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This is rather an obvious metaphor, but I often think of the similarities between travel
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and life. Many of the questions you could ask yourself about travel also apply to life.
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Do you travel for the sake of travelling, or do you travel to get somewhere? Do you
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move slowly, soaking in the moments, or do you move fast, accumulating experiences, ticking
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off boxes? And how much reflecting do you do on both your travelling and your living?
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How much intentionality do you bring into both your travelling and your living? Do you
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want to get somewhere, or are you happy in the present moment? Are you restless even
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when you are still, or have you found a way to always be at peace even when you are moving,
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perhaps especially when you are moving? Do you think about travelling? Do you think about
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Welcome to The Scene In The Unseen. My guest today is Utsav Mamoria, the creator of the
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Great Travel Podcast, Postcards From Nowhere. Utsav is a creator who thinks deeply about
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what the act of creating means, and he is now sharing his insights with all of you.
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Utsav and Chuck Gopa, like Deepak Gopalakrishnan, who's been on a memorable episode with me,
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are starting a project together called the 6% Club, in which they help creators get from
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idea to launch in 45 days. So if you've had creative ideas for a while, but not had either
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the momentum or the know-how or the non-Bengaliness to launch these ideas, don't just stand there.
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Sign up with the 6% Club. Utsav and Chuck will get you there. The URL is in the show
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notes and Utsav also talks about it at the start of this conversation. And we talk of
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a lot else. We talk of slow travel, we talk of noticing the world, we talk of intentionality,
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we talk of learning how to see, we talk of being a creator, we talk of how a philosophy
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towards travel can also be a philosophy of living. The best travelers don't just look
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outwards, they look inwards. Utsav certainly does, and that's why I love this conversation
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so much. But before we get to it, let's take a quick commercial break.
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the show is called Everything is Everything. Please do check it out.
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Utsav, welcome to The Scene and The Unseen. Thank you so much, Amit. Happy to be here.
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Yeah, we've been talking about this for a long time, and it's been a long time sort
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of happening. And I'm really glad you're here. And I'm especially glad to learn about your
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new venture with our good mutual friend Chuck Gopal, the great Deepak Gopalakrishnan, who
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did such a memorable episode with me a couple of years back. And I just think he's one of
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the most brilliant content creators out there, not just in terms of content, but in thinking
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meta about content and getting meta about it. And the show is called that. And I had a role to play
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in that. But so and then you two are coming together to help content creators. I'm just so
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excited about this. So tell me more.
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So this actually just started off with, you know, Deepak, you know, telling me that, hey, you
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know, I have been always wanting to do something in this space. And Deepak and I go our way
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back, right? So we could wave over. Yeah, so he was just a batch senior to me at our MBA
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school, Micah. And we have been discussing things on and off. He got me into podcasting, right?
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I think that's a story I really want to tell because I remember it was 2018 or 17 sometime
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and he reached out and said, Hey, I run a podcast. And I wanted to come on it. My two
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questions were, what is a podcast? And I was like, what do you think I will have to say,
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which is of going to be of any value to you? Right? He's like, No, you work in market
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research. You work in consumer behavior. So just come and speak and, you know, we'll figure
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it out. We'll have some fun. I'm like, well, it's your show, but feel free to junk it if you
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think it's not worth it. Right? So we went on to that show and I had a blast, absolute blast
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with the simplified team. And then it's around that time I took a sabbatical, right? I was
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always into traveling, but something I really wanted to do. So I took three months off from
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work. Right. And I then did a episode with them talking about how to take a sabbatical in
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India. I've heard that. That was lovely. That was super meta. Right. Because one thing is very,
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you're very conscious, right? That unlike a lot of creators out there, you know, including
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yourself, my side gigs are my side gigs that they are not my main gigs. I still have a full
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time job and I know I need my to pay and so on. So was it a wise decision? Should I do that or
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not? You went to go through all those things and, you know, also navigate that at your
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organization and kudos to my former organization who said that, you know, yeah, just sort of go
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for it types. Right. So that happened. I came back, did a whole couple of episodes on budget
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travel. And it's around that time when, you know, we were sitting in one of the recordings and I
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had set myself a goal when I started out saying that in three months, I want to write a book of
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whatever my experiences. Right. Now, the funny bit is that I actually wrote the book and I have
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been sitting on the manuscript for the last six years for a variety of reasons. But when I was
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talking about this entire thing, one of the producers said that, why don't you pitch your
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own travel show? Right. And this is where my favorite enemy came back to me, which is called
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self rejection. Right. And I'm like, yeah, sure. But really, I mean, I have traveled a bit. Sure.
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I've done a sabbatical, which is interesting and different, but, you know, creating content is
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completely different game. And, but then Deepak said, just give it a shot. Right. I mean, why
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don't you submit a pitch to IBM? And, and then we went through a couple of random iterations
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and that's how Postcards from Nowhere, the show was born. And I think one of the things which
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at least I did not realize then and now I realize now is that all of creativity, content creation,
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podcasting, YouTubing, whatever you do, the most important journey you take is actually the journey
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which you take within. Right. The amount of sheer discipline it gives you. Right. Because you can't,
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you simply cannot do it without discipline. Motivation is fickle. Right. And sort of this
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thought has been with both of us between Deepak and I for a while. Right. And just about a couple
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of months ago, I sort of said to him that, you know, we should do something in this space.
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So initially we thought of, thought of, you know, just talking about accountability.
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And this also happened completely by chance because a couple of friends told me that, hey, listen,
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I'm trying to do these things. One of them is an entrepreneur, one is a freelancer saying that
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these are important for the future of my work. But because I'm so caught up in day-to-day stuff,
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I'm never going to dedicate time to it. So please be my accountability partner. Right. And help me
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through this. And both of them said, I'll pay you. I'm like, why are you paying me? You're my
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friend. There's no reason for you to pay me. And they told me, no, I should feel the pain of paying
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you because I should feel that something I should have done by myself. I'm literally paying someone
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else to tell me, Hey, have you done this? Right. So that's how it started. I'm still working with
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those two individuals for their goals. Right. And that's when we sort of came up with the idea
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and we call it the 6% club. Now, you know, people are very, you know, say that what is the point of
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a 6% club? If you have to be a club, be a 1% club, be a 0.1% club. But it really comes from the fact
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that there is some research which says that 94% people don't reach the goals they are into.
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Right. And we have been on that side, both him and I, but we now also feel that we're on the
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6% side. So we just want to sort of create a club called the 6% club and help people get their
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content projects off the ground. And we understand it's very hard because he runs a full-time venture.
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Right. I have a full-time job and it's really hard to balance these things. And it does not come easy,
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but we always sort of found ways. And we really want it to, you know, meet a 30-day, 45-day period
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where you just go from an idea to an execution. You're getting another friend on board who's a
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full-time YouTuber. Right. So he's done the proper, the Indian dream of engineering, an MBA, and then
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decided that this is not what I want to do. And took up lunch into YouTube about four years ago.
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And now he's monetized and he has built products on the back of his YouTube audience as well.
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And he's also in the travel space. And so he's again an old friend, I know for about 20 years now.
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Right. So what's his name? His name is Abhishek Vaid. His show is called The Untraveled Show.
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I know it's on YouTube. And just the three of us felt that, you know, with Deepak doing podcasting
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and newsletter and a whole bunch of other stuff he has done. I've done two podcasts now, and next
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year my book should come out. And Abhishek, of course, is a full-time YouTuber. So we felt that
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the larger space of content creation, which is what most people want to do, sort of covers the
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three of us. So again, that's it. We really have no idea how this is going to go, but it's just
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such an exciting and fun thing to do. Because, you know, when you get to see your dream projects
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come to life, there's certain joy, which honestly no amount of corporate promotions sort of can,
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you know, give you, or maybe I'm too old for it to be overjoyed by corporate promotions now.
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But yeah, so that sort of has been the discussion between Deepak and I. And we agree on a lot of
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fundamental principles in this, right? And while our approaches are different, Deepak is a very
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different person in terms of his taste, right? The kind of music he listens to, I just don't know
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what to do with. And I'm sure it's vice versa. And he's a cyclist and he does a whole bunch of
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other things. And I'm not as diverse, nowhere as diverse as he is. So yeah, so we're just now
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taking this plunge and we will see how it goes. Mind blowing. And I hope the 6% becomes 12% because
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of you, that more and more people, you know, manage to do stuff. What do you find are the roadblocks?
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Like I know for a creator, for me, the biggest roadblock is just willpower, just getting started,
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right? And luckily, whenever I've gotten started, the fact that I'm putting a timeline to it,
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it's every week, forces me to go on. But otherwise, discipline is also something I have really
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struggled with in my life and I'm trying to sort it out this year and I can share some of the
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experiments I'm trying. But what have you found when, you know, what are the problems you are
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solving for people while doing this? Yeah, so a few things, right? Now discipline is a problem
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everybody struggles with, right? I don't think even the people who have figured it out are not.
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So one of the first things we decided that, you know, it's really hard to take something off the
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ground just by yourself, right? Now, if you now everything is everything you're doing with Ajay,
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right? It would be much hard for you to do the show just if you were yourself, right? So just the
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aspect of having someone you are working with and who's aligned to your vision of what you're doing
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really helps. Because while you may be in a certain week or a certain month, not in the zone,
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the other person will push you and say that, hey guys, we really need to get this done, right? So
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that's at a very, very broad level, right? But then with any sort of passion project or content
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creation, what tends to happen is that it comes down to the brass tracks, it comes down to
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execution. So we're approaching it in three broad ways, right? The first ops, and of course, because
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I did an MBA, I have to create a framework for everything. We call it the maps framework, right?
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It's mindsets, accountability, process and systems, right? We believe all of these are required for
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you to really, you know, succeed at whatever you're trying to do. So the first bit is essentially
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an assessment exercise to really understand a few things, right? The first thing we really want to
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understand is that what are the limiting beliefs people hold about themselves, right? What are the
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limiting beliefs they hold about the others and what are the limiting beliefs they hold about life,
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right? Now, to give you an example, a limiting belief which people hold about life is everything
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is destiny. What's going to happen is going to happen. So if my content project has to happen,
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it will happen. Otherwise it will not happen, right? That's the sort of one way of a limiting
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belief which people hold, right? A personal limiting belief is what value do I have to give
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to the world or, you know, I'm not good enough for this or why should someone read my writing,
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right? So the first step is to really understand what are those limiting beliefs people are sitting
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with, then go one level deeper and understand that what are those experiences or reinforcing
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memories they have, right? Which sort of doesn't help them break out of it because
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often what we find is that, and again, we mean, you know, Freud, of course, talked about it,
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talked about, you know, the parent ego, the child ego and the adult ego, right? So things we are
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just mimicking from our parents, things we are mimicking from our childhood and things we are
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mimicking from our adult here in our experiences, right? I think that is a fundamental building
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block of how we want to approach it because I think it's rarely a lack of talent, if I may use
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the word loosely or knowledge or experience, it's really a lack of mindset or, you know, maybe,
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you know, we're in a negative mindset when we're in some of these spaces. So that's the first step,
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right? The second step is really helping them think through the content idea itself
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because what happens is that, and again, I mean, you've seen this with the evolution of the show
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itself, Seen Unseen, that you started off with 15-20 minute episodes and now you're into much
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longer oral histories going beyond politics, economics, behavioral science, is that one,
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content creators have to be okay with the idea that what they start off with and what they
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eventually go down the road would be different. And second, never create an idea which is so
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limiting that you cannot think beyond 10 ideas, right? At the same time, do not worry about
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niches. I feel the whole niches thing is honestly overrated in the sense that you do what you like,
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you do, niches will figure themselves out over time, right? You start interacting with the kind
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of stuff you do and so on. So that's really the second step. The third step is where we provide
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more, you know, technical advice. For example, if you're starting up YouTube, right? What kind
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of gear should you have, right? What kind of setup should you have? How much a budget should be and
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so on. So very, very brass tacks stuff. And then of course, talking, getting into the accountability
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part of it, right? Like, because my intention is that if I'm able to help someone get off from a
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30 to 45 days to start, I want them to continue, right? I mean, that is a real measure of my
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success. In fact, Deepak and I have been discussing that the metric, which at least I like to define
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and his agreement is of success is the percentage of clients we lose, right? Because they don't need
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you anymore. They don't need us anymore, right? Because that's really the true success, right?
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If I've gotten you to do the first five episodes is great, but I want to reach 50, right? That's
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really the metric I want to gun for because if you're able to do that, right, you don't need
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marketing, honestly, word of mouth will take care of at least the zero to one kind of a building
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of this. So that's the accountability part where we help you build a plan. We understand what the
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cadence of your life is, right? People have all kinds of responsibilities, whether at work or at
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home, right? Deepak and I, and my friend Abhishek also, we have made some life choices, which
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allow us a little more time in our lives, but not everybody has that luxury. So how do we
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look at your day structured in such a way that you have dependable, repeatable, reliable time slots
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in time for you to do it? Otherwise, you're not going to do it. Your other things will life will
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take over, right? And the last bit is equipping them to keep going, right? Once you've built a
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system, also give them an understanding of how to tweak that system. Because, you know, life will
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not always be where it is now and you will need to make adjustments and shit will happen.
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So that's how we are looking at it as a three, four step sort of a thing. Again,
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I have not nailed it down completely in terms of what the journey of someone who's coming into it.
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And at the end of it's look like we're doing that now, but that's what we are really kicked
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about at the moment. So I'll link to this interview Deepak did with you on his substrack.
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And I really loved your definition of passion in that, where you distinguish between passion
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and interest. And you say, you know, you can't just say I'm passionate about music. You're
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interested in music. A passion means that you put in a lot of time in it and that compounds and
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cetera, et cetera. And I also like there or elsewhere, I forget where, but you've made
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the point that you have to treat your passion like a job. So if you have another day job,
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you have to treat this like a second job, but you don't have the luxury of like at work,
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you don't have the luxury of telling your boss that, hey, I can't deliver by Saturday. I don't
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feel like it. I'm not in the mood, et cetera, et cetera. You have to do it. And in a similar
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sense, you have to sort of treat this with that kind of rigor. And one of the sort of like,
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I think what happens with a lot of creators and it's true of myself in certain contexts or
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projects that I am planning is that I'll be stuck in a vicious circle and I won't do it.
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And because I'm not doing it, I'll keep wondering, can I do it? Maybe I can't do it and I won't do
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it. And I'm just stuck in that cycle. And the moment you break out of that cycle, if there's
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an inflection point where you actually start doing it, then it can turn into a virtuous cycle.
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And then it doesn't matter what is a quality or, you know, like Ajay and I have made a pact that
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we are going to do two years. We are going to do 104 episodes. No matter what, we will not look at
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the analytics. So of course he's a geek. So he keeps looking at the analytics and he's got a weekly
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email about analytics. And I'm like, fuck you. I don't care. Don't tell me, you know, we'll talk
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after 104. And, and I think that that sort of mindset shift for creators is really important
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that if you're into creating, because you want to be a YouTube star or you want to be an influencer
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and you want crypto brands and Ayurveda brands to pay you money to hog their nonsense, then,
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you know, you're not really going to get very far. But if you're into it, because you just love it,
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you want to do shit, right? You want to just get down and dirty and do shit. And at some level,
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you don't even care about, you know, whether it's working or not. Like we're just, we've just
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released episode 35 of everything is everything today. And there's so many things I just feel
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like I'm like, I wish I was learning faster. I can see how much I've learned in 35, but I'm
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also frustrated because I can see all the things that all the areas in which I wish I was better.
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But that journey is a whole thing. You just got to get in there and you got to keep doing.
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Yeah, no, I mean, completely agree because, and one of the things while looking at statistics,
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not looking at statistics is so important, right? In fact, I would say it actually helps
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every content creator that they don't go viral, at least in the initial times, right? Because you
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make your mistakes, right? You just enjoy the craft of doing what you're doing. I think the
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enjoyment part is so important. And for everyone who has, you know, ever worked a job, right,
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you can't compete against someone in your organization who's having fun at their job.
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You simply cannot because the kind of, you know, intellectual input they're getting in the kind of
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hours they are putting and the kind of thinking they are doing, someone who's not interested in
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the job will never really get that in. And that same goes for content creation. And this is why
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I feel that I have done a whole bunch of content projects, which I have failed spectacularly at in
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the past, right? And the one thing I realized is that while I was interested in them, I don't think
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my reasons were right, right? And I think with my show postcards, what really clicked was that I
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really wanted to tell those stories, right? That I know there is a ton of travel content was there,
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will there, will be there. But I wanted to bring a certain perspective of saying that, hey, can you
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just take a step back, okay? Don't rush through five countries in 15 days in Europe. I know
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maximizing the F out of your Schengen visa is something, you know, Indians are very hardwired
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at. But if you just take a step back and start to think about how you are traveling a little
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differently, you know, that's really going to change your travel experience. That was the only
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thing I really wanted to bring out in the world because I have traveled the other way, which is,
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you know, just going through things and places very quickly. And then I started with my sabbatical
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really slow travel. Like I spent the first month in Bosnia and Herzegovina, right? Not exactly the
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kind of place where most people would think, hey, sort of, you know, let's go for a month to Bosnia
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and Herzegovina. I spent a month in Armenia and Georgia. And the third month, which I spent,
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which was where I bulk of my writing got done, was actually a one room cottage about an hour up from
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Manali. And this was a, this was a very funny experiment. I feel in hindsight, I tried to do
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is that how much can I disconnect, right? So that cottage doesn't have anything around it except
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trees. It's super basic. It has one light bulb. It has one chair, one mattress on the floor and a
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bookshelf. That's it. Right. And you can walk maybe about 200, 300 meters to find a cell reception
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somewhere, but sitting in your cottage, you're not going to find anything. And I remember that
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for the first two or three days, I was losing my mind. I just did not know why is time passing by
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so slowly. Right. And I was genuinely struggling for the first two, three days. But then by day
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four, day five, you know, that sort of cloud starts to lift off your head and you find a rhythm.
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Right. So of course the routine helps. Right. And because that place is sparsely populated,
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I went on for like long short hikes, walks, and you know, this adorable mountain dogs were
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accompanying you everywhere you go when you, when you go hiking. Right. And then I started
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talking to the caretakers of where, so I used to just sort of, you know, I spent a total of rupees
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18,000 in that month for my stay and food. Right. Which is, I mean, if any of you are worried about
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can budget travel be still done in India? Very much. This is an example of it. And I started to
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understand the rhythm and cadence of life in the mountains. And it's a very romanticized idea that,
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oh, I want to retire to the mountains. Right. So the two caretakers, Dolma auntie and uncle,
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you know, they are well into their seventies. Right. And they catered three meals for me.
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And just to sit down with them and talk about what life looks in the six months when it snows.
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Right. And the amount of preparation they do, right. Amount of food drying they do,
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food preservation they do. Right. How the cuisine completely changes in the winter when it comes to
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food versus in the summer. Right. And your entire idea of food habits, food systems changes once,
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you see something like that up close and you start understanding what farm to table is because
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literally my veggies were grown right next to where I was living. And I could see that they
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were so fit at 70, like auntie could outrun me on a mountain. Right. I was 33 then and she's into
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her seventies and she could outrun me even then. And now when you, when you go through an experience
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like that, I'm not saying that I had some crazy life changing insight or anything,
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but it just showed me the value of slowing down. Right. And the value of slowing down is that
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you suddenly start observing so much more because ultimately when we experience reality,
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we're only experiencing a sliver of the reality, which is actually happening around us.
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But the moment you slow down, you will start seeing things. For example,
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I started noticing the tree tops. Right. Cause I have so much free time. So if you're just going
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to sit and gaze at nature and she started pointing out to me trees, which have been struck by
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lightning. Right. Because the entire crown has, you know, sort of completely burnt off, but the tree
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still is not being used for wood or timber because the trees plays a certain role in the ecosystem.
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Right. I started walking with them and she took me to the forest and showed me that kind of,
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you know, basic herbs, you know, which they use sometimes. So very normal ailments. Right.
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Or they would use something which adds a completely different dimension of flavor
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to the food. Right. Now, this is what I really got attracted to using my sabbatical that, you know,
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I want to, I want to think of a place like an onion that I want to take off layer after layer
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after layer and understand the core of it. And living in India, you know, that in a lifetime
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is less to experience India and it holds true for most countries. But then I started thinking about
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how much time do I want to spend when I go to a place. So since then, my idea of travel
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changed completely. I started doing, you know, trips, which are at least two weeks, but in two
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weeks, I would just go to one country. I've usually now do actually almost a month. I work
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two weeks remotely and two weeks I take off completely. So the idea now is that you stay
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in the larger city of a country for the first two weeks where you have good internet connection
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and you're able to do your work well enough. And the time zone is not completely off. So Europe is
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three and a half, four hours. You can manage with your time zones and the next two weeks,
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you go off anywhere in the country because you don't have to work. And what tends to happen
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is that I give an example of Ireland. My wife is there a year and a half ago.
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She decided to take a career paper and pursued her masters. And this was my eighth or ninth day
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of going on the bus in Ireland. Right. And I noticed the ad of it said that get paid to be
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thanked. Okay. Very strange. And the ad is actually about a recruitment drive for bus drivers in
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Ireland, because in Dublin, at least every time people get off a bus, they say thank you to the
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driver. Right. And I find it's a very sweet thing to do because labor jobs are so underappreciated,
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at least in India, if not abroad. And that's what got me thinking that, you know, where does this
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really come from? Right. I've not seen it in a lot of other Western European countries I've been to.
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Right. It's very specific to Ireland. And that sort of led me down to a rabbit hole of, you know,
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the economic history of Ireland. Right. Anyone who's familiar with Ireland knows of the great
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famine which Ireland went through, the potato famine, which decimated the population of the
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country. But then you start understanding why did the famine happen? How were the British involved?
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You start connecting it back to why did the troubles exist? Why was there a conflict between
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Ireland and Northern Ireland? And why do the Irish people have the world's largest diaspora,
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you know, outside of its own country and probably even larger than the population of the country?
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And then you start understanding that fundamentally, as a race of people, that
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because so many of these people went and did all kinds of jobs, right, because they were
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immigrants, they didn't have the choice. And this was the 1800, late 1890s or 1880s we're talking
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about, that there came a very distinct respect for every job. While it exists in many parts
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of the Western world, it's really taken to another level in Ireland. Right. I could not
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have figured this out in two days in Dublin, because in two days in Dublin, I would be figuring
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out, okay, where is the best beer in the country and right. But this is what happens once you've
#
hit all the pubs, for example, right, there is, I've done an episode on this, there's a pub called
#
the Grave Diggers pub. Right. And it's literally next to a cemetery. And whenever there's a service
#
in the morning, the Grave Diggers would come very early at four or five in the morning, start digging
#
the grave. Once they finished digging the grave, they would come and have a pint of beer. Right.
#
That's why it's called the Grave Diggers pub. And one of the strange things I found is that after the
#
funeral, everybody who comes to the funeral goes to the pub to have a drink. Right. Now, as an Indian,
#
as a South Asian, right, you are thinking, okay, people are consuming alcohol at a funeral. This
#
is not making any sense. Right. Then you start thinking, but this is so accepted. Why is it so
#
accepted? Right. Then I got into, I read a fascinating book, I forget the author, but it's
#
called the Irish way of death. Right. What are the death rituals of the Irish people? And that's where
#
the word wake actually comes from. Right. So the original story of the word wake is that because
#
medical science wasn't very developed even 150 years ago, a lot of times people who were in some
#
sort of a coma or were passed out for long periods, people thought they were dead, but they were not
#
actually buried for three to four days because there's a chance that they might wake up. Right.
#
That's why it's actually called the wake. Right. And then you understand that how Ireland views
#
death and it's in many ways, it's celebration of someone's life, which is a beautiful way to look at
#
death. Right. Of course, there is grief and loss and longing, but there is also a celebration of
#
a life well lived. You're not going to end up in the Grave Diggers pub after two days in Dublin.
#
Right. You need to stay a while and, you know, get out those things. So it's not always about,
#
oh, this is a hidden gem, but really what are you seeing and consuming and observing as users,
#
just people are going about their daily lives. Right. All across Dublin, if you notice carefully,
#
you will see the graffiti which says fuck the rich. Now fuck the rich is of course not specific to
#
Ireland. Of course, it's been used as a way to talk about uncontrolled capitalism, but one of
#
the largest crises which most people don't see up front is the housing crisis in Ireland. Right.
#
There might be one house and 700 people have showed up to see that house and, you know,
#
and rents are completely out of control. Now, what that does for someone who has a very dignified
#
job of let's say a bus driver, right, is that it still makes it unaffordable for them to start
#
living. And you would see that you would see Irish people migrate into countries like Australia,
#
which itself is not a cheap country to begin with, but they feel that it's still cheaper to live in
#
Australia as an immigrant as compared to living back home. And then you start understanding that,
#
oh, there is a safety net, which people have. Right. But that safety net, and I'm sure you
#
probably have more nuanced take on unintended consequences of a universal Baker's rate income,
#
but there is a rise of homelessness and drug abuse as well. Right. And that's also a ramification
#
of how the country, how, because Dublin is a tax haven, right. I mean, that's why so many of the
#
IT companies are headquartered there. So that the amount of tax they save now that brings in
#
a certain amount of money for the economy, which helps proper universal basic income,
#
but that has unintended consequences. This is what I really enjoy about my travel, right,
#
to try and peel off that every sort of single layer about a country. And even if it means
#
I understand 2% of what this country is, I feel that 2% is way better because it stays with you.
#
And this is where, you know, the idea of memory becomes very important, right?
#
Memory fails, of course, all of our memories fail. And, you know, next time we recall a memory,
#
we are really remembering the memory of that event and not the event itself. But
#
what also tends to happen is that if you slow down and experience things slowly and a little
#
more deeply, and when I say deeply is that when you are able to make these multiple connections,
#
right, the experience stays with you much longer, right? And the beauty of what experience is that,
#
and I'll give an example of someone we both admire, Narendra Shinoi,
#
who's been on this show for so many times, right? The stories he talks about, some of them are really
#
old stories, right? But the beauty of an experience and a retelling of that story is that the film of
#
memory goes on and on and on. And with every telling and retelling, we imbue a certain weight
#
and a value to it, not just as the person who's narrating it, but also to the listener. Now,
#
slow travel allows you to accumulate those memories. So in a way, postcards for me is a way to
#
really write down those experiences in the moment, in the way I was feeling them, in the,
#
you know, in the very incomplete way I was doing. And in fact, I brought the book for a very
#
specific reason. There's certain passage I want to read out because all this while I've been
#
thinking about, you know, what's really my, you know, way of travel and philosophy. And then this
#
is a book by Barry Lopez. It's called Horizon. This is his autobiographical take. He's been
#
traveling the world for 50 years and he has gone to places most of us would not go. But again,
#
he's not the kind of person who would say, hey, there are 180 countries. I need to tick off 180
#
countries. But again, very methodical, slow travel. And even after traveling the world for,
#
you know, that many years, and again, I'm just going to take a couple of minutes to locate that
#
passage. One of the things which really stands out for me is how does he think of his own
#
role as a traveler? So I'm just quoting him now. I had an ethical obligation as a writer,
#
in addition to an aesthetic one. It was to experience the world intensely and then to
#
put into words as well as I could what I had seen. I was aware that others could see better than I,
#
and also that other people were not able to travel in the way I had begun to,
#
going away habitually. And whatever reader might make of what I tried to describe,
#
I already understood that their conclusions might not match my own. I saw myself then as a
#
sort of a courier, a kind of runner come home from another land after some exchange with its
#
denizens, carrying by the way of a story, some incomplete bit of news about how different,
#
how marvelous and incomprehensible really life was out beyond the pale of the village in which
#
I had grown up. Right. So for me, this really sort of brought alive of how I think about
#
seeing the world today. And I'll also read one more bit from him that talks about no matter
#
how much you slow down and how much you want to understand a place, how little you see of it.
#
One can never, even by paying the strictest attention at multiple levels,
#
entirely comprehend a single place, no matter how many times one might travel there.
#
This is not only because the place itself is constantly changing, but because the deep nature
#
of every place is not transparency, it's obscurity. I have never been drawn to the idea of writing
#
definitively about anything, especially herculean nature of cultural geographies. In revisiting
#
these places, then I was more interested in how in reviewing my previous experience of that location,
#
I might find another truth, one different from the one I first wrote about. I was also interested
#
in how my memory of a place might trigger new emotions and in how the truth of such emotions
#
might differently inform the facts I had once so carefully gathered. Nobody has the vaguest notion
#
of what this world is really like. The only thing that can be safely predicted is that it is very
#
different from what anybody supposes. So this sort of always stayed with me because I know that
#
someone who would go to Ireland for another month might see a completely different side of Ireland
#
and both of those truths are as valid as any other truth which is out there. And one of the things
#
which I strongly believe and if any of you have now bought into my spiel of slow travel by now
#
and are considering it is that you have to be intentional about your travel.
#
So one of the things I highly recommend is getting a guidebook and I know that for someone who's a
#
travel content creator a guidebook is the exact antithesis of what I'm trying to do. But what a
#
guidebook really helps you is that the first 10-15 pages of a guidebook is a super short crash course
#
and history of the place. It really brings out the seminal events of what the country has been
#
shaped by. And that history doesn't go away. That history continues to shape us for decades
#
and we're seeing that in our own country. So that becomes one step. And second, understand that what
#
really interests you. So I don't drink whiskey. I do not care for alcohol in general.
#
But for someone who's a beer drinker, Dublin is the mecca of where you should be drinking beer.
#
It's the house of home of Guinness. There are a whole bunch of Irish whiskeys. You can take whiskey
#
tours. You can go to whiskey tasting sessions. You can understand how blending is done and so on.
#
Now that's a part of Ireland I will never experience. But for someone who genuinely
#
appreciates whiskey or beer, it can be a fantastic experience just focusing your travel towards that.
#
And that is where being intentional is so important because fundamentally all travel is
#
self-discovery. When we go to a place, we go and see that, hey, I like this thing. But have you
#
ever considered why I like this thing? There are so many times that many of us have gone to really
#
famous places. And you're like, it's nice, but it didn't do much for me. And if you go to other
#
places and you're like, man, this completely blew my mind. I remember this. I had gone to the
#
Adalat Stepwells near Ahmedabad. And we were doing this lovely course in Micah called Imagining India
#
where we were asked to bring in what growing up as an aspect of India which stood out for us.
#
And those Stepwells are absolutely gorgeous. I mean, you can look up images if you've not been
#
there. But the idea of what Stepwells constitute, that it has a functional purpose, it has a
#
spiritual purpose, it even has a military purpose for that matter, completely blew my mind.
#
Right. So now, of course, I became obsessed with Stepwells. Since then, I have gone to many of
#
them. I bought books around it and understood why they exist and what the future in terms of
#
living heritage looks like. But you have to really start spending more time in a place to understand
#
what attracts you. I'm big on architecture. I'm big on food, right? I'm not a party person. I'm
#
a very boring person. I don't like going to parties. I believe that any place which does
#
not allow you to talk is not a place worth going to. Maybe it's being in late 30s, but maybe that's
#
how I think about it, right? But for someone who probably loves partying, Barcelona could be the
#
perfect place for you to go. So instead of saying that, hey, the world views this destination from
#
this lens, what is your lens of viewing the world? And that's what I believe travel should help you
#
cultivate. You can aid it with reading of books like I love reading books before I go to a place.
#
Because that intentionality helps me, you know, uncover so many things. People often, you know,
#
would come to you and say that, listen, there's a very academic or boring way of travel. I mean,
#
no, what I'm not, I'm not saying that I will only go and do this. But what suddenly starts to happen
#
and an example is I had spent a day in Belfast. This is Northern Ireland, of course, completely
#
different from Ireland. Please never meet an Irish person and confuse them from Northern Ireland.
#
That conversation will not go down well. And we were just walking and I just happened to look up
#
and I saw a plaque which sort of commemorated John Dunlop. And that plaque was put at a building
#
where he accidentally actually discovered vulcanization of rubber.
#
Right. Now, I did not know this. I did not read about it. Right. But because
#
there were so many other things I understood the moment I landed in the city, I was able to look
#
beyond that first level of observation and then have time to actually look at the other things.
#
Right. So, of course, when you go to Belfast, you can do the tours of the graffiti of the troubles
#
and it's a fantastic tour. I highly recommend everyone take that if you ever end up in Belfast.
#
But it's those small things which you start noticing and that makes the travel unique to you
#
because now you have a very unique memory. I must have seen 10 other things in Belfast,
#
but this stays with me as the first memory I tap into the moment I think of Belfast.
#
And that is what makes it more memorable. And the memorability is important because ultimately as we
#
age and one of my beliefs is that we become the stories we tell about ourselves to ourselves and
#
to the world. Right. So, if you start telling that, hey, I am a person who appreciates architecture
#
and nature and food, for example. Right. I will start seeing those things whenever I travel because
#
that will attract me the most. Right. And that becomes a virtuous cycle in that way. And then
#
you really start enjoying your travels beyond this is what needs to be checked off your itinerary.
#
I have no idea where I started, but go on in this random direction of-
#
It's not random at all. No, no, you've given me 40,000 things to double click on. And
#
what I find really evocative about this is that I don't think of it as just slow travel, but
#
slow living in the sense that I have been thinking more and more about the rhythms of living which
#
we adopt for ourselves. And often what happens is that I find, and this is a lament about myself,
#
that I'm sprinting through life, that I'm scrolling, scrolling, swiping, swiping,
#
you know, do one episode, do another episode, write a newsletter, blah, blah, just
#
sprint after sprint after sprint. And there is a part of me that longs to be able to not sprint,
#
like in a sense we are traveling through life. Right. What is that mode of travel? You can either
#
travel through life accomplishing one thing after another, just like, you know, a tourist with a
#
checklist. Or, you know, you can just not have an objective in mind in per se, but just sit back and
#
kind of soak it in and absorb things more deeply. And therefore I, you know, what you said about
#
travel being a means of self-discovery, I not only by that, I will go further and say that
#
the way you travel, whether it is through a place or through life, is a way of shaping yourself.
#
Right. Like if you are remembering things differently because you're in a different mode,
#
then in that remembering what you have seen teaches you to see differently the next time.
#
Right. When you talk about that beautiful quote from Barry Lopez where you use the phrase ethical
#
obligation, I also think it is an ethical obligation to oneself to not treat us in this
#
shallow manner by just living on the surface of things and therefore the surface of ourselves.
#
But kind of, you know, getting deeper and this is something I kind of struggle with now because
#
there's like so much work all around and I keep wondering like I keep trying to build those slow
#
moments for myself and sort of compartmentalize in that way and give myself those slow spaces.
#
But I want to dig a little bit deeper into your sort of introduction to slow travel. Like my sense
#
is that it would have affected every part of your life, not just the travel, right?
#
It changes you as a person. And my question is that while you mentioned one instance of
#
appreciating it, which is when you were in that cottage north of Manali and you really got to see
#
the tops of trees and notice things more deeply, I'm guessing that that would have been one milestone
#
on your journey. Was that a seminal moment in terms of shaping your love of slow travel or were you
#
already on that journey along the way and that sort of became something that allowed you to
#
think overtly about it? Swamit, I was on that journey in the sense that I was on it,
#
but the realization of being on that journey hit me then. So the reason I kept Himachal for the
#
last was that I wanted to travel for two months so that I have enough ammunition to write about.
#
And so what happened in Armenia was that it's a lovely country, very easy to get to from what I
#
remember. It's still on arrival. So, and cheap flights from Delhi. So please go for it. And this
#
is completely by luck of chance, the kind of things which happen when you slow down is I went
#
and stayed with a couple homestay, booked it off booking.com. So the very usual, nothing,
#
not some super specific country, specific website. And the person that couple was running it,
#
the husband was ex army, Armenian army. And when he understood that I'm from India,
#
he actually told me that outside of his army duty, he along with two other people are the last three
#
remaining Aryan priests of Armenia. Right? So I went to their house and he said that Armenia is
#
about 99% Christian, right? And a very small percentage of people who identify as Aryan.
#
And they next day took me to a ceremony, which was an actual fire ceremony. So they were worshiping
#
the fire, right? And because it was outside the Gurni temple and they were just living there,
#
right? They actually invited me, made me a part of it. He sat down and explained what these fire
#
rituals mean, right? And that suddenly sort of made me realize that if I had not taken this detour,
#
so as to say, I would have never uncovered this, right? Now that sort of led me to
#
the history of Armenians in India. There is an Armenian church in Calcutta, which still exists,
#
right? And if you go back to records that Armenians did for a very significant part of time,
#
did live in India. So now what started to happen, and I'm just going to using this example to sort
#
of bring out the point that in my own life as well, right? Because I grew up middle class,
#
single parent, my father passed away quite early, right? You were always very focused on hitting
#
that next milestone, right? This entire experience taught me that while milestones are important,
#
you do not have to live your life by milestones, right? So what travel really teaches you is that
#
there are a hundred thousand different ways to live your life. And all of them are as valid as
#
any of the others. But then I started realizing that, okay, who has set this milestone, right?
#
How much of it is, you know, and it comes back to the point of the thanatic desires that how much of
#
it is something which I really want to do, right? And by no means I am discounting my privilege.
#
While I grew up middle class, I did have the privilege of an English education from some of
#
the better schools in India, and of course, accessible to the job market, right? But I imagine
#
a lot of your listeners also would have very similar privileges, right? What are we doing with
#
that privilege? That was a question which sort of kept nagging me that I can run on this treadmill.
#
And this was a realization I had for a very brief moment when I used to live in Bombay for
#
10 years. And I took the local trains between probably two of the worst most crowded stations,
#
Dadar and Kurla, right? And there was a time which I said, sorry, Bombay, I refuse to run.
#
Because living there after a point made me realize that there is no end to this running,
#
there is just no end. But at the same time, I had to balance that, that realization with
#
making a living being financially secure, and, you know, having a life which I want
#
with the comforts which I enjoy. And in a chance conversation with a friend, and I mentioned one of
#
my simplified appearances as well. She very, you know, pithily said that,
#
that sort of came to me to the question that
#
most things in life matter only because if they matter to you, if they stop mattering to you,
#
they don't matter. But because as a society as a country, we have been so conditioned.
#
Now, I was thinking about why do we Indians maximize the F out of a Schengen visa?
#
Five countries, why do we want to see in 15 days? Because for most people like me who grew up in
#
the 80s and the 90s, right, we grew up with fairly limited resources. Only after 91 did things start
#
opening up for us. So what we saw from our parents is that if you had a material object,
#
you will give it a second life or third life or a fourth life, and maximize whatever value you can
#
get out of it. Now, when we grew up as adults, when and we were the first set of people who really
#
made some significant money in our lives, where we could actually invest in our wants, we transplanted
#
the philosophy into our experiences as well. We were right, and I talk about this idea,
#
we became consumption maximizers, we became memory minimizers. We just consume, consume,
#
consume, we've gone down to the treadmill. And that then sort of extends to every aspect of our
#
life. We start thinking of our relationships that way, we start thinking of our work that way,
#
we start thinking of how we spend our time. And then at some level, I realized that the entire
#
talk about productivity is also a trap. Because the productivity mindset talks about
#
be productive, be disciplined in every aspect of your life. But you have to realize you're not a
#
machine, you need to have aspects of your life that you're slowing down. Because boredom is a
#
very necessary condition for creativity. Right? You have to be bored for your mind to go away
#
from the shackles and you know, the rails you have put on for your own thoughts.
#
And that's where it started affecting the kind of decisions I took. Right? Now, while I would,
#
I would love to get promoted, I'm not particularly bothered by whether I get
#
promoted or not. As long as I feel that I'm contributing to my organization, I'm doing good
#
work. And I'm trying to hit it out of the park more often than not. I'm okay. I do not want to
#
change the next promotion. I do not want to change the leadership roles. Right? Because I know that
#
that comes at a cost that comes at a personal cost that comes at a health cost. I think that's where
#
travel went from being a tool of self discovery to also a way to live life better.
#
And better as in my own very limited perspective of how I see my life and my world.
#
Because you started realizing that so many of these myths you have built up in your head.
#
Right? They are really myths. Right? And they're actually mythia. They're not so much as myths.
#
And once you start taking that control back, it's it's liberating. It's liberating because
#
now you genuinely see that so much of what the world expects of you.
#
You don't have to live up to it. It doesn't matter. And that that feeling that it doesn't
#
matter is very liberating because then you can focus on doing things which you truly enjoy.
#
I want to talk about intentionality. And I think that there's a paradox in intentionality,
#
which I sometimes think about, which is that at one level, if I'm traveling to a place like you,
#
I will have the instinct that let me read up on it and let me have a better depth of understanding
#
when I get there. And you said that that extends before and after and that journey is always
#
becoming more and more alive as you, you know, find out more and more. So at one level, there is
#
an intentionality that you have to read all this, you have to go to all this place, etc. etc. And
#
you are trying to be more sort of intense about your experience. But at another level,
#
this runs a danger that you are too focused on the things you're being intentional about.
#
And you can't just sit back and soak it up. Like if I'm on a riverside in a foreign country,
#
intentionality can tell me that a certain war happened here. And this is a culture of the
#
place. And this is the kind of food they eat and why. And all of that is in my mind space.
#
Whereas another way of traveling slowly would be to just leave all of it out and just enjoy
#
the river for what it is. Right? Like every place is at its core, it is a place without that baggage
#
of history with self-important humans put on it. The river was there long before humans came. It
#
will be there long after we are gone. There is a beauty to that as well. And I think this dilemma
#
extends to life itself. Like when I am unwinding, for example, and I don't have work, there is one
#
part of me which is saying, Amit, relax, but read a book. Do some self-improvement,
#
read a book, you know, whatever, read it, watch a good film. Don't waste your time.
#
And another part of me rationally knows that, no, fuck it. Sometimes, like I think John Lennon said,
#
no time is wasted unless you feel it is wasted. And there's another part of me which is saying,
#
ki nahi kuch nahi karna hai. Bus, you know, I can sit and look at the sky and that is good enough.
#
So how does one balance this? Because in intentionality, there is also the danger
#
of overthinking it. No, there absolutely is a danger. And it's always a danger for me because
#
I know that at some level, some of these experiences will end up on the podcast,
#
right? So there's always that angle that content, right? And that, you know, I want to give,
#
I want to be right. I don't want to misstate facts. I don't want to use only one interpretation of a
#
certain thing that always is there. And there will always be gaps in those things. So Amit,
#
what internationality does is the first internationality is that I have created a
#
month to see a country. That intentionality automatically negates a huge part of what you
#
feel is too over preparing to go to a place, right? Second is I'll give an example. I've been to Paris
#
a couple of times and none of the times I've been to the Louvre. I love art, right? But there is a
#
reason I didn't go to the Louvre because the era from which Louvre has art, I actually don't know
#
anything about that art, right? I know Monet, I know Van Gogh, I know that generation of, you know,
#
Impressionist painters. Now, if anyone who has been to the Louvre knows that you need at least
#
half a day to one day to at least scratch the surface of what that place is. Now by not going
#
there, I have instead decided to go to the Museum d'Orsay, I don't know how it's pronounced,
#
where I could see a Van Gogh for the first time in my life, right? Now there is intentionality,
#
but now it allows me to just sit there for half an hour and look at that Van Gogh.
#
So your intentionality doesn't mean it's restricting, the intentionality allows you to
#
open vistas for you, which were not available to you earlier, right? Now taking the same thing in
#
life and I struggled with this thing exactly thing which you said, right? Like yesterday, I was
#
sitting and I was just reading this book because I love it so much. And I was thinking, should I
#
prepare something for Hamid's interview? And I mean, in the hearts, I know that you cannot prepare
#
for podcasts like this, but that thing comes up, right? That I should do something with this.
#
And this actually brings me to a very important point for people who work full-time, very regular
#
corporate jobs like I do, is that the biggest mistake we do, the biggest disservice we do to
#
ourselves is we define our identity by our jobs, right? So what happens is that if something goes
#
wrong in your day job, right? It just messed up for a different reason. If it's politics or you
#
got laid off or something, it completely brings you down as a person, right? Which is why I believe
#
art for art's sake, like I sketch. I do not put any of my sketches anywhere on social media.
#
I mean, I show it to some couple of friends and some of them give me feedback and stuff and
#
like it, right? But when I'm doing that, there is absolutely no intentionality of
#
this has to yield something, but I enjoy, I do pen sketching, right? So you cannot undo a stroke,
#
right? So you then just do it. And of course, because I'm a beginner, there will be a lot of
#
flaws, but you accept that piece of art saying that I enjoyed this. That's why I have done it.
#
And that is the end goal of it. So it is very important to get out of this intentionality,
#
productivity mindset to say that you cannot program every single aspect of your life. You
#
shouldn't because you're not a robot AI. We have AI for that. Let AI do what it needs to do. You
#
are human. Retain that quality of being a human that you are not living an only task-based life.
#
And that is how I feel it to balance intentionality without being over-preparing for a certain
#
experience. How has the journey both in terms of travel and in terms of creating the content
#
around it changed the way you look at time? Like in a lot of your episodes, and I must confess,
#
I haven't heard them all, but I've loved everything that I've heard. In a lot of your
#
episodes, there is this sense where we are not just traveling through geography. We are traveling
#
through time. For example, a recent episode, you spoke about how, you know, the jarts of Rajasthan
#
are 90% from all over the place. I think your episode title is about how we are all
#
Hungarians from Rajasthan, which I thought was absolutely fantastic. And there, of course,
#
you're looking at genetic evidence and so on. But in a lot of your travels, there is that sense
#
that you're not just traveling through space, you're traveling through time, which partly comes
#
about because you have that intentionality of, you know, understanding a place and uncovering
#
its layers. I want to later on, I'll double down on architecture also, how every little thing in the
#
design of a place will tell you so much about its history. But at a broader level, how does that
#
then change the way that you look at your own life? Because one of the realizations of being able to
#
step outside of this time and, you know, see it as this flowing river and so much of the present
#
influence by the past, which is still flowing in it, would also make you then think about your own
#
life and think about your own goals and etc etc. Like you've spoken about how you won't let your
#
job define who you are, you know, VPI, VP kya farak bharta hai etc etc. And so how much of that has
#
been changed by you? Like I'm so impressed by the fact that you have this intentionality ki
#
I'll take a month off and for a month I'll go to Poland or I'll go to Bosnia or I'll go to
#
wherever and, you know, I'll do the rigor of doing my job remotely because it has to be done. But
#
a couple of weeks, I'll also just go off on my own and all of that. But how do you now look at
#
time compared to maybe 15 years ago? Like when you were young, when you were in college, just out of
#
college, what are the kind of, what was the story you told yourself then and what is the story you
#
are telling yourself today? So in terms of time and my day job involves using statistics to some
#
degree, I would think of thinking of time and life in cross-sectional and longitudinal terms, right?
#
So cross-sectional is right here right now in this point of time and longitudinal is of course
#
over a longer period of time. I think the shift for me what has happened is I started looking at
#
life longitudinally and not cross-sectionally. So for me earlier, I was used to think, hey,
#
this is what I'm doing now. This is not good enough. I can do better. I can see other people
#
are doing better, right? But in that cross-sectionality, I was neither looking at
#
my own journey and I was also not looking at their journey because of course I was not aware of their
#
journey, right? Now, if I look at anyone and that sort of lends beautifully to content creation as
#
well because if you are starting now, somebody else is doing it better than you and somebody
#
has been doing it for much longer and they already have an audience. So the question you ask is why
#
do it, right? And in Deepak's newsletter, which we were talking about, I talk about this that
#
what if you started treating all your content projects like your children?
#
You are not, people don't have children because they, oh, my child will become the next chess
#
grandmaster or they will go and to win the Nobel prize in literature. Very unlikely it will happen,
#
right? Too many Indian parents have that habit. Yeah, right. But the realistic part is that your
#
child will have a regular life with a few highlights here or there. So that doesn't mean
#
you don't have children. A lot of people find joy and purpose in having children. Can you treat your
#
content project like your child, right? You don't expect your child to come out and start solving
#
the Pythagoras theorem, right? Or say that, listen, I will solve Fermat's last theorem by the time I'm
#
18. It's not going to happen. So the moment you start thinking of your life longitudinally,
#
you understand that this is a journey, right? Nobody goes off the blocks going to be to
#
send bolt when they start running. You are not going to do that either. The most successful
#
content creators out there have put in time for their craft. The moment you start understanding
#
that, you start worrying far less about the cross-sectional view of things. You start worrying
#
far less about, you know, where other people are and what are they doing. Because let's face it,
#
at whatever age you are, someone is doing it much better than you, whatever you have wanted to do.
#
But they have come from a different circumstance. They have come from a different life experience.
#
They have come from a different mindset into their own life. And that is their journey.
#
And, you know, I used to, I used to read this philosophy. I think it was John Rilke. I don't
#
know how to pronounce the name. He says that the only journey worth having is the journey within.
#
I used to feel what sort of garbage this person has written sitting in some fancy town in Europe,
#
being funded by royalty, right? But it makes complete sense. It makes complete sense now,
#
though. It did not make complete sense 15 years ago. It sounded like utter garbage,
#
but it makes complete sense because only if you think of your life in logical terms,
#
you will get off that wheel and you have to get off that wheel. The only way you should be willing
#
to accept to some extent is a wheel which you have designed for yourself is to say that this
#
is the wheel. The wheel I chose is one episode, one week, come what may. And I would say I've
#
been fairly successful at, you know, doing that. But that wheel is what I have defined.
#
And the difference is the cross-section and the longitudinal. When you start thinking
#
everything longitudinally, you start approaching life longitudinally because you will stop
#
expecting immediate results. You will stop expecting immediate improvements. Your idea
#
of success itself changed. Now, one of the things which I have started thinking about differently
#
is that the input is the output. You can control the input. You have no control over the output.
#
How much ever we would like to believe we are masters of our own destiny, we are not.
#
We are definitely, you know, subject to the vagaries of the societies and the nature we live in.
#
But the moment you say that my intentionality is only putting in the effort because without
#
the effort, there is no outcome. And when you start focusing only on the effort,
#
is when also things start to sort of change in this space.
#
So, you know, my typical answer for those people who say that why do I do podcasts or why do I do
#
a YouTube show or whatever, there are so many like me and et cetera, et cetera. And I always remind
#
them that there is one thing that no one in the world can be better at than you are, which is at
#
being you. You know, if you are simply authentic to yourself. And the point is, all of us are on
#
journeys of different kinds. Journeys to life, intellectual journeys. You are at some point on
#
that journey. Somebody on some other point in that journey will relate to you and will feel
#
useful. And therefore, I think that too many creators are second guessing ki audience ko kya chahiye,
#
niche kaha pe hai. And I think that that is a terrible trap and a race to the bottom. And
#
what is worst about it is that it takes you outside of yourself. Like the way that I think
#
good content is created is not that is not outside in ki logon ko kya chahiye, main wo dunga. But
#
inside out that I am what I am and here I'm putting this out there and I'm just doing that.
#
And in a sense to me, you know, that input is the output which you said, you know, that input is all
#
that really matters. That is a result. You wanted to create something. The result is not how other
#
people react to it. The result is the creation itself. Ki mujhe utsaf ke saath conversation
#
karna hai, I have done it. Now I don't care. Of course, it is nice when people say are a great
#
conversation. But it is a doing that matters. You know, you're kind of so tell me about your
#
content journey because earlier you said that, you know, there were some things you did for the wrong
#
reasons. And I'm guessing those wrong reasons would be reasons of positioning or too focused
#
on what others might want or markets and so on. And postcards was for the right reasons,
#
which you can make out from the product. It's obviously for the right reason. So elaborate a
#
little bit on this. So I started, I've done a bunch of stuff like a lot of it's in the travel
#
space because I've always been fascinated by travel that I started a newsletter which will
#
help you find the cheapest airfares internationally because traveling from India abroad is expensive.
#
It actually did quite well. But I just lost motivation after point simply because I feel
#
my intent was right in terms of that. I did want travel to be more accessible to people and so on.
#
But it felt like a maze after a point. I was just running in that maze and
#
it was not fulfilling me in any way. Right. And of course people would say back, say thanks to you.
#
I got such a great deal and everything. Sort of that sort of, you know, fizzled out. Then I
#
tried to start a blog about behavioral sciences. Right. Because my work is in consumer psychology.
#
So what happened there was that again, I lost motivation because after writing few posts,
#
I realized that I'm not as interested in the topic I thought I was. I was not as invested
#
in it. And it's around that time where I realized that the question you need to ask for anything
#
you want to achieve in life is that are you willing to suffer pain for it? That's really
#
the only question you have to ask. Because if you are willing to suffer pain for it means it
#
intrinsically matters to you and you will suffer pain for it without anyone having a ringside view
#
of you suffering that pain and making a spectacle of that suffering. That's a great illustration
#
of thick and thin desire as well. Right. So when I started to understand that what am I willing to
#
suffer pain for? So again, I told you the story about how postcards came to be somewhat
#
serendipitously, but by then I definitely wanted to write that I had already written that manuscript.
#
And what happened then was that I started doing postcards. Postcard, of course, as a show also
#
evolved. Initially, it was only about how to travel differently, but then it went into
#
specific stories, uncovering countries, doing like a three month long series on a country.
#
So two things happened. One thing which I am absolutely thrilled about
#
is that I got back my reading habit. This is one thing as an adult, I have struggled.
#
I've had phases where I read prolifically. I have had months where I've not lifted a book.
#
I've had times where I could not finish books. Even there's nothing wrong with the book. It
#
was really a me problem, not as much as a book problem. But the intentionality of doing postcards
#
and having IBM help because I had a producer who was going to say,
#
boss, where is the episode? And you're like, okay, I have two days. I need to get this out.
#
So I got my reading habit today. I buy at least one or two books a week.
#
I read only 20% of it, but the rest 80% which sits there is
#
my acceptance of how much of the world I do not know.
#
And when I accept that there's so much of the world do not know, I will go out and seek
#
that knowledge. There are times when, you know, okay, I have ideas for two weeks.
#
After that, I'm not really sure what I want to do. I will just pick up a book.
#
I will read something. I will connect it over a decade of travel experiences,
#
put three points together. One of my favorite episodes and in surprising it has also done well
#
because things you personally like don't always do well in content, right? Is an episode called
#
sunlight Europe versus Asia, right? I could have done with a better title, but again, early days of
#
content creation, you don't understand much is that if you look at how architecture is a sunlight
#
in India, we have this entire system of Jali architecture, right? That you go to so many
#
of these places. And now one of the reasons was that, you know, it actually blocks out harsh
#
sun rays coming into a building. And we are a very hot country and we did not have as many
#
cooling techniques back then. And because the moment you create a Jali, you create a lot of
#
these small, small, small holes. And thanks to Bernoulli's principle, the air which passes
#
through it actually cools down. Air you get inside is much cooler than what you get outside.
#
Now take the same sunlight and look at how Europe is a sunlight in architecture. Most of these
#
churches where you have stained glass works actually do the job of concentrating sunlight.
#
The reason is that because those spaces don't get as much sun as we get, right? Now this is
#
something which occurred to me. I was reading a very random book called Imaginary Cities and
#
by Calvino. No, I think that is Invisible Cities. That's Invisible Cities. I forget the author. I'm
#
very bad at remembering author names. This book called Invisible Cities. And I was reading about
#
this and it suddenly struck me that there is a very intentional way sunlight is being used.
#
Now as a traveler, the joy that insight gave me, I am pretty sure someone else has also figured it
#
out somewhere else. I'm not claiming to be the inventor of this theory, but the joy that which
#
it gave me really propelled me to keep doing this because I'm like now I am seeing the world
#
in a way which I have not seen the world before I am able to experience it more closely.
#
Now when you start building that level of intrinsic motivation and podcasting in India,
#
the kind of content I do, I know is a niche. I know it will not explode.
#
It could be a function of how I do it or it could be a function of the subject itself,
#
a whole bunch of things. But because I enjoy doing it so much,
#
I am not particularly fussed about what are the listener numbers.
#
Of course, when someone writes in and say that really enjoy the episode, I feel good. There is
#
no doubt about it. I am not about validation. I am very much in the validation game,
#
but I am not also worried about how much episode, how many numbers did this episode do.
#
So my content journey, when it pivoted from stuff, it said that this sounds fun and is cool too.
#
I really like doing this. That is where the switch really happened because I have gotten up at
#
four in the morning, you know, wrote till six, went through one round of edits, done by 7.30,
#
take half an hour to record in four hours. I've turned out an episode for 10 minutes, right?
#
But I have done the pre-work to know what to write it when I was sitting down at four.
#
So I was not figuring out what to write. I had already done the pre-work.
#
Right. Now doing this and then walking into work. Right. But the next day when that episode lands,
#
just the landing of that episode is, gives you joy saying that, listen, I've put a part of me out
#
there. And that is important because the moment you start putting out your content, you are putting
#
out a very intimate part of yourself out there. You are really putting out saying that, Hey,
#
this is who I am. This is how I see the world. Right. It could be esoteric. It could be obscure.
#
Right. It could also be maybe just intellectual masturbation at some point, but this is literally
#
how I see the world. And yeah, there are a few thousand people out there who find value in it.
#
Right. So then what starts happening is that then the flywheel starts to work.
#
Now, because of this podcast, you know, I got approached by a publisher to do a travel book
#
on India. Now the publishers also reaching out to me because they see that, okay, this person
#
has a sense of what he's doing. He definitely has an audience, which will help sell the book
#
because ultimately publishing is a business. It needs to sell books, but all that wouldn't have
#
happened till I did four years of postcards. I am here because I did postcards. Right. That's
#
literally the reason I'm here today. Then what happens is that the flywheel starts to happen,
#
that opportunity start to open up because of postcards, you know, Spotify hired me to
#
train some of the podcasters. I did another show with IBM, which was a paid show and so on.
#
And now because of that, we are doing 6% club. And that's why they say that you cannot connect
#
the dots. You have to look only backwards and connect the dots. When I started on that journey,
#
I had no idea all of this would happen. Sure. Everyone who writes would always has that dream
#
of writing a book. I also had that, but to see actually happening it without me going to
#
chase a publisher. And this is not a brag I'm trying to make. I'm just saying that
#
all of these things are now falling in place because of the four years. So then you start
#
realizing that if it can happen in this dimension, you can take that same philosophy in any dimension
#
of life. Right. Last one year is when I have consistently worked out three to four days a
#
month, sorry, a week. And I have been able to reverse my cholesterol issue. Right. You know
#
that you have reversed your own diabetes. Right. So you understand that if you actually find a
#
system and stick to it, that applies to every life that applies to your relationships. Right.
#
You can significantly improve your relationships if you start investing in them in a very committed
#
manner, because as much as I know the world talks about love, I believe love is very intentional.
#
You choose to love the person you love every single day. Otherwise there is no amount of
#
attraction, chemistry, shared interests will guide you through life. You have to make that choice.
#
So I think my content journey has one made me realize that you should stop self-rejecting.
#
Let the world reject you. Right. And because you are doing what you're doing it for yourself,
#
the world rejecting you does not matter as much. So I'm not saying that tomorrow if I write the
#
book and it doesn't sell well, I won't feel bad. I will definitely feel bad. But it will not stop
#
me from writing my second book. It will not stop me from doing postcards or YouTube, which we were
#
discussing before the break that I'm getting started on YouTube myself, because I know that
#
I'm doing it for myself. Yes, I am also doing it. And to your point of niches, right? I will feel
#
that niches figure out themselves out. You just have to put in the hours and naturally as a person
#
who's who has put in the hours, you start saying, Hey, this is doing like, for example, some of the
#
episodes which do the best on the podcast are food episodes, because we are a country are crazy
#
about food. We love our food. And in a way, because I like food myself, and I love reading
#
what food is trees and evolution of food. I double down on it. It didn't feel like, oh,
#
I'm trying to game the algorithm or do something. I like architecture. I like food. Food is doing
#
well. I'll do more of food. I didn't stop doing architecture. I'm still doing architecture. I
#
just do more of food. So it doesn't feel that you are trying to game the algorithm, but you're
#
still providing some inherent value to someone who's saying that they're giving your attention
#
in this world. I mean, what more can you ask for? I feel someone is giving you attention is
#
more important than they're probably giving you money. And that is how I stopped self-rejecting
#
with this book thing also came. I had this moment of thought that, listen, can I really write this
#
book? And then I'm like, well, they think that I can write it. I can write it. I just have to put
#
in the hours, right? And of course I will edit it. There is an editor and the whole process goes
#
through and it will come out as a finished product, right? The only thing that changes is,
#
and now I want to be proud of whatever I'm putting out. And pride doesn't mean perfection. Pride
#
means I feel I have given it my time, my consideration. And that is pride to me now. Pride
#
is not about, oh, this piece reads flawlessly. I mean, nothing reads flawlessly. You can always
#
improve whatever you've written. And that I think has been my sort of content journey. And that also
#
propels me now to even look at, you know, I'm starting my YouTube journey now. I am exactly
#
at the same place I was four years ago. I did not know anything about podcasting. Now I don't know
#
anything about YouTube. But my philosophy is very simple. If I do it for another four years, I'm
#
sure I'll get good at it. So I have a story I love, which in fact I related in the episode of
#
Everything is Everything we just released today. But I'll tell you anyway, it's a story about the
#
Soviet chess player Tigran Petrosyan. He played, he was a grandmaster in the 50s, 60s and 70s,
#
world champion for a brief while. And he was once playing, and this is when he's a veteran,
#
so probably 1970s. He's playing a game with someone who wants to draw, basically, for whatever reason.
#
Maybe it's the last round of an interzonal. There's nothing to gain. Maybe he needs a draw
#
for a norm. He wants to draw. So he wants to draw with Petrosyan. And at one point after the game
#
starts, he leans forward and he asks Petrosyan, are you playing to win? And Petrosyan says no.
#
So now our friend is happy. He's like, okay, draw to man jaayega. So then he leans forward and
#
very hopefully he asks, are you playing to draw? So Petrosyan says no. So he goes like, what the
#
fuck? And then he asks, so why are you playing then? And Petrosyan says, I'm playing to play.
#
Right? This is the, this, I want this to be the philosophy of my life. I have adopted this.
#
He yahi karna hai. I'm playing to play, you know? So when you write a, write a book, you're writing
#
the book. Baad mein jo hoga dekha jaayega. Like yesterday I recorded an episode, I don't know
#
whether I'll release after or before this, but with Malini Goel, who's written this lovely book
#
called Unboxing Bangalore. And she was saying that when the book launched, she was so busy,
#
so busy that she couldn't enjoy the launch, that her mind simply couldn't go to the thing.
#
And in my mind, I was thinking ki wahi toh hai, achcha hai. You know, you move on, you do the
#
next thing. The dharma is to write the book, you've written the book. Abhi move on, dharma
#
is to record episode. Kar liya, abhi jao. Move on to the next thing, you know, don't kind of
#
linger back. So I, I kind of really love that. And, you know, I want to talk about food and
#
architecture, but we'll talk about food later. I want to talk about architecture first because
#
you mentioned the jaali and the sunlight and that sort of insight. And there are insights like that
#
sprinkled through your work. Like, for example, in Uzbekistan, you've spoken about the doors with
#
metal loops, right? So the doors will have two loops on them. And, you know, I think in one of
#
your posts on Medium, you have a photograph of those loops. And, you know, one of, and they're
#
made of different materials. And if you knock with one loop, you're a man. If you lock with another
#
loop, you're a woman. So you can tell by the knock, whether it's a man or a woman at the door.
#
You know, you've pointed out why the doors outside the buildings are so incredibly small.
#
You know, you've, in a, in a different context, you've shown pictures of a Polish building with
#
no balconies or doors. And you've spoken about, you know, why that is the case. And these why's
#
fascinate me. I remember once traveling from Peshawar, I had gone in 2006 to cover the
#
cricket tour, India's cricket tour there. And a friend did some Jugaar and we managed to drive
#
down to the border with Afghanistan, right? And on the way we passed the dwellings of the Afridis.
#
And instead of windows, there were these narrow slits. And I asked somebody, why are these narrow
#
slits instead of big windows? And I'm not convinced of his answer, but it is plausible,
#
which is that machine guns are kept there because you're always at war. I don't know. I suspect
#
that there's a, you know, a deeper, older reason than that, but I'm always fascinated by all these
#
little things, which to a tourist would go unnoticed, but a traveler may actually see.
#
So give me some sense of when you started noticing architecture and then what does it do for you to
#
experience a city with this extra layer of seeing where you're asking those questions about design
#
and because for me, all these different forms we see around us and we take them for granted,
#
they originate for a reason. There is a reason townhouses in France will look a certain way.
#
There is a reason that many Indian houses will be like, you know, there'll be a courtyard in the
#
center, which is open and everything is facing inwards. And that's the way joint families are
#
living. And through architecture, you can learn so much about a society. So tell me about, you know,
#
your sort of how your understanding and interest in that group. So my understanding of it,
#
I feel is still super limited, but my interest has always been there. So for me, and I always
#
think of all travel writing as an interplay of space and time. We discussed this a little while
#
ago that, you know, you can see a very clear element of time. So I'm saying that architecture
#
is a space, but it is also time because it's existed for so long. It's been sometimes renovated,
#
you know, parts have been added, parts have been taken away and so on. So it's the monument
#
is actually a living thing. It's not a dead thing because the monument tells us a story.
#
Now, if you look at so much architecture, and of course, I am very biased towards architecture
#
in India, because I'm biased towards India as a country is that there is a lot of
#
very specific reasons why things are being done. I have an episode called Jaipur architecture as
#
statecraft, right? That how Raja Man Singh, you know, who had accepted the suzerainty of
#
the British, you know, started using aspects of architecture from different parts
#
as a way to please certain factions of people he was trying to work with.
#
Now, if you look at it, have you been to Jaipur? I don't know. Right. So if you go to the old part,
#
right, where the whole city is pink, and there are these specific shop shops, only one kind of
#
shops, right? Now, how did they start? That started because he wanted to set up, you know,
#
a flourishing city because Aamir had become too small for him. And he knew that to set up a city,
#
you need money, right? To need money, you need to attract trade. How are you going to attract
#
traders? He said that, listen, I'm going to set up specific markets. And even if you look at if
#
anyone who's listening to this opens the map, and you go to the old city of Jaipur, you will see
#
specific lanes named after professions, right? All of them, right? That is because he said,
#
listen, this is the place where I want everyone who's selling tail to trade. And
#
he built that and that stays to this day. Right? Of course, some of those things have changed,
#
but that stays to this day and that becomes the foundation of Jaipur as a city.
#
Great. Now, someone took a very deliberate choice to say that I want to set up Jaipur
#
and a very intentional and smart about it, if I may say. And I had these realizations in 2018.
#
When I took my sabbatical, I was in Sarajevo. And Sarajevo is one of my favorite cities in the
#
world. I would say Istanbul competes with it for me, pre Erdogan, though I'm not the biggest fan
#
of what he's doing to Turkey. But that single city you can see within maybe a 30 meter.
#
If you just look at the architecture, it goes from 17th century, 21st century
#
in 30 meters. Along with that, it has different styles of architecture. Along with that,
#
it has different religions influencing that architecture. Now, you could stand in those
#
30 meters and unravel the history of Sarajevo from those 30 meters. But you need to be
#
intentional about it. Right? So architecture became also very important for me because
#
I said that, you know, all countries try to
#
modify their collective memories, change it. And all power struggle is essentially,
#
and this reminds me of my master's thesis, I had done this thesis around anti-war art in Cambodia
#
around the Khmer Rouge period, right? And absolutely brutal period of Cambodia's history.
#
And one of the things which I sort of understood from is that the struggle for power is actually
#
a struggle for national memory. What do you institutions, organizations, political parties
#
want to be known for? Right? And once you start seeing that, you see that, yes,
#
people with their vested interests will try to bury history, but architecture is living history.
#
Right? Because there's so much of it has already been documented. Sure, it might be lying a little
#
obscure, but it's definitely there for you to access. And to me, that became just another tool
#
to really understand the place better. The same goes for food. And we'll talk about food, but
#
that is why I find, for 2015, I lived in China for about six months. I traveled for work and I
#
went to Tiananmen Square and I have an episode on town squares, right? Why dictators love town
#
squares. And if you go to any of these town squares, there is never a bench. There is never
#
a tree, which means you can't rest, you can't sit, you can't organize, you can't protest.
#
Tiananmen Square is that way because of what happened in 1989 in Tiananmen Square.
#
Now you go to Tiananmen Square and the people are all the time there. You can see nothing,
#
but the moment you bring in this lens, right? You know why this is the way it is. And that way of
#
hiding something actually reveals more than what was trying to be hidden. And there are so many
#
and there are so many aspects of architecture which completely blow my mind. Sometimes it is
#
ingenuity, sometimes it is vanity, which you see, sometimes it is the sheer craftsmanship of it,
#
right? And I feel that what we call as deep work now in the modern age, people did deep work then.
#
The kind of Nakashi which you see in palaces, in temples, in so many other architectural elements
#
that people were doing deep work and that deep work has stood for hundreds, sometimes thousands
#
of years. The other thing about architecture which fascinates me and which continues to interest me
#
is what is absent? So, you know, the absence or the forced absence of something in architecture
#
tells us so much, right? Like the Hindu rite talks about Muhammad Ghazni coming and sacking
#
the temples X number of times. And while, of course, it is true, he definitely did that.
#
But the fact that you start understanding architecture as a tool of power, right? The
#
sacking of the temple is very deliberate. He could have done hundreds of other things. He very chose
#
to sack temples because he wanted to further a certain philosophy of what he believed in.
#
And that was a straight craft. There's this historian Aniruddha Kanishetti,
#
written in a brilliant book, The Lords of the Deccan. And in one of his articles, he talks about
#
that, you know, while it's very easy for us to, you know, fall into that, oh,
#
X mosque was demolished, X temple was demolished. But in the medieval times,
#
kings used to demolish, coming from the same region, same religion, same community,
#
would demolish another temple so that they wanted to build a bigger temple in that place to show
#
that, listen, I am more powerful than him, right? So when you start seeing this, it also helps you
#
understand that a lot of narratives which you see, and it doesn't matter which side it is coming
#
from, are also narratives of convenience, of propaganda in many ways. And a deeper look at
#
architecture helps you see through it much more easily than you would sort of, you know, see it
#
from the outset. And that is why what I love about travel is that it might seem as one singular
#
aspect of what you do, but it really insights go into all directions.
#
So you mentioned Aniruddh, in this very room in the Takshashila studio, I once sat with him
#
doing a voice role for his podcast. I think, you know, he used to do a podcast here. Yeah,
#
he used to do a podcast here when he used to work in Takshashila.
#
Yeah, Echoes of India, I think.
#
Yeah, yeah, something like that. So he would have these voice effects with kings sing things
#
and princes sing things and I was a king for a brief while. So I'm going to think aloud and ask
#
you a question and see if you have any thoughts on it. Now I'd done an episode of early episode
#
of everything is everything on this where we were still trying to figure the medium out,
#
which was about the pinkness of Jaipur. Like one of the things I realized when I went to Jaipur
#
and obviously I did the kind of thing that you would recommend reading up and all of that.
#
And one of the things I realized is that that pink city thing is kind of recent. In 1876,
#
Prince Albert was going to visit the city. So they painted it pink in his honor.
#
Now somehow it caught on and it became a branding thing. And because it's called the pink city,
#
what it does is it does this kind of part dependence where certainly in the touristy areas
#
it became the rigor to paint everything pink and pink became a destiny, thereby foreclosing
#
other possibilities. Right now, this is a relatively trivial thing. It doesn't really
#
matter whether a building is pink or blue in a deeper sense. But, you know, I focused on this
#
because I felt that this kind of part dependence happens in our own lives. For example,
#
if you see yourself in a particular way, you know, if a young girl is praised for a particular
#
attribute that, oh, she's so coy or, oh, you have a charming smile, then you focus more on that to
#
the, you know, detriment of other things. And there is a part dependence that comes in.
#
And similarly, I'm thinking of the part dependence of architecture. Like Winston Churchill once said
#
that we shape our buildings and thereafter our buildings shape us. So when I think about town
#
squares, it is not just that a town square designed like that without benches or trees
#
is useful for a dictator. It is also that a town square that remains like that is useful to a
#
future dictator, that in a sense we are shaped by our architecture as much as in the past we
#
shaped our architecture. And it's important to watch out for these sort of falling into these
#
part dependencies in our own lives in various ways. But in the context of cities and the way
#
they are and the kind of life they enable and the kind of life they don't enable,
#
you know, do you have any like further observations? So while the pink city example,
#
of course, is deliberate, and there are deliberate examples, right? In so many parts of the world,
#
you're not allowed to change the outer facade of buildings because it maintains a certain look,
#
right? In Bombay, for example, art deco buildings, you cannot modify, you know,
#
matter what you can do inside. I know that a lot of people have an issue with this to say that,
#
hey, why do we have to do this? Let places be what they be. They are, but nothing is just as
#
they are. Everything is intentional. Someone is taking an intentional choice. And one of the
#
things I, and you did mention the tourist and the traveler thing, right? I actually don't think
#
there's a difference between a tourist and a traveler and I'll come to why. But the fact that
#
a place is popular for a certain thing allows a lot of people to come and of course leads to issues
#
like overcrowding of places. But at the same time, it runs someone's house. And I think that is what
#
we, you know, forget that, you know, I can, I can talk wax eloquent about, you know, how amazing slow
#
travel is that is, that is, and oh, but sometimes the best known places are genuinely worth it,
#
right? They're genuinely worth the hype they have. And even if, you know, you, you may not like it,
#
but it's running someone's house and it's a part of the economy. I think why should we should not
#
forget that, that sometimes these places and ideas and experiences have to be designed,
#
right? Why do countries run tourism campaigns? They run it for a simple reason that they want
#
more people to come, right? We all, you know, project this idea of what our country is.
#
And this takes me to a very brilliant anthropologist called William Mazzarella. He had written a book
#
called Shoveling Smoke. So he had done an ethnography of advertising agencies in India,
#
I think late nineties, if I'm not wrong, or maybe early two thousands. And he came up with this idea
#
of auto orientalism. He says that orientalism was how the West viewed us. We have now, we have now
#
made it our own and we are now sending it back to the West, right? In a very crude form, if I may
#
say. So even when we do incredible India campaigns, right? And I think we do the same thing. And I do
#
not think that is wrong in a very sense that there are some truths to stereotypes, right? Of
#
course they're exaggerated and which is not true, but there are some truths to stereotypes, right?
#
If someone is seeking, let's say some sort of a spiritual experience, it is possible in a country
#
like India, if they have the right mindset to go to some of the right places, it's at least possible,
#
may or may not happen. So I am quite okay with some of these intentional choices. And this
#
actually reminds me of one of my favorite poets, Kabir, right? One of the reasons I really like
#
Kabir out of everyone else I have a little bit read off is Kabir was a weaver. Kabir was a man
#
in the arena. So he was not an aesthetic who said, I'm going to quit everything and preach. I am a
#
weaver. I will leave. I will take things to the market. If it sells, I eat. If it does not sell,
#
I don't eat, right? And Kabir talks about this entire thing of intentionality that, you know,
#
that you can talk and of course there's a huge amount of critique on religion, organized religion
#
because he was against it. And the reason I like it is that as much as he talks about things which
#
are metaphysical or spiritual, it's very grounded in reality. And I feel that whenever you are
#
traveling, you cannot let go of that grounding. And I think that's very important. That's why
#
I actually like the intentionality in some cases because we are ultimately trying to
#
preserve a piece of history, right? And allowing a storyteller to take that piece or that sample
#
and help us imagine the universe. Because we don't know today what the Vijayanagara Empire looked
#
like, but based on the ruins, the temples we have and what historians are able to put together,
#
we can imagine it was genuinely a glorious empire in that time. And that's why I feel that
#
internationality works. Yeah. And you know, with cities, I was not talking so much about the
#
touristy element of it that you take one aspect and then you foreground that and all that. But
#
even little parts of the design shape the culture. For example, how much public transport is there in
#
a city will shape the way people live. Are there cycling tracks or not will shape the way people
#
live. I, you know, feel this profound dissonance when I think of the city of my birth, Chandigarh,
#
like at a sort of a philosophical level, I'm opposed to it because it's like top down urban
#
planning. It's not growing organically from the needs of the people. Every time I go to Chandigarh,
#
I see the white roads and the green parks and it's like utterly beautiful. But the counterfactual
#
is something that is far more vibrant and, you know, far more colorful. And that vibrancy hasn't
#
been allowed to come up. You know, you contrast it with any other Punjab city, for example,
#
because of the way that it's designed, because you can only have a certain amount of density
#
possible and, you know, that restricts the sort of possibilities. So all of these different choices,
#
the way they lead to, you know, cities being what they are.
#
I think, Amit, it's important that we recognize that there is an equal mix of beauty and chaos
#
in how cities evolve, right? There is a beauty because the 30 meter stretch in Sarai where I
#
spoke of, right? That walking down that street, you can understand Bosnia as a country, if I may
#
say. And that street has been preserved for a reason, right? Because, and it actually comes
#
back to the point of national memory, right? We preserve things the way because we believe that
#
this is the national memory we want people to carry. This is what the idea of conception of
#
people we want to carry. But at the same time, we understand that memory is malleable, right? You
#
can change people's idea of what a country is and what a memory is by doing things in various ways.
#
And we are seeing that play out in India right now as we speak, right? We want to change the
#
conception of what India as a country is. So, yes, Chandigarh, like an example, and I've been to
#
Chandigarh a couple of times. Chandigarh is a rich man's city, right? Chandigarh is a privileged
#
city. Exactly, and that has a cost, but yeah. Yeah, right? Now, but there is an upside to it,
#
that it looks beautiful. It's organized and, you know, I have not really seen traffic in Chandigarh
#
from what I remember. Now, Bombay, the city which both of us have spent considerable time in,
#
has layers upon layers of history, is chaotic, still manages to function,
#
but has some serious issues as a city now, right? So, I don't think this question can be
#
conclusively answered. I think very few people, you know, and people talk of their love for
#
European cities. You consider yourself a child of enlightenment, for sure. So,
#
you know, but the fact is that how many European cities can take the population load we have today,
#
right? Exactly. They evolved because they knew they were catering to, you know, certain aesthetics
#
to certain population, to a certain way of life, which is why Paris is out of control as a city.
#
Paris simply cannot take the amount of immigration which is coming into Paris right now. And also,
#
as you pointed out in an episode of your podcast, European cities are literally built on shit. Yeah,
#
that is what I call a cheap thrills episode. Yeah, I'm going to link it from the show notes,
#
so we're not going to elaborate. You have to listen to the episode to find out why they're
#
built on shit. So, yeah, I don't think this question can be answered. And I don't think
#
there is a balance also in a sense you can strike because some cities will always be weighed down
#
by their history. No matter how much of decontextualization you want to do, their history
#
doesn't lead them and it will never lead them. Delhi's history will never leave it. You can do
#
whatever amount of social engineering in a country, but some things are very hard to erase. I would
#
hope so. You know, from a recent episode, I think it was Swapna Little who gave me this
#
insight that, you know, we think of domes as inherently Islamic architecture, but domes,
#
actually, there's nothing like that. You know, domes were used by everybody. It's a freaking
#
technology. It's a technology for how you, you know, cover the top of a building from the elements.
#
But, you know, these associations have come. So when you rewrite history and you rewrite design
#
and et cetera, et cetera, all of this random shit gets in. On that note, let's take a quick break.
#
After the break, we have lots more to talk about.
#
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Welcome back to The Scene in the Unseen. I'm chatting with Utsav Mamoria and we just
#
went travelling. He took me down on a slow travel down Church Street where we had a slow pizza,
#
positively, leisurely. And as we came back, we picked up coffee and we discovered the concepts
#
of OD and AC. And I think we owe it to the public to tell them what is OD and AC. So,
#
I can begin with OD and then you go on to AC. And together we'll do a teamwork job of explaining
#
this as it were. So, OD means optimum delusion. And here is the funda behind it, that a certain
#
amount of delusion is necessary if you want to be, if you want to achieve excellence. Because what
#
happens is that when you begin doing something, you suck at it, right? And how will you get good
#
at it by doing it again and again? But if you have the intellectual honesty and the good taste
#
to see that you suck at it, that might dishearten you from doing it. So, you need a certain amount
#
of delusion which makes you think I'm actually good at this shit. And then you do it again and
#
again, inadvertently faking it till you make it and then you actually become good. So, to get the
#
iterations through, you need to be deluded. But the reason the O comes in, the optimal, is that
#
if you are too deluded, then you will never, you know, that will also come in the way and
#
it simply won't work. So, you need that amount of delusion which makes you keep practicing till
#
you actually get better at it, but not so much that it stops you from improving at all. So,
#
that is a concept of optimal delusion. And at this point, I will now hand over huge round of applause
#
please for my good friend Utsav Mamoria, who will explain the concept of AC. But before you do that,
#
I forgot what the A was and what the C was. Adequate. So, the idea of OD extends well in
#
a more culturally acceptable space to AC. AC stands for adequate chutzpah. It's pronounced
#
something else I just got to know from Amit. It's called chutzpah. But of course, I learned it from
#
the Vishal Bhardwaj film, Haider. Where he says chutzpah. Where he says chutzpah, as Amit says.
#
You know, I could be wrong. You're actually speaking to two people who are awful at
#
pronunciation. So, kindly forgive, but it is spelled with a C, therefore AC.
#
Yes, therefore AC. So, ultimately, we all need to arrive at a state of adequate chutzpah,
#
because adequate chutzpah is what will keep you going. Because it's a continuous journey
#
of learning and improving. So, you still need to be a little deluded. Like, I'm doing a good job
#
and I'm improving. But it should not be that I have reached perfection and then you get to
#
very, very unhealthy megalomania ideas of who you are.
#
Optimal delusion leading to adequate chutzpah. From bad thought to brave action, I guess,
#
is what you could put it. BT to BA. So, you know, typically in all of my episodes,
#
I will also ask my guests about their childhood and growing up and what they were like and all
#
of that. And we haven't done that so far because it was just such a joy riffing over all the ideas
#
and themes that we were riffing about. But that moment has come, Utsav, where you are now required
#
to tell us about young Utsav, the Utsav of ages past, the Utsav of memory, both semantic memory
#
and episodic memory as you like to talk about on your shows. So, tell us about that, Utsav.
#
So, I was very fortunate in a sense that I grew up in a very small town. It's a town of Anand in
#
Gujarat, of course known for Amul. But the town is so small that I think even as per 2011 census,
#
the population of the town is about two and a half lakhs or three lakhs or something. So,
#
you can imagine that when I was growing up about 25, 30 years ago, how small the place would have
#
been. But at the same time, I was staying in even a sub part of Anand called Vallavidyanagar,
#
which is the university town of the city. So, my father was a professor and my mother was a teacher.
#
And by the virtue of my mother having a PhD in Hindi literature, my father had a PhD in economics.
#
I think we had more books than we had furniture in the house. And it was such a normal part of
#
growing up to see my father. My grandfather and my father both have authored textbooks. So,
#
they used to both write prolifically. I remember my father writing almost, if not every day,
#
maybe every second or third day after he would come back from university. Because he had to
#
constantly revise his books, write new books, working with the publisher and so on. And that
#
is such a distinct memory for me because till maybe about seven or eight years when we started,
#
we had a junior library in school, where we started going to the library, I realized that,
#
oh, there are people who don't read books. Because I was living in this bubble of my parents
#
and my parents' friends who were also other professors in the university because we were
#
migrants to Anand and we did not have any roots. So, all the people we knew were through the
#
university. And their kids also read because, well, they were professor kids. So, that's when
#
I realized, oh, that reading is not a thing which everybody does. And it was not a judgment thing.
#
It was like, oh, the world is also like this kind of a thing. And I think one of the questions,
#
Amit, you always ask your guest is, what is your Gangali? Thanks for listening to so much of the
#
show. But I feel it's always, and I don't remember which of your guests said this, but it's a place,
#
but that place does not exist today. It existed at a certain time.
#
Max Rodenbeck said this about Cairo. So, yeah.
#
Yeah. So, for me, the Anand and the Vallabhavitha Nagar of me growing up was really that place where
#
I just found an immense amount of comfort of being at home. And I read this beautiful quote,
#
and because I'm so bad at remembering names, which says that home is a place where all attempts to
#
escape cease. And that is how I thought of, and I still think of my growing up years. And
#
given the fact that there were so few of us, we had such limited understanding of the world.
#
I remember cable television coming in for the first time and oh my God, it's like my world had
#
changed. It was a seminal cultural event if you grew up in the late 80s, early 90s. And then,
#
of course, I went through that rigmarole of Indian education where because I had 10th and 12th board
#
exams, there was no cable connection at home because my parents were like, you're just going to
#
waste your time on television. And at that point in time, I think the 10th and 12th board exams
#
were just seen as make or break, like your entire trajectory of your life depended on those exams.
#
And given that my parents were fairly middle-class, then there were really no avenues of
#
going out and pursuing something without education. So that was really literally only
#
it. In midst of all this, when I was about 10 years old, I think it was 10 when I lost my father
#
suddenly. And it's going to sound incredibly cruel to say, but I think had it happened later,
#
it would have affected me a lot more than it affected me at that time because I didn't
#
understand the gravity of it. So of course, it took an emotional toll on me not having to see my
#
father on a day-to-day basis. But I think only in adulthood, I realized what the ramifications of
#
losing a parent are and what a single parent, especially for a woman in a country like India,
#
is. And one of the laments though I do have from that time is that because there isn't enough
#
technology, I have very limited pictures of him. I maybe have one sort of voice recording of his
#
when you used to do those tape recorders. You used to play and record together and record those
#
things. And somewhere a part of me definitely wishes that I had more memories of him.
#
Right. Whatever memories I have of him are very good memories, but they're still very few in
#
number. And I think somewhere he definitely sowed the seeds of writing because he used to give me
#
dictation in a very professional way to give me dictation and correct my spellings. And at school
#
as well, I was very fortunate. It was a school which was run by the National Data Development
#
Board and Amul and a very, very privileged school in a very small place. And I had fantastic
#
teachers and I respect them to this day. And the only, only, only sucky part of being in that
#
school was that my mother was a teacher at the same school, right? Which is just a nightmare
#
if any of the listeners who have been through this know exactly what I'm talking about.
#
Because one, you were held to a different standard as a student, right? And second is that
#
when I used to perform poorly in exams, right? My mom would know my scores even before I knew
#
my scores because the teachers would go and tell that, you know, he really needs to improve in this.
#
So I would get a tongue lashing once on that day and the same tongue lashing again when everybody
#
got the exam papers. So, but I think, and I'd be very honest that I was a fairly non-focused,
#
relaxed island. Maybe it was the times or maybe it was just the way things were that it did bother
#
my mother that, you know, I'm not really paying attention to studies, but also I never felt an
#
overwhelming, overbearing pressure to perform, right? I didn't have to do like, oh my God,
#
you have to do IIT, you have to do medical. Of course they wanted me to take a professional
#
course. That never went away. But at the same time, I never felt that intense pressure.
#
And one thing that I'm super, super thankful about to both my parents is that they always
#
encouraged me dabbling in the arts. In the eighth grade, I briefly tried to learn the harmonium,
#
right? I did about just about okay, but it was never sort of seen as a distraction from studies,
#
which unfortunately a lot of my friends probably had to go through during that time that, you know,
#
oh, please don't do all this and focus on what you need to do and where it was, whether it was
#
reading or writing or, you know, whatever little drawing I could do at that point.
#
And of course, these things you see in hindsight at that point in time, you didn't really think of
#
them as anything significant. But the fact that it was always encouraged, I feel somewhere has had
#
an impact on me in terms of always finding a way to express myself, whether it was verbally,
#
because you had those debates and allocutions and everything. And also the ability to put down
#
your ideas in words. I think it came fairly early to me. So all through growing up, we used to,
#
you know, write something for something in school. And, you know, if you wrote really well,
#
your teachers would actually call you out in class and say that, I think this one is really good.
#
And they would read out the whole thing, which was probably only 300 words at that age, but
#
those words meant a lot to you when you sort of write it. And what I really miss about it
#
is the slow pace of life. I think just that nothing was ever hurried there, right? Even,
#
yes, even of course you had to reach school on time, but the city was so small that
#
my school was seven kilometers away, we reached in like 15 minutes or something,
#
which of course is unimaginable now that I live in Bangalore. And it was just a very, very calming
#
time, despite the personal hardships which, you know, we were going through. And a lot of credit
#
to my mother that we never felt the pinch of that hardship. She never let us sort of feel that. And
#
that I think also gave me a lot of confidence as a person growing up, saying that, you know, that
#
a lot of what you can do in life is also dependent on how you do it. And how you get a situation
#
you get thrown into a situation, how you react to it. And so I was very fortunate that my mother
#
was educated. She had a job that made things much, much easier sort of for us. And in fact,
#
the interesting part was that my parents had an arranged marriage like most parents did at the
#
time. And my mother was finishing her MA and it was my father who actually pushed her to continue
#
studying for her PhD after marriage. And which at that time was fairly revolutionary because my mom
#
was actually quite okay quitting and just taking care of the kids and everything. But it was my
#
father who sort of pushed her to do a PhD. And then once we were a little older, he encouraged
#
her to go back and sort of start working and get a job. And somewhere I feel that because of his
#
worldview and the way their equation was, right. And again, I have very vague memories because
#
I was just 10. One, I had always seen my father do housework and I had never seen raised voices
#
in my household. I feel it had a massive impact on me as an adult because even today,
#
my conflict resolution with my partner or with anyone in the house is never raised voices.
#
So yeah, if you are feeling worked up, just walk away for some time and come back
#
to it because whatever you are feeling in that moment, you don't really actually feel.
#
It's just that moment which sort of brings out the worst of you when you take that. And I think
#
which is somewhere also why I took to cooking quite easily because while my father did not cook,
#
but he used to do a lot of grocery shopping, vegetable shopping, dusting the house and doing
#
a lot of household chores, which I would not say then even now a lot of men would not partake in.
#
And as I was growing up, I think the other pivotal person in my life was my sister. She's
#
an elder sister and I owe so much of who I am to her today in the sense that of course having an
#
elder sibling helps you can lean on to them for so many things. And they understand the unique
#
circumstances you are in because they are also in those circumstances. And at so many points in my
#
life, I remember that this is 2007-8 when I was applying for business schools and I got admitted
#
to IIT Madras, the management program and MICA. And I was dead set on going to MICA, saying that
#
I have studied with engineers all my life. I want some diversity in thought and I want to go to a
#
place like MICA. And my mom coming from a more traditional mindset was saying that hey, you
#
should consider IIT as well. It's of course a great school and everything. And my sister is like,
#
just let him do what he wants to do. And she's like, it doesn't matter as much as you think it
#
matters. What matters is that what he does when he goes there. And ultimately an education is
#
what you extract out of it, not what the Institute gives you because there are so many
#
Institutes in the country who don't really do a good job of providing that kind of intellectual
#
leeway to people. So I think she is massively responsible. There is one person I would pick
#
who's responsible for shaping me as an individual. It's her. And she was the first person who loaned
#
me money to travel. I was a student at MICA and had gone to Singapore on a student exchange program.
#
And this was the first time I solo traveled. So I booked a ticket to Cambodia. You got those
#
$0 flights, right? And then I went to Vietnam and it booked a flight back from Ho Chi Minh.
#
And that was my experimentation in the sense that I had no accommodation. I had no plans.
#
I said, I'm just going to try this out, right? I only think of course I had a mobile phone saying
#
that if I really in a bad situation, I can call someone, but that's the extent of it. And of
#
course there were no smartphones then this is all feature phone era. And I think that's where really
#
the travel thing started somewhere, right? Because when suddenly you have that much of free time and
#
you start seeing a completely different culture, because still then I had seen only India and
#
Singapore, but Singapore also is a very unique country in a lot of ways, right?
#
That it doesn't throw you into chaos in any sense. It's a very organized country and so on.
#
Whereas Cambodia is not. Vietnam, at least 2007, 2008, I've not been there since,
#
is not. And that gave me a very different flavor of life. And that sort of, you know, just showed me
#
that how much or how differently people approach life and what their life goals can be.
#
And during Maika is where I also feel was a very, very pivotal moment. And thanks to this is all
#
thanks to my teachers at Maika, Professor Matthew, who's at IM Koi Kod now, and Professor Rita
#
Kathari. I think she's at Ashoka University now and Professor Seema Khanwalkar, who taught semiotics
#
to us. She wasn't a faculty, I think she was visiting, right? And I think that was my first
#
that was my first introduction to the ideas of what race is, what gender is,
#
right? What sexuality is. And the beautiful part about Maika then was because it was a
#
communication school, right? Film studies was a course, which was incredibly hard to
#
find in a management program. Then I'm not sure about how management programs look now.
#
And the fact that I could write my master's thesis on anti-war art in Khmer Rouge,
#
in Cambodia, and actually understand what is art and what anti-war art and what purpose does
#
art serve in society was profoundly changing because I think that time I saw a lot of art as
#
purely for entertainment. But then you also start understanding the power of art in so many other
#
different ways. And I was talking about Professor Mathew, he was my master's thesis guide.
#
And it was very nice to actually do a master's thesis in a management school
#
on a non-management subject because, you know, we'd always taught in management schools,
#
make sure whatever you do is to make you employable, right? But the other counterpoint
#
to think was that well, if you went to a good school, you will become employable at some point.
#
Just do whatever you want to do at that point in time. So that was a very beautiful two years
#
I spent at Mica and Professor Rita Kathari. She had a course called Imagining India.
#
And that was fantastic because while, of course, we all came from a fairly privileged set of people
#
coming to an expensive private school, it still brought out so many, you know, things. For example,
#
a batch mate of mine did his master's thesis understanding the poetry,
#
revolutionary poetry of Pash, the Punjabi poet, right? I had not even heard of Pash
#
till he did that. And his defense was just before mine. And the way he spoke of it,
#
it has still left such a deep imprint in terms of how much passion he had for what he read as a
#
child. So I think it gave me a very good grounding, even when I went on to do
#
consumer research work, which is my chosen career in terms of what is traditionally called market
#
research. Because every time I looked at a piece of communication or a piece of content,
#
my views of it was very, very different. And I could see that my views were different from
#
other people who are working on similar stuff from different schools, right? Because I was
#
fortunate enough to get that grounding. And I also co-wrote a paper with a professor,
#
Professor Harsh Taneja. He's in the University of Illinois, if I'm not wrong. And that got accepted
#
at a conference in Columbia. So Micah funded me to go to Columbia. Professor Mathew was also there.
#
And I remember we had one of the scariest experiences of our life there, that we were
#
coming back from Ecuador, and we didn't have a place to stay for the night. And there was
#
no online bookings then, 2008-9ish this was. No, maybe 2010 actually. And we took a taxi driver's
#
help. And I remember this so distinctly that the more he drove us to where we were going to stay,
#
which was his house, he said, I'll put you up at my house and I'll charge you this much. It was not
#
the money, which was the concern that every time we took a turn, the area got more dimly lit, more
#
dimly lit, more dimly lit, right? And we were in Bogota, which is the heart of Columbia and has a
#
terrible reputation as a city. And he put us in the room. The room was fine. And he said that,
#
come, I'll take you to dinner. And we were absolutely not sure how this is going to turn out.
#
And there is that, you know, a moment of humanness or human rawness, which sometimes happens
#
that when he reached there and he ordered pizza, he just took out his phone. He had a smartphone
#
then and started just showing pictures of his daughter. Right. And then just suddenly the
#
entire moment changed. Right. And he told us about that how he drives a taxi, but he tries to put up
#
people so that he can make some extra money so that, you know, he can provide a better life for
#
her. And, you know, that kind of a thing suddenly sort of reminds you that for how much ever evil or
#
bad is out in the world, a regular person you will meet on the street is mostly a good person.
#
Right. And in all, I call this the milk of human kindness that, you know, how much ever you travel,
#
you will always find the milk of human kindness. People in most cases than not are out there to
#
help you because think of it this way that you are in whatever city you are. Let's say we are
#
recording this at the Takshashila in Church Street. Now, if I find a foreigner who's confused,
#
right. And the worst thing you will do to him or her is that you will not say anything to them and
#
you will just walk past. Are you going to actually go and actively harm that person? I would say
#
highly unlikely. The question is, if we can assume that about ourselves, why do we find it so hard
#
to assume it about the world? Right. Because we tend to think of the world in collectives and
#
not in individuals, but at an individual level, you will rarely find someone who's out to get you.
#
Sure, there are bad experiences, but I would say that in a very, very anecdotal manner,
#
probably 97 to 98% of your experiences are pretty good when you're traveling.
#
So I think that also sort of gave me a very good sense of
#
giving me different lenses to look at in the world. And a lot of
#
of what I saw in my engineering days, I went to NIT Surat and that was my first exposure out of
#
my privileged small town bubble, because we also had students whose parents earned 30,000 rupees in
#
a year come and study with us, right. Of course, the college provided them with support, right.
#
And it suddenly makes you realize that how hard they must have worked to come at this playing field
#
than what I did not have to. And because you now understand caste, you now understand gender,
#
you now start to begin to scrape what India is as a country, all those experiences of the past
#
suddenly start making a lot more sense to you. Things which you could not understand. I remember
#
there was a batchmate of ours who had not read a non-academic book till he reached college.
#
In the first year, he read 64. Wow, wow, wow. Right. At the end of the final year,
#
he had a fully funded admit to London School of Economics. And I'm bloody sure he's doing damn
#
well today. Oh yeah, he's doing very well for himself today. And he's from Orissa where he had
#
incredible amount of pressure just to do this. And I think he also came into himself as a person
#
as a person during those four years. And I think those were very formative years for so many of us.
#
And I'm very blessed that I was able to see so much diversity of people because thanks to the
#
NIT system then that every state had certain number of students coming in. So you were literally
#
living in a mini India. We had someone from the Andamans who used to be called Andy every year,
#
no matter who that guy was, he just used to be called Andy. Right. So that became, I think,
#
a very good melting pot for me to probably begin my obsession about understanding and
#
uncovering India as a country. Because even now that I go back and look at my podcast,
#
about 25% of my episodes are India focused. Could be Indian food, could be Indian places,
#
could be something else. And that somewhere has stayed with me the idea of the intangible education,
#
which you do not get from degrees, but you get from people. Right. And you have very early on
#
in life, you see people struggle and come up against incredible odds. It humanizes you to
#
the extent that it almost makes you feel guilty of your privilege. But it sometimes also pushes
#
you to take to action, say that I need to do something about the privilege I hold. It's not
#
always a very positive mind space to be in, but when it pushes you to action, I think it's a good
#
mind space to be in. And I think after that, I took on a very, very, very conventional trajectory
#
of my career. My first job, I spent about four and a half years. The next one, I spent six months in
#
China. Right. And that was just something else. And that sort of cemented the idea that, you know,
#
we have this theory in social sciences called ethnocentrism, that you shouldn't judge another
#
culture by the ideals of yours. And that really came true to me in China, because what you hear
#
of China sitting outside was when you go and live there and talk to people who are living regular
#
lives. And one of the things I realized is that fundamentally, world over people care for three,
#
four things. They care for family, they care for health, they care for money, they care for
#
relationships. Right. These are the four things people care for fundamentally. It varies in
#
different degrees in different ways. But you can understand mostly most cultures if you understand
#
these four things well. And China was a revelation. Of course, I spoke no Mandarin. So which had its
#
own rather unique experiences once because I was trying to get to work on the second day and I
#
flagged off a cab, right. And that cab stopped and he was just looking at me blankly. And I had the
#
address where I wanted to go in Mandarin, so I was prepared. And then the guy is just suddenly
#
sort of pointing to the top of the car. And I'm like, of course, it's day two, I'm already confused
#
what's happening. And then I realized that this is actually a cop car. Both cop cars and taxis are
#
yellow in some parts of Shanghai. And I had just stopped the cop car on day two, and he's just
#
looking at me. And I'm looking at him, I'm just like, hey, listen, I'm doing the right thing. Why
#
are you looking at me like this? So of course, those, you know, misadventures, pleasant
#
misadventures did happen in my time. But one thing which really stayed with me from my China
#
experience is that I got a chance to visit Tibet, right. And that is where I was actually probably
#
able to see firsthand what cultural erasure looks like. So China, if you look at as a country, is
#
heavily populated towards the east. Whereas the provinces of Xinjiang and Tibet, which form a very
#
large chunk of Western China are very sparsely populated over into the terrain and a whole host
#
of other reasons. So as China was moving west, there were a lot of people who were coming from
#
Eastern China into Western China. And by the time, thanks to the kind of work I did on a day to day
#
basis, which was more on consumer psychology, consumer behavior through research and statistics,
#
you start observing things. Now, one thing which I observed very keenly was when you looked at
#
signboards, right, you are in Tibet, where everybody speaks Tibetan. But there was a larger
#
text for any road in Mandarin, followed by a much smaller one in Tibetan. And while it may seem
#
insignificant, but it's one thing to say that the native language takes, you know, a bigger chunk of
#
the font and the other language does not. It's the exact reverse. And then you started to realize
#
that they stopped teaching Tibetan in school, right. Now, which sort of brings me to the point
#
of language, that what do we lose when we lose a language? And that became so stark because
#
the guide which I had for my Tibet trip was a Tibetan because nobody wants to see Tibet
#
through a Chinese guide's eyes, right. And in fact, I remember when I was trying to get
#
the permit to go to Tibet, my travel agent had point blank told me that this was what 24 hours
#
before I was supposed to leave, my permit had not come. And he told me that there is a chance that
#
your permit will not come because you're Indian. So be prepared for that. I will refund you most
#
of your money because I know it's not your fault. But you know, and I feel that should have alerted
#
me a little more to what I was going to see there. But again, hindsight is 2020. So I reached there
#
and we were finishing the trip and he was very happy to see someone from India. And he said that
#
I have been in Tharamsala and I have crossed over and gone a couple of times. And he took me to
#
the Tibetan part of Lhasa. And we sat, we ordered some food and he just broke down.
#
And I was not prepared for it in any way. And he went on to talk about, you know, a very,
#
a thing which I did not think about is that when the new generation of children lose the language,
#
they not only lose their cultural heritage, but they lose a deep connection with the grandparent.
#
Because now they can't speak to the grandparent anymore. The grandparents speak barely any Mandarin,
#
the child speaks barely any Tibetan. And that severing is a severing of familial ties. So they
#
are both existing in the same space, in the same house, but they can't talk to each other. And
#
but they can't talk to each other. And which, which is only now going to get accelerated as
#
nuclear relation continues to happen in the world. And when you start seeing that level of cultural
#
erasure happening, you really understand that why imperialism and colonialism were so damaging to
#
the countries that went through it. Because it was a stripping of people's identity, in a sense that
#
and the confidence in which they had in their own cultures, by saying that hey, culture is better
#
than your culture. Right. And this sort of brings me back to one of the things which, you know,
#
Barry Wilson said about language, I'm just going to read that out. Some languages are so play
#
specific, that it is not possible even to speak them intelligibly apart from the landscape in
#
which they arose. He emphasizes that languages are more than mere words in drama, that they reveal
#
ecologies and potentialities, unrecognized in other languages. He makes it clear that each
#
language brings with it another history, another mythology, another set of technologies, another
#
geography. In The Last Speaker's The Quest to Save the World's Most Endangered Languages, he writes,
#
we will need the entire sum of human knowledge as it is encoded in all the world's languages
#
to truly understand and care for the planet we live on. The loss of any human language means
#
that in the most difficult straits humanity has ever found itself in, one more strategy for
#
survival has been thrown away. And this also takes me to the point of cultural religion is
#
essentially violence. Right. It may not be violence which you see every day, but, and in fact,
#
there is violence which you see every day because there are still so many Tibetan people who emulate
#
themselves in protest of what China does to Tibet. And right at the beginning, Barry Wilson
#
talks a lot about what's happening in the world in terms of politics and of course of climate
#
change. And he's describing a time when he's sitting by the pool with his grandson is playing
#
just then a handsome Japanese woman striding along the pool's edge makes a graceful arching dive into
#
the water, an impulsive act, a scream of water rises above her, like a flare of a Filimenko's
#
dancer's skirt. The pool water shatters into translucent gems. In the beauty of this moment,
#
I suddenly feel the question, what will happen to us? I stand up, a finger marking my place in the
#
book and search the breaking surf beyond a hedge of sea grape for my grandson.
#
He is hysterically at me, smiling from the slope of a wave. Here, grandpa,
#
what is going to happen to all of us now in a time of militant factions of daily violence?
#
I want to thank the woman for her exquisite dive, the abandon and the grace of her movement.
#
I want to wish each stranger I see in the chairs in the lounges around me, every one of them,
#
an untroubled life. I want everyone here to survive what is coming.
#
I know it sounds extremely apocalyptic of what he's sort of saying, but the idea that
#
cultural erasure, environmental erasure is happening all around us is something I
#
cannot anymore dissociate when I'm traveling. I don't think I can travel in that purely hedonistic
#
space anymore without reacting to what you are seeing around you. When I go to a place like
#
Poland, I was in Poland in the midst of the elections and the right-wing party which had
#
been power in the last two terms did not win power and a more centrist kind of a coalition
#
did come to power. Now you could go through that country without understanding the ramifications
#
of what that means because on one side there is a Ukraine refugee crisis happening
#
with the country, right? The other side, Poland is one of the fastest developing
#
economies in Western Europe, or rather Europe. Poland calls itself as Central Europe. Don't call
#
Poland Eastern Europe. You will definitely upset a few people in Poland. So it's become increasingly
#
very hard not to see the world where it is going and it does sometimes leave you with
#
despair. I went to the Nazi concentration camps in Poland and I very clearly saw what was happening
#
and then you see what's happening in Gaza right now and you see the entire cycle of violence has
#
just come back. The oppressor becomes the oppressed, then the oppressed becomes the
#
oppressor and this cycle is not seemingly ending and I'm so sorry I'm sounding so cynical right now
#
but it's just very very hard to tear away and talk about the joys of travel
#
without acknowledging what's happening. So a lot of my episodes sometimes tend to go in very dark
#
territories. In fact, I did an entire episode on dark tourism, an entire series where I spent time
#
in Bosnia and Herzegovina and one of my defining moments of my entire maybe 10 plus years of
#
traveling now is an experience I had in Nagorno-Karabakh. So Nagorno-Karabakh is a disputed region
#
between Armenia and Azerbaijan and was in news about a year ago where there was a war which
#
happened during that time and a part of Nagorno-Karabakh is now controlled by Azerbaijan.
#
At the time I went, you needed a specific visa to go to Nagorno-Karabakh which was quite easy
#
to get if you were in Yerevan and again thanks to slow travel I had no agenda. I had four days in
#
Nagorno-Karabakh and I went there and I was walking around. I saw the office of an organization called
#
Halo Trust. Now Halo Trust is a UK-based organization which is involved in demining
#
activities all across the world and because it's a disputed zone and it has changed hands
#
there are a lot of landmines in that region and I had seen their work about
#
10 years ago when I was in Singapore and I went traveling to Cambodia and Vietnam. The Cambodian
#
border is also mined thanks to the war and so I said that I believe they're doing something
#
which is noble and I said I'll make a very small contribution whatever I could afford
#
and I went to the office and it was so confusing because they had never had a tourist walk into
#
their office and I told them I want to make a small donation and they said that you know
#
we've never had a tourist come in so we'll call our director and he will give a tour of our
#
facility. I said that listen I don't want to impose I just wanted to sort of say thank you and move
#
on. He said no no today is the day off so we are just sort of doing our admin stuff so I said okay
#
then sure so he told me about the entire demining process and he showed me you know mines which
#
have been diffused and bombs which have been diffused and missiles and stuff and he said that
#
how long are you here? I said I'm here for about three more days he said that when you come tomorrow
#
we'll take you to a active landmine site. I was like sure I'm not going to say no to that
#
and knowing that this was people who did demining day in and day out I knew I'm safe
#
so that drove me about two and a half hours to a landmine site so it was on the top of a hill so
#
of course a very strategic location on a border and you know we see films and we see these you
#
know tripwire mines and people stepping on mines and you know these things happening and while
#
those things happen what we also don't know that there are tank mines mines which are specifically
#
designed to blow up tanks and because tanks mine tank mines are buried deeper they usually
#
can't be detected with a metal detector which means every square centimeter of that hill has
#
to be dug up manually to look for mines and there were people doing it right and they took a break
#
and I was able to go to the demined area and see how they were doing it and how carefully you have
#
to do that job because you know one small misstep can trigger thing and I was speaking to one of
#
the miners there and I asked him that you know that I know this job pays well so there's one
#
reason you're doing it but there are also other jobs which you could do and you still choose to
#
do this and this person had lost a family member on a landmine explosion while clearing mines
#
and I asked him how do you do this like knowing this is the risk knowing having lost someone
#
and he told me that you have to let go of things you can't bottle things inside you and keep them
#
because if the landmine will not kill you that will kill you and this is not coming from someone
#
who's being philosophical about it is coming from someone who's lived reality is losing
#
someone to a landmine and working in a job which which puts him at the risk and so many others like
#
him at the risk of you know losing a limb or even dying and no amount of amit intentionality
#
research preparation prepares you for this encounter for it to happen and for you to
#
experience it and to me this is a rich life and to me this is why seeing the world slowing down
#
is so important because this aspect of someone's life to know it so intimately
#
you cannot have it when you're rushing through sometimes you can't even have it at slow travel
#
I mean I'm glorifying it for all it's worth but there's so little you will anyway see
#
but the idea that you have time to go down and do things which you wouldn't otherwise do
#
to step out of your comfort zone I think is very important so though I have been able to see so
#
many of conflict you know zones there's a there's another village I forget the name starts with a
#
where it used to be an Azerbaijani village at least then in the war it changed and went
#
to Armenia now it might have changed hands again I don't even know and there there's a
#
minaret of a mosque and that mosque has a visibility to snipers on the other side
#
and in the way teenage stupidity works there are kids who will try to go up that mean aren't peep
#
out right now in your national mind you will ask why would you do this right even in teenage
#
stupidity this is a matter of life and death and what you suddenly realize is that people who live
#
somewhere except and assimilate that they live in a conflict zone
#
and try to live with it there is not a lot which is happening in those zones in I spent
#
four five days in my new magazine article in the town of Mostar it's in Hadza Gubina and so
#
Hadza Gubina is a divided city one part is Muslim other part is Christian and thanks to Couchsurfing
#
there's a feature of Couchsurfing called Hangouts where you know you can just ping the local who's
#
available for Hangout and they'll just you know probably have a coffee with you chat with you
#
or show you around so I met a art history student there who actually took me through the city
#
and its history through its graffiti so he just walked with me over two days and he spoke to me
#
about because there you can still see evidence of the 92 Bosnia war there in that city and this
#
is where you sometimes realize your stupidity he said that this is one particular ruined place
#
where today a high school students put up Romeo and Juliet right as a part of their theater
#
and then it was written love is love right and my immediate reaction to it was
#
what a stupid teenager thing to say right about a month later when I was writing something for
#
my book I realized that Bosnia still persecutes homosexual people and then I realized this is not
#
the stupid love is love this is a very very different thing they're talking about and in
#
a city which has been damaged by bor and ravaged even in those ruins they are trying to sort of
#
say what they want to say and just take a claim to their identity now
#
this was as is complex enough for me to understand but on the third day when I was chatting with him
#
he told me about how his mother and father had to separate during the war that his mother was sent
#
to a different part and his father was still in the city and the war was going on and one of the
#
things which he said has stayed with me till today is that his parents told him that
#
unlike films very rarely does it happen that someone will come and make an announcement and say
#
the war is over you never really know if a war is over or not
#
now if you look at him an art history student living in a country which doesn't have as many
#
economic opportunities he is somewhere still burdened by what has happened to his country
#
and to his own parents and he has lived through that and then I get my privileged behind there
#
and I'm trying to see that city as a tourist I feel it's very insulting and I feel that we owe
#
it to the people where we travel to to at least have respect for what they have gone through
#
not everything is overt not everything would be be seen right but if you have the ability to
#
engage and sometimes listen that's all it matters right listening is far far more important a skill
#
than there is any and I think that is how it is sort of made me a better a listener made me a
#
more empathetic traveler and the ethical responsibility which we spoke about right
#
I feel I feel it even more and more as I sort of you know go through the words of the prophets
#
are written on the subway walls you know one of the most moving images I've seen on Instagram was
#
something I saw on a post you posted which was the airline map to Auschwitz where you posted this
#
map and it looks like a normal airline map of what flights are going out what flights are going in
#
but it's actually a map of everybody's last flight to Auschwitz and it's a last flight
#
and I also and and that makes me wonder that there is a dichotomy here and one part of the
#
dichotomy is that wherever you go and in the extremely limited travel I have done I have
#
also seen this you have traveled much more than me everyone who travels has said this to me
#
is that people are so fucking generous that they are so kind they are so generous
#
they are so warm-hearted like you pointed out the individual on the street will never want to
#
hurt you he wants to help you I have seen this everywhere I have seen this in Pakistan with
#
people who know I'm from India right I've seen this everywhere and yet within all of us there is
#
we are all like I like to say we are all one circumstance away from the banality of evil
#
as Hannah Arendt would say that you press a particular button and we are doing the worst
#
possible things as if it is absolutely nothing love is love but hate is hate and you know
#
what do you make of that dichotomy like is it that we are essentially good but can be riled up
#
to behave in terrible ways or is it that within us we contain the seeds of both good and evil
#
and then it is luck then it is luck and then it is the shit that happens to you
#
and either you're smiling at me or you're cutting off my throat I mean what does one make of this
#
so there's a very famous experiment called the Stanford prison experiment by Philip Zimbardo
#
it's a very controversial experiment for very good reasons why it's controversial but to sum
#
up the experiment that this was a university professor Philip Zimbardo who took a bunch of
#
students from his class and over a period of a few weeks if I'm not wrong he gave them roles
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one was a prisoner and one was a prison guard and he just let it play out of course the prison
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guards were supposed to be a little harsh and the prisoners were supposed to be a little
#
submissive going to the nature of the power equation between them and very quickly he could
#
see that regular intelligent empathetic people really became the worst kind of prison guards you
#
could imagine right so Amit I think before we are able to take moral high grounds on things
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of violence and of othering people we must remember that we are literally one circumstance
#
away from being evil everybody is evil in a certain way most of us are fortunate that that
#
side does not come out but I believe that so the other thing which I mentioned in one of the quotes
#
I was reading out is to write about things with certainty somewhere I'm not even sure if I should
#
think about things with certainty because I think time and again we have proven that
#
as Albert Einstein said the only thing certain is human stupidity and the universe also is not
#
sure about but the infinity of human stupidity is definitely a fact so there's a very interesting
#
book I read by Bernard Anderson it's called Imagine Communities and where he talks about that you will
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never really see or meet most of the people who are part of your nation but it's an imagined
#
community of people right as beneficial imagined communities is an idea I think it's also very
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very dangerous because imagined community while you are trying to use it as people like me but
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in the moment you make that an imagined community of people who are not like me right is very very
#
fertile ground for the kind of things we are seeing today that you know we are very very
#
personable and kind in person but the moment we are able to put a put a layer of anonymity
#
between us and someone else or never having to interact with the person on on whom the our
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actions may have an impact I think we are capable of incredible evil
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yeah moment of silence because I didn't know how to react because
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I think you're right let's since we are talking about incredible evil let's talk about market
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research which is what you turned your sort of career into no but I'm actually seriously
#
interested in that in a couple of things number one I think what is it seems to me that coming
#
from that small town has two kinds of distinct advantages and one distinct advantage as you
#
mentioned during lunch is the power of observation that you're so bored that your power of observation
#
is acute in a sense that slower rhythm of life is already baked into you where you have that
#
hair out naturally because hey what else is there right that's what it is it's it's just it's in
#
the air around you and the other is that what you know english-speaking kids from big cities
#
like me unfortunately often tend to take for granted in their little echo chambers or whatever
#
is that they have a blinkered view of the world and I would imagine that being from a small town
#
you don't have that blinkered view of the world you see a little bit more around you and also the
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fact that you have again the great good fortune of being in a college where there is that kind
#
of diversity where you are meeting all those different kinds of people so on the one hand
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I'm combining I'm assuming that this slow living the slow rhythm is kind of ingrained in you in
#
the sense that you're not jumping to conclusions about everything but stepping back and learning
#
to listen and learning to figure shit out and at the same time you have this exposure to this
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diversity which possibly you know serves as a warning against certainty of any sort because
#
the world is complicated and there is all of that and then when I come to your profession the
#
question I want to ask is that is it just that you got into the profession you did because hey
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I'm good at this and I need to make a living or whatever or even within that are there ways
#
of looking at something as banal and mundane as market research and getting an essential truth
#
about a society like I've done a couple of episodes with Santosh Desai who I think is just
#
a mind-blowing thinker absolutely a mind-blowing thinker just just like there's no one like him
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and and he's also he's an accounts planning guy he's a research guy he looks at the numbers
#
and he can apply the numbers to great truths about this nation and build these great narratives out
#
of them which contain so much insight so for you what was was the market research was the numbers
#
was the data was it all part of just that I'm professionally good at this this will make me
#
money or did it tie in with your interest in behavioral economics for example and understanding
#
how the mind works into sort of getting a larger picture of the world so there's a film which came
#
out few years ago it's been a while now called Bunty and Bubbly right there is a song which says
#
it's actually bang on right that's literally what happens for anyone who comes from a small town
#
and migrates to a big town right and that's exactly sort of my life story as well but one
#
incredible advantage who anyone who comes from a small town has is that you are just blessed with
#
curiosity because you have that understanding that you are seeing a very limited part of the world
#
because by the time you have been exposed to the world through media right you know there is a very
#
interesting world which also exists there which is out of my thing right and the moment you step
#
into that world you carry the sensibility of the observation of a small town with your curiosity
#
and you are now able to view everything in that large town or metro through that lens
#
so not only it makes you a lot more observant you're also able to see things which other people
#
cannot see right so for me market research really happened because one i was very interested in
#
media as an industry as a business of how it works the business of media and because i was curious
#
and i enjoyed studying my consumer psychology courses i was like this sounds like fun let's do
#
this right and that time the what the industry paid versus what the fee was the delta was not
#
that bad it was okay and that's why i landed my first job and i remember that i did not apply
#
for any companies till the day three of placements because the company i want was day four and there
#
were times even i was second guessing myself i'm like listen is this a too much of a rookie move
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now that i'm doing or i'm risking too much but well it worked out so well who knows
#
it was a rookie move or not and then i think what market research really pushes someone like an
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mbo to do is the first week of your training is field work okay which means you have to go
#
get someone to respond to a 30-minute survey with with mostly no compensation for them for it
#
right and trust me if you think cold calling is hard please do this in person the amount of times
#
you will get shut down by people on your face cold calling is someone shutting down on the phone
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imagine having been shut down in your face right so the first two days are extremely humbling
#
because you have done actually nothing in two days right whereas there are field workers who
#
have to do four or five surveys in a day to earn their living and you suddenly have an immense
#
amount of respect for them that they're able to do this on a day-to-day basis the second thing is
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that it gives you a very unique opportunity to be able to talk to anyone because most of the times
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we talk to people in our privilege bubble right with everyone else it's a very transactional kind
#
of equation you have so i remember that one of my assignments was that i had to do two surveys
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in like second half of the day of condom users okay and this was in bombay so i think i was
#
still better off and now the problem is as i'm in a country which is as homophobic as india
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how do you go to a man and ask him in a mall hello do you use a condom it's not happening right so
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for the first half an hour i struggled i did not even know how to go and talk then i said i cannot
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open with this i have to open with something else so i tried to find someone who's taking a
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smoke break he's chilling wiling away time taking a break started talking to him he saw the survey
#
sheet this was pen and paper interviews so he saw the survey sheet in my hand and asked him what
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i'm doing this is what i do this is my job i'm on training this and that and then i you know finally
#
got one person to agree to talk to me so by the time you had established a rapport so the condition
#
starts going flowing so one of the questions is that which is your favorite brand and why very
#
typical market research question and this guy he was just talking to me looking in the eye like a
#
regular conversation then suddenly i see that he's looking towards the floor and you know very he
#
softly says she likes the flavors okay and to me and because you were trained not to react to
#
people's answers it was genuinely a great moment because this guy has just told me such an intimate
#
part of his life which he probably doesn't even tell his friends of course i had the advantage
#
of anonymity but in the last 20 minutes i have gotten from him being a stranger who meet on a
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spoke break to actually tell me this about his life she likes the flavors it's your first podcast
#
interview yeah that's how podcasting started for me right and met another guy we asked him a
#
question around frequency of buying and what pack size he buys and he says i buy three times a week
#
and the pack size is 10 and then you have you in your head you're doing he's using 30 condoms in
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a week i am like what is happening in his life i really want to know or what is missing from my
#
life i really want to know right so those experiences are also very humanizing experiences
#
and it really gives you the ability to go and talk to someone you don't know how to find a common
#
ground with someone how to make someone speak to you for 30 minutes when it is not a lot in it for
#
them right so i think that was a great great part about market research i still love and i sort of
#
miss now that we have moved to more online forms of research the human connect i was also doing
#
project for a multinational company in mayanmar right and you know there are things
#
there is power of survey data but there is power of qualitative research and ethnography and
#
observation and when you used to do these home visits and do these interviews in every household
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you will see that at the most prominent position in the dining room
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there would be the photo of the child of the family in the graduation room
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right now we also as a country are obsessed with education and degrees but you will not see this
#
in india but it is in mayanmar the question you have to ask is why you should not ever stop at
#
saying that okay this is it but why this is not the most common thing to expect and then you realize
#
that this is also a country which is coming out of years of military rule right it is also coming
#
out of a place where the men were either working in the army or did nothing else and now that the
#
army janta is gone these men don't know what to do which means it's upon the next generation to
#
actually pick up the mantle and provide for the household economically because in mayanmar it's
#
women who do most of the work and not the men right but if you don't have this context of where
#
this country is coming from you miss that insight and this is what i say that you know these are the
#
lenses which mica gave me as an institute to be able to see the world and then what happens is
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that every data point you see it start it starts connecting like a piece of jigsaw and that's really
#
what an insight is you know people talk of you know insights but you cannot prepare for an insight
#
an insight will come to you you can prepare for the experience you can prepare to push yourself
#
into the field go out talk to people understand and the insight will come to you and and that's
#
the beautiful part of being and working in market research that sometimes these very core human
#
truths are revealed to you and it doesn't happen always of course but even if it happens 20 percent
#
of the times it really makes you worth it because the curious person in you suddenly has made that
#
one you know kuhnian way of understanding the world has been one minor step which has been taken
#
and that is immensely immensely satisfying and so that's all in some ways market research happened
#
to me but the other thing which i think i was telling in the lunch break as well is that
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because the natural part to progression in many of these fields is doing revenue and sales till
#
very recently i used to do a lot of sales and if any of you ever have a self-awareness that you are
#
becoming too egoistic or arrogant please do sales nothing decimates your ego like sales the amount
#
of constant rejection you deal with right for reasons which could be in your controller could
#
be completely out of your control really really is a humbling experience i think you know there's
#
a reason why i think market researchers are first put on field to first establish empathy for the
#
people who we are studying right it's not just statistics and numbers in one place and the other
#
is to put you through the sales process to also get you outside of your own head and you know
#
start seeing as what inherent value do you provide in the economic machine and your inflated
#
worth of from your degree has no value in the real world beyond the point so if you have two
#
parallel universes and in one of them you do sales for 10 years and in the other one you do
#
marketing for 10 years how are you different how are these two cells different so i think
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uh and i know that all the marketing folks hearing is going to kill me
#
a research guy with sufficient time can do marketing a marketing guy without research
#
experience and sufficient time will not be able to do research because research is ground up
#
right you have to understand the problem you have to design the survey instrument or the
#
discussion guide if it's qualitative you have to go to ethnography you have to go out in the field
#
you have to collect your data you have to know that data will have problems and incomplete data
#
and biases and everything versus a person who does marketing unless having said that someone
#
has run google ad campaigns themselves someone has run fb ads meta ads themselves from scratch
#
then i would say they were much better hold on some of the marketing fundamentals
#
right which is why some of the best companies in india put their marketing folks through a sales
#
tent right fmcg companies first two three years go do sales that all your fanciful notions about
#
how a brand is built and a business is run you know that's why they said distribution is king
#
and they say it for a reason because they've done sales and they know that for everything we can do
#
it comes down to you know the last acts of business so in these early years of working
#
what was your story about yourself so my story about myself is that i get to
#
understand why do people do what they do and that is a lot of fun because it often sometimes helps
#
me understand myself one of the most interesting clients i worked for was learner international
#
which runs cartoon network and pogo and my god have you designed a research instrument for a child
#
everything you know every single fundamental and principle is out of the window
#
out of the window and to make a child sit for 10 minutes and respond to a survey
#
and to any of the parents listening you know what i'm talking about is so hard
#
right because one you are going in the daytime when the child is back from school and he or
#
she is wanting to watch cartoons you have turned up at the house and say hello please
#
help me answer the survey the parent is very diligently trying to push the child
#
to do it and again whatever knowledge you have again till now is out of the window
#
so you are wrong so many times in research that there is also an experience to say that
#
you don't understand enough about the world and i think in a lot of other fields there are known
#
unknowns in research there are unknown unknowns and once you understand the magnitude of unknown
#
unknowns we are dealing with i think that's a great foundation to sort of one further
#
funnel your curiosity into something else can you give me an example of insights you got from your
#
work in market research which really surprised you or you know which were big moments for you
#
yeah so i did some work around 2016 or 17 that time the men having beers thing had really taken
#
off right you know and we did an understanding so whenever you want to understand popular culture
#
we look at three things in india bollywood cricket religion right whatever happens in bollywood
#
cricket religion is a very good reflection of what's happening in the country so we started
#
seeing that you know cricketers someone like birat koli varun davan oh no sorry varun davan chikar
#
davan you know having a beard right film stars now coming in shahrukh khan who used to be clean
#
show for the longest time came up with a couple of those looks and you're seeing that those cultural
#
flows are happening then we tried to understand that you know where are these cultural flows
#
coming from right is it ingrown is it hollywood so you said there was some amount of import
#
happening from hollywood also right but so those are well and fine but the most important thing
#
which we had to sort of see was that is it a trend or is it a fad because the company
#
we were working with said that we want to establish that should we invest
#
into building a brand for you know beard and makeup of beard and stuff so fat basically
#
you're saying comes and goes and a trend stays yeah that's it that's really the difference that
#
a trend would stay for a reasonable amount of time for a company to invest and make some money of it
#
so it could stay for 10 years 20 years our fat probably saves two three years and it sort of
#
goes away right so we of course had to get down to why is this trend coming up
#
now this you can't really do through service you need to do qualitative interventions and
#
depth interviews with people and group discussions and i was happy with the insight but sort of
#
disappointed with the insight as well is that it came bent went on the idea of masculinity
#
but it went in the way that till a certain generation of men they knew what exactly being
#
a man was right they were not challenged by women in the workplace but from 16 17 by that
#
change had already was in place there were women in the workplace having sufficient numbers
#
and so many men felt that they could not do anything to differentiate themselves from women
#
and they felt that you know growing a beard or presenting themselves in a certain way
#
makes them look more authoritative and powerful right so it broke my heart i am saying that
#
it's a very interesting cultural trend but i was kind of sad to find this insight was
#
someone's analysis or the men themselves were saying this so you have to ladder up to some
#
of these things right and the laddering up is always a little tricky because you can always
#
confuse a hypothesis for an insight right so what you would do is that you will build a bunch of
#
hypotheses run it as separate you know sort of statements in a survey and then an aggression on
#
it right because these are not stated friends they're revealed preferences right so this is
#
sort of one thing which came out and you know because they were sort of struggling to you know
#
get an edge over women and statistically there have been studies to say that women tend to be
#
more efficient or workers as compared to men now that was a bit of a disturbing insight for me
#
personally that and while male ego being fragile is not a new thing at all but to see it play out
#
in these ways was a little tricky and that is where we hypothesized and again there were other
#
pieces of data which i can't talk about but precise that this is going to be is going to stay this is
#
not a trend which is sort of going to go away immediately we expected it to last for at least
#
five to seven years and it has clearly lasted where we are so we definitely at least got that one
#
right the other interesting bit which came out was amongst older men and when i say older men
#
who is our men in their late 30s early 40s is that for them
#
beard matters because the sum total of hair on their face which is their head and their face
#
should remain constant so you will see a lot of men who are balding will start growing beards
#
whereas a lot of men who have sufficient and may or may not grow beards that's another very
#
interesting thing which sort of came out we could not really go down to understand why it's happening
#
we somehow could not really land on a strong we had a few hypotheses but nothing really panned out
#
in confirmation so yeah those kind of things sort of you know happen did you study global
#
beard trends because my sense of the indian beard trend was it really started with hipster beards
#
in the us and then came out here and then it just kind of continued so i always thought that was
#
so there was a cultural import as i said that hollywood was an example from where it started out
#
but what we see also is that in india cultural trends go from north to south right the north is
#
always the first to adopt cultural trends the south is much slower to adopt some cultural trends
#
whereas in the south a mustache is a very common thing right but the beard was not always and when
#
we started seeing it in the south we felt it we had to go deeper than just cultural flows coming
#
in from it came first from the south and then in the north no it came first in the north and the
#
south which is where the cultural flow theory from hollywood to north makes complete sense right but
#
when it percolated out in the south is where we actually had a stronger sense of this is going to
#
stick around because the south doesn't adapt to a lot of these cultural things very fast for good
#
reasons of its own so that's where sometimes you know these insights you know really surprise you
#
know one other insight which i had was looking at uh characters of children cartoons the most
#
popular one so that time uh chota bheem was super popular much much to the frustration of parents
#
shin chan is extremely popular and he's an extremely loud-mouthed foul-speaking child
#
and we sort of mapped all these personalities uh you know on the archetypes on human archetypes
#
and we noticed that all characters in in cartoons at least during that time they were essentially
#
an archetype which had no care for the external world did not interact with the external world
#
because that's what exactly a child is now the beauty of this insight is it is obvious when you
#
hear it but then you suddenly say that all the successful ones are literally this character
#
they are just different versions of it they don't care what the parents have to say even
#
in chota bheem who's a very good kid the entire show revolves around what he thinks he feels
#
doesn't care what chutki has to say or what any other character has to say right now the moment
#
you take an insight to a client the lens of a client to think of which show to acquire suddenly
#
changes because they're not most of them are not building their own content they're all acquiring
#
content right so they know that hey this is a safer bet than x which probably doesn't fit this
#
archetype it has its downfalls any of analysis does have its problems but that was again something
#
which i found fascinating which came out of our work but there's a danger there that they then
#
acquire only shows featuring that particular kind of character and then that becomes a self-fulfilling
#
prophecy because of course kids like that character because no no there's another thing
#
which happens there which is where the the demand supply takes in ultimately only the people who have
#
money will acquire these characters the rest will get left out the lower-rank channels will pick up
#
those characters and sometimes they will come up and then break that trend ah great right for example
#
the more popular sort of people today are motu patlu who don't fit the darkie type at all but
#
they're extremely popular amongst kids now we're taking what chota bheem used to be at some point
#
right so there will always be those things and which is why i'm saying that you are wrong so
#
often in what you're doing that it grounds you a lot more so were you traveling all this time
#
all these years while you were sort of working also like how did you view your leisure time your
#
urge to travel so i think the urge to travel was definitely always there and the good part
#
about research is that because you used to travel for field work you used to at least see a lot more
#
of india and sometimes even miyanmar and countries like nepal where i've been i feel it was also the
#
time where you know the first part of the first four or three years i had paid off my education
#
loan so i had some money at hand and i took my first international trip after i started working
#
which we went to turkey with a couple of friends and it was a very zindagi na mile ki dobara trip
#
because we're just three of three guys you know and in some parts we had rented a car and it was
#
just a lot of fun and i think that's where i started to realize you know my specific attractions
#
towards architecture because turkey is gifted in terms of you know the confluence of europe and
#
asia there's so much happening and it also was the first time where my entire notion of what
#
food is changed not because of it being a meat heavy country and i grew a vegetarian i'm not
#
vegetarian anymore but we went to this restaurant i think it's called siya but i don't remember it
#
well enough where the food was great and when we came to dessert we asked him what desserts
#
do you have said i only have one dessert and that is a desert made of brinjal okay and as an indian
#
the idea of a dessert made of brinjal sounds just ridiculous and i was like well how bad can it be
#
so we got it it was a brinjal which had been cooked in sugar syrup for three days or five days
#
oh my god and it was served with white butter or cream i don't remember very well
#
the dessert completely blew me away it was one of the best desserts i've eaten in my life
#
in my life and that completely shattered my notion of what food can be and that
#
trip was seminal for me because one i had taken a trip with my friends for such a after such a long
#
time and we had finally had some money to spend and we only spent two weeks in turkey we did not
#
go anywhere else not because we had discovered slow travel but because every additional visa is
#
painful as an indian passport so you are like you got one let's just sort of go with it
#
so that trip is where i think my ideas of travel started to really you know form and
#
somewhere they were you know kept bubbling up sort of kept going down i went back to old ways of
#
trying to rush through places once in a while and then you know when you are going for
#
work sometimes you always get in sort of urge to you know oh i'm going that far let me take two
#
days off and you know extend and see some stuff but every time i came back that frontier was just
#
not satisfying i know sure i ate some good food i saw a couple of places but again if someone
#
asked me how the trip was i'll say it was fun i couldn't describe it and it should be apparent
#
by now that i love to talk but i couldn't really talk about it and that's where i feel that
#
there's a break in the matrix something is not right and i in 2016 after my student in china
#
i went to kenya for some work and i got to spend a day and a half in masai mara the masai mara
#
sanctuary with the tribe and we of course went on safaris
#
now the thing about safaris is that if you don't if you've never been to a safari
#
the idea of driving around one and a half days just to see animals sounds a little insane
#
and you say that i'm going to get bored out of my mind
#
and then you go there and after one and a half days you tell yourself i should have
#
extended this to three days because that is a time where nothing happens for hours altogether
#
and then suddenly you will drive to a point where you see a leopard
#
taking a deer kill and sitting on a branch and it is like right here which is probably
#
about 15 feet from where you are right and when you see that nature in its elemental form
#
and that leopard has absolutely zero fucks to give about you
#
and then you start seeing and then you see national geographic sort of come alive right
#
you've seen national geography growing up as a child you suddenly see these hundreds of zebras
#
you see the wildebeest trying to cross the river you're seeing there's a crocodile there
#
so it just suddenly sort of you know comes alive and you realize that because you are sitting
#
because you are sitting there and you're nothing else to absolutely nothing else to do
#
you are observing and you are seeing so many things and observing those minute behavior of
#
animals that now if you ever seen a wildebeest crossing which especially when they have to come
#
down a hill and cross the river they would you know really really stand there for 10 15 minutes
#
hours all together but because no one has taken the plunge and then requires one wildebeest to
#
take a plunge and then everybody just follows him right to see that happen in front of you
#
reference cascade so is is just something which you realize that if you were impatient and you
#
had walked away from that spot but you didn't because i mean the safari owners know that you
#
know this is the behavior of the animals you would have missed out on seeing one of the greatest
#
migrations which happens in the world and that's when you start realizing that there is no value
#
in hurtling at 100 kilometers an hour it's not going to do you any good because the world as
#
this is too large for you to see but whatever you see you should see it with an intensity that you
#
remember it you will of course not remember everything but i remember i was in 2015 i spent
#
for three weeks in argentina i had a very very kind boss who understood that this is the time
#
of life you should do this she likes she liked travel herself so i think it became a little
#
easier and i got three weeks off exhausted my entire vacation and i was in patagonia
#
and i have seen i don't think i've seen that beauty ever in my life in all these years of travel
#
maybe some parts of himalayas come close but
#
i am still stupefied by how beautiful the argentinian part is i've not even been to
#
the chilean part of patagonia i'm just talking about the argentinian part
#
and the point which i returned to which we discussed a little while ago about human
#
kindness and generosity that we were in the wine region of mendoza and we were driving about four
#
hours in a bus to the andes mountains and we decided that we'll go to the lowest peak which
#
is confluencia i think so so a four-hour hike and the only smart thing we had done we had taken a
#
guide so we had gone in december which is peak summer in argentina days are long sunsets at 10
#
pm you have a whole day to hike we went reach the summit we were about 15 minutes from the
#
we didn't reach the summit 15 minutes from the summit it had started to snow heavily suddenly
#
weather turned we were not prepared for snow we were cold we were prepared for rain we're not
#
prepared for snow because there's absolutely no forecast but that's just how weather in the
#
mountains works and one of our friends she started losing body heat very quickly her body was turning
#
cold so we realized that we have to head back there's no way we can even stay in 15 minutes
#
and come back and when you know we were coming back because it was so sudden there were a bunch
#
of mules were also coming down they were spooked so it's like we were coming down what is kacha
#
rasta i don't know what is kacha rasta called in english you know a dirt track and those mules
#
came charging down we were in the path of the mules one of the friends was a little away so
#
she was okay the one who was having hypothermia probably i don't know what it was but and i
#
managed to jump on another track right next to it where they were not coming one of my friends was
#
banging in the middle of it literally the last second our guide realized he jumped he did a
#
hand-wearing motion in which they turned their path otherwise i don't know what would have happened
#
to my friend now one would say that of course he's a guide he has to take care of you that's
#
his job but he also was putting himself a certain amount of risk because while of course he was
#
trained to handle this but there are no certainty in how these things turn out right and we got
#
down we were okay we went back he kept checking on us till we reached our hostel right he called
#
us the next day and checked on us again that are we okay now and so on this is beyond hospitality
#
and services i mean this is the kind of things which people do for you i in in bosnia for the
#
most part when i went outside the larger cities there was very limited public transport so there
#
were times i hitchhiked and i had to go to this i had to climb this peak called umoliani which is
#
a village called umoliani which is the one of the most remote villages in the country
#
and the village is so remote there are no shops in the village there are only some eight houses
#
that's it i'd hopped three towns and was trying to get something there but literally nobody goes
#
there right i met a boston family who took an eight kilometer detour to drop me to the village
#
because they knew nobody's going to come he also told me that these are the two guest houses in
#
this village go to this father has an old lady she's a very nice person she'll give you a house
#
he came with me he spoke to her explained my situation and then only he went back home
#
and he was with his family so he was not alone by himself he didn't have to do it
#
but he did it and that is what makes me so hopeful about the world and the future
#
that you know there is so much goodness inherent in people that if they see someone who know who's
#
struggling for whatever reason they will go out of their way to help you in whatever means and
#
resources they have another example is not my own experience but when i was in uzbekistan and i met a
#
cyclist who was traveling in central asia for three months he was cycling to central asia he
#
in fact is from banglore and he was in tajikistan for a month and when most of these people cycle
#
they would usually carry tents or something he was a little extreme he said that i have to reach the
#
next village it doesn't matter how far it is and because this is the pamir mountains and pamir
#
highway which is very sparsely populated the people he met were very poor and he said that
#
for the 30 nights he cycled in those mountains only once was he denied a place to stay
#
in the first house he knocked and almost in every place he had to argue with people to accept some
#
for money from him that please take this money you have given me a place to give me food
#
and he spoke some russian so they they always sort of came back and told him that
#
you are a traveler on the road it is our duty to do the best we can with what we have we cannot
#
accept money from you these guys are not getting anything out of helping him out right there are
#
no social media posts to make there is no story to brag about but when you see this kind of
#
incredible kindness from people right and this is we are all coming from third world countries so
#
we are not the typical white privileged people who might get an advantage right
#
and if you ever worry about the state of world safety please go on the internet
#
read travel blogs of single women travelers they have had fantastic experiences of course they've
#
had bad experience i'm not going to deny that but most of them had such good experiences tells you
#
that the world is still largely you know a good place and i hope it stays that way just now you
#
were saying we're all evil you keep flipping like a switch i remember a story prem panicker once
#
told me and i'll try to remember it correctly i think i have the gist of it if i get it even if
#
i get any details wrong that he was on this great walk with paul salopek and others so it was part
#
of that walk i don't know if he was with paul at the time but he and uh compatriots yeah so he and
#
compatriots were walking somewhere and they came to this little village and this person said hey
#
why don't you come to my hut and i'll make lunch for you and they go and the guy disappears and an
#
hour passes two hours pass and nothing's happening the guy's in there they're wondering like what the
#
fuck is going on and then eventually the guy comes back holding a chicken and what happened was
#
he wanted to give his guest chicken so he had to first go to the money lender borrow money and then
#
get the chicken and then he brings it back to cook it for these people and i am like what the fuck
#
you know and yeah i mean how many people do this you it makes you it makes me feel ashamed for what
#
i am like would i do this would i borrow money to feed someone which is just a sort of a wild
#
hypothetical but while we are at food i have questions about that as well and so i in my
#
days playing poker i often used to go to macau and macau has magnificent food because it is of course
#
part of china but at the same time it was once colonized by portugal so you have this wonderful
#
confluence of different kinds of food there some of which seem almost gone in their taste
#
because of course common common rulers in portugal at different times and all the freaking indians
#
who would come with me would only want indian food right so wherever you go they're looking for that
#
one indian stall at a food court and etc etc and i even missed a flight once because on the last
#
day this bunch of people said ki you know we had an evening flight they were like indian jaga mein
#
i said you fuckers you can have dinner there in india we are going there calm down you know and
#
they're like no and we went out of the way and we missed our flight so long kind of story but my
#
question here is is that at one level it is natural for people to be resistant to new food
#
experiences because their palates have been shaped and conditioned in a particular way
#
and anything outside that just tastes bad to them like indians will often find european food bland
#
because their palate has an overton window for spice as it were right and some food that is
#
allegedly bland would lie outside that overton window for spice and i'm guessing that every bit
#
for everybody's palate there is a window within which it functions so you know and and people
#
like me are maybe lucky that it's kind of wider and probably the good fortune of my childhood
#
also when i ate in a diverse way but is that when you would travel did you have to gradually train
#
your palate to appreciate other kinds of food and in the particular context of you know you're
#
being vegetarian to begin with and turning non-vegetarian what was that first experience
#
like because something that i often wonder about is when a vegetarian is having their first non-veg
#
meal they have no frames of reference to even be able to understand what what what are they tasting
#
you know so what was that whole experience for you one in this limited context of eating non-veg
#
for the first time and two in just cultivating that mental openness to different cuisines and
#
different kinds of flavors so last the second question first that it it does take a certain
#
amount of unlearning and relearning when you want to cultivate a new taste and even with that
#
some things are incredibly hard to accept now this may sound very illogical in terms of
#
differentiation but i was in china and i was able to eat frog and snake but i was not able to eat
#
an insect if you gave me an insect on a stick i had to give me a scorpion or a cockroach or a
#
cricket or something i wasn't able to eat that now technically you could ask if you could eat
#
a frog you can eat a cricket what difference does it make to you how did the frog taste so i think
#
both frog and snake did not have particular tastes of their own i think they largely absorbed tastes
#
or whatever they were stir-fried in so they were chickenish in that chickenish in that sense but
#
the texture is quite different so i felt snake was a lot softer like crab and frog was more chewy
#
like not well cooked mutton chewy right so i think it does take some amount of training your mind
#
it's not really your palates your mind which you need to train to accept new foods i'm going
#
to make a slightly tangential point about language there's a beautiful book called language of food
#
as always i forget the author's name i think it's jan duravsky where you know he talks about that
#
how our experiences of how we live changes how we understand and describe food so because
#
fermentation is a big part of south eastern cuisine and there were times where refrigerations
#
was not available and you know even now a lot of places electricity issues are there
#
but for a certain generation of chinese people they're losing the language
#
of how food ferments from one day to the other how it sars and what can you cook with that
#
sour food that is going away because they are now buying from supermarkets right so in that sense
#
language and food are also so intertwined and in fact the episode which landed just yesterday
#
is called sex drugs and gobi manchurian right and essentially talks about how when we think of
#
eating at expensive restaurants when we talk of desserts we use metaphors of sex oh it was
#
it was luscious it was you know it was an orgasm on the plate but the moment you talk about
#
inexpensive food or you talk about fast food use the metaphor of drugs oh it's a high it's
#
my drug it's my fix of choice right and then of course he goes into some reasons of why why
#
this could possibly happen so in terms of food some of the conditionings are visual and some
#
of the conditionings are more the feel in your mouth so one of the most popular things to eat
#
in china is chicken feet visually i can't do it whereas for me eating crickets or scorpions is not
#
as visual as it is the feel of it because they have crunch you've tried both i have tried a
#
fried spider once in cambodia and it is a terrible experience because i ate half and i just puked out
#
most of it you just could not stomach it and this is despite the fact that frying a spider actually
#
removes all the hair and everything so it's a fairly you know thing to eat but i'm with
#
unconditioning ourselves for something which has been done drill down to us for years is very hard
#
with food because in a country like india food is not just gastronomical it is identity linked
#
right and it may not be the taste which revolves you as much as the idea of it which revolves which
#
is why i said conditioning the mind and conditioning the visual senses are two different
#
things about food and when i think of my experience of having you know tried various things i have not
#
been able to eat a snail because in my head it will have soil of course it's cleaned of course
#
all the soil is removed because in my head a snail crawls the way it crawls there would be soil and
#
i feel i would get those crunchy dirt bits in my mouth onto the first experience of eating
#
non-vegetarian food i prefer the word meat over non-vegetarian but that's a more accepted way so
#
i just non-vegetarian so i think only in south asia do people say non-vegetarian i think it's
#
more of an india thing it's not even a south asia thing yeah we're doing a disservice to other
#
south asian nations we are being linguistically hegemonic by even making the suggestion that this
#
is south asian i apologized to my friends in pakistan and bangladesh and sri lanka and Nepal
#
also yeah so for me it was driven out of curiosity so this is where sometimes i like that my rational
#
part of my brain wins so my thing was that 80 percent of the world eats this how bad can it be
#
that's literally my thought and though having said that i did not eat the best chicken because
#
this was hostile mess chicken which knowing how hostile messes in india operate but i tasted it
#
and i like the texture of it i didn't find it revolting and because it was cooked in
#
indian spices so the taste is not very different and what chicken we eat anyways is is so broiler
#
chicken that it doesn't have an inherent taste of its own exactly right so it didn't feel you know
#
sort of what where i generally felt difference in taste and flavor was mutton i think mutton has
#
distinctly a different did you like it yes i actually liked it and to this day i would
#
prefer well cooked mutton over chicken whether it's a biryani or a gravy because i just feel
#
it's more flavorful and again it could be a bias i don't really know if it is and pork pork really
#
blew up for me for the first time when i tasted pork fat because it has an incredible flavor
#
and i think i think also it's an acquired taste but again so is karela so well who are we to say
#
what is not an acquired taste i like both pork and karela but yeah yeah so next time amit i'll
#
come to your house you pick you please cook karela in pork fat and then we'll have it and see how it
#
comes out that's actually a good experiment you always try karela right so why not in pork fat
#
why not in pork fat yeah yeah and i do save all the pork fat from my bacon and you know use it
#
with other things so why not karela why not karela so i think and i that had experience the first
#
time in meghalaya and and of course i it's element i have as of now that i have not really
#
sampled much of northeastern india cuisine because each state has so much to offer my cuisines in
#
india still very mainline india cuisines and not those so i think it's a slow learning curve when
#
it comes to food i remember outside of indian food the first time i ate anchovies in italy
#
the first bite was revolting i'm like this is so salty and this is so fishy
#
right and i didn't grow up in a one i grew up in in a vegetarian household and seafood was never
#
the choice to begin with right it was it went from chicken to mutton and then seafood eventually came
#
somewhere in the radar and if you're not used to dried fish and the smell and the flavor of it
#
it's a very hard thing to you know get used to even now i'm not very comfortable eating it
#
if given an option i would avoid it
#
so i feel that a lot of it is conditioning some of it happens naturally some of it you have to
#
you know put yourself through it because once you start you know liking it pork fat for example or
#
pork for example we just had a very nice pork topping topping pizza for lunch once you start
#
to like it it suddenly just opens up another you know way of eating food and then your travel
#
becomes so much simpler i think one of the recommendations i always give to people who
#
are vegetarian is i understand you don't want to eat meat for various reasons but if you can open
#
your mind to eating egg it really really simplifies travel because egg is almost available everywhere
#
universally and that's one tip and the other tip which i always give for vegetarian travelers is
#
that you know if you are traveling to a place where you're pretty sure you're not going to get
#
indian food bosnia was an example is very hard to get indian food in bosnia is that i always carried
#
a biryani masala with me because you will always find rice will always find curd you would find
#
onions and tomatoes and can substitute with aloo if you want or put tofu or anything you can still
#
make a pretty decent indian tasting meal and if you are staying in an airbnb or hostel for two
#
three days that could be your meal and you can get your fix of spices and vegetarian food
#
and it has served me really really well because as an indian my ability to meet also has constraints
#
because i cannot just eat a steak three days in a row i can eat for a day i love it
#
maybe day two day three i'm like i can't eat this i need carbs with it or i need veggies with it
#
right so there were also times where i got overwhelmed with the amount of meat i could
#
consume and i said hey listen i just want something very desi comforting right pulses have started to
#
make an entry into many supermarkets globally you've spoken about dehydrated indian food oh yes
#
that i didn't realize so kindly yes so dehydrated indian food is is is my salute to the my adapted
#
homeland of gujarat where the gujaratis have figured this out with a very enterprising people
#
who essentially there are places and services where you can cook your own food you can give
#
it to them they would dehydrate and give it to you in powder form all you need to do is add hot
#
water cook it for a couple of minutes and i've had pav bhaji in patagonia
#
pav bhaji in patagonia also sounds like a nice title for a food book it alliterates so why not
#
in fact on speaking of alliteration the book which i wrote during my butter paneer in madagascar
#
since it's alliterating it has a less it has a less food title because at the top of that hill which
#
was getting demined there was an old destroyed monastery and the book is called monastery in a
#
minefield so again alliteration but pav bhaji in patagonia was made possible thanks to this
#
dehydrating technology which a friend of mine knew about and she got it so that's an excellent
#
way for you to travel it's much healthier than the packed foods which you get of you know mtr
#
and all these things because they're of course loaded with preservatives but pav bhaji means
#
you're you're basically dehydrating the bhaji right of course bread you will get anywhere right
#
correct yeah so only carry the essentials why do you carry something else you can get onions to
#
chop with it lemons you can get yeah you can always do that butter you will get so it's all
#
mishmash things which you can get dehydrated because anything solid won't retain its form
#
obviously but most of solid stuff it's starch anyways right so it's available it's available
#
anyways and all the subzis which will you cook will be in a matched form at the end of it pretty
#
much yeah by the time they are in your stomach so i think that works out well and so right from the
#
experience of you know eating that brinjal dessert in turkey to seeing insects you know in in china
#
and of course experiencing pork right i'm going to make us very very massively biased statement
#
and i and i that that is the hill i'm prepared to die on you cannot have more culinary diversity
#
than you have in india that's actually extremely non-controversial because to me it feels like
#
it's obviously true right no but the thing is that as an indian you might feel it's obviously
#
true but a lot of people are willing to contest that again i don't know how much of the exposure
#
they had sure you can find sometimes more complex foods maybe in iran or persia where they really go
#
to great lengths to cook some of the foods but again we have also taken so much culturally from
#
those parts of the world and i think you need a lifetime just to eat food in india right and
#
it's just amazing that no matter what your dietary preferences are in any part of india
#
you can always find something to eat and that kind of luxury i always say that please please
#
take the effort of seeing our own country and i mean i of course travel wherever i can but i
#
always make it a point to travel in india every single year because you can't have this much
#
diversity of landscape architecture food culture music dance forms at the cost which you can travel
#
india versus the cost of traveling in the western world it's it's it's incomparable i mean you know
#
if i were to create a rank of the best places to travel keeping in five ten fifteen parameters
#
i can see india easily ranking the top five if not the first yeah and the remarkable thing is for
#
people who want to go traveling and experience new cultures and new cuisines and etc etc you just
#
have to work out of your own freaking front door like my friend kumaranand he runs this great
#
twitter feed on bihar and he introduced me to the saying you know your dialects are just
#
changing every four kilometers i remember me and a bunch of friends we did a food trip where we
#
rented a bus uh 15 of us and we went through mysore and mangalore and you know and and the
#
remarkable thing about these places is that you could be parked in a particular spot knowing that
#
within a square kilometer of you you'll get four different kinds of biryanis from with four
#
completely different heritages which are all authentic to that location right in this so it's
#
it's just so rich and so kind of mind-blowingly diverse and one of the sort of laments i often
#
have and i absorbed this in myself and strongly castigated myself for it when i was touring
#
pakistan in 2006 is because i was live blogging and all that i was looking at everything with
#
these eyes which are finding significance in everything you know you'll see a milestone and
#
you'll be like it'll be significant and etc etc all that shit is happening but in your own country
#
you've kind of normalized everything like literally when i say seen in the unseen for all of us pretty
#
much much of our own country is basically unseen in the sense that you know you if you're in a car
#
at the traffic signal you don't see the people who are outside who are on the you know that middle
#
divider and etc etc and you've pointed this out i think in the context of bombay itself like
#
sakinaka and exactly just you know so tell me about some of your more local discoveries which
#
took you by surprise and which had you thinking like why didn't i see this all this time right
#
so sakinaka i'll begin with sakinaka this place has a special place in my heart because i think
#
if you want to turn zen the fastest ways to live at sakinaka the traffic will turn you zen and
#
allow you to accept that there is not much in the world you can change but so sakinaka actually if
#
you go to sakinaka and see what the what the naka is actually called it's called datta saman chowk
#
now who is that the saman that the saman is or rather was a labor leader in the mill movements
#
of the 60s and 70s in bombay right now once you start opening that chapter of bombay right you
#
understand what the mill movement was about you start to understand who indian communists were
#
you start to understand where did bal thackeray come from where did shiv sena come from
#
how did all of that culminate to what happened in bombay in 1992 and how has it changed the
#
fabric of the city and why today all of these mills becoming fancy offices or malls is such a
#
different change of the landscape and who those mills actually belong to who holds the moral
#
rights to you know those lands outside of the economic rights to those lands and that thing
#
alone you can do by just walking to sakinaka which i would have done thousands of times
#
in my 10 years of living there so sometimes it's just about getting out and figuring out here why
#
is this place called this place i mean also to any listeners in banglore if you can tell me why is
#
sarjapur road called sarjapur road because i don't know i live on sarjapur road i still don't know
#
why it is called sarjapur road so that's the first thing right you don't really need a lot of time
#
and money to slow travel a lot of people come back and say boss i don't have one month i know
#
you don't need one month you can travel store traveling one day just go to one place and spend
#
your time there and understand what this place is why is it like that the other example which
#
happened very recently to me is i was on a trip i'm researching for the book i'm writing right now
#
in rajasthan it's from a it's a place we just call bhadaria now bhadaria on the map is just
#
feels like one of those india has six lakh villages right what is so remarkable about that place
#
so that place has a temple of a social reformer from panjab who eventually settled
#
in rajasthan and the interesting bit is that prasad in that temple is toffee
#
wow right so one of the fascinating things about india is that in fact one of the things i
#
definitely going to do in the podcast is the different kinds of prasads which are served in
#
india you will get everything from meat to alcohol to you know toffees for example but that
#
tangential bit aside who gives you alcohol there are mandirs where you where you sort of give the
#
alcohol a charava and you get part of it back i don't remember the names as of now and of course
#
there are visa temples where you go and pray to get a visa and so on so there is a library right
#
next to that temple which is 16 feet underground another question is first of all why is the library
#
underground what was the problem creating the library over ground so very close to bhadaria
#
is pokhara where the indian military conducts its missile tests right and some of those missile
#
tests send out vibrations which go quite far travel through the land so the person who was
#
creating the library said that i want this library to exist for much much longer than what buildings
#
around this area exist hence to make it safer i will create it underground okay this library
#
is not very old it's it's actually still being stocked with books
#
but the library is so large that it stocks nine lakh books nine lakh books in a random village
#
in rajasthan why now this guy was a social reformer he passed away in 2010 and
#
he was smart enough to understand that he needs to build a trust so that the money he has collected
#
for the library is not misused the library is still not open to public but if you go there
#
and request they will show you the library the library is so large it has such long corridors
#
and additionally it has put it has put mirrors at the end of it to create an even more sort of
#
sense of losing direction that we actually lost our way in the library about 2000 people can sit
#
in that library and study at one point in time because the social reformer who did it believed
#
that you know that education is a right for everyone and no one should be denied education
#
just because they don't have resources which is why this library is not in a city
#
and it has books on psychology on history on geography on law on politics everything you've
#
been there i've been there i went down to the library and it has books in hindi also so it's
#
not just english right it has books on italian geography it has books on german history so
#
you know of course his his intention was that i want to build the repository of the world's
#
knowledge in this library that was the lofty aim which i am sure he knew is not possible
#
but just to undertake something of this scale with your own money when you know that you
#
could have built a legacy for the sake of building a legacy in in far more austenite ways that man is
#
my hero and and this is what i love about india that there are these aspects of the country which
#
which you discover we just give you so much heart it gives you so much hope
#
that there are in this day and age people who think in a certain way who think of the greater
#
good who are not trying to fleece you in the in the garb of religion or spirituality or anything
#
else the village is nine kilometers from the highway and then all the nine kilometers has
#
gaushalas which actually you know keep cows who are very old who don't can't give milk anymore
#
or bulls for that matter who will move to a slaughterhouse right it's a great it's a great
#
service right to to the animal kingdom as well so that was you know one place which took me by
#
surprise another place was from about one and a half hours from jaisalmer there is a temple like
#
most indians would have this idea of kul devi that you know who is your family's goddess and
#
the kul devi there is called tanot mata now tanot mata the miracle of tanot mata as it is called
#
is that this place is about 20 kilometers from the india pakistan border and during the 1965 war there
#
was heavy shelling in that region and the 300 odd bombs which fell in that temple did not explode
#
so you enter the temple straight ahead you see there is the goddess on the right side
#
are unexploded bombs put in display which could explode anytime or they have been sort of
#
the government and army wouldn't take care of but the army believed that there was divine
#
intervention which really sort of helped them because if that much area had been bombed out
#
they would have been pushed back further from their posts and their positions right so strong
#
is the belief that the border security force maintains that temple so if you go inside you
#
will see body security force they take shift rotations and maintain that temple and there is
#
a certain i don't know what it's called it's like a dome shaped silver thing which sort of goes on
#
the head of a god or a goddess which was donated by the commander of the pakistani army who said
#
i also believe that there was divine intervention and this is my gift and you know my salute to the
#
goddess right and this by the way this is not some sort of a secret temple or anything right
#
the hundreds and thousands of people go there every day but we live in such blinkered urban
#
spaces that we have forgotten that there is a beautiful fascinating india which is out there
#
for us to see right you don't need to go to the obscure italian town or you know that amazing
#
island in southeast asia there is enough and more in this country which will completely blow you
#
away and that has been one of my advices which has which i have stayed with for the all of my
#
life till now is that please please go take time to see india there is nothing less fascinating
#
that you can find in the world the bhadriya story is mind-blowing like just to think that
#
in some random remote village 16 feet under the ground there is a library where
#
you know uh 2000 people can sit with nine lakh books like this you know you could write a
#
post-apocalyptic dystopian novel there like i'm just thinking of it it's called the library
#
and a kid basically crawls into that little thing and while apocalypse happens uh upper and then
#
the kid comes out and everybody's gone so now the kid has to reconstruct a vision of the world
#
from the nine lakh books i mean the logistical matters of how it eats and how it survives and
#
etc we can figure out later but there's an idea and i came across this magnificent instagram
#
account which just kind of blew me away so the so it's it's it's about interior design
#
and there'll be this funky voiceover and the uh the all the animation seems to be ai generated
#
so it's very funky and it's ai generated and the voiceover will be like the first video i saw had
#
a voiceover to the effect of
#
and then you have you know details of the descriptions of the room in which 10 kids
#
are staying and all of that right and the reason i'm thinking of it is a follow-up to this video
#
because you said nine lakh books the follow-up to this video was like this video if you remember
#
it's showing the scaffolding of different beds and all that and talking about hundred million
#
and it is mind-blowing i'll link it from the show notes but people are kind of wonderful and
#
speaking of big numbers you also told me about one million falcons so please tell our listeners
#
so all these stories which i'm i'm telling you now in like sort of very superficial ways are
#
good to make it part of the book right because that's where i'll really get into some of the
#
more fascinating details of these things so there's a village called pangti in nagaland
#
and i think scrawl had done a story on it i have done a episode on this on my podcast as well
#
so it sees in october every year one of the world's largest amur falcon migrations right an
#
estimated a million falcons you know migrate and when they migrate together and they fly out
#
in the mornings or the evenings in the sky is just filled with falcons and
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i'm sure it's a beautiful sight i'm looking forward to going in october this year
#
now till very recently they used to kill about 10 to 15 000 falcons every day and sell them for
#
meat and this is the story of how the people of that village turned from being poachers to
#
conservationists right and now there are you know there are homestays and guest houses where you
#
could go and stay and and see and it's a beautiful part of the country either ways it doesn't matter
#
whether you go in the amur falcon migration season or not and these people are also my heroes
#
right because it takes a lot of courage to say no to a livelihood of yours
#
and make the hard call of earning and building a new livelihood which isn't coming immediately
#
it's not that it's a switch over that you can get it next day and it's it's amazing that you
#
know it's always people who live close to the land who live who are indigenous communities
#
have a beautiful understanding of what our relationship with nature is which has been
#
massively severed by us you know living in cities so one of my one of the things i really want to
#
talk about in the book is seeing our natural history or natural heritage as a part of our
#
cultural heritage i think we've all grown up with the idea of nature and culture being separate but
#
neither of it emerged in a vacuum right the culture did not emerge from outside of a natural
#
vacuum it came all came together another example of it is you know there's a huge dinosaur fossil
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park in gujarat hardly people go there i mean imagine you are even seeing a fossil of an
#
organism organism which predated humans right you can actually go and see it how what tell me what
#
in an urban city can you see which is remotely as mind-blowing as seeing a dinosaur fossil is
#
there are villages in chhattisgarh which have booth festivals right where the entire village
#
is supposedly possessed by ghosts on one day of the year i don't know if it happens i don't know
#
if it is true but i definitely want to see it right so the amur falcon migration or or the
#
dinosaur fossil park or the lunar lake in in maharashtra right which is which was created
#
by after a meteorite impact and the soil around that still has magnetic properties
#
and scientists are actually using it to understand what conditions
#
for life can emerge from outer space because in some parts it mimics the kind of soil structure
#
of outer space now you could go to that lake and think of it nothing this is a lake but now
#
you know what that lake is and and that suddenly the lake has meaning so as with life human life
#
has no purpose you have to find your purpose right human life is meaningless
#
travel in the same way you have to find the meaning in the place you go
#
right sure some some aspects are just immediately more beautiful to the eye and and and that is our
#
idea of aesthetics but sometimes knowing what that place is attaches so much of heft and i think i
#
was listening to this episode with amitav akumar the latest one where he talks about
#
this is van gogh's last painting the moment you say that it adds a tone of finality and weight to
#
that painting right travel is like that the moment you understand the significance of something
#
you are not seeing it cross-sectionally now you are seeing that thing longitudinally
#
and the amount of meaning it could have for you you know is immense
#
and it's amazing how travel gives you this intersection of places and meanings like at
#
one level i i could also think that even if life doesn't have meaning you know you can
#
you can still find joy in the living you know it doesn't have to have meaning similarly if you are
#
at a beautiful if you're by a beautiful riverside it can just be what it is for its own sake but at
#
the same time you can also have meaning superimposed on it and that gives an added layer
#
so you know the the sort of joys of travel right there so tell me about the book i mean
#
when did this happen and what happened to the earlier book boss yes so i'll just finish the
#
thought riverside a couple of years ago so i think this is between the first and second wave of
#
covid my wife and i we spent a month in kashmir and we were living in pahalgam and we found a
#
very old guest house you know and we got a good rate on it we took it for the whole month
#
and it was right next to a river and we used to eat our meals there take our break sit there
#
that itself was calming was beautiful and then the guest house told owner told us that the tree you
#
see is the willow tree from which kashmiri willow comes and from which the best bats in the world
#
are made right now i remember that river a little more yeah because it has a slightly additional
#
set of meaning for me even though i'm not big on cricket i'm just rediscovering my love for the game
#
right now but it still has an additional meaning because now outside the beauty of the river
#
i now also think of the kashmiri cricket willow on to the book so what happened to the first book
#
so to any publishers listening that book is written it definitely needs to be edited it
#
has 50 000 words so it's a decent size smallish paperback you know book but i've not touched it
#
in six years but because i have changed as a person you know in in six years because it's
#
since it's never the same river it's a different river every time you go i'm sure i would change
#
it but one of the things which i spoke to an author and she had published about three or four
#
books and which was the hard truth of publishing is that if you want to publish a book and sell it
#
you need to have an audience right and that is one of the reasons i never pursued that book
#
because i was like i don't have an audience now luckily with postcards i have an audience
#
who likes my take on travel and listens to the show so one advice to aspiring authors
#
please build an audience if you really want publishers to publish and sell your book or
#
you could just self-oblish i mean that's another way to sort of go about it but i feel amit's
#
expression gives me there's a counter i have a counter i disagree with this i mean if like
#
henry ford did not have an audience for cars he had an audience for faster horses true right true
#
so if uh and i a lot of the authors did not a lot of the great best-selling authors we noted
#
it did not necessarily have audiences it's just that you do what you do it finds its way in the
#
world and it will find its audience now it is true that it is far easier to get published when
#
if you have an existing audience but it is also true that publishers in india publish a lot they
#
are playing the volume game and i was the judge of literary prize a couple of years back and we had
#
to read every book every publisher entered for the particular prize trust me there were a lot of them
#
and most were garbage like the jury literally had to ask surprise organizers that do we have
#
to come up with a long list of 10 and the you couldn't come up with a long list and apparently
#
the same question had been asked by the jury the year before us we eventually had to come up with
#
a long list of 10 but left to ourselves it would have had less than 10 that is you know with the
#
quality and and and forget the long list it was still decent everything on there was decent
#
but there would be a long tail of maybe 20 30 percent of the books published which were garbage
#
which didn't even have grammar which was weren't even edited once i mean it they weren't coherent
#
so so i don't know my sense is that you know for any creator and we should talk a little bit more
#
about creators also my strong feeling is that for any creator don't second guess what the audience
#
is don't second guess what publishers want what anybody else wants you just have to follow your
#
heart and do what you do and it will find its way that is the only way everybody who
#
achieves excellence does it like that i would agree with that assessment so what i just said
#
was the easier path yeah but the easier path also requires you to put in the work for years to build
#
an audience so it's technically not an easier path it's still a hard path it's just that you
#
choose to say that what what comes first and what comes later so you know it's very interesting that
#
i'm talking to you because you've taken my thinking in a sense and taken it a little bit
#
further in the sense my thinking is that my thinking on this is that i have a principle
#
and that principle is be authentic and true to yourself and i take it to the extreme
#
and therefore i focus all of my bandwidth on doing the work that i do and literally zero percent on
#
marketing or sales you know any advertising you ever hear on my show is people coming to me and
#
saying hey can we advertise i never actually look for anyone i don't do any marketing etc etc
#
and what you've kind of done is you've gone a step further like when we were doing lunch you were
#
talking about building a category of one which stays true to my principle but also
#
you know uses it to figure out a rational way of actually acting on it
#
so tell me a little bit about this category of one so again i can't take credit for this
#
concept i read it somewhere but i've sort of extended it to content projects or passion
#
projects is to say that you are unique enough as a person that you are a category of one
#
you just don't see yourself in it so and i'll give you my own example because that's what i can
#
explain best and maybe amit i would i would encourage you to attempt it for yourself right
#
oh my god right so one of my strengths is podcasting now that's a narrow term i will
#
go one step and say writing because i have a narrative podcast so i need to write before i
#
do the podcast i would go one step above and i would say content creation right other strength
#
which i have acquired over time and which is why the six percent club the discussion we had in
#
the beginning is about discipline processes mindsets and systems right that becomes a
#
second strength i have now just take these two for example create an intersection of the two
#
the intersection is discipline systems habits in content creation that what what is what six
#
percent club is that's literally it now i've been fortunate enough to find someone like deepak who
#
has a similar overlap but now try to do this for every single thing you are good at so create three
#
when i get three you know diagrams and you know you will definitely find one in which all three
#
intersect now that is one spot which you are probably ahead of 99.99 percent of the people
#
right so if nothing you start with that and you will excel at it
#
i would say take a step back look at the intersection of any of those two things instead of three things
#
that of course by virtue of just being interested in two things is a larger space to play in
#
and that could be a need you could fulfill for someone the six percent club is a need
#
we are fulfilling for someone because we want more people to put out their content
#
their content out in the world and this by the way you could apply even in your job it doesn't
#
have to be only for content or passion projects right pick out if you want to make a career switch
#
pick out two or three things in your job you are really good at let's suppose you are really good
#
at sales right you are really good at negotiation right and you are really good at graphic design
#
right you should just start your own graphic design agency you know how to do the work you
#
know how to sell you know how to negotiate what else you need to run a business that's really
#
the basics of running a business so for everyone who is in a career today and for everyone who
#
wants to do something of their own and it doesn't matter i don't i don't come from any sort of
#
background of people running a business my parents were professors my grandfather was a professor
#
i am in a job my wife is in a job my sister every one of us are in jobs
#
but we believe that with the six percent club we have something unique to offer
#
right i talk about content creation and travel as another intersection which is why the book is
#
happening it's exactly at the intersection of travel and writing right now i added to the layer
#
of discipline that instead of telling it to other people i'm applying it on myself to make sure i
#
write my manuscript by 15th of december which is my deadline for this year so everyone is a category
#
of one you just have to put yourself analyze your strengths and actually sit down on a pen and paper
#
and create that overlap and see what you're getting amit so i have three circles and i've made two of
#
them intersect and land up in a very nice place so the three circles i guess are making sense of the
#
world from first principles or root causes that's circle one circle two would be being able to write
#
or communicate in clear language that everyone can understand and in a sense that's related to
#
the first because clear thinking and clear writing are related and the third is creative
#
storytelling and if i just take the first two circles making sense of the world and communicating
#
it clearly you know an intersection would be let's see what about a long-form podcast where i'm
#
talking to interesting people and i would flip it how about you train cxos to write and communicate
#
better in the entire flux-filled world we live in especially in creative industries i have a writing
#
course also they're welcome to sign up that is other two things that is a clear writing and the
#
other strength which you mentioned so you're already working in your strength you just realized
#
it now that it actually fits the formula or a system yeah this is it's a no no i i i totally
#
get it and thankfully in the course of doing this exercise like even everything is everything kind
#
of fits into the communication and making sense of the world space but i think the third circle
#
of creative storytelling is the one i have ignored the most so inshallah i shall be able to do more
#
there and when you're talking about multiple circles intersecting that also brings me to
#
another thing that you mentioned at lunch that you would want to sort of double click on once
#
that when we speak of passions we are not saying people should only have one passion and that's an
#
impression many people have i will find the love of my life and that will be my passion i am passionate
#
about whatever smoked smoked spiders but you know so you can have multiple passions you can
#
find ways to kind of do all of them so would you like to sort of elaborate yeah so i think the idea
#
of a singular passion is a very misplaced idea right because i think the stories of passion
#
which stand out are the stories of geniuses right we talk of Mozart because we if you see the film
#
medias it's a very well-made film i think and you see the suffering of Mozart as a person
#
but everything is centered around his music now i do i have not read enough about Mozart to know
#
whether he did have any other passions or interest or anything maybe he did maybe did not maybe if
#
he had it was not documented enough because his musical genius was you know outstanding
#
but i would say that i don't think i am a genius in any field
#
right but i'm good at multiple things now passion essentially is whatever you are good at you
#
nurture it with time money and effort so you could be i'm passionate about writing i've always liked
#
to write i feel it's a great way to express and put my thoughts and clarify my thinking
#
at the same time i am you know passionate about travel you could choose to only focus on travel
#
you could choose only focus on writing you could put them two together and do podcasting like i did
#
right there is no idea of singular passion because you are not one person and to use the most
#
favorite line of this podcast we contain multitudes right so everyone cultures so we all contain
#
multitudes so the idea that you can have only one passion and the moment you start getting
#
interested in something you know people will sort of you know not really pay attention to it because
#
it goes against their idea of their identity of who they are and who the story of themselves
#
they tell themselves right and we were talking about krish asok during lunch right he is
#
passionate and good at multiple things right food and music are the two things which i
#
immediately think of and i'm not very familiar with more of his life but i'm sure there is more
#
so who says you can't do both together right so never ever be restricted by the idea that you
#
only have one passion you are not a unidimensional person so you can have multiple passions and you
#
could have different passions together at the same time you could have different passions at
#
different points in life you might be passionate about amit probably was passionate about poker
#
till a few years ago for various reasons he he let go but that doesn't mean he's still not
#
interested in poker he might not play it as much or may not play professionally right it's podcasting
#
it is youtube you might go ahead and do something else five years down the line and the idea that
#
we can only be one thing which is very honestly a very indian idea i feel somewhere is an extremely
#
limiting way to think about ourselves i think we need to love ourselves a little more and and say
#
that you know i am capable of doing more than one thing i might choose to do only a few of those
#
and that's perfectly okay you should do what you can but do not limit your own potential or own
#
life your own possibilities with the idea of singular passion i think that's just just
#
not existent as a concept in my opinion so ajay said something really interesting in one of these
#
everything is everything episodes which kind of struck me a lot and had me thinking which is that
#
like number one his point is we all going to have uh not just lifespans but health spans well beyond
#
hundred right and he's saying that most people because of the scarcity of time and perhaps in
#
a country like india of resources as well think of life as having one track that you get an
#
education and then you pursue it to its logical conclusion and turn it into a career so you go
#
to iit iam city bank and his point is that no if you are going to live till 120 we can think of
#
life as 20 year chunks in which we learn different things or in which we learn different things
#
simultaneously and shift the focus at different times and i think that well just the audacity as
#
it were the ac as it were of thinking of life you know with that frame that i can live multiple
#
lives i i no longer am you know circumscribed by you know lifespan etc etc you know it just
#
changes what you do and the point is even if you nevertheless live till 60 only it doesn't matter
#
that life will still be much fuller than a life where you're living as if you're living till 60
#
yeah and my analogy for this is like you're running a relay your previous self passes on
#
the baton to your next self beautiful beautiful right and you cannot complete the race without
#
your previous self existing so don't blame your previous self don't find faults with it
#
right sure reflect have self-awareness but your current and your future self can only happen with
#
your previous self and you have to respect your previous self to be able to do the next bits
#
wise words you know what i'm going to do is i'm going to get transcripts of all your podcasts
#
scrape all your writings wherever you want to get transcripts i have transcripts give them all
#
all your everything that you have ever said or written or spoken will go into this llm which
#
and from there i will generate a new age ai guru and you know that will be my next revenue stream
#
great words of wisdom so i have four more questions for you
#
ah but amit you will have to do a contract with me if you're using my data for llm
#
google is paying reddit 60 million dollars you should pay me something amit
#
we'll we'll we'll talk about it after the show after the show
#
which you already got so we are done
#
so fourth last question for people who want to travel more and you know many people will say
#
i want to get out more many people will say
#
but people genuinely i think are more and more getting it that this pace of life cannot do this
#
this fast rhythm of always swiping and clicking and scrolling on the phone cannot do we are trapped
#
by the infinite scroll so for people who want to travel more what advice would you give how should
#
they approach it assume that not everybody would have the luxury of taking a month off at a time
#
but if you just want to give yourself a chance to soak in that slow rhythm and
#
think in a different way what advice would you give so i look at the scarcity of travel in two
#
ways time and money right there will be different scarcities at different points in life when you
#
are younger it's usually money which you are scared of when you're older your time is what
#
you're scared so if you are short on money right my first advice of traveling industrial stands
#
railways are an incredibly cheap way to get around so our state public transport buses
#
right we have shared autos we have all kinds of local transports available
#
you want to live cheaply live in hostel dorms you can get beds for 300 400 rupees
#
in some of those cities you want to go extreme go live in a dharmshala you have to live with
#
restrictions you can't of course turn up drunk but i think it's probably worth the trade-off
#
if you ask me get onto couchsurfing create a profile host a few people at your house
#
so that you get some cred i hosted almost 20 people when i was living in couchsurfing in
#
china i was living by myself i said hey why not it's a great way to meet people and i met
#
travelers from all across the world i met someone from uruguay i met someone from korea met someone
#
from japan and u.s and france so that becomes a great way to travel for free you can in india
#
you can eat cheaply i don't think eating cheaply in india is a challenge at all you can still eat
#
a meal in 50 rupees in india i don't think it's and no matter which city you are in actually
#
right so if you are i think if you have less money i think it's a easier problem i know it
#
doesn't sound that easy when you are that age but having been at that age and now at where i am in
#
late 30s it's a much easier way to travel when you have less money because you could trade off it
#
right you don't have too much money to stay take overnight train sleep on the train
#
right you want to really really rough it out there are now payable public restrooms you can
#
use to take shower and and i know and and stuff like that another way great way to travel if you
#
are studying or if it's your first job just go and visit wherever your friends are
#
you can stay for free you can eat for free that's the biggest cost taken care of take public transport
#
in the city you can actually stay for one week go to delhi for one week have a friend just crash
#
with them right that that's the beauty of you know not having not being too fussy when you're
#
younger to those who are on short on time there are two three things i suggest the first thing
#
i suggest is redesign your life and the priorities so shane parish of the knowledge project you know
#
does this annual exercise in which he says that write down the 10 things which you want to do
#
this year and then struck strike out the bottom seven do only three if you want to travel make
#
it a priority like for me to able to sustain my reading and and and my podcast i almost watch
#
nothing on ott absolutely nothing on ott and that of course frees up a lot of time
#
am i missing out for sure am i missing out is it worth it absolutely it's worth it to miss out
#
to for those folks who have not who are not married if you really care about travel please
#
find a travel partner who loves to travel i'm very fortunate that my wife probably loves travel even
#
more than i do so we never have a discussion of should we travel it's only a question of where
#
are we traveling right so if it's a life choice you could make and you get lucky please find a
#
partner who's who is at least open to travel if they are not already you know traveling with
#
to say that hey let's go out and see the world the third thing is utilize your weekends effectively
#
if you have kids i know the weekends are the only time you get but instead of just spending time
#
with them at home you could go with them and spend time with them outside right all metros in india
#
give you access to things about four to six hours of driving by car or you know by a taxi a lot of
#
places you know which you can see tack on one or two days of leave you can actually take a flight
#
and do a short two-day trip in those two days you can still so travel no one has asking you
#
that you should be you know seeing five things just spend one day in a safari one day in local
#
sightseeing that's it there's nothing else you need to do you have to be intentional about it
#
you have to make it a priority that's the only way it will happen right as as the way we prioritize
#
our careers over so many other things or maybe in your stage of life you might have prioritized
#
health over a lot of other things the same way you can prioritize travel it just comes down to
#
how do you want to design your life so those would be my recommendations for people with
#
scarcity of time or money marvelous so my third last question is what would be your advice see
#
i'm already turning you into a guru of sorts what would be your advice three three utsav shankar to
#
young creators who will look at you who will look at you know like one of course they should sign
#
up with you but with but the six percent club but but regardless i mean assume they don't do that
#
assume you know so what is your advice to them from all that you have learned so one of the
#
things i want to tell young creators is that gen z is actually far more fearless than millennials
#
are right i like the fact that they don't have too much regard for conventions and rules and you know
#
i'm kind of proud of them so that you know they're usually doing the right thing i think as a
#
millennial i was caught up in conventions for a fair degree of my life only now i have broken
#
out of it but one thing which i know gen z cares about is what do what does their peer group think
#
of them and which is not unique to gen z everybody cares what their groups think of them and my advice
#
is nobody really cares about you just just the hard facts of life right some people will be happy
#
for you some people will judge you some people will be neutral actually vast majority will be
#
neutral they don't care so you should do it because you like doing it don't don't chase a fad don't
#
a trend because fads and trends will go your motivation will come and go with them
#
but you can approach content creation in two or three different ways one is you don't know
#
anything but in this process you will learn which means you will either talk to experts you could
#
run a podcast you could interview people put a newsletter or you could say that hey i'm going to
#
read three books about this and i'm going to write about it right so use your content creation as a
#
vehicle of learning it could be positioned that you already know something well enough
#
you probably have spent two three years and your niche could be as much as i can only afford
#
a hundred dollar guitar i don't know how guitars cost i'm just putting a number
#
a hundred dollar guitar what is what are the top five songs i can play with a hundred dollar guitar
#
which are the easiest chords to play right just focus on that right no one is asking you to you
#
know play the 100 greatest guitar solos that's not needed so something you are good at you can
#
teach so either you can learn through your content creation or you can teach through your content
#
creation right or the third way which you can do is just say that the way i live my life is
#
interesting enough for people to vicariously live through me right which is what vlogging is in some
#
ways right that could also be you might be living in a very unique situation there are youtube
#
channels today which just document village life and they have millions of subscribers
#
so do not assume like you know you could be sitting one my youtuber friend abhishek says that
#
you know you could be sitting by the window and just describing what's outside your window and
#
there's an audience for that as well right so you will be surprised the kind of things which have
#
audiences which you don't think has inherent value but there is a lot of people who would be
#
very happy to spend their time on it so these would be my three advices that you know this is
#
how you can go about content creation do not think about what the world thinks and perfection
#
is your enemy please do not ever chase perfection ever in life in any aspect of your life right
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unless of course you are making a vaccine which could say millions of people yeah then maybe
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perfection is a good way or a good goal to achieve but in content creation there is simply
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no perfection it's more important to be like nike just do it and the fourth and the most important
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thing please have fun while doing it if you don't have fun while doing it sure some parts of it will
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be bad which will be taxing mentally physically right anyone who does editing knows that editing
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is not the most fun thing as a creator so sometimes you outsource sometimes you do it yourself
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or whatever but please have fun in this process because you will go through an incredible journey
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of transformation as a human being in this in this right you do something regularly for over
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extended period of time you will really start understanding principles of compounding and once
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you understand compounding in one aspect of life you can see it in play out in every aspect of life
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so that would be my advice to young creators as james cleo says habits are the compound interest
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of life so that's you know just forming good habits is everything and i remember you know
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when i was running a few years ago and yes it is true sir you can't tell looking at me right now
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you know or the pizza we ate all the pizza we ate things have gone a little wrong but i'm going to
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put them right very soon but i was running a lot about four or five years ago i even finished a
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10k at this marathon event at iot and i remember and obviously i geeked out on it once i got into
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it and read every book on running and one advice from one of them really stood out it said that
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every morning you know no matter how you feel like you will realize that if you go out running
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you will never regret it you will never regret having gone running and i have the same advice
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for creators that you will never regret creating like it's a fucking pain to actually put up the
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willpower and muster up and you know to actually get down to do it but once you do it you will
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never regret it so it is again you know just do it just just get out there bias for action and
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this is something i learned in a slightly different way is i hate exercising right and the
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way i solved it is i can afford to have someone come and have a personal trainer now and every
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evening he asks me whenever our class is scheduled that can we do it tomorrow this time and instead
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of thinking of the painful effort which i feel doing it i think of the endorphin high i get
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after the exercise right and the moment i think of that i tend to say yes a lot lot more than i
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tend to say no so sure you are tricking your mind but well everything is about tricking your mind
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anyways it's always worth it after you've done it so my second last question to you is just plug
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everything that you do because we've spoken about a lot that you do like postcards from nowhere
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like you know the six percent club but there is other stuff you do including guided tours for
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foreign travelers who wish to discover more of india than just state geography
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so you know just plug everything you do okay so the first plug of course
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is my labor of love postcards from nowhere it's available on all wherever you can find podcasts
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the second is going to be my book which unfortunately will not be written by the
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time this episode comes out but hopefully maybe another conversation in a couple of years
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we will we will get to it and the third is a new journey i'm starting on youtube
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my content will be targeted towards international travelers coming into india so it will be a mix of
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very functional content of how a foreigner can use upi in india how to travel safely in india
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and something as basic as how to eat with your hands because i've seen a lot of people struggle
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with it to doing more stuff which i do on on postcards which is more cultural deep dive into
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india bringing out certain aspects of india you know bringing out lesser known places
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in india and so on what is associated with is the website which i have is juries in india
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which is essentially help helping foreign travelers more focused european travelers
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who come from long periods into india help them design an itinerary which tailors to their
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interests what i've often found is that i've met travelers in india who are let's say really
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massively into hiking and mountaineering and they spent two weeks in delhi agra and jaipur
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and i'm like you know you don't even get the aravalis forget the himalayas
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i know there's no vindhyas there's nothing right why do you but because india is also sold to them
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in stereotypical ways in in in fixed design itineraries by travel agents by internet
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right i feel that there's genuine need to bring that india alive which i love so much
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for them and there is no matter what kind of a traveler you are you will find something in india
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for you and i say that's what i really want to do so the idea is to put out more of that content
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and find people who want to travel india take them to the website and you know give them paid
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consultations on it and who knows maybe if someone is willing to take time and pay me enough i am
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happy to do guided tours for them into specific aspects of india doing a deep dive into food into
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culture into history and we will just explore and tell them about india the way only an indian can
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because nobody understands the country as well as the people who are you know living in it and
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the last is our latest venture with deepa gopala krishnan and my friend abhishek which is called
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the six percent club hopefully by the time this episode comes out i don't know when it is going
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to come out i think four or five weeks from the time we are recording okay so maybe this is
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somewhere around late march early april we would have the six percent club ready in place so yeah
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sure if any of you are struggling with your content journeys we'll take you from idea to execution
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in a very very short period of time and equip you to make sure that you continue
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doing it without any help from us in the future yes i think that's about it yeah yeah no i mean
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six percent club is such a great idea and you know we were discussing over lunch how we were
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kind of lucky to surrender viciously in different ways we got set off on our content journeys and
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we had some help but everybody doesn't necessarily have that help there are people sitting there
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stewing with great ideas in their minds but not being able to execute not knowing how to execute
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so i strongly recommend at least utsav and chuck and i'm sure that her partner must be most capable
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so fantastic team just you know just do it and you'll take them from idea to execution within
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40 days or something 40 45 days is our intent so that you can you can do it and then equip with
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you with the system and a process which helps you continue without our help i think that part is
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very critical because just taking them there is really half the job done it's not not the whole
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thing and i'm also i'll also ask amit to make a public commitment that he has to work on some of
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his book projects which he has been sitting on so we will make a public commitment which is a great
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way to come let yourself to do something i've made many of these in the past they don't work
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with me i'm bengali but yeah i i make a public commitment i will i will do things my final
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question for you which is see how quickly i'm like sprinting away from you know taking the
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subject away from me final question and you know what it is you know for me my listeners
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you know recommend to me books films music which you love so much you want to share them with the
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world i'll start with books because that's what i really spend my time on with with no surprises
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barry lopez anything barry lopez is written whether it is horizon or arctic dreams right the way he
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describes landscapes you know we will start seeing landscapes very very differently so anything by
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barry lopez anything by robert mcferlin i think he he writes brilliantly about nature and places
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and and so on so anything by robert mcferlin i would i think i've pretty much read everything
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every book he has written has also a huge influence on me the other book which we never got to i also
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was carrying it with me is the art of travel by ellen de botten and he has a very interesting
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youtube channel called the school of life i would encourage you to you know look at that
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because it has some amazing videos and it helps you tackle everything from
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the you know personal relationship challenges to your idea of self and in all in many ways it's
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also a great way to think about yourself just by viewing those videos you can find ways and
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frameworks to think about yourself another great youtube channel i could recommend is
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cruzsetsart i don't know how to pronounce it it's called in a nutshell right really stunning
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animation and fantastic deep dives in 15 to 20 minutes and it is so tightly written so tightly
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edited and i got to know this thanks to deepak he told me about it and since then i have been hooked
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to their videos coming to books oh my god so much i could recommend i travel writing pico ayer i
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think he is a brilliant writer and very interestingly as an indian who now lives in japan and he still
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writes about japan and sometimes about india also if you if you really want to know how to
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write simply and you know maybe very pithy in your writing i think he does a brilliant job a book
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which i really enjoyed recently came out from an indian writer arati kumar it's called margin lands
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she's recording with me on venus oh great so yeah i think then you will get a
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great understanding of why she's such a brilliant creator to follow
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um outside of that some of the recommendations have been of people who have been on the show
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one of my absolute absolute favorites is peggy mohan's book i love that book she is such a
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brilliant researcher my heart sings when i read her writing so wantrous kings and merchants is her
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book um which i would recommend outside of that i think there's a lot of food writing which has
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come out in india so uh someone something by i think her name is tarana hussein khan
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and there is something by sadaf hussein which has come out right krisha shok's masala lab is a great
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book he now has a more illustrated version of the book which has come out i think it's a very very
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fun book to read and really simplifies indian cooking when it comes to architecture now there's
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a book called the language of cities author name eludes me as usual i think that's a very very
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good book anything by italo calvino uh on travel right in with its invisible cities or any of his
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books actually i think uh he brings out i think no one is able to bring out uh the the intersection
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of space and time the way he does imaginary cities is by darren anderson that's the one i think so
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yeah darren anderson i mentioned it yeah talking about imagine imagined communities were bennett
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anderson if you really want to understand what a nation is and how we conceptualize a nation
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and how you can love or hate a community of people without ever interacting with them
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i think that's a great great book to sort of you know think about a very obscure recommendation is
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a book i talked about which is uh shoveling smoke by william majorella which talks about
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auto-orientalism and how we have taken the west's ideas of orientalism and then replaying it back
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to the west very interestingly marketing ourselves in that space yeah i can't think of i mean i can
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think of whole bunch of other books but there is all over the place with no sort of uh you know
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the sense in them last book that made you cry some parts of horizon and when breath becomes
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aired by paul karaneti i think that definitely made me cry more than once i think it's a beautiful
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book and a great meditation on life in that sense uh music i'm actually i do listen to a lot of
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music i am a big time follower of a lot of coke studios of in pakistan nothing very unique i love
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kabir cafe i have been reading about kabir for the last one year or so and i'm quite influenced by
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some of his writings and i feel it's very it's it's shocking that how relevant it is
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six centuries later also of what he talks about and he he talks about religion in many many ways
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so kabir cafe the album uh was it the one which had also in it and yeah i think it's a couple of
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beautiful songs which was originally performed by kumar gandhar which is this one then there is
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in fact that entire album is great another great album two great albums again coming from the same
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production house is one is i think a very very interesting coming of h film uh has great songs
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and other is luthera from the same phantom films or i think vikram aditya motwane's productions
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those i think would be my music recommendations not very short list films also i used to watch a
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lot of films but i think i will definitely call out some films or either maybe one of my favorite
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films is the spotlight i think it's a it's a brilliantly done film on the involvement of
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the catholic church and sexual abuse of children and the great i'm a huge fan of miyazaki films
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grave of the fireflies i think i've cried every time i have seen that film it's just so moving
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in the entire family if you have young kids i would highly recommend my neighbor to toro and
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the whole set of films which you know they create there is a certain beauty in in miyazaki
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storytelling which is hard to find iranian filmmakers also i i reduced to like i just
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liked how simple their storylines were but they were able to do so much of complex storytelling
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in the kind of censorship environment they lived in so abbas kirastami mosin makmalbhav
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then i'm blanking majid majidi temi mamilani i think all of them great directors and i'm sure
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there are a lot more which you know you could look at osu's film in japanese films right
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very interesting era of filmmaking there's a beautiful film called woman in the dunes
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i think it really messes with your head because it asks you questions about identity and existence
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which are very uncomfortable and and the film called the departed which was a japanese film
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which explores the complex relationship of japan with death and how death is and just japan anything
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in japan in general it's just it's just a crazy crazy country and i really want to go there at
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some point in my life outside of that i yeah i think i think i mean i'm not very good at this
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well we'll have you back again and yeah yeah no this was great it's of literally an utsaf for me
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to sort of chat with you and no no thoroughly enjoyed this conversation we will hopefully
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have many more and uh yeah thank you thank you so much thank you so much
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if you enjoyed listening to this episode please share it with whoever you think might be interested
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check out the six percent club sign up for it if you're a creator just waiting to be born
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check out the show notes explore rabbit holes at will you can follow utsav on twitter at utsav
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memoria you can follow me at amit varma a m i t b a r m a you can browse past episodes of the
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scene and the unseen at scene unseen dot i n thank you for listening
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