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A great quote I learnt from my guest today is something the poet Wendell Berry once said,
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what I stand for is what I stand on. The question that rose for me from that quote is what do
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I stand on? Most of my life is lived inside my head and when I think of where I stand,
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I am mostly not thinking of the actual place where I stand, but a larger abstraction. But
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think about where you stand right now. Don't give me the name of a city or a neighborhood
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or your housing society. Close your eyes and imagine that place a hundred years ago,
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a thousand years ago, ten thousand years ago and maybe a hundred years from now. What do you
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really stand on and what do you really stand for? Welcome to The Seen and The Unseen,
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our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral science. Please welcome your
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host Amit Varma. Welcome to The Seen and The Unseen. My guest today is Aarti Kumar Rao,
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an author, a photographer, a writer, someone who takes life slow and always wants to go one
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layer deeper. I first thought of Aarti through our mutual buddy Prem Panikar with whom Aarti
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was part of something called The Peeply Project. I was struck by the kind of long-form hybrid
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storytelling she was doing with a mix of words and photography. I didn't know those phrases then,
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but she was doing what could be called slow travel, immersing herself in places and habitats,
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understanding people better, understanding what they stood on. She went walking with the legendary
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Paul Salopek. She spent vast amounts of time going to remote places and remote times and she
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recently published a superb book called Margin Lands, Indian Landscapes on the Brink. This
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conversation was a long time coming and I enjoyed every moment. Before we begin though,
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let's take a quick commercial break. Do you want to read more? I've put in a lot of work in recent
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years in building a reading habit. This means that I read more books, but I also read more
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long-form articles and essays. There's a world of knowledge available through the internet,
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but the problem we all face is how do we navigate this knowledge? How do we know what to read? How
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do we put the right incentives in place? Well, I discovered one way. A couple of friends of mine
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run this awesome company called CTQ Compounds at CTQCompounds.com, which aims to help people
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up-level themselves by reading more. A few months ago, I signed up for one of their programs called
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The Daily Reader. Every day for six months, they sent me a long-form article to read. The subjects
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covered went from machine learning to mythology to mental models and marmalade. This helped me
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build a habit of reading. At the end of every day, I understood the world a little better than I did
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before. So if you want to build your reading habit, head on over to CTQCompounds and check
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out their Daily Reader. New batches start every month. They also have a great program called Future
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Stack, which helps you stay up-to-date with ideas, skills, and mental models that will help you stay
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a whopping 2,500 rupees, 2,500 if you use the discount code Unseen. So head on over to CTQCompounds
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at CTQCompounds.com and use the code Unseen. Uplevel yourself.
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Aarti, welcome to the Scene and the Unseen. Thank you, Amit. Thanks for having me.
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It's my great pleasure. It's been a while. And at this point, I want to begin by informing my
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listeners that a minute ago, Aarti was saying that I don't think I can talk for more than one
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hour. I have nothing interesting to say, blah, blah, et cetera, et cetera. And I was absolutely
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shocked, especially coming from you, because you are, in a sense, a connoisseur of the slow life
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yourself in terms of sinking into a place to understand it, in terms of not worrying about
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the form of a medium, but going as deep as you want, and so on and so forth. So you're the one
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person I would really expect to come here and say that, Amit, we need at least 10 hours, 12 hours.
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Let's do this over months, but you're not saying... I wish. No, no, no, no, no.
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Unfortunately, when it comes to me speaking, I don't think it's going to get that long.
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What can you, I don't want to use the word content because some people object to it,
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but what kind of content do you consume in terms of books and movies? Where do your tastes run?
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Quite wide. I love first person accounts, nonfiction, especially by people who have
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either faced or are facing some kind of displacement. So I read a lot of refugee kind
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of account books. So a lot of that, actually anything. I read a lot of fiction too. I love
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historical fiction and then a lot of nonfiction, which is of course, nature writing, largely.
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But also other kinds of nonfiction, like, you know, killers of the flower moon and those kinds of,
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you know, like the crime-ish nonfiction, lots of things, different things, different things.
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And I do consume a lot of podcasts. Oh, I didn't expect that.
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I had a guest here yesterday, the economist Somya Dhanraj, who said something that completely
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stunned me. She said that once she forgot her mobile phone at her tailor's and she didn't
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realize she had forgotten it. And she went back a day later, full 24 hours had elapsed.
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And the tailor said that, madam, you left your phone. And that was when she realized that she
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had left her phone. And I was so jealous of this because I was like, Somya, you know,
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if I am without my phone for 15 minutes, except in the rare occasions of recordings like this,
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but if I am without it for 15 minutes, trust me, I will know. And that is something I lament
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because I feel that, you know, when I was growing up in the seventies, eighties, et cetera,
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the texture of our lives was so much more slower and we could sink into experiences and things.
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And I feel like I have lost some of that ability. I can try to regain it with intentional acts,
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but otherwise that natural sinking into something seems incredibly hard. Right. So I want to ask you
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about the texture of your life, because a lot of the reporting that you've done is deliberately
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cutting yourself off from these sort of weapons of modernity and just immersing into a particular
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kind of life, a particular kind of place, just spending time with people. So when you come back
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to the city, is that slowness of rhythm? Is that way of looking something that has always been part
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of you, something that you managed to retain or is it a struggle for you as well? It's interesting,
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actually. I hadn't thought about it this way until you asked this question, but it takes very little
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time for me to be able to let go of this thing that's sitting in front of me, the square rectangle,
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the phone. And many of the places that I find myself in for reporting do not have network.
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So, you know, and it takes maybe an hour and then I've forgotten about it and it's not there. And
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then you're, you know, kind of listening to things and being there very, you know, present in the
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moment. And then when it's time to get back and you're on your way back and if it's not in flight
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mode, it starts pinging. There's almost this reluctance in me to pick it up. I'm like, oh god,
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no, I don't want to see this again, you know, that kind of stuff. And I resisted for a while, but I
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know that people back home will be waiting to hear from me because I've told them I'll be back in
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network zone by so-and-so time and so on. So then I do, you know, pick it up and then
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equally fast, I get sucked in right back in. So it's this very strange adaptability, I think,
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of the human mind. If you don't have it, you don't have it and it's fine. You can absolutely
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live without it. But if you do have it and how enticing that whole thing is, the human mind is
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happy to give in as well. And in these phases, in a sense, you're saying that there is a phase
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where you can be without a phone and you're fine, but there is a phase where you're with the phone
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and you're on it all the time because the phone is what it is. Is there a difference in the way
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that you read or the way that you write or the way that you think about it? Do you have to make
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an intentional effort when you're in the city to take an hour away, take two hours away where you
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actually keep the phone away or are you able to multitask and switch context? No, no, no, no.
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I'm terrible at that. And definitely, I think when I am writing, for example, and Prem always
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laughs because I always tell him, I'm like, why don't I write more? Because when I'm writing,
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I'm so loving it. I don't miss anything in the world. And then I don't do it enough.
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So I think when I'm doing anything, whether it's art or whether it's writing or whether it's
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photography, I don't miss the phone at all. It's in those interludes that the phone becomes very,
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very kind of enticing to me. It's not when there's something going on, I'm happy to do that deep work
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without even looking for the phone. Except like I was telling you just before we started recording,
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I do live in a gated community and we have this awful thing called my gate where we have to
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constantly approve things. And so you need to keep it closed, which is worse actually. But so,
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you know, if it's at arm's length, the tendency to even subconsciously pick it up is so high
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that even if you don't want to, you find your hand having a mind of its own and reaching out
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for it and picking it up, which is terrible actually. But when I'm shooting, my hands are
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occupied and I'm completely in the zone. Actually, when I'm writing too, many times I write in a
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notebook first. I don't write straight on the computer. So I write on a notebook and again,
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hands are occupied and there's no way, no need to reach out for anything else except coffee or
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something maybe. So I think, yeah, it's the interludes when I'm between tasks and so on,
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that I'm just a slave to the phone. Really quite a slave. Yeah, I have my gate too and my building
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in fact has this further thing where they've integrated the fast track that our cards have
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with the building entry system. So what was happening was, and they've changed it now,
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somebody must have complained. But when I would enter the building, this big billboard would light
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up and say, welcome Amitavarma. It's visible from the street. And I'm like, what the fuck is this?
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And I recorded once with Rahul Mathun, who's one of the architects of the whole Aadhaar system. And
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he had come to my home studio to record and I told him about that. And he was like, you know,
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this is illegal. Yes, sounds bad. Yeah, like Aadhaar privacy is like so hard coded and hard
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baked in the way he described it, that something like this, this is like absolutely illegal and
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should not be allowed. And perhaps the building was listening into our eventual conversation
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because it removed that thing. So my name no longer flashes, but my car movements are tracked.
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Oh my God, it's crazy. Yes. So that whole thing, you have to be constantly present,
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you have to be on your phone. So even if you don't want to be, but if you live in a place like that,
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there's something that's holding you that, you know, there's that leash that they have you on.
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And life was actually quite different back in the day. So tell me about your childhood. You
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grew up in Bombay, right? So tell me about your childhood. What was it like there?
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I grew up in Bombay, yet a not Bombay kind of place. So my father worked at Tata Power,
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which has its own colony. And it's a series of colonies. There's RCF, there's Tata colony,
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there's BPCL, HBCL, you know, a bunch of those colonies. And almost all of them are pretty
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wooded. So we grew up in a wonderfully up and down hilly wooded little colony, not very large,
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but just enough to be able to get lost if you want to. And, you know, so cycling up crazy slopes.
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In fact, my friends from childhood, we just got on a WhatsApp group together and we were
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discussing what it was like. And every one of us has a tale of coming down a slope on a cycle
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and crashing into something and having scars to show for it, you know. But it was just so
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delightful talking about it, even just on WhatsApp. It was just, you know, one of those things,
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it just brought back a lot of memories. And then of course, one thing led to another and what
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playlist we used to listen to, what it was not called a playlist, then it was those little cassettes,
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whatever, but the music we used to listen to, and then the books we would read and what we would eat
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when we read the books, you know, the gooseberries, the amla that we would pluck. And so I think we
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all came to the conclusion that touchwood, our childhood was charmed, because we were in a
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bustling metropolis like Bombay, and yet we were cocooned in this absolutely gorgeous place,
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which I think my sister and I counted something like about, I think it was 59 species of birds
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on a casual Sunday morning walk. And I've seen an Indian pitta there, I've seen, you know, vultures,
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I've seen all manner of birds, and it was just a beautiful place to grow up in. Very quiet,
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you would not hear any sounds except a loudspeaker from, you know, the other surrounding,
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maybe, you know, the shanties and so on. So early morning suprabhatam kind of loudspeakers,
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and then of course the occasional Hindi music playing and so on. But it was a charmed childhood.
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My father believed that cars are not ecologically friendly, and so he never owned a car. He's pretty
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Gandhian in his thoughts. And so we would walk from this colony, which was about a kilometer from
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the main road. We'd walk to the main road, catch buses and go everywhere, trains, buses, and thank
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God for Bombay's public transport, you know. I used public transport all along and just, and was
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just fine, you know. Went to college in Xavier's, so from Chembur, where I grew up, to Xavier's was
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a long way off, and either a six-limited bus or a train, and to college and back every day. And
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never complained, really. It was just really beautiful, all of that. So I think in hindsight,
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in hindsight it just sounds charmed. We had tennis courts, we had an Olympic-sized swimming
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pool. So, you know, all those things that come with the colonies. So very privileged childhood,
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good friends, a lot of music and dance in the family, a lot of science talk, a lot of English,
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all of that. And, you know, apart from the obvious ways in which you call it privileged,
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I would say that it feels like there were two distinct things which, you know, when I think
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about it, make me think you're very lucky. And one of them is that even though you're in Bombay
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with all its advantages and all that, you've actually got nature around you. And you mentioned
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you had the good fortune of having a father who would take you bird watching at 4.30 in the morning
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and all of that. So you have that awareness of nature around you that you're able to identify
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40 bird species as mind-blowing. I stop at pigeon and crow, and which probably are all there are in
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my neighborhood. No, no, no, no. I'm kidding, I'm kidding. You're in Bombay. Yeah. So at one level,
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what happens is that city slickers like me, you know, to take the metaphor of the show's name
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forward, the nature becomes unseen to us. It might be around us, but we never actually see it. And
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at another level, there is something else that is unseen to us, especially when we have our private
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transport or we're going around in cars. The car becomes a bubble through which we travel everything
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outside the car, not only becomes unseen to us, but there is no need for us to engage with it in
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any way. Whereas if you're in public transport all the time, you're on a bus, you're on a train,
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you're walking from one place to another. The engagement is kind of much deeper. You are part
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of that world. You can hear the noises, you can smell the smells and all of that. And I'm just,
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and there is of course a danger in reading too much into all of this, but I'm just thinking that
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your acute sense of vision, the way that you see, you know, is it something that was natural to you?
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Do you think that it is something that was helped along by the circumstance in which these, you know,
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you're not cocooned away from these things? Or is it something that you also have to work on and
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develop as time goes by? I think I would put that down to the way my family operates. We're
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constantly looking out for things, you know, in nature, sounds, not just sight. So my mom would
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suddenly say, oh, barbit, barbit, barbit. And then, you know, we'd all run out to go spot the barbit
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because it's there somewhere. And it happens even now, even today, even this morning, we were,
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there was a conversation where some sound of a bird, what is that? Was that a tailor bird? You
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know, that kind of thing. So we are very tuned in to nature, both through vision and sound and
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texture and all of that. My grandfather's on one side, he was a zoology professor, the other side
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was a botany professor. So I think nature has just kind of been in the family and constantly talked
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you know, there's just those kinds of topics happening all the time. And
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my sister is an avid birder even today. And I think so I think it was it was the the upbringing
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and the nature in which we operated. So because I otherwise I could extend it to anybody who had
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grown up in Bombay in a colony like that should be as aware and it's not necessarily the case,
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right? So but I think in our family, that's what it was. And so in fact, when I was walking with
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Paul as well, he was amused almost at how I would keep talking to birds and, you know,
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noticing birds and bushes and you know, things like that and naming them and so on. So I think
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it's just that that papa and mummy were both are both very much tuned into what's around us.
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I think both of them are very tuned in even today to what's around around us and how things
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connect us connect up and and making connections and so on. And that kind of trickled down to us.
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My daughter's like that too. And so is my sister's both my both both her children are like that very
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very tuned into stuff. So yeah, I think I think it's more that I'm also curious to know more
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about your father because one of the things that sort of struck me when I was reading a little that
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you've written about him is that his engagement with nature, for example, was not just an ascetic
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one, but also an ethical one in the sense you're not just appreciating nature, but you're also
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saying I'm not going to use a car. And you're also you know, that whole ethic is set in.
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And it seems to me that when one becomes any of the other things that you have been,
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whether you're a photographer or you're, you know, doing the kind of writing that you've done,
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at one level, you can be drawn to it for, you know, the aesthetic considerations,
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which are considerable if you can see that natural beauty, if you know how to present it,
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the frames to put it in. That's one thing. But in your writing, there has also been this much
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deeper sort of quest for a narrative that goes beyond what is in front of you,
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but it goes back in time and it goes out in space and all of that. So I'm guessing that
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began with your dad. Tell me a little bit about your dad. Tell me a little bit about the
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environment at home and your parents. Yeah, actually, very much so. I think both my parents,
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Papa, especially because I think I was too young before that. But I think around the 1980s when I
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was still in school, I began to and he began to read stuff out to to us and book kinds of books
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he read. And he was a minority of one at that at that time. And it almost seemed at that time like
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Papa's not like the other people around, you know, we were in an electric company colony,
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right? So everybody else was almost everybody was an engineer and they were all very technocratic
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kind of people. And Papa was so different in his thinking. So it was something that we noticed
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early on and the kinds of things that he started reading to us, Masanobu Fukuoka, I mentioned this
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in the book as well, Wendell Berry, all those things seemed very different and seemed very,
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to me, seemed very gentle, very nonviolent in a very large sense, you know, in the sense that
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there's truly something, the ethic was something that was wedded to the land, wedded to how things
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are meant to be in nature, the natural connections, the natural civilization, almost, you know,
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and so that was something that we would constantly be talking about. Papa would be
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he would actually call out many things that at that time that were considered the norm,
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you know, and he would say things like, you know, this is, this is not, this is modern civilization,
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this is not, I think he called it normal civilization or something like that. But he said
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that this is not normal civilization, it's modern civilization, and this is not going down the right
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way and so on and so we were very conscious of that and I think much later I began to see the
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wisdom in his ways and while I would listen to him and I would love the poetry and I remember
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I used to do calligraphy so I would write out Wendell Berry's poems in calligraphy and so on,
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I would read it, I think it began to sink in and make much more sense to me only much later,
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much later when I paused, otherwise I was just running, running, running,
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and so when I paused it started making sense to me and I was I think at the point where I said,
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okay, you know, I need to pay attention to some of these things that I have been taught. Mama was
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very insistent on good communication skills, so for her good speaking, a way to, you know,
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modulate your tone, your voice, handwriting, the way you write, the words you use, vocabulary,
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all of that was very important. She was also, she was also a teacher, so, you know, quite strict,
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very strict growing up and so, you know, we, we kind of knew that it was this way or we're
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going to get into trouble so there was, and thank God for that frankly in hindsight.
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So I think the combination of those two, that ethic that Papa brought to the family as well as
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the rigor that Mama brought to the family did, did great for both my sister and I and,
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and I think, yeah, it was, it's just been in me throughout. I can't be any other way. It's,
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it's, it feels alien to me if I sit in a car too long. I hate it and same with the plane flying
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over. I'm, my nose is stuck to the window pane and, you know, I'm like what's happening there
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and, and it's interesting. I think I mentioned this in the book as well that when you're down
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there and then when you fly over it, you realize the amount of stuff you're missing out on and not
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in a formal kind of missing out, just the details, the understanding of the land that it's just lost
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to you if you travel too fast and too far and too high and, you know, whatever. So I think that it's
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very deep inside me, that kind of slow, as little footprint as possible like Papa would do. Papa
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would say he would just have a cycle and he'd go and he'd catch the public bus and go wherever.
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And so as little a footprint as possible, which of course then opens your senses up to everything
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that's going on and you're feeling your surrounds with all your senses and that again, I think it's
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so deep in me that that's just the way I don't think too much about it now. Yeah. You know,
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you mentioned reading Wendell Berry and in your book, you've got this beautiful quote by Wendell
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Berry, what I stand for is what I stand on. Yes. And it felt to me that that was almost like an
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articulation of your, where you are coming from because your, you know, your caring and your
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passion for the environment and for the world around us, natural civilization as it were,
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is just so, you know, so powerful and so strong. And yet, you know, a lot of things that are deep
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within us can also lie submerged or in the background for a long time. Like if one is just
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to look at your biography after this, you know, you do a master's in physics, you do an MBA,
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you're living the corporate life. In your words, you're running, running, running.
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And, you know, so when you're a kid, when you're growing up in this house where, you know, you've
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got an unusual dad like this. And again, obviously you're very lucky to have someone who saw out of
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the thing. You're growing up in that particular place. You can identify 890 birds or whatever
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the number is. And what is, how do you think of what you are going to do in life? Because
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I think what happens, what happens with many of us is that we treat something as a dichotomy.
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We should not be a dichotomy. And that is the difference between what we do and what we are.
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And we assume that, okay, I might be this poetry loving, nature loving, music loving, whatever,
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but I will do this, you know, MBA, banking, vice president, et cetera, et cetera. And to me,
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a cause of a lot of the silent suffering in the world is that dichotomy, that we don't realize
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that it is there. So do you think that you kind of like, how was it for you? How did you see
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yourself? Is it just sort of inertia and just following the path of least resistance that took
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you across all of these things? Or, you know, is that an unfair view? And were you also passionate
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about physics and management and all of those things that you went on to do?
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I was passionate about physics. In hindsight, I was terrible at it. I don't know why I was
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passionate about it. I think it was because I really looked up to this uncle of mine who's an
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astrophysicist and very much wanted to emulate him. And so I went all the way through with physics
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and finished my masters. And then within three months, when I was in the lab, I was like,
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I can't do this. It's not me. And so I gave it up. But I think, you know, you're so right about
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this dichotomy and I see it all around me. I saw it in myself too, which is what happened during
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the pause, you know, where that dichotomy just kind of collapsed and it just showed me the way
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really. It was not autopilot or anything. It was just that I got married. I was in the U.S.
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And somehow I didn't find my way through to telling stories in the U.S. and
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doing, getting into corporate life. I got into corporate life as a startup within Intel.
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And that was really fun. One year of real fun. But then the dot-com bust happened and then
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Intel shut down that group. And then I was absorbed into the main company. And I can't say I was very
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good at what I did there because it was not me. But yes, you know, there are these golden shackles,
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right? You're getting a monthly paycheck. Everything is really, you need that in the
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U.S., you know, two incomes to survive and so on, you know, in suburbia and all of that.
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And so there was that, but constantly knowing at me was this feeling that this is not what I want to
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do. And it takes, I think, some kind of pause, some kind of disruption to then bring that
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to the fore. And it came pretty strongly to me. I've always, right from young, when I was young,
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wanted to tell stories, wanted to, you know, work with, at that time National Geographic was
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Holy Grail, right? So that little yellow border thing would come home every month and I would
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pour over it and I'd be like, man, I wish I could one day. And, you know, I'd see some of these
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photographs that I see a Michael Nick Nichols clicked of this raging, you know, elephant in
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Ndoki. It's a blurry photo, but I'm like, good Lord, to be able to witness something like this
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and then capture it and so on. So those were very aspirational things for me right from when I was
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very young. But then of course, all this happened. And so when the paratyphoid happened and I was
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lying in bed, I think it came to a head where I said, you know what, I really need to do what I
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want to do, not what I can. And I could do a lot of things. I think if you apply yourself to it,
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you can do a wide variety of things. It's just a question of, you know, whether you want to make
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it work or not. And so I could do a lot of things, but I really wanted to do this. And I knew I would
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have to start from scratch and that there would be no money in it. There isn't any money in this.
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And so it would be a struggle. But I think collapsing that dichotomy and just making
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who I am and what I want to be one, there was no other way. I couldn't see my way out of that.
#
It was just, this is it now. I have to do this. And it had happened once before. It had happened
#
when I finished my master's in physics and I was working at TIFR in Bombay in a lab. And three
#
months in, I said, okay, this is not me. Overnight I quit and walked into Society Magazine. Do you
#
know? Which year was this? 1994. I walked into Society Magazine and Suma Varughese was the editor.
#
I just met her in Bombay at Kalaghore after all these years. And I told her, thank you. If it
#
wasn't for you taking a chance on me, because I had never written anything before and I was a
#
master's in physics, what would I know? And she said, okay, start work from the Monday. So I was
#
like, wow. And that one year that I was in society, one and a half years, I realized that this is
#
really, even though it was not nature writing, it was writing, it was meeting people, it was telling
#
human stories. Every day was different from the next and the previous. And it was just everything
#
that I had imagined I wanted to do. So I loved those one and a half years. And I got to work with
#
Suresh Natarajan, who was a photographer. And I would be happy scurrying all over Bombay, trying
#
to find something that he needed for some shoot. I was not even shooting. It was just his production
#
designer. But all those things came together. And I was like, I'm having fun. This is really
#
what I wanted when I was in my element. And I think I was not too bad at all that. But then I
#
got married and went off to the US. And then all these other things happen. So when I came down with
#
Paira Toyphoid in Bangalore, when we had returned from the US, I was still at Intel. And this is
#
2007. 2007. Yes. I realized that no, I really need to reclaim myself and who I am. I know
#
this sounds very, very hoo-ha. But I couldn't see myself going back to a corporate job again.
#
And so you're right. That's the dichotomy. And it's hard for people I can understand because
#
many times in things that you may want to pursue, that's you, there isn't a way to put food on the
#
table. And I think, again, here I was very privileged. I had a safety net, which is
#
not for everyone and not everybody has it. And that I think was superb. I was always taking loans
#
and paying it back always. So I'm still doing that even now. But taking loans, as in personal
#
loans, so I could borrow from people I knew. And that was, again, something that allowed me to do
#
this, allowed me to do. And what you said about Wendell Berry's quote, what I stand for is what
#
I stand on. That truly defines everything that I believe in today. And I'm sure we'll get to this
#
later. But even anything that I think India or the world is facing, if there was this kind of an
#
ethic that we, everybody in different places had or followed, and many people do, it's just that
#
they're not listened to. So many people do and they're not listened to. I think it would be a
#
very different world. It's just a, I don't know what to say. There's just some honesty about it
#
that helps you be very grounded. There's no way hubris can enter in that kind of situation
#
because you really know nothing. You know nothing. You're always learning. And so that really brings
#
you to base level. And it's a humility that is very beautiful. I think it's just, it is a huge
#
load lifted off your shoulders. And you don't think that you, there's no need to be somebody.
#
You just kind of just exist. I know that kind of sounds weird. No, it sounds, it's very wise and
#
we'll double click on that. But first I want to go back to sort of the moment of your pause,
#
where again there is a dichotomy in play, which is that when you want to follow a passion,
#
there are two ways of thinking about it. And one way of thinking about it is that, for example,
#
let's say I want to be a photographer. You start thinking about how will I make a career out of it?
#
Who will publish my photography? Will anyone take me serious? So you think in terms of goals,
#
in particular achievements, and you think in terms of a path. Whereas another way of thinking
#
of it is saying that actually I don't care about that. Actually I love doing this and I want to do
#
it. That's what I want to do. I don't care about any of the other stuff, the practical stuff and
#
all of that. And how was dealing with this dichotomy for you? Because on the one hand,
#
I feel like what that pause would have told you is that I want to do this, whether it is photography
#
or telling stories or whatever, I want to do this. But on the other hand, all the doubts that came
#
would have come from that other side of the equation. That is it practical? Is there a
#
career in this? Will I be taken seriously? Imposter syndrome can also come in quickly here.
#
So, you know, take me through your journey, you know, grappling with this.
#
I'm still on that journey. You're absolutely right. Those doubts were like mountains, really
#
huge mountains. And I knew what I wanted to do. Yes, tell stories. Whether I would be taken
#
seriously, whether anybody would publish me, whether I would be able to sustain it because,
#
you know, day in and day out, it's a very self starter kind of thing. You have to find the
#
stories. You have to do everything. There's nobody telling you to do anything. So it's that motivation,
#
that energy that has to come from very deep within you. And then, yes, of course, that, you know,
#
who wants to hear what I write, right? Will anybody want to hear what I write or what I say?
#
I have always had a huge imposter syndrome problem, always. I have never worked in a field
#
in which I have gotten a degree in. I've always moved. You know, it's so, so funny. I get a degree
#
then I move. Get a degree then I move into something else. And so there was always this,
#
am I enough? Am I qualified? Who am I to say this? You know, all of that. It's still there,
#
very much there. And in 2007, it was doubly kind of intense because I was in a new city.
#
Bangalore was new to me at that time. I'd never lived here before. And I didn't know anyone.
#
And here I wanted to do environmental storytelling. And I knew that for that,
#
I would need to spin up on wildlife biology. I'd need to spin up on hydrology. I didn't know
#
anyone, right? I'd never done this before. And so I was like, how do I begin, you know,
#
and how do I even start? And I think at that time, I always doff my hat to social media.
#
And by about 2009 or so, which is just when I was maybe just gathering, because until then,
#
the way I started out was travel storytelling. You know, this is kind of almost the easiest thing
#
to do. You go someplace and you pitch the story then to a magazine or something like that. And
#
luckily, a couple of magazines, I think at that time, it was India Today Traveler or something,
#
I forget. And Outlook Traveler, a couple of these guys actually published what I was writing,
#
what I was shooting. And it was not the right genre. It was not what I wanted to do.
#
But it was something. It definitely did not pay the bills. So that was not that that was really
#
quite a, it's just a side note. But I think at that time, I started getting on Facebook and
#
started connecting with I had gone. I remember in 2009 in Bangalore, there was, I think a wild
#
screens film festival or some something like that had happened in Cunningham Road and or Miller's
#
Road or somewhere there. And I'd gone there and I was like, why died seeing all these filmmakers,
#
Sandesh Kadur and Kalyan Verma and all these people. And I tried very hesitantly to make
#
friends with them and, you know, try to figure out ways to stay in touch or to learn and stuff
#
like that. And I did a bunch of workshops also with these people. And then I started making
#
connections with wildlife biologists. And I really, really have to thank them because
#
they allowed me to stand on their shoulders. Aparajita Dutta, Divya Mudappa, T.R. Shankar Raman,
#
people like this who and in Sri Lanka, Manori Gunavardana, who's an elephant researcher,
#
excellent, excellent. She's taught me so much. I would go to Sri Lanka and spend hours with
#
elephants and then of course, you know, shoot and write and stuff like that. And she would teach me
#
how to parse it and, you know, what's happening in these with elephant behavior and so on.
#
Beautiful stuff. And I think I stood on the shoulders of these giants. At the same time,
#
I came to know of S. Vishwanath's work. He does a lot of rainwater harvesting and water work here.
#
And so all of these things, you know, they were like little pieces of the puzzle,
#
but they were all disparate at that point. And I was not quite fitting them in. And again,
#
I kept writing for various little magazines. There was a magazine called, you know, Ashwin Mahesh's
#
thing called India, India Together. And so I wrote a bunch of articles for them and a lot of good
#
research. And actually, Ashwin taught me how to, he was a great editor, you know, he would ask me
#
such incisive questions, which I had not thought of in field. So I was almost learning on the job,
#
the beautiful stuff. So a lot of that was happening. And slowly, slowly I was,
#
and this was happening actually to 2005, 2006, 2007. I was in Bangalore, not yet quit. And I was
#
doing all these little things on the side. And then, so when I quit, I had these wonderful people,
#
you know, who would help me, but I never, you know, how scientists are also right.
#
They're very clear about certain things and they're very cut and dried in how they might,
#
you know, give you feedback. And so the imposter in me came up and I was like, oh my God,
#
am I saying this right? You know, so I sort of doubt myself, second guess myself, and just wonder
#
if I said this, will I get backlash from these guys? You know, that kind of stuff. So very,
#
very diffident, I think is the word, very diffident, but hesitantly putting, you know,
#
one foot behind the other and keeping on at it. And again, you know, some of these people were
#
really gentle and helped me a lot. So it was very nice. And this slowly built that up.
#
But I don't think that imposter syndrome went off or went away at any point. You know,
#
it kind of rears its head up now and again. It's lesser now than it was then definitely,
#
but it does come back. And those questions, you know, am I good enough? The one thing that
#
really helped with that was the fact that I was doing the legwork. I was there, I know what I saw,
#
I know what I heard. And if somebody in the city was telling me that I was wrong,
#
how could they reconcile what I had seen and heard, you know? So maybe there was,
#
and that's what then started giving me the clue that maybe the way people who are removed from
#
these places saw things is different from the people who have to live in these landscapes and
#
actually go through this kind of stuff. And so there was a story there as well,
#
just like there is a narrative here in the city. There is a narrative there in those landscapes,
#
which are not any less because it's true. It's happening. I'm seeing it. This is very much
#
happening. And so for me, I think slowly I started finding the ground beneath my feet.
#
You know, it just becomes a little bit more hard, like firm. And so I kind of, I'm not as hesitant
#
to stand on that. And so that helped, that even today helps me because I know that I've been in
#
these places and I know what it's like. So unless somebody who has also been there and tells me how
#
to see things differently, which also happens often, like there are people who work in those
#
landscapes and me as a newbie going there, I see something and I assume something. And then I'm
#
told, no, no, this is what is actually happening, which is immensely educational as well. You know,
#
then the imposter syndrome begins to kind of just, the imposter that that voice begins to kind of
#
just get muted a little bit because there is a self assurance of, you know, okay, I know what I've
#
seen and that's, that's valid. I sort of wonder in that journey that you take as a storyteller
#
or an artist or whatever, the role that the forms you're forced to adopt take, like you pointed out
#
your early stories of Outlook Traveler and all these travel stories and they have a particular
#
kind of format and a template and you've got to follow those. And at some level, you're forced
#
into a sort of a shallow kind of narrative. And I mean, it is what it is and that's what you do.
#
And the danger there, it seems to me is that, you know, the forms that you create and you're
#
forced to think in those forms. And like when you came into storytelling, were there like,
#
what was your conception of what do I want to do? Was it a nebulous thing of I want to tell
#
these beautiful stories like these great writers I've read, or did you have a more specific mind?
#
And then when you're forced in these forms, what is the impact that has on you? Because
#
we get good at something by doing it again and again. But if you're going to get good at
#
storytelling by telling Outlook Traveler kind of stories, then that's a deviation from what you
#
would originally have set out to do. So what was your thinking about that? Like, you know,
#
obviously, eventually you land up doing this kind of long form writing and thank God for that. But
#
what was that process like? Were there times where, like, I imagine if I was in your place,
#
I would have felt this annoying dissatisfaction, but without being able to nail down what it is
#
that I'm dissatisfied about. So what was it like for you? Yeah, you're right. You're absolutely
#
right. And there was that dissatisfaction. In fact, it came to the fore. I remember when my first
#
piece, which I had just gotten back from Lhasa, was published on Lhasa. And right in the middle
#
of my words, in the middle of those pages was an advertisement of something
#
very China. And my whole story was a very different kind of voice. And I was like,
#
I think I was very naive to think that my story would have been understood in a different way.
#
And when I saw that, when I came back from Borneo in the airport, when I went into a shop
#
and I had, and I turned over everything that I wanted to buy because I was hungry,
#
and everything had palm oil in it, you know, and I knew that I was going to write about Borneo.
#
And I knew that I could not, I could not bring that part up really, you know, in that Outlook
#
traveler story. Other than one single line, maybe somewhere, I realized that that is what I
#
don't want to do. And I was very sure about that, because Papa's words would ring again in my, you
#
know, my, my, I have a very lovely, dear, dear, dear, dear cousin, actually an aunt, but a cousin,
#
who finished her master's in chemistry or something, and went into copywriting.
#
So she was in an advertising agency. And I still remember this conversation Papa had with her,
#
saying, why are you going to market lies to people, you know? And of course, I mean,
#
she had to earn a living and she went ahead and she did, she was very good at what she did.
#
And she now is a market researcher, which is different. But I still remember that. And I was
#
like, you know, do I want to be part of the lie? Do I want to be part of the, well, lies may be
#
too strong a word, but the, you know, the kind of greenwash, the eye wash, the smoke and mirrors
#
kind of thing, or do I want to tell stories that are unafraid, you know? And so that was something
#
that I had to, I had to make that conscious decision. And I knew that I would not be able to
#
to continue telling those greenwash kind of stories for very long. Couldn't do it at all.
#
In fact, even, you know, when I went out on these wildlife photography expeditions,
#
and we'd be in a Jeep in a national park taking photographs from the Jeep of these animals,
#
I just knew that that's not really how nature is. And that's like, you know, you're in a little
#
bubble. So very quickly, I gave that up too. Though it taught me a lot, it taught me photography
#
in leaps and bounds, actually my photography improved. However, I knew that that was also
#
not what I wanted to do. I did not want to tell pretty stories about, about charismatic animals
#
and, you know, hunky dory, everything is good kind of stuff, because I knew that wasn't. And so
#
very, I was very clear that I wanted to do a certain thing. But I did not know if anybody
#
would publish it. And my friend and I, Kalyan Verma, and I would often talk about how so many
#
outlets, Western outlets, don't want to hear the bad news. They don't want to hear,
#
conservation stories even were too much for them, imagine. And so they wanted only, you know,
#
natural history, very good stuff. And he would, he would, we would lament, and I think that's how
#
Pipli was born also, around that time. And so we knew that, you know, telling those hard hitting
#
stories are not going to find takers in the mainstream media. At least maybe it was not
#
ready at that time. Now it's quite different, maybe, maybe, but so that that was always going
#
to be a struggle. And I had no idea whether anybody would publish what I wanted to do.
#
No idea. Hindu carried my early stories of conservation, where I went and I went, I talked
#
about on the conservation in the pocket, which is a project that does work. And I went and spent
#
some time there and write and wrote about that, which is, I think, even today, it's just one of
#
those amazing stories, not without its messiness. But it's still still a it's a good story. And so,
#
you know, I was doing a little bit of that. So Hindu and some of these other places would be
#
have mint would be happy to carry some of these stories, but not not something where they'll say,
#
okay, I'm going to, we're going to commission you to do a series because some of these things need
#
to be serious, you know, it's not one offs. So that question always remained whether whether
#
anybody would want to read, but I just knew that I wanted to do it. Do you remember any instance
#
where you report on a story in those early days, and what you notice and what you think is the
#
essence of what your story is not what you can write about, but you have to write about something
#
else? Do you remember something like that? I don't remember because I never allowed myself to do
#
those kinds of things. I would say no. In fact, there would be certain outlets, which had a certain
#
ideology that I would not even want to engage with. So I never wrote for don't take names,
#
but what kind of ideology Oh, like the fortress forest kind of ideology, the foot, you know, where
#
people have to be outside and it has to be pristine nature kind of stuff, where I knew I would never
#
want to write stuff like that, because that's not how it is. So some of those things, some of the
#
things where people would say, Oh, but big dams are also necessary, you know, that kind of stuff,
#
anything where it was not quite so honest. And it was very much a propaganda or or something,
#
some agenda that was being pushed either by a funder or by an ideology or by something which was
#
not which didn't sit well with me and which I knew is not easy to take the other tack to take
#
the opposite tack, but which I knew needed to be said because that is the direction we eventually
#
want to move in because the other direction is what has gotten us into the soup. And as you sort
#
of started doing these stories and delving deep, what were the kind of preconceptions which shifted
#
like the things that have been normalized, for example, you know, in your book, what I
#
went margin lands, what I was very struck by was the nature of borders. For example, at one point,
#
you write desert dwellers recognize borders observed by birds, outlines that are thoughtful,
#
meaningful, natural, inspired by geology, with no written documentation to guide them to rely
#
on memory and no answer, no visceral interaction with the land, and they are one with it. Elsewhere,
#
you have this great sentence, the Ganga moves the borders move with them, right, with reference to,
#
I think, what was happening in Chharkhand and Bengal, and, you know, they were fighting over
#
the land because the river kept moving around. So obviously, the state borders change. And that's
#
again, something that for most of my life, I never questioned the lines on a map of what a nation
#
state is. And it's only in recent years that I've begun to think that not just in terms of geology,
#
not just in terms of bird, bird movements, but little things like cuisines or little things like,
#
you know, just the clothes people wear or languages or dialects or whatever,
#
that there are so many shifting fluid borders, almost a multitude of borders, that in a sense
#
is framed that we look at that this is a country and that is a border and Chharkhand ends here and
#
Bengal begins here is this ridiculous, artificial frame of looking at the natural world and almost
#
serves as a metaphor for our overall attitude towards the natural world where we try to put
#
it into boxes and so on. Yeah, you're absolutely right. You're absolutely right. Yes, the border
#
thing. So there are biogeographic regions, right? And that's what I meant by what the birds recognize,
#
where they don't see a line on a map. This is how they migrate, not just birds, right? Karibu
#
in the north, in the Lapland, and the Maasai with their herds. Our own shepherds here,
#
they walk past borders. They work in Tibet, for example, in Ladakh, for example, which is part of
#
Tibet. There you go again. See? Ladakh is the eastern, the westernmost part of the Tibetan plateau
#
and the Changpa herders live on both sides and these are grazing lands and they don't even
#
migrate. They just move across, right? There are these fluid movements that happen and we are the
#
ones who have drawn that line and have forced people, whether it is Punjab, Pakistan versus
#
Punjab, India, whether it is Bangladesh, West Bengal, whether it is Kuch Bihar and Northern
#
Bangladesh, whatever. We have drawn these borders and created these artificial boundaries which
#
rivers don't recognize, birds don't recognize, animals don't recognize, and neither do the people
#
who live with the land. It doesn't serve them well at all. So that is something that
#
I knew at a visceral level, but then I saw it playing out when I went to Bangladesh and my
#
trip to Bangladesh was very early on in my journey in storytelling, so 2014, and I noticed things
#
that were happening in Northern Bangladesh with the Chit Mahal and all those parts and just the
#
Tista, along the Tista, which stunned me so much that I came back and then, so I think I've always
#
been blessed with people who have guided me, you know, people who have been one with the land and
#
who have guided me accordingly. Like two people in Assam, Professor Chandan Mohanta and Professor
#
Arup Jati Shaikhia, or both of them from Assam and both of them who just heard me intuitively when
#
I told them what I had just seen in Bangladesh and had gone to Assam after that, and they told me how
#
to parse this information and what's really happening and so on, and whether I was right in
#
this, whether I was wrong in this, and so on. So those kinds of preconceived notions of yes,
#
this is a boundary and this is where this land ends and that land begins, it's completely, it's not
#
tenable, it's not sustainable. You know, at some point, because of the way nation states operate
#
also, you are going to find problems crop up and they have. It's happened in Bangladesh, it's
#
happened in India, it's happened anytime there is a transboundary river, right? Like there's a river
#
coming from China to India, India to Bangladesh, there's going to be issues, right? So there's
#
all those kinds of things. So that was one big thing. This whole thing of even forests, right?
#
And how national parks are seen and so on. It was a huge education to me about community
#
conservation and so on. And none of it is easy, none of it is a right or wrong answer. There are
#
these very messy situations that even people who are whole hog in one camp, they have to deal with
#
it, you know, and it's not easy. So I realized that while I want to say something which is
#
honest or truthful or something, there are different colors to all of that. And so I think
#
those things also, each time I went back to places, I would discover something, I would
#
uncover something different, which would inform me differently. And so kind of built upon,
#
sometimes I had to take off one layer and then, you know, start again and build and so on.
#
So it was almost like a cumulative knowledge gathering process. Sometimes you're, it's like
#
a tapestry, right? You're building a little bit, little bit, little bit, and you're creating
#
something which then doesn't seem maybe right. Something else comes, sits on top of it. There
#
are many layers. So it's not, it's not a quick and dirty, fast, clean, clean process.
#
I think, I mean, I agree with you that the world is deeply complex. There's no black and white and
#
different viewpoints can often be simultaneously, can have different aspects of the truth.
#
But what I do think is that whereas I wouldn't necessarily jump to judging different views,
#
I would jump to judging different ways of seeing that there is a way of seeing where you go in
#
without preconceived notions and you just take everything in by osmosis. You just observe,
#
you take the ego out of it, you take the self out of it, you let things happen and,
#
you know, and then whatever you come up with, it's a good faith effort to make sense.
#
And then there is another way of seeing, which is that you come with, like, you know, I can't
#
think of a visual equivalent to the phrase blunt tool, but you come with a blunt vision, like the
#
state often does, where you do not have the capacity to take in complexity or the humility
#
to be open to it. So you apply a fixed frame to everything and then that is it. And all your
#
judgments are based on that frame. And within the limited context of that frame, a lot of the things
#
that you believe might seem justified, but if you were just to open yourself up,
#
you would realize that it's sort of different. And I, like, whenever one writes a story,
#
especially when one is young, you know, it becomes difficult to sort of let go one's
#
preconceived notions because it is natural to come at something thinking that, hey, I'm intelligent,
#
I look at things in a good way, you know, I can see things others can't and etc, etc.
#
And that ego can then get in the way of learning. So what was that, and you've used the word term
#
humility before, what was that process of discovering and cultivating that humility,
#
of recognizing that, you know, all of these people you're talking to, you know, when you're
#
a reporter from the city, they can sort of be a tendency that there's almost a natural hierarchy
#
in place. You have come from somewhere, they are a subject, they are telling you things,
#
you're noting it down pompously and, you know, crafting narratives in your head with beautiful
#
phrases. And from your writing, it's evident that at least at the time of all the, you know,
#
stories and margin lands and all that, you're not doing that. You're just sinking in, you're almost.
#
So what is that like? Was it easy for you to straightaway sink into that role where you're
#
just a curious observer and you're open to everything? Or did you also have to fight these
#
battles within yourself? So here's where the imposter stood me well. So I would go to those
#
places and I'd say, who am I? You know, what do I know? And so that was also good, you know.
#
So very early on, thanks to Chhattar Singh and people like him, thanks to Manori, people like her,
#
I was just, I was really just a sponge. And I knew that I did not know, I haven't studied any
#
of these things. I've never been in many of these places before. I haven't studied sociology. None
#
of this, right? I'm come, I'm really a blank slate. And so for me, sometimes that can even,
#
you know, anybody can tell me anything and I can believe it. I didn't believe it blank. I mean,
#
I was not stupid, but I was willing to listen to everyone. And it was interesting because then I
#
started finding people who were willing to teach and there were different people we would meet.
#
And these guys would also show me a way to, to parse what I'm hearing, which is,
#
which was so helpful. Like, for example, I'll give you an example where it's very easy to,
#
for me to think that all shepherds in Rajasthan live with the land and know what's good for the
#
land, right? Because I've met Chhattar Singh, I've met all his cohort. I've met everybody who talks
#
like this and who, it's just all very beautiful and lovely. One day we are out, we're in the,
#
in the desert and we meet a shepherd and I stopped the car. We're going to some other place. And so
#
I stopped the car and I tell Chhattar Singh, I want to go talk to him. Do you know him? Chhattar
#
Singh doesn't know him. So I'm like, fine, let me go. So I go, I go and I'm walking with this man.
#
He's walking, he's herding his goat and sheep through seven grass, high seven grass. And I
#
talk to him and I ask him about various things. We're just talking, where is he from? What's he
#
doing and all of that. And, you know, what's this is again, two years into a drought. And so I'm
#
asking him, what does he think about the water situation? He's very far from the Kadeen. What
#
does he think? So I'm just talking and he says something like, yeah, I'm waiting for the,
#
the government to put a tube well, and then all our problems will be solved. And so there are
#
people everywhere who have, who have different narratives, right? Who believe in different
#
things. But there is the land which tells you a certain way to live that is right. Because that
#
is your ultimate, right? If you go against the land, things are going to happen. I mean,
#
this is not just me speaking or anything. You're, it's just unfortunate, but that's how it is.
#
So I came back to Chhattar Singh and I told him, this is what he said. He said, ah, and so he has
#
bought into that narrative. And, and then Chhattar Singh proceeds to tell me that the reason why
#
shepherds are dependent upon hand dug percolation wells, which are very shallow percolation wells,
#
is that they'll dig a well, the water will come up, the, the sheep, the flock will graze and will
#
will graze around there, come there for the water. And then that water will be gone. You
#
keep pulling out, pulling up from a shallow well, you pull up from the well and the water's gone.
#
So then that flock has to move until you dig another well in a different place,
#
which also helps that this place doesn't get overgrazed. So, you know, there is a rhythm to
#
that kind of life, which will be completely disrupted if there is a borewell. And so then
#
there is the chance that grasslands will get overgrazed and then it's going to become a
#
dust bowl. And so other things will happen and so on. And so, you know, these kinds of connections,
#
what would I know coming from the city, right? I know nothing. I didn't even at that time knew,
#
no, I mean, I'd spoken to people like Vishwanath, so I knew borewells were not what we should do
#
and why and all that. But imagine, right, if you come from a city and you're going there and
#
somebody says, Swadesh, he comes and builds a borewell, right? Shahrukh Khan. And everybody
#
loved the movie. But if you are slightly ecologically bent, you know that, oops, that is, you know,
#
that was a quick fix, but it may not. And again, you know, it all is dependent upon where that
#
exact place was and, you know, particulars of that area, but it may not have been the right way.
#
It was a quick way. And usually quick ways are not the right ways. So all those kinds of little
#
things, what would I know, right? So for me, all of margin lands was just one huge,
#
huge learning curve. Like it just keeps going up. Even now it keeps going up.
#
Everywhere I go, I just came back from Kutch late last year, huge learning curve, you know,
#
seeing what's happening there and what the people are facing there and how
#
life can be lived, how life is being lived, what's happening. And, you know, I went there,
#
I'll tell you a clear preconceived notion I went there with. I went there with this preconceived
#
notion that there's a lot of that invasive prosopis juleflora there. And so what does, for me,
#
if it's invasive, root it out, take it out, right? And I've heard that even in Rajasthan,
#
there is charcoal to be made from prosopis juleflora. So great, you know, you can make
#
charcoal and stuff like that. And then I go to Kutch and I hear there that the politicians have
#
said, go forth and remove the invasives, right? Take it all off and make your charcoal and make,
#
you know, make a living out of it and so on. Then the people over there who are slightly more
#
educated about the land tell me, how many people really know to tell a prosopis juleflora from a
#
native Babool? Not too many. How many of them, when they take their JCBs to uproot, because these
#
things have deep roots, to uproot this prosopis juleflora, don't uproot all the native vegetation
#
with it, right? That's one. And then we are driving at night. We're coming back from a place. We've
#
gone bird watching. We're coming back from a place. We're passing through these villages
#
and you can't see. Visibility is zero because they're burning that for charcoal and you can't
#
breathe. And it's black, thick black smoke. And these are people, the villagers who are living
#
there, they're burning it there. And so you go with the preconceived notion of yes, you have to
#
root out, you know, yeah, great that they're taking out invasives and the government mandate
#
to take out invasives. And you see that everything is nuanced and it's not all that it's cut out to
#
be, right? Everything is. So if you do something quick, like quick fix, take out everything,
#
right? So you are going to probably land in hot water. So, you know, slow considered, which is not
#
necessarily economically the best route is usually in long term economically the best route.
#
So I want to ask about when you start doing these stories, like the initial way of learning what's
#
going on as you go and you try to talk to people and in your halting language, in their halting
#
language, you find a way to communicate and it's incredibly shallow and you know nothing at the end
#
of it. Then as you spend more and more time, you figure out better ways to learn. And I'm just
#
thinking about the immense complexity of language and how tacit knowledge is contained. For example,
#
in your book, you mentioned a few of the words that they have, which, you know, was like a Chinto
#
for a drizzle or good for what you describe as the asphyxiating stillness of clouds that blanket the
#
sky without giving way to rain. What a lovely description. And they have one lovely word for
#
that. And here pointing out that these specific things have specific words for them is only a
#
metaphor for also saying that there is so much local knowledge that is in a sense impossible to
#
communicate. They know it in their bones. At one point, you pointed out about how Chattar Singh
#
is talking to you about his son. And he's saying that my son is not learning any of this. He is
#
being trained by the education system to be a slave of the 31st, you know, which is where you
#
get your salary. And I thought that's such a lovely phrase. You know, it cannot come from a
#
city dweller. It needs to come from someone who is outside looking in so they can see the absurdity
#
of the phenomenon. And I'm just thinking that all this tacit knowledge is not written down.
#
It's contained in the lived experiences and in the everyday wisdom of all of these people
#
and what they can communicate even to someone like you who's spending months and months there
#
and making herself completely open as a fraction of this. And it is not even as if the next
#
generation takes it on. Their next generation is, you know, trained for a quote unquote modern
#
world where priorities are different and all of that. And this is lost forever. And I'm thinking
#
if this is lost forever, once the language disappears and the words disappear, then there
#
is no way out. Then it is no longer sort of a battle between one status ideology and a more
#
bottom-up way of thinking of the world. It is just then the natural progression of things that
#
this shit will happen. Yeah. Yeah. And I think Barry Lopez puts it beautifully where, you know,
#
he has this essay called American Geographies. Brilliant essay. And he puts it really well where
#
he says that if you are not intimately aware of your local geography, then the interlopers,
#
the charlatans, the people with huge marketing budgets, they will come and they are happy to
#
take it over. And that is what is happening to large swathes of India today. Any place in the
#
world actually, not just India and not just today. It's been happening, right? So that awareness,
#
that understanding, that observation, and that connection with the land, that elemental connection
#
with that land, with the land, with the water, we need to reclaim it. And it doesn't mean that we
#
need to go back to places or something like that to reclaim it. We need to reclaim it in Belandur,
#
for example, where I live. What is right? Where is it? Is it in a valley? I mean, it's built over so
#
badly now that you can't even tell what the geography used to be. And so where, you know,
#
what is right for Belandur? It's not probably what's right for Whitefield, which is the very
#
next, you know, suburb and so on. So if you don't know, and if we don't know it, who will, right?
#
Somebody sitting in the Vidhan Sauda or somebody sitting in Delhi is obviously not going to know
#
it. So if you can't stand up for what you stand on, then be prepared to lose it. And then we are
#
going to be down a slippery slope. We are already on that actually. And interesting that you bring
#
up that thing about Chinto and Khutyo. It happened where we were sitting in a, in a courtyard and
#
drinking tea. And it was summer and there was like, you know, dust storm and all of that.
#
And I asked Chetar Singh, I tell him, oh, looks like it's going to rain. And he said, no. I said,
#
no, no, he was facing me. So I said, no, turn around and look there. He said, I don't need to
#
look. I know it's not going to rain. And then I said, how do you know? So he said, that is,
#
he called it something, I forget now, it's past or something. So I was like, no, but then,
#
and then I said, what is that? And then he said, this is that and that is that. And then he started
#
pointing out all these different, there were three, four different clouds above us. And he said,
#
these, and none of these will rain and you'll have to wait until it becomes Kala for it to rain.
#
And I was like, that's, you know, and then that's when the storyteller in me said, good Lord,
#
there's a story here. It was just a chance conversation where I said, then you can't,
#
he's the kind of guy, you can't tell him, okay, tell me all the names of clouds. Not like that.
#
Then you spend day as, and when those, whichever cloud comes, he's going to point out and tell you
#
what it is, which is why I don't have all 40, because not all 40 showed up. Right. But the,
#
you know, even that awareness to, to be able to, to read the land,
#
you know, it's, it's so important. It's so important. Or read the river. Like in my story,
#
there's a guy who's a boat master who's from Bihar and he reads the Brahmaputra like the
#
back of his hand. And he knows exactly how to go and what to do and so on. Where, you know,
#
where to find food, where to find fish, where to find eel. These things will be lost to us,
#
you know, with this, with that generation passing on because all of them have, because we told them
#
to put their kids in colleges, engineering colleges or BA in history or something like that.
#
What is that going to do? They don't know how to fish anymore. This is also a crazy dichotomy
#
that one wishes didn't exist between an old way of doing things, which, you know, is all this tacit
#
knowledge, but it's not written down in a, you know, in a systematic way and also a new way of
#
looking at the world, which when it looks at these subjects can be like so shallow and so blunt.
#
And, you know, as a story lover, I of course love the stories in your book, but I also love
#
the stories within stories, which are the stories that these people tell themselves or have told
#
themselves through time about the things around them. For example, and I hope I pronounce them
#
right. So if any biologists are listening to this and they don't like, I mean, I'm sorry,
#
my pronunciations are terrible. So you mentioned this thing called palithoa toxica, right?
#
And it's something that grows on a rock and it's poisonous and you almost put your hand on it and
#
thank goodness you didn't. And the story behind this was so beautiful. It is a myth of a hunchback
#
who is atop a mountain, a hunchback hermit. And one day the fishermen decide that the fishermen
#
keep vanishing. So it is a hunchback's fault. And they go up and while beating him up, they
#
noticed that on a part of his body, there is a mouth of a shark. And then they realized that he
#
goes swimming every day. And when he's back, you know, a fisherman is missing. So they slaughter
#
him. And after they slaughter him, these palithoa toxica start appearing on rocks. And if you touch
#
them, it's poisonous and they'll kill you. Another story I loved, and it was also moving in a way
#
as, you know, how human beings accept their lot. This was a story about Bheel fatalism,
#
where you point out, you know, Shiva and Parvati one day look at the Bheel farmers and they decide
#
we must help them. So first they put a silver pot in their way, but they ignore it. Then
#
Parvati says, let us give them a bull. We'll send Nandi and Nandi goes. And the Bheel farmers
#
apparently don't realize it's a special bull. So they kill the bull. And Parvati gets pissed
#
off and she says, okay, a curse upon you. You will never be able to farm properly again,
#
which is why those are barren lands. And this is such a, and this is a convenient myth for
#
them to then be fatalistic and believe that, oh shit, we are screwed. This is the way it
#
always will be. Right. And I think about these lovely stories, which like,
#
which are not very different from science. I mean, we understand the world by telling stories about
#
it. These are early stories. Science is later stories based on deeper observation and many of
#
it obviously is pretty close to the truth. But the thing is that when governments come with
#
their preconceived notion, when, when you look at it in a top down kind of way, you miss all
#
the beautiful nuance. And I keep wondering that this is the dichotomy and a real dichotomy,
#
and not a false one that we need to bridge, that there has to be a way to get someone to capture
#
some of that knowledge about the 40 ways of clouds and kind of put it out there. And both
#
ways of thinking that arise seem so simplistic to me. And one tragically simplistic and the other
#
just foolishly and bullheadedly simplistic. What's your thought? Yeah. Yeah. It's, I mean,
#
putting it out there is one thing, but then who's listening. Right. Like for example,
#
many people come to meet Chhattar Singh, because there is never ending water in the deep Thar,
#
where there is no water to be seen. Right. So there are collectors, there are various other
#
people, there are chief ministers, there's all kinds of ministers will come to meet him to say,
#
problem, you know, that kind of thing. And he shows them everything. He tells them the whole
#
thing. Does anything happen? Next thing we know is Boerwels are being dug there. He called me the
#
other day saying Boerwels are being dug here now, all over. That's going to destroy the ecosystem
#
completely. Right. It's going to destroy even these villages, these far flung villages. Granted,
#
there aren't too many people there, but it's going to completely destroy an ecosystem as well as the
#
wildlife that depends upon it, as well as these goat and sheep that depend upon it, the desert
#
goat and sheep. So putting it out there is one thing, but is anyone willing to listen? I think
#
is the question. And when I was in Bengal, my guide there, not Bengal, he told me, you know,
#
very clearly he said that, how can you wake someone who only pretends to be asleep? You know,
#
that is just exactly what it is. It's not that these guys don't know that there is another way.
#
It's just that is anybody willing to do what it takes? It doesn't take too much. That's the
#
problem. Maybe there's not that much money that needs to be doing. You don't need that much money
#
to do a lot of these things. And maybe people want things, which are a lot of money, you know,
#
concrete and whatnot. And so for build and then create even, even here in Bangalore, for example,
#
there's going to be a huge drought this year in summer. They're saying, oh, summer is going to be
#
terrible because there's been less rain and so on. And so now the immediate question, the talk is
#
about yet another dam, which keeps coming up. But the question is, are we doing enough in the city
#
itself to stem the rot? You know, Bangalore gets two X the amount of rain required for domestic
#
consumption. Two X. We don't even hold half of it. We're getting everything from Kaveri, right? Or
#
bore wells, worse. Now the question is with, with rainwater and with gray water, we could do so much,
#
right? And there are enough and more people who have been talking about this for years,
#
like Vishwanath, like many others. Who's listening? So the question really is, do we want to listen?
#
Do we want to listen to simple? Do we want to reclaim a land ethic or do we want to impose
#
our ethic on the land? So for all my listeners, I do have an episode with Vishwanath as well,
#
but it was way back in the early days where I did many. Yeah, there were miniatures. So this
#
was like 40 minutes. So maybe I should call him in and take some 40 hours from him or something.
#
Please do because such wisdom, you know, you need, you need a lot of people to hear this kind of
#
wisdom. Yeah, but even in those 40 minutes, he kind of opened my eyes and I remember my listeners
#
found it very sort of enlightening and I have never looked at bore wells the same way again.
#
I can promise you that. Let's go back to your journey. You know, we'll come back to all of
#
this later and in a much deeper way, but let's go back to your journey that, you know, the first
#
time I noticed your work frankly was not as a storyteller, but for the incredible,
#
mind blowing photography, right? Which just blew me away. It was absolutely like when I was a kid,
#
although I had no aspirations to anything to do with National Geographic, I would still look at
#
that as a gold standard. And you know, you can make out what is a National Geographic photograph
#
and your photographs were exactly in that class. Thank you very much. You're very kind. It's
#
evident. I mean, this is just stating the obvious. So I want to know about your journey in photography
#
also, like how do you start? Because you know, today, you know, we live in the golden age of
#
the creator economy where equipment is relatively cheap. Learning is relatively cheap. You can learn
#
everything, do courses and et cetera, et cetera. Back in the day in the 80s and all that, like
#
there used to be this Japanese saying, if you want to make a man a pauper, give him a camera.
#
Like photography was mind blowing. Still today. Yeah. I mean, but at least, at least not in terms
#
of film. I think they meant in terms of film, at least I understand that. Yeah. Even I will
#
occasionally, you know, look at these lenses and say, Oh my God, wow, this is great. Four lakhs.
#
Yeah. So it could not have been an easy journey for you. It must have been bloody difficult. So
#
how, how, how did you get good? And how did you, how did you gain the aesthetic in this case,
#
the aesthetic of understanding what makes for a good photograph? What do I need to do to turn
#
what I see in front of me into something that can wow people and look like a National Geographic
#
photo? Thank you very much. You're very, very kind, Amit. I must say though, that the writers
#
think I'm a photographer. The photographers think I'm a writer who shoots. You're amazing at both.
#
Anyway, but so I've, so my grandfather always went everywhere with his camera. His ag fi solely to,
#
you know, little camera. And he went everywhere with that. And I was to be always like, can I,
#
can I shoot with that please? And so when I, when my father also got, you know, you remember we
#
used to have this long cameras, the Kodak ones. So that one, I would carry it everywhere. So even
#
in college and school, if there was an ethnic day or an annual day or something, I would be the one
#
with the camera taking photographs. So I was, it was always my, my passion. I love it. I just
#
absolutely love it. So that was always been there. And I think it's, it again comes down to, I think,
#
seeing. And I think I always liked art. I love, I love teaching myself art as well. So it just comes
#
down to seeing. And I think you can train yourself to see a certain way. And then of course, if you
#
lift your camera and you, I mean, the rest is mechanics, right? So it's just that, but I,
#
I do say, I must say that a lot of the friends I made along the way post 2009, 2010 or so,
#
like, like Kalyan. And then I went on a, I went on where I was teaching, co-teaching this course
#
with Jayant Sharma and so on. We, we went to, to places and I would listen to them and speak.
#
So the mechanics I started picking up from them, the aesthetic is, is, I guess mine. I don't know.
#
I, I've never given it much thought, but that's, that's what it is, I think. But also realized that
#
I can never be just one or the other, you know? So if someone were to say that you write the story,
#
we'll send a photographer with you. I'll always have my camera. I'll always shoot. I will, because
#
I just see things in a certain way. And then that also informs my writing. So for me, it's a package.
#
It's a storytelling package, sound, stills, video, and words. It's like the storytelling package,
#
right? And then the smells come from, from description, but whatever. So, so for me,
#
it was always, I think the mechanics were learned more recently to, and I'm never,
#
I'm not a gadget kind of person, so I don't have the latest, greatest camera. I'm never, oh,
#
new cameras come, let me go get that kind of thing. What gets the job done? So for me,
#
very often this, the phone has become my go-to. And many, in fact, just the other day, I was
#
telling people that I think about four or five book covers, my photos are made into four or five
#
book covers. They're all phone photos. Wow. So it's about how you see, you know? It's really that,
#
you know, it's not about the equipment. So that I think is just, and again, you know, it's in the
#
story. So when you're a storyteller, I guess you start noticing details and then you start shooting
#
where those details come out and so on. So it really has to do with observation. I think if you
#
can teach yourself to observe or to slow down and observe and pay attention,
#
a lot of things will become much clearer and you know, you'll even become good at it. I don't buy
#
this thing where people will say, oh, I'm not an artist. I can't draw to save my life. You just
#
haven't tried. That's what I tell them. How many, how many hours have you put into it? Like how many
#
hours have you put into observing something that you want to describe, right? And I know that when
#
I'm drawing something, I'm observing so much more than when I'm photographing it. So again, you know,
#
it's a training. You just kind of train yourself. So now when I pick up the camera, I'm looking for
#
those details, which I know I will need when I want to draw something, right? So I think it was
#
Diane Harbus who said that the camera is something that teaches you to see without a camera.
#
And that really is what it is. You know, you start seeing a certain way, but then
#
when you're just looking at stuff, you start seeing light, the way it falls, there's a play,
#
there's composition. There's just so many things that start falling into place that it just informs
#
even your writing aesthetic, when your writing improves with just observations. I think observation
#
becomes your biggest aesthetic.
#
Tell me a little bit more about this interplay between these different forms and how they aid
#
seeing in the other form, like photography, writing. Prem mentioned that you learn drawing
#
super fast, that you just learn everything really fast. So that's what I've been told,
#
and Prem is a credible source, so I will believe him over you on this matter.
#
And no, no, no, no, no, discount everything he says by 90%. He's too generous.
#
He is generous, but I won't discount by 90%. So my question is that then, you know, when,
#
like assuming you're only doing photography, right? What you'd be drawn to then is a beautiful frame,
#
what you'd be drawn to then is something that makes for a great picture and tells a story
#
within that picture, but that story need not necessarily be a story of the whole thing.
#
But when you're also writing about it, you're getting deeper, you're trying to figure out the
#
essence. Like you said, that you might then focus your camera on a different set of details,
#
because those are the telling details. And now the camera and the writing are in this sort of
#
interplay between each other. And what you said about, you know, photographing,
#
you know, learning photography is like learning to see without a camera. And that's such a beautiful,
#
you know, and I guess that plays all of these in play into each other, then drawing also plays
#
into that and vice versa. So tell me a little bit about that. Like, how do you think your
#
photograph, like these days when you go out and take photographs, are you always doing it from a
#
storytelling point of view? And if you don't do it from a storytelling point of view or before,
#
when you didn't do it from that point of view, how was it different, you know, and how have they
#
sort of influenced each other? I think I've always seen it from a storytelling point of view. I can't
#
think of a single, no, I can't think of a single time that that it might be opportunistic, it might
#
be speculative, but it is still informing some story. Maybe it may not be the story that I'm
#
working on professionally at the time, but I am seeing with respect to something, you know,
#
like something, either a geography or something which is going to fit somewhere. And I think
#
that's the scientist in me. I'm just seeing things because they're all data points for me.
#
And like, even when I'm on a flight, just the other day, in fact, I was looking through my
#
photographs and I realized that I had taken this flight from Paro in Bhutan to Delhi. And of course,
#
I had to sit on the right hand side of the plane because your Himalayas are going to be there.
#
And it helped me because I shot incessantly. I shot from Kanchenjunga all the way, then Everest,
#
and everything was clear that day. It was just a beautiful, beautiful trip. So Kanchenjunga,
#
Everest, Annapurna, and then and on and on and on and on until we come to the plains of Nepal and
#
then Delhi, you know, I can even see Nanga Parbat at the back, whatever, all of that, Nanda Devi at
#
the back, all of that. And it was just beautiful. And I was looking at these photographs and I
#
realized that thanks to doing that, I have flown right over Mount Kailash. And I can see, I mean,
#
if I want to tell a story about Brahmaputra, which is Yarlang Sangpo, which begins from there,
#
I have my, you know, the thing from the air right there. And that's only because I sat at a
#
obsessively clicking at a window seat because I said, the Himalayas, I'm going to be traveling
#
the length of the Himalayas and who gets to see this, you know? And at some point it'll,
#
I know I will be telling these stories. So I think it's that and it's constantly at the back
#
of my mind, whatever it may be, whether it's a structure or a little creature or if it is
#
something. In fact, even just the way I post, and again, this comes back to my obsessive,
#
you know, phone thing during interludes, I post a lot. And if I post, if I've shot a creature,
#
I go back, I research about it and I post the story about it. So I may not have shot
#
knowing the story, but I'm curious enough to go back and find the story, to tell the story
#
with the picture. So it all goes together. You once called a bumblebee or tailor bee,
#
I think, or vice versa. Yes, a carpenter bee, a bumblebee. And then of course my
#
wildlife biologist friends were quick to point out that I was wrong.
#
But it's fun, you know, that kind of learning is fun. And you say, oops,
#
see, that's again, you know, because I'm not trained in that, I have no rep to protect.
#
What do I know? Yeah, okay, fine. It's not a bumblebee, it's a carpenter bee.
#
But it's just, it's lovely starting from zero, you know, in a field because
#
you don't know anything. And I think starting from zero, like my guest yesterday, Somya Dhanraj,
#
read her first book at the age of 16. You know, her dad worked in a factory, her mom sold a tea
#
at a tea stall, read her first book at the age of 16. And in some ways, as I, you know, my
#
conversation with her continued yesterday, I realized that in some ways that was an advantage
#
because there were no preconceptions about anything. She was asking, when she was in college,
#
she was asking questions that others would be too embarrassed to ask, like what is a stock market?
#
Right? Because we have these impressionistic views of things and words in the world,
#
which we never question. What is this? Why is it this way? And I think that, you know, being able
#
to start at zero and ask those basic questions, which would nobody else's, you know, normal people
#
don't think about, I think there's a great advantage to that. And in a sense of fact that,
#
you know, you joined society in 94, worked there for a while. It might even be an advantage that
#
you spent a lot of years away because then when you come back, you haven't gotten trapped by any
#
of the hidebound conventions of that world. You can just come at it completely fresh. And with
#
that regard, I want to ask you, you know, earlier when you said that I learned to see, you know,
#
I learned observation, take me through what that means, because that implies
#
a level of intentionality. It is not just about open your eyes and capture what is there,
#
but no, see in a different way, see with a different intensity, which could require looking
#
deeper or which could require even looking less intently and just letting things happen.
#
So tell me about that process of learning to see. It came with my shadowing all these
#
wildlife biologists, you know, the Divyamudapas, the Aparajitadattas of the world,
#
minorities of the world, because that's how they see, right? They'll be walking along and then
#
they'll see a fern, which everybody else will pass by, but they'll pick it up and they'll say,
#
Hey, you know, this is this, or they'll point out to you if you're interested enough. And they'll
#
say, this is what it is, or a little creature like a small insect, or, you know, they'll say,
#
why is this tree growing here? It's a lowland tree or something like that, right? And I'm just
#
making stuff up. But, you know, that kind of observation is there in people who, you know,
#
do research on those landscapes, right? And when you walk with people like Chatter Singh,
#
it's because they use it, right? They'll say, this is Tumba. And, you know, he shows me a small
#
gourd like creature, which, you know, which is used to feed somebody or something else. And then
#
he'll point out to a grass and say, this is the most nutritious grass for goat. And this grass is
#
being lost, right? So they are the people who are observing. They observe for survival or for their
#
job, right? And here I am tagging along with them and learning to see, learning to see that this
#
also has a part in the landscape. This also has a part in that big fabric, you know, of how things
#
work. And that teaches me that I need to also keep looking, you know, and I'm going to also,
#
and of course, I don't know what I'm seeing often, then I'm taking photos of it to then go find out
#
what is it that I'm seeing. So it's then, you know, fitting retroactively into place and so on.
#
So that was, that's, you know, that is very important. And then I must say that my,
#
the start of my journey in January of 2013 in the desert was with Pradeep Krishan,
#
Harsha and Payal. We would go out from Jaisalmer into the deep desert and just walk.
#
No agenda other than to understand the place. So Pradeep is walking and stopping at every
#
thing and asking, what is this? What is that? He also doesn't know. He's also learning. He's
#
teaching himself. The man has taught himself botany and he's better than any field botanist
#
today. You know, he's just amazing. So he goes and he stops and he sees things and he sees a certain
#
geology and he asks the question and he says, what is this? And why is it like that? And
#
what might this have been called long time ago? Because this feature is so different from this
#
feature here. Does this feature have a name? You know, and then we go around asking people.
#
So here we are treating the land, treating this landscape as a laboratory, constantly investigating
#
different things. And that was just superb. You know, so your learning goes from zero,
#
just like exponentially higher. And it's so rich. You come back and you're making notes every day.
#
You're learning things like crazy, crazy amounts. And you're going back and searching also. You
#
know, you're doing research and so on. And so then when I would go and meet Chhattar Singh,
#
I would see the other part of it here. We're looking at it from a botany perspective.
#
He's telling you from the cultural perspective. Here's how it's used. And then those two things
#
come together. And so it's just beautiful, you know, so that kind of observation. I love being
#
with people. Even this time when I was in Kutch, I happened to meet two people who are like that,
#
you know, who see the landscape, ask questions, learn and try to connect things up. You know,
#
how it dovetails into either culture or, you know, survival and so on. And I think I've been
#
very fortunate to be in the company of such people. That's the way I think I've learned to see.
#
And again, I think going back to my parents, my mother, because her father was a botanist,
#
she would constantly be asking, you know, what is this tree? You know, so let's find out what
#
this tree is and what this plant is, what this flower is and so on. So there was that botany
#
angle. And then of course, because of Papa and our interest in birds and animals, we have that
#
constantly asking questions. I think it's just that and it's all of us scientists in the family. So
#
the scientific temper of just curiosity and asking questions that kind of just is there. So I think
#
that's all it is, you know, just that's how I learned to see or I'm still learning to see.
#
And each time, even now, somebody else will point out something and I'm like, I didn't even
#
notice that, you know, so then learn to see that and so on. It strikes me that one danger with
#
learning to see like this is knowing when to stop. Because obviously, it is true that the more you
#
slow life down and the more you observe, the more you'll see because the world is infinitely
#
complex. But infinitely complex is exactly the thing that the danger then would just be that
#
you just sit in one place constantly. There is no movement. You're just seeing, seeing, seeing. The
#
question is, when do you stop? Like what happens right now is there are many simple stories people
#
tell about the world. Sure, you learn to see a little better and you tell more complex stories.
#
But you can just see and see and see and it can get more and more complex. And because what you
#
are also trying to do is see a bit more and tell a better story than that existing story. But no one
#
can ever tell the full story. Chatter Singh doesn't know the full story. Pratip Kishan doesn't know
#
the full story. No one knows the full story. So is it then necessary that there has to be in this a
#
balance where you balance the pleasure and the process of sinking into this new reality you're
#
discovering with an instrumentality, with an end that I have to write a book out of this or I have
#
to do a long form out of this. And that something like that, however heartbreaking it is, is necessary
#
to allow you to stop. Like is this something you've grappled with? Do you mean by pleasure
#
as in when I'm in landscapes or when I'm not in landscapes? When you're in landscapes. When I'm in
#
landscapes, very much so. So as Prem will tell you too, I can't take more than maybe two, three days
#
at a stretch of this deep investigation. After that I need two days off because I need to A assimilate,
#
make connections for myself but also soak in the place. You know just be there. Otherwise I'm
#
constantly on and you know it's very taxing. I get headaches. So then you know I just stop and two
#
days I will not talk to people. I don't want interviews when somebody else will say, no no
#
you have to meet this person. I'm like day after tomorrow, not today, not tomorrow. So those two
#
days I will go out in the land and I will just roam. I will just see and I will just like just
#
feel it. You know I really just, I can't or sometimes I even just sit in one place and just
#
feel. Just like this is it. Now this is all that I know and it's slowly sinking in somewhere I think
#
but it's not top of mind and I'm not obsessively writing or you know doing any research or anything.
#
I'm just letting it be. Interestingly what I found Amit is that those two days always help because it
#
brings things into perspective. When you go out on the third day you've made somewhere,
#
subconsciously you've made some connections which then you want to probe and see if this is
#
going to bear out you know. And so those things are not very necessary, those are not very apparent
#
when you're looking so close. Those large connections of this connecting to this is not
#
very apparent when you're going like this you know. So and then when you start probing those things
#
it starts making sense you know. And then the whole tapestry is coming into view or some part
#
of it is coming to view which makes sense. And so you know that then and even
#
films about the place you know just kind of go to different like somebody's poetry, read the newspaper
#
of what's going on in that place, different things. So completely removed from your primary research
#
that you're doing you know. You just go off and do something completely different and that I just
#
need every two, three days max I think I can go and then afterwards I need some like that interlude
#
of just doing things by myself, just being and trying to assimilate. And that helps because then
#
I actually also get sometimes when I'm in Calcutta for example I just ride the tram. I get in at
#
Esplanade, get off at Shambaza or something then get in somewhere else, come back. I'm just sitting
#
on the tram and just watching everybody. I'm doing nothing, not taking photos, nothing.
#
I'm just sitting and watching and then they'll be so amused. People will come and talk to me,
#
people will tell me things. I have noticed all kinds of things you know just just it's just amazing
#
you know just turning almost turning your brain on some kind of a different not autopilot but it's
#
just cruising you know and you're watching things. Or if I'm in the Sundarban or something I get on
#
a boat or you know something like that so it's just very it brings things together.
#
And I'm thinking that these are both different and important ways of seeing in the sense that
#
when you say that you sit on a tram and you just go from the beginning to the end and you won't
#
take a single picture you'll just sit and see. And I'm thinking that there are two ways of seeing
#
here and one is intense seeing when you have a camera in your hand and you're looking for
#
a photograph to take that captures something and you know you're looking with that intensity.
#
And the other way of seeing is that that intensity isn't there you're coasting as you said you're
#
just cruising rather as you said and things are happening and you know you might see something
#
that you would have kind of missed otherwise like there is that famous cognitive psychology
#
experiment where this bunch of kids are told to watch a basketball game and see how many
#
times a ball bouncing and you know and they miss a gorilla and I use that in my in my photography
#
classes that's the first thing I show my god wow and what is the point you make with that exactly
#
this the fact that when you're so intent on seeing something and you're looking for something you're
#
looking for how many times the black shirt or the white shirt touches the ball or whatever
#
that you miss a gorilla walking across the damn thing I mean you're going to miss things you know
#
and so you need to have situational awareness that's the point I'm trying to make over there
#
and that's exactly what I try to put into place when I'm like this because then you'll see how
#
people interact so when you're looking through a frame you're not necessarily aware of what's
#
happening outside the frame and there are interactions there are personal things there
#
are people yelling screaming fighting shouting or a mother you know holding on to a baby or
#
you know something you see what a person has bought what is in that person's you know bag
#
you see what footwear somebody is wearing you know you see you see the tiredness on somebody's
#
face you see you see what mithai somebody is eating you see how many cups of you know the
#
chai the the kulhads are all lying in one place you know you won't necessarily photograph that
#
you'd be photographing something else maybe him doing that you know long thing but you don't
#
notice but you then you know when you're not with the camera you're noticing all these things which
#
are like my my there's a professor at icp the international center for photography in new york
#
who says that what you leave out of the frame is as important as what you frame right so that then
#
starts also building your picture for you so that's very important you're you're absolutely
#
right there's that situational awareness that you need of what's going on all around and I think
#
cats do this really well they'll be staring but their ears and everything they know exactly what's
#
happening they might be intently focused on something but they know what's happening
#
be a cat I'm super scared of cats uh no in the sense I'm a little wary of them so I had this
#
this is a complete digression and nothing to do with either you or me but I had this playful
#
theory once that we we want to present ourselves as dogs or we want to be like dogs but we're
#
actually cats and the sense is that dogs are cute and cuddly and friendly and they'll do
#
everything unconditionally and there is no instrumentality in their behavior well cats
#
are fucking sociopaths right they want to cuddle they'll come to you you want to cuddle it doesn't
#
matter fuck off we don't have a hope in hell being as as accomplished as cats because those guys I
#
think you know in terms of athleticism in terms of just sheer awareness and senses they're on all
#
the time I think we are incompetent cats we have the sociopathy of cats without the abilities
#
but here's a question I want to ask you in that in the in in the context of that great metaphor
#
of the gorilla in the basketball game do you remember any gorillas that you've seen any
#
memorable gorillas when you're switched off and you notice something that you may not otherwise
#
have spotted oh like that
#
yes it's it's from the tram only so the first time in I was in calcutta december 2011
#
I was enamored by the place I think I'm a half bengali somewhere in me I think I was a bengali
#
always felt like very that makes it one bengali in the room because I'm an actual half bengali
#
so my mom is bengali so yeah so then somewhere but so I was just like thrilled to be in calcutta
#
and I was on the trams and I was doing this I was going up and down but I was with my camera
#
and shooting obsessively everybody everything every time that those trams are so dilapidated
#
and scratched that's just like a photographer's delight right like a very distressed look and
#
this that was just shooting shooting shooting shooting going up and down up and down Rabindra
#
Sharani going that time that time the tram would actually go there now now it doesn't
#
doing all of that then the last trip I was doing I had thought I'd shot enough and I think maybe
#
I was kind of done maybe battery was low or something camera was sitting next to me
#
I'm going on the same thing okay the exact same route suddenly I see this guy old man sitting
#
with his sitting on a on a ledge this high red color ledge this high with about three feet high
#
I'm showing about three feet and his legs dangling over the ledge and underneath that it says house
#
of Tagore and I was like wait what and then I look up there's this huge arch which I've missed
#
completely and it says Joroshanko and I'm like what because for me I've always been a huge fan
#
of Tagore right from when I was little to always read all his books and stuff like that and I've
#
always wanted to visit Joroshanko and I always thought it was outside Calcutta so I thought
#
that this my first trip of Calcutta I'm not going to be able to see it I'll come again and all that
#
and here I am and I'm like I've passed this like six times and I've not seen this
#
and so of course I got down and went there which is another story completely but
#
that was one I'd not seen this massive archway which said Joroshanko no matter how many times
#
I've gone up and down because I was looking at this level you know I was not looking up
#
and seeing the whole thing so I asked you if you've seen a gorilla and you said
#
Joroshanko what would Robidass say what would Robidass say I didn't understand your question
#
I was like wait what oh that way what have you seen rel gorillas also no I haven't yet not yet
#
seen orangutans but not gorillas on that note let's take a quick commercial break
#
and on the other side we shall continue
#
have you always wanted to be a writer but never quite gotten down to it well I'd love to help you
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welcome back to the scene indian scene I'm still with aarti kumar rao you would have noticed we
#
spoken well well past the one hour she initially expected so I want to you know follow up I want
#
to go back to your biographical track and talk about that period where first you take that pause
#
from your career and then you kind of leave and you're doing all of this other stuff and
#
you're fumbling and you're fighting your way around how is it that then you know take me
#
through that part of the journey where you eventually shift to doing the kind of long-form
#
stories that you've done you know whether it's reporting from rajasthan or the river diaries
#
and so on how did that journey really begin the long-form journey right very interesting
#
it actually was not gradual it was a moment in time and I'll tell you how so I was in
#
Sri Lanka 2011 2012 every year I would go back sometimes couple of times a year
#
to watch elephants and shoot as well as write about them make notes about elephant behavior
#
and so on in 2012 in November Prem and I were going to Bepor in Calicut to look at the Uru
#
building the the house the big the big boats that they build there and we were coming back
#
and on the way back we were in a car and we went past a man walking in a dhoti
#
and he had a crutch of some sort and we were just way too fast it was a highway we were just we
#
just zipped past him and maybe about five minutes after zipping past him I turned to Prem and I said
#
I don't want to do stories like this you know where we are going to a place and then
#
coming back and you know it's just been a few days and then we're just zipping past and so on
#
I wanted to talk to that man you know so it was just a random thought in my head it was not it
#
was not a particularly insightful thought or anything but I just said this is not how I want
#
to do stories I want to do stories at the human pace of life we come back and Prem in his typical
#
way he plies me with reading like almost every other day I would get links or something to read
#
which is just the most amazing education I ever got and so one of those links that he he said
#
you were talking about the human pace of life here's a guy who's who's planning to walk around
#
the world at the human pace of life and he sent me this big this link of paul salopek and I realized
#
that there are people who are doing this kind of stuff and or rather who want to do this kind of
#
stuff and that my my premise was valid and that I did not that I was not out there and and then
#
so time passed it was I think February 2013 or so when I met Vishwanath and then came back and
#
told Prem that yeah I want to do I want to do long form slow I didn't know these words at that
#
time I didn't know long form and all that I was a complete newbie right so I would just say I want
#
to do slow storytelling which will be which will be centered around fresh water because that was
#
my thing I was also remembering papa and his railing against dams and stuff like that and I
#
knew that Arunachal Pradesh was going to be riddled with dams and so on and so I knew I wanted to
#
explore that too and then Vishwanath had told me to go to the desert and start from there with
#
their rainwater harvesting which is an ancient tradition and so on so I I told Prem that I just
#
want to do deep storytelling about fresh water different things around fresh water and the first
#
thing I'm going to be doing is going to the desert so I think that's where it began and of course when
#
I went there Chatter Singh took his own time and then I said he I went when we started talking the
#
very first day within five minutes he asked me how much time do you have and I had booked a one way
#
ticket thank goodness and told him that he was most happy and that then led me to staying in the
#
desert for the rest the one one and a half years or so not staying but I kept coming back but also
#
going back because I had a little daughter so I couldn't go and just live there much as I would
#
like to and so that but then as I was doing that also I was keeping up with stuff that was going
#
on in Arunachal Pradesh and the dams and so on were never far away from my mind and so I knew that
#
the Ganga Brahmaputra basin also was something that I wanted to spend time in so those were the
#
two things that are basically that's what river diaries I mean no not river that was river diaries
#
to start with but this is that's what margin lands basically is and I was thinking about the
#
story of yours with Chatter Singh that he asked you how long you have and you said I've taken a
#
one-way ticket and even before that in a sense when you quit for good you took a one-way ticket
#
how important is it to take one-way tickets I think it's very important I mean in my mind I
#
never know what I will find when I get when I get to a place whether metaphorically or literally
#
and so for me that first step of just leaving to go somewhere or to get some place is or just
#
leaving home is the most important thing and the rest is up in the air I've never thought about it
#
I never I never buy round trip tickets unless it's a very defined thing you know where
#
I don't know if it's a if I'm taking people on an expedition or something you know like a snow
#
leopard expedition where you know that you're going from pointy to pointy and finishing it up
#
and coming back but for my work work it's always a one-way ticket yeah and I I sat in a broader
#
metaphorical sense because I think that there is a profound shift that when you take a one-way ticket
#
you made the commitment you can just plunge in and you can do it and there's no hurry also and
#
and when you when you speak of you know doing slow stories it's like to me the thought sounds
#
incredibly attractive I keep using the word therav I want to find therav in my life right
#
incredibly attractive but difficult to find it if you go looking for it because then you're looking
#
for it and by definition then it's not there right so was there a phase like that where you
#
are still kind of stuck in the old way of thinking where you're thinking about milestones and what
#
have I done today and what am I going to do tomorrow like when you mentioned that you would
#
work for two days and take two days off you know is that something you arrived at because initially
#
I imagine you know it would may well have been difficult for you to give yourself the permission
#
to take those two days off so what was that process like of finding the right rhythm for what you want
#
to do I spent 10 years at Intel which is a US corporate company with a very strong corporate
#
culture a great place to work frankly and their commitment to deliverables is very high and if
#
you're working there for 10 years it's ingrained in you so deeply so deeply that almost you write
#
something called weeklies which is at the end of the week you write over Monday morning 11 o'clock
#
it's due you write what has happened the previous week everything that you've done all your
#
accomplishments and that happens week after week after week and then you write a monthly
#
and then you write an annual okay so you're doing all of this so you are you have to keep producing
#
you can't say what are you going to put in it if you don't do anything right so this stuff gets
#
ingrained in you so deeply and I must say though Intel took really good care of me but it was so
#
ingrained in me that I had to deliver something every day that when I quit
#
to sit without doing anything even if it was just research or something right so nothing to show
#
for it right you haven't actually written or published or something oh my god it used to
#
drive me up the wall it took me a long time to get over that deliverable mindset and the thing
#
that helped me was going back to Wendell Berry and going back to the land because a land that
#
is constantly asked to produce will lose its its capability to yield very fast and also then become
#
much worse than it was to start with and so it's that that concept of land lying fallow
#
for periods of time and then again it regains itself you know like zoom agriculture and so on
#
the old way old ways of doing things that helped me and I said look if that's the way it is in
#
nature that things lie fallow to regenerate it has to be right because nature doesn't do anything
#
wrong and I'm not saying that to romanticize anything it's just the way science is that's
#
what it is yeah exactly so it's just it's just biology so I said okay give yourself the permission
#
to sit I mean don't sit and do purposely do nothing like don't waste your time or whatever like
#
you know doing random stuff like looking at your phone or something but if you're not actively
#
producing something if you are just mulling things if you are trying to make connections
#
but you're not really doing doing you know the doing of not doing right the action without action
#
kind of thing the the Chinese concept of wei wu wei that it kind of appealed a lot to me and I said
#
okay I'm going to give myself the permission to not do if I don't you know if I feel like I need
#
the time and so that also played into this whole slow process of storytelling and the permission to
#
give myself days off even though I'm in field when you're in field you are staying in some hotel or
#
something I mean you are bleeding right you're bleeding money so it's not easy to give that
#
permission to yourself either but I realized that what came out after that period of lying fallow
#
was so much better than if I were not a lie fallow and I was to just keep going going going going
#
so yeah that it took some unlearning and some reconditioning of my of my mind
#
but now I find there are so many well written well documented people you know amazing stuff in
#
literature which says this you know that everything that happens to you is is fodder so even when
#
you're lying fallow you can't there is something that's happening to you and it it is for you
#
constantly there is something that that you can use to to do going forward so it's not a waste
#
quote-unquote waste one of the powerful aspects of your book for me was how you spoke about you
#
know taking the time to immerse yourself in stories and especially about how so many stories
#
in so many stories the interactions are transactional that you want something out
#
of a subject quote-unquote and you ask them the questions and they give you the answers and you
#
take whatever part of it suits in a narrative etc etc and you spoke at length about here
#
exactly what you just said immersion is necessary and there's also a point there about nature and
#
time itself like at one point and I'll quote here you write Reiner Maria Rilke likens the
#
life of an artist to that of a tree and his words are true of storytelling about landscapes too
#
in this and these are his words in this there is no measuring with time a year doesn't matter
#
in 10 years or nothing his words and now you continue that need to absorb myself in landscapes
#
deep and further with time and was reaffirmed when I came across a wise professor's urgings
#
environmental stories rob nixon writes in slow violence in the environmentalism of the poor
#
are about quote-unquote slow violence and now these are his words a kind of destruction that
#
unleashes itself incrementally over seasons often over generations unspectacular and sometimes
#
imperceptible it can be spatially dispersed a disruption in one place can affect landscapes and
#
lives several hundreds of miles away those who live in these landscapes and the ecosystems
#
themselves die by a thousand cuts stop quote and your book has many examples of this and I'll
#
discuss some of the specific ones later but my broad question here is that how did that moment
#
come where at one level you're just you're taking it slow you're immersing yourself you're understanding
#
a little deeper but over a period of time your attention must be shifting from seeing the shorter
#
term stories and the you know the impressions of the present moment to seeing the bigger picture
#
to going to traveling not just within the place you are but traveling back in time in that place
#
understanding the linkages seeing that bigger story you know what is it for you because one I
#
imagine that one way it can happen is in a very glacial slow way where gradually it takes years
#
and things kind of simmer down and there can also be these drastic moments where you suddenly
#
see something and you're like wow fuck I didn't know what that was like and in a sense you know
#
when I think of the seven years I've been doing this podcast I kind of think of now I've begun
#
to think of all the long conversations I've had in the last three or four years as not being
#
separate conversations but part of a greater journey of curiosity and part of this larger
#
conversation that it's sort of part of and I'm thinking when I read your book that okay the
#
different sections might be about different places and different people but in a sense it's
#
the same long continuing story about your engagement with what you stand on which makes you stand for
#
it so tell me a little bit about that those frames of reference shifting and what does that then to
#
do to you when you can you know because I think that must also bring with it a great sense of
#
how unimportant one is in that larger span of time in the larger scheme of things where
#
everything is happening so I'm sounding a bit incoherent but I'm very curious to know about how
#
you made this journey of being able to slip back into that slower rhythm where you're seeing these
#
deeper stories play out and then every deeper story informs every other story that you do
#
you know I think I realized that that was the nature of things and the very fact that
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like for example in the Brahmaputra the very fact that I was in one village in Assam and what was
#
happening in that village was because what was happening in Arunachal high up and what was
#
happening in that village then affected what was happening further down in lower Assam
#
it cued me very quickly into the fact that all of these things are connected the basin is
#
one humongous living breathing creature we may not see it that way immediately
#
but it really is like that because what's coming from the Himalayas
#
is what is depositing in the Sundarbans in Bangladesh right and so you stop that things
#
will change here right and we are stopping that and we are making these changes to to the land
#
without looking at it as a whole and I realized that seeing that that creature in its entirety
#
is so important to be able to take decisions of what to do in those lands right in those landscapes
#
and it was really and I think I bring up that story in the in the chapter on the desert but
#
it's equally applicable to the rest of India too about the blind man and the elephant right
#
so when you look at things piecemeal you see only one part of it you don't really see how
#
it connects and why that piece is important and that piece is important every piece is important
#
because when you change that piece it changes a whole bunch of things around you and around it
#
and and those changes then will be very difficult to walk back because it's all cascading effects
#
and it may not happen immediately also those changes are also temporarily displaced so that
#
was very quick and in fact I think it it's lucky I was lucky to visit Faraka very early on in my
#
in my journey here because that threw so many things into place you know I had already seen
#
what the tista was doing which was a year before that and then I saw what the tista baraj that is
#
and then I saw what Faraka baraj was doing and these are just examples of which there are many
#
like you said in the book but very telling examples of how both temporarily and spatially
#
things can be dispersed and how what happens in one place can just change and destroy things that
#
happen even 1200 kilometers away so seeing things as and that and again I go back to what my dad
#
used to say when I was young at that time I used to be like okay yeah dad's going to give me another
#
lecture kind of thing but he was saying those things you know he was talking about how things
#
connect up how ecologically expensive for example a dam is and how you're how thoughtless and why
#
why you have to think about more about and it's not just the displacement of the people immediately
#
around the region ecologically it's very very very destructive and and in the long run also
#
and so you know to be able to think through those things and then I think it just started
#
connecting up and I started seeing things I started meeting people also who could see
#
that these things were happening like there is a person called Kalyan Rudra I mentioned him in the
#
book as well excellent conversations I had with him so important to be able to see the bigger
#
picture and these people helped me see that and then once you see it there's no unseeing then
#
wherever you go no matter where you go you take that 30,000 foot view and then you start connecting
#
things up so it just takes one or maybe two times of that learning and then you know that oh my god
#
you know these are so then you start asking those questions okay this is happening here what's
#
happening upstream what's happening up the coast right or whatever so then when you ask those
#
questions and you hear those answers you say well duh you know this is going to happen because
#
somebody is not seeing the big picture so it's really important to see those things so while I
#
keep harping about local geography the reason I do that is because that local geography connects up
#
to other places too and you need to know what is right and how that system behaves before tinkering
#
with any one place there's a place called Sadgaon which Ibn Battuta once called a big place on the
#
great sea yes and you've written in your book about the importance of Sadgaon in the 13th
#
century when it was so central to this region and I had never heard of Sadgaon till I read you
#
write about it right and I'm sure most of my listeners haven't either and that kind of brought
#
me to thinking about how and it's just a few centuries ago and it brought me to thinking about
#
how fast things change that we live in the present moment and we almost have this illusion about the
#
permanence of this moment and the permanence of how things are and everything is going to be wiped
#
out you know everything is going its time is moving so incredibly fast nothing will stay the
#
same the lines on the map which we take for granted honestly cannot possibly stay the same
#
over time it just doesn't make sense and I wonder that as you get deeper into these when you see
#
you know these long narratives that have played out over centuries and all these places that you
#
have been to what does it do to your relationship with time as you also are growing older you know
#
so I think about that because you know when you are young when you're 20 it seems like time
#
stretches out forever and you know someone who is 40 is middle-aged and someone who's 50 is old and
#
all of that and then when you actually hit 40 and then when you actually hit 50 you're like wait a
#
minute where did the years go it went by so fast and then you look back and 50 years in history
#
would seem like such a long time when you were a kid is nothing a couple of centuries is really
#
nothing all of this is really nothing everything kind of compresses so how has that changed you
#
and the way you look at the world yeah you're very right and in fact especially in that that
#
region right sathgaon bengal with the moving rivers I write about gaur which is a expanded
#
essay in the paperback which has just come out and the fall of gaur because the river moved
#
and of course it's easy to say that it doesn't happen immediately it happens over time
#
but looking back there are all these different you know changes that have happened which are
#
unthinkable right now right if you think about it and it's just the that is also partly why
#
let me put it this way what might endure you know what might endure what might what might the world
#
look like in the future and beyond our lifetimes will probably depend upon what we do in this day
#
in this day and age right and and then what successive people do as well
#
even if you just look at for example and i'm going to jump around here a bit because my
#
my thought process is just jumping around even if you look at for example in
#
invasive species right if we did nothing and invasive species which have which is their
#
nature to take over places take over and crowd out the native species which are very specific
#
and very different and very varied and very diverse all of that goes and you're just going
#
to have a mass of one particular invasive species or three particular invasive species
#
that's what the world will look like later on and it may not be as productive as it is today
#
and those people will have to deal with it whereas if we did something right today
#
the world might look very different right if we restore landscapes today if we if we did
#
right by the land like i keep hoping about today then even down and then everybody every
#
successive generation does that too then the world's going to look different so i think
#
while time compresses and expands in our memory in certain ways i think our actions
#
will determine what that time looks like for a particular time you know space or land landscape
#
and so i feel that the here and now is very important and while it might seem larger than
#
larger in importance than maybe in the long run it really is important because what we do
#
does determine what happens right and so destroying something now or not paying attention
#
to something now will have repercussions and then subsequently and subsequently and subsequently
#
whether we care about it or not is a different thing completely and i'm not talking to that
#
but the point is that what is time right why is why is one part of arunachal pradesh which is on
#
the china border why does it look today like it looked 100 years ago right it hasn't changed at
#
all that's because probably people did things that or people do things to that area which
#
and people are there everywhere people do things to that area which has kept it that way in the
#
very next valley people have behaved differently and maybe all the tigers are gone or all the
#
whatever something has happened and you know the river has changed course or something like that
#
and it looks different so i think what happens in certain time periods
#
determines the rest and so while when you look at it you know over time and you say oh yeah the
#
river moved this this city fell that city rose in importance and so on it might be small changes or
#
small things that happened at that time maybe a small dike somebody made or some diversion
#
somewhere something happened which changed the course of history so it's really our actions that
#
change that so that i'm very very cognizant of the fact that these actions matter small actions
#
matter it might seem small actually but it's not really small but these decisions we take and these
#
things that we do matter and it helps us to keep that in mind because what do we want to leave
#
if we don't care about it and we say okay hey what the hell let it be all let everything look the
#
same and let's actually let's do it with all trees and then be what it may let it become hot and
#
whatever else happens and let the climate change happen and those guys you know that's just the
#
natural course of life a lot of people say that so that's just the way it is you know every
#
every generation has its legacy and this is our legacy and that's fine that's one way to look at
#
it the other way to look at it is to do right and and so that when history looks back i mean
#
when this big this period becomes history rather there is you know something to be said about what
#
we did i don't know if that answered your question i was rambling all over the place
#
so it was a great question and my question in a sense was also about your personal sense of time
#
but i think in a way you've given me an answer if i if i if i might just double click on it
#
is it then the case that your sense of how tiny actions by us can have a part dependence that can
#
have massive consequences in the future does your understanding of that then give all your work this
#
sense of purpose that's too much for me no i know you at the moment i thought formulated the question
#
in my head and i knew you'd recoil from it because it sounds grandiose and self-important
#
but i think at some point one can own it like i do this podcast with a sense of purpose i think
#
it's bigger than me you know and there's no harm in saying that it might be vanity but it is what
#
it is so and in your writing like in a lot of your writing fine early on you know there were
#
people who were paying you to write but a lot of the time there were people who were not paying you
#
to write like you said you've taken personal loans so that you can fund your travel and you can do
#
all of this and you have paid a price it is a labor of love you could have been somewhere else
#
i mean you left the corporate world to do this and you continued doing this and you went deeper
#
into this where it was cleared and it was no money so i just want to know what drives you
#
none of us is going to save the world if anything you're going to make such tiny differences that
#
it doesn't matter but what drives you nevertheless so maybe maybe just the fact that
#
you know writing recording witnessing putting it down somewhere where maybe somebody will
#
will use it to do the right thing like to to just think the right way maybe
#
is what is what drives me increasingly though amit i must say that i'm not that ambitious even
#
i feel that it comes down to to very what should i say it comes down to
#
things that aren't in our hands it was just weird to say that but i'm just saying that
#
like if we go back to that earlier question you asked me right is anybody listening is anybody
#
reading i'm doing this yes i'm doing it with you know like like the epigraph says in my book that
#
it's it's it's not that individual stories matter it's just that maybe better policies
#
will be crafted if individual stories are known right so maybe someone sitting in you know like
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a cop 28 or a cop 29 or 30 or however long it takes to solve this sits and you know understands
#
how a river basin behaves and all the complexities not just the fact that you need to get to zero
#
emissions but all the complexities that play into that if somebody puts that then on the table
#
saying hey we also need to look at x y and z and not just zero emissions and not just blinkered
#
vision of you know going towards a certain way and then there's a conversation that goes on over
#
there maybe that's that's you know somewhere so i'm not thinking that and i and it's not just my
#
work it's let there be a ground swell of this kind of thinking let there be a lot of people
#
even students writing about such things being able to see things the right way where and right way
#
i'm just saying right way in the sense that do right by the land the land way right to see the
#
land ethic the water ethic and if there's a ground swell of such things and all of that starts getting
#
written about and say your times of india you know front pages and every i mean there is just
#
this kind of a movement of doing correct by the land and not just the shiny badge of gdp
#
then maybe something will shift something will change something will move so it's not just me
#
but i'm just one part of of hopefully a movement because there are so many people who have been
#
saying this i'm not the first hopefully i'm not the last and there are so many people who have
#
been saying this before us and in so many different ways that maybe at some point somebody will listen
#
maybe it may be too late maybe it might be you know you've destroyed all this and then you have
#
to build back from scratch which is always harder instead of you know saving or protecting or
#
conserving what is already there maybe we'll get to that point of no return and then try and come
#
back i don't know but i'm just hoping to be part of a kind of way of thinking which stands every
#
every creature human and non in good stead i think you know the question of whether all right
#
uh harti is making faces now saying have i said too much have i sounded you know why why women
#
are like this of course it's not grandiose own it no and and like you know i i think the question
#
will someone read me will someone listen to this i think the question is wrong it's partly wrong
#
wrong but it's partly wrong because you can't control who will listen or who won't and also
#
this point in time doesn't matter whether they read your book now or not doesn't matter 30 years
#
later some young girl could read the book and get inspired and that makes a difference this travels
#
across time and you know so maybe you know you can think of outcomes in terms of will policy change
#
you could think of outcomes in subtler terms of will other writers get inspired will they feel
#
they have the permission to do this kind of long form but i would actually say that in a sense the
#
outcomes are irrelevant you know it is i you know it is our dharma to do what we do and therefore
#
absolutely right and that's my thing you know i'm just doing it because that's what i do
#
and that's my joy i have really i have joy in doing this kind of work even though a lot of
#
it is bad news but the outcomes be be what they may be what they may be and you're absolutely
#
right you know sometimes it's just some people who write into me who have read the book or who
#
have just started reading the book they write into me with things saying things like i will never
#
go to a place and see this a certain way again you know that in itself is a change for me you
#
know and i think that is great i'm so happy that that kind of awareness or that kind of
#
observation will change and then that person will probably have progeny who will look at
#
things a different way and so on and so forth right it just goes on down the road so
#
yeah outcomes just don't matter but when people write this such things back it just feels like
#
this thing which has acquired its life of its own which is which is what it has i mean and it's out
#
of my my realm now it's got a life of its own and it's doing its thing
#
and if it didn't do anything and or if these these people didn't write into me and
#
i didn't know anything so what so i've done practically uh no talking on this
#
show ever about the environment and so on but i have done lots and lots and lots of talking
#
about the state and everything that you wrote about the state in this book was so incredibly
#
familiar to me and i'm going to read out that bit about the blind man and the elephant because
#
i think it's such a beautiful statement where you write i think of the fable of the six blind
#
men and the elephant and i reimagine it for our times one touches the limestone and thinks are a
#
resource to be mined another feels a wind that sweeps the desert into dunes and says oh yes
#
carbon brownie points for the taking a third feels the dryness of the sand and envisions a
#
world of intricate canals and flourishing agriculture and a fourth dreams of large
#
stretches of acacia on the towering dunes dunes each touches an element of the desert at some
#
opportunistic point in fashions his worldview accordingly none bothers to fathom the desert
#
in its intricate entirety and therefore none appreciates how an intervention here could ruin
#
an integral dynamic elsewhere stop code and there are so many examples of this you speak about the
#
de-desertification of you know that part of rajasthan where you went to where you know the
#
consequence of clumsy government action leads to mosquitoes everywhere where there were unknown
#
in that area you have malaria you have dengue the grasslands are cleared supposedly for agriculture
#
but what it means is that all the vegetation that millions of goats and sheep would eat is
#
lost and this affects the ecosystems of goats and sheep and you know the regeneration of that is
#
also lost and everything basically goes to hell you've got you know detailed sections on the
#
you talk about you know the sea walls and groins of kerala and everywhere it is what hayek would
#
have called the fatal conceit where a government has a little bit of information the blind man
#
thinks he knows the trunk of the elephant and therefore the elephant itself and then you do
#
these top-down policies and everything absolutely goes to hell and i was just thinking and i wonder
#
what you think of this that the solution isn't so much that you will get the state rid of its
#
fatal conceit i think that's never going to happen because humans are flawed power corrupts
#
absolute power corrupts absolutely and we will take the lazy shortcuts i think the solutions
#
are structural where number one you need government to be as local as possible because the less
#
centralized it is a more this kind of nonsense will happen if the people living on a land are
#
the one administering it they are less likely to do stupid things and the other one would be that
#
even there the principle should be that the government as far as possible should not act
#
like on one level we can say that hey the government should do xyz for the environment
#
but i think 90 percent of good would come if the government just you know did not do things that
#
it has done like the farrakha baraj and all of that which have such enormous consequences
#
that play out over decades so how do you think of the role of the state because it seems to me that
#
to get the state to change his behavior when it's sitting in delhi and making policy that
#
will affect arunachal is next to impossible and never really works it's a wider battle to change
#
the system where you empower local people everywhere and you know this kind of clumsy top
#
down thinking doesn't happen yeah completely i mean that what you've said is exactly exactly
#
where my mind is at as well except that it's not a question of delhi it's a question of mindset
#
and the people sitting in delhi are removed geographically yes from certain places but
#
that's not it doesn't mean that they'll do right by delhi either you know it's a mindset and same
#
way a person who might be a chief minister say of arunachal need not necessarily do right by
#
arunachal either it's again a mindset so it's really more of a colonial mindset or a mindset
#
of taming the land and making it pliable making it do your at your bidding and so on rather than
#
listening to the land but if you listen to people who live with the land they have a very different
#
take on things you know they'll tell you they'll say all those kinds of things they know what
#
happens what doesn't happen in fact in the in the desert they know that beyond a certain point
#
the soil changes you will not be able to do what you can do east of that place west of that place
#
you know so there's there's a there's a border there's a last place where you can actually
#
farm beyond which you can't farm the government has gone and put the canals exactly beyond that
#
place where you can't farm and they want to they're trying to so you'll see swathes of just sand
#
being watered and a lot of fertilizers agriculture etc etc so the thing is that
#
if you are going to impose and this can come even from a person who is not connected to the land
#
but is off the land you know so it's it's really a mindset if you if your mindset is to impose
#
what you think you know or what has worked elsewhere see that's the other thing right we
#
have constantly colonial of course the british brought all kinds of things to india and have
#
created a huge mess with you know embankments or whatever else everything and so you know
#
inappropriate stuff in the sense that even what works in maharashtra will not necessarily work
#
in ladakh what works in panjab doesn't work in ladakh or even using a public distribution
#
system where you're flooding ladakh's markets with panjab rice it's not necessarily the right
#
thing the term biologists have for it is isomorphic mimicry you take a policy from
#
here and you think it will work there and like fat chance exactly and the land is laughing and
#
it's like dude this is not going to work here i would have told you like even faraka and i
#
mentioned it right you put a dam but then you don't consider that this land is a tidal delta
#
so of course the damn thing is going to come right back right so it's just a question of yes
#
absolutely going local seeing what i think so i don't have the answers if i had the i had the
#
answers i think i would have been in i've been making money actually but not happening so i
#
don't have the answers but i think the way to think about it would probably be to yes devolve
#
to the people who live closest to the land and or at least listen to them right and see what each
#
community needs and and so again i'm getting into solution space here which is just i know that
#
things are far more complicated than that and so so it's not that but it's just that we can't do
#
a one-size-fits-all and and let's just if even if we were to just come to that conclusion and make
#
that resolution that we will not do one size fits all that we will not go and put a high dam
#
in a seismic zone who does that right but we're doing it all the time so who you know it's just
#
let's not do stupid things yeah that'll be even a first step i'm sorry even just that would be a
#
first step yeah that's why i said i i'd like the state to have a bias for inaction yes you know
#
just not doing things would solve 90 percent of the problems i for a moment let's move away from
#
the unpleasant subject of the state and talk about society and culture where you know if we go back
#
to that earlier statement of chattar singh that oh my son will not get these languages and he's
#
you know the tyranny of the 31st or whatever phase he used and i'm thinking that there is a
#
genuine dilemma there like it is easy for us to say look at the state and say that okay this kind
#
of blunt top-down thinking is nonsensical there is no new answer it is just bad it's the wrong way
#
of thinking but when i think of the clash between modernity and a traditional way of life i think
#
the question becomes much more complicated because it is natural for the young to want
#
prosperity to want to go to a city where there are so many more opportunities especially in
#
these times where the whole world has opened up so that attraction towards modernity is something
#
that i understand and even support but at the same time there is that lament of chattar singh
#
that we are losing all of this and we are losing the language and more importantly we're losing
#
the understanding of the land that we are living on and in my mind i can't find an easy way to
#
resolve this particular tension because i can't find it within me to decide from top down bombay
#
that no chattar singh son i would like him to stay with chattar singh and learn the land of course
#
not he's got to do whatever he's got to do he should have the same ambitions as you and i do
#
so how do you sort of see this playing out at a social level that you know the choices of these
#
rational individuals to do what's right for them can have a kind of impact where an entire way of
#
life and entire multitudes of languages and other cultural facets like foods and all that
#
just kind of vanish so what what is your sense of you know yeah it's tricky and i think prescription
#
is never a good thing of course so the other to spin this on its head though imagine now if
#
chattar singh's kid and i heard this exact same lament from the nishi elders in arunachal by the
#
way that our kids are learning rubbish because they can't they come back they don't know anything
#
about their land right one is not so let's turn this on its head and say how about if our education
#
system would at least equip the child to live in its milieu and know how to work the land productively
#
so it's not pumping urea and fertilizers and so i mean this is a whole i think we've just gone so
#
far away from what is correct for the for different parts of the land right like growing rice in panjab
#
or i mean everything has just gone so so far away from what is ideal or what was that even just
#
that even just saying something like that sounds radical but how about if the nishi child
#
could go back home from school and know not to touch that plant which is going to give it rash
#
or know that that river at that point is going to have that fish which is going to give
#
which is going to feed this family right or you should not touch the fish because it's
#
gravid whatever different things right so how about even just that where yes make it worth their
#
while to not be forced to migrate because let's face it our cities as they stand today are not
#
equipped for these this kind of migration right if everybody were to migrate 400 million people
#
migrating to our cities imagine look at our cities even today right and look at the people who come
#
to live here so so now i'm on a national geographic grant to document what happens to these people
#
right so margin lands was about the you know the landscapes and so on and now these people are
#
forced to move many of them forced what happens then right so that's my next project now so that's
#
what i'm i'm investigating i'm going to start investigating it's been pushed because of covid
#
and various other reasons book and all that but it's going to start now in earnest and if you ask
#
them they are living hand to mouth in the city they do not have children if they've come with
#
them they don't have adequate or good education there's no health care the the way they live they
#
live on roads even just now just outside on church street i saw somebody in a in a gharghar which
#
clearly tells me they're not from local karnataka living on the street with a child and that's it
#
this is just right here on chit street right so what kind of life are we giving even these
#
migrants we're saying oh you know it's their right to dream and let them come to the city for a job
#
but what kind of job so when i went to bihar for example in kahalgaon eastern bihar just across
#
the border from west bengal that's what the fishermen threw in my face fishers actually
#
the women threw in our face they said you told us send the kid to school we have you know made
#
heaven and earth one to send them to college the child is first class first
#
but doesn't have a job now what now you look at all of them they're sitting with their mobile
#
phones on chalk huts and doing nothing and they don't know how to fish there are also no fish in
#
the river right so where are we leaving these people this is the demographic dividend of india
#
where are we leaving these this next generation and some of these districts have the highest
#
population of young children right under the age of six and so on this jarchand west bengal
#
north west bengal and bihar this whole area and that's just one example what are we okay so if
#
we are saying yes they have the right to dream are we then setting it up such that they are able to
#
take that further or are we saying yes you have the right to dream but then that's it
#
so it's neither here nor there so then maybe it makes sense to at least teach them
#
that generational livelihood which and and i'm sure there will be economic economists who will
#
completely dis this and say this is not the way your economics is different and so on but there's
#
a caricature of economists i don't think economists would say that i hope so and i know i'm hearing
#
some new ones now who are saying things which are actually ecologically sound as well i feel
#
that it's so funny that economy is shorn of ecology when ecology actually supports economy
#
so it it should they should be far more aligned than i agree i agree and i think it's a false
#
dichotomy i think you can grow gdp and look after the environment at the same time you just have to
#
do it right things in the right places you can't put the faraka barrage hasn't done anything for
#
our economy right with all the destruction is caused all of these things are backfiring in an
#
economic sense also i mean i mean look at what's happening in uttarakhand look at what's happening
#
in joshima i mean do it right nobody's against development but what is development right it's
#
there has to be a fundamental reshift that's why i keep coming back to mindset it's a mindset that
#
needs changing it's not you know and then the tactics will change automatically but anyway
#
yeah so i think you know if that then if if somehow we give these people a reason to stay back and i
#
know of people like for example sonam wangchuk in in ladakh is trying to make it worth the youth
#
in ladakh for them to stay back in their villages have homestays resurrect their dry land agriculture
#
which has been destroyed by the pds of of punjab rice and so on and and let them thrive here let
#
them thrive otherwise you're going to lose all the pashmina is going to be gone because there's
#
so many things happening right it's all connected so the question is not i mean it's the answers are
#
not easy nobody said it was but we have amazing minds to put if we just start thinking in the
#
right directions you know and the problem though is that everybody wants quick fixes and that
#
quickness that fastness that speed is never conducive to thought or to thoughtfulness
#
and and so then you know you'll you'll end up with everything that's already going on here
#
i agree with absolutely everything you said i'll i'll add to the lament and kind of you know deepen
#
those themes a little bit i have a very close friend of mine mohit satyanand who has a hill
#
home in satali in himachal so he's been going there for some 30 40 years so he's seen generations
#
and he often talks about how you know when he was young the people who were you know locals
#
they may be the gardener maybe the plumber etc etc they send their kids to school right and what
#
has happened now is that the kids have done school they've done college they've got their ba degree
#
and perhaps even more but they're not getting jobs because there are no jobs out there and one they
#
don't have the local kind of knowledge that their parents do and two they think those jobs are
#
them they're like i'm not going to tell the land i have a degree right so what we've done there is
#
exactly that phrase you use neither here nor there that you have purportedly given them an education
#
but frankly it is a farce one should not call it an education which is which is not you know and
#
despite the fact that we have a jobs crisis there is still a supply demand mismatch because a lot
#
of the people are not capable of doing anything our education system has completely failed them
#
and part of it is of course that whole homogenizing approach that kids of the
#
same age will study together and learn the same damn things and you know which is decided in the
#
early 19th century etc etc and that's nonsensical and the other thing again is that i am a huge fan
#
of urbanization i think cities are incredible people should come but like you said look at the
#
state of our cities and part of the reason for the state of our cities is really short-sighted
#
thinking for example one of my favorite phrases i've learned from doing the show is from alex
#
rabarok where he said that in mumbai stop reclaiming the land or the sea reclaim the sky
#
you know you just change the fsi you have more vertical growth you have less pressure and
#
actually building cities the way they should be built would you know not only make life in
#
cities cheaper and easier for those who come but would also reduce the load on the environment
#
massively and we are just doing everything wrong like what is the mode of public transport i would
#
like to see more and more besides walking which is my favorite but besides that the great mode
#
of public transport is the elevator and people don't think of it like that you know you travel
#
vertically if you do that you don't have to travel horizontally so a lot of the pressures you put
#
on the environment with you know and even some of the the bridges and flyovers that are happening
#
all over the place you know i gotta tell you this in andheri west where i live there is this thing
#
called the goclei bridge right so we are recording this on 28th feb this is true as of today that a
#
couple of days back this news came that goclei bridge has basically destroyed our lives it takes
#
one hour to reach the damn highway because everything is gone right and it's supposed to
#
connect andheri west to andheri east and along the way it has to synchronize with another bridge
#
called i forget what it's called but whatever it comes from juhu to whatever right and now they
#
have built the whole damn bridge and at the end of this process taking one and a half years or
#
whatever they have realized that this bridge is a couple of meters lower than that bridge they got
#
the alignment wrong so now the whole freaking thing is a waste it is all a waste and i'm like
#
this project must have had hundreds and thousands of crores of budget you can get the best civil
#
engineers in the world what the fuck is happening you know so it's it's misgovernance that has
#
destroyed this urbanization is an incredible force for goods you know the state can do so
#
much if it's designed correctly education can achieve so much but we have we have fucked up
#
the way we do each of these things and therefore you have that image of that false dichotomy that
#
hey development and environment i object you build the cities right you'll reduce the stress on the
#
environment you know you can you in fact the only way to have real good growth is to have them
#
together this just not a contradiction and this false dichotomy bugs the hell out of me no you're
#
absolutely right and and density in cities you know given the right infrastructure which is
#
public transport and all of that you can't build densities and then have cars which is what
#
great banglore is doing and then you build more roads and you think that it's going to solve them
#
i mean it's just all backwards but there are good enough and more books written about this and there
#
are enough and more ways to do it that you know that work and that have been proven to work and
#
i just i just feel that that's what it again comes down to amit that
#
you know the knowledge is there but is anyone listening is anyone thinking is anyone reading
#
or is anyone wanting to do right i mean smart cities it's not just having wi-fi everywhere that
#
makes a city smart or you know whatever i don't even understand what it is but can you make a
#
city water self-sufficient right especially a place like banglore right it's getting so much
#
rain and i mean there are all these solutions already that we've been through this i'm not
#
going to repeat but and then bombay which floods every year and you're by you're building more
#
concrete you're putting more concrete on the outflows are the outflows enough outflows are
#
still the size of what the british has built have you upgraded that i mean just
#
no-brainers you think but then is anybody paying attention so yeah you know if the cities were
#
were all they were made out to be if our education system allowed for people to get
#
good jobs you know all of that then yes it makes sense but we are not doing any of that
#
plus we are fucking up the oh am i allowed to say that of course you're allowed to say that i said
#
that yeah i mean if you're fucking up you're fucking up what other there's no other language
#
for this yes plus you're fucking up the villages which are now you know grossly unproductive for
#
whatever reason all kinds of different reasons there's so many you're destroying our rivers
#
and then there is climate change we've not even come to climate change that is going to sit on
#
top of all of these things that we're already doing here so i mean it's it's hard then to tell
#
people you know that the way to do it is to move to a city because they're really then
#
exposed to all kinds of market forces and and just daily wage work also is not available these
#
days then they're just really suffering right i just find it so i mean either do do one of the
#
two things correctly you can't you can't let both of those balls drop yeah i i've had many
#
episodes in cities a recent one with pritika hingurani was particularly enlightening for me
#
especially when one thinks of density so i'll link that from the show notes and you know just
#
as manto's great short story toba singh was such a wonderful allegory for what went wrong you know
#
your story of palash gachi is just an amazing allegory for modern india and everything that
#
you're describing and essentially it is like this sandbar island or temporary island which is there
#
on the ganga which is created by the ganga and as you point out the ganga is moving all the time
#
it's not in one place so eventually this palash gachi becomes what the jharkhand government claims
#
is now part of jharkhand but the people are not they refuse to accept the people and so the and
#
the west bengal government will not treat the people as their people or give them any benefits
#
because they're like but these people are in jharkhand so these people are like toba take singh
#
they're just stranded they're like where the fuck am i am i jharkhand am i bengal what's going on
#
so it's just an incredible sort of you know since you spoke about are people listening
#
you know all the knowledge is out there etc etc tell me a little bit about the ecosystem of ideas
#
that you have experienced that have you always felt that you're a voice in the wilderness
#
or have you felt that there is a growing community of people who want to listen to this stuff like
#
every time i come to bangalore from floody bombay you've you know painted us as floody but we have
#
the best floods much better than your floods so every time i come we have the best floods
#
i'm going to remember it should be a t-shirt by the way by the way i'm a bombayite through and
#
through so so i'll make a t-shirt for you also we are the best yeah so here's the thing so when i
#
come from floody bombay to bangalore one thing that actually delights me is number one you have
#
the best bookstores in the world and blossoms and bookworm and all of that and i think i find book
#
like whenever i travel i go to the bookstore of the town i am in because i find that so reflective
#
of the cultural life of the city and secondly you have a vibrant cultural life i had an episode
#
with sugandha srinivasa raju where he introduced me to the different local language cultural lives
#
which i may not have been aware of but even in my limited experience i remember six years back i
#
recorded with ram guha and when i finished he said you know let's go to a book launch rajmohan gandhi
#
is launching his book on south india right so historian launching book on south india you
#
imagine like if you have that in bombay there'll be like seven people showing up right and five of
#
them probably work for the venue over here it was like packed this auditorium was packed standing
#
room only and i just absolutely loved it so my sense from outside is that there is an ecosystem
#
of ideas that people do care so tell me a little bit about this that are you a voice in the
#
wilderness literally and otherwise or you know it's interesting so i have grown up with my
#
father being a voice in the wilderness pretty much he had his friends a few of them in bombay
#
even in in the 80s that he would hang out with who are pretty much the same people even now
#
who are saying the same things i mean they're the same same crowd and so i knew that it was
#
not going to be popular opinion and even today while banglore you know it's very easy to find
#
the tribe that people who will who will agree with you and listen to you and things like that and
#
they are there in pockets i happen to live in a in a community of high net worth individuals
#
ceos of unicorns and very well to do and all of that and one or two only voices like this
#
you know so i think the whether it's the awareness or whether it's the exposure to such ideas it
#
depends upon where you are you know and so why i always complain that i feel like i i don't
#
belong there and i i probably don't belong there also but then does that mean that i belong only
#
with my tribe in which case everybody knows and that's why you know when i wrote margin lands i
#
thought 10 people will read it because i know those 10 people they'll have to read it yeah
#
so um but so so it's interesting i i don't know i find that a lot of people are very
#
um and again again i don't know whether it's the ignorance or whether it is the
#
and ignorance not in a pejorative term it's just the you know they're just not exposed to these
#
kinds of ideas or or whether it is willful ignorance that you know that they don't want
#
to listen but i find a lot of people are happy with status quo their life's going well they
#
don't want to think about this because this is inconvenient and it needs change and it may need
#
it may mean giving up certain things and it's far away it's not going to affect them because
#
they're cushioned by privilege as well as whole lot of money what happened last year when the
#
floods flooded these high net worth individuals homes and took their bentleys and their my box
#
and their mercedeses i think people began to see that environment is not an obstacle that has or
#
a tick mark that has to be on the way to some project or the other it's not a nuisance maybe
#
it is but it's not the nuisance that they thought it was that they have to pay attention to it that
#
there may be something in what these environmentalists these tree huggers
#
have been screaming about i've been called a tree hugger and i'm continuously called a tree
#
hugger have you ever hooked a tree i do i regularly do you should have a t-shirt i hug the best trees
#
i do actually we have some lovely trees in the city and i hug them for sure but yeah so but it's
#
not and i think that the othering kind of went off to a small extent and came home to roost
#
last year but memories are short everybody goes back to their daily jobs and their and what they
#
know best and it's but it's interesting that now it almost seems like some of these things that
#
sounded outlandish to them or sounded out of left field and out of you know oh she's like you know
#
this whatever tree hugger types green now people do listen they do at least
#
at least listen like you know they may not actually do anything about it but they'll at
#
least listen and and i think for better or for worse given all the things that are happening
#
in bangalore and i'm speaking only about bangalore because i live here the heat the the crazy rains
#
the no rains the floods the water problems all of that people have begun to see the sense in
#
some of these ideas and i think it's sad that it had to come to that that it would be something so
#
it has to touch them before they can see you know and they can't extrapolate but
#
but i'll take it you know if people start thinking start thinking about these things
#
again i also love the fact that wherever i talk whenever i talk people who are not
#
people i know do come to listen they ask great questions there is a curiosity and so i'm willing
#
to say that maybe it's just the fact that they're not exposed to things and that if they were things
#
would be different because people do want to learn do want to do the right thing i really hope
#
that and and i hope that that then will hold sway going forward as well you know you you begin the
#
last section of your book with what is the plot for a beautiful allegorical novel which i wish you
#
had written you know it would have been like sarama goes blindness for example but i love the plot
#
where basically you're creating the thought experiment and saying that imagine if everybody
#
is basically blind and we navigate the world through echolocation or through sound so sound
#
is really important and hearing is really important and one day there is a barrage of drones that
#
comes and there is this drone noise everything and that affects your ability to navigate the world
#
because now your echolocation isn't working that drone is everywhere and no matter where you go
#
what you do that drone is there and eventually it goes to hell and you think of it it is dystopian
#
but when you now created this delightful image of floods coming and taking away bentleys in my box
#
and mercedes's i instantly thought that yeah floods is equal to drones that this is sort of
#
you know that this makes you see what you were earlier blind to and it's profoundly important
#
and i actually think that part of part of the puzzle is in the danger of phrases like tree huggers
#
right that people people have this simplistic narrative of whether it's environment
#
environmentalists or feminists or whatever these simplistic narratives where they've almost
#
turned the words into pejoratives and the point is if you look a little deeper it is in your
#
interest it is in the economy's interest if we don't do bullshit like the faraka barrage and
#
the de-desertification and all of that everything that you have pointed out in your book that hurt
#
the environment also hurt the economy doesn't make sense yeah and even these people right who
#
are being displaced they are going to hurt the economy because imagine these people are growing
#
up without education first secondly without health care should we have god forbid a public
#
health issue what's going to happen i mean just think about it right and then all these people
#
could have been part of this economy and they're being just being uh short-changed by the whole
#
thing so i have to have to have to bring up this quote by aldo leopold i say it everywhere so i
#
think people who have heard me will say oh god there she goes again but this thing he said in
#
1949 but it is so true today also he said that civilization so clutters this elemental man-earth
#
relationship with gadgets and middlemen that awareness of it is growing dim we imagine industry
#
is what supports us forgetting what supports industry you know and that's exactly where we
#
are now those middlemen who do not understand the land who are not interested in true development i
#
mean what is development it should raise the quality of life for everybody and raise and and
#
keep it sustainable right that is true development but so that that's the middleman who usurps this
#
notion for his own gain and gadgets which we assume technology will solve everything for us
#
but it's it's quite different from that and and so i really feel that that connection
#
is just at the center of of both our both hope and of the despair that we feel today
#
that connection disconnection so you know i'm obviously going to ask everyone who is listening
#
to this to buy your book if they haven't already and and to just buy your book and read it but i
#
will also ask you to kind of you know sum up or take me through some of the stories in your book
#
because they're incredibly powerful and even for someone who may not buy the book immediately or
#
who may buy the book because of these stories i want you to kind of talk about you know whether
#
it's a faraka barrage or the desertification or the coastline of kerala or whatever in each of
#
these cases these stories are almost unbelievable to see the level of hubris and folly by the state
#
and just to see the extent of the damage and so on and so forth so you know take me like pick one
#
which had the most impact on you or talk about all of them if you want we have time and you know
#
take me through uh take you know which left the deepest impact on you and kind of take me through
#
that so all of them leave deep impacts but i think the one which was most illustrative
#
which i will pick is the faraka barrage because i think it'll also be easy for people to wrap
#
their heads around the story even though you know it's not in front of them so in the late
#
19th century so late 1800s the port of calcutta at that time was silting up
#
and it was an important port for the britishers and they needed that port to be silt free because
#
they wanted the ships to come all the way to assam and and up into you know to alabad and so
#
on for their trade as as well as for movement of troops various things so they needed that port to
#
be to be uh active and free of silt and so on so they then came up with an idea some engineer
#
arthur cotton he came up with the idea that he that we should build a dam somewhere upstream
#
they're not said where but somewhere upstream and take the water that builds up through a canal
#
and push out flush out the port downstream of the silt and keep it silt free and do that periodically
#
and so the britishers at that time could not decide upon where to build the dam and so they
#
shelved it they didn't they didn't build it and then we got independence this was 1947 of course
#
and then by 1957 this topic came up again because calcutta port continued to silt up
#
and so then india along with some british engineers and stuff like that they decided upon
#
faraka being the place where the dam was going to be built and they built the faraka barrage which
#
is 2.6 kilometers long and it's at a place called faraka in north west bengal this is just after the
#
ganga turns south from bihar enters west bengal and this is the head of the delta
#
and they built the built the dam there and then they built the canal which would flush the port
#
of its silt but what the but none of these engineers thought of was the fact that
#
the calcutta calcutta sits in a tidal delta and the tide brings back 160 times the volume of water
#
than the any any of these canals could could push out which meant that the silt came right
#
back in until today the port still has a silting problem so faraka the the reason faraka was built
#
faraka barrage was built was to not nothing happened but what it did end up doing was something
#
far more sinister that the ganga is the silt it's one of the siltiest rivers on earth right it's
#
coming from a young mountain system the himalayas and it's bringing all the silt and then it comes
#
and it builds these deltas the the delta of bengal undivided bengal all of bengal right so if you put
#
a dam across the ganga in its in its lower plains that is in its delta and forget about it what's
#
going to happen the silt is going to build up behind the barrage and it did and therefore it
#
rose the the whole river bed rose and as the river bed rose the river was trying to find ways to go
#
here there the right bank has got rocks the raj mahal hills so it's completely rocky so there's
#
no purchase there and then it would just swing to the east and there there are all kinds of you know
#
mango orchards and paddy fields and villages and soft blind earth and so the river pushed back
#
towards the east and it just chunked up and just ate up all of that land right and so it's pushing
#
and ever since so if you look at the maps and the maps from 1971 which is when farrakha barrage was
#
built till today you'll find that this river is swinging wildly east and it's finishing up all
#
these people villages and when what happens when a river swings east you're basically having
#
erosion massive erosion and the flooding and there are people living this is a very fertile delta
#
and people are you know hundreds of thousands of people getting displaced every year till today
#
so it's been 52 years and counting 53 years and counting and it's still happening this kind of
#
erosion now that's what's happening right in and around the farrakha barrage itself but what also
#
happened is that it not only it not only builds collects the silt behind it and therefore the
#
bed rises it also deprives the delta of silt the delta needs silt to shore up its defenses against
#
the seas and against the storms and so on now if you don't give that delta silt that delta is going
#
to eventually keep sinking because there's going to be constant erosion which already happens
#
anyway and now with rising sea levels and increased storm surges and stuff like that the delta is just
#
completely laid bare with with no defenses with very little defenses so that's number two what it
#
did the third thing that it did was you have the hilsa which every bengali loves and it's an iconic
#
fish a cultural fish and a very lucrative fish and it goes upriver to spawn it used to be found
#
as far up as baksar and alabad now with the farrakha coming up the river can't go upriver to the
#
the fish can't go upriver to spawn and the whole fishery has collapsed so all the fish upstream
#
of the farrakha barrage which is what i was talking about the fishermen earlier in kahalgaon
#
in bihar for example eastern bihar and all that no fish in the river none of these big fish and
#
they're forced to fish these really tiny fish which they call trash fish and the whole fisheries
#
has collapsed and this is a very lucrative fishery through the whole basin which has collapsed and so
#
even just a single act which was thought to solve one problem on paper
#
has ended up causing a whole host of ecological problems from alabad to
#
the bay of bengal so that's a total of 1200 kilometers and it's going on till today so
#
it's not something that happened once and is finished it's continuing to happen and this is
#
just one story and it's illustrative because it came from people not seeing the basin as a
#
basin you know of just seeing one problem isolated and doing something which they thought
#
will solve the problem without really looking at the way things go as the way the whole basin works
#
so that's that's one of the stories that is and it's going to be expanded like i said there's
#
much more because interestingly what is added now in the paperback version of the book
#
is what used to be gaur laknowati which was the capital of bengal then in the 1300s a bustling
#
city which fell because the river shifted and that was because of probably an earthquake
#
that the river shifted but that this river can make and break city fortunes it's it's like this
#
massive thing right it's a creature untamable and here we are trying to tame it with the
#
farakka baraj now it is swung so far east north of the baraj that it threatens to find that old
#
route on the other side of gaur and just bypass the farakka baraj and go off that way into
#
bangladesh if that happens it's going to be a lot of changes again you know a lot of lot of
#
stuff it could happen it's not like it will happen but it's just that it's threatening too
#
so if you look at the map right now the ganga north of the farakka baraj is way more east than
#
you know it's like a bulge which is threatening to just push through because there was an old
#
channel there so um yeah that's that's one one story but then several other such kind of willful
#
willful ignoring of well-known scientific data it's not opinion it's not somebody's
#
somebody saying something saying okay no i think of something it's not ideology it's
#
it's just scientific data and if you don't look at that data and there are people who cried foul
#
even when farakka was being built saying don't do this it's not good they were labeled spies
#
they were labeled pakistani spies because of course 1971 you know during all that time
#
and and they were vilified uh just like much like what's happening today so in fact my book
#
therefore it never names it doesn't name a government it's not against any government
#
it's just a mindset the mindset of just trying to impose a certain way of thinking on the land
#
which is not working it has not worked in all all of this part of history and it needs to change
#
i think even outside of the question of all the data was there and all the arguments were there
#
even outside of that i think in principle if there is a complex ecosystem the state
#
should just not do anything in principle because you're always going to get it wrong we always
#
underestimate that so this should just be the basic principle that unless there is something
#
drastic and immediate and you know on a very small scale do not mess with a complex ecosystem
#
you don't know what's going to happen and you know when i read about the farakka barrage in
#
your book and it's so beautifully described and i read the kindle version so i'm presuming the
#
paperback will have more so i'll go out and buy that right away but what struck me was that the
#
scale of the story is enormous i mean this could be a nine season web series honestly and you could
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you know build human stories into it like you pointed out for example that it's a recurring
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thing lakhs of people every year it is not that something happened once it is a recurring thing
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it happens every year but the government won't recognize it as a recurring disaster because
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erosion and you know that doesn't have that same sort of headline generating feel to it also what
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you pointed out and i found it very moving was when you told the stories of families splitting up
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and kids going away to cities and you said that this is not just erosion of land it is erosion of
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families yes so the impact of this just goes so deep and and that was not i must confess that
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that was not my those are not my words those are tarikul's words where he says that the
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bhangan which is erosion does not stop at the doorstep it comes right in
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heartbreaking heartbreaking but the biggest of all and i think any self-respecting bengali
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would agree with me is the elish the baki shop will be intolerable i mean just imagine right and
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then your elish has gone from a good two kg lovely fish to about 800 grams what is it now you know
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some ridiculous amount bangladesh on the other hand has imposed bans and things like that and
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has been able to keep its elish at a particular at some you know sizable uh respectable size
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actually but we have just allowed our fisheries to collapse i think you know like topotec saying
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like palash gachi the elish is also a symbol of i'm joking i'm joking but i'm glad you agree
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no but it is it is because you know it's like the salmon in the u.s right which was which which
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were there were so many rivers which were dammed and the salmon's just disappeared from them and
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us is busy bringing down those dams elva was brought down klamath is being brought down
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because they want to let the salmon run again and the whole ecosystem it comes back it regenerates
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and they've seen that with elva it's been so good that they're doing it they're doing it now with
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klamath as well i mean there's research to show that these dams also are not
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not what they are cut out to be they're not anyway yeah right so three final questions but
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longish one so don't think you can just get up now and it's not so easy and if i think of more
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in between i will ask so my third last question as it were is you visited all these landscapes
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and come to know them intimately i'm also curious about how the landscape of your own life has
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changed like in this process you've not only had to look at the world in a new way but i'm guessing
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just interacting with so many people who might begin as subjects but then end up as friends and
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people that you care about and i'm sure you're in touch with many of them and you know they
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become part of the fabric of your life the way you look at everything around you i'm pretty sure
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has just been changed completely so tell me a little bit about how this has changed you
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since you took that pause you know in 2007 and made this journey how have you changed
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hmm i think one way in which i changed very very fast was that i would go to these places
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many of these places with with very stark devastation and you know be hit with all kinds
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of stories and then come back to to a very comfortable lifestyle in banglore and you know
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you know roof above my head hot food waiting for me but not just that sometimes i would land on
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a saturday night or something and then there would be social engagements and i i would find the
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the dancing the drinking the conversations nothing wrong with it as it is i mean it's
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just that for me the the contrast was so stark that i would balk at it i would be like oh my
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god what am i doing and i just hours ago i would have been in a place which was
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completely devastated and so that made me acutely aware of my privilege aware of the
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fact that i could get up and leave from these places that i'm telling stories about and that
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that do move me that have touched me these people are people i know but yet i can leave and for no
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no nothing that i have done i mean this is just lottery of birth where i was born i could have
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been born in that village just north of faraka and i would have you know been facing the same
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thing this lottery of birth became very very acute for me that understanding and with that came
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came an intense i don't want to make this sound very don't overthink how you're sounding
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you've been doing this all i just don't want it to sound like oh my god i'm a saint or something
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i'm not a saint but it did make me intensely humble just really really humble and also that
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nothing i could do could really change anything so kind of little wanting to wanting to change
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wanting to make people see how how to see making wanting people to actually pay attention to the
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land screaming saying that you know there are people who know what to do and you're not
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listening to them it made me slightly angry very angry it made me irritated at the at the
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government it made me very irritated at my friends who would talk about things that mattered to them
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which i would say my god in the big scheme of things this is nothing you know so it made me
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feel like very almost made me feel like i didn't belong again you know in that place and and and
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so it changed me that way it changed me a lot and it's taken me a while to to come to terms with
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that and and and even just be okay with that kind of company and you know the the the social the
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social life that that that i have and it's so that was that was one big way where my internal
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landscape changed the second thing that i that was actually a little bit nicer was the fact that i
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loved the fact that what my dad said all along was bang on spot on you know i was like dude this guy
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got it right late 70s early 80s you know he's been saying this thing forever
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and he was always the end of one you know and so i was like oh my god so every time now i meet
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somebody like when i was working with paul and we'd have these conversations i'd be like oh my god
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paul has heard of wendell berry he's read wendell berry i don't remember whether he's met him also
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but whatever he's read him and then we would have these conversations where his ethics and my ethics
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and the land and we were everything would match and i'd be like there are other people like this
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you know there are there are people who who get it and i'm seeing that everywhere's meeting so
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many people like like sunita rao who is part who's the head of one s3 the seed bank malnard seed bank
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people like that and i'm just so i'm so thrilled when i meet these kinds of people because i know
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that papa's you know just his vision is kind of like vindicated that's really the way it should
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be and that that would have saved so that always makes me feel kind of like comfortable inside you
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know that i'm that it's right you know that that we were always in the in the on the right side of
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of these arguments and it was it's being born out now and other people are also now joining the
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tribe which is great you know that's what you need because you want that that groundswell that i was
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mentioning earlier to to you know kind of become louder and louder so that's the second way in
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which i so there's a very nice comfort in what i'm doing there's a there's like a i don't know a chop
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off it's good let just keep doing what you're doing you know kind of thing so like a like a
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validation not a validation that's too stupid a word but it's just it's just like a confirmation
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reconfirmation of of all these ideologies and these these thoughts and all that that they're
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they're they're the way forward so that's that's the second way in which i've changed
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and the third way is that what we were discussing earlier is that my ambition has fallen away
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you know it's not that i have a goal in mind nothing nothing if nothing were to happen and
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if i were to die tomorrow i would be very very happy because it's just that i'm spending my days
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or my time doing or rather just just doing the right thing but i don't want to say that
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you already said it will capture the whisper you know as annie dillard says how we spend our days
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is how we spend our life exactly so that's what it is and so now i'm feeling like it's just like
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it's it's it's great and and i really i think if there's any ambition left in me now it's to
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to go and spend some time observing a patch of land and just seeing various seasons
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micro seasons bigger seasons years over that you know in that patch of land and see how things
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change you know observe the birds the the insects the the the reptiles everything that comes by
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uses it the fungi the mosses how they change so you know just just kind of spend my time
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with a patch of land very close to a patch of land so that's really and it's not even an
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ambition it's just that i just want my life to be that you know and hoping that you know once my
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nachio grant gets done and so on it's uh it's on the horizon
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penultimate question and one my writing students won't forgive me if i don't ask like firstly i
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asked you about your photography earlier and spoke about it i think your writing is just amazing
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right and there were various points where i was just saying that this is so good like just one
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sentence to give you an example where you wrote rivers play ping pong between banks creating
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serpentine courses for themselves and that whole thing of rivers play ping pong between you know
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it's so visual it just brings it alive it brings rivers alive it's not a static landscape anymore
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it's it's so vivid and beautiful and i want to ask about that process of writing because
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as anyone who has ever been a writer knows it's bloody hard you have to spend a lot of time
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learning doing your apprenticeship figuring it out and the hardest part often is that that
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anxiety not that anxiety of what other people will think which of course we need to get past
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but that anxiety of can i capture what i see right and there is a danger there that sometimes you
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might try too hard that you see something that has an amazing impact on you but when you try
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to write it if you try too hard it just won't come it will fall completely flat tell me a little
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bit about how you taught yourself the craft of writing how you learned it were there you know
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guides along the way were there models that you could look at in terms of books and writers
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give me your sense of that journey so when i was young tagore's writing was very evocative for me
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i felt like i was with him in with his characters like for example i'll tell you one book which i
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which i've read many many many many times called the wreck it's about this mistaken identity and
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you know a boat capsizing in in the ganga and everything about in that book was so
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visual but so simply said nothing not a single big word right just very simply said but so visual
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that i mean those kinds of things always grabbed me you know i was i was just very taken up with
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the writing of tagore and the visuals of ray so those two things have stayed with me throughout
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you know and i must say the poetry of gulzar those three things have stayed with me throughout and
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it's always been i always go back to some of those things and even if it's just in my mind
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you know i play replay things in my mind just to feel that but come 2012 i met prem panikar
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that man i don't know what he thought he thought maybe that here's a here's someone that needs to
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learn how to write but he plied me with so many books so many stories links and constantly taught
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me corrected me or you know just very gently in his very gentle way but he would just kind of
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tweak things that i wrote and i think it took me 10 years so which is when i finally was writing
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the book or or the more recent pieces that i was able to maybe even begin to get the purport of
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what he was trying to do and but all those books that he suggested every single one of them every
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single link to a story from either esquire or you know different places that he would send me
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and tell me what to read and tell me how to read it tell me what to look out for you know what
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this person does well what this person doesn't do well that kind of stuff i think was my education
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in writing i always thought i could write yeah i could just string sentences together fairly
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fairly okay but i think my learning after meeting prem has just like shut up and i'm still not there
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i'm a very lazy writer so i hate i'll do the first draft because then everything will just
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like tumble out of me and then afterwards trying to chisel it and put it into this like
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i hate it i take long times to do that so this is very bad but i'm a lazy writer but the first
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so i walk around the story a lot in my head so before i put anything down on paper and it's
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amazing how much patience supreme has because there'll be like weeks will go by and he'll say
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have you written and be like no i'm still walking in my head but then it it helps because then when
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i sit down to write it's just a few hours of writing and it'll all come out like the whole
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chapter will be out or whatever so that helps but i do i do walk things around in my head and also
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just the fact that i also take photographs and i i have short videos and things like that it's a
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lot of memory aids as well so i use all of that too to and and and if i'm smart if i have been
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smart i will have in the moment jotted down how something felt those are gold my god those are
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gold so when i'm going through my notebook i'm like thank god i wrote this down you know because
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those are just absolute gold so some of those things are are also helpful then people like
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rachel carson her writing barry lopez's writing has has influenced me a lot also
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nan shepherd the living mountain especially that book baker's peregrine big influences
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rob mcfarlane and who am i forgetting some of these are just beautiful i mean they i read them
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over and over again and it just kind of it makes me feel these places and it's just lovely and
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that's the kind of stuff i try when i'm i just try to feel so i try to go back to where i was
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and just try to feel what it was like which helps with photographs and all of that help
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sounds help i i often record sounds just sounds so then i can just hear the sounds again
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so a lot of those things help so i just try to go back to feel those places and i
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try to put that down on paper so it's not any very clever ways of doing it i'm not somebody
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obsesses over a sentence and tries to get it perfect very lazy writer very lazy right what
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comes out comes out that's it so very bad and i need to improve and i've promised myself that
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i would uh will improve and you know just getting second drafts third drafts out and so on so that's
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good but i i think thanks to being a visual documenter also i do observe keenly so that
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helps so the details come in right in the beginning now that you've been identified as
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a fellow bengali the laziness is not surprising welcome to the club and you know and preem's
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preem's generosity is both a friend and an editor is i think legendary and i have a t-shirt idea
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you know we'll get a t-shirt made which says preem ke pujari are you with it yeah yes we love this
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so much yeah gentle listener we just did a high five so it will happen at some point so my final
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question though i think you've answered some of it in in the last answer sorry before you answer
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the final question there's one person i forgot to mention paul salopec amazing writer his writing
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has taught me heaps his conversations with him has taught me heaps whatsapp messages from him
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have taught me heaps let's digress a bit and double click on that uh you know tell me about
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what you learned from him in the process of walking in the process of communicating so
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first of all humility that man is amazing just i mean what hasn't he achieved in his uh space and
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and what i've learned most and what i want to emulate is the fact that the man is two times
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bullet surprise winner national geographic fellow all of that and then he'll take on something like
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becoming a ranch hand in a mexican ranch or he'll go and become a commercial fisherman you know
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very hard labor that i think it was that that or that quality not this particular thing but
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that quality that quality of walking through a landscape or something which really caught my
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fancy all those years ago in the 1990s when the mega transect came out you know mike phase mega
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transect he walked across the congo and that's what i wanted to do i was like no i really want
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to be able to tell landscape stories but not from a car and actually go through it live through it
#
you know that kind of stuff and so with paul it was almost like a like a fellow traveler like
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very very close buddy even before i met him and when we met it was like just house on fire types
#
we laugh like mad we have all kinds of conversations and the philosophies are one to one corresponding
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it's just like fabulous but i think mostly how thoughtful he is and even when he's writing and
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he's slow he and his dedication to writing oh my god he writes in the craziest places
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after walking 30 kilometers he'll sit down and write i mean it's amazing dedication which i
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haven't picked up it it inspires me but i don't manage to to emulate it at all but when you read
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what he puts out you're like how can somebody describe something like this you know it's just
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so beautifully done and i i know from credible sources that is his editor that he sends pristine
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copy in the editor has to do nothing so you know aspirational goals all those that's not happening
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anytime soon but yeah so that that man too yeah so the three actually pradeep trishan's observation
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prem panikar's writing and dedication to writing and how he reads and writes and paul's overall
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humility and dedication and just beautiful way of expression those three are fantastic set of
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sort of mentors to have the final question for me and my listeners give me records of books films
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music which you love so much you want to share with the world it's not anything new though
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it doesn't matter it's just just whatever gives you joy i think i mentioned a few of these you
#
mentioned a few of the authors ja baker's peregrine fabulous i mean it's it's a it's almost
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a master class in photography because of the way he sees you know it's just beautiful really really
#
nice rachel carson's books beyond silent spring that is edge of the sea all those all of our other
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books which are again great in terms of nature writing i know i'm going to forget i wish i had
#
come with a list we have time okay in terms of movies pathir panchali i really love the way he
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does everything in that every scene every frame i don't know how many times i might have watched
#
that so visually beautiful and and then i have a sketchbook also so i'm like on that totally and
#
and oh how can i forget grapes of wrath steinbeck big time learning for me big time learning i mean
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i just love that book and i just one exercise prem gives two friends is to read grapes of
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wrath and simultaneously read a diary that i did that and oh my god what a difference it makes
#
because you're seeing it you know you're seeing what was happening in his life at that time when
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he was writing this oh my goodness it's fabulous so that yeah that in tandem is just fabulous to do
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grapes of wrath yes and then more recently i have read this thing called call me american
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which was also very interesting it's about this guy who grows up in wort on maugadishu which i
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found very very very gripping and interesting as well i told you i like reading these refugee kind
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of stories stories of hisam matar's books like them a lot kamila shamsi's books i liked hers a
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lot it's a lot of the diaspora kind of leaving that kind of stuff
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awesome arthi thank you so much this has been such an enlightening conversation for me i
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learned a lot from both the book and this conversation so thanks for your time this
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was great and see it wasn't so bad it's more than it's three and a half hours almost i think
#
it was okay i was really scared about anchoring effect anchoring effect i got into three and a
#
half no one has to do these things now that it's over i can tell you we could have gone to eight
#
but you have to leave at 5 45 it's five o'clock now but thank you so much i think this has been
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the first interview podcast whatever interview where i've spoken so much about so many things
#
that have never paid attention to before i have not even thought through i mean childhood and
#
all that yeah but who thinks about it in such detail so thank you very much thank you for your
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generosity i hope your friends your listeners will get through it yes see you made a freudian
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slip there it is not the case that all my listeners are my friends i do have more listeners than that
#
it's not like your 10 readers okay i know if you enjoyed this conversation share it with anyone
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you think might be interested head on over to your nearest bookstore online or offline and pick
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up margin lands indian landscapes on the brink by aarti kumar rao you can follow aarti on twitter
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at aarti kumar rao that's one word you can follow me on twitter at amit varma a m i t v a r m a you
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can browse past episodes of the scene and the unseen at scene unseen dot in and every podcast
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tab of your choice thank you for listening did you enjoy this episode of the scene and the unseen
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