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If you're a curious person, if you're creative, if you like math and the mysteries of the
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universe, if you have drive and enterprise, you could go in one of two directions.
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You could do science or you could do technology.
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Now in my mind there's a subtle difference between these two.
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Science is about pure truth seeking and sometimes require you to dive into a world where your
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work may seem abstract and you may not seem to be affecting the lives of actual people.
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That is, if you're in technology, whether you're an inventor or an innovator, you're
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trying to make a visible difference to the world, maybe responding to a need that you
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have felt or that you see out there.
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You're getting your hands dirty.
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Now much as it is possible to be great at one and not care about the other, this might
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just be a false dichotomy.
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The best scientists also care about the applications of their work, about how their insights can
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lead to technology that makes people better off.
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My guest today falls into that category.
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He began as a pure scientist, but then became a serial entrepreneur whose work in unseen
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ways might have shaped our world and might still be shaping it.
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Welcome to The Scene and The Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
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Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to The Scene and The Unseen.
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My guest today is V. Vinay, a brilliant scientist who is also known as one of the gang of four
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who created the Simputer at the end of the last century.
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In 2001, Bruce Sterling wrote in the New York Times, quote, The most significant innovation
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in computer technology in 2001 was not Apple's gleaming titanium PowerBook G4 or Microsoft's
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It was the Simputer, a netlinked, radically simple, portable computer intended to bring
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the computer revolution to the third world, stop quote.
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The Simputer was a handheld device meant for rural India and was expected to cost only
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It was designed to contain within it possibilities of online banking, including micro banking,
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e-commerce, real-time agricultural data and multipurpose citizen cards, kind of like an
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Aadhaar without the coercion.
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It had text-to-speech features, did not require a keyboard and was conjured up 25 freaking
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And we know that the big guns at Apple and Microsoft sat up and took notice.
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Now, eventually, the Simputer didn't quite take off, but the technology it pioneered
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eventually showed up over the years in other devices.
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Vinay was also one of the founders of Strand Life Sciences, a genomics and bioinformatics
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company founded in the year 2000.
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Vinay later founded Jedi Technologies, which aimed to popularize STEM education in schools
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And as if this was not enough, a few years ago, he also founded Ati Motors, an autonomous
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This conversation was a long time in the making.
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I've admired him from a distance for quite a while, and I'm so glad it's finally happened.
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Vinay's passion for the pure sciences, his understanding of how it can be applied to
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the real world, his insights on education, on learning how to learn, on the importance
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of always staying creative, of always asking questions, inspired me so much.
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And I'm sure it'll inspire you also.
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This conversation was recorded in Bangalore in February, by the way.
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And I'm going to make you wait a few seconds more before we start, because hey, even though
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we have no commercials, let's take a commercial break.
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Hey, the music started, and this sounds like a commercial, but it isn't.
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It's a plea from me to check out my latest labor of love, a YouTube show I am co-hosting
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with my good friend, the brilliant Ajay Shah.
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We've called it Everything is Everything.
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Every week, we'll speak for about an hour on things we care about, from the profound
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to the profane, from the exalted to the everyday.
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We range widely across subjects, and we bring multiple frames with which we try to understand
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Join us on our journey, and please support us by subscribing to our YouTube channel at
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youtube.com slash Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
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The show is called Everything is Everything.
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Please do check it out.
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Vinay, welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.
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I want to start with a question that involves a thought experiment, a time machine and you.
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And the question is, Bill Gates was once asked if he had a time machine, where would he like
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And he said, I want to go to Bell Labs in December 1947.
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And that, of course, is when the semiconductor was invented.
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I asked this question to another friend, Ajay Shah, we did an episode on our YouTube show
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And he said, I want to go to the late 60s Bell Labs again when, you know, Unix was created,
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C came up, et cetera, et cetera.
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Other people could possibly pick Einstein's, you know, Anas Mirabilis.
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If you had a time machine and you had to go back just to, you know, soak in a particular
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time or the excitement of a particular age, what would you choose?
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A particular time, I'm not sure.
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But overall, I would think one of the things that's fascinated me is the spread of languages.
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And probably what I would want to do is to understand probably the movement of humans
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themselves, maybe through Africa, they're supposed to come, follow the course, come
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to India, eventually go on to the Far East and then to Australia and so on.
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But languages are different.
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I mean, probably languages happened after this migration.
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And I'm fascinated as to what influences created these languages.
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For example, there have been some studies by people who have said that there is some
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similarities in terms of grammar and words between Japanese and Tamil and Korean and
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But the question is, how did these similarities arise?
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And probably that would be interesting because I don't think, no matter how well we patch
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up things through our study of history, we'll ever find out what really happened.
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So I don't think I want to go to one instance.
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I want a big picture of how all these things evolved.
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And probably what I want is some sort of simulation that runs on a computer screen where you can
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compress, you know, whatever, 100,000 years of human history into maybe 30 seconds.
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And yeah, so that would be my time travel.
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I would want to time travel 30 seconds of human history.
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But evolution of languages and the movement of people.
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Yeah, in a time lapse type of thing.
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Yeah, that probably would be fascinating to watch.
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Going to one specific event and trying to look at the mind of a scientist.
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To me personally, I think it's a waste of time because as somebody who has been on this
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side, who has proved theorems and so on, if somebody stood next to me, I don't think they
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would learn anything at all while I was discovering or inventing something.
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So I don't think I would find that fascinating at all simply because it's a very discontinuous
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And even if you are in the same room as, you know, Einstein, there's absolutely nothing
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that you can figure out.
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The second part is that even if you are there, you have to realize that, for example, general
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theory of relativity, Einstein always thought that he was not a very good mathematician.
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And the level of mathematics that was required to understand what he did, I mean, he took
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about seven, eight years to learn that mathematics.
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And that mathematics was very new in the sense that his mathematics was discovered
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about 50 years back by Riemann.
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And I think there are very few people in the world who actually knew that mathematics.
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So even if I were there in the same room of Einstein, I'm not doing much and I could
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probably see him drinking coffee or something, but yeah, so what would you discern?
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Einstein once famously said, it's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with
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And I think the friend of mine who brought up UNIX, in fact, what they essentially meant
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was that whole atmosphere that enabled the creation of something like that, which Bell
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Labs kind of signified.
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But I'll put you on the spot with another thought experiment, since you mentioned the
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evolution of languages and so on.
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It's always fascinated me that supposing we reboot the world, what evolves exactly as
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it is and what evolves differently.
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And I first came up with this in the context of sport, where I thought that we will get
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football again, because it is so primal and basic, it's a round object which is rolling
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We will get basketball because it's the same thing except up in the air, we will get boxing.
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Cricket is a mad accident, nothing about it makes sense.
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But that is in the context of sport.
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And I have also explored this in the context of finance, where people have told me that,
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look, finance would evolve, but banks may not.
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So in the fields where you can think of plausible answers.
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So I would restate your question in terms of my framework.
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So I am a computational complexity theorist.
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I don't know if any of your audience will know what it means, maybe some of them will.
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So I look at problems in computing and ask questions about how efficiently you can solve
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But it turns out that the resources that we use is not just time.
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Time is not the only measure of efficiency.
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There are various other measures of resources.
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And in that context, I think what you're saying is, we would have found probably football
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and basketball would have discovered because you think they are not complex.
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And cricket is a more complex game and therefore less likely to happen.
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Let's actually go back.
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I don't know when football was actually discovered, invented, whatever you want to call it.
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Between basketball and cricket, I'm fairly certain that cricket and basketball were probably
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Football probably, I don't know, maybe 50 years, 100 years before, I don't know.
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Do you know when football was?
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I know it is older, but I don't know how much older, but it just seems like my instinct
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It's much more elemental.
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It looks like it's a less complex game and maybe it would have been discovered.
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But in reality, I think if you look at the progression of science, there's lots of elementary
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stuff that we probably have missed and we discover more complicated stuff.
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And that's happened routinely in, at least in my research area, there's lots of face
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moments when you felt that some result that you discovered in 2008 or 2010 or something
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should have been done in the 90s, 20 years back.
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And we had all the technologies to do that, all the ideas to do that, but people simply
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And so I'm not sure that progression in the real world really happens via complexity.
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It's not that, you know, water fills up the plains before it, you know, sort of runs
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The reality is that water probably is in some hill and it takes a very complex route and
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arbitrary things happen.
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And there are lots of low complexity things probably which probably are not found at all.
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I'm sure there are lots of ideas, even today in science and mathematics and so on, which
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are likely low complexity in terms of the ideas that they require, but that they're
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A classic example, for example, you know, is one of the big results, at least from India,
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was this notion of primality, which people at IIT Kanpur found about in 2002.
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So one could ask the question, what are the ideas there?
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Of course, I mean, it had new ideas, it's a question of not new ideas.
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What could any of the great mathematicians of the previous century have figured it out?
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It's likely implausible.
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So it was not waiting for something that happened, let's say, in 98 for this to happen in 2002.
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Most of the ideas were available.
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People just didn't put it together.
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Now putting it together also is part of the complexity of the problem.
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But again, I would think it was out of turn.
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Probably should have been found earlier, but it was not.
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So I'll double click on some of this later, but let's go to your personal journey.
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I'd love to know, you know, where were you born, how did you grow up, what was your childhood
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I was born in Bangalore.
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My father was a geologist and my mother was an artist.
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She also used to play the violin and she used to give some programs and she was an AIR for
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Yeah, my father was probably a more interesting influence on me also because I think he passed
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away when I was very young.
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I was in my first year PhD when he had a heart attack.
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But my father was somebody who used to be very magnanimous with his time, especially
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to other people's problems.
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And that probably is something that has stayed with me.
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I think that influence is definitely there.
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My mother I think is probably the, she did not read much and she didn't work and so on,
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probably she was the brains of the family.
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And she was extremely clever, very artistic, very creative.
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And I think she understood people very well.
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And I think when I grew up, I think I was fairly naive, I'll tell you some stories about
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But after I think I got into my 20s and so on, it's probably her influence that made
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me sort of think about people, figure people out and all these things become important.
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I want to become an entrepreneur and do things.
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But I think that that entire thing is I think from her.
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In fact, in my thesis acknowledgement, I say that much of my creativity comes from her.
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She is the person who influenced me in that sense.
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She had her own, she could be pretty ruthless, cold, whenever she wanted to be.
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And initially, when you're growing up, that's not something that you like.
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But over time, you appreciate that.
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That's a skill that's useful to have.
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So in the family also, I think her advice was sought after because she could see through
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things and she could see through people, their pretenses and so on.
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So she was that and I think that was good.
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And for example, once my father passed away, she, I mean, it is very traditional South
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Indian where you're not supposed to put kumkum and so on and you're supposed to erase it
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She refused to do all that.
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And she said, I am not doing this because I was decorating myself with jewelry and kumkum
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and so on even before I got married.
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Nothing to do with the person and I don't care.
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Same thing with the rituals on the 10th day.
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There is a ritual where, you know, it's supposed to break brangles and stuff like that.
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And she said, no, I'm not doing any of that.
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In fact, she refused to come to the ritual itself, saying, if you guys want to do it,
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it's your problem, but I don't care.
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Yeah, so she was, she was very demanding of this.
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So all these are traditional because this is what used to happen 30 years back, 40
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So you go to some function, you know, somebody's marriage or something else.
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And there's a tradition that they'll pass on a plate of kumkum and so on.
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And if there's a widow, they will bypass.
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And it's really cruel to do that, but people do that routinely.
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And if that happened with her, she would call the person back and say, you're not doing
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And so stuff like that.
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And to a large extent, I think she was, I don't know, she was a social reformer of some
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So people in the family immediately understood that, you know, within about a couple of months
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they understood, you know, these usual things are not going to work.
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And people out of the family, if they did not, there are cases where she has not, she
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cut off relations with people because they treated her as a quote unquote widow as opposed
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And she said, I'm not willing to engage you anymore.
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So she was all of that.
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And as you grow and you see these things, you admire that ruthlessness that comes this
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And she was not completely unperturbed by what people thought about her or what it was.
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So I do believe that in a different world, she would have been a great leader.
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But yeah, so that was her.
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And her influence on me has been enormous in terms of these things.
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My father was very different.
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He was, he somehow had a deep sense of justice in him.
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And he would take up causes, help people.
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In his office, I think there has been no instance where if somebody has sought help from him,
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he has, yeah, and if there's something that he could do about it, he has always done it.
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And I think one of his bosses said something, I think, which was deeply profound in a very
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So this person, who was his, I think it was the deputy director general or something that
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sought at that point, told him that I have not met Krishna.
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Krishna is supposed to be somebody where you ask someone and he gives.
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He doesn't ask any questions, he just gives.
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So this person said, I do not know about whether Krishna exists or not.
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But in my lifetime, you're the only person I have seen whom I can depend on, I can ask.
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And you will never say no again.
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But he died very young.
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He was about in his fifties when he passed away, early fifties when he passed away.
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And yeah, so my father's influence has mostly been about being humane and helping people
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So that probably is a contribution.
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One of the things I did was I took GATE.
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I don't know if GATE is an exam that you take to join your master's program.
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I had a choice of taking many subjects.
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You're supposed to, in my time, you're supposed to take two or three subjects and lots of
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And typically you take subjects in engineering.
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You take either physics and maths and then you take electrical, electronic, something.
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I took geology because I wanted to understand what is it that he knew about geology and
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what the subject was about.
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So I spent about three months reading geology.
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And to his credit, he got me all the old classic books in geology and he made me read them.
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And one of the things I understood, I mean, I think I was 22 or something.
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And I was very brash those days, very obnoxious and brash.
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All 22 years probably, but a bit more than usual, I think.
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So I mean, I had a sense that I was good at some things and therefore that gave me some
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cockiness I think to what I was.
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And most of these three months was about checking whether he knew geology or not.
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How much of things that he remembered and did he understand the concepts well or not
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So I must say that he did very well.
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Those three months were a lot of fun because I learned a lot about various things.
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Yeah, but in the meantime, of course, that was about, I don't know, how many years back?
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Yeah, no, about 35 years back is how many years, a long time back.
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Yeah, I haven't touched geology after that.
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So broadly, I think coming back, born in Bangalore, went to Hyderabad, was in Hyderabad for about
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three years, including the time when India and Pakistan had that war.
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That was probably amongst my earliest memories, big memories that I had was that famous photograph
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that came in all the newspapers of the signing of the Surrendering.
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What else do I remember about?
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So I went to school very early, I went to school when I was two and a half and then
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I went to Hyderabad, I went there I think first standard, then apparently I was good
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enough that I got promoted to third and so I skipped second standard.
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So one of the jokes I usually make is that I have absolutely no idea what happened in
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It's like the concepts are all missing in me and I went to third and then I was, they
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said they'll put me in fifth and my father I think took a decision that, you know, maths
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and so on may become too difficult and they said no, we'll go to fourth.
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But this happened to be a December, a Jan to Jan school in Hyderabad.
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And then my father got transferred, so I had done my fourth there, I got transferred
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Here the school was on May, used to start in May those days, now it starts in June.
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22nd May was the day it starts.
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And the school said that they can put me in third because I was too young.
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And then my father had to go and meet some officials in the education department and
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And they did something which used to happen those days, they had to change my date of
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So my date of birth was changed to 20th of May and the school starts on the 22nd.
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So that allowed me to enter not third, not fifth as I should have gone, but fourth again.
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So fourth is something I understand very well, multiple perspectives.
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And I read something in Hyderabad, I read something in Bangalore, second there's a problem.
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Then I came back to Bangalore, the schooling was good, I think, yeah, nothing special.
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Like all kids was interested in cricket, but was terrible in cricket.
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I don't think I played the game very well, but that was the game everyone played and
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I have memory of watching the first test match in Bangalore, which was also the first live
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telecast TV event in Bangalore.
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This was, I forget now, 1973 or 74 when Lloyd's team came to Bangalore.
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So I was there in the stadium when Viv Richards made his debut, he didn't hit a century here.
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He made a debut and so did, I think Greenwich made a debut, Richards made a debut, maybe
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Andy Roberts too, maybe I'm not sure of that.
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Gavaskar got some eight or something, four or eight and got out and Gavaskar apparently
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got out for a hook and the legend is that he did not play a hook shot for the next decade
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until the famous test in Delhi where I think he took, he hit a hundred before lunch.
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So until that, I think, or maybe most of the next 10 years, I think he didn't hook.
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Yeah, so that was, so I remember Gavaskar, so I think that was great.
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And I also remember because I think, I think my father got some tickets, but we could go
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for only two of the five days, okay, because they were all rotating and so on.
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Then we went to some other place near my house where they had one TV, they had about some
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70, 80 people in the room watching a black and white grainy television and yeah, it was
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some 10, 15 rupees per, you could watch it for an hour or something and it was a lot
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of money, but we got to watch it for a couple of hours and then we came back.
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Yeah, so the first time I saw it, television, it was also, I think 74, I think, yeah, probably.
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Yeah, so nothing, no other special memories, I'm trying to recall what was special.
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Yeah, went to school like everyone else, 10th standard was a, yeah, so in school I enjoyed
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I don't know, how deep do you want me to go?
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I mean, it really depends on.
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I want to go a lot deeper.
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All right, maybe I'll say something about my high school because I remembered something.
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In high school I had, I was decent in math, decent in the sense that I usually used to
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top the math exams and so on and I had somebody who was one year my senior, a guy called Raju
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who is still in touch with me, we're still great friends, but I did not, I knew of him
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then, but I didn't know him at that point, but he was one year my senior and I heard
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that when I was in 9th and he was in 10th, I heard that he knew trigonometry and he knew
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Both of these were taught in, you know, in our times in first PUC, we did not even have
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11th and so on, it was first PUC and second PUC, pre-university and so he, so these were
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taught in first PUC and he already knew it.
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And first PUC in Bangalore, Karnataka was a big deal because you go to college, unlike
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11th and 12th where you continue in the same school, okay, after 10th in Bangalore is a
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big deal because you now go to college and you're now a big boy and all those things.
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So I remember when that happened, I, my father was a geologist, he probably took geology
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because he didn't like maths and he was not very good at it, which is a bit strange because
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my grandfather was a mathematician.
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My grandfather was a professor in Maharaja's college in Mysore in the 30s and he had several
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students of his who, I mean, in those days Maharaja's college was the best college that
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you could aspire to if you were in the Mysore kingdom.
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And for example, one of his students was Kengal Hanuman Thaya, who was one of the,
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the chief minister who built Vidyanswara, one of the great poets of modern Karnataka,
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Adiga was one of his students and lots of them.
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But anyway, my father was bad in mathematics and so I had to pester some of his friends
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to teach me something and his friends indeed taught me how to look, how to solve the quadratic
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equation, elements of trigonometry, sine and cos and stuff like that.
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And one of them taught me how to look at the log tables.
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And so I came back, you know, two, three days of meeting various people and I too knew some
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trigonometry and so on.
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By the time I finished my 10th, I knew calculus, I knew trigonometry and I was as good as any
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12th standard kid doing these things.
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And in some ironic sense, I tell people that that's the calculus that I still know.
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I mean, of course I know a bit more than that, but that was essentially the foundation of
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who I was and what I became.
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So it was around that time I sort of realized that one of the things that I like doing was
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doing things which are not in my syllabus.
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And that became an important part of, in some sense, defining who I was.
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I've never stuck to reading what's in the book, what's in the syllabus and restricting
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myself to that and now passing exams.
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And that probably is the only thing that has made me a reasonable researcher in some sense.
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I have a fairly wide breadth only because the breadth comes from the fact that I'm
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curious and I am willing to look at material even if I don't understand it very well and
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I'm happy to plow through.
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So much so that by the time I finished my second P.U., I had read a 200-page book on
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And I don't think, looking back, I knew how to manipulate things.
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I used to calculate all sorts of crazy things, various tensors and operations and the things
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called Christoffel symbols and so on.
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I knew how to manipulate all those things.
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I mean, looking back, I don't know how much I understood, but I could manipulate.
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And that sense of manipulation, I think, gives you a sense that you're making progress.
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It's only much later I think I understood that almost all mathematics that you learn
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in school is really competition.
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There's really no mathematics there.
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In the early days, you learn addition and multiplication and so on, and those are procedures
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and algorithms that you use.
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Later on, you learn ratio, proportion, this, that and the other.
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I think geometry is probably the only place where there is some real mathematics, but
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then in some serious sense, in the research world at least, I mean, nobody is doing Pythagoras
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theorem or similar triangles anymore, though they are important ideas.
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Pythagoras theorem is captured in what you call as a metric in linear algebra and so
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Plus, the basic Euclidean geometry is not necessarily a research area per se.
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So, not much of what we learn in mathematics is really mathematics.
#
So, it's mostly competition.
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So, I think that familiarity comes because of competition, because you're able to use
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your brain and fingers and work out things.
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And if you're interested in the process, then you see deeper questions probably from
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So, that probably is the story.
#
But Raju is an interesting thing because I met him around 93, I think, 92, 93 when I
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So, this happened probably in the 78, 79.
#
I'm talking about 78, 79.
#
So, interestingly, he's also the person, I mean, in the schools, you have the science
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debate or something of that sort where somebody speaks something about a subject in science
#
and the prizes are given and so on.
#
So, I was in one of them and Raju was the person who spoke for 20 minutes on the fact
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that binary numbers are used in computers.
#
And that was utterly fascinating.
#
So, that's where I learned that these binary numbers and so on and so forth, they're useful
#
things because computers understand binary and they don't understand decimal.
#
Then I met him, then he went to IIT Madras.
#
He went off somewhere and I was at the Center for AI and Robotics at around 90, I think
#
I met him in 91, around 91.
#
And I don't know whether that was outside, you know, of care, inside the building, but
#
just outside the main entrance.
#
And somebody told me that a physicist has joined, Bangalorean and IIT Madras.
#
There was enough there to sort of believe that it couldn't be anyone else.
#
And then I said, the guy was telling me that this new person has joined and I said, is
#
And he said, yes, how did he know?
#
And then I just ignored the guy and I ran up and I met the guy.
#
It was like a fan moment.
#
I told him that I knew of him in school and he had a major influence on my picking up
#
math and reading things and stuff like that.
#
And I repeat the story every time whenever Raju meets someone and Raju keeps coming to
#
Bangalore and the third person, I have to tell the story and it irritates him a lot because
#
I've heard this about 20 times.
#
But anyway, I think it's good to hear it one more time.
#
Now it's part of history and yeah, it's the part dependence of Raju could be a fascinating
#
subject because if not for him, maybe you, you know, some of that journey you don't.
#
Okay, so turns out that one of my uncles took me to a book fair.
#
There was some book fair somewhere in Bangalore, one of the large book fairs that's held annually.
#
And I remember I went there and I picked up a book and calculus.
#
But this had, I think, Raju had predated this event.
#
So I knew some trigonometry.
#
I picked up this book called Calculus Made Simple.
#
Okay, I picked up the book and it turns out to be a beautiful book on calculus.
#
If, I mean, I would still recommend it as the first book that anyone should read.
#
Calculus Made Simple, the author was a person called Mulholland, I think, some Britisher,
#
And I started reading it and I read that book cover to cover in my 10th standard.
#
To me, that was probably the turning point.
#
I think the trigonometry part was good.
#
But I think it was buying this calculus book in 10th that made a difference in making sure
#
that I really stay within the math world in some sense.
#
You know, before we started this recording, you were complaining that your memory isn't so good.
#
But your memory about the Bangalore test match is spot on.
#
You got the time right.
#
It was Richardson Greenwich making their debuts along with Hemant Karnitkar of India.
#
Karnitkar made what, he was the highest scorer in the first innings.
#
He made some 40 odd or 60 or something like that.
#
He made 65 banging at number three.
#
I remember him playing.
#
I remember Prasanna getting Kalicharan out.
#
In the first innings, he was court engineer, bowled Prasanna.
#
And in the second innings, he was LBW.
#
But Lloyd hit a century.
#
Lloyd hit 163, which was described in great detail to me earlier this week by Ram Guha
#
because he was at the test match.
#
He described how he wrote about it in an essay which he sent to his editor Rukun Adwani
#
who then replied saying, I was also at that match and here is what I remember.
#
So now three people in the last few days have...
#
Yeah, so that match was, I think it defined one era of Bangalore.
#
I mean, we all had to go there.
#
All of you are the ground together.
#
I want to double click on a few things.
#
And one of them is an observation I have made about other fields.
#
Now, I don't know anything about science, but given human nature,
#
I would imagine it's probably already also true there,
#
which is that in most fields, 95% or even more of the people
#
are really just settled into a groove and don't do higher order thinking.
#
They learn what they have to learn and then they are just sticking the boxes
#
and they stop thinking, are fresh for themselves.
#
And it's really like 5% of the people who are always sinking deeper
#
and updating their priors and try to learn new things,
#
which to me is like an essential skill.
#
And especially in this modern world,
#
I think a truly fundamental skill is learning how to learn.
#
And the sense that I get from your journey is that you've always been learning to learn.
#
You've always been learning new things from first principles from a very young age,
#
whether it was sparked by Raju when you pick up trigonometry
#
or whether it was sparked by Mulholland's book on calculus
#
when you pick up calculus or whether it is as recently as, you know,
#
when you had started Ati Motors, you pointed out that you gradually
#
had to learn all the different kinds of engineering involved from mechanical to this.
#
But I'm asking about that general sort of trend of always thinking about the API as it were,
#
always learning, not going with the way you're programmed and you're supposed to go.
#
So was that something that was inherent in you from a very early?
#
Was it something in your dad?
#
Because, you know, when you talk about your dad, you know,
#
giving you all of those early books to teach you the first principles of geology
#
and you said you tested them in the past.
#
So, you know, was it something that you feel that by osmosis you might have picked up from there
#
that you don't just settle with learning what's in the syllabus.
#
You go beyond that and you go beyond the silos you're supposed to be in and you learn new things.
#
Yeah, that probably happened when I joined, I think, 8th standard.
#
One of the things my father did was he picked books that he had read, good books.
#
So, for example, somewhere in 9th, I think he bought me a slew of textbooks in chemistry.
#
Now, he picked up chemistry because chemistry was close to him as a geologist.
#
The subject that I was poorest in was chemistry.
#
Physics I liked, I liked maths, but chemistry was not something that excited me a lot
#
simply because I think I had to by heart probably come into memory a lot of things.
#
And I did not see the patterns that I ought to have seen at that age.
#
But nevertheless, I appreciated the fact that if I passed chemistry, it was because of the books that he got.
#
I still remember those books.
#
So, one book was on physical and inorganic chemistry by a person called Partington.
#
That book was a second hand book that was picked up, was thrown in the middle, but all the pages are there.
#
I put them, got them bound, and then I read that book.
#
Fascinating. I mean, the English could write really well.
#
And that probably was part of, some of the influence was probably that.
#
The quality of writing was very, very high.
#
There was a book on organic chemistry that he got, which was called Kipping and Kipping.
#
I used these books until my engineering.
#
My first year in engineering also had subject in chemistry and so on.
#
Until that point, I have used all of these books since my eighth and ninth standard.
#
So, for the five years or whatever, they survived.
#
And so, similar to these, he had a lot of books.
#
And mathematics, it turns out that many of the colleagues of my grandfather, they all wrote books.
#
And my father got several of these books as well.
#
There was one Jambunathan and he said, this is a friend of my father, I don't know, read it.
#
So, I would actually read these things.
#
Some of these books were BSE books and so on, but he didn't care.
#
I mean, he didn't care that Partington is supposed to be read at undergraduate level.
#
He was like, yeah, you can read it.
#
So, that probably made a difference.
#
Probably the fact that he did not somehow think that people in fifth standard should read only fifth standard books
#
or eighth standard should read only that textbook and so on.
#
That probably made a difference in terms of my branching.
#
But I was not afraid of opening a book and reading things.
#
I think that was probably a big thing.
#
So, I would think that is a major influence.
#
So, I happened to mention to my writing students on a WhatsApp group that I was kind of speaking to you.
#
And did they have any questions?
#
And one of them called Apurv had an interesting question.
#
And he pointed me to this piece written by Derek Sivers, who was once a musician.
#
And I'll link it from the show notes.
#
And it's basically about how Derek Sivers at one point is about to go to Berklee College of Music.
#
He's got admission there.
#
And he reaches out to a nearby guy who runs a studio for some other reason entirely.
#
And he happens to mention he's going to Berklee.
#
So, that guy is a gentleman named Keemo Williams.
#
So, Williams tells him that, you know, I have been to Berklee and I have also taught at Berklee.
#
So, why don't you do one thing?
#
You'll land up tomorrow morning at 9 o'clock.
#
And I will teach you what they teach you at Berklee.
#
And it'll be much faster.
#
And you'll finish college in Berklee in two years.
#
So, Derek Sivers reaches there at 8.40.
#
He waits for 19 minutes.
#
At 8.59 he rings the bell.
#
And Keemo Williams opens the door and is overjoyed to see him.
#
Because it turns out that Keemo Williams tells every young man he meets that you come tomorrow at 9 and I will teach you.
#
And this is the first person who showed up.
#
And then he sits down with him on the keyboards, I think.
#
And in three hours, says Sivers, he teaches him what they teach in one semester at Berklee.
#
And then he learns three more semesters were just sitting with him in the next two, three days.
#
And when he goes to Berklee, he's allowed to give those exams straight away.
#
And he actually finishes his Berklee music degree at two years.
#
At Berklee College of Music?
#
And the question here is and this is something that I've always found utterly ridiculous
#
that our education system is designed in a way that assumes that everyone learns at the same speed
#
and has to be good at the same things.
#
And you've already spoken about how in your own life you've kind of, you know,
#
you don't know the second standard because you bypassed that when you did the fourth twice.
#
And you know, you were learning tegrometry well before your time,
#
you were learning calculus well before your time, and so on and so forth.
#
And do you think that and a lot of kids who might be as smart as you
#
may not have the good fortune of having parents who would encourage them to learn ahead of their time,
#
who would give them an undergraduate textbook when they are in the eighth standard
#
and say, you know, learn this.
#
And I know that, you know, we'll go on to talk later about Jedi also and all your work as an educator.
#
But just thinking in general about the sense of the speed of learning
#
and how because you are catering your teaching at a pace at which the slowest student can learn,
#
which is noble, you are actually also hampering everybody who has a potential of going beyond.
#
So what are sort of your thoughts?
#
It looks like you touched something where I have five, six different things to say.
#
So let me say the first thing that I need to.
#
So my son went to Berkeley College of Music.
#
Wow, I didn't know that.
#
He is on Twitter somewhere.
#
He was fairly popular about 10 years back because he was very young.
#
But since then, I don't think he comes on Twitter.
#
And he went to Berkeley College of Music.
#
I think I heard the name of Williams probably from him.
#
And he finished in two years, nine months, not quite two years,
#
but two years, nine months, close enough, not a four year program.
#
And now he's finishing his PhD in music tech at Georgia Institute of Technology.
#
So his case is also a bit similar.
#
He finished his 12th, took a gap year.
#
He was interested in music.
#
It's amazing the number of people who actually told me and Shubha, my wife,
#
that you're taking a risk by sending your son to music school and stuff like that.
#
And initially it was not even clear that he could actually get into the music school.
#
So I had to tell you this story.
#
So it so happened that he was interested in some music.
#
We didn't know because I am not...
#
If you have asked me to pick one area where I am not good at something, it would be music.
#
And that's a bit surprising because my mother used to play the violin.
#
And my father was reasonably good in identifying ragas and so on,
#
in Carnatic music and stuff like that.
#
I was somehow the only guy who was not good.
#
And I think it had something to do with my mother.
#
At an young age, my mother decided that I did not have...
#
And she simply, in her usual, efficient way, kept me out of music.
#
On the other hand, when my son was born,
#
and he was about six or seven,
#
she made him sing, do something, and then decided,
#
okay, this guy has some aptitude for it.
#
And he went to a music school.
#
Very typical South Indian, you go pick up some Carnatic music and so on.
#
He learned music for about four, five years of that nature.
#
And then he, one fine day, he abandoned Carnatic music
#
and somehow said that he wanted, was listening to Western and so on,
#
which I had absolutely no idea about.
#
And then at some stage in 12th, he decided, he said,
#
I'm going to music school.
#
Which music school? He said, I'm going to Berkeley.
#
He did not apply to any other school, none at all.
#
He applied to this one school, and he took a gap here
#
so that he could prepare for it.
#
And his interview was, his audition was in Bombay, Mumbai.
#
And on the day of his audition, an eminent person in Mumbai died,
#
Bal Thackeray, and the city closed down.
#
So the plane did not fly from Bangalore to Mumbai.
#
So then we had to send a mail to Berkeley people and say,
#
can we take the audition elsewhere and so on?
#
And they said, we'll have to think about it.
#
A few people reached Mumbai and they actually had their audition, I think.
#
We just didn't go in a couple of days in advance or something,
#
Or even the previous day probably would have been fine.
#
Anyway, so there was some mishap that happened and we were not sure.
#
I mean, if he doesn't get an audition,
#
there's only place now on the question of what do you do, right?
#
And then he got an audition in Singapore.
#
So he went to Singapore.
#
He cleared the audition.
#
So he's always done that.
#
He likes to take a punt on one thing in some sense and takes his chance.
#
And somehow things work out.
#
I do believe that, you know, you require at least one plan B at least to back up.
#
But he somehow had no plan B.
#
He said, this is my plan A and this is what I want to do.
#
And I was surprised on the day when he got his admission and so on.
#
And that was memorable.
#
So this was what was the question.
#
The base of learning, the way the system is structured.
#
Over 5% of the people who actually...
#
So it is true in general that most parents, I think,
#
but I think your question was a bit larger.
#
It's also true of scientists in general.
#
So I have one other person who had a large influence on me was Vidya Sagar,
#
who's also on Twitter somewhere,
#
somewhat right-wing as he has grown old,
#
And so Sagar, for example, was heading...
#
I think there was a science committee on, you know,
#
when the pandemic happened and these people came up with a model.
#
I don't know if you read some controversy about various things happening.
#
And so he was heading that committee.
#
So he's one of the few FRSs in the country.
#
Sagar used to be the director of CARE.
#
And my first job after my PhD was at Centre for AI and Robotics.
#
And so to that extent, I was among the first people in India,
#
maybe, I don't know, maybe a handful of people, maybe 100, maybe 50,
#
something of that sort,
#
people working reasonably deeply in AI machine learning at that period of time.
#
There weren't many people in India doing things.
#
There were a few people at IIC,
#
a few people at CARE like Sagar and a few others,
#
and one or two IITs and a few people, but a very small set of people.
#
One of the first things that Sagar told me,
#
probably the second or third day I was at CARE,
#
and that made a huge impression on me, was the fact that
#
he said he doesn't like people who keep doing their PhD problems all their life,
#
that they get a PhD in a specific area or a specific problem
#
and they keep doing that all their life.
#
They don't do anything else at all.
#
And he gave me an example of a mathematician called Halmas.
#
And Halmas is a fairly well-known mathematician.
#
All mathematicians know who Halmas is.
#
And his guide was a probabilist called Doob.
#
Again, very famous probabilist.
#
Doob apparently wrote a reference letter for Halmas
#
saying that Halmas' second paper was not in the area of his PhD thesis,
#
whatever his thesis or problem was,
#
to indicate that this guy is not a one-trick pony,
#
that he has the ability to look at other problems and contribute there.
#
And this is a story that Sagar told me on my second or third day at CARE.
#
And I remember that made an impression.
#
So those days I worked in neural networks for some time
#
and we wrote a reasonably interesting paper at that point in time
#
on neural networks and stuff like that.
#
But this idea that I need not be confined to the area that I work in
#
and that I could actually move out and find interesting things,
#
I think that influence was from, I think, Sagar to a large extent.
#
It was not that I was not doing those things,
#
but I think the story sort of solidified in my mind that
#
here is something that I should not do,
#
work on a specific problem for 20 years, 30 years,
#
and miss out on, in hindsight, I think, the richness of life.
#
And the world is fascinating.
#
I mean, I'm looking at it as a scientist or a mathematician or whatever,
#
There are so many things to learn and appreciate.
#
Why you get confined to one specific problem or one specific thing?
#
Lots of things that you can learn in some depths.
#
So my idea of looking at things has always been that I go into something new.
#
I spend about maybe two, three weeks, maybe a month on it,
#
and I learn whatever I need to learn
#
to a point that I appreciate what's happening and I have this aha.
#
Once I have these ahas and so on, I say, OK, I'm done with this.
#
I move on to the next thing.
#
And many of these things I forget,
#
because it's impossible to sort of remember so many things.
#
Not even, it's not even about memory,
#
but it's difficult to do research as a different story.
#
To do research, you need to be able to manipulate your tools very well.
#
So I don't know whether I achieve that sort of skill in each of the things that I read,
#
because one month is very short for that.
#
But I think I reach a level where I can appreciate
#
what the big thinking is or what the great thoughts are.
#
And that, I believe, is important.
#
And so that I do that and I keep going.
#
There are some things I keep returning to,
#
some themes that are recurring that I keep returning to.
#
One of them is, I think, electromagnetism of Maxwell.
#
Every four or five years, I spend a month on it, just for the sheer joy of it.
#
Simply because I would have forgotten most of the things.
#
Of course, the essence is there, but I would have forgotten.
#
And I recreate the entire thing for over a month.
#
And the next three, four years, I forget it.
#
There's a book called The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan.
#
There's a beautiful quote there,
#
that memory is the enemy of wonder.
#
It gives me a right to forget things.
#
And I want to forget things so that I can re-create it,
#
reconstruct it, re-create it, and again, wonder.
#
I think that is a very big part of this idea of revisiting some things again and again.
#
And being fascinated by it again.
#
It's like falling in love again and again with the same thing.
#
But then you have to forget.
#
I think forgetting is important.
#
That's a fascinating insight.
#
And another way, I think, convention is also the end of wonder.
#
Once you choose to adopt certain frameworks and that's all you have,
#
you stop looking at the world in new ways.
#
And I'm thinking that the approach that you said of learning little bits of new subjects every once in a while,
#
there are two ways to look at the trade-offs involved there.
#
On the one hand, there is, of course, a standard trade-off between breadth and depth and everything that you get with that.
#
But at the same time, I think that even flitting across subjects in that way,
#
even if it seems shallow to a specialist,
#
actually, you know, can deepen your understanding of your own field because you can bring so many other frames to bear on it.
#
So would you say that is the case with...
#
Okay, so let me tell you another story.
#
And there's a person working in Jedi who used to do...
#
She was a material scientist.
#
And one of the subjects she should have known well,
#
and I think she did know it reasonably well, was thermodynamics.
#
At some stage, I actually gave a three-hour, four-hour lecture.
#
So all my lectures that I used to give the last 10, 15 years,
#
of course, whenever that I see, I have to give all these hour and a half type of lectures.
#
But later on, I moved to lecturing for three hours.
#
And later, sometimes I've done full day, six hours and so on with breaks, of course, but lunch and so on.
#
But I just keep talking.
#
And I think that's a useful thing to do.
#
In any case, I was doing this thing in thermodynamics for over six hours.
#
And then at some stage, I got into some advanced stuff,
#
some bunch of things that Maxwell did and some partial derivatives of various sorts and so on.
#
And I was describing these things.
#
And at some point, she lit up and said, this is exactly what I wanted to learn for a long time.
#
And nobody taught me this well.
#
And she was, after that point, she was like a gog.
#
And she was sort of lit in some sense.
#
And that's one of the joys of teaching, especially in a classroom.
#
When somebody gets it, you can see it on their face.
#
And that is satisfying because you know that the person gets the point.
#
The lecture got over and then she came to me and then she was very thrilled about it.
#
And then she said she was not expecting me to teach all these things.
#
And she naturally presumed that, I think this lecture happened on a Monday or something like that.
#
And she naturally presumed that I had studied this for several years or something.
#
And then she asked me, so how long have you known thermodynamics?
#
And I said, or when did you read? Something that she asked.
#
So when I read things, when I, that month, at the end of that month, if you ask me,
#
I think I will be as, of course, an expert will know much more than I do.
#
But for a person who is in the audience, I don't think they'll be able to distinguish between me and the expert.
#
And you'll be able to do what many experts can't, which is explain it in a clear way.
#
I will be able to explain things with clarity.
#
And I will be able to fool the person on my expertise.
#
I will know the subject. I'm not saying that I'm going to fool them based on if I'm wrong at this thing.
#
I would have understood the concepts.
#
So I think one of the things that I do have, one quality that I do have is,
#
I think I know what are the right questions to ask in any subject.
#
And then I seek answers to those questions.
#
And those answers are extremely painful.
#
They take me days to get those answers.
#
Which really means, you know, pouring through probably in the multiple textbooks,
#
trying to see somewhere the author would have actually felt the need to answer this question somewhere.
#
Or even if not this question, something similar, and then I can construct things.
#
The reality is that most of the time, these answers are missing from standard textbooks.
#
And the place you find these answers are some math overflow or some physics site.
#
Somebody had asked a question, somebody would have given an oblique answer.
#
And then you read that and say, but it means you have to read a lot of stuff.
#
And finally you get that little nugget.
#
And this little nugget, I've known this for 10-15 years now.
#
I'll come back to the Jedi part, which involves this particular activity.
#
I think 15-20 minutes, maybe half an hour of my lacha,
#
I think is a distillation of probably about 10-15 hours of trying to find these answers and so on.
#
And then I string it together, probably give a lacha somewhere and so on.
#
And if I'm lucky, the lacha is recorded.
#
And then after a year or two, when I feel like reading this particular thing, I go back, listen to my own lachas.
#
I'm usually shocked at what I think is wisdom then.
#
The present Vinay somehow can't relate to the fact this past Vinay understood it in this particular way.
#
Yeah, but those things happen.
#
Yeah, but I think asking the right question, I think is crucial.
#
And the school system doesn't teach that.
#
Can you give me an example of a subject you wanted to learn?
#
And what were the right questions that you picked for it and how did you find them?
#
I mean, I'm just trying to understand the process of how you think about it and learn.
#
Yeah, you have to give me some time. I think it'll be in the background somewhere.
#
The most recent lacha I gave was to my friends at IIS Master's program.
#
So one of the things I did after I finished my thesis in 1991, my PhD thesis,
#
and after finishing my thesis in 1991, July or something,
#
I said I don't want to look at complexity theory anymore for the next few months at least.
#
I want to do something else.
#
And then at that point, the actual question was what do you do?
#
And I was looking around and I thought people keep talking about astrology.
#
And to critique astrology, you have to know what astrology is.
#
Otherwise you're just saying we have heard some rationalists say astrology is bad
#
and you mouth somebody else's views about astrology.
#
But your question is, is there any truth to it?
#
So I spent about three months reading astrology, not a month, but multiple months.
#
So I still remember some of that.
#
And in the process of doing that, I had to learn a fair amount of classical astronomy and some math as well.
#
The math that goes into it is spherical trigonometry.
#
So all of this I had to learn at that point.
#
And then I learned some astrology as well.
#
There's a math based and then I learned some astrology.
#
And eventually there's a learning that I think I on and off, I think for a year I was on it
#
until about 1991 to about 1992 there was.
#
After a year I sort of gave up on it.
#
I didn't seriously think about it.
#
And recently something, I don't know, some event happened and some eclipse or something happened.
#
And in your usual WhatsApp group, there were some questions that were raised.
#
And one of my classmates actually, who was a professor, he actually raised a question about, he was a professor at Georgetown.
#
And he raised a question about, and I want to wrap my head around this, but I'm not quite sure how to.
#
And I said, I mean, if you want, I can talk about it.
#
And then he said, oh, why not?
#
And they fixed a date and I had about 20 days.
#
And they said these were things that I read a long time back.
#
And so again, I went through the process, 20 days.
#
And so again, I had to ask these questions.
#
So I said, I will not do the prediction part of astrology.
#
I'm not interested in that.
#
I want to lead my life and all of you lead your life.
#
Prediction, there's no fun knowing what's going to happen next and so on.
#
And I had a problem with Indian astrology as well.
#
I sort of soon realized that all the rules of prediction in astrology, they're all very simplistic, very simple.
#
So in terms of complexity, they had very low complexity.
#
And I wanted to believe that the lives that we lead are much richer than these low complexity rules that were there,
#
which could predict things almost constant time.
#
Some three rules and then you follow these tick, tick, tick and within five seconds you have an answer.
#
Nothing is that simple.
#
Even if you have to think about a question, it takes several days to think and come back with a considered answer.
#
So something that happens in five seconds can't be too deep.
#
So I said prediction I will not do, but I wanted to understand the process and what the ancients are thinking.
#
So I said I will teach you what it means to cast a horoscope.
#
What is a horoscope and what it means to cast a horoscope, but I will not tell you anything about interpreting and so on.
#
We're not bothered about that.
#
And that happened about a week, a week and a half back.
#
I actually did a, I initially promised a 60 minute to a 90 minute presentation.
#
As it turned out, it was a three hour thing.
#
And so some of these same questions, I think.
#
I mean, these questions are technical, so it doesn't make sense to an audience.
#
But the the main ideas is pick up three or four things that you think are the main ideas of this particular activity.
#
And so, for example, how do you identify?
#
What does it mean for a star to be on a sky?
#
How do you identify the star?
#
And if you identify the star, are there multiple systems in which you can identify the star?
#
So it turns out that there is something called the ecliptic, which contains the sun and the earth and so on.
#
Then there is the orbit where the moon and the earth is there as an orbit.
#
So I don't know if you know what Rahu and Ketu are.
#
I vaguely heard the terms.
#
Rahu and Ketu are, in Indian astrology, they are two planets.
#
They are called shadow planets, or chayagraha.
#
But the question is, what are they?
#
I have heard people who argue against astrology and so on, saying we did not even know what planets are.
#
Rahu and Ketu are not even planets.
#
So they know that Rahu and Ketu are not planets.
#
But many of them don't even know what the non-planets are.
#
It turns out that you have the earth and the sun.
#
And the moon and the earth are on a different plane.
#
So these two planes intersect.
#
So when two planes intersect, you get a line.
#
And like the binding of your book, you open a book.
#
There are two different planes and there is a binding, which is the line.
#
So in some sense, the extremes of the line, where the intersection, those extremes,
#
one end is Rahu, the other end is Ketu.
#
And so people understood that.
#
It is not that the ancients didn't know what they were.
#
They not only understood it, they also figured out how it moves in time.
#
They had equations of motion to describe how it moves in time.
#
So it's fairly sophisticated in terms of the math involved.
#
But these are the questions you want to ask.
#
And one of the things that is happening,
#
Okay, so it probably happened because of Shankranti that came.
#
The Shankranti we celebrate is on Jan 14th.
#
But in reality, the solstice happens in December.
#
Mid-December, 14th December or something.
#
So the question on 22nd December.
#
So the question is why is there a 20-day gap between these two events?
#
And I was trying to explain that phenomena.
#
Why there is a 20-day gap.
#
And it has all to do with the fact that the earth is tilted.
#
But not only is the earth tilted.
#
But the tilt of the earth also keeps rotating.
#
Like as if it's part of a cone.
#
And because this rotates, several of these things go wrong.
#
So the seasons start shifting and so on and so forth.
#
So this entire explanation, you have to ask these questions of why it's happening.
#
What are causing these things and so on.
#
I'm not being very specific to the question that you asked me.
#
But I think this is the best I can do at this point.
#
No, it's absolutely fascinating.
#
And my question on just this would be that my sense of it would be that
#
a lot of the mechanistic thinking behind astrology,
#
a lot of the math that went into it, the observation that went into it
#
would be much more complex and rigorous than we give credit for.
#
But the first principles would all be wrong because they could not possibly understand.
#
So it is said that until about...
#
So the first person who actually figured out how planets move and so on, of course, was Kepler.
#
But in reality, I think the equations defining these motions came from Newton.
#
So technically the differential equations to solve these things were set up by Newton.
#
But we did not know how to solve differential equations quite well.
#
Today we know because we have computers and so on.
#
So numerically you can solve them very fast.
#
But we did not have very good numerical techniques at the time of Newton.
#
It required several other people to come in.
#
We read some of these techniques in our bachelors like Euler's method and Runge-Kutta and so on.
#
But these are all more recent post-Newton things, maybe 50 years, 100 years after Newton.
#
Until that point, the best way to predict the positions of, not to predict, but to estimate the positions of planets
#
was to use these formulas that the Hindus had.
#
And in fact, there is a paper by a person called Playfair who says somewhere that somewhere in India,
#
among the Brahmins, a Newton was born, whom we do not know.
#
But this person actually wrote these equations and passed away.
#
The Hindus were... I am using Hindus as ancient Indians.
#
They were different or they seem to be different at least in the eyes of Rodham and Nassim.
#
Very eminent scientist and he used to be the head of NAL at some point.
#
Rodham said that ancient Hindus were computational positivists.
#
They were interested in formulas and so on, but they were not necessarily interested in models.
#
So they did not try and find out like Kepler did, you know, is it an ellipse or is it something else and so on.
#
There is some notion that the Greeks, for example, thought that the way planets moved was using some theory called epicycles.
#
And there is some evidence that the Indians also knew about epicycles and so on.
#
But their interest was not in epicycles.
#
Their interest was knowing whether they are able to get an equation to know where, for example, Jupiter is tomorrow morning.
#
Can I actually figure that out with a great deal of accuracy?
#
And they had formulas to all of this.
#
But there were no explanations. They just had a formula.
#
Because that is the computational part.
#
Computational positivism is that everything in the world can be reduced to some computation and that's all you require.
#
So Rodham used to say that the word that these people use, and I think it is still there in us,
#
there is a Canada word which is also there in Sanskrit.
#
It's called prayojana. In Hindi also I think prayojana is probably a word in Hindi.
#
It is like in Canada you would say en prayojana means what is the use.
#
So anything is presented, the first question that these people ask is what is the use?
#
If it had no use, then why waste time on it?
#
So that seems to have been the driving force.
#
So the question was, if I have a model, the question is what is the use of a model?
#
Finally you want to know where the planet is and I am going to give you a formula for that.
#
So what is the use of knowing any of these other things?
#
So they rejected it. It's not that they were not capable of knowing it.
#
I think they consciously thought there was no prayojana and therefore they said no.
#
Okay, I am not bothered about it.
#
But I think the math that these people knew was fairly deep.
#
They knew spherical trigonometry and so on. There was no question about it.
#
In some sense I mean this is very well known.
#
But apparently it was not well known about 10 years, 15 years back.
#
I think now Indians are catching up on their ancient past in some sense.
#
The notion of sine for example is from India.
#
Sine theta in trigonometry is an Indian origin word.
#
The Greeks used to look at a circle, look at a chord of a circle.
#
And they had tables for measuring the length of a chord in various circles at various angles and so on.
#
The half chord is what the Indians looked at and that is the sine.
#
And so trigonometry in some sense was born here along with algebra and so on.
#
So it was always there.
#
I don't think among the ancients you would have found any gap in terms of their ability to do things or clarity of thought.
#
I don't think there would have been any muddiness about those things.
#
We are fighting various things.
#
I mean there are a bunch of people who claim everything was there in the ancient world and of course that is a stupid line to take.
#
But the opposite line is also stupid which says we knew nothing and these people are just propping things up.
#
Which is also an equally stupid line.
#
I mean my sense is that in terms of things like math and astronomy and so on, you could say we were state of the art at that time.
#
But things like astrology and Ayurveda get their first principle so profoundly wrong.
#
Like I don't think planets affect our bodies and you know Ayurveda's understanding of health and the body.
#
I will give you an answer to that planets affect our body.
#
Of course planets don't affect our body.
#
I don't think that is the right way to look at it.
#
The right way for me to at least the right way I look at it.
#
At some stage I worked at the Institute for Mathematical Sciences.
#
After I finished my PhD I went to Kare for some time and then I went to I was at IIMSE in Chennai.
#
And then I came back to Kare, worked there for another year or so and then I joined IIMSE.
#
So when I was at the Institute for Mathematical Sciences I actually gave a talk on this.
#
But typically for any of my technical talks, research talks, I'll be happy if I can get five people to come.
#
Because usually five people come, usually people and they're working in either the problem that you are looking at or in allied things.
#
So they are experts in those things they come.
#
This is amazing. I think I got over 60, 70 people to come.
#
And I started by saying I wish I had this sort of crowd for my technical talks.
#
And I forgot the context of the astrology planets affecting the bird.
#
So the explanation I provided at that point was the fact that it's not that the planets affect us.
#
The way I look at it is that there are about 10 parameters there.
#
And with some effort you can make that about 20, 30 parameters if you subdivide things and do some more things.
#
And if you're looking at these parameters, you're essentially doing classical curve fitting.
#
If you have about 20 parameters, I think for now when somebody said if you give me 26 parameters I can make an elephant,
#
I can plot an elephant and not only an elephant but I can also make it stunk, wiggle or something like that.
#
So there are enough parameters here for you to make predictions.
#
So the planetary positions gives you enough randomness because it takes a long time for these planetary positions to repeat themselves.
#
So once you have a source of randomness, I mean these are random.
#
They're not truly random because you can see what's happening and I can produce these random bits so to speak.
#
100 years from now, 200 years from now, I know it's sort of a deterministic source in some sense.
#
But there is some non-determinism depending on where you're born and so on that is unique to you.
#
The place you're born and so on has an effect on your horoscope and that's unique to you.
#
So there are enough parameters for people to be able to ask.
#
I get married on this date or somebody dies or I suffer a loss.
#
You can plot these things, yes or no answers you can plot and this is what today's machine learning does.
#
But those answers aren't true, right?
#
Answers are true or not true, it doesn't matter.
#
Can you plot and can you get something which is 70% accurate, 80% accurate?
#
Even if it is 51% accurate, the fact that you're able to even squeeze 1% is still interesting.
#
But can you beat randomness with that?
#
You're not trying to beat randomness.
#
I mean the utility of it only would be...
#
Your predictability is in some sense better than an arbitrary guess.
#
So you can probably beat some randomness.
#
So you probably will always be able to do that.
#
In some sense, I think if LLMs are shown as anything and what OpenAI and so on has done is that
#
if you have enough parameters, there are a lot of things you can learn.
#
You don't need a theory to do that.
#
And you can learn a fair bit.
#
And I do believe here that's what's happening.
#
The nine planets are of course not affecting us.
#
They're very weak sources of randomness.
#
They're very deterministic.
#
But nevertheless, that was the attempt at least.
#
So that's my way of viewing it as an attempt to extract some non-random data,
#
juice in some sense, out of what is decidedly a deterministic source,
#
but probably a pseudo...
#
In computer science, it's called a pseudo random source.
#
Let's go back to your academic journey or the journey of your passions in a sense.
#
Give me a mapping of the different kinds of things you were interested in
#
and how you ended up at computational complexity in the journey you took.
#
Was it a case of this is what I'm passionate about, so I'm not going to do it?
#
Or was it also a case of this is the stuff I'm good at, so it is rewarding to do it?
#
How did all of it play out, the different directions you went in?
#
And what was the story you told yourself about yourself when you were 23, for example?
#
What story did I tell about myself?
#
Okay, so I have to go back to something sometime before that.
#
So here is a story and you said young, I remember the story.
#
The story is about I was I think in my second PUC.
#
I was just joining my engineering second PUC around that time.
#
Those days there used to be this magazine called Mirror.
#
I don't know if you've heard of that or have you read it at all?
#
It rings a bell, but I can't picture it.
#
So there used to be something called Mirror and I think there were two of these magazines.
#
One was called Caravan, which not the new one, but I think the old one.
#
It was probably by this guy.
#
Was there a person called Vishwabandhu Gupta?
#
Anyway, this person had something to do with BJP, something.
#
I forget now what the connection was.
#
Anyway, there was a Vishwabandhu Gupta who had this viral video on YouTube a few years ago
#
where he said that cloud computing cannot work because what if it rains?
#
But I'm guessing it's about the person.
#
I think you probably had to Google who the Caravan editor was a long time back.
#
My associative memory says there's something linking this Caravan, this person and Maneka Gandhi somewhere.
#
Anyway, I can't recall exactly what it is.
#
Anyway, so Mirror had an article about a Swedish woman who apparently went to an airport bookstore,
#
picked up a book there and it changed her life.
#
And the book happened to be the Bhagat Gita.
#
And then apparently she landed somewhere in Uttarakhand, maybe somewhere, Uttar Pradesh those days.
#
Went to some ashram, did something and these people wrote an article on it and I read it.
#
I was sitting in Maleshwaram in Bangalore and I read it.
#
And then my father was reasonably, I think broadly I could describe him as an atheist.
#
He was not interested in anything about Hinduism and didn't care.
#
And he gave me all these other books on chemistry and so on, but he didn't bother me about religion at all.
#
My mother had her views, but they were not deep.
#
They were more like there's a God in the puja room when you pray and so on.
#
The only thing that my father did was he would do the Ganesh puja once a year.
#
Very interesting again, not because he thought he believed in Ganesha, may have had some, I don't know.
#
My sense is he, I don't think he ever asked God for anything or any of those things.
#
But I think he once told me that it's easy to break tradition.
#
This tradition is probably 3000 years, 5000, I don't know, whatever number of years.
#
Ganesh puja probably much, maybe 100 years, probably came from Tilak.
#
But nevertheless, there's some tradition, it's easy to break these traditions.
#
But once the tradition is broken, it's difficult to reconnect them.
#
So his viewpoint was, it's not for me to decide whether you want to be religious or religious and so on.
#
I am neutral about it, I don't care.
#
But you can do what you want, it's not for me to decide that.
#
And I do Ganesh puja because I want you to realize that we live in an environment where these things happen.
#
Now how seriously you take them and how you incorporate them in your life is your problem, not my problem.
#
So when I saw this particular comment, my first reaction was, I'm sitting, I'm an Indian, I'm sitting in India.
#
I haven't read the Bhagavad Gita.
#
Some girl in Sweden is getting influenced by that.
#
What the hell am I doing? What do these books actually say?
#
And so around the middle of my 12th standard probably, or maybe at the beginning,
#
for the next three, four years, I think I did a deep dive into the Upanishads and what did Hinduism say and various things.
#
Since then I branched off to other things like Buddhism and stuff like that.
#
But I did do a fair amount of that in my, between 16, whatever, 16, 17 to about 23.
#
And so I have some reasonable understanding of what Hinduism is and what it says and stuff like that.
#
I read Vivekananda a lot, Ramakrishna and Vivekananda a lot, because they were accessible, a lot of content.
#
So I kept reading them. At some stage you wanted to go to the source, so you started reading Upanishads especially.
#
And the Ramakrishna Ashram has wonderful books on all of these things.
#
So that was, I think it had some influence on me, on my thinking and so on.
#
So this business of looking at astrology and so on happened much later. It was after my PhD.
#
So what got me into research was the fact that around my final year B, or my second year B, something very interesting happened.
#
I was in the first batch of computer science in REC. I went to REC Trichy, which is now called NIT Trichy.
#
And REC is a nice place because you get people from all over India.
#
So in my batch there were 240 people. 120 from, were within Tamil Nadu.
#
The remaining 120 were distributed throughout the country and that was nice.
#
And I was in a wing where, you know, the 21 people, 20 people in my wing were all from different places.
#
Some of them came from, I think, Mumbai had some people, Bangalore had some people.
#
I think Hyderabad, Delhi, all sorts of people. It was a mix of a lot of cultures.
#
So in my second year we sort of realized that we took computer science.
#
We sort of realized that that computer science syllabus was completely useless.
#
And there was really no computer science in it.
#
There was some electronics pretending to be computer science because they thought it was a nice cool thing to do.
#
So as students, we were about 25, 30 of us, so we decided that we had to change the syllabus.
#
And changing the syllabus was not easy.
#
But we had somebody who was powerful in our batch who happened to be the grandson of AVM,
#
the people who make films, who have made films for centuries.
#
And so this person had some influence with MGR or the Chief Minister then and film fraternity and so on.
#
So some 20 odd students got together and they created a syllabus looking at some master's program in IIT and some other place.
#
Some REC in Ahmedabad or somebody in Allahabad, some place had a master's program or a bachelor's program.
#
So it just took some mishmash of various things, put it together and created a syllabus.
#
And we got it through the Senate as well.
#
So we now had the new syllabus.
#
And one of the subjects that we had put, for reasons that are completely unknown to me, it so happened,
#
was this book called Design and Analysis of Algorithms.
#
And the book is a book by Aho Obcroft-Ullman which is a very famous book on algorithms
#
and was probably the only book that was used in my time.
#
A very advanced book, a very famous book and probably used at a graduate level.
#
That book was the recommended book for our undergraduate algorithms program.
#
And we had no teachers.
#
So it was the first batch of computer science, so there was no hiring actually.
#
And we also had one course on discrete math.
#
And it was a funny course because I think they also started a master's program in computing and so on in REC.
#
And there was a lady who was a student of that program who is a teacher of discrete math.
#
And I later heard that in her discrete math exam, the master's level, she apparently did not make it through.
#
Whereas we all passed our exams.
#
So she was the teacher, she was our teacher.
#
She was most like, it's like a teaching assistant becoming a teacher.
#
Somebody was doing a master's and then teaching us.
#
For this algorithms course, there was absolutely no one.
#
So we got one person from some college who should come and teach.
#
And then some portion of this book, I decided to read it up and teach.
#
So I read some parts of AHU as it's called, A Hoop of Thurman.
#
And I taught from that book.
#
And so I had early exposure to an algorithms course, but for whatever reason also happened at a master's level.
#
Two, I took my bachelor's thesis at IIC.
#
I and a friend of mine, we came to IIC, met some professors and somebody took us.
#
And because that happened, that particular year, we did not go to REC.
#
We just spent that year at IIC.
#
I took that, I think the August semester, I took a course on combinatorics, which was a master's level course.
#
And in the JAN semester, I took my algorithms course for my second time.
#
But this time at IIC, it was a full-fledged course taught by somebody who knew what was happening.
#
So by the time I finished my bachelor's, I had a course on combinatorics,
#
which it is a bit like my knowing trigonometry when I was in ninth or tenth or something.
#
Because this combinatorics, nobody at my level knew combinatorics.
#
And yet I had an exposure to a master's level course.
#
And I already had two courses on algorithms at that point.
#
So that, I think, is what made me go into algorithms and complexity.
#
But probably I would not have done complexity theory per se.
#
I probably would have stuck to algorithms.
#
What changed was, I think, so I used to have the person I admired those days,
#
now more her friend than somebody just admired from a distance, a person called Ravi Kundan.
#
Ravi used to be at CMU, and he's a demigod in algorithms and so on.
#
And I was interested in reading his papers and stuff like that.
#
I read a lot of his papers and I was doing some work based on this thing.
#
And the person who knew him is also somebody who I was in touch with,
#
a person called Vijay Chandru, with whom I started these companies and so on.
#
So Chandru was Ravi's first student at MIT, in some sense.
#
And so because of Chandru, I got interested in Ravi's work,
#
and then I started reading his papers and so on.
#
Until I started my first year of my PhD,
#
and then a person called Venkatesan came from Georgia Institute of Technology.
#
He spent a year at IIC.
#
He was a complexity theorist.
#
And he had written a paper in one of the recent conferences,
#
recent at that point in time, that particular year.
#
And I was interested in reading more about it.
#
The reason I had not read more about it was because I had absolutely no exposure to complexity at all.
#
And there was nobody at IIC who actually knew the subject.
#
But the fact that Venkatesan came for a year meant that I could start looking at it and reading stuff.
#
And that particular year, I read a lot.
#
So in the 300 days that were there, I think I read probably about 100 papers or something.
#
I read a lot. Everything that was there, I do it.
#
And that's how I started.
#
If Venkatesan was not there, I don't think I would have got into complexity.
#
I would have continued something which probably would have been more in tune with what Ravi was doing.
#
So that probably was the thing.
#
But that would have been difficult because I think Ravi was not easy to match.
#
And sitting in Bangalore, not having...
#
So I think that was a problem.
#
I mean, you could be as bright as you want or as good as you want.
#
But at that level, if you don't get a good guide, you can't expand.
#
So we still did pretty well, I think.
#
I think the batch of students were there.
#
We all did reasonably well.
#
Many of us got academic jobs and so on.
#
But starting a new area, working in a new area would have been difficult without at least one person like Venkatesan being there.
#
It's only a bit later that I discovered that Ravi himself had done work on complexity when he was at MIT and so on.
#
And after that, he had shifted for the last four or five years after that, he had shifted to other problems and topics.
#
So later on, I met Ravi at various places.
#
We have written joint papers and so on.
#
One of them happens to be in complexity.
#
So we did collaborate later on on a famous theorem called Toda's theorem.
#
We gave an alternate proof of that.
#
So that's how it started.
#
Another sort of theme I want to explore with you is sort of the relationship between science and the real world or science and technology, as it were.
#
Like in many academic fields, you can eventually get into a theoretical space where there is no reflection of what you're studying in the real world at all.
#
For example, if you're studying quantum physics or certain kinds of math, I imagine that you are in that beautiful abstract space where you are surrounded by elegance and beauty, but there's no relation to the real world.
#
And in contrast, what you were studying seems to be intimately connected with how humanity has actually progressed since then, whether in terms of understanding ourselves or whether in terms of the technology that came out of it and all of that.
#
So what was sort of your mindset?
#
Because I think the danger of studying a pure science is that your mindset can be removed from this.
#
But at the same time, you know, throughout your career after that, and we'll talk more about after the break, throughout your career after that, you've actually gone into the real world and tried to kind of make a difference with your science.
#
So how was your mindset evolving and how are you looking at the world?
#
Okay, so I think I have to repeat something a physicist at IAC told me that whatever you talk about quantum physics, there's nothing more real than quantum physics and its relation to the real world.
#
It is the real world. It is just that we don't see it. And if we don't see it, it's because of my inability or the inability of my senses to comprehend.
#
So I just wanted to say that quantum physics is the real world.
#
No, I meant in the sense of how one sees it, one can view it as something removed.
#
Okay, so what is the question again?
#
So my question is, what was your mindset like in terms of relating everything that you're studying, like computational complexity and so on to the changes you see around you in the real world?
#
Because they can at one level be the scientific desire for get deeper and deeper and get more knowledge, but also somewhere that entrepreneurial spark that let me use this knowledge and do these exciting things.
#
Okay, so I think, let me see if I can, if I remember the trail, but do get me back if you think that I'm slipping off into some arbitrary direction.
#
So I am somebody who understands the world only mathematically in some sense. It's very difficult for me to understand the world.
#
Different people understand it differently, but to me, I need a mental model for me to understand things.
#
As an example, the first time I rode my bike, I got a Hero Honda or something when I was young, and I broke my tooth because of an accident.
#
I fell from a Hero Honda, some metador hit me and I fell at a signal and my head hit the, anyway.
#
So what happened was I was on a Hero Honda, I was on a slope on the road, I was coming down the slope and it gathered speed as you would expect coming down the slope.
#
Okay, and I had to take a left turn and I took the left turn at a very high speed and I narrowly missed the divider and anyway survived.
#
And I did not know what I was supposed to do and somebody said, no, you cannot be in third gear when you're going down a slope, you have to be in first gear.
#
And it's not the question of applying the brakes, but you had to be at a lower gear and so on.
#
I didn't understand this at all until a few days later I went and I spoke about this and then Chandru explained to me how gears work and why the first gear you get more torque but less speed.
#
You know, it can take more load and therefore, you know, it will slow down the speed if you're in the lower gear, it wouldn't have rotated that fast.
#
I required that model for me to understand what needed to be done. If somebody just told me go to first gear and that's what you should do, it will not work with me.
#
I need to get that why it is and that why it is usually an explanation which involves some physics, some math, something like that.
#
And that has always been the case with me. I have not been able to understand anything purely, I mean, based on intuition or something like that.
#
I find it very difficult. If I think it's intuitive, if somebody says this is the intuition, I can only internalize it once I have understood a model that can explain it.
#
Otherwise, I'm very, very uncomfortable using it in my work.
#
What really happened I think after I joined IAAC, until I joined IAAC, I was broadly, I am a theoretician mostly, but I was broadly that.
#
When I joined IAAC was the time the internet actually happened. Mid 90s is when the internet happened.
#
And IAAC had an internet project, it had, we had a connection. When even when we were students at 1991, we had, we got connection.
#
But it was very strange. I had to tell you that story because we had to send email. We could send email, we had to send email.
#
We had to send, write our emails on our local machine. It will all get stored at a specific place.
#
One of my friends had actually copied onto a floppy that would go to from my department to the ECE department.
#
And they would take that floppy and load it onto a machine and then send that from I think Bangalore to Mumbai.
#
I think there was a machine called Shakti which everybody in that generation remembers.
#
And I think Shakti or something had to get that. And then that would then get related through one wire.
#
Somewhere to the rest of the world. And that's how it was. So that is how we started on the internet.
#
By 95, the first web pages had started appearing. And I was curious about what these web pages were and what they were doing and stuff like that.
#
It turned out that there was nobody in the department who knew how it worked, which is a very strange thing to say.
#
Today probably, I can't imagine somebody being in the computer science without knowing it.
#
But what was it? 95 is what? I was 30 years back. Nobody knew.
#
I thought there were some students who would be interested. There were two students who had some idea.
#
But even they were half-baked in their knowledge.
#
One of the students actually set up, figured out a lot about Java and figured out a lot about setting these web servers and so on.
#
And it turned out that the only expertise about setting web servers in those days, or at least a large portion of it, was at IAC.
#
So this guy actually went and set up the web server at Rediff, which was one of the first new sites in those days.
#
And this guy called Dinesh, he actually went and set it up there.
#
So he was among the first to know all these things, figure out these technologies.
#
The precursor to Apache was what we used to use. It was called some NCSA or something, web server.
#
And he was a person who understood those things.
#
So my question was, if I do not know this, then if nobody in IAC knows it, then how do we teach this thing? I mean, these are new things that are happening.
#
And in that context, I think I started learning how these things happen.
#
So I became hands-on. And I offered a course called network programming, where I would teach hands-on programming.
#
And my exams were nothing about, absolutely no theory at all. In a sense, I had a lot of conceptual stuff.
#
I would teach about TCP IP and how all these things work, how networking works and so on.
#
But finally, my questions would be a three- or four-hour exam where they had to develop something and they had to build something.
#
So that change only happened because I joined IAC and did not find this thing.
#
Secondly, I also offered a course along with a colleague of mine, who later became my co-founder in many of these companies, called Ramesh Areran.
#
He's the CEO of Stand Life Sciences now. And he and I offered a course on perceptual computing.
#
Again, that was the first course to look at two parts, speech as a perception.
#
And I'll come to why I had to do speech. And the second was user interfaces.
#
Again, probably, I don't think there was a UI course anywhere in India at that point, 95, 96, I can't imagine.
#
And so a lot of students went through it. And it was again a very hands-on course, no exams, they had to build systems.
#
And so that's how I got interested in the fact that hands-on things are useful and stuff like that.
#
On day one, they would all sit in front of machines and they had to make some things happen, do things and stuff like that.
#
The reason I took speech was because I resigned from care in 94. And between 94 and 95, I had to do something.
#
So I and a friend of mine, we went around looking for, we thought we'll start our own company, do something.
#
We went to various people and all these people said, you should go to IAIC and work with some process there.
#
And I'm like, I'm good enough to be a faculty there. Why would I go and work with some process? I have a PhD from there.
#
But this was sort of advice that we used to get. Work with XYZ and then learn something and then we can fund you probably.
#
So then, of course, eventually I applied to IAIC and became a faculty there. So that was not a challenge at all.
#
But we had to survive for a year and that was a tough year because my son was born in 94.
#
And I can't be without non-learning members of the family.
#
So I and a friend of mine, we actually bid a speech project with one of the local companies in Bangalore, a company called Encore.
#
And these are the same people who partnered with us on the Simpita project.
#
And so I, someone knew them and Chandru knew them and then I knew them.
#
And so we managed to do something there and that was speech related stuff.
#
So I had some exposure to that, but all of that was post-PhD.
#
Until my PhD for an algorithms course, I remember my guide used to teach algorithms at that point.
#
And once he hinted that he wanted to give some programming assignments in the algorithms course.
#
And I really was very angry with him. I said, this is an algorithms course.
#
They had to learn how to prove the algorithms that develop, not to code the algorithms that develop.
#
I was really, really angry with him. And he had to sort of calm me down.
#
That this is not some selling out type of thing.
#
I mean, to me, implementing an algorithm was not, that was not the challenging part.
#
The challenging part was thinking about it and coming up with it and understanding why it works.
#
And if it does not work, why it does not work. And that was a skill that one had to have, not copy an algorithm and write a code.
#
And I thought that was an easy way to pass the course or something.
#
And he was diluting the quality of the course.
#
Today, probably I would take a very different view of that.
#
I would probably start with an implementation or something and make them realize that different implementation can result in different running times.
#
And therefore, it's important that you learn how to implement these things.
#
It's not enough to know an algorithm, but implementation matters.
#
So from there, I think the fact that I had to earn some money and therefore I had to look at this speech.
#
And eventually teaching these two courses on network programming and perceptual computing, I think that is probably what made the difference.
#
And I thought every student in IAC, in computer science, as a master's student, they should know how to code well, think about how to code well.
#
And not just code some simple sorting algorithm or something, but do some deep things, some networking, some speech, something.
#
So that was the interest.
#
Then another interest, which I haven't touched on, again, it has to go back to my childhood.
#
Until about 8th standard, I thought I was very poor in drawing and so on.
#
As I said, music was ruled out because my mother decided I was no good at music, so I didn't do music.
#
But in 8th standard, I got a teacher in my school who was a good teacher.
#
He taught me how to draw.
#
And it turned out that I had some talent for drawing, drawing and painting and stuff like that.
#
So much so that I passed two exams in drawing, which are typically prerequisites to get into an arts, a bachelor in arts program.
#
So there's some equivalent of an SSLC or PUC in drawing.
#
You have to take six exams, you know, and there are two years, two successive years you have to take.
#
There's something like junior and senior type of stuff.
#
And I passed all that with some reasonable performance.
#
And I even took part in a couple of competitions.
#
One of them was a competition held in Kappan Park for all students of my age from various schools.
#
Over 2,000, 3,000 students took part.
#
And I painted something and I came back.
#
And next day I go to school and then people tell me that actually I got the first prize.
#
That was a bit of a surprise.
#
So I was not even there to receive the prize.
#
So it was delivered to me the next day.
#
And some certificate was given that it said that I got the first prize.
#
So I had some talent for drawing.
#
And that talent for painting and drawing I think has stood me in good stead.
#
I think this is not controversial.
#
Most engineers have a very poor sense of aesthetics.
#
They ought not be doing anything that is aesthetic.
#
I mean, engineers are the people who land up writing a front-end web design and so on and so forth.
#
But if you allow them, they will write some horrid things.
#
So you do need somebody who understands user interfaces, UX, user experience and so on.
#
And I've been lucky to be in that position.
#
And I have had reasonably large teams of design people who have worked with me.
#
By what your seniority, I've been the boss.
#
But I've had many people work with me.
#
So that has been a good experience.
#
And in that sense also, I think I am an atypical engineer.
#
Well, I think I have some sense of aesthetics which usually all the other engineers in my group,
#
various people, many of them I have, since I've seen hundreds of them,
#
I can safely say probably 99% of engineers lack.
#
In any case, this was the background I think which led to being reasonably close enough to engineering.
#
Now, how did the Simplitas start?
#
The Simplitas started because, okay, so one of the things that happened was in 98, 99
#
or maybe it was 97, Ravi Kundan then shifted from CMU to Yale.
#
And I visited him at Yale.
#
And believe it or not, we had the math to, we actually developed a search engine.
#
And we had some math and Ravi got a patent on it and various things happened.
#
And we actually wanted to be a search engine company.
#
So, I mean, you could have been talking to the head of Google.
#
Well, somebody like Larry Page or something.
#
So, we had a search engine called Manjara.
#
And Manjara was probably about 18 months adrift of Google.
#
Google was a bit, it was earlier by about 18 months.
#
So, by the time I had the confidence of saying that we had something reasonable,
#
I think Google had already got funded.
#
They initially got a funding of over 25 million or something.
#
So, all those things had happened.
#
And in fact, I remember on 98, 99 I spoke, 99 I think I spoke to a friend of mine in the valley.
#
And those days everybody was using Yahoo and another thing called Altavista.
#
And this person who was using Yahoo daily told me something very interesting.
#
Then I was telling him about Google and stuff like that.
#
And I was one of the early users of Google.
#
They even had a newsletter Google had when these guys were at Stanford.
#
And I was part of, I don't know how many there were, maybe 500,000.
#
And I used to get these newsletters saying, you know, we have this new feature, we are doing this and that and so on.
#
And Google was impressive.
#
And I used to tell people in IAC and so on about Google.
#
But this friend was interesting because he was sitting in the valley and he dissuaded me saying all the search engines.
#
We continue to use Yahoo because it's like a newspaper.
#
You don't change your newspaper no matter how better the other newspaper is.
#
And then he said, Vinay, I am sitting in the valley.
#
I have not heard of Google.
#
And you are telling me it is good, but I'm not quite sure how good it can be.
#
I don't know about it and I'm sitting here.
#
And yeah, so that was an amusing start.
#
We did meet the Google people.
#
There was some talk of Google doing something with us, but none of those things came through.
#
We did go and meet the founders of Google at some stage.
#
So those things did happen.
#
So when Manjara was going on, I came back to IAC and I met the senior people at IAC asking,
#
what does it take to start a company from IAC?
#
So Manjara actually was the first example of...
#
Before that, it's not that IAC faculty have not started companies,
#
but they have usually started companies in their wife's name or brother-in-law's name or something like that.
#
They have gone and worked there, but it's been something you do on the sly and not officially.
#
So I wanted to take the official route to see what happens.
#
But somehow Manjara did not happen.
#
Eventually, we got funding.
#
We got funding to the extent of 3 million, including, I don't know how I did this,
#
but we convinced a Brazilian bank to actually fund us.
#
But we did not start the company.
#
We incorporated the company, but we didn't start because that's when the bubble burst.
#
The bubble burst around 1999-2000 and we were not sure it was worth going in
#
and then finding that we can't raise the second round and so on.
#
So we didn't venture forth.
#
Instead, what happened was in 1999, there was a Bangalore IT.com that happened,
#
the first IT.com happened in either, I think it was in 1998 or 98 maybe.
#
And there, there was something called a Bangalore Declaration
#
and Chandru and Manohar were involved in that.
#
And I was helping behind the scenes with various things.
#
And as part of the declaration, they said that computing has to be global,
#
but it has to satisfy the local needs.
#
There's no point in computing being only global.
#
I mean, then you'll get only PC machines for the elite.
#
So how do you spread this to the rest of the world is the question.
#
So things were in the declaration, that's all fine.
#
When something was declared, somebody laid out something and everyone clapped and went off.
#
And then the question that we asked ourselves was, yes, this is there,
#
but who better than us to actually do it?
#
And that is how we, along with the Encore people, who had the good hardware engineers,
#
so there were seven of us, we started the Simputer project.
#
It started as a trust and we developed the Simputer.
#
We had a big event and so on.
#
And then the next question arose, what do we do with the,
#
who is going to productize it to make it happen?
#
And then the answer was the same, who better than us?
#
So we initially wanted it to be IAC Encore, we thought we'd divide and do things.
#
But the Encore people wanted, I think, I don't know, 60%, 70% or something.
#
They didn't want a 50-50 split.
#
And this I can definitely assert that at some stage, some of the people, four of us,
#
some of us were actually prepared to go with that.
#
But I think one of the meetings I put my foot down and said, we are not doing that.
#
We are starting our own company.
#
We don't require these guys.
#
If they're not prepared to treat it as equals, we will not go there.
#
So Picopita started, but started minus Encore.
#
And that's how we started.
#
But while we were doing Picopita, one of the things we did is,
#
Chandru, through someone, we got a project in Boston.
#
There was a startup in Boston who actually was prepared to,
#
it was a genomic company and was prepared to help us.
#
And so they gave a project to us.
#
So that allowed us to get a place and decorate the place.
#
Even those days, I think we spent maybe a crore or something in making the place tables
#
and various things, partitions and so on.
#
And we did it very aesthetically, very, it was a beautiful office.
#
So we started both together.
#
We started Strand Life Sciences and Picopita as Simputers both together.
#
The four of us, Chandru, Ramesh, Manohar and myself.
#
Then what we did is, I and Manohar went with the Simputers project with Picopita.
#
Chandru and Ramesh went with Strand Life Sciences.
#
And I sat on the board of Strand and Chandru was on the board of Picopita.
#
We swapped one person to sit on each other's board.
#
And we used to meet often, we used to talk.
#
And one of the early questions that people would ask is,
#
especially investors, is whether these guys will survive for five years, ten years,
#
or will they fight, the four of them and so on.
#
It's been 25 years, Strand is still going strong.
#
I still am part of some, usually a weekly meeting at Strand.
#
And over the last year, especially because I found more time after my exit from Mahati,
#
I've been contributing in my own way to Strand,
#
which is satisfying because something about early detection of cancer and so on.
#
And about a year and a half back I knew nothing about it.
#
Anything about cancer and how we can detect it.
#
But today I know a fair bit of what happens and enough to ask Ramesh,
#
did you try this or something?
#
Yeah, I came across this charming old website by Ramesh Ariharan,
#
where he refers to you guys as a gang of four.
#
And there's even a picture of you guys there and all that.
#
And before we go into a break, after the break, of course,
#
I'll dive deeper into both Simputer, where there's so much to talk about,
#
and Strand and everything that happens subsequently.
#
But before the break, a quick question about the nature of friendship.
#
Like, did it help in a way that you were scientists to begin with
#
and you got into these projects, you know, driven by that urge to apply that science to something in the real world,
#
rather than from the place many entrepreneurs start,
#
that I want to venture, what idea can I have?
#
They'll look around for ideas, they'll pivot here, they'll pivot there, and all of that.
#
And, you know, in a sense, does that commonality of purpose,
#
despite the fact that all four of you were specialists in completely different things,
#
but at the same time complementary,
#
but, you know, did that commonality of purpose, you know,
#
lead to the friendship being so solid and the partnership lasting so long?
#
And in general, what is your thought of the importance that friendships have played in your life?
#
Okay, I have followed, I think I've used a very simple rule for friendships.
#
I tend to make very few good friends.
#
I don't have, I have maybe 10 very good friends.
#
I don't have, I mean, I know a lot of people, that doesn't count as what I'm talking about.
#
So either people happen to be in my inner circle, the 10, 15 that I talk about,
#
but these are dependable, I mean, I can approach them by anything, anytime and so on.
#
And these are people I don't judge.
#
I am not people, if you are in my inner circle, I will not judge you,
#
no matter what you do and so on, until some betrayal happens or something has to go wrong,
#
something has to seriously go wrong.
#
And then I will start doing basin updates on everything that you tell
#
and I will analyze the tone in which you said something and so on, but I don't care.
#
So there are a bunch of people, strangers I don't really care because you meet them once and go away,
#
so there's no point in spending time analyzing strangers.
#
So I don't care much about what they say or don't say to me.
#
People very close to me, I don't care.
#
I don't judge them, I don't care. They can say whatever they feel like.
#
In between, I tend to be a bit careful because these are the people who can,
#
you don't know, I mean, probably sometimes there are people whom you know,
#
you think reasonably well, but then suddenly they start acting strangely,
#
which is detrimental to you and then you sort of realize, okay, I need to be on my guard.
#
So Chandru, Ramesh, Manohar, Raju for example and so on,
#
these are all people who are, it's an unconditional friendship, I don't care.
#
They can say whatever they feel like, it doesn't matter.
#
I am not going to get affected by what they say unless it's a very serious fight.
#
It's not that we haven't fought, we have,
#
but I think the friendship is strong enough to withstand these fights and so on.
#
Is it important? Of course, it's absolutely important.
#
Otherwise, I think it's very difficult to make.
#
And I think, first of all, one has to realize that in engineering,
#
when you're building things, if you, it's not a one person game.
#
You require good people and you require good teams, you require good people.
#
And you need that trust and they need to trust you.
#
And it's not easy for a stranger to come and spend time with me.
#
I am both harsh, but I also, I think my humor is extremely cutting, biting, sarcastic, whatever.
#
People have to get used to it.
#
It's only after some time they sort of realize that,
#
even if I pull their leg, they sort of realize that I don't mean harm.
#
I just can't let a joke pass.
#
So I have to crack something at their expense.
#
But they sort of realize that I mean no harm.
#
Once they, it's beyond that, I think people who have worked with me have,
#
I can say definitely that I don't like the word loyalty,
#
but I don't know what another word is.
#
Loyalty is to, looks like a politician saying something.
#
What is another word for?
#
I mean loyalty is a good word also in terms of friendship, the bond.
#
I'm not talking about even people who have worked with me, my juniors.
#
But those relations also have been very good.
#
I can call upon them at any point in time and they will respond.
#
And they do believe that I have played an important but positive role in their lives.
#
And I think that is satisfying.
#
So for example, on the Simpita project, I'll just, as an example,
#
Simpita at some, PComputer got acquired at some stage by a company which no longer exists.
#
But when I got out of the company, I started Simpita in 2001 as well.
#
When I got out, it was 2008, 2009.
#
So for about nine years, people worked with me.
#
My core technical team stood with me for this entire nine years.
#
They could have got double, triple the pay and so on, but not one of them moved.
#
And that is what I'm talking about.
#
That is the strength of the relationship that they not only bought into the vision,
#
but they were prepared to, you know, be with me, whatever.
#
I mean, come rain, come shine, whatever.
#
And to that, I think, to that I am very grateful that they could place that sort of faith in me and Manohar as well.
#
I think that's a big deal.
#
I did an episode with Ajay Shah for our YouTube show on UNIX.
#
And towards the end of it, he said something that surprised me a little bit, but then it made a lot of sense to me,
#
where he said that a key factor in the success of that ecosystem
#
and a key part in how we live our own lives and how we should approach our work is the word devotion.
#
And at first, it seemed like a really strong word to use.
#
But then when I thought about it, it made complete sense in the sense that
#
if you are devoted to your work for the sake of it and the people with you,
#
if you communicate that devotion to them and then they share it,
#
then that loyalty or whatever quality we are talking about comes automatically.
#
The higher salaries don't matter, nothing matters.
#
It's a shared purpose and you're part of a clan.
#
Yeah, that is the same as this book, this French book called The Little Prince.
#
Yeah, it's exupery or however it's pronounced.
#
So there is a quote there that if you want people to sail with you,
#
don't talk to them about the length of the boat and various other things,
#
but talk to them about the sea and the sense of adventure and stuff like that.
#
And that is what brings people to this thing.
#
Otherwise, once you get in the ship, it sails and you look around and there's no land anywhere
#
and it's probably raining and there's no water to drink and so on.
#
But what keeps you going I think is the fact that it's the sense of adventure
#
and purpose that brings you together.
#
So that's a quote that I use in many places when I'm giving a talk or something.
#
On that note, let's take a quick commercial break and come back on the other side.
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just a willingness to work hard and a clear idea of what you need to do to refine your skills.
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Welcome back to The Scene in the Unseen.
#
I'm still chatting with Vinay, and we have most of his fascinating journey ahead of us.
#
And I wanted to start with, you know, a question about learning and teaching and mentoring,
#
because what sort of fascinated me, firstly, is that at a lot of times,
#
you were learning things with the intention of teaching them.
#
Like when you gave that lecture on Monday and you started learning on Saturday,
#
or, you know, where you had to sort of learn computer science
#
and all of these new texts coming in and I see yourself.
#
And my first question really is about how, you know, like for me,
#
the quality of my learning goes up exponentially when I decide that I have to learn to teach,
#
because then I am just taking in the first principles so well,
#
I have to be foundationally really solid.
#
And I haven't done that for many things, but for a few things, in fact,
#
I try to get into every new thing with the mindset that I will teach this one day.
#
Not because I want to, but just because it helps me learn better.
#
So tell me about your approaches first towards learning and then towards teaching.
#
Like, was it natural for you to always learn this way,
#
or did you realize at some point that, wow, this really works?
#
No, I think it's always been the way I have learned.
#
I don't think I have tried too many techniques in terms of,
#
let me try a different approach and see if it works and so on.
#
I mean, you keep reading about a Feynman technique and this and that and so on,
#
but this is the way I have learned.
#
So, okay, so one of the things I also learned fairly early in my first year of my engineering,
#
I developed this unique habit which I continued throughout my engineering,
#
which was to take a piece of an A4 sheet, fold it into four parts,
#
one horizontal and one vertical fold,
#
and I would write notes on each of the eight sides that you get.
#
You get eight small pieces.
#
And typically, I figured out that I can finish an entire subject in two of these pages.
#
16 small sides, 16 sides.
#
I would just fold them.
#
I just keep reading, unfolding and reading each small side
#
and about 16 of them and that contains more or less everything.
#
And to me, I think this compression was important.
#
I could have done some small font and finished everything.
#
So the way I would prepare for an exam was where everybody else is probably looking at a textbook and reading and so on.
#
To me, it was glancing these material.
#
And I had a, I won't say that I have a photographic memory,
#
but I have something that approximates photographic memory reasonably well.
#
So, for example, I have this sense of, you know, if I'm talking about an idea or a paragraph,
#
I know it's on the right hand side of a page or it's on the left hand side
#
or it's on the, you know, 30th page or 50th page.
#
I have some sense of where it is in the book and which side it is and if there's a picture.
#
And similarly, I think in my home, I probably have about 500 books or something
#
or lots of math and engineering textbooks,
#
but I usually recognize and think of books in terms of the color and the texture of the book.
#
I hardly remember the title, but if I have to tell something,
#
for example, if I'm telling Shubha, you know, where can I find the book?
#
I'm usually describing, it's a red color book with some yellow on it and so on.
#
And she has also now got used to red color books with some yellow on it and stuff like that.
#
And so that's how retrieval of information happens.
#
So that's how it has always been.
#
So that's probably the only innovation I've had.
#
I think compress information to the extent possible.
#
I've believed in this notion of learning something at a glance.
#
That entire idea should be available to me at a glance.
#
And then I can look at that and I can work my way through the details.
#
But that entire thing should be something that can fit into one frame.
#
And then I say, ah, now I understand.
#
And would that one frame come into your mind by the 16 small side?
#
Like after you've actually gone through the whole thing and then it clears up?
#
Or do you need to begin with that?
#
No, my sense is that I'm digressing, but I think the problem with the education itself,
#
especially engineering and so on.
#
So you have a 300 page textbook, usually has about 10 to 12 chapters.
#
Nobody tells you what are the important ideas there.
#
The person who's writing the textbook treats all the 10 things.
#
Maybe the book has 15 ideas.
#
This person will treat all 15 ideas as important.
#
Simply because I think the person believes that if I don't put this idea in, my book will not sell.
#
I need to be comprehensive.
#
And if it's not comprehensive, my peers will not take it seriously.
#
Then they will not use it in their course and so on.
#
On the other hand, I think, at least the way I look at it,
#
when you look at a book and you read a book,
#
at the end of six months or a year or something,
#
what remains with you are maybe two or three different ideas.
#
Outlines of ideas, not even full ideas.
#
And that is all, that's the essence of that subject.
#
And that's what I want to carry.
#
And my attempt at these 16 pages, 8 pages is to extract that essence.
#
What is the essence of that subject?
#
Now, you obviously have to change the distribution.
#
The author's distribution is that it's a uniform distribution, everything is the same.
#
You sort of realize that no, this idea is more prominent, something is less prominent and so on.
#
So my 16 pages will probably have all these ideas, but in different prominences.
#
When I talk about a frame, I'm talking about a single idea.
#
That idea must be in one box, in one frame.
#
And a subject, I think, should not have more than six, seven frames or six, seven important ideas.
#
That's about it. I mean, whatever you want, you work with those things and everything should fall out from.
#
Those principles in some sense, those major ideas that are there.
#
And that's probably how I would look at any subject.
#
Yeah, so I think that probably...
#
And following on from there, the question of a two-way relationship that happens when you become a teacher.
#
One is the ways that you have learned and the things that you have learned obviously shape your teaching.
#
And at the same time, as you teach, you understand your subject better, you understand yourself better.
#
And I'm guessing that your teaching shapes you as well.
#
And this is a constant sort of symbiotic process that happens.
#
So tell me a little bit about this, because you have taught both within the formal environment of an IASC,
#
for example, where you were for more than 10 years, I think,
#
and also in the more sort of unconventional way of what you did at Jedi,
#
where you realized everything that was wrong with engineering education and you said, no, we're going to do it right.
#
So at a broader level, how did you shape your teaching and then how did your teaching shape you?
#
I think teaching is hard and I still find it hard.
#
And it's probably because I take it seriously that I enjoy it as well.
#
I don't think there's been a single class. It doesn't matter at what level.
#
I taught about two months back, I taught fractions to six standard children in a rural school in Bangalore.
#
It was for 40 minutes. There were two classes of 40 minutes each.
#
I probably spent about 20 hours preparing.
#
I could have walked in, what is it that these children will know about fractions that I don't?
#
I could have walked in, I could have said anything that I wanted, but somehow I can't do that.
#
I have to spend these 20 hours to somehow reorganize and so on.
#
The next time I teach fraction, I will teach it in a different way.
#
I will almost never teach the same material the same way,
#
because I believe that that experience that I've had will shape, I have to iterate.
#
It will shape me differently.
#
And because it has shaped me differently, it will also make sure that I teach it differently.
#
In some small way, there will be change, a subtle change in emphasis.
#
Maybe new ideas come in and so on. That's one part.
#
Second, I almost never plan the sequence in which I want to teach things.
#
That is not how I do things.
#
I know what I want to teach broadly in terms of the content.
#
So here are six ideas that are there and I want to teach, convey these things to them.
#
To me, teaching is a bit like classical music.
#
I'm told that people, I mean, I'm giving an analogy of music, something I don't understand very well,
#
but I'm told that a musician goes to perform the songs that the person decides to perform
#
and the manner in which the performance happens really is dependent on the audience.
#
It's a reaction to the audience.
#
And so how I stitch my lecture together, in what sequence it goes,
#
it really depends on the students, the questions they ask.
#
One of the things I emphasize in my classes, my classes have to be interactive.
#
I have almost never done a monologue.
#
I used to probably do it in my initial days, but it has not happened in the last 20, 25 years.
#
It's never been a monologue where I just go to a board
#
and I just teach for an hour and a half and I come,
#
and the students are all passively sitting there silent.
#
To me, it's an interaction and that interaction they have to figure out
#
and they have to bring the best out of me.
#
If they do not ask the right questions, then I may forget to answer those questions.
#
I may not go down that path at all.
#
So those things have also happened where I come out of the class and I say,
#
oh, I should have spoken about this.
#
I miss talking about this.
#
But it happened because it did not lead that way.
#
So my teaching has been based on interaction.
#
Do not prepare the sequence so rigidly that you can't move away from it.
#
There are people who do that. They know exactly what to do.
#
So broadly, I try not to do slides.
#
I prefer, I have a Wacom tablet.
#
I connect it to my Mac and I write.
#
And that is better than doing this sort of stuff.
#
So that probably is the way I teach and that's worked out well for me.
#
When we are young, we think of changing the world in many grand ways.
#
And I think one thing that I've realized is that one,
#
we'll all have a minimal impact on the world per se.
#
But two, one of the most meaningful ways of having an impact is that
#
you teach someone something that moves him a little bit in one direction
#
and changes his life in a small way.
#
And if you can affect just a handful of people that way, it's a big deal.
#
And you've taught so many people and in the break,
#
you were chatting about your nephew as well and all of that.
#
So I'd like you to tell me a bit about that and the satisfaction it brings you.
#
So his nephew is Ram Pasad.
#
And he is now actually a professor at TIFR.
#
And he says, I'm hoping he's being truthful,
#
that I have had an impact on who he is.
#
And it partly happened because he would come.
#
He grew up in Chennai, but he would come and visit us every summer.
#
And the way he would come,
#
and I would actually probably be doing some fairly sophisticated theorem,
#
and I would probably teach him that.
#
So for example, there's something called the Sperner's Lemma in topology.
#
He was probably seven or six or something when I taught him.
#
And he learned that perfectly and he could execute the lemma.
#
He understood what the lemma said and so on.
#
When I think around the same age, I think he discovered negative numbers by himself.
#
One fine day he was chatting with me and I asked him something
#
and he just looked at me and said 0, 1, 2, 3,
#
and he said there must be numbers on the other direction also.
#
And I was quite shocked. I was so shocked that I was at Maths Science then
#
at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences.
#
I went and told a very famous number theorist called Balu.
#
So I went to Balu and said this is what my nephew did.
#
And Balu's reaction was fantastic.
#
I think you should encourage him to do some maths and so on.
#
And then at some stage he became the usual student, took the IIT exam and so on.
#
So 11th and 12th he was not interacting much with me.
#
Somewhere I think before six months before the 12th exam happened, January or something like that,
#
I spoke to him and then I said why didn't you take the CMI entrance exam?
#
CMI is Chennai Mathematical Institute and I asked him to take the entrance exam.
#
And he went there and there used to be somewhere in Teenagar.
#
It was a one floor, some place like this, small place, small classrooms and so on.
#
He was confident of getting into IIT and he had a lot of extracurricular activities
#
at this and that large campus and a different life and so on.
#
He was like, Chitappa, I don't like, I'm not quite sure of this place.
#
It looks too constrained and stuff like that.
#
I said just take the exam, let's see what happens.
#
And then he was again rebelling, he didn't want to and stuff like that.
#
And finally the present director of CMI, Madhavan and another friend from CMI, Kumar,
#
both of them, we used to run the Olympics in Bangalore those days, the Informatics Olympics.
#
The three of us used to run it.
#
And both of these gentlemen had come for that.
#
And they visited me for dinner one day.
#
Then I asked Rampasar to come for that dinner.
#
So he came from Chennai.
#
So all three of them are in Chennai, Madhavan, Kumar and Rampasar.
#
Anyway, Rampasar took the night bus, came to Bangalore and then stayed on for dinner,
#
interacted with these people.
#
Apparently what surprised him was that all three of us were joking.
#
And we were laughing and joking and badmouthing some people.
#
And we were doing all the normal things that people do.
#
And that somehow surprised him.
#
And then he actually joined CMI, finished his degree there,
#
got interested in computer science,
#
got to work with the best known complexity theorist in India, Manindra Garwal.
#
So he worked with Manindra for his thesis.
#
So I see him as a sort of replacement.
#
I have stopped doing complexity, but he does similar things.
#
And probably he does better things than I have, but he does similar things.
#
Much of the initial maths and also complexity that he learnt, he learnt from me.
#
And all happened during his visits during summer and so on.
#
And I think one of the things that he spoke about in some other context was the Rubik's Cube.
#
Apparently I did not give him a solution to the Rubik's Cube,
#
but told him how to think about solving it instead of giving him a way to solve it.
#
Or saying this is an algorithm, just try it and it works.
#
So he said the fact that I did not give him the actual solution,
#
but actually told him how to think about it,
#
he took about a week or something, but he found a solution.
#
To him it was a turning point apparently because he figured out that he could think independently,
#
because somebody said I have not given you an answer.
#
So it seems to have played an important role in his growing up in some sense,
#
coming to age in terms of math and thinking of proofs.
#
That's a fantastic lesson.
#
Let's go back to chronology now and talk about the Simputer.
#
You've described how early on you guys decide that you're going to come up with the Simputer,
#
the whole journey to forming PicoPeta and all of that.
#
But take me back a little bit and tell me about what you thought was the purpose of a machine like this.
#
What is the problem you were trying to solve?
#
You've already spoken about how you had to cater to local needs,
#
but when I think about some of the things that the Simputer was doing in terms of,
#
and this is in 2000, enabling online banking, electronic commerce, micro banking,
#
providing multipurpose citizen cards, actually having a SIM card inside it that does all of this, operated by a battery.
#
A lot of it seems like way ahead of its time.
#
In fact, you had an accelerator on the Simputer well before the iPhone did it,
#
and so many people think the iPhone was the first for an accelerometer.
#
Tell me a little bit about how you conceived of it.
#
Did you conceive of it thinking of what does India need right now and therefore what can the tech do?
#
Or did you just know that the tech can do all of these things and my God, it can be so useful?
#
Take me through some of those early brainstorming sessions.
#
I'll just start with a one-line description of what the product is really, or where the idea of the product came from.
#
It's a realization that a few bytes of data can change your life.
#
And what are these few bytes of data?
#
An example was the fact that somebody wants to sell, let's say, tomatoes somewhere.
#
In those days, even now it's famous, but it was especially true in those days that people would go to a particular Monday somewhere
#
and they would find that the prices have crashed.
#
They could not even select.
#
I mean, typically there are about two, three of these Mondays around,
#
and they could not even figure out what the price is.
#
So they had to go there with all their stuff.
#
They would transport it, and then they find that you're getting one rupee or something per kg of tomato
#
or 50 paisa per kg of tomato, and then it's a complete loss.
#
So all that they required was some way of informing them of what the current price is.
#
And that's a few bytes of data when they start their journey.
#
That's about it, right?
#
The same thing is true when somebody is going for fishing.
#
What do they need to know?
#
They need to know a weather forecast, and they don't need to be able to read a weather forecast.
#
They just need to know whether on that particular day,
#
is there a likelihood of a storm or something of them getting walked away somewhere,
#
or can they actually get back home safely?
#
It's again a few bytes of data.
#
There was another instance which was called Pygmy Banking,
#
which was very famous in Bangalore in the 70s, 80s, and continued to the 90s.
#
So what would happen is in places like Malaysia and so on, which had large markets,
#
you would actually get a Pygmy banker, typically from one of the banks.
#
I think the most famous was Syndicate Bank.
#
This person would go to a vendor and collect some 10 rupees, 5 rupees every day and continue life.
#
And then once a month or something, their passbook would get updated.
#
But the idea was that they save money every day.
#
No matter what happens, this guy lands up, they give some 5 rupees.
#
They set aside 5 rupees, no matter what their business is for that day.
#
So the idea was that they accumulate some money.
#
And these vendors are actually the real entrepreneurs.
#
Because if you look at their probability distribution, it's very, very nice.
#
The variance is very large.
#
And despite the large variance, every day they go and they try to sell,
#
they try to make money and run their families.
#
But it's not easy at all.
#
And there the people are taking the risks.
#
It's a very risky thing.
#
One day it rains, they don't get a customer.
#
You may have some flowers and so on.
#
It's very easy to destroy.
#
Maybe it's sun, it wilts and you lose a lot of it.
#
So it's a difficult life.
#
What would happen is these Pygmy bankers would actually run away with the money.
#
So they would accumulate this money.
#
They would deposit it at periodic intervals, but they would not do so in the bank.
#
And one day they just vanish.
#
And the bank would probably say, I don't see the money in the bank, so I'm not paying you.
#
So they lost that one month of money in the bank and the interest that they got and so on.
#
So the idea was to just introduce a simple smart card.
#
And everybody has a smart card.
#
All the vendors and stuff like that.
#
So it was something that the banker asked.
#
And they put the smart card, a few bytes of data, that data goes in.
#
That the transaction happened.
#
Now the bank cannot deny that the transaction did not happen.
#
So it was based on the simple ideas.
#
Then we saw somewhere that in Bangladesh, I think, there was a mobile phone that an entire village would have.
#
And somebody, maybe from Europe, people travel and migrate.
#
Or maybe Europe or maybe some other place.
#
They would call the family.
#
And this person would take the call.
#
And the village is small enough that you can actually go and hand over the phone and people would talk.
#
So we said, why can't we do this for transferring money?
#
Because people typically happen to be in some other place.
#
And you want the money to get transferred to you, to the family, in some other village or something.
#
Now why can't we enable this using smart cards and so on?
#
So the idea was to use smart cards as a piece.
#
Not as a computing device, but as something that every individual has.
#
And the simple way is something that travels along.
#
A simple example, again, is health care.
#
In health care, you want to go to the office, the primary health care center, you want to go there.
#
But then the doctor is there, but then there's a long queue.
#
And you don't know whether he'll get your appointment or not.
#
It would be so nice if a postman on the previous day could actually go around the village.
#
And get data about who wants to visit the doctor the next day.
#
And these are all the guys who are booked.
#
Again, smart card has data about your health or what your problem is.
#
Or maybe what medication they're taking.
#
All in a few, in a tens of bytes. That's about all.
#
So it turns out that there's a lot of stuff that you can do by just a few bytes of data.
#
And either transmitting or capturing a few bytes of data.
#
So the Simpita was just built with all of these cases.
#
Just the idea that a few bytes of data can make a difference.
#
And then the question is what are the things that you require?
#
We put each one of the smart cards, came because of this.
#
We wanted a smart card with each person in a village.
#
That would be a way to transform.
#
And a postman or somebody who is a trusted person in the village would have the Simpita.
#
And they would do the moving around.
#
We did not even think that it's required that every person has to buy a Simpita to make things happen.
#
That may or may not be useful.
#
So that was basically the idea.
#
The most obvious next question is, does the Simpita succeed or fail?
#
I'll come to that whenever you want to ask.
#
So what was your original plan?
#
How did you plan to sort of operationalize it?
#
What were the hurdles you faced?
#
The hurdles we faced was money.
#
And this I've said many times before.
#
I had about 40 people at some stage.
#
About 30 engineers, probably 10 support staff, various types.
#
The 30 engineers are very good.
#
Each one of them motivated and so on.
#
Of which, as I said, about 10 of them, the senior people, they stayed with me for 8-9 years.
#
The remaining people went for higher studies and various other things.
#
And I was burning at something like 20 lakhs per month, which is 1 lakh a day.
#
And at no point did we have more than about 60 lakhs in the bank.
#
So it is about 2-3 months of burn.
#
There have been times when that 60 lakhs has become 20 lakhs.
#
And we are wondering where does the next month's salary come and so on.
#
But I'm happy to say that in Picapita, we did not default either on salary or on rent or on anything, even once.
#
Somewhere we went, we found money, we did it.
#
But it was not easy to raise money.
#
We somehow had the confidence of finding it and somehow we did it.
#
But it is not that we had 10 crores in the bank and we built something.
#
Some of the money came from the government.
#
We got money from TDB for about a couple of crores we got, stuff like that.
#
And they would release the money in transfers and stuff like that.
#
But it is not an easy journey.
#
What would happen when we went to VCs and so on is
#
everybody understood mobility and phones and so on.
#
So they all had their own ideas about these things.
#
And they were not particularly thrilled about the things that I spoke about.
#
I don't think it moved a needle in terms of what VCs wanted to hear and so on.
#
And many a times I think many of them would actually say, well, if this is what you want,
#
I hear you, but I hear that you also have this other company called Strand.
#
Strand was a more mystical company doing some biology and genomics and so on.
#
So we got a lot of investment into Strand, but not so much into anything.
#
But I will tell you two things which are interesting because more recent context.
#
At some stage, Sequoia came to India.
#
And the people at that point were talking with Sequoia and so on.
#
They wanted to showcase some technology in Bangalore.
#
And the entire Sequoia team landed up in Picapita.
#
We did not get any money from anyone, but they spent about an hour with us and then they went somewhere.
#
The same thing happened when NVIDIA started in Bangalore.
#
The chairman of NVIDIA came to Picapita because it so happened that the person who was heading the NVIDIA office in Bangalore
#
also was an investor in this computer project.
#
He put a small amount of money, but he did put something.
#
And so he got the chairman of NVIDIA to come and spent about an hour with us in Picapita.
#
So in some sense, we were one of the only talk in town 25 years back in terms of technology.
#
Nobody else had, I mean everyone else was about body shopping and services and so on.
#
Not that there's anything bad with it, but that's how it was.
#
I think in 2001, Bruce Sterling wrote a piece in the New York Times about how the great innovation of the year is not something in Silicon Valley from Apple, but Simputer.
#
I don't think it failed.
#
I think we measure success as money.
#
And that probably is where we are wrong.
#
I think there's a computer scientist called Barbara Lishko.
#
And Lishko is a Turing Award winner, which is equivalent of a Nobel Prize.
#
Lishko came up with a language called, I think, Clue, if I remember, which is an object-oriented language.
#
And she was one of the early pioneers of object-oriented language.
#
But the language that she developed went nowhere.
#
But the ideas that were there over the object orientation eventually found their way into Java and other things.
#
As far as Lishko is concerned, she succeeded.
#
You can argue that she developed a language and it failed.
#
I don't think it failed.
#
Failure is not in terms of the fame it provides you.
#
It is in the impact it creates.
#
Did it start a ball rolling?
#
It's like this Goldberg, right?
#
There's a marble or something that hits and then it keeps falling.
#
And there's a domino effect, right?
#
Or a relay race of knowledge in a sense.
#
So I think we set the ball rolling.
#
And that, I think, nobody's going to take it away from us.
#
And the reality is that despite all of these years, 25 years later,
#
how many ideas can you think of that's come from the Indian ecosystem?
#
Which can match this computer very few.
#
I mean, we were the first Linux machine, we were the first to use the accelerometer.
#
And not only were we the first, we were the first to use a...
#
Once upon a time you used to have something called a USB master and a USB slave.
#
The USB slave was a much thinner port in some sense.
#
And the USB master you would use, master and slave, depending on what the other side was, right?
#
For example, even with this computer, I used to have a Sony digital camera.
#
But I could connect it to the computer and download the photos.
#
Because I could treat the computer like a desktop.
#
It had a master and the Sony was a slave.
#
On the other hand, there were various other devices where the small handle device would act as a slave and not as a master.
#
A slave because it had to sync with the desktop and it would do that.
#
So I would say, no, that's not the case.
#
And I think we foresaw several of the technology innovations that happened at that point in time.
#
And so one of the things on the Simputer, which still I can still claim hasn't come fully,
#
but it took me about 10-12 years to see it, is the ability to annotate on the Simputer,
#
the Simputer that Pika Pita developed, which was called the Amida Simputer.
#
You could be on any screen.
#
You could be on an email.
#
You could be on a photograph.
#
You could be listening to music.
#
You could be on a web page on anything.
#
You could press a button on a click and you could annotate it.
#
You could write on top of the screen.
#
The next time you came back to the same web page, the same photo, it would come back.
#
The same annotation would come back.
#
So this required some modification of the system at a deeper level, but we achieved that.
#
And then on the second click, you could immediately share it.
#
There was absolutely no entering any email and so on.
#
You could immediately share that image with your significant other, just on a one press.
#
One press to annotate, one press to send to one person of your choice, something like that.
#
It's only in 2013 that I saw a Samsung ad, I think it was for the Galaxy,
#
where they showed a photograph of a baby being born or something of that sort,
#
and some father or mother writing a happy birthday or something, things of that sort on a photograph.
#
That happened a good 10 years after that idea was there on the Simputer.
#
Have people looked at the Simputer?
#
I believe that every major company has looked at the Simputer.
#
I know for a fact that somebody I know spoke to a design engineer in Apple.
#
This was around 2007 or so.
#
And the person said that they had got a hands on the Simputer and they had seen it.
#
So had Microsoft and Apple seen the Simputer? The answer is yes.
#
There was some story I can't watch for this, but there's a story that when Bill Gates came to India,
#
I forget now which year he came, but he came around 2007 or 2008.
#
Somebody apparently had asked him, what do you think of the Simputer?
#
And they actually gave a reasonable answer, signifying that he had looked at it, he had kept track of it.
#
So I think all of these people were aware of it, they had seen it.
#
It was not a commercial success because I think we did not have the money to market it.
#
And unless we had the money to market it, it was not going anywhere.
#
It is not that we did not have good people to market it, we had a good team also.
#
All those youngsters who were part of my marketing and sales team,
#
they're all holding very senior positions today in various MNCs.
#
The senior people at that point in time were really very good.
#
One of them was a founder of Shere Khan, one of them was the head of Unilever in the Middle East.
#
So they were very senior people. So it's not that we didn't know what was happening or we didn't know how to sell.
#
We just did not have the money to make it happen.
#
At a personal level, I think we wanted to…
#
I don't think this importer looked very very interesting.
#
We were told that we wanted to go to Hong Kong to actually get the cover made, the casing and so on.
#
But simply because it had a lot of curvature and so on and we thought that it couldn't get done in India.
#
But finally, I think the SARS flu actually hit and Hong Kong became a problematic place.
#
And the people who had to put in the money, we had tied up with BEL for the hardware.
#
They would manufacture and stuff like that.
#
So they were actually putting money upfront for the hardware cost.
#
The cost of goods came from them.
#
At that point, the chairman of BEL thought that going abroad doesn't make sense
#
because it may get quarantined or something and we may not be able to release the consignment.
#
So in the meantime, somebody in Pune started it.
#
There was a Philips company which started it.
#
So they said we'll be able to do it in India.
#
I forget whether it's Philips or somebody else, but they said we'll do it in India.
#
So we said okay, it can be done.
#
They said we have some new machines, we'll do it.
#
I remember the disappointment that happened the first time that box came.
#
So we had some beautiful design and on the sides where it was curved, there were wrinkles
#
simply because that machine was not able to generate enough pressure to stretch it exactly at that point.
#
So stuff like this happened and there was nothing that we could do.
#
So we said okay, we're not going to put a themed cover on that.
#
So then they did what was a terrible idea.
#
They got a plane car and then they painted it with silver, black and so on.
#
Not the best of things.
#
That was the day I think part of me that died.
#
Lots of other people thought it was fine, but as I said, engineers are okay with a lot of things.
#
But if you have a bit of aesthetics in you, you can't go with this.
#
But there's nothing much that we could do.
#
I think if I had 20, 30 crores, I think the story would have been different in terms of commercial success.
#
But I am at peace with myself.
#
I don't regard it as a failure in terms of its ideas, in terms of what it did,
#
and simply in terms of the wonderful time I had building it.
#
So what's the big deal about the failure?
#
You climbed Everest, there's no commercial success to climbing Everest, but you do that.
#
It's accelerating and then you come down.
#
In one respect, you remind me of Mahatma Gandhi,
#
which is that Gandhiji is correctly given credit for the whole philosophy of non-violent resistance,
#
Satyagraha, changing the world, changing the way so many others like Nelson Mandela fought their battles.
#
And yet, every individual Satyagraha that he undertook was a proximate failure.
#
Perhaps the last of the South African ones was half a success, so he could save face.
#
But every one of them failed, if you look at the proximate aims.
#
But overall, they mobilized the whole nation together and changed the world, etc.
#
But in proximate terms, they failed.
#
So when you speak of the Simputer actually succeeding in a larger sense, I totally get that.
#
And how important does luck and timing play a part in this?
#
Because what you came up with was pretty revolutionary,
#
but it seems to me that it came up too early and in the wrong place.
#
And had it come three years later in Silicon Valley, for example, who knows?
#
But what's the sense of the role of timing in all of these things?
#
So timing is important.
#
One, I think we could not sell the Simputer in the US for the most stupid reason.
#
Somebody in the Middle East actually took a trademark on the Simputer world.
#
And they said they cannot sell in the US.
#
They actually filed something in the New York Circuit Court.
#
They actually put an injection saying that we cannot sell it there.
#
But you could have changed the name.
#
We didn't want to change the name. That was the name we were known with.
#
And so we actually fought that case.
#
So it did come in our favor.
#
So one of the things that luckily had happened is,
#
I think Rahul Mathan, who used to be a tri-legal, probably still is.
#
Rahul was young. You know Rahul probably.
#
Young Rahul who had just passed out of National Law School.
#
So I don't know whether he will take it.
#
Hopefully he should take it as a pinch of salt.
#
But we gave him the first big break with the Simputer.
#
So he was a legal advisor on the Simputer project.
#
So one of the things they suggested was to write something on the Simputer
#
and put it on the cover and mail it to ourselves.
#
There would be a stamp and stuff like that.
#
We had done that and somehow all these things were used
#
to make sure that they establish some precedence about the word Simputer.
#
Rahul also drafted the entire simple Simputer legal document
#
which allowed people to use the Simputer in their own designs if they wanted to and so on.
#
So the licensing part was something that he had worked on with us.
#
And then all our companies, they all started at his office technically
#
because he gave that as the name of the office and so on.
#
It's only now he was interested in IP because we'll claim some credit for that.
#
But I think he's been doing very good work in the last decade or so.
#
He's been doing a lot of other things, writing books and so on.
#
Okay so that was about Rahul but that was not where we started.
#
The question was about in a sense the tragedy of time.
#
Oh yeah, the tragedy of time.
#
I think probably if we had the ability to go outside of India, we still would have done well.
#
But I think we would have to improve the quality of the final casing and so on.
#
And see there, you want to make a die for it.
#
Even those days a die would have cost about 40-50 lakhs.
#
Now once you made a bad die, nobody wants to junk it.
#
Because the argument was we already made this die, we already paid 40-50 lakhs.
#
Now what's the guarantee that the next die will come out better and this and that and so on.
#
And where do you find these machines? It's too expensive to make it.
#
We can't sell it at this price point.
#
All of these questions come up.
#
I don't think we were a bit ahead but we were the first to do things.
#
But that is not really a bad thing because if you look at many products,
#
being the first in a category is also good because it allows you to plant a flag and make sure that you corner the market.
#
Like Microsoft for example, when they initially started with DOS and so on.
#
They had the first more advantage.
#
I really think it just comes down to money.
#
I can't think of, because we had the team.
#
We had a very good team, not just technologically but in terms of sales and marketing as well.
#
It's not that I was trying to sell it or Manohar was trying to sell it and we had no experience.
#
It is that we had good people.
#
And we would have found good people.
#
There were people who were prepared to join us simply because it was exciting times.
#
So I don't think, it was not even talented, none of these things.
#
Are there issues with VCE's mindsets then and now that are also a problem?
#
Whether it is thinking in hidebound conventional ways or in the current VC environment,
#
would it have been much easier to get funding?
#
Or the mentality has stayed the same, the problems are the same?
#
I think it's by and large the same.
#
Some things have changed.
#
It's not that people have not funded technology companies.
#
There are companies in aerospace now.
#
The companies are making satellites.
#
So there are newer technology companies.
#
It's not, I'm not saying it's empty but it's still hard.
#
Even with ATI, when we were trying to raise money and so on, it's not been an easy sell.
#
Technology is not necessarily, I mean ATI, I think it's,
#
the fact that it's an autonomous vehicle, it's blindingly obvious that it's not true technology.
#
But I think it's also part, today I think the problem is,
#
no matter what I tell you, right, it's very difficult to surprise you.
#
Simply because I think we have seen so many things.
#
I mean, I think we've come to a level where we think that you press a button, things happen.
#
There's no need to understand anything behind it.
#
So it's difficult to surprise.
#
I think the major surprise has been ChargPT.
#
Even that people don't think is a surprise.
#
There are lots of people, if you look on Twitter, right, who are formally Twitter, now known as X.
#
If you look on Twitter, you will find that a lot of people are critical about ChargPT.
#
Oh, it doesn't do this well, that well and so on.
#
But if you're genuinely honest and you look at what it can do, it's astonishing.
#
So it's far, it's more and more difficult to surprise people with technology.
#
It's all taken for granted.
#
And I think that is also the problem with any of these things.
#
Those days, I think my problem, I think the simple thing was those days, I think people did not want to back hardware.
#
They did not think that it was, you know, it was sort of written that India is a software car, this thing, services place.
#
And that's what we should do.
#
And I also want to sort of double click on that mindset because a lot of our success in IT was really doing lower order stuff below the API, code coolies, body shopping, like you said.
#
So there were very few entrepreneurs, particularly 25 years ago when you started, who are doing higher order thinking and who are really, you know, genuine innovators for the world.
#
And I guess to some extent, some of that mindset might have changed today.
#
I don't know, you know, this ecosystem better.
#
But so what is your sort of sense of that?
#
Was that always a barrier that when people are looking to start, they're looking first to the West and then, oh, there's Amazon, let's build a flipkart and etc.
#
Rather than, you know, was part of the reason that you guys thought out of the box that you did not come from conventional entrepreneurship and MBA kind of background.
#
But you were pure scientists and you were, you know, coming from there.
#
So it's true that in the 2000s, I think the big companies were, you know, the Infosys, the TCS, and then lesser companies are doing the same type of work, but for smaller companies in the US and Europe and so on.
#
I mean, Narayan Murti genuinely believes that, that it was in fact, you know, a major innovation.
#
And I do believe that it was a business innovation.
#
It probably was not a technology innovation, but there was definitely a business innovation in what they did.
#
But I think it's very difficult to convince them that that technology, whatever they were doing was not very deep or something like that.
#
We can say these things, but the reality is that they brought in a lot of money into Bangalore, for example, and they did change the way people lived.
#
Elsewhere, I will tell you this, that there are people who actually, at a different point in time, around 2013-14, we wanted to build Jedi in a slightly different way.
#
And that slightly different way did not happen because we wanted to develop engineering in a certain different way.
#
But it did not happen because when we spoke to people, the answers that we got was that we got rich without doing any of these things.
#
Now, why are you saying that we need to do these things?
#
And so there was this idea that, you know, I have gone through an experience in this life and that experience did not require me to do anything.
#
I probably had to work somewhere and start a company, do something.
#
I did whatever was required, but it did not require any of the things that you are talking about.
#
And so why do you think that innovation requires this? It doesn't require these things.
#
So I had a harsh, I mean, I'm meant to say some controversial things.
#
I think I had said this before, it is not new, that it's never happened in history, that no point in history has people with so little debt,
#
mediocre people have been rewarded so richly as probably what has happened in the last 25 years.
#
I don't judge them for their money, but I judge them for what it does to the ecosystem.
#
And the acceptance of mediocrity.
#
Precisely. So that I think is the main problem.
#
And how do you change that? It will change, but very slowly.
#
I mean, look at what's happening today, right? In the last one month, two of the flagship product companies or the companies that you want to talk about,
#
unicorns and so on, whether it be Paytm or it be Biju's.
#
I don't know these people personally, but the fact that they're undergoing whatever they're undergoing is a reflection of the fact that
#
there's a belief that in India you cannot do business cleanly.
#
And there I have to give credit to the TCS and Infosys and so on.
#
Nobody is going to say anything about those guys.
#
But every unicorn that comes up off late, you don't know why they're a unicorn.
#
And you don't know what makes them a unicorn, what's the big idea.
#
And then you keep seeing messages which keep saying these people have only a revenue of 20 lakhs, 30 lakhs, but they become a unicorn.
#
And just because somebody put money into them. And then sure enough after some time they fail.
#
Yeah, but yeah, that's how it is.
#
Yeah, partly a consequence of easy money flowing in from the West, but also like I completely agree with you.
#
Like when I look at Biju's, they are not doing anything to redefine education at all, whereas so much disruption is needed.
#
They're just changing the delivery mechanism, which is we'll teach you online.
#
Let's talk about Jedi and let's talk in general about your thoughts on education and the need for reimagining it at every level.
#
Yeah, so it goes back to the Simputer story.
#
And in particular, the material that was used to make this plastic.
#
So I was technically the CTO of the Simputer project and also the NPcomputer.
#
I sort of realized that while I could do programming and various other things, there were a lot of other things that I was not good at.
#
So the realization at the end of the Simputer project for me personally,
#
was that engineering is of course being good at something and being good at something will get you a job and that is fine.
#
But personally to me, to be myself, to run a company or something,
#
I needed to be in a position to talk to people about various aspects of engineering.
#
I may not be an expert, but I need to be able to converse with you and catch you if you're doing something wrong or if you're trying to take me for a ride.
#
And that was the realization that I came toward the end of the Simputer project that I needed to acquire.
#
And much of it was acquired on this thing because you have to write drivers, you have to do things.
#
So you had to deal with hardware, but I didn't deal with hardware at the level of picking up the chip or soldering and so on and so forth.
#
But at the other end of the hardware, there are lots of things I've done.
#
So definitely one of the things I can claim, even on the Simputer and other things,
#
every first idea whether it's the sanitation or anything else or the accelerometer, usually I've written the first code.
#
It's been my code, I've written it, I have tested it, I know it works.
#
And then I tell people, now it works, now you go ahead and do whatever you feel like.
#
And they have done marvellously well.
#
So one of the nice things about the accelerometer and various other things is we used to have something called Golgoli on the Simputer.
#
So you must have played this game with lots of arcs of circles and there are ball bearings kept inside and you have to move it to the center.
#
So one of the employees actually simulated that using the accelerometer.
#
There were lots of these circle and arcs and so on and you had to go to the center.
#
And there were some three balls that you had to move there.
#
Fun, okay. And you show it to anyone.
#
In 2003, 2004, they were all mesmerised by, you know, oh, it can do this and that and so on. It was fun.
#
So when we started ZI, one of the first things I did was I spent about two years looking, buying all textbooks that are available across disciplines.
#
Civil engineering, mechanical engineering, electronics, electrical, whatever it was, I bought them.
#
And I went through all the subjects one by one to understand what was, you know, what did the subjects say and what was the main ideas and crux of these things.
#
It doesn't make me an expert on any of these things, I lack knowledge, because I was doing this 15 day type of thing.
#
I would pick up a subject and spend 15 days on this.
#
Okay, these are five main ideas.
#
Go on to something else. These are the four or five main ideas and so on.
#
And it so happened that while I was doing this, I think Raju was also in between jobs.
#
So we would speak every week for three hours.
#
I would pick up something and then we would discuss these things in detail and stuff like that.
#
And one of the things in that process was, which I understand reasonably well, much better than most people, was this notion of a Kalman filter.
#
Kalman filter tells you that you observe things, but there is a bunch of equations, let's say equations of motion that are happening in the background.
#
So you observe something, okay, upward position and velocity that you physically see.
#
But from that, can you say what the internal state of the machine is?
#
That's a Kalman filter and that was one of the big innovations that was responsible for, for example, for something to go to the moon without drifting.
#
The question is, if it starts drifting, how do you self-correct?
#
How do you re-estimate, you know, your parameters and get back on trail and so on?
#
So Kalman filter is one of the big ideas of engineering, I mean, any engineering.
#
And I remember we spent three months trying to read every possible thing about Kalman filter and both of us, Raju and myself,
#
of course the maths is there, you try to read the maths, of course you get the maths, but it doesn't mean you understand.
#
So finally, after three months later, we eventually came up with a way of thinking about it.
#
And I've taught that several times in all my companies to whosoever is willing to listen.
#
And now I can, I go into this thing and say, in one hour I will teach the entire thing.
#
And there's not a single place where you'll feel I don't understand this.
#
But it takes about three months of effort.
#
Now why nobody has written this one hour thing as a book or something, I don't know.
#
My sense is that every expert in the area obviously knows these things, otherwise they will not be experts.
#
But they're unwilling to write it for an undergraduate level.
#
And so education has to put another controversial spin.
#
So people tell you that I'm using Brahminical in a very metaphorical way.
#
It's a sense that you're made to jump through hoops.
#
I will not give you the solution, I will not tell you what this is.
#
If you jump through this hoop successfully, and ten of these hoops,
#
I'm willing to then entertain you as my equal and now let's talk research and so on and so forth.
#
But they're unwilling to...
#
So my idea of research, for example...
#
Okay, so I have to tell you something funny.
#
So I am not somebody who actually goes and does all the exercise problems in a textbook and so on.
#
There are people who do that.
#
And there are mathematicians who do that.
#
So there are books in mathematics.
#
The people who know mathematics know heart shown and so on.
#
They spend years just doing these exercise problems.
#
There's a 400 page book.
#
It takes you probably a couple of years to get through it and solve all the exercise problems.
#
And at the end of it, they know the subject well.
#
But I don't know whether they have become better mathematicians.
#
At least to some extent when I look at their research and so on,
#
I don't get the sense that they have profoundly contributed to the area.
#
So my sense is, and my sense has always been,
#
that you should spend your time doing creative things so that it's useful.
#
Not solve exercise problems, you have to solve some of them.
#
So I'm always fighting people in education who say at the end of a chapter,
#
you should give 100 points.
#
Why do you want to give 100?
#
What's a person going to learn from 100,
#
which the person can't learn from five?
#
So I have a story of a professor at IIC who went to the US
#
and got the first book on complexity theory, which was written in those days.
#
This person came back with the book and gave me the book.
#
In some lecture was happening, he gave me the book and said, take a look at it.
#
And I was sitting in the lecture, but I was reading this book.
#
After the lecture got over, he came to me and said, how do you find the book?
#
So I told him that the book has a lot of exercises, some of which are double-starred.
#
I don't know if you know what a double-starred problem is.
#
So difficulty of a problem.
#
In good old times, you would have a number like three,
#
but sometimes you would have a three with a star indicating that it's slightly difficult.
#
Then there's a three with a double star, which indicates it's much more difficult.
#
It may take you a few days for you to figure it out, if at all you figure it out.
#
I mean, is there any quizzing that some questions will be starred and they become tiebreakers?
#
So here it's a degree of difficulty.
#
And so some take a few hours, some take a few days.
#
Some things you're expected to do, maybe half an hour or something.
#
So I told him all the starred problems, I know how to solve.
#
Simply because I told you it's previous year, I had read a hundred papers, I knew all the techniques.
#
I said, okay, all the starred problems I can solve.
#
The unstarred problems, I have no idea how to solve.
#
The unstarred ideas, I had some basic elementary ideas that are there,
#
which we don't get used that much in the research papers.
#
But to me, when I looked at them, they looked a bit alien
#
because they were contrived some problems, they're trying to show something.
#
I said, unstarred problems, I don't know how to solve.
#
Starved problems, I can solve.
#
So I would always believe that spend your time doing something creative.
#
To me, it takes the same time, whether I want to do a research problem or a starred problem, unstarred problem, whatever.
#
I might as well do something in public something rather than trying to solve an exercise problem.
#
Mathematics has a culture where you learn everything by solving the exercises.
#
So a very important idea is actually put into the exercise and broken into five parts or six parts.
#
So you solve each part, may take you multiple days or maybe multiple hours.
#
And then at the end of it, you say, oh, now I understand this.
#
And then we'll go to the next thing.
#
And that to me is a problem.
#
That to me is saying, jump the hoop.
#
Otherwise, you don't deserve to be talking to me.
#
I'm prepared to spend the time thinking about a problem.
#
I don't have a problem thinking about the problem.
#
But if I don't get it, what do I do?
#
You're saying I'm stuck.
#
The author of the book is saying, tough luck, you didn't solve it.
#
No cookies, no nothing.
#
And that, I think, is a problem.
#
And that's also the reason why mathematics gets a bad rap.
#
Because a lot of mathematicians have this attitude.
#
And consequently, they make it unnecessarily tough for kids.
#
So a lot more people can appreciate and learn mathematics
#
if the mathematicians are a bit more lax about these things.
#
And a lot of people say, here is something that's fun and interesting
#
and come and take a look at it.
#
They're not saying that.
#
They're saying, I'll allow you a peep only if you do all these things
#
I think physicists do things better.
#
They write stories better than, I think, mathematicians.
#
And consequently, there are a lot of books on physics
#
which are at a very elementary level.
#
You will learn nothing about quantum mechanics,
#
but you think you'll learn something.
#
Or about relativity or something.
#
There are popular books much more in physics than math.
#
So at what point did you make that jump from that intellectual understanding
#
of learning and what's wrong with learning and education
#
to actually saying that I'm going to do something about this
#
and to actually going out there, starting JEDI,
#
which in 2009, I think you started.
#
No, I think between Pika Pita and Strand,
#
I think we had interviewed so many people.
#
And it was sort of clear that if you wanted to get one good person,
#
you probably had to interview about 30, 40 people.
#
Because the confession is very small.
#
And so it became clear that the change is not going to happen.
#
Where is the change going to happen, right?
#
The change is going to happen only at the bachelor's level.
#
At the master's level, they're already too old.
#
And I can tell you that at the master's level, even by the time,
#
even by 2000, at a place like IISC,
#
which is, they get very bright kids, no question about that.
#
But even at that point in time, the first class,
#
the first thing I would do is get into a class
#
and then I would ask the students,
#
introduce yourself and tell me why you are here.
#
And most of the answers in the class would be,
#
I'm here to get a better job.
#
The IITs in my generation,
#
many of the IIT guys used to join places like IISC and so on.
#
By the time I started teaching and five years into my teaching,
#
the IITs would either go for a job or something,
#
or they would go abroad.
#
Very few came to a place like IISC,
#
or continue at IIT itself, that was very small.
#
So most of the people who came into IISC at that point
#
were not either from IITs or from NITs or RECs, very few.
#
Majority of them were other people,
#
and they were all there because they wanted a better job.
#
And a bit like what you said about Williams,
#
I would actually have said this many times in class.
#
I'd said this would typically be my network programming course,
#
and I would tell them that whatever you want to learn about networking,
#
I can teach it to you in about three classes.
#
What should we do for the remaining time?
#
What should we do for the remaining time?
#
This is all that is required for your work.
#
You can learn that in two, three classes.
#
Occasionally there's one person who says,
#
I come here because I want to learn computer science better,
#
or something like that, very rare.
#
So master's is not, you already lost it.
#
Master's is already too late.
#
So you have to intervene in the bachelor's.
#
And I'll tell you why even bachelor's is not good enough.
#
And then we had to start in the school itself.
#
Bachelor, the problem is very interesting.
#
Four years of bachelor's, the first year is common to everyone.
#
They know nothing about their branch.
#
You may be computer science, you may be mechanical,
#
but you study nothing about your branch.
#
First year is physics, chemistry, math, and a few other things.
#
There's some beginnings of mechanical and some programming and stuff like that.
#
Since it's common to everyone, everything is the same.
#
Second year is when you start learning your subjects.
#
And by the end of your third semester,
#
your second year, third semester, you realize by God,
#
these teachers are all horrid.
#
I'm not going to learn anything.
#
So by that time, the realization happens your fourth semester is over.
#
You had two bad semesters of exposure to your core engineering subjects
#
that you're supposed to be mastering.
#
Fourth year is your project.
#
So you don't do anything, there's no studying.
#
So there's only one year, the third year.
#
Then you realize that for project, everybody goes off to various places
#
to do their projects and so on.
#
Third year is what you have.
#
And then you realize you already spent two years.
#
You have only one more year and we'll all disperse.
#
That happens in the third year.
#
And then the fourth year, they all go do their projects wherever they do.
#
And then they're passed out.
#
Now you ask, where did they learn?
#
When did they learn in these four years?
#
And there's hardly any learning that happens.
#
They're just trying to pass their exam and get through.
#
And similarly, by the end of their third, sixth semester,
#
usually there is a campus recruitment and so on.
#
Six months before, they've decided,
#
okay, now I have to read for the exam, prepare for the exam.
#
They have to take some soft skill training to tell them how to talk and so on.
#
So we decided to intervene in engineering colleges in the first year
#
because we cannot catch them at any other point.
#
Third year, fourth year, we can't catch them.
#
So first year is the only time when they're not dissolutioned about engineering.
#
And our job was very simple,
#
to provide them with the confidence that they can actually design things.
#
That is about all that we wanted to do.
#
So we did not do any theory at all.
#
We would give them all the equipments.
#
So for example, we will teach them about motors,
#
we'll teach them about sensors and so on and so forth.
#
And at the end of it, we'll ask them to design a robot.
#
It could be a robot that throws a ball into a basketball hoop.
#
It could be a robot that plays football.
#
Every year that would change.
#
But we will not provide any recipe for how it should be done.
#
So consequently, every batch of five, six people,
#
they will all do their own things.
#
So every design is unique and different.
#
But they have thought through,
#
hopefully at least as a team of five,
#
at least three of them have thought through.
#
Usually there will always be,
#
if we have four people, then two of them won't do anything as a rule.
#
So if we have a team of five,
#
at least three would have spent some time thinking about it.
#
Those people we are hoping will go out
#
and they will actually be confident about designing things
#
because they have designed things.
#
Otherwise, the only design that they do is the five-year project.
#
They don't do anything in between.
#
So that program, I think about 14, maybe 15,000 people have gone through that.
#
We did that for about six, seven years.
#
Lots of colleges, but we sort of realized that we can't expand beyond some specific colleges
#
because most colleges in Karnataka, they are run by politicians.
#
And their only interest is in placement and money in placement.
#
That's the reason why they are there.
#
And the question that they ask is, does this improve the placement?
#
To whom does it benefit that you can design something?
#
None of those companies are coming here anyway.
#
You know how recruitment happens, right?
#
I mean, typical recruitment in engineering colleges,
#
the big three, Infosys and TCS and Wipro, they come.
#
And of the 500 students the college may have, they take over 350 of them.
#
For that programming skill, it doesn't matter whether you can design something
#
or not design something, it doesn't matter.
#
So that is a problem that was very difficult for us to answer.
#
So we've been to about a dozen colleges and done this.
#
And multiple colleges, we have succeeded in doing it for multiple years.
#
But I don't think it was a sustainable business activity.
#
So that we sort of realized.
#
We got funded by the way.
#
And they were, I should say that all the investors that we had,
#
they have been very good people.
#
And they have been empathetic, all of that.
#
No question about that.
#
Whether it's been Axel or Stand has had multiple investors.
#
And so they've all been very good people.
#
I don't have a problem, investors at a personal level, I think they've all been great.
#
Unlike the stories that we do sometimes here from the West and so on,
#
Indian chaps are very civil and very good people.
#
It's difficult to change the system. It's not easy.
#
So finally it became like what they're doing for the IITs.
#
Can we take over engineering college and do things?
#
And then you can implement your own whatever ideas you have and so on.
#
That's a very specific college, very specific number of students will come.
#
So that was not that interesting.
#
But instead what we wanted to do was,
#
we wanted to build a Jedi, not a college, something like a college,
#
where you come and you spend two years.
#
So again it somehow echoes our friend Williams, what he said.
#
You don't require four years for engineering, you require two years.
#
So the idea of engineering was to make sure that you do multiple semesters.
#
But in each semester I will do a course,
#
but you'll only do that course for those three weeks.
#
It's born out of the fact that I do these six hours of teaching.
#
So I said I don't want to teach one subject in the morning,
#
three in the morning, three in the afternoon and all that.
#
I don't want to do that. You want to learn a subject, learn it.
#
It's called block learning or something it's called.
#
And there are some colleges in the US which use it.
#
Learn it for let's say three weeks, continuously.
#
So all assignments, whatever you do, you are just doing that.
#
And I wanted about six, seven subjects or maybe ten subjects, maybe at max,
#
And it was holistic, no, nothing about any particular discipline.
#
And at the end you are supposed to do two projects with any faculty that you want.
#
You create your own committee of three faculty members.
#
You ask them what's the grand challenge that's happening.
#
You pick up some top problem.
#
Maybe you want somebody to work with you, a fellow student.
#
Maybe you can work in pairs.
#
And the moment somebody certifies that you have done a couple of projects on your own successfully,
#
you get your degree and you go.
#
There are engineering colleges of this sort in the US.
#
One of them is Olin in Boston.
#
Not quite the same model, but the model is to build better, make better engineers.
#
So we tried to raise some money for this.
#
Probably we would have started if we got about 50, 60 crores.
#
I think if we had got, I think we would have started.
#
So we had some interesting conversations with some of the people who wanted to put money.
#
One of them said, I will put money, but don't ask me to introduce you to anyone else.
#
Our initial idea that we get about five people putting, let's say five crores or something,
#
that's 25 crores and then they will have friends and we can get to 50.
#
Each one of them will have at least one friend who can put my hand.
#
They said, I am not doing that.
#
Then this person said, you see, the moment it happens, I ask somebody else to put money.
#
In three months that person will come back and say, my nephew is doing something.
#
You have to put in the money.
#
So he said, it doesn't matter.
#
I might as well give you the money directly.
#
Because I know that that person will recover the money he has put.
#
In three months we will say, my nephew is doing this.
#
You have to put some money and bless this.
#
That's bizarre, that sucks.
#
So we met a lot of people, but because of this person, at least we understood
#
why there was no branching that was happening.
#
But I am happy that there are other people who managed to do it.
#
I think one is Ashoka, who is a good example of people who have,
#
I think lots of people.
#
I mean, you look at the Ashoka page and look at founders.
#
Lots of people have put in money and so on.
#
I think more recently there's an example of Plaksha, who also did something.
#
And somebody I know, an ex-IIC professor, he is now the, I think the vice chancellor there,
#
on Rudra Pratap is I think the vice chancellor.
#
So some people have managed it.
#
But somehow in Bangalore it didn't happen.
#
In this region it didn't happen.
#
Which is a bit strange because IIC came from the Tatas and so on.
#
So it was a philanthropic effort of people like the Tatas.
#
Let's talk about how you came to Aatimotors now.
#
Because there also it seems that after your previous entrepreneurial ventures,
#
you could easily have sat back and said, no, no, I will live a life of pure science and thinking and blah, blah, blah.
#
Another hardware company, why on earth would I do something like that, et cetera, et cetera.
#
But you went into this project that seems incredibly difficult from the outside,
#
involves deep science, involves innovation and involves your plunging in
#
and learning all these different kinds of engineering to be able to understand what's going on.
#
You had already learnt.
#
I had learnt because as I said, for my Jedi I actually did.
#
And you got many of your students from there to be early engineers as well.
#
No, no, no, not those students.
#
But I had people who were working with me who were instructors in Jedi.
#
But they became instructors because they were good at building things and they built a lot of things in Jedi.
#
And those people also became the first set of engineers in Aatimotors also.
#
So Aatimotors happened maybe several things.
#
I think it happened because I think in 2011, let's see, no, 2013, I think I met Saad for the first time.
#
Saad was 11 years old then.
#
And he came to me because I was introduced by somebody I know from IIT Bombay.
#
And he sent me a mail saying there's a boy called Saad and he seems to be a prodigy of sorts.
#
And he has learnt some things, but I think he will learn something from you.
#
And he sent this mail from Saad which contained almost anything that he can think of.
#
It said something about aerospace.
#
It had half a dozen programming languages.
#
It had computer architecture.
#
It had physics, chemistry.
#
Whatever he can think of was there.
#
And I said, this is not happening.
#
This is probably some scam or something.
#
And there are children who can add numbers very fast or something or multiply numbers very fast.
#
And the immediate neighbourhood will say, oh, there's a genius here and so on.
#
And I thought, some kid like that, so let me not bother too much.
#
So I gave him some excuse and wired him off.
#
Then I said I'm tied up and maybe a month later or two later I can talk to him.
#
Somewhat surprisingly, month, month and a half later, he sent me a mail again saying, can we meet now?
#
So I said, OK, come along.
#
I think it probably took about...
#
So I came along to my office and Saad had bought this very neat 200-page book on cryptography.
#
And I just opened the book.
#
He showed the book and he...
#
So this was one of the first courses on Coursera.
#
Coursera had just come out.
#
And this was the first course on Coursera offered by a professor in Stanford on cryptography.
#
And I opened the book and I found everything neatly written.
#
The math was there, everything was there.
#
And then I asked him a few questions, probed him a few places.
#
He answered those things.
#
And it took probably about 10 minutes for me to realize that, OK, this kid is real.
#
So after that, I made it a point to meet him every Tuesday afternoon.
#
I would spend about three hours every Tuesday afternoon.
#
So at that stage, he was reading his fourth standard.
#
And then at the end of that year, he left his fourth standard.
#
He stopped going to school.
#
Because apparently some teacher told something and he...
#
I think he is one of these things where the teacher makes you stand in class and ask you a question.
#
You don't answer it properly.
#
Everybody says you think you are very smart and all that.
#
So I should say the principal of that school is very enlightened.
#
The principal said you don't have to study, come to school anymore.
#
I understand these things are problematic.
#
You can use that affiliation for whatever it's worth.
#
And when you are in ninth or tenth or something, if you want to continue, come back then.
#
So he is on paper, he continued to be a student.
#
As far as the school is concerned, the principal made sure of that.
#
And then ninth, tenth, if you want, you can come back.
#
Then Saath continued in his fifth, sixth, whatever, in absentia.
#
And then he would go for all these iris contests from Intel and various things.
#
He would either win it or something.
#
And for a couple of years, he went on some broadcom scholarships to the US, to various places and came back.
#
So he has done all those things.
#
Then he met Kalam and various people as part of these things.
#
So all that journey, several other people at ISRO and so on.
#
He has met Rodham Nassima.
#
In fact, the last meeting I had with Rodham Nassima, I went to his office in JN Center.
#
And he was like, before we start, let me ask you, what do you think about Saath?
#
He wanted to finish the Saath conversation before this thing.
#
But it was amazing. Rodham probed him. Saath had developed a re-entrant rocket.
#
This was around 2016-17, something like that.
#
And he had developed a re-entrant rocket just before ATI, I think.
#
And Saath knew everything.
#
He asked all the questions about how this would happen, that would happen.
#
He answered Rodham, everything, and Rodham was very impressed.
#
So then he asked, where do you think his problem lay?
#
I told him his intuition to think that it's tremendous and he's a very good programmer.
#
And so those he knows very well.
#
And that was indeed the case.
#
So my effort was to teach him a bit of mathematics so that he can read papers and so on.
#
So even now, he can read any paper.
#
You give him a paper and ATI and so on, he has done that.
#
I give him a paper in the morning and I'll tell some stories about Saath anyway.
#
But next day he would have implemented it and it's running.
#
He is good in that sense.
#
So after that, he spent about a year or six months a year in Indus.
#
So there was a Google challenge about trying to launch, there was a lunar challenge.
#
And they are supposed to put something in the orbit of the moon and land something on the moon.
#
And so he was part of that challenge for some time.
#
And then after that, he joined the Robert Bosch Center at IAC.
#
He was there for another year, worked with some process there.
#
And then two things happened around 2016.
#
One was when I think he got a job from one of the multinationals.
#
He was an intern for a year, one of the big multinationals.
#
And because of the fact that he gave some talks on Bitcoin and cryptography and so on there.
#
So I said, young kid, who knows, we can see.
#
My fear was if he goes into any of these multinationals, he will get sucked in.
#
After that, he will talk to me once in 15 days and a few months later it will become, it's been a long time.
#
What are you doing? Just go away.
#
The second thing that happened was the question of whether we should resume his schooling.
#
So on the schooling front, he said he didn't want to go back to school.
#
He was very clear about that.
#
And the question is, what will he learn?
#
By that time on edX, he had done a couple of courses, including a course on aerospace.
#
And he had passed that course.
#
And I think he was even a TA for one of the, with the same MIT professor, he was a TA for some time.
#
So then the question was, what do you do?
#
Then one of my co-founders, Nathi and I, Saurabh and I, we said one of the things we can do is we can make him start a company.
#
Because I was fairly certain that by the time he is 22, which he will be in a month or so, all other engineering students also would have come out.
#
And they also will know things.
#
They will not know his things at his level, but they will all know things.
#
The bright guys will know and the people eventually catch up.
#
So if this guy has to be ahead, how can he be ahead?
#
He can be an entrepreneur.
#
So we were at that stage thinking about multiple ideas, a variety of ideas.
#
Eventually we settled on an autonomous vehicle as a challenging thing.
#
By that time, Tesla and so on were already there.
#
But I don't think at that point in time, on the day we started, I did not know in any reasonable detail as to what should go into the platform.
#
I knew some lots of engineering buzzwords and so on.
#
Broadly one knew, but I don't think I knew exactly what algorithm will go and how it will become autonomous and stuff like that.
#
That we figured out over the next two years.
#
And so in that, I remember the story I wanted to say was I figured out one particular algorithm to implement,
#
which would actually create some sort of path for the vehicle to move.
#
The question is, how will it find the path and how will it move?
#
And I came up with that algorithm on an independence day because that day happened to be a holiday.
#
I had leisure. All discoveries happen because of leisure.
#
This is what Russell said. Russell wrote an essay on leisure that he says the entire enlightenment in Europe happened because people had,
#
they were very rich and they had a lot of money and they had a lot of leisure.
#
And so they did a lot of interesting things.
#
You can have money and not do interesting things, but you have money, you can also do interesting things.
#
So as usual, it was about two and a half hours or so.
#
I started describing the framework, what I had said, what the problem I was trying to solve and so on and so forth.
#
And then I solved it. And then I was trying to convince people about the proof and stuff like that.
#
And at the end of what I started around 9.30, around one o'clock or something.
#
I think then Saad said, he was sitting in the audience, he said, it works.
#
And I said, what works? And then he said, your algorithm works.
#
So by that time he had implemented the entire thing.
#
And I went to, then all the 20, 30 people in the room, we all converged.
#
And then he had a full implementation and it worked indeed.
#
So he is that sort of guy.
#
Yeah, so we started Hathi because, partly because of course we wanted to start something.
#
My motivation was to figure out if I had it in me to build another piece of technology.
#
That was my motivation.
#
Also motivated by making Saad an entrepreneur and give him a taste of entrepreneurship.
#
In the process, I think Saad learned to talk to people.
#
How do you make sure that people deliver and things of that sort.
#
And to the credit of the people there, I think he is still in touch with many of the people in Hathi.
#
It's to the credit of the people there, they are still very good friends with him.
#
At no point did anyone come and complain to any of us that this boy doesn't know anything.
#
He is slowing me down or something like that. That just did not happen.
#
And the entire stack that is there, including all the algorithms that I, whatever I conceived and everything,
#
everything he wrote, finally the code is all his.
#
So he has a very good sense of computer architecture, a good sense of hardware, is an extraordinary programmer.
#
Another story if I had to tell you about Saad that has happened recently,
#
maybe, I don't know when this was, when this Chandrayaan mission, something was happening, right?
#
It was about six months back, something.
#
So they wanted to land that Vikram, right? Something into the moon.
#
And I think the landing was supposed to happen at five o'clock, sometime like that.
#
And I was talking to Saad at about 3, 3.45 or something, 3.30, 3.45.
#
And then I was asking him at what speed should it, and how far should it actually detach itself
#
so that it comes on a trajectory and lands on the, wherever it's supposed to land.
#
How do you figure it out?
#
And then there was some data that was available in the newspapers and so on.
#
So from that data, we figured out at what speed it escapes.
#
Then we had to find something.
#
And then he said, okay, give me some time.
#
And by the time it actually separated, he had worked out using his, I mean, he wrote a program.
#
But he went to NASA, he picked up some equations, they picked up a rocket equation.
#
He wanted some parameters he picked up from the NASA website.
#
And he programmed everything in about 35, 40 minutes.
#
And figured out exactly what the configuration should be before, at what speed it should be going,
#
what it would do, how far from the actual landing spot for it to actually create the trajectory.
#
This is all one kid doing it in about 45 minutes.
#
And today I can't do it.
#
And I know that I can't match him on that today.
#
In my younger days, probably I could have.
#
But I know that there are very few people who can do it.
#
I'm fairly certain that even in ISRO, there aren't too many people who can do it in 45 minutes.
#
So he's special. I think that there's no question about it.
#
So you've given me a lot of your time today, but we're coming close to the end of it.
#
So I'll end with three final questions, both of which can be deep and detailed as well.
#
And for my third last question, I again want to give you a thought experiment.
#
Imagine you've woken up on this date in 2033 or 2034 rather, 10 years from now.
#
What does your day look like? What are all the things that you are doing both at home after waking up,
#
when you go out? How has the world changed?
#
Because the world seems to be changing so dramatically fast.
#
The pace is accelerating, as it were.
#
AI is going to upend everything, especially for Bangalore.
#
I think it's a huge threat to the lower-order thinkers, the court coolies and all of that.
#
Everything is under threat, and yet it's such an enormous opportunity for higher-order thinkers
#
to increase productivity and change the world in a great way.
#
So, you know, if I ask you to close your eyes, imagine yourself 10 years from now,
#
what does life look like for you? What does the world look like?
#
2030 is far off, in the sense that 10 years, I'll be quite old by then.
#
Let's imagine in our thought experiment, you're as old as you are today, so we don't have to get that in.
#
Okay, so to a large extent, I think I live very little in the physical world.
#
And that is an unfortunate reality.
#
Okay, I'm going to digress.
#
To a large extent, I think, I do think that people in their 30s and 40s, right,
#
there's a sense of, especially if you're writing software and stuff like that, I don't know, whatever you're doing,
#
people get disillusioned about what their life is.
#
And I see a lot of people in their early 30s or later, they start taking what they call as hobbies.
#
When I got married, one of Shubha's friends asked me, what are your hobbies?
#
I said, I don't have hobbies. And she was like, what do you mean?
#
I said, if I'm sufficiently interested and motivated with something, I spend a lot of time thinking about it.
#
So I'm not going to have a hobby or something.
#
But there are these people who I think take to a lot of things.
#
Photography is one, travel is one.
#
Some people take up suddenly agriculture or something and various things.
#
And I find that when I see that happening with people around me,
#
to me it's a sign that they're not excited about life the way they were in their 20s.
#
I think the only difference between some, I mean, you can probably, you would have seen it in many people
#
because you interview a lot of people.
#
There is a certain spark in the eye when you're 20 and there's a certain spark in the eye when you're,
#
I mean, lack of the spark when somebody is in their 40s and so on.
#
It's as if the life has drained out of them.
#
And that's when they start trying to find some of the spark in photography and writing
#
or whatever else that people want to do later in life.
#
I think, if I think I'm young in my mind,
#
it's probably because that enthusiasm that I had in 25, I have not lost it.
#
Simply because I continue to do that.
#
I continue to learn. I continue to be ignorant.
#
I continue to forget and I continue to explore.
#
I think those are the things.
#
That is not going to change in 2034.
#
That will be the same and that world will be the same.
#
But the physical world, as I said, will change to whatever.
#
But I don't think my life will change at all.
#
whatever I've been doing today is the same thing or yesterday or something,
#
the same thing I'll be doing then.
#
That will be invariant, I think.
#
You'd earlier spoken about how when you learn a new subject,
#
you can encapsulate its core insights maybe on a single index card
#
or just, you know, in a couple of lines or whatever.
#
So if I ask you a question about life,
#
like if you had to write down your life lessons on a small index card for me,
#
like the core things that you have learned.
#
I have one. I already have one.
#
Obviously, that's something I do think about.
#
But this is something that
#
this is a statement that stayed with me.
#
It's a statement that I first uttered
#
when I was in 1990, I think.
#
I think life is a celebration of creativity.
#
So long as you are creative, you are alive.
#
The moment creativity stops,
#
you can live, but you are not alive.
#
So life is a celebration of creativity.
#
Life is a celebration of creativity.
#
There's nothing else to life.
#
This notion that, you know, somebody who is 95 passes away
#
or somebody who is 85 passes away,
#
and they say, oh, we have lost something.
#
Unless that person was actively creating something,
#
there's nothing that we have lost.
#
That person died a long time back
#
when, you know, the person ceased to be creative.
#
So, yeah, so I died the day
#
I stopped thinking, stopped enjoying,
#
stopped being creative about something.
#
Beautifully said, and it almost brings you
#
like a full circle back to your mother
#
when you were talking about her, how she was creative and stuff,
#
and your dad was a scientist.
#
And at that time, I thought that it's actually the same thing.
#
To be a good scientist, you need to be creative.
#
I mean, creativity is at the heart of everything.
#
Okay, so maybe I will...
#
So why did we become entrepreneurs?
#
I said Manjara was one of them.
#
But there was something that Manohar told me
#
which I thought, which had a huge impact on me.
#
And Manohar and I were once walking within IAC campus,
#
and he used to stay in the apartment complex within IAC.
#
I've always been a Bangladeshi and I always stayed outside.
#
So he observed as some professor who was going,
#
and those days I think retirement was at 60 and now it's 65.
#
But those days I think it was 60,
#
and then he pointed out to someone and saying the guy was cycling.
#
He was sort of worn down by life in some sense,
#
retiring in six months,
#
and he has some daughters to get married.
#
And if you have been on an IAC salary, you sort of realize that.
#
It's very difficult to rent a house in Malaysia.
#
On the salaries you get at IAC.
#
Now it's probably slightly better, but those days it was tough.
#
And this person has spent all their life doing the service of science, so to speak.
#
And let's face it, even at a place like IAC, maybe there are 500 faculty members, all researchers.
#
But how many of them are really world-class?
#
So the number of world-class scientists will probably be 10% or maybe even less, maybe 5%.
#
The remaining people all tried.
#
I think that's the right thing to do, because I like this computer or something.
#
They did not succeed in the commercial terms.
#
So Manohar said, I don't want to be that person when I'm 60.
#
And I thought what it made sense.
#
Okay, I don't want to be that person either.
#
And so we started this entrepreneurship in part because of that conversation that Manohar and I had.
#
I think you require enough money so that you're comfortable.
#
This is the realization now, that you're comfortable enough and that's adequate.
#
But once that basic comfort is reached, probably in the Maslow hierarchy or something,
#
I think creativity is probably the important thing.
#
In one other talk somewhere I had said that in the history of mankind,
#
no statue was ever built for the rich.
#
Statue was always built because either you were a king or because you were a philosopher.
#
There's a Buddha you build, an Ashoka you build.
#
But I don't know, there must have been somebody who was rich in Buddha's time.
#
Who knows and who cares?
#
Yeah, so in that context, I had made a joke that 500 years from now,
#
the Bill who will be remembered is more likely to be Bill Clinton than Bill Gates.
#
Why Clinton over Gates?
#
Both had Bill in the name.
#
Yeah, I know, I get that part of it.
#
But why would Clinton be remembered and not Gates?
#
The President is the nearest that we have to somebody who has.
#
So the President is alive.
#
Yeah, and probably his name will survive much longer.
#
As I don't know what his number is, whatever his number was, 30th, 40th something.
#
So whatever, he'll survive.
#
What will happen to Bill Gates 500 years from now?
#
What reason is there to remember him?
#
Fair enough, statues aren't built for the rich.
#
My final question, for me and my listeners,
#
recommend books, films or music which mean a lot to you and you'd love to share them with the world.
#
Well, I do mostly, I mean, by now you would have guessed that I read most of my books are science, engineering based books.
#
I used to read a lot when I was young, mostly fiction.
#
And Seventh Standard I started with James Hadley Chase.
#
And then I went on to Alastair Macklin and Desmond Bagley and all those stuff.
#
Then went to Agatha Christie and various things.
#
Then at some stage after all these things happened around 12th or something, I think I more or less stopped reading fiction.
#
The book that has influenced me most, okay, so one book probably is Richard Buck, Illusions probably.
#
He had another book, I forgot the name of the book.
#
Jonathan Livingston Segal.
#
Jonathan Livingston Segal was excellent.
#
There's a great quote I remember from Illusions which I also loved as a child.
#
What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.
#
Correct, yeah, that used to be on my wall.
#
There's another there which is, argue for your limitations and sure enough they are yours.
#
Okay, so both of these.
#
So occasionally when I get into a mood when I'm telling Shubha that I've become too old or something and I can't understand something, she will quote back this to me.
#
Okay, so Illusions, Buck, Buck I think was one.
#
Buck had another book, neither of these.
#
It was either called, was it a book called Leela?
#
Leela was Robert M. Persig, that was, he wrote Zenandhi Auto Motorcycle Maintenance.
#
Okay, so Leela probably was one interesting book.
#
Okay, Leela is about soulmates and so on.
#
I've forgotten what it is about but I remember Zenandhi Auto Motorcycle Maintenance is more celebrated but I like Leela more as a kid.
#
I know, I also like Leela.
#
Yeah, I think it's about soulmates probably.
#
Eric Hoffer, the true believer.
#
I don't know if you have.
#
The name is familiar but I haven't read it.
#
So he was I think a quasi-literate who wrote during, just after the World War, 1950s, bestsellers.
#
The True Believer is I think a beautiful book.
#
More recently I think I read a book by, oh the books that, I mean I should, fiction.
#
The last big fiction was Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment is absolutely a masterpiece.
#
But there was another book that he wrote, which was The Idiot, I think.
#
Okay, and that was a beautiful book.
#
The women in his book are extremely powerful.
#
I think if I remember right, Idiot had Natasha and Crime and Punishment had I think Sonia.
#
Okay, both were powerful characters.
#
And short stories of Tolstoy.
#
Yeah, there are some wonderful short stories of Tolstoy also.
#
Crime and Punishment is absolutely a masterpiece.
#
Yeah, those are good books.
#
No, there was one more book, more recent book.
#
Oh, I mean other books are of course philosophers, lots of them.
#
Emerson, Emerson probably had a huge impact on me.
#
His essays on self-reliance and so on, beautiful.
#
There's also journals of, Emerson used to write a journal.
#
And you have to read some of the journal entries.
#
There's one particular entry, there are two entries that I think I remember, I'll always remember.
#
One was about, he had a young son who died very young, five years, six years, something like that.
#
And then there's one entry where he actually goes and says, he opened the grave.
#
He was very attached to this kid and he apparently opened the grave.
#
The other entry is more interesting, less horror.
#
It's about the fact that internally, all of us have an extraordinary amount of freedom.
#
He says when we talk, we do things and so on.
#
He's establishing that entry that we censor ourselves and so on.
#
But he's lamenting about what happens inside.
#
He says, the freedom within.
#
But it's set with a tone where it's a lament because in the freedom within, you can do whatever you want.
#
You can kill people, you can do whatever you feel like.
#
And that freedom, what do you do with that freedom?
#
So there was a beautiful journal entry about that.
#
So Emerson, Toro probably.
#
I mean, if Emerson, Toro is natural.
#
I think Buddha was absolutely a great master.
#
There's no question about that.
#
I've tried reading a fair amount of the original, this thing, of Buddha.
#
They are coincidentally called Vinaya Petika.
#
So therefore, one has to read some of it at least.
#
They're customized for you.
#
They're customized for you.
#
Among the Upanishads, I would probably pick up the, my favorite Upanishad is also Gandhi's favorite.
#
There's a nice story behind it.
#
It's called the Isha Upanishad.
#
It's the smallest Upanishad, which is about, depending on how you count it, it's about 13 stanzas.
#
And Feynman in his book starts by saying,
#
If everything in science was destroyed and you could pass only one sentence or something like that to the world,
#
He asks the question, he answers it.
#
He says the existence of atom, that there are atoms.
#
Maybe the next set of people don't know there are atoms, but you just say there are atoms.
#
And from that, you can derive a lot of things.
#
And so then in this first chapter, he actually shows how many things in nature can actually be deduced by knowing that there are atoms.
#
Gandhi asked a similar question.
#
If everything in Hinduism was burnt, how would you pass on?
#
What is the essence of Hinduism that you would pass on to the next generation?
#
And his answer was the first stanza of the Isha Upanishad.
#
And so Isha Upanishad, because it's a small Upanishad, you can commit it to memory, which I did at some stage.
#
And it's a beautiful, simple Upanishad, no complications, no other thing.
#
The other Upanishad which is good is the Mandukya, which is a frog.
#
That is a great Upanishad.
#
But the Upanishads from which my son's name came is the Bradharanyaka, which means the great forest.
#
So there, there is a name of a, there's a king called Janaka.
#
And Janaka has a person who conducts the Yajna and so on.
#
He's called a Hothri. And that Hothri is Ashwala.
#
And that's how my son got his name, because it so happened that on the day he was born,
#
I was in the hospital waiting for him to be born.
#
But there's a story about that waiting also. If you have the time, I can.
#
And then I went to, this is on Rupatanga road, not too far from here.
#
And I went to Kamath there. Next to Kamath there was a book stall.
#
I went there and I found this Upanishad and then I bought it.
#
And then we were looking for names everywhere, nothing clicked.
#
And then finally I said, okay, for whatever reason on the day he was born, I bought this Upanishad, so let me look into it.
#
And I found Ashwala there. So Ashwala is a person, so all of these people are people who are actually talking to Yajnavalkya.
#
And there's a dialogue written in Yajnavalkya and all these people.
#
Another eminent personality who comes in that same chapter is Gargi.
#
And so Ashwala is the first person who says something to Yajnavalkya.
#
And then Gargi says and then various other people say.
#
And then Yajnavalkya demonstrates whatever he wanted to demonstrate.
#
So that's a great Upanishad.
#
That is also the Upanishad that contains the famous, this Asatama, Satgamaya and so on.
#
So that comes from, that's the ending song of The Matrix.
#
So that comes from this Upanishad.
#
I don't know, have you watched this Chanakya TV show?
#
In the 1980s, I think, right? I think I watched it, but I've completely forgotten.
#
But this is also the opening stanza that comes in that.
#
Your waiting story was buying that book at the stall or you have another waiting story?
#
No, the waiting story was about astrology.
#
The last time I cast a horoscope or did something was in 94 when my son was about, on the day he was born,
#
the doctor gave a certain time and said, most likely the child will be born around this time.
#
And I cast a horoscope to see what was happening.
#
And the horoscope did not look good.
#
And then I went and told my wife who was in this thing that he will not be born before 1 o'clock or something like that, I said.
#
And then she asked why.
#
She said if he's born between 11.30 and 1.30, then his stars don't look good.
#
And I had the, I don't know what it is, the arrogance probably.
#
They say this is my son and he can't be born at this time.
#
Oh my God, so she had to wait.
#
No, no, she didn't have to wait. It happened.
#
So I said he will not be born. Nobody waited for anything.
#
I just said that based on what I saw, I said he cannot be, he will not be born in this period.
#
So he will be born after 1.30.
#
He was born at 2.50 or something.
#
So she was surprised because she was next in line.
#
They were inducing her into labor and so on.
#
But something else happened with another patient and the doctor was called away.
#
And when the entire thing happened, I mean this entire thing was no surprise to me that it happened.
#
But Shubha, I think she was a bit taken aback when I said that.
#
But she had the confidence that once I had said that, she had the confidence that that's what's going to happen.
#
She was like, oh okay, now that you've said it, something will happen like this.
#
So that was I think the last time I actually cast a horoscope to see anything into the future.
#
I have not seen, I mean I've told Abu, he doesn't believe in any of these things anyway.
#
And as I said, neither do I because of the low complexity problem.
#
But this is one instance where I wanted to see at least the beginning point should be reasonable, irrespective of whatever else happens in life.
#
I guess you could call it Pascal's caution, even if there is nothing to it, let him be born later.
#
I don't know, I mean I've had some success with prediction.
#
It's not that they've all failed. I've had some success.
#
So it's very difficult for me to say it doesn't work.
#
But I think it's a probabilistic thing. I mean, as I explained, to me, it's just a probabilistic thing.
#
Somebody doing a curve fitting based on some parameters they've been given and they've created some rules, probably simplistic rules.
#
But that's what it is. I don't think it will give me deep answers.
#
It's not even as complex as Newton's laws of motion.
#
There's much more math in Newton's laws of motion.
#
So Vinay, thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure talking to you.
#
And I hope we get to talk again, maybe 10 years later you can come on the show again and describe your day to me.
#
So this is wonderful. Thanks so much.
#
I had to be alive for 10 more years. I'll catch you in 2034.
#
Oh, by the way, I have to tell you this story about this nephew that I was talking about.
#
I think his wife is somebody who listens to your podcasts very frequently.
#
So what, six months back or something, they were all in Bangalore and they were talking something.
#
I don't know, you can decide whether you want to put it.
#
Of course I want it. No, no, we don't cut any.
#
So we'll see, whatever.
#
And then she said some podcasts and so on came and then she said, oh, I haven't finished films and so on.
#
There are other things to be done.
#
So after the story, we'll do films and music.
#
So then she was saying I'm listening to some podcast of Amit and so on and so forth.
#
And then I casually mentioned that some years back Amit had sent me a mail
#
and I was supposed to be on the podcast and she was surprised.
#
And then Shubha was also there, the three of them, they were all listening.
#
I had not told Shubha that you had sent me a mail sometime back.
#
And Shubha, somebody who, she's on your WhatsApp group or whatever and so on.
#
And she said, oh, I didn't know that he had invited you.
#
And this was like, they took it like I was pulling their leg or something.
#
And I had to tell them, I'm surprised that you think that I'm not even 250 interesting people in India.
#
And actually, I'm glad that you didn't come then because my show was much shorter then.
#
So I wouldn't have got so much time then.
#
Of course, we could have come again now.
#
But I'm really glad we made this happen.
#
And who knows, 10 years later, we can do an 18-hour episode or something.
#
But yeah, so films and music.
#
The first film that I remember making an impact on me was a Kannada film called Chowmana Dudi.
#
I don't know if you've heard.
#
This was either by B.V. Karanth or by Karnad.
#
One of them, I think Karanth was the director, B.V. Karanth.
#
That I think was a film.
#
I like most of Kurosawa's films.
#
I think they're all beautifully done.
#
It's very interesting because for me, when I think of art,
#
I think the two opposite approaches and both beautiful approaches,
#
I call them the Kurosawa approach and the Ozu approach,
#
where Ozu is completely minimal and still.
#
And Kurosawa is a master choreographer of action and events.
#
And it's really interesting that you love them both.
#
And of course, Miphun, right?
#
Yeah, I don't know how to pronounce it.
#
Yeah, he was a tremendous presence in all his movies.
#
There was a more recent movie called The Departed,
#
English movies, I mean, there are lots of English movies there.
#
Science of the Lambs for some time was something that had...
#
There's something that, which I now don't remember,
#
where we covered what we see all the time.
#
Yeah, so that was something that Hannibal Lecter says,
#
we covered what we see all the time.
#
Yeah, so that I thought was...
#
That's a phrase that's been with me for a long time.
#
Yeah, more recently, I don't know.
#
I mean, I don't remember the newer movies.
#
What are the other movies that in the 70s?
#
Okay, so I love Notorious, for example,
#
lots of Hitchcock movies.
#
I thought he was an excellent actor.
#
And I liked him, especially in...
#
There's one, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
#
Beautiful, nice, fun movie.
#
So was Philadelphia Story, which has Cary Grant,
#
Katherine Hepburn, another superb actress.
#
I mean, there was one, what was that?
#
It was Bringing a Baby, I think was one of the movies.
#
There's a lion and all sorts of Cary Grant.
#
Among actresses, I think probably Ingrid Bergman is...
#
Notorious, of course, she is there,
#
but lots of Casablanca, for example,
#
she is very good along with Bogart.
#
So old English movies, probably American movies, I think.
#
Gandhi was a movie that was really something that had impact.
#
Especially the scene, there's one scene where
#
the police is hitting everyone, I think this is a scene in South Africa.
#
And there's a shot of a guy who picks up...
#
I don't know, there is some ID card or something that's being burnt, right?
#
He picks it up and puts it into the fire.
#
And then I said, I mean, forget whatever Gandhi was,
#
I mean, now there's a recent trend that Gandhi was a terrible person
#
and Ambedkar didn't write the Constitution, so that's going on.
#
To me, I think if tens of thousands of people
#
are prepared to get hit without retaliating,
#
I don't know what that man was who convinced them about it.
#
Whether you want to call him a cult figure or something else or whatever.
#
I think we contain multitudes.
#
We contain multitudes. He was a great man.
#
He was also in some ways a terrible man.
#
We are all messed up and complex.
#
No, it's all fine, I think.
#
But it would be a shame to highlight
#
the not so interesting or important things of Gandhi.
#
And many of them are probably genuine mistakes like people make.
#
But look at what he was able to achieve
#
and that sort of towers over anything else that we can point out at Gandhi.
#
And I feel sad when people miss something that obvious.
#
So that I think is the pain.
#
So Gandhi was a remarkable person.
#
Yeah, so Gandhi, the movie was remarkable for many ways.
#
Of course, every Independence Day or something,
#
they keep putting it on TV somewhere.
#
But there's a lot of other things.
#
I think a lot of Korean drama, I think movies,
#
they're all fairly interesting and made a mark.
#
There was one guy who died recently.
#
But I remember the name of the movie.
#
It was called something like Summer, Spring, Autumn, Winter, something of that sort.
#
We'll link it from the show notes.
#
Yeah, but he died recently.
#
I think he died on the COVID digesting.
#
But that movie itself was an extraordinary movie.
#
It was just beautiful to see.
#
That was probably the last Korean movie I saw,
#
which was really, really great.
#
Lots of Italian movies.
#
Yeah, you can name many of them.
#
Music, as I said, is my weakest.
#
But I like, by and large, I like Iliya Raja.
#
I like T.M. Krishna, classical music.
#
I mostly listen to either Carnatic or this.
#
I think I have a decent sense of rhythm,
#
but I don't think I understand music.
#
And also, my son has not taught me how to appreciate music.
#
I mean, of course, he's usually into some western, this thing.
#
But yeah, so music, I think, more limited repertoire.
#
But I do, for example, I have listened to a lot of M.S.
#
But that's because you happen to be in a certain region.
#
So those things happen automatically,
#
whether you like it or not, it happens.
#
TV shows nowadays, I think mostly Korean maybe.
#
The one show I liked a lot was, I think, 25, 21.
#
I haven't seen any of the Korean shows.
#
There's another show which is by the same director,
#
I mean, not the 25, 21 director, but one director,
#
who made a show called Misang, which is very good.
#
I think he also did My Ajushi.
#
My Ajushi is good because also the fact that there was a Korean actor
#
who recently committed suicide.
#
I forget his name, but he's the guy who also came in Parasite.
#
He's good and so is the lead actress.
#
The story itself is beautiful.
#
Yeah, so succession, of course, on TV.
#
Succession is probably the one.
#
Have you seen succession?
#
I keep meaning to, but I haven't yet seen it.
#
I mean, I think succession is the one thing where there are no good people.
#
So it is a bit disorienting the first half an hour or one hour,
#
but after that, you get to like the show.
#
But it's a beautiful show.
#
Saar likes succession as well.
#
Then, of course, the standard things are there.
#
Breaking Bad is, of course, extraordinary.
#
House is something that...
#
House is a very interesting show,
#
which both Breaking Bad and House, I did not watch for a long time.
#
Breaking Bad, I did not watch because the main,
#
the hero is somebody who was a comedian
#
and Malcolm in the middle or something.
#
Some chemist guy with cancer and doing some drugs.
#
In different circumstances, are you like a Walter White?
#
Would you be making a new kind of meth for the scientific challenge?
#
But something, probably.
#
House also for the same reasons.
#
Hugh Laurie, I thought, was an out and out comedian.
#
I somehow couldn't visualize him as a doctor,
#
but I don't know if you have not...
#
Oh, and he was brilliant in House.
#
After seeing House, you sort of realize that nobody else could have been House.
#
It is not that particular interpretation,
#
House only, he could have done that the way he did.
#
But these are classical, I think.
#
Anybody would name these things.
#
Awesome, Vinay, thank you so much.
#
This was great. We shall meet again.
#
I will inform the Takshashila people that
#
10 years later, please book the studio for 20 hours.
#
We are doing a lot of recording.
#
If so, would you like to support the production of the show?
#
You can go over to sceneunseen.in slash support
#
and contribute any amount you like
#
to keep this podcast alive and kicking.
