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If you're a long-time listener of the show, you know that I like unconventional thinkers.
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Most of us join a herd.
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It's tempting, it gives us comfort and safety.
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Striking out can get us into trouble, especially from the pushbacks one receives from what
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Paul Graham calls the aggressively conventional minded.
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That's why I like thinkers like my guest today, an academic who's an outsider in academia,
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a thinker who likes to run iron man triathlons, who eats once a day, who thinks all the time,
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who's self-reflective and non-conformist.
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The specific ideas don't matter so much, you could agree or disagree, but the world
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is shaped by those who dare to think different and to think deep.
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and
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Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.
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My guest today is Aakash Singh Rathore, a philosopher and political theorist who's
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written books on wine, political theory and B. R. Ambedkar and has broken new ground with
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He has thrust aside conventional wisdom and approached every subject with curiosity and
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I love reading his books, especially his book on Indian political theory and also his recent
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work on Ambedkar, which is powerful and looks at Ambedkar's life in a new way.
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I love talking to Aakash about his life and thinking.
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He's an important and original thinker.
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Before I take you to my conversation with him though, let's take a quick commercial
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Hey, the music started and this sounds like a commercial, but it isn't.
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It's a plea from me to check out my latest labor of love, a YouTube show I am co-hosting
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with my good friend, the brilliant Ajay Shah.
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We've called it, Everything is Everything.
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Every week, we'll speak for about an hour on things we care about, from the profound
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to the profane, from the exalted to the everyday.
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We range widely across subjects and we bring multiple frames with which we try to understand
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Please join us on our journey and please support us by subscribing to our YouTube channel
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at youtube.com slash Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
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The show is called Everything is Everything.
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Please do check it out.
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Aakash, welcome to the scene on The Unseen.
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Thank you very much for the invitation.
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You know, a couple of years back, I did an episode with a friend of mine, Krish Shok,
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who's into music, wrote a great book on the science of food.
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And he told me something really interesting.
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We were discussing how people often listen to audio content at higher speeds.
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And he said he always hears my podcast at 3x.
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And I can hear it comfortably at two, two and a half.
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And then he mentioned a friend of his who is visually impaired.
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And to make up for that, he has to listen to everything.
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And he listens to stuff at 6x.
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Now, I have tried 6x and to me, it is just noise.
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I can't make anything out.
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But it tells you a lot about the plasticity of the brain that it can adjust so beautifully.
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And that came to my mind where you mentioned that for the last five weeks or so,
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you had a botched cataract operation and you were blind for a couple of weeks in between.
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And you had to travel around Europe giving talks and all of that.
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And, you know, maybe, you know, I don't know how much of this experience you've
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A lot of it comes with time when you look back.
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But I want to ask a little bit about that because it strikes me that
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the forms in which we experience the world can shape us intimately and can also shape
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For example, there's, you know, a talk of yours on YouTube where you talk about
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the Norwegian writer, Torkel Brekker, who, you know, wrote this book, I think, called
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And you were struck by the writing of that, which you found was very lively and different.
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And you wrote to him to say that, you know, how come your writing is so powerful and so
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much momentum and whatever it was.
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And he sent a picture of himself with what was basically a treadmill desk.
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That he had, you know, hooked up a desk at a treadmill.
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So he was walking while writing.
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And the form of his writing sort of changed the content, changed everything about it.
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And I would imagine that in subtle ways, we can't quite pin down.
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It would also change the way he thinks.
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Like, I think about how we live our lives where, you know, when I was growing up in
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the 80s and 90s, the world was a little bit quieter in the sense that there were less
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things invading your senses.
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You know, so you could actually sit with a book quietly and read it because there was
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Now we are swiping all the time, scrolling all the time.
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You know, that's what the world has become.
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And it seems to me that that can also affect the ways in which we think, they affect the
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ways in which we write.
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And so perhaps, you know, looking at your recent experience of having to give so many
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lectures in different cities of Europe without being able to see your notes and all of that.
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What was that experience like?
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Did you have any thoughts on, you know, did you think about stuff differently?
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Can the forms that you choose to inhabit in the ways that you live your life, does it
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And, you know, you hinted at something.
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Frankly, I haven't processed it fully yet because I had so many thoughts.
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There was a moment when, you know, my family was really panicking when I was sending the
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messages back that there'll be typos in this.
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I can't see, but I just want to let you know what I'm doing.
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So they were really, really terrified.
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But a couple of days into total blindness, I told myself, okay, I'm blind now.
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And because I didn't really know if it would improve, I still can't fully see and I still
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don't know if it will fully improve.
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But once I told myself, I'm blind now, somehow it took its effect.
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So everything that I did, I didn't feel sorry for myself.
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I didn't, I wasn't angry at the surgeon or about my decision to go somewhere for the
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Perhaps I ought not to.
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I was just trying to cope with the situation.
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And it wasn't even coping in the sense of coping with a tragedy.
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It was just restructuring my life.
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Now you mentioned this friend or acquaintance of yours who can listen at 6X.
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When I was in college, in order to fund my university, I needed to take odd jobs.
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I had a recent tweet that became very, you know, retweeted a lot when I was reflecting
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back on all of the jobs that I've done because they are things that I think have really made
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But one of the jobs was to read textbooks into audio so that the visually impaired students
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could listen to those books.
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And one thing I made a point of doing was to speak clearly and slowly.
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And now that you say that, you know, they develop this ability to listen fast, I feel
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kind of stupid for having read so slowly.
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But the experience, and I must have been 19 years old.
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So that experience came back to me a couple of weeks ago when I started listening to old
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YouTube talks of my own in order to prepare for talks that I needed to give because I
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couldn't read my notes.
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So I would try to piece together what it is that I want to say based on what it is that
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I might have uploaded on my YouTube channel.
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So that was one thing, dealing with how to continue my work at the same level of productivity.
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And the other was, as I had mentioned to you before we started recording, that I run,
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I train every day, and I didn't want this to change either.
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And I started running completely unable to see.
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And I would fall and I would have scrapes and I would sometimes think this could be
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the last step I take because I have no idea what's coming next.
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But once again, you mentioned I was in Europe.
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I think I wouldn't have thrown myself in not knowing if there would be an open manhole
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cover and things like that.
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In Europe, especially Germany where I started, the pavements are pretty reliable and predictable.
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But it was, so let me say there was a kind of, I'm not a religious man by any stretch
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of the imagination, certainly no sense of transcendence to something beyond human spirit.
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But there was a kind of giving over of myself in a way that, okay, I'm blind now.
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I'm just going to see what, well, see, I'm just going to find out what happens,
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what happens when I run, what happens when I walk through the airport.
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People were, because I didn't have any indication, I didn't have any
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card stating visually impaired, anything of that sort.
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So at the airport, I remember in Malaga in Spain, couldn't see a thing.
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And people were saying, go that way.
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And I was saying, I don't know where you're pointing.
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And also I can't speak Spanish.
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So I found the world very aggressive at times because they didn't know that I had this issue.
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And then on the opposite experience, when I told people I'm unable to see, can you help me?
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I found the world extremely accommodating.
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So there were these two extremes that were also experiences I have not had as a fully sighted
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person for 50 years or whenever one gains that.
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So there were a number of things that happened, very strange phenomena.
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I'm very surprised at the way that I just gave in.
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Maybe it's because I'm getting old and one just, this is me now, what can I do?
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But the way I gave into this idea I told myself, this is me now, I'm now blind, was surprised me.
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And I still have that attitude.
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I can't see right now fully.
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I can't read in the morning.
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Yesterday, a friend taught me how to enlarge the text on my phone.
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So finally I'm seeing messages and things like this.
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But somehow I'm not too hung up on it.
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I don't know why that is.
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There's a lovely short story by Raymond Carver.
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I'll link from the show notes called Cathedral.
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I'll send you the link.
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It's a beautiful story about a man's encounter with blindness in a sense, in a certain scenario.
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What you said about people being extremely aggressive till the moment they realize
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that there is a problem and then they're extremely kind,
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also strikes me as a great metaphor for life itself, how we are with other people.
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Everyone carries around blindnesses of our own, right?
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And others cannot see that.
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And there can be so much aggression when that goes unseen and so much kindness,
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And I think there is a lot of scope for all of us to be more kind.
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We just don't see the different blindnesses of others in some way or the
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different kinds of infirmities which hold them down perhaps.
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I was just teaching a course at Nalsar a couple of days ago in Hyderabad.
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And there, there is a legal scholar, Amit Dhanda, if I remember is her name.
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She's written really eye-opening work on disability, law and disability studies.
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And one thing I learned from her, which possibly accounts for the way I've given in,
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submitted, just submitted myself to the current situation.
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She has argued consistently throughout the years, for many decades in fact,
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that the way that we privilege in public spaces and in law and in society in general,
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the autonomous fully capable agent is ironic because how much of a human life is really like
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So maybe from age 25 to 40, we're fully able-bodied and we don't need really assistance
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and we're autonomous and self-sovereign as they say, self-sovereign in certain
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respects in public spaces.
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But from birth, we need care, attention.
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We're incapacitated for many years, physically early on.
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And then again, after we age, we're not rational agents by any stretch of the
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imagination for decades of our lives.
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So the fact that we are autonomous, sovereign for perhaps two decades out of eight,
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and yet all of public space is arranged according to that paradigm.
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So Amita's work on disability studies was extremely insightful suggesting that
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we complain so much about basic accommodation of disabilities or differences when in fact,
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each of us couldn't be autonomous had we not been cared for, had we not had accommodations
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I've been spending so much time in airports lately every other day.
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So one sees the ways that these wheelchairs need to come on the gateway, blocking everyone's
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ability to get out of the plane and people get extremely agitated that they can't get off the
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plane because this person has a wheelchair or this woman gets to board first because she's
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carrying an infant and so on.
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We all need that accommodation most of our lives.
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And yet the brief period that we don't, we become so angry about people who are doing it.
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So recognizing that those insights from disability studies have in some way
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become home to me very viscerally in the last few weeks, encountering that aggression in the queue
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for security and so on.
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I just can't see, I don't know, do I go left, right?
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Have I reached the tray or not?
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People behind will say, this kind of stuff.
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But it is very, very suggestive of how the last couple of weeks have been very suggestive to me
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how badly I must treat people on a daily basis.
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Not recognizing whatever difficulties they may be undergoing, facing.
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And I was actually using an expansive metaphor and not talking just about over disabilities
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like blindness or other kinds of physical infirmities.
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But not even looking at disability so much as differences.
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You've used a great term in one of your columns where you've spoken about
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Where your effort to Joni Mitchell song, Both Sides Now, which even I love,
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we should perhaps discuss later which version of her renditions is our favorite.
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But there you speak about the ability to see things from different sides.
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And you named your column in Deccan Herald, Poorva Pakshaya after that.
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And I'm also reminded of this great book written by Arnold Kling called
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The Three Languages of Politics, where he spoke about how within political discourse,
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and he wrote about it in the US context, you have the three broad tribes as he identified them,
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simplifying a bit for the sake of the argument.
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Speaking past each other and never to each other because they simply don't recognize
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that each of them starts from different first principles.
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So progressives will talk about equality, libertarians will talk about freedom,
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conservatives will talk about tradition.
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And those are the sort of not stars and that's what they are guided by.
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And when they speak to each other, they speak to each other from their own point of view.
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The other side is therefore not merely wrong, but evil and misguided and heretical and so on and so forth.
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Instead of acknowledging where the other person is coming from and being able to have those conversations.
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And I think within our political discourse that leads to a lot of that kind of aggression,
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where it should really not, where it should be,
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where that whole Poorva Pakshaya spirit that you talk about should sort of come about.
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And I see a lot of that in your writing.
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But is that something that you've kind of had to cultivate over time?
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Because what happens like when I look back on myself as a young man,
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obviously, you know, you build a frame to see the world.
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And that frame seems to explain everything.
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And for a while, you might be very taken by whatever that frame is.
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And you become less tolerant of other sides.
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It seems to you that those who are wrong must also be bad and so on,
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or stupid or whatever, so on and so forth.
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And it takes a period of time for us to lose that youthful arrogance,
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to gain some humility, to be able to have conversations and find common ground
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and understand that there's no point my, you know, telling this person to go towards,
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you know, to turn left there when they don't have their bearings yet.
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Or they might have different bearings from me.
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In that context, it's not that one can see and the other can't.
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It's that both are just seeing different things.
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Like how did you arrive at being Puroh Paksha, as it were?
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What is that journey like?
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There's so many ways to answer that question because
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the most interesting way is the one I have least access to,
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which is understanding it in my own personal development.
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I have a grasp of it as a scholar and a philosopher, you know,
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I can give all of the arguments about why it's significant.
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But really, I ought to reflect back on why that is of personal significance to me,
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as opposed to merely theoretical significance.
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One's experience in the world gives so many opportunities to understand this truth.
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The way that laborers regard intellectuals such as ourselves as really ridiculous people,
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we might be offended by it.
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We might think the same about them.
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But what it actually is, is an opportunity to understand that
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we see the world completely differently.
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And then if you move it from, let's say, those who are laborers versus intellectuals,
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to different branches or kinds of people within our own class,
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it's so obvious that we see things very, very differently.
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And social media has been very informative when one reads comments,
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when one is misunderstood, writing columns and seeing the comments and so on,
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is also extremely instructive that this person has no idea where I'm coming from.
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And then it doesn't take too much to push yourself to realize,
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and I have no idea where they're coming from.
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That second step requires a certain amount of maturity and self-reflection,
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and it comes very, very late in most people's lives, if it ever comes at all.
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If it ever comes at all.
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But another thing about social media is that Twitter, for example, even YouTube,
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the algorithm, the overbearing nature of the algorithm feeding you
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what you want to see and what you want to hear.
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For someone who likes to experience different ways of being,
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different lifestyles, I prefer bizarre characters to
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those with whom I have a lot in common and so on.
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In my personal romantic history, I noticed that I always go for really unstable people,
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people who are going to cause problems because I want to be knocked out of my path,
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And the algorithm is so overbearing to me.
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Every tweet that happens to come before me are just ideas that I myself agree with.
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So what is the point about this?
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What is the point of just getting your ego stroked and your ideas confirmed and so on?
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Because once you enter the real world, as it were, you don't encounter people
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with these kinds of ideas.
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So you have a great difficulty negotiating any relationship beyond the,
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you know, hello, how are you?
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Once you pass that stage, you're in treacherous waters because
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you're in your algorithm and they're in their algorithm.
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You have no idea how to transcend.
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So social media probably awoke me to that because of the really overbearing nature
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And I started doing things like subscribing, following people whose ideology I found
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I would follow right-wing accounts and nationalists and racists and things like that.
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Partially, I suppose, my psychology just because I like suffering.
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And partially because of how it forces me not just to think idiot and swipe,
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but why is this person saying that?
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And why do I find it so objectionable?
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And what is his or her argument in this case?
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And that's where Purvapaksha came in Deccan Herald.
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It was to tie the kind of work that I do to realizing this in personal experience.
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I can really speak about this for hours because my experiences at JNU and
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so on have taught me something very, very, I believe, important and worth
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communicating over and over again.
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But if we cannot in some way articulate the arguments and ideology of our opponents,
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then the only recourse we have is violence.
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And I think we see this a great deal.
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Violence and microaggressions to macroaggressions.
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And I taught at JNU for several years, and that was always an ocean of microaggressions
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I don't have a good grasp of how I came to see the fundamental importance
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of this concept like Purvapaksha or the ability to not only affectively empathize or emotionally
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empathize with strange others, but also cognitively empathize and try to see the
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world from their point of view.
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I don't have a great insight into how this arose in my personal life.
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I'm just making guesses that social media and so on contributed.
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But as far as work and so on goes, I can and I will teach courses on this topic because
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I think it's so important in a society as uncivil as Indian society tends to be to
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really make a point of trying to see things through the eyes of the other.
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I love the way you put it when you said that, you know, once I meet a stranger and we've
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gone through the high hellos and I'm in my algorithm, they're in their algorithm.
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And, you know, I once played out this experiment where I wanted to understand what the extreme
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Hindutva right-wing here was on about.
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So I didn't want my YouTube algorithm to get messed up.
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So I opened an incognito window, another Gmail account, and I entered that rabbit hole.
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And of course, you know, we all know about how extreme those guys are to the extent that,
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you know, Modi has let them down.
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They call him Mulana Modi.
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Adityanath is not Hindu enough for them.
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So it's pretty extreme.
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But what I realized there and what really took me aback is that my two YouTubes were
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now completely different worlds.
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You know, the respective algorithms took them over.
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One of them was what my usual interests are, the kind of music I listen to, the kind of,
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you know, the vlogs I watch, et cetera, et cetera.
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The other one is a different universe.
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Firstly, there is no overlap.
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And secondly, the other universe is as full of content, as sort of compelling,
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as coherent within that logic.
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And I'm thinking that it's okay.
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I have read widely and seen the world and all of that.
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So I can recognize these two algorithms and I can know that there is more.
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But you imagine a 15-year-old kid entering one of those worlds.
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A friend sends a video on his phone.
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It is some rabid fake news nonsense, but he watches it.
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And then the algorithm takes over and it pushes him into a different direction.
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And then if you're only watching that, you become a particular kind of person.
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And it is natural for you to think that the people on the other side,
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whatever that other side is, are just wrong or deluded or bad or the enemy.
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And it's just so easy to sort of other them.
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And that's one kind of fear that, you know, young people get sucked into those algorithms.
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And then, you know, your incentives of tribalism keep them there.
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And the other issue is that even if you know better,
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even if you've been exposed to different ideas,
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the incentives push you towards tribalism.
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Like you go on social media, you want to belong.
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You know, you want to be part of a community of people.
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So you might get drawn into one of the ideological tribes.
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And then you want to raise your status within that tribe.
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You want validation, you know.
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And the best way to get a lot of retweets and so on is through shitting on other people,
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whether they are on the other side or whether they are on your own side
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and they're not being pure enough and not actually engaging with arguments
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or nuance and so on and so forth.
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And then that takes over the discourse.
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Now, I do believe I'm still optimistic because I think that a lot of the noise
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that constitutes our political discourse is really vocal minorities.
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That the silent majority is just, you know, sitting back
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and they know the world is more complicated,
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but they don't really want to enter and get cancelled and so on and so forth.
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But yet these vocal minorities do shape the discourse.
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Like you've spoken about in one of your articles,
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you wrote about how in January once you gave a talk on Ambedkar's riddles in Hinduism
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and the ABVP protested.
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And shortly after that, you gave a talk on Golwalkar's,
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we are the nation who defined and the left protested.
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And the ABVP guys were on the front benches.
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And this is just crazy.
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Everybody should attend both of those lectures, right?
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Yeah, so that statement you just made, everybody should attend both of those lectures.
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How much experience and understanding goes into that realization?
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I think a huge amount of experience.
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You're in your 40s, I've turned 50.
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I don't think in my 30s I would have reached that conclusion.
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I think I would have been one of those protesting,
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I don't know which one I would be the left protesting,
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that this professor who must obviously be a crypto ideologue for the right.
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I would think like that, I think.
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So how much experience goes into that?
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As you said, momentum, the algorithms,
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our access to the world gets mediated,
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not as you had mentioned in the 80s by our families.
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I think we all grew up, those of us who are several decades old,
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grew up having conversations with ideological rivals in our own family.
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And so we still had love as a basis to prevent murder,
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which was the inclination, strong inclination with some family members
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But now I don't want to sound like a very old man,
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but the disillusion of family bonds that may be the result of just faster paced world,
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two parents working, whatever, whatever social causes,
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have reduced that experience.
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And then what experiences do we have?
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We have that, in the schooling, I don't really know what happens.
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Does the algorithm, does the ideology,
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does the polarity already take hold from that point?
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Certainly in colleges where I do have experience,
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one sees from day one a kind of lining up in your camp.
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Which camp do I belong in?
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And then, you know, three years, you stay in that camp.
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And then of course, a pet peeve of mine,
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the way that the national parties have youth wings on campuses.
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I think it should absolutely be prohibited on college campuses
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to allow national parties to have representatives,
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especially walled campuses.
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And maybe later I can talk about why a wall is so important around a campus in this respect.
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But we get locked in and more traditional ways of transcending,
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emotionally transcending, you know, the vilification of your ideological opponent.
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It's one thing to loathe, despise, or have contempt for ideas.
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It's another to have those feelings towards a human being.
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And so this latter has also dissolved, which is why I think that only violence is what we have
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as a mechanism to encounter the strange other now in today's social life.
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So it's very, very disturbing to me that I must have spent so much of my life in this mode.
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I wonder how many mistakes I made, how many people's dignity I didn't recognize or acknowledge
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because of not having gained this insight.
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And yet I don't know what creates this insight,
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this experience that allows you to make that statement so plainly and me to agree so readily.
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And would everybody agree?
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I think to go back to a university campus,
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one peculiarity of JNU, and I don't know that it's only JNU.
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I've been on a dozen or two dozen campuses throughout India for considerable lengths of time.
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One experience that is very crisp at JNU, if I go across a room to shake hands with someone
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who's obviously an ideologue for the right, I will hear hisses and later contempt and later
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receive WhatsApp messages.
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Why did you go speak to that person?
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Don't you know he's this and that?
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And why did you shake that person's hand?
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We all knew you were secretly a right-wing.
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Just walking across the room to show some kind of basic human decency, it's unacceptable.
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In the ideological polarity of a campus like JNU, and once again, I think it's not only JNU,
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I've had similar experiences at HCU, Hyderabad Central University in Hyderabad,
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and Aligarh Muslim University.
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All very prestigious universities, all places where I have been in HCU physically accosted
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for having shaken hands with someone from an ideologically rival camp.
#
So the situation is not good, especially considering that these are great liberal
#
We all know what's happening on IITs.
#
Engineers are never in the first place even introduced to ways of thinking beyond,
#
cultivating their imagination in any respect.
#
That life can be otherwise than how you've been raised.
#
But if on these prestigious liberal arts campuses, people are closing off the possibility
#
of having civil encounter with your ideological opponent, that's what frightens me,
#
and I think that's what motivates Purvapaksha and largely all of the books and work that I've been
#
doing for the last probably since 2015 or so.
#
I see a clear change between what I was doing in 2010, a book that I had written.
#
I see the preface was extremely hostile and unkind to my ideological opponents,
#
versus work after 2015.
#
So sometime in that period, I had the insight that you find so natural.
#
Sometime in that period, I guess, it occurred to me.
#
Before we go to your childhood, and I want to ask you a lot about that,
#
I'll first ask you about parenthood because that's also relatively recent.
#
You've got two young kids growing up, and I imagine the texture of their childhood
#
must be completely different from yours.
#
When you and I grew up, and I'm going to be 50 at the end of this year,
#
so we're pretty much the same age, when you and I grew up,
#
and I was a child of privilege, and I'm guessing you were as well.
#
But despite that, compared to today, there was such a scarcity of knowledge around us.
#
I was lucky to be surrounded by books and all of that,
#
but today's kids have the whole world on their smartphone,
#
and everything is available to them.
#
And yet, as Jonathan Haidt points out, all of us are consuming content
#
that was produced in the last three days, right?
#
And we are constantly scrolling, or we're constantly swiping,
#
and everything is just broken up into bite-sized little TikTok bits of entertainment.
#
And I don't necessarily mean that as a pejorative.
#
I'm a big fan of TikTok.
#
But the texture of our lives are completely different.
#
So when you see your kids today, one, in certain ways,
#
they're far luckier than you were because this incredible world of possibility
#
where they can learn anything they want.
#
And in my time, I remember we had to scramble to just figure out what kind of music we like.
#
It was so hard to get a mixtape together,
#
and you'd get together with a friend who had a double deck,
#
and you'd copy song by song, if you remember that.
#
And today, those scarcities are completely gone.
#
And yet, I find that a lot of young people today,
#
it's almost as if they have all the time in the world,
#
but they have no leisure time at all because they're constantly bombarded with shit.
#
And it also leads to different kinds of anxieties,
#
especially, you know, it's been much remarked upon by many,
#
how in the last decade or so, there's been an outbreak of teenage depression
#
among girls in the US, depression and suicides.
#
And part of that is because it has been attributed to Instagram, Facebook.
#
Young people are comparing their real lives with other people's projected lives,
#
and it becomes like a constant race to keep up.
#
The anxieties can be crippling.
#
So, you know, so in terms of parenthood, one,
#
what worries you or gives you hope about the world
#
that your kids are inhabiting and the way they are growing up?
#
And two, how has that changed you?
#
I think it changed me in a way that, you know, in ways that are,
#
that I will never fully understand.
#
As I had mentioned in the 30s, I probably was rather ignorant in so many ways.
#
One of them, I was quite resolved, never fully understood.
#
Ignorant in so many ways.
#
One of them, I was quite resolved never to have children.
#
I remember that even at the age 30, 31, 32.
#
And this was a conversation I had with my, at that time, fiance,
#
that, you know, I don't want to have children.
#
She knew I was an idiot, so she would just, okay, fine, fine, fine.
#
I think she, somehow she had a great, maybe because of the way she grew up,
#
she had sort of more insight into the way people change and delude themselves and so on.
#
So she didn't make a big fuss about it, but I remember having that conversation with her.
#
And then just jump forward some years.
#
My wife was posted in Pakistan, and very dangerous posting.
#
And not least because of the way we had to travel.
#
There are no direct flights, obviously, between India, Pakistan, and so on.
#
And we would take these small propeller planes.
#
There was a great deal of turbulence on a plane, on a flight once.
#
And I was looking, there was a pilot seated next to me.
#
On a flight during turbulence, I used to be afraid, I no longer am,
#
but I used to look at the staff, you know, for confidence, like they don't seem scared,
#
So I looked very worried.
#
So I looked to my right to see a gentleman who told me he was a pilot.
#
And his feet were up against the, I forget how you call that, you know,
#
the wall separating on an aircraft.
#
And he was grabbing so tightly the armrest.
#
And when we made eye contact, he said, I'm too old for this shit.
#
And I thought, okay, he's terrified.
#
Now I'm really losing my mind.
#
On a similar flight, I would take these between Lahore and Islamabad very frequently.
#
I had my newborn first child, Amaya.
#
She must have been just months old.
#
And I was holding her to my chest.
#
And once again, this kind of turbulence began.
#
And suddenly I felt that she was giving me all kinds of courage.
#
You know, I just felt that I have no fear because nothing can possibly go wrong
#
because I have responsibility to this creature now.
#
And so it created a kind of insulation from all of my immature anxieties and whatnot.
#
And I remember that sensation very clearly.
#
And I feel like it hasn't left me in some regards.
#
That once I made, you know, that unlikely decision to have a child,
#
I felt that I have a new responsibility as a person in the world.
#
And that I've taken very seriously.
#
So I'm, you know, no matter, sometimes we live in different countries because of my
#
work and my wife's work and so on.
#
But I've taken the upbringing of my daughters very, very seriously.
#
So I know that it has changed me.
#
Now, my concerns about them are informed by other things.
#
So, you know, I must have this conservative sort of underlying characteristic because
#
once, you know, I always wanted my girls to read.
#
I would always read to them physical books, not on the screen.
#
And when they began their own life reading, and my younger one doesn't read at all,
#
which still creates so much heartache for me.
#
When they began their own life, they would go on the screen.
#
And at the same time, their schools sort of changed.
#
So they didn't have textbooks.
#
Everything was on their laptop.
#
I had great resistance against this, so much so that I thought of changing their schools
#
so that they would have physical textbooks just because of my nostalgia.
#
You know, the feeling of a book, the page, the sensuousness of the page,
#
and all of these things are significant.
#
But it is largely nostalgia.
#
It is very largely nostalgia.
#
Now, as a philosopher, I have an understanding through my study of authors in the ancient
#
world like Plato up to the contemporary world like Marshall McLuhan, who have shown that
#
at every innovation in technology, there has been conservative resistance suggesting that,
#
you know, that's the end of humankind as we know it.
#
So McLuhan wrote about the Gutenberg Galaxy and the way that the printed word transformed
#
basically human epistemology and the way that we, in fact, even see the world left to right,
#
right to left, things like this.
#
But when one looks back at, there's an ancient dialogue of Plato's called the Phaedrus.
#
And I find it, I have to remember it many times when I'm dealing with my children.
#
And in this dialogue, Socrates, it's one of the Socratic dialogues.
#
Socrates has a student named Phaedrus and they've come to have a conversation.
#
And Phaedrus sticks something into his cloak and Socrates says, what is that?
#
What have you put into your cloak?
#
And Phaedrus doesn't want to tell him.
#
And then behold, it's a book, scroll at that time, but let's just say physical book.
#
Don't you realize how bad books are for your mind?
#
The exact kind of thing that I would say to my children.
#
Don't you realize how bad the screen is for your mind and how you need
#
books and their physicality and the sensuousness?
#
But Socrates is saying the exact same thing about the book itself because for him,
#
conversation, dialogue should be oral and one should remember the positions of the other
#
instead of outsourcing your memory to the physical page, just like we now outsource our memory to.
#
In the 80s, we knew so many phone numbers, right?
#
I don't even know my own phone number, really.
#
I just remember two phone numbers.
#
So now we outsource our memory like cyborgs in some respect.
#
So Socrates' concern was once you rely on books, then you can no longer be dialogical.
#
Your experience with the words of the other get mediated through this
#
foreign object and it's dangerous.
#
So I often think back that because of a dialogue like the Phaedrus or Marshall McLuhan's
#
work on communication and changing media over time, I often realize that I'm
#
just repeating generations of resistance to change.
#
So I have tried to let my daughters be the way that their generation is.
#
Whether I've made a mistake or not, only time will tell.
#
But that's one way I've really wanted to… I suppose this is also very different from my
#
own childhood because my father imposed his ideas very, very strictly and strongly.
#
And so I have the opposite way of doing things.
#
So my nails are painted.
#
My daughter decides my nails need to be painted.
#
So my nails get painted.
#
I just let them be the way they want to be and try in this respect to show that
#
heteronormativity is not something I demand from them.
#
And all sorts of ways where I let their generation just live out in our household rather than try
#
to impose the past generations, my way of thinking onto them.
#
And I think that's been very liberating for me because I have to walk around with
#
nail paint or makeup in my classes and people are really wondering what's going on.
#
And so letting them be as their generation is has also served to force me to cope or to
#
navigate a lot of my inherent conservatism of my own ideas.
#
So I think let's see how their lives turn out in terms of their agency.
#
The world is going to shape it largely.
#
But I feel I have made the right choice, just letting them be and not try to impose my sense
#
of what is right and wrong in terms of how I grew up or how I prefer the book to the screen or how
#
I think they have short attention spans because of TikTok, 13-second attention spans.
#
Today you told me something that I always wondered about, that you mentioned people
#
want depth and they want ideas to play out irrespective of how long it might take.
#
And that's something I had almost forgotten was possible because both running my YouTube channel
#
where I keep getting told make things shorter, get to the point, all of this sort of stuff,
#
and the ways that, as you mentioned, book reviews will come or
#
articles in the paper about my work and so on, and they're so superficial and shoddy.
#
I just assumed that's the way of the world now, no depth, superficiality, bite-size pieces.
#
And then I walk in here and you tell me, no, people want depth.
#
So I think there's a lot more going on than one's intuitive knee-jerk reaction to what one thinks
#
is going on. And I'm sure that one can remain optimistic about even the lives of people
#
who have grown up on something like TikTok. Just to give context to my listeners and what
#
you're kind of talking about, we were chatting about how people do listen to long-form podcasts
#
because I began this podcast in 2017 under the impression people have short attention spans,
#
hook them fast, keep it short. Realized that's not the case because A, people are a captive
#
audience. When they listen to audio, they're either sort of working out, commuting, or doing
#
errands, and less likely to be distracted. Therefore, two, they listen at higher speeds
#
because the brain can comprehend language at 500 words a minute. We speak much slower,
#
so 2X is common. And plus, people do want depth, not all the time, but some of the time they do,
#
and everybody else is a mile wide and an inch deep. So depth is sort of great.
#
Regarding YouTube, here's an interesting thing. About a month ago, a friend of mine,
#
Ajay Shah, and I started a YouTube video podcast called Everything is Everything,
#
which is about an hour long each episode. And our determination was that for a couple of years,
#
we're just going to do it every week, not look at the analytics, not look for validation,
#
just do our own thing, be authentic to ourselves, see where it goes. But Ajay is a bit of a geek,
#
he's an engineer, so he did look at the analytics. And he found two interesting data points. And
#
one data point is that in our first two episodes, there's a metric YouTube uses called how many
#
people dropped out in the first 30 seconds. And for our first two episodes, that metric was about
#
45%, 55%. But the second metric, which I love, which is more important, is how many people watch
#
the whole thing at one go. And that's between 12 and 15%. And I love that. I don't care about
#
the people who are dropping out, and possibly many of them are just people who saw the thumbnail on
#
YouTube and clicked without knowing who we are. But I care about the 12 to 15%,
#
which may not be a high absolute number, but the engagement is great. And that's what I love.
#
Is that watched till the end?
#
Till the end. From the start to the end, about 12% are sticking.
#
I'm so happy with that. I don't care if that absolute number seems low of that 12%.
#
But that engagement, which is something, especially with audio podcasts one sees,
#
it's just huge. And Socrates, I think, would have approved of you and I talking like this.
#
I don't know what he would have made of these metal objects in front of us. So the fact that
#
people will listen to this later instead of having new conversations. But I want to ask you about a
#
related thought that strikes me, which is like, one, I share your optimism for new ways of doing
#
things, because it's easy to be a Luddite. And people did say the printing press will destroy
#
the human mind and clearly is the other way around. But I also wonder about the forms in
#
which we write and the forms in which we read. For example, I teach this online writing course
#
where my students will often ask me that should I write by hand or should I type? And at one level,
#
the answer is that hey, words are words. If you're creating, it doesn't really matter.
#
At another level, there is a difference. Because when you're writing by hand,
#
you are slower. And it will be ugly for you to go and cut words out. So you're likely to be
#
more deliberative in what you put down, especially if you're at a transitional
#
technology of a typewriter. You've got to be really careful. But today we've got the backspace,
#
we can type fast, we can just go through things. The speed of thinking changes, the amount of
#
deliberation you put in changes. I wonder if that makes a difference. Another thing I've explored
#
with a couple of my guests is how back in the day, I remember when I left home as a young man,
#
and I would work, I would send long letters on these inland letter cards or even, you know,
#
proper paper to my parents or friends, which would be like you're talking about your day,
#
you're talking about how you were feeling, you were talking about a book you read.
#
And our communication was like that. And at one level, the act of sitting and writing a letter
#
to someone is sending a message that you matter to me. So I'm spending this time. And it is also
#
a time of quiet reflection for yourself, that you're getting to understand yourself and even
#
shape yourself better in the act of writing. While today, so much of our interpersonal
#
communication, even with loved ones, is really terse, instrumental WhatsApp messages, information
#
exchange. There's nothing of that. So that form has changed. And I wonder if the changing of that
#
form changes in some way, the ways in which we relate to them, the ways in which we relate to
#
ourselves and think about ourselves. And you've even given a talk on writing and cognition and
#
all of that. I'll link that from the show notes. It's fascinating. But what do you think about
#
this? Like, do you feel that there is a difference in the way that you read and the way that you
#
write? Is this something you've thought about? It's something I think about very frequently
#
and more and more lately. And one thing I'm picking up about you, Amit, is that I think
#
you and I are both very nostalgic people. That's what old age does. Is it our age? I think it could
#
be. So have you looked, have you seen any of these letters lately that you used to write 30 years
#
back? So I actually did. My dad had died last year, a couple of years back during COVID second wave.
#
So we cleaned out his house and gave most of his books away and gave most of the things away. But
#
I found some diaries and stuff and obviously I kept them. Some of them were his diaries and
#
my mother's diaries. And they're really interesting in the kind of insight they give. But I also found
#
an old letter I had written to someone and never posted. And this must have been when I was 19 or
#
20. And it is an enthusiastic letter about the plot of a story I want to write, a short story
#
I want to write. And it's really detailed. It's like, you know, four handwritten pages goes into
#
a lot of detail. And I was really surprised at my young self, because sitting here where I am,
#
I look at the past in sort of broad strokes. And I look at my younger self and I think, oh,
#
he was arrogant, he was foolish, he knew nothing, bad attitude, shit writer, all of those things.
#
And maybe those are the broad aspects in which I've changed. But I've forgotten the final details
#
of what that young person who is almost a stranger to me was like. And reading this letter, I thought,
#
what an interesting guy, right? And what interesting ideas and how is he even thinking
#
of these? And it was like looking at someone else and not even nostalgia. It's just an act
#
of curiosity. So I was kind of struck by that. And I didn't know what to make of that. And there was
#
also the sense of loss that whoever that person was, I have lost that person. But I mean, it's
#
interesting. Yeah. Lately, so when I was about 18, 19, I took a bus, you know, a bus ride from,
#
I believe, New York City to Washington, D.C., or something like this. And there was a girl on that
#
bus. I was 18 or 19, she was 15, 14 or 15. And she was traveling also. And we were seated together,
#
we became friends in the course of those few hours on the bus. And this is, I don't know what year
#
this would be, but obviously prior to any internet technology or mobile phones and so on. And I got
#
her home address and I started writing her letters. And then she would write back and tell me,
#
she doesn't have a father, her school doesn't teach her anything, things like this. And I noticed
#
that she needed kind of paternal figure and someone to guide her. And I started
#
writing her long letters about whatever I was learning in college. And then I would send her
#
different poems. And then eventually when I had enough money, I would send her paperbacks,
#
you know, you should read this and things like that. Now that went on for
#
as long as letter writing, until letter writing ended. Recently, and I mean, even this week,
#
she started sending me screenshots or photographs of these letters. And
#
I'm awestruck by many, many things. One, that I was ever kind enough to take that kind of time
#
to treat a stranger in this way, because now I'm a professional teacher, but
#
um, you know, it's very different, right? There's something very different about that
#
commitment in some way.
#
Were you ever kind of in love with her or something?
#
So I try to think back about whether that was the situation and in our age difference at that time,
#
because I was 18 or 19, she was 14, 15, if that was, you know, sublimation,
#
right? Because I couldn't have a relationship. So maybe it was being sublimated through this
#
other form. But looking at the content and what she describes, I was sending her and
#
she basically went to university. She got a degree in some kind of comparative literature
#
or something, which she credits, you know, the books that I would send her for being
#
formative in that respect. And the way her life turned out, it seems that if it was sublimation,
#
it was very good sublimation. So I've been reading those letters and they have put me in touch with,
#
as you say, you know, the strange person of 30 years ago or more. But the thing that most
#
influences me or by which I'm right now most moved is re-reading those poems, you know,
#
that I might have sent her at that time. So there was a, oh, I left my phone in the other room,
#
but just last week she sent me a sonnet, which obviously I had written, handwritten out.
#
And I forgot about that sonnet. I used to be obsessed with that. It's one of Shakespeare's
#
how is it? The burst of, on lust and love, the burst of, no, I've forgotten that that's on it.
#
And then a poem of Sappho's that I wrote out for her in Greek. At that time I was,
#
you know, learning ancient Greek and trying to teach her as well. So now I look at these poems
#
as a 51 year old and reflect on these poems as having been extremely important to me
#
30 years ago and what happened to them? What changed in my life that this poem was,
#
I was no longer, you know, connected to this piece of writing or this text and so on.
#
So I do have very concrete and significant experiences relating to precisely what you're
#
describing. That we took the time to write, that something went into that that was more
#
in some way committed, if not generous, than the way we engage with our loved ones today.
#
And that there was an articulation of spirit in some respect of our ambitions of our futures and
#
so on that we're now in some ways disconnected with. So these things really are fascinating to me,
#
but always I try to control nostalgia because I think nostalgia can be
#
extremely burdensome on the present generation, on kids today. It used to be five years back,
#
I would be teaching a course, let's say, and I'll reference a movie or a book. A few days ago,
#
in I think in Hyderabad or in Bangalore, I referenced Tagore's Gare Baire. And I said,
#
anyone familiar with either the novel or the film? No one raised a hand. No one said yes.
#
Five years ago, I would have started berating them. You know, this is how can you not know
#
this work? You have to know this work and so on. But then I look back when I was 20,
#
did I know Citizen Kane? Did I know these masterpieces that any of my teachers would
#
berate me about? And generation after generation has their own heroes, has their own myths, has
#
their own works of art that unlock the universe for them. And it's not necessary for me to impose
#
that pantheon that I was raised through onto this generation. So whenever it comes to
#
thinking on these experiences, I always try to stop myself and just give some freedom to this
#
generation to have their own ideas. Maybe a generation from now, people will look back
#
nostalgically on WhatsApp. Those were the days. The relaxed days. We could write long form on
#
WhatsApp. You mentioned asking your students have they seen Gare Baire and getting kind of
#
blank faces. And here's another thing that is happening, which is that, and I realize this
#
because many of my guests are from a little older than me or a little younger than me, but the same
#
kind of generation. And many of our influences we realize are similar, or at least we read the same
#
kind of things growing up. So you and me obviously can talk about how good Victor Banerjee was in
#
Gare Baire or whether it was one of Ray's good films and so on and so forth. But I've realized
#
that what has happened in the last 10, 15 years is that the mainstream has dissipated in a way that
#
these common cultural connections are really vanishing in the sense that back in the day,
#
there were a certain number of films and a certain number of books which are part of the canon,
#
which everyone kind of refers to, which everyone has sort of heard of. And today you have an
#
outpouring of options of entertainment and art and literature from all sides, which I think is
#
incredible. I think this is in many ways a golden age of world cinema, for example.
#
If you watch enough of it. But what that has done is it has fragmented the audiences in such a way
#
that the mainstream is vanishing, that 30 years later when people get together and they're both
#
50, it is no longer so likely that they'll have these common cultural references. They could each
#
be their own unique algorithm with no overlapping points at all, which is neither good nor bad.
#
I'm not lamenting it, but it's kind of interesting. I mean, in a sense, it's a great thing that
#
you are not restricted to a small bunch of common sort of load stars, as it were. But also then,
#
you know, and I'm sure when we talk about your childhood and ask you what you read and what you
#
watched and all that, there'll be a lot that will make me nostalgic because there'll be common
#
points of connect and those common points of connect for a future generation might sort of
#
not really be there. And I'm just thinking aloud. I don't know if it's a bad thing or a good thing
#
It's hard to say. There must be elements of both. So one can see
#
the dissolution or the fracturing of the canon in many, many different forms.
#
So there was a literary canon, there was a cinematic canon, there's a music canon,
#
and then there's also a moral canon, you know, and an aesthetic one and so on. But
#
what people have come to realize is that in almost all of these different modes,
#
what has been asserted as universal was in fact particular to class and caste and gender and race
#
and so on. And so the fragmentation of the canon is part of the consistent logic of the recognition
#
of all kinds of hegemonies and forms of systemic oppression. What's disturbing in it is that,
#
once again, to be nostalgic, the era that I find so fascinating, which is why all of my songs that
#
I write in the Poovapaksha column come from the 60s, that the civil rights fighters of today
#
in the studio right now, there's Bob Dylan's photo is right in front of me, the songwriters,
#
the filmmakers, the novelists and so on, often used that shared canon as a resource for arguing
#
why the canon needs to be brought down. I remember being very confused by a French philosopher Jacques
#
Derrida, with whom I studied very briefly in Paris, saying that one should not read Shakespeare,
#
one should not be indoctrinated by Plato and Aristotle and the so-called traditions of
#
Western philosophy and Western literature and all of these things. And I thought, but his education
#
was entirely in this and he's a master of it. And now he's telling us, me, don't study it.
#
So what am I supposed to do now? And I found that very ironic and also the feminist movement,
#
early feminism, the black power movement, civil rights, hippies, the singer-songwriter,
#
folk singer-songwriter, all of those people had the experience of the canon in whichever modality.
#
While they deconstructed it and taught the next generation, don't listen to it. Find your own way,
#
find your own thing. And indeed, the result today is total fracture. Their canons are specific to
#
caste and they're specific to class and they're specific to gender. At IIT Tirupati, I was just
#
teaching a course on my book, Philosophy of Autobiography, and going through Hemingway's
#
autobiography, A Movable Feast, and thinking how moving, how powerful this book was for me
#
as a budding writer to learn the discipline of writing. Hemingway would sit down every day
#
whether he had something to write or not. He made himself sit in this chair for seven hours
#
so that eventually that part of the physical discomfort was no longer an issue and he was left
#
to write. So this discipline for me, it changed my life. Reading Hemingway's A Movable Feast
#
changed my life as a writer. And then his heteronormativity, the fact that he was always
#
a manly man, that he found F. Scott Fitzgerald effeminate and started criticizing not only his
#
writing but his penis size as well. And all of these, I asked women in the course, there were
#
many women who were a bit older, teachers also joined this course, has anyone else been inspired
#
from this? Only men raised their hand, no women. So one realizes that often the canon is gender
#
specific as well as class and caste and culture specific. So somehow it is something to celebrate
#
that we have destroyed the hegemony of this canon, which was the false universalization
#
of a particularity, usually white man or Brahmin man or whatever. On the other hand,
#
one has to think that something much larger is going on in terms of the way that global capitalism
#
works and the way that global capitalism requires the splintering of identities and the lack of
#
solidarities and the lack of commonalities in order to exploit every market and every
#
individual within those markets. So the Marxist side of me makes me very skeptical about these
#
fractured identities and acknowledgements of the specificities of each of our positions.
#
But let's say the progressive side of me makes me champion it. The nostalgic side of me makes me
#
miss it. It's very complicated, but I think so is the world, I guess.
#
Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of criticisms of capitalism should at some level be criticisms
#
of human nature itself because capitalism is all about when it works well, is all about giving
#
people what they want, you know, you fulfill my need, I fulfill your need, it's a positive sum game
#
and so on and so forth. But there are these two interesting currents in opposite directions,
#
which I see as having taken place. And one is a sort of a homogenization where, you know,
#
back in the day to become a successful artist and only 1% of your musicians would be successful,
#
the rest are strugglers, and you have to achieve scale and everything is homogenized and you're,
#
you know, playing to the lowest common denominator and so on and so forth. And that is a force
#
against art and whatever indie art survives also survives thanks to markets, but at a smaller scale.
#
Today, I think what's happened is that the mainstream no longer matters so much artists
#
no longer need to scale like certainly within the creator economy. As a podcaster, I don't need to
#
reach a million listeners to have a show that is working and paying for itself and appreciated by
#
others. I can exist despite that and that's enabled again, by markets and markets and
#
technology and a future shift and I'm just thinking aloud here is that, you know, we talk about the
#
fragmentation of entertainment and all of that. But a future shift might even come about, for
#
example, because of AI, like I did an episode with the writer Jerry Pinto, we spoke for more than
#
eight hours. Only eight hours with Jerry Pinto? It was too short, it was too short. Yeah,
#
Jerry is fantastic. But at one point, we were kind of musing about how he's written this great
#
crime thriller called Murder in Mahim. And I was like, you know, why don't you make it a series?
#
And he was like, no, man, I have so much work to do. And I just thought that, you know,
#
X years later, there is going to be AI and I'll tell that AI write me more novels in the series
#
and AI will. And now I'm taking that thought further and saying it is not that a publisher
#
will get an AI to write 10 more books and they will all be as good as Jerry's original. I am
#
saying that we could literally sit down and get AI to write individual versions tailored for us
#
of, you know, Murder in Mahim in that series. And you could just get it on the fly. And that
#
completely destroys mainstream entertainment in terms of, you know, and this is something like
#
my writing students often ask me that, you know, if AI is going to eventually one day somewhere down
#
the line produce great works, if a monkey is going to write Shakespeare as it were, then what is my
#
motivation? And the way I break it down is that sure, you know, if your thin desire is to get
#
validation and acclaim for your works, you may not get that because there might be much better stuff
#
coming out and you can't compete with either quality or quantity. But if your thick desire
#
is to be a creator, to tell stories, to write, no one can take that away from you. Is this sort of
#
something that you've thought about? Well, it depends which aspect you're talking about,
#
the drive to create art and write or AI? I think both as a creator and as a consumer
#
and AI itself, like you wrote a recent piece about how your phone is full of these AI apps that
#
make your life easier in so many different ways. And one of them promised to tell you the truth and
#
you were like, I love you. But, you know, so what is your sort of relationship with technology in
#
that sense? And as both a creator, if I can use that term, I've had people on the show get offended
#
before and say, I'm an artist, I'm not a creator, but you know the sense in which I mean it.
#
Yeah, content creator. I have to say, I have a discomfort with that also, with the idea of
#
content. Because then what about form? You know, I also want to contribute to form. You're contributing
#
to form by doing an eight hour podcast. It's not merely eight hours of content. It's the very
#
fact that you go for eight hours, changes the form in some respects. Yeah, but the important
#
thing there also is that the form changes the content. And like I wrote an essay about how A,
#
the form changes the content because our conversation already is much more discursive
#
than it otherwise would be if we just had an hour. We are flowing into all these different directions.
#
It forces me to listen. It changes the quality of both my listening and my engagement with your
#
work. And that eventually ends up changing the person that I am. So form, content, character,
#
they all feed into one another. Yeah, they all move. But because of that, I have a lot of difficulty
#
being called a content creator when I'm working on YouTube because I want to be more than that.
#
I didn't know artist was maybe the paradigm that I'm secretly, what is actually annoying me is that
#
I'm being referred to as a creator rather than an artist. That's fascinating.
#
The ego of the artist is mysterious. No, but just to sum it up, I think Eric Weinstein did an episode
#
with me and he took umbrage at being, you know, at the term creator and he preferred artist. And I
#
said, no, I actually think creator is much more egalitarian because here's the thing. If I'm a
#
17 year old kid and I've started creating my own stuff, it would be pompous and presumptuous of me
#
to call myself an artist right away. That is for others to call me an artist if they feel that way.
#
But I can certainly call myself a creator. Anybody can be a creator. So it's in that sense.
#
I think you're right. And this certainly Andy Warhol would agree with you. I want to talk about
#
Eric Weinstein eventually. So you began by saying one of the important things about thinking about
#
capitalism. One of the important things in this question I think is, I mean you mentioned that
#
capitalism and human nature. How does AI and the future that it opens up change human nature?
#
Not, I mean I think this is the important part. So for millennia,
#
you know, the reason that we study ancient literature, ancient mythology, ancient philosophy
#
and so on is because we have a certain connection with that content. If Plato was a content creator.
#
We have long-standing ideas such as freedom, choice, dignity,
#
creativity. I personally believe and I'm writing a book on this right now. The working title is
#
Why Siri Will Murder Us All, but what will turn out probably to be the title is more
#
blasé like AI and the Future of Humanity. The idea is that the classical way that we've thought
#
about things like choice and freedom are definitely going to change when AI gives us what we want
#
before we want it. So right now the idea of a choice is to have options in front of us and to
#
decide and pick. But we all know that already the way AI is functioning in IT is that, you know,
#
there are processes of keywords or harvesting words from emails that you've exchanged or
#
something like that to present ads to you in relation to these things. So
#
that I have a free canvas from which to choose whatever I will has already been
#
largely curtailed given the amount of time we spend on email and internet and Google and so on.
#
It keeps track of everything that we do. The phone keeps track of everywhere that we go.
#
I run every morning and there's something that I still after years cannot get used to,
#
which is that as soon as my phone or my watch recognizes where I am, it asks me,
#
do I want to play the music that I usually play once I get there? And I scream at it. No, I will
#
not. Yes, I did want to, but now I don't want to. Yes, I did want to. It knew my thoughts before I
#
had them, but just to resist and to show that I still am an agent, I will listen to something
#
completely different just to throw it off. But what this suggests is that as AI progresses and
#
as our experience integrates more closely with it, both in terms of the watch is going to change
#
into the glasses, the glasses are going to change into a retinal contraption, the watch itself might
#
be integrated into the wrist. Our paytm is eventually going to be a fingertip. As we
#
cyborg ourselves, along with these changes will change human nature. What we always thought
#
freedom was from the ancient text that we currently read to the future when it begins to unfold.
#
The idea of choice is going to change. The idea of freedom is going to change. What does it mean
#
to choose? What does it mean to be free? And consequently, the idea of creativity is probably
#
also going to change in ways that we can't anticipate now. Again, we're complicated,
#
multilayered people. The Marxist in me thinks maybe this is actually very good because Marx
#
had this notion that there has to be fundamental changes in human nature so that consciousness
#
elevates to a point where something like communism is possible. It's certainly not possible
#
today. It certainly wasn't possible in his time. We always talk about Marx as a communist and so
#
on, but you look at the number of pages that he wrote, 30,000 pages. How much is on communism?
#
300 pages. Two books, The Communist Manifesto, 1848, the last book, The Critique of the Gotha
#
Program, which means that the last book he wrote, one of two books on communism, was a critique of
#
communism as actually existing. So he's a philosopher of capitalism, not of communism.
#
And why is that the case? Because he certainly held that if he were to lay out what communism were
#
given the brutish nature of the human person at that moment in history and her consciousness,
#
how much it had evolved at that moment in history, we would have immediately assimilated
#
it back into our baser interpretations and things like this. And there's one line,
#
if you don't mind me, I find when you talk about AI, I go a little crazy. One line everybody knows
#
about Marx is about the communist state is from each according to his abilities to each according
#
to his needs. Now parse this out. What is it suggesting? That we are unequal. Now Marx is
#
supposed to be an egalitarian. So how can he make a statement about the nature of communist society
#
as being a place of an inequality? Well, obviously a change in consciousness. Right now, given the
#
consciousness, the level of our development of our natures, we need to press for equality because
#
we're so fundamentally in egalitarian and exploitative and extractive on that basis.
#
But eventually with the evolution of human consciousness, inequalities will not be the
#
foundation for extraction and exploitation, but rather for fulfillment. But Marx can't explain
#
these things. That's why he never writes about communism because we would appropriate it into
#
our own grotesque ways of being. So I believe that Marx anticipated that technology like AI
#
would serve to elevate and advance human consciousness to such a level where it could
#
start to make sense to talk about justice and a kind of communist, whatever content you want to
#
fill in into that concept, utopian, let's say, way of being. We certainly can have it now. So is AI
#
part of that advance of human nature? There are similar arguments to be made by philosophers
#
like Nietzsche who say really crazy things about one should never be moral. Why? Because morality
#
is a thing of the past and human life is a thing for the future. So why should we lock the future
#
into the past? Only animals want their offspring to live identical to them. A puppy's life is the
#
same as a dog's life. That's the life of animals. So for human beings, we want our progeny to be in
#
a better position than ours. That's what makes us uniquely human. And yet we bind them in our morality
#
and the moralities of the past. So Nietzsche's argument is the only way that human consciousness
#
is ever going to evolve in advance is if we untangle and dismantle the expectation for
#
future generations to be bound by our morality, which is basically bound by our history. He tries
#
to liberate them in that respect. So philosophers like Marx and Nietzsche make me very optimistic
#
about AI even though once again I have that discomfort about is it being done just for profit?
#
Is it being done just for the total surveillance state? Is it being done for all the opposite
#
reasons that I'm optimistic about it for? And so both of those, that great optimism and that great
#
discomfort go hand in hand along with the nostalgia. Life was so much better before AI.
#
Isn't the future of humanity going to be so much better because of AI? These are the things to
#
balance. I'll cut myself off here. I can go on forever on this topic.
#
There's lots I want to double click on but first an anecdote. You spoke about how the tech in your
#
smartphone will go to your glasses and then it'll become retinal and all and I remember recently for
#
the last few weeks I've been spending a lot of time at a friend's farm in Karjat. Karjat is like
#
two and a half hours away from Bombay and I was driving there one night and it was pretty late
#
at night when I was getting there and it was raining and there's a stretch of road
#
in Karjat district which is completely dark and for some reason when I was driving down that stretch
#
even with my headlights on full beam I simply couldn't see anything. I could just see black
#
all around me and it was moving in weird ways and I was very tired. It was like black waves and walls
#
and all of that in front of me but I managed to get to where I had to go. How? Because I replaced
#
what I could see with my eyes with what the map told me. So if the map told me go straight,
#
I was just going straight. I'll beat very slowly because you don't know there might be a speed
#
breaker and I can't see anything right but I just kind of followed the map really slowly and got to
#
where I was going which was sort of a surreal experience and not part of any point I'm making
#
at all but what I you know you're speaking about marks and elevating human nature and that reminded
#
me of something the biologist E.O. Wilson once said about communism. He said great idea wrong
#
species. His intuition was that it would have worked in ants but humans know given human nature
#
as you know as a restraining feature it could not possibly have worked. What I think technology
#
and AI do and this is both worrying implications and good ones is that they don't elevate human
#
consciousness. Instead they amplify aspects of human nature. You know Steven Pinker once said
#
nature gives us knobs nurture turns them and we have all kinds of different knobs and different
#
inclinations and instincts often contradicting each other. We have what Pinker would call the
#
better angels of our nature but we also have much worse demons. What I have seen happening over the
#
last 15 years or so is that social media has amplified some of the worst instincts in us.
#
For example the Facebook like button or the Twitter retweet button amplified our desire for
#
validation, amplified the inherent tribalism within each of us and perhaps underplaying other
#
instincts like cognitive empathy for example which might take us in the other direction and
#
this didn't come about because of big tech companies were evil. This came about because
#
they were trying to maximize engagement and it just so happens that this happened. You know I was a
#
professional poker player for five years and one of the things I learned while spending a lot of
#
time in casinos and poker is of course a game of skill. You're not playing against the house,
#
you're playing against other players but a lot of it was played in casinos where everything else was
#
you're playing against the house you're bound to lose. Everyone else is a sucker and there's a
#
great book by Natasha Daushkul on how the gambling industry 20, 30, 40 years ago realized this what
#
the tech companies have now and they were amplifying our worst instincts in terms of
#
how we are addicted. So you'd have a slot machine which has you know the sounds and the lights are
#
in a particular way and you know and there's an algorithm somewhere in the back end and this is
#
I'm talking 1980s 1990s and somewhere in the back end there's an algo which is figuring out that oh
#
this guy has sat there for three hours he's playing more slowly this is his pattern of losing at some
#
point he'll get up and go and so send a waiter down and a waiter comes to him and says hey sir
#
free drink for you on the house and blah blah blah and you continue playing. While you know markets
#
and technology exist to fulfill our needs they also end up in these insidious ways in amplifying
#
these instincts so you're absolutely right that an algorithm which is tracking me on my phone
#
will give me what I want before I know I want it and you know that makes us rethink choice that
#
makes us rethink freedom and I think that part of the answer there is not necessarily in coercive
#
state regulation which always ends up in territory I'm very suspicious of but just
#
figuring out that okay we we turn the wrong knobs how can we turn the right knobs and make it play
#
for us like I find Reddit a far less toxic space and Twitter for example right and it's interesting
#
to think about why that is you know what are the different instincts that these technologies are
#
playing on so in a sense I'll I'll kind of disagree on the narrow point that I don't think we can
#
elevate human consciousness but I think there's a lot of good stuff about human nature as well
#
and I think what all of us have to figure out and the problem that we have to solve in
#
peaceful voluntary ways is how do we turn those knobs and how do we minimize the damage that
#
the other knobs are doing right well one thing that is is interesting is to take a grand historical
#
perspective here so as opposed to to what the last the destruction that the last 15 years of
#
Facebook likes and you know Instagram models and so on will have done to each of us and especially
#
as you mentioned much earlier to teenage girls self-image and all of those things the fact that
#
these things come out and can be reflected on at a larger from a larger if you pan out
#
this these might be the conditions for what I was referring to as the elevation of human nature
#
because essentially it's just greater experience upon which we can reflect about the wrong roads
#
that we have gone down and there is a larger element I mean obviously the violence of the
#
20th century has done very little to teach us in the 21st that we took have been taking wrong
#
path so there's an extra element that an extra dimension that needs to come in there which
#
must be partly physiological must have to do with brain chemistry and all kinds of things like that
#
which somehow as a materialist I believe AI can in some way influence or alter so I don't think
#
human nature really is anything more than stereo chemistry in the brain and body so I think that
#
just the fact that the like button was invented has played out continues to play out and eventually
#
will be part of our learning about ourselves that then can be you know you bring up a very
#
important element which is when you said you were a professional poker player I got extremely excited
#
and a little bit anxious because that means that I know that you can read all my signs on my faces
#
for how I feel and that's a misconception about poker players it's all math you don't need to
#
read nothing oh there's nothing of that okay good now I feel better so uh but you pointed out the
#
house you know the house so I my fascination with the poker player is his or her own relationship
#
you know his or her own experiences and skills and talents and things like that but then you
#
point out the house this thing that's watching over and that it has its own agency and puppeteering
#
you bringing the drink to the slot machine player or whatever so uh the stereo chemistry
#
the evolution of possible evolution and alteration of what we call human nature at least from a
#
material point of view you know good idea wrong species well maybe the species will change we
#
know they we evolve biologically why can we not evolve spiritually as well um and we also know
#
there is a correlation between biological and spiritual spiritual evolution for which of course
#
some people are now saying that perhaps the whole point of ai what I'm sorry perhaps the whole point
#
of evolution was that a species such as our own should bring ai into the universe you know that
#
that was the ultimate aim not not the the human human intelligence but this further artificial
#
intelligence so I think that there's a sense in which the very fact that these horrible
#
knobs have been turned and that the the base the better angels and the worser ones whatever the
#
devils that they have emerged in ways that we a deck a generation ago didn't know oh these were
#
we didn't realize that hormones could do this to us you know that that we needed this fixation
#
of the like button and the squirt of you know whatever hormone that we get from from that and
#
so on dopamine and now we know now given that we know as an intelligent reflective species
#
we assimilate that into our self-understanding and we evolve as a process I'm more I'm more
#
optimistic about not this static idea of the human but there there will and must eventually be some
#
kind of quantum growth in our spiritual evolution that matches the one of our biological
#
what I find miraculous is we are the only species that can actually fight its own programming
#
you know we can reflect on the machines that we are and we can redesign ourselves and that's
#
you know miraculous to me it is of course true that we should have extreme humility because there
#
is an argument that can be made that we are colonized by bacteria there's another argument
#
if we're colonized by wheat all of those may well be the case but they can't change themselves and
#
we can but uh yeah there we uh we are away from uh humility again now I really want to kind of
#
begin our conversation about uh you know your younger years and how you grew up and all of
#
that but let's take a quick commercial break and on the other end of that we'll meet up with the
#
much much younger akash singh okay great 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 the art 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 head on over to register at india uncut dot com slash
#
clear writing that's india uncut dot com 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 akash singh rathore and we are
#
already in the 90 minutes through the show but now we'll actually start discussing akash's life so
#
this is actually the you know the part of the show where i have the most fun you know discussing
#
ideas discussing books is all great but just getting to know someone and getting to know what
#
they were like when they were kids i for some reason i just love this part so tell me where
#
for some reason i just love this part so tell me where did you grow up or what were you like as a
#
kid i was extremely naughty fairly precocious i think but just we can put it in context because
#
i grew up as you know an indian in the u.s. not quite second generation because my father
#
so to to to go back my father left in the 1960s so very early to new york city he did his bhc at
#
columbia university and then started teaching there at columbia so i grew up on that campus
#
i was born in the u.s. but my older brother and older sister were born in in india in in benares
#
yes my mother's family was and remains from from benares my father's family
#
i believe it was called the judicial services my father's family is originally from jodhpur but
#
my grandfather was in the judicial services and was assigned to the high court in alahabad
#
and so i believe my father was born in alahabad studied at alahabad and laknow and then at bhu
#
where he met or married my my mother now she was according to what she tells me she's only 17
#
when they were married and 18 when she moved to the to to new york which is just remarkable
#
she already had two children and then i was born there and her life story is far more fascinating
#
than my own tell me your life story first yeah so my father is highly educated highly qualified
#
and she has you know she's 17 18 years old two children an immigrant in new york in the 1960s
#
when there are no there is no indian community or anything of that of that sort so she had a very
#
lonely uh but busy uh life some of my youngest memories are at that ice cream shop you know
#
baskin robbins so my mother took a job at baskin robbins in midtown manhattan near hunter college
#
and used that money to put herself through her bachelor's at hunter college
#
and i was more or less raised by the servers of baskin robbins because she would
#
slip away and attend her classes while i was sitting there at baskin robbins eating ice
#
cream for hours on end oh wow these are some of my youngest memories really which is strange
#
because i don't eat baskin robbins anymore i can't stand i have no idea what might be in it but
#
but just i remember you know this these pink color all of these bubble gum kind of colors and
#
so on and sitting there and wondering where my family is and why am i why have i been
#
abandoned in this ice cream shop so she then went on my father is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist
#
was he died very young uh back in 2001 so my mother also studied psychology she did her ba
#
and then she completed her masters as well and a licensing in psychotherapy but not psychoanalysis
#
my father was an intellectual you know psychoanalytic psychotherapy is a very
#
intellectual enterprise ordinary counseling clinical psychology and so on is a is a practice
#
right it's a so so but she you know really uh in some respects my father was very orthodox
#
um not a misogynist but you know the classical indian man of the 1960s of that of that cast
#
and class so her interior life was you know not significant to to him but surprisingly she
#
she had a rich one and she she made out of nothing you know while having three children
#
in an alien city uh she made a uh she got herself educated through her own cost because
#
i think my father wouldn't pay and uh and then opened the practice and she eventually became
#
such a uh success opening a private practice i believe she had 30 counselors working under
#
and she titled it alternative counseling center and in this time in the 80s
#
there was a lot of uh emergence of the trans community and the idea of sex change operations
#
and things like that and the state mandated that people should have undergo a kind of psychological
#
evaluation before they're permitted to undergo sex change operation and since her clinic for some
#
reason she chose a cc alternative only to get high up in the phone book you might have to explain to
#
the audience what a phone book is so she wanted the a but everyone understood it as alternative as
#
in non-heteronormative and so she kept getting these phone calls can you meet me i want to have
#
a sex change operation she slowly started specializing in trans sexuality and issues
#
like this and became very very popular amongst the trans community and i remember another one of my
#
early memories is not as an infant like the baskin robbins one but is encountering all of these
#
people that you know were obviously men but dressed like women or you know these kinds of
#
phenomena and i think i've taken that with me as i had mentioned in our first hour and a half i far
#
prefer people who live on the margins and in subcultures and so on to your ordinary run of
#
people and i think maybe it comes from feeling safe in that environment early on
#
so that's a bit about my mother quite extraordinary often i wonder about why i
#
don't you know i don't watch sports i never was into watching football or cricket or anything
#
like that and i often wonder if it's because i was essentially raised by by a single mother
#
you know she she was so isolated that you know she was basically alone and i and i think a
#
lot of my attitude towards gender and so on was basically because of having a
#
such a strong role model in my mother far more than my my father my father was a kind of intellectual
#
role model but in every sense of that word very abstracted from his body you know just typical
#
academic no sense of the connection unity of the body and the mind which is so important to me and
#
i often think it's because of it's a kind of unity of my father's life of the mind and my mother's
#
engagement with the with the real world that uh why that has become you know something so
#
so natural for me so that's a bit about my mother my father is an altogether curious phenomenon
#
um i learned to really dislike him in my childhood uh but as a intellectual and a
#
scholar you know to be honest i became an academic because of my father one thing i remember from
#
my youth is coming home from school and seeing my father lounging on the sofa with his feet propped
#
up and reading a book and one day i asked him why don't you work you know like every all of my other
#
friends fathers and he looked at me very stern and he said i am working he was lying down you know
#
with a head on a pillow reading a book and i thought okay i think he has cracked something if
#
this is if this is hard work this is the kind of work i wouldn't mind doing so that really
#
got me into academia the sense of because i'm really i'm i'm lazy like anyone else and if
#
if there are shortcuts to be had you know if a life can be lived productively while lying on a
#
sofa reading a book i signed up for that so he has lodged into my super ego to speak you know
#
psychoanalytically for sure but no in no greater sense than my mother interestingly uh he was
#
a person of proud of his caste and his hinduness and i think anyone would call him a right-wing
#
person looking back at it retrospectively the thing that people need to understand is that
#
the diasporic indian community in the west especially the u.s and australia not where
#
they were there for decades like the uk they all had a sense of guilt about their economic escape
#
from from india and i think that got filled in with a hyper nationalism and a chauvinism
#
which which one can see parading today when modi goes to you know the u.s and
#
wrongs of nris they're championing him because i believe there is this this guilt about having
#
abandoned india you know if it's so great why did you leave and and then the precarity of their
#
position as a racial minority even though they are generally a very rich and powerful
#
uh affluent minority so you know the psyche of the of the economic migrant especially the indian
#
in a place like the u.s is a very curious thing and i and it manifested my father as kind of
#
hardcore nationalism and uh you know at his will he donated everything to the construction of a
#
temple in chicago from an early age because of my mother's influence i did not identify with
#
this saffron you know sanskritic uh kind of ideology of my father but when he was in charge
#
we did have to you know every weekend was spent learning sanskrit reading the gita in the original
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and um having lessons with him we had to go to various kinds of temples um krishna consciousness
#
was a phase which actually turned out to be very useful when i left the united states at around
#
age 18 and started traveling around europe turned out that these hari krishna uh organizations have
#
restaurants and hostels all over europe vienna berlin london and so on and after i'll get to it
#
but you know sometime homeless in in the uk when i was thrown out of university and lost my
#
scholarship and was sleeping in the park for some time uh i was rescued by the recollection
#
that my father had given so much money to these people that i'm a lifelong member and i i could
#
freely um sleep at any uh of these hari krishna hostels anywhere in europe so i move you know from
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one to the other uh staying with them instead of being homeless but he so he had uh forced us
#
literally to you know we had to learn i had to learn tabla and harmonium my sister had to learn
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what was it uh you know we each had to take up indian instruments and
#
i think my sister had to learn all of this kind of imposition so we would
#
remember our the not just our roots but the glories you know the wonder that was india needed to be
#
kindle in us uh and very typical of that time you know school studies were not enough just like
#
the average middle class indian kid school is one thing but then tutions is another world that
#
so that is completely alien to american culture but every day after school we were each assigned
#
a letter of the encyclopedia that we should you know read master and then he would test us on this
#
i was the youngest as i had mentioned and in some respects possibly because born in the united
#
states as opposed to my brother and sister i i think i was more adjusted because of the
#
racism of the 1970s i believe being an immigrant was far harder on my brother than it was for
#
for me because i could always retort i'm a natural-born uh you know citizen my brother was
#
not and uh i believe they had their indian passports for several years in their childhood
#
uh so my brother i say this just to suggest there was a very oppressive
#
you know uh it was an oppressive childhood under my father's regime because my brother
#
didn't cope very well he he had a bipolar disorder which everybody of course says is
#
a you know genetic natural whatever but i think there definitely are social factors that come into
#
play um you know you had mentioned that you reversed your type 2 diabetes i have a feeling
#
that i may have reversed uh my bipolar my own bipolar disorder but that is speculative you know
#
so uh uh so my my brother didn't survive really he also died uh younger than i am now i think he
#
was 40 years old when he died of a of a heart attack but it was really from you know drug abuse
#
and and and things like that from uh from the traumas of our childhood so a few things happen
#
one for someone like me being the youngest for example my father never beat me but he did
#
my sister and my my brother so i had a lot of liberties being the youngest so as a consequence
#
of that softer treatment i think i did get a lot of the benefits of this brutally enforced education
#
and uh acquisition of knowledge and certain skills you know sanskrit in fact has proved very useful
#
to me um in later life in like arguing with my ideological opponents who immediately assume
#
because i am a leftist that obviously i can't know sanskrit and then i start you know in in on that
#
as well um but uh uh but it was a you know a very nurturing loving but fractured childhood from
#
from my mother's side and a you know one of my other earliest memories is uh my father leaving
#
the house my mother is throwing him out of the house by the time she had developed you know the
#
kind of autonomy and confidence to to to take charge of her own life and you know uh not allow
#
him knowing that you can call the police if he starts hitting her things like that so uh one of
#
my very traumatic memories which i try not to remember is him being thrown out of the house
#
under threat of her calling the police because maybe he was violent with her or something
#
and he's saying he's going to take me and she's saying no he's staying with me and both of my
#
parents pulling on my arms you know so one has my right arm the other has the left and they're both
#
pulling me trying to uh take me or keep me uh with them so it was you know not the not the
#
healthiest childhood by any stretch of the imagination but still somehow from my father's
#
side filled with uh a quest for knowledge and maybe you know just luck genetic inheriting his
#
intelligence um and uh from my mother's side a kind of respect for so if from my father my father was
#
very proud of his cast of his class of his learning of his family background i remember
#
he would make me recite all of my ancestors and stuff all the way back to Mirabai so um and he
#
would say you know she wasn't Mirabai she was Mirabai Singratore and this is you and she is
#
your ancestor and then it was this and then it was this and then it was this later i've looked into
#
it historically i think it's all I think but um but you know so he had this haughty kind of pride
#
and elitism and he was a bit of a racist and you know all of the things that we that generation
#
their their vices were all in him my mother was entirely the opposite as i mentioned she was very
#
open to anyone who suffered because she suffered she was she was very kind loving confident proud
#
and able for sure but extremely let's say empathetic and uh politically progressive
#
i think my father in the united states context was always voting republican my mother democrat
#
and in india of course my father was uh pro the right uh and my mother the left and so i think i
#
you know got the traumas of this kind of uh all of this division but at the same time
#
if you survive that uh which fortunately i have uh there's so much you know to gain uh from it from
#
these two perspectives from understanding intimately what it means to be proud of
#
cast or understand intimately what it means to be to have uh the highest demands for intellectual
#
achievement things like that and that i inherited from from my father which is obviously very
#
significant in my in my own life and my aspirations while doing it with um you know empathy and
#
understanding of other ways of being and the fact that most people suffer and the fact that
#
most people don't grow up middle class with uh you know on a columbia university campus
#
with all kinds of understandings of higher education and skills like classical languages
#
and you know so understanding that this is a profound privilege and i have to both make the
#
most of it myself and also do what i can for other people to you know bring them the fruits of
#
whatever that allows me to to accomplish so this is in some way the family life that i
#
grew up in in in new york and then by the time i was in high school i was already reading
#
you know marks and that did not go well in an american high school and so i found myself at
#
odds with all of the the teachers i also found myself in some way more knowledgeable than
#
them about many things uh i found myself already to recognize certain insights such as courses like
#
civics or social science or social studies were actually indoctrinating techniques creating
#
citizens out of children and so i rebelled quite a lot in in high school
#
so much so that i was i i think i was threatened with being thrown out several times and
#
suspended you know and and things like that interestingly because of twitter and
#
instagram and things like this some of my teachers have gotten in touch with me
#
in the past and said things that make me really reconsider what i thought they thought of me
#
so i i received not long ago about two years ago a message from a teacher who i gave a lot of grief
#
to an english literature teacher and she wrote something like it was on it was a comment on
#
i believe a public talk i was giving about a book that i had written and she wrote i always knew
#
you were going to be a success i said you know when i read that i was very surprised because
#
i made her life miserable you know she i remember we had to recite
#
the that friends roman's countryman speech from caesar shakespeare and i thought that
#
you know in my constant rebelling against authority traits that i continue to have today
#
i thought the way i could undermine that was by taking a walkman i think it must have been a
#
cassette player i recorded it the speech onto that giving breaks and then i put a earpiece in
#
with the cord behind my my shirt and i when it was my time to recite the soliloquy i just pressed
#
play on the recording and it went into my ear and then i just repeated it so i thought you know
#
cheating on this was my way of undermining the the requirement so i did so poorly in that class
#
and yet she wrote that comment so you know memory is a curious thing so maybe teachers recognized
#
my talent even in my disobedience and troublemaking and so on or maybe just
#
this one person did who knows i went on to university in again in the united states
#
at a small liberal arts college called william james college and started studying
#
of philosophy i believe or physics i think i started with physics i was fascinated with
#
theoretical physics and uh yeah it was physics first then i did it a year abroad at uh king's
#
college and in london as part of an exchange program and uh that's when i was thrown out of
#
university i lost my scholarship and started living in hide park that was 1990 maybe
#
and it was a very very significant point of my life so london was very cold and rainy and
#
you know sometimes when i would sleep in the park i would get just drenched and shivering and you
#
know so then i started i learned that you could climb up in the night after the sunset you could
#
climb up buildings in london and the rooftops were isolated and they would have little shelters and
#
things like that so i started climbing rooftops and sleeping there in my sleeping bag in the night
#
and then when the sun would rise then i would pack up everything and go around uh looking for
#
work as bad as i must have smelled and all of these things so i lived as a homeless person in
#
london they have a circle line and the circle line would run all night so when i learned about that
#
from some other homeless people in the park that you can get warm there but the police will harass
#
you eventually i started to go to the circle line at night and you just fall asleep and it just goes
#
round and round and round and round and round and then eventually you get waking up woken up
#
so you know living homeless for a while
#
i wasn't unhappy i guess i was too young and it was exciting and i
#
would read what was that literature dharmabhams and you know the beat yeah so i was reading
#
literature and i thought i was living that that way what maybe it is true of the beat generation
#
also but the secret here is i come from a middle class family and eventually when i got tired of
#
it i rang up my mother i said send me money and get me out of this that's the difference of you
#
know this um really living it and just fantasizing it or whatever although i mean it was dangerous
#
i got attacked and things like that and uh it was a big it was a learning experience but then i
#
finally someone took pity on me i started working as a bartender in a restaurant in london and then
#
eventually got back on track went back to the united states and then started studying
#
philosophy so there was something about that time in in london uh that got me interested more in
#
philosophical speculation than the narrow way of thinking and speculating in theoretical physics
#
besides that i wasn't good in physics it required mathematics which i wasn't talented at
#
studying philosophy my father always wanted me to study law it was kind of the family
#
tradition from his grandfather and i think earlier so eventually i enrolled in law school
#
to kind of satisfy him but always did a few things at once so i also
#
enrolled in a another special kind of college in the united states st john's college which
#
is a great books program that means that you don't have teachers and you don't have marks
#
you just read books great books the canon and you do it in the original languages so you have to
#
learn greek and french and so on and and you sit around along a big seminar table and everyone
#
who's enrolled in the program just discusses these these books that also is extremely formative on
#
the way that i think today and the kind of fearlessness that i have in what's called
#
interdisciplinary studies so most people become just a philosopher or a psychologist or a
#
mathematician or what have you but since my first i think that was my first master's degree
#
was in this inherently interdisciplinary approach we read uh i guess over the course of two and a
#
half years uh 200 books from all of the sciences you know we read euclid in original greek and we
#
had to do the math in greek and so on and we read newton and we had to do the experiments of
#
gallileo when we would read the two the the sciences and so you just uh as bourgeois as
#
that's an education is i think it is what made me who i am intellectually uh today
#
eventually i kept studying law but i moved to europe out of uh maybe a romantic
#
you know frustration with the limitations of the american social and cultural experience and i
#
thought europe was the place for me um and i went to europe and that's where i did you know that
#
was around age 20 22 and i never have been back to the united states since then i'm 50 i mean i've
#
visited but i've never lived there so having left in that time uh then i moved to europe until age
#
33 when i met my wife uh so stayed there for about you know a dozen years uh doing my second and
#
third master's degrees my llm my law degree my phd my postdoc in law and so on so i concurrently
#
pursued philosophy and classical languages and literature as a ma phd and so on and um and law
#
so llb llm uh and uh and postdoc uh that also accounts for the way that i work across disciplines
#
in a in a structured way so if the great books education this liberal arts education
#
fills my head with ideas from every discipline irrespective of you know their borders um the
#
fact that i got simultaneously two bachelors two masters two phds um in two different disciplines
#
also i think is part of what makes my thinking kind of unique you know why i move from writing a book
#
on philosophy to writing a book on law writing a book on literature to writing a book on wine and
#
things like that so the the training made a lot of difference i was in berlin to learn to speak
#
german properly because my doctoral defense there was a german very famous stubborn man from Mainz
#
in germany who was going to sit as the external supervisor of my doctoral defense and he refused
#
to speak anything but german and you had to reply in german or he would fail you so you everyone
#
was terrified of him and so after submitting my phd a thesis i used that time between
#
the the submission and the defense to enroll in a postdoc at in berlin in german to improve my
#
german and then i started studying at the girtha institute for spoken german
#
reading and stuff was fine but for spoken german and there i met my wife my future wife because
#
she was on her first posting with the indian embassy and the first posting of ifs officers
#
they have to learn the language so she was at the girtha institute learning as a language trainee and
#
i was there desperately trying to learn how to communicate so i could pass my doctoral defense
#
yeah i fell in love with her almost at first sight and that feeling was not mutual
#
i told you already that i thought i'll never have children i also thought i would never be married
#
and something happened i don't know what happened but almost like the third day seeing her i asked
#
her to marry me and she said absolutely not that's absurd stay away from me
#
and i asked her every day for the next six months literally and every day she rejected me and
#
called me names and told me to you know stand clear and so on and so i have probably the most
#
romantic acceptance of a proposal because finally after six months of asking her day in day out
#
she i said okay you we have to get married you have to marry me so finally she said
#
aritike baba this was our this was the way she accepted just leave me alone stop asking
#
i'll i'll i'll marry you but uh little did i know that that all of this thing that i was saying
#
about my father and his you know the pride in his caste and things like that that this made material
#
difference so part of the reason my wife was saying no was because of our difference in caste
#
and her father um who's quite radical outspoken um uh he was a dalit panther
#
he was at the first meeting of the panthers and so on the last thing he wanted was for her
#
to marry some you know casteist guy which he would assume that i am because of my my father
#
and uh so he was partly behind her constant rejections but he also happened to be an i.s
#
officer with contacts in cbi and things like that and so he went and got me investigated wow
#
and uh um and it turned out that i think he sent people to go to my ancestral home and to go to
#
Benares Hindu University and find out things about us and our family and it turns out that he
#
received sort of positive reports about the son me i don't know how or from whom or why
#
because i had hardly spent time in Benares you know like all NRIs every summer you spend you come
#
back home and you you spend time there but uh the report came back that you know i was not a
#
casteist i was not an opportunist trying to get you know into this family for whatever reason
#
that i was just a you know intellectual sort of well-educated guy living his life and so he
#
decided to to you know give me a chance and uh interestingly the government of india rules at
#
that time probably hasn't changed is that you need prior permission to marry a foreigner if you're
#
in the ifs and that prior permission is at the you know whim and fancy of the external affairs
#
minister or whoever is the so-called competent authority so we planned for a marriage in
#
mumbai in 2003 and i believe we flew to mumbai and everything and then that permission never came
#
in fact the permission didn't come for another full year uh and that turned out to be for two
#
reasons if i understand properly i could be misrepresenting this but if i understand
#
properly one was just you know the status of a Dalit in the ifs in the service which is a
#
you know a service dominated by people from other castes so a kind of
#
uh another way of imposing you know authority uh on her and secondly because they had their own
#
security checks to run on my background and so on so the whoever the rnaw people or whoever are
#
outposted um in europe and the u.s need to go and find out you know why am i trying to get in uh
#
have this marriage so that finally was cleared a year later but that year gave me a lot of time
#
to get introduced to my wife's family and their their ideology i mean their hardcore ambedkarites
#
unquestionably and very very suspicious of people from me and my cast and in fact my father-in-law
#
told me something very touching which i couldn't even imagine he said he was a election observer
#
or something like this in gorakhpur district and he says that he discovered through you know those
#
that investigation that he had conducted that one of my members of my family
#
abused him even though he was a government officer gave castes slurs against him and
#
things like that so um and i can understand that i mean gorakhpur and what my the orthodox part of
#
my family uh living there and so he told me you know don't think that i have a problem with you
#
you just have to understand that people from your your flesh and blood have you know haven't just
#
historically humiliated my people it happened a few years ago you know so um so that year gave
#
me time to get to know him to this was where i was of course introduced to ambedkar because as a
#
you know second generation growing up in new york city the irony
#
the ironies here grew up on the columbia university campus where ambedkar was educated
#
i studied at lse where ambedkar was educated i did my llb ambedkar was a llb so we had so many
#
overlaps in our lives and yet you know being uh of my cast in the united states ambedkar's name
#
would never have been mentioned uh so ironically although my life paralleled his in so many ways
#
it wasn't until marriage that i understood you know what he who he was and what he stood for what
#
he meant in fact the very first time i saw his photo at my wife's apartment in berlin within
#
months of meeting her i looked at it and it was prominently placed in her hall living room and i
#
said is that your grandfather and she always thought i was an imbecile so her answer was yes
#
later on i asked her about that and she said look look by now you understand that i wouldn't be here
#
if it weren't for him so i wasn't just making fun of you when i said yes he's very you know very
#
much so my my my grandfather so um the condition for me to be so these kinds of experiences you
#
know led into the work i started doing dipping my toes um there's a lot of study to do before
#
one can write on a person like ambedkar but these sort of personal experiences between 2003 and four
#
up to 2010 when i've published my first book on ambedkar so six seven years of intimate
#
experience with my wife's family as well as um of course intellectual uh scholarship and study
#
yeah at our marriage when it finally happened most of my father's side of the family refused
#
to come and they don't speak to me till till date it's been 20 years i've spoken to them
#
that's how they betrayed they felt by my degrading the cast in this way and then
#
true to those kinds of differences that i had mentioned in my early upbringing my mother's
#
side of the family came and they still have become very close with my my wife's well very
#
close as a stretch but um they've they respect and appreciate my wife's family and interact with
#
them and so on but my father's the orthodoxy is very clear runs deep in my father's blood
#
and the constant question that i had that i get you know jumping ahead now 20 years
#
to yesterday in fact the constant question i get as a ambedkar scholar from outside of the community
#
is what are you doing here you know what why do you do this work and
#
the activists what right do you think you have to do this work you have no lived experience are you
#
just like another appropriator of this movement for your own casteist ends what's interesting is
#
that generally the people who ask this don't know anything about my life story you know i i grew up
#
essentially as a as a liberal american child who doesn't you know when you say i don't see race
#
who doesn't see caste but it's very literal because in the 1960s and 70s the u.s nri community
#
was exclusively the privileged cast so you don't have to see cast because you already know that
#
everybody is acceptable now things have changed profoundly that's why california has passed the
#
state legislature has passed the anti-cast bill because thanks to reservation they're you know
#
you know compared to the 1980s the 2010s is a period where a generation of marginalized
#
obc students could get educated in the iits the places where from which they were previously
#
excluded so thanks to reservation they now have skills on the global market and they have gone
#
to the united states and the misfortune is the generation before them all the people who went
#
from these iits we all know iits are extremely casteist places that's why everyone you know
#
keeps killing themselves it's a clear indication but the iit mentality was just picked up and
#
dropped in silicon valley you know so silicon valley is now as casteist as iit mumba bombay
#
or iit madras and that's why today caste consciousness is everywhere in the united
#
states but when i was growing up we had no idea what what it meant to be you know not to not be
#
an elite caste and therefore it was very egalitarian in that you know delusional way so i never thought
#
about caste and when i met deviani and she told me she was a dalit i thought so you know what does
#
that matter it made no difference to me whatsoever that was the kind of the way that i was was raised
#
had she been black you know in the united states context wouldn't have made any difference to me
#
i was raised by my mother as a you know liberal person not to see these kinds of differences as
#
being significant so as a dalit when she said that i thought who cares what difference does it make
#
little did i know upon coming to india it makes all the difference all the time
#
you know that was a new education that started when we left berlin i finished my postdoc she
#
finished her posting and she was called back to headquarters south block in delhi and i moved to
#
india uh 2004 and uh for the first time a stretch of three years you know all the time until then
#
was summers and maybe my father was on sabbatical so we would spend six months
#
max in uh monadis but uh really that was when i became indian again 2004 for
#
that lie uh that uh that period in delhi that was really the learning curve was so steep
#
um my hindi was very childish because it was just what i would speak with my parents and so my
#
vocabulary and everything was like that's how my hindi was formed and people would just look at me
#
like you know you look 40 but you're speaking like you're seven so um and then understanding
#
caste understanding the privileges of the bureaucracy in india you know living in this
#
in chenakya puri and you know these kinds of things were
#
blew my mind in every respect i thought i i had a great education i was highly educated i had a
#
huge international experience but three years in delhi for someone who had never seen that way of
#
life more richer than an entire you know phd could possibly uh offer so that i don't know how much i
#
skipped how much i emphasized and whatever but that is a sort of the arc post 2004
#
devyani was posted to my wife was posted to to pakistan spent a couple of years there
#
the marriott hotel blew up i was in it on that day are you serious yeah yeah and um
#
i said devyani you stay here i'm leaving
#
i was deeply traumatized by that experience so i think what 80 people dead czech ambassador
#
three us cia or whatever where were you at that time like what what what how did you experience
#
so what happened was uh i don't like to talk about it because it sounds incredible but
#
that hotel was one of the places where people would get their haircut so i went in for my haircut
#
in the middle of it you know standard talking how you talk to your barber and so on in the middle
#
of it i got this very ominous feeling and i ripped off that thing that they put on your
#
smock yeah the smock i ripped it off and i just ran out the of the salon and i couldn't even i was
#
i had to get out of there so badly that i didn't even go to the lobby and so on i just pushed
#
an emergency exit and the alarms went off and so on and i just took off out of the out of the hotel
#
and when i reached home the news was that it had exploded that it had been attacked by a
#
truck bomb so i told you i'm not a spiritual religious man but somehow something told me
#
to get out of there at that moment and my life is owed to that in the meantime how did you
#
rationalize that action like in between running out i couldn't i couldn't and i can't till this
#
day and that was 2007 right um or 2008 i don't know and had you been in the barbershop you would
#
many times oh yeah of course everybody died from from there yeah yeah there were 70
#
local staff pakistanis who died including everybody in that salon so uh
#
anyone on the first three floors was so yeah i that i can't understand but whatever happened
#
it wasn't only me who got traumatized my daughter you know because this was a period
#
when musharraf the helicopter gunships were raining hellfire on the lal masjid you know the
#
talib students had taken over and so on and body bags were coming out and we lived just next
#
next to that um body bag after body bag and explosion after explosion my daughter's
#
my daughter uh the older one was there at that time and she was always crying like why is
#
why is the earth you know shaking and then i would say it's an earthquake now she if you say
#
earthquake today she still has trauma she's 17 years old so she from that period um so islamabad
#
was very trying at that time musharraf had benazir butto assassinated the talib take took take over
#
the bomb explosion of the hotel the even in general you know the life for an indian diplomat
#
in islamabad is very very difficult you're always followed by the isi a tail sometimes they're
#
helpful i remember once being late to the airport and my and some policeman blocking me and starting
#
to harass my driver and stuff and then the isi from behind got out and said you know leave him
#
alone he's late for the airport so you know the one's benefit of after years of surveillance and
#
and mental games you know they'll enter your house and they'll rearrange your things just to
#
let you know that they're always watching they're always there now i can't say we do we don't do the
#
same thing to pakistanis posted in in india i'm sure we it's tit for tat but it's even ordinary
#
life is difficult for an indian diplomat in pakistan and in this moment it was particularly
#
difficult so i'm ashamed but i'm a well-qualified academic i just i looked up what are all the
#
direct flights from islamabad hong kong singapore whatever i applied to the universities in all of
#
those places and i got a job at the university of rome which i still have today and i just ditched
#
my wife i said you stay i'm i'm i can't cope with this anymore um i took my daughter also
#
and it became a non-family posting anyway just a couple of months after that so we had to
#
leave anyway it got too dangerous so only the essential staff in the embassy remained and all
#
families had to leave so i left for rome then my wife came to rome on a posting after an indian
#
diplomat serves in islamabad you more or less get your choice to go wherever you want to go
#
and rightly so and uh as she said she apologies to any italians who might be listening she said she
#
wasted it on rome so when she got to rome okay i have to say i was in paradise the one the culture
#
i told you i'm a you know in classical languages i know latin it was easy for me to to understand
#
what was going on in italian the renaissance florence venice i was in paradise my wife on
#
the other hand has just come from two years in the trenches and the only day i saw her smile
#
in a year of living in rome with me the only day and i this is not i'm not joking was when
#
the some calestani group sent a letter bomb to the indian embassy in rome she thought finally
#
some action you know so she was so miserable she applied for um a termination of her post and she
#
went back to hq she went back to south block and she said okay if you're enjoying yourself in rome
#
you stay here but i can't stand it i have to do something meaningful i didn't join the foreign
#
service to relax and have la dolce vita i joined to make a difference for my country and my
#
community and so on and uh so she went back to to delhi and then i was stuck in rome again
#
on my own eventually i thought i have to join her and and my daughter so i moved
#
back to delhi i joined uh maybe jnu at that time no du i think delhi university but uh
#
the rest is kind of boring total adulthood you know normal life moving place to place
#
um different universities different uh i guess my intellectual career my career as an author begins
#
around that time lots of stuff i want to double click on but a little anecdote about pakistan
#
you know you mentioned about whether it is reciprocal or not i remember in 2006 i had
#
traveled through pakistan for three months with the indian cricket team there was a tour there
#
and in islamabad i was hanging around with the bureau chief of the hindu in islamabad i think
#
it was a gentleman named murli i have an old post about it i'll link it from the show notes
#
and murli told me that the way um the government treats a foreign correspondence there is
#
reciprocated in india exactly in the sense that if murli is to report that someone broke into his
#
house and took his fridge the indian government will make sure that someone breaks into the house
#
of his pakistani counterpart in delhi and steals his fridge so it was like school boys you know
#
that the the two governments the way they were kind of uh doing that and i love the story about
#
how your would-be father-in-law said the cbi after you and i'm just thinking that had the cbi tried
#
to figure out um you know what i'm like when i was a young man i would have been like that's
#
impossible because even i don't know what i'm like and i want to sort of double down on that
#
when it comes to you and the shaping of the self like when i look back on the past and i think
#
about who i was and how i changed and how i went through all the places i did to land up to where
#
i am today i realized that i can only do that in hindsight after a lot of time has passed and most
#
people do not even have that level of self-reflection and in your case it seems that the influences are
#
really rich like you pointed out your mother's constantly engaging with the real world your
#
father is lost in the world of ideas which perhaps also explains why they are you know such different
#
kinds of uh people and you know you go you go to college you go to university and again there are
#
those two tracks you're doing philosophy you're also doing the law um then who you fall in love
#
with also influences the patterns of your work later on in life and uh just kind of changes
#
everything and give me a sense of your you know how you looked at yourself how yourself was shaped
#
like what kind of person were you as a kid what did you want to be like was philosophy what you
#
wanted to do why were you kicked out of college in london what you know and you know what was the
#
angst how did you see yourself you know why dharma bums and kerouac you know did you also have that
#
artistic urge take me on that journey as well on who you were and how you became you know what you
#
are yeah i don't think that it's inaccurate to say that i had no idea who i was
#
um i i had by dint of luck grown you know was born into a family that had
#
means and genetic uh you know some intelligence my mother's also very very bright and so on
#
so none of this was my own doing right the the advantages the push the jump start that i that i
#
received but i i relied on shortcut i see this with my older daughter too she's very bright and
#
very lazy so i see her in her high school doing exactly what i did which was you don't have to
#
study because you can cram just before and thankfully you know you have the intelligence
#
to to to to get by one so there was there was always maybe a kind of undermining reliance on
#
natural ability uh that turned out to get me into trouble that mixed with something which i don't
#
know where it comes from uh you know psychiatrist or psychoanalyst might know but a profound
#
anti-authoritarianism it is so deep in me and it's i can remember it from the earliest moments
#
of my life to today you know everything i do every position ideal intellectual position i take
#
ideological position every interaction i have with a a bureaucrat a a guard that uh you know
#
standing in front of a bank everything is motivated unconsciously by an anti-authoritarianism
#
that is so pronounced that it is probably the trait that stands out most in me if one were to
#
evaluate and uh don't know where it comes from the obvious thing is you know uh against my father
#
um but somehow it seems deeper you know i hate the i'm sorry i'm just going to say it i hate the
#
police just you know looking at them revolts me and uh and i make this clear in my writing and
#
you know in various ways sublimate that into all kinds of things decan herald wants me to
#
write a serious column i'm going to put a song in everyone you know uh university wants me to
#
to teach uh uh whatever a very serious course i'm going to undermine it in some way by
#
putting something that's going to destabilize that authority i'm supposed to submit this
#
paperwork i'll do whatever i can to submit it late or you know not submitted at all everything
#
this is just a trait that runs through and it has been there as long as i can remember
#
it's not healthy but it's you know it's the case so that mixed with kind of laziness
#
i'm lazy in a bizarre way because i'm extremely motivated and i work very very hard but somehow
#
at the end is always this idea that if i just get all of this done i'm going to relax forever
#
which i never you know which never happens but it seems to be the motivation behind
#
everything get this book written so that you can have you know so you can chill for the rest of
#
the year which you don't you start the next thing but uh so these are kinds of things that seem to
#
be the thread relying a little bit this is a confession relying a little bit on native talent
#
to do shortcuts and be a little shoddy always trying to control what's going to happen with
#
my anti-authoritarianism so at king's at that time the professors were called dons and they wore
#
those absurd gowns and i was standing i was in a classroom with a man who obviously didn't know
#
what he was talking about and i decided to tell him what was he do you remember or what oh it was
#
this is 30 years ago so i i really i really don't remember i remember his face i remember the shock
#
and horror on his face that i would speak like that being a guest like a visiting whatever
#
exchange student maybe being an indian and i immediately i the next day i was not allowed
#
on campus and i learned that i lost my scholarship and everything so uh but it was that anti-authoritarian
#
thing and that you know i know i'm smart i know i'm clever so i'm going to
#
those two mix toxically to create this uh outcome uh yeah so that's that and it hasn't that hasn't
#
improved i'm always shooting myself in the foot with these this anti-authoritarian bent which
#
is so deep so the jack carowak and the beat that was what they were about right so i think i
#
identified with that literature when i was in high school there was something in america
#
propaganda outfit called uh junior achievements or something like this where they try to turn every
#
student into a little budding capitalist you learn how to to buy shares on the share market
#
and things like that and i'm walking around with das kapital saying what about socialist
#
junior achievements we should you know we should teach everyone how to do collective farming
#
whatever my young uh idealistic and misled mind would get me into so i was always
#
fighting with everybody at that time as well uh so so this has been a constant thing uh probably
#
maybe the most dangerous trait of my personality always getting me into trouble
#
i have controlled it largely in the last decade or so realizing the vulnerability of my wife's
#
position um as a government officer and um the ambiguity of goi rules is very useful because
#
they can be selectively enforced and obviously for a kind of a strong woman every rule is going
#
to be enforced and um uh so realizing that the harm that i do not just to myself but to
#
to her has got me a bit you know in line not uh as much as you read my articles i never criticize
#
the government and so on in an explicit way some years back things are very different so any
#
government you know authority is authority so um uh that has been a constant trait and i think
#
that is what manifests in those points that i that i told you so that my orientation in literature
#
in music has always been rebellion i love punk you know i love i love rebellious music i was
#
fascinated with sid vicious and anyone who would smash a guitar on stage they had my you know
#
full attention and uh the clash anarchy all of this has always been my my leaning uh
#
emotionally intellectually ideologically uh it's always been anti-authoritarian and
#
pro kind of mess and anarchy and um hippie and whatever just transgression of any kind
#
that includes drugs and you know i this is a weird thing but i tell them you know i said
#
i was a very responsible parent and so on but there are certain things where with my children
#
i say you know if you want to do drugs you do drugs uh i think that's backfired because they're
#
very conservative like we're never going to do drugs you know stop you stop telling us to do
#
drugs what a bad father you are for telling us to do that but i say no seriously these you know uh
#
i was uh i was forced into so much conformity by my father that i snapped and i have this you know
#
anti this this rebellious thing and i don't want you to have that so i just want you to know that
#
there are options you can explore and you're not under a you know this is not a total this family
#
is not a totalitarian regime so you can you can explore all the options so that you don't become
#
like me but uh yeah that's kind of the contours of this weird thing i can't believe i've said all
#
of this in public i love the way your kids are not conforming with your non-conformism
#
you know some parents could try that reverse psychology trick if you don't want your kids
#
to do drugs tell them to do it and they'll do just the opposite you know earlier we were talking
#
about our younger selves and i remember i was telling a friend about something the writer
#
said in an episode a year ago where he spoke about the piece of music that he'd like to be
#
played at his funeral and i told a friend about this and she asked me what my music was and i
#
couldn't really think of something i love a lot of songs but i couldn't really think of something
#
so i don't know what it would be now but i know what it would have been when i was 20 and it was
#
a song by the replacements called unsatisfied and the lyrics are basically you know look me in the
#
eye and tell me am i unsatisfied you know that's the whole am i satisfied and then you know just
#
unsatisfied is the refrain of the whole thing and how we kind of outgrow that and then we look back
#
at our younger self and i'm like thinking why was i such a rebel you know what was i rebelling
#
against it was just you know the angst of youth as it were but just to take that story forward
#
from here you went on to study both law and philosophy why philosophy what drew you to
#
philosophy you know what was sort of intellectually how were you evolving who were the
#
people you found interesting or appealing to you i don't i don't know how it happened but two things
#
happened after that bout of homelessness in london two things happened one i became a very serious
#
student very serious so from that point all of my marks i became the topper in every program and
#
you know there was that was not me prior to london from marks to marks yeah
#
and there were people who knew me before and after including my father and they they couldn't
#
understand what happened even i remember my father saying what happened to you in london you used to
#
be such a you know so difficult to handle and now you are you know the topper and winning scholarships
#
and prizes and things like that something happened in terms of the discipline of study philosophy
#
i think it came largely from a couple of things one is i was always you know what form does
#
rebellion take it takes physical form you know breaking laws breaking rules things like that
#
but it also the anti-authoritarianism is you know who are you to tell me this what right do you have
#
why should i do that you know those are fundamentally philosophical questions so i think
#
that was a part of it that i was always demanding from everybody what why they think they can tell
#
me what to do and i think i encountered some you know philosophical manuscripts or what's it a
#
platonic dialogue or i don't really know where these were precisely the questions that were
#
being asked and so i was so shocked that i'm not alone in my rebellion and in fact it turns out
#
that maybe in some respects the long history of philosophy has been a history of various kinds of
#
rebellions and so i wanted to figure out you know what kind of questions were asked and what kind of
#
answers were given so that was maybe the intellectual side and somehow sleeping on a bench
#
being arrested you know spending time with there was this soap box right the in hide park
#
i was sleeping there on a saturday i believe it would take place on sunday mornings i don't
#
remember quite but i was sleeping on a bench near there and i heard this man just espousing
#
whatever he was espousing i thought okay another madman in the park not not unusual
#
but i went over and started listening and he was giving a speech on a walden maybe henry
#
walden something like that and it was really captivating to me and then i started listening
#
i started coming to the park to hear that people doing those public lectures and i think a lot of
#
them were about philosophy that's not normal right to be homeless sleeping in a park and hearing
#
other homeless people giving lectures on philosophy so there was something about it that made me think
#
that that is the solution to all of my problems that somehow philosophy is going to teach me
#
and maybe help me understand my past and how bizarre it was and was my father right to force
#
us to read the gita and was he you know what is the nature of you know family and all of these
#
philosophical questions so i think it was very much therapeutic but also intellectually stimulating
#
and i believe that's why i went into it and i've always you know my book on plato is so
#
it makes academicians so uncomfortable so much that at gargi college university of delhi i'm
#
enemy number one because i went to speak on that book and basically the lecture i gave to all these
#
young innocent minds in front of all of their philosophy professors was that everything you
#
learn about the sophists from these professors is wrong you learn that the sophists were like
#
are you familiar with the sophists and so the socrates was presented as this noble person who
#
didn't take money for his teachings and so on and taught morally correct things while the sophists
#
were all relativists and they were manipulators and rhetoricians and they took the audacity of
#
taking money for being you know forgive for teaching and so on i wrote a book basically
#
exposing my understanding true understanding of the sophists which was that they were not
#
aristocrats and greek philosophy was the domain of the aristocrats which is why they needed to
#
take money to teach and that they were basically teaching common people how to succeed in the
#
political debates of the time which was the the emerging democracy had people giving public
#
having public uh speeches and competitions and obviously the aristocracy always dominated
#
whereas the the the common people couldn't participate in the in in in democracy so the
#
sophists were training they were common people and they were training common people how to compete
#
with the aristocracy also gorgias for example was the first person in greece to defend helen helen
#
in the ilyad she had always been represented as betraying the uh the greeks um and you know
#
as a temptress and a turncoat and all of these things because she went off with the trojans
#
um and the only defense of helen ever made publicly was by a sophist gorgias so i are
#
i i argued in that book that the sophists were the emerging democratization and and and the first
#
you know sort of steps towards uh feminist thinking and democratic thinking authentic
#
democratic thinking not the ideal aristocratic side in early greece and uh and consequently
#
the aristocracy had to react plato being the classic you know aristocrat so much so that in
#
his republic he creates a caste system right people have gold in their blood and silver in their blood
#
and so on um so they had to destroy the reputation of undermine the reputation of these sophists
#
which they succeeded to do for all of history um so i gave this talk at at gargi college with
#
all the citations and you know i know how to read ancient greek and so on unlike most of the
#
professors so i proved very systematically that they have been taught incorrectly by all of their
#
faculty and even today that was like five years ago when i wrote that book even today i understand
#
from now some of my students who teach at gargi that they hate me no end they just like anytime
#
you want to say something is bad you just evoke akash's name to represent how heinous this is
#
so the anti-authoritarianism i managed to bring into my scholarship in numerous ways
#
but i see that it still plays out you know i'm still annoying people i could have handled that
#
much better early on but um you know it's something that has been constant about philosophy is that it
#
allowed me in an intellectual way to channel my what would otherwise be rather dangerous
#
anti-authoritarianism and you know i'm i could have been a violent i don't know i don't want
#
to use the t word in on the air but i i could have had i not had an outlet like this i things
#
could have been bad you know given how strong this anti-authoritarianism runs in my blood
#
you could have been a contender so here's so here's a multi-part slightly and forgive me
#
if this question comes out more complex than i intended to be but a multi-part question about
#
academia but starting with what you said earlier about your parents that with your father it was a
#
life of the mind where he was always busy in ideas but your mother really engaged with the world
#
and that got me to thinking about you know the abstract and the concrete and how it plays out
#
in the real world like you know i had long ago done an episode with anchal malhotra on her book
#
on partition survivors and she talks about this one incident where she was chatting with these
#
people in pakistan who had escaped during partition and they got lost in their memories and they were
#
ranting against hindus and at one point they realized she's a hindu and they said
#
and what really happened there was a clash between the abstract and the concrete that keeps coming
#
up that in the abstract it is really easy to hate the other this imaginary conception that you build
#
up whereas in the concrete when once you're engaging with people you know it is much harder
#
and obviously the opposite is also true but largely this is how it plays out and i see
#
therefore it being kind of natural that more than your mother i would have imagined it would be a
#
father who would be likely to be to have go into those hindu right-wing kind of tropes and all of
#
that because if you're living in an abstract world of ideas and not engaging with real people
#
you're likely to be the other way whereas your mother was actually out there making a life for
#
herself working in baskin robbins working with trans people and obviously that concrete engagement
#
with the world will take her in a different sort of direction so at one level this is a question
#
about the abstract and the concrete but the first of my questions about academia also is that
#
a common criticism about academia which i agree with in large part is that more and more what you
#
see in academia is this sort of circle joke where you have scholars talking to other scholars just
#
talking to each other publishing in journals that only other people like themselves will read and
#
kind of losing touch with the real world and you know even to the extent that like earlier you
#
pointed out about how a lot of your learning was interdisciplinary right your your learning
#
frames in one subject applying them to another and it's obviously not just philosophy and the
#
law you're engaging with the world and learning about stuff and applying all of that but another
#
criticism about academia is that it becomes super specialized that the incentives are towards
#
hyper specialization people get lost in these silos and they cannot think outside the silo
#
or outside the box and in some cases outside the academic fashion of the time perhaps you know so
#
whenever you do something unconventional like you did with those poor folks at gargi college
#
you know there is going to be that sort of a reaction so what is sort of your sense of
#
this because at one level you are an academic you've gotten the degrees you've written the books
#
you've you've taught in so many different places but on the other hand you're not typical as well
#
you know you're ranging across subjects you might be writing about Plato but you're also
#
you know writing about Ambedkar in such great detail which you know would seem
#
atypical given the sort of the the journey that your academic career was taking give me a little
#
sense of all of this are you a misfit in that world what is your opinion of that world do you
#
think that that world in certain ways has become deficient or kind of hampered itself my very good
#
friend Ajay Shah talks about how and he talks about this in the context of the humanities and
#
especially economics that it is such a waste of great talent that the incentives of publishing
#
in journals and getting tenure and all of that make a lot of great minds work on subjects of
#
absolutely no import to the real world and he considers it a bit of a loss and you know and
#
that becomes a sort of a vicious cycle out there so so what is your sense as both an insider but
#
also from where i can see it and forgive me if i'm being presumptuous but also a bit of an outsider
#
so i have essentially been an academic you know all of my adult life but i am very much an outsider
#
very very much an outsider that is clear in three ways one i don't have a permanent position
#
so tenure is of course the crown for a professor and i don't have tenure at any university i have
#
been tenured but due to my own this is something we didn't really get into but i'm not comfortable
#
staying in any one place for very long i grew up like that i suppose and once a university offers
#
me tenure if it does i usually resign so um so that's i can't say that no one has ever recognized
#
me and therefore i don't have tenure that's more my you know some sort of psychological
#
tick that i have that i don't want to be there are two things groucher mark said you know i would
#
never be a member of any club that would have me as a member the i every time i'm offered a position
#
like i had a tenorship at dell university and i resigned after a couple of years every time i
#
have i just think about is this my life now am i really going to be here for the rest of my
#
you know until i become a decrepit old man coming to this office seeing these faces
#
you know is this is this what it's going to be and that scares me and i leave so i'm i'm an outsider
#
but not necessarily because i've been rejected there's a choice element but there is a great
#
deal of rejection also and the second thing i said in three ways the second is that after some time
#
when i when i awoke to the kinds of uh things that you're hinting at in your complex question
#
i was at a bookstore i believe in new york city and
#
um i was looking for a book and the bookseller said they didn't have that book but give me your
#
name and i'll order it and i gave her my name and she said oh i read a book of yours and that really
#
confused me because it's not a student it's not my student and so on and then i realized that
#
and then i realized that she would never have said that about a journal article
#
so all that time i was doing the classic academic you know rat race publish or perish
#
publish or perish does not mean books you know in academia it means journal articles and journal
#
articles as you say there's a meta study that shows that in a discipline or sub-discipline
#
every time there's a community the threshold is 500 people every time there's a community
#
500 people interested in that topic a journal emerges so you know um the podcast journal you
#
just need 500 people who are interested in that topic and the journal emerges those those those
#
journals then give you the academic credibility once you've once you've published in them and
#
there's a point to be mentioned here just to defend that i don't believe in it but just to
#
defend it to be fair a book consists of x number of chapters let's say 10 chapters and it is peer
#
reviewed usually by three other persons sometimes just two but that means those three people are
#
reviewing 10 chapters whereas a journal article is one you know equivalent of one chapter and it is
#
also reviewed by two or three people that means the rigor applied to a journal article is several
#
fold that applied to publishing a book and so in some respects from the scientific point of view
#
journal articles are more rigorous than than than books and consequently your academic
#
credentials are strengthened by journal articles and not really by books
#
so your academic reputation might be enhanced by books but your legitimacy is based on the
#
the journal article around the time i had that experience with this bookseller i stopped writing
#
journal articles and at that time then i started a rapid decline in my academic legitimacy so now
#
when you do there are things called h-index or api points and so on my my points have plateaued
#
whereas most people my age they would be increasing year after year because they're
#
always publishing journal articles but interestingly the public even academic public awareness of who i
#
am it has multiplied many many times why because there are 500 people reading a journal
#
and there are thousands of people reading a book i'm with you on this podcast not because of any
#
journal article i wrote right so so something happens there where resentment begins to build
#
up with academics and that resentment gets justified by this guy is just a clown because
#
he's not publishing journals which means that he's writing the class anything that he wants to
#
write so there again i've become an outsider in some respects and then the third which is
#
more substantive to your point it's important to distinguish academia in terms of its over
#
you know of its broad schools and so on so the sciences are one thing hard sciences are another
#
thing applied sciences are another thing and where i have the most authorities in the humanities
#
and social sciences broadly conceived that you know philosophy politics science sociology history
#
economics law all of those areas i have an intimate knowledge of those because i've worked in them for
#
30 years in different departments because i'm qualified to teach in philosophy departments
#
political science departments and law departments as well as different universities central
#
university state universities i've taught at both as well as different geographies i've taught in
#
the u.s i've taught in europe and i've taught in in in in india and southeast asia so i consider
#
myself an authority on the on this topic nobody else does but i do and my feelings on this are
#
very very strong that for the most part what we are doing in the humanities and social sciences
#
is especially in india but to some extent all over the world is a huge waste of talent an enormous
#
waste of time and a waste of resources and what's saddest about it is it is a failure to future
#
generations because we once i had spoken about nicha and so on there is no greater example
#
of framing the possibilities of future according to outdated modalities of the past
#
than the university system today and humanities social sciences again is is what i'm speaking
#
about so i can argue this with a dean with a vice chancellor and i have on many occasions very
#
frequently one gets informed for example in chronicle of higher education how philosophy
#
departments or literature departments are shutting down in universities and then everyone
#
there's a hue and cry about how we're going to become all ignoramuses and isn't culture so
#
pathetic today so commercial so job-oriented and so on and every now and again i'll peep out a little
#
article saying good let them fall everybody gets very hostile and angry but my argument is this
#
that if they were valuable would they collapse there's got to be an inherent weakness that they
#
cannot sustain themselves in the face of contemporary economic or social or demographic
#
changes and so if something is inherently weak as i'm presuming it is because it collapses so easily
#
then let it fall not that i'm against uh the arts and the humanities i'm a writer i'm an artist you
#
know so this is my passion but because whatever strength there is will reemerge in some other
#
form and one has to keep in mind i don't want to get too didactic and pedagogical but one has to
#
keep in mind the ways in which the university form as we know it in india today emerged historically
#
and it's in macaulay and macaulay his minute on education to produce indians in skin color and
#
blood but englishmen in thought and morality and intellect and and uh and uh values and that uh
#
process is what you know like theorists colonial theorists called epistemicide you know epistemic
#
the destruction of various other ways of knowing and knowledge systems and so on
#
now generally we don't like to talk about this because it immediately clicks with a right-wing
#
ideology that yes you know these everyone secularism all of these are western concepts
#
and ideas and let's destroy them but to don't to not hasten in that direction just keep in mind
#
that for thousands of years we had gurukuls and vidyaliyas and viharas and madrasas and all
#
other ways of of organizing and disseminating knowledge why are we so connected to this
#
university system uh as it stands we've seen others rise and fall uh the real aim of education
#
should be future-orientated it's not that we are making people who won't be employed like where
#
it's not that we're just mistraining people and and so on it's that we're we're creating
#
generations that are going to be unemployable you know not just that they're not enough jobs
#
for these people but the training that we're imposing is you know whole cloths useless to the
#
dynamics of the changing world and i think bringing down the university system
#
is not the worst thing that i could imagine even though it is the system that has been my home for
#
for 30 years so in these three ways i'm very much an outsider and i say things that are seen
#
i do things that are seen as a betrayal and i say things like this that are seen as a betrayal
#
but it's not because i want to destroy it it's that let it pop up let it reemerge in ways that
#
are healthier and more sound and engaged with the future direction of the planet rather than
#
stuck to the 19th century um way of organizing knowledge was that a weird speech i gave no it's
#
wonderful and i completely agree with you and like one thing i want to point out is like one
#
yes may the university system collapse as soon as possible and i will also reiterate that you know
#
what i keep telling people is that a humanities education is absolutely fucking essential
#
and it has absolutely nothing to do with humanities departments in universities
#
though you how you get your humanities education is by engaging with the real world by reading
#
books by watching movies that's how we learn all that stuff not through the moribund university
#
system that this long long sort of yeah i agree now there's another you know issue that i have
#
with the iits and technical education in india especially the production of engineers and you
#
know it goes back to my understanding of of nazi germany hannah aren't a german american
#
philosopher wrote a book before she was an academic she had to work as a journalist when
#
she moved to the united states massade the israeli secret service so so many nazis fled
#
germany went to different places argentina was one where a lot of them developed a kind of incognito
#
life and one of adolf eichmann who was uh who was responsible whose job was to uh was to figure out
#
logistically how to get all of the jews from all over europe onto trains that would ship them to
#
the death camps auschwitz birkenau dachau and so on which are all basically in poland western poland
#
eastern germany and that's not an easy thing to to do talking about there are nine million jews
#
around europe i think he managed to get five million of them so he was trained as an engineer
#
logistical genius he had moved to argentina taken up a new name massade had a spectacular
#
uh program or what do you call that uh like you know specific assignment to go
#
kidnap him rendite him extraordinary rendition rendite him to israel and make him stand trial
#
and it was of course a show trial in many respects so hannah arend decides that she
#
wants to go to jerusalem and and and and report for some american like new york magazine or some
#
some something like this and she sends back a series of articles um uh you know i guess
#
the golden age of journalism when a great philosopher starts writing on a great historical
#
moment event she starts writing on eichmann's trial and the irony of his intelligence because
#
she like all of us in a way assume that you know if you're very bright you're probably also moral
#
or something you know some kind of equation with of goodness and that kind of uh of intellect
#
what she found was of course far from moral he was he was as criminal as a human can get
#
you know figuring out how you know the jews had to pay their own tickets
#
to get on these trains to al-shet so you know he even managed the funding by taking the people who
#
he sending to their death they're paying for that uh journey so he managed all of these logistics
#
he's very bright he can argue perfectly well the lawyer the prosecutor is telling him you know why
#
did you uh obey uh hitler's commands and he's retorting look it's just an accident that you
#
won this war and if i had disobeyed hitler i would not be in trial before you i would be on trial
#
before him and he would be saying why did you disobey orders and the whole everybody in the
#
courtroom would see me as this as disgusting as you see me now for the precisely the opposite thing
#
so uh so he had good arguments he had he was uh intelligent he had an engineering genius and uh
#
logistical uh you know prowess and all of these things so hannah arent is trying to understand
#
when we thought that being educated being intelligent having an analytical mind that all
#
of these things were the virtues of the human and that's how you know and then we put morality with
#
it when in fact it's all used for precisely the opposite so what is missing and then her in her
#
post script she says what's missing is he didn't have a drop of empathy you know so this gets back
#
to you know a lot of my work on on cognitive empathy and so on so then she talks about then
#
she moves in her own philosophical work on talking about philosophy german philosopher
#
manuel kant and his third critique which is on aesthetics and literature and representation
#
and art and the sublime and so on and she begins but she doesn't completely conclude in the kind
#
of work that i've been doing which is to suggest why i write that book on autobiography and why
#
i write biographies and you hinted at this earlier on but i didn't want to mention it which begins
#
to suggest that the only way that we can translate our intelligence into moral goodness is to mediate
#
through the imagination and cultivate empathy for the distant other if we have been educated
#
entirely into vocational kinds of training like being an engineer chemical engineer civil engineer
#
it specialist and so on and have never been introduced to the humanities which you had
#
mentioned and these people btech starts from 12th right so they never read a novel they never of
#
course they're generally from privileged castes but at least for the most part classes and cast
#
they never interact with those who are different from them their families are usually conservative
#
so you know either the muslim is depicted as you know something wrong with him or
#
cast people there you know reservation is taking all our you know seats and college so you know
#
the other is always represented in a demeaning light they don't have any personal experience
#
and more importantly they don't have any imaginative experience because if i we're
#
also we're all stuck in our algorithms we talked about that before so what's the only way to puncture
#
out of that if you're not going to interact with people who are unlike you and we don't usually
#
at a level of equality at least you can in the level of imagination so so so the iits
#
need the humanities so desperately so that we don't produce generations of eichmanns
#
and if what's happening on the iit campuses with the marginalized communities and in the united
#
states with the tech in the tech industry silicon valley if those are any indication we are producing
#
more eichmanns than we are producing our rents you know for for example so while the humanities
#
is a decrepit academic institution nevertheless what you had said i fully agree with it is
#
essential to become educated in the humanities for becoming a whole person because being
#
a technocrat is not enough if you don't cultivate the abilities to imagine what it's like to be
#
other than yourself to be to have experiences other than your own and to be able eventually to
#
empathize with people who transcend your direct experience and reality so the iits while they
#
might be producing better graduates than the hss faculty i'm not sure they're producing better
#
people and this is something that a university ought to also keep in mind for future generations
#
and the maintenance of civil civic life you know in a in a polity or so i'm not an engineer i did
#
a bachelor in arts but nevertheless i must point out that eichmann might have been an engineer but
#
hitler studied fine arts so something to keep in mind i i feel i have to say that
#
you know i keep complaining about the engineering mindset i think that is a source of so many of
#
our problems but at the same time the engineering mindset is almost instinctive to us where we
#
because we think of the world in you know top down controlling design ways and the fact that
#
the world is this you know formed by spontaneous order that it's it's a result as adam ferguson
#
said of human action but not human design is something that's deeply counterintuitive
#
but i will nevertheless say that you know there might be a hint of caricature in what you are
#
saying because uh you know unless the data proves otherwise i can also point to many engineers i know
#
who are excellent people who've got an education in the humanities not by studying it in some
#
decrepit university but by actually reading and watching films and engaging with the world
#
the co-host of my youtube show is indeed an iitian so i you know now it might turn out that data
#
supports uh you know your vision of engineers more than uh more than any other but i think
#
everybody contains multitudes and i wouldn't be really so quick i think the problem is not so
#
much with iit's but our education system as a whole that it is uh you know in the words of
#
in an old episode of mine it's designed more for sorting than actually educating it doesn't teach
#
you anything but from a really large sample size you're sorting out the best minds and then those
#
best minds a lot of them will go to iit's and whatever and then they'll go to silicon valley
#
and they'll be ceo of various tech companies and you're like wow indian education is so great but
#
it's not education at all you just sorted the best minds give them a little bit of technical
#
knowledge push them there but apart from that how many of them become good people with empathy
#
is i think just i would argue the same as in the general population so i i you know i can't believe
#
i'm defending engineers but yeah so on that note perhaps you can take a quick commercial break and
#
then come back and can talk more about your work long before i was a podcaster i was a writer in
#
fact chances are that many of you first heard of me because of my blog india uncut which was active
#
between 2003 and 2009 and became somewhat popular at the time i love the freedom the form gave me
#
and i feel i was shaped by it in many ways i exercise my writing muscle every day and was
#
forced to think about many different things because i wrote about many different things
#
well that phase in my life ended for various reasons and now it is time to revive it only now
#
i'm doing it through a newsletter i have started the india uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com
#
where i will write regularly about whatever catches my fancy i'll write about some of the
#
themes i cover in this podcast and about much else so please do head on over to indiancut.substack.com
#
and subscribe it is free once you sign up each new installment that i write will land up in your
#
email inbox you don't need to go anywhere so subscribe now for free the india uncut newsletter
#
at indiancut.substack.com thank you
#
welcome back to the scene in the unseen i'm still with akash singh rathore who's showing great
#
patience by you know hanging in here with me as we discuss his uh life and work before we get back
#
to talking about your work and the world of ideas and so on i'm also fascinated by the fact that
#
while you are you know fully immersed in the world of ideas producing books like you know
#
with such incredibly with such incredible frequency which makes me so jealous
#
you are also a triathlete you know you're an iron man runner the internet says you're india's number
#
three iron man runner but you pointed out that's only in your age group yeah but you've done what
#
eight iron man so far i think i have completed seven eighth is coming up in november that's
#
coming up wow so tell me a little bit about this like were you always into sort of running and
#
fitness and so on how did the journey begin for you yeah i think i have always been physically
#
active from high school in college i was a tennis player even thought about going professional for
#
some time until i played a professional player and thought maybe i'm not as good as i think i
#
and a jogger you know not a runner but a jogger throughout college
#
high stress i would sometimes jog to to to decompress and so on when i look back at the
#
distances that i was proud of at that time you know i would do a 3k and think okay this is great
#
you know now 3k is hardly a warm-up but um so i've always been physically active as i had mentioned
#
i have never been into sports i just even today i can't i can't uh i can't watch a even a one hour
#
match just i would never sit down for an hour to watch a match of course now i think i would much
#
rather be doing it rather than watching but so where this sudden motivation came from and the
#
funny thing is it wasn't like i think i'll start running more consistently or i think i'll start
#
cycling it was just i'm going to do an iron man so it started just like that why did it happen
#
i don't know just through a friend a doctor friend of mine medical general practitioner
#
from the united states he he started doing them and i just got into it like that interestingly
#
he the last one i did in mexico he was there with me also so we still continue to um we live in
#
different countries but we meet to to to do these races um uh yeah i can't say i can't say how it
#
actually began what i can say is that i don't know how i ever lived without it now because it's only
#
been 10 10 odd years um and it's changed my life it has unified my life in some way it's given
#
retrospective unity to to my life somehow i think it's like this these two sides you know my father's
#
side my mother's side uh somehow i feel it has healed a trauma in a in a lot of ways so
#
it's fundamentally important to me at the same time i recognize how unusual it is
#
is i'm even writing a book on this i had a quora blog on this topic called mind and muscle
#
and somehow i don't know how by the time i kind of stopped posting which i apologize to all the
#
followers there were 140 000 followers or something like that um which told me that you know people
#
are really interested in this even though nobody does it and so this is the mystery so i'm right
#
i have been working on a book called just you know tentatively called mind and muscle
#
on the unity the rareness of the attempted unity of the life of the mind and the cultivation of
#
physical virtues so you look back in history how many people have really attempted to to achieve
#
you know total commitment and greatness both in terms of an artist you know as an artist or as a
#
writer you know at the noble prize-winning writer level and to be totally committed to bodybuilding
#
or marathon running or something like that and so i have gone back looking in history and i find so
#
i find so few characters leonardo da vinci we all know about his work as a poly math and a talent
#
in engineering and art and painting and sculpture and architecture and so on but what gets unspoken
#
is that he had an obsession with cultivating his physical prowess he would train by ben trying to
#
bend horseshoes you know this what metal is that made of but you know impossible to to to achieve
#
and there's a hilarious i found in one biography i was reading the hilarious thing he used to do
#
line up his apprentices four apprentices in his workshop every morning for the the unlucky one
#
was the one in the front so he would line them up he would go back a hundred meters and he would
#
run sprint straight towards them as fast as he could to try to leap over them and inevitably
#
the one in the front would get completely bloodied you know bloody nose and so on
#
so he had this idea of his physical strength of bending the horseshoe of being able to do feats
#
of you know high jump as we call it today and uh so it's fascinating da vinci is one of these
#
characters and then you can re-understand the vitruvian man and other works in this terms of
#
his attempt to unify the physical and the aesthetic and uh you know byron the poet byron byron you know
#
for triathletes long distance open water swimming was really started as a phenomenon by byron
#
and part of it is because you know he had a club foot he had difficulty walking
#
but when he he stayed he stated that when he was in the sea you know that there was no uh
#
he felt free freedom from his his his deformity as he called it but he did these long swims
#
i mentioned off the air that i'm going to do the cross bosphorus transcontinental swim from europe
#
to asia byron did this uh byron did this in i mean 100 more than 100 years ago when
#
there were no safety standards of any kind he swam yes lisbon the port there's a giant kind
#
of channel and he swam that channel in italy there's an island called the poet's island because
#
he swam out to that island and must have been miles and miles um so byron with his long distance
#
swimming and so on and of course he mustered up a small army to to attack uh during the greek and
#
turkish wars so byron also not only had achieved you know this great prowess as a poet um and uh
#
um living the life of the mind but also cultivated was equally dedicated to cultivated
#
cultivating his physical uh virtues um nicha he talked about it but it was all just banter he
#
never achieved anything he he said he was an artillery man in the war and so on but he
#
actually he was he was not he was just not jest but he was a he would be the person who carries
#
the cots uh i don't know how you refer to that but um so yuki omishima who in 1968 was step
#
was offered the noble prize and stepped down so his uh an older japanese writer could win it in
#
his stead he wrote his autobiography in english called sun and steel but on this principle called
#
bunbu which the japanese bushido tradition the samurais called the harmony of the feather
#
and the sword so they have the feather is of course the writing instrument but it's beautiful
#
now we say the harmony of the pen and the sword but feather is beautiful because of its lightness
#
compared to the sword and the steel so yuki omishima his entire you know actually like me
#
or i like him came to it after achievements intellectual artistic achievements so he
#
he had finished his novels and become famous and known as japan shakespeare and so on
#
and then he suddenly realized that none of this means anything because the life of the mind is
#
an abstract life and the writer's aim is to articulate the real when in fact all they do
#
is avoided and so he turned to bodybuilding he trained as a samurai he became very uh uh
#
expert in swordsmanship and martial arts and so on so much so that in 1970 he attacks the ministry
#
of defense and then of course commits seppuku ritual suicide in the samurai tradition interestingly
#
in 1968 he published his autobiography where he more or less anticipates that he's going to do
#
this because he says how is it possible to unify the life of the mind and the life of action
#
it can be realized only in death and then sure enough two years later he kills himself fully
#
articulating at that time he was 45 years old that he did it when his body was perfect
#
and he didn't want to see it decay you know so great narcissism and mishima also but mishima
#
is an example of someone who had achieved that level hemmingway to a certain extent
#
another noble prize winner who you know really judged men according to whether they were physical
#
you know why did he like azura pound because he was a good boxer and a good tennis player and why
#
did he dislike scott fitzgerald because he couldn't box and uh and so and so that was more like he
#
wanted there was more machismo in hemmingway but still that orientation is there of someone who
#
achieved the highest you can achieve in the intellectual realm who was fixated on achieving
#
more and more and more in the physical one and so much so i think he had monkey's testicles sewn
#
into his thigh to enhance his his ability you know so basically you can count on two hands the
#
number of people historically that we have access to who have really attempted this and so what is
#
interesting to me is how rare it is and yet how i feel that without it my life would be meaningless
#
in some respect totally unfulfilling and uh that is mystifying to me i guess at one level is rare
#
because you're only going to get a small subsection of people who are great artists and at the same
#
time a small subsection of people who are into this kind of uh you know physical activity and
#
for them to sort of coincide is a really tiny bit of a venn diagram so there won't be too many people
#
anyway though i think in modern times consciousness about fitness is so high and you see so many
#
people working out and spending time in the gym and so on and so forth that i would imagine that
#
moving forward there will be kind of more people like that but i'm also curious about how the
#
different impulses that drive you towards something like this come together like on the one hand as
#
we were discussing outside in the break on one hand it is obsessiveness that you decide you're
#
going to do this and you get obsessive about it and you just go all out you grok it intellectually
#
you figure out what you need to do you enter a rabbit hole of that world and you get the job
#
done and i'm also kind of like that that i'll be a serial obsessive about different things
#
so on the one hand i'm guessing there is that obsessiveness that once you decide i'm going to
#
do it you figure out a way to master it it's a geek in you speaking out as much as anything else
#
and on the other hand i think there's also i guess the realization of what physical activity
#
can do for you like when i was running regularly a few years ago i obviously i geeked out and i
#
read all the books on running that there are and one quote that struck me i forget from which book
#
it is but this guy said that you know i'll often kind of wake up in the morning i'll be feeling
#
terrible i'll be hungover i'll be like do i want to go running but the one lesson i learned is that
#
every time i have gone running i have never regretted it and i kind of made that my mantra that when i
#
gotta go i'll just go and i never once regretted it so that high that the you know that running
#
gives you or that physical workout gives you and the fact that you you know and and that's a
#
different joy of its own so what was that journey like for you like did you get into it because you
#
were obsessive did you are you still obsessive after 10 years how did that working out physically
#
change say your mental state of mind did it make you a different person a better thinker perhaps
#
yeah yeah this is complex and i i i haven't systematically reflected on it so i don't i
#
don't know all of the answers but i can just kind of talk through it there are a few things that i
#
noticed one steady state cardio so let's say you know running on a treadmill at a fixed speed as
#
opposed to sprints or as opposed to weight training resistance training and so on
#
steady state cardio does something for novel ideas so often a new idea for a book a new way
#
of approaching a chapter a new pedagogical idea how i can teach a new way of speaking to a phd
#
student about the struggle that they're having in their finishing their work you know something
#
like this they always come during steady state cardio and so sometimes it got to the point
#
after i realized that that i'm at an impasse let me go for a run so you know some people say
#
sleep on it i never get anything by sleeping on it but somehow steady state cardio i realized
#
is a way of breaking through impasses intellectual impasses ideas
#
the barrenness of ideas and and and so on i don't know why that is and i've spoken to other people
#
and like torkelbrick and they have confirmed that so it's not just me so there's something about that
#
oh you said you know that author said i never regretted a run i realized that also long long
#
long time back as much as i hate look i'd mentioned that i'm lazy and so on people think
#
you're a writer i don't know if you're going to agree with me but for me i consider myself a
#
writer and after my last book and rereading my last five books which i've had to do because
#
as i mentioned i've been doing a lot of summer schools and teaching and so on so i had to reread
#
five of my books and i thought it was going to be torture and i thought i was going to be squirming
#
at how bad they were and what mistakes i made and very surprisingly i enjoyed all five books
#
and that's from 2017 to 2023 and i told myself i think i'm an artist you know i never would call
#
myself that before but after reading these five books how different they are and the nuances and
#
the risks that i took and the ideas that go into it and so on i said wow i'm maybe i'm actually an
#
artist nevertheless i agree with you and i don't know why you would ever question it but well i
#
have imposter syndrome and so on i hate writing i hate waking up knowing i have to write i hate
#
the process of writing i hate it when i'm doing it i hate it after i've done it and as much as even
#
if i have now the audacity to say i think i am an artist doesn't become easy never becomes easy
#
there's that old saying about hemmingway which someone a friend of mine has broken my heart to
#
say that it is apocryphal but hemmingway when asked you know how to write he said oh writing
#
is easy easy you just sit down at the typewriter and bleed so um i identify with that very very
#
much that's why i'm angry that it might be apocryphal it always is painful to write i
#
never want to do it it never goes well after a day of doing it i don't feel oh great you know it's
#
just always always difficult but that's not true about running or cycling or boxing or anything
#
like that afterwards i always feel great and maybe there's something about it's not so cumulative as
#
writing or like there's not a let's say the end product it just disappears into your into the
#
world right when you after an hour of boxing there's no text right it's just it's an experience it's
#
an ephemeral experience also endorphins writing doesn't produce endorphins so ah yeah does it
#
not i mean do we know that for sure well if it does not as much as exercise for sure it might
#
produce dopamine if you had a if you set a task for yourself and you manage to get that many
#
words done but that would be a little bit so writing has always been as much as it is my life
#
it has never gotten easier and that's not true about physical activity
#
now it's hard as hell to convince oneself to run in the morning and so i do as little thinking
#
as i can and i do all of those tricks i'll have my shoes right there on the side of the bed so
#
that as soon as i get up my feet are touching the shoes so i put them in and i tell myself
#
do not talk don't say a word i mean my internal monologue because all i'm going to do is talk
#
myself out of why i need to run because i have work to do i told you tomorrow i have an eight
#
o'clock thing it's going to be the easiest thing for me to say look eight is pretty soon don't you
#
need to shower don't you need you know to talk myself out of the run in the morning so i don't
#
let myself speak and so on because there's a great you know laziness that will immediately
#
prevent you from wanting to do it but it's certainly easier for me to run a 10k now than
#
it used to be and that's not true for me to write 10k words you know they're just as difficult as
#
it used to be so there's something about them these two arenas of my life that are so dissimilar
#
and yet they are mutually reinforcing so why you mentioned that i write a lot of books
#
i see them as marathons each one and i didn't have the endurance
#
uh to sit down for 12 hours a day and write and that now i have that endurance and i do it all the
#
time and uh discipline the discipline see i see everything about as about being about discipline
#
and maybe this is what i've learned from the physical exercise that was very ambiguous or
#
misunderstood by me when i lived only that life of the mind that you know for a long time when i
#
was writing especially when i was writing fiction i thought you know the more i drink the better
#
things are good because there's that romantic idea of the you know the writer the the drunk
#
the the bukowski's of the world and watch your soul yeah single malt yeah exactly i can't tell
#
you how much i've drunk to try to get books written and uh that doesn't work but when i
#
started to apply the discipline required to push yourself physically to the limits and beyond
#
then i started writing very successfully um and finishing projects finishing books
#
right now in my head i have today right sitting right here i have five books outlined and kind
#
of filled in in my head and i would have thought that an absurd thing to do 10 years ago but now
#
i know that these will become a reality if i you know inshallah assume i live these five books
#
are going to be real because i know exactly the steps that it takes to bring them into existence
#
and why not because of the experience because i'm a better writer necessarily but because
#
i know what it takes to prepare for an iron man i know that you have to do it every day
#
you have to do x y and z and that if you try to skip y it's not going to work and you know so
#
the discipline of cultivating the physical has translated into the success of
#
living the life of the of the mind and um maybe torkel taught me this you know by that one
#
detail when he told me that he writes on a treadmill uh there it the analogy became a reality
#
for me that yes writing a book writing a paper writing anything writing a short story is like a
#
marathon you have to you have to put you know the effort in you have to manage the endurance
#
you can't take shortcuts and um you will the the result will be determined by the input uh 100
#
percent you know you can't you can't cheat that you can't cheat a marathon you have to go the
#
distance and you can't cheat a story you have to go the the distance and um uh this has so the
#
physical has informed me about the intellectual much more than the other way around the other way
#
around almost interferes well that's fascinating and i love the way you say the other way around
#
almost interferes just last week parumita vohra in an episode with me told me about a slogan she
#
coined be kinky don't be thinky and i love that word thinky because you know i guess thinky can
#
also interfere with the uh sort of the physical exercise part of it i especially like that you
#
pointed out that writing is tough like in uh you know the last webinar i teach in my writing
#
courses about process and i begin it by saying that every writer finds writing tough you know
#
sometimes beginning writers will have this impression that for actual real writers it
#
must be so easy it's just hard for me i'm not cut out for it i can't do this and i tell them that
#
no man it doesn't matter how many books you've written it is always bloody hard you're always
#
sitting at the typewriter and bleeding as you said you know it is bloody hard but the point
#
the additional point that i go on to make and i will make here again because i feel so strongly
#
about it is that writing doesn't require any special talent everybody can sit down put in the
#
work put in the hours and learn to write good prose you know and it's just a question of trusting
#
in that in the same way as you'd probably agree that everybody can say run a marathon if they
#
just put in the hours and do the process and go for that now certain things require talent if you
#
want to be a great painter or a great musician there are specific talents required for that
#
but if you just want to write good prose i believe so strongly that anyone can do it you just have
#
to put in the hours and put in the work i agree i agree not everyone can be swim like Michael
#
Phelps run like Eliud Kipchoge or cycle like Lance Armstrong or whoever but everybody can
#
learn to run fast i mean everyone who's abled can learn to run fast swim well cycle and the same is
#
true about writing you you might not be Shakespeare but who needs to be that's not why most people
#
write necessarily you can do it in a way that fulfills you is effective communicates to an
#
audience you can achieve all of that in my view which i don't know if it overlaps with you you
#
yours my view is that it takes discipline it that's really all it takes commitment
#
by discipline you know i mean like all of those elements having a schedule having a routine having
#
commitment to to doing it not giving up when it gets difficult but persevering and pushing through
#
all of these sorts of aspects study you know reading often when my prose is stale i'll read
#
poetry or something like this and i'll start to imitate it and then stop reading that so i
#
don't get too controlled by it and so on but you know these little elements little tricks little
#
procedures to keep yourself going i bracket i i include all of that under you know discipline
#
and i think with discipline anyone can become a very very very accomplished writer
#
wise words and i i agree entirely let's talk about again your emotion in the world of ideas and i'm
#
particularly interested by the incredible amount of insightful writing you've done on india while
#
actually in a sense being an american you know you were born there you brought an interesting
#
view to it whereas you know if you're born and brought up in india there are certain things
#
certain tropes certain ways of looking at our history that would just you you would have taken
#
in by osmosis you would have kind of imbibed them perhaps you don't step back and question it
#
so you know how did you first start looking at india did it help that you weren't actually here
#
you didn't grow up here you had that remove from which you could look where you know certain
#
figures aren't deified certain figures at the other hand aren't reviled and you know all these
#
great men and women that you've sort of written about who were part of our freedom struggle and
#
so on contain multitudes right and sometimes what happens in india especially with modern politics
#
is that they're painted as either black or white or there's almost a mythology around each of them
#
you know gandhi is a myth ambedkar's a myth they have their own it's almost like the amarchit
#
rakatha comics on their own and and actually they were flesh and blood real people incredibly
#
complex incredibly deep how did you begin to make a sense of all of this because the initial entry
#
would be through all the standard books which everyone has read which would apply certain
#
frames to it which would almost be like default to them you know in your while writing your recent
#
biography of ambedkar you pointed out how the two existing great works on him dhananjay keer's
#
english book and khair mode's 12 volume marathi work are the works everybody refers to so those
#
are almost canonical in that sense and yet both of them are riddled with different kinds of errors
#
for different kinds of reasons and you know all the ambedkar books that have recently come out
#
in this year in a flurry you point out take either from kheer or khair mode and you are the one person
#
who's kind of standing outside that and you know questioning that and say no no no let's let's look
#
at all the evidence again let's look at let's find other primary sources let's do all of that and
#
i mean i just mentioned ambedkar because it's the first thing that came to mind but even with the
#
way that you look at gandhi even with the way that you look at say indian political theory even with
#
your examination of the different ideas of india you know you've just you know not
#
taken that existing frame for granted but taken a step back and looked at it in a new way so how
#
did you sort of learn to look at it differently to begin with because it's so tempting just to
#
you know accept the existing frames and then work within that yeah i think there are two things one
#
that in a way i don't have any choice because i'm coming from outside of course i
#
you know i was steeped in kind of cultural values and experiences both from
#
early travel and upbringing but nevertheless you know my real
#
journey in india began in 2004 so just 20 you know less than 20 years
#
that's one thing but secondly in my formal education in philosophy i studied at a university
#
called louvin levin where the great phenomenologists worked so like husserl satcha
#
and this school of philosophical psychological thinking was one that always demanded from
#
students to experience first and analyze later so you don't project your ideas and expectations
#
and your frames and then see what data fits into it and then write about that data and forget about
#
outliers and and so on and so my training academic training was always phenomenologically
#
oriented and as i'd mentioned my own personal experience made me an outsider from the
#
from the start i think it has been an enormous advantage and i that advantage
#
comes from not being too close and not being indoctrinated from within and i've seen that
#
in a number of things like as i got better and better in in in hindi or tried learning marathi
#
and so on there were many puns that i could make that even like my wife was marathi speaker she
#
didn't realize you know that this word sounded like this it was a homophone with another thing
#
and these are all the prerogative of people on the outside so you know you can make
#
i want to give you some examples but everything is very um they're all bad words
#
but uh but you can you may give an example nevertheless my listeners are mature enough
#
they will take the adult content if there be any um but uh uh you know so so so approaching
#
things from the outside allows you a vantage point a perspective that while people on the inside
#
might think is immature or un let's say you know uneducated in some respect because you you didn't
#
from the inside it has allowed me not i never put forward my views as something to supplant those
#
from the people who are on the inside but a perspective a perspective that i think is
#
unique and valuable given my educational training and background which has been very very good
#
you know that's a great gift that i've that i've had great privilege and the my positionality which
#
you know is the inevitable outsider but one thing about growing up as an immigrant uh one is always
#
an outsider you know so in india for a long long time i was regarded as uh abcd right american born
#
confused desi suggesting that america is my home but when i'm in america i'm an indian
#
you know nobody walks up to me and says oh are you from texas they say where are you from and you
#
say your mirabai is rescinded yeah then i give a seven hour rendition so uh uh so you know jane
#
mohanty this very accomplished indian philosopher wrote when he wrote his autobiography called it
#
between two worlds because he went west very very early on and that captures it you know
#
an immigrant he's never fully either the place where their parents came from or uh the place
#
where they're where they end up and that perspective is something that
#
is often very difficult and can be brutal for people fortunately as i mentioned earlier somehow
#
i managed to leverage these potentially traumatic experiences leverage them in some positive way
#
and i think this grants me a kind of unique uh perspective that can produce insights because
#
i don't need to think about gandhi the way i was indoctrinated to think about gandhi whether to
#
vilify or to uh to and i don't need to think about anyone or anything any phenomenon freedom struggle
#
partition uh constitutional drafting you know often like the preamble book which
#
i think every lawyer intellectual in this country knows now i can't meet a lawyer who doesn't know
#
who i am because of that book i thought that book was so obvious you know these are the concepts we
#
have to figure out what what what was you know the lived experience that generated them in the mind
#
of the drafts person it's like you know obvious when i wrote the book on indian wine 2005 or six
#
i thought why am i the only one writing this book indian wine is so you know such a fascinating
#
subject and it's emerging as a the wine industry is growing by 30 per cent per year and everywhere
#
you go people you know posh people want to have a glass of wine why am i the one the only one to
#
write a book on indian so i have found them like a lot of my books to be the obvious thing to do
#
and i'm wondering if someone else will do it by the time i finish but it turns out that i'm the
#
only one who's doing these things and and and i guess that comes from having this outside uh view
#
um so it has been a great advantage and uh fortunately since i have grown up with a lot
#
of intellectual curiosity you know the learning curve is often very steep but it's not something
#
that i shy away from i i want to know more and more and there are often another
#
advantage comes from just not having that burden of i don't i don't have to slough off
#
an old way of thinking in order to do something new because i never had that way of thinking
#
and i noticed that really burdens a lot of my colleagues uh in history in philosophy in
#
sociology um in law that they have to first get out of how they were taught to see it before they
#
can start to introduce new way of seeing it and for me i start with a new way of seeing it because
#
it's new uh for me so i i do think it has been a great uh you know advantage for me in opening up
#
new angles that are just not you know my book on the philosophy of law in india indian jurisprudence
#
rethinking indian jurisprudence the whole series that i do with penguin rethinking india every one
#
of these uh books is because everything is in a way new you know let you know why is it like that
#
let me let me see whereas someone on the inside might say this is just the way it is you know fish
#
in water i'm jumping in the water and so i'm looking around uh and have a different vantage
#
point on it so this again is a place where i could have been traumatized debilitated and paralyzed
#
you know i don't know enough i can't do that um but fortunately somehow you know this is all due
#
to my wife my family giving me information language help my community scholars being helpful
#
communicating discussions it's a generosity of the community but um but thankfully because of
#
these circumstances i i feel that i've been able to produce very original work that you know later
#
inspires others to start thinking along those lines but that's absolutely fascinating how kind
#
of coming from outside and not knowing the water the way the fish knows the water helps you kind of
#
look at it differently tell me about the concept of thin swaraj i think that's a that's a good way
#
to get into uh yours sort of the way you look at indian history and how you arrived at that is also
#
really relevant i think to grokking the present times and even times from a hundred years back
#
so uh the in humanities and social sciences i observed as soon as i began at delhi university
#
a huge discomfort and confusion about as i had mentioned macaulay macaulay's minute on education
#
you know that was delivered in order to secure funding for opening universities in india university
#
of calcutta mumbai madras and so university of delhi and so on so the very formation of these
#
universities everybody has recognized was precisely to colonize the minds of indian
#
in this case academics or intellectuals so everybody is what i noticed upon arriving
#
and joining delhi university as a foreigner you know i noticed that everybody was profoundly
#
uncomfortable and yet unable to articulate this discomfort what was going on and so i began studying
#
it from that moment well you know the institutional reaction has always been to to to get people out
#
when i was hired at delhi university i was one of 13 non-indian citizens who were hired at the
#
university so people from abroad and and and and uh people of indian origin like myself coming back
#
and so on and after two years there's nobody left nobody left they were they all resigned or were
#
um you know pushed out and so on in fact i was i resigned but i was really pushed out they stopped
#
paying my salary i wasn't paid my salary for uh i think eight months or something like that
#
okay because the administration has a great deal of trouble with the kind of demands that people
#
like us from the outside make so i could never understand for example why bureaucrats are running
#
our universities and i still don't and you might have seen some articles i've written on this
#
topic that what we need to do is get them out and these bureaucrats have never had a liberal
#
education so how are they going to respect a liberal education and on you know for them
#
the fetishism of the file is you know this is the sacred thing and these people are engaged in
#
folly so you know so so unlike other professors who know that you have to touch their feet and
#
bow down to get anything done i would scream at them as would all of the others you know what the
#
hell are you doing why you know why why does the program work like this why are you the
#
one making this decision do you know anything about you know so you know really challenging
#
their authority and i'm sure all of my colleagues who were hired then did the same thing so their
#
revenge was to find rules that we had violated one was um uh station leave station leave was
#
fantastic station leave station leave so station leave is an old it's a it's a 19th century british
#
bureaucratic requirement because any officer like a collector is posted at a station and like
#
railway station and if you're going to leave your post you need station you need prior permission
#
for station leave now they impose that on university of delhi faculty because we're
#
we're paid by the state so we're public employees and i pointed out that you impose all of the
#
requirements of is officers on every faculty member and we get none of the benefits and so if
#
we're not going to get our payments and emoluments and fringe benefits and all of these the the
#
benefits of being a public employee but you're going to uh assign all of the burdens of being
#
a public employee upon us then i will i refuse to follow all of those uh those rules so i will not
#
apply for station leave until my pay scale is put equal to those who you know upon who this one so
#
obviously they use that to dock my pay and not pay me and things like that and they did this to
#
everyone and eventually got all of us out so this institution has to survive the input of these of
#
this um uh you know foreign body and get it get it out purge it now i noticed this this total
#
discomfort i've just gave an institutional analog that little story was like an institutional
#
analog but with ideas the same is true so the greatest minds in the humanities and social
#
sciences in india like rajiv bargav was obsessed with this nandi of course has always been obsessed
#
with it nita chandu you know everybody writing and producing literature in the in political
#
theory political sciences we're all talking about how is it that we manage to decolonize our minds
#
and the question is once you decolonize what fills the void because a vacuum is created
#
you decolonize look afghanistan is a state that was you know where you have a vacuum of power
#
and we know what comes in so you get this style of regime and so on when you create a vacuum
#
something has to fill it in so everybody knew we needed to decolonize now humanities and social
#
sciences in india every we know it historically how the institutions begun but what no one could
#
solve is what content do you fill it in with now the clear answers have been two one is so-called
#
tradition and what tradition means as you know very well tradition is really modernity right
#
there's nothing in the 11th 12th 13th 14th century that suggests that the gita was a book of any
#
significance in indian cultural history that was resurrected in the 1870s gita rahasia was written
#
about 1908 gandhi writes hinshwaraj 1909 the next year gets published in india 1919
#
savarkar writes hindutva 1923 after reading gita rahasia from tilak and hinshwaraj from
#
gandhi and so what's happening is that that savarkar himself recognizes that this weakness
#
effeminacy of hinduism that's so accommodating is what has allowed these impure you know these
#
colonizers to come in and therefore we need to produce we need to muscularize our hinduism
#
semitize our religion and so the gita stands in now as a strong a document as the bible or the
#
quran because the abrahamic or semitic religions have these strong powerful books as the centrality
#
of their faith and so we need to create one so you know so-called tradition that we harken back to
#
the gita is actually a modern phenomenon now the gita will supplant the western philosophy or
#
literature being taught so when you create a vacuum by decolonizing what fills it in
#
tradition but is this really you know some kind of authentic search for tradition and as we know
#
india has never had tradition it has had traditions so if you have brahmanism you
#
have shravanism if you have the the so-called um tradition you have a rival buddhist jane or
#
charvak tradition and so on but because of the the the wounds of colonization and the kind of
#
right-wing reactionary effort to recuperate our dignity and muscularity and dignity and our
#
insulted you know sense of national pride and so on we harp on everything that we recognize as
#
the authenticity of our tradition and all that turns out to be is a lot of kind of fascistic
#
um oppressive and the manusmriti is going to replace our constitution our constitution is
#
too western so let's let's supplant it by the dharmashastras dharmashastras essentially are
#
extremely patriarchal extremely inegalitarian literature so when we see that the efforts to
#
decolonize fill that space with an extremely oppressive reactionary fascistic oriented
#
pseudo tradition the immediate response of any progressive or liberal mind is we can't decolonize
#
so doubling down on the westernness of our education um and uh these turned out to be
#
the two kind of vague ways that i noticed all my academic colleagues intellectuals political
#
theorists philosophers public intellectuals and so on at csds or du or you know shantiniketan and
#
calcutta or whatever the two kinds of reactions they seemed to have were you know you have
#
fundamentalism or you have nothing you have what i characterized as the fukuyamian idea that let's
#
just wait in you know in the waiting room of history until we we all become rational liberal
#
agents just like fukuyama said that basically the framework is there westminster parliamentary
#
democracy and we just have to elevate our you know cultural accidents into fitting that uh model so
#
these are the two alternatives that you find in all public thought i think any article in indian
#
express to the hindu to books on indian political thought all of them more or less show these two
#
characteristics and it's a it's a legitimate bind and it's a legitimate fear right now we're
#
talking about the ucc uniform civil code somebody like me as a lawyer and as a kind of someone who
#
likes order and rationalism and so on i obviously am inclined to the a uniform civil code and yet
#
knowing that it gets deployed in fact not for order but for oppression i have to oppose it
#
so you know i'm left with a discomfort that i know what is what is right from let's say
#
the juridical point of view but it is not right from the moral cultural social point of view so
#
being caught in this these kinds of dilemmas is not unusual it's you know it's very common
#
shared experience but what i realized is that almost all of the people who are engaged in these
#
conversations these disciplines these newspaper debates and so on are uh in in some way over
#
intellectualizing the situation and not keeping in mind that there have been answers provided
#
for a long long time and that became clearest to me in the debate between gandhi and ambedkar
#
about what is the significance or meaning of swaraj so if for gandhi swaraj is a dual
#
kind of phenomenon of home rule or state sovereignty and independence according to
#
something like the chart of the united nations which declares national sovereignty and territorial
#
integrity and so on if that's the swaraj at the level of the state he also had swaraj at the level
#
of the person which is a kind of emancipation personal bodily physiological psycho spiritual
#
emancipation so not just decolonize the state decolonize the person and the mind
#
but in ambedkar the notion was that the techniques that you use
#
to decolonize your mind a return to tradition an idealization of the varna dharma these have been
#
forms of internal colonization and oppression for us and just because you the elite will inherit the
#
state from the point of view of the ordinary person really makes no difference to be tyrannized by a
#
white side or tyrannized by a brown side of course brown side was what macaulay was creating
#
through our universities and through our elite and through our is and so on and so that vantage
#
point that viewpoint made me understand that there has always been an author an alternative way of
#
seeing what fills in the vacuum when you decolonize and it is not you know just a parenthetical remark
#
more more marxism because i know you enjoy it so much
#
marx wrote this essay very anti-semitic essay but nevertheless we can salvage some of the ideas
#
from it called on the jewish question and in this he talks about how the jews who are are always
#
marginalized and excluded from political and civic civic life due to their
#
religion and the dominance of christianity are fighting for inclusion on in civic and
#
political life but they're doing so on the terms of the majority so this excluded minority is
#
trying to get into the center on the terms of the majority saying please let us in and mark says
#
but the real question here is why are you excluded in the first place why do we have these
#
differentiations and so what you what the jews ought to be fighting for is not the narrow interest
#
of civic or political inclusion but human emancipation as such because if we were all
#
fighting for human emancipation you would have never been excluded in the first place so this
#
is very similar in some respects to what ambedkar had argued that the question is not home rule
#
versus empire the question is emancipation versus hierarchy and enslavement and that
#
so from the point of view of the marginalized the white sob and the brown sob are both imposing
#
hierarchies and both oppressing and so the event what fills in the normative structure when you
#
decolonize what fills what occupies that void does not need to be tradition in in its equally
#
oppressive manifestations it should be the preoccupation with emancipation as such
#
and if that is what i call things for us because it's not packed with a metaphysics like you know
#
the gita and you know our varna dharma and our spirit cosmic spiritualities and the vedas and
#
all of these things which currently the government as you know is trying to dismantle the university
#
system to reintroduce these kinds of ideas because thick swaraj extremely metaphysical
#
and extremely reactionary belief that this is how you find the authenticity of india
#
but the authenticity of india is not a leap back to some pre you know to some glorious age the
#
authenticity of india is going to be found when you liberate the people at the margins and on the
#
bottom and that's what swaraj was meant to do in the first place even in gandhi's conception
#
the problem is that they didn't know how to realize that conception without just uh turn
#
backwards so it's an excavation downwards the idea of din swaraj a non-metaphysical attempt to find
#
indian authenticity by emancipating your ordinary uh persons and this is how this was kind of the
#
plot of that book indian political theory because i wanted to give something to all of my colleagues
#
the public intellectuals and the political scientists and so on to sort of show them
#
that i know you're uncomfortable i know these are the dilemma we find ourselves in but if we would
#
just remove ourselves from our elite positions and see that the answer has been facing us all
#
along what we're interested in is the emancipation of the common person as opposed to some kind of
#
metaphysical suturing of our wounded soul that um we would find a way forward both
#
uh with political uh real world consequences as well as a way of
#
kind of fixing the university and the things that we teach and why we why we teach them so i thought
#
that was a really good book you know i thought it was a really good book really thought-provoking
#
we could just talk five hours about that i did an episode with shruti kapila and she came up with
#
this pithy formulation for hindutva at the turn of the last century where she said that it's a
#
theory of violence in search of a history and that's pretty much the way you've kind of
#
articulated it as well in terms of how historic it was and what a political project it was it's
#
not that those were actually our traditions per se but this is one view of it what kind of gives
#
me a little bit of a pause here is that you know when we talk of decolonization or when we ask
#
questions like what will fill that void it feels to me like a very top-down question to ask like
#
this is really to me a bunch of indulgent elite sitting around a table and saying let us plan the
#
nation what do we want it to be what is our idea of india as if your idea of india can ever become
#
india just because you decide in a round table conference that you know let us kind of do this
#
and uh you know and i'll quote something that you and ashish nandi wrote in the introduction
#
uh to your book vision for a nation and you wrote there where you were talking about one
#
particular idea of india but you wrote quote one amongst innu innumerable alternate alternative
#
visions rival conceptions and yet still ends course firmly within the fundamental idea ideas
#
of india established in our constitution we take it for granted that within any vision for the
#
nation competing ideas of india must battle it out within the area delineated by the constitution
#
this is a very meaning of the term india within a phrase such as rethinking india for we are
#
rethinking the potential potentialities available to us to be imagined in line with the vast
#
but not infinite horizon of our founding document was this you and nandi in that book or was it you
#
in the introduction of one of the other books i i think it was that that sounds like vision
#
for nation yeah yeah that is and and my question here was about sort of the centrality of the
#
constitution which many people treat over here as a holy book you know so many will treat the
#
constitution as a holy book here in the same unthinking way that many on the right will treat
#
treat the manusmriti as a holy book the gita as a holy book and i have a problem with that because
#
when i think of the founding of india i see that number one what we did was we did hand the nation
#
over from uh you know white sahibs to brown sahibs uh you know we took the same colonial
#
state apparatus a coercive state apparatus that was designed to rule and oppress a people rather
#
than what gives me immense disquiet and very few people speak about it is what patel and vp
#
menon did during those few months when they put the nation together where they got all of these
#
princely states either through coercion or through promises that were later broken to agree to be
#
part of this union and that seems to me to be like a kind of fast-track colonization what the
#
british took two three centuries to do we just did in a few months and that founding moment gives
#
me this quiet and i think not enough people question it and to question it doesn't mean
#
that i'm questioning our nation state or i'm questioning an idea of india you know etc etc
#
i also have my ideas of india as do you but i think those ideas must be fought for in the
#
marketplace of ideas you know cannot really be imposed from the top down and in many ways
#
the constitution has many parts which are deeply illiberal as well for example the first amendment
#
the way free speech is not really protected only lip service is paid to it and so on and so
#
forth so this is quiet that i have that uh you know if if one section of the people say that hey
#
you know more than india it is some fictional traditional notion of this country that really
#
matters and we must go back to the manusmriti and the varna system or whatever even if that's a
#
little bit of a caricature but if there's one section that says that i am i'm equally disturbed
#
with the other section that says that the constitution is our holy book and that's what
#
it is and i think that if we have ideas of india we care about and yours and mine would be pretty
#
much along the same lines we have to fight for it in the battlefield of ideas and i think in a
#
fundamental sense of failure of our project is that our society was never as liberal as a
#
constitution that was imposed upon it even if the constitution isn't may not be liberal enough for
#
you and me but it is still much more liberal than society and today politics has caught up with
#
society and we can't just sit around and bemoan that it is a battle that has to be fought but not
#
fought among elites in rooms discussing in lofty tones you know how do we decolonize but it's a
#
battle that one actually has to kind of go out there and uh fight and this question sounds like
#
a harsh question i'm not criticizing any of what you said you you've shed fresh light on many of
#
these ossified ways of thinking and i'm really glad about that but what do you what do you sort
#
of feel about this like you know especially the fact that the constitution is today treated like
#
such a holy book and what i'm more worried about is the state of a society and i don't think that
#
can be sorted in a top-down way yeah i i think you're bringing in a crisscross of questions
#
so one is at the let's say the horizontal level we have an inability of rival ideologies to
#
communicate to to to even have any shared axioms for a debate and this is in itself
#
hugely problematic given how top down the state the modern state tends to be so
#
a kind of historical philosophical point worth mentioning is that the formation of almost every
#
modern state not only modern one is undertaken through violence this goes back to you know even
#
biblical tales uh cain and abel you know the the brothers in the old testament one murders the
#
other and then the next line in the in that book of the bible is and he went on to form the first
#
city and so that you know really shook me when i read that uh that you know the first murder
#
fratricide and the first city formed and isn't the case that every state is formed out of that kind
#
of fundamental violence you know the australians and the aboriginals the united states and the
#
natives and the slave you know so it's everything seems the the state always seems to emerge out of
#
some fundamental crime but we are but things run very very top down technology only has been
#
serving to enhance that with the you know from adar to the paytm to through all the measures of
#
of covid and you know so the top down nature of things in terms of the state functioning of the
#
state uh seems to be pretty well in place even if in terms of society you're very right to point
#
out that we have a question of the vertical so the on the horizontal level let's say people active
#
and who identify with the state and who control the state and who make decisions in terms of the
#
state um they are polarized to such a degree that they have no possibility of reaching overlapping
#
consensus even to consider yes there are some problems with the constitution because nobody
#
wants to grant that because once you grant something uh you're terrified of what the result
#
will be when i wrote the preamble book great scholar he he wrote an endorsement of it and
#
then he rang me up and he said there's something i wanted to tell you which is that i think it's
#
great what you've done by showing that it was ambedkar rather than nedu's
#
objectives resolution and so on but do you really want to publish it in this time
#
when the government's intent is to remove nedu from our history and the fabric of our you know
#
consciousness altogether and i thought that's very you know interesting what problem that he's
#
posing he knows i'm right but he wonders should we say it because it's going to be exploited
#
in this project of uh current project of you know undermining nedu in every in every respect
#
so we're always scared to to speak plainly because it will be exploited by our ideological
#
opponent that's the horizontal problem the vertical problem the social one is extremely
#
uh significant in terms of the real dynamics of how power functions and in some respect what you
#
articulate doesn't i don't see it as a criticism at all because i'm speaking to an arena in english
#
a book in english to an audience i'm addressing a particular audience i'm not addressing
#
the rickshaw or something like that and so with this audience this is how i'm going to
#
to cope but the larger political question is what about the audience of the you know
#
700 million others who uh for whom these questions are not academic they're organic
#
and they're every day i can't you know i'm that's not my domain that's not where i act
#
and every there there are there are agents to act in every different arena the question is
#
you know the mediation between those agents who act in that arena and the intellectual
#
and what i did with this vision for nation i started working as a kind of advisor to
#
political parties and basically congress in in in particular to try to articulate how an idea like
#
thinswaraj may have meaning on the ground for someone like raul gandhi giving speeches you know
#
so let's look at your speech and let's look at this theory of thinswaraj and see if there can be
#
any meeting point that would be of significance in the kind of work that you're doing so it's a
#
kind of a chain um there but i'm happy i'm satisfied in speaking to an audience with whom
#
i have a shared language in the hopes that you know you had mentioned 12 percent as being the
#
retention rate someone who watches a youtube video youtube show yeah i i as a teacher as a scholar
#
i often think if i get to one student you know there might be 30 there might be 300 if i get
#
to one student my lecture has been worthwhile that's why i found 12 to be very high because
#
i never thought i could communicate with 12 percent of my audience i always thought
#
is there one person who who i'm going to impact and if so what i'm doing is worthwhile
#
so i don't think solving the vertical question is necessarily the job of a political theorist
#
but there is a chain of where one should take very seriously how things are going to move up
#
and down that chain so you shouldn't just think you know i'm a i'm in an ivory tower so what i
#
say has no significance no meaning and i don't need to worry about it you know i just learned
#
yesterday osmanian university social science and humanities faculties have stopped teaching
#
because the government had announced the state um civil service exam openings and there's since
#
they haven't done it in what eight nine years there's so many jobs available in the civil
#
services now in the state and so the university decided that you know really we're not here to
#
educate people anyway we're only here to provide hostel canteen a place for them to prep for civil
#
services so let's stop playing this charade and we won't hold classes so that they can properly
#
prepare for the states so that kind of relinquishing of your responsibility is one extreme
#
but on the other hand i don't think that i as a political theorist am here to you know to directly
#
influence there's mediation along the way so for me the much more fascinating urgent question
#
because it's one i can address is that horizontal level and i think that is something that we that
#
that has been ignored for so long and i saw it most clearly most desperately clearly
#
during the protests at jnu when the campus became anti-national you know the symbol for anti-national
#
i was behind a lorry what do we call these lorries you know those uh delivery
#
they call lorries yeah lorry full of uh human souls you know it was just transporting it
#
should be transporting goods but it was transporting people who looked confused and didn't really know
#
what they were doing and all wearing kind of saffron head dresses and with signs and so on
#
transported them to the jnu main gate uh let them out and then they started protesting the
#
anti-national nature of jnu now obviously there was nothing in them to be there they were like
#
cattle moved to that location to to um uh to protest and then the the jnu students were on
#
the inside of the gate and they started shouting at them and when i walked in because i i drove
#
behind them and i was just looking in their eyes and realizing that they have just been moved here
#
you know they're furniture of a kind um when i got into the main gate the first thing i did
#
was i said stop yelling at these people and get them chai you know do something for them be
#
be human because they're not here protesting ideas they don't know who you are they don't know why
#
they're here they've been moved here by a politician who's exploiting the situation
#
and when i started saying this the students had jane you started screaming at me
#
you know you we always knew you were right wing and all of this kind of thing so they could not
#
step back and see the absurdity of this situation they were engaged in this performance where you
#
have people protesting and then you're doing your counter protest but those aren't people protesting
#
right those are puppets uh who are you know being used just like you by your own you know
#
political party professors or or whatever this just stop this take them tea and treat them as
#
human beings and that is something that has till date not happened on the campus and if it's not
#
going to happen on a campus where you said we need to hash these ideas out how how are you
#
going to do it when you don't see the other person as a human and you share no axioms
#
and i had very early on spoken about walls around a university and this is the key point
#
our universities many of them central universities especially the law universities and so on they all
#
have walls around them what are those walls for they're to keep people out now why are you keeping
#
people out there's only one good explanation for why you're keeping people out which is to create
#
a sanctuary inside and that sanctuary inside is specifically designed not to be the external world
#
because on the external world the only way you confront your opponent is through violence and
#
screaming and shouting but on the internal world when you have a wall and you've created a sanctuary
#
this is the the key moment and the only moment that an indian will have to see her ideological
#
opponent as a fellow human being and for this reason i'm very very opposed to having national
#
parties have a youth uh parties in a campus on a campus okay if students from the campus themselves
#
form into some kind of party or whatever that i can understand but once again we had talked
#
about nicha and marx and the future and so on what we're hoping to achieve on these university
#
campuses is a new generation of insight about how to approach the questions that our generation has
#
created you know how to solve climate how to solve um communal uh riots how to how to solve all of
#
these things and yet the parties are indoctrinating them at the very moment that they should be able
#
to think freely and have new non-ideological ideas thematic ideas uh ideas on uh topical ideas and
#
not platform you know this is what we must think about ucc this is what we must think about the
#
first amendment this is what we must think about reservation on the contrary that means we're
#
locking the future into the politics of the past very dangerous especially when our politics is
#
careening off the rails right now so the wall is around the campus which means that
#
the right-wing student and the left-wing student and the bapsa student the ambedkar fule group
#
the the the radical and the uh the the moderate and so on need to sit around the table together
#
be uh colleagues or associates if not friends and hash out their ideas in a way that 20 years later
#
when they're in parliament and they want to you know intellectually destroy their opponent they
#
don't think the means to do it is also to physically destroy them because they shared
#
space together they shared meals together they had long conversations and they recognized that
#
they don't meet ideologically but they meet as human beings as indians all most with the
#
best interest of the country in mind and every university that i've been to in india and that's
#
a lot of them does not have this space and does not um even permit as i had mentioned to you i
#
think off the air going and meeting someone from a rival ideological position you cannot
#
shake their hand which means that they are not human beings which means that the only way
#
to vanquish something that is not human is to destroy it and that is where our politics are
#
this horizontal level and it's the universities are the only sanctuaries because when you get
#
into the so-called real world where there are no walls protecting you you don't have gentle civil
#
um there are no rules to the game right around in an academic space there are rules to the game
#
you have to speak to the argument not ad hominem against the person you have to allow another
#
person to speak you have to interpret it charitably purvapaksha articulate the position of the other
#
before you dismantle it all of these kinds of practices which are of course intellectual
#
are fundamentally based on the fact that you're sitting in the same room and you're not violent
#
and you're not hurling abuses at each other and you're not screaming why on earth are people
#
chanting slogans on jnu campus this is the most right-wing thing i can say right and yet i believe
#
it because you have three to five years to have a conversation the rest of your life is slogans
#
the algorithm is nothing but a slogan you have three to five years to have an actual conversation
#
to see the other person as a human and to understand their ideology to understand it
#
intimately so you can destroy it dismantle it later and yet instead of having that discursive
#
relationship you're shouting you're shouting slogans just like you're on the street this is
#
a this is a great loss of opportunity and one that is just going to have disastrous consequences
#
decade after decade as we you know as technology and so on continue to to to polarize us and
#
make us not meet merely ideological rivals but as fundamental antagonists
#
wise words and i think food for thought for me and for everyone listening to this and by the way i
#
didn't actually mean to imply that that vertical problem is something you are i could solve like
#
i really see us as kind of playing the long game within the ambit that we can and you know like
#
you said if you influence one student you're happy like one of my fantasies which i've spoken
#
about on the show is that somewhere in some small town in india there's an 18 year old girl
#
listening to the show who will be prime minister of india in 2050 so if i you know that is a long
#
game that i think people like us can aspire to sort of play here's a question when we talk about
#
the horizontal problem though i'll sort of go back to our freedom movement like i won't even
#
mention savarkar's books because the ideas are just so half-baked and so shabby but when i read
#
something like hints forage for example what strikes me is that and and gandhi of course
#
is a kind of a black spawn event he was very different from many of the liberals and the
#
moderates he admired in the party like go clay naroji agarkar and so on in the sense that all
#
of all of them had red mill and bentham and smith and all of that and gandhi was kind of all over
#
the place some tall stoy from where he got the admirable idea of non-violent resistance then the
#
idealization of the village life from raskin and so on and so forth it was a mishmash of ideas
#
but reading hints forage you realize that there's nothing coherent in his world view
#
unless distrust of the west is coherent like he rants against railways he rants against lawyers
#
he rants against doctors you know and i i had a couple of episodes with ram gohar on this and i
#
asked ram about this and i said that look he gets all of these things wrong and and of course he
#
contains multitudes he changes his mind on many things but he gets all these major things wrong
#
there is nothing coherent he gets one thing right which is non-violent resistance satyagraha how
#
did that happen and ram's answer was kind of illuminating to me he said that the reason he
#
got that one thing right is that that is the one thing he had experience of he had actually done
#
it and it is a different matter that all the satyagrahas kind of failed in their proximate
#
aims like the last one in south africa half the aims happened but otherwise they failed in their
#
proximate aims but they rallied the causes and you know he managed to kind of build a nation around
#
those now that's important because when i look at all of our great freedom fighters from that point
#
onwards let's say from the time gokleda is you know there is not much happening in terms of
#
coherent philosophy a lot of it is tactical a lot of it is rhetoric against and righteous rage
#
against a state which at the at the time are the colonial powers and then independence happens but
#
like you correctly said there is still a vacuum there is you know barring slogans and barring
#
keywords like secular there isn't really a guiding philosophy that can sort of fill that
#
vacuum as you said earlier and i think about this in the context of your recent criticisms
#
and i'll link to this wonderful caravan interview where you spoke about the left in india today
#
where you pointed out that they are less concerned with articulating progressive
#
values and more concerned with dirty politics you've spoken about how one day they will say
#
secular secular and the next day they'll be visiting a temple which describes the congress
#
so well and and so on and so forth and i'm just thinking that in modern times there perhaps isn't
#
space for a coherent ideology to now emerge simply because of the incentives of politics
#
politics is all about winning the next election right politics is downstream of culture all our
#
opposition parties for whatever reason have decided that uh you know there is a certain
#
traditional element in hindu in indian society uh that they cannot compromise with which is why
#
the amadmi party will do the hanuman chalisa nonsense which is why the congress will visit
#
temples and priyanka gandhi will remind people that it was my father who opened the gates of
#
the babri masjid and you have all this rubbish happening and then there is no scope for something
#
alternative to emerge and i sometimes wondered at a have they seen something in indian society
#
being canny politicians which is non-negotiable or is it a lack of imagination and i wonder what
#
you think of this because you you said you've also been a consultant to you know some of these
#
parties and whatever and i wonder what you think of this because this fills fills me with deep
#
despair it means that any any battle that we now forge will be forged on the terms decided by the
#
ruling party on a battleground where it is almost accepted that certain values will remain dominant
#
and then you have to fight on the margins and i i find that deeply disturbing yeah i think this
#
is a very difficult but also not a particular problem so in india we see it very clearly
#
because it almost plays out in its own caricature you know the way that it manifests the examples
#
that you gave but it's a universal problem faced by churchill you know in in that period and
#
it has in the ancient world you know shakespeare wrote a play called coriolanus
#
and in that coriolanus it's the very same thing everyone's demanding show your wounds and he says
#
no i will not show my wounds and no but how else will the people sympathize with you and he said
#
i'm here to to mold the people not to uh to to to to play uh to the gallery and so on so it's been
#
you know forever this this issue and uh that doesn't help us with its urgency and its danger
#
to know that it's his you know coincidental with human politics but i think let's look at a
#
particular case congress destroyed itself over the last uh nearly decade and not only with
#
no chance of victory but no hope of it by the ways that they manage their you know
#
party apparatus and at the top and one wonders that if everything always is about making
#
compromises so that you don't lose an electoral battle if everything's always if all of politics
#
is electoral politics then why did they not fight the ideological battle which as you rightly point
#
out will inevitably result in failure because they resulted in failure anyway then they resulted in
#
failure while not having the principal stand the principal stand which is such a risk that nobody
#
takes because electoral politics prevails so one sees this bizarre lost opportunity of the last
#
decade when the party that has long represented fairly progressive and promising values has its
#
own problems of course but it has long represented that neruvian values in some respect and his
#
qualities and virtues and and so on irrespective of his vices and if they're going to lose election
#
after election and that is the reason one doesn't take a principal stand why did they not take the
#
principal stand and have us 10 years later in such a better position where at least we understand
#
what the terms of engagement are that you know we can we we will have to play to the everything
#
bad in our natures we have to give the people what they want in order to win it was not principally
#
articulated that we you know rulers are here not just by chance and by opportunism and by luck
#
but because we bring something to our politics culture and society and i believe that every time
#
i have met a prominent political person i have noticed something about them there's something
#
special and that pops out in different ways in more ways for certain people than others i remember
#
first time i met rambillas pasjuan i thought this there's something magical about this man you know
#
that matches the kind of guinness book of world records of his enormous electoral win and so on
#
there's something about this person that is you know great in some respect in some way lalu you
#
know almost everybody i have met whether i like them or not whether they're my ideology or not
#
i've noticed you know these people are here for a reason it's not just as we like to think that
#
they're you know i could do better you know i personally know as much as i want to criticize
#
raul gandhi from top to bottom left to right in every possible way if i were in his place i would
#
probably be worse you know it's not every person is suited to this kind of so there's something
#
about them and why not why not double down on that and say i'm not just here to to to go to
#
the temple and show you that i'm i'm a you know why i am a hindu in shasheeda's soft saffron
#
you know saffron politics or whatever why not take that principal stand now obviously one knows
#
why not take the principal stand because you're going to lose but we they've lost and they they
#
knew they were going to lose they knew they were going to lose again and again and again
#
so that opportunity that missed opportunity is kind of historically missed opportunity because
#
no party shot itself as badly as congress in the last decade and yet they did nothing principled
#
to compensate for it so i'm not giving you any answer but i'm i'm i'm i'm mourning the fact that
#
we know electoral politics doesn't allow the principal stand we also ought to know that
#
politicians are not just the idiots and the corrupt kind of people that we characterize them as
#
there is something that has put them where they are not always but very often
#
and that ought to be recognized in a way that they should be
#
not just giving us what we want but also giving us what we need
#
I did an episode with Mukulika Banerjee and one of the books we spoke about is a magnificent
#
book the pathan unarmed and that came out of her quest i think for a PhD thesis to figure out how
#
the khudai khidmatka you know the form by Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan believed in non-violence like
#
why were there such a non-violent party where essentially the stereotype of the pathans is that
#
they are violent people and i love a conclusion and the conclusion is that that non-violence did
#
not come from you know Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan being influenced by Gandhi it did not come from
#
western values it came from within pathan culture that non-violence was also a part of their
#
traditions and that was what was expressed and i sometimes think that all the all these so-called
#
western values which you and i hold so dear you know secularism tolerance diversity all of this
#
is also an intrinsic part of Indian culture and Indian history because we do contain multitudes
#
and yet we don't see our parties kind of doubling down on that and you know trying to unravel those
#
strands and building narratives around those and this is just a lament it's just i think
#
it's it's such a lost opportunity we have five minutes left of the time by which we are supposed
#
to end and you know i know you'll be coming out with the second volume of your ambedkar biography
#
so i am going to ask you to promise that we do a full eight hour episode on ambedkar after
#
you know after that is out because i definitely have so much to talk about that i don't want to
#
hurry through it in a few minutes your works are magisterial and i would you know ask my listeners
#
to just pick up those books and read them now because your work is brilliant those books are
#
great to you i'm therefore going to end with my traditional last question to all my guests
#
and ask you to recommend for me and my listeners books films music any kind of art which means a
#
lot to you it need not be about any one subject but stuff that means a lot to you and you love
#
it so much that you want to stand on a soapbox and yell out to the world you know check this out
#
wow that is the most difficult question that you've asked do other people reply like that or do
#
are they ready always ready answers they all reply and i remember i did an episode with josh
#
felman where he hesitated a bit but then i got him to open up by asking him which was the last
#
film that made you cry so i'm happy to ask you that as well every film makes me cry you're just
#
like me then okay so i'm thinking about i told you long long long time back i think i first
#
my b.a. was first in in in physics i also told you that when you contacted me to speak
#
and i saw that eric weinstein was here i thought this is a dream the same man who's just had an
#
interview with eric weinstein wants to speak to me i weinstein is so fascinating to me and while
#
i'm not really convinced that he's found this theory of everything that he claims i'm i'm really
#
thankful that in my life i know what a theory of everything is and what conditions would satisfy
#
it now most philosophers political scientists political theorists lawyers don't have that
#
and once again that is from the fact that you know all the way back from aristotle's physics to
#
newton to lobachevsky and einstein i had to read all of that literature in my in my great books
#
education so i think as weird as this sounds given the last several hours
#
i think the most one of the most significant experiences that i've ever had is reading
#
einstein's works on general relativity and as strange as it sounds not a day really goes by
#
where i don't think about it i don't know how that is or why that is but i'm obsessed with people
#
like einstein i'm obsessed with the nature of the universe the last dekken herald i wrote on was
#
artificial intelligence was on ets and uh and um extraterrestrial ufos ufology i think ufology
#
is a discipline that as strange as it sounds and this is related to general relativity because we
#
have to understand the nature of our physics and if ufos and aliens and so on are here it means that
#
our physics is not complete right that there are um gaps in our understanding of uh the nature of
#
the universe and speed of light and things like that and so another and this is going to be very
#
bizarre but you know with the idea of einstein in general relativity another kind of film or
#
youtube or whatever i would suggest people to to engage with which i think nobody does or would
#
because of how foolish it sounds is something like a documentary by jeremy korbel which was called
#
um i've forgotten the name of the documentary but basically contemporary area 51 and flying saucers
#
bob lazar yes something like this so so so this kind of uh work the the higher quality one not
#
all the really bizarre stuff now why because we talk about you know we've talked about ideology
#
and algorithm and things like that but a certain wall that we will never penetrate in a room like
#
this because we consider ourselves relatively serious people not um i mean serious in the
#
sense that we take life and the world seriously and truth seriously and so on in the social
#
sciences the historian knows that every 30 years you have to rewrite because that's when documents
#
get um declassified and there are so many common the 20th century was full of historians have to
#
rewrite events once declassified documents came and showed that what the standard understanding
#
was was completely erroneous so as much as we think that we as academics or intellectuals or
#
scholars or intelligent lay persons think we have access to the external world we have to know that
#
there are secrets and that these secrets are on another level from what we have access to and
#
what are those secrets about so secrets can be about this world the things that you know we
#
experience but they might also be about another world you know another kind of intelligence
#
maybe there really are ufos that are in the hands of governments and and and things like this well
#
just imagine i told you i like bizarre people bizarre ways of thinking probably the greatest
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unknown that we face right now is alternative physics physics alternative models of physics
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and alternative models of intelligence and these two things fascinate me to no end and i will spend
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as much time whenever i'm taking a break from my work it always goes into etes and theoretical
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physics so probably not the answer you reply you were expecting but i think it changes the way you
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see the world to to dare to peek behind that curtain and if it weren't for weinstein or
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weinstein i don't know how he pronounces his name eric weinstein whom you had interviewed
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i think i wouldn't have the courage to to explore this area because he's obviously a genius he's
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obviously um extremely knowledgeable he's beautifully articulate and eloquent i'm sure
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you found and yet he is obsessed with aliens and you know ufos precisely for these two reasons
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because they disclose an epistemology to which we have hitherto had no access and they suggest
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that our models of physics need radical revision reconsideration and um and this is a space that
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you know small questions about whether i'll see you as a human or as a as evil or something
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as soon as these space people show up you and i are going to be hugging
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you know because we're going to be face them just like uh and you know what hugging means
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in marathi so we'll be hugging that way also
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so um so this is the area that i think is really unbelievable and that honestly preoccupies me more
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than the work that i do and the other obsessions that i have physical and intellectual it is the
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you know the fermi paradox where is everybody the answer to the fermi paradox that's most
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consistent is well when any intelligent so fermi had determined that statistically given the
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trillions and trillions of earth-like planets that must be in earth-like so star systems
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statistically it's far more probable almost infinitely more probable that there is intelligent
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life than that there isn't and so the paradox is when the math shows that there must be billions
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of forms of intelligent life in the world and there is nobody for us to see that's the paradox
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so the fermi paradox where is everybody the answer that has come is because when you when
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a civilization comes to that point where it is intelligent and technologically advanced enough
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to travel in this way it destroys itself nuclear ai
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all of the technologies that go into being able to explore the universe are the very things that
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destroy that civilization and so the number one competing answer to the fermi paradox is by the
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time you get to where we are or just where we're about to be you're gone and
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and so these are big questions and these questions are not answered
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in the social sciences and the humanities because they don't penetrate that next level
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in epistemology and these questions are only answered by weird weird geniuses like weinstein
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or weinstein and jeremy korbel and that guy whom you just mentioned the the weird area 51 guy
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bob lazar and these people talk about those questions and so those so so so so i'm i would
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strongly recommend to anyone with a mind like yours you know intellectually curious able to
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separate fiction you know this is the perfect mind to explore that um uh that bizarre
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other other world uh of thinking so you know general relativity and ufology these are the
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things that really give joy to my life eric would be delighted with your answer and i'm
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delighted with the full conversation akash thank you so much for your generosity i've had such a
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great time thank you so much i also had a great time i thought you were going to put me through
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so much torture when you said eight hours but it actually passed very very quickly and pleasantly
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if you enjoyed listening to the show check out the show notes enter rabbit holes at will
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akash's books are listed there do pick them up he's an important thinker you can follow him on
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twitter or what is now known as x at asr underscore meta it's also linked from the show notes you can
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follow me on twitter and x both of them just imagine at amit varma a m i t v a r m a you can
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browse past episodes of the scene and the unseen at scene unseen dot i n thank you for listening
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