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I often speak about the importance and the rarity of self-reflection in this world, and
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I'm usually thinking of individuals when I say that.
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Most of us get trapped in a group of living, of thinking, and we don't spend enough time
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reflecting on ourselves.
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This leads me to a broader, more nebulous question – can a society do self-reflection?
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Now I don't like thinking in terms of collectives, and at one level the question is ridiculous
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Societies don't think, individuals think.
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Sometimes a thinking of individuals spreads and becomes a fashion or even a norm.
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This can go in dangerous directions, as demagogues can appeal to the worst instincts of our nature,
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and social media can of course scale their impact.
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But even among all this noise, there are thinkers who are questioning every aspect of our lives
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They think about how we live and why we live that way.
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They help us make sense of a complex world.
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My guest today is one of those thinkers.
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We should all read his work, and be inspired by it, to examine ourselves and our world.
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Welcome to The Scene and The Unseen.
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My guest today is Santosh Desai, who was a guest on episode 137 of the show, talking
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about how Indian society had changed in the last 30 years.
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Now all of us contain multitudes, Santosh is one of India's great thinkers and writers,
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and he contains multitudes of multitudes.
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So one episode was never going to be enough, and I was so glad when he agreed to do another
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I've made sure we repeated nothing from that last episode, so you can actually hear
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them together in any order.
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They are not just a master class on our society, but also a master class in how to think about
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It was such a privilege to have this conversation, but before we get to it, let's take a quick
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Hey, the music started and this sounds like a commercial, but it isn't.
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It's a plea from me to check out my latest labor of love, a YouTube show I am co-hosting
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with my good friend, the brilliant Ajay Shah.
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We've called it, Everything is Everything.
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Every week, we'll speak for about an hour on things we care about, from the profound
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to the profane, from the exalted to the everyday.
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We range widely across subjects, and we bring multiple frames with which we try to understand
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Please join us on our journey, and please support us by subscribing to our YouTube channel
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at youtube.com slash Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
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The show is called, Everything is Everything.
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Please do check it out.
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Santosh, welcome to the Seen Indian scene.
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Thank you so much, Amit.
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It was such a delight recording with you four years ago, I think it was.
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However, the show was shorter in those days and we only did two hours, so I'm hoping to
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kind of keep you captive here for 10 hours, 12 hours, however long it takes till we get
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That's what I'm terrified about.
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So I don't want to make you self-conscious, but as you sat down, I noticed something in
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common between your shirt and my shirt, and it is something, in fact, which you have written
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I don't want to kind of read those words out, but you wrote, quote, In earlier times, one's
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midriff modesty was protected by the fact that shirts had a substantial overlap between
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I'm sure there is a technical name for this, but I'm talking about the strip of cloth on
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which the buttons are mounted.
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This isthmus of restraint, this plank of civilizational propriety ensured that when one sat down and
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the shirt folded upon one's ponch, no skin was revealed.
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For reasons best known to themselves, and no doubt in the interest of moody fashion,
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that strip of cloth has either been removed altogether or narrowed to the point of rumour.
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As a result, every time one sits down, one is exhibiting skin, stop quote, and I'm sorry
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I made you look down like that, you are much more fit than me, so it is less of a problem.
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This is an interesting theme to start with, because one of my pet peeves is how what biologists
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would call isomorphic mimicry is all around us, that you know, fashions that may make
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I just transplanted to India and they make no sense, like your particular column was
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about something that I rant about and my recent guest Pushpesh Panthaji was absolutely fuming
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about it, the slim fit phenomenon, and you know, and another fashion that I think started
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happening, I started seeing 15 years ago was, you know, hotels in their rooms would have
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this glass wall between the bathroom and the bedroom which makes zero sense in a country
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of 1.4 billion, I don't think you'll find anyone who kind of wants that.
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Kind of looking back, you know, if I ask you for a moment to reflect on what would you
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have worn 30 years ago, how is that different from what you wear today and what would you
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find fashionable and desirable then, you know, how have your personal notions of fashion
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Well, actually, you know, 30 years ago, I have to say that one had virtually no notion
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of fashion, in a manner of speaking, so 30 years ago would be, let's say, 93, actually,
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the problem is that, you know, as the older you get, your idea of 30 years ago, when you
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count, it turns out to be surprisingly recent, 93, okay, that's not so bad, I had some notion
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of fashion then, so, yes, so, I think at that time, it was more rudimentary, right, I mean,
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the fact is that, you know, in India, all of us have had some very basic constructs
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of fashion, and I was no exception, and so, you know, for instance, we have this notion
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of matching or contrast, we have two kind of ways of thinking about it, right, and so,
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it was the idea of fashion was essentially to be presentable, to have X number of blue
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shirts, white shirts, you know, not have too many loud checks, so, and a lot of it was
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to do with what you will not wear, rather than what I would wear, right, for instance,
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it was a lot to do with saying that is garish, that is, but what you end up wearing was absolutely
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middle of the road, blues, whites, greys, any, by 93, any deviation from the norm was
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in fact a problem, so, I must say that I dressed absolutely generically, and that was my idea
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fashion was, and so, and then fashion was either specialness, so, it was not actually fashion,
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as much as there was a notion of specialness, and a notion of everyday, so, there's everydayness,
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there's office, there's everyday at home, and then there is special, special is just, you know,
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again, if you, what defines special is a little more expensive, maybe at that time ready-mades,
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certainly, so, something which is ready-made, a little branded maybe, but it was, I must say,
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a very rudimentary idea of clothes at that time, we stopped, I think, by 93 stopped doing the
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tailored stuff, right, so, otherwise, if you go back earlier in time, it was all about, and there
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was actually no notion of fashion, because we used to get gifted pant pieces and shirt pieces
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by sundry relatives across the year, and so, you essentially, your wardrobe was made up of things
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people gifted you, and then you got them stitched, and so, that was pretty much it, but yeah, so,
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things have changed, I think, certainly, there is a, you know, in terms of fabrics, in terms of
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cuts, in terms of, you know, there is a, I think, a much greater, I mean, if I was to look at my
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wardrobe today versus what it was, you know, 30 years ago, certainly, I think, there would be a
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change, particularly, I must say, post pandemic, I find that the sensibility has loosened
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substantially, I cannot now tuck in my shirt, it is, that is done, I mean, I find it, you know,
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it's impossible to go back to the time when you sort of have this, and then if you just reflect
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about it, it's a weird thing to do, why should you tuck your one piece of garment into the other,
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I mean, you know, as a convention, it's interesting as to how that becomes a
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convention for formality. How do you think it became a convention?
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I am wondering whether it has to do with the military, you know, because our notions of
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formality in some senses, and the spit and polish, and, you know, all of the idea of being well
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presented, even the notion of matching, in a sense, I wonder if it came from, because the best
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turned out people, you know, certainly growing up, were people from the military, you know,
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they had a certain, you know, there was a certain crispness to the attire, there was a certain
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finish to what they did, and obviously, there was a great amount of care that went into it.
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So the notion of who is well presented, and their shoes were shining, their buckles were shining,
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you know, there's a certain, and then I think that, I think in many ways, the creases were sharp,
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and so the idea of what constituted being well turned out, I'm guessing, but if I had to attribute
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it, I would probably attribute it to the military. Yeah, and military people also have bodies that
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are more amenable to slim fit, slim fit bodies as it were. No, I remember Pushpesh Panji was
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particularly furious because he was like, I went to Taylor to make pajamas, and he started asking
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me, and I'm like, and I'm like, and I remember you've written this wonderful essay on the Nara
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back in the day, where you speak about how the Nara solves a problem by refusing to acknowledge
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it, which is useful for so many Indians. And in a sense, I have a narrow question about fashion,
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which I think is also a broader question, and even touches on glass doors in hotel, or how
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cultures change and evolve, which is that, you know, one assumes sometimes that there is a reason
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for everything, like we just speculated on the reason for why shirts are kept out, and they're
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not tucked in, and clothes can come about because of climate, and because of various other contexts
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like that. And in your time, studying brands, studying, you know, what people do, what they
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wear, etc., etc., what is your notion of change? Like, is all change explicable, or is a lot of it
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just accidental stuff? Like, some guy decides ki hotel mein glass wall lagana hai, and then it just
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takes on, you know, like, I often wonder, like, one of my pet peeves, and perhaps it's a sign of my
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age, is that I cannot stand restaurants that are too noisy. But it has almost become derriger,
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it's become convention that every restaurant, every empty cafe has to have music blaring at
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an insane volume. And my suspicion is, and I have asked restaurateurs, why do they do this,
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and they just kind of waffle around the question. But my suspicion is that, at some point, this
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slipped into conventional wisdom ki essay hona chahiye, and then people follow it kind of
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unthinkingly. Like, there was a cartoon I remember reading, I can't recall where I read this, about
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how there is, you know, a convention in a particular army camp that a guard always has to, you know,
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stand by a bench. And it's been like that for 30 years, nobody knows why. And then one guy decides
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that I got to find this out. So he speaks to, you know, his senior in the camp, he doesn't know.
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And then it goes back all the way 30 years ago, where he calls a commandant who founded the camp,
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and he asked him that, you know, where did this tradition come from, you know, and the guy says,
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what tradition? He says, there's a guard standing by the bench. And he says, oh, the paint hasn't
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dried. So what is your sense? Because as, you know, thinking, rational men, we try to ascribe
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causation to everything and try to understand everything. But often things are just chaotic.
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Well, that's true. I think that's true. I think there's certainly a large measure of what happens
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that is accidental and it crystallizes into, you know, norm. But I think the flip side is also
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true. And that's what actually interests me more, which is the fact that things we
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don't think mean anything, as to why they tend to mean something. If I was to look at, say,
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the restaurant example, I tend to trust things that are not rule based, but that are where there
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is a large number of people participating and where that still continues. So if, for instance,
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restaurants are noisy, there are lots of data points and the number of experiences for that
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are so many that if that was not serving a purpose, there is a reason why that would die out.
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The army is different because it is rule based and it is hierarchy based. And therefore,
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the idea of an individual taking any initiative does not arise. So, but where there is a crowd,
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where there are individual instances and there is a repetition of a certain kind, I tend to
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first ask as to what might cause this, rather than say that this is, it is what it is. Because I
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think most of the times as the problem is not so much that you think it is accidental, but because
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we don't think about it and we take it as given that the reality is what it is. But the fact that
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very often there is something that is driving it. For instance, interestingly about the restaurant
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noise thing is very consciously you will find that the, even if the crowd hasn't grown,
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you will find if you go to a restaurant at seven o'clock and by the time it's 10,
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the volume of the music that they play will go up regardless of whether there are more people in the
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restaurant or not. It is based on their understanding that the idea of the evening as people get drunk,
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as people get, you know, is the fact is there needs to be a sense of some sort of a crescendo,
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some sort of a progression in the evening for the evening to have meaning, for the sense that you
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had a good time. So the notion of progression of some, you know, some experiential progression
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is important. Now that's a hypothesis. I mean, I don't know if it is true, but so therefore it isn't
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random. There is something that goes into it. And now when you align it to human behavior,
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it is when we go out, we do want to have a good time and we want the third drink to
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take us somewhere that the first thing didn't, right? So we are on a journey of some kind.
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And therefore for that journey to get marked in some tangible way is important. So I mean,
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the danger, of course, of this point of view is the fact that you start describing causation
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when none exists and you overthink and over read at times. But I think I find the larger problem
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is the fact that we are normally blind to most things and we just, you know, accept them as a
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given. Why is the NADA popular in India is an important question, I think, you know, I mean,
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it may not be a pressing question, but it is an important question.
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Clearly not. So I think because otherwise it's the kind of thing that just we just, you know,
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take for granted around it. On the one hand, I buy that and, you know, in that sense, I get the
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conservative logic that if something is there and our tradition is there for a reason, and we have
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to be really careful before judging it or doing away with it. At the same time, and I'm thinking
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aloud here, I'm reminded of something two different guests have spoken about in two
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different episodes, which were TILs for me. One is in the context of food, where Krisha Shouk told
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me about something that happened in the South, I think, during World War Two, where they used
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to get all their rice from Burma. And because of conflict in Burma, the supply of rice went down,
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and they were trying to force the South, the Imperial government to have more wheat.
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And they didn't want to have wheat because their women worked and they didn't want to make rotis
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all day. The girls went to school, they wanted to keep going to school, etc, etc. So the compromise
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that they arrived on is a kind of wheat that can be cooked like rice. So, you know, semolina and
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therefore upma, and that is the origin of upma as a trend. And what happens there is that there is
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an accident of history. And after that, when that reason no longer exists, you know, that has
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already become tradition and custom, and then it just survives through inertia and there's no
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reason to change it. In a political context, a similar argument was made by Subhashish Bhadra,
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who's written the book, The Case Tiger, where he was speaking about constitutions. And he was
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saying that, look, the nature of a constitution will be determined by the circumstances and the
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context in which it is framed. So the American context, where they are fighting the British,
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where they're fighting for freedom, will necessarily, you know, privilege individual
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freedom to that degree will necessarily be much more federal than other constitutions have been,
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and so on and so forth. Whereas in India, you have a constitution with a centralizing impulse,
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because at the time the constitution was framed, the country's falling apart, and, you know,
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you don't know if the center will hold. So that is natural. And here, again, you have the accident
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of particular circumstances and contexts bringing about something that then becomes rigid and as
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hard as a rock, and there's nothing you can do to shake it, you know, for good or for bad.
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And Upma, of course, is not exactly rigid and hard as a rock, unless you sort of...
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But yeah, so I was just thinking aloud, Spark, by what you said, do you think there is something
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to this, that we then become slaves to accidents or contingencies of the past that no longer apply?
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That's true. I think that is absolutely true. And I have no problem, you know, with that at all,
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because I think that's true. I think the interesting thing is the first part of it.
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The fact that, you know, there is that a certain design of any kind is a product,
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therefore, of its context, right? The fact that that design endures, and it'll endure,
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what I'm saying is that, you know, again, something like the constitution, the fact is that
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it is not subject to, you know, the fact that there are individuals who, how they experience it,
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they don't have control over changing it, right? So there is a certain rigidity that is structurally
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built into the idea of the constitution. So wherever there is that kind of, just like we
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talked about in the army, there is a certain rigidity built into that, where in the case of
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Semolina, it isn't. Then it has just become tradition, it has become accepted and people
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like it, which is the reason why it continues, right? For instance, you know, milk scarcity
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produces a certain response in the East and the South, right? Now, that, when that scarcity eases,
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so you can continue to have Horlicks for a few generations because you were used to, you know,
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having Horlicks because of milk scarcity. But eventually, the fact is that you will want milk,
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you know, you don't want diluted milk, or you don't know, you know, you get used to the fact
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that there is plenty. So some things, I think, accidents of history, which are really contexts
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that create a certain kind of design or certain kind of behavior, it will endure because they're
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accepted, or there is the fact that I think there is a certain, you know, rigidity that is structural
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and inbuilt. But over a period of time, you would expect that to change if it is, if there is a
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certain, you know, number of experiences that will shape it going forward. So, I mean, I don't see
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these as an either or kind of a situation at all, I mean, in that sense. Yeah, I mean, these are
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interesting trivia in a sense, like the QWERTY keyboard, or did you have Polson's butter as a
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kid? Of course. So my good friend Ajay Shah told me a story about Polson's butter, which no doubt,
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you know, but for my listeners, essentially, Polson's butter was a butter that was there
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before Amul butter, and everybody loved it. And it was a big hit in Bombay. And it was like just
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part of the cultural fabric and etc, etc. Then Mr. Kurian starts a great cooperative movement,
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and he gets, you know, Danish collaboration, and the Danes send their high tech machines,
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and they send their cooling plants and butter can now be transported beautifully without,
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you know, getting degraded in any way. And then Amul sends a shipment of the most perfect butter
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that you can imagine to Bombay from Gujarat to Bombay. And Bombay hates it. They're like,
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this butter sucks. And then they try to figure out what's going on. And what's going on is that
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Polson's butter, when it made the journey from Gujarat to Bombay was not refrigerated properly
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with the same kind of Danish high tech that Amul was using. So it would get a little rancid.
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And then that became part of, you know, people became conditioned to expect butter to be like
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that and wanted to be like that. So Amul actually had to make that butter objectively worse by
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making it a little rancid. And then that is, I mean, I don't know if that's a butter that we
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still have. But let's go back to your childhood, because that is one thing that we didn't really
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touch upon in the last episode and all that. So tell me about your childhood. Like all I
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remember you talking about was that, you know, you were born in West Delhi and etc, etc.
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You know, I was born in Baroda. I was born in Baroda. I, my father was an engineer with
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Indian oil. He was a civil engineer. So his job essentially, you know, for large part was to
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build townships. So we, I remember my childhood. I mean, I was born in Baroda. Then we spent some
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time in Delhi when I was very young. And then we moved to a place called Haldia, which is,
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you know, 80 kilometers off of Calcutta. There he went to build the township. So we actually
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went pretty much, you know, at a time when there was nothing there. And so very primitive kind of
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a thing. So in fact, for the first six months, there was no school there. So I used to, for the
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first few months, have a Bengali tutor coming in. I didn't know Bengali. He didn't know any other
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language. So it was, I don't know what learning, but I picked up, in fact, you know, for those six
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months, I picked up spoken. And in fact, I could read Bengali. I couldn't write, but I could read
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Bengali. How old were you? I was seven or eight. So anyway, since that there was no school there,
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I went to Baroda for six months. And I think, no, I was nine, I think class three, so eight or nine.
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And I finished my class three day, by which time there was a school that was set up since
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Xavier's at that time, set up with, you know, my class had some seven students or so, it was
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that kind of school. So I came back, by that, which I had forgotten how to read Bengali,
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although I can still recognize some sort of, I can make out if some letters are, you know,
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are, which I still recognize. But so, but it was growing up in a township and which was actually,
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you know, great because very few people. And you were roaming around, you know, the whole day,
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there were like piles of sands that you were jumping from all the time. You know, it was
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that kind of with a little parkour or lake, a little pond that you, I first went swimming in.
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So it had that kind of an element, which was, I think, in some ways, I mean, there was nothing
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available there. I mean, because there was absolutely nothing. I mean, so, you know,
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so it was far away from any sort of urban kind of an idea of growing up, but it was, I think,
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great. It was, in some ways, idyllic. In some other ways, it was not because there were a lot
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of, you know, it was primitive. But so that, I think we were five years there in Haldia.
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Then we moved to Faridabad and then Delhi. So I've spent a long time in Delhi. So West and
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West Delhi. That's where West Delhi kind of roots. So from, I think, class seven to first year
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college, I was in Karol Bagh. So I was in the heart of West Delhi with, you know, friends with
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names like Lovely Pinky, you know, I mean, many, many such. So we used to play cricket in the
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evening and then Rome. We got next to Ajmalkha market road. So the evenings were spent after
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that walking up and down Ajmalkha road. So that actually, I must say, that was a terrific sort of
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a part of growing up because it was, I mean, you were in the heart of something that was alive.
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You know, that was a very alive kind of a place. It was very different from my Haldia experience,
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absolutely radically different. But it was, you know, it was a good place to be when you were
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adolescent growing up. And my school, Sardar Patel was far away. So you used to change two or three
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buses every day to go there in the morning and then back in the evening. So, you know, one had the
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run of Delhi. I mean, you know, you were, you know, on a totally kind of,
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in that sense, you know, absolutely free with the whole landscape of Delhi going from one place to
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the other. So in that sense, it was a very open kind of a, and then quite, it was possible to
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explore. It was, so I, it was, it was a good experience those five, six years in Delhi.
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And what kind of a kid were you? Were you reading a lot? Were you into sports?
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Yeah, so I was reading a lot. I mean, from early days, I mean, I was reading the usual stuff from
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starting from the innate blitons of the world, you know, kind of stuff, but I was reading a lot.
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In fact, in Haldia, I'd started along with some friends, a circulating library in my house,
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because, you know, you didn't have books. So, you know, it made sense to pull together books.
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That was the fact that after the first few days, you know, the enthusiasm kind of,
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you know, waned very quickly. And the evening was the time we used to play cricket and evening
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was the time when people would come to exchange books. So, you know, that became a bit of a
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problem because, you know, I was out playing cricket when people came into sort of a transact
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at the library. So that kind of shut down pretty quickly. But, but I was, I was, you know, I was
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actually went through about, I think eight or 10 years reading a book every day. And I'm not
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exaggerating. I mean, it was a book every day. You know, I would always have circulation in Delhi,
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for instance, there was circulating libraries. It was a daily thing, you know, and the circulating
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library, in fact, is a fascinating institution. I mean, we were run by people who had no clue.
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And, you know, you had this whole sort of set of books that, you know, there were some authors
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that you knew and you went back to, and then there were random picks that you sort of, sort of,
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dived into and sometimes found something interesting, sometimes not. But I went through,
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you know, the usual, everything from the Nick Cutters of the world to the, you know, I mean,
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from Pulp to the Woodhouse, of course, and then all the Arthur Hailey and, you know, that, that
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thriller kind of thing, no serious reading, you know, until that time. But sports, meaning only
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cricket in the evening and, and reading. These were, and music, listening to music. These were
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like the preoccupations. A book a day is pretty impressive. Yeah, I was a fast reader and I would
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read a book a day. And to me, that was a way of maximizing the circling library thing. So I was,
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so I would be reading through, you know, dinner through, I mean, so I was, you know, it's that
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kind of, you know, in the bus in the morning, if you happen to get a seat, I was reading in the
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school at any time that, you know, I got any time. I was reading throughout. I mean, it was, it was
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just, you know, I absolutely couldn't stop myself. How are readers different from non-readers?
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It's an interesting question. I think, I think fundamentally the fact that you allow yourself to
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be immersed in other realities, I think, you know, allows you, I think,
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I don't know if it's true for all readers, but I certainly, for me, the idea of being able to
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detach yourself from your context and to see the world through the lens of someone else,
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I think is something that, at least I think that what reading did was that for me, was to
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not place yourself at the center of the universe, you know, and not therefore imagine that your
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ideas and your way of seeing the world is the only one. You know, there are multiple
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perspectives, multiple ways of seeing the world. And I think reading,
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you know, the fact that you are able to, I mean, I grew up, for instance, you know,
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entirely in this make-believe world of, you know, an imagined English childhood,
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you know, which is what, you know, or an American childhood as I grew older,
#
which is the Archie's comics of the world, right? So there were two completely distant landscapes
#
that- Scones and ice-tea and hamburgers and-
#
Yeah, hot buttered scones, yes. Potted meat sandwiches. I still don't know what potted meat
#
sandwiches are, but you know, they sounded like, you know, English cuisine sucks otherwise, but
#
at that time, it sounded like it was the best thing in the world.
#
So quick digression from your childhood. There's a lovely quote by you, which I really like,
#
where you once said, nothing is mundane. It is merely a profound truth that we have got used to,
#
right? And I want to ask you about seeing, because there is so much truth in this,
#
in the sense that in our lives, and this is a lament about myself also, that everything becomes
#
mundane, everything becomes normalized, you lose the spark of living when you lose that sense of
#
looking at something with fresh eyes and so on and so forth. And what writers have to do,
#
I mean, either they do it already or they have to do it, is they have to learn to look with a
#
deeper intensity. Now, one way of doing that, of course, is reading a lot, because then you are
#
constantly sort of looking at things in different ways when they are written about in different
#
ways. You mentioned, I think, in our last episode that you like travel books, because it's outsiders
#
looking at us, and that helps you as well. And I want to ask about seeing and intentionality.
#
Do you think that because you were reading a lot and you were a curious kid, etc., etc.,
#
that that facility of seeing past the mundane-ness, the potential mundane-ness of everything
#
was inbuilt in you? Or do you think that it is something that has to be nurtured
#
with an act of intention and that the career paths that you went on to take sort of enabled that?
#
I think in some ways, it has to do with how much you own your own experiences,
#
and how much you draw from them. And the more I think one is able to own one's experiences,
#
in a sense, then it helps you unconsciously develop a frame or a framework of some kind.
#
What do you mean by own? In the sense that, you know, when you, the granular nature of your,
#
because a lot of it is comes from one's own experience. You know, you say that I enjoyed
#
sugarcane juice a lot, and I remember the fact that the other thing going in and the juice coming
#
out till it is dry and the husk is dry. So it's about you sort of, you know, if you have that
#
vivid kind of a memory and a picture of that event, all that remains is to ask why. You know,
#
why is sugarcane juice so ubiquitous? What is the nature of sugarcane juice that sets it apart
#
from other fruit juice? Right. And I find that so that's where the intentionality comes in.
#
Right. So there is one is the owning of the experience, which is the base that you have,
#
which is, you know, and giving it respect. And so that has meaning and knowing that it has meaning.
#
And then the second is to sort of the intentionality of asking the why. And I think,
#
you know, I do this exercise actually with other people also, you know, in workshops, etc.,
#
which is the fact that most people, if you ask the fundamental question, you know,
#
you ask what is time or what is a burger or what is, you know, instead of assuming that it exists
#
and it is what it is. But if you just ask the fundamental question as to what is it fundamental,
#
what is it, if you have to define it as a thing by itself, you know, what would it be? And, you know,
#
I find that it's actually not difficult to arrive at, I think, deeper sort of understanding of
#
things. So I think there is intentionality, of course, the fact that my career was in things
#
where, you know, you have to understand why people did what they did, I think certainly helped us
#
these questions. But without the experience and the fact that those experiences had value,
#
without that understanding, I suspect that it would be sterile, that, you know,
#
it would not be that useful without having an experiential base on which to apply that.
#
You mentioned in our last episode that, you know, you like writers like Barth and Umberto Eco,
#
because they would quote unquote locate meaning in the trivial and everyday. And is there also a
#
danger there? Like I remember in 2006, I traveled through Pakistan to follow the cricket tour there.
#
So I was there for two, three months. And I was also writing for the Wall Street Journal and so
#
on. So I was doing a bunch of things along with the cricket and along with following the cricket.
#
And I was almost live blogging. I was kind of blogging regularly, blogging every day.
#
And at one point, I realized this tendency within myself that, boss, I'm trying too hard,
#
that, you know, I am traveling somewhere, I feel that I must produce meaning out of everything,
#
every interesting stone or every person I meet who doesn't look like me. I want to find some
#
significance there and make it a big deal because I am engaged in the act of writing.
#
And that is one way to look at it. And another way to look at it is to lament that I am seeing
#
with a gaze here that I don't apply in my own country or my own city because everything is
#
normalized and I should apply this gaze there. So how does one sort of watch out for, you know,
#
those things that you because you can go too far to get meaning. And at the same time,
#
the joy of discovering meaning is also intense and pleasurable.
#
No, I think that's a real danger. I think there is a real danger to,
#
you know, like I said, to overeating things, I mean, and to sort of and there is no
#
sort of objective yardstick that tells you that now you're overreaching things, right?
#
There is no, I mean, there's, you could be, you know, be construing meaning where none exists,
#
you know, it could be an accident, it could be a perfect or it could be another explanation,
#
which is perfectly functional. It is, you know, I mean, things, you know, so I think it's entirely
#
possible. And the only way I think is a self-awareness and the fact that you have
#
the ability to criticize and yourself. And so I think that's what I mean, I think the idea of,
#
you know, subjective rigor, the notion that, you know, interpretation is subjective and it is it,
#
you know, that there cannot be any objective way to verify that, you know, in most cases.
#
But without the rigor and the self-incessant self-criticism, in fact, not just self-criticism,
#
but there is a certain harshness to that self-criticism. I think that is important
#
because that's the only thing that I think keeps you, you know, somewhat disciplined because
#
otherwise you can go, because it happens sometimes, you know, that when you talk about it and, you
#
know, you do this as in a larger group and you try and demonstrate it and you have other people
#
come back to you and do a reading based on what they have seen. And it can be so horribly wrong
#
because, you know, there's, what are the guardrails here? I mean,
#
anybody can hypothesize as to what, why something happens. Right. So the, but the other thing is
#
that, you know, you connect dots in a different, your, your, what you're looking for is you can't
#
find linear validation. But if the, if phenomenon is happening, then B and C should also be happening
#
and D should not be happening. Right. So it is by trying to construct a, you know, a worldview,
#
which goes beyond a single observation and is able to locate it in a network of, of behavior
#
or action that gives you some comfort that this reading is, is robust or at least, you know,
#
it has a chance. So I think it's important, but that process is important of asking yourself
#
those questions and of, you know, but also I find very often that when, when it rings true,
#
then there is a certain instant acceptance of, of that explanation, you know, which is,
#
which I always talk about, you know, this any insight is retrospectively self-evident,
#
you know, meaning that, that it is once you say it, I always knew it. It's not just that it's true.
#
There is almost foreknowledge that, that has been buried. Give me an example. No, for instance,
#
you know, in, in so many things, I mean, when you, for instance, if I was to say that says,
#
I'm just saying, because we talked about it, sugarcane juice, and I talk about the fact that,
#
you know, it is extracting sweetness from wood and it is the combination of the, so unlike a fruit,
#
which is colorful, which is pretty, which, which is enticing, there is nothing enticing about
#
sugarcane. They're like pieces of wood. You could beat somebody with a sugarcane, right? I mean,
#
it's, it's hard. So it comes from something which is hard and it is every day and, but it's sweet
#
in an ambrosial way. I mean, it is sweet in a way that virtually nothing else is sweet, right? I
#
mean, it's sugar. I mean, of course it is sweet. And then therefore, if I was to say that, you know,
#
our connection with it comes in part because of the fact that it is such an every day, it is such
#
an unlikely source of sweet. And, and therefore, unlike fruit juice, which is exotic and wise fruit
#
juice, you know, in the earlier days, the fruit juice stalls were, you know, were for special.
#
They were, but sugarcane was for everybody. And, and what, you know, there is a certain character
#
to sugarcane that allows that everyday-ness of sugarcane. And it comes from its form and
#
it's, you know, I don't think it's some brilliant insight, but, but it, it is an explanation that
#
is, would rarely be challenged, right? Or if I was to say that, what else can I talk about?
#
I've probably been fascinated by, you know, you know, the creases in our trousers, for instance.
#
Why do we have creases in our trousers? Why do we put a straight line in the middle of,
#
of our clothes? Why? Why did we put a straight line in the, in our parting, in our hair?
#
So what does the straight line signify? Right? You're going to tell me, right? Yes.
#
I'm going to give you my hypothesis. It's a straight line is a, you know, is a sign of
#
civilization. It's a sign of order. It is a sign that I am not allowing circumstances to dictate
#
to me, but I impose my will on circumstances. Right. I draw a sailor deliberately to signify
#
order. Right. And therefore I, my hair is not just, must it, I draw a line through it to say that
#
it is, it is a sign of conscious, self-conscious grooming. Right. And, and now when I say this,
#
right, I have no idea if it is the truth. Right. But I find that in more cases than not, people
#
will say, okay, that makes sense. Right. I mean, I hadn't probably thought of it like that,
#
but now that you say it, it seems like, yes, that is the reason why we do it. I mean, that's just
#
another example. And with time that changes, of course today, for instance, people don't put
#
parting in there. Nor do they necessarily have creases in their trousers because that idea,
#
just like they don't shine their shoes to, you know, so that you can see your face in them.
#
Right. Because our ideas of, of what order means and the importance of order in our lives
#
has changed. We don't think, you know, the mark of being civilized is order. There are different
#
marks of being civilized. Right. So, so these are not cast in stone, but the fact that we,
#
we have behaviors of certain kind that, that we again take for granted, which are actually,
#
if you were to look at them with a new eye, absurd. I mean, shining, for instance, something that you
#
wore on a extremity of a limb, which is made up of leather to shine them. I mean, and to have
#
polish and to have cream and to spend time. I mean, it is ridiculous. It is a protective device. I
#
mean, why do you need to shine it? Right. But it's, it's something that you never ask as to why do
#
you need to put a straight line, you know, on your clothes. You don't need to ask, you don't ask that
#
question, but when you explain it, there are times when, when the explanation rings true.
#
Yeah. On the subject of fruits, a little bit of trivia. You know, people think fruits are healthy.
#
They are incredibly unhealthy, huge amounts of sugar. And my good friend, Susan Thomas,
#
told me recently that fruits today have 30 times as much sugar as they're used to in prehistoric
#
times. They're very ancestors. So they have evolved to get sweeter and sweeter and sweeter. And
#
because sugar is such a crazy addiction. Let's go back to your childhood. You know,
#
today, if someone is growing up, a kid growing up, is surrounded by just so much media,
#
so many potential influences, so many potential inspirations and role models, et cetera, et cetera.
#
You have a multiplicity of choice, but back in our day, and I feel safe enough to club myself
#
with you. I don't think that's true, but yeah, we'll let that pass. But back, I mean,
#
70s, 80s, but back in our day, we didn't have that. So a lot of our conception of self is
#
circumstantial. And some of us, like I certainly was, you know, privileged enough to also have
#
access to books and read a lot. And some of us have that slightly wider world, but it is still
#
sort of, we are working on what today looking back appears to be incredibly limited information,
#
both about ourselves and about possibilities and about the world. What was your conception of
#
self back in those early days, like as you were coming through school, like what was it based on
#
stuff that you're good at and where that will take you? Or did you also have, you know, a sort
#
of a deepening sense of the things that you really care about that sets you apart? I think I was,
#
you know, in many ways, I was not in a very self-conscious kind of a frame, you know,
#
and certainly in terms of the future, it had no meaning for me till very late in life, actually,
#
till I started working. Also, if somebody asked me, what do you see yourself doing five years from
#
now? I had no clue and no interest in that question. You know, which after a certain age,
#
I find strange because, you know, now I have a huge amount of interest in that question.
#
But earlier, I mean, I had no interest in that question. I think there were some things that I
#
was good at and which I enjoyed doing. And I had a fairly basic sense of that arc saying that,
#
you know, I will continue to do this. And I was confident that I would find my way. I did not
#
have any lack of confidence in that sense. I always felt that, you know, I would be reasonably
#
good at what I did, whatever it is that I did. And it was not a question in my head.
#
In that sense, it was, you know, knowing there was a certain amount of, you know,
#
certitude, maybe too strong a word, but a certain sense of who you are without it being,
#
you know, it was not a question. I think that became a little unsettled in my 20s,
#
where you sort of start just mentally, I mean, not so much about the self, but as much about
#
a worldview where you are trying to form a worldview and there are too many pieces that
#
don't fit. And then you go through a process where you are trying to fit those pieces together. But
#
childhood, I did not have that kind of an experience. I was, I think, fairly settled.
#
And I had a, at least mentally, I was settled. I didn't have that many, I think, areas of self
#
doubt. What was interesting is that from a family perspective, you know, my father was going through
#
a difficult time at that time. You know, he went through a, you know, a phase when career wise,
#
etc. I mean, he was working in a public sector company. So, I mean, there was that, but he
#
went through a, you know, a mentally challenging time. And as somebody growing up dealing with that,
#
that, you know, was a little difficult because I was, you know, sort of having to sort of deal
#
with that. So, but from a personal perspective, I was always a little, you know, self assured,
#
maybe on the cocky side, maybe rather than, you know, on the, you know,
#
looking back, I would probably say that. Did you daydream?
#
No, it was just, you know, idle. I mean, idle daydream. I mean, you know, like the fact is,
#
I mean, and I've written about this also, is that filling time was such a, you know, and passing
#
time was not easy, right? So, you sit outside the window, you just sit in the window and you just
#
look at people and you imagine their lives. And so, I used to do that, you know, and where you
#
sort of try and figure out and picture what X or Y might be in, you know, just some random stranger
#
on the street, that kind of thing. And to fill time, I would do, I remember doing ridiculous
#
things like book cricket, right? I used to play a lot of that.
#
Not that book cricket. Then I would compile scores and I would do the analysis of their
#
performance. Utterly fictitious, you know, so I would actually do that. I would draw graphs,
#
not graphs, but I would draw charts. I would make charts and actually have an
#
utterly fictitious career kind of a record of people playing book cricket. I used to note down,
#
which is absurd to admit, on Delhi, on the radio, we had this beat up old GEC radio with valves,
#
et cetera, which you have to keep fiddling with for it to play. And so, I just tuned into western
#
music. So, I would actually make a note of the songs that are playing and which are the most
#
popular songs. So, I actually had a record of which were the most popular groups,
#
which songs were playing the most. So, I'm just saying those are, you know,
#
ridiculous things that one did. But I think it's amazing. When I look back,
#
I think the fact that, you know, it's not daydreaming exactly, but it is a form of,
#
you know, an other kind of a reality where you're trying to construct in some ways, some way to
#
make sense of the world in some form, you know, and have some idea of being able to place things
#
somehow in some sort of order, which looking back now, I guess, because otherwise, what is
#
this fascination for statistical kind of a description of the world? It had no meaning
#
to me in my immediate life at all. In my house, there used to be a book lying around
#
called the Wizard and Book of Test Frickate, I think edited by Bill Findel, which had every
#
scorecard till 1977. And of course, they weren't so many test matches. So, it was one thick book,
#
it was containable. And I would look at each scorecard and make up elaborate narratives of
#
what happened and how they got out and attention and all of that. And you know, just as there is
#
a saying that youth is wasted on the young, I am thinking that technology is wasted on this generation,
#
because I'm just thinking that with your sort of obviously geeky mind, your attention to detail,
#
your imagination, all of those things which you show in your book cricket adventures,
#
you know, if you were young today, you'd probably be coding and building apps and building businesses
#
and all of that. And people living today are just so fricking lucky, including us. I mean,
#
we are still around. I also want to you know, you mentioned worldviews. And earlier when you were
#
talking about reading and how things begin to make sense, I was thinking of one of the sort
#
of metaphors I use when I talk about the importance of reading is that we make a picture of the world
#
by joining dots. And the more dots we have, the more high definition the picture and reading
#
gives you more dots. Right now that tendency that desire to make sense of the world is universally
#
human. The world is deeply complex. We want to find meaning, we want to tell stories.
#
And what typically happens with most of us is that we find a story that fits and that gives us
#
comfort. And then we stop right there and we don't explore further. And a danger that can often
#
happen to the young is that you arrive at a frame which seems to explain everything and which may
#
give you other consolations or tribal belonging or whatever. You arrive at frames and then you
#
don't adjust them. Once you find a frame that fits, you're like completely cool. And what you
#
were pointing out about, you know, your reading and all of that is that there was this desperate
#
sense to make sense of all these different dots, all these parts that don't seem to fit. And I
#
imagine that is a danger for voracious readers because then you cannot possibly fit all the
#
dots into a simple explanation as it were. So I'd be curious in knowing about how your thinking
#
evolved in terms of the frames through which you looked at the world.
#
So I think, you know, I'll just go back a little, digress a little, because I think one element
#
which I think was, which I think missed out, which was important was apart from reading was
#
the fact that, you know, my father was actually somebody who was, you know, quite contrary to,
#
you know, the other milieu that, you know, if I was to look at my relatives, if I was to look at
#
other friends, parents was this extremely sort of open-minded person when it came to arguments.
#
And so a lot of, you know, my early childhood, I remember having shouting matches with my father
#
on purely conceptual things. I mean, not on anything that affected our life, not on my
#
progress report. I mean, and so that was very clear. He was my father and everything he said
#
and everything was done exactly. I would be the obedient son on things to do with, you know, home.
#
But the moment we had stepped out of that and talked about things, it was fair. I mean,
#
everything was fair. I could say that you're absolutely, that's an idiotic point of view
#
and you have no idea about it. I could say all that when I was 11 years old or 12 years old to
#
my dad, and there was absolutely no problem. And like five minutes after the argument ended,
#
I was back to being the obedient son, right? I think that along with the reading helped
#
sort of open up the world, right? Because it gave the fact that it was absolutely fine
#
to sort of cross lines of authority, the traditional lines of authority and have a
#
point of view. And that point of view was valued and was not quashed using force, but was, you know,
#
was actually engaged with and argued with, I think was something that was hugely important.
#
And I think which also over a period of time, you observed your own point of view changing.
#
So, you know, so I think because it was open and the fact that you don't have to hang on
#
to your point of view, you don't, you know, there was no need felt to preserve and protect yourself
#
because, you know, everything was fair, right? So it was possible to have that kind of a freedom.
#
I think that was very, very, very important, you know, for me. And I think the whole, the question
#
of whether you get wedded to a single frame or not, I think the exploratory period of my life
#
would have been early twenties where, you know, while I was, you know, I had done an MBA and I was
#
pursuing a corporate job. I remember my first job was at this company, which went, you know,
#
downhill very, very quickly. Soon after I joined was this company called Nikitasha, which used to
#
make these kitchenettes. And, you know, my office was in a plant in Faridabad and I was staying at
#
that time in Karol Bagh again. And I was just scribbling, you know, I mean, if I noted half the
#
time, all kinds of things in a pad on my way there, there was nothing to do with work. And it was,
#
it was a time when, you know, I had started reading some elements of, you know, existentialist
#
philosophy and I was kind of getting interested in philosophy. And it was a period of great tumult,
#
I mean, in just trying to get my head around questions of a more fundamental kind, you know,
#
and over a period of time, I think it kind of sort of became a, not a particularly codified or a
#
coherent worldview, but it became a worldview of sorts. I mean, it gave me some sense of,
#
of, I think overall just the fact that a certain amount of detachment from your immediate context,
#
the ability to look at things, you know, trying to remove, you know, your own sort of needs
#
from it to the extent to which you can, explaining the world rather than taking positions on the
#
world, you know, and being more interested in why rather than whether this is good or bad.
#
Of course, you have a sense of what is good or bad, but that is not the primary lens through which
#
you look at the world. I think those became the some sort of principles that rather than a point
#
of view, which was ideological, a point of view, which was more, in a sense, setting the guardrails
#
on how to see the world. And I always find even to this day, I find it very difficult to be
#
described by any label. I mean, I cringe against, you know, I have a problem with that. I have a
#
problem with, I always in socially and otherwise also, I find myself much more comfortable being
#
the outsider rather than inside a group. I'm never part of, I mean, I find myself very difficult to
#
be part of a group and having a group identity. I just find that difficult. I mean, I would not
#
like to be described even as a liberal. I mean, even that label I would shy away from because,
#
you know, of course, in many ways, I have views that would correspond to that.
#
But that label is so confining. It is, you know, it just freezes you into having a certain
#
expectation. Why should that be? Why should I not have on one of the many issues that liberals
#
agree on? I could disagree violently and I must have the freedom to do so. Because otherwise you,
#
I just find myself kind of, you know, restricted and imprisoned and that's something that I don't
#
enjoy at all. What was your relationship with your parents like? Like one interesting
#
movement that I note and that, you know, happened to me fairly late in life is, you know, when you're
#
young, you're just looking at your parents as parents. You know, your dad is your dad is a
#
father. Your mom is your mom. She's a mother and that's it. And it takes a long, long time for you
#
to be able to look at them as human beings who are flawed in their own ways, who are really winging
#
it a lot of the time, who are screwing up, who are messed up, you know, as essentially human.
#
You know, what was that sort of process like? Like, you know, what was your mom like? What was
#
your dad like? Was he also a thinker in the same way as you are? Yeah, so my dad was always, you
#
know, was always somebody who was an engineer, a civil engineer, but he was actually, he should
#
have been in humanities actually at that time, you know, he was by nature that kind of a person
#
and that kind of thinking. He was also used to write. And it's interesting that normally he would
#
write these, you know, nice pieces about people and interactions and stuff like that. But he also,
#
when he went through a sort of a mentally difficult period, he wrote some fairly sort of
#
interesting pieces that were sort of, you know, a little, let's say, less conventional in terms
#
of their arguments that they were making. But, for instance, you know, he would talk about stuff
#
like the fact that, you know, stones have memories and that inanimate objects have memories. And he,
#
you know, in fact, it was very interesting that he, the one interesting interaction that we had,
#
which was completely out of our, you know, socially, we are utterly middle class. I mean,
#
you know, the middle class in the way that in which Indians describe themselves as middle class.
#
But my father was, you know, we're hand to mouth. I mean, in, in, in Delhi, because what happens is
#
that the, he was making some, bringing home 1800 rupees or something. And in fact, he had given me
#
the responsibility for keeping accounts. So I was acutely aware of the fact that we were absolutely
#
hand to mouth. I mean, by the end of the month we were out and we had about 1500 rupees in our bank,
#
you know, so it was like that. You were, you know, we lived in a three bedroom house.
#
But, you know, when it came to actually having money that there was none. So we were in that kind
#
of an environment. So I, at the time when he was, you know, writing, I think in that phase,
#
he wrote once to Dom Moraes and he described him as saying that you have a, I don't know how,
#
where he picked it up. I don't remember him reading to one Dom Moraes, but anyway,
#
and he said, you have a fear of immortality. He said about Moraes writing. And somehow Dom found
#
that very intriguing. So he called him over. And so I remember going with my dad to meet Dom Moraes
#
and Leela and I don't, I was, I think in class eight, nine or 10 like that. It was totally like,
#
it's a totally different world, right? I mean, there's Dom, you know, slurring and sort of,
#
you know, that alcoholic is, but very, very sweet man. I mean, incredibly sweet man. Leela was
#
like a force of nature, et cetera. I remember even at that age. And so we went there, we visited
#
them a few times. You know, they came over to our house once, you know, which was utterly sort of
#
far removed from theirs, sort of a milieu, but it was an interesting interaction based on. And I'm
#
not sure if I remember this correctly, but I have a, I have a memory and I really want to find out
#
if it is correct or not. That in a later writing of some kind, Dom mentioned this actually,
#
fear of immortality. I don't know. I could be, you know, it could be a false memory,
#
but it was interesting. So he went through a time when, you know, certainly he was sort of had,
#
you know, but it was, it was a difficult time because, you know, you coming back to the question
#
that you asked that, that as a parent, you know, so for me, it became possible to see my father
#
as a human being relatively early because he was, you know, he was going through a difficult time
#
and it, therefore, you know, I had to really sort of, you know, take on the role of the concerned
#
parent in some form, right. But you have to watch out and you have to be a little,
#
there was a phase he then, you know, he was absolutely fine thereafter, but there was a
#
phase that he had looking back. I mean, you know, at that time we didn't have the, you know, the
#
vocabulary to describe it, but it was, it was a, you know, a certain amount of paranoia, a certain
#
amount, you know. So there was a, you know, it was a mentally difficult phase for him. My mother was,
#
you know, somebody who was in that sense, a traditional homemaker mold. She grew up actually,
#
she lost her father pretty much when she was one or two years old. So she grew up with relatives
#
and my, her mother was also not a very assertive, but she was just a, she was a child widow and,
#
you know, so pretty much grew up with relatives. So she, and she was the only child,
#
but she was a dancer in a, you know, in a, in a young day. So, so she had an artistic sort of a
#
temperament, but otherwise she became, you know, she was a, she was a homemaker and she died early,
#
you know, when I was 18. So she died at 46 in Delhi, in fact. So, I mean, in that sense, I only look
#
back with memory and, you know, it's more a feeling rather than actually concrete memory.
#
But yeah, so that was my parents. So where did you go to college? Like how, how did your sort
#
of life proceed from there? So my college, I did one year in Delhi, I did, I was SRCC, I did EECO
#
and then I finished college because when my mother passed away, then my father saw
#
transferred to Baroda, which is where, you know, our family was. And so I, after one year in Delhi,
#
I finished my college in Baroda and then I went for the IM. So, you know, earlier you mentioned
#
sort of the notion of time and how one begins to look at that differently. And that's something
#
that I think about a fair bit because, you know, when we are 20, you think that, hey, you know,
#
35 is old and you're positively growing at 50 and you're kind of, et cetera, et cetera.
#
And the notion of time then changes as you grow older and older, even the way that you look at
#
history and society changes, because when you're 20, something that happened 50 years ago was
#
ages ago. But, you know, both of our births are closer to India's independence and they are to
#
where we are kind of sitting now, much closer. Like, how has your conception of time changed
#
through all of this? And how has that made you look at life differently or live your life differently?
#
Yeah, I think, you know, when I was younger, certainly time was, in some senses,
#
it was not a relevant kind of an idea, meaning in the sense that you lived in the everyday
#
and I was focused on, you know, immediate goals and nothing more than that. And life took you
#
where it did. So time was simply, you know, sort of you were riding time, you know, you're on top
#
of time and you were riding it. I mean, you know, so that I think was the conception of time.
#
And time did not have meaning, actually up to a certain stage in life, time did not have meaning
#
both in going ahead and going back also. I mean, memories also didn't really have meaning. I mean,
#
I didn't really actually, till a certain age, I didn't own my childhood. It felt to me as if it
#
happened to somebody else. You know, I didn't think that it happened to me. You own it now?
#
I own it now. I own it now. I owned it soon. You know, let's say in my 30s or something,
#
I started sort of really sort of owning the past. Even then I didn't sort of... What does it mean
#
to own the past? I think it means that you feel a connection with your own experiences much more,
#
you know, whereas it felt like, you know, till a certain stage, I just felt like I was
#
in this little bubble floating in the present, disconnected from the past or the future. I mean,
#
of course I was a product of my past, but I didn't, you know, there were no active memories that I
#
looked, you know, back on or associated with. In a sense, there was a certain
#
just sense of floating in this bubble. And then I started owning much more and relating to the past
#
much more. And it's only after 40 that I started thinking about the future. So my sense of time,
#
you know, of the future and what it means and what it could hold and what, you know,
#
started only till I was 40. In fact, rather, I would say exactly at 40, meaning I think there's
#
almost like a switch that went off at 40, which says that, okay, now, you know, so financial
#
planning, the sense of what happens in the future, knowing that, okay, having the fantasy of retiring
#
early, all of that, you know, started happening at the age of 40, which is also coincided with
#
the time when I was probably in my most high pressure sort of part of my career, you know,
#
I'd just become the head of an agency. And, you know, it, so therefore, it, I think also
#
the need to escape was the strongest at that time. So I went to plan escape. It was actually more
#
to plan and escape than to plan the future, I think, in some ways. No, there's a saying about
#
how the past is a foreign country. And I sometimes feel like that, like, when I look back on my past,
#
it feels like it's another person. It's like, just completely different. And I think, you know,
#
people can also make that opposite switch at 40, you know, to the one that you did,
#
where their past seems disconnected and far away and another person, and equally, you know, you
#
kind of stop thinking of the future and just go with the flow and all of that. Tell me about your
#
career trajectory from there. So you went to IIM, you did your MBA. My first job, like I said, was
#
with Nikita Shah, which lasted about, I think, six months, because I was analyzing, you know,
#
my strong markets for the one where we declined by 70 percent and the weak markets where we
#
declined by 90 percent. So that was, that was my experience pretty much in Nikita Shah. It was a
#
dying company when I joined. But then I joined advertising. So I worked with this agency called
#
Ulka, which is now called FCB. And I was there for five odd years. Then I went to another agency
#
called Mudra, where I became sort of head of the branch there. You know, it had two branches. I was
#
head of one. Then I joined Macan. And I was actually alternating between two functions. One
#
was strategic planning, which was more sort of thinking about, you know, and strategy. And the
#
other was running things. So I kind of did both. In Macan, I joined as head of planning to set up
#
their thing. And that's where actually most of the work on this, on culture and trying to understand
#
everyday life and sort of, you know, you know, that's when it actually really crystallized. And
#
that's the kind of work where I think at that time there was nobody, you know, in the industry
#
thinking about it in those terms. I think that the idea that brands are actually cultural artifacts
#
and that, you know, that in India in particular, culture has a strong bearing on how you create
#
brands and the need to read culture. And because India is so diverse and so difficult to sort of,
#
you know, generalize the idea that rather than, I mean, dialogue was good and, you know, the normal
#
mode was doing research and talking to people, but actually being able to decode behavior was a much
#
stronger way because you were able to. So if you look at popular culture, if you look at, you know,
#
our customs norms, things that we enjoy, that's a better clue to understand, you know, why we
#
behave the way we do. Then necessarily asking people, because in India as it is, it's true
#
globally, but in India in particular, you know, most of us don't know why we behave the way we do.
#
In a lot of things, you know, we just do them, right? I mean, when we touch somebody with the
#
foot, why do we do sort of, you know, why will you touch somebody and, you know, why will you ask for
#
some sort of forgiveness? But I mean, there's so many things that we do without actually being
#
aware that we are doing this, right? And why do we say, right at the end of it or no, I mean,
#
why do we say that? Indians tend to shake their heads. Why do we do that? We do that because,
#
you know, we just do, right? And then therefore that worldview of saying, decode, don't just ask
#
and then put things together, that kind of developed there. So that became like a parallel
#
thing. And soon, I think at that time is when I started writing. So it kind of, but it came from
#
actually from advertising, the source actually was advertising because that's when I had started
#
asking these questions and it made sense to ask those questions and they were used in, you know,
#
in the work that I was doing. So that was a product. But then I went on to head the ANC,
#
I mean, after that. So that was, and then now, you know, for the last so many years,
#
I've been sort of, you know, running this consulting advisory kind of a company.
#
So that's been the... And is it the case that, you know, were it not for the field of planning,
#
coming into advertising in a big way around at same time, I'm presuming from what I remember,
#
were it not for that, is it the case that you could have been a misfit like your dad,
#
humanities person who wants to think deeply about the world, but stuck in sort of another area? I
#
mean, why did you do your MBA and get into advertising? Was it because, you know, it just
#
seemed the smart option, you know, a good career is waiting for you and the life of the mind will
#
happen elsewhere? Or were you also excited by aspects of it and everything just happened to
#
dovetail beautifully? No, I was clearly during my MBA, I was a misfit MBA in some ways. I mean,
#
in the sense that I quite was happy to be a sort of a bit of a misfit. I was not a major misfit.
#
I won't say there were people who probably were bigger misfits, but I was a bit of a misfit. I was
#
reasonably good at the quantitative side, which is normally the reason why people have... I was not
#
great at it, but I was reasonably okay with it. I enjoyed actually, more than being great at it,
#
I enjoyed. So I don't have any fear of the quantitative side, but that was not what I
#
wanted to do. I didn't want to do the typical consulting, the business consulting slash
#
investment banking kind of a thing. It held no interest for me. So I was always sure that I
#
wanted to be in a more creative kind of an environment. And so advertising was not the
#
smart... Actually, advertising was not the smart thing to do. The smart thing to do was, you know,
#
a job with Citibank at that time. That was a smart thing to do, if you got it. I didn't even
#
apply for those jobs. I mean, I was not interested in those at all. It was either marketing or it was
#
advertising. And so to that extent, it was, you know, I was quite clear about the fact that I
#
wanted always to have... And so had I not had this planning thing not happen, I think, you see,
#
at least when I joined advertising, there were a lot of, you know, when a lot of agencies didn't
#
have plannings, you could still be an account management type of person or business person
#
and still do this, you know, because I think that was the expectation that agencies do this and that
#
it was a more sort of a cerebral function. So to that extent, I don't think I would have
#
been a misfit had this function not happened. But yes, because this function happened,
#
I think it allowed me to sort of really, in that sense, do what I really like doing.
#
It was, you know, and also the truth is that I chose to define it in a way that, you know,
#
so it was not defined like that. It was defined in a much more... It was an adjunct to marketing,
#
but it became much more a humanities discipline because of the fact that India was going through
#
what it was. It was ripe. And that's how I decided to make it. I mean, I decided to
#
define the job like that. So, I mean, it was not... That was not the definition of the job
#
at that time. You were not considered to be part of the, you know, broadly speaking,
#
the humanity spectrum. It was still an adjunct of the MBA. It was analysis and figuring out
#
market segmentation and figuring out, you know, that kind of stuff. The idea that you're talking
#
about codes and narratives and how, you know, that was a totally alien language. And that came out
#
of my interest in, you know, the kind of things that, you know, we've talked about.
#
And I would imagine the typical kind of MBA or the advertising person who, you know, gets into that
#
field, for them, it'll be about understanding a market. While for you, from where you came from,
#
it was about understanding a society. And then, of course, you understand the market at the same
#
time. So, can you give me a sense of how this actually plays out, where, you know, where in
#
the process of understanding a brand, you dig deeper, you figure out something, some fundamental
#
truths, you know, perhaps early TILs for you, which then play back into, you know, building the brand
#
and so on and so forth. There'll be several examples, but say for instance, you know,
#
Tanish was a brand that, you know, we had worked on now many, many years ago, but it was a brand that
#
came and that was created with the, you know, with the idea that, you know,
#
India is a huge jewelry market, but it's that the designs are all traditional. So that there
#
has to be a place with such a huge market for a more contemporary, you know, design led brand.
#
So its founders, Akshay Desai, who was this, he had this amazing kind of a, you know,
#
facility and understanding of design. So he had created this brand with a very European
#
sensibility and the idea that, you know, there is, you know, and initially it was, in fact,
#
you know, they did 18 carat gold with very high stones and embedding kind of, and a very high
#
design kind of a brand. Of course, in India, 18 carat stone is aluminum, you know,
#
there is nobody counts it as gold. So I mean, that was an early correction they made.
#
And, but their problem was when, when we were, we went to them was when we worked with them
#
several years ago was the fact that they were a very well regarded brand, but they were seen,
#
they were bought for trinkets, you know, so earring here or ring here. And it was also people who,
#
you know, did have traditional jewelers when they were, so for instance, if you moved to
#
Bangalore and you didn't know anybody, you went to a Tanishk. But if you lived in Lucknow and had
#
been there all your life, you went to a traditional guy because, you know, jewelry. So they couldn't
#
participate in the wedding market. And, and, and the advertising also tended to be this very
#
designer advertising, you know, which were young women with a certain style, a certain,
#
and, and so they're reading and, and therefore their design function was also populated by
#
people. Their design heroes were people who did that. The wedding stuff they did was a bit of a
#
chore, you know, we have to deal with this, you know, so clunky kind of stuff, you know, we don't.
#
So when, and their conception, their mental model of jewelry was, was much more as fashion. And
#
that's what it was articulated. Jewelry is fashion. It's an accessory. And therefore it follows fashion
#
codes. I think what we demonstrated to them was the fact that in India, jewelry is not fashion.
#
Jewelry is, jewelry is culture. It is not fashion. Jewelry is highly coded. The motifs are highly
#
coded. They all have meaning. They have legacy. They have history. And, and you are basically,
#
your mental model of the category is wrong. I mean, it, it is not fashion. And as a result,
#
you celebrate the wrong people. As a result, you are happy with, you know, the, the, the part of
#
the market that is not, you know, that is not, you know, rem-relative. Now the problem, of course,
#
is the fact that you can't be a, you're not a traditional jeweler. So, so the, the way out
#
was the fact that why don't you, you know, reinvent tradition rather than follow it,
#
but use tradition as a base. Don't be, be an insider changing things rather than outsider,
#
you know, sort of thumbing a nose at, at what exists in your own way. Right. And, and therefore
#
this idea that own, become in fact, the largest repository of, of jewelry traditions in India,
#
understand them the best and then do a version of them. So do a Danish take on Nizam jewelry,
#
do a Danish change, you know, on, on Rajput jewelry, do a participate in Bollywood cinema.
#
And, and, you know, you know, so, so it became from a brand, which is, you know, an outsider
#
looking in a brand, which is an insider sort of reinventing, reimagining traditions, but very much
#
embracing traditions. And, and therefore internally, you know, we celebrate that aspect
#
rather than, so I think a cultural read of, of jewelry, which allowed, and it had a huge
#
difference. It made a huge difference to them because it allowed them to participate in the,
#
in the mainstream market, you know, much more that advertising, in fact, started with, you know,
#
new tales of tradition was that the tagline at that time. And it, so therefore it, it, it became,
#
you know, so just an illustration of how a cultural reading can be useful.
#
There is a conventional marketing, we went segments, we went this, we went that,
#
there is no way to reach this point. I want to double, double click a bit on the fashion versus
#
culture thing. Like, would it then be correct to say that fashion is something that is transient
#
and may depend on, you know, superficial things like what looks good and what doesn't, but culture,
#
you know, comes along with deeper meanings and so on and so forth. Is that?
#
Fashion also has its own, you know, it has also comes from deep meanings. It's not as if it
#
doesn't. So it's not as if fashion can be superficial, but fashion, it's, it would be
#
wrong to say that fashion is only superficial. Fashion also has its own, but it's there are
#
different codes and different categories have different codes. So, so.
#
Can you, can you give me examples to illustrate that?
#
No, for instance, you know, I'm just saying that fashion, if you were to look at, you know, what
#
you know, why, you know, certain kind of fashions are classics and why certain kind of fashions are
#
transient, right? There is a, there is a, the reason why we see the fashions are trying to do
#
two or three things. One is that they, at an individual level, you are, they are a communication
#
system, right? Essentially fashion is a communication system. So, so we are always trying
#
to communicate who we are, what our context is. So what our insight is, what our times are,
#
what group do I belong to, right? You're doing gender signaling, you're doing status signaling,
#
you're doing, you know, you're doing groups. So there are a whole lot of things that we are
#
expressing through fashion. So, so fashion fundamentally is a, is a very deep sort of
#
an instrument of communication. So, so I would not characterize as saying that culture is deep
#
and fashion is shallow. Fashion is deep, but for it, transience is important to communicate
#
that I am ever changing, times are ever changing, contexts are ever changing, which is the reason
#
why fashion must be ever changing. So it is not, it is not about superficiality, but it's about
#
communication of a certain, it is about time. It is about the fact that the world has to change on
#
a moment by moment basis. And if we are alive in this world, then we must reflect the fact that
#
the world changes on a moment by moment basis. And fashion therefore is a sign that we are alive.
#
And the fact that we are alive, two things around us. So I certainly think that fashion
#
has its own fairly sort of deep reasons why fashion is fashion. Although it is possible
#
to construe it as being superficial and being transient and being trendy, right? So trendy is
#
one part of fashion, but trendy is not all that there is to fashion. So, so I do think that fashion
#
has, you know, what it chooses to emphasize, what it chooses to hide, you know, there is a story in
#
all of that. Can fashion become culture? I mean, wasn't everything that is culture once fashion?
#
Ah, yes, I think so. I mean, I haven't thought of in those terms, but I think, you know, fashion
#
can become culture. Fashion can certainly become, you know, so deeply embedded in our way of life
#
that it, you know, it becomes sort of, you know, something that we don't think about on an
#
everyday basis. But then we stop calling it fashion also. I mean, you know, so by its very nature,
#
then that moves into another box. So, tell me about the writing. Like, does, you know,
#
our mutual friend Vikram Doctor asked you to write for the first time, I think for Economic Times,
#
right? Yes, Economic Times. For Economic Times. And eventually then your long running Times of
#
India column, City, City, Bang Bang, which has been how many years now? It's the 20th year.
#
This is the 20th year. Oh, congrats. 2024 will be 20 years, June. Mind blowing. So, two significant
#
events next year, this and the elections. Yeah. So, what was that like in terms of evolving your
#
interests and your thinking? Because there is often a danger when you're in a job that even though
#
your focus was beyond marketing and into society and culture and all of that itself, there is still
#
a danger that the focus becomes narrow and, you know, you think only along those lines. But I'm
#
guessing that having to write every week then makes you think differently. Like, first you look
#
at the world differently because you're trying to find meaning. You're saying, I can write about
#
this next week and et cetera, et cetera. And B, the act of writing is in a sense an act of sharpening
#
your thinking itself. So, how did the writing shape the thinking? How did it shape your reading? Did
#
it shape your reading? Were you then reading more to kind of expand your thinking as well?
#
Well, I think writing certainly, you know, shapes thinking in terms of the fact that it
#
makes it more pointed. It forces you to also expand it. So, a single observation, you know,
#
then has to, for it to have a piece, for there to be a piece in it, it needs to be bolstered by,
#
by, so, you know, every piece in a sense is a little ecosystem, you know, around an observation
#
or two. Right. So, it's a little, right. So, that's the other thing that I think
#
writing does, which is just to sort of, you know, and also I think the fact that it forces you,
#
because I don't see the point in writing. In fact, I find, you know, that is my big complaint with a
#
lot of, you know, ideological writing is the fact that you're making a point that has been made a
#
hundred times before over and over and over again. It's the same thing. It's a very noble thing that
#
you're saying, but it's not readable. Parumita Bora calls his jogging on the spot for 20 years.
#
I actually, I'm a big fan of Parumita's, but anyway, so this is, I think it is that it is
#
just endlessly repeating the same thing. And I don't know how that is readable. Right. I mean,
#
yes, understood, very good, very noble, but why, I mean, why should I read it again? I know exactly
#
what you're saying. It's an outrage and it is this and, you know, and all of that. Anyway, so,
#
you know, to me having a stance, having something to say, which I don't know about others, but for
#
me feels like I have a slant on it, which is fresh. I think that forces you to always evaluate your
#
thinking from that perspective. There is no point in saying something that has been said in that
#
way. I mean, at least I should feel it is fresh. Other people may or may not agree. So I think
#
that's the other thing that it sort of reinforced. In terms of reading, actually, I've had the
#
opposite experience, actually, I must say, which is a very, very, you know, dispiriting thing for
#
me, which is the fact that the more I write, the less I read, actually, I find, because I find the
#
two, I find because most of my writing is kind of completely homegrown in the sense, you know,
#
it comes from, you know, and I find that with reading, I lose some of the freshness of that.
#
I find myself, you know, echoing other people's thoughts. And I find reading valuable when I have
#
a thought and I read then to expand that thought. So I prefer to now, unlike earlier when I would
#
read anything, now I find myself naturally without thinking consciously about it, reading along the
#
axis of an idea that I've already had, which I think is very limiting and which I find, you know,
#
terribly sort of disappointing, but I can't help it. I just find that I'm not interested.
#
So, otherwise, I think it interferes with, you know, with how I am thinking about things. So I,
#
this ab initio way of thinking, you know, through first principles and having that freshness. So to
#
me, originality is something, you know, that comes from the origin rather than something that is,
#
you know, necessarily new, that has not been said before. So it, for me, it must come from
#
the origin. It must come relatively sort of, you know, fresh. There is nothing that is absolutely
#
fresh, but I find that when it is secondhand, you know, it's not as if it doesn't happen. It
#
happens all the time when you're reading something and a thought strikes you and it's still a fresh
#
thought. But somehow instinctively, I find myself reading less rather than more. And part of it,
#
of course, is the usual social media, having attention spans, kind of get chewed up, you know,
#
in today's times, all of that is true. But I think the more fundamental reason is that I have seen a
#
link between my writing and my reading. So, you know, a final question before we take a break and
#
we have khati kababs waiting for us, which were once fashion, but are now culture. I think you'll
#
agree. But, and that dives into this whole thing of, you know, people jogging on the spot. And yes,
#
people do that a lot. Now, you know, there is the phrase public intellectual. I don't, you of course,
#
don't like any labels ascribed upon yourself. And once I called Ram Guha, public intellectual,
#
I've done five episodes with him and he was offended and said, no, I am no such thing.
#
But I think what happens is with a lot of people who write, who do writing, which is public facing,
#
there is also the sense that it is okay to repeat yourself because you must not assume that a reader
#
has read everything you have ever written. There is an arrogance in that also. And if there are
#
things that you feel are important to say, it is okay to say them again and again. Like I used to
#
hold myself back from writing about stuff because I would say, Hey, but I've written about that
#
before. It is, you know, it almost seems cliched to me. It almost seems banal because it's been
#
tossing around in my own head for so long. But then I will say something I will consider
#
completely commonplace in an episode and someone will write in and say, that was such a TIL,
#
you know, or this really changed the way I think about this. You know, one way of looking like a
#
writer would be that you're trying to have an impact on the public and, you know, the whole
#
public intellectual quote unquote phrase. And that's why you'd one does it. But the other way,
#
which is what you seem to be saying is that it is not just about the impact on others,
#
that first and foremost, you write for your private enlightenment, you are thinking something through
#
and getting to know it better. Is that how you approach it? Yeah, I think that's largely true.
#
Although I also have, you know, I have sympathy for the other thing that you said where, you know,
#
that, you know, that the, you know, the fear of repeating yourself sometimes is a form of arrogance
#
to believe that everybody has read every word and retains it, you know. And, you know, we don't
#
detain, you know, anything that we have to study. I mean, we go over and over again. The presumption
#
that somebody read something fleetingly in a newspaper will somehow, you know, stay stuck in
#
their heads for years is obviously arrogance in that. But I think, you know, I think it's,
#
I think when we talk about jogging on the spot, I guess, for 20 years, we are talking about 20
#
years, we are not talking about jogging on the spot twice, you know. I mean, that's a different,
#
I think that's a different issue. I do feel that, you know, one can sort of say the same thing
#
more than once, as long as that's not the only thing you say over and over again. I mean, that,
#
that really, but I do, I will go back to the other point that you're making, that I do find that
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to me, you know, writing is a way of thinking, it is a way to, you know, because it's so easy
#
in our everyday lives not to do that. And, and much as, you know, writing a weekly column
#
for 20 years, you know, particularly when it is not always about topical issues, you know,
#
and in fact, increasingly, I don't write about that topical issues. In between, I was writing
#
a lot about politics now, you know, not so much. But I find that that forces you because every time
#
there's a sort of panic in a certain sense of saying, what am I going to write about, you know,
#
meaning, because, you know, I've written about the obscurest things possible, you know, and,
#
and after that, there are only so many things that you can write about. So, and, and plus,
#
even if you find a new thing to write about, what you say about it may come back to something
#
familiar, right? Because not everything has a completely fresh meaning, you know, a lot of
#
things are pointing in the same direction. So, I mean, even if the starting point is fresh,
#
what it leads to is maybe, you know, old. So, but I find it exciting to, you know,
#
to have new thoughts. I mean, to me, actually, the most important thing in life, actually,
#
in many ways, is the way of feeling sort of alive is to have new thoughts. I mean, and I really don't
#
care what happens with those. I mean, so to me, actually, writing is best because actually,
#
I don't care what happens, you know, sometimes, you know, I get when I write about something and
#
people write, hey, that's very useful, you know, why don't we, you know, convert it into something
#
and, and, you know, and I'm like, always say, yeah, that's nice, but let me think of my next
#
piece here. You know, I mean, let me focus on that because, because instinctively, I'm not, I'm not
#
that, you know, interested in outcomes. I mean, there are parts of my life where I am, of course,
#
but otherwise, I'm, you know, I'm happy to just think the thought and leave it there.
#
I do have a follow-up question, but we'll get to it after lunch.
#
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Welcome back to The Scene in the On Scene. I'm chatting with Santosh Desai and we finally got
#
to learn something about your life. And I mentioned that I had a follow-up question to what you were
#
last talking about. And the question really is about form. Like one of the things I realized
#
as this podcast evolved is that the form in which you work shapes the content and then that shapes
#
you as a person. For example, if the way you would approach a five-minute interview as opposed to a
#
one-hour interview, as opposed to a five-hour interview, is really different because in a
#
five-hour conversation, you have to learn to listen to understand and not to respond. As the
#
saying goes, you have to go much deeper into conversations, prepare much harder. It creates
#
a kind of a therav and that determines the content and that can even shape character in the sense
#
that it can make you over a period of time a better listener and more inclined to going deep
#
yourself and so on and so forth. And the more I think about it, I've come to realize that this is
#
true in literally every domain. And I'm going to talk about some of them, but first I want to ask
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about writing per se. Like in the sense that in your writing, you've chosen a particular form,
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which is a column and the column has a periodicity. It will come out to that sort of routine. It has
#
a certain length which becomes a limitation. You said so beautifully that each column is an
#
idea with an ecosystem around it, but there is generally one idea and it is generally a limited
#
ecosystem and that is a space you have. And in the break, you were talking about
#
how you don't really want to write a book. And I want to ask about what thoughts you have on how
#
this form has shaped your interest in your reading and your thinking and what different forms could
#
kind of do to it. Because if you were forced to write a book, if someone kidnapped you and said,
#
write a book or we won't let you out, which could be an interesting plot. But if, please don't get
#
any ideas, if Santosh is kidnapped after this, I'm going to get into trouble. But if someone were
#
to do that, I imagine it would take you into a very different space. I mean, apart from the
#
physical location where you are confined coercively, but it would take you into a different sort of
#
space where you have to really not just build an idea with an ecosystem, but interconnecting
#
ecosystems with a grander idea at the center and so on and so forth. So what is your thinking?
#
And I ask this not only with reference to yourself or thinking of this particular counterfactual,
#
but in general, if I may ask you to muse what impact forms have on content
#
when it comes to writing or other artistic forms.
#
No, I do believe that form has a huge role to play in content, not just in terms of artistic
#
endeavor, but in a much larger sense. And we'll talk about that because that's something that I
#
have, you know, something, I mean, stuff to say about that. But when it comes to writing,
#
I absolutely think that, you know, that it's a two way thing. I mean, although I did not choose
#
the essay form, I mean, in that sense, it was visited upon me because of this accident. But
#
it is something that actually does suit my, you know, interest and the fact that I'm interested in
#
a lot of things, you know, rather than being interested in a pursuit, you know,
#
and then chasing that down. So in that sense, it reflects that. But you are absolutely right,
#
that form does shape how one thinks and structures one's thoughts, where one puts a stop to the
#
thought, you know, because it's not necessarily beyond a point, how one compresses that thought,
#
because, you know, sometimes you have a lot to say, and then in a thousand words,
#
which is my limit, I mean, I need to find a way to say, you know, the most salient sort of a part of,
#
or whatever else I might have to say, how, then sometimes it becomes more than one piece,
#
it becomes two pieces, sometimes it cannot. And so therefore it has to become part of only one
#
argument. So there is a certain, there are a whole set of effects that that form has in the way that
#
one thinks. And over a period of time, since you do it for many years, then that also shapes
#
the larger kind of way in one thing. And what I was mentioning to you is that, you know, I mean,
#
it's not about, I mean, I have a book and I have another one in the works, but it's still a collection
#
of essays to do a conventional book, which is a, you know, a one thread of argument running through.
#
I found it difficult simply because I think partly because I genuinely, I don't think in that way,
#
but more importantly, the, the, my column writing has shaped and honed in a sense, my writing to in
#
a certain, because in a column you're compressing always, and you're not elaborating, you're not kind
#
of, you know, you're not a little personal anecdote, which, you know, in a book you could
#
dwell on in a, in a column, it feels self-indulgent and it feels like, okay, get to it, you know,
#
meaning what, what are you trying to say here? And, and therefore, you know, I find that the,
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the more diminutive, more exploratory style is something that I have naturally sort of, you know,
#
not developed. And so therefore I think there is also a certain ability question of, of having
#
a certain comfort with a certain way of writing, which, which, you know, when it comes to that kind
#
of book length writing, I don't have, so I have to develop that ability. I have to develop that
#
patience with my own self. I'm impatient with myself, you know, when it comes to writing,
#
and again, you capture the thought and, and don't sort of, you know, sort of ramble,
#
which is not a fair way of perhaps, you know, characterizing it. But so I think
#
all in all, I would agree that, you know, the, a certain form and a certain, you know,
#
comfort with the form and the fact that you've lived with that form for a long time
#
does limit or shape the way one thinks and, and the way one then is able to write also.
#
So yes, if I was at gunpoint sort of, you know, asked to write a book length thing, I suspect I,
#
I could. So yeah, so the idea of writing a full length book to me, I mean, I guess I could do it,
#
but I would have to learn actually, in a sense for me, it would be an exercise in, in developing
#
an ability to sort of lay out an argument, you know, over a certain number of words and,
#
and have a certain narrative that, that doesn't need to close, you know, quickly. It sort of
#
allows it to breathe and till it, it kind of crystallizes, you know, so, so it's a different
#
grammar. And, and so it's, it's about learning that grammar, which I guess I would, conceptually,
#
I find it, you know, the idea that, you know, there are, you know, subjects where there are lots of
#
interlinked thoughts and, you know, they could become chapters and it could all be hung together.
#
So, I mean, I don't have a problem visualizing that what kind of book it would be, but I think
#
the actual ability to do, to write that book would take some doing. I think what has happened to you
#
is Samulina Upma has happened to you in the sense that there is a contextual accident that
#
Vikram doctor asked you to write columns and that led to part dependence. And now you're a
#
column writer, but you know, different friends of mine keep convincing me that with advances in
#
medical science and so on, we are going to live till one 20. So more than half your life is ahead
#
of you. So I sincerely hope that you, you know, also write books in this time, please don't stop
#
the columns, but also write books. I want to dig deeper into, into different kinds of forms,
#
right? And one that I want to talk about is let's start by talking about family,
#
right? We've sort of moved from a space in, in, in just two or three decades where you used to
#
have a lot of joint families, where you have communal settings, everybody's at the dinner
#
table together. You know, elders always have company, kids always have other kids to play with.
#
You move from that into nuclear settings and you move from that into what I think of as atomized
#
settings, atomized families, where you will have your three people sitting and having dinner
#
together, but they're all looking into their screens. And I'm just wondering how this change
#
in form, what kind of changes it brings about in the ways that we approach the world. Like in a
#
similar, you know, this is why, for example, I think slum redevelopments fail so often because
#
the whole mahal of a slum is it's a very open community thing. Elders are sitting outside,
#
children are playing, and suddenly you put them in individual apartments and they don't know how
#
to live or how to think anymore. And it can get debilitating, but in a larger sense, the same kind
#
of process has also played out in the context of families, the families we grow up in and how we
#
approach the notion of that. So what are, what are your observations? Well, I think that's it. It's
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a really interesting area. I mean, you know, let me, I'll begin it, come at it sideways, you know,
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I mean, let's take the notion of privacy. I mean, I grew up at a, you know, in a time when I think
#
it's true for many of us, but there was no concept of privacy in the homes. I mean,
#
rooms did not belong to people at best. Maybe the parents had a, had a bedroom, which was assigned
#
to them. Otherwise, you know, you, you didn't say three bedroom house, you said a four room house.
#
Right. I mean, and, and rooms could be useful. And then through, dude, you know, I remember
#
staying with my uncle said that the house, the whole house was fair game through the day,
#
you know, you could go to anybody's bed and plug yourself. I mean, there was no concept of the
#
fact that this is my room. This is it. Right. Structurally, therefore the home was integrated.
#
It was, it was one space and, and, you know, and also the way in which it was used, you could have
#
a refrigerator in the living room. You know, you could, I mean, even now you travel across India,
#
you will find that, you know, scooters are parked in the, on the, in the living room and there is a,
#
there is a natural and organic nest to, to where things are, where they are used most. So if a
#
Godrej cupboard has to be, you know, accessed very often by a person next to their bed is the
#
Godrej cupboard. Right. So it's not about space is not allocated to function or to people.
#
You know, in that sense, as a rigid overriding rule, it is allocated on the basis of need.
#
So, so the structure of the home creates a certain kind of fluidity of interaction
#
and creates a certain kind of a family, you know, so, so therefore it determines that.
#
Now, when you move into an era of bedrooms, so you start demarketing that space. So there is
#
the idea of ownership of space within the home and, and different, you know, have claims. So the
#
teenager's bedroom has a certain marking and there is a certain thing as the family's progress,
#
you have to knock before you enter your own child's room, right. Which, which becomes a,
#
a formality of interaction that did not exist before. So, so that structure, that particular
#
form, the idea of, of having bedrooms as private marked space creates that air conditioning
#
closes rooms. Right. So it closes the doors. And so the form of air conditioning, you know,
#
creates little cocoons where you are, you know, everybody's in their own cocoon.
#
And if now you put a television inside the bedroom, it becomes a closed space because,
#
you know, you are self-sufficient more or less except for food. So, you know, you have,
#
you, you'll create a home, which is made up of little independent, little habitats. So,
#
so every change in the technology or form creates a corresponding change in the nature of the
#
relationships. And now when we talk about, you know, you talked about, you know, the, the coming
#
of, of, you know, digital technology and mobile phones and then the vacuum on screens. So that is
#
again creating this sense of, so I think there's a constant movement from family as this fluid,
#
where, which is, where the differentiation is on the axis of roles. So parents have a certain
#
role. Children have a certain role today. The differentiation is, is, you know, you today,
#
what you have is much more the, they're much more, everybody's an individual and they're an
#
individual even when they're together. Right. So there is, there is the, what, what technology
#
does is that it overrides the form of sitting together. That design, the fact that you are
#
sitting together earlier meant that you really nearly had something to do with each other.
#
What technology has done is that now you can sit together, but you still may have nothing
#
to do with each other. So I think in every instance, form, the design, the technology
#
is what has an effect on relationship behavior. And it, and I think, and not just here in
#
everything, I mean, the most fascinating thing I find about the mobile phone, I mean, apart from
#
what it contains again. So I go back to the McLuhaness kind of view on this, which is the
#
fact that the structure and form is, is far more important. Although it does not appear to be so
#
content appears to be the most powerful thing, but form is in some ways more intrinsically kind of
#
powerful. So for instance, in the mobile phone, the fact that a, you have a number,
#
which is individualistic, you are being reached. Right. So you are important. You know, a telephone
#
identifies a place. You have the old telephone is in your house. This is on your person. So there's
#
that. The other thing is that the most powerful communication that the mobile phone makes is
#
gestural in the sense that by gesture, particularly a smartphone with a touchscreen is telling you,
#
you're the most important person in the world. I have brought the world and I have fashioned it
#
for you. This is, you know, and you access at any given point in time, this is your connection
#
with the world. What you wish is provided by you for you. A lot of people who don't make
#
historically have not made that many decisions in their life are making
#
hundreds, if not thousands of micro decisions in their life on it in a day on their mobile phone.
#
I like it. I don't like it. I will prioritize this later. I not this, that what it is communicating
#
is that you are important. You are the master of your desires. I'm here to obey you. In fact,
#
the touchscreen as a form, I think is the most vivid demonstration of that. Every part of it
#
is responsive. Nothing is wasted. Anything you touch and there is a reaction. Right. It is like
#
liquid haste. It has, you know, in terms of responding to what you want. And it is telling
#
you that, that, you know, so I think how it, how technology individualizes people
#
is through that form, which is actually telling you all the time. Then you have algorithms,
#
which are actually chasing you and fashioning the world according to you. So you take that form,
#
you take the design of the algorithm and every day we are being trained to, you know, to sort of
#
it is being implanted into us that you are important, you are important, you are central,
#
what you say matters. So therefore, when we give an opinion on Twitter and slash X,
#
we think we can never be wrong. It is sort of a host of, you know, downstream consequences that
#
follow from, from this training that is being given to us by technology, not because of what
#
it contains, but simply because of the fact that it is, it comes in a certain form factor,
#
that interaction, the mode of interaction is something that is pointing you in a certain
#
direction. And I just find that interesting that, and that's where you find form in so many things,
#
you find form, you know, I mean, how a small change in form, for instance, the way the cup
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of tea is served in a cooler, it means something else in a cutting chip, it means something else
#
in a cup and saucer, it means something else, right? Cup and saucer has a certain, you know,
#
is a world of where, you know, you should not be dropping anything, so you have a saucer. So,
#
I mean, there is a communication there, right? So, because it's bad to drop things, so there's a
#
saucer, but the handle is this little thing that you have to pinch and you have to hold like,
#
you know, like a prissy kind of a handle holder, the designs are all chintzy, that little old lady,
#
those are the kind of designs. And so, the culture of tea drinking is captured, that kind of,
#
and the cooler tree drinking is completely different, it could be the same tea,
#
but served in a cooler, served in a cutting form, served in a cup and saucer,
#
means entirely different things, right? So, form actually, I find it so powerful in communicating,
#
at a, it speaks in a language because it is not, you don't use words,
#
it is, it very often is invisible as to how we are shaped by the form in which things appear
#
and how sometimes we are, you know, overprivileged content.
#
Often in our arrogance, we think that we are masters of the universe, but the truth is that
#
you could, from one point of view, you could say we are colonized by bacteria,
#
from another point of view, you could say we are colonized by wheat or sugar, and so on and so
#
forth. And it seems to me that even though that individual with her mobile phone seems to have so
#
much autonomy and agency, you are also colonized by the various addiction machines that exist
#
around us. And thinking of form, like slavery to form is so ubiquitous, like even in the creative
#
arts, for example, the convention of the three minute pop song exists because that is how much
#
a record could hold at the start of the 19th century. You have the album coming out when the
#
long playing record which can hold 40 minutes comes about. You know, a book is a particular
#
size that convention comes because that's, you know, given the grammage of the paper and binding
#
technology, that's how much you can have. There is a ceiling and a floor to that, you know, ditto
#
with cinema and so on and so forth. And the interesting thing is that all these forms are
#
artifacts. They've kind of collapsed. They are the semolina upma's of their fields. And yet there is
#
a lag between people figuring that out and forging ahead. I'm going to look at other dimensions of
#
form and I'm going to double click on both of these in terms of family structures and technology.
#
But let's talk about family structures first. Like what are the features and the bugs of what
#
is going on? Because at one level, I see that young people having privacy and some kind of autonomy
#
is great for them. You know, a father having to knock before he enters his son's room is also
#
great because it bleeds into, you know, other things. But there are bugs also because you no
#
longer have those shared safe spaces and that sense of community and that sense that we are
#
all part of the same fabric. What are the features and the bugs of what's been happening in terms of,
#
you know, family? So I think one of the things is the fact that, you know, I find it interesting
#
that there are two kinds of, you know, opposite effects happening. At one level, the fact that
#
there is respect for each other as individuals, you know, creates a certain level of empathy
#
where everybody, the family, it's more easy for the family to be pointing in the same direction.
#
So, for instance, what are our child's ambitions and goals get adopted by the family instead of
#
there being a superimposition of an external goal. So the idea that in our family or in our family,
#
meaning which is arbitrary kind of, you know, expectations that were laden on to the next
#
generation, which have nothing to do with what the individual wants and which is what, you know,
#
my generation had to battle when we were growing up. I was exempt from it, but a lot of my peers
#
had to go through that. I think that is giving way to the fact that there is a greater alignment.
#
And I find it interesting that actually I find that I'm privy to so much more of my children's
#
life than my parents were to mine to the point where, you know, even if the children are in the
#
thirties, I find that I'm, I know, you know, far, far more. And they're, you know, they're on the
#
phone all the time because of the fact that the power distance between the two generations has,
#
has, you know, has decreased substantially. And there is a sense that the other generations
#
appreciates my context. And so therefore what I'm doing is not going to be alien to them. So,
#
you know, there will still be some stuff that is not visible to us, but, but that has decreased.
#
So on the other hand, I think this is a generation which has, you know, a huge amount of pressure,
#
you know, which comes out of, you know, what I would call anxiety of abundance.
#
There is abundance, you know, there is relative abundance of opportunity.
#
But success has, the standards of success have gone up. So, because now it is no longer enough
#
to be, you know, you could be, you know, making a lot of money, but are you a foodie also? Do
#
you have other interests? Are you interesting? Do you, you know, because it's not enough just to,
#
to be successful at work. There are a whole lot of other things, not just that on a granular
#
basis, on a very atomized basis, you have to be interesting because every post of yours is
#
being evaluated. Every time you present yourself, you know, you change your DP that is being
#
evaluated. So you are constantly, so, so the yardsticks of success have multiplied and they
#
have become also more, they become stiffer. You know, you, you have to live up to a, and
#
you have to figure stuff out on your own. Like I find that, you know, when you look at
#
the notion of relationships in, in this world for young people, they are in the unenviable
#
place of, of having to figure out, you know, how to make things work in a relationship.
#
If you go back in time and just, I'm perhaps digressing a little, but if I were to look at the
#
sort of the evolution of relationships, actually in India, because there were rain marriages,
#
most of the time, the dialogue between adults or between married people about their relationship
#
was virtually non-existent. Nobody, you know, talked about compatibility, adjustment, the,
#
the usual thing that marriages work and you have to work at marriage. You know, those things that
#
you hear from the, the couples counseling thing from the West was non-existent in India. I mean,
#
you got married, you made it work. I mean, in some form, if it didn't work, tough luck. I mean,
#
you know, you, you, you found a way. There was no vocabulary to discuss relationships. You know,
#
there is no inherited vocabulary. Then the idea of love itself, the word love, when it was used
#
for the first time was this exotic confection that we borrowed from the West. I mean, love
#
was a little bit like, you know, saying diabetes, you know, both are afflictions. Love happens to
#
you. Diabetes happens to you. Unlike, you know, things that you know, and you can describe like
#
dust, you know, there are things that are part of your life, but diabetes is exotic. It is outside.
#
Similarly, there are things in your life in terms of emotions, but love is outside you. It is exotic.
#
It comes from outside with some wrapped in some form. Right. So when you fell in love, it was,
#
so that's why we still talk about love marriage as if marriage and love are two different distinct
#
ideas that somehow happened to coexist. Right. So that was then how we thought about love,
#
that it is something now, then we started thinking, you know, love became a bigger part of our lives.
#
And I, there's a whole spate of films, you know, that had love in the title.
#
And if the earlier idea of love is captured by the song, which is presenting it as this thing that
#
is shooted into your lives, you know, from outside, then you have the whole lot of films about
#
love, love and this, you know, so you had this title where people actually grappling with
#
choice-making and, and, and, you know, the, and, and that notion of choice was new. So there was a
#
whole grappling with choice-making today. What we are seeing is, is moving a granular stage further
#
where people are talking about how to make a relationship work. What are the problems in the
#
relationship? What are the expectations that our partners have of each other, you know, what
#
happens? And, and you find that is so much more, and this is a generation that has to figure it out
#
by themselves. There is no experience they can drop on the elder generation has no idea about
#
this, you know. And so as somebody, a colleague of mine put it interestingly, when we were
#
discussing it, that she said that when I overheard, you know, her, her young son talking to his
#
girlfriend, it was as if they were two therapists talking to each other. They were doing therapy
#
to each other in the name of love. And this is so true. I find myself that the younger generation,
#
so much of their conversation is therapy speak. You know, it is, it is, and I think that is an
#
effect. I mean, we're coming back to the, from the digression that as families have, have become
#
individualistic, the younger generation, I think feels it is not abandoned in terms of being taken
#
care of, but it is abandoned in terms of having answers. And the fact that there are so many
#
possibilities and so many choices and the pressure is so great. And there is no source
#
for us. They're looking for answer at each other and each they are trying to help each other out.
#
And there is mental health. Therefore is a huge issue with this generation in spite of the fact
#
that they have, you know, from my generation's viewpoint, they have it so easy. They are so
#
lucky. They have so many opportunities. They have so many facilities. They have this technology
#
and they don't feel that way because you know, what it does is that it imposes so many expectations
#
on them. And, and there is a positive answers. What you refer to as therapy speak is actually
#
something that I think you'd find only among, you know, English speaking elites and so on
#
and so forth. And there's a larger problem out there, which has forever been a problem,
#
but there's perhaps an interesting new dimension to it in recent years,
#
which is that men and women everywhere, but certainly in India, more so in India, perhaps
#
don't really understand each other. They, you know, they want different things. They don't
#
know what the other wants. They don't know why the other wants what the other wants.
#
And especially in India, as you know, Sringta Poonam who wrote Young India once told me in an
#
episode with me, it is a boys who are incredibly bewildered because the world is changing and they
#
do not know how to cope with it. And I did an episode with Nikhil Taneja also about how
#
young men are trapped by patriarchy. And the thing is that patriarchy can afflict us all,
#
but the women have access to literature about it. They can read about it. They have frames
#
with which to look at it. A lot of young men by and large don't even know that they're trapped,
#
don't even know that they don't have to play this role. There's another way of doing things
#
and all of this. And, you know, and it's India really occupying three centuries at the same time,
#
the 21st, the 20th and the 19th, and they're all in collision. And I can imagine that it can be
#
incredibly bewildering. And while you might imagine that, hey, with all this technology
#
and all this media, people can figure shit out, but I think people can't figure shit out because,
#
you know, I did this experiment once where I wanted to figure out what the right wing
#
ecosystem thinks. And I didn't want my YouTube, I'll go to be messed up. So I opened an incognito
#
window, different Gmail account. And today my two YouTubes are completely different from each other.
#
They're different worlds. There's nothing in common. And I was imagining then that a 15-year-old kid
#
gets some random video of some sort or some ideology or whatever. And then the algo takes
#
over and they're all getting that. And that is their universe. And everything else is inexplicable
#
or impugnant to them even. And so what's your sense of all this?
#
No, just go back a little. So, because I think, I mean, to my head, you started somewhere and then
#
you, you know, have ended it at this idea of... Yeah, I started with this notion of men and women
#
finding it really hard to understand each other. So let me first, you know, go back there. I think
#
that's true. I think, see, the fact is that, you know, in India, the relationship between men and
#
women was role-based. And actually, I would say species-based. I mean, you married into a species.
#
Right. And the person you happened
#
to get married to was simply a representative of... I mean, you know, and so you have such broad
#
understanding of, you know, expectations on each side. Within that is a role that you are there,
#
you're going as a bahu, you're going... So, you know, you're... So for the woman in particular,
#
strong expectation role. For the men, also equally strong expectation of a role, but
#
along fewer dimensions. So, you know, so that is the construct. So men and women went through
#
a lifetime without understanding each other, or they understood each other in sort of instinctive
#
ways over a period of time. So it was, you know, so when the man grunts, which is what he did most
#
of the time, the woman was expected to know what that particular grunt meant. So, I mean, that was...
#
So I think there is a crisis and it's absolutely true that I think the crisis right now and this
#
whole idea of the bewildered man is true because the role of women actually is a foundational
#
idea in Indian society, that the women have a certain role. What we call values,
#
middle-class values is nothing but the protocol to control women. I mean, fundamentally what...
#
they behave, that means we have values. I mean, you take away the whole large idea of
#
sanskar or values and you can boil down a lot of it to the women and their place.
#
And so, therefore, when that changes, when women don't know their place in life,
#
and when they don't behave according to those protocols that have been set, it is seismic,
#
that shift, because men have always been assured of their centrality in the world.
#
There is no reason to challenge it. And now, for the first time, the woman is asking questions of
#
the man, is evaluating the man. And that is a terrifying thing for men. Men have never been
#
evaluated by the women that they were married to. Whatever there was, the woman was expected to
#
sort of adjust around that, is to find a way around that. So, I think that is such a fundamental
#
shift that is taking place, that men are really, really struggling, I think, to cope with that new
#
reality. But along with that, and which is interesting, so, therefore, the nuance here
#
is the fact that, therefore, at one level, they are forced to understand the woman.
#
And also, larger shifts towards people becoming more individualistic and recognising individuals
#
means that you have to recognise that individual as a person and not a species,
#
and not a member of the species. So, that is one move that is happening.
#
The other interesting thing, when we talk about romance and relationships, is that there is a
#
certain radical potential of romance, particularly when you go to peri-urban India, which is the fact,
#
and even rural India, which is the fact that romance, because of the fact that the influence
#
of cinema, the influence of so many, of television, of the desirability of romance has an idea. So,
#
when young men start seeking and valuing romance in life, it forces them to look at women
#
differently. It forces them to acknowledge women in a new way. So, for instance, this thing where
#
somebody in a village said that now, earlier, I mean, there are such restrictions that a man
#
and a woman, with a woman riding pillion and putting her arm around the waist, which would
#
be a normal way in which a couple would travel, if they passed a village elder,
#
it would be embarrassing. They would have to remove the hand and today saying that I can do it.
#
There is a certain pride in saying that I can, you know, my wife rides pillion and that's fine.
#
And there are married couple who felt this way. That is such a powerful sign of change. The fact
#
that the idea of romance making men more invested in women's feelings and acknowledging them as
#
equal. That doesn't mean that the rest of the marriage will be happy, but it just means that
#
at least there is some shift happening and which I think is important to take note of as to how
#
romance softens the nature of the relationship between men and women and more importantly,
#
awakens men to the fact that there is a person who I need to understand aspects of.
#
And I think that's part of the change that I think is positive that we are seeing.
#
How has courtship evolved? At one level, I would imagine that courtship fundamentally can be
#
fraught with danger because both parties can look at each other as instrumental in different ways.
#
In terms of the man you speak of, for example, it could be like earlier you had an arranged
#
marriage and the woman was instrumental. They played certain roles. You got your food on time.
#
You got your laundry, et cetera, et cetera. And now added to that is you get the thrill of romance,
#
but the woman is still instrumental and women could similarly look at men for different
#
instrumental reasons. And I think that this is a fundamental human problem, not in this society
#
or that, that we tend to have this main character syndrome and it takes an act of will and
#
consciousness to actually come out of it and see other people as people. And if you think of the
#
distinction of love as a noun and a verb, that's also telling because when you use it as a verb,
#
there is that intentionality in it. It is not something that happened to you, but something
#
that involved an act of will. So how does all of that change? Because you have a country that is
#
still deeply traditional slash conservative slash whatever you apply to it, but the modern world is
#
coexisting with it and you've got your Tinder and your Hinge and everything also happening.
#
What do you see happening there? It's a complex species. Like you said,
#
at its structural level, it's a global issue. If you go down to its heart, it is the dichotomy
#
that exists between attraction and a long-term relationship. The phenomenon of attraction
#
is instant. It can be chemical. It can be circumstantial. It just so happens that that
#
person lives next to you and therefore you don't have to go far and there's attraction and it
#
becomes a relationship and it becomes a marriage. The modern idea of marriage is based on attraction
#
and you could argue that the traditional idea was more aligned to a long-term relationship because
#
you recognize marriage as a kinship tie rather than as an attraction between individuals.
#
Algorithmic as you point out. Algorithmic, absolutely.
#
Whereas here, there's much more chance involved because that is a momentary attraction and that
#
is not a predictor for a stable long-term relationship, that attraction.
#
That's the essential dichotomy and that dichotomy isn't going anywhere. I think to some extent in
#
India, there is I think the relative sweet spot between the fact that because it is framed by
#
old notions of long-term relationships, there is a combination, what you call instrumental,
#
could be called pragmatism and the combination of a certain pragmatism married with the importance
#
of attraction and the need for individual inclination. Together, it might be increasing
#
the probability of relationship success because there are both sides that you are covering to a
#
certain extent. I think to a certain extent that is true, but it's also true that as individual
#
expectations start sort of becoming stronger, then it becomes easier for relationships to fall
#
apart. I mean, the fact that we have now the phenomenon of saying becoming more commonplace
#
is itself so radical in India. I mean, in India earlier, if a woman had a relationship earlier,
#
then she didn't have a relationship, she had a past. I mean, that's how you described it.
#
Darkly you muttered the fact that there was a past, right?
#
She kidnapped a writer and made him write a book.
#
Okay. I think we have to get you off this track. I mean, this is going to give somebody seriously
#
some ideas and I think it's, I want to announce this to everybody. If something happens to me,
#
you know who's responsible. So, I think that's the kind of shift that I think we are seeing.
#
You know, I did an episode a long time ago with Chinmay Tumbe who wrote the book India Moving
#
and the big TIL in that for me was that the largest source of internal migration in India
#
is when women get married because then they move to their next house and that it seems to me is
#
perhaps one of the greatest inequalities between genders because men by and large,
#
they live the same life except they now have a woman at home taking care of their needs.
#
But women are completely uprooted even if they're not physically going to another town or village,
#
even if they're just moving away. Like sometimes there is a custom of even changing their first
#
name, not just their surname, but they are a different person. Their friend circle change,
#
their circumstances change, the way they spend their time changes, all of that sort of gets
#
uprooted. Some would argue that along with marriage, perhaps motherhood is another kind of death
#
where any individual dreams or aspirations you might have had now fully go out of the window
#
unless it was to be a mother. Do you see that changing in modern India, how women approach
#
these matters and does popular culture play a role in it, maybe a lagging role?
#
No, that's absolutely true. I think among a certain section of women,
#
there is a great fear of marriage because it is this completely random event
#
that comes at a certain stage in life and particularly when women today
#
in college, when they are studying, they have ambitions of their own, they have aspirations,
#
there is a certain imagined trajectory of their own lives, which they are not allowed to have
#
because it all depends on where they get married and by far arranged marriages are the norm,
#
so they have no control over that. They don't get to choose that. As against yesterday,
#
they may have a roster of options between five, six people that happen to be on the short list
#
but otherwise it's such a random event that changes the trajectory of their life in such
#
radical ways that it is such a terrifying idea. If you place yourself in their shoes,
#
the idea that you could get married tomorrow and you have to shift to Jabalpur or wherever,
#
where you have no roots, nothing, everything that you said and you have to start your life
#
from zero and it's not necessary that cognizance will be taken off what you want to do,
#
it all depends on who you get married to and what their family is like, everything is available,
#
everything is new. So for a lot of women, they desire to keep postponing marriage
#
getting time for themselves and just eking out that time for themselves and it's living
#
with a sense of dread that maybe it'll turn out well, maybe it'll turn out terribly.
#
So once we did this work, I think somewhere in Madhya Pradesh, there were these two sisters
#
and the one that was prettier and was supposed to do better got allegedly a better match with
#
this traditional family who were living in the same town and so it seemed to be a great catch
#
and this other girl got married to this struggling kind of a guy in Delhi.
#
But when we met them five years after that marriage, the story was totally different.
#
The woman who was in a traditional very rich family felt stultified and felt totally kind
#
of hemmed in and she was the one who was supposed to do well and the one who was married with a guy
#
who had a much better sense of equality, wanted her to work and she came into her own in a dramatic
#
way and so it is just so interesting and so sad also at the same time that just that random event
#
completely changed their arcs. I think that's the problem. I think the problem is
#
and is this changing? I mean the nature of the marriage certainly has become more open.
#
Certainly the husband is a little more receptive to what the wife needs. Popular culture is started
#
to present more positive role models in terms of the in-laws. You're beginning to see more
#
supportive sort of representations. So I think that there is change happening and like you said
#
it's a lagging kind of a change because it will take time and it's not easy because institutionally
#
this is the foundational assumption of this institution of arranged marriage in a certain
#
sense and while it is elastic right it is elastic over time and it is not infinitely so.
#
So we are seeing that elasticity as it stretches to accommodate the needs of the individual.
#
Certainly we are seeing that but I think it's going to take a while before the woman's desires
#
are accommodated in a way that are satisfying. It's interesting how you know I think a lot of men
#
don't realize how a lot of mundane things can have a far greater effect on women than on men
#
just you know in their awareness in the awareness that they have to carry around them in the world
#
like Margaret Atwood has this great quote men are afraid that women will laugh at them women are
#
afraid that men will kill them and this is the whole game and men just don't get this and this
#
makes life so complicated and even unfair for women to navigate in a sense. My next question
#
is about you know what you what we were speaking about earlier about sort of technology and the
#
form of consumption where we are constantly scrolling scrolling scrolling swiping swiping
#
swiping at one point you wrote eloquently the truth is that we are reading less vertically
#
but are far more exposed horizontally which doesn't mean that we are not reading standing
#
up but we lie down and take off our clothes contrary to what some might think and you also
#
have this beautiful line where you wrote the world is a river flowing through our lives
#
right and there is this you know increased pace of consumption and it is the form in which we
#
live our days like the form in which you and I kind of lived our lives in the 70s and 80s and so on
#
is that we had plenty of time we could play book cricket we could daydream we could read books
#
because there was nothing to distract us so like what will distract us you know whereas today
#
it's everything is broken up into a sliver sliver sliver sliver you know slivers of things happening
#
and that also leads to a different kind of shallowness captured I think by Jonathan
#
Haidt's observation that while we have all the knowledge in the world open to us
#
we are really consuming what was produced in the last three days right whether you are looking at
#
the youtube algorithm or instagram or whatever what are the implications of this like on the
#
one hand it is of course we've both discussed how that cliche that people only have short attention
#
spans and are extremely shallow is not quite true that is why we are able to have such a relaxed
#
conversation but by and large I find that even in myself I keep lamenting that damn it I am always
#
in a state of shallow concentration deep work is almost impossible I'm looking at my phone
#
40 times an hour or whatever it is so what is your sense of the consequence of this like if you were
#
10 years old today would you grow up to be the same person or would you grow up to be someone
#
else or what are the features and bugs that are involved I mean I certainly won't grow up to be
#
the same person if I was 10 years old I mean I don't think that is possible because I think
#
the very nature of what I would be exposed to and the manner in which I would be exposed to it would
#
make me a different person I don't know in what direction whether you know I don't know that but
#
it would be it would definitely be different I think this there I think there are so many different
#
you know consequences of this I mean one thing that I think about is that you know as a collective
#
as a society I mean if you were to look at our epistemic pool where do we draw knowledge from
#
you know what do we dip into and refer to and what becomes our sources of information
#
it has become so shallow right our epistemic pool is now other people's sweets it is maybe
#
an article or two at best right I mean and and that is for people who read for people who don't
#
read you know earlier at least there was the reverence for the fact if somebody said okay a
#
book so and so has said it there is okay you know I may not have read it but you have and therefore
#
you know there is superior knowledge today I have confidence because I have an epistemic pool
#
unlike in the past where I may not have had one I have an epistemic pool but which is you know
#
full of other people like me saying you know you know crappy things about everything in the world
#
and I think that is sufficient because I have stuff to draw from and I feel confident in that
#
and so that this false and then this sense of confidence that comes in your own opinions
#
has a lot to do with the fact that you know I've read this right I mean I'm not just saying it I
#
there are other people who are saying it right it's not just me but what you're drawing from
#
is regurgitated kind of you know opinions of people who are drawing from an equally shallow
#
pool right so I think one of the things that we are seeing which is the fact that it's a
#
scary thing when when what a society draws from I mean if it doesn't draw from so earlier if you
#
look at it the the fact that there was a class that was that was you know acknowledged as having
#
wisdom not everybody in that class said the same thing they were conflicted points of view but the
#
fact that this is wisdom and this is not so there is that that kind of a delineation in society
#
sometimes falsely so but there was that delineation today that delineation between what is acknowledged
#
as being wisdom and what is not that delineation has become blurred so therefore everybody has a
#
has you know confidence in in their opinions so I think that's one aspect of it the other is which
#
which is I think is is the idea of of this the world being a fast moving current and are being
#
sort of you know having no control over it it's almost like you know it's like it's become like
#
breathing when we when we look at you know our timeline that is moving it has become like a
#
clock I mean it virtually is a substitute for a clock and the clock goes second second second
#
second second here we go tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet you know it's almost like that is our way
#
of keeping time that is a way like I said fashion is a way of knowing that you're alive this is
#
another way of knowing you're alive the fact that I keep things keep changing and the belief that
#
everything must refresh itself that there must be something new all the time and that the the
#
mental model of the world is that that you know so therefore what is given what is timeless
#
those become destabilized and and our sense of a of the fact that we are constantly looking
#
for for you know so I mean of course in terms of stimulation all the time which has been talked
#
about a lot but the fact that you know we are it just changes our conception of of what the world
#
is from a stable largely stable place with movement on the periphery on the outside on the skin
#
this is everything is there is no skin that is just it's not just the periphery that is moving
#
everything is is moving all the time and and so I just find that a the scary kind of a conception
#
of of the world I mean you know back in the day as I think we're both old enough to say that back
#
in the day you know there was a consensus on truth right and you could dispute the truth
#
and there might be a problem that there are gatekeepers and that there are biased views
#
and all that but you had a consensus on the truth now I feel that one it's a huge net positive that
#
the means of production are open to all of us including people like me to do what we do
#
but a side effect of that is that forget the consensus on the truth that of course is not
#
there anymore but there is not even the acknowledgement that something like the truth matters now we are
#
buffeted by competing narratives that are taking us in different directions all of them
#
amplified by the tendency of social media to amplify the worst instincts of our natures for
#
example you were talking about you know how like if you talk about form if you're on a particular
#
app and I notice this first with Pinterest that if you press a back button to get out of the app
#
like one day they changed that you could press a back button get out of the app but now if you
#
press a back button the page refreshes so you're immediately confronted with something new and
#
then how can you go when there's something new you know it validates your existence it is there
#
for you for more etc and and this is something that I think about a lot because at one level
#
I celebrate technology because I feel it can both empower individuals and at the same time
#
amplify all that is good in us but what is also happening is that it also empowers the state
#
to subjugate us when that becomes relevant or for big companies to which are addiction machines by
#
now to you know capture our attention and imprison that and they not only amplify the better angels
#
of our nature as it were but more and more they amplify things like our innate tribalism things
#
like the desire for validation and that really polarizes the discourse because you know you
#
mentioned how when you would argue with your dad you could change your mind there was nothing at
#
stake today if you go online first of all there is a pressure on you to have a certain point of
#
view because that will help you belong to some ideological tribe or the other and we all crave
#
community and two once an opinion is out there you can assume it has been screenshotted you are tied
#
to that you double down on it you was if I yourself and therefore the discourse gets more
#
and more polarized everybody wants more and more validation it's a race to the bottom how do you
#
get validation within your tribe by attacking people on the other side not engaging in arguments
#
or by attacking people on your own side for not being pure enough and we see this push to the
#
extremes that has made conversation on twitter pretty much impossible for me you know I find
#
twitter really valuable because I think if you curate your feed well you can have something
#
that would have seemed magical 30 years ago that you're listening to the best minds in the world
#
think aloud for your benefit every single day but the conversations are just toxic the discourse is
#
crazy it is simplistic there is no space for nuance etc etc etc so what is your sense of
#
how we can come out of this because at one level all the big tech companies were optimizing for was
#
engagement right and engagement is a good thing there is no coercion it is voluntary you are
#
getting what you want you're getting your dopamine but the side effect is that these
#
worse demons of our nature as it were have been amplified you know in your imagination
#
is there a way to either turn this back without state coercion which can lead us into terrible
#
directions because we know because anybody can be the state or are there alternative
#
paths to keeping engagement but also amplifying our better instincts because we also have
#
opposite and better instincts like the instinct towards community towards helping others etc etc
#
so I think there are two parts to the question one is the in a sense the situation as it exists
#
and the other is is there a way out of it I mean you know so let me talk about the first one first
#
again I would go back to the form issue you know here because of the fact that there is
#
I mean take twitter for instance and it's true for all social media because of the fact that
#
it is real time and it is rolling right so which means by its very nature it can capture
#
a snapshot of your mind you know it cannot capture there is no it doesn't it is not
#
fundamentally geared to handling it's a flow not stock it's not your stock of your thinking but
#
it's the flow it is what is uppermost so you have to use the most sort of in reactive part of your
#
mind to to participate by its very nature therefore that allows for universal participation
#
because everybody has a has some instant reaction to things so it is it is in that sense it is
#
you know perpetually it is relentlessly reactive it is your in the moment you're reacting which
#
means it is the the nature of discourse you are you can engage with the shallowest part of your
#
mind and so the nature of the discourse is open and becomes therefore more impulse led more
#
reptilian rather than thought through right it allows everybody to participate but it
#
fundamentally comes from all and therefore and the other thing that happens is that things that
#
we would whisper to each other in private groups saying that that guy is an idiot or that guy is
#
or worse today what was because there are no consequences to to your words it is possible
#
to say the same thing in public domains and and in a real life you still will not say it
#
to your face so therefore I always wonder that you know people who get trolled
#
so badly how do they travel anywhere don't they get accosted by people saying horrible things
#
to them but they don't nowhere near I mean they perhaps do to some extent but they're nowhere
#
near what they get you know horribly the horrible things that are said to them you know the absolutely
#
filthy things that are said to them on on twitter are not said to them anywhere near with the same
#
intensity of frequency in real life because in real life you understand the consequences of your
#
words on on twitter you have no consequences to face and so therefore then it is a race to the
#
bottom because you know it that becomes the the the overton window shifts in terms of what
#
is is acceptable and what is not right so I think that is one kind of an effect the other thing when
#
I look at the form again in a sense you know I think one of the things about the digital medium
#
is that it by its very nature has it produces contradictory effects and and just to sort of I
#
just again just go back a little and say that if you look at print as an effect
#
the print the nature of print is such that it is retrospective unless you're a stenographer
#
you know all print is is retrospective yeah so when you write something it is after the event
#
when you read something it's after the event by its very nature therefore it is reflective
#
you are not caught up in the moment you know it is it even if it's a commentary it is it is measured
#
you will correct your language when I speak my grammar will be all over the place if you listen
#
to this I mean my sentences are left hanging you know it's the it's the nature of how we speak we
#
we don't but when you write there is a certain decorum to writing there is a certain form there
#
is a certain protocol yeah and and you will therefore put things in order when you write
#
so there is writing impacts the way you think then there is that same same effect right there
#
is order there has to be argument there has to be flow it has to make sense so there is a certain
#
inherent in the form of writing is a certain rationality that gets in built into writing
#
also it is a code writing is a form of code so you are there is a separation of the senses
#
right so you are not writing with the active engagement of your senses it is cool detached
#
retrospective right so that's the nature of writing and therefore writing produces a world
#
a world where writing is is is the primary mode of communication creates order of a certain kind
#
television on the other hand is instant you can't I mean now you can but earlier you couldn't go
#
back in television it's a ceaseless constant flow right it is a bombardment that is taking place
#
so the viewer is passive but the viewer has choice has the remote control can switch so so
#
you know so what happens is the individual desire becomes primary that's why television
#
by its very nature is commercial television produces celebrities people who have you know who
#
simulate greatness right there then it's that it's there they they becomes known and and therefore
#
because they are watchable right so that's the power of the image so television produces a
#
society of a certain kind where of the popular becomes the most important ratings become
#
important newspaper the popular is not the authoritative newspaper is the most important
#
here popularity is the most important digital by its nature it's interesting that it is at one
#
level a repository of all knowledge in the world at another level is fast moving so it is deep and
#
it is shallow right at the same time it is it is engaging and it is distracting at the same time
#
right so where you are important but the you are run by a corporation so there is the sense of
#
illusion at one level great individual agency but you are all being controlled by algorithms
#
which are invisible so there is a so by its very nature it is it has a whole set of contradictory
#
sort of effects which is i think tearing us apart in many ways because it is doing both
#
the same time unlike other media where effects were of a certain kind but they were largely in
#
a single direction not always but substantially so here we are actually creating and we don't
#
understand these effects and they are all new to us and they are all at scale i mean never in the
#
history of the world has the microphone been available to every individual never we don't
#
know how to deal with it we have no societal institutional mechanisms to deal with a world
#
where everybody's talking at the same time it never happened so so how do you create those
#
protocols and those institutions so we are and yet we value individual freedom we value so
#
so right now it is a little bit like the wild west it is a little bit like you know we are
#
figuring things out and and and therefore to the question of what can we do about it and how can
#
it potentially change and that the truth is that you know it's a it's a long shot i think the best
#
hope is that we start seeing the limits of of so for instance you are seeing the the the need
#
to have a say a twitter alternative so whether it is you know that's something called tribal that
#
i am trying out or whether the threads now is you know came in with a bang but has he has not figured
#
out what it is so you know but i think that is one possibility where you start seeing different
#
different points of view and different sort of you know manner in which you construct and you
#
know the if it is not engagement based if it is based on some other metric it is fundamentally
#
finding a model and a design that allows for a certain different kind of level of involvement
#
fundamentally it is design i think it is if you design with a different objective in mind i think
#
also there is a certain exhaustion so for instance you know it hasn't affected things at scale but i
#
know so many people like myself who stopped watching television news in india like i have
#
stopped meaning i don't by mistake watch a minute of any television news in india i haven't done it
#
for 13 years same yeah so i mean it'll i'll probably be a little less but zero and i meet
#
i mean we're still a small number but it is there it is a so eventually there is there is a point
#
you know hopefully i don't know eventually but hopefully there is a point where where there is
#
a an organic need for an alternative and that alternative if done well you know begins to
#
attract a certain amount of attention even if i would say that actually i was i'm all for
#
fragmentation i think one of the problems that is currently there in on the internet is there
#
isn't fragmentation if there was fragmentation if instead of twitter being the behemoth that it is
#
if there were eight social media sites of a similar kind that were working well
#
that would be fine because then there is not then you do not create a single kind of a template
#
i think what happens there is network effects come into play which is kind of despite there
#
being competition despite markets being open there are these seeming monopolies so i say
#
they're not monopolies because they're all you know twitter facebook google are all competing
#
for our time and attention so in that sense they are competing but and i'm just thinking
#
aloud but i'm thinking that you know one of the things that i realized when i thought about
#
entertainment in podcasting and so on is i often say that i would rather have say a hundred thousand
#
people listen to an episode of mine than 10 million views for a youtube video and the reason
#
for that is that the 10 million views will be very shallow engagement maybe 15 seconds average view
#
time whereas the engagement for a podcast like mine like the average session is i think around
#
40 minutes and people listen across multiple sessions is off the charts and that deeper
#
engagement means that people are also willing to put their money where their mouth is and actually
#
you know support what they are doing and i think a future model perhaps is a model which is a pay
#
model you know where people are paying for something that they value and therefore they
#
are getting the value and not necessarily something that is free and playing to network
#
effects and playing to addiction and you know hopefully someone sorts this out in you know in
#
the next few years and i think you know the fact that right now we are talking about you know
#
twitter musk talking about a dollar for a year for a new user you know i mean is is is the beginning
#
of a movement where even if it is right now symbolic the fact that you pay for something
#
like this i think what it does over a period of time i mean if it pushes it in that direction
#
but that is i think that is the direction forward because i think going forward the fact is that
#
you know the all these balance sheet led kind of you know ventures eventually will have to face
#
reality right so i mean the fact is that if you are unless you're making particularly for a new
#
venture facebook is making money so i mean it's not as if you know it has a but facebook is facing
#
an issue of relevance you know going forward facebook itself you know there's a whole audience
#
that it has lost and then over time each of these you know you will face that kind of a sense of
#
this whole thing of what's new what's new how do you keep it refreshed is going to be a question
#
for for all of these sites so i think
#
eventually i think i mean the only way i i you know think about it is the fact that we are at
#
the absolute ground floor of this world and you know i would not be overly pessimistic about the
#
fact that you know that that we will not find a better way i mean the other there are two ways
#
of thinking about it one is that you know read along with the political situation in the world
#
this could be a raid the race to the very tribalist bottom where you know we have entrenched
#
tribes and we destroy and it's an anti-intellectual kind of a world where we destroy all reverence
#
for knowledge and you know you know live by our impulse and instinct alone and we become warring
#
tribes that that you know sort of are extremely satisfied with our own you know belonging to that
#
group i mean so you know that is one vision of the world but i i do think that that given the
#
fact that technology which plays such an important role in this since that is evolving and that is
#
still early days i am i am hoping that you know it takes on a different trajectory yeah and also i
#
think i think here the form since you're talking about form the form of how you earn your revenue
#
makes a difference like if the content is going to be free then eyeballs are the product and
#
they're going to do whatever they can to collect eyeballs but if people are paying you have to
#
provide value so maybe that is a shift you need from being an addiction machine to a value machine
#
right in in some kind of sense i mean i know there's been a lot of noise on the left about
#
musk taking over but in my mind when musk took over twitter as it then was twitter was at its
#
lowest point they could not be a worse place on this planet it was toxic had it disappeared it
#
would have been good so i did not see any way in which he could make it worse now there is a lot
#
else that i would have done but perhaps he has his constraints but certainly making it pay is a
#
step in the right direction you know certainly surfacing those committed users more is also a
#
step in the right direction but it is still incredibly toxic so let's see where that
#
sort of takes us i also want to sort of double click on the point you mentioned of tribalism
#
right and there is a point and and this is unrelated but i'll segue back to it
#
you wrote this beautiful column on tradition where you wrote in the last paragraph we are
#
constructing tradition every single day even as we believe we are dismantling it so essentially
#
even if you think that you are sort of leaving the past behind you often are just constructing
#
another version of it and i think of this in the context of religion and theocracies
#
that many of us will think that we are you know living in a rational world
#
there is no religion there is no theocracy but i see modern ideologies on both the right and the
#
left being essentially identical in the way that they function in the form that they take
#
two theologies where there are in groups and out groups where there are dogmas that you cannot
#
question you know where and in modern times we find how you know and driven by social media how
#
outrage can so often be performative as you have pointed out about how victimhood can often be
#
something that you claim to show your virtue and you have you know oppression olympics
#
and so on and so forth and honestly these new theocracies dominate and the bewildering
#
shift that i did not expect and still can't completely fathom is that at one point we
#
thought that in politics there is something called the median voter theorem so using america as an
#
example you know in the primaries you will have the republican guy and the democrat guy go towards
#
the edges to appeal to the base but when they actually run in the general election they're
#
next to each other and i looked at 2016 and i thought okay the candidates are going to be
#
jeb bush and hillary clinton they are basically identical to each other minor differences
#
that's the way it is but suddenly you have trump and suddenly then you'll see the left going even
#
further leftward and i couldn't really figure that out but now i begin to think that it is this
#
natural inclination towards the extreme fringes amplified and enabled by social media but now
#
existing outside of it as well like i think of that hindu dharm sansad video if you remember a
#
year and a half back those seven or eight sadhus and each going and saying incredibly outrageous
#
things and my sense is if it was sort of one guy giving a speech he would be less radical and the
#
least radical of them but suddenly they are competing with each other for attention and
#
then in that scenario where the only way to compete for attention is to be more radical than
#
the next guy you know you are going to have this move to the fringes and one positive way of looking
#
at it is that all these noisemakers are vocal minorities a silent majority sensible but i
#
really don't know so what is your what is your take i think again you know i think it's the
#
the nature of i think today's form is the fact that you know it it is geared towards the extreme
#
so it's not an accident because the fact is if i want engagement if i say something sensible
#
which everybody you know knows or agrees with it is not news i mean it is it is you know it is when
#
there is an inbuilt reward for for outrageous extremist positions there is an inbuilt and
#
also i think at a other level at a human level i think our basis our instincts have been legitimized
#
things that we would be ashamed of admitting have are now we can proudly
#
declaim we can reference falsification is over so we are we are actively see earlier
#
you know so it's like we've stopped doing films that you know had tokenist kind of representation
#
of national integration right we had tokenist thing but that's why hypocrisy is so important
#
you know because hypocrisy at least maintains we all agree that this is the facade we should
#
maintain we may not be that but you know let's maintain the facade that there is a
#
muslim character who's the good muslim character he is the sidekick he is the one who will take
#
the bullet in the end he may not live in the end but he has a role to play so good abdul
#
has a role to play in cinema right when we stop doing that when we and at that time we can
#
criticize that saying this is just performative this is tokenist this is not real and we can get
#
outraged at that but when it goes away when people say that there is no need for that also
#
who the hell wants a token you know any muslim we will not have any muslim we will not have any
#
muslim you know candidate we don't need that tokenism because you know our who we really are is
#
liberated but who we really are is the shallowest part of who we are and and that is what it is
#
encouraging the fact that we are you know actually are so that's why tribalism is the the instinct
#
there is the fact that you know we react with everything that was that was because the the
#
consensus of a of a facade of a desirable facade when that gets dismantled then you have the
#
consensus of a of the animal instinct right and and i think that is what we are seeing across the
#
world where people are being able to say things about you know so and and what happens is that
#
because the more you push in the and and so both of them feed on each other the left extreme and
#
the right extreme they need each other so the more you move towards an extreme here i have to be
#
even more extreme the vogue extreme creates outrage and more people join the the the extreme
#
part so there is a there is a and and that is not to say left can be utterly insane i mean the left
#
extreme is is nuts in so many different ways right the right is is inhuman and barbaric it can be
#
but i'm just saying both sides i actually i'll take the controversial viewed as ify i get more
#
irritated by the left extreme because the right extreme will wear its bigotry on its sleeve
#
whereas the left extreme is always doing these pretensions of virtue yeah no i i agree and also
#
because i i think in a sense i find myself in so many ways sympathetic to to that side i find when
#
it goes overboard very very disturbing it hurts us yes it is deeply disturbing because that is just
#
the i mean you know how do you then claim to have you know a viewpoint in the world which accounts
#
for you know you know different perspectives if you are absolutely close very if you are using
#
the codes of blasphemy today right you know which is exactly the point you make i mean that the whole
#
theocratic codes today in the way that you articulate yourself is i think the right wing
#
has the advantage for the fact that it doesn't pretend anything you know it is if you call it
#
bigoted it just another name for being nationalistic or being sort of you know proud
#
of being american or whatever i mean it is you know it is but here you have all the pretensions
#
of of of actually being open-minded and being and and then you you know sort of take these positions
#
i mean it is it it it becomes much more disturbing i love your frame of the users of hypocrisy
#
and that's a good time to kind of talk about politics and society because and the inter the
#
relation between them because you know one of the tropes that i keep coming back to is
#
right how essentially we pretended to be a liberal country but the truth is in many ways we were a
#
deeply liberal country you know the imposition of a relatively liberal constitution was never going
#
to change that as you write at one point in a different context i must say start quote
#
communities must find their own version of change in a way that works best for them ideologies
#
imposed from above have a habit of falling away for they do not connect with the complex ecosystem
#
that is reality stop quote and gandhiji warned about this gandhiji's scene was if you want to
#
make india liberally you got to do it from the bottom up we tried to do it from the top down
#
that failed and it appears that there is no use for the hypocrisy anymore so politics has caught
#
up with society and that is kind of where we are and my question to you is that is there a
#
part dependence here was it always bound to be the case or did we get unlucky at some point
#
because while our society is deeply liberal at the same time as jp narayan once you know
#
castigated me during a conversation he said it is also deeply liberal at the same time
#
you know if you look at the delightful melting pots and the khichris that are our khichris
#
literally our food our clothing our customs so many of them so in many of our lived experiences
#
we have been syncretic and we've embraced the world but at the same time the opposites also
#
exist so what is your sense of this because i pessimistically have realized that one being
#
a member of the english-speaking elites i i was living in a bubble and i was completely wrong
#
about the country when i thought that broadly huh we are tolerant and liberal and all of that in the
#
best senses and obviously we are not obviously it's something else and i also feel pessimistic
#
about uh the possibility of change and this pessimism is underscored by the fact that other
#
political parties who are not in power today are also catering to these same uh base bigoted
#
instincts and are also doing their soft hindutva and their hanuman chalisa and going to temples
#
and all of that and that dismayes me and i wonder if either that is a lack of imagination that they
#
cannot find other aspects of people's aspirations to appeal to or they see something i don't and
#
they have they they have skin in the game yeah well i i think it is certainly true that you know
#
india in in many ways has been a has been an illiberal society which has had an
#
constitution that has been imposed that that you know because of the fact that i think for
#
many decades the power structure was such that that a small elite could you know create rules
#
and and those rules became given and and they became desirable and nobody could
#
formulate you know or articulate objections to it even if they felt so and politics in any case
#
was distant i mean for most people so it it you know you could play have a performative kind of an
#
obeisance you could pay to the flags that you were supposed to salute you know you could
#
salute the flags that were that were in vogue and and that was fine but you asked whether you
#
know it was inevitable that that would go away i would say that in even in the maturing even if
#
it was a process of maturing of a democracy it was inevitable you know whatever form it took because
#
the very nature you cannot have a real democracy if it is founded on on ideals that are not felt
#
by people or that do not believe in those ideals so i mean sooner or later we had to reckon with
#
what was you know sort of buried under the carpet i mean what we sort of chose to ignore so that
#
reckoning had to happen the problem is that that reckoning is happening in a way and it is being
#
led in a way that is you know that is right now i mean one could you know looking at this broad
#
sweep of time hopefully say that this is a process of negotiation that is taking place untidy as it
#
is messy as it is and 30 years from now you know we will look back and say okay thank god we went
#
through that churn because now we are in a better place i mean you know if you take a 50 year view
#
a 100 year view you could perhaps sort of you know accord this with a certain amount of you
#
know indulgence if you like but unfortunately i i'm not sure if that is is the case given everything
#
else today whether that you know we can look at it like that i think because there is
#
that the thing is that i think you know coming to what you talked about jp narayan's thing about
#
if it is deeply liberal it's also deeply liberal i think that the true is that that the nature of
#
hinduism i think allowed for that openness you know it's it's not a text-based
#
religion a text-based religion has the disadvantage of the fact that you know what was written in at
#
a certain point in time now has to live beyond its context and has to make sense here you know
#
there's like great openness and and there is great so therefore there is a certain inherent structural
#
reason why there is tolerance and why there is ability to live with you know different life and
#
and that has been a deep kind of reality of india i think but what we are seeing is an is an attempt
#
to actively reshape that i mean it is to semitize the religion it is to give it so we didn't have a
#
place a central place now we have a central place you know i mean we may not still have a book but
#
we have a slogan you know which you know so for instance if you like you know you you talked about
#
ram ram to people it was everything you know so everybody said ram ram jaishri krishna for instance
#
in gujarat is a is a very common phrase you say jaishri krishna you know to each other but jaishri
#
ram right it is not it is not innocent in the sense that it has only those words have power
#
so it has become you know much more than just another form of greeting it is not it is the
#
greeting it is the so the idea of the ayodhya the greeting the you know it there is a phrase
#
with an ecosystem as you might say exactly it is a phrase with it and it is and it comes therefore
#
with intentionality it has it has so therefore i think what we are seeing is this crystallizing
#
take place and it is happening successfully you know one of the things that that just digressing
#
a little one of the things that you know we do this annual exercise our team we go across the
#
country and we try and map change you know our own bhara darshan what we call it and and so for
#
so several years you know when we went around and this small town india we don't go to villages but
#
and what i found interesting was the fact that
#
it seems strangely unaffected by the political winds of the day when you talk to people there
#
was broad contentment there was broad the issues of the day were you know what you would expect to
#
be but overall there was a positive kind of and we year after year after year we saw that and so
#
in fact i think that you know there has to be more so in fact one year we constructed a study
#
which was around fault lines so we said let's go and find fault lines because they don't seem to
#
have naturally come up that much so we looked at caste and we looked at we looked at all and of
#
course we found it it's not as if we didn't caste being a very prominent fault line we found we
#
found migrants versus you know locals we found fault lines we found generational found gender
#
as a fault line so we found all of that but even so what we are seeing in the last two or three
#
years is a shift because this whole the whole religious polarization is now beginning to we
#
didn't see a sign of that but now you know there are signs of it in popular culture there are signs
#
of it in in many places so i think this is a project that is succeeding and it is changing
#
the nature of that reality which was that you could have taken for granted saying you could
#
do what you may india as an ancient civilization has always figured out a way and this too shall
#
pass and we will find a way i you know i am not sure if if that is true in the same way anymore
#
so i think there is a greater reason to to feel a little more pessimistic now that the illiberal
#
sort of shift i think is something that is not going to because there is no fundamental respect
#
for democracy it's not as if there's an idea it hasn't taken root the idea that there is
#
accountability that there is that needs to be accountability is not it's not an idea that
#
animates you know people at large it doesn't animate people at large so so in the absence of
#
your own mental model of what your power is in the absence of that there is you know
#
the the there is no fundamental impetus for change when it comes to political parties
#
showing a lack of imagination i mean would you agree that they're showing a lack of imagination
#
and not finding other margins to fight on and you know just making the default assumption that
#
this is non-negotiable that we have to be hindu to you know we have to appeal to that vote to win
#
here do you feel that there is something there or do you feel that they that it is what it is
#
you know they figured society out so i think i would agree with the fact that you know there
#
is a different axis that is worth looking for but that axis is not i would be surprised if it is
#
the opposite of of hindutva so if the axis is we stand for a secular india that is not i don't
#
think that is an electorally viable axis because i think see one of the things about you know what
#
the the success when you are successful in making the numerical majority feel like the emotional
#
minority right which is what you know the current government is doing right the thing is that what
#
is the cost of i i mean casual majoritarianism is the easiest group to belong to right what is
#
the cost i mean the majority i mean i do i feel that you know muslims should be treated well yeah
#
sure they should be but if they are not is that an issue that i'm going to go to war for absolutely
#
not i mean what does matter my life is you know i'm in the right side i'm not on the wrong side
#
you know why should i why why should their happiness be my central cause my happiness
#
is my central cause as long as you know i am taken care of in some form or the other
#
why should i rock the boat i mean that fundamentally the incentive for the a member
#
of the majority once you create that identity right and and and once you create that sort of
#
a boat into which everybody is accommodated that is important to do but once you do that then what
#
is why that there is very little incentive so so i don't think the so for a lot of people who say
#
that the congress should take a position that that they should you know i mean for instance i think
#
that from a tactical perspective much as you know the many things that you could argue for or against
#
but i think the amrb party's decision to go soft on hindutva is just pragmatic it is saying that
#
look i don't it is fundamentally to neutralize a line of attack is to say that the bjb cannot
#
attack me on this front let me neutralize that front right because i can't fight that front
#
the the problem is that in the absence of a compelling alternative axis
#
this is the default axis that has got established now you can't ignore it
#
it exists now either you neutralize that or you find a more compelling axis which makes
#
this feel irrelevant or less relevant and i think what the opposition has failed to do now
#
because it's also not easy to do is to find they need simultaneously something that blunts
#
the power of hindutva without going against it and simultaneously they need to come up with an idea
#
which is compelling so for instance anti-corruption seemed like a brief for a brief period to be that
#
kind of an idea but but it kind of you know had internal contradictions it fell also it is limiting
#
to the middle class and also interestingly anti-corruption it turns out is a common plank to
#
many populist movements yeah because anti-corruption is something you know and which i still feel the
#
fact of the matter is that the bjp while it has you know you know done whatever in in other areas
#
the fact is today if you're stopped on the highway you still have to pay a bribe if you know you have
#
some inspector come to your factory you still have to pay a bribe in everyday life there is you do not
#
there is barring one or two you know areas corruption is visible you know and at the
#
macro level you can see enough instances of of the fact that some people are favored and so
#
so the idea and plus the fact that when somebody changes parties the all corruption charges are
#
dropped so i mean very clearly yeah you know the what the bjp has not done is managed to
#
tame the corruption problem i mean you know in that sense so that's but that corruption is a
#
is an issue that that is an urban much more an urban issue than a than a national issue so i
#
think that's a limitation there so i don't think it's easy for the opposition to find that access
#
but if it doesn't and to me that is the biggest problem with the congress today
#
yes that is good but what is your alternative vision i mean you know people now who look back
#
and say look at the mahammohan singh government and say you know fondly talk about the i think
#
the the best thing about the manmohan singh government was what it did not do rather than
#
what it did what it did not do is actually what we are fond of it i mean in terms of what it did
#
i mean it was yeah i mean certainly nobody can argue that you know that was a you know that was
#
a desirable thing to have a prime minister who does not have the you know who's not a leader
#
or you know within the party and who's propped up by a center of power who lies outside i mean
#
nobody can argue that that was desirable i mean that that clearly was not so so it's not as if
#
there is an alternative you know that the opposition has to offer today that will be
#
compelling for the electorate at large and it's not even the you know like even manmohan's
#
governments are divided into upa one and two and i think one was far better it really went
#
downhill and 2011 onwards we kind of went to hell i've had many episodes on this and and you know
#
this one used to think back in the day that hey the arc of justice always bends in a good direction
#
whether towards justice or freedom or whatever and the last few years is certainly given pause
#
for thought there because you have the rise of all these populist movements you have all these
#
different personality cults not just populist movements across the world and i would argue that
#
a lot of it has to do with form in in terms of how social media amplifies our worst instincts how it
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takes politics towards the extremes but i think that even if in the worst case scenario there is
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no way to turn this back the you know you can't ride this tiger successfully i still think that
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hope might lie in the sense that nation states themselves could become less relevant and have
#
less control over the lives of people now here's a thought that i haven't formulated too well what
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i've been thinking about is that what has also been happening because of technology over the last 30
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years is that everywhere the mainstream is crumbling whether it is in media whether it
#
is in entertainment everywhere markets are getting fragmented and people are you know
#
and getting globalized at the same time but like in one of your columns you've written about earth
#
life and sky life right the life we live in the real corporeal material world where you cannot
#
get away from the nation state but you also have a sky life in the online world or in the cloud as it
#
were where you could be from anywhere and it doesn't really matter now of course the place
#
where you live that your nation state has a monopoly on violence and incredible oppressions
#
can happen but a lot of people can also sort of live outside of that and live you know different
#
empowering lives and not have to see themselves as creatures of their circumstance like one of
#
the delightful things about the internet for me personally which has made a big difference
#
is that earlier i was bound to communities of circumstance and now i can form communities of
#
choice and geography and nationality are certainly not a restriction there so in in these senses
#
have you seen you know shifts in the way that people think you know or is there is this a
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cause of hope for you it's i don't i i think that you know because of the the sort of simultaneous
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kind of contrary effects that the internet has i think just as much as you know we are you know
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you know we have this the earth life the sky life where we know we we have much greater freedom
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and we have there are many more possibilities and the fact that you know we can create like
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you said communities of choice rather than on of circumstance while that is true at the same time
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i think if you were to look at how our most basic identities are getting reinforced whether it is
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religion whether it is ideology whether it is nation state actually they're getting more
#
entrenched the number of times when we talk about being Indian or you know being liberal or being
#
you know right wing or being you know has dramatically increased right so self-identification
#
on those fronts has not gone down so i think the problem is that you know our old style of thinking
#
is is the fact that you know that there is a either it's either this if it is more of this
#
then it is less of that but that's not true there is more of both right so so which which i think
#
confounds us because you know how can that happen now if you know how can we become you know have
#
the freedom and to imagine ourselves in a variety of different ways if we have that freedom why the
#
hell would we root ourselves and anchor ourselves to you know identities that we are born with or
#
that were given to us but the fact is that is exactly what is happening those are the nature of
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simultaneous sort of contradictions that we are seeing and i think i just think that that's an
#
important shift to make in our mental models in terms of how we regard digital effects because
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you know the presence of one does not rule out the the presence of the other which we have thought
#
of as an opposite and i think that's that's the reason why i don't think of that as a
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you know as an optimism a site of optimism for me because i'm not really seeing that becoming a
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shift away from the other i'm seeing that happen but but you know so is the other i mean i guess
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there is a possibility of that shift but that shift isn't really happening is what you're saying
#
no and also the other the opposite is happening also so i mean you know if if it is only a question
#
of the fact that this shift is not happening you could say it's a matter of time it'll happen but
#
the opposite is also happening we are becoming more tribal we are becoming more tribal we are
#
becoming more entrenched we the number of times you say india anti-national anti-india this is
#
anti-india this is anti-national not just that the way that we celebrate religiously you look
#
at on facebook everybody puts up their diwali clothes and their puja and so there is much greater
#
you know religiosity which is on on on public display you know in terms of ideology which is
#
another religion today as as you know you talked about it's again on so much on display the fact
#
that what religion you are in what you look at in tinder and how you are looking at you know ideology
#
as a way of determining whether you will go out with somebody or not i mean the fact you say it
#
as if you're on tinder are you on i have this great desire to figure out what it is like but
#
you know i don't know how to be there without being there anthropological research i am very
#
keen to do that but i have you know i have not found a way to which be there without being there
#
suddenly every female listener of this show is going on tinder to quickly search is he there
#
is he there right right right of course of course yeah you know i i often say to express my sort of
#
exasperation with the world and the apathy i sometimes feel i often quote kashinath singh
#
from kashi kasi and the family friendly version of the court is bar may jaya duniya hum bajay
#
harmonia right and at the same time much as that is kind of what i feel i want to do at the same
#
time we have interesting and exciting new developments which means ki hum bajay harmonia
#
is also not really required because ai will do harmonia for us right and i want to sort of talk
#
about that because i find i'm not an ai alarmist i think it is absolutely incredible and mind
#
blowing and will help us be the better version the best versions of ourselves and will empower
#
us tremendously and when my writing students for example asked me once that hey you know if ai is
#
going to at some point in the future write like shakespeare and do great novels and etc etc what
#
is there for us and my answer which might be considered feeble by some including me in certain
#
moments was that if you crave validation and if you crave outcome then perhaps not because ai
#
will churn out great books but if it is a process of writing that you are in love with that no one
#
can take away from you but i wonder if that answer is also inadequate and a rationalization
#
because i am reminded of robert nozick's thought experiment the experience machine from the book
#
anarchy state and utopia and the experience machine was something that and he was arguing against
#
utilitarians with this about you know pleasure being something that is equal to good and talking
#
about how if you have an experience machine which basically you plug into it and it gives you every
#
experience in the most authentic way possible you cannot tell the difference between that and
#
the real thing you know of happiness or joy or excitement or lust or satisfaction or whatever
#
you want to feel then would you want to go out in the real world and nozick's answer was of
#
course you would because there is something else to it but i think in these times that takes on an
#
added sort of resonance because so much of the things that give us value and give us pleasure
#
can be done by ai can be replicated and equally you know in in that thought experiment if i can
#
just implant something in my brain and can control my feelings through that then why do i need to do
#
anything in the world and that's something i wonder about and want to ask you about because
#
ingrained in that is a question of something that all of us have grappled with anyway which
#
is how do we find meanings in our lives and what gives us purpose like in a best case scenario ai
#
becomes so incredibly productive that nobody needs to work you can basically give a ubi to everyone
#
and we all have free time and we are chilling but the question is where is the meaning where is
#
a sense of purpose and obviously everybody has to grapple with these questions anyway even in
#
pre ai time so what would you say yeah so i you know i'll just like to sort of again approach it
#
slightly sort of from a different place and maybe come back to this is that if i think about
#
technology you know and and what technology is and ask a fundamental question as to what technology
#
is and and if you just very crudely it's a very crude kind of an approximation of how it has evolved
#
and therefore is there a direction that we can discern without it
#
necessarily being sort of you know deterministic but but is there a you know so to me it feels
#
like technology is the overflow in its initial days of the mind to the body in a sense that the
#
body is inept our body is inept right it is a it's a very rudimentary machine but our mind is
#
strapped in this very inept frame which is the body right so in the initial days what the mind
#
has done is equip the body and to overcome its is its shortcomings so tool making to begin with
#
which is the most basic form fire tool making and then you look at the growth of technology it is
#
basically looking at all the constraints that we have you know you don't have strength so you
#
have a machine that helps you lift something you can't move fast so you know you have machines
#
that you know transport you faster you know so motive force etc so you you know there is the
#
whole the idea of technology in some ways is is that as technology grew i think then then you
#
come to the phase where so you have also technology of the mind language is the technology of the mind
#
you know which which is developed and which has vastly multiplied sort of human progress
#
but largely the early phases you have the technologies of the body you know that have
#
been taking primacy increasingly in the post computer world it is it is you know what so what
#
we do is outsource so we outsource a certain amount of physical labor to to technology
#
with the world of the computer we've started outsourcing mental labor so so so by minds
#
connecting with minds which is what internet is so it is kind of multiplying minds with minds so
#
that's what technology is artificial intelligence so when we do have say variables so what you are
#
doing is you are actually embedding intelligence in our body right so you're putting actually
#
taking the mind out and putting it in our body so you're saying the mind so overflowing to the
#
body has a physical form it is now embedded that intelligence is now embedded in our bodies and
#
ai is out of body intelligence right so it is actually now taking the the mind out of the body
#
right and it is locating it elsewhere and so now in a sense so we made our bodies redundant
#
at first the fact is that the body you could argue barring for sex or barring for you know
#
there is a vestigial function in the sense that we have to take our body for a walk
#
right when we go for a walk earlier you walked eight kilometers to get some you know and you
#
even now in india so many parts to get some you know to get you know to get anything you're
#
walking eight kilometers you're carrying loads firewood you know in the hills you will see you
#
know women walk kilometers to get firewood because your body was a machine that needed to work the
#
now the body is a machine that doesn't need to work so we have to make we work out we don't work
#
so we have to work out which we have to sweat artificially we have to we go on you know we do
#
ridiculous things to keep our body from rotting because otherwise it'll rot if we if we don't
#
exercise and if we don't move our bodies right so we have made our bodies fundamentally redundant
#
are we on our way to making our minds fundamentally redundant is the question
#
not that we have not found alternative uses for the body right so at one level you can say
#
ai makes our minds redundant and and therefore what i mean we had the mind and we had the body
#
unless there is a higher order thing that exists beyond that where is our next investment in right
#
so so so at one level you know you can argue that that you know we've run out of things to outsource
#
now we've outsourced everything that we have right so at one level you can argue that and then where
#
is the meaning in life right so therefore the meaning in life also shifted from from the
#
physical being able to provide being able to hunt being able to gather to the mental
#
the fact that you know what do you read what do you enjoy i mean so meaning in life has also
#
shifted now if that also we take away where does meaning shift to
#
is the question so i so i don't have an answer to it because i didn't nobody knows but but so i'm
#
torn always between the positive you know the fact that there is certainly so much good that will
#
come out of ai and it gives us time it gives us ability to do sort of a higher order things
#
but i think there is a crisis of meaning that that that is inherent in a movement like this
#
there is a crisis of meaning because we derive so much from acts of creation we derive so much
#
and while like you say the the purity of the act of creation will remain but the fact of the
#
matter is that that that the self-image or the fact that you know only we can do this
#
right and and this is what is our utility in this world is the fact that we bring this value to the
#
world you know i think it's such an important part of our our our sense of who we are in a sense of
#
validation that we feel that in the absence of that if the fact that there is a machine that
#
is churning out stuff that is you know that is better than what i can do right so so you know
#
what does it leave me with i think is a is a and there's a whole ubi thing is it the same thing if
#
i have time to do it's actually at a very at a much more mundane level is the problem people have
#
with retirement is that you keep fantasizing about retirement and at a much more granular
#
level at which you have to have school with summer holidays exam you're thinking i'll have such a
#
blast and then summer holidays come and the second day you're saying now what do we do
#
i have nothing to do right i enjoyed my summer holidays boss but i did too but but i felt a
#
sense of emptiness i must say that when when the exams were over in the summer holidays the first
#
day i had a blast the second day i said okay this is you know there is a and which is what
#
retirement has done for many people which is that you know look forward to retiring retiring retiring
#
and then when it comes you know you don't know what to do if you retire and you get bored we'll
#
send people to your house with a gun to make you write a book no no i see this i see this you know
#
at least you're committed i you know that was what we said so i think i think it for me but
#
it's still an open question also i don't think it is possible to have a a view on this that is
#
meaningful you know i i because it's unknown unknown it's an unknown unknown so i mean i
#
think it's it's will we find ways of dealing with it i'm sure you know it is possible i mean so far
#
we found ways of dealing with everything right i mean we've you know uh but but on the other
#
hand you could argue that we've used up you know if i was to look at this mind body kind of thing
#
then kind of we've used up you know all the degrees of freedom that we had
#
to outsource things so i don't know if there is anything else so you know i've taken a lot
#
of your time i want to end with a bunch of questions that i think go back to the personal
#
and we were talking about purpose i want to also ask about that that how did you
#
like would you be able to say in concrete terms that you have a sense of purpose how did you
#
arrive at that sense of purpose you know or to put it another way i love there's this great quote by
#
annie dillard i think about a lot where she wrote how we spend our days is how we spend our lives
#
so what is your view of that day what kind of what is fuel for you and i'm sure it must be
#
very different from what it was say 20 30 40 years ago but what is it how has it evolved how
#
did you get here no i i think you know the the fuel in in many ways is is the fact that you know
#
you know actually all of a sudden then i must say that i find you know social media and
#
twitter and all that would be extremely useful and and you know for for whatever effects it has
#
i think it the fact that at a certain level there are constant triggers that it provides
#
maybe too many but but there are constant triggers that it provides that that and then because it's
#
like you know life on shuffle mode right so you don't know what is coming next
#
so there is a certain agility that it forces you to have where you know where you are kind of
#
constantly responding to newer inputs so you know that that is something that i think is
#
has been very useful and i think it's where is in the past i think i think but the difference
#
is that in the past i think the quest was self-driven right so it was largely
#
i've always you know had the advantage of having questions in my head which i i think is very
#
important i mean that to have unresolved and unanswered questions in one's head you know it's
#
extremely important and and then you try and find answers to those questions and and you know it it
#
then becomes you know it becomes a quest it becomes a cause that that you have some things
#
that you don't know some things you haven't figured out some things that perplex you some things that
#
one day you think a certain way the other day you think the other way and you don't know what to
#
make of it and and that kind of an open inquiry was something that that you know it was was i
#
think very important i think with time that continues but i think there's also external
#
triggers now because you're you know you come across something and that forces you to think
#
something which you hadn't thought of earlier so i think there is a part of it is there's certain
#
passivity then that comes in because you expect that to happen all the time and your original
#
questions in your head do not occupy the space that they once did but part of it is is is the
#
fact that it opens you out and and gives you new avenues to think about which you previously may
#
not have thought of because you know that was not in your sort of axis of of inquiry so i think with
#
that extent i i find a change now which is both which is both good and bad more externally led
#
i think in some ways but still there is always something to think about are there any big
#
questions you've been thinking about these days i think certainly one of the big questions which
#
you know is this whole nature of technology and what it means and where it goes and where it takes
#
us and what effects does it have and i think that to me is the important part that you know
#
the whole what we all talked about for so long about the form and and its effect and and you
#
know so to actually have a framework of that really getting because of the very noisy kind
#
of set of effects that we are seeing how do you do attribution of of any sort of cause and effect
#
and how do you accommodate and account for at least i mean you may not be able to account for
#
everything but at least what framework allows you to see all of it in as as as being interrelated
#
and part of an ecosystem i think that's a big question and the other is i think also that the
#
ways that the world is going through today i can it's easy to i think relatively easy to understand
#
why this is happening but what is the way out of it and and you know what what if any is is
#
an axis of change and then to me this whole idea of change which is the other thing that actually
#
fascinates me is the is change as a as an idea and then as as a phenomenon i mean how does change
#
occur and you know so what is the anatomy of change here i i think and what would it be
#
i think that's so change in a conceptual sense the meaning of change
#
and how it occurs is something that that is a big question which is not yet fully resolved
#
and the other is how will change in this case happen i mean enough to keep you busy for a few
#
decades writing many books kidnapped or not kidnapped or not my kidnapped by your own curious
#
mind of course that's what i meant all the time what did you think my penultimate question and a
#
two-part question really in all your years of you know writing about society reading about it
#
doing all the research that you do and the work that you do what have you learned about
#
a india and b human beings that surprised you well india of course i think never stopped surprising
#
you at at one level so i think i think one thing that has surprised me about india is is actually
#
contrary to the tenor of our conversation that we've had so much so far is how
#
fundamentally contented people are you know that has surprised me and and
#
i find that because you know there's every reason very often you find you know from an external
#
perspective reasons for discontentment but i find that there is a certain sense of self-knowledge
#
that that you know and and so you know however much there may be difficulty there is a certain
#
innate sense of of who you are and i think that gives certain amount of stability
#
i'm not necessarily saying that there is no unhappiness i mean far from it but there is a
#
certain self-assurance you know which i i have always been surprised by and and i have always
#
pushed at it you know because i it seems to me to you know defy reason in in at on particularly
#
when you come across people with certain circumstances and and you wonder as to you know
#
how could this be you know there has to be more but i think there is a fundamental level of
#
stability and contentment which i don't know if it is changing but but you know that has surprised
#
me about india what was the other part of the humans human beings human nature yeah which is
#
how easily we can we can actually then the opposite of that in some ways
#
revert to to very primitive primal i mean how easy it is and and and you know the how easy it is for
#
that to get activated in us and for how easy it is for us to shed all the progress that has been
#
made you know intellectually and otherwise over so many centuries and how we can go back to
#
absolutely primal selves without without a in a blink of an eye i mean how easy it is for us
#
to do that i mean that to me is is is source of surprise just when i thought we were ending on
#
an out of hope but you know i will quote what walt whitman here saying do i contradict myself
#
very well then i contradict myself i contain multitudes my final question for me and my
#
listeners recommend books music films any kind of art at all that you really love so much that you
#
want to share with everyone uh music actually i love uh i i listen to all kinds of music so i
#
love and and i i'm sure people have heard the sort of more some i am listening to
#
russian folk music which i enjoy a lot there's an artist called mark burns that i like baba mal in
#
that is i think is is fabulous you know we are recording in a studio advaita i mean i like the
#
that genre of of sound uh in india so that's the other stuff i like uh uh i have not been reading
#
too much so i will you know actually i must say that i am you know i am i enjoy art a lot actually
#
and and i enjoy art without ever having i don't i hate talking about art but i actually
#
you know enjoy art immensely and you know i like again you know starting with the impression is
#
you know to the the the indian sort of the old sort of the modern grades too i think a lot of
#
contemporary art i think there's a lot of action and a lot of interest globally india i mean art
#
is i think is is something that uh i and i would urge i mean i i really think that if people
#
i find a lot of hesitation in in engaging with art because of it's because of the fact that you
#
know you struggle to grasp it and and i personally find that the best way to you know look at art is
#
just react emotionally to it and there is absolutely no reason why you need to explain to anybody why
#
you like somebody i find that no interest in in what the artist's motivations are or what the
#
artist is trying to say i have zero interest in that purely selfish interest in art which is which
#
is just to look at it and and be moved by it so i mean that's uh something that i would recommend
#
i would recommend an art again everybody has their own you know what you like you like
#
representational art you like non-representational art you you enjoy abstraction you don't i mean it
#
doesn't matter but i would you know i would say that that is such a source of pleasure
#
so i i actually again you know it's everybody i mean i so we just i just went to uh paris recently
#
and i the work that moved me the most was to lose lothric which was i mean i just was amazing but
#
i just i i absolutely love it i like rucho andri rucho i like i mean there's a whole bunch of
#
artists i like i love sezan and and and his work in india i like a lot of kishan khanna's work as i
#
like i enjoy so in fact the the masters i think a lot of the masters are great i like
#
who else jayshree barman i like that sort of more slightly decorative but i i think there's a
#
there's an there's interesting work that she has gogi saroj paul who's somebody else who i i like
#
yeah so bunch of artists actually i find that you know the data have a lot of it is
#
female faces somehow i don't know why i mean it's just you know i i just find that there's
#
something that that resonates there and uh what are the books that really helped explain the
#
world to you per se so need not be something that you've read recently but foundational stuff
#
well i think i've talked about it last time i'm not sure but you know so in the india stuff i
#
think it was held a lot by sudhir kakkar's work his works ashish nandi sudhir kakkar's work i
#
talked about baths i talked about you know some of the because to me these two axes actually one is
#
india and the other is the nature of meaning making i think these are broadly the two kinds of so
#
makluhan in in a sense ong walter ong i mean that so there are various people who sort of in the act
#
of you know ways of john burger ways of seeing i mean there are there's a whole you know that
#
axis and then the india one which is you know the basically the classic writing on india again you
#
know you're the which i think has helped shape you know my views substantially santosh thanks
#
so much for your time this was awesome i loved it thank you so much amit always a pleasure
#
if you enjoyed listening to this episode check out the show notes enter rabbit holes at will read
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everything santosh writes it is so rewarding you can follow santosh on twitter at the sai santosh
#
you can follow me on twitter at amit varma a m i t v a r m a you can browse past episodes of
#
the scene in the unseen at scene unseen dot i n thank you for listening did you enjoy this episode
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