#
I had a thought while listening to the episode that you're going to hear now. Every economist
#
should be a poet. Now at one level, this is obvious. We should strive to nurture the multitudes
#
within us. There's a great danger for all of us that once we get good at one thing,
#
we follow the path where that takes and forget about the rest of the world and about the
#
rest of our own selves. We should watch out for this. Life is not about what you achieve,
#
and poetry is beautiful. To use a metaphor, it feeds our soul. It puts us in touch with
#
our deeper selves and thus with all of humanity because we all share the human condition. It
#
gives us empathy. Hopefully it makes us less dogmatic. And these are good qualities for
#
an economist. Too many economists are stuck inside their narrow lanes, concerned more about their
#
careers than the world at large. My guess today is different. We need more economists like him.
#
Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics,
#
politics, and behavioral science. Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
#
Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen. My guest today is Rohit Lamba, a wonderful economist who
#
scored it in an excellent new book with Raghuram Rajan. It's called Breaking the Mold, Reimagining
#
India's Economic Future. You should pick it up right away. But also you should note that just
#
over one hour of this conversation you will hear is about the book. The rest is about so much more.
#
Rohit is a man of many parts. He loves poetry, has studied Urdu, dreams in Hindi, and has deep
#
insights on our culture, our languages, our politics, our country. I found him to be such
#
a fine thinker, and I love this conversation, and you're going to love it too. But before we
#
get to it, let's take a quick commercial break. Do you want to read more? I've put in a lot of
#
work in recent years in building a reading habit. This means that I read more books,
#
but I also read more long-form articles and essays. There's a world of knowledge available
#
through the internet. But the problem we all face is how do we navigate this knowledge?
#
How do we know what to read? How do we put the right incentives in place?
#
Well, I discovered one way. A couple of friends of mine run this awesome company called CTQ
#
Compounds at ctqcompounds.com, which aims to help people up-level themselves by reading more.
#
A few months ago, I signed up for one of their programs called the Daily Reader.
#
Every day for six months, they sent me a long-form article to read.
#
The subjects covered went from machine learning to mythology to mental models and marmalade.
#
This helped me build a habit of reading. At the end of every day, I understood the world a little
#
better than I did before. So if you want to build your reading habit, head on over to CTQ
#
Compounds and check out their Daily Reader. New batches start every month. They also have a great
#
program called Future Stack, which helps you stay up-to-date with ideas, skills, and mental
#
models that will help you stay relevant in the future. Future Stack batches start every Saturday.
#
What's more, you get a discount of a whopping 2500 rupees, 2500 if you use the discount code
#
Unseen. So head on over to CTQ Compounds at ctqcompounds.com and use the code Unseen.
#
Rohit, welcome to the Scene in the Unseen. Thank you for having me, Amit. I've been a fan for a
#
very long time and it's an honor and a pleasure to be here. Thank you. It's kind of you to say that.
#
I want to start with a question that is sparked by something we were just talking about just now,
#
where you mentioned that you have been sort of doing videos where you're explaining these ideas,
#
the ideas of your book and the ideas of your work in Hindi. And I was very fascinated by that because
#
let me tell you a little sort of story that I learned from an episode I did with the historian
#
Fafna Little. And she's written this great book called The Broken Script and it covers about 50
#
years in Delhi between 1803 when the Anglo-Maratha war, the Marathas lose and 1857. So it's an East
#
India company and a nominal Mughal court, which is kind of, there's this delicate negotiation.
#
And it's also, there's a lot of churn in society at that time. For example, during this time,
#
Persian goes from becoming the official language of all of India, much as English is today. The
#
link language into absolutely nothing because English takes over. So, you know, you could be
#
10 year old being educated in Persia and you're going to rule the country one day and you're 25
#
and it's completely irrelevant. And that's a great shift. But what fascinated me was that there was
#
an institution which was founded called the Delhi School. And obviously in my college spirit,
#
the idea was that the Delhi College, sorry, and the idea was that the Delhi College would spread,
#
you know, Western learning. But their biggest endowment came from a gentleman named Fazal Ali,
#
who insisted that his endowment be used for what was called the Oriental branch of the school.
#
And therefore all the teaching happened in the local languages like Urdu and Persian. And the
#
issue with that was that those local languages, Urdu, had been used before that to teach a certain
#
kind of learning or talim or whatever, which is their knowledge system. And it would now have to
#
adjust to the Western knowledge system, whereas, you know, the Western knowledge system would have
#
to adjust to this language where often, you know, the vocabulary was simply not there and you had
#
to kind of make stuff on the fly. And I've often found that when I try to talk about economic ideas
#
or political ideas in Hindi, and I have tried, that is damn difficult because at one level,
#
of course, very soon you get to the compromise that you can't just translate everything,
#
you know, like free market, you can't find the equivalent words for it because it'll make no
#
sense. It will have no context. So you say some things in English the way that they are,
#
but even otherwise, like it felt so uneasy to me. And of course my Hindi isn't right. So I want to
#
find out about that. And you know, the role that these two languages therefore play in your life,
#
one, as you were saying before the recording is a language of emotion for you, which is Hindi,
#
and the other is a language of learning and, you know, where all your rational thinking happens in
#
a sense. So how does that work? Yeah, I mean, Hindi for me, I remember this day distinctly,
#
I think I was in graduate school at that time where I woke up one day fearing that I was dreaming in
#
English. By that what I mean is that I have always prided myself in thinking whether it's true or
#
not, I don't know, that I emote in Hindi and I professionally converse in English and that I
#
am reasonably well versed with both. You know, my Nana used to say, he was a man of great languages,
#
he was fluent in Urdu, used to write poetry in Urdu. And he used to say jokingly, you know,
#
it's not like, you know, your English is Shakespearean or you are, you know,
#
by you he meant like generation that is coming up, you know, or that you are
#
kind of writing in Premchand Hindi, or that, you know, you have like some kind of Iqbali Urdu.
#
And, you know, he used to use this word that I fear that you guys are becoming Bezuban.
#
Bezuban is a very powerful word, you know, it kind of means not just without language, but
#
to him it meant without emotion, because language is connected to emotion. And obviously it's an
#
extreme view language, you know, if you look at what linguists have written, language evolves
#
over time, you know, and Urdu is actually a great example of a language, or Hindustani as we know
#
it, which is another Hindi word I like a lot is Mishran. You know, it's a deep mixture of a lot of
#
things. And at some sense, actually, and I don't think there's been, to the best of my knowledge,
#
that much research on this, I think language is also a very powerful economic idea. Commerce
#
has driven historically language a lot. So, you know, in that backdrop, there has been distinct
#
moments in my life where I remember. So when that happened, I decided that, you know, I needed to
#
kind of go back, even though I was doing a PhD in economics, go back to some kind of class where
#
I would just be speaking or conversing or reading some light Hindi or Urdu while I was in graduate
#
school. And that's when I met my Urdu teacher, Fauziaji, who's from Lucknow and was teaching
#
Urdu in Princeton. So I decided not to do Hindi, but Urdu. And I remember even then she asked me
#
to describe what I do, game theory that I was kind of doing research in Urdu. It was a disaster.
#
That's when I reconciled with myself that it's okay that actually that I cannot explain very
#
technical terms of game theory in Urdu, but I still should be able to converse what I do on
#
a daily basis. It was just a promise to myself in simple Hindi and Urdu. And what you described
#
as this Delhi college or Delhi school, I haven't read the book yet. It's a very interesting
#
phenomena, right? Because I remember asking, I think my Hindi teacher or maybe my Nanaji that,
#
you know, why is it that, just to give you an example, somebody must have come up with this,
#
right? Why is it that railways is called Lopatgamini in Hindi? I didn't know it. Yeah. So
#
this was, it was in my Hindi book. You know, somebody, somebody wrote in my, I remember
#
middle-class Hindi book, Lopatgamini, you know, which literally for our English audience translates,
#
literal translation, law means loha, path means path, gamini means something that moves, moves,
#
right? And voila, what happened is that eventually all Hindi newspapers and writers just started
#
saying rail, right? So because language is, you cannot beat convenience in language. Language will
#
always find it's the coarsest possible way to communicate an idea. That's the job of a language.
#
I mean, obviously, you know, when you're emoting, when you're writing poetry, complexity is
#
desirable, but in daily communication, actually, simplicity trumps all other. So, so for me,
#
both, especially for this book, when we were thinking about it, we were keen that the book be
#
released in other Indian languages also. And one thing that we were insistent on that the
#
Penguin Publishers have reported to us has worked very well, was that we insisted that the Hindi
#
translation be released at the same time or around the same time. So a book released on December 7th,
#
basically that meant that in November, I didn't really sleep, you know, because while we would,
#
you know, the English edits had been done, but we had a fantastic Hindi translator, and he would
#
send me chapters, you know, and so I was in the US at that time. And, and, and, you know, I would
#
sit with him. And obviously, he's, he has fantastic Hindi and has a good grasp of English. But as you
#
were communicating, right, he's not an economist. So I, there were several parts that I thought to
#
myself were very unsatisfactory. You know, for example, there is a, you know, a discussion in
#
the book in the part one of the book about, you know, the role of services versus manufacturing
#
in India's development trajectory. And, you know, services is translated as seva. Oh, gosh,
#
yeah, right. So now it just doesn't capture because services, it is the literal meaning,
#
and it is the correct meaning. But the word services, when I say to you in an economic
#
context, has a whole another meaning in your head, right? Seva invokes social service.
#
Exactly, right? That somehow you're so, so, and I had to, I didn't have a better answer.
#
So, so at a lot of places, you know, seva has been used, and we say, you know, you know,
#
seva atva services, seva and service, in kind of telling the context. So this is a good example
#
where a word in English, over the years, it has has assumed, if I may use the word scientific
#
meaning of its own, but in Hindi, because it that language never developed, we are not sure
#
whether that actually the word is going to translate reasonably well to an informed reader,
#
but who's not very well versed in economics. So that requires that is that just simply requires
#
a build up of literature, discussion, knowledge in that language. Maybe it will be seva, I don't
#
know, maybe 30 years on the line, we'll come up with some other word in Hindi for it. But,
#
but I did feel that knowledge shouldn't be governed by language. And I do think that
#
in India, there is a increasing problem that English is considered a substitute for knowledge.
#
And to that extent, I wanted to do my whatever 2% to, to, to at least try to communicate
#
the ideas of the book in different languages. And more power to you, like I keep telling my
#
writing students, like when they'll say I'm starting a podcast or something, I'll say that,
#
look, if you know a language other than English, 80% as well as English, please do it in that,
#
because that's where, you know, the lacuna is that's where you'll bring far more value.
#
And I'm reminded of something, Peggy Mohan, who wrote the wonderful book, Wanderer's King's
#
Merchants, a point that she made while speaking to me on the show, where she said that we think
#
many of us are bilingual, but actually we're diglossic. And what that means is that if I'm
#
describing thing A, I can't use English and Hindi to do it. I do it in English, but for thing B,
#
only Hindi works for me. So each language is in a particular context. And when you speak about
#
Hindi being that emotional context, a language in which you dream, like what is that language in
#
which we cry in our dreams and ask for our mother, you know, that is one context and that is one
#
language. And it might be a completely separate language where, you know, you actually do your
#
learning. You know, there is this fun, I don't know if it's true, but somebody told me many years
#
ago, this joke that this very worldly guy comes to Akbar's court, you know, and it's kind of one
#
of those panchitantra type jokes, I think, you know, and he says, he tells Akbar that, you know,
#
I am well versed with all, almost all the languages of the world and you will not be able to tell
#
where I'm actually from. And you know, and he does, and he puts up a show and it's, you know,
#
everybody's mesmerized, you know, he's speaking Urdu, Persian, English, you know,
#
and so Akbar is confused and then he calls on Birbal, right? So Birbal comes and Birbal watches
#
him for a while and then Akbar says, can you solve this puzzle? And he said, yes, I can. And Akbar
#
trusts him. And so he said, okay, let him keep performing and quietly goes behind him and kicks
#
him really hard in the nuts, you know, and he screams in a certain language. And Birbal says,
#
that's your mother tongue. Amazing. I'm not saying this is what people should do, but
#
please no one do this. No one do this. We should all be honest about our mother tongues. So, but
#
if the guy was being so pretentious, maybe he deserved a kick in the nuts. So I'm so struck and
#
so impressed by your grandfather's use of the word Bezuban because actually I totally get the
#
spirit of it in the sense that I think there is a danger of all of us becoming Bezuban and having
#
to fight it on a daily basis. Now in one narrow, I'll give you a narrow example and a broad example
#
and tell me what you think of the broad one. The narrow example is academics itself, where mediocre
#
academics can get trapped in jargon, where they're playing a circle joke game with other academics
#
and it's all, you know, it's like how postmodernism became a parody of itself. And what happens is
#
that when you get trapped in that kind of language, your thinking also ossifies and you can't go
#
beyond that. And that is one kind of, I think, becoming Bezuban where you use a language to
#
discover new things and to think of the world in a new way. But a broader sense of Bezuban,
#
which I try to fight in myself and which I think we all must, is that, you know,
#
when people talk about LLMs as autocomplete on steroids, I think in a very fundamental sense,
#
we are all autocompletes. You know, our LLMs have far smaller databases than actual, you know,
#
chat GPT LLMs would. And a lot of the time we are just autocompleting without even sort of
#
realizing it. You know, 80% of our speech is perhaps cliche in some manner or the other.
#
And the danger of this is that even the best intentions of us, even the most curious of us,
#
can stop thinking in new ways, can stop looking at the world in new ways, because just as
#
everything we see around us gets normalized, even this language sort of gets normalized and
#
thought becomes restricted in these boundaries. So what is, you know, do you have any thoughts on this?
#
I mean, you know, I am not a scholar of linguists. I can only talk from experience
#
is that I do think actually that language inhibits your ability or lack of openness.
#
You don't even need to know. Lack of openness to certain linguistic traits that are around you
#
does restrict your ability to understand and empathize with people around you
#
and also to create new knowledge. And I think you see it, for example, in politics,
#
right? Like that one of the things that, you know, my father-in-law, he was a, you know,
#
he's a great scholar of Hindi literature and he was at Delhi University for a long time.
#
And, you know, he, for example, notes that there is a certain kind of, you know, if I may,
#
these are not his words, but my interpretation that there is a certain kind of apartheid when
#
it comes to people who write in Hindi versus people who write in English in, it's not in terms of
#
access, right? Hindi's access is much larger, but it's just in terms of what is considered
#
good talk or knowledge talk. You know, in fact, you know, he was part of the left, so to say,
#
for a long time. And he observes, for example, that even within the left, like hardcore left,
#
CPIM and so on, which is, which is supposed to be very egalitarian, actually, there was a hierarchy
#
amongst those who conversed in English and actually couldn't therefore communicate with
#
a large part of the country. And those who wrote in Hindi, who were, you know, actually much more,
#
you know, had much greater access, but were in a different intellectual club, so to say, right?
#
So I think, I think, and what, and how you're saying it played out in politics now is, is what,
#
for example, the current, you know, government has done for the last 10 years, that it has upended
#
this sort of monopoly in some sense of English as a medium of knowledge. And,
#
and I do think that both sides would be much better off if they were just open
#
to, to not letting language be the, the, the premium vehicle of knowledge. And I think,
#
I still think we are talking past each other. Yeah. I mean, the danger in, you know, firstly,
#
it's common to all populist movements that you are essentially anti-elite. That's a great simple
#
narrative that sells very well. And a lot of that anti-elitism, even though we are both elites
#
ourselves, but a lot of that anti-elitism in my mind is justified because we have shut ourselves
#
into ivory towers. We haven't made enough of an effort to get our ideas out there. We have been
#
complacent, but the danger of being anti-elites by default is that you also become anti-expertise
#
and anti-knowledge, right? So yes, English should not have a monopoly on knowledge, but to thereby
#
not just turn aside English, but to turn aside knowledge seems completely bizarre to me. And,
#
and you know, you were talking about this hierarchy. It was well illustrated in this
#
recent episode I did with Ira Pandey ji. And Ira Pandey's was of course Ninal Pandey's sister,
#
Pushpaish Pan's cousin, Shivani ji's daughter, the great Hindi novelist and, and great writer
#
in her own right. So I think this would have happened when she was in her forties, right?
#
Her husband is an IS officer. So she went with him to a party and somebody at the party
#
politely making polite small talk said, oh, what do you do? And she said, I've written some books
#
and the person said, oh, I really must read them. You know, what are the names? And she says they're
#
in Hindi. And he just turned around and walked away, right? And it's that kind of an attitude
#
that makes me understand the anti-elite sentiment, which is common out there. And my next question
#
is also about translating ideas, but not from one language to another, but within the same language.
#
Like one thing that I've often found is that economists, especially there is this danger of
#
suffering from the curse of knowledge and assuming that everyone has a baseline understanding
#
of the subject and therefore not bothering to say, explain terms. Now Ajay Shah and I,
#
and Ashu, everything is everything. We talk about all of these terms and I keep reminding him
#
that most people don't know what these terms mean. So when you say public goods,
#
they'll think what is good for the public. When you say market failure, they'll say when the,
#
they'll think when the market fails to give me what I want, like I went for a green shirt,
#
there was nothing out there. And the problem with many of the terms in perhaps in all fields,
#
but certainly in economics is that all of the specialist terms, which mean one specific thing
#
can be interpreted in completely another way. If you just look at them as common nouns,
#
you know, rent seeking being another example and the sort of so many of those. And as an economist
#
who is also making, I think the laudable effort to speak to a larger audience, which I believe
#
every scholar who thinks his work is important must do. You must be a public intellectual in
#
these times if you are an intellectual and it's almost a duty. Therefore, how do you tackle
#
that particular challenge where you have to get across complex ideas? It is possible to
#
get across complex ideas in simple language, but then we learn, then we run into, you know,
#
obstacles like this, where all these phrases come up, because every time you use a phrase,
#
you're not going to explain what it means. You know, you assume at some point,
#
but actually perhaps, you know, it might lose some people any one time that you don't do it.
#
So how have you thought about this? And I'm sure this is a challenge you faced. How does one get
#
past it? So let's think about this from two perspectives, a historical perspective,
#
and then a kind of more modern network structure perspective. So what do I mean by historical
#
perspective that economists as the arbiters of truth or even arbiters of how society should be
#
organized, of it market is just one component, is a very recent phenomenon. You can argue that
#
historically this hat was given almost exclusively to philosophers or theologians, theologians,
#
I don't know if I said that correctly. And, you know, there's a there's a very interesting
#
book I read recently called The Price of Peace, which is basically a biography of Keynes,
#
you know, kind of, and also a biography of modern economics, but through Keynes's life.
#
And you see that, that, you know, even when Adam Smith was writing what he was writing,
#
he was kind of writing it not as a public intellectual, he was writing it as a scholar,
#
as an academic. It only sort of happens towards the end of 19th century, beginning of 20th century,
#
pre-war, that you start seeing economists actively engage in what you think of it as the public
#
realm, right, like taking ideas, or even attempting to take complex ideas as the market economy was
#
thriving, the welfare state was coming up, these complex ideas to the public. And Keynes was
#
obviously like, you know, the bacha of this, you know, I mean, it's kind of incredible how he was
#
both a remarkable public intellectual, but a very, very serious academic,
#
and even like a mathematical economist. And I think, once you think of that things,
#
Keynes is a remarkable person, right? So once you take that and think about it very seriously,
#
and that's where I will kind of come to the second network structure component, what I mean by that
#
is that, and I can only speak as an academic here, is that there is a challenge that you need to
#
first earn your place within the academy. There is an unwritten rule, which, you know, I think I have
#
not followed, unfortunately, which I don't, it's not even advisable that you should, that is that
#
you have to first, academy has a very strict unwritten rule that you need to first earn your
#
place within the tribe, and only then you're allowed to go and pontificate outside the tribe.
#
Now, what tends to happen, I have seen in my experience is that while you're trying to earn
#
your place within the tribe, and probably there is no other way, you become so specialized,
#
you become so kind of expert in, become an expert in a certain narrow discipline or area
#
that then to extricate yourself from that, and to therefore then read, I mean, Keynes was very
#
well read in art, in history, in philosophy, then to go back or, you know, if you especially haven't
#
read these stuff carefully all through graduate school and in your tenure track years, and then
#
make those connections, and then simplify them and make it accessible to public is no mean task,
#
right? So what tends to happen is that in every generation, that's what I've seen, you get people
#
like Hal Varian, you know, who's a chief economist of Google, you know, who's translating ideas to
#
a different kind of audience, right? Or Paul Krugman, you know, at least while he was, you know,
#
at least a decade ago, you know, people like, you know, or Larry Summers, you get certain people,
#
and there are many others, I'm just giving you, they are not the norm, they are somewhat the
#
exception, because I think that's my theory, because of the reasons I just said that people
#
are then not able to extricate themselves from that complexity of thought to really simplify it
#
and communicate to a public. Also, the incentives are not there within the academy to do that.
#
So now that doesn't mean that, in my personal opinion, that everyone should do it. There should
#
be certain people like Thomas Sargent, I took a course with him, brilliant economist, he won the
#
Nobel Prize, you know, he's built in a certain way that he has continued to, you know, the academic
#
route till he was C70, 80 and so on, right? But I agree with you that more and more people should
#
be encouraged and informed at a much younger time in their academic career, that you should
#
actually also train yourself for this, that this shouldn't just depend on the personal endowment or
#
preferences of people, that they should actually be incentives and structures built into the
#
academy that encourage this kind of public discourse and they just aren't. And in fact,
#
if you try to jump, you know, kind of and try to start doing this too early, it's not looked
#
favorably upon. And I think, in fact, you should try to start doing it early so that you learn it,
#
you learn and hone your craft. Because, you know, like, you know, we were discussing at lunch,
#
how you hone the craft of doing the podcast, right? It takes time. And I think just like that,
#
to be able to communicate complex ideas and simplify them, it takes time. Even for this book,
#
Raghu and I, you know, went back and forth many times about what should be the right
#
pitch of the book. And that took actually more effort than even writing it, because to
#
first understand who are we talking to was very, very important. And we were constantly juggling
#
this idea that it shouldn't be too, we were certain it was not for academics. But we also
#
wanted it to be a little more nuanced than just a descriptive work of, of, hey, this is what's going
#
on. To have it to infuse the description with enough theory to give it structure for, say,
#
an informed reader. You know, I share your lament entirely of the hyper specialization of academia
#
and the incentives it creates. And, you know, the fact that there are very few people today
#
who can be described as a renaissance man, the way Keynes no doubt was, and, you know,
#
so many great thinkers of the 19th century by default would have to be people who spread
#
themselves out across subjects, because everything is everything. And Ajay and I did an episode of
#
our show called Fixing the Knowledge Society, where we kind of spoke about this. And the lament there
#
was that, look, there was a time that when you think about knowledge in this world, like,
#
where is knowledge produced? Where is knowledge refined? Where is knowledge disseminated?
#
And the university at that time becomes like a natural repository and a center for all of these.
#
And today, in many ways, it is now irrelevant. It is partly irrelevant because it has made itself
#
irrelevant in the ways that you describe the hyper specialization and how academic fashions
#
can destroy academia, which we can talk about later. And also because of now the means of
#
production being available to everyone, the means of learning and knowledge becoming available to
#
everyone, like the fact that Robert Sapolsky's biology lectures for Harvard are available for
#
everyone to see on free on YouTube just blows my mind. And therefore, one begins to wonder
#
that how is this knowledge society, if I may use this term, how is it going to be organized maybe
#
30 years from now? Like today, I look at someone like I've had six episodes with Ramchandra Guha,
#
a man I respect and adore. And Ram has forever been looked upon as an outsider by historians
#
because he's done sociology, anthropology, whatever, but he's looked upon as an outsider.
#
He was resented for a long time, one because he's from outside the field. He hasn't made his name
#
within the tribe, as you point out, and also because he's writing for a popular audience.
#
And therefore, the assumption is that it can't be as good. Now, Ram, of course, today, I think every
#
historian would acknowledge that Ram's rigor is second to none. And at the same time, he reaches
#
a large audience. And I think it'll take a long, long time for us to really appreciate fully what
#
a staggering achievement that is. But, you know, where is more of that going to come from? Because
#
the danger of, you know, knowledge coming from outside the academia is that you can then get
#
narrative battles, you can get WhatsApp University, there is a trade off that there may be a loss of
#
rigor or methodology or whatever, all of those things. But at the same time, what you get from
#
inside academia a lot of the time is nonsense that might be tied to the fans and fads and fashions
#
of the day and have no relation to the real world whatsoever. And what I loved about what, you know,
#
you and Raghu have done, and Raghu's been doing for many years, is that you're stepping outside of
#
that and saying, yeah, okay, I know what I know. No one disputes my credibility, certainly in Raghu's
#
case. And therefore, I am now going to talk to the world, which is an important public service.
#
But if I can sort of go back to that hypothetical question, where are we moving and what do you
#
think a knowledge society looks like in 20 years from now? Who are the great experts of 2050?
#
Let me break down that question. First, you know, it's funny you mentioned Ram. You know, the first,
#
you know, and we can talk in more detail about the role books played in my life, but the first,
#
actually the first to the fact book that I dared to pick up a nonfiction and read in totality was
#
India After Gandhi. This was maybe 23 years, it was, you know, came late in my life, it was maybe 23
#
at that time or 24. And I could just couldn't put it down, you know, it was just a subject as banal
#
as banal, but as you know, I could be very dry as history, right? It's a modern history. And it was
#
around that time that I was talking to some people, I think who may have been graduate students in
#
history, and Ram's name came up. And one of them, you know, this is again, I was trying, how do you
#
earn your place in the tribe I was mentioning, right? One of the same said, Oh, Ram Guha,
#
you mean that journalistic historian? Oh, good. Right. And you know, what did I know at that time,
#
I was still I was still too young, but to understand really, I still don't in some ways,
#
how the academy works and what are the things you should say and what you shouldn't say.
#
And I was I just looked at them. And I said, what do you that what does that even mean?
#
And I said, No, I mean, that academic versus journalistic historian, I was just I could
#
understand it. And I was angry, but I didn't know how to communicate my anger. Now I can
#
communicate my anger in a more sophisticated way as to how could you differentiate I mean,
#
my mind what I thought, how could you differentiate that given that I picked up a history book after a
#
long time because of this guy, and I read it in total, and I know so much more about Indian
#
history, which I should have, you know, in the introduction, he beautifully I still remember,
#
puts this thing in the book that, you know, why should Indian history stop at 1947?
#
You know, why is suddenly that after 1947, it becomes political science?
#
And, you know, and then he takes off from there. And that stayed with me that stayed with me that
#
somehow for this kid, you know, it was my age, saying that I don't even think this kid understood
#
what they were saying, right? It was just that saying that was the kind of the thing you did
#
in the tribe. It was the autocomplete. Yeah, yeah, very good. Yeah, it was the autocomplete
#
because they that's what this heard around them, right? Like by saying Ram Guha is a
#
journalistic historian, they would get some street cred in, you know, and it was very unfortunate.
#
Still, I think it's very, very unfortunate. But you're right that I think today, I don't think,
#
you know, it's well recognized. This is already more than 10 years, 12 years ago. So that, you
#
know, most of modern Indian history has been, you know, built on a lot of the work that he's done.
#
And it's of second to none rigor. I don't think there's any question about that.
#
Yeah, you know, I mean, I can push back a little bit on the irrelevance, maybe because of my own
#
bias is that I think the university does offer that's not unique to America or India or Europe,
#
the university does offer a very unique place in in both ancient medieval and modern society,
#
where there is a constant interaction between the next generation and the
#
arbiters of knowledge of this generation. Now, you're right that the notion that these people
#
should be provided the baton of being the arbiters of knowledge has been challenged
#
fundamentally since the advent of the internet. There's no question about that. But I do think
#
there is something very beautiful about physical proximity between a bunch of people who are
#
researchers, whether they are researchers in the sense of the ivory tower or accessibility to the
#
greater public and young minds. I think this is very unique. And because it happens at a density
#
and, and also breadth of topics that is unique to a university. So you can be in a non I still
#
continue to tell people that I'm not worried about the job of a professor so much completely
#
disappearing. I think it'll I think what online stuff has done is made me you know, it made it
#
anything it will make even more so in the future be a more on our toes and kind of, you know,
#
you know, make it harder to be very good at your job. But I don't think I don't think the
#
university is going anywhere. I do think there is something unique about both students young minds
#
interacting with each other physically in a space for four to five years, and professors
#
interacting with students on a regular basis. And I think for me, actually, one of the problems with
#
the academy is the the, the lack of emphasis it puts on both teaching and PhD and advising,
#
you know, like I one of the advisors I got when I started my job was, you know, teaching evaluations
#
are too good too early, there might be a problem. In the sense that, you know, that is that must
#
mean that you're putting too much effort into teaching and actually tenure decisions are based
#
are based almost exclusively on the basis of research. And teaching can be a disqualifying
#
criteria, but it is rarely a qualifying criteria. So, so in fact, I think I, you know, have learned
#
so much. So I, you know, I taught this freshman course introductory micro for a long time, which
#
is basically a bunch of enthusiastic high school students were taking their first course in college
#
in economics. And I have learned more economics, just teaching that course, then, you know,
#
basically teaching my PhD course, because they're so, you know, the eager but also they're so blank,
#
right? Like, you know, they don't buy the concept of a utility or a preference, you have to explain
#
to them and they challenge you, right? Why should what is utility? Like, why do we care about this?
#
Why are we measuring happiness in terms of utility? Very basic questions, you know, even
#
when I taught intro macro for the first time, students were very confused about why is GDP the
#
right measurement? What is GDP? You know, like certain things that, you know, we just take news,
#
GDP has gone up 8%. And, you know, it's almost become a political device now, right? So and so
#
they challenge your thinking in ways which are almost axiomatic. So I think for that reason,
#
I think the university is a beautiful place. And I don't see a substitute just yet.
#
Having said that, how a knowledge society has become more democratic, but it's also become
#
more chaotic. So, you know, as I was telling you over lunch that, you know, I view you, for example,
#
as, you know, as a curator of knowledge as much as a producer of knowledge, because I think
#
production is become easier, but that doesn't become that doesn't mean that it become
#
necessarily of higher quality, right? In this era of opinions rather than information,
#
how you make sense of the world is actually by curating much of the information that is out there.
#
And I think that's where the role of the public intellectual becomes very, very important. And I
#
do think that in that sense, it has become even more important than, say, when Keynes was, you
#
know, bringing economics to the people, so to say, because there is so much more information,
#
because everybody seems to have an opinion on what growth means. And we can't even seem to agree on
#
basic facts. You know, you look at the debate in India right now, for example, on economic policy,
#
we just don't seem to be able to agree on consumption data, on growth data, on jobs,
#
for example. And so I think in this day and age, what I would like to see more, actually,
#
is the university being open to people who are not traditional academics. It's almost like a
#
lateral entry, you know, we keep saying in IAS, you know, you should, I really think the university
#
should be much more open right now. There is a sort of slightly hierarchical system of, you know,
#
this person is a professor and this professor is a professor of practice. I think we should really
#
embrace people who've done well in various walks of life and invite them to the academy
#
and ask them to not just, you know, Amit, come and teach a course in my university, you know,
#
Amit, come and be part of my university, you know, we'll give you a normal contract. I mean,
#
you may not want it, but I'm saying the people, you know, people who are and just not just be
#
embedded in teaching young minds, but also be embedded in the ivory tower. Come, you know,
#
have a look at the other side, so to say, you know, spend five years here and somehow,
#
and this is, you know, a more longer-term challenge, make you feel welcome enough that
#
you don't feel like an outsider, you know, we're writing in our journals and, you know, Amit, just
#
know, I think we value what you do and you should come talk to us. That, I think, will go a long way
#
in the ivory tower actually becoming a more important member of whatever knowledge society
#
will look like in 2050. So I'll ask you to indulge me in a thought experiment and the thought
#
experiment is this, that if we rebooted the universe, so let's say we rebooted human
#
civilization and I ask this in different contexts often, how much of banking, how much of finance
#
would look the same, what sports would evolve and which wouldn't, but what I'll ask you in this
#
context is that how would the knowledge society then evolve, like would universities look the way
#
they are, would, you know, the entire education system, could it look different and the reason
#
for asking this question is that I find that a lot of things that happen in history are pure
#
contingent accidents and they wouldn't, you know, if those, you know, completely different things
#
could have happened and they would not have evolved, but there are some things which would
#
have evolved no matter what, like, you know, a system of money would have evolved, currency
#
would have evolved, all of those things we can agree would definitely have evolved. In the context
#
of sport, I believe football would definitely have evolved because it is so primal, you're
#
kicking around object about, there is no way cricket would have come again because it is just
#
such a bizarre game that you need historical accidents for it to actually come about in the
#
manner that it did. So, you know, if you can indulge your imagination a bit and indulge me a bit,
#
you know, and think about how this whole system of knowledge and education and whatever, how could
#
it be different and the reason I ask you to make that effort is that all of us, me, everyone who's
#
listening to this, we normalise things as they are and we assume, these will be the departments,
#
this is how it will be set up, you know, and all the incentives that come along with that.
#
How could it possibly have been differently? See, let's go back to the idea, let's go back to how,
#
like, what Cambridge and Oxford used to do earlier, right? Like, they were basically
#
meant for religious scholars and obviously as history has evolved for men, unfortunately.
#
If you look at the gurukul system back home, all right, again, it was meant for, I mean,
#
there was obviously the training of priests by priests, but there was this training of princes
#
by teachers, right, or whatever the elite, it doesn't, maybe not limited just to the princes.
#
I think that we're not that far away from that system still, like, you know, which is that
#
typically you physically go, let's get it to very basic level, you physically go somewhere to get an
#
education, it's not necessarily at your home, why is that? One can ask that question at the outset,
#
maybe it was just constraints of technology. Second was that there is an interaction between
#
a learned person and a younger person, right, that's the other kind of almost axiomatic,
#
you know, way in which education has evolved. I don't see how that would change either. Maybe
#
that learned person becomes a 3D hologram or something or, but that idea that somehow there
#
is a repertoire of knowledge that is being communicated by another human being or some
#
kind of technology that is going to stay, I think, that you learn with peers, right?
#
That can change and has been changing that in the sense that COVID taught us that a lot of people
#
were, you know, shut down in their homes and they had to look at their laptops or phones
#
to access information and material and they were not necessarily in physical contact with
#
peers, they were in online contact with peers, right? I would like to believe and I could be
#
wrong is that some level of physical proximity with peers is important because education is as
#
much a collective learning experience as it is an individual experience. Now you put these elements
#
together and it is not a surprise in some sense therefore that the education system evolved into,
#
evolved through a school and then a university. Now I would continue to believe that that basic
#
tenant would remain, this basic dhacha, as we say, framework would remain, but within its framework
#
that we're going to see a lot of changes and we already are seeing a lot of change. One concrete
#
example I can give you, it hasn't happened yet, but my prediction is that business schools are in
#
a lot of trouble. I think there was a point in time when, you know, management was, it'll continue
#
to be what management taught in a certain way, was kind of, you know, getting the best talent.
#
I don't think it is today. I think it is going into tech very early on and I don't think tech
#
companies believe, or even these days actually a lot of, except maybe consulting firms, a lot of
#
finance firms even believe that you did somehow, if you've done an MBA, that's a strong enough
#
signal that you're smarter than the next person's CV that I'm reading. That has changed very recently
#
the last 10-20 years. So this is a structural thing that I see, for example, within the university
#
that is going to change. You know, whether, you know, as I was mentioning, you know, whether
#
one must require a PhD to be a professor, I think must also change. Just coming back to what I was
#
saying earlier, I think this is again a structural problem that obviously you should have proved your
#
merit in some way. You know, for example, when I was in, you know, when I was in university,
#
we used to have this idea of a writer-in-residence, you know, Paul Moldoon, who used to be the
#
poetriate of the New Yorker, used to come and teach literature. And I think by the time I was
#
leaving, Jhumpa Lahiri was asked to come and be the writer-in-residence. These people have not done
#
a PhD, but nobody would argue that they are not good at their, right? So why should one reserve
#
it only to literature and not to economics that other people should, with certain kind of expertise,
#
should be allowed to come and enter the academy? More than that, I, you know, the other missing
#
link, which is, you know, which I don't know how big it is going to be in 5, 10, 15, 20 years from
#
now is really the impact of AI into how we both generate and curate knowledge, right? So, you know,
#
is it true that given the information that is being produced, even curation of knowledge
#
can be outsourced to a machine, which I think today definitely requires a human touch?
#
If that is true, then I think the university is in further danger that I'm not actually accounting
#
for right now in this discussion, in this thought experiment. But I continue to believe that this
#
interaction between the, you know, sometimes when I start teaching a course, I tell the students
#
this old Sanskrit shloka, which I can tell you in English, you know, it goes like...
#
Feel free to tell me in Sanskrit also.
#
I don't know if I will be able to. I can try, but, you know, it goes something like, you know,
#
one-fourth from your faculties, one-fourth from your peers, one-fourth from your teacher,
#
and one-fourth only with time. And I think it's a very powerful verse, a set of verses,
#
which basically I'm trying to tell my students that, you know, I often joke with them that I'm
#
trying to, you know, reduce already telling you, you know, my impact on your education is just
#
one-fourth. But I do think there's some truth to it, you know, that one-fourth is generally about
#
how much effort you're going to put in. And peers are very important. That's why I was trying to
#
emphasize that one-fourth from your peers, that you're going to learn a lot from your classmates.
#
I'm going to teach you one-fourth. I think one thing that is not appreciated immediately by
#
students is that no matter how bright or no matter how hardworking you are, certain things take time.
#
You know, even after the course finishes, you may not really understand,
#
you know, exactly how budget constraints work or how profit maximization works or why do firms
#
make certain decisions that they do or why, you know, does Uber charge surge pricing? Why is that
#
actually good in certain ways? You learn with time. You understand the tools and you learn with time.
#
So I think, you know, I can only answer your thought experiment in these is basic. I'm a
#
theoretician, so it is basic axiomatic frameworks. And so, yeah, I think the university will stay,
#
but the form it takes could be dramatically different in the 20, 30 years from now.
#
I find that Sanskrit shloka fascinating because it doesn't mention parents.
#
Like I'll often irritate parent friends of mine by pointing them to The Nurture Assumption by
#
Judith Rich Harris, an influential book of the 90s, which looked at a whole bunch of data and
#
really rigorous book and pointed out that actually parents have almost zero influence on their kids
#
and peers have a far greater influence. So the best parents can do is not be a negative force
#
on their kids and destroy their lives. But apart from that, they're not really going to, you know,
#
manage much. And I'm going to dig further with the question that I think is more of an economics
#
question, even if it is about the academy is that everyone in this country can aspire to go out there
#
in the market and buy the best quality Maggie. Everyone can aspire to go out there and find 50
#
varieties of toothpaste. You know, we can all buy the best things and money is a constraint. And for
#
many of these things like the best quality Maggie, which is basically all the Maggie, it isn't even
#
very different. That's not the case for education. Everybody in this country cannot aspire to be a
#
mechanical engineer because there are too many hoops to jump through for it to become meaningful.
#
And we've of course normalized it, that quality education is a scarce resource. And at one level,
#
when I think of it, it almost seems to me that a university is by default an exclusionary place,
#
especially in the Indian context, higher education here, you're keeping out many more people than
#
you're taking in. And that seems an incredible tragedy to me, because there is this great desire
#
from people to learn, but you know, they can't do that. And I wonder if one kind of moves out
#
of that, like what has gone wrong here? At some level, obviously, I do believe that in India,
#
you guys have written about it in your book as well, that if you look at school education,
#
for example, definitely the supply is far more constrained than it would otherwise be if you
#
just allowed free markets. And if you just had various good policies in place, you've given
#
charters and vouchers as two examples of what can be done. But without doubling down on that
#
specific example, my broader question is, what is the structural problem that every single person
#
who wants to be a mechanical engineer cannot get the best training in mechanical engineering?
#
See, there's definitely a supply problem that you're pointing out. But let me first,
#
I'll take that up. Let me first take up the problem of the demand itself, right? So
#
while it may be a legitimate demand for someone to be a mechanical engineer,
#
but the unfortunate truth is, and this we say in the book also, is that
#
mechanical engineering is hard, and to do it well is not easy.
#
What actually, specifically to the context of India, a big issue is that your human capital
#
needs to have developed to a certain degree by the time you're age 15. Actually, I mean,
#
there's very good evidence to show that actually your human capital at age five,
#
what you've accumulated in terms of your health and your basic kind of learning techniques,
#
goes a long way into your life outcomes and learning outcomes. Definitely learning outcomes,
#
life outcomes obviously depend on a lot of other things. And so just because a 15-year-old wants to
#
be a mechanical engineer, unfortunately, our health and education in the early years of the
#
child are so bad on average that we are actually denying them from a purely welfare and human,
#
a good perspective, the opportunity. You know, before even the supply question comes into
#
question, right? Like mechanical engineering is a higher education. Have you prepared an individual
#
and a 15-year-old individual to a stage where they can A, make an informed decision about that,
#
is it what they want to do, and actually be ready, their faculties be ready to be able to
#
absorb that kind of sophisticated knowledge? Let me come in here. My recent guest on my show,
#
Deepak Vyas, made the great point that the way the IIT exams work out, they aren't actually testing
#
if the people best equipped to do mechanical engineering get into it. What happens often is
#
that it is such a competitive test that everybody, for example, who lands up in the metallurgy
#
department does not want to do metallurgy. And across the country, there might be scattered
#
many kids who care about metallurgy, but they can't do metallurgy because of that random exam
#
which optimizes for something completely different and has been gamed utterly by the, you know,
#
the quota classes and so on and so forth. So one, you're not even achieving that. Two,
#
the way my mind works is that rather than a centrally administered test deciding whether
#
I have the faculties to do mechanical engineering, like in the same way, there is no, if I want to
#
start a business, there will be no centrally administered test and I won't have to jump through
#
hoops. I can start a business. If I fail, I fail. So similarly, I believe that anyone who wants to
#
study mechanical engineering, you should be able to do so. And then if you fail and you can't keep
#
up, you'll figure it out. But it's that absence of opportunity that kind of grates it.
#
Right. So that's the second point, right? So good. So let's assume that we have now a collection of
#
reasonably talented 15-year-olds who may want to be mechanical engineers. So then I think what
#
you're saying and what your guest said actually becomes very important because the allocation,
#
it's a matching problem, okay, to use a technical term. Basically, you're saying that are we, you
#
know, are we getting the right kind of people who actually want to do this? And I think their
#
educational system is a fairly big disaster in the sense that, you know, a lot of people are taking
#
the IIT exam as much as it's a clear marker of social and economic mobility, as it is my deep
#
desire to actually become a mechanical engineer. And so you get this, and it's actually much more
#
true of, you know, hard engineering. By hard, I mean like non-computer science engineering,
#
where people just kind of, they land up there, you know, and I've seen this a lot of my classmates
#
from high schools, you know, whatever rank they got. In the first year of, you know, this is the
#
famous joke in three idiots, right? Like that if you, you know, that if you always knew you
#
wanted to become a bank manager, why did you do engineering? So, you know, so if you're from
#
first year college, you know, you're telling me you want to do an MBA, then why did you,
#
I mean, there should be at least a somewhat of a positive probability that you actually like
#
engineering. You know, I always tell undergraduate students who come to me to ask whether they should
#
do a PhD. I said that it's not a necessary condition that you want to become a professor,
#
you know, but if you're committing to five to six years of your life, you should think that there
#
is a reasonably positive probability that I may like the life of the academy. So actually try to
#
first understand what professors do, what is it, most PhDs actually don't become academics, right?
#
The supply is much, but you should at least entertain the idea, right? So, in that sense,
#
I do think that the way we used to rationalize actually, you know, a lot of my friends who
#
either went to national law school or IITs or, you know, all these like,
#
sort of very well regarded, you know, they will all, I think, agree that basically what these
#
exams did was somehow test for some intelligence and then got a bunch of reasonably intelligent
#
people in different ways and under the same roof. And then this is that one fourth that I told you
#
about kicks in, right? That the one fourth from the peers and actually they learn a lot, a hell
#
of a lot from just peers, whether that becomes network effects later on in life is a separate
#
thing. But and I don't think actually a lot of these institutions, you know, if with due respect
#
to all my teachers, I have very good instruction either. So it's even the top level IITs in some
#
ways. And so I do think that in that sense, the welfare loss must be huge that given so conditional
#
on so there is a first a problem at whether you're being able to prepare enough 15 year olds to
#
access higher education to the best of their capacities, abilities, resources, and so on.
#
But conditional on that, you're absolutely right that we do have a big problem of,
#
of allocation of of talent, where I think the US system has its weaknesses. But on this dimension,
#
it is actually very good that you let people decide when they're 20, like by the second or
#
third year of college, what do they want to major in? In fact, I have strongly believed for a long
#
time that you should let people study history, philosophy, math, and some literature in the
#
first year, maybe even two years of college, and then let them decide whether they want to study
#
physics, engineering, and two years is more than enough. The next two years more than enough to
#
actually specialize in a subject. I mean, you know, this is something that, you know, you have
#
talked about often in your show, this is these are relics of some bygone era when these rules
#
were made, you know, this kind of certain socialistic centralization ideas we had about
#
how, you know, certain things should be administered. And in fact, even education,
#
my some of my teachers were lamenting to me that, that, you know, I did my master's at
#
Delhi School of Economics that now they've apparently even doing some kind of centralized
#
admission for all master's courses of economics in India. So earlier, JNU had a separate exam
#
than Delhi School because JNU offered a different product, you were going to get a different kind
#
of economics education, which is totally fine, which is actually the right thing to do, then
#
Delhi School of Economics and ISI Delhi, you know, but now apparently they're trying,
#
you know, I don't know if this has been implemented yet, but that's in the works,
#
that they think that somehow having who they I mean, I don't know who they are, but a centralized
#
exam for all economics master's courses in India is the right way to go because of some kind of
#
efficiency criteria, which completely kills what you're talking about in terms of differentiated
#
products. Even for mechanical engineering, you should be able to offer different sorts
#
of mechanical engineering targeted at different kinds of people with different kinds of skills
#
and talent. And maybe some 15 year olds may not be as ready as some other 15 year olds who've
#
gone to the best schools in Delhi and Bombay, but they might learn on the job and they might
#
become actually better mechanical engineers later on in life than people who are better prepared
#
at age 15. So I think that requires a much deeper and longer discussion on higher education India,
#
which I'm happy to have because I do have deep grudges and misgivings about the way it is going,
#
not just the way it is, but actually the way it is going. Elaborate and let's have a conversation.
#
I think, you know, there is a, at many levels, right? So there is like the economy, there is this
#
deep sense of this deep desire to centralize everything, you know, let's have one exam,
#
let's have one set of rules, let UGC decide, you know, what the syllabus should be, what the
#
professor's salaries should be, you know, why should a, why should a professor, you know, who's
#
at the cutting edge of chip design be paid the same salary as, I don't know, some other professor
#
who's only interested in doing mathematical research. I'm not saying one is more valuable,
#
the other is one is just much more valued by the market. And I just don't get like why we are still
#
in this stuck in this, this old equilibrium where professor salaries are actually pegged along with
#
the salaries of civil servants, that somehow a professor in IIT Delhi cannot be paid more than
#
the education secretary, you know, it'll just spoil the hierarchy somehow. You know, the education
#
secretary has nothing to do with how higher education is actually implemented and who the
#
best talent in the country is and so on. I think this desire for centralization is, has already
#
killed a lot of higher education, is further killing. And I think this desire for control
#
in private universities, beyond setting syllabi, regulating basic things like, you know, is the
#
building intact? Is the water supply there? And is other toilets functioning in a private university?
#
You know, obviously some modicum of what instruction is being given. UGC or any other
#
government body should have no business in, there should be a licensing, a very light touch licensing
#
body than let's say, you know, interventionist body that it is currently. And I think the most,
#
you know, we can keep going on, but like my big misgiving is now is that both from the left and
#
the right, I think universities have become bastions of politics rather than, than places
#
of instruction and knowledge creation. And I think, and I think the, the Indian academy
#
let it happen because they kind of tacitly approved it while the destruction was happening
#
through the left wing. And now that when the right wing is doing it, you know, they don't really have
#
any moral credibility, to be honest, to say that, you know, what is happening is wrong because,
#
you know, we know what happened in Bengal, for example, right? As just the pinnacle of education
#
in India, not just in humanities, but in physics, in chemistry, and you know, CV Raman was given a
#
chair in University of Calcutta, right? Like at that time, they had these ideas of private endowments
#
of attracting the best talent, you know, you know, universities in Bengal were very cosmopolitan and
#
so on. So I think we, we allowed this to happen at both ends of the political divide. And it
#
saddens me actually, to see even Delhi University where I spent five years, how it is, how much it
#
has deteriorated over the last 10 years. I couldn't agree with you more about the need to, you know,
#
let a thousand flowers bloom, let universities compete with each other and give different kinds
#
of programs and whatever. I mean, I mean, for me, the UGC and the education secretary shouldn't
#
even exist, but that would perhaps be a radical stand for some. Is it also the case, and I'm
#
thinking aloud here, that when you talk about the political drift, is it also the case that in a
#
sense that political drift is inevitable, that capture is inevitable and the drift to the extremes
#
is inevitable? Like earlier at lunch, we were talking about wokeism in American universities,
#
and I'd love to hear your opinions on that as well, where it seems that once a political agenda
#
as toxic as that kind of takes over universities. And just to, you know, clarify for those of my
#
listeners who haven't heard me speak about it before on why I consider wokeism toxic is because
#
wokeism fundamentally begins where liberalism ends. You know, liberalism is all about the autonomy
#
of the individual. You know, the individual rights are at the center of it, and wokeism teaches you
#
to think in terms of group rights and to build simplistic narratives of victimhood and oppression
#
and tie you down to those. You know, it is incredibly reductive, and in the kind of discourse
#
that it brings about where everybody's attacking everybody else and you're either a victim or an
#
oppressor, it's incredibly toxic. And the way that I see it from a distance is that it's just
#
taken over American universities and completely made at least the humanities departments completely
#
irrelevant to the real world, disconnected from the real world. And I often say that everyone
#
should have a humanities education, except we can get it ourselves. You know, the humanities
#
departments and universities are the last place you should go to for that. But let my little rant
#
be, what's your sense that is it kind of inevitable because I would imagine that, let us say that a
#
particular tribe begins to take over. And then what happens is that preference falsification kicks in.
#
And you, of course, I realized I've been a fan of Timur Koran for decades, perhaps,
#
and have read a lot of him. And then that reference falsification sets in,
#
till eventually everybody is pleading allegiance to the tribe, they're hiring more people like
#
themselves, they become litmus tests for pure purity, and there are incentives to become more
#
and more extreme because anyone who is slightly impure or deviates from the party line has been
#
canceled. And it's just become crazy out there. I don't think wokeism has infiltrated Indian
#
universities to a certain extent, but the tilt towards the far left and towards Marxism has been
#
there. So what is your sense that is it inevitable? You know, what are the kind of institutional
#
safeguards or structures that could have prevented it? And what are your observations to the extent
#
in which it has happened abroad? I mean, I think wokeism is a definite problem
#
in US universities, on most US campuses, and I think it is particularly pernicious in elite
#
universities, in what we call Ivy League universities and so on, for the reasons that
#
you have mentioned. But you know, I'd like to claim that actually I really, even as in my mid-20s,
#
I saw it coming. At that time, I couldn't have articulated it. This term probably didn't exist
#
in as widespread understanding as it does today. But I think that and it has, you're absolutely
#
right, it has emanated in the humanities. I think I remember at least two instances,
#
many such actually two ones that I remember right now I was talking. So, you know, in my
#
university days, in my PhD university days, I was an interesting creature in the sense that,
#
you know, economics kind of lies in between the humanities and hard sciences. And you know, you
#
can, depending on who you talk to, which economist, they will bend one way or the other.
#
But my interests were in both. And so I had friends both in, you know, computer science and,
#
you know, my flatmate was a historian. And so I had many friends in the humanities. And I actually
#
really saw the divergence. I saw computer scientists, sometimes overly so, you know,
#
like, you know, there was something that Pratap called, I think in episode 300,
#
techno-solutionism, a beautiful term. And I saw it coming, you know, but I also saw the good part
#
of it, that they were really interested in solving problems. You talk to any computer science PhD
#
student in the late 2000s, when I was in graduate school, and, you know, all this sort of AI stuff
#
was just starting out. And they were so fascinated. And they were, and I think this language had been
#
normalized by the leaders of the tech world at that time, that their main objective, that all
#
of them are going to make money in the process. So that's not going to be a primary motivation,
#
that they were really interested in solving problems, using technology. And I really felt
#
that, you know, when I was talking to my colleagues, and whether they were professors or
#
the humanities as important as they always have been, and will be, you know, no matter,
#
you know, even if the university goes away, as you were saying, humanity is going to remain
#
important, because they help us make sense of the world. They are very, very important, you know.
#
And I remember in 2011 or 2012, you know, so for example, there is this idea of the subaltern,
#
right? Like the subaltern, let the subaltern speak and so on. So there was this episode where
#
this A.K. Ramanujan's favorite famous essay, 300 Ramayans, was being taken down by Delhi
#
University and so on. So I said, you know, let me read what this essay is. And I read the essay,
#
and I remember talking to some friends, we were having, you know, sitting, maybe having beer or
#
coffee somewhere, and these were my humanities friends, because for this I needed to turn to
#
them, the computer scientists could get less, you know. And I said, you know, I had read this essay,
#
and they said, oh, okay, great, you know, an economist is interested in history, and you know,
#
so on. So I said, yeah, I found it odd. I said, it's very well written. The idea is very well
#
taken, you know, and I, you know, I've learned since childhood, my Nanaji always taught me that
#
the beauty of our epics is the myriad versions, you know, that everybody has their own version
#
of the Ramayan and the Mahabharat and so on. And the core remains the same, but it's told in
#
different ways to suit time and place in history. I said, you know, Ramanujan mentions exactly once
#
or twice Tulsi's Ramcharitmanas. That's very odd, given that that is the main, you know, in North
#
India, the main, kind of the dominant version of the Ramayan, like whether, you know, it's not the
#
Valmiki Ramayan, it's not the other Jain Ramayan and all the other ones that he talks about.
#
And there was silence on the table, you know, and I didn't realize, understand, nobody had tried to
#
address my question. There was like five or six people in the humanities. This was, I had broken
#
an unsaid rule. I later, I was later told that, that somehow it's a, it's a very uncool, quote,
#
unquote, sanghi thing to talk about Tulsi's Ramcharitmanas. It's not considered cool in,
#
in certain elite circles. Even, even though you were being descriptive. No, no, I was just,
#
it was just a question. I mean, what did I know, right? Like it was just that I am coming from the
#
outside. I have, I think I have a legitimate question. And then after a few days, when I
#
understood what the silence was about, right? Like, I mean, Ramanujan must have thought that
#
he should, you know, he talks about, if I remember correctly, five different Ramayans in that essay
#
as a way to saying that there are many different versions of Ramayan, but he doesn't cover Tulsi's
#
Ramayan as one of those. He doesn't choose Tulsi's Ramayan. You know, if you want the subaltern to
#
speak, Tulsi's Ramayan, Ramcharitmanas is the ultimate, at least in terms of pure numbers,
#
right? UP, Bihar, like the Hindi belt. So, and, and what was surprising to me was that, that,
#
and I could be completely wrong, right? I don't know, like, but I definitely felt, and I was told
#
that, that there's certain things that are considered subaltern and there are certain things
#
that are not, right? Even amongst the movement that is aspiring to be subaltern, right? And this
#
is purely premised on the other, because the other side in their mind is the, let's say, the larger
#
sang or whatever that you may call it. And in that circle, Tulsi's Ramcharitmanas is a dominant text
#
for whatever reason, right? It's historically very, very important. So therefore, you know,
#
instead of addressing it, engaging with it in a deep way, which is what I would like you to
#
do as a, as a scholar, because it is so important to so many people, you are not even talking about
#
it. So just giving you an example of why the humanities is losing touch, right? And the second
#
example I had, which actually was really funny that it came to me because I saw this, somebody
#
told me, I had resisted reading the new, almost, you know, by this few months biographies of
#
Savarkar that have been coming out. But apparently I was told that there is a new one by Janaki,
#
I forget her last name, that I just bought at the airport and I read the first two, three chapters
#
of it. It's really well written. And I remember talking to this one student who was doing, oh,
#
why I'm mentioning this is that, you know, he was studying, I was asking, oh, what is your PhD topic?
#
He said, I'm studying the Marxist history of Mumbai. You've gone all the way from India to New
#
Jersey in a university and, you know, and I couldn't believe it. Like, you know, like I said,
#
is this, maybe it's, I don't know, maybe it's an important topic. And I said, you, and I just,
#
on the passing mention that you speak Marathi, why don't you study Savarkar? This is again in
#
2010, 11, right? You know, because I said, why do you say that? I said, because I, you know,
#
I have, I have heard from so many of my friends, especially from the Heartland and Marathi friends,
#
that he's a great scholar. You know, that in addition to, you know, that, and that actually
#
I've heard that he actually was, I've read actually from whatever my limited reading online,
#
that he was actually within the Hindu community. He was a great social reformer, or he was really
#
ruthless about the caste system. And what were his motivations? I don't know. Like, I don't know. And
#
it seems like, you know, that he was clearly, you know, in various ways, anti-Muslim, you know. So
#
how do you reconcile all these things? And again, I was met with complete silence as if this guy is
#
not important. You are a scholar, you of history, you know Marathi. This seems like an almost natural
#
topic for me to study of much more widespread relevance and important than the Marxist history
#
of Mumbai. You see what I'm saying? So, so I'm just giving you two examples where I thought that the
#
humanities were themselves narrowing them, you know, given all the resources at hand, given all
#
the expertise at hand, given all the talent at hand, or what questions are important. Eventually,
#
what I learned from one of my advisors, Dilip Abrihu, who always used to say, a Bombay boy,
#
actually, is one of the most amazing game theorists of his generation. He always used to tell me,
#
half the battle in a research is to come up with the right question.
#
You know, if you, and that's the hardest thing to learn, you know, you will write many papers
#
in your lives, but when you look back, you'll be proud of a few of them. And I can assure you that
#
in each of those cases, you will be proud of the question you asked. And I, in my opinion, the
#
problem with the humanities, which is, you know, coming back to your roundabout way of answering
#
your question, is that with all the talent, with all the resources, that somehow this has persisted,
#
my first inclination in university, that the tech people ran away with asking good and important
#
questions. And it is not their monopoly. It just so happened the sociology or the anthropology of
#
the computer science and other technical fields of education was just way more connected to
#
solving real problems. Then, unfortunately, the humanities willing to engage with,
#
you know, the Savarkars or the multiple Ramayans question in a way that actually mattered to people.
#
These are brilliant examples. And, you know, what has happened in the seven and a half years of
#
learning the episode of doing this podcast is that very often I have realized that I was wrong about
#
something. And the most prominent thing I was wrong about is this, that I largely thought that
#
we are a liberal and secular nation. That I had grown up in my elite English-speaking bubble. I
#
thought, ki sab mere jaise hai. This is like the consensus. I won't call it the Nehruvian consensus,
#
but this is how we all are. And I remember once when I recorded the first of my episodes with
#
Aakar Patel, I approvingly quoted Ram Guha to him in saying that in the Hindi right-wing, there are
#
no right-wing intellectuals, right? And I got to realize that a more nuanced position was required.
#
That wasn't exactly correct. Partly from doing episodes with Hindi speakers like Rahul Verma and
#
Suyash Rai, who grew up reading in Hindi and they read a different kind of literature. And I was
#
introduced to a lot of writing by them of people I may disagree with, but who are nevertheless
#
coherent and who are nevertheless intellectuals. And I did an episode with Akshay Mukul, who wrote
#
that great book on the Geeta Press, which taught me exactly this, that, you know, the Ramcharit
#
Manas, for example, is a mega bestseller. It's probably sold more in the Hindi heartland in
#
India than any English book has sold in America ever. I'm pretty sure that must be the case.
#
You know, the Bhagavad Gita and the Ramcharit Manas are just enormous. So to pretend that they
#
don't exist seems completely absurd to me. And Ditto Savarkar, you know, such a complex
#
personality in today reduced to, you know, a tug of war where he can either be black or white. But
#
when you think of people containing multitudes, that's a classic example. Like I think his book
#
on Hindutva is complete garbage and terrible thinking and etc, etc. But a complex man that
#
you need to study and more than anything else, you need to study to figure out why is this man
#
so popular. If you want to understand Indian society, you have to understand Ramcharit Manas.
#
If you want to understand Marathi society, you have to understand Savarkar. And you also have
#
to understand Pula Deshpande and why he was so popular. You have to do all of this. You can't
#
do Marxist history of Bombay, which frankly just seems like utter nonsense to me. And I'm
#
struck by something that you said earlier, so I'll ask you to elaborate. Where at lunchtime,
#
you were mentioning about how one of the counterintuitive things that you're taught,
#
which is a difficult lesson to live up to, is that you should always be focused on the idea rather
#
than the method, right? And when you say asking good questions, I am reminded of some of the
#
questions that RCT wallahs ask. Like our good friend Rajeshwarishan Gupto was telling me the
#
other day in the finest Bengali, I can't really do an imitation, but Gupto, that's an immense
#
discovery. We have found that mosquito nets reduce the chance of getting malaria, right? Which is a
#
ridiculous fucking stupid question to ask. It is ridiculous to do an RCT on something as banal and
#
obvious as this. And you shared another similar example with me, which had my eyes boggling. So
#
if you want to share it and record, I don't know. But a lot of, you know, that again, RCT seems to
#
me to be a different kind of problem. It's not an ideological problem in the workism sense,
#
but it is a fashion slash fad kind of problem that at some point RCTs became this big fad and
#
everyone's got to do them. And that's where you get funding and that's where you get noticed. And
#
that's where you get ahead. And there is a bit of a danger in that, that even something that
#
might appear to be useful at one point, you can kind of overdo it. And then there is a crowding
#
out effect because there is a scarcity of resources and attention. Yeah, I think this is something I
#
learned with, you know, I have probably have my own biases because I learned in early development
#
with Angus Deaton, who was, who has, you know, famously being very critical of this particular
#
approach to, to development economics, which is heavily premised on randomized control trials.
#
But one thing I took away from him and from various other mentors and teachers of mine was that
#
it is an idealism, but an idealism nonetheless too worthwhile to aspire to that ideas must drive
#
research passions than methods as much as possible, you know, because especially what
#
tends to happen is that career incentives take over. And so when you become good at a method,
#
you just want to replicate different questions that will fit into that method. I think to an
#
extent it is fine because you will have certain questions that will be useful with that method.
#
But I think over the longer arc of intellectual history, that is a problem. And I think, you know,
#
Kuhn had this famous phrase, right? Like paradigm shifts that, that one field, you know, so I think
#
that I, I really believe in this idea. I've come to believe it even more and more as I have grown
#
into, you know, as an academic is that ideas matter so much and ideas are what are, are left
#
behind. And I think when it comes to, see, I haven't done a randomized control trial yet,
#
so I don't know. So, you know, so I'm not coming from that experience, but yes, as a, as an
#
intellectual and as an academic, I definitely think that at some point, and we are past that
#
point, we have gone too far in letting this particular method define the kind of questions
#
we must ask of, of development economists or of questions that are important in development.
#
Are markets not important in development? Somehow, if I'm studying markets in India,
#
it becomes a development economics research question. And I'm studying markets in the US,
#
it becomes a question of industrial organization or, you know, the, the, for the fields of the way
#
narrow fields economics are defined. And so the counter to that as well to make progress on
#
questions, you need to have some kind of quote unquote field discipline. I buy that largely,
#
that there has to be some disciplining of methods for us to have a common language in which to
#
communicate complex ideas. But the problematic part is that these, that these methods are A,
#
not interacting with them often enough, and B, are not being updated often enough. Because once I
#
have gained a monopoly over a method, it is in my interest to not only monopolize it, but also,
#
also produce progenies of this method, you know, that also to produce, that's how you increase
#
influence in the profession, like by, by, by creating more and more PhD students who think
#
like you do like you, and so on. And I think that, yes, you know, and Angus gives many funny
#
examples of this, where, you know, what you would think of it is like excruciatingly obvious
#
questions. You know, the example that I was giving you was that, that, you know, you take,
#
it's only a slight caricature of the question that, that, you know, there are 100 people in
#
a factory, you put 50 of them on the left and 50 of them on the right. The ones on the left
#
are exposed to machinery that is very noisy, and the one on the right are using normal machinery,
#
and voila, the, the one on the right are more productive, because, well, they're exposed to
#
less noisy machinery, and so that, you know, and if you, if you ask the question from
#
the researcher, why are you asking this question, they would typically tell you something like, well,
#
the sign may be obvious, but the slope isn't, which is to say that, well, it may be obvious that the
#
ones without the noisy machines will be more productive, but by how much? At that point,
#
you shake your head and you, you know, just, you know, understand that these are things that
#
beyond your control. Yeah, I, you know, I think that there has been a pushback within economics.
#
So what has happened, interestingly, is, you know, is that development economics itself has split into
#
macro development and micro development. So micro development folks are mostly focused
#
on randomized control trials, and macro development have sort of separated themselves into asking,
#
for my taste, are more interesting questions of markets, institutions,
#
growth patterns in developing countries. You know, so some of the most interesting questions
#
that, you know, we touch upon in the book that, that, that I think are coming up now is, is,
#
you know, what are standard structural, routes of structural transformation in newer economies?
#
You know, is it true that the only way to grow is to go from, you know, agriculture to, to low
#
scale manufacturing, and then to services and so on, lots of interesting work is, is started just
#
about starting to happen. And it's still development economics, because we're still trying to study
#
developing countries. But these are big and important questions, in my opinion. And I hope,
#
I hope we do do a deep reflection of what decades of research in randomized control
#
trials has been able to teach us. Obviously, there's some very, very good studies, but even
#
those, you know, some of those very, very good studies that have been done on education, for
#
example, you know, they eventually lead to conclusions that are rather straightforward.
#
And so one wonders why the investment in so if, for example, you know, this area of study was on
#
its own producing some knowledge that you and I could agree or disagree upon, I would be totally
#
fine with it. But actually, what happens and this happens in what economists call general equilibrium
#
is that it's not just that right by doing by giving primacy to a certain method, you actually
#
crowd out funding towards other methods. You know, Indian statistical
#
system that we used to be so proud of is in complete disarray. It's not because of the
#
randomness, but it is indeed true that by giving so much funding and so much focus in the bill and
#
Melinda Gates Foundation is not giving money to improve the survey statistics of India,
#
it is giving money to do more and more randomized control trials in India.
#
I would rather that they bolster the survey statistical system of India even more, which is
#
actually not doing very well right now for a variety of political reasons, then maybe do one
#
more RCT. And you know, it has spread its tentacles into the World Bank into funding agencies, there
#
are various issues of ethics that the Economist magazine recently raised about, you know, one
#
really infamous one where they cut off water supply to villages in Kenya to understand how
#
people behave differently when one set of villages have water, regular water supply and the others
#
don't. And you ask like who gave the ethical approval to do these things. There definitely
#
have been instances where I have asked myself and privately people, you know, do you think you would
#
get permission to do this in the United States? And the answer most often would be no, you know,
#
and the various ethical considerations, there's a certain kind of uneasiness in, you know, and I'm
#
happy to use that term, you know, even though it is very forceful, there is this uneasiness in
#
assuming that certain nations and Africans are being used as lab rats. You know, it makes me very,
#
very uneasy. And so just as a well-wisher of the profession, I really hope that we are both more
#
careful about conducting RCTs and limit it to truly interesting questions. Yeah, and that's an
#
important point I want to kind of underscore that isn't like if somebody is doing a thing on,
#
you know, an RCT to see if mosquito nets helps drop malaria, you know, that you might say that's
#
a banal question, but let them go ahead, they'll find the slope, maybe, you know, how much mosquito
#
net but the problem is a fucking opportunity cost that money could have been put to better use. And
#
especially if it's part of this fad that is almost like become a tyranny out there, then there is so
#
much other work that could be doing that could be done diverse work that could be done some of it,
#
which is perhaps beyond the imagination of the bureaucrats who approve these funds,
#
that there is a great loss happening there and that loss is unseen. And both in terms of talent
#
and resources, right? I mean, some of these people are really smart, I've talked to them,
#
they're really smart people, they ask interesting questions, but because the career incentives are
#
so well defined, and you know, and, you know, people these, you know, most of these people,
#
they are there because they're ambitious. So they want to succeed in that narrow sense of success,
#
narrow definition of success. So they're putting all their talent, and then, you know,
#
both the physical and human capital is being put into certain kind of questions, which,
#
as you're raising is the opportunity. Sometimes they can be directly harmful in the ethical sense
#
that I just described, but oftentimes, the indirect cost is actually quite non-trivial.
#
It's so sad, it makes me want to crawl up in a fetal position and cry and thinking of fetal
#
position now that we've come there. Tell me about your childhood, you know, where were you born,
#
where did you grow up, what were your early years like? I was born in Delhi, and my parents come
#
from different parts of India, my father's from Jammu and Kashmir, area called, you know, called
#
Poonch district, which is on the border. Actually, if you read India after Gandhi by Guha, it's in
#
the first chapter where- That's why you like the book. Yeah, I think there were the Kabalis,
#
famously, when they attack in 1947, when the Kashmir question is still up in the air, they
#
come from Poonch, which is one of the areas where they come in from. It's literally a border
#
district. That's where my father grew up. My mother's family is broadly from Agra, though she,
#
my Nanaji, who played a very important part in my life, was, I've never really fully understood it,
#
he was, I think, a lower level clerk in the Ministry of External Affairs. And so because of that,
#
my mother was able to travel to different parts of the world as a youngster and a teenager.
#
And I think, you know, in some alternate universe, I always like to believe that he was a spy or
#
something, because everybody was so cagey about exactly what he did in the MEA. But from what I
#
understood is that he pushed passports in and out. But growing up, you know, I would say I grew up
#
mostly as a Delhi boy, whatever that means, I can go into it. And the constant other influence I had
#
was from my father's side of the family, which was that basically from 1989 to about 2001 to till
#
I was in class 12, every summer for about two months, we went to Poonch. And so that played a
#
really important role in my childhood. You know, I remember you often, I think you've raised it in
#
some of your shows, I forget the exact term, you call it Gangoli. I think I've asked myself this
#
many times. And I think there is various, you know, I often joke, you know, with my wife that,
#
that, you know, if I was to ever, you know, describe myself in a title, it'll often be,
#
at least before I met her, it will be, you know, the quest for home. And I think the closest a
#
physical place has ever come as home is Poonch still. And I think, you know, it's not, it may
#
not be the Poonch of today, but it's definitely the Poonch of my childhood. And so that played a
#
very, very important part in, in, in my life. We were in Delhi. So in, in terms of my grandparents,
#
my, I never saw my grandfather, maternal grand, paternal grandfather, my dadaji and my naniji,
#
I never saw. My dadi also died very young when I was two years old. So it was in terms of
#
grandparents, my nanaji played a important role in my life, which was unusual because
#
in North Indian families, typically, if you have sons, you don't really stay with your daughter.
#
And so, but he did stay with us for about eight, nine years in the nineties, from early
#
nineties to about 98 when he died. And so, so he played a very important part in my life.
#
Both my parents were working. In fact, in about 88, 89, my parents met in January. My father was
#
learning Spanish. My mother was learning German. My sister and I often joke that, you know, we don't
#
really, we don't, we're not really fluent in any language, foreign languages that we haven't lived
#
to our parents' grand expertise. And so around 88, 89, I was born in 85, around 88, 89,
#
my mother went on a scholarship for her MPhil to Germany. I don't have very many memories of that.
#
I was about three years old and my father worked in a nationalized bank. So he kind of gave up,
#
you know, in, in, in, in JNU, he learned Spanish. He was thinking of doing civils.
#
And I think there was a pull towards maybe entering student politics. Also, he was this
#
good-looking, you know, Kashmiri boy who the leftists loved. You know, he had this good story
#
of coming from a war-torn area, but he didn't buy any of it. Like he was, you know, and he sort of
#
gave these bank exams, you know, and then he basically, almost all his adult life, he worked
#
in Bank of Baroda. That was his. So whenever you, you know, Bombay has lots of it actually.
#
Whenever we see Bob, we still get very excited because we think it is like our bank. Basically,
#
till he retired, he was working with Bank of Baroda. And so, and so at that time he took leave
#
and mom went to Germany in 88, 89. And I was there with her for about 10 months after which
#
my sister was born. I have some vague memories. I remember that my parents often joke that when I
#
came to take admission in a school in Delhi, this, you know, I could, they, they complained
#
that I couldn't speak Hindi. So I could speak a little bit of, I actually, I could speak fluent
#
German for a kindergarten kid. And I had some English knowledge, but I couldn't really speak
#
fluent Hindi. So then, and then we settled into West Delhi, a place called Vikaspuri,
#
which where I think I would say that our family kind of, you know, it was like a nice two bedroom
#
apartment where at that time, at every stage of my life, I feel like our aspirations as a family
#
were in tune with our resources till at least till about, and I think it's in retrospect was
#
a beautiful journey where at every stage I could see now in retrospect that liberalization,
#
we're kids of liberalization. You know, when the first car comes, you know, when you, you know,
#
like get the first expensive crockery, I think, you know, almost like that all happened in the
#
nineties with both, both my parents are self-made. My father, one of six siblings, only one of two
#
who went to college, you know, mother, you know, taught German in maximal or bow and basically
#
almost all her career. There's one in Bombay also, she taught the one and the one in Delhi.
#
And I think it was a very nice childhood in Delhi, a lot of cricket. I think I wouldn't be
#
exaggerating if I said that for better or for worse, I learned a lot of my, I mean, my parents
#
used to speak English at home, but it was mostly Hindi, a little bit of English, but I learned a
#
lot of my spoken English from English commentary in cricket, you know, which meant that I had strange
#
vocabulary like majestic and tracer bullet. And, you know, the Harsha Bogle was obviously a breath
#
of fresh air in this, in this crowd. I now realize, you know, and my early childhood memories of,
#
you know, watching the rerun of Mahabharat, I used to be fascinated by the Mahabharat, even as a
#
child, you know, that opening line, opening kind of credits of the Mahabharat where, you know, this,
#
I think it was Mahendra Kumar or the singer of the opening title track. I used to be fascinated by
#
it when he says, yada yada hi dharmasya glanir bhavati bhāratah abhyuddhānam adharmasya,
#
you know, that Krishna says to Arjun, you know, whenever there is a deterioration of dharma on
#
this earth and an increase of adharm, I will come, you know, and I used to love that, that
#
shloka and that line and would often complain to my nanaji when I, you know, a couple of times when
#
I saw strange things on the news as to why Krishna is not coming, you know, if this is not a dharma,
#
then what it is. So mythology played a very important role into various extents, both because
#
of at home, but also because one of my mamajis who's passed away now, he was a, he was a doctor,
#
but it was really, I was close to him and he was very, very well read and also very obsessed with
#
mythology, not just Indian mythology, but also Greek mythology and so on. And that, you know,
#
looking back seems to have played an important role in my life in terms of making sense of the
#
world. You know, I used to, you know, like both the Ramayan and the Mahabharata a lot, and I think,
#
and even as a teenager, early teens, I used to ask questions, you know, of the form of why,
#
you know, why is Ramayan a simpler story and Mahabharata a more complex story? I don't know
#
if I still have answers to those questions, but I think that played an important part
#
in my growing up years. Both my parents were very encouraging of whatever it is that we wanted to do,
#
but they were, they were, you know, like good aspirational middle class parents, they wanted
#
us to have a very good education. And so they were very insistent on that. I think I got a lot of my
#
ambition from my father, this desire to, you know, that knowledge is in his way. I don't think he
#
ever used those words, but from whatever I remember absorbing, you know, that there is a
#
high correlation between knowledge and success, but they're not the same. That sometimes in life
#
is very unfair, that sometimes in life, the most knowledgeable people don't succeed and whatever
#
success meant to him, you know, and sometimes successful people are not the most knowledgeable.
#
And he wanted both me and my sister to understand that and have tried as much as humanly possible
#
to aspire to both. My mother, because of her child, was more worldly. And so she was the one who sort
#
of imbibed in us this idea that the world is just much bigger than Vikaspuri or Delhi, or even India
#
for that matter, that the world is much bigger, that there are ideas out there, there are people
#
out there that you must interact with, must speak to. You know, in middle school and high school,
#
especially, I was a very active debater and dramatics. And the initial push up for that
#
came from her, the idea that public speaking is very important. And she wrote some of my first
#
debates. I think I learned that language is important. There's a Hindi word, there is an
#
English translation of it, but I like the Hindi word more, is leh. You know, that when you're
#
speaking in front of an audience, that leh is very important. That it's not just what you say, but
#
the loose translation of that is the lyricalness, the lyric in your speech, not just in song,
#
but in speech. You know, when you hear Martin Luther King, right, like there is a certain kind
#
of poetry in prose that I learned from her. The lilt, as it were. Lilt, yeah, you know,
#
there should be a certain kind of flow in what you say and how you say it. It came from her,
#
that definitely I learned from her. Yeah, I think when I look back at that time, it was not a big
#
deal. But I definitely, when I look back, especially when I, we were not part of in any way,
#
the so-called intellectual elite of anything, you know, like in the sense that, you know,
#
one thing that I used to lament, but now actually I'm very happy and proud of, proud, I don't know,
#
but I'm definitely happy about how it sort of panned out, was that we didn't, you know, we were
#
not, there was a lot of emphasis on education and knowledge, but we didn't have a lot of books at
#
home. You know, when I hear some of your episodes that, you know, you by mistakenly read Dostoevsky
#
when you were 10, I feel very jealous, you know, because it wasn't there. So for me, that did two
#
things, but I was still very thirsty about knowledge. I did read that at Blighton's and
#
the stuff at home, but I didn't make the jump, a dumb jump came much later in life for me,
#
but it did force me to be an experiential learner very early in life. And that's something my father
#
taught me that, that, you know, that you learn as much from people as from books. And I think this
#
is true for me, my life at least, you know, and then these are not substitutable and that life
#
teaches you certain things and books teach you certain things. And, you know, the most beautiful
#
sweet spot is when you're able to actually marry them together and see them together as a unit,
#
as a unit in unison. And, and I think experientially, when I came in contact with the
#
intellectual elite much later in life, one thing I realized, which especially the, again, the
#
humanities and the liberal discourse, for example, in India, which I was completely
#
befuddled by because of my training in childhood and stories I heard from my father was their
#
understanding of Jammu and Kashmir. You know, despite the fact that we were there at least
#
every summer, and it was very much part of our lives, all my father's, their six siblings,
#
five other brothers and sisters live in Pune or areas around Pune. We have 15 cousins. You know,
#
now politics is much more polarized, but what was, what was shocking to me actually now in adulthood
#
is that there was almost no hatred preached at home, which I think is a complete, now when I look
#
back, you know, is, is, is, I look back very fondly and, and, and despite what was going around us in
#
the 90s, no adult ever told a child that certain people are evil or certain conflicts have these,
#
these specific resolutions. And to me, that was refreshing. You know, this is, it's, it's,
#
you know, we even, in early 2000s, we lost basically my father's brother-in-law, a very close
#
member of the family to a terrorist attack. And I remember even then, even in that atmosphere,
#
he was lying in the Jammu hospital. I remember, you know, certain images stay with you in life.
#
And, and the image of him, I wish you never know, none of the listeners ever have to see it,
#
but a body that has been splintered with a bomb blast has lots of small holes in it. And I remember
#
that visual, it just never leaves me. And because we were all with children, all of our children were
#
very close to him. Even then I cannot recollect my father, especially in, you know, saying anything
#
that would have influenced, I was pretty old by then. I was 16, I think 15 or 16 by then. I think
#
I was in high school, you know, that, yeah, basically anything spiteful, you know, about
#
any community or anything for that matter, it was, it happened, it was wrong. It happened for
#
wrong reasons. Those words were said, but they were very careful that children's mind are
#
impressionable and that these certain things should not be said. I recorded an episode a while
#
back with the economist Somya Dhanraj. It's not out yet. Maybe it'll be out before this. I haven't
#
decided the order and it's a remarkable episode for many reasons. Everyone must listen to it.
#
But one thing she said was that she read her first book. I forget the exact age, but she was
#
basically an adult when she read her first book. And as she spoke to me about what she was like
#
because she hadn't read any books, I thought, hey, you know, maybe not reading in her case was a
#
feature, not a bug, because the kind of questions she was asking were questions like, what is the
#
stock market? Where did it come from? Why do we have this? And just thinking to myself, I realized
#
that, you know, what you said earlier about asking the right question, maybe if you don't have a
#
profusion of answers to everything around you, that you find yourself asking better questions
#
because those are the ones that matter to you in the moment. You don't take that shit for granted.
#
I have never in my life asked myself, what is the stock market? You just grow up kind of knowing,
#
right? It's in the ether. It's like oxygen. But to sit back and ask fundamental questions,
#
and I imagine that a lack of knowledge there is or a lack of the access to books and knowledge there
#
can even be a good thing because it sharpens your mind to look at what's essential. Before I get to
#
my next question, I'll quickly give context to my listeners about Gangali as to what the hell is
#
being spoken about if they haven't heard past episodes. I first came across this great quote
#
from Amitav Kumar, where he was talking about Rahim Mazum Raza's novel Adha Gaon, where during
#
partition, a branch of activists go to this village and they're telling the Muslim villagers,
#
come to Pakistan, come to Pakistan. And one of them is a young man called Tannu. And he's,
#
you know, fought for the British in the Second World War and he's come back. And he tells his
#
visitors, I am a Muslim, but I love this village because I myself am this village. I love the
#
indigo warehouse, this tank and those mud lanes because they are different forms of myself. On
#
the battlefield, when death came near, I certainly remembered Allah, but instead of Mecca or Karbala,
#
I remembered Gangali. So the question I ask people is, where is your Gangali? And I'm going
#
to ask you to double down on your answer about Poonch. I'm very interested not just in Poonch,
#
but this whole notion of being Kashmiri. Like another phrase you would have heard
#
in my podcast is rooted cosmopolitanness. And I've often lamented that, unfortunately,
#
I'm not rooted enough, though I'm cosmopolitan. And back in the day, for a certain class of people,
#
it was an aspiration to be cosmopolitan, that you speak the link language of the world, you've taken
#
knowledge from everywhere, you are a globalized citizen, you're a citizen of the world, blah,
#
blah, blah. And that is invaluable and that is great. And no doubt that is what you also have
#
achieved. But at the same time, I want you to talk a bit more about your rootedness and that
#
Kashmiri aspect of you and what it meant to you and how it shaped you. So just to clarify it,
#
because there's a lot of regionalism in Kashmir, which people outside don't understand. When you
#
say Kashmiri, there's a certain context which we are not. We are Poonchis. And so, for example,
#
we don't speak Kashmiri at home. Before all the Kashmiris take out their knives on me,
#
I'm clarifying it. We are not from the valley, but we are from a valley. Somehow in the liberal,
#
this is another thing I discovered later on, that in the certain intellectual discourse,
#
the valley means only Srinagar, but actually Poonch is also a valley. So we are from the other
#
valley. And so we speak a certain kind of Pahadi Punjabi at home, which is, you can call it Dogri,
#
or you can call it, it's dialect. But because I think in the outer world, it's very hard to describe.
#
So there's a catch-all phrase, Kashmiri, which is people, Ladakh, Kashmiri, again, very different.
#
But yeah, I think, I think, you know, again, in that moment, you know, let me, let me read this
#
one poem that I like from this Kashmiri Poet Kaur Agha Shahid Ali. Kashmiri shrinks into my mailbox.
#
My home, a neat four by six inches. I always loved neatness. Now I hold the half-inch Himalaya in my
#
hand. This is home. And this is the closest I'll ever be to home. When I return, the colors won't
#
be so brilliant. The Jhelum's water so clean, so ultramarine. My love so overexposed. And my memory
#
will be a little out of focus. In it, a giant negative, black and white, still underdeveloped.
#
This is from Postcards to Nova. This is from, yeah, this is from Agha's famous. I read this,
#
not just because I love this poem, it's also because I, over the years, I've shared a certain
#
kind of longing for home, which is very parallel with Shahid. You know, Shahid's father was Kashmiri.
#
His mother was from UP, just like mine. But overwhelmingly, you know, as I often joke with
#
all the UP walas, including my wife, that there's something different. The term I use is you people
#
from the plains will never get it. You know, that somehow, and Agha, interestingly, Shahid did his
#
PhD in literature at Penn State University where I've been a professor. So sometimes I joke that I
#
walk the streets looking for Shahid. You know, and I think there's a certain kind of rootedness that
#
I have developed over the years of travel as a child. And then those memories as they grow within
#
your own brain, your memories have their own history, is, you know, mainly of the Himalaya.
#
And why I like this poem is that he touches upon these two things, which I miss a lot about
#
Poonch, is the Himalaya and the water. That somehow, Himalayan rivers just have a different
#
texture, they have a different sound. My favorite sound in the world is the sound of water cashing
#
through a mountain. It is, you know, again, the Hindi word captures it better, dhwani. You know,
#
there's a certain reverberation even in the word dhwani, you know, which is what the reverberation,
#
if you, you'll see when you go to a reasonably, when you're above a certain height in a mountain,
#
even if you go above Manali, for example, you'll see that the stones are round.
#
It's because the water has been coming out so hard over the years that the stones have shaped,
#
they've rounded actually because of the constant badgering by the speed of the water. And that
#
something for me is a sense, as an image, very close to home, there is a certain kind of
#
simplicity of life in mountain people in general. And by this, I don't mean people who are living
#
like at the top of a mountain, right? Like people who are living in valleys and, but they are sort
#
of, the culture has developed over the years, defined by the vagaries of the mountain. They
#
have a certain kind of inherent simplicity in them, which I, which I absolutely adore.
#
It's very hard to describe it. And, you know, we just sort of absorbed it. We just assimilated it
#
as we, we frequented Pune, you know, both, you know, for a long time, we couldn't afford to fly.
#
And then for, you know, and for other while we couldn't, the Jammu airport or the Srinagar airport
#
was so uneven, you couldn't rely, you know, now it's, it's, it's a more recent phenomenon in the
#
last 15 years where flights are, are, are constant. We used to take the Jammu-Tavi train,
#
I remember. And then from there we would drive to Pune. And so it's, it's, now it's a much shorter
#
drive, but it would take forever. It would take like six, seven, eight hours to drive. And, and
#
mountain roads are kind of circular, you know, because you kind of go up a mountain and down a
#
mountain. Yeah. The technology that now we are installing that Switzerland has had for decades
#
of cutting through a mountain is very hard. So actually when you go from one place in a hilly
#
region to another, or at least in a mountainous region, you actually kind of, you know, if you
#
zoom out, if you see a drone footage of a, basically the road is going up the mountain
#
then coming down and then it's going to the same thing to the next mountain and the next mountain
#
until you kind of reach. So, you know, in physics, what we used to learn the difference between
#
displacement and distance is very high in a mountain. If you want to just draw a line between
#
Jammu and punch, it's actually an aura Srinagar and punch. It's not that, that long. And so that,
#
that mountain journey for me is just a certain kind of bliss that, you know, thinning of the air.
#
So as you go up a mountain, the air thins. And then as you come down the mountain, you,
#
you know, you start breathing freely again. And so that, you know, for a while, my schoolmates,
#
we used to have this bus that used to come at six AM. My high school would start around seven
#
and we had to go from West Delhi to South Delhi. So, and so we start this Monday test and I would
#
always like a good student read for the Monday test in the book, in the bus in the morning.
#
And, and all my peers would complain that, you know, Rohit never gets a headache because when
#
you read in the bus, right now, I started with ages. I started, it was, I think it's because of
#
the training and because we used to go mount in the mountain so much up and down that actually I
#
could read. I would like to believe, I don't know if this is true, but this is my causal link.
#
And so all that part of my childhood, you know, eating plums from, from trees without any
#
restriction, you know, you go to a nearby plum orchard and you just, you know, pluck plums and
#
eat. That was very unique, I think, to childhood in Delhi. Like I think most other children in,
#
in Delhi didn't experience that. And just, I think, I think having a notion of a big family,
#
because as I said, there were 15 cousins and almost all of them would,
#
because we had this big ancestral house, it's big in my memory. When I went recently,
#
it didn't seem as big as somehow it is in my memory. But, you know, we had this ancestral
#
house where all the cousins would, would kind of dawn on from different parts of Jammu and Kashmir
#
and we would come from Delhi and, and, you know, like we do things that, that eight,
#
10 year old people do, play cricket, play antakshini, go to the market. I was suddenly
#
very independent because I could walk around everywhere, which I couldn't do in Delhi.
#
I had to always tell my parents, okay, you know, I'm taking a rickshaw to go here or there. And
#
somehow in Pune, nobody cared. There was a certain kind of trust that, you know, that, that,
#
that kids will be fine. You know, everybody in the Mahalla knew they were
#
Lambaji's sons and daughter and, you know, and, and so there was this kind of freedom,
#
which was very, very exhilarating. Yeah, I think, I think this combination of
#
Delhi and Pune in the childhood was very idyllic in some sense. You know, we got the cosmopolitanism
#
of a big city and the rootedness of a small Himalayan town and that love for Himalaya has
#
endured. So recently I was at a conference in, in Switzerland and some of the conference people
#
asked me, sort of wanted to go for a hike and we went and, you know, and some of these people like,
#
oh, this is so beautiful and this, that, and I think I, you know, I, I would like to believe
#
it that I'm, I am not arrogant about anything in life except mountains.
#
You have the best mountains. I just, I just told them, you know, the Alps are fine.
#
And they looked at me as if, you know, like Europeans are just, you know, aghast when you
#
say the Alps are just fine. And I said, yeah, they're just fine. You know, once you've seen
#
the Himalaya, you know, it's, it's, everything else is a little more, yeah. And, and what you
#
said about the distance, the, the difference between displacement and distance is such a
#
profound metaphor also for the mountain roads that our politics has made in our country.
#
You know, that poem that you read by Agha Shahid Ali reminded me of a poem by Mark Strand,
#
which I think I've read it on the show before, but I don't know if you've heard it, apologies
#
if you have. You can always get there from here by Mark Strand. A traveler returned to the country
#
from where he had started many years before. When he stepped from the boat, he noticed how
#
different everything was. There were once many buildings, but now there were few and each of
#
them needed repair. In the park where he played as a child, dust-filled shafts of sunlight struck
#
the tawny leaves of trees and withered hedges. Empty trash bags littered the grass. The air was
#
heavy. He sat on one of the benches and explained to the woman next to him that he'd been away a
#
long time, then asked her what season had he come back to. She replied that it was the only one left,
#
the one they had all agreed on. Oh, it's beautiful. I think I've heard it, but not, yeah, before
#
somewhere. Yeah, it's beautiful. Yeah, yeah. Tell me now about your Nanaji, because you mentioned he
#
played a big part in your life. So describe him to me, tell me about him. You know, he came
#
to my life, I guess in the early night, like, you know, maybe from age five to 13, very formative
#
years of my life. And I think both my parents, they were very nurturing and very invested in our
#
childhood, but they were both working. And so, you know, he was the first person we saw when we came
#
back from school and, you know, kind of asked us about our day and so on. But he instilled in me,
#
one, I think, inadvertently, and the other very actively. So two aspects of my intellectual journey
#
that I think have been very important to me is math and poetry. And I think he was very keen on,
#
just he liked it. I don't know if he was doing it intentionally or something. He was fond of
#
a logical way of thinking. So he taught me chess at a very young age, at age three, I think,
#
almost, before even we had gone to Germany. And from what my parents tell me, I was a very,
#
very good chess player at age three or four. And he was the one who taught me. My father also taught
#
me, but he was the one who sort of started teaching me and honed my skills and taught me certain
#
openings. And I would like to believe that my five-year-old self would actually beat the hell
#
out of me today in chess. I don't know why it is that I was that good at a young age and then solely
#
it sort of petered out because I didn't. Because, you know, chess actually, contrary to what most
#
people think, is as much about muscle memory and pure memory than it is about hard analytical skills.
#
It's really pattern recognition.
#
Exactly. So what I was going to say is that recognizing board patterns, right? It's just
#
after a while. Initially, it's about analytical skills in the sense that you only know how the
#
pieces move. And so you're trying to learn, you know, let's say two or three, or maybe even five,
#
if you're really, you know, moves down the line. But then actually, what it translates into is
#
completely board pattern recognition. Do you know that from this particular place in the board
#
pattern, what are the five likely scenarios that are to emerge in 15 moves from now?
#
That's very, very hard to do. And very good chess players develop that through, obviously,
#
innate brilliance, but also sheer practice. And so, you know, he really encouraged that kind of
#
logical thinking in me. And, you know, he also was very fond of cricket. And so the idea that,
#
you know, he persuaded my parents, for example, my parents were, you know, they were very
#
interesting, I think, especially in today's age where of choice, they had an interesting
#
parenting style, which again, in retrospect, I'm very thankful for was that they gave us certain
#
things a year or two after they could have afforded it. So when cable TV came to India,
#
I remember the first time I came to India, came to us, like, let's say, and became accessible.
#
For the first year or two going to the neighbor's house to watch such and complete the century.
#
And now later on, I realized my parents could have afforded in that year or two,
#
but they just delayed it by a year or two, probably a great sacrifice to themselves.
#
And the same was with with video games with internet, when we got the first computer in
#
the internet, you know, and I think there's a certain kind of I appreciate that I don't
#
know how to express it in that that somehow we're earning it in our in our childhood.
#
And he, you know, sort of this, this idea that, you know, let's wake up at 5am,
#
because together, just me, my parents will be sleeping, my Nana and I would wake up at 5am,
#
because India is touring Australia. And the cricket the match will start at around four,
#
five am or something, then we should start see from the very beginning and the toss and so on
#
and watch the commentary and the pre-match coverage and, you know, hear Richie Beno and
#
Ian Chappell and, you know, he was very fond of these things. So this stuff, you know, I knew
#
who Gary Sobers was before anybody, you know, in my age should know who Gary Sobers was, because
#
he was not playing at that time. He was not a commentator, but my Nana, he was very fond of
#
Gary Sobers. He was the greatest all rounder of all time, you know, kind of thing. So,
#
so all that creating a community of things you care about, you know, whether it's cricket or
#
chess, beyond the daily school life and, you know, things that kids do, which is to play
#
with other children. I think he provided a certain kind of framework to both me and my sister was
#
much younger, but slowly my sister as well, which I, you know, and he used to write, so, you know,
#
we used to live in this two bedroom apartment where at least from about, you know, age five to ten,
#
because my age five to ten, my sister was very young. My sister earlier would sleep with my
#
parents and then eventually in the same, when she grew a little older in the same room, my Nanaji,
#
me and my sister would sleep, you know, and so this is a very close proximity and so in the night
#
he would wake up and a thought would come to him. He was a poet, a poet, you know, like a lot of
#
his poetry got lost. At least he was a poet to himself and he would write in Urdu and a thought
#
would come to him in the night and he would wake up and he would write it down because he would have,
#
he was afraid that it would escape him by the time he woke up in the morning.
#
So that kind of little thing stayed with me that, you know, that poetry is important,
#
that language is important, that, yeah, and, you know, it was the first big loss of my life was
#
losing him in the late nineties and that also taught me a lot about how to, you know, keep
#
somebody's memory alive and be grateful for, you know, the time that they were there.
#
I'll take a digression from personal biography and sort of ask about a couple of questions
#
that really interest me and I'll start with using chess as a metaphor for that in a sense.
#
Like I've also played chess pretty seriously and what I've found is that, okay, let me first
#
point to you that on chess.com you have these many variants of the game where the rules are
#
different. So the normal heuristics of chess don't apply, your normal pattern recognition goes for a
#
bit of a toss. You have to relearn first principles and go through that whole process again where
#
first you kind of are going step by step of if I do this, he'll do that and then you gradually
#
get patterns of activity because the board is still in most of them the same patterns of activity
#
and figure it out from there. And my journey there is that I'll initially have this incredibly
#
enthusiastic expert where I'll figure out the first principles and figure out the rules and all of
#
that because I just love doing that and in some of them on the site I've briefly been number one
#
one form or the other at different times before clambering back down and the reason I clamber
#
back down is that after a while it becomes second nature to me and I'm really doing autocomplete
#
play. I'm just ticking boxes, I'm not really thinking as actively and intensely as I used to
#
and in that lazy time pass play the rating goes down because one makes mistakes. Now the way chess
#
has evolved and the role that computers have played in it is really interesting in the sense that
#
people always assume that once computers get so strong that they're stronger than the strongest
#
human then there'll be a homogenization and everyone will start playing the same way.
#
The fucking opposite happened and the reason the opposite happened is that earlier there were a
#
certain set of heuristics which were codified by the soviet school of chess which was dominant
#
which was based on pattern recognition in a sense pattern recognition and first principles
#
that you know with these kind of patterns interacting with each other these are the
#
things you aim for this is a relationship of space to initiative in this kind of position and
#
so on and so forth and you learn those general principles and then everybody kind of plays based
#
on the same heuristics. I mean one of the reasons I think of Vishwanathan Ananda is absolutely
#
extraordinary is that he didn't have that early grounding and yet at the age of 16 through the
#
sheer brute force of his genius he managed to play with the best soviet players and reach the top of
#
the world like I've written a piece where I've described it as you know his winning the world
#
championship was like winning a formula one race in a maruti 800 so outstanding but that's a
#
digression so what happened with the age of computers was that computers made it possible
#
to seek out concrete exceptions to general rules so if there is a general rule that in this
#
particular opening this particular kind of move should not be played because this is how the
#
patterns interact computers allowed you to look for concrete exceptions which no serious player
#
would consider because you've been taught that that's not the kind of thing you do like doubling
#
a pawn somewhere or putting a knight on the rim for example you know there's a saying a knight on
#
the rim is rim but there are concrete exceptions where that is the best move and players started
#
going for those and figuring it out and therefore different players started the styles began to
#
vary because it wasn't just the same set of heuristics and that was perhaps a stockfish
#
era brute force calculation etc etc then alpha zero with machine learning came in and and that's
#
a story i find miraculous enough to be magical right it's like just mind-blowing it basically
#
it was fed in with nothing no prior biases about the game it will just fed the rules it played
#
against itself for a day and in that day it replicated all of the human evolution of what
#
we know about chess so for a while is playing the french defense and at some point it realizes no
#
it is suboptimal it moves away then at some point it discovers that you know your best defense for
#
black if you want to equalize against e4 is really the berlin which you know kramnik pioneered in the
#
2000 match against kasparov it plays that and then it reaches 20 80 and then it goes beyond
#
and then it starts doing things which because machine learning is a black box we don't know why
#
the fuck it's doing what it's doing for example playing actively on the flanks with the pawns you
#
know the e and the h files or completely subverting what we understand of the relationship between
#
initiative and material where it's making really long-term sacrifices with no immediate tactical
#
payoff but it is so far down the line that you can't really see it you know a slightly different
#
in category from a strategic sacrifice and i think i belabored chess enough but where it's useful to
#
me in terms of thinking about thinking per se is that we do that to the world that are rocking the
#
world and thinking about the world is basically pattern recognition so an economist will look
#
at a particular say a shortage in the market and immediately think about supply demand where could
#
the bottleneck be etc etc and you start thinking of that relationship you look at the regulation
#
is the problem there etc etc a sociologist might look at it in a different way through frames that
#
they have formed and so on and so forth now the first part of a person's intellectual journey
#
which i guess you've been through and we'll talk about it more in detail is when you form those
#
initial frames through which you look at the world which really explain the world to you
#
but i think an important part of one's development and an incredibly difficult thing to do is once
#
you have settled into a framework for looking at the world and the pattern recognition is in place
#
or being able to go beyond that and say that there might be concrete exceptions to this like
#
stockfish shows you or that some things that i believe about the world might be completely
#
wrong as alpha zero shows you right and and that's that thinking like my two questions are really
#
about learning how to think and learning how to learn and i'll come to learning how to learn later
#
but in learning how to think i'm really curious about that because that is something that i think
#
everybody has to watch out for i'm sure i'm a victim of it myself in many different ways
#
but we all need to watch out for it because a temptation always in this deeply complex world
#
is to eventually settle upon some simple narrative or the other which seems to fit more or less
#
everything and your patterns are in place so how do you think about that like in terms of learning
#
how to think how did you learn how to think and you know what's your journey been like
#
you know first of all just the narrow point of what the software did right like in some sense
#
if you've studied some statistics it's not that surprising that so if you think of chess as what
#
game theorists call an extensive form game what is an extensive form game it basically says that
#
you we are playing a game in which our moves are sequential versus are they could be simultaneous
#
right and now because the chess board is you know not small but it's fairly large
#
the size of the extensive form game increases exponentially right so you you have a first move
#
then i have a move right so my second move is conditional on 10 possible first moves of yours
#
why 10 because you could have moved the eight pawns and the two horses that's the only thing
#
you can do in the first move in a chess board right so already i have 10 possible contingent
#
moves 12 because you can move the knights two ways exactly so that's good yeah so so so actually
#
20 because the pawns can either move yeah i'm saying the pieces you can move not the number of
#
places you can be on the board the number of pieces you can move is 10 right so now i can have now
#
contingent on exactly right on on the possible places right so immediately you see my strategy
#
set yours is one right you know or let's say one amongst 10 pieces is now you keep increasing a
#
well-defined extensive form game that includes all possible moves ever within the fourth move
#
becomes impossible to keep track of yeah for a normal human brain right so now once you express
#
it in that language it is not that surprising that human beings even if it was for centuries
#
or maybe at least definitely decades discovered certain specific patterns and as long as my
#
opponent is also operating within that realm that pattern will all that pattern will always lead to
#
a certain existing set of patterns subsequently right how we were discussing that patterns lead
#
to patterns and how how you need to understand that to be a good chess player right so why why
#
i said it's not that surprising is that once this is statistics and brute computing power comes in
#
right by the way even the best machine learning algorithm cannot solve a chess game yet right
#
because again even with the all the computing power we have in the world you cannot completely
#
solve a chess game because again the the number of moves is so exponential but they are the level
#
of pattern recognition itself has gone up exponentially so they have found certain things
#
that maybe as i don't know it was a historical accident or somebody if somebody else would have
#
found they would have operated within that realm but they're they found all those realms or all
#
those let's say first second third fourth fifth sixth level of thinking realms right so so that's
#
very cool and very interesting now when i map that into economics or let's say economic jargon
#
or the sociology of economics per se i i find a very interesting analogy which is which also
#
speaks to the rct question that we were asking is that economics differentiates itself from other
#
definitely social sciences in that it puts a premium on causality i think it's a very
#
good goal to have but sometimes why i wonder my critique of the rct was was placed on is that
#
it is twofold one is in the search for causality you can you lose the perspective of relevance
#
what do i mean by that is that because you only understand those these two or three realms
#
you will beat them to death searching for granular and glanular levels of causality
#
and calling victory whereas there is a whole another world out there which is equally relevant
#
which is what these software showed you right which are currently beyond maybe the scope of
#
human not relevance but let's say possibilities right that you are you are not paying attention
#
to them so i often say that you know what machine learning has forced economists to do i often think
#
to myself at least is that they have re put the focus back on sophisticated versions of
#
correlation over causation that even if just i can continuously tell you that a is correlated
#
with b and not necessarily be able to conclude how a causes b it's still interesting and then
#
one must be open to newer and newer possibilities in which a can be correlated with b rather than
#
exist you know clinging to an existing theory and then kind of like trying to prove it strong in
#
a stronger and stronger way i hope that makes sense so that i find very interesting about you
#
know the the one example of that is when your house is burning down do you want to know how
#
to put out the fire or do you want to know what caused the fire your house is burning down right
#
you know just go and put out the fire right like you but but but somehow this idea that the that
#
the most important question is why is the house burning down we'll come to that question right
#
and then there will be various versions of that i think is is something that that i have been
#
forced to re calibrate in fact i almost think that there is a meta mathematical theorem out there
#
that formulates a trade-off between causality and relevance so if you think of the analogy
#
that i can make is that you know some listeners may remember from their i want to say either
#
chemistry or physics class from middle school is something called the heisenberg uncertainty
#
principle right so it says that you can never with complete precision know the location and
#
speed of a particle and i almost think the same principle applies to learning what caused what
#
in a renewed effort to understand whether a implied b you can just simply ask narrow and
#
narrower questions and that it is okay sometimes to be imprecise on both speed
#
and location as long as you have a good enough idea of both rather than trying to understand
#
one because heisenberg uncertainty principle tells you you can't do both right so there is a trade
#
off at some point in between trying to understand both approximately versus one really accurately
#
and i think this is something that high computing power computer science and new statistical
#
techniques have forced me to to to recalibrate and i think that in my so far attempt at learning
#
stuff i have used i i try to use a high level of joining the dots and pattern recognition
#
almost as an axia much more than obsessing over causality and i think obsessing over causality is
#
very important but i often say that the world is so complex that even if you can start uncovering
#
newer and newer patterns in which things are connected it's really beautiful it's very
#
deeply satisfying when you when you're able to discover something that you didn't think
#
you know you thought a and b are connected and b and c are connected but when you realize that
#
a b and c are connected you may not know exactly which way they are connected but just discovering
#
that they're connected is very deeply satisfying to me that's why i think what you mentioned about
#
the renaissance man the lack of the renaissance man is because i think
#
a is becoming harder and harder to make new connections but i do think that there is less
#
and less premium within silos of intellectual discourses about the for people to develop those
#
kinds of skills so my learning has mostly been you know kind of accidental in many ways so i think
#
when i was in high school i did think about
#
like everybody else my age at that time about and who was studying science about doing iit and
#
engineering and so on and i even enrolled briefly in fidji and all this stuff but i think i i was
#
too invested at that time in debating and dramatics and you know you cannot do the iit exam
#
maybe if you're very brilliant you can do all of these things together but
#
at that time i asked myself what i'd really like the two things i really like or i guess three
#
things i really liked at that time were public speaking and this what i said in public speaking
#
really fascinated me this this idea of how to construct an argument and communicate it to a
#
wider audience my first love was undoubtedly mathematics i i absolutely loved mathematics
#
in all its abstract abstractness and i liked history a lot and i was a you know a very avid
#
reader especially of of european history at that time and to some extent mythology also
#
and and so i kind of decided that at some point that what i wanted to study it was a it was a
#
yeah i basically decided what i wanted to study which will not anger my parents too much and and
#
also would keep my these three interests three or four interests that i had at that time alive
#
would be to study mathematics so i i i did i did an undergrad in at steven's college in mathematics
#
i actually had almost no background in economics at that time and i just loved it you know i think i
#
don't know how the curriculum it is now but at that time i think the drawback as you were saying
#
of the indian education system is that i had to choose mathematics before i even knew what
#
college mathematics was about luckily i liked it a lot of my classmates did not because it was too
#
abstract for them and my learning method at that time was you know just devouring on as much
#
math stuff as i could find in the in the st steven's library and you know because you know some
#
people have made the argument for having the semester system i think now the university is
#
under the semester system i love the yearly system because i mean there was internal assessments but
#
they were only 10 percent of the total score nothing you did till the end of the year mattered
#
except the final exam now obviously it can be really bad if you fall sick on that day of the
#
exam but what that meant was that i just was reading the mathematics that i liked and that
#
my teachers liked they encouraged us to read outside syllabus and then you know in the last
#
three months i would uh i had you know exam giving in india is a skill it used to be at that time at
#
least and and it was not necessarily correlated with it was correlated but it was not necessarily
#
one-to-one with uh with knowledge absorption in the truest sense of the word so you know you you
#
had your own you have to learn how to do the 10-year exams and be very good at them and and
#
so i i used to do that i used to do the needful and i understood at that time that again you know
#
this is a lesson that that my father gave me was about you know try to keep both success and
#
knowledge in mind that you know you need to do well at exams but you know you also because of
#
whatever other ambitions you have but you know keep your keep your thirst of knowledge alive
#
and towards the end of i mean you know and saint stevens was a was just an amazing experience
#
for me i was you know i was one sanskrit hindi word i really like which has stayed with me also
#
for a long time is the word santulan um and this is something also that you know to a large extent
#
both my parents but especially my father taught me was that you know in almost every argument
#
a santulan is very important in almost every aspect of life santulan is important it's not
#
necessarily meaning that both sides are right or you must always balance is that sometimes
#
you need to go to both extremes and understand both extremes or or be equally passionate about
#
different things but there needs to be a balance in almost everything you do and i think that
#
it really helped me enjoy college life a lot because even though i was very deeply worst in
#
mathematics deeply engaged in mathematics and i was very actively engaged in the debating society
#
at stevens i never took any of it very seriously by that i don't mean that that i didn't acknowledge
#
seriously i was very i think i was very aware as an 18 19 year old that our passions are misplaced
#
you know i used to when you were in saint stevens there used to be this fad of you know being very
#
passionate about marxist labor theory of value it was a thing in delhi university it still is
#
probably right my god and and and as if we understood anything you know as if there used
#
to be this idg informal discussion group where all these prominent people would come
#
former stefanians they would give these talks and people would have these impassioned discussions
#
at the dhaba afterwards and you know i would partake in those discussions to some extent
#
but i never pretended to know what was going on because i actually didn't you know i understood
#
that there is i was not even a student of economics at that time i was just a math major
#
i understood that that you know that nehru emphasized socialism too much and there was
#
a different argument to be made and all these i understood the principles but to be honest i
#
was i just had no idea and i and i and i i would somehow almost to a fault apply this principle of
#
santulan to those discussions to myself i was not very i mean i was very vocal in the debating
#
society but in the debating society we learned almost like a lawyer to make an argument on any
#
i could debate on both sides of the same topic so it was not as much i think it was nickil who
#
mentioned it on your show who's a friend of mine from college days you know that we would sometimes
#
make he was in ramjas in the debating society and you know we would sometimes make arguments on both
#
sides where you know they were not very honest like we don't we didn't know really what we were
#
talking about and you know we would have these deep discussions on article 377 and you know and
#
i could to be honest debate on both sides of it i mean now i'm firmly you know in in on what i
#
believe is to be the right side of it having repealed it having the supreme court repealed it
#
but and and this idea came from you know people had very strong opinions at that time i remember
#
when i think when i was in college the vajpayee government was at its final tenure and you know
#
these certain students of certain intellectual pedigree from certain families were trained to
#
think that everything vajpayee was wrong i never understood that you know because in my family
#
you know we were not as i was telling you my father was you know encouraged a lot during
#
genuine times to enter politics but he was very resistant for a variety of reasons you know just
#
to give you a concrete example like you know vajpayee was a good name at home not that we
#
would have overtly political discussion but broadly the consensus was you know this man means well
#
he's got a good team i mean this is what i remember from my childhood days you know so 2004 i mean
#
like by the time he loses i'm in first year of college right so it's still very early days
#
and i remember in 2009 elections having a conversation at home where my father's saying
#
that you know this government is doing fine you know and i asked him i said but you just said
#
that vajpayee is better you know and that i said that that doesn't mean that you know that
#
necessarily that the manmohan singh government is wrong right and that's what i mean by santulan
#
you know so so when i was exposed to a certain kind of certain kind of acerbic political
#
dialogue even early on because in college that was the norm i was very amused not because i
#
didn't have an opinion because i was surprised they had such a strong opinion and again it's
#
not wrong for people young people to have strong opinions but this is just how my training was that
#
to be skeptical to almost be methodical logical mathematician to a fault where emotions are more
#
important actually in politics than than logical kind of breaking down of issues and and i would
#
always tell my peers that you know that i have opinions on issues i don't really have opinions
#
on entire governments on certain issues we can have a certain discussion so my learning was very
#
much steeped in that kind of training mostly from at home including you know what perplexed
#
me a lot when i went to the u.s was how people had very strong views in kashmir and had no idea they
#
never mean to kashmir but people had very strong views and on the issue and and that also perplexed
#
me i said you know that that it's a very very complicated reality it's an in which you know
#
one side which i think ram mentioned on your show also one side just wishes something 1990 may not
#
should have if only it hadn't happened you know life would have been much more simple because
#
you can then just criticize the indian state and you know but the reality is different it's more
#
complex it's more nuanced and and so i have carried that that attitude of learning i think
#
throughout my life which i hope comes across in the book also a little bit that not that there's
#
not right or wrong but that most issues especially of public policy are very complex
#
and as you often say people carry multitudes ideas also carry multitudes you know that when you
#
when a certain idea when it when it interacts with reality right gst is a good idea but when
#
it interacts with reality and how it's executed it's always complex it's always going you will
#
have to in the end you'll have to make a decision you know and the decision is made by decisive
#
people that doesn't necessarily mean it's right or wrong it's broadly right given the information
#
that you have and then you go ahead and do it and so while mathematics has absolute truths
#
for me social sciences have approximate truths and i've tried to bring the bring that that
#
that approach to learning always and also that you know that morality can be absolute but
#
morality also changes over time and i think that is also something that social scientists
#
don't appreciate much sometimes when when in the in the midst of passions and uh and so on sorry
#
that was a long winding way of my learning technique there's a lot to process and a couple of
#
things i want to double click on but first what do you think would be the best translation for
#
santolan like would it be composure or equanimity yeah that's why i use that word so i think it's a
#
combination i've thought about it i think that it's it's balance composure and equanimity i
#
think some combination of these things i think usually people translate it as balance but that's
#
not really it yeah and what you're saying is particularly resonant in these times because
#
you know the that tendency of seeing the world in black and white people saying oh much why is bad
#
and you know when i and i've done many many episodes on the history and economics in the
#
political economy of that period and what you realize is that all these different leaders were
#
much closer together than you thought that you know narasimha rao when he's handing over to
#
watch by he says samagri tayar hai you know telling him that the nuclear tests are ready and he's you
#
know you you have the watch by government passing on the new pension scheme the nps to the manmohan
#
singh government you have that mutual respect in fact playing out all the way till 2015 across a
#
bunch of different leaders from you know narasimha rao to watch by and jaswant singh on the one hand
#
then manmohan and chidambaram the respect that jaitley had for them you know k.p krishnan
#
who i did an eight hour episode with has many stories on that and in fact a bunch of the
#
decisions and the policy making was done by this common band of great reformers who ran across all
#
of these administrations and i had an episode of everything in everything on them as well called
#
the reformers so that is resonant i want to take you back a little bit on what you said about the
#
heisenberg principle and about the relationship between causality and relevance and you mentioned
#
the burning house as a metaphor and can you give me a concrete example to make it vivid
#
for me and my listeners so we can understand a concrete example where you know that dilemma
#
played itself out in your head you know you mean in an academic sense or in a in absolutely any
#
sense but where you experienced it and had to think about that trade-off so i think so i mean
#
there are various ways we think so i think in my let me give you an academic example and then i'll
#
try to give a real life example so in an academic sense when you are choosing questions to answer
#
right so you know this is joke that you know that economists often crack that macroeconomists ask
#
the best question with the worst tools but microeconomists ask the less interesting
#
questions with very precise tools mosquito nets you know exactly so you know so i think does
#
giving a bag of rice to people increase the probability of coming and getting vaccinated
#
okay that's a micro question the answer is probably yes and you can ask it in different
#
actually the answer is most likely yes and then you can ask it in different ways in different
#
contexts and understand the slope you know of how likely it is and so on right does increase of
#
minimum wage increase or decrease unemployment does extension of social security insurance
#
increase or decrease people's willingness to go back to work i mean these are i would argue
#
not that the vaccination question is not interesting these are very big questions
#
that i the latter ones that i just raised and in my opinion you would never ever know
#
a very precise answer to them but they are worth asking repeatedly in different contexts using
#
different models different doing different data sets and trying to get closer and closer to
#
precision because relevance is so important i mean just two examples right of one things that you
#
know that you can get caught in in relevant that gets often get caught in the debate between
#
relevance and causality is is the study of financial bubbles if you believe the efficient
#
i'm just being a little bit imprecise so you know in terms of formalism if you believe the efficient
#
market hypothesis bubbles should never arise what is bubble how can a price how can something be
#
priced more than it's valued it's just not part of the equation but we kind of instinctively
#
understand that bubbles arise all the time it's a very relevant question even though i may not be
#
able to come up with a precise causal mechanism to explain to you why bubbles arise i have different
#
patterns that i can tell you and it's an interesting question actually on its own right which are the
#
probable causes of why bubbles arise it's people understand actually much more why bubbles how and
#
why bubbles burst but actually how bubbles arise is a very difficult question to ask and answer
#
so this is another academic example of where relevance should trump obsession with let's say
#
precision of answer because this is just a super important question to understand for
#
for society as a whole i think in my personal life i you know i i don't even know how to
#
frame that question because i rarely think of exact causal mechanisms in my own life i mean
#
the only times i can think of i do is when i'm trying to actively tell myself that i should be
#
better at something like you know either in my personal behavior with a friend or a colleague
#
or family or i went wrong or in in my professional endeavors there is you know you one would try to
#
if one is trying to seriously think about it right like try to reach a causal understanding why did i
#
behave this way in this situation but if you think about it very deeply you are looking at again at
#
different types of pattern recognition which gives you an approximate sense of causality
#
okay i become more agitated whenever i am i don't know in this sort of a situation and i must i mean
#
at least i ask myself this sometimes and so i must recognize this about my own behavior and try to
#
improve it you know this is a discussion sometimes my wife and i have about you know how to be better
#
people and so on and and i think they're also you're actually kind of applying the heisenberg
#
uncertainty principle you in it's in a certain framework in a certain context you're thinking
#
about your own behavioral pattern and trying to get as good a sense of how you can be better as
#
a human being using some approximation of causality but i i find it as a a very useful metaphor
#
at least in my in my in the way i approach asking a good question here's a thought experiment of a
#
question of personal morality which probably brings this heisenberg principle into play
#
again i love this thought experiment it was posed to me by deepak vs in a recent episode
#
which in fact is released on the very day we are recording now uh today and his question to me was
#
is that there's a thought experiment you have to choose two parts in one part you kill your you
#
kill somebody but you're never aware that you've killed him so there's no guilt nothing you're
#
never aware that you killed him in another part you don't kill anyone there's no death involved
#
you don't kill anyone but you think that you did and you live with that guilt forever which path
#
would you choose it's a tough question i think there's a rationalist response to it and there's
#
a humanist response to it not necessarily that they should be divorced from each other all the
#
time but in this particular instance they do seem divorced because the rationalist response to it
#
would be to choose the former is that you did inadvertently or inadvertently intentionally kill
#
someone and you don't know because just in terms of again the vague concept of happiness in life
#
depends on whether you believe in an afterlife or not you would choose not to know this and and we
#
go about your life i'm assuming there are no consequences attached to it but the humanist
#
response of course would be that killing is is is you know having killed someone whether you know
#
it or not from your own intention it has to be intentional i'm assuming something you did
#
intentionally did is the most horrible thing you can do so i know that's a hedging of an answer
#
but i don't know it's a great answer because it is a heisenberg thing the way you have to balance
#
those yeah to to really competing different things no and i found it fascinating because
#
whenever i ask this question now which i have been over the last three four days to you know
#
hapless participants in my thought experiments everybody's instinct is to go towards i want to
#
live without the guilt right and what that tells me is that actually despite all our posturing
#
about human life and etc etc the humanist argument as it were actually really deep down inside is
#
our own well-being that matters and how we think of ourselves and how we can thereby therefore
#
project ourselves i found that really interesting and it got me thinking because my instinct is
#
also that i want to live without guilt like how would i live with the thinking i killed somebody
#
and would that then corrode my character to the extent that then i think anything goes that i
#
think a smaller quote unquote sin goes because hey i've done that would that completely destroy
#
my life what psychic damage would it do and and then you know so i love kind of questions like
#
that yeah i i love these kind of philosophical puzzles a lot you know so here's a non-philosophical
#
puzzle it's a social science conundrum and in fact the minimum wage is a great example because
#
of course it was read seminal card and kruger study of 92 where they seem to show that contrary
#
to logic and everything that minimum wages do not actually make unemployment go up and then
#
there were other arguments against it that hey you know methodology was flawed and since then
#
i think there have been competing studies every few years that you know contradict the previous
#
one so that's i won't you know wade into that particular debate but i'll the question i want
#
to pose is based on something interesting our mutual friend shruti rajgopalan once told me where
#
she said that imagine that you want to find out if putting a coin in a bottle of you know displaces
#
water if you put a coin in a water body will it displace water one way of doing it is in
#
controlled lab circumstances where you take a beaker of water you measure the water you
#
put in the coin and then you measure it and it's precise the other is as a crowded 100 foot by 100
#
foot swimming pool with 84 people jumping around and there's a storm and it's raining and you put
#
the coin in that and try to figure it out and at one level to me that is social science right
#
swimming pool is social science right how the hell do you prove anything when the world is so
#
complex and everything is multi-causal and there are so many other confounding factors etc etc and
#
i i mean apologies i'm not an economist so i don't know all the jargon to explain
#
how complicated it is but that then makes it seem as if a lot of what is happening one study
#
another study one study another study 50 studies in this direction 50 studies in this direction
#
meta studies playing around it all seems to me to be you know extremely muddy and that one doesn't
#
know what to think and you know in the case of the minimum wage i'll i'll i always mentally i just
#
go back to first principles and i go back to friedman's argument which i'll link from the
#
show notes that hey minimum wages will always increase unemployment because you're pricing out
#
certain people from the labor market anybody whose labor is the price that less will simply not get
#
a job that's what's going to happen and that's the first principle so the question i always wonder
#
is if something contradicts something that has a logical first principle then explain it to me
#
theoretically why it happens but that's a separate matter but in this in economics how does one think
#
about it like and and you know whether it's causality or relevance this matters that what
#
is even the accuracy of my study how do i get to the truth if that's all we want in a in a pure sense
#
see the the strength of economics and i would argue sometimes a weakness also is to build
#
minimal theoretical frameworks then to challenge them and add complexity okay so think of this
#
example that you just gave with minimum wages right so i think Friedman's argument is exactly
#
right however it's right in the context of what economists call the first best world
#
okay that that there is somehow a free market of employers with minimal market power or at least
#
power over labor or employer employment and so therefore if you know the your skill level is at
#
a certain level and the demand for your skill is at a certain level then may maybe your wage is
#
below what some people morally may regard as a minimum wage but at least you're employed
#
and you're getting by and you're getting food on the table and so on i think the problem this
#
would arise in this kind of argument would be that if we were to believe that certain businesses
#
have actually have market power then Friedman's argument actually collapses because because
#
now i can actually govern your wages over and above or below and beyond what the market would
#
have dictated had i not had market power in this sort of a situation this is what economists would
#
call so economists don't this is also the criticism of from people like Piketty and Sayers is that
#
economists start their framework starts with the market and accommodates the government i think
#
what Piketty and Sayers would like to see is a framework that starts both with the government
#
whatever state government whatever you may want to call it and the market so in that example that
#
we just discussed because there is a market failure there in the Chicago school of thought
#
there is a requirement for market intervention not otherwise which is also broadly the libertarian
#
argument that that now in this world which is the world of the second best there is a room
#
for setting off a minimum wage to ameliorate or to balance out the power that the other side of
#
the market has now the problem is that in order to do that or in the process of doing that and this
#
is i'm sure most economists would agree to this you overcorrect you don't know right i mean who
#
knows in a complex world with money you can broadly say that boss yes there is some problem
#
labor is getting exploited you know i would i you know like i would be with my marxist friends on
#
this which is a rarity that yes in the process of letting markets run amok without the requisite
#
level of competitiveness built into it you can get exploitation and so there is a need for intervention
#
whether the form of minimum wage and so on but often what you do is that by having
#
excessive zeal of intervention because politics is not the moment you have a state of politics
#
right is that you are going to have overcorrections which actually stifle innovation and we can argue
#
how that happens but also actually be detrimental to the people who are trying to protect in the
#
first place and indian economic history is replete with this stuff you know replete and it's kind of
#
it's almost like a case study after case study of things where the state thinks it's trying to do
#
the right thing and just cannot get out of the way and so on and and i think this friedman minimum
#
wage example is a good one to you know when i used to work in policy when i first worked in policy i
#
remember you know having this conversation with raghu actually and you know he joked which it
#
stayed with me was that one must always know the first best you know this is kind of the chicago
#
school coming in right because he said that you know it's not even that and this is not formal
#
language but kind of a figure of speech is that it's not even that you're operating at the second
#
best you're somewhere the fifth sixth seventh eighth best so to understand where the first best
#
is is actually a great theoretical way of framing the problem and then approaching a solution so
#
you know i was kind of having this conversation about you know i i you know i regard myself as
#
a theoretician not an i mean who is you know training to be all constantly training to be an
#
empiricist and so for me theoretical knowledge is is the argument that you just constructed about
#
friedman is a theoretical insight right it's not an empirical truth it's a theoretical insight
#
having observed certain empirical patterns in the data that he comes up with this insight and
#
milton freeman is an amazing theoretician and so i think that what the role and come to the second
#
part of your your comment is that what the role of these studies after studies studies after studies
#
are doing i think in my in my understanding is that they're trying to build a body of knowledge
#
so that when a policy maker comes to this question they have access to it and then according to the
#
i mean in an ideal situation doesn't happen always like this in an ideal situation they can access
#
this knowledge either through their economic advisors or themselves directly and then make
#
the right political decision it's not an economic it's a political decision but i think it's very
#
important to keep building on this repository of knowledge because this does change with time and
#
place it does change in you know whatever pre-war america to post-war america to india of today
#
versus india of 1950s and so on and so these things i think there is a reason to have a new
#
minimum wage study every five years in almost every country to understand how this basic
#
theory is holding up and how exactly it is feeling because here the mechanisms are important i may
#
not know the exact causal mechanism but i should have some sense of the family of mechanisms at
#
play so a is causing b c is causing b d is causing b all of them are causing it and i have some
#
understanding of that of that world i think for this it is actually quite important to continuously
#
have but i have my theoretical i often joke that i have my theoretical bias that
#
i have this i sometimes make these rather strong statements that all truths are theoretical
#
so you know i i kind of respond to that by saying that i agree with everything you said now that
#
you've said it but i would say that the reason for doing a minimum wage study every five years
#
or three years or whatever is slightly different from what you propose like my sense is that
#
i agree with you that what friedman is proposing is he said pointing out is that in a free market
#
a minimum wage will always lead to unemployment going up and what you're saying is that look there
#
isn't a free market anywhere that there might be some market power in which case the focus of the
#
state should be on tackling the market power making sure there is a free market so we have
#
a first base first best instead if the state tries to put a band-aid in like a minimum wage
#
legislation or some other regulation or whatever then eventually you will have so many band-aids
#
in all directions that you'll have a mummy an egyptian one not any other pregnant lady
#
and and and and that's my whole thing with it so i totally get doing study after study to figure out
#
where is the coercion and then telling the state to get the fuck out of the way because obviously
#
you know they are causing the problem and then taking care of the problem of market power
#
but to then say that look it isn't perfect so we will make it worse by interfering without
#
knowing what the unintended consequences might be seems to me a bit you know a bit wrong-sighted but
#
i want to come back to my original question but would you you have anything to just very quick i
#
think so i 100 agree with you and i think this is where the theoretician should step out of the
#
ivory tower and interact with reality just very quickly to project this reality to the indian
#
context today for example right so we are so far away from a world of competitive capitalism
#
that to wait for that to happen i mean the level of market concentration in india today is so high
#
like with few firms controlling so much capital that
#
as the theoretician when they will encounter this reality would be forced to say okay work on this
#
because this is just to the theoretician will seem a political problem they they will say well i can
#
tell you what to do you know the competition commission of india should have much stronger
#
teeth well you know one company cannot be vertically and horizontally integrated into
#
every aspect of the economy right like basic principles like this but as a theoretician if i
#
understand that these things will take time or may never happen actually so i will impose
#
that as a constraint on my model whether for better or for worse right like so and then i'll
#
say okay now that you've given me this constraint we have to go to some band-aid that's where you
#
limited pick the best band-aid basically yeah for the time you know i agree with you that that you
#
know and and and this you know historically has been the case right even in the u.s where we do
#
have something close to a not even i mean you know something like a more competitive market
#
you still need band-aids right because of the just you cannot wait the state cannot wait it
#
works in its own time frame of elections and of of trying to do the right thing for people and
#
getting everybody above a certain kind of minimum threshold so yeah but to sort of go back to the
#
swimming pool for a moment the danger that that tells me is that we are then forever condemned
#
in a sense to narrative battles where you'll have different ideological schools within economics
#
within academia always trying to prove their point with different studies which are extremely
#
muddied because they all take place inside a swimming pool as it were a muddied swimming pool
#
i'm mixing metaphors really badly here but you got what i'm saying and so you know and and at a
#
you know at a really utopian view of the world of knowledge is that everyone wants to get at the
#
truth and there is competition for that and there is a marketplace of ideas but with every step we
#
come closer and closer to the truth but sometimes it seems that no we don't get closer and closer
#
to the truth in fact we might just get entrenched in our equally non-truthful positions in different
#
ways and and and the game just goes on forever so i would you know i would rephrase your comment
#
with an important caveat that i don't think having been in the academic world now for you
#
know over a decade including my phd that i don't think that everybody is in the search of the truth
#
so i think that it's an objective function which has certain weights you know like you do and every
#
like you know by that i mean well a government has different objectives and so what economists
#
use this jargon to say well you know you know amit's objective could be that he wants to reach
#
as many listeners as possible or he wants to actually engage deeply with whatever listeners
#
he has currently right these are two different objectives and the path you take could be very
#
different in terms of your right exactly as you have often mentioned on your show right
#
so you know suppose in an ideal circumstance some circumstance you could say well i want to
#
my objective function is to put equal weight on both just giving you an example right that's what
#
i mean by an objective function so i think what happens is that in an individual academics career
#
and then it gets aggregated to the to the academy in general and it's not even true in
#
for academics it's true of every individual even if you are just you know a person writing or read
#
or or podcasting or whatever form of knowledge creation outside the realm of academy you know
#
there is an always a between seeking the truth and doing well in your career
#
and i kid you not that it's not the same i wish it was the same and i have learned it the hard way
#
that it's not the same and what you're suggesting that's why just how i want to rephrase it is that
#
these weights but are they half half are they three fourths one fourths are they 0.9 0.1
#
that's an equilibrium phenomena no what what i completely accept is that the total number of
#
people engaged in the knowledge game could be distributed in absolutely any proportion within
#
these two but that the game itself will be a game that will go no closer to truth because a
#
different people who are seeking the truth might have different versions of the
#
you know different routes to the truth or different frameworks with which they are chasing the truth
#
and the people who don't care about the truth and are getting ahead are also then in pursuit of
#
winning some narrative battle that has nothing to do with the truth and which makes it even worse
#
right so that's the noise right so the so the so the so it becomes harder and that's why
#
you know in game theory we have this term called the behavioral type you know the behavioral type
#
is someone who would do the same thing irrespective of whatever you do they're just
#
not going to respond to strategic considerations you need uh i maybe i'm inflating too much but
#
you know you need people like einstein and one newman once in a while i mean is a complete
#
behavioral type i don't know if you've read his life history he was just not bothered he's like
#
you know you didn't like his phd advisor did everything he was kind of a patent's clark
#
you know person wrote his stuff kind of outside the academy and then the academy had to take
#
note of him you know because he was just so good right so you need certain behavioral types
#
from time to time and we've had many you know in hindi poetry world there was nirala you know
#
nirala was even tulsi for example what what what we is a completely behavioral type in the sense
#
that you know to ramayan was supposed to be uh consumed by the purest only in sanskrit and here
#
is a guy who comes along in bridge and avadhi bhaasha and just like kind of you know i don't
#
think the people the the the the scholars of his time liked what he was doing but he was completely
#
a i mean i think from whatever i've read so you need people like that from time to time who will
#
just change the swimming pool you keep swimming in this pool you've muddied it so much that you
#
don't even know that finding the coin has also becoming irrelevant right so i'm going to create
#
a new swimming pool the jug so to say that shruti talked about right where we're gonna we're gonna
#
sort of attack the same questions but from my perspective you know newton was right but only
#
partially so i'm gonna give you a fourth dimension which is time in which all these questions are
#
going to be reframed that was a different swimming pool so so i think that i'm not saying you should
#
just wait for that messiah to come in always one must always try to reorient and people do you know
#
try to reorient the swimming pool in in various ways um but this is the coon thing right like you
#
have to do your bit in in in in both operating within the current paradigm and nudging it along
#
all the time to change it i remember when i was
#
danny rodrik who's an economist i quite admire had moved to princeton for at the institute for
#
advanced studies and i went and met him he's told me something that you know it's something very
#
simple but it stayed with me was that and danny in many ways is a is a is a you know is a is an
#
attacker of tradition he's both a traditionalist and and sort of outside it and he said that the
#
way rohit this works is that um is that there is a wall and uh and and you can punch holes in the
#
wall from outside the wall or inside the wall and so it's up to you both both are noble goals do you
#
want to be inside the wall and feel good about it and then punch the holes because then you're
#
taken more seriously or you want to be outside it because then it could take longer maybe the
#
entire lifetime uh so it's up just as a way of so i think that um i think some people may not enter
#
the swimming pool and just try to show you a different one and i think some people would
#
enter it and i you know i i do know of people like angus for example and many others um who
#
who did that who did the the the in some sense even the harder part of being in the pool and
#
then trying to just sheer force of nature and their ideas try to uh try to make it less muddy
#
final question before the break have you made your choice about whether you're
#
you're inside the wall punching a hole you know i think i i that's a very hard question that i keep
#
asking myself and i think that um for example writing the book uh you know which we can talk
#
about more in the second half is was a question a dilemma for me because i hadn't yet earned my
#
place inside the wall and writing a book which is of a public nature is typically is allowed
#
for people who have earned their place and i'm still a bit young i think i at least from the
#
from the requirements of the academy to to have have have tried to punch in that wall but um
#
yeah it's a good question that i i think that i would like to play earn my place inside the wall
#
but i'm a bit too impatient to wait uh for it before punching in the wall so i don't know if
#
i don't i don't i don't you know i don't advise younger scholars that this is the right way
#
but that's just the way i've chosen you know i'm going to take four of the words you just used
#
and uh you know put them on a t-shirt and that's requirements of the what was the fourth word
#
requirements of the academy or something yeah requirements of the academy uh so i'm going to
#
make a t-shirt which says requirements of the academy and then i'm going to burn the t-shirt
#
okay let's do that hey the music started and this sounds like a commercial but it isn't
#
it's a plea for me to check out my latest labor of love a youtube show i am co-hosting with
#
my good friend the brilliant ajay shah we've called it everything is everything every week
#
we'll speak for about an hour on things we care about from the profound to the profane from the
#
exalted to the everyday we range widely across subjects and we bring multiple frames with which
#
we try to understand the world please join us on our journey and please support us by subscribing
#
to our youtube channel at youtube.com slash amit varma a m i t v a r m a the show is called
#
everything is everything please do check it out welcome back to the scene and the on scene i'm
#
chatting with rohit lamba and for those of you who thought that economists are boring dry people
#
what nonsense rohit is uh you know now going to read us a poem that he loves and that i'm sure i
#
love as well yeah let's start with this we're during the break we were talking about you know
#
existential moments of our life and i mentioned to amit this one poem that actually helps me
#
has helped me at various stages when i was having existential moments so
#
it's called mai gautam nahi hu by khalil ur rehman it goes like the following it's in hindi and or
#
hindustani i'll do a translation uh it's a short poem it goes like the following
#
beautiful yeah you know it's it's uh it's it's kind of this
#
when you know since i was a kid i was very fascinated maybe not as a kid but maybe since
#
i was a teenager i was fascinated with buddha and there was this sort of this this kind of
#
indic approach to knowledge right which fascinated me which was that um you have to hit the forest
#
the forest is obviously a metaphor to gain knowledge and accompanying frustration that
#
the knowledge is not coming and in those moments and i discovered this poem i don't know a long
#
time ago and it really stayed with me especially this metaphor that you know
#
every tree has turned to ashes and i'm kind of still seeking the truth and this the last
#
line i quite enjoyed which is which is emptiness upon emptiness and strangely enough i over time
#
it became a positive metaphor in my life like even though it is a you could you could regard it as a
#
depressive poem in some sense but this idea that that you know everybody goes in in in seek of some
#
knowledge or the other and being existential is actually concomitant with seeking knowledge at
#
least that's what i took it out took out from it over the years and it has stayed with me
#
and maybe the forest is not just a metaphor i mean even a literal forest can serve the purpose but
#
you know do you think that an economist having a poet's soul can help in becoming a better
#
economist i think that you know i mean different people can have different approaches to this i
#
think that poetry for me helps you be a better you know this is going to sound very grand but
#
it helps you better be a better or more empathetic human being and i think in the process of which
#
it might help you it might help you become a better economist there is i think i remember
#
there was a line there was this essay that i wrote on nirala some point ago in the mint actually
#
the mint weekend edition and it opened with this line that i'll tell you literature is the last
#
refuge from fervent hopelessness and poetry is it ration deter i don't know how to say that
#
french word but you know the you know there's something about poetry that that that is you're
#
unable to express because reality is so complex that abstraction gives you a will to to communicate
#
confusion in a digestible way that that poetry allows you that formalism doesn't
#
that's why i i think i mentioned the first part that that my two loves have continued to be
#
mathematics and poetry in some sense which are very similar but also at the opposite ends of
#
knowledge which is that one is so precise and the other is so abstract or and so yeah i think i
#
think poetry helps you make sense of the world and hopefully in some you know a might imply b but i
#
don't know the causal chain of it but in some sense it probably helps you be a better academic
#
if i may think aloud i think that poetry might seem to be in a purely abstract floating realm but
#
i think what poetry can do is it can help you connect with yourself and therefore it can help
#
you self-reflect and we were talking about how important the quality self-reflection is
#
for a human being and so many people seem to kind of lack it and therefore it that can help you
#
empathize with others also as you connect with yourself but since you mentioned your two great
#
loves i'll actually go back to the first of them because the question i meant to ask before the
#
break till the break came upon us was about math and you know you've mentioned the precision of
#
math but where i have found math useful and this is a life lesson that i learned actually from my
#
years as a poker player is that the precision of math can help you deal with the imprecision
#
of life and the uncertainties of life like the biggest thing that i have learned and the most
#
important life lesson i've learned i think is probabilistic thinking and you know learning
#
to look at everything that has happened not with the hindsight bias of you know oh it was inevitable
#
but oh that every action has probabilities attached to it you can't control which way
#
the dice fall but you can just play the game the best you can according to the probabilities
#
whatever happens happens you control only what you control don't sweat about the rest the rest
#
is 98 percent and all of this brings us to that magic word i know you like santulan right so
#
you know that at least in terms of where life and probability theory mesh together which i
#
find very beautiful is that you know in sometimes in many ways life is about controlling the mean
#
the variance is always outside your control you know so when you're playing poker you are you are
#
understanding you know maybe if you're a very good poker player you also understand the distribution
#
and not just the mean right you understand higher moments of a probability density function but
#
that's about it right and i think people mistake some people who are not used to probabilistic
#
thinking they sometimes mistake actions to be mistakes in in hindsight right so sometimes i
#
as a policy maker can make a decision with the best information with the best objective with the
#
best faith but at the end of the day it is a probabilistic decision and i think the question
#
you should ask in hindsight is given the information that you had given let's say the the mean or the
#
variance whatever information you had about the impact of the likely impact of the policy did
#
you make the right decision and i think that way of thinking should be more widespread than it is
#
actually because the world is simply not deterministic it is highly probabilistic it's
#
highly uncertain and you know a good example of that in terms of public policy that that i often
#
tell people is in the recent past is that you know you should ask yourself your friends especially
#
policymakers you know did we go wrong for example did we have a role we as in society and as
#
policymakers in what happened during the second wave of covid the first wave you know we were
#
playing with too many unknowns and you know you could argue whether lockdown was the right
#
decision whether it's too stringent and so on i'm just giving you an example right more probabilistic
#
thinking that sometimes people say that oh you know the whole world suffered you know so you know
#
it was inevitable and i and i think probabilistically one may be able to one may be able to argue that
#
that we didn't do enough to control the mean because we were lucky in the first wave
#
you know did we do enough and i think we simply didn't anyone can go into the details of why
#
probabilistically i think i think deterministically it would be the wrong way to say i think there was
#
always a probability that a second wave would happen that it would be detrimental but did we
#
do enough given the knowledge we had given the distributional knowledge we had what had happened
#
in the rest of the world to prevent it and be better prepared for it so that's a way of thinking
#
that i i i that mathematical precision allows you to have i think a discipline of having clear
#
objectives defining those objectives and then evaluating those objectives in a probabilistic
#
bayesian way and i'm thinking about that whereas governance good governance demands probabilistic
#
thinking the nature of politics seems to militate against it because politics is all about saying
#
look that guy did a so x happened i will do b so y will happen and that is just the nature of
#
politics because anything beyond simple narratives like that will simply not appeal to the people or
#
sell you simply cannot be nuanced everything is about simplistic narratives and in fact
#
simplistic narratives are you know one of the common things that populists across the world
#
have you know jan verner moller wrote a great book on that which i'll link from the show notes
#
and so i'm just kind of thinking aloud here that to govern well just as to live your life well
#
you need probabilistic thinking but if you are you know in the game of politics there is no space
#
for that so it's just an ugly dirty game where you must attack the other side no matter what
#
and you know honestly to kind of come to a question on a larger theme that i want to ask you anyway is
#
about this a certain political the political environment we are in today where you cannot
#
discuss ideas and policy anymore like at one point i think it was possible but today you
#
don't do it anymore if you are the opposition you have to criticize every single thing the government
#
does and vice versa and there's just no space for example you know i despise yogi adityanath
#
but when he repealed those labor laws those labor laws needed to go they were holding india back
#
they were hurting workers far more than they were helping them and there's pretty much among
#
economists this consensus of that over the last 20 30 years every party even knows this and yet
#
because this adityanath there's so much outrage there's a you know full social media campaign
#
that oh look what he's done he's hurting workers from people who've you know never thought about
#
economics for 10 seconds in their life before this purely because it's political all the farm
#
laws on which ajay and i had an episode of the scene and the unseen which like our point was
#
that the it was a political disaster by the bjp they brought it out the wrong way and the
#
way they treated the protesting farmers was absolutely disgusting and condemnable in a
#
democracy you cannot do that but the laws were great the laws were great the many of those laws
#
had been on the congress manifesto for the 2019 elections were crying out loud and again it is
#
something that the the policy community across parties has had consensus on for 20 years
#
but then the politics gets in the way and you're screwed and then that made me wonder
#
that if the battle is never going to be in the realm of ideas now if it is just going to be
#
based on you know which party is doing the talking then it becomes a question of which
#
side has a better narrative machine rather than you know a marketplace of ideas where good ideas
#
been out i mean i am taking an excessively negative and simplistic take perhaps but
#
what how would you react to this yeah i mean i think see like anything else you know institutions
#
all these institutions are built by humans and so fundamentally i am perfect right i think that it
#
is true i don't think it is necessarily a indian phenomena i think it's a global phenomena that
#
that debates have become more acerbic they've become more polarized in india unfortunately
#
it's happening at a much earlier stage of development you know and this is something that
#
you know our vince brownian and i have talked about in one of our articles that you know india
#
is kind of an outlier that it becomes democratic before a consistently democratic before it's
#
developed it really is like you know for a country of its size and so you know to have that kind of
#
which is good to have that kind of vibrant debate but actually before you've reached a stage where
#
you know these debates really matter for india in a way that some university debates in america
#
don't matter that much in real sense of the of the world i think it is very unfortunate actually
#
and we and you and you give a good example in terms of the farm laws for this that intellectual
#
you should be able to debate on policies rather than people and i i'm sure this was true always
#
it's not a new phenomena but the extent to which intellectuals themselves have become polarized
#
that you are a congress economist or you are a bjp economist and or you are a
#
north pole economist or south pole economist or so on right so this i think is is become
#
too entrenched you know i was once privy to this this discussion which i really enjoyed
#
many years ago we had this discussion with harvey rosen and al kruger god bless his soul he
#
passed away a few years ago where harvey was the the the chief economic advisor i think they call
#
it something else the council the head of the council of economic advisors to the white house
#
for george bush and al kruger was for obama and you know they were having this nice discussion
#
among students and i was a student at that time and you know there was remarkable camaraderie
#
between them and and and one thing that al and harvey agreed on which i found quite striking at
#
that time and now in after having worked a little bit in government i i i now understand what they
#
were saying is that our job often and they both agreed on this our job often was not to
#
promulgate good ideas it was to strike down obviously stupid ones you know so so what you
#
do is that you keep certain professionals right like you know like somehow when we think of a
#
doctor we think of a professional right like it's almost bereft of ideology right because you have
#
to save the life of a patient but agreed that social science is not a hard science but somehow
#
we need to get into the habit of trying to both economists themselves and politicians in how they
#
treat economists as doctors rather than as politicians in the sense that you know my job
#
is to tell you that what you're doing is stupid and i need to be need to be able to tell you that
#
without fear or favor uh whether i do it indoors whether i do it outdoors i think the problem that
#
happens is that when you i'm not even able to do it indoors you know it's like the the emperor who
#
had no clothes right so so the i at least i should have the courage and the ability to tell you you
#
know that what you're doing is just wrong and i the the debate gets very problematic
#
when you get so polarized that even behind closed doors because of the way incentives have now been
#
structured and your job depends on your you having you know favor with the the king so to say
#
that you're not able to say truth to power and i think that is when it's very very corrosive i
#
don't think that having taking sides is anything new i don't think uh even economists to some
#
extent having ideologies is anything new but i think what is new is the extent of these things
#
the intensive margin of these things and to the extent that has affected our own thinking
#
you know there was an interesting there was an interesting comment made by i'm forgetting the
#
person's exact name this famous publisher in england when they asked when the recent attack
#
on salman rashti happened you know they are he was asked that you know do you think that
#
you know it it sends it sends a wrong signal for the authors about what is it that they they they
#
they want to publish and he said that i'm not you know it's i've gone beyond worrying that what i'm
#
more worried about is that the would the author even bring the pen to bear to think this forget
#
about to write this and then to to to disseminate it to the world or send it to a publisher i think
#
that's the more scary part are you able as an intellectual you know like are we filtering
#
ourselves too much this is the preference falsification stuff that you talked about
#
with timur in in the in that lovely episode that i do definitely worry about and i think economists
#
should again it's not possible for them to be treated absolutely like doctors but we should
#
try as much as possible both ourselves as a profession and and i think as as how policymakers
#
view us to be harder than than we currently sort of engage through the public images i think there
#
are certain truths that we need to discover and tell politicians policymakers and the public at
#
large yeah and and what you know what you said about advisors economic advisors should be able
#
to speak indoors and their job can be to strike down obviously stupid ideas and i instantly
#
thought of demonetization obviously for which apparently six people kind of knew and gently
#
wasn't one of them and it was just like any sensible economist would have struck it down
#
though i believe among the six people there were people who should have struck it down and
#
kept them out shirts and shame on them forever and i also and this is actually the tendency of
#
a very short leader in both a metaphorical and sometimes a real sense like an example i like to
#
give is that you know i i forget exactly where i read this or who the specific people were but
#
i remember there was this mafia gang in the early 90s i must have read this there were photographs
#
of a mafia gang from the leader to the next leader to the next leader to the next leader
#
they were all shorter than the last guy because each leader only hired sidekicks who were shorter
#
than him and i am right now i instantly decided hey let me just you know look at something for
#
my own curiosity so i opened up this page which lists soviet leaders by height and lenin was five
#
five and stalin was five four and a half which is irrelevant because there was a battle before
#
stalin took over but the only person stalin really allowed to pass unscathed and who remained and
#
who succeeded him nikita khrushchev was five three so you know you have exactly that same thing that
#
if you are a true leader you will surround yourself with people taller than you and you
#
will listen to them you know and and you will become taller as a result in a metaphorical sense
#
but if you are not quite that kind of leader you will surround yourself with shorter men than you
#
in every sense and what we get is demonetization so there you go but yeah you know i don't know
#
what the the the discussions behind the scenes were but yeah you know see the demonetization is
#
a i think i was mentioning that to you that's a very low bar of no but it's a good bar because
#
again one thing you can say for sure like i i wrote this in an editorial for a magazine i used to
#
write it called praghati it was a policy magazine and i wrote this at the time that every economist
#
who supported demonetization is either a bad economist or a bad human being and many of them
#
and i can think of names were both right and and this is just it just makes me so angry because
#
it just gives it's such a bad look on economics like any you know intellectually honest economists
#
would should either speak up or shut the fuck up but don't go out there and support it like so many
#
people did knowing it was wrong but anyway that's it that's a pet rant i've yeah i think i think see
#
the thing is that again there is a careful deliberation see economists are also human
#
beings right so you could have you know i would even say you could have a first reaction to say
#
oh this is interesting you know like okay you know somebody did this you know okay
#
sucking money supply seems wrong like you know i think what an economist will be able to do a
#
good economy even if for example their first instinct was this is interesting right just as
#
a because economists also learn natural experiments you know so this is interesting this has not been
#
happened in a major country economy before would this have any positive consequences probably
#
but you know after a little bit of thinking maybe a day to maybe a few hours just right if you give
#
them some kind of framework time to think about because these things even democratization as
#
sudden as it happened decision wasn't made in a day right was made over months right so any
#
thinking economist any good macro economist at least when they will sit with the facts for let's
#
say a few days they will see i am reasonably certain that the whatever positives that are
#
being put on the table are completely outrun out maneuvered outnumbered by the negatives that are
#
that are on offer and anybody who understands simple incentive theory will also understand
#
that whatever positives you are viewing right now down the game tree that we were talking about
#
right like people will find ways and when your positives even will get washed out i mean the
#
negatives will still send are you even certain right that's how i would have kind of analytically
#
approached the question as an as a good economist right and and i think you would have reached the
#
conclusion that you reached and i'm okay i'm even okay with economists who uh you know may not have
#
had an immediate bodily reaction that this is stupid and bodily reaction that saying this is
#
interesting you know but quickly actually they would have reached the conclusion that this is
#
this is the Harvey and Alan Kruger thing i was saying that given you know a few days they would
#
have come up with a with a report to you saying this doesn't make sense i think another angle
#
to look at is that sometimes we can take that kind of like i apply economic thinking to everything i
#
try to write but sometimes i think you can take it too far in the sense that in this case i would
#
say that it is immoral to even do a cost benefit analysis because a humanitarian cost is so immense
#
and whatever notional benefits they are going to a different group of people the cost is massive as
#
i wrote in the times of india at the time this is the largest assault on property rights in human
#
history right and this is like this is the opposite of what burkean conservatism or hike
#
and libertarianism would suggest this is really right out of mao's playbook right so it's not
#
right wing at all it's actually deeply left wing and deeply statist it's out of mao's playbook
#
and we know what mao did it's it's stunning so therefore there are certain areas where
#
those calculations don't matter at all you keep your economic thinking out of it it's a humanitarian
#
disaster like i could for example say that in a terrible cruel thought experiment i could say
#
what if you could kill the poorest 10 percent of india's population your per capita gdp instantly
#
for that moment would shoot up right is that a right way to calculate it of course it isn't i
#
mean i'm giving an extreme thought experiment example only a monster would you know agree even
#
engage with a calculation like that and i worry that that happens now obviously the demon like
#
you said is a really low bar most things are within the realm of discussion and we can discuss and
#
argue so so let's move on from demon and let's go back to talking about your life i think where we
#
left off in uh your biography was your love of math and the time that you spent in college studying
#
math and so on and so forth so take me to the next step how do you get from math to economics
#
and what's going through your mind at this time like you are in love with the abstraction of
#
math you're having a good time in college but what is your image of yourself how is that evolving
#
take me through that period so yeah i think i think i grew a deeper and deeper fascination
#
in love for math i was going through college right you know most of college is just three
#
years in india right so by the time i'm in my third year i had this sort of various forces pulling
#
me in different directions you know one force was you know we're still in the sweet spot of
#
after liberalization a lot actually in st stevens there were lots of good jobs on offer you know i
#
was 20 years old you know and so there was that pull that and then there was this pull of writing
#
the cat exam which a lot of people seem to be doing at that time and there was obviously this
#
desire to do higher math go you know go abroad study more math and then two things happened i
#
think one was that i i you know i had this teacher in in college called gita venkatraman
#
she's in ambedkar university now it's just a phenomenal mentor for me she kind of made me
#
believe which i don't know how she did um which only i think teachers can i think parents are
#
too close sometimes to make you reflect honestly to yourself and and friends are too too affected
#
by other friends you know there's a peer um so she kind of made me convinced me that the private
#
sector stuff these jobs and all will come again i don't know why she was able to convince me
#
because it's very hard you're in that sort of race and rut and everybody is getting these jobs
#
and you want to do that and so the choice really was between studying higher math or doing something
#
else and at that time i i did this course in number theory and i really fell in love with number
#
theory number theory is just one of the most beautiful things in the world because the
#
questions that number theory raises are very simple that even high school middle school
#
students sometimes can understand them but the answers are just impossible you know they took
#
hundreds of years to give you an example you know the question that was solved after three four
#
hundred years after it was posed is called the firma's last theorem and from his last theorem
#
you know for the listeners is basically most of you would have heard of the python gurus theorem
#
by the gurus theorem basically tells you that the three sides of a triangle are related by a
#
square plus b square is equal to c squared right so the interesting thing is that there are some
#
solutions to the python gurus theorem which are only in integers right so what is what is an example
#
example is three four five three squared plus four squared is equal to five squared nine plus
#
sixteen is equal to 25 which is five squared right and there are other examples like this
#
what firma wrote firma was a clerk in the french civil service and what he wrote in the sidelines
#
of his book was that well i conjecture that this particular identity has no solution so a to the
#
power n plus b to the power n is equal to c to the power n we know when n is equal to two it's
#
the python gurus theorem but for n greater than two he conjectured that there are no solutions to
#
this equation in integers that you cannot find integers right like three four five five six seven
#
that will satisfy this equation a cubed plus b cubed is equal to c cubed a to the four plus
#
b to the four is equal to c to the four and so on and he just said that it's kind of obvious to see
#
this and he left it at that so that's why it's called the firmas you know it was not it was not
#
a proven thing and then it has puzzled mathematicians for hundreds of years they and the computers were
#
able to show that this is true for n equal to i don't know one million two million or something
#
but there was no mathematical proof of this it was only proven by andrew wiles in the 1994 95 or
#
something like that so just to give an example of how beautiful i mean so i find this i mean
#
somebody may think who cares but actually number theory is the reason why we can get into a very
#
deep discussion about this later on but like number theory is the reason why all your bank accounts
#
and your passwords work actually so they're all cryptography which is all based on number theory
#
so the reason why you know your passwords are protected and you know when you see the
#
double-sided encrypted on your whatsapp this is all number theory are you are you telling me that
#
amit 123 is not good enough you know it's not so you know so number theory attracted me a lot
#
at that time but somehow and i and i was applying to oxford and cambridge for some higher math and
#
geetha advised me not to apply to the best colleges or something like that because she said that the
#
probability goes down and i was just resolutely either non-bayesian or adamant about which
#
colleges i applied to and so i only applied to trinity college and obviously i i got turned down
#
or i didn't get a scholarship or something like that and so at that time i was trying to make my
#
mind about what is it that should do and and at that time i had this inkling which i think is was
#
right in hindsight that even though i love number theory i don't think i could have become a very
#
successful mathematician and this is where my kind of the father's teaching about success and knowledge
#
i don't think i was enunciating it that way i can't really explain to you why i thought that
#
i i think that number theory requires a certain level of absolute dedication to mathematics you
#
know andrew wiles shut himself down for seven years to be able to he thought he had the proof
#
and then he took him seven years to prove it you know i saw two of the farmers last theorem so
#
and i very honestly asked myself i love it do i have that level of dedication toward just the
#
craft of number theory and i do think that i i convinced myself that i love people too much
#
to completely dedicate my life to mathematics i don't know how else to explain it and and so
#
then gita told me that that you know why don't you think of doing economics it is mathematical
#
enough it involves people and i didn't know much about economics at that time to be honestly and
#
then and then while i was kind of debating what to do considering this job offer i had applied to a
#
few other places abroad i wrote some of these entrance exams for for economics masters in
#
india and actually very few of the only two of them had math options delhi school of economics
#
and isi delhi and delhi school of economics thankfully at that time now they discontinued
#
had only a math option like there were no econ questions they were just pure math math questions
#
and i is that exam it was pretty straightforward and though i got admitted to delhi school of
#
economics and at that time i didn't really know much about delhi school of economics
#
you know whatever i learned from pierre even though it was across the road from
#
from saint steven's i didn't really know much about economics other than you know participating
#
in some policy discussions in college and i kind of thought this is good i i at that time i had
#
just seen a beautiful mind you know and i was sort of interested in this intersection between
#
math and econ that john nash did and so that was good enough that it seemed like a good enough
#
option i wasn't really keen on working as a 2021 year old and and this sort of my own
#
reconciliation why with why maybe i shouldn't pursue pure math but econ at that time seemed
#
to be like applied math that maybe i should pursue that then i went to delhi school of economics
#
and delhi school of economics i slowly you know i was i was i was kind of taught by bhaskar datta
#
who's was a very you know well-known uh micro theorist from india he's now at ashoka university
#
and he um his wife has been on the show his wife has been ashwini desh pandey it was who i do i
#
don't think i took a class with her but you know obviously i know her and admire her very much
#
and so bhaskar da was kind of somewhat and and some other uh people at delhi school were
#
very encouraging and and they saw that i was good at math and you know they said you know
#
helped me pick up various uh basic uh principles of economics and so then in my second year at
#
d school i applied for phd programs and yeah and then i i got in which was you know very interesting
#
and relieving because i had kind of committed to kind of this life of and to my family it was a bit
#
they were pleased but they were very confused because nobody in my family for generations is
#
an academic so i remember my mother was very encouraging i think i'd mentioned in the first
#
half that she was she was very worldly and she kind of understood she she encouraged my pursuit
#
of ideas a lot since i was a child and and so she kind of got it a little more than my father
#
in some sense i remember my dad was in a meeting at some point and i called him and i said you know
#
papa i i i you know i got an that time i was i think we were still getting letters or email
#
no we were getting emails yeah i got an email from university of chicago that i have been
#
admitted to their phd program so i thought i'll tell you he was in mumbai at that time and he
#
said okay beta congratulations and he was happy and you know but he didn't really know what
#
university of chicago is or anything like that you know and so so that he went back to some meeting
#
of his and then i think as he mentioned to someone else who was like a you know public sector bank
#
people are you know no public sector stuff and that you know maybe he was sitting with some
#
economist or something and and so they so he mentioned to them oh my son called and you know
#
and he said what you know the chicago school of economics is this and that and this and that and
#
you know he just went to that person probably went on a rant about like a positive rant about
#
this is why this is so cool and my dad came out of the meeting and he said you know i was sitting
#
with this person and they were telling you something about university of chicago so it's
#
a good school right so i said papa that's what i hear you know so you know so slowly they warmed
#
up to the idea obviously they were very happy for me that i was very happy and they never really
#
tried to impose their and they were yeah they sort of let me do what i wanted to do and then
#
they were eventually very happy that i was happy about going to princeton and yeah and then i think
#
once i went there it was like any other journey of a phd program which is that it was the first
#
time i was abroad for on my own for a prolonged period of time it took some adjustment to be
#
honest it didn't it didn't take there was a certain kind of cultural adjustment but the adjustment
#
of um the smallness of princeton actually was more than just the cultural because like you know
#
i was in college in delhi and so on princeton is a very small town it's close to new york but
#
it's still very um you know i see amit in the morning i see amit in the evening it's two coffee
#
shops you know like you know the two bars you know like so so it's just like there is no anonymity
#
as such which can be good or bad you know i don't know but it takes time to adjust to you know so
#
it's a so so it in that sense was interesting it was yeah i think i definitely formed my formative
#
intellectual years were definitely in princeton i i learned a lot both in economics about poetry
#
about humanities about mathematics more the five years i spent there five six years i spent there
#
made some very good friends um and some of whom who have been on your show also
#
and i don't think i appreciated as much what a network i was being exposed to at that time i
#
think it's always like that when you're in the middle of it you don't know you know uh but just
#
in terms of economics but also in terms of you know like you know this uh albert hershman was
#
one of my you know economists i really admire you know jeremy edelman who's a historian was writing
#
his biography at that time and you know sort of thinking about those questions about you know how
#
economics evolved as a discipline there was this gentleman called dilip abriu about whom i've i've
#
written a long essay in the mint which you know we can link from the show notes he was one of the
#
people i really admired even going in to to princeton in fact it was on one of the evenings in
#
the delhi school of economics library that i read this beautiful theorem in dynamic games
#
and it said abriu 88 and abriu is a portuguese name you know so and then i just kind of you know
#
how you are you kind of flip the book and you see the references said you know this is a beautiful
#
theorem you know who did who wrote this and so i saw that his first name is dilip oh okay indian
#
guy you know and so i googled him and it turns out that he was also from delhi school of he's
#
a bombay boy he also went to delhi school of economics and and you know dilip has is really
#
uh i think one of the most original theorists of his generation you know just such a brilliant
#
guy and i think more people in india should know about him he's a bombay boy he went to
#
elephanstar college i think and then went to um uh delhi school of economics and then put
#
his phd at princeton just really brilliant he's he laid the foundations of a lot of ideas in
#
in game theory and and so i was very excited about meeting him and you know lots of other
#
people there and and kind of my idea intellectual ideas developed about what is it that i wanted
#
to do there was this sort of lure of doing development economics because i was indian
#
you know well for the lack of a better reason but i kind of stuck through my desire to do theory
#
because i don't know what it was i think it was my passion again for mathematics but also this idea
#
that i was mentioning to you briefly that that i wouldn't have framed it in that sense at that
#
time but i'm becoming more and more comfortable saying it to myself that all truths are theoretical
#
and that empirical realities are very very important and then they what they do is they refine
#
truths your approaches to truths and so they refine theories and i think over time i've
#
convinced myself that that theory has two roles which are both equally important and some people
#
like one over the other one is to tell stories theoretical tools especially mathematical equations
#
are actually just one way of reducing complex ideas into simple equations and telling you stories
#
like you know how human beings you know i remember when uh raja moly right the guy who made bahu bali
#
and a triple r you know when he did this interview that i found very interesting and he said
#
storytelling has been one of the most primal things that humans have done since they form
#
organized societies and i view theoretical approaches to all sciences whether it's physics
#
or computer science or economics as sophisticated storytelling the other role of theory which has
#
emerged more so in recent time but which is i think equally important but sometimes people
#
in my view are to thinking of it as the primary goal of theory is to is to put structure on data
#
it's connected but it's a different role so because there is such an outburst plethora of
#
data available now to us and this increase in computing power that somehow you know that's
#
also the reason why empiris there has been an empirical revolution has gone you know kind of
#
to a different level in in most social sciences because there's just simply so much data available
#
whether the data is field experiments which is the swimming pool that you were talking about or the
#
lab experiment which is the shruti saying that put the coin in a bottle because it's controlled
#
both kinds of data are available and so what theory does is that you take all this data and
#
make sense of it that's the other role of theory i started with the first very much of storytelling
#
and now i have embraced more and more the second role but i'm resistant still to the idea that the
#
primary role of theory is to put structure on data i think it's an equally important role
#
but to tell stories stories that by definition you know there's this famous saying all theories are
#
wrong but some theories are useful so that i think that the narrative building of a role of theory
#
is what i learned very well at princeton my advisor was this british guy you know stephen morris he
#
was my primary advisor i think really the best advisor one can hope for i've learned a lot from
#
him both about life and about being an economist and and and and just how to approach research
#
research questions he was he had this unique ability where he was he was open to all ideas
#
and then he would narrow down the standard or the criteria of a good idea slowly i think some
#
people and i'm learning this now that i'm a phd advisor also is that if you are dismissive from
#
the outside you you had risk killing originality dillip used to tell me he was also on my committee
#
dillip used to tell me that you know rohit you know don't read too much like in terms of literature
#
you know and i said dillip what do you mean and he used to say that there is an optimal frequency
#
of reading if the objective is to make yourself well versed a well versed with certain techniques
#
that's good but you all if you read a lot you risk yourself being just a follower the autocomplete
#
that you were talking about in the first part and that also stayed with me they know that this idea
#
and stephen what he did very well was that he allowed the meandering in the beginning
#
and would bring down the hammer gradually you know that okay enough meandering now what is the point
#
but he wouldn't say it in the first meeting which i think a lot of people because they're busy and
#
you know they they kind of lacked that patience and he had this you know almost infinite patience
#
with my meanderings in the first few years of my phd i think princeton also taught me failure i
#
think the first time i failed i mean obviously i failed many times in many things in life but
#
but the first like real setback i got was in the second year at in those exams in in the in the
#
in the phd you have to give these field exams you have to choose two fields so first year is
#
general everybody takes the same courses the second year is field exams you choose development
#
macro finance io theory whatever and you give high stakes exam in those in which you can fail
#
i took micro theory you know which i studied game theory and mechanism design all that stuff which
#
we can talk about more and the second field i took was finance and i failed in finance
#
and it was just horrible you know i couldn't believe it like i couldn't believe that i studied
#
so hard because the exams were genuinely very hard and this that year they somehow decided to
#
change the i don't know what are the anyways something happened and and a lot of us failed
#
actually i think five out of eight people failed the one who were taking the exam and they were
#
and and i was just you know it really felt very bad and i think the support system i had then
#
with my friends and and one of the things that i really appreciated about stephen was that i went
#
to him that summer just before the summer the exam happens and we were supposed to have a reading
#
group with each other after which i was kind of formally asked him to be my advisor and i said
#
stephen i failed in finance even though i passed in theory which is what he was the main advisor
#
for he said okay let's get to work somehow it didn't affect his it didn't seem to i don't know
#
maybe if it did and he didn't want to pass it on to me it didn't affect his his desire to work with
#
me he said yeah just just read about it and so you get another attempt at the end of the summer
#
to give it and just just work hard do it again and i'm sure you'll be fine and the nonchalance with
#
which he approached it really encouraged me that that hey this guy doesn't seem to think it's he
#
said yeah these things happen you know just make sure you do it again better and he because he had
#
seen i guess other students failing him maybe himself failing in life and so that was a very
#
important moment for me because i could have gone either way at that time could have been derailed i
#
don't know if the confidence was hurt and yeah you know in fact like the i often tell the professor
#
one of the main professors who failed me marcus brennemeier is a is a very good friend today and
#
we are co-authors on a paper which we are very proud of so you know so it turns out that even
#
it didn't affect affect his because i think somehow from in indian education system failure
#
is seemed as a personal defeat as much as an intellectual whereas it seemed for these people
#
it wasn't it was neither it was just a thing that you something you had a bad day and maybe you
#
didn't prepare well enough and you'll do better job at it as long as you they just wanted to see
#
that i'm willing to work harder and so that was a big learning experience for me during my time there
#
yeah and i think as i was working on my phd i was very grateful to have friends both in
#
hard sciences and in the humanities i think two of my closest friends one is now a theoretical
#
physicist one is a historian one is a political scientist who's been on your show you know and so
#
you're talking about vinay vinay yeah i know so you know these were people rohit day was the
#
historian and arijit paul who was the physicist you know all these people i was surrounded with
#
and you know and i made what was interesting was that my closest friend at that time in my phd was
#
this guy jacob golden who was very instrumental in me he's an economist he's now economist at
#
university of chicago law school he and his family kind of embraced me in the americans
#
what was important for me was that not only was i kind of learning my stuff i was also trying to
#
absorb the world outside india you know how a culture is different how our
#
and i think that was very important for me and jacob and i just had this sort of
#
instinctual liking to each other and and i often joke with his parents harry and jane that they
#
they kind of they're my american parents and they you know so from the first year onwards actually
#
i started going to their house for the thanksgiving break every year and they you know embraced me as
#
their family and so i learned a lot from them about nuances of american culture you know how
#
in many ways is very different than than indian culture about their ideas of community and
#
individualism you know and we can you know go into that if you want so i think i had these support
#
circles that kind of came up at the right time whether it was about phd advising or
#
you know family life basically you know people like people uh you know these friends of mine
#
all these friends of mine they became family and and so it helped me in these phases of
#
failure but also in terms of understanding that you know what we were discussing that
#
how does how do you ensure that at the at the stage of your intellectual formation
#
you're not just training to be an economist but i when i look back i feel like i was training to be
#
a social scientist or or or a person who liked thinking about problems irrespective of
#
what realm they fall under um it was because of all these people that i was able to to develop
#
an interest in in you know in in in in questions of how for example physics rates relates to
#
economics or or indian history or political science or law uh with jacob you know so this
#
was very very important in my formative years uh intellectual and i really regard that those as my
#
as my formative and i started reading a lot during that time you know we were discussing i was not
#
exactly surrounded by books growing up but i think at that time i started reading a lot
#
of non-econ stuff i was always reading math and poetry but i i started reading much more of
#
non-fiction or even fiction at that time in those years summers between uh you know summers were
#
full of a lot of reading various kinds of things and i think i think then the the important part
#
came at the beginning of the fifth year which is towards the end of the fourth year which is when
#
i was kind of ready to to hit the job market and and stephen my advisor didn't think so
#
he was right you know i i think it was more sort of a a frustration of like getting on with life
#
uh you know graduate school is done let's let's start of life and and you know he sort of
#
politely in his way he always did he told me that i don't think you're ready and so i remember
#
going back after that meeting being very kind of not happy and and and towards the end of that
#
summer as i was trying to evaluate whether i should continue with academia or you know write
#
another paper wait for another year i mean stephen was clear that i'll get some job in academia but
#
he wasn't sure i'll get the job that he thought i it was good for me or was good enough for my
#
talent or and so he asked me to write another paper wait for a year and it was around that time
#
maybe in august i think or something of that year when it just came out in the news that
#
professor raghu ram rajan from university of chicago was gonna go and join the indian
#
government as the chief economic advisor uh this is before he went to the rbi and i had no idea
#
who are uh i obviously knew i'd read fault lines i had read a lot of his academic work i had no
#
idea who he was like personally i'd never met him and the audacity of youth you know in those
#
existential moments where i was saying to myself i shot him an email i said uh you know whatever
#
hi professor rajan this is who i am and this is my cv and can i come work with you i don't know i
#
twist of faith he emailed uh one of my professors still won't professor sylvain chassang was this
#
french guy just brilliant chap who was also my committee he didn't email stephen or other people
#
silva happened to be visiting booth at that time or had just spoken to raghu so he had a
#
personal connection with him and so he asked him like who is this guy uh you know is he any good
#
or something like that you know so so silva called me to his office he's like what are you doing
#
sending emails to senior economists telling them you want to work with them i said no silva i you
#
know stephen told me i'm not ready i'm very confused i think i want to go back to india for
#
some time and this seems like a good opportunity and i don't know if professor rajan is going to
#
be interested or you know so he said okay yeah you know if he said this sounds like a good idea
#
why don't you i'll write to him like something positive and let's see what happens and so you
#
wrote to him that what i don't know what it was a private email he wrote something good about me and
#
then uh raghu emailed me then saying okay i'm not in india yet but i'm going on so-and-so date and
#
so i have no idea what this will entail because i'm not there yet like what is the procedure of
#
getting someone who is not from the government to come work in the ministry or um so so yeah
#
so then i at the beginning of my fifth year actually i went i kind of went on leave and i
#
remember when going to stephen and saying i'm gonna go to india and he sat me down my advisor
#
and you know he had this most wonderful conversation where he was so so encouraging
#
you know and as a he's a pure theorist you know he is a but he said rohit you know it said something
#
like if you know i vaguely remember now i said something like you know when i was your at your
#
stage in my phd i also left for reasons uh don't ask me you know maybe i shouldn't put this on
#
record so i don't know what you know and so and but then you know after a year i came back and
#
finished my phd uh and you know and he became a very successful theorist and he said why don't
#
you go you know i can assure you that you'll either like policy a lot and become a policy
#
economist or you'll come back and you know if you want to still be a theorist you'll become a
#
theorist uh but you know just promise me that you will finish your phd you need to either
#
everything else is fine i said okay i'll promise you i'll come back and finish my phd
#
and then i went to delhi and spent about 10 months with raghu at ministry of finance
#
basically he had you know obviously as a chief economic advisor you're head of the indian economic
#
service uh and you know you're tasked with various responsibilities including producing
#
the economic survey amongst other things you're like kind of a soft advisor to both the finance
#
minister and prime minister of india depending on you know your camera personal equations with
#
both of them and so raghu decided to have three people who were outside the the main the ies as
#
as his uh in addition to the people in the ies in his cea office and i was one of them
#
i was the youngest of them i mean by this you know and i was just like this kind of lost phd
#
student in the corridors of north block you know i you know i i spent so much time in delhi i had
#
never entered a government office lucky you know exactly so it's just like something that is so
#
far away from and this was another world altogether you know and this was i was just put into this
#
world and i learned so much about both economics about how to be an economist about what is a
#
good question from not a good question in those 10 months i think and it was during that time
#
that i told myself that i really wanted to be an academic you know conventional wisdom would say i
#
would have gone the other way because i liked it so much that i thought maybe i should become a
#
kind of a full-time policy economist maybe take a job at the imf or something
#
but i really was convinced that that i wanted to be full-time in the in the kind of pursuit of
#
ideas and then and obviously interact with the with the real world and various capacities and i
#
think then basically towards the end of maybe june or maybe the beginning july must have been
#
when raghu's appointment came for the rbi and so he was going to go to bombay and i said okay boss
#
you know i'm and he agreed with me you uh let's go i want to go back finish my phd and hit the
#
academic market and you know yeah that that was when i came back my advisor was obviously very
#
happy i finished my my my my thesis went on the job market did a post-doc at cambridge
#
in england uh for a year uh and then went back to the u.s to to kind of start my academic journey
#
as a professor it strikes me that one summary of what you spoke about in the last 45 minutes
#
could simply be and this is another t-shirt line so i'm giving you merchandising ideas for your life
#
could just be from saint stevens to stephen that's a good one you you mentioned that stephen not
#
only taught you your subject but he also taught you about life how to live expand on that i mean
#
you know he was not very he's not very he's very light touch so you know it's very difficult to
#
actually point to specific you know moments that's what he preached you know that's what
#
when the guru said something and i took notes or something it was just more like you know
#
so when he was my advisor he was also the editor of econometrica which is the leading journal in
#
economics in many ways he was a very busy man and i don't think i ever sent him an email to take an
#
appointment he had almost for his students only he had an open door policy i mean if he was busy
#
he would tell you you know why don't you come back in half an hour and you know i would go
#
and he would just sit with me and chat i don't know how he did it you know and um and unlike
#
okay unlike many other people i met he was very well read like you could you know you assume like
#
a game theorist you know was struggling with his equations you talk on with about him with him
#
about widrow wilson yeah yeah when i was reading the biography of woodrow wilson you know when i
#
came back from india one day i i gifted him i think this was the summer i spent in bombay like
#
either maximum city or shantaram i don't know he told me like give me some get me some book on
#
bombay or something he did it you know like and he was discussing and so he was he was very well
#
read so i think it was more like learning by example you know sort of and that and that having
#
that light touch of of nudging whenever necessary and letting me me be otherwise and not judging me
#
too much or actually at all for my intellectual interests outside economics i didn't have to hide
#
anything from him you know that i was in urdu class i used to tell him you know i used to go
#
to urdu class and he was very intrigued by why what about i was learning you know i was telling
#
him i'm just doing it for poetry and you know and and he was very always encouraging and and
#
i think that moment was very pivotal when he advised me you know i think most and i've seen
#
this now as colleagues you know who advise students most advisors would have said don't go to india
#
what are you doing you're you do you want to be a game theorist or do you want to solve
#
indian economic policy problems there is no relationship between them he was not like that
#
he said you know you're going to go learn with a serious economist you know i'm sure you'll learn
#
something you know being in his office and just keep in touch with me and he always kept in touch
#
with me so this was this light touch approach that it's your life but i am there whenever you
#
need advice and i will nudge it's not like i will not nudge you i will nudge you in ways
#
that i think are right and this is the you know this is in some sense similar approach that gita
#
had with me in in stephens where you know she said you know this will come you know this this
#
this private sector jobs which you which you which everybody is aspiring it will come want a job in
#
bcg mackenzie it'll come at age 24 it doesn't have to come at age 20 trust me and this light
#
touch approach worked at least seems to work with me very well where i am very open to mentors
#
mentoring me but also letting me be and i think stephen had that very very even till today you
#
know i i met him recently i was deciding between jobs you know i'm going to move now in the next
#
fall to a new job and i was discussing the options with him and you know he was one of them was in
#
boston he's at mit now so he was saying well i would personally really like you to move to boston
#
but you know here are the you know here is what i think and so i think yeah it's very it really
#
encourages me to you know in the break you were asking me about life in academia versus outside
#
academia and i think one of the things that i really enjoy now is is mentoring my own phd
#
students and having talking to people younger people about research and it's really rewarding
#
that anecdote that you mentioned earlier not exactly an anecdote when you said that if you'd
#
go to stephen with a big idea he wouldn't strike it down immediately you know he'd let you live
#
with it for a bit he'd let it marinate in your head and gradually in a bit that soft touch that
#
you mentioned it and and that seems to me to be so wonderful and exactly the right way to go around
#
it because that allows you to learn how to think on your own you know and without necessarily
#
having the hammer come down on you like one thing that i've realized uh in a in just a field of
#
creativity or in just a field of writing is that when i was a young writer i was overly flamboyant
#
in love with language and etc etc and it would have been very easy for an editor to just come
#
down hard on me and just tell me all the things that were wrong with it which you know after all
#
these years i can see and i remember i worked in uh first wizard run and then quick and four with
#
sambit bal and sambit bal was known as a magnet for good young writers and one of the things that i
#
recognize only in hindsight is that he would let everybody play their shorts right his whole thing
#
was that these are young people with great energy and talent they have to they have to make the
#
mistakes to learn what the what those mistakes are you can't dampen their style too fast you
#
don't want to homogenize them and turn them into the same damn thing and that you know for me it
#
really worked well rahul bhattacharya was another of his young writers chandrahar choudhary a whole
#
bunch of people came out of there and uh and that seems to be the exact touch so my next question
#
to you is that how did how did that play into your mentorship like what is mentorship like what is
#
teaching like for you because the little bit of mentorship that i've done in an informal sense
#
of people who worked with me and i find that it's incredibly satisfying to see the change to be able
#
to step back and not interfere and not actively you know try to shape someone but to just let them
#
form and sometimes you'll give a little guiding touch but to just let them form and see them bloom
#
you know i i've thought about this a lot because i have been so blessed in life
#
with good mentors at various stages of not just in phd or undergrad but even after that that i have
#
you know really tried to think about what good mentorship entails right so from stephen i learned
#
to let you know as you were saying marinate but also that the funnel is very important that
#
eventually to actually funnel the idea that is equally important as the initial marination
#
because the initial marination may not go anywhere and both it is both the humility to first say that
#
i even don't know where this idea is going so let it meander and the other is to say
#
well this kid needs to first think for themselves and then i will nudge them
#
right both are equally important the other was i think i learned from devesh kapoor who had had
#
the privilege of knowing after my phd or you know towards the end of my phd after my phd we have a
#
we have written a chapter in a book together you know from devesh i learned that everybody can
#
not i shouldn't say everybody but like you know it's easy to mentor the star student
#
you know what's really satisfying is to support the underdog you know and devesh has this amazing
#
quality of supporting underdogs all through his career i've seen mentoring people mentoring
#
students you know who may not otherwise find good mentors you know investing in them beyond
#
just academic curricula building a rapport with them whether it's you know their personal lives
#
or obviously without interfering but you know kind of being open to talking about their personal lives
#
or or or being open to you know how to deal with different students differently you know where they
#
come from different walks of life and i think that for me has been a very also a very formative idea
#
of of what mentorship means you know it's it's not just the the the satisfying thing is not just
#
where you're able to take the mentee but the distance they have traveled
#
you know and the distance travel is so satisfying you know when you see someone
#
complete underdog making it to whatever extent they have in life and you've had a small role
#
to play in it it is very very satisfying and i think and then like later on in life i think
#
when i was when i came back to the ministry of finance and worked with arvind i think from
#
arvind i learned that that how to create a team you know how to be a team because academia doesn't
#
teach you how to be a team player it's a very lonely this was the first time when we had by
#
that time we had the ca office had grown quite large and now it was interesting that you know
#
i was i was friendly with arvind and and and you know and and how do you create now a team
#
which really does the job so first of all you know does the job that is to be done
#
but also because there is so everybody is relatively young and he's much older and so
#
there was this sort of how do you make sure nobody feels left out they're not there no
#
severe jealousies you know who's in the room in which meeting you know everything's team
#
for some reason which is wrong everything seems very important in ministry of finance you know
#
as if like this meeting is going to change the course doesn't right nothing changes the course
#
of indian economic history if i just whatever if at all something years of work and it does
#
so i think there i learned with him that you know he used to say you know what really matters is to
#
infuse the ecosphere of ideas and that's the best you can hope for and our job is just that you know
#
to hope that this i you know that that these are going to get executed or implemented is just
#
and and and and there i think we really learned how to his his mentorship taught me kind of how to
#
have everyone in a team take ownership of ideas you know and it's it's it's really you you'll
#
see that you know for example the economic surveys don't have any names on them at least
#
historically they've never had and so you know the cea can take ownership but like none of the
#
even he can't take you know is this more like a you know a ecosphere that in the ministry of
#
finance that is creating those ideas and i think that was very powerful because you know we were
#
able to at that time put out certain ideas whether it was the jam trinity or you know i still
#
remember in the first economic survey that we did at that time it hadn't become a big deal now
#
everybody is of course talking about it i think maybe this is the first or the second economic
#
survey we we put in these words it's going to be a little jargony now it was that you know what
#
what at that time the government was trying to do was public provision of private goods
#
you know like so in the sense the bank account is not a public good the toilet is not a public
#
good in some sense sanitation is but to physically give her you know and it was we could see it was
#
a bit different we couldn't like yet see the scale that this was going to have or the importance is
#
going to have in indian politics but we could see so to coin that term and you know language matters
#
to learn that language matters and yeah so i think i think so i was i've been lucky to have
#
these kind of mentors in life and i've i've learned and you know i've also learned from all of these
#
people right like whether stephen or raghu or devesh or arvind or or dillip you know they all
#
have weaknesses as human beings you know i'm sure they will not mind me saying this you know and so
#
i also to learn that you know you you idolize certain people in life for for certain things
#
and then you understand you get to know them closely you also understand that also helped me
#
reflect a lot that that i have many weaknesses as a human being and when we were saying about that
#
you know the thing about moral clarity or or trying to learn right this idea that you actually
#
constantly learn need to learn i'm not saying that i do it very well but this at least this idea
#
exists that i'm way i'm far from being perfect and to constantly work on myself both being a good
#
mentor and being a good good person so yeah i think the frailty of the people i admire actually
#
in a sense makes them like them more closer to them yes because yeah we're all in the same boat
#
we are all you know fucked up in different ways we're all trying but then in the middle of that
#
battle when you come up with good work and good ideas and good mentorship it just matters a lot
#
tell me about how did your gaze change during the years like you've gone abroad and you know
#
you've had this great education etc etc you've done the phd you're coming back between leaving
#
india and coming back i'm sure you went back on holidays and stuff but between leaving india and
#
coming back with raghu you know in that time how did the way you look at india change because i
#
i imagine that one way in which would have changed is just the physical distance where you leave and
#
you the things that you take for that were normalized in your eyes you see them in different
#
ways you now notice them you know as you think about them but also you are exposed to new
#
ideas new frameworks and you know the default mindset that so many indians have i mean our
#
default mindset when we grow up in india especially in that era is that state is my
#
bap you know if there's a problem steady solution etc etc and possibly you were already past it but
#
even that takes some kind of work so give me a sense of you know your intellectual development
#
in that sense that what is the journey that you're making like are there any important books during
#
this period are there any important til moments these great ideas that are like a light bulb in
#
your head are there any specific mentors or you know teachers who have that influence and make
#
you see the world in a different way i think yeah these things were very gradual i don't know if i
#
had many til i mean obviously a micro til moment but like in terms of i think one thing that i
#
find frustrating even though there is some merit in it is is this lazy attack that some of us now
#
have back home that because this person has spent x number of years abroad they're not indian enough
#
and therefore i have no right on commenting on indian stuff so one of the calls we consciously
#
took in the book for example was to write in first person as we as concerned citizens of india even
#
though you know people may say we live abroad or or you know both raghu and i but i think there is a
#
that's a very lazy so i think there is some merit in in the sense that if you don't continuously
#
keep engaged you could lose your pulse of the ground i think that's completely a legitimate
#
critique but i think that the other the the lazy critique is that you know there is this i'm
#
forgetting his second name rahul is the first name the famous relatively famous hindi writer
#
i recommend the listeners who are comfortable in hindi to read his book called ghumakkar shastra
#
you know ghumakkar shastra he lays down this beautiful kind of hypothesis that some many of
#
the great world's great thinkers were ghumakkar's you know he gives the example of guru nanak
#
of the abud and many others and he says that you know this when did this lazy idea come in
#
to our domestic thinking you know there was this there's this idea that you know
#
hindu should not cross the river or some some some idea like that and he kind of debunks that
#
idea that you know that that that that ghumakkari is a way of actually understanding the world and
#
then yourself and your society because only when you're exposed to ideas different than yours
#
then you're able to kind of what's it called shaft the wheat this is a phrase right like
#
sort the wheat from the shaft yeah you know so or at least make your own frameworks right like when
#
you have competing frameworks in your in your midst and i think you know you gandhi was like
#
that right like gandhi went outside discovered in some sense the gita comes back and then so
#
so i think for me this was very important that that in retrospect at least that that that i
#
was i have been able i have been exposed to varying ideas not just of economics of state
#
of interaction of state economics state markets but also about you know communitarianism versus
#
individualism of friendships and what they mean and and that really i was never i was never i mean
#
i made me to almost a fault i was never very insecure about my identity in the world as an
#
indian for rational or rational reasons i'm very indian uh in the sense that it has never
#
what does it mean right to not be indian in today's world you know it has never crossed my mind for
#
example not that it means much but just my own insecurity maybe your security that i've never
#
you know contemplated for example giving up my passport it's just not a thing that i would do
#
it's not a state of the world i don't know why it is like it's just i i am indian and this document
#
is important to me because uh i want to be recognized as an indian uh all over the world
#
and so if this is how modern i did it's my karma boomi and and so so i'm just saying so i was
#
almost dogmatic about this to an extent where some other indian friends abroad you know judge
#
me for this dogma because a lot of other people think it's just a document and i don't you know
#
and for whatever reason i i think that if that's what brands me as an indian abroad and then then
#
so there is that that level of security or insecurity and then and then from that lens
#
i'm very open to to to all kinds of ideas of of the world you know like i to give you an example
#
when i was in the first year of grad school you know there is this if the listeners who've seen
#
a beautiful mind they would remember there is this bar that is shown where john nash thinks
#
of the idea of the nash equilibrium and he runs it's called the d bar and it is called the d
#
basement bar the d bar i was sitting there uh with a friend of a few friends having a beer
#
and this friend of mine he looks at me and he says are you religious
#
to you it might seem like a a very basic question but in the 23 years of my life till then nobody
#
had asked me that question it really puzzled me and i said what do you mean and it's such a
#
common american question you know it's a very common american question i said are you religious
#
i said uh why do you ask that question i don't know it just came to my mind you know that that
#
you know that that uh i said no something may have triggered and so i wear a collar
#
you know as you can see here uh and so i think that's what he said that you know i thought
#
i thought you know he was a reasonably well-read guy or cosmopolitan enough and he said i thought
#
these this thing is worn by Sikhs are you Sikh uh he's an american guy american jewish guy and i
#
said no i'm not Sikh but let me think about it he said why do you have to think about it
#
i said yeah i am religious he said okay you know it's interesting you know blah blah blah and we
#
chatted about it a few times i said yeah religion matters in some way or the other
#
to me and it's played an important role in my life something some spiel i gave him
#
and then a few a few months later we met and he asked me uh which is the nearest temple to campus
#
i said which temple he said hindu temple i said i don't know he said but you said you're religious
#
at this interaction really stayed with me i said you that's not what religious means and he said
#
what else does it mean if you don't go to church every sunday how are you religious or like in his
#
case synagogue every sunday or you know every week or every month at least you know we've had
#
this conversation a few months ago how can you be religious and i understood the basic cultural
#
difference uh in my opinion at that in my 23 year old mind at that time about well okay i i i do
#
think that in some indian sense of the word i'm religious but it seems like in his american sense
#
of the word i'm not and this really stayed with me just as an example of how you rationalize the
#
world and there were many instances like this where i i had before i went to the u.s i i don't
#
think maybe i'm exaggerating but at least in my mind i can't remember a time where i had a meal
#
alone in my life as a kid in india even as a college-going kid you know maybe even even
#
i was sitting in the dining hall in stevens i don't think i was alone right and the amount of meals i
#
had to have alone in in first year in america was just very bothered me a lot whereas it's a
#
way of life for them you know you're having your lunch on your desk while you're working or you
#
know you're even as a student you're just solving your problem set while eating your dinner i don't
#
think i'd ever done that and so this you know maybe i judged myself if i you know but this
#
opened myself to the idea this is fine you know that this is normal and it is not something
#
to be ashamed of or it's not i opened myself to the idea of going to a movie alone
#
i don't think i'd ever done that in india and i do i really enjoy that now like you know i
#
have a busy day at work and sometimes i actually really enjoy i remember i went to see some i think
#
some shahrukh khan film recently javan or patan or something alone you know i enjoyed it you know it
#
was not a and so this again is something that now you may think this is a certain individualistic
#
idea in a simplistic way right where i don't maybe people do that in india now also but
#
but it was rare at least when when i was in college that people would go to a film alone or eat a meal
#
alone and and and so just getting accustomed to these ideas but i think as an adult i've also
#
becoming more aware that that that individually this this sort of slightly more individualistic
#
touch to how american society is organized is also very problematic it's very lonely
#
it does encourage a certain kind of emphasis on work work workaholic life or or this tantalan
#
is a little bit my son to an ideal santalan is somewhere between the american work professionalism
#
and the indian communitarian emphasis on family so i'm still i'm not there yet but i i am definitely
#
calibrating this santalan in my head so earlier you mentioned gamakar shastra what a beautiful
#
name that's where rahul sanskritayan okay yeah i just never i think it's a it's a it's a last
#
name he came up for himself yeah janvi falke also raved about him in an episode okay yeah beautiful
#
writer last year yeah yeah i want to double click on a couple of aspects of what you said and one is
#
you know eating alone or just generally being alone and all of that which for some like like
#
for an introvert being with people can be a scary prospect but being alone can also be scary i mean
#
being alone with yourself is actually often a terrifying thought and what i want to ask you
#
about now is that what was that process which took you towards becoming comfortable in your own skin
#
and i said towards because i'm not sure whether you'd say you are yet i don't think i am fully
#
either it's a life long journey it's a lifelong journey one makes but what is that process because
#
i would imagine that when you go to america like that there would be you know dual anxieties coming
#
up and one is the anxiety of will i be able to cope with the academics is that where i belong
#
you know will i be able to manage have i you know chosen the right path you think of the road not
#
taken etc etc well you know makinzi coming at 24 is now out the window what your earlier teacher
#
said and the other anxiety is of just being an indian in america because in india unfortunately
#
we grew up with a complex about being indian that you always imagine that the white-skinned
#
foreigner is superior to you that in the hierarchy of languages english is superior to everything
#
else in india that's the way it's treated and you might be lucky that okay you know some english
#
and you can get by here but over there again you you you feel conscious of your skin you feel
#
conscious of your accent etc etc all of those things and and then obviously it's a matter of
#
time and you get over it and then there are deeper anxieties like what do people think of me and i
#
think this has again something fundamentally to do with the shaping of the self itself because
#
you know there's a term i really like called the looking glass self where you shape yourself
#
according to the reflection you see in other people's eyes and i think that's it it's tempting
#
but the thing is most of the time you won't even know you're doing that it'll just happen like i
#
think about you know but the the possible part dependence in your choice where you say i won't
#
do development economics i'll you know do this instead and for a moment the thought struck me
#
that maybe you're a different person entirely if you do development economics maybe you're a
#
different human being only you know i don't know is there a part dependence to that i mean my
#
stronger inclination is that no he would have been who he is because there is also a part dependence
#
to character and to interests so i i'd say that that's a greater thing but this larger thing
#
the evolution of who you are as a person and then dealing with these anxieties which naturally come
#
up and eventually reaching a stage where you've gone a fair bit in that journey of comfort in
#
your own skin tell me about that you know there is this beautiful line that irshad kamil wrote i
#
think in one of the songs in rockstar that reminds me of this you know
#
like that song i don't remember the title of the song but it's basically this idea that all of us
#
are you've just captured in three lines what i took like five minutes to say that's a beautiful
#
poetry yeah it's a beautiful you know i i don't know i i'm still getting comfortable as you're
#
saying i'm still on the journey of getting comfortable in who i am because both because
#
who i am is evolving and and how i perceive myself in other people's eyes is also evolving
#
and i think actually in some sense if you're not evolving rapidly enough to be comfortable in your
#
skin academia can be a very cruel place because it's the way it's it's structured now is it's
#
completely premised on what other people think about your work and this constant evaluation
#
right it's not like you know a kitab you wrote in 10 years and then some people are
#
it's just journal article after journal article rejection acceptance rejection acceptance this
#
journal is higher than that journal right because you don't have the hindsight of longevity right
#
like it's not that we're looking at your work 10 years from now it's in this moment you know
#
where is your article getting published and who is at what university and so it's a very
#
you know the famous Kissinger line right like the the people are so vicious because the stakes are
#
so low or something yeah so um so i i think i'm still constantly evolving uh in that dimension
#
i don't know i think when i went to the us i didn't really have i don't know what i was i
#
mean i don't know if i was expect what i was expecting of myself i obviously had these grand
#
ambitions of you know being you know everybody wants to be a good academic they want to solve
#
big problems i think as soon as i went there i realized that i had classmates from all over
#
the world you know who had done equally or more brilliant things than me or wherever they were
#
coming from right and so that immediately makes at least it made me humble it was just i mean you
#
know there were some people like i was mentioning my friend Jacob i mean Jacob had you know he was
#
not as mathematically trained as some of the other people but his intuition was at another level you
#
know he could construct arguments from first principles that i had never seen before you know
#
so that's just like humbling you know you see something some that level of brilliance you know
#
i had some other classmates Gonzalo this guy from Chile who was just a mathematical whiz kid you
#
know he was just just compute any problem at least at a much higher level than i could and so
#
you know you you it takes you time to find your i often tell myself that the that
#
one moment of personal peace but you know which at that moment i may have considered defeat but
#
eventually it was peace was that i told myself i remember telling myself this i am not the
#
lip of real because i'd idolized him so much before i went there and when i met him i realized he has
#
a certain grasp over theoretical elegance that i just don't but then it took me another year or so
#
to say it's okay i may have something else that he doesn't not that that's necessary but it's just
#
like you we are different people we cannot be you cannot fit a square in a circle you know you just
#
keep trying all your life and you won't other you know other than you know so so i think that
#
it took me a while and it took me a while from saying i am i am not the lip of brew to saying i
#
am me and that's okay and i will find brilliance in that that took a while i think it's still
#
probably ongoing where you're constantly comparing yourself to other people i think i i i what i've
#
tried consciously to do and it requires a conscious effort is to find inspiration from people you
#
admire but not necessarily trying to emulate them all the time i think there's a big difference
#
between emulation and inspiration that i'm trying to imbibe more and more as i go along i do think
#
that that going to the u.s at least operating in that system made me realize the importance of
#
competition not just in the market sense right like there's a market obviously i don't mean the
#
technical sense of the world i think to keep high levels of professionalism and high levels of
#
you know sort of quality in your ideas you need to face competition you know unless you're
#
you know completely self-driven which very few people are you know you need to feel a
#
bit uncomfortable from time to time you know this this thing that and and again there's a big gap
#
there's a big you know continuum between ruthless you know journal rankings and university rankings
#
versus saying no there should be some competition between people just in the market of ideas
#
you can't just you know say you're good or this person is good because they have been a professor
#
for 10 years that is no you know a 20 year old can have a better idea than a 50 year old there is no
#
age and i found indian academia to be a little ageist in that sense and i think generally to
#
some extent still i did sense with a lot of universities in the u.s and invest in general
#
there is that level of competition that that that eventually if you have a good idea and you're
#
obviously pushy enough with it the ideas get recognized and i really want a similar kind of
#
you know if this is something i can contribute one or two percent in my life towards that in india i
#
would have you know it would really give me a lot of satisfaction where you see a lot of indian
#
academics indian engineers do very well in the west i think because they just they understand
#
that they are in this market for ideas and they compete knowing that it's a level playing broadly
#
a level playing field like i you know why is it that you don't see you know one question that
#
we ask ourselves you know which we've raised often in the public discourse also is that if
#
25 20 to 25 percent of chip design in the world is being done in india actually in bangalore
#
and 40 to 50 percent of chip designers in the world are indians not even just in bangalore even
#
the globally you know why don't we have our nvidia our qualcomm and so on because we just
#
don't have the conditions the platforms to let them just run with it right it's not that it's
#
clear that it's not there's something not wrong with indian entrepreneurial talent clearly so i
#
think this idea that you need to compete with with the best in the world and that's really
#
the way you you you become good at what you do is is something i also learned with all the
#
insecurities and all the all the you know existential dilemmas that come from moving
#
from one place to another i i did learn by moving to the u.s. tell me about the role of
#
religion in your life like i love the difference that you pointed out in religiosity as americans
#
would view it and the more personal kind of religiosity that one can have and it can play
#
so many roles you know it can give you a life meaning it can you know bring solace to you
#
it can just add a sense of community in your life or a rootedness to your life in terms of
#
your fellow religion members and i respect all of these replay i'm a non-believer but
#
i sometimes wish i wasn't but can't do anything about it but you know i find all of them
#
incredibly valuable in certain ways and and yet people you know might you know look at someone
#
like you and say that hey you know you're a rational thinker you're dealing with numbers
#
you're in the world of you know you've got the scientific mentality you're looking at
#
mathematical precision and this is you know appears to be the opposite of that on the
#
surface of it so tell me about the role it's played for you and what it's meant to you
#
i think the the you know i it's just something it's still evolving in my head and there's
#
various facets to it i think that religion plays a role in my life i'm very happy about it
#
i'm very intentional about it in some ways i am a little impatient with with rituals
#
though i'm getting more and more warmed up to the idea because of my wife to the importance of
#
a structure of which ritual can be one part so i think it's a very personal journey and i do
#
think that there is a difference in one has to be careful as well how one says is because this
#
has become so political now rather than intellectual is that there is a difference i have noticed
#
after spending a lot of time in the us and some time in the in europe also there is a difference
#
between an abrahamic approach to religion and and and let's say an indic approach to religion
#
whether it manifests in your life or not is a separate issue but i think this idea that
#
there is no one truth and and that we're all seekers and by the way different religions manifest
#
in different ways if you look at most of you know renaissance writings by theologians in christianity
#
or sufi poetry in islam they also are seekers right so it's not like but i'm seeing it at a
#
some sort of scholarly level i've really enjoyed reading this stuff and trying to rationalize it
#
in my own way and i do like this idea that the truth is a is a personal journey and that and
#
that you find it in your own ways and to that extent i think i don't want to do a cop out and
#
say oh i'm not religious but i'm spiritual because i think that's kind of a fashionable answer but i
#
do think that both religion and in terms of structure in terms of ritual in terms of the
#
spirituality it brings of it largely has had a positive influence of my life because i actually
#
kind of reject religion when it doesn't seem rational to me not that every aspect of religion
#
is rational but just that when it when it's exclusionary even it's you know when it
#
distinguishes between people in in systematic ways i i just i i'm able to reject it but i'm
#
perfectly aware of the pernicious aspects of it it has in in in society as a whole but you know in
#
my in my personal journey it has it has it has benefited me a lot you know i i really i've been
#
to the you know for instance the one act of religion is to go to a temple or a mosque or
#
a gurdwara or a church which i you know i quite enjoyed like in in when i was in college you know
#
since steven's had this small chapel and sometimes you know i would just go sit there
#
probably be saying a hindu prayer or something but like the the silence that that place offered me
#
the solace that that place offered me you know we were talking about hindi words right which or
#
words that don't get translated a word that i really like which i don't think has i haven't
#
been able to find a very good translation in english which i think in some sense religion
#
and spirituality offers me is ekant and i don't know how to translate it it's not being alone
#
it's not being in silence it's a mixture of all these things and i think it's a calmness of being
#
alone or something i mean that's yeah sort of something in that narrative yeah and i think i
#
think religion offered me that in in or spirituality has offered me that in various ways
#
and you know i it's you know reading for example shankaracharya reading the buddha
#
you know i find it for example i find it very fascinating that when buddha attains enlightenment
#
what does he do right what do you do with that knowledge right okay you're an enlightened soul
#
what do you do and he thinks about it and as an academic i find it very fascinating that he the
#
first i think from whatever i've read the first thing he does he doesn't go to the people so to
#
say he goes to sarnath why does he go to sarnath because sarnath at that time was the so-called
#
harvard of india at that time it was the seat of great intellectual ferment let's say he decides
#
that he first must confront the existing dogma with his knowledge amongst the intellectual elite
#
and hone it very well before taking it to the people but i find that very fascinating i've been
#
to sarnath and i was kind of actually sad by how little i don't know how little developed it is
#
it's such an important place of global history actually it's like writing a paper before
#
writing a book yes yes you know so like you know kind of really trying out uh he's aware right and
#
this is traditionally been the buddhist tradition that you go and debate and only when public the
#
you know when publicly and then you when you and that's what adi shankaracharya does later on also
#
is that he instills this this spirit of debate that you must win an argument clearly and squarely
#
before you know calling your your thesis or theory the best or or for best for the time
#
and i think that spirit has remained with me in in and i you know for various reasons that we
#
have been discussing that you know it's today's times actually make it very hard to do that to
#
really say what you feel like in on various things another ask you know i on a purely kind
#
of personal level also the the at various points in time the i have turned to the gita as a as a
#
source of and the mahabharat in general as a source of strength um you know yeah you know
#
in various aspects of it various renditions of the gita various aspects of the mahabharat i i draw
#
a lot of i have tried to draw a lot of strength from it the fact that everybody is imperfect in
#
the mahabharat nobody's i mean like you know i would always question myself why did christian
#
do this you know this is wrong but this you know that that even god can be imperfect i find that
#
very very um intellectually satisfying i don't know why but it's it's sort of grown on me
#
and the sheer power of poetry there is in mahabharat also helps me in some in in some
#
you know again you can you can say this is religious this is spiritual this is mythological
#
whatever you know cap you want to put on it there's this uh famous poem by i think by dinkar i think
#
my wife introduced me to it um called rashmi dati and there there you know there is a beautiful
#
scene where christian goes to to the court of of dhritarashtra and dharyodhan and says you know
#
just give us five ghans just give us five villages and you know and this idea that what can what can
#
arrogance do to you and you know it's not like dharyodhan was completely evil he has some shit
#
what he does with karan is very positive and you know there's this line that if i remember correctly
#
that a beautiful line by dinkar you know that that when when bad clouds are hovering around
#
you it is your brain that goes dead first or you know when when christian says you know when they
#
don't agree to him you know christian says christian gets very frustrated and he says
#
i find that very powerful you know that that not that i'm saying that to it sometimes i just stand
#
off the mirror and say that to myself when i'm feeling low it's not like i'm saying it to an
#
enemy the enemy is obviously out it's uh is faceless but okay the time of request is done
#
now is the time for war i'm kind of almost egging myself in a strange way
#
it will be life or death you know it's like very powerful lies they're almost kind of
#
childish but but uh but but you know just by using the stories as a crutch i find it very
#
motivating to to find meaning in my own life these small small instances and so yeah that's
#
the role i guess a long answer of how religion plays a role in my life this is such beautiful
#
lines also the you know both the bits that you quoted earlier while you were talking about
#
the influence of all your mentors and how america changed you you use a phrase friendship and what
#
it means and i want to double click on that also because at one level much like lust perhaps so
#
much like love friendship seems utterly irrational and meaningless you know at the completely
#
rational level and you could argue it is like that anyway under all the veneers everything could just
#
be transactional but there is a thing called friendship and there are different kinds of
#
friendships and there are some friendships which sustain themselves despite no effort
#
made on either side and you can meet someone after six years and it's like cool there are
#
friends you just hang out with and you don't really need to talk there are friendships which
#
you have to make an effort and you know show some intentionality otherwise everything kind of
#
drifts away and recently i came up with a phrase which i rather like so just as there is falling
#
in love i think there can also be falling in friendship where you you know you just really
#
vibe with someone right away but more and more the context in which i think about it is the context
#
of intentionality that ultimately the only thing of value in your life are the people around you
#
and the people you kind of collect and cultivate and whatever and you can't take them for granted
#
you have to you know pay attention there and be intentional about it and i guess it's it's a
#
question at one level about friendships but if we talk about intentionality then also about
#
relationships and so on and so forth so since you mentioned since you use that phrase i'd love to
#
know you know what it how your thinking evolved on that front yeah i think that i think that
#
i've always been blessed with good friends and one thing that made me think recently about
#
friendships a lot was your episode with ranjit where he mentioned that he finds it puzzling
#
that we are no longer having vertical friendships and i would like to believe that that a lot of my
#
mentors actually over the years have become my friends obviously there is some inherent
#
hierarchy there because you know you are older you have i've learned from you but i think i have the
#
liberty of saying certain things that i would say to friends in a certain tone with a certain
#
language with a lot of them i am also intentionally trying to have that relationship with my students
#
one has to be careful especially in the modern times with i don't know like well everything you
#
know i do worry sometimes that the the the rightful correction that that many of the movements in the
#
west have had with trying to you know take notice of certain kinds of abuse that have happened in
#
hierarchical relationships but i i i i do try to make it a point that i try to be friendly with my
#
with my students and especially my phd students are much older graduate students and and pass
#
on that vertical friendship that kind of intergenerational mitzvah to use a yiddish word
#
that i've had in my life and i have to be intentional about it you know in in terms
#
of horizontal friendships i've been very very lucky and and in i have not really lost many
#
friends i have as you said gone in and out of touch with them so you know one of my closest
#
friends from college keshav banerjee he's now in europe uh we were debaters we used to debate
#
together and uh you know we have a deep bond which gets rekindled every time we meet which
#
is not very often but you know i regard him as one of my very close friends and how does how do
#
you do that i think is yeah i don't know you know my my father used to say when i was you know when
#
i was growing up you know that that that the the most important thing to manage in a relationship
#
is expectation um whether it's your spouse whether it's your best friend whether it's your parents
#
because human beings are social creatures and so no matter how mature how evolved we are
#
when we get close we invariably form expectations it's just human it's not a good thing or a bad
#
thing it's just i think it's just how we are and so as we go along in life i i i try to make sure
#
that i manage expectations with people i really care about uh in ways that i can fulfill them
#
and and you know in some sense to the extent possible have true relationships
#
or not true but like good deep bonds be non-transactional at some level everything
#
is you know expected so i try to differentiate between expectation and transaction you know that
#
there's a legitimate expectation that amit can have from me if we are good friends and it's
#
it shouldn't even be an issue right you should call the pick up the phone and ask me a question
#
and so on and i think you could start a friendship from the level of transactions and then become
#
good friends but but but i i do try to be intentional about you know the friends that
#
i have collected over the years and that really mattered to me that that actually they should
#
continue to have expectations of me and i should be there for them whatever whether in personal
#
capacity whether in emotional capacity whatever it is that means and yeah friendships i i generally
#
believe friendships make life more meaningful like i i i want to have friends from various
#
walks of life i think one of the problems i've seen with many economist friends of mine is that
#
you know early academia is so all-consuming that actually you don't have any friends if you're
#
spending you know this is a joke that went around with narayan murthy saying 70 are we actually are
#
working you know in a in a in a 60 70 hour weeks uh and i could you know we are we really uh yeah
#
i mean obviously not always but like you know on many weeks of the year we are working that much
#
and and and so how do you make sure that you hold on to old friendships and you don't confuse
#
professional bonds for friendships they really aren't it's rather danger i think there is i
#
for me it i think there is and what are the consequences of the consequences of it are
#
are feeling a sense of loss or or or sense of control of your place in the world i was like
#
wait i thought we were friends but we are actually professional friends which is different and
#
at least one way i've tried to ameliorate that to some extent is to is to work with people
#
by work i mean have co-authors in in in research papers who are very good friends
#
or who i become very good friends with i intentionally try to like if i'm working
#
with you on a research paper either we are already reasonably good friends or yeah i mean it's not a
#
necessary condition but i would try that that we our relationship goes because we are spending
#
so much time together that our relationship genuinely goes beyond you know just debating
#
about how this paragraph should be written and and i think that may be the reason why i do feel
#
a sense of friendship with my mentors also because i worked with them i worked
#
in a vertical relationship with them sometimes but but i do and they have also tried to
#
to reach out to me at an individual level and it's not just a a professional relationship
#
in some sense and that makes even the professional part of it much more fulfilling
#
there was a wonderful piece of journalism in scroll recently i link it from the show notes
#
i forget the name and the name of the author who did a really good job but it was really about how
#
office environments in the us have changed completely because of this new political
#
climate and everybody is hyper vigilant and everybody speaks in coded language in a sense
#
and you know before you say one critical thing you have to say two good things
#
and then two bad things after it and you have to be careful of what can be interpreted as a
#
microaggression so you don't make no friendly overtures at all and i wonder how much of that
#
becomes a scene in academia because when you say that you're a mentor you obviously want
#
to be friends with all the people that you're mentoring but it could also be misinterpreted
#
or looked at the other way by people of the opposite sex and which is which would actually
#
be very unfair on the women at one level because you know if you don't give them the same
#
consideration as a man like one-on-one meetings when they want to or you know take them out for
#
a beer once in a while it's just not fair you know but at the same time that stuff can be
#
misinterpreted so how does one sort of walk that minefield how have you thought about it
#
you know it just happened 20 minutes ago when i was trying to say and i didn't use those words
#
because i was censoring myself i wanted to say well while the me too movement has had some good
#
outcomes it but i just couldn't i don't know what i said you probably the listeners would have read
#
between the lines but i should have just said instead of saying oh relationships that have
#
some hierarchy can be abusive right so because i was now that i did now that you said it out loud
#
i was actually censoring myself whereas i think it's perfectly legitimate to say that that they
#
said let this has led to some much needed debate and discussion but it has also led actually to
#
us being a little cautious about maybe for the good but definitely it has affected male female
#
relationships in in the workplace and i think how how have i tried to navigate it i have tried to
#
check myself as much as possible that i am not excluding any female colleagues or students from
#
usual intellectual discussions especially one-on-one i have instituted certain
#
i tried to at least a certain norms which includes keeping the door open of my office always
#
and sometimes it's counterproductive actually and i noticed initially that i was doing it for
#
one gender and not for the other and i thought that was this is really bad why should i be doing
#
so i have now started opening the door for both and only if the female or the male student requests
#
that they would like the door to be shut that i do that so just intentional being intentional
#
about it so they don't earlier i would actually close the door immediately because i i don't like
#
noise coming in the corridor and so on i as i think as i was mentioning to you before we started
#
recording that i often have this practice of walking to get coffee with my phd students
#
and i did check myself a couple of times whether i should be doing that
#
with both male and female students and and after a few months i realized i was being irrational
#
that i was being hyper a kind of hyper reacting to it and i've started this thing again of where
#
i just whether it's one student or two students whether it's male or female i do walk but i'm
#
intentional about the fact that they don't feel uncomfortable in simple ways that that it's really
#
not that's really an intellectual discussion and and and and that they should feel open and
#
if they don't feel comfortable going for a coffee they can we can just meet in the office but most
#
often i've found whether it's a male or a female student they actually like taking that walk
#
and and getting coffee with me and and but you know i you know a recent episode happened that
#
you know for example that made me think i don't know why i went there but in an undergraduate
#
class i mentioned i was talking about axe i now remember i was talking about axiomatic approaches
#
to thinking and i said one of the great things that euclid said which is kind of obvious to us
#
now was that two things equal to the same thing are equal to each other it's an axiom if x is
#
equal to y and y is equal to z then x is equal to z but it's like it's actually a building block of
#
of axiomatic thinking and then suddenly my mind diverted to to saying you know who said this
#
actually there's a there's a daniel day lewis playing lincoln in the movie lincoln who i thought
#
was just a brilliant performance says these lines that you know that that and he was saying
#
obviously it in the context of slavery that he the two things be if you agree that you and
#
i are human beings then then it doesn't matter whether we are evaluating ourselves to a third
#
criteria and and then there was silence and there was an economics class and i was a silence in
#
class and i said i do assume everybody knows who abraham lincoln is this is in america right so
#
and there was silence there's complete silence there was 25 students all freshmen but they've
#
been so trained because you know the abraham lincoln's legacy is now a little contested
#
because of you know his his sort of attitude towards native americans and so on which is
#
all legitimate but this is my sense maybe i'm wrong but then my sense was that they were so
#
hyper controlled that they couldn't even bring themselves to say yes we know who abraham lincoln
#
was and he is known for kind of you know winning the war and and and making slavery illegal and
#
so on they just didn't say it this is nuts oh my god so i'm just saying you that the good things
#
versus the you know that it's good that i'm more careful with all kinds of students in my interaction
#
with them which is the right thing to do but i just became so upset that day you know i was like guys
#
abraham lincoln it's okay to say lincoln did many good things in the world it's okay to say this
#
at least for me it's okay i'm saying it on your podcast this should not be contested did anyone
#
push back nobody said anything you know it was just and then i just had to kind of everybody
#
laughed with a nervous laughter and and they're all 18 19 year olds right and so
#
i'm just surprised kind of yeah the indoctrination and the whatever you want to call it it was a fear
#
which i i sensed a fear i could be you know i cannot believe that you know all of them believe
#
yeah you know who's going to say it exactly yeah you know so so yeah but then this creates a
#
cognitive load on you right because you always have to have this layer where yeah you're filtering
#
everything you do everything you say and it's just a burden on you then it's adding to your 70
#
hours in a sense i think it does and i i think that what i what i mentioned with with respect
#
to the editor talking about salman rashti is that i i i i i i it's okay till we reach a stage where
#
we think that we are not even allowing ourselves to think because once we think then you should
#
decide rohiti was it wrong was it right let me think i haven't sensed this too much in my work
#
yet but i'm sure it is playing a role in some way or the other but you know in it was a kind
#
of ad display to some extent in how the hearing went in the u.s congress of these presidents of
#
various universities you know where you know you were kind of stuck between the spirit and the
#
letter of what is considered genocide and what is not i mean you know like no nobody should be
#
calling for genocide of anybody period you know period like this is it like there's no letter or
#
spirit or then i found that incredibly bizarre that none of those three women could get themselves
#
to say that we condemn genocide yeah just say that and then add context don't we just say that
#
you know so i was surprised you know that and so so that you know we reach stages like that then
#
you know and it started long ago but let's shift to a happier environment and instead of talking
#
about academia let's talk about i don't even know if it's a happier environment or a more depressing
#
one i'll leave it to you to describe the government of india yes where you had stints
#
working in the ministry of finance with different economic affairs advisors which is raghuram rajan
#
arvind subramaniam perhaps more which i am not aware of so you can fill me into that but tell me
#
about your experience with government because now this seems another fascinating shift that you've
#
gone to america you've expanded your gaze in terms of economic theory and everything you must be
#
pretty solid but everything is still kind of up in the air and in your head and now you are actually
#
in the ministry in the belly of the beast back in india where everything has consequences and
#
what is it what do you see what did you expect what did you see what was it like give me a sense
#
of all the insights that you got during this period i mean these two stints were somewhat
#
different that uh i think when i was working with raghur i was still i was very lost not the work
#
that we were the particular work that we were doing but i was very lost in terms of what is
#
this world everything seems so important you know like for a for a phd student who never entered a
#
government office because it was relatively suddenly it was relatively i won't say high
#
stakes but it was relatively seemingly high importance right like you were in these meetings
#
and i was supposed to be taking notes and you know and there's this like finance secretary sitting
#
there occasionally there was mr chidambaram who was a finance minister at that time and there were
#
these economist meetings there's meetings with the imf and whatnot right so and raghur was
#
reasonably well recognized right like and and so it was interesting and it was i was it took me
#
a while to find my feet and and so i think that my first impression was one of wonderment that how
#
how that things got done because that on the outside one goes with this impression the the
#
that you know nothing happens in the government you know but actually i was quite surprised by
#
a everybody was well intentioned everybody was trying to do something from whatever their
#
faculties and and positions would allow and stuff was more i mean i was a little annoyed by i think
#
i'd become a little american by then so i was a little annoyed by how late everything started
#
like why can't you be in office at eight like i don't get it you know like what is going on
#
like sometimes i would get it get there at 8 30 and the you know the cleaners would come at nine
#
and you know i would still be there and then 10 o'clock people will trickle in to what mr
#
chidambaram and mr jaitley's credit who were the finance ministers at my two different stints they
#
were in the office quite on time and early but the that was my main uh i didn't understand you know
#
that what's going on like and then why do you have to stay till late only if you just came early we
#
could just finish at five yeah you know just because you're coming at 11 why am i supposed
#
to stay till nine you know this this frustration that i had with this work culture thing that took
#
me a while to adjust to but in terms of just the process of government that was the first time i
#
participated in some way with some distance or uh in the budget making process that was very
#
interesting how the meetings happened with various stakeholders they happen every year
#
between the finance minister and you know people economists industry people
#
NGOs everybody gets like this one round table discussions happen and i realized that the budget
#
per se is actually just an accounting exercise but it's become culture to discuss policy issues
#
around that time it's not so much i don't think the budget and we should stop actually treating
#
the budget as a policy document it shouldn't be it should be in no other country of the world
#
the budget is treated as a as some kind of major policy announcement exercise it's just that in
#
91 we had this crisis and monsoon gave this legendary speech obviously the culture existed
#
pre then also that we have started expecting somehow the budget to be the the the site of
#
all reforms it shouldn't be it cannot be the reform process is a continuing process and so
#
that i found quite interesting that it was used so i reconciled it to myself that is it's an occasion
#
that the finance minister chooses to interact with various stakeholders in a systematic way
#
it was you know it was it was apparent to me at even at that time that there was a problem
#
with having full-time non-bureaucratic talent enter the ministry i think the cea's position
#
is an exception and even that is you know more political than it should be that should be just
#
a person who gives honest advice to the government that's what the role of that position should be
#
but i really felt that most of the ias officers i met were really good they were very professional
#
they knew their stuff but it was clear to me even at that time but to run a ministry as important
#
and as professional and as high stakes as the finance ministry i don't even know what's going
#
on in south block and in the defense ministry and foreign ministry and you need professionals
#
you just cannot you cannot you know you can't put me in health ministry and expect that i will
#
understand nuances of of medicine right i can understand nuances of health economics
#
right you need someone who's very professional who spent their whole life studying tax or whatever
#
there's so many aspects of the finance ministry you need and not just one like you know you need if
#
if you know you have raghuram rajan as a chief economic advisor you need to have mandate and
#
space in the ministry of finance for him to be able to hire 2030 economists this this thing
#
doesn't it's ad hoc like you know okay somebody will come they will hire a few people here and
#
there you need a very professionally run you know they they keep they keep tinkering around with
#
this idea of lateral entry but i think this is this is just high time i think it's just high time
#
that it was clear to me even as a young person there that you needed a deeper expertise in the
#
ministry of finance i learned in that stint a lot about delhi policy world what you know the prime
#
minister jokingly and and and with with with i would say uh the right amount of disdain calls
#
the khan market gang i think it's some of it is legitimate i did think i did think that it was
#
it was because i was i was really an outsider in that world and i was like what is going on
#
you know like what is i mean it was just bizarre to me because i was uh you know i think it was
#
because of the stature that maybe raghu had and and and whatever is like because i got associated
#
with him and then later with arvin you know that that somehow i was allowed entry into certain
#
worlds and certain parties and certain whatever but i was just like what is going on like you
#
know it's this this is just like self-absorption and self-importance to a level which tell me more
#
give me details i mean i know it's just i don't remember like particularly it's just
#
certain certain instances that you know that that for example what i really liked about both
#
raghu and arvind was that they just had no patience for this world you know maybe as good
#
tambram boys i don't know what it is you know they both of them you know and and and uh you know
#
you know at least i never went to any gathering with them where you know so so but it was the
#
ecosphere around like you know the journalistic world you know what's tablin thing disparagingly
#
calls darbari culture right it's a merit to it actually this is just bizarre like you know you're
#
important you know when you say delhi is kind of i for the first time i saw what it means in delhi
#
to be kind of you know to your importance being attached to how many degrees of freedom you are
#
from the seat of power i don't know how to explain it but it's there it's very much in this narrow
#
world not in the entire city of delhi but it's just in this narrow world that derives its
#
importance it's not specific to congress it's not specific to bjp it's specific to delhi and the
#
culture of power that you know like oh you know like i had a meeting with the fm i had a meeting
#
with the pm calls on me or for it's like so what like you know it's just you know it's can we not
#
talk about this in the evening you know we did this the whole day and you know so so that i think
#
was was something i i saw even though i'd grown up in delhi i'd never seen this world
#
because it just we just were never part of it and so i saw this world for the first time
#
from a distance but but and but there was some positive sides to it as well i met some wonderful
#
people uh who are you know my friends you know pranjul i met pranjul bhandari who's now the
#
chief indian indonesia economist of of hsbc you know she was also working for raghu at that time
#
we became very good friends and even her husband varad we are all good friends
#
you know so i made some friendships that at that time which sort of got across this this illusion
#
if it was pranjul who who introduced me to certain writings of adi shankaracharya uh you know and we
#
used to say it was after some policy meetings we would come back we used to share an office and
#
we would you know this famous line that adi shankaracharya said jagat mithya hai aham brahmasmi
#
the world is an illusion i am the only reality so we would just joke to each other you know it like
#
some fluff was being said in some meeting you'd come back to each other and say jagat mithya hai
#
nobody knows what they're talking about but it's just like if they're talking the air it's a lot of
#
that in policy world when i came back to work with arvind i think i was more i was more i knew more
#
of what i was doing and i was a more sort of relatively senior member of his team in that
#
sense and it was a much larger team and i think because raghu had left to go to the rbi uh arvind
#
i think sort of it seemed like you know at least he was jaitley ji was very fond of him it was
#
clear that he was there for a few years and that he had a you know so he sort of built a team and
#
we worked with him i was already in ish cambridge at that time so i was kind of more or less in and
#
out but i helped him a little bit build the team and you know and it was very fascinating you know
#
again like as you were saying before you know the uh before we started recording that there is a
#
certain continuity in indian bureaucracy because i saw this transition right now jaitley ji was a
#
finance minister a new government was in power but there was definitely a certain kind of continuity
#
which may not have we may have suffered after jaitley ji passed away but but i think there was
#
definitely this this continuity and then you know arvind had these ideas that he wanted to implement
#
and it was a lot of fun you know we definitely wrote a lot of things that we are very proud of
#
till today now one thing that you know i am very proud of which we worked on was this this chapter
#
on the problem of exit you know i remember we had this line that that i really liked which you know
#
we tried to describe the evolution of this thinking of the state on markets you know where we said
#
that the indian you know basically the indian ethos has gone from state ethos has gone from
#
socialism without entry to capitalism without exit this idea that you're not allowed to exit
#
you know the certain things are not working whether they're schemes or they're firms
#
you know you see this irregularity in indian firm level data that neither do firms grow
#
very large nor do they become bankrupt so they're kind of a lot of middling firms in india which is
#
which is very problematic actually so so these are things like they seem like good ideas to
#
be working on and and and an interaction with i already saw you know some change in people's
#
perceptions but to be honest they were mostly outside government and inside it i definitely
#
remember first economic survey we were writing i called up this person and i said you've done
#
this analysis we want to include it in the economic survey can you help us update it
#
and we'll give you credit you know we'll name you in the economic survey and so on and this person
#
just refused and i said why are you refusing you know it's an it's an important document people
#
read it you know it has a wide circulation and he said i don't want to do anything that is related
#
to the bjp government or this government and that was my first taste of of not that ideology
#
doesn't matter like it's just the idea that no but but this is not government this is the state
#
i am part of the state like i was contract i was not a full-time employee of the government but i
#
was in some sense a part of the state right and this the first time i was a bit jolted that maybe
#
in people's perceptions i'm part of the government and not part of the state i was like this is an
#
important piece of information we want to update it this is an important idea it doesn't matter
#
whether in my mind it still doesn't matter whether the bjp government or the congress
#
government is putting it out there as long as i think it's an important idea and what happens
#
is that when it has the voice of a government it gets amplified so your idea reaches more people
#
this is very important it's not just writing a journal article actually putting it in the
#
economic survey that a lot of people are going to read and that was a learning experience for me
#
also this idea that that that means sometimes in people's minds maybe it's healthy to differentiate
#
sometimes and it's unhealthy sometimes but in that moment i definitely felt the distinction was
#
warranted that we were doing it as part of the state that we were employees of the state and
#
trying to put out an idea yeah i think i think but overall my experience in working with the
#
after that i didn't i haven't engaged directly with with the state or the government in any way
#
but you know both those experiences were very formative in some sense and very
#
for me very satisfying like i think we were able to do certain things that you know whatever you
#
know as i said were able to feed the ecosphere of ideas and to expect certain things to change
#
because of something that you did is is asking for too much you know the humility says that at
#
some point if something happens because of you something you may have written that's more than
#
you can ask for and you know what you said about the person responding that way sounds so familiar
#
because i think many people don't realize and i didn't realize till recently frankly
#
that you know 90 percent of what any government does is not really the political party in charge
#
it's a deep state the continuous deep state bureaucracy that's been there forever and if
#
you're lucky they're doing good things if you're unlucky it's kind of moribund i had that you know
#
great episode on youtube the reformers where we spoke about that continuous line of bureaucrats
#
and the politicians who sort of you know helped each other out from different parties and that's
#
all gone to hell in 2015 here's a question i want to ask you that my i want to know about
#
what is the default culture in the place not culture in terms of office culture and so on
#
but in terms of thinking like how does one think about it is there still like my point with people
#
like ap krishnan and ajay shah always is that you guys are outlier we're lucky we had you but
#
you're outliers the default culture is still statism it's still the socialist hangover
#
it's still that and that runs everything so you might have brilliant people with great intentions
#
all trying to work together for a common cause none of that i doubt you know i have met many
#
people within the system who are wonderful people but despite all of this and without politics even
#
coming into the picture things go to hell because of that default sort of dna of the the system that
#
we built so tell me a bit about your thoughts on this i completely agree with that i think i
#
it's very hard to i'm i'll try to think of some specific examples but i definitely felt
#
in my two stints with the government that the ethos of the indian state is socialist
#
there's just no two ways about it it is and you have to churn at it you have to chip away at it
#
very slowly and that's one thing i learned from personal a few couple of personal conversations
#
with montech is that is that you need to have the patience that montech did to chip away and that
#
the moment arrives and when the moment arrives you should be ready with the idea you cannot
#
control when the moment arrives and so and so i think i think that that to reform the ethos of
#
the indian state you need to reform what constitutes the indian state and that is where i think that
#
this idea that you know you just need to populate it with a lot of people who are not statist
#
and it's not rocket science you know you you need people who think differently who are trained
#
differently because even if you put one person who's very good into a system they start behaving
#
like the system no matter how good they are because that's just their mandate that's how
#
they are supposed to work it's stockholm syndrome you see it playing out in american universities
#
you see it playing out in the state it's very difficult to and so you need a lot of a critical
#
mass of people you know who who bring fresh ideas you know and so the way i think about this
#
and i think pranjula and i wrote about this in our essay on on on economic liberalization is that
#
the way reform happens globally but definitely in india is three things matter you know one is this
#
humanitarian idea of creative destruction the second unfortunately is the idea of an optimal
#
crisis and the third is a role of personality okay so what do i mean by that creative destruction
#
means that you are so sluggish at endogenously creating change that you have to wait for the
#
system to collapse and you build a new system you know look at indian higher education right
#
you know i have sort of longed for long that somehow the public education system because
#
it is so egalitarian in certain ways gets reformed but actually to be honest i'm nearing almost
#
giving up hope and i think that unfortunately the hope can only come from the private sector now
#
i hope i'm wrong but given the way indian higher education has gone public higher education is gone
#
so creative destruction is this idea that you know you you do destroy existing structures and
#
build new ones on top of it now when can you do that right an optimal crisis that you know as
#
as albert hershman described is a is basically a a situation where the crisis is deep enough to
#
provoke change but not so deep as to kill the means to to make that change right so 1991 was
#
an optimal kind of crisis i hope we are nearing i hope i hope and don't hope we're nearing an
#
optimal crisis in higher education in india and the third is is but i think personalities matter
#
a lot you can have creative destructions tendencies in the economy you could have an optimal crisis
#
pass you by i would argue that both creative destruction and optimal crisis were at play
#
the after covid the time was ripe to overhaul indian indian medical and health system and we
#
just let it pass i don't think we could have gotten a more important moment in in in global
#
history than to look back and say boss what happened you know what were the chinks in the
#
armor what was and and we had a good analogy actually you know we say this in the book also
#
with raghu that that if you compare india's performance in medically before the crisis and
#
after in our vaccination we did much better in vaccination because actually we had institutional
#
knowledge of how to vaccinate large number of people it's not a coincidence that india
#
despite its complexity was much better at vaccinating people than actually treating
#
managing covid it was not a it's not because of one person you know whether it's the pm or
#
the cm or whoever right it's because we had institutional memory and this is something
#
that ajay said in his in his in his show with you also on health it's not you know this is stuff
#
that you know that that requires experts that requires a kind of crisis to then convert it
#
into a and we really let that moment pass and i think the indian state i don't know what an
#
optimal crisis would look like for it to to let go of its it's it's really you know very disturbing
#
and an outdated socialistic ethos and to to see itself more as a as an arbiter and regulator of
#
sorts i think the motion had been set in place in the narasimha rao and vajpayee years and i
#
think we have gone back quite a bit in the last few years on that note i think we need a break
#
let's take a quick commercial break and on the other side we'll finally start inching towards
#
talking about your book 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
#
of clear writing and an online community has now sprung up of all my past students we have
#
workshops a newsletter to showcase the work of students and vibrant community interaction
#
in the course itself through four webinars spread over four weekends i share all i know about the
#
craft and practice of clear writing there are many exercises much interaction and a lovely and lively
#
community at the end of it the course cost rupees 10 000 plus gst or about 150 dollars if you're
#
interested head on over to register at indiancar.com slash clear writing that's indiancar.com slash
#
clear writing being a good writer doesn't require god-given talent just a willingness to work hard
#
and a clear idea of what you need to do to refine your skills i can help you
#
welcome back to the scene on the on scene you can tell when an economist is playing the long
#
game when he begins recording with me because you have to play the long game rohit lamba is
#
still here with me and we are going to continue doing poetry welcome back this is the third part
#
of the podcast where we will hopefully talk about the book now but let's start with the poem so
#
this is a poem i wrote in one of the independence days long a long time ago it goes like the
#
wow you write poetry also yeah once in a while remarkable anything else uh no i think we should
#
jump to the book so let's uh before we actually jump to the book book let's tell me about how
#
the idea of the book gradually uh you know took shape in your and raghu's head like how did it
#
come about why did you decide to write it why did you decide to write it together just take me
#
through the whole thought process so as i said i think i worked so i worked with raghu during 2012
#
12 to 13 i think yeah when he when i was a phd student and he was the cea and when he moved
#
to rbi i moved back and we kind of you know he was doing his thing i was doing my thing and
#
we would keep in touch you know regularly i actually would almost there was like almost
#
for a few years in between there was this tradition that i would go to my friend jacob's
#
house who i'd mentioned before who happens to be in his house happens to be in chicago and so
#
i would go there was almost every year i was going to chicago and and uh raghu because his
#
family would kind of converge home with his kids at thanksgiving so he would always be in chicago
#
so we would actually meet so thanksgiving is on thursday so i think for almost few years in a row
#
every tuesday before thanksgiving we would meet have lunch kind of catch up and catch up on email
#
also but we'll definitely meet in person and we'd obviously almost always talk about india and
#
the indian economy indian society you know text around indian literature and so on and you know
#
this back and forth continued for for many years we kept in touch and it was really during covid
#
that we started talking much more formally about writing about the indian economy and so we kind
#
of had and sort of we started doing that by having zoom sessions with a lot of friends and colleagues
#
and you know across disciplines not just in economics political science history shrinath
#
was one of them about various aspects of indian policy making politics economics history and then
#
slowly then the two of us decided to start writing op-eds and so we wrote wrote op-eds in the times
#
of india for a couple of years and then raghu had this idea that you know we had firmed up an
#
understanding of political economy for current times and then we should we should convert that
#
into a book and and and we went back and forth a lot about what this book could be how what
#
shape it would take and and as i had mentioned before i was a bit reluctant not because i didn't
#
believe in the idea of the book but because i i was a bit unsure about its place in my career
#
currently like should i actually pursue a book which is a of a wider interest is not theoretical
#
because you know and so on and he convinced me actually that that you know one should do
#
what one thinks is right and hopefully the world you know kind of comes around to it and and and
#
so that you know that's kind of the encouragement i needed i think yeah once then we set set ourselves
#
and the question was you know we wrote down a kind of a book outline and approached a few publishers
#
in india and there was really that we were keen that the book comes out basically towards the end
#
of 2023 because we wanted it wanted it to have a few months for it to germinate both before the
#
elections but also just in terms of the discourse elevates before before before some something as
#
important as the national elections yeah and then i think we just kind of worked backwards from there
#
towards the middle of sort of the first i would say quarter of 2023 around march april we had the
#
outline done and then we basically spent the entire summer writing it going back and forth
#
that was a fun process handed the i think probably handed the first draft of the book to penguin
#
around july august and they did a pretty good job and we had a great editor in radhika marva
#
in basically turning the book around by by december and as i mentioned we were very keen that
#
the hindi edition be released some if not immediately i think it released on december
#
17th and or something like that and then the english one released on december 7th so i think
#
we were able to keep a close enough sequence of of of the two languages and what i found
#
delightful is that you already sold out of the first edition of the hindi yeah the first print
#
run of the hindi edition so well done that's exactly what the world needs how was the process
#
of writing like i'm always interested in when two people write something how does it work like in
#
the sha and kelkar book in service of the republic you know the content is both of them equally but
#
the writing is basically ajay uh you know which is a convenient thing when i co-write an article
#
with someone what will normally happen is that we'll just brainstorm it all the way but then
#
just because i'm quicker and it's easier for me i i've done the actual writing so in your case
#
you know how did that work out and also how did like the the how did the seniority effect play
#
out in the sense that you might be friends now but you know he he was your boss once he is a
#
you know in that sense a couple of decades ahead of you so is that something that kind of played
#
in your mind was there how did how how were those dynamics and how did you write it all of it played
#
in my mind i think you know it was i think that's why it helped that we had actually written maybe
#
i think 10 pieces or so in the times of india maybe a little i think i ate to 10 pieces in
#
the times of india so we had gone through the process of writing together a bit there was a
#
definitely a mutual trust you know i have to give credit to raghu in that in the sense that there
#
was especially when the book project started he was even though in the op-ed sequence i think we
#
had gone up to a kind of level in the sense that you know the the hierarchy had seemed to
#
disappear in the sense that we were writing as equals and so on sometimes he would write the
#
first draft sometimes i would write the first draft and we would kind of you know not be afraid
#
to pack punches at each other if we didn't agree with something we were both very keen that whatever
#
product came out we both believed in it i think once the book project started i i realized how
#
much ahead he was the years showed you know the experience of what it means to write or
#
you know he would tell me just write the first draft you know the 10th draft is going to 20th
#
draft is going to be the final one you know so i would take longer to write the first draft
#
because of my inexperience not because i was like writing something deeper or
#
you know so the idea that just get it out of the way and then you i'll take a pass at it then you
#
will take a pass at it you know that's how book authorship works and it operates is easier because
#
800 words right so that my inexperience showed and then he was patient with it but i think what
#
what was more that he he encouraged me to really take a go and a crack at his first drafts he was
#
obviously doing it in mind like he was not you know he was just like this is wrong this is not
#
interesting but i think what he needed from me which i took me a few weeks if not a month to
#
really get comfortable it in his in his in saying that i don't agree with this
#
or i don't think this is coming out well or i think this is too technical
#
and initially because especially the initial drafts we were also calibrating
#
how technical it should be and how accessible it should be you know how simplistic and simple
#
because there's a difference between being simple and simplistic that i think took a while to
#
calibrate and you know i think at some point i definitely thought the hierarchy was for the
#
outer world and at least between the two of us it it is an interesting experience because you go from
#
kind of you know almost idealizing someone to getting to know them then becoming their then
#
them becoming their mentor then you becoming a co-author and then somehow becoming or attempting
#
to become an intellectual partner equal that i think is a very interesting process actually
#
and i feel like you look after him in his old age so it's fine yeah that's the way the cycle plays
#
out i'm very interested also in what you were talking about you know calibrating the
#
tone of the book i'm i'm interested in how you arrived at the voice for the book and how you
#
decided to pitch it because who is it for you know at one level you could just be writing for
#
fellow elites at another level you could say i want to reach a mass audience and i'm guessing
#
because of the insistence of publishing in hindi at the same time and i absolutely salute this
#
decision it's pitched towards a mass audience and like you said yeah the problem that that gap
#
between simple and simplistic and avoiding the curse of knowledge as it were they're all
#
very real things but how do you how what was the process like of arriving at the voice for the book
#
and getting just the right pitch that this is how much we explain this is how much jargon we use
#
how did that work out i mean it was a continuous process i think we were clear that we are not
#
we're clear about a few things we were clear we're not writing forget about economies we're clear
#
we're not even just writing for social scientists we're clear about that we are writing for a much
#
broader audience we're writing for anyone who is has some experience reading and is kind of
#
curious about public policy i think that would be the our kind of audience and our goal was to do
#
that in a way that we don't lose the social scientist and that's a very hard task to do
#
and i think what we settled on was using not avoiding using jargon but defining it as much
#
as possible and then using as many examples as we can so you know both in terms of real life
#
examples and abstract examples you know when we talk about structural transformation we talk about
#
punjab as to you know how punjab was ripe for structural transformation in the sense that
#
going from an agrarian surplus economy to manufacturing ludhiana was already a manufacturing
#
some sort of a managing powerhouse and then kind of how it loses its way right so it concrete
#
examples to whenever we're introducing concepts which are technical like structural transformation
#
that was the key and i think that we learned along the way when we used a couple of examples
#
for a few concepts like wait this seems to be working and and i think you know obviously
#
editors and and and you know both at our homes you know his wife my wife and our actual editor
#
radhika they were very very helpful and and constantly engaged in in in in in in keeping
#
us on our toes about what is the right level of simplicity in the arguments you know and then
#
you know in part three of the book for example we kind of delve into a conversation between
#
an editor and a writer which is which is again a way of trying to communicate complex ideas in
#
in a very different way so so it was a mixture of all approaches you know yeah i i still don't know
#
if we if we we we pitched it at the right level but you know at least when we finished writing
#
it we thought it was it yeah we wanted to do what we did no i mean i enjoyed it i i do do
#
think that you succeeded in pitching it for a wider audience it's it it works at title pretty
#
well how did you find the balance between description and prescription because on the one hand
#
you could say that look most people don't even know what the problems are let's just get into
#
the description so at least we can start there and that's a baseline and the description
#
especially for people like you guys is really pretty easy to do this it's not rocket science
#
the prescription gets a little bit more complicated because there you enter subjective territory some
#
prescriptions could be deeply counterintuitive especially because in india people's intuitions
#
are if there's a problem the state should step in to solve it and in many cases if your prescription
#
correctly is read that no no that is a problem get out of the way and also even at prescriptions
#
i can see two kinds of prescriptions one is a utopian one ki asa hona chahiye and you point
#
to the equilibrium which is ideal but the point is the other is a really practical gradualism
#
kind of prescription where you take the political economy into account and then you talk about it
#
which would get too complicated for a book like this so you didn't really get into those particular
#
weeds and i get that but just in terms of trying to figure out that balance like what is the mission
#
of the book is the mission of the book to tell people what is this economy how does it work and
#
where is it or is the mission of the book to show the road ahead and say this is like our manifesto
#
i think it's both right so and again the balance was calibrated over multiple drafts i think we
#
were very clear that we are of the opinion that the current path by that i don't mean that path
#
in the last five years 10 years or even 15 years just the just general gist the trend where we are
#
going is not the right path in many ways and and and so to do that we have to first describe
#
what the the traditional wisdom is and and when we were being prescriptive we were
#
worried about being too preachy and so the approach at least we tried to take was to
#
prescribe principles as much as possible rather than specific solutions obviously when you're
#
describing principles you have examples of solutions you know that you know if you want
#
healthier kids you should probably upgrade your anganwari system and so on right so but the
#
principle is that india should really obsessively focus on early childhood health now how to do
#
that that's a principle and i and i think that's you know as said as it seems like a truism but
#
actually we're doing very poorly on it so so i think we we we did try to balance this thing
#
between description and prescription but you know to be honest what i've noticed is that for a lot
#
of people even the description was novel which i which surprises me because as you're saying
#
that you know if you if you're next if you're you know if you're more in the expert territory
#
you think prescriptions descriptions are banal but even a well-done description actually has a
#
has a large audience because it maybe helps them understand what something is a genuine
#
problem and the scale of it all these years as the columnist i've realized that the curse of
#
knowledge is real that we'll think so many people are so freaking obvious you don't need to say it
#
but you're running on deadlines so you'll say something obvious anyway and then you'll get
#
email from people saying that was a til for me or i've never thought of it before yeah i think and i
#
think it's it's nothing to say about you know their lack of understanding you know people have
#
busy lives you know they're trying to understand puzzles that affect their daily lives day-to-day
#
life right so zooming out and talking about issues of public policy i think is a describing well
#
is is an art in itself i that's one of my learning experiences of writing the book you know i mean
#
everybody would tell you that prescription uh doing prescription well is a is a is an important
#
intellectual exercise but actually what i learned was that just describing well is also
#
an equally important yeah you could say a good prescription could depend on being good economists
#
but good description requires being a good writer to begin with and that's kind of the first step
#
how was that faced for you like how did you how you know your progression and you know polishing
#
the craft of writing that you were doing how was it for you and also what happens is when two writers
#
write together they'll often have different voices when they sit down to write different rhythms
#
you know so how do you kind of reconcile that because within the book everything read like
#
the same voice there was no space where i could you know tell that oh you know this is clearly
#
a different person so how does one arrive at that and in your personal journey in particular
#
you know how is it arriving at the craft especially when being part of the academy
#
you are surrounded by jargon everywhere i mean you know it's a yeah thanks i you know we we
#
i take that as a compliment in the sense that i think we really tried to compliment styles in
#
the sense that as i said i think we were very clear that that no matter who writes the first
#
half the other person gets a serious crack at it you know so that's what i think that's what
#
led to the continuity in language and thought like even sometimes i don't remember which part
#
you know which particular paragraph or or part i wrote or he wrote and i think and and we were keen
#
on that that it shouldn't look like a collection of essays so to say there should be some continuity
#
in in in thought you know both of this is again sameness of objective right like we were both
#
clear that we will minimize each other's jargon this is a very specific objective that we kept
#
repeating to each other because no matter how hard we tried a lot of the times things became
#
jargony you know even in things even when we were writing about things which were strictly
#
outside the economic realm like like foreign policy because we are so exposed often to certain
#
terminologies and certain ideas that that actually and it became clear to me actually how much
#
jargon we use in our writing when i was reading the hindi translation
#
you know because as the chapters were coming in for approval you know because there are certain
#
things that are so jargony that there is is very difficult for the hindi translator to find the
#
right expressions and even non-jargony thing like you mentioned earlier at services and seva
#
exactly right yeah so so to simplify that you know how do you do that and and and and you know
#
even you know we had this one instant where i think raghu had written a line or i think
#
raghu did a line where he used something like i'll be in the in the neck of your woods
#
next week your neck of the woods then your neck was the next week
#
the translation came back as you know
#
and so it's not that it's nobody's fault right it's just that this expression is a is a is an
#
idiom it's not jargon but it's an idiom right so what i realized is how how much of our conversation
#
is in idioms even when we write uh and and so you know does everybody understand what
#
being in the it's a very american expression i don't know what it is but does everybody actually
#
understand what that means and it made me think a lot actually because i was going through very
#
carefully the the translation so yeah so i think we tried to minimize obviously you know using
#
idioms well is is a form of good writing but but it did really force us to to to to correct and
#
calibrate at least our economic jargon so let's let's talk about the book itself and let's uh
#
give me a historical perspective to how we should look at india relative to the neighborhood like
#
at one point you point out that in 1961 our income per person was 86 dollars south korea was 94
#
dollars china was 76 dollars same ballpark and then you say that you know india's income per
#
person today is 2300 dollars china's is 12 500 korea's is 35 000 right and giving the context
#
for how this happened is what you begin your book with in fact so tell me a little bit about that
#
you know how is it that these guys zoomed ahead and we didn't see uh for this i think uh the
#
backdrop of this is is not just economics it's political economy right so if you look at most
#
uh countries of the world especially in the west they kind of sequence there's a sequence
#
in which politics and economics works which is that countries become more democratic and
#
grow further almost kind of gradually so arvind swaronyam and i have this chart in our paper
#
where we plot growth in development time on the x-axis and democracy index on the y-axis
#
and what you see is that us and uk are like these two crawling lines that are going slowly from
#
the southwest or the northeast of the graph korea is interesting because it also crawls
#
but actually it's it condenses a lot of the growth that us and uk were able to achieve over 150 years
#
in 30 40 years but it does so in semi-democratic circumstances and eventually becomes democratic
#
china and india outliers in the sense that china is on the kind of you know bottom of this graph in
#
the sense that it does grow rapidly in terms of the x-axis but on the y-axis its score is almost
#
zero because it continues to be non-democratic in a very robust way india on the other hand is
#
somewhere at the top of the y-axis but its growth is slower than all it's faster than us and uk
#
over time but but it's actually much slower than korea and china but it continues to be a democracy
#
except barring a few years in the middle broadly a robust democracy and so one thing you notice
#
is that china and korea especially china is able to build is able to make this what economists call
#
structural transformation what is structural transformation it is the process by which post
#
industrial revolution most countries have grown from surplus in agriculture to low-skill
#
manufacturing and then high-skill manufacturing and high-skill services and china is remarkable
#
because it was able to do this first step of the transition in almost 30 years which is very very
#
remarkable they were able to pull out hundreds and millions of people from poverty doing this
#
transition under a broadly autocratic regime and korea too was able to do the first step of the
#
transition and actually it moved it has now successfully moved to the entire kind of gamut
#
going to high-skill manufacturing and services under first an autocratic regime and then
#
now it's broadly a pretty robust democracy and the question in india stands i already told you why
#
it stands as an aberration politically in the sequence of politics and economics but it also
#
within the the category of economics it does stand as an outlier in that it kind of goes from
#
agriculture to the as the largest sector of the economy both in terms of employment and in terms
#
of economic output to high-skill services which is remarkable i mean it's almost unique in world
#
in eastern world history what do i mean by that i mean that you go from agriculture being the
#
largest component of the economy into stuff like it and tourism not tourism but like it and it
#
services and finance and consulting and so on so and we never really it's not that india doesn't
#
do manufacturing well it's just that it never does it at a scale that china and korea were able to do
#
both in terms of fraction of employment and in terms of its fraction of gdp that makes india an
#
outlier now is that the reason why we didn't grow as rapidly as china and korea probably you know
#
we provocatively even say in the book you know did india democratize too early it's not a moral
#
question it's just a factual question given these the way these transition works probably you know
#
could the first step of the structural transformation happened under non-democratic regimes given you
#
know who knows because counterfactuals are very hard you know it is entirely possible that they
#
could have there are certain cultural differences between china and india and so it's to be seen
#
culture is a big very hard variable to measure that what role would it have played had india
#
tried to espouse a china growth path in the 70s and 80s but what is interesting is that when
#
china sets out on this path and korea too they're competing with japanese and more importantly
#
american and western european labor and so the labor arbitrage is just massive and it is concomitant
#
with the time when global movements of goods becomes very cheap so shipping technology
#
fuel prices all this stuff that goes to rock bottom so the cost of if you're able to produce
#
at scale it makes much more sense to produce something for in far away cheaper china than
#
let's say in the in your backyard in the united states and so china and korea and china you know
#
more recently build and the backdrop of this reality now the question we ask is
#
you can ask two questions right why did india as you ask like why didn't india grow as much
#
as it did and you know and part of the reason is our obsession you know you may say china is
#
a socialist country but actually den shopping dismantles socialist ideals so clinically
#
within the economic realm right so which india just wasn't able to and the second is that you
#
know it's probable that given the pressures of a democracy we were not able to do certain things
#
that china was able to do now the question that we ask in the book is that given where we are at
#
today does it make sense for us to turn the bus not just in economics but also in politics
#
that should a semi-fetishism with authoritarianism because somehow it will give us the goods in
#
low-scale manufacturing justified either you know we try to give our opinion on it
#
so i have a fascinating narrative and i have a sort of a bunch of responses and the first of
#
my responses is that when people make grand narratives about nation states and economies
#
and all that i just think that my god you have such a limited sample size to go on it's a couple
#
of centuries of a handful of countries and on that sample size you come up with narratives like what
#
is the path to growth first to do agriculture then you do manufacturing then you do services
#
you fix an order you may even fix the speed as you guys have pointed out in your book
#
in the 19th century the growth was actually much slower because of obvious reasons and then
#
in the 20th century the east asian tigers grew much faster so already the narrative is being
#
subverted so number one as you point out you should not take for granted that that manufacturing step
#
is necessary you know at the way that i see it this was a story we told ourselves based on a
#
limited sample size and there is no reason that this is the only structure and the only way forward
#
for growth as far as a democracy point is concerned it's a provocative point my feeling is that it may
#
not have made a difference because it really depends on luck in terms of who is your authoritarian
#
leader you know if it if it was nero he was a creature of the fashion of the times he would
#
have done what he did his economic actions were a huge mistake and set us back but his intent was
#
good i don't really blame him indira gandhi on the other hand i think was a complete sociopath who
#
was going for electoral gain and you know forget her emergency i i think and you know i think you
#
agree with me that her economic policies were worse they were a crime on humanity they kept
#
hundreds of millions of people in poverty for decades longer than necessary and in fact they
#
held manufacturing back because the truth of the matter is that low-cost labor should have been
#
our advantage that arbitrage arbitrage advantage should have been seized by us long before that
#
deng woke up and saw the light and instead with a variety of terrible regulations with bad incentives
#
including those labor laws we spoke of earlier we just never managed to grow we never managed
#
to scale and therefore indian manufacturing never took off and now though people say that you know
#
can free them your argument is that look it's you can skip manufacturing and move ahead and you
#
don't need that part of the puzzle so explain that to me yeah i agree with you what i was trying to
#
say is that you you can have a provocative uh hypothesis i'm not saying the hypothesis would
#
be correct no no i love provocative because it makes everyone think so i think i think you know
#
there's an extensive margin of who would have been the leader but actually even the leader would
#
behave differently under an autocratic versus a demo how would have indira gandhi behaved had she
#
did not have the pressure of winning an election who knows right what would have nehru done and
#
and at no point am i prescribing for it because i'm actually not talking what yet about the moral
#
argument right which which obviously for democracy which is very good so yeah so i think you know you
#
you put the right context in there which is that we you know and this is what i was saying you know
#
as human beings we want we like to tell ourselves stories which is what i call theoretical
#
constructions i think one theoretical construction we built for ourselves was this construction of
#
structural transformation because it broadly fits the narrative of nation state development
#
post world post industrial revolution especially after world war two what we are saying in the book
#
is uh is you're right is that in a we try to be constructive that that that this narrative is a
#
coincidence could it could it be a coincidence that it is absolutely not necessary for you to go
#
through the standard route and it doesn't even have to be that you go from agriculture to
#
low-skill manufacturing services it could even just be that you go from agriculture to both
#
some kind of khichdi of manufacturing and services at the same time right that already will be an
#
outlier to most the way to the way most countries have developed and we have what we're saying is
#
that you have already started cooking the khichdi this is the indian way which we call it you know
#
and i'm not saying this is a positive or negative thing this is just how things have evolved
#
and to have that perception that no boss i know because this is how china grew so must i
#
is just the most not only the wrong it's just lazy and you know and bereft of creative ideas
#
you know why we grew you know we can delve a bit deeper into it beyond the autocracy element there
#
actually many other reasons china had and korea had a ready-made mediocre moderately skilled
#
labor force educated labor force that india just did not have so nehru for good or for worse
#
emphasized higher education much more than than than investing big time in primary education
#
and so we developed this weird comparative advantage in in in high skilled in high-skilled
#
labor a lot of it which actually went abroad right so and and so once we develop this this
#
comparative advantage in certain kinds of high skill services by the way we've also gone up the
#
ladder within services it's not like that we are still just doing call center and you know somehow
#
people have this vision that services means that you know we're just answering calls of people in
#
western europe in the u.s if you look at the quality of our global capability centers you
#
know jp morgan walmart have the biggest offices outside the u.s in india so we've really grown up
#
the ladder even in terms of services and and what we're saying in the book is that see there are
#
two kinds of services that are not the same but india has a comparative advantage has developed
#
a comparative advantage in both one is a direct service what's a direct service a direct service
#
is tele education or you know for example you're working in the jp morgan india office and you're
#
providing services to clients in the u.s or even you're a consulting firm and and you're
#
making a presentation to your clients in london this is all direct services right and this is a
#
huge industry in india already simply because of the labor arbitrage i have a student in the u.s
#
who graduates at age 21 22 with a degree in economics and finance you know a firm has to
#
pay him or her 150 to 200 000 in new york for a starting salary right so 150 000 the same person
#
will do 90 of the job in bangalore for 40 000 dollars 50 000 dollars right the labored arbitrage
#
is huge and it's so therefore it's no surprise that that these jobs are are coming at the pace
#
at which they are in india the other kind of service which actually is very connected to
#
manufacturing is what we call in the book services embedded in manufacturing right so think of the
#
quintessential manufacture product the car all right when you think of the car some people have
#
in their minds this sort of assembly line of ford where thousands of people are employed on a
#
factory floor it just doesn't work like that anymore so take the the most modern car i guess
#
in some sense the tesla car it has 50 to 60 million lines of code written into it so what is that
#
activity if amit is writing code for the tesla car that's what intermediate that's what economists
#
call an intermediate good a car is a final good an intermediate good is all the components that
#
go into building a car which is finished products in their own way let me let you
#
into a secret right now my listeners will be delighted to know this in fact i am in fact
#
writing code for one of the tesla cars and whenever you set off on a long journey in that car which
#
is going to last six or seven hours the car asks you tell me about your childhood and scene of the
#
unseen starts yeah yeah no no no no it's a conversation between the car and you yeah i
#
see i see i see that's designed by amit yeah so so you know so sometimes it comes one hour
#
two hours into the ride so it doesn't always come in the inception of it so you know so i think
#
what we're trying to explain and is that is that this is also manufacturing in some sense you
#
might categorize it as a service but actually is going into the quintessential manufactured
#
product which is a car there's also a lot of activity now in india one of the examples we
#
give in the in the book is about lens card for example which you know a lot of people living
#
in urban india would have seen uh you know we we have a section on that where we spoke to ph
#
bansal who's the ceo of of lens card a very interesting story where what we call that is
#
basically manufacturing driven by services so they started off as trying to sell glasses and
#
they were like well you know why shouldn't we manufacture our own glasses that's kind of the
#
way to achieve scale so now they're doing services and connected with it is and they in fact first
#
started in china then they realized that actually india is not very good at at at at you know the
#
generic manufacturing because you know in his words you know there are entire towns in china
#
that make just glasses you cannot you know but what he realized very quickly was that when it
#
comes to customized manufacturing india is very good because we have this very kind of solid base
#
of what he calls engineering jugar and so they adapted their manufacturing to india where actually
#
because of the skill level of the indian worker they had to use with higher levels of automation
#
and so that's a very good example of of of again something that is the intersection or the union
#
both intersection and union of manufacturing and services so what you need to do is you need to
#
broaden your horizon into thinking what are growth inducing industries right you cannot have limited
#
your public policy be beholden to the china story or even the korea story or even the japan story
#
because times have changed both because times have changed and we can go into that more in
#
more detail and because india is different and another thing i kind of noted is that the
#
government seems to almost have gotten one part of the fundamental lesson when it comes to
#
manufacturing is that we need to fix manufacturing but not the second part of it which is that you
#
fix it with freedom because as you've pointed out there's this great passage which is kind of
#
eye-opening so i'll read it out where you say take for instance a micron semiconductor plant
#
agreed upon in june 2023 intended for a site in gujarat assuming it goes through it's a 2.75
#
billion investment out of which 70 is a direct subsidy coming from the central and gujarat
#
governments this is expected to create 5 000 jobs so we are spending nearly 2 billion dollars for
#
5 000 jobs which is 400 000 dollars or 3.2 crore per job and and you go on to point out that this
#
is just assembly and some testing not even rnd and all of that 3.2 crores per job so again the
#
mindset is this status mindset oh there have to be jobs in manufacturing so we will give massive
#
subsidy and create it which is daft which is moronic you know the way you do it is by freeing up
#
enterprise by not only having more economic liberty but also having predictable enforcement
#
and rules and etc etc and none of that is there you know later on you also point out about how
#
there is such abuse of power embedded in the structure of our state where you write quote
#
the villager who wants to protest teacher absenteeism in the local government school
#
should not fear being locked up by the teachers police inspector brother-in-law business people
#
offering critical assessments of the government's performance should not find investigative agencies
#
at their door the next day data that reflect unfavorably on government performance should
#
not be suppressed leaving society navigating in the dark and so on and so forth it's a really
#
long para it's just intimidating to look at it but it's all like this and so the core problem
#
really is the oppressive state and the mindset of the people within the state which you alluded to
#
in our earlier section where we spoke about that embedded socialism that the state has to do
#
everything and the fact is that it's the other way around the state in many cases has to get
#
out of the way in some places you i mean i mean along with getting out of the way you also need
#
a functioning rule of law which we don't have in most of the country anyway so that's another
#
additional problem so how do you see this you know it's easy to sort of you know you've come
#
up with a description and but that's great but the fundamental changes that happen have to happen
#
at the level of the state and does that make like how much of a problem is that i mean it's
#
a huge problem right let's let's you know so when we give those numbers right like i want to be
#
clear that and nuance that that it's not that in all industrial policy per se is bad right but
#
in a poor and no matter what the narrative may be of the fifth largest or whatever economy we are
#
india is a poor country you know and so in a poor country their genuine budget constraints
#
their genuine trade-offs a genuine opportunity costs that micron factory subsidy is like one
#
third of our education annual education budget and so it's not even i mean it's staggering when
#
you when you think of it like that but even even let's say i i would i would i would grant that
#
actually there is a in in the way the industry has shaped up globally there is a role for government
#
in coordinating signaling even providing credit in some sense to encourage
#
something that is as capital incentive as intensive as a chip manufacturing right but
#
let's be clear right what is our goal if your goal is that india should have a piece of the chip
#
you know juggernaut of the world the chip you know given the chips are so fundamental to everything
#
that we manufacture let's suppose that's your objective that's a reasonable policy objective
#
to have right would you go about would i go about doing things the way they're doing absolutely not
#
so let me give you an you know the counter the counter to it about one third of value added in
#
in in chips is in design another a little more than one third actually and and about so so
#
nvidia which is the most profitable company in the world now it's just i think it's just taken over
#
microsoft where it's about to oh maybe it's the second most valuable i think after microsoft
#
it only does chip design okay it doesn't tsmc in in taiwan manufactures the chips most of so
#
and about less than about somewhat about one third a little less than one third is fabrication which
#
is called manufacturing of chips which is what these plants are supposed to do but not for the
#
cutting-edge logic chips but for memory chips and so on and then the rest of the one remaining
#
fourth is is is basically assembly and testing and and and putting it out in the market
#
now the second part and the you know is hugely capital intensive even the third part assembly
#
and and especially fabric we want somehow want a piece of the fabrication pie why
#
you know i don't understand why like you know you can say it for strategic reasons
#
but actually you know none of it is and china is finding out the hard way
#
none of you cannot make chip manufacturing completely domestic you know the the the the
#
only the only two companies in the world that make machines for chip design they are in netherlands
#
in the u.s the chip manufacturing most of it is happening in taiwan most of the design is happening
#
in india in the u.s and so on so if i wanted a piece of the supply chain of chips which i
#
again reiterating that is a noble and important goal to have i would say where is india's the
#
economist way to approach the puzzle would be where is india's comparative advantage i think
#
i mentioned briefly in the earlier part of the podcast that about 20 to 25 percent of all chip
#
design in the world is happening in india what is the problem the problem is that we don't own the
#
intellectual property it is happening for companies like in nvidia and qualcomm and so on about 40 to
#
50 percent of all chip designers of the world are of indian origin so if i was the indian
#
government and i had two billion dollars to give i would actually set up and this is this is not
#
even a short-term view you know people get it's a it's it's it's not even a very long-term view it
#
actually in the short run i would set up three world-class computer science departments in about
#
200 million dollars even probably lesser i'm just giving a very and i would spend some more let's
#
say 200 million dollars in getting up the best talent from the world which is of indian origin
#
or indian and giving them a free hand and saying build the next nvidia in india i mean not that
#
this is going to be enough but i'm just saying in terms of the comparative advantage that india has
#
already shown we have already shown now you can say this is manufacturing this is services but no
#
this is services embedded in manufacturing right if we are doing cutting edge chip design in india
#
and you know outsourcing into tsmc and then eventually having the aspiration
#
of bringing chip manufacturing to india that to me seems like a much more sensible objective a
#
sensible way to execute the objective that we just stated then what the government is doing
#
and i i could be naive and i could be wrong about this this has to do with some kind of fetishization
#
of political leaders with large factories and somehow thinking that somehow you know giving
#
large subsidies to set up factories is the only way of of showing growth you know this used to be
#
our problem with building dams at some point in time and somehow this signifies it doesn't
#
and and and so you know so even if i you know i i i let the idea entertain the idea that you can
#
have industrial policy you know as we're not like kind of blanket against it what are you doing with
#
it you know what are you which way are you using and this really matters because i don't have two
#
more billion dollars to give once i've given it to build up this you know so i would rather spend
#
it on r and d because i have a comparative advantage and and and complete attacking a
#
completely different part of the supply chain you know in your book you talk about the smile
#
curve of value right and and this seems similar to that and the smile curve of value for those of
#
my listeners who may not have heard of it do you should go and buy this book directly and read it
#
from there but the smile curve of value is that if you look at apple's products right a significant
#
chunk of the value that comes from there is right at the start of the process where you have the ip
#
and the design and everything and that's apple most of the manufacturing is done by foxcon and
#
there is very little value there and then it is comes back to apple which is the marketing and
#
the branding and the sales and all of that and that's where the great value is and to want to
#
be a fabricator instead of to want to be an nvidia is to want to be the foxcon in the middle while
#
isn't it like why on in fact even more stock in fact in chips you could still argue that
#
fabrication still has about one fourth to one third value in phone manufacturing it has so
#
little value you know so you know and we can make the discussion a bit more nuanced in the sense that
#
so first of all you know just to think of the in terms of value you know apple is foxcon is worth
#
50 billion dollars and i think apple is more than 60 times the worth like around around three
#
trillion dollars or something like that so so you know so you can see already that the company the
#
last time apple manufactured anything was in 2005 so if you buy an iphone or a lap or an app mac
#
laptop it will say kind of created in california or designed in california it doesn't say manufactured
#
anymore made in california because it's not and i think it is hard to explain this to people
#
sometimes that value you must think in terms of value added you must not think in terms of
#
just revenue you know for example when we wrote some pieces about the mobile phone manufacturing
#
in india it is true that by volume and and even just pure value not value added you know india
#
is exporting a lot of mobile phones right but what india is also doing is that it's first of all
#
built a lot of tariffs around mobile phones you it's very expensive to import a whole samsung
#
phone or a whole apple phone into india fine what what initially it started off is is as importing
#
all the parts of the mobile phone assembling it in india and calling it made in india
#
right what people need to understand what we are trying to do through our book is that is to
#
question what does it actually mean to make something in india you know and are you what
#
kind of products are you making in india and and and why we're saying this is because the value
#
added of that last step is very very low you're not getting that much out of of shifting this
#
stuff in india not that you shouldn't i think india should aspire to assemble phones bring
#
apple to india bring samsung to india but this should not be our primary policy lever you know
#
we should not go around tom tomming this as the greatest achievement of our economic policy but
#
because it really cannot be we must have higher much much higher aspirations for our country if
#
we want to be vixit bharat by 2047 you know so and now a legitimate critique of this line of
#
inquiry that that we just said is that well what about jobs right like you know you know isn't it
#
that factories and i think that's that's that's also a legitimate critique yes you know assemblies
#
are going to have certain kind of jobs but at that point are you really paying to bring jobs to india
#
what is the trade-off and do you see a clear i would agree with that trade-off
#
if i saw a clear increase in the the value added component that somehow i could see a path whereby
#
india would actually start manufacturing the battery the chips the camera and then assembling
#
it in india because then we will start acquiring a much larger component and i could justify in the
#
long run having paid this subsidy what is that path what is the road map either from the government
#
or from the industry and we haven't read anything along those lines so i you know we've been happy
#
that at least a lot of actually government you know documents now or or announcements have
#
actually started at least using the word value added i'm not claiming we a victory for us but
#
at least there is a realization that just saying that you know these many phones are being
#
manufactured india doesn't mean much after a point i have to say though at one place where
#
i'll push back a little bit is that i disagree with you that there is space for industrial policy i
#
think there should be absolutely none i think what's happening here is that what you are really
#
saying is that the state should do the right thing the wrong thing is giving these massive
#
subsidies through these factories and basically you know spending 3.2 crores per job to bring them
#
in that's that's absurd but what you're saying is instead of doing a the state should do b which is
#
that you figure out where our comparative advantage is and then you uh you know you you build these
#
training centers and you enable that and i am like just a mindset that the state should do
#
something itself is wrong because power corrupts absolute power corrupts absolutely these state will
#
always fuck it up this is india right and there will be a crowding out effect they will get in
#
the way so what i would really like to do is the state focus on the one thing that they need to
#
deliver which is rule of law enforcement of contracts and all the other things you mentioned
#
in the book which i want to talk about which are way more important and get out of the way and then
#
let a thousand flowers bloom and then we'll one day have an nvidia emerge out we have to have
#
that faith but the reason we don't right now is we don't have that enabling environment and when
#
i say enabling environment i don't mean the government has to do something to enable an
#
environment they just need to get the hell out of the way so i you know i i actually completely
#
agree with that pushback what i was trying to say more with it if you at all have to do something
#
right like then do that then like at least have some some some debate some discussion
#
some internal you know as to where the biggest given that you're spending two billion dollars
#
my thing was a conditional argument i am completely with you that i would actually spend all of that
#
money in the factors that we're going to talk about subsequently in creating enabling frameworks
#
rather than actually subsidizing anything i am completely with it i'm saying that you know in
#
certain circumstances if we do think that there is a role for the state you should actually think
#
very very carefully about where your comparative advantage is and i would be actually in favor of
#
the state for example it does in the us and and in large parts of europe in subsidizing fundamental
#
research for example right like you know i would be very happy if the state said you know i'm going
#
to pay whatever salary is required to get the 10 best computer science professors of indian origin
#
i mean does they don't have to be indian origin but that's the easiest ones to get to come back
#
to india and and set up you know cutting edge departments of of computer science that actually
#
study and do research in chip design right so this is a kind of thing that i would actually be
#
happy spending but it's a mindset thing right if you tell someone you're going to spend
#
millions of dollars setting up computers they would just they would not be able to visualize
#
that this is a long-term investment into into tech you know that somehow rather they think that
#
setting up this factory is a is a is a is a better use of resources so i'm completely i'm actually
#
totally for this yeah i think i'd be perfectly happy to see my taxpayer money spent in a way
#
like this but the point is that the moment you exceed to the principle that the state should
#
do something about it they will always do the wrong things so this is a little bit like a pipe
#
dream in the sense that anyway there's tons more in your book so let's talk about that enabling
#
framework like when you talk about how our governance structures are fundamentally flawed
#
in terms of design you know and just explain that so you know so let's begin with the the design of
#
the state itself right so so there was one could argue if you read the constitutional debates a
#
legitimate reason for the for creating a highly centralized state in the aftermath of partition
#
there was this problem that you know we thought that it was the constitution or the set of laws
#
were a bit too elite for the country at the time partition created genuine fears of secession
#
in other parts of the country and so we you know for a variety of other reasons we gave ourselves
#
a very centralized governance system a very centralized tax system a very centralized
#
policy implementation system and so on having said that i think the original sin in some ways was
#
that we didn't factor in a gradual decentralization i mean one could argue it was there in director
#
state of state's policies and so on but it was too weak i think we we paid too much
#
we put too much faith in the integrity of the people that were to follow and i think that has
#
remained that has sustained this idea that that this is you know what you're saying that the
#
state assumes power for whatever noble reasons and then it just never gives it up and i think
#
that our our governance system as a very broad principle is just way too centralized for the
#
complexity of governing 1.4 billion people so one example which we give in the book is you know
#
which is a very simple example is that how can you legitimately think that you can govern up
#
from luck now right it's it's 250 million people that's the fifth largest country in the world
#
can you imagine like you know you have 330 million people i think in the u.s and you have a
#
federal government you have state governments you have municipal governments you have city
#
governments and all of them are various of them are elected they have budgets of their own
#
municipal governments can even raise bonds of their own right so for 330 million people you
#
have this kind of a governmental setup and you think you can just govern 250 million people
#
through you know a vidhan sabha and i.s kind of in each district right i mean so so the level of
#
decentralization that is required basically the three f's you know this for for digestion of
#
of ideas you know fund at the level of funds functions and functionaries we require much
#
greater level of decentralization in almost every part of the country and you do see some
#
promises there right so you do see whatever little one could argue that whatever little
#
successes you see in delhi for example of you know of of improving health and education outcomes
#
in kerala too are because a lot of these setups are decentralized i mean delhi is basically a
#
mayorality you know the distance between the government saying that we're going to deliver
#
on health and education versus you being able to see visible progress is actually quite small
#
and so the problem is that if if if our chief minister in uttapradesh or even in bihar or
#
wherever even in the says i'm going to deliver on health and education what does it mean
#
unless a local person is accountable a local person is either elected on the on the basis
#
of those outcomes and and therefore is also given the freedom and the funds to make those decisions
#
this i think is the original sin in some sense of governance architecture which would have did
#
have some sound foundations in the early in the 1940s 50 60s but just doesn't have anymore
#
and i think the way the finance commission so the finance commission is an organization
#
that meets every few years to set up how funds will be devolved from central to state governments
#
needs to be you know sort of much more it shouldn't be left to a commission it actually
#
should be institutionalized you know we should have direct responsibility of local governments
#
for things like local health and education architecture and outcomes couldn't agree more
#
strongly with you i have episodes on this including a really early one with shruti rajgopalan where
#
she beautifully explains the sort of the mismatch in a city like bombay where the people who have
#
power to make your life better they are not accountable to you and the people who are
#
accountable to you that is the corporators and all that you vote for they can't help you they
#
don't have the power and it's a crazy mismatch it doesn't make any sense and you want to just
#
have power as local as possible and yeah i mean political economy etc but let's not go there
#
let's sort of talk about you know the next part of the puzzle part of which it doesn't get spoken
#
about much enough like a lot in your book has been spoken about a lot for years and years and years
#
but i was especially struck by the primacy that you give to early childhood nutrition
#
right tell me a little bit more about that and you know bring it alive for me how how critical
#
and important that is so you know there's a lot of research that shows that over the years across
#
disciplines and biology and economics and health science and public health and you know all kinds
#
of disciplines that have built a fairly formidable committable kind of theory with outcome-based
#
evidence that what happens in the first three to five years of your life is almost irreversible
#
okay what do i mean by that in terms of development of your brain development of your body parts
#
basically the so think of the body as you know for the lack of a better word a production function
#
you know like you're going to produce some kind of intellectual human capital later on in your life
#
but how developed is the function you know how developed are your capabilities your capacities
#
to absorb anything that i throw at you later in life whether it's education whether it's even
#
health whether it's even medical good medical infrastructure right whatever enables you to
#
be a useful citizen in future in your life actually is very dependent on your nutrition
#
and your learning whatever limited learning you get in the first three to five years of your lives
#
this is what we call the early childhood challenge and it's really a topic of national shame
#
that even till 2018 which is when the last i think data was available india had something
#
like a 35 malnutrition rate it's higher than sub-saharan africa so if you plot
#
in gdp per capita on the x-axis and malnutrition rates on the y-axis you will see that india is
#
an outlier in the sense that countries with lower levels of development have better outcomes on
#
child stunting and you know for the longest time it is really sad actually that some people within
#
even our academy and stuff have brushed it off as saying indians genes are different you know and
#
this has been debunked very systematically through various studies you know for instance showing that
#
indians who immigrate to the u.s in the uk their children actually attain
#
median level heights within one generation so it cannot be that you know it and you know actually
#
you will see it very strikingly if you take a train from say let's say north india towards
#
east india you will see actually very interestingly a drop in the height of people people are
#
systematically shorter in bihar than they are in banjab or haryana this is an observation i've
#
often made and you don't have to go to bihar for it uh in the 90s when i first came to bombay and
#
i traveled by local train yeah one of the first things i noticed was that people in first club
#
the men in first class are taller than men in second class and it broke my heart yeah like that's
#
when you it's a reality you know exactly so that's why i felt very sad when i said
#
read stuff by you know people social scientists who try to because this is something that you
#
can see it's not and and and what happens is that is that no you know this is what i was
#
trying to describe and we were making we were discussing about the mechanical engineering
#
point is that no matter how vibrant a market for education you may have for later on in life if
#
your individual has not been prepared till age five seven whatever to be a learning machine
#
a large part of it can never be recovered and this is a human tragedy of a colossal magnitude
#
and we are simply not obsessed about it we should be completely obsessed it should be keeping us
#
awake at night that we are doing very poorly on the early childhood challenge at the start of
#
covid in a sense april 2000 when the lockdown had gotten underway i'd written this big column
#
in times of india a link from the show notes called a tale of two disasters and my point was
#
that covid 19 is a disaster yes but it's a it's a temporary disaster we know what's going on it'll
#
eventually be gone but there is a larger ongoing disaster that we completely ignore and at that
#
point i pointed out in my piece that 3000 children die in india every day from starvation one in four
#
indian children are malnourished right and perhaps more as you're saying you know and if a natural
#
calamity had caused something like this had caused as many deaths as die because of this you know
#
the whole world would be up in arms a un would be sending aid it would it would just be a big
#
freaking deal and uh you know and our government which is actually pretty awesome in mission mode
#
when there's a short-term problem to solve would have just swung into action but there is this
#
larger ongoing disaster around us which we have completely normalized and just to think one in
#
four children around us is malnourished how is it morally acceptable to live with that around you to
#
be in a society like that so what are the kind of causes for that like the what has caused those
#
failures in health care and and what are the ways out of it or what are the solutions what is caused
#
is difficult to answer because i think there is a certain kind of stubborn eliteness in our policy
#
making that makes these problems invisible you know myron wiener has his classic text in book
#
i'm forgetting the name of the book we cited in our book where he basically argues that indian
#
education system could never do the right thing when it came to primary education because basically
#
argues because of inherent notions of hierarchy caste and class he says we no matter how it just
#
the elites could just never bring themselves to take this problem very seriously we all relate to
#
problems of higher education because somehow it affects us not that we're doing very good at it
#
but somehow they're much more in discussion than are you know i mean the amount of learning setback
#
that covid has made to children in our country is again a huge problem but because it's slow death
#
like this slow pain it's not visible pain and so but but on the other hand there are and we say
#
this in the book they actually tremendous india is not alone in this there are actually many countries
#
like peru is an example we give obviously it's smaller so you can say that you know it's more
#
manageable but there are examples where people decide the elites they're decided that this is
#
an issue of national shame and built-in mechanisms so you know they made it a political problem civil
#
society combined with certain aspects of polity made it a a political issue that this is unacceptable
#
and then they built in mechanisms around which you know they built very strong evaluation
#
mechanisms at so as to every two to three years there was a strong and publicly visible and
#
publicly condemned and adulated evaluations which showed how peru was doing in terms of its
#
malnutrition outcomes and it made and and and what is interesting in peru's case for example it
#
that they they observed that that with all the parameters you think are actually correlated with
#
this which were getting better malnutrition outcomes were not getting better what is that
#
urbanization even something as simple and as striking as increase in the level of female
#
education was not bringing in bringing down malnutrition figures because they realize it's
#
a systemic problem what the child eats what the mother eats when she's pregnant what is what kind
#
of priority is given to the composition of the meal that the child is getting not the quantity
#
of meal and all these things are you know maybe in certain households they are folk knowledge but
#
it's not widely accessible knowledge to everyone and so by making these small changes and making
#
and and and and incentivizing people to enforce them in their homes you know they they actually
#
achieve dramatic improvements within 10 to 15 years so you know it's a really a failure of
#
at multiple levels and i and i and i do feel like it's a failure of both the polity but also of
#
the so-called elite in the country where they haven't been able to make this an obsession
#
and i think sometimes let me give you an example some people say that you know it cannot happen
#
but we did it in polio i remember in the 90s right like i just everyone every child that grew up in
#
in in the 90s remembers amitabh bachchan on television this you know baritone voice you know
#
pledging people as a pleading people to go get these you know these drops of polio and we actually
#
have managed in pakistan it hasn't been eradicated in india it has been eradicated more or less you
#
know been so we we did that not over one year not over two years but systematically through
#
dissemination of information getting celebrities involved getting so the local society involved
#
and so we you know i think malnutrition is a harder problem than polio because it's not just
#
about two vaccination drops but it's a problem that has a similar flavor that it's widespread
#
it is tackleable we know kind of how to do it through even our own experiences tamil nad has
#
done very well for example in in tackling this they'll their the levels are much lower i think
#
in single digits in comparison to the pan india numbers why is that i mean it's because i think
#
their governance is much more decentralized and i think they that's our understanding and and and
#
there i think female education again helped a lot like you know this idea that somehow
#
composition of food matters not just what the child is eating has been delivered through the
#
aganwadi system through the local governance system much more effectively than let's say in
#
in the northern part of the country my intuition about this actually would be that there is a
#
long-term approach and a short-term approach and the long-term approach is that eventually growth
#
will make malnutrition vanish because eventually if you lift everyone out of poverty then the
#
problem kind of goes away but that's a very long-term thing in the short-term thing you do
#
whatever you can to ameliorate the problem but even with the long-term thing when you spoke about
#
peru and i'll ask you to double click on that because i didn't really understand that point
#
where you said that you know they found that some of the factors that they expected to get
#
rid of malnutrition like urbanization and female education didn't help and the problem was more
#
systemic do you mean purely in terms of the education of the composition of food or by
#
systemic do you mean you know so i should be careful i i i'm not saying they didn't help but
#
the the the they want to punish you yeah they they didn't they they weren't just not sufficient
#
they were they were probably necessary to some extent but they just you know what you would
#
expect right like you know after having reached certain levels of education and and urbanization
#
especially of of women it you know there is a certain sociology or cultural norms that are
#
set in into what what it means to feed a child appropriately and i think those are very stubborn
#
they're intergenerational can you get concrete about that and kind of specify what are those
#
you know for example is the child getting enough protein you know if you're a vegetarian household
#
you're not feeding the child eggs or even more so you know what are you feeding the
#
the mother when the the child is in is in infancy right it starts from there actually so the thousand
#
the famous thousand days thing actually child starts in the womb and goes to about two to three
#
age years of age for the child what kind of food is the mother consuming is she consuming a rich
#
enough iron and and and and protein diet you know is you know and then when the child is one or two
#
years old actually the things like water supply start mattering so if the child has constant
#
diarrhea i'm just giving you another input function into this if even if you're consuming
#
certain amounts of proteins they may not be getting getting absorbed into the body
#
because the child is on constant diarrhea work by dean spears and dianne coffe has shown that that
#
even open defecation is a problem that you know open defecation actually leads to a certain kind
#
of waterborne diseases around you which prevent again like even if you're feeding the child egg
#
and so on the nutrients are not getting absorbed right so so so there is a whole
#
kind of a you know family of reasons around you that you need to understand and address
#
systematically you know it starts from you know what the mother is eating to what the child is
#
consuming to the quality of water supply around you and all and all i think india is making
#
progress on all that you know providing tap water to people providing toilets to people at home and
#
so on but all these things are they collectively contributing and you know i think they are but
#
they're contributing at a much slower place and we will given that we have the demographic
#
dividend we have so many children right now i think we are not appreciating and realizing what is the
#
loss in human capital years and quality of life that we're just getting washed away because of
#
the problem of malnutrition and just to talk of unintended consequences and take what appears to
#
be a digression but in this very multifactorial thing might well play a part in it is that
#
you know ajay and i had done an episode of everything is everything on agriculture
#
where one of the things we pointed out was an example of the damaged red msp's rid where in
#
the 60s i think it was msp's were offered on a very wide scale to farmers to grow cereals
#
and the consequence of this was because they were incentivized to grow a lot of cereals they grew
#
less pulses that's more carbohydrates less protein and in a sense that started off a trend that you
#
could say contributed to india's diabetes epidemic and could even have contributed to this specific
#
problem where the mothers when their baby is in the womb are just having a carb rich diet
#
and not having enough not taking any pulses because you know it's just not become part of
#
the culture now and therefore not getting enough protein and therefore the malnourishment problem
#
so it just tells you how you know bad governance can have knock-on effects in really unexpected
#
places msp's of course also cause the deli fog but let's not go there so and chennai's water
#
problem this is something that you know economists kind of keep harping about which is the issue of
#
externalities whenever you think of a policy you must think of not just the first order effect
#
but what effects is going to have on things like water supply on child nutrition on burning of
#
stubble and all these things which you know we obviously don't but you know even something
#
as simple as you know you're trying to i would i would like the government to boast that they
#
have provided not just free grains for to 80 crore people but also free pulses yeah but somehow this
#
is in our brain that you know that that filling up the stomach is more important than providing
#
nutrients to people like we have largely i won't say solved but we have largely been able to
#
successfully to the credit of successful governments and economists and civil society
#
and agriculturists we have you know achieved a certain high level of food security the problem
#
now is not food security it's food composition and also like you pointed out when government is
#
too centralized it becomes a problem like i had an episode with rs neelakantan who's written that
#
north was a south book and he points out that often you know the the kerala may have a problem
#
of obesity and bihar may have a problem of malnutrition and the government solution for
#
that because bihar is much closer is you pump out calorie rich food and your whole policy thing is
#
increase the number of calories calorie intake of the whatever but you know that's not what you
#
need for kerala that's why you need governance to be local that's why you need funds to be local
#
that's why you need to kind of localize and even within kerala there are different districts which
#
might have different needs kerala is also pretty large you know yeah yeah so yeah i mean i think
#
one this this see it's very interesting right so talking about trade-offs and unintended
#
consequences right one thing that technology has done is that it has and to this government's credit
#
minimize the role of the intermediary in terms of service or actually not even service goods
#
delivery right to some service delivery also to some extent but what it has done is that it has
#
made possible the attribution of credit much easier so it's very easy for me to now and so
#
therefore it becomes more tempting for me sitting in delhi to say this gas cylinder i gave you
#
you know this vaccine card i gave you so the temptation to so you're seeing that that even
#
though and this is not just true of delhi this is true of chennai this is true of trivandrum this is
#
true of laknow even every cm is also doing it right that attribution of credit because of the
#
power of technology has become simpler so you are you are more and more tempted to centralize at your
#
level so even though this is the unintended unintended consequence of you know largely a
#
good thing which is minimization of of leakages but it actually has has had pernicious political
#
economy consequences you also point in your book to another excellent phenomenon which i think
#
you know deserves more attention which is the apathetic middle class not using public services
#
and therefore setting a vicious cycle in motion that because there is no call from the middle
#
class to improve public services because they found jugaru way is outside it that the public
#
services never actually improve when you're kind of stuck in that terrible equilibrium like i've
#
had my good friend from bangalore ashwin mahesh on the show a few times and one thing that i think
#
where we have a minor and really friendly disagreement with about is that i think what
#
ashwin is doing in bangalore in terms of citizens initiatives is absolutely mind-blowing but my point
#
to him is that many of the things that you are doing are things that the state should do i don't
#
understand why you should do it in the first place it is like you're saying fine screw the state it
#
doesn't exist we'll keep paying our taxes and we'll have to do it ourselves by the way and i
#
don't understand that i think a lot of that effort should just go into making the state accountable
#
to do the things that it should do but this is a sideways rant which you know this is again this
#
you know a good framework to think about this is the first best second best thing right so in a
#
first best world civil society's only role actually exclusively only role should be to act as pressure
#
groups but you know in the world that we live in you know there are more immediate problems
#
which is to plug the holes so what he is doing laudably as you say and i remember that episode
#
in covid i think you did with him uh was to plug very serious holes but you know hopefully we'll
#
get to the stage where the civil society's role is only to make the government do what it's supposed
#
to do better tell me about some of the like i i i i won't go through your book chapter by chapter
#
because i just want everyone listening to this to buy it and the reason i want you to buy it
#
you know gentle readers is that you have skin in the game this is your country we are all going
#
to get screwed if things don't get better so please do buy the book but what are the other
#
major points or the other areas you looked at in the book that you felt haven't been adequately
#
addressed in the public discourse i think that let's take up two of them right so i think that
#
it somehow in the last decade at least or even more somehow we don't seem to debate
#
the quality of higher education enough so i actually think that quality of primary
#
education is being discussed i don't think enough is being done but you know we have
#
pushed ourselves back so much in terms of the quality of our higher education in terms of
#
uh what do we expect from it you know to give you an example in the this is a parliament what
#
is called a starred question which somebody has to the ministers have to respond to according to a
#
parliament starred question seven and a half lakh students left india last year just 2020 to 23
#
to go study abroad let's make a conservative estimate that each of them took out ten thousand
#
dollars from the country very concerned i mean it's much higher usually per student
#
i think if i'm if i'm if i remember correctly this means seven billion dollars
#
talking about import substitution you know like you know like think of it like because again this
#
is something that you don't think of it in those language right if i was an import substitution
#
enthusiast which i'm not you know i would say you know you know the payoff from getting higher
#
education even remotely right is that massive because people are paying with their feet right
#
they are they are not coming to the universe they understand the quality of the universities
#
you've opened back home and i feel the instinctive response of the state when you tell them this is
#
let's figure out a way to stop those kids going out or let's stop the foreign exchange flow that's
#
not the point of the state that would be the instinctive response no the instinctive response
#
should be that what is it that we are doing wrong exactly that obviously you know i went abroad to
#
study i have nothing against people going abroad to study but actually you you know i i would claim
#
you know that you know that that you know 25% or even half of these students would be happy
#
to get a decent education in india at some reasonable price and so you know there is no
#
reason to go to you know the second or third best university in australia or new zealand or canada
#
or india if and you know one of the things that the ukraine war showed us was how many indian
#
students are studying medicine in ukraine not that i'm sure medicine teaching in ukraine is
#
very good but we should be able to teach these students in india so you know this is a problem
#
that you know when we talk about you know developed country and all of that that somehow we don't
#
appreciate and realize how far behind we are in even in china in terms of for example china
#
in terms of the quality of our higher education and i think this is again something that we
#
talk about in our in our drawing rooms and dinner tables but it doesn't get
#
enough prime time by that i don't mean just news time but just enough discussion time in government
#
in public policy circles about what are the unintended consequences of actually holding
#
higher education with an iron fist you're not letting you are you are taking public institutions
#
many decades behind by controlling hiring by controlling the quality of people that you're
#
letting in you're not even letting private institutions thrive because of the you know this
#
the kind of you know restrictions you're putting on funding the restrictions you're putting on
#
what can be taught and said at these universities and so on so this is i would say a big problem
#
the other problem that we raise that i think is getting a bit under noticed is in terms of
#
our engagement with the world i think that there is a sense in which india has arrived
#
which i think is you know there's some merit in that but i think our approach to that has been
#
that you know you know the word that is being thrown around is it somehow we've become vishw guru
#
you must have heard this word uh you know too many times too many times i didn't expect to
#
hear it from you rohan yeah so you know what does this word mean right this word means we
#
are somehow teacher to the world and as as as proud in indian as i am as i told you in this
#
podcast i think any reasonable rationalist would say we are we are at present a net importer of
#
ideas from the world which were cautionary tale yeah so you know wish for attach your favorite
#
sandeep vichet to it so so i think that while we should be confident about our place in the world
#
we should also be realistic about it about what is it and what terms should we engage with the
#
world you know we have a fairly precarious neighbor in our north which is significantly
#
bigger than us is constantly pushing us in our boundaries and you know we are economically also
#
very linked with them obviously i'm talking about china and how we choose to engage with the world
#
i think is is underappreciated at the moment because we are under some kind of spell
#
that we have arrived and therefore we should be able to say anything and engage with the world
#
completely on our own terms i think this is a bit problematic and i do think that what was
#
remarkable about india was that it got a larger say it has historically got a larger say on the
#
world stage then it then its economic footprint would allow because it's it's set an example to
#
the world that you can be poor and yet democratic and have certain kind of principles that people
#
value that i think we shouldn't lose sight of and i fear that we are again this doesn't mean that
#
just being democratic will fetch us some goodwill in the world but as we grow bigger as we grow
#
stronger actually we should reinforce these ideals and how we deal with the world and i do worry a
#
little bit that our kind of muscular positioning posturing in the last few years i fear that it
#
might be alienating certain people from regarding us as a trusted friend especially with china i
#
don't understand the muscular posturing at all you know the the whole banning tick tock thing
#
because we were too ineffectual to do anything else is just so bizarre and and and and you know
#
vishwa guru when china is on at your north and they can basically do whatever the hell they
#
want and you know i i think you need to be friendly to play positive some games with everyone to go
#
out there etc etc but instead we seem to be playing some you know bizarre zero-sum game
#
which we can't you know i'll give you an example that you know that um see i already told you like
#
you know that i come from jamun kashmir and the whole kind of area is important to me in multiple
#
ways i was very puzzled when that a leading representative of our government you know stood
#
up in the parliament and said no no i just don't mean you know kashmir i also mean that
#
pakistan occupied kashmir and aksai chin are integral parts of india now obviously you you
#
say that i believe that in some sense okay you know that this is a but just why i'm bringing
#
this up is because soon after that there were there were aggressions in ladakh and i'm not
#
making causal claims but what was interesting to me was that one of my chinese colleagues
#
right who's this like really nerdy economist i've never talked to her about geopolitics or
#
anything came to my office one day and said i read that your minister said in chinese media
#
that your minister said in your parliament that a part of china is part of india
#
and i was just befuddled right like you think that you're making something
#
an a comment just to posture to domestic audiences but it has had significant consequences
#
that you didn't even factor in this is a rookie mistake so so i'm just saying that you know you
#
the terms in which you're engaging with the world need to be much more mature much more
#
systematic than than i think not that i am you know i understand i am a deep reader or scholar
#
of foreign policy but some of them seem to me to be just a very myopic muscular approach that hasn't
#
been thought through last question since i've taken up so much of your time if i am to ask you to look
#
20 years into the future and give me a best case scenario and a worst case scenario for india
#
in the sense uh you know what do you worry can happen and what do you hope can happen
#
you know um i hope what can happen is that we and you know we
#
we are able to crack the problem of public service delivery i hope we are able to crack the problem
#
of you know having those 15 year olds actually having those five year olds which are learning
#
machines and having those 15 year olds are able to make informed choices about how to be productive
#
citizens of the country and of the world and i know this is very abstract but i think actually
#
is very concrete in my mind that that it might be abstract in the sense of how we typically have
#
policy discussions oh that oh you know if you have this discussion today in a forum people will say
#
well i hope india is a 10 trillion dollar economy or 15 trillion economy whereas i do think that if
#
we get that right other things will follow because i think india's constraint in the near future
#
is not going to be hard infrastructure it's going to be human capital my worry is that
#
uh we change our political by the time we realize that our political discourse is becoming too
#
autocratic it's too late that is a worry that i have and connected with the economic worry that i
#
said which has been said multiple times but it's becoming more and more concrete now
#
is that a demographic dividend turns into a disaster uh and it leads to some various kinds
#
of civil strife yeah and you know the next time someone tells you we're going to be a 10 trillion
#
dollar economy ask him can you count to 10 trillion and you know what rohit i can yeah okay you want
#
me to go ahead yes do it one trillion two trillion three trillion four never mind okay my penultimate
#
question for you is i'll turn back to the personal here like what is the story you tell yourself
#
about you what is your game you know are you playing some kind of but do you see yourself
#
as in it for the playing a long game do you see yourself as playing a short game do you just you
#
know take it a year at a time uh what's what's your story about yourself i think the story that
#
i've come to tell myself is is a story of of three to five year blocks i think that that i think
#
planning more than that it seems a bit silly or aspiring even more than that this is what you've
#
learned from indian economics you're doing a five-year plan exactly yeah exactly yeah
#
going back to our socialist ethos uh you know that that that i think i i would like to
#
you know make some kind of improvements and increments to my life you know on three
#
dimensions you know personal professional and health health and personally you can say is
#
because when you are healthy then you can make professional and personal improvements but
#
but you know generally i think i think i you know family is important to me and and
#
you know family by family i mean my my sister my my wife my parents and my immediate friends of
#
course and and and all other close people who are close to me and and and professional i mean you
#
know that what is it that i want to do in terms of my academic life both in terms of just pure
#
research but also my engagement with public policy and i i just set smaller goals now i
#
think than than i used to do when i was younger uh and i think in those smaller goals in three
#
to five years i want to write a few more good papers in economic theory maybe write one more
#
book you know and and i hope to to have a couple of more good phd students wow magnificent i i
#
didn't think you'd end there and when you said i hope to write a few more i was hoping you'd
#
say books but you said papers and then you said one more book yeah you have any uh books in mind
#
which you want to write yeah i i think i'm toying around with a few ideas it's too early to talk
#
about them but uh yeah i think i think i'm right now i'm debating between writing another book
#
on an issue of public policy related to india or writing a kind of a more economic theory text
#
not textbook but let's say a topics book whatever it is i can't wait and in the meantime my final
#
question and you must be aware of this because you seem to have heard every episode for me and
#
my listeners you know recommend books films music any kind of art at all that you absolutely love
#
and want to share with the world and might i add that you're also welcome to read out poetry that
#
you love at this point in time because why not we you know you i must tell my readers also
#
that rohit got home at 12 30 to have lunch with me and then we would record
#
and it is now 11 36 p.m so you know this shows great commitment and yeah and thank you for that
#
yeah as i said when i came in i wasn't i wasn't really planning on any
#
upper bound on time given your reputation so um you know i don't know if i have grand suggestions
#
but at least for me personally uh you know at various points in time you know certain books
#
helped me make sense of the world and and in my own improve my own reading habits and and absorption
#
of information you know i i loved at certain point in time and i read maximum city for the first time
#
by suketu maitha i really really liked it there was a writer called j.m koitse i think uh he has
#
that book i think he is a noble prize winner actually in literature i think twice i mean a
#
book a price rise yeah i really liked his book disgrace i think it's a beautiful book
#
that really stayed with me orhan pamuk snow is a book orhan can be a hit and miss i really liked
#
snow i think it's a beautiful and especially when i visited turkey i could really see some of his
#
scenes come alive so that i recommend uh to a lot of people there is a hindi writer who's more
#
known for his uh to a lot of people he might be known for some of his acting called manav call
#
i i write i like uh some of the stuff that he's written recently he had this book travel book
#
he had this book called which i really liked reading he had this play i think one of his
#
first things that he wrote was a play called which i really like i think it's it's kind of
#
almost like a monologue uh so manav call is someone i would i would look out for and and look for
#
the recent stuff writing in hindi i did recently read i didn't i have to say i didn't know much
#
about louis glock who recently won the nobel prize in literature but i did buy her kind of
#
collection of poems and i found them to be very very yeah with his pointing out to the book in
#
on his shelf i i thought some of her poems were very very powerful you know the i think i've
#
already mentioned the mahabharat i think in every form i really like the mahabharat you know and
#
many people have said this you know keep reading the mahabharat it will never finish
#
like there's such wealth of knowledge in there in terms of just characters emotions literature
#
art of writing art of poetry that i find um people say a lot about my episodes as well
#
in the sense it'll never finish it'll never finish yeah yeah so there's a mahabharatian
#
quality to to see in the unseen uh that that i quite uh you know i i really i really like
#
appreciate uh so i i recommend people to read you know whatever versions of mahabharat they can
#
they can get hold of one of my favorite poems and i've written an essay about it is uh
#
it's a beautiful poem beautiful lines um that poem has it's basically about ram
#
you know feeling demoralized on the battlefield because ravan is just
#
you know doing very well and then how he kind of emerges from it and what he does and and and
#
shakti here is refers to durga ma it's a beautiful poem a very long poem so that's i i recommend
#
everyone who has some familiarity with hindi i don't know of a very good translation of that
#
poem but it's a beautiful hindi poem i iqbal's poetry makes me very happy especially
#
iqbal has many of these beautiful um poetry so i i recommend in more kind of the realm of love
#
and romance i really like ahmed faraz ahmed faraz has that amazing most people may have and may not
#
some people may not know him but probably they would have heard his most famous guzzle which is
#
ranjit shi sahi that's ahmed faraz and one of my favorite poems of his is guzzles of his is
#
zindagi se yeh gila hai mujhe tu bahut der se mila hai mujhe and then he goes on this is one of
#
my favorite guzzles actually of of ahmed faraz that i quite like yeah i think in terms of music
#
i'm a very uh i'm not a very i i don't know much classical music and stuff i'm a very filmy
#
music listener and you know all through the 90s was a big fan of raiman raiman's music that really
#
played a an important role in my childhood at least and has you know i have fond memories of
#
that in terms of i really really like instrumental music which has the tabla and any kind of percussion
#
actually raiman uses that a lot in his music it's in taal or in swades he uses a lot of percussion
#
so that i i quite enjoy and uh listening to so since then i developed some taste for
#
for just listening to tabla on audio which i really i i wish in another life i could play the tabla
#
why another life why not this life yes maybe i i i have tried it is quite hard to pick up musical
#
instruments later in life but i think something i think it's something i want to do yeah i think
#
that pretty much is a good enough list marvelous so you know thank you so much for spending so much
#
time thank you for writing this book and and yeah we will keep talking yes thank you for having me
#
it was really a pleasure and honor and i hope the listeners go by and read breaking the mold
#
if you enjoyed listening to this episode share it with anyone you feel might be interested
#
head on over to your nearest bookstore online or offline and pick up breaking the mold by
#
raghu ram rajan and rohit lamba you can follow rohit on twitter at ro lamba roh lamba you can
#
follow me on twitter at amit varma a m i t v a r m a you can browse past episodes of the scene
#
in the unseen at scene unseen dot i n or any podcast app of your choice thank you for listening
#
did you enjoy this episode of the scene in the unseen if so would you like to support the
#
production of the show you can go over to scene unseen dot i n slash support
#
and contribute any amount you like to keep this podcast alive and kicking thank you
