#
Sometimes I get out in a crowded city road or I get stuck in a traffic jam and it is
#
loud and the air is bad and there are people everywhere and I think to myself, oh for some
#
peace and tranquility, oh for some space around me, less people, more greenery, fresh air,
#
into that heaven of freedom my friends let my body ascend.
#
But the feeling passes and rational thought kicks in.
#
I chose to be here like the billions of people who choose to be in a city somewhere, being
#
surrounded by diverse people and a rich cultural life helps me become a better person.
#
Being part of a larger economic network helps me become a richer person.
#
Cities are where we can open our minds and expand our opportunities.
#
That's why throughout history human beings have mostly migrated from sparsely populated
#
areas to densely populated ones, to cities, we are social animals, we need other people.
#
Welcome to The Scene and The Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and
#
Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
#
Welcome to The Scene and The Unseen.
#
My guest today is Pritika Hingorani, who has deep expertise in both economics and urban
#
planning, a rare combination.
#
She is one of the sharpest thinkers anywhere on the subject of cities.
#
She is a CEO of Artha India, a policy consultant organization that helps governments, including
#
our central government and many state governments across parties, to design and implement policy.
#
I've had a previous episode with her a long, long, long, long, long time ago, when she
#
and her colleague, Ruben Ebrahim, chatted with me about urban India, and I was looking forward
#
to this solo deep dive with her.
#
Pritika and her team at Artha dive deep into policy and are basically the foremost experts
#
But unlike many other experts, they don't just put out policy papers and give jnana
#
Instead, they work with governments to design and implement policy on the ground.
#
This requires taking a backseat when it comes to credit.
#
They need to stay in the background for governments to trust them.
#
So they do tons of great work, cannot take credit for any of it.
#
And I found Pritika and her colleagues to be driven by this deep sense of inner purpose
#
and not so much by external validation or rewards.
#
I found that fascinating.
#
But I wanted this conversation not just to talk about how they interface with government,
#
the political economy and so on and so forth, but also to talk about cities.
#
And in that regard, this episode is full of mad insights, such as how we think about density.
#
But before that, let's take a quick commercial break.
#
Pritika, welcome to The Scene in the Unseen.
#
So you know, you have of course been on the show before, but this was back in the days
#
where my episodes were tiny miniatures.
#
I think it was a one hour, nine minute episode.
#
And you were there with your colleague and our good friend, Ruben Abraham.
#
And I'm glad to have you all to myself now for a somewhat more leisurely chat.
#
What have you been reading recently?
#
What's the latest book that took your fancy?
#
So the latest book that took my fancy was actually one of the only books of Murakami
#
that I hadn't read yet, which was Norwegian Wood.
#
And I think the reason, the content aside, I think the reason it was lovely is it was
#
in the midst of what was a hectic and busy year, there's this almost lyrical slowness
#
to the way that he writes.
#
And you're sort of going along this journey with him, you know, and you're not quite sure
#
And then there are these moments of blinding insight that you sort of make you stop and
#
underline, because I'm old school and still read physical books, and underline.
#
And then you're like, oh, that's, that's what this was coming to.
#
And then it goes back along this sort of like winding, winding path, and it almost slows
#
you down in a way that I find incredibly beautiful.
#
Murakami's got a lovely book on which I'll link from the show notes, where I think he's
#
in conversation with someone about what music has in common with writing.
#
And there's a particular passage from that I always give my writing students, because
#
it's about the rhythm of language and what that's like.
#
So when you speak about sort of the slowness, and by the way, before he became a writer,
#
he used to run a jazz club.
#
And actually, that makes so much sense, because there's something that's almost, I use the
#
word lyrical now I go back, but there's that something that's almost musical, not lyrical
#
to the way, you know, the way that he writes, and I'm sure it's that influence.
#
So I will take a digression, because digressions are the key feature of the show, and ask a
#
question about another Murakami, forget Haruki, have you read Ryu Murakami?
#
So Ryu Murakami has written these cult books like In the Miso Soup and Audition, both of
#
which became cult horror films.
#
Yeah, but the first book of his which I read was called Piercing, and Piercing begins,
#
if memory serves me right, I might get minor details wrong, but essentially the beginning
#
this guy wakes up one day in this dark room, and his wife is with him, and his newborn
#
kid is in the crib, and he goes and he gets some big sharp object, I forget what it is,
#
and he stands above the crib, and he realizes that he has an uncontrollable desire to stab
#
And the only way to save his child, because of course he does want to save his child,
#
is to go out and kill someone else.
#
So the rest of the book is about how he's planning for that.
#
And of course, his writing is also beautiful.
#
I think Murakamis have something about them, but one may generalize from a sample size
#
But that got me to thinking about how you are basing a whole book on an unexplainable
#
instinct, and nowhere do you feel the need to explain it.
#
You know, like the Bollywood way would be, you would eventually have a flashback back
#
to his childhood, and you'll figure out a way to explain it.
#
And here there's no way to explain it, you're accepting the messiness of the human condition
#
that we have uncontrollable instincts, and it is what it is, and you don't have to explain
#
it, you just have to deal with them as best you can, though ideally not by killing people.
#
Exactly, this is the person in a moment of time, and it's about the choices they make
#
from here on, and not necessarily justified by where they've been and what they've done.
#
So do you often look at yourself feeling a certain way and think, oh my God, that's a
#
That's the person I built up for myself and my own mind to be.
#
So I think what I've made my peace with, and it took me a while to do that, is that, I
#
mean, this almost sounds silly, but we are not the same person 10 years later, right?
#
And so I think there was a point at which I said, you know, well, how could I not have
#
known this 10 years ago, known this about myself 10 years ago or 15 years ago?
#
But I think what we want, what we think changes, and it's interesting, I think one of the reasons
#
when I was in graduate school, there was a lot of pressure to, well, gentle pressure
#
from my advisor to get into academia, and I think one of the things that I struggled
#
with, and I'm not saying in particular to academia, but one of the things I struggled
#
with was taking a very strong point of view and not being able to evolve and backtrack
#
and change, and at least in my mind, I mean, in my late 20s, so, you know, what did I know?
#
I found that something I just wasn't comfortable with.
#
And then when what I thought and believed and, if not believed, but what I thought and what
#
I understood started to change, at first it was uncomfortable, and now I've actually,
#
now I actually celebrate it, right?
#
I know I'm not the person today that I was 10 years ago, for good and bad, but I think
#
that's just the normal progression of life, we should embrace it and not hold on to positions
#
just because we used to believe them, but actually say, well, life and circumstances
#
There's a great phrase I learned from Pranay Kutasane, he was quoting someone, so I forget
#
who, but I learned it from Pranay, strong opinions weakly held.
#
Yes, I remember hearing it on the episode.
#
And it seems to me that there is something fundamental there in, like, where I am now
#
is like you, I'm possibly less firm about my beliefs in the sense that what I like to
#
say is that I am very rigid about my values when it comes to liberty or freedom or whatever,
#
consent, but I am completely open to being shown a set of facts that changes the way
#
I look at how events unfolded or how something may unfold.
#
I'm completely open to that because the world is complicated and messy and so on, but I'm
#
And one thing I have realized is that many people when they go through life, they adopt
#
a framework that explains the world very neatly to them, but then they stick to it.
#
They don't go through this process of having to constantly sort of evaluate that frame,
#
change it and you could say in different ways, you and I are in the world of ideas where
#
if we want to sort of grow as thinkers, we have to keep examining ourselves.
#
But with most people, that's not the case.
#
And the lazy way out is, you know, the easy-pour version of coffee.
#
So I just, for my listeners, I'm at Pritika Coffee before this using the blue-tokai.
#
Easy-pour, and I explained to her that I'm optimizing for laziness.
#
So earlier I had a French press once and I moved to the AeroPress, which was much easier.
#
And the easy-pour is the easiest thing.
#
So in a similar sense, it is rational for people not to waste cognitive energy on reconsidering
#
their framework all the time.
#
Once they have a framework and everything fits, that's what it is.
#
And it can lead to a kind of easy tribalism.
#
And I wonder if you've, besides the struggle that you mentioned that you had with your
#
own self of overcoming that, is this something you've seen in other people?
#
Is it something that is sort of an occupational hazard because people in public policy will
#
often be trained in a particular way, come at the world with a particular frame and then
#
find out, hey, it's very complicated, it's so messy?
#
So I mean, I've definitely seen it in other people.
#
And I don't judge it because I think there's a certain discomfort in saying, or there's
#
a process of discomfort in saying what I, you know, what I believed 10 years ago, I
#
So I think it's not just public policy.
#
I think it's a human tendency.
#
When I feel lucky in some sense, fairly early on in life, I saw, let's say, you know, complicated
#
situations, but I was forced to see it from different perspectives.
#
And I could see how, you know, two things could be equally true at the same time, just
#
from two different people's perspectives.
#
And I think that gave me a sympathy, just gave me a sense of sympathy.
#
And I often blame it on my mom, who's a psychologist, you know, saying, maybe you, you know, maybe
#
you taught me to see too many things from too many different perspectives.
#
And so I'm not able to have us, you know, like, be almost dogmatic about something,
#
but I've seen it as a gift over time.
#
And I do think it's, a lot of people don't do it because there's a certain discomfort
#
But I also think, particularly in the last 10 years, I've been fortunate to work with
#
and be exposed to, you know, a fantastic set of people that are very, very comfortable
#
with this evolution of thought and have given me the comfort to also evolve with how I think.
#
Let's let's sort of talk about your childhood.
#
You are, of course, a Bombay girl and you grew up here.
#
So tell me a bit about, you know, where in Bombay did you grow up?
#
What was your childhood like?
#
Yes, so I grew up in Bombay.
#
My family is, as with most families in Bombay.
#
And what's so fantastic about cities is not originally from here.
#
So my mom's side of the family is from Amritsar and Lahore.
#
My dad's side of the family is from Karachi, but I moved to Bombay post-pre-partition.
#
I grew up in Bombay, grew up in Kullaba, a rich, interesting neighborhood.
#
And I think, I think Bombay is a lot of the reason that I got interested in cities in
#
And one of the first books I read when I was in school was Rahul Mehrotra and Shardhad
#
Vivedi had this lovely book called Bombay the Cities Within.
#
And I think something about understanding the history and the evolution of cities over
#
And I had no idea what I would do with this interest, but histories just seem to be where
#
you understood history and sociology and economics and politics.
#
I remember soon after reading the book, going to Ballard Estate, and thinking to myself
#
that on this road that I'm standing, there used to be a railroad that went from the port
#
And just the layered richness of cities that we don't sometimes see in our day-to-day
#
lives is something that's always fascinated me.
#
And so yeah, I did high school in Bombay, went to Xavier's for college, and then completely
#
by accident, as most important decisions sometimes happen.
#
A friend of mine was applying to study in the US.
#
I had a lot of free time.
#
I said, sure, let me do this.
#
I wasn't quite sure what I was doing.
#
And so I wrote a whole bunch of applications.
#
I was asking for a full scholarship, so I wasn't quite sure this was going to happen
#
Sent off these applications and went back to college life.
#
And then six months later, had an offer to go to a small women's college in the US called
#
And it was at that point that what I had done actually became real.
#
And I remember actually opening a map and saying, OK, so where is this exactly?
#
And so it was a leap of faith, but one that I'm very glad that I made, because it pushed
#
One of the first papers that I wrote for a psychology class in college, I remember getting
#
a fairly poor grade on it.
#
And the reason at the bottom was, I don't want to know what X by Z thinks.
#
I want to know what you think.
#
And I remember going back to my professor and saying, well, am I allowed to write what
#
And he said, yes, that's the purpose of this paper.
#
And I then proceeded to submit something that was what I thought.
#
And so for many things, I was very grateful for that education.
#
I have friends from all over the world that today trace back to Bryn Mawr.
#
But that's also where I got interested in development economics.
#
So it was very fortunate for that experience.
#
After four years of college, I then moved to Washington, DC, this perhaps typical Indian
#
paranoia with, well, now, what's the practical thing that I do?
#
So my undergraduate degree was in development economics and political science.
#
So it's fortunate to have an advisor in my senior year that got me interested in the
#
debate in the 90s between corruption and liberalization, that if you liberalize your economy, that's
#
And it led me down a path through a very rich literature on different forms of corruption.
#
And that led me to starting to study the East Asian development models.
#
And I think what we know now is there can be huge, there may not be retail-level corruption,
#
but huge kickbacks, but that doesn't come at the cost of growth and economic efficiency.
#
So what I'm curious about at this stage is there sort of comes a moment in every serious
#
scholar's life where when they get into a particular field, they're not super duper
#
interested in it yet, right?
#
They're kind of just, they're in it because of circumstances.
#
As you pointed out, you were in college, you sort of applied for this, et cetera, et cetera.
#
But then there comes a moment where they begin loving the subject and then light bulbs go
#
off and then they become really involved.
#
And I would imagine that that happened with you at sort of two levels.
#
One is when it comes to economics itself, using the economic way of thinking.
#
And the other would be when it comes to thinking about cities.
#
Now, I'll ask about cities later and I'll even ask about economics later.
#
But before that, I'm curious about like when you were in college here, what is sort of
#
If you hadn't applied or if you hadn't gotten through, what was your conception of yourself?
#
What were you thinking of what you would like to do?
#
And you know, is there sort of, was there a natural interest towards, you know, like
#
for cities, you've already mentioned that book had sparked your interest and you sort
#
of had a realization of the richness of cities.
#
But even in terms of economics, a kind of, you know, default beliefs one grows up with,
#
especially in India, are very statist and, you know, very sort of one-sided and ignorant.
#
And then you go out and you're exposed to sort of different kinds of thoughts.
#
And even within, even while studying development economics, I'm guessing that you would have
#
which you no longer believe in, but which you kind of learned then.
#
So take me through your, that internal process.
#
Like is it true that were you always interested in this stuff or did that interest happen
#
and what really made it like come alive for you?
#
Was it just a question of continuing down the path that you happened to be on and you
#
happened to be good at it and you just continue down that path?
#
Or was there a moment that sparks a hunger in you where you're reading books and you're
#
trying to figure stuff out?
#
So I was always interested in economics from high school.
#
And I'm not quite sure where I thought that interest would take me, but I liked it.
#
Maybe, you know, like you said, I had a fantastic teacher in school.
#
So it may have that may have been the sum total of where the interest came from.
#
But I think it was in college that I really began to understand why I found economics
#
And there were two reasons.
#
I studied for my undergraduate degree, I studied development, economics and political economy.
#
Those were my two, my two majors.
#
But fairly early on, I had a wonderful professor, Professor Allen, who got me interested, two
#
professors, Professor Allen and Professor Michael Rock, both that got me interested
#
in development and specifically at the time in the East Asian model of development, but
#
also in this in the corruption and liberalization debate.
#
Right. And so the sort of facile notion that if you liberalize your economy, corruption
#
goes away. We all know that's not what happens.
#
You may do away with some retail level corruption.
#
You know, and you know, Yunyunang's amazing work as well.
#
It's not that growth can't happen alongside corruption, but that led me down.
#
You know, I remember sitting in my dorm room reading Pranab Bhardhan, fantastic scholars
#
at IDS Sussex, and that's what really got me interested in the study of development
#
And then several years later, so I in between for a couple of years, I worked in economic
#
consulting in D.C. and in London, it was interesting, not what I wanted to do.
#
But many years later, when I was thinking of graduate school, I went back to meet Professor
#
Allen and said, look, you know, I'm pretty sure development economics is what I want
#
to do. He knew I had this abiding interest in cities.
#
And he said to me, he said, well, if you're interested in cities and you're interested
#
in development, then cities are where development is going to locate.
#
And so you know, why don't you marry both?
#
And so I did my master's degree at MIT.
#
But the reason that I chose that department was it's not a pure urban planning degree.
#
Given that I was in the International Development Program, and one of the big reasons for going
#
there was Alice Amston, who I was lucky to she had stopped teaching by the time she was
#
she had slowed down her teaching, but I was lucky to work with her.
#
And she was starting to write a book that sadly, you know, I think it became a paper,
#
but she wasn't able to publish the book because she passed away suddenly called I think the
#
working title was A Farewell to Ideology.
#
But what was so fascinating was it was it was breaking down these easy boxes into which
#
we place, you know, the role of state and markets.
#
And I trace it all back to, you know, those two professors who changed so much for me
#
That's like a great title of Farewell to Ideology.
#
And it strikes me that it could also, you know, be a subtitle of a book both of us love
#
Order Without Design by Alain Bartho.
#
And in the first part of the book, he kind of describes what happens where, you know,
#
urban planning meets economics and how that kind of changes everything.
#
And in his case, of course, he was, you know, flexible enough to sort of change his worldview.
#
But one of the things he describes so well and one of the things, you know, people like
#
Jane Jacobs critique so well is the old urban planning mindset where in a top down way you're
#
trying to impose certain kinds of grandiose plans upon cities without even thinking of
#
what are the people there, what is the way in which they organically live and all of
#
And what Bartho does so well and so spectacularly is describe this marriage of economics and
#
urban planning and how you can use the insights of economics for urban planning and vice
#
versa, you know, and then through lived experience, through actually, you know, doing the gritty
#
hard work of working in cities and trying to get stuff together.
#
I mean, there's just so much learning in there.
#
So what was sort of that like for you?
#
Like when you a there is that you're learning economics and you've got that economic toolkit
#
in the mindset there, but then you're going to do city planning.
#
What was that experience like?
#
Like how much did that sort of new modernism school of city planning?
#
How much was that in sway or were there already more nuanced ways of looking at the world
#
You know, so how did you sort of begin to navigate the territory?
#
So and I remember we discussed this on the first time I was on the show.
#
I think my biggest disappointment when I got to graduate school is I hadn't realized
#
because I always saw urban planning or whatever you want to call it as this very rich
#
interdisciplinary subject that should have economics at its core.
#
And I think I was, you know, maybe I should have known better, but I was surprised when I got to
#
graduate school and, you know, we were in the same, the next department architecture.
#
And that's true, you know, for planning schools across the across the world, with the
#
And I think that's a very smart decision, because I think co-locating or being right next to
#
architecture departments reinforces the fact that really it's what you build that matters.
#
But how I got around that was I think what was incredible about the MIT program, apart from the
#
faculty, people like Alice Amstin, Karen Polinsky, Bish Sanyal, my advisor, is that you could
#
construct your own degree.
#
And so the way I got around it was taking enough economics courses, development courses, civil
#
engineering courses, whatever they, you know, allow me to take, and policy courses, right?
#
So you could, so you got a flavor of everything.
#
But I do think, and I see SEPT trying to change that now, that urban economics should be core to
#
the study of cities, because in some sense, the way I see it is that cities are the physical
#
manifestation of markets.
#
There needs to be, you know, like with all markets, there needs to be some amount of
#
regulation, but the regulation can also then strangle too much regulation, which is what,
#
you know, certainly the case in India can eventually strangle the economic life of cities
#
and the economic resilience of cities.
#
So what's wrong with how we think about cities?
#
Like when you speak about how, you know, it's a problem that they text to architecture
#
departments, which is a very interesting sort of subtle way in which, you know, the design
#
of a place can play into, you know, how people think of themselves.
#
But, you know, so is that sort of urban planning mindset, the new modernism, we will, you know,
#
transform the city by building from the inner top down way?
#
Is that something that is still in vogue?
#
How difficult is it to break through?
#
Because I would, I mean, I know at one point that that was the conventional thinking.
#
Has it kind of changed over the years?
#
Is it still something that one has to fight against?
#
And I would imagine that in a place like India, for example, there would be two problems.
#
One is that there would be a lag in changing fashions or changing sort of beliefs, you know,
#
percolating down to India where people would still think in a slightly older way.
#
And two is there would be the danger of isomorphic mimicry, where you look at something that might
#
have worked or is set to work elsewhere in the West and you try to transplant it on an Indian city
#
and it simply doesn't work.
#
Like the spectacular example of that is really there in Berto's book,
#
where he speaks about how in Algeria he had to give building permits.
#
And the French had, of course, colonized it.
#
And there was this regulation which was designed towards getting French style
#
independent townhouses on streets.
#
Whereas the Algerian way, and it seems similar to our way in many places,
#
is that you just had a courtyard in the middle of a lot of, you know, buildings on all four sides
#
and people looking out into the courtyard.
#
So there is a communal life there.
#
But to protect privacy, there are like there's not much happening looking out into the street.
#
And if you just try to sort of transplant one kind of plan onto another kind of culture,
#
it cannot possibly work.
#
And I wonder how much of these two problems that I'm really asking about,
#
like one is a lag in terms of Indian planners learning sort of, you know,
#
evolving as fast as the rest of the world.
#
And the other is just a problem of isomorphic mimicry,
#
where you're force fitting a particular frame or a particular set of solutions
#
that may or may not work elsewhere, but they certainly don't work here.
#
And so this is not quite the example you were saying,
#
but you know, when you said transplant, I remember maybe five or six years ago,
#
I can't remember, there was this proposal to make Kala Ghura,
#
so an area in the fairly central part of Bombay.
#
And I remember thinking to myself,
#
you don't make something Times Square by building tall buildings.
#
Times Square has tall buildings,
#
not that it's a part of New York City that I particularly like,
#
because so many people want to be there, right?
#
And so I think we get the logic backwards very often is we think,
#
you know, I will build something, you said isomorphic mimicry,
#
I will build something that looks like something else
#
without understanding why that place is like that in the first place.
#
On the lag, absolutely.
#
So I don't know how much the new thinking on planning
#
has percolated planning departments and all in India,
#
but even if it has, and it has to some extent,
#
you then run up against what's on the books.
#
And that certainly hasn't changed.
#
And that hasn't changed in the longest time.
#
There are obviously tweaks that are made over time.
#
The Mumbai development plan from, I'm forgetting when,
#
maybe 2014 that ended up getting replaced
#
was actually an attempt to overturn some of the old ways
#
that we did planning, for instance, allowing higher floor space area
#
around transit corridors.
#
But because the concepts of higher building density and so on
#
aren't things that most people for obvious,
#
I mean, completely understandable reasons aren't familiar with.
#
There was a lot of pushback and the plan ended up getting shelved.
#
But yes, there is a lag.
#
So even if there's an awareness that we need to plan differently,
#
you run up against regulation,
#
which hasn't changed for the longest time.
#
And I do think there are many things
#
we're going to have to do differently from the West.
#
So for instance, in a relatively poorer country,
#
you are going to consume land horizontally
#
before you consume it vertically.
#
So our cities are going to spread out, right?
#
And as more people move to cities,
#
all of our cities are going to double, if not triple, their footprint.
#
The way that's going to happen is we're going to spread out horizontally.
#
And then over time, as we get wealthier, we will consume vertically.
#
But to Alain's point, you see this perversion all the time.
#
Because we force the formal market to look a certain way,
#
we end up with a lot of informality, right?
#
So you insist that people have to live in a certain type of structure
#
with two parking spots, which just doesn't suit the income requirements.
#
So it's similar to the Algeria example, which is,
#
I remember what you were saying,
#
you're trying to build these semi-detached French-style suburban homes.
#
But actually, what people want is homes clustered around a courtyard
#
that don't have windows on the outside for reasons of privacy.
#
And Birjya, and just speaking of planning,
#
in one of your papers you wrote about the 1981 Mumbai development plan,
#
which was made where Mumbai had a large textile manufacturing base.
#
And by the time the plan is ratified in 1994,
#
that's completely changed.
#
The textile industry is on the verge of collapse.
#
But the plan is what the plan is,
#
and that kind of leads you nowhere,
#
and long time horizons become a problem.
#
Let's double-click a bit and talk about density,
#
because it's hugely important.
#
And I think most people sort of have this intuition
#
that density is a bad thing.
#
And this is sort of almost an abstract intuition,
#
because in the concrete they are embracing density.
#
They're living in cities, and they're going to markets,
#
and you're not going into an empty field all by yourself,
#
because there's no density, let's party here.
#
And a lot of sort of misconceptions which I get really mad about,
#
I use cities in a thought experiment to talk about them.
#
For example, people will say that India's problem is population.
#
And I'm like saying there's no such thing as overpopulation.
#
Population density is a great thing.
#
The best way to think about this is by asking yourself the question
#
that where through human history have people moved?
#
And the story of human history is a migration from
#
places with less population density,
#
aka villages and towns, to cities,
#
to greater population density,
#
because larger economic networks,
#
and just in every way, culturally, economically,
#
you live a richer life with more opportunities
#
and less discrimination.
#
And that's sort of one way to think about density,
#
but we always think about density in terms of congestion,
#
and et cetera, et cetera.
#
Let's break down various aspects of it,
#
that when you spoke about how we are first horizontal
#
and then we become vertical,
#
I think part of what slows that process down is also regulations.
#
Like I did an episode on FSI, Floor Space Index,
#
which regulates how tall a building can be,
#
and in Mumbai, you're not allowed to be very tall.
#
And I did an episode on this with our friend Alex Tabarrok,
#
and Alex used a memorable phrase
#
that in Mumbai, you have reclaimed the sea,
#
now you must reclaim the sky.
#
And I love that phrase,
#
because there is only so much of the sea,
#
but there is a lot of the sky.
#
So tell me a little bit about the importance of density.
#
Assume that I am someone who is saying that,
#
hey, no, it's too crowded, infrastructure will creak,
#
we can't manage it, we must spread out horizontally.
#
Convince me that density is a good thing.
#
I'm just going to reinforce the point you made
#
on people moving to cities, right?
#
I think all of us that work on cities hear this constantly.
#
There's this refrain at some point,
#
and it's not just an India thing.
#
You've seen it in policy across the world,
#
which is, why don't you just ask people to live in villages?
#
Why don't you make life better for people in villages?
#
And I always want to say, and in some context, you can't say it,
#
well, you move to a city, right?
#
And if we want to move for opportunity,
#
then why are you denying that aspiration to somebody else?
#
And Alan Berto, who I think is both big fans of his,
#
he describes cities as labor markets, right?
#
And I think it's beautifully precise
#
and boils it down to exactly what it is.
#
I mean, it may be more than labor,
#
but the primary motivation is to seek opportunity.
#
And why should we deny that to anybody else?
#
And so that ties to the point about density.
#
So I think very often what we mix is the two concepts that we conflate
#
is the density of people and the density of floor space
#
or the density of buildings, right?
#
So a 20-story building with one person doesn't have density of people,
#
but it has density of floor space.
#
Whereas if you look at any slum settlement,
#
it has a density of people, but not a density of floor space.
#
And we conflate those two things.
#
So when maybe a decade or two post-independence,
#
the thing as people were beginning to move to Bombay,
#
the thinking was if you cap the height of buildings,
#
you will cap the number of people that come.
#
And that's simply not true, right?
#
So you cap the building density,
#
but people are moving for opportunity.
#
And so they will make do with less and less space
#
so that they can access those opportunities, right?
#
And so the way to solve that really is to liberalize the floor space
#
and to say, okay, fine, if there was a building with four floors
#
that used to have 20 people,
#
but now there's 100 people that want to live there,
#
why don't you just liberalize the floor space?
#
Now, when the building redevelops and all of that is a factor of income,
#
how easy and quick it is to redevelop, there's all of those factors.
#
But the point is that you should allow that densification to happen
#
because what we fear about density is we fear crowding.
#
But what you get when you cap building heights is you get crowding,
#
whereas when you liberalize them, you alleviate crowding.
#
And then the associated concern, which I completely understand is,
#
well, then what happens to streets and what happens to pressure on water
#
and what happens to pressure on infrastructure and all of that.
#
And the truth is, yes, there will be an additional strain
#
on what planners call the carrying capacity
#
of the infrastructure that serves the building.
#
But cities have done this through history,
#
which is they augment the carrying capacity.
#
So if you have a road in front of the building
#
that earlier carried bikes and cars, depending on what city you're in,
#
you put in a bus lane because more people can fit in a bus.
#
As a city gets wealthier, you may put in metros.
#
Across the world, you use what are called developer exactions
#
or betterment levies to basically say, well, if you want to build higher,
#
then you pay some amount to the municipality
#
to increase the carrying capacity of the water and infrastructure.
#
So the point is all cities go through this densification process.
#
The question is, you can't control densification of people.
#
What you can do is you can allow for building density.
#
And what's really interesting is during COVID,
#
we ran some of the largest serological surveys in India.
#
And the first one we ran was in July 2020,
#
when we didn't know much about how COVID spread in the first place.
#
And the way we ran it, we ran it in partnership with Anoop Malani,
#
who we both know at the University of Chicago,
#
was in three wards in Bombay.
#
We sampled buildings and slum settlements separately.
#
And what was incredible was you saw that in July 2020,
#
when the BMC was placing anyone that was infected in either in hospital
#
or taking away from the community,
#
87% of people, I think that was the number, had antibodies to COVID.
#
Whereas in apartment buildings, I think it was 12 or 17%.
#
I'm forgetting the number.
#
Which tells you something about from a disease transmission
#
and public health perspective, crowding is what you don't want, right?
#
What you want is actually when you live in a building,
#
you can protect yourself.
#
There's more space from other people.
#
You may have access to, you know, better access to bathrooms.
#
What we are ending up doing by preventing buildings from coming up
#
is forcing a density of people.
#
That from a public health perspective is dangerous
#
because COVID is not the only communicable disease we deal with.
#
It's the same case with TB with a number of other diseases.
#
And so I don't know if I've convinced you
#
that liberalizing FSI is a good thing.
#
And I think it's important how we communicate it to people
#
because then like the Mumbai Development Plan of 2013, 2014,
#
good plans get shelved because people are scared of what will happen.
#
No, I mean, you have convinced me,
#
but part of the reason you've convinced me,
#
and I must honestly say this,
#
is that I was already convinced to begin with.
#
So it is really hard for me to sort of, you know, strip that sort of bias apart.
#
But one thing that I love here is how you've disentangled,
#
you know, the density of floor space and from density of people
#
because you're right that, you know, people worry,
#
especially slick city, slick elite city people like us
#
will, you know, look at the slums and say,
#
we must do something and it's an eyesore.
#
And I, you know, I land at the airport and I can see them.
#
What the hell is this, et cetera, et cetera.
#
But the important thing to know,
#
as I think in a very old episode on slums,
#
Pawan Srinath made this point very well,
#
is that we need slums because they are the entry point to the city.
#
If you're coming from a village or a town to a city in search of opportunity,
#
and the thing to note is all opportunity is a positive sum game.
#
You know, if someone is coming here
#
and they'll use that opportunity to be a driver or a domestic help,
#
it is also benefiting the person on the other side of the bargain.
#
So you want that, where are they to stay?
#
And slums are the only option when you've created
#
this artificial scarcity of land, like Hernando de Soto, for example,
#
you know, uses a phrase, a debt capital.
#
And if I may use it in a way he may not approve of,
#
but it seems to ascribe that every time you're looking at a building,
#
you know, above the top floor, the stuff that hasn't been built,
#
all that in a sense is also debt capital is wasted.
#
You could have something there.
#
And the thing is, if you just did not have FSI regulations,
#
or if they were like other cities have,
#
then you would have higher buildings, you would have less crowding.
#
Importantly, you would have affordable housing,
#
you would have less of a strain on public transport
#
because less people would be, you know, living far away,
#
needing to commute to work.
#
And I think Ale Berto had, I don't know what distance he defined as,
#
you know, I think it's one hour away from work.
#
30 minutes is about, you know,
#
X amount of time is about how much it is feasible for you.
#
And therefore people end up paying more and therefore, you know,
#
jobs have to sort of align with that as well.
#
So what are the political obstacles against something like FSI?
#
Like who would possibly object to it?
#
Because it just seems like a win-win for everyone.
#
It's a win-win for us people because we get affordable housing.
#
It's a win-win for anyone who's in the slums now
#
because, you know, without top-down slum redevelopment schemes,
#
you know, more options open up for them in the long run.
#
And it should be a win-win for builders because they're building more.
#
So where do the obstacles come from?
#
So the win-win for builders is, you know, over time,
#
I don't know how it plays out because when you increase,
#
in some sense, the benefit of constrained housing supplies,
#
you can, you know, charge astronomical prices for formal housing.
#
But I think to your point on slums,
#
you touched on a very important point, which is,
#
you know, we have this obsession with housing for ownership.
#
When reality shows you that when most people move to a city,
#
rental is what works for us.
#
That's actually true across the income spectrum, right?
#
Even if you, as a high-income migrant to a city,
#
when you move to a city, the first thing you do is not to buy a house,
#
And then, of course, you can buy.
#
But it's especially true of lower-income communities, right?
#
And so, while there may be some, you know, ownership in slums,
#
a large part of it is rental housing.
#
And so, you know, I totally agree with that point,
#
which is, you know, slums are the entry point into the city
#
because they provide affordable rental housing.
#
Now, should that be where affordable rental housing is located?
#
We should have a mechanism where there is, you know,
#
better built affordable rental housing,
#
but that's essentially the purpose that slums serve.
#
We did, a couple of years ago at work, a report on affordable housing.
#
And we were very clear to say it wasn't, you know, we didn't call it,
#
we called it making housing affordable, right?
#
Because right now, the way we think about affordable housing is,
#
well, housing is very expensive,
#
so we provide subsidies and all sorts of things.
#
We don't ask the question of why is housing so expensive
#
to provide in the first place?
#
And a lot of the reasons, and so we took, when we did this,
#
we took a life cycle approach to how you build a house, right?
#
So it started with what is the land available
#
to build housing in the first place?
#
And that is constrained by a variety of factors,
#
including some that we'll get into in a bit.
#
Does transport infrastructure exist to open up new parcels of land?
#
How long does it take permissions to get housing?
#
And then, you know, construction costs and all of that
#
are really the sort of the smaller piece of it.
#
What really is, is how expensive it is
#
to build formal sector housing in the first place.
#
On the politics, I think, you know, the politics are complex.
#
I think a lot of people benefit from the way things are today.
#
But I think the other political battle,
#
and we've spoken to enough people in government who get this.
#
But the other political battle is to convince the public
#
that higher FSI is in everyone's interest.
#
And so, you know, we've spoken to a number of people
#
who've said, I understand this.
#
We've tried to put this in development plans,
#
but the outcry is so much
#
that we haven't been able to do anything about it.
#
But is it an outcry from activists
#
or is it an outcry from actual people?
#
Because actual people don't even know what FSI is.
#
I mean, why should they care?
#
So I think actual people, I think, you know,
#
you know, sort of people reading the newspaper,
#
all they see is all these tall buildings
#
that are going to come up, right?
#
So friends have asked me, like,
#
why are you okay with more tall buildings coming up?
#
Our roads can't carry it, right?
#
But the effort to say, well, yes, our roads can't carry it.
#
But actually, when you redevelop, if you set back,
#
if you widen roads over time,
#
you can augment the carrying capacity.
#
I think it's a nuanced explanation that needs to be done.
#
And so it's not just activists,
#
but I think certainly in the case of the Mumbai development plan,
#
there's just a huge outcry for ordinary citizens, right?
#
So you're going to make our quality of life worse
#
instead of realizing that over time,
#
what you're going to do is make quality of life better
#
for a wider number of people.
#
Let's double click on what you said earlier
#
about the land available and the artificial scarcities.
#
And for example, another, you know,
#
bugbear that I have about Bombay is rent control,
#
which is again, policy with the best intentions,
#
absolutely terrible outcomes.
#
And for listeners who may not have heard of it,
#
what rent control basically does is that
#
the government decided that rents are too expensive.
#
So they freeze rents at a particular point.
#
And that basically means that, for example,
#
you have people in South Bombay or Marine Drive
#
who are paying 70 rupees a month still,
#
because that's where the rent has been frozen.
#
And the result of that is they are never going to move out
#
because 70 rupees a month or whatever it is.
#
But what that does is that the owner of that apartment
#
then has zero incentive to look after it,
#
to do anything with it,
#
to maybe redevelop it in different ways or whatever.
#
They don't have power over their property anymore.
#
That power is shifted to the rental person,
#
who is after all a rental person.
#
So they are also not too incentivized.
#
And you have tons of sort of land in Mumbai,
#
which is facing exactly that problem.
#
And this is classically what the sort of would call debt capital.
#
The owner can't, for example, take out a mortgage
#
or take out a loan on the basis of this property,
#
because its real value is negligible compared to
#
what it would be in an open marketplace.
#
And again, I think New York had a problem with it
#
after the Second World War,
#
and it led to the same kind of disastrous situation.
#
And I believe it's no longer there.
#
But there's still a few rent-controlled apartments,
#
but it's much less than it used to be.
#
And over here, that's another,
#
and I'm guessing that's one of the areas of scarcity,
#
and the other would be just a lot of public land
#
owned by the government,
#
which is really doing nothing with.
#
So tell me a bit more about these sort of artificial scarcities.
#
So there's a number of them.
#
So I think when you walk around Bombay,
#
we keep saying Bombay is short on land.
#
It is not short on land.
#
You know, whether it's the Eastern Waterfront
#
or the mill land that has now been redeveloped
#
or large parts of the city,
#
it's largely underutilized land.
#
Now, some of that is what you said,
#
which is there's a lot of public land
#
that is being suboptimally used.
#
So to go back to, I think,
#
something we talked about the Mumbai Development Plan of 1981,
#
I think part of the problem with master planning
#
is we say, I'm going to know 20 years down the line
#
what the city needs, right?
#
And so a good example is there's a plot
#
close to my apartment building
#
that was zoned for a telephone exchange, right?
#
And that may have been done 20 years ago.
#
Today, we don't actually need telephone exchanges, right?
#
So there's this large plot of land
#
that's completely suboptimally used,
#
and it is in government hands.
#
Some of it sits with the state,
#
some sits with the center,
#
much less with municipal governments,
#
And so Alan talks about this a lot in his book.
#
When you destroy price in a land market,
#
which is what you do with government ownership,
#
that has very perverse outcomes.
#
But the really interesting aspect of underutilized land
#
that not many people know,
#
and this is Vimal Patel's work,
#
is how our building regulations force us
#
to use a very small piece of a larger parcel of land.
#
so if you take either lower Perel in Mumbai
#
so the newer financial district
#
and the old financial district,
#
and if you look at the planning regulations,
#
if you have a plot of land
#
that's 100 square meters, right, as an example,
#
you are required to set back from the street.
#
So, okay, sorry, let me backtrack a little bit.
#
Best practice land utilization across the world
#
is 40% of your land should be in streets and open spaces,
#
and 60% of your land should be in building footprints, right?
#
So building footprint is basically
#
the land beneath your building.
#
But we have a perversion in India,
#
which is you've got a small amount in streets.
#
So in lower Perel, it's maybe 12%.
#
In Nariman Point, maybe it's 20%.
#
And then with the plot that you have left,
#
you have to set back from the compound wall.
#
So what you end up with is on a 100 square meter plot,
#
you use maybe 25% of it for your actual building,
#
and then you're swimming in space around your building.
#
And now, you know, we have gone back
#
and justified the use of the setback to say,
#
oh, you need it for parking,
#
and you need it for storage,
#
and you need it for all sorts of things.
#
And so what you get is,
#
I think something like 50% of Bombay's land,
#
45% to 50% of Bombay's land is locked up
#
in these small parcels that we now call compounds.
#
And what we don't realize,
#
at the individual plot level,
#
well, I have all this space around my building.
#
But when you add up all that wasted space across the city,
#
it's when you realize how much land you're wasting.
#
And when you've got very little land under buildings,
#
you'll get expensive housing
#
and expensive commercial real estate.
#
And when you've got very little land in streets,
#
And so really what it is,
#
fixing the allocation of land between those two uses
#
and not frittering it away
#
in all of these other suboptimal uses.
#
It's actually startling to know that,
#
it's startling to think of
#
how tiny a fraction of the land in Mumbai we actually use
#
because there is land above us that is wasted,
#
and there is land all around our buildings,
#
And in some cases, yes, you want parks
#
and you want all of those things,
#
but you can easily have all of those things
#
without these kinds of regulations
#
around each individual building,
#
which kind of constrain you in this way.
#
And I'm reminded of, you know,
#
an insight I got from Timur Kurran
#
in the episode I did with him,
#
where he, you know, spoke about the Middle East.
#
And one of the sort of the things that held them back
#
and economically over the centuries,
#
is what seemed to be a great innovation,
#
the voluntary private provision of public goods.
#
And therefore, to you and me,
#
this would seem like miraculous.
#
back in the 11th, 12th centuries and all that,
#
the Sultan would tell rich people,
#
look, I'm not going to tax you,
#
but you leave your wealth in something called a VAC,
#
which is a public institution,
#
which will have your money devoted
#
to a particular purpose.
#
but over the centuries where it gets screwed up is
#
and those purposes become redundant.
#
For example, there's a caravan sarai on the Silk Route,
#
which when the Silk Route is no longer being used,
#
it's wasted and there's dead money tied up there.
#
And a similar, another example,
#
like you spoke of the telephone exchange,
#
and I immediately thought of this particular VAC
#
which was set up to build water fountains,
#
like X number of water fountains every year.
#
But when 18th, 19th century,
#
but the capital is tied up there.
#
And it seems to me that what the state is,
#
and I'm thinking aloud here,
#
is one giant outdated VACF,
#
that you have a lot of capital tied up
#
in all of this bullshit,
#
all of this land that isn't being used,
#
telegraph offices perhaps for all you know.
#
And the main reason for that to me,
#
and I'm thinking aloud again from my bias,
#
is that the balance between the state and society,
#
that I'd rather see most of this capital with the society,
#
and then you have markets allocating the capital
#
but instead they are tied up with this,
#
and they are tied up with that,
#
and it is just sort of a default way of thinking.
#
Yeah, and I think what we found is that
#
certainly most state governments themselves
#
don't have a handle on,
#
between departments and so on,
#
what land that they actually hold.
#
And so if you look at the land
#
that Indian Railways has in Bombay for instance,
#
if you look at the land that most departments have,
#
I don't know that even the revenue department
#
has a clear handle on what all of that is.
#
And look, just freeing up some of that land
#
could raise a huge amount of capital,
#
whether it's to build infrastructure,
#
to provide services, whatever it is,
#
but I don't think that information exists.
#
Tell me also about how we think of public transport,
#
because part of what densification
#
in terms of just densification of floor space does,
#
is that there are more people
#
who can get affordable housing nearer the city center
#
and the pressure on public transport is less,
#
less need for et cetera, et cetera.
#
What have you sort of learned about public transport?
#
Firstly, how it's evolved across the world,
#
because you pointed out that in a lot of the West,
#
cities have gone through this process of evolution,
#
you reclaim the sky bit by bit as it were,
#
and the infrastructure keeps up.
#
It is not as if everything collapses.
#
The infrastructure keeps up,
#
it does find the transport system kind of falls into place.
#
How should we think about the transport system?
#
What are the pressures that are about to bear
#
on the transport system because of the way things are?
#
And if it was a little bit different,
#
if you had more densification as we showed and so on,
#
And are our priorities sort of misaligned
#
to begin with at this moment?
#
So if you go back to what we were talking about earlier,
#
which is that we move to cities for opportunity,
#
then the two things that matter are housing and transport, right?
#
And so, you know, place to live, you know,
#
so we always say don't think of housing as an asset for ownership,
#
but it is a means to access opportunity, right?
#
Which means it doesn't matter if it's rental,
#
it doesn't matter what it is,
#
it's your weight, it's your foothold in the city.
#
And then the equally important piece of that is transport.
#
So whether it's that it's a walkable city
#
so that you can walk to opportunities,
#
whether it is a, you know, bus, metro,
#
whatever the form of public transport,
#
transport becomes incredibly important.
#
So in 2014, in partnership with New York University,
#
we set up one of the first geospatial labs in India
#
at Pillay College in Panvel,
#
which, and we'll get into this diversion,
#
but also shows me how transformative it can be
#
when we invest in Indian institutions.
#
So what we were saying is, look, by official definitions,
#
But if we look around, we know that's objectively not true.
#
Now, you know, what that cutoff should be in some sense,
#
you know, there's a host of different definitions
#
So we said, let's not get into that.
#
Let's just look at what does built-up area
#
look like from the sky.
#
And one of my favorite maps is,
#
I mean, I wish I could show it,
#
is you see that the area
#
under municipal administration has not changed, right?
#
And that's entirely dense.
#
But then what you see is,
#
you see this much larger built-up area
#
spreading north, south, west,
#
all spilling over municipal boundaries.
#
That, to my mind, is the economic city, right?
#
That's the real economic unit.
#
You may manage part of it with the municipality,
#
but the real economic unit is much larger.
#
Now, what tends to happen is,
#
a municipality has a mandate, for instance,
#
to build 16-meter roads, 12-meter roads, whatever it is.
#
It has a mandate to provide public transport,
#
though most Indian cities don't yet provide
#
public transport in the manner in which they should.
#
But because the surrounding areas
#
are still governed as rural,
#
you get three-meter roads, four-meter roads,
#
and no mandate to provide public services.
#
Now, if you are someone who lives within this economic unit,
#
but in the part that's governed as rural,
#
and have to work in the municipal part of the city,
#
you essentially have to traverse three- and four-meter roads
#
with no public transport
#
before you can connect to a public transport system.
#
And so what that does for efficiency
#
and economic productivity is dismal, right?
#
And so I think we should think of investments
#
in public transports as investments in productivity.
#
I mean, a simple heuristic to use is,
#
I was in Bangalore till last night.
#
If you have to be in two places in the city during the day,
#
that's as much as you can do.
#
But in any city with good public transport,
#
you actually can be in 10 different locations
#
and just move quickly within an area.
#
About two years ago, so as an organization,
#
we've worked on urbanization for over 10 years,
#
but we never actually looked at climate very closely.
#
But increasingly, we began to see that
#
to meet national emissions targets.
#
So we talked about productivity and growth,
#
but equally on the emissions side.
#
We have to engage with public transport in cities, right?
#
So the way we frame it is,
#
four pathways to decarbonization run directly through cities.
#
So it's the choice of public transport systems.
#
It's urban energy systems.
#
It is construction, and then it's urban form.
#
So if we continue to build these sprawling cities
#
that are poorly serviced by public transport,
#
where you need to take intermediary measures
#
intermediate public transport before you connect
#
to a public transport system,
#
we're essentially locking ourselves
#
into a very high emissions future.
#
And so, yes, I think public transport,
#
we should think purely as an investment
#
in productivity and efficiency.
#
And I'm guessing that sort of the climate change angle
#
is an additional angle to make what we already want
#
more sellable, isn't it?
#
Because I mean, everything that you mentioned there
#
is stuff that we want for its own sake.
#
But somehow, you know, growth and productivity
#
doesn't have the same resonance as climate.
#
And so it's interesting.
#
A lot of the outcomes that we care about,
#
whether it's productivity or whether it's the, you know,
#
the more sellable ones like climate or air pollution
#
for that matter, which is sellable for the right reason.
#
If you trace back the roots,
#
a lot of them actually have their roots in poor planning.
#
But I think the problem is that such few people
#
understand the basic principles of planning
#
I wouldn't if I hadn't gone to planning school,
#
that we fail to see where the problem really sits.
#
And so we put band-aid solutions in place.
#
You've mentioned, and in fact, in our last episode,
#
we spoke at length about how it's not 31% or 26% or whatever.
#
It's way more than 50% of India, which is urban
#
and it's not being defined that way.
#
And you spoke eloquently about the implications of that,
#
that if you look at the implications of that
#
and the people who live in these economic cities,
#
as you put it, which are not official cities,
#
you know, with ratified and triplicated by the government.
#
But here's my question.
#
When you know that India is urbanizing,
#
as a world is urbanizing,
#
so when you know that India is urbanizing,
#
how does one do planning for that?
#
Because the danger is that when I look at the kind of planning
#
that has already happened in the cities,
#
it seems to me that further planning is actually a disaster.
#
Better to let things grow organically
#
because a lot of the existing planning
#
is based on the wrong first principles, you know,
#
which is why our buildings are short, our FSI is messed up.
#
There is so much land that is wasted, you know,
#
for good intentions, but achieving the opposite outcome
#
and kind of easy to fix.
#
So in that situation, when you think about that,
#
okay, Bombay is X today in terms of area,
#
tomorrow is going to be 1.5X, then it's going to be 2X,
#
then it's eventually going to include Pune.
#
So too bad, Pune people, you will one day be part of us.
#
So in that case, how does one plan for something like that?
#
Like, how does one plan in terms of public transport?
#
Because planning in terms of public transport
#
would also depend on knowing what the shape of the city will be.
#
The shape of the city depends on what kind of regulations there are.
#
Are you allowing vertical growth?
#
You know, so take me through, for example,
#
I mean, the larger question I'm asking here is this,
#
that a lot of what has gone wrong with our planning
#
is based, I think, on a set of fallacious assumptions
#
So when you come at it in a different way,
#
what are the first principles that you hold dear to your heart?
#
Like one you've already mentioned,
#
that think of a city as a labor market,
#
that when people move to a city,
#
they're not taking a house for somewhere to live.
#
They're taking it to have opportunity accessible to them.
#
And that's a really useful frame
#
and a great first principle to look at.
#
So what are sort of your first principles
#
through which your framework arises?
#
The core principle really is don't pretend to know the future.
#
And I think so much of what planning gets wrong
#
is pretending to think that we're going to know
#
what anything looks like 20 years from now.
#
And so I wouldn't say that we shouldn't plan.
#
We have to plan, but we have to plan differently.
#
And so every city, pretty much every city in India,
#
maybe barring the metros,
#
is going to double if not triple its footprint.
#
And it should double and triple its footprint.
#
New cities are going to develop.
#
I think the problem is that
#
because of the master planning approach,
#
we have gone back to go back to the telephone exchange examples.
#
We do very prescriptive planning.
#
So we do too much, too late.
#
And, you know, there's enough research to show
#
that we force people to violate the law
#
by putting in place laws that don't make sense in the first place.
#
And so I think we've mentioned this
#
on the previous version of the show,
#
which is the 1811 Commissioner's Plan for New York.
#
And so in 1811, it was a thought experiment really to say,
#
you know, this is when New York was concentrated.
#
You know, at the tip of what we now know as New York City
#
is if the city grows over time, what do we do about it?
#
And so all it did was put in place a grid
#
that reserved the rights of way to the grid, right?
#
So at the time there were fields and there were homes
#
and there were all sorts of things.
#
And they said, that's fine, stay exactly as you are.
#
As the city grows, here is where the roads are going to be.
#
And here's how we're going to reorganize the plots.
#
Though I think at that time they didn't reorganize the plots,
#
which is actually what Ahmedabad has done very well.
#
They appropriated that land.
#
But what that means is the right way to do planning
#
is to say if the city grows in any different direction, right?
#
So some cities are constrained by geography,
#
but others could grow north, west, southeast,
#
depending on the pull of other economic factors.
#
Put in place a basic grid that reserves the rights of way.
#
On that grid, you can then build roads.
#
You can build public transport below it.
#
You can build the carrying capacity that we talked about.
#
And then divide the remaining land into plots
#
that the market can use.
#
And then you can reserve some parcels of land
#
for social amenities, but don't be overly prescriptive.
#
And so it's actually very, very important that we plan
#
because we've already left it, I mean,
#
a lot of informal urbanization has happened
#
That's going to be very difficult and expensive to retrofit.
#
But when we do planning, we have to do it the right way.
#
So can you sort of elaborate on that by talking about,
#
for example, how should we plan public transport?
#
Because one view, when you look at American suburbia
#
and it was great for cars, et cetera, et cetera.
#
And there's another view that you just,
#
you know, you build great metros, you do away with cars.
#
You'll also get decarbonization, which is now such a buzzword,
#
So how does one sort of think about that?
#
If I'm thinking of Mumbai expanding to the places
#
which are now between Mumbai and Pune,
#
Karjat one day becoming a suburb, for example,
#
then how does one plan for that in terms of public transport?
#
Does one just leave it alone and say,
#
okay, we've got the basic roads in place
#
and then we will adapt and we will not try to think too far ahead?
#
Or do you go the whole sort of New York grid way
#
and try to, you know, look at it like that?
#
Like in Bombay, for example, there's been this perennial thing
#
that this metro has been built
#
and whatever of the metro is up is mind-blowing.
#
You know, when you want to go abroad, you won't go to the airport.
#
You'll just roam around in the metro.
#
You'll get that feeling.
#
So I'm kind of cool with that.
#
But for the last three years or so,
#
they were building all parts of the metro simultaneously
#
and everything was dug up
#
and just vehicular traffic was a nightmare.
#
And you begin to wonder of the trade-offs, you know.
#
There are trade-offs between vehicular traffic on the roads
#
and, you know, other forms of transport.
#
There are sort of trade-offs between building for the future,
#
which might inconvenience the present.
#
And the problem with building for the future is that
#
the future will not be what you expect it to be either.
#
So how does one think of, you know, public transport?
#
Because public transport will also have to be dependent
#
An urban area which is allowed to build vertically
#
and is full of high-rises
#
will demand a very different kind of attention
#
than a public area which is completely flat
#
and sprawling for miles.
#
So how do you think about that?
#
So I think we discussed this.
#
Both you and I are very excited about the new metro lines as well.
#
So I'm less concerned with the short-term inconveniences.
#
I think there are ways to manage it
#
and I think the metro has done a reasonably good job.
#
I mean, of course, there are multiple projects
#
that are happening at the same time.
#
But in the long term, the thing to do is then allow
#
densification along transit corridors.
#
So when we did this satellite work,
#
what we noticed is that when you look at the patterns
#
of built-up growth, right?
#
Now, it doesn't matter if it's rural or urban.
#
This is just built up and built up that you can see from the sky.
#
Built-up area growth follows transport.
#
Now, in most cases, because we were looking at this
#
from 74 to now, that transport infrastructure is roads.
#
So go one step further and say, even when you build a road,
#
plan for the development that's going to happen
#
to the left or right of that, right?
#
Because connectivity is what matters.
#
So the Mumbai-Nagpur Expressway,
#
plan that development is going to happen to the left and right.
#
And then the simple way to do it is the grid, right?
#
Here are the rights of way for roads.
#
Here are the plots within that.
#
Whether it happens or not, you preserve the rights of way
#
on paper and then hopefully enforce those rights of way as well.
#
There are multiple ways.
#
So if you look at Hong Kong, which has limited land,
#
it uses investments in public transport to shape the way the city grows.
#
Now, it's a different construct.
#
Land is owned by the city.
#
But it essentially opens up new parcels of land
#
and says the city can grow in this direction.
#
In a city like Bombay, a lot of the growth has already happened.
#
And so then what becomes important is designing the metro system
#
in a way that creates points of interchange and intersection.
#
So in some sense, metro systems that reinforce linear road networks
#
or just allow you to – we were talking about the bi-metro earlier, right?
#
That just allow you to travel long distances in a short period of time
#
have some utility, but not as much as metro systems
#
that create dense nodes within the city.
#
And then along those nodes, you can essentially build higher buildings.
#
So I went to Hong Kong when I was in planning school.
#
The most expensive housing sometimes is built on top of the metro station,
#
because that is the best connectivity.
#
On your walk to the metro station, there's enough commercial space
#
that you can do your grocery shopping,
#
you can do whatever you want on your way to and from work.
#
And I think the main point of transit systems should be to say,
#
how do I make it most efficient for people to travel within the city?
#
Here's another question.
#
You know, you mentioned a grid.
#
And grids are, of course, for people of the planning mindset
#
or the engineering mindset, really attractive.
#
Ki grid banayenge, we'll fit everything in the grid,
#
and if it doesn't fit, we don't want it, and etc., etc.
#
One of my favorite books, and again, a recommendation for my listeners
#
who have recommended it often before, is Robert Caro's great book,
#
The Power Broker, about Robert Moses and the building of New York City,
#
which I think was an 800 or 900,000 word book,
#
of which, because it was more than a million words,
#
he had to omit, I think, 120,000 words, which were about Jane Jacobs.
#
And to me, that's a tragedy, you know,
#
it's a book length section on Jane Jacobs just excised cruelly.
#
And Jacobs is, of course, you know, one of our heroes.
#
And I sort of think about the trade-off there,
#
where Moses' plan was that I'm planning for New York,
#
as it will be 50 years from now, and essentially,
#
and he lays around the grid, and essentially,
#
all the sort of the flyovers and all the great roads that exist today
#
are probably built by him, but he was an unelected official,
#
just maneuvering power in extremely creative ways.
#
And Jacobs' whole thing was like,
#
no, you cannot just build a random flyover over a neighborhood,
#
because then darkness comes on that neighborhood,
#
the social and cultural life changes, cities evolve in a particular way,
#
you have to put the people first.
#
And there is a tension between these two ways of thinking.
#
And I would imagine that there is also then
#
sort of a similar trade-off which a state has to make,
#
where I think our state has got it completely wrong,
#
which is a trade-off between building and enabling.
#
Do you say that I will build what has to be built,
#
and not necessarily build, build myself,
#
but through my regulations force a particular kind of structure?
#
Or do I simply enable, do I step back and be an enabling mechanism,
#
and do I let people as they grow, as cities grow organically,
#
kind of figure out what to do and how to do it?
#
So tell me a little bit about, you know,
#
how you think about this Moses versus Jacob's battle,
#
which is, you know, fiercely ideological,
#
what are the nuances there you would like to bring to our attention?
#
How does that inform your thinking?
#
They are in some sense opposing views,
#
but I think they're also complementary.
#
And I think the magic lies in the complementarity of these.
#
So you need some investments to be made at the city level, right?
#
So you need large infrastructure projects
#
and not neighborhood level decisions, right?
#
Because that perspective, we talked about the wasted land, right?
#
So when you look at it from the perspective of the neighborhood,
#
what I'm calling wasted land may be,
#
well, we love our compound walls and we love all of that.
#
But at the city level, it makes no sense.
#
And so you need that city level thinking,
#
and then you need the neighborhood level thinking.
#
So one shouldn't, the tensions between them,
#
but it shouldn't be either or, right?
#
I didn't know that Jane Jacobs section got eliminated from the book,
#
but both are extremely important, right?
#
So if you don't have the city-wide public transport,
#
the city is not going to function in an integrated manner.
#
But then at the neighborhood level,
#
you need to have more local level decisions
#
about what the appropriate level of density is,
#
what that fabric looks like, and also to the grid.
#
I mean, grids don't have to be large, impersonal grid.
#
So an interesting comparison is, you know,
#
to anyone who's familiar with DC versus New York, right?
#
The New York grid, just because the blocks are smaller
#
and there's, you know, maybe more commercial street,
#
you know, more commercial space and more activity,
#
is actually allows for a much more,
#
and because public transport is so good,
#
and the stops are so frequent,
#
allows for a still a very dense and rich social fabric,
#
whereas Washington DC blocks tend to be,
#
because they're a bit longer,
#
there's more distance between the metro stops, more spread.
#
So the grid also depends on how, you know,
#
big or small your grid is.
#
Many years ago, we've been in Rajasthan for meetings,
#
and, you know, we were having this conversation
#
about, you know, planning along a grid and so on,
#
and our meeting got done early,
#
and so we had time, so it was a couple of us colleagues.
#
So we went to the old city of Jaipur,
#
and we felt really stupid,
#
because everything we had just presented as this,
#
actually played out in the old city of Jaipur.
#
So it is laid out on a grid.
#
There are major arterial roads,
#
there are minor arterial roads,
#
there is mixed commercial and residential space.
#
So it leads me to think.
#
And did it evolve on its own that way?
#
So this goes back to the point that you do need planning,
#
because these things don't evolve locally, right?
#
You need that, it's like the banks of a river, right?
#
So you need that, or I call it the bones of the city.
#
So you need that, and then you can allow uses to evolve,
#
density to evolve, all of that.
#
But you need to secure the bones first.
#
But just to say, I mean, grids can be as large and impersonal
#
and as, you know, sort of small and dense as we'd like them to be.
#
It's just a good way to organize space and people.
#
So on that note, let's take a quick commercial break.
#
And on the other side of the break, let's talk more.
#
There was a time when Pune used to be called the Oxford of the East.
#
It was a hub of social movements, of educational institutions,
#
of intellectual ferment.
#
But since the seat of government is in Delhi,
#
all the policy making happens there.
#
This episode is sponsored by the Pune Public Policy Festival.
#
The Pune Public Policy Festival is an important step
#
towards re-establishing the city and the center of intellectual discourse.
#
On the 19th and 20th of January 2024,
#
Pune's brightest experts of business and policy
#
will interact with some of the most eminent economists
#
and thinkers of the country.
#
This particular event is about the trade-offs
#
that India will face in the next decade.
#
Trade-offs between growth and equality,
#
development and environment,
#
convenience in technology and privacy.
#
Professionals and bureaucrats, academics and students,
#
insiders and outside experts will gather together
#
to discuss the shaping of the world.
#
For more details and to register,
#
head on over to www.pppf.in.
#
This will also be linked from the show notes.
#
The Pune Public Policy Festival 2024,
#
a historic city building towards a brave new world.
#
Welcome back to The Scene on the On Scene.
#
I'm still with Pritika Hingorani
#
and we are discussing cities and her life and culture
#
and so on and so forth.
#
And so a question I was going to ask before,
#
you know, the break came upon us.
#
Just following on from what you were saying is about,
#
you know, we've discussed about the follies of bad planning
#
and the reason not to kind of take the future for granted
#
because you don't know what it's going to be like.
#
And, you know, you have to plan,
#
but you want to maintain the balance
#
where you sort of don't go too far.
#
Give me a sense of how other cities throughout history
#
have kind of evolved in the past
#
and the directions it tend to take.
#
Because I guess there would be,
#
you'd have a cross section where there would be cities
#
which have been planned decently for a long time
#
and the cities which have just grown organically
#
and all the trade-offs that are involved
#
and the lessons we can learn from those.
#
So give me a sense of that
#
because when I think of Indian cities,
#
it seems to me that it would largely be unplanned
#
and sort of just organic
#
and any planning would possibly not result in great consequences.
#
And when I try to sort of look ahead,
#
what is a way a city naturally evolves and spreads out?
#
How does it happen left to itself
#
without anyone getting in the way?
#
So as a starting point,
#
I'd say, you know, all good cities are planned,
#
but I think what matters is how they're planned, right?
#
So we've talked a fair bit about overly restrictive planning,
#
And I think overly restrictive planning is the problem
#
and just as much no planning is a problem as well.
#
So you just have to look at,
#
you just have to look at what we call peri-urban areas
#
or the outskirts of any city
#
to see what no planning looks like, right?
#
So you don't get regular roads,
#
you don't get open space,
#
you don't get all of that.
#
So if I can digress a bit,
#
we talked a bit about the geospatial lab
#
that we had set up at Pillai College
#
and essentially what we were doing was we were looking at,
#
so Sully Angel at NYU had done this very important work
#
on how the footprint of cities have grown over time.
#
And then the second question that he was asking is,
#
so that was just the quantity of urban growth,
#
but what happens to the quality of urban growth
#
And so the Indian context is a really good illustration
#
because we have frozen municipal boundaries
#
so that all urban growth that happens
#
outside of municipal boundaries is essentially unplanned.
#
You actually get a very good illustration
#
of the question you asked,
#
which is what happens when there's no planning?
#
And I think the outcomes
#
when there's no planning are equally bad.
#
And so we looked specifically at parameters
#
like average road width, access to open space,
#
how formally or informally laid out
#
different plots of land are,
#
and the outcomes are pretty poor, right?
#
So you get narrow roads, it's hard to navigate.
#
Most importantly, you don't get basic infrastructure, right?
#
So I think the trick really is good planning.
#
And good planning goes back to what we talked about,
#
which is the banks of the river, right?
#
Can you reserve the rights of way?
#
Can you reserve, do the 60-40 split?
#
Make sure you've got enough land that can be built on
#
so you get built up area density,
#
enough land for people to move and public life to happen.
#
So that's parks, squares, roads, streets, and all of that.
#
And that should be the essence of planning.
#
And so to the question of how cities have evolved over time,
#
and over the break, we were talking about
#
one of my favorite books,
#
which traces the history of Islamic cities
#
from the seventh century to the present day.
#
So it starts in Mecca, Medina, goes to Damascus,
#
goes to Baghdad, on to Cairo, ends up in Dubai.
#
Good cities were always planned.
#
I think what we're struggling with today is as cities expand,
#
and Chandigarh is a great example,
#
we fail to plan for that expansion.
#
And so then you get the chaos around what is a planned core.
#
And so if you look at, I mean, if you look at,
#
I keep going back to Mumbai because that's what I know best,
#
but if you look at the area around Fort, for instance,
#
it was planned decades and decades ago,
#
but it has actually managed to hold up
#
despite a huge increase in the density of people,
#
precisely because it has that 60-40 split.
#
So you've got 60% of land in buildings,
#
40% of land in streets.
#
It's interesting because if you look at the ground floor
#
of buildings in Fort, the ground floor is recessed,
#
and you get this covered walkway.
#
And so I think the trick really is all cities over time
#
need a modicum of planning,
#
and it's to do this sort of getting these basics right
#
that's the most important.
#
There's a great science fiction crime novel
#
by China Meevil called The City and the City.
#
So it's basically about two cities
#
which exist simultaneously in the same space,
#
and each city is invisible to people from the other city,
#
even though they're literally occupying the same space.
#
And eventually I think the plot of the book
#
is something to the effect of a guy in one city
#
has to go into the other city to solve a murder,
#
and that's what it's all about.
#
But I find it metaphorically extremely useful.
#
And when you talk of the city and the city,
#
you can of course bring in many dimensions
#
of the scene and the unseen,
#
but you mentioned Chandigarh, the city of my birth.
#
And I'm thinking of that
#
because I went there like a couple of years back
#
in a sense to say goodbye to the city.
#
My father had passed away,
#
we were selling off his house, giving away things.
#
And I realized that, okay, every ideological bone in my brain,
#
if such a phrase can be used,
#
ideological bone in my brain is wrong at multiple levels,
#
but every part of me rebels against the concept
#
of a city like that, you know, centrally planned,
#
built without consideration
#
to what the people may want, et cetera, et cetera.
#
But as a visitor, it is a lovely city
#
because the roads are wide
#
and there isn't too much density of people, as it were.
#
Crowding is not an issue, the roads are wide.
#
There are parks and gardens everywhere and all of that.
#
And to someone who can look at the positive aspect of it,
#
I would say that there is another city right here,
#
right now, which you're not looking at.
#
And that is a counterfactual city.
#
What might have arisen here
#
had you just not done all this planning
#
and allowed the city to flourish.
#
Like for me, the sort of cities I like
#
are really cities that are dense
#
where there's a diversity of people.
#
There's a tremendous amount of commerce happening.
#
There's intermingling happening.
#
Something which Jane Jacobs describes so well in her book.
#
For example, she talks about this one particular neighborhood
#
which all the elites want to redevelop
#
because it's slummy and it's not planned
#
and it's all over the place.
#
and she finds it is the most amazing part of the city.
#
Everybody is super happy living there
#
and there is so much action.
#
And yet from the outside,
#
it is an epitome of what has gone wrong.
#
So I think that with the Chandigarh that there is right now,
#
with these beautiful open spaces and wide roads,
#
there is another Chandigarh that is not there,
#
which Le Corbusier had nothing to do with.
#
And there is no God and he doesn't have a soul.
#
So that's also, I'm just venting here.
#
And which is also a beautiful city.
#
And a lot of the beauty of the city
#
comes not from necessarily the streets free of people,
#
but from the interactions and the dynamism
#
and the creativity and the commerce that is happening.
#
And I feel that this is true of every city.
#
You could make a case about a counterfactual Mumbai
#
or a counterfactual Mumbai where we do X instead of Y.
#
We privilege one kind of public transport
#
maybe over the other, et cetera, et cetera.
#
So does it happen to you with cities that you know,
#
that you manage to look past the everyday
#
and what has been normalized in your mind
#
and you can also see the counterfactuals?
#
And if so, then how does one sort of communicate that?
#
Like without rent control,
#
marine drive would probably look really different
#
because the incentives of the people
#
who own all that debt capital
#
and all those buildings would be very different.
#
You know, they might have rebuilt them
#
and done completely different things and all of that.
#
So much as there is an old world charm
#
about driving through marine drive
#
and the old architecture all around you,
#
you know, we don't see the city that is unseen to us.
#
And it's interesting in some ways
#
the counterfactual to Chandigarh is Mali.
#
Because, and I think why, partly why,
#
and I don't know Chandigarh as well as you,
#
but partly why Chandigarh has been successful
#
in shutting people out,
#
which is what say Bombay or any city
#
that tried to cap FSI do,
#
is a lot of them are individual homes, right?
#
So whereas in Bombay, if there were apartments,
#
more and more people can crowd into apartments.
#
That is harder to do in single-family homes.
#
I mean, you can have friends and relatives
#
that want to work in Chandigarh,
#
but that's perhaps where it stops, right?
#
Like a PG or something like that.
#
the dynamism that Chandigarh loses,
#
is everyone that may want to come to a city doesn't.
#
But then the other thing
#
that also attracts people to a city
#
is the economic base of a city, right?
#
And in government towns and government cities,
#
that economic base in some sense,
#
the opportunities are limited
#
by the number of jobs that there are, right?
#
So any vibrant economic hub
#
ends up getting more crowding.
#
Chandigarh, both because of the economic base
#
and because there's a lot of single-family homes,
#
you know, sort of has retained its character.
#
And there's no question that it is...
#
So I think because we are so starved
#
in this country for cities that work,
#
And Chandigarh is lovely.
#
I was actually in Chandigarh
#
the weekend before those really bad floods
#
in the north a couple of months ago,
#
and Chandigarh held up reasonably well.
#
It's good roads, there's good drainage.
#
So to someone who is sort of just a lay person,
#
I'd say, watch, this city works great,
#
but there's a dynamism that's missed.
#
So yes, I think the counterfactual
#
is this more vibrant city,
#
but a lot of that depends on the economic base as well.
#
So here's my next question.
#
Jane Jacobs' excellent book,
#
The Death and Life of Great American City,
#
her early chapters talk about streets
#
and the importance of sidewalks and all of that.
#
And one of the things that she describes in that
#
is I think she uses a phrase, eyes on the street,
#
is that there are always...
#
There's a sense of community.
#
Everybody's kind of got eyes on the street.
#
They're looking out for each other.
#
There is that easy sense that you can go
#
and make casual conversation.
#
This is where you belong.
#
She's got a very striking passage about how
#
at one point she's looking out of her window,
#
and at the street corner there is this guy
#
who is trying to make a small girl go with him,
#
and the small girl is adamantly just standing there.
#
And on the one hand, you might get alarmed
#
and wonder what's going on,
#
but then she looks to the side,
#
and the owner of the deli is keeping an eye on those two
#
from where he is in case something happens.
#
The owner of the grocery store on the other side
#
has come out with her husband,
#
and they're also keeping a shifty eye on it.
#
And as it happens, nothing happens.
#
Adamant girl is an adamant daughter,
#
and she eventually goes with her dad.
#
But that leads me to thinking about the impact
#
that the structure of a city can have on a culture.
#
Like the last time that we met
#
and had a long conversation we really should have recorded,
#
we spoke about how the change in form
#
that a slum redevelopment causes
#
can change the cultural life.
#
Whereas today you might go to a slum
#
and you'll see squalor and all of that,
#
but the point is everybody is kind of out and about.
#
Maybe the elders are sitting out in a church
#
where children are playing all around them,
#
wives are entering each other's kitchens
#
and building up an implicit sisterhood of women.
#
And when you redevelop them
#
and you put them in atomized apartments,
#
suddenly the elders are all alone all day,
#
the women aren't seeing each other so often,
#
and it just shifts a fabric.
#
And this is not to argue for one or the other,
#
but it's to talk about how the form of a city
#
can shape the culture of the people,
#
and the form of the city itself
#
can be shaped so deeply by regulations
#
and by planning and by the oppressive hand of the state.
#
And therefore, how the oppressive hand of the state
#
in its top-down way can actually change culture itself.
#
And so tell me your observations on this.
#
So I think if we believe, and I certainly believe,
#
that what makes cities tick
#
and what makes cities productive
#
and economic engines is agglomeration,
#
then this sense of community
#
and the creation of social capital and all of that
#
goes hand in hand with it,
#
because it's through networks and so on that this exists.
#
There's no question that the built form of cities
#
influences the social fabric.
#
So I think that you tend to think of villages
#
as having a sense of community,
#
but when you move to the big, bad city,
#
And that's not true at all, right?
#
which is it really depends on how the city is planned.
#
And so denser cities with more,
#
either commercial space at the bottom,
#
more parks, more space for people to meet,
#
which is a lot of how older cities were planned,
#
fosters that social capital.
#
And in this larger, more impersonal city,
#
the neighborhood is this great counter, right?
#
Because in the neighborhood,
#
you feel safe, you feel protected, you feel watched.
#
I think in a world in which we may not live
#
with multiple generations in one household,
#
the neighborhood in some sense makes up for that.
#
And I think sometimes we think,
#
because you talked about Jane Jacobs,
#
sometimes we think that the only way to have community
#
is then to preserve structures that are like slums, right?
#
When in fact, I mean, I never want to assume
#
that that's how people want to live
#
for the sake of community.
#
They may prefer to live in apartment buildings,
#
but then it's about the fabric
#
around the apartment building.
#
Do you have common space in the building?
#
Do you have wide enough pavements
#
that you can find a public space to sit at night?
#
Are there neighborhood parks?
#
As I couldn't agree more,
#
and we talked earlier about Moses and Jacobs,
#
and I think it's so important the city has both.
#
It needs a sense of community.
#
And if you build essentially,
#
or you force people to build suburbia,
#
you're not going to get that sense of community.
#
And obviously we both agreed that in an apartment block,
#
it makes sense for there to be a common space
#
where people can congregate.
#
It makes sense for there to be an open park-like space
#
where the kids can play,
#
and families can walk together, et cetera, et cetera.
#
or should you leave it to the market?
#
Because what the state will often do
#
is the tendency will be that this is desirable,
#
therefore let us mandate it.
#
And this leads to all kinds of unforeseen consequences,
#
many of which we've kind of spoken about before the break.
#
And that sort of worries me.
#
I get the sense that when a builder is building,
#
he may not get an explicit demand
#
from the people buying from him
#
that he needs a park, a common space,
#
because no individual buyer
#
is really thinking that far ahead.
#
Even though it will be like a public good for them,
#
it will be beneficial for them,
#
it will be a positive externality.
#
So the market also won't kind of provide it.
#
But at the same time, I find it hugely problematic
#
hey, we'll mandate all of these things
#
because they're desirable,
#
because then everything goes to hell.
#
So what's your view on this?
#
I don't think it's a good idea for the state to mandate it.
#
And then it also drives up the cost of formal housing.
#
So we talked about parking spots earlier.
#
Mandating too much in any city
#
where land is at a premium becomes a tax,
#
that's imposed on the buyers of the house.
#
In an ideal world, that park is at the neighborhood level.
#
So when we talked about earlier,
#
making sure there's 40%, 60%,
#
the park should be at a neighborhood level.
#
The reason why developers in some sense
#
high-end properties get incentivized
#
to build neighborhood parks is two reasons.
#
One, because of the lack of public parks,
#
this then becomes a premium product
#
that you can't find elsewhere.
#
And the second reason is
#
because of what we talked about earlier,
#
because you have to create the setbacks.
#
Because if you want to build,
#
and if you want to build a tall building,
#
essentially, you have to aggregate
#
a fairly large parcel of land.
#
You end up with all of this space
#
and can then offer parks and pools
#
and so on to the people that buy your properties.
#
Right, so here's my next question.
#
Many of the benefits that we get
#
from coming to cities, right?
#
The agglomeration, the economic networks,
#
are now benefits that actually technology
#
We can have online agglomeration.
#
We can form, we can join dense economic networks
#
just getting onto a laptop
#
and not actually having to go out
#
and interact with people who wants to do that,
#
So how does that change the evolution of cities?
#
Because to me, it is not that we'll stop getting urban.
#
We'll continue getting urban
#
because there are dimensions of agglomeration
#
that you only get through in-person contact
#
and obviously not through the net.
#
But some dimensions are taken care of otherwise.
#
So are there future cities in the cloud, for example,
#
just as you look at someone like a Facebook
#
and they're bigger than many nation states,
#
most nation states in fact.
#
So what is sort of your sense of that?
#
So I think this is a very important question
#
in the wake of COVID, right?
#
So I think early on what a lot of people were saying is,
#
well, this is the end of cities, right?
#
Because now we can do everything on Zoom.
#
because sort of running an organization through that period,
#
what we saw is what you're doing essentially
#
is you're running off the back of social capital
#
and trust that you have built, right?
#
So a lot of those interactions that you had on Zoom.
#
So if you look at existing relationships,
#
you could maintain existing relationships,
#
you could build, you could,
#
because you had this bank of trust
#
that you had built from meeting people in person.
#
And over time, as people left the organization
#
and new people came on board,
#
I've asked them subsequently,
#
what was it like to join an organization remotely?
#
you don't quite get a sense of the place, right?
#
you don't quite get a sense of the culture,
#
you don't have a sense of commitment
#
to other people in the organization
#
when you spend time together in an office.
#
So I will say at the outset,
#
I mean, there's no question
#
that technology changes the game.
#
I don't think it changes,
#
I think human behavior is such that,
#
trust and true connection is built in person.
#
So if I think of anybody that I got to know over COVID
#
and there was so much that happened on COVID remotely
#
and so many new connections that were made,
#
it really only got cemented when we met in person, right?
#
And then when you see the person,
#
you see the body language,
#
that's when the relationship really cements.
#
But I think there's an age
#
and industry dimension to this as well.
#
I think for people like us
#
that are later on in their career, right?
#
We've built our networks,
#
we've built trust, credibility, whatever, whatever.
#
We've also learned what we needed to learn
#
in an office and from other people.
#
I think the problem is really with younger folks
#
coming into the workforce.
#
There's a lot that being in an office teaches you,
#
there's a lot that being around people teaches you
#
that you don't get when it's on Zoom.
#
I also feel the sense of,
#
I'm talking specifically now say about a workplace,
#
but there's a lot that happens in between discrete tasks
#
and that sense of sort of putting up your hand
#
and saying, I'll do what exists between this task
#
doesn't happen when you don't have a sense of connection
#
to the person in front of you.
#
And then finally, this may work in a Silicon Valley
#
where both tasks are more discrete,
#
but the nature of jobs are largely technology
#
David O'Toole has done, he's at MIT,
#
an economist and I really love his work.
#
He's looked at what's happened to a lot of,
#
whether it's New York or sort of places
#
where there were dense downtowns
#
and all of the service sector jobs
#
and all of those jobs that sort of fall away.
#
And so I think technology in some sense,
#
Technology alone has lent that to this,
#
if cities are networks,
#
what it's allowed us to do is broaden our networks
#
and geography doesn't matter that much.
#
But I still think that human capital
#
and human interactions make a big difference.
#
And by your point, especially about that,
#
the fashionable phrase work from home,
#
I have worked from home for like 15, 16 years,
#
but the point is that I think it can be
#
really counterproductive.
#
I'm reminded of this old quote
#
from Shane Parrish from a year ago,
#
the people that don't show up at the office
#
will end up working for the people that do, stop quote.
#
Because there's just so much learning you have
#
from interacting with people,
#
the implicit knowledge that gets passed on
#
at the metaphorical water cooler
#
and that's really important.
#
But that's not the only aspect I meant.
#
When I sort of think of my life,
#
I live in a city, I live in Bombay,
#
but I know hardly anything of Bombay
#
despite like almost 30 years here, 29 years now.
#
And equally, I live in Andheri
#
where I've lived for most of these 29 years
#
and I know really little of it.
#
My city is what I carry around with me,
#
and not necessarily everything on the way,
#
the handful of people that I meet regularly.
#
And so on and so forth.
#
It's a very narrow sliver.
#
Someone, everyone else who lives in Andheri
#
knows Andheri in an extremely different way from me
#
and from each other, right?
#
And I think the internet is sort of an extension of this,
#
like which is a neighborhood I'm most frequent.
#
You could argue that it is four bungalows where I live.
#
You could also argue that it is a particular WhatsApp group
#
where I might spend half the day, right?
#
So just that notion of where do we really live
#
is, you know, we don't really live in a city.
#
Like at one level, we don't live in a city city.
#
We live in a sliver of it
#
that we have carved out for ourselves.
#
That is as much in our imagination
#
as actually in the bricks and mortar
#
or the cement and steel,
#
whatever it is they make buildings with these days.
#
But also another level of it is just online
#
So I'm just going to check because,
#
and I can't remember who I said this to
#
at some point during COVID.
#
I said, I realized when geography stopped to matter,
#
where my true, and maybe the word is city,
#
but where my actual network lay, you know?
#
So it was interesting because at the summer,
#
the start of COVID, a bunch of us from college, right?
#
Who live all over the world.
#
So from, you know, Ecuador to Switzerland to Turkey
#
to the, you know, the U.S. all over,
#
started getting on a Zoom call every Sunday evening.
#
And somehow three years later,
#
we've managed to keep that up.
#
But I think I realized the minute
#
you don't step outside your door
#
and geography doesn't matter,
#
your mind settles into it.
#
Maybe because you've been working from home,
#
you've had that for longer.
#
Because you're not so consumed with the day to day
#
of getting to places and doing things.
#
There is that other city,
#
that other collection of people, right?
#
That you start to allow yourself to construct
#
and rediscover that you may have.
#
You may have, I totally agree with you.
#
I mean, if a city is any agglomeration of people,
#
then, you know, a large percentage
#
of that agglomeration of people are in our heads
#
and enabled through technology.
#
And I'll just think aloud and I'll think that,
#
let's say I'm working in an office every day.
#
Throughout the time that I'm at the office,
#
I'm not really alone alone.
#
So even if I'm in my cubicle
#
and most offices these days tend to be kind of open.
#
and you can glance into someone's workspace.
#
You're not really alone alone.
#
You're never completely off your guard.
#
Whereas if I'm at home, if I'm working from home,
#
most of the time no one's really watching me 99% of the time,
#
And this leads me to think about what
#
the distinction Marquez made between our three selves,
#
the public self, the private self and the secret self.
#
And the public self being, of course, the public self,
#
the private self being, you know,
#
the only our intimates kind of know that self
#
The secret self is known only to you.
#
And sometimes I would argue not even to you
#
because many of us don't even know ourselves that way.
#
So just sort of a personal question,
#
but take me through your sort of journey
#
of spending time with yourself
#
and kind of sort of getting out of the race.
#
I don't know if maybe COVID helped that
#
or played a part in that.
#
But even apart from that, I think as we grow older,
#
some of us just go with the groove
#
and spend no time in self-reflection
#
or thinking about what they really want.
#
While some of us end up doing more and more self-reflection
#
and perhaps one could argue even too much sometimes.
#
So what's your journey been like?
#
So I think in my case, so COVID interestingly
#
was not a great, it was just busy, right?
#
You know, it is incredible how busy you can be
#
within the four walls of a house.
#
But I think the, I think interestingly the, you know,
#
and I've, like all of us, you know, you try to sort of,
#
you think that what you learn about yourself
#
will come from, you know, staring out of the window
#
or being in a quiet place.
#
And there are parts of yourself that you discover that way.
#
But interestingly for me, I think the process of discovery
#
has actually been by doing,
#
and by increasingly putting myself in situations
#
that are either situations I don't know if I can handle
#
or situations that are new.
#
And in the process of doing that,
#
I think is where I've actually started to discover myself.
#
And I think, and maybe we spoke about this earlier,
#
but I think what's also interesting is
#
being comfortable with the fact that who I am today
#
may not be who I was 10 years ago,
#
and that's absolutely fine.
#
I think sometimes we hesitate to admit things
#
about ourselves today because we think,
#
oh, well, that's not who I used to be.
#
And so if that answers your question, it, you know,
#
and I definitely fall into the bucket of too much thinking,
#
but increasingly it's becoming reflecting on doing
#
and saying, oh, that's something about myself
#
that I didn't know was in me, you know,
#
and that has clearly developed over time.
#
And is there something you discovered about yourself
#
which you didn't know you had?
#
I think I discovered I had a tenacity I didn't know I had,
#
a level of organization I didn't know I had.
#
You know, I think those are the two,
#
at least of the last couple of years,
#
my two big discoveries,
#
like a determination sometimes to make something happen
#
that I didn't know I had before.
#
And is that something that you kind of learned
#
or is it something you discovered you always had it,
#
but you were just underplaying it?
#
I think it's something I was never forced to deploy.
#
Maybe I had it all along.
#
I mean, I have, now that I look back,
#
I have seen it in flashes,
#
but I think sometimes life pushes you
#
to deploy a certain trait
#
that has lain dormant for a long time.
#
But those two have been my big discovery
#
of the last couple of years.
#
And when I invited you to the show,
#
you said, what will I have to say?
#
And I had to point out to you that every woman I invite
#
on the show says, why me?
#
And there's this imposter syndrome
#
and no man ever does it.
#
I mean, not exactly like that.
#
Because not all are Punjabi men.
#
Not all are Punjabi men.
#
And that's not the vibe also, actually.
#
Most of the men are suitably humble,
#
but never possessing imposter syndrome,
#
which all the women do.
#
And when did you sort of get conscious of this thing?
#
How hard is it to beat it back?
#
And now that you're the CEO of a company
#
and you have many women colleagues working with you,
#
do you feel it important to kind of just keep pushing
#
at this sense where the women are constantly
#
undermining themselves?
#
And the men, of course,
#
perhaps have a problem in the other direction.
#
So I went to a women's college for my undergraduate.
#
And I always joke with friends of mine from college
#
that, you know, from day one,
#
we were told women have imposter syndrome.
#
You know, don't fall prey to this blah blah blah.
#
We were literally told this day in and day out.
#
And then all of us, I think,
#
watch ourselves falling prey to exactly that.
#
So you ask yourself the question of what is it really?
#
Like, is being told enough to snap you out of it?
#
Because we were all told,
#
but we all do it time and time again.
#
In my case, forcing myself to putting myself in it.
#
And now I look back at every point in time
#
in an uncomfortable, unfamiliar situation
#
and you flounder for a bit.
#
And then most times you swim
#
is really where that imposter syndrome begins to break down.
#
And, you know, I said I've seen it more recently,
#
but to be honest, I mean,
#
even when I went to college in the U.S.,
#
you know, I can't remember if we discussed this
#
I had not a clue what I was doing.
#
I had to open a map and say, you know,
#
where on literally, not where on earth,
#
but like, you know, where in this vast country
#
called the United States am I going to?
#
But I found that that is the best antidote sometimes
#
because you can doubt yourself endlessly.
#
To the point of, you know, yes,
#
our organization has a lot of women
#
and pretty much across the board,
#
I've seen everyone struggle with this.
#
And so I do make a very conscious effort
#
and I make a very conscious effort
#
to use personal examples to say,
#
look, I have been in your position
#
and I have doubted myself.
#
To this day, I continue to doubt myself,
#
but just give it a shot and do it, you know?
#
And we're here to back you.
#
And I've realized that that's the only way through,
#
but it is pervasive and it's certainly not just an India thing
#
because I see this with friends all across.
#
Let's go back to your personal journey, where we were.
#
So you were in college,
#
you were doing development economics
#
and then you go to study urban planning at MIT.
#
So tell me a little bit about those days
#
and also, you know, how,
#
A, the prisms that you're forming right now,
#
the frameworks you're forming to explain the world
#
to yourself and to look at the world,
#
And within this, what are you thinking of yourself
#
in terms of, I wanna do this,
#
I wanna, you know, spend the rest of my life doing this,
#
or at least I wanna do this after college, this is for me.
#
How was your thinking evolving in that period?
#
So after my undergraduate,
#
I knew I was interested in development economics,
#
but I think some of that, you know,
#
I don't know what to call it, middle-class Indian,
#
well, I have to do something practical, kicked in.
#
And so I worked for a couple of years
#
in economic consulting in DC for a couple of years
#
and while the work was interesting,
#
I worked across financial economics,
#
international trade, which was really interesting.
#
I worked on the case that overturned the ban
#
on Alfonso Mangos into the U.S.
#
I don't know about this.
#
It was, I did, most of what I did was steel,
#
steel trade cases, but this one stood out.
#
When I say worked on, I mean, it was a case
#
that we worked on at the firm.
#
But I think my heart always lay in development economics.
#
So I was at MIT and I think we talked about
#
how I constructed it to be part development econ,
#
part planning and policy degree.
#
And then I reached a point where I said,
#
you go into say role at the World Bank or the IFC and so on.
#
But I also realized that
#
for someone who is interested in development,
#
I had never actually at this point
#
worked in a developing country or worked in India.
#
And so I think I had this moment and this was 2010.
#
So it was also interestingly the height of optimism
#
about what was happening in urban in the country.
#
So JNNURM had been launched five years ago.
#
There was all of this stuff.
#
And so I took the decision to move back.
#
What's been the most incredible journey of the last,
#
for the 13 years since has really actually
#
been getting to build something.
#
So not only to engage in a practical sense
#
with what I had studied at a policy organization,
#
but the part of myself that I discovered through this
#
is learning to build something
#
has been incredibly rewarding.
#
And I consciously use learning to build
#
because I think you make a ton of mistakes along the way.
#
There is no formula for how you build an organization,
#
whether you do it once or you do it twice.
#
But it's been this the last 13 years
#
have been an interesting meld of getting to work
#
on the issues and the subject that I really am interested in
#
development more broadly and urban more specifically,
#
but also helping create something new.
#
So before I go to my next question,
#
a couple of things I want to double click on,
#
but before I get to those,
#
a quick question about developmental economics, right?
#
So for my listeners, what is it?
#
What do you like about it?
#
What does it get right?
#
And what does it get wrong?
#
So to answer that question in a very simplistic way,
#
it is in some sense the study of how countries become rich
#
and getting rich doesn't matter for getting rich is safe,
#
but if you look at the correlates between per capita income
#
and pretty much every other health
#
and any other indicator you care about,
#
I think what the two things
#
that development economics gets wrong,
#
and there's enough people in the field trying to fix it is,
#
so one is I think currently,
#
there's a very large focus on small interventions.
#
So certainly the field of development
#
has got swung in the direction of bed nets
#
and cycles and smaller things
#
without asking the big questions
#
of how does the country develop
#
and how does the country grow
#
and how does the country get rich?
#
And the second is I think,
#
and I mentioned Alice Amston,
#
and she was one of the earlier people to say,
#
look, the state has an important role in development.
#
And so I think in this tension
#
between is it markets or is it states,
#
I think there's a lot of nuance that gets lost
#
in the development economics.
#
Yeah, no, the reason I asked was
#
that Ajay Shah and I show everything is everything.
#
At some point in the future,
#
about why development economics is nonsense.
#
I knew a couple of people who would happily
#
add to that. Who would happily agree.
#
Not because, I think what happens sometimes
#
is that a common noun becomes a proper noun
#
and development economics for everything it aims for
#
and stands for is fantastic.
#
But then you have a certain kind of cult forming,
#
you have group think forming,
#
you have emphasis on certain ideas over others.
#
And that can become a bit of a problem.
#
Till Ajay and I do our episode,
#
if listeners would like to read a little bit more
#
about this is a great book by William Easterly
#
called The Elusive Quest for Growth.
#
In fact, any of his books.
#
So I point you towards that because like,
#
is that a danger in academia?
#
That there can always be a fashion of the times,
#
perhaps tied up to a certain kind of tribalism.
#
And then there is a pressure to conform with that fashion.
#
Maybe your tenure could depend on it,
#
your funding could depend on it
#
if you're in an academic sort of career.
#
And that can unleash its own kind of subtle pressures
#
and eventually destroy diversity of thought,
#
which is the most important kind of diversity.
#
And have you seen that in academia?
#
Like, was there ever a time you considered
#
staying in academia and just enter a life
#
of full-time scholarship or, you know?
#
So what sort of your thinking about that?
#
So there was, I mean, when I was doing my masters,
#
there was sort of gentle pressure
#
from my advisor to do a PhD and stay in academia.
#
And I think, and look, age 28,
#
I'm not sure it was the most informed decision,
#
but I think that the two things
#
that made me uncomfortable were one,
#
what I perceived was that to survive in academia,
#
you had to have an idea
#
and then hold onto it for a very long time.
#
And that's just something I wasn't comfortable with
#
because I said, I don't know enough,
#
and I had some intuition that I don't think
#
I can hold onto one position for a long time.
#
And I'm not saying that's what happens in academia,
#
but there is a part of it that does.
#
I think there's enough brilliant academics
#
that have challenged what they said
#
or added nuance to what they said before.
#
And the other thing is, I think,
#
so also we're talking about development economics, right?
#
And I think that's actually way too narrow.
#
So I think some of the most interesting books
#
that I read during my undergraduate were,
#
it's not just economics, right?
#
It's the interplay of so much more.
#
And I think I worried at the time about economics
#
not being able to answer the whole set of questions.
#
And so I didn't feel comfortable just staying within that.
#
So my next question is about your journey back.
#
Like at one level, you worked in DC, you worked in London.
#
You know, for anyone from my generation,
#
certainly it seems like a good life.
#
Once you have got out, you better bloody well stay out.
#
What are you doing coming back?
#
You came back and you used an interesting phrase
#
saying learning to build.
#
You were learning to build and enjoying that.
#
so I'm gonna ask you to double click
#
on why you chose to come back
#
and how much of that is a joy of the process
#
of doing a particular thing rather than a particular goal.
#
Because a phrase like learning to build,
#
indicates someone who is more involved in the process
#
than in chasing a particular goal
#
that I want this outcome.
#
I want to be, you know, X, Y, Z.
#
I want to achieve A, B, C, you know.
#
so take me a bit through your rationale for coming back.
#
What attracted you to returning?
#
And once you returned, what excited you
#
and made you happy that you had come back?
#
So the decision to come back
#
was a mix of both professional and personal.
#
So, you know, at a personal level,
#
when I left for college, my sister was, you know, 13,
#
six years apart, and so I, you know,
#
part of it was also just wanting to be home again
#
And it was a, it wasn't an easy decision
#
because, you know, you do have this sense of where,
#
you know, what if this is a one-way street, right?
#
And you do realize it is a good life.
#
It's, you know, for many reasons,
#
it's a great opportunity that I hadn't known
#
would land on my plate in the first place.
#
And then the professional decision was,
#
and perhaps some of it was driven by imposter syndrome,
#
like, can I actually work on these things
#
without having actually engaged in them?
#
You know, so it was a, it was a mix of both
#
and a certain sense of excitement
#
about what I perceived was happening,
#
or, you know, seemed to be happening
#
from the outside in the country.
#
And so that was the decision to come back.
#
I think had it not been for this opportunity
#
perhaps maybe I would have found a way,
#
who knows, back to London, back to the US
#
to do something more conventional,
#
but there's something fundamentally
#
challenging is the wrong word,
#
but it challenges so many different parts of you
#
to learn to build something.
#
And that's what I found really interesting.
#
Because, you know, you study a subject, right?
#
And then, you know, at some point I used to joke,
#
I mean, I know way too much about,
#
more about sanitation than, you know,
#
anyone would necessarily care to know
#
or about housing and so on.
#
But none of that prepares you for the complexity
#
of managing people, managing organizations.
#
And there's something about that
#
that I have found incredibly compelling and motivating.
#
I think I'm the sort of person
#
that if you give me a set of tasks
#
and say, these are the things you should do,
#
Whereas if you set sort of a broad goal
#
or I set that, you know, that broad direction for myself,
#
I like figuring out how to get there.
#
But it is very much like you said,
#
but it's not about the goal.
#
It's about figuring out the process
#
to get to a certain place.
#
That's been really interesting.
#
At this point, I must tell my listeners
#
that during the lunch break, you know,
#
Pritika told us this excellent story
#
of how she went to Canada Bank once to get some work done
#
and gave the bank manager a lecture saying that,
#
it is not enough to give access,
#
you must also have process.
#
And the bank manager was like, what the fuck?
#
Needless to say, I'm not welcome back at that branch.
#
And I think Canada Bank would also not be welcome back
#
So that works perfectly well.
#
So tell me about the early challenges of coming back.
#
Like you worked in IDFC group for a few years
#
and you know, in the sort of in the policy group
#
and you worked on housing, water, sanitation,
#
rural development, et cetera, et cetera.
#
Take me through some of those early challenges.
#
Like give me a texture of what your early days
#
would have been there like,
#
because you mentioned new challenges
#
like working with people
#
and presumably working in environments
#
where there might be a lot of pushback
#
on certain ideas or initiatives.
#
So take me through some of that.
#
What were those challenges?
#
How did you deal with them?
#
so, you know, since the motivation to come back
#
was to say, look, I know academically
#
about these ideas of development.
#
How does it actually play out?
#
So the motivation was always to work,
#
if not in government, then close to government.
#
And the IDFC policy group,
#
which is something that actually Urjit Patel had set up
#
when he was at IDFC back in the day,
#
is, you know, seemed to be the perfect mix
#
because we worked very closely with different ministries,
#
but sitting outside of government.
#
And so I worked largely on a lot of work on sanitation,
#
a lot of work on housing,
#
all the areas that you mentioned.
#
that was still in the realm of content, right?
#
So that was still in the realm of
#
whether it was writing papers or policy briefs
#
or, you know, policy recommendations.
#
And so that challenge was really one of coming up to speed
#
with what is and sort of breaking away
#
from theoretical knowledge, right?
#
And that was interesting.
#
So I remember we were doing work
#
looking basically at the economics
#
of municipal sewage recycling, right?
#
Which is still something I think, you know, works.
#
I mean, we need to recycle the vast amounts of sewage
#
that our cities produce.
#
And so that was, you know, in multiple cities,
#
going to sewage treatment plants,
#
looking at the, you know, cost of treating water.
#
And so that challenge was sort of theory meeting
#
what's happening on the ground.
#
That wasn't a challenge of managing people or any such,
#
because that was just, you know, me doing my work.
#
So in 2013, Rubin joined IDFC to set up IDFC Institute.
#
And I was lucky to be one of the early members of the team.
#
And I think that journey has been
#
what has truly been interesting,
#
because that was, you know,
#
starting out with a very small team.
#
You know, at our peak, we were a 55 person organization,
#
and that's the journey that really challenged other parts.
#
If you said that you can't read in a textbook
#
and you can't figure it out,
#
and that's the one that I found really interesting.
#
So tell me a little bit about the IDFC Institute,
#
because what I kind of find fascinating about it
#
is the why of it, right?
#
Because it's a think-do tank, as Rubin likes to say,
#
and you're going in there
#
and you're working with government to make lives better.
#
But to carry out policy of which, A,
#
the effects are long-term in the future
#
and are not easily, you know,
#
you can't easily disentangle them.
#
And two, you can never take credit for anything.
#
You always have to leave credit
#
for your fellows in government, you know,
#
who are the ones who are, you know,
#
taking the risk, getting out of status quo bias
#
So then what is the motivation?
#
Because every time I chat with Rubin about it,
#
I'm sort of astonished because it seems to me
#
to be a complete public service thing.
#
And yet people can look at you
#
and consider you evil capitalist
#
because you believe in markets,
#
or they can consider you captured by the state
#
because you work with so many government departments.
#
And it must be said across different states,
#
so it doesn't matter which party is in charge,
#
you kind of work with any government.
#
So tell me a little bit about, you know,
#
so the why of that and what is the sense of purpose
#
that then, you know, makes it all stick?
#
So, and look, a lot of the thinking that I'm,
#
you know, this was Rubin's thinking early on,
#
Rajeev Lal, who, you know,
#
gave us the funding to set up in the first place.
#
I think it came from a starting point of, you know,
#
you know, humility and compassion for the challenge
#
of what it takes to write and implement policy, right?
#
And saying, you've got an incredible set
#
of people in government that,
#
and the think tank ecosystem in the country,
#
you know, when you compare it to,
#
so I remember when I was at MIT
#
and the US was negotiating the Iran nuclear deal,
#
Ernie Moniz, the top nuclear scientist,
#
essentially spent all his time at the White House, right?
#
So the ability to bring in expertise from the outside,
#
that same ecosystem doesn't exist as much.
#
And I think that really was what Rajeev was thinking with
#
and Rubin was thinking when they set it up.
#
And so in that sense, the stepping back
#
and not taking credit is built into the model
#
because you're saying, look,
#
our job in some sense is facilitation.
#
And someone I, you know, respect greatly said,
#
you know, you shouldn't shy away
#
from using the word knowledge broker, right?
#
Because the minute we see the word broker in it,
#
we think, especially those of us in Bombay,
#
we're like, oh, that's terrible.
#
But in some sense, being the connector of people
#
and ideas has enormous value.
#
And so the thinking very much was,
#
it started out by saying, look,
#
from the research that we do,
#
from the expertise that we have,
#
can we provide inputs into policy?
#
Rajeev and IDFC were incredibly generous
#
in that they gave us the financial freedom to say,
#
you know, here is untied money
#
to focus on the issues that you think are important.
#
So that's why urbanization was a big piece of it
#
because it's something that not enough people were looking at
#
and something that we fundamentally believed
#
is important to the economic prospects of this country.
#
But I think at some point we realized
#
that just ideas was not enough, right?
#
And you actually have to engage with what the translation
#
from ideas to implementation looks like.
#
And so I'd say we made two pivots.
#
One is where earlier we worked largely with the center.
#
We began to work a lot more with states,
#
also because when it comes to urban states,
#
you know, states matter.
#
And the second pivot that we made
#
was we started doing a lot more implementation support.
#
So actually placing teams inside of government.
#
So for, I think about four or five years, we had a team,
#
many listeners will know Amar Shah
#
and this was his and Chinmay's work,
#
sitting within a state government,
#
essentially helping them build out
#
their grievance addressing system.
#
But the focus was always very much on,
#
you know, we are a small part of this ecosystem
#
in the sharing of knowledge and ideas.
#
Give me also a sense of like,
#
you describe yourself as a knowledge broker
#
and you know, the way you describe yourself,
#
it's as if you were filling a gap.
#
And I want to ask about the gap or why the gap existed.
#
But before that, I want to ask about
#
the machinery of government itself, right?
#
You can take different cartoonish views of it
#
and one can be the benevolent,
#
my Bab Sarkar is doing everything it can for us.
#
And the other is, oh, the evil oppressive state
#
And the truth, of course, is somewhere in between.
#
The truth is that in government,
#
you have by and large well-meaning people,
#
good people, often really smart people,
#
working under conditions where the incentives
#
can often be messed up and can take them
#
in different directions.
#
And even when they aren't,
#
there is a natural ossification
#
within government machinery itself,
#
which makes it really hard to achieve something
#
So, you know, tell me a little bit about,
#
not a little bit, tell me a lot.
#
Describe in great detail, you know,
#
write a six-page essay for me right now with your words
#
on how government machinery works.
#
Because you would imagine that
#
if you have some interesting piece of public policy
#
and you've done the knowledge brokering
#
and gone to the IAS officer and sold it to him.
#
And he, of course, is a rational person.
#
He says, yes, yes, this will be done on Monday.
#
But it's never quite that simple.
#
Like a recent guest I had on the show once said that,
#
yeah, he is seen to be on the side of government,
#
but it is unfair to say that he is, you know,
#
a person in the camp of Modi and Shah
#
because he says Modi and Shah
#
can't really get anything done.
#
The deep state runs circles around them.
#
And my sense is that the deep state
#
also runs circles around itself.
#
So tell me a little bit about,
#
a lot about, an essay length,
#
a book length sort of answer is expected here
#
about the machinery of government.
#
Like you don't have to take names or get too specific.
#
you're not really saying anything bad about anyone.
#
But I just want to understand how does government function?
#
How is policy arrived at firstly?
#
And once it is arrived at, how is it implemented?
#
What are the challenges?
#
How do all of those wheels turn?
#
And maybe after all of that,
#
you can talk a little bit about why that gap existed,
#
which you guys tried to enter.
#
So I think the most gratifying part of this work
#
has been the civil servants that we have,
#
the opportunity to work with.
#
And you see the scale of what can be done
#
and what it takes to get the things done that they do.
#
I think the big learning has been,
#
and that's why we, the shift to implementation.
#
I remember several years ago,
#
we were speaking to a municipal commissioner
#
and we had this lovely conversation about ideas and so on.
#
And he said to me, he said,
#
Pritika, well, all of this is well and good.
#
I don't have a single person in my office
#
that can write me a memo.
#
And I think that's the reality of it.
#
Which is so much that the loss between
#
what's written on paper and what people know
#
and what it takes to translate that into action on the ground
#
is something that we can't take lightly.
#
And so, it's interesting.
#
And I think, and there's been a couple of pieces about it.
#
I think the people actually that have stepped into the Freya,
#
And so I think I remember the first time somebody called me up
#
and said, I won't name the consulting firm,
#
but they said, I'm the so-and-so implant
#
calling from the government department.
#
And I was like, implant?
#
And essentially, that's what it is.
#
So in some sense, you're outsourcing.
#
And this is not just an India thing.
#
This has happened across the world,
#
but you're outsourcing a lot of the thinking
#
and the doing to organizations
#
whose incentives may not align.
#
And I think for us, the big, as IDFC Institute,
#
everything we did was pro bono and that was by design
#
because really what you want to do
#
is you want to engage on ideas
#
and you want to engage on ideas,
#
not because you're chasing a profit motive,
#
which is, I mean, that is the prerogative of consulting firms.
#
But very much for us, it was to say,
#
this is an issue that we think we have a perspective on,
#
that we have value to add
#
and something we want to engage on.
#
And that's when we engage.
#
And so I think to me, the biggest observation
#
has been the breakdown between what's on paper
#
and what actually gets done.
#
And a lot of that goes to this sort of glaring capacity gap
#
that sits at the heart.
#
And it's interesting because more recently
#
and particularly during COVID,
#
we've got used to saying in this big capacity gap.
#
But now what we've started to look at is the frontline.
#
And we too easily dismiss,
#
and I think we all saw the value of frontline workers,
#
whether it was Anganwadi workers or ASHA workers
#
and just the sheer amount that they took on over COVID.
#
I think a couple of us are beginning to question this,
#
you know, it's very glib almost to call it a capacity gap,
#
but it's maybe this like missing middle
#
that exists within government.
#
So I have a couple of questions about that.
#
And one is that when the gap exists,
#
when the bureaucrat tells you that,
#
hey, you know, your ideas are incredible,
#
but no one in my office can even write me a memo.
#
You know, when that is the case,
#
often, are you faced with a choice
#
that do we give this detailed implementation plan
#
to improve the sewage system of blah, blah, blah,
#
when we know that they don't have the capacity to do it?
#
Or do we simply say that yes, XYZ is worth doing,
#
we can tell you how to do it, but don't freaking do it.
#
There's an opportunity cost, you have limited capacity.
#
And instead, you know, focus on prioritizing
#
stuff that is urgent and can be done.
#
And you don't have to do everything
#
because you simply can't anyway.
#
So is that a dilemma that you sometimes face?
#
Because when it comes to, you know,
#
you guys sitting with ideas and figuring out that,
#
okay, what is wrong with the system is X,
#
the fix that it needs is Y.
#
But that is never enough
#
because there's no capacity to do Y.
#
So how does one then sort of, can you talk,
#
I mean, I'm sure you've been in that situation many times.
#
So can you sort of take me through
#
how you would think about it, how you would address it
#
together with the people in government?
#
Because as you say, they also want to get the job done.
#
So I think maybe part of it is,
#
so there are prioritization is important
#
in the context of limited bandwidth resources,
#
So I think by and large,
#
we've tried to maintain a discipline of
#
these are the things that we think are very important to do.
#
And so, you know, urban definitions,
#
the work we talked about, right?
#
Is India more urban than we think?
#
It's funny because sometimes you almost have to get,
#
one of the skills that I have learned
#
is being able to say the same thing
#
over and over and over again
#
for 10 years, 15 years, whatever it is,
#
with the same enthusiasm
#
as if you're saying it for the first time.
#
And what someone said to me once,
#
he said, Pritika, that's not exactly it.
#
You have to say it and say it and say it
#
till somebody says it back to you
#
as if it was their idea.
#
And that's when you know that you've succeeded.
#
We have been careful, at least to our mind,
#
not to say, look, all of this stuff is good to have.
#
And so it's been a mix of focusing on
#
what we think are the most important things,
#
even if we have to say them ad nauseam
#
and eventually maybe one day someone will say.
#
Because we're also conscious that what our priorities are
#
may not be the priorities of, you know,
#
the actual decision makers.
#
And, you know, if there's a conversation about saying,
#
look, well, actually, X is not our priority,
#
but Y is, then focusing on Y.
#
Because I don't think we assume that we,
#
you know, we can sort of weigh in on that prioritization.
#
We can make an argument for what we think is important,
#
but that's where it stops.
#
And my other question there is,
#
like, as far as consultants are concerned,
#
I've actually heard horror stories
#
about consultants like McKinsey,
#
who can stop me from taking names.
#
While I'm being more circumspect.
#
Yeah, you can be circumspect,
#
but people like McKinsey's have gone in
#
and given these fancy PowerPoints,
#
they have no doubt put together in half an hour
#
without knowing the first damn thing
#
about the depth of the problem.
#
While you guys have been perhaps working on that problem
#
for 10, 12 years and may not be taken that seriously
#
because you don't have that tapas.
#
But my larger sort of question is that
#
this points me towards a structural problem
#
within the state itself,
#
if it needs people like you to step in with assistance.
#
I have also had my friend Ashwin Mahesh
#
on the show a few times.
#
And he, of course, is part of various
#
civil society initiatives in Bangalore
#
where he's working together with the state
#
and helping the state do things
#
that the state should do anyway.
#
And the philosophical argument I have with him
#
is that, boss, the state should do this anyway.
#
It should not need help from civilians.
#
We pay taxes so that we can sit back
#
and enjoy these services.
#
And his case is, no, no,
#
you need to look at the real world.
#
It simply doesn't have the capacity.
#
So I will step in where I can.
#
And I see you guys as doing that as well.
#
And I just wonder that then
#
if there is a deeper structural problem to solve,
#
that the state can do the things
#
it is supposed to do on its own.
#
Like on the one hand, we all agree
#
that the state in India is far broader
#
than it should be in terms of scope
#
and far weaker than it should be in terms of strength.
#
Instead of doing a few things that it should do well,
#
it does many things really badly.
#
And among doing those few things well,
#
I would imagine is building that in-house capability
#
for this kind of knowledge
#
and the kind of services that you and Ashwin and all bring.
#
So at the structural design level, what is the problem?
#
Or is it always inevitable that the state
#
will always not be able to do all of this itself
#
because a state is designed keeping the present in mind
#
and the future is unknown, unknown.
#
So you will need people to step in.
#
So I think part of the problem comes from the fact that,
#
so what we've all known for a long time,
#
this state does too much when it should focus on less.
#
But I think also the nature of problems
#
and the nature of challenges have changed, right?
#
So climate change, which we spoke about earlier,
#
something like the COVID pandemic, right?
#
And so I think from a structural perspective,
#
and there's this administrative reform committee reports
#
but the ability to understand the need
#
to equip oneself for evolving challenges
#
is sort of a structural issue.
#
So COVID is a great example.
#
So one of the things that we did when COVID hit was,
#
I mean, we had never done anything on health,
#
but we realized this was much more than a health problem.
#
And we said, well, we know nothing about COVID,
#
but arguably nobody knows anything about COVID.
#
And so quite as an experiment,
#
we set up a COVID-19 task force
#
that in essence was a WhatsApp group.
#
And we said, look, what we can do.
#
So earlier, everything we had done was
#
knowledge that we had in-house.
#
But we said, what we do have is we have the network of people
#
that might know what to do
#
in an evolving situation like this.
#
And so we brought in epidemiologists,
#
public health specialists, communication specialists,
#
venture capitalists, supply chain and logistics folks,
#
wide variety of people.
#
So on the one hand, we reached out to partners in government
#
and said, clearly here's a huge and evolving challenge
#
And on the other hand, here's expertise that you can draw on.
#
And what we did essentially was provided the,
#
again, we were the knowledge brokers
#
and to some extent, the implementation support.
#
So we ran, which we spoke about earlier,
#
some of the largest serological surveys in India.
#
Though the minute you do something in India,
#
it becomes the largest in the world
#
with nine different cities in India.
#
And so in some sense, what I have sympathy for
#
is that the nature of challenges is evolving.
#
And so structurally, I think the state
#
needs to equip itself to say,
#
well, the base of that uncertainty
#
is only going to accelerate.
#
And so how do we, if not build the in-house capability,
#
how do we smartly source the capability?
#
Which goes back to the Ernie Muniz thing,
#
which is, well, maybe we didn't think to build capacity
#
to negotiate a nuclear deal.
#
I mean, I'm just being facetious, but you know what?
#
There's no hesitation bringing somebody in from the outside.
#
And I think that openness would help in the short run
#
a lot more than, you know, capability can be built,
#
but that's a long-term game.
#
And sometimes you don't know
#
what you're building capability for.
#
So you have to have the ability to say,
#
well, where do I source that from in the short run?
#
And then, of course, the ability to tell good idea from bad,
#
because there's no shortage of people
#
who will put up their hands and say,
#
don't worry, I'm an expert on this.
#
But the capability to say, well, who do I go to
#
and who do I not is also a structural problem.
#
And the ability not to reject outside experience
#
because it threatens you, I think is a big challenge.
#
And for us, the COVID, you know,
#
we've been talking about networks
#
at various points in this show,
#
but it showed us really the beauty of networks,
#
even for an organization, right?
#
Which is you can't as an organization
#
equally as much as a state build all the capability in-house,
#
but you can build the discernment to know
#
who to go to, when to go to them,
#
and how to utilize their.
#
And does it become a challenge
#
that within the civil services,
#
the post keeps shifting all the time.
#
So you build up a rapport with person X in post A,
#
and suddenly, you know, two years later,
#
when everything is hunky-dory, the bugger's gone,
#
and there's somebody else,
#
and you have to repeat yourself about,
#
you know, the classification of cities all over again,
#
and hope that the guy thinks it's his idea,
#
and so on and so forth.
#
So tell me about the incentives of bureaucrats.
#
Like, at one level, the bureaucrats are talking to you
#
because they recognize that, oh, this is a problem,
#
and, you know, it's a straight job to solve this,
#
and I happen to be the straight,
#
and I will, you know, with the help of these people,
#
I can figure out a way to solve it.
#
But also, there must be the status quo bias
#
that don't do anything drastic.
#
towards following the conventional wisdom.
#
I guess there is a bias towards
#
taking the least initiative possible.
#
There might also be a bias
#
about going for the most expensive solution possible
#
because you enhance your own budgets
#
and your own power, and so on and so forth.
#
You know, Parkinson's Law kicking in
#
with, you know, bureaucrats trying to maximize
#
the size of their budget and their subordinates.
#
So, and I understand you're in a sensitive position.
#
One can only hope that bureaucrats are not listening
#
to this podcast until this point in time.
#
But without being too harsh,
#
I mean, we're just, you know, in general
#
without taking their names.
#
Give me a sense of what the challenge is for them.
#
I mean, I think it's better to rephrase it as a challenge, right?
#
They're facing such a tough challenge.
#
So, yeah, tell me about those incentives in play
#
and how you kind of work with them.
#
For us, what has worked is trust, right?
#
Because, so first you talked about, you know,
#
people being shifted from posts,
#
and that's happened innumerable times
#
where we've made headway with something
#
and then a post shifts.
#
But equally, we've had people who say,
#
look, I think this is important.
#
And so I will make sure that I brief the person
#
And so I think, you know, one of our highest impact,
#
pieces of work with the highest impact
#
actually survived, or, you know, five years
#
because in every case, the person that was running it
#
made sure to brief the person after them.
#
And so you see that level of commitment
#
to seeing things through, even if they're not going
#
to get credit for it in a sense.
#
And so perhaps I have a sliver of the view.
#
I don't, I mean, you know, all the problems
#
you described exist, but I think for us,
#
the set of people that we've worked with
#
realized we are going to stay in the background.
#
We're not trying to gain, you know,
#
brownie points or any such.
#
And so to us, really, the currency has been charged.
#
And equally, if it's something we don't work on
#
and we don't know, we just, we won't do it.
#
And I think that's been the, that's been the secret sauce.
#
Tell me a little bit about how COVID,
#
the kind of work you did within COVID,
#
tell me about that in detail.
#
And I'll ask my next question after this.
#
So, you know, I won't make it a two-parter
#
where it gets confusing.
#
So yeah, tell me about everything
#
that you did during COVID.
#
So, you know, so sort of March, April,
#
we set up this COVID task force that had the,
#
you know, mix of people that I mentioned.
#
And so the, in the sort of immediate aftermath,
#
a lot of what we were doing,
#
which a lot of people were doing
#
was just coordinating relief, right?
#
And that's when you realize the, you know,
#
And at every point, you know,
#
so when it got to the Delta wave
#
or the Omicron wave was not as much,
#
in those windows, literally,
#
all you were doing was coordinating relief,
#
you know, doing whatever you could.
#
But in the periods in between,
#
so some of the really interesting stuff that we did,
#
I've mentioned the serological surveys quite often,
#
but we did them over a period of two years.
#
So the first one was July 2020 in Bombay,
#
you know, and the BMC was incredibly supportive
#
and it showed this massive difference
#
between, you know, slum and non-slum areas, right?
#
Which gave you some intuition at a time
#
when we didn't know how COVID spread,
#
that crowding was the problem.
#
We then repeated it a couple of months later.
#
I think the final one we did in Delhi
#
was a pediatric serosurvey,
#
you know, which showed the extent
#
to which children had antibodies to COVID, right?
#
There was a lot of discussion around opening schools, right?
#
And at that level of antibody prevalence,
#
it's a clear case to open schools.
#
So subsequently, we've set up a new organization
#
And within Artha Global,
#
we now have a center on public health,
#
because what we realized is there's a lot of work
#
that's happening on healthcare,
#
but very little on public health, right?
#
So whether that's air pollution, you know, water, sanitation,
#
how do we not get sick in the first place?
#
And so that led to a focus on public health.
#
Some of the other really interesting work we did
#
was just on communications.
#
So there were at least two state governments
#
look, people aren't coming in to test, right?
#
So we brought in communications experts.
#
And what was interesting,
#
we realized we ran a survey when the vaccine came out,
#
because the same state came back to us and said,
#
well, earlier people didn't test now,
#
they're not taking the vaccine.
#
And we ran a survey in two states.
#
And in one of them, we found that people thought
#
that the vaccine was a curative,
#
because, you know, when you're sick,
#
the doctor gives you an injection.
#
And in some sense, a vaccine, I mean, it is an injection.
#
And so that allowed us to design
#
two very different communication campaigns
#
in two different states,
#
because we unpacked the underlying reason
#
for why people weren't having vaccines in the first place.
#
And again, like I said, I think we worked with the World Bank
#
on, you know, the initial sort of thinking
#
through how to make social benefits portable.
#
And that's become a big piece of work for us subsequently,
#
because I think it ties again to the work on urbanization,
#
which is, you know, India's social benefit system
#
cannot be static for a country on the move.
#
And so COVID allowed us to work across an entire spectrum
#
of issues that have become core to what we do now.
#
And that's again an example of,
#
in a lot of places, a state doing a really good job,
#
like in Mumbai, for example,
#
the BMC was supposed to have done a pretty wonderful job
#
in whatever manner they could.
#
And this takes me to a point that like Kartik Moolidharan
#
makes in his new book and in his last episode with me,
#
where he said that, look, the Indian state is great
#
You have a crisis, flood relief, vaccination program,
#
COVID wards, Indian state will get the job done.
#
But in providing essential services,
#
it just fails completely.
#
Like I wrote a column for Times of India
#
about how at the start of COVID,
#
about how there are two ongoing disasters.
#
And one is COVID and we'll figure it out.
#
It's there for a limited period of time.
#
We don't know the damage it will do,
#
but we'll figure it out.
#
And the other is the ongoing disaster of the Indian state,
#
the failure of the Indian state,
#
where you have some 3000 children dying of malnourishment
#
every day or blah, blah, blah.
#
I don't know the numbers, but the numbers are horrifying.
#
And the point is, if you had a natural disaster
#
where there are 3000 kids dying every day,
#
the freaking UN would come in,
#
the world would send aid, major things would happen.
#
But because it's so normalized,
#
the kind of poverty, the malnourishment,
#
et cetera, et cetera, that we see around us.
#
And the state is a complete failure in that regard.
#
And the difference between doing so well in mission mode
#
and not doing well at all in the job of everyday governance,
#
especially in these life and death areas,
#
it seems to me would be that magic word processes.
#
So is that something that you have also focused on?
#
I understand that in a sense of saying that,
#
mission sewage, we got to do this.
#
Mission rural housing, we got to do this.
#
But when it comes to that more critical thing of changing,
#
changing the gears and the levers within the state itself,
#
so the processes are better
#
and the inefficiencies are wiped out.
#
Is that also an area that you pay attention to
#
And so it's the processes, it's the plumbing,
#
it's the day-to-day, it's sort of deeply unsexy things
#
that you need to focus on.
#
And so, look, I mean, I think, yes, COVID,
#
but if you look at tuberculosis numbers,
#
large number of people die every single day.
#
But across, I mean, I remember there was this,
#
that famous table which shows
#
what kills the most humans every year, right?
#
And the mosquitoes right at the top.
#
And I remember even at various points in the peak of COVID,
#
and COVID numbers across the world,
#
varied, you've still got large sort of public health problems,
#
particularly in India, right?
#
So malaria, TB, all of that.
#
And so there's no question.
#
I mean, I think on the processes side,
#
I think pretty much most of the work that we do
#
is can you fix the day-to-day, right?
#
So there's this lovely Desmond Tutu quote
#
that will hopefully be on our website soon, right?
#
Which is, when you're done fishing people out of the water,
#
you have to go upstream, out of the river,
#
you have to go upstream and figure out
#
why they're falling in in the first place, right?
#
And I think the crises are what get attention,
#
and then we snap into action,
#
and then there's band-aids and there's solutions
#
But we never go back and say,
#
well, what were the institutional failures here, right?
#
What were the process failures?
#
Is what did we not have in place?
#
And what can be put in place to make sure
#
the next time this hits?
#
So that's the other thing we don't do well.
#
And then sort of a post-mortem to say,
#
well, clearly these systems weren't in place
#
or didn't work and can we strengthen them?
#
and it will very likely happen again.
#
We're great with band-aids
#
and we're great with mission mode
#
and just aligns people and minds
#
and all of that in a way that,
#
you know, boring process stuff doesn't.
#
Make it concrete for me and my listeners
#
by giving me an actual example of a band-aid
#
and what the institutional solution would have been.
#
So we're starting to do a lot of work on air pollution.
#
And, you know, every time the air gets bad in Delhi
#
and here we smog guns and, you know, all these things.
#
And then the wind changes and things get better
#
and then we bought all these smog guns
#
and, you know, God knows what happens to them.
#
But that is a clear band-aid
#
because it's not dealing with the source of the problem.
#
And so, you know, in different cities
#
the source of pollution may be different.
#
In many of the cities in which we've started to work
#
we've realized based on source attribution studies
#
that transport is, you know, sort of vehicular emissions
#
And the truth is we talked about poor land utilization earlier.
#
Most Indian cities use their roads very poorly to begin with, right?
#
So average speeds are low because there are no pavements.
#
People are, you know, people take up part of the street space
#
because they need space to walk.
#
We don't stick to lanes.
#
And so very often just cleaning up the flow of traffic on arterial roads
#
can have a massive impact on reducing vehicular emissions, right?
#
Because you've got idling, you're driving at a slow pace.
#
So we talked about urban form as well, right?
#
And so denser cities, and again dense by building area, are more walkable.
#
Densities with more pavements are more walkable.
#
Sprawling low density cities require you to take cars, maybe metros,
#
but at the moment, you know, cars, two-wheelers, autos, whatever it is.
#
You know, the answer to air pollution does not lie in smog guns,
#
but that's when we, you know, that's all we do.
#
The answer really isn't this long fix.
#
So I lived in London when they first piloted what has now become
#
the ultra-low emission zone, and it was a small area.
#
You know, it was not really doing anything to reduce pollution at that size.
#
But to my mind, it was a lesson in saying,
#
how do we practice enforcement in this area?
#
What are we learning? What can we change?
#
How do people respond to this?
#
And then it slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly grew to what it is today.
#
And but those types of long-term fixes take a long time.
#
Whereas bringing out smog guns looks like you're doing something,
#
but you're not doing anything at all.
#
You know, I mean, even something as basic as doing a source attribution study.
#
I mean, do most cities know, and CSTEP is now doing fantastic work on this,
#
do most cities know where their pollution is coming from?
#
And when you know where it's coming from is when you can start to do something about it.
#
And the fixes aren't terribly, I mean, they're not rocket science,
#
but they require you to examine the source of the problem in the first place.
#
And I love the way that we again made a case for density here.
#
If you just do something about FSI, allow vertical growth, let us reclaim the sky.
#
Then you have less vehicular traffic and you have less pollution.
#
And in any case, for the upper floor people, the air is fine.
#
But et cetera, et cetera.
#
So I have a couple of questions here.
#
And one is about, you know, how when the problem gets incredibly naughty,
#
like the naughty as in K-N-O-T-T-Y and not naughty as in, you know, whatever,
#
like the Delhi smog, right?
#
Now the Delhi smog is multifactorial.
#
There are a thousand factors doing odd even, like odd even was a complete bandaid,
#
not going to solve nothing.
#
And now one aspect of what goes wrong there, and I accept it's multifactorial,
#
but one aspect of what goes wrong at the peak is the farmers in Punjab burning struggle.
#
Now you have the same government in both Delhi and Punjab.
#
However, I just feel that for that particular problem to be solved,
#
it is like almost literally impossible because your political incentives will not allow the
#
Punjab government to crack down on the farmers.
#
It just ain't going to happen.
#
You know, there is a fantasy that we'll get funding and do a lot of drones in the air,
#
which will locate fires from on top and send local police.
#
But that ain't going to happen.
#
I think Ajay Shah had used it as a hypothetical example.
#
He wasn't serious, but as a hypothetical example of
#
what you could do about a public goods problem of clean air.
#
But the point being that this is not a problem where even if you identify that this is a problem,
#
that there is any public policy solution to it.
#
It is ultimately a political solution that has to be brought.
#
And while this is like a blatantly explicit case of purely politics,
#
I would imagine that a lot of the other stuff that you work on
#
has politics at some level or the other involved where you not only have to
#
consider not just the goodwill of the bureaucrat, but also his incentives.
#
But you also have to consider the incentives of the politician
#
and how can you make a sales pitch to them.
#
So tell me a little bit about your learnings of this particular process
#
and how much is possible and where do you just throw up your hands
#
and say, you know, we've reached the limit of what we can do.
#
So, you know, it's interesting on the politics.
#
The other thing that exerts an influence on politics is public opinion, right?
#
So you're not going to do anything about the farmers.
#
But equally, what always surprises me is where is the public outcry about air pollution, right?
#
And look, to be honest, Anderson, you and I may be greatly upset about air pollution,
#
but I think to the average person that also deals with poor sanitation
#
and crowding, this is just one more thing, right?
#
And so I think there may be more political pressure to do more about it
#
that may counter the other political pressure to not do anything about it.
#
If this was something that as citizens we said, this is not okay.
#
But I think both given the other things that people have to deal with
#
and the sort of, you know, this plays out in the long,
#
I can't breathe for a couple of months, but I don't actually see the long-term impacts.
#
And then there's also some amount of like, it's okay where Indians like, you know,
#
we're fine with it, just buck up a little bit and you'll be okay,
#
is what I've been told by more than one person when I've complained about pollution.
#
I think, so urban is the classic example of this, right?
#
Which is we can say what we say, we can do what we do,
#
but until urban captures the political imagination, the big things aren't going to happen.
#
Look at the level of state governments, you can change building code legislation,
#
you can change a number of things, but the real incentives and the really big change,
#
the decision to maybe say, look, actually we are an urban country and that means we invest
#
in our urban future and we realize we have a limited window to do it.
#
All of that is politics.
#
And I think that's something that's beyond the remit of any organization.
#
But I think a lot of it comes from what people regard as their priority.
#
And I don't think yet urban has captured the political imagination
#
or people's imagination quite as much.
#
And so the answer to your question is, there is no sidestepping politics.
#
You work within the constraints of what's politically possible,
#
but there's still a lot that you can do within that.
#
And we normalize the pollution.
#
Like I remember, I think Raghav Chaddha, it was the Yamagri party leader,
#
who during COVID once said that, okay, Indians won't suffer so much from COVID
#
because of our bad air, our immune systems are good.
#
Some utter rubbish like that.
#
And I don't want to single one guy out.
#
This example came to mind that they are pretty much all like this.
#
My other question about political incentives is just the way governance is structured
#
in the sense that it is not as local as it should be.
#
And what that means, for example, at the state government level,
#
is that what a political party would need to win Maharashtra
#
would be really the voters who are important to them are the quote-unquote rural voters.
#
And they don't really care so much about Bombay.
#
And their priorities are kind of elsewhere.
#
Shruti Rajgopalan expounded on this really well in a very old episode we did on urban governance,
#
even shorter than the one I did with you subsequently.
#
So how does one sort of deal with this aspect of it?
#
Because you can go to the state and say that, okay, XYZ, here are our urban problems.
#
But the point is that the political imperatives are not necessarily going in that direction.
#
And the state has limited capacity not just to act, but to even listen.
#
So, you know, what's your experience with this?
#
So experience with this has been, those constraints are undeniable, right?
#
You are not going to get the same interests, the same
#
momentum behind change.
#
Then you are in areas that are politically salient.
#
But then what we found is when you work with good municipal commissioners, for instance,
#
or work that we're currently doing on air pollution, right?
#
So it's the state government and municipal commissioners saying,
#
okay, we need to do something about air pollution.
#
But you're never going to get the same salience as, say,
#
if you worked on something that is politically very important,
#
you're not going to get the same salience at all.
#
And there is no, you know, it's interesting.
#
I, you know, for the longest time, I thought the answer.
#
So there is no question that cities having more political accountability to their city
#
leadership having more political accountability to people who live in a city is unquestionable.
#
On the devolution question, I think we can't get around the issue of capacity, right?
#
So I think the sort of easy solution has been devolved, devolved, devolved.
#
I think devolved, devolved is not actually going to play out that well in the short run,
#
because you actually have to build then the capacity within cities to
#
take on a whole set of functions.
#
I know the two things go hand in hand.
#
But yeah, until, you know, the people that run our cities
#
are accountable to people that live in the cities, you're not going to get,
#
there's just transmission loss between what needs to get done.
#
And when you interface with government,
#
are you only talking to bureaucrats or do you also talk to politicians?
#
And initially, was there ever a confusion about, you know,
#
I forget the dialogue exactly, are you a party or a broker?
#
So, you know, like, who are you?
#
What is your interest in this?
#
Did you kind of get that?
#
And what was your answer to that?
#
So I think when we explained at the outset what we did,
#
you know, I think the thing that certainly in some of the early conversations they had,
#
we had was saying, look, outlining that in some sense,
#
our interest is to help them do what they want to do better.
#
That solved a lot of it.
#
And I think the trust comes from multiple, you know,
#
trust comes from repeated interactions,
#
from seeing other work that we've done,
#
from maybe seeing other work in other states.
#
And that's how it slowly builds over time.
#
And there's certainly skepticism saying, well, who, you know, who are you?
#
Why should we work with you?
#
And I think over time, you begin to build that credibility.
#
Tell me about the lessons you've learned personally across different domains,
#
like A, managing people, and B, building networks.
#
Because I would imagine that you start off as a scholar, right?
#
You're geeking out in all these various areas,
#
and figuring out what is the right public policy, and blah, blah, blah.
#
And this is a whole different skill set.
#
You know, whether it is networking with people,
#
and I guess when you're networking with the state,
#
you have to be super careful about how you phrase everything that you say,
#
because that trust is all important.
#
You have to convince them of that.
#
So that is a whole level of people skill.
#
And then eventually, and these are separate questions,
#
I'll just phrase them together, and you can take them in whatever order.
#
And the other question is about managing people,
#
because my experience in, though I stopped having a full-time job some 15 years ago,
#
but my experience in whatever I've seen,
#
is that the people running an organization will always be super motivated,
#
because there is much more of this skin in the game.
#
While people who are interns, and associates, and program managers, and all that,
#
are far less committed, because they can just shift to another job.
#
It is, after all, just a job for them.
#
At the end of the day, you also have to keep them motivated,
#
and they won't have your sense of purpose.
#
So, you know, two separate questions about managing people,
#
and their motivations, and all that,
#
and about networking skills, and etc, etc.
#
So I think I always, like a lot of people, never liked this work, networking, right?
#
Because that felt alien to me, and it felt,
#
you know, it brings connotations of being false, and, you know,
#
maybe having to sell yourself, and all sorts of things around,
#
you know, that didn't seem authentic.
#
And I think what shifted for me was when I said, look,
#
if you strip away all of that, and if you say,
#
can you focus on having interesting conversations, right?
#
And really focusing, sort of leading with curiosity,
#
which is, who have I liked talking to?
#
Where do I find, even if it's somebody who works in a completely different domain,
#
but where has there been, in some sense, a genuine connect, right?
#
And I'm surprised at how, when you approach conversations with that lens,
#
you know, there's people that work in domains that I know nothing about,
#
you know, but you connect at a certain level,
#
whether it's about a shared common interest, or just something
#
they said that's interesting, and that you can relate to.
#
And so I think to me, when I shifted the lens from something that seemed
#
based on falsehoods, to something that seemed based on more authenticity,
#
it just became a lot easier, you know?
#
And I always say, I can't quite place, I guess, an ambivert in that sense, right?
#
What's an ambivert, I'm sorry?
#
So somewhere between an introvert and an extrovert, you know?
#
So, or, you know, you can't quite tell where you fall on that spectrum.
#
And so I think for me, that's how I got past this, you know, what we call networking.
#
I mean, showing up somewhere with business cards is not something
#
that I would ever find interesting, but going somewhere and saying,
#
I'm going to find, you know, three interesting people to talk to,
#
and two of them I will stay in touch with, is a much better way to approach it.
#
And that applies to, and that then leads to trust.
#
And so if you look at the COVID network, for instance,
#
a lot of people that we reached out to were not names and titles,
#
but people where there were genuine connections, right?
#
And it's surprising how far that can take you.
#
On managing people, that's actually exactly something that you've struggled with, right?
#
So IDFC went through a corporate restructuring.
#
The IDFC, Limited and IDFC Bank, are now merging, so we actually shut down IDFC Foundation.
#
And have set up a new organization called Artha Global, which has a slightly different mandate.
#
But I say that because it's a similar process of also building something new.
#
And that's something you struggled with, right?
#
You will put in the hours and the effort to do it because you know what you're building in.
#
I think that tension will always exist.
#
You can try your best as a small organization to explain how things tie together.
#
But if I look back at myself, you know, 15 years ago, did I understand the pressures that the,
#
or maybe even 20 years ago, the pressures that the, you know,
#
VPs at the economic consulting firm had?
#
But I think what I learned from that experience is if they had
#
conveyed a bit more of that to me, you know, and said,
#
well, this is how you partner in the process of making us X.
#
I think we've been lucky to find people that are committed to the organization,
#
even if they realize they don't see the whole picture.
#
And then you will always have folks that say, well, you know,
#
And then, you know, if this doesn't meet the set of things, and as a small organization,
#
I mean, you can't, you know, you can't give people tons of perks and you can't say,
#
well, you know, if you're interested in this, we'll make sure you work on this.
#
And you can't sort of cater in that way.
#
And so that is a tension that you have to constantly navigate.
#
And there's times it's scary because you ask, you know, how much can a small core team do?
#
Has it taught you to moderate your expectations?
#
And it's taught me not to be upset when people don't have the same sense of ownership that I do.
#
And equally now it's taught me to say, well, yeah, I think it's taught me not to
#
judge when people don't have the same, you know, energy may not be the only word,
#
but the same motivation that you do and say, look, maybe they just don't see it.
#
I don't know if 20 years ago I would have been able to see it.
#
So maybe I should cut, you know, cut somebody some slack.
#
So another question across both these dimensions, but first across the networking dimension,
#
which is how does being a woman affect all of this?
#
Because I have heard from another friend in public policy in the past.
#
Maybe it was Shriyana Bhattacharya mentioning that when she would go for
#
World Bank meetings with bureaucrats, they would be looking at a junior male colleague
#
and talking and not at her.
#
I don't remember if it's her apologies, if it's not her.
#
But I think it would be true of every woman who's interacted with men in high places
#
that there is a danger that they don't take you so seriously.
#
And especially if they are men in government who are likely to be of an older generation
#
and older in their thinking and they're already drunk with power as it is.
#
See, I'm applying all the stereotypes here.
#
I just want to point out to any bureaucrat listening, these are my words, not Pritika's.
#
So how do you navigate that?
#
What did you learn about that?
#
How do you navigate that?
#
So there's no question.
#
I mean, I remember when I talked about the sewage treatment plants that we went to.
#
And I had all of this information.
#
I had done all this research on the plants, on the technology and all of that stuff.
#
But I had to take a male colleague as a chaperone pretty much.
#
And I'd get so irritated when either they would look at my shoulder or they would talk to him.
#
And I'd be like, but I'm the one that knows the stuff, right?
#
And then I'd speak and then they'd speak to my colleague and it was incredibly frustrating.
#
And so that happens time and time again.
#
And you try different things.
#
One of my female colleagues was also told, who led a very important piece of work
#
and was in her early 30s when she did it, was told, why don't you just
#
get some gray hair and then come back?
#
Or literally the joke was like, put some powder in your hair and come back.
#
So there's no question that you get that.
#
I've also equally been lucky.
#
You know, many of the people at our organization, incredibly lucky to see the other end of that,
#
which is male colleagues that will back you to the hilt.
#
And male colleagues that will see things in you that you don't see for yourself, right?
#
So there's that part of it as well.
#
That may be a smaller set.
#
I think what I have realized is somewhere you have to start believing it yourself
#
and then you will project it, right?
#
Because for a long time what I tried to do was say,
#
I went into a situation saying, I know I'm going to be perceived as X.
#
And then I was trying to adopt the behaviors that would counter it.
#
But I realized at some level it's because maybe I still didn't believe I,
#
you know, it's almost like you need to have this, develop this unshakable confidence
#
in yourself to say, I don't care how the other person responds to me.
#
I know I need to be and something about the way you project yourself when you do.
#
And then when someone continues to look at your male colleague,
#
you just start to dismiss it, you know, as they're failing and not yours.
#
But there's no question, you know, like I say, I mean, within an organization,
#
within a certain ecosystem, it's been wonderful to see the opposite,
#
but by and large across the board.
#
And it's not just, it's certainly not just government.
#
It's, you know, in sort of, you know, day to day interactions with a bank, you know,
#
who, when we set up the account, looked at a junior male colleague.
#
And I was like, no, actually, I'm the CEO of the organization,
#
you need to speak to me, but was speaking to my junior male colleague,
#
assuming that it was him.
#
And so that, that I think happens.
#
And, you know, do you, to a certain extent,
#
have to fake it till you make it in the sense of confidence?
#
That you have to project a certain confidence upon yourself,
#
even if you don't feel it.
#
And then the mask becomes the face and you actually become confident over a period of time,
#
because you forced yourself to act in that way.
#
Do you think there is that kind of feedback loop?
#
I think it's, I think it's both.
#
I think it's partly what we discussed earlier, which is
#
sometimes just putting yourself in a difficult situation
#
and seeing it through gives you that confidence.
#
And maybe that is fake it till you make it, right?
#
Or it's just, you know, figure it out at that moment.
#
You're not even faking it because you just have to figure it out.
#
And there is some amount of fake it till you make it.
#
But I think it's much more that, which is saying,
#
force yourself to figure it out.
#
And at the other end of that, at least this is what I tell a lot of my
#
junior female colleagues in the office,
#
don't shy away from that difficult situation.
#
Ask for help if you need to.
#
But at the other end of that will lie, you know, a great amount of confidence.
#
And the next dimension of this question is in the workplace itself.
#
Like on the one hand, you're the CEO.
#
You'll have, you know, many men working for you and young men tend to have,
#
and I remember from my own younger self,
#
tend to have this hubris about themselves, have figured the world out.
#
They're always interrupting other people and they already know all the answers and all of that.
#
So how does one deal with that?
#
And in a general sense, because I'm assuming that that would not really be a problem at
#
your particular organization from what I know of it.
#
But in general, within the workplace,
#
you know, do you feel that there is a way to go, not just from your organization,
#
which I think I've seen enough of to know that it's pretty awesome in this regard.
#
But just the other places you see around you.
#
So there is, and I speak to enough friends, women in senior positions that say,
#
and there's nothing wrong with somebody junior in an organization challenging you,
#
but the confidence with which a junior male colleague will stand up
#
and question a female leader versus a male leader,
#
you know, there's a fairly stark difference.
#
Look, again, I feel lucky, you're right, it's not something we faced at either organization.
#
But I do think that exists.
#
And I think I have seen
#
woman after woman struggle with, you know,
#
it's not that I want to create a culture where people don't question things,
#
but I don't want them to doubt my integrity as a leader because I'm a woman.
#
Like, I don't know where that's because they can see the differential behavior
#
when they're speaking to a senior male colleague or a senior female colleague
#
that does exist very much.
#
And again, it's not just an India thing.
#
So let's go back to cities.
#
You know, one of the interesting things that most people don't realize about Western cities
#
is that they weren't always thus.
#
People think of London and they think, oh, like, it was always modern and always clean
#
and always all the things that it is.
#
But the turn of the 20th century, London was a hellhole in the sense
#
you know, when the 1900s began, it was a hellhole.
#
There were rats in the sewers.
#
There were water problems.
#
There was massive air pollution.
#
People were falling ill all the time.
#
And it is like almost like an inverted it's almost like a bell curve journey that cities make
#
where, you know, they get really bad as they get crowded and so on and so forth.
#
But then as they get more prosperous, as they get richer, et cetera, et cetera,
#
they become much better.
#
And it seems to me almost to be a natural journey that cities make.
#
I think beyond Lombard outlined a lot of some of those journeys
#
in the skeptical environmentalist.
#
But yeah, throughout history, you see that journey where, you know, a city forms
#
and it's pretty good for a while.
#
And then it gets really crowded and it becomes a hellhole.
#
And everybody's complaining, but everybody's coming anyway because hey, cities.
#
And then eventually they get much better.
#
And then you end up with the wonder that is London or the wonder
#
that is any modern Western city.
#
So I want to ask you a little bit two questions about that evolution.
#
That one, is it inevitable that all big cities will evolve in that positive direction
#
after hitting whatever low their low is?
#
And number two, what are the lessons that we can take
#
from how great cities of the West have done it?
#
Because they have done it in different times.
#
Are there ways to leapfrog some of that?
#
For example, you know, what are the lessons for Indian cities?
#
Because I expressed this optimism to a friend recently and he was like, no,
#
but our cities are not necessarily going to get much better.
#
But I'm like, no, of course they are.
#
Just wait 20 years or whatever.
#
And so what is sort of your sense of this?
#
That is that sense of progression, just selection bias,
#
because I'm thinking of all the cities that made it.
#
Or is it, you know, just the natural progression of things
#
that unless a country dramatically falls into great decline,
#
as long as you're economically growing, they will get better.
#
And, you know, so on and so forth.
#
So there's no question.
#
And these are actually images that we use time and time again
#
in presentations that we make, right?
#
Which is the London and the New York you see today is not the city
#
it was 100 years ago or even 20 years ago.
#
And so there's a great book called London, a city as a Senate
#
that Vimal Patel had recommended to me.
#
Sort of talks about these peaks and troughs, right?
#
And there's times at which, you know, not so long ago,
#
London was losing people, right?
#
And it has come back even stronger, right?
#
And so I always like to say, you know,
#
the world's greatest cities reinvent themselves over time,
#
you know, and really to reinvent yourself, you know,
#
and the cities declined for all sorts of reasons.
#
The economic base of a city changes, Detroit, right?
#
But again, to be able to reinvent yourself takes a, you know,
#
you know, takes a variety of things.
#
It takes a certain imagination.
#
It takes, not to go back to planning and regulation,
#
but, you know, the Midland, they vacant for years and years
#
Until it could be redeveloped.
#
And arguably, by locking up that piece of land,
#
forced the city to grow completely differently
#
than it might have before.
#
But I also think, and I was thinking about it
#
on the way here actually, I think it is a bit of a cop out
#
when we say, well, when we get rich, our cities will look better
#
because there's a lot of things that you can do today
#
that don't require money.
#
And those things will actually help us get richer as well.
#
So the two that were on my mind when I came was
#
keeping the city clean doesn't actually require money, right?
#
I mean, there is the, of course, there's staff in terms of,
#
you know, municipal staff that, you know, collect waste and so on.
#
But it's also citizen behavior, right?
#
I mean, norms and around not throwing things on the street,
#
that doesn't take money.
#
There is a process to sort of to build that.
#
Road management doesn't take money, right?
#
Traffic management doesn't take money.
#
And I think we, there's so many of these things that we say,
#
well, you know, one day when we're a richer country,
#
these things will go away.
#
I actually think a lot of them we can do now.
#
And so, you know, I don't think it's inevitable that every city gets better.
#
I do think there are some cities that become victims of their own chaos, right?
#
And lose out, lose out because, I mean, I have no doubt,
#
Bombay loses out because it's very expensive for someone out of college to move here, right?
#
And yes, there's economic opportunity, but at some point,
#
the trade-off between that economic opportunity and quality of life,
#
quality of life begins to bite.
#
So, you know, it's interesting that the,
#
so the correlation between growth and urbanization has stayed pretty strong over time.
#
And it's in the last 30 years, this has actually begun to break down.
#
And a lot of that is because of congestion.
#
So you will see cities where people will stop coming to the cities,
#
or people will choose a secondary city.
#
So I don't think it's inevitable that every city will sort of make it through.
#
But I do think that there's a lot that we can do now that doesn't require money.
#
And that will make our cities a lot better to live in.
#
And that's actually a great point about, you know,
#
this incentivizing young people from coming to the city because it's too expensive.
#
Whereas if you had to go back to our earlier point, density,
#
if you had adequate density, you had affordable housing,
#
you weren't wasting so much land.
#
More young people would come here seeking opportunity.
#
And, you know, positive sum games for everyone,
#
because I think the greatest energy in India today is young people in small cities
#
And just for them to be part of bigger economic networks
#
and more opportunities and larger agglomerations would be amazing.
#
And some of that can happen through the internet,
#
but a lot of that really has to happen by physically being in a city where it's possible.
#
And we are just making it harder and harder.
#
So the unseen effect is all the young people who don't come.
#
My next question is about, you just spoke about littering, right?
#
That sure, we have, you know, BMC workers who will, you know, clean up after you.
#
But what you also need is a culture of not littering.
#
And it seems to me that we are stuck in a vicious cycle there
#
where everyone is littering so everyone continues to litter.
#
And there is this famous thing of an Indian is happily littering outside Delhi airport,
#
but the moment he lands in Singapore, he is completely law abiding.
#
And the reason for that obviously is that the Singaporean culture of not littering
#
has been either created or at least reinforced by the strict laws,
#
where if you litter, you're going to have to pay a massive fine or urine, whatever, you know.
#
Dubai, similarly, the drivers are really careful because you have incredible fines
#
for, you know, just breaking a traffic light or whatever.
#
So at some level, there is also that dilemma that part of the civic culture
#
can be affected by laws.
#
But the danger there is that if the state tries to legislate
#
the behaviour that it would like to see, there is inevitably going to be overreach.
#
So how does one sort of think about this?
#
So, and I don't think all of the answer lies in enforcement.
#
So laws, certainly in a context like Singapore, you are very aware of the law, right?
#
But I don't think that's all it takes.
#
I mean, I think I can think of a number of cities that I've been in that are
#
poorer cities than Bombay, right?
#
I'm specifically comparing sort of city to city that are very clean.
#
And I don't think it boils down to enforcement.
#
I think it boils down to this, of course, some amount of enforcement, but
#
norms, and I'm not quite sure what it is.
#
So I have an observation, which is Bombay used to be one of the more
#
orderly places to drive in India, and something changed during COVID.
#
And it's not enforcement.
#
And I find lane discipline is much worse post-COVID, if there is such a thing.
#
Then pre, you know, and I don't know what broke down, but now I find, you know,
#
lane discipline much poorer in Bombay than it was a couple of years ago.
#
And so I think there's a certain amount of reinforcement.
#
So when this is enforcement, but when they put the cameras on the traffic lights and said,
#
well, you know, and immediately you got a text if you broke a signal, suddenly people,
#
you know, drove, you know, drove really in a much more disciplined way.
#
And then someone realized that was happening no longer than it descended again, right?
#
So there's some cycle we need to kick off.
#
And some of it comes from enforcement.
#
I don't know how you change norms, but, you know, a lot of this can be done.
#
And again, this is not a question of money.
#
And like you said, a lot of this would make our cities much better places to live in.
#
You mean they've disabled the traffic light cameras?
#
You know, I went to Malad yesterday.
#
It would have taken me 41 and a half minutes.
#
I wish you told me this.
#
So I would have, no, no, I am no respecter of lanes.
#
So I cannot speak for others.
#
And, and I remember this funny, you mentioned COVID again.
#
And I remember this funny regulation someone told me about that at one point in COVID,
#
the government wanted to avoid crowding, obviously.
#
So they had a regulation that shops on the right side of the road remain closed on a
#
particular day, left side open and vice versa the next day, except they did not specify
#
where the hell you're standing and which way you're facing and what is right and what is left.
#
So, and in typical Indian fashion, then what, so, so the, you know, shops on, then I guess
#
between themselves, shops decided which side of the road they were on.
#
But then, you know, they'd pull their shutters down, but leave them open.
#
And so if you just, you know, wiggled your fingers under the shutter, like, you know,
#
knocked or made a noise, they'd open the shutter and you could go in just fine.
#
You know, I think of certain cultural equilibrium and you're right that not everything is
#
because of enforcement.
#
Like when I think of auto rickshaws, right?
#
If you go to a city like Delhi, the last time I tried, you are never going to go anywhere
#
in an auto without haggling over the price first and paying, you know, you're never going by meter.
#
In Mumbai, on the other hand, you're always going by meter, more or less, you know,
#
except in extreme circumstances.
#
And to me, it is not because there's some inherent cultural thing.
#
The way that I speculate what happened is that accidentally one place arrived on one
#
equilibria and now it is too costly to shift.
#
And I'm wondering if there are external interventions, whether by civil society
#
or by the state, that can shift this equilibrium from one direction to the other.
#
Like a few years ago, I did an episode with then Congress MP Salman Anissos.
#
I mean, I say then Congress MP because he was then, I'm sure he still is now.
#
But Salman was gracious enough towards our current Prime Minister, Mr. Modi,
#
who he was otherwise opposing, to point out that one good thing he thought that Modi did
#
was the Swajh Bharat campaign because it kind of, you know, made it cool to be clean again
#
and to care about cleanliness, perhaps a first person after Gandhi to do it.
#
And now I don't know if that really tipped things, but Salman felt that it was a great effort
#
to make anyway, and I kind of agree with that.
#
But have you actually seen any such tips happen?
#
Like, even if you can't establish the causation of why something went from one equilibrium
#
to another, can you think of instances where it has happened?
#
Not that immediately come to mind, but when I was thinking about the cleanliness thing
#
on the way here, I said that sort of signaling.
#
I was in Singapore on the day Lee Kuan Yew passed away.
#
So that entire week that I was there, I mean, it was incredible to see the outpouring of,
#
you know, the grief really, right?
#
I remember speaking to a woman who'd come to, you know, offer flowers,
#
and she said something really interesting.
#
She said, you know, he taught us how to live and he taught us how to behave.
#
And paternalism, yes, all of that, right?
#
But I do think the sort of signals, certainly the Swachh Bharat Mission,
#
and this sort of direct messaging does sometimes have an impact, right?
#
I mean, you know, someone who's worked in sanitation is endless wash campaigns, right?
#
So like, or, you know, hand washing campaigns and all of that,
#
and all of that have had, you know, sort of mixed effects.
#
But I think this sort of signaling has actually, you know, has actually helped in pockets.
#
I can't think of an example that's coming to mind,
#
but I do think those shifts are possible, you know?
#
I mean, nudges try to do exactly that.
#
I mean, do they always work?
#
No, but that's exactly what they try to do, in many cases.
#
Yeah, and it doesn't only have to come from the state.
#
Like, I think there is so much talk of influencers and influencer marketing and all of that, you know?
#
Influencers can also take some of that responsibility upon themselves.
#
Like, I used to think once upon a time that, hey, celebrity endorsements,
#
influencers, they don't count for anything, it's a gimmick.
#
Today, I've come to entirely the opposite point of view,
#
where especially reading about mimetic desire,
#
Luke Burges' books or the episode I did with him,
#
I've kind of realized that mimetic desire is real.
#
Most of us want something because somebody else wants it,
#
and that could often be a role model or a celebrity or whatever.
#
And it just makes me mad the kind of things influencers market
#
without realizing the impact that they are having, you know?
#
Shady crypto schemes, bizarre kinds of alternative medicines,
#
horrible dietary advice, and it just kind of makes me mad.
#
And I think that there is scope there also for trying to create good shifts
#
in behavior such as littering less, but who knows if that will come about.
#
Maybe as a result of this, some influencers will take it up.
#
I don't think any influencers will listen to the scene.
#
So on that note, let's take a quick break and have a cup of coffee
#
or a diet coke or whatever and come back on the other side of the break.
#
Have you always wanted to be a writer but never quite gotten down to it?
#
Well, I'd love to help you.
#
Since April 2020, I've enjoyed teaching 27 cohorts of my online course,
#
The Art of Clear Writing.
#
And an online community has now sprung up of all my past students.
#
We have workshops, a newsletter to showcase the work of students
#
and vibrant community interaction.
#
In the course itself, through four webinars spread over four weekends,
#
I share all I know about the craft and practice of clear writing.
#
There are many exercises, much interaction,
#
and a lovely and lively community at the end of it.
#
The course costs rupees 10,000 plus GST or about a 150 dollars.
#
If you're interested, head on over to register at indiaankar.com slash clear writing.
#
That's indiaankar.com slash clear writing.
#
Being a good writer doesn't require God-given talent,
#
just a willingness to work hard and a clear idea of what you need to do
#
Welcome back to The Scene and the Unseen.
#
I'm still with Pritika Hingorani.
#
See the patience of this remarkable woman.
#
This is a person we need to work with government and change public policy.
#
But what I want to talk about now is not so much the shaping of public policy,
#
but the shaping of yourself.
#
I think we kind of skipped some of that and went through your early journey really quickly.
#
While you've always been extremely eloquent about what is wrong with our cities,
#
what is wrong with governance, et cetera, et cetera,
#
and more than what is wrong with them, how to fix them,
#
which is always where your focus has been.
#
I want to ask you about the shaping of you,
#
because you're not a typical Bombay girl.
#
You're not a typical South Bombay girl for that matter.
#
Outwardly, you might look it, but yeah.
#
So tell me a little bit about,
#
and I'm sure a lot of this is stuff you figure out in hindsight,
#
but tell me stuff about the shaping of you.
#
You mentioned earlier that your grandparents had a bit to do with it and so on and so forth.
#
So I think the, I suppose, early and fairly defining experience was
#
my parents got divorced when I was five.
#
And certainly in India at the time, that was just not a thing that happened.
#
And I still remember in school, somebody coming up to me and saying,
#
my parents have told me not to speak to you because your parents are divorced.
#
And yeah, I was quite taken aback.
#
And fortunately, I had a friend next to me with much greater presence of mind
#
who looked at this person very dismissively and said,
#
well, then don't talk to us and please leave.
#
I mean, I think by and large, I'm not saying that was the response,
#
but I think it was an interesting experience to,
#
when early on you feel like your experience
#
is different from what you perceive to be the norm.
#
I think it gives you a creator empathy for people around you
#
and realize that everyone has their own story, even if you don't see it.
#
And so we were very lucky because we went to stay with my grandparents, my mom's parents.
#
And they were a huge influence on my life and a very positive influence.
#
And in many ways, you know, were parents as well.
#
So, you know, you sort of mentioned women being able to walk out.
#
And that's not what happened in your case,
#
but I want to ask in your mom's case, but I want to ask a general question.
#
I had once written a column, I think circa 2008, arguing that
#
the best possible metric for whether women are advancing in India is a divorce rate.
#
Because to me, the more divorces there are, the better it is,
#
because it means more and more women are being empowered
#
and becoming independent enough to walk out of bad marriages.
#
And otherwise, they're basically stuck.
#
And here I sort of begin to kind of think about that,
#
because, for example, there is the aspect of community that, of course, it is hugely helpful
#
if you have a community, sort of a metaphor, metaphorical extension
#
of Jane Jacobs' eyes on the street,
#
but a community where people are looking out for you and et cetera, et cetera.
#
But it strikes me that in India, that community, in most cases,
#
except for in really elite enclaves,
#
in most places would be so conservative
#
that the pressure would be on getting the women to stay with the abusive husband,
#
rather than say that, hey, you know, you get out of it,
#
we'll take care of you, look after yourself, look after your kid.
#
You know, and that's really an orthogonal point.
#
I don't think it's leading to a question,
#
and it's not even sort of related to your mom's case,
#
because she was not the one to walk out.
#
So my question was, given that what you saw your mother go through,
#
bringing you up as a single mother,
#
I wonder if women sometimes tend to underestimate their own strength,
#
you know, in the sense that it ties back to the earlier question of the imposter syndrome,
#
it ties back to how one way of your finding confidence in yourself
#
was actually doing stuff.
#
And when you're in the middle of a situation and you have to do it,
#
you suddenly realize that, hey, I can do this, it's not a big deal.
#
And, you know, women, actually, if you think about it,
#
just biologically are equipped to take way more pain than men possibly can, right?
#
Like, what is childbirth?
#
Put any man through childbirth, and it'd be like a sobbing baby himself.
#
Is that something that we kind of miss?
#
Like, I did an episode with Kavita Rao and Lady Doctors,
#
and, you know, 19th century lady doctors,
#
and I keep going back to the story of one of them,
#
which is Hanapati Sen, who was basically married off at 10
#
to a 45-year-old widower, used to play with his kids during the day,
#
get raped and wake up naked and bleeding at night.
#
When she's 12 years old, her husband dies, her in-laws die,
#
her parents die, and the only living relative takes all her money and throws her out.
#
And she's 12 years old, utterly destitute in a village called Barisal
#
in something like 1869 or some random year like that.
#
And you think it's over, and I promise you, for any man, it is over right there.
#
But this woman has a freaking strength of character to make her way to Benares
#
to somehow teach herself medicine and become one of the acclaimed doctors of her age, right?
#
So it's a story that blows me away.
#
And just reading Kavita's book also blows me away,
#
because all of the women she's talking about in that book
#
are remarkable just by dint of doing ordinary things
#
that are ordinary for men, but otherwise sort of denied to women.
#
So do you feel that there is something there, that there's an important lesson there?
#
Did this shape you in any way, just seeing your mom do stuff herself and not have to, you know?
#
It did. I think the thing, you know, and I was lucky to maintain, and you know, to this day,
#
a good relationship with both sides of the family and all of that.
#
But I think the one thing that my mom certainly told both my sister and I from an early age is,
#
no matter what your circumstance, you could be in the happiest marriage,
#
you could be on your own, whatever it is, you have to know that you can count on yourself.
#
You know, certainly be self-sufficient financially.
#
So to her, she said, look, I will do whatever I can to give you the best education.
#
Then it's on you. But that's what I know that I can do. And I think time and time again,
#
over the years, she has said to both of us, don't underestimate what you can do.
#
I think she sometimes downplays perhaps what today, looking back, I mean, today I'm
#
older than she was, you know, when she was in this situation. And I am amazed at what she took on.
#
I think very often the person that doesn't see it for themselves. But it definitely shaped me
#
both from watching her and from the things that she told us, you know? And I think
#
both my grandparents as well, you know? I mean, I think there was never any question that said, look,
#
we are here for you and all of that, but you have to back yourself.
#
I think I was lucky not to grow up with any of this, this sense of, oh, poor you for being
#
in a certain, I mean, in any situation, right? It was always like, look inside yourself and ask
#
yourself what you can do. And what's extraordinary is, but there was never any, this is the thing I'm
#
always struck by, there was never any bitterness in it. And there was never any look out for
#
yourself at the cost. It was very much look out for yourself, look out for the people around you. So
#
my grandparents are both Sikh and I think a lot of it was rooted in their faith, which is
#
this deep sense actually of looking, even if you have a little bit, for looking out for people
#
around you, you know? And in that, you know, in this sense of community that you build and in all
#
of that, just, you know, being able to look beyond yourself as well is a very important part of it.
#
And you took it too seriously. Instead of just looking out for the people around you,
#
you're looking out for the whole damn country. That I'm not sure, but.
#
Yeah, but at least that part of the whole damn country which lives in cities.
#
So I want to ask you about another, you know, interesting word that struck me where you said
#
that you're no longer so judgmental or that you were never so judgmental because your position
#
being that, hey, you never know someone else's story, right? You don't know their background
#
and all of that. And do you think it is a problem that we are too judgmental today? And more than
#
that, that we are incentivized to be judgmental. Like what I see in the public discourse is a lot
#
of the public discourse is incredibly polarized where people are always judging the other person
#
and looking for a gotcha moment or, oh, you hold that incorrect opinion or, oh, if I twist your
#
words this way, it might appear that you hold that opinion and I can appear virtuous by, you know,
#
judging on you. And do you think that that's a little bit of a problem because what I find
#
in the discourse is that there is a silent majority which is just trying to do its work and is scared
#
of entering the discourse. And there is a vocal minority which is deeply shrill and canceling
#
people all the time from either left or right and judging people and abusing them. And that just
#
poisons the discourse. And these are people who are just Twitter warriors. They're not contributing
#
to the real world in any meaningful way. You know, people like you are doing that. So what is your
#
sense of sort of the discourse and how it has actually literally changed during the time that
#
you've been working? So I do think that, you know, I don't know if en masse we have become
#
more judgmental. I think social media has made, you know, has made just a lot of this visible,
#
right? And the anonymity doesn't help because things that you wouldn't say if people know who
#
you are, you are, you know, free to say multiple times over and with much more
#
venom than perhaps you would say if people knew who you were. I think very often the need to judge
#
comes from an insecurity, you know, and it comes from a need to say it almost bolsters what you
#
may want to believe about yourself by saying, well, that person is not this and that person's
#
not that. And I do think that, and I don't know whether it was that experience or it was a
#
combination of factors where I have felt that I like to reserve judgment because you really never
#
know where someone is coming from. But it is disturbing to see on social media the unwillingness
#
to have a conversation and the unwillingness to say, look, you know, maybe I hold this belief
#
because this is the set of circumstances that shaped me and maybe yours, we may not agree,
#
but just realizing that someone's point of view is a product of what their circumstances are,
#
right? And so, you know, agreeing to disagree to use a cliche. And that does bother me because I
#
think the room for discourse and honest conversation seems to be shrinking, you know,
#
and then people shy away from it because you don't want to get into a screaming match.
#
And I think there is still room for, there needs to be room for more nuanced conversations.
#
You're in a space where as far as your work is concerned, validation is always elusive and
#
far away that, you know, you will after tremendous amounts of effort move inches,
#
but the inches you move can be consequential at scale because it is the Indian state you're
#
talking about. But their effects may be felt over time and they may be multifactorial and it,
#
you know, forget taking credit for it in public, which of course you don't do,
#
but you cannot even perhaps take credit for it properly yourself because, you know,
#
you don't really know. So in that case, do you sometimes feel frustrated at the slow pace of it?
#
Like we are hardwired to seek validation in some form or the other, you know, to think that there
#
is some fruit for our work and et cetera, et cetera. So what do you think about that?
#
Have you been frustrated at other times where the journey seems really hard and you think,
#
hey, why don't I just, you know, become a consultant and make PowerPoints or something?
#
That is never a thought.
#
No, no, but I hear you. I mean, there's times I'm like, you know, maybe in my next job,
#
I want to sell soap because I know how many pieces of soap I have sold.
#
And certainly, I mean, I think there's, there are definitely points when
#
you want to do something that is more measurable or the gratification is more immediate.
#
I think what has helped is both keeping in mind that when you actually do have impacted scale,
#
the scale is very large, realizing that this is a long game in a sense.
#
But I think also then you start looking for the smaller bits of gratification along the way.
#
So we talked about learning to build and I think you make a fair share of mistakes,
#
but even looking back and saying, look, this is how far I've come when it comes to
#
learning to manage teams or projects or building an organization. And so you start looking at the
#
things that are tangible in the ways that you have changed and you have grown. But no question,
#
you know, I mean, I have thought this many times, which is, would it actually be
#
easier and more, not more gratifying, but more tangibly rewarding to do something where you can
#
see the impact? And who knows, maybe the next time we, you know, I'm on the show, I'll be selling
#
soap and I will tell you how many, but I mean, it's, you know, it's just something more immediate.
#
Yeah. And if you do sell more soap, you would have done something more for Swachh Bharat.
#
Maybe that's the way to have impact.
#
So outside of your work, what's your self-actualization? What are you doing
#
in your free time? What do you enjoy doing? What's the texture of your days?
#
So the tech, I am becoming much more of a morning person than I ever was.
#
I was always, always a late night person. And that's when I had quiet time and time to think.
#
And the wonderful revelation of the last two years is that quiet time also exists in the morning.
#
I didn't know this. And so it's interesting because I feel that the cadence of my day has changed.
#
So earlier it used to be, you know, you're up, you're at work. So you're just sort of doing,
#
doing, doing, doing. You see friends in the evening. You know, if you are particularly
#
disciplined, you will work out. Can't say that always happened. But then you get your time at
#
the end of the day to yourself to unwind. And I think now taking a lot more of that in the morning,
#
in some sense, it changes how you set up your day. And so that's, that's been an interesting change.
#
And one of the things now I try to do early in the morning is to do yoga. Because I think over the
#
years, it's something I've done on and off, on and off, you know, loved it. But I found the,
#
the centering that it gives you before, before a long day, I'm making more time to travel.
#
I haven't been very good about that. I love to travel. I haven't done enough of that in the last
#
couple of years. I think COVID makes you realize that you shouldn't keep putting those things off
#
indefinitely. It's no surprise that my favorite places to travel are cities. And we were talking
#
about this earlier. I have this odd thing where the thing that I like to do when I go to a city is
#
to take a map and walk around. And so I actually don't like trips where I do, you know, four cities
#
in two weeks. I like going back to the same city time and time again, until I actually feel like
#
I understand the city and I feel like a local. And so travel is the other thing that I'm working
#
What are your favorite cities?
#
So, I mean, this is an awful cliche, London, for sure. But I think that's partly what we talked
#
about earlier, this sort of layering of history, right? So I follow this blog called, and now I'm
#
forgetting the name, but it's excellent. It's called, I'll send it to you if you want to link
#
it in the show notes, right? But it says all these incredible things. So if you look at the railings
#
in London, you'll notice in a particular neighborhood in London, you'll notice that,
#
you know, the railing is straight and then there's a slight bend and it's straight again. And it's
#
because what they did at some point during World War II was actually take railings down,
#
convert them to stretchers. And then when the war was over, the railings are now old stretchers,
#
right? So that little dent that you see was really to be able to lift it. And so
#
it gives me enormous joy to walk around a city where you notice these small things and see
#
history, Istanbul, partly because it's a city I've managed to go back to time and time again.
#
And so beyond just the tourist sites, which are beautiful, it's a city that I feel I understand
#
the texture and the rhythm of. And I've also seen it change over a period of 10 years. And it
#
connects you to a city when you feel part, not part of its evolution, but you feel like you can
#
observe its evolution and you haven't seen it at a point in time. I recently went to Cape Town
#
that I'd always wanted to go to. I went on work and it's an incredibly, incredibly interesting
#
cities. You see the scars of the past, there's no question, but I was also struck in perhaps
#
because we were there again on a city's visit and got to interact with planners. It was really
#
inspiring to see what at least the people in the planning department we spoke to are trying to do
#
about the scars of the city. And just learning to see a foreign city and make it your own
#
also teach you to look at your own city in a different way, because so much around us,
#
we just normalize it. I'm sure there are many Londoners who've never noticed those railings,
#
for example, and who do not find wonder in many of the small things that you will.
#
And this city itself, I mean, you of course don't live in Bombay, you live in South Bombay,
#
we know that that's a different city. Earlier you referred to Kalaghora as a central district
#
or something. One of the, I was very careful, relatively central part of town, no longer.
#
It's not even close. It's like, you know, hello, I mean, anyway, what can you say to these South
#
Bombay people? Central part of town means where I am, Fort Bungalows. It is always where you are.
#
So you move the center with you. So even for you today, this is kind of what it is. But
#
have you learned to see your city differently yourself over time through all these many
#
dimensions? There's a dimension of the history of it. There is a dimension of the different
#
impacts that bad policy have on it, for example. So, you know, take me a little bit through how
#
your gaze has shifted. So it's interesting, when you first started asking me the question,
#
I think the interesting thing is I've never felt this, because so much of human history is
#
intertwined. I was talking earlier about the Islamic cities book that I love, that our
#
common friend Niranjan recommended. I've never felt this sense of our cities, other country cities.
#
My grandfather, my dad's father spent a lot of time in Kabul. I unfortunately never got to meet
#
him, but I've seen some of the pictures, right? I think to me, it's been the cities of the world
#
are fascinating. And I know, you know, the history of cities intersected at so many points, whether
#
it was because of trade or the movement of people and so much else. What has changed is what we
#
talked about earlier, right? Which is money doesn't need to be a reason not to do things.
#
I've seen enough cities that have far less than we do, that manage to do sensible things, right?
#
And I think that's certainly one perspective. I used to say, well, what we talked about earlier,
#
which is, well, one day we will get there. Some examples, some examples.
#
Okay, so Cape Town, I mean, you can't compare. I have a close friend who's also a planner,
#
we were both in undergrad together and in planning school together. And her sister
#
lives in Rwanda, right? Or she's from Ecuador, right? Now, again, slightly different income
#
levels. But she said to me when she came to Bombay, which is, you know, it doesn't need
#
to be this dirty. So I don't think that, I think some of the things we make, what it's made me
#
realize is some of the things we think money will fix, money doesn't need to fix, you know,
#
can't fix now. You know, having pavements, utilizing road space better, none of that needs
#
us to wait till, you know, a certain per capita income at all. It's about political will, it's
#
about making the right choices. None of these are difficult fixes.
#
So my sort of penultimate question for you, and the penultimate question is, for people who are
#
interested in public policy, but interested in sort of the way you are, not interested in a sense
#
of studying it in an academic sense, and whatever, but studying it and figuring out and solving real
#
world problems, perhaps in the exact same way that, you know, you guys do, you know, what would be
#
I think immersing myself in it has been an extremely rewarding choice. You know, we started an
#
internship program in 2014, I want to say, and we thought to ourselves, you know, how many people
#
would be interested in public policy? And it is incredible to see, I mean, when I started working
#
in public policy, I had all sorts of questions over how am I going to pay off my graduate school
#
loan? I mean, how am I going to pay off my graduate school loan? I mean, how am I going to pay off my
#
graduate school loan? What exactly am I going to do? And I think what's been interesting to see is
#
how many more avenues there are, you know, both, you know, within academia, but also in practice.
#
But I'd say it doesn't only require a career shift. It could also just mean
#
being more politically engaged or being more engaged in your community or being more engaged
#
in understanding. You know, I think the, you know, we say this a lot. This was an observation,
#
you know, in the U.S. was how much more, it may not be true anymore, but how much more
#
issue-based elections in the U.S. were than, you know. And I think what gives me
#
certainly a great sense of optimism is when I see a lot of the, if I can say, the younger generation
#
that, you know, comes to the office and how much they care about issues and think about them,
#
that eventually we will reach that point where we're battling about is, you know, is policy issues
#
and we actually think about them and don't accept it as, oh, you know, like, you know, politics is
#
outside of the, it's not something that I think about. Yeah, I mean, great point. Engage deeply
#
is how, is a good way to sum it up? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Though sometimes I worry that issues
#
that people claim to care about or even think themselves to care about are like badges they
#
are wearing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That worries me a bit, but there are exceptions who really do care
#
and we'll see right in their work. And I'd say don't, exactly, right? I mean, I think there's,
#
it becomes this badge of honor to like, you know, really care about this issue. I'd say
#
understand the issues and actually maybe don't care. Don't care at all. Care enough to understand
#
it, see it from different perspectives. Don't, don't pick a side and get worked up about it,
#
you know, but actually see it from all perspectives. See why, you know, you know, good ideas
#
may not get implemented. I mean, one of the things I think we had to get comfortable with early on
#
is just because an idea is good doesn't mean it's actually going to get implemented. I mean,
#
we talked about it, there's a host of factors why it wouldn't. So, yeah, you know, sort of build
#
this understanding of what it takes to see things through. Engage, replay the long game if you have
#
the temperament for it. Yeah. Final question, for me and my listeners, recommend books, films, music
#
that mean a lot to you or that you just enjoy so much you want to share it with everyone.
#
So the book, because we've been talking about cities, Order Without Design, Alain Berto,
#
is by far my favorite book on cities. And it's one of the few books on cities that engages with the
#
question of markets. I think that would definitely be the book recommendation that I leave. It's a
#
masterpiece. It is, it is. And there is a forthcoming book that perhaps I won't talk about yet, but will
#
be the second book to look for in planning. I think I know which book you mean. I can't wait
#
for it myself. I have never had that particular writer on the show, but we have been talking
#
about it for two and a half, three years. And I hope to get that person on the show when the book
#
is out, because that will be an absolute rock and roll episode. And I'm not talking about
#
Kartik Muldidharan, by the way, whose forthcoming book also people are looking forward to. But
#
we are talking about an actual book on cities, which is going to be. And a film, since you said
#
film, that I rewatch recently, that I had watched years ago, was Goodbye Lenin. I don't know if
#
you've seen it, but it's a boy and his mother that live in East Berlin. And then the wall comes down
#
and his mother's, I think, largely homebound. And how he then, and the world around her starts
#
to change, but he realizes it will be too overwhelming for us. So he recreates, he tries
#
to recreate, maintain around her what the world used to be, even though the city around him is
#
changing. And it's an incredibly beautiful story, film that I rewatched earlier this year.
#
I've heard about the film, never seen it, but it's a 2003 film. They were thinking about the
#
world changing then, think about what has happened since then. Any music?
#
Or even leisure books, because the book you've recommended is a masterpiece, but it is
#
related to the area of work. Some things, you know, which might take people by surprise.
#
Yeah, I am a big Murakami fan, for the reasons we discussed.
#
Prithika, it's been such a pleasure having you on the show again. Hopefully, you know,
#
the last time. Thank you so much for coming.
#
If you enjoyed listening to this episode, check out the show notes, enter rabbit holes at will.
#
You can follow Prithika on Twitter at prithika13, I'll also link that from the show notes.
#
You can follow me on Twitter at amitwarma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A. You can browse past episodes
#
of The Scene and the Unseen from sceneunseen.in. Thank you for listening.
#
Did you enjoy this episode of The Scene and the Unseen? If so, would you like to support
#
the production of the show? You can go over to sceneunseen.in slash support and contribute
#
any amount you like to keep this podcast alive and kicking. Thank you.
