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I often crib about how economics and public policy are not given the importance it deserves.
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We hear vague jargon, we hear terms like fiscal deficit, inflation targeting, opportunity
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costs, price controls and we think hey, too boring for us, doesn't affect our lives.
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Often if we take a position on any policy, we may do it simply based on which political
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party we support rather than the policy itself.
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And yet, economics matters, policy matters.
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Bad economics kept hundreds of millions of people in our country in poverty for decades
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Good economics and good policy for about 20 years from 1991 brought hundreds of millions
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Policy has humanitarian consequences.
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That's why I refer to many of Indira Gandhi's economic policies as well as Modi's demonetization
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And so, as concerned citizens, we must not leave economics to the experts, we must not
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leave public policy to those in power, we must make an effort to understand the forces
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But this is easier said than done.
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Some of the basic truths of economics are counterintuitive, like the fact that at the
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level of a society or an economy, central planning always fails and everything good
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Also, we are wired to think of the world in zero-sum ways, but actually, every voluntary
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transaction is a positive-sum game it leaves both people better off in what John Strossel
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calls the double thank you moment.
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That's why markets are where magic happens and governments fail so often.
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Now, I'm someone who's tried for over 20 years to share these insights to a larger
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audience and to affect the demand side of the political marketplace.
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And for those of us who care about this, it's a constant problem.
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How do we take these insights to the public at large?
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The stakes are high, and we must try.
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Welcome to The Scene and The Unseen.
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My guests today are Khyati Pathak, Anupam Manor and Pranay Kodaswane.
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Together, they've written a marvelous book called We the Citizens, strengthening the
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You could call this a book of comics or a graphic novel.
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Essentially, it features the illustrations of the brilliant Khyati Pathak with text and
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storylines by all three of the co-authors.
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And the purpose of the book is to make the basic principles of public policy and economics
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easy for everyone to understand.
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Any kid can pick this book, lose herself in the storytelling, and come out a smarter person
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and a better citizen at the end of it.
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So I recommend you buy multiple copies of this book and share it with all your friends.
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Pranay and Anupam work at the Takshashila Institution, Pranay has been on the show many
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times so you know him well, and Anupam has been on it once before as well.
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Khyati makes her debut on the show, but podcast listeners would know her as a co-host of the
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great Hindi podcast Pulya Baazi, along with Pranay and Saurabh Chandra.
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We are all kindred spirits, so naturally, this conversation had to happen.
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But before we get started, let's take a quick commercial break.
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I don't even know whose name to start with.
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Khyati, Anupam and Pranay, welcome to the Seen Indian Scene.
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It's our pleasure being with you on this show, Amit.
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Yeah, I've been here so many times, Amit.
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This feels a little bit like a classroom, where I greeted you one by one and then you're
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all replying one by one.
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Yeah, I feel like I have to give an attendance.
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So Khyati, you're here for the first time.
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And let me inform my listeners that Khyati has, though she's never been a guest on the
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You've been an illustrious part of my journey, because one of my most memorable episodes
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with Mukulika Banerjee was illustrated by you.
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And Mukulika loved the illustration.
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So thank you again for that.
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You know, I'm not going to dig into Pranay's life at all, because he's been here on so
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He went to university on the beach, everybody knows everything about him.
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But I want to dig into, you know, the backstories of you and Anupam a bit more.
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But I want to start with you, not with backstory, but something you just mentioned, that you're
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So tell me a little bit about, you know, your approach towards learning and what I found
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intriguing was your learning with your daughter.
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So you're both kind of learning together.
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Because there's an interesting thread I came across on Twitter yesterday, which I'll link,
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which speaks about the different ways of learning something, the frameworks you built for it
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And I also wonder about it, because sometimes, like to take the guitar as an example, you
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know, some people learn the guitar when they pick it up, and they learn a few chords and
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they'll play a few popular songs because they've learned the chords.
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And then later they get more advanced if they want to, but they've got the immediate gratification,
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while others will do the boring, hard first principles work of learning scales and all
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And at some level, I'd love to know your insights on learning, because in a sense, your book
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really incorporates the experiences of all three of you with regard to how people learn
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public policy, incredibly difficult subject.
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And your book just makes it look easy in terms of the clarity and the structure you've set
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So how do you think about learning in general?
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Yeah, before I begin to answer that, I want to say that I have been a listener of The
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Seen and the Unseen for such a long time, I think.
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And in fact, listening to this show has been a part of writing this book, because I was
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listening this and this, it was a part of the process of writing the book.
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And it used to put me in a place where I used to feel now, yes, I'm ready to write it.
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So and it was a pleasure for me to be able to make that illustration.
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So yeah, about the process of learning, I think I like the challenge of learning something
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And I like to feel that, like with every small step that I finish, I feel a sense of accomplishment
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that I have done something which I have, it's like a small skill that I've learned, which
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But I do like to learn things in a way that, so there, I think there are multiple ways
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of this, and you probably do not follow the same process for everything that you learn.
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Some things you want to, I want to get this thing done, so I need to learn this quickly
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and then you get it and you get your project going.
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I have done a lot of learning in that format also.
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And then there is some learning where you see that you just want to learn it for the
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sake of learning that thing, right?
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I think learning music for me is probably in one of those genres, where which I'm just
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learning for the sake of learning music.
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I do not, I don't think that I will ever become like anything bigger in that, but it's a skill
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that I feel like it's going to bring joy to me if I do it.
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And I also like the idea of, I actually started learning music because I like the idea of
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I think that it's almost like a superpower and reading music is, music is like a universal
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When I saw my daughter was actually learning music from this very interest, her teacher
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She's like 24, 25, very energetic and very interested, enthusiastic person.
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And she would, every time I would give her a new music, I would sometimes give her a
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new song, maybe it's an Indian song, and my daughter's teacher is actually a Chinese person.
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So she has never heard that song, but she can play Kal Ho Na Ho just by reading it and
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she will not take even like five minutes for it.
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She would just read it like we read a newspaper.
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So she would read and she would just play.
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And I feel like this is a superpower to have, right?
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That gives you accessibility to music from all kinds of places and all, not only time
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and space, because any geography, 500 years ago, the song, you have never heard it.
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Nobody in the world has heard that song.
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But as long as it is there in that notation, it can be read.
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And I found that to be an interesting thing that I want to get to that.
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I think it's very difficult.
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So I am trying to learn music step by step.
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So very few adult learners actually go through the exam process, but I'm going through that
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because I feel like I want to reach that.
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And that I will not learn by just learning pop music and stuff like that.
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You read ABC of music and then you practice enough that it gets implemented in your mind
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that you can read that note and you know this is this.
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I want to do it for that sake.
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There are multiple ways of learning things.
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But this one I'm taking a longer approach because I'm doing it for the sake of it.
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I mean, for the sake of learning this thing like this.
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So I've set two targets for myself, which is to learn the guitar and to learn coding
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I took up Harvard's iconic CS50 course.
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And I bought a guitar and I bought a guitar when I was a teenager, but my attitude was
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I wanted instant gratification.
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Everything had to be fast.
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And I was like, I pick it up and I'm, you know, why is music not coming out?
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And now I have the same kind of approach as you that I'm never going to be a musician,
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but I just want to do it for the joy of it.
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And I want to learn it properly.
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Like I don't mind putting in the hard yards and you practice your skills and you learn
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the theory and it's the boring stuff that actually fascinates me more because you know,
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mastering the boring stuff is what leads to sort of actual mastery, intuitive mastery
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So let me turn to you and ask you about your thoughts about learning, like especially the
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one subject of which you have deep knowledge.
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And I'm sure there are others who feel free to share, but the one subject of which you
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do have deep knowledge is economics and extending from that into public policy.
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Now when one learns a subject, say you go to college, you're doing education, et cetera,
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Typically what happens is there is a textbook, the textbook has a format, our textbooks tend
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to be hopelessly out of date and completely horrible, which is why I'm really glad I didn't
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study economics in college because God knows what it would have done to me.
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And then later on there comes a moment where you learn enough to be able to see the bigger
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picture, to be able to go beyond the jargon and the techniques that might be taught to
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you and actually be able to see, you know, the broader view of what the field is and
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relate what is otherwise only in textbooks to the actual real world.
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So tell me about your journey of learning in that sense, because I'm guessing that
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your journey through learning also taught you how to teach later on, like what observations
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were there in your own learning process, which you could then apply as a teacher.
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And in that journey as well, what did you learn about learning?
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Yeah, there's actually multiple things that I want to say on this front.
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As you mentioned, I think economics, the way that it's taught in India does a massive disservice
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to the domain, to the discipline, and I'm sure that is replicated in many other disciplines
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The way that it's taught, it's completely unrelatable.
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It seems like, let me tell you this, the economics that I learned in 11th and 12th had pages
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and pages and pages dedicated to economic history without context.
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As in, we had an entire section of 91 not going into so much about why it's important
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or what it did for India or why is it such a momentous kind of occasion, but rather focused
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on what were the precise laws that were changed.
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So it said, okay, there was this thing called MRTP Act.
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It gave the salient features of the MRTP Act and then said why it was repealed and what
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Now out of context, it's completely unrelatable.
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I mean, you're literally expected to learn by rote what are the features of a particular
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law that existed before your time, which I would find that very few teachers, I mean,
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very few students would be interested in.
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It would be a completely dry, boring subject.
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And then we had entire pages dedicated to the different players, what they did.
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It's not really interesting, right?
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Just to again give an indication, you have the NET, the National Eligibility Test for
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Teachers, and at some point of time, I thought I should take it up and I started preparing
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as in just opened a sample question paper.
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My entire preparation journey of NET lasted five minutes.
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And the reason being, I opened a previous question paper, I looked at I think the second
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or third question, which said, who was the finance minister during in 1987, which did
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And I said, if that's what you expect me to know the names of people at particular times
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without any of the context, I said, I don't want to do this.
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I mean, I'm also I mean, I'm going over the details in I mean, I'm sure I'm making up
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But I'm saying those were the kind of questions, which is which doesn't do anybody any good.
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We had an entire paper on Indian economics, which as I said, it was just this.
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And I don't like the notion of Indian economics at all.
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I mean, there's economics, which is applicable around the world.
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You don't have Indian physics the same way.
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I don't think there is an Indian economics.
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You can have Indian economic history, which is different from Indian economics.
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But again, all of that meant that it was a lot of just historical facts put in place
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without context, without any kind of relatable content, you know, which which seems important.
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So even in my journey, I mean, for instance, when I did and this, as I said, is a cross
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So when I did mathematics, you know, we'd learn trigonometry and the same thing, right?
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Everybody would say, OK, at what point of life do you imagine as walking down the road,
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you look at a building and say, OK, I have to find out the sine and cos theta, right?
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And I think much of economics and or at least mathematics, which was there, was in a similar
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You wouldn't find areas where you could possibly apply it now.
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I mean, you jump forward a few years.
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And, you know, when I started getting interested in economics largely because of whatever reading
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I'd done on my own and I that had an overlap between studying kind of politics, political
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science, political economy and finding out that economic systems are intricately kind
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of linked with political systems.
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I think reading things like 1984 or some other novels did a lot more to, you know, incite
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my interest in economics than my economics textbooks did.
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And that's when I kind of probably incite, which should have been very clear.
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But any of these domains can only be, you know, can be interesting when you make it
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relatable to people, right?
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And you have to move away from the classic textbook examples of if you, for example,
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if you read a textbook version of comparative advantage and trade, let me give you that
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It'll say, OK, England produces bushels of wheat and Portugal produces wine.
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And firstly, I have no clue what a bushel of wheat is.
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I don't think anybody does.
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I don't know what a bushel is, right?
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And then something else of cartons of wine and how they trade.
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I don't want to learn that.
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So when I teach comparative advantage, I try to give the example of Virat Kohli, right?
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And I'll come maybe come back to that later.
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But the example should be something that people can relate to, right?
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OK, how do you understand comparative advantage?
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I give the example of understanding or the example of Virat Kohli and a typist.
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So you have Virat Kohli, who's an excellent bat, bat man, and obviously amazing or was
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I don't want to get into that, but was amazing at what he does.
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But he also seems to have a lot of contracts that he has to go into.
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And that requires a lot of typing.
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So Virat Kohli has a secretary who's an excellent typist.
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But it just so happens that Virat Kohli can obviously can type better than the typist,
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is faster, makes lesser errors, and so on.
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So now you have a situation where Virat Kohli is better at batting and obviously better
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at batting, but also better at typing than the typist.
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So should Virat Kohli do both?
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Immediately, most people would say no.
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Virat Kohli should not be typing.
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And you ask why, and you prod that a little bit further, and they say, at the waste of
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his time, he can do much better things.
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That's comparative advantage.
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So Virat Kohli has an absolute advantage in both batting and typing.
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But the opportunity cost for Virat Kohli while he's typing is extremely large, right?
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Every one hour that he spends or every minute that Virat Kohli spends on typing is a minute
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that he's not spending on batting, on practicing, or even doing ads, right, which earns him
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Whereas for the typist, the opportunity cost is very low, and so therefore you say the
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typist has a comparative advantage, right?
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So the whole idea behind all of this is how can you make it relatable to students or anybody
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And that's when people's interest in that subject gets awakened.
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So you can give most of my examples back in the few years back when I started teaching
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was all to do with beer, because beer, snacks, things like that, which people use on a day
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to day basis and which makes it relatable.
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So the big kind of insight is if you want to get people interested in the subject, make
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it relatable, remove the jargon, and I genuinely believe that you can explain the most complex
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ideas in a manner that is relatable to anybody, right, without necessarily a background in
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that domain or without having spent years and years in that domain, you can actually
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And I think that is one of the challenges, which we have failed in our Indian education
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system by and large, I mean, maybe elsewhere as well, but I know in the Indian education
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And as long as that happens, we get, I mean, every single student of Thaksesheela's public
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policy course probably comes here saying, I hate economics, or I feared economics, or
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it was one of the most boring things.
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And then hopefully, at the end of it, they go back saying, I actually enjoyed this bit.
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I love the way about, you know, making it relatable, like I'm reminded of, have you
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heard of this two time Bastia Prize winner named Tim Halford?
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Yeah, Tim Halford, yeah, I won it once, but I won it twice, I was the first person to
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win it twice, Tim was the second.
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So Tim wrote this great piece circa 2005 called Trade Deficit with a Babysitter, where
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with this beautiful example that I have a trade deficit with my babysitter, I only consume
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services from her, she buys nothing from us, now is a trade deficit bad?
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And I thought that was a brilliant way to make a point that there's nothing wrong with
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In your book, you've changed it to tailor, I think, is it tailored at somewhere?
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I use that all the time with my students saying, I have a trade deficit with my barber, and
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I'm absolutely happy to have the trade deficit.
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Yeah, so I think Khyati while illustrating that turned barber into tailor.
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We have a barber and a tailor both.
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Oh, you have both of them.
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Yeah, I remember the trade deficit line in the context of tailor and I find that so important
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and I also find it important, interesting that revealing in fact, that you mentioned
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that 1984 and reading books like that was one way of you to understand economics better
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and apply it to the real world.
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And I think that is so true, like I think of economics as the study of human behavior.
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It helps our understanding of the world.
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You know, 1984 has such a fundamental book about power and oppression and freedom.
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And those are the concepts at the heart of economics.
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So like I totally get that and your book is also just incredibly relatable throughout.
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Pranay, let me sort of turn to you that in the context of teaching, like you began as
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a student in the sense you did one of the Takshashila courses and then you and Anupama
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spent all these years teaching and what are the sort of broad lessons that you think you
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learned during this time of teaching?
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I mean, it's very easy, for example, to say, make it relatable and we'll use Virat Kohli
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And I'm assuming you, it sounds obvious, but I'm sure you arrived at it after a period
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But a lot of what you know, you guys teach, the fundamental concepts are actually pretty
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And you know, people would have come here with biases against them, like the state is
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not the solution to everything.
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It's a spontaneous order thing, how the invisible hand works, you know, the positive someness
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of things where I noted you quoted the John Stossel's double thank you moment in the
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book, which I always talk about.
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So more power to double thank you moments.
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So tell me a little bit about your learnings of how to teach, because one of the things
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that Takshashila has been pretty remarkable at, it's like mind blowing when I think about
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the number of students you bring out, is that anybody who's, you know, somebody smart
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in the public policy community has come through you guys.
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So what has been your approach towards teaching and what are your learnings?
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Yeah, I think a few of them, one I'll illustrate with an example since Anupam is here, and
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we always say bad things about him in his presence, but I'll say a good thing for a
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So what happens is many of our students now are serving Colonel level officers in the
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And they are great at the things that they are supposed to know when they are in the
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But economics is something that very few of them have an experience of, right?
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So that is the thing that hits them the most, right?
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The most counterintuitive insights are from economics for many of them.
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And when they first realize that this is going exactly opposite to what their instincts
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are and what they have learned, it hits them the most, you know, so they're really surprised
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at that and they really resist what we discussed.
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But six months later, after the course, the only teacher they remember from the course
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is Anupam, many of them, because that is what they take away that, you know, this was a
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blinding insight that I hadn't even thought of.
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And you really change the way I think about the world.
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And that often comes from what Anupam teaches rather than what we teach on the public policy
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So that I think is one idea which comes from economics, right?
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The power of economics and the power of good economics teaching, which Anupam does.
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The other thing, I think from my experience, I've learned broadly three things.
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One is not to look down upon the people whom you are engaging with, right?
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So for us, it comes easy because we say that very clearly none of us at Takshashila are
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So we are all learning, probably we are just ahead in that learning journey because we
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have read a few more books and we have interacted with a few more people in this community.
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That's the only single difference.
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So once you take that out, then it is not very difficult.
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So one, you just take away that difference between the learner and the teacher.
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So once you start from that position, it becomes easier.
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Second, apart from going teaching in the class, a lot of it matters about what the reflection
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happens after the teaching, right?
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So that's why what we do is after the webinars get over, we also have a very active learning
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management system or a chat community where we are always discussing things.
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Sometimes we have tried to do AMAs also, and that sort of helps in bridging that gap, you
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know, because teaching is not just about listening and responding, but also how do you reflect
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How do you discuss it later on?
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So that is another thing which has big impact.
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The next point on this is I think grammar is important based on what Khyati also said.
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I think learning grammar for any subject helps.
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It can sometimes be boring, but unless you have that vocabulary to discuss, these are
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the foundations, right?
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Unless you discuss the foundations, it doesn't help application.
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So the example that I bring is when you're learning languages, if you know the grammar
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of any one language, well, you can learn another language also very easily, even though
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the grammar structure might not be same.
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But the fact that you have that vocabulary, you know what are the kinds of elements of
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Those are the same thing.
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So that applies and it's a transferable skill to other languages.
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So again, learning grammar can sometimes be boring, but it is supremely important.
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So that is again something we stress on building the foundations.
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The last point on this is the difference between domains and disciplines.
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So economics to me is a discipline, not a domain, right?
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So many times people will sort of jump into health policy or international affairs.
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To me, they are domains.
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So there are blinding insights there as well, but not as many as there are probably in economics
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and psychology or others.
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So if you are well versed with some of these core disciplines, I think you can also excel
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So learning about those disciplines, spending time on learning them is really, really important.
#
So that's why economic reasoning, probably public policy frameworks, they and public
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finance, I would argue, psychology help you in really grasping things across many domains.
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So that's why our learning focuses a lot on really strengthening this grammar and teaching
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a lot about these disciplines before people go into a narrow discipline and try to become
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a health policy expert or whatever the field they might choose.
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But get the disciplines really, really well understood.
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And even the assignments that we try to do are all fun, application oriented.
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So the idea is not to grasp some kind of thing that Anupam gave an example of, but
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it is largely, are you able to apply concepts in a group?
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Sometimes we do good group assignments.
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So it helps people bounce ideas of each other and come up with something.
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Those are some things that I can gather from our experience.
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So I wanted to add a student perspective to what they were just talking about.
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And I want to also tie it up with the piano lessons that we started off with.
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So we often forget the importance of a good teacher and what the teacher brings into a
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They bring a certain energy.
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It is not just the content, but what energy they bring in makes a whole lot of difference.
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And that's why we see that even though there is Coursera and so many things, most of us
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would have tried those courses, but we often do not finish them because there is no teacher
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who is there in the class and we are not having that connection with that person.
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And I feel like the importance of your peers also, the kind of peers that you meet.
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So the part of piano lesson that is interesting for me is that my daughter is also learning.
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And sometimes I am playing and my daughter will give me feedback because she is one level
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So she will tell me, mama, you are playing this right.
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And sometimes I don't know how to read this note and she will help me out.
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So I feel like that environment of having other people who are also a part of this journey
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and if they being an interesting set of people that you want to know and learn with, I think
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that also adds to the kind of...
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And I think for me, when I was explaining about the grammar, right, so I knew about
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a lot of the concepts that I learned at Takshashila.
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It is not that the first time I was learning about them, but I think I had not unified
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them into a structure the way that it made sense after I studied this.
#
So I think that's why probably the book has some structure is because I got that structure
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I knew the concepts, but I think they made a bit more sense after learning about them
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in a more structured fashion.
#
There's a great anecdote and it's actually a piano anecdote and it's about the importance
#
of a good teacher, which is that it's a post, I'll link from the show notes, written by
#
this guy called Derek Sivers.
#
So Derek Sivers is known for a lot of things, but one of the things he is as a musician
#
and he had gotten admission to the Berklee College of Music, which is like the ultimate
#
place you can go to learn music.
#
And very randomly, he happened to call a studio for some other random Chhota Mota work and
#
the guy who picked up did small talk with him and he mentioned that, you know, I've
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got admission to the Berklee College of Music, I'm going there soon.
#
So that guy said, okay, so I have been there and I have also taught there and I'll tell
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you something, why don't you come and meet me tomorrow morning at 9 a.m. you come to
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my house and I'll teach you in one afternoon so much that you will finish your Berklee
#
Like normally it takes four years.
#
So this guy lands up and the person he's speaking to is Keemo Matthews.
#
So Derek Sivers lands up at Keemo Matthews house or wherever he had to go at 8.40.
#
But he has to wait till 9.
#
So he counts the minutes and he waits till 8.59.
#
An important part of the story because it shows you the desire and the hunger.
#
And at 8.59 he hits a button and Keemo opens and Keemo is like surprised to see him because
#
he tells every young person he meets that meet me tomorrow at 9 o'clock and I will
#
teach you everything and nobody ever comes.
#
This is the first guy who showed up and then he takes Sivers inside and they sit down at
#
the piano and according to Sivers in three hours he learns what they teach you in one
#
And then he has two, three more sessions with Keemo Matthews and then he goes to Berklee.
#
And Berklee also is a progressive kind of place where it's not like, no, no, you have
#
to come to class, you have to sit.
#
They allow him to give exams early and he finishes a course in two years.
#
And I find this is such a beautiful story.
#
And at one level, of course, it illustrates a completely different point that I keep making
#
about our education system, that people learn at different paces.
#
It makes zero sense to me that we have a system where children of the same age study together,
#
same bunch of subjects, that whole homogenized approach towards whatever, when everything
#
else in our beautiful capitalist, full of choice society is so personalized and individualized.
#
And I think that's a problem to be solved.
#
But also this tells you about the power of a good teacher.
#
And my imagination here is that what Keemo Matthews would have done is, you know, begun
#
with a really great framework, began with the grammar, as you put it, Pranay.
#
So then everything else kind of falls into place.
#
I have a tangential question for you, Pranay.
#
You mentioned that you guys, you know, teach a lot of people in the army and stuff.
#
And I've done a bunch of episodes with Ajay on the subject.
#
We did a deep dive into the Indian military and before that we have done deep dives on
#
both the seen and the unseen and everything is everything on Ukraine.
#
And I was stunned by how beautifully, like one, how deep his knowledge is of military,
#
but also how beautifully he uses the tools of economics to understand wars, like in this
#
whole Yashia versus Ukraine, let's see, Yashia versus Ukraine, I don't know.
#
In this whole Russia versus Ukraine conflict, you know, it reminds me of the question that
#
When you have a bacon and eggs breakfast, what is the difference between the pig and
#
It's an economics answer.
#
The chicken is involved, but the pig is committed.
#
So it's about incentives.
#
And I think of Ukraine as a pig that you're going to die if you lose.
#
And I think of Russia as a chicken.
#
You kind of involve megalomaniac dictator, but the incentives are totally different.
#
Ukraine is fighting for its survival.
#
So thinking of the incentives helps you make sense of why Ukraine did not just roll over
#
and die despite being a much smaller army.
#
And also, you see the power of spontaneous order, like Russia was functioning in a very
#
dysfunctional top down way, like a Moribund large organization.
#
And Ukraine in their early days, structure had broken down.
#
So they actually created, they programmed an Uber for artillery, where they built an
#
app by which you could figure out where the optimal use of artillery is and where the
#
And they essentially put together a working market system from the bottom up without any
#
general directing that, you know, send me the requisition and blah, blah, blah.
#
So do these concepts of economics, do they play a big part in your defense studies?
#
And are they also percolating down at the army levels?
#
Because my worry sometimes about the Indian army is that it's such a large organization
#
and large organizations tend to become ossified and bureaucratic and hidebound and conventional
#
and think in all those old ways.
#
So for me, it seems like an incredible experiment that a lot of the senior officers there actually
#
come here and like you're saying, they remember Anupam most fondly because he blows their
#
That's what I'm hearing.
#
So what are your thoughts on this?
#
Yeah, so we do teach fundamentals of economics and strategic economics.
#
So like, because economics is a discipline, it obviously has insights for defense as
#
And in fact, one discipline which we wanted to build, but haven't been able to is about
#
defense economics, right?
#
So there are lots of good books on this in UK, like Keith Hartley, etc, who done applied
#
economics to defense very systematically to make to answer these kinds of questions,
#
So if you have 1% additional GDP to spend, should you spend it on defense or not?
#
What are the kinds of things you will answer to come to this conclusion?
#
All this is systematically thought through.
#
But that kind of discipline doesn't happen in India.
#
So if you would have seen conversations when even when people in the defense think about
#
economists, they think these are number guys, these are the people who will say they think
#
about budgeting, not economics.
#
So economics, the fact that it tells you about these core concepts, you will think about
#
opportunity costs, you will think about marginal gains, marginal benefits, marginal losses,
#
all those are things that come through economics.
#
So I mean, the fact that now many of the people choose to come to this course and learn this,
#
I think is testament that they find something useful about these concepts.
#
And hopefully, we'll see policy changes also in that direction in the defense realm.
#
So just a couple of things.
#
One, it's fascinating to see that, I mean, most of the people who come from the defense
#
and from the armed forces largely look forward to the latter half, right before the course
#
begins because that's when we go deep dive into artashastra and strategic studies and
#
But at the end of the course, they generally mentioned that they enjoyed the first bit
#
a lot, which is just a general introduction to economics.
#
All you have to do is maybe fine tune the examples a little bit, but even just opening
#
their eyes to something like the guns versus butter, right?
#
The idea of opportunity costs and they immediately start appreciating that there is something
#
called opportunity cost and even within their own, for example, domain.
#
So you can, you know, kind of tell them that every amount of whatever resources that you
#
spend on buying a particular kind of equipment means that you have less for something else.
#
You can put things like pension, OROP, all of that in this context of general broad economic
#
ideas and I think their appreciation of it goes up quite a bit.
#
They're able to now use some of these ideas in their conversation.
#
So I think that by itself is just a fascinating for me a takeaway.
#
You also, as Pranay was mentioning, we are oversubscribed.
#
What began as an experiment to say, okay, can we get some of the defense folks into
#
Now we are oversubscribed where people, even though they're not nominated by their
#
headquarters, they want to pay on their own come and do this course.
#
For me, that is a fascinating takeaway.
#
The third bit, which I mean, from the outside, I had the same kind of apprehensions of the
#
It's a large organizations, you know, again, complex bureaucratic structure and so on.
#
But increasingly now that I have a glimpse into the inside, I can see genuine efforts
#
from their side to the amount of money and time and resources they spend on skilling
#
on some of these things.
#
They've invited me to go and talk about Bretton Woods and gold and a whole bunch of
#
things in the Air Force and Warfare kind of college in Hyderabad.
#
So for me, that's fascinating.
#
The fact that they really want to learn about this and go deep into some of these things,
#
which is not directly going to affect the way that their lives are run.
#
These are all challenging things.
#
I mean, these are all fascinating things for me.
#
I speak to them on trade.
#
Again, there's a lot of resistance.
#
Let me also not say that, right?
#
Immediately there's a lot of resistance because they come from a particular background.
#
And, you know, when I make snide remarks about Atma Nirbhartha and so on, it doesn't sit
#
very well right at the beginning.
#
But, you know, with enough time to digest with just exposing them to some of the evidence,
#
but more importantly, I think exposing them to a particular line of reasoning will in
#
time, you know, change their mindset.
#
Not everybody, not all at once.
#
But some of these things just fester, right?
#
At least telling them that there's an alternative way to think about some of these things.
#
I think that itself is just a good starting point.
#
I just wanted to add General Menon, who has been on your podcast and who's the director
#
of the strategic studies program.
#
So he has conceptualized this course, a concrete example of how that has translated into something
#
that is useful for defenses.
#
He's developed this military resource allocation framework.
#
So this is actually taking all the insights of opportunity cost, limited resources, scarcity
#
to literally identify if you are in a particular resource care situation, what are the kinds
#
of platforms you should buy?
#
What would be the opportunity cost of that?
#
So it has gone to that level of platforms of that Indian Army or Air Force or Navy will
#
So that is also something which is really useful to the people who take the course.
#
And one more point I wanted to add, I think what Cathy said, a lot of learning in public
#
policy is generally omnidirectional.
#
So I don't think we can teach, as I said, none of us are experts.
#
So we can only point them towards some readings, but a lot of people learn by talking to each
#
So public policy really helps if there are more interactions with people, group assignments,
#
or just group discussions on a broad range of topics.
#
That really has much more impact in this discipline than others.
#
This episode is now going to take an authoritarian turn, as I'm going to unilaterally
#
decide that every time any of you say something that my gentle listeners cannot understand,
#
I will intervene on their behalf and ask you to explain guns and butter.
#
Anupam kindly explained, this is a curse of knowledge, you know, just because you know
#
doesn't mean everybody knows.
#
What do you mean by guns and butter?
#
What does it illustrate?
#
So this is a classic kind of example used in economics to just underscore the concept
#
of opportunity cost, right?
#
So if you are at a national level, you have X amount of resources, and resources are always
#
scarce, you can spend on either one or the other, right?
#
And the guns versus butter kind of debate is the classic thing saying, okay, if you
#
have, as a government, have 100 rupees, and you can choose to spend X amount on guns,
#
and guns here represents all kinds of, let's say, defense, security, all of that.
#
Or you can spend it on butter, and butter again represents all non-security expenditure.
#
It could be school, health, actual food, production, whole bunch of things.
#
Again, you would probably ask the question, why should the government spend anything on
#
But we'll come to that later.
#
This could be just any kind of subsidies, any kind of transfer payment, all non-security
#
And the idea is just to say that every one rupee that you spend on buying a gun is one
#
rupee less for butter, and the other way around, every one rupee that you spend on butter is
#
one rupee less for guns.
#
And I'm just trying to highlight the idea that there are opportunity costs, that at
#
every decision, you have to make trade-offs, right?
#
So resources are scarce, and so therefore you have to make a choice.
#
Every time you make a choice, if you're choosing one, it means that you're giving up on something
#
So I think that's the idea.
#
And then you can go ahead and go deep dive into that.
#
So even if you've decided to spend, I don't know, 20 rupees on education, there again,
#
this entire guns versus butter comes in.
#
I mean, here it's not really guns, but within that, you're saying, okay, how much do you
#
spend on primary education versus how much do you spend on higher education and so on?
#
And every rupee that you spend on higher education is one rupee less for primary education.
#
So just really going into this idea of opportunity cost and trade-offs.
#
People, you kind of also find that it's good to go from a mic, I always like to go from
#
a micro to a macro level.
#
So you start with saying, okay, one hour that you're spending here listening to, let's say,
#
I mean, generally it's about maybe four hours, but four hours that you spend listening to
#
Amit Varma's podcast is four hours that you don't have to watch and do better things like
#
watch Netflix or go to the park or spend with family or any of those things.
#
So that's the opportunity cost of listening to the seen and the unseen.
#
So, and I think people understand it when you say that at a micro level, and then you've
#
just got to extrapolate that to say, okay, the same thing applies at the community level,
#
at the state level, at the national level, and even at the world level.
#
And you know, greater teachers than you have been talking about opportunity costs.
#
Kishore Kumar himself, I remember I used to edit this section for Prakriti Gold Household
#
Economics, and I had once written a column explaining opportunity costs from Kishore
#
Kumar's famous song from Golmaal, Aane Wala Pal Jaane Wala Hai, Ho Sake To Isme Zindagi Basa Do.
#
Because time is scarce and what you choose to do with your time, you know, you're giving
#
up on a lot. So everyone who's listening to this, let me thank you for listening to this.
#
So my thanking you is perhaps a waste of time.
#
I also want to correct Anupam a little bit and say that every hour of the seen and the unseen
#
that you are listening to is one hour of mindless chore that you could have done.
#
You can just convert it into a slightly more useful time.
#
Right, so I cannot do any of my chores, any of my dish washing and that all that I do at home
#
without listening to something because those things are mind numbing for me.
#
And I feel like, okay, if I'm doing this, then I'm probably doing something productive at the same time.
#
So you're just being nice to the host.
#
I was just thinking, Baskar Pagli Rulayegi Kya.
#
But I want to talk about opportunity cost only and turn to you, Khyati, and ask all of you, in fact,
#
about how the thought for this book came about.
#
Because it's a very sort of unconventional sort of thing for you to do.
#
Because it's like a long haul project, you know, it involves detail.
#
There is no immediate gratification in the sense you must have done this for months and months.
#
The art is so intricate and it's just like fantastic at every level.
#
But how do you commit the decision that, yeah, like, where did the idea for the book begin,
#
So I will begin and then I'll let them add because I think it was a slow process
#
that it evolved into this thing, okay.
#
So before actually I joined the GCPP, I was already making some comics on, related to politics.
#
And I was making my own sort of personal political comics
#
where I was talking about feminism and environment and things like that.
#
So I knew that I like these topics and I like to convert them into something
#
more interesting using this artwork is what works for me as a medium.
#
But then when I was trying to make commentary about politics,
#
I thought that I don't know enough, you know,
#
how can I make so much commentary about it without really understanding it so well.
#
So I should learn something.
#
So that's where the idea of this was key.
#
You know, I want to use this in my artwork was there,
#
but not in a very concrete way.
#
It wasn't like, oh, I want to make a book out of it for sure.
#
So I was just learning from there.
#
As you know, anything that I learn, I get very excited about doing those things.
#
And if I'm doing it, I tell myself I have to do it 100%.
#
So it's never like, you don't do 80% of anything, you have to do 100%.
#
So anyway, so I did it with all my, because I was enjoying it.
#
And by the end of it, it just came to me that, you know,
#
this sort of 10 panel comic came into my head.
#
Oh, you know, this whole comic that the whole course that I'm studying about
#
can be summarized into these small lines, you know.
#
So then I just wrote them and then I spent a couple of days making that comic.
#
And I honestly had no idea what they're going to do with it.
#
I took the liberty of drawing their caricatures in it.
#
And I sent it to them saying, hello.
#
And I did not post it somewhere else because I wasn't sure
#
if they would like me posting their caricatures and stuff like that.
#
So I just sent it to them saying, hi, this is what I learned.
#
And I thought I wanted to make this, so I made this.
#
And from there, I think they enjoyed it.
#
They liked it and they said, oh, you know, this can be an interesting way
#
to teach about public policy and we can make it into something else.
#
So that's where the idea began.
#
But even at that point, Pranay had said that we can make it a book.
#
But I think it wasn't very clear in my head, at least,
#
that what kind of book this was going to become, right?
#
Because I was thinking, what will they do with this?
#
You know, would they use it as a textbook for what was the purpose of this book?
#
So I was thinking still in that sense.
#
So then we decided to make a couple of pilot chapters
#
and see if I can actually do this thing, you know,
#
if it can be done in an interesting way and if it makes sense to them also.
#
So that's where we made a pilot chapter.
#
And then at that point, it became clear that, okay,
#
we can actually make it into a book.
#
But I didn't use those pilot chapters over here
#
because I had made them in a very textbook-y fashion.
#
But when we decided, okay, this was going to be a book,
#
then I said, no, I had to re-look at it and look at it like
#
how a normal person is going to read it, not a student of Takshashila.
#
It's my daughter reading it, right?
#
So what story would I like to tell her?
#
So then that's where it became more clear,
#
but then it built by itself step by step.
#
Yeah, I have a very simple take on this.
#
She sent that bit over to us, which encapsulated the eight weeks.
#
And I was mind blown because in just that simple kind of,
#
I think, two or three page comics,
#
she had captured all of the big insights of our graduate certificate
#
in public policy program over three months.
#
And I would have been just happy with that.
#
I mean, I would have paid her for that.
#
Literally, I would have paid her for that
#
and said if I can share that with the students, right?
#
But I think maybe Pranay or someone had an idea,
#
why don't we do more of this?
#
I think throughout the book,
#
she was the one always in kind of self-doubting,
#
I think Pranay and I are always quite clear on that thing.
#
If we have fun doing it, we should do it.
#
And that was it for us.
#
Cathy is obviously an amazing person to work with.
#
The kind of efficiency and single-mindedness
#
she has on the project, you know, amazing.
#
I think the biggest task that she had was trying to bring us in line
#
and actually do some work, which we haven't done really.
#
So I think that's where it is.
#
Yeah, see, I think this book is a continuation
#
of the other work that we do, right?
#
As we did with Missing in Action, the course, the podcast and the newsletters.
#
The idea is that we are not looking at the normal end of the policy pipeline,
#
which is the politicians and the bureaucrats.
#
We are interested in the other side of the policy pipeline,
#
which is citizens, right?
#
If the idea is if the overton window moves,
#
and we've talked about overton window before,
#
then the policies will also move.
#
So we need large numbers of people to know that spontaneous order works
#
or the fact that, you know, there is something, someone called Hayek
#
who has a paper called The Use of Knowledge in Society.
#
And if we can simplify that to in a way that a person can understand,
#
we will internalize those ideas in our policies also at a later point of time.
#
So a lot of our work is essentially that whatever Takshashila does
#
comes from that mindset.
#
So then once you have that mindset,
#
you're thinking what are the ways in which you can get your message across?
#
What are the different ways, right?
#
So when we did this book on Missing in Action,
#
and that was one way of telling the story.
#
And by that time, I had also seen Brian Kaplan's book on Open Borders,
#
which is again an illustrated comic making a case for immigration.
#
And that also is again a counterintuitive idea about open immigration policies.
#
And I thought that format was really good.
#
And especially in Indian public policy context,
#
I haven't come across any comic book.
#
So when Kathy sent this, I thought like, you know,
#
this can become a book which I haven't seen and it's a new medium.
#
Maybe we'll be able to get the message across in a way that writing alone can't.
#
And that's how we thought about, you know,
#
working on this and getting it done.
#
I'll take a digression and ask a slightly broader question.
#
If I zoom into this book, it seems like a great way of tackling,
#
like you said, the demand end of the political marketplace, right?
#
You make the common person understand this and blah, blah, blah.
#
And suddenly I see a universe of Pranay Kutasane books,
#
because you seem to be writing a book every two weeks or something with different co-authors.
#
And I see a universe of these books.
#
And some of them are aiming at the same thing and some of them are slightly different.
#
Plus, I see that you are, of course, building Takshashila as well
#
and doing all the things that you are doing.
#
And in a sense, a question for both of you,
#
even though Anupam, sadly, you have not been as prolific as him in terms of writing books.
#
Where one can only aspire.
#
He has shifted the overton window of productivity, which is a good thing.
#
And my broader question then for both of you is about,
#
and even you, Khyati, I'm sorry.
#
But they actually teach at Takshashila, so I thought, yeah.
#
But my broader question is that,
#
what is the sense of purpose that sort of drives people who work in this field?
#
I know some people, like our friend Ajay, who talk of the long game.
#
And Ajay will say random things like,
#
that its result will come 50 years later.
#
Or this is a 30-year project.
#
And the mind boggles a little bit at that.
#
But he's totally genuine and committed and all of that.
#
And I want to see the bigger picture.
#
I see the smaller picture of this particular book,
#
and it's a wonderful book, and we'll talk much more about it.
#
But is there also a bigger picture in your minds
#
where you see yourselves playing a role in this ecosystem and in this society,
#
saying that, yeah, we've got to change.
#
What are the different vectors of change?
#
What are the different locations we can take?
#
What is the difference we can make?
#
What should I optimize for?
#
So do you think in those terms?
#
Or am I overthinking it and you just, you know, follow your heart?
#
Yeah, Amit, so this is an existential question,
#
which maybe it scares me even when I'm thinking of answering it.
#
But I'm going to actually quote our dear friend Nitin Pai on this.
#
Because, okay, so on yesterday, which is the 24th of February,
#
we had, Takshashila had a massive convocation
#
where we gave, you know, the scrolls to 120 or the graduating students,
#
the people who are present.
#
And so Nitin, you know, he gave the address as the director
#
and he just spoke about two things,
#
which, I mean, we've been saying it.
#
And I'm sure on your podcast as well, Nitin has said the same thing,
#
which is changing India as a marathon, right?
#
That it's a long-term project.
#
Things don't happen overnight.
#
And I think we should be completely alive to that fact that,
#
yeah, you can't bring about change overnight.
#
The second bit, which again is one of now Nitin's favorite metaphors,
#
which he keeps saying is about complexity that, you know,
#
that Einstein was wrong when he said,
#
or the court at least attributed Einstein most often,
#
which is that, you know, insanity is just doing the same thing over and over again
#
and expecting different results, right?
#
And Nitin has a different take on it saying, that's not insanity.
#
In fact, that's how most of public policy works.
#
You keep doing the same thing over and over again.
#
And, you know, maybe nine times it'll fail
#
or maybe 99 times it'll fail and a hundred times something magic happens.
#
Einstein was right in his context of controlled experiments and labs.
#
Exactly, but not in the context of public policy.
#
And I mean, in a way that,
#
at least I'm speaking just on my behalf and not Pranay's.
#
In a way, that's what I think even drives me.
#
I literally think I've written about 99 op-eds on price controls.
#
It's, I mean, it's a joke amongst us that, you know,
#
I have a template and I just fix in, you know, the variable of the day.
#
Today it might be cab prices, tomorrow it's something else or drug prices and so on.
#
The price control on AI is actually called Anupam intelligence.
#
I've actually written maybe 10 pieces on price controls in the last 20 years,
#
It's a random number, but I think that's, that's what it is.
#
And, but there is hope that it will reach the maybe policymakers,
#
but maybe enough people because I think in the past we've had this,
#
the price controls on movie tickets or something of that sort where I'd written.
#
And there's a lot of people who said, yeah, I agree with you,
#
even though ordinary moviegoers who would normally, you know, would rejoice at this.
#
I think when I said, okay, these are the consequences of it.
#
This was how it will affect something like the movie industry.
#
Eventually people do see it.
#
And I genuinely believe that, right?
#
If not, I think there's no reason why I should be working in Takshila.
#
Both Pranay and I will get hopefully better paying jobs
#
in consulting firms and, you know, retire peacefully.
#
But we're in this because I think there is a belief that you can bring about change.
#
It's sometimes a 30 year project.
#
Sometimes it's a 50 year project.
#
And I think we're okay with the fact that you might be doing things
#
which the results of which you might not see in your own lifetime even, right?
#
I mean, I'm a lot younger than Pranay.
#
Pranay is nearly getting grandfather status,
#
but, you know, at least it's why not take little laughter break.
#
You know, maybe when if you and Pranay are together on my episode,
#
I should have those laugh tracks you have on comedies.
#
So I'm trying to add that.
#
So you and I can be the laugh track.
#
But I mean, I think on certain things, you might not see the needle move at all.
#
But in certain other things, we have actually seen the needle move.
#
Now, the other thing that I think you should be okay with
#
is that the non-attributable nature of all of this.
#
I don't know what the correct noun form of it is.
#
But yeah, you might see certain things change.
#
You have no clue what role you played in it.
#
I think that uncertainty sometimes might be unsettling
#
because you don't know the fruits of your action, right?
#
The end result of your action, whether somebody's actually taken it, not taken it.
#
Somebody else might have played a role.
#
We don't know, but it's okay.
#
So I think there's two things that should drive you.
#
One, genuinely that you care about that at the end, the nation is better off.
#
I know this might sound like a grandiose thing, but I genuinely believe that.
#
If I didn't, I wouldn't have been in this profession.
#
So seeing that change happen is important.
#
Whether you played a part, not played a part, something else happened.
#
I want to see that change happen.
#
And two, the way that I think you can pacify yourself
#
and make yourself feel happy is that you should enjoy that.
#
Every single op-ed I write on this or podcast where I talk about price fixing
#
or something else about economic freedom, I have a lot of fun while doing it
#
because I believe in it.
#
I'm very passionate about these things or every webinar that I take.
#
Sometimes it's repetitive.
#
That's when most teachers will tell you that sometimes teaching gets repetitive.
#
So you have to do what you can to make it fun.
#
So I always ask provocative questions.
#
I enjoy the feedback that I get.
#
I like pushing back on those things.
#
I enjoy the process of trying to persuade people on some of these things.
#
I like getting into heated arguments about some of these things.
#
I deliberately sometimes make extremely provocative statements.
#
I start off a trade class saying,
#
everybody's riled up and I enjoy that energy.
#
I go into breaking it down and saying, why should you think this way?
#
I try to make things fun for myself.
#
I was just telling Cathy before the podcast,
#
I'm an entirely selfish, self-driven, hedonistic economist.
#
I do whatever gives me pleasure.
#
It just happens that I like these things.
#
So that's where I'm at.
#
Yeah, I think what Anupam said, something similar.
#
I think all human or social organizations are interesting and the state is one of them.
#
Obviously, because of the power it wields, it is interesting.
#
And because it is India, every small organization in India will be interesting.
#
The state even more so.
#
It gives us fun and joy to understand this beast called the Indian state.
#
Why does it work the way it does?
#
How is it that in many ways it has the best intentions in mind
#
and it results in some of the most stupid policies and hurts people?
#
So all that is just inherently fun in itself,
#
trying to understand and make sense of this complex adaptive system called the Indian state.
#
Once you're trying to make sense of it, I think that drives pretty much a lot of things.
#
I'm personally not thinking about whether this will
#
result in a change in a particular policy domain.
#
Because as we said, if the overton window moves and it has moved on many things.
#
Now people realize that at least the fact that private sector has a significant role.
#
I don't think 40 years ago people would have said that.
#
So we have moved the overton window in some things and maybe we'll move it in many other things as well.
#
So that is what drives me, like just curiosity and fun doing what we are doing is just enough.
#
Another sort of tangential question that whenever I write something on the same lines as you guys
#
and it's counterintuitive but people come to me later and they say oh I agree or that changed my mind.
#
My instinctive thought is that there is a selection bias here.
#
I should not get carried away and think I'm making a difference that these are people who
#
were inclined to be open-minded and would have come around here anyway.
#
Now when I look at the broader discourse today, there's one aspect of it that just makes me super
#
sad and you know even worse and which is that the polarized nature of the discourse in a political
#
sense that today when you speak of public policy, it simply does not matter what the
#
merits of the policy are. It matters which is a party. Like you find the entire opposition
#
just sitting up now and supporting these recent farmers demands for MSPs. MSPs are a disaster.
#
You know we could write another book on why MSPs are a disaster. They are terrible for the nation,
#
they're terrible for farmers, they're terrible for the poor, they're just all around bad and many of
#
the people in the opposition actually know this and yet because it is a BJP government that's on
#
the other side, they will support these demands even though they know it is bad. In a similar
#
sense, the Congress was supporting like the old pension scheme. We know the OPS is a disaster,
#
the Congress knows that. Ajay tells me about how when the NPS, the new pension scheme which
#
he partly designed was coming about, he's had talks with these Congress people including Rahul
#
Gandhi where they all agreed. There was consensus on this across Vajpayee and Manmohan governments
#
that you need the NPS old pension scheme is bad and yet today you'll have the opposition and the
#
Congress despite knowing that the OPS is a disaster and could bankrupt the country literally
#
fighting for it and that makes me wonder that we are not even close to discussing these policies
#
on their merits. It is all about which party wants to do something. I oppose Adityanath more
#
than anyone else I can think of but when he got rid of those labor laws, I was like yes,
#
those labor laws were horrendous, they hurt workers more than they helped them but the whole thing
#
was seen through a political prism and all of Twitter was up in arms and oh how can you do this
#
and they haven't spent 30 seconds thinking about the policies themselves or understanding the
#
history behind it. So in this context, do you feel that it makes your job harder because I think to
#
some extent this is a recentish development, this increasing polarization and also when you talk
#
about the needle moving, I'd like to ask all three of you if you can think of examples of that and
#
especially you Khyati because as you've done this book, I was about to say written, is it fair to
#
say you've written this book? Written, drawn, whatever. Written, drawn, everything. So as you
#
guys have created this book, people around you, your daughter would have seen it, your friends
#
would have seen it. How have they reacted? Is there a sense like what I look for is and what I think
#
you guys provide for a lot of people and this book will certainly provide for anyone who reads it,
#
are those light bulb moments where you know something goes on in your head and it never goes
#
off again. You flick the switch, you've got an insight, it never goes off again. Once you get
#
positive some-ness, you get it. It's never going. So can you give me examples from your experiences
#
of when the needle has moved in that way? Shall we start with the first question on
#
just the polarized nature and so on? I remember that almost every webinar of mine I start off with
#
by saying that I'm an equal opportunity offender. So we are discussing public policy. We give all
#
of those disclaimers because I don't want it to get caught in a political discussion and that's
#
just a downward spiral once you start discussing personality. So we say that we're discussing
#
policies, not personality and so on. I genuinely think I'm an equal opportunity offender and as
#
you say, when you're talking about political parties, I don't think I expect anything else
#
from them. Congress, for example, will oppose the reduction in MSP because that's their nature.
#
They have to be the opposition, that's what they say. We can discuss about the sad state of
#
political affairs later, but I blame the academics, at least people with some kind of intelligence
#
and who understand these issues. I blame them when they take blind sides just based on their
#
political persuasion. I have many examples of this. A lot of noted economists, for example,
#
who sided with the farmers saying, yeah, you should not remove MSP. Now, you can't blame the
#
process under which this was carried out. Some of the farm laws were carried out, but opposing the
#
farm laws themselves, which were a reform, it was just, you know, it was headbrained to oppose
#
something like that. So I think one important thing is to try and maintain your own credibility
#
to say that, you know, we genuinely keep looking at policies across the spectrum, praise policies
#
if it does good under your broader kind of agenda of whatever, transforming India, open markets,
#
freer markets, et cetera, and irrespective of who's doing it. And I think, you know, we've
#
tried to do that always irrespective of which party. So while we were obviously absolutely
#
critical of demonetization, you know, whereas we'd say, okay, GST was good. Not the way that
#
it was implemented with the 20,000 slabs and all of those things, but, you know, the idea of a
#
unified tax system is good. So it happened more or less at the same time. You say, okay, now how
#
can we concentrate on improving the GST, right? On having fewer slabs, lower rates, broadening
#
the base, all of those bits, right? So focus on that. So I think one of the things that you have
#
to do is try to maintain your own credibility. Keep talking about policies, keep talking about
#
policies as objectively as possible, analyze them as objectively as possible. Do not get caught into
#
traps even while you're writing them. Don't bring in personalities. Don't say, you know,
#
this policy which was done by Modi is bad, right? Remove the personality altogether,
#
right? Say government instead. So I think those things are ways to maintain your credibility,
#
which will probably have a slightly bigger impact in terms of seeming objective in all of this,
#
in your analysis, and therefore has a much higher chance of being accepted by a larger number of
#
people. And I think this is also where writing in popular media is important when you're trying to
#
reach out to the broader base, right? So while, of course, you'll have some people completely shut
#
off saying, I don't care whatever you say, it doesn't matter. You know, they see you either as
#
pro or against. And of course, you know, sometimes we want to make a compilation of all the wonderful
#
things that Pranay and I have been called from lobby, of course, corporate lobbyist, everything
#
else. Once I was called a lobbyist for chargers. Because I had written this like by having mandating
#
a USB-C charger is a stupid idea. You shouldn't do that. You don't need to mandate it already from
#
20 systems, the market itself has come to two different and all the idea of the fact that you
#
need innovation and you so someone told me you are a lobbyist for charging companies like, yeah,
#
at least find some lobbyist of higher status. Yeah, it was like an insulting acquisition almost.
#
We've been called all sorts of things from I mean, communist right wing, left wing, everything else
#
under the sun. Now, while that is a sad part, but I want to like flip it on the other side and say
#
that you're able to reach a large number of 14s. And I genuinely think that on the margin at the
#
margin, you are still able to persuade some people saying, maybe this is not the best move,
#
or maybe this can be improved in this particular way. And therein lies the hope. We'll come to the
#
specific examples of the needle moving, but this is just my take on.
#
I think there are two different problems. One is at the demand end, one is at the supply end. So at
#
the demand end, actually, I think, yes, there is polarization, but you look at it from a different
#
perspective, right? 15 years ago, we used to say that the middle class is apathetic. They are not
#
interested in politics. No one is going to vote. That was the common refrain, even though India's
#
voting percentages are okay compared to many other democracies, but that was a refrain. So now
#
we are talking about exactly the opposite thing. Everyone seems to be interested in politics and
#
what they are doing. So which is the better equilibrium? I think this is the better equilibrium.
#
Lots of people are interested. Sure, there are many people who are louder, who appear to be
#
polarized, but as Anupam was saying, change happens at the margin. So obviously there are many, many
#
people at the margin as well. The fact that people are interested in learning about public policy
#
more than they were 10 years ago is itself testament to the fact that more people want to know
#
what is the grammar of government action, why does it happen, so on and so forth. So as long as you
#
are able to convince the people who are at the margin willing to know and equip themselves with
#
the fundamentals, I think we are on the right track. And I see that this is a better equilibrium
#
than the equilibrium which had apathy there. This is at the level of the demand end. At the supply
#
end, a lot of the examples that you said are because we don't have, especially under the last
#
10 years or so, the mechanisms where parties spoke to each other and state and union governments
#
spoke to each other. What Dr. Rao calls intergovernmental bargaining mechanisms are
#
missing. So MSP, sorry, farm laws, also nothing done through parliament, you bring in an ordinance,
#
even I would say for NPS. We thought 2004, NPS is done, no protests, great, victory achieved.
#
But the real test of NPS would come when those people start retiring. The people who
#
were onboarded in NPS in 2004, when they start retiring is when the rubber hits the road. That's
#
the real test. So you actually had to have that political negotiation convincing to happen
#
after NPS came into place. But where, which government was talking about it,
#
were there talks done between Congress and BJP and the many parties that why this is required
#
for India's future? I don't think that negotiation happened. So a lot of the things at the supply end
#
are because of the way the policies have been implemented without aligning cognitive maps,
#
without at least getting people who think they are going to lose on board in one way or the other.
#
That is an important part of politics and policy, which we didn't do.
#
I will try to answer your second question when you were talking, trying to ask about the light
#
bulb moments, right? So one light bulb moment for me while studying this course was this framework
#
around what should the government do? Because that is a question which is always, that is the
#
central question in contention, right? Because nobody's thinking there is no government.
#
The whole point is that if there's a government, what are the things it should do? What are the
#
things it should not do, right? And all the fight is around that. But how do we think,
#
not only specific to an issue, specific to thinking in terms of, okay, what is this
#
structurally? Is this structurally, this kind of market failure, then the government can do this,
#
okay? And everything that is a market failure should also, is not necessarily that has to be
#
solved by government intervention of this type or that type, right? There are different kinds
#
of interventions that can happen. So that framework was interesting for me to understand
#
because what happens often in India is that when something is not working, as citizens,
#
our first impulse is to ask that the government should fix this. And recently, this is a very
#
recent example that happened in one of the WhatsApp groups that we are part of, where people were
#
supporting this new rule that had come up that in Maharashtra or in Mumbai, I'm not very sure of
#
that. I think it's the whole of Maharashtra. The school should, the primary school should begin
#
from 9 a.m. only, right? And a lot of people were actually supporting that, saying that, oh,
#
this is a good, this thing that children are, the children will get more time to sleep because some
#
schools begin at 7 a.m. in the morning, especially in Bombay, where there's a sharing of schools,
#
where in the morning shift, there is the primary school and then the second half, it is a secondary
#
school, right? So some children have to wake very early and it's not children need more sleep. Yes,
#
children need more sleep and so they can go to bed early also. And there are many, I mean,
#
that's something that the parent can take care of. It is their responsibility, right? And let the
#
school decide what is the time that works for them in that locality, in the specific location
#
that they are existing. Why is this mandate even required? There are some mandates that are required
#
that the government should be making about what a school should do or what it should not do, but
#
this is not one of them, right? And people were supporting it because they agreed with the decision,
#
right? But I may agree with this idea that children need to sleep more, but I do not agree with the
#
idea that the government needs to mandate that. If I, as a parent, like that school should begin
#
at 9, then I will send my child to a school which begins at 9, right? Government doesn't have to
#
make that decision for me. I think this kind of examples are there everywhere around us and I
#
feel like just thinking about them in a more structured fashion can help us come to a better
#
answer on why we should let government rule everything in our life. Yeah, and this is actually
#
a beautiful nuance point in the sense that I've often said that India's number one religion is
#
not Hinduism, it's a religion of government. My point is that when the state passes a dictat,
#
do not think of whether I agree with that, yeah, children should sleep more,
#
but think of the principle that coercion is being used. Do you want it to be okay for the
#
state to use coercion in this way, whether or not you agree with this issue, because then that
#
coercion is going to be used in other ways and we need to think broadly. So a few quick responses.
#
Ajay and I did this episode on the farm laws which kind of elaborates on the point you were
#
making Anupam, how it's good economics but terrible politics in the sense that they didn't
#
ordinance, they didn't put the processes in place where they were consulting everyone
#
and they treated the protesting farmers with such disdain and arrogance and the politics was
#
terrible but those farm laws were something that essentially in the policy community across
#
parties there was consensus on for like 20 years that this should be done, you know,
#
and anyway regardless of that I'll also say that one of the values about Takshashila that I've
#
always appreciated is that non-partisan element of it, like even when I was editing Prakriti,
#
our policy at the time was that we will not speak about parties or people, we'll speak about
#
policies and ideas and that is the only thing we will discuss. That I say anything about parties
#
and people which also I have stopped because why get into pangas and I've been an equal opportunity
#
offender there as well but you know stick to policies and ideas and then people can decide
#
for themselves and think sort of across those lines. The other thing that really strikes me is
#
that you know I've come to realize over the last few years that the discourse isn't as bad as I was
#
making it out to be, right, in the sense that there is a vocal minority of people who will take
#
extreme positions and who will be completely closed and they'll be in the echo chambers
#
but I believe that there is a silent majority which is open which is listening and that's who
#
you guys are for and they may never even express their support of these ideas because why get into
#
panga but the silent majority is completely open and we are speaking to them and you've got to
#
ignore the vocal minorities on either side and even within the silent majority I feel that there
#
is a sliver which you could call a silent minority within the silent majority which are the elites
#
who are the future deep state runners who really make a ton of difference who are the you know
#
reformers of tomorrow. Ajay and I did an episode of everything is everything called the reformers
#
which was you know sort of telling the story of the great reformers we've had and the thing is we
#
need more of them the ecosystem isn't rich enough but I'm glad that people like you are doing the
#
kind of work you're doing to sort of plant those seeds in terms of the needle moving in specific
#
policy terms do you guys have examples? Yeah I think there are quite a few that we've seen again
#
it's very difficult with a big caveat that we want to start with saying that it's very difficult
#
for attribution. No one can take credit yeah but where you've seen the needle move in a way you
#
would have liked it to move without necessarily saying hey humne kya. Yeah right so I think yeah
#
I mean for for instance let's just take a very simple thing right which happened quite recently
#
which is the government coming up with this entire lamp laptop import licensing thing they
#
put that out I don't think they really thought it through but they put it out got quite a bit of
#
backlash I think both Pranay and I had an op-ed out very quickly about it saying you know why
#
this does not work etc many other people wrote about it as well and I think soon they realized
#
the folly of that particular policy and they've you know just put it on the back burner maybe
#
some kind of face-saving thing it's a simple example but I mean it has deep consequences but
#
it's a simple example where they've backtracked and it's just saying that you know I think that's
#
not so much of the needle moving as much as saying that there is a constant kind of tug of war
#
that happens you know sometimes you win sometimes you lose but it's important to just have your
#
presence and state these things repeatedly over and over again I don't think I've made a single
#
new argument in that piece where I said why laptop import licenses are bad but
#
it's good to just make that again right again you might have influenced a few people but it's just
#
putting those ideas out there saying something like that is bad right we can also take some
#
larger kind of context right so where in places where Karnataka is something like you know their
#
regulatory approach towards technology and tech companies and startups where you know sometimes
#
you might read they might reach out to us and saying okay what should we do and we've given
#
inputs and you see at least some of those inputs going through and you know again the needles move
#
they've said okay let's at least create a regulatory sandbox where where you know we allow for greater
#
freedom and that's that's not bad there have been times when for instance I think yeah the labor
#
reform thing is good during the pandemic I think many state governments looked at that and thought
#
okay this is the opportunity to kind of relax some of the strict labor laws and many state
#
governments kind of followed suit which for me was a brilliant indicator that this clear understanding
#
within the government that those labor laws are not good the fact that they waited for an excuse
#
to you know kind of silently push through those labor reforms tells me that they understand that
#
the current set of labor reforms are not I mean labor laws are not necessarily great that it
#
requires reforms and yet probably you know the understanding that I took was that they're afraid
#
of the political economy aspect of it they probably according to me they overestimate the
#
the potential kind of political consequences of that but yet that is what they're scared of
#
so they I'm taking the message that they're in favor of those reforms but they're just afraid
#
of the political backlash but that moved we're seeing kind of interesting
#
forward steps something like the space sector which again Takshila has worked on
#
we've seen kind of privatization of of an area which probably you would have never expected I
#
mean that's a government monopoly you have ISRO and you said you know this is one of those things
#
where there's it's kind of fixed for life but we've seen that change happen we've seen them
#
being open to private entities maybe in the components maybe in some other parts I think
#
so you'll see various such spaces where you might see some back even for for example 2024 in the
#
just before the budget happened they said that they're going to reduce the import tariffs on
#
import duties on electronic items for me that was just a great indication so they're realizing that
#
if you want to be part of the global value chains you cannot have high import duties right I don't
#
know if it's a one-off I don't know if it is sustainable we have to see all of those big
#
caveats again but that was a good interesting nice piece of news which tells me that maybe there are
#
you know they're just awake to the fact that you can't have high import duties on areas where you
#
want to have a global presence so you can look at many of these things maybe it's again it's instead
#
of looking at grand kind of needle moving where suddenly the government wakes up and says okay
#
we're going to be libertarian we're going to not impose our will on people and we're going to have
#
free markets I think it's more individual small pieces of victories right so it's like that tug
#
of war you know some places you you go back in other places you move forward for me that's the
#
way I kind of look at this yeah I mean we are so far behind the production possibility frontier
#
in a sense in the sense there is so much to be done that in every sector there is one reform
#
which is akin to liberalization of it which can be done and it will take us in the right direction
#
in possibly every area that we can talk about talk about and they those things have happened
#
like Anupam mentioned in fact on the laptop monitoring scene it started with a quote unquote
#
ban this next day it was changed after it was announced and then it was watered down further
#
and now it's just some monitoring so clearly I mean someone at least would have opposed maybe
#
not the policy wrongs here but there would have been companies which would have made the case that
#
this will hurt your own efforts at build exporting and all that so that happens and I think the
#
biggest area in which we still don't have a good understanding is about trade policy in general I
#
think the fact that there can move there cannot be exports without imports is I think the most
#
heretical idea still within the government in many areas so when that happens I see it as a
#
as a big victory so all this even the mobile phone components first there were bans so
#
like we were discussing earlier every government has some sort of production linked incentive
#
schemes even the US has some industrial policies there in many governments across the world but
#
those industrial policies are not often coupled with barriers to trade in India that's the default
#
posture that it comes as a package first do import first do import bans restrictions and then give
#
support to your own quote unquote domestic producers and hope that this import substitution
#
will lead to you becoming fantastic exporters of that product we have seen that fail yet we keep
#
repeating that over and over again so when we I see some things happening on that front that oh
#
we are realizing that okay this is not the right way to go and import tariffs actually hurt our
#
own industry that is a big movement in my head so yeah I mean these are examples also for example
#
recently in a very limited way but private some private universities have been allowed to open
#
campuses in India again it's a very limited way but I think great competition more competition is
#
great yeah foreign universities sorry foreign private universities are allowed to set up
#
campuses in India which wasn't allowed until like I mean why would you not do that but
#
that again is a positive move so sometimes the fact that competition is important when that gets
#
internalized it makes me very happy also you can see from this entire idea of import substitution
#
as well the idea of import substitution 50 years ago was that it is a domestic player which has to
#
do import substitution but now you can see that that idea of import substitution has also moved
#
and now they are ready that okay it may be a foreign player which produces here that's fine
#
so you can see an evolution in that sense also so all the things we are talking about mobile phones
#
or cars we are not necessarily saying that it has to be an Indian player it is okay if there are
#
foreign players but they are making in India and selling in the world that again is a big move
#
in terms of the overt and window shift just a very quick kind of addition into the areas
#
where this is shifted I think is on just fiscal policy I recall the budgets you know quite a few
#
budgets going back where the the temptation to kind of do expansionary fiscal policy
#
with high fiscal deficit has been toned down right there's still a lot of wasteful expenditure
#
etc we can look at that but a couple of very interesting things happened which is that
#
so until about the 2020s our fiscal deficit numbers were very suspect right in fact it was
#
scarily getting into the kind of China statistics territory where you couldn't trust it a lot of
#
things was what we'd call as off-budget borrowings and a whole bunch of those things and I think
#
people in public finance have been shouting about the saying our fiscal deficit numbers are suspect
#
we can't really trust it and so on when the pandemic hit and there was obviously an you know
#
when the there's an expansionary fiscal policy where expenditures went up they used that
#
opportunity to kind of bring in all the off-budget borrowings onto the book so to speak right so it
#
meant that we had a much larger fiscal deficit as the number but it was a truer reflection of
#
what was actually happening and I thought that was a great kind of reform or I don't I can't
#
call it a reform but just a great move that happened which now at least you know the true
#
extent of our fiscal deficit right we're not lying about it or that we are not you know under false
#
kind of pretenses of that it's small etc and now they have a part towards fiscal consolidation
#
it's taking its time it's slow I would have you know obviously as a small government kind of the
#
thing I would like it to be a lot faster but I can very clearly see a directional change there
#
that budgets should be should try to be balanced there and they have a pathway towards it they're
#
trying to curb some of those things and even if you look at the kind of focus areas of expenditure
#
it is still capex by and large so even if they're saying that you know if we're going to borrow if
#
we're going to have fiscal deficit let it be for capex I think those are just again positive
#
directional changes so you know a little while back you were speaking and you used the phrase
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overton window and I thought of Salman Khan do you know why you don't know why I didn't think of him
#
as Salman Khan I didn't think of you as Salman Khan I thought of me as Salman Khan because Salman Khan
#
once said and a short while back I made a commitment on the show that if we use any jargon we must
#
demystify it so I'll demystify overton window for my listeners before we kind of before I get to my
#
next question which is related so the overton window is essentially the window of discussion
#
which is acceptable which is you know and it shifts from time to time so if there is something
#
outside the overton window on either side it sounds kind of ridiculous people just rebel against it
#
and the window is always shifting in your book you've you know given a beautiful example and
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it's drawn so well that that alone I think does a job where you've shown how for example the
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decriminalization of homosexuality which in the 80s I remember would have been outside the overton
#
window is now firmly within the overton window everybody agrees but gay marriage is still
#
outside the overton window and I feel that will come within the acceptable discourse and in a
#
different context I tell people that podcast may I shifted the overton window for length
#
because when I started one hour was like a deep dive today now that I'm doing eight hours nine
#
hours you know two three hours is acceptable nobody thinks of it as a big deal so this is my unseen
#
contribution to the world of podcasting by shifting the overton window but my question is
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about the work you do in terms of expanding the public consciousness of these ideas where I see
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this inherent tension in what you guys do that on the one hand a good way of shifting the overton
#
window is you go to the extreme right private roads for everyone as our friend Yazad Jal says
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you go to the extreme and then you come at first principles from there and because you go to the
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extreme ideas that are just outside the overton window suddenly seem much more acceptable
#
because you've made the extreme viewpoint right so that is one way of thinking about expanding
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the overton window while the other way is that no boss don't go too far people will stop listening
#
to you you know look at the low-hanging fruit which you can persuade people with look at the
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thing they are most likely to agree with you on and use that as a lever to nudge them forward
#
and as you know you guys are both you know public policy people where you're writing
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op-eds framing public policy you're also educators and in a sense I would say that at different times
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your role is both of these so how do you think about this how do you manage this
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tension between the two you know what are the kind of strategies you've evolved
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yeah I think for us it is more of the former that is we are trying to put new ideas into
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the public domain which might fully knowing that it might not get implemented but the fact that
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as overton window the insight from that is one of the ways of getting change is to actually put a
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radical idea into the public domain make a convincing case of it and maybe over time that
#
will shift right when people debate it people think about it and because our focus is more on
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the demand side of the public policy pipeline we do more of this so that's why even the areas
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that we choose we choose very carefully if some things are very obvious we don't get into it and
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we are our comparative advantage doesn't lie in making that incremental change happen because one
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we are not even in Delhi or we are not talking to the policymakers so people who are who are in
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committees people who want to see that change happen and know the government structure very
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well they are probably better suited to doing that incremental change so there's a role for both
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but for us the comparative advantage is just make a convincing case for an outlandish idea
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and then see where it goes for example Nitin and many others at Takshashila had a paper on
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how do you solve this Kaveri water dispute which happens every year and now we are in water shortage
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period again it will happen and we made this idea that you actually use economic economic way to
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look at how you should allocate this water instead of these court mandates which happen every year
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and the tribunal mandates now this is a taking the idea of you know treating water as a commodity
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through pricing is quite a heretical idea but we've made the case for it and hopefully others
#
will probably find ways to make it more palatable to the government but we don't play that game so
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our idea is just advocated many people had also advocated for example about 100 percent FDI in
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defence long back i think 2008-9 or so people from Takshashila and you have seen that move it's not
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100 percent in many areas but it has moved in the direction that you would want so for us it is
#
just make a convincing case for an idea that whose time hasn't come yet yeah so i don't know i i
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probably have a slightly different take because i don't think anything that he said is truly
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radical in the sense that i think there was a very common sense i'm going to put you on the spot
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what is truly radical i don't know i don't think i'm truly something has to be truly radical i
#
would say get i don't know get the state out of most things but even that doesn't seem to be
#
radical that's what i'm trying to say i mean for me for example i would say the state has no business
#
in education it can subsidize but not run schools so i'll tell you a radical idea which in fact i
#
released an episode today with yugang goel and he gave me a radical idea he said that there should
#
be no elections but you choose your leaders by drawing lots right and he made an advanced
#
argument for it and now that is truly radical you know another radical idea which deepak vs
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made a few a few days ago with me which i absolutely loved and it's a thought experiment
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he's come up with and his question was that what if instead of iit entrance exams what you do now
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instead of that you have swimming tests because there is enough coastline in india
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and you have a swimming exam and whoever is the fastest over a particular period of time or the
#
longest over a particular whatever you you put them into it and he made a detailed argument for
#
why the results would be as good you know and of course the system would degrade because next year
#
all the kota colleges would have swimming classes and you'd have coaches and speedos on billboards
#
and all that those are radical this is not radical anupam i expect better give me something that's
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what i'm saying i don't think it's one radical idea that we had discussed i am forgetting it now
#
the quadratic voting one and there was one more that we had discussed it is not our idea or any
#
such thing but there is a book if i do not i think it's called radical markets yeah yeah that is
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quite radical yeah which it has this these ideas about quadratic voting about if you can give as
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many you you can actually save up your votes and you don't need to vote on every topic but like
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so if you are very very strongly feeling for one particular topic then you save up your votes for
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that and you vote for it with full rigor so and you don't you have to do it in quadratic fashion so
#
for one vote you have to give one but for two votes you have to give four points and for three
#
for nine like that so like you really have to put your resources in it to be showing your backing
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but so these were some of the radical ideas we had one puljabazi on it but yeah but i think see
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for a policy analyst these kinds of ideas are great i mean we can have debate about that but
#
when your role is a policy analyst you are thinking about making that policy change happen so obviously
#
you're not thinking about okay changing india's governance system obviously yeah that's a meta
#
change that you would want to but when you're thinking about a specific question when we think
#
about overton window the overton window is the range of possibilities on that particular policy
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it's not so much about you know changing india's political system itself so there some of these
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ideas that we are talking about at the policy level they'll still be very radical and then you
#
have to make a convincing case if you go and say yeah the whole problem is india's electoral system
#
itself doesn't work i mean yeah sure but how will you there is a role for it but not for a policy
#
analyst because that's not going to make things move i want to add another angle to what we are
#
discussing so they have answered in terms of what a policy analyst would do right but my answer is
#
more specific to what a writer or a person who's trying to comment about these things would do
#
right and so i was trying to make different kinds of art forms and there was a short period of time
#
where i tried to make one panel comics also but i realized that you know if you have to make one
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panel comics you essentially have to make an extreme point of view right you have to take
#
and and it it would be understood there would be a lot of context that would also go into it and
#
it would be understood by two kinds of people who are on your side completely and it will also be
#
understood by the other side because they know that you're making a snarky remark on them
#
right but sometimes the middle is still the confused set of people who really do not know
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they have not made up their mind right so if you are making a single panel comic then you are not
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really changing anything in the sense that you are making a statement yes you are maybe moving some
#
people from these sides but if you want to speak to the people who are in the middle and then
#
maybe help them create help them form some kind of opinion or at least tell them about what can be
#
one of the opinions i'm never trying to say that this is the only opinion that exists in the world
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but i'm trying to present my point of view or my opinion and if i have to do it in a nuanced
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fashion it has to be a slightly longer coming i mean at least this is how it works for me i'm
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sure other people have different formats that they work for them but i i felt that this is and i feel
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like i would find more value in talking to people while being centered around a topic and speaking
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to every kind of people and sometimes i may change people's mind or i mean not i don't know
#
but at least i'm trying an effort there is an effort there's a possibility of that happening
#
if you are doing it in the middle versus and centering it around issue or rather than doing
#
it middle or this thing is not my main thing but centering it around issue around reasoning on why
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we are saying what we are saying i think that has a bigger possibility of changing somebody's opinion
#
at some point of time rather than taking that just making a remark and just going there
#
you are splitting people but i don't know how much we are really bringing changes that's what i felt
#
for myself i'm this is not to say that i i do not enjoy the other kind of artworks that happen i do
#
actually like some of the statements that people make and they're quite brave statements sometimes
#
so i do appreciate that but i i feel for me this middle path works for me that's a fantastic
#
insight and i want to double click on that also because it would seem to me that the one panel
#
comic in a sense is the art equivalent of twitter with this 140 character or 280 character limit
#
that there is no space for nuance and therefore i would not really sorry i cut you off because
#
there is there are some amazing rk laxman comics from those times right you see them and then
#
they they are also they also have nuance so i would not necessarily reduce them so much
#
is what i wanted to just add but yeah please carry on i feel and i'm just thinking aloud here
#
but i feel that if that rk laxman could not have done a one panel comic on price controls that got
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the point across i don't think it's possible to do a one panel you can do a one pan like the reason
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we love laxman so much and he's such a master is that and all the great artists in a sense do this
#
that they express things that we already know and feel but we never put in words or we never
#
thought of it like that they make it real and they make it explicit and laxman did that so when he
#
speaks about the plight of the common man or when he you know like the oppressiveness of the state
#
is not something that people will talk about using language or analysis but everybody
#
experiences it and when you see a glimmer of it in an rk laxman cartoon that spark of recognition
#
comes up but the harder task which i don't think laxman would have attempted or he would have maybe
#
attempted it in a different format and succeeded magnificently is what you guys have tried in your
#
book keep price control somehow you know trade deficit somehow etc etc and i think that's really
#
hard and i think the reason the discourse in a place like twitter is so incredibly polarized
#
and shallow and why you know snark is incentivized because mocking somebody is always really easy
#
right uh but i mean snark is really the lowest form of discourse and your one panel comic or your
#
you know tweet and there are some great tweeters also by the way i mean i i spend a lot of time
#
on twitter more than i should but i would certainly spend some of it anyway because
#
once you curate your feed as the best minds in the world thinking aloud for your benefit
#
but deeper discourse is not possible so tell me a little bit about how you've thought about forms
#
in the course of your work because like you said you have tried the one panel comic you've just
#
done the single illustration as well like you did for the mukulika episode you've you know you did
#
that strip for them which you sent to anupam and pranay at the time of after doing the course
#
now you've done the book so what are the insights that you've got during this period
#
about the form itself and what is possible with it and you know uh what your approach
#
towards it can be it is also about my evolution as an artist so i began at some point where
#
honestly i had no training this i have absolutely no idea about what i'm doing when i started off
#
so that's one of the reason why my the medium that i'm using has changed and part of it is
#
also figuring out what is my voice what is right and i think that happens only after you have
#
written enough so i started off writing about very silly comics i made a lot of comics about
#
introversion and being a bookworm right because that was my weird thing that i was right i was
#
i'm generally a socially awkward person is how i see myself so so i started writing about those
#
but then slowly i evolved from there and that is that was no longer that interesting for me so i
#
was looking at different topics and then i just went ahead with okay what are the topics that
#
interest me and while doing all of this i came across other people's artwork also so where i
#
came across this very beautiful comic written by varun grover and illustrated by i'm forgetting
#
his name so so this comic is called karejwa it's a very very long form comic and very beautifully
#
illustrated i have to recall the illustrator's name but it's right ankit kapoor yes yes ankit
#
kapoor ankit kapoor sumit kumar yeah so karejwa is this beautiful comic that is written by varun
#
grover and illustrated by ankit kapoor and sumit kumar sumit kumar runs this platform called
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bakarmaks where he has posted it so this was a very incredibly incredibly long comic which i had
#
never seen before and it was so fascinating it was like a storytelling that was it was almost
#
like a narration that was being done and i was totally engaged in that so i felt i got really
#
fascinated by that as one of the things and then there was another comic that sumit had made when
#
he had talked about harishankar parsai okay that was another because he was talking about
#
a very indian form of art he was talking about a very indian topic something that we all had
#
known and he had talked about so i had never seen a comic about a writer or an author you know
#
so i thought this is a completely different genre this is a different kind of topics that these guys
#
are handling and they are doing it very well so i thought okay what can i do in this space and
#
what stories can i talk tell in this space right and so when i started thinking about these stories
#
then some of my own stories and my experiences came through so i think this is a common experience
#
with most people that everybody starts writing about themselves because this is a subject that
#
you know so you write about yourself so then as you evolve you learn that okay you should make
#
it a little bit more than that so you take yourself and then you try to wrap it up in
#
some other story and then you mix some fact and fiction and then you create something else so that
#
is your evolution as an artist so i think this is slowly that happened and at some point when
#
again sumit was very supportive of my work when i sent him my work for the first time
#
so he decided he published it so i got very i got good feedback and i got very enthusiastic
#
about doing this so i said every month i'll make one long form comic and i did not decide the
#
format it was it used to come based on what is it that i want to tell if it needs five panels then
#
five panels it needs 10 panels 10 panels so that way i kept on trying out different kinds of things
#
i tried different styles also because till that point i but in doing all of this for some amount
#
of time is where i figured that this is the this is my voice this is the format in which works this
#
is my process so i i got used to doing certain things in a certain way and but i keep on i
#
still i do not think any of this is a fixed thing i look at it as okay if i'm trying to tell this
#
story what does it need and then i begin from there so for this particular comic book again i
#
think i i thought of it in terms of chapters i made them into chapters and then every chapter
#
is more or less an individual chapter so it was like i'm making 15 comics but they all have to
#
tie together because they are on this set of themes and we had decided the themes before so
#
we had decided the whole outline for the book before we began with this process but then when
#
i was dealing with it it was almost like okay this month i am going to do these two chapters
#
and this is what i need to read about and compartmentalize it and just chase that one
#
chapter when i'm doing it i actually did not even chase the whole book at the same time i was like
#
this week i have to finish this so that was how i was going with it i want to also you know ask
#
you about your evolution as an artist because you know the book was really delightful in the sense
#
that it is perfect in terms of there is no clutter and yet it is not too minimal you know it's just
#
the right amount of detail the right amount of shading the choices that you made and and there's
#
that uniform uniform voice through the book so tell me about the evolution of your style
#
to that level we're just thinking in terms of like the casual reader will not notice it what
#
are you putting in the frame what are you not putting in the frame all of those choices that
#
you make so tell me a little bit about that journey that you've taken to you know to building that
#
voice as you said and understanding that this much is right and no more and making those kind of
#
choices i think it comes from me being more of a writer than an illustrator so i call myself a
#
writer first because this is i have been writing since i was in eighth standard you know that so
#
people have always appreciated whatever i've written and i used to see myself as a writer since
#
i mean not in the sense that anybody was paying me for anything but this is a self-image that you
#
make of yourself right so that was always there illustrator honestly i don't know from where this
#
thing came to be honest i used to just draw sometimes i used to make sketches of my teachers
#
in at the back of your pages and things like that but it is just very silly things that you do at
#
school you know but when i started drawing this somehow it felt that oh i'm having fun doing this
#
you know so making this kind of an artwork and it seems to be working for me but then i started
#
trying to look at different kinds of what other artists are doing and i'm i'm not doing that much
#
this kind of exploration right now as i was doing do it in the early days because i was
#
still in this mode of what all is there in this universe right and so i came across this very
#
interesting written it's like a visual essay of sorts again a scrolling format where i think
#
it's written by sam waltzman and he had made this very beautiful long-form comic about land you know
#
how the whole world is pretty much organized around you know people's fight for land and
#
all conflicts can be you know led to how we see land and how we want to use it and how we
#
exploit it and so it's a very lyrical and something about it that got really i got attracted to and i
#
thought you know let me try to use this kind of you can i make something of this but you know
#
on a topic that i like so this that time i was actually i have a friend called sidharth who is
#
who has walked 3000 kilometers along the river ganga he's trying to work to bring awareness about
#
issues of related to rivers and stuff like that right so so i was following his work for some
#
time and i thought you know whatever i was learning from there maybe i can use that into this
#
essay and create this kind of a long form so that was another experiment and i think it was one of
#
the most beautiful things that i have drawn so far because it came from a place of very it was
#
something that i was following for more than two years and it came from this very authentic place
#
i had no reason to make it nobody had asked me to do it but i just made it right i tried to send it
#
to some publications also foreign publications also they liked it but they said oh we do not have
#
everybody has their own set of constraints you know so after a point i felt like many people
#
said we like it but they were like oh but it doesn't form fill into our format it doesn't
#
so i was a bit disheartened by that also when people were like i was like okay this all of
#
these things are going on a on a digital place why does it not fit in your format honestly
#
like this is just gatekeeping is yeah maybe i was just explaining myself but anyways so then again
#
i sent it to sumith so sumith had published it finally so like that i was trying with different
#
things and i think voice is something that just evolves i don't think you can try to be anybody
#
else i think at some point i figured this i should write the way it comes to me i should not try to
#
over engineer and try to sound like this person or that person i felt now and now i'm like i'm also
#
going to not worry so much about grammar or words i use if some new word comes into my mind i should
#
use it if some new structure comes in mind to my mind i should use it it should make sense to me
#
if it doesn't make sense or it doesn't make sense from there to the reader yes of course that is
#
the feedback you have to take but you should play with it you should not feel so restricted that
#
every time grammarly you don't have to check it and write it right you can you can play with
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the words so that's how i think i think about it in a very loose fashion for this particular book
#
the approach that i followed was to think of it as there are many other people who are going to
#
look at it and they will tell me if it is wrong so i do not have to first censor myself and i
#
do not have to feel too attached to it so i will draw what comes to me very organically and i will
#
put the best version i can put forth without worrying about is this coming to not overthink
#
it basically right so and i will not be very what is the word attached to it okay if somebody comes
#
and tells me that this doesn't work if you tell me this example is not working i will change it
#
if an editor comes i was actually when i went with this mind that if the editor comes and tells
#
me this 50 of this book even 100 of the book is bullshit you need to write it again i will write
#
it again okay so thankfully that didn't happen because that would be a lot of work for me but i
#
think that kind of detachment helped me get over this fear of i have to make it perfect i don't
#
have to make it perfect i can come back tomorrow and i can edit it nobody's reading it today that's
#
very comforting actually that nobody's reading it today so i wrote it and then if whenever i
#
had doubts i have come to come back to some chapters again and said okay this chapter i
#
don't like you go back and you edit that's okay but a lot of them were actually quite okay in the
#
first pass itself there were edits as as and when they told me that okay this this doesn't seem to
#
be reading well or this can be interpreted in a wrong fashion or this is inaccurate then i would
#
go and change those things of course so those were the things in which so i think this what
#
worked for me in writing this book is not having this attachment abhi i have made it it should not
#
be you know it's like i cannot change it no i can change if there is something wrong i can edit it i
#
can correct it and i think some feedback that i got before i started this one i got some advice
#
from sumit on how i should pursue this project and i asked him in terms of coloring what to do
#
with the coloring should i keep it black and white because this is a important like this is
#
a bit of a serious topic i don't want to make it kiddish so that's where he gave me this insight
#
that we always think in term of black and white or color but there is a middle path which is you use
#
sparing colors i think that was a very useful insight and i should thank him for that but
#
yes so i think i took it and then somehow i like these color combinations so i just went with it
#
because my i know that my artwork is a bit more flat so without the color pop it would have
#
seemed very very flat with a little bit of color it has some pop to it which is working for the
#
book i mean the insight is great but i think it's also well executed and just very tasteful i
#
kind of liked it and another thing that impressed me about the book is the element of show don't
#
tell now it might seem weird to some people show don't tell because of course images hai to show
#
but what i mean is that right at the start of the book where you talk about community you're
#
actually showing a scene where a last ball six is required and somebody hits a six and everybody is
#
celebrating and to me that show don't tell that is magnificent rather than talk about community
#
and have a drawing with many people you are actually creating you're recreating that community
#
feeling with something that everybody knows right so how much of that was like a conscious effort
#
and how much of it was already baked into your consciousness because that's how you learned
#
about these ideas in the first place like when you thought of craft you know what were the sort of
#
like was this one of the parameters that went into the storytelling and what were like the other
#
parameters that you thought about consciously like i'll only notice one or two of these but
#
there must be so much else that you're thinking about behind the scenes so take me through that
#
journey yeah i think one one of the things to think that i think while making it first of all
#
it should come out interesting and it should come out it should be clear to everyone what i'm
#
trying to do it should not miss be misinterpreted is was one of my worries so that was one of the
#
main things but in terms of whether show or tell i think that is a judgment that you take as you
#
go panel by panel and you think okay does this work so sometimes so i do spend some time while
#
while i i first write it down and it comes to me with this visual in my head whenever i writing
#
it so i write it and then in the brackets i keep the visual that comes in my mind so i have
#
something in my on my paper already before i begin my panelling and everything and then i
#
think in terms of page by page okay how will i i just start elaborating it as it goes and sometimes
#
you realize oh no no no this this is too and in fact sometimes you get that feedback also that
#
this is too literal right and so sometimes your your mind gives you that feedback while you are
#
drawing it and sometimes you get that as a feedback from your co-authors or your editor in terms of
#
that so i think this is a process that you constantly keep a watch on what you are doing
#
and constantly i actually edit a lot while i'm doing i'm drawing it like i once i've drawn
#
it's done but there is a constant editing process that happens while i am making it so i think
#
that process only you figure out what what is working or what is not working i want to dig much
#
deeper into this but we'll take a quick commercial break and for this break anupam i have a task for
#
you and that task is come up with a truly radical policy solution don't give me the shit what state
#
should get out of this and that's no longer radical we've moved the overton window enough
#
so you know you have 10 minutes to think about something truly radical and on the other side
#
of the break we will discuss your radical idea and much more about the book because
#
there are so many other things that i'm going to talk about
#
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
#
and an online community has now sprung up of all my past students we have workshops a newsletter
#
to showcase the work of students and vibrant community interaction in the course itself
#
through four webinars spread over four weekends i share all i know about the craft and practice
#
of clear writing there are many exercises much interaction and a lovely and lively community
#
at the end of it the course costs rupees 10 000 plus jst or about 150 dollars if you're
#
interested head on over to register at india uncut dot com slash clear writing that's india
#
uncut dot com slash clear writing being a good writer doesn't require god-given talent just a
#
willingness to work hard and a clear idea of what you need to do to refine your skills i can help you
#
welcome back to the scene in the unseen i'm still chatting with khyati anupam and pranay
#
about their wonderful book we the citizens and my attention is first drawn you know not first
#
drawn my attention is drawn to this wonderful panel which unfortunately i failed to notice
#
the nuance of it that you pointed out during the break khyati which is on page 105 all readers go
#
to page 105 where there's this beautiful panel of a marketplace where all the signs on the stores
#
are written in different languages and that is a detail that i completely missed and that's an
#
example of the kind of detail that is in this book like it is you know so thoughtful and well
#
thought out and all of that so tell me a little bit about that because that's also such a great
#
example of sure don't tell right like and how and a lot of these details i feel nobody would notice
#
most people would not even notice them but you're doing them because you know it's it's the art
#
even if only you do it you want to do it so and i'll i'll i'll before you answer that question
#
this reminded me of the musician rubinstein have you heard of rubinstein anupam you're going to see
#
a bethoven concert this evening you never heard of rubinstein okay so rubinstein was a great
#
musician of some sort uh even i have don't know much more than that because i've just heard this
#
anecdote so rubinstein once said that you know if i don't practice for one day only i know if i don't
#
practice for two days the critics know if i don't practice for three days everybody knows and the
#
kind of artists i respect are in that one day category where they will not even let the one
#
day happen and you seem to be in that category where these little things matter even if no one
#
notices them so tell me a little bit about you know your approach towards this art especially
#
when you're doing a long book like this the temptation must be keep it simple keep it easy
#
don't make it too complicated i did an episode with manjula padmanabhan recently and she of
#
course read the comic strip suki for many years and all of that and she would say that she would
#
choose the characters and suki according to how easy they are to draw because she would know
#
and you know you take shortcuts like that so what were the trade-offs you faced and what were the
#
approaches and what are the little things you've done in this book that none of us would notice
#
yeah so thank you for those flattering words i don't know if i deserve them but
#
so one way to make it interesting i thought was to infuse a lot of pop culture and i think
#
like i think it's just about that i like to observe so many things and i feel like i don't
#
really know what to do with it you know so i thought finally there is this one movement where
#
whatever i've observed in this world there is i can use it and apply it somewhere so i think that
#
was the reason where everywhere there's a little bit of a nod to the bob dillon song or and and
#
that there is one very that panel i also like very much where it's a yin and yang between a
#
a grandmother and a the girl the grandmother is telling her that
#
something to that effect is what that the grandmother is saying in that panel and the
#
girl is saying the times are changing you know i think i just thought that this is
#
yeah it's a cute thing to add to make it a little more interesting you know so i mean some of these
#
things actually came organically i i can't say that i have overthought about it or have thought
#
that this should go there it's just that it comes and i if i find joy in that moment then i
#
think that even the reader will find it interesting that's the marker that i i apply
#
let's cut it short that basically is a message from kathy to her grandmother but written through
#
the book okay yes but yeah so you'll find so kathy will deny this but she's kind of narcissistic in
#
the sense that the main character is based on herself you can see it it is entirely it's a
#
self-portrayal and of course that's the hero of the story he's always has the best punch lines
#
and you know the big insight comes from that character and so on so kathy has done that and
#
we've all just allowed for that obviously no no i have i have an explanation for this because my
#
leg has been pulled many times on this so i came came with a good answer on this so so the three
#
characters that i selected for as the main characters so there is no story between them
#
is such they did because the story is not about them they are representative of the indian of
#
all of us right and they just happen to be so the first two characters they happen to be
#
a girl and a boy or a man and a woman it doesn't like their gender is not really that important
#
but i wanted to present both the sides and they don't have any religion they don't really have
#
any names because they are it doesn't matter whatever their names are it doesn't matter to
#
the book so and then i wanted so the but two characters were not enough because you know you
#
want to have a joke or something then there needs to be something more so i thought three third one
#
and third one i thought of an economics professor somehow because because i thought that there was
#
a lot of exposition required in some of the chapters related to economics where we are teaching a lot
#
some of the things right so i thought it would be interesting that a teacher character comes in
#
between and gives us some you know so that would that would be an and it can also be a character
#
on which we can pull a little bit of he can make a snarky joke on the other people now
#
the dynamics that works is now because this is a professor character right so he's also a character
#
of authority right so between now the girl and the boy if i cannot make the girl to be the weaker
#
character because then there is this two men who are constantly telling things to the woman which
#
i found to be very awkward so i thought it's just natural that she would get the the better lines
#
but there is there is no such thing as it is it is not me that per se at all it is not that the
#
boy's Ranupam's character character or any such thing because it is just it is it is written in
#
a way that it the conversation should make sense it should be funny and interesting and the ideas
#
that any of those characters can be actually ideas that have come from either pranay or anupam
#
or it some of them are mine so it's a mishmash of that and nobody is really there is no autobiographical
#
thing going on in this i would i would like my listeners to totally observe what's going on here
#
that a woman has been given some prominence and immediately mr anupam is saying how can how can
#
this happen man should be anupam why this is this is shocking my my next i'm kidding obviously it's
#
not shocking i expected so so my next question i love the title of the book i love the title
#
of the book because you know it's obviously playing on we the people but this is we the citizens
#
and i love that because i keep ranting about how indians have made themselves into subjects rather
#
than citizens and the mindset needs to change so tell me a little bit about the title how did you
#
brainstorm how did you kind of come i mean what's that the thinking the title came from pranay so
#
maybe pranay can talk about it yeah no a lot of it the framework that we have used in the book is
#
again the one which we had also used in missing in action about the state society market so we
#
were looking at the title which conveys all three vertices of that triangle appropriately right and
#
so we brainstormed on a few options and also because the book is a lot about the republic
#
as such not specifically about the constitution but the fact that the republic is something we
#
should strengthen uphold not just the democracy part of it so what would send this message was a
#
question for us and that's where we thought we the citizens has that collective part of a
#
samaj which we talk about it is talking about the citizen which is also the individual here and of
#
course it the context is the state so that sort of fit all these three arms and that's why we
#
went ahead with that of course the working title was something on called gana tantra for republic
#
and i vetoed it because i i would have trouble pronouncing it for the third time consecutively
#
so i forget pronouncing gana tantra for the entirety of this episode you've been referring
#
to khyati as kathy listeners will wonder kathy khyati no no but my pronunciations are terrible
#
and here's how i think about pronunciations very serious point that when people get snobbish about
#
pronunciations i get pissed off whenever i hear someone pronounce a word especially a complicated
#
word badly i feel it reflects well on them it means that they haven't been in those circles
#
where the word is being spoken a lot but they have actually through the dint of their hard
#
work and their initiative they have read about it a lot and they've internalized the word
#
but simply never spoken it i think extra credit must be given to that person doesn't excuse you
#
but or me for that matter because i just get so much wrong you know i did this episode with irfan
#
sahab recently and irfan sahab was you know going on and on about arey aaj kal ke bache ye
#
pronouns karte hu isko ye kaita hai usko wo kaita hai and i was so thinking that irfan sahab i don't
#
think you've heard many of my episodes because i am like culprit number one and i also must while
#
we are on pronunciations i must tell you this ira pandey anecdote that she was once at the jaipur
#
lit fest and at the jaipur lit fest mr william dalrimple was referring to bahadur shah zafer
#
zafer zafer bahadur shah zafer so she went to him and she told him that it is not zafer it is
#
zafer it rhymes with duffer and i think that is like the best put down ever like ye actually
#
apko t-shirt banana chahiye with dalrimple's face on it it rhymes with duffer so leaving
#
leaving that aside let's get back to your book i'm also curious about
#
you know how three authors like i'm curious about how two authors do this but i'm especially curious
#
about how three authors you know collaborate on something like this like what are the brainstorming
#
sessions like do you divide up work in a particular way how does you know take you know make me a fly
#
on the wall in your early meetings where you're deciding about structure where you're deciding
#
about tone and so on and so forth so i think we would i think it was clear to us that a lot
#
of things that we had learned from gccp was going to be a good framework because i thought okay this
#
is many things it can unify but then we also thought about okay what else can come as part
#
of it so one of the things that we did early was to set up like a recurring meeting for us to meet
#
every 15 days initially it was seven days then we made it 15 days and so that where we can just
#
meet and discuss about it and my role was more to ask questions and their role was more to answer
#
me in terms of okay this is what we can do so sometimes if i was not very clear about
#
should we be including this topic or not does it make sense to you so they would
#
they would have actually a stronger opinion because they do this on a daily basis and
#
on a very regular basis so they would have very clear answers and insights on what they want to
#
do so that would add clarity to my point of view because sometimes i would also be in two minds
#
things like that right then sometimes they would give me additional readings okay you should go
#
and read about this or they have already written about something so they would say go and read this
#
i have written about this so all of those were the feedback that i got and then i had to
#
read and digest it for me to make sense out of it and the voice was clearly i mean i thought we
#
thought that it will not work if they write it and then i was going to illustrate it because
#
it's not a medium that they are working in no it's totally my medium so my job was to convert that
#
so but their job was to make sure that i do not lose accuracy in this process and i do not
#
misinterpret things or oversimplify things in this process so that was the sink we had to make and
#
every time i did know okay i didn't know what is the example to be given for this situation then
#
they would tell that you know this is something that can go here things like that you want to
#
add yeah pretty much yeah kathy took the lead on a lot of these things and because there is a lot
#
of economics that's where anupam took the lead where there was no economic sometimes i took the
#
lead in terms of what content could be shared but none of this could have been possible without
#
the gcpp course and takshashila's course material which already existed so we just built on top of
#
that with some examples so kathy went through all the webinars again the recordings and tried to
#
interpret that that was useful and i have collaborated this is the third book i have
#
collaborated on so always these kinds of meetings really help every week or so then that has an
#
anchoring point that you're thinking through the week about the book in one way or the other and
#
then you have a focal point to discuss that and get those ideas across and yeah we did that over
#
a year or so and yeah that's how the book fell yeah if if anything this collaboration changed
#
my mind on certain things before this book i would very rarely collaborate with anybody else i mean
#
even my writings like pranay would often write op-eds with others collaborate and write i never
#
liked it because i like again you know my voice my it's a particular structure i follow something
#
i wake up at 4 a.m finish it off in one go whatever i have different processes i don't
#
like collaborating but i think this book showed me that there is an opportunity that somebody else
#
can do all the work and i can get credit for free and why not take that yeah right so i think this
#
is what so anybody else who wants to do the work and give me credit i'm up for collaboration we
#
can do more of these things but yeah i think it just puts in the best part about something like
#
this is that i think you can hold each other accountable on days that i mean very rarely would
#
Cathy be the Cathy you actually got it right the first time now you're thinking too hard
#
i've been practicing this i'm not even listening to you guys anymore because i'm practicing how
#
to pronounce in your head yeah don't worry it's fine i'm used to everybody saying me with different
#
names so it's okay okay but um there'd be many days you know where one of us would not be
#
available or we're not done the review etc but i think this is just a way to keep each other
#
accountable and we do so as she mentioned i think large parts of the storyboard the conceptualization
#
of how to put in or how to express those ideas all Cathy's we would brainstorm initially on what
#
are the examples to use then she would again put that in a kind of whatever storyboard format
#
etc and then that would come out and then we do a review and say okay maybe this is not working
#
maybe we can use some other example or etc i think that was generally the process which meant
#
she did all the work we were just no but i would say that actually panam anupam is sorry anupam
#
is very good at storyboarding he catches my he would give me very critical things he said
#
you need to end it with something like this so he would give me very critical feedback that
#
sometimes you know you are missing on your own and you get that and i think pranay is very good at
#
filtering out a topic and saying this is in two lines this is what i want to communicate in this
#
chapter so if i can catch it from him and then then i know okay this is what i need to explain
#
then i can build rest of it on it so i think that clarity always helps and if i was left off left
#
to do this on myself i would have probably just wasted a lot of time in self-doubt and figuring
#
out is this right you know it's too much of questioning here there's somebody who's telling
#
you no no this is okay this is you can go ahead i think that has a lot of value that somebody is
#
showing trust and they are showing you the path okay they will tell you they will give you proper
#
feedback it's not that you are left alone by yourself so that that has a lot of value and
#
that is why we were able to make progress it took a lot more than a year actually but yeah i think
#
i love what you said about keeping each other accountable and i think one of the benefits of
#
collaboration must be that you don't have to be self-driven and self-doubt is really not a problem
#
both of those you know so like you said the imposter syndrome can't come in because
#
if anupam says the chapter on economics is perfect then it's perfect you know that's the end of the
#
story yeah you don't have to overthink it and equally you know if you have like i'm presuming
#
you had regular zoom calls at regular whatever so that's another way of kind of making sure that
#
you don't let the other two people down is this why pranay all your books are co-written with
#
people yeah what anupam said someone else does the writing i take the credit no no i see i see
#
you know everyone listening to this knows that that's bs your productivity is incredible you
#
know i've got to tell people that there was a couple of days back i happened to be in office
#
finishing work late and there was some other meeting that went on that meeting got over
#
and then there were a bunch of takshashila people including our man anupam in a very snazzy blazer
#
and all that one did you have yeah you had a blazer and we were standing in this tall table
#
at the entrance of takshashila and for 10 minutes seven people tried to bitch about you but all that
#
came out of their mouths were good things things like that guy writes too many books
#
yaar pressure on us is crazy etc etc so sort of a testament to the incredible regard that you're
#
sort of held in i have a question about the tone also you know we you mentioned your grandmother
#
khyati and then anupam also mentioned your grandmother my grandmother i have never met
#
my grandmother by the way ah there you go so but i will nevertheless add to the list
#
and uh so when i teach my writing course i have this thing called the naniji test
#
and that is for non-fiction writers writing for a large audience like op-eds and all that
#
and the point i basically make is that your naniji should be able to understand the piece
#
and finish it if she doesn't it's not your naniji's fault it's your fault and the idea
#
being not too condescent to naniji's or the other example i take is like your teenage sibling but
#
the idea being that an intelligent layperson should be able to understand it no matter how
#
complex the subject is your job is to make naniji understand and this book of course flows so
#
beautifully i think everyone would understand it etc etc and there are places where like this one
#
place where you used a graph for something and then immediately the next panel says that oh that
#
graph is so boring and then they and then you have a storyline which kind of makes that point clear
#
so how did you sort of arrive at that tone because it feels that there is a danger there that you
#
can go off on one side where you're too simplistic or you can say are some words people will know
#
fiscal deficit people will know you know so how do you arrive at that balance and a question for
#
really for you about the book but also all of you about your teaching that how do you arrive at the
#
balance of where to pitch it i think but it is a judgment that you have to take as you write
#
the tone i think the tone is probably the kind of tone that i have in a lot of my writings where
#
it is this some some people may find it too sugary or too positive in many things
#
but i am a i am generally a slightly more optimistic person so i think that kind of
#
flows from my own self and in terms of using the jargon and all i think that is a conscious
#
thing that you think about okay if this if this is a word i use would people understand it and
#
otherwise if i think they will not then i should put some explanation in some form or shape so
#
that's what we try to do and the whole idea was to take a complicated thing and break it down so
#
and i think i like doing that like i like taking something which i feel like it's i don't know
#
what it means but then you can i draw it and make it explicit and just if this abstract idea can be
#
drawn and can be made more understandable so i i find that challenge so i think there's a lot
#
of thinking just in making sure that you are being self-aware okay if i have used these words
#
should i use and sometimes the feedback comes from them in terms of okay this is you should
#
break it down or you should explain this in more detail so there were there were some topics which
#
were a little more theoretical which i think needed more explanation so they also told me
#
that this you have wrapped up too soon so you need to maybe explain it a bit more
#
so that kind of helped can you give me an example yeah so one example about the government's toolkit
#
right it's a very it's got one two three many things right so that's where where
#
i was explaining it in one example but then we felt that we needs a little bit more explanation
#
so you then expand on that example a little bit more or you put more wordings to then explain
#
that okay if if it's not very understandable from the graphic itself then at least the
#
words would do the job so you play on those things yeah and i think you i would just try
#
to read it myself and some my my test is that i write it today and then i come back to it
#
tomorrow and see if i it still makes sense to me and sometimes maybe after a week if it still
#
flowing for me then i think i assume that it will flow for other people also so because in a week
#
you have some distance between what you have drawn today versus because sometimes you can get
#
caught in your overthinking and you would you would think that it's making sense but it doesn't
#
and you also take feedback so my my daughter is was about 11 years old when i was writing this and
#
she's quite a good reader so she reads a lot so i used to get her and ask her can you read it
#
and sometimes she will even she will even give me feedback about some panels she'll say mama this
#
drawing i don't know what you have drawn i'm not sure so i will take some feedback from there as
#
well so i think i had my i didn't have my grandmother but i had my daughter to give me feedback yes
#
so you know you you mentioned the government toolkit ajay sha and i have done a bunch of
#
episodes and everything is everything where we kind of do do this build from basics so there's
#
one episode called understanding the state episode 25 another one is when should the state act
#
so this whole toolkit of you know what how do you identify a market failure what should the
#
state keep in mind so i'll i'll i'll we've done an episode on public choice here as well so we'll
#
link it all from the show notes when you arrived at the structure for this book
#
were you just taking the you know the structure of your takshashila courses and saying that this is
#
a good way like how do you think about structure like where is a place to start what should you
#
cover what should you not cover what do you leave for the next book you know so how did that thinking
#
proceed and what kind of learnings did that thinking come from yeah i'll probably elaborate
#
on that i think we i think we we really started off by seeing that we had a solid base for the
#
structure in terms of our takshashila curriculum so you know we have the gcpp has one entire section
#
on policy analysis which deals with you know government and so on and another one on economic
#
reasoning and you know that that formed the basis so you had a very good kind of starting point and
#
we know exactly the kind of things that we wanted to cover there i think one of the challenges here
#
was how do you then seamlessly blend those two things without it being as if it's a you know
#
two different kind of modules in silos which are just putting together as a textbook it had to come
#
together seamlessly and i think again that's where a lot of the ideation and brainstorming happened
#
how do you put that in a again a story format or this thing where it doesn't feel like you're
#
jumping from one module to the other and you know it's like okay chapter one is just this module and
#
so on so that was a starting point and then yeah there were judgment calls on whether this is a
#
bit more advanced so you know does it really have a place here for instance i'll tell you one of the
#
things that we've added here which is not a part of let's say our regular programming is just on
#
the role of society and that's a shame i mean we can again i think pranay will speak about this
#
a lot more but you know we don't have good literature or curriculum or a lot of understanding
#
of the role of society in affecting change in the entire policy process and so on but we've tried
#
to at least just put some thoughts and ideas there maybe just a starting point but i thought
#
it was important to just that that the fact that that is there and then we go from there to then
#
just try to blend all of these three things together saying okay you need that's what the
#
market the society and government the state to work together and then you're at the middle of
#
all of those things and so you get affected by all of it and in turn you can affect all of that right
#
so i think that is still a very good starting point for the entire book and then that's how it
#
unraveled yeah i just want to come in on that jargon point jargon is important right in the
#
sense it brings precision to what you're saying so i'm not averse to using it a very simple example
#
is the difference between center and union right so people use both of them interchangeably but we
#
try to always use union right because center indicates that all of us are at the periphery
#
we're not in delhi right but we aren't and union is a precise word the constitution does not
#
mention the word center even once so the union has a special meaning now from the outside it
#
might seem like why is he using union but it has it brings precision it has a
#
significance so the idea is you introduce the reasoning to the audience before and then you
#
start using that jargonified term but introduce it to the reader lightly and also explain why
#
this word matters you know so that that vocabulary is essential to make sense of
#
complicated ideas you need to have some foundations to build on top of so we do use that even in our
#
teaching like without opportunity because we can't teach a lot of things right so you have to build
#
that but yeah i mean as long as we first introduce the concepts explain them very clearly concisely
#
and then start using that concept it's not that difficult that's a great point and i also
#
wonder about a different sort of difficulty in language which is that words can mean so many
#
things especially you know words will have a specific meaning in economics but completely
#
will be much more nebulous otherwise like market failure you know the amjanta will think that i
#
wanted to put i wanted a green shirt my market may go there were only blue shirts that's a market
#
failure right or social welfare that's a social means something in economics and outside and
#
outside it means something else and and even language outside of that like you know most
#
liberal people i meet so-called aren't really liberal you know freedom is so nebulous and means
#
so many things rights are so nebulous and means so many things swapna little in a recent episode
#
with me gave me a great insight where she said that if you think about it history means two
#
simultaneous things one is what happened in the past and the other is a study of what happened
#
in the past right and these are so different and conflating these two uses has such consequences
#
for the discourse as well and of how you think about the subject so what does one do about this
#
because i think one of the ways in which nitin describes himself and i guess that would apply
#
to takshashila as well is as liberal right now we mean liberal in the classical liberal kind of
#
sense where individual rights are at the center of everything americans appropriated the word and
#
made it something completely different which is welfarist and much more sort of group thinking
#
oriented and etc etc so all of these words which otherwise were useful words
#
and which we almost use in a reflexive way means so many things that they're completely useless
#
so how does one then evolve a vocabulary or an idiom or a way of talking about these things
#
so your point about explaining what opportunity cost is and explaining what an incentive is is
#
obviously taken that language becomes a really useful shortcut and you know once you are going
#
further down you need it but what about these sort of nebulous terms which especially when
#
you're writing in an op-ed for a larger audience i feel that if you use too many of these terms
#
matlab people will interpret it as they like so how does one get passes yeah in fact let me
#
elaborate on on that point a little bit more my favorite example of a horrible term which causes
#
a lot of confusion is public goods because the general understanding of public goods can be so
#
varied one people would imagine that it is things which are provided by the public sector
#
so it means water electricity even banking insurance all of that which is provided by
#
the public sector will be thought of as public goods second common misconception is that which
#
is good for the public so public good so i mean again parks can be public good roads can be public
#
good at the same time happiness whatever right anything which is good for the public bacon can
#
be good for the public so is whiskey right all of those are public goods then and so from there to
#
go to using you know to try and use it in a very particular sense of it being both non-rival and
#
non-excludable is a big jump right it takes some time to say okay these are all not public goods
#
this is what it means in economics to say public good so from there would i i then try to avoid
#
using the term public goods in an op-ed even when i'm talking about things like market failure etc
#
because it requires all of this explanation if i just throw the term public good in an op-ed
#
without saying non-rival and non-excludable it you know it loses meaning and then it perhaps
#
does more damage to the overall meaning that i'm trying to convey then help me with it but then
#
putting in every time i say public good if i put it in a bracket saying non-rival non-excludable
#
i've lost my audience because again that also requires explanation it's not these are not popular
#
terms so you either avoid it or you try and you know somehow navigate through that mess unless
#
we're talking about a very specific topic which you have to elaborate on public goods you try
#
and avoid that bit altogether so i think there is that challenge of exactly finding that balance of
#
where do you use jargon and where do you not without the use of some of these terms i think
#
you will lose both efficiency at one level because you then you find yourself explaining
#
all of these things every single time that you use which is tiresome not just for the reader
#
for yourself every time if i have to explain the idea of opportunity because it is it's tiresome
#
right and also i mean of course you have limited space and there's all of that constraint so i
#
think you can take the liberty of using certain jargon the way it is but in some other instances
#
you'll have to find i mean you'll find yourself having to explain that or skirt around it convey
#
the meaning in a better way i think that's more to do with the the art of clear writing
#
but yeah i think that's where it comes down to you you have to make those judgment calls
#
yeah i mean there are many examples of this right terrorism for example what
#
it's an ambiguous term there can be many definitions for it republic the way it is taught is
#
very different from what it means and one of our favorite examples there can be state terrorism
#
right there's terrorism by the state and if we look at just what the word terrorism means which
#
is pranay yeah so i mean terrorism is the threat or the use of violence or the indiscriminate
#
use or the threat of use of indiscriminate violence to achieve political ends is called
#
terrorism so a lot of effort we do is to try to come up with a parsimonious yet somewhat complete
#
definition of some of these terms and once you have explained that then you can use that term
#
again but unless we are convinced with that definition ourselves does it cover all the corner
#
cases then you don't want to use it that's one thing if you look at any concept it has three
#
sides to it right there's an intrinsic value to it there's an extrinsic value to it and there's
#
an instrumental value to it so you can define anything in either of these three forms they
#
explain instrumental is for example what is that thing doing right so it intrinsic means you can
#
think of it as a structural thing so you can give a definition of a state in terms of how it is made
#
of right this is an intrinsic definition extrinsic means for example yeah when you when you talk
#
about coercion being the primary element of the state that is an extrinsic it's actions what it
#
does and similarly there can be an instrument instrumental definition so you can use any of
#
these to define a particular concept so just doing that consciously sometimes helps and the other
#
thing that i already mentioned that just having these definitions just putting some mind to it
#
clarifies it to yourself coming up with a precise definition the other thing you can do is to create
#
new terms and that that's when you again try to overcome this confusion right so liberal can
#
mean so many things so what does what precisely are you talking about or it could be a merger of
#
two or two or more things right so for example nithin had come up with that concept of radically
#
network societies we did an episode also on that right so the idea is you're combining two or three
#
things but by themselves they are complete they are indicating what we wanted to say and then we
#
spend some time on coming up with a definition that a large number of people can understand
#
that i think is a conscious effort to be put in as long as we are on language i think one of the
#
other things which gets tricky is the use of metaphors now while it can be a useful aid in
#
some situations right because that's that's what makes it easy for people to understand
#
but it can it's a it's a tricky thing to you overuse metaphors because there's again people
#
start visualizing that metaphor and then there are lots of caveats and then you have to say
#
no this is where the classic thing is during net neutrality right everybody's saying net neutrality
#
is like a highway and then people will say okay but there are exits and there's something else
#
and what kind of highway is it six lane you know it gets into really difficult territory so i think
#
while it's tempting to always use easy metaphors and so yeah i i think at that overall superficial
#
level people are able to understand it easier but you lose nuance very quickly so you have to be
#
very careful in using i mean that's really the trade-off between simple and simplistic right
#
the metaphor will make something simple but if it runs the danger of making it simplistic
#
and therefore becoming a barrier to understanding rather than an aid to it yeah but metaphors are
#
all narrative devices right so when you're when you're writing to convince metaphors become very
#
important every narrative device becomes important but when you're writing to analyze that time
#
metaphors often end up complicating things because they don't apply one to one so so
#
depends on what you're doing with that so when when for example we are writing research papers
#
if i see metaphors i tell people that why are you using this is not the place to use the metaphor
#
and most of the people who are going to read your paper already know what that area is you
#
don't need to use some metaphor to make that point but when you're writing an opinion piece
#
or you're trying to explain it convince an idea that time give me an example extremely important
#
yeah i mean for example people would use just something that came to my mind data is the new
#
oil for example right now this is used a lot now it from a metaphorical sense it does make that
#
data can't be seen you and you don't know where it is so to relate it to something which is tangible
#
something you have experience of is a very powerful narrative device right and in a from a policy
#
lens it has another significance that then you can say what you have you don't need to do
#
understand what you need to do with respect to data you just need to know what has happened
#
with respect to oil and managing oil and that the solution becomes superfluous right in a sense
#
when you are doing these narrative metaphorical comparisons so that that makes sense but i will
#
when people are writing a paper i'll say don't use this right the data so anyway won't doesn't make
#
sense because there are many differences another example i'd given you is chip war
#
right and i tried to explain that this is a wrong metaphor it's not a war but once you put this in
#
the war reference you are essentially thinking of a zero-sum game only either us can win or china
#
can win and but the reality is in fact both of them are benefiting so but see the war metaphor
#
has stuck right that's how everyone talks about no one talks about semiconductor geopolitics chip
#
war is a powerful metaphor everyone is using it so that's the power of metaphors to be able to see
#
through them is important i like that changing the metaphor changes your framework of thinking
#
about it right and once we put it in a war perspective we are going to think from national
#
security perspective so all narratives will go in that direction i wanted to add something to this
#
i feel like yes jargon is actually very important because there's so much difference between
#
different words that we use right recently i was having this discussion with another friend
#
who's talking about secular versus plural right now this is a seems like they have the same meaning
#
but there is some difference between them that one needs to understand so definitely some thought
#
needs to go even from a reader's perspective right if i really want to understand these things you
#
have to put effort you cannot be expected to fed everything and everything cannot be simplified
#
beyond a point sometimes you have to apply your mind there is no choice in that as well if you
#
want to think about even at a second level of thinking then you need to there is no escape from
#
that at the same time i also feel that second problem that we are facing now is all the silos
#
that are forming like you said how liberal word is something else in the u.s context and how you
#
will see in indian context feminism is a word which is much misused and people a lot of people
#
would actually not know the exact meaning of what it's actually tragic how it's become a pejorative
#
like i consider myself i think every decent human being should be a feminist by default
#
but yet it is the way the word is used in india is just bizarre to me yes so that's one another
#
thing and i think part of it is because we all are thinking a lot of our discourse in our daily
#
life is in our languages right and now we are bringing these these ideas which are articulated
#
in english but they are not what is an equivalent of those ideas in our languages we fail to connect
#
that all the time so sometimes we do not we map them but we probably do not map them very accurately
#
and i think there is something some loss of loss happening in that translation also probably there
#
is some loss in our languages itself that our all of this discourse is not happening in our
#
languages where we can discuss this and say that uh what is that you know now what does that mean
#
and if i discuss and explain that in that language then probably that word will be more understood
#
by normal people so it is not remaining constant i mean limited to an elite audience but it becomes
#
a part of our narrative and that is the link which is probably missing in india right now i feel
#
that's i think i agree just explaining a concept in a language other than english
#
brings clarity to it that's very interesting i want to double click on that but first i must
#
inform all of you and especially you pranay since you use the term so much that i am engaged on a
#
constant chip war you know i'll see potato chips and i'll be like i want it but i know it's not
#
good for me because sugar is poison but i want it so inside me there is always a chip war which
#
has nothing to do with semiconductor geopolitics so i want to point that out that's a fascinating
#
point you just met khayati about how translating a concept immediately clarifies you know the
#
aspect of it which you want to highlight and my other question to all of you but khayati and
#
pranay of course to puliyabazi so especially to you guys is that what is the task of finding
#
the language to translate these ideas to indian languages because i think the great tragedy and
#
equally a great opportunity is that a lot of this discourse doesn't exist in the indian languages
#
in fact i tell all my writing students also that if you are equal in two languages and one of them
#
is english please write in the other one don't think of immediate reward that other language
#
needs you that public needs you because you know it's just not so discourse rich because english
#
has had this privilege of being a linked language of the world there's so much in it that is not
#
there in these other languages so how do you guys think about that because again i know that all of
#
you think deeply about the long game and the purpose of what you're doing and to me it seems
#
that you know the the biggest thing and of course you guys do this with puliyabazi but the biggest
#
thing you can do is take these ideas into the languages and i feel like the benefit of that
#
will be exponentially higher than in the english space where everything is cluttered and everything
#
is messy it would be exponentially higher so what are sort of your thoughts and the challenges that
#
you would have faced with getting these concepts across and like a finding the language to do it
#
and b i'm guessing conventional thinking among people who whose first language is something else
#
would often by default be different so my my first language is actually gujarati my second
#
language is hindi third is my english is my third language so i started learning gujarati letters
#
and english letters at the same time in school so i feel like i do understand that
#
how a native speaker understand things like that right but what is missing is that there are two
#
different kinds of conversations that we have in different languages right i talk about certain
#
things in i talk about my daily life and my daily conversation i can only have it in hindi or
#
gujarati while so if i if i really have to be talking to my friend in english i think it will
#
be very awkward for me right at some point i would switch to another language but there are some
#
ideas which we do not talk in gujarati although i would say it's not true because actually i
#
started reading politics also in gujarati because we only used to have gujarati newspapers and
#
gujarati magazines when i was growing up and so i used to read a lot of political analysis
#
but what is happening is somehow that discourse is very limited and new ideas that are coming i
#
think possibly because a lot of new ideas are coming from the western world and because they
#
are coined in the like bitcoin world is coming from there because it's it's not something that
#
we have it's not an idea that is generated within india so because a lot of these new ideas are not
#
being generated in india that's why they would have a foreign origin just because that they
#
originated somewhere else right and good thing is some of this is getting absorbed in our native
#
languages also but but there is still that discourse is not so much and not enough people
#
are talking about these ideas that that they get fleshed out and that they talked about and then
#
that new vocabulary to speak about them emerge in that language so while we speak in hindi for
#
we actually often struggle with finding the right words that our audience will also understand which
#
we will not find awkward sometimes i find myself speaking a lot using a lot of english words although
#
i don't want to use them but if it goes in the flow we just use it so i think part of it is our
#
own practice that we are reading a lot more now at least i'm reading in lot more in english rather
#
than gujarati which i used to read before i was before i was probably 15 years old after that i
#
slowly changed so so i think our practice in those languages have reduced and the total discourse in
#
that language is also much lesser so that there are not enough people debating about these ideas
#
and lesser space for new words to be formed in that language is how i see it yeah i see it from
#
what the perspective you shared earlier that the returns for your own well-being or the returns
#
to doing something in a language other than english will be more so that's why you should
#
do it because i actually think the discourse in other languages is also very rich it says that
#
we are not following that for example a best seller in hindi sells at least 10x copies than
#
what a best seller in english would be so there are far more people reading that language than
#
they are reading in english so but yeah i mean some of these concepts like khyati was mentioning
#
the ones we are interested in politics policy for that the space is narrower but maybe for say i
#
subjects related to spiritualism or things maybe the discourse and the vocabulary in the languages
#
will be far richer than what we use in english so in our top in our subject this applies and that's
#
why it is important to think deeply so we make an effort to not think so much about one-to-one
#
mapping of what is a term for radically networked society in hindi don't need to do that we use
#
radically networked society itself but explain it in give a definition to it in the most clearest
#
terms possible if you have done that job in hindi once then you can keep using radically
#
networked society that i think is also a strength of hindi i i have read marathi newspapers and
#
hindi newspapers for example and i realize the difference marathi newspapers tend to use very
#
precise terms in marathi whereas hindi just appropriates a lot of words which are in english
#
so in fact hindi is pretty much like what english is right it appropriates from many languages and
#
just presents it so it's not stuck up on inventing one precise word for that particular
#
in that particular language so that works well so focus should be on giving a precise definition
#
for opportunity cost right like explains opportunity cost right you don't need to
#
can use and all that but if you are able to explain this sorry what is that kindly explain
#
what is opportunity cost i thought apply an officer
#
i mean there are precise differences between like cost price value also in hindi right so
#
i mean as long as you are able to differentiate these concepts and explain that all three mean
#
different things right cost means different thing cost is prices and then value is all these are
#
different words so as as long as we are able to identify that these are three different things
#
they mean different things then you can use price cost value in hindi no one will be agitated about
#
it i was today years old when i learned the word in this context so yeah i think of language not
#
just as a way in which we express ourselves but also a way in which it shapes our thinking
#
and i think different languages can lead to different kinds of thinking because of the
#
words that you have available to describe your universe like the eskimos apparently are 40 words
#
for snow or something like that right ira pandey ji was lamenting how you know our polyglottedness
#
as it were is under threat and she was saying that where she comes from there were so many words for
#
different kinds of smells like the smell of a wet towel and there's a particular word for that
#
and i'm thinking that when there are words for these things you notice these things more and
#
they become part of your sort of conceptual universe and therefore i am thinking that
#
like i am therefore curious from all of you to figure out like you know you're saying you read
#
gujarati when you were young you read marathi hindi of course anupam i have no idea if you're a
#
deracinated person like me and only read english but i'm very curious in what would be if i may
#
coin a phrase what would be the thought universes in you know in these languages and from that
#
because then if your language is restricted that at some level restricts your thinking and
#
restricts your understanding and shapes you in a different way which is why i actually think a
#
being multilingual is great and b when i say restricted i mean restricted perhaps in a
#
particular domain ki you know marathi might be restricted in terms of perhaps not having terms
#
of public policy as have evolved elsewhere but it could be far more evolved and less restricted
#
in some other context perhaps a religious or spiritual context so different languages will
#
have will you know kind of cover different areas so what is your sense of this that can you describe
#
those thought universes for me in terms of both what they had that we can learn from and what they
#
did not have which is an opportunity and perhaps even an imperative for us to you know think about
#
i'm guessing the people who are truly multilingual will have longer answers so i'll just go first
#
which is see i'm as long as you're not too stuck up about my language and attach too much pride
#
into all of that i think it's just a matter of best of all worlds as in can you derive
#
the best of all worlds and communicate in the most effective way possible right i'm an economist
#
even in this i think i really value efficiency and effectiveness both more than anything else so i
#
mean i i speak canada at home and i think there are certain words in canada for feelings slash
#
relationships and things like that which you can never capture in english and for that i just i
#
mean i'm comfortable speaking in canada and i but again for all technical terms i mean for i have
#
no clue how i will say jdp or any of those things in canada i just use english for the same right
#
i think so it really comes down to just being effective and using you know things from all
#
over the place and sometimes it's confusing because i've i speak french and i speak nepali
#
thanks to my wife right i've learned nepali to impress the in-laws and other in-laws impressed
#
and no not really opportunity because you could have learned something else yeah i could have
#
learned something else but and it's fascinating i mean when the whole point i don't know if you
#
guys have done this where you prena has learned chinese recently right so when you're learning
#
a language as an adult it's a fascinating experience you can just look at your own kind
#
of learning the process of learning how do you pick up words and sometimes you're just excited
#
by your the fact that you yourself have used a new word right in that language and yeah even
#
in nepali for example there are certain words that is not there are at least there are like
#
two or three words for just cold which i don't know here there's a word for cold due to the wind
#
and things like that which i don't know in english or canada so yes there are those things i think
#
if you can try and pick up as many languages possible the better for you my question was
#
actually not from the point of view of we multilingual individuals where of course
#
we can take the best of all these universes my question was more from the point of view
#
of someone who is in that universe who is primarily reading in gujarati or reading in marathi
#
and thinking about what is their thought universe and what can we bring into it i think a lot of
#
cultural context is in that language right so what are our what are the daily things that you do
#
what are the religious practices that you have what is the different kinds of food you eat exactly
#
sometimes you do not have a very good you cannot translate some of the foods that we eat into
#
english right you have a very dirty pronunci you dirty translations for them so when uh so i
#
remember when when i was younger and i used to read some gujarati which was very old gujarati
#
right i would also find difficult because this is gujarati only but it is again in a different
#
time frame and i have lost some of that context because i now don't understand what they
#
what they mean by that particular verb so sometimes you use that verb or you hear that verb
#
in some phrase where you probably now know the meaning of that phrase that this is what they
#
want to say but i don't exactly know what what that where that came from that verb because i
#
have lost that context an example for our gujarati listeners i'm not very sure that this is the one
#
but my my grandmother uses this term called why did you go there like that right so i remember
#
know it like that but is a word and if i'm not wrong right it has some some ritualistic meaning
#
in terms of some puja you go somewhere and put something and something like that right
#
but now i don't really know that but i i know what it means if she says this to me nobody
#
really uses that phrase around me other than my my maternal grandmother my nani so she says it
#
like that but i somehow some somewhere i i heard this word being used in some puja that that they
#
are okay this is what she's trying to say but that's a thing that gets lost and i i don't know what
#
that that verb no longer can be translated into some other language right and probably after my
#
nani's generation people may not be using it that much so something like that yeah yeah i don't have
#
precise thought universes of these languages either but what i can say is that technology for
#
example is one area where a lot of these languages are missing out on right we are not having great
#
terms on the new things that we talk about and there we start using the english equivalents as
#
well so that's fine but i think i remember like the only way to overcome like peggy mohan said
#
when she was on puliyabazi is that we are not multilingual we are not bilingual we are diagnosis
#
and the idea is that the only way you work and diagnosis means that we actually can't
#
we have different contexts and we use different languages in different contexts so
#
bilingual would mean someone who can say the same thing so you can talk about artificial intelligence
#
in marathi and in english then you would be a bilingual but most of us can't i can't so we have
#
we speak about certain specific things in marathi or hindi when we are chatting up about cricket or
#
what you had for food that time it's hindi or politics but when we are talking about
#
opportunity cost it is in english so that is the diagnosis and the only way to overcome it
#
she said and which really drove the point home to me was she said the only way you overcome that is
#
you put yourself in that situation you put yourself in a situation where you have to
#
explain opportunity cost in hindi so you how will you do that right you will have to come up with
#
a way to explain it using the metaphors that are there in hindi using the similes or other
#
figures of speech in hindi and you or references to movies right you will not think of a hindi movie
#
when you're giving the definition of opportunity cost in in english but when you're thinking about
#
that you will say bazigar, kuch khoke, haar kar jeetne wale ko bazigar kya hai, golmal, aane wala pal jaane wala
#
yeah so all those you make the connections when you're thinking in the other language so
#
so when you're diaglossic and you put yourself in that situation your horizons of what you can
#
communicate in that language slowly expands the more you put yourself in that situation the kind
#
of complicated ideas you are able to present it compounds over time so that's how i would put it
#
so i just want to say bengalis have sorted this out it's not a problem for us
#
rovida used to say omit have you heard of the big bong theory
#
you should not think that there is a word which is not bengali every word is bengali
#
these gujarati people can be doing all this we don't do all this gandhi was a fool
#
to get back to the sort of subject of the book is it planned in other languages
#
not yet yeah we didn't think of it until you've asked this so yeah i think maybe
#
it would be nice to write it in hindi i don't know if we can write it but yeah
#
and what do you guys think about form like earlier you spoke about the difference between a single
#
panel and a long-form comic as this book is and you know what are the other kinds of
#
forms that you might have considered like for example this could be a webcomic series
#
you know this could be a daily strip it could be so many things yeah it can also so if i have to
#
go in more detail and really explain these concepts then you would have to add more text and then
#
another format could be and there's much more text and then some illustrations which would
#
explain some of the things that's like a midway of a conventional book which is slightly more
#
illustrated something like that right so i think with so much illustration heavy you can only go
#
that deep is probably a limitation of even this format right because the moment i start explaining
#
everything then it's going to be like 600 pages long so that's that's a trade-off that i could
#
see that so if i have to probably write a more detailed version of all of these concepts then
#
it has to be a more text-heavy book but then in a way prana is already written missing in action so
#
yes i think we established that i didn't write it rsj wrote it they've established that rsj wrote
#
it whoever rsj is you could be rsj we don't even know who is rsj so yeah one thing i've thought
#
about this form idea is see the book has i think 8000 or so words and but it communicates so much
#
more because of that the images that are put in right that for example that image about the
#
overton window and where there's a phone used by khyati to show i think for me to be able to
#
explain that would have taken many many more words and yet it would have left the reader
#
unsatisfied but that particular picture itself tells many stories and the reader can take it in
#
multiple directions right like the importance of the phone in moving the overton window and the
#
fact that people can move it in different directions it can be stretched so on and so forth
#
are illustrated i mean an illustration works a lot better for this compared to you writing
#
reams about explaining what this overton window is so yeah yeah and it's absolutely wonderful
#
because it is also seamless it is not like words are written separately images are written separately
#
it's completely seamless so well done with that and i actually hope that you know within a couple
#
of years maybe you'll have ai that is powerful enough that you can feed in the base characters
#
and then create an animated film featuring these characters and all these things actually happening
#
is gonna be possible and i'm totally kind of encouraging you guys to do it yeah i want to add
#
i want to add something to this that we have said that this book is for a beginner but today i read
#
review that our friend ashish gulkarni has written i realized this that there are different
#
kinds of beginners also right there can be a beginner who is a 14 year old is a different
#
kind of beginner versus a 25 year old who has maybe studied a little bit economics but not
#
studied about public policy as such right so they both may consider themselves beginners but they
#
would be able to catch different contexts in this book at a different level so i see that
#
somebody would get a gist of it but if later on they understand a few more concepts and they
#
come back they would probably see a layer to it that they had not seen before so and some of
#
the people who also understand it but they would be able to actually get all the jokes
#
in the in the book right so there is there are different readers would gather some different
#
things out of the book but i hope that the idea was to keep it simple and not make it
#
at least it should not be inaccurate that that was one of the things so yeah actually i think
#
that's that's one thing where i push back a little and say i don't think this book should be
#
targeted as being for the beginner it's simple that everyone can understand it but i don't think
#
it's for the beginner because anyone who has not really thought deeply about public policy would
#
you know have those light bulb moments and you know i'll i'll sometimes get a query for my
#
writing course from people who will say that you know can i enroll my son for this he's 14 years
#
old he's 12 years old and the correct answer i have realized which is what i now say is that yes
#
this is the time it will actually be more useful for them than for adults because adults come in
#
with all kinds of preconceived notions about the world and you have to break through them first
#
and if you're getting a 12 year old 13 year old in you know it's far more useful for them because
#
they have a solid set of first principles to work with instead of habit bad habits that are picked
#
up by osmosis and you know impressionistic thinking so what is you know your sense on
#
that as educators and as people who are learning that how much harder is it to teach people who
#
have already learned a set of conventions that are wrong like paul graham has this great essay the
#
four quadrants of conformism where he talks about how the enemy of progress is actually the
#
aggressively non-conventional the aggressively conventional sorry and who will you know not have
#
anything new to say but will be aggressive about being conventional and will constantly
#
hit out at anyone who tries remotely to think radically which by the way you haven't come up
#
with a radical thing yet on a permit by the end of this episode you must or we will continue till
#
you do no matter how long it takes but so what is your sort of thinking on that what is your
#
experience with that i think both unlearning to learn and learning to unlearn both are important
#
so and yeah i mean especially in public policy right then we'll come up with our preconceived
#
notions about all of these things so it obviously is a challenge in this area but for most of the
#
time the people who are who come to take takshashila's courses are people who are not
#
actually in public policy right they are in very different fields so that problem of being very
#
aggressively conventional doesn't arise for us right the people actually want to
#
there's a selection of a selection bias there so we don't face that problem but we do explain to
#
people right up front that you have to learn to unlearn there are lots of things you have already
#
there's a stack which is built up in your mind that you have to slowly get rid of how do you
#
learn to unlearn yeah so for example we tell people that see the course is not a whatsapp group
#
right you're if if by the end of this course you are going to only go away reaffirming your
#
existing bias then it's a waste of your time energy money that you have come here the you
#
should consider that you have actually made a breakthrough if you are able to challenge at
#
least one deeply held belief of yours by the end of the course so that is something that we say
#
upfront and then to help people unlearn you have to give those foundational concepts right on based
#
on which you can break down deeply held beliefs right so i mean for example a deeply held belief
#
people always think about is population is india's problem we have this in every cohort
#
that some person will feel india sucks because india has so many people and i don't know you've
#
done an episode also on this but just putting that frame that okay yeah no problem is about
#
governance not about population and i mean so what if we have more people there are
#
so many advantages yeah so i mean just putting that frame in mind or you can give analogies
#
that you can the land in india is actually not that restricted it's not as if there are so many
#
people that we are bursting at the seams that's not the problem so explaining those kinds of
#
things takes more time so we've made a list of things that people must unlearn before beginning
#
to learn so we talk about that what is that list like we've talked about it in a previous episode
#
about intentions as not the same as outcomes and also that you know good policy bad implementation
#
is a myth so we have like eight things to unlearn before you start learning so we put that out
#
right up front and then constantly pose questions which challenge people's deeply held beliefs so
#
that convinces some people to at least think differently or there are many examples right so
#
i always try to think of things like which are the world's biggest exporters so people will say
#
china us but they are also the world's biggest import and then i ask okay which are the world's
#
biggest importers so generally you will not have an answer then the biggest exporters are also the
#
world's biggest importers or people have this notion for example in semiconductors thaiwan is
#
the biggest exporter so you ask a question what is thaiwan's biggest export most people will say
#
chips today but when you ask what does what is thaiwan's biggest import then they'll not
#
have a good answer the answer is chip chips so again you so that that probably drives a point
#
home that oh okay if thaiwan also is importing to export then even india will have to do it so
#
maybe those kinds of things first identify a set of deeply held beliefs and then challenge them
#
through examples or comparisons with other nation states help sometimes the fascinating thing is
#
that you know the student profile of a cohort is so diverse so you know at if you ask me to
#
kind of characterize a typical cohort i cannot because there's nothing called a typical cohort
#
for us i mean we have people who are from 18 to 65 or maybe 21 to 65 sometimes we've had lower
#
than that but you know typically that's the age range and one of the things that i realized during
#
this is that age is not a factor at all you know it doesn't we've i've completely busted that myth
#
for myself that you know younger people are more keen to learn and are more open-minded not at all
#
i find sometimes the younger people will be extremely hard-coded with whatever because
#
of exposure to social media or exposure to maybe their own parents i have no clue what and i don't
#
want to get there but it doesn't mean that you know they're naturally more open to learning
#
so it could be that they're coming in a lot more hard-coded i've had wonderful conversations with
#
people who are 60 years old nearly twice my age and where they've been absolutely open to learn
#
i'm saying oh you've completely changed my mind on this issue i've really thought i used to think
#
this now i think this makes sense so i i don't think age is a factor i don't think occupation is
#
a factor again i've had people let's say from the armed forces who are completely unmoving
#
and i've also had met people in the armed forces who've been extraordinarily curious to learn and
#
who you know who said yeah maybe this is not the right approach so i don't think again professionalism
#
i think it comes down to the individual and how open they are to learning how much are they willing
#
to kind of challenge their own deeply held notion and i think that's a difficult thing to do it's a
#
really difficult thing to do to challenge yourself to really question the beliefs that you have had
#
saying does this hold true does this hold true always what are possibly the exceptions to it
#
when do you think you should kind of tone it down etc i think even all of us if you challenge
#
yourself right we are very firm in our own beliefs so challenging that is never going to be easy so
#
you've got to press it upon to the students that should ask pranay was saying that you're here to
#
learn so just i i always try to tell you know at the end of my webinar saying i don't expect you
#
to change overnight i don't expect you to magically believe in what i say just because i'm saying
#
because one of the things you say don't differ to authority right just because some idiot called
#
anupama saying trade is great doesn't make it so right you have to really think through it yourself
#
be convinced of the arguments from a logical point of view look at the evidence
#
inspect it see if that convinces you that that argument makes sense
#
right my job is to just lay those arguments in front of you and lay out the evidence in
#
front of you so and some some of these things i think it's it's wonderful i mean it as an
#
experience it's absolutely wonderful for me because you're going to go and say things that
#
they've sometimes never thought about in their life they just take it as a given so if i say
#
for example you should not give water for free at all you should charge market price for water
#
that really rattles them right i'm like what are you saying because that's probably something that
#
they've not thought about and then i'll say the reason why you have water shortage is because
#
you're not pricing water correctly the reason why you know pranay uses water to wash his mercedes
#
three times a day is because you know your price water too cheap you mean he gets it washed three
#
times a day nobody with the mercedes bench is going to wash it yourself come on he gets it
#
washed yes your lies are so transparent by now and so on and so forth right you can you can state
#
all of these examples and i think sometimes it it does convince it does convince quite a few people
#
in fact i mean this is like a standard trope every once in three months i just talk about water
#
pricing it's one of my favorite things to talk about which most people take it for granted that
#
or haven't thought about it and then you just kind of wake them my you know this when i spoke
#
about another example is when i spoke about mrp right that there's no need for mrp i think and
#
this is where context matters i think 99.5 percent of india and i'm just pulling that number absolutely
#
out of their hat but 99 percent of india has never thought about this idea of whether we need
#
something like mrp or not it's always been there and it should continue to be there and when i say
#
there's no need for it that we shouldn't have something like a maximum retail price it shakes
#
them and some of them do think about it at that point of time yeah okay why do we need mrp
#
right maybe some others don't some others saying yeah i'm completely close so i think it that is
#
individual specific the other area where it gets interesting is i mean as we have spoken about it's
#
just the role of the government right and there i think also context matters a lot
#
in it's probably sign of the times that at this moment when i ask people to be slightly skeptical
#
of the government it that itself is difficult people saying why why why should i i mean the
#
standard argument right if i say privacy matters people say why why do you have to hide i'm like
#
no i have nothing to hide but i don't want the government to know where i am or what i'm doing
#
those are things which i think is just matter of the is a product of the times right is a product
#
of and it's part of this entire whatever political situation that we find ourselves in whether you
#
know where people equate and i one of the first pages in this is that you know being anti-government
#
is not equal to anti-national you can criticize the government all of those things which is why
#
we want to put it there right up front that you can criticize policy it doesn't mean you're
#
criticizing the government if you criticize the government doesn't mean that you're criticizing
#
the nation or if you criticize even the people it doesn't mean that you're criticizing the state
#
and so on and so forth country you know you have to distinguish between all of these things it's
#
okay to you know criticize some of these things but those are again ideas which people have very
#
strong notions about and you have to just prod them enough to say okay just think about it i
#
don't i always try to say you don't have to change your mind overnight just think about it that's all
#
you need to do just think about it maybe at you know given time given enough evidence you might
#
change your mind i think there is a tendency and i'm speaking from a student perspective and i do
#
see this the dynamics that he's talking about right that you see certain tension with people
#
that when you may you hear this statement from a teacher then it's very quick and probably it's the
#
discourse of the day that people are very quick to put it into oh is this my side or that side or
#
you know this ideology so that ideology so suddenly the the urge to put everything under
#
the prism of that ideology is so strong that you are really not paying attention to the question
#
that is being asked about the water scarcity right so from one side people will say oh this means
#
they are saying that you know that is not necessary the thing that he's saying he's saying that
#
okay if everybody gets charged actually there would be more water for people who actually
#
need it and they would be able to get it for free but i that whole thing doesn't you know it never
#
so it but they i mean all the faculty takes a lot of time to explain that but as a student i
#
i know the dynamics that he's talking about i i feel that within the group also that
#
i know how other people are thinking about it and i feel like that stress you feel and i think as a
#
student also you are also making sense okay if that is the sense should i make sure that i not
#
i don't bring in my own bias and also try to not oversimplify things and try to focus on the point
#
that is being made right now yeah and you know curiously if i may go on i'm also experimenting
#
with narratives in a session right so if i'm talking about a particular thing i think even
#
we have to learn to use effective narratives well it's not just about presenting arguments
#
if you're trying to persuade people again if you're teaching science if you're teaching
#
chemistry or biology there's no space for narratives you it's it's a fact you're just
#
stating it but here you're you are trying to persuade people you're trying to persuade in
#
in at a time you're trying to persuade 300 people right and so you have to figure out what is the
#
most effective ways to convince them can i give a couple of examples i want you to here so one of
#
the things that i change so you know we collect feedback for webinars and so on and generally the
#
ones that i do on trade get a lot of reactions it's not bad feedback it's just that i can't
#
believe you're saying things like that and and so on right so i i try to you know change the way
#
that i do some of these things so in when i teach trade i'll say okay do you not believe in indian
#
companies to be strong enough to fight against global competition instead of saying you know
#
just let you know the standard free market thing saying trade is better etc so now this time i just
#
tried to put a spin on it saying i believe in indian companies do you not if you believe in
#
indian companies then we should have a free trade policy and some of many of the indian companies
#
is truly strong enough to take on the rest of the world right protectionism is equal to not
#
believing in ourselves just change the narrative and i saw there's a drastic
#
difference in the way that that idea is perceived the entire water debate by the way
#
i constantly make it as a poor versus rich debate because i know that's where they'll come from
#
so i do it before them and i say pricing water cheaply is anti-poor and it helps the rich
#
i want you to explain this because you've been saying pricing water pricing water pricing water
#
for so long that all my listeners will be like this is a neoliberal conspiracy by the world bank
#
so what do you mean tell me about why water should be priced okay so as of now across india in
#
probably every other city we price the water the price that we charge for water drinking portable
#
water is extremely low far below any kind of this thing even if you just take the price of water
#
in banglore if i can give an example right it takes something like 100 to 120 rupees per
#
kilo liter for transporting water from kaveri to a tap right on an average whereas the on an average
#
you're paying no more than 15 to 20 rupees per kilo liter so that's an 80 rupees kind of discount
#
that you're getting every single individual who uses water in banglore so where does that 80 rupees
#
come from right that comes from obviously public purses it comes from a subsidy so one of the first
#
things that i say is who gets the subsidy more the person who uses more water gets more subsidy
#
and right because per liter you're getting 80 rupees subsidy so pranay washing his mercedes
#
bends is getting all the money pranay getting his mercedes bends washed washed yeah is getting
#
more subsidy so you i immediately you know you've got to make this point that it's the rich who use
#
more water than the poor and therefore the rich get more of the subsidy than the poor right and
#
where does that subsidy come from public finance right public purses and that is collected from
#
everybody not just the rich alone right indirect taxes so i want to make that point saying that
#
there is a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich through bad water pricing strategy
#
and that's not all then there's you know two or three other points that you speak about
#
if you have if you don't charge for water correctly then you're gonna have a bankrupt kind of water
#
agency whatever that is and it's all you know government monopoly in in india so that government
#
monopoly agency which provides water is always going to be bankrupt which means that they will
#
not have the best technology they will not have the best kind of equipment this the infrastructure
#
will be weak direct consequence of that is more water wastage so you're if you're concerned about
#
water wastage that's a big deal right and there's no we know that for example i think in banglore
#
nearly 50 to 60 percent of water leaks even before reaching the taps it's and just that's
#
because of bad pipes and there is a lot of mixing also right i'll come to that sorry so so one this
#
is a water wastage and part of that water wastage obviously price act as a signal price act as an
#
incentive you're destroying both by pricing it cheaply so pranay has again no incentive to
#
switch off the tap while shaving right he lets the water flow endlessly are you picking on pranay
#
that's what we do and he's so cherubic looking like have you started shaving
#
so so that obviously right so people have no incentive to save the same thing rainwater
#
harvesting you can go on endlessly about why you need rainwater harvesting but people will not do
#
it until you have an incentive right if you price water correctly immediately they'll realize that
#
okay we got to save that water and use it then there's yeah the hygiene factor the fact that
#
you don't have enough money and for upkeep and so on there's far too often and i hope none of you
#
are listening to this on an empty stomach far too often the stormwater drain and basically the
#
sewage pipes and the water pipes get mixed and so you get really dirty water and even there
#
you know again who are the ones who are going to be more likely affected by it it's going to be
#
the poor people right the rich people will put up a cantaro and make him only happy whereas the poor
#
people are the ones who will get affected by it so then they have health problems public health
#
crisis nutritional problems whole bunch of things so on i can go on i can go on for another 20
#
minutes of why but i think what hima malini herself hima malini ji herself would say is that
#
you know will then have to go without water will not be able to take a bath children will get
#
cholera from taking water from so yeah as of now they can't do that anyway with that extremely cheap
#
water policy because first thing that is disrupted by pricing water cheaply is the supply of water
#
because if again where do the poor stay poor stay if they're staying in the middle of the city they're
#
staying in slums where it is very difficult and expensive to put up pipes so you don't get pipe
#
water anyway so you end up staying in the periphery and in banglore again for example the periphery
#
don't get your bwsb water they have to rely on either private water sources which is the tanker
#
mafia so the poor actually end up paying three to four x more per liter of water than the rich
#
two so you're not helping them anyway by pricing water cheaply in fact you're just helping the
#
pranayas of the world right whereas the poor people don't get access to water so by pricing it higher
#
you have money you can lay down the pipes then you can always give a subsidy for those who can't
#
right you can i mean inclusion error there is not a problem give subsidy if you want but i think
#
that will still be a far better outcome than the what the status quo we have yeah we didn't talk
#
about one major point in this the agricultural yeah this is just open this is just the urban
#
landscape which actually accounts for maybe five or ten percent of overall water usage right the
#
agricultural mine that's a minefield yeah so there was world bank data on this in the indian
#
subcontinent 90 percent of the water is 90 percent of the fresh water is used for agriculture so if
#
you want to do anything about water you need to attack that i mean if you just decrease that by
#
three four percent the gains that you will have will be significant and especially if you stop
#
giving msp's for water intensive crops in states that should not grow them like tamil nadu and
#
punjab you know i think it was it ashok gulati who pointed out that or should they say that we are
#
exporting exporting waters so yeah but here i think again again coming back to that point of
#
learning to unlearn right a lot of us come with this doer mindset that we have to do something
#
about this right so that's why there's so much agitation about this water purifier miss a water
#
waste that reverse osmosis is so we should protect that water in fact government had a policy about
#
that we'd written in the other book that you will not be allowed to use a water purifier if the hard
#
water hardness in your area is below a particular threshold and all that like why are you going to
#
that details and lord it will find support massive support in the uh that okay we have to do something
#
this is something concretely that i see something that i can do about this so i should do something
#
about it but here that's what the doer mindset is actually not going to solve any problem
#
and as an analyst you have to think more deeply about it that 90 percent of your water is from
#
agriculture even if you can save five percent there you're doubling the water available to
#
all households but that's what will you need to be able to unlearn there was a there was a classic
#
line from yes minister we must do something this is something so let's do it and i want to point
#
out that you know after all the revelations that you anupam have made about our friend pranay
#
you miss the biggest connection of all that where does pranay get his mercedes from he gets them
#
from running the tanker mafias of course like if you think about what is actually happening you
#
know it is it's like the baptist and the bootlegger except it's not exactly the baptist but it is where
#
the bootlegger is a tanker mafia where the government creates a situation with their
#
subsidies towards water that there is a perennial water shortage and who steps into that gap the
#
tanker mafia steps into the gap why personally contributing to you know the water being shot
#
yeah i am very angry that you called it a mafia yeah ah it's a legitimate business you're
#
fulfilling a social need that yeah exactly so pranay gets his mercedes from the tanker
#
businesses and of course as the lobbies for the charger industry don't forget
#
lobbies for the you know one day when you know mercedes has evs i don't know if they do already
#
then you know the they all come together the charger industry and the mercedes and you
#
can have mercedes then i can charge for water i think this is a good time to stop
#
so my next big question we are talking about changing minds we are talking about openness
#
and humility and all of that so i want to ask each of you that what are the major inflection
#
points in your life when it came to changing minds or what is the one subject on which you
#
had a deeply held belief and you changed it or modified it substantially i'm thinking
#
inflection point in terms of changing your mind about something that you had a belief yeah
#
your nrgs rethinking i mean i was lefty in my youth so i've changed everything
#
yeah for me it's i'll be so i mean before taking up a public policy course at takshesh line 2013
#
my thinking on many of the public policy issues were driven from what you read in newspapers and
#
how issues are presented similarly so i would have thought of exactly this way about water
#
and that you have to do something if you can do something at your level why why don't you do that
#
so i would have tried to optimize at my personal level without thinking why the government is or
#
i would have thought very differently about taxation right so yeah wealth taxes why not
#
but once i got to learning all these frames just you pick up concepts which really change your
#
mind about okay you start thinking about it systematically what is taxation what are the
#
various costs of taxation what happens when you put a wealth tax and things like that so
#
once you have this vocabulary then you're able to think deeply so for me yeah it has been
#
it has changed me on multiple fronts on most ideas for example i never
#
i had never heard of hyac before i took the course why would i write like engineering
#
background and we are never taught about so i mean just reading the use of knowledge in society
#
is like a light bulb goes in your mind that you can't turn it off after that but
#
before that point i also thought okay price it's okay price profit should be there but profit
#
should be in some limit right there is profit and profiteering differences there why are people
#
extract i think all those notions which we population is a problem i would have also
#
thought of that 15 years ago that because that's how we begin right like if you chat with any
#
random person on the street why is india where it is the first answer most likely will be we
#
have too many people so on most of these issues i would have thought this in a very fundamental
#
way my mind has changed on all these and i must tell our listeners at this point that i have been
#
on puliyabazi talking about hyac so it is like oh my god i if i listen to it again i'll probably
#
cringe like hell at the language i'm using yeah you put yourself to overcome diglossia i tried
#
to overcome diglossia i have heard that episode and it was very nice i heard it as a listener of
#
so is it you know just thinking aloud from where you took off pranay is it then fair to say
#
that you had a bunch of opinions and you changed them and that change came about because you gained
#
a frame that before that the opinions were just impressionistic and it seemed to make sense and
#
it seems commonsensical but gaining the frame helped you reevaluate the world and that changed
#
everything would that yeah and specific frames so i mean before this i told you i used to also
#
i had prepared for upsc in 2008-9 and i had learned sociology and a bunch of other subjects
#
but unless you pick up a discipline like economics or maybe psychology i don't think that just
#
having other frames would have helped me change my mind so i learned sociology that helped me in
#
some areas but on most of these i would not have thought any differently so for policy economic
#
reasoning is really important so we always teach that public policy is like the application of
#
economic reasoning right it's like what biology and medicine are so similarly economic reasoning
#
is the same relationship of economic reasoning exists to public policy so in that sense having
#
an economic reasoning frame was really really important i would say that i
#
i began so i come from the small town in india in gujarat right so my i won't say my journey is
#
anywhere where one thing has made a big difference but these have these have been like very small
#
small things every every few years you figure out something okay there is a different way of
#
doing things right and that has happened with traveling for me i feel like every time you
#
travel and suddenly you had some notions of the world which was supposed to be like this right
#
and things were right in your world based on this funda but you go to another place and suddenly
#
feel like oh it doesn't work like that over here things same things are seen in a different way in
#
a different place right so whatever example food for example if somebody is coming from gujarat
#
this whole thing about vegetarianism right and i grew up in a vegetarian family so in my family
#
definitely we eating egg was also not allowed i mean my parents tried to feed me but we never
#
eat but in my family other members would not like to have it so so basically it was a taboo
#
and later on even though my some of my aunts who asked me that you should have it because you are
#
growing up you are too thin i was always a very thin child so they were like you need more protein
#
you need to have it but i was like no no i will not have it right you know but then and my parents
#
were also not very comfortable with eating in a place where you would there would be non non-vegetarian
#
prepared right so in gujarat most of the hotels are by default pure vegetarian if there is a
#
non-vegetarian restaurant it would be on the highways most of the time right so i grew up
#
with this setup and then i went to hyderabad to live and for my work and suddenly everywhere you
#
see with food and then it takes some time initially you will also react like how you
#
have seen other people react right because you you have influences which you cannot shed yourself
#
completely from your environment but then you start to think okay this is also food somebody
#
is eating their food why should i have any kind of value judgment about what they are eating and
#
today from there then you go to another country where they are eating something else only that
#
also is food for them right so you start to respect that okay people in the everywhere
#
in the world are eating what they find around them right that's how food has evolved primarily
#
before we start bringing our religious notions on top of it that's how people what if you are
#
living on a in on the seacoast you are going to eat fish if you are living in a place where there
#
is so much water you will have coconut so whatever so you will eat those things right so i disconnected
#
and then i made actual when i actually have my daughter i figured out growing children need
#
protein to grow so i have made a conscious decision of feeding everything to my daughter
#
which means that i have started eating i mean i don't eat but i also cook sometimes at home
#
and i feed it to her because i think that is the right decision for my child if she's want
#
i want her to grow well then i want to feed her everything and i also want her to go out
#
in the world and be comfortable traveler anywhere in the world and she should not struggle about
#
these basic things you know that these are no longer restrictions for her she can go anywhere
#
and be assimilated without worrying about these kind of things right so this is a conscious choice
#
so but this is a very personal thing but there were many such things where you feel and i think
#
traveling and going to another world where you see okay policies also work differently
#
you go to like the example of mrp you go to singapore where there is no concept of mrp and
#
you suddenly realize things are not necessarily the same price everywhere and you have to see the
#
price at which you're buying before you actually buy right so i sometimes have to remind my mother
#
in law key mama it's not the same everywhere you have to see the price you know like that
#
so you see that there are different ways of doing things and they work with some context and you
#
start to figure out that you have to see everything in the context where it is operating that's one
#
of the things and i think if you have to really talk about some policy then maybe msp is something
#
that i probably have changed my mind from the first to now i feel i'm closer to
#
being more less supportive of msp yes i'm quite happy if i just reflect upon some of
#
these things i'm quite happy to think that i have changed my mind on quite a few things
#
while i mean the standard cliche applies which i will not go into which is that
#
yeah maybe at 18 19 you're a leftist i think the line is something to the effect of if you're not
#
a communist at 18 you don't have a heart if you're still a communist at 26 you don't have a brain
#
yeah something i think that applies very much so there was a very brief moment when i was
#
i mean shegovara seemed like a you know like a hero and things like that but it was very brief
#
i think i got over it very quickly because as i was mentioning earlier just after this romance i
#
happened to read 1984 and there's an iron rand book we the citizens or we know the living
#
something like that where she basically talks about her escape from russia so it's not really
#
her other kind of thing which was just is very interesting at that point of time then so i so
#
that i got over quite quickly religion is another aspect right where i had i was very religious at
#
one point and that was at a time when my dad was for example an atheist and i was very religious
#
and now it's completely switched over he's very religious and i'm an atheist so i think it was just
#
i want to know this story an only place for one believer in the family i guess i also want to know
#
the story for whatever reason when we were growing up parents never really imposed any kind of
#
religion on us so i was i didn't have any kind of indoctrination in that sense from a family
#
perspective but for some i i was you know wondering about the purpose of life and all of those things
#
so my aunt and uncle they were quite religious so i i used to go to their house i used to ask them
#
questions they used to give me some answers then i started going for bhagavad-gita classes which
#
all of that bit right and i got quite this was when i was in 11th grade or something of that sort
#
i was quite religious and that took two or three years the breaking point was really that i used
#
to go to these classes i used to ask some questions and i never got any satisfactory answers
#
right just about free will and things like that and when i started you know when there
#
was no satisfactory answers and i was just brushed aside saying don't ask questions i'll tell you
#
you know this is the way right don't just question some of these things i pretty much lost interest
#
in it and from there to obviously becoming exactly on the other side where i'm an atheist
#
where did your dad start believing i think he had some personal episodes in his life which kind of
#
changed it i don't know too much because i'm not i it seems like kind of a personal story for him
#
i'm like that's okay but he started believing in it and now he's very religious and i'm exactly
#
not but yeah that's um that's i think one of those things where you change your mind but
#
there are also other kind of interesting well interesting to me sorry where you know you kind
#
of change your mind the environment is definitely one i'm i love being in nature more than anything
#
else in fact i think everything that i do is for me a means towards that end where i can just
#
go away and live in the hills and be happy and you know it kind of bears out every single time
#
that i get an opportunity to be away i go to the hills that's that's my fortress of solitude and
#
happiness so i i do that quite often and then you know once you're kind of connected to the nature
#
and i'm i would like to believe a vegan by choice again it's not imposed on me because as i said
#
when i was growing up i grew up in a family which is not religious so it's not imposed on me for
#
religion but for me i just don't want to be the cause of any kind of suffering for animals and so
#
on right and that has not changed can i say something yeah go ahead if you eat a plate of
#
poha you're killing far far more animals than if you eat a chicken no i don't think so agricultural
#
involves large-scale genocide of various kinds of species and creatures yeah i don't think so more
#
by the way i mean there's i've studied a lot about this as well in terms of what is the
#
relative impact am i saying agriculture has no impact absolutely not i mean every cup of coffee
#
i drink has massive impact on the environment and again what do you say bio ecological impact
#
yeah it has ecological impact on just biodiversity for example right so your forests are cleared for
#
coffee plantations i have no two doubts about that i just don't like the large-scale mechanized
#
farming i mean of animals right mechanized uh whatever of animals i was with you till farming
#
then you said of animals no no i i you know millions of creatures under the soil and blah
#
blah blah i think if you care about animals the most moral thing you can do is only eat
#
large animals because in each meal meal has a lowest per capita so i don't care about but i'm
#
just no no that's fine but even there i don't mind so much about the killing of animals i think
#
that's i mean whatever you kill animals etc i'm really what i really don't like is the
#
what happens before the killing right small spaces extremely this thing all of those things is what
#
gets me uh but but if you think about somebody who is living in a village who has a farm behind
#
they are raring five chickens and they're getting eggs every day so i'm saying so that again that
#
is the context and we are eating something like avocado sitting here and that avocado has come
#
from where so you know we don't know about the ecological footprint of that so it's probably
#
yeah i mean no i'm still saying why i changed my mind about sure sure i was just being provocative
#
we're not trying to change your mind though maybe you know 10 years later if somebody asks him what
#
is the one big thing you change your mind on and anupam will say i only eat big animals
#
but no on the on the environment right so i'm saying from a position where i felt very strongly
#
about some of these things and where you know i would always imagine that you know my desire
#
was that the government should go and you know stop all of these things uh ban plastic because
#
of the danger it does etc and then again as even pranay was saying once you start learning things
#
like public policy or economic reasoning you realize for example banning is definitely not
#
the way to go forward and then i you know again with my purely from uh economic freedom personal
#
individual freedom as i said i might not eat anything but i will defend you know until death
#
your right to eat whatever you want right so those are i think nuances that have been built over time
#
so i don't know if it is a change of mind really but just nuances that you can still i still
#
dream about bringing about some of these changes but through can i think about doing it through
#
better regulations where can you for example i i don't know i've not really thought about deeply
#
but again even the use of plastic can be regulated in a better way right instead of banning it
#
obviously providing alternatives making it slightly more expensive at the margin etc etc etc so if the
#
same thing goes for even how how many whatever animals you put in a square meter can you just
#
increase that by regulation yes it will add costs can you negate that cost in some other ways
#
there are i'm saying policy solutions which are subtle which are nuanced which are sophisticated
#
not which uses a scalpel instead of like a hammer and i think that's where you begin to learn the
#
nuances better right you begin to appreciate the nuances of these things better than saying yeah
#
government should go and ban things and that's exactly what i try to teach all of the students
#
as well that there are no answers whatever you care about it's not binary in nature that's pretty
#
much the starting line of the entire gcpp that i begin with saying things are never binary it's
#
all about no answers or as you also say right we all contain multitudes and all of those things
#
yeah magnificent i'm being quoted back at me so you know so before we wrap up and at the end as
#
you know i will ask you all for recommendations et cetera but before we wrap up a question for
#
book which kind of fascinates me which is about this the actual mechanistic process of making
#
these illustrations and these drawing like how long do they take do you use pen and paper and
#
scan it do you use a software what kind of software take me take me into the engine room
#
of the creation of something like this i don't use pen and paper i i make some art using pen
#
and paper but so i try to do sometimes something called urban sketching where you just go and
#
if there's a old heritage building you just try to draw so it's more of a practice that i try to
#
do key if you can draw it or not but for this somehow i think what works for me is making
#
digital art so i have a small huon tablet it's not very expensive very very very affordable
#
tablet you just put it in your normal pc and i used to use this free software called sketchbook
#
i mean it's probably one time paying or something like that and then basically all my artwork is
#
made on that using that and yeah so the problem with this is you know i feel i have learned that
#
as you change the the disease devices right a lot of things keep on changing so i mean i was always
#
very worried that if i'm halfway and if one of these things conk off and if i have to change to
#
another system i don't know how well this will translate to some other things so that was always
#
my worry throughout the making of this thing because somehow i feel like same level of grain
#
too much device dependencies there in the kind of artwork and the strokes that you get out of
#
different devices so that was my worry the rest of this then i use an in-design so adobe in-design
#
and then put them and just designed the whole page so i was actually drawing it and designing
#
at the same time so it was more like building up page by page this is how it will go so there was
#
no separate drawing it and designing it i it was probably like one process of doing it in one go
#
and is it you know generally when you work like many writers will complain and this is
#
you know something that i have to tell my writing students about i don't imagine that writing is
#
easy for anybody like typically one trap people fall into is they'll be like writing is so hard
#
for me et cetera et cetera and the point i try to make is that look writing is really really
#
tough even for someone who's written 20 novels and the only thing is you have to have the discipline
#
to sit down and kind of get through it and i wonder what the process is for you because sometimes
#
when i am writing i'll really be enjoying myself but sometimes it is just bloody hard work it is
#
like torture why am i doing this so what is it like for you like do you feel that you sometimes
#
you need a force of will to push through or is it just beautiful is it easy for you to like
#
get into flow for example is there a meditative aspect to it i think getting into that flow is
#
the state of happiness if there is any state of true happiness people are saying i feel like if
#
you are in that flow that is where you are truly happy in that sense right so but it's a chase it
#
is not always a given that you will get it right so i think i like the chase that you go into that
#
and then i have formed some habits where i know that if i do these things it's easier for me to
#
get into that flow so generally what works for me is like getting up in the morning and then i'll go
#
for a walk and listen to some podcasts but mostly seen in the unseen because i think it's a very
#
calming i'm not saying it just for i'm truly saying it because i think the tone of of this
#
podcast is such that that puts me in that place where i want to go and create after that
#
especially if you are listening to other creators and people talk about it right i think there is
#
a natural inspiration that you get from them know and if you are getting that catching that energy
#
you feel like i want to do something with it right so that's how i can go and try to sit and
#
basically use that energy to just go through it there's a very beautiful lines by this
#
one german american poet charles bukowski i think you must have heard yeah so this is a very
#
controversial poem in this time because people are split on how they interpret it okay that's
#
why i chose to discuss this so so bukowski says is like this so you want to be a writer
#
if it doesn't come bursting out of you in spite of everything don't do it unless it comes unasked
#
out of your heart and your mind and your mouth and your gut don't do it now with these first
#
two lines a lot of people would think that what you interpret is that a very idealized notion of
#
if it is flow only then you do it but i feel that there is something missing in that interpretation
#
it's probably not a full at least my own interpretation if you go through a few lines
#
then you can see what else he's saying about it right so he's saying that don't do it if you're
#
doing it for money or fame don't do it if you're doing to doing it because you want to have women
#
in your bed don't do it if you have to sit there and rewrite it again and again don't do it so
#
again he's saying you don't do these things for very shallow sort of things but you do it
#
because there is something which is driving you from within you know if it is so i feel like that
#
that is probably crux of it there should be some internal motivation for you to do it because
#
writing is a very bad way of it's no way of making money right so very few people make money
#
i mean the opportunity cost of the time is so high that you're actually giving away money by writing
#
exactly right i got bought mercedes's by getting that is your banker mafia side job
#
charger lobbying bribes but so so but then he says if you have to wait for it to roll out of you then
#
wait patiently so there is some weight right and if it never does then you do something else and
#
i'll just end this unless it comes out of your soul like a rocket unless being still would drive
#
you to madness or suicide or murder don't do it unless the sun inside you is burning your gut
#
don't do it so i feel like he's talking about some kind of an internal motivation that needs
#
to be there and there is also he also talks about that if you are a chosen one it will come to you
#
so it it doesn't mean that it's going to come to you by yourself but there is something about
#
a lot of people have talked about especially poets and musicians talk about this being that
#
inspiration is something that is an external thing sometimes it's almost like it's visiting
#
you right and the point that i'm trying to go is yes all of that is true and that is important
#
i think most beautiful writing happens in those moments where it's almost like
#
you are being visited by somebody else and you are just a conduit for all of that writing
#
having said that your job is to be present on the keyboard or wherever you are writing
#
to receive it when that happens right if you don't show up for your work it's not gonna come
#
so that's but again don't sit because because somebody else is writing don't sit
#
because somebody else is something else right because that external motivation is very little
#
in this right like you are writing this in 2022 and we are seeing the book now so it unless that
#
internal motivation there is there you cannot sustain this as long as what i is the crux of it
#
where does that internal motivation come from so you can it doesn't come magically you know it's
#
sometimes you have to train yourself to be motivated i don't know if that makes sense amit
#
but it doesn't come out of the blue as in you you do it that itself has a reinforcing mechanism
#
and you know you get some kind of positive rewards i mean the simplest thing right everybody
#
is scared to take that first step of writing even a paragraph because they're like oh i can't write
#
or i i don't know how to write or what if people say but you know you write a paragraph you maybe
#
just the fact that you finished writing that will give you some kind of positive reinforcement and
#
then you'll want to write the next paragraph maybe you write you know you stitch together
#
three or four then you show it to a friend the friend says hey that's not bad that itself will
#
give you further motivation so i think there's a cycle there waiting for the fire from within
#
etc it might never happen for most people right and or i mean at least in in some places like
#
so there's a difference right i mean if you're writing about the beauty of the world and
#
okay you can wait for that fire but if you're in a field like public policy and i'm just trying
#
to bring it back to our lives if you are in the field of public policy i don't think you have
#
the luxury of waiting for the fire from within to come out so i've i've actually read that
#
bakowski poem and i agree with your interpretation of it completely i think it's beautiful and i
#
hadn't thought of it exactly like that but and i think the idea there is that of course i don't
#
think he's saying that you only write when you're inspired because nobody will ever write then
#
i think that that what he's talking about is the desire that makes you build the habit like
#
ultimately we all know that achieving any kind of productive activity is not a not a thing of
#
having the willpower to go out there and do it but the willpower to say that i will build that habit
#
and then within that habit things will flow and books will come and podcasts will come and all of
#
that and i think it is that hunger and that desire that he is talking about that if you don't have
#
that don't don't do it which actually in a sense makes the advice gratuitous like when people ask
#
me should i write a book i'm like the only answer i can give is no because if you have to ask then
#
don't do it right so the desire and the hunger have to be there at the same time like i look at
#
myself and i look at it in two conflicting ways that one is that i keep doing this podcast not
#
because like on its own i haven't even calculated if it actually earns this money back i get my
#
revenues from my writing course but i still put in the work and do it because it is so rewarding
#
for me and i don't even know why sometimes i kind of question it but there is that hunger and i'm
#
doing it and and i think bokowski would approve but at the same time there are things i want much
#
more that i haven't had the strength of character to do to build the discipline and actually build
#
the habit so i think that there is this tragic confluence where you might have the desire and
#
the hunger but perhaps a weakness in character or perhaps you know other things that are happening
#
perhaps even at a biological level which make it hard sometimes life comes in the way right
#
life comes in the way of course right and to just to add to anupam's point of view yeah i do agree
#
with what he's saying sometimes you have to you cannot wait for motivation all the time and for
#
that i got a good advice from pranay one day about when we were doing the course pranay gives good
#
advice yes so he said that you write because you want to understand that topic i think that
#
is a very simple way that's probably more accessible for most people that i want to
#
understand this thing and the best way is to think i will write about it and for that you will have
#
to read and you'll have to at least figure it out to some and you may not write the best piece
#
possible but at least you will understand the topic slightly more than what you were understanding
#
before so it's a much more doable thing for anybody to try out i feel so whenever i i don't
#
know i am not able to find that motivation then i i go to that advice and i'm like
#
that is great advice and pranay is following it like why is he writing so many books to
#
understand the world better now we know a final question to you before we you know get to the
#
echoes which is that bokowski's advice also seems to me to be very man advice you know that often
#
men will have the privilege to make time for deep work and their masters of their time and all that
#
but women have lives where they are multitasking much more you might have a job you might also
#
have the responsibilities of the home in your case you're a mom so you've also got to think
#
about your kid and you don't have the luxury of waiting for inspiration or being able to carve out
#
large chunks of time and all of that so what are your writing habits like like how have you
#
managed how have you built that discipline within yourself to do a big project like this
#
yeah i i actually am a very bad multitasker and i feel it's a myth that women are better
#
multitaskers because i think we are forced to multitask but yeah i i know that you were not
#
saying that but some people actually think that women are good multitaskers there is no choice
#
we have to do it and it gives me a lot of heartburn when i have to multitask so i like when i don't
#
have five things i'm just doing one thing that is the best day of my life and i have i know small
#
chitra putra tasks are there and only sit and do this and i have my time for it right but what i
#
have learned is to what i have unlearned is to feel guilt about it because i used to feel a lot
#
of guilt about when i have to take time out from other people i have learned that i should not
#
feel guilt about it and i will have to voice and i'll have to fight for it and i will also have to
#
fight some conventional conventions that i have put on myself some of the pressure is self-generated
#
that i my house has to be like this i have to cook five different things anyways i never had the
#
cooking bug but even the little bit i i try to optimize time so that i'm spending much less time
#
in doing those things and i have because that's how if if i were doing a nine to five job
#
then i would be doing i would be forced to do this right so if i'm trying to do if only because i'm
#
working on my own time and myself i shouldn't think that i have infinite time i have to reduce
#
time in those spaces only then i can work so opportunity cost yes exactly so i do not and
#
i tell my family members also i don't enjoy my time in kitchen i don't don't expect that from me
#
i will do what is required for us to have good happy like healthy meals and all yes but don't
#
expect too much beyond that so i just put those boundaries and i i have stopped feeling guilty
#
about it it has taken a lot of time for me to reach that space but and yeah it still needs to be
#
reiterated again and again for me to remember this i loved your phrase chitterputter you know
#
english doesn't have words like this chitterputter is beautiful you should write a book called the
#
war against chitterputter so thank you for so much of your valuable time i mean thank you for
#
writing the book in the first place that you know even uh it was clarifying my concepts as well when
#
i was reading it so so you know just a wonderful book that speaks to everybody a final question
#
as you guys know and pranay is i think tired he's probably named every book that has ever happened
#
but you know what have you been reading recently and then i'll go to these guys for their fresh
#
recommendations yeah so since books we've talked about i thought i'll talk about some papers that
#
people can read so some papers if you're interested in public policy that are really
#
important one i would begin by going back to dr vijay kilkar cd deshmukh lecture i always recommend
#
that to our students as well that's the lecture which then became the book in service of the
#
republic but that is a amazing lecture in 30 pages you will understand the policy maker's
#
perspective and an economist insight both combined in one paper what can be better second is a paper
#
by devesh kapoor another very well known political scientist so he has a paper why does the indian
#
state both fail and succeed it's a brilliant paper there's no math but if you read that paper your
#
way of thinking about the indian state will change for sure so that is the second one the
#
third one i would go back to milton friedman's paper on india right when he had two visits in
#
the 1950s and the good folks at ccs have compiled it into a pdf his observations about india were
#
remarkably prescient and especially i mean people think milton friedman he would have said
#
government should not do anything but please go and read it what he talks about that human
#
capital is india's biggest strength and india should spend a lot more time and energy in there
#
in that and you can see how insightful he was on a topic which is not his it's not a not a topic
#
in monetary policy which is known for it but it was remarkable insight so again a small paper
#
on the political side umbedkar has written only one manifesto in his life
#
which was in 1951 for the scheduled caste federation that is the best manifesto you will
#
read ever so it is very beautifully written on a range of topics from the pattern of production
#
and prohibition and china so because it was written towards the end of his life it also
#
you know captures a lot of his thinking over the many years because he did change his
#
views on many topics so that i really enjoy and finally for people who are interested in research
#
hal varian the he is a i think he's still the chief economist at google he had a paper called
#
how to build an economic model in your spare time i really like that paper because it says
#
one foundational thing it says many people rush towards systematic literature review too early
#
into the cycle he says don't do that when you are interested in a topic first create your own model
#
your own way of thinking about it then pick up the literature review otherwise you will just
#
think in the conventional the tyranny of the conventional thinking you'll fall into it so
#
that is something i really value that's it i did an episode with chandrabahan prasad ji where he
#
also spoke about that ambit kar manifesto which by the way i will second that it is brilliant
#
and the great point there is you know what you were quoting a famous man earlier saying we
#
contain multitudes and that is also so true of ambit kar because he changed his mind constantly
#
throughout his life and people will often give a lot of importance to his views in the 30s and 40s
#
and all of that and this is right towards the end a great thinker perhaps at the peak of his powers
#
at that time assimilating all that he has learned about the world and actually changing his mind on
#
a lot of stuff he used to believe in so if you want you know and a distillation of ambit kar's
#
final thought coming out after he has experienced life and all his richness you know that's a
#
sort of great place to start and chandrabahan prasad's episode was about how his two great
#
heroes are ambit kar and adam smith and you might feel that ambit kar would have approved of that
#
you know when you read his writings right at the end so you know there's something there
#
anupam let me turn to you and yeah what a radical thought sir radical thought no so what no what
#
haha i really thought about it amit during the break time as to what i would what could i put
#
forward here i don't think any of them are radical because it seems like i've been making those
#
arguments for quite some time so they're not radical to you yeah what would shock me shock me
#
anupam no i don't think i can shock you though because on some many of these things we think
#
similar i'm quite shocking things like oh if i say we shouldn't have an ms semi policy at all
#
right we shouldn't have for example we shouldn't care about micro enterprises yeah should not have
#
a department of industry we should not have a department of industry we should not try to
#
for example i say that government should not try to preserve culture or language it's not the job
#
of the government correct so see none of this yeah if i say get religion out of public space
#
it's not radical yeah so i don't know i'll say my standard thing one of the things that we i was
#
working on is how do you get the army out of cities for example that army owns far too much land in
#
cities army as in our defense forces so get the cantonment out of cities sell that land to the
#
cities and then we can use that land it'll be a massive boost to city jp have fsi of 40 yeah
#
remove rbi as a payment regulator is one of the other things that i thought yeah
#
but none of these are radical these are all great you know there's a book by walter block called
#
defending the indefensible where he takes a bunch of ideas which seem indefensible at first sight
#
and then he defends them so maybe we should do an episode like that someday i think i did something
#
like that with yaza jaal your former colleague and my good friend we had a section on pragrati
#
called reforms 2.2 or something like that where i didn't see like removing slr requirements but
#
those are micro policies but that was good no that's what i was saying when you're thinking
#
from a hat of a policy analyst it will be radical in a narrow space you are not thinking about
#
you know don't have a i mean change the political system to i don't know like
#
don't have the representative democracy i don't think that or replace replace all rupee notes
#
with bitcoins or things you're not going to you're not going to say that recommendation
#
sir okay recommendation i want to start with i mean make make a very broad statement which
#
in you know if i say this in office or in policy circles i'll be looked down upon but
#
i want to probably even just make a recommendation that you don't always have to read a book
#
to get knowledge i'm actually a very poor reader i'm a very poor reader because i don't have the
#
patience to read books i mean having said that please buy and read be the citizens i think that
#
is a great book that's my first recommendation i think one way of defining poor reader would be
#
that you have lots of books but no money because you're a poor reader but never mind i'm sure he
#
reads a lot as a part of his work he's just yeah i think that as part of a job but i mean i don't
#
but yeah i don't have to read entire books for that i'm a very purpose oriented reader
#
which means that i i need to know something i will go go very deep into it and read about it
#
are you at peace with that like do you think you should do you wish you had more spare time
#
not at all no i'm very happy i don't want to so i i don't even what is that japanese word
#
i don't face that at all i'm happy with what i read i i think you can get knowledge from a variety
#
of sources and i in fact most of the time reading an entire book is a waste of your time because
#
they sometimes go into far too much detail i get really i'm a very restless person i don't have
#
that much patience i'd rather flip through those things find what i want to get knowledge about
#
go deep into that then find another paper another paper another paper get as much assimilate all of
#
that make my own notes and sing right in fact most of the reading that i do is when i write
#
which is why i also like to keep writing because that's for me the way to gain knowledge as much
#
as possible so that's at at the broadest level that books i know there's a lot of emphasis on
#
you know how you should read books etc but i'm seeing that's not the only way i actually agree
#
with you because i think that that hierarchy of intellectual activity where we place books at the
#
top is actually misplaced podcasts can be great youtube can be great you know knowledge comes at
#
you in different ways and also i think there is a tyranny of form here that because a book will
#
always be a particular length you have the phenomenon where a book that should be 60 pages
#
is padded up to become 200 because far too far a paper is just converted into a book yeah yeah
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so even in the paper i mean sometimes you know even when you're reading papers i i read quite
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a bit of economic literature as in like for every week i go into nbr and see what is the
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latest kind of economic literature but all of that i don't need to even read the entire paper
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because for most of those things i don't need to know the methodology right maybe i i'm using my
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bias here saying okay if something is on nbr it's of a decent methodology it's been peer reviewed
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it's you know it's gone through all of that process so i'll take that for granted i i'll
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read the abstract i'll read the introduction and the conclusion and for me i get a lot of that
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and that way i can go through you know 20 papers instead of reading one in detail
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because it's 40 pages long right it goes into all of the econometrics which i can skip
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so i think being i am a little bit more deliberate in what i read and how i pick what i read
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just being conscious of my time right and yeah i listened a lot of podcasts for me
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an episode of econ talk gives me a lot of insight which perhaps an entire book cannot
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so i'm i'm quite happy about that but okay so having said that broad recommendations i i think
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pranay would have already said this but use of knowledge in society is a great greatest essay of
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the 20th century i think reading that matters i would also say read read slash watch free to
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choose the entire milton freedman i'm a big fan of freedman i mean the monetary policy parts apart
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because i think he's one of the first great economists who was also entirely dedicated
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to persuasion yeah which very few economists are right if you're looking at complex ideas
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and simple language he's a man he's he's as good as it gets i mean in fact if any of you
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are interested please just youtube i mean search milton freedman speeches slash talks on youtube
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and you'll find great debate you send me your favorite ones i'll put them in the show notes
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yeah sure sure yeah he's some of that which he talks about i mean these things that we spoke
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about during this day about capital about etc capitalism etc i think he defends it in
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impeccable manner right i love milton freedman's speeches so i would strongly recommend that
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but i would say yeah i mean if you read even just the economist sometimes cover to cover but this
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is a part of my was part of my job when i first joined even takshashila i was just read the
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economist cover to cover right i mean yes there's a quite a bit of things which you might find
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irrelevant but again you'll find you'll get so much information slash knowledge in one episode
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and then you can go deeper into any of those things that interest you i think there's a lot
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that you can learn through that maybe i mean the book actually that i've picked up now is is on
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just trade douglas ervin's trade trade and a fire but yeah i'm just again i'm probably skimmed through
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it and it's just okay so i think they have given more than enough recommendations so i'll just give
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nothing is more than enough what are you talking about no no anyways i have one recommendation to
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give okay so this is a different kind of a book it's called the art of charlie chan hawk chai
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okay so this is by a singaporean artist sonny lew and what he has done is he has created a
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fictional character called which is a cartoonist okay he's a this charlie chan hawk chai is a
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fictional cartoonist character and he has told the story of singapore from the 1930s
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for early 40s to whatever happened has happened the high points of their politics still i don't
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remember till when but a very like through the life of a fictional cartoonist life story he has
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taken us through the story of singapore which is a very interesting device that is i mean it's
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almost a masterpiece so if anybody wants to study it for understanding not so much for
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understanding singapore but in terms of a different kind of a storytelling a different kind of a
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narration and an immersion into exactly so that way i think it's a very interesting piece that
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one should read wonderful i'm going to run to blossoms right now and look for it so guys this
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has been so awesome thank you all for coming and i've just really loved it and learned from
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your book and learned from this conversation thanks abit thank you for having us
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if you enjoyed listening to this episode buy the brilliant book we the citizens by khyati anupam
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and pranay you can follow them on social media by checking out the links in the show notes check
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out the show notes enter rabbit holes at will you can follow me on twitter at amitwarma a m i t b
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a r m a you can browse past episodes of the scene and the unseen at scene unseen dot in
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and any podcast app of your choice thank you for listening
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did you enjoy this episode of the scene and the unseen if so would you like to support the
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production of the show you can go over to scene unseen dot i n slash support and contribute any
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