#
My guest today and a few other guests before him have spoken highly of a book by John Berger
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called Ways of Seeing and if I may borrow that title, that's exactly what I've expanded
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through the many conversations I've had on this show, Ways of Seeing.
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I've learned new ways of looking at my country, my society, my culture, our times, our cities
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and I've also learned to look at myself differently.
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Many listeners, I'm quite sure, would say that the first episode I recorded with Amitavakumar,
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episode 265, did exactly that for them.
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That's an episode I know means a lot to many of my writing students and to many of my listeners
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Among other things, it taught us the importance of journaling and how by journaling, one can
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not just learn more about the world but also about oneself.
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We can shape ourselves through our writing.
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Well, when we last recorded, Amitavakumar had just come out with the blue book which
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I love and keep gifting to people and now he's come out with the yellow book.
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So of course, I took the chance to call him on the show again, Ways of Talking.
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I will warn you though, that Amitavakumar inflicted immense cruelty on all of you during
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He insisted on spending half of it asking me questions and because he's a friend, I
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Personally, I think that's half an episode wasted because I think you'd all agree that
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we could just listen to Amitavakumar forever.
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But the first half is all him, it's great, maza aagaya and then right towards the end,
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I get him to recite some of his poetry in both Hindi and English.
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So do listen but first, let's take a quick break.
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Amitavakumar, welcome to The Scene in the Unseen.
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All right, great to see you, great to talk to you again, boss.
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Yeah, I should actually be saying welcome back because it's been a couple of years since
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we last recorded and that was such a delightful episode, a big favorite of my writing students
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as well who kind of keep talking about it.
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Well, I have to tell you, whether you believe it or not, I have not gone to a single literary
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festival or done any reading without at least one person coming up and saying, I heard you
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on Amitavarma's Scene in the Unseen, though, you know, please send me your address so that
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I can start sending you royalty money, etc. every month.
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As I said to you once, a friend of mine proposed that I should buy you a flat in Bombay.
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A flat in Bombay will be more welcome than an author's humble royalty money, but
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yeh humare jaisu satra fele hoye hain.
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You know, as we were setting this recording up yesterday, you told me rather alarmingly
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for me that it has snowed really heavily and the snow is on all the power lines and inshallah
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we will be able to record and indeed, thank goodness we are.
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But when you mentioned snow, I was reminded of this incident that happened in this recent
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web series I was watching, which is the British version of Volander, which is of course based
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on Henning Manckel's great books with Carl Volander and the British version stars Kenneth
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Brenag and it's brilliant, Brenag is just remarkable in it, one of the great acting
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performances ever all through the series.
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In the particular episode which is based on the White Lioness, you know, our lead character
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is in South Africa and there is a young man there who is soon going to die and you kind
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of know that this guy is going to die, he's been caught up in a crime, almost a victim
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as it were, and at one point he is imploring Volander that, you know, take me back to Sweden
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with you, I want to come back to Sweden with you.
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I have heard that there is snow there, I have never seen snow, I want to see snow.
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I just thought that was so beautiful and moving for me even though it was almost kind of sort
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of matter of fact and then when you mentioned snow, I said, yeah, you know, coming to think
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of it, Amitabh would not have seen snow till he was an adult perhaps.
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So I want to ask you about snow and also in your beautiful book, the yellow book, there
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is a section at the end, I found the section at the end about your father very moving and
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At one point you mentioned that he had told you that the first time in his life that he
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saw a light bulb was when he was 8 or 10 years old and again I think that all of this we
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take for granted that you, he may take, you know, you may take electricity for granted,
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you today may take snow for granted but the first time it happens there must be this sense
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of wonder and this joy and all of that.
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So I want to ask you not just about snow but about that sense of wonder and you know, does
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Does it require intentionality to continue to notice things with that sort of freshness?
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Let me begin because you welcome all kinds of, I'll read to you a small poem which is
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whose title is Barf Girne Se Pehle but I'll first read the English version which is what
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I first wrote it in Hindi and then I translated it into English before the storm.
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This morning my wife said to me that the Central Hudson Electric Company without telling us
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had cut down three trees in our backyard.
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I was writing an essay about an artist who had seen as a child her mother cutting out
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her own face from all the family photographs.
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I looked out of the window and then at my wife, how easy would living become if it was
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Any readers or listeners who do not have Hindi please forgive us but this is the Hindi version
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I wrote it in Hindi and then I translated it into Hindi and then I translated it into
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Hindi and then I translated it into Hindi and then I translated it into Hindi and then
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I translated it into Hindi and then I translated it into Hindi and then I translated it into
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Hindi and then I translated it into Hindi and then I translated it into Hindi and then
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I translated it into Hindi and then I translated it into Hindi and then I translated it into
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Hindi and then I translated it into Hindi and then I translated it into Hindi and then
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I translated it into Hindi and then I translated it into Hindi and then I translated it into
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Hindi and then I translated it into Hindi and then I translated it into Hindi and then
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I translated it into Hindi and then I translated it into Hindi and then I translated it into
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Hindi and then I translated it into Hindi and then I translated it into Hindi and then
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I translated it into Hindi and then on I translated it into Hindi but then I translated it into
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Bombay and I wrote about her in a lecture.
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Talking of snow, there is a wonderful essay in Grantha by the Polish writer, Richard Kapuchinsky.
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He is in Ghana and at night because his tyre has had repeated punctures, they have stopped
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There is no electricity.
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In the light of the fire, what the people want to know is, what is snow?
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And then they want to know other things about colonies and whiteness.
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But when he is trying to get to sleep in the night, he has this lovely line, paragraph,
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suddenly I felt shame, some sort of shortcoming, a sense of having missed the mark.
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What I had described was not my country.
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Now snow and the lack of colonies, that's accurate at least.
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But it is nothing, nothing of what we know, of what we carry around within ourselves without
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Nothing of our pride and despair, of our life, nothing of what we breathe, of our death.
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Yani ki aap se koi puche, mose koi puche, what is snow?
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Aur mai jawab doon, let's say in my village in Champaran, or alternatively, I come here
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and someone says, yaar, har ki body, what do Hindus do in, you know, beside the Ganges?
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Aur mai jo explain karu, will I have said much?
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I would have said something.
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But would I have caught the wonder and the shame of something, you know?
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That is what this writer is getting at.
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And what I want to say to you then is, ki mujhe Kapuchinsky ki tarah, hamsha lagta hai
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ki yaar, mai kya keh rahe hoon?
#
You know, jaise, I have a line somewhere in passport photos where a distant cousin of
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mine in my village asks, ki tell me about your life there, he is asking about America
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and I say, unable to say anything, I say, abhi aija din banu, aija abhi raat ba, mani
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ki, you know, right now it is 3 p.m. in the day here, but there it is night.
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And he said, oh my God, toh toh toh ala na malhaun alaag duniya bata hoon.
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For him it was an idea that there is something entirely far away.
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Well, I have a novel coming out in February here and in Maine, India.
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And my protagonist has come to Berkeley on a full bright, he is from a village in India,
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just like my father was.
#
And one of his students at Berkeley shows him a photograph from Kumbh Mela of a priest
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pulling a car with a rope tied to his penis.
#
And the guy, you might have seen some of these photos which appear not necessarily of priests
#
pulling, you know, a sadhu, you know, a naga or something, but you have seen various feats
#
The student with a smirk says, hey, professor, is this true?
#
And the professor thinks to himself, isn't it even stranger, though, that I, who did
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not see an electric bulb till I was 8, and I had to go out into the fields to shit.
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Isn't it an even greater wonder that this cheeky boy and I are meeting here in Berkeley,
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where Jaiprakash Narayan had come as a young man, or where Sikhs came a hundred years ago
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Isn't it more strange if we think of all the things, this encounter, than the simple
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fact of some priest pulling a car with his penis?
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Let me end my long lecture on wonder right there.
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No, that's a delightful lecture with his delightful allusions and digressions.
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But what was it like the first time you saw snow?
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Or the first time you flew a plane, you know?
#
Yes, both things I'll tell you.
#
I remember I was a graduate student.
#
I had newly arrived in the country.
#
Maybe two, three months had passed.
#
I had discovered things like yogurt in a plastic bowl that you could buy
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and that had fruit at the bottom.
#
It filled me with excitement, these small things.
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I had been taken to an apple orchard by a woman I liked in my class.
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But there was another classmate of mine, and this also was a woman,
#
and I was walking beside her when the flurries started coming down.
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And it seemed like a scene from, you know, I felt I was already inhabiting a movie I had seen
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or something, and I began to slowly whirl around her and I stuck my tongue out so that
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I could catch it on my tongue.
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First time I flew on the plane was to come to this country as a graduate student.
#
I had never flown before in my life, and they offloaded me and sent me to Bombay.
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They had given too many passengers that they had given seats to.
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And so I kept saying to people who seemed to be in a hurry,
#
yes, please go ahead, please go ahead.
#
And then I was left behind, and they sent me to Bombay.
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And when they put me on the plane, because they had delayed my flight
#
and sent me for another day and all that, they put me in business class.
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And the woman came down, and I thought, I was very nervous.
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And the woman, the flight attendant said, what would you like to drink?
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I had never drunk champagne before.
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I said, champagne, please.
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But my manners or what I was doing or how I was clueless must have given me away.
#
Because the Frenchman, an old elegant man next to me,
#
he said, how come you're traveling in business class?
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So that was my first experience.
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I liked it, I liked it very much.
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The taste has never gone away.
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When was the last time something new happened to you,
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like your first time with snow or your first time flying?
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In the sense that last night, I was listening to you talking to Ram Guha
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and then Danish Hussain on your podcast and I was shoveling snow outside
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because the snow was falling a foot and a half of snow had fallen
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and I was expecting a guest.
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That was the first time.
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You know what I'm saying.
#
But I'm thinking you are asking a slightly different question.
#
Well, this summer, I went on a trip in India.
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Visiting towns along the length of the Ganga.
#
What had happened was that in March, my father died
#
and so I had felt that during the rituals, I had followed them
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but they seemed a little distant.
#
So I thought, okay, let me return to that site.
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But instead of just going to Varanasi where we had cremated him,
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I thought, let me start from the place where it becomes Ganga.
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So that is Devprayag in Uttarakhand.
#
So I went there, Delhi to Haridwar, Haridwar to Devprayag and then I went down.
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So being in places like Joshimath or Auli
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and then coming down to the plains to Allahabad, for example,
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where I stayed with a former student's family and then Banaras.
#
All of that was new, you know.
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So there was a sense of discovery.
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I made drawings and I took notes
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and hopefully from what I wrote, I'll do.
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You know, I started a sub stack that was new about that journey.
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And so all of that, am I getting to what you were asking?
#
Yeah, yeah, no, no, absolutely you are.
#
So there is, you know, in our last episode,
#
you know, we had spoken about that moving passage from Rahim Azum Raza's Adha Gaon
#
where, you know, he talks about this character talks about,
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you know, how quote, on the battlefield when death came very near,
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I certainly remembered Allah, but instead of Mecca or Karbala, I remembered Gangauli.
#
And I have quoted this to many of my guests in future episodes
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and asked them all the same question, where is your Gangauli?
#
And I've got interesting answers from everyone,
#
but there is one in particular that I remember from Max Rodenbeck,
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who was editor of The Economist in India.
#
And he had grown up in Cairo and he said, my Gangauli is Cairo,
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but it is not the Cairo of today.
#
It is a Cairo of my childhood and that Cairo no longer exists.
#
And you mentioned your dad, which is this beautiful passage in the yellow book where you write,
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quote, when my father was gone, a large part of my past would disappear.
#
Like one of those videos you see of landslides,
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an entire cliff with a winding road and cars disappearing into the swirling river.
#
It wasn't land or property that I was thinking about.
#
I was thinking about my parents,
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my mother who had come to this village as a young bride,
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and my father who had brought me today to the place where he had been born.
#
It was a people who had made my past who would soon be gone.
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And I want to ask you today, you know,
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to come a full circle and ask you about your Gangauli because
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I feel that this passage sort of, you know, adds a layer to it
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that perhaps when you lose your parents,
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and I think I felt it very strongly as well,
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that you lose that sense of home a little bit because it is so much embedded
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in your past and in the people who have inhabited those times with you.
#
Yeah, by the way, I'm very glad you asked that question.
#
In many ways, in your podcasts, you ask your guests to return
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to their origins, to where things started, you know,
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and I have also been intrigued by their responses.
#
How, for example, Ram Guha, talking about what I was listening to last night,
#
Ram Guha says his Gangauli is, you know, Dehradun
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and the forest that drew him back to his first work.
#
And then Danish complicated it by saying,
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by saying something which, you know, Danish is a friend of mine and I respect him.
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I totally disagreed with his response because he said
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when he was best poised to answer that question,
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he should have said to you, Gangauli is my Gangauli,
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because his village is just a little distance away.
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And if I'm not mistaken, Rahim Masoom Raza is also a relative of his.
#
In any case, and Danish represents none of your other guests
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are as close to that Gangauli as Danish was.
#
But that is the point, even what is in front of you,
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you sometimes do not recognize.
#
In all these digressions, I have forgotten what you were asking.
#
I had a feeling, I'm still, you know, even as I was,
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when I told you on our last episode,
#
when my parents took me to our village when I was a child,
#
I would try to draw images of what I saw on the Ganga, for example.
#
It looked very beautiful to me or when I reached the village,
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I would think, you know, these fields, I should be able to draw them.
#
They're so beautiful and I was never was, it never worked for me.
#
And maybe it was December or January when I went with my father,
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I was drawing it, I thought, I was drawing it,
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I was thinking, I felt I was approaching a reality I recognized.
#
And at the same time, I was so conscious that he would die soon.
#
And that's what happened three months later.
#
So at the very moment where I felt most closest to the village,
#
I was also very conscious of how close I was to losing it,
#
to losing my most vital connection to it, which was, of course, my father.
#
So that is the real point I want to say to you,
#
that it's not that you slowly lose a connection,
#
but maybe it is at the point where you are,
#
when you feel that you finally have some intimacy,
#
that something then breaks away, you know, and now it's gone.
#
I really don't think, I really don't think I will have that connection anymore.
#
I think about how sometimes our relationship
#
to things that seem very real and very solid and will last longer than us
#
is actually really frail and hangs by a thread.
#
Like I was discussing with a friend a while back about
#
cities and the cities that we have lived in.
#
And I thought that, okay, I have been in Bombay since 1995,
#
but how much of the city have I really inhabited,
#
in the sense that my city is really, I spend a lot of time in my room,
#
I might go out for a walk sometimes, I might go to a cafe,
#
I might meet a friend, and that tiny sliver,
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that superficial little layer of life that I carry with me
#
and which is around me is my city and nothing else is,
#
and I don't really know the city at all.
#
And I am not really off here.
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And nobody is really off here in that sense.
#
Everybody is in this like, this individual kind of imagined city
#
that they carry with them that, you know,
#
they can superimpose on the real one and it kind of seems to fit,
#
but it seems to fit until it doesn't.
#
And what you said about your sort of father's village
#
and losing that connection when you lost him,
#
also brought alive to me the frailness of these sort of connections,
#
that do you have a connection to that place anymore outside of memory?
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And do I really have a connection to this place
#
that is any deeper than to someone who may never have lived here?
#
What are your thoughts?
#
Please, please, please.
#
This poem is called Cold Spring.
#
Now, when I take the train from here to New York,
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I pass a place called Cold Spring.
#
So first, I will read in Hindi.
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Cold Spring is the name of a railway station.
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Although, it can also be called a cold ring.
#
Maybe it is known as Vidya Balan, Alia Bhatt.
#
Alia's favorite drink will be called Chill.
#
When my train stops in Cold Spring for two minutes,
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I always look outside to see if my friend Kiran is standing on the platform or not.
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I have passed from there hundreds of times.
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I had met Kiran only once, but now it has become Kiran's station.
#
Let's say that the station has changed its name.
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A small city on the banks of the Hudson River,
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Kiran, where you can drink tea during the winter.
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Now, the English translation.
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This Kiran, by the way, is Kiran Dasai.
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Her mother, Anita Dasai, has a house, a home there, and they lived there.
#
Cold Spring is the name of a train station.
#
Even though, it could also be the name of a cold drink.
#
Maybe Vidya Balan would appear in its ad, but not Alia Bhatt.
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Alia's drink of choice would be called Chill.
#
My train stops at Cold Spring for two minutes,
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and I glance outside each time to see if my friend Kiran is standing on the platform.
#
I have passed that place hundreds of times.
#
Only once did I find Kiran, but that station is now hers.
#
The station's name has changed to Kiran.
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A small town on the Hudson River.
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A place to get a cup of tea on cold days.
#
What's my relationship to her?
#
So your question was...
#
Your question was, what is my relationship to her?
#
I teach a course called Writing About Cities.
#
So you might want to know what books I teach or something.
#
So let me do a quick exegesis there, which is the last time I taught it, it started with...
#
At Grand Central Station, I sat down and wept by Elizabeth Smart.
#
I certainly had my friend Teju Koh's Open City in it,
#
KT Keetha Mura's Intimacies,
#
a book about Harlem, various pieces by all kinds of people.
#
Hanif Qureshi goes to Bradford.
#
A little section by Salman Rushdie on London.
#
We have Naipaul writing about coming to Earl's Court as a new migrant.
#
So, for me, or Suketu Mehta's wonderful piece about Bombay which had first been published
#
in Grantham and then made it into Maximum City.
#
So Sam Sullivan's Lonely Londoner Sky Extract, where these early migrants,
#
working-class migrants from the West Indies describe a chairing cross and other places.
#
So my relationship to place now is an evocation in literature of various places and my thinking
#
how other cities or other towns live within these larger places.
#
If someone steps into the polluted Yamuna holding a little straw,
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it is called soup in Hindi,
#
and on the soup, there will be a coconut and a banana and a little Diya burning etc.
#
in the cold chill of November and she offers it to the sun during Chhath Pooja.
#
That is a little bit of a village from Bihar still living in Delhi.
#
And that is the thing that catches me always.
#
A small rough field in this town that I live in, Poughkeepsie,
#
where West Indian cricketers play cricket.
#
So that is my idea of the city, these other histories, other pasts,
#
other places surviving in what is a larger place.
#
We should just take a pause for a second to tell your listeners that
#
you have always asked questions of your interviewees and before they get all bored
#
out of their minds listening to me, I should tell them that it is certainly my plan today
#
to ask you questions and we will make discoveries that will be new to them.
#
So that should be what we keep as a hook for people to keep listening.
#
You are right that you are not warning my listeners, you are warning me.
#
I am absolutely kind of terrified.
#
So here is my next question, in your extremely moving section about your father and your book,
#
you also speak about your own worries that when you forget a name or you forget something,
#
you wonder, am I getting dementia, am I getting Alzheimer's?
#
My father of course went through that through his last year.
#
In your father's case also, you speak about how somebody who was always so crisp in his memory
#
in terms of numbers and events and all that was getting confused about
#
birth dates of family and so on and so forth and all of that.
#
And I have really two questions here and the first of those is sort of a question about memory
#
because and I think this subject kind of this question first came up in an episode I did with
#
Luke Burgess whose father went through a similar thing where he just forgot everything by the end
#
of it and then I wonder what is a self, you know, like everything that is core to my sense of self
#
is contingent on my memory and I feel that if the memory vanishes and the person vanishes and what
#
is left is really an accident of nature and some nurture, you're then flesh and bones, you're kind
#
of an animal in a sense which is sort of a very bleak outlook but I kind of sometimes I will also
#
forget things, I'll get very absent-minded and the same thought will come to my head and this
#
actually ties into the second question so I'll ask it anyway which is a question about the passing
#
of time, you know, you're 60 now, you know, when one is young time stretches out ahead of you it
#
seems that, you know, somebody who is 40 is like an old man and so on and so forth and, you know,
#
was there a period of time where you had to recalibrate this in your own head, you know,
#
where you had to come to terms with growing older, maybe not being able to do all the things you
#
wanted to do in your life, you know, impending mortality and of course, you know, every time
#
you forget something it becomes a reminder of this. Yeah, what is the self? Yeah, I always think that
#
I'm very alert to paradoxes or contradictions
#
and so I'm alive to the point that, to the simple point, that those people who record
#
how their memory is being lost and some have done this are perhaps most alive to memories,
#
you know, because they cherish them so much, you know, and they, so what I'm saying is the self
#
the self that remembers is indeed an important self but so is the self that feels the self
#
slipping away and tries desperately to record something or to preserve something, you know,
#
and therefore I cherish very much stories, there is a story by Alice Monroe called The Bear Came
#
Over the Mountain. That's my favorite short story of all time. Oh my god, that's very, very good,
#
very good, very good, we have the same page then. All the twists and turns of what happens
#
as you're losing memory and in the story as you'll remember someone who has lost her memory also
#
finds love for a while because they have forgotten, they have erased the past love and now
#
two people who have lost their memory discover love in each other and then something else happens
#
and then another memory clicks into place. It's amazing, so I'm very alert to the shifting sands
#
of time. You also asked me, apart from that vanishing self, there was a second part
#
about time, about coming to terms with the passing of time. Yes, well as you will have noticed and
#
you had stopped, you had talked about it last time also and maybe because you had double clicked on it,
#
I titled a chapter, the opening chapter here, How to Stop Time. I think journaling is a way to stop
#
time. To do art is to stop time and what do we mean by that? What we mean by that is not to preserve
#
time in a number but simply to prevent it being all a blur, you know. So for example my rules here,
#
how to stop time? You must keep a journal. Two, don't just keep a daily journal, make marks in
#
your journal all the time, return to what you once enjoyed. Four, be alert to the passing seasons,
#
time cannot be stopped of course but it can be lived more fully and by which I mean I just
#
I love drawing the spring when the, you know, today I'll try to draw the snow maybe but
#
when spring comes, I love drawing the cherry blossoms on my street and all of these are
#
suggestions on what we must do even when it's a time of
#
crisis. There is a great line which I hope I can find about which I've offered here. Yes, here it is
#
from Maxine Hong Kingston. It's in rule five in How to Stop Time. She says,
#
in a time of destruction, create something, a poem, a parade, a community, a school, a vow,
#
a moral principle, one peaceful moment. I've been asked by friends to say something or to provide
#
a statement on a particular forum appealing for peace in Gaza and I have not done so far,
#
not because I'm not utterly committed to the idea of peace, I am, but I did not know what I would
#
say that would be different from what so many others had said. So yesterday was the first time
#
that I did my first painting for that, you know, for the issue of peace. I mention this because I
#
want to say that following Maxine Hong Kingston's dictum, I want in a time of destruction to create
#
something, to stop time, to mark time, but it cannot be just anything also. It should come from
#
some valued introspection and to think about what indeed only I can say.
#
Of being an artist. So I've started doing a series. It's called An Olive Branch.
#
You quote Virginia Woolf in the yellow book where she writes,
#
I must try to set aside half an hour in some part of my day and consecrate it to diary writing,
#
give it a name and a place and then perhaps such as a human mind, I shall come to think of it as a
#
duty and disregard other duties for it. And in our last episode, of course, we'd spoken and I know
#
that this was influential for many of my writing students. We'd spoken about how journaling can
#
shape the self, how it's not just about recording the world, but you're creating yourself in a sense
#
by writing every day. The you that writes every day for five years will be a different you from
#
you that doesn't. So it has that kind of an impact. Now you've written more about journaling in the
#
yellow book where, for example, you speak about how you have separate journals. It's not just one
#
journal. So one journal is just for free writing in the morning, 10, 15 minutes. Another journal
#
could be for the writing project you're working on. There is a file on your computer where you
#
record the day's main events, which you do at night. And the most important, you say, is a
#
daily planner where you note down how time is passing. Like you say, quote, I often write down
#
how a particular half hour was spent. More often what I mark is an hour or a longer chunk of time,
#
a long line, crossing out three hours or more if I have been teaching, stop, quote.
#
Give me a picture of your day through this particular kind of journal. And I have many
#
questions about journaling. I'll double click on different aspects of it, as it were. First of all,
#
I'm intrigued by this habit of, you know, like in yesterday or perhaps today. I mean,
#
today hasn't really unfolded fully for you. It's your morning. But yesterday, for example,
#
how many chunks were there? What did the diary look like? And how does it change the way you
#
think about your day? Does it then change your behavior where you are, in a sense,
#
being accountable to yourself for what you do with your time? Not necessarily working hard,
#
but I mean, even leisure can be a part of this. Yes, yes. I cannot stress enough for you
#
and also for your listeners how much my life has changed after I started doing a more detailed
#
journaling. By more detailed journaling means, at night I wrote, I went to Kalgaon,
#
now Mamaji took me on a boat. When we got off, I ate mutton and rice. Returned,
#
Ma was singing a song. Everything else was okay. You know, not that. Instead, 9am, this, or 9.30
#
had coffee. 10, 11, listened to music and wrote through 50 words. So that planner is a slightly,
#
is a much more bulky thing, which I could not take to India when I went for my father's funeral,
#
but otherwise it was a very faithful account. This year, I'm going, every week I have to travel
#
between my town and New York City where I have a fellowship. So I'm, but just for this year,
#
I bought a slightly, you know, so that I can record, not necessarily, I know, every half hour,
#
but just, so yesterday for example, well, I've been trying to do some yoga. So it records that
#
I did yoga. It records that I made breakfast for my son and for my wife. And then I went out to get
#
samosas from the Indian store. I started priming canvases, which means that you work on the canvas
#
to just put some color on it in order to make it more receptive to the more brighter or
#
heavier colors. And then it says that I was preparing for seen and unseen. And I did that
#
by reading a book, which you will hear about later, which where I thought, wow, this gets to the heart,
#
I think of what Amit has done or has succeeded in doing. And then it also records that I made two
#
watercolors for the olive branch series. Cool. But the two things that have changed much more
#
dramatically since the last time we talked is that one is, it is all, and both those things
#
have followed in some ways from the book I read around that time called Artist's Life. Is it called
#
Julia Cameron? Okay. And there she suggests that what we should do is do the morning pages,
#
which is what you talked about when you said free writing. And that allows you to just sit out and
#
write. My little change or variation on it is that I also do a drawing when I write in the morning,
#
just a quick sketch. Whatever I can see outside the window or in front of me,
#
it could be the banana I have peeled or my coffee cup, or it can be the tree outside loaded with
#
snow, which is what I did this morning. Now, the morning pages allows you to just free yourself,
#
free yourself, because you're putting down not just, you're not only allowing yourself to write
#
in an uncensored way, what you're really doing is also you're expressing everything that has
#
been a little bit repressed or has been engaging your subconscious. So it just comes out, some
#
things do, your anxieties, your dreams. And the other thing is that she talks about having
#
an artist's date every week, you know. And so that is something I do, which is how to carve out time
#
to do something nice for yourself, which feeds your creativity. Take a documentary,
#
anything. Now, so what I was saying was that it is not just the morning pages,
#
or for that matter, the artist's date that has been transformative. What has been really crucial
#
is that I have been able to, I have been determined to just note down what's happening from
#
often hour to hour. And that has produced a different consciousness of time,
#
a different kind of engagement. And I think it must have happened to you too, that sometimes
#
you have sat in front of, as I have done, let's say it's late night, and you have a moment.
#
And somehow, because you're on YouTube, you suddenly see Virender Sehwag batting in Melbourne,
#
you know, and you click on it. And that takes you to Sachin Tendulkar playing in Karachi,
#
or then something else. And then before you know it, an hour has passed. And that is fine,
#
that is fine. It happens now and then. But having this particular kind of journaling practice
#
doesn't allow your days to pass empty. And maybe I'm emphasizing, it seems,
#
productivity. But it is, I have to say, I wasted so many years of my youth
#
that I do cherish the time that remains and want to arrive at some aesthetic ideal that is mine,
#
you know, that feels ki bhiya, haan, yeh kaam mera hai. Just you know, I cannot read the
#
Hindi writer Vinod Kumar Shukla without thinking that this is Vinod Kumar Shukla.
#
No one else writes like Vinod Kumar Shukla. To us tera se this desire to find a language
#
which is my own, or an idiom that is characteristic, or a certain look in the sketches or the drawings
#
that is mine, I'm committed to that. And I think being committed to an idea of time passing,
#
or an engagement of time is a way to get to it. What comes closest to that ideal of yourself?
#
Well, I don't know whether you mean, for me, what comes closest is what I see others doing
#
in a way that articulates their personalities or their histories. J.M. Kudriya writing about
#
apartheid without always necessarily talking about apartheid seems to me a great thing,
#
you know, waiting for the barbarians doesn't once mention an apartheid regime, but you understand
#
the violence of the apartheid regime from what is portrayed. And I think, so artists like that,
#
you know, artists who, or the one example that is quoted in very early in the yellow book is that of
#
Werner Herzog, the German filmmaker who decides, who decides he's going to walk
#
from one city to the other, from Paris, I believe, he's going to walk from Germany to Paris, I can't
#
remember, because someone, a friend of his has called and said that their friend, their common
#
friend, Lotte Eisner, is seriously ill and is probably going to die, and he decides that if he
#
walks, then she will not die, she will live. And that happens, but that's not the point. The point
#
is to have that sort of an artistic vision and then the commitment to undertake travails and travel,
#
travel and travails. That's very striking to me. I want to use that story to take you in a different
#
direction. So the story, of course, is that Lotte Eisner is this legendary sort of artist who was a
#
great influence on a bunch of German filmmakers like Werner Herzog, like Wim Wenders, and circa
#
1974 Herzog got to know that she was really ill and she was expected to die, and he said, and you
#
quote him in your book, quote, I set off on the most direct route to Paris in full faith, believing
#
that she would stay alive if I came on foot, stop quote. And as it happens, he got there, she didn't
#
die. And eight years later, she just felt that her body was too frail, but she wasn't dying. And so
#
she told Herzog, quote, I am saturated with life. There is still the spell upon me that I must not
#
die. Can you lift it? Oh, my God. I didn't know this part. I did not know this part. That's amazing.
#
And eight days later, she was dead. And this was in the early 80s. And Wim Wenders dedicated his
#
great film Paris Texas to her. And my question to you is, who is your Lotte Eisner?
#
Wow. You have shaken me to the core there, because I immediately thought for some reason,
#
rightly or wrongly, of a woman I used to know 40 years ago, when I was young and she was young,
#
we were not lovers. But we saw each other in college. And I found maybe a year or so ago,
#
the letters I had written to her. No, there were only a few letters I had written to her,
#
because I don't know how I had them. Maybe I made copies. But there were the letters that she wrote
#
to me and from which I glimpsed what I had written to her. So last year, I wrote to her. I said 40
#
years later, she's a well known academic now, and a writer. I wrote 40 years later a letter.
#
And I thought one is, I said to her, we must ask ourselves, what did we know of love? What little
#
we knew of love? And how? I said, you have written books. I have written books. And she said,
#
I have followed from a distance your career. I have read your books. And I said, I have
#
listening right now to the talk you gave at blah, blah, blah. And
#
I thought we could ask ourselves what it meant to be green with youth
#
and not know what love is and not know what to do with each other, etc.
#
Or at least in my case, maybe she did, I didn't. So for some reason, when you asked that question,
#
I thought, ah, going back in time to find how stupid I was or how ignorant I was or simply,
#
more innocently, how young I was, would be one way to think about the Lotte Eisner.
#
But then when I think of how much these people owed to Lotte Eisner and I think of someone then
#
being someone who is older than you and someone who has taught you, who would it be? I mean,
#
last time you and I talked, we spoke about Janet Malcolm, for example. When all these women began
#
to divorce, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Janet Malcolm. It's a selfish thought, but I thought,
#
oh my God, I'm not going to meet, you know, Janet Malcolm now. Because Ian Jack, my old friend,
#
was a good friend of Janet Malcolm's. And when I used to see him in New York, I would say,
#
when are you going to take me to meet Janet Malcolm? And he would say, you should come,
#
you should come, but it never happened. You know what I'm saying? So all of those are my Lotte
#
Eisners, really. You know, in that city course that I told you about, writing about cities,
#
I feel Janaya in the Forest Hills is one of her, Janet Malcolm's account of her trial of her doctor
#
accused of killing of a woman, accused of killing her husband. I teach that and I always think,
#
I would have so many questions. I've learned so much from these people. My God. Yes, I would walk
#
from here to Paris if I could keep Janet Malcolm alive.
#
What are the things you would walk from here to Paris for?
#
The main thing I would walk is to write about what I would encounter. There are little details
#
in the Herzog story when he is walking. He breaks into a farmhouse or something
#
to find shelter for the night. He meets someone, he drinks milk, he observes the crows,
#
he writes about a road and a highway. I would not necessarily to keep someone alive though that is
#
a great goal. I would walk that route just so that I could write about it. You know,
#
what would happen? Think of the things that would happen. There would be the enormous problem of
#
the ocean in between, of course, and how to walk on water, which has not been attempted since Jesus,
#
I think. But apart from that, I mean, but yes, you know, walking a long distance. I mean,
#
that is the idea. Travel, travel, travel. This is for all your writer listeners. Travel is a way to
#
open so much. It leads to stories. It gives you ways to rediscover and reformulate yourself.
#
That is, you know, I mean, Pankaj Mishra's butter chicken in Lugana, for example,
#
and India through, you know, a trip through India's small towns is a great example that anyone should,
#
if I could, I would want to attempt.
#
Is travel particularly important because it forces you to get outside of yourself?
#
Otherwise, you're in your comfort zone, you're in your own head.
#
Say about it. It is. I always say to my students also,
#
let's say my students are on Instagram, I say to them, have you noticed that when you go to
#
a new town, new place, how many more pictures you take that day for Instagram than you would do
#
otherwise? It gives you new eyes. Also, so much especially among writers, writers in this age,
#
the engagement with the self can be a bit too much. If you travel, you are putting yourself
#
out into the world. You discover the richness of the world and that is a wonderful way
#
to really advance the boundaries of your thinking and of your thought and
#
how you define your selfhood.
#
You mentioned Paris and one book I love is Italo Calvino's A Hermit in Paris,
#
which is really an early blog. It's all like blog entries and it's a beautiful book.
#
I don't think it's in this book, but elsewhere he has these beautiful lines which
#
bring us back to the subject of journaling and writing every day and all of that.
#
It is only after you have come to know the surface of things that you can venture to
#
know what is underneath, but the surface of things is inexhaustible.
#
And just thinking aloud, it strikes me that the surface of things is in a sense a whole thing.
#
When a writer tries to go to what is beneath, you run the risk of losing yourself, but if you
#
engage with the surface hard enough, you will find everything. In a sense, the act of journaling
#
is perhaps, it seems to me, not to try too hard to find the interior, but just to stay on the
#
surface and then the interior will bubble up.
#
The idea should be to observe as faithfully as one can the surface, but always to attempt to
#
understand what is it about. One thing I have found useful is Vivian Gornick's distinction
#
between the situation and the story. What she means by that is the situation is,
#
let's say in an Elizabeth Bishop poem called The Waiting Room. A small child, a girl
#
who is maybe seven or eight years old is in the waiting room. Her aunt is inside
#
where the dentist is working on her teeth and she hears her aunt's cry of pain
#
and Vivian Gornick's point is that the situation is a girl in a waiting room, but the story,
#
the story is a young person's awareness of loneliness or of her separateness or of her
#
sense of the outer world outside. So,
#
observe the situation, observe the surface, but let that paragraph be followed by
#
a little observation that gets to, that summarizes what it is about. For example,
#
Naipaul going to India for the first time and observing what he sees as signs of chaos or filth
#
or underdevelopment, whatever it is, that is the surface. So, that is the situation,
#
but what is the story? The story is that of anxiety, is the situation of someone who is
#
an exiled, the child of the indentured migrants who has come back to the ancestral land,
#
who has expected richness and finds a poverty, a poverty embedded in his imagination, you know.
#
So, this movement, this movement of, yes, that, you know, how to be acute about the situation or
#
the surface, but also then how to underline it, to summarize it with that moment of insight,
#
that is it, that has to be done. That necessarily dialectic provides a sense of
#
dynamism to the pros. The most startling example I can think of is again from Vivienne Garnick,
#
where she describes a poet who has gone to the New York Pier to let his pet turtle,
#
who had become too big for the aquarium, he is going to throw it into the port.
#
And she says, this is, that is the situation, but the story, the story is this man's relationship
#
to women. And that's like, oh, you know, that little leap, you know, that's like,
#
if there are two electric points and the charge leaps from this point to this other point that
#
is distant from it, that leap is the real leap of the imagination. That is the link
#
that makes it vital. So, let there be the surface and then let it make that link with what is the
#
insight, what it is about.
#
The great Gekiga artist and storyteller Yoshihiro Tatsumi, you know, one of his short stories is
#
a similar kind of thing where the situation and the story are different and the situation is that
#
this guy has a pet monkey and he can't look after the pet monkey anymore. So,
#
he thinks he should go to the zoo where there is a pit where all the monkeys are and he should
#
kind of, you know, leave the monkey in its own habitat. And he thinks he's doing it a favor and
#
he throws the monkey in there. And of course, the monkey is slaughtered by the other monkeys
#
immediately in front of his eyes. And that is also such, you know, that is a situation,
#
but the story is also so powerful for which I will link Tatsumi's books from the show notes.
#
Oh, do so, do so. Yes, yes, yes. Oh my God.
#
I also want to ask you that, you know, I know your situation. What is your story and how has
#
your story evolved over time in the sense of how do you see yourself? You know, in an early essay,
#
you talk about reading Orwell's Why I Write and how he's, you know, telling a story about himself
#
at different points in time that the author entered the room and there was a hint of light
#
from the whatever. So, what has been your story for yourself? Because when we are young,
#
like when I look at myself and I was young, I would tell these stories about, oh, so much talent,
#
will write great books, etc, etc. And now those stories are completely pointless and I'm having to
#
construct an entirely different story in the ruins of that. What have been the core stories
#
that have sort of defined your life and defined yourself to you? I think you're being too harsh
#
on yourself and but we'll talk about that later. In terms of me, I often think, I often think,
#
you know, I often think that my real theme is failure and not failure on an individual level,
#
but failure in the sense that I think most people in the world, the truth of the human condition
#
is that most people in the world fail. We hear stories of success and we try, we gravitate
#
towards them maybe or celebrate them or they get sensationalized. But what is the general human
#
condition? I believe the general human condition is that of striving and failure.
#
Simple fact, most people in the world actually have never used a telephone.
#
So, I mean failure in a very loose sense, you know. Most people in the world actually cannot
#
take for granted what you and I take for granted. That sense of deprivation is something that
#
really, really engages me or I am, it is something that I'm bound to. Now,
#
against that failure is the sense of wanting to record it and that is also a part of
#
my story, which is the story of, if you see my books, in each book I feel and this might
#
be a limitation or it might be a strength, I don't know, in each book it is really
#
the desire and finally the ability to put things down on paper to record something
#
that is the story being told, really. You know, in my very first novel, for example,
#
there is a journalist, his brother is a criminal and at the end, having been asked by someone who
#
resembles Mahesh Bhatt to write a film script about a murder that has taken place in UP,
#
the journalist tries to write his own story and begins to imagine something. A train is coming
#
crossing a field and I feel that idea is that of, okay, so finally finding words
#
in which your own story can be told. My first non-fiction book Passport Photos is being able
#
to tell a story about yourself that the government does not want or cannot expect for you to tell
#
and so my story, my story, the situation can be whatever, a professor in US teaching or a writer
#
or a parent, but the story always has been that of at once a grasping of human failure
#
and the desire to say something about it or to record it, the struggle with it, against it,
#
whatever, on the page. Does that make sense? It makes a lot of sense, continue. But at a personal
#
level, like what would you daydream about at the age of 25? Do you daydream today? Did you daydream
#
then? You know, how do you see yourself? Who are you? I mean, I'm sure you would have answered
#
that question differently then and now. At 25, on the day I turned 25, I was a graduate student
#
going to deliver a paper in the US and I was at an airport and I asked myself,
#
I've turned 25, how many years will it be before I can write a book? Will I ever be a writer?
#
So I guess there was always the desire or at least at that age there was the desire to write
#
without the anxiety to write, the ambition to write, but never the secure knowledge that one
#
would be able to write. Do I daydream? By daydream you mean a sort of reflection or sort of
#
empty vague thinking about what one would like to do? Yes, I always have. I heard last night
#
Ram Guha saying to you that because you had quoted Ruku Narvani saying something about all the ideas
#
that Ram had about books and Ram says, yeah, it was full of energy and even now I have different
#
books in my head. Yeah, that's the same with me actually. You know, I think of two or three books
#
and whether I'll be able to write them, whether I'll be able to finish them, that is one's life.
#
In Husband of a Fanatic, you had this lovely para where you wrote,
#
As a young man talked, I was reminded of the writer and activist Sonia Jabbar's conversation
#
with an old Pandit woman in a camp in Delhi. The old woman had said to Jabbar that she would survive
#
Delhi's hot summers by sitting in front of the cheap coolers with her eyes shut. She told herself
#
that it was a cool Kashmiri rain and no drops of water from the fans of the cooler caressing
#
her face. What is your Kashmiri rain?
#
Actually, it's great to first of all be called back to these things that one might have one
#
wrote but I certainly had forgotten. I remember it now. You know, that woman is speaking from a
#
point of such exile. For me, Kashmiri rain is Lata Mangeshkar singing,
#
So that is it. That is it. You know, when I was young in Delhi studying in Hindu college
#
and then later at Delhi University, one of the small private pleasures I had was,
#
was a program on All India Radio. To be able to listen to those songs,
#
to listen to Mukesh or to listen to Lata or SD Bergman, I would often go for walks but I would
#
not, you know, those were the days when you didn't have phones like this which would play something.
#
But if I had a transistor, I would always make sure that I tuned in. I wouldn't be on a walk
#
but I would listen to that or I would pass by a pawn shop or sometimes walking on a road and
#
hearing a snatch of a Hindi song from the window of a passing truck or bus was a great delight to
#
me. I was very, very, very, very attached to these songs. I still am. So that is my Kashmiri rain,
#
those Hindi songs that call me back. I mean, my God! I don't know whether you know Sabrina Dhawan,
#
you should interview her. She wrote a monsoon wedding. My God! Every time, you know, I listen
#
to a song, you know, something that once again I just try to, you know, send it to her saying,
#
listen to this. And just the other day we had gone to watch a film in New York and then we sat in
#
Central Park and hum log ek dusre ko sirf Hindi gaana sunate rahe. You know, we would seek them
#
out on YouTube. I think I have a better taste than her but she has, she's a genius. She has great
#
memory. She remembers words and she can beat anyone in the world in Antakshari.
#
Tell me about the songs that mean the most to you. You just gave us a glimpse of one by Lata Ji.
#
Tell me about others. Well. And if you want, tell me about memories attached to them.
#
There is this, you know, this Madhyasam song, Ranjishi Sahi. I think, you know, I was trying,
#
I was playfully saying to my wife because she was angry with me about something. So I started
#
singing that and then I played Ali Sethi who had sung a wonderful version. Farida Khanam's.
#
So many songs. You know, many people, certainly I had an uncle who always dissed Mukesh
#
but I thought, Saranga Teri Yaad Mein was a great song, you know, in, in,
#
yaar, Gaurav Chintamani will give us a pause while I quickly look for a song which appears.
#
Yes. Yes, I have found it. Okay. So, Ramit, I told you I have a novel coming out called
#
My Beloved Life and early in the novel, my protagonist has gone for his college friend's
#
wedding and this is the 1950s. On the train, they are listening to Binaka Geet Mala
#
and one of his friends sings, Mohabbat Karlo, Ji Bharlo, Aji Kisne Roka Hai. Now these were songs
#
that were so lively, you know, there was really celebrations and I've always appreciated that
#
about these Hindi songs. They are calls to a communal living. They cannot be simply sung alone.
#
They have to be sung with friends or to be sung with one other person and that was true of Hindi
#
films, has been true of Hindi films as a major strain for the longest time. For example,
#
who is a left activist and publisher and writer and a dramatist in Delhi,
#
he once said to me that in old films, you'll see that the hero has gone to, let's say, a tea estate.
#
The song he sings is not just him singing. Actually, the workers also participate,
#
they also move their hands and it becomes a situation where it is always a social thing.
#
And that is wonderful about Hindi films. Now in this book, after getting drunk at this
#
wedding, my protagonist decides he should write a letter. But can he write a letter too?
#
The alcohol he has drunk, the songs he has heard has moved him immensely and he wants to share some
#
emotion with someone. So he writes to a girl in his village and he says, I thought of you just now
#
because we were listening to Binaka Geet Mala on the transistor radio and when I heard Lata Mangeshkar
#
singing, mera dil yeh pukaare aaja, mere gam ke sahare aaja, it struck me that it is likely that
#
the song was playing in our village too. Were you listening to the show on the radio tonight?
#
I want to believe that you were. These are the ways in which one misses home. My thoughts tonight
#
turn toward our village, my parents, my friends, in a way very different from how I usually feel
#
when I am in Patna. The whole world is the night around me. Home is the lamp burning in the distance.
#
Do you know what I mean? And then he says, I hope you are well and then ends with a flourish. Health
#
is wealth. But you get the point. These songs, I often think are things that are calling back,
#
calling me back to my deeply felt emotions. There's nostalgia there, but also a certain kind
#
of reckoning and sense of loss. Yeah, that's it. I just recorded an episode with Ranjit Hoskote,
#
which in fact comes out tomorrow, but obviously you haven't heard it yet because it's not out,
#
but in that Ranjit speaks about how one of the things that people don't realize about
#
Hindustani Classical is that the whole mahal at a Hindustani Classical concert was very different
#
from say a Western Classical. Western Classical you're supposed to sit with decorum and just
#
listen. Hindustani Classical there will be interruptions, performers will talk to the
#
audience, the audience will talk back. And today he laments that that is kind of changing and people
#
just sit and listen and it's become like a much more sort of static experience, my words. And I
#
wonder if what you say about our music being communal and in a sense the most exuberant
#
kind of performative stage for Hindi film music is the antakshari and that is the very definition
#
of communal. And one begins to wonder that one, if that communal sense is lost and b,
#
then does that change the kind of music that is being produced today?
#
Yeah, you know, when Ranjit Hoskote delivers his crystal, how shall I say, in his crystalline
#
language, whole paragraphs that seem to have been cast in marble in a communal display,
#
I always feel like saying, wow, wow, wow, and others join. So anyway, has it been lost? Well,
#
I haven't read this new book that has come out on Hindutva pop called H-Pop, but I'm curious about
#
it. The communal aspect has not been lost, it has been transformed, it has been perverted.
#
You can be in a Ramnami procession and a song will be playing and the communal display there
#
is where people can shout anti-Muslim slogans and dance in front of the masjid. So
#
the communal or the social has not entirely been lost, but it has been perverted, it has been
#
distorted. And I guess that, you know, one will often think, what is the way out? And I think when
#
we retreat and offer thoughts that can only be offered in sort of an individual seclusion,
#
then that is a response to it. You know, an artist, for example, sitting in her room,
#
writing a protest song, might be responding to it. And that's a genuine response.
#
Can there be a communal response? I mean, that is what a protest is.
#
When people take on the streets and speak in one voice, and I'm often guilty of
#
not joining in such protests because my greater commitment has been to sitting in a room
#
and fashioning something that can be used in a protest. So those are my thoughts on that matter.
#
You spent a lot of time in India in the last couple of years. You've written about it a lot
#
also in the yellow book. And give me a sense of, you know, your impressions in this time,
#
because now that you are also simultaneously journaling, I am guessing that there is a quality
#
in your noticing that is sort of enhanced. And also what happens is that when you go away and
#
you come back, you see things that a person who is constantly here does not see that is normalized
#
for people like me. So give me a sense of, you know, and in a sense, and what you have is you
#
have a series of snapshots or a series of films you visit, you see it and then you go away and
#
then you come back and everything is kind of stalker for you. Give me an impressionistic sense
#
of what it has been like over the last couple of years. Yeah, I don't know whether I have
#
mentioned to you, but for me, I started writing Husband of a Fanatic or that I went to Gujarat
#
up to the Gujarat riots because I was inspired by Haruki Murakami who had been in the US
#
when the SARS attack happened in the Tokyo subway. He thought he would go back and he
#
produced a book out of it. He would go back and talk to people. He would interview them.
#
He would do these long-scale interviews and then he would, it was his way of entering back into
#
the nation's life, you know, and I have felt a little bit of that as a necessity in more recent
#
times because of the, I mean, my most, my most visceral sense in the last few years of coming
#
back is how normalized, how easy it is, how accepted it is to be Islamophobic in ordinary
#
conversations. That is, that has been very, very, very apparent to me, you know. Someone,
#
you know, like anyone from, someone I try to interview, let's say outside of Mandir or outside
#
of Masjid or talk within my own family, some, you know, some remark. Now, some people must,
#
in my family, must be aware, for example, that I'm married to a Muslim, but somehow even that is
#
forgotten and someone will say things so routinely that it just strikes me as, wow. So that has been
#
a major change. The extreme polarization that is evident, one part of the country
#
believing that what is happening is wrong, one part of the country believing that what is happening
#
is utterly right amazes me. I'm trying to talk to people, I have been, and it always amazes me that
#
people who have suffered the most under certain policies, for example, demonetization or the
#
lockdown, still think that, well, if the state has done it, that is another, you know, in this,
#
I've mentioned now this book a couple of times, My Beloved Life. In My Beloved Life, I've discussed
#
a video I had seen during the lockdown, during, yes, the lockdown, but during actually the second
#
wave, a woman says that she was in Lucknow, I believe, a young woman, she says that she had
#
been, she had spent about 40,000 rupees getting oxygen for her father and now the oxygen was
#
finishing and the Chief Minister of that state had declared that there was enough oxygen and if anyone
#
said that there was not enough oxygen, they'd be arrested. And in that video, the woman had said,
#
she removed her mask and she said, you know,
#
you know, because she was, and I feel that even that desperation of people who had seen so many
#
deaths, despite all of that, despite all the inefficiencies, despite all that electioneering
#
that turned this pandemic into a wider pandemic, the people in power will still spin it into a
#
success story and they will get the votes during the next elections. So those are the things I see
#
and that disturbed me a lot.
#
Of all the sort of the art in the yellow book, the painting that I loved the most
#
that really spoke to me is called Too Many Hurried Goodbyes and it's kind of abstract and I
#
don't want to even describe it because it is so moving and it's kind of accompanied by that
#
period, the Too Many Hurried Goodbyes are of course about all the deaths in the second wave
#
where they come one after another and you have these beautiful lines also where you say this was
#
on 25th April 2021 when I got news of the death of an uncle in Bhagalpur from COVID.
#
When I was quite young, I would watch him swim across the broad breadth of the Ganga, his body
#
becoming tiny in the distance and then swimming back, making that impossible return to being
#
life-sized again. What a beautiful line. And it struck me while looking at that painting that
#
I would not have been moved by it if I did not know what the title was and if I did not know
#
what the context was. Too Many Hurried Goodbyes and then you see these frames of red and it just
#
has that kind of impact on you. But without context, it is almost nothing and I was reminded
#
of that because you also, just now what you're saying is absolutely correct that I think what
#
happens with history is that the context is stripped away and other narratives are super
#
imposed on that and then you're like oh you know all these great things have happened and we
#
controlled the pandemic and we did this and we did that and somehow the harsh reality of what
#
happened is just completely lost and I simply don't get it because to me COVID and especially
#
the second wave was worse than the horror of partition in the sense that the horror of
#
partition struck certain parts of the country. COVID struck every household and what is this
#
mechanism? Like I remember in one of your books you talk about going back to a village where
#
there was this Muslim gentleman whose entire family had been slaughtered a few years ago
#
and you go there and you find that he's living with another wife and it's like that never
#
happened. He's managed to get on with, start living normally again and yeah it's not really
#
a question it's just I mean just sort of yeah it's a lament like yours. You know on one page
#
you see an image and then when you turn the page I learnt this from and when you turn the page you
#
see another sometimes you have the context with it sometimes you turn the page and you have another
#
image and another context. I learnt this from John Berger when I was very young I think I must have
#
been not even 20. I read Ways of Seeing in Delhi by John Berger and he presents you a picture
#
and it's a picture you see it and it is on field and there are crows flying over it
#
and it says maybe it says there that Van Gogh and then you turn the page and then you learn. He says
#
does your sense of the image change if I tell you that this was the last painting that Van Gogh made
#
before he killed himself. I'm now looking at the book. He says paintings are often reproduced with
#
words around them and then below it we see it. This is a landscape of a corn field with birds
#
flying out of it. Look at it for a moment then turn the page and then when you turn the page it says
#
this is the last picture that Van Gogh painted before he killed himself
#
and then he says it is hard to define exactly how the words have changed the image
#
but undoubtedly they have. The image now illustrates the sentence.
#
I always think that the role of the artist is somehow at some point to dislocate
#
a picture from the meaning that has been assumed and to supply a new caption to the image. If in
#
India you go around today at every billboard at every petrol pump at every corner shop you see a
#
face a large face on a billboard and I think the task of an original or creative artist of a public
#
artist would be of a political artist would be to supply a new caption for that image everywhere
#
to displace the meaning that has been attached to it by most people and to produce a new meaning.
#
How to do it? How to do it powerfully? That's the question.
#
You know you spoke of Van Gogh's last painting and that reminded me of an album by Warren Zevon
#
called The Wind and album of beautiful songs but the context here is that when he recorded it he
#
knew he was going to die so this was like a goodbye album he got all his friends to come in and
#
play guitar with him and sing with him and his long-time lover I forget the man's name he was
#
also kind of there and it's beautiful and to me everything in this album is imbued with this
#
extra meaning that the guy who wrote these words knows he's going to die there's a beautiful love
#
song called El amor de me vida and that has these lines I look outside I know you're there and you
#
found a brand new life somewhere I only wish it had been us but I'm happy for your happiness
#
you know just beautiful sort of beautiful good yes yes yes yes yes and communal also communal
#
it's a social response because it's not the man dying alone it's the band you know celebrating
#
life with his friends yeah yeah and and you know in that moment kind of finding life again as I
#
play music together it's it's quite beautiful I've forgotten what question I was going towards
#
which perhaps okay let me let me kind of ask you this you begin the yellow book with this beautiful
#
quotation which I think you also mentioned in your last episode and it's by David Hockney
#
what does the world look like I don't think it looks like photographs you have to find out for
#
yourself you have to draw it stop quote and and when I read this it reminded me of how elusive
#
the nature of reality is that we can only get snatches of it at a time this reminded me of
#
two other quotes I love one is by George Simonon where he says the fact that we are I don't know
#
how many millions of people yet complete communication is completely impossible
#
between any two of these people is to me one of the biggest tragic themes in the world stop
#
quote and he said this was like the liate motif so just as Hockney seems to suggest or I can
#
draw from that that you can never know the world equally Simonon is suggesting you can never know
#
another person and you're always kind of trapped in your own head and there's a great quote by
#
which also plays to this where she says quote love is the extremely difficult realization that
#
something other than oneself is real stop quote so first of all can you can you do the second
#
quote again love is the love yes love is the extremely difficult realization that something
#
other than oneself is real yeah wow yes yes yes yes yes and I'm thinking about then
#
at one level this makes us feel desperately sad as Simonon did that we can never truly know
#
another person and no other person can truly know us but at the same time through the this
#
you know Kafka once spoke of literature as I think breaking through the frozen ice of the soul or
#
whatever I forget the exact words but that's you know what art gives is it gives these snapshots
#
and you can recognize yourself in them and you can connect with others in that and so what is
#
sort of your sense about this because I think for every artist it is on the one hand empowering
#
that you can capture some of the world but on the other hand it must always feel inadequate
#
that you can never capture enough of it yeah you know since you quoted Iris Murdoch
#
and because we have been talking about aloneness and communal living or social living
#
Iris Murdoch also said that the definition of a happy life
#
is to find 13 people you find absolutely fascinating
#
so whenever the name Murdoch is mentioned I always think about when Iris Murdoch is mentioned
#
I always think where are my 13 people who are they and at the heart of that question is the
#
question who am I and who do I seek in the you know and what do I seek in the other
#
and if you have that answer you also have an answer to what is it that you believe in what your art
#
can do for me it's very important really to think you know there's a lot of bad writing
#
and there's a lot of bad art being produced there's actually
#
even more than bad art and bad writing there is bad journalism there is a dishonest journalism
#
especially if we speak about India there is a journalism of utter servitude
#
that is being produced so if I then come back step back from that then I think of bad writing
#
of bad writing or bad art as being a writing of bad faith where for example
#
you for example where you appeal to emotion where you yourself don't believe in that emotion
#
or you appeal to emotion only as emotion not as thought when it is a kind of bold sentimentalism
#
so for me it's very important for my own sanity and my own sense of integrity
#
to think at once about how to produce art that is not in bad faith that is not you know trying to
#
seek popularity or greater number of readers by you know just for no other reason than to
#
get more readers and it is a desire to find solidarity with that 12 or 13 people
#
whom I revere or cherish
#
I think to collect these people you know like let's say someone who has died um well Janet
#
Malcolm or Susan Sontag to have them as your witnesses you know one of the quotes I have is
#
I know that you like Joan Didion also so here's a quote see enough from this from Joan Didion
#
see enough and write it down I tell myself and then some morning when the world seems
#
drained of wonder someday when I'm only going through the motions of doing what I'm supposed
#
to do on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be a forgotten
#
account with accumulated interest paid passage back to the world out there and I read this line
#
and I think of her then as a kindred spirit who is teaching me how to journal or why to value
#
journals and why to value a certain desire to inscribe the ordinary and the everyday in order
#
to return to something valuable oh that is my interest in art boss color call yesterday what
#
I also did in the morning was listen to radio 4 BBC radio 4 Hanif Qureshi was guest editing on
#
boxing day and they still had that up he was guest editing on that day's show and he was just you
#
know because on the previous year's boxing day he had had his accident when he became paralyzed
#
so to listen to a writer being so honest about all that he is going through and to give it
#
through his honesty the shape of art it's very valuable to me and I think of him then as one of
#
the 12 or 13 people I want as my you know in my circle shall we take a break here and make sure
#
that when I come back you can anticipate but I'm just suggesting that because I realize that we
#
had halfway time and I want to see how what will be the artful way to do a to keep answering your
#
questions but to just keep pushing back with a couple of leading queries I have for you to get
#
out your truths I think your own listeners frankly should understand you better
#
give it to my system why are you succeeding in the way you are
#
in communicating something what is your secret well you know you have been generous enough
#
to ask people but someone should ask you this question and we should get to some things so
#
I want to be able to do that too if you don't mind I shall submit to you and we won't edit any of
#
what you just said you know so just to sort of keep the flow going so yeah let's let's let's
#
go in for a break get a cup of coffee and I shall submit to whatever you want to submit to
#
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 before 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 cost rupees 10 000 plus gst or about 150 dollars
#
if you're interested head on over to register at india uncut dot com slash clear writing that's
#
india uncut dot com slash clear writing being a good writer doesn't require god-given talent
#
just a willingness to work hard and a clear idea of what you need to do
#
to refine your skills I can help you
#
welcome back to seen and unseen with amit varma I'm just the guest interviewer right now my name
#
is amitavakumar I'm going to talk to amit we'll find all those things that he about him that he
#
asks his guests so let's start by asking amit amit uh you have a more artful way of going
#
about asking these questions but please tell me where were you born and when were you born
#
I'm flattered by your interest I should point out by the way that
#
this idea has been had before by a guess and in episode 200 of the seen and the unseen
#
Shruti Rajgopalan spoke to some 30 of my guests recorded questions from them for me
#
and we did a five-hour episode so Ram Guha also recorded Harsha Bhogle various people asked me
#
questions which were very kindly recorded by Shruti um that is wonderful that is great I'll
#
allow her to check that out um let's hope that uh because I you know Shruti Rajgopalan uh ignored
#
me oh my god I have in other words I wasn't asked this question we hadn't recorded together then
#
this was episode 200 but I hope to get to something that maybe some of these guests
#
did not and I'll explain in a moment but tell me where were you born and when you were born
#
so I was born in Chandigarh in at the end of 1973 and there's a gentleman in your book you
#
mentioned who has had his arm raised since 1973 because he had taken a vow that he will you know
#
in the honor of Shiva he will raise his arm and never bring it down so I in fact wrote a little
#
poem about that a short while back when I was reading a book where I thought that uh he uh you
#
know the bhai saab for the entirety of my life his arm has been up and let me read it okay so
#
do you have the poem in front of you yeah yeah so there's a story behind this also I'm working
#
for my youtube show everything is everything with these two wonderful young people Namsita and
#
Vaishnav they are 19 and 22 respectively but they're incredibly talented and wonderful so
#
they got me this really old school diary sadly in an audio podcast you don't get a sense of it
#
but I'm showing it on video to you now and it's these parchments and they made me promise that
#
every day I will write something so today I remembered that I haven't written anything
#
today so this is what I wrote and this is to Amar Bharati who is a gentleman and it's like
#
a short prose poem it's like really short for all my life since 1973 you have had your arm raised
#
if you lowered it would you feel that you had lost an arm
#
very good anyway so yeah I like that I like that I mean I don't care if it's good or bad
#
that's exactly right uh for our listeners we should tell them that Amar Bharati is uh you can
#
uh google him he's this gentleman who has had his arm raised and his nails have gone long he has
#
not touched them his arm has shriveled and I made his discovery in a French novel uh it is the one
#
that is called them I think it was in the Mursau investigation by Kamel Dadu I think it's the name
#
okay very good so you have been you have been on this planet since 1973 yeah the end of 1973
#
so um so yeah I was born in Chandigarh my dad was an IS officer uh my mother was uh technically
#
a housewife but a Hindustani classical musician who would you know do things in the arts try
#
you know wrote a couple of books as well uh published writers workshop in Calcutta all of that
#
and so from the time I was very young I had sort of the serendipitous good fortune of being
#
surrounded by all kinds of books and that's kind of at a very early age I discovered a love of
#
literature unfortunately my mother would keep trying to teach me music and I would steadfastly
#
refuse for really stupid reasons and I now regret that so you know one of my resolutions for this
#
year is that I'm going to learn an instrument and I'm going to practice one hour a day and I'm going
#
to learn something so I'm just about to choose between like a keyboard and a guitar but leaving
#
that aside so I uh yes yes yes like none of my childhood was goal-directed uh so in that sense
#
again I was very lucky also there was zero pressure on me to either join the IAS like my dad or
#
to do medical engineering or even an MBA the standard things of those days
#
which what did you end up doing so I decided I want to be a writer and in the stupid way of
#
someone in the late 1980s was trying to figure out like what does that really mean I you know
#
I finished my college in 94 and I said okay let me take an adjacent profession because writers
#
don't make money so I go into advertising and become a copywriter and then one day I will write
#
books but for now I can make a living by writing but I spent a few months in HTA Delhi HTA is today
#
J Walter Thompson then it was India's number one ad agency spent a few months there our office then
#
was in Jhandewala in Delhi didn't like it very much but I was very excited by something that had
#
just started in Bombay which was Channel V and Channel V had just started there were exciting
#
things happening with you know Quickgun Murugan if you remember so I just upped and left one day
#
on a Friday I got to Bombay on a Monday I had a job in Channel V so I was in Channel V between 95
#
and 97 writing scripts I then shifted to MTV between 97 to 99 doing more of the same thing
#
but at a more senior level 99 I realized that this is fuck all this is like a shallow life nothing
#
is happening at the same time I wasn't ready to write anything because I didn't have the lived
#
experience and I wasn't even a good writer in our earlier episode and I think in the blue book you
#
mention about how writing is equal to waiting and it was kind of like that for me so the question
#
was like what do I do now that I'm waiting I tried entrepreneurship circa 99 so for about a year and
#
a half I tried entrepreneurship but the Nasdaq crash happened in 2000 I failed utterly in fact
#
went deeply into debt those were the days before venture capital and stuff and I mean it was in
#
the same industry that it is today and sort of devastated by that failure I took the first job
#
that I could which was that of a cricket writer in this magazine called Wisden there was a physical
#
magazine called Wisden Asia Cricket and we were connected to you know the legendary Wisden Almanac
#
in England and so I was there for a while then we bought CrickenFo in 2003 I became the managing
#
editor there but writing only about cricket was kind of boring and also cricket was happenstance
#
for me it wasn't a core passion I love the game and I think I came to understand it very well but
#
it wasn't a core passion so I started a blog called India Uncut which I then did for which was active
#
for about five years between 2003 2004 to about 2009 I would do five posts a day I did some 8000
#
posts in that time we know each other since that time and the scene with blogging was that it gave
#
me the freedom to write about anything else not just cricket it gave me a freedom of form I was
#
no longer restricted to the 800 words a newspaper would give you I could do 80 words I could do 8000
#
words you were not dependent on a news cycle or what was topical you did not have to go through
#
any gatekeepers it was incredibly liberating and initially I didn't take it seriously at all so
#
therefore therefore there wasn't even the typical writer's anxiety of thinking what will the reader
#
sink it was just a blog I just put paras out there and did it and no doubt a lot of that would make
#
me cringe but it was like a writing gym which kind of helped me polish my skills then towards
#
the end of that decade I decided that I need to write a book and I kind of came came to an
#
agreement with Crick and Ford that you know I'll move from being like a managing editor to a
#
consulting editor I'll come in once in a while I'll do things in certain areas and so that was
#
my transition out of there and my mom fell ill with pancreatic cancer in 2008 and she was dying
#
at the time she had a few weeks to go and in that time also coincidentally I decided that I'm
#
going to throw away all my great ideas for the great Indian novel and I'm going to try and write
#
a book and the idea was that I'm just going to start with a situation as it were write try and
#
write a thousand words a day and see if I have the discipline to write a thousand words a day and
#
whether I can maintain narrative so in five weeks I had a draft and the good those sensible thing
#
for me to do would have been to chuck it away or keep it in a drawer and look at it after another
#
year I sent it to a friend of ours Nilanjana Roy who is who was then a publisher at Westland so
#
she said Amit I really like it I will publish it but I am your friend so let me tell you you
#
should show it to all the other publishers so I did and there was a little bit of a bidding war
#
and I got completely carried away at this moment I you know I didn't have perspective I had written
#
a very slight book of slight ambition and I I think I really let myself down and I didn't
#
realize it then and there was this bidding war and I got carried away and then Hushet which was then
#
the world's second largest publisher said we will launch in India with your book we'll take you on
#
a five city tour and put you up in five stars and all of that and I got carried away and I said okay
#
let me go with this I went with that the book sold well I happened to have the e-writes of it so I
#
have made deliberately made a choice not to put it on Kindle perhaps I'm overreacting but I felt
#
that I really let myself down with that book and and I think people kind of expected a lot more
#
of me you you I remember you Amitav Kumar were kind enough to give me a blurb for that book
#
which is yes but but tell the audience the title first the title was My Friend Sancho
#
I mean it makes no sense unless you read the book but it was like a coming of age love story
#
set in Bombay and and I think I did an okay job getting down the voice of the narrator the voice
#
the narrator was a young man in his 20s it was written in a first person voice I think I nailed
#
the voice but because I was a young man writing my first book people automatically assumed that I am
#
that person that that is my voice and therefore you can think oh this is an immature guy he's
#
whatever you know etc etc so that kind of happened and another interesting thing that happened during
#
this period was I went to Goa and I had played poker on my phone with myself in this game where
#
you play with yourself and I was struck by the intellectual challenge because for me I have
#
realized that I didn't know it then but I've realized over time that what really gets me
#
going the core thing I love to do the core skill I have is to find a subject go to first principles
#
figure it out from first principles and that intellectual challenge fascinates me and poker
#
of course is a game of scale involves math and game theory and all that so I love that and I
#
went to poker and I went to Goa and I had a lucky weekend a beginner's luck and that got to my head
#
and I said writing is my other great passion
#
and I was a little distraught by the fact that I let myself down with the book because I was just
#
beginning to realize at this time that I shouldn't have published this and so I said
#
but my second passion is poker I can make money with this let me try that so for five years I was
#
like a professional poker player and I did well number of things happened one thing was that poker
#
requires obsession and to the point that you have to shut the rest of the world out and there's
#
this biography of an American poker player I forget who who said that for the 30 years that
#
he played poker he didn't know who the president of the US was and that is a level of absorption
#
that it requires so I realized over five years that I felt like I've gotten stupider I've stopped
#
hanging out with my other non-poker friends I'm not reading books I'm not listening to music I'm
#
not thinking new thoughts it's crazy it also destroys your lifestyle because everything is
#
you play a 40-hour session you go you sleep for 10 hours and then you're off to another 40-hour
#
session now there's an interesting realization I made during this period when I got into poker
#
my thinking was that it's a game of skill five percent of people make money so what's going to
#
happen is the winners will stay in the game the losers will cycle out when I left I realized and
#
it was a heartbreaking realization that it's actually the winners who leave the winners leave
#
because they are winning because they are just generally good thinkers are good at other things
#
they will they will find other things to do the losers are the ones who never leave because they
#
are addicted it's because after all at one level it's game theory math it's a science but at another
#
level it is gambling you can you can play it like you play teen patti or ami or any other gambling
#
game and I have seen lives destroyed by it lives of friends destroyed by it I have tried to make
#
interventions and failed because when people are addicted and intervention doesn't help
#
so that was one of the factors that I felt I have to leave also it had kind of messed up my
#
lifestyle completely I was you know I had put on some 15-20 kilos it just didn't feel worth it
#
and I had saved enough to say that okay you know I won't have to work for a couple of years
#
I will write a book I will do all that and so when did you leave I left in 2018 no I left in 2015
#
and I was writing perhaps the only column on poker in a mainstream newspaper in the world I
#
was writing a column for the economic times on poker I'll link it from the show notes so
#
installment 42 was titled why I loved and left poker which is around the time I left it so people
#
will get some perspective and then the thing is I never actually did the writing I kind of stumbled
#
around here and there I was editor of a policy magazine called prageti for a while in 2017 I
#
started the scene in the unseen and it was just like a casual side project kind of thing
#
okay okay stop I'll show down you started that in 2017 seen and unseen and at that time
#
were there one or two podcasts that you really liked and you thought
#
I should do something a little different how did the thought come to you so
#
So India mein toh kuch nahi tha there was this company called IVM podcast
#
so which is run by a guy called Amit Doshi so Amit approached me and said that you want to
#
do a podcast and I've always had 40 ideas for things to do in my head and one of them was why
#
don't I do a show on YouTube called the scene in the unseen where the scene in the unseen the
#
title is inspired by this famous essay from the French essay is Fred di Bastia that which is seen
#
and that which is not seen which is about the you got an award about with his name on it I got
#
an award twice with his name on it the best year prize so yeah so you own him you own him I owed
#
him I owed him and so the idea was that it will be about the unintended consequences of public policy
#
and instead of doing a YouTube show tk podcast kar letao episodes will be 10 minute honge 15
#
minute honge because people have a short attention span that's what I thought and I realized very
#
soon that that is wrong for three reasons one is that people listen to podcasts on their smartphones
#
when they're a captive audience so you're either commuting or you're working out or you're doing
#
errands so if you're out running for example you're not going to keep changing the channel
#
whereas if you're watching a YouTube channel you could click on another of the 300 tabs you have
#
open you can turn your head and talk to someone etc etc but with an audio podcast you've chosen
#
to be a captive audience reason number two is that people listen typically at much higher speeds
#
2x is very natural the brain can comprehend words easily at 500 words a minute we speak at about 160
#
so 2x 3x is easily done for power listeners and people crave depth the media is basically
#
going a mile wide and an inch deep like you correctly said a while back that a lot of the
#
journalism today shouldn't even be called journalism and people actually crave depth
#
we have that short attention span mode even I will be scrolling and swiping randomly at times
#
but when you want to know something you want to know something you want to kind of dig in
#
so there are really you know four phases of the evolution of this podcast
#
should I go through them or do you have any just a second sure when you thought of this podcast
#
was it from the very beginning that you decided that it should be about as the announcer says in
#
the beginning about politics economics and behavioral science yeah we never changed that
#
I mean actually that's completely inaccurate now but we never changed that and and about my
#
partition why is it inaccurate it's inaccurate because it's not just about those subjects it's
#
not just about politics economics and whatever it's it's really about everything it's about
#
human beings it's about life so it's a it's a full canvas of things and and and by the way I parted
#
ways with IVM podcast after a couple of years so I've been doing it alone for the last four five
#
years and the show evolved I mean there are these distinct evolutions that took place the first
#
evolution was when instead of tackling a particular subject like why are price controls bad I would
#
go into I would take a deep dive into a subject like you know I've done episodes on three
#
article 370 Kashmir with Srinath Raghavan or education in India with Kartik Malli Radharan so
#
the first move was deep dives into subjects which could be two three four hours the second move
#
which you know has been read massively rewarding is a deep dive into people
#
which is almost akin to oral history where initially what happened is I would do a deep
#
dive into subjects and I would think he had a gun tub in K background ke baare me baat karte hai
#
let's humanize them for the listener let's take him out of his sound bite mode and get him using
#
his own language and then we can uh you know the conversation flows better and then I realized that
#
boss actually that is a whole meat and I just fell in love with that aspect of exploring somebody's
#
life for five six seven eight hours last year I had three eight hour episodes with Shanta Gokhale
#
Jerry Pinto and KP Krishnan and I cherish each of them and they were all very kind to give me so
#
much how many people listen to those eight hours I mean first of all actually tell me how many
#
people listen to each show on an average 30 to 50 000 downloads but downloads I think are often
#
measured as somebody who's heard 70 percent of the thing so the the thing with numbers is so for
#
example uh in a month I get about a quarter of a million downloads that's between 200 000 to 250
#
000 and this number has plateaued for a while so it's not even you don't divide it by four and say
#
that's the episode this month got that there are a lot of binging also happens and the key thing to
#
note about the listenership which is another great realization I made about podcasts is that podcasting
#
will typically give you lower numbers in YouTube but far higher engagement so I keep saying I'd
#
rather have a hundred thousand people listen to an episode than 10 million people watch a YouTube
#
video because YouTube video may your average time of watching might be 15 seconds 20 seconds
#
while over here people are really deeply deeply engaged so my average session time at one point
#
I calculated was 40 minutes which is off the charts you tell me that in the 80s I'm like
#
if you're a really sticky video game you're getting 40 minute sessions otherwise no freaking way
#
right that was the average and people listen across multiple sessions
#
so that is the thing that I I had no way of understanding what those numbers were
#
it took me a lot of time to understand what those numbers were and how much the show means to people
#
and uh and it took me by surprise wow now why do you think I'm very interested in understanding
#
why you think people would listen to anything for hours why because and they do they do but
#
and the next question I will ask or in your manner I will put two complex questions in the same
#
question and it's amazing to me that you always remember your questions which is why do people
#
listen to for such a long time and b in a in a in a show that has often used the word terror or
#
you know slowness why why do people and why do you think it's a good idea for people to speed up
#
the delivery so both parts of the question if you could answer that then people will understand
#
what they are doing when they are listening to you too I'll answer the second part first that
#
actually the terror remains even if you because what happens is you take it to 1.2x that normalizes
#
you take it to 1.5x that normalizes what happens is the brain is adjusting so you're not missing
#
the gaps you're not missing the pauses you're not missing the meaningful intonation of something in
#
a particular way you get all the nuance the brain just normalizes to the extent that when I hear
#
myself at 1x I'm like like who the fuck is this retard what are you saying hurry up you know so
#
it really sounds like a slow draw like if you listen to yourself at half speed that is the kind
#
of feeling I get when I listen to myself at 1x or most things at 1x you know I mean live telecasts
#
of sports you don't have a choice so the brain normalizes that completely now as far as the first
#
question of why one reason is that it's a circumstance it's a situation that you are
#
out running or you're on a local train now you could listen to music or
#
you could listen to an interesting conversation and you know and apparently I think a long time
#
back someone shared with me that 30 percent of the people who listen to audio prefer talk to
#
music it's just inbuilt it is almost hardwired and it's across the world across cultures so it
#
is true in America where there is a rich culture of talk radio it is true in India where there
#
isn't so actually 30 percent of the people are just wired they prefer talk and also it's an
#
incredibly efficient way of taking in information slash entertainment like when I did my three hour
#
15 minute episode with Kartik Muralidharan which I think was one of my first three hour episodes
#
on education he got it transcribed and of course he speaks fast and it came to some 45,000 words
#
40 45,000 words now if you are listening at double speed then in an hour and a half you have 45,000
#
words which is half a book or which is even a good short monograph you know so you're taking in
#
that amount of directed conversation of thought-provoking content if it is done well
#
in such a short period of time that it becomes incredibly efficient now people may not have the
#
time to actually read books and reading 45,000 words would take much longer but you can listen
#
to a conversation and take in all that information and part two of what I would say is it's not just
#
about information a conversation is more than that when you and I are talking a transcript would not
#
be as satisfying I believe because there is an ebb and flow in the conversation there is you know
#
the way we are responding to each other beach may somebody will think of something and you know you
#
can interject with that so there is a flow there is a vibe there is a mood that has an enormous
#
amount of pleasure on its own which I don't think is possible to sort of let's round up this part
#
of the discussion by asking you who are your listeners what is their profile so the thing
#
with podcasts is that podcast analytics are notoriously you can't go very deep because
#
podcasts are spread through rss feeds and etc etc and it's very backward that's also a reason
#
the rss is even in that sir the rss
#
so so I don't have deep analytics but I get a sense of
#
it spans age groups but there would be english-speaking elites there is unfortunately
#
no way around it so english-speaking people in cities would very much be
#
who the audience is and yeah I mean I I don't have any deeper demographics demographics in it
#
okay well that's good one of the things one finds in your
#
questions is that you're very widely read sometimes you drop names of people of artists musicians
#
even writers who I should know more about which I have no clue about so I wanted to just clarify
#
something you mentioned in passing that you were a student you had called you did college I believe
#
in prune what did you study in college oh I studied english literature and my purpose
#
for studying english literature was I wanted to optimize for least number of visits to classrooms
#
so I think in my BA in the three years that I did my bachelor of arts and Ferguson College
#
Pune I maybe went inside a classroom four times and that was so I just wanted something that was
#
easy and I just wanted to scrape through because I correctly realized that education is not something
#
you will get in a classroom now you might ask what did I do outside the classroom what education
#
did I get there nothing much matarkashti or you know however it goes so just kind of chilled out
#
and those are the days before the internet and all that so whatever youthful energy and hunger
#
I might have had did not even have an outlet or a direction or whatever you kind of you know
#
stumble through life and take whatever it throws at you now because you often in your writing
#
and in your shows do one thing useful which is to provide the show notes which takes people to
#
different readings I wonder whether you I'm sure you know this book but I wonder whether you have
#
ever provided thinking fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman have you ever linked it or can you talk
#
about it I'm sure I've linked it three four times I mean obviously I was familiar with Kahneman and
#
Twosky's work well before the book came out but why obviously it just because yeah explain that
#
that's an extremely arrogant thing to say I should not have said that but because I was
#
reading widely in the subject anyway I was reading about behavioral science and behavioral economics
#
and a lot of which seems to have been built upon a crumbling edifice now that there are all these
#
replication errors but I was reading widely like my gateway into a lot of literature actually was
#
Steven Pinker's book great book the blank slate and that led me to discover on the one hand
#
evolutionary psychologists and writers like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett and all that
#
so that was one kind of rabbit hole there was another rabbit hole into cognitive neuroscience
#
and you know again reading about Michael Gazaniga's famous experiments before he wrote his book human
#
and at the same time also into behavioral economics in the behavioral sciences
#
so it's wonderful how sometimes a single book can be a gateway and can take you in
#
so many marvelous directions have you had books like that which were a gateway to you
#
yeah yeah but I'm not going to let you do that to me because of a because uh it is now my turn
#
to ask you these questions that we arrive at something I'm noting it down I will ask you at
#
the end anyway I'm thinking of this book also as one of those but I think I think that uh from the
#
kinds of responses I have gotten from appearing on your show I think that at least broadly two
#
kinds of people one these are folks who are into writing and want to learn more about writing
#
and then the other set are educated folks who very broadly speaking are into understanding
#
what human behavior or life why do we do what we do how to make better decisions and when we
#
grasp that point we get a sense of where a book like this thinking fast and slow
#
has its importance because it says to you how are we often wrong in making decisions
#
but also how should we decide how to how to how should we use um rationality and so um
#
I want one of the things um Kahneman says very early in the beginning is that when he would talk
#
to his colleague Amos Tversky he would um he says our research was a conversation
#
in which we invented questions and jointly examined our intuitive answers if you think
#
about your practice in all these shows you ask these people who have numerous uh different skills
#
and talents and pasts uh you ask them questions and you explore the answers and you
#
and I wanted to ask you two things one is the Kahneman says each question was a small experiment
#
and we carried out many experiments in a single day so I want you to list for me
#
uh two or three questions that you ask uh that is an experiment I would want to say that the question
#
that I have heard you repeat to different people from based on what you read in my own book where
#
is your gangoli is an experiment it can have many different answer you know uh results but it's an
#
experiment where some things are fixed the question is fixed and then the answer comes goes in
#
different directions because of the variation in what is being put in right I'd like you to tell me
#
and I'll come to the second part in a minute I'd like you to tell me how you design what are your
#
questions how do you and how do you can think of them as experiments in social inquiry and
#
how do you design them what are your questions what are some of your principle experiments
#
so uh you know uh as I answer this question just before I do a book recommendation Michael
#
Lewis has written this great book called the undoing project which is about the collaboration
#
between Kahneman and Twosky and at its heart it's a love story you know and I absolutely loved it
#
for that reason it tells you the great affection between these two men they're changing dynamics
#
coming together falling apart to answer your question let me go into it in some detail I
#
alluded to this in the intro of a recent episode but let me go into it in a little bit of detail
#
because this last evolution that I took of doing oral histories of doing talking about somebody's
#
life and doing that for seven or eight hours made me think deeply about the craft because
#
there is nothing else like this you know people have done random seven-hour episodes or eight-hour
#
episodes and etc etc but no one's routinely doing these kind of large conversations so I
#
don't have a model to look at like for shorter episodes I could look at uh you know a whole
#
bunch of people if I'm doing two-hour episodes I can look at Russ Roberts uh Sam Harris Tyler
#
Carvin I can look at the art of conversation from them for an eight-hour conversation I don't
#
have a guide so over time I arrived at this principle for myself that when I am exploring
#
someone's life really what I want to do is I want to construct it uh across three overlapping
#
scaffoldings scaffolding number one is their life story all the things that they have done the
#
chronological stuff scaffolding number two is their work this could be the books they have written
#
or the papers they've written or the films they've made or whatever scaffolding number three is ideas
#
and themes I want to talk about with them some of which will emerge spontaneously in the course of
#
the conversation so now when I get into the conversation I will of course have read everything
#
they've written and I'll have a long list of you know I use something called Rome research for
#
note-taking again I'll link to an episode of everything is everything on productivity where
#
I've actually shown screenshots of our research episodes and all of that so I will have a broad
#
sense of the area I want to cover but I never go in there thinking this is the order this is the
#
structure like a mistake you can make when talking is that you have 10 questions and you ask question
#
two by the time the person is halfway through the answer you will you signed off you're already in
#
question three I never do that I like to digress I like to go in different directions and I try
#
to maintain a balance between these scaffoldings now it what I am still trying to figure out and
#
come to terms with is that it is not necessary that the balance always has to be absolutely equal
#
like for me in terms of craft an episode I thought of as perfect at the time I recorded it was
#
episode 301 with Natasha Badwar and she is an incredibly eloquent thoughtful wise person
#
but also all of these scaffoldings came together beautifully an episode which is incredibly popular
#
among people where the scaffoldings are totally not balanced is with our good friend Nilanjana
#
you know where that particular scaffold of her private journey her personal journey is not there
#
at all we didn't spend any time talking about her years in journalism her year writing novels
#
we did nothing of that in fact the scaffolding the scaffold that really dominates there is ideas
#
and you know abstract things and it it kind of worked beautifully you know but when it was over
#
I was thinking key you know is it a failure of my craft that I didn't kind of manage to balance
#
these three but later I thought about it and said look everybody loves the episode it doesn't have
#
to be an equal balance it is useful in my mind to sort of have a sense of this and have a sense
#
of this and use it as a guide but I don't have to be a stickler for it I can let conversations
#
flow where they are flowing and my thumb rule for a conversation of this sort always is that
#
it has a natural length I never despite people thinking that oh he loves to do long episodes
#
actually my average episode over the last few months has been like three and a half four hours
#
um you know not more than that but so I let everything find its length if I am really loving
#
it if my guest has the energy and they're loving it but otherwise if I feel after four hours okay
#
this is a natural moment where some other day we'll pick it up then I kind of ended there
#
and are you saying that you have never felt the need to stop at an hour and a half
#
no absolutely not I mean it would be stupid of me it would be irresponsible of me to stop
#
at a given point because the medium is affording me the luxury to go for a deeper conversation
#
it would equally be irresponsible of me to force it beyond a point to say no
#
that would also be wrong but I think when there is a natural flow you kind of go wherever you
#
can with the flow and as far as the particular questions that you ask you're right that there
#
are some questions that and and people like the ganguly question now people will feel that oh
#
ask that question to so many people he's repeating himself but I'm doing it with a reason I'm getting
#
different answers every time and I I think of certain kinds of questions as unlocking
#
questions right I want it is an unlocking question earlier I asked you in this show what
#
is your Kashmiri rain that is intended as an unlocking question I asked you who is your latte
#
Eisner that is intended as an unlock unlocking question and in both those cases you did unlock
#
you did kind of you know talk about something that you may not have expected to sort of talk
#
about but I feel the important thing is that when you enter a conversation you should never be
#
cynical you know when I enter a conversation I think my guest knows and you have sensed and
#
all my guests sense that there is total good faith that this guy is you know as vulnerable as us
#
you know and he's kind of opening himself up in the same way that we are and I think the
#
moment they get the sense then there is that opening up there is that trust and I've been
#
really fortunate in the kind of trust that I have got and the fact that people will actually
#
engage with all these odd questions I might ask sometimes and you know follow them where they lead
#
yeah I think as a guest on your show I can also say that I'm influenced by the fact that you have
#
been very careful in doing your research and you know you're so familiar with the work that
#
you come with good questions but listen the unlocking questions that you asked me you
#
couldn't have asked others like you know Lotte Eisner or the so I want you to give me some
#
questions that your readers whether your listeners recognize or not I feel I should get I should have
#
a special insight into your method if you were to say this these two or three questions I enjoyed
#
asking let's say both Natasha and Ilanjana so that that the consistency reveals what your interest
#
has been so I've asked a lot of people to the point it's become a cliche and I've stopped doing
#
it about thick and thin desires so I beg forgiveness of all the listeners who heard this like 40 times
#
before from me but so Luke Burgess has written this great book called wanting he's done an episode
#
with me as well and he is a student of the great mid 20th century philosopher Rene Girard and Rene
#
Girard and you might be able to relate to this he's a philosopher but he was once asked to teach a
#
literature course I think of European literature and he was very young then paise chahiye the so he
#
said ki theek hai kar dete hai and he put together a reading list and read the reading list and then
#
he realized when he read the reading list that all the characters and all the novels that he read
#
they all wanted whatever they wanted they wanted it because somebody else wanted it
#
and he came up with the concept of mimetic desire here where he said that most of what we want is
#
mimetic desire we want it because others do and I forget whether it Burgess came up with the frame
#
of thick and thin desires or it goes back to Girard but the idea is that thin desires are
#
mimetic desires of this sort and they can be deep very intense thin doesn't mean they're not
#
intense so you know for example I might want the latest Mercedes right and I might think I really
#
want that Mercedes but actually it is a mimetic desire because I want that status in society or
#
whatever or I might you know a lot of young people will grow up thinking that oh the natural I want
#
to get married have kids etc etc but have they really thought deeply about whether that is what
#
they really want to do or it is just a mimetic desire a conventional thing that they have adopted
#
even in the context of a writer and I remember discussing this with Nalanjana that if you're a
#
writer you can want to be a writer for the thin desire of getting a claim winning the Booker Prize
#
etc etc or thick desires are something that are innate to you and for a writer like for you it
#
would be the thick desire of storytelling it would be the thick desire of writing down the world
#
and I and so I ask people to reflect on this and think about what their thin and thick desires are
#
and and I've kind of found that useful so that is a cliched question that
#
sometimes great example though very good example okay because what else everybody thinks about it
#
differently but you know the point I want to make is that it is not always about particular
#
questions it is about the unlocking but the unlocking doesn't have to happen through a
#
particular question but it can happen by building a vibe where a person is sinking into themselves
#
and this is why I have the rule that I never interrupt because the problem is whenever
#
if you interrupt whenever someone is going deep and you interrupt they stay at a really shallow
#
level they cannot get deep because you're interrupting for example I did a great episode
#
with Mrinal Pandeyji and which you referred to in our last episode you said you enjoyed that
#
when I asked my first question which was about her childhood for one hour five minutes she spoke
#
uninterrupted and took us from the 50s to the 60s to the end of the 70s right and it was magical
#
it was glorious and I made sure I did not say a word you know and I can think of other people
#
and you're completely screwing it up if you do that you have to let them go deep
#
and sometimes a way to let them go deep is that you take you don't talk about whatever book they've
#
written or the subject of their expertise because they will have their sound bites in their head
#
and it'll be automatic take them to a place I've never been before like I remember this was very
#
unexpected for me I in between the first and second wave I did a couple of episodes in the studio
#
and one of them was with Tamal Bandopadhyay and Tamal had written a book on banking now you might
#
think relatively boring subject it's a decent book but I thought you know before I start talking
#
about the book I just casually to loosen him up I asked him you know what have been your experiences
#
with covid and then he started talking and then he said you know I live in Bandra and I went for
#
a walk the other day and these kids who used to sell things were begging now and one man with a
#
crazy look in his eyes helped me by the wrist and he took me into a gully and I was scared but he
#
said bhaiya bhaiya don't worry and there was a biryani stall and he said I don't want money from
#
you I just want to eat something please buy me some food and Tamal is not carrying his card but
#
he tells or any cash he tells this person you know who I am I walk here every day please give
#
this man a biryani I will pay you later and Tamal teared up as he said this and I teared up and it
#
was this moment and then and then what happens is and it's important to build this window inside
#
a person's soul as it were because then everything about them opens up then you realize that later
#
when Tamal says that he's been a business journalist since the mid 1990s that when I meet an RBI
#
governor when I meet a chief economist of some place I ask them questions like a complete lay
#
person would and I understand this vibe of his I understand where he's coming from because I have
#
had this glimpse into this empathetic warm person and therefore I get that that his journalism is
#
an extension of that that he doesn't want to ask fancy questions to impress the person he's with
#
but he wants to ask questions so that people common people will understand and this is and
#
this is just one example but it's that's always the effort to sort of talk in a way that you know
#
breaks those filters down so you're no longer thinking but you're just yourself
#
I feel now bad that I interrupted you a couple of times
#
No, no, no, please, it's cool, it's cool.
#
So your questions are small experiments but they need not be the same for everyone and you change
#
them and you also have a great commitment to not interrupting the experiment and paying a great
#
respect to it's not the researcher but the researched who has great autonomy here all right
#
okay now I think it would be useful for people to know and I'm going to use the
#
Kahneman text as an example you know he explains and I used this in my last novel he explains that
#
if you're doing a test and you have a word which has some letters missing
#
let's say it starts with s and ends with p if the person is hungry they might say soup
#
if their hands are dirty they might say soap and he talks there about how
#
in these experiments the priming how you prime the audience determines the outcome
#
I wonder in what ways intelligently critically for a certain critical result not to manipulate
#
but just if you have given thought to it how do you think you encourage your listeners
#
to think about certain things because you have primed them in certain ways your introduction
#
I would argue is a way of priming right you said about your introductions are
#
uh individualized they are about the particular person like in but but there are various things
#
you say during the talk itself I the reason I'm asking you this question is not so much to say oh
#
let's understand priming but instead to understand
#
what your goal uh you know let's try to get a better understanding
#
because Kahneman also says most of our intuitions are biased we are wrong you know
#
we straight away are blind the fast thinking makes us takes us somewhere in order because we want to
#
be decisive but we often make the wrong decision it is you know um or even the rational thinking
#
that we do is actually uh we feel we are in control but we arrive at the wrong things and
#
at the wrong things and he says even statisticians are not good intuitive statisticians
#
so I'm trying to get to the point about saying for listeners who want to self-improve or listening
#
for Gyan uh that how to be more critical also so first let's talk about priming do you feel
#
that you prime them or want to prime them in a particular way I don't think about it like that
#
I mean I mean so what happens is that my intro which I record is really in two parts there is
#
a part before the packaging which is my general musing allowed on something thematic which might
#
is connected to the episode but is not directly about the guest and then after the packaging
#
I will talk about the guest interview I'll say welcome to the scene in the unseen my guest today
#
so and so and give a reasonable idea of what we kind of spoke about and go in there now my approach
#
to this is this and why I feel priming is not the right word is that I often talk about how
#
this is the most intimate medium of all podcasting and now why is that let's as a metaphor look at
#
the audio visual arts first somebody is going to see a movie in a theater there is a certain
#
distance between them and the big screen and there is a similar distance between the camera
#
and the actors so you have your great westerns and your car chases and all that make it a little more
#
sort of compressed and you have a television set which is a couple of meters away from you
#
and you have a similar distance between the camera and the actor so you'll have your sitcoms
#
like friends and Seinfeld and all of that then you have youtube which is a laptop in front of
#
you or it's on your mobile phone and it is really close and a lot of made for youtube content is
#
also like that it's really close it's a close-up in audio the reason podcasting is different from
#
radio it's not just radio on demand it's not a netflix for radio the reason it is different
#
radio goes wider and especially in markets like india where the license fees are so high
#
radio stations have no option but to go for the lowest common denominator they are broadcasting
#
there is a reason for that word so the situation i'd use for someone and a radio is five people
#
are in a car the radio is for them so the announcer will declaim and he will say as you know and
#
there's a certain artifice in that as well podcasting is a voice in your head it is the
#
most intimate thing there is like i remember my finest the finest compliment i've received and
#
it speaks to a truth about the show and about podcasting is after my episode with abhinandan
#
sekri someone wrote in saying that i felt so much that i'm sitting with two friends and talking to
#
them in my living room that at one point i interrupted and i fucking love that you know
#
that is a whole game so the thing is that when what you are doing is premised on an intimate
#
conversation that where you and the person you are speaking to do not have a filter you're talking
#
to each other like friends you have a similar relationship with the listener so in that sense
#
in that sense you could say i've kind of been naked on my show there is no artifice the listener
#
knows a regular listener of the show knows me pretty well right and they know me pretty well
#
in a nice sort of this person is part of my family or a close friend kind of way not a creepy stalkery
#
kind of way and therefore the the funda of priming doesn't arise i am not trying to manipulate you
#
i'm not trying to take you in a particular direction the the premise of the show is that
#
i will follow my interests and it is that's a journey i'm on and you're welcome to join me
#
on this journey and you might find some of it interesting and that's the way it works
#
so i have to firstly be authentic to myself and then i present it to the reader it is what it is
#
i can't prime it one way because you know i mean i i don't think of it like that maybe subconsciously
#
i end up doing that but i don't think of it like that it's just a very straightforward that this
#
is what i did this is what i went for and this is what you have yeah you know kahneman has this
#
metaphor of the water cooler conversation a podcast is a water cooler cons you know conversation
#
except on a much bigger scale in some ways you know it is where people are discussing now
#
here he says he would like to correct he says um you know the biases of intuition he says so this
#
is my aim for water cooler conversations improve the ability to identify and understand errors of
#
judgment and choice in others and eventually in ourselves by providing a richer and more precise
#
language to discuss them i feel that you know sometimes let's say when you ask your guests
#
what do they feel about the kind of exchanges that happens in social media and how is it different
#
from other forms etc you're trying to have us question the level of discourse and in many
#
ways to improve it i feel it is and so in some ways you're performing a public service whether
#
you like it or not about how to be better citizens how to have a truer society how to have
#
democracy or at least that's the spirit in which i have received it so that's why i'm pressuring
#
you in some ways on these points in order to say ki ha you know if you are sitting down at some
#
family dinner you will have some uncle say something that is just received truth in no
#
way submitted to the kind of logic or statistical scrutiny that kahneman wants to do and therefore
#
you are having an intelligent discussion in order to counter the kind of systematic or systemic
#
biases that people have and they prefer at a dinner table and that we should always try in
#
these conversations to in some ways interrupt unexamined thought and that's what you're doing
#
i mean i feel when you ask people these questions i wanted to ask you one crucial question which was
#
you know when people listen to ted talks those are very very short and they offer a quick fix
#
on something and you know it's i have often clicked on a few let's say there's something
#
about public speaking or more efficient teaching or prejudice in blah blah blah i click on it
#
thinking i will learn something and i sometimes have sometimes i have been skeptical yours is
#
a ted talk with chai or you know it's really not a ted talk because it's so long to begin with i
#
would like you to just say something about how do you think of this as either sharing something
#
but also being different from a ted talk i'll respond to three aspects of this one aspect is
#
that uh where what it might have in common with a watercolor conversation is the informality of
#
language and uh the lack of self-consciousness but where it is different is that it is directed
#
conversation like some of my oral histories i think of them as assisted autobiographies for example
#
and one of the things i've realized in conversations i've done with old friends
#
is that i might have known the person for 20 years but then i'll do an episode with them and
#
i'll be like wow i did not know the first thing about them i have felt this with old friends i've
#
recorded with like chandrahar choudhary deepak shinoy etc etc i mean you and i are also in a
#
manner of speaking we've known each other for a long time but we never hung out much physically
#
so that feeling uh isn't there we in any case didn't know much about each other but the people
#
have hung out with a heck of a lot like chandrahar and deepak and all of that you just get to learn
#
so much because in a water cooler conversation you're not going to ask someone about their
#
notion of home you're not going to say tell me about your mother you're not going to say
#
you know what makes you cry at night etc etc whereas in a conversation of the sort you can so
#
that's part one part two as far as the discourse is concerned it might seem ambitious and grandiose
#
to say it but yes i will say it i do want to make a difference to the discourse our discourse is
#
very shallow very polarized and i feel that by leaving a repository of such conversations out
#
there i feel it makes a difference it shows you that a different kind of conversation is possible
#
uh that a different kind of conversation is desirable that none of the people i am speaking
#
to are the social media stereotypes they are often made out to be they're people with deep depth
#
like ram guha for example i've done five episodes with him right he's a wonderful human being deeply
#
generous but both the right and the left have stereotyped him in different ways on social
#
media for me the highlight of these five conversations is when he spoke about how he
#
will often lie down in his bedroom and he will listen to hindusani classical music and then it
#
will get dark and sometimes his wife will come home from work and open the bedroom to find he's
#
lying in the dark and he's lost track of time and he's listening to music and to be able to
#
have him share a moment like that and then to have that music linked in the show notes so people can
#
listen to it for themselves and be moved by it i think that's a beautiful moment of human connection
#
that is there because ultimately we are all part of the same freaking community ultimately we all
#
have a stake in this nation no matter where you come from so having the sense of dialogue
#
is important and the third thing i would say is that look at ted talk is a snapshot it is a
#
snapshot of a view by a person whereas i think of even an atar conversation of mine as not being
#
one thing but it is part of a larger conversation that multiple people are taking part in so for
#
example the theme of a relatively liberal constitution and the extremely illiberal
#
society that has been imposed on and how politics has caught up with society today that has been
#
a larger conversation across maybe 30 40 guests who've written books on this who've thought about
#
it differently and together when you listen to those conversations and you take in those views
#
and even if you have not you know remembered everything those people may have said somewhere
#
by osmosis you now have a larger sense of the issue like i have done multiple episodes on our
#
economic reforms in 1991 i've done episodes with montexing alualia and kp krishnan i've
#
done an episode on narasimha rao with venasit apati and recently episode 28 of my youtube show
#
everything is everything it's a show i co-host with ajay shah we speak about the reformers and
#
i loved the episode so much because i felt that ajay's 30 years of experience in this field and
#
my 50 60 conversations on this subject were so beautifully distilled and it came together in
#
one story that we tell over one hour and there is no way that this would exist if i hadn't put
#
in that work if i hadn't put in those you know hundreds of hours of conversation so i think that
#
there is a larger conversation across many subjects there is a larger discourse out there
#
whereas the ted talk is one random shallow sort of snapshot it can be a great snapshot but it is
#
not this tapestry of conversation that you know that is so rich and at least for me you know so
#
i am i do this with a sense of purpose i you know this was not i didn't seem i i never had
#
an ambition to be a podcaster or to do something like this but now that i'm doing it like a i do
#
like doing it i'm proud of it b i think i'm pretty good at it but what really drives me to do it is
#
a sense of purpose that i feel i'm building something bigger than myself and you know that's
#
what keeps me going can you be in the same way as you ask your guests to explain how they are good
#
at it in in different ways you'll say you know i want you to unlock a little bit of your secret
#
what do you think you're doing right what makes you such a successful podcaster so many people
#
are listening to you what works you think what are you doing it's not don't just say well because
#
it is deep dive but instead what are some things that make you an attractive podcast thank you
#
for calling me attractive so i'll think aloud about this like number one i think there's a
#
lot of luck and i'm not being unnecessarily modest but i also produce this great podcast
#
called brave new world at brave new podcast.com for a friend of mine called vasanthar he is an
#
ai professor in his 60s in new york at ltern university and the kind of guests he's had on
#
his show are mind-blowing he's at daniel kahneman on his show for example he's at scott galloway
#
eric topol just a bunch of big big names you think of the big names are there and very good
#
conversations one one and a half hours the show just has never taken off i know the numbers i'm
#
not going to talk about it just simply never took off you know and i've seen so many other shows
#
which will have like it doesn't matter how long you do it they just don't take off so firstly i
#
just like i don't know how this happened but it just took off like this and became what it is
#
and the second part of it is that i can't talk about why people like it that is for
#
people to talk about but i'll talk about what i think my credos are and credo number one is
#
you have to be authentic to yourself and this show is always my journey i ask you questions
#
i want to ask you i go down bilanes i want to go down it's driven by my genuine curiosity
#
right nothing else i will never ask a question i don't really care about and i will never have
#
a guest on the show who i don't really want to speak to you know you would be amazed if i
#
told you some of the people have actually turned down for the show but the point is if i don't
#
have that feeling i don't have that vibe i just don't want to do it so one i have to be authentic
#
to myself and therefore that authenticity or whether you call it good faith or whatever
#
is something that i think comes across to listeners secondly i always give the guest
#
that respect that you know there's this great quote by stephen covey you have to listen
#
not to respond but to understand and what that means is that you know most of us listen because
#
we are waiting we are listening with our ego we want to button and say the next smart thing
#
that comes into our head and when you do the longer format you're forced into a mode where
#
you're listening to understand you really want to know the other person you're not being judgmental
#
of them like you know i have disagreed with pretty much every guest i've ever had on the
#
show on something some small thing or the other and and that's great and i've disagreed a lot
#
with some guests and that is great because the point is you're connecting as human beings
#
the disagreements are not tackled here like they are tackled on twitter or somewhere else
#
i tackled respectfully you know the other person will say what they say i will never interrupt
#
so often after the person finishes a long answer i will say something like okay i have
#
three observations and the third one leads to a question and that's because you know i have this
#
notepad which i am now showing you but alas the reader cannot see it where i'm constantly noting
#
down whatever thoughts come and and the other part about as far as research is concerned is that
#
look you do a deeper conversation you've you've you know you can't like i have for some of my
#
guests just as an exercise i've put a question in chat gpt i'm speaking to so and so today give me
#
20 questions to ask him and the questions you get are actually adequate for a one hour show
#
but they are completely useless to me because they're completely surface level so today if
#
i'm doing a life in times i have to read everything you've written i have to really
#
understand your field well and i have to let my curiosity take over and take me down rabbit holes
#
while i sort of research you i do all my research and roam research now i have a superpower that
#
contains a feature and a bug which is that i can absorb a lot of knowledge really fast what other
#
people would take 10 hours to do i can do in one hour i have to read three books in one day i will
#
read them all without skimming i will read them deeply the bug is that within a week i've forgotten
#
everything so it is almost like a short-term thing so what happens is i am i am putting in
#
the like 20 30 hours before an episode i'm not really sleeping much i'm reading everything i'm
#
taking the notes in my own research then i have the episode the episode is done
#
and then i unwind i forget everything i don't remember everything so during an episode it
#
might seem that he's just quoting from thin air and he's referencing this and he's referencing
#
that but a lot of it is simply notes that i have taken and i am meticulous about my notes i am
#
the best note taker in south asia but you know that also brings with it the bug that my memory
#
is staggeringly poor and when i think of what happened to my dad and your dad and other dads
#
and what age does to us sometimes i worry that fuck it's all gonna go away so do the good work
#
while you can yeah i have a couple of more pressing questions and then i will shut up
#
one is that you know i don't know whether we have discussed this but in
#
uh my book a foreigner carrying in the crook of his arm a tiny bomb i talk a little bit about
#
uh the night before i went to uh interview this indian man who was the first arrest
#
of first convicted felon i can't remember under the patriot act he has tried to sell a missile an
#
igla missile to the fbi his name was himant lekhani i had tried to interest him in a conversation
#
so as an interviewer you try to what you were calling a moment ago unlocking question you know
#
a question to unlock uh i had sent him an article on psychology but he was not interested so i took
#
down from my uh bookshelf among the believers by vias nagpal because i was interested in the
#
questions there was a passage he had about his conversation with ayatollah khalkhali the hanging
#
judge of khomeini so he says that on a sheet of hotel paper that he had brought him with him
#
he wrote he asked he wrote where were you born what made you decide to take up religious studies
#
what did your father do where did you study where did you first preach how did you become an ayatollah
#
what was your happiest day
#
there's one beautiful question i remember at the time i asked it and it it came in the moment it
#
wasn't planned it came in the moment this is where gaurav will have to edit an awkward silence out
#
because i first have to kind of find it i can't remember it so
#
at the time i remember telling my writing group that it's the best question i've ever asked
#
all right then then then let's be patient and try to find it let me kind of find it
#
but it's contextual it is not a good who knows
#
there are 700 people in this group somebody or the other will remember so
#
see this is what i mean by memory the reason i'm going to knowing this song
#
is that you mentioned covid memories and there was that great memory of there was a report
#
of the bengali doctor i think he's a doctor yeah his name was soham chatterjee
#
he sang that song for his mother he could not visit her when she was dying he sang it
#
because they had a love for music
#
i was chatting with erik weinstein and and there was a moment towards the end where
#
uh you know we went into personal story territory and this precise moment the question
#
strikes me which out of context is you know just a normal question but the question was
#
what did you need when you needed something the most or what did you need when you most needed
#
something i forget exactly but i it it was an unlocking question it his eyes misted over and
#
it absolutely unlocked him and it was a great moment and often so what happens is that you
#
don't pre-plan this but during the conversation something strikes you some moment of connection
#
and you can kind of uh get in there and uh sort of uh talk about it like in in my episode with
#
ranjit for example i just randomly at one point asked him look without any context what do you
#
miss and our conversation had kind of reached that flow and reached that point where he actually
#
answered this otherwise in a water cooler it's like a bizarrely abrupt kind of um you know
#
question so i think you have to learn to kind of get in the flow and just go where it takes you
#
and you know where it takes you is where it takes you that makes sense i've come now to my final
#
question you will remember that um earlier in our discussion today i mentioned in passing
#
haruki murakami he had been away from his country he had been in the u.s when there was uh an attack
#
in the tokyo subway and he went back to the country to conduct a series of interviews
#
because he felt he needed to participate in some ways in the natural light you and i have also
#
talked today and earlier about the changes that have overcome our society or indian society in
#
the last few years so i want you to help me out as a ninja of such conversations that if i want
#
to enter into that discussion if i want to enter that national life
#
what would be the questions i should ask to advance that conversation ask who
#
the people i meet in india are you meeting intellectuals are you meeting common people
#
how does it all kinds of people i would like to
#
um and are these i mean how to how to do the murakami kind of thing and would these questions
#
be met purely as unlocking questions or would these also meant to be questions that would be
#
heard by others and the you know uh would be content on its own i would have my phone out
#
i would ask the question i'd listen to the responses while recording them and taking notes
#
and then i would shape them into a narrative see here's a realization i've had and it's a very
#
depressing realization over the last couple of years which is that the way we discover
#
information and we discover the media is very different from what it was when you and i were
#
young let's say a 15 year old today somebody forwards him a video which is toxic in whatever
#
way it is toxic and that is the first youtube video he's ever seen at that point the algorithm
#
kicks in and it will recommend more videos of exactly that kind and eventually it will create
#
from him an echo chamber in which his world is one particular kind of world with one particular
#
set of narratives in one particular history and somebody else his next-door neighbor the same
#
algorithm could take that person into a separate world of their own where there is nothing in
#
common between these two people you know i did an episode with akash singh rathore and i was
#
expressing exactly these thoughts and he came up with this pithy phrase about how when often two
#
young people meet each other is two algorithms meeting each other and i think that from a distance
#
you and i don't see this from a distance you and i have grown up at a time where there was a broad
#
consensus on truth and there are certain commonalities we take for granted and we
#
think that okay both of us have that shared bedrock of understanding the world and therefore
#
everybody has a shared bedrock and the point is no boss the common truths are gone you know
#
you could be talking to someone who looks at the world completely differently from you and finds
#
you utterly bizarre and even evil you know it might make it might be rational for that person
#
to see you as evil so then i think part of what we need to do as storytellers is unlock these
#
different worlds get a sense of where they are going you know get a sense of what is happening
#
in those ecosystems like you referred to kunal purvath's book on edge pop i haven't heard it
#
either i haven't read it either i'm waiting to read it but i think there needs to be more work
#
like that and those are the kind of stories i i want to hear and and and the thing is it's very
#
easy and i'll ask you this also i'll turn this back around on you since this was your last question
#
so i'm allowed to ask you a few questions is that you know as a writer as a journalist or
#
someone with the phone out and asking questions it's very easy to look down on the other person
#
that they are the subject and you are asking and oh they're so ignorant and oh they don't know this
#
or oh they don't know that how do you get past that trap because ultimately you know there but
#
for the grace of the flying spaghetti monster go you you know we are very lucky we grew up as we
#
did we had the llms that we did in a sense a lot of people aren't and everybody is you know
#
everybody is different and at the same time everybody is the same it's a human condition
#
so how do you sort of how do you how do you deal with that how do you make those connections when
#
you're out on the road talking to people by the way what is llm llm is large learning model so all
#
of these ai's yes after the riots in bombay no it was after let me see
#
yeah after the riots after the 1993 riots the bombay police had picked up this family near the
#
conkin border and they had tortured them for days a muslim family the hospitals and they believed
#
that these people had rdx as they had propellers rocket propellers it turned out that actually it
#
was just there was an accident of a truck and it was a textile products were being taken and these
#
were actually project they resembled projectiles but they were for textile weaving these spindles
#
here so they beat them up on this frustration because they were muslims when i was interviewing
#
these people and the guy who was most articulate or expressive he took me aside and he said
#
you know the americans what they are doing right now in abu grave they learned it from
#
bombay police now i could be condescending and think what a stupid man but actually
#
all i needed to understand was how he was trying to connect what had happened in his world in his
#
life to something that had received attention and had not been ignored by the media that had
#
been condemned the world over that had been seen as an instance of brutality and torture and so
#
trying to you know when you said earlier that how you find effective this notion of
#
trying to listen not to respond but in order to understand here what was important for me was to
#
understand that this man was placing himself on the global stage he was saying i too have a place
#
in the world and i cannot be dismissed and what happened to us should not be ignored i mean so in
#
a way that was the most eloquent plea that he could have made and that's how i saw it so that's i think
#
the attempt i'm trying to make as a listener or as a journalist or as a writer to understand
#
what is not just the situation but what actually is the story so i'll ask you a question here you
#
mentioned abu grab you mentioned what the mumbai police did to these people and one is reminded
#
of hannah arendt's phrase banality of evil and the thing is we think of the nazis as particularly
#
evil but the point is that common people everywhere at all times in these times around
#
us in our cities in our neighborhoods perhaps even in our homes behave in the most terrifyingly evil
#
ways and and this is commonplace and this is recurring and i also think simultaneously of
#
what i consider to be the human project of culture like we are the only species that can reprogram
#
ourselves that can mitigate our own hardwiring we have instincts that are that we would consider
#
bad we have instincts that we would consider good and i think the whole enlightenment project
#
the whole project of culture is that we mitigate the worst demons of our nature as a tribalistic
#
sort of instincts that we have and we amplify the better angels of our nature as steven pinker
#
eloquently put it but what is increasingly happening is that human nature is a fixed thing
#
and whereas this project this cultural project this project of sort of civilization is something
#
that requires eternal vigilance renewed commitment you have to keep working at it
#
which is why generation after fucking generation we do not learn we have the same shit happening
#
you know what happened in abu graib that happened in mumbai that will happen for the rest of human
#
history all over the world in every city in every town what are your thoughts on that
#
i would think that someone like kahneman whom we have been talking about now and then
#
would want us to be a little bit more skeptical of saying that human nature is unchanging
#
or to resist broad generalizations and as a writer i'm particularly interested in the exceptions
#
in the divergence from you know the moment of you know when people talk about let's say
#
the murderer at the moment that he is about to plunge the knife the moment of hesitation
#
or you know people turning otherwise but you're right not only is there the talk of you know not
#
not only do i admire and accept the term that aren't used over the banality of evil
#
i actually like whoever it was who coined the term banality of the banality of evil
#
evil that's that's how ordinary it has become you know yeah i mean the terrible let's say you know
#
you if you think of the killers of naroda narodapatiya now under the present dispensation
#
allowed to go free and them being garlanded so that is banality of the banality of evil
#
uh and at the same time also to you know i don't know i don't know why um
#
was one thing is to be skeptical so even when we talk about the enlightenment how to say that as
#
a part of the enlightenment project though as a part of the emergence of rational discourse or
#
this or that was also the idea of civilizing discourse and the attempt to go out and colonize
#
people and thereby introduce civilization to them which was the most damning thing they could have
#
done it was actually the destruction of the civilizations that were present let's say in
#
africa or asia so our attempt should be i feel except i am always reluctant to give gyan on such
#
a large scale is to be skeptical of any claims to righteousness and to stress otherwise to be
#
enormously um not cynical but just questioning you know to question for example the state's
#
discourse on development and what is being done with irrigation with our mountains with our rivers
#
with all our natural resources and also on the other hand i'm very attentive because you know
#
the blue book came out then the yellow book and if you mix blue and yellow you get green
#
so i am now very attentive as i work on my next project
#
to think about the resources of hope really so one of the people i wrote about in a
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piece called i think it was called particular matter for grantha was my conversation with a
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guy who has been saying all across rajasthan that your family should have a green family member
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you have you know you plant a tree and you think of that as a family member and you take care of
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it and he has succeeded some claim the un has given him an award in turning the desert green
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you know and he told me i have yet to verify it he told me that he has been able to plant bear
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without using a single drop of water and i'm very curious about that all these efforts you know all
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across the country i'm to be very alert to have your ear down to the ground to see where is
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resistance last month i met natasha narwal in delhi and i found that very inspiring you know
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they kept her in prison they did not let her come out when her father was sick with covid and dying
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they let her out only to light his funeral pyre but now unable to pursue or feeling a disconnect
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with what she had originally enrolled in her phd she has now started doing her studies in
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carceral studies so that even that which was came as the worst thing done to her is now leading to
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something positive and i feel that's great you know i want to be able to record those things
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what is carceral studies sorry studies of in of of prisons oh okay as a incarceration
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incarceration so it's connection so you know as we are reaching the end of our allotted time as
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it were you're reaching the end of your allotted time you have three seconds buzzer will ring
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answer the question but we have like about 10 minutes or so so you know i you of course have
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to promise to come here again because i had so much to talk about and it's an honor boss it's an
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honor okay i mean oh my god okay uh so i'm going to throw that earlier question back at you which
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you refused to answer then uh gateway books what are your great gateway books like i i spoke of
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pinker's blank slate and you know i could speak of others but what are your gateway books which
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served as a rabbit hole for you into a world of knowledge and curiosity i think ways of seeing
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which i have mentioned by jeff dire by by john berger was a great example jeff dire actually
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then wrote about berger later on so that's why and then john berger's book a seventh man which
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was about when he got his booker for g his novel which when i first read i did not entirely
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understand he used half of the money to give to i think it was caribbean workers because the
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booker because booker's wealth had come from colonies in the caribbean so he gave it to
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workers who were trying to organize and the other half he used to research and write a book called
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seventh man which was about immigrants in europe and the way it mixes you know prose and poetry
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and images that has been a very important book for me then the you know our early discoveries
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in terms of george orwell or even our indian writers kushwant singh or ved mehta when i was
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a young man allowed me to observe our setting our immediate setting and write later in more
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in recent more recent years like let's say 20 years and 30 years people like j.m kudzeer you
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know his book waiting for the barbarians waiting for barbarians or disgraced or elizabeth costello
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are great models of how to write novels while addressing power and important questions
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um more recently i've been reading penelope fifth gerald because there is a lightness of touch there
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that i really appreciate you find that also in someone like nipols house where mr biswas has
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that sense of the comic even amidst the tragic it's just something i really really like and
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want to aspire to you know that's it i mean there's so many books so many books so many books
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you know um recently just two three days ago at the kulman fellowship where i'm at the new york
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public library someone said we should do a reading group people don't read philip roth that much
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but this person said sabbath's theater is such an outpouring
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that we should do a reading group and philip roth has been important for me because of a certain
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frankness a certain also a certain uh sticking to a particular identity and trying to articulate a
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life and i've been thinking that i'll read sabbath's theater maybe that will be another of those books
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that you have been asking me about you know i should also mention without forgetting
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that when i was an utterly aimless
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young man who wanted to be a writer but did not know how reading vs nipols autobiography
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which i took down from a friend of mine had it in his room and i was sleeping on his floor because
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i didn't have a room myself at delhi university at that time it was finding the center you know
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uh his autobiography there about how he wrote his first book was very important it just gave
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me a sense of what it means to be a writer and uh my god it was beautiful
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my penultimate question uh and for this i'll quote a passage from a matter of rats
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where i think in the introduction you wrote quote here is a case that was a favorite of mine for
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several years a journalist arvin das wrote in the republic of bihar about a conversation over
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heard in a train from patna in 1991 a woman distraught at her husband's prolonged illness
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was telling her son that she sometimes found herself wanting to commit suicide
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the son responded that his father's death would be more welcome das had written why should you
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die why not kill babuji instead if he goes away we will get his gratuity and provident fund money
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and it is possible that i might even get a job on compassionate grounds what do you use will
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your dying be and this boy was only 12 years old so it's a great memorable passage oh my god and i'm
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also reminded of this quote by ralph wildo emerson where he says every man alone is sincere
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at the entrance of a second person hypocrisy begins a friend therefore is a sort of paradox
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in nature stop quote and the what both of these kind of hint at is how people are instrumental to
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us and we might put a veneer on this and we might you know exalt relationships like fatherhood and
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friendship and all that but people are ultimately instrumental to us and one of the ways in which
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we try to fight our hardwiring one of the good things about culture and civilization is that
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we want to rise above this we don't want people to be instrumental with us and therefore late in life
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i have also come to think that one has to be intentional about relationships if nothing else
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about how we treat the people around us about how we nurture our friendships and so on and so forth
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so i want to ask you to sort of ponder about that to share your thoughts on that because earlier
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you had also said that you know you'd refer to arismodox saying that there are 13 people you need
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and at a closer level i you know i heard someone once say that there are there should be five people
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in the world to whom you can say anything to whom you can bear your heart out so how do you think
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of relationships and friendships and what is the kind of intentionality you bring into the way you
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relate with people boss i only bear my heart to you because you ask those you ask those unlocking
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questions uh that's your skill okay to go back i had totally forgotten uh that quote that you read
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out from arvind dandas who was a model of mine when i was in college because he was a journalist
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from bihar and would write great pieces in toi um but what it recalled to me was another story
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also from bihar which i want to provide as an antidote and i must have listed that because i
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had gone out for a walk during that trip with ashish nandi and my tomb and he said as i was
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going to bihar the next day or the day after he reminded me that one of the things that arvind
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dandas probably had told him and wanted him to remember was that in bihar uh desperate parents
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sometimes would take a gun and would be on the train and they would catch hold they'll see a
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young man ask the cast maybe ask him at gunpoint to get down from the train and marry their daughter
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and ashish nandi wanted me to consider the simple point that maybe it was arvind dandas
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who had communicated to him that none of these marriages in bihar had ended up in the violence
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of what we saw elsewhere in india certainly in punjab in delhi of bright burnings he said those
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marriages had worked and he wanted me to always carry this thought of that society of that
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tenderness uh in mind when i wrote in other words so it's not always instrumental how is it
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that cultural or other facts factors save us from depravity or inhumanity sirji i asked a question
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about you but so you know how do you look at the issue of relationships
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so yeah i always think that uh i would like to think of it of our interactions as uh
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as as as collaborations so that i bring with an open heart something to you
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and should feel free to demand something from you i was always a little bit struck when a friend of
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mine when i was younger he was a communist and was from a poor family asked my mother
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he said ma and my mother must have been very inclined to give it away even though that was
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the first thing luxury item that she herself had got for herself and i was distraught at this
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boy demanding it but at the same time i kind of admired you know i would not have dared to ask
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a friend's mother even for food if i was hungry i would have felt inhibited and i thought i kind
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of like this guy's honesty in asking for what he wanted um so i don't know i still feel uncomfortable
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about that but with friends i always feel that if we forgot about if we left aside all those other
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things and thought of ourselves as creatives communal by which i mean social subjects then
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we would be very much open to what have we brought and what we asked of others and thereby we would
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produce as if we were participating in a potluck we would produce a wonderful feast so it was in
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that spirit that i wanted to be open with the questions which i expected you to ask me and you
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did ask me and i wanted to prepare for you by also doing a little bit of reading which i thought
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because i was caught by the description of your podcast which i had not noticed before about the
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behavioral science the behavior science and so i thought i should read kahneman's so that's what
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i read yesterday and i had questions for you which i thought i would remember and maybe think more
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about not only to better answer you but actually to be a better questioner and a better listener
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myself when i conducted my interviews so welcome to the feast baby no no thank you for your
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kindness and asking the questions you're reading for the attention a final question and it's more
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of a request that you know when we were discussing recording today you had said that i will read out
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things in hindi and all of that and i know for a fact that many of my listeners love that i love
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that because the the swath of your reading out hindi work is wonderful so please read out things
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that you love to end this show you have such a good memory you complain about dementia but oh my god
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i will read two one because you were right to remind me that somebody had said five people
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rather than having 14 friends so in that i will read a poem that i first wrote in hindi it's
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called homeopathy or as in hindi it would be pronounced homeopathy
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a list of your dear friends
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ought to be short perhaps a dozen and the list of enemies even shorter but it should be there for
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sure written in some corner of a page in a diary all those names that give off an order of hate
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today i am remembering dr bhattacharya who had a clinic in patel nagar in patna imagine someone
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who looked like dinesh thakur about 30 years older a shawl on one shoulder who before giving
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homeopathic medicine always provided a list of all those items of food and drink it was essential
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to avoid beautiful and i should tell my listeners at this point that the dinesh thakur you're
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referring to is not the health activist who's been on my show but the actor who often played a
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hindi film villain with a distinctive beard and all of that yes yes and also a character role
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yes yes yes all right so uh more my final poem yes sir if i may please is called in hindi
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i had titled it sub but in english it is translated as rules of writing and i know
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there are many writers on your uh among your listeners i'll read that english in a later
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in a bit here's the hindi one first here's the hindi original first
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nowhere in mahatma gandhi's memoir does he mention the weather
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or describe london's streets its houses or even a room the crowds no discussion of any mode of
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transport this criticism has been made by vs naipaul but the weather was inside gandhi
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a solitary spirit caught in the storm a lone self walking stumbling making his own moral way
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if you're searching for the truth how does it matter whether the sun set this evening at 6 15
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or 6 25 but i do heed vs naipaul if you are not a mahatma and merely a writer you will have to
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pay attention and take note of the lovers whose names are scratched on the walls that ride around
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you the interval between the drops of rain being blown on the roof the light branches of trees
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dancing in the wind the ringing of a bicycle spell the silence after a riot
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you will have to write about the young woman sitting alone in the canteen and the glass of
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water in front of her in which the whole world appears upside down beautiful magnificent
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i will put this episode to bed thank you so much and we shall keep talking
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if you enjoyed listening to this episode head on over to your nearest bookstore online or offline
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pick up the blue book pick up the yellow book pick up every book by him they're all great
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you can follow amitawa on twitter at amitavakumar that's one word you can follow me on twitter at
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amitavakumar you can browse past episodes of the scene and the unseen at scene unseen dot in
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