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In his youth, he used to hang out smoking grass at Ganja Park in Kolkata, where Mamata
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Banerjee would ask him to write speeches for her.
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Three of his great-grandfathers at colleges named after them, while the fourth was a river
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pirate who had, quote-unquote, access to a decent landing-guard in Silhet.
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He was a chess prodigy who travelled through Eastern Europe playing chess in the 1980s,
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and in this episode, he describes his intellectual awakening as well as his sexual awakening.
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He has been a shippee, he has been a journalist, he has been an editor, he has been an investor,
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and we shall also investigate the legend that he has been in jail in 13 countries and has
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played chess naked with Tukban Bashi.
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In this episode, we talk about how Pond Hub versus OnlyFans is basically old economy versus
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We speak of Bengalis who make bombs, Gujaratis who make fetish costumes for a world market,
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and what he describes as a burial of the Brahmo within him.
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Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics, and behavioral
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Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen.
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My guest today is a remarkable Devangshu Datta.
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Devangshu and his wife, Nalanjana Roy, who has also been on the show, are not just old
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They are like family to me.
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They have always treated me with so much kindness.
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And Neela won't mind my revelation that for many of us friends, it is Devangshu, or D.D.
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as we call him, who we are besotted by.
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This is a man so well traveled with such colorful adventures that his friends have often referred
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I often speak of how most of us have deep knowledge of just one or two things.
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D.D. is a polymath with deep knowledge of many things.
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At one point, he used to write four columns a week for business standard, at least four.
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One was in chess, one was in investing, one was in economics in general, another on current
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They were all brilliant.
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I've done some early episodes of the show with him, back in the day when they were 20
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minutes long or so, and I've been waiting for ages to do a long, leisurely life in times
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episode with Devangshu.
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We talk India, politics, military history, chess, sex, pornography, investing, and lots
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I love this conversation so much.
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Please join us on our journey and please support us by subscribing to our YouTube channel at
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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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D.D., welcome to the scene on The Unseen.
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I've had you for an earlier episode once upon a time, but that was back when the show was
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much shorter and it's good to have you back again.
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And I'll start off by asking you what may not perhaps be a cheery question, but something
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that I think about more and more that, you know, you've lived a long and eventful life,
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been in many countries, had many kinds of experiences, and you've also been remarkably
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progressive for your times also.
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You've got a background which we'll no longer talk about if you have a family being part
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of the Brahmo Samaj and all that, et cetera, et cetera.
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When you, from a vantage point of this current moment in time in 2023, when you kind of look
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back on how this country has changed through these decades and what, on maybe how you have
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changed through these decades in terms of optimism, pessimism, hope, despair, you know,
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what's your overall vibe these days?
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Well, I think the last 10 years have been terrible in terms of both ramping up of extremism
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and lost economic and socio-economic opportunities along that period.
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Since you mentioned other countries, I'd say that in my experience, what little I've
#
seen places go through cycles, but we've genuinely had, India has genuinely had a problem where
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people with the most regressive social mindsets and complete lack of economic empathy for
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want of a better word have ended up in power over a long period of time.
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So at one level, they have actively pushed for social and liberal values to revert to
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a mythical third century AD which did not actually happen.
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And at another level, they have pushed to reset the regulatory regime back to the 1950s
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and 60s where you had enormous discretionary power for bureaucrats and ministers and they
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could make huge sums of money while giving their preferred crony businessmen a good ride.
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As a result, I'd just call it a huge lost opportunity.
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You have much talked about demographic dividend, but you haven't educated the demographic dividend.
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You haven't given them jobs and I would say the one thing that unites most Indians
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under 25 is the desire to emigrate.
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So no, I'm not particularly optimistic at the moment.
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At one point in time on your Twitter, I think when I first knew you and when you first opened
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your Twitter account, on your bio you jokingly said proud right-winger or whatever the term
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right-wing was part of that which you no longer have and I'm guessing you no longer have that
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because of course what you meant was economic right-winger, someone who's for free markets
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and that kind of freedom, extending personal freedom to every domain and not keeping it
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And of course, you and I are in the same boat there.
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And the point is, unfortunately, the only kind of right-wing that exists in India today
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is the toxic social right-wing.
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You know, I think both of us would have described ourselves back then as right when it came
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to economics, left when it came to society because we both value individual freedom in
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And unfortunately, more and more as I look at, you know, Indian politics and Indian society,
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it strikes me that Indian society has always been conservative and illiberal, even if
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aspects of it in their live reality are liberal, as you see in our cuisine and our dresses
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and all that, which are all beautiful khicharis, but otherwise, you know, as Akshay Mukul shows
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in his book on the Geeta Press, we've had these illiberal strains in our society and
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in our politics for decades now.
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And equally, you know, there's no party that has really been economically right-wing.
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We had our glorious 20 years from 91 onwards, which lifted hundreds of millions of people
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out of poverty with those partial reforms.
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But otherwise, all our parties have been statist or left-wing in terms of economics and, you
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know, conservative and sort of right-wing when it comes to social issues, which is why,
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you know, Arun Suri's formulation of NDA being UPA plus cow holds so true.
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And my question to you is that, number one, was it a surprise to you at any point that
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our society was like this?
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Because growing up in an elite, English-speaking, liberal bubble as I did, I always assumed
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that our default was that we are secular and tolerant.
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And it is only now that I realized that, hey, we were in a bubble of our own and the country
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But today, in a sense, politics has caught up with society.
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So what has been your sense of that or were you always aware that, you know?
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I think I was always fairly aware of the fact that you had very militant strains of extremism,
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both right and left-wing.
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While I grew up in a liberal, educated household, I was about five years old when my father's
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boss was murdered in broad daylight.
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And by the time I was 10 years old, I had seen maybe 15 people being killed on the streets,
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which was a common enough experience for, I am talking about, Calcutta and West Bengal
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in the 1960s and then about Manipur in the 1970s.
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Which was a common enough experience, but if you grow up in that particular bubble,
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then I don't think you have any illusions about extremism and extremism fading into
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And of course, we've always had reformers like, going back to the 1850s or so, Ram Mohan
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Roy and Vidyasagar, etc., the great reformers who helped push through things like abolition
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of sati and widow remarriage, faced huge social barriers on oprobium.
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The people who are now trying to put together coalitions and push LGBTQ rights, including
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the right to get married, etc., are facing huge social backlash.
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And that part of it doesn't surprise me.
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What does surprise me is that you had that 50-year window when it was not considered
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all right to go beyond dog-whistling in terms of public politics, actually going out and
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triggering a communal riot in order to win votes wasn't considered normal.
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And you didn't have a culture where it was considered okay for an unemployed
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youth to go out and find some poor chap from another community who he could lynch.
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Move to the point where said youth would then be garlanded by a minister for carrying out
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So that way, yes, I mean, I'm not surprised, but it makes me feel deeply unhappy because
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these are things that you hope eventually that any nation will rise beyond them.
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But obviously, we haven't and we seem to have regressed in a lot of ways.
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I mean, to take the LGBTQ example, one of the things that they want is for this whole
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30-day wait period if you're getting married by a special license to be pushed out, which
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is actually something which in practical terms makes a lot of sense because what is done
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is your picture and that of your putative spouse are put up in a public place and people
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are asked, is there any reason for anyone to object?
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And of course, objections have happened because of community, because of caste, forget about
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And that again is a phenomenon that just simply did not occur even 10-12 years ago.
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I come from West Bengal, of course, but I went to my school batch out of 180 people,
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about 25 were Muslim and another 25 since I went to a missionary school were Christians.
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And we went to each other's birthdays.
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We played hockey and cricket and football together.
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We hung around a lot in each other's houses as friends.
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And now I see people from that particular batch in WhatsApp groups saying things like,
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you know, I hate Muslims, I hate Christians.
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When you grew up in a bunch where 20 people whose birthdays you went to came from a certain
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community, it takes the some of my best friends are Muslims argument a little further.
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I simply cannot understand how you can, you know, stand up and have these attitudes.
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When you are intimately aware that whatever narrative bullshit you're feeding the world
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is your lived experience tells you that that narrative is wrong.
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So, yeah, I mean, I feel very unhappy about these things, but then what can one do?
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It is, I suppose, part of a phase where this country grows up or maybe ends up being a failure.
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So, a couple of questions.
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I mean, the same question really asked in different ways.
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One is that, you know, I often think about the difference between the abstract and the concrete
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that in the abstract we will let, you know, notions like nationalism and purity and race
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and blah, blah, blah kind of drive us apart and they can be the source of much hatred.
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But in the concrete, you will find people often behaving in a different way and people
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who are otherwise bigots on Twitter being perfectly friendly when you meet them in person.
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And a classic example of this is perhaps what you described,
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that many of the people that you're describing fulminate against the other and against all the
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damage that Aurangzeb did, blah, blah, blah, and therefore who fulminate against Muslims today
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actually had and perhaps have, you know, Muslim friends with whom they behave differently.
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And this is a weird kind of disconnect.
#
And it raises the question that why the need for this abstract narrative,
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you know, that these narratives, I mean, I understand that we are instinctively
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geared towards tribalism and in politics you always need an other.
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So for a politician, I understand why these are attractive narratives.
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But why do common people, you know, who are just like you and me in every way,
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why do they feel the need to give in to this narrative of othering?
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And my related question is that, you know, you mentioned that
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there was a time where politicians would simply dog whistle, but today
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they just go out and say what they have to say.
#
And my theory for this is really, it's a concept, it's a frame
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introduced to me by Timur Kuran, who wrote this great book, Private Truths, Public Lies.
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And it's a concept of preference falsification.
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So I have often suspected that there are many closet bigots who could not openly say
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things like Muslim should not be in India or a woman's place is in the kitchen or whatever
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nonsense they believed. But suddenly they realized that that kind of bigotry is not just
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widespread. The majority seems to hold that view.
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This emboldens them, leads to what Timur Kuran,
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coins of preference cascade and my sort of related question to the earlier one of A,
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why do we need these narratives of like, why are these narratives of othering and
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these anti-Muslim narratives, for example, so attractive to so many people?
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And two, is it that something has changed today in people or were they always like this?
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And this was just a part of them waiting to find expression.
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I will now have to break Godwin's rule, but I'll add a rider to this. Godwin's rule plus
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the Eastern Europe, what is the Warsaw Pact countries?
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You're talking about deeply repressive, genocidal regimes, which perpetrated
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false narratives in order to create an enemy. You're talking about hundreds of millions of
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people who bought into that narrative or apparently bought into that narrative. And
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of course, you had a Holocaust, you had a sequence of wars, including the
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including the breakup of Yugoslavia and the post-Soviet Union wars,
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including the one that's going on right now. But you've also had a gradual movement
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towards liberalism and towards values one would consider humanist in quite a few of those places,
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which to my mind means that give it enough time. And maybe the example,
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and this is the horrifying part, maybe you end up with a Holocaust or a World War II or
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a scenario where, you know, hundreds and millions of people are sent off to labour camps.
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Maybe you need that sort of horrific example before a society wakes up and says, hang on,
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this is not a good idea. But again, if you give it maybe 20-25 years, eventually you will get things
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like the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, not every East European country,
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but quite a few of them, Ukraine itself, the Baltic Republics, which have moved from
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being repressive, genocidal regimes which had narratives of the other and targeting the other
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to being places which are no more bigoted than anywhere else in the world. Yes, you
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probably will have tribalism anywhere in the world, but I think state-sponsored tribalism or
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a political system which has realized that it can monetize hatred. I don't know how to put it,
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you know, to perpetuate its grip on power. I think that amplifies a lot of things
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very deeply. You're right about the fact that, yes, of course, so
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Bengali who's screaming his or her head off about the terrible Muslim thing will
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calmly go down to Nizam's and have a beef kiri roll as well.
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And, you know, be perfectly comfortable eating a cuisine which is obviously influenced by
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other influences. I mean, our very prime minister's elegant
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churidars have an Islamic influence, which is so ironic. Yes, of course. The geometric
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patterns involved are clearly Persian and Arab driven, but then, of course,
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said prime minister would probably argue that they stole the ideas from some Indian back in
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the second century. The point is that I don't think that this is necessarily permanent, but,
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you know, so many great nations, and I'm not using that word lightly, so many great nations have
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gone through this sort of period of extreme genocidal elements taking control.
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What I think is different in the context of India now or the Philippines or Brazil or maybe Hungary
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is that a lot of them have come to power through the ballot, which is, you know,
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it's different from the earlier narrative where you had one man, one vote once or
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twice. So, political parties seizing power through a revolution and basically perpetrating it by
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holding on. So, preference falsification is, yeah, it's a good matrix to look at this,
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to try and look at this, but it doesn't necessarily tell you what you need to do to get past it.
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And that, I think, is a problem that India in specific and also places like America,
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which is essentially split in on a 60-40 basis right now between the bigots and the non-bigots,
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will eventually have to deal with. And I suspect that, like a lot of social problems,
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it will take maybe generations before you have some sort of stable future beyond this.
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I mean, horrifying thought about the Yangs had their civil war in the 1860s.
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It took them till the 1960s before they desegregated and ran the Equal Rights Amendment.
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Even now, just a cursory look at things like incarceration rates and per capita for
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African Americans versus average per capita tells you that there is still a problem with that
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community. That's 160 years. India started putting in anti-cast legislation only in the 1940s.
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It's been just 75 years. So, maybe India tends to get things done very slowly. So,
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maybe it will take another 150 years. Yeah, it makes you sort of wonder,
#
about whether the arc of history is really going in a particular positive direction as Martin
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Luther King would have hoped. I think in his formulation, the arc of history bends towards
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justice. But I think both of us at one point would have thought it at least bends towards
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liberalism and Fukuyama's whole end of history question mark. But I now increasingly wonder
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if it bends that way at all. And then you have to ask that how long do things take to play out at
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the sample size of history, the sample size of these kinds of political debates. It's really
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small. You didn't even have space for them until about 250 years ago, let's say, the French
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Revolution or thereabouts. I mean, I'm just randomly throwing out a date and I'm open to
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any other date you like. But yeah, you did not really have this sort of debate until
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the 18th century. And I mean, it's really enlightenment onwards in a sense.
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Yes, yes. I mean, a whole rough load of variables falling in place gradually over, let's say,
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100, 200 years worth of changes in political systems, technologies, etc., etc. But yeah,
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maybe it will take another, you know, the old Shaolin Lai's famous statement that when he was
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asked about the French Revolution back in the 1960s, and he said, it's too early for you to
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say how events which happened in 1789 have actually panned out.
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You're the second person to quote Chavan Lai saying that to me over the last,
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like this is a six of six recordings in Delhi. I think Aakash Singh Rathore mentioned Chavan Lai
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or was it someone else? But yeah, I mean, and also there is that, you know, one of my favorite
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quotes about how paradigms change one funeral at a time, you know, indicating that you're not
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really going to change anyone's mind now and the change that is actually visible is generational
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change and it just takes a lot of time. That is where, you see, I think the Indian
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educational system, the way in which it's structured has absolutely failed this country.
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Chavan Lai, it isn't just that you have nonsense being put now in history or civics books.
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It's a fact that at the age of 14 or so or 13 or so, you're asked to make a call between whether
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you study the sciences or the arts and depending on which stream you choose or which stream you're
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allowed to choose because let's face it, no 13 year old makes this decision on his or her own
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bat. You are completely cut off from the other magisteria. I'm quoting somebody else, but anyway,
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you're completely cut off from the other magisteria. So as a result, you might know how to make a
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small modular nuclear reactor, but you have absolutely no idea how history actually worked
#
in India, how regimes changed in India or anywhere else in the world and you have absolutely no idea
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how social or liberal systems, social and legislative systems developed or for that matter,
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you have absolutely no idea how markets work. My dad was a historian and a lawyer.
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He liked working on archaeological digs. When he was in his mid to late 30s and already dean of a
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college, he decided that he wanted to pick up a degree in geology because geology, soils,
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stones, et cetera, come useful if you're fiddling around with archaeological
#
things and he had to jump through hoops to actually get into one of those courses and just sit in on
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the lectures because his educational background did not allow him to actually sit for the exams
#
or what have you and he had to actually jump through hoops to sit in for some lectures
#
because he wanted to learn the subject and I think this shows up in the fact that people who
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are highly educated are also highly ignorant. C. P. Snow talked about it in the English context
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back in the 30s and 40s where he said that you will get a scientist who cannot quote Hamlet and
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you will get a classically trained literature buff who does not know Newton's laws of motion
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and it is pretty bad. It is pretty similar over here. I think at that level at least
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you failed people. Your education system has failed entire generations.
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So a couple of questions. One is about ideas and the other is about education and the question
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about ideas is that it seems to me that our terms of reference when we are having this conversation
#
are ideas that have really in a sense come from the West, come from the Enlightenment onwards and
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so on and therefore they are very common among the English speaking elite to the extent that you and
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I when we have a conversation we have a certain common ground on which to have that conversation
#
but that common ground is only between us. It is not there in the rest of the country
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and this is partly because we haven't fought enough of a battle to inject our ways of thinking
#
about the world into society at large and we haven't won that battle in the market marketplace
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of ideas and we haven't even tried. We put a top-down constitution, we built a top-down system
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and then we assumed that our job is done and we didn't fight that battle as Gandhiji wanted to do
#
and therefore we remain illiberal in the field of ideas and even the elites, a lot of the ideas
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that we take up either by osmosis or by brainwashing in foreign universities
#
are outdated and often wrong like a lot of the far-left communist nonsense I hear from
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people who really should know better and have lived incredibly privileged lives
#
and had the means and the access to educate themselves. They are not educated even though
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they have PhDs and that's a question about sort of the idea space in India and my question about
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education there also is that I think that at fundamental levels our education system is flawed
#
number one. Our current schooling system was really designed in the early 19th century to bring out
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workers for the industrial revolution, kids of a certain age study together, certain bunch of
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subjects. If a monkey is tested on how it climbs a tree so is a fish and that absolutely
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doesn't make sense. In addition to this the system in India is trained in a sense to churn out clerks
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from a college in India which is long gone but we still have the same system in place
#
and it doesn't change because of inertia. This is the way things always are. Schools functionally
#
like our education system as Karthik Muralidharan says said in an episode with me doesn't
#
actually teach people anything it is a sorting instrument that you sort out the best minds who
#
go to IITs who then go to Silicon Valley and blah blah blah but that doesn't mean that
#
you're doing education right in any way and what schools are in practice is they are fantastic
#
daycare centers that is in a sense the only function of schools a real function of schools
#
are fantastic daycare centers and parents get some time off while their kids are being looked
#
after somewhere but there's no learning actually happening and at all of these deep fundamental
#
levels in terms of how ideas are have percolated and I realize I'm sorry I've asked you two
#
questions so you can kind of take them one by one I felt they were related. They are related certainly
#
if you're to run a thought experiment as you're saying that you're fine you grew up
#
in an educated liberal anglicized background so we had early exposures to a lot of ideas
#
if you're coming to this blind from let's say deeply conservative family background
#
where you know the women stay in the kitchen and the widows eat vegetarian food and
#
the rest of the paraphernalia and the concept of not having an arranged marriage
#
or if you happen to be LGBT not having children to inherit your property is horrifying
#
if you're coming from that kind of background you'd have to start by looking at things like
#
Hobbes and Locke back in the 17th century or the 16th century and it would be like being hit with
#
a sledgehammer because you'd be asked to examine concepts which are so ingrained that they've
#
never actually been articulated to you you've been born and bred into it it's like the mad bible belt
#
about a Christian who believes Trump tells the truth where do you even begin to
#
start questioning that person's mindset and I think we have that with the additional issue which is
#
true where in that India's internal cultural diversity exceeds that of the European Union
#
we have more languages we have more ethnic groups we have more ethnic groups which have
#
lived cheek by jowl while hating each other I'm talking about not just the caste system but the
#
religious fissures within groups and we have a currency union and we have a sort of
#
parliament which lays down broad principles in that sense maybe the European Union's
#
you know the fact that they are self-governing countries as opposed to
#
India's situation where you have states which have some few self-governing powers
#
maybe that actually makes more sense because it would be difficult for example for
#
you to create a syllabus which made sense both for a boy from Kerala as well as a boy from
#
Tripura as well as a boy from Himachal your lived experience in all three cases is so
#
different and of course the fact that you have you've sorted for the ability to in back in my
#
college day you sorted for the ability to add up numbers and to read a technical manual if necessary
#
that printing press works this way a gun works that way etc
#
you're still sorting for the 21st century equivalent of those things
#
you're not really sorting for an ability to think abstractly
#
and yeah that is a huge problem apart from the fact that India has never invested in breadth of
#
education even our best colleges and universities do not a boy who's studying electrical engineering
#
in IIT could not for the life of him also study let's say international relations
#
the courses don't exist the ability to take those courses don't exist I'm not saying that he should
#
I'm just saying that the ability doesn't exist if he wants to look at to take one of my
#
random hobbies I like looking at the way perspective has been used in art across
#
genres you have you know the western art perspective drawing thing where people have
#
worked out by mathematical principles that okay there is a focal vanishing point in this picture
#
and if you put a head of Jesus or whatever in that point people will automatically look at it
#
you've also got the east asian scrollers the long long 100 meter long scrolls which are describing
#
entire epics where the question perspective is used very differently this vanishing point thing
#
doesn't exist because it wouldn't make sense but I'm saying that if you're looking at something
#
like that someone with an engineering background might actually find that fascinating but he or
#
she is not going to even know that this exists because you'd have to do an art appreciation course
#
or accidentally stumble upon it
#
and that I think is a crippling problem because the other side of the equation is that the
#
talented artist does not know about the fact that yes you can program a computer to
#
work these things out in you know to the third decimal point before you actually start drawing
#
it's part of the whole lost opportunities thing and it's also the reason why
#
what you I was just looking at the numbers about 30 to 35 million indians live abroad officially
#
that's around two and a half percent two point two to two and a half percent of the population
#
they remit meaning this is income surplus to them they remit over a hundred billion
#
us a year that's close to four percent of gdp
#
you talk to any 18 year old he or she will tell you that they want to get abroad
#
abroad and a lot of them the bright ones will end up abroad so if you're just doing a ballpark number
#
if two percent of your population living abroad makes something like 25 percent of your gdp
#
because I'm extrapolating from the fact that you know this is surplus income they can afford to
#
send home and you've got a young population of which everybody wants to leave what sort of
#
opportunities are you missing out on what is the opportunity cost of this brain drain
#
it's frightening and the brain drain is really driven by the fact that you have
#
bright people eventually figuring out that yes if I can get out of this extremely
#
um straight-jacketed um regulatory and legislative and social regime
#
some are trying to escape family some simply don't want to go through the nonsense of
#
900 clearances to set up a business others want to do research in a good research institution and
#
again you have regulations which prevent let's say harvard setting up a college
#
a lab in india without extreme government interference so for various reasons people
#
want to leave the opportunity cost of this is huge and it's lost opportunities are difficult to
#
see and to account for but if you sum this up over a period well
#
it's it's a number that sort of leaves you shaking india could possibly have been the
#
third largest economy in the world 10 years 15 years ago if we hadn't had this brain drain and
#
we'd had the growth rates these people have the ones who left the kind of dynamism they took away
#
with them and if i might go to uh bb can on the the he was talking about the buddha he said that
#
the thing with him is that a certain amount of compassion had gone out of sanatan dharma
#
when the buddha came along and the buddha put that compassion back into the equation
#
call it compassion call it empathy whatever you want to call it and in this case it actually
#
translates into you know you can make a hard money assessment a hard financial assessment of this is
#
what we've lost because we have a bad educational system because we have
#
socially conservative society and i think the losses have accelerated because in the last 10
#
years you've got more illiberal some stray thoughts and firstly some thoughts about the
#
education system that while i couldn't agree with you more that you know it doesn't make sense that
#
people in say money poor in Tamil Nadu and Haryana are being taught exactly the same things
#
i'll take it further and i'll say it doesn't even make sense that all the kids in any one
#
of those places all the kids in Haryana are being educated in exactly the same way like i wrote an
#
old column a link from the show notes where the analogy i drew was with a trip to the supermarket
#
that if i want potato chips i'll get 40 flavors if i want shaving cream you know there's a world of
#
choices to me but i don't have the same multiplicity of choices when it comes to education that if
#
there's a you know that an eight-year-old girl today has just one limited option and that's it
#
you know even all your education startups and all that are not really doing anything that is
#
disruptive they're teaching the same syllabus only it is to excel within the same system
#
two times tables then you learn how to you learn how to do calculus or whatever it is
#
yeah so that is waiting for disruption where we can kind of figure out how each individual can get
#
exactly the kind of education which would help them get ahead there is a flip side to this and
#
the flip side to this is that that kind of personalization or the word that is more apt
#
for what i'm describing is fragmentation has actually happened in terms of information like
#
one sort of scenario that worries me is if i'm a 15 year old today in some small town in india
#
and a friend sends me a video on youtube which is some bigoted nonsense the algorithm then takes
#
over and i will constantly be shown live in a world where that is my reality and there is
#
nothing else and akash singh rathore put it very well when i recorded with him recently where he
#
said that there is a danger that when two people meet each other it is not a person talking to a
#
person it is an algorithm talking to an algorithm you have been and it's actually the same algorithm
#
obviously but you've been taken in such different directions that they are entirely different
#
realities and this worries the shit out of me yeah i mean and it can it is not only an amplification
#
and putting you in a bubble and amplifying sometimes it can get ridiculous results i mean
#
speaking from personal experience as you know i'm interested in animals in general and
#
felines in particular so about a year and a half ago i suddenly started getting advertisements for
#
oh this one put it mature women looking for young boyfriends toy boys this puzzle the hell out of me
#
because i'm not a mature woman i i'm not looking for toy boys by any stretch of the imagination
#
i'm not a toy boy nor am i looking for toy boys then i eventually figured it out i'd been looking
#
for videos on mountain lions pumas cougars and cougar is a synonym for the older woman who's
#
looking for young men and at some stage the algo got confused and decided that
#
you know i was a good candidate for nigeria i mean this is this is a sort of subsets subset
#
of the prince of nigeria who's offering you large sums of money that there are elderly
#
princesses in nigeria who are offering you a deal to become a toy boy so i mean but yeah it it is
#
like that that if you do you can even mangle the algorithms to a certain extent by deliberately
#
saying that okay today i'm going to watch pop music and the next two weeks or whatever or as long as
#
you feel like it you will keep getting you know pop music recommendations happening and amazon uses
#
a version of the same netflix uses a version of i mean the algos are different but they're all
#
aimed at exactly the same thing keeping you on that platform as long as possible you are essentially
#
the product and yes if you're self-selecting for your education and what you wish to learn you're
#
going to end up putting yourself in a bubble maybe in a bubble which is even more dangerous
#
because you're talking about a 12 year old or a 15 year old who doesn't even know for example that
#
certain subjects exist and maybe will never be able to find out because he or she will
#
structure a course where it doesn't work in that sense i think
#
some of the american universities probably have the best sort of compromise in that they offer
#
a very wide range of subjects including you know you can study electrical engineering and
#
take an art appreciation course and get credits for it so in a sense you have that opportunity
#
and the other thing is that they don't straight-jacket you quite so early into the
#
all right you are studying physics and chemistry and mathematics so you will not study history
#
and geography there are some interesting takes here for example you have not that many indians
#
until fairly recently who are involved in geolocation work this is because if you're
#
a computer if you're coming to it from the computer angle which is the programming angle
#
which is where most people were coming from you wouldn't really have ever looked at geography
#
and beyond the point if you're doing geolocation or navigation you also need to understand
#
geography you also need to understand that if i'm sitting in a car on top of a mountain and
#
there is somebody who is a thousand meters down but in the same straight line a gps satellite
#
might well say that we're sitting in each other's laps and for a while what happened was that
#
while the indian programmers were perfectly competent they simply did not get this they
#
simply did not get differences in terrain and landscape etc etc now of course
#
simply due to the fact that there are so many applications which involve geolocationing
#
you know india has a lot of very good programmers in that space but it was maybe
#
several years late getting into that revolution because you don't have the two you actually have
#
to teach this is something i know from the uber and ola sort of experience you actually do not
#
teach people in school how to read a map
#
you had several iterations of drivers being told that you know a map is usually set up with north
#
on top kind of thing and being taught how to locate themselves on the you are here principle
#
you think this is intuitive and it is intuitive to a six-year-old you do not have this problem
#
with a six-year-old who's natively growing up with gps but you had a lot of 25 year olds
#
and 30 year olds who had to be taught so yeah the narrowness of the indian syllabus
#
and maybe i don't necessarily think self-selection would get you past it but
#
yeah the narrowness of the syllabus is is a huge problem there are there are areas where you would
#
simply not manage to go anywhere because you don't get the you need to digest information from a
#
academic stream which you have never studied before you can do whatever you need to do
#
i'm guessing isro is going to run into this problem now because
#
while it's great at sending satellites up and landers up and the rest of it
#
it has never really tried to send human beings up and keep them healthy and sane in space and that
#
is the next stage in the process so you're going to have to you know drag in a lot of doctors and
#
a lot of medical scientists bioscientists and make them talk to a lot of physical engineering guys
#
who will have to be told that you know the human body works this way and
#
this is what you need to do if you're going to send somebody up in zero gravity or one-fifth
#
gravity or whatever it is and i would be also interested in knowing how they intend to keep
#
people sane for six month periods if you know you're sitting up in a capsule somewhere in
#
the middle of nowhere listen boss don't stay saying here what have you seen twitter recently
#
no and i'm thinking the whole category of geolocation mistakes could also explain why
#
sometimes cougars and toy boys can land up in each other's laps but you know leaving that aside do
#
you think like a related thought that strikes me is that one of the problems with people's
#
approach towards education in india is that it is very goal-directed in the sense that even when
#
you reach a certain level of prosperity it is goal-directed that the child has to go to IIT and
#
then he will do IEM, MBA, become vice president in city bank but your whole life is set up in a
#
goal-directed sort of way and you know leisure time is not appreciated in that sense it becomes
#
a time of just completely sort of zoning off and the whole value of reading books for the pleasure
#
of it or you know going to a museum just to you know sort of reset your brain yeah just yeah the
#
in between the time pass and the studying that there is a certain kind of thing you might do
#
as a hobby reading books being part of that but you are listening to music when you're not intending
#
to make a career out of music but or painting or any of any of a dozen different things or
#
for that matter programming because you are interested in the subject the concept of doing
#
this without either a concrete social or monetary reward is very difficult for a lot of indians
#
including i mean and this shows up in things like golf for example or bridge i don't play golf i do
#
play bridge and in both games you have a a huge population of people who are just there because
#
they see this as a good platform for building social contacts which will help them in terms
#
of business or in terms of professional career growth it's sort of like an alternate linkedin
#
that okay you get onto a golf course with a couple of people who are senior professionals
#
somewhere or the other and you know at the end of it you can probably monetize that relationship
#
similarly with bridge and David remnick in his biography of obama the bridge he talks about how
#
obama used to play poker for a while because it was a good way for him to get together with
#
democratic party officials and kind of become part of that scene in the 90s yeah i would believe
#
this because i mean both eisenhower and nixon both of whom were republicans
#
used to play a lot of poker and yes there were circle poker cronies who obviously had in that
#
sense off the books comfortable access to the big man because of that yes but what i was trying to
#
say is that you know you don't even play what is apparent leisure activities
#
except because you believe that this is going to further you your career professionally in some
#
i mean i've walked around the golf course it is not a game that has ever
#
interested me but my wife used to play my father-in-law used to play in once in a while
#
the interesting places because you know you have a large open green space in the early morning and
#
i can understand why somebody might want to go out there and you know bash a ball around the same
#
way that fine i used to like riding when i was a kid it's a similar thing you get onto this
#
animal which moves in amazing ways and you're out there in the open at a certain hour when you know
#
it's not too hot it's not too cold and the world looks very beautiful and i i don't get somebody
#
who doesn't actually like playing golf waking up at quarter past four in the morning
#
because he thinks that all right i have three vice presidents of city bank or
#
GE or whatever out there who will be playing golf with me
#
and unfortunately that's how a lot of people take it and i've been to bridge tournaments where
#
you know people are fighting to get to play against
#
some corporate honcho or some big business one who's a well-known bridge player i mean who
#
was not necessarily a good bridge player but you know bill grates plays bridge
#
wadden buffett plays bridge deepak parekh plays bridge anand mahindra plays bridge so you have
#
a lot of people and i don't know about buffett and bill gates but since both of them play a lot
#
of tournaments and i would assume that their time is worth something i would assume that they
#
actually actively enjoy playing the game and i i'm certain that in the case of mr parekh he
#
actively enjoys playing the game and you know he plays but if you're playing the game because you
#
hope one day you will be sitting at the same table as this guy and you will somehow you know
#
slip him your business card and then chat him up and get some business out of him i think that's
#
warped i mean there is something wrong with the way in which you do business
#
i think there's something wrong with you and me we are the weirdos that we dive into things for
#
their own sake i mean the kind of utterly pointless rabbit holes that i have entered
#
is but i mean no no but i'm kidding i mean i'm i'm i'm glad i'm the weirdo and i'm glad you're
#
the weirdo before we get to biography and start talking about your life which i which is where
#
all the fun is uh i want to ask i want to put a thought experiment to you and uh put a question
#
to you about something that's been completely normalized like earlier you referred to india
#
is actually being way more diverse in europe and all of that and it strikes me and it especially
#
struck me when i read narayani basu's biography of vp menon that that whole exercise that patel
#
and menon embarked upon of putting this nation together either through coercive means or through
#
promises that were later broken seems to me to be extremely troublesome to think about in moral
#
terms it's like fast track colonization what the british did over 300 years we did in the space of
#
maybe two and a half three years whatever time it took patel and menon and it seems that at the
#
heart of the founding of this nation state and i am of course as great a patriot as anyone i love
#
this country but at the heart of the founding of this nation state you know there are those
#
extreme acts of violence and immorality and that makes me uncomfortable so that is one question
#
that i have for you that what do you feel about that and also it sometimes strikes me that maybe
#
it would have just been better for all of us on individual terms if we were many disparate states
#
instead of one now i know there are people and you know your wife nalanjana i think is one of them
#
if i remember an old conversation correctly where there is a fear that it could have led to a kind
#
of balkanization and violence and things falling apart and all of that but then i wondered that
#
maybe the the incentives would have played out the other way there would have been competition
#
between states you know governance would have been more of a priority especially borders were
#
relatively porous so i don't know i mean counterfactuals are always hard but what do you feel
#
take a look at the eu you have some 25 20 30 nations i often i don't know the number
#
i can't remember the number there's self-governing
#
there is a currency union there is a market union there is a by market union not just goods but
#
labor anyone can go anywhere there are significant economic diversity disparities between say a
#
germany and a bulgaria or a rumania etc again i do not often know the exact numbers yeah but there
#
is significant economic disparity there is a sort of uber institution the european parliament
#
which lays out what i would call constitutional directive principles
#
even though they're called laws things like the jdpr the general data protection regulations
#
are really closer to being a sort of indicator which says that you can structure your laws
#
your local national law data protection law in many ways but it should still fit
#
with these principles and your every one of these nations is in some fashion electing
#
representatives to that uber institution you've also got statutory institutions
#
you know which are looking at monopolies etc etc and of course it's not a perfect
#
fit at any means but worth mentioning that these countries have all within living memory
#
done their best to kill each other there are plenty of people around who have done their best
#
to kill members of other nations in these countries take the analogy where india is concerned
#
first of all the coercive integration is not too surprising if you look at germany in the 1850s
#
and 60s prussia bismarck and prussia did precisely the same thing the united kingdom did precisely
#
the same thing even america arguably did precisely the same thing when it came to integrating
#
several states so unfortunately that's a factor of history but if you look at india in that model
#
we have more diversity than europe we have more languages we have more local subsets
#
uh you have more people speaking tulu than you have people speaking czech
#
and tulu is not even a recognized one of the recognized 19 or 20 languages
#
uh you have more economic diversity i think the difference between sdp and
#
tripura and tamil nad is greater than the disparity between and certainly the difference in
#
quality of life hdi indicators between you know some of the the difference between goa and
#
bihar would be far more than any two countries in germany far more far more you have a currency
#
union you arguably do not have a market union of the same levels while labor can more or less
#
move from anywhere in the country to anywhere else your goods movements are still subject to
#
far more in the way of regulations than the european union latvia can sell stuff to ireland
#
much easier than kashmir can sell stuff to tamil nad you unfortunately don't have self-governance
#
you don't have a scenario where the kerala or the tamilians can say
#
piss off your you know what you want us to do in terms of literacy or medical care is
#
those benchmarks have been exceeded 20 years ago you know we have a fully literate population
#
we have a population where we have medicare levels where your doctor to population ratio is
#
way better than the central directives or targets in this regard and we would prefer to
#
look at middle-income countries or high-income countries to see where we
#
set our next targets and this is just a random example of when it comes to hdi
#
but for example the fertility rate in tn and kerala is already below what you would replacement
#
so the you know the nonsensical central directives in this i mean they're basically
#
irrelevant where these states are concerned at the other end of the spectrum you do have bihar
#
and up where you know there may be 30 years behind the curve if you had more self-governance
#
and if instead of parliament being this beast and the central government being this beast which
#
basically raises the funds has the coercive military force and makes bizarre laws
#
you had a scenario where your parliament was a sort of uber institution which set up directive
#
principles and your states were self-governing you could in theory have a
#
much better or less tense a less physically situation in practice i'd look at not contemporary
#
history but india in the early 18th century if you take a look at the map of india circa about
#
1720 1725 and you take a look at a map of india right now in terms of states controlled by the
#
government at the center the match between the mogul empire which was falling apart at that
#
point of time and the bjp which as far as i know is not falling apart at this point of time
#
that is pretty strong the moguls say in farukhsiyar or alangi it's not alangi shah alam and
#
farukhsiyar's time also can largely controlled what is now bihar and up and bits of haryana
#
with local satraps such as wajid ali shah types over there it had alliances between
#
marathas rajputs and rajputs who controlled not just rajasthan but large chunks of gujarat
#
and madhya pradesh it had a on-off relationship with the navabh of bengal it had an on-off
#
relationship with the nizam of hyderabad and it had trade relationships and alliances with
#
various southern sultans and with the sardars the sikhs who are already starting to become a
#
political force the afghans who control large chunks of kashmir etc etc and it basically paid
#
off the northeast not to hassle the not to harass the empire calling it an empire is
#
pushing it but not to harass the remnants of the empire take a look at that and take a look at
#
the bjp's current hold over india and there's almost a one-to-one correspondence
#
you have regional satraps in bengal orissa down south you have an alliance with the marathas
#
you have the sikhs and the kashmiris who are not really on the same page as the central government
#
and you control the buddha belt and of course most of us or some of us who have read history
#
know eventually a multinational ended up in charge of this whole mess and the maybe the
#
difference is that if a multinational does end up in charge of the whole mess
#
so it will be a gujrati multinational rather than a british multinational that
#
i don't know whether that makes you feel any better about it but it could go two ways you could get
#
a completely chaotic period where essentially you kept the currency union the country fell apart
#
people fought each other the nagas fought the manipuris and the canadigas fought the tamilians
#
and etc or you could end up with a european union situation where by and large everybody considered
#
the british idiots to bullshit themselves into leaving the union and they are reluctantly
#
admitting that they were idiots and i would say that by and large most people consider that a
#
happier situation than when you know it was 30 different fragmented markets with 30 different
#
currencies and no real common points except that they were neighbors the fact that a pole can go
#
and work in germany or a belgian can make chocolates in poland is a big deal for everybody
#
i love the way you use i love the term you use fizzy barriers which i always say it wrong i
#
say pissy barriers which is also so you know before we go on to biography and i keep saying
#
before we go on to biography but before we go on to biography a biographical tidbit about you i
#
heard since you were mentioning regional satraps in bengal is that you have once written speeches
#
for momotadi back in the day so kindly kindly elucidate this is way back when she was an
#
up-and-coming congress leader so late 70s early 80s her ancestral i mean her family
#
home etc is in kalighat which is the you know the center of the whole mother goddess worship place
#
kalighat also has a sort of sub locality called potuapara where the potters who make the statues
#
who make other stuff uh hang out potuapara used to be an extremely good place to go
#
in order to smoke gaja and charas i mean and to drink bhang and generally hang out
#
it helped that the next set of lanes is that of the shady ladies who make a living out of pilgrims
#
so you could sort of take in the sights while smoking your grass and as kids i didn't live
#
very far away from here this is three bus stops or walking distance from my my house which is in
#
which was in bhawanipur and we used to go down there and basically smoke a few chillums in the
#
evening this is when grass was still quasi-illegal you could actually buy it at a government shop
#
in fact my bus stand was called ganja park because there was a government shop which sold ganja over
#
there this was the official name of the bus stop yeah the i mean even now it is still the name of
#
the bus stop people will you know the minibus will yell ganja park ganja park etc so anyway so
#
so we used to hang out there and she would she was always a busy person in the sense that she
#
was always rushing around doing things and checking out stuff and she would come and
#
you know see this bunch of kids and we stuck out in the sense that we were obviously
#
at least economically slightly better off even though quite a few of the patwa para
#
lads were in the same colleges as us etc we were economically slightly better off marginally better
#
dressed whatever and of course calcutta being calcutta having passionate political conversations
#
in between whatever so she would come around and she would say aha you boys
#
you are wasting your time you should be in college and studying properly and whatnot
#
and we would say yes didi very sorry didi kind of thing then she would say okay
#
this is the next speech that i'm going to give you know at some random library where whatever some
#
some random function this is before she became an mp or anything so what do you think i should say
#
and she would sort of hand you this thing of notes you know these are the things we have to
#
talk about and i have to talk about and she would say that can you sort of structure and
#
and handle the flow and in between taking drags of the children we would say that didi why don't you
#
say this and then say this and she would take notes she wrote her own speeches it's not that
#
we wrote her speeches but she also spoke up with you no no she didn't she genuinely didn't and she
#
would occasionally affectionately hit somebody on the top of the head and say you know you boys
#
are being naughty and such like were you naughty and she we were i guess first recipient of
#
you know the undiluted mamatha so to speak after which she would go out and get the speeches and
#
then of course in 1980 she beat shomna chatterjee who was who was then already a
#
very well-known cpm mp and lawyer and later speaker of the house etc etc she beat him
#
in a huge upset election and became an mp and the rest of it but yeah a lot of the
#
see this is something people don't get about politicians
#
a great deal of the public image is often genuine
#
you know the charm or the false charm or this is a person who's come up from the ranks or is
#
is you know a simple 24 7 worker or what have you quite a lot of that is often genuine the
#
few politicians i have met have all tended to be 24 7 switched on kind of thing and
#
you know the connect with the electorate comes from the fact that they do have
#
of they come from those backgrounds and they do understand what's going on in the heads of
#
the people who vote for them or don't so yeah i mean i i never wrote speeches for didi but
#
you contributed to the phenomenon in a small way contributed to the phenomenon there's a lovely
#
video of hers which is a very charming video where she's talking to a party worker as he
#
was in the audience and she starts teasing him that look at your mudhu pradesh you know
#
referring to his as bengalis would say or his paunch and he tries to convince her
#
and she's like and it's just such a lovely charming video and obviously genuine and i can
#
quite imagine that the tone in which she would have spoken to you boys also and like absolutely
#
that you know the elder sister who's loving but exasperated by this bunch of idiots
#
right let's get to biography and when i get to biography you know i don't want to get to your
#
childhood also i want to go well before that like earlier you were talking about 250 years french
#
revolution i actually want to go to 250 years and because you have something that i am very
#
jealous i don't have you have a very deep sense of your family history and your cultural history
#
and how far it extends back into the 19th century and so on and so forth and while my history and
#
the history of so many others would be terribly disjointed where you can probably you know go one
#
ancestor before your grandparents but that's all everybody's anonymous there's nothing happening
#
there there are no narrative strands you don't feel you kind of belong to a particular kind of
#
world or a way of thinking so take me a bit through your pre-history as it were
#
okay i i guess i mean this is mildly embarrassing but
#
there are colleges named after three of my great-grandfathers
#
so they were in diverse ways interesting people the fourth was a river pirate
#
one of them one of my great-grandparents was a doctor one of the first doctors
#
in bengal and what was his name a chap called neel ratan sharkar another was a pioneering
#
journalist ramananda chatterjee the third was a lawyer who was probably this is
#
under the brits uh the equivalent of the supreme court was the privy council
#
so he was the first guy i think the first indian certainly the first indian from the northeast
#
to argue cases before the privy council and there's a law college named after him and
#
cell chair what was his name chandu uh so and the fourth lord the dattos basically had you know a
#
sort of they had access to a decent landing gut in select and they were also basically professionals
#
who valued education i think that's true for all four branches of my family so they ended up
#
um you know a lot of them ended up being
#
all sorts i have um you know have very highly educated uncles and cousins i'm talking about
#
distant relatives and all these people were remarkably fecund they all had lots of children
#
and possibly because they were more educated than the norm most of the children survived
#
uh given infant mortality rates everybody in i'm talking 1870s 1900s had hundreds of children
#
but possibly because the slot was slightly more educated and
#
slightly smarter at it more of the kids survived so you have this enormous widespread network of
#
of first cousins second cousins third cousins fifth removed all over the place and
#
large chunks of my family ended up becoming brahma samajis which was i think
#
purely driven by the reform and the social movement thing at the same time we have a
#
300 odd year old tradition of doing chundi puja chundi being of course madhurga but uh you know
#
she was the ishtadebi the family deity and uh when partition happened the idol idol and her
#
jewelry etc was brought over the border kind of thing and even now that
#
tradition of the annual durga puja continues this being done by a large bunch of people who are
#
avowed atheists brahma samajis uh etc so there's an there is a dichotomy there which i think you'll
#
find in a lot of bengalis in particular uh take the chittagong army raid guys shurjyosan and ko
#
they were all committed marxists they were all committed atheists and they all vowed to fight
#
for the country in front of maakali so you have to take that dichotomy into yeah but yeah so
#
and so the i think the brahma samaj and it's it's a tiny community but it's a tiny community
#
which has a disproportionate effect let's say in driving social revolutions and particularly
#
you know if you list the bengali uh ethos um what uh you're talking the nobel prize winners
#
were both bramos uh jaudesh boss was a bramo sattvajit rai was a bramo vidhan chandurai
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the first cm was a bramo siddhatta shankar rai was a bramo so you have this and you know enormous
#
numbers of uh you know reformers and educationists down the line etc etc who were very strongly into
#
this whole thing and i think very largely driven by the fact that
#
maybe because of a lot of cultural factors by the pangol was one of the places which early on
#
had let's say large minorities of people who thought that the current social system as in
#
widows not being allowed to remarry sati as the case may be women not being allowed to
#
go to college all this they saw as a as evil if you want to look at it that way calcutta university
#
actually handed out degrees to women earlier than cambridge did one of my grandmothers
#
uh was in cambridge during the first world war that's why she met my granddad
#
he was also in and her degree was from trinity dublin because cambridge at that point of time
#
had suffered to the point where they allowed women to attend lectures but they did not give them
#
degrees in contrast by the 1890s you know calcutta university dhaka university
#
was giving degrees to anyone who sat for the exams another of my grandmothers also the other
#
grandmother also uh you know she went to she married my grandfather because he said he would
#
allow her to continue studying and we're talking 12 13 year old and she did her graduation from
#
dhaka university when she was in her 30s and she did a postgraduate degree from calcutta university
#
when she was in her 40s with her daughter wow so you know the commitment to learning was obviously
#
very strong i mean this is i'm talking about a housewife a classic homemaker who basically
#
brought up many children and you know organized meals for everyone that kind of thing so her
#
commitment to education was obviously very strong because she uh you know she went through this
#
loop so i think that way
#
and my family is half west bengali half east bengali and east bengal technically
#
select which was part of sm pre-partition and which was only part of india where they actually
#
held a plebiscite about which whether to join east pakistan or stay with asam stay with india
#
so in that sense i'm you know the half and half is useful and there are further contradictions there
#
my east mongoli side of my family were all committed mohon mangan supporters
#
because mohon mangan was the first team which had beaten british outfit so the nationalism
#
1912 and the nationalism etc was a very big deal whereas quite a few of me and my cousins
#
were east mongol supporters because you know we grew up in the 70s when east mongol was
#
the team to support if you were into calcutta football i mean
#
uh calcutta football is technically a joke but we didn't know it was a joke until we watch
#
started watching television in the 1980s and realized that you know you were something like
#
50 years behind the rest of the world in terms of the quality and skills you were seeing but
#
there was that whole thing of east mongol versus mohon magan and the rest of it
#
so yeah so that's that's the family so and people wandered all over the world and got degrees and
#
settled down in vague places and you know i have i have a cousin who's an undercover cop in canada
#
i have an oil rigour cousin in norway i have random neurologists and biologists and physicists
#
uncles scattered all over the place chaps with i have one chap who runs a balti restaurant in london
#
and all this i know because we sold one of our ancestral properties in the early 2000s where
#
you actually have had under i think under asam law to put together a list of all the possible
#
claimants and get two-thirds of them to sign off on the sale so at that stage it ended up being
#
a loop where we were you know looking at eight brothers and three sisters who had had
#
five kids each who had also had random kids kind of things so and they were all over the place
#
again my family at least when it comes to getting married doesn't seem to have much in the way of
#
barriers i have what i have khasi cousins i have borah cousins christians of course
#
i mean they married into i have a dogra cousins they married into all sorts of communities at
#
various points of times i have a half i have a half swedish cousin who has actually been on
#
a eurovision winning team because he was a sound recorder wow so you know so
#
it does a completely crazy and and the thing is that i don't really know any of these people
#
or i've met a few of them at some family gathering or some what have you and i'm
#
perfectly happy for it to stay that way but it's an interesting background to come from and
#
the other good thing there was that joint family saw a house which had books scattered across
#
about 15 disciplines my i mean both my parents were academics and a lot of other people in
#
the family were also highly educated and in different disciplines so and no one ever stopped
#
me reading you know you mentioned the football and one of my previous guests i think it was either
#
our friend joy bhattacharya or nandan kamath they did an episode together if i remember correctly
#
and one of them spoke about how his dad or somebody was uh you know watching a football
#
match of a foreign team in circa 96 and another channel was showing an india football match
#
and the person actually asked in beville demand that are they showing the india match at half speed
#
because it was just the disparity was so sort of ridiculous so uh but again our loyalties happen
#
not because of quality of play but because of just so many other instincts that kind of come
#
into it i want you to double click on a few of those things one is that many of my listeners
#
would have heard the term brahmo samaj in a vague way they would have heard about these reform
#
movements and etc in a vague way but what was it actually what did it mean for you what kind of
#
ethos did it create for you which you you know grew up under like i understand there is a sense
#
that there is a diversity of ideas milling around where you can embrace contradictions like atheism
#
and also an older cultural practice like a worship of makali or whatever there also seems to be in
#
your family's case this respect that you give to reading and knowledge and the the beautiful
#
serendipity of having many books lying around from all these different disciplines all of this
#
so give me a sense of you know what the brahmo samaj was what it meant to a you know the society
#
of that time and be to to you as a sort of an umbrella of ethos under which you're kind of
#
growing up personally speaking the influences on me would start at the level of later figuring out
#
that i'd met a lot of very bright people when i was a kid without necessarily realizing who they
#
were second there's a whole host of hymns bengali songs which evoke emotions ranging from hunger
#
to sadness the hunger because this would usually be fairly late into a sermon
#
and you're waiting for the khichuri to be served my i think both my parents were closet atheists
#
but they were very strong about the social connect with family and the rest of it so
#
you have two three kuchabs and you know you have marriages and
#
and the usual hatches matches and dispatches things where
#
brahmos i've actually been a brahmo acharya myself despite not being a believer the acharya's job
#
is to give upadesh advice and
#
any brahmo ceremony tends to be interspersed with people singing
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the songs generally are very well known compositions by tagore and other luminaries
#
of the musical era so a you get and there is always food so you end up i suppose as a kid you
#
end up associating the music with the food and with the ambience the community always had a very
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large proportion of smart people for want of a better word and i'm talking about the 60s and
#
the 70s when you know you had people like mahalan abish floating around still in his late
#
uh not in his dotage but i mean in his later years
#
anecdotage and nirod jodhuri etc etc so nirod wasn't a brahmo but he he had worked as an editor
#
under my great-grandfather so he had a strong connect from there that's the famous ramananda
#
that's the ramananda babu yeah so in terms of what i think the brahmo samaj does is
#
it bears down dogma so if you believe in the tenets of brahmoism what you're being told is that right
#
read the vedas there are there is this laundry list of natural phenomena which has been personified
#
as gods and goddesses they are all manifestations of one creator who is formless etc
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um it does not impose any dietary requirements it actively rejects caste it actively rejects
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dogma in the sense that brahmo's encouraged widows to eat non-vegetarian food and to wear jewelry and
#
colored saris and it actively encourages you to break caste and religious barriers in the sense
#
that you can eat with anyone you can feed anyone and you use the same utensils to cook for
#
any one kind of thing so if you put that together and for someone like me or for
#
for someone like me or for omartoshain or many other brahmos i know what happens is that at
#
some point during the process you also realize that hey you can take this creator out of the equation
#
and the universe still probably continues to run and again this would not be
#
doctrine per se for a brahmo samaji but if you're taught that okay
#
3000 years ago when the vedas were written natural phenomena was personified as
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gods because we didn't know how lightning worked or why it rained etc well
#
you take it a logical step further and say that okay we have now figured these things out we've
#
also figured out how stellar equations work we understand how atoms get split at least to a degree
#
and everywhere here we figure out more about the world and the deeper you've gone into
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to natural sciences you've found explanations that do not require a creator
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which extrapolating from there you don't need a creator and the other thing is that
#
while like any other religion it has its problems in terms of
#
what is socially acceptable or not it has far fewer problems in that respect than most religions
#
religions aren't really defined by supposed core beliefs they're defined by what you're allowed to
#
eat who you're allowed to sleep with and what you're supposed to do with people who are
#
who don't share your belief system and in those terms i think it's a very human religion
#
because you're allowed to eat anything and while promiscuity is discouraged this is one of the
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problems with the religion you're allowed to sleep with anyone or marry anyone as the case may be
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and you're supposed to treat people regardless of their beliefs as human beings as your equals
#
so i think in that sense it is a good religion to grow up with and
#
i referred earlier in this conversation to social reformers who saw certain practices as evil
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evil the classic scenario there is that you need to step beyond dogma and having been told
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that you know widows must be must wear white and not eat meat to realize that you are
#
doing this to a human being and that goes further i mean there are enumerating the social evils of
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society would take us many days and there's no point in doing that all i'm saying is that
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because this religion rejects a lot of dogma it may be people who grow up in it are trained to
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look at and reject dogma if if it conflicts with normal normal moral values
#
you see a human it walks and talks like a human it seems to have the same broadly the same
#
behavioral characteristics as you do you don't give it labels i should not be using it i suppose
#
i should be using they as the pronoun pronoun in this case but yeah so you don't give it labels you
#
interact with any person without trying to figure out you know what their religion is and what their
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beliefs are and getting in the way of that that also involves of course not being sucked into
#
pernicious practices because their sanction in some religion or another again i won't get into
#
that because then you'll get cases thrown at you by various people but every mainstream religion
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has huge problems somewhere in its in its definition of what is socially acceptable and
#
unacceptable and maybe if you're trained to look at dogma and doctrine and say that hang on it
#
doesn't matter if some wise man three thousand years ago or two thousand years ago said something
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maybe that wise man was talking nonsense and if it doesn't work right now check it out the window
#
and look for something that does work better there's an enormous amount of brahmo contribution
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to education in fact indeed that is why the brahmasamaj and incidentally the ramakrishna
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mission filed for status as minority religions because getting back into the indian system
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the indian government likes having control about over its educational system even if
#
it mismanages the educational system horribly it will not easily allow other people into
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that space and one of the ways of getting past this is if you're a deemed minority institution
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so there are a whole bunch of colleges and schools mainly in mongol which are run by the brahmasamaj
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which had to file for minority status and the ramakrishna mission did it for similar reasons
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because it runs a large network of schools across the country and the contribution to
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education in that sense i think is a very big deal because well for the obvious reasons that
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particularly in areas like pioneering women's education i think the brahmasamaj did an
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enormous service to the country and well you know the thing is that
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by the early 20th century it had a hundred percent literacy rate
#
it's a small community which of course skews the stats but it is also true that there were very few
#
communities where all the women could read and write and most had been to college and getting
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into the old argument of you know you educate a woman and she will make bloody sure that
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her kids are educated etc etc so plus the other takeoffs like fertility rate drops and etc
#
because obviously a force for good for a fairly long period of time and unlike other religions
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maybe it is phasing itself out gracefully in the sense that you know the community was never very
#
large it is currently i think there are maybe less than a hundred thousand paid up brahmas
#
i'm one by the way in the sense that i pay a subscription fee to help keep things running
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and many of us are not in that sense believers of the central doctrine of there is this
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great formless creator but we like those social implications of a religion which
#
tries to make you think for yourself and
#
low fertility rates and the rest of it and none of us have i don't have kids but
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a lot of my brahmo friends who do have kids haven't necessarily pushed the kids into
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you know becoming a brahman so to speak so it will you buy in another generation or so i would
#
assume that a large proportion even of the community as it exists now will have disappeared
#
and maybe that's a good thing maybe that is what should happen to religions it has happened for
#
example to christianity in scandinavia where you know the majority or the vast majority of
#
swedes and norwegians are no religion i mean they are by by indian definitions they are
#
christians of some protestant lutherian persuasion mostly but by their own definition they don't
#
have a religion they haven't they haven't actually been to church or been baptized or
#
they've been to church in the same way that i've been to see the pyramids
#
and at the same time maybe another input for me is because my dad was
#
into archaeology and he was an ancient historian and the rest of it
#
i've had the privilege and i would call this a privilege of seeing a lot of ancient temples
#
mosques buddhist viharas etc at close range being guided by experts who pointed out the
#
iconography who pointed out how things used to work and you know you take that experience
#
as transcendental in a very peculiar way the dominant religion of any given place and time
#
and time always has the money to hire good artists to hire good architects
#
to pay the poets and the musicians to perform so a hell of a lot of very high quality
#
cultural input is inextricably linked with religion
#
and for me i see that the same way as literally i see the pyramids
#
i love the north sagas like the pyramids i'm willing to visit any religious place of worship
#
in fact i wrote a book about the holy places of the panjab i'm willing to visit any religious
#
place of worship simply because it's likely to have fairly interesting art
#
the religious part of the experience may be zero in the sense that there is no belief of faith
#
involved but you're fascinated by the sheer quality and skill of an imagination of the
#
people who've done that work
#
so i guess that also helps you be a saint-cretist for want of a better word you see that
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all major religions have horrific certain horrific aspects to them but they have also inspired
#
people to do great work including great social reform etc in any case to take
#
this is something which
#
i mean might sound a little provocative but if you look at the shariah
#
of death it was point by point a more humane
#
criminal justice system than the one that existed in europe pre-enlightenment
#
you amputated a hand for thieving whereas you executed somebody for thieving
#
you said a woman's right you allowed for a woman's right to property and you said that
#
she could give witness even though her witness was worth half that of a man
#
at a point of time when she did not have a right to property in christian europe
#
europe and she could not give evidence in court so i'm just saying that arguably the shariah was
#
for about a thousand years it was a better and more humane system than that
#
prevailing in christian europe and
#
and it was certainly a huge step forward for the nomads of arabia
#
so i think religions i guess at some stage contribute to reform and then they hit a sell
#
by date unfortunately people who believe in a religion don't necessarily want to
#
acknowledge that there is a sell by date as well yeah and also to go back to the old quote of how
#
paradigms change one funeral at a time perhaps religions die one funeral at a time as a later
#
generation may not believe and it seems to me to be almost a natural progression then that something
#
like the brahma samaj should indeed die if it does one day because i would have imagined that
#
in one particular point of time it served as a haven for free thinkers where they could now call
#
themselves brahmo samaji and still be part of society in a way and still be part of a conventional
#
setup while retaining their free thinking and today you don't need that framework you can like i am
#
just be a free thinker and say you know fuck off to every religion without needing to you know give
#
a label to yourself i'm struck by you know the point you mentioned that one of the places where
#
its attitudes wasn't that as progressive as the rest of them was promiscuity and that term itself
#
seems interesting to me because it's it it has a pejorative connection to it i'd rather use a term
#
like sexual liberation which kind of indicates that and obviously in india just through the lens
#
of the control of women's bodies you can understand a lot of what is happening in society
#
like one of the great revelations of you know and your good friend tony joseph's book is that for
#
the last 2000 years like before 2000 years we had all our different migrants from all over the place
#
mingling and partying and all of that but for the last 2000 years has been this intense caste endogamy
#
and endogamy obviously then leads to this urge for female seclusion and the desire to control
#
women's sexuality which leads to some of these terrible regressive attitudes towards women
#
and some of them were perhaps exacerbated by you know the british colonizing us because some
#
of our attitudes about sexuality are just victorian attitudes they're not even
#
sanskari as it were a large proportion of what i meant these are again this is
#
offhand we are talking about the 19th century when polygamy was rife where there was a large
#
a large latitude for hedonism in the upper classes if you could afford to have your dancing girls and
#
your drink your wine you you would do so you know the the classic stories of the zamindar
#
zamindar babu what have you so you're coming from there to a religion which actively propagates
#
monogamy which while it says that widows should remarry is very very anti sexual relationships
#
outside of marriage and is against against the whole hedonism thing in that sense there's a
#
very strong puritanical streak there's a classic story about one brahmu leader who was on the
#
street and a passing stranger asked him that sir this is mahalanubhish's father-in-law by the way
#
asked him that sir can you direct me to the star theater on the star theater being this notorious
#
place where cabarets etc used to happen and of course being a brahmu he would not lie so he said
#
yes i know where it is but i will not tell you brilliant and you know he was proud of the fact
#
that he had saved some youth from falling into the clutches of a cabaret dancer or whatever it is
#
so they had these peculiar issues and you know the whole thing about rescuing fallen women this was
#
another very victorian attitude and now sex workers in india are treated horrendously they
#
have always been treated horrendously so in that sense the brahmu drive to rehabilitate
#
sex workers and to ensure that their children at least got an education of some degree was laudable
#
but it also meant that there would be that small percentage perhaps of
#
let's say the smart sex worker or the escort who had actually carved out a space for herself
#
perhaps because she had a rich patron or whatever who would have been considered
#
beyond the pale in brahmu terms in fact the you know she couldn't be slotted into the brahmu
#
the mary magdalene noti binodini concept the you know the fallen woman who falls in love with
#
a great religious reformer jesus or ram krishna as the case may be and hence changes her lifestyle
#
and becomes a saint that is a sort of meme that runs through a lot of religious histories
#
but the concept of a mary magdalene who just continues doing what she does or a
#
binodini who continues doing what she does and that loop is something that the brahmus really
#
wouldn't have been able to handle and the insistence on monogamy again is totally
#
understandable given the fact that a century before you actually had a bill that banned
#
multiple marriages you had this scenario where man would marry 15 times and you know leave 15
#
widows behind in terrible conditions and it's so okay you i totally get where it comes from but
#
i think it got pushed a little too hard context matters so much yes let's go back to talk about
#
your childhood so you know i've got a sense of the sort of the social ethos and you know the
#
attitude towards learning and all but you know what what was your childhood like what were the
#
kind of books you were reading just give me a sense of the texture of your days you know and
#
i'm guessing you grew up in calcutta and elsewhere take me through the different geographies of your
#
childhood and also what was it like both parents were academics also i grew up in close proximity
#
to campuses and in an ethos where practically every second person i knew was connected in some
#
description to academia this was during the noxal period when idealistic young men and women were
#
also killing academics and fighting the cops etc on the streets you grew up with a scenario
#
where there were pitch battles on the streets all the time like i'm saying i saw murders
#
my father's boss was the vice chancellor of jadapuri university he was stabbed to death on
#
campus in front of maybe 30 people i've seen a policeman directing traffic
#
being shot by a pipe gun by a guy who just walked up to him i've seen a
#
guy chucking mums from a roof
#
people getting a lamp lighter's ladder to get onto the roof i mean this sounds like something out of
#
you know a medieval siege and then chucking him off the roof i'm just mentioning random
#
incidents i've been in buses something like four or five times where bus has been
#
stopped people have been politely or not so politely asked to get off and then the bus has
#
been set on fire and you were inured to the fact that there were certain areas where people would
#
be chucking bombs at each other across the street all the time or shooting at each other um
#
about five batches senior to me in school there were a bunch of guys who had by the time by this
#
time got into college who staged a attempted breakout from aliput jail which ended up with
#
something like 40 people dead plus there was the the whole encounter thing and
#
the rest of it and there was that bizarre routine that at certain levels the son of
#
the inspector general of police was a friend of mine he's still a friend of mine siddhata shankar
#
rai was a you know a brahmo in good standing and obviously the orders to
#
carry out encounters i think this is the first time that the encounter became an art form
#
in the early 70s so the orders to carry out encounters were coming right from the top
#
and i mean i i lost count of the number of people i know who you know had somebody in
#
their family encountered and a very large proportion of this was middle class fairly
#
well educated mongoli intelligentsia in fact i would say one reason why mongol
#
collapsed after that is really that you wiped out an entire generation
#
this probably happened in panjab as well in the 80s but so after my dad's boss was killed
#
my dad as the most senior person on campus became a target plus he had at various points of time
#
worked with the fort foundation so he was cia or whatever supposedly
#
never saw a cent of whatever money he was supposed to have made but anyway so
#
we did a three-year stint where he set up what is now munipur university in munipur
#
so living in imphal i can still understand maithai and nagami so and i have a sense of
#
where the current conflict is coming from because you also had a sense that okay these areas are
#
kuki these areas are tangkul these areas are maithai and you have different sensibilities too
#
i'm talking as a 10 year old boy 10 11 year old boy you had different sensibilities to
#
account for if you were wandering around in any of these places and at the same time as a kid
#
you sort of had license people were not going to shoot me they might have shot my dad possibly
#
but they wouldn't shoot me and we were living in this big bungalow in this very green part of the
#
imphal valley i've visited six or seven of the biggest sites of world war two battles
#
and the memorials i've been back later etc you have some amazing artifacts over there because
#
you have abandoned airfields etc and
#
you had a decent public library which was one of the few places i've been in fact in india where
#
you had a decent public library with a lot of good books and i enjoyed myself it was
#
it was i guess as a growing up experience it was a very nice growing up experience
#
i got on with my dad's driver who had kids the same age i've
#
wandered around i've been guests at local weddings etc guests meaning literally gone off and lived
#
with a family for three four days while some somebody in that family was getting married
#
i've crossed the burma border a dozen times legally you had this thing where
#
moray and tamu which are the border towns tamu being on the miyanmar side
#
you had this thing where a local could be in the other place from sunrise to sunset
#
so people used to you know go over cross over to do their shopping kind of thing on a fairly
#
regular basis and it was fun you're also very aware of the fact that it was fun with an under
#
current of tension because there would be shootouts there would be times when you got
#
blacked out for two days there would be times when you know the whole place was under curfew
#
and the bangladesh war happened while we were there so again there was this huge buildup of
#
forces more out of mighalloy than out of munipur but and all of this is stuff that you
#
you store the memories at that point of time and i'm talking as a 10 year old you store the memories
#
as a nine year old really and you sort of figure out later that oh okay this is what was going on
#
at that point of time i suspect that in a lot of ways i have probably grown up with mild ptsd
#
because you're used to uh random acts of violence at a level where you sort of don't take it
#
seriously but at another level you're also very jumpy i'm guessing that this is true for anybody
#
who's grown up in kashmir in the last 30 years or in certain parts of the northeast or in the
#
punjab in the 80s you have a similar sort of mild ptsd i'm struck by uh you know your young
#
experience of naxalism your father being a potential target and all of that and you know
#
when i think about the great folly of naxalism there's also that whole cliche that goes about
#
how if you're not a communist at 18 you don't have a heart if you're not a capitalist at 28
#
you don't have a brain and when we are young we get drawn to ideologies that appear to explain
#
the world and make us feel virtuous and noble and a lot of these ideologies like of communism itself
#
as we saw through the 20th century can lead to extreme acts of violence and can really take you
#
down a terrible path and of course you know naxalism was a tragedy in the sense that we
#
lost so many brilliant young people to really unnecessarily who could have achieved so much
#
but was it also for you a sort of a cautionary tale into what could happen if you gave into that
#
kind of ideological uh sort of direction and dogmatism and all of that i think extremism
#
is always a bad routine and the thing is that after that i also had the experience of
#
west bengal being ruled by a communist government for many many years and i've also wandered around
#
in eastern europe when it was ruled by sundry communist governments and they were all appallingly
#
bad they were appallingly bad in terms of the mismanagement of official resources
#
they were appallingly bad in terms of what they did to the lives of common people
#
and you know i don't think there is much of a difference between the right and the left
#
when you're talking about extremist governments you end up with the same routines of you have
#
of you have personality cults you have appeals to nationalism you have
#
screwball economic and scientific theories being chucked into the ethos you have terrible
#
educational systems at least eastern europe did the thing of fast 100% literacy
#
but then you look at something like russia which has been 100% literate for
#
you know 50 years and it is in such a horrific condition as a place you realize that there's
#
something wrong i remember meeting an east german in this would be around 1986 and
#
he had never heard of eric maria remark all quiet on the western front it it was literally i was
#
reading an english translation of one of remarks books and utte said you know looks like a german
#
name and i sort of had light bulbs going off and saying hang on you know one of the most iconic
#
anti-war novels and it's probably sold a hundred million or 500 million copies in various
#
translations and been made into five different movies and i mean that wasn't the only book he
#
wrote he wrote something like 15 bestsellers or whatever and you never heard of him and he
#
said no and then this guy being of an inquiring mind and a very brave man went to his local
#
library he had some sort of connect with the librarian who explained to him that look
#
first he was banned by the nazis because obviously he was not showing up germany's
#
governments in good light and then the ban was perpetrated by the communist regime which came
#
in later so you can't get his books in german but if you want to read them in english translation
#
they were in the local library so he borrowed and read remark in english
#
because remark wasn't available in german and remark had been wiped off the educational
#
map of east germany to the point where you know a well-educated young east german had never heard
#
of him remarkable literally and you've had similar issues i think with left wing and right
#
wing governments who they wipe out is a different matter but i think you've had similar issues
#
everywhere with them what makes me both unhappy and hopeful about the current regime and
#
india is that i think at a certain level the soviets and the chinese and their satellites
#
allowed for a release intention i will explain what this means in the former soviet union
#
you could not criticize the government or the party
#
you could get blind drunk you could eat anything you wanted you could sleep with anything you wanted
#
ditto for china plus in china you're allowed to make money
#
without the government overtly interfering with you that creates a lot of safety valves and releases
#
safety valves and releases the government isn't really getting into the way you order
#
your social life and your you know your day-to-day interactions the
#
current establishment in india is very very deeply invested in trying to hassle you in those respects
#
which means that you have less in the way of safety valves and analogies in in this respect
#
are probably you know stretching things a bit too fast far but if you don't have safety valves
#
things tend to explode earlier and in a sense you know the soviet union could carry on for a long
#
70 odd years because yeah you could go out and get drunk you could meet somebody who found
#
attractive and go to bed with them and of course there were no food restrictions if you could
#
find food you could eat it the chinese you can get rich you can travel abroad you can
#
sit on a beach in thailand with whoever you want so you have even more in the way of a safety valve
#
you can't do any of this in india without many fingers being pointed being hassled in multiple
#
ways so i don't know whether that is a good thing or a bad thing in the sense that are you
#
more likely to set up an explosive reaction or not at some level human beings are human beings
#
we don't like being told what to do about everything in our lives i mean you know you like
#
like whether you wear a lungi at home or you wear half pants is not really anyone else's business
#
but this government does seem to think that it is their business or nothing at all do not send me
#
a notice if i am naked which to be honest no one has yet but i must also point out i agree with
#
everything you said i must also point out that stalin and mao did kill tens of millions of people
#
however there is something that is happening here i mean i think there's a difference in category
#
because the issue there with stalin and mao the issue was a state and the authoritarian
#
individuals in charge here i think what is happening in politics is a symptom of a cancer
#
in society and that there is a deeper social problem it is not as if anti-muslimness is being
#
imposed upon society by a top-down authoritarian leader it is unfortunately part of the fabric of
#
our society and all parties to differing degrees are playing to that you know including the congress
#
including up that's true for anti-semitism across europe i mean the you know the program is a
#
russian word the russians were carrying out programs long before the the zaas were carrying
#
out programs long before hitler got into the act and and decided to institutionalize it
#
and the poles were perfectly happy to have the jews and poles and the ukrainians were perfectly
#
happy to have jews being massacred they didn't care who was doing the massacring
#
and you have similar levels obvious anti-muslimness and anti-christianness
#
and anti-what-have-youness happening across the political map of india and
#
yes it is true that this government hasn't killed tens of millions as
#
talented or as um mounted but that is not because they necessarily care about
#
killing tens of millions you have a disturbing lack of empathy when it comes to
#
you know coercibly pushing very very invasive legislation or something like demonetization
#
around the sorts of people who it did become existentialist the way the
#
covid lockdowns was handled did become existentialist you don't really know how many
#
people died in how many preventable deaths there were let us say in that one year or so when
#
covid was raging so i think there is a lack of this government has also built
#
jails for people who do not qualify as indian citizens it hasn't been able to fill those jails
#
yet because there has been pushback but it would like to fill those jails after all why did it build
#
them in fact even in the question of tens of millions of deaths if they if a it was possible
#
and they could get away with it and b it would help them win elections you know maybe they would
#
yeah i don't think there would be an issue uh in terms of moral qualms about it
#
it's that they lack the reach to do this without necessarily running into a problem and
#
it would be a dubious electoral strategy beyond the point and people bemoan state capacity india
#
ka state capacity nahi hai sometimes i think it's good that we have an incompetent state because
#
some of our laws are so incredibly bad and you know this is a it's a frank herbert thing you
#
know frank herbert i mean the not the doon novels but the george mackey novels where george mackey
#
is this super james bond in the 25th century kind of thing and his job is to prevent governments
#
he works for a government department called the bureau of sabotage whose job is to prevent
#
governments running smoothly to throw sand in the works of governments running smoothly
#
because a smooth running government can do a lot more damage than a government that's
#
incompetent and has bureaucratic holdups so yeah i mean in that sense also you're lucky that this
#
is a continent-sized country you know hell breaking loose in manipur does not necessarily
#
affect you in delhi i'm not saying it you should not feel unhappy about it but it doesn't necessarily
#
directly affect your life in delhi in that sense you have ways to run away which you wouldn't in
#
a small country i love the phrase bureau of sabotage which of course has the initials bs
#
similar to a publication you have worked at so i'm noting all these connections kindly notice i want
#
to sort of dig into some of the things that you're passionate about which i've known you as being
#
incredibly knowledgeable in over the years that i've known you you know things like military
#
history chess bridge on twitter you uh point to sex and religion as being two of your great
#
interests we've already done religion so i won't ask you to go there and we will come to sex later
#
because certainly we must speak about that but i was wondering when you mentioned manipur and
#
uh you know interest in world war two all the unused airfields and all of that i want to ask
#
about a that time in general for you and b specifically how your interest in military
#
history developed and you know what fed it over the years and so on and so forth
#
i have multiple ancestors who at some level or the other have been involved in the defense forces
#
either army or navy or air force as the case may be so there are books lying around second the
#
second the manipur experience was probably in retrospect a trigger because
#
i visited places like palel where there was a huge battle which has abandoned barracks abandoned
#
airfields i visited churachandpur which has a ina memorial because that is the deepest point
#
of penetration by the ina in 1944 netaji gave us iconic speech over there i've taken i've looked
#
at memorials all over the northeast kohima outside imphal the red pagoda etc etc including japanese
#
memorials i've always been i suppose it sounds gruesome but fascinated by
#
battlefields meaning trying to figure out why a specific location
#
is considered suitable for people to kill each other in industrial quantities this is always
#
or usually for a strategic reason i mean there is a reason why panipat has featured so many times
#
in a sense similar to perspective and art like you pointed out yes yes there is a focal point
#
which or for example kharkiv in the ukraine war kharkiv saw five battles in the second world war
#
and about three during the russian revolution and it's seen too so you you're talking about
#
10 battles in one specific place there's a reason for that sekigehara in japan i've always been
#
fascinated by what are the contours which make a specific place more likely thermopylae thermopylae
#
has featured in battles in the first and second world war and of course the persian invasion
#
can you give an example of a place in india and what you learned about it
#
panipat the har ki patan which is in panjab which is featured in battles in
#
usually because there's a transport nexus or there is no way of getting to a big strategic point like
#
delhi in the case of panipat and holding it unless you fight a battle over there
#
and win that battle i i spent a lot of time floating around and visiting battlefields i
#
read about military campaigns across history because again that's part of it you need to know
#
why there has been a battle over here why flanders and belgium is the cockpit of europe why so many
#
critical european west european battles happened in that area and
#
it ties in at a certain level to my interest in chess which is a very abstracted
#
sort of way of looking at battles but it is it is the kind of thing where again
#
um history tends to work in
#
in long phases of and patterns which repeat not exactly but they do repeat so the whole thing
#
about you know why has europe ended up where it is now if you're looking at this then you have to
#
start looking at what happened during for example the napoleonic wars and which is a time when the
#
europe in let's say 1810 is recognizably europe as of now as opposed to europe in
#
1400 where it was you know aquitania and aleria etc various places which
#
barely exist on the map now and countries were not the countries they are now
#
so you you look at this you look at why did
#
why in was there this whole pattern of conflict at a certain point in history then again why is
#
there a repeating pattern of conflict let's say in the 1860s and 70s when germany was unifying
#
then the first and second world war similar things have happened in india with let's say the mogul
#
empire which is one obvious connector also with things like the marathas because there was a sort
#
of rise and fall shivaji happened then there were some fairly incompetent successors and then there
#
were a couple of highly competent pishwas and then again incompetence and you have
#
you sort of get fascinated by the patterns this takes on and
#
being human beings who look for patterns in everything you try to look for a pattern which
#
might be in operation right now or maybe a long cycle pattern which will be in operation 20 years
#
later or 30 years later it's the same reason why you would also look at economic cycles
#
long longer economic cycles not not necessarily you know a three-year business cycle but
#
longer economic cycles you're looking for patterns and sometimes because the numbers
#
pass belief i've been to wipers which is a small town in belgium
#
one reason for going there is because it has a peculiar calcutta connection the calcutta high
#
court was originally built using the plans of the town hall of wipers then wipers went through four
#
battles in the first world war and the town was obliterated by artillery fire and after the war
#
they sent architects to calcutta to take a look at the high court so that they could rebuild their
#
buildings but so you're talking about a place where something like 60 000 people died in one day
#
i mean and died not because a nuclear bomb was dropped but because they were shot shell to death
#
and this happened over a period of months i mean on a regular basis there were 5 000 10 000 people
#
being killed every day and it sort of defies belief you go there because you're wondering
#
how big is this place and how the hell could you sit here and do it similar things happen
#
to me in galley bully where you are literally talking about australian trenches and turkish
#
trenches with less than 30 meter support separating them so i mean you're sitting in a trench
#
and you dare not put your head up because it will be shot off
#
the other guy sitting there is going through the same thing when you are taking a crap
#
you are literally crawling through a shallow tunnel for 30 meters in order to take a crap
#
up and crawling back at the end of this and you're sitting in the middle of this for months
#
the part of this insanity also you know it happens on a regular basis in on the loc lac
#
sort of scenario it's happening it happens to some extent i suppose in korea on the dmz
#
though there is that buffer zone but it also defies the imagination that how the hell
#
did you manage to pack so many people into this place and convince them that they have to kill
#
each other and quite often there are no answers i've also done things like wandered around the
#
Shenandoah valley in america because that is a that is a campaign which barely features in
#
the history books very few people got killed but for a period of months stonewall jackson
#
was leading a very small army without any cavalry managed to tie down
#
two and a half to three much larger forces with cavalry with artillery by sneaking around
#
in the Shenandoah valley and every so often threatening to attack washington
#
dc he never actually attacked washington dc they never actually managed to get hold of him
#
because he would have been wiped out if one of those armies had actually managed to
#
force a battle on him so it was this thing where the guy was you know spiraling around in this
#
green area it wasn't even a guerrilla campaign he wasn't trying to kill anyone or you know attack
#
them he was just showing his face so that these guys would stay occupied over here
#
and could not go into action anywhere else and again it sort of passes belief how can 10 000
#
people wander around in an area without actually being intercepted by a much larger force
#
so some of it is like that and some of it is just the waste
#
the indian graves in france from the first world war in gallipoli in mesopotamia
#
such a waste here were these guys who you know basically joined up because the army and the
#
pension was a better life than being a farmer and ended up being shot in some random place
#
in some random battle which had absolutely nothing to do with them
#
you mentioned stonewall jackson and i was you know reminded of this chess anecdote i think this was
#
nimzo wish didn't like smoke blown on his face and you know once he was playing vidmar and he
#
was sort of i think it was vidmar and he was kind of freaking out because vidmar you know got a
#
cigar case and he kept it on the table in front of him and nimzo wish called the tournament director
#
and vidmar said but it's a cigar case i haven't started smoking yet and nimzo said no threat is
#
worse than the execution as every chess player knows so you know i hope i've got the characters
#
right but that's pretty much uh it is a it is a nimzo with story i can't remember who the
#
cigar smoker was it could have been lasker could have been a lot of tarash could have been tarash
#
could have been vidmar all of this military history i would imagine that like history even
#
when it doesn't repeat it rhymes as people say so all of it is relevant you see the same battles
#
playing out but my assumption is that they will never again be a battle of panipat that gallipoli
#
will no more be important and flanders the only battle at flanders will be one of my favorite
#
cycling monuments a tour of flanders which happens every year and because i has a change has a has
#
modern warfare the kharkiv would seem to give a lie to that but has modern warfare changed and
#
it's changing rapidly so fast that a lot of those old paradigms don't matter that a lot of those old
#
patterns don't even come into play because like i did an episode on the ukraine war with ajay
#
shah and ajay was talking about how you know they've got an uber for artillery and there are
#
these remote controlled drones so even if you're on a trench which is many miles inside the remote
#
control drone the technology has changed but if you read manstein's lost victories manstein being
#
in and you look at what is happening right now in the counter offensive
#
citadel and map it to citadel you're talking about people trying to take exactly the same territory
#
with completely or rather with very different technology but yes they're fighting over exactly
#
the same territory and yes of course the technology has changed it has changed
#
i mean the first battle of thermopylae involved guys with spears going up against guys with swords
#
and bows and arrows the last battle of thermopylae in the 1940s involved armored warfare
#
and but yeah of course the technology has changed but you still end up fighting over
#
the same terrain and you still end up with largely the same strategic objectives i think
#
in many cases flanders i agree is unlikely to ever see another battle unless belgium has a civil war
#
which is not impossible but is unlikely i can't really see the flamans and the
#
french speakers deciding that you know they're going to kill each other by the way
#
from a political scientist point of view belgium's devolution is fairly interesting to look at because
#
you know they've very deftly managed through deep self-governance they've very deftly managed
#
this situation where you have two bunches of people who speak different languages even though
#
they can both i mean both bunches are bilingual but they do speak completely different languages
#
and who you know the communist party of belgium has there are two communist parties of belgium
#
they have similar manifestos but one is belgium for the flamans and one is belgium for the french
#
speakers but you know the whole self-devolution thing plus you've got a catholic protestant
#
divide which is true for holland as well that's the divide between fans of baut weinart and
#
found fans of remco evanopol only cycling geeks will get this i'm sorry yes okay but yeah so
#
belgium and maybe hollanda the dutch similarly the dutch have a monarchy but they never have
#
a coronation because a coronation would involve involving a religious leader to
#
put the crown on and because of their history it used to be a colony of spain and the fact is that
#
half of holland is still catholic there would probably be a civil war about
#
whether it should be a protestant bishop or a catholic bishop so they've never had a coronation
#
but belgium example is interesting because of the i mean deep self-governance of i think a level
#
that doesn't exist in any other country maybe it does but i'm not a political scientist or an expert
#
on this but i looked at it in the context of trying to understand panchayat raj
#
which is a fairly obvious analogy and i don't think you have that level of self-governance in
#
any other country in terms of the ability of local villages to raise taxes and to
#
um legislate what they do with those taxes i'll bring it down to that very basic
#
level and you're talking tiny communities you know places which this one street in malvianagar
#
would have more people than an average belgian village marvelous we are of course recording this
#
in malvianagar and this one street has more people than a belgian village uh and yet there
#
are no cyclists coming out of here shame shame let's take a digression from chronology for a
#
moment though it's not a digression digression because it's part of your narrative and talk
#
about chess because you mentioned how chess in a sense is a sublimation of the interest in
#
military matters and military history and all of that so uh and i i've known you for the longest
#
time as like you know at different points in time where you have you used to have a chess column
#
but you also used to blog at one point during one of the world championships you had this
#
fantastically insightful uh blog where you were blogging about the games you've played at a very
#
high level you have co-written vishiyanand's autobiography yet to be published but and and
#
you were a serious like a national level player in the 80s and all of that take me through your
#
you know journey playing chess what was it like in the early days was it a huge handicap that
#
you were in india and not in russia for example what was your chess life what has your chess life
#
been like you're also a very high level correspondence player i know yeah i mean i
#
switched to playing correspondence quite a few years back and the key differences are two things
#
one is access to information instantaneous access to information the fact that you know i can
#
download a five million game database instantaneously now and i can download the
#
games of a tournament live while they're being played second engine analysis the sheer quality
#
of engine analysis and the things we've learned from engine analysis it's not just that the
#
fact that the engines can go deeper they have actually shown us stuff that chess human chess
#
players did not know things like certain positions the way an alpha zero or a stockfish handles them
#
uh has actually there was a very insightful i suppose monograph would be a good way to put it
#
written by peter heinie nielsen who's been on and second and is now carlson's major second about
#
adapting ideas from an alpha zero uh matthew sadler who's another very strong chess player
#
computer man has written excellently about this so you have you put those two things together
#
and while you do need coaches you now need coaches really to take care of behavioral
#
ticks and to help people learn how to think you do not need coaches to give you insights anymore
#
in the sense that you do not need a grandmaster to look at a position and say that hey you know
#
this is a good move all you have to do is switch on stockfish and it will instantaneously tell you
#
what is a good move and what is not you do need human coaches to help you learn how to calculate
#
to learn how to understand positions to maybe to notice the key aspects of a certain kind of
#
chess position and to give you advice about hey you're this kind of player and this is what your
#
natural inclinations are and this is how you should be trying to strengthen your game
#
so the difference is that you know we were looking at things like a two month delay on a
#
six monthly compendium of physical games something like chess informant or you would go and chat up
#
librarians at the soviet cultural center and say that dada can you get the latest 64 which was the
#
official russian thing or shas which was the latvian journal originally edited by mikhail tal and then
#
by various other latvians can you get this quickly from moscow because then you know we can take a
#
look kind of thing and you knew that people in eastern europe had already seen and digested this
#
information they had strong coaches who would tell them that this is a position you handle this way
#
and that is a position you handle that way they had these index card sort of systems where you
#
know openings had been analyzed to fairly great depths and with a lot of midnight oil being burnt
#
and plus again not just the openings but middle game themes and end game technique
#
the level of polish they had i read my first
#
i had access to and read my first book on the end game basic chess endings
#
and when i was in my early 20s was this a rubin fine book yeah yeah this was the rubin fine book
#
when i was in my early 20s by which time i had already been playing at the national level for
#
several years for about four years and you know it was revelatory to learn
#
um which positions were winning and which were not and basic chess endings is a basic book it is
#
it is not definitive it covers a lot of positions but it also does not cover a lot of stuff
#
but you know he had model end games from here and there and he had
#
statements that like this position can be won this way this position can be drawn this way that kind
#
of thing and it was revelatory for me and it was also a learning experience and a humbling experience
#
to realize that there were 13 year olds in russia who knew this who had just been taught this 10
#
years earlier it's like you're learning the alphabet at 18 and they've learned it at six yeah
#
absolutely i mean the analogy here would be the alphabet or mathematics that you're doing addition
#
subtraction they've done calculus yeah they're already into calculus maybe into multi-variable
#
calculus so and it used to show up in the fact that the indian thematic was you would take
#
enormous amounts of time in the opening and early middle game because you were struggling to make
#
sense of positions which were completely new to you and you'd be playing an east european who
#
you know would just bash out those moves with 20 seconds thought perhaps and there is something
#
very intimidating about that as well you're playing someone who is obviously not even thinking
#
when he's playing a very complicated position and you're going nuts trying to work out all sorts of
#
you know what is there at the table it's a game which equalizing
#
access to information has changed the game and the way in which it's played and that's pretty
#
obvious i mean you look at the junior ranks and you look at the fact that india now has 84 grand
#
masters most of whom are 16 years old or 20 years old uzbekistan is the olympiad gold medalist
#
again with a team which was average age of 19 and obviously it's it's changed the way the game is
#
played it's also changed it's democratized the game in a way which is difficult to describe it
#
yes you have good players out of russia still of course but you have good players out of everywhere
#
now and if you're talking sheer weight of good players india is one of the best places in the
#
world if not the best you have a huge that's one place where the demographic dividend has paid you
#
have a lot of young bright kids who have taken to chess and thanks to anand's example their parents
#
believe that this is a decent thing for them to be doing and they've done you know they've you have
#
reasonably cheap data so they've they've gone and they've gone places in terms of the overall level
#
of chess being played in india now even at a very even at a small event somewhere i mean every
#
yes tamil nadu is still the biggest place but every state more or less has its five or six
#
good players and by good players i mean grand masters and you know even your state championships
#
are pretty solid events it's also changed correspondence in that
#
when i started playing correspondence which is in the early 2000s it was still a game where you used
#
engines but you looked for very sharp positions where you might find you know a little tactical
#
trick six moves deep which your opponent was also using an engine of course hadn't gone that deep
#
into it and trick them so to speak now you play uh really in the carlson style you play to keep
#
all sorts of pieces on the board and to reach a sort of rich middle game position which is
#
not necessarily good for you or bad for you but simply something that the engine will not be able
#
to fully analyze and understand so your opponent will have to make
#
deep strategic decisions at some level you're no longer going to beat anyone
#
tactically in a correspondence game in fact when engine versus engine tournaments are played they
#
play preset positions because otherwise you know the engines are too good they will just draw
#
each other every time so you sort of you look for uh really deep obscure stuff like
#
all right the one thing that my opponent must not do is exchange his dark soy bishop
#
and if he doesn't realize that uh i will eventually beat him or that i can move
#
forces from the queen side to the king side a little quicker than he can
#
you're no longer looking at tactical blows which will you know knock the other guy out
#
and this means the dichotomy the difference between correspondence and
#
over the board chess has also widened at one time correspondence used to be the more tactically
#
complicated thing you were always playing for deep positions where you had capture recapture
#
threat going 10 moves deep and hoping that your opponent would not go that deep you can
#
still do that in a normal otb game in fact a lot of people do uh someone like arowana or nakamura
#
is usually trying to do that aronian sometimes but you wouldn't do that in correspondence anymore
#
now in correspondence you play for i want to get to a middle game which maybe i'll understand
#
better than my opponent and you know you mentioned peter heinie nelson's monograph earlier and one
#
quote i remember from him at the time alpha zero did what it did is about how i've always wondered
#
what it would be like if aliens came to earth and played chess and now i think i know you know and
#
the thing is the stereotype most people would have had of computers is that computers in chess is
#
that they're going to calculate much much deeper and it's all going to be about great tactical
#
calculation and so on and so forth and a couple of ways in which i think people were surprised
#
is that number one what happened earlier was that it didn't homogenize everybody's play as people
#
expected it took it in the opposite direction if anything the principles laid out by the soviet
#
school of chess were a sort of a homogeneous way of playing and computers allowed you to find concrete
#
exceptions to broad principles and those became a competitive advantage so you know that generation
#
which came which learnt on stockfish like wesley so and so on are just so different in terms of
#
their thinking all of them all of them and they are all very they all have very very individual
#
playing styles if you look at the top 20 in the world right now you cannot slot them into any one
#
or even into any separate bucket they're all very good at what they do but they do it differently
#
and they obviously think differently about the game and that's for sure
#
and and the second revelation was which i realized after alpha zero is that
#
you know we had at least developed a set of heuristics which were broadly correct
#
that you know you go to initiative is important and therefore you develop your pieces space is
#
important so the center is important unless you're being hyper modern and trying to control it from
#
the this thing but it was almost as if by playing itself over 24 hours alpha zero actually played
#
itself to a more nuanced set of heuristics like the the relationship between initiative and material
#
in the long term changed completely and that leads me to asking a broader question about
#
ai in general because i think these sort of two generalized assumptions which people would have
#
made about computers within chess did not hold true for this and i don't think they hold true
#
for anything we often make a lot of simplistic assumptions about computers of
#
about ai in terms of what it is i think we're already seeing that with the large language
#
models the fact that they seem to be able to do an enormous range of tasks which they were not
#
expected to be able to do i mean no one created llm saying that you know this will help me code
#
but they can actually code they can actually solve a lot of mathematical problems they can
#
i can see situations where see generative ai is always going to be a funny thing because
#
the other thing i think which people there are two things about ai's which i think people
#
are underestimating one is the first has been talked about the second actually has not been
#
talked about much the first is you have biases baked into indian into human society are assumptions
#
about and i mean not just assumptions about color and gender but assumptions about who you should
#
give a mortgage to those are baked into the system also assumptions in criminal justice about who is
#
more likely to backslide and be a whatever they call it a recidivist criminal or whatever again
#
baked into our thing ai trains ultimately on this material you might try to clean up the material
#
but it is still training on this material and those assumptions are already they are baked in
#
so deep that you cannot get them out you know if you tell an ai look at people working in stem
#
it's going to say well women don't work in stem and that is unfortunately a fact
#
i mean there are far fewer women working in stem than there are men and if it takes that as a basis
#
for judging who you should give scholarships to then you're going to perpetrate the bias this
#
okay people have actually talked about this but how to deal with it on a gigantic scale
#
is a different matter the other thing that has not been talked about with ai
#
is that we're already on the road to a certain kind of slavery and this is not slavery to ai
#
it is slavery to organizations using ai i will try to explain this
#
one of the easiest ways to get data of the kind that all ai's need is get a bunch of people or
#
a bunch of monkeys or whatever give them cameras tell them go out take pictures of whatever
#
label the picture by voice pair versus tree etc ai crunches the data gets to know what a
#
tree looks like gets to know the hindi oria in spanish and english word for a tree how that sounds
#
and it's jumped a level in terms of training you might be using this training to
#
build a system that can run a auto auto driven car it knows what a tree is it's less likely to
#
hit it etc you might use this system for anything but you've got this data you have actually got a
#
actually got a scenario where you can almost seamlessly translate from one language to another
#
with enormous degree of fidelity and facility and you're paying the monkey with the camera
#
jackshit you're paying the monkey with the camera
#
you know 50 rupees an hour for his work and you're selling it up the line
#
at 500 dollars an hour the data he's giving it so you've got a
#
scenario where cybercullism of a different kind is happening
#
in the bangalore scenario where you were using a programmer out of bangalore yes you were
#
using a labor arbitrage thing where you were paying the man a lot less
#
then you would be an equivalent american but here you're talking about
#
exploitation at a level which is insane if you think about it you can i know people who are
#
actually doing this you can hire an entire village in hariana orisa give them all a dirt cheap phone
#
and a data connection and collect these pictures you're not even note you're not even breaking
#
the man's privacy it's non-private data and what you've got at the end is something of enormous
#
value and you've paid literally peanuts or less than peanuts for it and the people who have put
#
that data together for you have no intellectual or monetary claim on what you do with it
#
and they will eventually in other ways also get exploited because you will use the data
#
here and so it's a it could in my estimation lead to a well cybercolonialism or cybercullism
#
of a scale and a rate which hasn't happened even with normal
#
with all the i.t outsourcing that has occurred this would be a new paradigm and a new dimensional
#
shift in many ways and it hasn't been talked about it has barely been written about at the
#
science and business journal level and of course anybody who talks about it is also
#
at risk of being labeled a communist or a mad left winger and i'm not any of those things
#
i'm just saying that i think this is unfair because of the sheer differentials
#
in terms of the value of the work being done versus what you're actually paying for it
#
and i think this is dangerous because it's at an level of international relations it's going to
#
lead to a situation or it is already trending towards a situation where there are certain
#
countries in the world india venezuela brazil which will be exploited to the max by a few
#
a few organizations which will lead perhaps to a change in world order of a you know of
#
what is that flipping movie skynet terminator well not necessarily a hostile ai
#
but a bunch of mncs running ai's well maybe neuromancer is a better example of the kind
#
of world you're talking about or snow crash you know a few a few mncs running the world with
#
a few countries at the bottom of the pile in terms of not being able to get even the crumbs
#
from the table where that is concerned i'm going to push back a little bit and i'm going to say
#
that this scenario is actually condescending to the people you're speaking on behalf of in the
#
sense that if there are people in a village who are being paid peanuts and far less than the value
#
of the data that they collect to collect data the reason they are accepting that is because
#
it is a best option open to them it is a better option the classic you know i i i'd once admitted
#
admitted i i'd 15 years ago no this is and i'll just elaborate on this a bit because 15 years ago
#
i'd like written a column on child labor and it's very easy for elites to say oh we should ban child
#
labor but oxfam once spoke about the situation in bangladesh where international outrage from
#
elites like us made factories lay off 30 000 child workers and you think wow we've gotten
#
rid of child labor many of them starved to death many became prostitutes there was a similar 1995
#
unicef study which showed that you know there was an international boycott of carpets made in nepal
#
by elites like us because child labor and more than 5000 to 7000 girls nepali girls turned to
#
prostitution because the best option they had was destroyed by the elites i i i get that side of the
#
argument i get that side of the argument and i'm i'm admitting that that that is of course why the
#
labor arbitrage works because you are picking up a village where people don't have any other options
#
and you're giving them what they consider a better deal than they could get but i still feel very
#
uncomfortable about this because i can see things developing out of this trend which are if you like
#
fairly nasty and potentially tectonic shifts in world order and it is if you like similar
#
to the scenarios where you know people were asked to gather plants which they considered
#
herbal medicinal plants which were then taken to a lab and then turned into
#
ip by a pharmaceutical giant somewhere else which sold the drugs back at a huge markup
#
this is on a scale which is much more gigantic yeah i would just feel that i feel that it's
#
profoundly wrong to make judgment on people have it taking up the best option open to them
#
i'm not making a judgment about the people taking that option i'm just saying even the mncs i think
#
all of those mncs are doing something incredibly virtuous by giving all of these people the an
#
option for earning money which is better than any other option they currently have it is a social
#
service see this is market meets supply and demand mnc needs cheap data from wherever it can get it
#
the cheapest data it can get now for example the ukraine could at the end of this war become a
#
great place for this because you would have a highly educated profession which has no jobs
#
which has nothing and who can of course use a smartphone to take pictures and
#
label the pictures i mean i'm just objecting to terms like slavery and exploitation i don't
#
think that's what's happening here what's happening here is empowerment that people are given an
#
option that is better than any other option open to them and it's just wrong for elites sitting
#
in a city to say nay nay but the data is worth much more then give them a better job you know
#
if that's the best do you give them a better job or do you give them
#
a long-term lien on the value of the data which is what i would look for not necessarily sure
#
then that becomes something that you can only do when companies are when different mncs are
#
then competing for such data and then that could be one of the things you do in competition
#
market structure here is fascinating because it isn't easy to analyze this situation and
#
i'm aware of the argument you're making it's one i have made many times yeah so i'm not i'm not
#
dissing that argument i'm not coming here from an ideological angle i'm coming here from
#
two things one is deep discomfort with the sheer disparity in values the sheer disparity in values
#
is more than much more than it is with a pfizer taking a malarial herb and turning it more
#
the scale of the impact is a lot more the potential change in world order
#
the fact that this might push you from being nation states with maybe a way up the ladder
#
or down the ladder into a dystopian kind of snow crash or neuromancer-ish environment where
#
the countries which are currently generating the data would be at the bottom of the pile
#
couple of things one is that one is that i said discomfort yeah yeah no no i'm not yeah yeah no
#
my couple of reactions is that one i think that as long as it is a positive sum game i don't care
#
about the disparity are both parties benefiting or not that's one angle to it i'm looking at the
#
level of individuals of the individuals doing whatever the grant work is whether it's cheap
#
coding or collecting data or making carpets as long as it's a best option open to them and
#
they are benefiting that's what i really care about and the other thing is that it is not that
#
some countries will be at the bottom of the pile because you know people bring up this bogeyman of
#
inequality will increase which is absolute errant nonsense because what ai does and what all new
#
technology does is it actually democratizes a field and empowers poor people i mean if you look
#
at the way poor indians all over the you know not just in cities but towns and villages are
#
empowered by technology like cheap like ubiquitously cheap bandwidth right now for example it's my
#
blowing to me it's a democratizing force today any every indian can use chat gpt or any of the
#
generative ai it is not just for the rich it is not just for people in rich countries and therefore
#
someone anyone sitting here today anyone sitting in any village today can really
#
innovate their way out of you know their social conditions and their economic conditions so
#
i i on the whole i feel enormously confident i do have a separate issue with how you know
#
uh like my chief issue with a lot of this is that the disquieting move that i have seen in the last
#
10 years is that the wrong aspects of human nature can be amplified by big tech companies
#
because of the technology open to them for example i think the facebook like button and
#
the twitter retweet button amplified our instinctive tribalism polarized our discourse
#
those are the things i worry about but i also think that those did not come about because
#
the companies were evil they were maximizing engagement this was a side effect and it is
#
also possible to take it in the other direction like there is a reason i think reddit is much
#
less toxic than twitter that discussions are better and it is simply because as we understand
#
you know which aspects of human nature can be amplified in what ways i i think we'll also you
#
know i'm a little more but it is a isn't in itself a fascinating example because
#
they're trying to monetize it etc and the whole thing with which has happened with mods in reddit
#
so yeah but okay let's i'm not disagreeing with your arguments i'm just saying that
#
i think in this case scale makes a difference and my projection of the situation is that it
#
will eventually lead to stress huge stresses in the world order and that is may or may not be a
#
good thing and yes if you had to take one of the points you made if you had for argument's sake
#
five different companies coming to the same villages and saying buddy do this for me for
#
25 bucks an hour versus 26 bucks an hour yeah you'd have an open market and maybe that is
#
the solution maybe you actually need you know the cabbage to stand up and say that all right
#
we will pay you to do this for 26 bucks an hour why cabbage to stand up the cabbage meaning the
#
man who is currently prime minister of india okay well yeah okay first time i've heard him
#
referred to gobi ji you've never heard him called gobi ji gobi ji yeah yeah yeah okay okay now
#
everything is falling into place and fool gobi ji is another aspect that we can bring into
#
the agreement which is you know mockery of audio leader let's take a quick commercial break and
#
after that we'll come back and talk i've barely begun it you're going to be sitting here for
#
another 10 hours listeners enjoy have you always wanted to be a writer but never quite gotten down
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to refine your skills i can help you
#
welcome back to the scene in the unseen i'm chatting to devang su dutta and in the break
#
you were telling me about you know bengali commentary on openheimer and so on kindly
#
kindly reproduce some well there is this it's very colloquial bengali so it can't be reproduced in
#
that sense but essentially there's this chap who's sort of spoken an open message to nolan
#
christopher nolan saying hey you seem to have made this movie about a guy who built bombs
#
let me tell you bengal building bombs is a cultural thing and
#
something to that effect and you know you should and we make better bombs than anybody else
#
we're better our cottage industry of making bombs is better than anywhere else in the world so maybe
#
you should do a movie about bengalis who make bombs well bengali bombshells are also quite a
#
thing let's sort of go back to your ground logical journey like i think i have the vague impression
#
i don't know if this is true but i have the vague impression that you have been in prison in 13
#
countries but i have no idea if that is the case but i do know you're widely traveled and
#
you've always got these incredible anecdotes about all these different places you've been to
#
so tell me a bit about this side of you like when did you start traveling you became a shippee also
#
for a while what was that life like take me through your travels what you learned what you saw
#
world was a very different place at that point of time and much less in the way of paperwork
#
in fact one of the things i deplore about the indian government in the 1980s is that
#
it actively asked for visa regulations for example until the mid 80s you could go to the
#
to west germany without a visa you could go to canada with a with a very easy visa and then the
#
indian government decided no no kalistanis will come and do various things and of course
#
kalistanis did various things the visas didn't getting a visa didn't or not getting a visa didn't
#
stop them but they asked for these bilateral agreements where you would need a visa for a
#
canadian citizen to come to india and for a german to come to india and vice versa so a lot of
#
the easy connections got cut off other than that i wandered around
#
not being a very ambitious person and being more interested in
#
experiences and meeting and seeing peculiar things then making large sums of money or having a
#
regular job i wandered around a fair amount so and the good thing with chess is that
#
chess players are part of a sort of global guild you can land up in any place where the game is
#
played just find a local club bash out a few games of blitz and you know let it be known that you're
#
looking for a place to sleep that night somebody or the other will cheerfully take you home
#
and give you a you know you can unroll your sleeping bag on the floor and hang out and we've
#
also done things like hit tournaments where you hit a motel and basically seven of you pack into a
#
room so i mean and pretend that there are just two of you there or something but
#
so again it was a easy fairly footloose life and this is 1980s 1980s and even in highly
#
authoritarian places like the soviet union and eastern europe this was a sort of
#
informal passport even the local cops played chess they assumed that if you were a chess player you
#
weren't very interested in anything else you weren't a spy or something and while it led to
#
occasional hysterical experiences as in you know you were just you didn't have an explanation for
#
why you were in a place except that you were playing chess and it also meant connecting with
#
people at a personal level which would probably not have been possible for a non-chess player
#
you would you know if you were going there on a delegation to discuss buying mig-21s or something
#
you would have been part of that delegation and presumably had a translator who was also a minder
#
chasing you around all the time and you would have been living in a hotel etc whereas a lot of
#
what i did was you were basically hanging around in people's houses and you were just
#
randomly enjoying yourself and you also got to see the i wouldn't necessarily say the
#
underbelly of a place but the senior side of places in many cases which sort of gives you an insight
#
into how a system really works not putting this very well but let me put it this way you have
#
a country which is run by a government of some description that government puts
#
certain kinds of laws in place and does what it can in the way of enforcing them if you're
#
looking at the senior side of that country the people who are in the cracks and margins who are
#
not necessarily government servants or doing particularly interesting or exciting jobs but
#
who are also making a living one way or the other quite often by doing criminal or quasi criminal
#
things you get a reasonable sense of how the country works and whether the enforcement
#
actually works or it doesn't work can you give me some examples
#
like i'm totally waiting for like exciting salacious stories with names and places and
#
details come on man see we used to do things like trade soap and disposable needles into the soviet
#
union at a personal level i'm saying and i have swapped my pants i mean just normal corduroy jeans
#
for sex so you also had this for example you had this wonderful thing where the rupee and the ruble
#
were at one to one the ruble and the dollar were officially at one to one unofficially you could
#
get 18 20 rubles to the dollar if you sold on the black market so it was a wonderful time for
#
was a wonderful time for indians because you could buy dollars officially using rupees
#
in the soviet union and then sell them unofficially which led to an instant huge boost in your
#
capacity to spend money on the street also for i guess a lot of indians of my generation
#
it was one of the places where you didn't have racist barriers against indians to a large extent
#
and you had a lot of attractive women which you do in many other i mean every country has its
#
attractive women but you had a lot of attractive women who did not have a problem interacting with
#
you including intimately interacting with you and it was basically fun i mean i guess that is
#
part of where my you know the brahmo in me basically got buried for the first time
#
you know the burial of the brahmo in me started that okay fine you can
#
and i mean sex is a wonderful experience and why do you need labels like you must be married or
#
you must be monogamous so what have you in order to have sex so that was one level where
#
i mean a lot of it was also very transactional like i'm saying that
#
corduroy jeans how did that happen how did the transaction suggest itself
#
a woman basically said can i take these
#
and peacefully took her clothes off and peacefully tried them on and said okay i mean they didn't fit
#
perfectly but you know she could figure out what to do to presumably to make them fit or
#
she didn't care i don't know so and that was it and so what was the transition like like i'm
#
imagine when you travel for the first time you're like a shy good bengali boy and then you have this
#
awakening in different ways and i'm thinking that the most impactful way of this sexual awakening
#
the most in the greatest impact would be on confidence that you become just a man of the
#
world so to say and you know you know how did you change my sexual awakening actually happened in
#
monipur meaning i hit puberty while i was there and my first girlfriend per se was a monipuri
#
so i was i discovered i was interested in women if that makes sense i mean there's no
#
better way of putting it it's not as though i was you know i was great at picking up women or
#
whatever but so i'm certainly not a virgin when i traveled to when i started traveling so
#
but and i hadn't i didn't have a great deal of experience i don't think i still do but
#
and there was this i would reckon the first time i slept with a woman abroad it would
#
have been my fifth or sixth sexual encounter but
#
no i i mean you're where i think the difference happens is that a you're grouping to figure out
#
moles this is after all you're talking about cultural differences and
#
and in places where you're not going to be for very long and where you don't know whether you're
#
going to be clubbed to death or chucked in jail or whatever for piling on to someone and
#
the other side of it is that
#
you learn to take no for an answer actually
#
you be on if the woman says fuck off or no she's not interested or whatever you shrug and say good
#
luck and move on that i think is one place where most indians really screw up very badly ego and
#
entitlement get in the way and that you go out and ask a woman whether she will dance with you
#
have a drink with you go to bed with you and if she says no you start getting unpleasant or
#
you do the asking by being physical which is in itself offensive where a lot of women are concerned
#
and so i guess my learning curve was really that and i well brought up
#
balovanush bengali boy so i do not you know i may leap upon women with glad cries but
#
only after i am fairly sure that they have given me permission and if a woman says she's not
#
interested i will salute and move on and without any hard feelings so i guess i mean the big deal
#
there is that i haven't been clubbed over the head or what have you i've had my share of good and bad
#
sexual encounters i suppose but like me you tend to geek out about things that you get sort of
#
interested in whether it's chess or bridge or investing which we'll speak about later and
#
military history and all of that and sex is one of the interests listed in your twitter bio so
#
did you also geek out about sex and is there a danger in becoming what paramita vora colorfully
#
referred to as thinky like one of her slogans which i love is be kinky not thinky you know
#
referring to men who overthink you know what what they're kind of doing so geek out yes but
#
let's see there were two or three things happening at this point of time i'm
#
it's a reference point i was chatting i had breakfast today morning with our mutual friend
#
mohit sathyanand and another person who's been a guest on the show akshay jetli and akshay was
#
telling us about one of his heroes is great the gentleman who invented hi-fi i think mark levenson
#
and mark levenson married samantha of sex in the city and together they wrote a book about the
#
female orgasm now to me that is geeking out you know that you geek out to the extent that
#
you've written a book about it so no look when i was growing up a young adult not a young adult
#
a young man young adult is generally used for that 14 to 18 or whatever i'm talking about your
#
publishing hat on whatever i'm talking about in my 20s and early 30s you
#
didn't have huge amounts of i think literature on sex per se you had a lot of psychoanalytical babble
#
some which i read alike with everyone else but and you had the you had the
#
herb playboy and penthouse level of imaginary encounter or semi-imaginary encounter or whatever
#
you you had a fair amount of porn but also very vanilla vintage porn for want of a better word
#
at that point of time and that i was in your too because it was always playing on the background
#
somebody or the other had a pawn tape on when you were floating around and you sort of
#
took a look if it looked interesting you looked if it didn't you just ignored it
#
and in that sense the other thing that started happening was that towards the end of this period
#
the late 80s people had started getting terrified about AIDS so you everyone was consciously
#
throttling back the geek out in the sense of you know there are 900 positions or whatever in the
#
kama sutra or something no not beyond the point i'm
#
i was willing to try lots of things but you know not beyond the point and
#
i think what the you know in that sense the internet has democratized sex it has also
#
also democratized the ways in which porn actors can make money in a in a very healthy way
#
in the sense that the whole concept of only fans and shooting your own video and you know
#
taking a subscription or whatever all of that i think has made a huge difference to the industry
#
second thing is and this this i'm not sure what the reflections are
#
but essentially you know if you've got a fetish about cigar smoking nuns someone on the internet
#
has done something about it and what is more you can now AI it so you can get incredibly real
#
looking porn with exactly the faces that you want in any situation yeah so in that sense
#
a my on the odd occasion when i'm you know you
#
dive down the porn rabbit hole i did that last year when i was trying to write a piece on only
#
fans versus porn hub one of the things which blew my mind was the sure categorization and
#
subcategorization of porn fetishes fetishes probably not the right word here but you know
#
preferences can you expand on that a bit it's very interesting see in my time i would have said okay
#
it was either you have straight porn or you have gay porn or you have lesbian porn or you have
#
you know some mixture of the three and maybe you have a threesome or an orgy
#
now it would be sliced and diced into is this mature is this you know is somebody using feathers
#
is somebody using a dildo you actually can i mean you can search for
#
wild a very wide-ranging variation on and only fans has more of those only fans i think has only
#
fans has that insanity where you know a lot of the stars over there basically have subscription
#
models where a subscriber says that i would love to see a scene which goes like this
#
so another thing which has happened is the scenario building back in the 80s i remember
#
very little porn which actually had a story i mean this sounds corny but
#
in the sense that i remember one
#
forgotten the name of the damn thing but the storyline was basically there is this great
#
musician who is trying to write a symphony around the orgasm so he's wandering around
#
trying to record orgasms which obviously means having orgasms then of course you had the classic
#
deep throat which was earlier but it was still very much available you had the devil in miss
#
jones which is about young spinster who dies and she's in purgatory but she's not done anything
#
bad but she's not done anything good and she has a vivid imagination so the devil says okay you can
#
go back and do what you want for the next month or whatever and so she bonks her way through many
#
things but you know by and large there was no storyline i'm sure this is still the case there
#
is probably no storyline man meets woman or whatever woman meets woman and they wander out
#
somewhere and they do various things but the only fans sort of thing is you know you have this
#
thing where a subscriber says i say would you do a scene which goes like xyz scripts the what have
#
you so there's this woman who's only fans i mean i will confess that i don't think this is actually
#
there is a huge gender divide over here there are far more women porn stars making a good living
#
than there are guys i wouldn't want to even figure out why but so woman in question goes out and does
#
this and you know it's much it's much more detailed in terms of so there's obviously somebody there
#
who's got this very detailed fantasy and it's much more detailed than anything which would have been
#
out in that space in the 1980s or 1990s and you know you have again the ai thing coming in you can
#
have you can dress your ai in bizarre fetish gear of all sorts of description so i think the whole
#
slicing and dicing of porn that you know i want pregnant blonde in harem costume having it off
#
with Dracula you you would actually get a lot of this and the other thing is that i think
#
uh you've had an internationalization of porn in the sense that there are Japanese porn stars
#
who are now producing stuff on only fans using ai generated translations of conversations etc etc
#
which is again i i mean fine but it's bewildering because of the categorization subcategory
#
i'm sure if you if you get onto porn hub you know there there's like three lows of of what you can
#
look for in terms of tags which in itself is so it's like the old thing they used to say that
#
if you offer somebody a choice of four jams he can make up his mind but if you offer him a choice
#
of 40 flavors of jam he's going to be confused. Porn hub is a they produce their own porn or
#
they're an aggregator. It's an interesting story you have this bunch of Canadians
#
who met in college mostly from middle eastern backgrounds Lebanese i think
#
who put this thing together. It has an EU registration because EU is easy about this.
#
Then they worked as an aggregator for a while
#
stood their way through a lot of court cases in various degrees about IP. Then they got hit by
#
by the underage thing number one and they got hit by multiple cases involving women who said they
#
had been filmed when they didn't want to be or whatever it's non-consensual. So they went through
#
a cleanup where they dumped about 80 90 percent of their content because they couldn't be sure of
#
either the the age or the provenance in terms of things. They have subsequently
#
I think restructured the platform financially in some way. You have a lot of original content
#
including amateur content but well I mean technically all of this would be amateur in
#
the sense that it's somebody who's filming in his or her bedroom and
#
they actually produce you know a fairly strong
#
statistical database of where the client where the viewers are coming from
#
and also which categories are popular. India is number four or five on that list
#
despite the fact that PondHub is banned. So a bunch of people using VPNs and
#
this is not even people using VPNs. The VPNites would show up as somewhere else. This is people
#
who are getting PondHub has these sub-domains where they change from .com to what have you.
#
So this is some youth in Meerut who's figuring it out. Meerut incidentally does a lot of porn.
#
Meerut used to be the capital of the very bad Hindi porn magazines.
#
The what were they called? Mostram etc.
#
And it has subsequently graduated to doing Desi porn. I've not been able to.
#
But like what's the revenue model? Where do they upload it? How do they make money?
#
The revenue model this is actually as far as I can figure out and I haven't really been able
#
to get a handle on this. This is actually closer to the old porn revenue model. Guy
#
basically pays a flat rate 10k, 5k whatever to the actors, takes a thing and then he markets it
#
and he sells you know videos of it to various people, sells it on to various people.
#
So it's almost old style. Then what happens is that see obviously it gets stale and various
#
people make copies of what is going on so he produces some more. But it's a very cheap model
#
in the sense that very little if anything is being paid on is being spent on the production.
#
And since the actors don't have options it also doesn't matter you know the man gets
#
2,000 views he's happy or 5,000 views he's happy and they're collecting 10 bucks, 15 bucks
#
at some stage I'm presuming some mealy mouthed revenue official will hit it like a ton of bricks
#
but Meerut has been producing porn now for about four, five years and you know
#
I cannot believe that it's flown under the radar.
#
So presumably they've either figured out some way in which they can do it without getting busted or
#
they're paying people off not to get busted. And I'm really fascinated by the analogue of this
#
with the creator economy like one trend that I've seen in the creator economy is how
#
the mainstream becomes more and more irrelevant. Creators have the means of production open to
#
them and they can do things that no gatekeeper would ever allow like 8 hour podcasts or whatever
#
the case may be and the advantage of that is that not only does the mainstream often not cater to
#
niches it doesn't even know the niches are there but individual creators can reach out and actually
#
build a market for something that wasn't even there. Like forget my long-form podcasts like
#
10 years ago like long-form podcasts are the best kind of podcasts because people like Lex Friedman
#
or Joe Rogan or whatever there are so many long-form podcasts who are doing five, six,
#
seven, eight hours today although perhaps not eight like me but you know and I see only fans
#
as an analogue to that that on the one hand you may have a mainstream which is constrained by
#
convention and its own imagination but you have creators going out there trying interesting things
#
taking you know customization demands from paying users and it's like the long tail actually
#
becoming you know a pun not intended kind of situation. Absolutely and you know it
#
broke the porn industry model and has refashioned it in this way which is
#
at least in financial terms a better deal for the creators. Again how long this will last I
#
don't know because you keep having issues where you know Visa refuses to process only fans revenues
#
or what have you so and most countries you're skating close to the law if you're making porn
#
there are very few places where it is completely legal to you know to film porn and sell it
#
that part of it is unfortunate I mean and the other thing that I figured out in that one
#
investigation if you can call it of only fans and porn hub is that you need to draw a distinction
#
between the sex worker who's even the high-end escort who is being paid to perform with the
#
total stranger who is paying versus the actor in an only uh fans sort of scenario or in a porn hub
#
scenario who is for want of a better word scripting
#
a movie I mean the script may not be terribly imaginative and it may be very narrow focus
#
with somebody who is scripting a movie and they have agency they're empowered yes and they're
#
doing it with people they do not have a problem doing it with I mean and at some level
#
the customer remains anonymous but it's not the customer who's participating in the exercise
#
some of it I simply didn't get beyond the first layer because it would have involved signing up
#
and paying for a lot of stuff you know the whole routine where many of them do this thing of okay
#
I'm doing a live show but and I have no idea how a lot of that works
#
I mean I have an idea of the financial model I have no idea how a lot of that works the
#
I think sex in general or selling sex in general is has always been cutting edge technologically
#
I mean within weeks of the Gutenberg printing press being up and running there were people
#
trying to figure out how they could you know do dirty pictures or what have you on it
#
woodcuts transfer cuts to what have you so and that trend just continues
#
imagine taking woodcuts with you to the toilet for a private moment with the so here's a question
#
for your broader question that do you think the and these two have really happened simultaneously
#
the growing the current ubiquity of porn and the easy access plus the sort of the ubiquity of
#
dating apps as well and the way men and women meet and hook up and interact with each other
#
and the fact that both of those in a sense either commoditize sex or make it transactional
#
or at least separate it out from sort of the coating process you know separate out love and
#
lust as it were and even it's always been an uneasy relationship between love and lust in any case
#
do you think that has kind of changed the way men and women relate to it
#
you know what are sort of your thoughts on the changes that you've seen
#
I'd say that somebody who grew up in this native atmosphere the 20 year old or the 25 year old
#
would probably see it as natural that fine you're looking for somebody you have this big sense of
#
what your categorization is and you go out on a dating lamp amp and bang it in or you go to
#
bang it in or you go to pond hub and you fill in the tags or whatever
#
for an earlier generation I think
#
that can possibly be a greater level of discomfort with the whole thing
#
but where I'd be interested really is figuring out what happens if you're from a
#
conservative Indian family with an arranged marriage
#
in the future or what your parents assume will be an arranged marriage in the future
#
and you've been on a dating app and so has your putative potential partners or partner
#
you'd actually probably throw in the sexual compatibility thing you know when you
#
take a look at each other in a way that you wouldn't have in an earlier generation in an
#
earlier generation your parents in that in that kind of atmosphere your parents would have decided
#
all right whatever in this the next progression was all right and can meet at some
#
you know carefully curated dinner or coffee date where they discuss stuff in my generation a couple
#
of my friends went through that particular loop and you know it was more like saying that hey you
#
know I smoke grass please don't ask me to stop smoking grass with a woman scratching her head
#
and saying okay what is grass what is grass as the case may be and now I think in that particular
#
meeting would possibly be far more transactional that do you do this this this and do I do this
#
this then this and actually the other thing here which I would like to take on board is I remember
#
talking to our mutual friend Vikram about the gay dating scene and he was the first one who
#
tipped me off to this that the fact that the LGBTQ community is far more upfront where
#
it comes to discussing what they will and will not do before they actually get into a relationship
#
which can vary from you know the base level of all right I will or will not have penetrative sex
#
two very complicated things like I will wear a Halloween costume I mean variations on
#
what Halloween costume you will wear I want to get you drunk and ask you about your kinks
#
but never mind I've been a good boy cigar smoking nuns Halloween costumes
#
the Halloween costume thing I used to know this Gujarati gent who supplied fetish costumes
#
wow yeah yeah it was it was an amazing thing in India but why would no no no no no globally
#
it was like he had a cousin who had a playboy connection as in used to supply
#
stationary or candles or whatever to playboy I'm talking again of the late 1980s early 90s
#
and cousin in question having seen playboy used to send out these catalogues of Halloween costumes
#
I mean you want Wonder Woman or you want whatever and the cousin in question being a good gujju
#
with a good business knows that I have cousin in Ahmedabad who will make this 10% cheaper
#
so you had you know a chap in Ahmedabad who didn't know didn't care you gave him a namuna
#
and you said you I want costume which looks like this he would give namuna to his master tailor
#
and cutter who would just make it and of course he was he grabbed the market because you know he
#
could undercut everybody because of the labor I have a dirty slogan for this I don't know if
#
I should say this on the show but then the costume would go from master tailor to masturbator
#
apologies to all my listeners my image has crashed in front of their eyes absolutely but
#
Ahmedabad was an amazing place actually the other thing I've always found amazing about
#
Ahmedabad was so that Patel airport had a cafeteria come bookshop which had the best
#
collection of LGBT erotica not porn and books about LGBT relationships etc that I have seen in
#
India and I'd got friendly with the father and daughter combo that ran that place this is early
#
2000s when I was in and out of Ahmedabad twice a week on a project I'd got friendly with them and
#
so I asked that how come and the thing was that
#
I'm the bud did not have a place for LGBT people to meet
#
and this was in the part of the airport where you could buy a visitor's entry ticket for 50 bucks
#
and go in so this was a good place for them to meet so you bought your entry ticket you went in
#
you stood in front of the bookshelf with the LGBT material and said Kem Cho to
#
anybody else who came along and stood in front of it
#
whatever the you know the guju equivalent of a pickup line is and you so
#
sound business principles you put together a shelf or two of LGBT literature and you know
#
thinking about it now it actually makes complete sense that LGBT people would have complete
#
honesty and openness in terms of sex and be able to be transactional about it and honest about it
#
and talk about it because for them while falling in love while falling in love because for them
#
it would not be tied up with all the social taboos and dogmas that are there in heterosexual
#
relationships and all that not talk of love shove would also not be there marriage marriage
#
would not be there I mean if it's not going to work out at that very basic level then it's
#
probably the love shove and the rest of it will not work out I think maybe for a lot of people
#
at least anecdotally I've hit the age where you know large we have a large number of divorced
#
acquaintances and you know that marriages have gone bust for random reasons but this is a fairly
#
important one the complete I mean lack of compatibility at some at the sexual level
#
which is often not in the Indian context I suspect at least in my generation
#
it was largely people being unaware even that they had a incompatibility that you know the
#
the whole thing was glossed over that achcha haan you will get married you will have children
#
the how's and where's of you will have children and one of you actually likes doing this and
#
the other doesn't or both of you don't as the case may be is something that I suspect a lot
#
of people simply didn't know about themselves until they actively you know they were married and
#
trying to do whatever and then they figured out that okay this is maybe not going to work out and
#
maybe a lot of unhappiness about this do you think the institution of marriage
#
is itself archaic at a couple of levels one level being that in India especially it can
#
be an incredibly toxic institution especially for the women I mean unless you're privileged
#
it pretty much ends the life of any woman who gets into it and and the men and women tend to be
#
trapped in roles and expectations you know which kind of get ossified and it can you know just be
#
an incredible problem as people live lives of quiet desperation to use Thoreau's phrase though
#
he didn't mean marriage specifically of course and and the other one is that once you sort of begin
#
to desegregate the many components of what was supposed to be contained in marriage whether it
#
is sex or companionship or friendship or falling in love then for a lot of reasons it may not even
#
kind of seem necessary like in today's society sure if you want to have kids and yeah maybe you
#
get married for the sake of the kids but there are two things on the checklist where you need some
#
institution like marriage not necessarily what we have at the moment this would be my opinion
#
one is the checklist on inheritance because
#
marriage is a shortcut if you're not married you actively need to make a will in order to
#
leave whatever you may process possess in the way of property etc and second in the again in
#
the Indian context this is not so applicable globally anymore you need if your kids are out
#
of wedlock and you're not living together they have an enormous problem in terms of
#
the Aadhaar listing and the
#
further calculations on inheritance etc I mean both the spouse as well as the children
#
spouse or partner as well as the children so you need in my estimate some
#
sort of shorthand or shortcut to this it doesn't necessarily have to be marriage
#
but then you've got the LGBT case up there at the moment and I think that itself forcing
#
on the supreme court to think about this is in itself useful even if the supreme court does
#
nothing about it there's an inherent absurdity here in the law a multiple murderer who's on death
#
row and likely to be executed tomorrow can choose to get married provided the partner is of the
#
opposite gender at the same time a perfectly good citizen who has never committed any crime paid all
#
his or her taxes and what have you cannot if the partner is of the same gender
#
and the justification for one is that there's a tacit acceptance that okay if you have assets
#
or property of a certain description and it isn't you know you wish to leave it to somebody
#
you should be allowed to do so which should apply even more in the other case and
#
given this country's lunacy is and the determination to try and put in a uniform civil code
#
in a place which is as diverse as India I don't know whether you'll ever actually address this
#
problem or in our lifetimes address this problem but I think yes marriage as an institution is
#
probably our cake but it is shorthand for something which you do need which is the next of kin the
#
the financial and legal implications of
#
and also like our education system I guess it's an equilibria we are stuck in it may not fit we
#
may need to reform it but we are stuck in as far as LGBT marriage is concerned you know
#
like our mutual friend Vikram at once given me a lot of dope which I wrote a column called the
#
Matunga racket which I'll link from the show notes about what used to happen when 377 was criminal
#
and gay sex was criminal and you know as recently as 15 years back you imagine that
#
if it was ever decriminalized there would be an uproar against it but on the contrary to our
#
delight when it was decriminalized most people were completely fine with it the uproar I would
#
have expected 20 years ago didn't happen which indicates that social attitudes have really
#
changed and I think at least on these margins social attitudes are kind of progressing
#
I mean that's my optimism.
#
I have a slightly different take I don't think the socially conservative Indian
#
really cares who somebody is sleeping with they care about who somebody is
#
socially associated with and their caste levels in cases of marriage and
#
inter-religious yes the inheritance and the marriage and the inter-religious thing
#
I don't think the socially conservative Indian really cares who somebody is sleeping with and
#
whether you know the gender of that person or even the caste of that person so long as on the
#
surface you are married to somebody of the opposite gender and the right religion and
#
the right caste I don't think they give a fuck the flip side of this is when people have
#
including friends of mine who have surrogate children when they've gone through the surrogacy
#
routine families have said you must make sure that the mother is of the right caste and etc etc
#
and you know so I don't know whether it's progressive or whether it's indifference but
#
yes the fact that there wasn't a lot of screaming about 377 being repealed is a good idea
#
there has been a lot of anecdotally since the people who
#
filed that case are friends of mine one of them is a colleague
#
anecdotally there has been a lot of resistance to the idea that people of the same gender can
#
get married and that boils back turns back to the inheritance factor
#
well I mean again going back to paradigms changing one funeral at a time soon may they die
#
yeah and maybe be kind of rid of this kind of opposition yeah I mean there again I mean you're
#
talking about you know the at one level in Haryana in the cup scenario if you have the same gotra as
#
someone else getting married to them is like a death sentence the cups will kill you
#
if you go into conservative Tamil society there are high castes where it is common to pass the
#
parcel in the sense that two families reside that all right we're in the on the same page in terms
#
of caste and gotra so you have one marriage then if you have a daughter from that marriage the
#
daughter from that marriage marries somebody from the mother's family often the mother's brother
#
so her mama and the concept here is that fine a party a has paid dowry in the first marriage
#
party b returns the dowry in the second marriage and this can go on for generations
#
so and of course gotra compatibilities etc at some stage it's obviously not important in that
#
particular hesab or it has been sorted in the first stage and you have a lot of tribal communities
#
where which are nominally at least some of them are nominally hindu where i don't think this
#
concept the concept of marriage as we see it in the
#
in the north indian conservative society isn't really the same
#
meghalaya large proportions of the tribe's inheritance of the youngest daughter is the
#
primary inheritor of property kind of thing and i mean it's common enough for
#
khasi children to take their mother's name as their surname which would be unheard of in
#
in and if you're going to look at this diversity i'm pretty sure that
#
you know a lot of communities might not might really not care which is fine that's
#
the ultimate liberalism if you like you don't care how somebody else is living their life so
#
long as they do it you know with consent and without bothering you for the others i think
#
there there would be yeah whether it's a legacy or whatever marriage is something everybody
#
understands i mean i i've seen bizarreness one of my friends in calcutta been divorced for several
#
years police suddenly landed up at his place with an arrest warrant for his ex-wife because
#
that was the last known address kind of thing so what was the loop she was supposed she'd
#
supposedly kidnapped a couple of kids given that you know this and she actually makes noodles for
#
a living given that she had she isn't a career kidnapper loop was that the kids in question
#
were the children of a divorce where father did not have custody rights
#
however he had cunningly picked up both the kids and he was in a relationship with this
#
lady and the cops could not file kidnap charges against the father because brain
#
head explodes at the thought of but so they filed it against her
#
so you have absurdities like this one of my cousins who is a school mom says that over the
#
last 10 to 15 years they have actually started dealing with this sort of situation where
#
you know you've had a acrimonious divorce where one parent is not allowed
#
to even see the children or can only see them in a supervised situation kind of thing and
#
they've had to deal with that but the point is that people understand marriage they understand
#
divorce they understand inheritance via this so if you're chucking it out you have actually have
#
to put a whole new system which may well be better i'm not i mean i it could well be better
#
but you actually have to put in a new system there's a classic example of india inhabiting
#
many centuries at the same time the gotra compatibility of the 19th century and the
#
halloween costume of the 21st century yeah and long may the halloween costume live though
#
well people have i've been to a not a halloween but a holy party evening where everybody was
#
stoned on bhang where people were wearing such outfits and i was told that you should
#
come as a pirate and i said fuck off but your great-grandfather was a river pirate yes but
#
it's your heritage it's your sanskar yeah but my great-grandfather wore a dhoti while being a
#
liver pilot so you should wear a dhoti and say i've come as a pirate but you know there were a
#
lot of people there who were wearing ridiculous things i mean if nothing is ridiculous if turns
#
them on that is absolutely fine but you know they were wearing absurd costumes so i guess holy and
#
halloween have yeah holy wean holy wean costumes holy wean costumes and i'm sure that if you look
#
for it now uh in fact i will make a note of this i must try to figure out how much in the way of
#
fetish costumes you can buy in india or amazon i'm sure yeah really must be be kinky don't be
#
thinking let's uh let's go back to talking about your life i give me now a sort of a
#
chronological sense of where are you and what are you doing because what i have learned is that
#
in your teens you're playing a lot of chess and at some point you're traveling through europe and
#
continuing the sexual awakening that began in manipur when you hit puberty but quite apart from
#
the question of sexual awakenings like what are the subjects you're really interested in what are
#
you thinking of doing as a living you you know you were a shippee for a while how did you get
#
into that how did you meander your way out of that into journalism you give me a you know that that
#
kind of narrative it's an inherently fucked up profession you tend to have long periods when
#
you don't have a contract why did you become a shippee though like what were the options in
#
front of you and why did you say no i want to do sailing i mean so far as i thought about it
#
it was basically quick money and for a young man easy money and i like the thought of seeing exotic
#
places there are long periods it's a very cyclical industry there are long periods when things go for
#
a toss so one of the one of my semi-skills was the ability to
#
fiddle with programming and figure out how computers work
#
this had very little to do with shipping but so
#
also because of the long layoffs etc at various points of time i had studied various subjects
#
so now early 90s i was playing a tournament in puna and bumped into a friend of mine who
#
is a was a stockbroker and investment banker later who said vaguely that i remember you used
#
to be okay with computers so i said yeah what where so his company had just bought a shitload
#
of what at that time was high highly expensive high-end computers and trading and financial
#
analysis programs and they didn't have a clue about how to run this stuff or to make sense of it
#
or to integrate it with indian data as was available there
#
yeah so this is just before the harshad bhai boom took off etc i was at a loose end i
#
went in i figured out how to reverse engineer these programs to the point where
#
you were getting cyclostyle data from the stock exchanges but typists could type that in and
#
you could basically run these programs and get some sort of results along the way i figured out
#
that i can write coherent sentences i had off and on been writing about travel and chess and
#
stuff like that from the early 80s so 92 93ish there were firangis getting into the game trying
#
to get into the indian market everybody was writing reports most of the people who were
#
writing reports couldn't string two coherent sentences together so i moved up the ladder
#
to somebody who was writing reports then around 96 somebody i was very close to was in delhi
#
was in the process of dying of cancer so i was looking for some reason to be in delhi at this
#
point tony joseph who had carried some stuff that i'd written offered me a job so i took the job
#
this was a business world this was a business standard oh he was he was handling both at that
#
point of time i was also writing for bw world basically this was a business standard
#
standard so i ended up being a full-time journalist for a couple of years after which
#
when shit started hitting the fan in the media business i went freelance but i
#
i continue to write for business standard and to do a certain amount of work for a couple of other
#
uh journalistic setups though for a couple of trade magazines in the finance and infrastructure
#
space telecom and infrastructure financing etc and once in a while i used to edit manuscripts
#
essentially you could call me an expert editor of a certain kind of manuscript meaning non-fiction
#
popular economics investment that kind of stuff
#
um so i've done quite a few of these then about a year and a half ago two years ago
#
juggernaut cheeky offered me a regular gig doing this so i'm i mean i'm doing it in a more
#
regular fashion now which is also meant to
#
insights into other things about the publishing industry which i frankly didn't know
#
you know its processes how it tends to work where its pain points are if you like and
#
i mean height bound is a word which comes straight out of publishing and
#
the industry has a huge problem there but uh tell me about it
#
it's not been able to capitalize on the digitization of all these processes and the
#
fact that you know you can deliver any manuscript turn it around in a couple of days
#
is as a result of which amazon has eaten its lunch and the ridiculous thing here is that
#
books are a huge branding thing for amazon and amazon is a monopolist where it comes to
#
ebooks but it's a tiny fraction of the turnover so they don't even care about it
#
and these guys the domain experts the publishing houses have never been able to make sense of the
#
business or to put it together in a way where they could potentially challenge amazon even though
#
there's an obvious opportunity there um there's several obvious opportunities there the other
#
thing is you you've had a serious problem in the sense that you've had say for example someone
#
like colin hoover who's sold more books than uh stephen king and sydney sheldon combined
#
and was was self-published until book three or book five or whatever and was basically a
#
middle-aged housewife who lives in a small town in texas and writes
#
you know why my romance is i mean i've got nothing against her she's not not a terrible
#
writer or anything like that but yeah so she managed to build a brand all on her own which
#
went mega i can't think of a single publisher anywhere in the world who has managed to do that
#
for any author which means that to my mind it means that you have a huge problem in terms of
#
publishers not getting the medium if you've had ebooks around for 20 years
#
approximately you've seen amazon eat your lunch breakfast dinner
#
you've seen who was not the only one there are others who have managed to do things like this
#
but mostly in niche areas there are a few science fiction guys there are a few romance
#
types what have you you don't have a single mainstream publisher who has managed to
#
write the medium build either an individual brand or to challenge amazon
#
in terms of produce a provide a better platform and provide an alternate to the kindle etc
#
and as a result you're still stuck in a business where a whole pile of these guys are
#
you know you're printing a physical edition hoping taking on those enormous extra overheads
#
involved in printing a physical edition i mean what does an e edition cost in if you remove the
#
fact that you have to typeset send it out for pages and then push it out into a physical
#
distribution system which is crazy and where your returns come in dribs and rubs over a period of
#
months that instead of that none of them have been able to use the
#
ebook advantage couple of questions you said there are obvious opportunities have missed
#
what are those what are they specifically missing like what are publishers doing wrong and
#
that others are doing right and also is ebooks a whole game because i remember vaguely when i did
#
an old episode one of my favorite episodes in fact with kartika on publishing she pointed out
#
that look ebook sales kind of plateaued at a particular point in time we thought they'll
#
take over the world they didn't it's still printed books which are you know getting the job done
#
so what are the obvious opportunities that the publishers are missing and you know you know what
#
can they do differently and you are now a publisher yourself so what stops you with me personally
#
it's beyond my pay grade sure and i don't i mean i lack both the expertise at
#
the nuts and bolts of these processes as well as the interest to you know chase it down and get
#
going in terms of opportunities they missed
#
it isn't just that ebooks have plateaued amazon is also your go-to distributor for physical books
#
i mean you are probably seeing amazon as one single channel plus
#
you know your 20 retail outlets when you're selling a book
#
retail outlets when you're selling a book
#
you haven't been able to do that particular thing whatever that involves which is
#
also to take over your own physical book distribution i mean you haven't been able to
#
to even put together an industry-wide initiative where you're
#
looking i mean if you talk to any publisher they will complain about amazon
#
about different aspects of the amazon thing you haven't been able to put together a
#
an aggregator where you talk to let's say a consortium of five publishers who decide that
#
okay fine we'll put together a physical distribution system as the case may be
#
and i think part of what kartika is saying is with the greatest of respect
#
because she's amazing and she knows a lot more about the industry than i do
#
but i think part of it is a tail wagging the doll thing ebooks have plateaued at a certain point
#
because publishers have not been able to push the distribution part of it may be a legacy issue in
#
that maybe people like not you and me but a lot of people our age who are readers prefer a physical
#
book i don't know for my part me personally unless it is a graphic novel i would much prefer the
#
kindle version or i mean or i'm going on a trip where i know that i will have connectivity and
#
power issues or something i always right now i mean i've got a physical chess magazine with me
#
it's in the bag because at some stage i might be on a flight on the metro and i will read it without
#
you know having to worry about can i get on the internet i haven't seen a chess magazine since
#
early 90s you must show this to me after our recording yeah yeah this is new in chess which
#
is and i mean but you get it in india yeah but i mean i i have one of those digital plus physical
#
subscriptions and i i mean basically i hit the digital far more than the physical if that makes
#
sense isn't a physical chess magazine incredibly outdated because i mean you can't click on shit
#
and go further and blah blah blah yeah and that's that is true to an extent but
#
then again this is for guys like me who don't have a problem reading a game and i mean the
#
pleasure of browsing and holding it in your hand i mean the browsing of physical places where
#
i don't necessarily have the net and where i mean i don't have a problem seeing i mean blind reading
#
again so i'm comfortable with that but it is a digital plus physical edition so i mean i also
#
have it on my mobile and i mean i can access it and what i tend to do is download sections and
#
use the analytical tools and let it go but yeah i mean i also
#
carry a magazine in this and you know i would carry a book i would carry a magazine
#
if i'm wandering around in places where net access may not be convenient or
#
i can't get on the Kindle for whatever reasons but per se my preference except with a graphic novel
#
would tend to be an any format rather than a it is so much easier even if you're
#
or you just want to bookmark a sentence which you will think about later it is so much easier
#
if it's any format but there are also issues here in the sense that they haven't been able to push
#
the publishers have not been able to push mainstream media
#
to review books more often apart from a very few old-time
#
newspapers and magazines which have book review sections practically speaking
#
mainstream media does not cover books there are very few outlets where mainstream media does
#
serious book reviews etc you have a bloggers and goodreads ecosystem
#
which is in many respects just plain poisonous really yeah what tends to happen on goodreads is
#
either you have the author trying to game the system by getting friends and whatnot to
#
come up with good reviews or you have somebody who hates the author trying to poison the system by
#
coming up with bad reviews so again these are channels which i think publishers in general
#
have not been able to understand the medium because if you don't understand the medium here
#
you cannot make the medium work for you they have actually got into this game of
#
looking for bloggers and influencers but there again you need to be less hit and miss
#
it's comparatively easier if you're handling non-fiction of a certain description because
#
you will find influencer bloggers who are in that bandwidth
#
but if you're talking about fiction you very frequently just end up with
#
you know the five people on goodreads who would necessarily look at the book and
#
who are not necessarily very incisive or perceptive they're just very high volume
#
this is me talking as an industry newbie but and a reader and a reader yes i mean
#
but as a reader these are not considerations which i had come thought my way through
#
and you know like to take the obvious analogy i mean i've been listening to music since forever
#
and i've heard 78 records i've heard 33 and one-third records i've listened to cassettes
#
i've listened to digital music of sundry description i've never really thought about
#
about you know what constraints the medium imposes and how you can handle that
#
and of course music has also had to handle that disruption and you know the napster kind of
#
blew away phenomenon and well it seems to have survived now i'm not an industry insider i don't
#
know how exactly it has survived but i know a few musicians including who seem to be reasonably
#
happy about the way the industry is now proceeding and i think that there are holes in the way
#
publishing works quite seriously i should tell our listeners that when dd said including his
#
thumb was towards the booth where our friend omurto hush is sort of sitting and looking over
#
the recording fine musician i shall from the show notes i'll link to omurto spotify page or
#
whatever you want me to link to kindly check it out and the thing with music what i sort of hear
#
from people is that the the changed imperatives is forcing a new kind of music in the sense that
#
and an episode i did with him once told me that spotify starts paying musicians after 30 seconds
#
are heard that is a minimum so there was some beetles cover band that covered every beetle
#
songs in 35 seconds because they just wanted to hit that mark similarly all the mainstream labels
#
will now put pressure on their artists that i don't care what the song is but i need that 15
#
second hook that can go on instagram reels or tiktok or whatever these incentives take you in
#
a bad direction but a better direction could perhaps be that musicians like creators i guess
#
can build audiences of their own on youtube do live streams do whatever but i mean i don't know
#
how the ecosystem works all i'm saying is that from the outside and from the few musicians i
#
do know i mean i'm friendly with the indian ocean gang for example but they seem to be comfortable
#
or they seem to maybe musicians had more agency as creators anyway and maybe they
#
adapted faster to it because inherently music has always been forced to use technology
#
in a way that publishing did not for many years i just feel optimistic that creators of all sorts
#
will always get by including writers but publishers as intermediate the intermediaries
#
keep changing and they need to adapt to changing times and publishing should really
#
disrupt itself if it cannot i think it will end up having to disrupt itself because
#
what it has done is made organic changes when it's been forced on publishing in the sense that yes
#
every book pretty much will have any addition kind of because of the i mean for the obvious
#
reasons but i don't think they have realized how to do this and look the process differences are
#
just plain stock as in to edit a book and turn it around in the digital version
#
takes maybe a third of the time that it takes or maybe a fourth of the time that it takes for you to
#
print a paper copy and get that out through your channels to you know the ultimate reader
#
from the point at which an author submits a manuscript to the point at which you can buy the
#
book at the airport let's say is a solid one and a half two month period which
#
is imposed by physical constraints i mean it's not that the industry is working inefficiently
#
it's simply that that process is inefficient beyond that point and
#
like i said i think there is a tail wagging the dog effect here if ebook sales are plateaued
#
publishers don't know how to drag people from one format into the other or to
#
simply do it for all you know all it would take would be for you to
#
start selling your ebooks at a 50% discount i don't know Michael Crickton had a great phrase
#
for this tail wagging the dog effect and he called it wet streets cause rain you know when the
#
causation is the other way around so what you're saying is it's not that publishers are not doing
#
ebooks because ebooks don't sell but on the other hand they haven't put enough into selling ebooks
#
and if they did perhaps you know that would be a bigger way forward but i'm a newbie to the
#
industry and i don't necessarily understand it well enough to make this judgment call i'm telling
#
you today it's time for you to be an entrepreneur i want my next episode with you to be four years
#
later when you told me how you sold your publishing startup for a billion dollars
#
totally waiting for that let's talk about the other thing for which you are almost legendary
#
in our common circles which is investing you know how did you and you're a quant i believe
#
so i'll ask you to explain how you got into investing your philosophy towards investing
#
how your journey has been through the years i've had my ups and downs i am a quant in the sense
#
that i would follow the data and the numbers far more than the human beings in the indian context
#
which is essentially where i have focused most of the time you cannot be an honest business man
#
the environment is so fucked up in terms of legal and regulatory compliances and deliberately
#
fucked up it's um you have a bunch of corrupt people making complicated laws
#
in order to trip up businesses in order to force businesses to come up with
#
money under the table if you have to come up with money under the table you have to be
#
dishonest yourself in the way you run your business i once did a youtube video on how
#
to generate black money um so it's still there we'll link it i have no idea you must find it
#
for one of those 10x things anyways it was it was a long time ago there are other methods of
#
doing this now but anyway so we must do a new video so a lot of people will go through this
#
bullshit about you must look for honest and competent managements competent managements
#
yes honest in the indian context there isn't they don't exist second
#
if the numbers don't make sense to you you probably should not be buying a company
#
third your investment needs are different buckets you have some long-term needs and goals and what
#
have you which is realistically different from trying to talk around a 30 return in two months
#
and it's okay to be doing both but you need to keep them separate in your heads that this is
#
my long-term bucket this is my you can have a long-term bucket which is all right if i live
#
to 80 i will need money you can have a second long-term bucket which is there is this kid i
#
have to send to college so i will need 50 lakh or a crore or whatever on this specific date
#
or at this specific time i'll say in 27 2027 or something i will need this money for
#
the next three years over the next three years and you have
#
other long-term needs which is at some stage you will want to buy a house or a car or something
#
and you want mad money for that specific purpose so these are completely different from
#
each other in the way ways in which you would structure investments or the kinds of investments
#
you look at and they're also completely different from trading there's a technology has made a
#
difference to the way i would trade 25 years ago i would get into arbitrage type trades that there
#
is a problem where i could potentially make you know one percent return in a one day period kind
#
of thing those opportunities don't exist anymore the computers have taken them out of the game
#
you have some trends in the market which are pretty common in terms of industry cycles
#
you have other trends in the market which are behaviorally common as in
#
there are periods when ipos do well and there are periods when ipos do badly
#
and if you can identify those things you can
#
make a reasonable return one of the very very key questions for a guy like me and this is
#
also because as far as i'm concerned investment is the same as betting on a horse race or
#
in a casino even on my ability as a chess player or while playing bridge the risk of ruin and the
#
amount of money you can risk of ruin meaning how fast can you run through your entire corpus
#
and the amount of money you can afford to lose on a certain transaction are the two things you
#
really need to work out before you get into investing and trading if you're not going to
#
be comfortable say if you invest in the indian stock market right now it's doing well it's
#
at a near top you're going to have a lot of volatility through december to april may because
#
elections you have a fair chance that the market could crash if the electoral results are not
#
on the other hand if the market does crash you'll have a wonderful opportunity in the sense that
#
the economic conditions will not necessarily get any worse can you
#
stomach that risk you can or you can't but most people will not even ask themselves this question
#
they will go through shitting bricks in april and may if the market is swinging by large amounts
#
you need to ask yourself that question how much money am i prepared to lose before you actually
#
get into a trade which comes to the other thing that this is my cutoff point if i hit it
#
i will shrug and walk away i'll cut my losses and walk away it may be a
#
it may be an error you might look in the jv mirror later and say that fuck i made a mistake i should
#
have hung in there but if that is your if you have a pain point that you know this is where i will
#
really start hurting you need to have decided that before the before the
#
situation arises this is an easy known knowns and known unknowns sort of situation but
#
there are all sorts of i mean you need to ask this question every time you're getting into a
#
transaction whether it's long term or short term that are you how much money are you prepared to
#
lose i had once done an episode with our mutual friend moit satyanandan investing in poker he
#
spoke about investing i spoke about poker the commonalities and i have zero memory of the
#
specific things that we spoke about there but you know what is certainly true of poker is that a lot
#
of really good players get completely screwed over because they haven't done bankroll management
#
that you absolutely have to know you know what amount of money or you know what's your stop loss
#
how much are you investing and they just don't do that and also you know all of those psychological
#
things throwing good money after bad and you know there's a saying about a particular poker
#
player where they would say that what was he saying he shits like an elephant and eats like a mouse
#
something like that the idea being that you know when when you're losing you lose a lot you drop
#
a lot of money when you're winning you quickly just want to you know run away and all of that
#
so all these kind of human cognitive tendencies this is true for rubber bridge players as well
#
there are a whole pile of them who on the days when they're playing badly will put a lot more
#
in the way of money on the table and who will cut their winnings and run away when they are playing
#
well or when they have a good thing happening so yeah that that risk of ruin thing is
#
i think is critically important because that is really something people don't think about
#
and you see that is for a long-term investor
#
um there are other considerations involved perhaps you know that
#
you know if you buy into a company like hindustan levers hindustan unilever you're never going to
#
end up losing huge sums of money what you may not get is a return which beats inflation on a
#
uh long-term basis that's more difficult to calculate i mean as in it's an opportunity
#
cost which you may not realize that this company has given me four and a half percent
#
annualized where inflation has actually been six percent and just so you're just losing money a
#
little slower than you would in a savings account basically yes you're losing money but it's sort
#
of draining slowly um that's more of if you're getting into you know some i i did this exercise
#
about three four months ago
#
i don't know whether this is okay but i own both paytm and ntpc
#
one is a utility which supplies you know 50 percent of india's power it has very very
#
predictable returns the other is you know what it is and both i had bought sequentially at
#
what i thought were fairly low levels and i made as it happens i've made money on both
#
i was checking at that point of time ntpc had a return of about 20 percent in a 12 month period
#
ptm had a return of about 23 24 percent in that same period however ntpc at its
#
worst when it got hit by a lot of people selling was down about 15 percent max the drawdown
#
ptm's max drawdown was around 50 percent so you need to be capable of treating these two
#
stocks differently even if you're holding them for long term in the hopes of long term returns
#
that find i mean your chances of going bust in ntpc is almost zero you will at worst land up with a
#
situation where you're not keeping in luck your chance of going bust in paytm is pretty high but
#
you might conceivably get a three x or a five x return if you bought it at the right moment
#
it's really how you think about variance that comes into play yeah variance yeah how you think
#
about variance and volatility or call it what you will see doing the analysis is not very difficult
#
you're not i'm not using particularly fancy statistical tools or whatever i don't think
#
it makes sense to try and fine tune this sort of operation beyond the point
#
but you've got to ask yourself the questions and you've got to be prepared to look at the
#
possibility that you could be wrong that for a lot of people is very difficult what has this
#
journey revealed to you about character about your character about i don't like
#
working fixed hours i don't like being given orders
#
i get bored very easily
#
and by and large i've looked for ways in which i can support myself without having to worry about
#
somebody else's opinion on me i mean if you're going to join general electric g and get to the
#
top you have to be worried about your boss and then the board and what have you's opinion of you
#
i would find that almost impossible to handle psychologically i get bored easily
#
i ages ago i dated a shrink and she was curious so she made me take this test
#
apparently i have something this is for asperger apparently it's i think it's 50
#
markers and i have 47 of them oh my god i would not have put you down for that yes
#
so whatever for whatever that is worth so i guess the inability to
#
interact with people on a long-term basis on a daily long-term basis is part of that
#
particular thing and i can't read
#
human beings brilliantly i mean i can't i wouldn't even be able to tell on a daily
#
basis whether my boss is pleased with me or not you know assuming i was in a boss
#
relationship so i've always tried to avoid being in those situations apart from that lack of ambition
#
i like being in high tension dangerous situations but i like knowing i have a
#
bolt hole let me put it this way i've been in iran during the iran iraq war i've been in sri
#
lanka while the ipkf thing was going out and i grew up in calcutta and monipur at a time when
#
things were absolutely crazy so at a certain level i'm very comfortable with those situations
#
and like is obviously the wrong word to use but i'm comfortable handling those situations
#
but i like knowing that i have a bolt hole that i can get out of here and go somewhere and
#
you know just chill out without having to worry about somebody shooting at me or whatever the
#
case may be two of the urban legends about you are one that you have been in prison in 13 countries
#
or 14 countries and two that you have played chess naked with tukman bashi is there any truth
#
to any of these can you elaborate if there is certainly not the second i've been in lockup in
#
a lot of places and i'd rather not elaborate on that how many places it depends on it depends on
#
how you categorize the soviet union let let me put it that way but i've been in lockup in a lot
#
of places in jail as in you haven't done time i haven't done time no okay how glamorous but
#
still lockup is also fun anything funky and interesting that you can reveal having a translator
#
who phrased who started every question being asked by the cops
#
with you are a citizen citizen of a friendly peace-loving socialist republic
#
obviously the cops thought i was you know very high on something because he would say this and i
#
would sort of crack up and then answer the question that followed that friendly peace-loving
#
democratic something socialist republic i mean he was quoting you know the constitutional
#
india is a sovereign what have you with all the belts
#
so that that was hilarious then
#
what nothing really i mean random brawls here and there and you know random brawls being drunk being
#
one time i wasn't arrested this is in mumbai so it's not particularly here
#
there was this guy charles sobraj he had escaped and he was floating around so
#
that'll place the year for you it was india recaptured him yeah and
#
uh i'd gone to visit a friend who's uh i was hoping to hop into bed with her but she wasn't
#
interested uh so it was late at night and i had basically hit one of those
#
um cd hotels and the cops raided it
#
i think and i had told the you know the reception at the hotel etc that no i am really interested
#
in you know sleeping the next four hours i'm not looking for any action or what have you and they
#
thought okay the man is crazy for but i mean eccentric whatever and given me a room
#
sent a woman along and i had said you know thank you but no thank you and then it was raided
#
and so bang bang bang at three o'clock in the morning or two o'clock in the morning
#
seeing what the fuck is going on polo police etc etc they should have arrested you for being alone
#
yeah the guy on the desk was with the cops the cops were staring at me that he is actually
#
alone and the guy was saying everybody else along the corridor was random women in various
#
stages of unrest and random men in various stages of unrest all trying to offer bribes
#
bribes to anyone and me saying that you know like can i go go back to sleep the cops obviously
#
thought i was the ultimate pervert yeah yeah so you didn't get arrested no i mean what you're
#
supposed to do i would not i mean obviously i would not be prepared to pay money to
#
get out of the situation there were many sages and such like who were very much more yeah and
#
the thing that there was that you know the cops were they were seriously surprised
#
this was the first yes why would somebody be in this hotel and later i discovered that
#
they'd use sobraj as an excuse to raid every such joint in an extort yeah yeah one of my
#
favorite quotes is by annie dillard where she says how we spend our days is how we spend our lives
#
and i want to ask you about that in terms of how has number one how has how you spend your days
#
changed over the years to what you do now and number two what is a perfect day for you then
#
because i guess i guess at this point we both you know kind of know the truth of this how we spend
#
our days is how we spend our lives so it really does matter so what is that sort of ideal day
#
for you and how has it changed over the years and i guess in a sense this is also a question
#
about notions of happiness and how we want to live and what what we want and why we want it
#
let me try and define it in terms of negatives i do not like housework
#
i do not like being bored which leads to the fact that i like having a fair amount of reading
#
material an internet connection
#
and hopefully a few animals cats as you know around to take care of the boredom aspects
#
not crazy about food but i like good food so good food is an interesting
#
not being under crazy work pressure so able to structure my days so that if i want to take a
#
break and play a few deals or bridge or play some blitz chess or whatever i can do so
#
so so those things would also check in on the loop i like going for walks
#
i like okay this is a fetish i like
#
doing a workout not a very heavy workout but usually a workout with kettlebells
#
while watching videos about mats why is it a fetish does it turn you on
#
no but you know most people seem to i mean consider this very weird
#
not the fact that i would work out nor the fact that i would watch a maths video but the fact
#
that i would watch maths videos i don't mean i don't do maths in the sense of you know i'm
#
not trying to pass an exam so it's not like i.r.t entrance exam but some entertaining math video
#
huh some math related video which is or maybe a science related video is it a case of neurons
#
that fire together wire together that you have to do these two together like can you work out
#
without watching math videos oh yes oh yes and i do watch without necessarily working out
#
particularly pleasurable yeah i find it particularly pleasurable so yeah i've been
#
told that this is not normal no it's charming why is it not normal i mean whatever whatever gets
#
here yeah i mean yeah so that so i you know which again means the internet and something which is
#
let's say mentally engaging let me put it that way and as it happens i like a lot of science and
#
maths videos i find them more entirely engaging than you know political stuff or what have you
#
so yeah i would also in this sense i'm a strongly indian guy i would also watch
#
a fair amount of music on youtube in fact i would tend to have music playing in the background
#
more or less the whole day and i would yeah i would and those would be my my normal normals
#
and human beings don't seem to feature very heavily in this that's what i'm wondering i
#
mean there are people i know who would be quite upset with not being named to begin with
#
yeah i guess solitude is part of the i mean i enjoy interacting with a lot of people but
#
it isn't it isn't mandatory for me to enjoy my time one of the most wonderful times in my life
#
was many of the times i look back to with pleasure is when i've been on the road on my own
#
hmm so i actively enjoy uh my own company for want of a better word
#
and which can of course be a high risk thing in the sense that you know when you get into
#
trouble there isn't anyone to pull you out and the rest of it but i do spend a fair amount of time on
#
my i like my socialization and socializing to be segmented i like to not socialize for more than
#
maybe two three days days in a week and i find it very difficult to handle
#
you know the large party where you have to hang around i don't i don't mind going to a
#
large party saying hi hello and pushing away pushing off you know you know have one rink and
#
and wish whoever and push off that's fine but the large party where you have to hang around
#
for a long period is can get very tedious so i'm good with as you know with long one-on-one
#
conversations i'm perfectly happy with and what else would i see as enhancing i like traveling
#
without uh being nuts about it i like traveling and i appreciate luxury when i can afford it
#
and i mean without without being nuts about it so
#
yeah so good book music decent food pets a certain amount of physical activity
#
a certain amount of mental
#
concentration and whatever it's a good way to spend a day and it's a great way to spend a life
#
very few spam phone calls
#
the fewer the spam phone calls the better that way i'm a huge advocate for texting rather than
#
calling i cannot stand the whole thing of you know the the mad pointless phone call
#
well lucky you for having your own company which you said you enjoy so much and i'm really glad
#
that you spent so many hours with me i'll sort of end your audio in the studio with a like a
#
final man you know question obligatory question i ask all my guests which is for me and my listeners
#
recommend books films music that you absolutely love and you feel you know everyone should watch
#
i mean you could start with whatever your favorite math video channels are or the music
#
you like to listen to all day but just apart from that anything that's meant something to you
#
over your life among recent reads i've been recommending
#
this professor sarah hart she's she wrote a book called once upon a prime fairly recently which is
#
is the connections between maths and literature so things like everything from people who have
#
deliberately written mathematically constrained stuff as in not the letter don't have the letter
#
e kind of thing as well as the obvious the poems and i mean the structure of
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yet to people who used a fair amount of maths or math based concepts in their
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books which includes people like melville and edgar lenpo who did a lot
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of stories which involve cryptography and also the treatment of mathematicians in
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in fiction moriarty professor moriarty at one end and
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the curious incident of the dog where you got a asperger's kind of asperger's kind of kid yeah
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and things like the gentleman in moscow where the time series of each event is
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is a fibonacci golden ratio sort of thing so it's a very it's a delightfully written book as well
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as being fairly deep in its conceptual thought processes so i thought it was charming in many
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ways books people should read no no stuff that you've loved the shoot area can take us into oh
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this is worthy and you must read it for your identification not that but it's just stuff that
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you love fantasy jemisin she's extraordinarily good i would have recommended acilla leguin except
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that you know so mainstream that you don't even want to go there i mean she's brilliant she was
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utterly brilliant but uh then among modern
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a lot of my reading is unfortunately subjects which are so geeky that
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one hesitates to recommend no no please do what it's about you whatever you love
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terribly difficult difficult question
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and this is this coupled to a documentary i watched on youtube i don't know whether it's
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there anymore i was read recently reading antony beaver on the spanish civil war
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and there is this multi-part or was this multi-part documentary on the spanish civil war done by
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tems tv back in the 80s which was quite extraordinary i mean again this sort of thing
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somebody puts it up on youtube then you have a complaint about copyright so it may have disappeared
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but would be well worth it uh i have a plebeian taste so i really enjoyed uh the sandman adaption
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first season that i saw i can't even remember whether it was amazon drive or netflix but i
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really enjoyed it again i as graphic novels go i thought that sequence 12 books or 14 books or
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whatever it's it's extraordinary michael tyles autobiography which is hysterically funny at a
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lot of levels because he was obviously a crazy man i mean he has stories about i don't know
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trying to pull a hippopotamus out of us working out a mathematical problem i was
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trying to pull a hippopotamus out of us out of a swamp while actually playing in a critical game
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so he was he'd just seen this problem before he sat down to play it was one of those physics
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things that there's a five ton animal which is stuck in a swamp and you have a winch and a
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and gear and how will you pull it out so he's just trying to work this out like what when
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he is thinking i'm making tal think and tal is thinking about hippopotamus
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when he realized he was short of time because of all this and he said that well i thought let it
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drown focused on playing the game and one and sure enough everybody said that you know he was in deep
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thought kind of thing so uh yeah so his autobiography is in itself quite extraordinary
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quite i mean it's entertaining in many ways
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who else what else do i like just what's the last film that made you cry
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you don't cry i cry but not necessarily at the movies the last couple of movies i watched which
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i really liked were both science section dune i like the first thing i like the
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uh remake of androids dream of electric sheet blade runner 2049 2049 extraordinary
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extraordinary visuals um so um cry no neither of them uh cryable movies in that sense but
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actually if i'd thought about it i would probably have come up with a less random set of
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choices random is good whatever comes into your head or you send me a list later i'll put that in
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i think uh sreenath ragavan's book on india in the second world war india's war which was
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extraordinary because it shows you how india's global influence
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collapsed after the british left and india started thinking of itself as a
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a nation country rather than the brits thinking of india as this
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arm this battleship which could control everything from the north african northwest africa through
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i mean first and second world war indian troops fought in you know every theater practically
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speaking including really bizarre ones the indians have actually fought on the same size
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side as the japanese against the germans in the first world war and this is in the bismarck sea
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in in the pacific where a joint indo-japanese expedition took over german possessions in that
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area so uh all the way from there to all of africa to italy to france
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to places like azerbaijan where you again you don't think about
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about indian soldiers having been involved there and iran of course so that and the
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drivers of that war sreenath is a truly extraordinary writer and
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this is and thinker so i i mean that is a book i would recommend i would recommend
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anything written by him but that is magisterial because i don't think anybody else has done a
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book with that sort of scope on that particular subject if you had to write one book what would
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not sure because i have i have too much of a
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attention span problem perhaps i would probably keep wanting to switch subjects
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i might end up writing several books one way or the other if i can sit down and think my way through
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them but the subjects would also vary i would love to do a book on corruption for example and i don't
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mean uh specific incidents of corruption those would feature of course but uh corruption as a
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as a way of life as as something that drives empires if you get what i mean
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that would be a subject worth writing on i'd probably like to write a book at some stage about
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um people have professional mathematicians have done this kind of thing how a mathematician looks
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at the world which is not where i'm coming from i'm saying that uh the kind of joy you get
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if you have a certain kind of mathematical mind or not necessarily a very deep one but
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something where uh you see situations and you realize that they are amenable to
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mathematical analysis if that makes sense actually everything is amenable to of course
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the world is probabilistic so yeah of course but uh you know that uh you actually have a situation
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which can be abstracted for a mathematical analysis and particularly the ones which
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are in apparently intractable like you know the the game theoretic looks at
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things like will north korea drop a bomb on south korea uh is
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i mean i would not want north korea to drop a bomb on south korea i'm just saying that
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it's the kind of situation where it gives me a huge charge to realize that you can actually
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analyze this in mathematical terms right or wrong that you can actually look at this and say that
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you know i think reform in india the half completed was actually happened because for
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a while you had a coalition government which didn't know whether it would last
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uh so it was looking at the value of the discretionary powers it had
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individuals in that government they were sort of saying that well okay the net
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present value of my discretionary powers since i'm not going to last five years
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works out to so much and then finding a way of getting that cash under the table
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while freeing up the sector concerned which is i suppose not the way in which it happened i'm
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pretty sure that none of the people involved actually did a net present value analysis in
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those terms but i suspect a very large proportion of reform in india has happened because of that
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because there is somebody insecure who thinks he or she will not be in a position of power
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tomorrow and is trying to cash in today in a smart way
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that's fascinating i mean i sometimes wonder about if you're in the finance ministry
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you could make so much money on the stock markets because you know in advance
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big announcements which are happening you do i mean that is one of the things which
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i'm pretty sure has happened yeah has happened multiple times on that note dd thank you so much
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this has been an incredible day so thanks so much
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if you enjoyed listening to this episode check out the show notes enter rabbit holes at will
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