#
There is one human quality that I believe all of us should have, curiosity, the desire
#
to know the world better, the desire to engage.
#
If you're not curious about the world and our fellow humans, we might as well be the
#
And you'd imagine that one profession that curiosity is perfect for, one profession that
#
surely draws curious people, is journalism.
#
The dharma of a journalist is surely to try and seek the truth about the world, to peel
#
off one layer at a time till we get closer to understanding the true nature of things.
#
And yet, in my time in journalism, I found few people like this.
#
More than 90% of the people, just as in any other profession, were just going through
#
the motions, ticking boxes, uncurious about the terrible beauty around them.
#
That's why it filled me with energy to speak to my guest today.
#
She's been a journalist for three decades, but she's never allowed herself to be jaded.
#
She looks at the world through fresh eyes, chases big stories, runs after deep truths
#
and doesn't care about mundane matters like career and so on.
#
She's written a wonderful book recently and is constantly busy doing so many things.
#
And she reminded me that without this lust for life, there can be no meaning.
#
Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
#
Please welcome your host, Amit Varma.
#
Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.
#
My guest today is Malini Goel, a veteran journalist who's done much acclaimed work for Economic
#
Times in India today and is known for her deep dive stories and massive features.
#
Malini's also recently co-written a wonderful book called Unboxing Bengaluru, a fine work
#
that works at multiple levels.
#
At one level, it is a history of Bengaluru.
#
In fact, many histories in different overlapping timeframes.
#
At another level, it's a portrait of a society in flux as young people struggle to adapt
#
their desires to both a globalized world and a local churn.
#
It also contains many portraits of Indians of different types.
#
Young people from small towns figuring out life and companionship, migrants trying to
#
build a home, even visionaries trying to look to the future while the past still lives around
#
them and drags them down.
#
This book contains multitudes, including a fascinating look at what Tinder data reveals
#
about young people in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore.
#
There's much to dig into, but first, let's take a quick commercial break.
#
Malini, welcome to The Scene in the Unseen.
#
Lovely to be here, Amit.
#
Look forward to this conversation.
#
Yeah, and you know, you were just telling me a horrifying story just before we begin
#
of how you once lost your notebook when you were in Israel.
#
And for a journalist to lose a notebook with contacts and all of that is absolutely frightening.
#
And tell me a little bit more about the sort of tools that you have used in your life which
#
meant something to you from the time you started doing what you're doing.
#
I think notebook and pen, it's something that I'll always have.
#
Pen, not an expensive one, never an expensive one, that if I lose them, it's okay.
#
Notebook and pen are always there and I always number my notebooks, always.
#
And the key words that I put on the notebook, so for example, it's Israel, so Israel will
#
be written on the notebook somewhere prominently so that if I have to refer sometime later.
#
So there was a time that I had hundreds of notebooks that I had collected and through
#
many many years and then often there are themes, right?
#
So as a journalist, what I did, sometime around 2008-10, I began, every year I would pick
#
a theme that I would want to focus on, right?
#
And then for example, jobs is the theme that I want to focus on that year.
#
This is besides many other sort of themes that I'm chasing that year.
#
So there would be a series of books on jobs, jobs one, jobs two, jobs three, like that.
#
And then there would be other normal notebooks and there would be sort of, I would have a
#
So where interviews would be sort of named, like number one interview is X and then Y
#
and then Z, right, like that.
#
So that helped and whenever you wanted to go back to a particular conversation, even
#
at some point of time, like you want to refer to that, that would be very powerful.
#
So you have all these notebooks collected over the years with you?
#
No, when I changed home, I threw many.
#
Then when I came from Delhi to Bangalore, I threw many.
#
India today onwards, I joined India today in 1999 and from then onwards, I had kept
#
many notebooks, but slowly I had to get rid of some because it was just like too much
#
Was it heartbreaking letting them go?
#
So you know, when people say that like they are saving their jewellery and their pressures
#
and all that, for me, these were the jewellery and these were the precious stuff.
#
I'm not very fond of jewellery, right?
#
So these were the kind of precious things I was like nurturing, saving, all that.
#
It was very, very hard.
#
I'm not a throwaway person, I'm not a use and throw person.
#
So anything and everything in my life, they'll stay till the time I just can't sort of hold
#
on to them because there is no space or there is whatever reasons that I need to get rid
#
So it was very, very hard, very hard.
#
One didn't know what to throw, what not to throw.
#
I remember when I was in the eighth standard once we shifted houses and as we shifted houses,
#
my mother threw away all my notebooks from class one to seven and I was distraught.
#
Like I cried and cried because and for, you know, now looking back on it, it is absurd,
#
but they had that kind of value for me.
#
And over the years, I've come to exactly the same approach that, you know, you just described
#
that you'll have a cheap pen and if you lose it, you'll take another one and it doesn't
#
And it was, it's kind of like that with me where I love my gadgets a lot because they
#
helped me do my work, but they're all replaceable, you know, and all the really valuable stuff
#
I would imagine is now in the cloud or it's in your head and et cetera, et cetera.
#
But I'm struck that, you know, well into the last decade, you mentioned you were still
#
physically writing with pen and paper or notebooks and you hadn't shifted.
#
And I always have a notebook and pen.
#
In fact, throughout my book journey, I would have had what 40, 50 or not notebooks, all
#
And even when I was recording, I was taking notes.
#
And I think it's also a more efficient way for me to take, go back to the conversation
#
because often what happens when you are recording, everything gets in right.
#
But when you are taking notes, there are highlights, right, which you want to sort
#
of preserve, which you want to focus on.
#
Two, I think when you have so much notes, it's just easier to catalogue, easier to go
#
back to, just flip through.
#
And I have used it quite well.
#
And in fact, during the book journey, I also did video recording, right?
#
I have never gone back to those video recordings.
#
But most of the interviews, actually, I did video recording, I did audio recording and
#
It was just backup, backup, backup, backup, backup.
#
But nothing compares to notebook.
#
I think there are things I'm noting down on the top, on the side, right?
#
This point is important for that chapter that will also come at some point of time.
#
So all that is very, very easy to do in notebooks.
#
Yeah, there is the decision of what do I note down out of the, you know, in the flow of
#
So I've been also a journalist for a very long time, though not as long as you, but
#
for about a decade I was.
#
And I remember at one point for Cricut for circa 2003, 2004, I was just casually chatting
#
at the nets of a match I had gone to cover with Aiyaz Bindra.
#
And he was so great that at the end of it, I said that, you know, is this all off the
#
record or can I quote you?
#
And he said, no, no, of course you can quote me.
#
So I went back and I had to reconstruct the whole thing from memory.
#
And I managed to do that.
#
And I now realized that because I didn't have a notebook, my brain was just holding on to,
#
you know, it was breaking it down to what are the essential things I need to remember
#
and just remembering them in a sharp way.
#
In fact, I linked that piece from the show notes because in that piece, dear listener,
#
this was circa 2004, so well before IPL or anything.
#
He told me that, you know, I have this young friend, Lalit Modi, and he wants to do a league
#
and the league will look like this and all of that, you know, well before IPL or ICL.
#
And that was quite fascinating.
#
But the other thing I wanted to ask you about is reading your book.
#
I was like firstly, of course, delighted by all the human stories in there.
#
And you clearly spoke to so many people for this.
#
Many of your interviews must have lasted hours and you just had to pick out two, three lines.
#
And that's all that we get in the book.
#
And I was wondering and I've been thinking about it for a while that back in the day,
#
it was necessary in some senses if you're having 10, 20 hour conversations to distill
#
little bits because, you know, what are you going to do with all those conversations?
#
And in that sense, curators of content like us are required.
#
In the modern times, I also often wish that the writers who are collecting all of this
#
material would also, as long as it's on the record and they're not reaching confidentiality,
#
also just dump it all online because there must be so much there that you are unable
#
to use because within the book, you know, there's a particular narrative you're following
#
and you have to follow that particular arc.
#
But just these kinds of kinds of people speaking to you for so many hours, like I'm sure many
#
times during your career, it must have struck you that, wow, what a great conversation.
#
You know, it's such a pity that I have to write an 800 word article or whatever.
#
Even here, Amit, even during the book journey, there have been some meetings.
#
Some people have met three, four, five times.
#
And some conversations were so personal, so deeply personal that, you know, first meeting
#
was only about just getting to know, right.
#
Then you open a little, then you open a little bit more.
#
And then you want to have a deeper level conversation.
#
And that only required a certain trust building before you could do that.
#
I didn't want to force myself to have that conversation in the first, second round.
#
One has to earn the trust.
#
And that definitely is the case.
#
And in fact, let me give you an example.
#
So, you know, there was this chapter, there's this chapter called Startup Couples.
#
And it's a chapter close to my heart because I wanted to understand through these couples
#
how the dynamics within the marriage of marriage, if marriage as an institution is evolving
#
in any interesting and significant way, I would have spoken to eight to ten couples
#
at least and spent a lot of time, like half a day or over two, three meetings or four
#
meetings and multiple conversations.
#
And I only used, I think, four or five, that's it.
#
At least five to six or five to ten, I would have just not pursued any further, right.
#
And I had to take that hard decision and I had to bring in the generational shift.
#
I had to bring in different kinds of couples and different challenges that they were.
#
All that is sitting, right.
#
At some point of time, I would love to, that raw sort of footage, as you would call it
#
in the print, right, at somewhere.
#
But maybe I've just gotten so sucked into a range of other projects that we are working
#
In fact, I have not had the time to soak in the joy or find that relish, sort of, that
#
This work that I was working on, this book that I was working on for three, four years
#
I haven't had that moment to sit with myself, to relish it.
#
At some point of time, I want to do that, but I, you know, by and by, as days go by,
#
you know, it's just like, okay, kitab toh aage, aap aage pado, aisa toh aage pado,
#
toh, you know, in November 17th, when we released the book, we were also preparing for our festival
#
and we only had three months last year to do it.
#
So even the day the book was getting released, the person, Ravi Chander, who is kind of the
#
He's been on the show as well.
#
He told me, Mali, aap kaam jo hai na, festival ka karna hai, maine ka, Ravi, aaj ke din
#
uske baad hum log baad karne.
#
So the bottom line is that I didn't get time to sort of sit back and sort of enjoy that
#
So that's a regret, but I think it's good to move on, right?
#
And find other projects, interesting projects that you can immerse yourself deeply in.
#
I think my lesson from all these years of working and sort of the approach I get to
#
is that I never look back in the sense that I'm always engrossed in the process, right?
#
So I'm recording with you now between my last recording and this.
#
This has my full attention.
#
And the moment this is over, I will completely forget about it till the time for release
#
comes when I listen to it once, make the show notes and completely forget about it.
#
So today on Twitter, various people are praising the episode I just put out, which as it happens
#
And I've actually literally forgotten the contents of the episode.
#
And at one level, I understand that having written a book over so many years, you deserve
#
that moment of basking in the joy of having done it and all of that.
#
But equally, I think that for people who are productive and who found a good process that
#
works for them and who found happiness in that process, I think that's just the way
#
You're always, you know, your mind has moved on, you're on at the next thing.
#
Even for the magazine writing that I did, right?
#
So that way people call me that I'm very structured, very methodical in how I looked at it.
#
So I would at a time work on three to four stories of pipeline of stories at different
#
Typically one story would require four to five weeks of turnaround.
#
But that's the only way you can do deep stories and have a churn out story every week, right?
#
But when the story ends, when the story comes, like typically Friday would be the day, Friday
#
morning I would turn in the copy and Saturday it goes, right?
#
And I would feel like when you see off the bride, right?
#
That farewell, that atmosphere at home, a mini feeling of that I would get, oh, the story's
#
Now, Monday is the new start, right?
#
And I would get that feeling.
#
Every Friday you would feel that.
#
Yeah, every Friday when I was working on a big story, right?
#
And whenever, especially the big story where you have put your heart and soul and you worked
#
for weeks on it, I would get that.
#
And what was very good that I liked is that, you know, even over 25 years, I could find
#
stories that still excited me, right?
#
Where I still felt anxious, that what is this, I mean, will it be right or not?
#
What would be the reaction of my, either the boss, the editor or like, what would people
#
react to, readers react to?
#
I think those were the things that makes a creator always maintain edge and also your
#
I think those were important things for me as a journalist to sort of try and I always
#
moved from one story to another, one sector to another.
#
So I'm not one of those beat reporters that auto 20 years and I'm happy.
#
I just get bored very easily.
#
So if I'm doing auto for some time, I'll just deliberately not do, even if my boss is saying
#
auto stories are well read, we need this.
#
So I'll come back to it, but then I'll develop something else that which is totally new and
#
I know nothing about it.
#
And the kind of joy I get in like immersing myself in something new and learning from
#
scratch, I think it's a different kind of accomplishment and adventure that a journalist
#
And I wonder about how you keep that joy alive.
#
Like what I have tried to, like I've been working since 95, right?
#
So what I always find in all the professions where I have been is that there are a really
#
small percentage of people who are really involved every single day.
#
And a lot of people just go through the motions of filing what they have to file or they're
#
shooting what they have to shoot or, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
#
And it's just maybe 5% of the people who are always involved and, you know, keeping the
#
Like for me, that joy is certainly alive in this particular show because I bring it out
#
myself and the feedback is very intense.
#
Every week I hear from people and et cetera, et cetera, and that keeps it going.
#
But I remember in my time in journalism, often you would do these stories and there would
#
be that instant feedback would not be there.
#
You would simply not know your story would disappear into the world and you would hear
#
nothing of it, especially pre-social media.
#
You hear nothing of it and you keep doing story like story after story like that.
#
And it can also, you know, lull you towards that sense of complacence where you're just
#
going through the motions and all of that.
#
And I am imagining that you were never in danger of that because your character trait
#
is just to be excited about what you're doing, right?
#
So one, as I mentioned, you know, I was not somebody who would do one sector and then
#
And my expanse, the areas that I would look at is totally all kinds.
#
And I like things at the intersection of society, business, economy, consumer.
#
And it meant enormous possibilities.
#
Let me give you some examples.
#
Like once there was this trip to Alang, okay, it's Asia's largest shipwrecking yard.
#
Now, some people would say, kahan jaana hai, shipwrecking.
#
I hadn't ever been to a place like that.
#
And just to see what that place meant, kind of a graveyard for the ship, right?
#
And the kind of people, the kind of conversation.
#
So reporters came back, they wrote their spot stories.
#
I came back and wrote a story on Alang.
#
And I brought back many numbers surreptitiously, right?
#
Speaking to guards, speaking to workers on the dock.
#
You're not, you can only have in presence of whatever people.
#
I came back and then I called them for more candid conversation.
#
And those conversations are far more deep, right?
#
Those workers could tell me stories that they could not tell me in front of people.
#
And that was a powerful story to be able to understand a place.
#
You can't imagine Alang unless and until you go there.
#
And then when I came back and wrote that story, I loved what I was able to do and my own experience
#
I remember, you know, there was something happening.
#
I think Facebook Mark Zuckerberg was doing philanthropy.
#
I saw many Indian entrepreneurs were doing philanthropy.
#
And one of the things that occurred to me is the markers of being wealthy is shifting.
#
What people are doing with their money is changing in India.
#
It was happening globally, right?
#
And I wanted to explore.
#
So it's the personal curiosity, the hunger and the curiosity together would.
#
So I began reading about it.
#
And thankfully in internet era, you can read everything.
#
You can read latest research in happening at Harvard, Stanford, all that.
#
And I would just immerse myself reading about it.
#
What does being wealthy, markers of being wealthy in today's world.
#
And once there is enough meat one has gathered, then I start doing the reporting.
#
So like my theory is kind of that, that my premise is being confirmed by some of these
#
researchers in the global sort of where it's appearing.
#
And then I began to do conversations within India with some of the entrepreneurs that
#
It was very, very interesting, you know, how these rich looked at their wealth and what
#
it meant to be rich for them and how they were looking at their wealth, their relationship
#
with it and what they were doing with it.
#
It was an interesting way to sort of dive into it.
#
So you know, you found stories like that.
#
And this also meant two things.
#
One, I was learning something new.
#
And two, I was not competing with anybody.
#
These were the stories that wouldn't occur to anybody to write.
#
These were complex layered stories to do.
#
And there were times that there were areas that I was intimidated by.
#
Let me give you that example.
#
So around 2014, elections were happening, right?
#
And I didn't understand social media.
#
I'm not that social media person.
#
I wasn't that social media person.
#
So I would watch people be a fly on the wall, but nothing more than that.
#
I thought if I'm good at work, my work should speak for myself and not, I didn't need to
#
go market myself on social media.
#
That was the thought that I had.
#
And that meant that I didn't understand the beast at that point of time.
#
But there was a desire to understand the beast because elections were getting shaped by social
#
And I decided to dive deep into it.
#
So I did a cover story for Economic Times at that point of time that the top social
#
media political leaders in the world.
#
And then I sort of conversed with, I engaged with, collaborated with a firm based in Singapore.
#
It's an analytics firm, right?
#
And we worked together to carve out personalities of top leaders in the world.
#
What they did on their social media platforms, who they followed, who were following them,
#
So we put together a range of indices on which we vetted them.
#
And we together worked on it.
#
Now in the beginning, I just was very candid, right?
#
I told this person with whom I was working that I know nothing about it.
#
You are expert and we'll do this journey together.
#
So one, once you admit to yourself and to the person in front that you don't know anything,
#
so there's no need to pretend, right?
#
And that takes away a lot of anxiety, right?
#
And then we are starting from scratch at the end of it.
#
Well, I understood social media very well.
#
And then he was telling me, Tamani, the story that you wrote, it didn't even feel like you
#
didn't know the social media at all.
#
And that's the approach probably has also helped.
#
That areas I didn't understand, but that I felt the need to understand, I would just
#
And through that journey, it was also a learning curve and getting over that fear that, arey
#
mere kuch aata nahi hai isme.
#
Probably in your book, you wrote, quote, there is a certain journalistic thrill in
#
immersing oneself into something unfamiliar, and then writing about it, stop, quote.
#
And I would guess that that is, therefore, in a sense, what is essential about your work,
#
that you like to do a deep dive into something that is interesting and you know nothing about,
#
and you come out of the other side, clothed in all the layers that you've just traveled
#
I guess that would kind of be it.
#
That's who I am, actually, in multiple stories.
#
You were asking me, how do you keep your sort of excitement alive?
#
So let me take you to that era.
#
So I had come back from US, and Economic Times had hired me at that point of time.
#
And I was heading a section, Career and Business Life.
#
But within one year, I got very bored.
#
I had a team that I was steering, I had a section that I was leading, but the work didn't
#
excite me because it was daily copies, and daily copies were like, you know, you didn't
#
have much time to process them.
#
After one year, I was just so bored, I didn't feel like going back to work.
#
So I sat down with my editor, and I said that, you know, I want to move out of this.
#
He said, what happened?
#
And I told him, I'm not enjoying the work.
#
And he said, but this is the only way that you go up the hierarchy.
#
I said, what is the point of heading wherever you are headed if you don't enjoy the journey?
#
I would like to enjoy the journey as much as the destination.
#
So he tried to persuade me out of it, but I said, no, for me, that is important if I'm
#
So he said, what do you want to do then?
#
I said, maybe I'll become a reporter, or a writer at large, or whatever you want to
#
So, you know, not having that hang up that so many people reported to me, I headed that
#
The bottom line for me was, did I enjoy the work?
#
Did I look forward to going back to office next day?
#
That I prioritized over everything else, right?
#
At that time, people may have thought that mera dima kharab ho gaya hai, but totally
#
the best decision I would have made at that point of time.
#
And after that, when I became just a reporter, in 2006, 2007, I began doing stories I wanted
#
to do, with a hunger that I couldn't let out for a while.
#
So I did one four part series on India's liberalization children.
#
It was, they were turning 18, so it must be 2008.
#
And I looked at this generation through multiple lenses as consumer, at the kind of psychographics,
#
the kind of attitudinal shifts that may have happened in the 18 years, the kind of workers
#
these people will be at workplace.
#
Through multiple lenses, I loved that.
#
And thankfully, we were in an era where India was boom boom, and so Economic Times had pages
#
and I would get one whole page to write one sort of part of the series, right?
#
Around the same time, I did a four or three or four part series on Hyderabad city.
#
I'd never been to that city, okay?
#
And I decided that Hyderabad is making headlines, Chandra Babu Naidu has taken it to another
#
I was just curious, what has he done to that city?
#
And I had no reference point.
#
And I decided to immerse myself in Hyderabad, so I traveled to Hyderabad and just did a
#
And again, looking at the city through multiple lenses, through political infrastructure lens,
#
through corporate lens, through how the city's socio-economic, cultural sort of change shifts
#
are happening because of this growth.
#
And in that, when you immerse yourself in completely new area, I think the fear that
#
people have and which I also have is that you'll get things wrong, right?
#
So the strategy that I deploy is I go with a very open mind and as a cup reporter.
#
I'm not here as journalists with 20 years experience, 15 years experience.
#
I come as somebody who knows nothing and I do a lot of groundwork.
#
So maybe South Africa might be a good example to give you.
#
So when I was at Forbes in 2010, I got an assignment to do a special country report
#
I knew nothing about it.
#
For two months, I put Google Alert on South Africa.
#
I began reading on South Africa.
#
I began talking to people remotely on South Africa for two months.
#
That was my preparation.
#
When I landed in South Africa for 15 days for my reporting, I probably already had a
#
certain structure to the entire sort of report that I wanted to write.
#
Reporting was only reinforcement and confirmation of premises that I had built through my research
#
Through my research and reading and some conversation that I had done on phone.
#
And many things what you realize that during virtual reporting, reading, you would have
#
picked up and then you realize when you go there, they're wrong.
#
Assumptions are wrong, premises are wrong, and you should be willing to revisit them.
#
But there are things you realize that again and again, again and again, somebody is talking
#
It's coming up in conversation and it's getting reinforced.
#
Then you realize those trends that you picked up are probably right.
#
And that's how I think it's easier to sort of get into unfamiliar territory and then
#
try to sort of own it after some time and write about it authoritatively.
#
I think that's one thing that I've learned over the years.
#
This is a great phrase I picked up called Gelman Amnesia.
#
So this is Michael Clickton narrated this anecdote about his friend, Murray Gelman,
#
And Gelman told him that, look, whenever I read something in the newspaper, which is
#
on a subject I know deeply, like physics, for example, I know is bullshit, but I, but
#
I trust the newspaper for everything else, which I know nothing about.
#
And he said that's a kind of amnesia and that's Gelman amnesia, which Michael Clickton kind
#
And here I see that there is a problem that journalists cannot escape, that whenever you're
#
writing about something, you are necessarily a generalist to begin with, right?
#
So especially when you are deep diving into a new subject, you're necessarily a generalist.
#
And what has happened with the blogging age is that all the specialists now have the means
#
of production and they are actually online.
#
So you also have the actual experts to compete with in a sense.
#
But as a journalist, you face the incredibly difficult task of making that subject vivid
#
for your, for the general reader without making any of the basic errors, which will make the
#
expert jump on you and say, Hey, you know nothing.
#
You know, the Murray Gelman kind of observation.
#
And I wonder how you navigated that because in other media, like when I wasn't journalistic,
#
if I was blogging or whatever, it's easy to put an eye on that.
#
And okay, I am sharing my journey, learning about something.
#
And then even if I make any mistakes, the reader accounts for it and it's fine.
#
But as a journalist, at one level, you are the voice of authority.
#
And at another level, like you said, you're also aware of your own sort of the impossibility
#
of becoming an expert in four weeks or whatever it is.
#
So how did you tackle that?
#
Like were there times where it was particularly difficult?
#
Were there times where even experts came out and said like, you know, you did such a great
#
job explaining that to the general public?
#
How did you tackle that?
#
There were plenty of occasions where I felt very challenged.
#
In fact, every story that I did on a new area, I thought medicine hi hoega at the beginning.
#
And then what I would start with is just read whatever you can on the web.
#
Two, being a journalist, you can reach out to anybody and everybody, all the experts
#
and let them do the talking and you listen.
#
It requires a lot of hard work if you are the kind of journalist who want to immerse
#
So first few conversations that I would have had with these experts, they would have thought
#
She doesn't know anything.
#
She doesn't even know how to question.
#
And I was okay with that.
#
What I was doing is I was trying to understand different layers that made that subject or
#
made that space that I was trying to.
#
So first few seven, eight conversations would be like that.
#
They were enough to warm me up as well to this space, right?
#
Then after that, many times I would go back to the same person.
#
I had some few additional questions.
#
Can we do a round two of the conversation?
#
And we would do round two, we would do round three.
#
And by the round four, probably I knew, we understood, we had a certain equation.
#
And he also understood I was not that reporter that who did round one and who sounded stupid
#
and thought she had done the job.
#
Second thing was that what is good is when you are a generalist and you have views of
#
multiple sectors is the way you can connect the dots.
#
It's a very, very big advantage, big edge that rarely people will have the way one can.
#
Let me give you one example.
#
So automobile is a heavily tracked sector, right?
#
There are auto reporters, auto editors who have done that forever, right?
#
You can't compete with them.
#
So I always tell them that I'm not car enthusiast who can tell you that talk, power, this, that
#
I look at auto industry at a very structural level with its forward and backward linkages
#
and what it means to the economy, to the job market, to the manufacturing sector.
#
That's what I'm interested in.
#
So I knew what I was looking at.
#
So I'm not the person you would want to talk to if you're looking at, oh yeh gadi kharid
#
nahi ya boh gadi kharid, I'm not.
#
But globally, I track the industry very closely.
#
So one, I kept a sense of a very macro perspective of how this space is shaping up either in
#
China or in the US or in Japan.
#
So that gave me an enormous global perspective, which is not every auto journalist would look
#
They would look at more here and now.
#
You see, with daily reporting, remember that.
#
And I remember doing a story when Maruti 800 was turning 25 or 30, some such thing.
#
And I decided to do a story.
#
It was again a cover story, a cover for Economic Times, the journey of Maruti 800.
#
And I parallel it with the journey of India and journey of Indian consumers and how they
#
had evolved together and how Maruti 800 exemplified how India has evolved.
#
And Maruti 800 being phased out was a certain reflection of an inflection point in India's
#
consumer aspirations, India's evolution, right?
#
And its economic and consumer evolution.
#
Now that story, I don't think auto reporters would have written.
#
They would never write.
#
It's what I brought to the table, right?
#
Because I understood India's consumers, I understood India's macro economy.
#
And I spoke to a whole lot of people, not just auto industry, but consumer behavior,
#
people who understood the economy.
#
And that's how I think I would have differentiated myself, I guess.
#
And you pointed out about how, you know, first interview, second interview, third interview,
#
fourth interview, etc, etc.
#
And the thought that strikes me is that in a sense, you would be a bit of an outlier in
#
journalism simply because of the way journalism has certainly become now.
#
Most people don't have the luxury of doing a story over three weeks, four weeks, you
#
know, with ET, with that particular, you know, the kind of stories that you were doing, you
#
And I guess in Forbes being a magazine, obviously, you get more time.
#
But a lot of journalists I speak to today feel incredibly frustrated because everything
#
They're expected to give something every day or two stories a day and there's no time
#
There's no time to enter a rabbit hole.
#
One day you're covering this beat, another day you're covering something else.
#
In fact, editors bemoan to me that beat journalists have just vanished from the scene, no more
#
And my thinking there is that if you are turning in a story every day, as opposed to you're
#
turning in one story every two weeks or three weeks, the kind of thinking that is required
#
is so incredibly different that you're actually producing a different kind of person.
#
Like a Malini who does daily stories every day for a year is actually really different
#
from a Malini who does, you know, one story every week and has a time to sink in and do
#
interview one, two, three, four and all of that.
#
So tell me a little bit about that, like on one hand, of course, as you point out that
#
2006 incident where you tell your editor, I can't do this anymore.
#
I need to actually write and be a reporter.
#
But also in a sense, I'm guessing there are long form reporter, these long features, the
#
kind of stories you've been describing.
#
But had that option not been open to you?
#
Had you had to go back and do the regular kind of daily, semi-daily kind of reportage?
#
You know, I'm guessing that it would have been so much at odds with your temperament
#
that you might just have left, right?
#
I don't think I'm that person.
#
I'm not that person who can do a breaking news story and enjoy it.
#
I remember actually, in 1999, I did join Reuters.
#
I had two offers, one from India Today, one from Reuters and Reuters salary was 50% higher
#
than what India Today was offering.
#
I was a young person, young reporter, where money mattered, right?
#
And I took up the Reuters job, much against my internal wish at that point of time.
#
And money and working for a sort of global agency was two important drivers.
#
Within one week, I had told my boss at Reuters that I can't stay here.
#
Within one week, I realized that's not the place I can ever bring joy to my work life,
#
That also meant taking a 50% cut to go to India Today, but I have never regretted it.
#
It was probably the best decision of my career.
#
India Today was like going through a wringer at that point of time.
#
It was at a different place and I learned so much, so much at India Today.
#
And I've always been a deep dive journalist, thankfully and deliberately.
#
I don't think I would be a good person in a daily reporting thing.
#
Second thing is, I think being planned and being structured also helped.
#
Many times, one week is not enough to churn out an in-depth story, right?
#
I mean, two days to likhne mein lag jaata hai, uske paad you want to do first draft,
#
second draft, third draft sometimes and you don't have the time or even on a weekly.
#
So I would work on very long cycles.
#
So my editors typically knew that I have three, four stories already approved, ideas approved
#
and there are different stages of execution.
#
And sometimes they would come back and say, Malini, this week, I don't have this.
#
Would you be able to prioritize that one that you discussed?
#
And I would be able to.
#
But I would parallelly sort of process multiple stories, right?
#
That was one important thing.
#
Like many of the collab work, like I was telling you about that social media story, I would
#
have taken like four to eight weeks.
#
You work with this outside agency, they themselves will take two weeks to turn it around.
#
And then you have engaged in the conversation two months before actually when that conversation
#
first began, they started working on.
#
So working on a lead time and not working on breaking news story, those were very, very
#
important things that I was not chasing breaking news ever, very rarely.
#
Sometimes like editors would say, okay, this is breaking news, why don't you do something?
#
And one would do because one understood that space, so it was easier to churn.
#
But one wouldn't get joy and as much joy in writing those pieces as much as, you know,
#
what you've worked so hard over four, five, eight weeks to be able to churn out.
#
At one level, I think both you and I are on the same page that most of the joy is in the
#
You're just diving deep into something and you're doing it and that's pleasurable for
#
But at the same time, we are only human and you sometimes want a claim for the work you've
#
done or if you work really hard on something, you spend eight weeks working on something.
#
You want to hear back from people how great it was and you want it to sort of be remembered.
#
And one of my sort of observations about, you know, either the journalism I did or I
#
have written columns for pretty much all the Indian outlets, including 80 for a while.
#
I had a column on poker with Economic Times, which ran for a couple of years.
#
And my sense with all of that work, every little bit of it is that it just gets lost.
#
Like that whole metaphor that one day you're a newspaper on someone's breakfast table and
#
a week later, Pani Puri is being wrapped into you.
#
And that's exactly right for the way that I think about it, that stories come and they
#
Whereas other things, not just the podcast, but even the blogging or the news lettering
#
or whatever, it just feels that it lasts a bit longer.
#
You hear much more from people and all of that.
#
So was there ever that kind of sense that you've spent years and years going really
#
deep into different things and you might feel that, my God, what an amazing job I did.
#
And then suddenly some random other 600 word shallow piece of thing is going viral on Twitter
#
while you are like, my God, I wrote the ultimate thing.
#
It has happened so many times that, you know, this rich and the markers of being rich.
#
It was a story I was very, very passionate about and I spent a lot of time and my heart
#
was in it trying to explore as a researcher ki ho kya raha hai yahan pe.
#
And you know, editor also theek hai, chala gaya.
#
And many stories would sink and it was okay.
#
But you know, a special story needs a special attention and when it doesn't get it, it just
#
Then you are a little heartbroken.
#
But the important thing is, you know, what you said, you just look ahead, you move on
#
and you don't even have the time.
#
Monday, you are on another story.
#
But there are times that somebody will remember you and especially seek you out to tell you,
#
you know, that story that you did was so good.
#
And especially what they would come and tell me is that, for example, cars pay.
#
And I was told that, you know, your dad's story, I don't think even auto reporters
#
You know, that got me a particular joy because you've entered into it as a newcomer.
#
And I always saw myself as somebody outsider looking into a space.
#
I remember a story I did on different corporate, different species in India's corporate jungle.
#
So you know how American companies are, how European companies are, how Japanese companies
#
are, Chinese companies, Korean companies, and Indian companies, right?
#
They all have a very different, distinct culture and how you're supposed to behave.
#
The bosses there have behaved very differently.
#
And over the years, I had looked at them, I'd seen how they behaved, the customs, the
#
office traditions were very, very different, even the hierarchy, the way they shaped and
#
So I did that story, that different species in India's corporate jungle and outlining
#
what a typical American multinational would be like, what a typical European multinational
#
would be like, and then Korean and Chinese and Japanese and Indian.
#
And it was fascinating for me to sort of unearth some of those things.
#
Now, they give you a special joy, right?
#
When somebody writes to you that, Malini maja aage padke, o samajhme aaya raha hai, what
#
But this is where a reporter with experience will be able to bring depth, right?
#
Inside perspective, depth that otherwise would be difficult.
#
And I think as a journalist, one has to play to one's strength.
#
And these were the strengths that I brought to the table for the paper.
#
I'm imagining that in a sense, like one, I love your description of yourself as an outsider
#
That's how I kind of look at everything and whenever I enter into any kind of subject,
#
I feel that I have some natural advantage because I'm going in there in a very interdisciplinary
#
I'm not looking at it in some, the cliched way that someone who's been in that silo
#
all their life would have been.
#
And in your case, I would imagine that the insights you would have gotten into our changing
#
society would be far deeper than anyone just covering society or covering culture or covering
#
any one of these beats.
#
Because in a sense, you know, there's that old parable about the blind man and the elephant
#
and you're actually looking at the elephant from so many different angles.
#
So can you share with me some of the things you learned about our society and our changing
#
country which surprised you at the time?
#
Like in Markers of Wealth, for example, I imagine, you know.
#
You know, liberalization children was an eye-opener for me because as you grow, your peer level
#
is very different, right?
#
And you understand what your peers are going through, similar age group.
#
You don't know what 18 years are going through.
#
So when I did that liberalization children and these are 18 year old, what they're expecting
#
out of life, what their love life, their drivers, their passion, what money meant to them, what
#
success meant to them, just unearthing all that.
#
It gave me fantastic insights and it allowed me also to talk to people who were in touch
#
with that generation, right?
#
People consumer behavior, people like Santosh Desai, marketers who keep a pulse on it from
#
MTV executives to a range of people.
#
And being a journalist, you can virtually call anybody and that's probably an advantage
#
not many people have and I would use that advantage and not just in India.
#
I've often tapped what I see because I was there in pre-internet era, right?
#
When we struggled for basic information, all that.
#
In internet era, the joy of just looking up and finding out who is an expert on Gen Z,
#
who is an expert on intergenerational shifts that are happening globally, reading about
#
what's happening in the West or what's happening in the East in Japan or China, those are things
#
that you enrich your perspective in and India could be very, very different, right?
#
But just getting a global sense of what's happening to this generation globally gives
#
you a certain worldview in which you contextualize what's happening in India, right?
#
So I looked at India's job market for over two decades, right?
#
And it's an area very close to my heart, India's employability crisis, India's unemployment
#
problem, all that, all that.
#
And I also looked at global, right?
#
What's happening in Japan, what's happening in China, just out of your interest.
#
It would enrich my story often.
#
So I remember once I did this conversation, I got experts in Japan and China.
#
And we were doing a conversation on what's going on in Japan, what's going on in China.
#
And this was MRSA, so Global HR Consulting firm, right?
#
So their partners and their executives in China and Japan, they got onto a call and
#
we did that conversation.
#
I told them that I don't know what will come out of this conversation, but you know, I
#
wanted to understand it.
#
It was interesting, right?
#
Sorry, I forgot what the question that you had asked.
#
All of this is part of that answer.
#
I mean, I was really, I was interested in knowing what kind of unusual learnings you
#
came across in this journey.
#
So I'll tell you, so here, this conversation was happening.
#
And one thing I learned, so as a girl, as a young girl, as a woman, I thought that as
#
the country grows and evolves and develops, the status of women will automatically change,
#
Japan surprised me, shocked me.
#
Japan, one of the most developed, most successful, economically developed country and the status
#
of women at workforce disappointed me.
#
And that was a time that I rethought my premise that, you know, it's not necessary that a
#
country evolves and economically develops and progresses and women are beneficiaries
#
I think it is closely linked to the cultural sort of aspect rather than economic aspect.
#
And Japan is a great example of that.
#
In contrast, China is very different.
#
China's workforce participation of women is pretty high.
#
What women are able to do in China are much, much at a higher order than, say, even Japan.
#
What's happening in India with women and women at work, right, it saddens me.
#
Like, you know, countries progressing, but women aren't able to sort of have the kind
#
of progress that they can.
#
So some of these things, you begin to sort of unearth that you could not otherwise.
#
And having a global perspective on anything also gives you a better sense of how a particular
#
subject or a particular issue that you are vetting.
#
And women at work is something that now if you look at globally, there are many countries
#
which are very poor, but, you know, women are doing very well.
#
India is closer to what Gulf countries or Arab countries are, or what even Afghanistan
#
etc. is on women workforce participation.
#
So these are some of the things when I bring in to some of the reportage that I am doing.
#
Because I already know that it's not economic progress, if you are betting on that.
#
But other than that, there would be many other things that need to happen for a woman's position
#
in the society or at work to change or to evolve.
#
Yeah, I've done many episodes on this with the likes of Namita Bhandare and Shreya Bhattacharya
#
and it's so multifactorial and complex.
#
And one of the things I realized is that many of the truths about this country are so counterintuitive,
#
that even after you know this is true, you're like, you can't figure out why, why, why,
#
you know, like, Japan, for example, what you just told me is, you know, surprising to me.
#
Did you hypothesize about the why, like, why is that the case?
#
It's a very traditional, very feudal society.
#
But why would it get worse with wealth?
#
Things haven't changed for women.
#
That's a better way to put it.
#
That's a better way to put it.
#
Not that it's getting worse.
#
Things haven't changed for women, as much as it has changed for the country from an
#
economic standpoint, right?
#
So let me take you now a little further back into your journey.
#
Tell me about your childhood.
#
What were your early years like?
#
So childhood actually really feels like another world, another world that I can't even conjure
#
And I grew, I was born in a very, very small town in Bihar called Munger, okay, Mungeri
#
Lal Ke Haseen Sapne, okay, that one.
#
And I grew up in a very conservative Baniyar family, where girls didn't work.
#
If they at all got educated, they got educated for the heck of it.
#
My mom got married at the age of 15, 16, when she wanted to, and she was from Bengal, right?
#
So she was very keen to, hungry to study and she could not.
#
And this was, we are five sisters, and you know the reason why we are five sisters, okay?
#
So this was a typical conservative Baniyar family where girls were supposed to be in
#
a specific role, right?
#
But it was an idyllic childhood.
#
It was another era, 70s, my grandmom and grandparents, it was a large house, always full of people.
#
There was no chase in life, no dream in life, right?
#
Life went by and you enjoyed it.
#
And some of the things that I remember as I look back is, probably I was very tomboyish
#
and I was a rebel in some sense, because simply I didn't like many of the things my grandmom
#
was a matriarch, right, and who would have a say in the house.
#
So girls shouldn't have short hair, girls shouldn't wear pants, girls shouldn't do this,
#
and my counter was that I'll do everything that they are not supposed to do.
#
So I'm sure I was tough for my parents to bring up from that point of view.
#
So that was one thing that I remember and also in grade four, my parents shifted me
#
It was probably the best school in the town, right?
#
Much against my grandmom said, this school convent me daal ke dimaar kharab ho jaayega,
#
ladkiyaan barbaad ho jaayega, this that.
#
But my parents thankfully had only daughters.
#
So there was no discrimination, all of us were daughters, all of us were equally treated
#
and that I think as I look back was a good thing to have happened, right?
#
And my mom was absolutely very, very clear that all of you will study.
#
You have to stand on your own feet.
#
That was very, very clear.
#
But the childhood was, you know, we would steal guavas from neighbor's garden and do
#
things like kabaddi khelna in the narrow alley.
#
But this was a very, very full house, all there were always visitors coming, visitors
#
We didn't know who was part of family, who was not, second cousin, third cousin, all
#
That was quite nice, actually.
#
And there was so much joy in doing small things in that world.
#
Simple thing like going and plucking guavas from the garden.
#
We had a huge garden at the back of the house that we bought.
#
And small achievements also felt so big.
#
And I remember that in that small town, girls were hardly seen in the public spaces, right?
#
Thoda baut, but not that much.
#
It was also not safer, right?
#
It, remember, this was 70s, early 80s, was also the Lalu Yadavera, right?
#
So law and order was getting worse and worse.
#
So I remember my grandfather got me a cycle, got us a cycle.
#
And right now you think about it, it sounds bizarre.
#
But learning to ride a cycle and going around in that small little town, you could get spotted.
#
So we were the first girls to ride cycle in public, right?
#
And people would know that this one's daughter is riding cycle.
#
Then we slowly graduated to Muppet.
#
Then again you got spotted.
#
And what was good was that because we started many others kind of joined, right?
#
And it was easier for others to get that, win that battle.
#
Then I remember I was riding a scooter as well after that.
#
I'm sure I must be a bit underage.
#
So bit by bit and those felt like big battles that you are winning.
#
You know, when I first rode that cycle, the liberation I felt.
#
I don't think I can feel that liberation again.
#
It was so nice to just go on your cycle in the public space and do that.
#
And I remember I must be 10, 12, whatever.
#
And at that point of time, I would go and tell my mom that this is something I need to buy urgently for tomorrow's school.
#
And my mom couldn't stop me.
#
And I was this person who would love to get wet in the rain and ride my cycle to that shop, pick it up and come back.
#
And these were interesting sort of journey in that small town, right?
#
Every small little win right now, it looks like really bizarre.
#
But those were very important to win at that point of time for me.
#
Doesn't look bizarre at all.
#
I did an episode with Shelly Chopra where she spoke about how for her,
#
riding a motorcycle in college was so empowering and, you know,
#
just changed the confidence with which she sort of looked at the world.
#
So in these early days, you know, in riding cycles in the rain and so on and so forth.
#
What were you? How did you see yourself?
#
Like, what were your dreams for yourself?
#
How did you see yourself?
#
You know, were you someone who was also reading?
#
You know, how did you look at the world and your space in it?
#
In my house, there was very little, no books, OK?
#
It was a business family.
#
So books had very little space.
#
So, but I think going to a convent changed a lot of things for me.
#
And I remember I had a friend, class friend, and his dad was a PhD from IIT.
#
And I went to his place and I saw a room full of books and I was jealous.
#
Man, wow, what kind of house he has that and his dad is so erudite.
#
And you can sit down and have a conversation.
#
So in that place, I met finding role models,
#
finding people who could help set aspirations was hard to find.
#
But I do also recall myself as somebody looking for that role model.
#
So, you know, this friend's father was a kind of person.
#
And he was like known for his particular high integrity in ethics.
#
He was a professor in college.
#
And only if two students came, he started his class on time.
#
He didn't bother. He was that kind of.
#
And I said, what kind of man he is?
#
And I would look up to him.
#
I remember when I joined in grade four, not in him.
#
That's where I studied.
#
I was this outsider looking in, right, in a very different way.
#
It was a very new world, right?
#
And virtually who is who of this society then, right?
#
The professional class, the administrative class.
#
There was an ITC factory.
#
There was a railway factory.
#
And many of those kids sort of came to that school.
#
And I came from a very non-illustrious sort of family from that point of view.
#
So. And I was also coming from a largely Hindi medium, right?
#
So I remember the first time our teacher told us that there will be a quiz tomorrow.
#
I didn't know what quiz was.
#
The word quiz didn't even register.
#
I thought he must have said something.
#
Next day was test and I flunked and I got zero.
#
And that was the first time I failed in an exam.
#
And after that, I've never failed.
#
I've only excelled after that because I decided that this won't happen again.
#
And then had to work hard at it.
#
And from being this outsider, but always hungry and curious,
#
I think those were the two tools that worked a lot for me.
#
So I would just observe, be an observer and understand their world space, right?
#
What world they belong to, what world they came from.
#
Those were important things for me to be an observer.
#
And of course, remember, you're a child, right?
#
So you don't even have the confidence.
#
You have your own set of complexes.
#
You don't want to say something and become a fool about, you know, everybody is making fun of.
#
So you want to be quiet, but you want to observe.
#
So that was something that I think has stayed with me all my life.
#
In fact, all my life, I think I felt like this outsider trying to get in.
#
And then the moment I'm an insider in that space, I want to be an outsider in another space, right?
#
And also, that was one time, particularly I remember that, you know, in childhood,
#
things happen to you and how deeply it shapes you.
#
So I have this voice, which is a little screechy, a little high pitched, right?
#
And in school, grade four, grade five, all these boys would tease me, right?
#
Every time I would speak, they would mimic, they would imitate.
#
And it reached a stage that I would hate speaking in amongst people,
#
because I was scared of these people mimicking me in front of everybody and making fun of it, OK?
#
And this lasted for a very long time for me in the sense that there were...
#
It's four or five years back, you know, I was at a stage where I would hesitate speaking
#
or voicing myself in a public forum, right?
#
Because that complex had got seated so deep and one doesn't realize it.
#
And I deliberately, three, four years back when I did my podcast,
#
my biggest agenda was to get over this complex, get over this fear, right?
#
That your voice, your voice is your voice, right?
#
You don't have to be ashamed, embarrassed or whatever,
#
and just be confidently able to deal with it.
#
So in the school, some of these things happened, right?
#
But also the school offered me a world which was so far away from what my home world was about.
#
It was the first place where girls were positively discriminated.
#
So girls' fee was lower than the boys' fee.
#
It brought special joy.
#
And the school also taught that girls and boys were equal, right?
#
It was my first exposure to the fact that girls and boys can be equal,
#
which is in contrast to the society I was living in.
#
And that also set me on a path to question a lot of things I was seeing around.
#
I remember one of my aunt, she eloped with a Brahmin boy.
#
And I must be like eight, nine, some.
#
I forget the age, but...
#
And he was a professor in the college.
#
So the day she eloped, there was this...
#
Everybody, all the elders are sitting in the house and there is a kind of mourning, right?
#
Kya ho gaya? Naam kharab ho gaya and this, that.
#
And as I said, I can speak up.
#
So I told my dad, what is the problem?
#
What are you guys sort of worrying about?
#
So she ran away with somebody she loved.
#
You guys don't have to even give dowry.
#
And the boy is well-placed.
#
He's a professor in a college.
#
And I was just shut up and I was told, my mom was told, please take her away.
#
But some of these things, I can only look in flashback and think that school instilled some of these things, right?
#
Because around me, there was caste, rigid sort of boundaries that were being set, either as a girl, as a part of community, etc.
#
And they were important foundational pillars on which I think I built myself.
#
But coming to the question of dreams, I don't think I had any dream, nothing.
#
I mean, I was just living here day to day.
#
But the only thing that I think my mom was pushing us for is that you have to study and you have to excel.
#
And there were times that I would get 99 out of 100.
#
And my mom's question was, where did one go?
#
Not even like you are the topper, you are the 99 out of 100, no?
#
So I think that also rubbed off a bit, that you don't get complacent.
#
And she was a hard taskmaster.
#
My mom really made our life miserable at that point of time.
#
She pushed us hard at a point of time that I could have just let it be.
#
We could have just been like any other girl, got married and had children, like that.
#
The toughest phase I remember when I was in grade 11th, and our school was till 10th convent.
#
And 11th, 12th, almost all my classmates went to Delhi, went here, went there.
#
And my parents said, no, you are not supposed to go.
#
And I got, in those days, I think it was 88, so DPS RK Puram, where a lot of my friends had gone.
#
And I wanted to, and my mom said, no, you can't go.
#
So I had to actually move from a convent to a college there.
#
And it's a Biharpur, right?
#
And for me, it was a dramatic shift in culture, everything.
#
And this is Coit College, okay?
#
And Coit College, we were three girls and everybody boy, all rest were boys, right?
#
And safety was an issue.
#
And you dressed like as poorly, as badly as you could possibly.
#
And for me, it was major adjustment.
#
And I remember I was this strong boyish girl wanting to ride cycle, wanting to,
#
and I had to collect myself and be as not noticeable as possible.
#
And I remember that period was very difficult, 86 to 88.
#
And, but finally, when I was to appear for my 12th exam, we decided,
#
I decided actually that I'll move to a girls' college at that point of time.
#
The reason being that boys' college, there was a lot of cheating, a lot of this, that,
#
which was not my cup of tea.
#
So I moved to a girls' college and appeared for my exam there.
#
Thankfully, I had a university position, despite the fact that I had nothing else.
#
And I think that was my lottery at that point of time for an escape
#
from that small little town that I grew up in.
#
My parents were still not convinced at that point of time that I should come to Delhi.
#
And it was a big battle for me to fight.
#
And so I told them eventually that either I'm studying in Delhi or I'm not studying at all.
#
You can do what you want with my life, right?
#
And my parents had the concerns,
#
how will we send the girl so far, this will happen, that will happen.
#
And we had no relatives at that point of time in Delhi.
#
So it was a new sort of world.
#
At that point of time, my cousin's sister was there.
#
So thankfully, she was there.
#
So then I came, I fought that battle and they said, OK, go, do whatever you want to do.
#
So I came to Delhi, it was 89.
#
I must be 19 years of 18 years of age.
#
And that was the beginning of a new journey for me.
#
I got admission in IP college and I would have gotten admission in other places,
#
but because IP college had hostel, it was important for me.
#
Otherwise, my parents wouldn't have allowed me to stay.
#
So I stayed in the hostel and again, I was this outsider looking in.
#
In my first year, I remember, it was a three-seater and three girls.
#
One girl is from Woodstock, Mussoorie.
#
One girl is from Vellamse, Dehradun.
#
And another one girl, this is me, is from this small town, Bihar, right?
#
You don't know how to speak in English properly.
#
You don't even have the dress that is required.
#
You don't know the lingo.
#
You don't know nothing, right?
#
And then to adjust to that world, it was a huge adjustment.
#
But what I think when you come from that background is that I think you have enormous grit and determination
#
and enormous hunger to do well, right, to get ahead.
#
So what I didn't have, I compensated for my academic excellence, right?
#
And that, I think, stood by all through my three years.
#
So again, I was the class stopper.
#
And interestingly, in 11th and 12th, I had taken science, right?
#
And I wanted to get into the army.
#
And don't ask why I wanted.
#
I just wanted, I thought it was aspirational.
#
And girls typically didn't get it.
#
They were not allowed in the army except for AFMC, right?
#
So I wanted to get into AFMC and get into the army.
#
AFMC me hua nahi, only 20 seats.
#
So when I didn't get in there, so I asked people, what should I do?
#
And everybody said, you are so good in academics, you should do UPAC.
#
I have zero idea what UPAC is, okay?
#
So, but everybody said you are good at studies, so UPAC is your thing.
#
So what do I do for UPAC?
#
They said, history le lo.
#
And some of these friends from earlier era, not in him, they are there.
#
They told me, history le lo.
#
So I said, okay, history le lo.
#
First month in college and from science to history, and I was very good in science.
#
And I realized I'm stuck.
#
And the way they teach history is not that inspiring as well in college.
#
And I just didn't like it.
#
But I also realized that if I have to make my stay here work, I have to make this work.
#
I think, particularly because now I have a 24-year-old, I can sort of contrast that
#
with this, that our generation grew up with making the most of what you've got.
#
We are the children of scarcity, the era of scarcity, and the ability to make the most
#
of what you've got is also an enormous ability.
#
That you don't look at what you don't have, you just look at what you've got on your
#
plate and just try to make, enjoy that and make the most of it.
#
So that's something I decided that, okay, history karna hai, toh achche se karna hai.
#
Because I don't want my parents to feel disappointed.
#
So I remember actually in first year, I got a second division.
#
This was the first time that I got second division.
#
I was class stopper with second division.
#
You know history, you don't get too much marks.
#
So my mom came to Delhi and I told her that I'm class stopper and I've got 58 or 59,
#
He said, don't fool me.
#
And you think 58, 59 can be a class stopper.
#
I had to actually take her to my HOD and who told her that, no, actually she's done well.
#
So then my parents were convinced that she's not faffing around, she's not just fooling
#
around, but she's studying and all that.
#
But this was also an era that my parents back home were going through a difficult phase
#
because, again, as I was saying that this was also the Lalu era, the RJT era, and businessmen
#
there were going through very rough patches.
#
And my dad was going through a rough patch.
#
Once he was bombed, once his shop was robbed, and once you got a ransom letter that you
#
come with whatever amount, otherwise consequences are from anything to anything including raping
#
These were very, very difficult times and I remember one by one, my sisters, I brought
#
My elder sister, who is elder, but she's more the compliant one because she's the
#
And I'm the one who said, okay, she'll not get married right now and she will study,
#
And then I brought her, then one by one, all of my five sisters, four sisters, that is,
#
I got them admitted in schools in Delhi at that point of time.
#
My parents were back in Bihar and that was an interesting era, you know, in the sense
#
I was in college and I was doing this.
#
So I remember I'd taken my sister for admission to, I think, Convent of Jesus Marys, that's
#
a school in Delhi and we both are sitting, me and my youngest sister.
#
And I must be looking like a school student only, I was looking, I was very frail and
#
And they said, they confused me for the student and I was in college final year or something.
#
But because we as sisters were so tight in our bonds that it was such a fantastic place
#
to be in, you know, caring for your sister, being their local guardian, sort of supporting
#
But it also meant that you matured much before your age, right?
#
She's going through her heartaches and forget your own heartaches, I mean, it's her heartache
#
which gets priority over yours, right?
#
So those three, four years were about sort of all that, my own personal transitions.
#
But I think as I look back, those three years in IP college were probably the fantastic
#
It brought me to another world, it showed me many worlds that could exist outside of
#
my little place in Bihar.
#
It was also the place that I learned to dream, okay?
#
And Delhi is also a place where you learn to be like, fight.
#
It's an aggressive place, right?
#
And to survive, you have to learn to fight.
#
And that place taught me that as well.
#
In many ways, this reset, this transformation, I think I would give Delhi a lot of credit
#
for opening up possibilities for me at that point of time.
#
So okay, I never gave UPSC.
#
By the final year, I realized UPSC is not meant for me.
#
But I wanted to go, I applied for UCLA.
#
I applied overseas for studies and I got admission in UCLA.
#
This is my master's first year.
#
And I told my parents that I want to go and they said, you should get married and go.
#
Do my master's in the US?
#
So this is by that time, it was 93 or something.
#
And so I decided that I'm not going and UCLA, I would have needed some financial support
#
from my parents before I went.
#
But what I was very clear is that before I got married, I wanted to be on my own feet.
#
So when people were thinking they want to be X, Y, Z, my only sole agenda was that I
#
want to be financially independent before I got married.
#
And then sometimes serendipity happens, sometimes luck sort of favors you.
#
And it happened right in January 94, 94 summer, I was graduating for my master's, right?
#
I was finishing my master's and I didn't know what I was going to do.
#
And in January, a bunch of friends were applying for this Time Center for Media Studies and
#
Diploma in Business Journalism.
#
I had zero idea about journalism.
#
I had zero idea about what business journalism was.
#
I just happened to be at the right place at the right time.
#
I typed out my resume right then and there as everybody was and I submitted it.
#
And then I just called the director.
#
So you know those numbers are registered.
#
So you picked up the number, director himself picked up and I said, you know, I had applied.
#
I have not got any call.
#
I just wanted to make sure that where I am.
#
And luckily he says, well, I would love to meet you.
#
So I said, okay, when can I come?
#
And then he called me and he met me and he said, well, I'm good with your admission and
#
I'll have to have Sanjay Balu.
#
So if he agrees, then we'll take you in.
#
So I met Sanjay Balu and they took me in.
#
And so this was a Diploma in Business Journalism, January of 1994.
#
And then after three months, three months was incubation period.
#
The training period on job training, right?
#
So option was Times of India and Economic Times.
#
So I didn't understand what Times of India was.
#
I have no reference point, right?
#
And I've come from history, right?
#
So Economic Times is like another world.
#
But some of my friends said, no, no, this is 1994, liberalization has happened.
#
Business media is doing very well.
#
And they said, Business Journalism is for Economic Times.
#
So I opted for Economic Times.
#
I'm not somebody who easily gets daunted, you can make out.
#
So even if I know nothing, I said, okay, I'll figure that out once I go.
#
So I joined Economic Times.
#
And they put me in corporate finance markets page.
#
Okay, I have no idea, nothing.
#
I don't know what's the difference between net profit and gross profit.
#
I don't even know the financial year is different from calendar year, nothing.
#
And this is pre-internet era where you can't even look up on the web.
#
Bonds, interest rates, real interest rate, inflation, nothing.
#
And okay, part of this corporate finance market page, and I have this boss, Chandi, and I
#
ask him stupid questions, but within six months, I was able to sort of measure up.
#
And in a quick time, I was able to sort of handle that section on my own, right?
#
It was important, Chandi.
#
The moment I was able to handle all that, I wanted to write.
#
I didn't know I was a writer, frankly.
#
I didn't know writing was in me, but I thought I wanted to try my hand at it.
#
And well, I began to write little, little things, and I enjoyed the process.
#
I enjoyed reporting, writing, and corporate dossier was the place where, and remember
#
I was in corporate finance market page, so there was a direct linkage with corporate
#
Understanding what was going on in the corporate world at that point of time.
#
So I wanted to write and began, and my bosses there resisted me writing.
#
They didn't like me writing.
#
I mean, you are a sub editor, so you should write, do sub editing, right?
#
And you can't be writing.
#
But for sections that I was writing, which is corporate dossier, they were delighted
#
that somebody not on the team writing, writing prolifically and stuff.
#
So there came a time that I asked my desk bosses to put me on permanent night shift.
#
So 6 to 12 at night, and morning 10 to 6, I would do writing.
#
And you are young, right?
#
So you can work long hours and you can maintain that energy level.
#
At least for one or two years, I did that writing, working, and then it was, I really
#
enjoyed writing and I found my calling there.
#
So eventually, I think they got bugged with me and they said, okay, go and write a corporate
#
So I began to write for corporate dossier and then the journey began with writing and
#
then it took me to another trajectory.
#
But I do remember journalism in that era.
#
I mean, I think it was also an era where people who got into journalism came from very privileged
#
I remember I still was not conversant, very fluent in English, there were words I would
#
get like the accent wrong.
#
I was very conscious of interviewing people in English and messing things up.
#
Also the fact that probably you may not be knowledgeable in that area sort of did weigh
#
Like you are interviewing somebody on a corporate thing and abhi toh pata nahi hai ki you yourself
#
are in the depth of things or not, right?
#
I think some of that definitely kind of weighed heavy on me at that point of time.
#
I was very conscious, very insecure in my reporting process as a reporter, but I was
#
And even if I messed up, it's okay.
#
And I'm sure I would have messed up things at that point of time.
#
Thankfully, there were bosses you would go back to, mujhe ye nahi samajh mein aa raha hai,
#
yeah, I'm not able to get this.
#
If I messed up in my writing, they would fix things and stuff and tell me.
#
And it was another era also where the editors were of a very different mindset, right?
#
They would work with you, all that.
#
And then India Today happened.
#
It was a very different world.
#
I think I'm continuing nonstop.
#
No, no, this is delightful and I have so many things I want to double click on.
#
There are a couple of words which for me seem to sort of play such an important part in
#
what you just described.
#
You know, you mentioned serendipity earlier.
#
And even before that, I was thinking of how heartbreaking it is that if it was not for
#
your good fortune and having a mother who wanted you to study, if it was not for the
#
good fortune of having a convent where you were able to go, if it is not for the good
#
fortune of doing well in the university exams in 88 and getting admission into IP or whatever,
#
if all of these events in a perfect storm don't line up and fall into place, you are
#
And there are so many millions of Malini's who are not where you are.
#
And you know, that serendipity and that luck plays such a big part that it is almost heartbreaking.
#
So you know, you use the word in the context of, of course, you know, choosing to, you
#
know, in January 94, choosing to go for that.
#
But it is really the whole game.
#
So, you know, when I came to Bangalore, many people asked me that how would you stack up
#
Delhi versus Bangalore or what do you miss about Delhi?
#
And I said, my first reaction was that, you know, how a woman experiences the world is
#
very different from how a man experiences the world, right?
#
And for me, the biggest was that in this city, I could step out and walk in the dark alone
#
and not have this stress, anxiety weigh on me.
#
Looking over my shoulder, conscious of it.
#
You know, I have not been able to do in Delhi, despite the fact I have grown older.
#
I'm not a young girl anymore.
#
I've lived in Delhi for 35 plus years.
#
And yet there was this huge overhang in that city, right?
#
In fact, I remember 2021, November, December, when I first, one of those first trips to
#
Bangalore for the book and I was to meet somebody barely 10 minutes walk away.
#
And but I booked an Uber and I went and I have a terrible sense of direction, so I just
#
took an Uber and I went, it was just very close by.
#
So when we wrapped up by nine and it is dark, deserted stretch, right, I had to go back.
#
So he said, so he said he's walking back his home.
#
And it was for him also short hop.
#
And for me, it was a shitting bricks, man, that this deserted stretch night on familiar
#
I know nobody here and I'm going to walk and I'm not getting Uber.
#
I walked that day with a lot of stress and anxiety.
#
You know, it's been three years now that and this was the overhang of Delhi, right?
#
In Delhi, I would never do that.
#
I would take out my car, even if it's five minutes walk at night.
#
And here I now routinely walk, walk comfortably with no anxiety, no stress.
#
So how a woman experiences a world is so different and so distinct that things that men may not
#
often realize and women internalize it so much that it's kind of muscle memory, right?
#
But you know what, if odds are stacked against you, I think you compensated by doubly by
#
bringing in certain great determination, hunger.
#
I don't think if I had a very sort of accomplished sort of childhood in the sense that everything
#
was given to me on a platter, I would have this hunger, this determination, this grit
#
And I can see that a lot of my friends whose parents were well placed, who got things on
#
I remember like 94 when I joined Economic Times, my sister was staying with me and she
#
I had to prepare her breakfast, pack her lunch, and then she would come home, right?
#
So we two were there and then go to office and then do this double shift at some point
#
It was hard work and they would tell me, why do you have to do so much work?
#
The thing is, work was what I knew.
#
And work was what I knew will make things work for me because you have nothing else
#
You don't have a dad to open doors for you.
#
And then you don't distinguish yourself in any other way, right?
#
So work is where you can excel.
#
This is the easiest route to sort of up.
#
So I think when you don't have certain things, I think you compensate with other sets of
#
And I would definitely look at things like that.
#
What I didn't have, I compensated for the hunger, the curiosity, the grit, the determination
#
and those are important things.
#
You don't get it easily.
#
So I feel good that, you know, you go through the grind and only through the grind you learn
#
the power of some of these things.
#
In fact, the second word that came to my mind was not a word you had used until then, but
#
you've used it, I think, five times since and it is so apt.
#
Like when you describe about, you know, calling, getting the director's number and calling
#
him and I thought, OK, if I am the director, I am admitting this person right away because
#
it took the initiative to pick up the phone and make the call.
#
And it doesn't matter what the level is right now.
#
They will go far in life.
#
You know, your story about getting all your sisters to Delhi and helping them study and
#
helping them settle there.
#
Your story about working that double shift.
#
You know, that hunger is a whole game.
#
So it's it's I have another question.
#
It strikes me that in a sense, being an outsider, looking in actually probably in one sense,
#
while it made life much harder in one sense, I'm imagining it gave you a certain advantage
#
also because you could see things other people couldn't.
#
You had a broader vision, like at one level.
#
It is, of course, a negative, like just as women have to carry this extra layer of awareness
#
I'm guessing as an outsider, also you see things which others take for granted.
#
So it's totally a negative, but you can also use it for you because then your approach
#
to every story that you do, to everything that you read is shaped by that.
#
Would you say that's OK?
#
I mean, I think because you realize you have nothing to lean back on, right?
#
Like appointments milna hai, with a secretary.
#
You don't know anybody who will open doors for you, especially in the 90s when you are
#
like two, three years in the profession, right?
#
Or in the corporate world.
#
Your dad isn't somebody's friend who will open doors.
#
So you know that you're not expecting anybody, you don't get complacent.
#
And you know that you've got to work hard to get things.
#
I remember there was a comment that I needed from somebody who was a senior executive,
#
I think one of the corporate headquartered companies, a company headquartered in Delhi.
#
And this is pre-internet era, no cell phone, nothing.
#
And I had to get his quote for a story that I was working on.
#
I went and stood outside his home, kabhi toh aayega ghar, a ghar ka address yo hai,
#
wo registered hota hai.
#
So I went and stood outside his home and I got his comment because he arrived at some
#
point of time in the evening.
#
So one, this determination, this great hunger doesn't come easily.
#
And I actually feel that it's an important skill to have.
#
And it's hard to get many times when you are given things on a platter.
#
So I had that huge advantage.
#
I could work hard and I'm also a very hardworking person, right?
#
In the sense I can take rough and tumble, I can, I used to go in buses, I didn't have
#
a car or a vehicle, I didn't have that, right?
#
And I could take buses, move around, but 90s were also time not everybody had buses, right?
#
Not everybody had cars.
#
So totally, totally right that it is an advantage.
#
I actually see it as an advantage.
#
In hindsight, it was totally an advantage if I look around.
#
So when I remember when I joined Economic Times, I was really this outsider who knew
#
nothing about anything in Delhi, who knew nobody in Delhi and was starting from scratch.
#
But also the thing is, I am not weighing down on anybody's expectations, right?
#
My parents were just happy that okay, she's on her own feet, blah, blah.
#
So I was not being weighed down.
#
Whatever I was doing was first time happening in the family, right?
#
So there was joy from that point of view, despite the fact initially my parents thought
#
that you become journalist and this that, so they were quite upset actually, initially,
#
but slowly they gave in and they said, no, it's okay, whatever you decided to do, chase
#
You are neither also weighed down by your own expectations.
#
So when you have a certain dream that you've constructed for yourself, then you are on
#
I had no specific chase.
#
That meant it freed me in many ways.
#
I could chase what I wanted to at different points of time and I was not hostage to it.
#
And one of the other things that I realized as I look back is that I didn't develop these
#
golden handcuffs that people develop in their lives, that you can't do your life without
#
X or Y or Z, the material things particularly.
#
I'm not a very material person.
#
I'm not a very consumptive person.
#
So what dress I wore didn't matter that much even when I was young, right?
#
How I looked, it didn't even matter that much.
#
That meant that a lot of things that people spend their money on, I didn't drink, I didn't
#
smoke, that meant I was not, and I didn't like eating out, which is very rare again
#
I like home cooked food.
#
So all that meant I was able to conserve the limited amount of money one was making at
#
So I remember we bought our, invested in a house before we bought a car, okay, and which
#
In a small journalist's salary, how do you manage that?
#
This is like 90s, very, very small salary, you could hardly get by.
#
A small seed money was paid for a house that we wanted to buy.
#
So some of those very, very grounded middle class sort of approach to living life also
#
liberated me in the sense I was not hostage to the things that everybody was hostage to,
#
kaunsa nightclub mein jaana hai, kya hai.
#
But you can say the converse that how did you enjoy life?
#
How did you unwind life?
#
But for me, all these new things were joy, that, you know, things, the stories that I
#
was doing, the new world I was immersing in.
#
For me, it was, I was like a kid in a toy store, discovering, learning new things.
#
And that's what brought me so much joy, that, you know, books I could read, which I didn't
#
have access to earlier, right, I didn't also have the time to do it.
#
So, and in fact, now I reflect back a lot of my reading was mostly nonfiction, and it
#
So if I'm reading on wealth or doing a piece on wealth, I would read a book on the 21st
#
century, the wealthy class or something like that, you know, you would look up on the web
#
You couldn't buy books.
#
So there are Google books where you get the extract, at least one or two books, or I went
#
and did the, read the interviews of those authors who, people who've interviewed the
#
author and you get a sense of the book, right.
#
So some of those jugad you would do to understand that space.
#
And I actually truly enjoyed it.
#
Discovering these new spaces that I didn't know anything about.
#
What was the first, like, do you remember any memorable early stories?
#
Because imagine first you said you were a cyber writer, then they allow you to write,
#
they allow you to report, but your long form stories must still be way into the future.
#
So are there any memorable stories, stories that gave you that moment of pride, ki haan
#
So I got an interview with Jack Welch.
#
Story was not my god, so a story interview was not a big deal, but getting an interview
#
with Jack Welch in 97, 98 forgets, in the nineties some year for a cover reporter.
#
And Jack, this is the Jack Welch era, I remember he's a big guy globally time and everybody's
#
kind of celebrating him is the best CEO in the world and stuff.
#
And then I got an interview with him.
#
So that felt like, wow.
#
And of course, inside you know that you don't have the confidence to go and interview.
#
And thankfully, I had a lovely editor Arindam Sen Gupta, he said, Mani, can I come along?
#
He could have easily said, I know he was just trying to assuage my anxiety saying, I'll
#
come along and we'll do the interview together, but he was such a lovely editor, he asked,
#
can I come along and we together did the interview.
#
Getting him present in the interview made me so much more comfortable, but so in terms
#
of getting a break like that, that felt like really nice.
#
I did, I think I was the last one to interview Dr. Parminder Singh of Runback Sea before
#
And that story was a cover story on corporate dossier and I wrote well, I mean, the bosses
#
it was a great story and it felt good.
#
But I can't remember what I wrote in that story, but anyway, that story stood out for
#
In fact, today's first six months was every day, I thought I'm going to resign.
#
So you know, at corporate dossier, I was a star reporter, okay, who was doing cover stories
#
every other week, so my bosses put me on a pedestal and this that.
#
But inside I knew, I can't be a star reporter at this age, I have a lot of learning to do.
#
So if they are thinking that I'm a star reporter, something is wrong somewhere.
#
So I wanted to try another world, right?
#
So my son was born in 99 May, I don't know how I got that guts, 99 September, October
#
or November, I joined India Today, okay, my son is six months old, I should not have if
#
I was in my senses at that point of I should not have but anyway, I joined.
#
And here I come and India Today is a completely another world.
#
Here, my ideas were trashed, trashed, rubbished, my stories went through so many rewrites,
#
I couldn't even recognize it.
#
And I suddenly realized, I am so incompetent, inadequate, my writing needed so much rewriting.
#
And there were times that I felt, but I had a wonderful editor, Rohit Saran.
#
And he was like, Malini, it's okay.
#
And then he'll sit down with me that this is what was not right.
#
And India Today, the process of putting together the idea and submitting your idea, idea pitch,
#
that itself is a process that you would do a lot of hard work to submit your pitch in
#
that meeting, Friday meeting where all the editors are sitting, and your idea will get
#
trashed threadbare, right, there'll be discussed threadbare, so you don't want that to happen
#
So you'll research, research, research, and come to a place where your hypothesis you've
#
already come to, premised, you've already arrived, so you've done a lot of work before
#
you even present your idea to the team.
#
So having an editor who understood you, and who worked with you to make you better, I
#
don't think they make editors like that anymore.
#
I was very, very lucky to have him.
#
And so working the first, after first six months, things began to settle down, you got
#
a hang of it, right, how to do an idea, how to write a story.
#
And of course, bit by bit, you only got better, right.
#
And also remember that corporate dossier was a corporate focused, business focused, the
#
readers were very different.
#
India Today was like, our moms should be able to read it, making it lay person, the kind
#
of themes you chase were very different, macro economy, consumer, car story, but written
#
not like an economic story, but a consumer story, right, B2C kind of pieces.
#
So I learned, and those five, six years that I was at India Today was transformative.
#
I think it laid the foundation for me, the kind of journalist, eventually I evolved into
#
right, hard work that went into writing, hard work that and thinking about new ideas, how
#
It was a very, very important sort of stint for me from a learning standpoint.
#
And I learned so much by just observing people, right.
#
I remember Mr. Arun Puri, and he would ask such basic questions, right.
#
Mr. Puri doesn't even know this, but the moment he starts asking those basic questions,
#
you realize half the people in the room don't know this.
#
And he's asking very valid questions, while it may look dumb questions, but those were
#
very important questions to be answered before putting anything on the cover of the magazine.
#
And from that, I learned, Ahmed, that even if you sound stupid, ask those basic questions
#
that you don't understand, that what will happen, people will think you're stupid,
#
It's better to ask those stupid questions than make a fool of yourself, not even fool,
#
I mean, ask, there's no shame in it.
#
You don't know everything, and it's okay not to know everything, but there should be
#
an intent to know whatever you are accomplishing.
#
I think that was a very important and powerful learning for me, that best of people may not
#
know everything, but ask, don't be shy from asking those stupid questions as well.
#
And there were many other things that I learned, writing a B2C story, writing stories with
#
so many layers, writing stories at the intersection of society, business, economy, many of those
#
things I learned in that place, very, very formative.
#
I don't think they make editors in workplaces like that anymore.
#
I'm kind of fascinated by the different ways in which one learns a craft like journalism,
#
like one way of learning it is that you go to a big journalism school and you're reading
#
all these models, and you know, you're writing from when you're very young, you're an avid
#
reader, you've got all of that, that's one way of kind of getting into it.
#
You come with preconceptions, but you also come with a certain writing style and et cetera,
#
and the other way is coming at it differently, much more like you did, that from the ground
#
up, you are having to work hard and learn everything, you know, how do you craft a sentence?
#
How do you begin a story?
#
How do you structure a story if it's 600 words, if it's 800 words, if it's 2000 words?
#
How do you reach out for quotes?
#
You know, so take me through a bit of what that learning process of two aspects of journalism
#
were, the craft and the values, craft, of course, just in terms of, you know, I'm guessing
#
a lot of your earlier work would have been learning by doing, by doing again and again
#
at the ET desk and et cetera, et cetera, and also of values, because that is something
#
which we are never taught explicitly in a sense.
#
You kind of, you know, get it from osmosis, from whoever your mentors are, you mentioned
#
you were lucky to have good mentors, but a lot of people aren't.
#
Journalism is full of mediocrity and it's full of people who just should not be editors
#
So what was the journey like for you of learning these different aspects?
#
So I'll first talk about just the values, right?
#
As I was mentioning, you know, I was not this person who hopped out, you know, who enjoyed
#
a five-star meal at a conference, right?
#
I would be as happy eating a roasted butta in the roadside, right?
#
So some of those jays that people had, I didn't, thankfully I have, for whatever reasons, right?
#
Second was that I worked with some wonderful editors.
#
I remember it was a day trip to Kabul in 2001, 2000-2001, some that era, and I started my
#
day at three in the morning.
#
It was a chartered flight that the CII was, and certain government officials were taking
#
to Kabul, and it was an immersion trip, and then we were coming back, and a very, very
#
And I am the person who is in bed by nine, sleeping by 10, 10.30.
#
Even when I was young, I would prefer to do that.
#
So I came back, and before going, we had done all the groundwork, me and Rohit, Rohit Sanmarni
#
Pura tayaar karke rakho, background sab kuch tayaar karke rakho, aap aauge.
#
You have to just write that bit from there so that the padding and everything is done,
#
and you just need to write the color and stuff.
#
You know, I returned to office that day at two in the morning.
#
Rohit was waiting in the office.
#
We were together, then I told Rohit that, you know, I am like really tired, and I don't
#
think I can write anymore.
#
He said, Marni, you just sit here, you dictate, you tell me what you saw, we'll do it together.
#
We did it together, until five, six, whatever time we finished, and we sent the pages to
#
You know, a boss who works alongside with you like that, it was an important value that,
#
you know, you don't take shortcuts in any of these things.
#
Other things, I think it comes from the family as well, right?
#
My father was that person that khilana pilana nahi hai, jitna tumhara hai tumhara hai, baaki
#
tumhara nahi hai, so whatever.
#
You know, one incident particularly sits in my memory, which I want to talk about.
#
So I remember I had done a critical story, it was a cover story on a car company, and
#
it's a deep dive piece, where I had looked at this car company, and obviously they were
#
And then the cop-com person came and told me that, Malini, this person, my boss wants
#
to have lunch with you.
#
So I deliberately avoided lunches in a five-star hotel, because one, I can't afford, baba,
#
toh main toh paise nahi de paungi, and okay, chai coffee chalega.
#
So I said, you know what, not lunch, we'll do tea coffee.
#
So we met at Oberoi for tea coffee or whatever, and then I got into the car.
#
And this person came to see me off till the car, and then he left something at the back
#
He was leaving something.
#
I said, hey, what are you leaving?
#
He said, no, some book.
#
I said, okay, a book is fine.
#
So I drove outside, and then I stopped the car, and I looked at it, there was a Bose
#
And there was a book as well, right?
#
I was leave it, I was leave it.
#
I called the cop-com person, I said, this is not on, please have it picked up from my
#
And I reached office, but I took this stuff home.
#
And my son was, I think, seven, eight or some such, I forget now, whatever age, but he was
#
And I wanted to make a point to my son.
#
And my son was very fond of music, very whatever.
#
But I was not in a place where I had the opportunity to buy a Bose speaker.
#
So I told him that, see, this is what happened today.
#
He left it, and I told that person to come and have it picked up, he'll come and have
#
it picked up yesterday.
#
And I was trying to mostly make a point to my son that something like this is not on.
#
And my son was trying to sort of argue with me that, what's the problem?
#
Yo, you shouldn't get influenced, your story shouldn't get influenced, what is the harm
#
in keeping, blah, blah.
#
He's a very young little child who's only looking at that Bose speaker and sort of talking
#
That day, I felt very, very disappointed, and with a heavy heart, I slept that somewhere
#
I've gone wrong in bringing up my son, that I can't make sense to my son that this is
#
I'm sure he agrees with you today, when you're six or seven.
#
No, no, no, I finished the story.
#
This happened that day, and I was quite heavy hearted that day.
#
And you know, after one month, he comes back to me.
#
And he tells me, Mom, you remember that conversation that we had that day?
#
I said, yeah, what happened now?
#
So he said, you know what, I reflected on it.
#
And my respect for you has multiplied.
#
And I really respect for what you stand for.
#
And that day, he says in Hindi, my mind went blank, that somewhere I realized I had not
#
sort of failed in instilling the values that I would want to see in him.
#
So those things happened.
#
But I think multiple things shape it.
#
I think your family values, your personal values, and I think what you see around, I
#
think it's a combination of all that, that I think shape the kind of journalist you become
#
and from a value standpoint.
#
Now on the craft itself, I'm thinking about it.
#
So as I said earlier, I had no idea that writing was in me.
#
I never thought I'm going to become a writer.
#
I had barely read books, actually.
#
When I was doing history honours, I was reading history books, that's it.
#
And there was no time, other time for other things that I could read.
#
But I did get exposed to Ayn Rand and some of the other things that, but I was not that
#
Mills and Boons person.
#
So I know the girls in this college would read Mills and Boons.
#
I would find it too fluffy, too flaky to sort of even look at it.
#
So I don't think I had exposure to good writing from that point of view.
#
But I read people who were writing around me.
#
And they were writing that I really loved how they captured things.
#
So that came from reading.
#
Two, I think what was good at that point of time is that Times of India had lovely library,
#
which got all these expensive magazines from HBR to Time to Newsweek to everything that
#
you could, including New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times.
#
And I would sit in the library a lot.
#
So whenever I had free time, I would go and read.
#
I think that gave me exposure to the kind of stories, possibilities that you could look
#
And New York Times particularly, I remember the kind of stories that they did, which was
#
not just a business story, but they brought so many layers to the story.
#
That was an important learning curve for me that a same story can be done in so many ways.
#
And those layered stories really interested me.
#
I also liked how some of these global publications looked at, say, maybe if they're looking at
#
layoffs or they're looking at consumption and the kind of lens that they used to look
#
Many of them, even in Indian journalism at that point, you would not find so many of
#
those kinds, but globally you did.
#
And thankfully, it was an era that global publications access were free.
#
At least first 10 articles were free or whatever.
#
So you could have access to them and you could read.
#
And there were times that you didn't have access, you begged and asked somebody to forward
#
you that piece and there was something that stood out for you and you would learn that.
#
So in terms of craft, that was it.
#
I think sometimes bosses also helped enormously.
#
You learned different ways of writing, different style of writing.
#
And I experimented a lot, write first person account, case study based this thing.
#
I remember I was in Seattle and I didn't, I was working for Seattle Post there.
#
I'd gone on a fellowship in 2005 and for six months I was working there.
#
And again, I knew nothing about Seattle, but I loved to soak in.
#
And I became this reporter who was writing extensively about Indian population there
#
and a lot of stories came, page one and in great interviews I did.
#
So one story I did was a first person account of what was it like for somebody working in
#
the 24 by 7 industry, right, from an American standpoint.
#
It was an entire page they had given, I forget the entire page or whatever, it was a massive
#
story and written in first person account.
#
My boss was thrilled to get it, okay, that somebody from India, third world country in
#
2005 could write a piece like that.
#
So I experimented with some of that first person account, different formats of writing
#
and looking at what others did also helped inspire you, give you ideas.
#
And global publications were a great place to look at.
#
I've read Economist a whole lot and that is one publication I still do.
#
I know they are opinionated, I have a very strong point of view.
#
Sometimes I may agree or sometimes many times I may disagree.
#
But what I like is I know that which side of the argument they are and then I can accordingly.
#
But I also like that they offer me a rounded view of the world.
#
I mean, there is science, there is culture, there is art, there is business, there is
#
geography, there is national politics, everything, right.
#
It again gives me a very rounded sense of the world, what is happening.
#
So that's one important reading habit that has stuck.
#
And earlier I used to read it in the library, but now I can afford a subscription so I have
#
And I think I still do multiple drafts of the story, multiple drafts, till the time
#
I'm not happy and typically I sometimes I get up at 3 in the morning.
#
I'm a morning person so I can get up at 3, 4, but I can't be awake after 10.
#
So I'll wake up in the morning and give it a stab, another stab till the time I'm happy
#
Now this means that I'm just looking at my, at the time we can't talk for seven more hours
#
because we'll be past your bedtime.
#
So we'll have to sort of end it before that.
#
So let's take a quick commercial break and on the other side of the break, let's talk
#
about your book and much else.
#
Look forward to that, Amit, thank you.
#
Have you always wanted to be a writer but never quite gotten down to it?
#
Well, I'd love to help you.
#
Since April 2020, I've enjoyed teaching 27 cohorts of my online course, The Art of Clear
#
Writing, and an online community has now sprung up of all my past students.
#
We have workshops, a newsletter to showcase the work of students and vibrant community
#
In the course itself, through four webinars spread over four weekends, I share all I know
#
about the craft and practice of clear writing.
#
There are many exercises, much interaction and a lovely and lively community at the end
#
The course costs rupees 10,000 plus GST or about $150.
#
If you're interested, head on over to register at IndiaUncut.com slash clear writing.
#
Being a good writer doesn't require God-given talent, just a willingness to work hard and
#
a clear idea of what you need to do to refine your skills.
#
Welcome back to The Scene and the Unseen.
#
My great pleasure to be chatting with Malini Goel, who's had such a fascinating journey
#
And the overwhelming question I have at this point is that seeing your sort of proclivity
#
to diving deep into things and finding out more about them, how is it that you didn't
#
write a book before this?
#
Like through your journalistic career, were you always sort of like, did the thought cross
#
your mind that I can write something deeper and I can, you know, because it would seem
#
to be a natural extension or were you just happy with the journey, the way it was going?
#
So I think writing book is a matter of multiple sort of things, right?
#
It requires a kind of time and commitment that you should be able to afford.
#
I don't think I had the time, right?
#
So but the moment my son got older and he was more on his feet and I'm a single parent,
#
So it became easier and easier.
#
And then came a time that I wanted to write a book, but I didn't know what.
#
And all journalists want to write a book at some point of time.
#
It tests their sort of new territories.
#
And so this was around 2015, 2016, I had begun to think about a book.
#
My son had gone to grade 11th or something.
#
And I thought maybe now is a good time.
#
But second is I think women often talk about it and I do.
#
I used to think, will I be able to write a book?
#
So you question yourself, right?
#
And it's funny because you've written all your life and still you think about that,
#
And this book also didn't originate as a book.
#
So I think it was 2016, 17, somewhere around that period.
#
And before going there, like usual, all new countries that I go to,
#
I put a Google alert one month before where I begin to get all the news reports on the country.
#
That's my favorite pastime to read about a new country.
#
So normally journalists would look at it like a junket.
#
But for me it was an immersion into a new country.
#
And it was a long journey, which would begin much earlier.
#
So when I reached there, I'd read that book, Startup Nation, written by two journalists there,
#
one journalist and one somebody from the government or startup.
#
I forget the name of the author, sorry.
#
And when I reached there, I realized that how a small country like Israel could position itself
#
as startup nation so beautifully at so many levels.
#
Journalists came together, entrepreneurs came together, governments came together.
#
The country has something called a chief innovation officer,
#
who sits on a billion dollar or more budget to shape Israel's innovation strategy.
#
All that was very, very fascinating for me.
#
And as we journalists were sitting in the room interviewing this Tel Aviv mayor,
#
it occurred to me how fascinating it would be to look at the world's top five startup tech hubs
#
and what makes them tick.
#
Each of them are so distinct from the other.
#
You go to Shanghai, it feels very different.
#
Go to Berlin, it's very different.
#
Bangalore is very different.
#
And each of them have such unique strengths and weaknesses.
#
And combination of that is what uniquely shapes them,
#
including the geographical and bilateral and other reasons why they are there.
#
So I came back and then I began to think about it.
#
And it was just a special report.
#
I didn't know what to do with it, but I knew that something like that would.
#
At some point of time, I toyed with the idea of sort of immersing myself in two, three kinds of countries.
#
So one was the Scandinavian countries.
#
One was the Arab country that I wanted to.
#
Japan was the third that I was fascinated by.
#
And maybe US or something.
#
And I wanted to sort of look at the lives of women in these countries and how they are shaped by.
#
These are like dreaming, right?
#
And women in Gulf countries, right?
#
They live in such different and dramatic world, right?
#
Contrast that to us, all the Scandinavian countries, which I think is heaven on earth for women particularly.
#
So that was another project that I was toying in my head.
#
But it was very complicated.
#
And it was also not directly relevant to my work as well.
#
Startup and tech, I had begun to look at it by around 2010.
#
So I was looking at that space for a while.
#
And by 2015, unicorns were being born.
#
Flipkarts was making headlines.
#
And Bangalore was hitting headlines more frequently than that.
#
And all that was happening.
#
And that's why I thought maybe tech landscape.
#
And this was also entering a digital era, right?
#
And tech aid, as they call it.
#
And I thought this is a good space to explore something.
#
And then I put together a plan for Bangalore.
#
This is that, remember, the special report I'm working on on five countries and whatever, five cities.
#
And Bangalore is one of them.
#
And I said Bangalore toh nastik hai.
#
And I will make trips as a journalist also.
#
And I was trying to be frugal and sort of not that ambitious.
#
And I said, okay, we'll do a special report on Bangalore first.
#
So when I put together this plan, this is sometime in 2019.
#
A friend of mine said, Malini, this is a fantastic book project.
#
He said, this is a fantastic book project.
#
Why don't you do a book on Bangalore?
#
You have to do that book.
#
So then the idea occurred to me.
#
And then I began to work on it as a book and see the serendipity of it.
#
How very organic, very serendipitously this project evolved.
#
So all through my life, you know, if I found somebody with whom I resonate,
#
I immediately sort of pause and make friends and say that, you know, I love interacting.
#
So there's this person called Avinash Raghava.
#
We met one or two times, but something about us resonated, right?
#
The values, the worldview, all that.
#
And Avinash and I became friends.
#
And Avinash was working with Excel at that point of time.
#
So I say, for years, 80% of my meetings are without agenda.
#
With agenda, I can pick up the phone and talk.
#
But without agenda is where the maximum interesting conversations happen.
#
And as a journalist, I sort of try and follow that.
#
So Avinash was also catching up for coffee.
#
I told him, Avinash, I'm working on this.
#
He said, well, if you're working on a book on Bangalore, then Prashant would love to collaborate on it.
#
I knew him, but I hadn't met.
#
So I said, okay, why don't you find out and tell me and we'll connect on.
#
By then it was January of 2020 and lockdown had begun to happen.
#
Prashant and I connected on Zoom and we got aligned.
#
He was totally aligned on how I had envisaged the book, which is what it is.
#
Barring one or two here and there, but it's mostly what I had put together the plan then.
#
And I wanted to look at the old layers of the city.
#
It was not a tech layer or it was not just startup or not just one layer.
#
It was a multiple sort of 360-degree view of the city that I wanted to do at that point of time.
#
Prashant was totally aligned and we began to work and lockdown happened.
#
Pandemic sort of unruffled our lives, ruffled our lives.
#
And then by 2021, summer, my parents, you know, that wave that everybody went through, massive sort of disruption in their lives, it happened.
#
My parents were hospitalized and it was a moment of reckoning as well.
#
What also happened is sometime in 2019, I had gone on a Vipassana.
#
That was my first sort of Vipassana.
#
And when I came back, my son decided to go on a Vipassana.
#
He was 18 year old or some such, right?
#
And he came back and then we were having a chat.
#
Sometimes he talks like he's my mother or he's my father or whatever.
#
So he sat down and he told me that, what are you doing?
#
You want to do this book and you are chasing this full time job.
#
And I was traveling to different worlds, right?
#
Trying to also do the book and also do this thing.
#
And he sat me down in 2020 December or something and said, quit your job.
#
Write a book if that's where your heart lay.
#
You don't have to be so stretched.
#
You middle class, financial security, this that.
#
And then he said something that, you see these four walls.
#
Three walls of your life canvas is painted.
#
You can say it's your parent, it's this, it's my this, that.
#
The fourth wall is still Kali canvas.
#
You paint it the way you want.
#
Don't turn 75 and tell me that because of you, because of XYZ, you were not able to paint the way you wanted it to paint.
#
And then this 2021, this happened.
#
The COVID thing happened, right?
#
And I was turning 50 and I saw death of a whole lot of colleagues, friends.
#
And it was a moment of reckoning.
#
Life, I don't know when till when you live.
#
And summer of that year, Economic Times was shutting down, Sunday Economic Times, where I worked for 10 years plus.
#
And they were telling me digital sort of version or whatever.
#
And I told myself, you have to give yourself one year to do what you want to do.
#
In my son's word, the middle class mentality of financial security, I quit.
#
And I decided to, I said, at 50, I deserve to give myself one year to do something that I'm deeply passionate about.
#
And I'll see what will happen next.
#
Prior to that, I think I was this person who would plan, who would be structured, who would think all the pros and cons, way things before I actually took step.
#
I think that was it was an inflection point for me as a person that I began to experiment a lot,
#
like take decisions on gut and instinct a lot after that I've noticed it.
#
And that's that's what I'm sort of and I feel very good about that shift inside me that I'm able to trust my instinct, gut and take decisions.
#
OK, so I quit Economic Times.
#
And I said, I do things that I felt scared about or that I wanted to do, but I've never done.
#
So one thing I decided I'll do podcast.
#
I have to get over with my this complex that I have about my voice, insecurity that I have about my voice.
#
So I said, that's one thing I want.
#
One battle I want to win.
#
Second is the book that I wanted to finish.
#
So I looked for a podcast opportunity and I didn't know if I could do it.
#
I was a print journalist.
#
But OK, what will happen?
#
I'll make a fool of myself.
#
So then I looked around.
#
There were people who were willing to give me podcast.
#
And then my ex-boss Rohit was at Times of India.
#
I said, well, you want to do podcast, do it for us.
#
We'll pay you a small sum as well.
#
And since he was my ex-boss, there is a comfort level as well, right, to get started.
#
So I began to do a podcast for Times of India.
#
So that one tick box happened.
#
And then I began to work on the book.
#
September was the first time that, you know, pandemic was unwinding and people were starting to lead normal life.
#
And I took my first flight to Bangalore and I met Prashant for the first time.
#
And it was also a very different world, right?
#
When I came here, people were working from home and I was staying in a guest house.
#
This guest house had like 30 odd rooms.
#
I was the only person staying there with workers.
#
And it was a really difficult place to be just working like that, right?
#
But I also realized that if I have to understand the city, I have to start from the bottom.
#
Because when I was reporting in Delhi, from Delhi, talking to people on phone, it was a very top-down view of the world.
#
I was a business journalist who knew the startup founders, who knew the investors, but I couldn't get a sense of the city.
#
And I felt I wouldn't be able to write a book like that.
#
So when I came here, I began to meet people on the street from slums, poor people, right?
#
In hindsight, that was the best strategy I could have deployed to work on this book.
#
I think top-down view of the city would have been so flawed.
#
And I just started at the bottom and met all kinds of people.
#
And what was good about it was, before that, when I began work on the book,
#
what I also realized that I need to be on social media.
#
I was not a social media person.
#
I was a fly on the wall watching people, but never very active on social media.
#
But I realized that if this project has to take off and work, I need to cook in public, cook the book in public.
#
So show people what's going on behind the scenes.
#
That was an important learning that some of the conversations I had with people as I was working on the book.
#
And it was a very difficult transition for me because I'm that way a little more introverted.
#
In a sense, I don't like talking about myself or marketing or pitching myself, taking a selfie, putting it out.
#
That was a very difficult journey for me.
#
But the moment I persuaded myself and convinced myself it was important for the project, it became easier.
#
And what happened as I was reporting, I didn't know people on the street or even the entry-level graduates or even the middle managers.
#
I knew the founders and CEOs, right?
#
Social media helped enormously in connecting with the kind of people I wanted to.
#
Even the slums that I visited, right?
#
Somebody just reached out on my DM said, okay, I'm so-and-so and I work with this NGO.
#
Then I just got onto the phone and I deliberately didn't reach out to people I knew because I didn't want a reportage bias in my reporting, right?
#
So all these people were reaching out and then I got on a phone and I didn't know who the person was.
#
There was an instinctive trust and we just spoke.
#
He said, well, I've worked in the slums.
#
I said, slums? Okay, can you take me to two, three slums in the city?
#
He took me to two, three slums in the city.
#
I didn't know Canada and he was a fantastic sort of guy to take me around.
#
And people like that came up.
#
Activists, other people who I had zero connect, zero understanding and they didn't know me.
#
I was this business journalist, right?
#
So they didn't know who I was.
#
For them also, it was a clean slate.
#
They had no baggage and all kinds of people just stepped forward to sort of show me different aspects of Bangalore that they wanted to show.
#
At some point of time, I also realized that my reportage had very huge male bias because most of the time when I was calling out for names or references were coming to me, they were mostly men.
#
So then I put out a tweet again that, hey, women of Bangalore, I want to hear your stories.
#
Tell me, especially if you are young and new to the city and young and sort of chasing your career, because I didn't want everybody to be my age, right?
#
I wanted young people to also reach out.
#
And then my mailbox, my DM was flooded with so many women reaching out to me.
#
That was powerful because these women I didn't know and all kinds of women, I spent time with them because I knew that if I have to capture the flavor of the city, this young and single in the city chapter was important to capture.
#
I would have spent time with over 40 such people in the city and spent time having a meal with them, having a deep conversation with them.
#
Many people that you see in the book, those conversations would have happened over five, six, seven meetings and many conversations to be able to thread a narrative around their story.
#
So such things happened.
#
Slum was difficult, but especially language barrier was there and language means not just Kannada, but Telugu also sometimes, Tamil also sometimes.
#
Having those conversations were difficult.
#
But I leaned on a range of props like at times I had this driver who came and I was interviewing this Ola Uber driver on the street.
#
So there was one place in Koramangala where these people come and eat and that place is like buzzing through the day.
#
And that man who was selling doesn't know English, but his sons knew.
#
So his sons translated for me.
#
And then my driver helped me interview all the people who were coming there.
#
And I spent half a day with all these people asking all kinds of questions.
#
As simple as what do you do on your phone when you are waiting for the ride, right?
#
And you'll see them waiting on their bike and just flipping through their phone.
#
And I would be curious, what do you do?
#
And there was a park that where I used to frequent in Koramangala Park.
#
And in the morning I would go for my walk in the morning and you would see so many cars lined up
#
and drivers are sleeping inside them.
#
And then deliberately sometimes I would come later in the evening when they're up and about this thing
#
and have five minutes conversation that where you are from and what you do and some of those conversations.
#
Or in the beginning when I came, I was working out of Accel office and Accel Launchpad office.
#
And I was the only one working there.
#
Everybody was working from home, but there were workers there
#
and workers from all over, they became like friends, right?
#
I would sit down and have a chat with them.
#
And many of these conversations, like anybody, I think trust is the most important barrier that you have to break down.
#
Once you win their trust, then everything smoothens.
#
And I spent time to sort of build that trust with many.
#
I remember this Kormangala Park, there is this guard who would see me every morning.
#
And this is COVID time.
#
You have to wear a mask, everything is there.
#
Ma'am, wear a mask, this, that.
#
And then sometimes I would say, Sudhir, what is going on?
#
Transition from there to one day.
#
Sudhir, won't you invite me home for tea?
#
Then he got shy and said, Ma'am, come on Sunday.
#
So then on Sunday I called him, come to your house.
#
And then he called me home.
#
He lives in a small room, just one room, which doubles up for everything, including a kitchen.
#
And there is a bathroom, which is a common bathroom of the park, right?
#
Sitting down, having a chat with him.
#
What dreams he has for kids?
#
So there was a time that I had some time between my meetings and my driver was, I said, where do you live?
#
So he said, Ma'am, it's very far.
#
He said, 45 minutes ride.
#
I said, come on, I have time, 3 hours time.
#
I sat with his wife and kids and we just spent time.
#
I was trying to understand people, because these people are not articulate, right?
#
You need to spend time with them to understand instinctive things that they will not be able to articulate.
#
So I was trying to understand how did his life change?
#
He was a Kanadiga, right?
#
I was trying to understand how does he see the change?
#
How has his life changed?
#
And he said, you know, when I came here in early 2000, my salary was around 20 and today I earn around 25.
#
But at that point of time, I didn't have baby, right?
#
Today I have got kids and this thing and 25 is nothing today's world.
#
So clearly there were parts of the society that was hurting and they were not sort of keeping their incomes were not keeping pace to the growth.
#
But there was another part where you saw even in that segment, people had just blossomed and began to dream and dream big and achieve big.
#
I remember there's one guy I met.
#
It's there in the book as well.
#
So this guy came to Bangalore as a 13, 14 year old and he came via Coimbatore.
#
So he was from Assam, came via Coimbatore to here and he came as a guard first, right?
#
And he was held hostage by a contractor, subcontractor where he was not given food, nothing locked in.
#
A bunch of them locked into a room for three days and he narrated that story.
#
And when he came here, I knew no other language except Bengali.
#
And then slowly he grew, grew, grew and he finished his 10th.
#
I think he finished his 12th.
#
Today he works for a large security agency, multinational.
#
So he has a full time job and he supplied over, I don't know, I may be getting the numbers wrong,
#
hundreds or thousands of people to the security agency.
#
And when I was leaving, he said, Madam, if you get to know of somebody who wants like workers,
#
security guards or any kind of worker, please tell me.
#
And he had done, I think, 5000 or some such numbers already,
#
like he brought in people and supplied to the agencies here.
#
And I saw people like that and he was earning around 80-90,000 or more than that.
#
Somebody who came like 5-6,000 over a period of 10 years, 12 years.
#
And you saw so many people come here with nothing.
#
And I think it's a story that you see play out all across other big cities.
#
I'm sure Delhi, Bombay would have.
#
But what hit you here is that these growth stories were often crunched in a very short span of time.
#
Like within 10 years or within 5 years, these people have sort of dramatically evolved in their ambitions, in their chase.
#
That was something that stood out for me at least when I looked at them.
#
What else? I'm going to pause.
#
One of the things that strikes me is that at one level,
#
you could look at life for migrants in any of the big cities.
#
And it feels nasty and brutish and it feels almost brutal at some points.
#
And at another level, you see the same people, and this is probably truer the lower down you go in terms of strata,
#
are so often incredibly open and friendly and welcoming.
#
Just when you think that, oh my God, every day for this person is just such a nightmare.
#
It's just horrible. They possibly can't wait to go to sleep to escape the day.
#
And yet time and again, I've heard from various people and experienced myself that the sort of openness and friendliness you get is off the charts.
#
And I'm sure you agree with that.
#
But what do you think explains it?
#
And is this something that also tells us about the essential loneliness of urban life,
#
that anyone reaching out at a human level is a welcome opportunity no matter who they are?
#
So one, I think there's nuance in all these conversations, Amit.
#
It's not that everybody is against or everybody is for, so let's just get that out of the way.
#
I think during my conversation, I've met so many people who are kind of digger.
#
I remember meeting an auto driver and asking.
#
So he's an old auto driver. I can see it.
#
And so I just took an extra 10 minutes before I'm getting off.
#
He's been riding an auto for a very long time.
#
So I said, do you like the change? Do you not like the change?
#
He said, Madam, if this change doesn't come, then where does our income come from?
#
It doesn't come, right?
#
So I get, I earn this much, this much.
#
I said, are you happy with it?
#
Then he said that, okay, unhappy, I could have done this, that, that.
#
But the thing is, the growth has brought, the limited point he was making,
#
the growth has brought prosperity in our lives, right?
#
Going back to, so at the bottom, yes, all human beings are the same.
#
I think what happens is, at a level where you belong to a different state,
#
that is, you are the professional, well-qualified, well-heeled, globetrotting workers, right?
#
You are cushioned from some of the hardships that go into the making of the migrant underclass,
#
as you would want to call it, right?
#
Because one, they don't have the money.
#
They are exposed to the range of flashpoints that they are not able to sort of witness.
#
We retreat in our gated communities in many ways, right?
#
We are not that exposed to it, and we speak a language which is a common language here.
#
So one, there is a class barrier that, definitely what we experience and what the underclass experiences,
#
and the migrant workers at the bottom experience is a two different world.
#
But you also see that incidents of some of these things have been rising, right?
#
It's also because I think what Santosh Desai mentioned,
#
that this city has grown so rapidly, so sharply, and so dramatically,
#
that many people feel they are being run over by the outsiders coming into the city.
#
All the top jobs are being taken away by them, right?
#
But I also feel that global cities, all global cities from London to New York,
#
look at them and they are multicultural, multinational in how, who reside there.
#
And there is a journey in between, like you are a small town and you are this multicultural global city.
#
There is a journey that you have to cover from that small town to being that multicultural city.
#
And that journey in the middle is full of friction points.
#
And all global cities must transition that to become that.
#
From Silicon Valley to New York to London, they all sort of today are really world class
#
in terms of the kind of people, how they look at outsiders.
#
I mean, you go there, you don't feel, I mean, the range of languages,
#
the range of accents with which people speak and they seem okay.
#
Bombay has reached that.
#
I think Bangalore has to reach at some point of time there.
#
That will be, we say that Bombay is a global city,
#
but that is an important marker on that journey that it needs to cover.
#
My broad question was not so much about the approach that people have towards migrants.
#
We can talk about that as well, but also about, you know,
#
your experience with like within the book, it seems, and from what you were saying,
#
is that people were always very open with you, very friendly with you, very happy to talk.
#
And that's something that always leaves me a little surprised
#
because at one level you imagine that, you know, you've got enough shit going on in your life.
#
You're not going to be friendly with random stranger coming and asking questions and et cetera, et cetera.
#
And yet they do often, so often let you in, yet they do often surprise you with friendliness.
#
One is that over the years you learn that skill not to be intimidating.
#
I think that is very, very important.
#
And I have done similar reportage.
#
I've gone on similar assignments in UP villages,
#
some of the most backward villages in Haryana,
#
and many other parts in Maharashtra, Jharkhand, all that.
#
I think that experience trains you how not to intimidate people.
#
You dress down as much as possible.
#
You look as normal, and I'm a woman, right, and I will stand out even in that surrounding.
#
You learn to talk their language.
#
You learn to sit with them on the floor, make them feel comfortable.
#
Second is I think there were times that somebody didn't open up, right,
#
and it happened multiple times.
#
And you respect that as well, that some people may not.
#
Third is that I think you don't be impatient.
#
You are not talking to a CEO in a boardroom who will know,
#
who will be articulate and who will tell you what you are looking for.
#
You have to be extremely patient with some of these people on their trust
#
before you ask any questions.
#
Like I told you about this guard, like I told you about this driver, many maids,
#
and in the morning I would go out, and even the municipal workers, right?
#
There was language barrier, but just a smile, and good morning,
#
and that sort of opened them up.
#
And then one occasion, she's in a thoughtful mood,
#
and you found somebody who can translate the language.
#
You sit down with her and ask one or two questions.
#
And she'll tell you some small things like that.
#
So I think with interviewing executives, well-heeled executives,
#
it's so much easier than getting trust of these people.
#
There are so many barriers, class barriers, economic, social, language,
#
and you have to cross that to be able to.
#
And winning their trust was very, very important.
#
And often I was not an aggressive reporter.
#
I'm not an aggressive reporter anyway,
#
but definitely with them I had enormous patience.
#
Two, three, fourth meeting and I'm okay.
#
And even with educated people, right,
#
if there were deep personal stories to be told,
#
you want to wait, you want to earn their trust.
#
They should feel comfortable to be able to open up to you.
#
And if they don't open up even then, it is okay.
#
I remember there is a couple that is off the record, right?
#
We would have met three, four times.
#
We would have had multiple rounds of conversation.
#
Then I played back the entire section to them.
#
They were earlier okay, fine, fine.
#
And then after reading it, they said, Malini, it's too personal.
#
Can we keep it off the record?
#
And you learn to respect that.
#
I think as a journalist, if there is one thing I will never dilute is the trust.
#
In the people that I'm interviewing.
#
In fact, there are times that people haven't even told me to play back the quotes
#
and I have played back.
#
Not because of anything.
#
It's just that their trust matters to me a whole lot than anything else.
#
It's old style journalism, but I think it is a very important part.
#
Human trust is important.
#
You've described in your book how Bangalore is a city of change.
#
Not just in the context of change over time or so on and so forth.
#
You've pointed out that if you are in 1800 and you wake up now, of course it has changed.
#
If you are in 1900 and you wake up now, of course it has changed.
#
If you are in 2018 and you wake up now, it has changed.
#
So it doesn't matter what the time span is.
#
It is just changing massively and it's mind blowing to that extent.
#
I think you quoted Nandan Likhani in your book of pointing that out and all that.
#
So paint me a picture of the broadest of those changes.
#
Like maybe over a hundred years or a hundred and fifty years.
#
Because I remember when I was growing up, as you pointed out in the book,
#
in my imagination, Bangalore is garden city, retired people city,
#
weather is great all year and etc.
#
That's what we heard about it.
#
So give me a sense of what are the sort of historical forces bringing it here?
#
Because the other thing that I find interesting and in your book,
#
somebody even uses the phrase virtuous cycle.
#
And it seems to me that with any place there is always a virtuous cycle
#
where once it evolves in a particular way,
#
people are coming just because there are people like that there
#
and it feeds itself and it becomes this beautiful thing.
#
So if you want to work in a place with this kind of energy
#
and this kind of labor and this kind of capital,
#
you end up coming here and the network effects multiply.
#
But I'm trying to think of even before that,
#
what is it about Bangalore in the first place,
#
well before the 80s, well before the tech boom happens.
#
What is it about this place that it would eventually become the city that attracts all of this?
#
So I'll answer this question in two parts.
#
There are things in the city that I heard again and again
#
was true in the 60s and 70s is as true today.
#
And there are things that's changing so dramatically so quickly
#
that people can't wrap their heads around it, right?
#
So I remember talking to, I forget the name,
#
let me just try and remember the name.
#
Somebody came in the 60s, the name will come to me later.
#
He had done his PhD from UIS and he was from Hyderabad
#
and he wanted to return to only Hyderabad, right?
#
This is the 60s and 60s and 70s.
#
And this was this PSU city and everything was,
#
it was a town, PSU town, there is HAL town, all that, colonies, right?
#
And then he came here because everybody in the research field,
#
in the electronics area, this was an electronics hub, right?
#
All the government ITIs and electronic labs, etc. were being set up here.
#
Are you referring to Sridhar Mitta?
#
Yes, yes, Sridhar Mitta, correct.
#
So Sridhar Mitta came here and he wanted to go to Hyderabad
#
but somehow Vipro wanted to set up its unit here
#
and Sridhar Mitta came here in the city.
#
So what hasn't changed is some of this top talent
#
who were looking for places to locate, for one reason or the other, located here.
#
So in the 60s and 70s, since it was the PSU era which hired the top talent in the city,
#
the city got the top talent, at that time it was PSUs which were hiring,
#
now it is the tech industry which is hiring.
#
So that is something, it's a constant.
#
And reasons have changed.
#
At that time it was PSU, later it is IT outsourcing,
#
then it is MNC, R&D hub and then now it is start-ups, right?
#
And now it is at a global level, India is kind of rising up in terms of tech flavour,
#
its tech journey, just the other day Paul Graham was tweeting that
#
India is often the place that people are thinking of
#
and 20 years back he would have questioned that
#
but today he understands that and he is actually betting on it, right?
#
So that, now second thing that was particularly very interesting
#
is the women and how they looked at their world.
#
So I remember somebody, and this is more recent, 70s, 80s,
#
because I didn't meet too many going back too long back,
#
that women and people from down south particularly
#
saw this place as a very cosmopolitan, modern, liberal-minded world.
#
It was almost like a foreign destination made of dreams.
#
So this was a dream city for many and this I heard not just from women
#
but I'll come to the women later, but so many people from Kerala, from Chennai,
#
from Hyderabad, down south, this was the dream city
#
where you got beer, you got clubs, you got this, you got that,
#
that they didn't get in that part of the world.
#
It's the kind of lifestyle, aspirational.
#
So this was an aspirational city for many, very cosmopolitan, modern, liberal.
#
From women what I heard was, here was a place nobody judged you.
#
Like they could wear their sleeveless, they could wear their shorts,
#
they could hang around with their boyfriends, they could smoke,
#
they could be out till late night and they were okay.
#
This was particularly that stood out for women and women were from all over.
#
And all these things are relevant till now.
#
And I hear versions of this story still.
#
I know everything in life is relative and again it's relative
#
that women still think if they come from Delhi to here,
#
like I felt this place is a relatively safer place for women to hang around.
#
This is still far more cosmopolitan, liberal, open-minded.
#
Of course Bombay would be ahead of that,
#
but still this is one of the most cosmopolitan, open, liberal-minded.
#
And now expats have joined, NRIs have joined that wave.
#
Like over the last 20-30 years, especially from early 2000 to now,
#
that wave is only building up.
#
Any Indian overseas who wants to relocate to India,
#
for them India is the first city, sorry, Bangalore is the first city that they look at.
#
Bombay for whatever reason, the quality of life, the chase, all that they don't.
#
Delhi, the culture, the aggression, all that puts them off.
#
This is the city, temperate city, where everybody can come and feel normal
#
So these are the ways people think the city hasn't changed.
#
But there are ways that people, city has changed.
#
And I'll tell you one interview that we had with Rahul Dravid.
#
And he was speaking about, he grew up in Indiranagar, right?
#
And Indiranagar he remembers, wherever they were living,
#
there were only empty plots and fields and everything and they would play cricket, right?
#
And then slowly he saw where they were playing, construction happening,
#
then they moved to another, then another, then another,
#
and slowly all these open places where they used to play as children
#
kind of got taken over, got built out.
#
And I remember speaking to a bureaucrat, and again, sorry, I'm blanking out.
#
He was a fairly senior bureaucrat and I met him at Indiranagar, right?
#
And he was mentioning when in the 80s he shifted to Indiranagar.
#
People said, dimaar kharab ho gaya hai?
#
Going back of the beyond, boondocks, who lives in Indiranagar?
#
And his was one of the first buildings that had come up, right?
#
And there were no telephone lines, this is the 80s, right?
#
And then today Indiranagar is like what a bustling,
#
overcrowded, jam-packed traffic gridlocked city,
#
So that is the kind of, real estate is one of the biggest markers of this shift.
#
And Nandan talks about it as well that in 2009 when he began spending more and more time in Delhi,
#
so he kind of lost a little touch with Bangalore at that point of time
#
because he was spending a lot of time in Delhi.
#
So by 2014 when he kind of started living in Bangalore and he lives in Kormangala,
#
he said, I couldn't recognize the city, I didn't know what had happened.
#
This was the start-up wave all around me and I couldn't recognize it.
#
And this is the span of 2009 to 2014, right?
#
It's just such short, but that I've heard so many times.
#
I myself, you know, I came here in 2021.
#
I live in Kormangala, Astibet layout now, and I moved to this area in 2022, January.
#
Between then to now, I can tell you four or five big residential complexes have come up.
#
Many, many more are under construction.
#
I haven't seen this frenetic space of construction anywhere else.
#
So real estate is one of the biggest markers of it.
#
Second is, I think what amazed me is when people came here,
#
three, four, five, six thousand salary, and suddenly they are an entrepreneur earning something.
#
Even at the bottom of the pyramid, right? Those people.
#
That was the big change that I saw, that people who came and who made certain success out of their life here, chasing their dream.
#
I particularly sort of want to recall this guy, I call him Dhani.
#
He's there young and single in the city, and he came here in 2020 or some such time during, just before pandemic or during pandemic.
#
And what he was and what he is, he's kind of changed a lot.
#
And he comes from, he's discovered himself, he's discovered his dream.
#
He's bought two plots in Chennai, all at the age of under 30.
#
So people have learned to dream in the city, how this city has enabled them to dream.
#
But also it's been a difficult city for many. That also is there.
#
I remember this guy called Kevin, and I used to go to his parlour for a haircut.
#
And I deliberately, I'm that person that once I cultivate relationship, I like that, to go to the same person again and again.
#
So I would go on over multiple meetings and catch ups and along with my haircut, we would chat, chat, chat.
#
And finally, one day we sat down for a long chat, two, three hours.
#
And then he opened up and he came as a 12th pass, dropped out of college, started with zero salary in a salon industry.
#
And he knew no skills, had no skills. He learnt on the job.
#
And today he runs a parlour and pays a rent of, I forget now, 90,000 or some such, right?
#
He employs whatever, five, six, seven, eight people, and he earns substantially.
#
He sends money home, his wife sends money home, that kind of dream.
#
So he's made that big growth and realizing his dream.
#
But also at some level, he's a little heartbroken because he's from Northeast.
#
He looks different and he experienced that in his daily life.
#
And he's so conflicted that does he belong here?
#
Because this city is where he learned to dream and achieve his dream.
#
But there are times that he questions, does he belong here?
#
Should he sometime, at some point of time, pack his bag and go?
#
And you particularly hear this story at the services economy, which is catering to the tech boom, right?
#
For them, it's been, some of these things have been challenging.
#
Yeah, I guess the people at the higher end of the tech boom, migration, etc., etc.,
#
are they insulated from all of this in their workspaces and in their cafes and all of that?
#
But it is a service economy which has come up to support them,
#
which would sort of not be able to get away from this.
#
I'm also struck by like I'm thinking of what are the deeper sort of factors which makes the city welcoming for outsiders.
#
I guess one itself would be that if there is a city where outsiders tend to go,
#
then automatically it will treat them a little better and automatically other outsiders will be drawn in and that becomes a virtuous cycle.
#
Historically, what is your sense of how much a part it has played?
#
At one point in your book, you write, the 24th Maharaja of Mysore, Krishna Raja Wadiar IV, 1902 to 1940,
#
must also get credit for bringing in a progressive and liberal social outlook.
#
Ahead of the times, he pushed for women's education, introduced compulsory primary education,
#
and directed public schools to give up caste discrimination and admit Dalits.
#
He actively promoted industry and pushed for civil projects like the Krishna Rajsagar dam reservoir
#
and Mandya district and KR Hospital in Mysore.
#
Under his reign, Bengaluru became Asia's first city with electrified streets in 1905, stop code.
#
And there's a lot happening before him.
#
You could argue that some of the setting which allowed him to do all this was perhaps late by Kempegauda long ago,
#
you know, centuries ago, and so on and so forth.
#
And of late, one of the things I've realized is that you have to look further back in history than you think.
#
Like when people speak about the Kerala model, for example, and how well it's done,
#
it's not just about the communist parties in independent India.
#
There's a lot of stuff happening there for the centuries before that,
#
that leads you to this place where society, you know, has this quality or that quality and all of that.
#
So a couple of things, you know, do you feel that culturally there are aspects
#
which make Bangalore and Karnataka very conducive for this?
#
And two, is there a danger of that changing over time as the city grows so fast and changes so fast?
#
Is there a danger that that will also be one of the things to change?
#
So one, you're 100% right that roots, it all goes back to the roots, right?
#
And when Kempegauda sort of set up the different pete's, right?
#
This was a trading up and all kinds of people were coming here to trade, right?
#
And remember, this is one city which is so close to six states, right?
#
Five, six hours drive, five to eight hours drive, and you are in another state.
#
So you have, and especially during the British time, because it was a contornment city,
#
many people from Madras, Presidency, Hyderabad, and other, other sort of places,
#
they came to the city for seeking livelihood and range of professions, right?
#
So right from that time, you know, what struck me is I've had help, part-time help.
#
I've met Nepalese, I've met Oriya, I've met Bengali, I've met Tamilian, I've met Malali, Karnataka.
#
I don't think I've ever encountered such a diverse variety.
#
And they all have been here for a very long time, except some of them are recent, but many of them are here.
#
So this rainbow color of so many different kinds of people who've come and made this city a home,
#
it's a historical thing. It was there.
#
In fact, I remember there was a film that Naresh Narasimhan, he's an architect
#
and also engaged in a lot of other work in the city.
#
He was filming, he was showcasing.
#
And I think long back, 100 years back, this film was there.
#
And then they said, what is the language here? And Karnataka, Canada is the language.
#
And then somebody speaks in Tamil and say, but I'm a Tamil.
#
And then somebody says, I'm a Malayali, Malayalam.
#
And then so even long back then, people are speaking multiple languages.
#
This is a polyglot city, 107 languages spoken, right?
#
And so the fact is that the city has had a tradition of all kinds of people coming and settling down.
#
And it has only gotten reinforced again and again.
#
So during Kempegoda time, it was pettis and stuff.
#
During British colonial time, it was the contornment that drew people from different parts of the country.
#
Then PSU time, this was the most meritocratic job.
#
If you were from IITs, you only got into our PSUs, right?
#
And so there only if you were meritocratic and you got through IIT, you got here, right?
#
So it didn't discriminate over caste, gender, this, that.
#
You just got in, right?
#
So at that time, again, people from all over were coming, but for a very different reason.
#
Then 70s, 80s, when the IIT outsourcing boom happened, it was a most aspirational job at that point of time.
#
Dollar dreams, where can you get? So 80s, 90s shaped that.
#
And again, it further sort of took this cycle of drawing, lowering workers from all over the country with a different spin, IIT outsourcing.
#
Early 2000, again, sort of brought in not just people from all over India, but this dot-com bust that happened.
#
And it brought many Indians from overseas.
#
And I do remember even as a journalist, I saw so many expats coming to Bangalore.
#
Wim L. Frink, I remember, Cisco Globalization Officer.
#
He was a global sort of CXO.
#
And he relocated to India and Bangalore, right?
#
So expat wave that happened during early 2000.
#
So it has only gotten more layers over the years.
#
Now it's a range of foreigners coming from all over, from Europe, from Asia, from China, from Russia.
#
All kinds of expats that I have met are coming here.
#
So different streams of influx of migration and migrant influx has been happening.
#
So that's the first part of the question that one, the city had roots.
#
And somehow the city has managed to keep those roots alive and fresh and only add new flavors to it and get better, strengthen that.
#
And today, the startup world is luring a lot of people.
#
Now, will that wane? Will that weaken?
#
So one doesn't know right now.
#
See, the thing is, if I look at Silicon Valley, that's the only parallel that I can look at.
#
Silicon Valley has lots of challenges.
#
The percentage of global venture fund that flows into Silicon Valley as a percentage has come down at a global level over the last 20, 30 years.
#
Simply because other alternative venture ecosystems have emerged, including India.
#
So as a percentage it has.
#
But if you ask me if today there is all the AI and where it is happening, it's Silicon Valley.
#
And somehow it has managed to reinvent itself.
#
And for now, at least some of the future building blocks of the startup ecosystem.
#
Let me give you one example.
#
So in the defense sector, defense sector typically does not appear on your horizon if you look at Bangalore.
#
Government has been trying very hard to build.
#
In UP, there's a defense corridor being built.
#
And a lot of investments are going in, a lot of government incentives and government push, nudge.
#
Ditto is happening in Gujarat, Ditto MROs, etc.
#
Now, nobody tried for Bangalore.
#
None of them pushed for Bangalore as far as defense is concerned.
#
But what has happened is because of the talent density that exists in this city.
#
Remember the transition that happened in automobile industry from hardware to software.
#
So hardware is getting commoditized.
#
It's a software which is not a differentiation where the differentiation exists.
#
It's happening in the defense as well.
#
But the hardware, the missile, the hardware is commoditized.
#
It's the software that goes into it where the value add is beginning to happen.
#
Now annually, the defense ministry does a startup competition in the defense sector, especially for defense startup.
#
And a lot of those startups are coming from Bangalore.
#
There is one defense company based in MP.
#
They do explosives, etc.
#
And they are based in MP.
#
Now they set up their new unit in Bangalore.
#
Now why is this happening?
#
The city has enough on its plate.
#
And I'm sure government isn't luring them aggressively that other states are, like UP is, like Telangana is.
#
But it is happening, right?
#
One of the biggest virtuous cycle is the talent.
#
And this I've heard from many people.
#
Like you can't lure somebody to Gujarat, another city where that landscape, ecosystem does not exist.
#
It's similar I've heard from a product.
#
So I was speaking to one guy who is in the product space working in Pune.
#
I said, why are you here?
#
And he said, you know, just monthly meet we used to have, he was saying, and product guys, right?
#
But monthly, the number of people you would meet in that special meet-up, monthly meet-up,
#
here you go into a restaurant in Indiranagar on one evening and you meet so many product guys.
#
Now remember, the network effect is a powerful effect.
#
You can't replicate easily.
#
So what is most compelling about this city, and I just hope that this city doesn't lose, is the software.
#
I call it 5G software and 2G hardware that the city has.
#
I mean, everything in the infrastructure of the city is crumbling, creaky.
#
There are roads, pothole roads, garbage, this, that.
#
The software of the city is so good that it is able to sort of withstand the weakness on the hardware side.
#
And on the software, it is able to be this pull.
#
And remember that software is harder to sort of compete with, compete on.
#
I mean, you can build roads, you can build everything.
#
But how do you build culture of the city?
#
One of the most powerful things, at least I heard here, is the paid-forward culture, right?
#
And one you think, one is just puffing things up or it's a good PR.
#
But you know, I heard this again and again from so many people that I actually have begun to feel it's not puff and it's not PR.
#
So many founders have told me that when they were nothing and they were struggling,
#
somebody just came up with no skin in the game and decided to support him, decided to back him,
#
decided to help him, decided to counsel him, put in money or whatever.
#
And it has happened so many times with so many people that I know that it can't be puff, it can't be just PR.
#
And it has happened with so many people. I mean, I remember Ather Energy, right?
#
Tarun there and I know Tarun since 2014-15 when he was in IIT Chennai and he was nobody and he was struggling.
#
And then he was telling me that for the first time when he was trying to raise
#
and then he reached out to Flipkart founder Sachin Bansal, he knew nothing, he knew nobody and he was nobody.
#
And he responded and he said, come and meet me.
#
And this is 2014 or something I think you said.
#
So they are already big.
#
Yeah and Flipkart is big.
#
And Ather is nothing. He is working out of IIT Chennai campus.
#
And he said he could have not responded. I mean, a thousand people reach out to people like that.
#
He responded, he came, he met him and he said the energy that he saw here,
#
that meeting was a pivotal point that he decided to move out of IIT Chennai to here, right?
#
That meeting. And then Sachin at the end of the conversation, why are you guys in Chennai?
#
Come here. And whatever, the reasons were multiple but he decided to move here.
#
And then what happened, he said we tried very hard to raise funds.
#
We ran out of options. We had staked, we all, whatever, personal money, this, that.
#
And we had run out of options, we would have shut down.
#
So as a last ditch effort, he messaged Sachin and that was a big billion day sale, right?
#
He knew that Sachin won't have that time to even look at his phone but he messaged him.
#
And Sachin responded within an hour. They met that evening.
#
Not only that, he said, okay, this one entire sort of round I will take care of.
#
And version of that I've heard from so many people, Amit, that that's something I think is also important about the city.
#
The other bit that occurs to me, especially I'm coming from Delhi, right?
#
Delhi has a very different culture. It's a very hierarchical culture, right?
#
And getting into that inner circle is difficult if you are an outsider and I've felt it.
#
In fact, in three years, like 35 years when I was in Delhi and people would say Delhiite,
#
I would think if I'm a Delhiite or not and I would look at my roots and stuff and analyze things, right?
#
Also because markers of being in Delhi is like you have to be branded, what car you drive and where you live and all those are important markers,
#
which meant nothing to me. I'm not that person.
#
So many times I was that misfit in that city from that point of view.
#
This city is much more open. This city is willing to accept you without judgment.
#
What you wear means nothing to anybody.
#
And I think that openness allows people to be welcomed irrespective of those some external sort of markers by which we judge people.
#
So, okay, I lost the train of thought that I was I'm trying to think what I was the point I was trying to make.
#
You're talking about cultural commonalities and you first spoke about how there is that welcoming,
#
sort of paying it forward kind of trait, which is so common and so powerful and is a part of the culture.
#
So I was coming to the network effect of the city and this city feels like everywhere there's a campus vibe.
#
When you stay in the hostel, you have a problem.
#
Okay, you're my friend. He will solve that problem for you. Go this one, that one.
#
And there is certain the bonhomie that sort of exists, right?
#
I find that here so much and without being very transactional.
#
It happens often that even today and you know at Unboxing BLR that we are building,
#
there are so many times we I'm grappling with a problem.
#
I don't know how to answer and I will tap into this, that all kinds of people.
#
So many people have just said, okay, Malini, I'll just come volunteer and I'll do this for you.
#
So many times and they have nothing to gain, but they're willing to hand hold me through that journey.
#
That has happened very easily.
#
So that network effect where people will just step up and say, okay, I'll do it for you.
#
Even if I don't get, so that happens.
#
The other bit I particularly experienced when I was working on this.
#
So this project began as a book, right?
#
None of what we are doing today was anyway planned.
#
Nothing was planned. It was just a book.
#
And I was supposed to go back to the city to Delhi and where I had home.
#
This is 2022, March, April.
#
And I'm deep inside the book and Prashant and I are chatting.
#
And then it occurs to me, Prashant, this city has such a tech legacy
#
and we should try and document and capture.
#
The city should try and document and capture.
#
So I said, why don't we think of a digital museum?
#
So he said, why digital museum?
#
I said, you know, physical museum is Capex.
#
How would you sort of look at it?
#
He said, no, we should think about physical museum, right?
#
Now, I had already decided in my head, physical museum is not possible.
#
But the city is also about possibilities, right?
#
You will at least give it your best try.
#
You've quoted Nitin Kamath from Zerodaya saying this is the city of irrational optimism, which seems to fit.
#
So, and then Prashant said, no, we should try.
#
We should try and make it happen.
#
And today where we are, if all goes well, fingers crossed,
#
we will have India's first startup tech innovation museum in the next three to four years.
#
Highly experiential, world class.
#
We have looked at some of the top museums in the world,
#
which have deployed technology to help you experience it.
#
Now, coming from Delhi and coming from a sector which was already like media is slow down, on a slow down, right?
#
It's going through a rough phase.
#
Dreaming doesn't come very easily.
#
The thinking of possibilities doesn't come easily.
#
One of the largest shift I find is I'm opening to the world of possibilities here, right?
#
I mean, there are things that you think you can do.
#
At least you'll give it a try. You'll fail.
#
What will happen? You'll fail. You won't be able to do it.
#
But what is the harm of giving it a try?
#
Last year it happened. So, this is the museum, right?
#
Last year, I remember around July, Prashant came to me and he said,
#
Malini, we'll do a city festival.
#
And we had a book launch in November.
#
I told him, please don't do.
#
And where is the time? There is no time.
#
December is like... I had no bandwidth.
#
I have no knowledge of city festival, right?
#
He said, we'll do a soft launch.
#
And with the kind of conviction, he talks that you'll do a soft launch.
#
Now, he's convinced that you only have to align with that, right?
#
And then, okay, if you want to do it, we'll put our best foot forward.
#
And by October-November, Amit, it's art of...
#
I mean, how everybody came together.
#
Ravi Chander, in October, he came on board as sort of the festival director.
#
He calls himself Chief Facilitator, we call him Festival Director.
#
He came on board as that.
#
So many people just stepped up.
#
Michael Foley, who is a brand design, whatever, he said,
#
okay, I'll do pro bono, your brand sort of template and brand design.
#
He did it within two days, two or three days, right?
#
We had a presentation to the government.
#
I mean, I remember Sonia Manchanda, who's done work at the airport.
#
She did some other work, many of it pro bono.
#
And these people just stepped up, saying, okay, you need this help, we'll support you.
#
And eventually, government came on board as a partner.
#
We needed their blessings.
#
Many of the permissions, etc., like music in the park, right?
#
We needed government permissions to enable that, and we got that.
#
And eventually, at the end, in December, when this happened,
#
even we didn't know this would happen.
#
We had 50 plus partners, 65 plus venues, 500 plus events that we did in the city,
#
all in a matter of three months.
#
We wouldn't have been able to accomplish if all these people didn't align or all these people didn't step up,
#
if all of us didn't collaborate to make things happen.
#
So many volunteers who just came in, said, Mali, I want to volunteer for this.
#
Can I do something for you?
#
And they just came on board.
#
I'd done an episode with Ravi Chander six years back, if I remember correctly,
#
and he described himself as a commissioner of lost causes.
#
And I'm just thinking that it's only if you chase those lost causes
#
that you get the big wins and you change the world.
#
So I just kind of love that spirit so much.
#
Quick question about the book going back to it.
#
The last census, as you have pointed out, was in 2011, right?
#
This is a city that is changing in tectonic ways every month, practically, right?
#
And your book, I found to be just the perfect mix of both great stories and human stories
#
and the impressionistic accounts of what the city is like.
#
And at the same time, really rigorous, fantastic data.
#
And I'll double click on some of it.
#
But how was your approach towards this?
#
Because it would have seemed like such a huge challenge to get credible data
#
and to figure out what's going on with it.
#
And yet you managed so well. So what happened?
#
So I'll tell you, in fact, I must talk about this because I think I was a first time author.
#
And in December 2021, I'm in this guest house.
#
And I have to submit these two chapters as part of my proposal for the publisher.
#
And I'm shitting bricks.
#
And I've reached a stage where I tell myself, mera se yeh nahi hoega.
#
It seems like too daunting a task.
#
And because I'm doing things in the public, so on social media,
#
and people are anticipating, I've built a bit of anticipation,
#
and I'm getting crushed under it.
#
And the moment I sat down to write, and I'm writing the first chapter,
#
I've done quite a bit of reporting, but still I find myself totally inadequate, totally ill-equipped.
#
And I tell myself, mera se nahi hoega.
#
I've spent two, three weeks just laboring over it.
#
Typical imposter syndrome.
#
And I'm googling how to write.
#
How to write, and how to this.
#
And I can't confess to anybody, right?
#
And then I reach out to two, three author friends.
#
And because I knew that what I had done as a journalist,
#
I had told myself what I had done as a journalist is irrelevant now.
#
The book writing is a different ballgame, and I'm doing this for the first time,
#
so I'm starting from ground zero.
#
And mujhe kuch nahi aata hai.
#
So pachis saal ka writing career I have written off in my head,
#
and I'm starting all over again, right?
#
But conversations helped.
#
I spoke to all kinds of people who have written books to understand what was their writing journey.
#
And I'm not telling them that this is what I'm going through, okay?
#
And I'm just asking what happened.
#
Many of them suggested a writing drill that I found it very complicated.
#
I thought mera se nahi hoega.
#
And they were so catalogued.
#
Some had things on the wall, sticky notes, etc.
#
After reading all that, then I decided that I will not go through the chronological order,
#
because everybody, two, three people had recommended you should go the chronological order of the book,
#
because that is how you'll be able to,
#
because writing a book is different than writing a story in the newspaper.
#
But I went with my gut instinct, and I said the first two chapters I'll write,
#
which will be the easiest for me to write and which is what I'm deeply invested in at a personal level,
#
which is the start-up couples, young and single in the city.
#
They were the most fascinating and interesting sort of chapter for me.
#
And I told myself that they are the easiest for me to write.
#
And I wrote those two chapters.
#
So that was one challenge I faced that as an author,
#
first time I questioned this imposter syndrome,
#
almost sort of handicapped me to a level that I almost froze in my writing.
#
The writer block that they talk about, I was totally hemmed in by that.
#
But somehow writing these two chapters opened me up.
#
And then yet I was not convinced.
#
Writing is a solo journey.
#
You are in this dark tunnel.
#
You don't even know what you are doing is good or not.
#
So when the first time my literary agent sort of reverted back on my proposal,
#
and she said she loved it,
#
more than anything, there was a sigh of relief.
#
So this is okay. This is good work.
#
Some way of reinforcement from outside was very important to gain some confidence in writing.
#
And which I think was very, very important.
#
Then after that, you are absolutely right.
#
The data was totally missing.
#
I tapped into some of my past networks like QuestCorp
#
to sort of get a team list for some other data on jobs.
#
And you are right that the city is changing so rapidly that the 2011 census is archaic.
#
In any other city it wouldn't be.
#
Even in Delhi and Bombay it wouldn't be so irrelevant.
#
But in this city it would be.
#
But what I did realize is certain trends would still play out.
#
And I would want to at least look at that trend.
#
Because anecdotally I could see some of the things play out.
#
Like I saw single women staying alone and working at a lower level.
#
Incidents of that far more in this city than I found in Delhi where I have lived for years.
#
And in Bombay where I lived limited.
#
But I go there frequently.
#
My sister used to stay there.
#
So anecdotal evidence were telling me things that I wanted to explore.
#
And then when I started looking at census data,
#
which was the most credible data that I could lay my hands on,
#
I got reinforcement there.
#
They were corroborating some of the trends that I was witnessing by reportage.
#
So I began to connect the dots.
#
And then going forward I know they will amplify.
#
Second level was I did have two, two and a half decades of tracking labor job market.
#
So that was very, very handy for me.
#
My networks in that space where I could reach out to people,
#
ask them for views, my own sort of understanding of that space,
#
how things have evolved as a job reporter.
#
My first job cover in India today was early 2000.
#
From then to now I had looked at that space very long.
#
So all that helped enormously as well.
#
And then of course working with IIHS with how India lifts a startup which analyze for that.
#
In fact, that became laid the seed for one project that we are working on.
#
And I'm going to talk a bit about that.
#
So we are right now working on a project called Bangalore in 100 Charts.
#
It's an annual data report on Bangalore.
#
We look at Bangalore through three lenses, three or four lenses.
#
Bangalore today versus Bangalore past.
#
Bangalore versus other Indian cities, Delhi, Bombay, Hyderabad, Chennai, Kolkata and Pune.
#
And Bangalore versus other global tech hubs.
#
And we are looking at three, four sets of data.
#
Government data, regulatory data and then platform data.
#
Of course, taking care of all the anonymization and stuff, privacy concerns and then some global data.
#
And we are trying to build a sort of story about the change.
#
And we will of course be sort of compromised on the current data.
#
Sensor data is not available.
#
But we'll try and make sense of it.
#
And satellite data also some of it will come in.
#
And that became laid the seed because the challenges that I was gripped with when I was writing this book,
#
I persuaded, persuaded Prashant, let's do this annual data report.
#
And we are working on it in the next one or two months.
#
Again, it will be very snackable data, very reader friendly, not for data expert.
#
This is for a lay person.
#
What I felt is that the city has changed so rapidly that many times even perception is so far behind the reality.
#
And I'll give you one example.
#
Till 2000, this city did not have one international flight.
#
Today, this is the largest third largest aviation hub in the country.
#
By the looks of it, this will be the second largest over the last next 10 to 20 years.
#
And the ripple effect will be felt by rising number of consulate consulates that are coming up.
#
The direct international flights that it's coming in.
#
The city emerging as a hub, aviation hub at multiple levels like Air India, et cetera.
#
You are beginning to see all that.
#
All that telltale signs are there.
#
What about bank deposits?
#
These are real data that is telling you the growth.
#
This is the second largest market for iPhones.
#
This is, I think, the second largest market for automobile after Delhi.
#
Karnataka gets the largest FDI in the country.
#
And Karnataka, please take Bangalore as proxy.
#
Bangalore is proxy, right?
#
This is the place where maximum is happening.
#
So all this is the different prism of change that is happening in the city,
#
which many times at least I sitting in Delhi didn't know the change that was happening.
#
And I think it's important for a city to talk about,
#
especially a city which is amidst so much change, it's important.
#
And this project probably will help us do that.
#
And those two chapters that you mentioned you wrote first are amazing.
#
I mean, the whole book is great.
#
In fact, you spoke of the imposter syndrome.
#
It's so frustrating for me that of all the guests who come on my show,
#
all the women talk about imposter syndrome.
#
No man has ever brought it up.
#
Men are like, I'll do it.
#
I had the conviction, blah, blah, blah.
#
All the women are full of it.
#
So I just want to put it on record and say that,
#
first of all, you should never have had those doubts about your voice
#
because your voice is great.
#
As all my listeners will attest, it's fantastic.
#
I'm sure you were a great podcaster and you should do more of it.
#
And the book is so wonderful that it kind of boggles the mind
#
that you had any self-doubt to begin with.
#
One of the most creative uses of data in the book, which I really loved,
#
was the Tinder data you got to look at the lives of young people in Bangalore
#
vis-a-vis young people in Delhi and Bombay and all of that.
#
Almost kind of mind-blowing.
#
And I have so many follow-up questions for that.
#
But tell me a little bit about how you even thought of doing something like that
#
and how did you get the data and then what are the kind of things that you found?
#
So I was looking at a range of surveys, range of data,
#
and many of them triggered by conversations.
#
I spoke to people who have dated in Delhi, Bombay, Pune, other cities,
#
and they've dated in Bangalore.
#
And they themselves are telling me things that is triggering my thoughts.
#
Like this guy who I sort of interviewed, young guy, and he was a Muslim.
#
So I asked him, have you dated, how many cities have you dated in?
#
And he spoke about Delhi, Bombay, Pune, and Bombay, Bangalore.
#
And then he told me about different experiences in different cities.
#
He told me that in Bombay, I could never go to the person's house
#
or never get out to my home because simply where is the privacy, right?
#
So virtually everything in terms of...
#
Then I began to look for data to support it.
#
It was a reportage which bubbled up trends I should be looking for.
#
And I think most best stories are done by that,
#
that you are spotting trends through reportage,
#
and then you want to go confirm with the data if there is data to support it.
#
And then I tried looking for data in different places,
#
whatever I could to support my narrative,
#
because otherwise it's just reporting and you can't base it.
#
One of the most fascinating things, Amit, that I want to talk about is
#
how much trust matters in the matter of heart.
#
And the journey from connecting on the app
#
to the meeting at home and the bedroom, right, physical,
#
felt like the shortest in Bangalore.
#
And that kept repeating itself, like different people, different places,
#
and they're telling me the same thing.
#
In Delhi, so many people told me, girls as well as boys,
#
and boys were frustrated, girls were scared,
#
and hence they were telling me that we would do in-app conversations.
#
So they would not share their number.
#
Within the dating app, they would talk,
#
because they were concerned about safety,
#
they were concerned about the other person,
#
the trust was totally missing.
#
And hence many times, over three months, they have charted within app,
#
and that real interaction in either real world
#
or even on WhatsApp, etc., didn't happen.
#
And that told you how much the trust mattered in this world.
#
Then in Bombay, the real estate and the privacy concerns, right,
#
that definitely played a very, very big role.
#
Bombay is a very cosmopolitan city, safe city, trust, all that is there,
#
but real estate meant that there was no place to go to, right?
#
And young people need the privacy, right?
#
In Pune and other cities, I think the conservative approach,
#
like I remember talking to this guy who was in his thirties,
#
and he said, you know, in the dating world, I was a dinosaur.
#
As a single man, I was a dinosaur.
#
Everybody was in their early twenties and stuff.
#
And in thirties, everybody got married.
#
So in this city, the pool is much bigger for him.
#
And here, what I heard was that
#
connecting instantly almost on the WhatsApp, right,
#
the trust factor was pretty high.
#
And meeting at home was very easy and very quick.
#
The journey from app to meeting in person was the shortest in this city,
#
and trust had a very, very important role to play.
#
This, for me, was really something that was very, very interesting and stood out.
#
The other thing that stood out is how the money behaves in different cities.
#
And this insight sort of was given by Deepak Chinoy, okay?
#
And then, of course, other people sort of spoke about it,
#
because once he triggered that, I started talking to people to understand it
#
and how the money behaves in Delhi versus Bombay versus Hyderabad
#
versus Chennai versus Bangalore.
#
That itself is a fascinating sort of a story about how the culture shapes,
#
what color the money and how it behaves, right?
#
That was also very, very interesting and important.
#
You want me to talk about that?
#
Yes, please, elaborate.
#
So, you know, in Delhi, money has color, black and white, right?
#
And it's a cash transaction dominates.
#
A lot of money is the trading money, the business money, the power structures right now,
#
and you can talk about politics and bureaucracy and all that.
#
That meant that money behaved in a very different way.
#
There was a black transaction, there was a white transaction
#
that shaped how people looked at money.
#
And then, of course, brands, status, all that kind of where money got real estate, right?
#
That's where the money got spent.
#
Bombay is about dhanda, the stock market dhanda,
#
and how much interest the money earns.
#
There is not a very little or not as much concept about the equity capital, right?
#
Hyderabad, and this, again, it was corroborated by a lot of people,
#
so it's not one person, but if one person is saying it, I went,
#
and I'll tell you how this somebody else told me another story to corroborate some of these things.
#
In Hyderabad, are you ready, or are you this?
#
That built a certain network, and if you didn't belong there,
#
a lot of things became very difficult for you.
#
In Chennai, it was the family businesses, right, which had money,
#
and often family finances and how the capital gets deployed is you have 10 family members,
#
and all of them have to align, even for as little as 25 crore, 100 crore,
#
we'll have to have the alignment of everybody to be able to push that deal through.
#
In Bangalore, it's a first-generation entrepreneur.
#
Nanda Nilayakani's money is his money. Prashant Prakash's money is his money, right?
#
And they have a lot of leverage and control over how that money,
#
how he deploys his money, how he behaves his money, and they also understand risk capital.
#
So there's a lot of flexibility and agility to that money, that risk capital,
#
and they also understand risk capital because they are part of venture world in many ways.
#
And that shapes a lot of how the risk people here are able to take with their money.
#
So that is one part. I'll give you one example that I heard from somebody else.
#
So this was an entrepreneur sitting in Hyderabad.
#
I was trying to understand, I'm hearing about Hyderabad or other cities,
#
so that I've done for other cities as well, but I'll specifically pick up, pick out Hyderabad.
#
So he was in Hyderabad and he was trying to raise money, right?
#
And he announced on Twitter that he's coming to Bangalore and he would love to meet.
#
Multiple people reached out. I forget now, somebody in the venture world,
#
he also said, okay, I'll catch up with you, and he met.
#
He got it first round of funding like that on one meeting.
#
He said, Hyderabad mein kabhi nahi hota.
#
Multiple filters would have gone to make that happen.
#
So I think that also sort of should have played a...
#
So this is how probably how money behaves, the color of money, all that.
#
Is it interesting about different cities?
#
To go back to, you know, your sort of insights into dating from the Tinder data,
#
like I was particularly struck by at one data point,
#
that the journey from first making contact on the app to actually visiting someone's house
#
in Delhi can be like up to six months, I think you said.
#
And because of the trust factor in Mumbai, it can be a few weeks.
#
In Bangalore, it can be a few days.
#
And that would seem that the dating scene is vibrant in Bangalore
#
and it's good for singing people, single people.
#
But a couple of sort of one, you've had a lot of people telling you in the book
#
about how it's, you know, you have the choice, but you're bewildered by the choice
#
and you don't know what to do with it.
#
Like a former guest on the show, Samarth Bansal had once written this beautiful essay on dating
#
where he had said, quote, For men, dating is like dying of thirst in the desert,
#
not a drop of water in sight.
#
For women, it's like dying of thirst in the ocean.
#
Water is everywhere, but it's mostly toxic and full of salt.
#
Right. So just because you have this sort of like at one on one hand,
#
the data might seem to indicate that, hey, you know, it's good here.
#
But on the other hand, you have a lot of quotes from people in your book who tell you
#
it's not quite that way.
#
And another interesting data point in your book, which really struck me
#
and had me thinking was about how Bangalore is almost becoming the pet capital of India,
#
that more and more people are buying pets.
#
And, you know, and that also signals to me that there is, you know, is it out of loneliness?
#
I think you've mentioned oxytocin may play a part and, you know,
#
you just want to go back in the evening and hug something.
#
It's just that process of having someone to take care of, et cetera, et cetera.
#
So what is sort of your sense with what's happening with the lives of young people in the city?
#
Because in my mind's eye, the way that I see it is that it's not that I mean, Bangalore is a part of India,
#
Like Bangalore today is India's tomorrow, in a sense.
#
It's going to go to the other cities.
#
We're going to become more and more globalized, et cetera, et cetera.
#
So what are the lives of young people like, especially young people looking for love?
#
What is your sense in all this?
#
Absolutely bang on, Amit, that while it seems they've got plenty,
#
but it's also that dating platforms have corrupted or maybe made things difficult for young people.
#
While finding sex one night hookups has become so much easy.
#
Finding love deep, long term relationship has become difficult.
#
And it's not just in the dating world, but what you realize in the city is that
#
the volatility of life and work hits you in so many ways, right?
#
And I was working out of a co-working hub, right?
#
And there were startups all around me.
#
And I saw that, you know, there were days that they were on cloud nine.
#
Then I saw the startup winter happened.
#
And then the closures happened.
#
There was a time that it was such a boom boom time that, you know,
#
everybody was like having a great time.
#
And this volatile life strikes you.
#
It is far more volatile than I have experienced in any other city.
#
Maybe stock market has its gyrations, but I think this city,
#
you experience it so much more powerful and strong peaks and troughs
#
that they shape life a lot, both its highs and lows.
#
And that volatility, so this is a professional life, which itself is volatile.
#
Like startup world is a cyclical, right?
#
And ditto is happening in the personal life.
#
Remember, many of these people are away from their parents.
#
And they are probably here with their peer group, with their friends.
#
They are staying with their friends, whatever, right?
#
So that now friendships are fickle.
#
Dating dates or girlfriends or boyfriends, right?
#
They are romantic relationships too, thanks to the dating world, right?
#
It is also very volatile.
#
I mean, finding long-term lasting relationships is very difficult.
#
And in the book somewhere, sort of this girl tells me,
#
and many people have told me, but particularly I pointed to this girl.
#
She says, you know, she's got two people here.
#
She's kind of dating on a regular basis.
#
But she's got like so many people staring at you from the dating platforms, right?
#
But you've gotten so used to moving from one thing to another
#
that you don't know how to stay on one relationship.
#
And I think it's a problem that dating, not just about Bangalore,
#
but today's young are grappling with.
#
The dating platforms have opened up so many challenges.
#
They have made things easy, which is easy to hook up or find sex.
#
But it's become so, made it so hard to find deep friendships,
#
deep relationships, long-lasting.
#
And because you have just the next relationship,
#
just another swipe right away, that the patient's threshold
#
to stick through a downturn in a relationship,
#
and all relationships are built through downturns,
#
not when everything is a honeymoon period, right?
#
That patient threshold goes away or goes down,
#
and you just move from one thing to another.
#
And I've seen this cycle play out, particularly in the early 20s, right?
#
These people are having sort of go-go-to-go time, right?
#
But by late 20s, when the joy of hookups and sex, et cetera,
#
has kind of feels jaded,
#
they want to look for meaningful relationships.
#
And I've had some of these very candid conversations with people,
#
and they are desperately looking for those.
#
And remember that many times the traditional family arranged marriages
#
that one thinks about, right?
#
Many of those options are not a possibility anymore,
#
because either their ties to the family or that conventional caste system
#
And they are grappling.
#
So many of them are grappling what to do, how to settle down,
#
how to find a match for themselves.
#
But what I also interestingly know is that many of them,
#
after years of dating experiences, many of them living in some deep,
#
long-term relationship, have suddenly gotten into an arranged marriage.
#
And I myself know two, three people like that.
#
And that sort of confounds me, right?
#
That with so much experience in the dating world,
#
and they rediscovering the strength of and the importance of arranged marriage, right?
#
And people have different rational why they've gotten into it.
#
But I know so many examples that I would love to find out
#
what the two are thinking, the two of them.
#
And many of them have lived in together for a very long time.
#
And this has come as a surprise to one of the partners.
#
Overnight sprung up like two months before his wedding,
#
or something like that, or her wedding.
#
This has happened. This surprise has come to them.
#
So I don't know. I still don't have answers.
#
But what I do see is, and I've had multiple conversations with therapists.
#
They give you another dimension of perspective,
#
what's going on inside those relationships,
#
to be able to triangulate things that you are picking up.
#
And what men seek in those therapies is so different
#
than what women seek in those therapies.
#
I mean, that's so interesting.
#
So women is often about...
#
Okay, let me jog my memory.
#
It's there in the book, and I'm just trying to remember.
#
We'll come to this question in a bit.
#
But the reason women and men come to them is very different.
#
And it tells you a fascinating story about how different genders look at themselves
#
and the problems they are grappling with.
#
But what I also constantly heard is that they saw a big change in women
#
and their worldview and their expectations from themselves,
#
which was not the case with men.
#
And that is creating so much dissonance between the two.
#
But also, there is a generational shift that is beginning to happen,
#
At one point of time, there was a hierarchy in the relationship.
#
The man in the relationship had a certain position and women had a certain position.
#
Today, women have become more vocal about what they want,
#
about their career, about things that they want to do in their career.
#
And they have certain demands and desires in the bed and outside of it,
#
at work and outside of it, and they are not shy of expressing them at all.
#
And they are not even shy of taking decisions,
#
either walking out of marriage, etc.
#
That's a big shift that they see.
#
Many things, at least women of our generation, never could think about.
#
What I heard from this therapist is questions around having children or not.
#
It happens even before they are getting married.
#
So those are very powerful, important conversations that these young women are beginning to have.
#
Many of them are very clear that they don't want children,
#
and they will have that conversation right there.
#
And I remember that this one guy sort of mentioned to me that his relationship,
#
they broke up because the woman was very clear that she didn't want a child,
#
and he was clear that he wanted a child.
#
So they broke up their relationship.
#
So something that I heard in the Western context in the past,
#
I am beginning to hear with the younger women here.
#
I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing,
#
but the fact that some of these women are expressing their point of view,
#
and they have the courage and the confidence to express themselves is a good change to notice.
#
What I also noticed in the start-up couple, deliberately I chose couples from different age brackets
#
because I wanted to see a generational shift if any of that is beginning to happen.
#
And it was interesting because while older couples had very conventional sort of stereotypical roles in the house,
#
a whole lot of them, not all of them, but a whole lot of them,
#
the conventional idea about a family which is having children and stuff,
#
the younger ones, some of them were like, I was delighted to meet them as a woman
#
because many times I noticed the role reversal where woman was the prime economic provider,
#
the roles had reversed at home, and I don't know if it's a broader trend or not,
#
but I definitely found these younger women far more assertive about what they want, how they want.
#
There is a change in their life outside of marriage that they are very clear about,
#
and men are also stepping up as a partner.
#
Even if it's a small change, even if it's a small minority sliver of change,
#
I would be happy to see that sliver of change happen around us.
#
So I did notice some of that, and I felt good about it,
#
and I did see that generational evolution of some of these dynamics play out.
#
So I have a question for you, but before that a sort of a quote,
#
like one of the people on Twitter I most enjoy reading,
#
in fact hers is the only substrack I have ever paid for, I like it so much,
#
is this lady, I don't know whether she's in the UK or the US, I forget now,
#
she's called Ayala, I'll link her from the show notes,
#
she's both incredibly good at data, a fantastic researcher and a sex worker.
#
So she regularly writes about sex and men's and women's attitudes towards sex,
#
and I'll send you her stuff because I think you will absolutely love it,
#
and there is a great tweet by her which is very thought provoking for me,
#
and mind you she's using the word slut not in a bad way but in a descriptive way,
#
and she says, all the dudes I know with high body counts tend to be mostly banging women who have high body counts.
#
It's less, quote, preying on wholesome virginal women, stop quote,
#
and more, quote, all the sluts are in a giant slut cloud fucking each other, stop quote.
#
You know, and that phrase slut cloud is so great,
#
and when I read your book and that chapter that you've written,
#
I got to thinking about whether there are already two particular subsets of people,
#
and one subset of people is people who are using these rating apps regularly and hooking up and etc etc,
#
the quote unquote slut cloud as she calls it,
#
and the other set of people which isn't, which is perhaps not using these dating apps,
#
doesn't want to be promiscuous,
#
and therefore doesn't have that sort of problem of too much choice and not finding friendships,
#
and not finding friendships and deep relationships is difficult anyway at any times,
#
I guess that's a difficulty that endures,
#
So my question really is that what percentage of the young people do you think are on Tinder in the first place,
#
because while the Tinder data tells you something stark about Bangalore,
#
it would suffer from the selection bias of being only about those people who are on Tinder,
#
and the rest could have a different outlook towards life,
#
which is perhaps more quote unquote old fashioned or whatever,
#
and what you said about a lot of people who are on that Tinder game going in for arranged marriages,
#
actually doesn't surprise me,
#
simply because I would imagine that if the texture of your meeting people is from shallow interaction to shallow interaction,
#
then eventually at some point you lose the ability to be able to connect deeply,
#
and you crave it so much that you're like fuck it, I'm not going to hold out for that,
#
I'm getting the arranged marriage and I'll just commit to that,
#
so at some level that also makes sense to me, but what are your thoughts?
#
So one is that yes, in this city digital platforms including dating platforms are very high penetration level,
#
very very high, I don't think I've met anybody who's not been on any of these dating platforms,
#
some dating platforms, in fact they've tried a whole lot of them,
#
in fact not just here, in other cities as well, Delhi, Bombay and especially speak of large cities,
#
and my son is 24 and his peer group and etc, I'm aware that they are on dating platforms,
#
that has become the prime way of exploring relationships, that's one.
#
Now second thing is I think it's a matter of hormone that when you're in your early 20s you want to experiment with things,
#
sex is important at that point of time and you want to experience the rush and all that right,
#
but I think at some point of time and one mind you it's not just about men,
#
I want to clarify, it's equally women and it's just a good thing,
#
that I think there's no gender gap from men wanting sex and women not wanting sex,
#
and this is especially in this city that I know of, I can't speak of other cities,
#
but that is an important aspect of the relationship,
#
especially in your early 20s when you're discovering sex, discovering physicality of it,
#
but overwhelmingly I've heard from so many that the joy of the physical sort of physicality of the relationship begins to wane
#
as they kind of reach their late 20s,
#
and I'm sure there would be a minority or there would be quite a few who will still continue to enjoy
#
just the shallow physical sort of level of the relationship,
#
but for a vast majority at least I interacted with did talk about the missing friendships,
#
missing deeper level conversations in the relationship,
#
I saw that even if they indulge in casual sex, shallow sex, shallow relationship,
#
and even if I have spoken to just 40 right, I mean I remember talking to this one person who was in his early 30s
#
and I was talking to him about his dating journey and then he was getting married to his longtime girlfriend
#
and I was asking him, and he was saying all around me in his early 30s,
#
I've seen people with broken hearts, right, and they don't have answers to,
#
but they are just so hollow in their own life,
#
I mean they feel that they need a relationship, whatever the depth is, whatever it is,
#
but they don't understand that the dating platform is not giving them the answers,
#
the construct of the platform is such that it encourages moving from one partner to another,
#
so he said all around me I see these people who are so broken,
#
who want to get into deep relationship, but they don't know how,
#
so that is what probably I would say to answer what you are saying,
#
I don't think it's just a men and women thing, I think the chase for physical sort of relationship is equally,
#
I saw amongst women as much as men in the early years,
#
but I also saw a sort of curve, right, that from a peak of early 20s to now,
#
they're feeling jaded and wanting deeper level relationship begins to set in in the late 20s,
#
minority will always be there who will still be engaging in it,
#
but that's the broader curve and yes in this city because digital penetration is so high,
#
so high that I don't think it's a bubble that I'm looking at, I won't say that.
#
Another question I have which kind of comes out of data and is great data is probably already out of date,
#
but I'll quote it anyway because it's so impressive where at one point you say,
#
home to 33% of India's frontier tech talent according to the Karnataka digital economy mission,
#
Bengaluru has over 1 lakh PhDs, over 2.5 lakh data scientists,
#
3 lakh chip designers and testers, over 31,000 AI talent,
#
over 30,000 automotive software engineers and over 15,000 aeronautical engineers,
#
stop quoting, you go on and on and you give more figures and I'm sure they're even more impressive now,
#
but you also described how you know there can be swings where one day things are going well,
#
you're optimistic the other time you're not and there is I think a fundamental threat to the entire industry
#
in the sense that a lot of the industry and this has changed a little bit,
#
but certainly in the 80s and definitely the 90s it was true,
#
a lot of it was low level workers doing IT outsourcing,
#
your population was mainly court coolies,
#
now obviously in the last 10 years that's kind of changed,
#
you've got many more startups, you've got a lot more sophistication,
#
there are a lot of different roles there,
#
but what's going to happen with AI eventually is going to put court coolies out of a job,
#
AI will be a tremendous tool for higher order thinkers who can dream big and build bigger
#
and for them it's mind blowing,
#
but as far as a court coolie population is concerned,
#
unless you can shift yourself to becoming a higher order thinker,
#
to think above the API as it were as the phrase goes,
#
you could kind of be screwed and that appears,
#
to what extent do you think that is a threat over here?
#
So let me just unpack a little on the talent landscape in the city,
#
while startup world is the sexiest part of the talent landscape,
#
let me also mention that IT outsourcing is the core,
#
IT outsourcing services industry,
#
which is not the sexy part,
#
which is the labour cost arbitrage once upon a time
#
and that is the biggest core of the tech industry,
#
the other part that you mentioned which is the PHDS etc,
#
the city has plenty of research,
#
from HAL to ISRO to IISC to many other labs,
#
they are a very different world from Ccamp etc,
#
and they work in a very different environment,
#
I would have loved to uncover and talk a bit about that,
#
the way the drivers, the work environment, the salary,
#
everything is so different in this,
#
government labs work in such a distinct and different environment
#
than say Microsoft R&D center,
#
or a Google R&D center,
#
and which is so different than IT services outsourcing,
#
where you clock in, clock out,
#
you have hazard restrictions and all that,
#
as compared to startup which is very different,
#
and when I speak of volatility which is the sharpest in startup,
#
where you go up and go down,
#
and then on that scale of volatility,
#
different parts, for example at government labs,
#
there is not that much volatility,
#
but their challenges are very different,
#
and all this set of talent is sitting in one city
#
is what the talent density is about,
#
I mean you wouldn't think that auto experts will sit here,
#
which is where Maruthis of the world sit,
#
Because Mercedes, Volkswagen, GM, Ford,
#
all these people, and I don't know,
#
GM, Ford, but almost all auto companies in the world
#
have their R&D center here,
#
and increasingly the software that goes into the car
#
is getting bigger and bigger in its value sort of contribution,
#
and these are auto specialists,
#
I forget now it was Stanford or Harvard,
#
they put together a global report
#
talking about AI talent density,
#
and they put Bangalore at the top,
#
and there was some specific term that they used,
#
translational, I forget now,
#
I'm forgetting, but on some parameter,
#
they put Bangalore on top,
#
so one, that volatility is there,
#
but you have to look at it at the graded scale,
#
some areas are extremely volatile,
#
and the startup lay at the top,
#
but they are also the most aspirational jobs.
#
and the sort of transformation
#
or disruption it is bringing in,
#
it is, it is bringing in,
#
you can already see in the number of hires
#
that IT outsourcing is doing,
#
it's dramatically come down,
#
and it's a reflection of that,
#
they are also preparing for it,
#
because a lot of jobs might get disintermediated,
#
I remember one of the last conversations
#
I had with Kunal Shah of CRED,
#
and we were talking and
#
I asked him about AI and its impact,
#
tech industry is shifting,
#
and we don't know what will happen,
#
so we have no idea what will happen,
#
but what we don't know is
#
disruption is underway,
#
abhi kya hoega pata nahi,
#
I have seen where I work
#
and I know so many other people
#
that their startup became irrelevant
#
overnight because of AI,
#
the business model was flawed,
#
I think different parts of the tech ecosystem
#
here will feel it in different way,
#
IT outsourcing will have to completely
#
re-imagine how they construct
#
their business model and deliver
#
what is big that is happening
#
including in Bangalore is the
#
Global Capability Center or
#
next year or last year,
#
IT outsourcing industry new hires,
#
and that is telling you that
#
where more and more are getting hired,
#
and this will happen in
#
multiple spaces, multiple industries,
#
for example Mercedes is a prime
#
example, I was talking to Manu
#
who heads R&D center here,
#
he was saying that money for long,
#
nobody bothered, we were doing little
#
shaping a lot of things that Mercedes
#
critical to what Mercedes experiences
#
globally, the software experience,
#
and that is playing out
#
in multiple sectors, defense,
#
all the hardware sector that you can
#
think about is getting disrupted
#
so GCC is a big story that is
#
Hyderabad is a big player
#
with this good infrastructure
#
everything, Hyderabad is getting a lot
#
of investment, increasingly
#
is also getting, but that's a
#
competition that two cities
#
are competing, but all competition is
#
good right, I mean it keeps cities
#
on the edge to try and compete
#
have I answered your question?
#
Yes, yes, yes, you have
#
penultimate question, I've taken a lot of your time
#
today, so a couple of final questions,
#
and my penultimate question is that
#
you've spoken of Bangalore's
#
hardware and software as being
#
2G and 5G respectively,
#
the beautiful things that are
#
part of that culture which create
#
this virtuous cycle have come down through decades
#
and centuries and all of that
#
but the urban governance
#
a 1947 independent India
#
construct thing, it's absolutely horrible
#
it's creaking at the bones, all my friends in Bangalore
#
keep complaining about the traffic
#
I will now point them to your data about automobiles
#
and say why are you buying so many cars
#
and use scoundrels? There's no public transport
#
How will they manage? So my question is that
#
and this is a dichotomy
#
you point to right at the start of this book
#
where you talk about the
#
on the one hand this is Bangalore
#
shining as it were and on the other hand
#
there's a creaking public infrastructure
#
the potholes, no public
#
transport, everything's kind of going to hell
#
how far do you think that can continue
#
because beyond the point then
#
it begins to creak at the joints
#
if urban infrastructure isn't fixed
#
in the last chapter of your book you also talk about how
#
whatever civic activism there is
#
it's not really talking to each other
#
I've done episodes with Ashwin Mahesh
#
who's a good friend of mine who does a lot of those things
#
within Bangalore and my complaint to him
#
always is that look I love the work
#
you guys are doing but the point is
#
that what you are doing is filling in the gaps
#
for what government should be doing anyway
#
those systems so there's
#
accountability within the system
#
civic action isn't even needed
#
so what is your sense of this
#
now that you're also a Bangalore resident
#
and you're a Bangalorean
#
so what is your sense of this
#
does something have to give at some point
#
or will governance get better and improve
#
so one just talking a bit about the problem
#
before we talk about this that one of the things
#
look at Delhi and Bombay
#
historically they come with an enormous
#
capital cities or in some way
#
and those have advantages
#
you government thinks of projects
#
it comes to Delhi naturally
#
it was really 10th, 12th, 14th
#
the city has shifted massive gears
#
India's innovation capital right
#
a lot of things that has happened in modern India
#
in terms of science etc. from Aadhaar
#
to UPI to whatever you can think about
#
enough recognition at a national level
#
the importance of the city
#
simply because of the legacy
#
while the city has changed
#
so much and grown so much
#
and contributed I think
#
for many people at the centre
#
or at other levels right
#
second is I think while Delhi is a
#
city state it has its advantages
#
it is the capital city also
#
pollution problem is the supreme court
#
lakes are frothing it's the back of the beyond
#
it doesn't make headlines except when
#
the traffic congestion gridlock
#
traffic or something happens like that
#
the recognition it doesn't get the priority
#
government has to pay attention
#
and political electoral politics
#
does shape a lot of things that
#
manifests in how the city is
#
in terms of city infrastructure in fact
#
one of the data that as part of data report
#
that we are doing I am pushing
#
our partners to look at the kind of
#
infrastructure investment that is happening
#
in other cities and quantum it is
#
and it will be a fraction in terms
#
of the growth that the city is seeing in terms of
#
people flocking to the city
#
and commensurate investment
#
in infrastructure I am 100%
#
sure there will be huge lag
#
will there be an inflection point
#
I think at some point of time
#
and I remember Manish Sabarwal and I
#
we were talking about this
#
the city is still at a growth phase
#
growth is still going on
#
velocity is pretty high
#
the data of census should tell
#
us the growth and momentum and all that
#
I think there will come a
#
time when the growth will have to
#
slow down and the velocity
#
will have to come down and then
#
I think at some point of time
#
some inflection point will happen either
#
at the center or at here where
#
there will be recognition
#
because our city governance administrative
#
sort of mechanism is flawed
#
we all know right we don't have mayors
#
we don't have empowered mayors
#
who have a budget who can look after the city
#
well being city are orphans
#
from that point of view and all our cities
#
I mean multiple projects have
#
just coincided to fix the
#
cities at least infrastructure issue
#
there are many problems but at least
#
they are fixing the infrastructure issue
#
so I am going to be hopeful
#
and optimism that I think at some
#
point of time political
#
stakeholders at the center
#
this and you know a lot
#
of things that India is going to do
#
will be digital diplomacy
#
right that we are talking about
#
now if you want to nurture that you got
#
to somehow sort of figure out a better
#
these are political issues that are emerging
#
the state and the political stakeholders
#
that's shaping the narrative
#
within the city will shape a lot
#
of things how the city trajectory
#
evolves going forward but I am
#
going to be hopeful here but I am
#
hopeful person optimistic person on
#
that no but now you don't have any
#
choice but to be optimistic because Bangalore
#
will kick you out here in the city of optimism you
#
my final question to you I am so
#
grateful you have shared your time and
#
insights with me today totally my pleasure
#
my final question is for me and my
#
listeners recommend books films
#
music which mean a lot to you and which you would love
#
to share with the world so I am
#
going to pick one or two
#
films that have meant a lot to me
#
and I still watch and I am not
#
a great big movie watcher
#
the pursuit of happiness is
#
always go back to I think
#
it's a powerful story and
#
it's a good film to watch on a
#
low day right and there would be
#
multiple other films that
#
heroes and heroines I like Shafali Shah
#
a lot I like Irfan Khan
#
I think they offer me fiction
#
in a way I would love to consume
#
Katherine Graham's book
#
she was a Washington Post
#
right their owner family her
#
biography and the imposter syndrome
#
that you speak about that was the first
#
time I was exposed to that
#
Gassi and what went through
#
and Steve Jobs and I've
#
after that I have read Einstein
#
I think biographies offer
#
you know otherwise when
#
you read the headlines you see
#
but an honestly done biography
#
tells you so much about the complexity
#
and if somebody can bring out the nuances
#
and complexity and challenge and highs
#
and lows of the person I think it's a
#
you don't have to go through it but that's
#
a huge exposure and learning that
#
witnesses another world in a real
#
sense it's not a fiction
#
in fiction two three of my
#
authors favorite author is
#
one is Alice Monroe I love her
#
between Murakami and Ishiguro
#
I lean towards Ishiguro a lot
#
nuances of relationships
#
you know when my son was growing up
#
I didn't read Roald Dahl
#
when I was growing up so I
#
when he was growing up and I would read to him
#
and I discovered Roald Dahl much late
#
in life but I loved him
#
but I read non-fiction a
#
relevant to my work as well and
#
that was an eye opener is
#
Daniel Kahneman's thinking
#
brains would behave in such a way
#
was an interesting book but I
#
pick up normally my non-fiction
#
is related to my works when I was
#
working on Bangalore I virtually
#
read all the books that came out
#
a book on slum on Bangalore
#
a book on this a book on that
#
everything that I could so
#
that I understood the city
#
and it applies to others like when I'm doing
#
something on social media I used to I picked
#
a book on social media so it was
#
well thank you so much for these recommendations I'm
#
really inspired by your energy and
#
thanks so much this was great
#
thanks Amit lovely to have this conversation
#
you can follow Malini on twitter
#
at goelmalini one word and you can follow me
#
at amitwarma A M I T V A R M A
#
you can browse past episodes of
#
the scene and the unseen at sceneunseen.in
#
tab of your choice thank you for
#
this podcast alive and kicking
