#
So if you want to change India, where do we start?
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It's easy for me to list down the things I would do.
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At a broad level, we need to refashion the Indian state so it does a few things well
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instead of many things badly.
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I can zoom into this and give you details.
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The state should only do A and B and C and nothing else.
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Here is a 10-step program for reforming A. The state should also get out of the way of
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Why do I need 40 licenses to start X or a bureaucrat's permission to do Y etc. etc.
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You get the drift, especially if you've been a regular listener of the show.
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But making lists is easy.
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Even if you were to have a dictator in charge who agrees with every item on your list, it
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wouldn't move the needle.
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Actual change happens at a glacial pace.
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Paradigms change one funeral at a time.
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If you want change, you have to build institutions to seed good ideas, shape the discourse, build
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independent thinkers, give them the tools they need, enable communities to form.
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It can take decades to play this long game.
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For many people, social media posturing is the easiest way to signal virtue, no need
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But if you really want change, you've got to settle in for the decades-long grind.
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Welcome to The Scene On The On Scene.
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My guest today is Narayan Ramchandra, a man of many parts and two distinct lives.
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In his first life, Narayan rose to the top of the corporate world.
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He went to IIT Bombay, got an MBA from the University of Michigan, became a banker in
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Wall Street and later the country head of Morgan Stanley in India.
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But then he pivoted, gave up his corporate career and began his second life.
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That second life has to do with giving back to the country.
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It has to do with building institutions.
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Narayan is a co-founder of the Takshashila Institution, which, as all of you would know,
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He has his fingers in many other pies.
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He started an incubator for ideas in the social space.
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He played a part in the deworming of 35 million school children.
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And he keeps contributing to the public discourse with his column in Mint.
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He's thought deeply about our history, our economy, our politics, our society.
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And when we had this conversation, I also loved his insights on being intentional, on
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embracing serendipity, of finding purpose.
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I hope you're as inspired by this conversation as I was when I heard it.
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But before we begin, let's take a quick commercial break.
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Hey, the music started and this sounds like a commercial, but it isn't.
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It's a plea from me to check out my latest Labour of Love, a YouTube show I am co-hosting
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with my good friend, the brilliant Ajay Shah.
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We've called it Everything is Everything.
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Every week, we'll speak for about an hour on things we care about, from the profound
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to the profane, from the exalted to the everyday.
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We range widely across subjects and we bring multiple frames with which we try to understand
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Please join us on our journey and please support us by subscribing to our YouTube channel at
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youtube.com slash amitvarma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
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The show is called Everything is Everything.
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Please do check it out.
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Narayan, welcome to the scene and the unseen.
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Absolutely wonderful to be here.
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I want to start off by asking you a thought which was triggered when I was, you know,
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watching whatever of you is available on YouTube and in an old talk, I think Prithika of IDFC
#
many, many, many years ago asked you to compare different policies and I'm not interested
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in those sort of economic systems or whatever you spoke about, but you said something interesting
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Listen, we need to think in larger timeframes.
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You know, we don't just need to get stuck in the here and now, whether you're comparing
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the economic system of a country or whatever it is, we need to think in terms of larger
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timeframes and more and more as I've done different conversations over the last couple
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of years, more and more I think of how with age those timeframes shift even for us in
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our own lives, how we redefine the things that we do and what makes us happy and all
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Just looking back on myself, I turned 50 recently, when I was much younger, everything was goal
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I would have these grand goals, you know, these are the books I will write, these are
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the prices I will win, you know how it is with the young, we have the best goals and
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then as time went by, I realized that A, many of those goals are not going to happen and
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B, it doesn't matter because what is more important is the way that you live your life,
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you know, as Annie Dillard says, how we spend our days is how we spend our life.
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That change I think came about because you begin to look at time differently in two ways.
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One is of course you are conscious of your own mortality and how fast time passes, but
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the other is that you also realize with that fast passing of time really applies to everything,
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you know, like when you were born is as far away from now as it is from the first world
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So you look at history differently, when we are young, when we are 25 years seems like
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such a long time, someone who is 35 seems positively over the hill and old and that
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So both in, you know, sort of the personal domain and in the way that you look at the
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world, how have time frames shifted for you and how has it changed your thinking?
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Yeah, I mean, I guess I too have followed the usual path of being more impatient while
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young and much more patient as I have grown older, which is common to virtually anybody
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who has the time to read and reflect as they grow older.
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But I have always been of the view that and partly informed by my investment career that
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in the context of computers and other algorithmic methods of making money, for instance, in
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investment management, that the only true advantage that a human being possesses is
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And if you were to ask me, you know, among the many, many principles, what appeals to
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you in the top five, compounding would definitely be one of them.
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And that's compounding not only of literally arithmetic compounding, which everybody, every
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math student knows, but compounding of relationships, of networks, of ideas.
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So it's truly the time function of anything that you engage in consistently.
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So I very fervently believe in that.
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And that, of course, coexists with an idea for not making great the enemy of the good.
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And that means that I again believe in something that is an action bias.
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Now, an action bias has a little shorter time fuse to it than always thinking about the
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So in a way, what I'd like to embody is Gandhi's famous quote, which says, you know, live
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every day as if you were to die tomorrow and learn every day as if you were to live forever.
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So you have to blend these two things constant and ability to execute small, steady steps
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in the right direction, embed each day of the future into today as it were, because
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most people overestimate what can be done in a year and underestimate what can be done
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And the only way to make that not true is for you to embed aspects of that 10 in today
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so that, for instance, you might think, okay, I can never learn Mandarin.
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But if it's a 10 year goal, it's absolutely possible that you can learn Mandarin if you
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But you'll have to start today.
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You can't wait for a perfect time in the future to start it.
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So I have believed in this action bias for the here and now and the ability for us to
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will ourselves to use the time for compounding, whatever it is, whether it is for investments.
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So every investment of mine, for instance, as just a metaphor for life, is really oriented
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towards long termism, which is ride the wave and stick it out rather than get too excited
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about why it's going up or down right now.
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But that applies equally to life, which is lots of things will sort of go, the time for
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this will come and pass as it were.
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And so time is a solution in many ways to a lot of these things, both positively, you
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use it to make change and also in a much more patient sort of way.
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I absolutely share that philosophy, especially the bias for action.
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I remember I did an episode on pensions with Renu Kwasane and Ajay Shah and Ajay, who's
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And he knows that as a creator, I keep talking about bias for action.
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Perfect should not be the enemy of the good and get it done rather than get it right,
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And he said he was like in government, the bias for action is toxic.
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And I was sort of when you send me a list before the recording of a bunch of different
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And one of them was titled People I Mostly Admire.
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And you had Mahatma Gandhi and Gopal Krishna Gokhale at the top.
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And both are heroes of mine in different ways.
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And I find that here, for example, there is this distinction between them in the sense
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that Gandhi in a lot of his thinking was radical.
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He went for really big change and often he would, especially in his earlier days, would
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go for big change very fast.
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And Gokhale and a lot of the other 19th century liberals I admired so much like Agarkar,
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Ranade and so on were people who I tend to think of as liberal in their ends but conservative
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That what they want is what we would call broadly liberal, more freedom, more agency,
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But in their means, they don't want to upturn the apple cart completely right now.
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They don't want to set fire to everything around them.
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It's a gradual part that they take.
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And of course, for many others, that gradual part is something that they fight against.
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That whole moderates versus extremists battle in the Congress is about exactly that.
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And when I was younger, I would think of the values I want to see in the things that should
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happen and I would feel really impatient.
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But with time, you realize that states and governments move at a glacial pace.
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And of course, you can, as you said, overestimate the short term and underestimate the long
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You have to play the long game.
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But I also wonder about what drew you to Gokhale and what do you feel about this essential
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sort of difference, which even Gokhale realized, like when Gandhi comes back from South Africa,
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there's this famous story that he realizes Gandhi is perhaps a bit naive.
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So he says, for one year, don't do political activity.
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Just go around the country and absorb, just learn as if you're going to live forever,
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And Gokhale dies a month later, I think, but Gandhi continues and he fulfills that promise.
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And I think within all of us, whether we think of our personal journeys or whether we think
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of the tougher business of changing a country or influencing the state, I think there must
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be this tension, the same tension between Gandhi and Gokhale, for example.
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So I know I've asked a really broad question.
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There are many sort of strands to this, but what are your thoughts?
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Before I answer the question, I should say we should speak about the Maharashtrian Renaissance
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in India, because little is said about it.
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You know, you mentioned Ranade and Jyothira Phule and Gokhale and all of the others.
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Everybody knows about the Renaissance from Bengal, but not too many know about what happened
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in the early 19th century Maharashtra.
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So that's a separate topic for discussion.
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But hey, listen, I don't think there is a fundamental dichotomy between the Gokhles and the
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And later on, the Tilaks, who is much more in favor today than Gokhale is or was.
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If I were to add another principle that we can again push a little bit, it is this principle
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of knowledge and knowledge essentially being a stacked commodity.
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It's now commonly called a digital stack and all of these things.
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But if you think about it in a different way, civilization evolves on a stack of knowledge
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And to me, Gandhi stood on the shoulders of Gokhale and he said so as much of all the
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pantheon of Indian freedom fighters.
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If Gandhi were to pick only one, I think he'd have to pick Gokhale.
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And for that kind of person, I think he's a bit of a forgotten person, which is why
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I really like Gokhale for that reason that Gandhi would have picked him for all the right
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reasons and he's a little bit forgotten today.
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So I try to do my little bit to remind everybody about Gokhale and his existence.
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It's now fashionable to think about Tilak.
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But Tilak came after Gandhi and Gokhale or at least during the Gandhi's time, but well
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And it was fine for him to do that because a lot of the groundwork had been done already.
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So bringing it together, I would say there are three topics that every moment in time
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There is what I call evolutionary revolution.
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And then there is revolution.
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There is a time for each of the three.
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And real wisdom and judgment is when to apply which of the three.
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Not that your speed is limited to one of the three.
#
So for instance, in a totally different context, in a business context, I often tell those
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people who listen to me that, hey listen, you should be reasonable most of the time,
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but every once in a while be unreasonable.
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Because only then, one, you won't get stamped on.
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But two, importantly, when you're unreasonable, people say you're reasonable most of the time.
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I got to listen to this guy because for the first time in a long, long while he's actually
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And you can think of that as a moment of revolution, if you will.
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So you need to practice revolution when the immediate past needs to be negated, not evolved.
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So if it needs to be evolved, then you need either evolution or revolutionary evolution.
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So I think just using labels for way we each are all approach things may or may not be
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So for instance, my dad used to work in the IAS.
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So did my mom, actually.
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My dad was often accused of gradualism because that was what the IAS was supposedly about.
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But just knowing him, his ideas were the most radical that I at least had come across in
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And he was part of the Second Administrative Reforms Commission.
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And many of the ideas there are a very clear departure from the immediate past.
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So gradualism is a method that you practice on a trajectory that you don't need to change.
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You may want to change the slope, but you don't need to change the trajectory.
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But if you have to change the trajectory, as probably Margaret Thatcher did in 1979
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or Javier Millet is doing now in Argentina, we can debate whether it's good or bad.
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But if you want to radically change trajectory, then you need revolution.
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And so I think the one speed is probably not the right answer.
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Now, the reason why I am advocating long-termism is really that India is broadly and has been
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broadly, despite against the flavor of the moment, has been broadly in the right direction
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You can argue with small things.
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You can argue with some things could have been done this way, that way.
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But broadly, we are in the right direction.
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So then the issue becomes, now can we focus on the long term?
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If we truly are focusing on 2047, then what are the tender reforms we need to make 2047
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and Vixit Bharat happen in the way that we think it might happen?
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Now, we'll miss the deadline.
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But directionally, if we are to do that, how can we do that?
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So it is with the prior that the slope is pointing the right way that you would practice
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But otherwise, you'd probably want to do revolution if you really want to get rid of something
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I mean, so for instance, a choice for Sri Lanka and Pakistan in economic terms today
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is whether or not they want revolution.
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And of course, it is for their population to decide.
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But they are at that moment where that might be an effective choice.
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So India to practice revolution right now would be overkill and might upset the generally
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correct slope, which could improve in magnitude, but doesn't need to that much improve in direction.
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That's a fantastic frame to look at the world with.
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And firstly, I would say that many of my friends and I think I myself would argue that 91 to
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2011 was a golden period.
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But we've had a kind of a tough time then.
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And now we haven't exactly reversed, but we see some of the stratism coming back.
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For example, you know, you could argue that today's Atma Nirbhartha made for India is
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a bit like Nehru's import substitution and all that.
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But I agree with you that we no longer need a revolution in the same sense as we perhaps
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And just using that frame, like I've had many episodes on the reforms, including with people
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who participated in it like Montaigne.
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And the sort of the narrative that I see is that for many, many years before 91, there
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is this gradualism that is happening with people like, you know, Montaigne and Manmohan
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and they're working within the state, but it's very gradual.
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They're not trying for revolution.
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And that's perhaps a kind of, you know, revolutionary evolution or evolutionary revolution,
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And then eventually 91, the moment arrives and they do the revolution.
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Where I think of it in, you know, Gandhi really fascinates me because I think the revolution
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that happened in his case happened over a longer term than he perhaps intended.
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Like I always look at his Satyagrahas and I find that except the last one in South Africa,
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which was a half success kind of a face saver, the rest of them failed in their proximate
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aims, but succeeded magnificently in the ultimate aim of mobilizing the people.
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And actually getting the masses involved in the cause.
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But in the proximate aim, they failed.
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So there was no immediate revolution, right?
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But there is, he said something simmering with a revolutionary act, which leads to a
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And I'm not even sure he would have intended it that way, but it worked out that way.
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And sometimes I wonder then that how does one recognize the time?
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How do you know that the inflection point is here?
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You know, if we are always overestimating the short term and underestimating the long
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term, which I believe we do, but at some point there is an inflection where that
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underestimation kicks in and change happens really fast.
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You know, so are there?
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Yeah, I don't know that you will know it ex ante.
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You will only know these ex post and the events of history provide evidence of this,
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both for good things and not so good things, right?
#
So you mentioned the so you could think of the Indian Freedom Project essentially
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having started in the early 1800s on the shoulders of, you know, originally late
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1700s with Raja Ram Mohan Roy and others.
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But if you add Jyothi Raffule, M.G.
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Ranade, Gokhale, et cetera, et cetera, in the mid 1850s, the first the first and
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second girls school were in Maharashtra in the early 1800s Indian operated.
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So and then the college education for Indians started into the mid 1850s and for women
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started well into the 1800s, probably late 1800s.
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So and very, very few handful at that time.
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So so the project really started 100 years ago.
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That's what I meant by the stacking.
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And all you can do is keep doing the right thing.
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I mean, take a totally different example.
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Hayek, who wrote The Road to Serfdom when he was a middle aged guy or young middle
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aged guy, sat on it for 30 years before Hayek became Hayek that we all know.
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So sometimes these ideas catch and sometimes they don't.
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And I mean, we think today of Margaret Thatcher as being a revolutionary.
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She had roughly the same title as Indira Gandhi in the early 60s when she took power,
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which is the Gungi Guria equivalent.
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She was very tentative till the Falklands War.
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She was not the radical that I mean, and all the radical, by the way, with a small R
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because I'm not speaking radical, both on the right and the left.
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But Margaret Thatcher was not a forceful iron lady before the Falklands War.
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And then the Falklands War transformed her, much as the activities of 1969 and the War
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of 1971 transformed Indira Gandhi into a much more decisive leader.
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So I don't know that there is any magic wand to suggest the best time to practice.
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And Gandhi too, if Gandhi had been born 100 years earlier, Gandhi might have been a Gokhale,
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literally, because there were external circumstances that might or might not have allowed for,
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whereas you had World War I and then World War II.
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You had the broad setting of the sun and the British Empire taking place at the same time.
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And you had the upsurge of Indian freedom fighters.
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And India was, I think, truly blessed to have, I mean, more than its fair share of extraordinary individuals.
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And maybe we can talk some other time about this sort of clustering effect,
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which I think is another very powerful effect that is happening in Silicon Valley,
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is happening in Bangalore, as you just observed a little while ago, and so on.
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So the clustering of just outstanding individuals, I don't think people quite realize.
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And we can critique them as being soft, as being hard, but if you just take them as a collective, it's just outstanding.
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I mean, it's not something that you can even dream of or wish for, should you want to.
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You can't just create it.
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It needs to happen organically, and it did, luckily for us at that time.
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And at least politically, it hasn't happened since.
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You could argue it briefly and in small parts happened in corporate India afterwards.
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But it hasn't happened since in politics.
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So I don't know. World War I, would it have happened the way it did without that bullet being fired?
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There might have been another proximal trigger for it,
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because there were other things that were happening that were, you know, the militaristic Germany, et cetera, were all there.
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The final match, the fire might have been something else, and it might have come five years before or five years later.
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So very tough to say in ex ante how you might know the perfect time.
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So, you know, that old Dilbert cartoon, just I know the right thing in the right place.
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I'm just going to hang out in the right place till lightning strikes.
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I just don't know when it's going to strike.
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The surface area of serendipity, as it were.
#
You know, Margaret Thatcher in her first cabinet meeting, I think in the late 1970s, whenever she took part in her first cabinet meeting,
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she put a book on the table and said, gentlemen, this is what we believe.
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And that book was The Constitution of Liberty by Hayek.
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So there's sort of a moment of early conviction there.
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And yeah, and I think I agree with you that you only know these things in hindsight.
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And that then, you know, makes me think that those who do revolutionary things must do them.
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And those who do evolutionary things must do them.
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And you must do them because it's your dharma to do them.
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And that is a role that you play in that movement at that time.
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And, you know, you don't know when something works and when something doesn't work and all of that.
#
You mentioned, and by the way, Ajay Shah and I did an episode on exactly clustering,
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a full episode talking about clustering and the effects and all of that.
#
And the Indian Freedom Movement was, you know, one of the areas that we looked at.
#
Just a quick interruption on that.
#
So clustering can take place in two ways, right?
#
Clustering, you can think of clustering as a geography based idea.
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But really clustering is a people based idea.
#
Geography is an important aspect of the people based idea.
#
But the people based idea, so therefore it can apply to politics, to economics, to business, to art, to anything else.
#
So Berlin in the 30s, you know, et cetera.
#
So you can think of clustering as really a collection of world class people joined together in one place.
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And that then produces just a fountainhead of creativity.
#
So I want to look at another kind of possible clustering.
#
I mean, I'm not sure how much clustering there was in this,
#
but you said that let's dive deep into the Maharashtrian Renaissance.
#
So, you know, I studied in Ferguson College, Pune.
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And I'm ashamed to say that while I was there, I had no idea of the history of that place.
#
For example, it is in 1893 on the grounds of Ferguson College that Gokhale and Gandhi met for the first time.
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And they went for a walk in that place.
#
And in those days, Ferguson was known as a hotbed of atheism, right?
#
So Gopal Ganesh Agarkar, who died too young, but you know, a Gokhale like figure in my mind,
#
he was once teaching a biology class in Ferguson.
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And at one point he asked his class if donkeys had got, what would they look like?
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And then he raised his hand above his ears to indicate they would look like donkeys.
#
So, you know, at one point there is in Gokhale's brilliant biography by I think B.R. Nanda,
#
there is this moment where he writes to this British lady and tells her, I'm in Ferguson.
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And she says, oh, Ferguson, you're all atheists, you know, something to that effect.
#
And it feels like when I think of those times and even Tilak was a part of that whole circle
#
till they eventually fell out, the Deccan Education Society and all that.
#
And I'm talking about just this period of time in the 1880s, 1890s.
#
But as you pointed out, there's a lot happening before that as well.
#
You know, there are the Fules, there's Navroji elsewhere who goes to England and et cetera, et cetera.
#
Tell me a little, tell me more about, you know, this particular renaissance as it were.
#
Like, why do you call it a renaissance and, you know, what are the factors that went into it?
#
Yeah, so it really brings the two ideas we've been talking about, which is one is
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I have a personal preference to sort of reveal what has been forgotten a little bit.
#
And Gokhale is an example of a forgotten nationalist, in my view, an absolute patriot
#
who deserves a little bit more than what he's currently getting due.
#
Therefore, I talk about Gokhale, not so much because others don't know him,
#
but that he should be in that first row seat, as it were, of Indian greats.
#
So there's a little aspect of me that wants to highlight what is forgotten.
#
And so the Maharashtrian Renaissance, I highlight for that reason.
#
Everybody studies, as we all did in some CBSE curriculum about Raja Ram Mohan Roy
#
and the entire Bengal Renaissance, but nobody's even heard.
#
You know, frankly, before I got involved in thinking about all these issues about 15 years ago,
#
I didn't even know M.G. Ranade existed. He was literally and figuratively a giant of a man.
#
You know, in those days he was well over six feet tall.
#
He was a Ghatot Gaja of a guy. And his ideas were as stalwart as his stature was.
#
And so this group of people, and then they all believed, as did Gandhi at least early on,
#
and maybe he got it a little bit from Gokhale, that India needed to ready itself for liberty, full liberty.
#
And all the actions, for example, the anti-Sati movement, the education of girls,
#
the removal of the nasty aspects of the caste system, which Phule was very keen on, et cetera,
#
which later on in a very different context ended up in the Dravidian movement in Tamil Nadu.
#
But all of these were preparing India. And so that grand long-term plan could not be done in a hurry
#
because it was ultimately evolving society with their participation to a place they had not been
#
at least in the prior 200, 300 years. So that's literally, I think, Gokhale's biggest contribution
#
is this ability to lift India and all the terms that they've used. I mean, Gokhale was a scholar.
#
I mean, for us to dismiss him as somebody who wouldn't know anything about anything was totally wrong.
#
I mean, he learned the scriptures. He was rooted in the ground. He used to wear a panchakacha every day.
#
So he was a true patriot, but at the same time, suffused with this notion of equality and liberty
#
and fraternity, which was a relatively new concept then. If you think about it in Gokhale's time,
#
hardly 100 years old from the French constitution. So he imbibed that and then brought it together.
#
So I think we all in India need to learn both about these two strands of Renaissance,
#
the Bengali Renaissance, which was a little earlier that continued all the way to the late 1800s,
#
and then the Maharashtrian Renaissance, which began maybe the early 1800s and went all the way again to the end.
#
The two strands together are the platform upon which the Poornasvaraj could be built.
#
I don't think you could have realistically, even to use a modern corporate term,
#
even a stretch goal of Poornasvaraj would have been appropriate in 1830.
#
Now you could argue, I don't know which particular congress it was propounded in 1914 or 18 or whatever it was,
#
but you could argue that it might have been 10 years before that.
#
But it was literally at that period that it became germane, that you could actually ask for Poornasvaraj.
#
It was a little late. Yeah, it could have been a little bit later even.
#
Literally the term, but by that time the discussion had started. Gandhi had taken it.
#
Yeah, and Tilak was part of it as well.
#
So there were a few people who were not for Home Rule and all of that and much more for Poornasvaraj,
#
but I don't know the perfect time for that.
#
It was a zone of time and maybe it was in the middle of that zone of time rather than the early part of that zone of time,
#
but it couldn't have been done.
#
So to that extent I would say that the proximal event, and it might be a misuse of the word proximal,
#
was the 50-60 years of the Maharashtra Renaissance that led to the realistic call for Poornasvaraj.
#
Sometimes when I think of that period, I think of Gandhi as a bit of a black swan event that happened to Indian politics,
#
because everything before that in a sense is an evolution of thought.
#
Like when I look at Gokhale, Agarkar, Ranade, all those guys who were clustered around Pune
#
and doing the Deccan Education Society and all of that,
#
I think of them as British liberals quintessential in their thinking.
#
They are rooted in Indian thought and Indian culture,
#
but they are also reading Mill and Bentham and they have all of those kinds of influences and so on and so forth.
#
And even Tilak, these guys were together in the late 1800s and then Tilak diverged and I think he died around 1917,
#
but even Tilak in a sense is part of that, is a digression from that.
#
Like there is this famous saying, again I forget who said it, some British person,
#
about how the moderates are actually extreme in their moderation and the extremists are moderate in their extremism.
#
So they were closer together than you think.
#
And when Gandhi comes, it is like a complete black swan event because it is like a disjuncture in terms of thinking.
#
Gandhi has actually read none of those books that these people have, Mill, Bentham and all that.
#
His reading influences are much more eclectic in terms of a little Ruskin, a little Tolstoy,
#
but very eclectic and not systematic.
#
And at one point when somebody asks him why don't you read more, he says I experience the world, that is how I learn and so on and so forth.
#
And the stuff that he asked for, for example the Khilafat movement,
#
is not something that either the moderates or the extremists would have recognized as coherent,
#
in the sense that on the one hand you are seeing Indian independence, which is radical,
#
but on the other hand you are doing this alliance with the Ali brothers who want this larger Ummah
#
because the caliphate has fallen and they want it to be restored.
#
And together these don't make sense.
#
And if I think of who were Gokhale's successors at the time,
#
the logical successor, the person expected to take over the Congress party, a great moderate until then,
#
and ideologically exactly like Gokhale was Jinnah.
#
And Jinnah was so baffled and appalled by what Gandhi was doing that he walks out
#
and then it is a personal tragedy and in terms of studying human beings,
#
really interesting why he takes a turn and becomes the polar opposite of what he was until that period.
#
But I think of Gandhi as this bizarre black swan event that if you look at that,
#
there is like until then you could also argue that the freedom movement hasn't really exploded into a mass movement.
#
And what Gandhi does at some level is a disjuncture with the methods
#
that either the moderates or the extremists before that would have kind of preferred.
#
It is radical. So I'm just kind of thinking aloud.
#
I agree entirely with you that all of these people are emerging out of, you know,
#
the stacked knowledge that was made possible by the Bengal Renaissance
#
and what you term as the Maharashtrian Renaissance, which I agree with
#
because there is red-lustering effect and they're all there, Pune are thereabouts.
#
And then it goes in this radical direction and I often think about this
#
because I just think of sort of the accidents of history that make something like this happen.
#
Like if Gandhi did not exist, our history would be completely different.
#
Jinnah would probably be the leader of the Congress party, you know,
#
and leaders like Nehru, Rajaji and Patel all emerged in the 1919 Satyagraha that Gandhi carried out.
#
You know, they all emerged at that time inspired by him and all of that.
#
So to me the landscape looks different and I look back on that and I think that,
#
yeah, you know, in hindsight history seems inevitable because everything happened
#
and you can, you know, draw a linear straight line from everything.
#
But I think the great lesson of history, the more I read about it,
#
is that grand accidents shape history and all we can do is prepare the best for them
#
so that whenever these grand accidents happen, whether it is a balance of payments crisis in 91 or whatever,
#
that we are ready in some form to deal with it.
#
Lots to unpack there, so we'll end up on the economic side,
#
but let's start, let's stay with the politics for just a second.
#
I mean, I am in total agreement with you, which by the way is not necessarily the flavor of today,
#
that Gandhi was the tallest leader of the lot, I mean, by a mile.
#
So it was not, and a different way to express that would be to say,
#
if you were to describe each of these greats as once in how many hundred years,
#
I would say Gandhi is at least once in 500 years, probably once in 1,000 years,
#
maybe a Gokhale is once in 200, 300 years,
#
and then the others are probably once in 100 years kind of figures,
#
including Nehru, I think, who again now has become once in negative 100 years,
#
but I would think at least it is once in 100 year kind of guy.
#
And if you were to ask historians, and I have actually postulated this question to Ram Guha among others,
#
is it, come at the man, come at the hour, or is it come at the hour, come at the man,
#
forgive the gender stereotype here, but come at the person if you want to generalize it.
#
I don't think historians can separate it too much,
#
and if they are forced to separate it, they always separate the time over the person,
#
partly because there are not too many once in 500 year old people hanging about,
#
but so yes, I think Gandhi might have tipped it over from one particular path to a path
#
that actually produced the success that it did eventually,
#
but I don't know that Gandhi would have existed in the same way without at least Gokhale,
#
and that's almost a fact, but without Gokhale and Ranade and all the others we are speaking about,
#
and Nauroji and all of those guys, and Nauroji was the mildest of the lot in a way,
#
I mean Firoz Shah Mehta, even milder in that sense,
#
but they were all, they created the staircase upon which Gandhi stood,
#
now maybe he jumped the last couple of steps,
#
and in so doing really pulled us out of our somewhat complacent path forward,
#
but I don't know, I mean it's a what if, you could imagine India without,
#
you may not be able to imagine India without Gandhi or at least this India without Gandhi,
#
but at the same time I don't think you can imagine Gandhi without the events of the 1800s,
#
both the people and the events of, I think there is a path dependence to,
#
and a different way of saying path dependence is a stacking,
#
he stacked himself on those grades, the clustering and the...
#
I think the road to Gandhi was necessary but not sufficient,
#
it was necessary for Gandhi to do what he did,
#
but if Gandhi didn't exist it isn't at all inevitable that another Gandhi would have done the same things,
#
in that sense I think of it as, so I agree with you, but...
#
Yeah, for Gandhi specifically that may be true,
#
but in many other instances difficult to separate the necessary and sufficient conditions, right,
#
so for instance with, and since you ended with reform in the economics in the earlier question,
#
was it necessary that only a Narsimha Rao would have been able to do what was done in 1991?
#
Question mark, I don't know, there is also a grander environment question,
#
so for instance Pakistan found itself in a 1991, two years ago, and Sri Lanka did three years ago,
#
why have they not done a 1991, is it because of the absence of the PV Narsimha Rao, Manmohan Singh, Montek Combine,
#
or is it because the environment has changed?
#
It's very difficult to say, China didn't exist in 1991 in the manner of speaking,
#
whereas today China is a major player in the geopolitics of Pakistan,
#
and that shapes how Pakistan responds to the IMF for the 23rd time I think it is,
#
so we will only know, we may not even know, but if at all we know, we will only know in retrospect.
#
Yeah, yeah, wise words, and I actually hold the view that everything that happened in India,
#
including Bengal Renaissance and Maharashtra Renaissance and Gandhi,
#
was irrelevant to the central question of imperialism because the British would have left in 47 anyway,
#
that was part of the Atlantic Charter,
#
now what shape we took, the fact that the lines on the map are what they are,
#
yes, that has a lot to do with what happened, but the British would have left.
#
And the how matters, the partition, those all would have mattered.
#
Those all would have mattered.
#
But broadly, and I'm not so sure about 47 particularly, but somewhere between 45 and 55 they would have left.
#
So that's what I meant by you are judging Gokhale with a lens of at least 1947, actually 2023 or 24,
#
is not appropriate and quite unfair, and judging Tilak 50 years later with the Gokhale lens is also unfair.
#
So I think people don't...
#
Gokhale and Tilak were kind of contemporaries.
#
Tilak came slightly later...
#
They were contemporaries, I think they were co-founders of the Deccan Education Society.
#
They were, but I think he was much...
#
Early on he was an acolyte.
#
Early on he was an acolyte, later he was an adversary.
#
See, that was the other thing.
#
Maybe this is nostalgia, so let me engage for just a second.
#
And that is that people with very different views were still able to...
#
Talk to each other and sometimes be persuaded, sometimes hold their point of view,
#
and this is true for politics everywhere in the world, right?
#
I just recently read a very interesting statistic in the US Congress,
#
and we metaphorically talk about it crossing the aisle,
#
but apparently somebody is actually using technology,
#
measured the physical number of times the aisle was crossed.
#
I thought that was a great experiment.
#
And apparently the result of that is a 40% reduction in the last 30 years
#
on the physical, just the number of steps taken back and forth across the aisle.
#
And both literally and metaphorically, I think, unfortunately,
#
we are not able to one, talk to each other, and two, persuade each other,
#
because that's the only real way to make progress, is one, be allowed to be persuaded,
#
and two, listen so that that persuasion can take place reciprocally.
#
So maybe it's nostalgia, and maybe that time has passed,
#
and maybe the age of social media required as a different framework to evaluate all these things.
#
So, I mean, as an example, and somehow we've gotten on this political topic,
#
but as an example, the first few governments in India,
#
particularly the first government in India, had a very wide tent,
#
including people from well outside the Prasad, I mean, Shyamaprasad Mukherjee,
#
and Baitkar, and others, as a sort of a government of unity,
#
which was super important in that project.
#
So for instance, right now in Israel, bizarrely, the opposition is in government
#
as unity government at the moment of tension in Israel.
#
So I think that does produce, the tension does produce some sort of conversation,
#
but I wish it were more so that we could persuade each other well.
#
No, I can actually identify the precise moment I think it ended, which is 2015.
#
Like I've done a ton of episodes with people which talk about how across parties,
#
you know, you had people talking to the opposition.
#
For example, there is a famous story of how when Narsimha Rao hands over to Vajpayee in 96,
#
he says, samagri tayare, which is essentially that I've prepared the nuclear tests as a courtesy.
#
I didn't do it because elections, but you can go ahead and do it.
#
Similarly, I had a long episode on the new pension scheme, the pension reforms that happened,
#
and they were prepared by the Vajpayee government,
#
but the same bunch of policy wonks straddling both governments.
#
They were prepared by the Vajpayee government, left to Manmohan.
#
Manmohan was completely convinced about it, and they carried it through.
#
And the final story I've heard to this extent came from this 8-hour episode I did with KP Krishnan,
#
where Krishnan spoke about how in the last days, on 2015, before the government changed,
#
they prepared inflation targeting, they prepared a note on that,
#
and Manmohan said this is great, Chidambaram said this is great,
#
but they said elections just now, we can't do it, let's leave it for the next guys.
#
And they left it for the next guys. So when Jaitley comes to office,
#
Krishnan takes a file to him and says, like, this is super important, have a look at this.
#
The next morning, Jaitley says, let's go ahead.
#
So Krishnan says, look, no, wait a minute, I agree with everything in that document,
#
but it is of tremendous importance, basically we are inventing the RBI all over again,
#
you need to spend more time. So Jaitley said, no, I don't, go ahead.
#
He said, are you sure? So now Jaitley gets irritated and he says, listen, you know,
#
India's finest legal and economic minds have said yes to this, who am I to disagree?
#
And he meant Manmohan and Chidambaram, right?
#
So this is the kind of camaraderie and the kind that went across the parties,
#
you recognize that fine, in the political marketplace, I have to fight you,
#
but we are all, you know, moving in the same direction towards the same goal.
#
And there are many more examples of this. And it ended with a bang around 2015.
#
And one of the reasons to my mind, apart from the, you know, individuals
#
and how they feel about the world, is also social media,
#
which creates these incentives to be extreme.
#
We are now, you know, earlier you had the median voter theorem, right?
#
So when I look at the 2016 primaries in the US,
#
my imagination was it's going to be Hillary Clinton versus Jeb Bush,
#
and they're both pretty much identical.
#
They're just next to each other with the imaginary line,
#
maybe some interest groups that influence them are different,
#
but they're pretty much the same because that's what you get.
#
But instead you get Trump on the other side.
#
And even though you've got a relative moderate, even today as a Democratic candidate,
#
you see that shift in the discourse.
#
So everywhere, I think, social media forces you to choose your ideological tribe,
#
and then the only way to raise your status within that ideological tribe
#
is to be more extreme than the other person.
#
And then the discourse gets polarized.
#
Anyone who is reasonable and in nuanced has been canceled
#
or denounced as a centrist, quote unquote.
#
I mean, Gokhale today would have been canceled for being a centrist,
#
because there is no space for nuance.
#
Even if the silent majority thinks in nuanced ways,
#
but the vocal minorities make it impossible.
#
And I see politics driven more and more to the extremes.
#
And even if you look at recent things,
#
like the farm laws were opposed by the opposition parties
#
simply because the BJP came up with them.
#
You know, and the BJP messed up the politics entirely,
#
it should not have been an ordinance, et cetera, et cetera.
#
But today, when parties look at policies,
#
they don't care about the merit of the policy.
#
They only care about which is the party in, you know, will opposing this help me?
#
You know, you see the same thing with opposing Adityanath's labor reforms.
#
And you see the same thing, for example, you know,
#
with the Congress supporting the OPS, the old pension scheme,
#
which is a disaster for the country.
#
And they know it, but they're doing it because, you know,
#
you are in that cycle of opposition and all of that.
#
And it wasn't always like this.
#
And I wonder if, you know, at one level,
#
there will be those who argue that the cultural changes
#
because of the individual that's an accident,
#
that Modi is different from Vajpayee, et cetera, et cetera.
#
At another level, I think the incentives
#
and the opposition today also is incredibly incompetent
#
and devoid of imagination.
#
it seems that the incentives also drive you to in these extreme positions.
#
And the world that you occupy,
#
where you and the community of people over here in Bangalore, for example, do,
#
is really in between that,
#
where you don't care about the rhetoric on either side,
#
which is so angry and shrill.
#
But it's like, let's get something done.
#
There is significant consensus on that among a lot of people.
#
So what is sort of your kind of sense of this?
#
So I'll begin with a confession.
#
I have consciously and very deliberately accepted centrism,
#
and I will die with centrism.
#
So whether that is valid or not, that is...
#
I think large, heterogeneous, multilingual, multi-religious countries
#
such as India and the United States
#
and maybe France and the UK and a few others
#
are best governed from the center.
#
It can be center, right, center, left,
#
and probably better still should oscillate between the two,
#
I think, to keep everybody honest and humble.
#
But I genuinely believe that if there was one ism that I needed to adopt,
#
it would be centrism for what India is.
#
Now, for some other place, it might be a different answer,
#
but for India, I think, at least for my lifetime,
#
for the next 30, 40, 50 years,
#
I would say centrism is critical, required, and the right answer.
#
I'm not as cynical as you that virtually everything has now become,
#
you know, just election-dependent,
#
and street cred of election matters over everything else, which is true.
#
But I do think some good things are getting done here and there.
#
It's not as comprehensive and as holistic as it could be,
#
but good things are getting done here and there still,
#
and there are still good people and moments in time
#
in which the shelf reform can be pulled out.
#
So that's literally what's happening, I think, as we speak.
#
But I am distressed by the fact that in any moment, not only this one,
#
there is always an environment in which you have to operate,
#
and then there is leadership.
#
And what leadership is able to do
#
is to practice those things that never get stale.
#
And that is absent, and there I would blame leadership.
#
That is an individual thing. That is not a function of...
#
So particularly if you have, you know,
#
370 majority or 320 majority, whatever majorities you end up with,
#
it gives you that much more ability to practice leadership
#
as opposed to practice the politics of it is not us.
#
The politics of it is not us is encouraged by social media,
#
is encouraged by everything that's going on around the world, etc.
#
But the practice of leadership is a global constant.
#
One of the fellows that I follow relatively closely is a guy called Morgan Housel.
#
And he now has a podcast. He's written a couple of books.
#
But one of the ideas he has is things that never change.
#
And certain aspects of leadership should never change.
#
So, for instance, I do not understand
#
why you need to denigrate a prior stack
#
in order to justify what you have done, which is actually not what you have done.
#
So take the digital stack as an example.
#
It is demonstrable in the lifetime of even of our young listeners
#
that it is actually a continuity over the last 10, 15 years
#
rather than something that magically showed up in 2014.
#
Why deny it? What is the value of...
#
Particularly if you have 320 already.
#
I mean, you're not going to get 340 because of that denial.
#
So I think leadership would suggest that in certain important aspects,
#
you accept that continuity, that stacking,
#
that humility that others before me had a role to play.
#
And I think that is absent.
#
And that's what I am particularly distressed about.
#
I think there's enough sort of good things happening on margin.
#
There are bad things happening on margin as well,
#
but there are good things happening on margin
#
that we will muddle along as we have done for quite some time.
#
But this thing bothers me.
#
Why denigrate Nehru as a path forward?
#
Maybe it's a political calculation,
#
but even as a political calculation, I don't understand it.
#
It's simplistic and bizarre.
#
I want you to double-click on leadership
#
in the sense, what does leadership mean to you
#
in the sense of what are the qualities that you would like leaders to have?
#
And why are those qualities necessary for leaders to have?
#
So first thing, going back to where we began this conversation, Amit,
#
is this ability to move the camera lens back and forth.
#
I think that's the first thing you do.
#
So the ability to move the lens forward is present, I think, in this government,
#
the corporate term would be b-hags, right?
#
The big, hairy, audacious goals are being put out there.
#
I mean, you could say a lot of negative things,
#
but for instance, this whole thing about Swach Bharat,
#
what a brilliant use of the bully pulpit
#
to drag India into the 21st century
#
on such an elementary and completely necessary idea.
#
It's an absolutely brilliant idea.
#
So those kind of things are just outstanding,
#
putting ourselves out there as, you know,
#
wanting to be at the table with all the powerful countries in the world,
#
another very good long-term idea.
#
So I think those are examples of inspiring, aspirational leadership
#
that I fully subscribe to, and I think we are doing quite well.
#
But leadership also requires empathy.
#
Leadership also requires not a mantra of inclusivity,
#
but a practice of empathy,
#
and I really want to make a difference between the two.
#
I think the mantra of inclusivity in a literal sense is being practiced, right?
#
So that in a way, we are giving away things for free,
#
and in that sense, they're inclusive,
#
though in the long-term sense, we may be shooting ourselves in the foot
#
by giving everything away for free.
#
It's essentially a populist approach.
#
We are bizarrely fiscally conservative a little bit,
#
or at least borderline fiscally conservative,
#
but our largesse in terms of giving away things for free hasn't gone away.
#
There's no difference between the past and the present in that sense.
#
So inclusiveness is important,
#
but I really think empathy for the marginalized is equally important,
#
and I find that completely absent.
#
So that would be an example of leadership
#
that, whether that is just practicing the Constitution
#
or much more heartfelt.
#
It would have been heartfelt for Gandhi, for instance,
#
and for some people in the old Congress tent,
#
and I do hope we will get back to that in the next administration, whoever it is,
#
that that part of leadership would be there.
#
Another aspect of leadership is this,
#
use your gravitas, your power, your presence, your influence
#
to make people talk so that you can...
#
I mean, another of Gandhi's greatest phases, which is...
#
I mean, it's a brilliant quote which says,
#
I will let the winds of the world blow through my rooms or house,
#
but I will not let my feet be swayed by any of them.
#
And that entire phrase is operative.
#
It seems to me we are shutting windows,
#
literally, metaphorically.
#
Literally, though, it's happening through FCRA, this, that, other things,
#
so many different ways,
#
and metaphorically, it's happening because we just say,
#
okay, we're already so strong, we are the best in the world,
#
we deserve the seat at the table yesterday,
#
so tomorrow is no question, so we don't have to listen to anyone.
#
We know everything we're doing.
#
That complete lack of humility.
#
I think the humility to learn
#
and the empathy for the truly underserved,
#
to me, would be the mark of true leadership
#
at this kind of level, at the political level.
#
Of course, at the corporate level, we can talk about something else,
#
but at the political level, I think this...
#
I mean, maybe at the corporate level, you can translate those words,
#
but it would be the same, right?
#
At the corporate level, the ability to say you're good at whatever you do,
#
core competence and all of that good stuff,
#
but you can never stop learning or adapting to the market, right?
#
So your humility and hunger to learn has to be,
#
I mean, paramount as a leader,
#
and you need to encourage that in the culture,
#
you need to showcase that, you need to role model that,
#
you need to do all of that.
#
Similarly, the empathy for everybody's doing something well.
#
Of course, there are KRAs and there's performance reviews
#
and all of that good stuff in a corporate context,
#
but that said, virtually every corporation is lacking in mentorship,
#
virtually every corporation is lacking in customized training.
#
Everybody does training,
#
but it's become just a tick box kind of training, right?
#
But if you can truly develop your human capital,
#
I think corporations will do...
#
I studied under a fellow called C.K. Prahalad,
#
who was legendary for all his work,
#
which is not as well known as fortune at the end of the pyramid and so on,
#
is this idea that human capital,
#
decentralized, empowered human capital,
#
is the sure path to success.
#
And he said it in a corporate context.
#
Gandhi believed it in a political context,
#
but it's the very basis of enlightened democracy
#
in all senses of the term, right?
#
So I firmly believe in it.
#
And I think Prahalad articulated very well in the corporate context.
#
Couple of things I want to double-click on here,
#
and one of them is just me thinking aloud,
#
where, like, of course I agree with you
#
that humility has to be the mark of any good leader.
#
I mean, humility is the mark of excellence.
#
How do you get to excellence without humility?
#
It's an essential part of the journey.
#
But I look at this interesting conundrum then within politics,
#
that to rise in politics,
#
you have to present yourself as being full of confidence.
#
In the same way as to rise in, say,
#
panditry, you have to present yourself as being full of certitude.
#
And both of those are traps,
#
because the danger then is that the mask can become the face.
#
And you can actually be overconfident and arrogant,
#
and you can actually become too sure of yourself and ignore nuance,
#
because that is a mask that you had to wear.
#
And I find that that may then be a danger
#
in the sense that if you've taken a 30-year journey
#
where the image of yourself you've presented to the world
#
is a strong man who knows everything,
#
then it becomes difficult for humility to be part of that mental makeup.
#
Like, typically what gives us humility is also a lot of failure.
#
You know, we try things, we fail.
#
That gives us humility, we learn through that.
#
But if the journey hasn't had so much failure,
#
and even if it has, if that mask of confidence and arrogance
#
and I know what I'm doing,
#
and if I've thought about it, someone must have thought about it.
#
You know, and I wonder if that is kind of an issue,
#
because there are sort of leaders we've had before this
#
across parties all the way, stretching back,
#
who've had that sort of humility,
#
who've had the consultative approach,
#
who've, you know, not been megalomaniacs, for example.
#
But I wonder that politics would draw that particular kind of person
#
who is a megalomaniac, we know that power corrupts,
#
and if that is an image of yourself that you put forward to the world,
#
then how common is humility?
#
Like, you've interacted with both leaders of industry
#
and leaders of the state.
#
How common is sort of humility?
#
My default position is that I will think the best of everyone
#
unless I have reason to believe otherwise.
#
So is humility the outlier, or is megalomania the outlier?
#
Yeah, so I want to distinguish two aspects of humility here.
#
So one aspect of humility is what I would call the humility to learn, right?
#
And then there is a total attribute of humility,
#
which is just, I'm just humble, I'm self-evasing, I'm this, I'm that, right?
#
I'm advocating at least the humility to learn, right?
#
You could also be the other, but that may not be as necessary in politics
#
or in leadership and corporate thing as the humility to learn.
#
But you have to have that streak of humility to even admit
#
that what any single human being knows
#
is not even defined by a fraction of what is knowable.
#
Knowable, leave alone what is yet unknown, right?
#
So the greatest of them, I mean, if you listen to Feynman,
#
I mean, I know Feynman in particular used to always say this,
#
I would rather die uncertain than know something
#
that eventually turns out to be certainly wrong.
#
So it's just a state of being where you're okay with the uncertainty of not knowing.
#
And the older you get, it just becomes very obvious to you
#
that there's so little you know.
#
I mean, literally, it's not even a fraction, it's not measurable.
#
Nanos and Fermis don't do the trick on how little one knows about anything.
#
So I think the ability to learn, I mean, were you a prime minister,
#
you don't know about semiconductors, you don't know about this, you don't know about that.
#
I mean, there's just so much to learn, right?
#
So I think you can project Atma Vishwas,
#
which is you can project a self-confidence and a emotional stability.
#
Going back to Gandhi's comment, Gandhi had thought about every one of these issues,
#
which is why I think it's truly and looks like we are at least kindred spirits here.
#
Maybe this will become an ode to Gandhi in a way, but Gandhi said exactly that.
#
I want the winds to blow, but I want to keep my feet on the ground.
#
That is reflecting both.
#
It is a humility to have those winds blow through,
#
but the self-confidence to keep the feet anchored.
#
And I think Gokhale did exactly the same, by the way.
#
So I think it's not orthogonal that you can have your feet planted, but be totally humble.
#
And I think that's what leaders should practice.
#
So in corporate life, I have seen a fair number of people, at least with the humility to learn.
#
One other version of that is for leaders to surround themselves with people smarter than themselves.
#
It's not a common thing, but it's not totally rare.
#
It's, I would say, 20%, 10%, 20%.
#
So it's not zero, but it's not anywhere near 70 or 80.
#
I think it should be, because particularly with the movement of technology, you are never current.
#
The only thing that is current is your leadership.
#
Everything else is not current, because the subject matter has changed between when you learned it and wherever you learned it to now.
#
And even if you've kept up with the times, you've only kept it up rather than have learned it from scratch.
#
So whether it's artificial intelligence or chat GPT or the ability to use macros in Excel at my time or whatever it was,
#
there was so much movement in technology and ways of doing things that you were not current.
#
So it was better to surround yourself with people smarter than yourself.
#
And the whole becoming the sum of the parts is the leader's contribution.
#
And that's a whole bunch of very soft, subjective things that we all call leadership.
#
Few people, there are 10%, 20% of leaders, I think, who do that, but not enough.
#
I wish more people were able to do that.
#
And the ones who are truly able to do that, I mean, Satya in Microsoft is an example.
#
I mean, lots of people think of his technology leadership.
#
But I think he's a leader first.
#
He's more than adequately well-versed in technology to make the choices with somebody's help.
#
But first and foremost, he's a good leader.
#
And therefore, the rotational aspect of what the idea comes up is whoever brings it to him brings the idea.
#
And that's what Narsimha Rao did.
#
He rose to the occasion.
#
And he was a gradualist, by the way.
#
I mean, Narsimha Rao would have been in the bottom quartile of gradualism going into 1991.
#
So people also rise to the occasion sometimes.
#
Yeah, the second thing I want to double-click on is on that other quality you mentioned,
#
which everyone should have, not just leaders, which is empathy.
#
And I'm thinking that a friend of mine who is in the CXO suite of a large bank here
#
sometimes tells me that when he goes out with fellow CXO level people,
#
he finds that conversation is really hard for him because they don't read books,
#
they don't listen to music, they don't care about culture.
#
Everything is cricket and Bollywood, and it's just very circumscribed.
#
And this is something that I hear from a lot of people,
#
that most people are kind of going through the motions in their job
#
and don't really have deep interests outside of it in art and culture and all of that.
#
And it seems to me that, you know, you can either have a goal-directed vision of life
#
that everything I do is towards a goal and you might be extremely efficient at that,
#
or you can take a broader view that this is one part of me
#
and the other part of me is enjoying all the other things.
#
And my instinct is that the latter kind, which is pretty rare,
#
the latter kind is more likely to have that genuine empathy,
#
to sort of think outside the lanes that are prescribed
#
and to think outside of convention and to kind of open themselves up.
#
And so I wonder whether you see that same correlation
#
between being a person who has a broad interest in the world at large
#
and in culture, who's reading books, who's...
#
You know, because every time you read a book,
#
you're living the life of another person, you're inside their head,
#
it just broadens you, it makes you, you know, a different person.
#
So, you know, is there a correlation there?
#
Is empathy something that can be incentivized
#
or is it something that has to come naturally from within
#
and then does all of this play a role in that?
#
Again, lots to unpack there.
#
So, first idea, I mean, I'll pound the table and together with you,
#
if you were not literally doing a podcast,
#
stand on this table with you to say, reading is...
#
If I had to say, you can only do one thing with a 20-year-old,
#
I would just say, read the heck out of everything, right?
#
Because that's the fastest way for, you know,
#
diction and articulation at the very least,
#
but comprehension, ability, persuasion, negotiation,
#
reading is definitely one of the shortest ways to get there.
#
And too often, most people forget to read
#
between the age of 20 and 45
#
because everything in life happens at exactly that same time
#
and then they sort of get back to it.
#
But by then, the meat of their contributions is sort of behind them.
#
So, let's encourage everybody,
#
if you take one thing away from this podcast, please read, right?
#
So, I fully endorse your point of view.
#
But the second part of what you said that my ability to relate
#
and I certainly am that way.
#
So, for instance, I would rather not give a bouquet,
#
I would rather give a book.
#
But you could argue that that is a bit elitist.
#
And it is partly true, partly untrue.
#
But therefore, the way I think about it,
#
and this I've learned through my careers, right?
#
So, at an early stage, I was much more,
#
if you're not widely read, if you're not cultural,
#
if you're not philosophical, then you're part of the proletariat, right?
#
And I've completely changed my view.
#
Somebody can be a very good cook.
#
And through the medium of cooking, teach you so many life lessons.
#
Mothers, for instance, at least mothers who are homemakers in the old Indian context,
#
have life wisdom that is unparalleled,
#
that is obtained through daily transactions and nurtured and polished through those
#
rather than through Voltaire and Rousseau and Buddha and Gautilya and others, right?
#
So, I think the elitist's view that that kind of reading
#
is the only way to wisdom is not necessarily correct.
#
The empathy can be practiced.
#
Now, it may be true that they won't know some of these complicated words and concepts
#
that we have for ourselves.
#
But on the flip side, if you ask,
#
can another human being teach me something?
#
I think the answer, I would even venture to guess,
#
is that it cannot be less than 100%.
#
Oh, but people approach that with, I have nothing to learn from this person, by and large.
#
I mean, the judgment on how smart they are, where they come from, what their pedigree is,
#
what their clothing is, is so quick that people put people in boxes very quickly
#
and many, many boxes are not for them.
#
That is anti-empathy, if I can coin a phrase.
#
Whereas if you said, now, of course, there is a cost to it.
#
I mean, if you intersect with everybody and you spend time with everybody, there is a cost to it.
#
In that sense, you're kissing many, many frogs, right?
#
But the act of, again, you mentioned this earlier,
#
but the act of serendipity has no pre-knowledge of which frog is going to turn out to be the prince.
#
So, both from empathy and humility, I would say you have to believe
#
that you can learn from every human interaction.
#
And I didn't start out that way, I have to confess,
#
but I have nurtured that as a muscle over the many years.
#
I'm still getting better at it, but I think it's a very, very important lesson from the security guard,
#
from the vegetable seller.
#
They have a much more intuitive understanding of markets and price
#
than the armchair economists who practice all around us.
#
So, there's something you can learn.
#
I mean, most economists, yesterday I was in some restaurant with an economist
#
and we were talking about, I didn't want garlic in the food because I don't particularly like it.
#
And I said, it's a good thing that it is 500 rupees a kilo,
#
so therefore it will likely, they will put it in their thing.
#
By themselves, they won't add it.
#
Economists had no idea that it was 500 rupees a kilo.
#
And I said, what economists are you practicing that you don't know the most expenses of agricultural commodity today?
#
So, I think that comes from a lack of humility to learn.
#
I mean, you would have learned that if you had gone and bought something in the market that morning.
#
So, I'm going to put you on the spot.
#
What's the price of onions today?
#
40 to 45 rupees a kilo.
#
Nice, we're recording on 29th February.
#
I will take your word for it because I have no idea.
#
And I have to say Bangalore retail.
#
So, there's always Mandi and different locations, but Bangalore retail 45 rupees a kilo.
#
Somebody can verify this.
#
So, I think the two big lessons already from this podcast is one, read a lot and two, kiss every frog.
#
So, the surface area of serendipity, good things will happen if you keep yourself in the right places at all times.
#
Could I stretch this word serendipity?
#
So, one of the conversations I have with a lot of the young people that I intersect with is this idea of serendipity.
#
This book called Growth Mindset has received a lot of press.
#
So, we won't talk too much about it.
#
But there's an equivalent book on serendipity which hasn't received much attention.
#
And I would encourage people to read this book about serendipity.
#
But the aspect about serendipity that I want to emphasize is its difference from luck.
#
Everybody sort of equates the two.
#
That serendipity is sitting next to the lottery and just getting your finger on the lottery and therefore you go on.
#
But I distinguish serendipity and luck in the following way.
#
And this is taking the notion of kissing the frog a little bit further, which is everything in the world takes two hands to clap.
#
And the serendipity mindset essentially requires two things.
#
It requires you to be open and not common state, by the way.
#
Most people are phone-obsessed or self-obsessed or both at the same time.
#
And therefore don't talk to their neighbor, don't talk to the vegetable vendor to inquire about the price of tomatoes, etc.
#
But they're so absorbed in whatever it is that they're doing that they're not open.
#
So, first requirement of serendipity is to be open.
#
The second requirement of serendipity is, and it may require a little judgment.
#
Sometimes you're right, sometimes you're wrong.
#
On average, you need to get it right, is you need to practice the next step.
#
You have to have that cup of coffee.
#
You have to find a transaction that intersects with that person that you intersected with out of luck or happenstance.
#
You have no idea where that goes.
#
And there is another famous idea called the Dunbar's number.
#
I'm sure you're familiar with it.
#
Again, if the folks on the podcast haven't heard about it, please read up Dunbar's number.
#
The summary of which is that 150 lose-ties acquaintances are probably more important to you and you to them in a career time frame than the 10 very close friends.
#
And if you can build your 150 over your career lifetime, it'll be very good for you.
#
That's sort of the summary of Dunbar's number.
#
But the serendipity happens in that I'm not so obsessed with the number 150.
#
It happens to be the size of an English village is what it said.
#
But I think it can be 400 in today's context, given availability of technology and ease of communication and so on.
#
But that 400 acquaintances that one can give and take, and both words are operative, right?
#
You can't just take because then, to use the Indian for a phrase, it becomes matlavi.
#
But if you give, then energy is shared.
#
And once energy is shared between two individuals in a context, then good things will happen.
#
It may be to either of you or neither of you, but good things will happen in general.
#
So I think to me, that is serendipity, which is following up on a happenstance intersection and creating opportunities,
#
co-creating opportunities with that person that didn't exist a little while before you had that happenstance meeting.
#
That's a great insight.
#
And I want to kind of double click on an aspect of that, which is the aspect of intentionality.
#
Step one is that you're intentional about being open and putting yourself more out there.
#
And step two is that then you follow that up with being intentional about actually meeting those people and taking those encounters forward.
#
And I wonder that there is also another danger here.
#
At one level, maybe you are the kind of extroverted, outgoing person who does this anyway.
#
It is part of your swabha to be in places, to go out, to meet people, to follow them up.
#
But it is also the case that if you're intentional about it, then at some level, at some level you run the danger,
#
not of it coming across in any way, but of treating it as instrumental, as seeing people as means to ends.
#
So there is, and I think there's a subtle difference there,
#
that you may take joy in meeting people and doing things for them and good things will then happen to you as a consequence.
#
Or you may think that, hey, I have to go out and meet people because it is good for my career.
#
I have to, quote-unquote, network with people, give my card, take their card, etc., etc.
#
And I wonder how one draws a difference between them,
#
because I think that that second kind of thing, you know, which the word matlabhi also would sort of refer to,
#
because even if you do things for them, you could be doing it out of a matlab, out of, you know, in an instrumental, long-term way.
#
And there is a danger that that can lead to a toxic mindset within yourself.
#
It can corrode your own character, forget the outcomes and all of that.
#
And at the same time, having the approach that I will meet more people and I will help them and all of that,
#
that approach is incredible. That is something that enhances character.
#
So I sometimes wonder about the difference between these two,
#
because it is important to me that I give the people in my life the importance I want to give them,
#
that they are not characters in a play where I am the main character and all of that.
#
But at the same time, I really want to, although we might naturally treat everyone as instrumental in some way or the other,
#
you also want to avoid that sort of mindset that takes you into a purely instrumentalism-driven approach.
#
So what are your thoughts?
#
So, Amit, I think it's a brilliant exposition of the discussion.
#
And I won't say I have the last word on it. It's just a point of view.
#
And I have to again confess that I haven't been able to persuade my nieces and nephews and my children
#
that it is not what you call instrumental, right?
#
Their view is, I mean, this max of instrumentalism, of Matlabism and of networking in its sort of lowest form, right?
#
And my point to them, and I have again learned to do this over time. I was not naturally that way.
#
The only part of what you said that I would quarrel, and maybe we've learned too much psychology,
#
that it's difficult for us to disabuse ourselves, is that you're automatically introverted or extroverted.
#
I think one can train oneself to do lots of things that you might have thought yourself to be at age 20,
#
but you're certainly not at age 30. And certainly by age 50, you can change.
#
So back to the long-term topic, almost everything can be changed in a mental framework.
#
So long as you reflect on it, have other people help you with it, whatever your method is, you can change.
#
So other than the certitude of nature versus nurture in this context, I'm totally in the camp of nurture for the ability to change what you do,
#
which is why I'm saying to a 20-year-old, I would say practice the higher form of serendipity.
#
That's why I distinguish it from the word networking. I think networking is shallow.
#
I think we should get rid of it as a card exchange with instrumentality.
#
But the most critical element of that difference is really the phrase I used, which is you must be prepared for an exchange of energy.
#
And prima facie, that exchange of energy has no result, no necessary result to you.
#
That energy in a cosmic energy exchange kind of way will manifest itself somewhere else.
#
It could manifest itself in either of you, but it could also manifest somewhere else.
#
So you and I could be talking, Amit, as we are doing just now, and that could result in someone it being,
#
you know, wow, wow, we thought of so and so that they could do that.
#
And we could just, one of us could pick up the phone and that could just happen as a consequence.
#
So that could happen. But you have to be willing to give and take.
#
And this is something that my wife has taught me a lot, which is that ultimately, unless you're sort of genius level,
#
which many of us are not, some of us may be, but many, many of us are not, is that only thing that matters is human relationships.
#
So if you approach this from the point of human relationships, and this is true for longevity, this is true for satisfaction,
#
this is true for health, what is it called? Healthy life, health span, that's the new word.
#
Yeah. So for all of these things, it's truly the human relationships that matter.
#
And if you approach it from that point of view, you're just expanding your human relationships.
#
And a human relationship requires two-sidedness to it. It's not definitely not one-sided.
#
And you have no idea. It's in certain human relationships.
#
If you start doing the tola, you might contribute 90% of that relationship or vice versa.
#
But there is no accounting for it. You can only hold it to account, and that account will be, I think, valuable for all.
#
So I'm asking people to think about this notion of serendipity that I'm proposing,
#
and think about it in a much more holistic sense than networking.
#
I think if you're just going to approach it from a networking point of view, I'm not interested, and you do what you have to do.
#
But if you can approach it, or even if you take 10 years, it's okay.
#
Take 10 years and say, I'm willing to give, I'm willing to take, I'm willing to be out there in these relationships.
#
I think you will find slowly that they contribute a lot to you.
#
Now, this can come from so many different communities that are not necessarily professional communities.
#
It can come from a golf community. It can come from a wine community.
#
It can come from a birdwatching community. It can come from a marathon community.
#
So it can come in very, very different ways.
#
It doesn't have to be only that I show up at the, you know, quarterly corporate networking event
#
and exchange eight cards and write back to two people.
#
I think by making it so mechanical, we have undersold the project.
#
And I just hope, but I have to confess, and I appreciate that there is this critique, that it is instrumental.
#
But I have learned, and maybe I'm preaching with the zeal of the converted, but I have learned this.
#
It did not come naturally to me. It was not there as a part of me at age 25.
#
But at age, much later, I won't tell you what, but I've learned to begin to do this.
#
And I'm already seeing the rich results of it that because literally, if you ask me what I do,
#
and maybe that's a good place to end up in, I do two things.
#
I practice ideas and I practice serendipity and the combination of the two results and things that I cannot even foresee tomorrow.
#
Wow, that's amazing. And what I was saying is I didn't mean that as a critique.
#
I just meant to say that there is a balance that we should be aware of in ourselves, that we don't think of it too instrumentally.
#
And even what you said about, I think all healthy relationships are positive some.
#
So even if there is a relationship where you can somehow do the accounting and figure out that, hey, I'm doing 90%, that's fine.
#
You're still taking out more than you're putting in. So to think of it in those terms can also be a problem.
#
Let's go back to history, but not the history of this great nation and all of that.
#
We've done enough of that. Let's talk about your personal history.
#
Tell me about your childhood. Where were you born? Where did you grow up? Tell me about your parents.
#
So I grew up in Trivandrum. I was born in Trivandrum and I grew up in Trivandrum. I absolutely love Kerala.
#
And Trivandrum in particular has retained its character of sort of not growing too fast and remaining the green and very natural place that it was.
#
Kerala, even today, by the way, lives very close to nature.
#
And if you were to say where in India is Ayurveda practiced in daily life, I would say Kerala is the lead candidate in India.
#
I'm not advocating for Ayurveda or anything. I'm eventually a person of science.
#
And I believe that Ayurveda has many great things to contribute, but it hasn't kept up with the method of scientific inquiry and investigation that needs to.
#
Something's happening now, but not enough. But I grew up with oil baths and Ayurvedic answers to many daily problems.
#
So I just absolutely loved Kerala. Both my parents are IAS officers.
#
And from my mother, I learned empathy and relationships and the ability to talk to anybody and everybody.
#
Even though I'm still learning, I'm not as good as she is or as good as many other people are.
#
So I'm a work in progress as it were. But that's the side of my mother.
#
And she was always cheerful and she is always cheerful and able to converse with people.
#
From my father, I learned this long-termism, this reading.
#
I mean, he was a voracious reader way before the age of the Internet.
#
So he actually had to procure books from here, there and everywhere.
#
And also this idea of forward-looking excellence.
#
So he used to always tell me, I don't care what you do.
#
Whatever you do, be excellent at something that will come in vogue five years from now.
#
So very atypical Indian parent. He pretty much didn't tell me what to do ever.
#
But he modeled excellence.
#
Then because they were both in the service, I followed them to Delhi.
#
And so my high school was Delhi.
#
And thankful for that because I learned all my Hindi then.
#
And I speak fluent Hindi as a consequence of that.
#
Not only that, a lot of my education was in Kendri Vidyalaya.
#
So even my geography and my civics was first in Hindi and then in English.
#
So later on in life when in some meetings I had to speak in the AGM in Hindi, it became much easier to do so.
#
So that's the early part of it.
#
I was caught in the final phases of the 11th grade, 12th grade thing.
#
So in the late 70s, early 80s, India switched from 11th standard system to a 10 plus 2 system.
#
And there were three, four years in which that was happening and I was right in the middle of it.
#
So as a consequence, I was one of those guys who wrote the IIT exam twice and my 12th standard was actually in.
#
And then I went to another IIT after writing it a second time.
#
So I ended up in IIT Bombay.
#
So I did a little bit of a Bharat Darshan having done Kerala one year in between in Tamil Nadu, then Delhi and then Kharagpur for one year and then Bombay.
#
So literally the four corners of India.
#
And of course, with my parents have traveled to fair bits of India.
#
My father's position in Delhi was in the PMO and he was the JS to both Indira Gandhi and to Muradji Desai, Joint Secretary.
#
So some of my interest in government and civics with a small C comes from that early association with.
#
I mean, I still remember as a young child running up South Block stairs to see my father.
#
Indira Gandhi used to be literally in the next office.
#
Those days were so simple.
#
Nowadays, of course, it's infinitely more complicated to do any of that.
#
But so I grew up in that kind of that kind of milieu of liberal excellence, if you if you want to call it that.
#
From IIT, I went straight for an MBA.
#
I always knew that I wanted to do an MBA.
#
And so I don't know how I figure that out, but maybe role models in the family or whatever.
#
And then that's when I went to Michigan.
#
Before it was called the Ross School of Business.
#
Again, it was pre Internet age.
#
I used to I type wrote my essays with little white chalk and all of that good stuff.
#
And I was persuaded to go to Michigan by the brochure at the breast brochure of the several that I applied to.
#
And I enjoyed every minute of the Michigan experience because I think then and I think today,
#
Michigan is one of the most balanced business schools that is balanced on finance versus everything else,
#
balanced on case versus theory, balanced on.
#
So, for instance, the professors who greatly influenced me were in three particular areas.
#
Strategy, I already mentioned CK Prahlad.
#
And he was just a brilliant guy because he what I learned from him was think from first principles,
#
something you mentioned already, and think normally.
#
Nobody has a predetermined pre assigned way of thinking.
#
You can think differently.
#
Most of these projects are not algorithmic.
#
And so he used to think from scratch on many, many things.
#
And so for that I and he I took one course with him and then hung out with him quite a bit.
#
That was the sort of the age of finance in the U.S.
#
So and that's where I ended up.
#
But the the finance function in and it was a little bit more corporate finance and stuff like that.
#
But the finance function in Michigan was also excellent.
#
So event studies and all of that good stuff in finance.
#
A guy, Mike Bradley, taught it.
#
And then the third field that really impressed me and I remain most impressed by that even today is
#
several Mormons, in particular a professor called Brockbank, taught me HR.
#
And from that entire experience, I have taken away that virtually every enterprise in the world
#
happens to be an HR enterprise in a domain rather than a domain enterprise that needs to adequately
#
So the idea of human capital from CK Prahlad, the idea of the finance guys were totally different.
#
And so I in that sense, I was a fish out of water when I joined Wall Street later.
#
I'll tell you that story in a second.
#
But you would have said that given my belief system, I would not have ended up in Wall Street because
#
Wall Street was full of extraordinarily bright people, partly attracted by the moment and by the money.
#
But in a system where the whole was magnificently smaller than the some of the parts, governance and
#
leadership was rank poor, not just averagely bad, it was just awful.
#
And so one of the words that I choose to define myself with is the word called balance.
#
And balance was not a word in vogue in Wall Street of the 80s and 90s.
#
So in that sense, I was a fish out of water, but I'll come back to Wall Street in a second.
#
But the thing that persuaded me from all these two, three types of study was that human capital is paramount
#
and everything needs to be organized around that human capital.
#
So in much later life, I have tried to practice that through everything we've spoken a little bit about already.
#
But in virtually every endeavor here now in Takshashila, in whatever other endeavor I'm in the midst of today,
#
it is this idea that institutions, culture, DNA matter a whole lot more than just brilliance in some particular field,
#
whatever the field is, finance, marketing, whatever the area is, technology.
#
Every technology I think is the greatest thing than sliced bread, but the board is made up of juveniles.
#
You can pretty much guarantee that that's going to hit a wall.
#
So this emphasis on human capital, so we can come back to that.
#
Should we go to the Wall Street side?
#
No, actually I want to double click on earlier stuff, take a bit of a look at some of this stuff,
#
and we'll come back to Wall Street.
#
So my dad was also in the IAS, and I was also really fortunate to grow up surrounded by books everywhere.
#
But one downside of that, which I realized well into my adulthood, is that then there was a natural tendency for me
#
to imbibe from my dad a certain intellectual arrogance he had because he read so much and people around him didn't,
#
and to also imbibe in general the social arrogance because in 1980s India you're clearly sort of in a different class.
#
And it took me into my adulthood to realize that about myself and to kind of wean those away and to get past those.
#
And I was struck by what you said about your mom, that you learned empathy from her and the way you talk to people and all of that.
#
That approach has come from that.
#
So can you double click a little bit on that and, you know, give me a sense of the texture of that childhood then
#
because in some ways the texture of that childhood would be similar to mine that you're surrounded by books
#
as that beautiful serendipity of discovering whatever you want and you're reading and all of that.
#
But at the same time, you are making yourself more outgoing and seeing a lot of the world that otherwise could remain unseen for kids like us.
#
So give me a sense of that.
#
I think again, Amit, you have this ability to hit it on the nub of the issue.
#
I think these are these two issues. There's the issue of intellectual arrogance and the issue of social arrogance.
#
Luckily for me, mostly because of my mother's influence and my wife asked me this later.
#
I mean, you're the children of two IAS officers. How come you're not socially arrogant?
#
Right. So luckily for me, that didn't happen, partly because I think they kept us extremely grounded.
#
And I think partly also because I don't know whether you grew up in Bombay or Delhi,
#
but growing up in Kerala, the ability to say you're one with the masses was a little easier than it was in some of the bigger cities
#
where you were driving up in the only car that came to school and stuff like that.
#
We never had any of those. I went by what sport there was and I've done all the third class stuff in those days.
#
And there's some nostalgia about going back to third class and stuff like that still.
#
So the social arrogance part of it, I think partly from the location,
#
but partly also from the household training of keep your feet anchored, helped, don't get new things.
#
I mean, consumerism hadn't invaded in the way that it has. There was certainly nothing online, nothing available, etc.
#
So we only got stuff when we needed it. And that too by postponing the moment of need.
#
And you remember that by months, right? If the canvas shoe was torn, you could hang on for a little while longer.
#
You didn't need to be replaced right then and there.
#
So all of those lessons of frugality and of you're not automatically born better than the rest.
#
And the ovarian lottery that you won, both in caste terms and in career terms,
#
is not necessarily something you should lord over other people.
#
So the social arrogance luckily for me did not exist.
#
But the intellectual actual arrogance that you point to did,
#
so much so that my first several 360s actually highlighted that as not just an ordinary negative, but a super negative.
#
So, and maybe this is a detour, but later on in life and in Wall Street,
#
I was one of those few who consciously accepted an executive coach.
#
And with the help of that executive coach, I completely changed that,
#
I know everything and what I don't know I can find out,
#
version of me to a much more current version now going back 30 years,
#
which basically said, I don't know very much at all.
#
I am fortunate to know a little bit, but together we can do a lot more.
#
Which is the growing up phase.
#
But it came after strong external feedback that the behavior, that intellectual arrogance,
#
I was in a corporate environment, maybe you were not, I don't know whether you were,
#
where the feedback mechanisms are not as consistent and as periodic as they are in a corporate.
#
And the Wall Street of those days, whatever else they did or not, they did this 360.
#
And the 360 was merciless.
#
And this is what came back. And luckily for me, it did come back.
#
And so I actually, I'm very grateful for it and that helped me change
#
and get out of that mode of intellectual arrogance.
#
And then of course, somewhere along the way, I also got married
#
My wife is also the daughter of an English professor.
#
So you could argue, but she was neither.
#
She was neither intellectually arrogant nor socially arrogant.
#
And she's almost communist in her makeup.
#
So she persuaded me as well to be much, to round the edges, so to speak.
#
So I'm grateful for all of those influences.
#
I'm going to double click now on your learning years.
#
You mentioned these three fields of strategy, finance and HR,
#
and the way you spoke about them.
#
It seems that there was just as deep passion that you had for all three,
#
partly, I'm sure, because of the professors you named and all of that.
#
But I'm also interested in what often happens is that at that age,
#
we figure out that we are good at a particular kind of thing.
#
Maybe it is thinking in an analytical way or whatever it is that we are good at,
#
we figure out and then it is natural to kind of go deeper into that.
#
And one danger that happens to academia and later through life
#
is that people put themselves in silos, that they'll choose a path
#
and they'll stick to it and they'll go down that path
#
and the rest of the world really doesn't matter.
#
And this is a tremendous trap that, in my view, has destroyed academia completely.
#
But even apart from that, it is a human trap that we can get into.
#
And in your case, there seems to be rather, A, this fascination for multiple subjects
#
that even if they're all being taught in an MBA are actually pretty different from each other,
#
requiring different kind of frames and ways of looking at the world.
#
And also it seems that the approach that you've brought to whatever little I know of your work since
#
is a very multidisciplinary approach, where you're not coming at it from any frame.
#
It is like, you know, my friend Ajay Shah and I have a show called Everything is Everything.
#
So it is that, you embody that, everything is everything, you know.
#
So tell me a little bit about this, that was it perhaps because of the width of your reading early on
#
is it that you were naturally like this and had multiple different interests
#
or is it that at some point in your life did you also have to, you know, bring some intentionality into it
#
in the sense that, no, I cannot just restrict myself to reading this.
#
I have to kind of broaden.
#
Like, did you find that frames from domain X are actually really useful in domain Y?
#
In fact, they give me a foot up in domain Y.
#
So give me a sense of your approach towards learning
#
and what you feel about this whole issue of how one thinks about the world.
#
Yeah, so I think it's a little bit of both and it sort of co-evolved over time.
#
So for instance, even in IIT, I was a very passionate student in the humanities department,
#
not so much of English, which was natural, but in addition of,
#
we actually had an outstanding course on Indian philosophy.
#
And most other people did it as a checkbox kind of thing, you know,
#
the mandatory course in humanities, somehow you have to get past it.
#
Let's pick the easiest one and keep moving.
#
Whereas I sought it out and I had great interest in it.
#
I still remember I load a long, my first column, I don't know, missive column, writing, whatever, on philosophy.
#
It was absolute crap, but my first column was actually on Indian philosophy
#
and it was almost a regurgitation of what my professor had sort of taught us at that point.
#
So it was very bad. It appeared in the Association Newsletter,
#
which is probably the only one that hadn't have high standards enough to publish it.
#
But it also got me into writing and, you know, we spoke a little bit about reading.
#
We'll speak about it later if you like.
#
But I think writing, for those who care, is also very important for a very different reason.
#
So we can come back to that idea, but my first writing took place there.
#
So I have always been, and I think it's a combination of two things.
#
Intellectually it came from my father, but actually it came from reading.
#
So the combination of the two makes me say that the most important education is liberal arts.
#
Rigorous, but liberal arts, upon which you stack specialized knowledge.
#
I couldn't do that. I sort of, I went into engineering sort of almost like many, many people of my era.
#
But in that, I sought the liberal arts at least as an adjunct, if not as a primary.
#
And I have throughout my life added that liberal arts element.
#
So to my children, young daughters, that's what I said. I said, listen, do whatever you like.
#
But if you have to do it, do rigor and liberal arts early and specialization later.
#
And so that's what they've ended up doing in their own lives. But I truly believe in that.
#
So I grew up what I would call analytically rigorous, thanks of course to the engineering degree,
#
but also fascinated and deeply influenced by the liberal arts of which Indian history,
#
Indian philosophy was critical element to it.
#
An underdeveloped strain, which I mean, try as I might, I have not been able to push too far,
#
despite my wife's field as well is art aesthetics and the human arts and aesthetics.
#
I know I need to do it, but I'm just no good at it. It's just, it's not, it does not come naturally.
#
Like you, like a wise person said to me a while back, give yourself 10 years and you'll do it.
#
So I'm hopeful I haven't given up, but it's been tough.
#
So if I were to break it up into three parts, maybe it is because it's a little easier to approach
#
the intellectualism of philosophy and history for me rather than the experience of art,
#
performing arts and human and things like that. But I'm trying, music appeals to me greatly,
#
but theater, dance, my wife is greatly moved by those things. I am not quite as there.
#
I must at this point interrupt and tell my listeners that this wife you keep speaking of is Shobha Narayan.
#
She's been on my show. We had a lovely episode where we spoke a lot about food and other things.
#
So I will link it from the show notes.
#
Thank you. Yeah. So she's again persuaded me that you experience art rather than understand art.
#
So that's been a lifelong journey. And I mean, I probably, she won't even consider me a student yet,
#
but I'm a student. So I think for any young people listening to this,
#
I would say don't look upon either engineering or the liberal arts with disdain.
#
Both have a very important foundational role to play. And engineering is a placeholder.
#
It could be statistics, it could be rigorous history. So I would say a pillar of rigor
#
and a pillar of subjective thinking is super important for every young person to proceed further.
#
And I just wish we didn't define our young people by the professions that they would need to get to.
#
Of course, profession is important. Of course, making money is important.
#
Of course, hedging your household is important. I'm not decrying any of those practical responsibilities
#
that people have. And I'm not naive enough to say follow your passion, even if it doesn't give you a dime.
#
It makes no sense to me. But on the flip side, I think if you can build yourself as analytical,
#
not even analytical, rigor and subjectivity, whatever the field, I would encourage all our young people
#
to do that and then build the professional layer on top of that, whether it is law or whether it is accounting,
#
finance, medical. I think medical college people at age 17, they go fall into medical college.
#
I mean, it's even worse than engineering in my view. At least in engineering, you learn analytical rigor.
#
If you're a good doctor, you're a brilliant tactician for life.
#
And 30 years later, you will be doing exactly the same thing a little better.
#
That's just a tremendous waste of human capital, according to me.
#
So my dad taught me this. He was basically saying a doctor is a tactician. There is no strategy in being a doctor.
#
So how can you be a better doctor? You can be a better doctor by having an interest in philosophy,
#
by having an interest in many other things, and you apply that wide thing into whatever it is you're doing.
#
I think you become a better human person. You treat the patient holistically.
#
You have a curiosity to learn. Doctors have this continuous learning thing.
#
Most people do it as a checkbox rather than truly continuous learning.
#
But if you learn how to learn, which sometimes many medical college programs don't teach you,
#
you will learn later in life, which is super critical for being a doctor.
#
In fact, learning how to learn is really, for me, the only skill. That is the fundamental thing.
#
I agree with everything you said, but the caveat that important as a liberal arts education is,
#
I think it is now something that we more and more have to pick up by ourselves through osmosis,
#
that the universities have completely failed us.
#
In fact, the universities and the way that they teach, say, the harder sciences,
#
and the way that they teach liberal arts have diverged massively.
#
And perhaps that is because if you're teaching engineering or statistics,
#
you get feedback from the real world. If you're turning out shit engineers who can't build anything,
#
you will know soon enough. But the liberal arts have been taken over by ideology,
#
gone into these, become ossified in these directions that have nothing to do with an interaction with the real world.
#
I mean, no great artist today is going to be turned out by a university because they learned liberal arts there.
#
They won't even understand the world better. In fact, they might misunderstand it entirely.
#
So that is my one little sort of side note here that the liberal arts are incredibly important,
#
which is why I would, you know, double down on what you said earlier,
#
that read more, that is how we get that liberal arts education for me,
#
that just read more, immerse yourself in culture more, but the universities have failed us completely.
#
Again, I'm a little less cynical than you are.
#
I mean, for example, Ashoka University and a few others have come up as a partial response.
#
Bizarrely, the Department of Humanities in IIT Madras as another example.
#
So there are pockets in India that are reviving this.
#
Hey, listen, if it appears like you and I, we can read ourselves out of any problem or issue, it's great.
#
It's frankly the easiest, most cost-effective solution.
#
But many people, and again, this is knowledge from my wife and my mother,
#
are not automatically capable of that, right?
#
And it may be a residual intellectual arrogance of ours to think that all should be capable of it.
#
No, I think my point was not so much that we should learn it by ourselves.
#
Most people don't have the good fortune to be able to even do that.
#
My point is that this is a problem to be solved,
#
that the earlier solution to this problem was a university system,
#
and which, especially in places like America, I think has completely gone off the rails.
#
And therefore, I think that this is a modern-day problem to be solved
#
in much the same way that in a different area of the education space,
#
you have something like Dakshashila, which is solving a problem
#
and I think is wildly successful at solving it because the approach is so right.
#
Similarly, for all of us who care about this,
#
I think that, and I'm really just thinking aloud because
#
I just think that the normalized way in which we think about education today,
#
and I'm sure you've thought about it with far more depth,
#
is completely broken, like even that primary system where
#
you have kids of the same age studying together for 10 years or 12 years,
#
studying the same subjects, makes zero sense to me.
#
You know, you want to test a monkey on how to climb a tree, sure.
#
You test a fish to do that, you are destroying lives.
#
And by and large, I would say that, you know, schools function really well as daycare centers,
#
but otherwise it is a destruction of human capital, potential lives and all of that.
#
And these are bigger problems that I hope, you know, over the next 30-40 years,
#
young people will figure out ways to solve by disrupting the existing equilibrium.
#
But I also think that it's important, therefore, to point out that the problem exists.
#
And, you know, I'm sorry, a bit of a tangent, but this is like a common lament.
#
I don't disagree completely.
#
The thing I would say is there is not enough emphasis on and study of how each person learns how to learn.
#
I think you and I are in violent agreement.
#
I mean, I'm not sure that that phraseology has been used that widely even.
#
And I was looking into it because the exposure to that came, observing my two girls.
#
They learned completely different one from the other.
#
Same household, same everything, same books on the shelves, same, you know, dinner table conversations.
#
But one from the other, they learned totally differently.
#
And in their channel, they each learn so efficiently, right?
#
So you expose them to their channel, they pick it up like that.
#
But you say, read this book or you do that other thing, that's not for them necessarily, right?
#
If the idea of education evolves and I think it must evolve in the future period, the industrial era education is over.
#
In the period ahead, if we can expose people to multiple pathways to learn so that they can identify here are my two leading pathways.
#
I think that itself will be a first service.
#
Then how do you get more and more through that pathway?
#
And I think technology can help that, right?
#
Whereas earlier to use a now cliched phrase, mass customization of pathways is possible.
#
So I do think, I mean, I completely agree with you that we have to completely transform education to that.
#
The idea that you learn in the method in which you learn best.
#
And if you do so, I mean, think about this from the opposite side, right, which is the potential.
#
The potential is absolute.
#
If you can just find ways in which people learn better, I mean, just imagine the human capital delta that we will create if you can do it at any scale at all.
#
I think that's the next revolution.
#
Of course, continuous education of the type Takshashila is doing now is super important.
#
And lifelong learning, both self-learning and assisted learning will continue and should continue.
#
It's not a widely accepted idea yet, right?
#
So this idea that people will live longer, people need to have multiple potential careers.
#
Therefore, your learning is not going to stop at age 21 or 22 or whatever it is, that it has to be lifelong.
#
That you can actually pivot in today's system.
#
It's all early in all of those observations, I think.
#
And I think the earlier people accept those, the better off it is for them individually.
#
But collectively, it's better off for the system if they each deliver to their new potential.
#
I think the potential itself can change.
#
So everybody says deliver to your potential.
#
But if you figure out the right learning method, then the bar itself goes up above.
#
I mean, if you can learn how to learn, potential is unlimited.
#
I mean, where is the ceiling? There is no ceiling.
#
We'll go back to your personal journey after the break.
#
But before the break, I want to ask you a subject that you mentioned and that I feel really strongly about, which is the importance of writing.
#
Like I keep telling my writing students about how writing makes you a better thinker.
#
It is not the other way around that if you are a good thinker, you are more likely to write well.
#
But if you force yourself to write or if you get the discipline of writing daily,
#
if you keep working that muscle out, then it will inevitably just make you a better thinker.
#
Because you understand the world much better, you understand yourself.
#
Not only do you understand yourself, you shape yourself through the process of writing.
#
So I want you to double-click on how that realization was for you, how important writing is for you,
#
what are the kind of habits and practices that you have built up.
#
Yeah, so I think we are at a violent risk of being in a bromance at the end of this conversation.
#
So I think writing is again super important for most people, not for all necessarily, but for most people, for all of the reasons.
#
So at the very least, again, it's diction and articulation and all of that good stuff.
#
But it teaches you two things that reading doesn't automatically teach you.
#
Reading helps you with it, but writing teaches you it.
#
And that is separating the wheat from the chaff.
#
This ability to discern what must go in and what must stay out, particularly if you have a word count.
#
It's something that writing teaches you so well.
#
You have a limited real estate to communicate whatever you want to communicate.
#
And that ability to say, yes, this goes in, no, this stays out is very useful.
#
It will start very poorly, and the best writers start poorly.
#
But the good news today, I had to go to my association newsletter, but LinkedIn is available to everybody.
#
You can publish the hell out of it.
#
So the standard is zero.
#
Nobody even will diss it if they don't like it.
#
They just won't read it, but they won't like it.
#
So you can start with it.
#
There's multiple avenues.
#
The avenues are just infinite for you to write.
#
So I would encourage those interests broadly in any of these topics that we're talking about to actually write for that, begin writing.
#
Because usually it is the process of beginning to write that that's tough.
#
Then you asked me about the so I write much more what I would call evidence and data based columns.
#
I think we've actually officially crossed 500 now for Mint.
#
So and again, I would recommend this as a way which is ruminate on the idea forever, but write in very disciplined ways.
#
So I that's literally what I do.
#
I ruminate every I mean, if I get a car ride for 10 minutes, if I'm in the toilet, if I'm having a shower, if I'm wherever, right, walking, I noodle on the idea.
#
And like books at home, many are half read.
#
And there's a beauty to the half read book that and the half completed idea as well in your head.
#
Right. So you could work on five, six ideas at the same time in your head.
#
But then when you get down to writing, you have to have your discipline and it doesn't have to be my discipline, but it has to be a discipline and then practice that discipline.
#
So my discipline now is for my biweekly column, fortnightly column, start to finish a write in four and a half hours.
#
Well, eight hundred words, four and a half hours, fifty five hundred characters.
#
So there is a very specific cadence to it.
#
The rumination has taken place over sometimes one week, sometimes several, several weeks.
#
Sometimes it is nuggets that are just there and stuck on a wall without any particular order to it.
#
That's the other thing is, is keep an idea log.
#
And again, the method of the idea log should be yours, whatever it is, it can be notepad on on your computer, it can be a brain map, it can be literally handwriting, it can be a whiteboard, whatever it is.
#
Keep an idea map because, you know, you know, there's a famous saying that the power of the power is really realized when ideas have sex.
#
Right. So I think Matt Ridley gave a talk with that title.
#
Exactly that title. So I mean, in this case, it's exactly that.
#
It's just there on the wall, but suddenly it transmogrifies.
#
It's a little bit like, you know, it's like an abstract mathematician.
#
You're just seeing some things on the wall and suddenly the clarity of a fully solved formula appears in your head.
#
I mean, it might seem very theoretical to people when they hear it, but they should develop their own methods of putting some ideas up wherever they put it up.
#
I think the act of transcribing it on something makes it real.
#
Just keeping it in the head sometimes keeps the fog going.
#
Right. Whereas if you put it somewhere, whatever the method you use, some people use phones, some people use computers, some people use paper, it doesn't matter really.
#
But the act of translating and putting it down makes it real.
#
Can you give me an example from your own work where ideas had sex, where you just put things down together and a connection appeared and you got something out of that?
#
I mean, my LinkedIn profile says connecting people, ideas and capital.
#
So literally, I sort of breathe the air trying to connect.
#
Because when there is divine connection, it becomes sex.
#
But it's so much a part of me.
#
I find it difficult to separate.
#
So my latest column, maybe apropos nothing in this conversation, but my latest column was on Chinese deflation.
#
And the two ideas that I was reading roughly at the same time was that China's December number for CPI deflation was very poor.
#
And for the first time in 34 years, Japan's index crossed its 1989 peak.
#
I'm just saying they're neighbors right next to each other.
#
By the way, another idea that I constantly tell the students in Takshashila is every emerging market worth its salt will one day bid for the Olympics.
#
And that's the day that you should not invest in that country unilaterally.
#
It's a small data set, so it could be erroneous.
#
But the impact I want to convey is that there is this huge growth period that then takes a society to say sociologically we have arrived.
#
And that sociological moment of arrival for many reasons is the end of that strong growth period, including with a strong currency,
#
which is exactly what happened to Japan in the 70s and 80s, happened to Korea a little after, happened to China.
#
So if you literally go through the Rio Olympics, the Seoul Olympics, the Beijing Olympics,
#
they all marked broad sociological tops and market tops after which people have struggled to grow.
#
So the question I was asking myself is, are we in the broad zone in China that we were in Japan in the 80s and 90s?
#
Because you're hitting the deflationary period, the currency needs to be much lower.
#
It's being kept higher, strangely, for China.
#
And it's the opposite in the early 2000s.
#
What next? So that's an economic connection.
#
But there's also a sociological connection because Japan was not doomed to 30 years of deflation.
#
The sociological connection or the political economy context of it was they took some very bad decisions in the 90s.
#
They kept monetary policy very tight.
#
And just when the economy was coming out in 87, Hashimoto imposed a tax, which tightened the fiscal side as well and just slammed the economy into deflation further.
#
That twin slamming essentially killed the Japanese economy for 30 years.
#
It's famously called the Hashimoto tax of 87.
#
So that's just an economic idea, may not appeal to everyone, but the sociological implication.
#
Everything ultimately comes back to human behavior.
#
So this idea that even the Olympics, we have begun this Olympic quest just now.
#
It won't happen and I don't believe it will happen for 38 for India.
#
I do believe it might happen 10 years later.
#
It's not 10 years later, that wouldn't be mathematically correct, 8 years later.
#
But India will, it will broadly be coincident with this Vixit Bharat idea, which will broadly be coincident with a demographic peak,
#
which will broadly be coincident with a appreciating rupee.
#
Oh, you're scaring the hell out of me.
#
Of course, all of this is 20 years away, 15, 20 years away, but separate topic.
#
We're not doing enough to invest in, and that's all what triggered the discussion of quality versus quantity.
#
We can come back to that question in a little bit.
#
I'm reminded of this completely unrelated domain.
#
I'm reminded of this book I read called Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt, where I got the interesting insight
#
that most accidents, really large percentage of accidents happen when you're very close to home.
#
And I'm guessing that happens because you kind of switch off, you're no longer alert.
#
You're like, ha, up to Ponchika, et cetera, et cetera.
#
And that kind of complacence is something that I think was also visible in a Japan context in Akio Morita,
#
where he wrote this document in the late 1980s, which you know,
#
R.H.J. and Pranay Kothaswamy have this incredible newsletter and R.H.J. quoted profusely from that document in that,
#
where it is full of this incredible kind of hubris, like hubris like you've never seen before.
#
Yeah, yeah, I just read it.
#
Yeah, yeah, an incredible kind of hubris.
#
And I think, yeah, when the hubris comes, I agree with you that that's a time where you got to, you know,
#
sit back a little bit and reevaluate.
#
And that's what we need to watch out for.
#
We're not there, but we're building to it in five, ten years from now.
#
I generally believe and I think...
#
And, you know, the good reason is that it's built on some foundation.
#
It was not some, you know, fly-by-night operation.
#
It had genuine credit to its bag.
#
So it's not without merit.
#
I mean, hubris, megalomania, lack of humility is all the reason why most of these things turn turtle.
#
And we have to be super conscious about...
#
And that's back to that old idea of humility, right?
#
And I think China is going through that exactly now.
#
And the phrase I have for it, mixing some words, is speaking too soon.
#
China is speaking too soon.
#
They are concentrating this hubris in one man's productive lifetime.
#
And I think it's going to end very badly.
#
It's not good for everybody, but it's not good for anybody.
#
I don't think if China ends badly, it's good for anybody.
#
But this will, in my view, just as a student of history, nothing else.
#
I don't have any strong basis to predict anything else.
#
But I would just say as a student of history that if you have a system that does not have automatic escape valves,
#
the more concentrated lack of humility, the bigger the fall.
#
No man is an island and that fall will hurt us as well.
#
I am so incredibly alarmed that I need a break right away.
#
So let's take a break and we'll chat on the other side.
#
Welcome back to The Scene in the Unseen.
#
I'm still chatting with Narayan and you were going to tell us about your exciting years in Wall Street,
#
surrounded by sociopaths where the whole is always less than the sum of the parts.
#
There is no leadership.
#
Everything is going to hell.
#
There is greed, greed, greed as the stereotypes go.
#
So tell me, you know, were you a wolf of Wall Street?
#
What were those years like?
#
No, as I told you, I was a fish out of water to use the animal kingdom fully.
#
But I was attracted to Wall Street really because of the bright people and the field of finance.
#
The field of finance still was very cutting edge at that time.
#
And therefore it attracted a lot of good people.
#
And I fell in with it, even though Michigan was not automatically the place for the capital markets,
#
number one, and number two, given my eclectic interests,
#
I could easily have gone into strategy or marketing or more likely some HR related field,
#
even though I was not as interested in HR administration as I was in people strategy.
#
So I'll tell you about how I got my job, which is, again,
#
I think people with resource constraint come up with creative ways to solve them.
#
So in the schedule, Goldman Sachs at that time would not allow me a spot because of the visa.
#
So I was like, I need to talk to the best firm at that time on the street.
#
And how do I even get to talk to them, leave alone, get a job?
#
So I ended up that I told the guy when he stepped out from the interview room for a cup of coffee,
#
I said, I will drive you to the airport. You interview me on the way to the airport.
#
And the rest, a little bit of history is that I got the job after that, even though I had no official slot.
#
And people who didn't know me stopped me and said, oh, wow, you got it in Goldman Sachs.
#
It was not common to have people from Michigan go to Goldman Sachs in those days.
#
And I started at Goldman Sachs, then went on to a firm in Connecticut that did a lot with pension funds and investing.
#
That's where I really got my first taste of emerging markets.
#
The word emerging markets was coined when I was in that firm, not by us, obviously, but by IFC, a fellow called Antoine Van Ackmal.
#
And so this way and that, I fell into the emerging markets world starting in the late 80s, early 90s,
#
and over time built my career in investment management in Wall Street, mostly at Morgan Stanley.
#
The world of investment management doesn't have as many wolves.
#
It's the world of securities and trading that has the wolves that you famously see,
#
and a little bit of investment banking that has the wolves that you see in the movies.
#
The investment management world is much more subdued.
#
But you mentioned, interestingly, the NPS, the pension scheme.
#
So the part of the business that I was in was 100% a result of an NPS-like law in the U.S. called ERISA,
#
the Employment Income Securities Act, I can't remember what R stands for,
#
but ERISA law essentially created an entire range of boutique investment managers and investment management firms
#
that would flourish for the benefit of these pension funds that were outsourcing their investments at that time.
#
So I was a big beneficiary of it, and I was a beneficiary of another trend,
#
and a little bit, again, recalling my father's advice, which was,
#
think about what might be useful five years from now rather than today, or ten years from now,
#
and emerging markets was just being born.
#
And so I was fortunate to catch both those trends, the investment management trend from ERISA
#
and the emerging markets trend that was just being born at that same time.
#
So my career in investing greatly benefited from both those trends.
#
You know, I have a feeling that if I was that Goldman Sachs recruiter,
#
and this kid came up to me and said that I'll drive you to the airport, you interview me,
#
I feel the drive would not matter then.
#
In my head, I have hired that man because he showed that initiative.
#
That's kind of how I look at it, and I've heard so many stories like this,
#
and to me, from whatever I have experienced of the world,
#
the biggest quality that one should look for is hunger.
#
If you have the hunger, you can do anything.
#
The rest follows from there.
#
And if you have the opposite of that, if you're apathetic,
#
then automatically the quality of your work will eventually suck
#
because you will never learn anything new.
#
So that is literally the only thing that I kind of select for now
#
when I think of who to work with or who to sort of associate with.
#
Let me ask you a question, if I may.
#
And interestingly, you used the word hunger.
#
I don't know whether you followed the recent conversation in cricket
#
where both Dravid and Rohit have said,
#
we won't select anybody who doesn't have the hunger.
#
Literally, this is what they said last week.
#
But they're right about this.
#
Yeah. So let me ask you the question.
#
I completely agree with you, but suppose you were to help somebody get there.
#
So your 10-year-old child, you know hunger is important.
#
They're 10 years old now.
#
How does the 10-year-old become a 20-year-old with hunger?
#
I'm going to ask you that question.
#
So my off-the-cuff, like I don't have kids and don't plan to have kids,
#
but my off-the-cuff answer in general with regard to young people is that,
#
you know, you mentioned the book, Growth Mindset, earlier.
#
And what I would really do is I would not use adjectives.
#
In the sense, I would never tell that person,
#
you're intelligent, you're so smart, and etc., etc.
#
I would say, hey, you work so hard. I like that.
#
Or you kept trying even though you failed.
#
That's great. Keep going.
#
You know, I would concentrate on those attributes of effort
#
and not, you know, qualities like intelligence or so on and so forth.
#
And I think that's really important because what even studies have shown
#
and I'll link those from the show notes, but what studies have shown is that,
#
you know, when you praise kids depending on attributes like intelligence,
#
when you use adjectives, you're smart, you're this, you're that,
#
it breeds, A, a sense of complacence and, B, a sense of entitlement.
#
And those kids are actually more likely to cheat in life later
#
because they feel entitled to it and the root doesn't matter.
#
Whereas if you praise kids on attributes of, you know, trying hard, perseverance,
#
keep going at a problem, you know, don't get disheartened.
#
Those kids really do well because that is what they do all their lives.
#
And that is, finally, that is the hunger.
#
So for me, that is a key thing.
#
Now, how, you know, that is my strategy.
#
How tactically, how do you get there in the case of a particular person
#
would obviously differ from case to case.
#
And I have no experience as a parent and no desire to have any,
#
so I can't answer to that.
#
But I would say that that is what I'm always,
#
and I say this in a sense with a sense of loss
#
because for a large part of my life,
#
I was in this space where I would think, oh my God,
#
like I am well-read, I am smart, I am this, I am that,
#
I can do in one hour what it takes others to do in 10 hours.
#
And that was terrible. That was toxic.
#
If there are many things I could have done by now which I haven't done,
#
And it took me a long time to realize that none of that shit matters.
#
It is just about getting your bum on the chair and building habits
#
and working hard and like habits compound.
#
Habits are equal to compound interest in that sense.
#
So that is a big lesson I've learned and that is really what I would try to...
#
So you don't think frugality,
#
I'm going to put it in the semantics of frugality rather than
#
the literal meaning of frugality,
#
is one input condition for hunger?
#
Okay, so you mean that if a kid is growing up in a family
#
where she has everything, is she as likely to be hungry?
#
We have struggled with this.
#
We have two girls and we have always wanted them to be hungry and independent.
#
There are only two things we wanted them to be hungry and independent.
#
Hunger takes care of everything going forward and emotionally stable and confident.
#
So those are the only three attributes we have said.
#
But we have struggled with what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for hunger.
#
So while I don't know, I'll bring in two sort of contradictory viewpoints.
#
And one viewpoint is that I do see that kids in small towns,
#
and for me they are the hope of India,
#
kids in small towns have much more of that hunger.
#
And it is a danger with elite English-speaking kids who get foreign-educated especially
#
that they come back with a sense of entitlement,
#
they come back with frames of looking at the world that don't really fit the real world.
#
And it just becomes a big problem and those kind of people are often
#
the worst kind of people to work with regardless of what their education might be.
#
So if you are therefore in that situation where you are an elite person
#
and obviously you want to give your kids the best of everything,
#
then this is just something to watch out for,
#
that you try to make sure that they don't feel too entitled and that they keep working.
#
But the contradictory viewpoint to this is that I have this great impression of kids in small towns
#
because the ones that I have been exposed to are the ones who showed the initiative in the first place
#
to escape the small town. So there might be a selection effect in play there as well.
#
So I really don't know. I mean I can't answer the larger question.
#
I would ask our listeners to think about this idea that...
#
Yeah, no, exactly. And maybe tell us on Twitter exactly what they think about how you might facilitate or enable.
#
I don't think you can create it because it's not you, it's somebody else,
#
but at least you can enable or help people on the path.
#
Because I completely agree with you that this hunger creates things that you could not have imagined.
#
And one example is... And I have fortunately been hungry all my life
#
and hungry to learn or hungry to do all my life. I don't know. I can't fully explain it, but it's there.
#
I think it's also in some ways a question of luck in the sense of for some people that hunger is a natural condition.
#
Like I remember this sports interview my mind keeps going back to, but I've forgotten who it was.
#
It wasn't Dravid, though it is very Dravidian.
#
But in the early 2000s, I read this interview of this guy where he was asked about talent.
#
And he said, you know what talent is? Talent is only one thing.
#
Talent is when you wake up at 5 in the morning because you wake up every morning to go jogging.
#
But that particular day you have a little bit of a cold and it's raining outside and there is no event coming up.
#
You don't need to go out, but you still fucking get out of the bed and you go out and you run in the rain.
#
And that is talent, that kind of bloody mindedness.
#
And I think that that to some extent is something that can be encouraged as a habit that everyone should have.
#
But to some extent, it is also inherent in you.
#
You know, like I was chatting with my friend R.S.J. about this.
#
And he was talking about how when people talk about his incredibly disciplined lifestyle,
#
and those who know him in the real world would know he's incredibly disciplined.
#
And he was saying, look, it's not discipline. I fucking love what I'm doing.
#
I am just doing the things that I love.
#
And I think that perhaps there is a mindset of living life with intensity, you are plunging into life.
#
I think if you plunge into life, if you care about the things you care about,
#
then what appears to others to be discipline is it just comes automatically.
#
I relate to that. Absolutely, yes.
#
And I think that's you, right? Isn't it?
#
So let's go back to Wall Street, where at one level,
#
it strikes me that you are in this heady place where you are on top of the world,
#
if not a wolf, but you know, certainly a warrior.
#
Yeah, you're on top of the animal kingdom, as it were, in the food chain.
#
And I guess it must be really heady to be young, to be doing well financially, obviously,
#
to have the best possible career, which it would seem that you can have.
#
And that, I think, can also be a danger because it can blinker the way that you look at your world
#
and even stop your growth or maybe constrain your growth through what you need in that specific kind of field.
#
And it's clear that, you know, you didn't fall for that trap.
#
But the larger question that I'm curious about is what was, at that time,
#
the story that you told yourself about yourself, like the who am I story?
#
Who am I and what am I doing?
#
And was it something that would have naturally evolved to where you are today?
#
You know, did the change in that story take something dramatic to happen, some disjunction?
#
Or was it, did you feel it was inevitable that you would have landed up being broadly who you are?
#
So, you know, so tell me a little bit about that. What was that story to begin with?
#
Yeah, so I'm going to start with an arranged marriage story.
#
So as you mentioned earlier, Shobha and I got married now well over 30 years ago.
#
And as it happens with arranged marriages, the only thing you can have is a conversation.
#
So we had several conversations.
#
And given the distance separating us at that time, we had several more conversations
#
because we could literally only talk through the air for hours on end.
#
And in one of those conversations, she asked me, so how do you want to define your life?
#
And I came up with five words then.
#
Curiosity, balance, family, contribution, and fun.
#
And these were very early in my days in Wall Street.
#
So in a way, it sort of predated even my so-called successful career on Wall Street.
#
And so I'm glad I did that because it was a marker for me
#
that I needed to reach back to these things if I went too far off track.
#
It didn't mean that you needed to practice every one of those things simultaneously.
#
But if you needed a reckoning at the end of your life
#
and you wanted these number of words to define who you were,
#
then at some point in your life, you needed to get back to at least the ones that never got done.
#
So the words I chose were very carefully chosen.
#
And again, for the young people, I would encourage you to choose.
#
These are just five words. It may mean nothing to you. It may mean something to you.
#
You can borrow one of the words. You can borrow none of the words.
#
You can borrow all of the words. It doesn't matter.
#
You have to be authentic to yourself and say, this is who I choose to be at the end of my life.
#
And luckily for me, that anchor always kept dragging me back.
#
So even when I had the tendency and the flirtation to get caught up in the headiness of the moment,
#
the nagging voice always brought me back.
#
So the question is, how do you keep your nagging voice speaking to yourself?
#
So this idea of curiosity and reinvention is built into that.
#
So my second or third career, you can call it whatever, what you will, is built off literally of that idea
#
that I knew that this was not the one career that I was going to do.
#
I didn't know when, I didn't know where, I didn't know how, but somehow I had to structure it.
#
So I got there in this lifetime.
#
And similarly for all of the other attributes that I knew, I mean, you know, for many women,
#
this work-life balance is a huge issue.
#
For men on Wall Street, work-life balance is a huge issue.
#
So balance was an integral element of who I believed I was.
#
And so therefore for me, right from the beginning on Wall Street,
#
it was a very important element to construct that balance rather than lose it right away
#
because it was very easy to lose.
#
Working till 2 a.m. was a given rather than an aberration.
#
So, and again, I just created a discipline.
#
And by the way, working till 2 a.m. is the result of a culture and an indiscipline
#
rather than working 18 hours.
#
That's not what people do.
#
It's a combination of a culture and an indiscipline.
#
So I just reset that culture.
#
And I said, we will work very productively for 12 hours.
#
Of course, when I was junior, I could only suggest it, but as I got more senior, I created it, etc.
#
So I would encourage young listeners to actually say,
#
whether it's in words or in poetry or however you want to do phrases, it doesn't matter,
#
but define some of these North Stars for yourself
#
and work actively on getting back to them whenever you can.
#
I think it's super important because otherwise you lose,
#
you lose a sense of who you are very soon.
#
And it seems to me that this act of definition is something that most people don't do.
#
That in a sense, when you write down those five words, you have shaped yourself.
#
In a sense, by writing down, this is who I am, you have made yourself that person
#
because now you have, you know, put it on the wall of your soul that this is who I am
#
and I'm going to do what I do.
#
And that act of intentionality of sitting down and defining, I think is usually important.
#
And of course, we can change our stories as our life goes on,
#
but the importance of writing it down so you're clear about what you're doing and why is kind of there.
#
And yet, even within these words, when you're living that life in Wall Street,
#
it seems that that balance must be hard to find because on the one hand,
#
you know, there is that quest for excellence and dedication,
#
and I'm sure you loved your work as well, which makes it tempting to just stay in office till 2 a.m.
#
You know, if that's what it takes, because you're loving it. Why not?
#
You're doing something you love. It's important.
#
But at the same time, you know, you've put family there.
#
So you need to then also carve out times.
#
And perhaps I wonder if at some point it became something that you made intentional
#
in terms of deciding that, you know, these are the days we'll spend together and et cetera, et cetera.
#
I wonder how much thought went into that.
#
And also, you know, the other aspects of balance, you know, then when is your reading time?
#
Like earlier, you correctly said that between 20 and 45,
#
many people stop reading because life is happening to them.
#
So how was that process of yours like of forcing yourself to live up to these five words
#
that you put on the wall of your soul?
#
Yeah, just myself, the way I solve a problem for myself is just sit and stare at a wall
#
and, you know, start scratching things literally on the back of the envelope.
#
I don't even use a pad and then do a little juggling and try to get back.
#
Different people do it totally differently, one from the other.
#
But this need for constant self-correction and periodic introspection is super important for everybody, right?
#
I mean, I have numerous friends in the US who keep lamenting not returning to India.
#
I don't care whether they return to India or not, it's their personal choice.
#
But if you lament it, then it's on you.
#
You've made a choice and you can still make a different choice.
#
There may be other reasons, there may be in-laws, there may be money.
#
There are all kinds of reasons to do it or not to do it.
#
But you live a life of your choice, many people do.
#
Of course, sometimes, you know, health and other things interfere,
#
but most cases they're making lives of choice.
#
And it is because the treadmill turns that they don't introspect, they don't stop, they don't reshape, they don't self-correct.
#
I think just like, you know, the person writing about economic reform will not do personal reform.
#
Why is that? Why is there no introspection?
#
Introspection is the most important quality.
#
Now, you could argue that many people don't have the self-skills to do introspection, and I don't disagree.
#
You know, people may not have either the discipline or the ability to do it, but somehow you reach for it.
#
Reach for a friend, reach for a method, reach for a technique, reach for a counselor.
#
It doesn't matter what it is, but you have to stop self-correct, stop self-correct.
#
I think in modern careers, assuming people can be productive for 50 years now.
#
It used to be 35, I would say it's 50 now.
#
At least every six or seven years, that deep introspection.
#
So recently I did an exercise with your indulgence.
#
So I asked about a dozen of my friends, good friends, to bitmap me.
#
And the bitmap, the goal was what shows up deep red, I mean brighter, and what shows up a little less bright.
#
Not so much to automatically judge that the less bright was more important or less important than the deep bright.
#
But did I like the bitmap as a whole?
#
And if I didn't, should I do something about it?
#
Now this kind of thing is available to everyone at every stage in their life.
#
And you don't have to choose this method, you choose walk with four friends.
#
You can choose whatever method you like.
#
But it is super helpful.
#
And the idea is not either on one side to get everybody to say you're the best thing since sliced bread,
#
or the opposite, that you're so flawed there's no hope for you.
#
The idea is not either extreme.
#
The idea is to say, and literally that's why I use the word bitmap.
#
The bitmap has, every pixel has a particular intensity to it.
#
And is the intensity that you seek correct?
#
Am I doing enough mentorship?
#
Am I coming across as arrogant?
#
Each pixel, do you want to accentuate it or not?
#
There's no value judgment.
#
You make the choice, right?
#
Particularly as you get older, that bitmap is definitely yours.
#
So you make the choice.
#
Do you want to accentuate further?
#
And you can choose to radically change.
#
There's nothing stopping you from radically changing completely.
#
And just saying, hey, listen, enough of this.
#
I want to do something else.
#
So I think people don't do enough of it.
#
And I was fortunate, and I think I'm still fortunate.
#
And it looks like you come from the same club, but it's not common
#
that people are able to stop themselves and through sheer force of will
#
put down what it is that is deficient.
#
And should you or should you not fix it?
#
Not everybody can do it, but I think there are many mechanisms
#
by which you can approach that issue.
#
One of my laments about the world around me is that
#
most people don't self-reflect or introspection, like you said.
#
And I didn't for a while as well until I started and didn't like what I saw.
#
And I'm going to talk a little bit about the conscious thinking
#
that I have done behind it, but first I'm going to ask you
#
what did your bitmap show and were you happy with it,
#
if you're willing to share your sort of...
#
Yeah, I'll just say a little bit.
#
Obviously, it's very specific to me and personal.
#
So first of all, the first thing you look for is whether your expectation of yourself
#
is broadly consistent with the other's expectation of you.
#
Because we haven't spoken about it in this conversation,
#
but I'm sure you will agree with me that the more you are close to your authentic self,
#
and I'm no psychobabble guy, but I believe in this statement,
#
the more you're close to your authentic self, the easier it is to live life.
#
So that was the first test, is sort of my expectation of myself in this career phase
#
roughly similar to what others believe of me.
#
So luckily for me, that is consistent.
#
For some people, it may not be consistent.
#
For me, at other phases in my life, it might not have been consistent.
#
So the first thing to work on is that consistency between what you think of yourself
#
and what others think of you, if you want that consistency.
#
The second, for example, one of the things that I was surprised by,
#
and maybe I need to work on it, is they say that, you know,
#
a lot of people say that I am, particularly in the context of boards and other things
#
that was germane to this discussion, that I facilitated a democracy of input
#
and all of that good stuff, which are all good things for boards.
#
But one thing that came back with me is to say that that was still not enough,
#
that when it got a little bit prolonged, my impatience came through.
#
So one of the things I'm working on is in the input phase of a collective decision,
#
I need to be more patient, more empathetic, and more democratic than I have been.
#
I thought I was, but apparently it's not sufficiently so.
#
And so that's one of the things I'm going to work on.
#
So those are the kind of things that it helps with.
#
But this is just one example.
#
The fundamental thing is exactly what you said, Amit,
#
and you were going to give me your story, which you should,
#
which is please stop and reflect in the same way that reading improves you.
#
Introspection can help redefine you, if you choose.
#
And I think even giving a structure to the nature of some of this introspection,
#
like this experiment I'm in the middle of right now, in fact,
#
is so early on in this year, I had this nebulous idea that I want to make,
#
I want to kind of account for every day in a good kind of way.
#
So I created this thing called the Satisfaction Index for myself.
#
And my idea is that at the end of every day, I'll rank the day out of 10
#
on how satisfied I felt.
#
So not ticking boxes in terms of productivity or whatever,
#
but do I feel like this was a day where I lived,
#
and then think about why that is.
#
And I started doing that.
#
And obviously some of my parameters are that if I record an episode
#
on a particular day, it's straight away a 10.
#
If I write a newsletter, it's a 10.
#
If I do two, three hours of reading, I'll score that highly.
#
Then I shared that with a friend of mine, Sudheesh Sarnobar,
#
who was with me in episode 350.
#
And he's something I, he's someone I like,
#
because he's kind of made his life through a force of will.
#
And he's deeply intentional about everything he does.
#
So he then created an Excel sheet where for himself,
#
he created a sheet where he put down 12 parameters.
#
And he said, if I do any of these things, I'll give myself two points,
#
except that 24 isn't possible.
#
Three of them are physical parameters.
#
And if I miss any of them, that's a straight minus two.
#
So if I miss all three, four is my max for the day.
#
And among those 12, I was really struck by what some of them were.
#
And I think everybody will come up with their own parameters.
#
One of his parameters was called someone from my family
#
and spoke to them for x time.
#
Another one was went out of my way to meet someone new
#
and spend half an hour with them to understand them.
#
Right? So these are, I found some of them really lovely
#
and it made me think about what I do as well.
#
And I think if everyone kind of sits down
#
and makes their own sort of parameters,
#
it can help clarify the mind on what you value and why,
#
what you are not doing that you would like to do,
#
what you're doing that you really shouldn't be doing.
#
And in my case, I realized like the last two, three weeks
#
have been insanely productive in terms of scene, unseen recordings.
#
Everything is everything recording.
#
So they've been insanely productive.
#
So whereas I'm getting tens on productivity,
#
I'm not as satisfied because my learning isn't that great.
#
So now when I go back, I'm going to be like,
#
I'm not satisfied because my learning isn't that great.
#
So now when I go back, I'm going to try and modify it
#
and make it a little subtler like Sudeep's list is
#
where learning has to be a part of the thing.
#
I cannot get a 10 if I don't learn something new that day.
#
So that's how I look at it.
#
And I think what is important is not this specific tool,
#
is not these specific parameters,
#
but is the act of just sitting down
#
and defining in the way that you did,
#
in the way that you've described
#
and your bitmap sounds fantastic.
#
I'm going to use that for myself.
#
Simply understand yourself better.
#
and what is it that I don't want that is in me?
#
I endorse that completely.
#
But a lot of the ideas that Sudeep, who I don't know, has,
#
family, for instance, is embedded in that idea.
#
So you can have the big picture words or phrases,
#
and then you translate that using kind of the tools
#
that you just described.
#
But it's an intentionality.
#
Let's say coinciding your today and your tomorrow
#
with an intention of who you want to be remembered as,
#
and who you want to be,
#
even more than remembered, who you want to be first.
#
And then, of course, you'll be remembered for whoever you are.
#
So I think that consciousness will produce great results for you.
#
But equally, I think if you do it consciously,
#
it'll produce great results for people around you.
#
Tell me about the next part of your journey,
#
because you are out there.
#
You're on an incredible trajectory.
#
You're rising very fast.
#
It's kind of, it seems like the dream life.
#
And then at some point, obviously, something happens.
#
You eventually decide to come back.
#
You decide to do everything that you're doing here.
#
In fact, in the notes that you sent me,
#
you had a subheader called My Career.
#
And there you've written career one,
#
specialist, analytical, focused, discerning, wheat from shaft,
#
global, surrounded by super bright slash flawed people.
#
And then you have career two, lifelong learning,
#
articulation, teaching, contributory, relationship based,
#
discerning, surround myself with people by choice.
#
And this just seems incredible.
#
It's like, you know, two different worlds entirely.
#
So how did you make this shift?
#
Was it that you were always aware that there would have to be something more
#
because of those five parameters, included contribution, as you said?
#
So were you always aware that they will someday have to be something more?
#
Or through the journey at some point, did you look at where you were and said,
#
yeah, I've done it all, but it's not enough.
#
So take me through your thinking and your evolution.
#
Yeah. So again, analytically, it's presented as two lines,
#
but there was a little overlap and that overlap probably began about 20 years ago
#
and lasted for about seven, eight years before I completely moved to this.
#
So I'll give you an example of Takshashila itself.
#
So the initial interest for Takshashila and impact investing,
#
both of which I have continued into my second career in spades,
#
actually started when I moved from the U.S. to Singapore.
#
And three of us, Nitin, myself, and Anand Nageshwaran,
#
who's currently chief economic advisor,
#
but who also happened to be located in Singapore at that time,
#
we were constantly debating ideas, thinking about India, thinking about contribution,
#
thinking about liberalism, democracy,
#
all of these things that we spoke about earlier in the conversation.
#
So we were like-minded people living life and talking about ideas.
#
And the contributory phase and the interest in impact investing,
#
and impact in general, but impact investing in particular,
#
began, I would say, just after SARS when I was in Singapore in 2003, 2004.
#
The story of Singapore itself is interesting
#
because it happened for some specific reasons.
#
For instance, China was becoming big in the emerging markets world,
#
and it was getting very difficult to cover it out of the U.S.
#
So from a time zone point of view, it was much easier to cover it out of.
#
So I remained head of emerging markets, but I moved from New York to...
#
It had the usual negative corporate reasons.
#
So I had actually internally exiled myself from a pretty poor management structure in New York,
#
and I found it a brilliantly great way of escaping daily irritations.
#
So there was some positive from that.
#
But perhaps the most important reason is by then,
#
Shobha was actually writing her second book called Return to India.
#
And that book was about identity and about giving our children
#
the ability to not be hyphenated in their identity and so on.
#
And so that influenced me greatly as well.
#
So those three things all came together in the move to Asia,
#
which also happened to be at a good time.
#
I mean, as you probably know, the best period that both India and Asia have experienced is 2003 to 2007.
#
I mean, even though India's economic growth has continued,
#
the 2003-2007 period was the best in a five-year period in Indian economic history.
#
So that was the move to Singapore.
#
The interest in contribution, impact, policy, all of that began as an overlap with my existing career at that time.
#
And then I actually had another period of introspection and a fork.
#
And the period of introspection, as you probably know, there was also a wave of hedge funds setting up at that time.
#
So my choice, given all the corporate stuff at Morgan Stanley at that time, was should I set up my hedge fund or should I not?
#
And should I do broader, wider things and return to India using the title of the book itself?
#
So there again, the reach to my liberal arts roots and my interest in human capital, etc.
#
I said, I can possibly make a lot, lot more money by doing a hedge fund thing,
#
but I cannot finish my life without engaging much more with human capital.
#
And I frankly get a high from people and human and business issues rather than from money-related issues.
#
Money-related issues have to be solved, but if you give me two hours of thinking time and I can think about a product
#
or two hours of thinking time and I think about a deal, I'd rather think about the product.
#
And so I consciously chose, even though it was the most automatic choice for me to be a hedge fund guy at that time,
#
setting up my own shingle and putting it out in Singapore and doing what many others have done,
#
no disrespect to them, but my choice was not to do that.
#
Having made that choice, it became very clear to me that it was easy to then say,
#
at some point I'll step down from all of this and move into a career of much more contributory thing.
#
And that's what happened several years later, but in 2010.
#
So the period of overlap, I would say, is from 2003 and 2010 for me,
#
where these things were simmering and baking and in fact, some irons were in the fire.
#
And then by 2010, I was fully ready to.
#
So I was not new to the thinking of career two when I jumped into it.
#
The doing of career two, I was, but the thinking of career two, I had enough time to marinate.
#
And I think that's another thing.
#
But again, it is a little bit dependent on people.
#
I have a neighbor who one morning went out and bought a dog.
#
I just could not do that.
#
I'd have to marinate on the idea of buying a dog before.
#
For them, it was right to go out and buy the dog or get the dog by the morning.
#
That seemed like a very impulsive decision to me.
#
Is he a good dog father?
#
I mean, they just genuinely love dogs.
#
But the decision, he also bought a restaurant in like a week.
#
So he's just a quick decision maker and that works for him.
#
But for me, I would marinate in it.
#
And the marination allows for introspection.
#
It allows for consensus building with those I care about, et cetera.
#
It is a classic sort of political economy kind of stuff.
#
But it's not for everybody.
#
Some people prefer the other method.
#
So you have to choose your method.
#
Whatever the method is.
#
So you could do cold stop and say, if I analyze this too much, I will get into analysis paralysis.
#
And therefore, I mean, marination is a positive word, but analysis paralysis is a negative word.
#
They're not much different one from the other.
#
So you have to know yourself.
#
So I knew that I was not at the risk of analysis paralysis.
#
That just given my general bias towards action that I would actually make it happen.
#
But therefore, I would I prefer the marination approach.
#
Tell me about to take that analogy perhaps too far.
#
But tell me about the masalas you put in your marinade.
#
Because now I'm thinking that, OK, once you decide that that contribution part of my five word philosophy,
#
that that's not really happening right now unless I change.
#
And then you start marinating on what to do.
#
But there are so many things you could do.
#
You could come back and set up an NGO.
#
You could work in philanthropy.
#
You could do et cetera, et cetera.
#
Or you could try to reform the state if you want to reform the state.
#
You need to first understand what are what are the directions in which it needs to be reformed.
#
What is a political economy like, et cetera, et cetera.
#
So within that marination, and I completely agree that this can't be a decision that you take overnight
#
because it's just the all of that territory is so incredibly uncharted.
#
So how did you start thinking about like when you think about what problem am I going to solve?
#
What problem do I want to solve?
#
How does one think about that?
#
So at one level, of course, you are engaged with human capital, engaged with people, et cetera, et cetera.
#
That is your orientation, as it were.
#
But then what are the specific problems?
#
Where can I make the most difference?
#
Take me through some of your thinking on all of these.
#
So a common theme is choose the idea through the people.
#
And this is actually a theme for me for investing as well.
#
So for a moment, I'm going to digress an investment philosophy.
#
Generally speaking, there are at least in private equity investing, there are two types of people.
#
One one type heavily focuses on the business model.
#
You know, what is the business model?
#
What is the unit profitability?
#
Does this cohort make sense?
#
Does the product make sense?
#
Is there a product market fit?
#
You know, all the classic words that many of the investing public will know.
#
There's another type that says give me the right founder and give me the right founding team.
#
And so long as the business model passes some good tests, I prefer that combination.
#
So I'm definitely in the latter group compared to the former group.
#
And again, no disrespect to the other group.
#
That's just the way I think.
#
I totally agree with you to the extent that I think that is the only way you can be successful.
#
Just find the right people and the right people will figure out the right things to do.
#
I wouldn't go that far.
#
There are people, maybe it's difficult to distinguish luck from skill,
#
but there are some people who have backed the business model.
#
And if the business model has such a significant, and just for a moment indulge me the economic terms,
#
but if gross margin in a business is 80%, it excuses inferior characters.
#
So it could be a way to make money.
#
If you find yourself in enough 80% gross margin business with sufficient profit pools,
#
maybe it's a fine way to make money as opposed to the other way around.
#
And I've learned enough about investing to say that so long as you have a consistent and disciplined method,
#
nothing is superior to the other.
#
It's one versus the other and both are good.
#
So I prefer the people method and I have chosen the people method for my career too, as you call it.
#
So the identification of a Nitin or I work with a young woman called Eera or in a very different context in wildlife,
#
which is a subject that doesn't pertain to anything.
#
I work with Dr. Kriti Karanth, who's a wildlife conservation biologist.
#
So just very different people, but my approach to the idea is through the people.
#
And I back the people and trust them enough with basic hygiene standards on the idea that the idea will work.
#
And if there is a need for a tweak or a pivot, they will make that to use a modern venture capital term.
#
So the second step is again something I chose, but not necessarily a given.
#
You could make that top down.
#
So you choose the right. So you say, OK, I'll go only with the right people, but I want this outcome.
#
So a couple of people have chosen that, right, which is a single idea.
#
Therefore, I will still work only with the best people, but I will go with the idea and the method that I choose.
#
So, for instance, I could have set up an institution that would then make sure it got the right people,
#
but drive it in the direction that I chose as opposed to back the people with that idea.
#
So in that sense, the second idea of one, serendipity and two, organic democracy have prevailed in my approach.
#
So I have been open to, I mean, literally, if you said, what are you doing today?
#
I'm in the business of ideas today, right?
#
And then some of those ideas go somewhere and some of them don't.
#
Or some of those ideas go somewhere with me.
#
Some of those ideas go somewhere without me.
#
Without me, some of those ideas go nowhere.
#
So those are the three outcomes to those ideas, right?
#
So all of the things I have done have been much more organic.
#
There is a downside to that.
#
The downside to that is you're not necessarily, it's a little bit like academia, right?
#
You cannot tell a PhD student what to do.
#
You can only tell them the broad area to work in.
#
And then after that, the question or the hypothesis that they're testing is there.
#
Similarly, if I work with person A or person B, it's their idea.
#
I can help them be effective.
#
So first idea is back the people.
#
Second idea is leave it to serendipity and a little bit of organic democracy.
#
And then the third idea is, should you do one thing or five things?
#
And this is highly controversial.
#
Almost everybody tells me what I've done is wrong.
#
But I've made the choice.
#
And the choice I've made is at any point, do a handful of things where you're not the protagonist,
#
but you're deeply involved in making the protagonist successful.
#
So the common phrases used is inch mile wide deep and the opposite.
#
I think of my model as half a mile deep, half a mile wide.
#
And it's not a commonly spoken about choice, but I think it's an excellent choice for,
#
or it's one excellent choice, not the excellent choice, but an excellent choice for somebody
#
who's had one successful career who wants to transition to another,
#
where the role is that of a catalyst enabler rather than protagonist.
#
And of course, it may be age dependent, it may be energy dependent, it may be.
#
But if you, again, go back to my earlier comment about energies,
#
if you said I have 100 units of energy and you were just designing the system from the top down,
#
how best is that 100 units of energy utilized?
#
Is it better utilized as doing one startup or catalyzing five startups?
#
Now, if I did 25 startups, it would make no sense.
#
But if I did one startup versus five, I think the five choice is not a well accepted alternative.
#
I'm not suggesting it's for everyone, but I do think it should be on people's radar,
#
particularly for those who have had one career already, that the half a mile wide, half a mile deep.
#
So I only do things where, one, I'm allowed to be engaged and two, I engage.
#
So I don't do boards for the sake of boards.
#
I don't do any of those things where I'm a signator on a page.
#
It's a waste of their time, it's a waste of my time.
#
But wherever I can help enable a project.
#
And by the way, we spoke a fair bit about empathy earlier.
#
The nature of empathy is that the help that you provide is broadly in the direction of the help that is needed.
#
This is again where a lot of private equity and venture capital goes wrong.
#
The help that they provide is templatized for efficiency, but not templatized for effectiveness.
#
So the effective template for help, you call it capability capital, whatever you call it.
#
I mean, all the venture capitalists call it something or the other.
#
But different points, different founders need different things.
#
Many times they don't need anything.
#
Sometimes they need super specific things.
#
So you have to cover that full range of help.
#
And the ability to influence comes from that ability to rotate or graduate how much involved you are in there.
#
And I do the full gamut of businesses from philanthropy to social enterprise to commercial enterprise,
#
where I'm enabling or catalyzing what they're doing.
#
So, you know, as a former professional poker player, I keep applying the concept of expected value to everything.
#
And it seems that even in this choice that, you know, how deep do I go? How wide do I go?
#
The EV is relatively easy to calculate for inch deep, mile wide and vice versa.
#
But the EV for, you know, half a mile here, half a mile there is kind of much harder.
#
And I think what is necessary to be able to make those calculations is to figure out for yourself
#
that what are the metrics for success?
#
You know, how will I judge whether it is working or not?
#
How will I judge, you know, whether my time is well spent here or whether I am wasting my time?
#
And that is something where initially you never quite know.
#
You get a better sense, a better grip on things once you are actually doing them.
#
So, how did these metrics evolve?
#
Both in terms of how did you choose what are the five things I want to do
#
or what are the, you know, the limited number of things I want to do?
#
And then how do you think about effectiveness in them?
#
Because I'm thinking if it's something like philanthropy,
#
then you can, you know, look at your output or outcome or whatever
#
and maybe, you know, there is something to measure.
#
But if you are actually investing in a for-profit business,
#
again you are thinking of ROI and again there you are fixing long-term or short-term depending on whatever.
#
So, what were your thought processes when you went through this?
#
For example, when Takshashila is being set up, you know,
#
it is again one of those things where at that early stage you have no freaking idea
#
that, you know, you can, Takshashila could have done nothing for years
#
and you could have rationalized it on the basis of some abstract metrics which exist only in your head.
#
Or it could have been phenomenally successful in a different way from what you imagined,
#
but you could have still stuck to some older metric and said, but we didn't do that.
#
So, how does that process work where, you know,
#
what begins as something nebulous, you know, hardens in shape?
#
And, you know, so, I mean, how did you kind of get to the decision of what do I do
#
and then how do you get to the understanding of is this working
#
or how do I define success?
#
Yeah. So, first of all, I don't think I, at least in the non-real investment world,
#
metricize it too much, but you have to sort of get into the framework that I'm positing here.
#
And then the framework is, I know that Takshashila will work
#
because of Nitin and the team, evolving team at that time, but Nitin and the team.
#
And, and is also important, and my influence, right?
#
So, all words are operative, Nitin, the team, and my influence.
#
So, I like the overall idea, you're absolutely right, the overall idea could go hit a wall.
#
And it's not that there have not been failures in my, in my attempts.
#
So, by the way, the good thing about a portfolio of five where you're an enabler
#
is you can also slowly graduate from one.
#
So, I have now been in my career, second career for 14 years,
#
and I would be, I'm in the third batch of five or six.
#
So, intellectually, that's just tremendous diversity for me, right?
#
Just the people, the problems, the issues, the, it's just fabulous, right?
#
One or two are constant, Takshashila, for example, has been a constant,
#
but there are others who have, that are slowly rotated.
#
And, and, and by the way, another belief of mine, and we can debate this as well,
#
is that it is important to sow the seeds of your own obsolescence.
#
Nobody is indispensable and, and the better off you are, you are better off
#
and other people are better off if it's a planned obsolescence.
#
So, in many ways, a seven to 10-year kind of approach to some of these things
#
actually works brilliantly for everyone concerned.
#
So, the one-minute detour, if you said to me in the early 90s,
#
would you invest in HDFC or ICICI?
#
What could be the basis for your decision?
#
They both got banking license.
#
There was a little legacy in ICICI, but other than that, they both got legal.
#
So, the way I would have approached that decision, I wasn't specifically doing that decision,
#
but would have been to speak to the HDFC folks.
#
Not that I knew what fork would come in the future,
#
but based on how you would evaluate that team,
#
you would say HDFC for the next 20 years had a better chance of success.
#
Of course, this is hindsight biased,
#
but still you would say that they had a better chance
#
because that team had the ability to navigate a future fork in the road.
#
And that's still how I navigate everything.
#
So, I'll tell you the example of...
#
So, I work with Ira on Asan Cup,
#
which is a menstrual cup startup based in the UK and India.
#
Serendipity at work, she sat next to me when we were listening to the Dalai Lama,
#
and she was saying, you know, I'm doing this project in my college,
#
nobody cares about it, it's going nowhere.
#
And I said, hey, listen, in Include Labs,
#
I actually did this project where we concluded that menstrual cups are the thing,
#
one of these solutions is possible for India,
#
but we were, for lack of a protagonist, it has gone nowhere.
#
So, the serendipity was she was right next to me,
#
and then we took it up, and then we...
#
I can tell you the full story some other time, but the...
#
So, that's how I would say it happens.
#
Now, I am not measuring opportunity costs, right?
#
Would it have been better that I spent a unit of time with Pratham
#
instead of with Asan Cup?
#
I am not making that judgment, which I might do for an investment,
#
but I certainly am not doing for this kind of investment
#
that I'm making with my human capital.
#
So, that's the trade on the organic.
#
The top down, you can say, these are the four things I'm going to do,
#
and I'll choose the people, but these are the four things I'm going to do,
#
and those are the only four things I'll do.
#
And I'm comfortable that I may be biased to the South or Bangalore,
#
I may be biased to the organic ideas that are surfacing now
#
as opposed to me actually thinking them up,
#
but that's both the cost and return of organic.
#
Tell me how much your sense of purpose has evolved.
#
Like, it seems to me that, you know, there are times in the evolution of purpose
#
that you start with a value, and that is forming the basis of your purpose.
#
For example, you know, I have lived abroad,
#
and therefore I want to come back to India and make India better off.
#
And that can be the start of purpose,
#
but then it gets deeper and deeper and more and more nuanced
#
when you actually dive into it and you realize that,
#
okay, this is a political economy,
#
and these are the holes that need to be filled,
#
and this is the work that I can do,
#
or, oh, look, I made an incremental difference there,
#
and my God, what a result.
#
And, you know, every little incremental bit scales
#
when you're talking about India
#
or when you're talking about the working of the state and so on and so forth.
#
Or, oh, look, when I came here, there was no intellectual ecosystem,
#
and now look at what Takshashila has done, just to take an example.
#
So, you know, how does that sort of evolve in the sense of, you know,
#
how differently do you think now from 14 years ago
#
in terms of the things that you've learned
#
and the things that you feel you might have been wrong about
#
or the things that your appreciation of has, you know, become deeper?
#
Yeah, again, I like those words that I used earlier.
#
Luckily, my sense of purpose is defined at a very broad level,
#
so I'll give it an attempt.
#
I haven't actually put it down.
#
You've told me that I need to do something here,
#
but if I were to try to phrase it,
#
it would be inclusive prosperity for India
#
where people learn how to fish.
#
Might be one clumsy attempt,
#
but it's at least comprehensive in my view.
#
For those of my listeners who are confused about the fish part,
#
there is this old saying,
#
if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day.
#
If you teach him how to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.
#
So, there's this notion of self-help.
#
There is this notion of fair play.
#
I mean, I don't have it in there,
#
but the word inclusiveness is for fair play.
#
To me, I'm a bit of a sports buff,
#
including watching different kinds of sports.
#
And even in the classes we teach in Takshashila,
#
I basically say that just imagine a tennis game
#
where you don't have the umpire,
#
where you don't have the net and you don't have the lines.
#
You don't have entertainment.
#
you will not get competitive high-quality tennis players over time.
#
Whereas if we're just with all of those,
#
and that is the role of the state,
#
the role of the state is to provide the refereeing,
#
the rules, the fairness, the drug testing,
#
and then leave the playing to the players.
#
And then there is a role for civil society associations, et cetera,
#
the tennis leagues that actually promote the players.
#
As an example, you can argue the same for cricket and so on.
#
So, in the same way, I would say,
#
inclusiveness is the role of the state.
#
In the same way, I would say,
#
inclusive prosperity for India,
#
where people help themselves.
#
That's sort of my sense of purpose.
#
and the word inclusiveness of,
#
so there's minor variations.
#
So for instance, I would say in the last five years,
#
I've been practicing the gender version of that inclusivity a lot more.
#
So I work with female entrepreneurs.
#
I work on problems that have a greater impact on women.
#
My interest in microfinance.
#
I mean, east of the Bosphorus,
#
women in households are way more reliable than men.
#
So it's just a good business decision,
#
but it also helps women empower themselves.
#
But I haven't worked on many other aspects of inclusiveness.
#
For instance, I constantly learned from Ram Guha and others
#
about the issues of tribals in India,
#
and I don't know much about it.
#
And I haven't really worked much on doing anything about it.
#
But I don't think of it as an incomplete purpose or anything like that.
#
So again, this definition of purpose is broad enough
#
that I'm moving in the right direction,
#
but I'm not necessarily measuring is it fast or slow.
#
So tell me about some of the specific sort of things,
#
like in 2010 when you leave and you decide, okay, this is it,
#
you buy that one-way ticket, as it were, and you begin this life.
#
Did you already have projects lined up?
#
What was your thinking of how do I navigate this space?
#
Give me a sense of that.
#
Because I think a problem where one leaves a career
#
and one changes a career like this is structured.
#
How do I structure myself?
#
I had a guest on the show tell me that to him his job
#
was what temples of the 17th century were,
#
that they gave a structure to his day.
#
He said that if I didn't have to land up at work at seven o'clock
#
because my team would come by eight,
#
I don't know what I would do with my time.
#
So how did that sort of impact you?
#
How do you then build that structure in,
#
structure both in terms of what you do during the day,
#
but also what you think about, what you learn, etc.
#
So again, the first answer to the question is the introspection.
#
For instance, this gentleman you mentioned
#
knows that he has this.
#
So hobbies I think is a very important separate topic,
#
but I don't know whether it was a hobby
#
or ended up being a career.
#
But regardless, it was enough of a hobby
#
that it could have probably been both for him, right?
#
So I think that's super important
#
that you have that kind of fallback option
#
Just given my eclectic interests,
#
I was very sure about doing something.
#
So I had no panic, no worry, no,
#
and as I just mentioned briefly,
#
every four or five years there's a rotational period
#
of slightly less full and slightly more full bucket.
#
And it has never fazed me because organically
#
I know the bucket will fill again.
#
That is just me as the individual.
#
So people again need to reflect.
#
Are you capable of being open
#
and serendipitous in your actions and all of that.
#
Now, the one macro thing that I would tell everybody
#
is that India is in a dramatic sweet spot, right?
#
For anybody with gumption, experience, connections,
#
it doesn't matter what you feel.
#
You can be a doctor, you can be a FMCG guy,
#
you can be a finance person, you can be a marketing person,
#
you can be a strategy person.
#
There's just a gazillion things to do.
#
You don't have to actually over-structure this thing, right?
#
The beauty of India, and it's quite distinct.
#
So assume for a minute I had attempted this in the US.
#
Exact same thing, except instead of inclusive prosperity for India,
#
I would say inclusive prosperity in my place of location
#
and it would have happened to be the US.
#
In the US, it is very difficult to cross fields.
#
So my first project in India, literally after I stepped down,
#
was deworming school children in India.
#
And again, it was the outcome of a serendipitous meeting
#
with now famous Esther Duflo and Abhijith Manoj.
#
And they were lamenting the fact,
#
hey, listen, we've done all this research,
#
yeah, it's going nowhere.
#
Literally, you know, they were.
#
And you dewormed some 35 million school children, I think.
#
Now it's at 100 million, but they're fully incubated,
#
actually nothing to do with Include Labs, et cetera.
#
But the idea was born serendipitously through a dinner meeting with both of them,
#
and it was evidence-based.
#
So the raison d'etre of Include Labs is any evidence-based idea taken to scale.
#
So that was literally the idea, and that was the first one.
#
And we chose it with a few parameters.
#
For instance, low vested interest against it.
#
Simple, basic program, and easy to get off the ground,
#
and it turned out all over.
#
The second project was exactly the opposite.
#
It ended up in difficulty, and it ended up as a failure.
#
But regardless, sorry, I lost my trend of thought there.
#
You were talking about India being a sweet spot.
#
Yeah, so India is in a real sweet spot
#
because it permits this ability to use your skill across multiple domains.
#
I mean, I would not have been permitted to work in the public health domain
#
in a developed country because it has enough protocol
#
and all kinds of rules that would have prohibited me from.
#
It's a super simple project.
#
Albendazol 400 is 100 years old,
#
and it doesn't take long to figure out what are the impacts,
#
and what are the chemical impacts.
#
Whatever you want to do, you can figure it out.
#
But I wouldn't have been permitted.
#
Whereas India allows people with gumption and with care to do lots of things,
#
still, it won't be the case 20 years from now.
#
India will become a specialist country, as it must.
#
But right now, the connectivity is more important than the specialization.
#
I want to understand that a little better
#
because it seems to me that what you describe in the US
#
that you can't switch fields, et cetera, et cetera,
#
seems to me to be a profound bug and not a feature,
#
and not necessarily something that will come with evolution
#
to being a more advanced nation,
#
but also a kind of ossification that sets in
#
where a state or a bureaucracy gets to set in its ways.
#
So why is it necessary that we'll be there 20 years from now?
#
Is it a function of the economics that over here we are able to switch easily,
#
or is it also sort of a cultural factor,
#
not in an Indian culture versus US culture kind of way,
#
but organizational DNA, et cetera, et cetera?
#
There may be some merit in what you're saying,
#
but I think that, you know, take the European Union.
#
They're very different culturally from the US,
#
but they have gazillion rules for everything.
#
It's, in fact, rule-bound.
#
Which is terrible, right?
#
It is terrible, but to me it's a bit inevitable
#
that as you become more prosperous,
#
you will become more rule-bound,
#
and the rule-bound will require you to go through corridors to enter.
#
I mean, already, for instance, I have a great interest in teaching,
#
and an institution like Takshashila,
#
which is super flexible, will permit me to teach,
#
but I can't for love of money teach in a regular university
#
just because I've been ruled out, literally.
#
Right, nor can you, I don't think,
#
unless you have a PhD that I don't know about.
#
But what is this principal requirement for PhDs,
#
and, you know, why make it such an ivory tower of,
#
even though at the end of the day, actually,
#
our universities are zero research, mostly teaching factories.
#
But isn't it the case that, in a sense,
#
across the world the mainstream is crumbling
#
and the gatekeepers are becoming irrelevant,
#
in the sense that, of course, you can't teach anyone at JNU,
#
but you can teach them at Takshashila,
#
and, of course, I can't teach anyone at JNU,
#
but I can do my online writing course,
#
which brings much more value, frankly, in that domain.
#
So, you know, isn't that almost a feature of the modern world?
#
The bulk still goes through the JNUs and the...
#
So, at the moment, it's just instances of that.
#
I mean, these are instances.
#
Now, in the US, you can overcome it with billions of dollars.
#
So, it's not that Bill Gates is not making vaccines.
#
He is, and he's not a vaccine guy.
#
He's, as we know, a tech guy.
#
So, you can, but the stakes are much higher.
#
You have to be, you know, a multi-billion dollar foundation.
#
Well, I get a much lower level.
#
For example, I just bought a guitar to learn it,
#
and I bought Rick Beato's online courses,
#
a $99 bundle where you get three courses of his.
#
And I'm sure he's not an accredited teacher somewhere,
#
but I just went online, I know the guy, I bought his thing,
#
and more and more people know this.
#
Yeah, so that kind of democratization is taking place,
#
so maybe I am overstating the case here,
#
but such as it is, I think India permits a wide range of latitude
#
Now, the operating environment was tough and is getting tougher.
#
I mean, no matter what you hear about ease of business,
#
particularly in the social enterprise and philanthropic fields
#
and FCRA, in the regulations,
#
they have just become minefield that is just so complex and so difficult.
#
But even there is exactly where my...
#
I'll give you a reasoned example.
#
Literally, one of the firms,
#
one of the philanthropies that I work with called Unnati
#
was the first to list on the social stock exchange,
#
and it's the first to list.
#
There's no second yet, right?
#
And the reason is I was literally able to pick up a phone call
#
and request legal help pro bono,
#
request merchant banking help pro bono, et cetera, right?
#
So it's the connectivity and the experience base
#
and the fortune of a career in all of this that allows for that.
#
And the average NGO has no such chance,
#
and they're not able to.
#
We don't have the second coming up anytime soon.
#
And if the second comes up,
#
it will be having to pay 20, 30, 40 lakhs of vendor costs.
#
And that then becomes prohibitively expensive for some new idea
#
like the social stock exchange to flourish, right?
#
So it's a great fertile environment
#
for people who want to contribute.
#
That's my limited point that India permits it,
#
and I think we are in a 20-year zone
#
in which you're permitted to do that,
#
and I just love it because that's...
#
One, you are allowed that flexibility,
#
and two, you can actually have impact
#
quite tangibly in some things.
#
What have you learned about the Indian state in all these years?
#
too much distinguish the Indian state from other states.
#
I know the India and US very well,
#
and somewhat to my distress,
#
the US has regressed towards India
#
rather than the other way around.
#
So I think states everywhere broadly behave similarly,
#
but you get these 20, 30-year periods
#
in the evolution of a country
#
where all actors are working collectively together
#
so that, again, back to that idea,
#
the whole being greater than the sum of the parts feels real.
#
So I would say the United States from roughly 1950 to 1980
#
was in something like that,
#
where everybody was pulling in the same direction.
#
They had all frictions, everything for sure,
#
but they were all pulling in the same direction,
#
so the whole was so much greater than the sum of the parts.
#
In India, we have not been able to sustainably create that.
#
We have pockets of it here and there.
#
I mean, the full digital stack is an example.
#
How easy Digi Yatra is.
#
Digi Yatra is so easy in India, in Bangalore,
#
but I talked to somebody in Chennai and I said,
#
And you would think the most obviously slam dunk thing to do
#
would be to replicate something that's actually successful,
#
and we haven't done it.
#
We are actually saying to citizens of Chennai for five years
#
that you don't deserve this.
#
It's not clear to me why that's happening.
#
That I would question the state on.
#
Now, the actual answer is that's an airport authority,
#
airport, and they don't have the wherewithal
#
to actually install all those things, et cetera,
#
but I'm sure there's ways to work around it.
#
So I think the idea of persuading the state to take action
#
It used to be, long years ago,
#
there used to be a few hundred super important men, right?
#
Vikram Sarabhai places a phone call to Nehru
#
or JRD Tata does, and we have the answer.
#
Migrated to expert committees and commissions,
#
and sometimes not one, but two or three of them
#
For the first time, you have two different things.
#
I think the Congress introduced the idea
#
of bringing in lateral experts
#
that could influence particular projects,
#
so the Aadhaar project as an example,
#
or before that, Pitroda and Telecom, et cetera.
#
And then now, for the first time, slowly beginning,
#
and I would just say it's very gradual and early,
#
the idea of think tanks or public discourse properly presented.
#
I think the old committee idea will become adjunct
#
but we are in the midst of that transition.
#
Most other democracies listen to think tanks
#
that have solutions on the shelves
#
that they can pick out depending on the problem that's at hand.
#
So I think in that sense, over the next 20 years,
#
think tanks will become more important
#
for persuasion of the state.
#
But how the state gets persuaded is very similar worldwide.
#
It exists in a political economy.
#
It has to be presented at an opportune moment in time.
#
You have to figure out how it will pass thresholds.
#
All of the good stuff that you can think of pretty much
#
is anywhere in the world valid here, too.
#
Couple of questions come up.
#
You know, one is when you mentioned DJ Yatra.
#
Now, my first attitude toward DJ Yatra
#
was similar to my first feeling about Aadhaar,
#
is that however great or non-great it is,
#
I don't want it mandated upon me.
#
And the way DJ Yatra is pushed in some airports,
#
that you'll have six gates to enter the thing,
#
and the furthest one is the only one you can enter without DJ Yatra,
#
and you have all kinds of subtle and non-subtle coercion happening there.
#
Now, the thing is, I did an episode with Rahul Mathan
#
where we discussed the tech behind it.
#
So I completely buy the point that there is no privacy issue,
#
there is no surveillance issue.
#
The data is only with the airport for 24 hours.
#
It is only to reduce the friction at that end.
#
So I have no worries about the technology per se,
#
but I do have an issue with the coercion.
#
And this was a similar issue with Aadhaar
#
where I am convinced of the tech behind it,
#
but my principle problem always was that it's mandated,
#
which brings me to the question of the default mindset that we often have,
#
that everything that is done, everything big that is done,
#
should be done through the state
#
and will often necessarily involve coercion like this.
#
And there is a danger in that being a default mindset
#
because if state coercion is a default mindset,
#
it won't always be used for things that we approve of like a tech stack,
#
but often for much else that goes on.
#
And it also then crowds out the private imagination
#
because fine, we have a great DG stack and all of that,
#
but in the future it is this incentivizing private innovation in this space
#
because the state has kind of occupied the space.
#
And I think that's a valid and deep argument against it.
#
And I want to ask you about this sort of default mindset
#
because what I love, especially in a city like Bangalore,
#
like one of my friends was saying the other day that Bangalore is a city
#
where the state does nothing of what it is supposed to,
#
and yet there are private solutions for all of those things.
#
And at one level I celebrate that there is a space for private solutions
#
for all of those things, but at the other level one must also ask
#
that why the fuck is the state failing so constantly and so endemically?
#
So that mindset is also something that I kind of want to ask about
#
because I think a fundamental part of our reaching our full fulfillment,
#
full potential as a society is if we get out of this mindset
#
that the state is an answer to everything and start solving our own problems
#
and at the same time then figure out ways to make the state more accountable
#
and function in ways that don't involve the blunt tool of coercion.
#
Again, lots of sub points there.
#
So first point, I think you have to separate what I would call
#
very basic services from not basic services.
#
And the state is failing at basic services.
#
And we're sitting here in Bangalore.
#
Bangalore municipality, sorry to say, is among the worst in India.
#
Terrible lack of capacity and where there is capacity there's no will.
#
Where there's will it's misdirected.
#
And as a consequence, basic services, water, electricity, et cetera,
#
are in pretty bad shape and could be so much better.
#
I mean garbage, there's no reason.
#
Five thousand cities in the world have solved the problem of garbage.
#
Bangalore is still struggling. There's no reason for this.
#
So that's one. I completely agree with you.
#
And by the way, one of the things that Takshashila itself has done
#
is it actually trains councillors on economic reasoning and policy
#
and solutions and action bias and all of that good stuff we've been talking about.
#
So in our small way we are attempting to get at the grassroots of this
#
and hopefully things will improve.
#
But I think collectively everybody needs to demand more from their municipalities
#
and actually be delivered on.
#
I mean now there is a talk that property taxes will get linked to guideline value in Bangalore.
#
Fine. I don't think it's the best framework.
#
But regardless, if that's the framework, then the expectation from the property owner
#
has to be a lot better than the system that is being delivered by this municipality.
#
So that's on basic services.
#
On digital public goods and literally my last conversations with both Rahul and Nandan have been exactly this.
#
That they are enlightened folks and they understand all of this thing.
#
But when you turn it over to the state, then the state slightly misuses
#
because they don't understand the full purpose and the intentionality of why all these things.
#
So therefore and literally my last conversation with Rahul was on this
#
which is that the idea of an interoperable protocol is worthy of the Bharat Ratna.
#
But the idea of an interoperable protocol with a state monopoly is a disaster waiting to happen.
#
Absolutely. Couldn't agree more with both of these.
#
And that distinction is not written carefully enough in a completely different way.
#
And since we started the top with politics, completely different way of saying the same thing is
#
what I have told both of them again is you are the freedom fighters.
#
You're doing a great job. What happens when Lal Bahadur Shastri shows up?
#
The long-term design of this is that the interoperable protocol must be innovated upon by the private sector.
#
You've cut out the private sector.
#
I mean my first, literally my first executive act after the UPI payment thing came was
#
ask RBL to withdraw from the payment system.
#
Made no sense because not only, I mean forget about unit profitability, there's no unit revenue.
#
Why would you do a business in which there's no revenue?
#
And now the KRAs of the government officials have begun to make this big.
#
And the constant feedback I get is there was no other way.
#
But there is no other way doesn't excuse the complete design deficit of including the private sector in it.
#
Now that they are shipping it abroad or thinking of shipping it abroad, everybody is pushing back on this dimension.
#
And I've been pushing back on this for quite some time and on deaf ears I might add.
#
But now a lot of the newer ideas are much more designed as protocols.
#
Right, so I agree with you. Why not make DG Yatra privately implemented?
#
It will be inconsistent. Some airport will be fantastic in some airport.
#
But hopefully the market will decide over time what is good and what is not good.
#
So I mean there are safeguards of the type that you speak about.
#
But the ability of the government to wield coercive power anywhere in the world at any time has to be checked.
#
Right, and if I'm sufficiently old school on all of those things to know that government will misuse if it can misuse at some point in its lifetime.
#
And therefore we have to be super careful about some of these things.
#
And I agree with you that so long term the brilliance of the Indian digital stack model is interoperable protocol.
#
But the sustainability of the India stack model will come from a design fix that includes the private sector as the true sustainable innovation engine.
#
Absolutely, more power to you.
#
Let's talk now about the ecosystem of ideas.
#
Like where I see substantial evolution in the last decade and a half, and a lot of it is due to Takshashila obviously,
#
is in the ecosystem of ideas where you are no longer thinking in the same height bound conventional ways
#
and you are no longer dependent on outlier examples of economists bringing different ideas from the West or whatever.
#
You know the Montagues and the Manmohans fighting lonely battles when they did not be so lonely.
#
But rather I see a community of people coming up within policy, within the space.
#
Some of them like you said you train people from the government and the army directly and economic reasoning sort of makes its way in there.
#
And equally there are tons of people outside.
#
And one of the delightful things about Takshashila is many of the people who do these courses don't necessarily want to make a career in policy.
#
It is just that I care about this and I will learn about this.
#
And I find that so lovely and I think the ways it will compound in really unexpected ways through the decades.
#
So that is so powerful.
#
But tell me about that evolution of the ecosystem of ideas.
#
What about that evolution surprised you in the early days?
#
What are the kind of decisions you took to take it in certain directions or to grow it?
#
Just give me a sense of all of that.
#
Yeah, so as you know Takshashila is born with a tagline that says connecting good people to good ideas, to good networks.
#
And so the intentionality was always there that it is the power of the compounding of people with ideas that will make this thing great.
#
I have to say to you I am not happy with the degree of, to use a modern term, virality of this.
#
I think we're not doing a good enough job.
#
I mean it is happening polynomially but I think the power to which all of this is being raised is much smaller than I think what I would like it to be.
#
It is a very osmotic, modest growth process rather than viral in the modern sense of the term.
#
So I hope we can do more and more of that.
#
I hope we can use technology to bring the communities together and chat about problems more effectively and create solutions in a variety of contexts more effectively than we have been doing even.
#
So it is a project work in progress.
#
But that said, very happy with, you know, people end up in the most unexpected of places in OSDs, in various state governments, a PhD in the United States, a consulting firm person who's on a government project.
#
Just numerous places that these young people, and as you say even if they don't specifically care about policy, they are reflecting a lot of the logical and methodological approaches that they learn here.
#
By the way, I don't know whether you know but the word Takshashila was chosen with great care.
#
So Takshashila as many on the thing would know is on the Silk Road.
#
It's at the crossroads of the Silk Road so to speak in current day Pakistan.
#
Nowadays spelt with an ex-Takshashila but we have called it the old name Takshashila.
#
And Takshashila and Nalanda were the great universities of yesteryear, the Indian subcontinent.
#
But the difference in Takshashila relative to all other university systems, both immediately prior and after, was that in Takshashila the peer learning, given its location on the Silk Road, was equally or more important than pedagogical guru-sishya learning.
#
And so that principle is really embodied here.
#
And so therefore the network and the peer group is super important to the idea of Takshashila, our idea of Takshashila as embodied in the old idea of Takshashila.
#
That it would allow for these metaphorical water-cooler conversations and those water-cooler conversations would multiply and fructify in areas that some we know and some we don't know, but that's totally fine.
#
Brilliant. And so the other day Prani and I were talking about the Oberton window and the different subtle ways in which one can look at it.
#
And I'm again thinking aloud a little bit here and I'm thinking that when you're talking about elites, the kind of people who will form part of the deep state or are already part of the state in different ways,
#
and who will even form part of policy think tanks and all that, English speaking elites who move the needle in many ways,
#
then maybe one way, the way of moving the Oberton window is not by going to some extreme, but simply by pushing at an edge, pushing at an edge until you move it little by little and expanding the range of ideas that are acceptable in that way.
#
But if you think about the Oberton window in the larger public discourse, including the whole country,
#
then perhaps a better way is to go to the absolute extreme and say something and be so radical that people who are actually kind of closer to the edges but still outside of it suddenly seem reasonable and it shifts that way.
#
And leaving the question of the Oberton window aside, I want to talk about how you think about the demand side of the political marketplace.
#
Because in a sense, what you're doing, most of what Takshashila focuses on is the supply side of the political marketplace, which is politicians, bureaucrats, the state itself.
#
And in the end, the way the incentives are, the supply side will react to the demand side.
#
So the most powerful thing that one can do is change the demand side and then the supply side will fall into place.
#
Now at one level, it doesn't exactly work like that.
#
Many policies kind of happen on the margins outside of public consciousness where you do have elites kind of doing little tweaks here and there and they can have great impacts at scale.
#
But is that something that you also thought about that how do we change the default mindset of the people out there?
#
Because in certain ways, the default mindset of the people contains all of these intuitive notions, which we know are wrong, which the people you teach will know are wrong.
#
For example, that everything must be top-down or intuitively Amjanta out there will think of everything in zero-sum terms, etc.
#
So is that something you think about or is that something that you can just say is okay, it's outside our purview, it's not a problem we can solve right now?
#
Because it is actually a different problem, it is almost an opposite problem of simplifying ideas without making them simplistic but then managing to get them out and scale in the languages.
#
So you're affecting many more people. So you seed it much more widely and hopefully in some places unexpected flowers bloom.
#
Yeah, I mean, it's a complex problem. Obviously we have thought about it and we think about it in many ways.
#
So if you say you start counting up from zero or start counting down from 1.4 billion, I think that's sort of what you're saying.
#
I think while we might pretend that we are counting down from 1.4 billion, we are just finding creative ways to count better from up from zero.
#
That's a brilliant way to put it.
#
I don't think we should be under any illusions that we are changing that. I mean, that is only two things have that kind of reach, politics and religion.
#
I don't think the act of reasoning or elitism or policy or books and even books, even in the vernacular, I think even books in the vernacular are counting up rather than counting down.
#
So I think that might be a boiling the ocean problem that we are not quite capable of.
#
But I do think so. So if you said, I mean, it's like, you know, this is the way the banking structure works in India.
#
By the way, there are only 10,000 companies with a paid up capital greater than 10,000 crores and the entire banking system is focused on it.
#
And NBFC is focused below it. This is the unstated secret of the Indian financial system.
#
And now, of course, RBI is shooting the NBFCs in the foot.
#
But the similar question here, I think what we are trying to do in Takshashila is very consciously not restrict ourselves to the 10,000 and find clever ways of expanding that.
#
If you said automatically, people who would listen to you is pick a number two million.
#
Can it be 20 million? I think we're working on that problem.
#
But I don't think we are working on the 1.4 billion problem is just no way that we would be, for instance, our podcasts in Canada and in Hindi and others reach that 20 million.
#
But it doesn't reach the 1.4 billion. It probably never will, at least in human lifetimes.
#
So that will need politics. Now, if you can influence the people who are speaking, then they may amplify an idea.
#
In a way, that's what Hayek did through Margaret Thatcher to the 70 million people of you.
#
Book him 40 years. And he didn't do it.
#
It went through Margaret Thatcher and then Margaret Thatcher spoke to Reagan and then Reagan took it to 250 million people at that time.
#
And even under Reagan, the American state just expanded.
#
Of course, there were other things that contracted, including spending.
#
But the idea is the same that you have to work through these.
#
I mean, as far as I know, only politics and religion can reach 1.4 billion people.
#
Now, certain things, and this is where I completely celebrate what Nandan and others have done, is certain aspects of it have crossed there.
#
I mean, either right or wrong with all the qualifications that we just went through has reached a billion people.
#
Nothing, not bank accounts, not fridges, not two wheelers, not televisions, not satellites, not nothing has reached that scale.
#
You have to celebrate that for that purpose, right?
#
It has actually reached that scale and has had an impact at that scale.
#
So in that sense, it is what he calls population scale, digital public goods.
#
It has value when you do something at that scale, but it's not a common.
#
Some technologies could have that aspiration.
#
But certainly in Takshashila, we don't have the capacity or the wherewithal to get there.
#
Where is the Aadhaar for ideas of liberty?
#
If you had to reboot Career 2 from 2010 and run it again, like I'm pretty sure you'll say that the causes you would take up are pretty much the same.
#
But how would you treat them differently?
#
Like what are the big lessons, the banner lessons that you've learned in this time about how change happens and how one can contribute to that?
#
That's an interesting question.
#
So again, a minor digression.
#
Shobhat constantly tells me that this is not possible, but I think I have eliminated regret and jealousy as emotions.
#
So we won't talk about jealousy here, but regret in particular.
#
So I try not to approach this as something I would have regretted doing and therefore I might have done something different.
#
Of course, one could approach it as what are the lessons and therefore what might you do different?
#
Given my organic method, I think I would critique.
#
I mean, I would understand the critique of the organic method, but I wouldn't change it for me.
#
I understand where people have said you needed to have been more intentional about the four things you did
#
and therefore chosen the right people for those four things as opposed to choose the people and follow their tracks.
#
I understand the critique, but I wouldn't have done it.
#
I don't think I would have much changed those things.
#
The other thing I would have changed is that the thing I spoke about, which is this relationship building.
#
I've been learning in this 10-year period.
#
I wish I had the ability to have learned it faster or be better at it 10 years ago than I am today.
#
I think the impact would have been a little bit better, but it is what it is.
#
So there's a thought experiment I sometimes inflict on some of my guests,
#
which is if you reboot civilization, what would evolve differently?
#
For example, in the context of sport, I first came up with this.
#
I was having lunch with Snehal Pradhan when I went to Dubai recently and she's of course working with the ICC over there.
#
So it came up in the context of sport where I was just thinking that if we reboot civilization,
#
sport would evolve differently in the sense that I'm pretty confident you would have a football and a basketball
#
because the principles are so elemental.
#
There's a round object. It's been kicked around. There are goals.
#
I'm pretty sure there would have been no cricket because it is incredibly complex and counterintuitive
#
and it is just a mess of circumstances that have brought it about.
#
It actually makes no sense as a sport at all.
#
So I'll ask you this in two contexts and the first of those is finance.
#
How do you think, if I ask you to close your eyes and imagine, would finance have evolved?
#
And what I find illuminating about the question is that it forces you to think on
#
what is essential and obvious and would have come up anyway
#
and what is circumstantial and need not have evolved in a particular direction.
#
Yeah. So, I mean, the superficial and simple answer would be
#
that the over-financialization of economies defeats the very purpose of finance.
#
So, and the most explicit example of that is derivatives, right,
#
where an instrument that is a figment of imagination on an underlying...
#
Yeah, I mean, I can give you all the theoretical financial constructs
#
for why that thing improves efficiency and all of that,
#
but in the human scheme of innovation, it's irrelevant, right?
#
Whereas something like credit default insurance, which is far more critical,
#
is underdeveloped relative to that. So swaps and derivatives and all of this.
#
I mean, there was a time in emerging markets when I could get a peso to the fore swap.
#
For the human condition, that is irrelevant.
#
It's just, it does nobody except some hedge fund manager some good or some brokers even.
#
Maybe even the hedge fund manager doesn't do him any good, right?
#
So those kind of inventions would just not have happened, I don't think.
#
I think the standardization of money as an instrument of exchange was a very useful financial...
#
It's an evolution of the barter system.
#
And at one point in time, as all of us know, there were multiple monies being issued by multiple people,
#
and then it became one money issued by a credible source.
#
I think that is a very effective system.
#
I think the more rules you have around interdependence,
#
and this is why I'm a little personally distressed by how the WTO is going sideways or downwards,
#
is that the more rules you have towards multilateralism and interdependence, you could have taken it to the next level.
#
But instead, we are drawing the nation-state boundary tighter and bolder
#
and reducing the multilateralism.
#
And forget about multilateralism, those are words of political science.
#
But if you just said that the human condition benefits from interdependence,
#
and any system that actually benefits and facilitates and reduces friction for interdependence is good rather than bad.
#
And the operative word is interdependence, not dependence or independence, it's interdependence.
#
And global trade is an example of that, and it's been recognized as a positive thing for years and years.
#
We are in a phase in which global trade is not a great word right now.
#
But to me, the worry is that we are going against multilateral rule-based structures that benefit everyone.
#
And the harder we draw the nation-state boundary, the further we postpone total prosperity.
#
So in finance, no derivatives, no finance for the sake of finance,
#
but finance as a subsidiary function to the human condition.
#
And then we can draw out multiple details from there, but that's how I would characterize it.
#
Beautiful. And the second part of my question, and it's the first time I'm asking someone, it's probably unfair, it's too broad.
#
I'm sorry for doing this to you, but the second is India.
#
So zero base, you mean?
#
Yeah, you begin a thousand years ago, let's say.
#
But much of what happens is perhaps inevitable anyway in terms of the conquests from outside and perhaps even colonialism or whatever.
#
So you can zoom into whatever path from where you want to take a divergent view that it need not have worked out this way.
#
Yeah, 1200 is a particularly dangerous time to actually start talking about things, so I will avoid 1200.
#
See, my belief in stacking then automatically means that I don't question the path.
#
I actually say that the path is a given and you actually have to build on it.
#
Let's start stacking earlier and...
#
Yeah, so let me give you an what-if that could have changed the...
#
I think the extraordinarily strong maritime tradition of the Cholas got forgotten for too long.
#
And the pathway of India would have been radically different had it not been forgotten, as one example.
#
The inevitability of the foreign invasions might have changed if the kingdoms of that time had become prosperous from the maritime, both military and trade of the Chola.
#
As the Cholas were, they were very prosperous and international or at least regionally supranational.
#
So I think India was never a maritime nation after, I don't know, 880, 980, something of that.
#
And that resulted in many of the things that we had. So that would be one what-if that I would...
#
That more people should have asked, what is behind the Chola?
#
Right, so penultimate question that as you are deep into career too now, 14 years of that and you had a couple of decades before that of your previous career.
#
What do you look forward to? How do you think of life? Various friends of mine have spoken about longevity.
#
Ajay, who is around 57, he says that I have decades of work ahead of me, which is just a wonderful attitude and a wonderful frame.
#
Whether or not he has, it's just a good frame to kind of begin with, you know, like you quoted Gandhi earlier, learn as if you will live forever.
#
So what is the philosophy you've arrived at for, you know, just moving ahead at this point in time.
#
Like earlier in this episode, I quoted Annie Dillard as well, how you spend your days is how you spend your life.
#
So how do you think of that? How do you try to structure your days? What are the things that give you happiness?
#
What are the things that you are intentional about?
#
So, I mean, as we've discussed through much of this discussion, I am intentional about a lot, almost everything I do.
#
And I would advocate that as a as a style for whoever wants to try it.
#
So other than accents, and that was the nature of this bitmap.
#
It was, of course, a little bit professionally focused, but equally personally, I think the accent on family time goes up a little bit more.
#
But other than that, I think I will work till I don't exist anymore.
#
I will certainly learn till I don't exist anymore.
#
And, you know, one of my hopes is that the mind doesn't go before the body.
#
But who knows? So you just have to be prepared for all those or not even prepared.
#
You just have to accept those contingencies in the way they show up.
#
But in the meantime, that's just enough.
#
I mean, India is a fertile place at this moment, as we talked about right through this conversation.
#
And the opportunities for contribution both to individuals, institutions and the country is phenomenal.
#
And, you know, live and learn and act each.
#
I think the one thing I would encourage people to do is to have a bias towards action.
#
I mean, it's easy to say, but somehow you, I mean, you can excuse yourself for not doing something for three months, six months,
#
but you have to get something done over some reasonable period of time.
#
Otherwise, everything is an intellectual interest.
#
And, I mean, you can study bronze art or, you know, chola sculpture forever, sure, by all means study it.
#
But then you're not, then you are within yourself, which is fine, too.
#
It's certainly right for some people to learn just for themselves and leave it at that.
#
But I'm not there. I think there's just so much more to do for that idea of inclusive prosperity for India.
#
I think if we can accelerate anything, any metric by five years, seven years, that's a huge, I mean, it's an impact for half a generation.
#
Huge impact. I mean, India has emancipated 400 million people from poverty.
#
Imagine if we did that on 500. 100 million people wouldn't have a very different view of this than they have today.
#
It's not non-trivial. And so every five, seven years of acceleration on any of these ideas makes a huge difference.
#
I couldn't agree more, especially with regard to the bias of action, because the more you do, the more you learn and the more you can do.
#
And it's such a virtuous cycle that, though I must say that the Bengali in me is also thinking about your prior wise words about the importance of marination.
#
Right? Because we Bengalis, that's how we rationalize all our inaction and inertia.
#
We say that ideas are being marinated. It's okay.
#
I mean, 18 years have passed, and it's still being marinated, but the time will come.
#
So I would like to tell all my listeners that ignore that person within you, ignore that voice within you and just go out and do it and so on and so forth.
#
So my final question for me and my listeners, recommend books, films, music, which means so much to you that you'd love to share them with the world.
#
They've given you joy and learning.
#
Oh, boy. That's a lifetime. I think I'll have to share this.
#
I'll put it in the show notes, but just a few highlights.
#
So, I mean, hey, listen, first of all, I repeat and maybe this is ad nauseum by now in this conversation, but just read, you know, classics to comics, tomes to trash.
#
Read, right? So the operative word is read.
#
And the wider you read, the better you will actually do it.
#
You know, I used to read 100% nonfiction 10 years ago, but again, a good friend of ours persuaded me that fiction really opens your mind.
#
Nonfiction is oriented towards knowledge, which is again a bias that I've had through my career, and we discussed it in this conversation as well.
#
But knowledge is only one thing. The ability to creatively apply knowledge comes from reading fiction.
#
So I have actually slowly started reading fiction as well over the last 10 years, and I've been much the better off for it.
#
So I used to look down upon fiction, but now it's the opposite.
#
So recently I read Chip War, which is a great book.
#
Similarly, on the venture capital industry, there is a book whose name which is Sebastian Malaby's book on the venture capital industry.
#
It's a great book that describes that industry.
#
So that's another one. I've read all the biographies that have come out in recent.
#
I read Subramaniam Jayashankar's latest book, just to be current with what is there.
#
It's not on my top 10 list for sure, but it's there.
#
I mean, great books of all time.
#
I actually have a full list, which I will send to you and you can please add to the show notes.
#
Because one of the talks I actually have done and enjoyed widely doing is called reading between the lines.
#
It's the lines actually, not the lines, the lines in the New York Public Library.
#
And it talks about how to read, what to read, how not to duplicate what you're reading by reading economic times and Hindu or business line.
#
So you can get all your earnings report in business line.
#
Don't read the same in economic times.
#
But if you want the gossip, read the economic times.
#
And it's equally important in certain functions, at least in finance, for you to read the economic times for gossip.
#
So you have to be very careful about how you read what you read.
#
So do another thought experiment on reading, which is if your wife or your spouse forced you to buy only two magazines, what would it be?
#
I buy zero magazines, actually.
#
I read everything on the net.
#
But I'd probably take The Economist and The New Yorker.
#
It's very high cost to reading.
#
Let me put it that way.
#
The Economist and The New Yorker, maybe.
#
But it's a useful way to think about it.
#
My answer is The Economist and The Geographic, National Geographic.
#
But you could have multiple answers.
#
And two is not the right number.
#
It could be one or three, whatever the right number.
#
But just force yourself these thought experiments in order for you to understand what you care about.
#
And then you can always let it go.
#
But at least you follow these things.
#
So I will send you the full list.
#
But, you know, five books that are unopened on my desk, including one by Cahill Gibran.
#
So just different, different types of...
#
Aniruddh Kanisetty's book on the Deccan is just a very good book.
#
So I read a lot of history based books.
#
And fictionalized history is very nice.
#
So for people who like fiction, you know, the James Michener style, the Alex Rutherford series on the Mughals is very approachable.
#
It has each of the Mughals as one book.
#
And it is written in slightly what I would call fictionalized history.
#
So 90% fact, 10% fiction.
#
But the 10% fiction makes it so enjoyable that you actually approach it very easily.
#
So Alex Rutherford's book on the Mughals.
#
So if you want to appreciate the Mughals in a very different way, that's a good book.
#
Several biographies, including the ones on Vajpayee, on the recent ones.
#
So I'll send you the list.
#
Wonderful. And by the way, that Kahlil Gibran book, which is unopened, don't open it because...
#
Because the words of the prophet are written on the subway walls.
#
Narayan, thank you so much for your time and insights.
#
I like to punt too, but my wife has said, stop, don't do it too often.
#
Yeah, I just have, you know, when we boys get together, we got to do this shit.
#
Otherwise, how do you stay alive, right?
#
So, Narayan, thank you so much for sharing your time and insights with me.
#
Such a pleasurable morning for me today.
#
Thank you. Thank you for allowing me to pontificate.
#
Thank you for listening.
