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I often think about the danger of getting into a rut.
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You start doing something, you get good at it, maybe you keep on loving it but there
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is a danger that eventually you get into a groove.
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You do what needs to be done, you tick the boxes, there is competence but maybe not excellence
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because the intensity has gone out of it.
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You know what to do and you rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat and this
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Bob Dylan once said, he not busy being born is busy dying.
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This is a danger in any profession but I feel that this is particularly a danger in academia.
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The pressure to conform in academia, whether to the fashions of the day or to the height
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bound conventions of the ideological eco chambers, that pressure is so great that to be busy
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being born is a path to sure death.
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There is no space for independent thinkers.
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Most of academia, certainly in the social sciences, is pompous old farts and pompous
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young farts talking to each other in a circle-jerk game and not concerned at all about the real
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That's why it's so refreshing to come across those rare academics who question everything,
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who engage with the real world and who by following their curiosities enrich our understanding
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of the world we live in.
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Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen.
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My guest today is Yugang Goel, an associate professor at Flame University and an independent
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thinker we must all pay attention to.
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Yugang recently came out with a co-authored book called Who Moved My Vote, which uses
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data to come up with many insights about the Indian electoral system and about Indian politics,
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many of them counterintuitive.
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He is also a deep thinker on everything to do with this country and in this conversation
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We spoke about education, elections, colonization, religion, history, society and much much else.
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I had so much fun recording this that I can't wait for you to listen to it as well.
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So let's do just that, after a quick commercial break.
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Hey, the music started and this sounds like a commercial but it isn't.
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It's a plea from me to check out my latest Labour of Love, a YouTube show I am co-hosting
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with my good friend the brilliant Ajay Shah.
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We've called it Everything is Everything.
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Every week, we'll speak for about an hour on things we care about, from the profound
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to the profane, from the exalted to the everyday.
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We range widely across subjects and we bring multiple frames with which we try to understand
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Please join us on our journey and please support us by subscribing to our YouTube channel at
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youtube.com slash amitvarma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
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The show is called Everything is Everything.
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Please do check it out.
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You aren't welcome to the Scene in the Unseen.
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I mean, it's such a pleasure to be here, I've admired it for a long time and so happy that
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I'm really glad to have you on and I was thinking that the moment you walked in, we should have
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kind of hit the recorder there itself because you were saying so many interesting things
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and I'm going to ask you to sort of elaborate on one of them because I don't know if you
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came up with it on the fly or you've thought about it in detail but we were talking about
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how you were telling me that, you know, when you went abroad to study, you and the other
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Indian in your class, you knew each other and everybody was surprised from such a big
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country how they can know each other and before that I was telling you about how all my guests
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in the 70s were part of the small elite, St. Stephen's, Hindus, they all knew each other,
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everybody's in the same thing and thankfully opportunities have expanded since then, it's
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no longer about a bunch of small elites but you made a very interesting point drawing
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on from that which and you came up with this metric for egalitarianism within a country
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so can you expand on that?
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Yeah, okay, so this was quite funny actually because, you know, all my European and non-Indian
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friends particularly from the cold countries, they were very surprised that both of us knew
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each other, the other Indian and, you know, happens to be, used to be my former colleague
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at Jindal, Shilpi and so the idea was that if there are two Indians, you pick them randomly
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in India and you pick two Indians outside India randomly in the same country, chances
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are that likelihood of these two knowing each other will be higher for the second couple
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and this can be done for any country in the world, so if the likelihood of two people
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within their own country knowing each other is less than any two randomly picked people
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of that country in another country, then we know that this country has a very low level
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of egalitarianism, the idea is that if there's just 1% people educated or 2% people educated
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and they're going to be abroad, they are likely to know each other because there are very
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few universities that are producing these elites and so the likelihood goes up, so
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two Germans within Germany randomly picked and two Germans within Australia randomly
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picked, I don't think likelihood of A is more than B or less than B, it's very hard to
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quantify but let's say two Bangladeshis or two Indians or two Nigerians picked up within
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their countries and outside, you know, we could probably make a claim on this type and
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so I now think with so many Indians abroad, chances are that their likelihood of them
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knowing each other is reducing over time and this I think is a good thing, so while it's
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easy for us to know people in the 1960s and 70s and then through them know everyone else
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who's important and not so much now, I think it's a good thing, like I think it should
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have happened earlier, the enrollment rate is increasing, every Indian now wants to study,
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go to good university, probably even go abroad and right now they can think about it because
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those possibilities are around and they're exciting, so for that small group of people
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who know each other, it's not a very good thing, for the society at large, I think it's
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definitely good and I must tell you, I have a feeling that one of the angst that political
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parties who are now kind of catching up with BJP is that, you know, the prime minister has made
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this comment, you know, the Khan market gang and this statement doesn't come, I mean factually
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one may argue, there are people who are elites even within BJP but there has been a sense of
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breaking up of this monopoly of the elites earlier to some extent or at least in terms of cosmetics
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it has definitely happened, so but yeah, I hope that as and when we grow older, Indians
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outside India are less known to each other in a way. No and actually I share that disdain for
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a certain kind of elite, so I totally get where that's coming from but I also think that the
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disdain for elites can spill into a disdain for knowledge and expertise almost, which in a sense
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it appears has been monopolized by said elites and I think that's a problem. That I think you're
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right, so what's happening is in our obsession to hate capitalists, we will end up hating capital,
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in our obsession of hating elitism, we will end up hating elites and that's not what we should do.
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So elitism needs to be hated but not elites because these are the guys who are probably,
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you know, doing many good things as well, so good that you pointed it out actually.
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So tell me about yourself, where did you grow up, are you an elite? I'm actually, we are all
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elites by default in a sense but tell me a bit about your childhood, where did you grow up,
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what were you growing up years like? Thanks, I mean I would like to consider,
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I mean now definitely we're elites but I don't think I grew up as one. I grew up in a very old
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part of Agra, Agra is, don't worry I don't have guns in my pocket right now,
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but I grew up in Agra, it's a small Mohalla in the old part of Agra which was very close to this,
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I mean somewhat famous monument called Atmat-ud-Daulah. Atmat-ud-Daulah was this
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monument that Shah Jahan's wife Mumtaz Mahal had built in the memory of her father. So it's like
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old part of Agra which was hugely influenced by the Mughal regime and this is what I think
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and it was quite a rustic childhood actually. So some of those postcard images of Taj Mahal
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and the backyards where some of these little boys are playing cricket on the sand, maybe I could be
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one of them. So that's how I grew up and then soon my father kind of realized that if I don't get
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good education I'll probably not do anything in life. So he put me in a good English medium school
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and that's I think what changed. So in the school we are talking about, so this was a convent school,
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you know the sisters and nuns are speaking in English, at home I am probably milking a cow or
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riding a donkey and doing those type of things. So it was an extremely diverse sort of childhood
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in some ways because in the first half of the day I am reading in English, doing things which
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otherwise would not be common to the second half of the day. And I think what this did is that it
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led me to run into people who influenced me, either my teachers or friends who used to come
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from elite families and their parents and slowly they would tell me you know do this, do that,
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this is a good subject, this is a good book, study this and things like that. So I picked up things
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and I think I would score well and things like that. So you know like most Indians who have
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scored well in their schools during the 90s and 2000s were pushing to engineering and so was I.
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I mean I got through some of the Delhi University colleges, Hindu, Stephen's, Hansraj but you know
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the parental expectations didn't quite match there. Like you know this boy,
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so therefore it's better you do engineering. So I went to NIT Surat, I did my engineering
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and mechanical and I quite liked it actually. Coming from old part of Agra to town called Surat
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was phenomenal and I think I'll tell you why it was, I think it has had a huge influence on me
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looking back because in NITs unlike IITs they used to be a state quota which means you will
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necessarily have students from each state of India, no matter their ranks. So states like
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Gujarat where competitive culture or cultures for these coaching institutions and entrance exams
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is not very high, you will have those students too as long as they're good in their state ranks.
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But so you will sit with a class which is kind of very, sort of culturally it's very rich class.
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I have friends from almost all kinds of region in India and so there are two learnings that I got,
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one which I got then, the second which I got much later, the first one no matter your rank
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you can still top your engineering colleges. So in a way we would always consider is do engineering
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entrance exams select only the brightest and I can say that yes by and large they are bright
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but they are not at all a proxy of intelligence because folks in my class who came with the so
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called inferior ranks because those states you know were not very competitive in their,
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they were doing very well in exams and the other way around as well right. Part of it can be
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attributed to well you know those guys who get good ranks they don't do hard work in their colleges
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but I know to the extent it is true but surely intelligence has nothing to do with your rank
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you know this is one thing that I learned and now I learn that I was unknowingly part of a very
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cross-cultural you know ecosystem and that cultural osmosis that happened without us
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knowing it is happening I feel makes me now a little bit more open in terms of the diversity
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that India offers both intellectually as well as culturally but I was never interested in
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engineering like right like most Indians I do engineering and like most Indians I'm not
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interested so I turned so I had many friends who were doing law in many you know some of these
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universities national law school Nalsar and it was through their influence that I started
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getting interested in law you know I picked up a few books I you know read used to read newspapers
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you know extensively we went to some conferences and everything started making a lot of sense to
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me a lot more than engineering and so by the time I was in the third year I realized that my CV
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if you can call it a CV there was a fair bit of you know law that that had gotten into it
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so we started a small law magazine with many of these law school students you know bunch of them
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from Nalsar some of them from Bhopal and it was a it was a magazine that was edited by the students
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of law there was only one person who was not from law is me and so I got a fair bit of exposure
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and because engineering is a mathematical science I knew a little bit of economics so what I did is
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I somebody told me again like I met these small you know mentors for small duration so to speak
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so then at that time point of time somebody told me why didn't you apply to this scholarship
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this is a good one called Erasmus Mundus and I didn't I hadn't heard of it I remember noting
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down the spelling because I wouldn't even know about it and internet was new this is mid-2000s
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computer was new so I back in my at least my in my you know ecosystem and so I found this
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scholarship out I kind of liked it European Union is giving you money to study in different parts
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of Europe in different universities for different semesters so I applied in a program called law
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in economics European masters in law and economics and this was fascinating because I am neither a
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lawyer nor an economist by my formal degree I got through later on one of the selection panel
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members who happened to be my teacher in Rotterdam Netherlands told me that what he really liked in
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the application was that I am even thinking of doing this you know being an engineer I mean so
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I was the only non-lawyer non-economist in the background who was in that class class of around
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90-100 students from all over the world and that exposure so so 2007-2008 I did this masters
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I didn't sit for CAD I mean I had grown really sick of entrance exam after my engineering entrance
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exam experience that was only once and I was so so I didn't apply to study abroad sorry I didn't
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apply to study in India I went abroad and now so I remember myself walking on the street as a
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extremely intrigued and curious child trying to understand why is this place so different
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and I mean days after days I would just walk or ride my bicycle thinking about what is it how
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is it possible that if you make me blindfolded and plant me here and I will tell you this is
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not India is it really the urban architecture and urban space maybe not that is it the people maybe
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not that what is it and so since then I had this question of difference between east and west in
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some ways has been a driving force for me at least in terms of my own curiosity so I I graduated
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you know scored well I really I I and I remember and enjoyed the most my class on comparative law
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and comparative law in which the our professor I still remember his name professor Jan Tingenbergen
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he says that he announces in the class that you think laws are the same around the world and they're
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different and for me as a non-lawyer I mean I understood this a little bit but more importantly
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he then gives us this book called Zweigart and Cudes on comparative law and I read how legal
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families are different around the world so Japanese have a different system common law civil law now I
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had known that they're different but historically why they have been different was the first time
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that I read it you know Napoleon's common laws origins and this so that made me and so from there
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I'm trying to connect why is Europe so different from India and why are certain legal systems why
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do why do they work here and they don't work in India and so on and so forth anyway long story
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short I came back I joined a private firm which was basically a joint venture between ICICI bank
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and West Bengal Industrial Development Corporation so it's like a consulting firm on massive rural
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infrastructure projects in eastern part of India so I joined them worked out of Calcutta and Delhi
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was quite nice actually because I worked in Jharkhand, Odisha, Bengal, a little bit of Bihar
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and so I really saw a lot another part of India so I'm in the north I grew up in the north
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I study in the western part of India and then I work here in the east and eastern part of India
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and this is the time when I am you know in my early 20s and I am hugely influenced by what I see
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in the Naxal affected regions in you know in somewhat of a because when you're at home like
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western UP is also poor but not as poor as eastern UP or Bihar or Jharkhand and when you're at home
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you're kind of still you know living a life which is not as you know brutal in your face but when
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I'm going to these villages where you know the government is planning massive infrastructure
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projects I'm meeting these people and I'm looking at these things with a sense of curiosity I've
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remained curious for most part of my life and that is and that's when I decided I don't want
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to do this I want to I want to do something else I don't want to look at targets and stock
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prices etc because real deal is somewhere else so it was a huge hugely important and learning
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experience for me but I couldn't continue it so and that is when I got a call from somebody who
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I had met in my during my master's days when he was doing PhD in Hamburg you know coming to the
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same connection and elite that you were talking about earlier and he is like the second or third
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employee in a new setup an enterprise called OP Jindal Global University and they've just bought
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land they're just buying land and he calls me and you gang what do you want to do you want to
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help these you know ICICI bank make money or you want to change the higher education landscape
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of India you know one of those proverbial phone calls I'm like yeah I'm looking for a change I
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had never wanted to be an academic but the vision that he shared and then I spoke to Raj who's the
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who was the founding vice chancellor continues to be and you know I thought there's something
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else going on I mean back in 2009 think about it this way private universities were really looked
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down upon I mean even now for that matter but less so and here's a new private university emerging
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where Naveen Jindal has given a huge amount of money but he said like look I don't have time so
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you guys do it so everything is being done by this small group of people so here's the startup
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university if I can use that term that was in the offing and I thought let me lap it up
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I wanted to go to Delhi anyway away from Calcutta and and so I joined it and that was a joyride it
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was extremely it was a hugely huge learning experience we were working 14 to 18 hours
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every day this was 2009 to 10 and it was amazing because we are trying to go to so think about it
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this way Amit I'm going to some school kids first of all I'm telling them don't do engineering
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do law then I'm telling them even within law don't go to national schools come to Jindal
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and then here are the here are the here are the factors that could drive your decision what are
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the factors well the faculty members are not quite old they're very young frankly the university is
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in Haryana a little away from Delhi the construction is still going on but it should be done by the
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time you join the you know we don't have placement record because you guys are going to be the first
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batch and I trust I promise that you'll do a good education you know the education will be good
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and you have to pay five times what any other expensive law school has I mean so are you out
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of your mind like what is making you even ask this so I think there was this conviction that
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what India needed was good quality education and people need to pay for education and not something
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else and education driven through faculty so and let me let me take I mean this is an important
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segue here because you know universities in India have been good because the students have been good
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you take IITs or IIMs or national law schools or any of the top universities in India
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by and large their expertise or their reputation their aspirations lie at the level of brilliant
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students and well of course students are going to be brilliant because out of lakhs of students
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you're selecting hundred they have to be so bright these are the kids who will do anything
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who can do anything really well they will be smarter than their teachers and in Europe I
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realized this that you know teachers I mean their one hour of lecture is so full of knowledge that
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you don't want to miss even one minute of it and you want to listen to it and then you know prepare
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for the next lecture and so on and so forth so can universities be driven through the intelligence
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of the faculty members and not just the students is the this was the hypothesis you were trying
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to test and so the deal in Jindal was we get the brightest minds to become faculty and let
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educational experience and learning be at the forefront not jobs or not anything else surely
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infrastructure but and in order to attract these bright kids to bright minds to teach we need to
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pay them salaries that are competitive we need to get many of them who are otherwise teaching abroad
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or studying abroad to come to India and teach and you know many of these kids want to become teachers
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but they simply don't because the system's here and so that is what we were trying to test and
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frankly that test turned out to be quite so people are so you pay money for you know for
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education and not just placements for that matter anyway so 2012 I realized by two three years we
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worked I was also you know helping them develop their international collaborations went and went
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and exposed myself to many other universities globally very very useful learning lesson and
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2012 I decided I want to do a doctorate because I want to be in academia went again secured the
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Erasmus Munda scholarship returned I helped set up school school of liberal arts and when I so I
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returned back to Jindal I helped set up their school of liberal arts and humanities in 2009
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we were doing school of law business international affairs public policy and then 2021 five years
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after that I moved to flame university which is again one of the few prominent prominent few
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private universities whose mandate is driven by the research and the pedagogy by their faculty
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members and you know students can benefit so the idea is instead of collecting instead of getting
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people who are at the 90 and making them 95 let's get people at 70 or 80 and make them 90 right so
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this is the premise on which these universities and now of course my research has moved significantly
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towards public policy so I I used to write in law reviews earlier after my PhD started writing in
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economics journals I continue to do that but now I engage with the government extensively and work
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on public policy issues and areas my curiosity that that got triggered when I went abroad
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now has found a place in a major project that I'm doing in flame university where we are documenting
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district level statistics and district level cultures in India so despite being an economic
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economist and some sort of a public policy at least enthusiast I also take keen interest in
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cultural differences it's too long perhaps for introduction no no not long enough I mean there
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are at least 40 things here I'm going to double click on and we can just talk about this part
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alone for us but I want to continue around that very important segue that you took where you
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spoke about education and the universities and all and I have a couple of questions here and
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the first of them is a broad conceptual question which is sparked by your insight that look a lot
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of those earlier colleges did well because they were selecting only the brightest right like
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Karthik Muralitharan in his episode with me on education pointed out that over here what we do
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in our education system is it's it's not a system for teaching people stuff it's a system for
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sorting you sort out the best and the brightest and that's it and I have always thought that
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this is a freaking waste I have always sought that as I he queued that only the bright
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brightest people can learn engineering or medical why can't everybody freaking learn
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engineering or medical if they want to you know we should all have the scope to learn whatever
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the hell we want and and therefore I love the fact that you know Jindal and flame and some of these
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universities are taking that forward and saying it's not just about sorting and selecting the
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best no matter who comes here you know we are good enough we'll give you the knowledge and
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the insight and we'll make you good and then that really strikes me and and I wonder therefore that
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you know is it that it is only in India that we think of it like this that we start sorting
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people out or is that mindset elsewhere also like even abroad there are only a limited number of
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people going to get into Harvard and honestly a lot of that isn't even merit it's about you
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know donors kids and this and that and it's an extremely political system even there so how does
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one think about the democratization of education because on the one hand it is perhaps simplistic
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not quite because you need those that physical contact the networks and actual active human
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guidance and all of that is important equally I just feel that you know I can go online YouTube
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has all of Robert Sapolsky's lectures and biology online there is you know I'm currently doing
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Harvard's iconic CS50 course in computer science which is free right all of these are free all of
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these are kind of available and and and I think the biggest way to get rid of you know the sort
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of speaking about egalitarian societies earlier the biggest way to make a society more egalitarian
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is just equalize and democratize access to education you know so what are sort of your
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thoughts on that so no this is this is a great point actually and I've learned it through my
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experience my work on higher education really comes through my experience in higher education
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rather than studying books on it actually and so this is something and so you're right I think
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sorting is a problem that sorting is not a problem of principle sorting is a problem of resource so
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you will need to sort if there are fewer places and there are more takers so any society where
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this has been the case sorting has taken over so you know you have very few I mean China's
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meritocratic system their entrance exam cultures predates India's by so many centuries and so even
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in Harvard for that matter so sorting is not the problem the problem is twofold problem is one
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problem is how do you sort what may what is the factor that you use to sort people and so if you
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are sorting based on how the person performs in a three-hour test vis-a-vis sorting based on what
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has a person done in his or her own life suddenly changes the equation so this is one the second
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you will need to sort if like I said earlier if there are fewer places so you in order to
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democratize education you the only option you have is to create better and larger supplies
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now between better and larger number of supplies larger is what we get better is what we don't get
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and that is why I said you know so enrollment rate for instance number of Indian students
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getting into any college as a fraction of total number of students graduating class 12th this
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is called enrollment rate enrollment rate in India is now I think around 25 26 percent
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and the idea is by 20 35 we should reach 50 percent when we were starting back in 2009 or
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10 we were starting jindal the enrollment rate was around 11 percent which means out of 100
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Indians graduating after class 12th only 10 or 11 at that time so basically we're going to
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college so basically our enrollment rate doubled did this doubling of enrollment rate lead to
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doubling of quote unquote collective intelligence of the society is a question we have to ask
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the answer would be I mean we would not be I personally would not be very excited with the
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answer because creation of new colleges and universities with respect to its infrastructure
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does not lead to creation of intelligence so let me tell you two things one when when students are
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going to a university or a college which are where the teachers are those who are teachers
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because they could not get their best jobs then it will do very little to inspire these students
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so you know in my career I may have I must have given around 300 to 400 talks in schools and
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colleges alone across the breadth of the country length and breadth of the country and one of the
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questions that I have consistently asked people is how many of you want to become teachers
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when you grow up and you know we say that India has unity in diversity and we have a long list
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of why we are unity in diversity there's one more point that I want to add to that list
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there is a unity in diversity in terms of how many of us want to become teachers
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practically none you know very few hands would go up and then I would ask them if none of you
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want to become teachers how do you think we are going to get those inspiring teachers who are
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going to teach you or your kids in future and so we don't have good teachers or scholars because
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we have not created the ecosystem and that's a separate this is one point the second point is
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these kids when they join a college their goal and hope is to get a job which by the way is true
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for any developing country and I think we cannot ignore so I'm not going to be one of those idealist
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educationists who will say well forget about the jobs they need to be given skills so that they
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can learn but if they're not inspired then they will not learn how to learn and I think in today's
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world I mean that's more important because whatever you learn by the time you graduate
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is going to be probably outdated right and you know you and I we don't need to discuss this
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so for us to democratize it we need to ask the first question the first principal question is
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what is a university for or what is a college for is it to give jobs yeah or I mean so I mean if it
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is to give jobs then it is just supposed to be a sorting mechanism and by the way many colleges
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their degree their degrees don't carry that value so imagine one of the most important functions
#
functions of a university was to signal the quality of intelligence right if I see a CV
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and I see what college you've studied from should give me an impression about how intelligent you
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will be for doing this job if the universities have lost this signaling function that means
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they have simply become a sorting mechanism you get a degree and and so by the way so you know
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I'm I sit on the academic advisory council of Indian school of public policy and ISPP located
#
in New Delhi is a one-year or 11-month program which does not give a degree it's fairly expensive
#
students flock towards it because it's not the requirement of a piece of paper that they need
#
which certifies that they have gotten a degree it's about whether they have learned or not
#
and so my my excitement in the last 10 years has not been because there are more universities being
#
built because if they don't have good and inspiring teachers the students are not going to learn and
#
we are again going to be in that rut of sorting because there are very few universities that you
#
can build anyway but my excitement is with this change of attitude amongst Indians that we don't
#
need degree we need intelligence we need to cultivate intelligence through we need learning
#
which is also something that chimes well with the corporate world so they are hiring people
#
without them having a degree I mean the government sector remains separate so if I have to come
#
combine all these points and put them in bullets bullet point number one sorting is a result of
#
demand supply gap we need to increase supply supply means build more higher education
#
institutions but two we cannot simply build them we need to create a powerful soft infrastructure
#
it's not about hard infrastructure and to do that we need to get great teachers if we don't have
#
great teachers these places will mean nothing in fact us and which is connected to this point
#
which is the third point is because of the loss of signaling value of these universities
#
we must be mindful of this second point even more just by building more and more universities
#
we are not going to create you know the type of you know intellectuals intellectual class or
#
cadre of you know people who can be professionals and practitioners in future and therefore while
#
my hope and you know when we were we were working for jindal and even now in flame we do know that
#
there have been some efforts where learning is more important because the focus is to get good
#
teachers and then learning will happen I would have thought after the experience of jindal flame
#
ashoka azim premji I would have thought there should be 50 such universities which will focus
#
purely on learning and get brightest for minds to teach not worry about the ROI as much I mean ROI
#
needs to be worried about so you need to be sustainable but it but but that has not happened
#
you know three years ago I think it was three years ago when we reached a tipping point in India
#
when number of students in private universities exceeded those in public institutions
#
and this was not noted in the media as much but I think it should have so now if if most
#
most students in India are being educated in private universities and if most of them are not
#
good where are we going then in that case so here's the point that I leave you with this question
#
how do you know whether this private university is good or worth or desirable and this is not
#
because you have now these two categories of private universities you have all these
#
mediocre institutions all around us and then you have these bunch of five six that I just mentioned
#
and the funny thing is yeah so I was doing this sort of sorting off the private universities in
#
a way and I realized there are three or four factors that you really need to distinguish
#
between these two almost all of them all those factors will converge to this that the owner or
#
the promoter of the institution is not dependent on that institution for his or her own survival
#
so this is a nice proxy huh so if you find a university's owner or promoter does not
#
I mean either because this guy is so big or because this person has simply forgotten about
#
the university and it is run by institutional you know by faculty members and deans alone
#
then that university is doing good a typical Indian is desirous aspires to be in that private
#
university if the promoter for his or her survival depends on this university I mean on paper all
#
universities in India have to be not for profit but you know it's nothing is on paper always
#
right and how do you how do you know whether this is going on well a I think faculty student ratio
#
could be one is to ten or one is to twelve very difficult for the mediocre private institutions
#
to carry b the faculty salaries have to be fairly high because only high faculty salaries will
#
encourage will encourage good people to come and this will only be done by those who are not sitting
#
on the balance sheets you know because the institution is running by itself and you know
#
we can think of which number and there is a significant research budget so faculty publications
#
per faculty per year in let's say scopus indexed a b degree journals like these are the these are
#
the measures these measures I'm not finding and so even though I'm hopeful and excited about the
#
future of India in terms of education I am not as excited as I was earlier because I would have
#
thought 50 such institutions would have emerged in India I mean there's huge amount of wealth in
#
this country now and thankfully one you know thankfully we've been able to lift so many people
#
out of poverty but many of these big people big guys they have not translated into what we can
#
call as really generous philanthropy because only that will be that will so it'll resolve the first
#
problem which is more colleges and universities but also resolve the second problem which is you
#
get really smart people to become teachers unless you have smart people becoming teachers it's then
#
it's just a you know building with some lights on thank god you're a teacher so I'm going to
#
double click on more of what you said but before that I'm going to triple click or in a sense take
#
a segue from a segue and when you mentioned that we are not sorting well we are sorting
#
you know according to the wrong parameters or metrics or whatever I want to double click on
#
that because earlier when you were talking about your life the thought actually struck me that if
#
I was sorting for success or trying to predict who will be successful I'll pick many of the things
#
which are either circumstantial in your case or which seem inherent to you like for example you
#
said when you applied for the Erasmus scholarship which another of my guests Shruti Rajgopalan has
#
also done I think perhaps Shruti and I were in the same batch actually you were in the same batch
#
but we did not cross the same universities so we even yeah but but we did meet in many of our you
#
know common gatherings so oh great yeah of course small world again and you know going to your first
#
question again as well yeah yeah see now I know both of you also so we're all kind of elites but
#
here's the thing you mentioned that when you applied for that one of the people who was on
#
the selection panel later said that they chose you because they were like just impressed that
#
you would apply and I'm equally impressed like if I was in his place I would immediately say
#
because what that indicates is two things one is curiosity and two is initiative and I guess a third
#
if I'm thinking aloud could be the the willingness to think outside of the box
#
and I think all of these are sort of fantastic qualities and one of the questions I was going
#
to double click on is whether that curiosity is inherent to you or to some extent it was
#
helped along by the circumstances that you're simultaneously in so many different worlds like
#
when you're in school you are half the day you could be milking the cow and all of those things
#
and presumably you know talking in Hindi and etc etc and it's a very different kind of cultural
#
osmosis which I envy because sadly I was just in that english-speaking bubble but the other
#
half of the day you're exposed to another world and you know you pointed out about how much you
#
were reading and all of that and that's all open to you and equally then later when you go to NIT
#
you have people from all the different states which is a huge feature not a bug right
#
little harder to find your comfort zone maybe if you were just in a homogeneous place
#
but it's a huge feature because you just learn so much and you've just taken so much just by
#
osmosis and what I would look at if I was sorting is one I would look to look at the level of
#
curiosity and initiative and two which perhaps the applicant can't help but I would also look
#
at this kind of broadness in their world experience that are they from a bubble and if they are from
#
an elite bubble they probably don't need to join here anyway but are they from a bubble or do they
#
have that variety of experience which I think automatically at some level means openness as
#
well etc etc so what are sort of your thoughts on that both with regard to yourself and with
#
regard to you know that you teach so many people it's that something that like for me
#
India's hope is young people from small cities because I've got energy openness and they're not
#
height bound yeah no I think this is great so I I mean I've thought about it frankly and I don't
#
know the answer what makes me curious I mean so I do know that I am a very curious person because I
#
have cross-navigated across these vertical silos of discipline in not just professionally but also
#
in my own interest like you know for instance the type of books I've read but my curiosity coming
#
from now that you're telling me in fact it's an interesting way to wrap up what I said but you
#
know the way you wrapped it up in a way my curiosity could be coming from my school experience where
#
I'm reading you know I went to ICSC that content school was ICSC board so I had to read Shakespeare
#
you know original Shakespeare books right you know so I'm reading Shakespeare
#
I had to do Julius Caesar so we did Merchant of Venice and Tempest so those are the easy ones
#
as they say but you know by the way so you know you're reading Elizabeth in English
#
and then you are talking in by the way I've used to speak in Braj Basha and Kadi Boli
#
not Hindi so to speak right so so I think that and then the NIT experience so back in my back in
#
the days when we were in college we used to lament of how we are sitting you know so I'm from UP
#
in UP the comparative culture for the entrance exam which I think is undesirable but it exists
#
so we used to have good ranks but then there were other folks from other states which who did not
#
have good national level rank but so we used to lament you know we are sitting with these people
#
who didn't do any coaching who didn't do any who didn't study at all and they just came to the
#
exam and they got like you know horrible ranks but still part of us but now I think it was so
#
amazing like you said it's not a bug it's a feature actually and I actually feel that this type of
#
this type of diversity in a classroom which goes beyond the score that you have in your exam is
#
extremely important and I don't have any scientific study which I may have conducted with respect to
#
my friends who went to IITs and who did not have this diversity but I think so what you're saying
#
makes me feel maybe this is what drove my curiosity further but in principle I don't know if curiosity
#
is inbuilt or it can be cultivated so I really don't know what I do know is that it can be killed
#
if you know if if it is at all inherent then the system can create you know systems can
#
make huge amount of effort to kill to kill creativity or curiosity you know children
#
are the most curious and then you know what happens as they grow up it's like we are intelligent
#
despite education not because of it in a way so that's definitely one part but the other part is
#
that if you were if someone is to sort what are the ways through which they can look at so you
#
say the diversity of experience is one of those interesting parameters that you could potentially
#
you know see so you're right I think anyone with more diverse experience
#
will probably have a little bit more to add in the on the table at least in the classroom let's say
#
so I'll give you two three two examples perhaps one is that I know a lot about what is happening
#
in the world because in my in the classes that we used to sit both in an IT as well as in my
#
masters and PhD the comments came from a perspective that I would never think about
#
because these guys are in a different part of part of the world and for them this something
#
matters and the same thing goes to me I mean as an as an Indian I have to say we were or at least I
#
was you know a little bit reserved in terms of speaking my mind compared to compared to others
#
and you know part of this confidence comes from your skin color you know particularly when you're
#
first generation you know Indian going abroad and things like that but I could I so I could see the
#
kinds of frameworks coming together like when I went to Europe I was told that you know of course
#
if you're walking by the car has to stop and that came to me as a surprise like well the road is
#
meant for the cars isn't it that's what I grew up thinking about I was like no but this is not how
#
it's supposed to be in fact so for instance in Netherlands they have strict liability against
#
any injury if you do it against against a pedestrian or a cyclist so you know no matter
#
who's fault so this is not fault based liability in tort anyway so in some ways that is very useful
#
but the flip side to this and I mean this is something I'm seeing in the last few years
#
I don't know what is your impression on it because western universities look at diversity a little
#
bit too seriously folks definitely you know in India and maybe even other parts of the world
#
they fabricate the type of diversity they've had in their lives in their statement of purposes so
#
as to get you know brownier points in their selection when they apply to western universities
#
or American universities I say so you will you will probably have you know this this girl or a boy
#
quote-unquote elite who will say how you know the person is has suffered because of some emotional
#
violence at the hands of you know let's say because the person belongs to a minority community
#
right or they will say because the parents are having you know they're going through separation
#
so they will so while I don't want to belittle this but this type of sympathy that their statement
#
of purpose draws in the hope of expressing a level of diversity that they've gone through
#
is something and by the way the American university the selection people who you know selection
#
panels they now are able to get this as well so they're trying to find some other proxies
#
in order to find out who can be smart so you know one of these amazing thing that I'll tell you
#
somebody told me who met who meets this American university's admissions head and this guy is
#
telling him you know what many students are applying from Pune you know to our engineering
#
school and so you know he said yeah that's great actually Pune has a lot of good you know intelligent
#
engineers he said but you know what we are never able to figure out who is the best because they're
#
all very good and their statement of purposes are all very shiny so now we have found a proxy
#
and that proxy is a very funny proxy but we have realized that that works very well in terms of
#
our past students and what is that proxy you this will shock you okay so here's the proxy
#
that this American university has figured out to find out the student will be good in future
#
in our college or not second semester score in mathematics during their engineering college days
#
why is that the case I don't know but he's looking at the past data and this person is saying that
#
somebody who has scored very well in second semester mathematics in their engineering college
#
in Pune is has somehow turned out to be a good student here in the last few years and so now we
#
whenever in doubt we just see that score wow now anyway coming back to the point that I was making
#
is that I will obviously go and you know advocate for this sorting to be done in a more holistic
#
manner because you know what if you're sick for those three hours when you're giving an exam you
#
know all kinds of things and of course your life experiences make you more curious but because
#
students can con the system as well this has to continuously change this sorting method which
#
is more holistic cannot remain fixed because if it remains fixed you know just like election
#
systems it'll be you know then then it'll be game so I strongly think you know sorting has
#
to happen in a more holistic manner the problem is in India is people so many people who apply
#
the sorting becomes very difficult but through smart proxies like this or through thankfully
#
the help of machine learning and the large language models maybe that can also be sorted
#
better but any day life experiences count more and in India actually we have a lot more
#
heterogeneous life experiences by and large right so yeah you know you totally destroyed
#
that particular proxy because everybody who's in engineering in Pune in the second year now is going
#
to say math second year important you know hedge your bets do your math no and I totally agree
#
with you and it's something that I feel strongly about and I'll use it to lead on to my next
#
question that sometimes there is a danger one can make a fetish of diversity in the sense that I
#
feel that more diversity is good I think I came across this study in Philip Tetlock's book super
#
forecasting where he talks about how the biggest predictor of good decision making is not intelligence
#
or education but diversity you have a room with diversity of viewpoints especially you're going
#
to get better decision making because you have people coming at a problem from different places
#
but I think what is also happening across the world is you know one reason when I speak about
#
wokeness I say that wokeness begins where liberalism ends because liberalism is all
#
about individual rights and individual freedom and individual autonomy whereas wokeness just brings
#
narratives around group rights where everything is about victimhood and oppression every single
#
thing you look at through the lens of victimhood and oppression and when you do that you have what
#
I find is a kind of victimhood olympics going on where people are you know trying to figure out
#
as many ways in which they can be victims as possible and that leads to exactly what you're
#
pointing out to and and I think that is cancerous but regardless of that particular cancer one thing
#
that I find is true of academia and our mutual friend Ajay Shah and I in an episode of everything
#
is everything about the knowledge society spoke about this as well is that originally you look
#
at universities as something absolutely beautiful it is a way to discover knowledge it is a way to
#
disseminate knowledge etc etc you are in the knowledge game but what has increasingly happened
#
over the last few decades is that it has become a self-referential game with no connection to the
#
real world it has become a kind of a circle jerk where you have academics talking to other academics
#
as they enter deeper and deeper silos and you know no connect with the real world again and a lot of
#
the incentives are screwed like a constant lament of Ajay's and I couldn't agree with him more
#
is some of our brightest minds are lost playing that academic circle jerk game this phrase is
#
mine not Ajay's are lost playing that game because it all becomes a question of you know you get
#
tenure by publishing set number of papers and set number of journals and there will always be
#
ideologies which are fashionable at a particular point in time and therefore you have to cater to
#
those and you don't get funding if you move outside of that you know narrow band of acceptable
#
or fashionable ideas and it seems to me that what is happening in the west and we have perhaps seen
#
this with recent events in America as well is that at a the academy has lost a lot of
#
his respect among the common people just as car market liberals have and there is good reason for
#
that and two it's more and more sort of ossified and not relevant to the real world anymore you've
#
completely lost the purpose so how do you think about this and especially how do you think about
#
this in the context of building a university ecosystem in India that doesn't fall prey
#
to the same trap so I mean brilliantly put actually and I think I couldn't agree more either
#
the so it's an echo chamber we often call university you know discourses as echo chambers
#
and I think a lot of it is driven through the politics of publication the journal you know the
#
journal editors you simply cannot write so during your tenure you simply cannot write let's say in
#
economics anything against rcts because your you know the tenure committee will definitely include
#
one of these people and they will not and so your papers will not be accepted by top journals and
#
so on and so forth but by the way this has been the this has been the case ever since you know
#
at least when they capture they would like people like them who would you know the gate they become
#
so they will only want their kids to join the group and so I don't think that is really the
#
prince the principle at the principle level that's not the problem because elites always want
#
people like them the problem is in the with the rise of social media this problem has magnified
#
to at a different level so I'll tell you what has happened into you know by giving two examples
#
example one when I was doing my PhD in fact that was not too long long ago in fact when I was doing
#
my bachelor's or my master's at that time the scope and access of google scholar was far less
#
limited far limited compared to today so today I can really go to google scholar and find out
#
literally everything that has been published which is of any worth now on the internet which makes my
#
publication so it allows me to publish faster when you can publish faster you will also publish
#
trash because at some point in midway through your paper when you realize oh this is not a good
#
argument you will not quit you'll say oh well might as well just funny finish it and send it
#
to some journal because I'm looking at one more b category journal in my cv and I'll do it
#
20 years ago if I realize the argument is flawed and there's some scholar who has already done this
#
I will probably not continue with it because my opportunity cost is very high the more time because
#
my paper turning is going to take a long time so therefore what has happened is that with the large
#
number of journals with a large number of you know with a with a greater focus on publications
#
by universities people have resorted to quote unquote conning the system as well so they will
#
publish garbage after garbage in some journals which are not top a grade but as long as they
#
match certain criteria let's say in scopus index or somewhere they will secure some standing for
#
giving points to the author right and so therefore all the incentives for a for a scholar for a
#
university professor is or a tenure you know person in tenure track is to keep publishing no
#
matter what some people will focus only on the top quality and this doesn't mean that everywhere
#
quantities all that matters in fact in good universities only qualities matter quality
#
but there the problem is different you will create so this is one group of scholars who
#
are publishing somewhere this is definitely a huge loss to society because they are writing
#
something which is totally useless because by even even by their own account they'll probably
#
never even you know discuss this paper with people because they know that there is a problem
#
and you know you and i i mean we know social science is a bunch of ideologies also it's not
#
i mean i don't know why social science is called a science i think even there is nothing scientific
#
about it force equals to mass into acceleration is not equal to how society is for instance but
#
anyway that's for another another you know debate so this is one group of people how smart people
#
doing this because the ugc requires it or their publication requirement requires it they're just
#
doing it second group of scholars who are doing trying to do it only in the the most amazing
#
and the most sort of sort after journals which which which emphasize quality over quantity
#
the problem is they are sometimes surely they're making good arguments but they're also making
#
arguments which are absolutely brilliantly internally consistent but with less relevance
#
to the outside world right this is a criticism that economic theory has received significantly
#
you know complex mathematical models it's like as if economists want to be like physicists and
#
physicists of course laugh at them that look you can't be like us so if you pick up one of the
#
you know journal articles from i don't know american economic review you'll find a lot of
#
these papers regurgitating some high math which makes very powerful internally consistent argument
#
but the extent to which it could be used by let's say a policy maker is far limited
#
so it's like a brilliant guy telling the other brilliant guy look this is a brilliant argument
#
that no one else can understand this disease by the way has percolated across all social sciences
#
so if you read a paper in any other relatively more accessible discipline like sociology let's
#
say you will find terminologies and nomenclatures used which make a very simple concept look really
#
heavy now of course this can be defended because they'll say well there are so many layers to it
#
if you use the word certain type of word but frankly it's not really needed and so they become
#
so it's like creating barriers to entry because the more barriers to entry there are the you know
#
more desirable your profession is in some ways which which is like sad because the real purpose
#
of this person being a scholar is so that he or she could translate some of the wisdom to an
#
you know to an audience who would otherwise not be able to access it so this group of people who
#
are really writing well you know by the way let me i'm just reminded of very very quickly i'm
#
reminded of this paper published in american economic review in 2015 by two sociologists
#
and the title of the paper is the superiority of economists and the so the so in the in the
#
paper they're trying to argue why are is it that economists feel superior and why is it that why is
#
that the case if it if at all and you know one of the things that they're showing is that they are
#
most insular in terms of their collaborations with non-economics you know ideas or non-economics
#
journals so co-authors of economists are often economists which is not the case in many other
#
disciplines and things like that anyway you know just it occurred to me to to emphasize how
#
economics as a design i'm talking more on economics because that's the my own discipline in a way
#
and you know like mr b and i am kind of self-deprecating in many ways with respect to
#
my my discipline the so this group which is publishing in really good journals often is
#
publishing arguments which have a very strong internal internal consistency but may have less
#
relevance to the outside world and i mean one defense to this is well we are writing for
#
for you know technical audience it is the job of many others to translate into accessible policy
#
conclusions and suggestions and tell the world but the other thing is how many of them are actually
#
writing about things which are really the pressing need of a society like we are facing wicked
#
problems today right we are talking about wicked problems those problems do not necessarily assume
#
center stage in the mind of this bright chap who's in a university tenure position so this person is
#
writing let's say how social ordering is done or is organized but not writing about let's say public
#
procurement public procurement i mean ordinary indians are suffering from public procurement
#
the ordinary indians are also suffering from let's say social ordering but social ordering
#
is intellectually very stimulating public procurement is really boring
#
so we have taken these bright brilliance to you know folks away from quote-unquote public
#
procurement to quote-unquote social orders so they'll keep on turning newer and newer articles
#
which will make a lot of intellectual sense but to us a joint secretary or a politician it has
#
absolutely no meaning over a long period of time perhaps hopefully some changes will happen and by
#
the way those changes will not necessarily happen by academics alone they will happen through these
#
politicians and through these policymakers or bureaucrats and you know connectedly something
#
that came to my mind those who work in in a particular discipline during their phd days
#
and then they continue working a little bit longer in that you know in their defense it becomes very
#
difficult for them to change the discipline as well so i know many people who in the in the middle
#
of their career feel that they wish they had worked on something which was more tangible
#
which could have directly impacted some policy issue but now that their cv has been built in a
#
particular direction you know the path dependency is so high so switching cost becomes very high
#
so i think at some level if we have to puncture this cycle so you know it has to be punctured at
#
the level of doctoral supervision so because that's the same person when he or she becomes
#
a doctoral supervisor will only encourage his or her student to write something which he or
#
she has been working on or the ideas that he or she has been developing and so it's kind of a
#
self-fulfilling loop where i study let's say i don't know i study gender relations society
#
my doctoral students study gender relations society they also study gender relations society
#
you know so on and so forth but for instance for them to pick up an issue of let's say has
#
banning of alcohol led to a better society for women is a question that will escape them
#
probably because this is not or maybe it doesn't escape them what i'm trying to say is that a more
#
technical issue which requires large churning of data might simply escape them because so if
#
it's only at a very at a phd supervision level where a doctoral supervisor needs to be mature
#
enough to advise his or her student to do a project that has a tangible relevance in society
#
and can i tell you something amit i know even though this may not be apparent university
#
professors they are of course happy when a you know when something gets published by them in
#
a good journal they are happier when one of their ideas is picked up by the government they are
#
actually happiest so relevance is something that they also miss but the way the system is designed
#
the incentive structure is designed very few will have that courage to step aside and not
#
go into the publication route or at least remain in publication route for being relevant quote
#
unquote in their cv value but also be relevant in their policy or you know impact value for that
#
matter there's a great essay by the philosopher agnes callard which i'll link from the show notes
#
about why is academic writing so turgid and even though she's a philosopher you will be
#
pleased to know that her answer has everything to do with economics it's about incentives where
#
she's just pointing out that look if you're on the tenure track you have to write for a particular
#
set of journals there's a particular kind of insider lingo you have to go for and the problem
#
there like you mentioned part dependence a problem there is that that language then becomes the only
#
language you use and the only language you think in and you know complicated muddied language leads
#
to complicated muddy thinking you know there was a time where i would read something and not
#
understand it and i would think the problem is me today i know the problem is not me if something
#
reads like nonsense it is nonsense i don't need to you know gaslight myself for it and all the
#
great writers and all the great thinkers are absolutely clear in their in fact let me add
#
quickly i'm sorry to interrupt here it just occurs to me when you look at the course manuals of many
#
of you know professors who prescribe it to the students and you may remember from your own days
#
it looks like as if every professor wants to make the students into a professor it was the point of
#
you know giving a heavy duty journal articles when the idea is to enhance the capabilities and the
#
faculties of mind by giving ideas that can inspire if they're not even accessible and i'm talking
#
about ug first year let's say or second year for that matter this doesn't mean that journal
#
articles should not be prescribed i think they should be but this doesn't but but to think that
#
we should only prescribe journal articles i think it does it does a lot of harm to you know incoming
#
class who's really i mean students in the first year are the most motivated bunch of communities
#
that you can find in the world they are out of school out of home coming to college first year
#
and then you know they need to be given ideas that are accessible so that they can think beyond
#
what their minds would otherwise allow and this is exactly what it is and partly i think it's great
#
that you mentioned about about this incentive structure because it's not that they're deliberately
#
they're trying to do this it's just the it's rational it's rational actually it's rational
#
for them yes correct have you read timur koran's book the long diversions of course of course
#
yeah yeah yeah so i you know it's a brilliant book and you were speaking about the intersection
#
of law and economics and that is just such a so illuminating in that and i thought of timur because
#
he did an episode with me and he echoed many of these thoughts where he was talking about how
#
today he would not be able to do the kind of work he did because he would not be allowed to
#
write about the middle east or about islam because he's of course writing in a very nuanced way and
#
today that kind of nuance is not appreciated you can you know you can't look at the gray as you
#
know in fact you know i met timur several years ago in fact i met him the year i was planning to
#
join my doctoral program so he's had some influence on me because not just his book but also
#
you know the the way in which he tries to persuade you in a soft way and and you know i mean he's
#
absolutely right i think in fact i prescribed some of his articles to my my own students so
#
great that you brought him up yeah you mentioned insularity and that also you know what you said
#
about economists that really strikes me because to me the one mark of a mediocre mind is if you
#
just stay in your lane you know the best thinkers i know are just multi-disciplinary they're trying
#
to they're going all over the place which is why ajay and i called our show everything is everything
#
everything is everything you know where is the renaissance man and i want to now sort of put the
#
focus back on you and here's my question so i have a very dear friend called suyash rai you might
#
know him kanagi india and suyash did an episode with me where he told me this beautiful story
#
which touched me a lot i may forget the details but the broadly the story is correct which is
#
that he wasn't privileged when he was young to be able to read a lot and so on and so forth so when
#
he did his first job i think it was somewhere in baroda he got his first salary of seven thousand
#
rupees or something like that which at the time would have been worth a little bit more than
#
today so he just went to a bookshop and he told the owner that i have this much money you take it
#
all i don't know what books to buy i want to educate myself you pick something for me and then
#
the gentleman spent a few hours picking something picking books for him i think it's such a beautiful
#
inspiring story because these are the kind of people who really you know go ahead i mean this
#
is what i would select for and it also shows that hunger for learning and so my question to you is
#
tell me about your early hungers i know a lot about all the things that you are passionate
#
about today you know from your book i understand you've thought deeply about elections and we'll
#
talk about that you've spoken about your current work and hopefully we'll speak about that also
#
tell me about your early hungers rabbit holes you dive down what were you really passionate about
#
wow okay so i haven't thought about it so let me give it a try so my father used to i think one
#
of the earliest memories that i have of picking up things that i would never do is that i would
#
typically not do is my father used to work in kinder bank and you know there used to be this
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magazine banks magazine that would be sent to you know some bankers and used to be called as
#
shares and the magazine is nothing but basically many bank branches telling about what they've
#
done right they're singing songs and praise of their own glory of how many accounts they opened
#
and what what did they do and there i so i mean we didn't have many books to read so i would
#
so i would actually wait for shares to come and i would just read what bank branches are doing
#
and it would it would be the most boring thing in some sense right but then there would be
#
pictures of somebody you know cutting a ribbon and you know and because kenra bank is headquartered
#
in bangalore i would read a lot about i would read south indian names a lot which would kind
#
of impress me i'm talking about like really you know in my school probably in my you know class
#
one two or three or something and then then on the last two few pages there used to be some
#
fiction that bankers have written right so there used to be some competition submit some story
#
and so there's a banker who's you know maybe a writer he's sending a story there they used
#
to be in english and hindi and those i hooked on to sometimes poems folks would write fictional
#
stories maybe sometimes non-fictions from their own branches so i think that is and it was surprising
#
for my dad because i'm reading something which is otherwise a very boring thing so that's
#
definitely one thing that comes to my mind the other you know inspiring things that i
#
went down the rabbit hole with is are these two three you know two three magazines that would
#
come during the 90s if you remember nandan and champak do you do you remember them i remember
#
champak very well i don't remember nandan so well but i've heard the name so champak used to be like
#
you know they would they would personify animals right and all these are the stories about animals
#
you know so it's kind of fun right so these are animals who have their own kingdoms and they're
#
talking to each other wearing human clothes and things like that nandan used to be all about
#
fairy tales you know there's sort of some prince some jadugar and things like that so that used to
#
have a huge amount of you know i used to have a lot of fun like i would read them cover to cover
#
and then there were a bunch of you know comic books which were all in hindi by the way i didn't
#
speak english until much later so that and then i think our own texts particularly the hindi
#
texts i would say you know poems and stories by prem chan for example so when i read prem chan
#
for the first time i must have been in what i think class five six or seven i don't remember
#
now exactly and my you know we used to have that you know prem chan's famous story book in my house
#
i read it i don't know how many times and then some of his novels i don't remember much of it
#
because that was all in my school but i do remember so the type of you know so think about it this way
#
i'm growing up in a very rustic environment and my school is extremely elite which is you know in
#
english speaking you know full of priests and and nuns and you know you can be fined if you speak
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in hindi you know that type of school right you know strict ones like dead poet society type
#
story and was by the way only boy school set up by british in 1846 actually predates the first
#
war of independence and so i would not be very proud of you know my home in order to be able
#
to even invite my friends because they all came from different you know better probably economic
#
class and things like that so so though so prem chan allowed me to appreciate where i am from
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actually because he's writing about these ordinary stories of indians maybe uh maybe that's why i
#
liked him i liked his writing and so on and so forth and then of course there are many poems
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that we would read in in poetry maitri sharan gupta or jayashankar prasad so i think these
#
and then my general inclination to you know debate in school take part in quiz
#
led me to you know go deeper into understanding about the world so at that time when there was no
#
internet so there was a bunch of friends of mine in school we used to just talk to each other
#
extensively over fun things and somebody would tell me about some history about some king
#
and that would pick my interest so in fact i if i were to say that i learned as much from outside
#
the books as much from within i would not be wrong and this is something that i'm thinking loudly
#
with you with the you know when you pose this question it was through what people are telling
#
me and oh and by the way i would i would read the entire newspaper every day we used to subscribe to
#
at that time you know i would in fact sometimes it wouldn't come at home so we would i would go
#
to shops in the area i would sit with the some some uncle you know all all the shopkeepers knew
#
me and we knew each other it's like an old part so i would sit there and i would read it and i
#
would listen to their stories they would tell me all kinds of stories so i think that so in a way
#
i learned more informally with whatever i could lay my hands on than formally other than my school
#
text obviously than formally when you know some book is coming to me when some you know one book
#
is leading me to go for another book which is leading me to go for another book so in other
#
words i don't think it's the vertical bar of t through which i learned it's the horizontal
#
bar of t the english alphabet t so i i mean maybe that's a way i can put it so so yeah i mean so
#
i don't know if i've answered your question maybe there was no rabbit hole that i went deep into
#
but there were many holes that i went in and came out of no this is very illuminative because in
#
your book you know you mentioned Premchand you've in your book in the up chapter i think you've
#
mentioned a story coffin yes which is basically for the sake of my listeners it's about this
#
impoverished father and son and and and the mother the gentleman's wife is dead and they don't have
#
money to buy a shroud or a coffin for her so they go begging for money and eventually somebody takes
#
pity on them and they manage to get the money and this father and son spend it all drinking
#
and you point out that this is like the story of up and that blew my mind because it is right
#
and it is and it also tells me that in this there is also an education that in a story like this
#
you arrive at this deep truth and all the learning in the world and all the data in in the world may
#
not express it as beautifully as this so it strikes me that again this is such a great
#
illustration of how when you expand your sort of where you're taking an art from and all of that
#
you kind of do you feel that you know many of your colleagues and many of the people you studied
#
with and all of that would be people i would say people of privilege who have not had this privilege
#
of taking in content in the languages and have had the kind of the kind of education i lament having
#
well fine you get the best of the best but that is all you get and you know i had once done an
#
episode with shruti she'd written a paper on it also with alex tabarrok an isomorphic mimicry
#
that isomorphic mimicry would basically be that they are you know policy makers are taking a
#
policy that has worked in the west and they are using it here but this is a different place it is
#
a different context it worked there doesn't mean it will work here and in a broader sense beyond
#
the point of policy application i think a mistake many people make is they will bring frames of the
#
west to bear on india for example in politics whenever people go on about the right and the
#
left the right and the left i'm like and you've also lamented it in the book and i've just been
#
scratching my head for years that this this is this sheds no light at all it is you know
#
absolutely not useful so what is your sort of sense of this when you look around you that do
#
you think that this is sort of a problem that having a western education going abroad getting
#
these degrees at good colleges on the one hand you get the state of the art education which
#
is not available to you if you're just studying in a more facile college over here but at the same
#
time that you to understand your country and your people better you know you need all that
#
now this is you've touched the touch the nerve i mean this is something that i have been
#
thinking through so deeply for so many years because so i think many indians go through this
#
experience which is where they have gone at least now for that matter because you know many people
#
who were otherwise growing up in an underprivileged if not underprivileged at least non-elite
#
ecosystem have now started to you know and so in a way there were many school friends of mine
#
who i would put in this category but they may not have thought through this because of the compulsions
#
of their you know living and you know being busy with the world but being an academic it allows me
#
the liberty to think and reflect and compare these reflections with other such reflections and i think
#
one of the things that i have really that i've realized and i say this with a lot of responsibility
#
and i've said this in many fora you know the in india i've realized this that the more you study
#
the more degrees you take the less you are connected to people you have grown up with actually
#
or you're the less connected you are to your childhood in a way and i'm using the word i'm
#
using childhood in a very metaphoric way so you know somebody who does bachelors and then masters
#
and then phd maybe another doctorate will this person be able to sit in the in the house of
#
the rickshaw puller who used to take him to the school when he was a child i don't know in fact
#
many of his school friends childhood friends would be people he or she may not be in touch with for
#
that matter and so you disconnect from your from your roots because maybe your roots were
#
non-elite and now you're an elite and education is making an elite in some ways right and i think
#
that is an aspiration actually that they want to be elite but i thought the whole purpose of
#
education was to connect you to your communities but we have we have ended up being exactly we
#
have ended up doing exactly the opposite and i'll tell you an instance which happened early in my
#
life which at that time it didn't matter much to me obviously but now when i reflect so i remember
#
very distinctly i think was class five or four when i or six i don't remember but exactly but
#
the incident was that my teacher my geography teacher she taught us solar eclipse and lunar
#
eclipse for the first time and i had grown up in a household where obviously eclipses are religious
#
phenomenon you have to follow certain rules and customs can't eat during the eclipse can't sit on
#
the bed you know you and i think most indians have have depending on which community you come from
#
you know you always have some religious customs which you have to follow and this is the first
#
time i realized that eclipse is nothing but you know the planet coming in between sun and the moon
#
and the moon is disappearing because there's a shadow and that's that's all about it i mean
#
there's nothing there's there's definitely something celestial about it but not something
#
religious about it and you know we we've been hearing rahu and ketu come and they you know take
#
take over they they swallow you know the planet and so you have to pray to these you know demons
#
or or or or gods whichever way you want to put it demons and gods with a small d and small g
#
you know anyway i come home and you know i tell my dadi you know what's going on like you know you
#
you guys have been just fooling around this is quote unquote superstition superstition is a word
#
that we in india learned very soon and you know and then i remember you know eclipse taking place
#
and i'm not i'm defying all her requests i am watching the eclipse through that x-ray sort of
#
print and you know things like that now well what will she respond you know i am the educated one
#
whatever she responds is not going to go through my rational mind and she's the irrational one
#
but by this logic millions of indians are irrational actually in fact they and these are
#
the same people who are otherwise running banks who are otherwise doing businesses they are somehow
#
meant you know surviving making sure their families are you know well fed and kids grow and they
#
you know they're raising families and they're also behaving this hugely irrational way in fact
#
you know aka ramanujan has this interesting essay which goes by the name by the title is there an
#
indian way of thinking in which he's saying is there an indian way of thinking is there an indian
#
way of thinking is there an indian way of thinking is there an indian way of thinking so he's and
#
and the question he starts with is his father is a scholar but he's also an idol worshiper like most
#
indians are and he what can't get over his head is how is this possible that my father who's
#
otherwise a great scholar of math and sanskrit i forget the subject though he is wearing a janeu
#
and in the morning he's chanting some mantras to a stone which he hopes to you know be a very
#
you know a stone which he believes to be god and whose whose praise is necessary for him to do in
#
his life because he's supposed to be a rational man and there's something that we've all gone
#
through right i think when we are growing up we look at all of our parents and grandparents as
#
people who are just sort of a little irrational in their behavior this irrationality is a very
#
uniquely indian thing right otherwise rational person behaving irrationally when the person is
#
in front of god so this i'm coming back to the question on education in terms of whether
#
we are you know western education so of course western education will make it look like as if
#
this is but there's not western education solar eclipse is solar eclipse it's actually true
#
in some ways and so so what is it either my grandparents are foolish or they're intellectual
#
imbeciles or what teacher told me is wrong that now we know that what teacher told me is not
#
wrong how do i make sense of my foolish grandparents then who are otherwise intelligent and raising a
#
family in some ways so this is what western education is it's not about studying shakespeare
#
i mean frankly i mean we can talk about that another time perhaps but you know indian students
#
reading shakespeare english elizabethan english which is not spoken and understanding about
#
england of 17th century is like english students studying premchand for that matter i mean will it
#
will it not be so bizarre that if english students are prescribed premchand in translated
#
premchand it will be so bizarre for them to learn we still continue to do i mean
#
premchand is 20th century so actually more relevant actually it'll be more relevant to
#
them frankly yeah but i'm not saying so this is one criticism that western education has is that
#
you're training kids in things which are not part of their context but the problem is you are not
#
training them in their context so what happens is so my problem with western education or western
#
the education that was inspired through western ideals is not as much as what they bring on the
#
table but what they take away from the table because there is an opportunity cost of doing
#
something so this is some form of that epistemic violence that gandhi spoke about when new knowledge
#
comes it destroys old knowledge because you can i mean typically you can have different types of
#
knowledges coexist but the way it has happened in india is that the other knowledge has gone away
#
and therefore when it is coming now in terms of revising histories and revising our cultural
#
studies and so on and so forth it is coming with some sort of quote unquote vengeance some sort of
#
an aggressive you know it's coming with as if a volcano has opened up because for for many decades
#
the understanding of india in the context of india was missing from our textbooks so i was
#
told that this is how solar and lunar eclipse happen but i but there was no discourse at all
#
if at all there was on why do we do what we do then who will explain me that why is i mean because
#
the only thing that comes out of this experience is that my grandparents are you know kind of
#
foolish people who haven't gone to school so they don't know reality they're just being told by some
#
you know brahmin or some pandit or this is what happens and they just tend to believe
#
but frankly they're not foolish because they if they were foolish they wouldn't have been able to
#
raise my father and me for instance right and so this is my this is my problem when you create
#
a new framework to understand the world it takes away the existing frameworks or it does not allow
#
newer frameworks to emerge in fact this is one of the biggest problems of colonization it did not
#
allow newer types of modernities to emerge we only think there is only one way to develop
#
i mean i may think about it this way and this might be a sort of a tangent but let me you know
#
put it on that on the table because this is important you see if we have to match
#
america american per capita income by 2047 let's say you know depends on what type of method you
#
use but by and large you will need to grow at a rate of around 10 to 12 percent maybe 11 plus
#
minus one or two percent depending on how you're calculating it and assuming us is growing at let's
#
say two percent between one and two percent now i mean you and i we can agree on this
#
11 percent interest in sorry 11 growth rate for another 20 years i mean how can a country have
#
this much of stamina this of course doesn't mean that we need to if it's not 11 percent next year
#
we won't reach that level it certainly doesn't mean that if we have it we will reach it's an
#
average but this is a humongous task and if this and then also we are only reaching american per
#
capita income put it differently if every indian gets a car and probably the size of the car that
#
every american has it's very hard to negate that that aspiration will you and i not like every
#
indian to have a car well maybe we will but is this possible like how many roads have we got what
#
is a total surface area of india if every indian has a car it's going to be physically impossible
#
for them to place it on on the on so are we saying that indians should not have a car i mean this is
#
a tricky one are we saying that because we can't grow at 12 per cent per annum for the next 25
#
years consistently we won't reach up to that growth but why why why am i making these statements i'm
#
saying this because we don't know what is an alternative model of development this is the
#
only model we know right now the point is not this the point is when colonize when colonization
#
happens the biggest violence that colonization does is that colonized start thinking like the
#
colonizer it's not territorial expansion that is the violence so surely that is but this is a much
#
greater violence and you know the way this happens is well the frameworks through which the colonizers
#
live intellectually the frameworks they use to explain the world are the frameworks that we start
#
using to explain our world our worlds are different so we cannot use those frameworks
#
just the other day i gave a lecture somewhere you know in in pune where i where i discussed
#
how more than 90 percent of india's workforce is informal in nature that does not sit on a written
#
contract and property rights framework more than 90 percent if you include agriculture if you take
#
away agriculture it's still 60 to 70 percent this is our experience economic models do not
#
explain this economic models explain us the demand supply curves for that matter explain us
#
part of the world which is not central to our being and so what we do is surely we should study
#
them because you know this is a globalized world but we do not have alternative models to explain
#
or understand we have them in economics but relegated to some footnote or some box at the
#
end of the chapter the problem of westernized education is we are unable to explain the world
#
in our own life we don't have vocabulary and you know when you don't have vocabulary that is the
#
worst because you don't have access to your own experience so i my experience is that in solar and
#
lunar eclipse i should not be sitting on the bed for instance let's say but i don't have a vocabulary
#
to explain this i'll give you one more one example that that might chime chime with you you know in
#
puja in hindi is typically understood as worship in english right now because a prayer would be
#
let's say right so puja is worship so if i have to translate i am
#
i am worshiping for that matter now now listen now now see see see what it does to us
#
we you and i and any indian knows this that when we enter a house we do bhoomi pujan
#
when we buy a car the pandit or we do a puja of the car so you know somebody buys a bicycle
#
vishwakarma day we do a small puja of our you know tools for instance
#
can we say that i am worshiping my car when i buy a car
#
because worshiping has to happen to the creator of the universe now am i in some sense of the word
#
considering my car to be the creator of the universe of course it can't be the case
#
so if i'm not doing so then to a western mind this is stupid like how can you worship a car this
#
this is the most stupid thing that you can do this is this guy is otherwise a rational guy
#
but he's worshiping a car and slowly you will think oh well yeah i think we are intellectual
#
imbeciles we just don't know but the problem is we you know what is going on here we are not able
#
to access our experience because we don't have that vocabulary we don't have the vocabulary
#
because the frameworks do not allow us and these frameworks are western in nature in in an abraham
#
in an abrahamic faith worshiping has to be done to creator of the universe not to you know let's
#
say an inanimate object like this so sorry for being a little lengthy here but the point i'm
#
trying to make is western education is not about the content in my view i think that content is
#
useful it is welcome it is necessary in fact i would in fact let me put it with big bold letters
#
thank god we have some western education as well because it has led to a huge amount of empowerment
#
that was otherwise missing in this country but it has replaced the both if at all there were some
#
frameworks that existed but it has replaced the possibility of those frameworks to emerge and
#
that is why today when you see the clash between east and west intellectual clash you find that the
#
that the west has a solid theoretical framework and grounding in the framework that they develop
#
and the east or the non-west or we do not have a framework but we are only reacting oh well no
#
this is not related to indian culture how can you say this well because there are there has been no
#
development in terms of the framework itself and that i think we are missing because we never had
#
any really wise words and please never talk about being too lengthy for this show this is a one show
#
where you cannot be too lengthy you know i'll read out this passage from your book which you
#
reminded me of when you spoke about you know when the colonized start thinking like colonizers over
#
here you write quote we cannot help but remind ourselves here of ashish nandy's brilliant weaving
#
of an argument in his book the intimate enemy a nation does not colonize when it physical
#
physically terror realizes a nation forgive my pronunciations it colonizes when the colonized
#
start thinking like the colonizer and begin adopting the value system of the colonizer
#
india has been a real colony in not just continuing with most of the codes laws and bylaws that the
#
british had rolled around through the last century but also in the choice of the form of government
#
the new leadership which was indian in blood remained english in thought a stop quote and of
#
course you carry on and i had a recent episode with orgo shangupto on this also he's written a
#
book about you know the colonial constitution and he was criticized for the title but the title
#
seems incredibly apt to me because we use the same infrastructure for ruling the people as it
#
were and i use the word ruling with some thought as the british did for oppressing us that is
#
how it was and i love that example that you gave of doing puja around a car because i mean i'm
#
atheist i don't you know do any kind of puja but i love the thought of that because to me when you're
#
doing puja for a car it is a ritual of gratitude it is a reminder that these things are important
#
you know and if that is the only purpose that it serves it's a big purpose and it is a purpose
#
that without that ritual you may have normalized it or not taken it for granted or whatever
#
that thought of doing puja to your tools is beautiful i love my tools so deeply you know
#
the microphone that you're looking at right now the laptop even the apps i use like home research
#
i would do puja to them if i was a puja doing person and it seems to me here that the
#
primary sin is not so much western education per se or even rationality the primary sin is
#
that judgment when you go back to your grandmother and you say oh you are superstitious or when you
#
look down on someone who believes differently and you say what a superstitious fool this is
#
you know this is a scientific way of thought and etc etc and i think that is also what breeds
#
resentment because you have especially in india for so long the elites passing judgment not just
#
in matters of science but in some cases in matters of values as well where the truth may not
#
necessarily be on their side and you know to me that is also you know that speaks to what we were
#
discussing earlier and like you said it has you know like a volcano sort of burst forth tell me
#
your you know when you came you were talking about your current project of looking at how
#
the colonial way of looking at indians has influenced how we look at ourselves and indeed
#
what we have become which is you know a very evocative subject to me so if it's a work in
#
progress i won't you know force you to speak on it if you don't want to but i find it so fascinating
#
i mean of course i mean i mean let me give an example like i don't know what was your
#
experience but i remember not knowing how to use spoon and fork or knife and fork was something
#
that i felt i have of i have uh you know personality disorder if i don't know how to use it so i i must
#
interrupt and say i was at a dinner three nights ago with people we will knowing economists and
#
other people as well and it was a chinese restaurant and they were all using chopsticks
#
and i was fumbling around with my hands because i still can't use chopsticks you know and i'm
#
not bothered to learn and one of them then asked me do you travel much so but anyway leaving
#
leaving that aside so you know this is the thing you know the judgment bit that you mentioned so
#
i mean why do we have to learn how to eat with the fork and knife and how which one is a tablespoon
#
and which one is a sugar spoon and things like that i mean the reason i do this is because of
#
course the colonized start thinking like the colonizer and the colonizer's value system was
#
this in fact uh you know for a long time i have i have felt that so and this is not about english
#
right so many people talk about that we should be speaking in our mother tongue and you know some
#
of those i mean i don't really have a huge amount of sympathy with that i mean surely we should speak
#
in we should know about our we should know our mother tongues because a lot of ideas go away
#
when a certain language goes away some of the thoughts and concepts go away but the
#
but this is not about that english bit i'm saying i'm saying inadvertently without knowing we
#
are doing things because they because these things are these things prescribe
#
us closer to the colonizer colonizer you know uh you know i'm wearing a kurta right now right
#
now this is uh you'll call it an ethnic wear right i would imagine if you know somebody from the
#
u.s comes over and says this is a nice ethnic wear why will i not call a pair of jeans ethnic
#
to the u.s why is that never called ethnic and i mean it's not called ethnic because it's not
#
called ethnic there is no reason to it but it is an ethnic wear of the u.s which we now wear
#
so it's about who whose gaze are we seeing like who is looking at who who is the questioner the
#
person who asks a question becomes the person who's more powerful obviously like right now you're
#
more powerful because you're driving this conversation because you are asking me the question
#
if i start asking the question then i become more powerful so when the colonizer comes
#
to a new society and when they start asking questions they assume that power and if we are
#
unable to respond to those questions well then we don't question the questionnaire we start
#
thinking oh how can we not know this answer and this is where my you know this this work that
#
i'm doing so i am so now back in the back in the during colonial times british used to write these
#
big documents called gazetteers of india you know these gazetteers were extensive documentation of
#
everything that they would see in india i mean they're they're coming here looking at the length
#
and breadth of the size of this country this is a crazy place you know all of these are pagans here
#
they don't you know worshipping all false gods and we need to civilize them you know the classic
#
story everybody knows about it but what they did in in in thinking about this is that they
#
they started writing about us so if you pick up gazetteers you have gazetteers of the whole
#
country you have you know archives and then you have district level gazetteers so you know pune
#
district so the collector of pune is writing about pune and the next guy is probably adding to it so
#
this was a period during let's say 1870s 1880s until 1920s when india was actually the most
#
documented country in the world at that time and you know there was this bug of anthropology
#
that they started when napoleon went to napoleon went to egypt and started measuring heights and
#
nose of people and that bug started you know all europeans were infected by it but british
#
particularly so so british wrote huge amount of british have huge amount of writings done on india
#
in fact even in the court case of babri masjid court's court case the you know the judges had
#
to refer to the to fazabad's gazetteer what british had written in it and you know earlier
#
i was telling you about james mille john stewart mille's father who wrote this three volume set
#
on history of india which is which used to be back in mid 19th century the most authoritative
#
text on india and how many times has he visited india zero because of course he had access to
#
everything written on india by british who were in india so so here's an exercise where this
#
you know this collector who sent from england actually most of them came from scotland because
#
the british hated our summers so they would send scottish here and so most of the people who ruled
#
us were actually scottish and not british not english anyway so this guy sent to run and
#
govern a city larger than the size of london he has never been to so these documents acted as very
#
important primary resource for these people to know what are these people who they are governing
#
so if you pick up a gazetteer it'll have 1890 gazetteer of pune will have 1880s gazetteer
#
of let's say kolhapur which i'm currently you know reading and i read a number of these gazetteers
#
because of this project you'll write what was kolhapur like in 1880s as it is and it's absolutely
#
detailed brilliant what it of course it is written in a very racist language but you know these guys
#
were like they were the kings they could write whatever they wanted to but what happened is that
#
these texts became the source primary source of our past in colonial times and because these people
#
wrote the past of india in those documents they also become primary source of our past that
#
predates colonial times as well so which means they are some of the most important sources
#
on which our even class 8th history textbooks are also written right so there because that i mean
#
an indian culture primarily has been very oral in nature old traditions and you know these guys were
#
so anyway the project that i'm doing in in flame here and set up a center called center for knowledge
#
alternatives is to recreate this exercise of writing about india but we don't want to call
#
it gazetteers this these we are making massive digital repositories of statistics at district
#
level and cultures at district level and you know so we are doing our pilot in maharashtra
#
and in doing this we are engaging with a number of gazetteers and we are right reading about how
#
british would explain us or describe us how would they explain everything that they saw here
#
a we realize a lot of it is continues to this day which is where we come to the point that you
#
are raising right western education and how much have we changed you know we've hardly changed in
#
terms of how we look at ourselves how the government sees its people you know british government was
#
a government against the people and sometimes this is what you see in ordinary behavior of
#
a policeman with you for instance right so you know not much change and after that and so we
#
have kind of kind of inherited that in fact with one of my colleagues at flame we are doing some
#
work on understanding the sources of constitution so constitution of india comes from a number of
#
other documents right and we only know about government of india act 1935 but then there were
#
many other constitution frameworks that were written different types of reports that came
#
and how much have they merged to become so you know part of the constitution and in that sense
#
i agree with argos argument in the title definitely the constitution is colonial in
#
many ways anyway coming back to the the idea of what british were writing british were writing
#
for instance they were writing about the castes in india and they were documenting the cast with
#
respect to their behaviors i wish i had brought some of the gazetteers with me here today so i
#
could have read them you know as we speak so for instance they're writing about how jats
#
and you know when they're writing gazetteers in haryana how jats are this aggressive tribe
#
they're writing about how you know some of these tribes actually they're notified as thieving
#
tribes i mean can you believe it i mean today of course no one can think about it and back then
#
people could think about it but the fact that they are thieving tribes is an appellation that
#
was created by british and so these these are nomadic tribes i mean these are banjara tribes
#
and they have they relegated them so all these people who they called who they notified as
#
thieving tribes you know they were supposed to come to the local police thana every month
#
to mark their attendance wow so you know that i'm here and i haven't done anything
#
it's another matter which is which is you know so ironic it makes me angry and you know it's
#
just so funny at the same time is that after independency started calling them denotified
#
tribes so that if i know the tribe is denotified then i know what was it notified earlier as like
#
it's a funny thing that indian government is capable of doing so many amazing things this is
#
one of those amazing things anyway they're writing about how dirty indians are i mean and this
#
this idea that indians are dirty has continuously over and over and over again
#
has been impregnated in our social fabric so much that even today we think the government needs to
#
train us and teach us how to be clean and why am i saying this well i mean i mean i mean we are in
#
mumbai right now go to i mean if we walk to a slum and we go into our into a small house there
#
chances are we'll have to put keep our slippers outside the house will be spick and span most
#
indians take shower twice a day chances are that our kitchen we are not allowed in the kitchen with
#
our slippers on i mean and and we are dirty so this doesn't mean i'm not trying to say that
#
indian streets are not dirty and the garbage collection method has to make be more efficient
#
and so on and so forth that's all i'm trying to say but to convert a statement that india is
#
dirty to indians are dirty is too much of an too much of a you know generalization and this
#
generalization carries on to this day they write about how indians are dishonest or certain
#
communities are dishonest these are the same communities that do millions and millions of
#
rupees of you know word of mouth businesses on a daily basis i mean if indians are dishonest how
#
is it possible that like we mentioned vast majority of indian workforce is informal in nature
#
it can't be the case in fact we we trust each other so much that we you know surat has is the
#
largest diamond market in the world and the entire business that happens in surat is on word of mouth
#
in fact it is the social trust that maintains us as a society and the government laws and the
#
you know top-down legislation it just happens to be there exactly and so if you look at it this way
#
you can go on and try to i mean if you extend this argument of the british that what they saw so
#
british are not writing about indians they're writing about their experience of india and their
#
experience of india and india are two qualitatively different things if i write about you knowing
#
a little bit about you and if you write about yourself i'm sure the two texts will be very
#
different so we know about india through british experience of india not through our own experience
#
i mean we know about through our own experience but maybe because it is not documented that is
#
relegated coming back to the same point of western education so indian frameworks are understood
#
through the experience of the british continues to happen so because obviously you know the elites
#
of the past were those elites which were enamored by british they go to british universities they
#
understand those frameworks and these frameworks are most poignantly visible in the clash that we
#
find today in policies that are quote unquote related to religion you know consider beef very
#
interesting example right and bala gangadhar has written a lot on this these frameworks
#
so for instance beef when i go when i was abroad people would ask me why don't you guys eat beef
#
right and i and like i mentioned the moment they ask this question why don't you eat beef
#
i don't know why i don't eat beef frankly because because any rational answer is going to make me
#
look stupid so consider this i don't eat beef because i think i treat cow as cow is revered
#
and cow is a goddess let's say in my eyes i pray to cow and the next question would be well but i
#
see cow you know rummaging through the garbage on the street do you keep your goddesses like this
#
or no we don't of course not cows can't be like this so then that means she can't be a goddess
#
she can't be revered like a god if it is then she would not be roaming around in the street
#
you know rummaging through the garbage okay what about the answer of the fall of the following
#
type well maybe i don't eat beef or we don't eat beef in india because because beef you know
#
historically we have not eaten so it's but it's strong i mean historically we have we have accounts
#
perhaps you know somebody will pull out some accounts in fact hindus eat beef in kerala bengal
#
and many parts of the country that doesn't cease that doesn't make them stop being hindu right
#
doesn't prevent them from being hindus or for that matter well beef because cow is commercially very
#
useful with milk well but you could make the other argument that you know cow is commercially
#
very useful for beef so how do you answer this question and i i'm continuously thinking and i
#
don't have an answer i'm not i'm not like religiously inclined not to eat beef but i
#
just don't eat it and so here's the thing what if i reverse this and i ask my american friend
#
hey dude tell me why don't you eat dogs like you know they're fairly tasty like you know i might
#
annoy some of your listeners but let's say if i ask this question what could potentially the answer
#
be from his mind is he going to give me a theory that i am trying to think about for beef i don't
#
think he probably he'll ask me what are you talking about man like how can you eat dogs dogs are not
#
supposed to be eaten i'm like yeah i mean exactly in the same way we think cows are not supposed to
#
be eaten so in a way i am doing this not because of some theory that is guiding me and explaining
#
this behavior of mine i am not doing it because i don't see food in cow and maybe indians don't see
#
food in cow they see food in maybe other animals but in cow they don't now we the framework
#
that comes from religion that we don't eat cow because of religion will make us run into these
#
illogical walls and we will have to come back and then we will have to find some text some
#
traditional scripture which has written oh cows are not supposed to be eaten and that's why we're
#
not eating it well maybe there is or for that matter many people would ask me why do you guys
#
wear a bindi and i'm like i don't know like then then they know that you always have these smart
#
people smart indians who will say oh well there's some acupressure thing going on or maybe because
#
there's some text that is written well you know the classic answer could be well i'm wearing a
#
bindi because my mother wore it and because she wearing because you know these guys told
#
it's just an ancestral practice it was an ancestor practice it does not need a theory to be explained
#
this is very difficult for somebody who has grown in a culture of abrahamic faith which are theory
#
driven religions to be absorbed so so you know for instance so we call him balu balu divides the
#
you know the frameworks of the world in two categories theory theory driven or theory
#
inspired you know folks and there are empirics experiential ones so theory ones will need a
#
theory and so the western world is by and large theory driven and because the religion and this
#
is largely you know in some ways you know there there is a there's a whole theological background
#
to this so there must be a why and there must be somewhere from where the practices are flowing
#
here the practices are not flowing i mean i can guarantee like both of us may be called as quote
#
unquote hindus by the way you know if we have to fill a school form but surely your family would
#
be practicing something entirely different mine would be very different we don't really need to
#
even i don't even need to practice anything to be called a hindu for that matter right but this is
#
not so all i'm trying to say is when these theological when theology allows creation of
#
frameworks to understand the world and this is definitely true in the 19th century britain
#
like any other place in europe they would see the world with those frameworks and that framework
#
will tell us certain type of indians and by the way the exactly opposite could also be true if we
#
had colonized uk for that matter or england for that you know at that time we would be writing
#
about our experience of england just like they are writing they were writing about their experience
#
of india so long story short when we follow the writings of british on india we are really reading
#
their experiences they are not they don't describe us they describe their experiences and in that
#
sense they're right but because they don't describe us we are at a loss for a vocabulary
#
in a framework to describe us this might be a little too complex the way it sounds but it's
#
really simple in in many ways it is really simple i love it though i'm going to listen to it again
#
and because there is so much food for thought in there and no pun intended when i say food for
#
thought though i love your counter question about a dog which is a you know i eat everything but i've
#
never eaten dog but i'm open to it uh unfortunately i guess i'm not some people might call me
#
unsenskari but i love the sense in which you immediately place it in the category of a
#
cultural practice that does not require an explanation like why do you wear a sari instead
#
of shirt pant or self alchemist it does not require an explanation it is just a practice
#
that has come down on that particular day you feel like wearing that particular thing and you do it
#
and it's not a big deal you don't need to explain it so the fun thing is what is the obsession that
#
wants us to know why so this is what i often ask my students did it even occur to you why do you
#
wear a bindi and for most of them it didn't even occur to them so what makes certain societies and
#
certain communities or cultures ask why for this so to give an example if you had told me that
#
yugang today you know we don't wear black in our house i would have probably you know i would have
#
probably picked up some other kurta but i would have never asked you why it would have been so
#
normal you know you can come up with any kind of random excuse to tell me you know yugang we don't
#
eat laddu on thursday i don't know and i'll probably say yes maybe you don't eat laddus on
#
thursday i to us in india we do not get triggered by an absurdity so to speak but in the in the west
#
everything which is not coming from a theory gets triggered in the in the form of a question of why
#
so you know for instance when the british started documenting us and they started census they're
#
trying to figure out what religion do we belong to the problem is we don't have a word for religion
#
in our language there is nothing called religion you know hindu word itself is like you know corrupt
#
version of sindhu and you know persian pronunciation and things we don't have that word we don't know
#
in fact gandhi writes that his mother followed different kinds of sects and you know if we go
#
back to our great-grandparents times they would call us we are a certain type of jati but we don't
#
know whether we were could be called as hindu so british are having hard time figuring out who's
#
a hindu so they ask the question are you a hindu this guy says yes and then they say do you eat
#
beef this guy says yes but you can't eat beef you're a hindu and so they are running into these
#
problems and then they collect these 10 pundits and they ask them please can you codify what is
#
hinduism can you write to us and tell us and these guys write this book which comes to be
#
known as viva the word setu and they for the first time they're trying to codify something
#
which doesn't exist in fact do you know what hindu marriage act do you know how it defines hindus
#
no so it's easy to define muslims and christians because if they believe in certain texts then
#
they are but can you say that if you believe in bhagavad gita only then you're a hindu i mean i
#
don't have bhagavad gita in my home for that matter maybe many indians don't have most indians i would
#
bet have not even read it but does that make them less of a hindu so you know how does the hindu
#
marriage act defines hindu anyone who's not a muslim christian parsi jew sikh or any other
#
religion is a hindu so we are defined in that act 1956 or 55 we're trying to scramble independent
#
india is scrambling for this definition which i'm sure is an offshoot of the obsession to scramble
#
for this definition that comes from british times because british were trying to scramble for this
#
definition or codify this so for them to ask this question i mean i sometimes were i sometimes feel
#
for the intellectuals of of india at that time when british were asking them
#
these questions and they didn't have an answer and poor thing they didn't even have a framework in
#
which they could put this answer so they would have asked them when was ram born when was krishna
#
born and they probably didn't have a date we still don't have i i mean i mean if i tell my
#
grandmother you know ram was born 10 000 years ago she'll be like okay great that's great if i tell
#
her you know he was born 5000 years ago she'll say okay that's great i mean nothing changes in
#
her life with the date but imagine if we don't didn't have dates how difficult it would have
#
been for our intellectuals in fact balgungadhar has also mentioned about these ideas and many of
#
his other you know you know other scholars who follow that that line that line of thinking so
#
so yeah i mean you ask question and you you're the boss my favorite ram was born in 1958 do
#
you know what i'm talking about your favorite what my favorite ram was in 1958 yeah since we
#
were discussing ram's birthday yeah yeah okay 1958 he's been on the show five times ram guha
#
oh yeah yeah so i have before we go in for a break i have another question for you but before that
#
a formulation of how i have typically thought of one of the ill effects of colonial rule on us tell
#
me if you you know i think you'll broadly agree with it but tell me if you'd like to add nuance
#
and then i'll come to my question and what really happened and i think manu pillai first spoke about
#
it at length on the show many years ago uh when he was on the scene in the unseen is that the
#
british come to india it is deeply complex i don't know what the hell is going on they're trying to
#
figure it out and obviously the way that you try to figure out something is you try to look for
#
patterns you try to look for categories that is how you understand the world their interlocutors
#
happen to be this happened to be these higher caste brahmans were of course the elites of the time
#
and they tell them oh this is hinduism this is a vanna system this is how it works then they write
#
it down then they do the kind of census that you speak of and then they topo that category hindu
#
on the you know the peoples here whereas what you have is a whole bunch of different religious and
#
spiritual traditions coming from a whole bunch of different places some people eat beef some
#
people don't eat beef some people do this some people do that it's kind of all over the the
#
place but their explanation of it is homogenized but because they are the ones writing it down
#
and we've been largely oral so far or persian has been the like you what english is today in india
#
it's official language but that gradually fades away you know what what we have is their writings
#
and then we construct ourselves through their writings and we begin to think that what they
#
have written about quote-unquote hinduism is the truth and therefore that gets ossified and it is
#
a restriction of our imagination and how we look at ourselves because for the first time it's kind
#
of been written down and once it's written down it is imprisoned in that particular narrative and
#
is playing out in various other ways for example what a lot of people the prudishness that a lot
#
of people call sanskari today i am like this is not sanskari it is victorian yeah again i think
#
it was in an episode with manu where he spoke about how in kerala you were supposed to be
#
bare-breasted if you covered your breasts it was rude there was something wrong with it perhaps
#
you read it if you were from a lower caste but otherwise you would i'm talking about the women
#
obviously would proudly be bare-breasted and this sense of shame this victorian prudishness
#
comes in with them and then it completely becomes normalized to the extent that we are
#
calling it sanskari today and adopting it as as our attitude we the land of the kamasutra
#
you know in fact if you read pride and prejudice it looks like a story of i don't know 1990s 2000s
#
india there's a woman with five daughters who she's unable to marry and she's worried because she
#
can't get them married and then she finds a prince who was a nobleman so there is an advantageous
#
marriage and these are the words that you know you know the these are the words that she's using
#
and then one of her daughters elopes with someone and that is bringing shame to the family and they're
#
trying to hide this i mean doesn't it look like one of the sasbahu serials of india and so and so
#
in some ways the 17th 18th century britain we have it in today's india if this is not colonization
#
what it is and i don't know and you know historians will have to add to this whether this is how
#
indian society was structured earlier i would say there were hundreds of ways of structuring
#
indian societies perhaps this was like you know we're all pagans in many ways and so you know the
#
problem is when we try to explain and codify us we try to make an abrahamic version of hinduism
#
when it is not there could be a range of similarities there could be a range of
#
you know areas at which most indians converge or let's say quote unquote the hindu indians converge
#
and surely that needs to be you know recognized but to but the british efforts that did it they
#
did it with a huge amount of violence and their bracketing of this allowed many people to be out
#
of it many people who were part of it should not have been part of it and so and this created a
#
path-dependent process when when you and you know i mean in in some ways what i'm trying to say is
#
this is a big harm of colonization we could have had imagine this we could have had a
#
whole new way of looking at religion in this place you know but writing is intolerant theory
#
is intolerant when you create a theory when you write something you create intolerance in some
#
ways in fact india is has been historically the most tolerant place in the world and i'm not even
#
talking about you know how we i mean everybody knows about the relationship jews had with india
#
is the only country where they were not persecuted but i am talking about everyday
#
tolerance that we have we have tolerance with the government the shadiest government i mean
#
people are dancing on the street during their wedding the the entire traffic is blocked
#
but you know they're all sitting i mean sometimes it can be annoying the patience that we have with
#
each other but this is a massively tolerant country probably because of the type of cultural
#
traditions and probably the type of religious traditions that we had but now that they're
#
bracketed these are you know up at arms with each other and you know to carry on with the thought
#
and lead to my question we see in a sense a similar narrowing of possibilities and a constriction of
#
the imagination with what has happened in our politics today where again hinduism is almost
#
being presented in an abrahamic kind of way that it's you know one religion one book etc etc
#
and is being simplified and all the complexity is just being stripped away and you know i had
#
an episode with ranjit hoskote where he spoke on this at length and it was a great lament of his
#
and so many other people as well that it's this massive complex religion which has so many aspects
#
to it and now we are reducing it to one thing and in a sense that is similar to what the british did
#
in terms of interpreting what our country is for ourselves and therefore shaping it in that process
#
so my question to you is this that how does this process get reversed is what is lost lost
#
is reversibly like tell me a little bit for example about the project that you are doing
#
because it seems to me that one of the things you're trying to do is if not reserve if not
#
sort of get some of it back at least preserve what is there and etc etc so how do you think
#
about the broader problem and what are the specific sort of things that you guys are doing
#
so you know you're absolutely right this is the problem we do not have the frameworks and maybe
#
the intellectual patience to evolve a framework that allows us to explain our world in the way
#
that we want to so the more we this is like you know somebody who doesn't know how to swim
#
is trying to splash the water on the surface trying to stay afloat and this is what we're
#
trying with with our culture and our religion so for instance what i am doing let's say
#
is that if i have to write about a temple i will not write those words which i know has no meaning
#
in english because they strip me of the experience so for instance i will not write the statue of
#
the goddess is adorned with the you know beautiful sari there's no statue that is the goddess in
#
fact i don't even use the word goddess we write devi so devi has a lovely sari on on her because
#
in our culture we she's a person she's there she's fed she's she's you know made to go to sleep
#
you know you you decorate her people pray she gives you ashirva and all of those type of things
#
so we write in the same way that a lady outside the temple explains her and if i cannot explain
#
it in english i will simply not use the word use an english word or maybe if i can i will have to
#
explain it english rather than convert it into some word you know so idol for instance idol
#
you know in hindi idol means buddha right you know where the word buddha comes from
#
the word buddha comes from buddha because when the when the invaders came towards india they
#
encountered the huge buddha statues in afghanistan and they and you know for these people this was
#
you know an act of infidels like the banian buddhas which were later destroyed
#
exactly so those so they started destroying them and so anyone who prays to a statue is known as
#
someone who's doing buddha puja and so buddha words come from buddha now but that is not how
#
we see our cultures i mean we are constructing ourselves against the definitions of abrahamic
#
religions it's like you can define night only if you define day and because day has been defined
#
and now you will end up defining as night as something which is not the day because we don't
#
want to do that therefore but both these definitions of day and night are following the same framework
#
they're following the same intellectual and cognitive load in the same way i think when
#
we define hindus we end up defining them in the same framework that christians or muslims or jews
#
define themselves and these are very specific one god religion and we are not in fact we don't even
#
have a capital god god we have many gods with small g and you know in fact in a devi temple
#
you will have a main goddess is devi and you know there are some minor gods hanumanji and shivji
#
will be outside small ones in a hanuman temple hanumanji is the main god and devi will be the
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small ones who are outside so which means you know in fact one of the recorded instances the
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british come and they're looking at this you know this one this pandit is you know saying
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or you know i don't know whether pandit or whoever but you know there are so many gods and they're
#
saying no you can't have so many gods i don't know we have so many gods obviously and there's a no
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jesus this is another god and this is one god there's a true god and so the this person is
#
very happy okay give me this this jesus cross and he puts this beside this beside all the other gods
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and goddesses and he says i'll start praying for no no you can't do this because this is unthinkable
#
to a western mind in a way right because there's one god or you know true god and all the others
#
are false gods to assume that the whole world is comprised of this was anyway this is history
#
coming to the present you're asking how how can we undo this i think it has to be undone by evolving
#
new frameworks within our own university systems our own intellectuals that have to now start
#
thinking about making sense of what is going on so let's say some people say that ram setu didn't
#
exist or maybe let me go to the to the babri masjid case itself which is the most recent
#
so the entire argument there is whether this is the birthplace of rama or not and i think this is
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this is a direction we should not we shouldn't have gone into at all because this is exactly
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the same abrahamic direction that we're going to is to find a specific proof that rama was born
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here and he was this is the place where he was born and we're trying to locate documents we're
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trying to locate skandapuran we are picking up fazabads gazetteers and we are saying oh no this
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is the place where he was born well it doesn't matter in india it doesn't matter if if if people
#
believe rama was born here then he was born here that's it and how do you how do you even make
#
sense of this but it is exactly the case sorry no in fact i think that just by saying something
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like rama was born here you are reducing rama i mean yeah that's that's another way to put it
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you know it's a reduction so we we don't we don't want to the moment we start defending
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that kurukshetra is the place where mahabharata battle took place
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then we are into the same trap and the same framework and it'll take years and decades
#
well we believe this is where it took place and that is pretty much it because this is how the
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cultural cultural constructions happen here in fact amit this is an interesting learning that
#
i've had by reading and by observing and these are some of the things that are coming back from the
#
same old you know the the old yugang who was for the first time abroad first you know first time
#
he sees this crazy countries like in europe and trying to figure out how is this different
#
and so here's what i'm trying to think a culture i don't think is defined by the type of answers
#
it has to complex questions i think a culture is defined by what questions it considers important
#
so whether i wear a bindi or eat or not eat beef these are not important questions to me
#
i mean we were discussing i mean in gita we are talking about what is right and wrong
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at the time when europeans were killing each other right left and center
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those were important questions to us it was not important for us whether we should wear this
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particular type of cloth or not well my parents wear it so i'll wear it and you know you know
#
my sons and daughters will wear it and so on and so forth these are not important questions to us
#
isn't that an amazing culture and an amazing tradition but because we have lost a framework
#
to explain this we need to evolve a framework so the answer to your question how do we undo this
#
we will be able to do this if there is a framework where we can plant it and locate it right now
#
there is only one framework you and i we understand religion only in one way religion means there
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must be a god there must be a practice you must believe in the existence of god and if you don't
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then you are an atheist these come from a certain type of theological framework which are abrahamic
#
in nature so anything which is non-abrahamic they're all pagans so in fact i'll say romans
#
were far closer to hindus than us and in fact you know many of the non-western religions well
#
it's taoism shintoism buddhism you know all of these they are far closer to so we explain the
#
world through our experience our we do things because their ancestral practices we need a
#
framework to put it in so that when we engage with students whose experience is different and
#
their textbook says something else they are able to relate to their experience because they don't
#
have access to it part of it can happen if you make sense of the vernacular itself because the
#
moment you translate it you destroy the thing so for instance today you know atma is translated
#
as soul and soul thanks to tulsi ramsay and shaam ramsay movies only gives us one particular
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type of impression this transparent sort of shadowy thing that comes out of the body like
#
that doesn't that concept doesn't exist in our cultures and at least not in the communities
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that i come from atma is something else but it has been if i can use the word relegated or it
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has been connected to the word soul and we don't have any other framework so how so the point i'm
#
trying to make is not that we should have so yes we can have descriptions of many vernacular words
#
but this is only you know the toolbox the framework within which this has to be planted
#
is what is necessary and this has to start in university and school spaces this has to start
#
at that age because it is exactly then when kids go through these conflicting emotions at one level
#
they have these superstitious parents at and they are the smarter ones at another level these are
#
the parents who are the smart ones who are putting them in schools and colleges are so let's say if
#
ram was not born there then either all millions of hindus and indians are liars and stupid people
#
and intellectual imbeciles including our parents and grandparents can we accept it well we can't
#
accept it i don't think they're stupid well then can we accept that ram was born there well we
#
can't accept it because there's no proof what do you expect then what will you accept if you can't
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if you think this is true this is untrue that ram was born there if you think this is untrue
#
that your parents etc are all fools millions of hindus are fools then there must be something
#
which is true what is that that framework we don't have just like for that matter we don't
#
have frameworks of what type of what type of let's say governments we used to have or state we used
#
to have we don't really know the rajas were the rajas in india the same as the rajas in europe
#
is is do people understand sovereignty i don't think so that's a very european you know treaty
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of westphalia post treaty of westphalia construction or do we understand shrenes the old quote unquote
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guilds maybe they were not guilds so let me put it this way i mean and because you you know we've
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we have many common friends who use this term very frequently it'll it'll interest you
#
any action in the world can either be public private or maybe commons is there a fourth category
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well i don't think so at least not off the top of our heads right so you know you you're doing
#
something so let me ask you this this conversation is a private conversation that we are having which
#
later on will become public right these are the two frameworks that we can put but are but what
#
if there's something which is neither public nor private is there a framework for that i don't
#
think we have a framework now do we have an experience of it yes surely we have an experience
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of it let's say many hindus do satya narayan katha you know some people do ramcharitmanasak akhand
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part is that a public event or is that a private event let's say we are doing a puja in our house
#
and there's a ramayan part will happen is this public or is this private if we are doing it in
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our house well it's private because we are doing it in our house does that mean that if anybody
#
who wants to come in will say no you can't enter unlikely if somebody who's a devotee who wants to
#
be part of it will actually welcome this guy but does this mean it is public is it open for anyone
#
unlikely i don't think we'll i'll put up a board outside anybody who wants to come should come
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we don't have a framework to explain this this incident other this uh this event that i'm
#
organizing just like we don't know anything outside society trust private limited corporation
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section 8 company and maybe one or two more such but so let's say you and i are friends i buy
#
something and you help me sell it off to somebody you are neither so who are you like you're not
#
part of the company you're not part of section 8 company but i can still give you some sort of
#
commission let's say for this i mean is this is there a framework to explain this i don't know
#
is there a framework to explain trade credit which is on purely on word of mouth i don't know
#
so we what i'm trying to say is how do we undo this we need to evolve a very rigorous theoretical
#
framework to explain our experiences because right now we explain them through the frameworks of the
#
west which may have theological origins which may have their own historical path dependency
#
through which they have refined it we have not refined it we have not refined it because we
#
have not had scholars who were able to do this earlier the you know the elites were british
#
later on the other the elites after the british went were you know more english than english let
#
me put it this way and so we need some indigenous thinking to emerge and if and the problem is the
#
point of wokeism that you mentioned earlier is that the places where i would expect this to happen
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the most are the places which are disappointing me the most as well these university spaces globally
#
for that matter beautifully put and you know well so and aside which seems unrelated but isn't
#
ajay and i just released an episode of everything is everything where he gives a master class on
#
unix and there he spoke about the ideological battle between bill gates and richard stolman
#
which seems relevant to this where richards where bill gates was like he ip caro company
#
banao profit banao etc etc and stolman was like everything should be free everyone should contribute
#
open source etc etc and it seems to me that hinduism in its original form and quote unquote
#
hinduism whatever you call it is like an open source religion there are a lot of rivers flowing
#
into it and a lot of tributaries flowing out and it's all over the place and that a lot of
#
these abrahamic religions seem almost like microsoft windows that this is one way and if you fit this if
#
you're compatible for tika neto apki app nahi chahiye you know it's and so that is sort of one way of
#
thinking about it and the other thing is that open source or bottom up is actually very counter
#
intuitive our brain thinks in top down engineering mindset kind of ways you know so a bottom up
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spontaneous order thing is not something that we can intuitively compute it's it's very counter
#
intuitive and hard to kind of drive home and therefore i when you speak of alternative
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frameworks is it something you can you know elaborate on and speak a bit more on because
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and i also see another conflict there that i totally see the need of frame more frameworks
#
to understand the world right because the existing ones are constrictive and they miss a lot
#
what kind of frameworks would go beyond what we have in terms of how do we live our lives like
#
for me in that sense you could say i'm a deracinated westerner or whatever but
#
enlightenment values mean a lot to me individual rights mean a lot to me so that is how i my
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framework for looking at what is good and what is bad is individual rights agency autonomy
#
whereas somebody from here might say that no the community matters and the car panchayat has a
#
right to make decisions on behalf of whatever which i would you know have the moment you start
#
thinking of group rights instead of individual rights i would sort of have an issue with that
#
now these are two different kinds of frameworks one is frameworks of value for how should we
#
live our lives where i find it hard to sort of reconcile that but the other where i completely
#
agree with you is frameworks of understanding the world where i feel that the frameworks we
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have of understanding the world do come from a particular direction and we possibly even
#
lack a vocabulary so when you think of alternative frameworks what are the kind of frameworks you've
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come across or try to formulate you know can you make that a bit more concrete for me so
#
so uh no this is great and i think there are two three things that you've packed in this so let
#
me unbundle this so first of all i think the reason why you say that it is counter-intuitive
#
that spontaneous ordering an open source could be the order of the world and this comes this comes
#
to you as a counter-intuitive idea the fact that this is counter-intuitive is the reason why we need
#
to redo and rethink of these frameworks because it's actually the most intuitive thing i mean
#
think of hunter-gatherer societies and they're evolving the the first thing that comes to your
#
mind is this open source type of imagination that would have emerged perhaps in fact you know there
#
are some scholars who have argued like naturally left to their own state would human beings think
#
about one god religion or many god's religion like what seems to be counter-intuitive and
#
sometimes people and many of these scholars say that actually one god seems to be counter-intuitive
#
because typically different kinds of communities different people you know they would be
#
creating co-creating and curating different kinds of gods for that matter right so in a way
#
the fact that you think open source is counter-intuitive is actually symptomatic
#
of the problems of the frameworks that we have because this is the most intuitive way in which
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you can imagine though i i think i'm let me clarify that i'm actually the framework i'm
#
coming at is biology or evolutionary psychology which is that when we evolve we are evolving in
#
small tribes and therefore for example positive some thinking is counter-intuitive zero some
#
thinking is intuitive because in a time of scarcity with few people sharing few resources it is
#
natural to think that for me to get that extra cut of lamb somebody else is missing out on it
#
our brains are hardwired to think in zero some ways equally our brains are hardwired to think
#
in top down ways where you know the only way of making something good is you know it's it's
#
top down and your tribe has a that's also why we are instinctively drawn to strong leaders because
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that's when our brains sort of evolved and i think people who care about liberty like actually if you
#
look at the way the world works and matt ridley has a beautiful book on this called the evolution
#
of everything i had an episode with him on that also many years ago and everything actually has
#
come bottom up you know right from natural selection to markets to the way society runs
#
or to languages everything is bottom up but whenever we look for a solution to a problem
#
our instinct goes to a top-down thinking et cetera et cetera so i would say that the framework here
#
is biology and some senses are a little immutable very interesting that you say this but now let me
#
put it this way so you can you have a situation where it's bottoms up you have a situation where
#
it's top down why are you not thinking of a third framework that could potentially exist
#
so here's here's a thought experiment so surely there is this you know leader of a tribe who's
#
trying to tell people but where is this leader drawing the legitimacy or authority from so is
#
this true that this leader so this is a speculation right we speculated just like the british or the
#
missionary speculated god is everywhere and then there are some places which have which has which
#
have been taken over by false gods but every person on the planet must have a religion i mean this is
#
an assumption about how the world works remember when we were growing up our school textbooks told
#
you know humans when we evolved as hunter gather societies we were we feared nature and you know
#
that's why we created gods out of nature but why do we think that we feared nature like
#
do we think a dog or a cat fears nature like is that the impression that they give i don't know
#
whether that is the case so the fact that we think surely there must have been a leader of the tribe
#
who would have organized a tribe in such and such way only tells us how limiting our frameworks are
#
that make us think this way so why not these people were coming together and you know now
#
you know a lot of evolutionary biology research also tells us that there was a lot of cooperation
#
happening and that is how this happened but the assumption you're making is that cooperation
#
happened because it was one person who was guiding this no no i mean there's a great book by robert
#
axelrod and i needed studies on it with robert travers called the evolution of cooperation
#
so there are reasons why it evolved but yeah it i mean so we have all these contradictory impulses
#
within us but in terms of what our brain can grok our brain can grok zero sum if the rich get
#
rich the poor must be getting poorer it can't grok positive sum so you know the it's interesting
#
because i'm just thinking loudly with you right now it's i'm enjoying this when you have an
#
institutional religion then a pyramidal structure or a top-down framework becomes so natural to
#
think through right so surely them this sort of one god and then there are you know who has given
#
the priest or the pope the legitimacy to anoint a king who then has a legitimacy that is drawn
#
from one singular source which is god to rule over people and then they are like so you know
#
you can clearly see this pyramid so again i'm going back to the theological framework because
#
that's the earliest norms quote unquote laws that we that we you know and i think what would happen
#
is that every religion would start evolving bottom up but then the elites everywhere when
#
they come into power they want to take it over and they want to control it and they build these
#
restrictive frameworks the the the fun thing here is that in non-western part of the world
#
there was no singular elite because the idea of a singular god didn't exist and so you can have
#
hundreds of communities having hundreds of different types of gods and each one learning
#
to live with each other because they think of course this is possible so in a way when you say
#
you know i'm comparing this with your the latter part of your question when you hinted at this
#
dichotomy between group rights and individual rights again if you look at it closely a bottom
#
up approach would tend tend us to believe or incline us to believe that in that pagan or
#
indian or non-western approaches would have been more favorable to individual rights because they
#
are bottoms up in fact it is a top down approach which will create group rights exactly stronger
#
than the bottoms up now if you look at history and you know because you mentioned about what
#
i mean there is an there is an anxiety when we start thinking group rights are more important
#
and i've seen this very frequently elites and intellectuals and even any ordinary person who's
#
who has done a fair bit of reading thinks that you know they compare indian cultures or non-western
#
cultures as collectivist cultures and the western cultures as more individualistic cultures right
#
but actually if you look at it deeply at the at the base of this pyramid there is nothing which is
#
which is collective here in india so collective depending on how you define collective of obviously
#
so in my community i would be doing something but surely i would not be doing things which
#
other hindus are doing which means i am very much very much part of my own small community which
#
has its own unit so let me give you one example and this is why i think it's important that we
#
recognize the beauty that lies within us and not make it more abrahamic in nature so you know for
#
instance most societies have in india most societies have this tradition that if somebody
#
dies in their family on the 12th or 13th day they feast some brahmins and some pundits
#
now in some communities they feast the and they feed the entire village and you know i've been
#
to some of these so i know this in some places it's only 11 or 12 pundits in some places they
#
have done away with it in fact i remember somebody told me in assam the idea was that
#
the sun will feast the sun will kill and cut as many goats as a number of water streams
#
he will cross in order to reach his native place wow so for instance because people would go to
#
different villages so if you are gone to several villages far ahead that means you must be earning
#
so much maybe and i'm trying to give a rational justification only through you know thinking
#
loudly with you i really don't know what was the reason and frankly like i mean i'm contacting
#
myself because i earlier said we don't need a reason for this but let's say for whatever reason
#
which is not important the ancestral practice was if you are living far away and your father dies
#
then you come and feast with this you will sacrifice the same number of goats as the
#
number of water bodies you have crossed over a period of time this became very exploitative
#
in some ways right because you know you are poor poor family how will you kill so many goats so the
#
custom slowly changed to number of chicken which then slowly changed to number of eggs
#
and this was not done in a top-down fashion this is the beauty of it there's no text there's no
#
priest who's saying okay this is what we'll do it just somehow so happened earlier the feasting for
#
people who are dead their families would feast a lot many more pundits than they do now and
#
these things are changing so an open source framework for a culture or a society is going
#
to be self evolutionary in a way and that means they are the ones who will take care of individual
#
rights a lot more than group rights this is why not only markets thrive in india in ways unimaginable
#
you don't have standard contract and property rights here but you have markets all over you
#
surely have a huge amount of state in fact it is a state which restricts markets from thriving
#
if you take the state away this country will you know thrive like anything if you look at
#
historical accounts including the british accounts you will be amazed to see the importance of the
#
raja or the lack thereof in these in these pages let me give you an example from a very popular
#
recent movie you've seen kantara i haven't i'm sorry okay so i will highly recommend you and
#
now that you've not seen let me ask you to predict what would have happened in this in a scene that
#
i'm going to describe so the movie starts where i'm not going to be this is not a spoilers alert
#
for anyone who's listening to the audience but everybody is highly encouraged to watch this movie
#
because i loved it anyway so here's a raja who is you know very happy you know wealthy and all
#
of that but he's not able to find peace unto himself so he's you know roaming around wandering
#
in the jungles trying to see if he can find some solace some peace because he has everything the
#
world can offer but he doesn't have peace and you know at one point of time he comes across in a
#
jungle a small shrine now shrine is not the right translation but a small temple in the middle of
#
the forest and suddenly something happens inside me and inside him and he starts finding that peace
#
here so he gets down off his horse he bows and he feels so elevated and he feels this is the place
#
this is where i find peace now this is part this jungle which is adjoining a forest a village
#
is part of his own kingdom what do you think the raja would do in such a situation
#
or could do there's an indian raja maybe some south indian state you can imagine who has found
#
a temple where he has found peace far away from his from his palace but surely there is some
#
what do you think you could do so okay those are the answer is clearly something unexpected and
#
i cannot go there but my logical response would be that if i was that raja i would build a luxury
#
kutiya near that shrine which gives me peace and hope to holiday there once in a while so i get
#
the peace and of course since i'm a raja i would fence it off so that commoners cannot disturb me
#
this is a rational answer so this is amazing why did it not occur to you to take the temple away
#
and take it to your palace because it is a combination of everything the place so a raja
#
a king in european sense of the word is an all-powerful king who derives his authority
#
from the god himself right the other thing that people often tell me so in so this answer i ask
#
this question to you know my friends in india obviously and my students or other people and
#
even people in the west and here's the difference for them of course this is a raja the king so he
#
will just do whatever he wants so he will you know do whatever like you know take take the temple
#
build a grand thing he'll probably shift his capital or probably take the temple there
#
and what if the villagers protest who's the gramdevta how can you take away the gramdevta
#
well he's going to kill these villages what else this is the raja but to most indians and even my
#
students the natural response is not that he'll kill these villagers the natural response is
#
the type of response that you mentioned and you know what happens in the movie he's asking the
#
permission of the villagers please give me this dev what do you want in return so he's negotiating
#
with the villagers if i want the dev what do you want and then they ask you know we need land all
#
kinds of things happen and then the movies goes on but the fact that raja is negotiating and
#
requesting the villagers to give him the devi to give him the dev tells us something about our how
#
our sovereignty was and so you know the recorded instances are that british are here and there's
#
some these bunch of these british they're trying to figure out who's the person in command here
#
who can give us a royal decree that we are the people who will deal in this particular trade
#
and they're asking people and nobody knows who's really in command here
#
many villagers don't even know the name of the raja which happens even today like if you go to
#
some remote corners probably people would not know who's the president of india and they're
#
perfectly okay to live their lives around in fact many people have made their youtube videos around
#
asking people that you don't know who's the prime minister and they say people are stupid people
#
are not stupid what there is a different way of looking at your your raja or king or whoever
#
so you know when i ask my students what how do you translate government and this is sarkar how
#
do you translate indian state and this is sarkar but state and government can't be the same thing
#
they have to be different because the words are different you don't have another word in hindi
#
or in your vernacular you don't know whether there is a word but if state but if there is no word so
#
what i'm trying to say is that royalty in india probably did not derive its authority from the
#
way the royalty in the west derived it and the quote unquote all-powerful raja is not something
#
that we know of as much you know when india got independence how many princely states there were
#
535 or something and how many districts there were 340 something so you had more rajas than
#
number of districts you know in gujarat you have a small district called panchmahal which means
#
there are five palaces the district itself must have had five rajas so in other words we had every
#
village had a raja you cannot have the type of top down approach that you had in the west
#
continuously for so many years in india this does not mean we didn't have large empires
#
surely the there were some big empires and we know about them in history but they were
#
how were they ruling the last man we don't know unlike in the west where they were ruling it very
#
differently so why am i saying this well i think if you allow open source cultures to flourish
#
they will actually favor individual rights a lot more than group rights in fact it is a top down
#
approach cultures for who individual rights become something that they have to make an effort towards
#
for open source cultures the natural intuitive thing would be individual rights to emerge
#
and this individual and this is something i am not very clear in my head because this work is
#
still continuing i'm still going going on you know this research is ongoing is how do you explain
#
sometimes the impetus or the force of a community on the person like you mentioned
#
kha panchayat well it is the same culture that evolves kha panchayats too right which i am trying
#
to now you know celebrate perhaps in the last few few minutes if it is an open source space then the
#
kha panchayat should allow anyone to do whatever we don't know i don't know the evolution historical
#
evolution of how this happened and how did this happen we surely know before british came castes
#
were not rigid i mean this is now there is a huge amount of documentary evidence that we didn't have
#
this ossified rigid manner in which from one caste you could not move to another caste i mean we have
#
instances after instances in both our mythologies our history books as well as you know amongst our
#
the stories of our kings like for instance chandragupta maurya was found by chanakya and
#
this is you know as documented history as it can be who was definitely not a kshatriya for that
#
matter and but i don't want to go there what i'm trying to say is we simply don't know what were
#
those frameworks like because i have a feeling the reason why our cultures are connected to
#
collectivist nature and top down is something which is fairly recent in the past the more i
#
read the more i realize that there was a high level of decentralized nature that this country
#
was living in there was a high level of similarity in many of our cultural attributes like burning
#
our debts and you know hinduism having similar frameworks across the country so there so i'm
#
not trying to say that we were million countries in one which many social scientists argue i don't
#
think we were million countries i think there was a very there are very very strong reasons to believe
#
that this land had a you know had large large amount of or vast you know huge amount of
#
convergences cultural convergences with millions of communities spreading around what happened
#
during colonization and even before that during islamic rule what kind of frameworks made us
#
what we are we don't know and like i said there's very little research on it anyway
#
so you know we do contain multitudes and i think who was it was it naipaul or gandhi who once said
#
whatever you say of india the opposite is also true so about caste i'll kind of push back slightly
#
like on the one hand i do believe that the british categorizing caste and doing the census and all
#
that played a part in ossifying it but equally i had an episode with tony joseph on his book early
#
indians and the genetic evidence that he came up with shows a very interesting thing in fact it's
#
the memorable quote by david reich who wrote a book called how we who we are and how we got here
#
where he says that if you want to look for a large population look for the han chinese india is a
#
collection of many small populations and what the genetic data shows us which tony talks about
#
eloquently in his episode with me and in the book early indians is that since about 2000 years ago
#
before that india was partying everybody who was in india was you know mingling with each other and
#
everything was fluid but since about around 2000 years ago a particular ideological strain in the
#
gangetic belt seems to have one out and since then you have very rigid caste endogamy which is why to
#
go back to reich's words you have many small populations and not one large population which
#
is kind of pretty stunning because what yeah so i think i think we are talking about two different
#
things so first of all i'm not an expert in this matter so i will of course reserve to the judgment
#
that you and other experts have but but i'm saying something slightly different so so here's the
#
nuance to say that many people followed what their caste occupation emphasized is not to say that
#
they were forced to do it so while we might find that the experiences that you know occupations
#
are caste-driven and you don't find these separations in these lineages probably from
#
the genetic evidence this does not tell us that people couldn't switch all it tells us the
#
switching if at all it was the switching was very minimal but if switching is minimal this doesn't
#
mean that these there is a structure to it it could simply a matter of practice and in a world
#
where probably the resources are limited in a world where uncertainties are far more i mean you
#
and i are sure that if we go out of the street here in mumbai nobody will kill us but thousand
#
years ago 500 years ago or even 2000 years ago maybe we were not so sure you know people leaving
#
in caravan for places to trade they're not sure whether they'll come back so in these types of
#
times it is possible there are chances that people would not be as risk-loving as they are today so
#
you surely i mean the genetic you know so tony's work surely tells us there was no intermingling
#
but this doesn't tell us that the intermingling was not allowed the text that we have tell us
#
that intermingling did take place both in the religious text that we have as well as in british
#
gazettes that we find but it was not widely prevalent and the two things are very different
#
you know you know for instance you can you can say that you know if genetic evolution tells us
#
that indians are not marrying westerners but is it not allowed i don't know it is allowed it's just
#
happening in small number and the two things are very different and both can stand on its own
#
irrespective of the other fact fair enough i'm not an expert either i'll sort of defer to experts
#
on that though the one very interesting sort of addition to tony's insight came from sort of came
#
when i was chatting with alice evans i read an episode with her and she was talking about female
#
seclusion the urge to you know keep women at home and not let them go out and part of it she of
#
course attributed to the rise of islam but i think part of it also definitely comes from
#
caste endogamy because and obviously if you want to maintain strict caste endogamy you want to keep
#
the women at home controlling women sexuality becomes a big deal but like you are saying it's
#
there is a little bit of an assumption there and whether it was you know socially enforced in such
#
a strict manner my my instinct is that it was but you know that's so you're right i mean look i i
#
would be the last person to say that there is no caste i mean obviously i've come from an extremely
#
conservative background i've seen this all around me and i i none of what i'm saying comes from my
#
reading of i mean the caste is a is an area which is not my not an area in which i'm an expert
#
what i am saying is through the reading of the the colonial documents and where i realize that
#
you know rizly for instance was one of the authors who ossified and made caste frameworks rigid
#
and so you find after when he carved out that this is a caste and you know he funnily enough
#
he calls that book people of india and then he documents all the cars and tells these are the
#
professions so when you write something i mean i mean writing is doctrine you know one of the
#
reasons why greek philosophers did not write is because they felt that if we write it will
#
fossilize this yeah and philosophy cannot be fossilized because times change and things
#
change value systems change etc so in a way if you write something and if there's no other
#
text that is written which can contradict it for so many decades it assumes a certain position of
#
power any in any society so my limited understanding so i'm i mean surely there's a huge problem of
#
caste surely we need to work around it and we've been trying to my reading tells me that the
#
ossification is fairly recent in history and again very limited reading of mine so again i'm going
#
to be deferring to experts there but there's a lot to unpack if we read the colonial documents
#
there before we go in for a break a quick quote from your book only i got the anecdote from your
#
book you mentioned you know the greeks not writing anything down because they didn't want to fossilize
#
it in your book you have this lovely anecdote about einstein where einstein once you know he
#
gave a question paper one year for a student and the next year he gave the same question paper so
#
i think his teaching assistant asked him that what is this why you're giving the same question paper
#
to the students again and he said because the answers have changed
#
and that just feels really so much fucking excitement because what a time to be alive
#
and the answers are changing oh yeah oh yeah that is true these are exciting times
#
whether it's like a roller coaster ride going up and down by the way that story might be
#
apocryphal but it kind of fits into einstein's personality you know and premchand's story
#
coffin is definitely fiction but it doesn't matter it contains the truth it doesn't matter
#
exactly that's the whole point of stories that's why that's what makes us human
#
let's go in for a break much more on the other side
#
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 here out of clear writing
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and an online community has now sprung up of all my past students we have workshops a newsletter
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to showcase the work of students and vibrant community interaction in the course itself
#
through four webinars spread over four weekends i share all i know about the craft and practice
#
of clear writing there are many exercises much interaction and a lovely and lively community
#
at the end of it the course costs rupees 10 000 plus gst or about 150 dollars if you're
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interested head on over to register at indiancard.com slash clear writing that's indiancard.com slash
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clear writing being a good writer doesn't require god-given talent just a willingness to work hard
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and a clear idea of what you need to do to refine your skills i can help you
#
welcome back to the scene in the unseen i'm chatting with the brilliant yugang goel about
#
many things and we haven't even reached this book yet but we will not get there just yet because i
#
want to know more about your journey and i'm fascinated by the fact that on the one hand
#
you are engaged in what is almost an entrepreneurial journey from the time you
#
join general and then you come to flame where you are sort of building new things and figuring out
#
a new way to see the world engage with the world but at the same time you are doing what a good
#
academic should be doing which is you're also doing serious research and getting into subjects
#
and all of that so tell me a bit about this period like what did the academic life mean for you how
#
much of it is administration how much of it is teaching how much of it is research how much of
#
it is this wake startup evangelism kind of stuff that's also you know seems to be a part of it yeah
#
thanks um again i i think it's been different during different periods of my career so far
#
so you know in the beginning while we were setting up jindal university we you know i was involved
#
in administration heavily because it was some sort of a startup university like i said during and
#
after my doctorate i have also moved towards direction of writing and research teaching has
#
always been very inspiring to me i think i learn a lot by teaching and i think the one of the best
#
ways to learn is to teach it because then you will have to you know go to the first principles and
#
you know so i in fact it was for my love of teaching and for my love of running into questions that i
#
didn't have an answer to that led me to do my doctorate and you know after my phd i started
#
also liking the life of a scholar and researcher and so i moved to teaching and writing less of
#
administration so let's say between 2009 to 12 when i was in jindal i was doing more of administration
#
then 12 to 15 16 i did phd from 16 to 1920 i was more of a scholar and teacher but not as much of
#
an administrator even though i helped set up let's say the indian school of public policy at that
#
time and i did so i don't think administration has all has ever been away from me it's sort of
#
it's been a sinusoidal curve but you know during my you know during my period in europe when i
#
was studying and writing i came across some fascinating uh you know descriptions of the
#
world both in my mind and in reality and one of the things that i think i should you know declare
#
here one of my mantras has been that i go to the field without reading the theory i studied
#
different kinds of informal markets in india in my phd and that's the research that i continue to
#
do continue to do so even now and i studied the agra so agra's footwear cluster i studied
#
coal mafia in dhanbad i also studied the independent sex work in new delhi it's not
#
not the sex workers who are in the red light area but the independent ones and after that my
#
research has also moved into the direction of higher education so i try understand how
#
higher education governance and regulations work so i am now for instance the nep the national
#
education policy steering committee member for the government of marashtra doing whatever little
#
bit that i can do i'm also i've also begun doing my research doing some research in public procurement
#
which is the government tenders it's one of those areas which is relatively boring but i
#
think extremely important and you know during post my phd i used to teach i mean i used to teach
#
courses on economics law and economics public policy so public policy is a very interesting
#
discipline right so it has an inflame for instance i am a i'm an associate professor in public policy
#
so public policy allows me to enjoy the diversity of disciplines because it's like the mb of social
#
sciences i say yeah so it has all kinds of theoretical frameworks pulled out from sociology
#
from economics from political science but you can't just lay up your own ass yes yeah of course that
#
is that is true and and that has that has inspired me to you know understand india at the local level
#
so while policy framing happens at the center i think it's really at the district taluka or
#
even village level that we really see it manifested and hence you know when i returned to india and
#
i had a chance to do the gazetteer of a district in in haryana and that inspired me into thinking
#
how british were governing us which is by documenting us at district levels now we have
#
a huge amount of data and statistics that gets generated in india you know if you buy a car it
#
is registered if you you know go in a train you know you're documented in fact the moment you buy
#
a shirt you know you are again documented if you use your card and even if you don't at least the
#
company you know sale is documented so the government is sitting on tons and tons of data
#
except that it is never accessible it's you know printed in hard copies forgotten about it and so
#
i thought why can't we collect it meaningfully visualize it digitize it and give it to the world
#
in a small local entrepreneur would like to know how many cars are being purchased in his city
#
if he or she is wanting to set up a mechanic shop let's say right so so i thought let me create
#
these repositories of knowledge where there are local level data statistics data and statistics
#
that are popularized and so now what i'm also doing is in addition to my research and gazetteers
#
which is also cultures i'm also doing work on local level statistics mapping and how india
#
collects its data what are the issues there and why we need to look at district level or small
#
scale data and statistics as well as cultures extensively so before the break we discussed a
#
lot on how local cultures matter and how decentralized understanding of india is very important
#
similarly i would say and which is also the second part of my project in flame is that
#
local statistics matters as much you know typically so maharashtra is around 11 12 crore people
#
which is you know six times portugal okay a smaller where are our six cristiano ronaldo's
#
well they are there they're just not known yet and i don't think they'll ever be known and this is
#
you know and by the way christiano ronaldo's also require a huge amount of training which is so you
#
know it's like shining and polishing which but you know if you look at if you look at small towns
#
so usmanabad you know recently they've renamed it dhara shiva so how many i mean so it's an
#
aspirational district one of the very low income districts in maharashtra i mean it has almost 16
#
17 lakh people and look at the size of the population there so statistics of these people
#
or of this district is somewhere there but it's not accessible to you or me i mean it can be
#
accessible but we'll have to go there probably if you want to find out number of cars and usmanabad
#
we'll have to go to its rto office and things like that so you know that's also part of what
#
i'm doing in terms of my research is district level statistics and cultures but i want to
#
mention about one part of my research which i think is useful because it helps explain our
#
conversation earlier and also will explain why i do what i do in economics also which is to do
#
with how informal markets work in india so these are markets that you know are not there on paper
#
but but they are some of the most thriving places and if you want to distinguish between the west
#
and the east and i think this is one very unique proxy that we found is that non-western countries
#
have a significantly overwhelming presence of informal markets whether it's thailand or vietnam
#
or nigeria or india for that matter so how is it possible how is it that they exist in fact they
#
thrive whereas you know in the western countries they don't and one of the ways in which i try to
#
explain this both in my research as well as in my both in my phd research as well as in my publications
#
is that these markets hinge on tacit knowledge which you know michael polanyi used to talk about
#
it friedrich hayek also mentioned a little bit when he was talking about spontaneous order that
#
there is this knowledge which is decentralized and exists in the minds of people it's basically
#
i know more than i can tell and so because i if the market rests on that knowledge which can't
#
by definition be explicitly categorized or stated then it's hard to formalize it because in order
#
for a market to be formal the knowledge has to be formal so i don't know your credit worthiness
#
because it's not formal but i own but you know your friend knows it only because your friend
#
knows you so there's a tacit knowledge that he has that if amit is borrowing money from me
#
will amit be able to repay in time or not there is no formula to it if a bank has to give loan
#
to amit the bank has to pull out the credit worthiness you know on paper based on the assets
#
that amit has and so on and so forth that means for the bank the search cost of credit worthiness
#
is very high but for amit's friend it's not very high and so amit's friend and amit will deal in
#
this business very easily and the banks will be out and because they are out of the banking system
#
by and large they're out of formal system and so there is massive amount of informal networks
#
that we have largely driven through tacit knowledge connecting this to the conversation
#
we were having earlier is that this might simply be an offshoot of the experiential knowledge that
#
we were talking about and theory driven knowledge so anything in non-western societies which exists
#
in the mind because it has come through experience through customs through modes of behavior through
#
networks becomes difficult by definition to to make to be made explicit and because you can't
#
make it explicit it's these markets are stubborn to be formalized governments have tried a lot
#
i mean and scholars often say these markets are informal because they want to be outside the tax
#
bracket because the transaction cost of following the laws are too high or because the government
#
enforcement apparatus is weak but i don't think that this is really going to the core of the
#
problem which is what i've tried to do in my research the core of the problem lies in the
#
knowledge systems through which these markets operate and are those knowledge systems at all
#
possible to be formalized or not if you can't formalize those knowledge systems chances are
#
these markets will evade formal designs of law for that matter now this means there is a huge
#
disadvantage that they may have which is that they may not be able to scale like your friend
#
will be able to do business with you but if you want to borrow huge amount of money you need a
#
bank and the bank will not give you money because the bank doesn't have explicit knowledge about
#
your funds etc and hopefully over time and now with the advent of ai a lot of this explicit
#
knowledge is becoming more and more a lot of this tacit knowledge is becoming more more explicit
#
so i'm hoping that this scaling can happen but even but i'm sure there must be ways of scaling
#
even these informal natures of transactions what those systems are how those knowledge
#
frameworks could be evolved is still something which is a work in progress but all of this
#
probably will indicate that i'm someone who's interested in small towns that's why i'm studying
#
them both in my project even in my research and in that sense i think the future of india also
#
lies in its small towns i've done an episode with rahul mathan where he was talking about how data
#
is used to determine creditworthiness by algorithms in ways that humans would not possibly imagine
#
they're so crazy like for example what is the average charge on your phone like someone who
#
lets his phone charge run out too much is not likely to be as credit worthy as someone who keeps it
#
or do you do you use all caps while typing whatsapp messages and i mean i don't know which way the
#
pendulum swings but i am guessing if you're always shouting on whatsapp you are less likely to be
#
credit worthy again perhaps you know so ai will come up with all these insane things like like
#
you know your thing about a second year of engineering which we can't possibly make head
#
or tail of but is nevertheless there is sort of something to it i'm going to double click on a
#
couple of these i realize i'm taking time away from talking about your book which i really want
#
to do but your book is out there and everyone can read it and we will talk about it for as long as
#
we can but what i have not read about earlier is you mentioned coal mafia in dhanbad and then
#
sex workers in delhi uh unorganized tell me a little bit more about what drove you to do those
#
and what did you find because they sound incredibly interesting to me wow okay so so you know
#
anurag kashyap made this movie called gangs of wasseypur i will not go beyond that movie to
#
tell you what drove me to dhanbad so the movie you know i was hugely inspired by the movie i
#
wanted to dig deeper i have friends from dhanbad and from bihar and i told you about my first job
#
which used to be you know in in and around calcutta and delhi so eastern eastern part of india has
#
fascinated me in its own right so i decided to take a plunge and try to
#
understand really what is this going on because interestingly
#
first of all mafia is a misnomer i think mafia in the academic world a scholarly world is understood
#
in the context of italian mafia mafiosi who were very prominent both in italy as well as in the
#
east coast and then you know this word was kind of used abused by many other people particularly
#
journalists so we call dhanbad mafia as mafia but i don't know if that can fit but that doesn't
#
matter let's you know let's keep that aside nomenclatures aside but i wanted to see why
#
dhanbad attracted coal mafia while many other coal mines did not and what is so special about
#
this place and why could people not come out of why was government which wanted to get out of
#
the mafia's control could not do it and so i go there i start reading a lot of vernacular
#
literature by the way amit i have to emphasize on the show how important you are asking me about
#
you know what can we do to create a framework or undo the types of intellectual violence we have
#
done by western frameworks in india i think one of the most important answers lies in our vernacular
#
literature books stories memoirs scholarly literature written by people in local languages
#
by some local publisher i mean there are billions and you know one of the things that internet has
#
done it has killed local intellectuals which i feel very sad about every small town has its has
#
his you know its own intellectual or group of intellectuals but these guys may not be you know
#
may not be part of a network where they could publish with top publishers or even write books
#
for that matter so i think a lot of my own understanding of the world has also come from
#
you know local writers in vernacular so the socrates of gud chiroli sits alone tonight
#
yes you're right i mean i just hope he's not poisoned to death
#
which was by the way through a very democratic process there you go we'll come to democracy and
#
elections after this yeah so i so you know i go to danbad i read books and talk to people and
#
this is what i find so mines in and around jaria and danbad that region is very very rich because
#
the coal was a very high grade quality coal british kind of found it and then they started
#
getting more and more coal out of it i mean british and coal what do you expect right
#
and that's what they did in england so they start looking for workers and laborers to work in
#
inhuman condition in the mines so they hire these people who they who are often called as
#
pehlwans or sardars these sardars are basically labor agents they get labor from eastern up
#
bihar and other places poor folks sometimes farmers during their lean seasons and they
#
come and work in the mines and the and these people you know get paid for how many men they
#
provide this continues in a very exploitative fashion for decades together and when the british
#
leaves the government nationalizes it sorry and doesn't nationalize it these mines remain in the
#
hands of private owners so many of these mines were purchased by you know some merchants but
#
mines are all private at the time of independence so they simply changed hands from some british to
#
some indian this goes on until the 60s and 70s when in mid 70s the government decides indira gandhi
#
government decides to nationalize it just like they nationalize many other things and so overnight
#
they decide that we so the system in the mines remained such until nationalization so british
#
the way in which british extracted mines through extensive exploitation continued after that
#
and when british when indian government nationalizes the coal mines this is what happens
#
and this is you know interesting thing because takes us to the conversation on democracy now
#
they nationalize the mine but they can't fire the workers because they are voters and by the way let
#
me remind you this was the region because of the large number of laborers working in the mines
#
dhanbad region was one of the most prominent hotbed for even independence movement in fact 1920
#
i think was 1920 when gandhi went there and spoke to the workers because if you mobilize these
#
workers en masse against british you have a strong case for independence as well so it was an
#
important moment space place politically so that is why this region has also attracted many political
#
leaders as well anyway coming back to the story after the so the nationalization happened overnight
#
and the government announced that we will retain the workers who will be given the government
#
jobs these sardars and pehlwans therefore overnight created lists like she does list
#
lists of workers in the region who are employed in the mines fictitious names many names that
#
they would otherwise bring from their villages and planted themselves in important positions within
#
what was then to be called as coal india limited over time these people became therefore the union
#
leaders these sardars because they are the ones who are getting laborers and workers
#
now this is unique because this goes this kind of this eludes a western mind i'll tell you what
#
eludes the western mind and i'll sort of you know from your and my experience and then connected
#
to danbad so imagine a a maid servant in your or my home who comes to clean the dishes or cook
#
food or clean the house would we call this person a slave maybe we may not want to use that term
#
and at the same time we also know that the lady or the person who comes is disadvantaged and that
#
is why the person is doing something that you and i are not doing at the same time if we ask this
#
question to this lady do you consider yourself a slave in this house the lady would probably
#
say no i don't consider a slave this is a job that i entered voluntarily nobody's forcing me to do it
#
and you know i get paid whatever is the market rate so there is no slavery going on so on so forth
#
to a western mind this is indeed one in fact if you remember the case of devyani cobra garden
#
the you know the indian counselor in new york she was not being paid the minimum wage even though
#
she was paying being paid the wage that the that would otherwise indians would otherwise pay to
#
their maid servants so therefore it was not slavery at all from their perspective how do we make sense
#
of the fact that the job that you and i don't want to do somebody else is doing but that is not
#
slavery just because the person is not forced so jan bremen this dutch scholar comes to india and
#
he finds this going on now this is this happens in you know this happens in in farmlands where
#
there are tenants who are working on somebody else's land this happened during zamidari this
#
happens in any relationship where there is one person more powerful and the person less powerful
#
but then by that logic every relationship has it even in our corporate setups you know the
#
off we often call them as corporate slaves are you a slave of flame i'm not thankfully because i'm a
#
you know the universities are not designed in that same way perhaps thankfully so if i were
#
working in a bank probably i would be right doing things that you don't want to but so look gula
#
is a translation of slave i would you know i would i would just say that i even disagree with your
#
contention that a western through a western frame that is slavery it isn't unless you're a radical
#
left-wing activist any uh any voluntary contract between two people isn't slavery period so yeah i
#
mean sorry you know people can differ on what is voluntary so you are right i would i would also
#
consider this to be an extreme position that somebody would take but it you know but prominent
#
narratives indicate it's such no no i'm just saying that it's it's a it's a crazy far left
#
narrative no reasonable person would say that somebody doing a job is a slave just because
#
there's a power differential that's insane i mean in fact that is one reason i think western left
#
wing activists got it completely wrong on sweatshops i think sweatshops are a service to humanity
#
because everybody who works in a sweatshop is getting an opportunity to do the best job
#
available to them they've chosen that job over every other job so to call them slaves and to
#
make that judgment on their behalf when you're sitting in an air-conditioned university room
#
somewhere is incredibly condescending so you're right so i and i will also point out i had done
#
in fact a column where i mentioned these things long ago that there were western campaigns carried
#
out against child labor and from you know what i remember i think unicef did one study and there
#
was another study run by oxfam and they found that wherever child you know in particular factories
#
children who were working were let go the boys went to crime the girls all became prostitutes
#
no you're right absolutely in fact in fact so western condescension of this is terrible but i
#
think by and large most people in the west are reasonable if it's voluntary it is fine but you
#
understand where it's coming from right so it's very easy for them to think that people who are
#
working in mines are actually doing slavery yeah because you know they've been working in this i
#
get the mindset i would just say that it's it's like a university left-wing mindset most ordinary
#
people would say that hey you know i'm doing a job out of my own free will yeah there's a power
#
differential no i'm not a slave so here's so i think you are absolutely bang on and this is
#
what leads to a certain type of framework to emerge to explain this so if a western mind who's not
#
able to explain this but is still seeing this in practice well how does he explain this if it is
#
not slavery so here's a frame but i'm using milton friedman and hayek's language to explain it but
#
these guys are also western so in that sense there is no universal definition that the westerners
#
have but we will not be surprised if a westerner flinches looking at a coal mine laborer and saying
#
that this this is slavery going on in modern day the point i am trying to build is the framework
#
that many of these scholars have often built around this is the framework of patronage and
#
exploitation and they're saying that patronage and exploitation happens alongside happen coexist
#
together so the person who is your slave is also dependent on you for his or her survival so he
#
has his daughter's wedding he will come to you to give him money for the daughter's wedding at the
#
same time you will also treat him or her you know whichever way you want this doesn't go very
#
conveniently in the like you put it the left wing you know western western intellectuals
#
and this is the same thing was going on within in dhanbad as well right so coming back to the
#
story where i started i realized that these people also become union leaders because they these
#
sardars and pehlwans are getting the workers and laborers into this into the mines and when you
#
have union leadership you know what it can lead to and if you control labor in a coal mine you
#
pretty much control the entire mine because without these laborers no matter which private
#
individual has purchased the coal you this guy needs the labor in order to load his truck from
#
the mine so the government tried in the mid-2000s to you know create an auction e-auction for coal
#
mines so that people don't have to physically come there and be threatened by these coal mafia
#
so i could sit here in mumbai and bid for a certain type of coal in a certain mine in a
#
certain colliery and the computer will generate a delivery because i bid the highest amount
#
but the problem is on that day i have to physically go there or send my truck
#
to load my truck and that loading happens through these workers and if these workers
#
are controlled by the union leader who is telling them which let which truck to load and which one
#
not to you clearly have a case of you know exploitation you have a case of appropriation
#
so the way coal mines the way dhanbad mafia used to work was for every loading they would charge a
#
small amount of commission and of course for the coal for the buyer it's okay because if the number
#
is fixed then he just simply needs to factor it in factor it in and you know the consumers pay and
#
i realized through my research that this number was high to the extent of around nine percent coal
#
price was loaded you know due to the presence of the quote unquote mafia and therefore one of the
#
conclusions that i drew from this research is that you will have mafia you will have this
#
exploitation if you have strong union but you need to have a union because obviously from the
#
framework from the framework of patronage and exploitation obviously these people are exploited
#
and you need a union leader in order to who can then represent the interest of the workers now
#
there is a lot of historical and historical context and nuances that i've eased out in this
#
discussion but by and large mafia in dhanbad used to work because there was a very strong union
#
leadership and the union leaders would obviously get corrupted and they would then you know go
#
hand in glove with the owners or promoters they will run the show they may actually not
#
work in the interest of the workers but appropriate the entire funds and this is what
#
happened when the government nationalized it i mean it continues to be nationalized there are
#
discussions that they will privatize coal is this still the case it continues to be the case i would
#
say in fact you know the story gangs of vasipur kind of showed a similar framework right so the
#
it's a union leader and by the way these union leaders became so powerful that they became
#
member of parliaments and member of legislative assemblies and the moment you enter politics
#
first of all you have so many votes and then you enter politics you amass even greater power so now
#
the fights that happen are between these families so there are two three families who control
#
specific number of collieries and they charge a commission whether it happens today today i don't
#
know but surely it did happen during you know and at least until the time i was doing my
#
phd and i then i the paper got published and i said the the whole point of this is that if you
#
create unions it's very easy for it to be converted into a mafia especially when you
#
don't have an option of bringing your own labor whether they are useful for the workers or not is
#
another question i don't think they are and so the workers are worse off the buyers are worse off
#
the government is worse off for the taxes basically everybody is worse off but you need to protect the
#
unions or you need to protect the unions and now it's in the interest you know there are
#
incentives for the leaders to ensure that unions are protected because they are benefiting from it
#
am i arguing against union i don't know but i'm definitely arguing i'm definitely saying
#
that unions will help the workers please let us get out of this mindset that unions help
#
those who they are expected to help i mean classic public choice right is it the case here that in
#
like unions everywhere would not be like this is it the case that this union is particularly
#
harmful because it is both a monopsony on one side and a monopoly on the other side
#
that it is a monopsony in the sense it is the only place that particular band of laborers can go to
#
sell their wares and a monopoly in the sense that it is the only place that the company can buy
#
labor from so because that would then be the source of the power isn't it it's a good point
#
i don't think it's a monopsony of laborers because the laborers are hooked onto a particular colliery
#
but they can i mean i mean i'll have to go deeper into this but i my my sense is that these workers
#
are not necessarily permanent in the i mean some of them are surely because they will be on paper
#
but many of them are like floating population and so you know they might just go to another
#
colliery if they're getting a better wage but by and large what happens is that this is all fixed
#
so they you know they're and they don't get to sell the coal they're only loading and unloading
#
coal so all coal in this country is owned by the government of india if you want to buy coal
#
you can only buy from the government you can only own a coal mine if you want to use it for captive
#
consumption so if you want to use coal for electricity generation in your power plant
#
only then you can own a coal mine but all mines are otherwise owned by the government
#
so coal india limited is this big fat company sitting on there is all the reserves of coal that
#
india has you know has its own issues you know i i think i think this is time that we should think
#
about what do we do with our coal mines where all kinds of and by the way this is particularly the
#
case in dhanbad and jaria coal mines not others because many of those coal mines were discovered
#
post-independence and so the government could set those systems better but this one had its also
#
path dependent the legacy problem the legacy problem yeah it's like old clunky software and
#
now you can't get the bug out of the system sex work in delhi well so you know after the rise of
#
smartphones sex workers can engage with the clients directly and this would otherwise obviate the need
#
for them to you know be in the clutches of you know quote unquote pimp right the who in the
#
literature is often regarded as the most vicious character who forces women to you know undergo
#
you know who forces women to engage in sex work so i so i mean this is well studied in the
#
literature so what i try to do is to see a certain part of delhi where independent sex workers
#
you know professed and and you know there was a this primary survey i did with many of them
#
through the help of a non-profit and i realized that i can categorize those sex workers in two
#
groups category one are home based and category two is street based so home based are sex workers
#
who use a home to profess street based are those sex workers who are typically on the street
#
now the street based sex workers suffer greater violence at the hands of police or violent clients
#
home based sex workers suffer less so and my question was that why would people why would women
#
prefer to be a street based sex worker and you know and i was also looking at the question of
#
you know how does a home home based sex worker operate without a pimp so it turns out that the
#
home based sex worker gets a small apartment or a small room on rent from a pimp by and large so in
#
other words the literature was arguing that with the rise of smartphones or rise of cell phones we
#
will no longer need to have pimps and the client and the client and the sex worker will be able to
#
engage with each other and i'm i realized over through this research that pimps have not gone
#
out of the market in fact they're still prevalent a different kind of pimp has emerged who provides
#
the space for sex workers to profess at the same time it is the pimp who also provides protection
#
to the sex worker both from police and violent clients and therefore pimps existed in my in my
#
study i discovered that pimps exist to provide a service to sex workers they absorb the transaction
#
cost and the uncertainty of being a sex worker in a country like india where even though
#
sex for money is legal prostitution is legal but everything else associated with it is illegal
#
thus rendering it illegal in de facto so pimps offer actually a very valuable service
#
because of exploitative state in other words to think that sex work is a result of pimp
#
we have to go out of that thinking in fact sex work is a result of the state
#
or let's say exploitative sex work is a result of the state not pimps can you explain that a
#
bit more because i i guess sex work would arise because it's one way to get an income instead
#
yeah so that's i said exploitative sex work is a result of the state not sex work so what happens
#
is you you would expect so let me explain this again you know in simpler words one would expect
#
that pimps take away huge amount of commission from the sex workers so you don't need them if
#
sex workers can engage with the clients directly but i realize that even independent sex workers
#
need them and the answer to that question is well they need them because this got it because there's
#
no rule of law and because it is illegal yeah because the pimp is the one who provides protection
#
to the sex worker from violent clients or even police so pimp manages the police and sex workers
#
therefore can practice can profess in in in peace so if you really want to get the pimps out you
#
have to get the state out yeah fantastic point yeah i mean if you want to get and until then
#
do not label pimps as the horrible exploitative i mean maybe there are pimps who have been
#
exploited and i am not trying to deny it but to paint all of them in this picture is something
#
that i don't think we can do based on my own field research in western part of delhi in some
#
residential neighborhoods so i've done a past episode and i've also written pieces on how
#
victimless crimes should not be criminalized because the moment they are the underworld gets
#
in which is exactly what is happening here there's no reason for prostitution to be illegal voluntary
#
transactions between adults the moment you make it illegal you bring the underworld in and you
#
also make the pimp necessary to protect the sex worker from the police you know just see the
#
irony magnificent and that is why when i realize that why do some sex workers prefer to do
#
street-based sex work without the need of the use of pimp i realize that these are sex workers
#
who get paid much less they are older they have much fewer clients sorry they paid much less but
#
they have far more number of clients but they also suffer at the hands of police and violent
#
clients significantly more than the home-based sex workers so one conclusion that i could draw
#
from this is that only when you don't have an option to be a home-based sex worker you will
#
you resort to street-based sex work otherwise you would prefer a home-based sex work because
#
you have the protection from the pimp wow it's very telling actually when i when i did that
#
yeah so at this point i'll quickly recommend a book called intimate city by manjima ghatichari
#
yeah yeah she was on my show as well so fantastic book let's let's get to talking about who moved
#
my vote tell me a little bit about how the book came to be in the sense how did you get interested
#
in the subject what was it that led to the collaboration because you have a co-author in
#
the book how did all of that work out tell me about the processes that led to the book and the
#
interest that led to the book well so i think i am from western up where politics is the talk of the
#
town i think that would be the case in most part of india anyway and so i was always interested in
#
this theatrics of democracy called elections and i so when i you know so it was something that i
#
was always interested in but never had never put a serious mind to thinking about it in a rigorous
#
manner so when i was doing my phd one of my batch mates also from india but who was a year senior
#
there arun kaushik you know was also you know doing the same same program and we met and we
#
became friends instantly we continued to be very very good friends he later on also joined jindal
#
university so we became colleagues so it was during the phd time when during you know one
#
of those random conversations so we started thinking about this more seriously it really
#
came you know came on the table because arun had written an article when he was studying in igidr
#
on seat share and vote share and sort of compared it with many other indicators and so he started
#
telling me about it and i started getting interested i i became so hooked on to it that
#
i read a lot about it and i realized that while in india people talk about seats all the time
#
and this is i think 2014 13 14 or something they don't talk about votes as much and that was
#
baffling to me because i thought votes need to be a stronger measure of how much a party's liked or
#
disliked and not seats because you know you have you can win by one vote or you can win by a million
#
vote you still get to have the same say in the parliament whereas in one case you are in the
#
parliament with a lot more with a lot bigger mandate while the other case you're not there
#
with such big mandate but you still get the same same importance this was even more peculiar or
#
rather this was even more intriguing because we were in europe and you know how voting happens
#
in european union so in the parliament every country has fixed number of votes based on the
#
population and so therefore and sometimes if each country has only one vote the small countries
#
tend to become a lot more weightier than they otherwise would so and then we started reading
#
on you know how do you weight certain votes and so on and so forth and i told arun you know this
#
is an interesting idea let's work more on it and you know pick up some stories from states what's
#
really going on let me tell you this with an example and which is we're going to make things
#
very easy at least for for the listeners let's say there are three constituencies you and i contest
#
in them you win in two and i win in one you get to make the government but let's say you win
#
with 51 votes against 49 of mine in both the constituencies and in the third constituency
#
i win with 100 votes and you don't get any so the total number of votes you get is 51 plus 51 plus
#
zero that's 102 number of votes that i get is 49 plus 49 plus 100 that's 198 you get 102 votes
#
i get 198 votes you get to form the government now this is bizarre but this will happen if the
#
equation is set like this and we started thinking about is this only a mathematical problem true in
#
theory and never in practice or does this really happen and turns out that it happens number of
#
times it has happened in india many times so what we're trying to show is a all the votes that came
#
to me are wasted you've become the leader of even those who didn't vote for you so maybe you have
#
become the leader with fewer number of votes the second the fewer number of votes it doesn't matter
#
what is the strength with which you have won where you won so we just ran some numbers and we realized
#
well this is going on in india and we need to write about it but you know like any like any
#
aspiring academic who's doing his phd in a different discipline and who has pressures of
#
publications in the field of expertise this was just a fun project that we picked up so it was
#
never taken up so seriously by us that we would really want to write on it but it was like in the
#
back burner it was kind of cooking cooking slowly and you know phd happened we came to india he was
#
elsewhere i was in jindal then you know he joined us and then also it started cooking we started
#
writing some papers in economic and political weekly we wrote some op-eds so this idea was
#
kind of continuously tickling us until a point of time when we met karthika so i actually happened
#
to meet raghu karnad who i gave this idea who sort of proposed this idea too and he was very
#
excited and he said you want i think this is important and why don't you meet why don't you
#
meet karthika who you know was who had just taken over westland the you know being the chief editor
#
of westland and i arun and i we met her she really liked the idea she said no this really deserves a
#
book we have to write it in very very accessible manner so that you know everybody who's an
#
untrained in numbers can also understand it and and so the journey began frankly it began in
#
2018 or or so if i'm not mistaken 2017 18 or 19 or something like that and so
#
so a lot of back and forth finally this was done covid was a time when we were we were really able
#
to finish it we had to redo we had to update this book many times because many elections took place
#
during this process but you know it was a fun journey and in writing this i think what we
#
decided is we'll add lots of anecdotes and stories so that people understand so i mean in some ways
#
through this book we wanted to show not of how we vote but how we get when we vote how what we get
#
when we vote right so are the mandates leaked if they are is it because of certain type of design
#
of electoral method and we realize it is because of that so we are allaying our excitement with
#
elections in this in this book we want to show that elections are not everything just to equate
#
democracy with elections is not going to be of much use because elections are after all an equation
#
and just like any other mathematical formula you can call this formula as well
#
and so it's a number game so what we have tried to do in this book is we have not looked at any
#
jan bhavna we have not we have not made any speculative statement we were very very clear
#
this particular caste votes for this particular you know party or women voted for this we have
#
tried to keep these type of speculations as little as possible and even with lots of lots of riders
#
all we've looked at is the revealed preference which is how have people voted
#
and what did they get after that i i love the prose of the book so you definitely delivered
#
to kartika's demand that you know it'd be accessible it had storytelling the language
#
was simple and clear and we were discussing the importance of that earlier so obviously that's
#
just what i would expect and what i particularly also liked was right from the start you you know
#
made the focus clear that this is about elections not democracy and i think that's somewhere where
#
people like me and so many scholars and so on will get waylaid where we will talk about how
#
we might be a democracy but we are not a republic rules of the game constitution blah blah blah
#
you know thinking of elections as oh we just take it for granted it's normalized there is a procedure
#
and of course we will lament majoritarian rule and what will happen if two wolves and a lamb meet
#
and they vote for what to have for lunch etc etc but those are all cliches but we took the system
#
for granted or didn't really speak about it much i mean i i've had long conversations with jp narayan
#
on the show about proportional representation versus first pass supposed but not more than that
#
but you got me to thinking about not just how important the exact form of elections is in a
#
democracy but how it pervades into our lives and this takes me to big boss so you know when big
#
boss became popular in india at one point i remember 13 14 years ago i was watching it every day
#
live tweeting all of that at a particular point in time and people were like why are you so obsessed
#
but i was just like you could apply game theory to it so well and for example the voting mechanism
#
now if the voting mechanism is that you vote on who should leave the house
#
then the smart strategy is to keep a low profile and not be noticed right but if the voting strategy
#
is on who to keep in the house then the smart strategy is to be an extremely polarizing
#
character where it doesn't matter how many negative if you get the most negative votes
#
but you'll get enough positives to keep you in right and i think they changed it from one season
#
to the other i don't remember the details but i remember that when the voting strategy was that
#
they are voting to kick somebody out i said rahul roy will win because he was the most low profile
#
you hardly saw him he seemed doped out all the time and eventually he did win right and to me
#
it was a natural consequence of the way the voting system was and similarly in first pass supposed
#
you know you've you've made a number of trenchant observations for example the person who ends up
#
getting voted in a multi-way election is a person who is the least hated and not the most liked and
#
that affects you know how you vote and and and the other important sort of observation you made is
#
because parties come to power on the basis of constituencies everyone and not total votes you
#
came up with this sort of concept and it's the first time here that i'm reading about it which
#
is the leakage of preferences right which is preference leakage and you and you came out with
#
a measure for the difference between a vote share and a seat share which you call a disproportional
#
disproportional this thing so explain that to me because i find that fascinating because then
#
through the book when i was just looking at how disp how do you do you say disp so it's like short
#
form of disproportionality yeah yeah i know but do you say disp or do you say disp well we we just
#
call it disproportionality it's only written as disp oh okay i'm not going to say disproportionality
#
how many syllables are there i can't we can coin that term now if you like so yeah yeah i mean
#
whatever so i i will just say disp so yeah so i found that measure really interesting like there
#
are certain elections like you know for example the way it changes in bihar over time the way it
#
changes in bengal and kerala over time and what it indicates and one of your fundamental premises
#
is that the higher the disp the more the leakage in preference in other words the less the voters
#
are actually getting what they voted for your votes aren't translating into seats and in an
#
ideal situation what you are saying is that your vote should translate into seats pretty much more
#
or less if it is even that is the perfect system though which is proportional representation right
#
so give me a sense of your thinking on the different systems that could possibly be the case
#
and you know you mentioned the constitutional debates around this and so on and so forth
#
but what are sort of the pros and the cons of this because typically what happens is that
#
when we are in one equilibrium and we lament it we will look at the cons of that particular
#
equilibrium and compare it with some other equilibrium and with the pros of that you know
#
where that looks perfect but every system has its flaws in practice and you've studied electoral
#
systems throughout the world right so what is your sense was this good for india what are the
#
pros and cons i mean first of all i mean i don't think i have studied all the electoral systems
#
but by and large there are different types of electoral systems coming from public choice
#
theory itself so you know how do you aggregate preferences but you know i just want to put in
#
perspective frankly i mean i i wish i had seen big boss i would have used that example in my in
#
the book i've never seen a single episode it's a it's a i mean i haven't watched it for 10 years
#
but you should but it happens every year so you should check it out and because it'll just be so
#
clear because the winning strategy has to be determined by how the voting goes so it's
#
basically an equation so if you you know write the equation differently the strategy becomes
#
different so right now i think what we do is we choose the person who's most liked but not the
#
least hated and therefore it is in the i mean there are incentives for the political party to be as
#
aggressive as possible because you'll be liked by most even though you may not be liked by the most
#
but you'll be hated by the least sorry what you said exactly so i think let me see there
#
are two three points that you raised so one of the points is leakages so when your vote
#
has gone to a loser by and large it is wasted because the loser doesn't get anything now this
#
doesn't mean that you know when when it it's quote unquote wasted wasted but it is definitely leaked
#
because what happens is out of a class of i don't know let's say 100 voters and there are 10 people
#
who are contesting everybody gets 10 votes except the last two where one person gets nine and one
#
person gets 11 so you can be so the person who gets 11 votes can become the leader of the entire
#
group so 89 votes did not go to this guy and they were kind of lost this you can preserve this you
#
can you can minimize this wastage by creating or curating a new system of elections so for instance
#
you know what happens in france that we saw so you know everybody contests and people vote and in
#
that first round the top two people are picked up and then the entire population has to vote again
#
to those two people so if your first preference lost in the first round you are still not wasting
#
your preference you are still giving it to the top two some of them will still be wasted but
#
not all of them similarly there are instant runoff voting there are proportional representation that
#
i mentioned in the book that we mentioned in the book and we for for us any system
#
could potentially be better than first pass the post system as long as the goal is to arrest
#
the leakages of preferences the problem is no system is easier than first pass the post system
#
also to implement right you come to the ballot paper you know you put your you cast your vote
#
and you leave and that's pretty much it whoever gets the largest number of votes gets to win
#
even if they're not more than 50 percent in fact you know interestingly in 1952 elections which
#
we think were dominated by congress you know there were around eight crore people who voted
#
in 1952 you know how many of them voted for congress around 3.6 or 3.7 crores which basically
#
means more than half the country did not vote for congress in 1952 it's another matter that
#
you know 40 percent or 45 percent of vote share itself is a huge number in a democracy they got
#
74 percent seats with 40 votes from your book yeah so so there you go so in other words first
#
of all let us think about this for a moment and consider okay so 60 percent of indians did not
#
vote for congress in 1952 quite startling fact because we are dominated by the overwhelming
#
impression of how many seats you get and not vote so but 60 percent indians were not voting even
#
though 70 percent of the seats they got so any other system will be better than this because any
#
other system means so there are a bunch of them right so you have board account method you have
#
proportional representation which can be in form of instant runoff voting let me try to explain
#
how instant runoff voting will work instead of you know if the so this is something that i did
#
in one of my classes so i asked them to vote for you know for the winner there were some elections
#
happening in the class and so they wrote the person who they prefer the most then i asked them
#
give them a score out of 10 and so they all gave them the scores then then i asked them give them
#
a preference order who is the first who's the second who's the third so you see all the three
#
things are doing the same thing but can you imagine that second and third will probably yield or
#
furnish a different answer than the first because in the first people who hated the winner may have
#
put him at him or her at the third position so you have the largest number of people hating him but
#
you also the largest number of people putting him in the first position in the first case you will
#
only get the guys who are putting him in the first position in the sec in the third case which is the
#
ranking you know this guy could be also the most hated in the second case because there's a score
#
you don't know if the second guy could win because he's got average score for all from all of the
#
people and maybe this guy who's the least hated or or lied by most people you know at an aggregate
#
so if you can make an equation of this type you know three marks for being liked the most one
#
mark for being hated the most two marks for average maybe this guy has got two marks from
#
everyone and gets to win the win the score card this guy is could be potentially more deserving
#
of a winner but more importantly each of their votes has now counted or at least most of their
#
votes have counted and many countries do proportional representation half the world
#
does proportional representation our president is selected through proportional representation
#
rajya sabha members so proportional representation is actually far more desirable and the constitution
#
makers are pretty pretty convinced with this the reason why ambedkar and others did not decide to
#
go for this is because the ease with which you can do first pass the post system by far exceeds any
#
other system and you know you have an illiterate population by and large who doesn't know how to
#
vote that is why you need symbols to vote on because they can't read the name of the party or
#
the or the or the leader you don't want to complicate the matters by telling them vote for the party
#
and vote for the candidate and them having to know that this is the calculation we will use
#
well just vote for whoever you think is the best guy and we'll just add it up it made sense then
#
i don't know if it makes sense now because now we particularly first of all we now use you know
#
electronic voting machine which most of the developed world doesn't use actually
#
so we have still computerized a lot of our calculation if we were to convert to any form
#
of pr which is proportional representation i don't foresee a huge problem there what it will do is it
#
will begin to consider and recognize the votes of those people who have voted to the losing party
#
in a much more holistic fashion there are people you know who may want certain party you know in
#
the center certain parties in the state they may want a certain party but not a candidate and they
#
can't vote for the party they have to vote only for the candidate and the maybe they have maybe
#
the candidate loses and so the party also loses so i mean anyway i'm probably making it more
#
complex than i wanted it to be but simply put first pass the post system attempts to factor in
#
more preferences than sorry proportional representation attempts to factor in more
#
preferences than first pass the post system but it is also a little bit more complicated for voters
#
to understand and so is the ease of functioning that first pass the post system continues here
#
which actually explains why we took first pass the post because a big feature in first pass the
#
post is easy to implement but now that we have gotten past that situation where we actually
#
have pretty advanced voting possible that may no longer apply you know how it almost turned
#
around in the early 2000s right i did an episode with jp narayan and he managed to convince i think
#
a bunch of the parties and even the congress that let's shift to proportional representation
#
and then sonia gandhi put her foot down and she said no and her logic was that hey we are
#
getting more seats and vote we are getting better seat share than vote share right now why should
#
we switch so you see the irony you see the irony so i mean it's in the incentive of the political
#
systems to maintain the status quo because they are benefiting from it the one who's in charge
#
will maintain the status quo all the parties who seat share is lower than the vote share will
#
obviously say hey we are on the wrong side of disp oh yeah you mentioned about disp yeah so
#
disp is just for a you know quick bit i forgot basically if you get a lot more votes
#
and very few seats or the other way around which is usually not the case you get more seats and
#
you know or the other way around actually which is mostly the case there is a disproportionality
#
because i mean there's a mathematical formula but we don't need to go there what basically it say
#
what it basically says is i have so many more seats with so little votes that means i have
#
been able to win in most of the seats with thin majority perhaps that's why my total votes are
#
small but my total seats are large which also means that i am sitting on a wafer thin margin
#
perhaps which could switch and therefore a lot of people who did not vote for me are in the
#
constituencies where where where i have won and so i am not really representing everybody or most
#
of these people i'm representing a small group of people who are somehow able to make me the
#
winner there so that's why i have a large number of seats and very little number of now
#
disproportionality will typically be high in any democracy because you know the i mean you
#
know we don't have unanimous type of election in large in large democracies and particularly
#
in india because constituencies are really big each constituency like there are only 543
#
constituencies you know in the in the population size that we have so with so many millions of
#
votes surely you know the unanimous nature of elections is never going to be seen and therefore
#
we will have some disb but the disb when it is really big that means the margins have to be very
#
small chances are this party in the next election might not be success or the party has to work very
#
hard to make sure it is successful in the next election also because it might just be a chance
#
that they are winning because the seats are in their pockets with small margins yeah in fact
#
you pointed out i think the up election the one before the last one which adityanath won for the
#
first time the dis was very high i think this is the bjp seat share was much more than i will need
#
to look at look look up the numbers i'll tell you i think i think i've uh they could be high but i
#
would imagine they reduced the next time yeah exactly so yeah i have it here so in uh they got
#
77.4 percent of seats on the foundation of 39.7 percent of votes and the next time 2022 which
#
happened after your book was written i think the vote share actually went up from 39.7 to 41 point
#
something but the seat share went down by quite a lot so that means they still won that means the
#
dis became better and you're right 2017 up witnessed probably the highest dis p after 1977
#
so so in other words you know you you had to i mean so my my takeaway from this is that uh up
#
up bjp worked very hard in up during 27 to 22 otherwise after such a high disp the chances
#
of them losing are quite high but they did not lose that means they really work they must have
#
really worked hard they must have really worked hard we'll we'll come back to that and we will
#
go into those details but first i also want to talk about another broader structural issue in
#
indian politics which you've illustrated so well in your book where you've spoken about to start
#
with the increasing cost of elections where you point out in 2019 political parties spent up to
#
8 billion of 55 000 crores this is the annual gdp of tajikistan or krigistan as you write and
#
most indians would not know where those are on a map but and you also pointed out a related
#
and and the reason the sort of spending so high is that coming to power in the state guarantees
#
you an roi because the state has so much power if we had a minimal state which only did rule of law
#
then elections would not cost so much because the incentives would be different and there would be
#
no return on investment on spending so much money but because we have such a parasitic state
#
you know that once you are in charge of the levers of the state you can you know milk it dry and
#
therefore the spending goes up another great stat you pointed out is you named our top companies and
#
the top companies in the west and you point out that our top companies all you know thrive not
#
entirely but they thrive on government patronage you get government contracts government services
#
and all that while that is absolutely not the case with the global companies like apple alphabet
#
microsoft facebook etc various government in that so obvious so that this talks about sort of the
#
interplay between money and power and i once wrote a limerick on that i used to write a weekly
#
limerick for times of india so i wrote the world's first limerick on public choice theory i will read
#
it out for you please it's called politics a neta who loves currency notes told me what his line of
#
work denotes it is kind of funny we steal people's money and use some of it to buy their votes
#
right so and you've also in your book quoted raguram rajan speaking in 2008 to the bombay
#
chamber of commerce where he said quote the poor need the savvy politicians to help them navigate
#
through rotten public services the politician needs a corrupt businessman to provide the funds
#
that allow him to supply patronage to the poor and fight elections the corrupt businessman needs a
#
politician to get natural resources cheaply and the politician needs the votes of the poor who
#
are numerous enough to assure him reelection stop quote so we have this crazy vicious cycle of
#
dependency where to win elections you need tons of money the money will come from special interests
#
and businesses because they know that once you come to power they will get an roi because you
#
will use the power of the state and serve your cronies well etc etc so this circle goes on and
#
on i want to ask ask you about give me the deeper structural insight into why our system is like
#
this like one part of the structural insight of course is that the state has way too much power
#
and therefore it can generate money it can generate returns so the kind of politicians you apply
#
are the kind of politicians who would be applied to you know power and lucre for the sake of making
#
money and not the public spirited minded think indesh ke liye kuch karenge you know people like
#
that join flame university as associate professors but so so give me a sense of well how you would
#
think of the design of the political system so that shit like this doesn't happen so can i give
#
you like a real shaker kindly i think we don't need elections i think we should scrap elections
#
and we should elect our leaders randomly by draw of lots okay and i'm being very serious about it
#
so i think elections are overrated and elections have but by draw of lots by the way not by
#
appointments elections are overrated and i think elections have run their ground we
#
i don't think they give us anything now they are essentially number games and that too not very
#
good and when people con the algorithm they can figure out how to do it if we let people so it's
#
basically a myth between transparency and accountability which one do you think is more
#
useful or more important so do you really need to know how the person became the leader or you want
#
the leader to be accountable and if both of them can't coexist which of them you'll put your money
#
on which of them would you think is more desirable the process through which this person became our
#
leader or i don't care what the process was but now that you're a leader you have to be accountable
#
i would say that the accountability is a given and on top of that if you have a good process
#
that helps so you know kenya taro got a noble prize in economics is the youngest to win
#
and you know one of the reasons why he shook the world is because he thought
#
he i mean he proved that democracy is i mean the only way in which you know aggregation of
#
preferences has no leakage or aggregation of preference is perfect is when you have a dictator
#
and so democracy is only the second best we don't have a better word better version and when he's
#
talking about democracies talking about election methods now we can have better electoral methods
#
but all electoral methods will have their own leakages their own shortfalls and their own
#
susceptibility to be conned and therefore now some research is emerging which is showing that
#
if you have a leader however chosen if the person is accountable you will pretty much end
#
with a better state of affairs and there are two arguments that go in favor of this the first
#
argument is because the person has not gotten leadership through popularity or through popular
#
vote he or she is under less of a pressure to please his or her constituency and so this person
#
will be less influenced isn't that a call for limited terms i mean don't they serve the same
#
yeah but five years is too long to destroy anything anyway the second because this person is
#
coming there by fluke and not by hard work he or she is going to be incentivized more
#
to do hard to work harder and not think that he can he or she can do this the next time
#
so there's only so much you know there's only so much that can go in his favor this person has
#
just been lucky and if the person has been lucky he or she would like to do the most of it as long
#
as the person remains accountable i think what is the point of having elections in fact think
#
about it this way after my n.i.t experience i was of this belief that if you select students after
#
a bare minimum some of their you know if you if you cover their basic aptitude test and if they
#
are all good in it then you should select students based on draw flots all the i.i.t's and n.i.t's and
#
national law schools and i.m should be filled with students on the draw flots as long as they
#
have qualified for some basic threshold aptitude and then these guys can because ultimately the
#
difference between the amount of effort gone into conducting those entrance exam and huge amount of
#
emotional torture that many of these students go through when they go to coaching institutions
#
the quota stories are you know around you know out there for us to scoff you know to for us to to be
#
so distraught by similarly so much of effort goes into organizing elections
#
if you have these people selected randomly and make them strongly accountable you've probably
#
got it now this is a crazy suggestion and therefore in the book we don't make it in the book we say
#
we should argue we argue in favor of better representation because ultimately look you know
#
people will say that india became india had a you know open market policy since the early 90s
#
and you know really free market came about but i don't think it really happened in fact take a
#
little bit of license raj has gone away but state is still the all-powerful all supreme in this
#
country i wrote a piece on the wall street journal in 2005 where i argued exactly that that the 91
#
reforms didn't go far enough the factor markets especially left completely untouched this you
#
know the amount of money that campaign financing has in this country surpasses american campaign
#
finance by and individuals don't have so much money only corporations have what is the business
#
of a corporation to do to give so much money to a politician in a poor country like india or poor
#
country in terms of per capita income well the only reason is if the corporation can expect to
#
earn a lot more afterwards and so all kinds of you know and by the way this is what drove me
#
to do some research in public procurement so public procurement is an area of my research
#
interest now thanks to this inside that you've you know picked it up from the book and thanks
#
a lot for you know bringing it out all these companies earn huge amount of money from these
#
rent thick sectors which the government's control do you know back of the envelope calculation
#
tells me that the total amount of public procurement by value in this country is
#
more than 20 percent of his gdp which by the way in OECD countries is 10 to 11 percent
#
maybe it goes to 15 percent so we spend so the government is the largest spender indian
#
government is one of the largest spenders in the world surely is going to enrich so many companies
#
who will then give them money for you know for conducting elections and so on and so forth so
#
there's huge amount and all of this only because of elections so while it's extremely difficult to
#
argue this you know in in a space where i where i don't want to be lynched let's say or while it
#
is very difficult to be to argue this in general i think there is merit in considering this i think
#
you know what i'm i feel really jealous of your students because it is now becoming clear to me
#
that you're the best kind of teacher in the sense that you ask these provocative questions which
#
force a person to think but i would nevertheless respond to your provocative question and say that
#
my response to it would be that number one the choice between unelected or the choice between
#
chosen by lot and accountable on the one hand and elected but not accountable on the other hand is
#
a false choice because i think accountability is what we needed a good constitution for sadly
#
ours is terribly lacking and the rules of the game don't have enough accountability in place
#
and give too much power to the state which you should change anyway beyond that when it comes
#
to iit iams and how we you know selecting by a lot that's an absolutely delightful idea but there
#
is one flaw that instinctively comes to my mind which is that you are not just that one of the
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things that you are selecting for is desire who wants to be an engineer more and you know and
#
how do you select for that if you choose by lot you could have some casual random guy who's like
#
not a big deal but someone who's deeply passionate about it or you're saying no one's ever passionate
#
about it how many engineers you think have stuck to their profession those guys who were terribly
#
desires of being there are some who are passionate about it still yeah but yeah in fact frankly if
#
people think they have become engineers by fluke and by luck are more likely to retain that
#
profession than those who think you have come through hard work and now they are free to knock
#
this profession out and go to medicine or sorry medicine mba or that's also true but i'm thinking
#
of that rare guy who's got a passion for it and he can't get it because it's by a lot as if this
#
guy is getting it anyway no but if he has that deep desire for it he'll go to quota he'll do
#
what it takes it's a terrible system right now no no so people figure out different ways to select
#
people who get through these engineering entrance exams you are not measuring their desire you're
#
only measuring if they are so desires that they can put in so much of hard work in order to get
#
through so your hard work is a proxy for their desire but do you think that really is because
#
if you get one answer wrong in a typical je exam your rank slips by hundreds even thousands for
#
that matter is does that mean that the person had less desire and did not do enough hard work
#
in fact what we have done is we have created these machines which create these which throw
#
people into depths of despair in fact what is the good need of that desire which makes you work so
#
hard and even after that pushes you into this uncertain zone where you're still not sure whether
#
you'll get through if these if this hard work was actually getting translated into selection i would
#
give you this point and i would concede but i don't think this is happening in fact majority of
#
engineers who get through through the je's or you know doctors who get through the the neat exams
#
they're really being tested for their hard work and their intelligence rather than their desire
#
and the two may not be same also the hard work is a proxy for desire right it will not be because
#
in our country engineering or many of these disciplines are a proxy or are a are a means to
#
get higher income move across the economic class ladder and so you really want to do this because
#
this is the least risky option in term rather than compared compared to let's say starting a business
#
so consider a typical person in i mean you why do you want to be an engineer really because you
#
want to be an engineer or you want to make sure that you have a steady job no no i'm saying 99
#
percent of people may not want it for what we would consider the right reasons but there might
#
be one person who's in f***ing love with mechanical engineering
#
this person so you are wanting to put 99 percent of people at stake so that the one person can get
#
their way no because the point is the number of losers in the system and the winners in the
#
system are the same the current system is broken because you should not have to go to quota to
#
you know there have to be better ways of selecting there are more losers they're not the same no
#
there are more losers than winners in the system the number of seats are the same
#
no not the number of seats number of people who apply and who take the test and number of people
#
who get through yeah you have more losers than winners no over there but all those people are
#
that many people are not going to get through anyway but imagine many of these people were
#
given an opportunity to study because the draw of lot got their name and now they think oh my god
#
this is my chance to be an engineer and there's somebody and there are a bunch of people who
#
really want to be engineer and now they cannot be an engineer because you know the luck didn't
#
luck closed their way is to say that as if the other person luck as if the other system was
#
making sure that these people who are really desire us are getting it i think the point of
#
agreement for both you and me on this issue is simply by saying you know repeating what we said
#
much earlier in the show that is increase the freaking supply there is no reason why everyone
#
who wants to do engineering should not be able to do engineering not that we need more engineers
#
but you know that being the case but my point about doing this in politics is also that i am
#
actually okay with career politicians provided you they have different incentives in the sense
#
that a career politician will have institutional knowledge of the process and of the previous time
#
she would have spent in government she would have gotten some expertise along the way hopefully
#
and i think that there is a value to that rather than put a random person but this random person
#
could be somebody who can be chosen from amongst those people all i'm saying is crap elections and
#
by the way the distinction you made between someone being chosen in a transparent manner
#
and being pushed to be accountable thanks to constitution however you know however successfully
#
it's doing its job vis-a-vis somebody being elected through some opaque random process
#
but being highly accountable in the in both the cases we are agreeing accountability is important
#
right in the only difference is in one case i am saying you don't need elections to elect a leader
#
you can just randomly select one you are saying you need an elect you need a leader look at the
#
cost of having a leader through electoral process and i'm not even talking about the cost that you
#
mentioned from the book you know the amount of money that is spent this cost has significant
#
spillover both in government contracts the power of the government the big mighty bulky state
#
crushing the poor folks giving them patronage from this money all of this has a huge cost not
#
just monetary but also emotional in some ways and i will and i will tell you you elect a random person
#
from a certain pool who i am as who i am giving you that could be someone who has cleared some
#
sort of you know quote unquote virtue exam this person is virtuous to be a who will who will
#
decide what is what is somebody who has had an experience in public service let's say right so
#
you select ies officers based on an exam you don't have to have an exam for politicians but anybody
#
who wants to join the public service you can have some criteria on the basis of which you will have
#
a pool shortened that criteria could be dependent upon the type of type of attributes you want
#
a particular politician to have allow the draw of lots to select these guys they are going to feel
#
extremely lucky less bowed down by a corporate and you know you know interest which may lead
#
to regulatory capture they are less influenced by their own party members they're less influenced
#
by a certain constituency which is voting for them they would really like to do a good job so
#
that whatever time they have in their hands they're able to contribute at least at least
#
not worse job than the others have done so far after spending so much of money and imposing
#
huge amount of structural cost to the structures of the systems itself i agree with you i think i
#
am reflexively being aggressively non-conventional in this particular case to use paul graham's words
#
because i'm hearing something new but it's worth thinking about and also if you picked someone
#
through the system you would never have had the emergency there you go your full incentives are
#
different there's no incentive to do the emergency all i'm saying is so here's something that you
#
know now that we're talking and i'm thinking loudly maybe this is what we should do we should
#
let the monitor of our class be selected randomly through a draw of lots and see how this person
#
performs as opposed to somebody who has pleased people to come to take that position i mean
#
pleasing his performance when you perform you're not being true yeah but you know if you choose
#
someone randomly by draw of lots to be monitor of the class and here i'm thinking aloud and
#
i'm even thinking premchand is that you could destroy that boy's life because he will change
#
his behavior to conform to what he thinks a monitor must be and he will become another person
#
and i can easily see a train of tragic events but he knows he knows it ex ante so i'm not making
#
an argument i'm making a flight of fancy so this is good that because i'm thinking with you as well
#
you know this person is deciding this ex ante he's entering into this race fully knowing that this
#
is going to happen and so agreeing to this so this is a voluntary decision that he's making that
#
yes if i become the monitor of this class i will have to change my ways and i'm fully you know
#
capable as well as happy to do it actually you know just crap elections and i and i'll tell you what
#
i'm not saying this i mean frankly this idea comes to me you know thinking unconventionally
#
in the in the way you put it but this is not something which is so unconventional after all
#
there have been there has been some research on this which shows that randomly random assignment
#
of entitlements can often be better for the society than an entitlement chosen through a
#
process which is so flawed so i would not say this that you should randomly make somebody the
#
ceo of a company because there the systems and incentives are placed in such a way that it
#
benefits the the larger output which everyone expects or intends in elections the incentives
#
get warped and those and and the you know the resultant actions harm the constituent
#
harms the democracy harms democratic environment by and large and this is something that we see
#
all around in fact if you look at it closely elections are a site of celebration in india
#
nobody gets so serious about it in you know the poor laborer by the street when he or she
#
when that family you know looks at a rally a political rally going on the road these little
#
kids start dancing they start taking pictures they're just enjoying it least realizing that
#
the person who just went by is the reason why they're poor see my sense is this my sense is
#
that a good election in india is like a manchester united versus leverpool game you are not going to
#
affect the game by shouting leverpool leverpool but you are part of your tribe you are doing
#
that tribal affiliation thing and you're feeling good about yourself and you're in that moment
#
which is which explains a high turnout also because you know we know how it is one vote
#
never changes anything right public choice again so rational ignorance is the best outcome is
#
a logical way to go but so much is why do people vote when you say people you'll have to qualify
#
why do indians vote why do the westerners vote why do old people vote why do even i think everyone
#
has a different motivation i think i like if i have to put this in one line based on my own
#
observation about how and i've primarily i have only observed indians voting i've observed other
#
countries voting behavior by being there very little i think indians vote for for fun i mean
#
again this is a very this is a very unconventional statement that i'm making and again this is not
#
something that i've that we have written in the book i mean to write something in the book of
#
course both arun and i have to i have to agree and second writing the book was a learning exercise
#
for both of us so while we wrote we also emerged more sort of let's say more mature about our
#
thinking and how can we so let's say the next book that we write on elections could potentially
#
put these ideas on the table but i think i think we vote for fun like have you ever voted
#
i've never voted and in fact i've defended it in an episode of which aji and i have done
#
a public choice series which will be out a week from now it's not yet out but you know people
#
often say that hey you know it's if you don't vote you can't have an opinion which to me is
#
nonsense voting is a right not a sort of a duty but my my logic is this that in an actual marketplace
#
if i go let's say i go to buy a shirt to in orbit mall tomorrow right i go to h&m i go to uniclo
#
which would be interesting because there's no uniclo in that mall but assume there is and i
#
go to both of them and i don't find a shirt i want it is okay i don't have to buy the least bad shirt
#
i cannot buy a shirt and my not buying a shirt or not acting in a particular way in a marketplace
#
is also a signal that there is a gap somebody please come and satisfy me so i think my not
#
voting so far means there is nobody i am satisfied with and therefore it is an invitation to
#
political entrepreneurs that come give me what i want maybe then i will vote for you and in a
#
sense so i don't like the amadmi party at all i oppose them but as political entrepreneurs in
#
in the context of delhi in the local market of delhi i think they were remarkably successful
#
and they did exactly this they went in and they said okay there is middle-class disaffection and
#
this is how we can you know tap into that disaffection and you know they did what they did
#
pretty remarkably so i feel that not voting is also a signal that we know what percentage of
#
people doesn't vote smart political entrepreneurs should pick it up and unfortunately those are few
#
and far in between but i think there is a problem in voting like so many people have you know will
#
vote for quote unquote the least evil and i don't think that is optimal i think so you know i if
#
you have not so first of all i totally prescribe to your views or subscribe to it actually i mean
#
why should people be forced to vote and i think there's a huge amount of discourse now developing
#
that you know people should be forced to vote in fact reminds me of a story that i that i think
#
was narrated by what's his name it'll come to me anyway but meanwhile can i give you a secret
#
there is one way in which you can get an enormous number of vote share across india but not much of
#
a seat share which is if you change your name to nota i mean i'm being glib obviously party
#
symbols and all other but yeah well you never know but there is a surname called nota in some
#
place in india some place or the other yeah because yeah i mean that's where the that's
#
what there'll be a crazy negative disc there right where you know your seat share is zero
#
basically but your vote share is pretty by the way speaking of which you know in the early elections
#
we used to have a large number of votes a significant vote share going to independent
#
candidates in india yeah your second highest candidate in 19th second highest party in 1952
#
was independence exactly if you can call it a party 16 percent so congress got 40 42 percent votes
#
and independent candidates got 16 percent of the votes and what you also pointed out in your book
#
very interestingly is that one state where independents do much better than in the rest
#
of india is bengal you know i mean the when you mentioned about the tribal feeling that this is
#
i mean and we were talking about decentralized nature of understanding india i mean what more
#
can tell us about how decentralized we are if it's not the religion that we profess or practice if
#
it's not the number of princely states they were when british left if it is not the number of
#
parties you know how many more than 2000 parties are registered in the election commission of india
#
altogether not all of them contest and the number of independent contestants even today in fact you
#
know if if the election commission of india hadn't increased the registration fee to nominate
#
yourself you know we would have had even more larger number of people like so anyway i mean
#
this is also something that we could we could you know take a segue on but to come back to
#
the point that you were earlier raising why do we vote and when i say indians vote for fun
#
what i'm trying to mean is that indians i don't think in the sense of like how many indians
#
think that their single vote is important we know all kinds of advertisements tell them this
#
i keep hearing all of all the time you know every vote matters every vote matters
#
and there have been very few instances where when every vote has mattered in this country
#
i don't know of anyone who has gone to vote by thinking that no my vote matters in fact
#
whenever i have seen voting taking place in india i have seen some form of fanfare and celebration
#
and rejoice it's a holiday people go back of course many people argue and claim that you know
#
this is the contribution we are doing to our democracy but by and large ordinary folks are
#
enjoying that day they are standing in queues isn't it also the case that there is an assertion
#
of identity here that otherwise in society i might be oppressed and i might be bottom of the ladder
#
but at the voting booth i'm equal to you it's an interesting point it's an interesting point
#
barring few people who are deeply impacted by the outcomes of electoral processes by and large
#
most indians don't make most of it they may be very happy about a certain party winning or losing
#
but they really don't think that with a new party coming in the site their fortunes are going to
#
change if they don't think that what what is in fact by the way do you know globally turnouts are
#
falling in most rich countries lesser and lesser people are going out to vote might be an indication
#
of how their lack of trust that they have in electoral methods or democracies in but
#
you know specifically but india is the only country where you know i mean not the only
#
country where india is one of those few countries where turnouts are going up which means more and
#
people are going more and more people are coming out to vote but do they really think that they are
#
participating in the process of democracy or are they participating in celebration of democracy and
#
the two things are very different it's like a festival i go out on the street electoral you
#
know i mean the elections around the corner they will impose a code of conduct and before that
#
parties will do all kinds of rallies political you know gatherings it's amazing when you when you
#
when you go to one of these gatherings do we i mean they are they are so happy to see some
#
of the leaders talking many of the many times they have to be pulled to that ground by giving
#
them laddoos and money and things like that otherwise you don't have so many people
#
but they're sitting listening to the leaders and they're enjoying a gathering indians love
#
to i mean gather you know gather have festival fun and i'm not saying about this as indians indians
#
i mean at least in my observation i will need more i will need a richer vocabulary to explain
#
what i'm saying but by and large i think most indians are going to vote because they're enjoying
#
it not because they just not because they think there is a high level of meaning that they're
#
drawing from it which is leading to some sort of massive democracy at action in work i don't think
#
that is probably the impression most of us carry or most you know most people i know or i've seen
#
carry in places that i visited while elections are going on it's like going to a hansraj hans
#
concert except that he wants something from you really badly so he makes you feel important
#
no and also there is a charming optimism of candidates like you pointed out that in both
#
2014 and 2019 in the loksaba elections with more than 8 000 candidates contesting almost 86 percent
#
of the candidates lost their deposits so a whole bunch of these most of these people would have
#
known that they're gonna lose yeah exactly they're just having fun i mean i would argue amit you
#
should contest elections next time just see what happens it's fun isn't it at least people who
#
came and you know this will also tell you how many people who you invited actually voted for you
#
my unfortunately i think my listeners and my guests are spread out all over the place but
#
if you have a good constituency your followers in the flame university constituency maybe i'll
#
stand from there and let you campaign for me or i wish they pass some amendment in order to
#
allow people who are not in their own constituencies can also vote that would be good
#
yeah so we've got to kind of wrap this up in only 45 minutes more so what while i will encourage
#
our listeners to go through your entire book it's got great insights on bihar on up on bengal and
#
kerala especially the ways in which they are different where well many people think that
#
they are alike but you pointed out why they're different i want to talk about you know one thread
#
in your book like the two threads in your book that really fascinated me besides the structural
#
talk is one is the the overall arc that you drew of how elections have proceeded and what they
#
have thrown up in india in general over all these years since the 1952 elections but the other which
#
speaks to the current day is you know the rise of the bjp and i was you know fascinated by
#
that particular chapter obviously you're busting a whole bunch of sort of commonly held beliefs
#
within that for example you're showing that as regards the 2019 verdict you are pointing out
#
that you know the if you look at the basic statistics you realize that the bjp actually
#
did pretty you know the common narrative is that hey it was just you know more of the hindutva
#
nationalism which won them 2019 but you point out that number one they did better in muslim
#
seats and they had the last time they actually improved they did better than congress you write
#
there are around 15 seats out of 543 which have more than 40 percent muslim population in india
#
bjp won four of these while congress won five more interestingly bjp's vote share in these
#
districts was highest 22 percent even though it was congress that had had the highest
#
vote share in these districts in 2014 and you point out that it's the same for districts having
#
20 to 40 percent muslim population which took me by surprise and i'll ask you to elaborate the other
#
thing that i already knew is about dalit votes how they did so well and and of course in both
#
2014 and 2019 it's a famous statistic that more dalits voted for the bjp than for any other party
#
which again goes against the dominant narrative and actually while people think of them as an
#
urban party there was a smaller increase in urban areas and where turnouts were lower bjp actually
#
did better which again goes against the conventional wisdom that it's increasing turnout that helps him
#
because it turned the people out and the interesting another interesting thing you point out is that
#
the hindis they didn't really increase so much in the hindi speaking states that was 2014 but
#
in 2019 you know the states where they did well were jnk karnataka manipur orissa tripura telangana
#
and west bengal and the states where they didn't do so well include bihar delhi chattisgarh etc etc
#
you know which is quite striking there so tell me a little bit about you know what are the
#
misconceptions about the current bjp and then we'll go back to history because i also want
#
to examine the 80s and the 90s but about the current bjp what are some of the misconceptions
#
you know when i saw the jan 22 speech that mr modi made and and of course listeners of the show
#
would know that i oppose him and etc etc i won't rant on detail in that but when i saw that speech
#
i said that okay he's got it for life you know he has now ascended to the stature of a religious
#
leader he has transcended politics the speech is masterful in terms of craftsmanship at multiple
#
multiple levels and multiple layers as much as it saddens me to say so and he's not going to lose
#
an election again but when i look at some of the things that you have pointed out i begin to wonder
#
if that is really the case so what are your sort of thoughts on that in the light of you know all
#
the things that you said about 2019 and also i simply do not get that the figure that you gave
#
about the muslim constituencies you know what explains that also so i so i don't know i can't
#
give an answer in terms of what explains this i because for that i need to know exactly what the
#
preferences of each of those voters were but first of all let me clarify for the listeners
#
that when we say in the book that pjp did better it's basically about their own relative performance
#
compared to 2014 not that they did better than everyone else so they improved in these places
#
and i think amidst my senses so i'll pick up the first point that you mentioned which is about
#
that it is performing in places it is performing better in those places which otherwise one would
#
think they would not be performing so well and i think the answer lies in how indian voters are
#
viewing the performance of the party the prime minister himself and otherwise how their lives
#
may have changed in the last few years so we have not had a census so and we don't have large scale
#
data on how people's lives have changed but from little bit of data that we have from let's say cmie
#
and others we'll clearly know that people are getting wealthier we also know that a large number
#
of policies that bjp introduced in during 2014 to 2019 they they were targeting typically the
#
poorer segment of the population whether it is jandan yojana or janani sriksha yojana or
#
kisan credit card i mean that scheme was there but they augmented it and so on and so forth so
#
many of these policies were actually focusing on the non-urban population the more disadvantaged
#
people one might argue and say that maybe they were influenced by the success of these policies
#
to some extent and therefore they voted for the bjp and this brings me to a point that we were
#
earlier discussing is that i don't think we can bracket bjp as a conservative party and congress
#
as a liberal party because both these parties have exhibited instances of being both liberal and
#
conservative at the same time and there's something that we have written in the book as well and so
#
similarly to say that bjp's victory is only attributed to its charm and appeal for hindu
#
nationalists is to ignore the data the data doesn't show it as as you rightly pointed out
#
i don't know so if you ask me what exactly could have happened i mean i can give you 10 ideas
#
anyone can when they look at the data but we really don't know what exactly happened at least
#
as scholars of you know electoral methods or siphology we would desist from speculating what
#
it could be because that's what journalists do and i think what journalists will say we would
#
probably agree but we all will have to take this from a pincher you know the only thing that
#
explains this is that people did not vote for bjp in 2019 purely from the lens of hindutva
#
they definitely saw many other things because otherwise it will not explain the rise in these
#
regions that that you mentioned so that's like point number one point number two is about the
#
how bjp performed with respect to and point number two was related to the prime minister's
#
speech itself and you know this guy has got it for life i think we would be naive to believe
#
that a leader who doesn't understand the pulse of its own society i mean we would be naive to
#
believe that such a leader who understands the pulse of the society will not be chosen again
#
and i think mr modi understands it exceedingly well he understood this about gujarat when he
#
was the chief minister there he now understands it about india and there and so in so far as
#
elections are a verdict on popularity i think he's got his code he's he's cracked the code
#
and that speech itself indicates the rise of the prime minister as a national level leader
#
in the minds of people and you know why this is true this is true because the symptoms can be
#
found in how indians have voted in state elections against the national elections so consistently
#
bjp may have lost in many states one year before or one year after the 2019 elections but these are
#
the same states where bjp won exceedingly well in laksabha which means indians look at the
#
prime minister differently or indians look at new delhi differently from their own state capitals
#
to say and this by the way also you know i mean i'm urged in some ways to explain why those who
#
oppose simultaneous elections don't understand this people think that simultaneous elections
#
will influence voters the quote unquote gullible indian voters to vote for the same party who is
#
in center also in the state but i have seen distinctly in all the data that we have screened
#
screened through and you know arun and i we have discussed this at length that indian voters are
#
actually smart they know whether they are voting it for vidhan sabha or laksabha and they are very
#
very clear in distinct in making this distinction so to come back to the religious aspect which you
#
mentioned on 22nd january comes up with this absolutely brilliant speech everybody's hooked
#
on to the television and they think he's the man that they that they need even for the next term
#
i would not deny it i think it was extremely compelling what he said i also know that this
#
was not done in the way that it may have been done in the 90s which is to say that there was
#
no malice that was expressed in the entire speech there was no malice that was expressed in the
#
entire ecosystem that drew 22nd january to take place so there was no anti x anti anything that
#
this movement was it was something which was a manifestation maybe of you know many many indians
#
and so i my my comment to your question would only be that i think mr modi understands india
#
and indians very well probably more than any other prime minister in the recent past and in that
#
sense if he understands this and if he knows how elections work he has probably cracked the code
#
like i said and the last bit which you said about again i mean there's a similar thing that i
#
mentioned earlier what may have explained this i can't say i only want to bring this on the table
#
people need to look at the numbers before making sweeping judgments on on why a particular political
#
party is winning or losing western media is particularly you know i would urge this
#
particularly to western media who think that prime ministers or bjp's rise to power has been driven
#
on a chariot of hindutva i i don't think i mean the numbers don't show this so i want to go a
#
little further back in history to ask you about another period of time where again you've used
#
the data to show things that are contrary to popular perception for example you point out
#
that for that the link between ayodhya and bjp is not so strong at one point you write quote
#
it can be seen that the link between ayodhya and bjp is not as strong as it is suggested to be there
#
was a sudden rise in bjp's appeal between 1989 and 1991 but the babri masjid demolition took place
#
only in december 92 and in 93 bjp seats had in fact fallen without impacting the vote share much
#
so the real impactful period is 89 to 91 this is prior to the mas demolition two things happened
#
during this time advani's irat yatra took place in september october 1990 and the mandal commission
#
recommendations were implemented in august 1990 so this is one thing that i like you to elaborate
#
on and also the part which i found super super interesting and i think my listeners also will
#
where you point out that even before this they had the moment of 1989 which was a watershed moment
#
for the congress in losing everything that they did but also a huge upswing in the bjp's votes
#
and as you point out that 89 was before the yatra yatra before mandal and obviously before
#
the babri masjid demolition and it was too far after 1986 shaabano judgment with some commentators
#
will say that caused it you have another explanation for it i'd like you to elaborate on that as well
#
thanks no this is this is great that you picked it up and it was actually a surprise so frankly we
#
wrote this book without any preconceived notion we're just looking at the data and data is
#
surprising us i think i'll highly highly recommend listeners to dive deep into the data now you can
#
get all the data i mean election commission of india anyway publishes everything on its website
#
so if you look at the data it'll tell you stories that you will it'll push you to think through
#
several stories that were there but were never documented so this is what we find bjp's fortunes
#
really changed in 1989 and not in 1993 between 1989 to 1991 surely there was a massive rise
#
and that could be attributed to you know a bunch of things maybe advani's ratha yatra but what led
#
bjp to come on the center stage in 1989 it's just 1985 to 89 for these four years now people think
#
about shaabano judgment like you rightly pointed out we actually look at the dates of how shaabano
#
judgment could have impacted and we don't think that it was probably a very strong reason two
#
reasons one shaabano's judgment you know the ram mandir gates opened before the amendment that
#
rajiv gandhi government brought which nullified the judgment and so therefore it would not have
#
had such an impact and also second more important reason you know 85 is too far behind 89 i mean
#
indians tend to forget something must have happened closer to 89 and what we spec what we kind of
#
zero it down to there were so many things happening we tried to pull out everything
#
that happened in india during 86 to 89 and the only notable impactful you know experience that
#
india as a country went through was to be glued on their television every sunday watching ramayana
#
at the same time i don't think india did one thing at the same time together in such large numbers
#
and some of us you know will remember or our parents will will tell us how auspicious that
#
one hour used to be during those days across the length and breadth of the country you know people
#
would not have their weddings public transport would be would be shut shops were shut i mean
#
i remember i was a very small kid but my faint memory of those times and i mean you may want to
#
also you know tell me about what were you doing at that time you know we would go out you are so
#
small that we don't don't really remember being glued to the television set the way our grandparents
#
and parents were but we would simply go out and enjoy the empty streets i just i have distinct
#
memory of this old part of agra which is always crowded and i come out of my gali and maula and i
#
and we know three four of us we friends we are on the road and there's nobody there and we're just
#
enjoying it oh there's nobody on the road let's walk and you know the bunch of a few people i
#
mean literally the country was on a standstill during this hour and what were they going through
#
they were they were watching ramayana they were they were putting garlands on the tv they were
#
you know with their diyas light lit up you know they're they're sitting they're they're praying
#
while the serial is going on and they're hooked onto this television at the same time everybody
#
in india was tied into this thinking about their own religious aspirations in a way unimaginable
#
and of course this was followed by you know by by mahabharata so i think this tied indiana way
#
that and there's not that it was bjp is doing this just somehow it happened and it was the first time
#
by the way when the whole country is told the same story at the same time and they all are
#
trying to relate to it this is also the time when some of the other serials in the doordarshan you
#
know bunyad and what was the other one we were a little earlier 84 85 oh they were a little earlier
#
ye jo hai zindagi would have been 87 88 but yeah i remember the phenomenon ramayana and and you've
#
written about it beautifully so let me just read those passages out like i said this is a very
#
well written book so kartika must be so pleased airing through january 1987 until july 1988 the
#
series moved the country in ways unimaginable a total of 78 45 minute long episodes aired on sunday
#
mornings and became weekly rituals at lakhs of indian homes ceremoniously indulgent with great
#
devotion and amazement streets would get deserted buses and even trains would stop
#
passengers would step out to watch the serial on tv in a roadside shop at times people would bathe
#
garland the television burn incense and kneel before the television as the show would begin
#
it was like a spell no one could have imagined generations of families and neighbors would
#
huddle together in the same room to watch the serial with unparalleled reverence and humanity's
#
most ardent following for any soap opera ever broadcasted the actors who played characters on
#
the show became real life gods for people estimates are jilted around 65 crore people
#
watched this show stop quote and it the timing was perfect like a perfect storm like you've
#
pointed out television sets were exploding in the country and etc etc and you asked me what
#
i was doing my dad in those days an ios officer he was posted to pune as a director of the film
#
and television institute of india and in those years i was getting into world cinema so when
#
ramayana was on i was probably watching some fellini when mahabharata was on i think that's
#
when kieselowski's decalogue came out so i'm really sorry to disappoint you but but i could
#
see the phenomenon all around me it was mad and again i'm struck by this fantastic phrase that
#
you've used which goes back to what we were speaking about earlier the centralizing imagination
#
where you have written quote people in remote areas had now expanded their horizon of imagining
#
india and research shows that a strong node of this imagination had had hinged around middle
#
class urban hindu imagination and then you talk about a bunch of surveys where muslim respondents
#
seek respondents laborers and artisans feel that they are not adequately represented etc
#
but this middle class urban hindu imagination has just kind of taken over
#
much as you know the image of ram actually is not some historical image of ram but raja
#
ravivarma's paintings which you know popular culture has taken from ram krishna and all that
#
similarly you know you have one particular vision of this epic you know i think kramanujan had a
#
great essay 300 ramayanas right about all the different ramayanas and it came about around
#
the same time and ramayana was being aired like there you go yeah so i guess it was a response
#
to that perhaps in a sense who knows it's a good point i don't know whether it was a response
#
it's again homogenized and a particular vision and and you know what happens is that in electoral
#
promises when you make a promise of a certain type which chimes with a large section of population
#
they think that yes well time has come and i i think this is also the time when you know indians
#
are connecting to each other maybe the transportation is much better there are also times of great
#
distress unemployment is a record high and by the way they also in decreased the voting populations
#
the age of the voters eligible voting age from 21 to 18 years so many young folks who were
#
otherwise not eligible to vote until 1985 are now going to be voting and these guys are also
#
you know people who either have finished college and don't have jobs or even if they have they are
#
watching the series so a lot of these people who are first time voters are understanding
#
themselves they're understanding their identities in a way that was never done earlier and the youth
#
world also played a significant part in 2014 and 2019 yes absolutely you know again and these
#
this youth they have only seen so this youth has been now exposed to the western world they have
#
been exposed to the type of media what media shows them about the west and now they want to be like
#
that and they think this is possible only through a strong charismatic leader and i think many of
#
these young people so i don't know no one can know whether young people are voting more i mean we can
#
do this correlation between you know young voter voting population in a constituency and whether
#
bjp is winning there or not i can't say that but surely you know whether women and bjp women or
#
youth are voting for bjp speculations are that they are i can't be sure but i would not be
#
surprised if they are and also just thinking aloud you know at at one level you would expect
#
the the young to be kind of rebellious and more liberal and etc etc we go through those phases
#
in college where we are reading marks and all that but at another level if you think about what would
#
motivate the young who are so much energy and perhaps pent up frustration and anger to vote
#
they would more likely be extreme emotions of anger and so on rather than you know abstract
#
things like secularism and tolerance and all of that which would not excite the young unemployed
#
imagination so much but i'm just speculating no no but i think i think the answer to this is
#
i mean most people are not reading marks and going to good universities in india most young
#
stars exactly and so therefore no i mean the general inclination that you think in broadly
#
bleeding heart kind of ways without really understanding the world yeah i mean i i see
#
what you're saying and i think i partly agree with it too young people they are voting through their
#
experiences more than any theories that they learn in schools if they learn anything at all
#
like most of them so let me ask you about something else i use this show partly to educate myself and
#
this is another great opportunity and two of the narratives that i have kind of picked up from
#
different guests of mine godas with weir sanghvi when i did the show and he wrote about it in his
#
book also his point was that look the bjp was founded in 1980 under the rubric of gandhian
#
socialism then 1984 happens and in 1984 according to weir if i remember correctly i hope i'm not
#
misrepresenting was an expression of the hindu vote really you know the antis you know after indira
#
gandhiji died and that was the way he interpreted it and his thing was that it was a wake-up call
#
for the bjp that shit that is our natural constituency it is going away and at that point
#
rajiv doesn't even realize what has happened because that's not a particularly smart family
#
from that generation onwards and and therefore sha bano which is very much part of weir's
#
narrative and the bjp comes storming back to take the hindu vote and then that happens that
#
whole game plays out and the bjp is really supplier responding to demand that society
#
the other narrative which i got partly from vinesh sitapati and the book he wrote on narsimha rao and
#
all that is that look all of us would agree that 91 liberalizations were awesome even if they were
#
incomplete as both you and i agree they got hundreds of millions of people out of poverty
#
but a side effect of that was that this massive newly minted middle class which could now express
#
itself just happened to be conservative and just happened to have those kinds of inclinations
#
and that became a natural vote base for the bjp now as far as both these narratives are concerned
#
when i read your book i felt that the figures don't back them up for the second narrative
#
you have pointed out that the bjp had the spike between 89 they did well spike between 89 and 91
#
but then they plateaued through the 90s which would not be the case if that newly minted middle
#
class was as nationalistic as one imagines and also when you you looked at the numbers in great
#
detail through the 80s and again the timelines don't seem to match up i find your narrative of
#
the ramayana mahabharat and that cultural consciousness that comes about because of that
#
an extremely compelling argument but i thought i'll share these two views and no i think so i'm
#
aware of these views not necessarily attributed to the authors but i surely know these arguments
#
because when we were doing when we were researching for this book we came across these arguments and
#
my own understanding so i was kind of getting challenged and we were thinking maybe this is
#
not the case and then we thought maybe this is the case we really don't know this is the beauty of
#
doing siphology or you know studies of this type is that we really don't know because we are trying
#
to theorize how people are thinking through their revealed preferences and these speculations go
#
only so far to explain this and i would leave it to the judgment of the readers which one do they
#
consider compelling i am very you know i'm quite pleased and humbled actually that you find this
#
this narrative fairly compelling i think there is more research needs to be done so let's say for
#
instance if we have the data on how much did bjp win in the constituencies where certain where what
#
was the reach of durdarshan in constituencies and within those constituencies what was the
#
voting you know how many votes did bjp that would be a great study that would be a great study so i
#
think this is just a call for so what we are trying to do in this in this book is we are
#
we are encouraging maybe future scholars to go deeper into the narratives that have been
#
fostered upon us by by many other intellectuals and whose narratives and arguments i quite respect
#
because with limited amount of information there is only so much that we can tell we are all building
#
on each other we're all building on each other right so in some ways from the perspective of
#
what many of the scholars mentioned fairly compelling now we have come up with another argument
#
hope someone will go further into this and pull out but if we do go to the bottom of this we should
#
then so we may not be successful in proving in what we are saying but we surely are successful
#
at least in my view in pushing readers to reconsider the dominant narratives because
#
the dominant narratives don't add up if they don't add up this doesn't mean that our narrative is the
#
is the correct one but it surely means that there is more research to be needed we simply cannot say
#
that bjp is in india thanks to ram mandir we simply cannot say it i think it was in india much before
#
that it had already made strongholds into the mind into the mental fabric of this nation much
#
before advani's ratha yatra let alone babri masjid we also know that you know shaabano was not the
#
only trigger it could not have been simply first of all it was four years you know behind if you
#
talk to people they will tell you things from their memory but you know as economists we generally
#
don't tend to believe in surveys because people can say whatever but what they really you know act
#
what do they reveal their preferences in is what we rely upon so yeah we hope that more people can
#
do this study and at least again find an indian narrative about what what is going on in india
#
out of the three sort of takeaways you had from that chapter the third one was that okay the
#
bjp preference in the center has to be looked at differently from its performance in states
#
you've already spoken about that the first two we've already discussed one that its performance
#
in 2019 was less reliant on the saffron color or the hindi speaking population than otherwise
#
suggested i find your data on this very convincing convincing it's also backed up by a lot of
#
anecdotes if one can call them that parth mn i think did some excellent reporting around that
#
time where he pointed out that the welfarism was really working in up for them and there was an
#
upsurge of support for that so i buy that i love the and and your second takeaway was of course
#
that it is a ramayana and not shaabano or ayodhya that really catapulted bjp in people's consciousness
#
so here's my question that i could either look at the jain 22nd speech which i agree with you
#
is an example of modi totally capturing the pulse and and there are two ways to sort of interpret
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why he why there was no othering within the speech like he didn't say jaishri ram once and it was all
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feel good touchy talk and one is that it is plausible deniability that the foot soldiers
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of the movement will do what they do while he is like a statesman but the other one is that he
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really sort of kind of believed in that because why not that is a legacy he wants so regardless
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of which of them is true i don't think that's relevant but the question that i'm coming at
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is that on one hand if the the saffron appeal is overstated then you know on the one hand
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the claim is that the saffron appeal is overstated when it comes to 2019 but on the other hand if the
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ramayana have was such a pivotal and seminal moment in the history of the bjp that is not
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exactly the saffron appeal but it is that same kind of cultural consciousness that is helping them
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when people say that the ram mandir helped the bjp i think it is partly meant metaphorically
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and not the specific event of the breakdown of the babri masjid and as a metaphor i think
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it seems to work right so how do we reconcile these so i don't think i think it's already
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reconciled right so both ramayana and 22nd january have similar undertones they go together very
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well but my point is i can i can look at 22nd january and either i can make that statement
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that i made which i do believe that he has now elevated himself to the level of a religious
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leader he's never going to lose an election again or i could say that no amity are overreacting
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2019 was not a saffron thing it was because they delivered on whatever they delivered on
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welfare in eastern up etc etc if they stop delivering they can get voted out you know and
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i can look at you know how different the states are from the center and say a personality cult
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can't last forever so which of these so i mean again from the way you're putting it it looks like
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it's the first one so let me let me try to tell this let me try to explain this with an example
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you know the first war of indian independence was triggered by mangal pandey not because of
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subjugation or british not being nice to them it was because they were forced to open up their
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their their sort of bullets with their mouth which apparently had non-veg yeah particularly
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cow or or beef or pork i don't remember exactly which one which means for most part of india's
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history whoever has ruled parts of india has come to terms with one fact which is that if you let
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people continue with their cultures and customs and religions if you don't meddle into into it
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too much they are by and large not going to you know claim any share of power and this is true
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because this is highly highly decentralized society so every community you just allow the community to
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be be happy with itself now it's sometimes it happened nicely sometimes it did not happen nicely
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but through history we see that our our our association with our cultures and our customs
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and our religion is cannot be bracketed into something like we are not secular and we are very
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religious in fact most people who vote for bjp are not necessarily those you know those jingoist
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hardcore hindus they may not be people who believe in that certain type of sect or a tradition in the
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hinduism and would be praying in front of you know god's image for hours most people are not
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like this in fact most indians are not like that but they still believe i think that their culture
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is important their customs are important what they do what they practice what they profess
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as a matter of ancestral practice is important and so when we say that mr modi has picked this
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pulse i think i will put it differently i will say you must be a stupid leader not to recognize
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this i mean any smart leader will need to know what is what is the population of which he is
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he or she is a part of and i think if we if we look at major sources of discontentment
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amongst indian population they have not really been about you know what is the other person
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doing you could do whatever you want in fact as long as i am doing what i'm doing and you allow
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me to do it i'm fine if you don't then there's a problem so our culture customs there is a reason
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amit why you know you know when ibn battuta came to india this is 12th century he is writing about
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some lovely food that he's eating in and around delhi i know what it was it was these potato
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things which are now called the batuta vada sorry the samosas actually i'm kidding in fact those
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so i mean but you're not very far actually so he is writing about samosas we used to be called
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a samosas but used to have meat in it and you know we still eat samosas of course with aloo now
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he's talking about black dal you know which we continue to eat we don't have necessarily
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museums i mean partly it's a problem i think we should have museums but partly also because
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you know maybe what indian women were wearing thousand years ago is what they continue to wear
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today there was no stitch clothing i think thousand years ago but they were drapes right
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they were drapes yeah but there would be saris without blouses saris without blouses depends on
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which part of india you are in but by and large what i'm trying to say is that much of what we
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were doing earlier is what we continue to do this continuity in our actions should be enough for us
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to recognize how important our customs and cultures and everyday living is to us and because we are
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all pagans we don't necessarily have a religion like we don't necessarily have a practice which
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is religion in fact you know if you read himalayan gazetteers these the british are quite confused
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and they are very very explicitly writing how is it possible you know they have in the same buddhist
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temple there is a hindu priest and hindu temples there are buddhist priests continues to happen
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like if you go to lahol and smithy you will find this so there's high level of intermixing of
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various religions various customs so i don't want to call it really you know something which is
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secular or non-secular you can only design secularism if you have a religion let me repeat
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this okay so if there is no religion secularism will not mean anything because secularism is
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defined against some religion because we are pagans we don't know how to deal with secularism
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so it just doesn't make sense to us so are we pagans haven't many of us redefined ourselves
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as hindus following the colonial categorization but look at our practices for that matter you
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know if we have a religion then these practices must be sourced somewhere but they're not sourced
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anywhere they're just ancestral practice we just do it some people will rise up and say oh no in
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certain such shastra this is written and so on and so forth anyway long story short what i'm trying
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to say is for us these customs matter the cultures matter our quote unquote religion matters and
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this is true of mangal pandey this is true of 1989 this is going to be true for 2022
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in none of these cases are we seeing a situation where there is a fight over which god is better
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than the other god that's never been the fight here actually even in communal riots in india
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it's not about whether allah is better than ram or not it's never the fight of gods that doesn't mean
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that it is not a fight of course there are communal riots but i but let me not go there the point i'm
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saying is by and large i think i think they're both reconciled already the the fervor with which
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we saw 22nd january you know expand and flourish in india is the fervor with which we saw ramayana
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and any political party or leader will be you know will be stupid to ignore this
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about india so you've given me tons of food for thought and i'm very grateful for that and i will
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keep thinking about it and process everything that you've said but i would also point you to
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a counterpoint to that whole thing about how it is not you know against anyone to you know akar
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patel did a couple of episodes with me and in the first of them he made this point which i thought
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there was something there to think about as well where he pointed out that this whole hindutva
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movement doesn't stand for anything it stands against muslims and it stands against a certain
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way of being and they define themselves by what they are against and not what they are for
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and akar's question is that if you are good at define a hindu rastra for me what what what does
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it have don't tell me what you're against that we will not be you know second-class citizens in a
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country ruled by muslims or whatever the rhetoric is don't tell me what we are against tell me what
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we are for and i thought that that was a really convincing rhetorical question to ask at the same
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time i get your point of view that when the ramayana happens at the time of the ramayana
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when people feel good watching that and they feel that sense of community at that moment they are
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not against anything at that moment they feel that shared cultural bonding so i get that also
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and i think that there's a lot to think about i feel i feel you know the time we've had today
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is deeply inadequate my listeners will be really pissed off at me because we could have spoken
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for five hours over this angle we could have spoken for another five hours about your amazing
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book but i recommend everyone please buy that it's just packed with insights and it's packed
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with numbers and the numbers speak for themselves you know rarely have you expressed any political
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opinion in the book i mean i don't remember any it's just all about the numbers speaking
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for themselves which i found really powerful and a fantastic approach so you know before we
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end this conversation my traditional question for my guests right at the end is for me and my
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listeners recommend books films music any kind of art at all that means a lot to you
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that you like so much you love so much that you just want to share it with everyone
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so i mean i could give a long list but i think a litany of it but i think a movie that i definitely
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mentioned during the course of our conversation is kantara recently i also saw this marathi movie
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called cycle and another marathi movie called mulshi pattern which i really like i actually
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have a habit of watching regional cinema as much as possible or even black and white cinema because
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they open up a different kind of india to you for instance so those are good of course in terms
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of texts i think i mentioned the scholarship of bal gangadhar and one of his books is the
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heathen in his blindness i will highly recommend that a lot of the ideas that i've discussed some
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of them you know you'll you know the listeners will be able to locate them there and many of
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his co-authors actually but i think instead of giving a longer list one or two more powerful
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ones will be will be enough i will of course recommend everyone to read gazetteers the
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colonial gazetteers where do they find it is you can find them online they're all in disparate
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sources so in in our project and hopefully we will launch maharashtra's project in a few months we
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will also have a repository of all colonial gazetteers on our website so people can download them
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they're properly cataloged look up your districts and pull it out you know hope we can meet again
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at that time and i'll probably be in a bit you know more detailed one more episode for sure yeah
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and but yes right now if you just google let's say i don't know pune gazetteer or agra gazetteer or
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or for that matter you know himalayan gazetteer you will find those just just read what the
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british have written about us i think that will be itself it's a once you hook with colonial
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writings it's so hard to leave it rabbit holes here i come uh you gone thank you so much i had
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such a great time i no no thanks a lot amit i i'm so happy and so happy to hear your thoughts on the
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book your questions are amazing it's my first time with you and i think i learned considerably
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with you i learned a lot and also you know i am not very you know both arun and i we've not really
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marketed the book so much but thankfully you know people who have read it have told me you know good
#
things to hear that from you is such a reassurance thank you so much thank you and you're gonna hear
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a lot more i think from our listeners as they discover your book in the coming weeks so thank
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if you enjoyed listening to this episode do share it with everyone you think might be interested
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do go over to your nearest bookstore online or offline and pick up yugank's book who moved my
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vote you can follow yugank on twitter at yugank underscore google you can follow me at amit
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varma a m i t v a r m a you can browse past episodes of the scene in the unseen at scene unseen
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thank you for listening
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