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On this show I often talk about how deeply complex this world is. One rational response
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to it is not to try to figure stuff out. We can never know enough to fully understand
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the world and we will never have the power to really change things. So why not then focus
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on our own selves, play the harmonia, optimize for our self-interest, sharpen the skills
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we have, give ourselves and our loved ones all the material comforts of the world. If
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you never aim high you can't fall far. But here's the thing, the world is changed by
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those who refuse to do this. They step out of their narrow paths and try to make a difference
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even when they are swimming against the tide. Now you don't have to do this. It is rational
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to avoid conflict. Why try to make a difference when it's so hard to make a difference and
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be so high. And yet people do try. Welcome to The Scene and The Unseen, our weekly podcast
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on economics, politics and behavioral science. Please welcome your host, Amit Verma. Welcome
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to The Scene and The Unseen. My guest today is Apar Gupta, a lawyer who gave up a flourishing
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career to start the Internet Freedom Foundation and has played a leading role in many battles
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against the state for our rights. For Apar, it started as an intellectual challenge to
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figure out how technology affects our rights. And then it became a moral crusade to protect
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them and to battle both the state and big tech to prevent them from encroaching on our
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freedoms. He's played a leading, if understated, role in many seminal court cases around these
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subjects and has fought this battle on many different fronts, not just in the courts.
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You'll hear about all these battles in this episode and we also discussed his fascinating
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journey. We spoke about the causes that are close to his heart. And we also argued a lot
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in the best way possible, politely and with genuine mutual respect. This is how you do
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it, folks, not the Twitter fighting. I find Apar's journey to be extraordinary and inspiring.
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And I'm sure you'll agree with me. I found him warm and optimistic and committed and
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fearless. We need more Apar Guptas in this world. But before we begin this conversation,
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let's take a quick commercial break.
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Hey, the music started and this sounds like a commercial, but it isn't. It's a plea from
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me to check out my latest labour of love, a YouTube show I am co-hosting with my good
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friend the brilliant Ajay Shah. We've called it Everything is Everything. Every week, we'll
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speak for about an hour on things we care about, from the profound to the profane, from
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the exalted to the everyday. We range widely across subjects and we bring multiple frames
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with which we try to understand the world. Please join us on our journey and please support
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us by subscribing to our YouTube channel at youtube.com slash Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
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The show is called Everything is Everything. Please do check it out.
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Apar, welcome to the Scene in the Unseen.
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Thank you so much for having me here, Amit.
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You know, before we started, you were talking about optimism and how you're optimistic.
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And that plays in nicely with the episode that you just mentioned, that you have heard
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with Aakar Patel. And I remember one of the things that struck me when I recorded with
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both Aakar Patel and Teesta Sattelwaad, both of whom have faced different kinds of persecution
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from the state, is how bloody optimistic they were. Like I remember asking Aakar at that
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time, uska passport waapas nahi aaya tha. So I remember asking him, ki boss, you know,
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I asked him, what is passport? He said, ki Covid ka time tha, main to waise bhi kahin
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jaane nahi waala tha, so it was fine. You know, and it struck me that that kind of
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optimism is perhaps a necessary quality if you are, you know, fighting against many of
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the things that, you know, you object to and you want to change. And that it is not the
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case that fighters need to be optimistic, but it might even be the case that only optimistic
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people can actually become fighters, because otherwise, it's really easy to give up hope.
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So tell me a little bit about your optimism in the sense, were you always an optimist
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or did you arrive at it? Is there an intentionality to being optimistic?
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So firstly, thank you so much for having me, Amit. I think optimism comes through as a
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spark of joy in what I am able to do. I consider myself very lucky. And it's principally a
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function which is very internal to me, where my work matches my values. I think a lot of
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people don't get that opportunity in the world because they have to go out, make a living,
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pay their rent, raise a family. So the privileges I have in life, they allow me to do what I
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love. Now, my work is not easy. He'll talk more about my work. It's not easy. It has
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moments of disappointment. I feel sad, I feel sometimes low. But what really moves
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me and motivates me is when I meet people, they recognise value in work. Okay. And quite
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often I get to learn something from somebody else. You know, and quite often when people
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meet me, they say, hey, Apar, all of the things which you say are so alarming, they're so
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bad. But here's the thing. Why do you sound so upbeat about it? Why are you always sounding
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such as that has changed as possible? Because I often have this conversation with people
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who are a little younger. I say that if we do not even envision it's possible, then we're
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just fighting for tragedy. And what's the use in being loser, right? There's some romance
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to it, right? But you do want to win in your life, right? You don't want to be the football
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team, which is always losing, because then nobody supports you. Nobody wants to come
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to a party, which is really sad, right? You want to grow your congregation, you want to
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be a expansionary movement, which relies on very human qualities. Now, the only thing
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which kind of sometimes, you know, disturbs me is another deeper conversation I had with
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one of my friends. I can't name them because I don't think so. They like to be named.
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But they said, Apar, your state of being is incredible. And we all support it. But there's
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also a lack of modesty in it. Because if you think that the world is going through a very
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terrible phase, why do you think only in your lifetime, it will turn out for the better?
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But if we are going through some dark ages, and it lasts for about 200 and 300 years.
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But later on, that friend, through the course of that conversation, and it was over multiple
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rounds of coffee, said that if we don't do what we do, we won't even be a footnote to
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a footnote to a footnote, which leads to that change 300 years down the line. So I think
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Amit, to be optimistic is inevitable for the kind of work which I do. Otherwise, I wouldn't
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be doing what I'm doing. You've got these beautiful lines on optimism on one of your
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Instagram posts, where you write, quote, as I think of the future, I try to be optimistic,
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but not a fool. I ask myself, will there be a dramatic change in our social values or
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national politics in 2024? No. For several reasons, I believe the space for civil liberties
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will continue to shrink. Civil society will come to an equilibrium with government authoritarianism.
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Who am I to judge? Many of these choices are predicated on survival and the quest for a
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good life. I introspect more deeply. Are my own values properly centered? What is my motivation
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for change? And why so quickly? And you've addressed that larger optimism that you mentioned
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here, but I was also struck by this question that you ask, are my own values properly centered?
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And I want to ask you about how one arrives at a sense of values. What is that journey?
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What was your journey towards arriving at your values and about arriving at them so
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strongly that it gives you that sense of purpose where you're willing to play the long game?
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I think the first step towards that is reflection for which you need to quieten yourself.
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If you're always engaging in the routine, which means that you're fixed to what a lot of
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productivity hackers today call, you know, you need to calendar your life to an end,
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it doesn't happen. It's not happening on a vacation because you also calendar the vacation.
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These are the five museums you want to see. It should be a little much more unstructured in the
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sense that if something bad happens with you, you should have the ability, the very human
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ability of saying that, hey, today what works for me, Amit, is a long run. What works for me
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is an entire pizza after that. What works for me is sleeping. What works for me then is sitting
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down with a pen and paper away from the things which will distract me, possibly playing some
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light music, sitting by myself. I think the first step to values and knowing what your values is
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thinking through what I think I am, but what do I actually do? And then discovering that distance.
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You have to be honest to yourself. Now I'll take one example and fairly early into this podcast,
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people will think, oh, Apar, you're revealing too much about yourself. I don't drink. I don't
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enjoy drinking. I don't enjoy a lot of the vices in the world. I'm a proper uncle like that,
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but there's one thing which I've not been able to leave since the fourth year of law school when I
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started it. And I've tried to quit it regularly. It's smoking, right? And I've tied it to functions
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such as writing, et cetera. And regularly I ask myself, Amit, I have to quit it. I'm about to turn
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40 and it was giving me a lot of anxiety. So I sat down, I wrote it. Why do I enjoy it? Why am I
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doing it? How far do I want to continue it? So I think a lot of times we have to be honest to
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ourselves. We have to sit down and have that conversation with us. We can have it with friends.
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We can have it with parents. The second part of discovering your values is being open to also
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accepting another point of view. In fact, I think I've learned most from people I fought with the
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most bitterly through my life. After four or five years, if I've had the honesty and the
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humility of thinking through, I've said, I may still not agree with what they were saying,
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what they did, or they hurt me. But four years down the line, Amit, I know that that experience,
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if I took it in the right way and I tried to change my path a little to account for what
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others were seeing externally, which I could not see because sometimes you're just standing too
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close to yourself and that obscures visibility. If you're standing really close to a building,
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you don't know how tall it is, how short it is. That sense of proportion, that sense of
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value in that is missing. So first you need to know yourself a little, but you need to also be
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open to what others say. And I think that's really important. And what's helped also is
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people who are supportive. Quite often we only think that people who are going to, you know,
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criticize you and you need to take it, et cetera, and be better. I've also benefited tremendously
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from people and have had a hard time accepting when people have said, Apar, you're doing the
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right thing. And I don't know why. So I think it's an environmental thing. The thing is that
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I don't like being static also. In that sense, that's very clear from my professional journey.
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So Amit, I'll say that values which I have, which I hold, which I practice are deliberative.
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At least I try to do that. And when young people, for instance, reach out to me for coaching and
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they say, I want to do this, this, this, this, I said that, okay, set it down into a kind of a
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timeline kind of stuff. And this is where I agree with the productivity hacker. I said, just make
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a calendar appointment, which says reflect on what I set out to do. Not so you can measure it,
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but do you still want to do it? So you have that inner conversation. I think that's really
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important. A lot of people take up meditation. For me, it's running, eating a big pizza and sleeping,
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and then thinking about these things or doing it even while I'm running.
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I wish you hadn't mentioned pizza. You've made me crave one, but I love your phrase,
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standing too close to yourself. That's a beautiful phrase. And you know, and what you said about
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calendarizing, about doing things, about setting up routines and all reminded me of something my
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friend Amartya Ghosh who's recording us right now mentioned yesterday about, I think someone who
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spoke about, you know, why people grow old so fast and the years tend to pass. And that person's
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conclusion was it's because you do the same thing every day. And when you're doing the same thing
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every day, the years just pass. It seems it's like, where did they go? You know, the days are long,
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but the years are short, that kind of thing. And that person's solution was every day, I will do
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something completely different. And even if you calendarize that, I feel that that's, you know,
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an interesting sort of outlook. Let's go back to your childhood. So, you know, tell me about
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your childhood. Where were you born? Where did you grow up? What were your early years like?
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So I was born into a joint family and it was a large house. Okay. So my father has two brothers
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and one sister. And I grew up in South extension in housing society, South extension in Delhi.
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This is a little difficult. I haven't done this before. Let me try this. And the house was right
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beside a Mandir called Dharambhavan. And it was also adjoining Kotla Mubarakpur. So the way Delhi
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is developed, right, land was acquired from villagers who were then given rights to construct
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what was called Lal Dora land. They were given some money and then, you know, these colonies
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were made and SouthX was one of those colonies which was constructed actually by DLF back then.
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They just cut plots. So it was a nice comfortable house. We had a small garden and my Dadi Amma was
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there. And like, it was a nice house in that sense. People used to have dinner together.
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There used to be a common kitchen, things like that. And there were a lot of caste privileges,
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which were not very visible to me, for instance, and learnings also, which were not very visible
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because when you were a child and you are in a privileged environment, you think the entire
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world is privileged, right? So you don't have that sense of depth of perception. So vegetarian meals,
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three meals a day, everyone wakes up in the morning, all the men go out to factories,
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come back at a certain time. Sundays, we go out, two cars in the house, all clothes need to be
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ironed and completely clean, etc. Things like that, family vacations, all of that was happening.
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But what also happened was my grandfather passed away when I was about one, one and a half years
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old in a traffic accident, a truck hit the car. And that kind of accelerated a movement towards
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a breakdown of the joint family. And it led to a messy partition. They are all on speaking terms,
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but like with most affluent Delhi families, there was a messy partition for assets. And my father
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continued doing business, etc. All of that. When I was a young kid, I was extremely pampered
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because I was the eldest male son in that sense. But there were also family dynamics which start
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happening because when a family partition is happening, the expectation is the eldest male
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son will also have some kind of right over the property, things like that. So things were a
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little messy. They were sometimes unpleasant. I wouldn't say I had the ideal childhood, but they
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were extremely privileged at all points in time. I remember sitting down with my family on Sundays
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and watching television. I remember when the Onni dad used to come, I used to hide behind the
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couch. They used to call me Mungeri Lal ke Haseen Sapne because I used to be staring out.
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And like all that kind of stuff used to happen. We had an Atari to play Pong on. And I used to
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break the joystick because I used to be very, very violent with how I used to play Pong.
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So early access to technology was there. All of those things were there. My mother's side of the
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family is also from Delhi. So they're both three to four generations from Delhi. My mother's side
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of the family is more from Purani Delhi. They actually have a Haveli in Ajmeri gate.
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And I flew kites there. I used to love flying kites. I still fly kites on 15th of August,
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took part in poojas, things like that. So Amit, in a sense, you know, like I hate this
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characterization, but it's true to some extent that the stereotype of a fluent South Delhi person,
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but I would say it's a little different in the sense that my parents made some choices. They
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wanted me to not join business. They wanted me to be a professional. So they placed me in a
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convent and that too on military land, Mount St. Mary's, Delhi cant. They said you have to be
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really good in English. And they made sure that I traveled with in public buses. So the privilege
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is always there. It's a backup, but they kind of nudge me towards also, you know, going to the
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bus stop by yourself, not having somebody carry your bag or bottle, which is a very common thing
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or not sending a private car. If I miss the bus, trying to figure out myself how to get to school
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in the senior secondary standards. And I would say giving me a sense of tough love because that
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was the idea of how I would break out of that cocoon, that shell. And by and large, I would say
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my childhood was happy. It was pleasant. It was sheltered. And when I compare that to a lot of
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people who I talked to about, they said, you don't have childhood trauma apart. I said, well,
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okay, I hope many people don't. And but it seems like it was, it had its complications, Amit, but
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it wasn't something which I think so gave me some deep sense of injury. In fact, that privilege, I
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think so really allowed me to see a better world. So, you know, we're going to come back to your
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personal chronicle. But before that, I want to digress and take a step back and ask you kind of
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a larger question, which I kind of think about sometimes. You know, you mentioned at one point
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that, you know, it was a joint family, you would have communal dinners, you'd all be together,
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et cetera, et cetera. And my first sort of question, and I wonder if you have any thoughts on it,
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is that I think about how all of these structures of living affect our lives and what we end up
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becoming. Like, you know, you can see a generational transition that has happened in India from these
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kind of joint families to more nuclear families, where you're not having these communal dinners,
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and you're all sitting together and all of that. And it's a similar sort of shift to, I mean,
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it's why slum redevelopments fail so often at a cultural level, because you're used to everybody
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being together, the elders are sitting in the courtyard, people are playing, and you take them
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to atomized apartments. And there are, you know, pros and cons, there are good things and bad
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things about one structure, there are good things and bad things about the other structure. But
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there are differences, you know, they are different. And fundamentally, I imagine a kid
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in one structure would be pretty different from a kid in the other structure. And you have sort of
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been in that transition, both within our society, and as you point out within your own life, where
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you transition from one to the other. And in another sense, also, you've seen that transition
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in the sense that, you know, you and I are in a sense, though I'm a few years older than you,
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but we are part of that generation, where we grew up in a world without where computers hadn't yet
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come in. Yes. Where you would go and fly kites, like you said, I don't know how many kids. Or play
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cricket. So it didn't make difference if the kid was from DPS, or they were studying in a
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Kendra Vidyalaya, we all played together, flew kites, it was sometimes I will accept,
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it's my parents or other relatives or other like people who are older, they kind of
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didn't clearly say why, but they said you shouldn't play with them, in that sense. But I think there
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was also a level of ignorance, which was then not impeding that there was a limitation of knowledge.
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And I mean, it was a big thing. That's why a lot of people, like, I wouldn't like to project it on
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you. But people like me engaged in mass levels of music piracy. Because people like me for sure,
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I mean, what else would you do in the music world, nobody had that money to go and purchase that.
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So the thing was that this level of knowledge was mediated either through a library, which was the
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school library. But that is not a YouTube video. Most people, they're learning really small micro
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things through YouTube videos, which are then, you know, layering with their social interactions
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in real life. We didn't have that kind of stuff. We didn't have Google. And for it, I wouldn't say
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for better or worse, but I would say that it resulted in a kind of a society which is very
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different. Now coming to your second part, where you say you've seen that transition. In fact,
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you know, Edward Snowden's permanent record has this entire section where he says I was born
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in 1984. And I've seen the waves of technology and the internet. And it was not like what it is
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today. It was a space of curiosity, excitement and exploration. And in many ways, it still is but
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these business larger business models of collecting personal data and serving you ads were not
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perfected back then. And the internet which we experienced, and I know you're old hand at
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Twitter as well now X, right? It was a really different experience in 2008 and nine. And of
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course, it was only because a micro fraction of India was online, but it was very, very different.
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And I want people to know, like each wave of technology has impacted society and altered it
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fundamentally in India. So let's talk more about that. And yeah, even before Twitter, I was an
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old school blogger 2002, 2003. Yeah, so, you know, and those were days where this level of
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polarization and this, you know, it sometimes it feels bewildering to me that, you know, what
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what happened to us. And let's dive in a little bit into that. Because I that larger social question
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interests me that kids today are growing up in a fundamentally different world than we grew up in.
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And it is so fundamentally different. There is, you know, your, you know, you and I would have
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common cultural sort of benchmarks or common cultural references that we can talk about.
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But people today grow up in different little niches or bubbles or whatever. And some of it is
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great, because, you know, everyone has a means of production, there aren't gatekeepers anymore.
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And people can discover their own tastes and cater to their own audiences, which earlier they
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might not have discovered. And that's fantastic. But it also means that a lot of the common cultural
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references which, you know, bind us together may not really be there for the next generation.
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And you're growing up always looking at your smart screen, like forget the communal dinner changing
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into, you know, a nuclear family dinner. But the nuclear family dinner today is basically three
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people sitting alone looking at their phones. I've seen this. And I wonder at a social level,
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what does that then do both in terms of the anxieties that the online world foists upon you,
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and also in terms of the other sort of the other kind of socializing that happened with you and me,
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but doesn't necessarily happen with the kids today. And what we are also seeing is that
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technology, especially in fairly affluent classes, will lead to introductions of what
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AR based technologies, I mean, that's not that far off. And Mark Zuckerberg is already saying that
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with about $300, you can wear these really good looking rare bands and stream what you're seeing.
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And also, in later versions, superimpose pixels on real life. So, and they're now AI avatars,
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and you just need to give it a cloak of to have a skin in a sense for people to be fooled by it.
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Now, in a lot of ways, I think we as people are facing very fundamental questions of which
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direction do we want technology to go in. I quite often sense that people are not thinking through
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that technology will take the course our values wanted to take. There's always a sense of
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inevitability. This is happening guys, get on with it, right? This is AI, we need to have AI in this
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critical function, right? Now, of course, it makes sense if you want to, let's say,
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look at a low value function, which is open to human check and processes. For instance,
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I use AI to transcribe a video, right? But it's not the same as AI then determining the threat
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levels for a nuclear launch, right? Based on how often that data may be accurate or inaccurate.
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Now, quite often, I think the changes which are also occurring, especially in Indian society,
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are being accepted uncritically. There's a subtext to technology in terms of it always being positive.
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In terms of it being a form of modernism, it being something which progresses us into a much more
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developed state of how we are as an economy, how we are as a society, how technology helps us.
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And this is this entire grammar, you can fill it out, entire dictionary leapfrog over what have
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been systemic deficiencies. And all of these are creating problems because of the uncritical
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assimilation of technology both at a governance policy, institutional, and at a social level.
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It's happening right now. So at the same point in time, the fundamental promises of technology,
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if you just listen to Snowden, if you just listen to people about 15 years back are proving to be
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false. Technology, especially network technologies, such as the internet was supposed to ease the
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flow of accurate information. It was supposed to deepen democratic engagement by allowing more
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people for the first time to have a lower threshold, a lower entry barrier into public
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discourse through social media, where you could broadcast to thousands or millions of people
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potentially. We have all realized that this is maybe leading to a huge surge in disinformation,
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where even scientific facts up to dispute is the flat.
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Are we run by a secret government, which is headed to somewhere in Davos, things like that.
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And these are really, we may amuse ourselves with this, but there are people who are really taken
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by this. So the lesson from this is it is undermining social trust, where governments are
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not trusted, scientists are not trusted. And we've seen this in COVID as well.
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The second point, which I think so is fundamental to the false promises of technology is that
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they may not sometimes fix the solutions, but create new problems in itself.
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And I don't think so people look at this very, very critically, because technology quite often
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leads to a power relationship, which is already there in society becoming worse.
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And that quite often is happening in India as well. So for instance, we are sitting in Delhi,
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the Chief Minister of Delhi says that there's crime against women.
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Delhi is going to be the most densely packed city with CCTV cameras. And we are going to give the
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feed not only to, let's say, the local police, but also the Resident Welfare Association and
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market associations. We have made a standard operating procedure, you're going to be given
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a username login, you just log in. And he says that we have also installed CCTVs in all Delhi
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government schools, where parents can log in through a secure login and watch their children
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and then thereby be assured that their children are being taken care in a proper and better manner.
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What is this doing to our society needs to be questioned at a deeper level.
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For women, does it actually improve safety? There are no audits. Yet at the same point in time,
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I do know anecdotally that it may lead to social policing. It may lead to women feeling scared,
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going out at night, or doing really human things which men do without question in Delhi.
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For instance, inviting their friends over for a birthday party. And I'm being prescriptive
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morally here. They can do whatever they want, right? But it is open now to a person who's sitting
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in the RWA, quite possibly a man in his 60s or 70s having a very conservative worldview
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to then gain knowledge of what people are doing. And people already have a tough time finding a
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rented accommodation in Delhi, where the landlord is termed as being somebody who's respectful.
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The second example which I used today was for CCTVs in classrooms. Studies after studies,
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which have been done particularly in the United Kingdom show that children actually don't like
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being under the perpetual gaze of a CCTV and get to know that they are being recorded. They
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don't feel safe. They in fact feel that they're being policed at such a young age,
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which leads to sometimes them also not talking to other children who they think their parents
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will not approve of. Their studies are already there. So what are we doing to ourselves as a
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society by assimilating and deploying technology needs to be questioned at a deeper level. It needs
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to be questioned on a level of morality as well as the solutions which are being offered, whether
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they actually offer the kind of results we are looking at and what are the unintended consequences
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of utilising technology in such a way. We need to be a little much more critical.
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I agree with everything you said. Let me sort of try and paraphrase it and think aloud as it were.
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The reason we were hopeful about technology and I'm still hopeful like you, I'm an optimist,
#
but the reason we were so hopeful about it once was we correctly thought that hey technology can
#
empower individuals and amplify our best instincts. But what we didn't realise and what we are seeing
#
now is that it doesn't only empower individuals, you can also empower an authoritarian state.
#
You can also empower a moral policing right-wing association which has CCTV footage.
#
And while it may amplify our good instincts, it also amplifies our bad instincts. Like you see
#
on social media where are the inherent urges towards tribalism and towards seeking validation
#
are also amplified in such, you know, ugly dangerous ways. And that leads me to thinking
#
that look, technology is incredible if you are in a free society. But if you're in a conservative,
#
bigoted, casteist, sexist, misogynist society, then it can be a huge problem. So this is where we are.
#
Now a part of me is still screaming out that no, it's a net good, we will solve it somehow.
#
But how do we solve it? Because when I think of solutions coming from the state,
#
that makes me deeply uncomfortable because the state's instinct will always be to oppress more.
#
Amit, can I interrupt you? Can I ask you? Yes.
#
Do you question the intent of the state itself right now?
#
Here's what I'll say. Or its power.
#
I'll answer that in two parts. Yeah.
#
I don't question the intent of the state. I question the intent of the political party in
#
charge today. What I do question of the state is I question the incentives of the state.
#
So in the sense that, and I mentioned this in my episode with Akar as well,
#
where I feel that we have three huge problems in India, one proximate and two bigger.
#
The proximate problem is one that only I may have. People may not agree with me politically,
#
that's fine. I feel the proximate, one proximate problem is a party in power today.
#
And the nature of our politics today, one can disagree with that, but that is my view.
#
But the other two problems which I think is indisputable is one, it's how our society is
#
being torn apart and fractured. And number one, and number two, it is a nature of the state where
#
the state is designed in such a way that the incentives are towards oppressing the people
#
and not serving them, ruling rather than serving. And the constitution does play a part in that by
#
protecting the state from the people and not the people from the state. And so to answer your
#
question, I question the intent of the party in power and I question the incentives of the state
#
which make it behave in ways that you can easily, as a metaphor, say the intent is bad.
#
So that's my... So, you know, I recently read a book by Taylor C. Sherman, it's called Nehru in
#
Seven Myths. She says, yeah, it's okay to criticize Nehru, maybe even abuse him, but do it for the
#
right things. She says that, okay, what you're engaged, like, of course, she doesn't say very
#
directly, but the thing is, every, you know, like, you get this regular WhatsApp about Nehru
#
with women or Nehru with a cigar or a smoke or like, with the ballet when it's visiting,
#
a lot of them are morphed out of context. Some of them are with his sister, Vijay Lakshmi Pandit,
#
etc. She says you have to look at him not as this omnipotent Raja who was there, but in the seven
#
roles, for instance, Nehru as a patron, Nehru as a inaugurator-in-chief, okay, Nehru. And what were
#
his limitations? What was he doing? What were the problems which were there? And or possibly
#
India's leaning towards the Soviet Union. And she says that a lot of these things are actually untrue.
#
And what I found very remarkable is that she says that there were, there were really fundamental
#
choices we made post-independence, which are today playing in us today. So Amit, let me tell you why
#
I think we are where we are. We had a small set of elites. The elites largely, to some extent,
#
post-independence were idealistic people of high energy. But then again, coming from a very
#
substrata of Indian society, upper caste, Hindu primarily, right, upper caste, and having a
#
political ideology which matched the ideology of the Congress party. The effect it had was that
#
quite often, as much as they tried to seek popular support, it was lacking in the articulation, in
#
the aesthetic, in the verbalization, which seemed to be foisted on the masses, especially the North
#
Indian cow belt, which I also come from, my family comes from historically. And over a period of time,
#
when people started seeing that, okay, they are possibly all men, men of high energy,
#
working for the country, setting up institutions who believe in what Sherman also calls high
#
modernity of building large dams, displacing villages, but also being unmindful of a lot
#
of things in policy setting is that, hey, they've also started working for themselves rather than
#
just the country. They're corrupt. So not only are they privileged and not connected with us,
#
they are working for ourselves in a sense. And it brings me back to the Anna movement.
#
I think the Anna movement needs to be studied very deeply by scholars in India today and explained
#
not only because a small fraction of this country started protesting in the metropolitan cities,
#
but why have they not done it again? And why did our media at that point in time blow this up to
#
be such a massive credibility crisis for the government, the UPA. Now, if you look at the
#
Lok Niti CSDS data, even at the time the UPA governments came in, one party's vote share is
#
consistently rising. That is the BJP. That is also without Modi. That's after the Janta days,
#
it's rising consistently, which shows, according to me, that, yes, India is a functional democracy
#
in many ways, but people are also losing faith in the system of governance, not only with the
#
party. They're thinking we are not being represented and the people who are governing us are only
#
feeding themselves. The benefits of post-liberalization are not flowing down. It's a
#
conversation about inequality. It's not only a conversation about representativeness.
#
And I think what has happened much more recently is that everything is being viewed through the
#
prism. It's given a historic opportunity to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which visualizes a
#
very different form of India, which is in their map, articulated as Akhand Bharat. And if you
#
talk to them, they say that Chandragopita Maurya's governance went from Burma to Afghanistan.
#
It's a territorial, colonialist, Hindu narrative, which of past glory insults through the Mughals
#
and then the British and a sense of being robbed, of a sense of feeling inferior despite strength,
#
despite us being the oldest civilization. You heard these phrases. So it is pride when people
#
are feeling unequal. They don't have enough. What do they have? They have this source of national
#
pride. We are the best. And we are seeing that play out in Israel in a very different context
#
today. But what I feel is that the RSS has a larger cultural project to reshape this country,
#
the constitution, the institutions, which is why we see the government acting the way it does.
#
When you think why won't it listen to the experts? Because they have a very different idea of what
#
institutions should look at. What should policy look like? Why do you think it lacks expertise in
#
certain areas? Because it does have expertise in other areas which are required for it to reshape
#
society. And I'm very clear about this. I question its intent, but on the basis that it is seeking
#
a social and cultural transformation of India as per what the majority of people in UP want
#
and foist it on even Tamil Nadu and Kerala. And I think that's very dangerous for this country.
#
And you're still an optimist. What nonsense. Because anger cannot sustain the path of
#
development. There's too much inequality. There's climate change in India, which is occurring in
#
even the northern states. It's resulting in landslides. It's resulting in erosion across
#
our coastlines and change in weather cropping patterns. I think this level of inequality is
#
unsustainable. You need to some extent, at least one thing also, it's led to a greater
#
realization even for people who come from ultra-privilege elite sections. You need to
#
build citizen power and it won't be done by talking. You'll need to listen to people
#
or also build these aspirations collectively. So if I'm talking about digital rights,
#
Amit, I'll have to write in Rajasthan Patrika, not only in the Indian Express. I'll have to
#
verbalize it not only as internet shutdowns. I'll have to call it netbandi.
#
So this is the lesson. And that's why I'm optimistic.
#
So let me ask you a two part question, one about society and one seguing back to the earlier
#
question of technology, but they're both related. Firstly, I completely agree with,
#
you know, everything you all the ways in which we went wrong, you know, after independence,
#
like I keep saying on the show so much that it's just become trope, if not a cliche,
#
that what happened after independence was a bunch of liberal elites got together and created what
#
was a relatively liberal constitution, not as liberal as one would like, but a relatively
#
liberal constitution. And he imposed it upon an illiberal society and that high modernism,
#
that top down thinking was never going to work. You would have to do something bottom up as Gandhi
#
would, you know, repeatedly keep saying. And we never went for that cultural change. We never
#
went for that bottom up change. And today politics has caught up with society.
#
And that was one mistake. And the question still looms before people like you and me
#
that in this deeply liberal country, which has always been deeply liberal,
#
how the hell do we bring about that cultural change? And the second part of the question
#
applies to technology to finish that up, that again, I don't think a solution to that can be
#
a top down solution that, you know, regulation by the state and big tech companies and all that is
#
if anything has a potential of making things worse, it has to, I think, again, come up in
#
a bottom up way where the people demand, where people stand up and say, boss, yeh mera data hai.
#
You know, do not mess around with this. And you've seen stirrings of that. But, you know,
#
there's not been enough said on Rajasthan Patrika and there's been a lot said on Twitter. And you're
#
right that that is a problem. So my question is then about this big how of bringing about that
#
kind of cultural and social change so we become more liberal as a society because otherwise,
#
you know, having democracy, democratic expression makes no difference.
#
If 34% to 44% of this country support Hindu nationalism,
#
the liberal project will need to include them. I want to be very clear on this. And
#
it comes from a sense of belief where I think despite my own moral beliefs, I like, I won't
#
try, I'll do my best not to be seduced by power because power has this strange ability when
#
you're sitting with somebody who's XYZ to agree with them, but also to maintain your own principles,
#
but essentially humanize the conversation and see them a little because you're lacking power. I think
#
liberals need to realize they lack power. They need to be liked. They need to include the majority
#
of the country towards expansionary movement towards an embracing movement rather than
#
exclusionary movement, which builds upon saying that, okay, you are a bigot in these ways, but
#
it doesn't mean I need to call you a bigot to your face if you agree with these five, six things.
#
And over a period of time, you can also agree to these three or four things. We have to give
#
people a chance and they have to give us a chance. And this can only be done by building greater
#
amount of social trust, which means that quite often what you're seeing in Indian society,
#
and this goes back to what you were saying, Amit, why is there so much anger? Why is there so much
#
anger? But don't leave it as a rhetorical question. Take a stab at answering it.
#
Two thirds of this country is scared of posting their social, political, religious views online
#
for the threat of legal prosecutions. Two thirds of this country. Every day we see a boycott trend.
#
The way it will be improved is by people and also political parties clearly verbalizing that there
#
needs to be a national revitalization of aspirational politics. We need to be better
#
rather than I need to look out for myself. You're mentioning fear. I'm the anger. I'm asking about
#
the anger. The anger? Yeah, because it bevel does me. I mean, there are lots of candidate reasons,
#
but it's inequality. I think so. I don't agree with that. I don't agree with that for a couple
#
of reasons. And one reason is that it is actually among the relatively affluent that you see this,
#
you know, expressions of Hindutva and bigotry and so on and so forth. You know, we sang we once
#
pointed out that hey, the liberalization was great in that it brought hundreds of millions of
#
people out of poverty, but they were Hindu bigots. I mean, I'm paraphrasing, not his words. And that
#
certainly gave a Philip to it. And secondly, I, you know, my, which listeners of the show will know
#
is that I'd rather talk about poverty than inequality, because they're completely different
#
things. And I think people who are poor care about poverty. Inequality means nothing for them. It's
#
a fashion of the West. It's a fashion of elite liberals who use that word, you know, the poor
#
care about being poor. If you lift them out of poverty, they don't really care if, you know,
#
somebody is getting richer faster. Yeah, but everyone cares about that. Everyone is searching
#
for status today. It's a very individual driven project, which we are seeing. So I think technology
#
has contributed to it. I think people also gauge social relationships today by saying
#
how many followers he has. This is a conversation which comes up. Like there is a sense of not of
#
I'll learn from the other person. I'll seek time from them or the other person will give me time.
#
It is a sense of envy. I think what, what has happened today is that we are comparing ourselves
#
to each other without learning from, without collaborating. We use these kinds of words quite
#
often, but I think the eventual sense is that the pie is small and somebody else is eating it. And
#
that's there in the rich and affluent. I'll support actually what you're saying to some extent.
#
So the same survey, which was done by common cause, local needy, CSDS,
#
showed that the rich and the affluent support mass surveillance more than Muslim Dalits and
#
Adivasis. So that's because they can negotiate their way out of whatever happens. And the poor
#
actually think that this is a way of a broken institutional systems of demanding some kind of
#
bribe or kind of policing their day-to-day activity. And that's, that's, that's the sad
#
reality we are in today. How do you tackle social anger? I think a principal part of that has to do
#
with how our national politics are centered. Have you seen the ads which have been released
#
by the BJP for the Rajasthan elections? Please do watch them. I asked listeners to watch them.
#
It is a young man who's saying that paper pe paper leak, etc. And it's, it's said in an assertive,
#
in an angry tone by itself. I would, I'm coming again and again back to politics, Amit, because
#
I think we think about policy and politics very, very separately in people and politics
#
very, very separately. But according to me, elections and politics is the most efficient
#
vehicle of building that kind of power over people in India today. It's the state which
#
drives a lot of that and political parties are the vehicle through which they gain that power,
#
that social project which is happening. And I think more and more they have realized that
#
the objective assessment of work which they have done, the rational way how they phrase their plans
#
and agendas, none of that matters if you rely on encouraging a certain degree of anger or social
#
violence as well, then nothing else matters. What matters is a very tribal belief that who's there
#
is from the same community I am, hence I will be protected. And of course, here the majority
#
community gets its way again and again and again and again. I think technology plays a big part on
#
it. I think technology has decreased the ability to spread this kind of social message. I don't
#
only think that India was always a very tribal society, which is not used to voting, etc.
#
Things like that elections were not successful. One of the key indications of elections not being
#
successful is that voting percentages start dropping. That's not happened. People still think
#
when they vote, they can impact change. Even in the state elections in UP last time,
#
just see the voting percentages. People went to the elections even if they didn't get what they
#
wanted, but they did go to the elections and cast their ballot. Of course, there are questions people
#
raise about the sanctity of the process, about how much money is there in politics. And of course,
#
that's not a free and fair way how elections are being fought. But people have hope in democracy.
#
I'll push back a little bit on that. Otherwise, voting percentages would drop. I think they have
#
been rising both with terms of voter enrollment as well as participation, which is increasing over a
#
period of time, right? Now, the other part to this, which I think is very important for us to
#
consider is that technology by itself, what it is doing is that it is telling people have a voice,
#
but the voice that they are quite often getting to hear is the one which is angry and polarizing.
#
In fact, there has been a recent empirical assessment of X because it has kind of opened
#
up its platform. It's saying like gauge algorithm, et cetera, the tweets which go viral, the ones
#
which are polarizing angry rise to the top. And I know this and maybe you know this as well. Of
#
course, you can build community over a period of time and people will listen to podcasts such as
#
this long form. But what will be truly Massey will be possibly a YouTube show which talks about
#
a Yeti or semen retention or about really sensationalistic topics, which talks about
#
things and themes which drive towards a much more baser instinct in that sense. And I think
#
platforms by itself encourage that because they draw human interest. They are also mirroring us
#
in that sense, right? So it knows you will spend more time on a platform. The more engagement you
#
get and the more engagement you get happens to be something which is with something which happens to
#
be not bring out the best in human beings. There's a great, great book. It's called The Shallows and
#
it describes how we consume and it's old, but it's so true. It says it says that our diet,
#
for instance, quite often is goes towards things such as pizza, which we were talking about,
#
right? But quite often, right? What happens when the system itself is saying there's,
#
there's like there are different kinds of pizza and you can have them every day. Of course,
#
you'll get sick of it a little, but then it says, oh, they're fries and there's a burger as well,
#
right? You'll keep having it in a sense, but it's not nourishment in a sense, right? It's not giving
#
you that fiber. So the writer essentially says that what people are engaging with is in the shallows
#
today. They're looking for fast junk food and of course that won't serve the needs of human
#
development. You won't grow as a person. You won't be having your richer meals in that sense, but it's
#
quick to make and it's cheaper to make and people really love them and it's being served again and
#
again and again and again. And that's why I think this podcast is important, Amit, because it defies
#
and bucks the trend for some reason. I don't understand why also what's, what's been your
#
experience given that this podcast has built such a loyal community. What brings people who also
#
spend substantial amounts of their time viewing a short, a reel or an Instagram to tune in and
#
listen to a podcast which stretches into hours? As it happens, my answer to that question ties
#
in beautifully with the response I was going to come up with in any case, and we've been straddling
#
both politics and tech, so I'll do that as well. Like firstly, I recorded an episode with Mukulika
#
Banerjee who wrote Why India Votes and the reason why people vote is really complex. It's not just
#
about driving change, you know, like my personal theory is a lot of people are voting to really
#
express a kind of tribal affiliation in the same sense that I go to say, you know, watch a match
#
by Manchester City and I'll go and vote for so and so party and it's, you know, so there are all these
#
complex reasons. Secondly, just the fact that they are voting doesn't fill me with too much hope
#
because if I look at the political landscape, there is no liberal party, you know, everyone is
#
against freedom in the personal domain and the social domains, everyone is against freedom in the
#
economic domains. It is sort of the worst of both worlds and that ties back to what you said earlier
#
that if there are 40% of the country today, you know, voting in a way that we don't agree with
#
and for reasons we don't like, we need to appeal to them also because people contain multitudes.
#
There might be a part of me which is a bigot and a misogynist, but there is another part of me which
#
wants prosperity from my children. There is another part of me which loves this intermingling of
#
culture and is having biryani and all of those things. So we want to appeal to the better angels
#
of their natures, which we don't see the opposition parties doing where so many of them play to this
#
soft Hindutva game and that kind of gives me a little bit of disquiet. Now getting to what's
#
happened in technology and this is completely true in the sense that, you know, there's a con
#
and a pro to it and the con is that yeah, we've seen that over the last 12 years, you know, Twitter's
#
retweet button or the Facebook like button, they amplify the worst instincts of our nature and the
#
way we are, it is always bad news which will surface. It is always anger which will get more
#
engagement than love because that is just the way that we have been wired. You know, when you're
#
living in a tribe in a prehistoric time, it's a bad news warning that is more important to you
#
than, you know, the weather is pleasant today. So obviously we will privilege that and that will
#
rise to the top. But now to get back to the question about the seen and the unseen,
#
I would say that one of the great realizations I've had while doing the show is that there is
#
shallow engagement and there is deep engagement, right? So Jonathan Haight is completely correct
#
in the sense that most people what they are consuming on social media or on YouTube was
#
produced in the last three days. It is shallow and they're swiping, swiping and scrolling,
#
scrolling. Yes. But that shallow engagement doesn't really lead to any action. It kind of
#
most of the time, it kind of dulls you into just a somnolent state where you're just scrolling,
#
scrolling, scrolling all day. But there are people who want deep engagement and I don't want to say
#
there are different categories of people. I am shallow a lot of the time where I'm scrolling
#
and swiping and it's mindless entertainment and sometimes I'll want a deep dive into something and
#
I'll, you know, go deeply into that. And what people crave depth, people fucking crave depth
#
because all that the media gives them because of this wrong impression that people have a
#
short attention span and all of that. No, all the media gives them is it's a mile wide and an inch
#
deep. It is completely shallow and a lot of it will obviously then play on those lowest common
#
denominators of anger and bad news, but the people aren't really acting on it. Whereas I think people
#
who consume deep content, not just podcasts like mine, I don't want to give myself too much credit,
#
but people who consume deep content, they may be fewer in numbers and not even that because there
#
are some incredible YouTube channels, for example, which are really good, like the vlog brothers,
#
Tom Scott and so on, you know, podcasts like hardcore history by Dan Carlin have such large
#
audiences. So there's a lot of great content, which has a large audience, but which also fosters deep
#
engagement and it is deep engagement, which I believe will inevitably at some point lead to
#
action. So that is my one little way of being hopeful about it. But I think most people don't
#
recognize this enough. Our political parties don't recognize that we can appeal to the better angels
#
of the natures if we are creative enough about it. Yes. You know, and similarly, creators will often
#
then chase the lowest common denominator because hey, they also want validation and, you know,
#
an immediate impact. But I think there is something deeper there that can be tapped into and that for
#
certain parts of our history, including certain parts of our inspiring freedom struggle, people
#
did tap into. Yes, I think they tapped into it. I think the role technology is playing today.
#
It's more and more leading people to also then engage in this race to the bottom. So of course,
#
this podcast is there. But if you see the larger changes, which so I started recently a YouTube
#
channel and one of the first emails YouTube sends me is like, make more shots. Like I want to put up
#
like scripted videos with research around law, policy, tech. OK. And the thing is,
#
like I was thinking, why should I put up a 30 second shot? Yeah. And it says that then people
#
will discover your content. And there were like really great people I talked to also were just
#
like build some YouTube channels. They said you need to put shorts. You need to like
#
repurpose your content in different ways, etc. Things like that. And I said I won't do it,
#
but it is a platform level choice which is happening and it is happening increasingly.
#
For instance, as bad as Twitter gets, that's because so many people are there who drive the
#
news or at least make the news of it. We have to be there in a sense. And we know that it's not what
#
it was even one year back in the sense that you could distinguish authentic media publication.
#
And there's enough critique about the journalism you can do, which is even happening today. But
#
even then it is still a journalist as opposed to an unauthenticated account, which may just be
#
speaking on the basis of ideology rather than of fact. And I think this is all happening due to a
#
certain form of thinking which has taken place in Silicon Valley. About two days back, Mark Anderson
#
who heads easy 16-18 partners, he wrote a manifesto which is being talked about quite widely.
#
And he says that we have enemies. Enemies are not bad people. Our enemies are bad ideas. This is the
#
same Mark Anderson who called the net neutrality movement one of the second worst decisions India
#
took after throwing out the East India Company. So he's the same guy. Okay. And then apologize
#
because he sits on Facebook's board or was at that time. He says that ideas such as sustainable
#
development goals, ESG, etc. You can disagree with a lot of that, but just look at that. He said tech
#
ethics. All of that are our enemies. And there's no reason to critique because it's a manifesto
#
in that sense. And when you think back and you look back at it, you say that, Hey, he's only
#
saying what they actually feel. Because if you have actually read zero to one. Okay. And if you
#
do read zero to one, it not only says that you should build a business in a niche where you can
#
become a monopoly. It also says you need to lie about it constantly and say that the market is
#
competitive. Otherwise you will get cracked down upon. So it's a, it's a monopolist playbook zero
#
to one actually. Did Thiel mean it in a normative sense or a descriptive sense? My sense when I
#
read the book long ago was he was being descriptive and he was saying that obviously when you start
#
a business, you want it to be a, you know, a monopoly, but that was more descriptive than
#
normative. But I agree with the... But it has been used normatively. For instance, when Amit,
#
just do a search on the startup culture here and very well-meaning people, young kids,
#
extremely brilliant, better in scholastic as well as life skills than me in any way. They say
#
taking X from zero to one in their Twitter bios.
#
And it is something they have read, they have internalized. It is a norm today.
#
And I'm saying that the social values, which are then affecting how people are building technologies
#
quite often is then manifesting in ways which are not accounting for the social impact it's having,
#
yet at the same time, quite often built of lip service when the thing gets a little big.
#
For instance, if you look at... And it's, of course, resulting in benefits. For instance,
#
you may look at the gig economy, right? And that's a great example, right? For a certain
#
affluent class of people, or not even so affluent, you can order different kinds of cuisine, even in
#
obesity today. And you can have it once a week or twice a week, depending on when you want to have
#
it at different times. And of course, you will then reason that, of course, that's led to more
#
cloud kitchens opening up, more people working in them. But a large part of that also has to do with
#
the service conditions. Service conditions, when you look at how labor law was there earlier,
#
and of course, it's never been perfectly implemented. Of course, it led to a system
#
of bribes and kickbacks, but still said, people need to be given uniforms, people need to be given
#
a minimum wage. The conditions of service should not be risky in a way. And of course, businesses
#
will try to be ethical to some extent. But then why are the people who are engaging in micro
#
deliveries of 10 minutes driving on the wrong side of the road, parking their vehicles wherever
#
they want, these dark warehouses have opened up everywhere? That's because the infrastructure cost
#
has not been internalized by the private company. They have not built any parking lots for the
#
Ubers which we have, which is why whenever you go to an airport, you see them all the way.
#
And these are the deeper questions I want to prompt that for all the efficiencies which
#
technology has brought, why can't we be a little much more critical in examining what it actually
#
delivers to us? Why can't we ask what it does to us as a society in sum total, rather than where
#
it works only for the people who consume those services, and maybe even for them, it does it
#
not in a very good way? Why do we only have to be focused? And it's a very important part,
#
but why should we only be focused on the part around safety? When we it can be much, much,
#
much more better. And this is the point I think, Amit, I quite often hit a wall with a lot of people,
#
because it's also conundrum. Who are you giving this power to regulate? Is it to the same state
#
apart, you were saying you don't even trust in intent? Do you think this will be a good outcome?
#
So I want to come to that conundrum, but before that, a couple of points.
#
And one point is, you know, when you speak about the gig economy and service conditions and all of
#
that, I am skeptical of these arguments being made by elites on behalf of people who are choosing the
#
best option open to them, right? That the Zomato delivery person is essentially choosing the
#
best option open to him. If you feel that his service conditions are not good enough,
#
then it is incumbent upon us to work towards creating an economy where he has better choices,
#
rather than say that technology is bad, because technology has given him an option better than
#
the option that was, you know, earlier open to him. And I think that's sort of an important
#
thing to take into account. But I agree with you completely about that. And you know, even if young
#
people in their bios put from zero to one in a competitive marketplace, you're never going to
#
have a monopoly as long as you can maintain the competition. But I agree with you that what's
#
happened with the tech companies is very disturbing. Now, on one hand, I can say that Facebook
#
and and I'm giving you the other hand also. But on one hand, I can say that Facebook and Twitter are
#
not monopolies, because while they appear to be monopolies in their specific verticals,
#
they are competing for people's time, everybody is competing for people's time and attention.
#
So therefore, it is competitive. But however, I agree with you that what network effects do
#
is that on those specific markets for those specific kind of interactions, they have become
#
what appears to be monopolistic and gained a tremendous amount of power over our attention,
#
which they can, which they are obviously incentivized to use to get us more and more
#
addicted, and so on and so forth. Which brings us back to the conundrum that I agree with you,
#
and I think we'd both be agreed that asking the state to regulate this is problematic,
#
because the state will be the state is not some benevolent entity, it is a beast with its own
#
incentives, which point in the wrong direction always. And currently, we know what the party
#
in charge is. And honestly, even if there's another party in charge, it will kind of the
#
incentives will always be really bad. So I don't trust that. Then the question is, where does
#
change come from? Like one of the things that you guys at IFF do so incredibly well, and we'll talk
#
about all of that in much more detail later. But one of the things you do so incredibly well,
#
is you engage with all these stakeholders instead of being adversarial with them,
#
where you're engaging with the tech companies, you're talking to people within them,
#
you've pointed out in the past about how there are good progressive forward thinking people
#
within all these companies who also want to make a difference. But to go back to that earlier
#
question, how do we bring this change about? Because to me, state coercion is not the way to
#
do it. It has to come in a different way from these companies, and from demands by people,
#
no, don't use my data like this, no, don't do this, no, don't do that. And that's also really not
#
there. So what are your learnings on this? So a bit of background where I went into gig work,
#
gig work actually didn't come naturally to IFF. When IFF was actually made, it came from the
#
net neutrality movement, it was a very privileged, male led Twitter phenomena in that sense, right.
#
And there's some academic writing on that also. And I think what it went into initially also was
#
representative of how the internet when it's made accessible to people, it needs to be equally
#
there for everyone. So there was a recognition of equality. And but what was lacking was that
#
the movement did not also focus on what was a core criticism. And of course, that criticism
#
lost out, which was that a lot of people don't have access. So let's give them some of the
#
internet, right. So the campaign never expanded towards saying that the government also needs to
#
give some form of internet access to POS devices, etc. The core functionality of the welfare
#
functionality of the state just like it gets health and education, right, given if the digital
#
economy is such a core part, we didn't do that back then. So it was a much more civil liberties
#
in its conception initially, when it started out. And but what became very early on
#
visible was like, India's a society, it requires civil liberties. And this again goes back to
#
how the early elites, the liberal intelligentsia and incident didn't look at this, didn't verbalize
#
it, I think they did look at it, but didn't verbalize it within that conception of liberal
#
values is that social justice is an essential component of it. So we started engaging actually
#
with groups of people who are in the gig economy. For instance, there was a strike by workers of
#
urban clap, who were saying that because there's no labor regulation, Amit, and we are not getting
#
even so we are beauticians, they are like people who do small parts of work, they were saying that
#
if we are told to do five jobs in a day, we have to do all five, we can't choose like three or four,
#
right. And if we refuse one, then we don't get it the next day. So there's a system of penalizing us
#
and treating us like a widget in a sense, you know, not like a human being. And there's more
#
writing around how gig work, especially around technology companies have been done to increase
#
levels of efficiency and how impacts they cause on people who don't have that level of economic
#
opportunity or even alternative. So the thinking which we also need to have a little much more is
#
they may not have even an employment alternative, right, but the employment alternative which is
#
offered to them needs to be humane in a way. So what can be done to improve that? For instance,
#
if an Amazon warehouse is optimizing for speed in packing, but it's leading to repetitive injuries,
#
and its argument is we are going to bring in robots, right. We also need to ask Amazon,
#
maybe through collective action, I would prefer regulatory intervention is to say that do these
#
systems really exist. So at least people can know there can be disclosure around that, right. It's
#
not only led to left to an investigative reporter in that sense. Now, my bigger thing about state
#
power is that if we believe we want to move towards we are imperfect democracy in sense that we are a
#
post colonial country moving towards a democratic system, which I think we are. I think at some
#
point we bottom out this race to the bottom needs to have an end. And we lose at the end and then
#
we start again in some way or the other. And it's not like a catastrophic reset in a sense or end
#
of days. But I just think that at some point there's a realization and people are fatigued
#
with the level of social aggression, which is there. There's a sense of idealism, which is
#
reignited in people's minds. I think in those idle lab test conditions of democracy, what may work
#
are regulatory institutions, which are, which has not happened in independent India, but has
#
happened at some times. And I've had conversations with Ajay actually on this and he says apart,
#
they don't work as well as you think. I said, well, the TRAI works for telecom. It gave the
#
net neutrality decision, right. And it said, he says, but I've worked with the TRAI doesn't
#
actually work like that. Okay. And he's, he says he's worked with several, several of them, but
#
I think even with that level of imperfection to some extent, if you intermediate state power
#
build autonomous, regulatory bodies and institutions by itself, that level of friction
#
is there because I don't see Amit to a large extent, the private sector as benevolently.
#
And with those real stinted glasses, as you do, I recognize its value in giving me my iPhone,
#
my iPad, possibly making this mic and everything in the studio, as well as everything in my office,
#
including the car in which I came here today. But I do believe that certain forms of state
#
regulation are necessary when we've seen that in the food that we buy and we eat,
#
labeling packaging, right? So I'm not that principled against state intervention. If it
#
is done in the right way, I am much more open to it in a constitutional framework,
#
but it needs to be insulated against two forms of risk.
#
The first one is the most significant political risk. And there is, it can be done. And the second
#
one is the institution being a risk to itself because it does not have proper check. And there
#
are ways to do that as well. I'm not envisioning a police state in any way. In fact, the preferred
#
route for regulatory agencies would be to promote good conduct, to bring out
#
guidances, practices, and to build it rather than enforcement actions and punitive fines.
#
The second thing I'd like to point out is that, in fact, we are going towards a movement of no
#
regulatory institutions and bodies today. If you look at the data protection act, which has been
#
passed, there is a data protection board which does hear complaints, but that's after you file
#
a complaint with the company and then with a self regulatory authority, which is set up by
#
multiple companies. And then you get to go to the data protection board. You don't go to a court.
#
Of course, courts are very inefficient. You wouldn't get anywhere, anywhere there.
#
Okay. Now, do you think this remedy will work for most people for fines, for corrections things?
#
I don't think so. It'll work out that, but there's no regulatory body to set standards.
#
There's no regulatory body to demand information, but who have all of these powers gone to
#
these powers and the data protection act have gone to the central government,
#
which means the ministry of electronics and information technology, which means Mr. Ashwini
#
Vaishnav and Rajiv Chandrasekhar. And you can check their Twitter timelines and you can see what is
#
their principal energy and function going towards today. Is it going towards governance based,
#
governance based work, or it's going towards the perpetuation
#
of their political ideology and the power interests. I'm only saying that from the
#
perspective also that there is a irrespective of these two people who have named.
#
If you build the regulatory capacity directly in the government ministry by itself, the other is
#
like, let's not have anything itself. Okay. But if you're built, if you don't have a regulatory
#
institution, which is independent, autonomous, or even notionally, so you bake that all in the
#
government ministries. And when you have it all in the government ministries, it's run directly
#
by the politicians. And that's what's happening in India today. And the private sector likes it,
#
by the way. So because we don't have a free market, we have a crony capitalist system,
#
and of course they will like it. And we always have, but before I go back to the earlier question,
#
let me kind of respond to this. One, I don't look at the private sector with rose-tinted glasses.
#
In fact, I think people everywhere are the same, whether they're in the private sector or the state,
#
people respond to incentives. So you have to see what the incentives are.
#
And that's what matters. Going back to the gig economy question, I think, and history bears this
#
out, that competition is the best regulation. And then the problem is that if you want companies
#
there to offer better conditions, then they have to compete for workers. And the only way you do
#
that is if you allow the economy to grow, and which we unfortunately haven't because of excess
#
regulation. You spoke about the labor laws, but Indira Gandhi's labor laws were a disaster for
#
this nation. They hurt workers much more than they help them. And it is one thing to look at
#
their intention, but here I agree with Ajay completely. You cannot look at intentions,
#
you have to look at outcomes. The lazy way out is to look at intentions and say, oh,
#
with good intentions we have made these great laws, our job is done. But you have to look at
#
outcomes, and the outcomes there were disastrous. And I'm not against all regulation. Obviously,
#
a fundamental part of a free society is you need the rule of law. So you need well-minded
#
government regulation. When you say that hey, Amazon should be transparent about whatever,
#
I completely agree with that. If regulation is making companies more transparent and etc.,
#
etc., that's completely fine. But a lot of the regulation that we aim towards, we need to look
#
not at intent, but at outcome. And you can arrive at the outcome by understanding the effects that
#
incentives have on people. And those two points that you made, that of political risk and
#
institutional capture or institutional incentives going haywire, that is what we need to solve. And
#
we need to solve that by getting a little meta and I think getting to the rules of the game beyond
#
that. And you can't tinker at the margins, at the micro level with little things here and there,
#
that's not really going to solve anything. It's the larger stuff that we have to solve and then
#
things flow better. And that seems sometimes to me, because I am also a pessimist in some ways,
#
that seems almost insoluble. It seems such a huge sort of, and I want to get back to the earlier
#
question about what do we do about solving what the big tech companies, what they do. But before
#
that, would you have a response to this? Because I think we're figuring out the solutions together.
#
One thing which we need to do is we need to be a little much more heuristic,
#
which means that we need to learn what's working and not working. That requires a higher degree of
#
humility, but also audit processes. Are our policies working? How are they resulting in
#
intended outcomes? Should we tinker them up and down? And if it's done with the right purposes in
#
mind rather than, so tech companies do it all the time. They aim towards improving the product,
#
the consumer experience, which means sometimes to make you spend more money or time on them.
#
But why can't we intend towards that within public policy? And I think there is a capacity
#
resource gap here, but it's also an intent gap. Because again, it goes back to what we
#
were chatting earlier. But here's the thing, it's not just an intent gap. Beyond that,
#
I would say it's an incentive gap. A private company wants to build engagement so that you
#
spend more money and they want to capture your attention and they don't care how they do it.
#
Because that is the only way they make money. So they'll do their A-B testing and they'll have
#
their complex analytics and they'll do all of that. A state does not have those incentives,
#
especially in times where the truth no longer matters. Everything is narrative battles.
#
And therefore the state and in particular the party at charge, there is a distinction,
#
but right now they're both evil for me. But their incentives are not towards doing this kind of A-B
#
testing and providing good governance. Because A, it doesn't matter. B, the results of good
#
governance might be something visible 10 years around the line and you have the next election
#
to win. And for all of these factors, so... Amit, you know, I think when we think about
#
individuals and how they cause change and it's driven by sometimes a high degree of irrationality.
#
So it's not behavioral economics in a way. And I think there will be people who will break
#
incentive structures in a way. In a way, I think it'll rely on some degrees of human
#
irrationality. And of course, what sustains them are incentives, right? That will need to be designed.
#
But I do think the system is getting jammed more and more, more and more, right? It's not working
#
for people as much as it should be working, right? My truth is not an absolute truth. It is working
#
for some people as well, right? But I think by and large, social media is not serving the function
#
of being social today, right? We don't feel to that same degree what it was five or six years earlier.
#
It is serving that function. Of course, it's doing it in a little different way. But there is a
#
constant sense we are being bombarded with propaganda and disinformation. There's a sense
#
and fear in people based on surveys, that what they will say will get them into trouble. So they
#
can't participate in a social conversation. And it's not only due to the platforms, it's due to
#
the state, it's due to the laws, it's due to our institutions. So I think it's a complex, big problem.
#
I share the sentiment about, you know, social media is not working for you and me.
#
But A, most people seem happy with it and B, I won't even call it social media. If we can shift
#
the frame, if instead of calling it social media, we call it addiction media. And there it is working
#
and people are happy to be addicted and people are happy to be numbed into whatever state they like
#
to be in, just scrolling and watching Instagram reels all day or whatever. And, you know, Instagram
#
reels being, I think, as far as I have seen, a little less toxic than, you know, what goes on
#
elsewhere. It's mostly WhatsApp and YouTube in a sense. We're being passive recipients of media.
#
At a constant pace of time, in a sense, which like kind of also prevents them from sometimes
#
being by themselves, being alone, being without fidgeting. And I think to, if you do query a lot
#
of people, it's not like they're always happy with it. They always say that we're taking a break.
#
It's not good for me. Right? You have that conversation.
#
Even I say that, but then I go back to it.
#
Yeah, but you do take that break, right?
#
No, five minutes later, I go back to it.
#
No, but some people do it a little longer, or they change their patterns in a way.
#
But there is a, even if it's not manifesting, even if that whole, that addictive quality
#
is very strong, it's overriding your sense of reason, your sense of self-preservation of
#
solitude. Even in that way, there is a level of dissatisfaction. So I wouldn't think that
#
people are happy if they're engaged, if they are, they feel more like a captive, right?
#
It's, it's a little wobbly feeling which you have, right? I need to kill time.
#
I need to look at something. Silence by myself is not an option.
#
So I may be wrong, but my feeling is that as people like you or me who will engage in that
#
activity, but also have the self-reflection to realize that you shouldn't do this. You need a
#
break or why am I scrolling all day? But for a lot of people, you know, in their humdrum lives,
#
living lives of quiet desperation, you know, trapped in their poverty slash inequality,
#
whatever you wish to call it. It's, it's a release that they don't actually introspect on.
#
They're just happy it's there. And that's where the big bucks come from for the big tech companies.
#
So, I mean, I mean, do you, I mean, before we go into a break, one final sort of thought that
#
as an optimist, do you feel that the texture of our lives can be different 10 years later?
#
Because today the texture of our... It will definitely be different.
#
So it's dominated by social media today. Will it be a qualitatively better kind of social media?
#
How will it be different? What could, what can you imagine?
#
What, what I will imagine is that there will be, I'm going by this data,
#
there, there'll be moderate, moderately high levels of tele-connectivity in India, broadband
#
access, more people will be online. The large big tech platforms will continue to be what they
#
are right now. They may go through some forms of consolidation and it will be primarily video
#
based in a sense, video audio based in a sense. And I think what we have seen is the rise of the
#
influencer right now, but that's not truly happened. I think in 10 years, it will truly,
#
truly happen. It will replace even the difference between now and truly, truly happen.
#
Truly, truly happens as big as Bollywood in a sense. I think the economic pie is becoming
#
larger and larger for them. I think the sophistication with which people are now making
#
YouTube channels is nowhere close to what it was about five or six years ago. It seems fairly
#
amateur. They're very well crafted productions, which are happening on YouTube. So those alternate
#
business models are coming through. So it will be OTT only in a sense and video only. So you
#
will have a completely different fandom in that sense. I also think while politicians have relied
#
traditionally on Facebook and WhatsApp, et cetera, they will also shift to videos much more often.
#
I will not be surprised if politicians start live vlogging all the time, all the time. They do vlog
#
right now, but they'll do it much, much, much more actively.
#
Now this is just in terms of media. I think our daily lives will also have a higher degree
#
of intersection with technology. There'll be greater levels of state coercion, Amit,
#
towards participating in some form or the other of the digital public good.
#
You may do it voluntarily if it works for you really well and fine like UPI,
#
but you will keep having issues with Aadhaar, which will remain. For the private sector,
#
if you're wanting to contract with the government, you'll need to go through GEM.
#
They'll build small things here and there like ONDC. They'll keep trying out, it may work,
#
it may not work. For mobility, they'll try out things here and there. So you'll see a large
#
level of resources there. And if the current political and social trends keep progressing
#
like they are, there'll be a very high degree of investment in security technologies such as facial
#
recognition, mass surveillance. If you've come to Delhi, you've seen already polls have gone up
#
for installation of cameras now by the Delhi police and most societies even at a 100 meter
#
distance. And these kinds of trends will continue. I think what will be really there in 10 years will
#
be today, but only different by a small percentage point in terms of the kinds of technology we
#
have. But I think it will be much deeper because if I look 10 years back, it's the same as today,
#
but only a little different, but deeper in that sense, in terms of how many technology
#
points touch our lives on a daily basis. That sounds really dystopian. And I was asking for
#
the optimist in you, but I guess you're optimistic in the really, really long run and not necessarily.
#
So again, the thing is that dystopia is not a sky which is filled with black smoke or does not need
#
to be something which is dramatic like black mirror. For me, the dystopia is something which
#
is sustainable, which doesn't relate like which in which technology is not our friend,
#
but it is not our foe. We do not know what it is. Is there a way out of the addiction machines
#
we're surrounded by? Yes, it is to look at their business models. No, no, that you and I can do,
#
but is there a way out of it for society out of it? I think that's engaging in some level of
#
victim blaming if the product has been designed towards making us addicted to it.
#
But is there a way out of it? Yes, it is to look at their business models. We have again,
#
and if you look at the SEC filings of all the large social media companies by itself,
#
they all say they focus on Mao Dao, daily active users, monthly active users. There are certain
#
degree of revenue which they derive from each user based on the geography they are in. And then
#
there are ad impressions which they sell. That's the basic model. No, no, I'm saying you and I can
#
look at the basic model and analyze what has gone wrong with it and analyze even what is evil with
#
it. You know, even if you use that word as a metaphor, but for society to come out of it,
#
like do you think people will ever do the amounts of large concentrated voluntary action required
#
to kind of come out of this? And all of that comes down to leadership. Who's leading our country?
#
One name has come to everyone's mind when I've said who's leading this country today.
#
What is the last thing that person has done with respect to social media? Said,
#
follow my YouTube channel. Right? Right? Everyone knows that, right?
#
Go and press the bell icon. If he's saying that, right? Is there any hope? Are we actually having
#
the politics of honesty where somebody who's gone and has actually critically stated that
#
big tech platforms do result in incredible benefits for the creation of communities,
#
for people to stay in touch, but these are the large problems we are facing in India as a society
#
because of them as well. Why is that a taboo to verbalize? Right? And I again and again go back
#
to why it links with Hindu nationalism. You know, Prime Minister Modi actually went to Silicon Valley
#
and this was near when the digital India program was launched. All the Indian origin tech CEOs were
#
sitting in the frontline. So you can read that speech. It says Satya. He calls them by their
#
first names, Satya, et cetera. And that speech has one sentence which is imprinted. It's tattooed on
#
my mind. It says that countries which were finding power on the basis of their constitutions are now
#
finding it through technology. So he's basically saying the constitution does not matter because
#
there's technology and there are digital technologies which have the same power.
#
It's a realistic, it's a realistic verbalization, but it also says that what matters is what you see
#
on the smartphone, right? And for a Prime Minister to say that to all the tech CEOs there. And if you
#
see that repeatedly, what's also happening and there's a very fascinating Rajiv Shukla interview
#
with Mr. Modi and Mr. Modi is actually washing his clothes, right? He's shown to be in his government
#
accommodation as a very humble RSS man. He's washing his clothes. And yet at the same time,
#
there's a laptop open and he's tinkering with it. I think it's a 99 interview or something like that.
#
Yes, yes. People should watch it. So the thing is the political leadership today, which is
#
essentially identified with one person, thinks that technology is a solution to the manifold
#
problems of Indian society. It's not a constitutional values of liberty, justice, equality, fraternity.
#
And I think that's if you're looking for solutions, you have to start with leadership.
#
So therefore we are screwed is what you're saying because we have the leadership we have.
#
And there also, you know, just to add a bit to that, I feel that if you're looking for top down
#
solutions, you can use technology and oppress the people and we can all go to hell and dystopia can
#
happen. But if you were looking for bottom up solution, then technology can empower individuals,
#
but except that there is no sign of that happening. We are in a top down.
#
There are some signs of that happening. Tell me. So for instance, there are some state governments
#
who have made Jan Suchna portals. Okay. So for instance, it's not in the self interest of a
#
state government to tell that when it's imposed internet shutdown, Amit, but you can file a RTI,
#
you can file a complaint in Rajasthan. It's registered on the Jan Suchna portal. They don't
#
delete it. It's always there. And there's a response which comes a real substantive response.
#
So when IFF people sent a representation to Rajasthan and said that, Hey, what the hell,
#
people say that internet is shut down in Jammu and Kashmir and parts of India. But look at Rajasthan,
#
it like is second highest. Like this is a joint report with Human Rights Watch. They said we are
#
being penalized for our transparency. So there's some truth there, but it's working. So you have
#
Jan Suchna portals in which administrative decisions, transparency is being brought to
#
government. Yet at the same point in time, I feel that it's something which needs a very high
#
level of political buy-in. Otherwise the, it takes one or two bureaucrats or a bad spell for
#
things to just regress again. I think these kinds of things are happening. There are more examples
#
which we have, for instance, if you look at, so there's a flip side to it. You look at the
#
entire OTT industry, Amit, right? It's gone through such a phase in which at one point in time, we were
#
thinking that our OTT industry will kind of give a new financial stream to Bollywood. It would lead
#
to also a lot of filmmakers who don't find Massey formats to even like in the multiplex format to
#
exhibit their movies or make them make it into smaller silos. And that's why we had things such
#
as sacred games come out, right? People talking in a way in which people talk in everyday life,
#
using the gullies, using those theme formats, also touching upon areas of political controversy,
#
which essentially are considered taboo, right? So what you have seen is that the OTT industry
#
has flourished. It has provided employment to a lot of people, the true crime series,
#
which have come through. I think, though, what has happened is, again, here, after Tandav was
#
released, there was a whole crackdown by the Hindu right. The regulations are brought in by the
#
Ministry of Electronics and IT, giving powers to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, and
#
then there's such massive levels of self-censorship which are happening now. So I think India is today
#
at a very peculiar and interesting point. I don't think so we are screwed. I think we are getting
#
screwed constantly. And we have an option to tell at one point in time, that's enough.
#
The screwed is not an event. It's a condition. It's a condition. It's happening constantly.
#
And I think when people were building that online mob or that online movement, how can I say,
#
how can I cast any kind of normative judgment on that? They were also doing the same thing.
#
We didn't save the internet. They sent that mass email, a template. So Ministry of Information
#
Broadcasting is at Tandav saying that not only file a FIR in Uttar Pradesh, but also bring in
#
certain kind of regulations. At that point in time, there needed to be a mass movement also online
#
in which 5000 people would have sent emails and said, don't do it. We like these OTT shows. We
#
watch these OTT shows. But here's the thing, everyone is really scared these days. The constant
#
thing which I hear from people, Amit, is that, how are you being so outspoken, Apar? Tujhe
#
What is happening in India today? And I think this is maybe a good point to take a break
#
and we'll come back. But I think this is the primary national condition. It's not like people
#
are happy with what's happening, at least in my sense. Of course, a large number of people may
#
be happy with what's happening. It's possibly aligning with their political worldview. But
#
even the people who are happy are self-censoring themselves quite often. They know that what they
#
do not have to say. And this sense of fear is there online, not only because of how
#
people are being censored, but also how surveillance systems are building in India more and more.
#
As we go into a break, I'll make a tangential point. And this is not related to any of this,
#
but I was never hopeful about OTTs because I imagine that big companies, which eventually,
#
which get ossified in their ways, which are risk averse, will inevitably just go to Bollywood and
#
provide the same kind of content. And maybe there'll be some movement in the margins,
#
like the shows you spoke about, but by and large, they won't really get away from that.
#
What really gave me hope was user-generated content, especially like I felt the ban of
#
TikTok in India was absolutely tragic because a kind of incredible creative outbursts, including
#
dissent that I saw on that channel, was mind blowing. And my worry is not about the OTTs
#
because of course they will self-censor. As Advani said at the time of the emergency,
#
about the media, when asked to bend, they chose to crawl. The OTTs will do that. The big corporates
#
will do that. But the hope is that young creators can go to platforms like no longer TikTok,
#
but maybe YouTube and whatever, and find ways to express themselves. But it is easy for the
#
government to crack down on that as well. And the biggest clue to why this is also happening is not
#
just the regressive social movements that are around us, but also the nature of the state.
#
It is telling that it is Advani of the BJP who used that phrase at the time of the emergency.
#
And the problem there again wasn't just the individuals involved, but the fact that our
#
constitution allowed for it. There's a lot about the constitution you and I care about,
#
which is exactly what Prime Minister Modi was decrying. But there is also a lot there which has
#
allowed the state to rule us and oppress us instead of serving us. And that's also a
#
fundamental problem. I think it's not only the constitution. I think, I always say we are a
#
post-colonial state on the path to democracy. So, you know, and it's not a straight line, zigzag.
#
Just with regard to the TikTok ban, I mean, this was the last part of my work. We actually came
#
out with a statement at IFF clearly condemning the ban because it did not fit the law.
#
There was only a press information bureau release, which was a press release, which said we have
#
banned TikTok. It came after border tensions with China. Understandably, I'm a nationalist.
#
I'm a patriot as any other person. And I would voluntarily not possibly use TikTok if a reasoned
#
argument by public officials would have been made that these are companies which trench up data and
#
as well as profit from users in India. And it should be our duty to, in fact, support
#
Indian-based platforms. If that kind of encouragement or signaling could have been given
#
rather than a ban, it would have been much better. And the second thing is, if you remember around
#
that time, the ban which was there, there was no published order. There was no security report.
#
There was nothing. So this kind of crumbles the kind of institutional process. They banned about
#
47 apps. There was also a larger question. What is a Chinese app? What is not a Chinese app?
#
Is money in a large Indian unicorn considered to be Chinese?
#
Flipkart at the time. Yeah, money, Paytm, all of them. But the thing is that they have divested
#
parts of their money. Flipkart, I think Walmart, but still headed in Singapore, etc. What is
#
Indian money? How does VC Capital work? What is the Indian tech company? What is the Chinese
#
tech company? And there are legitimate security concerns with TikTok. Other countries have looked
#
at it as well. Why couldn't you build an institutional process around it? Why couldn't
#
you do a proper, thorough investigation? Why couldn't you demonstrate this all in public and
#
come out with a reasoned order? That would have been great for India's business environment.
#
That would have been great for encouraging citizen trust, preventing jingoism. There was
#
one clip which went viral on WhatsApp. I received it. People were throwing out their televisions and
#
stomping on it and hitting it with lattes. So this kind of tribal response, which was encouraged,
#
brings out the basic instincts in all of us as a people. And then we want to think that we are
#
leading the world in notions of civilizational greatness. This is not how civilized countries
#
react. Now on the final thing, which I just like to end with this break is that there is a large
#
part of our governance around technology, which I've worked on for the past six years. When I
#
started work on it, I thought because technology changes so much conceptually, even the things
#
which change very marginally in 5% in society, there's still massive changes according to me.
#
So if you build governance processes around that to reflect what the constitution can provide as a
#
promise, then that change is massive. For instance, OTT, if we came out with a different form of
#
regulation to how a television broadcast was regulated, it would look so different. Of course,
#
funding and market concentration, which leads to a kind of like a assembly line process for
#
the creative industry and the arts is a risk. But if the government itself is saying you need
#
to put in a standards and practices department, it kind of promotes it, right? Only the big
#
corporate can make the big movie for the OTT then, right? It increases costs in legal vetting.
#
So I always thought, Amit, that what we could do with technology was also take another step
#
in towards democracy from our colonial legacy, which is there.
#
It's really fascinating. I want to dive much deeper into this, but let's take a quick break first.
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Welcome back to The Scene and the Unseen. I'm sitting with Apar Gupta and we're having a
#
great time and this is already such a stimulating conversation. I want to get back to sort of your
#
younger years in your childhood and so on and so forth. And I was very sort of fascinated by
#
how in the past you've written about and spoken about how your connection with technology grew.
#
And then gradually, it became a tool of learning and your engagement became much
#
deeper. You were building little things. So take me through, you know, that entire journey.
#
So one of the things my parents really focused on and they really, really pushed me towards was
#
kind of a scholastic development, which didn't only rely on me getting grades in school.
#
And let me be very clear, I was what was called in my report cards an above average student.
#
They made me go for taekwondo classes, swimming classes, painting, tabla, what not, yaar.
#
And that may help people understand that why they also got me a computer in possibly,
#
like I think the ninth or the tenth standard or even earlier. And it was a desktop. It was,
#
I think, a compact machine, one of those. Or Uptron ACL, one of these.
#
I'm forgetting. And then later on, you know, like, because I had early access to computers.
#
I remember a CD of Sherlock Holmes came with it. So I listened to audio book, actually,
#
in it. Yes, it was an audio book or something, but it was also there. And in my dad's factory,
#
already computers were there. So I used to go and play Prince 3D on it. And essentially,
#
not an example of great parenting, that your dad takes you alongside for a workday and he says,
#
here yaar, you play. Play Prince 3D. But here's the thing, a lot of games were there,
#
reading was there. And then I had early access to the internet also in the 10th, 11th standard.
#
And I really, really liked Western music. I really liked rock music, classic rock music. So
#
one point I had about 100 CDs with an Excel file, with a CD burner. I used to assemble
#
computers also for my friends. If anybody wanted a computer to build, I would go with them to Nehru
#
Place. I would know kitni cheez mein kya raha hai. Because you wanted to purchase the chassis
#
separately. You wanted to purchase the motherboard. Motherboard didn't come with integrated graphics
#
card. I did all of that. And for me, a large part of what I was enjoying around technology
#
didn't translate, unfortunately, Amit into coding. I went for coding classes and everything,
#
but I didn't love them instinctively. I'm that weird set of people who love everything around
#
technology, love the culture, for instance. So I even bought Bill Gates The Road Ahead when it was
#
released. It also came with the CD. I even remember some lines from it. I was like, of course, a very,
#
very early fanboy of Apple computers could never afford them. Jab iMac bhi nikla tha,
#
and all of that. But I knew about Steve Jobs. I was reading about Steve Jobs. I knew about
#
the Hacker Manifesto. I knew all the culture around Silicon Valley fairly early on. PC Quest,
#
Data Quest bhi ghar pe aati thi. I'd subscribe to them. And a large part of this, this kind of
#
fascination with technology was also sitting alongside another big thing which was there in
#
my life, which was that I had a stammer when I used to speak. And it was much more pronounced
#
when I used to speak in English. So I don't know why I started doing this, but there was a mirror
#
in the bathroom and I used to read out a Indian Express op-ed from or a Times of India op-ed from
#
memory to get over the stammer in a sense. From memory. So I used to first read it and then wanted
#
to read it out in a way. Matlab I forced myself in the 10th and then I don't know why I did these
#
things because samajh nahi aata. It seems fairly remarkable when I think about these things. And I
#
think young people have that level of energy to do these kind of things. So yeah, and so I read it,
#
started reading more. And I come from a family where there is some amount of economic privilege,
#
there's wealth, but cultural and literary privileges are not matching that in the same way.
#
So it's much more of a baniya household in that sense. Matlab where it has a much more protestant
#
ethic of making money, conserving money, spending it in a very economical way and then just like
#
living a very conservative life. But my parents chose a different path for me and for some degree
#
I took to it in a way in which I was then reading. My bus stop was in South X and there was a Midland
#
bookstore there. And so for instance, my pocket money was 100 rupees or 80 rupees and I used to,
#
I had to maintain a ledger, how I would spend it. Otherwise I wouldn't be given
#
money for the next week. So I saved money and then I used to get and buy a book.
#
And I used to get a great discount there and I used to also get a recommendation. And that person
#
who was there, that book owner who was there, he gave me books which are not meant for young people.
#
He gave me Kafka, he gave me Metamorphosis and I remember having nightmares after reading it.
#
And he gave me the Norton critical editions of these books. So my fascination with technology
#
at the same point in time, this is happening and I'm not good in school in the conventional
#
academic sense. Yet at the same point in time, I don't want to attend classes. So there's this
#
Wes Anderson movie in which, which starts out with a boy who's failing every class,
#
gets infatuated by the teacher, but is the president of all the clubs, right? So I didn't
#
want to attend classes. So I was part of about eight clubs in 12th standard. And I founded
#
the computer club, which was called Matrix Marians for some technology or something like that.
#
Very inspired again by culture around technology in a way. So early access to technology helps me
#
develop my personality, my skills, public speaking, it all kind of starts fitting in, in a way around
#
that time. And yeah, because I'm doing a large amount of music piracy, et cetera, I am attracted
#
to debates around open access, freedom, et cetera, things like that. So it starts fairly early for me
#
in that sense. And which is why I now believe that a core part of my personality is not only because
#
of the privilege, but that privilege giving me early access to technology in a way where
#
my personality has been shaped significantly by it. And that's, this is why I think early access
#
to technology provides a very high degree of autonomy for individuals to become who they are,
#
discover their true nature in a way, or discover a depth to their nature, which they will not be
#
able to do. So it will allow a lot of people, young people, a high degree of social mobility,
#
which is required. And I'll again go back to inequality, because I think that's a main
#
challenge. Now, one thing which I'd like to bring up from my early, early days in technology was
#
that internet access was extremely expensive. Okay. But the government also gave internet access to
#
people in Delhi who were government officers. If you dialed 4888888888 from your dial-up,
#
and in the username and password, you wrote username and password, and then you wrote PPP.
#
So if you had friends who had fathers or mothers who were working in the government service,
#
you could in fact access the internet and download things which others could not.
#
And to a large extent, I think we have overcome that barrier, in terms of internet as a cost
#
being there for large sections of society. But I also do think that that device-based
#
discrimination still stands today. So I think early access to technology is fundamental. It
#
gives me and offers me a very fascinating world as a person who's not truly introverted, but
#
somewhere on that scale, okay, helps me discover a lot of things, gives me access to incredible
#
amounts of knowledge and information, which I use fundamentally. I even made websites here. I did a
#
lot of weird stuff back then. I'm interested in the interplay of two things. Like you spoke about,
#
you know, how technology can help you discover your true self. And that term, the true self,
#
is interesting to me, because on the one hand, what happens is you obviously get drawn to things
#
which are easy for you and which match your inclination. So, you know, putting computers
#
together and all of that, there's a certain bent of mind involved in that. But also, there's the
#
interplay of that with the fact that you are putting in a lot of effort into certain activities
#
to compensate for perceived shortcomings. Like you said, your English wasn't great, your public
#
speaking wasn't great. So you would take part in debates and you would be part of the clubs and
#
you would be part of all of that. And that's really interesting to me. And I think that's
#
really interesting to me because I'm thinking, had your English been normal and if you didn't
#
have public speaking confidence issues, maybe you don't make that extra effort and then you
#
don't reach the levels that you eventually do. So maybe that effort that you're compensating
#
for something that you feel you lack, you know, gives that extra kind of dimension to you.
#
So I'm very sort of curious about this sense of, as you're shaping your sense of self, part of
#
yourself would be shaped by the things that are intrinsic to you. But part of it would also come
#
from intention that I want to do this. And then you work on that and that also becomes a part of
#
you. So how do you think about these? The way I think about this, it's true. You've caught it
#
very clearly that some, you know, there's this great line from Sacred Games, it says sometimes
#
I rule this world, etc. And sometimes you feel like utter complete worthless shit.
#
Okay. And I used to swing between this much more actively than I do today. But I think for me as
#
a young person, what I felt was always that I'm not good enough. And that was primarily a function
#
of me not scoring well enough in school, despite me wanting and putting in that effort. And I did
#
a lot of rote learning. And what technology and these other kind of formats provided me was a form
#
of learning, which matched my interests in a better way. To write a poem, I wrote poems
#
for participating in public speaking, choosing a topic. So it gave me a sense of autonomy.
#
Whereas the curriculum, the way it is imposed or taught to you quite often in school, it is that
#
you need to learn this, but it's not explained why or that value is not really tangible to you
#
as a young person. So it did cause a lot of this. What today I think drives me even further is
#
essentially a sense of my own mortality of knowing that how much time I have,
#
and knowing that a wide vibrant experience as well as the ability to do better is within me. So it
#
comes from a certain degree of confidence, which I sometimes need to pull back from and insert a
#
level of humility. And this is because I mean, when I've reached 39, I know now how many times
#
I've been wrong. Others have pointed it out, but I've been steadfast and I couldn't see it back then,
#
so I think this kind of thing may be within you. But I think to a large extent, it was also
#
a function of my larger relatives placing expectations on me as being the oldest male
#
child in a joint family, which can be a sense of responsibility. You need to behave in a certain
#
way. You need to achieve certain things because you're setting the bar for all the other cousins
#
in that sense. It may be those formative experiences. And I think to a large extent,
#
maybe also the nurturing and the kindness provided by my parents as much as they were really tough
#
with me in a sense where they took me for trips. My mother, for instance, every afternoon taking me
#
to learn taekwondo, taking me to different kinds of classes. When I look back and I said that
#
if you were able to do a lot of this despite having all of these kind of thoughts in your mind,
#
to a large extent, it's because of a nurturing environment, which I'm extremely lucky to get.
#
And I think a lot of people don't have that, but there was a fair degree of compensation. But
#
where do I come from? I look back at it with a sense of gratitude. I also can't associate with
#
myself when I was in my teens. When I think about me in my teens and there are some fragments of
#
stuff which come here and there in scrapbooks or you see the pictures and you're like,
#
wow, I was thinking so differently back then. What was I chasing? And those goals also seem
#
to be very, very immediate. It seemed to be like 12th standard. Okay, Apar, you didn't score that
#
much that you can go to Delhi University. Maybe you'll take admission in a professional law degree
#
in a college, etc. And that will be the best marriage of your skill of technology and the
#
law and public speaking. And after that, you will get a job in a firm and life will be set. I was
#
thinking like that in a very conventional manner in which I want to be employable. I want to earn
#
a salary. I want to go to office. The biggest fear at that point in time was that. So I think
#
young people are much more lucky and in terms of when I think they at least have an opportunity
#
today because of the internet, the interface with much older people through information exchanges,
#
which is why I think I'm optimistic also about things such as mental and physical health,
#
about being financially independent at a younger age. And these are great, great things.
#
Some bits of it will come from a degree of feeling incomplete, feeling inferior. But I hope
#
people who feel like that get nurturing environment from friends, family, from strangers.
#
And I'm also interested in another interplay between two quests that we are all on, I think,
#
when we are young. And one is the quest that comes from the anxiety of what others think of
#
you. And it's a quest to fit in that you want to be respected by your peers and you want to fit in
#
and all of that. And the other is a simultaneous quest that some may not embark upon, some may not
#
even be aware of, but it is a quest to find themselves. Like when you look back on yourself,
#
what did you want and why did you want it? And in a sense, you already answered that with this
#
conventional desire that I'll do law now and it's the best fit and then I'll get a job and
#
I'll work in a firm and all of that. But apart from that, if you look at how you were growing
#
during that period in terms of A, the anxiety of fitting in and wanting to be respected and
#
liked by everyone and B, kind of figuring out the things that are you in the sense that
#
I want this, I am this. So what was that journey like? That journey was
#
always easy and difficult at the same time because quite often you set the bigger goal
#
and you work towards it and a lot of people are great at that and I'm also good at that in some way.
#
But I've also discovered that maybe I don't do the best goal setting because sometimes when I've
#
reached that goal, when you've reached that summit in a sense and you've climbed that mountain,
#
you're like, what should I do now? So the question always for me then becomes what do I do next?
#
Okay, and I've always been a person who's been very, very driven in a sense and not being
#
competitive, but at least feeling that, hey, I can't spend like two days doing nothing
#
in a way which I don't enjoy it in a way. So I think parts of that journey became clearer
#
as I was there and when you did reach that summit, you did have a part of the answer and
#
then you embarked on another journey and set another goal. What I'd like people to know is
#
that when you look at anybody's LinkedIn, when you looked at my LinkedIn for instance, if you go
#
right now, look, open a tab, you'll see Apar graduated from school in 2002. He went to law
#
school from 2002 to 2007. After that, he worked in a law firm for one year, then Columbia law school,
#
then he worked again, then opened a law firm, then opened his independent practice, did IFF,
#
so there is no break which is showing. It's all showing like an even progression without doubt,
#
without reflection, but that's not the case. It's not all a plan. It's not all very, very,
#
you know, well thought out and intentioned in a way. And what I'd like people to know is that
#
there are short breaks there. There are periods of unproductivity there. There are periods of deep
#
personal doubt, professional doubt, whether it's fitting my values, what are my values?
#
And I think these questions go back to the first part of our conversations.
#
And one thing I think which has really, really though been constant,
#
has been a recognition of what I'm good at and what I'm not.
#
To some extent, where do I need to work on? I know those things and what things
#
interest me and what I can do. And that doesn't stop me even from experimenting. Like I was
#
saying, starting a YouTube channel gave me anxiety. People may think that a person like me who's so
#
public on social media will start a YouTube channel and everything will happen. But no,
#
I watched YouTube videos by YouTubers, how to make YouTube channels first for two months.
#
And the primary message was overcome social anxiety and overcome social judgment.
#
So the thing is that the things which you are good at can then
#
lead you to do a thing which is incidental to it, which is very important for people to know.
#
So if you're finding what I've always seen in myself, something which I'm doing right now,
#
like public speaking, can I turn it into something I enjoy and do on a day to day basis that is
#
lawyering because it goes down to a sense of personal satisfaction which comes from
#
verbalizing something which is there, which is playing with language, understanding what's behind
#
it and which is socially respected at the same point in time and provides me a status in society
#
alongside giving me some amount of money. And that drove me in my youth. Then towards the second
#
part is that if law is a movement towards social change, right? Am I only practicing it for
#
a commercial benefit? Am I not taking that into account? And I mean, it's a really scary thing
#
once the horse blinds have been removed and your eyes have been opened sometimes because it's very
#
hard to unsee. And there are certain moments in life where you think that I'm doing well,
#
but am I happy? And I hope more people have that feeling because that's an inner conversation.
#
And then you do public interest cases, then you realize even public interest cases may not be
#
enough. Maybe you're looking for larger social change. So you need to do civic literacy, be part
#
of movements, right? And that takes you on a journey. So goals are not static, but the skills
#
which are there, the love of language, connection with technology, as well as thinking about its
#
social impact builds on and kind of incrementally goes into a direction. And I would say the much
#
more clearer manifestations of that which happened are not happening between, let's say,
#
school 2002 graduation and law school 2002. That's happening between 1998 and 2002,
#
right? So that period of doubt, that period of indecision is leading to some decision and maybe
#
that may not also work out for a long period of time. But thankfully for me, things have worked
#
out. And I've gotten a bit better, I think so at planning, I sit down, I've learned around it
#
primarily through reading, watching others from conferring with others also. But I think the early
#
years, what provided me a lot of this platform have been my privileges. Not everyone has this
#
opportunity. And being a upper caste man, who's like heteronormative in every way, goes to a
#
great school, has a loving family, and the parental expectations largely are, apni life se khush raho,
#
okay? I consider myself incredibly privileged and lucky to do that. And this is also why I think
#
it's possible for me to do the things which I've done. So that support is there. This has been
#
kind of like a journey I've been on for some time. And I don't think so. I also am a person who's
#
easily satisfied. And like, for instance, I was just telling you outside, now that I'm breaking
#
from, I've stopped going to office in March at IFF, it's undergoing a leadership transition,
#
which was intentioned as per plan, which I set six years ago, I didn't decide the next step.
#
What would I do? Of course, I'm thinking of going back to legal practice. I've said that.
#
But I want to do a little much more public writing, because I enjoy it. And I also think
#
it fulfills a certain degree of social value. Again, that same thing is linking. But this time,
#
I think so I am intentionally giving myself time and signaling it in public. I'm comfortable. And
#
so somebody introduced me at a place recently, Amit. He read a lot of things.
#
Okay, this is Apar, Apar has done this, let's give him a bio. So I said, you know, a simpler way to
#
say it was the Hi, I'm Apar Gupta, I'm presently unemployed. Okay, so I said, it needs to be much
#
more acceptable for people. And not to even say that I'm on a sabbatical or things like that,
#
just to say I'm taking time for myself. And my next professional steps will be my next
#
professional step. So this, this time, I'm intentionally saying it, it's not a journey
#
in the sense where you know you're going, it's not mapped. And I think it's important for people to
#
know that. First of all, you know, thanks for giving us that glimpse behind, you know, the person
#
that you were, because I think it's important for people to realize ki bahar se jo bhi dikta hai,
#
you know, the journey there is never so easy, because if someone sees you as, you know, the
#
eloquent public speaker that you are today, to think that you were once an introvert who stammered,
#
it's an inspiring story. My next question is about, you know, this, what you describe of that early
#
period is that the sense one gets is that you're driven by, you're driven by what you can do for
#
yourself at an individual sense in the sense ki theek hai, English isn't great, public speaking
#
isn't great, I'll do this, I'll practice this, I'll join clubs. Then you talk about ki theek hai,
#
I want a good profession, I want to be respected, I'll do law, I'll join a firm.
#
And at some point, like today, if I speak to you, or if one just follows the trajectory of the last
#
few years, everything is towards how can I do things for society, how can I make the country
#
better off, that these are the things that make me mad, how can I make a difference, right?
#
And some would say that maybe the shift is also not a shift, because entangled in that are the
#
sense that when you say I want to change the world, you know, it that is also an act of ego
#
at one level. Yes, you know, so when did this sort of this sense of larger purpose begin to
#
sort of arise in you, like, you know, you've done self reflection and a lot of self reflection,
#
and most people don't do any. So, you know, so when you think back on yourself,
#
when is the time that you're kind of coming out of this, and you're thinking beyond the narrow
#
trajectory of whatever present path you're upon at that point, and thinking that no,
#
I have to do something else. In popular culture, in literature, in movies, it may be
#
shown as a dramatic moment of turn, a trigger, a point. But I don't think so that was with me,
#
Amit. I think I reached a point of dissatisfaction, focusing very internally,
#
and I started looking broadly even in college. But it was with a smaller set. So for instance,
#
in college itself, I became this. So I went to Amity Law School, I wanted to remain in Delhi,
#
my parents wanted me to remain in Delhi. And it's comfortable for a privileged South Delhi boy
#
to just travel for six kilometres, go to law school, come back. And it's not like I was
#
partying or anything, I used to basically drink chai and dip a lot of biscuits in it and like
#
sleep on that sugar high. Or I used to read, I was not very like not doing much with that time.
#
But I started participating in moot court competitions, which were like mock trials.
#
And, you know, again, that sense of personal ambition drove me. I'm in Amity, I didn't get
#
through those national law schools, I made the wrong choice. Now I'm going to best them in a
#
moot court competition through pure labour and intellect, etc. All of that. It doesn't matter if
#
I'm not even the top 10 law schools. Okay, again, that sense of me, me, me, I need to be better.
#
Right. And so I was successful to some extent. But it also allowed me to work in teams with my
#
colleagues, with my batch mates. And one area where I have not been very great at has been,
#
for instance, making personal relationships first and then professional relationships
#
later. I've always made a professional relationship and then a personal relationship in that
#
many times, right? It's not like with batch mates, I'm like, okay, let's like go out and
#
like, you know, do something fun, etc. play cricket, etc. social activity, or you are reading
#
this and like getting chatting and all of that. I'm more like, let's build a team, guys. Let's
#
with it and we get to know each other. I'm in touch with a lot of these people now.
#
So it's lasted over time. But the thing was, I started also looking at the world from their
#
perspective. And I was not a geek in that sense. Again, I'm above average, but I'm doing great and
#
extra curriculars. But I hate what's also happening in the law school, because there's
#
a form of a private law college which is enforcing attendance norms, being carceral, locking the
#
classroom if people are coming late. So I do all kinds of things. When they lock the classroom,
#
I get a screwdriver from home, I unscrew the latch, I put it in an envelope and I present it
#
to the director under his door. When the classroom air conditioner is not working,
#
and the paint fumes are coming in, I write a representation, which I get cosigned by
#
about 80 of my batch mates, all of them, and I give it to the director. When there are rules
#
which are placed for disciplinary notices for students who wore shorts, I represented them,
#
I said they need to have legal access and I will represent them. I said to the authority which
#
gave the show cause that you can't be the also the authority which testifies and also decides,
#
whereas you have evidence and etc. I did all of these funny silly things at that point in time.
#
And the blog called Mutiny and Amity. And the blog called Mutiny and Amity,
#
which started out as a joke, right? But also tell me about that. Tell me about that. So yeah,
#
firstly, my pseudonym, it was Deep Throat. Yeah, people should, it's not for the porno,
#
it's because yeah, you know, Watergate, etc. And of course, Watergate did end up
#
great for the person who called himself Deep Throat, as much as they stuck by their moral
#
principle. But yeah, so, and it had two of my batch mates, one was very fairly active,
#
he's a partner in a law firm, he's doing really well for himself, bless him, Ayush.
#
So we participated in a moot court competition called Stetson International, it was an
#
environmental law. And we won the India round, we were going to Florida. And we, it was the first
#
time college had done well, it's Amity, it's not a national law school. So we go to the founder
#
family, which is like the Chauhans, okay, in the defense colony bungalow, which is called Chauhan
#
Viti. That's because they bought eight buildings on the main road in defense colony. Yeah, man.
#
So the thing is, and anyways, yeah, I was like, I didn't like them. So even at that point in time,
#
and the thing is that, so we go under the pretext of sponsorship. And mutiny and amity,
#
if you go back to Wayback Machine, it's a horrible blog, it's just saying that this person is locked
#
that person in a fire exit, or this lecturer, when they when they give the lecture, they don't know
#
their stuff, like, etc, all of that. So and yeah, so here's the thing, like, and the blog was
#
being read by a lot of people within Amity Law School, and it was growing into a community. And
#
it reached the founder director. And the last blog post was essentially, when we were going
#
for a visa appointment, clicking pictures with a standee, and basically like being really happy as
#
a team, which had won the moot court and brought glory to the law school. And so the administration
#
figured out the founders figured out who we like, they must be these guys, they must be connected
#
to the people who are running the blog as much as we had, yeah, pseudonyms. And so they locked us
#
in a room and asked us to call mobiles away mobile phones, those dumb phones we had, I did have a
#
kind of a smartphone, it also had a stylus. So yeah, we used to click pictures from that.
#
And they took away our phones, locked us in a room, forced us to delete the blog,
#
write apologies, etc. And Ayush's father happened to be a criminal lawyer. So he filed a criminal
#
complaint of kidnapping and illegal confinement, and then it was settled. And for a long period
#
of time, we thought that we would be restigated, etc. Because that's what they threatened us with.
#
But nothing happened. But yeah, this is what happened. It happened in my ninth semester.
#
And in my 10th semester, the book came out, I was writing a book and the college, in fact,
#
gave me incredibly high marks. And for the first time, I topped the batch. So it was a very weird
#
experience. How do I put it? But you didn't finish the story when you went to the Chauhan's houses,
#
what happened? They locked us in a room. Yeah. Oh, in the at that time in one of those houses.
#
Yeah, they locked us in a room. So firstly, one of the Chauhan's comes and like Aseem comes and
#
he sits with a tablet actually way back. It's a Windows tablet. Okay, he brings up the blog
#
and he says that, do you know about this blog? And Ayush is like freaking out. Okay, and the larger
#
team is there also. And then he asks, who is Deep Throat? I still remember him asking. And because
#
I thought that okay, you should be scared, but it won't be an issue. He'll be able to talk it out.
#
I said, I am Deep Throat. And like Ayush slapped his head. I still remember that.
#
And he still blames me. He said, why did you just like say that? He had no way to prove that.
#
So he said that we'll file a police complaint. This is defamatory. It's disparaging the Amity
#
brand, et cetera, and this that. So like, yeah, and like, you know, what's the what's the sad
#
thing, Amit? Years later, there's been a student suicide due to attendance issues in Amity law
#
school. And a lot of the issues which we were mocking, and we were kind of raising that the
#
classes are done in a manner in which the faculty and the students have a very antagonistic
#
relationship. And attendance norms are enforced in a punitive fashion on people turned out to be
#
true. Some of the same faculty ended up being blamed by a student because at that time, your
#
anxiety is so high. You want a job with Trilegal, Amarchand Mangaldas, Lutra, one of these big, big
#
firms, right? And any kind of thing which goes against your academic record will just set you
#
back, right? You'll like because it's a very competitive and saturated market. And you are
#
anyways in Amity, you're not like top of the pick, right? So yeah, this is what happened here. But
#
our parents kind of were able to get us out of it in some way or the other, especially Ayush's dad,
#
by saying that, how could you take away their cell phones, lock them in a room, and keep them
#
for five hours and get them to delete this blog? Wow. All of this happened. So then a settlement
#
took place. I don't know what happened in the settlement. Ayush doesn't know, like, because my
#
father came, his father came, some of our other batchmates fathers came, like, and then it was
#
settled in that way. I've talked about this in, you know, present, in a, in a converge event,
#
which was done by Anshul Tiwari. And it became relevant also, because I brought it up, because
#
there was a student suicide in Amity Law School, because of these kind of cultures which
#
perpetuated over a period of time, we were able to get out of it. But a lot of other students would
#
have not been able to take this pressure or manage these outcomes, again, due to our privileges.
#
So, Amit, it also really deeply, like, it kind of made me understand,
#
which a person in my position would not have ordinarily understood what it means to be censored
#
in a very different way, where you feel that you're doing something for fun. You've made a
#
college blog, etc., things like that. Okay. And you've been kind of punished for it in such
#
a severe way where you've lived with anxiety. So I remember when I went to college,
#
matter is settled, but we don't know it's settled. Because the promoters called us,
#
they are director, faculty, how will they react to us? They didn't say anything. But I remember
#
I had difficulty walking into campus. I called two of my friends and they accompanied me inside.
#
Why? Why? Why did you feel? I didn't know how that day was going to go.
#
I didn't know what was going to happen to me, whether a formal notice was going to be still
#
given to me. Right? There's no legal settlement in a sense. This is that you don't push more
#
these kids. We won't push more our complaints because you did this nonsense with them. So,
#
Amit, in a way, like I, at an early age, got to know a content takedown through extra legal measures.
#
And it speaks to a sense of powerlessness, which I think a lot of people feel on a much more daily
#
basis, which I kind of understand in some way or the other. But I like to say that this was not
#
the pivotal point which changed me. I was just thinking that this could be your Mahatma Gandhi
#
kicked out of a train in South Africa. No, not at all. Nothing like that. There's no sense of
#
comparison there. No, no, I was kidding. You can spin it that way. But the thing is, you know, you
#
kind of you kind of become a little much more immediately you do become a little much more
#
jilted because of this entire kind of experience. But it doesn't turn you into a kind of a person
#
who's into social welfare, et cetera, immediately. Because even after that, I end up applying to
#
firms, I go work at a firm, I'm still interested in just writing around technology and the law
#
and regulation, practicing public policy, sending submissions to TRAI, doing that kind of stuff.
#
I've still not opened up in the way in which I think public engagement is important for me,
#
beyond people just reading what I write and that too, just so they can engage me as a lawyer.
#
Because my aspirations even at that point in time are towards a big house, a big car,
#
being a senior advocate, getting a senior's gown, having like five juniors follow me,
#
etc. Because those are the kind of values which the legal profession unfortunately also has,
#
which are denominative of skill, expertise, success. That you're a great lawyer if you are
#
really busy. You're an even better lawyer if you're really busy, okay? And you have these five
#
corporate clients who are the top corporate clients of India, this is how much you charge.
#
And of course, there's some truth to it, but I think it's become an atomized truth. In a sense,
#
you only need to do this to be successful in life, not only as a lawyer. So that is what was guiding
#
me immediately after law school into what I was. But I had another blog. It was called the India
#
Law and Technology blog. That's because the field was not that crowded back then. People were not
#
talking about technology and the law in 2007, 2008. There were, but fewer people were. And I
#
used to write a blog post about what's happening in the courts, what's happening with regulatory
#
institutions, not only in India, but even abroad, tracking it. I got the website designed as well,
#
I remember at one point in time. And I was fairly regular with it. Even when I went for my masters,
#
I was very regular with it. At least two blog posts a week or one blog post a week at least.
#
And it had about 300-400 blog entries by the end of it. So I was writing with a high frequency.
#
And a lot of the issues which I was writing about were not only concerning private disputes.
#
A lot of the law is also not only about settlement of dispute of Plaintiff A against Defendant B.
#
It's also about how the law is settled for future cases for CDEFG, which means it's a principle of
#
law. It's a principle of interpretation. And there's a large vacuum here, right? Technology has created
#
that vacuum in the law and how it will be applied. So quite often, I ended up commenting on issues
#
of public interest. And I think it's been a slow, gradual, glacial process, Amit, over years. And
#
you know, the worldview has just expanded. I've seen things. Now I can't unsee. And I think
#
law is one. Now, today, I've reached a point where I think law is one component of the
#
wider amount of activity which is required to take our society into a much more democratic
#
constitutional assimilation of technology, which advances it towards those aims.
#
So I want to ask you about your evolution as a thinker and a writer along two sort of separate
#
points of entry. And one of them is law. Like, you know, you'd sent me a note. I don't know if
#
we can link it from the show notes and as public the note you made for Ashoka. And let's try to do
#
that. Yeah, let's try to do that. So in that note, what I realized while reading it and taking notes
#
on it is that it is so sharp in terms of every single paragraph is a particular point. And you
#
move on to next and just thematically, it is so well structured. And I was wondering if the study
#
of law, which itself is a very well structured sort of field as it were, had a part to play
#
in A, how you thought about things and B, how you wrote about things.
#
It did initially, but I think legal writing is bad writing. It is verbose. It relies on high
#
degrees of complexity. It's not clear. And quite often, it is possible to do legal writing in a way
#
which tells a story. Quite often, what we are doing is we are not achieving the objective
#
of legal writing, which is explanation. Or in many ways, when you are doing contentious work,
#
for agreement based work, it will be clarity. Yeah. What do we agree between each other? And
#
what are the conditionalities? Whatever is foreseeable, let's set it down. A lot of time,
#
it's driven out of boilerplate terms of art, which are necessary. But then again, there is no real
#
study, at least by and large, it may be there at the higher levels of legal practice.
#
And for specific lines, in terms of understanding the needs, what are the real agreements between
#
both of them? What is the real points of conflict will show above? And how do we resolve them in a
#
way which does not lead to dispute? A lot of times that doesn't happen. And with legal pleadings,
#
what you see, is that as much as there are formats and necessary ingredients which need
#
to be articulated in any legal claim, what is the basis of the right? How do you establish it on the
#
basis of the rights which are there? What is a procedural process of obtaining that remedy,
#
which is the forum, which is the jurisdiction, whether it is in time limit permitted by that
#
claim, is that absence of actually satisfying the ingredients of that substantive remedy,
#
that A, B, C needs to be satisfied, then you win or then you lose. And the second thing is
#
the inability of the written word to persuade. And drafting did teach me to a large extent how
#
it's done. But I think what I also wanted to do is improve myself as a writer over a period of time
#
because I think, at least initially I thought, I still think I'm not a good writer. And I think
#
that small voice is in me where when people say that, hey, you've written this really well, I'm
#
said, are you talking to me? Sometimes I'm like, okay, Apar, accept it, accept it. I keep telling
#
myself, accept it, accept it. You've written this well. Because now a lot of people know me for my
#
op-eds, right, which I write frequently. You know, I go back to that op-ed after even it's published
#
and I crib over line A or line B and I tweeted about this. And thankfully, two or three people
#
like Prem Panikar said, every writer goes through this. Please, Apar, be easy on yourself.
#
I read even today, books on good writing. So there is a way where you keep learning about the things
#
which you want to be good at. As I'm embarking on a journey, I'm thinking of writing a book. Let me
#
tell you, I was under a book contract earlier, which I broke because I thought I was not good
#
enough. I signed a book contract. When was this? About five years ago. Oh gosh. I broke it.
#
Couldn't do it. Not because of lack of time only. But I thought, I made a synopsis outline. There
#
are 5000 words written. It's a chapterization. But I broke it because I thought I'm not ready.
#
And now I'm doing my second attempt. And this time I'm doing it a little less with the outline,
#
a little more in a thing which I enjoy. And I've told this to friends, it may happen,
#
it may not happen. I need to be happy, but I think it will happen. So the large part of this,
#
again, I'll say, is that writing is really important to me. I'm passionate about it,
#
but I also think I'm not good enough. And for instance, if I read writers like that,
#
that writer Nobukov, he writes beautifully. It grabs me, what he's done. And when I read
#
Great Gatsby, how can I forget his opening? And then you think, okay, we won't be able to do this,
#
we'll do something. But you're getting me, right? There's a sense of dissatisfaction that the written
#
word can do so much. And the law has contributed to it. But I've realized the law is not in,
#
they say the law is an ocean, the law is a universe. But if you look at the legal opinions,
#
which are being written really well, by some of the US Supreme Court justices, like Justice
#
Ginsburg, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, they are persuasive, they are open, if they won't persuade you,
#
they'll still make you or prompt you to think. And that's what's important.
#
I'll take a little digression here. And I don't want to talk more about this, which is why I'm
#
taking the digression. And I'll talk about Nabokov. Now, the thing about Nabokov is that he wrote in
#
a language which he learned late. And a lot of the exuberance in his writing comes from that, that
#
he is really enjoying playing with the language and all these new tools that he has and all of
#
that. But there is another writer I turn to often who also learned a language in her adulthood.
#
And that's a lady called Agata Christophe. I think she was from Hungary. And she had to move
#
to France when she was 21, started learning French at 21, and wrote a series of novels,
#
which is now available in an English translation as a notebook trilogy. Masterful. And it's a
#
masterpiece. And one of the things there is that she takes the opposite approach to Nabokov.
#
Rather than revel in the riches of language that are now available to her, she instead strips it
#
down to its essence and goes to the heart of what she wants to say to talk about and strips that
#
down to its essence. And the language is remarkably powerful and remarkably persuasive as much as one
#
can apply that label to a story. And what I want to say about your writing is that I really like
#
your writing. And what I like about it is that I do not notice the writing. I just get the point
#
that you have made. And that's a sign of the best kind of writing. So I'm absolutely freaking shocked
#
to hear about this self-doubt. And my little word of advice, unsolicited advice, if I may,
#
is something that I follow for myself. First of all, Prem is right that everybody, when they
#
look back on what they've done, they're like, what the fuck am I doing? I know nothing. That is
#
always a reaction. So my philosophy towards what I do, whether it is including the scene and the
#
unseen, is when I do a scene and the unseen episode, I do it with full fucking intensity.
#
I put all of myself in it. And once it is over, I never go back to it. I never listen to it. I
#
never get critical. Because what I have learned, I have learned in the doing. And that's so I would
#
advise you to take that approach and not let perfection be the enemy of production and perceive
#
perfection. I mean, it's always elusive. And the other question I also want to ask is about,
#
like you've done two things, which, you know, without perhaps realizing at the time, I think
#
must have helped both your writing and your thinking. And one is a constant debate in the
#
mood quotes that you're doing. And the other is a constant blogging. Like I remember I had a blog
#
called India Uncut. I would do five posts a day. I used to do five posts a day. In five years,
#
I did some 8,000 posts and then I stopped. And regardless, and today I can go back and some of
#
it is cute and some of it is like cringeworthy. But the important thing is that the fact that I
#
was writing every day, right, without self-consciousness, because I thought it's
#
only a blog. You know, you're working out on the muscle, you're working, you're writing
#
muscles constantly. So I want to, so I want to ask you now looking back, when you look back on all
#
your days of debating and mood quotes and writing your blog, how much do you feel that constant
#
process of iteration helped you both write and think? Completely. And that's also linked to how
#
I think a lot of the work at IFF has built out. Of course, like you need to have a plan,
#
you need to articulate it, you need to determine what will be your resources, how will you raise
#
it, which is the direction you're going in. But you can't plan for every step in that process.
#
And if you even plan for every step in that process, every step, you need to account for
#
and you need to be open to it. I think a lot of our work will be better and using this word
#
for the second time, when it's heuristic, you're open to feedback. And that doesn't stun you
#
from action, you're still able to do what you intended out to do. You're just choosing a
#
different path towards it, or you're improving the way you're possibly marching towards your goal.
#
And I think it's tremendously benefited me, Amit, doing that work day in, day out. And
#
another challenge which quite often was faced by laws, at least earlier, was that, and it's
#
used disparagingly today as well, is that why are you engaging in the public function of the law?
#
If you're writing this much, do you even have a practice? And it is possible to do both because
#
if you notice, the senior advocates of the Supreme Court all have Twitter accounts today.
#
They're engaging in the well of public debate. And the word which is used disparagingly, because
#
law also happens to be a very buttoned down profession in which what matters is quite often
#
how a person is carrying themselves in the canteen and in the lobby of the high court,
#
how they are dressed, which car they are coming in, which clients are briefing them. That's the
#
whole of that world in that sense. Nothing bad in that, but it's also a little limiting in that
#
sense, right? So any person who's seeking a world beyond it, in a sense, online, is seeking for
#
value, which is not prescribed from that small ecosystem, that network which is there. But I
#
think there is, especially the younger bar has kind of brought a sea change in that. And the
#
word which is used disparagingly is influencer. I don't think so it's bad to be an influencer.
#
In fact, I think to have public influence can be quite easily be termed as something positive if
#
you immediately call a person a public intellectual, right? So it's just based on
#
a person having a large following online. And I think a lot of people who have large
#
followings online today are because they drive it on the basis of their expertise.
#
And that expertise develops over a period of time. The important thing is you need to start
#
and you should not give up if you're not finding value externally.
#
No, that's great advice. And I keep telling people that when you start at something,
#
you will suck. If you want validation, you will not get it because you suck.
#
But the only way to get better is to ignore the validation and just keep doing it because
#
you love doing it. And then eventually you'll kind of get better doing that. And you know,
#
you use the phrase public intellectual. I've done five episodes with Ram Guha. And every time I
#
refer to him as a public intellectual, he says, No, Amit, don't call me that. I'm not a public
#
intellectual. And I'm like, you don't have a choice in the matter, whether you like it or not,
#
so please be intentional about it, which he is. And, you know, I want to ask you another question.
#
You combine, as far as I can see in my limited understanding, three things which I can't think
#
of too many people who have in the context of law. One is the academic rigor, which is there in all
#
your work, the systematic thinking. One is a practitioner's craft, because you've, you know,
#
you've been a practitioner, you really have a sense of what works and what doesn't work.
#
And the third is activist zeal. Yes. Right. And you're combining all three of these. And I
#
can't think of really, it's hard for me to come up with names or combine all of these, because
#
there'll be people with activist zeal, but their thinking might be loose and not rigorous. So they
#
might not understand the practicalities of a practitioner's world and so on and so forth.
#
And across each of these to combine these is kind of hard. And, you know, and I'm sure for you,
#
the journey wasn't that on day one, you have all of these, but gradually over a period of time,
#
you would have, you know, build these different facilities in yourself, perhaps made mistakes.
#
So, you know, can you talk about that a little bit? What this journey? I think so what happened was
#
that I was in Karanjawala and company and like, you know, it's always attractive to a law student,
#
because if they've done moot courts, moot courts are essentially on points of constitutional law.
#
But when you go in a law firm, what you're servicing are essentially either original
#
side disputes. If you're doing a disputes practice, like, so you're looking at contracts,
#
specific relief, or you're just sometimes just looking to, you know, get the right facts in a
#
case quickly before a court. So you can get some injunctory relief or you can like prevent injunctory
#
relief if you're for the defendant, things like that, like which kind of pay the bills at Zara
#
and Taj Mahan Singh. Okay, that's what lawyers are looking for, mostly consumerism. And see,
#
the thing is that Karanjawala had a very interesting subset of practice, which included
#
constitutional law matters, which people don't know about. So when Modi ji banned in Gujarat,
#
banned Jaswant Singh's book on Jinnah. Okay, one of the constitutional matters, it became a
#
constitutional matter and I was assigned to it. And Karanjawala was doing it through some people
#
and we filed a case in the Supreme Court. So I looked at all the book banning precedent that was
#
in a way my first true, true constitutional case as much as Karanjawala had other constitutional
#
matters as well. And I really loved it. Yeah. Because that essentially is determining a issue
#
of free expression, the power of a state government to man a book. And there was a
#
conference in which Jaswant Singh was there. And he gave me a signed copy of the book and like,
#
yeah, like you're part of history in a sense, right. And in that conference, Mr. Arun Shourie
#
was sitting and Fali Nariman was sitting. And of course, there were a lot of lawyers and I was a
#
very junior lawyer. I drafted that case. And of course, Mr. Nariman referred to me as a joker.
#
He said, which joker drafted this? Then he redictated the synopsis. Then we went the second
#
day. And then he again said, which joker drafted this? And because it was his dictation, actually.
#
But still everyone turned towards me and I said, sir, I am the joker. Okay. But it was such a fun
#
experience, right. And in that sense, like, Amit, when I started, then I went to Columbia
#
Law School, I took courses also there, which were there on legal writing. And my professor,
#
Katherine Franke, who taught me legal writing, because I also wanted to flirt with academic
#
work. And to do academic work in the United States, you need to know legal scholarship,
#
right? You need to write, you need to publish. So I took a seminar course with her and I discovered
#
I'm okay, but I'm not great at it. So I'm not going to become really someone who's distinguished,
#
I'll like, be in, like, you know, in academia floating around. And maybe I won't enjoy that
#
much. And but Katherine Franke was a tremendous professor, etc. I loved working with her. And the
#
second seminar I took was on multiculturalism. So I only remember my seminars rather than my
#
actual large coursework, which was there, which was a higher credit courses, which were there.
#
And my second one was with Professor Mortner, who had come from Tel Aviv University and taught us
#
multiculturalism using Orthodox Judaism, ultra right Hindu nationalism, and Mormon Christians.
#
And how all three situate themselves notionally within a constitutionally liberal society.
#
Wow. So I took these kind of courses, and I started noticing a shift was happening.
#
Because I didn't want a job in New York, maybe it had to do with a privilege, maybe it had to
#
do with me missing food, missing Delhi, because I love Delhi, I love the parks here, missing my
#
parents, missing my privilege. I also didn't want to immigrant experience in New York. I
#
felt very Indian. And I wanted to come back and practice in the Supreme Court. So I came back,
#
I came back three days after my graduation, and I was in office back at Karanjwala.
#
That's also because that committed to boss. And there's always your first boss who you always
#
call boss, Mr. Ryan Karanjwala, that I'll work for two years. So I completed my term of two years,
#
and then started my own practice with two other friends. It didn't work out that well till we
#
were acquired by another larger Bombay firm, then I managed the office, etc. But that when I was
#
managing that office, I got more time to write, to represent people in much more public interest
#
causes, represent journalists, do content clearance for comics, do, you know, be part of
#
the 66A case, where I first went to PUCL. And PUCL was having its national meeting at the
#
in Delhi itself at the women's press club here in central Delhi. And I went and I met
#
people there. And they said apart, you want to file a constitutional challenge for PUCL
#
against section 66A. This wasn't I think so around 2010 2011. And they said to me, but
#
we are dealing with issues and we have low capacity around extrajudicial killings, etc.
#
How many people have access to the internet? How many are going to jail? This is not really
#
a pressing issue. And I understand it. It's a small organization for civil liberties.
#
And it's trying to do things which are which is conventionally done and are the most urgent.
#
This is a new issue. This is a fresh issue. Then the Shaheen Dhanda issue happens. Two young girls
#
are arrested in Palghar in Maharashtra. The media blows it up. They basically post that
#
curfew has been enforced illegally in Maharashtra due to the death of Bala Sahib Thackeray.
#
And they are put in jail under section 66A. All of a sudden, all the reporting which has been there
#
over a period of time spikes. It's two young girls, a young Muslim girl, a young Hindu girl
#
who comments below that Renu Srinivasan. And they're placed in jail. And that shocks this
#
entire country. I think in 2012, around November, December, petitions are filed by Shreya Singhal.
#
PUCL takes some convincing. Then it does file the petition. And I think that kind of is my
#
the dais cast basically. Yeah, it's my baptism or something like that. Yeah, across the Rubicon,
#
whichever phrase I would like to use. But that case kind of changes what I think about. So even
#
at that time, what's interesting, Amit, is that I'm servicing the private sector. I'm servicing the
#
Internet and Mobile Association of India. And there's also a great amount of complementarity
#
in terms of issues between civil liberties and big tech. They're both on the side of free
#
expression. They don't want 66A. They don't want intermediary regulation and take down which happens
#
without transparency. They only want it when the government orders them to do it rather than when
#
they get a notice from a private lawyer who claims that you need to take it down, which was the rule
#
earlier. They don't want blocking directions to be issued without notices to be given to the party
#
without notices to be given to the parties whose content is hosted. Like you are a my Twitter
#
account is blocked. They said that call the person whose Twitter account you're blocking. Why are you
#
directly sending us a notice in this blocking the account? Give them a hearing. They want all of
#
this. Okay, it's in their commercial interest. They state it's also due to their ideologies for
#
promoting free expression, but it's in their commercial interest. Let's also recognize that.
#
So there's issue complementarity. So 66A is done for PUCL. Judgment comes in I think February 24th,
#
2015. Four days or five days later, TRAI announces its OTT net neutrality consultation. It has the
#
most ridiculous paragraphs of wanting to control how people in India are spending their time
#
playing multiplayer games online, etc. They are concerned but is TRAI the body to deal with it?
#
So I'm screenshotting that part of that consultation paper and somebody who's senior to me
#
who's engaged with TRAI for a longer period of time has documented it is also doing it. That's
#
Nikhil. Nikhil Pawar. We both are screenshotting it at the same time on Twitter. He said we're DM and
#
I'm primarily from a law legal practice kind of background and I'm not that familiar with
#
journalists and I think if you would ask people who don't know a lot of journalists and you would
#
ask them like what do you think of journalists they'll be a little hesitant. There's no like
#
stereotype. They'll be like okay that person is journalist they want to meet for work.
#
They get a little like should I should I not. So I had that sense at that point in time as much as
#
I was working on a lot of these things and so we meet. We meet in like yeah typical like yeah
#
has a great way to think about that. He has a clear way to think about that in which he says
#
that we are going to replicate the John Oliver campaign. You lead on how to engage with TRA and
#
draw up like all the documents and stuff like that. You do your lawyer stuff, institutional engagement.
#
We need the tech which will be done by Kiran from Hasgeek and all those guys
#
okay from Bangalore community and in addition to that we are going to bring in the comics and I'm
#
like and he kind of led it yeah. So that was the second point and here's the thing when we were
#
doing the net neutrality campaign which people don't realize the core group of people yeah it
#
was like upper class male all of that we tried to democratize it but like we were not conscious
#
towards it and we weren't doing it in that way. We didn't know better but and I also say that's
#
why that movement could have been better could have led to a broader anyway so but here's the
#
thing what people don't realize is we were tempted and offered things all along and the second thing
#
is none of us did it none of us took anything. What were you offered? I was offered money. You
#
were literally offered money? Kind of indirectly. Lot of money? Yes per month without work a retainer.
#
Wow. It seemed dirty anything which seems like kind of like icky my thinking is that
#
why anyways so and here's the thing the second thing I'd like to say Amit we took large amounts
#
of time away from our work on a day-to-day basis but people don't realize sometimes weeks went
#
without us touching work so I hope people realize how much time Nikhil Kiran as well as others put
#
in Raman etc a lot of others put in yeah. There were volunteers like Mitesh like Karthik etc who
#
for weeks were just monitoring how the platform was running for the first time so many emails
#
were getting delivered and a campaign is always based on events which tie into a larger story
#
it needs to have events it's like a movie it needs to have scenes and because it has scenes it needs
#
the protagonist to be in film people don't recognize how much work went into it so without
#
pay it was done for a long period of time it was driven by very high levels of idealism
#
and it had its faults I'll admit it but it's we need to also recognize that how did these
#
changes take place in me is not because of me finding a book which told me what to do
#
or some kind of moral awakening in which I saw some injustice happen in front of me but it was
#
because so many people that I was surrounded with did certain things at certain points in time
#
so before I get to my next question I want to tell you a little story as an entertaining
#
diversion which involves Nikhil Pawar and our Katti Kabab Nikhil is a good friend of mine I
#
know him from the blogging days in fact it is interesting that you mentioned Kiran also Jace
#
because both Nikhil and Kiran were early bloggers like you were and it's very interesting that you
#
know people who want to engage they're starting blogs people who want to engage they're starting
#
a movement it all seems to make sense but anyway back to the story so what happened is that once I
#
came to Delhi like this time and this would be circa 2007-2008 or whatever Nikhil was a kid
#
and even now for me at some level he is still that chubby cheeked little darling and two boy
#
so Nikhil was there, I was there and our other friend Chandrahal Chaudhary also an early blogger
#
and we had a blogger's meet so the three of us went to the blogger's meet and at one point there was one
#
particular chap there I won't name him and probably I would get along with him today if I were to meet
#
him but at that time he was very young and irritating so Nikhil and Chandrahas and I we looked
#
at each other we said we have to leave but if the three of us ditch together it won't look good so we
#
made separate excuses and we walked out of there and we had made a plan that we were in one part of
#
Karnat place we said that we will meet in Nizam's and there we will have katti roll so the three of
#
us separately we make our way to Nizam's and when our katti rolls arrive I have you know lifted up
#
my roll and I'm about to bite into it with my mouth open when from the corner of my eye I see
#
someone standing and staring at me with his mouth open in utter shock and dejection and this was
#
a person we were all trying to avoid and that guy happens to have come to Nizam and he's seeing
#
that me Chandrahas and Nikhil Pawar are right there and you know so an act of uh deception
#
negative karma points very huge negative karma points and all those people who have admired
#
Nikhil Pawar till now should realize that the man is capable of deep deception like this
#
well uh well India is better for it in the ways it's applied India is much better for it uh so
#
shout out to Nikhil if he's listening who's by the way Nikhil's been on two early episodes
#
of the scene and the unseen back in the days when the episodes were one hour long so I'll
#
link them from the show notes my next question for you is this that I want to understand the
#
journey between inclination and purpose you point out that you're there at Karanjawala you're
#
presumably you're good at your job and but you're dealing with these petty blue-eyed boys which is
#
and then you mentioned this constitutional law case around the Jaswant Singh book and it seems
#
to me that I can totally understand why that must have excited you because so far you're doing
#
random petty disputes between people and suddenly
#
They were not petty, they were good, they were high-level but I mean they were commercial
#
they were commercial and here is something that is a larger cause and I can get why that appeals to
#
you and then of course and and what you know listeners might not immediately realize if
#
they're not familiar with you is that you've been part of so many of the landmark cases around you
#
know uh rights in India and over the last decade and a half Shreya Singhal and early case was
#
Asim Trivedi also I think was yeah your case Puttaswamy and even first internet shut down
#
case in supreme court I did it, Gaurav Suresh by Vyas she just dismissed it then and this was I
#
think so in 2015-16 or 17 but the thing is that like at that time it seemed like issue like
#
internet is a convenience apar why are you being unreasonable and coming to court if the government
#
wants to shut it down because it will prevent a riot so larger question that at what point
#
does it start becoming a case of not I like doing this or I am interested in doing this
#
but that I have to do this this is my calling now
#
Amit I'm not doing this any longer when I've stepped into IFF I was on some of the cases but
#
I was only strategizing this will be the approach in the case this will be the lawyers
#
and after that I did not interfere no I don't mean in the limited sense of fighting those
#
cases okay not the cases but the domain of work that journey that journey to change the country
#
I believe that our constitution is under immense amounts of threat
#
which have always been there because there's a gap between what the constitution idealizes and
#
what is the lived reality of everyday Indian but today what's unfortunate is that the lived reality
#
of every Indian is being used to organize anger towards the constitution saying that this is a
#
document of deceit not of aspiration it was created to keep you down ignoring the drafting
#
process ignoring the the real way it equalizes power in so many other ways as much as it is
#
imperfect I agree it's imperfect but what's being verbalized today is a very very different
#
version of it's a it's a theocratic version but lucky the state will espouse a certain form of
#
dharma religion etc all of that kind of it will be built on certain civilizational values which
#
is subtext actually for what are extremely what are called as sanatam dharma values which I don't
#
know even if most people actually practice we even say what it is because they don't realize
#
for instance I come from a Arya Samaji family right and Arya Samaji was progressive in the day
#
right now I know it's a little captured by the RSS but even then these practices are not sanatam
#
dharma practices it was a reform movement it departed from it in a sense so I think going back
#
to your question a little bit when did I think this is my like what is the point when it stopped
#
being something I liked up doing or just happened to something I must do honestly I do what I enjoy
#
so I don't think so it stopped at any point when I was doing it secondly after save the internet
#
I kind of said we have to make a digital rights organization in India
#
we have to register it and IFF's first blog post is on 15th August it's intentioned
#
I wrote it it's called hello world so please go through it who's listening here so it is
#
meant to be an to fill a gap in which there are these movements which happen but nobody has the
#
energy to sustain a movement right and even the core founders who give weeks without money
#
let their personal and professional lives suffer because they're part of a movement it is exhausting
#
yeah so you need an organization and you also need an organization because most of the
#
most of the non-profits or the research institutes which are working on the intersection of
#
technology society and rights in India due to a regulatory structure such as the FCRA cannot do
#
advocacy cannot go to court cannot talk to a parliamentarian openly cannot come out with
#
a brief in which they are saying and talking about these 10 things they can't file RTIs
#
under their own name they cannot build public movements or assist in the building of public
#
movements and finally they are not funded by the public so with this idea that let's try out this
#
experiment IFF first created and from then I think so it took me one year where I discovered
#
like and it was a very great like it was like I had a very tough time justifying it to my parents
#
this connects back to the earlier part of the podcast in which what are the social values I
#
come from in which they say you're making so much money apart you're doing so well are you crazy are
#
you having a midlife crisis because you're not even middle-aged why are you leaving your practice
#
want to go and sit with a laptop you don't even the organization does not even have a
#
like has a bank account but has no money no employees and then they ask okay so you're
#
going to fundraise what is going to be your salary then I say it's going to be this much
#
they say that now the money the organization gets whose money is that I said it's not mine
#
they still can't understand it why I did it but they kind of respect it because for parents when
#
they see you published in newspapers or talking on the television they kind of understand that
#
there is some level of social recognition for the work he's doing so it must be okay so they
#
didn't push me and plus maybe they've given up but the big thing in this was that when I stepped
#
into IFF again I stopped practice on March 31st so I was closing out a financial year
#
and from then I took about even before that I started a little bit of work but I said I'm
#
going to read these five or six books one was a management book one was how to make plans one
#
was about digital rights and I said I'm going to take three months and I'm going to make an
#
organizational development plan I have this vague notion that there's this vacuum there
#
for a digital rights advocacy organization in India so let me build out this plan let me talk
#
to others not my own ideas even draw from others liberally borrow and then implement it in practice
#
because after IFF was created for one year it was kind of in a limbo how much can you
#
volunteer and run an organization which has no money you draw no salary right and of course
#
this kind of thinking did not actually gel with some people they thought that movements by themselves
#
are needed and they have raised other movements subsequently as well for instance which was speak
#
for me on adhar etc things like that and I do respect that I see that's also a framework of
#
change but I think an organization like IFF also needed to be there and I hope over the past six
#
years I've been able to establish at least why there is a need for such an organization in fact
#
in my transition note which was published I've said we need 40 such organizations today but
#
it became much more intentional when I made the plan and here I mean I kind of grew to love
#
even things which I never knew which were budgeting human resource management attracting talent
#
retaining top talent bringing a sense of humanism a softer emotive appeal to digital rights which
#
humanizes it grew to love I had to learn if you have to do something you grow to love it because
#
you in some way and if you don't love it that much then possibly find somebody who's able to do this
#
for you explaining to them that what are your limitations and offering them support so I've
#
tried to do it as much as I can but I loved building IFF sitting with a laptop fundraising
#
getting money and I built a lot of it in public yeah so if you see early reddit posts from the
#
IFF handle I'm saying at the end of every month this is what we have done this is what you're
#
trying to do etc and people are like cheering us on on the internet like complete rando strangers
#
there's a donor who we are not even doing like we do set up the widget etc for people to donate to
#
us come out with this tire plans and thumbs like that but there's a donor who writes to us and
#
offers money five lakh rupees and that's from reading on the reddit etc things like that so
#
we are building that public trust so it's see and I always said that the things which I'm doing
#
they seem more enjoyable because I'm doing this with others as well and of course yeah people
#
are nasty sometimes they are really like you know what's really annoying it's when people
#
support you but then they take up a lot of your time and then they are just there to kind of say
#
these three things you should do like this when they're not doing the job right or yeah this has
#
typo this has passive voice use and they are like 100 times coming in but I learned to grow into
#
patience to kind of handle it a little better and if you'll see like people who are saying that
#
apart your newsletter has a typo this is not the kind of work and standard which will help
#
succeed in the kind of things you're wanting to do against the forces you are up against like
#
you're like if you're challenging the central government and you're saying that this is your
#
program mass evidence in mass evidence you cannot say m a s as mass right they had a legitimate
#
point so I took that feedback and after that I put it in a process flow that we should spell
#
check it once again I mean cross paste it into a doc and run a spell check on it don't be in such
#
a rush to publish and slowly we were able to build it out yeah I learned everything slowly
#
I can imagine modiji sitting with your document and saying spelling mistake I can't take these
#
people seriously you're presuming he will no no I'm kidding obviously he's too busy fighting
#
crocodiles there's another aspect of this that interests me which is the dynamic of how a
#
movement becomes an organization you know like in the sense people will be drawn to a movement
#
where they might all coincide on that one central aim of the movement but they might be coming at
#
it from different places they might have different motivations somebody will say non-profit somebody
#
somebody will say don't dilute movement don't do organization so how does one reconcile all of
#
that how does one you know how did that process play out so there's a great book by zine up to
#
fecky called twitter and tear gas about the tahir square protest I discussed that in an episode with
#
pranay kotas a new one so I'll link it beautiful book and it's beautiful because it starts with
#
the wto gatt protests okay then it goes towards the tahir square protest and ultimately it comes
#
to the realization now that we are in and i've traveled to egypt also pre-pandemic is that the
#
military is back right yeah so most of the arab spring went to hell after the initial hope and
#
exactly she writes in that book also that movements sometime also
#
privilege people who are the loudest who assume and take leadership
#
and it's necessary because you need people who have that level of public courage or certain kind
#
of skills in which they are able to speak to a larger mass of people yet at the same time
#
handle incredible amounts of attack which come from interest groups which are challenging
#
but what movements are not aimed towards usually are towards long-term institutional changes which
#
require sustained forms of energy and the second is the leadership sometimes because it's moved
#
from one central idea may not have a clearer agreement on working together on a broader set
#
of goals it may also mean that the people who think that they really like each other because
#
movements are deeply emotional things will also deeply disagree with each other these are passionate
#
people they are working out of passion so their disagreements will be also coming from a place of
#
passion deep conviction okay so it's very very tough for movements to translate into organizations
#
so save the internet was much larger i have always said was much larger than iff iff only
#
hopefully carries forward that legacy in a manner which it has done recently it's supported a sign
#
on campaign working with nikhil and kiran despite differences which occurred when i became ed
#
so they hope life is long there will be differences and people who you work with sometimes there will
#
be low points of trust there will be massive disagreements but i believe that if there's good
#
intent work will continue together and ultimately i think that's happened one more thing which is
#
important is that organizations i genuinely believe also present risks all organizations can
#
become self-serving where they are not mission oriented but they are internally oriented towards
#
looking at what can we do as an organization to grow our mandate to get better salary levels
#
to seem active etc etc so those risks are there but i think especially in today's india
#
because there is a high level of issue fatigue if you notice in one day four things are happening
#
and and some things can be manufactured to divert your attention from other things
#
very easily social media can be flooded now yeah these are very organized techniques which
#
exist on an industrial level i use this word with care because there are paid groups and
#
organizations which do it they offer it as a service so the thing is that if you cannot
#
retain public attention even for about 10 000 or 20 000 people in a sustained manner over an issue
#
which does not link to their core identity such as gender sexuality caste etc which are much much
#
deeper then attention will shift from one issue to the other over a period of time building online
#
moments movements becomes very very difficult like that you do need organized support yet at
#
the same time organizations do movement building really poorly that's because they are not fast
#
they are following a organizational plan i believe there's move there's there's space for both
#
but there need to be more organizations and there also need to be movements which need to be
#
encouraged by organizations there like there's a level of turfiness which needs to be reduced
#
around these kind of things but i'll again come back to what i was saying the overarching
#
lack of collaboration in india around civil liberties social justice in the online space
#
is due to fear anything can be used to attack anyone movement leaders can be doxed very easily
#
they can be shown to be not theologically you know faithful to a certain form of faith to be
#
politically incorrect it can be weaponized against them right small imperfections of conduct online
#
can be used to destabilize an entire movement and of course there is always the question of
#
representativeness who do you represent right so these questions are there it's been a very
#
difficult as well as friction based process how save the internet became iff it's not only because
#
the co-founders did not agree it's also because let's remember save the internet was also supported
#
by people who come from a certain theology of building digital public goods it had the
#
ice spirit group it had mr nandan nilkani it had also people who were from the force communities
#
right who kind of believed that force closely aligned so it was a broad umbrella in that sense
#
and some issues are easier but when you say that technology links to all rights under the constitution
#
including the right to privacy we had a slack actually amit there were 150 200 people on it
#
and when we were moving towards a conversation around should save the internet because we've
#
said save the internet it shouldn't only be net neutrality it should be other things should you
#
look at it one person said that you guys have successfully been able to create a campaign and
#
a broader movement around net neutrality shouldn't it look at internet access for the people who
#
don't have it also now that you've done it i remember i said no that's not our role and i
#
regret saying that because we eventually as iff ended up doing that because i realized that i was
#
putting on artificial blinkers how can we as an organization argue against internet shutdowns
#
when we are not tracking connectivity data for large parts of this country it makes our advocacy
#
in fact stronger that internet needs to be there for everyone it's a human right we reached there
#
i remember there were people who disagreed why is privacy being part of this
#
objectives document that we need to form this organization
#
because privacy is not mentioned expressly in the constitution it came up as a conversation
#
does this mean you're gonna touch adhar those questions were coming up and what i was realizing
#
was that based on trust at least when we made the organization initially the co-founders stuck
#
together but a lot of others fell by the wayside and after that there were conflicts but largely
#
i think the organization by itself how it stands today will not be how it stands amit i hope 10
#
years from now because it's very closely associated with my personality but by leaving it
#
after six years and by attempting to collaborate with people who have also been at different
#
points instrumental in it it will be able to build into a truly public organization
#
right because we've put out a board call it's public people have been like we're trying these
#
things the other thing i think with movements and organizations is
#
it's always important for organizations to respect movements if movements if they are
#
if they are stifling movements they're lacking power you get policy changes quite often
#
especially in today's environment not on the basis of a better argument a sense of reason
#
or evidence which you take quite often you get it also because there are so many people which is
#
also because there are so many people which is democratic legitimacy which supports the cause
#
by itself let's for a minute not forget it was not only the the mass number of people who aligned
#
from the private sector the indian startups right which included people from different walks of civil
#
society which included technologists which all seem to disagree on so much which all came together
#
on this narrow funnel of hating your telecom operator right and it's very rare for these
#
things to be in other places as well but when these kind of movements happen i think it's
#
important for organizations not to think okay i didn't start why should i support oh by the way
#
this movement which is going they don't have the clear aims objectives evidence and prior literature
#
and academic thinking which is state of the art you're not going to do that don't talk down
#
try to build a degree of of collaboration okay because organizations have this huge amount of
#
toughness which i've noticed in india as well also bigger organizations against smaller
#
organizations research organization advocacy organizations but especially movements i think
#
movements are where citizen power is built and we are not being able to do it successfully around
#
the internet or internet-based issues in a sustained manner at least as successfully since
#
saved the internet here's my next question i want to read out a sentence by you and of course
#
everything that we are referring to will be linked from the show notes so i encourage people to read
#
all that but i want to read out the sentence and ask you to double click because it's just so
#
fascinating and contains the world you wrote while you're talking about the early days of iff you
#
wrote i slowly recognized that while the judicial system is an important institutional avenue to
#
advance fundamental rights with technology these goals were best realized with full play advocacy
#
stop quote and i want you to double click on this because i'm very curious about the process of
#
change when you get down to the brass tacks being part of a movement is easy you can do different
#
kinds of noises you can do campaigns you can do all of that but when you form an institution like
#
you did an organization like you did then what do you mean by full play advocacy because then
#
what happens is that it is not only the courts you are dealing with different kinds of stakeholders
#
you are dealing with the tech companies you're dealing with the government you're dealing with
#
bureaucrats and politicians and all of that give me a sense of that journey of dealing with all
#
these disparate interests and what you learned from it so the last constitutional case i
#
litigated was constitutionality of the adhar project and we won it in some parts but we lost
#
it on the much more significant ones and what it convinced me was that the kind of goals i
#
was looking for can only be achieved not only through filing a constitutional case
#
it needed movements or at least people to be organized a much more modest attempt at that
#
for instance joint letters things like that it needed great amounts of transparency rti is to
#
be filed over a period of time for instance iff files about 100 200 rtis a year it needed
#
media advocacy so if the rtis reveal something it needs to be made intelligible for people for
#
statements to be put out as to the clear analysis of law when something is happening
#
for engagement around intersections of pop culture for instance our Anushka our staffer
#
Anushka Jain authored this brilliant thread around Shah Rukh Khan's birthday as Shah Rukh Khan as
#
digital rights and also by engaging larger number of people around these digital rights issues
#
they understand these kind of constitutional values it builds a kind of representative power
#
what that also allows you to do is to then tell people this is the work which we are doing please
#
give us money citizen funded in that sense so you also then as a by-product of that tell them
#
what you're doing much more transparently honestly you share the journey with them
#
what you are able to do where are you failing be honest open up they're part of the organization
#
they're funding it they're your donors and it gives legitimacy to the work and then institutional
#
engagement because when a parliamentarian i've sat down with some of them some of them quite
#
frequently prior to sessions we have a parliamentary brief but rather than discussing the issues
#
if they're meeting me for the first time even if they've read my writing the first few questions
#
which they ask me is that where do you get your money to do the work which you do which is a great
#
question i respect when it's asked i said that our funding sources firstly sir are completely
#
public they include organizations and individuals individuals to this extent this percentage point
#
i don't know the latest figures but till i was there it was 50 45 45 to 55 percent on average
#
indian indian because you don't take any foreign indian individuals and 45 to 55 percent so it
#
varies a little organizational donations which means it can be grant etc things like that
#
or csr and i said that in a year sometimes we get about 7 000 individual indian donations
#
that's such a powerful statement because they're expecting a answer that i'm funded by big tech
#
right and i'm not disparaging people who are funded by big tech but when you do advocacy
#
and you're meeting people who hold public office and you're having a direct honest conversation
#
with them that sir these are five issues i work as a non-profit which is registered
#
there's this added level of legitimacy when you say that people are indians only are funding you
#
that there is that level of what i would like to say is that the truest tense test of not only
#
a organization like iff but a political party is when people give chanda
#
and people in india as per the cis ip report give the most amount of non-profit chanda to mandirs
#
and religious institutions which is understandable we are a religious country
#
and that's what they believe in the most deeply right so this is what happens and we start having
#
these kind of conversations with politicians even manifestos we came up with the manifesto
#
prior to the 2019 election three parties adopted it in part one party adopted it in full
#
it came out with a statement against completely internet shutdowns repealing sedition that was
#
the congress party it has a section on digital rights of course there is some distance from a
#
manifesto to even if a single party forms a government but still that signaling that intention
#
is there we engage with the regulatory bodies i mean and they're surprised when we send letters
#
of appreciation because we have to be objective so i always say you were saying early on that
#
you're collaborative etc i say the object of civil liberties or social justice organizations
#
is always to check power is to question it so we will be seeming to be adversarial
#
but we have to be objective at the same time if somebody is doing something good in a public
#
consultation if you don't like 14 points but you like two points please say you like two points
#
right not because it's a perception thing in which you want to seem objective it's
#
because you want the two points to actually be implemented right
#
and search for that look at it deeply right yet at the same point in time don't be afraid also
#
in doing and having a different audience in a different matter on a different issue and
#
being very direct and saying that this is horrible this is horrid facial recognition for voting is
#
horrid it results in exclusion and it may result in profiling and breaking the secrecy of the ballot
#
be clear if there's evidence right there's no upside to it if there's no upside don't manufacture
#
one right be clear don't hedge okay and of course courts are an important part of it
#
ifs most of the people who have traditionally i think in my term of about five and a half years
#
we litigated 60 cases yeah internet shutdowns pegasus mass surveillance that notification which
#
permitted all the government agencies arogya setu means a lot a lot of things have been done
#
kovin website blocking a lot of things have been done a lot of cases have been done and the thing is
#
that quite often we've realized that the institutional way how you are able to do this
#
is to involve the public involve the media involve the parliamentarians involve the regulators and
#
involve the courts and we're very clear in the sense which we say we are a advocacy organization
#
not a research organization we're a advocacy organization we are not a research organization
#
and anytime there's concern where do we get our values we say the constitution of india
#
who determines what values are prioritized over others here's the plan we put it up to public
#
consultation this is the implementation plan for one year we first send it to our donors we build
#
it first based on the staff talking to people who are employed at iff who are contractors at iff
#
then we open it up to our donors then we open it up to a community we honestly take in comments
#
same with the strategic man it's all built publicly if the money is public the work is
#
decided in a public way and you are applying constitutional values in a way where you're
#
building citizen movements at least that's the intention we have not been able to do it
#
to scale yaar and this is this is why i think this is a little troubling for me where we were
#
able to do some bits but i think the phase in which i have worked at iff it's been a phase of
#
rapid expansion discovery about a lot of these kind of things possibly the next phase will be
#
about stability cutting back on things doing things which are much more successful but the
#
thing was after the adhar case i realized the adhar case relied on people who had done years
#
of work extensively studying exclusions it had relied on people who had articulated and developed
#
why it would be a surveillance framework it relied on people who were activists who were
#
verbalizing it again and again and i realized that the amount of digitization which is spreading in
#
india will be not fully reformed in a way if we only approach courts the primary element of that
#
needs to be citizen awareness in an advocacy format rather than just a curriculum based format
#
and which is what we have tried to do to some extent through social media we've been successful
#
to some extent for instance when arogya setu was released we came out with the infographic it went
#
viral on whatsapp we've done things like that again and again again and again how responsive
#
is the state it is responsive i know government ministers have waved around our comments and my
#
op-ed and shown it to reporters cabinet ministers oh they changed their things also so they put up
#
the india data policy india national ministry of electronics and it we put out a statement or a
#
blog post on analysis and it mentioned because it was saying that government data will be shared
#
both personal and non-personal with other government departments as well as with the
#
private sector we wrote a blog post on that in three days they read it didn't acknowledge it
#
we sent an email also and they secretly changed the document without acknowledging
#
they changed the document wow then we again spotted an error because they only changed the
#
first page and we said this is changed they changed it again amit and we captured all the
#
screenshots on wayback machine and we put it so even the private feedback i get is like the
#
ministry of electronics and it really thinks that you have a bone to pick with them we don't have a
#
bone to pick with them in a sense because we have sent them a letter of appreciation also when they
#
said that early on at least when they said that we won't regulate ott platforms and but it's a
#
adversarial relationship in which we lack power in which large sections of private industry need
#
to also be on the good side of the ministry given that it has immense discretionary power
#
not only to make laws but also how they will be implemented and but to a large extent i'll say
#
like we've we've come across as people who they may consider as misguided idealistic
#
but not as like being an enemy in that sense we follow a constitutional path in that sense
#
we reason out our arguments we also send responses to every public consultation
#
and why would you do that if you don't believe that things can become better but i don't think
#
public consultation processes are being followed in india to improve the outcome
#
documents or policies or improve the foresight because every critic which you get actually is
#
helping you make something better in that sense right if you have the capacity to analyze those
#
drs still goes through responses and improves its eventual recommendations so government is not a
#
monolith government does change does respond does set calls state governments also do it with us
#
sometimes governments also change their documents sometimes we may not get credit
#
in that sense a lot of times sometimes even the prime minister's office does something which we
#
ask for it so undemand did not have telecom connectivity people they were crying we ran a
#
campaign in which we brought those voices we uh to to national prominence have articles done we
#
filed rtis we talked to bsnl we filed representations in the like a prime prime
#
minister's public grievance portal again and again and then he went after two months and announced
#
the fiber optic link to undemand of course it may be linked to the development of undemand by itself
#
but we started work on it and it did happen we don't often get credit though and we are okay
#
with it to a large extent in terms of other kinds of outcomes i would say that governments also take
#
things back they provide information so a lot of the rtis lead us to getting to know also how things
#
are being done in a way it also also the kind of things which we do public writing analysis
#
if you consider parliamentarians to be government as well in a sense that part of the state apparatus
#
i think a parliamentarian i think so two sessions back has three or four has expressly referred to
#
internet freedom foundations brief on the floor of parliament and others rely on our data points
#
and analysis because we come out with a parliamentary brief of the key digital rights points and what you
#
can possibly if there's a debate how can you engage around it by looking at these basic materials
#
so i would say that a large part if you consider the judiciary to be a part of government as well
#
we have 60 cases 500 rti so i would say that if you think about it broadly i would say
#
responses are different but they are generally from my perception about less to do with like
#
we are kind of like enemies we are mostly like increasing their work and thereby a nuisance
#
okay a very irritating person like that okay so they don't like us
#
i want to ask you a couple of questions about the organization now yeah and the first of them is
#
this that before this your core skill has been a legal skill you're a lawyer you're figuring out
#
cases you're doing your work etc etc but with the iff you are also you also become a manager
#
and in a sense a motivator yes and a manager and a motivator in a much more difficult
#
environment than a company because within a company it's easy the incentives are obvious
#
you get salary correct and over here essentially you are asking everyone you want to work for you
#
to be underpaid you uh you know in any organization of this sort that is the case
#
you and your job is to motivate them even though they may not to begin with have the
#
same sense of purpose that you do or be playing the long game like you pointed out a lot of the
#
work you guys do you know and i've heard this from other friends who run organizations that
#
do advocacy or work with government that we never get credit we should not ask for credit because
#
that will be an impediment in the way of change yes so you are asking these young people to do
#
an incredible amount of work for tiny sums of money relative to what they would get elsewhere
#
with the guarantee that if they are successful they will not even get credit for it
#
so what is this task like and what have you learned about yourself in the process of
#
you know being a manager and motivator let's say that for amit for some period of time i really
#
enjoyed it and i'll just being forthright as the organization grew i found it much more difficult
#
because the thing is that a lot of it is driven from my own perspective of we are on a mission
#
the people of india pay us our salaries we work for them right so of course we will
#
like get an air conditioner in office but we'll first put one air conditioner
#
and then we'll see if yeah and like staff is just thinking that i'm being chindi i'm being a miser
#
i'm being frugal all of that and like if it gets too hot let's let's test it out okay or like other
#
things or salary scales it's but salary scales weren't that bad in the sense at iff where i was
#
always vocal and i practiced it where i said that young people should not be in a situation in
#
which they find it tough to do this work but yeah at that same time for if they do this for
#
extended point in time and i think even in corporate jobs but like especially in this
#
sector work given the salary levels which are there they're not going to be able to
#
let's say purchase a flat in noida in 10 years right and that that is the reality of it some
#
of them will come from privilege a lot of them will not come from privilege it will increase those
#
imbalances as well so we have to pay to a certain degree where they are comfortable
#
and the nature of the recruitment which happened at iff due to the salary levels which we offered
#
was that a lot of people came into it at least initially who worked with me it was their first
#
job so it was also beautiful because i lately at least for two people i was able to in some way
#
shape their professional journey at least i think so i hope they do and with one person in fact
#
i hope i was able to influence them to quit the law and do something their parents would not be
#
happy at hearing this but never mind no they're meant for much greater things they meant for
#
greatness so yeah so i've had really motivated people also work with me really mission-driven
#
people who knew these realities but also were really clear we are going to do it for this extent
#
of time and i know a lot of people say this but if they're just like three people or four people in
#
our organization and i'm working with you like each day and sitting with you there is some level
#
of mentoring i'm offering and i enjoyed it initially but then it became difficult yeah
#
it became difficult in the sense that i'm really emotionally invested in your work and this happens
#
to non-profit founders and then they start identifying the organization with them and them
#
with the organization in the sense that if the work does not happen properly it reflects poorly
#
on me as a human being right and also incompetence can feel like personal betrayal
#
no that didn't happen that didn't happen with me what did happen was it seemed like that
#
that there was a greater degree of of work and we were not being able to move fast enough to that
#
higher level so my my larger reflection on a lot of this is that i expected too much from
#
people in their first job but i think i did a okay okay job i do beat myself over it but
#
most of them are in touch with me they wish me well i wish them well i'm supporting their professional
#
journeys but a lot of iff which you see is built today is built because of those people it's like
#
farkhanda zahoor who came and built our fundraising and coms verticals but with shivani who set
#
operations when i did not want to put any time into these kind of things who made correspondence
#
with the board really easy it's with dev datta mukhopad there and if you're noticing most of
#
them are women and they really trusted the organization they identify with it they've
#
built it and then later on when managers came etc it became a little difficult for me in the sense
#
where i didn't have a sense of each person in that sense that small office kind of thing
#
kind of changed a little somewhere down the line and it became a little tough for me
#
i've always visualized my role to be of a coach not of a person who's batting on the pitch
#
or who's the forward striker in a football match which means they are the stars which means they
#
do deserve visibility and thankfully in an advocacy organization amit they get to write
#
op-eds they get to be on video all iff staff has done it we hold something called a members call
#
which is that if you give a recurring donation to iff every month from 100 rupees to 1500 rupees
#
each month or 2000 then you get to join a quarterly call in which each staff member
#
tells what work they did in their vertical in a presentation which is offered and towards the end
#
there's about 15 minute conversation which is not live streamed then this is live stream on youtube
#
the 15 minutes is just like our members asking us do this do that like we've broken that barrier
#
each quarterly call has been chaired by a different staff member it rotates
#
they set the theme they decide how it will be done and we've tried these things in which it's
#
decentered from me and visibility at least from the organization is offered to people the second
#
thing i think which iff offered and this is one of the other staffers rohan which brought it up
#
and he took the organization in some parts of direction which were not my natural areas of
#
expertise or comfort for instance looking at how digitization is affecting farmers he did the
#
one of the first explainers around the agri stack and he said that something which iff offers me
#
which other places don't is the opportunity to define my work and also the support in which i
#
know you'll be there apart and you'll check it to a reasonable extent so it goes out in a credible
#
way if it links with our broad mission so it has given those things i think the deeper challenge
#
though amit is how do we retain people like this after they have learned these skills not only
#
organizationally in iff but broadly much more in the sector because they may get bored with the
#
organization they may not be matching their interests it may not match their vision of them
#
or they may not like working with me all of those things may be there as well together but there
#
need to be 20-30 organizations and offering different levels of salaries so talent which is
#
young which is driven by constitutional values which knows that technology is a very significant
#
force in realizing it in india today get to continue that work without being lost to big tech
#
without being lost to possibly maybe if they want to do it they can still do it but the
#
options are not there the options are not there that's why a person will possibly go on a phd
#
track they may not like to stay because they don't see a field by itself or digital rights
#
of 30-40 organizations and i think this field is really necessary because we've seen it intersect
#
with online campaigning by environmental justice groups when we represented fridays for future
#
we've seen that with gender which is a much more well established domain of the intersection of
#
technology we are now seeing it with caste and i think there are organizations which are doing
#
that but there's a greater degree of donor support which is needed and i'm not only talking in terms
#
of us thinking about csr of philanthropies but ordinary indians ultimately i think a lot of
#
affluent indians have understood you need to pay for your news for it to actually be news i think
#
they also need to understand if we are living in a post liberalization world right you want a
#
organization which represents you well maybe you may have to fund it as an individual you may not
#
think drawing a small salary you are the person who will traditionally fit within the framework
#
of philanthropy but you may need to give money for it and i think indians some indians have realized
#
it i think for instance long-term funding which is coming to iff for from just about 150 160 donors
#
who give money month on month realizes that it doesn't mean that only today the government
#
did something awful so i need to give money for this fundraising campaign because today i'm excited
#
about this this is long-term change but i think the support levels this awareness needs to grow
#
even much more larger i think this is tied directly to youth aspirations it's directly tied to my own
#
experience in possibly not being able to hire people or not being able to attract people to
#
this line of work not because they don't like the work but because i'm quite honest or even the
#
political the social and the legal risks or like the kind of environment we are in today
#
but it's also because it may be the path to penury for a person right so at the end of it
#
you don't end up you end up fairly like broken in terms of your values not being realized because
#
you're fighting against such large established entrenched in interests but you also you don't
#
have the money to show for it you don't have money to possibly travel take a vacation you don't have
#
money to join a gym a good gym you don't have money to go to the physio you and i'll tell you
#
amit when i was traveling from conferences i was traveling at my age when i was traveling much
#
earlier when i was traveling as a lawyer i had a i was i was traveling by premium economy or business
#
then i was driving economy and of course people will say oh but you're still being able to take
#
a flight but here's the thing even when i was taking cab public transport no matter how tired
#
i am i'm always searching for the cheapest thing i am sometimes going hungry a person at my level
#
so it will definitely be affecting people who are much younger than me thinking that
#
yeah after he's done all of this reach these levels he's trying to think that you need to
#
squeeze this money etc because this part of this thing is not funded right despite all my economic
#
privilege then what does that mean is this really a path which will help me build my life build a
#
house take care of my health and i think that's a big big part of it which is not talked about
#
i hope you're in live and you said that you had lunch and came here if you want we can order
#
something for you i'm kidding you know one of the things that i really love about iff is a funding
#
model that you know it's it's a distributed model you are not you know taking foreign money you are
#
not taking money from big corporates you cannot be accused of being an interest group there are no
#
conflicts of interest i absolutely love that and i agree that people are coming to the realization
#
that if you want something you have to pay for it you know there is that old jefferson saying about
#
the price of liberty being eternal vigilance and just as they say who will watch the watchman
#
i think it's fair to ask who will pay the watchman and the only possible answer to that is we will
#
pay the watchman we have to fucking do it so my next question about so yeah if somebody wrong
#
pays the watchman they can be an informer there you go yeah you're supposed to be an optimist
#
but all you're giving me is this dystopian stuff boss because i have a rational belief that this
#
will all change okay optimism isn't built on rationality i mean here's my next question
#
what organizations one of the things that happens with organizations in the natural course of things
#
is once they reach a certain size number one once they reach a certain size they get ossified they
#
lose their nimbleness they lose the spark they lose the passion you have people going through
#
the motions and that's a danger to watch out for and the other thing that happens in the non-profit
#
sector is that your incentives and you alluded to this earlier but your incentives get more and
#
more inward directed especially when it comes to something like fundraising and in your case of
#
course the model seems to mitigate against that happening necessarily but how does one fight that
#
ossification like when you're a four person organization your passion is infectious and
#
you're all passionate and you're all fighting and shit can really get done but when you're a
#
400 person organization for example if that happens then it's different when you're a 40,000
#
person organization it's different right so what are what are your sort of thinkings on that
#
especially as you know you have of course fulfilled the promise that this this organization will never
#
be around one person so you've transitioned out you announced it publicly you moved out and
#
obviously you know as i've heard others say as well that you've built a really good team of good
#
people who are uh you know forces themselves but in general does this sort of worry you
#
because you've also said you don't want one organization you want 40 40 you're thinking
#
of the ecosystem then how does one build the ecosystem the ecosystem is built based off
#
starts with the person an individual you are the person now no no i'm not the person
#
there's a person who's listening to this right now and possibly that person is thinking well
#
this muck can do it with all the self-doubt maybe i can and it's true the second thing i'll say is
#
that the environmental conditions need to be there for it and of course that's just about
#
that's it's make it's so tough right now people are so scared people are scared what will happen
#
to them if they say a certain thing do a certain thing are seen with somebody we're living in an
#
environment of fear why so many young have become tougher recently why are so many young people
#
leaving this country and going away earlier it used to be pre-liberalization you wouldn't get
#
the economic opportunity which is here are people still believing that it's the same lack of economic
#
opportunities unemployment that bad i don't think so in certain sectors it may be there for masses
#
i mean the economy has been not doing well for a decade now but yeah it's not i've seen noshid
#
fobh's book it's a great book which is showing that it says struggle in the promise and but the
#
larger question is the direction this country is taking a lot of people are also that is a thing
#
which they voice if you see a lot of the reddit india threads they are like criticizing a certain
#
government policy an event which has occurred and they just say immigrate move out leave
#
and i think more organizations in india will inevitably be built because it's needed
#
and we do have a very vibrant rights-based discourse and technology touches upon all of it
#
it but my thinking is a little different here
#
firstly organizations iff for instance need to be limited in size i think there is something
#
to speak about bigness and of course bigness as like a large organization is able to do things
#
smaller ones can never do but even smaller ones are able to do which larger ones can never do
#
and you can see it in examples of coffee shops bookstores or even people who possibly sell you
#
every item which is there in the world today so i would say you have to be a little much more
#
conscious about the size because the size also is increasing cost and cost when it increases by
#
itself it may put stress on the mission on the values on the fundraising model on the work which
#
is done on the quality which is there all of that because you're wanting to expand and grow
#
under the notional hypothesis that more people means better work and better outcomes so you need
#
to question yourself again and again right which direction i'm going of course it's really easy
#
for iff when i was budgeting because you didn't see the pool expand from one year to the next
#
in like a very dramatic way so you're trying to also work within that same amount of money
#
which you're getting okay these are people who are already working we need to raise salaries here
#
can we add one more here can we add one more there these are their needs we have talked here
#
this is how we can do so maybe it may not be thematic expansion it may be something just
#
deepening of the work that's the thing the other thing i think is important for people to think
#
about in the non-profit sector is that technology is already a very big conversation which is being
#
done in non-controversial areas of friction where the thinking is that okay the political
#
dispensation and the social environment and industry does not allow us to do and voice
#
this kind of work for instance the mention of rights or freedom so let's drop those words
#
work on a little less controversial corners of the room where incremental change is possible
#
as long as it doesn't become quote unquote a political issue such as tech building tech
#
for good that's a big conversation right and how do we use technology to ensure that people have
#
proper sanitation which is a goal aligned with the government or how do we make sure that
#
beneficiary data is being efficiently done or targeting is being done or remote education
#
is happening let's use technology for good right but in a lot of these use cases quite often if
#
you don't have a rights component inherent in it which is what i mean by 30 to 40 organizations
#
i don't mean 30 to 40 clones of iff i mean a gender rights organization which also does advocacy
#
around digital rights which have been there in india but may not be doing as much work or
#
may have closed down it has happened or doing around environment for instance climate and its
#
intersection around technology what happens with respect to the impact on climate change
#
when cloud servers go up and ai is heating up the world and that is a conversation that needs to
#
be had so i think different organizations which will get the systemic change which is happening
#
in our world due to technology amit is what is required something which works on issues of
#
exclusion extensively which has happened with article 21 but needs which is another organization
#
but needs to happen much much more broadly another thing it's not only thematic it's
#
socioeconomic it needs to be done for it to have a deep democratic change
#
in terms of the constitutional values actually being practiced by people who come from rural belts
#
it's not about the farmer who's holding their smartphone in a pdf
#
when that farmer by itself is not consulted for inputs into that policy pdf and will never
#
read that policy pdf that farmer doesn't is only uh it's that farmer is only put there in terms of
#
an aesthetic rather than a core beneficiary of that framework or participant and this is why i
#
think it needs to be spread geographically it need there need to be five organizations four
#
organizations which are there in tamil nadu seven in kerala madhya pradesh etc which all flow from
#
and they may or may not coordinate with each other but they will work in some way or the other
#
around they may be organizations they may be volunteer groups they may be reading clubs
#
but the change due to technology is massive and i think it can't only be limited to what's
#
popular today which is productivity hacks start your startup i'm sorry it's because he's really
#
popular okay angkor variku stuff okay i'm just using him as a hashtag okay so you can do epic
#
shit but that needs to be a little much more broader in that sense it needs to tie in with
#
different areas of social work which have been there and it needs to be rights focused because
#
when it's not rights focused then your problems start happening for instance technology is then
#
to reimpose as nikita at the at the criminal justice accountability project has found to
#
enforce what she calls as settled habits new tricks which is that how certain tribes are
#
considered to be criminal tribes and technologies used to surveil them more and because it's being
#
done by digital technologies you say it's objective this is what the machine says
#
right so what we need is a broader level of organic seeding of organizations which happens
#
which is why i'm writing about these things much more publicly i'm talking to people much
#
more publicly even when i've started this youtube channel which i've started i'm saying if other
#
lawyers want to do it let's get on a call
#
to help you they should also get on a call with you definitely and one or two people have offered
#
it already so why am i optimistic if people are helping me and random strangers on the internet
#
that's not changed but you know i agree with everything you said but i must also point out
#
that you keep making fun of startup bros and i know a lot of incredible people who work in
#
startups some of them are my friends yeah and the point is that their business is only going
#
to be successful if they bring value to others yes that is the only way to achieve success
#
so i wouldn't disparage them completely and i would actually say that okay i'll ask you a
#
provocative question don't get mad at me hasn't jio done far more to bring internet access to
#
spread internet access in india than you guys have yes sorry i said yes i thought i'll be
#
playfully provocative but i realized right it might even be offensive because i don't want to
#
disparage you no it's not offensive at all and of course they did it by purchasing a telecom
#
license from another full cronyism forget them okay so next question and before i sort of dive
#
back to the personal which i want to do i also want to sort of hit upon a phrase you used earlier
#
which was constitutional values yes now before that you used the phrase civilizational values
#
and civilizational values to me is a toxic phrase right for i didn't use it as a thing which i
#
believe in exactly you were you disparaging civilizational values as and i agree with you there
#
and talking about how theocratic that mindset can be and i use that word also as a pejorative
#
but i have a question about what we call constitutional values as well which is that
#
as we discussed earlier i mean this constitution was really drafted by a bunch of unelected elite
#
liberals and foisted upon a country which did not share these values in the sense a country was
#
largely illiberal and my question therefore is that the project that i would i think was
#
incomplete is of making these values the values of the nation the values of the society yes that
#
never happened and therefore when you talk of the the primacy of the constitution or constitutional
#
values that sounds theocratic in a different kind of way where you're holding up the constitution
#
almost as a book of religion without first building the justification that this represents
#
what society is like and that the people want this you know and i think that that task is kind
#
of left undone and that gives me a little bit of disquiet because you know what it sounds like from
#
the other side yes from the other side it sounds like when people talk of constitutional values
#
you know someone from the right wing can easily say that these are not the values of our society
#
these are the values of the Khan market liberals they would have said that the constitution assembly
#
how is it unelected it came from government of india acts there were local elections etc
#
second argument against this there have been amendments to the constitution as well
#
which is why the joke is we have elected these governments correct so which is the
#
amendments is also an interesting argument like there was this old cartoon where a guy goes to a
#
parliament bookstore and says can i have a copy of the constitution and the person replies i'm
#
sorry we don't stock periodicals because it has been amended so many times yes included dozens
#
of times by nehru and indira themselves yes yes that in that in that sense also it is very muddy
#
now i understand that there are a bunch of liberal values embedded in the constitution which i want
#
to fight for personally but at the same time i realize that it is a deeply imperfect document
#
and that a lot of the freedoms i would like have been hugely diluted like the right to property or
#
like all the right to free speech with all the caveats you know introduced in the first
#
amendment among others and and that gives me this quiet and i i worry that the discourse has reached
#
a level that it is essentially one theocracy against another and there is in that sense no
#
space for nuance and no space to say that like my sense would be that our society is deeply fucked
#
up in different ways but there are good aspects of it that can be redeemed and that can be appealed
#
to and equally the constitution tries to push a lot of values that i hold dear but it also holds
#
a lot of values that are deeply liberal and that i don't like and yet i see in the discourse the
#
phrase constitutional values being used as if it is you know some kind of holy thing that cannot
#
be touched and cannot be questioned so i don't think so it's holy in a sense amit but the
#
constitution is a product of a freedom movement we should see it as a product of a freedom movement
#
in which there are people who come from different walks of life different religions and caste groups
#
and they are fighting a movement for self-rule one of the ingredients for self-rule thereby which
#
is needed is a level of economic and social correction which will be offered by a shared
#
framework these ideas in the constituent assembly are debated okay and a provision
#
of governance is set and no side gets a complete say in that sense if you see amendments are made
#
consistently people like i think so pandit madan mohan malvi are a part of the constituent assembly
#
he was a congress member earlier and he was instrumental in the jansang there are what i
#
view the constitution quite often is as a consensus document which is why i think it's important
#
it's not because it only has the values of justice equality liberties fraternity and social justice
#
like like all of them working in the with the preambular values in that sense
#
or it satisfies a liberal framework in a sense it also is a reflection of what is india as a country
#
because we are trying to also ignore then what is the federal character of this country why people
#
from kerala tamil nadu even gujarat or madhya pradesh or uttarakhand or rajasthan bihar jharkhand
#
feel that they need to have a level of say over their own state in terms of how their curriculum
#
is designed how their public departments work and it has a huge amount of imperfection
#
even at that level i mean the constitution actually centralizes power hugely
#
it it you know it the like gyan pakash has pointed out in his book on the emergency
#
it wasn't an aberration the emergency you know the constitution allowed for that to happen it
#
allows for a lot of the excesses that the current regime carries out so if you look at emergency by
#
itself emergency has been proclaimed once like but like in terms of not being linked to
#
a armed conflict in my in my view i think emergencies have been proclaimed when
#
we have also entered wars in that sense if you look at provisions and constitutions
#
provisions for emergencies actually are there so constitutions can be maintained
#
and because emergencies are also conceptualized as having a start point and an end time because
#
there are exception from legal order and governance which is there i won't argue that it's not been
#
used in a way which is abusive and not as per its intent but the argument which is being made
#
right now which is flowing from you is that the emergency provision by itself being there is
#
something which undermines the governance framework and thereby centralizes power
#
now my argument is this that okay would you agree with the statement that a constitution is
#
essentially a necessary document containing the rules of the game that govern the relationship
#
between the state and society and which safeguard the people from those in power right and instead
#
what we have today is the other way around where our constitution enables the state to
#
rule us instead of serving us would you agree or this no i don't think so it's because
#
purely about the constitution i think to a large part but is the constitution an enabling factor
#
like first of all you agree that we are ruled rather than served by the state i think today
#
we are we are ruled by the state there's a huge disproportion in terms of accountability and
#
you say today but i think for since independence we have been ruled by the state no but there have
#
been points where it's improved if you look at even indices of economic liberty by conservative
#
institutions like kato hudson heritage foundation these are three which do it there have been
#
greater pockets of economic liberty which rose over the upa years first of all i'm talking about
#
all kinds of liberty not just economic so there are then again there are other indices to that
#
and of course akar would have gone over in the in your show over that but no i don't dispute
#
that since 2011 things have become much worse in various ways including economics but they were
#
bad in a lot of ways they have also improved over a period of time since the mid-80s it wasn't only
#
post-liberalization was one budget announcement by itself no no i've had various episodes on how
#
in a sense you could say it even started in the late 70s 79 onwards and then you had that big
#
spurt at 91 you had 20 great years where you had consensus about reform from not just manmohan's
#
government but the wajpai government as well and the manmohan government after that and you know
#
things were going well but my broader point is and but the liberalization was extremely limited
#
as even kato and hudson would recognize i myself wrote a piece in the wall street journal in 2003
#
in the wall street journal of course is the beacon of uh you know free markets as you would
#
know arguing that the liberalization was extremely limited factor markets weren't reformed
#
much of the country has suffered because of that but would you really say that there was a time
#
where between you know ruling and serving us that there was a time when the state served us
#
it does say they serve people in some way even today no no but the balance is towards rule but
#
it has gotten better has it gotten so much better that you would say it serves us more than it rules
#
us no but it's swinging and it's serving us in very different ways so as much as there's
#
political control today you have to recognize that there have been advances in the public
#
distribution system of course a lot of it is under threat because the payments are not being made for
#
a lot of people but it did revolutionize a lot of the rural unemployment problem which was there
#
so we you know the question which you're placing to me is that is the constitutional enabling this
#
rotten system of governance and this rotten system of governance is rotten because it doesn't work
#
for us in a way no no i'm saying this rotten system of government but the system of government
#
is rotten because we still have you know hundreds of millions of people in poverty sure we lifted
#
hundreds of millions after liberalization but we should not be a poor country today and the
#
reason that we are is that the state does the rules us it does not serve us and and that is
#
partly because of the rules of the game and the rules of the game are the constitution now much
#
as i recognize that it could be far worse and much as i especially recognize that if this current
#
regime were to write a new constitution it would be terrible it would really be theocratic i
#
recognize that but equally i say and this is perhaps not even a point worth making because
#
you know why bother but it just feels to me that every time i hear someone say constitutional values
#
i think that you're building a new new theocracy on the one hand and on the other hand you're also
#
alienating many other people who you could otherwise convince but now you can't because
#
you're saying take my values or else instead of building social change from the bottom up as
#
so i think quite often the constitutional values when we talk about them in an english format like
#
this i will say justice equality which i've said multiple times when we talk about it much more
#
from the perspective of people with whom i have been in touch with who do much more grassroots
#
based work they say for instance like that
#
and it's important for people for instance because then it's rooted in a source of authority which
#
goes above and beyond an elective chief minister or a local district magistrate i think that
#
type of articulation is possible i think quite often it's always also verbalized quite often
#
on social media by constituencies or minorities who feel this is what is protecting them this is
#
their shield they say constitutional values quite often because they say that the idea of
#
india is a grand compromise in which your vision of a theological state should not oppress my
#
identity my cultural practices and religious beliefs it also means something coming from
#
just yesterday for instance in which people who think that people who are of a different sexuality
#
want an equal status and not be regarded as second-class citizens they say that our reading
#
of the constitution is that we are we should be recognized to be holding these rights by the
#
supreme court of india two supreme court judges say yes civil unions are there for people who are
#
homosexual but the majority holds against them so i think it becomes a central piece quite often
#
not that these are my values i'm trusting you on them them on you i think what's much more
#
important for us is to say that these values allow us to be who we are in a way and that is
#
the way we need to verbalize that for people who believe in it for instance if i'm sitting with
#
someone who believes in a theological state and i know this is uh i think this is the carl popper
#
dilemma who says that no we need to be a dictatorship and holds illiberal values in that sense
#
i need to be okay with that and i need to be reason reasoned with them and not consider that
#
a national security threat if one day i come into power right and to make that person feel
#
comfortable who holds those views while they are in power that i will abide by that in respect
#
that is to appeal to the sense of human decency right and i think that's what's important
#
especially especially when we sit down with possibly members of in alumni school groups
#
or family where there's some degree of familiarity right all of you think this
#
i don't think so it's a great way to think about the world today to think that x people are y or
#
to think that you your ideas need to be imposed on everyone but yet at the same time i can live with
#
you voicing them and your bigotry to some extent as much as i think that i don't agree with it in
#
a sense i think we are not able to build that level of of agreement around that the constitution
#
is what is allowing you to do that quite often for instance the bjp and the jansang were registered
#
as parties under the constitution of india you know of course you will say that of course the
#
constitution should have not allowed like people may say should not have allowed it etc no i would
#
not say that no no that's why i'm walking back from it i'm saying that but but the thing is that
#
political ideologies to a large extent are recognized within a larger frame because of
#
what we call as constant value it serves different functions i i would actually be very hesitant of
#
saying or by in terms of attacking people for saying that you don't believe in constitutional
#
values etc if anybody's seen my online engagement at best what i do i wish somebody goodbye
#
and i stop engaging and i even then wish them genuinely goodbye it's just that i
#
don't have enough time and energy to engage with you because i think it's counterproductive
#
so i agree with you about the good aspects of the constitution but i should also point out that
#
until a handful of years ago we had 377 with us yeah we had adultery with us we still have
#
sedition which was ruled unconstitutional but then came back and so you know but these are these
#
are the indian penal court now i know but they should have been ruled unconstitutional long ago
#
if the constitution was the problem here the problem here which has occurred is that the judiciary
#
has quite often been reluctant this history of the judiciary is that shriya singhal in section 66a
#
in which it's struck down a central enactment which criminalized speech is an outlier it does
#
not rule offenses to be unconstitutional there's a presumption of constitutionality in any central
#
act of legislation it's been conservative my own view around this is it's because of how the
#
collegium system works right where there are some families which kind of appoint judges and it
#
perpetuates over a period of time and it's a conservative institution in that sense it's
#
not counter-majoritarian so it's the implementation body and the people who are there who have not
#
been able to realize it now 377 again ruled unconstitutional by the court the baseline was
#
the constitution but the movement for that in fact started a little earlier right and it
#
intersected with the social movement which is why i think that which is what i want to see more of
#
no but it also needs institutional engagement of course all of that yes so again what is
#
permitting what is giving a framework for all of that is for instance public assembly online
#
advocacy etc things like that and it's not easy it's not at all easy but i think if you're thinking
#
about and i know this is a conversation which is provocative which is being brought up again and
#
again and i'm not very comfortable engaging with it also i mean that's why i have not engaged with
#
when people have said somebody's written a book i don't even name that book but i think it's
#
it's somewhat also fairly cynical and opportunistic at this period of time
#
to have this conversation knowing where this country is headed as well as seeing express
#
documents which have been put out which are saying for instance articles 25 to 30 which
#
deal with minority protections need to be deleted oh there are documents like that yeah there are
#
documents they're clear documents they have been there for 10 to 15 years these are official
#
articulations it's built off a lot so of course we can sit down and we can fault the constitution
#
and i in my writing fault the constitution and the court so much but i always go with the hope
#
that we will get better over a period of time in this governance structure which is there
#
and just on for instance if you look at sedition there's a stay order the court
#
has referred it to a larger bench but again i think it's i think we need to focus on institutional
#
reform a little bit we need to focus on transparency and people need to approach
#
public spaces with a sense of idealism not think that a person is stupid because they're idealistic
#
right they are not kind of stuff okay yeah kind of thing idealism sincerity are values which are
#
not being viewed positively today and i think these kind of values are what leads to
#
big systemic changes otherwise you have people who are always assessing risk
#
and then you lead to the rationality of compromise verdicts and committees being
#
formed by the government so i'll say three things and in the second and the third of them
#
i will give a counterpoint to everything i was just saying and but the first of those i just want to
#
point out that for everything that we are against and both of us are against the present regime and
#
the present regime and for a lot of the stuff that we are against that they do the constitution
#
didn't go far enough in protecting us again i'll underscore that the real job of the constitution
#
as the rules of the game is to protect the people from the state and i feel that this constitution
#
simply didn't go far enough to do that however i will argue against myself and say that one i
#
am committing the cardinal error of you know chasing the perfect and ignoring the good which
#
as policy people know you should never do that you know and you know what we have is still better
#
than what would otherwise be the case but i still feel that if real change has to come
#
you know you're not going to get a liberal india with a liberal constitution from the top down
#
you need you know social change from beneath and finally the last point i'll make is you know
#
rohit day's book of people's constitution argues excellently that the constitution in many ways
#
does reflect the values of the people so there i shall there's you know i went for this art
#
exhibit which was by reena seni kalat and it was called verso recto recto verso people can look it
#
up and there's a sub exhibit in that which is called partition and preambles it has the preambles
#
of different constitutions amit and it's printed on a really dark blue cloth
#
the letters are all inscribed in white and the common letters which are there in each preamble
#
are sometimes in yellow and they're juxtaposed so indian pakistan juxtaposed where one huge
#
curtain almost of cloth is falling down from the ceiling to the floor
#
and the preamble of india is on one side and on the opposite side if you turn there's pakistan
#
and you can see the common words which are there which are there are plenty people should go and
#
watch see it and there are several for other states which have partitioned and then you
#
and then you think a little much more deeply that all of this text in the preamble
#
of so many constitutions which is common are human values to some extent must be must be
#
you know like built of a certain kind of for instance if i'm being disparaging hegemonic
#
thought that these are the values countries need to be formed towards but at the same time you start
#
thinking why did the paths go off so differently have you read subhashish bhadra spoke the cage
#
tiger yeah so you know like one of the things that he points out is that different constitutions
#
are a product of their times and their contexts and the american constitution therefore privileges
#
freedom so much and i think it's a wonderful constitution with the first amendment that is as
#
good as ours is horrible because of the context of that time they were fighting the british and
#
fighting for freedom you know it is truly federal in nature unlike what we have and ours was born
#
in the strife of so much violence where it seemed the center would not hold so the centralizing
#
impulse and continuing the oppressive nature of the state that we had replaced all of those
#
are there for that reason but what do you think of the book i don't agree with it but i think
#
more people need to write with different viewpoints i've given a blurb for it as well
#
oh okay i i didn't notice your blurb i'm sorry no there's a blurb for it
#
and uh he references iff's work i think i would respectfully disagree with the hypothesis it has
#
that we need less state and here's my fundamental objection to it we think two things one is that
#
the state is only oppressive the state is also oppressive and has power because it is paternal
#
people are expecting it to do things build roads give welfare give education give health
#
second presumption it's built over is that this power will be abused of course it is abused in a
#
lot of things but it's also providing a function and the second is the market alternatives which
#
are there will be much more efficient at least that's the word which is used quite often innovative
#
or human centered i don't think the human centered is used for market alternatives and
#
the government should just offer a competitive environment possibly in my utopia my utopia i
#
would say of small and medium size enterprises to do that right now i don't think so
#
so many laboratory test conditions exist i do think so there's a role for the state
#
but it needs to have very high degrees of institutional capacities of oversight
#
and friction i don't trust one government department i don't trust one person i want
#
different government bodies to have oversight over each other in terms of playing clear functions
#
financial autonomy having functions which work very differently because other models do work
#
they work in different ways if we look at education in for instance kerala and you can argue that
#
kerala has always to some extent had a leg up it's not as if the state being paternal by itself to
#
some extent is a core negative in a sense also private service providers if institutional
#
capacity of the state towards ensuring good conduct is not good good incentives also become
#
bad for instance if you ask what are the incentive structures for payouts in private medical
#
hospitals why would so many upper middle class indians sometimes prefer to go to our aims
#
or there may be a subtext behind it so i think it as a larger hypothesis is not clean i think
#
there is a space between which market-based and state-based intervention needs to function
#
and it needs to be a little less ideologically or narrative driven and much more heuristically driven
#
and of course you were right in the first part of our conversation to look at incentives
#
but we also have to look at structures how they are working we have to look at structures
#
because they create incentives yes and for instance i'm not opposed to even looking at
#
for what time the khadi gramand yaku actually worked and what what time it went wrong
#
and we also seem to be forgetting that really large companies in other countries also happen
#
to be public corporations which sometimes even go out and come in from private ownership to
#
state ownership all the time really large companies for instance i think saffron or
#
the salt french companies have this history etc so i think there's a greater degree of complexity
#
behind it also i think to some extent i agree with him i think the state uses its paternalism
#
for its own political interest and to some extent it works well when it is with the people you like
#
because the benefits are flowing to you in some way or the other incidentally or you're not
#
threatened or they match your wavelength or they like you people like you but the political interest
#
risk is definitely there the second risk is using it against opponents in a way in which
#
power perpetuates by itself people are not used to demitting office voluntarily or looking forward
#
to it as joy for some reason in india like nobody wants to take time off for some reason and spend
#
time with their families right everyone wants to be a busy politician all the time perpetually in
#
power right rather than go back think play a role in the opposition all of those things are there
#
they are big big imperfections according to me so i agree with the parts in the book which
#
relate to how there is greater amount of state control especially how it manifests towards
#
policing so what i would be really really motivated towards is looking at police reforms
#
how are they recruited from where are they recruited how much money is given to them what is
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what is their payouts what are they how are they promoted why are they not there are no police
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accountability committees why have we not reformed the police acts why do they still hold a bloody
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latte in the hands i would be interested in the coercive power of the state completely and
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reforming it because again according to me that is a paternalistic function which resides in the
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greatest amount of violence as per the policing in india report on people who are from any pocket
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of our society which lack power maybe a minority maybe socioeconomic things like that the rich
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and privileged like me can figure our way out mostly if we don't say things like what i'm saying
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today but like that's why i hold some disagreement but yet at the same point in time i believe books
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like this are important i've seen his engagement in which he's gone to different forums he's
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speaking on it he's regularly putting out tweets as well and i think all of that is valuable more
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people need to engage with topics of public policy write popular books around it and it's
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i think it builds a diversity of thought it builds a culture of conversation of dialogue
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rather than imposition through power that my ideas are better than yours because i hold the stick
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and you don't and i think that's what's important so i'm even grateful because i think he would
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he would know that i would have disagreed with some portions of the book but he still reached
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out to me for a blurb and i really don't think so like it's a bad book and i would recommend
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more people to read it long may this kind of dialogue continue where we can disagree
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respectfully as you and i in fact did in an earlier part of the show and even just now and
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and i won't litigate this further especially as you have much more experience in litigating than
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i do but i will you know link my episode with him from the show notes and the book and other
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episodes that i have done and i would encourage listeners to listen to both you and him and anyone
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else who may have any other point of view as long as they're being polite and civil in their
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discourse let's let's sort of go back as we you know get close to kind of winding this up and i
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want to go back to the personal yeah because uh part of what i i've already mentioned i really
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admire about people like you and attista and various other people who've been on the show
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is this sense of purpose that comes at the cost of personal enrichment like for someone like you
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you know the opportunity costs for doing what you have been doing would be incredibly high
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the roads not taken would lead you to really different places and you must have seen so many
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of your batch mates and colleagues flourishing in the conventional sense of the term and you
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chose to give it all up and do this so how does you know do you think about that sometimes do
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you think about roads not taken do you yeah i do i do how do you how do you reconcile yourself
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with it or you are of course going back to your private practice now so is that sort of
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yeah halfway between see firstly the thing with me is that i come from generational wealth in a
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sense so it's not like i have a level of anxiety in which i know i'll go hungry the second is that
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i did private practice for 10 years so i have some level of savings and it was tremendously
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financially rewarding i took care of some degree of financial planning before i stepped into what
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i do thereafter i have followed a path in which i have been able to practice my values i consider
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myself lucky so i also know that while others are doing what they love i get to do what i love
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and that's really important for me so that level of satisfaction i think so is what overcomes a lot
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of the self-doubt which is there a lot of the sense of comparison and i also keep telling myself that
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apart don't compare yourself with others one more thing i think is important for me to say
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for people who are thinking and listening to this is that it's not as if this is a tale of sacrifice
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and tragedy i'm on amit varma seen and unseen guys no seriously i'm i'm i'm here yesterday i
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was on a panel and like i don't like being on panels and sometimes in public visibility i like
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to share it as well but it's not like a small part of me does not enjoy it i'm i have avenues of
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publication of my views in national newspapers i get to read things expand my area of thought
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get to know i'm wrong meet really interesting people from different walks of life i got to
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advise on something recently and got two signed posters because i didn't charge them two signed
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posters from my favorite director recently so life is not that shitty i'm with like and like
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i think so like of course this has done far greater and braver work than me and so has akar
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but having a little sense of akar i think he'll understand what i'm saying well ultimately if
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you're enjoying what you're doing and it's not like you're draped in some level of
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aesthetic purity in which you become a monk and you forsake the world right
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you are open to a certain level of hedonistic desire and pleasure in that sense right i think
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that kind of mixed mode of living just like a mixed mode of economy is what i prefer and
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it's not that bad yeah but i'm being honest with you because see a lot of people on the
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right wing they say oh yeah these looted guys are living the life etc even today and all of that
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it's not that it's tough yeah i told earlier i'm making choices as to you know like always
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doing the cheapest flight always doing the cheapest cab sometimes not eating food when
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i'm traveling because i'm trying to save money and all of that is also not a great life but yet
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at the same point in time it doesn't mean that i am i'm forced to take only public transport if
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i'm tired at a late night flight and i can take a good comfortable cab instead right you make these
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kind of choices i mean so like you know it's not the high life in a sense but it's also really not
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bad and in some ways it does compensate in terms of at least one bit it is offered me it's really
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meeting interesting people over the over over the course of my work and making great
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great friendships in very different domains and i'm so thankful i'm sorry guys most of my friends
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are not lawyers yeah well you said most so some are so here's my next question in one one of your
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instagram posts and i really enjoyed your instagram by the way because in many of them you write so
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thoughtfully about stuff and i'm sure listeners will check that out and in one of them you spoke
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about how once upon a time you had gotten into a groove where you were reading mainly non-fiction
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yes and then you went into your work and you were reading mainly briefs and all that and then when
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you came back to reading outside of your work you started reading a lot of fiction and what i have
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also seen on your instagram is your love for art where frequently you're posting pictures of beautiful
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art you're writing about the art you're kind of engaging with it and so on and so forth
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so tell me also about this uh this side of your life fiction art what kind of music do you listen
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to and and you know is it is it something that you've come to later in life or were you always
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disengaged with the arts i was so i've i've been drawn to aesthetics for a long period of time
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and i i love also reading around the arts i've read ronald baths i've read uh john burger uh and
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whenever i travel even if it's locally within india like i went to amdabad i'll go to a museum
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i will take extra time out and just go myself to a museum because it's meditative you know i'm able
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to learn things about myself because i don't meditate daily also and i like because
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i can't run now every day for like six to eight kilometers which i used to do earlier
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like i still run on the weekends but i like sitting and like writing sometimes and like
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observing i like playing and looking at a canvas for a longer period of time
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and making notes and quite often it's moving a lot of this thing kind of really deeply affects
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you and you're able to know what you're passing through and of course i'm not doing it every day
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so it's over years i started out liking more the prog movement the indian progressives which were
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there so hussein raza suza all of those kind of people read up a lot about them read about
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their letters to each other and there's always one person cribbing to the other person why they
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don't write back okay for instance uh and one person who's the star who doesn't write back so
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it's just not about emails right so suza is writing to another member why is it writing back he just
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exhibited here is he doing well etc and you can always sense a tinge of insecurity there but it's
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also very interesting these are all collectives in a sense which is why you find it so befuddling
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when you know somebody says this is a network this is a poetry people need to talk to each other
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artists lawyers activists journalists even influencers and youtubers to learn from each
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other right it is always a community so i started out liking really the prog stuff and the national
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gallery of modern art was my favorite place when even i was practicing because it's not that crowded
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in the afternoons the high court is right beside it and it has terrific air conditioning and in the
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delhi summer if you go to the extension block which they've closed for several years now it
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is beautiful beautiful great air conditioning but then later on i've gone to several museums
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of different kinds and much more recently i've been drawn towards much more i i hate calling
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them tribal but indian forms of art more ethnic practices in that sense like gone that like and
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how they are being interpreted now in a much more modern context so aesthetics has always
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been a big part of what i have found to be not only pleasing to the eye but
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prompting a deeper level of thought and why i read fiction or non-fiction and i do all of these
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things is because it's of course instrumentally if i think about it what does it serve me
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as a person it offers me the opportunity to think laterally like it does something in your mind
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where it again like shakes it up and gives you a different kind of idea
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so sorry to reference steve jobs but i'm now recovering for all the disparagement i
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directed towards startups and tech steve jobs read widely in the library which include reading
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about fonts which is why the font on the apple looks the way it does there's a library of congress
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ad where he refers to a journal publication in which he says that they measured the land speed
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of a human against the land speed of a condor and the human came in at about
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16 to 18 kilometers per hour and the the cat came down to about 55 to 65 or cheetah leopard
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and he says but a human on a bicycle beat him and computers are like bicycles for the mind
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so what this demonstrates is when you read widely when you even read from journals which are not
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about the law when you read about aesthetics when you engage with matters of fiction you are not
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what is used in the law as a metaphor it is used is that you're not a mere mason constructing a
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case you're an architect you can visualize so instrumentally it does that for me but
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but i think in a much more deeper way it gives a sense of relaxation and it's fun yeah i enjoy it
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one of the reasons ajay and i called our show everything is everything is just as a reference
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to this that everything is interconnected and therefore you know the wider your interests
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range the you know the more it can kind of do for you so i'm going to segue from this to my
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penultimate question of the day which is that the tradition on my show is that at the end the guest
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has to recommend books films music art which means a lot to them and as you've just been
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speaking about them i'll you know not only that mean a lot to you but that made you think in
#
different ways that that you cherish and that you just want to share with everyone okay so my music
#
recommendation would be i'm listening a lot to bill evans these days so just go back put it in
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youtube and listen to 60 minutes of bill evans while you're writing you're reading folding
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laundry you'll really enjoy it my second music recommendation is nusrat fatih ali khan's
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i think he's done an album with the michael brook yeah glass i think so he's done an entire album
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with it forgetting but his albums with michael brook are called night song and must must
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but maybe you're referring to some other collaboration album those are both full albums
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in terms of in terms of books books i read a lot i'm really enjoying
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neomey klein's most recent book doppelganger it's resonating very deeply i'm enjoying it also
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it's very well written i it's yeah i'm reading it slowly and uh the other books which i think
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which i've touched upon which have like moved me a little there was like another one on how
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technology impacts welfare systems called automating inequality by virginia u banks i've found it to be
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quite influential quite fun and finally i think even i'm going to do actually a review video on
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this taylor sherman's book nehru in seven myths and if you're looking for a little much more
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activity kind of stuff of course a lot of people are reading tani biram's speaking constitution but
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you can actually get it on a kindle it's out of print is wages of servitude and it's great it
#
starts out with the first independence day and the flag being unfurled in a central jail where a
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political prisoner salutes the fact and that basically is his testament to how civil liberties
#
are not realized even post-independence so but it's a much more deeper thoughtful book by kani
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biram and you may like it so these are my recommendations but finally i'd also like to
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recommend to people that if you are if you're looking for much much much more deeper recommendations
#
books is to also follow my youtube channel and i hope it's okay to make a recommendation on this
#
podcast of course you can and i will link them from the show notes anyway and people should follow
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you on youtube instagram twitter and yeah and buy the future books that you have please have to
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write now and don't suffer from imposter syndrome and so on and so forth films what's the last film
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that made you cry so i have a trouble crying it's not it's not great but rather than movies
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i think i don't watch a lot fair enough so but uh but i watch i really love one show
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i really love one law show it's called the good fight and i love it because it aligns with my
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world view and yet it's distant because it's taking place in the space of us politics but
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it's essentially showing people who are holding extremely progressive values who are lawyers and
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they're trying to make sense of the world today as it gets more and more weird and crazy
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so you may like the good fight and just in terms of movies yeah but love the thing with
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the thing with movies is i have not watched a lot of movies recently in a sense but i do have some
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recommendations but they're like dark stuff yeah i like so for instance i really like one of the
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movie posters which i got signed recently okay i'll just take just check out these two movies by this
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indian marathi director chaitanya his first movie is called court and that accurately shows how
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lawyers are sometimes treated in fact i think it's a fictionalized account i've written a review
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of that it's a masterpiece i i think it's the best first film by an indian director since
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it's just a masterpiece yeah and his second movie actually is not watched by a lot of people but i
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think it's better it's called the disciple it if you have imposter syndrome watch it with a friend
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right no and you'll get to understand that a little slowly what's happening there
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it's basically dealing with indian classical music and a person really committed and sincere
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also over a period of time discovering they may not have the depth of talent as much as
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they really wanted so it's heartbreaking my final question to you i am of course going to become an
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individual donor for iff ashamed of not having done that so far but if people listening to this
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want to dive in and support iff or any other cause that you care deeply about
#
what would you recommend where should they go so i'm just going to start with saying something
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which has happened recently to me so last weekend i was teaching at iam i had been called for a
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course so they have their archives there their first director was called ravi matai and they
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have named the auditorium behind him and i was walking through the archives i saw his
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i saw his resignation letter he resigns one year into his second five-year term at six years
#
because he says our organization should not be determined by the ideology of a single individual
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and i hope that my voluntary resignation sets into motion a culture of relinquishment rather
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than holding on to a post i'm saying these things because quite often people lack trust in
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non-profit organizations there is a culture of sometimes founders holding on to it i am a co
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founder but i am also a member of this community who is truly saying to people who are listening
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to it iff is your organization it is not only mine over a period of time i hope it becomes
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into an institution in which people come into the board at governance level come into the staff
#
people who fund it shape it into the way which is needed fundamentally agreeing that or fundamentally
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pushing it towards a direction which is basically good good for people good for the country in terms
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of the kind of advocacy which is risky which is brave which is not usually done in india
#
right so of course financially supported for people who are but demand accountability if we
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put out a call for coming onto the board it's a public call please consider becoming a board member
#
do join the public calls if you would like to sign up for the newsletters sign it sign up
#
send emails to us tell people at the staff what you would like them to do and how would you like
#
to do it with them many people may not know we have collaborated with close to 30 artists
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who have made different kinds of illustrations graphics designed entire projects our facial
#
recognition tracker panoptic it's designed hosted created completely by volunteers so you can
#
volunteer your skills so there's a the intent is that if you have enjoyed this podcast and
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you truly think iff may not today have the ability of being a public organization
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i hope you see its promise and even for people who may think that it's tied to me very closely
#
is to push it towards the direction where it needs to go in future inspiring words and i've
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you know learned so much from this conversation i listened to it again and there's a lot to process
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thanks so much for your time boss i feel guilty taking you away from the nation for half a day
#
the nation will do fine it has one person the nation will do fine thanks a lot
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if you are listening to this episode check out the show notes enter rabbit holes at will many
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great links in there you can follow apar on twitter at apar 1984 you can follow me on twitter
#
at amit varma a m i t b a r m a you can browse past episodes of the scene and the unseen at
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scene unseen.in thank you for listening
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did you enjoy this episode of the scene and the unseen if so would you like to support the
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production of the show you can go over to scene unseen.in slash support and contribute any amount
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you like to keep this podcast alive and kicking thank you
