this is a subject i feel
#
strongly about because you know people think of this as an arcane matter for policy makers
#
but for me it's a humanitarian issue because these restraints have huge humanitarian consequences
#
when some of these restraints come in the form of barriers of entry which therefore restrict
#
competition or when they come in the form of tariffs of foreign goods which therefore keep
#
prices artificially high or quality artificially low what you're really doing and i'll link from
#
the show notes to a column i wrote on this what you're really doing is you're redistributing from
#
the poor to the rich it is a poor consumers who suffer it is a rich interest groups who benefit
#
and every intervention in market more or less in my opinion does exactly this and we you know and
#
then there is one way form of thinking that you know 91 liberalization did a lot sure it did a lot
#
and thank god it happened but there's a lot it didn't do and one of the things it didn't really
#
do is change the pervasive mindset that markets somehow have to be controlled and they're evil
#
and whatever and people also conflate pro-business and pro-market and i keep pointing out that it
#
is a freaking opposite you know a pro-business policy will help certain cronies you know maintain
#
their market share maybe even become monopolists and they harm consumers whereas pro-market policies
#
will increase the competition maintain the rule of law and will benefit consumers which is consumers
#
is equal to citizens and and therefore is great so give me a sense of when you and i have written
#
about this landscape so much for 25 years that my mind just boggles but writing about it from
#
the vantage point at which you have written about it from give me a sense of the landscape
#
of economic restraints and the damage that it does so one of the things that you know before
#
i even start answering that question is that when you approach the question of the economy
#
with this idea of liberties you're very often conflated with some kind of a heartless capitalist
#
who doesn't care about people and is only interested in profit and serving people and
#
two individuals etc i think it's quite the opposite i think when you start thinking about
#
it while still keeping social welfare as your guiding star you realize the complexities of
#
the situation so for example if you have high msp's sure it might benefit some farmers but who
#
is it coming at the cost of is it coming at the cost of someone who's in a kind of a rural place
#
and is dependent on buying food grains that coming at the cost of farmers in other regions etc
#
it takes a lot more complexity and ability to deal with it to have these kind of positions but now
#
coming back specifically to the question that you have the way i looked at it was again taking a
#
very individual centric viewpoint and saying look at each of the ways in which we participate as
#
economic agents in the market we are an agrarian country for example right from seed till the food
#
reaches your plate there is government intervention at each step of the process
#
when you think of input markets for example the government is controlling the prices of
#
fertilizer it's controlling land in many ways so you have inputs to agriculture being controlled
#
you have procurement from the farm being controlled in many ways which is the government
#
with the whole msp system and the ap mcs and all of that and then you finally have the distribution
#
of that food also being controlled by the government in many ways through the pds system
#
and all that it brings and each of these there is some most likely some sort of a price distortion
#
and every price distortion in the market is basically redistribution from someone to someone
#
else so when you for example distort the price of fertilizer you are not only redistributing
#
income but you are also resetting incentives and you speak about incentives a lot in your show and
#
if you look at the very micro level of incentives if i know for example that urea is incredibly
#
cheap for me i'm going to use urea more than i should which means now i'm leading to nitrogen
#
pollution in my soil leading to blue babies and everything else that i write in the book
#
so across each of these areas in the value chain we have a certain amount of price distortion that
#
is happening that is leading to second and third order implications for example when we are having
#
the pda system and we are giving people subsidized food grain but particularly rice and wheat we're
#
actually incentivizing them to consume a lot more of it than they would have otherwise used out of
#
their own free will these might all be legitimate choices of state policy however the question i
#
ask is not about the outcome but about the process that did we consider other alternatives that could
#
have got us to the same point did we consider for example can we transfer cash to people
#
maybe we did can we put that document out in public can we talk about the pros and
#
cons to make that happen so in each of these interventions i'm trying to bring about that
#
kind of question so that's about the agriculture sector which is where the most of our population
#
resides the services sector which is the growth engine of the economy i just take two very specific
#
points to kind of make this example which is that if you look at something like banks india is so
#
unusual in the fact that there are such large public sector banks and anyone who's been to
#
a public sector bank and a private sector bank in the same day and i once did the difference is so
#
stark that one has to question this and it's not just about you know saying somehow saying you know
#
these public sector guys are lazy etc they're still the same human beings probably getting paid
#
more which is a good thing you're able to hire better quality people but the fact that for
#
example the rbi for every private sector bank can go and say that a director of that board should
#
be removed but cannot do that for public sector banks so these kind of governance challenges
#
that come in banks is something we don't see in the private sector banks similarly airlines
#
while we have privatized air india in recent times the government was there for a very very
#
long time but a whole bunch of taxpayer dollars rather than letting the market function which is
#
why i call these the undefeatables there's no way that any private player can actually compete
#
against these entities because they're in a way subsidized by the government and then we look at
#
the manufacturing sector where india many claim has missed the bus in terms of actually building
#
a good manufacturing base and a lot of them ascribe that to the way that we've built our
#
labor laws that for example once you cross a certain threshold of workers you now suddenly
#
have to even require government permission to fire those workers so what you do instead and this is
#
what i saw firsthand in that factory in gujarat is every morning a bus would go to the village
#
pick up people and bring them to off to the factory so which means these guys actually in effect
#
because of that law had absolutely no protection the day we decided not to send a truck there's
#
going to be no one who's coming and for the person who's running that factory the day there is
#
a party in the village or there is rains and people decide not to show up he actually has
#
to basically have lower quality lower production in the factory and these are second and third
#
order implications that people don't think about and again i reiterate there are very good reasons
#
to do this and nobody's coming at these with bad intentions they want people to have food on the
#
plate they want farmers to not be as vulnerable as they are the question is are we actually
#
thinking about the second and third order implications are we thinking about
#
what are the alternatives for us to achieve the same policy impact and finally i dedicate an
#
entire chapter to talking about regulators because while a member of parliament looks at some 50 to
#
60 laws regulators are bringing out far more than that and these are the invisible parts of our
#
economy that are not just our economy now we have regulators in competition we have regulators in
#
content moderation etc these are the invisible arms of the state that people probably don't
#
see and think about as much but these are controlling the day to day of how each of our
#
businesses work so again the landscape is fairly large it's fairly complex but the common thread
#
through all of that is a government that has made certain choices and we as a nation have not had
#
enough debate about how each of those choices actually play out and i think a fundamental
#
mistake many people when they think about public policy is that they conflate intention for outcome
#
so they assume that if a policy has a good intention it's great so a government can get
#
away with just focusing on intention because it makes for a good narrative and not really
#
thinking about outcome per se and and you know the point i keep making about how these labor
#
laws have actually hurt workers more than helped them is you know beautifully brought out by this
#
illustration and i want to give a couple of illustrations from agriculture because they
#
really speak to me and the first is delhi pollution right the delhi pollution happens
#
because farmers in Punjab are burning the leftover of the rice at the end of the season because they
#
have no way to get rid of it now Punjab is an arid state why the hell are they growing rice
#
which is a water intensive crop because there were msp set on rice incentivizing them to grow
#
rice and therefore they get bore wells and tube wells and whatever to draw out water from deep
#
under the earth so you're also messing up you know our sort of water supplies or you know the
#
water balance of the region by doing all of that and by using all of this machinery and then you're
#
kind of making rice because of these incentives and all of these laws and no one could have thought
#
it's like a fourth order effect that you're causing pollution in delhi by giving an msp
#
on rice which is mind-blowing and also i think there's a question of equity right
#
many people might argue hey you know the why are the farm why you think about the farmers
#
pure poor farmers rights versus someone sitting in delhi but you also think about a farmer in
#
panjab versus the rights of farmer in west bengal if it's a it's a rice growing region why is the
#
procurement of rice from west bengal so little because we haven't built out the infrastructure
#
to procure rice from there and therefore again path dependency we started procuring from panjab
#
haryana madhya pradesh and we've now continued procuring the bulk of our rice from there and
#
i think at some level people have people will have to think stop thinking of this as some sort of
#
heartless urban elitist complaint against farmers but as a fundamental question of equity which is
#
why is of why are we discriminating between a farmer in panjab versus farmer in bengal
#
that's a fantastic nuance and the other illustration is of apmcs now apmcs are
#
marketplaces which are set up with a very laudable intention that you want farmers to have a guaranteed
#
place where they could go and sell where nobody will cheat them and you know want retailers and
#
consumers to have a guaranteed place where they can go and buy but because it's a monopoly you
#
have you know the you have no bargaining power on either side the apmc has all the power and
#
therefore farmer a farmer will often go there and say sell something for two rupees
#
which the consumer buys for 18 rupees whereas if there was a competitive marketplace
#
the farmer could have sold for 10 rupees a consumer could have brought for 12 rupees
#
both of them benefit you know by a substantial amount and when i did an episode with gunwant
#
patel who's a shedkari sangatana leader he told me about this great poem by sharad joshiji who
#
sadly you know is dead otherwise i would really have loved to have him on the show a great leader
#
and i'll just read this out and then i'll translate it and this is about the apmc
#
and this is a farmer speaking where he says
#
this is a farmer speaking to the consumer
#
and the way i've translated this is us i die my friend and so do you i die my friend and so do
#
you i sell my produce cheap and die you pay so much that you die too you know so the government
#
this intervention creating a negative sum game and by the way the one of the things that the farm
#
laws were doing were bringing competition in and saying yeah apmcs will still be there but they
#
will no longer have a monopoly and it would have benefited both consumers and farmers but you have
#
like you said part dependency vested interests and blah blah blah and today's politics is oppose
#
everything any government does even if once in a while they anyway ajay shah and i have had an
#
episode on the farm laws so i can kind of link that so you know next let's talk about another
#
aspect of the state and i'm skipping through different parts of your book you'll excuse me
#
i'm not following your order i'm kind of picking the ones which speak to me with most emotive force
#
and this chapter of yours is a fourth chapter it's called his master's police and you point out how
#
number one the police structure that we have is you know just taken from the british from the
#
colonialists so the objective of it is not to protect the rights of the people but to subjugate
#
them it's absolutely the opposite which is important to note and you write quote even
#
former police officials argue that the unquench that the unquestioned loyalty to the imperialists
#
has merely been replaced by complete submission to the political interests of the ruling party
#
and later you speak about you speak about the emergency which is useful to talk about police
#
excesses and also to remind people today that you know that there is a fundamental problem with the
#
state and not necessarily with any one party and you have this great story about how on march 1
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1976 a student of an engineering college in calicut called rajan warrior was picked up
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and he was tortured and for years they didn't know what the hell happened they rolled a wood
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and log over his body they just knew he was tortured and then eventually you know after the
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emergency was lifted years later the farmer the father of the kid filed a petition with the high
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court of kerala and his body couldn't be located and actually what had happened is that his body
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had been fed to pigs right somebody's body fed to pigs remarkable and then an entire paragraph that
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i want to quote quote the police arrested nearly one lakh ten thousand eight hundred and six people
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during the emergency under preventive detention laws even though they had not committed a crime
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this included at least 30 mps as well they tortured or killed many of the detainees
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for example they arrested kannada film actress nehalata reddy for an alleged plot to smuggle
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dynamite into the country to blow up railway stations however she was not even named in the
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final charge sheet filed by the police despite having chronic asthma she was regularly tortured
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in police custody her prison mates later recounted hearing her screams in the middle of the night
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on two occasions she even went into an asthmatic coma the police kept her in jail for eight months
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till her failing health forced them to release her on parole she died of a lung infection
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merely five days after she was released stop code and there's a great book on the emergency
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by kumi kapoor i've had an episode with kumiji where she really speaks about all this and we
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need to you know read that to understand you know the in a sense apart dependence of the indian
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state which brought us here and what you importantly also point out is that we didn't course correct
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after this that after the emergency the new government you know created a national police
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commission suggest ways to reform this not a thing was done right and so give me a sense of
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how deeply dangerous a problem this is because there is a paradox here
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that if the police exists not to protect the rights of the people but to protect the
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interests of those in power if they're directly under the politicians and the only people who
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can reform the system are the politicians themselves then aren't we stuck with this
#
so i started off when i'm writing this book thinking about how do people experience
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government in their everyday lives and the most visible form in which we experience government
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is the police because while we're walking on the road there is a certain notional belief
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that if something happens to me the police is going to come there and and be protecting
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of me and generally hold law and order together as you read some of those passages and stories
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from the emergency that are written in my book i don't think enough young people know about it
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and as i read some of these and especially as i for example read rajan waria's father's poem
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and he's also written a book about it it really brings it alive in a very visceral way that
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these are this is the extent to which the indian state can go and very often in a way that doesn't
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punish people who are actually responsible for that so a lot of these excesses in delhi for
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example happened under a certain police officer which as soon as the congress government returned
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was then promoted to positions of power so the perpetrator was in a way almost rewarded for what
#
he'd perpetrated now here's the talking about the police in particular one of the lenses that i took
#
was we have to start with a position of empathy for that individual police officer at the end of
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the day they have very very poor working conditions some of them are working 14 15 hours a day they
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have relatively low training they have relatively low wages only about some less than five percent
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have actually been trained in the last several years so we are not investing in their training
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in some states as we only have about 20 to 30 percent of the weaponry that the police requires
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so we are talking about a police force which is under resourced which is under staffed which is
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under trained which is under invested in therefore when we are talking about police reforms we should
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not nearly actually be thinking about the police officer on the street but we should be talking
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about the systems and processes the systems and processes as you rightly said are british systems
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and processes the police act is an 1861 act it was constituted right after the war of independence
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when they realized look the army can't be doing all of this so we need to create a police the
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purpose of this police is to control the people that those design choices continue to affect
#
how we experience our police in our everyday lives as we discussed previously on the show
#
that the police reports to the home ministers sitting in a distant land compare that to the
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uk for example where the local elected representatives have a lot of say in how the
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police functions holds them accountable etc in india there's a very distant power which
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holds them accountable even the question of accountability in in the police for example if
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you have in the u.s a complaint against police you can actually go to the to a complaint board
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which consists majority of civilians and that is going to do police investigations and in many
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cases i actually recommend termination that kind of transparency that kind of accountability
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doesn't exist out here if something happens typically it is the government deciding to
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suspend or transfer or whatever else so those tools of accountability also lie in the hands of the
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very same entity which effectively is being held accountable so there's something very deeply
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flawed in that system throughout the centuries we have actually had people come and say this
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system doesn't work 1902 the british themselves one of their committees came and said this is an
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oppressive system this is a corrupt system it doesn't work and yet at the same time obviously
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the british had no incentive to change the system then we had the emergency government that came
#
after it realized that this is the problem that is going to create and we actually had a lot of
#
commit we had the national police commission which brought out report after report which spoke a lot
#
about how the police can be reformed but despite the fact that since then we've probably not had
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single majority congress government for very long we've still not been able to implement that so
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the very same people who suffered under the emergency did not have the political will to
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implement it then the supreme court also in response to a petition filed by a former top
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cop of the police came out with recommendations and there's been recent study which says almost
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no state has implemented all of those recommendations so these are things almost
#
that we've known since time immemorial and hasn't happened and as we rightly say that it is because
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the people who can change it are exactly the people who benefit from the current system
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that if you have control of the police you have a lot of political and social power
#
therefore i think the only way out of this is to have a wider societal conversation about this
#
which if people realize that hey look there is an alternative way of setting up police there's an
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alternative way of having accountability mechanism perhaps enough of us will speak
#
about it for the government to gradually give up some a little bit of their power in favor of the
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people to actually have greater accountability from the police so i think this is going to be
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a fairly long journey and it is really encouraging most importantly that former police officials
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themselves are are speaking up about this and i'm also hopeful that one can perhaps build an agenda
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around this which talks about improving the quality of life of police personnel at the same
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time as improving these structures because if it is only when we have this kind of a very
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top-down hierarchical system that is ending up with the home minister of a state that we also
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have a system wherein the vast majority of the police official police personnel actually very
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little career progression to look forward to they cannot climb to the top of the ranks
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that they have to be subservient to their seniors in fact in the police act of the duties of what
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is the strength of a policeman one of the top ones is to follow orders and so they are also part of
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this system of subservience they have to fill out registers after register too much documentation
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which is never ever going to be used and hopefully we can once build a combined agenda that looks at
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both of these in conjunction and therefore builds the political will so i think it is incumbent about
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on people who are trying to make change in this to actually be able to build that platform
#
yeah and i'm really glad that you pointed out that we have to have empathy for the individual
#
policeman because the fact of the matter is we're all humans responding to incentives and what is
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more we are all broken and fucked up people inside right and if we are in a broken and
#
fucked up system good things cannot possibly come out of that so you know and and that empathy is
#
really difficult because you're out there and your traffic police is hassling you and you're
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getting late to go somewhere and you're like you know why doesn't the police go and stop crimes
#
why are you doing petty rent seeking but that's a freaking system that's not the guy you know
#
there but for the grace of the flying spaghetti monster guai right i mean i could be in that
#
person's shoes and it's yeah so that that's sort of an important point to remember we've already
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spoken about free speech but let's talk about it again you know in the fact that one you've
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pointed out that even within the constitution with the um the first amendment you know article 19
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you have article 19b is it which has all the caveats to it like public order decency all of
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that which can be interpreted so widely that you know literally anyone can go to jail at any point
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because you can just interpret anyone can kind of take offense you know we still have laws like 295a
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and 253a and all of those which essentially make free speech impossible in india like i
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often say that you know with all our bad laws thank god that in many areas state capacity is
#
so low you know otherwise we'd be completely screwed when you when you have so many bad laws
#
you want state capacity to be low so they can't implement and you want there to be corruption
#
so there is a way to reduce the friction within the system that the laws otherwise create but
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you know that's a separate point let's talk about where the state of free speech is
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especially in modern times because one of the things that you have pointed out correctly is
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that you know that the laws may or may not be used is sort of you know how much the laws are used
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don't really matter because one the process is a punishment it doesn't matter how many convictions
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you actually get the process is crazy people have been in jail for 25 years and etc and you've given
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examples in the book and two it has a chilling effect where everybody is just going to think
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that why the hell should i bother you know wire as you point out you know raised 30 crores in five
#
years and they have cases against them for 100 crores 200 crores whatever the hell you know
#
jay shah filed a 100 crore case i think and that creates a chilling effect where even if the
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government doesn't own the media the media will still draw boundaries of how far they can go
#
netflix will still say that no political show has to be done your show cancel you know all this
#
shit still happens and at the same time there is a countervailing force where technology is enabling
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people to speak out in various different ways you know you and i can have this conversation and
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perhaps because we fly under the radar and we are not important enough but you know so how do these
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play out that on the one hand you have the state with its repressive laws especially when it comes
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to free speech which really does it does not exist in india and it's no party's fault it's always been
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this way and on the other hand you have technological tools which almost allow people
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like us to live in a sense outside the domain of the state where we can say what we want we can
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create what we want we can use a vpn and we can you know go somewhere and have conversations in
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post content so what's you know when you look at the state of free speech in india what do you
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think especially when you know like in the like opposition leaders really haven't been arrested
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in the numbers that happened during the emergency during the emergency i think i would certainly be
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in jail i don't know about you i think you've been under the radar you're an important corporate
#
person but me and most of my friends would be in prison it's easy for these guys to do that the
#
moment they want and as a mutual friend of ours i won't named once said and we'll talk about
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surveillance later but i met him in this five-star hotel and the first thing he said to me was amit
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switch off your phone and i had to switch off my phone and only then would he speak to me right and
#
i'm sure you can guess who it is and one of the things that he said was that his surmise is
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that so far it's fine these guys have been winning elections right they're winning elections fair
#
and square you assume that that is the case they don't need to hack electoral machines because
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they've hacked minds but if they find that they're losing an election they can't possibly afford to
#
lose it because they will all end up in jail because of all the vindictive acts that they
#
have carried out so they have no option if they win the election that's great if they don't win
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the election they'll cancel the election and they'll do what they can to stay in power
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and if we reach that worst-case scenario all your free speech goes for a toss
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everything goes for a toss so what sort of you're thinking on this
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that's a great question because there is a certain amount of
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paradox here which is obviously we are having this conversation and we are having it fairly
#
openly and other people are also having these conversations and perhaps it's a reflection of
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how inconsequential you are but i at least like to think of it a little bit more positively saying
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that look at the end of the day we do have a significant degree of freedom of speech because
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the same conversation that we are having in many many countries especially in our neighborhood
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etc would be totally cannot happen right there'd be consequences to that and once again i think
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we see this phenomenon of the apparatus of the state leaving potential open so for the
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government to be selectively sensitive to some of these things and especially in recent times i think
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as polarization has increased for the government to do the bidding of a very vocal minority in
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trying to restrict certain people's free speech so even some of especially when you talk about
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art and literature a lot of this free speech while speech violations we've seen has been in
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response to some sort of grievances by people right to someone saying that look bharat mata
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should not be like this in a painting or the queen should not have a waste shown or you know
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this is a wrong representation of the islamic community etc so the the government i think has
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the ability to respond whether it chooses or not to respond remains to the particular government
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including this one previous one etc the question i kind of ask in the book is why should that
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decision be left to governments governments at the end of the day are representatives of the
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majoritarian will of the country and free speech is because it's a human right is something that
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is very deeply amnest with minority rights and there is therefore that fundamental disequilibrium
#
so when i think about the free speech problem in india as i put it it's not so much this particular
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government or that particular government but the question is the only forum in which the
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in which speech related issues or balancing of human rights needs to be done is the judiciary
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the government is not the right forum to do that bureaucrat is not trained how to balance
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one right against the other or one objective other the other against the other it's not a system it's
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not a forum designed to do that there is no counter questioning there's no presentation of argument
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decisions are taking far quicker than they're in the judiciary so i think india's structural
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problem as far as free speech is concerned is the lack of judicial oversight at the beginning
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we have judicial oversight at the end which is you arrest someone they are in in in the jails and
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depending on how fast they can get to the court it determines how quickly they get free and obviously
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many people cannot fight that battle and that is what has the chilling effect if you flipped the
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order and we said look every time that you have to clamp down on someone's free speech including
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covering the waste of that queen on this on the celluloid you need a court warrant to be able to
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do that and many people might argue that look we don't have enough capacity in the courts and all
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of that but it's still a net positive over where we are so i think of that as the fundamental
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problem of free speech in india while doing research for this book one of the things that
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really struck me was from a free speech perspective are we actually freer or less free compared to
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the british times and i think vindhav chandish would make this argument in his book that in
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many cases we are actually not as free as we were in the british time so when the sedition was
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invoked against bal gangadhar tilak they needed a warrant before going and arresting him whereas
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when kanhaiya kumar faced the same situation you don't need a warrant anymore in the 1970s the
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requirement for a warrant was done away with so there is those kind of things then we have
#
something around morality the british didn't care whether people were kissing on screen they
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didn't care about those issues because obviously they were not involved with the community but now
#
because we have governments which are democratically elected they have to respond
#
to the wishes of these communities even they're really small groups which means that in many
#
ways the bar on morality quote unquote morality has now increased that we have free speech
#
incursions happening because of the morality of a certain community's outrage a lot more than it
#
would have happened previously so for me while doing research for this book and while speaking
#
to people and reading that was something that came across as a fairly new thing for me
#
now to your question of where are we headed as you rightly said then now we have the technological
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tools to be able to circumvent a whole bunch of this very easily again an example i quote in the
#
book is that if the government wanted during the emergencies to stop it they just pulled power from
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all the printing presses nobody could go to press you cannot do that anymore unless you shut down
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the entire internet and that is a much higher cost than just pulling power from electricity
#
presses therefore i think the battleground around free speech is now going to shift to
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cyberspace which is why we see this whole battle around the whatsapp encryption case
#
which is should whatsapp be end-to-end encrypted because if it is end-to-end encrypted and nobody
#
else including the government can actually see what i'm talking about to my friends they can
#
only see metadata they can see that i sent you a text sometime yesterday but they can't see what
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i said i could have been talking about coffee or i could have been talking about very seditious stuff
#
and i think that's where the battleground is going to shift and to be fair every government
#
is fighting that battle the uk in the garb of child safety is also trying to in some way undermine
#
end-to-end encryption so i think the freedom of speech and the freedom to say what we say and
#
believe what we believe is now going to be played out in cyberspace i think therefore it's really
#
important for people to engage in those kind of issues i think our features speech is going to
#
be determined by whether end-to-end encryption stays it's going to be determined by how much
#
any government can actually coerce social media platforms to give up data it's going to depend
#
on our ability as an international community to come up with rules because at the end of the day
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even the people who espouse free speech don't espouse absolutely free speech right even they
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are saying there should be no hate speech so obviously these are even conceptually really
#
difficult things to grapple with and i think the emergence of a set of global standards around
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this is going to be something that's going to determine how we as everyday indians experience
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it so i want to double click on one on a couple of aspects of this and one of those is the judiciary
#
where you're saying get the judiciary into the process earlier like in bal gangadhar tilak's
#
case the british had to actually produce a warrant first if every time you have to go to a judge with
#
some frivolous nonsense about so and so's waste is uncovered then you cut nip a lot of these in
#
the bud but my question and it's a larger question and it also you know speaks to this hope that many
#
people have that the judiciary will save us is what if the judiciary is also co-opted and it
#
is certainly partly co-opted at least but what if the judiciary is also co-opted because the
#
government has the tools to do that they have the carrots in terms of post-retirement sinecures and
#
even plain up cash and they have the sticks and we've seen that with justice lawyer so you know
#
and i don't in fact understand the way the system is structured how we can even expect the judiciary
#
to be independent if it is so far or if parts of it are independent so far i think we are just lucky
#
with the individuals out there and the way that they're behaving but you know what are your
#
thoughts so firstly i think it's it's a far more complex topic than just saying judicial independence
#
because independent from whom in a democracy nothing is supposed to be independent so even
#
if there is complete independence of the judiciary that's probably a problem independence
#
and accountability are two things that have to come hand in hand but that said right seeing
#
that's a complex issue the way i would approach designing democratic institutions bottoms up is
#
to say there has to be horizontal and vertical distribution of power as long as there's a judiciary
#
which has reasonable independence and it is battling with government which also has reasonable
#
independence and power i think that's a good thing for democracy that these are these distribution
#
of power that there isn't concentration of power now to have that distribution of power what becomes
#
really important is to have this kind of independence that we spoke about and that's
#
where we go to the crux of the matter which is around some of these rules some of these
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norms that have to be put in place now let's take examples if you come to think of it the
#
the government when in the 1990 till the 1990s we had a single election commissioner
#
at that point the government brought in two election commissioners in addition to the chief
#
election commission where the chief election commission can only be removed by a two-thirds
#
majority of parliament the other election commissioners can can just be removed by
#
government on their own so we have to think about these kind of problems which make institutions
#
less independent and start plugging them one by one at this point for example even as you talk
#
about the ordinance case in delhi many might argue that actually having a committee which decides on
#
transfers of bureaucrats is actually probably a good thing because it protects the bureaucrats
#
from the vagaries of even the state government but then that body has to be somewhat independent of
#
other political powers in the vicinity and because this body that has been proposed in the ordinance
#
has two bureaucrats appointed by the centre so obviously it's it doesn't have that level of
#
independence so we have to keep pushing for that and if we see again the way things have evolved
#
in the country i think in many places these have started to be put in place there have been
#
instances where the supreme court has stepped in and saying the cbi director must be appointed
#
in this case if we now have the cbi director the cbi director is appointed by a committee which has
#
the leader of opposition prime minister and the chief justice of india so one can at least say
#
the appointment is somewhat insulated maybe not downstream so these structures have to be put in
#
place but even if these structures are put in place we know that there are enough loopholes
#
that even with this kind of setup of the cbi director's appointment we still know that there
#
are allegations of influence and that's where i think some societal norms have to build out
#
around that wherein society has to come and step up and say look this is not unacceptable
#
and we have good examples of that in israel right where people have come onto the streets
#
and saying look we need to protect the autonomy of the supreme court and i think as people
#
talk about institutional independence a lot more i think that's how we'll get there and
#
again i would like to take us back to the fact that this is not unique to this government
#
it happens at the state level where it probably flies under the radar because
#
there are too many to keep track of and it's happened previously as well but if i have to
#
summarize them then a the interplay between accountability and independence is complex
#
b we need distribution of power we just have to prevent the concentration of power in any one
#
entity thirdly that there's a lot that we can improve just by the nuts and bolts of how
#
appointments are done how salaries are decided can you be appointed to political office after
#
or not and finally at the end of the day it'll all boil down to the culture and people actually
#
talking about these issues marvelous now the other point i want to double click on is you spoke
#
about the whatsapp encryption battles and how states everywhere are fighting with you know to
#
get more and more control of information and surveillance and all that and you have a couple
#
of lines in your chapter on that the chapter is called the panopticon and your lines are quote
#
every government has a legitimate need to carry out surveillance to protect its citizens from
#
terrorists and to catch criminals however this need should be balanced against individual liberties
#
as an analogy just because some people stash black money in lockers governments cannot have
#
a key to every locker in the country stop code and here you know the classic trade-off is between
#
the state saying that listen part of what the state is there to do is to keep you safe and to
#
protect your rights and therefore we this is important and and the tech companies in a sense
#
are caught between a rock and a hard place if they don't comply with the i mean it is logical
#
that every company should comply with the laws of the country in which it is operating if the laws
#
are like this why blame the company so i'd be inclined to think that this is really a battle
#
between state and society and you know so give me a sense of what's happening here and the larger
#
question like you've also given examples from how china is moving towards dystopia about how they
#
have what are called nanny apps for the uighurs where that certain proportion of the population
#
which is muslim they have to carry apps on their phones which is tracking their location and
#
transmitting it at all times to the authorities and taking various other data about them like
#
blood glucose and whatever you know just capturing all of that and it's like an extreme
#
invasion of privacy it's as if you know the people belong to the state and the not the other way
#
around where really the way to think about it is of the state as an instrument of the people so
#
what is sort of your sense of this because on the one hand we speak about how technology can empower
#
individuals and we can break free in various ways but on the other hand there is a race
#
against the state which is fighting its own irrelevance perhaps by using this technology
#
at scale to you know to control the citizens and to know everything about them and and who knows
#
maybe the first listener of this conversation will be some bureaucrat in some you know surveillance
#
office amit varma kanya podcast i along before it is released who knows but what are your thoughts
#
you know this this balance or this race and so on let's start with the fact that
#
this is not something that's new has been happening for a long time and again i was not born in that
#
year but people tell me that when the 1984 riots for example broke out you already had access to
#
the voters list which had people's addresses that you can actually very systematically go about
#
persecuting people just based on that i think what technology does is to make it extremely easy
#
today for example if someone has to listen to amit varma's latest podcast before it is released
#
someone probably manually has to sit through and listen through the three four five seven hours and
#
maybe they don't have the attention span for that but someday it's probably going to be replaced by
#
ai which is going to be able to pick up on some keywords and then zoom in on that part of the
#
conversation and understand that so surveillance always existed now incredibly easy because of
#
technology and will become even massively easier so it's become going to become almost like war
#
machines that are deployed in everyday life so it's like we're walking with a policeman right
#
next to us all the time now as i rightly say that state needs to do surveillance in order
#
to protect us at the end of the day we live in a region particularly that makes us very vulnerable
#
as a country we also have a large population state capacity is limited resources are limited
#
policemen need these kind of ben these kind of supports to be able to do their job very well
#
but we are going down a very slippery slope and it's almost an inevitable slope but we are going
#
down that slippery slope wherein for example even just shri krishna who wrote the first draft of
#
india's privacy law when he saw some of the later draft he said this is taking us in the direction
#
of norvegian state wherein we might actually have a surveillance and restrictions with us all the
#
time here's how i would approach the problem a i think if we make the case to indians that hey this
#
is the extent of surveillance i need to do on you to keep you safe i think a lot of us will be open
#
to that because a lot of people are rational people they understand look we live in a neighborhood
#
where which necessitates this kind of surveillance etc so in making the case of this is how we decide
#
what is the appropriate level of surveillance but more importantly once we have decided that
#
this is what we are going to do then show us evidence that you are actually doing that
#
so while phone tapping is obviously a perfectly legitimate state aim and the state instrument
#
but how many of these phone taps have actually been produced as evidence in court so what's the
#
data around that and i think that's the transparency we need to be able to create to
#
to unpack this black box i think the problem with surveillance we have right now is it's a black box
#
in the 1990s the supreme court came in and said you can't just surveil anyone's phone you need to
#
have an order by a home secretary you need to have a review committee do we know when the review
#
committee meets do we know how many applications are filed do you have basic data on how many get
#
approved how many don't get approved in the mid 2010 someone filed an rti query just tell me how
#
many of these requests went to the review committee and how many got approved no specific
#
details and that rti response got denied so i think it is a very fine balance that we have
#
to strike and as a country as a society we cannot strike that balance unless we have people questioning
#
that data so i think there is therefore requirement for some sort of for a lot more transparency and
#
to use a very hackneyed term for almost independent regulators to be able to step in and
#
see if the government is holding this balance or not yeah i mean again independent regulators
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independence accountability all of it gets so messy one of the larger themes which you spoken
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about and and and you know the parts of your writing which i really enjoy are where you speak
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about where you kind of take a step back and and build a larger frame through which we can look at
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everything and one of in one of those you spoke about the three mega trends that are shaping our
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institutions now on the one hand it's true that these institutions have been with us forever some
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of them have been with us since 1947 or 1950 some have been with us since colonial times and you
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know stretching back to more than a hundred years before that but at the same time there are you
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know three sort of mega trends you've identified which are affecting it in fundamental ways and
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perhaps creating unknown unknowns also so we one can't really sit and you know forecast too much
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but you've looked at how you know you've in a sense looked at how some of them are strengthening
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our institutions some could be eroding our institutions so just kind of take me through
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that so the basic premise of this part of my book is that the same country the same set of people
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in the same situation can react in very different ways based on how their institutions and their
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politics evolves and the example i quote in the book is in the interwar period where the
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scandinavian countries and germany found them in a very similar situation for many countries
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led which was social unrest economic breakdowns etc and the approach that scandinavian countries
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in general followed was one of forming alliances finding the middle ground building camps etc whereas
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germany followed a far more exclusionary almost battle lines drawn out one institution going
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after the other what i'm trying to say in this chapter is because of these three mega trends we
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are entering an age of much much greater uncertainty what are these three mega trends
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a there's the spread of technology so on one hand it strengthens institution because we can have
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this conversation on this podcast and people can listen to it we can organize politically far more
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easier but at the same time it's far more easier for the government to be able to surveil us so the
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spread of technology both strengthens and weakens institution there is a trend around identity and
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polarization which is because now people are far more aware of their identities etc they're able
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to express it far more easily but it's also leading to a lot of polarization in society so even if you
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take something at caste it has become far more democratic because people are speaking up and
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expressing it but at the same time it's also leading to intercast violence etc which has
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shot up because of social media and the third mega trend that i speak about is that while
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immediately after independence we had this majority government in all states and at the center right
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now there are there is some level of distribution in for example we saw in the farm laws that even
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the majority government which had a brute force majority was forced to roll them back we have seen
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that in the labor laws that were brought out previously by this government so clearly
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this government despite its majority doesn't have the same powers as the post-independence
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congress government did it needs to balance with international allies state governments mncs if
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you do something that's really wonky for the economy there's going to be flight of capital and
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there's a lot of economic consequences so these three are the mega trends the spread of technology
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identity and polarization and the distribution of power each of these can move institutions
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strengthen institutions or weaken institutions the direction that they take will be dependent
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on the path that we adopt so for example one way that the distribution of power can take is
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in increasing confrontation which is you start creating these narratives of this is the enemy i
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am this foreign power is the enemy i am the government here to protect you i'm going to
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confront them and i confront them at many political fora or you can say look you have
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different priorities i have different priorities let's find the middle ground etc so our ability
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as a as a country and as a society to nudge and keep nudging institutions in the direction of
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strengthening them will essentially be the determinant of how these institutions evolve
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so you know there's tons in your book that i want to talk about but everybody is no doubt every
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listener should go out and buy them you've spoken about you know the interplay between the state
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and their interference in culture you've got a great chapter on regulation you know you've also
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you've got a chapter called peering into the crystal ball about looking into the future
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and i'll instead of going into the weeds in each of them i'll just ask the listeners to kind of
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pick them out but what i do want to ask you about is about change because a lot of your book is
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really descriptive and talks about all the things that are wrong and everyone must read it because
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a lot of this is like TIL stuff people don't know enough about it but you have also spoken
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about the path ahead and the ways in which institutions can evolve and change and you've
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spoken in particular about four channels of institutional evolution you know two of which
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are soft guardrails two of which are hard guardrails and i want you to sort of elaborate on each of
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those and you know tell me what they are and how potent do you think they might be in bringing
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about change so the motivation behind this chapter was a lot of people i think when they
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look at other people who are talking about things they're like hey you're armchair activists just
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sit down you don't know anything etc and the purpose of this chapter is also to attack this
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idea that armchair activists don't matter because unfortunately in a democracy or fortunately in the
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democracy armchair activists also matter the voice that each one of us express really matters and
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we've seen it very recently in the whole fiasco related to the tax collected at source and
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international credit cards that there's such a twitter storm that the government was forced
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to roll back all of that so i think that's where i started writing about these soft guardrails are
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things which armchair activists can do one is that i think in any democracy the government is
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sensitive to the voice of the people and we again see that example most importantly in the way we
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conduct our elections the model code of conduct if you think of it actually has very flimsy legal
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grounds if the government or if anyone wants to challenge it it would make for a very compelling
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case but it holds fort because it has become what one of the chief election commissions i spoke to
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said it's become a moral code of conduct there is a great moral value that is attached to it so as
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people speak about some of these things change happens the second soft guardrail is that now
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people internationally can vote with their wallets so in case for example the government brings in
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an economic policy which is really disliked by people there's going to be flight of capital from
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the country if we have inflation that is not controlled and stable there's going to be flight
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of capital from the country and that has a lot of downstream implications which harm the people
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who are in the political position so these are the two soft guardrails which is one speaking
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with your voice and b speaking with your wallet the hard guardrails are the more obvious ones
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which is actually going and showing up for a political protest or any kind of political
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mobilization we've seen that with rti with anna hazare etc many people think that those are for
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very issue specific things but i do think if you look at all of these they were in some form shape
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or manner talking about institutional change even the farm laws one of their demands was that there
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should be a law backing the msp so that is talking about some sort of an institutional change and
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finally a lot of the changes that happen in the indian ecosystem has been because of courts so
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that's why i call them the courts of change and out there we've seen from anything ranging from
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the right to privacy decriminalization of homosexuality in recent years back to the
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question you had initially posed about the constitution and the ability to change it and
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then we go to the case of nandana bharti case as well wherein you know the basic structure
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doctrine was put in place so we see the court stepping from time to time to protect the
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institutional architecture of the country so these are the four things that i call
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the four channels of change and i think it's very important for people and readers to be aware of
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this because otherwise you can give into the pessimism of believing that nothing is ever
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going to change but it's only by looking at this that you actually realize that even as an armchair
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activist even as a twitter activist there is some role that you can play in actually changing the
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state of the country even on such relatively technical issues as institutions so my third
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last question as you can see i'm organized my third last question is that and this is a question i
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think i've also asked you and we had a brief discussion on it when you gave a presentation
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on your book and ajay and susan's office a while back and it's this that on the one hand we can
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see how tectonic events at a particular point in time lead to part dependence in a way that
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continues for decades perhaps because of inertia perhaps because of interests arising that protect
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that way of being so whether it is the sort of american independence which led to that kind of
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government which paid a premium on personal liberty and that became then a cultural quality
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which the people still fight for and stand for though i would say that in many ways they've
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eroded their freedoms but they still have way more of them than we do and similarly we set upon
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a particular path with a really centralized government and a particular economic system
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in 1947 which has been really really hard to change and even seems impossible to change
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now i understand that incremental change at the margins can have a massive humanitarian impact
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just because of the scale you know you're talking the most populous country in the world
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and the scale is so much that even a tiny change can make a big impact however the fundamental
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edifice remains the same fundamental edifice and therefore the question must come that you know
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tectonic events are not over in the world it is not as if the world you know in a teleological
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sense the world was designed to arrive here and now we will be like this forever you know one way
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in which it could come for example is delimitation when you know i had an episode on north versus
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south with rs neelakantan and he elaborated on many of the things you speak about about how
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states have lost so much power because you know of the center and especially evocative in a
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north versus south sense so will it really to change the fundamental edifice from which we
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suffer so much to reverse the original sins which you talk about can that happen through
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incremental change or does it really require something more tectonic than that whatever
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that thing might be we are in a space of unknown unknowns so i'll start with two prefaces to my
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answer one is as you rightly said i think it's naive to assume that tectonic shifts are out of
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are never going to happen it's the end of history in any way sri lanka pakistan etc we're seeing
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there's enough that's kind of reaching that boiling point in our neighborhood for that tectonic shift
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to happen sometimes technology shifts happen in the reverse like we've seen in mayanmar
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so obviously it's not the end of history tectonic shifts can happen one of the things indira gandhi
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said about india is that it's more difficult for these tectonic shifts to happen just because
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of size of the and diversity of the country but even in the country of our size can possibly happen
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the second thing is that while we while i do talk about these three original sins there's also a
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lot of original virtue in how we set up our institutions that we have a lot to be thankful
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about and arvind subramaniam said that a lot of india's economic growth has been because of the
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quality of institutions that we had as centralized as they may be as coercive in many ways as they
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may be they also were especially compared to other post-colonial states were actually
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decently good institutions so we are talking about you know making things better rather than
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saying look everything that happened that time was bad ugly etc so i think i want to start with
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that acknowledgement now within that context the problem with any kind of revolutionary change is
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that it happens too fast that it goes in many different directions that it's really difficult
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for us to control so even if you look at the french revolution for example right
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obviously lots of people look up to it because of its espousal of those values but it also went in
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fairly violent and chaotic directions so to that extent i think revolutionary change when it happens
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can lead to a lot of social chaos and unrest which can be difficult to control and therefore
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i certainly belong to that to that group which says that look we need to keep making
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small and medium-sized evolutionary changes to get to a better society
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for example i do have a lot of faith in our ability as a country to self-correct some of
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our political excesses yes we will put new problems in place but hopefully we'll also solve the old
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ones at some point the dismissal of state governments by the center became so rampant
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and the supreme court came and stopped like greatly restricted it and we have seen the
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instances of the state governments being dismissed become far fewer than they were
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back in the day in fact it's almost unheard of now unless there's something really major
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so i think those kind of evolutionary changes will keep happening we will also then keep having new
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problems like the electoral bond system which has come in for a lot of criticism for being a
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gateway for kind of black money and concentration of power i would rather bet my horses on
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evolutionary change getting us to a better place rather than kind of an uncertain revolutionary
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change which i'm not sure how we handle so for example one revolutionary change today would be
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let's rewrite the constitution but i would i would be somewhat skeptical about the kind of
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constitution that we would be able to write i would be extremely skeptical given the guys who
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are going to rewrite it so i think that is why i lean more towards the latter piece and
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again i mean at some level it's coming from a sense of trust that i think a lot of indians share
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within kind of our government etc that despite all its limitations sometimes we do you know
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broadly get many of the things right so that's why that that puts me far more in the i'm more
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comfortable and understand evolutionary change a lot more rather than revolutionary change
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yeah which and and that's an optimistic view and more power to you so my penultimate question does
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include optimism but does include pessimism as well if we look forward to 2040 what is your
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best case scenario and your worst case scenario for india so in 2040 my best case scenario for
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india is that our citizenry has moved beyond the roti kapra makaan issue and have had
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care so much about the higher order questions of life around agency and liberty that we create the
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foundation for a far more prosperous country i don't think by 2040 we are becoming we are making
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such drastic transitions just about some eight to 17 18 years away but hopefully as we become a
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richer country we start thinking more about things beyond the bare essentials and about what makes us
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better citizens what makes our lives more meaningful and more interesting and more
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autonomous and that's my best case scenario for india because i think unless that foundation
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is put in place unless we create a culture where people care about liberty i don't think we are
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building the superstructure that all of us are hopeful so we can argue what's the best constitution
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to have it unless people believe in that we're not going to have that the worst case scenario
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for india which i think is true for a whole bunch of countries globally as well is that we enter
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this new age of what one might call surveillance crony capitalism to modify a popular phrase which
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is it's not even true capitalism because we we are not really free to participate in the market
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but it's crony capitalism that's dominated by a few players be it global big tech indian big tech
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business whatever else and that is explicitly promoted by a state in a way that is very
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disempowering for the citizen that as we were discussing earlier today that the citizen almost
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loses any kind of consent not just in their relationship with others but with their
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relationship with themselves and i think we do we are putting in place the tools to make that
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happen as you well harari says in his book that you know even covet for example put us in the
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direction of far greater surveillance state and i worry and my worst case scenario therefore is
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that we keep going down that path in a way that keeps eroding at individual liberties and now we
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actually have all the tools to make that happen wow optimistic words so final question and a
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standard one for my show for all my guests for me and my listeners recommend books music films art
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anything that you really love and that you you're so excited about you just want to share with
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everyone so the process of writing this book took me to a lot of other books which i think
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more people need to read about and write about i would encourage people to read about books more
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books around public institutions for me what was really useful was this anthology called that
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prathap bhanu maitha and others had put out around public institutions in service of the
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republic by shah and keelkar malevolent republic by kapil komi reddy so reading about a lot of
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these again each of them has a different style of writing but these really opened my eyes to
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looking at india very differently out of them particularly encourage people to look at the
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other side of the aisle so if you're leftward leaning read a new idea of india understand why
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are people on the right excited about the shape and the direction that our country is taking
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and in case you want and i'm sure this is somewhat of a hackneyed answer but in case you
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want to spook yourself about the state of the world and perhaps black mirror is a good series
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to start with because at least it will wake you up from or open your eyes to the possibilities
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that we can go down under so basheesh man it's been so it's been such a pleasure talking to you
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so thank you so much for giving me so much of your time this has been great thank you so much
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amit for having me and for doing what you do in terms of bringing all these interesting conversations
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to us if you enjoyed listening to this episode check out the show notes enter rabbit holes at
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will you can follow subashish on twitter at subashish 30 it's linked from the show notes
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you can follow me on twitter at amit varma a m i t v a r m a you can browse past episodes of
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the scene and the unseen at scene unseen dot i n thank you for listening
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so did you enjoy this episode of the scene and the unseen if so would you like to support the
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