#
Welcome! The conversation you're about to listen to now is what I'd describe as a Type
#
4 conversation. What does Type 4 mean? Well, this is purely my categorization and is based
#
on the kind of conversations I've had as the seen and the unseen has evolved. In my early
#
days, I thought people had a short attention span, episodes had to be 15 or 20 minutes,
#
and in each episode, I'd aim to dissect one policy or action. For example, why price controls
#
always lead to scarcities, or why tariffs are always bad, etc. etc. Just one small topic.
#
I'd call this a Type 1 conversation. Then, as I realized that people crave depth, I began
#
doing deep dives into subjects and these could often last 3-4 hours. For example, education
#
with Kartik Moolitharan, or Kashmir with Srinath Raghavan, or how Indian society has changed
#
in the last 30 years with Santosh Desai. I'd call these Type 2 conversations. This is subject
#
at the heart of it. I am speaking to an expert. We are going deep. Then, my show evolved from
#
deep dives into subjects to deep dives into people. These were like oral histories. I
#
like to think of them almost as assisted autobiographies. And these can be much longer. My episodes
#
with Shanta Gokhale, Jerry Pinto and KP Krishnan were all over 8 hours long and I am so proud
#
of them. These are all classics for me. There are many many episodes of this kind that are
#
5, 6, 7 hours long. I think of these as creating a repository of lived experiences for future
#
listeners to discover and to understand the times better. These require a different kind
#
of craft. I am more or less the first person to do so many of these deep dives. So I have
#
almost had to invent the grammar and structure of these conversations, which I call Type
#
3 conversations. I will write about it in detail some other time. But basically, in
#
brief, when I am doing a life in times oral history kind of episode, I see myself building
#
it around 3 overlapping scaffoldings. One is the life story of my guest. The second
#
is their work, which could be the books I have written or what they are known for.
#
And the third is broad ideas and themes I want to talk about, some of which will arise
#
spontaneously during the conversation. I like it when I can balance these. I think of episode
#
301 with Natasha Badwar, for example, as being just a perfect balance of the three. The guest
#
was amazing and I think the craft was just right. But you don't always have to get an
#
equal balance of the three scaffoldings. One may dominate, but that's okay if it fits a
#
guest. Anyway, maybe I'll write a separate essay about that someday. But today's conversation
#
is a fourth category. It's a Type 4 conversation. This is a conversation without any agenda
#
other than to have fun. It's not a deep dive into a subject or a person. It takes an incidental
#
quality of the show, the joy of digressions, and makes that the central feature. The idea
#
is to have a few hours of a fun conversation with interesting people and for all of you
#
to come along for the ride. Past examples of this include the 2022 year-end episode,
#
episode 309, the adda at the end of the universe with Roshan Abbas and Vikram Sathe. Episode
#
294, Dance Dance for the Halwa Wala with Jayarjun Singh and Subrata Mohanty is another example.
#
It's ostensibly about movies, but we have a blast and we go all over the place. Obviously,
#
for such a conversation to work, the chemistry has to be good and we all have to find each
#
other interesting. That's what I got when I recorded episode 343 last August. We are
#
all Amits from Africa. My guests, Zahir, were Krish Shashok and Naren Shanoi and we had
#
such a good time and going by the rapturous feedback, you had a good time too. So what
#
better way to start 2024 than by getting those fine gents together again.
#
Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
#
science. Please welcome your host Amit Varma.
#
Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen. My guests today are Krish Shashok and Naren Shanoi.
#
I've recorded rocking solo episodes with each of them and also one with both of them a few
#
months ago. I'll link all of those from the show notes. We loved that last conversation
#
so much that we agreed that the next time Ashok was in Mumbai, we would do one in my
#
home studio and indeed he flew down for justice. This could well be the most fun conversation
#
I have ever recorded. Naren tells many stories that Ashok and I draw linked in lessons from.
#
We discuss the difference between Chutiya and Dushht. We speak of how vegetarianism
#
is way more unethical than eating meat. Naren and Ashok explain ragas to mean both of them
#
do a lot of singing. It's quite magical. You got to get to that part. We speak about
#
how Indians do the best bench pressing, about Naren's forthcoming book, about Van Morrison
#
and Baregulam Ali Khan and about why a monkey covered in shit is a monkey that must be loved.
#
Another way to begin this year.
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Do you want to read more? I've put in a lot of work in recent years in building a reading
#
habit. This means that I read more books, but I also read more long form articles and
#
essays. There's a world of knowledge available through the internet, but the problem we all
#
face is how do we navigate this knowledge? How do we know what to read? How do we put
#
the right incentives in place? Well, I discovered one way. A couple of friends of mine run this
#
awesome company called CTQ Compounds at CTQCompounds.com, which aims to help people up level themselves
#
by reading more. A few months ago, I signed up for one of their programs called The Daily
#
Reader. Every day for six months, they sent me a long form article to read. The subjects
#
covered went from machine learning to mythology to mental models and marmalade. This helped
#
me build a habit of reading. At the end of every day, I understood the world a little
#
better than I did before. So if you want to build your reading habit, head on over
#
to CTQCompounds and check out their Daily Reader. New batches start every month. They
#
also have a great program called FutureStack, which helps you stay up to date with ideas,
#
skills, and mental models that will help you stay relevant in the future. FutureStack batches
#
start every Saturday. What's more, you get a discount of a whopping 2,500 rupees, 2,500
#
if you use the discount code Unseen. So head on over to CTQCompounds at CTQCompounds.com
#
and use the code Unseen. Uplevel yourself. Ashok and Naren, welcome to the Scene in the
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Yeah, it's so awesome to be back.
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And compared to Chennai, we are in the relative arctic environment of Mumbai. The Northern
#
Hemisphere, you know, a few more latitude degrees north of the steaming tropics.
#
I do have my air conditioner on, but I must tell the listeners that when I ask these gentlemen
#
what temperature should I keep it at, and generally the answer you expect is 22-23-18
#
if you want REM sleep. Though why someone should sleep during my recordings is bewildering
#
to me. But Mr. Chennai asked for 26, so we are trying to take it there. I have surreptuously
#
So there is this video by another Narendra I want to ask you about, Narendra, where the
#
other Narendra is asked in this auditorium full of school kids, what does he feel about
#
climate change? And he says, no, no, that's all in the mind. See, the weather hasn't
#
changed, we have changed. Right? So, you know, has your optimal temperature changed with
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I would not like to say, like, what euphemism can I say? Advancing years is offensive.
#
In your dotage. Anecdotage. Anecdotage would be appropriate, but yeah.
#
Yeah. So this interesting thing is, when I was younger, and my wife was the same age,
#
and she's still the same age.
#
Shahid Afridi of the wife world.
#
I wanted a much, a far lower temperature than she did. And as the years have passed, it's
#
reversed. And she needs the colder temperature now than I do. So yeah, so bedroom secrets.
#
Those days, I used to sleep with a thick blanket, now I sleep with a thick blanket.
#
The interesting sort of reversal. Do you have a story for this?
#
So there's actually one bit in Yes Prime Minister or Yes Minister, one of the things. So Mrs.
#
Hacker, there's a journalist sort of party happening in the house, and there's a lot
#
of wine flowing, and Mrs. Hacker is a little bit drunk, and somebody is basically just
#
sort of messing with her and just asking her about Mr. Hacker. And so they ask her, you
#
know, does your husband, does the Prime Minister snore? Something like that. So she says, yeah,
#
he snores, and something. So it's like, you know, he says, do you?
#
I think I know this one. I don't know why you're struggling. Should I say it?
#
Yeah, so they ask her, does the earth shake when you make love, and she says even the
#
So yeah, that's the one I was talking about.
#
There's another one which is bang on all of a sudden. So I was like, sort of trying to
#
Prime Minister is like a high fidelity system. So high fidelity, but low frequency. So she
#
says all of a sudden anyway.
#
So low frequency sort of sounds bass, right? So baby go bass person there.
#
Great reference. Yeah, so I don't know how that cut in.
#
So actually, yes, Minister sort of remind me some of these very offhand jokes, which
#
incidentally, I did not catch when I was watching the series, but I caught them when I read
#
that the BBC published a transcript. And there are some very brilliant small things.
#
One example was he's asked about some inflation going up and all of that.
#
And they say that inflation has hit 10 percent. So that is categorically wrong.
#
It's nine point nine six percent.
#
And then the end of the day, they say that, well, I will go back.
#
I will take this back to 10 Downing Street and so on.
#
He says, you mean nine point nine six Downing Street.
#
As Donald Bradman could tell you, the difference between 10 and nine six is pretty kind of massive.
#
So we have decided Ashok that in this particular episode, we will let our friend Mr.
#
Naren Shanoi do a lot of the talking.
#
And this is not frivolous storytelling we are doing today.
#
You know, the listeners should know that we are very serious that this is an educational episode.
#
It is a learning opportunity.
#
And, you know, one way of thinking of this episode is as LLM, LinkedIn Lessons Management,
#
because what Mr. Shanoi is going to do today is tell us stories with a LinkedIn lesson,
#
which he says you and I have to guess.
#
So I think there's a there's this nice little quote from these researchers who work on these large language models
#
that large language models are not fact tellers, they are storytellers.
#
So in that spirit, we will let our dear Narendra tell stories,
#
and we will then generate LinkedIn posts, business lessons.
#
And yeah, so that should be the goal, right?
#
And we will give the audience and listeners the opportunity to take those lessons and post it on their LinkedIn
#
and share with the world.
#
And I must at this point, while I agree with almost everything you say, almost,
#
I must protest so vehemently that I am right now, as you can see, lowering the gain on my ethics.
#
And my protest is that the way you say that not facts,
#
but stories makes it seem as if our friends stories are made up in some way.
#
And I want to tell you the while it is true that whenever he buys a computer,
#
he buys it with the lowest possible RAM, because he can manufacture his own memory.
#
Actually, no, so there's no value judgment there at all.
#
In fact, I would actually argue that the best way to communicate facts is via stories only.
#
That's how we are wired to appreciate stories, not facts.
#
That's how we understand the world.
#
You know, in primitive times, it was noise in bush, maybe lion run.
#
Solid probabilistic thinking, easy heuristics, et cetera, et cetera.
#
But today the world is complex and therefore we need better stories and noise in the bush.
#
There is this fantastic, right, you know, the overview effect, right?
#
So the first time you go into space, right, you see the blue earth.
#
And the idea is that you suddenly get this overwhelming sense of, oh, my God, I mean, this is so fragile.
#
I mean, the thickness of the atmosphere, the thing that keeps us alive.
#
And every astronaut and everyone who's gone to space has that sort of effect.
#
And I think there's this beautiful quote by Jim Lovell again.
#
So I said, either you can try to convince people about climate change with data, right?
#
You know, this many inches of, you know, Arctic ice cap melting.
#
Or what Jim Lovell said is basically that, you know, when people believe that when you die, you go to heaven.
#
He said the rest of the universe is insanely hostile as an astronaut.
#
You know that, that you literally cannot live when you go to heaven when you're born.
#
Because this is the only heaven in the known universe, which is the earth.
#
So that's why you should protect it, right?
#
So you've got to be able to find ways, powerful metaphorical ways of.
#
That's why I think these spiritual gurus are able to communicate better with people than scientists.
#
Because they have a story for everything.
#
But at this point, I just want to say that, you know, as far as climate change is concerned,
#
there is one place in the world which would welcome climate change.
#
And with this, I want to urge Naren to tell us a story about something that happened to Ashok in Winnipeg, Canada.
#
You know, where if climate change ever strikes, Indians will have Indian bodies.
#
They say in journalism that you must always go to your first, you know, they get the story directly from the person who experienced it.
#
But a rare example of this is that this story is best narrated by Naren than the person to whom it happened, which is me.
#
Yes, please go ahead, sir.
#
Ashok told me this and it's one of the most awesome stories.
#
So back in the day when he was like he had become an expert.
#
So he was a troubleshooting, a troubleshooter.
#
So wherever in the world there was trouble, Ashok would be sent with a couple of guns in his holsters.
#
One man, United Nations.
#
And just sort things out.
#
So he would go, he works for, is it okay to say TCS?
#
Yeah, you can say that.
#
He was working, has always been working for TCS.
#
So go to wherever the TCS office was, go and figure out what the problem was, do whatever he could to solve them and come back.
#
So he gets to go to this place called Winnipeg, Canada.
#
And when he goes there, there is, so the usual protocol is there is a TCS representative who is almost invariably 90 pounds and, you know, thick glasses.
#
I mean, cerebrally a giant, but physically very diminutive.
#
Somewhat like you, Naren, when you were young, except the cerebral part.
#
Well, I would think about that as well.
#
I'm noting on down these.
#
So that is Ashok's thing about Udupi restaurant proprietor.
#
So that's that's very interesting anecdote there.
#
There's a LinkedIn story.
#
So Winnipeg, Canada, and he goes there and he sees no one, no TCS person who answers for that description.
#
There's just one Indian looking guy, vaguely Indian looking, who has enormous tree trunks of arms, like just bursting from his clothes.
#
He looked like he could bench press Arnold, carry Arnold and like bench press Arnold.
#
He was built like that.
#
I don't want to make a fool of myself and go.
#
Definitely not an Indian IT guy.
#
Does not fit the description.
#
But eventually everyone left and they were the only two people.
#
And so he goes and approaches him and it indeed turns out to be a TCS guy.
#
And Ashok is completely stunned.
#
He doesn't know what to make of it.
#
He goes to the TCS office with his, you know, with his colleague.
#
And there are another 10 people there, all looking the same.
#
All of them with tree trunk arms bursting out of their t-shirts.
#
So this was actually the, like literally the, all the forearms, the material was like about to rip.
#
If the guy like bent his arm, you know, the shirts would like rip.
#
So like in my life, I've never seen a larger concentration of IT people with this many muscles.
#
It's one of those things where these two things don't belong in the same novel, let alone the same paragraph.
#
And so basically these, I really needed to figure out why are all these Indian people working in IT sitting in Winnipeg, which is, again, for those who don't know Winnipeg, Canada has like Toronto, Vancouver.
#
And there is basically then wilderness.
#
And the Arctic wilderness and Winnipeg is one of those places in the middle of some of the coldest parts.
#
Of where Canadians live.
#
And it was just frozen through and through snowing.
#
It was in winter and so on and minus 35, you know, kind of a temperature.
#
And then eventually I get to learn that look in winter, which is pretty much for eight months of the year.
#
These guys sun rises at like 11 and sets at like two or three p.m.
#
And there's little and there's literally nothing to do.
#
And because if you go outside into the cold, unless you're a typical white Canadian, your chances of dying are very high.
#
Indians not used to that kind of temperature.
#
So these guys have absolutely nothing to do.
#
So the only thing they do is hit the gym and workout two, three hours every day.
#
And they've all and again in true Indian fashion, they only exercise their chest and arms and nothing else.
#
So they have like, you know, spindly, you know, completely thin legs and massive kind of chests and so on.
#
But you should narrate the anecdote about the clothing store, though.
#
So he he finally reconciles, you know, sort of gets used to the idea.
#
And then his colleagues.
#
So his wife, Ashok's wife, has asked him to buy something.
#
And so he needs to go to a shopping mall.
#
So this guy takes him there and he's shopping and all of a sudden he is, you know, he's looking around.
#
His colleague seems to have disappeared.
#
So as he is looking around, a helpful shop assistant comes and says, oh, your partner is just gone on the other side.
#
And she thinks that the only universe in which a guy with a physique like Ashok is if they're in a relationship.
#
And then the interesting thing is that that guy is while I'm doing my shopping, he's trying to he said, why don't I get myself a blazer?
#
And I go find him and the store clerk, who is the sort of lady from Puerto Rico, right.
#
And with a strong Hispanic accent and she's like completely frustrated at because she spent the last 15 minutes trying to find a suit that fits this strange body shape,
#
which is that if it fits his arms, I mean, it's looking like a tent below.
#
Right. And anything smaller than that is absolutely not fitting at the risk of damaging the suit.
#
Right. And she is basically telling him that you why are you spending so much time at the gym?
#
You need to be eating more food and less protein powder.
#
You need to be a little bit more symmetrical so that you can actually get a suit and so on.
#
I said, this is the first time that in a place like Canada, a Bengali guy who could bench press Arnold Schwarzenegger is struggling to buy a suit,
#
being schooled by a Puerto Rican lady asking him to eat less protein powder and eat more food.
#
I said, this is globalization.
#
I was just thinking that.
#
Straight out of Thomas Friedman.
#
This is the LinkedIn lesson.
#
The power of globalization.
#
Bengalis bench pressing Arnold.
#
So a friend of mine at a conference a couple of days ago, a magnificent gentleman named Shankarshan or Shanky,
#
was telling me that, you know, have you heard of the Big Bang Theory?
#
Have you heard of the Big Bong Theory?
#
And the idea being that there's a Bengali at the root of everything.
#
But I have a bodybuilding story to go kind of go with this.
#
It's not about my own bodybuilding, alas.
#
But I had written a post about it and it has policy lessons, right?
#
So LinkedIn lessons can be policy lessons.
#
And the headline of the post was a day Ryan started masturbating.
#
Now, all of this is a true story, right?
#
When I was in college, I was incredibly thin.
#
It might seem hard to believe I was kind of one third of what I am now and et cetera, et cetera.
#
And this dictated in the morning that rather this did not dictate.
#
But this was a factor in the morning of deciding that when I come out of my hostel,
#
when I finish my college, do I go to the college canteen or do I go to the tapri?
#
Because the college canteen is on one side, the tapri is on the other side.
#
And if the wind blows against my shirt, my ribs are visible.
#
And I am so embarrassed because obviously at that age, you imagine every woman is looking at you
#
and making fun of you in their heads.
#
So I did not want the wind to blow against me.
#
So the wind direction would decide.
#
So my friends would say, where do I have to go to the canteen?
#
And I'd say, I'd look at the wind and I'd be like, no, no, tapri.
#
So you're using an anemometer and figuring out what is your breakfast strategy?
#
The heuristic of just facing one direction and seeing if my ribs are visible.
#
You could sort of moonwalk like Michael Jackson in whatever direction, no?
#
In those days, one did not have those sort of skills.
#
You did not have YouTube videos to teach you how to moonwalk.
#
Exactly, as if in those days one did not have those skills as if I do now.
#
So now in the hostel, in our hostel in Ferguson College Pune,
#
there was a friend of mine called Ryan who had a very similar body.
#
He was as spindly as me.
#
And he wasn't really concerned about people looking at him and et cetera, et cetera.
#
And it was like an unspoken sort of club of losers that we were in that
#
we are like the thin guys and it's OK and we are proud of it and fuck it, we'll own it.
#
And that's a posturing.
#
And one day I am passing Ryan's room and the door is open and Ryan is doing push ups.
#
So now this seems deeply unprincipled to me.
#
Betrayal of the values.
#
A betrayal of our values.
#
I mean, you don't sort of expect this, right?
#
It's like a pure vegetarian suddenly eating pork belly.
#
And we shall discuss vegetarianism later in the show, of course.
#
So he sees me come in and he looks up, look of guilt on his face.
#
And as you will note, the guilt is double edged, as you will find out.
#
So I ask him, what happened, boss?
#
So he said, Amit, I am masturbated.
#
But what's the connection between that and this loathsome act
#
that you are currently engaged in?
#
And now he comes close to me.
#
And he says, Amit, masturbation is a sin.
#
I have decided that every time I masturbate, I will do 25 push ups.
#
But is that the official compensatory act?
#
This has not been decided by the free market, but by Ryan.
#
No, it's a voluntary decision.
#
So it is a free market decision.
#
Six months later, I'm the only thin person in the hostel.
#
He is ripped in that very Indian way that the legs might be spindly.
#
But I, unlike you, was not in the habit of looking at men's legs
#
And now when I would walk through college with Ryan,
#
all the girls would giggle as they always used to.
#
But earlier they would giggle at who are these two thin guys.
#
Now they would giggle in sheer nervousness at the unlikely event
#
of this Grecian god walking in their midst, which of course was him.
#
And this is not the story.
#
The story is that shortly after this incredible transformation happens,
#
another gentleman in the hostel, who I shall describe as Varun Kumar Sinha,
#
very close to his real name, but I don't want to take his real name,
#
but everyone in that age will know, comes to me one day and he says,
#
Amit Bhai, ek baat batao.
#
Then he grabs me by the shoulder and he takes me to a corner where no one can hear us.
#
And he says, Amit Bhai, ek baat batao,
#
wo Ryan hai na, wo aapka dost hai na.
#
So he says, yaar, he was so thin six months ago.
#
Abhi uski aisi body hai.
#
I want a body like that.
#
Mujhe kya kanna parega?
#
So I said, bro, you have to masturbate.
#
And there are various LinkedIn and public policy lessons in this story.
#
Because of course, Varun Kumar Sinha was an experienced masturbator by that time
#
and did not buy the theory.
#
But you know, there are various lessons because there are various fallacies people can fall for.
#
And one of them is post-hawk ergo proctor hawk,
#
which is that first A happens, then B happens.
#
And you know, therefore A caused B.
#
So masturbation caused him to have his body.
#
The second one has a really suitable name.
#
Can you guess the first word of the suitable name?
#
It's called cum hawk ergo proctor hawk.
#
And this is that two things happen together and you decide that A caused B.
#
So there are all kinds of fallacies.
#
So I have given a story with LinkedIn lesson.
#
All through my teenage life when I saw somebody,
#
they would write in their bios that he was sama cum laude or whatever it is.
#
I always giggled because it did not sound like a very complimentary thing to say about someone.
#
In fact, Jassi's words, sama toh theke, but cum laude coming out of your mouth.
#
Suma means just like that.
#
It's like a combination of Tamil, Hindi, Latin, gali.
#
Your image has been destroyed.
#
You're like a dignified, knowledgeable, polymath person.
#
I have to tell you that his image was like, it's very high in my house for one thing.
#
So when I got married, I had a pretty handsome moustache as I would imagine,
#
which the first thing Sheila made me do is shave it off.
#
I was really, but you know, she said like it was a negotiation that's non-negotiable.
#
The moustache has to go.
#
So after a few days of this thing, a struggle I gave up.
#
Then many years later, I sort of met Ashok online.
#
And in a moment of recklessness, I put my wedding reception photograph.
#
Can we share it on Twitter when this episode is released?
#
It's going to be shared.
#
And Ashok immediately said, that is Udupi restaurant proprietor.
#
And Sheila, actually I was very offended.
#
But Sheila laughed so much.
#
He says, this is one rare friend who's actually sensible.
#
I said, in this crucial show.
#
Especially the photo that hangs on the wall in Udupi restaurants.
#
Rare friend who's sensible.
#
You have other sensible friends in Narendra Shanoi.
#
So let's move on to the first actual Narendra Shanoi story with a LinkedIn lesson.
#
But we are supposed to give you a prompt.
#
And you're supposed to find a story that fits a prompt.
#
Yeah, like Narendra GPT, right?
#
We will prompt engineer.
#
And my first prompt will be, let me kind of give you a simple prompt.
#
Okay, here is my prompt.
#
And just as our friend Ashok has spoiled his image by saying terrible things in Tamil, I dare not repeat.
#
I will also give you a prompt.
#
And my prompt is, chutiya.
#
So I have this really...
#
So chutiya is a word that is, you know, it has a lot of...
#
I mean, we use it in Bombay.
#
It's like, you know, it's like when you breathe in and breathe out, it's like pranayama thing.
#
And so I had a friend who was very offended.
#
So I thought he was offended by the word chutiya.
#
He said, you know, you use it too flippantly.
#
It has gravitas, it has meaning.
#
So there are many definitions.
#
And I could go on like it could be an entire episode on what a chutiya is.
#
Jeep is different, but that's another story.
#
So this is also my friend whom I shall call Mr Singh.
#
And so he told me that he had an uncle who was a carpenter.
#
And that carpenter, old man, excellent carpenter, used to work alone.
#
And he was getting on in years, so he couldn't do...
#
So he got an assistant, a fine strapping young lad from Punjab who was like really strong.
#
So, you know, he was very happy.
#
You want to play in a piece of wood, you want to do anything and this guy would be...
#
Or bench press Arnold Schwarzenegger.
#
Or bench press Arnold Schwarzenegger.
#
No, bench press the Bengali guy.
#
No, no, no, no, no, no.
#
Bench press Ryan who could bench press the Bengali guy who could bench press Arnold Schwarzenegger.
#
We actually now have to keep this going through the episode.
#
So, situation is, it's afternoon, close to lunchtime.
#
There is one door to be fitted.
#
It's fit, but it's tight.
#
So, uncle is really hungry.
#
So, he's telling his...
#
You know, he says, I'll take a break.
#
But the strapping young boy, he's like raring to go.
#
He says, do one thing, I'll go and eat.
#
You know, shave this off.
#
So, he asks him, how much should I shave?
#
So, he says, shave as much as a tree.
#
So, a tree is a pubic hair.
#
So, it's a standard thing.
#
A tree is like the diameter of a hair.
#
So, shave as much as a tree.
#
It almost seems, I think, the curse words from that part of the world
#
kind of come from a biology textbook chapter of the reproductive system
#
where every labelled part,
#
there is one use of every part of the anatomical part of...
#
There is, in fact, a famous saying in middle India,
#
life is a tree, food is art.
#
In Bombay, it is like, you know,
#
shave as much as a tree is a...
#
It's like a specification.
#
So, shave as much as a tree.
#
So, this guy says that, and he goes for lunch.
#
And then he finds out that the pretty thing has been
#
planed of almost three inches.
#
So, what happened was, this guy translating the specifications,
#
like, you know, you need to find out the standard.
#
So, he reached out, he plucked one hair,
#
he measured the length, and he reduced it by that much.
#
I would assume the reference is to thickness and not length.
#
There is a fundamental...
#
But this was the thing.
#
Mr Singh's question was, who is the chutiya?
#
It's because mamaji did not specify correctly.
#
So, that is the LinkedIn lesson.
#
Interesting. Fascinating.
#
I've also been confused by that specific...
#
But what is the LinkedIn lesson?
#
That specifications are important.
#
You cannot blame people for doing something wrong
#
merely because you didn't specify with clarity.
#
It's the Shakespearean who sins more, the tempter or the tempted.
#
I mean, in this case, I think, generally,
#
the blame should be on the person giving the requirements wrongly
#
rather than the person.
#
Very true. Great story.
#
And the remarkable thing is, this is not the story I expected.
#
I know another great chutiya story you have.
#
But the difference between chutiya and dhushht.
#
So, again, despite having lived in Delhi,
#
one eternal confusion we've always had is that,
#
is the literal meaning of this,
#
is just someone who comes out of that part of the body?
#
So, that is one carpenter.
#
So, he had told me, another carpenter actually.
#
So, there was carpentry work happening in our house.
#
I was a kid at that time.
#
And his assistant did something wrong.
#
And this carpenter was telling him,
#
you're not a chutiya, you're a gandu.
#
So, that kind of makes sense, right?
#
Either comes from there or uses that orifice for...
#
Because at least the first one would describe every human on the planet, no?
#
Everyone is from that...
#
I've always been confused by why that is considered a curse word.
#
And the other Mr. Singh story is that,
#
the difference between chutiya and dhushht.
#
So, that was the other thing.
#
And chutiya was a bit of a, you know,
#
sort of serious matter with Mr. Singh.
#
this is the difference between chutiya and dhushht.
#
That is also a nicer...
#
That is a LinkedIn lesson, actually.
#
Yeah, that's a LinkedIn lesson.
#
Yeah, that's how you do growth hacking and things like that.
#
In fact, even a public policy lesson,
#
there are so many things,
#
like Mrs. Gandhi destroyed the Indian textile industry
#
for no benefit to herself or her party.
#
Just to spite some Marwadi setjis, as far as I can see.
#
So, that makes her a...?
#
Yeah, so, it is also fascinating how
#
one curse words coming largely from sexual references, right?
#
Because of the taboos related to that.
#
And in many situations also, in both of these are true,
#
that sometimes the reference may be actually innocuous,
#
but in that culture and society,
#
the usage of that and the tone of that
#
indicates a level of seriousness
#
that you're supposed to take it seriously, right?
#
And likewise, even if it is deeply sexually graphic and explicit,
#
you're supposed to not take the explicit sexual part of it seriously.
#
And the fact that it is merely just a punctuation aimed at
#
sort of signifying annoyance or irritation, right?
#
The more graphic the word, you're supposed to...
#
Don't take it that seriously.
#
But if it's a very lame insult,
#
you still are supposed to assume that it is actually an insult.
#
Yeah, it's quite interesting.
#
Sort of, you know, gravitating towards the mean, if you will.
#
Actually, just thinking aloud, when language evolves,
#
you know, all these evolve as well.
#
Like, there are certain, you know, cuss words
#
which eventually become politically incorrect to use
#
and often with good reason, et cetera, et cetera.
#
Like, I often, if I think a little bit about it,
#
I think so many of the cuss words, like, you know,
#
are demeaning to women and so on and so forth.
#
But I wonder what new cuss words have originated,
#
because we need cuss words.
#
But I think right now, see, the weird thing about one is
#
that political correctness is a by-product of the television
#
Meaning that before that, no one had an audience
#
of the entire world and all that.
#
So you really, you didn't really have that kind of power.
#
So this is a new thing that you had to invent, you know,
#
sort of come up with a very boudlerized, banal way
#
of communicating things without offending
#
a maximum number of people, which is impossible
#
because humans are very diverse and all that.
#
The internet is weird because not only does it give people
#
a global voice, but it also gives a voice to tiny groups
#
of people who can get offended by you.
#
And the platform encourages you to, you know,
#
try and cancel them and, you know,
#
quote tweet them and things like that.
#
And so now there are like multiple small,
#
there are like, there are words that are used only
#
by the incel groups, right?
#
And there are words, there are other words that are used
#
only by say some specific ethnic group on Twitter
#
And some of these words you won't even recognize, right?
#
So for example, like people who are sus, for example, right?
#
It has a very specific meaning, right?
#
Suspicious, yes, but it has a very specific
#
of what they, when they refer,
#
this is like slightly sus and so on.
#
There are riz, for example, right?
#
What do sus and riz mean?
#
Sus is suspicious and riz is charisma.
#
No, no, but specific meaning.
#
So meaning that sus is not what you use
#
for a standard guy staring at you creepily, right?
#
Sus is used for very commonplace,
#
inner corporate, typical environment,
#
somebody you're working with, et cetera.
#
No visible suspicious behavior,
#
but you believe there is something wrong
#
about that person, that is sus.
#
So that, yeah, he sent this email that's very sus
#
It's not for the very obvious, visible, creepy behavior
#
that you might experience.
#
Someone once told me that Amit,
#
you're so riz, it feels sus.
#
So what could that mean?
#
But again, here are a bunch of three elderly uncles
#
discussing internet lingo that we probably
#
don't understand, to be honest.
#
And I'm absolutely certain that some people on Twitter
#
are going to correct all of these definitions
#
once this podcast goes live.
#
Rizness could be a redeeming factor,
#
but political correctness affects ordinary words also,
#
which is why I have decided that I will be very sensitive.
#
And even regular words which have not yet
#
come under their purview, I will correct myself.
#
For example, the other day I called someone a loser.
#
And then I thought, no, no,
#
that person is not a loser.
#
They are merely victory challenged.
#
That if someone is talking bullshit,
#
they're not talking bullshit.
#
They are insight deficient.
#
You could also say velocity challenged.
#
Like I think yesterday when we met at Naren's house
#
for dinner, somebody...
#
I don't think you were there then.
#
Our friend Sudheer Sannubhad was there
#
and I cracked a joke and he asked me to jump
#
As everyone is, but yes.
#
So when you land at the end...
#
Gravity compliant, but impact challenged.
#
As Douglas Adams used to say that, you know,
#
the key to learning how to fly is to jump off an edge
#
and forget that you're going to crash.
#
I keep telling my writing...
#
The idea of flying is to forget to fall.
#
And I keep telling my writing students that,
#
you know, only a lot of writing will make you a good writer.
#
And to that, I would say if you want to learn to fly,
#
only endless jumping of cliffs will...
#
And forgetting to fall.
#
Strategic forgetting, yes.
#
Are you going to give this prompt, Ashok?
#
We had this brilliant prompt with Dada Station.
#
So this time I want to say,
#
Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport is the prompt.
#
I mean, it's the new airport I'm talking about
#
is the worst design airport in my considered opinion
#
I prefer to take autos to...
#
Yeah, because autos are less traffic jam challenged, right?
#
So they'll find their way in.
#
And Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminals does not like autos
#
All airports, by the way.
#
Somewhere in the wilderness and they have to find...
#
They have to walk, yeah.
#
So the only exception is when Sheila is around.
#
So for some reason, she...
#
When she is with me and we've taken autos,
#
she hates to take an auto, but we take autos
#
because we are perennially running short of time
#
and that's the only way.
#
Miraculously, people will come and guide us to the place.
#
So I don't know whether this Sheila effect
#
or a Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminals,
#
whatever that airport effect is.
#
So I don't know what a...
#
What LinkedIn lesson there is in this.
#
So airports are actually quite...
#
Again, Douglas Adams famously is one of those places
#
where everyone is miserable,
#
including the employees, the cabin crew, the pilots,
#
the passengers, the kids in tow.
#
Everyone is miserable and amidst all of this misery,
#
I think, for example, the Mumbai airport has
#
a bunch of these Labrador retrievers
#
aimed at you going and hugging them
#
and don't have to de-stress
#
because they're recognizing that being in an airport
#
is inherently stressful, so you can de-stress.
#
You can transfer your stress to that poor animal
#
being non-consensually hugged
#
and needlessly harassed by all passengers and so on.
#
But airports actually...
#
There was a point of time
#
what would happen is that because there are too many flights
#
and clearly infrastructure never keeps up with demand and so on,
#
your domestic flight, you would board from Terminal 1,
#
but the flight would be standing in the international airport,
#
somewhere really, really far away.
#
Then you would be put in a bus
#
and oftentimes it would feel as if that
#
the airline suddenly decided that,
#
forget the flight, we are taking you by bus from here to Bangalore.
#
It'll take literally like half an hour
#
for you to be standing in that bus
#
and it'll take you to that plane
#
and then where you have to wait
#
for the previous bus to disgorge its load
#
and then for people to sort of get into the plane.
#
And there are also terrible people,
#
like at least here, so once this happened,
#
we went to the airport, we were checking in, security,
#
and Sheila has, she's put in her handbag and everything
#
and she's, the phone she forgot to put in,
#
so she gives it to me and I put it into my bag, we do that.
#
And then very unusual for Sheila,
#
she must have been really stressed, she forgot.
#
And she goes, she realizes the phone was not there,
#
she goes running back and asks,
#
has my phone gone missing?
#
And the lady was observant
#
and she said, no, no, I've given it to your daddy.
#
So this is the worst thing that has happened to me, man.
#
Scrapping youth like me.
#
And it's also another weird thing, again,
#
because it's Chennai, there obviously has to be a,
#
you know, Hindi reference.
#
This could lead to some good action.
#
You know, you could be telling a lady, who's your daddy?
#
I can, yeah, total fun.
#
So the other thing in Chennai, again,
#
the add-on tension is the fact that that entire CRPF staff
#
is only Hindi speaking.
#
And they will scream in Hindi
#
at people who do not understand Hindi.
#
P.J. Mode and all of that, I mean,
#
I was okay, I was supposed to understand it, right?
#
for a flight going from Chennai to Coimbatore,
#
that CRPF guy, the in-flight announcement,
#
everything is in Hindi, right?
#
And all signboards now,
#
I even, in fact, noticed that in the screen
#
where they show the English, then Hindi,
#
and then they'll show Tamil, right?
#
Somebody actually pointed out
#
that the Hindi was staying on for longer.
#
Started like, measured,
#
and this is Hindi imposition and so on.
#
But the other funny things I've seen is that,
#
I remember this Varun Grover bit about
#
him not being allowed to take Singhada, right?
#
It was a lovely bit, right?
#
Saying that it has a little bit of a sharp edge.
#
imagine if I was actually
#
going to kill someone with a samosa.
#
in a flight with a Singhada,
#
how much of that first word you used
#
that we would all look like?
#
So I had a very similar story where
#
clearly somebody who's traveling for the first time
#
in a flight and carried this large handbag,
#
not one of those strollers or anything,
#
pretty heavy, right, clearly.
#
And it's like, back to the gills,
#
and clearly that guy went through the x-ray
#
and they said, please open it up,
#
what the hell is this, right?
#
And it turns out to be about
#
eight or nine pineapples.
#
with all the sharp knives and so on.
#
And again, pineapple itself
#
is a very remarkable fruit, right?
#
One is that it takes two and a half years to grow.
#
Each pineapple takes two and a half years to grow.
#
Each pineapple takes two and a half years to grow.
#
It's one of the slowest growing things.
#
So if you're a pineapple cultivator,
#
it's not an easy thing.
#
You've got to wait like two and a half years.
#
It's a very slow growing thing.
#
And clearly, there is no other fruit on the planet
#
In more uncertain terms.
#
It has like a sharp armor.
#
insane set of sharp spikes
#
And if you manage to get past all of that
#
and like a hardcore animal is like
#
I'll go through all of the bleeding mouth
#
It has an enzyme that can digest your flesh.
#
Which is bromelain, right? Which is why it's a meat tenderizer.
#
And so on. So when you eat a pineapple,
#
the pineapple is trying to eat you and all of that.
#
And so the argument there in the airport was
#
all of these sharp edges.
#
And this gentleman was arguing that
#
no, the sides of the pineapple
#
they look rough but they're not sharp.
#
But the top part is what is sharp.
#
So he said, you give me a knife.
#
I will cut off all of the
#
top bits. And the CRP was like
#
To use the first word again.
#
Who do you take us for?
#
You take it out and cut it and bring it.
#
So from this, I want to shift the subject
#
to a subject you know well. Which is you know
#
about, we know well that
#
the whole purpose of everything a plant
#
does is to stop itself from being consumed.
#
Right? Like the pineapples
#
great self defense points.
#
So a plant is actively trying to
#
stop us from eating it.
#
And you could say with domesticated animals
#
it's literally the opposite.
#
Their species flourishes if we continue
#
eating them and so on. And therefore with this
#
vegetarianism which I think holds.
#
Which is an egoistic argument.
#
That this mother fucker is trying to fight me and I won.
#
I have eaten pineapples.
#
All our hunter gather instincts.
#
That I have not been able to go hunt a stag
#
but I can eat a plant that does not
#
want to be eaten. Like every time I'm trying to eat
#
a pineapple, the pineapple is trying to eat me.
#
Yeah, one day it may win.
#
I'll produce a better poison.
#
I'll segue from this and I want you to elaborate
#
on something else. In a recent episode of Everything
#
is Everything, I had this throw away
#
line. You know, that's my YouTube show
#
with Ajay Shah for those who don't know and everybody
#
must check it out. It's an awesome one.
#
it's so good. I've been
#
watching episodes multiple
#
Because Ajay Shah's density of
#
is remarkable. Per sentence very high.
#
And there are only one hour episodes of scene on scene listeners.
#
One of the few things as someone who
#
listens to videos at 3x.
#
This is the only one I listen to at
#
1.5. I will tell Ajay a great compliment.
#
But anyway, at one point I had this throw
#
away line that if you eat a plate of phukma
#
you're killing many more animals
#
than if you eat a chicken.
#
Because if you eat a chicken, you're killing a chicken.
#
But if you eat a plate of phukma, there's a whole fucking
#
ecosystem of living beings that are kind of dying.
#
And somebody put this incredulous
#
comment in the thing that what is this nonsense?
#
I don't understand this. You better explain this.
#
And I thought it is just freaking obvious.
#
If you think about it for 30 seconds,
#
the ethical reason for vegetarianism
#
vanishes. Because a vegetarian
#
is killing animals at a way greater
#
scale than a non-vegetarian person is.
#
So, you know, from your
#
mouth, Ashok, this will carry
#
Yeah, so this is one of those things where
#
because of the nature of how people are
#
moral superiority of their food choices,
#
both ways, right? Hardcore
#
carnivores as well as vegetarians
#
people who only eat raw food and every other
#
combination of fat diets
#
fundamentally is coming from
#
the fact that people, urban
#
people, don't quite recognize
#
it because we're so far from the farmers
#
and all of that. That all
#
agriculture is a brutal act of violence
#
is a huge act of violence.
#
any plot of land will be colonized
#
by a huge ecosystem of things,
#
things that feed off each other. Some will be
#
parasites, some will be symbiotic,
#
be animals, it'll be microbes, it'll be
#
fungi, it'll be a whole
#
bunch of things of all sizes, an entire pyramid
#
of things, each one eating the other, and that over
#
time, that's what stabilizes and that's
#
basically what it is. And a field
#
I wipe all of that out. You have to wipe
#
living things so that you can grow rice or
#
wheat or whatever it is.
#
everything else and also effectively
#
then consume a tiny fraction
#
of what, only the seed is what
#
you consume. And even that you remove
#
the husk because you can't digest that.
#
And then basically then
#
you do other things like burning the
#
stock because you need to
#
get in three harvests of rice
#
as a result of poor human policy
#
and agricultural policy and all of that.
#
But the interesting thing is that
#
most people sometimes forget the
#
fact that all food is one form of
#
life, killing and eating another form of life.
#
And people just sometimes just simply
#
forget that plants are living things.
#
Yes, of course, I'm not arguing
#
that, yes, of course, as an animal you're going to see
#
another animal, it has a
#
face, it has eyes, it has a
#
central nervous system, it experiences
#
pain in the same way that you do.
#
But then to therefore say that
#
because I don't eat that I'm morally superior is utterly
#
existing in eating food
#
you are committing violence. Either
#
you or someone else is committing brutal amount of violence
#
against nature to do that.
#
Of course, you can then make interesting
#
footprint and sustainability
#
and all of that. But then again that also has
#
to cut across economic classes
#
and whether someone can
#
afford. I mean, I think it is more moral
#
to be carbon neutral. I would imagine
#
that I think it's probably far
#
more of a priority to keep people alive.
#
Marvellous t-shirt line, it is more moral
#
to stay alive than to be carbon neutral.
#
alive, right? Either way.
#
That is the part and the other
#
I discovered it the first time when I went
#
point of time I was still
#
while I ate a little bit of
#
meat here and there, I was still
#
Just culturally and then
#
for sure I was not used to burgers.
#
I was not used to beef burgers. So the first time I went
#
to the US, you do want to go to McDonald's
#
for the first time in the early 2000s
#
and so on. What is this whole thing about? But clearly
#
at that point of time, McDonald's
#
did not have anything remotely other than french fries.
#
They did not have a vegetarian option.
#
Not only did they not have a vegetarian
#
the McDonald's understood what that word meant.
#
then eventually the people who had lived
#
there for a while, the Indians told me you have to say no meat.
#
So you can't say vegetarian, they won't understand.
#
You have to say no meat. That kind of
#
always got me thinking. And if you get a Marathi
#
server, you won't get salty either.
#
The interesting thing is that
#
it got me thinking that
#
I assume that the term vegetarian was a globally
#
well understood term and it turns out it's very uniquely
#
Our definition of vegetarian is uniquely
#
Indian and here's the interesting thing.
#
It's not even pan-Indian.
#
Our definition of vegetarian comes from the
#
geogangetic belt definition of what is vegetarian
#
or what they eat has now become vegetarian.
#
milk and dairy is included.
#
And eggs are not. Eggs are not.
#
rule is that there is no death of an animal
#
are vegetarian, as they are in the UK,
#
But in India they're not
#
because the part of India that gets
#
to decide all of this, it does not
#
So therefore, eggs are not.
#
And again, the morality of
#
eggs versus milk again.
#
keep a cow pregnant for
#
a decade, like back to back.
#
No choice in that matter.
#
have to prevent a hen from getting pregnant.
#
You have to keep the rooster away
#
again, let's think about the morality of that.
#
I would argue that depriving
#
probably more moral than keeping a cow
#
Stressful, if you look at the stress.
#
You're a mammal, right? We know what pregnancy
#
is like. Imagine doing that like back to back.
#
We know the effect it has on calcium and all of that.
#
For sure, we are absolutely reducing
#
So if you care about animals, have eggs,
#
stop having milk. And if you care
#
about animals, you want the hen to get some action once
#
in a while. Again, it reminds me of a Douglas Adams
#
thing from the restaurant at the end of the universe
#
where there is the scene where there is a
#
they go to the restaurant at the end of the universe, which is this amazing
#
place, which is not located at the physical
#
end of the universe, but it's located at the time
#
end of the universe. So you're in a
#
bubble of sorts where you can see the
#
end of the universe happening outside, right?
#
classic Douglas Adams references
#
of various kinds of toilets
#
for all the different alien species that come,
#
which again is not something that you would have thought of when
#
writing sci-fi, but Douglas Adams will think of it.
#
He would imagine that different species
#
will have different ways of going to the loop, right?
#
And the other thing was that there is a
#
there is a concept called the dish of the day
#
where the animal that is going to
#
feed you will come sit at the table, have a conversation
#
Good day, gentlemen. What would you like
#
to eat? Which part of my body? Would you like a
#
filet mignon? Would you like whatever it is?
#
Then I'll say I'll quickly go pop off, shoot
#
myself, and then your dish will be ready
#
and so on. And the first time these humans go,
#
they're like absolutely aghast. It's like
#
how can I eat something that is
#
coming and talking to me? And
#
to genetically engineer an animal
#
that wants to be eaten. And now
#
the remark that it actually
#
says. And the one guy says that
#
no, I'll just have the salad. I said I know some
#
plants that would vehemently disagree with that.
#
that ecosystem of millions and millions
#
of rats and other undersoyed creatures
#
which had to kind of suffer through
#
So I have a question I'm thinking aloud. You just
#
mentioned how animals of
#
different kinds do different things differently.
#
So for example, a snake listens through its
#
the world through echolocation, basically
#
through sound rather than sight. What
#
are the interesting differences in shitting that you can
#
Man, I think there's an insane amount of variation,
#
right? There are animals in the sea where
#
the mouth and the anus are
#
For me, it's always been also fascinating
#
how the language we use
#
for some of these verbs that are
#
then predicated on very specific
#
human biology sometimes may not transfer
#
to, like when we say a snake
#
hears through its stomach.
#
basically assuming that there is a very
#
anthropocentric way of looking at that entire thing,
#
right? So it'll be interesting to see how
#
eventually at some point of time
#
in a sci-fi future where there are multiple
#
species that are sentient.
#
What language will feel like?
#
And one of the challenges, I think the
#
movie, is it Arrival or one of
#
those other movies? Arrival, Danyville, you know.
#
The part that they captured quite brilliantly
#
is the fact that the hardest
#
thing you're going to find is
#
being able to communicate.
#
We simply assume that we'll somehow come
#
into some sort of a conference room and start
#
chatting with each other. Is that not
#
only the other side may
#
not even communicate using sound.
#
It could be chemical entirely,
#
right? And by the way, on Earth,
#
plants communicate via chemicals.
#
There's this astonishing, I think
#
the secret life of trees, I think. So there is this
#
hidden life of trees by Peter Walgreens
#
The acacia tree, I think,
#
that one is that it has been
#
in an evolutionary battle with the giraffes.
#
So it has started keeping its leaves
#
higher and higher and the giraffe's neck has gotten
#
taller and taller over like millions of years, right?
#
So that it can continue to reach.
#
And its current version of its defense mechanism
#
is that, chalo, I can't prevent
#
the giraffe from eating me, but what I can
#
do is synthesize a molecule
#
put it into the air that will warn
#
nearby acacia trees that, well, giraffes are
#
And those in turn will then produce
#
a molecule that will turn the leaves way more
#
bitter than they are. So that will
#
deter the giraffes from eating. And likewise
#
there are also trees that
#
produce a particular molecule
#
attracts a hornet or a wasp
#
the larva, the caterpillar
#
or the larva that is eating its leaves.
#
Wow. Magnificent. And also
#
one of the revelations in that book
#
which completely blew my mind, is that
#
trees you think they are solitary individual
#
beings in their stately dignity
#
but actually in a forest
#
all trees are interconnected through the
#
roots. And it's like a constant
#
meditative conference is happening
#
you can almost imagine this
#
done by fungi. That's the best part.
#
they charge with sugar.
#
So the plants give them the sugar
#
internet services if you will. And actually
#
technically the term for that is wood wide web.
#
reminded of a great quote by
#
Douglas Adams and I'm going to read that out.
#
Since we are mentioning Douglas
#
Adams so much and Douglas Adams says
#
Imagine a puddle waking up one morning
#
and thinking this is an interesting world I find
#
myself in, an interesting hole I find
#
myself in. Fits me rather neatly doesn't it?
#
In fact it fits me staggeringly well
#
must have been made to have me in it.
#
Stop. Now the you know the
#
puddle stops sinking and this is Douglas Adams
#
This is such a powerful idea that as the
#
sun rises in the sky and the air
#
heats up and gradually as the puddle
#
gets smaller and smaller is still frantically
#
hanging on to the notion that everything is going to be
#
alright because his world was meant to have
#
him in it, was built to have him in it. So the moment
#
he disappears catches him rather by surprise.
#
I think this may be something we need to be
#
on the watch out for. And human
#
hubris is staggering. You know
#
if you just shift the lens a little bit
#
one you realize that other
#
ecosystems of trees for example
#
are infinitely more complex than us
#
From one point of view you could say we are colonized
#
by bacteria. Another point of view you could
#
say we are colonized by wheat. You know
#
it's mind blowing. And the other
#
interesting thing is that you know the other common
#
assume that plants don't move.
#
They move at an extraordinarily
#
we lead very short lives.
#
Everything for a plant is in slow motion. A tree
#
lives like thousands of years.
#
sit through world wars and
#
famines and bad seasons,
#
good seasons and floods and I mean
#
While having a rich social life
#
under the ground and over the ground.
#
I had gone to this park
#
called Tadoba, the tiger thing
#
and there was a very interesting
#
And he's like a naturalist
#
and he's a terrific guy. I mean
#
I don't know how the hell I happened to
#
He was pointing out how everything
#
in the forest is fighting with everything else.
#
And there was one place, there's a lake
#
where we actually saw some tigers
#
and there are some trees
#
and the trees are enemies
#
and the tree is trying to spread its canopy
#
so that it dries. And you know what
#
the grass does? It dries
#
like in the summer it will
#
and that will burn the trees.
#
just. So the beautiful thing
#
here is that we all learn
#
in school symbiosis. If somebody
#
uses the term symbiosis and in fact
#
there's a famous college
#
in Pune as well. My brother went there
#
and we only have positive
#
connotations about symbiosis. It's about symbiosis.
#
It's come together. Let's agree.
#
armies, multiple armies
#
delicate balance with every
#
side trying to exploit as much
#
as possible. It is not a mutual
#
handshake agreement. It is absolutely
#
brutal war. So for example
#
we say that our gut microbiome is in symbiosis
#
with us and they digest the stuff that we
#
can't eat and in exchange they give us tons of
#
vitamins, they maintain the immune system
#
The exact same bacteria, if you have
#
a problem in your gut and they get into your blood
#
They're not like, we say
#
friendly bacteria, no. In context
#
they're friendly and by the way
#
Actually there's a fantastic book called
#
I think it's this book about
#
the gut microbiome and he basically
#
our body, the mucus lining
#
the gut bacteria from sneaking
#
into the blood which they want to because the blood
#
is filled with resources. They don't have to
#
sit and do the hard work of breaking
#
down all the beans and the fiber
#
and all the vegetable matter we eat.
#
They can just directly get the amino
#
acids and the sugars directly from the blood.
#
system keeps sniping and killing
#
but not killing too many.
#
We still don't want to lose them.
#
So it's essentially sort of like a line of control.
#
So the Ed Wong book by the way
#
has a title which is practically
#
and now you should guess what it is
#
or rather I keep saying it so often.
#
I'll give you another clue.
#
I've just been reading it.
#
Shame, shame. How can you forget?
#
The title of the book is I contain multitudes.
#
Yes, now I remember saying that
#
Alcoholics have this problem.
#
It's called a leaky gut syndrome.
#
And if you have too much alcohol
#
finds ways through the defense.
#
I think it destroys the mucus
#
And further also weakens your liver's ability
#
to filter out toxins which again
#
it's a circular thing where the whole thing gets worse over time.
#
people on social media are worried about
#
like a little bit of Maida and one
#
microgram of sodium benzoate.
#
So as an informant on all of this
#
what do you do about your gut microbiome?
#
I eat a lot of vegetables and
#
fruits but fruits nowadays
#
I'm a little bit, I mean I try and
#
go easy on the really sweet fruits.
#
I try and take like guavas and
#
things like that. But again a lot of fiber
#
and daal, rajma, channa
#
They obviously will cause a little bit
#
of discomfort because it's
#
bacteria basically going thank you for the buffet
#
and producing a lot of carbon dioxide
#
is what's happening there. But yeah, but
#
the discomfort is worth it because it's
#
actually. My friend Susan Thomas
#
once revealed to me that fruits are considered
#
healthy. Like one, fruits are, too much
#
of fruits is like deeply unhealthy. So much
#
sugar. And she pointed out that
#
and fructose. And she pointed out that fruits
#
today have 30 times as much sugar as they're used
#
to in prehistoric times. That they have evolved
#
to get sweeter for us. So
#
there is also this fantastic very viral
#
series of videos by Robert Lustige I think
#
and a bunch of others who
#
they're still figuring out the role of fructose
#
because unlike glucose which is the energy
#
currency of the body, fructose doesn't actually give you
#
energy. Although it's very same formula
#
but it's a different molecular structure.
#
Your body doesn't process fructose the same way
#
and only now are they figuring out what's happening
#
to fructose. It goes through this pathway in the liver
#
amount of consensus to believe that
#
fructose pretty much directly becomes fat.
#
fruit sugars and half of your
#
white sugar which is fructose again, right?
#
That is becoming just fat directly. Glucose on the other
#
hand is real time energy.
#
If you can't use it etc but fructose
#
is immediately directly getting to fat
#
and this is still research
#
under progress. And they're trying
#
to figure out why that is the case
#
most of our evolutionary period
#
where we were just a bipedal ape.
#
Agriculture and all of that is
#
very recent. So we've not had evolutionary changes
#
adapting to that at all.
#
time you're largely hunter-gatherers. You could
#
hunt whenever you can which is not every day, not
#
all the time. And meat would rot quickly
#
the cycle was that you really
#
ate as much as you can in one shot
#
because then you don't know when you're going to eat. So there's no
#
daily eating sort of thing which is why fasting
#
is good for us. The other thing is that
#
sugars were extraordinarily rare
#
and the only source of sugars were
#
or honey. Yeah and honey
#
and so on. Honey not always available but fruits.
#
The plants again want you to eat them and these sweet
#
specifically, we eventually kind of
#
adapted to turn the fructose
#
into fat because you want that as
#
a backup for the winter when you're not going to eat anything.
#
believe that that idea of how
#
fruits essentially co-evolved
#
and others in general as
#
a way of adding on fat rapidly
#
because you couldn't see
#
otherwise the only way you could get fat is to hunt
#
another animal. That's very interesting
#
actually. So the fact that
#
it's a feature not a bug that it becomes fat.
#
It is a feature but in the modern
#
lifestyle. It's actually a bug.
#
It is a bug because fructose is too cheap.
#
Insanely cheap. It's not a seasonal thing that you get
#
one week in a year in the hunter-gather area.
#
insanely over sweet bananas
#
and all these. Is there
#
Chili sauce is fructose in it.
#
So let me, since you mentioned
#
it's relatively recently we came into
#
agriculture and all that. Let me share a TIL
#
I learned from an episode that
#
I recorded three days ago. It will release much
#
before yours but nevertheless
#
it was with Rahul Mathan and he's
#
written a couple of books. His earlier book
#
and it's really two books combined
#
into one. Both of them fascinating and worth reading
#
but the first of them, the first half of the book
#
is about the history of privacy
#
which has a concept of privacy
#
and that human beings did not either
#
because it is against your self-interest.
#
So when we evolved in prehistoric times
#
everybody's got to look out for everybody else.
#
Any information that somebody has
#
which doesn't reach you could be potentially
#
dangerous to your life. And therefore
#
either you're sleeping in the
#
open and then you gradually evolve to a
#
place where whatever shelters you build
#
are shelters for food. Everybody's watching
#
each other. There's no sense of privacy.
#
Exactly. And the first time
#
that magnificent genius technology
#
which I never thought of in this way called
#
It is for the security of cities.
#
You know there are cities which are famous for having
#
walls on the outside perimeter to keep invaders
#
out but inside they are not necessary.
#
And then gradually you begin
#
and early walls are really thin where you can hear
#
what's happening in the next house and that's a feature not a
#
then walls happen. Then privacy happens.
#
of the world there are different incentives. For example
#
in Europe monks crave solitude.
#
The notion of the confessional
#
you know embeds privacy
#
that if you are confessing you're confessing because
#
you did something in private. And the interesting
#
thing that happens here as Rahul points
#
our self into the private self and the
#
public self. Because before this you
#
just have one self and that's who you are and
#
there's no need for segregating something else.
#
But here there is a private self
#
and a public self and that brings
#
a particular public self and
#
hiding your private self from that public
#
and creativity and science
#
because you have the time to sit in
#
solitude and self reflect
#
because solitude and privacy
#
and creativity all of them go together
#
incredibly recent and you
#
even look at the dwellings around you.
#
Like when privacy first came about
#
as a concept and it is one that
#
by the way both Rahul and I welcome wholeheartedly
#
we care about privacy it's what sets us
#
apart that we have that time to
#
ruminate in private and come up
#
with great creations whether of art or science.
#
But it was initially a luxury
#
of the rich and even today if you
#
look at the way our cities are constructed
#
you go to a slum there's practically no
#
concept of privacy or it's very minor.
#
You come to you know an apartment
#
block you have much greater privacy
#
and sometimes whereas you know
#
there is a feature that it gives you solitude
#
and leisure time it also carries a bug
#
like when I think about the form of our buildings are constructed
#
you know this is why so many slum
#
redevelopments fail you know in
#
a slum everybody is playing around together the
#
elders are sitting outside the houses action
#
all over them the women are constantly in and out
#
of each other's kitchen etc etc.
#
You move them into separate atomized apartments
#
and that social sense is
#
gone and the old are truly alone
#
and everything kind of falls apart
#
and you know and all of this
#
all of these sort of innovations and
#
ways of living are so incredibly recent
#
so I could not help but share this with you though regular
#
listeners have already no doubt heard that episode.
#
modern additional dilemma on
#
top of that is the fact that while the rich
#
and privileged have the access
#
to privacy, humans being
#
a social species have always
#
said I need to mix both meaning that
#
I need my private time but
#
I absolutely need my public and
#
social time but the social time is actually more important
#
but then the internet came
#
and now a lot of people now have
#
my private time is whatever I do
#
and this is my internet
#
logging onto the internet and doom scrolling on
#
Instagram and Twitter is my social time
#
and I think that is where
#
I think there is a problem. That is really not social time.
#
I think there is something about meeting people in person
#
that you absolutely cannot
#
replicate on a zoom meeting
#
even on video chat let alone
#
code tweets of passive aggressive
#
people dunking on each other on social
#
media. So this I think is another key
#
sort of crisis that we are going through.
#
The privacy thing also reminded me of
#
this other observation that somebody had made about how
#
again there are cultural variations
#
But how do you say I own this?
#
verb. None of the Indian languages
#
have that concept of ownership
#
that happens across time.
#
When you say this is mine, temporarily
#
speaking it's like at that moment you say
#
of metaphorically saying that I'm putting
#
this to use right now. This is mine.
#
I own this. I own this somehow
#
suggests that ownership over a period
#
of time and space. But there are two ways to look at this.
#
I mean one way obviously is if a language hasn't
#
evolved a word it's not evolved it because
#
it hasn't needed it and so the concept doesn't exist.
#
But the other part of it is that
#
you know like for example
#
the German word schadenfreude which is
#
basically feeling happy at somebody else's misery.
#
We don't have a word for that either but
#
the feeling is ubiquitous across the human race.
#
No but I would actually say again as I said
#
that's a compound word.
#
Another word even the Germans don't have is feeling
#
miserable at other people's happiness.
#
That is a word schadenfreude.
#
That is happiness at other people's misery.
#
at other people's happiness.
#
celebrated novelist who circa 1999
#
was once walking with me in Tardeo
#
and he said something that really shocked me
#
to the core. He said Amit every time
#
a friend of mine does well a part of me dies.
#
And I was like what the fuck.
#
an important life lesson I would like
#
to tell everyone is like fucking avoid
#
people like this. Avoid these negative
#
toxic people. Just take positive energy.
#
I think one of the most, the status
#
game for example right. I mean it's pretty
#
insightful in that. I think you know people play these
#
status games all the time. And
#
the interesting thing about this
#
language thing as well right. To your point about
#
the German words right.
#
That is a specific compound noun
#
thing where schaden means something
#
else. Freude means something else. But when you combine them
#
it takes on an additional layer
#
of meaning beyond just the one plus one right.
#
And that is there in Sanskrit.
#
Like you can actually combine
#
nouns to form. It's just
#
that it's not a living breathing language
#
that you don't kind of hear it but you hear the
#
but these kind of compound nouns
#
absolutely exist right. I mean it is just that
#
yeah it's just the spoken Indian languages
#
now don't have, Hindi doesn't have
#
compound nouns in the way German does
#
compound nouns. Conjugating
#
a third one which has more. Which has a little bit more of it.
#
So my favorite one is actually
#
elephant and rennen okay. So I'll
#
let you guys guess what that German
#
compound noun is. Tell me again elephant and
#
rennen right. Elephant and rennen
#
okay. It's one word. So
#
elephant means elephant right. Rennen means race.
#
What do you think it actually means?
#
It's fat Indian uncles running towards a buffet.
#
No. Okay think highways
#
right. So it's very specifically to describe
#
the frustration of you being
#
two buses or two trucks. One is
#
slowly overtaking the other and
#
I have a word for what I face so often.
#
And when you hear that you're like oh man
#
I've gone through it. Oh yeah yeah yeah.
#
This is going to be one t-shirt with
#
elephant and rennen on it.
#
Like I'm going to overtake the motherfucker
#
in the bus stop right in front of him and
#
get down and turn around and make sure he
#
reads my t-shirt which says
#
I have a question for you which is you spoke
#
quite correctly about how you
#
don't think you're being social if you're on the internet
#
agree with that. In fact it kind of really
#
bugs me if I go to a cafe and there are four people
#
sitting together and they're all looking into their phones. Families
#
sit at tables everyone is looking at.
#
It's completely atomized. You came from a joint
#
family to a nuclear family to really
#
a nuclear family with phones.
#
It's a further level of atomization but
#
none of us would have met if not for the internet.
#
the internet and social media is that
#
it allows you to form communities
#
of choice and therefore gets away from communities
#
of circumstance which is life changing for me.
#
I would have no friends if not. Same here. Same here.
#
No I think so this is an interesting thing a debate
#
I've been having I've been discussing with a few doctors as well
#
and there is this larger debate about
#
as I said sometimes medical code of ethics
#
communicating certain things in a
#
Because the doctor has to assume
#
that the person listening is likely to be the worst
#
extreme patient as opposed to
#
an average healthy person. You can't say
#
one beer a week is okay.
#
The doctor is not allowed to say that.
#
the interesting thing is that if you really
#
and I spoke to a doctor and he said that here's the interesting
#
thing right. Socialization
#
good for your health in a clinical
#
sense. There are many things
#
your heart works better
#
many things improve when you meet other people
#
you're exchanging gut bacteria your gut diversity
#
improves. There are just so many
#
benefits to being around people
#
in that old people literally
#
just waste away when they are lonely and you just
#
put them around people and they literally
#
live longer and there's like established data
#
and evidence of this right. And
#
basically and so this point being
#
that it's quite interesting how
#
meeting your friends and having
#
like a beer once a week
#
the benefits of the socialization
#
far outweigh the cons of
#
having the alcohol the one beer right.
#
We have to get liver doctor to comment
#
alcohol damages you. There is just no
#
alcohol is damaged. But you think
#
there is a non zero chance
#
that if you drive today in Mumbai streets
#
that you are going to get. You choose
#
your risks. Yeah it is really about
#
risk prioritization right and it's as I keep
#
saying that it's all about people
#
getting bitter at estimating denominators
#
that's the bigger problem. People
#
very conveniently ignore denominators
#
have to evaluate whether you're going to isolate
#
yourself in a like a hyperbaric
#
whatever your completely sterile chamber
#
to stay completely safe
#
versus you know being able to
#
go out into the world take a few risks but you know
#
balance that out. I love the thought of how
#
you know being social is good for the health
#
like there's a Japanese term forest bathing
#
and now I'm thinking we could have a term
#
for people bathing. So I will challenge both
#
of you on the spot using whatever languages you
#
know best to come up with a compound word
#
in that language which means people bathing.
#
pawn up category actually.
#
I think you could just combine
#
what would be a good Hindi Sanskrit
#
root for people. Janasnaan.
#
Janasnaan has a nice ring to it.
#
Janasnaan. And it sounds really
#
Sanskrit also. Janasnaan.
#
Where were we last? I think this was that.
#
We were talking about socializing.
#
Socializing and that yeah. So the interesting
#
thing an interesting additional
#
point like how I think the benefits of socialization
#
worth it than the risk of for example
#
driving to that place therefore you could
#
you know you could get run over and having a beer
#
which again is harmful for you right and eating
#
fried food which again is harmful for you.
#
All of that stuff right. Likewise
#
I think another interesting corollary
#
of a person I follow who's sort of a food
#
scientist as well right and somebody who I keep
#
chatting with on the various dangers
#
being anxious and scared
#
by the kind of content that people make
#
on social media about food. The 90%
#
of the content about food is
#
is sick cancer aega is say
#
diabetes aega and completely
#
right that's because that's the only way to
#
and somehow it seems to go viral and the algorithms
#
help it and so on. And this person
#
was basically wondering that
#
when you're anxious and stressed and
#
you're like oh my god I just had momos yesterday
#
and there was this video I saw today
#
where it said that momos will cause diabetes
#
some such nonsense right and
#
then again that's going to increase your stress and that's going
#
to increase your cortisol right and cortisol
#
and all of that stuff again increases
#
the chances of inflammation and so on and perineally
#
being high on cortisol and
#
inflammatory responses is linked
#
with longer term increase in risk in cancer.
#
So literally forever being
#
afraid of food is a greater
#
risk of cancer than the shit
#
these guys are warning you that is going to cause cancer.
#
So the irony here is if you
#
think too much about diabetes you'll get it
#
because cortisol and cortisol leads
#
to insulin spikes and insulin
#
resistance and then diabetes and cancer
#
also which will get you
#
first diabetes or cancer.
#
Indian social media is basically
#
how can you take anything and eventually
#
And there was this hawa a few months back
#
about and I think liver doctor also joined in
#
about how bonvita is bad for you and
#
the first time I saw that I was like yeah man
#
that's too many carbs it's terrible one must be
#
warned against it and then one of my friends
#
who's been on the show Shruti Jagirdar who's a nutritionist
#
pointed out that what nonsense
#
that you're taking one spoonful of bonvita
#
and putting it in a glass of milk
#
and the damage that that little bit of
#
bonvita can do to you compared with the
#
nutritional benefit of the milk that
#
a lot of kids are eating only because it's tasty.
#
fundamentally these are
#
the bonvita came from Cadbury
#
the turn of the century when
#
more and more women started working
#
and they were not sitting at home cooking
#
home cooked balanced meals
#
for kids and so there was a market
#
foods that would ensure
#
that kids don't get rickets
#
in beriberi and any vitamin deficiency
#
mineral deficiency calcium deficiency
#
especially right because you're just
#
going to keep eat processed food and so there was a
#
market for companies to come and say
#
hey look we got a bunch of doctors want to package
#
all these minerals you know put it in a drink
#
of course it's going to taste terrible
#
the only way to get kids to drink it is to make it
#
chocolate flavored and chocolate is bitter too
#
so the only way to make kids eat it is to add sugar
#
right the goal is it's not
#
the chocolate or the sugar it is basically
#
kid's not going to grow up
#
deficient because of iodine deficiency
#
or some mineral deficiency or a vitamin
#
we're probably eating some canned soup and some canned
#
whatever it is because we're all working in factory for 15
#
hours but I'm certain that the kids getting
#
all the micronutrients that it needs
#
and it's tasty so the kid doesn't have to be forced to eat it
#
so yeah the devil's bargain
#
you're making is with the sugar
#
because kids will not eat things that are not sweet
#
who are you kidding right so
#
you rather risk vitamin deficiencies
#
eating sugar we can deal with it when we're children
#
become more conscious and healthy when we become
#
teenager and later in life
#
so therefore that is the background to this
#
and in India the deal is kids often don't
#
like drinking milk this is helping
#
them drink a glass of milk
#
with all the fat soluble vitamins and these things
#
one of your organic artisanal
#
this herbal nonsense they're not fortified
#
see people who buy all of this
#
Himalayan pink salt and all of that right
#
Indian vegetarians who by the way
#
don't get enough iodine because iodine only comes
#
from animal sources right where are they
#
going to get their iodine that god damn reason
#
is why in the 1950s we decided to iodize
#
salt because Indians have a
#
ton of vegetarians who don't eat animal sources
#
like fish or eggs or not even
#
enough dairy in many places for you to get that iodine
#
so you anyway you're using salt
#
that's how we did it right and now people are like
#
no I will only use Himalayan pink salt
#
because this salt has some 0.01
#
grams of some anti-caking
#
agent that makes the salt
#
pour easily right otherwise you'll
#
then waste it it'll just get clumpy and all of that
#
right and then people eat this stuff and now
#
you're starting to see an increase in iodine
#
iodine deficiency which is far more serious
#
yes cognitive impairment and all
#
that stuff yeah not just thyroid problems
#
and I want to go back to the
#
because I can't help it because firstly
#
it is daft to be vegetarian for ethical reasons
#
and secondly it is terribly
#
unhealthy and you came up with this
#
great phrase at dinner last night which should be on a
#
t-shirt death by carbs and you
#
pointed out how you know so many
#
vegetarians who I think you said this in the context
#
basically you know giving themselves diabetes
#
and committing death by carbs and
#
it came in the context of
#
me visiting Gandhinagar and finding
#
part of Gandhinagar where meat and eggs are not
#
and for the record it's amazingly
#
absolutely Gujjati cuisine is just
#
India actually has the greatest vegetarian
#
cuisine in the world and again I think
#
the point here is that it is really about
#
we have such a fantastic vegetarian
#
cuisine but people are just simply not
#
willing to accept that in many
#
it's very imbalanced towards carbs
#
in that people think things are protein
#
like some tiny amount of dal
#
so carry on with your Gandhinagar story
#
basically is the fact that you can't
#
and you know we had a bunch of
#
we had a bunch of colleagues who were like from Andhra
#
Tamil Nadu are the highest per capita
#
and also both production and consumption right
#
there and they suddenly
#
and they're like no way
#
send me back to South India
#
and this is done in the name of
#
I don't know what Gandhi would have thought about
#
of the food they wanted to eat
#
Gandhi was vegetarian yes
#
also Gandhi was famous for
#
changing his mind on things
#
he would never have changed his mind on this
#
I don't know about that but
#
but the point here is not vegetarianism
#
the point here is consent
#
that you want to force other people to eat what they don't
#
what to eat I'm sure you know I've done
#
an episode where I've spoken at length about Sikhan
#
Abdul Ghaffar Khan who knew Gandhi well and also
#
a great man and I'm sure he would not have told
#
him you got to be vegetarian too you know
#
that kind of rubbish would not have happened so consent
#
and I have sort of you know
#
so we asked I went on Twitter and I also
#
asked my writing group I'm recording with these two fine
#
gentlemen do you have questions and there are a bunch of
#
questions and we shall look at some
#
of them in the group but what you just said
#
reminded me about one of those questions and I
#
have a spiel to give because it just makes me so angry
#
and when you join the dots it is crazy
#
so the question was ask Ashok
#
to talk about the political economy of food
#
now I will ask you to talk about
#
it but first the spiel I want to give and I have an
#
episode on agriculture on everything
#
is everything Ajay and I spoke about this for a long
#
time but here is what I want to
#
point out when we talk of diabetes and carbs
#
the Indian government decided to have minimum support
#
for cereals right and not for
#
pulses and the result of this
#
was that because of this minimum
#
support price and because of the market signal
#
being distorted it wasn't that people wanted
#
cereals and not pulses that
#
but you know the government said
#
you know gave them that security
#
started growing cereals there were far
#
less pulses having and therefore
#
this eventually led to the
#
diabetes epidemic in India because
#
people were just having carbs carbs carbs
#
and not giving given enough
#
protein and this becomes a particular problem because
#
so many people are vegetarian on top of that so they can't
#
even eat animals and get their protein from that and
#
even non-veg people really eat too
#
little animal per capita meat consumption
#
is 10 times less than the US
#
really get enough enough grams of protein
#
and many people including meat eaters
#
fundamentally miscalculate
#
underestimate the amount of protein they
#
need to eat and it's it's sort of like the
#
telling old people in the family that
#
I'm not asking you to go
#
do exercise right I'm not asking you to
#
do any of these harder go on these
#
simply the most ridiculously simple thing
#
that you can do to improve the quality
#
of your life is to increase your protein
#
intake because one it will automatically
#
reduce your carb intake because protein
#
signal satiety right I mean
#
anyone who's had like one of those cups
#
of whey protein once you have that
#
you won't feel like eating
#
and that's not a bad thing right and the
#
interesting thing is that and now by the way
#
you get keto whey also which I have which doesn't
#
have the added sugar but had added fat
#
in any case they nowadays even anyway
#
have a tiny amount of one of those sugar substitutes
#
so it's fine right I mean
#
so even the sugar is even not even a problem
#
right I'm not even saying and those you don't even need
#
to add to milk you just add to water
#
because anyway whey is milk
#
it'll taste of milk anyway
#
so the people completely underestimate
#
and there are so many studies that show that Indians
#
are protein deficient in
#
everywhere right it's not just in meat
#
eating north Indian so let's take a
#
diversion and double click on this because I think it's an
#
important subject and I want you to double
#
click on it in two ways one
#
please talk about you know what
#
the standard non-veg person
#
eats in a day and why it is severely protein
#
deficient in just in terms of
#
grammage and two if there are
#
vegetarians listening to this who are saying okay
#
I get this but I'm vegetarian by
#
habit and aesthetic reasons and whatever and I'm going
#
to stay that way but I want to increase
#
my protein intake how can I do it
#
so this is a very very the
#
problem is again because I think because there
#
is no one way to eat healthy and
#
there are in India where as
#
I said we are so many different culinary
#
cultures right you've got to find
#
a way that you still enjoy right because
#
I think the solution is not for everyone to
#
you know swig whey protein
#
right it's not practical either it
#
somehow has to be part of your food right and it also
#
goes down to our definition of
#
kind of like you know me being a
#
Carnatic musician and I have this specific
#
distaste for vocalists in general
#
because they tend to be divas hogging all of that
#
the vocal is basically carbohydrates
#
get all the attention do very little
#
of the work but get all the attention the Indian
#
thali is centered around carbs the Indian thali
#
is eight vocalists and one lonely bass
#
the thali's center piece is
#
carbs right right at the center
#
the center piece in a European
#
meal is the protein which
#
again is a different problem that's probably way
#
too much protein a piece of steak
#
is way too much protein that's not the point but
#
the point is there is probably a middle ground
#
where like for example I have like so for instance
#
even a even in a place like
#
Tamil Nadu or Kerala the traditional
#
is fine a fish curry that will use like
#
some sardines or something how many grams of protein
#
exactly the fish is there for the taste
#
for the flavor for the flavor
#
so the man of the house may perhaps
#
get one fried fish which
#
is fine you get some amount again
#
people forget that one egg is like six
#
grams of protein right if
#
at the bare minimum you need 50
#
60 grams of protein in fact people will now tell you
#
you need much more but at least bare
#
minimum right India at least Indians
#
you're nowhere close yeah but you're nowhere close
#
but a steak has 30 grams of protein more or less
#
30 40 so when you say it has too much I
#
really don't agree I mean we need 100 to 200
#
grams of protein a day right
#
they eat breakfast lunch and dinner
#
they eat protein breakfast lunch and dinner they're overall
#
this thing they're they're
#
I think you know so I've done a lot of
#
Europeans probably can do with less protein and
#
we need to eat way more you know I've done a lot of counting
#
macros when I was in keto along with
#
my CGM and everything and I
#
find that it's really hard to
#
actually meet these levels eating meat all three
#
meals is pretty much fine you know it's very
#
hard to reach the level you need to reach it is
#
and to be honest also I think see it is fair
#
that your action first is that
#
even if you're on a vegetarian diet you are getting
#
vegetable you're getting amino acids in
#
general not in the proportion
#
but what is so just for a moment
#
thought experiment you turn vegetarian
#
right what are you going to eat
#
in a typical day to meet your requirements
#
because my mother is vegetarian
#
from I'm also during my day
#
to day this thing I'm mostly vegetarian
#
in the sense that I do really look
#
out for plant sources of protein right
#
high quality nowadays there are these plant based
#
meats and all of that which are getting better and better
#
so the way I would say if you're a vegetarian
#
unfortunately the plant based meats are
#
targeted at meat eaters rather
#
than at vegetarians so they taste
#
like meat and so you won't like it yeah they try to
#
engineer to mimic that taste yeah so I
#
think there's got to be
#
you've really got to do stuff like
#
right in either a salad form
#
or not just the dal right
#
you need like your salad has to have like
#
rajma or chana these are some of the richest sources of
#
plant protein and so on
#
if you're a vegetarian in India therefore dairy
#
right ideally some of those
#
if you can afford it I think the Greek yogurt stuff is
#
high fat high protein much better
#
right don't go for the low fat nonsense
#
right go for the go for that stuff
#
and then on top of that this won't
#
be enough you've got to find some
#
sort of the soya chaap or not
#
is like 50 60 percent wheat only
#
and then the soya itself
#
is like again mostly carbs right so
#
people think soya chaap is protein
#
yeah but it's mostly carbs so I think you
#
if you can get a little
#
bit of paneer additionally which again is dairy
#
but again paneer is 70 percent of the calories
#
in paneer are fat so if you
#
eat a particular form of carbs for lunch
#
and then you take a nap you could say
#
a vegetarian person has
#
but if they want to get their
#
protein numbers up they have to work much
#
harder on the other hand
#
and the meat eater can just get
#
two chicken breasts and you're like you're
#
three eggs or something like that right
#
two chicken breasts and three eggs are not enough
#
I know it's not it's not I've gone hardcore
#
into macros it is simply not enough
#
but you are going to get
#
a fair amount of protein from all the other things
#
you eat yeah so see I think
#
even in a general vegetarian
#
meal where there's no visible protein you'll get
#
25 30 grams of protein anyway
#
right from all of the amino acids that are there
#
all the foods in general but you
#
do need to add yogurt you don't need
#
to add paneer of some kind ideally
#
some sort of a tofu those things
#
are again better some of the tempeh
#
you should try some of these newer
#
just say unless you have specific
#
medical conditions kidney issues and all of
#
that please supplement with the
#
whey protein at least 50 grams that would be
#
an easy fix like twice a day
#
right just do that and please do
#
workout obviously that also helps
#
I have one meta question okay so
#
bullock for example he's only grass
#
a lot of muscle but it's entire
#
machinery to turn grass into
#
so there is it is possible
#
to synthesize protein without
#
if you're a cow yes if you're a rhinoceros
#
we are not yeah so is there any
#
unless we genetically modify ourselves with CRISPR
#
in the next few years where we can
#
actually synthesize the essential
#
right if we can synthesize those nine essential amino
#
acids then then we're good actually
#
those amino acids you cannot
#
be seriously sick right so but
#
it's not like plants don't have those amino acids
#
they don't have them in the proportion
#
that we need them and so you
#
so in the sense that you've got
#
to take extra care right so a vegetarian
#
meal has to be more carefully thought
#
you're getting all of this compared to
#
someone who eats and the other
#
question is we have so many
#
instances of vegetarians living
#
protein deficiency really kick in and what
#
aspect of life quality the problem
#
we are like a billion and a half people
#
and law of large numbers if
#
every rare example you can think of
#
there is a the chance of that rare
#
example existing is one confirmation
#
bias is there right meaning that
#
everyone knows the smoker who lived up
#
to 100 the alcoholic who lived up
#
to 90 the vegetarian who
#
lived up to 100 and all that and everybody
#
also knows the meat eater
#
that's the problem right the problem is
#
you're not thinking in terms of aggregates
#
overarching I would say that all you have to
#
do is just look at a average
#
grandmother and an Indian grandmother and just see
#
how they walk that's all you have to see
#
and see what the stuff that they can
#
do they can go trekking and they can go hiking
#
Indians just become completely immobile
#
again and the only difference is
#
protein yeah it is diet yes
#
before we go in for a break it is time for another
#
story and I have realized that these
#
prompts are failing because Mr. Shenoy tried
#
to come up with something
#
random at that airport prompt and it didn't
#
really work out but he has a set of
#
great stories and we don't want to waste them
#
yes so I think how we should proceed
#
as I said instead of prompting we will let
#
the Narendra large language model
#
hallucinate we will let him hallucinate
#
and then we will try to come up with the
#
appropriate LinkedIn lessons
#
hallucination when Narendra large
#
language model does it it's elucidation
#
for mysterious reasons I think it's
#
in the day when you used to fly Indian airlines
#
that lady used to come for some
#
reason with the kettle but not
#
milk so she will pour you the
#
tea and then the milk will come later
#
will give you that sachet powder which
#
a taste for black tea and then
#
I was like you know for me
#
the added benefit was it made me look very
#
sophisticated so wherever I
#
go and everyone is ordering for tea and I
#
say black tea and everyone looks at me and
#
that's literally the only way I can look
#
sophisticated if you know
#
what I look like in person
#
and so all that was happening
#
so one day I happened to go to this place
#
called Udupi Bihar so Udupi Bihar
#
the waiter comes and his
#
Udupi restaurant is a very busy restaurant
#
the guy will come and say what do you want
#
so I told him can you do black tea
#
and he comes back after some time he says
#
the cook is asking a lot about black tea
#
he goes in and two minutes later
#
he comes back and asks if he wants to add tea leaves
#
the same guy with whom I had gone to
#
Udupi Bihar he was a friend
#
of small fabricated parts
#
they had some requirement
#
didn't know how to do so
#
he asked me to come with him
#
to see if I could understand what
#
they were talking so we went there
#
and they had some very specific thing
#
how it should be done and maybe
#
we can fabricate and see what happens
#
then when we are going out
#
there is one scientist type
#
tells this guy hey come here
#
come here and evidently knows him
#
so this guy goes and he has
#
some such I don't know what it was
#
specifications for what material to use
#
this plant of stainless steel
#
this that and the other and then
#
he gave us a 15 minute lecture
#
all those things and that went
#
even beyond me like I know a reasonable
#
amount of physics but this guy was into
#
he went into molecular structure and what
#
the nucleus does when it sees an electron
#
that kind of thing and yeah quantum
#
physics and I was and my
#
friend was busy nodding his
#
head like he understood
#
I was impressed I said like this guy has
#
been going to BARC you know so much he
#
proper degree but he seems to have imbibed
#
him I'm impressed I mean I didn't
#
understand a word I also didn't understand
#
a word so he says you are nodding
#
your head I said yeah that has to be done
#
how you know how are you going
#
to build this thing he says no no that
#
scientist only will build it from here I'll just take
#
into my factory and get it to be done so
#
say no he says yeah and then
#
he asks you what it is and the same
#
with this friend of mine he says
#
what do you want so the only counter
#
story I have to this is that they
#
the one state where this LinkedIn
#
lesson does not apply and again is
#
obviously the only state in the Indian Union
#
which always tends to stand apart
#
with the rest of India you know which state we're
#
talking about no no no no
#
now I'm still really angry we're talking about the
#
other state where people drink smoke
#
and play volleyball which is and football
#
anything India does what see
#
the story is what Bengal
#
does today India will do tomorrow
#
what India does Kerala will not do
#
that is the Kerala thing right
#
to this whenever when we
#
large bunch of North Indians for the first
#
time they were all forced to come to
#
South India for starters and they had to spend
#
three months there right
#
obviously basic challenges
#
in 1999 is for North Indian
#
in Trivandrum is to get chapati
#
right because the chapati
#
won't be smeared with the one place
#
that made chapati did not smear it
#
with ghee it's made it with coconut oil
#
and for them it was like no
#
cannot tolerate the smell
#
and things like that they were like deeply generally
#
depressed as a result of not getting home cooked food
#
and all of that so obviously to
#
drown their sorrows there are many bars
#
right and not your fine
#
bar one of those typical dives
#
Trivandrum right and to your point about
#
the UDP resorts these guys being
#
these guys take it to the next level right
#
one is that guy is wearing this sort of dhoti
#
wear is sort of optional sometimes he's wearing a banyan
#
and a sort of small notebook and
#
he's not even like asking you
#
what do you want right he's like
#
that's it right so that basically
#
the meaning that you need to and you're just supposed to
#
quickly answer don't waste his time right
#
guy from Bombay probably some army
#
brat who used to high and
#
liquor and all that he's asking
#
a shady bar in Trivandrum
#
do you have long island
#
that guy just looked at him and just said
#
and this has to be in Malayalam he said
#
here is gin, whiskey and rum
#
that's it and he says just you
#
can pick from one of these three
#
and he said do you have bloody Mary
#
he slowed it down like from 1x he
#
whiskey rum like the next thing
#
would have been a punch to the face literally right
#
screwdriver oh he could have got
#
a literal screwdriver yeah that was a classic example
#
of they will absolutely say
#
on this note let's take a
#
quick break and organize food
#
which we will have in the next break so confident
#
are we that we have things to talk about
#
and Ashok I ask you one question why are we
#
confident because we have Narendra Shenoy with us
#
the weight of the world
#
standing on the shoulders of yeah
#
then my favorite quote is
#
standing on the shoulders of the guy who's
#
bench pressing Arnold who's
#
sorry Ryan who's bench pressing
#
who's bench pressing Ryan who's
#
bench pressing the Bengali
#
who's bench pressing Arnold and
#
that's on his shoulders so
#
on Narendra's shoulders yes
#
that guy is on your shoulder
#
so in a sense you are bench pressing all these guys
#
Ryan who's bench pressing
#
the Bengali guy who's bench pressing Arnold
#
who's bench pressing Arnold this legendary
#
Hal Abelson so Hal Abelson
#
famously said if I haven't seen
#
as far as others is because giants
#
were standing on my shoulders
#
and indeed the state of
#
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
#
150 dollars. If you're interested
#
head on over to register at IndiaUncut.com
#
Being a good writer doesn't require
#
God given talent, just a willingness
#
to work hard and a clear idea
#
of what you need to do to refine
#
your skills. I can help you
#
Welcome back to The Seen and the Unseen
#
I'm still here with my good friends Krisha Shouk
#
and Naren Shanoi and Naren Shanoi
#
and I've actually seen you perform this
#
of your memory for poetry you read in your childhood
#
by reading out a couple of lines
#
and you have to complete it. Right?
#
Is the game on? Challenge accepted?
#
The time has come, the walrus said
#
of ships and shoes and ceiling wax
#
and why the sea is boiling hot
#
and weatherpigs have wings. Oh my God
#
Was this a Pink Floyd sort of thing?
#
No, no, this is Alice in Wonderland
#
It has the most amazing
#
I've never memorized anything
#
I used to be a member of this
#
not debating, but an elocution club
#
consisted of memorizing something
#
I must have done it pretty
#
there in all the competitions
#
I find it very difficult to do now
#
vanishes. I read this poem
#
by Emily Dickinson and I memorized
#
and I still, let me see if I can gather it
#
like a book to take you lands away
#
something something charger like
#
like poetry or something
#
it's a lovely little poem, it says
#
before he continues though
#
conversation to our comparison to our first
#
conversation he says he was a master debater
#
and as age goes it becomes
#
debater. So the D goes in between
#
is that what you're coming at
#
you're trying to figure out a way to put that in
#
no frigate like a book by Emily Dickinson
#
there is no frigate like a book to take
#
you lands away nor any courses like
#
a page of prancing poetry
#
this traverse made the poor a stake
#
without oppressive toll, her frugal is
#
a chariot that bears a human soul
#
didn't really understand it
#
or a little piece of poetry
#
you really need to pay no
#
toll for that. But here's the thing about the genius
#
of Emily Dickinson and I wonder
#
how many, you know, whether it is possible for a modern artist
#
like that to even exist. Which is
#
that she didn't have an LLM in the
#
sense that she literally didn't read poetry, she didn't
#
read too much language. So she had to
#
create it all sui generi. So for example
#
if you look at the ways in
#
which she uses the M dash
#
for example, it is unorthodox
#
you know, any English teacher today
#
will look at it and fail the student because it is
#
ungrammatical, it makes no sense, we don't use it like that
#
figures out ki aisa dikhta hai, iske liye
#
moga, and she uses it and somehow
#
when you read her poetry, it makes
#
complete sense, though it is
#
sui generi, no one uses it like that. And
#
can you think of any other examples like that
#
Like Ramanujan of course had to
#
reinvent all of 19th century math because
#
it existed but he had no access to it
#
but... I'm sure there are
#
instances like that in computer science
#
where people have just taken things
#
apart and created new things
#
with this. Yeah, I think so there are many
#
typically if you sort of... one of the advantages
#
of software is that actually
#
it makes this process of
#
bringing in a completely
#
to borrow ideas from another place
#
and it's very easy to do. So most other
#
disciplines, the institutional
#
and the cultural barriers to
#
bringing an outsider in, very high.
#
The other hand, it's very easy to bring in a
#
software person who can bring in a completely
#
new idea from a completely
#
different industry, right?
#
there's technological breakthroughs in the mid
#
in general. This is pretty smart phone, right?
#
Now we take an accelerometer for granted.
#
The idea of the gyroscope
#
being small enough to the point where
#
you can now measure acceleration
#
a whole bunch of things on
#
any sort of object wherever you are.
#
And it was largely being used in
#
by the military, by NASA, a bunch of these other
#
places where this was important to do, right?
#
But it required a software
#
a bunch of sensors in a
#
the data related to, at that
#
point even cloud wasn't a thing, right?
#
And then log things like
#
and also broadly, you know,
#
where the person is going, right? And so on.
#
I can give a far better, more accurate
#
insurance underwriting of whether this person
#
is a risky driver or not. Is he accelerating
#
hard? Like is he, and so on.
#
Basically the insurance industry by itself
#
never thought of this, right? So
#
therefore you'll find that even when
#
there are breakthroughs, you almost
#
always need someone to keep coming and telling
#
you that hey, there's this new cool
#
tech, how can we apply it to your
#
actual problem, right? It's like a hard
#
it's a design thinking problem.
#
I think a lot of people who are experts,
#
executives, etc, generally poor at design.
#
Yeah. Right? And design requires you to be
#
empathetic. It requires you to actually
#
ask what is the real problem,
#
better-edges law, what is the metric that I need
#
to solve. Acquire more customers
#
per month or solve a claim in quicker
#
And here this actually allows you to more narrowly
#
target insurance at safer
#
it used to be things like people would have this
#
broad random wisdom like
#
I mean, women with kids driving
#
a minivan get the lowest premiums in the US
#
because they're the safest drivers.
#
And 18 to 25 year old men
#
driving red-colored American
#
sports cars are the most unsafe
#
drivers and get the highest premiums
#
and so on. And so they used to have these very
#
crude ways of doing this. But now
#
you can actually do a lot more
#
and not just that, like
#
some of the ways in which credit
#
worthiness is determined for good insurance.
#
Some of the factors that go into credit
#
worthiness once they started measuring
#
these things, believe it or not
#
the charge on your battery
#
on your mobile phone, what is the average charge
#
on your battery on your mobile phone, that is how much
#
do you allow it to go down or whether
#
you type in all caps. And I
#
don't know which way this affects needle, but I'm assuming
#
people who type in all caps must be rather
#
less risk averse and therefore
#
unaware of the caps lock
#
button, existence of the caps, or maybe the
#
caps lock button broke and all that.
#
There are like people in my family
#
in WhatsApp they'll type only in caps
#
and I asked them why do you type in caps
#
it sounds like shoddy, they said no, no, no, it's just that
#
caps makes it easier for him to read apparently.
#
And distinguish the letters.
#
A wonderfully nuanced reason for an exception
#
which an algorithm might not
#
be able to figure out. I'll give you
#
actually another fascinating interdisciplinary
#
example is this, so I was in Japan
#
earlier this, for holiday, I've always
#
been fascinated with Japan and
#
obviously we had to go through the Shinkansen. Who is it?
#
I am, yeah. A completely
#
Absolutely. And in the best
#
the bullet trains apparently when they were introduced
#
and they started hitting 200 kilometers an hour
#
sound problem because air is getting
#
compressed and then as it
#
catches up then you hear that sonic boom of some kind
#
especially when they used to come out of tunnels
#
and things like that when that sonic boom
#
effect used to be when they come out of a tunnel you'll hear
#
that explosion and people were complaining that
#
no, this is like, this is really terrible.
#
And so it was an engineering
#
challenge. And interestingly enough
#
it took a zoologist who observed
#
that the kingfisher has a similar
#
problem to solve in that
#
touches water it has evolved
#
to make sure that it creates the
#
displacement and noise and turbulence
#
so that the fish don't know it's coming.
#
that it has evolved basically
#
is like your Olympic diver diving
#
And so now you go look at
#
the bullet train nose cone
#
it's literally shaped like a kingfisher's beak.
#
So they learn from that and that is
#
I have one amusing story about the
#
interdisciplinary thing. So this is way back when we were
#
in Manipal. I'm talking about
#
Around the days you used to bully Satya
#
But those who do not know Satya Nadella
#
The person who you asked to say
#
you really need to join. Go join Microsoft.
#
I distinctly remember advising
#
uncharitable karmajan that he is
#
he will not acknowledge this in public.
#
He is about 30 times more badass
#
than you. That is my conclusion
#
after the way he handled this whole
#
We were fascinated, me and
#
one friend of mine named Deepak
#
computers. So we had one
#
8-bit computer which was roughly the size
#
of your room and you have to take off
#
your chappals and go in and that kind of thing
#
and you could program it
#
and I used to, I was like a
#
sidekick. I would just hang around.
#
And he was really interested
#
in finding out how the damn thing
#
there were very few books on
#
computers at that time. So the library was getting
#
something called computer architecture.
#
the librarian had told us that it has been
#
ordered and we used to keep going to the library
#
finally one day when we went the librarian
#
said yes it's come and then
#
scurries inside to find out
#
where it is and then he finds
#
that it's not there and that there's a
#
been issued to the architecture
#
So somebody in the architecture department
#
has taken this absolutely
#
things like that, accumulators or
#
Interestingly the principles of physical
#
building architecture and software architecture
#
despite the common use of the word, couldn't be
#
considerations, even if you
#
take apart, even the meta patterns
#
are completely different. Explain that, I know neither.
#
a lot of your building design
#
multiple layers of redundancy
#
related things and the fundamental
#
difficulties of working with physical materials.
#
Fundamental principle of software
#
architecture is you never do anything
#
It's called do not repeat yourself
#
is like a fundamental principle.
#
The only time you design
#
it differently is if you're writing
#
the code for the lunar landing
#
module of the Apollo in which case you
#
need to think about it very differently because the lives are at
#
stake. Otherwise software is
#
highly loosely coupled and so on
#
in a way that a building absolutely is not.
#
It cannot be loosely coupled. So all
#
the values that make for good software architecture
#
do not make for good building architecture.
#
interesting. So I think in our last episode
#
we did point out why a heart surgeon
#
should sort of design Chennai streets.
#
that is kind of different.
#
Let's go back to Twitter request
#
and another Twitter request is to get
#
Ashok to talk give an oral history
#
Yeah, it's a very weird
#
thing. This is from Supriya Nair by the way.
#
millets and then Twitter came and started
#
It basically said all you bloggers
#
why sit and break your head and write
#
and then wait for people
#
to comment and things like that.
#
When you could just reel off a 140
#
and not really care. You don't need to research
#
much. Just put it out there.
#
generation of that was the prompt was
#
actually what are you doing? If you remember the early days
#
It used to be called a status.
#
And the box used to say what are you doing?
#
So early tweets used to be
#
having lunch, just stepping
#
my shower. It used to be
#
just had a biryani. It used to
#
be stuff like that and then slowly layer by
#
layer. Then people invented
#
hashtags, people invented ad mentions
#
and a bunch of these other things and so on.
#
And again, just like with blogging
#
narrowly selected bunch of people
#
who kind of took to the medium
#
as a just a de-stressing
#
way of just hanging around with cool
#
rarely did it get into politics and also
#
more importantly, people
#
kind of knew that you were expected to
#
say silly things and that it was okay to
#
say utterly ridiculous things. It was okay
#
to say things that were factually
#
incorrect. But then you would just say
#
I was just joking. You shouldn't have looked at Narenwal
#
saying that. Exactly. And so on.
#
It was a very, that was that first
#
generation of Twitter. And obviously
#
the platform dynamics changed as time
#
went by and I think by 2012,
#
2013 I think is when it started to
#
kind of become a public square
#
and so therefore political
#
topics became a lot more sort of
#
prominent across the world. It's not just in India
#
and then it changed the incentive
#
structures for the nature
#
of hot takes that people could give. And then
#
I think as time passed, as we kind of got
#
sort of everyone into their own
#
I'm getting offended, I'm getting
#
triggered by this and so
#
on that started policing speech and then the
#
introduction of the quote tweet is basically
#
moment if you will. Which incidentally
#
are old enough to remember that one
#
of the most important pieces of software all
#
things back in the day was
#
He had told me this, I was
#
I thought the problem was Nero was
#
fiddling while Rome was burning. He wasn't burning
#
Rome, was he? The fiddling part apparently is apocryphal
#
and all that and apparently records
#
say that he did a fair bit to help
#
and give them, help them out, set up
#
shelters and all that but of course that's
#
the part, this is what people will remember
#
and so on. And now Twitter is full of the victory channels.
#
So in a sense that I think you know the quote tweet
#
in my opinion, in fact I had
#
a, I still have a policy of not replying
#
to anyone who quote tweets.
#
meant as a reply to me but they just decided
#
to quote tweet. The earlier equivalent of
#
this used to be putting a dot in front of the
#
Yeah, it's that same attitude
#
of people wanting to perform
#
to their audience as opposed to
#
an open public conversation where
#
everybody accepts that you can
#
make mistakes, it's okay to make mistakes, it's okay
#
to be ignorant, it's okay to learn as you go along
#
and you don't have to explain your tweets
#
from ten years ago. So here's my thinking
#
about the quote tweet and there's
#
an ironic story at the end of this as well
#
the quote tweet is reflective
#
of all that is wrong with Twitter because essentially
#
what is it? Imagine the three of us are in a room
#
you, Ashok, say something to me
#
and while you are here, I turn
#
to Naren and I point at you while you are here
#
in your presence and I say
#
this moron just said this and then I kind of
#
repeat it. It is incredibly
#
rude, we would never do it in real life
#
and it is incredibly performative.
#
If someone wants to reply to something I have
#
said, they darn well better reply.
#
The moment you quote tweet it is a problem.
#
Now to me there is one acceptable use
#
of the quote tweet which is if you want to
#
broadcast to the world how good someone is.
#
So if you are doing it for something positive
#
and adding additional context that comes from your expression.
#
That is also fine. But if you are just
#
doing it to shit on someone, because
#
snark is really the worst form
#
of discourse, you have nothing to add to the
#
argument, you are just making fun of the other person.
#
So since we were discussing the
#
Should I finish that first? So the ironic
#
story is that I actually wrote exactly this
#
what I told you in a newsletter piece
#
my tweets, besides tweeting that piece
#
out, I also just screen-shotted this bit
#
I had like 3000 quote tweets from
#
people calling me names. You got ratioed.
#
Yeah I got ratioed badly for that. Eventually
#
it was so disturbing because it was like
#
between 6 and 7 in the morning after I woke up
#
some 3000 quote tweets from all kinds of
#
interpreted that as a pro Elon Musk tweet
#
somehow because he had just taken over Twitter
#
and I was complaining about Twitter
#
about what it was before.
#
So it was just describing Elon Musk. Yeah whatever
#
it was interpreted weirdly. Because he
#
literally decides to spend $54 billion
#
after reading an Amit Varma tweet about
#
But the point being that
#
I made a tweet about the
#
statement about the toxicity of the quote tweet
#
which was then toxically quote tweeted by
#
3000 people doing exactly what I
#
said is the problem with it.
#
I deleted it anyway because who wants to take
#
a panga and people are... But you know to be
#
if I had to sort of do a sort of devil's advocate
#
against myself it's right.
#
As much as I dislike the quote tweet.
#
I wonder maybe in all humility
#
having the privilege of having built an audience
#
and being able to say whatever you want and
#
have a bunch of people listen to it etc.
#
power that most people had.
#
Yeah but you know quote tweeting someone doesn't get you
#
It's not just that, I'm just saying that I'm just wondering
#
whether we have any historical lessons to be able to even
#
emphasize it meaning that is it perhaps
#
and again I may not disagree
#
is it perhaps people might feel rightfully
#
keeping powerful or influential
#
Getting ratioed etc. It's just
#
the tools that people have
#
in the modern day to challenge
#
someone. It's one of the tools that people have.
#
It's not great but it's a tool.
#
No frankly the thing you see I've done a lot of quote tweeting in my time
#
as well. You know Naseem Taleb has
#
blocked me in fact. Along with
#
Suhail Seth and Subramaniam Swamy.
#
I think these are the only three prominent people
#
who blocked me otherwise I'm blocking people all the time.
#
of the time it's just used for posturing
#
performative because what happens
#
when you're snarking on someone or you're
#
quote tweeting someone. You are basically
#
saying that I am more virtuous
#
slash knowledgeable than this person.
#
This is such a toxic attitude. My whole
#
scene is if I disagree with someone
#
then I will argue on the basis of ideas
#
and I will tweet about those ideas.
#
Quote tweeting is just so rude.
#
think it gets a little bit complicated
#
now that you're getting paid for engagement.
#
with any sort of incentive structures
#
now if you're getting paid
#
for it then you're going to
#
play to the system. You're going to game the system.
#
So people are getting paid for
#
if you get more than five million views
#
over a three month period you're getting paid.
#
like hot takes that you know
#
will outrage people and you will get ratioed but
#
it doesn't matter. That's engagement.
#
So in a weird sense you're
#
also encouraging people to say
#
dimensional things without any
#
from a world where like for example
#
since Supriya asked about early
#
Twitter I genuinely used to
#
believe in 2011 that I could share
#
half-baked thought and my goal is
#
to spend the rest of that one hour as I'm
#
spending time on Twitter learning
#
from everyone else because as I said the
#
best way to learn on the internet is to say something
#
wrong and then you will be corrected. But
#
it worked in the best possible way on
#
early Twitter because people
#
would then reply to you and engage with you.
#
They would engage with you.
#
That's not quite true. This is why it is and
#
then you could actually learn from that and nobody was then
#
judging you for the half-baked take that you
#
did which is just a prompt if you will right
#
to get people to the right experts
#
to come and so on and eventually
#
as you said the whole thing became toxic because now
#
people are posting that are
#
may not be posting it in good faith either. They're
#
actually posting it to gain. It's
#
just like how your big influencers
#
on YouTube will interview someone
#
and then edit out just the most
#
zero context controversial
#
bits and turn it into a reel
#
which will get huge engagement on Instagram
#
and bring people to watch the larger interview then
#
people will be surprised that's not quite what this
#
guy said. It is just edited in such
#
a way to make it look like the
#
controversial thing that you want. You did
#
give me a recent example of this. Yeah, exactly.
#
Beer Biceps, that entire thing
#
of course it's edited to make the
#
entire thing look like a patently
#
ridiculous statement that all meat
#
I mean it's unfortunate.
#
Pratap Bhanu Mehta in his
#
called Twitter The Great
#
Decontextualization Machine
#
and you know that's kind of exactly what it is.
#
Roald Dahl story. There was a
#
I have a question for you. Going back to
#
the early days of Twitter and when it changed from this to
#
this, was it simply a function of scale
#
or were there specific design
#
changes that caused it like Jonathan
#
Hitt will quite often and quite correctly
#
in my opinion talk about how the Facebook
#
like and the Twitter retweet buttons
#
just made everything so incredibly toxic
#
because then you were fighting for validation
#
and then you were driven in
#
extreme directions and even though the purpose
#
was to increase engagement, it
#
amplified our tribalism.
#
So I, at least in my opinion, I think it's
#
a little bit of both because I think
#
scale clearly changes on
#
like behavior because I think
#
we're all largely designed
#
be constrained by the Dunbar number
#
in the sense of even the old Twitter
#
the chances that you're probably engaging with
#
not more than 100, 150 people in that
#
Very rarely are you suddenly engaging
#
with, even if you have an audience
#
you're not actually engaging with 10,000 people.
#
You get the illusion that you are.
#
So scale clearly changes the
#
game in terms of, in the sense
#
that you never had that scenario where
#
Kanye West or someone else could just say
#
something anti-semitic and that entire thing is
#
the ecosystem, late night comedians
#
dunking on him, newspapers,
#
mainstream media talking
#
about it and then people
#
this entire circus around
#
one celebrity saying some stupid thing
#
is the thing that didn't exist.
#
It does not exist at that scale of
#
early Twitter. Everything is
#
localized and small. If you remember,
#
I don't know if you remember,
#
blocked people who criticized him.
#
So there was a meme, Chetan Bhagat blocks people
#
was a hashtag and people
#
the Hitler meme and everything else.
#
In fact, one of those videos was made by me.
#
Bhagat for blocking people.
#
If you ask me now, I would say
#
fine thing for anyone to do.
#
It's your channel, you get to shut
#
the door on anyone you want to.
#
But at that point of time, we all felt that it's a
#
small group shutting your ears on people
#
because you're slightly more popular.
#
people for saying something that was valid or something
#
that is etc. Now my ideas
#
on that have completely changed. I think he has perfectly
#
within his rights to block anyone
#
and so on. So scale absolutely
#
changes the nature of this because
#
that kind of media circus didn't exist.
#
The second thing is that
#
your design changes absolutely
#
but the design changes often come
#
in reaction to scale as well.
#
At any given point of time, the platform
#
wants to keep increasing engagement
#
and as scaling proves, they're going to have
#
the machine learning algorithms will find different ways
#
you're going to A-B test many things. You're going to try
#
the different color of a
#
like button. You're going to try a different
#
kind of a new engagement feature
#
calling it bookmark versus favor. You're going to try
#
many things and then eventually stick with what gives
#
you more engagement. So here's another
#
question and that is, this is again
#
a question about design. We've ended up
#
with a particular kind of design and a particular
#
kind of equilibrium but it could have been different.
#
Now everybody listening to this
#
has encountered at some point, if they're old enough,
#
the 404 error message. Now
#
there used to be, and I learned this from Rahul Mathan only,
#
there used to be a 403 error message.
#
And you know what the 403 error message was?
#
That you're forbidden, right? No, no, the 403
#
error message was payment not found. Because
#
when the first protocols were designed
#
the intention was that everyone
#
who visited a page would pay for
#
it, except that micro payments didn't really exist
#
So it quickly went out of the window.
#
But my sense is, and where I'm
#
coming from is that, my sense is
#
that I wish the way the world
#
worked is that these social
#
media sites weren't free and we had to pay
#
to be on because the problem right now
#
is that because the revenue source is
#
advertising, we are the product,
#
they have to hack our attention and
#
monetize our attention and
#
therefore in optimizing for higher
#
engagement from us, they have
#
inadvertently hacked our brain in such ways
#
that they've amplified all these terrible
#
instincts of tribalism and seeking validation
#
and all that. And the equilibrium that
#
could have come about is an equilibrium
#
where everybody, we are used to paying
#
for things on the internet, where we are not
#
the product, we are the customer. And the product
#
is exactly the kind of experience that we want.
#
And the incentives then are
#
very different. And another way of looking
#
at this is that another possible
#
model which a friend of mine Sunil Meghrajani
#
had shared with me in 2000 when the internet
#
was pretty new but already normalized.
#
It was already normalized, our free hair and all that.
#
And Sunil and I had started a
#
startup back then which was a disaster.
#
And Sunil pointed out that here's
#
a deal, think about this. We pay ISPs
#
We only access the internet
#
to go to certain sites.
#
So it is logical therefore for the ISPs
#
with the sites that we are visiting.
#
Which again takes care of the monetization
#
problem. Which of course creates
#
incentives for sites to be sticky etc.
#
But that's a different matter.
#
No, so the other point is that
#
so fundamentally I'm also
#
increasingly becoming slightly
#
skeptical and pessimistic about
#
whether or not they can actually
#
by now it's hardwired to
#
I mean in the sense that I think
#
in the last 15 years or so
#
larger companies have enough data
#
to have tried enough things
#
given all the criticism that they've
#
of course they've been laughing their way to the bank
#
but surely in the sense that
#
I would sort of I'm inclined
#
towards the Tristan Harris
#
and Jarrell Lanier and others who are now critiques
#
of social media to say that
#
hanging out in a public square
#
is not a human thing. Is that
#
I don't think it's practical at all. 150 people
#
hanging out, yeah it's a town square.
#
the number we can figure out
#
whether it could be 2000 in some context
#
it would be 10,000 in some context. Surely
#
it is not a billion. Surely
#
it is not one person saying something
#
anti-semitic this thing then becoming
#
turning it into a media that is
#
not something that you can really
#
I think we are not designed
#
what a million people are up to.
#
a different layer to that which is
#
when I'm on Facebook and
#
when you're on Facebook and when Narayan is
#
on Facebook we are not actually in the same
#
a universe that is in a sense
#
created by the algorithm
#
that is a limited universe and we are all in
#
different limited universes.
#
ever watch on YouTube is one thing and you
#
watch something drastically opposite
#
we are in completely different worlds and even
#
completely different echo chambers
#
and especially Bailful on the Young
#
like when I brought this point up with
#
Aakash Singh Rathore recently he came up with this
#
beautiful phrase that when two people meet each other for
#
the first time it's actually two algorithms
#
But it is actually to be honest it is an
#
algorithm picking the worst
#
So that's the thought I want to complete that what I'm wondering
#
is like number one I believe we can't really
#
shift from one equilibrium to another
#
because we are already in and there is a part
#
dependence there and network effects
#
have come into play and the tech giants are what
#
they are because of that so that model isn't going to
#
change. We are where we are.
#
Question one, in a thought experiment could it
#
have worked out differently if we happen to take
#
another model and that got taken?
#
And question two, the reason it
#
is a problem and I don't buy
#
that thing because there aren't 25 million
#
people on any social media where I am.
#
I'm in a bubble, you're in a bubble
#
our bubbles interact in certain insidious
#
ways and sometimes the world
#
opens up. To be honest I'll correct
#
you on that. See the bubble you referred
#
to is again algorithmically
#
created by something that has access
#
to 25 million people. Let's remember that.
#
It would not have been able to create that bubble
#
for you unless it had access to the
#
net sum of what everyone was doing.
#
algorithm was restricted to saying that
#
I can only show you content
#
from the 20 or 30 people
#
you are genuinely friends with and interested
#
in. You wouldn't have that
#
which was what the design of social media was in its
#
first generation before Facebook went to the
#
algorithmic sort of model and now Twitter
#
X and everything else is now algorithm
#
Instagram and every one of them is now
#
following the algorithmic model.
#
So therefore, you might be in a bubble
#
but that bubble is possible only
#
because the algorithm is literally then
#
sourcing stuff from people you have no clue.
#
My point is different. My point is
#
that the binding constraint
#
being all these negative
#
effects not existing. The binding
#
constraint is not the Dunbar number or
#
not that we can't deal with so many people etc.
#
I think the binding constraint is
#
a design that optimises
#
for engagement and increased
#
engagement because of the way our reptile brains are
#
wired necessarily means
#
more performative behaviour, more tribalism
#
more polarised discourse.
#
And I am just wondering if there
#
are ways, there are profitable
#
the design so you minimise this
#
damage. I would say Reddit is less
#
toxic subreddits meaning that the problems
#
are more localised. So Reddit is more
#
Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash.
#
You read that book. So basically
#
in that future, dystopian future
#
everybody lives in their own
#
private version of everything.
#
broadly the problem is that it depends.
#
a democrat stuck on say the
#
Donald Trump subreddit, you're not going to
#
Then again you still have the choice to leave.
#
is saying is here in subreddits
#
In most of the social media you're locked in
#
by chance, purely by what you
#
even Reddit, how do you discover
#
subreddits? It's not entirely all
#
voluntary. Again there is an algorithm at play.
#
Which pushes you. Again as I said you're going to
#
the home page. It's showing you the most
#
interesting posts. What do you think are the most interesting posts?
#
The ones that are more sensational
#
and the ones that are more... But I think it is
#
less of a decontextualizing machine
#
and it is less enabling
#
towards mobs. Absolutely.
#
And those are two of the key problems.
#
Because on Twitter you not only have a polar discourse
#
you also have a chilling effect on the
#
silent majority. Which is like saying
#
fuck it I don't want to get cancelled.
#
But I have seen say for example
#
for example I might have said something
#
on Instagram to the effect of maybe
#
critiquing something about Ayurveda.
#
deconstructed and criticized in multiple
#
So it can also have that amplifying effect.
#
Again it's possible for me that
#
I may not use Reddit that frequently etc.
#
log in, you can bet they are
#
at mentioning, you can at mention the
#
since I do have a user ID on Reddit of course
#
people do at mention. So if I go there it's going to be a
#
tough time if you're going to have to deal with all of that
#
random your anti-national
#
stuff. So in the sense that every one of these platforms
#
it's almost as if they have tapped into
#
the way our brains are wired.
#
With regard to large scale
#
It's insane I don't know.
#
has historically been the
#
large groups of people to mobilize
#
and coordinate. And then the nation state
#
you had all of these kinds of ideas. But they're still
#
identity bubbles where people get
#
so obsessed when very angry
#
is questioned or when suddenly their ideas
#
are questioned and so on. So
#
really if you ask me, I honestly
#
I don't think there is a
#
social media to be both
#
profitable and good for society.
#
down and you make people pay. Which again
#
I will say that if you make people pay
#
then you're creating a class system where only
#
some people will have access. You have to figure out
#
a way by which somehow you
#
can still give people access and still
#
create small groups. Some of the best of
#
Reddit, the best of 2010
#
The answer to it is Orkut in my opinion
#
on a lighter note. But anyway please.
#
There is another answer to it which is how can the individual
#
people deal with this and for this
#
we must turn for guidance
#
to Ashok's hero who has been
#
introduced in the last session
#
to us by Ashok in this particular quote
#
sums up I think Ashok's social media policy
#
so we shall now play it for our listeners.
#
This is Nithyananda himself.
#
You know which one right? So I'll just play it
#
and I don't know if you can hear it or
#
this will divert the sound into that
#
but let me just play it and then I'll kind of
#
who love me. So I don't
#
And you know in addition to
#
this I am reminded of something
#
the great Ashish Naira once
#
said where he was in the news for something
#
or the other and reporters
#
landed up and they asked him
#
are you disturbed by all the
#
sort of the way you are getting mobbed
#
and he showed them his phone and it was one of those
#
old Nokia phones. So the idea
#
being that if you are not on the net what are they going to do?
#
They are going to come outside your house and throw hashtags
#
So as I said I think my
#
policy for the last 10 years has been
#
if I get more than 10 retweets on
#
a tweet of mine I mute notifications
#
on that post. That's one
#
of the best features Twitter has ever introduced
#
from a mental health standpoint.
#
I don't have to mute everything but I can just mute notifications
#
on that one tweet because I might still want to engage
#
on something else where something constructive is going on.
#
So I can completely ignore the one where
#
somebody is ratioing and dunking
#
and doing all of that stuff.
#
Everybody does. If you live long enough
#
on the internet everybody does get dunked on.
#
an interesting recent example
#
and science communication
#
is one that scientists are actually generally
#
terrible at science communication because
#
scientists have been trained to communicate with other scientists.
#
They have to use a language that is dense
#
non ambiguous but again
#
understandable to the lay person. Imperatorable for others.
#
But it's necessary because that's how you
#
communicate science clearly to a fellow scientist
#
to peer review. You have to be specific.
#
Peer review is more important than audience understanding
#
because that's what moves science forward.
#
So there's always been this tension between
#
people who do science and people who do science communication
#
actual scientists versus Neil deGrasse Tyson
#
or whoever it is who's communicating science.
#
everyone from Carl Sagan to
#
Neil deGrasse Tyson to everyone else
#
at some point of time has been criticized
#
by actual scientists for oversimplifying stuff.
#
the problem with that criticism
#
is that one, science communication is
#
extraordinarily hard because you're actually
#
figuring out how do I take facts
#
and turn it into a story
#
metaphors that the person understands.
#
And scientists again hate metaphors because
#
metaphors have a life of their own.
#
Metaphors break down. And the scientists
#
job is to forever say caveats.
#
Under this condition only it works.
#
But the person communicating
#
doesn't, people don't think in caveats and
#
conditions and perfect sphere in a vacuum.
#
No. I need to be able to tell a story.
#
And so recently one of the things that happened
#
was that I kind of posted this
#
famous example of this how
#
and if you take a hemoglobin
#
they're remarkably alike
#
except for the fact that this has magnesium
#
and that has iron and so on.
#
And I know for a fact that
#
look for starters hemoglobin is
#
hemi and then the rest protein part
#
which is actually quite large. What you're
#
actually seeing as being similar is only the hemi
#
part of it. And not the entire hemoglobin.
#
But if I'm communicating to an audience
#
that's largely science illiterate
#
Nobody would have heard of hemi. They would have all heard of hemoglobin
#
because we all studied biology in school.
#
So as a science communicator I
#
make a choice to say look at the similarity between
#
chlorophyll and hemoglobin rather than say
#
look at the similarity between chlorophyll and hemi
#
I will lose my audience if I say hemi.
#
So I make that you know sort of you know
#
I really make that thing itself I'm just going to say
#
hemoglobin because my goal is
#
to get you to be curious about the fact
#
molecular structures tend to be conserved
#
via evolution. So there's a common ancestor
#
who would have worked out this molecule who would have done
#
something and that structure ended up getting
#
although the function of this is entirely different
#
from the function of this. So that
#
curiosity is the only thing that I'm interested in.
#
I'm not interested in peer reviewing a paper.
#
But then you have people who are in
#
science who get very upset by
#
the fact that you oversimplified and this is like a
#
WhatsApp forward you should not be doing this etc.
#
fundamentally getting it wrong. I'm not a scientist.
#
I'm a science storyteller.
#
And yes you will absolutely
#
disagree and it's good of you
#
to call me out to make sure that I don't
#
oversimplify beyond the point where
#
it can result in misunderstanding.
#
And then I end up creating WhatsApp forwards
#
which people then misunderstand entirely
#
they take something entirely the opposite of what it was
#
originally meant. But there's no misunderstanding
#
here purely to primarily encourage
#
this thing. So this is often the problem
#
is social media then it just makes it worse.
#
There is no context. There is no nuance.
#
And you have a population
#
that is not going to understand correlation
#
The final science metaphor
#
in my view is a selfish gene.
#
Which is so powerful, says so much.
#
And there are so many biologists who will criticize that.
#
That no gene does not have
#
motivations like I said boss if I have
#
to explain to a human being I have to explain it in those terms.
#
And it's clearly a metaphor you're not
#
talking about the intentionality of a gene
#
and what it wants. But it is such
#
before we go in for an arranged story
#
and then we go in for a break you know see I planned it
#
all out the digressions will happen.
#
And the final question to both of you is
#
when we would a blog or as early
#
tweeters it would be based on what
#
is happening in the news and what is happening in the world
#
and all of that. That would be the source and we would
#
the news seems to be based on what people
#
are tweeting. It's like you know
#
people being famous for being famous. So it's
#
kind of like now you tweet and
#
then that becomes the news where there
#
are entire news articles will be like
#
Narendra Shanoi tweeted this and then there's
#
a court tweet and Krish Shok replied like this
#
and then there's a court tweet and Amit Verma has
#
died of exasperation as a picture of his body.
#
And that is indexed by Google
#
and that now becomes the official
#
source on it. And it's almost like
#
a retreat from reality.
#
I don't know at which level to us to comment
#
on it. Declining journalistic standards
#
etc etc. Yeah we all know but
#
kind of feeling about this because
#
it just changes the world we learn about the
#
world the way we consume knowledge and information.
#
My favorite example of this
#
is basically now so you know
#
over the years like for example Quora
#
like historically has done a good
#
job of search engine optimizing. So Google tends
#
for people who type questions.
#
They tend to show one of the things will be a Quora answer.
#
Now it's quite funny for many
#
of the answers the indexed
#
answer is as of my training data
#
2022 or whatever. So basically people
#
are now using bots to generate
#
Quora answers using chat GPT.
#
that answer is as of my training data
#
I don't know the answer because the question is
#
actually something related to something recently in the
#
news and the guy has used
#
that bot to post one of those
#
typical copy paste. I don't
#
know the answer because it's after my training
#
data cut off. That has been indexed
#
now by Google. So for many questions now you're getting
#
sort of you know weird sort of circular
#
things. I'm still waiting for what
#
will happen when the GPT
#
has to get trained on internet data that has been
#
generated by GPT 4 and 5.
#
Which will be quite. And by the way
#
LinkedIn Gyan so now time for a
#
the challenge for Ashok and me. Don't give the Gyan
#
We'll write the LinkedIn post. And I got to say
#
that you know when I landed up at
#
Naren's house for dinner yesterday
#
before you flew in you know
#
we are recording this in Bombay so
#
Ashok flew in and is staying with Naren.
#
Before you flew in I went in there and he
#
offered me this whiskey and he said
#
this is named after you and the whiskey is called
#
Gyan Chand. So a superbly
#
sarcastic comment. That's how I'm
#
interpreting it and I had a little bit of that
#
and then I said okay I'm driving I can't have more of
#
this but I do want some water. So in the same glass
#
I had some water which I claimed
#
was homeopathic Gyan Chand and you
#
corrected me and said hey it's not homeopathic
#
Gyan Chand. So kindly give your
#
explanation was quite lovely. So true
#
homeopathic Gyan Chand whiskey is
#
that you pour yourself a whiskey
#
and then you drink it or you give it to someone
#
else etc. And then if the empty
#
glass will have some molecules of
#
whiskey stuck to the bottom right because can't
#
drink everything right.
#
whiskey in the Arabian sea.
#
The glass. Yeah the glass
#
few molecules of whiskey will now be
#
will enter the Arabian sea
#
the entirety of the volume. Now there
#
are some molecules of whiskey in the Arabian sea
#
and now you take a fresh glass and
#
take that sea water from the Arabian sea
#
that is your homeopathic
#
Gyan Chand. That's the level of dilution
#
you need for the highest impact.
#
The homeopathic logic is
#
now you will get truly high.
#
Because there is the strongest whiskey.
#
Which is why breathalyzers are useless
#
because the guy who's really
#
really drunk is basically drunk water with a
#
Over to your story Mr. Srinoy.
#
So speaking of homeopathy
#
were staying in hostel we also had some
#
day scholars. So one of the day
#
scholars his grandfather
#
was a homeopathic doctor
#
and his father was a regular doctor
#
and the grandfather passed away
#
he said that all this is rubbish
#
he told his son to throw everything
#
into the nearest gutter
#
he should he could monetize
#
it because he knew that
#
homeopathic medicines were made with a little
#
figured that grandfather had literally
#
thousands of bottles if he
#
there will be enough alcohol to have a
#
party. Absolutely. So he was
#
and actually the interesting thing is
#
if you are thrown into the gutter then the contents
#
of the gutter now becomes stronger homeopathic
#
medicine by homeopathic logic.
#
So you can never actually get out of the gutter
#
because you are progressively getting drunk.
#
Is there a Govinda song? Gutter Gutter?
#
your attempt to be like me.
#
I am breathing the same molecules of air as you are.
#
selling seats at the buffet table.
#
So some princely sum of 20 or 25 rupees
#
all of grandpa's medicines
#
we poured it and there was
#
a little bit of alcohol
#
but most of it was sugar.
#
everything and most of us got sick
#
because the sugar is horrible.
#
And we didn't get high at all
#
so there was just not and
#
we tried our level best
#
to get our money back from the guy
#
he said goods once sold will not be returned
#
adding insult to the injury that
#
we should actually pay more
#
because now we are immune to every disease
#
And also I would also make this other observation
#
that like a true whiskey fan
#
here is mixing all of those medicines
#
then you are drinking blended
#
It should be single source.
#
So I am not now sure of a LinkedIn lesson
#
but I can come up with an economic funder
#
which is that this is basically the fallacy of
#
composition. The fallacy of composition
#
is a fallacy that occurs
#
when and now I am reading out from Google
#
when someone assumes something is
#
true of the whole based on the fact that
#
it is true of some part of the whole.
#
So just because alcohol can give you pleasure
#
and make you high doesn't mean that
#
homeopathic pills that contain alcohol will do
#
that. But in general in case
#
Abby Phillips is listening and gets mad at me later
#
we shall add in the statutory warning that alcohol
#
is dangerous for your health.
#
One of my grand aunts, very smart lady
#
and her philosophy in life
#
was that the best way to improve
#
your mental health as a woman in
#
India is to after your husband
#
turns 60 is to stop listening to him.
#
in their cognitive faculties sooner
#
than women do. And they
#
generally become empty headed
#
and very dilute in general.
#
Or as we all call it homeopathy.
#
Brilliant and this reminds me of
#
this stand up act I just saw yesterday
#
where this guy is talking about
#
how he speaks to someone who is just a
#
husband who celebrated his 50th wedding
#
anniversary and he asked him that boss
#
50th wedding anniversary how did you get so
#
far? So the guy said just one piece of advice
#
say the third thing that comes into
#
your head. So he says like why the third
#
thing? So he says if you say the first thing
#
that comes into your head sooner or later you are getting
#
exposed. If you spend say the second thing
#
you are spending the night on the couch.
#
You say the third thing it's cool.
#
for the benefit of the readers
#
I have to add my little hack
#
so I was just discussing
#
my and I am saying this very
#
confidently because Sheila doesn't listen
#
please don't tip her off that I'm saying
#
of this will be sent to her on
#
WhatsApp. No no it will be created as a reel
#
you know judge of saris
#
and the truth is I don't have
#
is you know there used to be this horse
#
tap so the owner would say
#
four and the horse would tap eight
#
times and things like that the horse
#
which could do mathematics and it
#
turned out that all the
#
horse was doing was tapping
#
and he was observing his master
#
so the moment the master gave any
#
it would stop. Clever Hans. This is actually
#
smarter than a horse which would actually know the math.
#
the name of the horse was Clever
#
Hans and he was picking up on body
#
language cues when people
#
gave the answer their body language
#
was different and the horse was picking up on that
#
clever and I am like roughly the
#
intelligence of a horse
#
and you listen to Hans Raj Hans
#
Clever Hans Raj Clever Hans
#
is the guy bench pressing Ryan
#
on whose bench pressing Ryan
#
bench pressing Bengali guy
#
bench pressing Arnold Schwarzenegger
#
Sheila is shopping from her
#
eyes and from her body language
#
if she likes something or not
#
so it's trivial for me to say whether I
#
convinced that I have the most
#
sublime taste in because
#
every saree she has ever liked you have
#
this is a tip for little
#
because she know that you do not have a saree sense but a
#
but have you ever bought a saree for her without
#
I generally I don't know
#
I have very little so I once
#
in my dreamy and romantic youth
#
when I was far more gullible than
#
I used to have a factory in Wassey boondock place
#
so there is a wandering
#
salesman who has come with a lot of
#
like he opens the thing and I am
#
fascinated about glittering
#
some are gold some are silver
#
what have you and then there is
#
and he says sir omega is
#
500 rupees and 500 rupees
#
astronomical sum and I happen to have
#
it in my pocket I gave it I bought it
#
wrapped it in one like a muslin cloth
#
kind of thing where he with a great deal
#
of gravitas he gave it to me I
#
put it into my bag I brought it home
#
and I got a big wet kiss
#
I didn't know you had so much money
#
how did you buy it I had that day
#
500 rupees and she says
#
when it comes to brands
#
you do not know the alpha
#
when you are buying things like that
#
you either pay a lot or you pay very
#
very little it's actually interesting in Hong Kong's
#
Mong Kok market right I mean there will be
#
guys on the street who will have these
#
Rado Rolex fake watches
#
and that's for the average
#
consumers and if they sense that you are a little
#
then they will take you inside and show you the
#
that are much harder to make out
#
the original fakes basically
#
they are like pretty good
#
is everything every week
#
we will speak for about an hour on things we care
#
about from the profound to the profane
#
from the exalted to the everyday
#
we range widely across subjects and we
#
bring multiple frames with which we try to
#
understand the world please join us on our
#
journey and please support us
#
by subscribing to our YouTube channel
#
Amit Verma A M I T V A R M A
#
the show is called everything is
#
everything please do check it out
#
welcome back to the scene on the unseen
#
I'm still with you will never guess it you cannot
#
guess it they are still here
#
Shanoi and being stuck in Mumbai traffic
#
it's like being stuck in Mumbai
#
traffic this is I have to tell you about this
#
it's a brown color doormat with
#
you again question mark written
#
Amit could have it for you and me
#
yeah you again indicates that the
#
people are not welcome you guys are always
#
kind of welcome we began
#
the last segment with you know asking you
#
Narain Shanoi our modern day
#
poetry LLM to autocomplete
#
a piece of poem so I'll give you another couple
#
of lines I wandered lonely
#
that floats on high over Elan Hill
#
when all at once I saw a crowd
#
a host of golden daffodils
#
beside the lake beneath the trees
#
fluttering and dancing in the
#
continuous as the stars that shine
#
and twinkle on the milky way
#
they stretched in never ending line
#
along the margin of the bay
#
a glance tossing their heads
#
and sprightly danced the waves
#
beside them danced but they out did the
#
sparkling waves a poet could not
#
but began such a jokin company for often
#
on my actually this is one of the most evocative
#
things for often on my couch
#
I lie in vacant or in pensive mode
#
flash upon that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude
#
this happens right so you have
#
and it comes back to you when you're
#
it just enriches that moment for you
#
for me because I'm like
#
on a completely unromantic note
#
that fact that we have these
#
are all really indicative of a
#
computation cost of a neural network
#
we now know how expensive neural nets
#
we now know how expensive
#
neural networks are computationally
#
and clearly I don't think
#
but our brains do this on
#
2000 calories a day and a fraction of that is what is
#
and so it obviously has to optimize
#
it's got to strategically forget
#
and choose to keep stuff
#
that you need to remember for survival
#
and so on and so therefore
#
in the moments when you suddenly
#
are able to recall something
#
it seems like a very special
#
moment is quite you know
#
firstly we sort of recall
#
things in snapshots and not as in a
#
movie reel kind of thing that is one thing
#
and the other thing of course as I keep talking
#
about and it keeps blowing my mind whenever I think
#
in the sense of when an event
#
happens the first time I remember it I remember it
#
but the next time I am not remembering the
#
event I am remembering the remembering of it
#
and in this game of Chinese whispers
#
when you discuss something that happened
#
20 years ago with someone who shared that experience
#
you might be remembering totally
#
different things that's kind of like how memorization
#
works right meaning that what happens is that you have
#
that the failure rate is going to be low
#
meaning that somewhere or the other where the copy
#
of that is going to be there right I mean in that sense
#
so some remembering you are going to remember
#
apparently this is what happened my friend
#
we once so we studied in Manipal
#
institution in the same university was
#
interviewing for electrical engineers I am not an
#
electrical engineer Deepak was
#
but I just tagged along because
#
they wanted to interview in that
#
college so we went there
#
they didn't know I was from mechanical so I
#
wrote the test and apparently
#
I have no recollection of this
#
so they shortlisted me along
#
with the others for the interview and then that guy
#
started hurling questions
#
at me and I didn't know
#
and then he asked me how can you call
#
yourself an electrical engineer and not
#
know this so he said who called
#
in myself and I am a mechanical engineer and
#
then he very angrily threw out
#
I have no recollection apparently of this
#
true this is what happened yeah
#
just a blank in my mind but mechanical engineers
#
tend to believe that they are the OG
#
civil engineers technically
#
would be the OG engineers but yeah
#
what is the earliest form of engineering
#
philosophy is proto science
#
so what is proto engineering
#
civil engineering is the earliest form
#
building small contraptions around your house
#
if you could call it mechanical in that sense
#
yes but we've always understood
#
mechanical engineering only in the
#
context of machines whereas
#
civil engineering I mean
#
the pyramids were a civil engineering project
#
so if a mechanical engineer is
#
very polite would you call him a
#
civil mechanical engineer
#
and if a civil engineer
#
is very robotic in his movements and
#
his thinking mechanical civil engineer
#
these are the deep sort of
#
you also should know everyone listening to
#
this podcast should know the principles of
#
mechanical engineering so
#
the main there are two principles
#
the first principle is if it moves
#
use Loctite and the second one is
#
if it's not moving and it should use
#
do not use WD-40 that will
#
permanently wreck the machine on the long run
#
it is the world's greatest problem fixer
#
lubricant it's like some kind of
#
something that's not moving
#
and you need it to move
#
spray WD-40 it will move
#
hinges and things like that
#
and funnily enough also
#
if you've bought pots and pans
#
thing is to remove those god damn stickers
#
they stick on them and they never come out properly
#
WD-40 is an excellent way to
#
do you get consumer grade WD-40 can I buy it
#
you should not consume WD-40
#
wash the pan after that but it's an easy way to
#
being an Instagram alarmist don't have WD-40
#
it is okay in moderation
#
liver doctor is now as we speak
#
looking for studies of effects of WD-40
#
so far you guys are only messing up the liver
#
right now you're going to mess up the entire system
#
what do you have for us
#
no I haven't right the oxygen cylinder
#
four friends this is actually a long story
#
the first part of the story
#
from the industrial area of my factory
#
so the reason we went to Sikkim
#
had been there before and liked the place
#
in the league where we would
#
first choice was train I'm talking about
#
Keetanjali express one of those trains
#
and the moment we get in
#
so we get in at VT station
#
and by the time Dadar has arrived
#
which is literally ten minutes away
#
so we've got four different berths in
#
the same compartment and he's busy
#
reorganizing so he's saying
#
will you share with number 57
#
because number 57 will go to
#
3 so that we can take number 4 and
#
5 something like that and so all
#
he started doing it at Dadar
#
and the next stop is at Thane
#
and by Thane everything is completed
#
we've all settled into our
#
thing and a new bunch of people
#
then the numbers are clashing
#
he looks at our tickets and he says
#
this reorganization has
#
everywhere because multiple
#
relocations have happened
#
we realized that some people from
#
B2 are still looking for the guy
#
because from Bombay to Kolkata
#
they were not able to sort out
#
so the other thing was we were
#
to go to this place called Guru Dongmar
#
so Guru Dongmar lake was at 17
#
thousand feet or so the
#
flyer told us apparently it's
#
not but that's what people were saying
#
of our guys was very paranoid
#
that we'll get altitude sickness
#
my dad was a doctor so he says
#
ask your dad to give you an
#
oxygen cylinder we'll carry it there
#
so I went and told my dad I want
#
an oxygen cylinder I want to carry it to Sikkim
#
my dad said don't be fool
#
it's like this big and heavy
#
you go there and find out it'll be something
#
guy has talked me two of those guys are not
#
really they don't they're not
#
paranoid but this guy has talked
#
me into it I also have no clue what
#
but I knew that people could die from it
#
Sikkim trying to find out where
#
to buy an oxygen cylinder and
#
used only by mountaineers it's
#
not here you have to go to that Kanchenjunga
#
mountain this mountain that mountain
#
an oxygen cylinder we eventually
#
land up at Guru Dongmar
#
nothing you know we're absolutely
#
really thanking my staff we didn't
#
find an oxygen cylinder because
#
there there's a busload of
#
uncles and aunties merely
#
walking around like we we must
#
have been in our early 40s or late 30s
#
at that time and these guys were well
#
into their 60s no sign of oxygen
#
cylinder and what a stupid
#
sight we would have been
#
carrying two big oxygen cylinders
#
and walking around so there's
#
a LinkedIn lesson so interestingly enough
#
every year you know sort of
#
you know envelope on what crazy place can we go
#
in India right and with my
#
wife and kid they said let's do
#
Ladakh in winter right so this is
#
December 25th to December 30th
#
so let's go to Ladakh it's
#
so much of a altitude sickness place the height
#
Leh is already above like
#
13,000 feet and so on already above
#
is the risk of altitude sickness right
#
did a little bit of research and I said here
#
is how we prevent it and you know etc etc
#
our own research right and
#
after all the research I'd done I'd come to
#
the conclusion that we'll be fine
#
right I think unless we are going to
#
Khardungla and all of that should not be
#
a problem I think we'll be able to manage and we have
#
so from Delhi so we'll be fine
#
I land up there my wife has done our own
#
preparations and everybody had warned us
#
that by the way altitude sickness tend to affect
#
tends to affect young children
#
wife is also like okay right we've checked
#
in now let's go walk around let's go somewhere
#
I am lying down unable to
#
lift my head up from the
#
and I basically sleep for the next
#
I had altitude sickness for all
#
the and my wife Cooli had
#
taken some advice apparently there's a
#
anti-asthma tablet called Diamox
#
which opens up your lungs so you're able to
#
take in more oxygen from a thin oxygen atmosphere
#
so you'll be okay and I
#
wasn't and my son was also okay
#
and then I was basically so what happens
#
your brain then says I'm not getting enough oxygen
#
so I am going to prevent you from
#
sleeping because when you sleep your breathing rate goes down
#
so you're going to get even less oxygen so brain
#
but you'll be just be flying flat
#
slowly your lungs and everything else acclimatize
#
it takes some time right so you'll be just completely
#
flat and everybody told me that
#
everybody told us about
#
Ladakh said that don't plan anything on day one
#
you might have altitude sickness day two only
#
I was just literally flat
#
so yeah exactly not able to get up
#
for 24 hours and then eventually it was okay
#
the locals they were like
#
please smell this camphor
#
the local cure for altitude
#
sickness it doesn't work but yeah so that's the
#
interesting thing but once you get acclimatized
#
you're actually quite fine yeah then you can go
#
you can go to like 17,000 feet
#
and the other interesting story there was
#
that my younger brother does mountain climbing
#
but in the US right he Alaska
#
in Washington state in Seattle
#
he climbs these mountains
#
and all of that and crazy hardcore
#
mountaineering all that gear and all of that and he's
#
Rainier which is the mountain you see
#
near Seattle right on the skyline
#
13,000 feet and all of that
#
right so my wife was like wait wait I
#
need to take a photo at Kardungla there's a
#
sign board that says 17,000 feet
#
your brother does hardcore
#
work scaling mountains and all of that
#
I'm the laziest person around
#
I am now officially I have scaled
#
4,000 feet higher than your brother has
#
by just traveling in an Innova and going
#
that satisfaction is deep
#
that satisfaction is deep saying that I'm at 17,000
#
glorious moment I'm waiting for the LinkedIn lessons
#
Narayan LinkedIn lesson
#
the train story first is that when you
#
reorganize organizations
#
who have been reorganized
#
not find out who did it
#
I was thinking you were going to say
#
that if you are going to reorganize
#
don't reorganize the supply chain
#
lesson in that which is that perhaps
#
but you can have multiple births
#
this is the kind of LinkedIn post
#
that needs to be accompanied by
#
a photo of you in a thinking
#
post you know that trick right a lot of
#
LinkedIn posts will include a photo
#
of someone in a thinking post
#
and it's because all these people who are like LinkedIn influencers are not really
#
natively social media influencers
#
their idea of social media is only LinkedIn
#
and so they have somehow
#
internalized this idea that
#
post with picture does better than
#
post without picture and they're not
#
really creative enough to find an appropriate
#
picture gif no the photo of
#
themselves so people just write a post
#
and then put a photo of themselves
#
I'm not even on LinkedIn
#
but as our friend Sudhir Sanowat was saying yesterday
#
and he's very irritated by this
#
that many women are becoming prominent
#
influencers by posting mid shot
#
of themselves looking voluptuous
#
and that is now the next big thing in
#
the other weird thing is that
#
first interesting things happen historically
#
crazy things used to happen on 4chan
#
then they make it to Reddit and then they make it
#
to Twitter and then to Facebook
#
then to WhatsApp and finally LinkedIn
#
so copy paste comes finally
#
LinkedIn right yeah so I think that's
#
same thing LinkedIn is now
#
turning into the new Facebook
#
the Bengali guy carrying the
#
where were we last Naren carrying the
#
on someone we got someone below him
#
Naren carrying on his shoulder
#
no no there was someone who was carrying
#
Naren and Naren had on his shoulder
#
was bench pressing the Bengali guy bench pressing
#
Anil Shwasnagar same thing
#
LinkedIn is like basically like that
#
Anil Shwasnagar right now somewhere is like getting
#
really high without taking drugs
#
correct yes like one of those Cirque du Soleil
#
Shivaji Nagar as we would call him back in our Pune days
#
Anand Shiva Shankar as we used to call him
#
there is a guy by that name
#
yeah all right so what about
#
the LinkedIn lesson from your oxygen
#
cylinder story yeah so oxygen
#
cylinder story LinkedIn lesson was
#
because you probably look ridiculous
#
prepared and look ready on the other
#
hand Ashok's story had the opposite lesson
#
advised everyone but failed
#
to prepare myself right so
#
coding less consulting so I have a question for you
#
that is the LinkedIn lesson
#
so I have a question for you the reason you can
#
relate the cylinder story
#
with Sat Joy is that you ended up
#
not making a fool of yourself tell me about
#
a time and question for both of you when you
#
did make a fool of yourself
#
did make a fool there's like literally thousands
#
done things like that so I've been
#
we've had a big argument
#
and I've gone out of house
#
different footwear so they're
#
like almost the same color but they're not
#
quite and they're two different shoes and
#
dissolve the tension okay so
#
and not laugh at the same time
#
driven to a destination on scooter
#
and then come back by public transport because I forgot
#
I went by scooter and then I
#
I think the weird one is
#
I'm terrible at remembering faces
#
barely pay attention right faces
#
in a restaurant right and the
#
the staff in the restaurant all had
#
some sort of jeans right
#
and some guy in a white
#
t-shirt and jeans came and said was
#
wanting to say hi something and said
#
the wait staff and said
#
you know we ordered for
#
this naan it hasn't come
#
and he said I'm your neighbor
#
entirely his face barely same
#
always you know in my own head and all that
#
I was at a conference just
#
yesterday so it was like a two day conference
#
conference I see this gentleman
#
and he looks really familiar
#
and he kind of looks at me as if
#
expecting some kind of things so I nod
#
and I smile because it's a kind of conference where
#
you'll run into people at conferences
#
I'm assuming it's a casual acquaintance like that
#
but then he keeps looking at me as if he's
#
expecting more and I'm wondering what's going on
#
so I see the name on his sort of
#
and when I google him I come across
#
another person with the same name it's obviously not
#
him then later on I figure out the full form of
#
google that and then I realize this is a person
#
that has been mentioned in multiple podcasts of mine
#
by other people so he is
#
sort of someone who is known to people
#
who have been guests of mine and has
#
been mentioned and therefore is
#
aware of it and if I vaguely remember he had
#
even tweeted something but I have no memory
#
of actually meeting him but I'm assuming he knows
#
because you know you kind of know
#
who the person is so then later on
#
we are at a tea coffee counter and he's again
#
walking up from a long distance looking
#
at me very intently and I say hello
#
sir kya logay chai coffee and then I help him get
#
his tea coffee senior gentleman
#
and then he goes off and that's it I don't make
#
more conversation like that because hey I don't know the guy
#
right and thankfully I didn't do the faux pas of
#
dinner with a bunch of economists one of them
#
says oh you should do an episode with so and so
#
and I said yeah yeah he's been mentioned by
#
all these guys maybe I should yeah he's had an
#
interesting life right maybe I should
#
where does he stay and then they tell me
#
the name of the city near Delhi
#
at which point a flood of memories come back
#
that I was staying at a friend's farm
#
in Karjat for a few weeks
#
earlier this year and this
#
gentleman had come there and stayed there
#
for two days and we had hung out
#
and we had been extremely warm
#
exchanged personal stories
#
said we'd stay in touch forever
#
I had invited him on the show he said you know
#
when you come to Delhi I am in this town
#
nearby let me know I will come over
#
and I had completely forgotten the
#
full freaking thing the two days I spent with him
#
until the name of that town
#
this is so embarrassing so if he's listening
#
to this like I'm really sorry and
#
we will hook up at some point but I am
#
just such a and this is not even a memory
#
with faces it's like this entire
#
episode which happened three months ago
#
just vanished from my head
#
I suppose maybe I think we're all maybe
#
wired differently where
#
some people just simply don't have this as a skill
#
even if they try right I think it is just
#
if you'll say that no no you need to be mindful
#
you need to remember no I mean I'm
#
like maybe not I mean maybe that's
#
not what my skill is maybe I'm better
#
by being nice to people than
#
of remembering their faces and
#
saying hi hello and remembering their names right
#
so yeah I mean it's it's interesting
#
yeah it's it's disconcerting
#
actually whenever you break norms
#
with existing social tradition
#
often times you just have to suffer
#
and kind of unseen consequences
#
because like I'm so bad at replying to
#
email for example just horrible I'm sure I've lost
#
many friends but the point is if I've lost many
#
friends I don't even know I've lost them
#
or if I've inadvertently hosted someone
#
which is entirely possible
#
I have another story from
#
I was in Manipal I had a small
#
like only means of communication especially
#
parents were letter so there
#
were no phone nothing yeah we're talking about
#
would hate writing to their parents and
#
month they had to send money to cover my spells
#
usually that would be in the form of a demand
#
many parents had made it a condition
#
that unless you write a letter
#
at least once a month you're not
#
going to get that check so there
#
was like a good customer
#
base there you know customer
#
and people used to pay me in cigarettes
#
I used to smoke back then so
#
a will cigarette was astronomical sum
#
of 40 paisa for a will so
#
one letter was basically one
#
and everything was going
#
parents started getting suspicious
#
guy he said that first of all
#
your English has improved
#
as I said the chat GPT effect
#
yes that's the LinkedIn lesson here
#
has improved as a mom said
#
and the dad was even more suspicious
#
client was basically someone
#
who had discovered the joys of
#
weed and was consuming it in industrial
#
completely spaced out all the time
#
we're in the same way hanging around outside the
#
hello uncle you look very familiar
#
yeah so that was when I
#
decided to mothball my business it was
#
remember this since you mentioned writing
#
letters right I was this my
#
grandmother had a habit of writing one
#
letter every week to some everyone
#
she stayed in touch via letters
#
right till she was like in her 80s and all of that
#
right till her eyesight
#
eventually sort of stopped her from doing
#
she would have to write to someone who
#
Tamil right and then so she
#
it on a piece of paper in Tamil and she would
#
ask me to translate right
#
funny moment where so she would begin
#
all her letters particularly to
#
people who are she considered to be
#
elder to her etc with the
#
expression sarva kodi namaskarangal
#
which is basically just you know
#
to multi crore prostrations
#
and one I think one person
#
wrote to when they visited some wedding
#
saying that we were speaking to my
#
grandmother and saying that what is this multi crore
#
she was like I don't know but
#
you must be asking my grandson he
#
so that is multi crore prostrations
#
this reminds me of something the multi crore prostrations
#
like firstly I used to do what
#
Narain kind of did where
#
for a couple of people in college
#
I wrote acrostic poems for their beloved
#
so an acrostic poem is where the
#
first line of every sentence
#
reads out a message so for example
#
if someone was writing to you you would look at the
#
first letter of every line the first letter
#
of every line would spell out something like I love you
#
Narain you know and then I in perfect
#
iambic pentameter I would kind of deliver
#
those but where I remembered this multi
#
crore prostrations was when I was
#
in college we had a new bunch of hostelites
#
join us in first year after you know
#
I went from 12th to FI and I
#
one day if you remember back in the days and
#
all of you will remember both of you will remember I don't
#
know how many of our gentle listeners will
#
know this but there used to be this thing called an STD
#
booth this was not where
#
venereal disease this was not where
#
you went to procure a venereal disease but
#
these would like have physical phones because there
#
were no mobile phones at the time and
#
you would place a call to your
#
home town or wherever and you would speak
#
to them so once I am at an STD
#
booth trying to put across a call to my
#
parents and there's another guy
#
who's just come from Bihar who's on the next booth
#
and he gets through before me and
#
I hear his booming voice shout
#
is to say that they're loving unconditionally and so on.
#
But the other way of looking at it is that animal actually has no choice.
#
Any of its ancestors exhibited anything other than unconditional love
#
would have been brutally murdered or thrown out.
#
So you've bred that entire thing out.
#
So whether that is truly unconditional or not, I'm not really certain.
#
So dogs are absolutely dependent on you.
#
So they're actually being themselves.
#
I think the thing with dogs is you are right.
#
That given their genes, if you look at the motives of their genes, quote, unquote,
#
at the ultimate level, they are not unconditional.
#
But at the proximate level of the little of a furry creature itself,
#
it is giving unconditional love.
#
That would go back to the same thing we spoke about humans itself, right?
#
Whether our relationships and love and and unconditional love and all of that.
#
Is it transactional versus is it truly altruistic?
#
We don't have to go as far back as the genes.
#
Like, have I told you guys about Michael Gazzaniga's
#
split-brained epilepsy experiments?
#
I must have. I keep repeating it.
#
I remember hearing about it. Yes.
#
OK, so just for my listeners, I'll give a quick capped version.
#
Michael Gazzaniga was this great neuroscientist who was once looking at
#
patients of split-brained epilepsy and a common way of curing split-brained
#
epilepsy was you split the two halves of the brain.
#
So the corpus callosum, which has a left hemisphere, a right hemisphere,
#
you split it up and the left is in charge of the right part side of the body
#
and vice versa. Forget that for a moment.
#
But the right brain is considered the more creative and intuitive
#
and whatever the left brain is considered, a more analytical.
#
And I'm simplifying a bit.
#
So if you're a scientist, please consider me a science storyteller here
#
like Rishi Shok and don't get on my back.
#
I'm sure there will be a bunch of guys who will say that this whole right
#
brain left pain theory has been disproved.
#
I said, yes, but we're just trying to explain the larger.
#
No, no. And in case of the Gazzaniga thing, I mean, these are.
#
He wrote a great book called Human also.
#
But the experiments themselves are complete classics.
#
So they showed that eye, which was controlled by the right side of the brain.
#
They showed it an instruction like ask for a glass of water or scratch your elbow.
#
And then they would ask him, why did you scratch your elbow?
#
And he would concoct the reason, right?
#
The reason actually is he saw the instruction,
#
but he would concoct the reason and really believe in the reason.
#
And so why did you ask for water or whatever?
#
So for everything. And the term used for this now,
#
I don't remember whether Gazzaniga gave it this term or Steven Pinker
#
in the blank slate when I first read about this experiment, use this term.
#
But the term for this is an interpreter.
#
So the left brain is an interpreter of what the right brain
#
And I think Pinker referred to it as the press officer.
#
This is your PR guy of the brain.
#
But the interesting thing is the PR guy of the brain believes a Kool-Aid
#
completely believes a Kool-Aid.
#
And where I come at from this is further experiments have been shown
#
that we actually make the movement to do something
#
a fraction of a second before we think about doing something,
#
which means we are the most of the things that we do.
#
We are not doing them for the reasons we think we are doing them for.
#
It's involuntary. It's involuntary.
#
There is something deeper going on inside.
#
And therefore we rationalize everything.
#
Right. So we are all the time, you know, rationalizing shit
#
that we have no control over and giving like fancy reasons
#
and being the press officer.
#
To our earlier point about, I think, one part of our brain
#
being a fact teller and the other being a storyteller.
#
Yeah. So I think the instrumentality part comes here
#
that you might see someone really pretty
#
and be attracted in a reptile brain kind of way.
#
But then you rationalize and put a veneer of love and this and that
#
And so a lot of stuff that seems
#
genuine is actually instrumental.
#
Now, even even if at one level, I think this is true.
#
At another level, I'm making the conscious decision to not believe it
#
because then how do we have relationships at all?
#
So you got to behave as if your relation, as if your feelings are genuine
#
in all cases, and you have to put in that intentionality in the world.
#
It's a very strongly held thing, right?
#
That lust and love are two different things.
#
Yeah, it's at one level.
#
It is because, you know, I mean, all of us have felt love
#
for our spouses, significant others, whatever.
#
And there's really no love.
#
It's just that, you know, you are, you know, willing to.
#
Let me put it another way.
#
A typical way of looking at love and lust is that
#
lust is often in most societies looked down upon as something base and immoral.
#
And love is undeservingly and love is love is idolized.
#
To me, it should be the other way around, because lust is a pure, genuine emotion.
#
If you feel love, if you feel lust, you feel lust.
#
If it is what it is, you're straightforward, you're honest.
#
Elaborately rationalized.
#
All those multilayers. Exactly.
#
So it's it's it's a very complicated thing.
#
I've been to some degree.
#
Also, it is, you know, part of what makes
#
the ideas in Minority Report fascinating, right, is the
#
if you think about the fundamental concept of a thought crime, right,
#
the scary part is not the fact that they're reading your mind and, you know,
#
and they're punishing you for stuff that you might do, et cetera, et cetera,
#
is basically it breaks that entire illusion of the fact that
#
you're probably thinking of committing crimes, but you may not commit that crime
#
and that ultimately in society, you must be judged by that actions
#
and not for the how you arrived at it.
#
So you can't everyone's not a saint that you're only thinking pure thoughts
#
and you're like only love, et cetera. Right.
#
I'm sure our brains are just like all kinds of stuff floating around.
#
We literally have zero control over our thoughts.
#
Yes. You don't have as much control as you do.
#
It's a very sobering thing.
#
You're probably you're probably thinking of running over people
#
who overtake you all the time, but you don't. Right.
#
And it is just that ultimately the fact that you don't is what matters.
#
Look, you've got to understand one thing at this point.
#
I know you didn't mean me when you said you, but nobody overtakes me.
#
I only overtake people.
#
Let me tell you something, Krishnashok. Yes.
#
I have been in many competitions with pineapples where I've tried to eat them
#
and they've tried to eat me. Yeah, I'm still here.
#
Oh, yeah, yeah. Yes. You're the winner in the.
#
Some of them became some of them became bear hugs.
#
You know, that's a thing.
#
What's the difference between maniacs and idiots?
#
So the idiots are the guys in front of you won't let you overtake them.
#
And the maniacs are the guys behind you want to overtake you.
#
So that's that's basically it.
#
Yes. And we contain multitudes.
#
We are both maniacs for one and idiots for the other.
#
So do you guys believe in free will?
#
Or have you not thought about it?
#
I used to think that I did.
#
It's like, you know, that evidently there is free will.
#
Right. So I want to hear there's a pair of headphones.
#
It's my choice. I can pick it up or not.
#
That's what you think. I choose not to pick it up.
#
And then it's a rationalization rather than the actual.
#
You have no choice because you that is that is sort of like
#
stealing the question paper and then then cracking and saying,
#
I cracked the exam. Right.
#
Because you have you've designed the experiment yourself.
#
The problem with free will in general is that one is you don't have
#
as much of it as you think you do.
#
And and there are variations across like your, for example,
#
your the way your ability to to make certain decisions
#
varies based on whether you've eaten or not.
#
How how long ago have you eaten?
#
What's your blood sugar?
#
How stressed are you? How many how much cortisol level do you have?
#
Whether you're rich or poor.
#
So there's just so many things that kind of determine your ability
#
to actually exercise that will and so on.
#
I think, you know, I know there's been these experiments
#
where they give kids candy. Right.
#
And they say that you can either wait
#
like a certain amount of time, you'll get two.
#
And but if you want it right now, you can take one. Right.
#
And the original conclusion was that kids who are willing to wait
#
end up becoming more successful later because they have they've sort of
#
somehow built a discipline to control willpower and all of that.
#
And subsequently, it's sort of being debunked and said that it's
#
just ridiculously oversimplified, that we are far, far more complicated and so on.
#
But I think the whole a lot of this free will stuff is in illusion.
#
I think all of it is like the books I'd recommend on this is Sam Harris
#
has a nice slim book on it.
#
But there's a book I'm waiting to read.
#
I haven't read it yet by Robert Sapolsky, who wrote Behave.
#
So his latest book argues there is no free will.
#
And in Behave itself, he looks at human behavior
#
and then he breaks down the many different layers
#
that lead to that decision making.
#
So like you said Ashok, what you ate that morning could be a factor.
#
How much sleep you have had could be a factor.
#
Like there are now studies which show and this is in the context
#
of whether how much AI should be involved in sentencing.
#
And you actually looked at human sentencing and you found that a judge
#
who had lost a golf game on Sunday was more likely to give an 11 year
#
judgment than a four year judgment on a Monday than somebody who had won a golf
#
game and similar ridiculous things like this with a variance was incredible.
#
I think Daniel Kahneman.
#
Lunch was a thing, right?
#
So bail applications before lunch and after lunch.
#
There was a significant difference.
#
So Danny Kahneman talks about this in his book Noize.
#
I think the very existence of psychotropic substances and brain altering substances
#
I think should effectively prove that you have no free will.
#
Basically, ultimately meaning that if one molecule
#
can fundamentally alter what you think and do and choose,
#
how can you say you have free will?
#
And the fact that one of these things is basically something as simple as a pan.
#
I mean, the areca nut, right?
#
There's a molecule called arecolene, which interesting enough to Dr.
#
Abbie's point, if you really wanted to get high, you have to digest it.
#
And the arecolene has to go through your small intestine.
#
And then it has to pass through the liver and the liver will say, sorry, boss,
#
you're you're a foreigner.
#
I'm I'm neutralizing you.
#
That's what will happen.
#
So what do pan eaters do?
#
They add tuna, which is alkali.
#
And they also add a bunch of these other things that basically
#
make micro cuts in your mouth.
#
So the arecolene gets straight into the bloodstream.
#
So it bypasses the liver.
#
So only way for you to get high is to bypass the liver.
#
Otherwise, they'll get high, right?
#
Only alcohol can overwhelm the liver
#
to the point where it can then eventually your liver stops functioning.
#
Then it gets into the blood and then you get high.
#
All other psychotropic does have to bypass the liver.
#
Otherwise, they're not you're not getting high. Right.
#
So and then it it absolutely changes your state of mind.
#
That's what all your all the stuff is fundamentally about subdural.
#
Have you have you done mushrooms? No.
#
Do you plan to? I don't know.
#
I do. I'm hearing reading a lot of interesting things about it.
#
Like one of my friends just went to this workshop in Portugal
#
where he I would take his name.
#
He's been on the show, but I haven't asked him.
#
But he went to this workshop in Portugal, seven day workshop
#
where he took where they gave him in a controlled environment
#
what he calls heroic doses.
#
I believe that's the official term.
#
So not micro dosing, but heroic doses of mushroom.
#
And the way he described it was kind of absolutely mind blowing,
#
ending with what he said.
#
Like essentially what people do 20 years of meditation for.
#
You know, you kind of you can get that same state in a few doses
#
where you have a dissolution of the ego.
#
So I mean, I'll just Huxley and, you know, Brave New World and Mescaline.
#
See, the interesting thing here is that
#
you think about the fact that the mushroom again is a fungus. Right.
#
And fungus are they are some of the most
#
astonishing producers of mind altering substances. Right.
#
And it's not just for humans. Right.
#
And if you look at nature, they do some astonishing things. Right.
#
So the every 17 years, the the cricket.
#
That insect, cicada, cicada comes right in the US.
#
You have that thing. Right.
#
All of them come at the same time.
#
So there's an entire ecosystem of other living things
#
that have co-evolved to take advantage of the fact that for the next two days,
#
there's insane amounts of free food. Right.
#
And one of them is a fungus.
#
And it has and this astonishing ability is like a straight out of a Hollywood
#
blockbuster, which is sort of like if you look at Last of Us and all of that,
#
it's very similar zombie.
#
So what it does is that this is a fungus that infects the
#
And what it does is that if it infects a female brain, OK,
#
then it will first convince the cicada to think that it is a a male
#
and go and have sex with a bunch of female cicadas
#
so that it can spread as much of the
#
itself as possible. Right.
#
And so it's been it's taken over the brain.
#
It's convinced the cicada it is actually male.
#
Well, it might be female because the goal is to go spread.
#
It doesn't care actually about the cicada having sex.
#
It's really about spreading its pores. Right. And so on.
#
So just when you really think about that, right.
#
The fact that one a bunch of molecules, if you inject into yourself,
#
you can effectively do this.
#
I don't think we're all a bunch of chemicals, boss.
#
I don't think all of this is a free will and all is an illusion.
#
It's an abstraction that we create in the limited context of what we do.
#
Like, you know, it's like, you know, prepared question paper stuff.
#
Right. That's really all there is.
#
Yeah, I will share this one before that quick book recommendation,
#
which is Cicada by Sean Tan, a brilliant book where the star of the book
#
And then I went into a rabbit hole after reading the book.
#
And now I know everything about cicadas except this.
#
You need to read about that fungus. It's astonishing fungus.
#
I'm totally going to kind of go for it.
#
And the other thing is, I had once written a column about exactly
#
what you're talking about.
#
Chemicals happened to Chris Cornell, where Chris Cornell was on
#
some medication for something or the other, but a side effect of the medication
#
is that it changes your chemical imbalance, makes you suicidal.
#
So, you know, this hubris that we have that I am who I am, I am in control.
#
It's a very sobering thought.
#
It's like if you can if you can clinically take drugs
#
to alter your even for like depression, anxiety and so on.
#
How can you say you have free will?
#
So there's an episode of everything is everything just on this.
#
I'll link that also from the show notes.
#
Narayan, what you were telling us a story.
#
I know. I just remembered an old joke.
#
So I the lyrics go like this.
#
A clone, a clone of my own with a Y chromosome change to X.
#
And since my clone would have a mind like my own,
#
we would think of nothing but sex.
#
Randomly remembered that, yeah.
#
Brilliant. I thought it'll end with something like fucking myself
#
because, you know, but anyway, didn't kind of end up going.
#
One of a little poem as well.
#
He didn't do it for he didn't do it for something.
#
He didn't do it for health.
#
He told he did it because someone told him to go fuck himself.
#
Oh, OK. Yeah. Beautiful sort of words.
#
Let's now talk about let's turn to the sort of the reader questions
#
that we have from across Twitter and from my writing group as well.
#
And here's one of them.
#
And this is a lovely question.
#
Favorite classical ragas and why?
#
So in my case, I was it's very so one I've I've spoken about before.
#
It's very touching, evocative raga.
#
There's another one called Bihag.
#
So Bihag, I have heard Badegulam Ali Khan sing it is very romantic.
#
And the the words of that song also let will be a soul.
#
I'm missing it. Oh, yes, please.
#
So what he's saying is what she's saying is my hair is sort of this thing.
#
Can you please tuck it back into place?
#
There is mainly on my hands.
#
So can you put my bindi back? Oh, nice.
#
It's a lovely, very romantic.
#
And when Badegulam sings it is beautiful.
#
Oh, yeah. There's a story about how Mahatma Gandhi went to a Badegulam Ali Khan concert.
#
And then at one point, I mean, the concert is over.
#
Everybody gives a standing ovation.
#
And Gandhi goes to Badegulam Ali Khan.
#
Ab jab ga rahe theh, mai swark mein tha.
#
Lekin fir taaliyon ki aabaz aayi aur mai niche gir gaya.
#
And then he basically and expressing this sort of very purist view that,
#
you know, that art exists in of itself beyond the thing,
#
which I think is also a slightly naive view.
#
I think everything Badegulam Ali Khan did at some subconscious level
#
must have been also geared to what people really wanted to sort of enjoy.
#
And art has to be viral for it to survive, you know, I mean.
#
And so only the viral art survives, to be honest, right?
#
I mean, it has to be viral to survive.
#
I mean, here's the thing.
#
We think of art as something pure and it's in a different realm of its own.
#
But we're talking instrumental art is instrumental.
#
Why does a piece of music make us want to cry?
#
Because certain combinations of notes
#
move certain neurons in our brains in a particular way.
#
And that's a reaction we have.
#
And is that a reaction that you can then replicate?
#
Of course you can, you know,
#
and we don't have the knowledge of what combination of notes
#
and what are the effects in the brain.
#
So we give it this mystical aura and call it art.
#
But it's basically craft and it's basically instrumental.
#
And it's also art is is fundamentally also in the remembering,
#
meaning that it has to move you.
#
Then you have to remember it so that you're able to tell someone else
#
or influence someone else to experience it, right?
#
I mean, it is so therefore that virality is baked into the definition.
#
So people sort of sometimes derisively look upon, say, popular music
#
simply because it has a wider reach.
#
It is just simply a more viral pathogen,
#
as opposed to a less effective pathogen, which is what classical music is.
#
Yeah, yeah, you're hitting different buttons.
#
But continue down your raga road and feel free to feel free to sing.
#
Yeah, it's pretty generally one.
#
So there is a meme, Stop It Narayan.
#
And that came because I one day, I remembered the song.
#
I couldn't stop singing it.
#
So I I was I don't know how it got out.
#
But I was saying that singing that over and over on a loop.
#
And then Sheila in exasperation says, Stop It Narayan.
#
And somehow it got recorded.
#
I was trying to record the song and I posted on one of my WhatsApp groups.
#
And Sheila said, Stop It Narayan.
#
And that got recorded, too.
#
So literally the only thing everyone remembers is Stop It Narayan.
#
History will remember the Stop It Narayan, not the singing.
#
That will be auto tuned.
#
And then, you know, so I have an interesting anecdote and auto tune,
#
not an anecdote, something that something thought provoking I heard recently.
#
And I'll link to this video on YouTube where Arijit Singh is talking about auto tune.
#
And he says that, listen, it's fashionable for you to make fun of auto tune and all that.
#
Let me tell you, all serious musicians, you'll auto tune.
#
Like kya hota hai, main jab take se ta hu na, mera ek take hoga
#
jis mein emotion bilkul perfect hai, ek do note hil gaya hai.
#
So to fix ek do note without making it obvious or whatever, it's fine.
#
Then the whole thing sounds beautiful.
#
So often you'll hear a rendition and you'll be like, wow, mind blowing,
#
kitna achha gaya and all that.
#
And he said, actually, there is a little bit of auto tune in every one.
#
You know, now the thing is, when a bad singer does auto tune,
#
it's kind of obvious and you kind of philosophically, you revolt at it.
#
But everybody uses auto tune.
#
And actually, there is a there is a even more basic step before the auto tune,
#
which is that an Arijit Singh, when he sings a verse,
#
the music director will ask him to sing it 20 times.
#
That one verse, he will ask you to sing 20 times.
#
And that guy will listen to each of the 20 takes
#
and then mentally sort of actually mark out and say,
#
this specific phrase of this word is flawless on these takes.
#
I'm going to skip all of this.
#
This particular thing is flawless in these takes.
#
And then he will first copy paste and then stitch together
#
all the best parts of every take and stitch together final take
#
that you listen to in the final mix.
#
It was not sung in one shot.
#
Yes, sometimes it turns out like that in the pre.
#
The thing is that sometimes, you know, the technology didn't exist.
#
You only took one take. Right.
#
But now, if you listen to everyone sounding perfectly flawless, it's because
#
they are taking the best single part of multi small
#
one second elements from multiple takes even before you auto tune.
#
Even after doing all of that, then they're what they're going to do
#
is that they'll find that everything is flawless.
#
But this one note is about a few hertz, a little bit up or down
#
that they will auto tune.
#
See, the most egregious use of auto tune is where you turn on the.
#
So there's basically so it's like a it's a filter.
#
So what happens is that it is basically it is measuring the frequency.
#
And then after that, you can either immediately as a hard cliff,
#
change it to the correct frequency or you can gradually break it down. Right.
#
When you turn the knob to bring it hard,
#
cliff is when you get the T pain effect.
#
Yeah. So this is sort of when you get the T pain effect.
#
That's what people associate as auto tune.
#
But 99 percent of all auto tune use is just the small,
#
gradual fixes that you won't even realize.
#
So here's the thing. There is this masterpiece of a book,
#
the best book I have ever read on music called How Music Works by David Byrne.
#
And in that there are fascinating chapters about how recorded music evolved.
#
So there was a time where if you were recording music,
#
you would have just one mic and that mic would be kept in the middle.
#
And you would have all the musicians gathered around at various distances.
#
And some instruments are naturally louder than others.
#
So depending on what the music arranger wanted to have prominence,
#
there would be people called, I think, pushers or whatever,
#
some banal term, their job would be to stand behind the musician,
#
like stand behind the guitarist.
#
When the guitar part comes, he pushes him in front of the mic.
#
When the guitar part is over, he pulls him back.
#
And the trombone guy is pushed forward or whatever.
#
And that is literally what recording technology was.
#
So all the kind of music you were making was even optimized for that,
#
because, of course, the form changed the content.
#
Like, it's a fascinating look at form and content
#
because your early music is happening outdoors, right?
#
So it's percussive because that works the best.
#
And also reaches the distance.
#
But when you have the concert halls of Europe,
#
percussive music would be sound like a disaster.
#
And equally in those kinds of open halls,
#
music that is too intricate would sound like a disaster.
#
So you have your Western classical sounding the way it does.
#
Twenty violins and ten cellos.
#
But then when you have the rock bands and the jazz bands performing in clubs
#
where there are tables, chairs, things all around
#
and the sound is bouncing off all of those.
#
The separation of sound is phenomenal.
#
And you can play far more intricate and intimate patterns.
#
And then that creates a kind of incentive.
#
So you're not worried about.
#
See, the biggest problem with electrification was amplification.
#
So that's why they invented brass instruments were invented
#
to basically amplify, right?
#
And way louder saxophone is so much more louder than a violin, right?
#
Yeah, like Indian Nadaswaram is an example
#
of an insanely louder instrument, right?
#
Yeah. Let's keep going down the Raga's route, Mr. Srinoy.
#
My other favorite Raga is this.
#
My is Sheila's favorite Raga.
#
That's why it's my favorite Raga is Yaman.
#
So Yaman is the first Raga they teach you.
#
What do you mean Sheila's favorite Raga?
#
That's why it's my favorite Raga.
#
No, I mean, she she loves this.
#
So she doesn't she cannot identify a Raga.
#
But if she likes a song, more often than not,
#
it is based on this Raga.
#
Yaman. Oh, it's very it's ubiquitous.
#
that that's one or the one from that movie Saraswati Chandra.
#
Chandan Sabadan Chanchal Chitwan
#
or the Farida Khanum things.
#
I have a question for those of my listeners
#
who have no idea of Hindustani classical music and ragas.
#
Explain what is a Raga and break down Yaman for me.
#
Raga is just melodies, right?
#
So they're just the name, a fancy name for a tune.
#
So if it's a tune, it's a Raga.
#
And it should be a distant like Raga.
#
It should be distinguishable from Raga B.
#
What were the ancients found out that there were certain patterns of notes
#
which so you could have the same notes into ragas,
#
yet have two different ragas, because the way those notes were used
#
So patterns and that sort of characterizes the tune, the melody.
#
So like, what is a Yaman?
#
Which are the notes? What is the order?
#
So I'll give you a Sadiq.
#
If you take a no matter which part of the world you are,
#
there are only 12 notes of music.
#
And, you know, we've discussed this before.
#
These are pure accidents of physics, right?
#
You take a string or this thing and you divide the length by two.
#
It becomes an octave, you know, three is to five ratio.
#
It becomes the third and so on, right?
#
So all the notes you get by simply dividing
#
a string or a or place a hole in a bamboo and you get the flute
#
while on this thing, right?
#
Ultimately, these same frequencies and the the the gaps
#
between the frequencies is what makes music.
#
It's not the actual frequencies themselves,
#
because you can start anywhere.
#
Everything else is relative to that, right?
#
No matter where you go, these are these 12 notes, right?
#
And these 12 notes, furthermore,
#
they've been categorized into seven primary ones
#
with some having variations, meaning that there is a Sarigamapada Ni, right?
#
And then Sa Pa don't have variations,
#
but the other notes have flats and sharps and that's the basic sort of concept.
#
That's how you get the all the white and black notes
#
or the 12 notes of the piano from one C to another C, right?
#
You pick a sequence of notes
#
while you're ascending and a sequence of notes while you're descending
#
and say these are the notes in your raga.
#
But a raga definition goes more than just the sequence of notes
#
and the notes you pick.
#
So if you say like in so I'll probably take a Carnatic example of same
#
Yaman Carnatic is like say Yaman Kalyani, right?
#
And so Kalyani is very close.
#
So Sarigamapada Ni Sa, right?
#
So Sa Ni Rapa Magari Sa.
#
So that would be your Kalyani equivalent, right?
#
So the furthermore is that there are certain
#
catch phrases, combinations of notes
#
that can immediately indicate to a listener that this is that raga.
#
So sometimes ragas can share the same notes, but they can be
#
there may be variations in the order in which you can sing them.
#
The phrases can vary a little bit and so on that will.
#
So basically, largely, that is what a raga is.
#
And in the Western classical sense,
#
just the selection of notes up and down, they call them modes.
#
That's the jazz term for it, right?
#
So Dorian mode, Ionian mode, Phrygian mode and so on.
#
So the Dorian mode would correspond to the Carnatic
#
Shankara Baranam or Bilawal, right?
#
In Hindustani and so on, right?
#
And likewise, another one.
#
So basically on the piano, if you start with that C key
#
and you just play all the white keys, you'll get Dorian mode.
#
That's Bilawal or Shankara Baranam, right?
#
And so on. And if you start on the fourth note, which is F,
#
you will get your Yaman or your Kalyani in this case, right?
#
So it is just the Western style is far more absolute pitch,
#
but relative because they are about harmony.
#
In India, it doesn't matter based on wherever your voice can start.
#
You start and everything else is relative to that.
#
And meaning that I don't have to obey the fact that I have to sing
#
at one pitch that I can just start wherever I am comfortable with.
#
So can you illustrate one of these ragas say Yaman for me through distinction,
#
like sing that what would essentially be a typical thing of the raga
#
and then sing something else, which is another raga,
#
ideally with the same notes, just just to get the distinction
#
across that this is what characterizes Yaman and this is what characterizes
#
Let's say Yaman Kalyani and Kalyani both have same notes,
#
but they're sung in completely different moods in Karnatic.
#
So there's a famous song, a Kannada song called Krishnani Begane Baro, right?
#
Which I think is probably as Tamil people are the worst at pronouncing
#
all the other South Indian languages.
#
So, yeah, so Kannada listeners, please excuse.
#
But it's basically the Yashoda calling Krishna because he's like up to all kinds
#
of naughtiness to please come back.
#
So she's trying to entice him to come back. Right.
#
And Krishnani Begane Baro, that's the so that's the usual way of singing it.
#
And the interesting story there is that my my grandaunt who used to
#
who sort of used to work with Bala Saraswati, a famous dancer and so on.
#
Right. And then so so she used to dance and sing.
#
Oh, my God. And she was the last of the dancers who could sing and dance.
#
Right. And so she would say that the way you guys sing it, you're missing the point.
#
Because in the dance, it's more evocative.
#
Right. You're acting as Yashoda trying to call the the Krishna and so on.
#
So she would say that if you are trying to call a kid and ask him to come,
#
you don't start with impatience.
#
Right. Krishnani Begane Baro.
#
That should be your first phrase.
#
So that's the second one.
#
And then eventually like Krishnani Begane Baro.
#
That's more impeding. Right.
#
So so the whole idea is that you can sort of see those sequence of notes
#
mapping to specific moods.
#
So the same thing, if you in Kalyani, the mood will be entirely different.
#
So you would not pick this specific mood for there would be others.
#
It's a little bit more formal, more of a it is not suited
#
for that sort of, you know, a mother calling a baby sort of thing
#
is more suited for Yaman Kalyani and so on.
#
So, in fact, that's why I think, you know, so, for example, in in.
#
So there is a raga called Charukesi, which is one of my favorites in Karnatic.
#
Right. The reason it's favorite, because
#
the first four notes on ascension are the major key,
#
like the equivalent of the Western major key.
#
And major key is associated with happy, positive.
#
Minor key is associated with more plaintive sadness and so on.
#
Right. And this raga is first half is major key, second half is minor key.
#
So when you're actually in the lower part, you want to sound all positive.
#
And then as you kind of get higher, it starts sounding sadder and sadder.
#
Hindustani is also the same.
#
Charukesi must be the same thing.
#
I don't know where it originally came from, either here or there.
#
So this Yaman goes, the characters will
#
So knee, like a saw and ray don't go together.
#
It's always knee, ray and denser.
#
You give that sort of. It causes tension also.
#
Yeah. Yeah. And that's characteristic of Yaman Kalyan, where Kalyan is.
#
I mean, I'm mixing up. I'm like, yeah, but it will be correct.
#
So the other element is also tension relief also is there.
#
So, for example, every time you're stopping at knee,
#
your brain is like, get to the saw, get to the saw, it will happen.
#
Even if you're not musical, you will feel that tension.
#
So it is often used very widely to take a completely sort of random example.
#
Jimi Hendrix, Purple Haze, right?
#
The opening chords of Purple Haze use the saw and the Tivara Madhyama together.
#
And those the combination of saw and that F sharp
#
is considered to be the most dissonant interval, right?
#
So much so that the church used to call it the devil's interval.
#
So church music was not allowed to use that chord.
#
My God. And Purple Haze is basically that it just starts with that.
#
It's basically rock music, you know, sort of a few to the to the establishment
#
and the church and everything is that it's the devil's intervals again.
#
So that's how. Amazing.
#
So to continue, we'll because we'll come to your ragas,
#
finish off your ragas, but firstly, a digression like how did you get into ragas?
#
How did you like, did you have any kind of classical training or is it?
#
I'm just listening when I was a kid.
#
And so we used to have these couple of programs happening in the morning.
#
There would be small one, five minute, ten minute programs, which would
#
they would they would give a Bollywood song with that based on that raga.
#
Then there's a little explanation of what notes and then there'll be a small
#
piece by a master, either instrumental or vocal.
#
And that after some time,
#
you get a sense of the melodies and then you start seeing those melodies
#
everywhere, like Yemen is ubiquitous.
#
There are all these other rags.
#
There is a another popular rag.
#
Ahir Bhairavi is very common.
#
Yeah, Bhairavi, Ahir Bhairavi.
#
Bhairavi is a very common raga, you know, Millay Soor Mera Tumara.
#
That is the and then Alubela Sajan.
#
Alubela Sajan is Ahir Bhairavi.
#
So you keep and then after some time, it just grows on you.
#
For some reason, I never transitioned to the polyphonic.
#
I just I just didn't get it.
#
So for you, does everything have to be in one raga, every song?
#
Or is it like is dissonant if you're just shifting around and you're nowhere?
#
There are a lot of ragas which are there is one rock called Basanti Kedar,
#
which Malik Arjun Mansoor has sung.
#
There are there are very two distinct ragas, Basanti and Kedar.
#
And they, you know, he transitions.
#
There is one popular song,
#
which is in the one of these movies, I think Bajirao or one of those.
#
So it's based on Puriya Kalyan.
#
OK, and the song goes like this.
#
na na na na na na rang do laal,
#
And then it transitions to Kedar.
#
Nekh nekh tujh ko mai hoke nihaal.
#
Yeah, if the mood change calls for it, I mean,
#
there's basically two ragas coexisting.
#
And then they keep transitioning from one to the other.
#
Are ragas, and I'm thinking aloud here,
#
but are ragas really a technology for mobilizing vibes and moods
#
to make you feel a particular way?
#
But I will also say that it is it's cultural shared,
#
cultural understanding also.
#
Like, for example, the the Carnatic system may not recognize
#
that these ragas are morning ragas or these are afternoon.
#
This is rain and so on.
#
But do you have the concept of rasas in, no,
#
Veera ras or Pranaya ras?
#
You can take any raga and make it sound that way.
#
And like, for instance, like the Carnatic raga,
#
Amritavarshini for rain, sounds nothing like your Meghmalhar and all that, right?
#
So in the sense that I think it is.
#
So these are purely just shared cultural understanding,
#
the familiarity of just of people listening to it again and again
#
and those patterns, right?
#
Hindustani makes a big deal of it.
#
Yeah, that's that's their thing.
#
It's not a thing in in Carnatic sort of.
#
And can you listen to like Western music and say,
#
oh, this is a raga and et cetera, et cetera?
#
Like what what rock songs would be in Yemen?
#
You won't find rock songs in Yemen primarily because
#
rock songs will pick the equivalent of ragas or the notes equivalent of ragas
#
where you can make clean cards.
#
They won't pick the random ones.
#
So you will have a lot in your Bilawal
#
and your Ahir Bhairavi and Bhairavi and all of that.
#
But you won't have it in like some of these rarer raga.
#
It's hard to man, I'm trying to sort of remember, at least for certain.
#
Like if you pick a raga and give me your Carnatic version of that
#
or your classical version of that and a rock song in that.
#
So Al Bela Sajan, right?
#
Al Bela Sajan, like that.
#
I don't know what that last one was.
#
That's the Israeli one.
#
That is very much Ahir Bhairavi in that sense, right?
#
And then there is this.
#
There are a couple of these classic rock kind of songs where
#
there is this song by Don't Fear the Reaper, right?
#
The melody of the song is very regular Western stuff.
#
Then there is a guitar solo inside that is Hemavati, which is a raga, right?
#
And it is, and clearly you listen to that guitar solo,
#
that guy probably was inspired by Ravishankar or someone he heard.
#
There was a time in the 60s when these guys were all inspired by many of these.
#
They were listening to these melodies and incorporating them
#
into the guitar solos as opposed to the main song itself,
#
because main song is subject to you being having a rhythm guitar and others,
#
which is very hard to then fit some sort of random raga.
#
And there is some structural reason also why Western music
#
and Indian music don't correlate very well.
#
I think it's a transition between notes more linear in Indian music
#
and non-linear in the Western music.
#
Because we are creatures of what we consume,
#
does someone who listens to nothing but rock,
#
is he going to be a fundamentally different person
#
than someone who listens to nothing but Hindustani classical?
#
See, I think listening to music and experiencing music
#
is more than just you sitting alone and listening to it on tape.
#
In which case it's different, right?
#
It comes with its own concert tradition.
#
It comes with its own social obligations of how you enjoy that music.
#
So you can't disentangle where the difference comes from.
#
And enjoying Hindustani music comes with its setting
#
and a certain formality and a certain eliteness of how that is done
#
versus the general sort of slightly more democratic nature
#
of a rock concert and its audience and so on.
#
So you really can't entangle this at all.
#
So, yeah, I mean, Western classical music probably is more analogous
#
to this than anything else.
#
Any more ragas you want to share, Narayan?
#
Oh, like literally doesn't.
#
We could go on all evening.
#
Let's do a couple more that are really close to you
#
and they make you feel a particular way.
#
Tell us why. Then we'll go over to Ashok.
#
Then he can cancel his flight and we can do this till tomorrow.
#
There is this raga called Bibhas,
#
which I've heard Mallika Arjun Mansoor sing.
#
And it's a morning raga.
#
It's very solemn, very meditative.
#
And it goes something like this.
#
So this particular category of ragas, right?
#
Both in the north and south, they tend to be commonly used in the bhakti devotion,
#
the kind of songs that don't have to need an elite setting.
#
People can gather together in a religious setting and sing.
#
There's a lot of those ragas that are suitable for
#
so Revati, Revati in sort of in Carnatic, right?
#
And it says something similar.
#
Sriman Narayan, Sriman Narayan
#
So these ragas, if you notice, so you'll find that the anchor notes,
#
the saa, paa and all of these saa, the anchor notes,
#
the next notes are very close to them.
#
And then so for people who don't have great singing skills,
#
who can't capture that right note, which has a longer gap.
#
But it's easy for you to say, so which is when you teach music to kids,
#
you choose the ragas where the notes are very close to each other.
#
So on these and the bhakti, the bhajan kind of songs tend to be in ragas
#
where the notes are not discrete things apart, where you need training to hit them.
#
Because you want everybody to be able to do those and not.
#
Are there ragas you go to when you're in a particular mood,
#
like say you're feeling melancholy or say you're feeling in a celebratory mood
#
or whatever you're feeling?
#
I mean, I just randomly listen to there are some favorites there is.
#
So I listen a lot to Malika Janman Sur, Kesar Bhai, Kerkar, those kind of things.
#
So I am familiar with all the published, you know, whatever recordings there are.
#
And then you feel in a in a mood.
#
There is one raga called Lalitha Gauri, which is sung in the evening.
#
Again, which is both Kesar Bhai and Malika Janman Sur have sung it.
#
So it's a beautiful evening melody.
#
And I've just grown to associate it as an evening.
#
And you just just listen to it, immerse yourself.
#
Again, a very personal relationship, right?
#
In the sense that, like, for example, I think I've said this before that
#
people will often seek out music that resonates with them
#
as a response to a personal tragedy or a situation and help that sort of give succor.
#
And sometimes it is often a film song whose lyrics just touch you in that way.
#
Right. And I think my most pointed example of how people use music as a crutch
#
is that many years ago when a family in the 90s, a family member
#
who had lost a child in the sense of, you know, some congenital complications
#
and eventually the child died after being born and all of that.
#
Right. And so that person as a crutch
#
would listen to Ace of Bases, All That She Wants Is Another Baby.
#
You mentioned that in our last episode.
#
And it's in any other context.
#
You know, it's just sort of so cheesy, you know, pop song with little
#
or no depth in meaning.
#
And the baby there absolutely does not have to be an actual baby.
#
Right. And and but yeah, but you never know.
#
People can form an emotional crutch with anything.
#
Right. And that's what the power that music has is that
#
pop music then allows you to replicate that melody and sing it easily in your head.
#
Without training and without and all of that.
#
And allows you to identify as well. Right.
#
So that's why your favorite ragas.
#
So Charu Casey, I already spoke about.
#
Yaman again is a universal favorite, actually, because it's so easy.
#
You can naturally just when in doubt when you're singing,
#
it naturally sort of ends up being Yaman in that almost like a crutch.
#
Right. And and then I think let me pick some.
#
So one of the ragas I particularly I think is there in both Hindustani
#
as well as Sivaranjani, very melodramatic, etc.
#
But this has resulted in some of these very beautiful songs across.
#
You will sort of see why I'm an instrumentalist,
#
because I suck at remembering the lyrics.
#
Because when I hear music, I only hear notes.
#
So I only memorize notes. I never memorize like words.
#
There are so many songs.
#
The Kamal Haasan, you know that term.
#
So this has a so Sivaranjani again is not meant for your very serious
#
aficionados, but it really, really moves the audience.
#
Yeah, they can see the tragedy in and almost always use for tragedy.
#
And explain to me the distinction between serious and non serious.
#
Like you said, this is more popular.
#
This is a very weird, at least I know it's probably different in Hindustani, but in Karnataka,
#
there is this sort of distinction between the first half of a concert is where you sing the
#
serious ragas and the serious songs. The last part of the concert is where you sing the
#
popular songs. So these are songs that everyone knows, everyone understands, the lyrics are
#
not hardcore poetry, devotional, they're probably more common poems written by Bharati, Bharatiyaar
#
and you know other more common poets and occasionally sometimes you know popular
#
film songs and things like that. So there is this huge sort of class distinction between
#
this and light music. So it's still they use the same ragas and so on. It's sort of like the
#
distinction between Ilayaraja writing a song using a raga and Tyagaraja having written a song using
#
that raga. We've just declared that the Ilayaraja song is light music and that song is somehow
#
heavy. All it really indicates is that the person performing it has probably been trained for many
#
years and is using patterns that only a trained listener will appreciate. It's basically a way of
#
excluding people. Is it a fetishization of complexity and that's it? It is exactly what
#
TM Krishna says it is. It's a bunch of rich people have gathered and said this is classical.
#
That's all there is to it. There is no music theoretical superiority to the serious versus
#
So I have a long story which kind of illustrates this in the context of western music and it's
#
about two albums I'm deeply passionate about and perhaps my favorite musician of all time.
#
So indulge me while I go through the story and there is a point to this. It speaks to this exact
#
point of popular and you know serious music. So there's a guy called Van Morrison. Van Morrison
#
mid 60s used to play with a band called Them. One of the opening acts for the Them was a band
#
called The Doors which had a guy called Jim Morrison. So in fact the song Gloria is written
#
by Van Morrison for Them and Jim Morrison heard it in concert and picked it up etc etc. Now there
#
was a big record producer called Bird Burns and he took Van Morrison and he got a hit out of him
#
called Brown Eyed Girl. Iconic song but really a pop song. A great pop song today is considered
#
but it's a pop song right and that became a hit. Now it's a complicated story and I'll link to a
#
wonderful podcast episode on the making of this album. I think it's about the story telling the
#
history of rock and roll through 500 songs. It's a fantastic podcast which tells this full story
#
in detail but what essentially happened was that Van signed up with Bird Burns and was contracted
#
to do a certain number of songs for him and an album. Now at some point Van Morrison decided
#
that he doesn't want to do the Brown Eyed Girl kind of commercial music quote unquote commercial
#
music. Today we regard it as one of the great R&B songs but whatever. It's pop for him so he
#
wants to go in a more serious direction and Bird Burns is getting like fully frustrated and all
#
that and shit isn't working out and Bird Burns is also in with the mafia. So another of his artists
#
is Neil Diamond and at one point he sets a mafia after Neil Diamond and says I'll make sure you
#
never perform anywhere. A lot of shady stuff going on. Bird Burns runs a record called Bank Records.
#
Then one day Van Morrison and Bird Burns have a huge argument over the phone where Bird Burns is
#
saying listen I signed you up you got a deliver and Van Morrison is saying no I'm a pure artist
#
fuck off and Bird Burns after the phone conversation has a heart attack and dies and his wife who
#
inherits a contract with Van Morrison blames it on Van Morrison so she tries to fuck him over
#
and she says okay you have to give me 64 songs or whatever contractually etc etc but they are not
#
defined. So Van Morrison goes in there and he just sings 64 one minute songs and he's just doodling
#
away and he's talking nonsense and is basically shit and though he's got the kind of voice that
#
he could sing a phone book and all that but this is basically shit. Then he signs on to I think
#
Warner Brothers who are buying up everyone and he goes in to record this album which is later
#
known as Astral Weeks like my favorite album of all time. Now when I first heard Astral Weeks as
#
a young man I thought my god Van Morrison is such a great artist and he's got such great musicians
#
but here's what actually happened. The album was produced by a guy called Lewis Merenstein
#
and Lewis Merenstein told Van Morrison that hey I don't trust your musicians which was basically
#
a bassist and a flautist at the time I will get my own musicians and he did the radical thing
#
of getting a bunch of jazz musicians so a great bass guitarist called Richard Davis a great
#
proper guitarist called Jay Berliner and then eventually Van's own flautist a guy called
#
something pain I forget the name I'm sorry takes over on flute. Now the album is like nothing you
#
ever heard and the way it was recorded was not that there was one artistic vision.
#
Van Morrison came in he went into a recording booth solo sat by himself performed a song and
#
got the fuck out of there and the musicians are filling in the other bits and there's no
#
collaboration. Richard Davis is laying down this bass line the others are playing around Richard
#
Davis and the Davis and the band are playing together I forget whether Morrison put his
#
tracks down first but Morrison is in a booth he can't hear the others he doesn't give a shit he
#
doesn't talk to them because he is pissed off that he can't you know do this his way. Now the
#
album is a masterpiece it is sui generi also because it is a bunch of jazz musicians playing
#
with someone who is essentially a soul r&b guy it is like nothing you ever heard it's called
#
Astral Weeks you got to listen to it and what Merenstein also does a producer is he puts in
#
strings and all in places but beautifully and Van Morrison is like what the fuck is strings you know
#
you're offending my purity and etc etc so the album is out Van Morrison doesn't really want
#
much to do with it and then he decides that he wants to kind of go commercial and he go and all
#
the things that he used to say he doesn't want to do with bird burns like you know a particular
#
bunch of female singers in the chorus doing doobie doo and shusha la la and whatever that shit is he
#
brings it all back does an album called Moon Dance. Moon Dance is also one of the greatest albums of
#
all time it's a masterpiece right he's gone in another direction and this is more quintessential
#
Van and what you think of as a sound and people would generally like if you whenever you have
#
these iconic lists of the top 10 films or top like you have the top 10 films of all time and
#
Citizen Kane will be somewhere there Astral Weeks is like that and Moon Dance will be somewhere in
#
the top 20 these are two absolutely epic albums and much later in life Van Morrison puts together
#
a group to perform Astral Weeks live and he calls the bassist Richard Davis who he then fires
#
guess why he fires Richard Davis he fires Richard Davis because by now Van likes the
#
original the album sound so much that he wants Davis to play exactly like he played on the album
#
and Davis says fuck off I'm a jazz guy yeah I don't want to fuck around and play the same
#
same thing they improvise yeah so that's what happens and so here's the thing Van Morrison
#
turns his back on a particular kind of sound but then goes back to it Moon Dance masterpiece
#
and Van Morrison has no relationship with the players who are playing on this album there's
#
no unified artistic vision it's just a bunch of it's just a lot of improvisation and Astral
#
Weeks and it's again another sort of masterpiece and this also calls into question you know that
#
notion of authorship yeah that we think oh it's a Van Morrison album but is it or is it a Lewis
#
Merenstein album or is it a Richard Davis album or is it a beautiful accident contrary to all
#
that we are told about musicians having chemistry together and you know yeah I mean you know Indian
#
Classical they literally usually just see each other for the first time at live at the concert
#
mostly right I mean they just know there are some standard rules to follow and they just go there
#
and do their thing yeah that's both jazz as well as even sometimes even classical Indian Indian
#
Classical as well and the other thing is that also people also assume a lot of stuff in Indian
#
Classical is improvised live on stage it's not yeah yeah these guys have practiced so many times
#
that they are absolutely not doing anything new on stage at best they're just sort of putting one
#
pattern before another one phrase that brings us to mind Gaurav Chintamani was on the show sitting
#
in this very room he's of course here he edits a show dear friend of mine and also an accidental
#
cousin as we later found out through a complicated chain of events so Gaurav plays a bass for a band
#
called Advaita and he's produced and he's produced Raman Negi's new album but back in the early
#
2000s he played briefly with Lou Majaw so he was asked to fill in as Lou Majaw's guitarist Lou
#
Majaw is this legendary musician from the northeast and so Lou Majaw shows up in Delhi three days
#
before the concert Gaurav goes to him and says right here you know can you tell me the songs
#
how do you want me to play them and they're like ah chill we'll discuss it tomorrow he comes next
#
day they all have a drink ah chill we'll talk about it later he gets all the way to the concert on
#
stage and they haven't told him anything so he's just got to kind of make it out he goes to the
#
to figure out what's going on on this fly he goes to the bassist and the bassist says hey
#
just look at what i'm playing and just go accordingly right so Gaurav is doing that
#
and then at one point in the first song there comes this moment where it's clearly time for
#
the guitar solo and Gaurav is like kind of petrified by the moment and he's not playing
#
the guitar solo right and at this point Lou Majaw goes to him and whispers in his ear something to
#
the effect of i've forgotten what but colorful words but something to the effect of are you
#
going to fucking play or not at which point Gaurav launches into in his words every solo i had ever
#
played before then yeah you know and that tells you really what is happening that what is a musician
#
a musician is like a chess player essentially it is patterns and you put those patterns together
#
and you're kind of doing shit by the way rock guitar solo patterns pretty finite if you really
#
listen to all the guitar solos they all go for the same because it has to be largely tends to be
#
pentatonic scales because they're easier to play and the other thing is that it also has to be the
#
relative muscle movement optimization as well so you can only play certain phrases yeah that
#
at that speed reliably live right so some of the best solo sometimes may happen like in a studio
#
because you can make as many mistakes as you want but play something that that same guitarist will
#
never be able to replicate life right but of course there will be these genius guitarists
#
richie blackmore and all that who used to play the deep purple high high speed those solo things
#
live as well but most guitarists even including even our Led Zeppelin guy right you listen to the
#
live version of the stairway to heaven guitar solo it will have flaws but those flaws are part
#
of the live experience you actually it's it's meant to be that because the audience respects
#
the fact that you're playing this live right it's not meant to be pitch perfect rock is not actually
#
meant to be pitch perfect the lead singer is not meant to be in pitch right so it's about the
#
emotion it's about all of those people getting their teenage angst and all the rest of that stuff
#
to identify with with whatever those guys are saying that's the amazing thing about music
#
right so music as literature is a thing right so if you talk about literature as sharing the
#
human experience music to a great extent also does the same thing yes yes i mean so it is
#
so basically it's it's sort of music is in a weird sense it's a manipulation of basically
#
air pressure over time right wow the limitation with most basic definition of that is that right
#
have you heard of this band called greater van fleet yeah i heard of yeah so greater van
#
fleet sounds just like led zeppelin to the point that robert plant was so impressed he said that
#
led zeppelin won right they are and the singer sounds just like led zeppelin you should listen
#
to the band called the mars volta oh okay so they're insane they were relatively recent
#
but their sound will remind you of led zeppelin but absolute maestros and all songs are like
#
nine minute 12 minutes if you like that sort of thing amazing really really elaborate
#
stuff brilliant i think ai will produce so i think that sort of the the screeching raw
#
unpredictable atonal feeling of a electric guitar solo that's not what's going to come out of ai
#
right it can why not not in the same way there's a certain randomness to it so in the sense that
#
see these are patterns that like a pop song absolutely to produce something that sounds
#
like a taylor swift song or a rehana song absolutely because the it's formulaic in the
#
sense that you can detect patterns at the end of the day you ought to be able to detect patterns
#
right but it's not just about patterns i mean the patterns are subtle the pop songs has obvious
#
see the live rock experience for example so if you read through all of the literature writing
#
about rock music itself right so much of that comes from literally vacuum tubes heating up
#
to a point where it distorts the sound in one specific way that's not hard to recreate again
#
so a lot of that if you look at the amplifier setting you can speak to gaurav will tell you
#
that this amplifier that amplifier this setting all of that it is just it is the variety of that
#
and right now you can emulate all of them in software technically speaking but still it won't
#
sound like the same thing because there is a certain physicality to the live experience of
#
that right and ultimately i think it's a shamanic experience where you're just bothering your head
#
i really think i think so rock music for me i think is fundamentally meant to be experienced
#
live of course you can experience when if you cannot obviously you're going to experience the
#
studio right a studio recording of it but the fundamental value of rock has always been to
#
either experience it in a stadium or in a small place in a bar or some place in fact david burn's
#
book will convince you it doesn't need to convince you because you're already saying this but will
#
convince listeners if they read it that this is absolutely true that there is a certain mahal in
#
which something is appropriate there is another mahal in which it is completely out of place and
#
doesn't make sense i just find that amazingly beautiful like if you're doing heavy metal in a
#
batak you know where everybody is sitting on rugs i mean it just doesn't work and hindusani
#
classical with a mosh pit in front of you also just doesn't work you know a certain kind of
#
music in a closed hall won't work so everything kind of like i did this great episode i love it
#
so much with danesh hussein and we're talking about acting and i was saying that okay you're
#
talking about that you're going to be true to the character you're going to get into the skin
#
but nevertheless if you're performing at an amphitheater it makes a difference from
#
performing it for the big screen and performing it in a small room and the nuance he added to
#
that was even if i'm shooting for a film you know whether it's a wide angle or whether it
#
is a close-up should also dictate exactly how i do what i do and in every instance and that is
#
the art you're being true to you're being different this is also why i also truly believe there is
#
actually no such thing as fusion music okay what everyone calls fusion music is actually not fusion
#
it's juxtaposition meaning that the if you take a shakti right the zakir hussein playing tabla
#
right john mcloughlin playing some jazz guitar and you know our some guy you know shankar mahadevan
#
singing or in the past you know mandolin srinivas was part of it and so on each one of them is
#
simply doing what they know how to do right the audience is expected to somehow put it all together
#
in their heads right on the other hand true fusion essentially means that you somehow have
#
to remove your ego of i'm coming from a karnatic tradition and saying okay i'm going to have to
#
play notes and melodies that will fit into the chords that you're able to play the jazz singer
#
the jazz guitarist should be able to say you're playing kalyani so i'm going to choose this sort
#
of rare chord and this sequence that will fit into that raga that is fusion most fusion is not
#
i play my stuff then i stop and then this guy will play some hindustani thing that guy then
#
the tabla will do something it is that that's that's just juxtaposition right so that which
#
is why i admire bands like indian ocean because they actually take what might be western instruments
#
a bass guitar and all of that and they entirely recontextualize that in this sort of a something
#
that sounds so deeply indian it sounds so meditative yet it is western it is very much
#
western in every other sense but it sounds indian i i get that right in a way most fusion music
#
doesn't sound i this another thing i might rouse against most quote unquote fusion music is all
#
the western music musicians playing raga music that's that's what happens yeah i've heard the
#
other one there's a pakistani group uh guy named bakar abbas i don't know if you heard i'll i'll
#
dig it out and i'll share it yeah he's a crafty bakar he is he is he plays with vinton marsalis
#
and he actually plays jazz he plays the jazz notes it's incredible yeah i was mind blown
#
pakistani guy with a team of pakistani musicians very sublime and i wonder if all newness anything
#
that is new anything that is quote unquote original if anything can be is basically
#
juxtaposition only it's juxtaposition only and you know i i don't say the music is generally very
#
finite in that sense right you have only so many notes and only so many combinations that work
#
um all the rest of it is you experiencing it what effect it has on your head based on the
#
mood the lyrics and so many other things your memories your nostalgia you sort of you know
#
maybe proposing to your first girlfriend when that soundtrack was playing somewhere
#
so it's just that it's really hard to entangle so therefore some very cheesy song might have
#
a memory and specialness for you and then you'll suddenly come on twitter and somebody will say
#
that this band is overrated this is a stupid song because that person doesn't have those memories
#
so music criticism and this sort of music review stuff most of this average stuff is very lazy
#
yeah i used to do that so i used to troll my son was very fond of
#
pink floyd and i had a particular grouse against pink floyd because
#
when i was in engineering college i was i mean i used to listen to classical music all my roommates
#
everyone used to listen to pink floyd they used to make me shut my music and make make me listen to
#
pink floyd which i wasn't and so my general thing was i would go off on these ranch and just
#
troll these boys and one day this guy couldn't take it any longer and he he made me sit down
#
and he explained you know the pink floyd music and the whole bunch of force you to consume a
#
large amount of cannabis before so that is that so that was my grouse right so it was all these
#
genres of music to my mind were impossible to appreciate unless you had industrial quantities
#
in that the music has to somehow move you for whatever personal reasons yeah the the drugs
#
are very incidental and for what it's worth you know i'll just to use the music metaphor
#
whenever someone tells me in just today morning someone left a stupid comment to that effect that
#
your podcast should be shorter you know and i'm thinking that is like a rock music fan
#
going to malik arjun mansoor and zingi bhai tohra bass guitar kaha hai aapka drummer kaha hai tohra
#
rhythm chahiye bhai and i'm like that is don't you realize that is fucking offensive don't you realize
#
you're not my listener you know don't listen and i'm confident anyone who's reached this part of
#
the podcast is my listener and they have appreciation for it otherwise it's sort of like the
#
the youtube comment phenomenon right meaning that right now everyone has a platform to be able to
#
leave a comment like that which in the past you couldn't right i mean you could go to malik arjun
#
mansoor concert but you couldn't stand up and say that right the consequences and the the barriers
#
to you being able to do that you know here's the deal the audience at a malik arjun mansoor is
#
self-selected they've gone to listen to him and any feedback anyone gives will actually be relevant
#
someone who listens to all my episodes i will take her feedback very seriously because they're a
#
listener but someone who's saying is so meaningless and what is happening now is that
#
malik arjun mansoor is singing on twitter and a million random people who have no idea what the
#
fuck he's doing and who should not be listening to him no values have an opinion
#
see social media is absolutely shallow engagement for the most part in an entitled way
#
ki mujhe yeh chahiye give this to me and i'm like like people leaving comments like
#
i wasted one hour of my life listening to this i mean your your your loss yeah right i mean
#
nobody asked you to continue listening to it for one hour before determining that you are making
#
a loss of one hour do people say that to you i don't put out anything for one hour no it's all
#
like 90 seconds okay i was speaking of malik arjun mansoor and i have to share this anecdote about
#
originality right so malik arjun mansoor's guru was a guy named manji khan and manji khan's father
#
was a legendary singer named aladia khan and aladia manji khan died early and aladia khan
#
used to say then after aladia khan manji khan died his brother burj khan taught malik arjun
#
mansoor and malik arjun mansoor apparently was so good he studied only a couple of years under
#
manji khan before manji khan died that that bade khan sahab who had stopped singing by then would
#
so this is what would happen he would when malik the riyaz would happen and when he started singing
#
really well this guy would get up and go in and malik arjun mansoor that saddened him
#
so one day he asks why is bade khan sahab going inside so he says actually
#
he said don't say it but i will say it whenever you sing it reminds me of manji
#
nice lovely so the so my violin guru tn krishnan he i used to get offended that sometimes he would
#
ask me to play a verse and then he would sort of go off inside and call someone on the telephone
#
like boss i'm like paying good money to learn from you and you're not even listening to me then
#
how will you give me feedback then i realized then i made a mistake the man would pass the
#
telephone and say play that again he was there yeah he was just he was able to listen to music
#
no matter what else he was doing so i will now do a great act of juxtaposition right we will
#
bring together two of the themes in this grand act of fusion narrative bring together two of
#
the themes from this episode which are bare gulam ali khan and vegetarianism right so one day
#
and i got this from pushpesh panth ji he's written about it somewhere that one day bare gulam ali
#
khan was invited to sing somewhere and he went over and his hosts were wonderful in every way
#
but they were vegetarian so for three days he had to eat vegetarian food and when the time
#
came to perform he was shall we say by his standards merely competent right so later the
#
host went to him and said and i quote from pushpesh ji's book we had heard such great
#
things about the power of your voice that sometimes you sit by the sea to practice
#
your alap and you drown out even the roaring of the waves then what happened today and then
#
at this point bare gulam ali khan you know gave this look of grave seriousness the kind of
#
look that narain has on his face when he's going home late and he's wondering what sheila is going
#
to say to him and he said
#
actually i have the malik arjun mansoor anecdote i really wanted salwar odali a bit his his entire
#
me and it reminds me of salwar odali right so apparently malik arjun mansoor was performing
#
and he he was a pretty guileless singer very you know very humble guy singing and he was singing
#
his heart out and there's one grumpy old man sitting in the on the front row and you know
#
scowl of disapproval so this guy is singing and that scowl of disapproval doesn't go away so he
#
can't take it at all he stops his uh singing and he asks him what what is happening is there
#
something that i'm doing which is wrong so his grouse is
#
exactly yeah water line hot picks of malik arjun mansoor indeed people would understand
#
the significance of that if they have heard episode 250 so ashok another thing i'm curious
#
about that you you learned karnatic music at the same time you're deeply into western music and
#
later yes later yeah so were they two distinct things for you and you had to court shift and
#
was there a point where they kind of came together and are you today at a place where you're like
#
music is music i'll just do whatever everything blends into one thing or it is no it is so in
#
the sense that i think the first i started learning very young when i was seven right and
#
till i was about 12 or 13 i think the the establishment style of teaching music was
#
this is the greatest thing in the world all other things are evil influences right and i think i
#
narrated that anecdote of not playing the ilayaraja song and all of that right but you know
#
if you're living at that point of time you're living in the south you're being exposed to
#
the the brilliant music that's there in the film world right extraordinarily sophisticated music
#
of ilayaraja that basically combines the indian folk karnatic classical with hardcore western
#
rag joss funk you name it every genre right like every song would be a different genre and you're
#
actually because you didn't have access to listen to all of that western stuff one album of ilayaraja
#
you get to hear like five genres right and so you're always listening to that you're not trying
#
to replicate some of that so if i always had that interest of trying to understand what that was
#
but i didn't have access to do it because the teachers would not teach right and for sure as
#
well i wasn't going to be sent to a regular conservatory to learn you know western music
#
and at that point of time typically the places where you would learn western music was the
#
church related stuff and you know of course no no no going in here close to the church and so on
#
so that was the the mindset it was only after high school and others when you kind of then you are
#
you are wired to not listen to your parents a lot more i mean you're evolutionary wired to do that
#
and then i'm like okay i'm going to listen to other kinds of music and then as i said i think
#
my first exposure to this was actually when philip's powerhouse ad advertisement featuring
#
deep purple's highway star right and i was like what is this i mean how is somebody able to play
#
the guitar like this right and why why is there such a driving powerful rhythm to this and i want
#
to know what it was and then a a bengali friend of mine obviously said yes i have cassettes
#
which my brother who studies in the u.s sends me he records it from radio and he's
#
and send it the cassettes to him handwritten all the songs and then he gave it to me and then i
#
fell in love with classic rock at that point of time right and then obviously i think i recognize
#
that the the theory to understand this also had to go through western classical first right and so
#
when i was in the u.s i two years i went to a conservatory and in fact my my piano teacher
#
she did not even speak english it was san antonio texas right she was more hispanic yeah so in fact
#
my spanish improved as a result of i was learning spanish then as well so piano improve more or
#
spanish improve more so piano not so much but i learned for about two years just the basics i
#
wanted to be able to read music for the most part right to get that intuition so that it's easier
#
for you to read music and the other weird thing about indian music is that because of that general
#
lack of documentation mindset very few things are written down and this on the other hand that
#
notation is an absolute work of engineering genius right of how you capture in full fidelity what you
#
can perform right down to a bow movement the volume and everything else that with that accuracy
#
right and so on so that's what that was and then eventually then i basically at that point i said
#
okay no more learning and all the only way to learn more is now to start making music so we
#
started a band called plus two pass we started playing local indian restaurants and we would
#
play the sort of random fusion music there was one guy who was a rock guitarist in his college and
#
all that so he was a lead guitarist and he would just didn't matter what the song was he would just
#
come and do this insane soaring solo completely out of context it'll be some small light hindi
#
song but he will come and do some hardcore rock solo but we just had fun right and i used to then
#
suddenly play one because i was me i would then suddenly play and carnatic raga all up in between
#
some rock song and some completely random experimentation then got into recording and
#
that's when i kind of recognized that live music and recorded music are entirely different things
#
and live music perhaps requires a different level of commitment which i don't think given a day job
#
i cannot do it so i decided no i'm going to i'm going to be a studio musician rather than a live
#
musician right so then i said okay fine i can learn all the instruments and then use all the
#
shortcuts that i do to record all of this kind of music but essentially i would say that it was
#
critical to be exposed to all forms of music early in order to have this appreciation if i'd
#
only been exposed to only carnatic or only western this ability to code switch and context switches
#
and also figure out that hey by the way this this this particular pattern is very similar
#
or that hava nagila is similar to albela sajan you wouldn't get those kind of ideas unless you have
#
that exposure so listen widely i mean if you have kids any of your listeners have kids
#
don't be fundamentalist about what music they listen to let them listen widely
#
widely including i would even say the censored a lyric censored version of hip-hop as well
#
people get very but remember that hip-hop is actually a percussive poetry with words
#
right the reason the music is just a loop going on the background is because that's not the
#
creativity in the music it's the the brilliance that you do with syllables and words and the
#
percussive nature of how you make it fit you listen to kendrick lamar right there is as much
#
music in his choice of words and cadence and the choice of words and how he phrases and extends
#
and shortens as there is in anything else i mean it is masterful i mean the the modern day shakespeare
#
is perhaps doing hip-hop by now because what shakespeare really mastered was the rhythms of
#
everyday speech and how you turn it into art and hip-hop is exactly that there is you know when i
#
first heard hip-hop for the first time in the 80s i remember whoever heard it with me said
#
arey this is these people can't sing so they're just talking fast and whatever nonsense but as
#
i grew to appreciate it is such an incredible art form but people still have this classist condescending
#
attitude towards it yeah oh this is not music he's just speaking yeah it's very fashionable
#
to shit on it yeah very fashionable to sort of because it is again it is see it is black
#
people's response to the fact that instruments are expensive and the fact that their way of
#
saying that i can take a cassette tape cut out small bits reassemble it into a new beat without
#
any instruments and then loop that and then you know sing over it is you got to appreciate that's
#
where it came from and all forms of music are so contextual and so dependent on all of this
#
see the blues notes for example they come from the fact that the the plantation owners would give the
#
broken guitars to the slaves so they would only have one or two strings so that's why the the way
#
the blues notes and the leads and all of that is designed it was originally designed to be played
#
on completely broken guitars that's the minimalism of blues comes from that right and then people
#
will say things like blues is not as sophisticated as jazzy of course it isn't because it you you see
#
its background that's where it came from and it's probably in some ways more sophisticated
#
because you're doing more with less and you're doing more with less using the constraint is also
#
so much a part of this thing so do you you know like i think another of the questions
#
that i got on from our listeners when i put the plea out give me questions but offbeat ones and
#
some of them were asking things we've already spoken about in previous episodes so like guys
#
listen but the question is that of you're having a normal day job which i understand you're passionate
#
about so perhaps it doesn't feel like work yes but you're having a normal day job and balancing
#
that at the same time with being not just a creator but an extremely prolific creator and
#
if i may add a third element to it not just being a creator but being an entrepreneur creator because
#
you know a lot of people know how to create but they cannot be the entrepreneur of their brands
#
and build it that way right so you have your day job correct at tcs yes and you then you had then
#
you're a musician and all of that all the other things that you do a creator on instagram and at
#
the same time you're someone who's looking at the analytics and who's kind of hacking virality and
#
all of those things and getting into that so how does give me a sense of how you think about this
#
what are the frameworks that you have formulated after learning from doing what was going on so
#
first and foremost is one one of the things that i mentioned in the previous episode is the fact
#
that the software engineering mindset helps in fundamentally being a strategically lazy person
#
meaning that i am the big skill that i have is looking at a problem and figure out i'm going
#
to break it down into this and this is going to be automated by this tool not my problem right this
#
is going to be done by someone else this i will do and i can break this down into further smaller
#
things so we've kind of briefly discussed the strategic laziness software engineering modular
#
thinking part of that right the second part of that one that people i think often right and this
#
is a common fallacy people forget that a lot of this is entirely incidental meaning that i
#
stumbled into i was always a musician in that sense right so for me getting into a day job
#
was to think about how can i continue to do my music in a sustainable fashion while i have my
#
day job right which therefore means that not live music studio music right that's one compromise you
#
do and then within that's therefore you have that creative constraint of just doing that
#
and then how can i make it more interesting so how can i spend optimized amount of time on weekends
#
doing that and so on this is just one part the second incidental completely accidental thing is
#
that i spent a fair amount of time at tcs in my role researching how social media works
#
in the early generation so i have a really reasonably in-depth understanding of
#
how information flows right how what makes something viral and so on right but again if
#
people ask me can you make a course and make money with it maybe i can but i i really think
#
it would be a scam if you do that because these are all you have to figure out these things in
#
the context of your own journey and your own skills rather than take some universal from
#
someone else right so in this case i happen to have the multi-instrumental skills and i was able
#
to then basically say that i could either make dense complicated music by showing off my skills
#
or i could do something crazy that i know will make people share that so that's the
#
sanskrit heavy metal or the arnab goswami paradisi noise you know the the mixing hand zimmer and
#
this and you know doing so doing the sorts of things with music that would also in a sense
#
make it curious for people to say this is this is i've not heard it in this format because i
#
know that i can't compete with a full-time professional musician and the amount of practice
#
in the craft they do but what i can do is bring interdisciplinary creativity that makes people pay
#
less attention to the fact that i am not a maestro guitarist or a maestro pianist right i'm at best a
#
reasonably above average violinist and that's about it right and everything else people i have
#
to somehow convince people to ignore that in favor of the interesting funny story that i am telling
#
right so the same thing with humor writing as well right i mean i'm not a you know your david
#
foster wallace or something like that but i can turn a phrase with some indian pop culture
#
reference that will make people laugh and literally then stop worrying about whether there's a split
#
you know plit infinitive or any of these other grammar rules and all of that right so for that
#
i think that that internalization i think is probably i would say is a useful skill for other
#
creators that's very well put right in that you you cannot be get you first have to throw out this
#
you have to get the basics right is one of the most stupidest bits of advice you can give anyone
#
other than a brain surgeon or you know somebody building a dam or the stakes are high or you know
#
you're a marine or a raw agent or someone yeah i understand yeah the basics are very important
#
it doesn't help actually you've got to be able to turn your weakness into your advantage by then
#
bringing in something that can cover up that right and that is basically what it is right which
#
therefore my limitation is that i can do all of these things only on weekends right so this
#
recording would have been possible only on a saturday right we discussed this and therefore
#
i can fly friday night after my day job that way saturday sunday is my time and i can sort of make
#
this happen and so on right the other this thing i would say is that thinking about social media
#
is not virality is not about one it's a tremendous amount of luck you've got to ab test your way many
#
times for your content because it somehow has to hit the uh the trending zeitgeist sweet spot
#
and you've got to keep doing it sometimes it'll work sometimes it'll not right you've got to somehow
#
which is why i think but sometimes people do it in a cheesy way today's today's pungal i have to
#
put make something about pungal right today's uh whatever this diwali so i have to say something
#
about diwali is i think the wrong way to think about it because on those days this everybody's
#
doing the same thing people want to hear something they haven't seen before right they want to hear
#
some offbeat weird take on this the negative way of looking at it is to say something contrarian
#
like the cheesy twitter stuff we say something and get ratioed and all that but the other way is to
#
like suddenly say for example the the story about uh it was some context where upma was somebody
#
suddenly the trending topic and then i post the fact that hey you know what upma is not as
#
traditional as we think it is is the kind of timing that will make people likely to pay attention
#
and remember that you're making content on social media not to appear competent you're you're on
#
social media because you want to make your first layer of followers appear to have great taste
#
by sharing you if you're not able to think of it that way and if you're only thinking about it
#
your art your this thing your greatness then you'll be is you're setting yourself up for failure
#
right so you've somehow got to think one level beyond and say what will make this person share
#
this and why will he share that because it has to that person has to appear smart like a person
#
who's discovered this so what can you say that will make this person say hey this is interesting
#
right so you've got to have that deep second order kind of second order you have to have
#
a deep sense of what your immediate fan close fan following is like that's one way the other way
#
to think about it is that for example the example of why kolkata biryani has potatoes is basically
#
knowing that bengalis love their food and that if i make a reel about potatoes and biryani they will
#
share it and it's not just 150 million people in 100 million people in west bengal the 150 million
#
people in bangladesh will also do that right and so those are things that you can sort of like
#
likewise i think the maharashtrian food right the fact that again so one you could say something
#
very simple like i like maharashtrian food that's fine there's nothing interesting there right
#
and you know that indians like their ideas being validated by science this is whether you know very
#
deeply unscientific and pseudo-scientific but they like their ideas validated by science
#
so i linked this professor ganesh bagler's computational gastronomist his research that
#
basically showed that maharashtrian food has the most negative flavor pairing in that
#
their dishes statistically use ingredients that are more contrasting than any other cuisine
#
bengali and maharashtrian are the most negative flavor pairing cuisines in india and most positive
#
mughlai so you can sort of see they all kind of taste a very creamy you know a certain way right
#
whereas maharashtrian food has a very diverse textural variations and all of that and then i
#
said yeah so i've this i've got to be able to explain this science and then i thought okay fine
#
either i can just quote the paper and quote the science which again will not appeal to everyone
#
so a maharashtrian chef she volunteered to demonstrate this by making maharashtrian food
#
and then i my voiced over her cooking that was the perfect recipe for everybody in maharashtra to
#
share this on whatsapp right so it is it is like i wouldn't say there's a science to it but
#
there are some broad heuristics that you kind of pick up provided you stop getting you to get out
#
of your head and then start thinking about how other people use social media and i imagine that's
#
harder than it sounds because you're just wired to be inside your head all the time yeah so i yeah so
#
that's the weird thing about being an artist and being a creator that is what i would say an artist
#
is inside the head actually the artist does not care about the outcomes etc but if you if you
#
see yourself as a creator let's be fair you've got to care about your audience yes that's why
#
otherwise yeah that's what that's what you're doing and if that's what your goal is then yes
#
so i'll disagree i'll say you can be i'll say actually the best kind of creator is an artist
#
first and foremost but let me let me let me both i agree let me let me elaborate yes like first up
#
what you said about you know the basics not being that important reminds me of this great quote
#
which i uh from william maxwell which amitavah kumar told me in my episode with him where william
#
maxwell the great editor once said when he was looking at young writers work after 40 years what
#
i came to care about most was not style but the breath of life and so always you know that breath
#
of life is really what matters and then you can hone it and then you can that is artist so what
#
he said but at the same time no no this is not in the artist creator dichotomy that is not even
#
artist you know the i i think for that breath of life to then translate into solid work you do need
#
to kind of get a certain mastery of some of the basics i'll kind of push back on that like the way
#
i think about it is that i distinguish between talent and ability you know talent is like it
#
can be anywhere but for talent to turn into ability you need hard work and a focus on the
#
concentration on the craft and i think that's kind of important you can't really get from
#
talent to ability without putting in the work in systematic thinking the thing with that statement
#
like that is that it is true at 20 000 feet right when you go down to a phrase that you have to play
#
on the guitar for a specific song i think the like quantum physics there's a lot more uncertainty
#
there right what is therefore the basics and getting it perfectly right versus just doing
#
enough and using software and other ways in which you can sort of just make that happen or maybe
#
even choose a phrase that is easier to play and so on are all i that is where it meant that your
#
basics are not as important at at that micro level you're so but you're right at the macro level
#
you still need to have enough good taste to figure out what will work right at that art level that
#
is what requires that years of practice and getting the basics right but on a practical day to day not
#
the act of making a song or making a post a reel etc etc is where i really think the
#
artist creator kind of dichotomy and i truly believe that it is sort of like your see you
#
know people think that the in the mahabharata that the the the five pandavas characters that
#
they are five individual characters mythologic but symbolically speaking they are all archetypes for
#
people will exhibit behaviors of those five pandavas in in at the same time right so people
#
will so the external for external validation focused and right you know how much how much
#
do you like yourself this is sort of are you a somebody who hates yourself or you have a
#
very high opinion yourself an external validation two two by two classic consulting thing right
#
yudhishthira is on that top right quadrant yeah huge opinion of himself exceedingly externally
#
validated and so on and then you have your bima who's like internally he feels he's right but
#
he's not getting the external validation angry young man that's your bima right nakula is forever
#
a student right internally low opinion but he's always being appreciated sahadeva is the
#
exact opposite of yudhishthira and so on and arjuna being the middle pandava is actually the
#
focus of the story actually all these other guys are completely incident that's why arjuna is the
#
focus he's the third he's the person who exhibits a little bit of all of these characteristics when
#
the situation needs it so to that point there are times when you have to be in artist mode where
#
you cannot care about the outcome that is how we spoke about this last time but if your intent if
#
your question to me is how can i be more effective at social media then my answer has to be that you
#
have to be in creator mode so let me let me let me i'll come back to artist per creator let me
#
finish that thoughts first of all maybe in music you when you say the basics you mean something
#
different but let me illustrate what i mean in the context of writing which i teach yes i think
#
there are certain basics when it comes to writing which if you do not nail it you can never never
#
be a good artist i'll tell you what they are like the first fundamental one is when we say privilege
#
the concrete over the abstract right no storyteller if he sticks to abstractions is even going to grab
#
your attention abstractions don't work you have to get concrete or what people call show don't tell
#
and so on and so forth right now in young people you'll often see that there is they'll talk in
#
you know they'll get carried away with the language they'll use florid clothes but this
#
stay abstract and it just doesn't work it's not gripping they're not telling a real story that
#
reaches out so these are the kind of basics that you absolutely have to master to get anywhere
#
so i'm saying the fidelity of what the basics are will vary by discipline right even in music
#
like if you if you don't have a year for music if you don't know how cards work etc
#
exactly obviously you you can't you can't make music let's forget about it right exactly that
#
basics absolutely other i'm just saying that where people err is listening to others or the
#
traditional teaching establishment and telling you that you have to master several more things
#
before you can play no no no that i completely agree with you but i wouldn't categorize that as
#
basics i would categorize them as conventions i would say fuck conventions show them the middle
#
finger but there are certain basics of your craft that you cannot compromise with yeah the craft
#
part yes absolutely yeah as far as artist versus creator is concerned i'd say this that the danger
#
of going for validation is that ultimately you lose your soul and you're chasing the lowest common
#
denominator and therefore there is nothing unique about you the only thing that is unique about you
#
is you yourself yes and the important thing is to be authentic to yourself and here's the thing
#
it's a journey you might think that being authentic to yourself is not the way you want to second
#
guess what others want that's a way to ruin but if you're authentic to yourself the journey that
#
you're on is shared by so many people your tastes and your influences will be shared by so many
#
people that the truly valuable work will come from the juxtaposition of your own self to use
#
that word again juxtaposition of your own self with everything that you've heard and learned
#
from and therefore that is likely to get you the most success as a creator in the long run
#
and there's something that sam altman once said in the context of startups but i think it's true
#
for creators as well and it's something that i've embraced which is that it is better to be loved
#
by a few than liked by many yeah right and that is something i have completely embraced where my
#
thing is that i frankly uh have the opposite of your philosophy like i've started a youtube show
#
i will do what i want to do i will shape it as i want to do i will listen to feedback from people
#
who watch the show on various other things like just now we've got feedback that the teaser at
#
the start isn't working so maybe we'll go to packaging directly so as far as the craft is
#
concerned i will listen to feedback on how to make it better but as as far as the content is
#
concerned we will do what we want something is topical i'm not going to chase that particular
#
in your genre yes right so the point always is about what does that individual want to do
#
right see if that in see if that individual is basically trying to understand are there
#
things that i can learn in my journey i am an artist yes but i want to also be a creator
#
and at the same time yes i do not want the creator part of it to affect my mental health or my art
#
but what can i learn is basically the the point that i'm trying to make which is that
#
you've got to be in both artist mode for most of the time and at the same time there are things
#
that you can learn because at the end of the day it is see you you're still on the that
#
me that medium is part of the experience of how people consume here's the thing to finish my
#
thought i think what is happening is one you are both an artist and a creator because nothing you
#
are doing goes against fundamentally what you want to do you're not doing anything that you
#
would feel is unprincipled but you're saying this will go viral therefore i want to do it
#
so you have hit that sweet spot and everybody may not be able to hit that speed everybody may
#
not be able to hit that sweet spot in which case what i would recommend is never compromise on
#
what you want to do and change yourself do what you're doing and at the same time and there are
#
examples of this i won't take their names because they are young and learning but even if you just
#
chase validation just the act of constantly making content will also help you grow as an
#
artist i don't want to be uncharitable and take names there are young people who are a little
#
immature don't have life experience who are doing things and might even have become very popular
#
and i would not be too harsh on them right now because within the limits of their experience
#
and their talent they are doing the best they can but even in that process of trying to give
#
people what they want you know there is a possibility to learn stuff and to pick up your
#
own voice and we should not often sneer at the popular either you know like Van Morrison discovered
#
with Moondance but at the same time i think it is important for a creator not to think that you know
#
i know what you're what you're saying but it could be misinterpreted as saying that no no the numbers
#
matter you have to get validation adapted no all i'm saying is that you have to interpret those
#
numbers in a fundamentally different way than what the cliched social media gurus will tell you
#
right see which the numbers only matter to the extent that in my opinion the meant from a mental
#
health standpoint and an overall sustainability standpoint if you can just simply put yourself
#
in the minds of your most loyal fans or the audience you're planning to target right and
#
then sort of ask yourself is this something that they are likely to share now by the way don't let
#
that prevent you from making it because you if you like it you should make it but if at the same
#
time you're also your career and your revenue and all of that depends on that then if that is what
#
you're looking to be your day job etc etc then you have to pay a little bit of attention to that
#
and i believe this is a more sustainable way to do that while still keeping your soul right see for
#
example i think there are people who regularly tell me that you're the only guy with 700,000
#
followers on instagram who hasn't monetized how come you don't do influencer you should be doing
#
that he said i don't want to because i that entire ecosystem i find that unethical and i find that
#
entire that eco i don't find individuals unethical that system is results in unethical outcomes
#
right and and i don't want to do that and i can afford not to do that because i earn well enough
#
right and i don't need to do that right and it creates conflicts of interest and so on but if
#
you are someone for you for whom this is the primary thing and many people ping out to me and
#
say that i'm a full-time creator i need some advice from you and i said i'm perhaps not the
#
right guy because i'm in a position where i can take all these risks because our salary is getting
#
credited every month i'm doing those only on the weekends you're asking the wrong person but where
#
i can help you i can help you make sure that you as a creator won't lose your soul because i've been
#
doing this for 15 years i've developed a relationship to social media that i have not allowed the
#
toxicity to get to me and that in that i can advise you right so to that and then develop a
#
more useful constructive relationship to analytics and what you should pay attention to
#
what message i'm i'm getting from him is don't let the fact that your art may not be well honed
#
enough to be in the top-notch clause to prevent you from creating that's the number of times
#
the stuff that you put the most heart into sinking without a trace versus some of the most
#
rubbish not rubbish okay yeah but you just did it offhand you didn't put much effort
#
suddenly hit the sort of hit the right cultural zeitgeist at the right time and it just happened
#
to go viral it's possible don't learn the wrong thing from that yeah and don't then say i need
#
to do more of this that would be no and that is something i keep stressing all the time you can't
#
let perfection be the enemy of production the point is you keep doing don't look for validation
#
you can't let virality be the filter for your art exactly that's what i worry about with young
#
creators if you chase that too much you cannot create daily no matter what the platform salutes
#
yeah don't don't let virality it's not just virality corrupt no no there are two there are
#
two evil v's and one good v the good v of course is varma but the two evil v's are virality and
#
validation like what will often happen is a young creator will start when they start they will suck
#
because we always suck when we start and then they will not get validation because hey they
#
do suck and even if they were not sucking they would still not get validation because at the
#
start it's hard and then if validation is the only thing that matters to them they will either give
#
up or searching for validation they will go in directions which makes them completely different
#
from what they were to start with and therefore there'll be no passion in it they'll just be
#
calculation and it and an application of what they know and it simply won't work out in the
#
long run also let me also tell you that why there are there are unfortunately many kinds of virality
#
and people often don't recognize this so even if you just take instagram as an example
#
the way the algorithm works is that sometimes some videos just happen to be nothing special
#
about them they just happen to be timed at the right time where it just so happened that a
#
hundred people hit like in a two minute period and therefore the algorithm just ended up showing
#
it to more people and more people watched it and so on and so on right and some creators get very
#
frustrated by the fact that look i got 10 million views on this but my audience never grew no people
#
didn't follow me is because it got showed to an audience that is not the highly engaged audience
#
is not the audience that wants to follow you and see everything you have to say just completely
#
incidental that's again the distinction love by a few like by many like by many is virality it
#
means nothing no and also no no it is possible for you to have a loyal fan base and then also
#
go viral right it's possible to do that but i'm just saying that that's a different kind of
#
virality and often people mistake the shallow one-off virality as saying that why and then
#
people keep trying to do the same thing it will never work the second time right and so always
#
remember that there are there is shallow virality that's purely algorithmic because there's a
#
pressure on the algorithm to show new content to people and it just so happened to pick you
#
randomly right and you just suddenly you got to a point where it got a million likes and 10 million
#
views and all of that but all the people it showed to it was just completely random it got showed to
#
people in puerto rico it got showed to people etc who saw it and didn't react to it but they saw
#
it right but you got some validation some views and all of that they didn't think it was impactful
#
enough for them to follow you because at the end of the day all people care about is why you
#
growing your audience right it's not the likes and the comments they want a subscriber count
#
right and so you have to remember that there's a lot of shallow virality that that's purely
#
algorithmic so you've got to hit a niche and you've got to target the right audience and a large
#
number of people have to look at all of your content and then make a decision yeah i'm going
#
to listen to everything that this guy says that it takes a lot of commitment from people and for
#
you to be able to reach that audience it's not going to happen overnight exactly so you've got
#
to keep at it you've got to keep doing it then you got to do it incrementally it's not if you
#
think you can suddenly add 10 000 followers as a result of one video you know it's a fool's
#
head which is a danger of caring about validation and trying to game the algorithm just do what you
#
love get better at it eventually people will come and you know i think the problem is that the art
#
has become slave to the the particular today's mechanics then it's insane how much time is
#
wasted every few months there is content on youtube and instagram of creators discussing
#
and whining about the changes in the algorithm what a waste of everyone's time just make your
#
stuff don't worry about the algorithm exactly yeah but there is a fourth v there's not three
#
you said there are three v's yeah the good v varma the bad v is the fourth v is a tree near my house
#
it's a people tree it's called we the people oh i thought you're going to say
#
or we the people or something it's a funny thing is that in the construction context
#
it is the absolute villain right people is the absolute villain right that yeah it because it
#
can completely damage your structure the roots will it goes through concrete and it breaks
#
you have to put acid or smoke it but to speak of this fifth v ashok the fifth v is villain and
#
you and i are the villains because we you and i are being like the creators who are gabbing away
#
while the artist is sitting here waiting to tell the story exactly so an artist who has never
#
sought validation yeah which is not written a book yeah not started a youtube channel yeah not
#
started an instagram never seek validation partly because he knows he's never gonna get it
#
no i'm just kidding uh narendra shenoy is going to be the best-selling author of 2025
#
absolutely uh but in the meantime he will be the best-selling guest of whatever year this is
#
here goes uh this happened about 20 25 years ago 20 years minimum we were driving down sv road in
#
malad and sheila is driving and we have gone to see i think we want to buy curtains or something
#
we're going to a furnishing shop and sheila is not happy with the curtains and also she wants
#
to go to another shop she gets in the car and she's a little upset because you know what kind of
#
curtain shops are they making these days they don't have anything that i like and then she
#
takes a u-turn right there and i'm telling her this is the main road don't take you to no no
#
auto guys keep taking u-turns here all the time and all she takes a u-turn i'm telling her don't
#
take a u-turn and immediately there's a whistle and one really big and angry looking policeman
#
is marching towards the car and sheila i mean she panics right so she's really scared and she's like
#
frozen and the guy comes and he sees me i'm sitting on the in in manipal term that's called
#
the cleaner seat like the driver seat and the cleaner seat so i'm sitting in the cleaner seat
#
and he's frowned at me and he gives it to me with both barrels and maraudy and go on and then he
#
sees the sheila is driving and sheila has this look and like back in the day it was like perfected
#
to this thing you know she's very large soulful eyes and thing like a kitten so immediately our
#
chap melts and the entire tone changes and he's like baby he's telling you
#
the reason i was saying is as far back as then even cops were thinking he's your daughter yeah
#
that also probably but yeah my lesson of course one lesson was that there's no justice in the world
#
but yeah i was just wondering there's probably a linkedin lesson here as well yeah what is a
#
linkedin lesson i think uh it's that it's it's very important it's more important who your ceo is
#
than what rubbish your company or the sizzle matters more than the sausage actually
#
actually the interesting counter lesson for linkedin could be that all the artist creator stuff right
#
the advice about just create don't worry about analytics the linkedin lesson should be please
#
don't create we cannot tolerate any more of this banality please don't create that is an excellent
#
kind of lesson if you have existential doubts about you're not getting validation our strong
#
recommendation is don't post delete your linkedin account and please go away these are really wise
#
words you should you know what you should teach a course on how not to do anything how not to do
#
how not to create how not like if you have the urge to create how do you fight it how do you fight
#
it how do you fight it and one answer could just be eat so many carbs that you don't have the energy
#
to do anything anyway correct yes so there are this is beautiful isn't it how not to be a social
#
media influencer how not to be a social media influencer that will be such an album you should
#
write yeah how not to be a social media influencer and the point is that actually i'm sure it can
#
become another one of those spiritual you know sadguru jay shetty monk level right meaning that how
#
to be completely away from that toxic world and so on and it could not come from someone more
#
credible exactly unlike the other godman unlike the other godman because you have lived that life
#
you have assiduously resisted temptation unlike vishwamitra for example and not given into the
#
layer of being a social media influencer yes which otherwise as we know and our friend ashok
#
has shown us is like desperately easy koi bhi ban sakta hai is it not ashok influence our industrial
#
complexes we call it yeah yeah the other day somebody i did an episode on vaccines
#
with ajay shah for everything is everything and then at one point he kept talking about
#
influencer vaccine influencer vaccine and i got damn excited i said boss all but i turned out to
#
be influenza obviously but not yeah what an awesome product influencer vaccine is the
#
block button the block button no influencer vaccine is the delete instagram app from phone
#
button as well instagram twitter linkedin twitter linkedin everything i'm not on linkedin and
#
i have never posted on instagram so but maybe i will and i don't have a different medium it's
#
a visual medium it's not i have a lurking account oh yeah it's a visual medium it's primarily they
#
only care about short videos and nothing else very true so mr shinoy are you going to try something
#
on instagram yeah yeah i'm totally planning to so i wanted to have this segment called conversations
#
with my cat or stop it naren where i share my thoughts which are basically rants on everything
#
man no i cannot what i would recommend is that there's so much content on instagram of these
#
wise looking people who come and say gyan level things about you know you have these stresses in
#
life you have this etc you know you must you know clear your mind you don't need to worry about this
#
that's how to get banal useless spiritual advice you should say all they say at the beginning and
#
then give some ridiculously unhinged advice at the end yeah i think there's a market for that
#
it's one of those where clickbait ones where people will listen and then they will share it
#
with others and say you got to listen to this and then troll others it's a classic it's that one
#
step thinking right people will share second order let's do one right now you know think of some
#
banal piece of advice which people are giving which are well like what would chat gpt you know
#
what let's just do this experiment right now yes and let us most banal piece of advice no let us
#
no we don't have to ask chat gpt to give us something banal for us to give us something
#
and then interpret its banal answers through indian philosophy mythology and all that i have
#
one i have some very practical ideas to change the course of world history i don't know if all
#
of it is legal one of them is to sort of hack into the united nations translation thing and
#
when some country like for instance china is saying something very solemn and all the other
#
guys are listening to it on headphones you feed them because you hacked into the system
#
you feed them jokes jokes yeah and inappropriate jokes and they'll be laughing and trying to
#
suppress their laughter and the chinese guy gets so upset that he does something egregiously bad
#
correct like invades taiwan or something yeah invades taiwan or something and that would
#
change the course of that would bring chat gpt down right yes and that would reduce content on
#
linkedin yes which is what is which is not what we want to do yeah so i asked chat gpt let's see
#
if we can subvert this i asked chat gpt give me one tip to improve peace of mind i even misspelt
#
a couple of words but it understood give me one tip to improve peace of mind so one effective tip
#
to improve peace of mind is to practice mindfulness meditation mindfulness meditation involves
#
focusing on the present moment and observing your thoughts and feelings without judgment
#
this practice helps in reducing stress especially if you also while focusing on your breath stop
#
breathing if successful you will probably die and there is nothing that can increase peace of mind
#
now i added the last few lines obviously but isn't this kind of what is something along the lines of
#
to achieve peace of mind you can be mindful you can suppress all these extraneous thoughts go out
#
into nature be at one piece with nature or also realize that none of the shit actually works the
#
way to improve the peace of your mind is to take a piece of it and marinate it in yogurt and mustard
#
oil and then make like bhaja fry with it that would actually give an excellent piece of
#
literally peace of mind this is masterful this is this is a synchronicity of the artist
#
and the creator in you and i'm very proud it should be like it should be done a deadpan manner
#
right yeah very solemnly and we should really believe in it in fact i'm already believing in it
#
yeah correct yes absolutely peace of mind yes it's a great future and i think we will transform
#
the world to a better place i'm pretty sure yeah change the world yes i think one way to transform
#
actually it's a win-win game so if we lock ourselves up in a room with each other you know the room
#
will be a better place because great minds like us and the world will be a better place because
#
we are not in it yeah so it's a positive some game that can be an advice it's go lock yourself
#
in a room yes the room will be a better place and the world will be you are not there in it
#
the problem is this whole subversion thing this whole subversion thing is something that is clever
#
and works the first two or three times but can you sustain it over it's got to be different
#
forms of every time it's got to be different forms of that's not the same angle the surprise
#
has to be different yeah exactly exactly surprise element has to be like very deadpan very
#
offbeat yeah something something offbeat that once happened to naren was he fell in love with a cow
#
would you like to tell us about yes yes yes yes well not love with a cow this was in engineering
#
first year we were being ragged and there was a senior who caught me and we those days manipal
#
was full of cows just cows were everywhere and we're standing and there's a cow there and this guy
#
one of him tells me go propose to that cow so i go there and i sort of it's standing 15 20 feet
#
so i go i pretend to say something and i come back as i propose to it so in what language she was
#
i hope it was like pure sanskrit vedic sanskrit yeah actually maybe yeah so now when you hear the
#
second part of the story you'll realize that i should have actually so what basically what he
#
said was that you say you went and proposed but i didn't say her saying yes so she has to say yes
#
say yes also okay so i go back and i'm so i want the cow to sort of nod her head and she's just
#
she's doing cow things she's looking at me and chewing so i five ten minutes i'm like i'm just
#
nodding my head and trying to and cows are not like dogs or whatever they don't imitate so
#
in great frustration i hold the cow and you know sort of it's not a very big cow so i just you know
#
try to make it go up and down and she just butts me man she just like pushes me so i fall backward
#
and very handily and by this time that there are three or four other seniors who have gathered
#
together and basically having a laugh at my expense and to their great delight i get pushed
#
into one big cow pad so i've fallen into the cow pad and then i said boss and then that that cow
#
pushing me over scared me because i you know i have zero experience with cows i heard i wasn't
#
sure whether cows or bulls that gore you what if it's the cow that gores you so i said
#
so i come back to the senior and say boss
#
i've tried my best yeah i've tried my best but rejection oh yeah yeah
#
he's telling me so i said yeah you saw she pushed me into shit if that's not a yes to a marriage
#
proposal what is and so he had a hearty laugh i suspect this last bit you're making up this last
#
word is totally so you should have you should have said that the cow said not my guy and you also
#
said not my guy yeah with great regret you know but i'm now that ashok mentions that after 30
#
whatever 37 years i have this no wait a minute 82 30 41 years i have this pang of regret had i
#
said it in sanskrit chuda said yes so i have an anecdote here for you have you heard of chintaman
#
deshmukh also known as cd deshmukh because he listened to all his music on cds made that part
#
up so chintaman deshmukh was india's first finance minister and i think recently churchgate was
#
named after him and i think milton friedman loved him so much that he recommended he be made
#
no not milton friedman canes loved him so much that he recommended chintaman be made the first
#
president of the imf but the american said like what the fuck brown skin guy etc etc so chintaman
#
deshmukh became a widower in the early 60s and then he got the hots for a lady named durga by
#
deshmukh also a feisty lady had a child marriage and broke up with the child marriage like never
#
consummated when she grew old enough she went to her husband putate husband in law and said that
#
you know i don't want this shit so and he was kind enough to let her go and fiery lady and all of
#
that and chintaman deshmukh is like fully cosmopolitan possibly having pina coladas and
#
long island iced tea like your friend had wanted and all of that and durga by deshmukh is traditional
#
but like a fire brand right and in her wonderful book chintaman and i the first line of that book
#
by durga by deshmukh runs as follows chintaman took me to a eucalyptus tree in his garden and
#
inscribed two sanskrit shlokas on its bark it was a proposal of marriage i accepted and he kissed me
#
stop code and this is just like the best fucking story ever and these are people in their 50s i
#
think by now they must be yes and it is like such a great so on a related note my i mean i live
#
close to the durga by deshmukh hospital oh wow small world so there's a hospital
#
i'm not sure whether she built but i think it's yeah i mean it's named after i mean it should be
#
yeah yeah very uh so yeah so chennai has a bunch of these so the other main road near my house is
#
the dr b muttulakshmi road she was the first i think you you you had interviewed that person
#
who had written that book about women doctors right oh kavita right so she was the first ever
#
woman to graduate as a as a doctor right and metaras medical college did not have
#
washrooms for women right in the in the college and all that so she had to go to someone's house
#
all right let me i'm quickly looking at twitter and do you know anything about bihari sci-fi any
#
of you bihari sci-fi yeah arjun bali wants me to ask you about bihari sci-fi bihari sci-fi yeah
#
nitin sundar wants me to ask you about life in the era of peacocking
#
life in the era of peacocking i guess this must mean posturing and virtual signaling and we've
#
already talked about yeah we did kind of talk about that so we are kind of uh done okay so mahesh
#
you're talking remind me i have to tell you the story of the peacock in our mess so this is one
#
of those spontaneous things that happen like flash mobs and all so there is one one of our
#
classmates who's like you know been hitting cannabis really hard and also alcohol and with
#
anything that he can get some you know hands-on and everyone's been trying to reform this guy and
#
talk to him and you know tell him that he's overdoing it and he's just inveterate he keeps
#
going he has his sober times as well and he's really nice guy he's just like so all this is
#
happening and seven in the morning we are in the mess and it's a very early time and this guy for
#
some reason has woken up super early and he's come to the mess as well and behind our mess
#
manipal those days is to be a proper on the you know edge of a forest so there used to be all
#
kinds of wildlife common wildlife was peacock so there was one peacock whom probably the mess
#
you know waiters used to feed so he used to be there that morning because there was literally
#
no one other than two or three of us and this guy that peacock walks in and this guy you know
#
he's seeing the peacock and without really you know having discussed or whatever very spontaneously
#
everyone there four or five of us we decide to pretend that there's no peacock
#
and this guy is seeing the peacock he's trying to look at us and he doesn't know whether he's
#
hallucinating or what so he's very broad hints he's you know this there are animals here there's
#
that everything is saying and people are what he's trying to figure out and we actually managed to
#
shock him out of his habits i think he i don't know if he reformed totally but yeah for a long
#
time he was not imbibing peacock is one of those sorts of you know it's the it's the one bird
#
if you spend 30 seconds around it you will immediately feel like earning money running
#
standing in an election becoming a member of parliament and voting it to be removed as the
#
national bird of india it is one of the worst you know behaved terrible birds you can generally
#
be around the worst the male is just the absolute worst so like all good-looking indian men in the
#
sense all indian men are badly behaved the looking ones are peacocks it reminds me of this i think a
#
poor guy i think who posted a women's day message i had a while back as some senior executive and
#
posted a women's day message and said that today on the occasion of women's day i encountered a
#
beautiful female and it was basically a male peacock everybody is like waiting to jump on him
#
and say that who's going to tell him and that's what everybody's ready okay
#
yeah okay next question yeah this is from mahesh here he says dear sirs a question to you all if
#
you could go back in time and change a decision that you took slash made what would it be and
#
why would you change it i know this one okay tell i would so i i decided to study engineering
#
and i'd probably go back and change that to medicine that's because i've read a few
#
great books on on so i my dad was a doctor and the reason i didn't want to be a doctor myself
#
was that i've i had only seen the negative side of you know bad personal life and you
#
were 24 by 7 busy you're always seeing miserable people and you know everyone is unwell and things
#
like that but i think somehow for some reason with i can't articulate that would have been an
#
awesome thing that allowed to be in yeah in my case it's a very weird answer actually because
#
i have entirely sort of built a set of habits predicated around not looking back and not having
#
regrets and not saying what if what if etc etc so i've never really paid attention to i've always
#
said that okay the past is not about mistakes you make but can i take the this situation and
#
then adapt to that and do something else right rather than then try and see if i can go back
#
and undo that what's this what's this sort of i think that you know i think there's this
#
recent interview where i think that lex friedman interview where somebody speaks about the
#
two-way doors and the one-way doors right that the two-way doors are basically decisions you
#
make that you can undo you can come back right one-way doors are decisions you cannot undo
#
i've almost always been a one-way door person meaning that i've never really taken small
#
incremental things commit to it do it and then adapt to that and then move on right i mean
#
but yeah if you really push me i would probably say i would say maybe sort of you know better
#
financial planning in my 20s would have been a probably the thing that i would go back
#
and do other than that i think no no regrets at all yeah what about you what about me
#
i don't think it is a particular thing because i think looking at counterfactuals is like really
#
hard i'm happy where i am and kind of with i mean i'm not sure i'm happy with who i am but i'm kind
#
of i mean it's better than where i was so there's nothing particular but i would definitely be far
#
more disciplined and work harder i think that is a big life lesson for me that i should have written
#
10 12 books by now it is incredibly frustrating to not have done that so it is just i think really
#
about getting those habits right but then the point is you are who you are
#
you learn lessons by living life you know i i was i was who i was when i was 20 and that
#
and also there is no free will we discussed this so it is yeah and all of these are the cascading
#
each each of what you are right now is dependent on your previous state and it's all linked list
#
right i mean yeah in the sense that you go back and change something there are parts that you
#
could have never taken it is hard to so that counterfactual is completely and i don't want
#
to ask any like personal questions but if you had followed ryan's example would you have been
#
more buff than ryan just like you mean bench press the bengali guy who bench pressed me who
#
bench pressed boss if i did 25 push-ups every time i'm masturbated so i would have bench pressed the
#
guy who was bench pressing you while you had on your shoulders the guy who was bench pressing
#
ryan who was bench pressing the bengali who was bench pressing anul swasnekar when he was governor
#
of california and carried the weight of the world on his shoulders so yeah that is so yeah so yeah
#
we have a pretty good idea what amit was we have a pretty good idea what i was doing there is uh but
#
also i think in a sense the better metric almost always is that are you as you mentioned are you
#
a better person now than you were like a couple of years ago and i think that's a reasonable metric to
#
uh go by rather than try to say can i go back and undo something and be something that's a great
#
metric it's a great matter have i have i improved what those may vary individually are you yeah i
#
would like to think so yeah are you narrating yeah that's that's what you strive for right that's
#
what that's what you you just continuously so i like for example am i more and purely it will vary
#
the individual metric might vary like for in my case am i more patient than i was five years ago
#
yes right i mean uh am i spending more time with family than i was five years ago yes and
#
those kinds of things right can i so in the sense that all the if your hard work and all of that
#
stuff is not aimed at for example creating more free time with your family and all of that then
#
what's the point of all of that hard work so sadly my answer would have been yes every year for the
#
last 10 years but i think it is no this year because i feel i understand myself much better
#
and i don't like what i see so uh that's not an answer i'll elaborate upon at this point in time
#
but it's it's moment see this is i think this happens to all of us you are you all have blind
#
thoughts about blind spots about ourselves and there are circumstances which reveal some of them
#
to us in in due course of time and that has to change you it changes you because blind spot by
#
definition is something you didn't know about yourself moment you know that your behavior
#
changes i think awareness is improvement acknowledgement and awareness and being
#
self-aware it's i think it's a yeah all right a very a very specific question for our good friend
#
ashok which is let me find it or should i just do control f and look for the word payasam yeah
#
here it is it's from vinod and a question for ashok while making payasam how do you add hot
#
jaggery to hot milk i see that the natural salt in jaggery curdles the milk
#
so you've got to you've got to kind of do the if you're cooking rice etc then you have to
#
melt melt the jaggery first you got to mix the rice and do that first and then add the milk slowly to
#
prevent it from prevent it from curdling and the curdling thing is also a function of temperature
#
so you also it shouldn't be like searing hot and so on right and and then once you kind of mix the
#
once you kind of mix the jaggery with the rice and slowly add it then the chances that you're
#
letting the jaggery curdle your milk and also let me tell you one more thing the the cheaper
#
processed jaggery you get is less likely to curdle milk than the pure should organic
#
desi jaggery because that's actually quite acidic right so most jaggery you buy is actually super
#
processed great fallacy people believe is jaggery is unprocessed sugar is ultra processed jaggery is
#
just unprocessed in an unregulated way on the other hand sugar is processed by chemical engineers
#
and fssi breathing down your neck and checking and machines and all of these things whereas jaggery
#
is like a random guy taking a sack of sodium hypochlorite and dumping it into the sugar
#
sugarcane juice that's being melted down to reduce the color from dark brown right to to
#
the light color that people will buy right so that's the point so use lighter colored jaggery
#
and that'll probably and i didn't know jaggery was generally acidic which is why it is i guess
#
it's curdling actually almost everything you eat is slightly acidic very few things are alkaline
#
like egg whites are alkaline that's really about it and sugar is poison jaggery is sugar i don't
#
know why there's this thing that oh jaggery is a healthy alternative for sugar it's that whole idea
#
of i think people the the the harder thing to do is the it's a zombie value you know the harder
#
thing to do is to eat less food the easier thing to do is to say i will not eat maida
#
right so people are for the easier things it's the same mindset that says that the harder thing
#
to do is actually fast the easier thing to do is to say well the scriptures didn't say potato
#
because potatoes came later to india so i believe potatoes during fast and call it vrat food or po
#
or sabudana or whatever it is right so i almost always i think when it comes to food and i'm not
#
blaming people we all love food right any silly religious rule that says you will not eat food or
#
get in the way people will find a way around it that's the point right and so that behavior
#
science part of you know hacking your environment is a more sustainable approach than trying to fix
#
your willpower the press officer of the brain is getting us all into unhealthy habits one question
#
that is for the two of you and i can't possibly answer which is about parenting it's just a one
#
word suggestion parenting but if one is to expand how has how did parenting change you and etc etc
#
in my case it gave me immense joy i wasn't like i wasn't a tough time in my life running around
#
trying to make ends meet business-wise this that and the other but i i was lucky to have enough
#
time with the kids it's it's a great great great great joy to see kids growing it's it's amazing
#
that said you and i we agree that it's immoral to have children so i i still
#
i still feel that way so listeners who may not know i want to give them background on this
#
controversial thing narin just said narin and i were at his house one day and we were having
#
this discussion where it turned out we were on the same page and i ended up writing a column on it
#
so though you know narin had as much in a sense authorship of the idea forming in my mind so
#
yeah it's it's a question of either great minds thinking alike or full seldom differing
#
and and i have never been trolled for anything i have written the political pieces the anti-srk
#
pieces the anti-sachin pieces i have never been trolled for anything more than this because
#
the headline was it is immoral to have children and the argument was simple the argument was
#
that i think all of us would agree on three things that we should not do anything to anyone
#
without their consent that pain is bad that killing someone is bad right and when you give
#
birth to children you have because obviously you can't take consent of the unborn you have done
#
something to them without their consent they are going to feel pain and suffer they are going to
#
die and therefore it is prima facie just wrong there right period and it's not even a consequentialist
#
argument it's not the kind of anti natalist argument that talks about you know utilitarian
#
ends and life is sad and full of pain don't care about that life could be fully happy it is not
#
also one of these crappy environmental arguments you're making such a shit world for our children
#
and save the planet and that's all bs it is just a pure moral argument that consent is important
#
you are in you are inflicting pain and death on people who haven't consented because obviously
#
they couldn't consent and therefore don't do it at all it is a provocative argument i know uh
#
and and my whole sense is that there are a lot of things that we say that by way of rationality
#
this is wrong but it doesn't mean we don't do them like all of us would agree lying is wrong
#
but there are certain situations in which of course we will lie right especially if you do
#
that especially with children actually yeah yeah and if you're really tired we'll just might even
#
go to sleep just lie and go to sleep the only i think the counter view of looking at that is that
#
the the argument is absolutely flawless but it's also like the argument that all food is violence
#
right yeah you can't argue against that the fact of the matter is that for you to eat food
#
a lot of death has to happen for you to eat food that's just the nature of it right
#
so if you need it to be moral in that context you've got to starve and die right i mean in
#
that sense and while the only additional element here is that unlike with food you do have the
#
choice to not reproduce right unlike food you have you do have you don't have a choice
#
but i will say that at a macro level i think life is reproducing is is an element is a fundamental
#
element and feature of life in the macro sense individual living things can make a choice
#
especially cognitively advanced beings like us can make that choice based on the context we are
#
in climate change resources of the planet all that i think is fine but at a macro level
#
if everyone was to be moral about that specific logic then you wouldn't have human civilization
#
in the sense that you would need a labor force you would right in that sense i'm just saying that
#
it's the way to think about it is to therefore not judge people who choose to have children
#
while appreciating the logic and the choice of people to not have children couple of things to
#
respond to that one is that yes and no on the first one that all food is violence of course
#
all food is violence but the morality of it depends on how you define morality and i think
#
most people would keep would restrict their moral consideration to human beings and you know when
#
you're eating animals it doesn't involve human beings and it's a different argument whether
#
that's right or wrong whether we should also include animals in our moral consideration which
#
is frankly impossible there is tremendous amount of human suffering required to grow rice as well
#
i mean yeah point is that yeah sure it's not death yes but there is suffering for sure sure sure
#
but i mean then you can argue is a suffering and eat food that doesn't cause that suffering such as
#
you know just kill animals and eat them and stop eating rice but you know whereas with the case of
#
kids they're actual human beings that are causing pain to and killing and the other argument i think
#
commits a naturalistic philosophy of course we are wired to have children but that is a description
#
and not a prescription to convert an ease to an ought you know which is known as a naturalistic
#
fallacy that just because things are this way you say that things should be this way and nobody
#
there's a lot in nature that is absolutely terrible and we are rational thinking creatures
#
whatever so we are rational creatures that have the that can you know go past this and therefore
#
that is not an argument at all a description of nature is not a justification for it or a
#
prescription of that particular course of action but having said that i would also not judge anyone
#
who has kids purely because of this because we are all human we are frail we are weak no one can
#
be perfect so i just think the see for example for whatever the motivations while obviously you
#
can argue that i think doing it because there's social pressure to do it i think is obviously the
#
worst of the reasons right but it is only fair to say that people it is okay to accept that people
#
may have better reasons for for having children than just simply going to social pressure right
#
in the sense that see i am not a little too much on board the argument that you're eventually
#
causing the death of the being by bringing it to life which is sort of like i think a very
#
very abstract in the sense that i would actually argue that your responsibility is to see if you
#
look at all across nature the the parent has varying responsibilities from one extreme of a reptile
#
laying an egg and forgetting about it turtle lays egg gone then the turtle's job to bloody
#
crawl through the beach get eaten by all crows and everything else and then a few
#
they lay thousands of eggs a few of them survive and that's the nature of how like
#
fish eggs like they lay millions of eggs and like you know a small fraction of them survive
#
to the other extreme of human beings where you have to take care of a child till they're
#
their teenage years or some definitely 18 or 19 years old till they at some point of time
#
we have sort of decided that they now become an independent human being at that point
#
morally speaking that they're untethered the parents are untethered from a responsibility
#
standpoint you might feel you might feel some sentiment of i have to help all of that but at
#
that point then the journey that the person takes from there to their own death is their own i don't
#
think the the fact that you are born is i think is too far away for you to make this argument that
#
you are responsible for that person's death no you are responsible for everything bad that happens
#
in the life and even if you're responsible for everything good that happens in the life
#
the point is they didn't choose any of it so and therefore it is not a utilitarian thing again when
#
you talk of you know the turtle leaving the eggs and whatever and you know there might be different
#
sort of protocols in different species this is like you're standing at a signal and then it is
#
just amber but you chose to stop because you didn't want to take the risk or whatever it is
#
right but as a result of which the the person sitting in your car missed an entrance exam and
#
lost a job or something like that would you blame that person for so in a sense that i think it's
#
not that it's not that at all that person was in the car by their own free will unless you
#
kidnapped them it's a quick case of volition like my whole point is you forget the consequential
#
arguments if you agree with me on these three points that consent is all important you cannot
#
do anything to them without their consent can children consent exactly if they cannot consent
#
that is my point that is why the argument is so powerful because they cannot consent you
#
should not do you should not have them and by the way naren has convinced his elder son of this
#
so he is actually i know i i absolutely agree to the the current human context absolutely right
#
obviously fewer people should have children no no no no no that's the utility
#
by the way that is wrong i totally disagree with that vehemently i am arriving in a sense
#
this is a personal thing that if you start with these deontological first principles of consent
#
pain death yeah i'm saying it is wrong however while i will not have children myself because
#
i consider it immoral and also because i don't want to i hate kids but i would want all of you
#
to have kids because children are a positive externality in fact one of my everything is
#
everything episodes was about how population is a good thing not a bad thing that cannot that is
#
spread that no idea that it is immoral and it is also necessary that's perfectly necessary for whom
#
necessary at a macro level as i said in the utilitarian level not at an individual
#
so satisfying i mean we were talking about your experiences so what so in the sense that i think
#
you know see one is that it clearly i think in my case it is a broader sense that there is
#
is that sort of switch from you proceeding with life as a series of milestones and things that
#
you want to get for yourself and things you want to hone the target you want to meet money
#
you want to make etc to suddenly realizing that no you've got to pivot away to being entirely
#
focused on something that is deeply vulnerable and it completely changes you and it also makes
#
you actually deeply appreciate far better the the insanely tough role that women play in society as
#
a result of biologically just being the people who can give birth right and the and the insane
#
i mean just just sitting through that entire process of giving birth from admission to labor
#
pain to hospital etc right it is it is just a it is insane you just you're just jaw dropped about
#
how women go through this in the first place right and they go through it willingly multiple
#
times how do you do it a second time right and in my case my mother the third time as well right i
#
mean so it is yeah so that you get to develop perhaps a deeper appreciation that changes you
#
for the better in terms of appreciating all of that you tend to you hopefully have more nuance
#
and more better views about women's issues in general when they speak about you know the impact
#
that it has on their careers and how to change the system in such a way that you know if they
#
are taking a break to give birth why should they be penalized in their careers and so on so i mean
#
in the sense that you i'm not saying that you need and suddenly have a different policy
#
prescription to that but at least you're now a little bit more aware of the fact that this is a
#
complicated thing that you cannot just go about your world in this typical masculine mindset of
#
yeah i need to do this x and i'm just going to go from there you've now got to deal with something
#
that for the next few years is going to poop it's going to be completely like completely behave in
#
in completely unpredictable ways it's going to prevent you from moving around to crazy places
#
and suddenly planning vacations wherever you want and all of that i think in that sense it puts you
#
in a new frame of constraints which changes you potentially you can hope it changes you for the
#
good right and at the same time as you said you can opt not to go for it at all right it's perfectly
#
fine but yeah it's it has tremendous potential to change you for the good right at least men
#
you know i'm not saying it i'm not saying it does in many cases i think at least indian men i think
#
just you know don't change at all i think most indian most indian parents become parents when
#
they're not ready for it they don't understand what the hell it implies i also see what i also
#
see is the is what is also fascinating to me is how parents become grandparents that's equally a
#
second-order transformation right i mean the way my parents behave to me and the way they behave
#
to my son very different enjoyment without the responsibility and stress i guess yeah exactly
#
it's a very completely different sort of this thing and especially if it's like multicultural
#
right if it's like people in laws from different languages and all of that then there's another
#
dimension to that entire mixing and how the the child gets influenced by hearing multiple
#
languages eating different kinds of food right and asking very odd questions like you know we
#
asked my mother why why do you why do why don't you like chicken it's you know so delicious and
#
so on and and my mother now sort of learning that telling my son that eating chicken is bad is not
#
the right thing to say right but when i was young she would absolutely say eating non-veg is bad
#
right i hope your son listens to this episode and the next time your mom says something about
#
chicken he says you are having upma it's an act of genocide at multiple levels hello excuse me
#
both my both my both my mom and my son both like upma i don't like upma it's a violent family
#
yes so yeah so i guess i said i think it's a on the one hand it's still hard for me to
#
separate out the fact that i'm not it's not an argument by nature but it's a fundamental
#
feature of nature whether you like it or not right oh i'm not arguing so the point is that i think
#
and a cell doesn't exist just as a cell it will divide at some point in its life even a single
#
cell will undergo mitosis meiosis at some point i mean at that philosophical level that's that's
#
description not prescription and i'm i'm not even being normative yes it will just like as an
#
aside that i shared that this column i wrote so if i have to extend that would you say that a cell
#
dividing is being immoral no why i mean it's creating another cell that's going to die but
#
a cell it didn't have to divide a cell could just choose to say yeah but a cell may not consider
#
another cell to be of its moral consideration and it's not even capable of moral consideration
#
other cell is see in the sense we are macro manifestations of essentially what is a
#
microscopic cellular level evolutionary phenomenon we are fractals in that sense but before you ask
#
me that question you have to explain to me why morality should apply to anything outside of
#
humanity and then we can you know and then that is too complex and difficult to do so yeah i get
#
your point i mean yeah we we may not care about the model in fact the shoot question doesn't apply
#
at all to that world you know there is nothing normative there things are what they are so my
#
next question is this like one of the fascinating sort of tils i learned about the modern world was
#
when gaurav chintamani's son nishan learned to read through spotify lyrics so he would listen
#
to music and through the lyrics on spotify he learned to read and that completely blew my mind
#
and i want to ask you about you know seeing your own child being a father yourself you obviously
#
are not that old that you don't have memory of how you grew up so you remember how you grew up
#
and how you formed your influences and all of that and at the same time you can see your kid
#
living a completely different world with completely different sort of ecosystem of
#
influences and information around and what do you think are the pros and cons in that i mean both of
#
them are kind of obvious if you think hard enough but in your particular instance what have you
#
thought about as pros and cons what has made you go that shit i wish i had that in my time
#
and what has made you go that shit i really worry about this now i don't think i by particularly i
#
mean i would have loved to i guess have access to the internet and all when i was growing up obviously
#
but but at the same time i do know that i i definitely spend far more time playing around
#
with kids and outside and and definitely getting infected by a wider range of diseases building
#
immunity gut bacteria and all of that i'm sure is helping out now right and in that sense i am
#
worried that the amount of time that this generation of kids is spending with others
#
given of one the i think ours as we get wealthier we get more possessive and protective of our kids
#
as well right i mean i it's crazy i mean my mother used to send me to school on public transport when
#
i was in class four right i i she and me couldn't imagine doing that with with my son no way right
#
going out road getting on a bus and then you know going like 10 kilometers to school in your class
#
at nine nine years old no way right and so in that sense i think we live in a different world
#
i'm okay in the sense that i think we we now have the privilege of taking more precautions right
#
things could have gone wrong right in that sense i'm not saying that that's a great way please let
#
your kids run out on the street is not what i would say now we have the option of being more
#
careful and we are able to do that i think that's fine but to be correct yeah i would i would say
#
but i think the amount of physical play time that they spend with other kids is something
#
that i worry about in that i think the devices have hacked kids brains at a far greater rate
#
than they are hacking adult brains and far more susceptible in my you know obviously my son plays
#
roblox and so on i'm obviously checking to see there's like no chatting and that stuff going on
#
but otherwise but at the same time i'm also i can also see the fact that playing video games and
#
creating your own environments and roblox etc is building a set of skills
#
at his age that i did not have at my age right optimization problem solving
#
in a in an enjoyable fashion as opposed to the boring questions and answers you get in like school
#
right and now i love the fact that i can now do things like read him teach him a chapter in
#
in the in the textbook right and then open chat gpt and say here's a nine year old or ten year old
#
ask him questions on this subject and then and and then be encouraging even if he says wrong
#
answers and all that and you can do those kinds of amazing things which i think you know
#
those are just the creative ways in which you can use ai now to augment how you teach and learn
#
i think are all fantastic things that these kids have access to provided you kind of use it
#
the right way and so on but yeah for sure i think screen time and i hope as he becomes a teenager i
#
think social media obviously going to be worried about the equivalent of instagrams and redits and
#
other things at some point he's not there yet but yeah so that is but i think i also feel that in
#
another one year or two years the world is going to be so different in terms of what ai is going
#
to make possible that it's hard for us to even imagine all the new experiences that they are
#
going to end up having right in terms of virtual reality and immersion and the things that they
#
could experience having like not just chatting in text but pretty soon you're going to have a
#
virtual world he plays around one of the things we do is on the oculus one of the things we do
#
is he likes travel and so whenever like we travel once or twice a year but then he uses the oculus
#
and he'll search for switzerland 360 degrees or whatever it is and there's a eight minute
#
fly through you're just flying over switzerland on the oculus in 4k resolution right i mean and so
#
it's it's like so that's that's those are really really enriching experiences that kids can get
#
with modern day technology but it is at the same time the fact that they are not spending enough
#
time with other kids in actual physical settings is i think is a is a concern so it is making them
#
socially awkward um and the pandemic and the lockdowns didn't help right i was quite terrible
#
for them yeah that's worrisome yeah i was reading somewhere that kids though these these these kids
#
videos and kids software for really small kids yeah how they test them is they have like proper
#
home settings where the adults are there are adults in the room and then the kid who's been
#
given the app or uh the video or whatever it is and the other people are asked to do
#
different things things people might do in the house yeah and the child is observed and if the
#
child's attention goes to what that adult is doing that means the video is not riveting
#
riveting and you know the interesting very very interesting things about how these guys ab test
#
these things one is that they don't just need to test in physical settings they can literally do
#
it virtually right uh because there are they can choose tens of thousands of sample people where
#
they opt in to have eyeball tracking oh so they're tracking the gaze so you don't need
#
to be in a much much more sample you can get right and you can do it at scale and you're
#
doing it with consent you they're probably paying them and all that right the second thing is that
#
the amazing thing most people don't realize is that vast majority of these kids youtube channels
#
right almost all of them are produced in a small few five kilometer by five kilometer part of
#
chennai because in the 1990s uh dreamworks and pixar decided to start scaling up and cutting
#
production costs by outsourcing uh to india and just it just so turned up a bunch of companies
#
in chennai won that contract and as a result of it got tons of money and they were also
#
insightful enough to they knew that they need to hire lots of people so they set up training
#
centers for animation all over Tamil Nadu so Tamil Nadu has a large number of people with
#
animation skills right and so all of them now the easiest way in the monetize in the new world if
#
they're not making pixar films is to make kids videos on youtube so choo choo tv you name it
#
and the other thing you'll notice those channels will physically hurt your eyes have you noticed
#
the coloring yeah they are bright blue they are aimed at just keeping kids glued to it because
#
kids like those ultra bright colors because their eyesight isn't great at that age right so they need
#
this ultra sensory maximization to keep them glued so choo choo tv and all literally it'll hurt your
#
eyes if you watch it for like a few minutes and so they do color testing they'll try one video with
#
one shade of blue and then try that others and based on eyeball tracking which had more engagement
#
then they will standardize that it's all data driven now and and you have seen the number of
#
views on these billions billions billions yeah because it's just basically completely
#
hassled mothers with no help yeah just here's the ipad just let me take a breather yeah yeah
#
just sit yeah so it's a yeah so i mean another form of the function that the school performs
#
of being a daycare center that's one kind of daycare this is another kind of daycare
#
except that it's kind of yeah it's not involving human beings and that i think is a yeah so time
#
for another story by narayan and there is a particular request i would like to make and
#
i will lead on to something from there so you will see why i am requesting this particular story
#
kipchoge ah so there is the story i heard recently about so three guys who are running
#
the marathon the the guy who stood first was eliot kipchoge and two other guys whose names
#
are forgotten and one of the two so this is what happens in the olympics after your event is over
#
the winners the the medallists are you know put in a waiting room and the medal award ceremony
#
which is a big thing you go stand on your podium national anthem is played you get a medal is
#
scheduled for some later time when people are available and everything is organized so for an
#
inter indeterminate amount of time you have to sit in the room so these three guys they've so that
#
they don't lose you somewhere and can't find you when you need it so you're supposed to wait in
#
the room so they're stuck there and one of the others were he wrote he said about this he said
#
two of us the number two and number three so pull out his you know they said both of us pulled out
#
our phones we were looking at it and trying to while time and kipchoge was just sitting
#
and staring into nothingness not moving and he sat there for several hours without budging
#
these two guys said he's not human and it's just we were just talking about this yesterday
#
and i don't know i've i have i have someone told me that uh you know you should be able to do this
#
for an hour and then that means you can grow a beard and become satguru
#
but the furthest i've got is around 10 minutes so so here's why i like this story and an exercise
#
i'm proposing for us now yes which is this that we were shooting for everything is everything
#
ajay and i have been incredibly fortunate to get this new crew of two wonderful young people called
#
vaishnav and namsita who uh work with us now 22 and 19 respectively but wise beyond their years
#
both school dropouts i think namsita dropped out in the eighth standard to teach herself filmmaking
#
so phenomenal people and they made a suggestion which we said let's try it out they said that
#
before we begin the episode like we will roll the cameras and then for five minutes we will
#
do nothing we will just be silent we can think about whatever we want and the cameras are rolling
#
and we gather together we gather our thoughts meditate whatever five minutes of complete
#
silence and then at the end of it we begin and we did that for three episodes and i just found
#
that so good and no embarrassment about doing it because all four of us were sincere and we did
#
it and i found it really kind of made a difference to me so what i'm going to recommend now is that
#
the three of us stay silent for three minutes i will keep the time this will these three minutes
#
of silence will be edited out by young gorov who will no doubt anyway have to listen to them at
#
double speed in case we said something but they'll be edited out so the listeners don't have to go
#
through it and during these three minutes i want you to ponder the following question this episode
#
is airing at least that is a plan now on january 1 2024 and the question i want you to ponder
#
is you know what have i learned either in the year gone by or in the last few years gone by
#
and how will i live differently so very seriously i i'd like you to ponder this and give me your
#
questions if you can and i haven't thought of an answer yet but in the next three minutes
#
inshallah something will come to me so literally we are really doing this three minutes of silence
#
right three minutes run one more time who wants to go first yes narayan so i've
#
uh i always thought that i was in control of my life i knew what i want to do and things like that
#
and not just the last year last couple of years i've had a sense that i really don't know the
#
purpose the terminal goal of whatever you have a lot of instrumental goals i want to make money i
#
want to have you know acquire fame i want to be liked by people i want to see whatever things
#
but are any of these even close to what i really want to do or what i really want to
#
achieve in life what my true purpose is and what how this has changed me or is changing me is i
#
want to pay closer attention to what it is that i might be wanting to very difficult it's it's
#
very confusing it's uh and i have no clue how to go about it uh but yeah at least i think i know
#
that i don't know my uh what i really want in life so that's my two bits so
#
essentially one of the things i've come to kind of realize at least this year is that it
#
it kind of feels and i could be wrong it feels like this year
#
and sometimes when you live life it feels like every year is an inflection point you remember
#
how everybody used to say 2016 was the worst year because trump got elected that happened this
#
happened and all that and then 2017 people said 2017 is the worst year and so on i guess it always
#
that distortion that proximity distortion is there proximity bias but i i it feels that
#
we are on the cusp of a technological change that will have far far-reaching consequences at every
#
level from education to society to democracy to to jobs and everything right and in a deep sense
#
i am one of the things i've kind of therefore realized is that the
#
what i assume to be some sort of innate basic expertise at something is that you really have
#
to deeply question that that it's it's going to be very very hard to actually predict what's going
#
to get automated and what's not so don't make any bold crazy predictions that no no no this will
#
never be automated famous last words every prediction tech prediction in the last decade
#
has been wrong right and see it it feels almost that i'm going to have to think very hard about
#
especially i think there's going to be a flux of change a lot of people will lose their jobs
#
there will be many industries that will be in flux people coming into their careers and now
#
as i'm sort of you know 46 years old i kind of realizing that 20 year olds are coming up to me
#
and asking for career advice i've never people have never asked me for career advice before and
#
all i'm suddenly the uncleji who has to give career advice right and i i find myself having
#
to say honestly i have no clue yeah right it's such a hard thing to say honestly that's one
#
right and then and i think to to that end i think it's almost as if i really have to reset my idea
#
of saying i have 23 years of experience in an industry to say i have zero years of experience
#
in whatever this industry is going to be starting today that if all that baggage is actually
#
completely useless sure you can pick up some meta skills you can pick up some skills of empathy and
#
design and paying attention to people and and those things but honestly speaking i mean no more
#
qualified to predict than uh first i would actually say somebody just using these technologies ground
#
up as a kid and joining the workforce today is probably better place to think about where the
#
future is going than any executive with experience yeah i agree with you but i think that's
#
excessively self-effacing in the sense that nevertheless your experience of frameworks
#
that you've got the first principles thinking yeah i'm sure they will count they will count but i
#
it is always for example being in the technology industry has a tendency to go through massive
#
disruption every few years and it's the time the fame has been crunching right we went through
#
the original sort of pc era then we went through the internet era and internet felt like
#
groundbreaking and then we went through the mobile smartphone digital big data that era and now the
#
the ai era actually kind of feels like a each of these actually is sort of like a log scale
#
right it's not a right so it is i think we're kind of reaching that singularity point of
#
not being able to predict what if downstream effects and all these other things that are having
#
so many things right so i just want to make sure that i don't value experience as much as i'm wired
#
to expect right and therefore even in how i think about building a team or hiring people and so on
#
and thinking fundamentally differently about do i need an engineer for this should i just get a
#
arts graduate to get a completely different perspective i mean i'm in an industry that
#
famously only hires engineers right and saying that i don't think any of these things now an
#
arts graduate can use chat gpt to write python code to generate artwork with as much capability
#
as an it guy right see the it's it feels like the like the so the democratization of computing
#
which pc did and the democratization of scale which cloud and internet did meaning that it
#
allowed a small company to sell on the internet and compete with a large retail store right with
#
democratization of scale but i somehow feel that we are uniquely ill prepared for what this is
#
which is the democratization of skill because skill has always been our human differentiator
#
is how caste system worked how everything worked everywhere in every artisans that you know guilds
#
it has always been about skill and somehow this is going to break that right and then so it sort
#
of feels like that moment where you really have to be wary of how these things are going to affect
#
and how a lot of stuff is actually going to happen in terms of how you think about
#
where you know 10 years from now what should my son think about university will there even
#
be universities will those degrees even be meaningful and so on i think the second thing i
#
also feel is that it has also been a weird year where one year ago roughly october 2022 i had
#
20 000 instagram followers okay december 2023 it's 700 000 and it's it has been so and somehow
#
it is it is a the dynamic is entirely changed i get about 500 messages daily a large number of them
#
people saying i have this illness can you suggest what i should eat and again i do have to tell them
#
sorry i cannot right and and so therefore it is it is almost as if now i have to think about this
#
entire the weird level of trust in indians will place on individuals as opposed to no matter what
#
i tell them about the scientific method don't trust me right you should be skeptical of me you
#
should fact check me we are all just wired to say i trust you blindly right so that's a very weird
#
responsibility right and i i to be honest i don't know how i'm going to deal with that right
#
so it doesn't mean i'm suddenly get a nutrition degree and start answering those questions either
#
right but but at the end of the day i still have to figure out maybe there are some ai solutions
#
to the problem etc and that's me just thinking about it as an engineering problem if i can
#
respond to more people but it's a lot of right flagging it out you have to be like oh an order
#
of magnitude more careful of what you put out and also most of my most of the people who are in my
#
position operate as a team yeah they have a team there were guy who does camera there were guy who
#
does scripting there were guy who does research there were guy who does responding to comments
#
and in doing engagement stuff that's how everybody sets up this thing i'm no i have no such thing it's
#
just one person right because i don't want it to kind of get to that because then i'm running a
#
separate operation that is a big distraction on what i do and it also and the other feeling is that
#
i i get the sense that people get surprised when they get a reply from me that i did not expect you
#
to reply half of my messages and when i reply to someone on instagram is i did not expect you to
#
reply to me right i did not expect somebody with 700 000 followers would reply right and so therefore
#
i'm still sort of thinking of how do i think about this community in a different way and the honest
#
answer is i don't know that's something for me to think about because a huge responsibility
#
that not that i signed up for it but but i can't like shirk away from it because it just you know
#
it's not a responsibility in the capacity of responsibility in the sense that no one is going
#
to hold you liable correct yeah it's not that sense but it's a moral responsibility yeah it's
#
suddenly people who have consumed hunch binge to watch your videos and it's weird right it's
#
basically people have watched effectively two hours and 30 minutes of me is the net total of
#
what people have watched me on instagram and this somehow has given them the sense that i can ask
#
this person anything about food anything about diet anything about stuff etc and they're like i
#
don't care i don't trust my doctor i trust you this is like a it's a very uniquely indian problem
#
so i i have two sort of aspects to double click on here and one is that community is so important
#
like earlier you know outside the recording we were talking about how you know one of the things
#
i've come to learn that is not what i'm going to talk about but one of the things that i've
#
come to learn is that for creators what is really important is community that creators will make
#
most of their money if you're concerned about that from monetizing their community and not
#
from advertising sponsorship etc etc and that building a community is a really big deal and
#
there is a responsibility there and you realize that you are you know you can play a positive
#
role in the lives of so many people and the second thing is that i feel that the great need of the
#
modern world in an age of information surfeit and so on is for sense makers i have realized from my
#
india uncut days without being able to verbalize it in this way that many people are looking at
#
me as a sense maker i remember getting an email in 2006 from someone an indian in new zealand
#
saying that i don't read any of the indian newspapers on their websites or whatever every
#
morning i come to india uncut i would do five posts a day at that time five 18 posts a day was
#
my maximum he would say i make sense of what is going on through what you write now obviously
#
you know you could say that he sort of overrated my insight or whatever irrelevant but what is
#
important to note is that need for sense makers which is why complete strangers who have not
#
consumed so much of your content will nevertheless be writing to you for advice on things that it is
#
obvious that you have no expertise on and the big question for us to ask is that those of us who can
#
be sense makers in limited domains i think rather than stay away from it or be self-effacing about
#
it it is important to number one go out and do our best with intellectual honesty and in good faith
#
while acknowledging our limitations to try and fulfill that role and also to refuse to fulfill
#
that role when we are not competent like when other violence like the violence when the violence
#
in gaza erupted so many people left comments on ajay and i had just done an episode on ukraine
#
which ajay has been studying for 20 30 years he's given speeches to generals on military strategy
#
and they said why don't you do one on this and we refused we left a comment saying that both of us
#
have our personal private opinions and values and all of that but we simply don't feel we know
#
enough about this to give you an opinion right so that humility judge based on what you left out
#
yeah it's just it's just not worth that humility is also important at the same time there is that
#
responsibility that wherever you can if you can say that okay i'm also figuring it out but let me
#
share my journey in figuring it out with the caveat that i'm not an expert and i feel that you know
#
often i will say things on the scene and the unseen that i feel i've said so many times before is
#
completely banal it is obvious to me and then someone will send a mail or put out a tweet saying
#
it is such a great deal it has changed my life i'm figuring it out i believe is shrinking to be fair
#
no i disagree it is shrinking on maybe on twitter and social media and on some of the main that you
#
your regular platforms it is shrinking let's see absolutely i think if you have your own podcast
#
we have your own newsletter you absolutely can yeah yeah create your own private community i think
#
is a is a theme that i think is worth thinking hard about yeah and i think the whole theme of
#
the scene and the unseen is figuring it out you know talking about stuff changing your mind my
#
listeners who've been with me on this journey have seen me change my mind on a bunch of stuff
#
for add no hands and whatever so anyway so what i thought about in terms of what i would like to
#
change and one of the things is there is this quote that i keep asking my guests about which
#
i take very seriously it's my favorite quote of all time and it's by annie dillard where she says
#
how we live our days is how we live our lives right and too often we ignore the immediate fabric
#
of our day the present day that we're living in and we think in grandiose terms in our heads
#
and i think too much of my life i've lived in a grandiose way thinking of macro ideas
#
and not actually getting down to the micro level of focusing on the everyday and doing stuff
#
so what i want to do going forward which is very difficult to do it takes discipline and focus and
#
stuff that you have to work on and also character where also one can be deficient but it is to sort
#
of live in the micro right i have realized that the things that i do like you know you might think
#
okay 361 episodes or whatever of the scene and the unseen it's a marathon it's not a marathon
#
it's a series of manic sprints where each manic sprint will begin by just saying that
#
fuck i have 24 hours i have to read three books which by the way i'm completely capable of reading
#
deeply and that's my superpower so i have 24 hours i have to do all of this research no sleep
#
bang it out do a sprint and then completely collapse at the end of this record end of the
#
recording like i perhaps will tonight do this required no research at all because you guys are
#
such great recorders and banters if one might use the word banters in that sense and and it is that
#
micro that sense of sitting down and doing something and so i want to do micro things
#
but on the basis of macro principles and macro ideas so you want to bring all of that to bear
#
but do micro things and just do the basic stuff don't think about the book you're going to write
#
write the paragraph write the next paragraph spend the next hour doing whatever doodling
#
you're doing and etc etc at which point you know both ashok and i are totally turning to you mr
#
shinoy and asking the question and you will pardon the parliamentary language but where the
#
fish is your book yeah so i it's being aggressively assiduously arduously written and
#
so i wrote the damn thing like half of it and it sounded very banal to me it was just like strung
#
all my silly whatsapp uh anecdotes some of which i've just told on this show as well i just strung
#
them together randomly then i thought i should make it a sort of chronicle of my life with
#
sheila and sort of just weave these things into it so i've been trying to do that
#
and like this is the last final iteration so whatever it is whatever comes out at the end
#
it's like that famous organ grinder story about month is this guy who's done everything in his
#
life he's he's had all his experience everything the only thing he hasn't is childbirth right so
#
he hasn't experienced childbirth so he goes to a doctor and says i have to you know i am you know
#
i want to experience child but the guy says dude it's not biologically possible but he's an
#
insistent guy he's a wealthy guy and he's like he keeps badgering the doctor and finally
#
his doctor's assistant gives him an idea it says you know here's what you do you give him a good
#
five tablespoons of castor oil and you put a butt plug like put a cork up his butt
#
and tape it shut and send him home so he'll experience the pain of
#
so this guy they do that to him he goes to his room and he's uh sort of in his bed for a while
#
nothing happens and slowly the casserole is doing its work and the pressure is building up and it's
#
agonizing right and that the plug is holding it in and he's he's just he's just groaning and
#
moaning in pain and he doesn't know what to do and just then you know so there's an organ grinder
#
with a monkey down in the street and the monkey hears all these funny sounds coming so he jumps
#
up and enters the window just to very curious monkey wants to see what is happening so enters
#
in and just then the plug gives way okay and the monkey is splattered with his poop yes and this
#
guy like it's like relief so he picks up the monkey and he says you're ugly and you're hairy
#
and you're covered in shit but you're mine and i love you so my attitude to or whatever comes out
#
of this the book is going to be like monkey and yeah so this is such an awesome story this is
#
totally the high point of this conversation Ashok we finally absolutely yeah monkey
#
yeah the organ grinder's monkey it's such a beautiful
#
sort of metaphor do you have any stories left you haven't told oh there are a few there is my the
#
one uh you know which which i there's a lesson in it so i had this friend mr sing right so mr sing
#
had a factory very close to mine and he used to have this uh mind there are two uh 790 commander
#
jeep so he used to drive back and i used to travel by train so in the evening if our times
#
coincided mr sing would ask me to join him and as was his want he would first make a small pitch
#
top by a bottle quarter bottle of alcohol by a bisleri bottle make me drink about half of it
#
pour the alcohol into the bisleri bottle i have drink and he was like a reconter to
#
surpass all that you just have story after story you'd keep telling me and he had one
#
disconcerting habit is that when he was talking to you he had to look at you so he's also driving
#
he's also looking at you i don't know how we um survived this but we did i'm here and mr sing
#
passed away but out of natural causes he is nothing related to it anyway so one such evening
#
we are going and a particularly animated story mr sing is telling me looking at me and all of
#
a sudden there's is there's a road crossing and there's another vehicle that's coming and
#
he doesn't and mr sing is like driving without any you know he's full speed and then somebody
#
in the back of the car squawks and then he realizes and he presses the brake and there's
#
like one screech of tires and everything and the car stops in just in time so there's no collision
#
almost hit the guy yeah but that guy shat right so he is he is he's you know he just gets down he's
#
he doesn't know what to do he's just scared out of his wits so he starts shouting at mr sing
#
yeah i was not seeing otherwise i wouldn't have all this wouldn't have happened i was talking to
#
this guy i'm sorry so what if he had banged into me but he said i didn't bang it to you
#
he says but i did not then this guy's you know his anger is even more he says what if he had so he
#
says okay he went into the car he sort of reversed it a little bit to give a little sort of
#
run-up and then banged into the other guy's car he says
#
yeah he was so now you can be now you can be less stressed stressed about it right he just took
#
off so for some reason hypotheticals are hard yeah now it has happened now what is the lesson
#
so the lesson is if you're accused of something just fucking do it no yeah just do it just do it
#
as a yeah just do it as a lesson i i really don't know this is not a good there are lessons yeah
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there is a shakespeare quote right i think king lear or something there are sermons in stones
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there are books in running brooks and there are lessons linkedin lessons in narayan nashanai's
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stories sounds exactly like the kind of thing sir shakespeare would write yes all right so on that
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note i have taken so much of your time and it is time for ashok to also think of heading for the
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airport yes but you know any final recommendations in terms of i mean we met recently and we gave
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recommendations but anything good you've read recently that you like to share read listen to
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heard or something you haven't recommended before i was thinking about
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so i did kind of enjoy this and a recent sci-fi series on netflix is british series i hope
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i can i can forget its name but it's a think of it as a a more comprehensible version of dark
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it's a it's a time twist thing involving time machines and it's been very nicely done i think
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people can just google for these description or ask chat gpt if you will but it is it's really
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entertaining it was on netflix and it's a very nice little time paradox loop that was far more
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easier to understand than dark so the funny thing about dark was i'd seen season one and then it
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took them a while to make season two and all that right and then i then season three came i said i
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forgot on what season one and two were so let me see a youtube summary of what happened in season
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one and two so that i can watch season three and i didn't understand youtube summary of season
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i was wondering whether there's a explanation of the youtube summary of dark
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that i could understand yeah and so that in that sense i think it was uh i think it was called
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bodies yeah that's the name of the series bodies it's very nicely done it was enjoyable so i
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i'm not a lad for the movies but you're not a lad yeah but gautam forces me to watch movies
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whenever he can get hold of me so he made me watch this movie called the darkest hour
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it's about uh vincent churchill him getting appointed as prime minister in the middle of
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the war like just when the war was starting in the face of opposite opposition from chamberlain
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and this count why count whoever halifax whoever that guy is and you know it it paints uh it gives
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it gives a very good you know snapshot or you know idea of what you know because we we we like to
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judge people in hindsight and it's it's uh it shows how hard decisions are when you take them
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in real time so churchill is saying that we should wage war against the maniac hitler and
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chamberlain is saying that we should actually sue for peace and churchill knows that it will
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be a mistake he says we are negotiating from a place but they have an equally valid point
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they're saying the war will kill like hundreds and thousands of innocent people from our side
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and send people out to die yeah and then he takes churchill finally takes his
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you know his own decision but it's beautiful and also the fact that you're ultimately only
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going to be judged by the outcome of the war yes and very differently so right now all the
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deaths you cast on your side will be forgiven because now that you won the war otherwise it's
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my recommendation to connect with this would be andrew roberts's biography of churchill which
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is about a million words magisterial masterful you actually get the sense that at that particular
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moment in time churchill was you know driven by this um you know it was a moral force he
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recognized what hitler was he recognized the threat to uh western civilization enlightenment
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values and it's just an incredible book and i think churchill gets a lot of like a man who
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contains great multitudes you know and uh he's often uh it's almost become dogmatic among a
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certain section of people that he caused the death of so many bengalis in the bengal famine
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it's more complicated it's it's not only more complicated than that it is actually completely
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false like at one point i thought i'll do an episode and invite the writer of the book where
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these allegations were fleshed out but first i thought the british cabinet papers and whatever
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some of the sources are in the public domain let them look it up and i realized it completely
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cherry picked everything uh based on that agenda that on netnet uh you know churchill had actually
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probably saved more bengali lives than it cost you know roberts's book has great details of all
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the deliberations and the details that kind of went in and cherry you cherry pick details they can
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look anyway that's the story you want to tell the problem with political leaders especially at very
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high levels of position is that they do so many things one is that we probably overestimate the
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impact they have on very day-to-day decisions that get made at a you know at a micro level
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the second thing we often do is that we then cherry pick also the things that we disagree
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with and then ignore all the good stuff they may have done for others and so on and and i think
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it's always complicated and on that note i do want to make give one ai recommendation because
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obviously we're in the area quickly complete i'll link in the article to uh in the show notes to
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amartya sen's critique zarid masani's critique of the book in question yes so it's worth reading
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all of that has become a dogma among a certain section of people that oh churchill did this and
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committed war crimes like he personally like he freaking didn't yes yes that's not how it was
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it's more complicated i mean it's one thing to say colonial policies over a 200 year period
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resulted in but then you have well right but then you know putting individuals and then comparing
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that with the output of an entire colonial regime no and the thing is a he was racist he said racist
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things about gandhi but b he uh his principles also came into play like when jalyan wala bagh
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happened he was furious he wanted general dyer hauled up and prosecuted and he was furious and
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he thought it was a crime on humanity so extremely complex man and sort of worth reading but again i
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see the the which is why i wanted to sort of make a in this era right given that now people
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you can now go to chat gpt and say explain why churchill cost the deaths of millions of bengalis
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it will happily serve you and give you reasons why he did that and if you frame the question
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it won't answer explain why churchill is not the single most important reason for this and it will
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give you reasons for that right and this is going to be a problem as we kind of go forward because
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it can confirm to whatever biases right llms are storytellers not fact tellers see so along these
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lines right i think a related thing i want to recommend to people is to start looking at and i
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want to promote just one tool but right now i've been using this tool called perplexity which is a
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ai tool built on top of you know gpt and other large language models their selling point their
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sort of usb is the fact that they add a layer of curation where they look at what they call verified
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sources the science papers published papers and so on right and so what they do is that they take
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your query with all its biases and bad phrasing and everything else and because they add these
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verified sources the ai is actually able to more confidently push back against you and say no you
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got that wrong which is something that gpt never does because it always wants to make you happy
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and so it was interesting because i asked perplexity when i asked chat gpt explain how
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churchill caused the deaths of people it happily gave me five points how churchill caused the
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death of right you can go real off make a linkedin post about it right and give me five reasons why
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churchill did not cause and then give you five points perplexity when i said explain how churchill
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caused the deaths etc it basically said that that's a very common misconception this is a it's widely
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held in some beliefs but it's not borne out by the facts and here are some excellent reasons and
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recommends recommendations of scholarly articles and so on that you can check out so i was like
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very pleasantly who you asked this very question yes and perplexity actually gave me that this
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answer that i said yes i'm so impressed yeah so i was i was very impressed and i said yeah now i'm
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going to use that as a assistant tool to to fact check my own biases yeah because actually
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unfortunately gpt will not fact check your biases it just confirmed you know i have had another
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revelation what you just said about gpt that it always wants to please you yeah gpt is like a
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fucking demented dog remember the dog cat this gpt is a dog perplexity is a cat it's a mix of
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a cat i don't know what it is maybe it won't help you actually yeah yeah and of course kora is the
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organ grinder's monkey ugly hairy and full of shit yeah on that note but be please sort of be
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be wary of i would urge people to sort of be wary of these biases and always think for themselves
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don't adopt a belief because their tribe has it yeah do not be tribal and i also understand
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this is hard it is hard to read widely and synthesize and don't take a hard position
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on something you don't entirely understand yeah one of the things that kanaman says that even he
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he knows he studied all these biases to kingdom come and he still falls for them yeah absolutely
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yeah it's human nature exactly yeah yeah and i heard you say his subsequent books on focusing
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on how to design systems that can account for this is actually very insightful like noise yeah
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like noise and all of that right yeah excellent guys thank you so much uh you know a few months
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ago we discussed we were recording in chennai and i will let my listeners know that ashok kindly
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said that hey i keep coming to bombay and we'll let's do another episode and both narin and i
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obviously you know who can say who can say no to such an offer and you actually came down just
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for this i'm like really uh delighted happy this was so much fun and we must keep doing it at
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least once a year yeah we must yeah we must do it so thank you so much it's been such a great
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honor for me and the wonderful way to end the year and for the listener a wonderful way to
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begin the year yes so thank you so yeah thanks it was great fun super
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if you enjoyed listening to this episode share it with everyone to whom you want to bring joy
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check out the show notes enter rabbit holes at will you can follow ashok on twitter at
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krish ashok you can follow narin on twitter at chennai and you can follow me at amit varma
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amit varma you can browse past episodes of the scene and the unseen at scene unseen dot in
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have a great year have a great life did you enjoy this episode of the scene and the unseen
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