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Things are the way they are for a reason. And sometimes the reasons change, but the
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world takes time to catch up. And we can see this around us, right out of the window, especially
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if you live in a city. Cities evolved in specific ways for specific reasons. People began to
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gather together in denser and denser groups because large economic networks are the route
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to prosperity. And each kind of city led to a particular kind of urban governance and
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to specific ways of living together and commuting. But as a scale of cities changed, as a nature
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of cities changed, as a way people live and work together changed, all these forms, forms
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of governance, forms of transportation, the infrastructure didn't always change with
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the times. And over the last few decades, the world has changed so fast that this lag
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is inevitable. And people who do something about this lag, they are also visionaries
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of a kind. They may not see the future, but they do see the present for what it is and
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Welcome to The Scene and The Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and
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behavioral science. Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to The Scene and The Unseen. My guest today is Shashi Verma, a remarkable man I
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think I can safely describe as one of the world's top experts on urban transportation.
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Shashi has been a cutting edge thinker all his life. In his early 20s, he sold the idea
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of high tech city to Chandrababu Naidu. The rest is history. He then got interested in
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public policy, went to the Harvard Kennedy School, joined McKinsey and then around the
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turn of the millennium, made an important shift to working for an organization called
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Transport for London. He revamped London's transportation system with contactless payments
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being one of the innovations he pushed that probably affect your life, no matter where
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you are, whether you know it or not. He's a deep multidisciplinary thinker and is
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insights on Indian cities are also eye opening. I met him at a conference last year, couldn't
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stop talking to him. And luckily he visited Mumbai in April and came home to record this
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episode. I love this conversation. I'm sure you will too. But let's take a quick commercial
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break before we get to it.
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Hey, the music started and this sounds like a commercial, but it isn't. It's a plea from
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me to check out my latest labor of love, a YouTube show I am co-hosting with my good
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friend, the brilliant Ajay Shah. We've called it Everything is Everything. Every week we'll
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speak for about an hour on things we care about, from the profound to the profane, from
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the exalted to the everyday. We range widely across subjects and we bring multiple frames
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with which we try to understand the world. Please join us on our journey and please support
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us by subscribing to our YouTube channel at youtube.com slash Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
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The show is called Everything is Everything. Please do check it out.
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Shashi, welcome to The Scene in the Unseen.
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So good to see you, Amit. We've been talking about this for a long time. I'm glad to be
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So I've been obviously wanting to have you on the show ever since we met. And in between
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that time, as I've explored your work, my sort of eagerness grew deeper because you
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know, one of the, the show is called The Scene in the Unseen for sort of different reasons.
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When it started, it was about the unintended consequences of public policy. But as a metaphor,
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The Scene in the Unseen works really nicely for me. And one of the many sort of unseen
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things about the world, I think, is the way we normalize stuff that we consider routine.
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So we don't even, you know, think about it. One of those things, you know, Ajay Shah and
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I had an episode on our YouTube show with it where we spoke about electricity. We take
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it for granted that there is a plug point and we're going to plug something in and flick
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the switch and boom. And it's just so normalized that we don't recognize how incredibly miraculous
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it is. And I got exactly that same feeling of stepping out and saying, wow, when I heard
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you talk on another podcast about tickets, and this is where, you know, you were speaking
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about the oyster system and everything in London. And you casually mentioned that you
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went back to look at the history of tickets because the cost of selling tickets was a
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large chunk of the cost. And we'll speak about all of that later in the podcast. But what
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fascinated me was that I've never thought in all my life and all these decades of being
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alive about where, why the hell do we use tickets? Where does it come from? And you
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told the backstory of that. And then in preparation for this podcast, you revealed that one of
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your formative books was Gun, Jumps and Steal by Jared Diamond, which is a book that I remember
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also opened my mind in exactly these ways. And I think part of, you know, being alive
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and being a curious person is you examine everything that is normalized, you ask why,
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and then gradually, you know, that sense of wonder just explodes around you. And you are
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not just a person who's kind of transformed the world of transport and all of that, not
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just a technocrat, not just an engineer, but you're also a historian. And I'm guessing
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that these play into each other, the curiosity that leads you to history, and the mindset
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that is, you know, seeking the unseen, as it were. So this is the first thing that fascinates
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me about you and that I'd like to know more of. Tell me a little bit about, like, were
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you, you know, just a jaded person like everything else? And then gradually, as you grow older,
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these curiosities took hold? Or were you always like this, that you're asking the why?
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Well, Amit, you know, I'll talk a little bit about sort of my growing up experience.
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But it's a fact that these things have grown on me over time as well. You know, I wasn't born
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with all of these curiosities as such. You know, experiences through life have each been
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additive. And they've ended up creating this more multifaceted personality than I used to be.
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One of the things that I've realized, you know, through my career is that
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actually most problems are multidimensional, and they're multidisciplinating. And, you know,
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spectacular mistakes are made by thinking about problems through one dimension or through one
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discipline. You know, as much as people may be dismissive of other disciplines, you know,
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an economist and an anthropologist usually don't get along too well, right? And they're quite
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dismissive about each other. But the reality is that they have something to add. And there are
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certain problems on which each of their perspectives has more weight. And there are many problems on
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which both perspectives add to a whole that is more than what any either of them can provide.
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You know, I had a kind of light bulb moment when I realized that I actually had some merit.
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And, you know, my own education has been multifaceted. You know, I've gone from being
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an engineer to studying public policy, to being very interested in history. That is the way I think.
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Tell me about your childhood. You know, you grew up in Ranchi. You were in India till well into
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adulthood. So tell me about all of those years. Like, what was your childhood like? Give me a
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sense of the texture of your days, your influences. So I grew up in Ranchi. You know,
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I'm one of four siblings. I'm the third of four siblings. My father was an engineer,
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my grandfather was an engineer. And we'll talk a little bit about, you know, how that all came
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about. But like, you know, many people in that era, my father used to work for a public sector
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undertaking. Ranchi was dominated by this big company called Heavy Engineering Corporation,
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which was set up in the 1950s in one of these Nehruvian temples of modern India
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as basically India's heavy engineering outfit. You know, we didn't have that capability. You
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know, we used to import a lot of the machinery and HEC was set up to build that machinery in India.
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So my father and thousands of other engineers like him were drafted in to run this company.
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So we lived, you know, on this campus, huge sprawling campus, where it was very cosmopolitan.
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They hired people from all over India. There was this culture of education that was deeply
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embedded in the entire neighborhood, right? You know, we had these kind of what we call E-type
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houses, you know, which were up and down, you know, sort of two-floor houses with, you know,
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two families living up and down. Across every block, you could find somebody who had a childhood
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gone to IIT, right? So that was the environment in which I grew up. And so there was a, you know,
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a very high sense of expectation and aspiration and a culture that promoted that kind of emphasis
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on education, right? It didn't mean that there was no fun going around. You know, there was lots of
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playing and all that. I mean, again, because it was a nice enclosed campus and the facilities
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were really good, you know, access to playing fields and all that was very good. Access to
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cultural facilities was very good. But there is no doubt that there was a culture of education
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and aspiration that was genetically encoded into anyone who grew up in that environment.
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There were many other things that were also encoded. You know, it was a very
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secure environment, which in some respects didn't promote, you know, commercial thinking
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or risk taking. And I found that those things are things that, you know, I've struggled
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with in my life as well. I'm very commercial in my work, but when it comes to taking personal
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decisions, I've not grown up in an environment where you would think about your own personal
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decisions in a commercial manner. So that was the environment in which I grew up.
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Ranchi used to be a very, very small place before HEC came around. Ranchi has a fascinating
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history itself. You know, there's no sign of a town there until the 1840s. And it's in the 1840s
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that the British set up a garrison and slowly that grew up to become the city that is now Ranchi.
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But even at the time of independence, Ranchi was a very small place, you know,
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probably 20 or 30,000 people. That was it. And because it was high up on the hills and on a
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plateau, it used to be a place where people from Bengal used to come because the weather was good
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in the summertime, right? So it's not quite a hill station, but it was a bit like that.
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Interestingly, you know, as a historian, one of the interesting things is that when you look at
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the whole Burma campaign that was run during the Second World War. So Field Marshal Slim,
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William Slim was given the task of setting up the Burma army and he set up that army in Ranchi.
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So for a brief period, for about six months, Ranchi's population went from, you know,
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whatever 20,000 or thereabouts to about 300,000. Because this entire army was put together in
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Ranchi. And the fascinating reason why it was Ranchi and not somewhere else is that they were
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so worried about Japanese attack that they dared not set up this army on the plains.
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And Ranchi had no real access, but it was within a day's route march to a railhead. So this army
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was set up and trained and then marched down the hills, put on trains and sent off to the frontiers.
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So, you know, Ranchi went from being a very small place to the advent of HEC in the 1950s
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and suddenly exploded. But a very sort of idiosyncratic explosion in that it was a public
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sector unit and dominated by a public sector mentality, very socialist in its outlook.
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And, you know, so those are the things that I had to kind of learn and struggle with later in life.
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So, you know, it seems to me that, you know, you grew up in a kind of a place that was also
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multicultural in a way, because you would like people who've grown up in company towns and,
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you know, similar to this also speak about how there were South Indians there and there were
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people from all over and etc, etc. And the sense I always got is that it is a beautiful,
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almost idealized bubble that they are in. And I didn't grow up in such an idealized bubble,
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but I grew up in what I realized was a bubble of my own, where, you know, English speaking,
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elite, big city, and you grew up thinking that, oh, our India is sort of, you know, secular,
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liberal, all of those things. And I carried that delusion with me way into adulthood,
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till I realized one day that I was a Finch, that the reality of the country is something completely
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different and not everybody sort of things like this. And I'm imagining that your bubble in that
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little space would have been similar to mine in the sense that you have this vision of India where,
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you know, we all belong to it, we are all working for the same purpose, etc, etc.
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And in my case, of course, I've continued living here all these years, I've seen the politics
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change around me and, you know, the scales kind of fell from my eyes and the little bit of history
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that I have read also, you know, like Akshay Mukul's great book on the Geeta Press just tells
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you that we were always, in many ways, you know, a conservative society and all the baggage that
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that comes from. So what is sort of your sense? Like when you were growing up at that time,
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what was your idea of India as it were? And what was your idea of yourself within that?
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Like young people, you know, like me, when I was young, for example, tend to sort of
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bounce from thing to thing, life happens to them, they're not really planning or thinking or whatever,
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but it is also possible to have a certain self-image of oneself and sometimes to have
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a sense of purpose. So I've met very few young people who have a sort of cohesive sense of
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structure. So take me through your mental landscape as regards your country, any society where you are
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and as regards what do you want to do in life apart from the obvious, you know, the IIT imitation
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that would have, you know, settled? I mean, look, you know, I think we all live in bubbles,
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right? I mean, I think the fact of life is that there is no one who's truly representative of the
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vast diversity of, forget this country, the vast diversity of any city, right? So we all have to
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acknowledge that, you know, in some respects, we are all a fringe and it's actually all of
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it put together that makes the nation. To give you my personal experience in this, at least my
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perspective on this, you know, very cosmopolitan place. So we were being exposed to people from
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all over the country, people speaking all kinds of languages. So, you know, in some respects,
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these people were a window into the fact that there is a place called Kerala and they speak
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Malayalam. You could hear Malayalam and actually hear what it sounded like, right? Which, you know,
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to be honest, in the days, you know, you have to cast your mind back. This is prior to the internet,
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prior to television. How would you get exposed to the fact that there is a language called Malayalam?
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I mean, apart from sort of hearing that there is this alien language called Malayalam, how would
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you know what it sounded like, right? So at least we had the privilege of being exposed to the fact
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that there was that going on, right? So whether it was language divisions or, you know, regional
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or indeed religion or any of these things, there was exposure going on to these.
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I went to a Jesuit school, right? Our principal was a Belgian, you know, huge window into the world,
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right? And again, you know, whether I appreciated this at that time or not, I look back at it now
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and realize how unusual it was for us or at least for me to get this experience, which by and large
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the country was not getting. And so there is no doubt that it left an imprint on my mind as well,
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right? And, you know, as you said, and I completely agree with you, I mean, no one has a plan at this
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point in life, right? I mean, no 10-year-old kid knows what they're up to for the rest of their
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lives. And more than that, actually, you know, as I said, this was a very engineering-dominated
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environment. You know, the thought process was very logical, very engineering. The idea of
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humanities and social sciences or the fact that these things mattered was very secondary, actually,
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right? And that's despite the fact that, you know, my mother was highly educated as well
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in political science and the women in general in the neighborhood were highly educated,
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typically not in engineering, but the culture was dominated by engineering, right? And therefore,
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our thought process, certainly my thought process, my siblings, my friends, we all had a
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rather unidimensional way of thinking in which, you know, the idea that political debates or
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social debates or the fact that any of these things matter, they were very secondary, right?
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It was a very logical progression to, you know, you study, you become an engineer, you do this,
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blah, blah, blah, blah, and you just, life just carries on like that. So for me, you know,
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my later experiences where, you know, the thought process got impregnated by other ideas
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was actually a point of catharsis, right? So, you know, I went from this very kind of protective
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bubble into a less protective environment much later on. The one thing, you know, I mean, so we
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had a cosmopolitan culture, right? The one thing that I now look back and realize is that the caste
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division was definitely there. These were all privileged people, typically from upper castes.
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There were some Muslims, but you know, not many, by and large privileged upper caste people,
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and therefore, you know, the thought process was dominated very much by that.
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And so, you know, for example, when Mandal happened in 1989, it was a real shock,
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like, you know, what is going on? It hadn't actually entered into our worldview, certainly
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mine, that actually there is a demand and there is, you know, whether you agree with that demand or
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not, there is a rational basis for that demand. The initial response was this is all bogus,
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you know, what is happening over here? How old were you then?
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I was about 17 or 18 when Mandal happened. You know, I'll take Ranchi and I'll ask you a much
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broader question from there. Like, it strikes me as really interesting how circumstance can
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shape a city. Like you point out, there are 20,000 people and then the garrisons come in and
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suddenly 300,000 and then they're off again. And then eventually in the 50s, you have this
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big public sector company come in and then that shapes a culture and all of that. So I have sort
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of a dual question here. And the first part of it, I guess you'd have a lot to say from history,
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and it's not just about Ranchi, but about cities in general, which is that what observations do
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you have on cities being shaped by happenstance in path-dependent ways? Like I am guessing a
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culture of company towns like Jamshedpur and Ranchi would very much be, you know, there would
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be that one seminal moment where it is chosen as a spot for something and it is shaped like that.
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And then that shapes the people within it. And the second part of my question is that
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when you look back on your own shaping, you know, how much of your own shaping came from
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the fact that you were located there? Like you've spoken of the engineering mindset and all that,
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but you've also spoken of what it missed. And, you know, but how much of what you would consider
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essential to you is something that Ranchi played a part in? And of course, it's really two separate
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questions, so you can take them in any sequence. Look, I think there is no doubting that it had a
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very, very deep formative experience on me. There's no doubt about that. And I, you know,
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now that I've seen more of the world and I've experienced it from many different perspectives,
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I look back at that and, you know, there are good things and bad about that formative experience,
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by and large good, but, you know, there are things that I missed out in that process.
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And I talked to my friends who also grew up in that environment and, you know, we have a very
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similar, not identical, but very similar way of looking at many things, right? And that's
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basically telling you that that formative experience had some impact on us. You know,
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what did we miss out? You know, we missed out, for example, you know, we missed out on,
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I mean, I talked about the commercial mindset, you know, which is basically what a city like Mumbai
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is driven on. We didn't have that at all. But to go back to your point about, you know, what does
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a big intervention do to a city? I think what Ranchi went through is not dissimilar to the story
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of industrial towns worldwide, right? You know, I suspect we will talk about urbanization in some
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depth, but just to touch upon that, it's industrialization that has this sort of major
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interventions, you know, where somebody comes along and says, I've picked this site and now
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there will be tens of thousands of jobs where they didn't used to be. And they're all kind of
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sort of hung around a single pole. And therefore, you know, that's almost like a magnet drawing them
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in. The challenge with cities of that kind, again worldwide, is that the strength of that city and
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the health of that city is entirely dependent upon that one intervention. And when the intervention
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dies, the city dies with it, right? This is the story of the Midwest in the U.S. It's the story
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of the Midlands in the UK, of the coal mining towns. It's the story of Ranchi, right? I mean,
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HEC is a shadow of what it used to be. The city has struggled ever since, right? Despite the fact
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that it's a state capital and all that, they have struggled to bring other investment in.
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So in my mind, there are two types of cities. There are cities that grow up on external
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intervention of that kind. This is almost by fiat, right? This is I am going to invest over
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here and that's going to make the city versus cities that grow up more organically, right?
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Now, I wouldn't make the claim that cities that grow up organically are forever successful
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because there's any number of failures on that front as well. But they have more of a chance to
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refresh themselves and to keep the tricks growing. And they're more diversified in terms of the tricks
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that are happening over there. So that one fails, you still have 25 other tricks going on in the
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city. So I think that there is a very big point over there about how much of urbanization you want
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to be dependent on just one factor here. I'm certainly going to come back later in this
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app and we'll talk a lot about urbanization, perhaps seven, eight hours on just urbanization.
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But to kind of get back to your biography, tell me about your parents. You mentioned that your
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dad and your granddad were both sort of engineers. So what was the mahal at home like? Your mom also,
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you said, was well-educated and all of that. So what were they like? Were they books at home?
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What was the culture at home like? Were you reading a lot? I'm just interested in how all
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this sort of plays into the shaping of you in this case, perhaps in an intellectual way as well.
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So let me go back to before my parents, because I think there's a point here. One of the things
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that I debate with my friends, my IIT friends in particular, is we are all the children of privilege
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in one form or the other. People don't like acknowledging the fact that they have benefited
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from privilege. But the fact is, you look at the IIT population, it's by and large a bunch of
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privileged middle-class children. What do I mean by that? What I mean, and again, this is very
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relevant to the story of urbanization. If I look at my four grandparents, or indeed, even if I look
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at my great-grandparents, one is that I come from a community where education was favored for
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many generations. I can't even count the number of generations for which people were literate.
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That itself is a huge privilege in a country where by and large people,
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even today, not everybody is literate. So the fact that we were literate for
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at least 200 years set us apart from everybody else. But if I look on my paternal line,
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if I look at my great-grandfather, he lived in a village. He was a farmer,
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educated, but a farmer, landowning. Again, these are all markers of privilege.
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In the off season, he would work in the courts, copying documents. Nothing exalted as such,
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but nevertheless, very different from the entire milieu of the country.
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Now, there's a really fascinating story about my own family there. My great-grandfather had
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four children, a daughter and three sons. My grandfather was the middle of the three sons.
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The daughter was the oldest. I don't know quite what struck him,
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but he realized that my grandfather was a bride. He took him out of the village and said,
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you've got to get out. I took him 200 kilometers away into Patna
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and enrolled him in Patna Engineering College. Now, this is the mid to late 1920s.
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Everyone's gone. Apart from what I'm telling you, there's no documented history of any of this.
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But I look back at the thought process that must have gone on in his mind,
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where he took a very bold decision. In some respects, this process of conversion from rural
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to urban is the story of the country. It's still going on. Half the population still has to go
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through it. Well, that was our story. That was how my grandfather got out of the village.
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But his first step was a very, very substantial step that set us in the right direction.
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You can come out from the village and go into menial work in the cities,
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which unfortunately is what's happening to many people. His step was more daunting,
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but also more promising. He didn't have the means to pay for his education.
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And there's a very romantic story there, almost romantic story, where
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a village is about 200 kilometers away from Patna. But at some point during his education,
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an arranged marriage got set up and all that. It turns out my grandmother's house was only
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about a kilometer away from Patna Engineering College. I was literally outside Patna Engineering
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College. Now, of course, my grandmother and grandfather had never met, but my grandmother's
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brothers used to meet my grandfather. And through that process, my grandmother found out that he
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didn't have the money to pay for his education. And the deal in those days used to be, if you
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paid your fees for four years, you got a degree. If you paid it for three years, you got a diploma.
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But if you didn't pay for three years, you basically kicked out.
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By the end of the second year, he didn't have any money. So my grandmother sold jewelry
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secretly to pay for his education. I look back, this is 100 years ago. I look back at this and
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say, again, that was a very unusual step. Were they married at the time?
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No, no, no. This is before they were married. So she gave jewelry to her brothers to go and
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sell and give him money so that he could finish his education. And in fact, it was a no stud.
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In fact, when my grandmother died over 40 years ago, my grandfather had replaced that no stud for
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her much later in life. He refused to get that no stud taken off her. So she was cremated with that
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no stud on her. So there was something really deep in there. The point I'm making here, Amit, is that
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it's decisions of that kind that have accumulated over many, many years,
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which I now recognize this is what privilege actually means. You can work as hard as you want.
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Of course, you don't get through an IIT entrance exam without working for it.
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But the environment that is created over many generations has a very material bearing.
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So my grandfather was educated. He made sure that all of his children, sons and daughters,
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all of my aunts had a master's degree. My father and his siblings were all engineers and doctors.
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So that culture was always there and it had been set up and it's never gone away.
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So my father became a mechanical engineer. He worked as a production engineer,
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as a project manager throughout his entire life. In terms of practical engineering,
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I learned a phenomenal amount from him. Not from the education that I got. I mean,
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I learned a huge amount from the education I got as well. But practical engineering,
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I learned a huge amount from him. And in fact, I look back and realize just how
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privileged I was to have a father with whom I could talk engineering and learn engineering.
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That North Star story is beautiful and thinking aloud, I feel like one can draw a straight line
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from that decision of your great grandfather in the village to send that talented son to
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college to the oyster cart. In the sense that once you express a certain value,
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and this is again something that is expressed by your grandmother selling her jewelry so that her
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would-be husband can get the degree, that it then sets off an avalanche of values.
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That then it becomes practically inevitable that your grandparents for the rest of their lives,
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having chosen this path, will just stay on it. And therefore, all the kids get educated, even
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the girls. Therefore, the children get the same approach from them. One of my previous guests,
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Deepak Vyas, once told me, how you do the small things is how you do the big things.
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And I think that is deeply profound. And in fact, I will ask you about that as well.
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What were the small things? What was that daily culture? Were there cultures of discipline? Were
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there cultures of neatness? Were there cultures of how much play and how you balanced that with
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work? Take me through those early years as well. If you have memories of your grandparents,
#
I'd love you to share them. Completely. We lived in a very disciplined household.
#
There was a routine. Everybody had to be part of that routine. Truancy from school was not permitted.
#
You had to be neat and clean. All of that was absolutely part of it.
#
That culture came from my grandparents. It also came from my parents, my father, my mother,
#
both of them. You asked me today what time I would be ready. And I said early
#
in the morning. The fact is, my father had this attitude at half past five, six o'clock in the
#
morning, half past five in the morning. The Rajai would come off. The covers would come off. And you
#
had to be awake. Summer, winter, it doesn't matter. You had to be awake. The fact is,
#
I wake up at half past five in the morning today. It doesn't matter what it is. It doesn't matter
#
what time I'm going to bed. I'm awake at half past five in the morning. These are things that were
#
inculcated early in life, and they just don't leave you.
#
I think a lot of it is that discipline, that restlessness of mind, that you're on a mission.
#
Slacking is not an option. Mission doesn't mean that you're off to become the next billionaire.
#
That's not the point. There's an intellectual mission that you're on, and you don't have
#
the choice of opting out. What were your passions when you were young? We'll talk about
#
your IIT Kharagpur time, but what made you decide to do it in the first place? Was it just a memetic
#
desire because so many kids around you, like it was considered the thing to do the prestige thing?
#
Or were you naturally the kind of person who was thinking along those lines? Did engineering itself
#
interest you? And you mentioned somewhere that you did agricultural engineering in
#
IIT Kharagpur, and I'm guessing that was not your first choice. You must have just got through
#
the exam and then, yeah, this is what you got. So take me a bit through your sense of self.
#
Look, I think in terms of choice of profession, the first thing you've got to do is cast your
#
mind back into the 1980s when career choices were more limited. And if you had aspirations,
#
the way to fulfill it was either becoming an engineer or a doctor.
#
Right. It's not that people were not doing other things in those days. There were many other people
#
doing things in those days, but in my environment, that was it. Right. That was the route to success.
#
And for me, medicine was something that I was not interested in. Honestly, I would struggle
#
with it even today. And engineering was something that I have to say, I don't feel that I was
#
pushed into it ever. But the environment around me was such that it was almost like I was sucked
#
into it. The fact that I was fiddling around with my father's car from a young age with him,
#
with his supervision, it sort of brought about an interest in engineering, which was more or less
#
natural. And look, 30, 40 years later, I don't regret it for one minute. I don't feel I was
#
pushed into it. I don't regret it at all. I feel like it was something that I enjoyed and I learned.
#
I've never worked as a true engineer, but I've applied engineering every day of my life.
#
And there was, just looking around, because there were other people going into engineering,
#
there was this thing about that was a good thing to do. You're looking for role models around you.
#
And the role models are all your neighbor's children, in many cases, much older than me.
#
Now, in my family, as I said, I have an older sister, an older brother, and a younger brother.
#
So in my family, the peer pressure was immense, not least because my sister went to IIT as well.
#
And the day she got into IIT, that had set the benchmark. Everybody then had to emulate her.
#
My sister's much older than I am. So the next one was peer pressure on my brother. Then he went to
#
IIT. At this point, you've kind of lost it totally. And then I went to IIT. And then my
#
younger brother, of course, had the whole burden of the entire society on him. And then my sister,
#
so all of us went to IIT Kharagpur, by the way. And then my sister and my younger brother are
#
married to two IITians. And I have a cousin from IIT as well. So there are actually seven of us
#
from IIT Kharagpur, which may or may not be a record, but it's definitely out there in terms
#
of something unusual. So what was IIT Kharagpur like? On the one hand, you've done the family
#
thing. The pressure's kind of receded for a moment now that you've gotten there. But is
#
agricultural engineering, did that interest you per se? And when you, like, I'm just a year or
#
two younger than you, so it's not just in your bubble that the pressure was there. I mean,
#
the general scene across the country was engineering or medical or civil services,
#
and there was nothing else. And my dad was in the IES. So but I mean, luckily, I had no pressure on
#
me and I did something else entirely. But so once you are in IIT, what then happens? And I also want
#
to sort of know at this point about, you know, the two common anxieties all young people go through.
#
And one anxiety is the anxiety of fitting in, right? Earlier, you have been in a particular place.
#
And despite the fact that it's multicultural, it's also in terms of mindset, perhaps kind of
#
homogenous, right? Engineers are placed on a pedestal and all of that. And fitting in there
#
wouldn't have been a problem. But, you know, so what was IIT Ranchi like for you in that sense
#
of dealing with the anxiety of getting the validation of your peers and feeling that,
#
you know, you are somewhere. And the second anxiety, I guess that one doesn't even realize
#
it at the time. I don't know if one can call it an anxiety, but that need to find yourself. Because
#
initially, we often try to define ourselves through the eyes of others and their expectations,
#
but later at some point, we begin to, you know, get at our core. So
#
look, you know, the whole experience of arriving at IIT was very interesting, right? Now, I'd never
#
been to Kharagpur until I showed up as a student, right? But there was a degree of familiarity
#
because my brother and my sister had both been to IIT. So we'd heard a lot of stories and all
#
that. Which again, you have to keep in mind that not everybody had that experience. So I had that,
#
many others didn't. So, you know, you arrive at IIT with a degree of confidence about where you're
#
going. But it's a very interesting experience. So there are several things that happen,
#
in my view, when you arrive at IIT. The first is that, look, by definition, anyone who's getting
#
there is bright in some form or the other, right? What you've not been exposed to
#
is a culture where everybody's bright, right? And there are people who are significantly brighter
#
than you. I mean, it's visible from day one that, you know, the people who, I mean, you know,
#
there's a ranking system, which is almost like a caste system in IIT. That's how you end up in
#
agricultural engineering. You know, my rank was a bit lower and that's how you get allocated a
#
department. I mean, you have to provide choices, but, you know, frankly, there's a whole process
#
by which that allocation happens. But, you know, the people who get the top ranks in IITs in the
#
joint entrance exam, you know, it may not be a perfect correlation, but these people are bright,
#
right? Let's not doubt it, right? There is something unusual about these people.
#
And even sort of at the very, very creamy layer at the top, you know, within that creamy layer,
#
the cream that rises to the top is unusual. There are a lot of young people who struggle
#
with that, right? They've grown up, you know, for the first 18 years of their life being told
#
you are the brightest in the world and all that stuff. And suddenly they realize that they're at
#
the, you know, middle of the pack, bottom of the pack or whatever it is. Now, you know, the fact is
#
being at the bottom of the pack at IIT is not a bad place to be. But mentally, it's a very difficult
#
thing for people to get used to. And so when you look at, you know, people having mental health
#
difficulties and suicides and all that, a lot of it stems from that process of adjustment. I don't
#
want to generalize because look, you know, these are difficult issues and I do not want to generalize
#
for one minute because there's a story behind each one of them and they're incredibly tragic
#
when they happen. But that process of adjustment is a very big part of it, right? And so I think
#
finding your feet is important in that respect. The second thing that you find is that again,
#
by and large, the children who are coming to IITs are from privileged middle-class families, right?
#
But the striking thing of it is that that's not true of everyone. And the most outstanding
#
experiences that I had at IIT was interacting with people who came from a very different
#
background, children of much lower privilege, children who'd struggled there. You know,
#
there's this movie running around these days called Twelfth Fail. You know, there's a story,
#
I believe it's a true story. I mean, I have no idea of knowing yes or no.
#
But there are stories of that kind. There are real stories of that kind. I have friends who
#
had similar experience to that. And again, you know, you don't realize this on day one
#
because, you know, you're basically naive about these things, right? But these are the things
#
that slowly percolate through your mindset. And you begin to realize the world doesn't look like
#
you, right? And actually, the enrichment that that provided is something that I really, you know,
#
in hindsight, I admire. So I want to speculate on something and tell me if you agree with me or
#
if your observation bears me out, which is that my sense is that those who come from less privileged
#
backgrounds, if they survive the process, they will do much better than everybody else.
#
I don't think that's universally true. Look, you know, the joint entrance exam is a filtering
#
mechanism. But it's a filtering mechanism on one dimension, which is how well you can do a physics
#
chemistry and math exam. There are many other things to becoming successful in life, you know,
#
which is not determined by how well you know, my reasoning behind my speculation is that I would
#
imagine that if despite your background, you've gotten that far, you have more hunger and desire
#
and a better attitude. And that will count for a lot. You're completely right on that front. I don't
#
disagree with you. But to be successful in life, you know, you have to fit into society, you need
#
to know them sort of the manners and workings of society and all that stuff, which a physics
#
chemistry and math exam doesn't tell you, right? So in the same way that the J rank is not a
#
predictor of success for privileged children, it's not a predictor of success for underprivileged
#
children either, right? There's something else that there are many other things that you need
#
to be successful in life. So I've seen children from all kinds of backgrounds come and become
#
successful. I've also seen children from all kinds of backgrounds struggle, right? So, you know,
#
the great thing, I mean, these days is that, you know, with the advent of social media,
#
you can remain connected with your batch. And so you have a sense of what they're doing and how
#
well they've done and what they have done, right? In my class, you know, I was in the 1993 batch.
#
If you talk about 1993 batch, one of my classmates was Sundar Pichai, right? So we have the full
#
spectrum there, right? And I do reflect on, you know, what my batch mates went on to do.
#
And by the way, success is not just defined by, you know, how well you did in the corporate world.
#
There are people who've done very, very well and done very creative work in their own fields,
#
they may not be as well known. But I've also seen people who've struggled with life, right? And
#
struggled with life not because they weren't good at engineering, but they were not good at some of
#
the other things that you need to be successful. One study that had a profound influence on me when
#
I read about it, and I wish I'd read about it much earlier in life, is the Dweck and Muller study on
#
the growth mindset, where basically, their finding was they took a bunch of kids, broke them up into
#
two groups. One group was, and they were tested on various whatever, and one group was, according
#
to the results that came, they were evaluated in terms of adjectives, that you are brilliant,
#
or you are good, or you are whatever. And the other group was evaluated in terms of verbs,
#
that you tried hard, you persevered, and all of that. And as you would expect, you know,
#
the first group then eventually went on to become laggards, where they would feel entitled, they
#
would take it for granted that because they were brilliant, they would do well. And the second
#
group went on to continue to excel in life, because, or excel in the future tests that were
#
given to them rather, but I would imagine in life as well. Because for them, the value was
#
perseverance, and it was not that self-image that I am so brilliant. And I wonder how that plays
#
into it, because I have seen people who, when they were much younger, 25-30 years ago, everyone
#
around them thought they were brilliant, and I look at them today, and it's a life of underachievement.
#
And they were people who just tried. And I have kind of, and I view myself as a sort of a victim
#
of that first group, in the sense that I let myself down, because for a large part of my life,
#
I had the wrong attitude, didn't try hard enough. I would just bask in the fact that it takes me one
#
hour to do what others take 10 hours to do, and I would settle down, and in the end, not achieve as
#
much as the people who really slogged at it. And I wonder how that went through. Like when you said
#
that, you know, all of these kids who would have come here, because of the selection effect of the
#
JEE, would have been brilliant in the circles they came from. But suddenly you come out here,
#
and one, there is a psychological pressure of having to be in an environment where you're no
#
longer the brightest kid on the block, and how that pressure plays out. And the other is, if you
#
come there with the wrong value, if you don't have the values of hard work inbuilt into you,
#
then you can get completely screwed. So what did you see around you at the time? And what was your
#
journey? Look, you know, first thing I should say, you know, I was not a bright kid at school,
#
let's be clear, right? I was not quite at the bottom of the heap either, but I was a struggling
#
kid, right? And our teachers used to be quite harsh in the comments that they used to make.
#
And I was subject to many harsh comments. You remember any? Oh, totally. I mean, my mother
#
got called in and told that, you know, he's only fit to do polo rickshaw, you know. There were
#
things of that kind. And, you know, these things are seared in my mind, right? These were comments
#
that were made about me when I was seven, eight years old, right? And, you know, you don't forget
#
them. Look, you know, this is almost 50 years on. These are things that you never forget. And,
#
you know, I was kind of a middling student, you know, there was a system in our school where
#
you had to achieve a minimum grade, sorry, you had to achieve 40% in every subject to be ranked,
#
right? So in a class of about 45, only about 10 students used to get ranked. It was a tough
#
school to be in, right? And I was kind of one of those people who maybe once every four terms or
#
whatever, I'd get a rank. So as I said, not quite at the bottom of the heap, but nowhere near the
#
top. So I was never one of these brilliant students. And in school, I'm not sure I was
#
working that hard either. I was working hard because the family environment was one in which
#
I had to work hard. But I look back and say, was I really sort of exercising myself? The answer is
#
no, right? And my moment of epiphany came later on. And then from that point on, you know, it was a
#
kind of gradual upward curve. I just barely scraped through the joint entrance exam. Let's be clear,
#
right? And it was world-changing for me because had I not got through it, you know, life would
#
have been very different. So, you know, at every stage of life, I kind of just barely scraped
#
through. It's only much later in life that I realized that I actually do have a purpose
#
and that actually I'm capable of doing these things. You know, I'm frankly,
#
you know, that I have a mind that can think problems through and that I should be
#
not lazy about it, right? But that process was not inbuilt in me from the beginning.
#
It did take time for it to arrive. And you're quite right that there are children
#
who went through their early childhood being told that they were the best thing that had ever
#
happened to humanity, right? And many of them have struggled. Many of them have struggled. You
#
know, I mean, look, you know, by and large, my class from IIT have done well. You know,
#
no one's been a total dud, right? But I look back at the careers of many and say, look, you know,
#
you were bright. You know, there were many things, you know, why weren't you the person
#
inventing something because you had that capability. And part of it is that people kind of slumped
#
back. You know, I'll take a data science job. I'll take a software coding job. And you think like,
#
come on, you're coming out of IIT. This is not what you should be doing. You know,
#
you're capable of doing a lot more than this. But people settle into whatever suits their
#
needs and aspirations and, you know, the ethics of work.
#
So tell me more about, you know, how your frames of looking at what you are going to do in life
#
are evolving through this time at IIT Kharagpur. Because what you seem to have done right after it
#
is that rather than take one of those steady kind of jobs that your classmates did, you practically
#
became an entrepreneur. You tried commercial mushroom production. You know, you ventured into
#
real estate in Hyderabad, all of those things. How does that even happen? What is that journey
#
from where you have just about cleared the JEE, you are there, you're relieved to be there.
#
And then in that short time at IIT, you know, you're taking the initiative, you're doing stuff,
#
you're thinking outside the box, because it is so incredibly difficult, actually,
#
to think outside the box. Look, I think the first thing to say out of all humility is that life is
#
a series of accidents, right? So it's not like I set off on some journey and then created these
#
opportunities for myself. With a degree in agriculture engineering, this is a graduating
#
class of 1993, it was still quite tough to get jobs. And so for a short time, I worked in Mumbai
#
for a food marketing company that was trying to sell organic food before the term organic had
#
become popular. It was called chemical free food back in those days. And I remember sort of beating
#
the streets of Mumbai trying to sell this organic food. And honestly, people had no idea what it was,
#
and they didn't care. So the idea that, you know, rice would be, you know, 20% more expensive,
#
not interesting. I realized that wasn't the right thing for me to do. I got this job with
#
a tea producing company, the Assam company, you know, with a very impressive heritage,
#
first tea company in India set up in 1839. In fact, they started tea cultivation in India,
#
long and beautiful history about how all that came about. But this is 1993. And every company
#
with a bit of money was trying their hand at anything that came around, right? The go-go years
#
of liberalization. And so one of their ideas was to set up a commercial mushroom production facility
#
in Himachal. And so they were hiring young engineers to come and work for that. And that's
#
how I got into the company. Now, I had kind of self-educated myself on finances, right?
#
And so in the first sort of two or three weeks in the company, I was looking at whatever
#
feasibility work had been done on this mushroom plant. And I was setting up a P&L and balance sheet
#
for this company, which was not in the feasibility report. It took me like no time. It just took me
#
days to understand that there was no way this company would ever make money, right? And mushroom
#
production requires a dark, cold environment. This is a hot, dusty country. To create a dark,
#
cold environment, you need air conditioning, right? Energy costs are still high in India.
#
They're not as high as they're in the West, but still quite a burden. Back in those days,
#
energy was not reliable. So you had to set up your own diesel generating system,
#
at which point the whole thing is uneconomic. So within weeks of joining, it was clear to me
#
I was out of a job, right? This thing would never work. And this project persisted for quite a long
#
time. But I realized that this thing was going nowhere. So at which point you think about, okay,
#
so what next? But this is where I think the accidents have been very helpful in my life.
#
What I realized is there's so much other work going on in the company. Forget about what I was
#
hired for. There's so much exciting work going on in the company. Don't be dumb. Look for things
#
that are going on. Make yourself useful. And so there was this massive real estate project going
#
on in Hyderabad. And this has been, I'll talk a little bit about this, Amit, because this has
#
been, again, one of those formative moments in my life. Of course, a moment of great impact as well.
#
But a really formative moment in my life, because it set my mind on what I do and how I do things.
#
So there was a real estate project that had been sort of engineered by a long process. But it had
#
resulted in something very unusual. So anyone familiar with the geography of Hyderabad
#
will know that there is a big lake in the middle of Hyderabad called the Hussain Sagar,
#
which historically was the boundary between Hyderabad and Sikandarabad. What people may
#
have forgotten is that Hussain Sagar was also the place where all the sewage of Hyderabad flowed
#
into. It was basically a dirty, stinking lake. It had been around for centuries. And in the 1980s,
#
when NT Rama Rao was chief minister, he built what is now called the Necklace Road.
#
And that closed off all the sewage flowing into Hussain Sagar, and the sewage was diverted away.
#
But what the Necklace Road also did is that on the south side of the lake was the Budaponeema Park.
#
On the east side of the park used to be an old power generating station from the Nizamstein.
#
And the west of the area was where all this sludge used to flow in. But creating the Necklace Road
#
basically fenced off that area and created new land. So land appeared out of nowhere.
#
So Budaponeema Park was all of 74 acres. They're quite a big park,
#
lake fronting, very unusual property. You don't find many locations in India with that kind of
#
property. I mean, there are a few, but there are not that many. I mean, our cities are not blessed
#
with water bodies in general. Bhopal aside, we don't really have big water bodies in the middle
#
of cities. So the deal that had been done resulted in 10 acres of land on the west of Budaponeema
#
being sold to us. So I looked at this and said, oh my God, this is so unusual.
#
But I was a 22-year-old kid. I was like, what do I know about anything?
#
But there were two data points that were very interesting. One is that just behind my office
#
used to be the US Educational Foundation in India. And they had a good library.
#
And I had this habit of sitting in libraries and reading.
#
That was kind of, again, one of my windows to the world. This was all before the internet and all
#
that. And so I was reading an article from the Harvard Business Review that had been published
#
in 1993 or thereabouts that said that India's software exports were $4 billion in 1992,
#
but they'd be $100 billion in 2000. I remember when I read that article saying this can't happen.
#
This is unrealistic. I mean, 25x growth in eight years is simply impossible.
#
But I remember I was going back home that night and thinking, what if it did happen?
#
And actually, those questions, that's a fairly fundamental question.
#
It's questioning of that kind that I found has been probably the most eye-opening for me
#
personally. Now, the other thing that was going on, you know, I've always had a culture of reading
#
newspapers. I grew up with newspapers at home. My dad used to read newspapers. We used to all
#
imitate it. We used to all read newspapers and all that. The other thing that was going on is
#
every day, the newspapers were full of reports about property prices going up.
#
So when the economy opened up in 1991, the investment first came to Mumbai.
#
All the multinational organizations used to want to come to Mumbai, you know, because of connectivity
#
and, you know, frankly, in the US, this is the only city people have heard of and all that.
#
And very quickly, people realized that there was no commercial space in the city, to be honest.
#
Right. So property prices tripled in the space of two years. It went from about 30,000 rupees
#
a square foot to about one lakh rupees a square foot, just in the space of two years.
#
Very quickly, the spillover started going into Bangalore. And in two years, property prices
#
have tripled in Bangalore. So they've gone from 10,000 to 30,000 in Bangalore. Right.
#
Now, there are two data points here. And I think the brilliant thing was my thinking,
#
come on, if you put these two data points together, what happens? Where does all this growth
#
in the tech industry go? So I remember on New Year's Eve in 1993, sitting down with my boss,
#
who was the managing director of the company, and a very senior advisor that we'd hired,
#
Edgar Ribeiro, who was Julio's brother, but he'd retired as a chief town planner of India.
#
And a really wonderful man, by the way. And I learned so much from him.
#
And I said, look, you know, this is what I've read. And we've got the third data point,
#
which is we've got 10 acres of land in the Budapest park. How about we pitch for Hyderabad
#
to become a high tech city? Right. It was one of the completely off the wall ideas. Right. But
#
it stuck. It stuck. And so very quickly, you know, you might remember, you know, so
#
there used to be a company called Feedback Ventures. They were big in the infrastructure
#
space. They got brought in to work on this. Very quickly, we had put together a presentation that
#
two weeks later, we were pitching to the chief minister of entrepreneurship. You know, honestly,
#
how much of what we were pitching, he understood. I don't know. But he said, look, it's your land.
#
Work on it. Right. So we started developing the proposal. This is 1994. At the end of that year,
#
there was an election. And NT Rama Rao, who was in the opposition at this point, there was a
#
Congress government. NT Rama Rao had plans for what he wanted to do with this land that had
#
frankly come out of nowhere because of his previous term as chief minister. He wanted to
#
build a convention center there. So he wanted to cancel our project in favor of building his
#
convention center. So 7th of December was election day. And I remember us taking possession of the
#
land on the 7th of December, just before the election results came out. 8th of December was
#
counting day. I was in Vishakhapatnam taking possession of some land in Vizag. I flew back
#
from Vizag on the 8th, came to Hyderabad on the morning of the 9th, flew back to Delhi. On the 9th,
#
the results came out. And it was very clear that NT Rama Rao had won. On the 9th, he got sworn in
#
as chief minister. On the 10th, we got a phone call from his office to say he wants to see you.
#
So 14th of December, we were sitting in his office pitching the whole idea to him.
#
I'll tell you a myth, you know, for a person who had promised very directly in the elections that
#
he was about to cancel our project, he was incredibly erudite. He said, look, I've looked
#
at all the files and I've seen that you've paid a legitimate price for the land. Tell me what you
#
want to do with it. And he sat there and listened to us patiently, probed us, asked us a few
#
questions. We sat in his office for 45 minutes, took him through the whole thing. And he said,
#
I get it, but you have to explain all of this to my finance minister.
#
And if he says yes, you go ahead. So three weeks later, we got a date with the finance
#
minister. We're back in Hyderabad, pitching the whole idea to the finance minister again.
#
And my recollection is his eyes lit up. This was a big idea that was being presented to him.
#
Hyderabad was a sleepy old city back in those days, right? It's changed out of complexion.
#
But in the early 90s, you know, a bit of gemstone jewelry, there's a paper factory,
#
there's a bit of, you know, defense research, DRDO had a big presence over there,
#
but there was nothing else that was going on in Hyderabad, right? I mean, it wasn't like
#
Rajchi, it was a much bigger place. And you could see that there was more money in Hyderabad than
#
there was in Rajchi and all that. But frankly, it was a completely sleepy place. This was a big
#
idea. And Naidu just latched onto it. So for me, you know, the two things here,
#
one is I look back now. And the thing that I never forget is what I call the transformative
#
potential of a big idea. I've seen it, right? But the second thing is, is at that time,
#
the thing that struck me is I was playing with something that I barely understood.
#
You know, it was clear to me, I'm not making this up today. It's clear to me then that I was about
#
to have an impact on the lives of 5 million people in Hyderabad in ways that I had no comprehension.
#
And that is what prompted me not to go and get an MBA, but to go and study public policy.
#
What an incredible story. So, High Tech City was your formulation?
#
Well, I mean, not in the way it has happened. Because Naidu took it on and made the whole
#
thing very different. Of course, Budapur Neom Park is still Budapur Neom Park. You know,
#
nothing ever happened over there. Made it much bigger, the whole cyberabad and all that.
#
But the germ of the idea that Hyderabad could compete on technology came from New Year's Eve
#
in 1993. It's a remarkable story and it's a confluence of so many things happening. And,
#
you know, earlier you spoke about how all of this being a series of accidents and you've,
#
you know, laid that out, the HBR article and being in that company and etc, etc. But as much as we
#
speak about the right time in the right place, I think there is also such a thing as the right
#
person. And the three of them have to coincide for serendipity actually to result in sort of this
#
kind of value. So at this point in time, and this is like you've so beautifully told the story of
#
how you come to public policy, but give me a sense of the way you think about things. Like,
#
what are your mental processes? Because what you really did here was you were hired to set up a
#
commercial mushroom facility. You figured out that that shit isn't working. You get interested in
#
something else. But again, you figure out that the commercial mushroom stuff isn't working
#
because you taught yourself finance. That indicates a certain kind of mindset when it
#
comes to learning stuff. Later on, when you get into real estate, you're not, you're giving
#
context to the numbers by digging deeper, digging deeper, saying that, okay, this is the HBR
#
projection. This is what has happened in Bombay. This is what has happened in Bangalore.
#
Clearly, if prices rise like this, that means supply can't respond to demand. And the demand
#
is going to grow according to HBR. So has, you know, you're putting all of that together.
#
Give me a sense of, you know, were you always this kind of a systematic thinker? Did you at
#
some point train yourself to think in this manner? Who were the thinkers or the books who kind of
#
influenced you? And at this confluence where you reach this stage where you say that shit,
#
I'm going to impact the lives of millions of people. How do you now see yourself in the wider
#
scheme of things? Look, you know, I mean, the honest fact is, I don't know where I made that
#
transition, right? I have no idea. It's not like I read some book that had this big impact on me
#
or anything of that kind, right? I will say that I think it's been kind of the accumulated impact
#
of a lot of different things that have happened. It's no single thing. And, you know, I'm honestly
#
struggling to answer your question about where it came from because I don't know, right? What I do
#
know is that that was a moment of epiphany again. And it has had an impact on me because it's changed
#
the way I think since then to say, well, look, you know, there was some basic fundamental analysis
#
that I did and it had this huge impact. The one big thing it's had on me is that nothing in life
#
is too complicated, right? Actually, you know, let me give you sort of one backstory to this. You
#
know, one of the great things about the IIT Joint Entrance Exam is that, I mean, the exams are
#
ridiculously difficult. I mean, they're designed to be ridiculously difficult, right? But if you've
#
got the right answer, the answer is usually very simple. Like you solve this massive equation
#
and the answer is like pi squared by two or something. It'll be something very simple like
#
that. If you're getting a more complicated answer than that, it's probably the wrong answer, right?
#
And I think that is something that had an impact on me, right? Which is that
#
nothing in life is that complicated, right? What is difficult is how to cut through all the clutter
#
around the issues. And to me, the impact that Hyderabad had was exactly that. That,
#
you know, big ideas are not necessarily, well, big ideas are typically not complicated ideas.
#
They rest on very few key facts. And it doesn't mean that everything around it is irrelevant,
#
right? But the basic facts of the problem are usually dead simple, right? Our challenge is
#
whether we can see those. Double click on this for me. Like when you say nothing is too complicated,
#
I agree with every part of that. I agree with complicated and I agree with nothing is too
#
complicated in the sense that the world is deeply complex. But if you get to the essence of something
#
and you get to first principles, then you can solve it. But how does one cut through the clutter and
#
get to the essence of something like over here, for example, was there an element of accident in
#
the fact that you stumbled upon all of these separate things happening, the HBR article,
#
the real estate prices, or can you train your mind to like, are there heuristics that you use
#
to get to the heart of a problem? You know, it's something that came later in life. You know,
#
my Harvard days were very, very instructive to me as well. Harvard is a fantastic place in,
#
you know, in many different ways. But there's one thing when we'll talk about that in a bit,
#
but there's one basic fact that I want to pick out from that.
#
So one of my advisors, when I was working on my PhD, he used to tell me
#
that answering a question is not difficult. Asking the right question is difficult.
#
So spend your time trying to figure out what the right question is.
#
Because if you ask the right question, the answer should be obvious.
#
And his point was that people spend all their lives trying to answer questions
#
and finding it difficult because they haven't asked the right questions.
#
Now, you know, it might sound like semantics, but I think there is a very big kernel of truth
#
in that, right? Which is, you know, it happens with so many things. And again,
#
we might talk about some of these things later on. You know, so many social debates are complicated
#
because we don't know what the terms of the debate are. You know, if you set the terms of the debate,
#
you know, you may agree with them, you may not agree with them. But if you set the terms of the
#
debate, the debates become clearer. You know, in many cases, people don't want to set the
#
right terms to the debate because they want obfuscation. But to me, that learning,
#
which, by the way, you know, when I was being told all of this at Harvard, right,
#
what was playing in my mind is Hyderabad. What was playing in my mind is ask the right question.
#
The right question was not, what do we do with that land? The right question was much bigger than
#
that. The right question was, what's the overall dynamic in which that little parcel of land that
#
we have fits in? Let me ask you to contextualize this in, you know, with your own life in mind.
#
For example, one way of tackling your life after being an engineer from IIT is to answer perhaps
#
irrelevant questions like what will give me the best career? Where can I best apply the skills I
#
have learned and all of these things? But instead, at some point, it seems that you ask the right
#
question instead. You know, so what was that question? Is it a question about your maximum
#
impact in society, you know, given the skills that you have, or what, you know, so if you now
#
go back and in retrospect, look at the story of your life as it were, the story you told yourself
#
about who you are. What was that right question? You know, I mean, again, you know, I think it's
#
very easy to rationalize these things after the fact, right? And, you know, you can take the arc
#
of anyone's career and say, you know, can you retrofit every sort of logical step in that?
#
I think it's very easy to do that. And your business books are full of bullshit of that kind,
#
unfortunately, which is why they're very painful to read. I'm not sure I could rationalize it like
#
that, right? What I found is that I've worked on the opportunity that's in front of me,
#
right? Rather plan out my career in the long term and say, you know, I want to achieve,
#
you know, the following sets of things. I've not had that. My question is,
#
am I working on something that I find interesting today?
#
And what can I do with it? That's been my entire philosophy in life, right? And the reality is,
#
you know, if you search hard enough, there are opportunities everywhere.
#
Again, you know, you've mentioned the oyster card a few times, you know, we'll talk about
#
how that led to the invention of contactless payments, right? You could put your feet up and
#
say, well, the oyster card system is wonderful. It would have been very easy to have a nice,
#
relaxed life. But I wasn't one of them. So I think the point here is that, look, you know,
#
we are all blessed with opportunities that are put in front of us. And frankly, if you go to
#
IITs and opportunities are not being put in front of you, then there's something fundamentally wrong.
#
You know, we are blessed with opportunities that are put in front of us. The question is,
#
what can you do with it? And again, I don't want to sound pompous because
#
I look back at my career and say, you know, these things are things that I feel very proud
#
of in terms of the impact that they've had. But they've all been because I've just worked
#
on the problems that are in front of me. Is it the case that once you realize that,
#
you know, through serendipity, you stumbled upon, you know, doing this thing that you suddenly
#
realize has impact on scale and an impact at scale that if you're working for a company,
#
you're doing other stuff with the company is very hard to achieve. But if you work
#
at the level of a state, then a minor intervention can make a major difference to the lives of
#
millions of people. So was that like a drug? Like, was that the thinking that then drove
#
you towards public policy? I think impact is definitely part of it. You know, you know,
#
whether I realized that at the point where I was working on this or not, I don't know.
#
But after the fact, I realized that the impact, the potential for impact was something that drove
#
me, right? And I've gone and searched for that in other things that I've done since then.
#
You know, at the end of the day, you know, I mean, I've mentioned this several times now,
#
you know, I feel proud of the privilege that I've had and you want to make something of it.
#
You know, it would be very easy to make a nice, easy living, nice, comfortable life.
#
You know, my education and everything would provide that to me fairly easily.
#
But I think there's a degree of restlessness in the mind that doesn't allow that to happen.
#
So, you know, and now you decide to, you know, go to Harvard Kennedy School, study public policy in
#
detail. What was that step like? Like within this company, I am guessing you must at this point have
#
been regarded as a young Turk, as a bright young talent. And, you know, you could just have
#
basked in the comfort of that and coasted along with that. And I'm guessing you would
#
have been relatively brilliant within this company as well, though you would no doubt be too modest
#
to say such a thing. But then you go to Harvard Kennedy School and all of that. So
#
what is it that you are trying to become at this point?
#
Look, again, the experience of Hyderabad was instructive to me. And that's what drove me
#
towards public policy rather than going to a business school, which is what many of my
#
contemporaries were doing. While I started trying to study anything in particular, I don't know,
#
because, you know, I mean, I'd done my research sitting in the library. What I found is that
#
I was particularly interested in the interface between business and government, right? Which,
#
sadly, you know, it's an area that needs to be studied in a more structured manner.
#
You know, there's a whole discipline in the US that studies this, less so in India. But the reality
#
is that that interface is where a lot of work gets done, right? So that was what I found
#
fascinating. And, you know, that was basically coming out of my very brief experience in Hyderabad.
#
Beyond that, did I know very much about it? No, right? And the striking thing, Amit, is that
#
compared to going to IIT, where, you know, my sister's been there, my brother's been there,
#
the whole bloody neighborhood has been there, right? I knew no one who'd been to Harvard,
#
right? So this was all purely out of research. And so I'd done all this research and kind of
#
narrowed down into what I wanted to study. And I narrowed down the fact that there was the
#
Kennedy School at Harvard, which actually offered what I wanted, but not with any kind of direct
#
knowledge, right? So I applied and, rather to my surprise, got accepted, right? And, you know,
#
that was quite a day. It was quite a day for me. So, you know, I arrived in Cambridge, you know,
#
with no knowledge of where I was actually really going apart from the name and everything else. I
#
had no idea where I was going. And I found the environment to be very eye-opening in so many
#
different ways, right? Eye-opening in terms of an education outside of engineering, which, by the
#
way, you could get in many other places as well. You know, studying economics for the first time,
#
really, properly, but not just economics, you know, studying sociology, studying, you know,
#
political science, you know, the point that I've made earlier about problems getting solved in a
#
multidisciplinary manner. This is where I learned all of that. But also, I think, exposure to ideas.
#
That was a very big part of it. You know, Harvard still has this incredible program of lectures,
#
right? There's something called the Forum at the Kennedy School, which is where the lectures used
#
to happen. Absolutely incredible place. The first lecture that I went to, this is just before classes
#
started, was with the Dalai Lama. So that's the caliber of people, you know, so the Dalai Lama,
#
the place was absolutely chock-a-block full, right? That was the first lecture that I heard.
#
A month later, this is October of 1995, there are two lectures that had been set up in the Forum,
#
the first of which didn't happen because the person who was supposed to lecture got assassinated
#
towards Yitzhak Rabin. So he was supposed to be at Harvard on like a Wednesday or something.
#
And it was the previous week that he got assassinated. Of course, he didn't show up.
#
Two weeks later, so the two had been set up together. So it was Rabin and then two weeks
#
later, Yasser Arafat. So Arafat did show up and the security presence around the place was
#
bewildering. But you know, the tradition at Harvard is people come in and then you get the
#
right to ask them questions. And the questions are not filtered. You really get to ask them
#
anything you want. And people get asked very uncomfortable questions, by the way, right?
#
And Arafat got asked very uncomfortable questions as well about the PLO
#
charter and all that. It's a question that he probably was asked a hundred times before and
#
he knew how to answer them. But you know, there's something, look, all of these things are available
#
on YouTube today. You can go and listen to all of these people, but there's something about
#
their presence, which is not replicable on YouTube. The fact that you can sit in front
#
of them, you can look them in the eye, or at least you can look at them in person.
#
You know, you can listen to them in a very focused manner, which unfortunately you can try as hard
#
as you want with YouTube. You'll never get that replicated. And the fact that you can ask them
#
questions, or even if it's not you asking the questions, there's somebody else asking the
#
questions and see how they react in real life, right? This is not a made-up thing. This is not
#
an engineered thing. It's none of that. You know, it's happening in real time. You know,
#
one of my best examples of this, it really is a fascinating story, right? So in 1997,
#
Al Gore was speaking at the Kennedy School. This is probably late October, 1997,
#
about five or six weeks before he went to Kyoto for the discussions on the Kyoto Protocol.
#
This is the first time Al Gore made a big speech on climate change.
#
And it's very clear the whole thing was properly thought out, properly rehearsed.
#
He had these props up that were really spectacular. This is basically the speech
#
that became his video, An Inconvenient Truth, right? And I was sitting there in the audience,
#
probably like three rows deep from him, from the front, right? And Al Gore had this reputation for
#
being very wooden, which he was. There's no doubt about it, right? There was something about him
#
that just didn't kind of register with people. But I have to tell you, the impact of that
#
presentation was quite something. I mean, at this point, I had been following climate science. So
#
it's not that anything that he was saying was new to me, right? But the whole dramatic presentation
#
around it was quite something. So anyway, he finishes his speech and then it's time for
#
questions and answers, right? And a kid from Harvard College gets up and says,
#
you know, Vice President Gore, as you know, President Jiang Zemin of China is visiting
#
the US this week. And he'll be speaking at Harvard in two days' time. You were once a student
#
at Harvard. If you were a student today and you had a chance to ask President Jiang a question,
#
what would it be? I thought, wow, brilliant question. And, you know, because I was only
#
about three rows deep from the front, I could see the beats of perspiration on Al Gore's forehead,
#
right? And his umming and eyeing, it was deeply uncomfortable. You know, this went on for
#
what felt like forever. It may only have been about 30 seconds, right? But it just felt like
#
that pause was like a pall of gloom had descended upon the place, right? Deeply, deeply uncomfortable.
#
But then Gore came out with one of the most brilliant answers I've ever heard in my life.
#
He said, well, as you know, President Jiang has been to the White House
#
yesterday and I've had a chance to ask him many questions. But if I was a student,
#
the question I would ask him is this, President Jiang, you have written
#
evocatively about your time in Nanking during the rape of Nanking in the 1930s.
#
Can you reflect on your own experience and sympathize with the people who protest against
#
your government? Amazing. I mean, oh my God, the place just erupted in applause.
#
Where he pulled that answer out from, I have no idea. But, Amit, I tell you, these are the moments
#
that Harvard provided. And it's impossible to engineer it any other way. And so for me,
#
you know, Harvard was about learning economics and all that stuff. It was also about these moments.
#
And these moments were, I mean, it's 1997 to today, it's almost 30 years. These moments are
#
incredibly precious. For a moment, I'm going to, you know, turn your attention away from the big
#
problem that you worked on all your life so well, which is urbanization and talk for a moment about
#
education. Like, you know, this is not something that you would see happen in any Indian institution.
#
Our ways of education are just moribund. As Kartik Moolidharan once put it in an episode with me,
#
our system of education is meant for filtering and not for actually teaching, not for actually
#
educating. And what is, you know, if you were to sort of construct a university from the top
#
down in India or, you know, how can this kind of change happen? Is it that an approach like this
#
would simply not work in India because of the way people are almost, people internalize bad
#
habits of learning by the time they get to the university level? Or is it that, you know, there
#
can be change in this? Because to me, what strikes me is that most of the things we learn in a static
#
way are going to make us redundant in 10 years' time because the world is changing so fast.
#
The critical skill is learning how to learn, you know, with factors like critical thinking,
#
numeracy, all of those thrown in. And our universities don't teach us that at all.
#
You know, it's a very interesting point. I'm not sure how we've ended up in this state, right?
#
Because, you know, if you read the Upanishads, for example, the beauty of the Upanishads is that
#
almost literally they mean learning at the feet of the master. But all of them are dialogues
#
between a teacher and a student. And the dialogues are profound, you know.
#
If you read the sort of debates between master and son about what's the nature of existence,
#
and the master's asking the student and the student's asking the master,
#
and there's a debate going on. On one side, you know, we have
#
at least some memory of something of that kind. And then we have a system of education today,
#
which is about conformism. This is what the book says. Here's your model answer.
#
Here's what you need to write in the exam. That's how you get your results and all that.
#
And the entire system of education has got caught up in this system of conformism.
#
What I don't think is happening is a systematic effort to teach students how to ask questions.
#
And in fact, you know, many years after Harvard, Harvard wrote a case study on me,
#
so as part of the case program. And my mentor at Harvard, Richard Zekhauser,
#
who was a wonderful, wonderful man, one of the brightest people I've ever come across in my life,
#
he came to London to interview me. And remember, one of the questions he asked me is, you know,
#
what was your kind of impression coming into Harvard? And what did Harvard provide to you?
#
And you could ask the same question about IIT, you could ask the same question about
#
any period of my life. You know, so it's not a question about, I mean, he was asking from
#
his perspective for an obvious reason. My answer to that question is that having been to IIT,
#
you know, I mean, there's a sense that you're bright. But what Harvard taught me is how to
#
ask the question, not how to answer the question, but how to ask the question, how to recognize,
#
you know, what the issue is in the vast sort of complexity of the world that you face.
#
You know, there's a contrast here between, you know, a joint entrance exam in the IIT,
#
which is, you know, here's a problem set, and you're being measured on getting the right answer,
#
but also getting it fast, right? So you're entirely drilled into how to answer this problem set in
#
three hours, right? And the entire system of education at IIT, I don't want to sort of
#
diminish it by any means, but the whole system is geared towards something of that kind, right?
#
The exams are all about, here's a problem, crack it. The whole education at Harvard was very
#
different, which is how do you recognize what the issue is? And in real life, nobody gives you a
#
problem set. In real life, the whole challenge is you see the complexity of the world around you,
#
how do you unpick it to get to the root of the problem, right? And I think our universities are
#
failing us miserably in that regard. They're not creating that environment in which people are
#
being taught to ask the right questions. They're not creating the environment for continuous
#
learning, and they're not creating safe spaces to say things that are unpalatable, right?
#
So the conformism comes in many ways, but the lack of space, the lack of the ability to question
#
things, the lack of the ability to say there are actually five different answers to this question,
#
and we don't know which one's the right answer. And it's only through the process of debate
#
that you can arrive at the right answer. And the reality of, again, this is my experience
#
of Harvard, when you arrive there as somebody who's been bent on engineering, right? And you
#
go to a course of ethics, where are the equations? There are no equations. I'm totally lost at this
#
point. But that is what a lot of life is about. Life doesn't come in neatly structured laws of
#
physics. It comes in a more complicated environment from which you have to unpick the right issues.
#
And I think our universities are failing us very badly in that regard.
#
And part of the reason our system is like this, I think is a colonial legacy of where
#
the whole purpose was to churn out workers for the British Empire and
#
babus for the British Empire. And that set a kind of part dependence and other ways
#
sort of faded away once that system became ossified. You mentioned that at Harvard Kennedy
#
School, it was eye-opening for you in various different ways you pointed out. Tell me about
#
some of them. Tell me about some of the big ideas that influence you, maybe the big thinkers that
#
began to influence you. What were the ways in which your way of looking at the world changed?
#
So I think the lecture series that I talked about, absolutely incredible. And we were
#
absolutely spoiled for choice to the point where one evening I'd been working late,
#
I was tired, I was coming out of the school. I saw in the forum there was a lecture going on.
#
I didn't know who it was. So up from the atrium, I was looking down. It's Gerald Ford who's speaking
#
and I was like, I don't have time for this. And I walked off. And I now think back at saying,
#
this is the former president of the US who was speaking there. I didn't have time for it. So
#
we were definitely spoiled for choice. That's one very big part of it. The second is that
#
whether people like it or not, some of the faculty, maybe not all, but some of the faculty
#
are definitely unusual. And you learn from them in ways that I find very enriching even today.
#
Their way of thinking, their way of cutting through issues, their way of
#
of boiling down profound issues into something very simple. My mentor, Richard Zachauser,
#
was known as one of these sort of superb thinkers. Anyone who's been to the Kennedy
#
school will know who he is. So I took his course in my first year, which was a bit unusual because
#
people used to usually take it in their second year. I became his teaching fellow and then he
#
was on a sabbatical and he put me on the faculty. So I taught his course for a year. So I did a
#
year of teaching at Harvard as well. But his method of thinking has had a huge influence on me,
#
others as well. So there's a professor called Tony Gomez Ibanez who's now retired,
#
one of the foremost gurus on transportation and urbanization. I never took a course with him,
#
but huge influence. And again, one of these people who's, he's the only person at the Kennedy
#
school who won a teaching award twice. And it's only by interacting with him that you realize
#
how it is that somebody once been surprised twice. Because the clarity of his communication
#
as a teacher, I still look back at it and say, if I could emulate any of it,
#
that would make me a better person. So you're learning sort of in multiple dimensions here.
#
A university library system that is absolutely vast gives you access to information and knowledge
#
in ways that are quite amazing. Because most university libraries are sort of very narrow
#
and sort of focused on particularly, yeah, we have access to anything you wanted. That was a
#
big part of it. My fellow students, the Kennedy school is very unusual in that it brings students
#
from many different backgrounds. And when people graduate, they go on to many different things as
#
well. So it's very different from a business school in that regard, right? Where business
#
school output is very sort of focused towards banking and consulting. That wasn't like the
#
Kennedy school. So people who came with very different interests. And so the nature of
#
conversations even over lunch were very enriching because you learn from other people's perspectives
#
and interests. So those are all sort of good things. And some of the ideas
#
that I was being exposed to were profound. So let me give you one example of this.
#
So when I started doing my PhD, again, not being an economist by training,
#
not being in the economics department, but focused on economics, you're sort of struggling
#
to figure out what anchors you want to find. So I had to choose a few courses. And after having
#
done a bit of research, there's a course called contract theory, which I took and I struggled
#
through the course, I have to say. I did pass, but I struggled through the course. There's this
#
wonderful professor called Oliver Hart, who basically in his entire life has done nothing
#
apart from contract theory. He's focused on this very narrow area. And basically,
#
let me explain what it means. His very simple idea was that every contract is by definition
#
incomplete because it is not worth anyone's time to write a full contract.
#
So his point was, I teach, you study, there's a contract between us, there's a contract with
#
the university, and at the end of the term, I've got to grade you. Now, why do I have to grade you?
#
Because that's the mechanism by which the university figures out whether we've actually
#
fulfilled our contract. But the way of grading is that there's an exam at the end. That's all kind
#
of understood. But what's not written down anywhere is what happens if it snows on the day of
#
the exam. Because it's not worth anyone's time. Basically, there's a system of norms and
#
institutions that we've set up around this that tells you that if these things happen,
#
something will happen to take care of it. But the fact that that contract is incomplete means that
#
you need institutions to cover things up. Now, he's taken that theory and extended it into
#
all kinds of things. The size and shape of firms, the whole question of what gets done inside a
#
firm versus outside a firm, et cetera. I mean, there's endless extensions of this very core idea.
#
Huge formative impact on me. Because when you think about we're all engaged in things like
#
outsourcing, what things should you outsource and what things should you not outsource?
#
Well, if you follow the logic, this is a profound piece of theory that says,
#
can you actually write a contract on it? If you can, then you can outsource it. And if you can't,
#
you don't outsource it. You keep it within the boundaries of the firm.
#
Now, what do I say? It has had an impact on my work. But I'll tell you the first point at which
#
I ended up having a really heated debate on this. So 2001, I was having a debate with my colleagues
#
at McKinsey about Enron. So Enron had this thing called the asset light model. And I was saying,
#
this thing doesn't work. If you believe Oliver Hart, this idea that I make the money, but you
#
own the assets, how do you contract for it? And Enron was the poster child of its days with the
#
asset light model and all that. Without providing any fundamental basis for how you're solving that
#
contractual breakdown, there was this belief that that model works. Six months later,
#
the thing was bust. And I remember not when it went bust, but I remember giving to my colleagues
#
Oliver Hart's book. I said, read this. Which book? It's a book called Firms, Contracts,
#
and Financial Structure. So it's about 150, 200 pages. It's basically a series of lectures
#
encoded into a book. Very short book, but profound impact. And what I found at Harvard,
#
and this is different from what I found at IIT, is the exposure to big ideas of this kind.
#
And not just to big ideas, but to the people who were coming up with these ideas. So these are not
#
ancient ideas that were encoded by Newton or whatever. These are contemporary thinkers
#
who were thinking in very fundamental ways about the nature of business, the nature of commerce,
#
the nature of economics, the nature of society. And it's a deeply enriching experience.
#
So I'm going to double click on this with a broader question. Something that I often wonder
#
about and a trade-off that many of my guests also have dealt with and thought about is the trade-off
#
between going broad and going deep. So one thing you can do is you can hyper-specialize in a
#
particular subject like Oliver Hart and contract theory and do basically nothing else but hyper-
#
specialize in that. And the danger there sometimes is that if you just have that one hammer for every
#
nail, you don't have the benefit of seeing a bigger picture. And on the other hand,
#
you can be a big picture person, multidisciplinary, a renaissance man as it were, but the danger is
#
that you could be lacking in the details. And always I think that the great thinkers or great
#
academics maintain that fine balance where they have that deep knowledge in one or two subjects,
#
but they also have the broader lens to bear. And I guess an added nuance to it is that even when
#
someone like Oliver Hart is hyper-specializing in one particular thing, that particular thing
#
offers him a frame with which he can look at everything else in the world and that sheds light
#
on it. So I want to ask you about how you deal with the trade-offs between broad and wide. And
#
just as you've described, like one particular frame which you brought to bear and like the
#
Endron example, as you said, to be able to evaluate that, what are the other key big frames for you?
#
The first thing to say is Oliver Hart got the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2016.
#
So specializing in one thing certainly got recognized in his case. My mentor, Richard
#
Zeckhauser, has not won the Nobel Prize and probably will not because he's one of these
#
polyglots who's written papers on all kinds of stuff, never specialized in one thing.
#
And if I contrast the two of them, I've learned from both and not just learned from them, but
#
learned how from them. So there is some merit in depth and there's some merit in being
#
multi-dimensional. I think another thing that I learned at Harvard is to have a broad toolkit.
#
This is the sort of old adage, if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I mean,
#
there is some truth to that. Having a broad toolkit, which you can then apply selectively
#
by recognizing the problem that you're trying to deal with, I think is a fairly important point
#
in life. So on one side, the economics and hard-core econometric methods that were taught
#
are important. But again, I've had this debate with friends and family about research methods.
#
When I was doing my PhD, we had a whole course on research methods. And one of them was about
#
how do you look at data? Now, if you talk to people who come from, for example, the pharmaceuticals
#
world, their world is entirely about double-blind testing. It's almost like data means double-blind
#
testing. And that's not true. Double-blind testing is not the only way of dealing with life.
#
If you talk to many economists, not all, but many economists, econometric analysis with regression
#
analysis and all that is the way they do things. If you talk to an anthropologist,
#
very often they're dealing with a data set of one. If you go off into the Amazon and you try
#
and study a tribe, the reality is you're studying a data set of one. The case method becomes very
#
important over there. And it was emphasized severely that actually there's legitimacy to
#
each of these methods of analysis. Where it's not legitimate is if you're trying to use the wrong
#
toolkit for the problem that you're dealing with. You can't take something where you have vast
#
amounts of data available. You can't start applying a case study and pick the wrong example and say,
#
well, that applies to everything else. And equally, you have to be very careful
#
when you're taking the anthropologist's one case study because it may not extend to every other
#
problem that you're trying to solve, but it provides you with some depth of analysis on that
#
one problem. And if you look at the whole Harvard case study method, what are they trying to do?
#
Each case study is like one data point, and they put these things together and say,
#
well, what picture emerges from all of this? So I think it's important. And again, this is a big
#
learning from Harvard, which you would never get in an engineering school because the methods
#
are different. But the whole question of thinking appropriately to the nature of the problem you're
#
trying to solve is important. And what were the kind of problems that intrigued you at this point
#
in time? What I'm imagining is from your time in Hyderabad and the whole high-tech city thing is
#
perhaps the excitement of realizing that thinking in a particular way about a problem,
#
getting to the root of it, asking the right questions can help you do something impactful,
#
but that is still very general. But as you come here and you expand your toolkit, as it were,
#
you learn different ways to think about stuff. But personally, for you, what are the problems that
#
if at that time, say 1998 or 99, you were told that you can spend the rest of your life working
#
on one problem, what would you have picked? So interestingly, my PhD was on the design of
#
markets for electricity, which was a very hot topic back in those days. It's an area where
#
the research work has fizzled out. A lot of the research developments were done in the 1990s. A
#
lot of investment into creating electricity markets happened in the 1990s. The theoretical
#
development kind of stopped in the early 2000s. But it was a very hot topic back then. My PhD was,
#
which I never finished, by the way, my PhD was on the design of markets for hydroelectricity,
#
where there's a very peculiar problem that had to be dealt with. What drew me to that was that was
#
one, it was a hot debate at that time, and two, it had a material bearing on people's lives.
#
Especially coming from India, the whole question of what you do with the electricity industry
#
was a very live topic back in the 1990s, especially in the aftermath of Enron in India.
#
By the way, I wrote a whole case study on Enron when I was at the Kennedy School as well.
#
That's what attracted me because my view was that you could make a difference to people's lives
#
if these markets were organized properly. Now, the reality is that, and as I said,
#
the whole research work in that area, it's still going on, but the big advances were made in that
#
period. What has happened since then has not been as impactful. What's happened in India is that
#
we do have a market for electricity of a kind, but the problems are further downstream
#
and the problems are endemic. The problems were known in the 1990s. They're still around.
#
It's not an economics problem alone. There's a whole question of political economy of electricity
#
and all that, where life gets very difficult. Actually, the beauty of the education that I
#
was getting is that I was appreciating these things back then as well. The problem is
#
not just at the generating layer, it's actually further down in the distribution layer.
#
Whole access to energy and the whole equity around access to energy and all that are very
#
material factors. In the YouTube show I do with Ajay Shah, our 40th episode, which I'd be keen
#
for you to watch and give your opinion on, is called The Brave New Future of Electricity. It
#
is about exactly this sort of subject. Ajay has studied it a lot and understands the political
#
economy as well. That's an interesting deep dive there. What happens at this point in time,
#
after you're done with your education, you come to London, you're working in McKinsey and all of
#
that. What is now your vision of yourself? Why McKinsey? What are the kind of areas that you
#
want to work in? What's happening here? I got a job with McKinsey when I was doing my masters,
#
at which point I didn't know whether I was going to be accepted into the PhD program or not.
#
I got accepted. McKinsey thankfully waited for me for two and a half years.
#
One was I had to go and earn a bit of money. I mean, Harvard education is not cheap,
#
so I had to earn a bit of money. That was important. But also the small town kid,
#
the aura of a big firm, especially one with reputation and all that was important.
#
In hindsight, actually the best part of McKinsey was the training.
#
Forget about everything else at McKinsey, the training they provide is exemplary. That's what
#
I took away from McKinsey. The usual drill at McKinsey is that you don't join with a
#
speciality. You're joining as an associate, you get kind of moved around different industries.
#
I had the usual sort of rattling around heavy industries to mining, to banking and all that
#
stuff. What I found is that it's a great environment. Again, a lot of bright people.
#
It's not always a great environment. There's a lot of very frustrating work at McKinsey as well.
#
There are days when I enjoyed going to work and there are days when I didn't enjoy going to work.
#
The lifestyle is punishing. You can't really have much of a life outside the firm. It's demanding
#
in that respect. It's all great if you're single and you don't have any attachments. It just gets
#
progressively harder as life goes on. There are people, of course, who survive and thrive in that
#
kind of environment. For me, that was a challenge. But more importantly, if you read The Economist
#
from last week, consulting firms are going through a cycle of this kind again. The dot-com bust was
#
not great for the consulting firms. The whole kind of culture of the place had changed to the point
#
where it wasn't quite what I had envisioned when I joined. Very neatly, I got an off-ramp because
#
somebody I knew from my hardwood days had moved to London and was managing director at Transport
#
for London, which was a new entity that had just been created. I thought, hey, look, we can go and
#
have some fun over there. After having spent three years at McKinsey and having enjoyed my time there
#
and all that, I said, time to move on. That was my switch to Transport for London. I had never
#
imagined that 22 years later, I would still be there. I have accomplished so much as well in that
#
time. We'll talk about Transport for London after the break, but before that, I want to ask you
#
another broader question, not just about your McKinsey years, but just a broader question in
#
general, which is that I had lunch the other day with a friend of mine who runs a big consultancy
#
here. We were talking about what is the dharma of a consultant, and he considers himself to have a
#
larger sense of purpose and all of that. What I've observed as I look across so many professions
#
is that at one level, you could ask questions about what is your dharma? I mean it in a sense,
#
larger than duty in a sense, that what is my sense of purpose in this profession? It is easy to talk
#
about that, say, with respect to doctors or with respect to journalists. You have the Hippocratic
#
oath and you have, you know, whatever higher cause journalists may believe in, you know, comforting
#
the afflicted, afflicting the comfortable, etc., etc., all those cliches. But I also worry about
#
whether in every profession, there is a sliver of people who feel that there is a higher purpose
#
in that profession, but the vast majority of people are ticking boxes and they don't really
#
care. And that there is really no correlation between brightness and purpose here. You know,
#
the brightest people can tick boxes and keep going ahead in their careers and not really care.
#
There will be a sliver of people somewhere who will feel that, right, that this is what I'm doing
#
is an instrumental aim, that there is a terminal goal that is beyond this, sort of to say. So one,
#
what is your observation from wherever you have been and a place like McKinsey, for example,
#
that what percentage of the people had some sense of higher sense of purpose when,
#
you know, that this means something. It is not just about earning a great salary. And for you,
#
personally. Look, I mean, I don't want to sound dismissive, you know, and I will come across as
#
a bit dismissive, right? But I think, you know, we need to kind of deconstruct this a little bit,
#
right? If you're a private company, at the end of the day, your first objective is to make money.
#
Very few people acknowledge it. But you can't lose sight of the fact that that is your first
#
objective, right? And anything that conflicts with that, at least in the long term, anything
#
that conflicts with that is secondary. So, you know, you hear all these lofty ideas about,
#
you know, we're here to care for this, that and the other. You can't lose sight of the fact that
#
you're driven by a commercial motive at the end of it. And this is one where the public sector is
#
markedly different from the private sector. In fact, this is the point that I make all the time,
#
right? That in the private sector, you know, frankly, your scorecard may consist of many
#
things, but there is one thing that trumps everything else, which is your ability to make
#
money, right? And that's the one thing that doesn't exist in the public sector. So, your
#
scorecard, your objective function, in some respects, is more complicated. It consists of
#
more variables. And it consists of variables that are often conflicting with each other.
#
So, you can't lose sight of the fact that there is that fundamental distinction between the public
#
and the private. In the public sector, I think it is easier to have these lofty goals
#
because you are kind of absorbed of the burden of having that commercial motive, right? In the
#
private sector, you know, consulting firms will always tell you client comes first and all that
#
stuff. And to an extent, they believe it, but there's something that comes ahead of the client,
#
which is your ability to make money, right? And my problem is, you know, that actually a bit of
#
honesty about that would go a long distance. And the fact that people kind of try to purposely
#
obfuscate around it is not great. Let me both agree and push back in a way, like one, of course,
#
I agree that incentives play a part and in the private sector, you have to make money,
#
but equally, I would say one in the public sector, the incentives are so terrible that,
#
especially when I look at India, that it is pretty obvious to me that the entire public sector is
#
utterly dysfunctional in India. And that's, I think, a big part of the problem. And as far
#
as the private sector is concerned, I'd say two things. One, I think the incentive to make money
#
in a free market is a great incentive because the only way you make money is actually by making
#
somebody better off. It's a positive sum game. So the pursuit of profit is a noble motive. And
#
again, I'll clarify in a free market, not necessarily in a cronyist kind of system.
#
And the second thing is, even within that, there can be a higher sense that guides what you do,
#
even if you want to make money. For example, I'll just quickly take my own example and say that,
#
look, I could have made a lot of money with this podcast if I took it in another direction,
#
especially with my existing base. But instead, I have chosen to do the kind of things I do,
#
because there are certain values of what kind of work I want to do. And I can think of easy
#
examples, like say there are some doctors, like I had a great doctor on the show,
#
Lancelot Pinto, I think you've met him. And we did an episode together where he spoke about how
#
other doctors will, you know, tell their patients to go, go do 100 irrelevant tests because they
#
are getting a cut and during COVID, they would overprescribe and all of that. And his thing is,
#
no, his focus is on what is good for you specifically, if I say no more tests and
#
you don't need to do the test. And it pays off in the long run, because Lancelot is one of the
#
most successful and trusted doctors in his field. Similarly, I can imagine that a lawyer would
#
always be incentivized to tell his client that oh, you lost this case, please appeal.
#
But there are some lawyers who will never do that. There is something beyond that.
#
So let's be clear, you know, I'm not trying to create a communist utopia here, right?
#
The profit motive is not a bad motive, right? It's so fundamental to the human nature that
#
it's not something that we should look down upon. And I will certainly not be one to look down upon
#
it. I'm just asking for a bit of honesty, right? That, you know, we should put every other motive
#
in that perspective. And the fact that some of these broader issues of ethics, of good practice,
#
of being respectful of the society in which you live, being respectful of the communities you
#
serve, these are all eventually determinants of success and actually determinants of your
#
core motive. You know, these things can do not need to be in conflict with each other, right?
#
They can be, but they don't need to be. And I think this is the sort of difference between
#
good business and bad business. I'm not trying to make that point at all. I think the distinction
#
that I'm making between the public and the private is that in the public sector, that lack of
#
a single defining motive makes life much harder because it's harder to define what you're chasing,
#
right? Especially when there are conflicting objectives for which you're responsible.
#
You know, I won't finish emphasizing this enough. It is much harder not having that clarity of
#
objective. So where were you on clarity? Like, you know, you were in McKinsey, you said this
#
opportunity came up, this looked interesting. But if you had to at this point in time, like we agreed
#
earlier that you cannot define purpose when you're younger, when you're too young. But at this point
#
in time, was there a gradual sense of purpose? And was there a sense for you that this job
#
could give you a chance to do more purposeful things and make more of an impact than perhaps
#
at McKinsey? Absolutely. I mean, that was the basis on which the job became attractive to me.
#
My boss at that time, Jay Walder, who's a well-known person in the world of public
#
transport, he left TFL, actually went to McKinsey for a brief time, but became
#
chief exec of the Hong Kong MTR, became chairman of the New York MTA. You know,
#
he's had an illustrious career and a huge influence on me as well. Absolutely enormous
#
influence as a deep thinker and everything else. You know, when I met him, when he talked about
#
what I could do at TFL, the range of things he was talking about were exactly the sort of things
#
that I found exciting. Right? And remember, you know, public policy had become by this time,
#
a core interest for me. So the fact that I was getting an opportunity to do some real things,
#
not sort of sit and commentate from the sidelines, but actually to get my hands dirty with it,
#
was a truly exciting opportunity for me. Now, did I know what I would make of it? Absolutely not.
#
Frankly, no point pretending that. Absolutely not. But the fact that there was a canvas that was
#
open was exciting. Super exciting to me as well. I'm waiting to dive deep into this,
#
but we'll take a quick break first, have some lunch and then we'll come back. Sure.
#
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I can help you. Welcome back to The Scene in the Unseen. I'm
#
still chatting with Shashi Verma about his fascinating life and his fascinating work.
#
Before we get to talking about urbanization and your time at DFL, during lunch you said something
#
really interesting about how you had an opportunity to be an academic that you could
#
have been a part of Howard's faculty and they really wanted you. The reason you didn't is that
#
you didn't feel it was for you because people there have to churn out four papers a year and
#
you were like, man, that's too insane a pace. That got me to think about how the structure of
#
one's work, which in this case comes from what is demanded of you by the requirement of the job
#
itself, can then shape the kind of thinking and the work you do. I imagine if I had to produce
#
the equivalent of four papers a year, I would produce mediocre shit because it takes me more
#
time, I would imagine, to do more meaningful work if I was in that thing. It is almost a structure
#
that creates a certain kind of work. Of course, within academia, there are all kinds of incentives
#
which A, drive you into silos, B, they make you follow academic fashions so that in the end,
#
you're talking only to yourself and you have no connection with the real world, a common
#
trope I keep going on and on about on the show. What is your sense of that? Is it something that
#
you thought about coldly at the time in terms of because you would then be a different person if
#
you were an academic for 10 years as opposed to what you actually did. Is it something that is
#
visible in hindsight as it is to someone like me when I look back on all the things I could have
#
done and all the different people I could have been or is it something that you felt even then
#
that I want to choose a way of living that allows me to do a particular kind of work?
#
Well, on this one, I think I can claim with some honesty that actually this was not hindsight.
#
I realized at that time that I was not cut out for it and that the pace and the quality of research
#
that was demanded was not something that I could keep up with. That was a real moment of
#
personal realization. Part of it is looking at some of the great minds that I was working with
#
who were churning out that quantity and quality of research work. But the reality is that most
#
people were not. There are two critiques that are made of the academia in the West all the time.
#
One is that this rat race to produce more and more research has resulted in the quality of
#
research being very poor. The quality of academic journals is often criticized for being less
#
meaningful than it used to be. There's a lot of truth in that. Of course, incredible minds
#
producing incredible research work. But when you look at the mass of the academia, the idea
#
that it's all of that quality is very questionable. So that's, I think, one critique that's made of
#
them. The second critique that's made of them is that they've created an ecosystem where they're
#
only talking to themselves and not engaging with the real things in life. Now, to an extent,
#
philosophers are philosophers and they engage in philosophy, which is kind of distant from popular
#
consumption. But there is a very large element of where the academia has got disjointed from
#
their real life. And I think these are both critiques that I'm making. These are not my
#
critiques. These are commonly made critiques that are often true. In my case, I realized
#
that there was a benchmark that I had to meet to be on the faculty and to be on the tenure
#
track at Harvard and all that, that I would never meet. And that if I went down that path,
#
it would end in frustration. And that was a very clear sign to me that actually that was
#
not a career that I was ever going to be successful in. And despite the great honor
#
that being on the faculty at Harvard would mean, I realized that was not something that I wanted to
#
do. My sense is that you're a practitioner who's done deep reading and all the rigor of an academic,
#
but a practitioner. And my next question to you then is that when you look at academic work that
#
comes out of people doing urban studies or studying urbanization or the areas that you
#
worked in, do you find them lacking? There is some good work, but not a huge amount.
#
Let's be clear. When you look at seminal advances in thinking about urbanization,
#
they don't happen very often. And in fact, in the whole field of urbanization and transport,
#
you can actually count it out. There's only a few papers of that quality that have ever come around.
#
That's not to suggest that you need to come up with a seminal idea all the time. The application
#
of those seminal ideas in ways that are interesting is also very important. That's the life of a
#
practitioner. But my problem is that there is a phenomenal amount of research being pumped out,
#
which is not just meaningless because meaningless would be one thing.
#
It's in a world of make-belief. That's my bigger problem. They're trying to solve for problems and
#
they're coming up with solutions. And I look at them and say, what made you think that that's the
#
way the world works? That's my bigger problem of the disconnect between the academia and the world
#
of practitioners. And by the way, the critique should go the other way as well, that practitioners
#
are often not looking at real high-quality work that's going on in academia, which in many cases
#
is probing at issues that have not been probed in the practical world
#
and coming up with insights that are of deep meaning to the practical world but are being
#
ignored completely. Give me a sort of a potted understanding of how cities emerge in the history
#
of urbanization. And part of the reason I ask this is that something that I've been thinking
#
about recently and that I find very fascinating is that many of us, when we look at governance,
#
we assume that there is a nation-state and a subset of that is a city and the city governance.
#
And actually, the two of these have evolved completely differently, if I look back a little
#
bit, because cities are almost a spontaneous evolution, whether it's coming out of agricultural
#
surplus or whatever. It's people coming together, forming denser economic networks for
#
mutual benefit. And then the question comes, how do we govern a city? And all of that emerges,
#
in a bottom-up kind of sense, whereas the evolution of nation-states is almost like a separate path.
#
And then at some level, you find yourself in a situation where we do, where the city governance
#
is a subset of what the nation-state is. And in a place like India, where power is so centralized
#
and there is practically no power at the city level for a city government, and it's incredibly
#
dysfunctional to the extent that the incentives of those who run our cities are actually to not
#
care about the city, but instead care about vote banks, like in Maharashtra, for example, in the
#
rural hinterland. But leaving all of that aside, that is a current situation, but leaving all of
#
that aside, take me back in history and give me a sense, as if I'm a complete beginner, of how cities
#
evolved to begin with, what do we know about them and so on. So you've said quite a lot of things,
#
and I think we need to unpack these like step by step. So the first thing to say is that when you
#
look at academic work that's been done, there is a preponderance of work that's been done on
#
Mesopotamia. That's where the whole process of urbanization has been documented most comprehensively.
#
There is research in other parts of the world, but nothing that compares to the depth of the
#
research in Mesopotamia. What the comparative research in other areas says is that actually
#
the process of urbanization has similarities, but has followed a slightly different path in
#
other places. And before you get to urbanization, you have to think about what is the process by
#
which people got settled? Because historically, humans were nomadic hunter-gatherers, and the
#
process of settlement required something to happen. Something had to anchor them to the land.
#
That process of anchoring, interestingly, happens for very strange reasons. In fact,
#
some of the earliest anchoring happens in Japan, not because they had agriculture.
#
Agriculture is usually assumed as the way in which people got anchored to land and got settled.
#
But one of the great markers of settled civilizations is pottery. Because if you're
#
a hunter-gatherer, carrying pots and pans around with you is very cumbersome. So typically when
#
you see pottery, it's a sign of a settled civilization. So the oldest pottery in the
#
world interestingly comes from Japan, not from Mesopotamia. There's something called the Jomon
#
culture in Japan, which goes back to 15,000, 18,000 years ago. So there's Jomon pottery,
#
and vast quantities of it, by the way, that have been discovered. Jomon means a rope.
#
So this is basically something where clay was tied in a rope vicar basket and then baked,
#
where the rope would just burn away. What you find on the outside of the pot is the remnants of the
#
rope marks. Interestingly, Jomon pots were found in large quantities and then glazed on the inside
#
and used in the 19th and even in the 20th century. So there's all sort of world of Jomon culture in
#
Japan. But in other places, in Mesopotamia in particular, not just in Mesopotamia, if you look
#
at the Middle East, there are various things that are happening in sort of different parts of the
#
Middle East. But the oldest settled signs of settlements come from the Natufian civilization
#
in what's today in northern Israel and Lebanon. Or if you go into southern Turkey, like where
#
the earthquake happened last year, actually impacted the zone where the earliest settlements
#
are found. So there's a site called Gobekli Tape, which is studied extensively because it shows that
#
period of transition from being hunter-gatherers to being settled in the sense that this is a place
#
where there is a sign of a semi-settled civilization where people may have gathered for a few months
#
every year and then dispersed and then come back the next year. And this process could have gone
#
on for about 2000 years. So these are very slow transitions that happened. And then further in
#
Turkey, you find other places like Çatalhöyük and others where you start to see the earliest signs
#
of permanent settlements. Çatalhöyük is very interesting in that there are no streets.
#
All the houses are joined together and all the movement happened on the rooftops.
#
Wow. And what are the walls like? Are they thin, thick?
#
Well, they're sort of mud brick walls. Mud brick walls are never thin. I mean,
#
they have to be quite bulky. Çatalhöyük survives today as an archaeological site and it's a wonderful
#
place. So people would go across that settlement on the rooftops and then climb down through ladders.
#
Wow. Very interesting place for that reason. And then you start to see bigger settlements.
#
So these are all quite small. These are a few thousand people each. You start to see
#
bigger settlements, but they're more in Iraq and sort of Eastern Syria than in Turkey. And eventually
#
through a long process, you get to what are called the first cities and the cities of Ur and Uruk
#
and Lagash. But if you compare the timeline, something like Gobekli tip is almost 10,000 years
#
ago and Ur and Uruk are about 3,500 BCE. So there's a process of over 5,000 years,
#
5,000 to 7,000 years that elapses in that evolution. Ur and Uruk, of course, are studied
#
extensively. This is also when writing starts to appear. So written records start to appear.
#
Some of the earlier written records are very basic in the sense that they are
#
mostly contractual documents. This is not literature. Literature arrives much later.
#
The oldest piece of literature in the world is something called the Epic of Gilgamesh.
#
Wonderful story. It's taught to literature students all around the world.
#
Gilgamesh is a very interesting book because it is written by city dwellers who think of the
#
city as this civilized place and everything outside the wall as this kind of wild place.
#
Gilgamesh, the king, goes off into the jungle with his friend Enkidu and comes across this
#
monster called Khumbaba. If you read it, it's giving you an image of what urban people think
#
of the rest of the world. But it's very rich as a source of, of course, a piece of literature.
#
Not everything in it may be factual, but like most contemporary literature, it's giving you
#
a sense of the world around it, even if it's imagined. So if you think of that arc of evolution,
#
what changes? If you look at tribal structures to the extent that we understand it today based on
#
modern anthropology, a tribe is usually 100 to 150 people, well studied in the context of social
#
media and everything else as well. Dunbar's number. Dunbar's number.
#
And there's a particular structure of a tribe in which there is a chief, there's a hierarchy,
#
but the distinction is the chief also works. So compared to modern societies, the chief works.
#
When you get to settle civilizations, in the very early settlements, it's quite possible that it's
#
one tribe that's settling down. But very quickly, very quickly means still thousands of years,
#
you start to see settlements with multiple tribes. And typically these are civilizations
#
of 500 to 1,000 people, so potentially five tribes. By the way, Panch, as in Panchayat and
#
all that. It's not clear whether that's a link, but there could be a link that something like
#
a council of five, because five tribes have settled together, there may be some genesis in it.
#
I'm purely speculating here, by the way. But the reason I'm making that link, what is the point
#
of a Panchayat? It's a council of elders who were there to resolve disputes that would not have been
#
resolved in the tribal structure. And this is the whole process of the series of problems that
#
urbanization has to solve. That there is a governance structure within a tribe that no
#
longer works, so you have to keep coming up with new structures. So a village council
#
that allows for disputes to be resolved is important. And the point there is that you've
#
gone from a structure in which everyone knows everyone, to one in which everyone doesn't know
#
everyone, but you're only one degree of freedom removed. Because there's this village council,
#
the elders, between the five elders, they know everyone. The next point is where cities grow to
#
5,000 or more, which is the Uruk kind of phase. By the time you got to 5,000, and these cities grew
#
to about 15 or 20,000, by the time you got to 5,000, anonymity comes in. So now you have a
#
very different problem in urbanization, which is how do you impose a structure in which
#
the next person on the street is completely unknown to you, but you don't fear being killed
#
by that person. Or I'm of course dramatizing, but there has to be a sense of security, there
#
has to be a sense of contract, there has to be a sense of rules. And this is when you start to see
#
the emergence of kingly structures, where the distinction now is that there is a hierarchy
#
in which the top of the hierarchy doesn't work. Their job is only to administer. It starts off
#
with the king, starts off with the security force, a system of administrating justice.
#
These are the very basic foundations of urbanization. And the striking thing is that
#
in one telling, I mean, of course, there are many ways of looking at this problem,
#
but in one telling, nothing much happens with urbanization from that point on until the 19th
#
century. All that's happened is that that structure has been expanded a bit more, and cities have gone
#
from being 20,000 to in some cases being as much as half a million. But nothing much has changed in
#
the way cities were governed. So if you look at from that period, if you look at even the structure
#
of Rome, for example, the basic structure of governance was no different from what it was in
#
Ur and Uruk. Now there are of course many other views. But before we get to what the modern world
#
looks like, we should also reflect upon the fact that urbanization happened in other parts of the
#
world, and they happened for very different reasons. So it's very clear from the work in
#
Mesopotamia that what drove urbanization is a huge agricultural surplus, where not everybody needed
#
to work on the land. It allowed for the agricultural surplus to be exported, imported, traded. It
#
allowed for specialization to start happening in the economy. People start spending their time on
#
writing the Epic of Gilgamesh and all these things. It stems from an agricultural surplus.
#
If you look at settlements in the Mediterranean, and I'm reading this wonderful book by Greg Wolf,
#
who's a great urban historian. Settlements in the Mediterranean happened for a very different
#
reason. If you look at whether it's Cyprus or Greece or Italy, the early settlements are all
#
in very tough environments where it's not possible to produce an agricultural surplus.
#
And people were settling and banding together to be able to ride out the rough environment
#
in which they were establishing themselves. And for the longest time, people believed that
#
urbanization started in Mesopotamia and then spread out. The modern evidence is more complicated than
#
that. It's actually telling you that urbanization happened for different reasons
#
and that the percolation of ideas may have happened both ways.
#
So there's, of course, the evidence that's been gathered in Mesopotamia. There's a lot of work
#
that's been done in Russia in why settlements happen in much harsher cold environments.
#
And of course, sitting here in India, we're all very familiar with the Indus Valley,
#
but actually there's not very much work on how urbanization happened in the Indus Valley.
#
There is some, of course. I, again, don't want to be ignorant of all of the work that's been done.
#
But it's not quite with the depth of academia that we see, for example, in Mesopotamia.
#
It's clear that the Indus Valley was also a result of agricultural surplus,
#
but there's a lot more that's not known. There are very intriguing features about the Indus Valley,
#
the lack of a hierarchy or at least a flatter hierarchy than you find in Mesopotamia,
#
the lack of the coercive power of the state. You don't find the arms and weaponry. You don't find
#
the accumulation of wealth. You don't find the big temples or the palaces.
#
These are all quite remarkable things about the Indus Valley. In fact, I have a friend who's
#
retired as a curator at the British Museum, and I was chatting with him recently,
#
and I was making the point to him that one of the great injustices in the way Indian history has
#
been written is that all of us read in school that in the Indus Valley, there must have been
#
a hierarchy because people were commissioning jewelry. And you look at Indus Valley jewelry,
#
it's beautiful, but it's carnelian beads. And so everywhere I find the thing being mentioned,
#
there must have been a hierarchy. And I say, have you looked at the pyramids?
#
You want to study hierarchy, that's what a hierarchy looks like if you can commission
#
a pyramid. The ability to commission carnelian beads is not showing you a hierarchy, it's showing
#
you a very flat structure. But the thing that gets mentioned about the Indus Valley is there must
#
have been a hierarchy because they were producing carnelian beads. So I think that's my take
#
on the early period of urbanization. And as I said, nothing much happens that's any different
#
until we arrive in the 19th century. Before we arrive in the 19th century,
#
I actually want to take a step back and I want to talk about your passion for history. Again,
#
one of the things I've realized is that the deeper you go into history, the more wide-eyed one can
#
become about the present time. Like what you just said about, you know, that settlement in
#
southern Turkey where there were no roads and people moved from the roof of their house.
#
That suddenly made me think that, okay, roads are a technology. That's basically what they are.
#
They are a technology for traveling and kind of getting by and they are perhaps a more optimal
#
use of space and rooftops are, you know, which don't scale beyond the point, I guess.
#
So tell me about how you started getting into history because none of your biography,
#
which we've discussed so far, indicates where it could have happened. Was it when you were a kid?
#
Was it when you were in college? Was it when, you know, you were in London perhaps and working
#
and looking into the history of cities and transport and thereby? So how did all of this
#
come about and what are the areas which fascinated you the most? What are the things that opened
#
your eyes in this, you know, where you suddenly look at something that's been around you forever
#
and you're like, my God, that is mind-boggling. So take me a bit through the journey of your
#
passion for history. So I used to struggle with history at school, let's be clear. I mean,
#
in fact, I think teaching history at school is a very tough job. You know, one can argue whether
#
it's taught well in India or not, but it is actually a tough job because it's quite a difficult
#
thing for people to consume, you know, unlike, to be honest, unlike maths and physics, which I think
#
is far easier to consume. History is a tough thing to consume because by the time you've
#
simplified it and boiled it down to something that's consumable by children who are
#
12, 13, 14 years old, it just becomes a bunch of facts and dates, right? And I think we all
#
recall our history as having to mug up facts and dates and kings and the list of kings and queens
#
and all that stuff. So I used to kind of, I think hate history would be too strong a word,
#
but I was definitely very indifferent to it. My interest in history really picked up when
#
I was at Harvard, right? One is having access to a good university library system and all that was
#
a big, big thing for me. But interestingly, the very early interest was in industrial history,
#
studying economics, studying the structure of industries and trying to figure out like,
#
how was it that these industries came to be what they are? And not so much about the industrial
#
revolution as such, you know, because I hadn't gotten to that at that point. And there's, you
#
know, endless amount you can talk about the industrial revolution and why it happened and
#
the way it happened. But simple things like the structure of the automotive industry or the
#
structure of the aircraft manufacturing industry and what steps did people take to get to where
#
they were? And look, you know, these things have been studied in enormous depth. There are,
#
you know, hundreds and hundreds of books that have been written on them. That is what got me
#
started, right? And I found that actually that method of thinking through history to get an
#
understanding of what the present looks like was another part of my toolkit, which was very
#
enriching. So bit by bit, you know, again, not overnight, but bit by bit, I started getting
#
more and more interested in it, you know, and fundamentally because of its explanatory power
#
on what you see around you. Let's come back to the 19th century. What changed in urbanization?
#
Why did governance structures suddenly have to face a new challenge and have to be completely
#
revived? You know, so if you look at, if you look at the modern world, you know, sort of all around
#
us, you can hear the cars and you can hear the beeping of the horns and all that. Cities are
#
now defined very much by the means of transport, right? That actually has been a fact for a very
#
long time. And the limiting factor on the size or shape of cities for the longest time was transport.
#
So it's how far can you get? It's the movement of materials, you know, the logistics of getting
#
food in, waste out, all of these things. These were the limiting factors to cities for a long,
#
long time. And if you look at, you know, the big innovations that have happened in transport,
#
there are not that many that have changed the fundamental cost of transport, the economics of
#
transport. You know, the first was the domestication of animals, because until then, you know,
#
I'm talking about something, you know, which we may not think about it this way, but let's spend
#
a few minutes on this. The domestication of animals was the first point at which humans
#
could carry more than what they could carry on their back, right? And eventually they could
#
find a means of carrying them. You know, you can get on the back of a buffalo or on the back of a
#
bull and be carried without having to exercise your own feet. It's a huge difference to the
#
economics of transport. The second is the discovery of sail power. You know, the very basic idea that
#
you can have a raft and put up a sail on it and suddenly you don't need to oar your way through
#
is basically what led to the whole colonization of the Pacific, right? So again, very profound
#
change. The third is the creation of canals, which is daming water inland as a means of transport,
#
which happened with the Great Canal in China about 2000 years ago. It happened worldwide
#
from that point on. But the fourth, so the first three, I mean, of course, domestication of animals
#
had a role in cities. Sail power and canal power were not really relevant to cities as such.
#
It's the fourth innovation that made a big difference to cities, which is steam power.
#
Suddenly we had a means of transporting people and goods at a much, much lower cost,
#
you know, through long distances, through much faster speeds and everything else.
#
It had a fundamental impact on the way we consume everything, but it had a fundamental impact on
#
cities. The fifth, by the way, was the miniaturization of what is steam power doing?
#
It's converting chemical power into mechanical power, right? The fifth innovation was about
#
miniaturizing it with internal combustion, which gave rise to the cars and buses and everything
#
else. And then that has had a profound impact as well. But it's the advent of steam where the
#
economics of cities changed fundamentally, because suddenly you were not limited by how
#
far you could walk. And, you know, the best place to study that change happens to be London.
#
Of course, this is the hotbed of where railways are invented. A huge amount of creative and
#
inventive energy was being deployed in London, of course, the heart of the largest empire the
#
world had ever seen. So there were a lot of things that were coming together to create this living
#
lab for the next phase of urbanization. And the thing about London in the 19th century,
#
from so many accounts, not just Dickens', is that this massive expansion that happens to the city
#
also makes it like a terrible place to live in, almost unlivable. Like you've mentioned how the
#
first big challenge for a city government to deal with was just waste. You know, there's horse dump
#
all over the place. If somebody's horse dies, they'll just leave it, so they'll actually be
#
dead animals on the streets. There are other accounts of how, you know, you have sewage water
#
everywhere, you have rats everywhere. It is almost like a hellhole as it were. So you have
#
this beautiful thing which is urbanization, which is people coming together for mutual benefit.
#
You have the joys of transport, whether it is domesticated animals like horses or whether it
#
is steam, actually expanding cities so there can be more of this miraculous thing. But there is a
#
lag between the city actually being able to accommodate all of these people.
#
Take me through sort of that phase of development. You know, there's an incredible draw into cities
#
and I will mention this later when I talk about the work that I've been doing in London.
#
There's an incredible draw in cities. Something is happening in cities to attract people there,
#
right? But cities are fundamentally unpleasant places to be, right? The waste, the pollution,
#
the dead animals, the horse dung lying everywhere. These are all fundamental problems. These were
#
disease-infested hellholes, right? And yet people were flocking to cities because there was an
#
economic opportunity of a scale that they couldn't find anywhere else. The whole point about
#
urbanization is how to accentuate the good and control the bad, right? So if you look at London,
#
London was a city of less than a million in 1800 and probably about six or seven million
#
at the end of 1900. So in the course of a century, it grew by a factor of about six or seven.
#
And all the growing pangs of that were visible throughout. It's in the 1830s that the railways
#
arrived. That is when the city really takes off. One of the beauties of London is that the
#
architectural style is more or less consistent with the period. So you can look at a building
#
and figure out more or less. If you're careful enough, you could figure out the decade in which
#
it was built. So you can see as you walk around London, how the city expanded.
#
So it's almost like you can create a mental time-lapse of how the city must have come to
#
being. Totally. And again, this is an area that's been studied extensively. There are lots of books
#
and maps and everything else about the growth of the city. And you can see that the city grew
#
around its transport. So there are two types of cities in the world. On one metric, there are two
#
types of cities in the world. There are cities that grew on the infrastructure, and there are
#
cities where the infrastructure has to be overlaid on the city. The latter is basically the bulk of
#
cities around the world. And they're more messy. Whereas when you find a city that's grown around
#
the infrastructure, it's almost like the roots have taken shape and then the little tertiaries
#
have come out of it and all that. It looks like a bit more organized, even though it's completely
#
organically grown. These are not planned cities. London is not a planned city by any means.
#
So what happens in London is that in the 1830s, when the railways arrived, at that point, what
#
was the city of London, which was a square mile, plus a little bit to the west in what is today
#
the West End, extending as far as not even to Buckingham Palace, but that sort of area.
#
That was basically London. The whole place was probably three square miles at most.
#
In the square mile of the city of London, there were about 550,000 people living and working
#
in a square mile. Even from much later on, so Sherlock Holmes novels are written in the
#
1880s onwards, but you get a picture of what London used to look like. This was a tough,
#
tough place, very congested, all the sort of street urchins that Sherlock Holmes cultivates
#
to be his messenger boys on our land. That was all part of fact. That was what London was.
#
So when the railways arrive, the first thing that they offer
#
is the ability for people to live somewhere else and still be able to work in the city of London.
#
It was a completely new concept. It had never ever happened in the history of mankind.
#
You lived where you worked. This was the norm for all of human existence. This is the first point
#
at which the idea of a commute comes in. It opens up housing, much better quality housing.
#
The whole concept of housing changes. It's worth reflecting. There's something called a terraced
#
house, which is basically a row house. It started getting built in the 1850s or thereabouts.
#
This was basically the form of housing that was built until the First World War.
#
There are, give or take, about five million homes that were built across the UK, not just in London,
#
across the UK, built to basically the same template. There are slight differences in
#
sort of dimensions, but the basic layout is exactly the same. All built on the back of transport,
#
and they were replacing housing in some cases that went back to the 13th century.
#
Old stone houses and very drafty and all that stuff. So there was a complete refresh of the
#
quality of housing. Now, this is all aged stock right now, so it looks a bit decrepit in some
#
cases, although I live in one of these. Our house has been completely refurbished inside out, so
#
apart from the facade, it looks very modern. But this is what led to a complete refresh
#
of the quality of life for basically the entire country, all on the back of transport,
#
and all on the back of being able to distribute the people out and to leave the space in the
#
centre of the city to specialise in work, not have to deal with people living there.
#
So if you look at the square mile today, the city of London, it's got about 450,000 jobs,
#
give or take. So it's fewer jobs than there used to be. It's only got about 11,000 residents.
#
The city of London is, this is the square mile, is a highly specialised financial district,
#
but of course a very pleasant place to go and locate yourself. But without the transport,
#
it would never have happened. And so the big trigger for the next phase of urbanisation,
#
and this is why thinking about the link between transport and land use is so critical. It's
#
evident in London, it's evident everywhere in the world, but that progression is easiest to study
#
in London. Let's talk about London some more and how it sort of evolved. And you've pointed out
#
elsewhere that, you know, after World War II, the population of London peaked at kind of 9 million,
#
and that there are campaigns by the government to move people to home counties and they do so
#
and all of that. And this, you know, it stays like this for a few decades and then around 1981,
#
this gradually starts changing and the cause for the change is Thatcher makes, you know,
#
her big bang reforms to the private sector. And suddenly London becomes like a hub again.
#
Only the problem this time is that the population is expanding massively, but the infrastructure is
#
still behind, in a sense, a mirror image of what happened earlier but compressed in a shorter span
#
of time. So in 1989, the financial sector is doing great, but the city infrastructure is still
#
a problem and all of that. So take me through sort of these years of those years and, you know,
#
what was thinking in the in the circles of power. Can I just fill in one gap before we get to that
#
point? So the one gap that needs to be filled in is, you know, the railways allowed this kind of
#
longer distance commuting and the rise of housing and all that. The railways put a new pressure
#
on London, which is that London was a fairly densely developed city, you know, high property
#
prices even back then. The railways actually stopped at the fringe of what used to be London
#
back then. These are the mainline terminised stations even today. And they were bringing in
#
larger numbers of people in. But it's a big enough place where you can't really walk.
#
So the problem of congestion inside the city became more acute. And so even in the 1840s,
#
this was recognized as a problem. The railways had only been around for 10 or 15 years at this
#
point. This was recognized as a problem. And this is where the whole idea of the underground came
#
from. You know, you could not deal with this problem at surface level. So, you know, very
#
bright thinkers in the 1840s, Richard Forbes was thinking about how to take all of this traffic
#
underground. And this is where the whole idea of the underground came from. The first underground
#
line in London opened in 1863. You can look around the world and see what else was happening in the
#
world in 1863. It'll give you a mental map of how advanced the thinking was. Steam trains, by the
#
way. There was no electric trains in those days. So there were steam trains running inside the
#
tunnels, of course, with big ventilation shafts built into them. And the underground kept expanding.
#
The first electric lines came in in 1890. And then the system expanded. The bulk of what you see on
#
the underground today was built before 1910. So that is how old the system is. And by comparison,
#
the first line in New York went alive in 1904. So the bulk of London had already been built
#
before the first line went live in New York. So, you know, I think it's an important fact to
#
just expand on before we get to the post-war period, that the whole system of urban transport
#
had to be built alongside the railways. And the two of them actually work in tandem
#
to create that urban environment that we now recognize.
#
That's a great question, Amit. So think about what was the biggest problem
#
that the urban governance structure was trying to solve. It wasn't transport.
#
Actually, it was waste. You know, dealing with the proverbial was the real problem. In fact,
#
there's something called the great stink of 1859, where the raw sewage flowing into the Thames,
#
sort of backlogged into the Thames. It was a very hot summer. It got started rotting. It was such
#
a stink that parliament had to shut down. And that's what led to the first governance structure
#
called the Metropolitan Board of Works, which was akin to what you would call a city government
#
today, but set up with a very specific remit of sorting out the sewage. And this is a very famous
#
civil engineer called Baseljet, who built the sewage system, which is still in use.
#
That's it's Baseljet system that is still the main sewage system in London, built it along the
#
river. In fact, what's called the embankment now encases the sewers. And it really took the waste
#
out. I mean, it improved the quality of life, no end. And for the longest time,
#
the main responsibility, almost exclusive responsibility, if you want to call it,
#
was dealing with the sewage. It's only much later in the 20th century that something called the
#
London County Council gets established and they have remit over transport. But for many decades
#
before that, the need for an urban governance structure, citywide urban governance structure,
#
which is different from anything else, was to deal with sewage. If you look at the US,
#
the origins of urban governance was in fire prevention. So actually the fire brigade was
#
the first thing that cities had to organize themselves around. So it's important to realize
#
these are basic municipal functions that we're talking about. And these are not God-given
#
structures. They evolved around the basic needs of the cities. Did it help that governance structures
#
back in the day when they were evolving were relatively simple and hadn't grown to the point
#
that they have? And the sense I mean that is in that I would imagine that today, like if I think
#
of Bombay, if you implant Bombay's governance structure onto 1955 London or whatever, and you
#
say that, okay, fine, we've got railways coming in and now we've got to build an underground.
#
And I'm like, it would never happen because the agencies wouldn't coordinate. Different
#
agencies would work in different silos and all of that. But early governance structures, I guess,
#
would have one department responsible for every damn thing. There isn't a coordination problem.
#
There isn't the problem of a bloated bureaucracy. If anything, there aren't enough people.
#
So in a sense, was that in some context a feature and not a bug?
#
Well, perhaps. But I think the more important thing here is that the governance structure was
#
almost purpose-made for this problem it was trying to solve. It wasn't that here's the
#
governance structure and it's not responsible for solving every new problem that comes along.
#
In many cases, a governance structure has to be adaptable to new problems that are coming along.
#
But if you ossify a governance structure and say it's immutable,
#
then when you confront new problems, what do you do? And this is actually a fundamental failure
#
in India, by the way. Our problem here is that every time we confront a new problem,
#
we look at the existing governance structures and say they're inadequate
#
and we go and create a new institution. Every metro is a self-governing company,
#
totally disconnected with the whole municipal process. But given very wide-ranging powers
#
to go and disrupt the municipal process, they can go and plonk a station down anywhere they like.
#
So this disconnect is actually a very fundamental part of the problem
#
that comes from urban governance. And the problem here is that written in some ways is quirky
#
in that it doesn't have a written constitution. So I'm being slightly sort of comical over here.
#
There's a sort of element of make things up as they go along. There is actually a constitution
#
in it. It's not written down, but there are constitutional principles and all that.
#
It's also the most centralized country in kind of advanced economies. And so everything is set up
#
by an act of parliament. It can be abolished by an act of parliament. So local government structures
#
have changed over time in the UK, and they've changed to recognize the changing needs.
#
Whereas if you look at the sort of governance framework in India, it stems from the constitution
#
for very good reasons. The constitution has done a great job at delineating between the
#
power of the center and the states. Municipal authorities were not thought through in the
#
beginning. They were retrofitted, but they've been retrofitted with notional powers, but without
#
means to exercise those powers. So they are fundamentally, they're only notional, right?
#
And anyway, it's a big shortcoming of urban governance in India.
#
So let's go to the post-war period. I want to actually know not just about how transport is
#
evolving, but also about how the governance structures are evolving.
#
So in the post-war structure, let's just put a few facts on the table. So Britain came out victorious
#
from the war, but bankrupt. I mean, hugely indebted. This is also the period of decolonization. So the
#
empire is kind of crumbling. A lot of the trade with the empire is affected by the same processes.
#
London is suffering as a result of it. So there are many kind of fundamental economic factors
#
behind what is going on in the UK at that time. And there's a general sense of kind of downbeat
#
sense in the UK at this point. The compounded by all of this was that starting in the 1960s,
#
the government had this policy of trying to distribute economic activity,
#
which may have been a result of scarcity and all that stuff. So the result of the combination
#
of these things is that London's population was in rampant decline. London peaked at about 9 million
#
people in 1945. By 1981, it was down to 6.3 million. So a third of the population had left.
#
A lot of the economic activity had left with them. And there were new towns that had been
#
set up in the periphery of London that were doing reasonably well. So places like Welling
#
Garden City, they were set up in that period. Very nice places to live. And a garden city
#
tells you what it is. And then in 1981, things start to change. Now, the interesting thing is,
#
if you went to London in the 1970s from India, and you and I have a common friend in Vasantar
#
who made a road trip from India all the way to London in 1975.
#
You could check through Afghanistan. Yeah, through Pakistan, Afghanistan,
#
sort of trekking through Iran, which actually is a journey that's not been possible since 1979.
#
Right. In fact, not just in Afghanistan, but in many countries along the way,
#
it's just become much harder. And he's not the only person I know of other people who've made
#
that road journey as well. But I asked Vasant, just to confirm my view, what his impression was
#
of London. And he said, oh, it's like a glitzy place and all that. And it's absolutely true.
#
If you're going from India, London was a very well-developed city. Everything seemed to be
#
working fine and all that. But that's not how it felt to a Londoner. The city was in absolute
#
decline. It was visible all over the place and very heavily documented as to what happened in
#
that period as well. Then in 1981, for reasons that I've never been able to figure out,
#
the city started growing again. And by 1986, when the big financial deregulation happened called
#
the Big Bang, the city was really on a growth path. Two things were happening. One is in aggregate,
#
population and employment were growing. The second is the nature of employment was changing.
#
London actually had a lot of manufacturing dotted around the peripheries of outer London.
#
Manufacturing was still in complete tailspin. But in aggregate, employment was growing because
#
of the services industry, which were heavily concentrated in the center of London.
#
What that does is that in aggregate, population increases demand. But because there is a new
#
form of employment that's taking place, it puts even more pressure on transport demand
#
because you need to get people in and out. The result of all of this became
#
apparent very quickly. The constraints on the infrastructure, the fact that there had not been
#
the investment in it, all of that became apparent very, very quickly in the 1980s.
#
And that led to a lot of soul-searching about what was happening and how was it that the city was
#
performing so badly. What were the kind of debates around that? By the time you joined
#
Transport for London, the solution was kind of in place. So tell me a little bit about how the
#
thinking evolved and how matters reached there. This was all before my time. Some of this is
#
about reading about what happened. This is about talking about some of the actors who were involved
#
in it at that time. Because when I got involved in transport in London in 2002, some of the actors
#
who had been involved in that previous phase of work were still economically active. So I had the
#
great privilege of being able to talk to many of them. Interestingly, and I think this is very
#
instructive for India as well, the impetus for change came from the major employers in London.
#
It came from business. Now, if you think of business, there are many who are fleet-footed,
#
who can locate themselves anywhere in the world. So if you're Goldman Sachs, you're based in New
#
York, and if you're looking for a European headquarter, you have a choice between London
#
and Frankfurt and Paris and wherever else. If you're looking for something outside the US,
#
you may also look at Hong Kong and Tokyo or whatever. But if you're a Barclays bank
#
and you are a London bank, you frankly don't have a choice to move out of London. You are basically
#
rooted there. And so it's businesses of that kind that got together and essentially came to a
#
collective judgment that the situation could not be allowed to persist, that there was a real problem
#
with growth and that they needed to solve it. And they had a role to play in it. And I think that
#
last point is really critical, that they had a role to play in it, that they could not sit there
#
and be bystanders and let all of this happen around them. I mean, individually, they may or
#
may not have had a voice, but collectively they had a voice and they became a huge influencing
#
mechanism. One of the ways of doing this was by setting up an organization called London First,
#
which is fundamentally a lobbying organization, but was set up with immense research capability.
#
So they were funded not just to do lobbying, but to do core research.
#
These guys started doing comparative research on cities around the world. Fundamentally,
#
they were looking at Europe and the US, looking at the difference of levels of investment,
#
but also how cities worked and in how cities worked, particularly the question of governance.
#
There was a really influential piece of work produced in 1994 called the London-New York
#
study, which was a very in-depth comparison of London and New York. And again, it's not to say
#
that everything's good in New York and everything's bad in London. It was a real proper in-depth
#
analysis of how things were different. Their conclusion among many conclusions was, of course,
#
they wanted investment in transport. They also wanted investment in many other things.
#
But their point was that the city needs to be able to attract business. There are many things that
#
need to be fixed to attract investment. The transport needs to be better. The schools need
#
to be better. There needs to be better cultural offering. Crime and criminal justice needs to be
#
under control. Lots of things need to be done. These are all things which cannot be compromised
#
on if you really want people to come and live there. But at the heart of it, their point was
#
that the governance model was broken. So let me describe for you what the governance model was.
#
I said earlier that it's a very centralized country without a constitution, so everything
#
can be done and undone by an act of parliament. In a huff in the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher had
#
abolished the previous local government structure. They used to be a mayor and the whole structure
#
got abolished in 1986. So London was governed centrally by the national government.
#
Of course, in the national government, no matter what you do, there's only a limited amount of
#
attention that you can provide to London. So there was a period when London was struggling
#
as a result, just complete lack of political attention. Lots of different agencies formed,
#
huge amount of fragmentation, huge amount of overlap and conflicts between different
#
agencies and all that. So what this London First activity did is say that we need a mayor of London,
#
the mayor needs to be entrusted with real powers and real money, and their first and most important
#
job needs to be to fix transport. So it was recognized that transport was one of those kind
#
of core things that had to be fixed, and also one of those things which could not be fixed by other
#
means. So things like fixing the cultural offering, you don't need a mayor to intervene in that.
#
You can take care of the museums and the theaters are all sort of self-governing,
#
the private institutions. There are things you can do on that front.
#
Transport was one of those issues where transport and afterthought planning, which has become very
#
important, but those are issues that had to be dealt with by a mayor. And so they came up with
#
this analysis in 1994. They took it to the government, it was John Major's government back
#
then. They found a receptive audience with John Major's government, to be clear. And things had
#
started happening on that front even in 1994. But they found, again, this is where accidents matter.
#
They found an even more receptive person in Tony Blair, who had just become leader of the Labour
#
Party accidentally because the previous leader, Roy Smith, had died of a heart attack. And Blair
#
and Brown and Peter Mandelson and all these characters, they were hungry for ideas. They were
#
young, they were bright and inquisitive. They were hungry for ideas. They latched onto this one.
#
And so when Blair got elected in 1997, this got put as a priority idea. By 1999,
#
we had an Act of Parliament, the Greater London Authority Act of 1999,
#
that set up the mayor and that set up Transport for London.
#
You know, I compare this with India and I feel incredibly jealous because one standard problem
#
with the way our cities are governed, and Shruti Raj Gopalan and I had an episode on that, I'll link
#
from the show notes, is that there is no link between power and accountability at the level of
#
what happens at the city. You know, the Maharashtra state government, for example, will win votes
#
based on rural vote banks and all that. They have no incentives to do anything for the city and yet
#
they control the city. And you know, the corporators whom we can directly vote for and are accountable
#
to us actually have no power to do much because power hasn't been devolved to the local government.
#
Now what I see happening here in this English narrative is that there is power given back,
#
as it were, to the city with a strong mayor and all of that. And by the way, this is again,
#
it's one of the accidents of history that something that was there during colonial times,
#
unfortunately, you know, a lot of bad things carried over. One good thing that didn't carry
#
over was the empowered mayor, that people like Nehru and Rajaji and Sardar Patel were all mayors
#
at some point in time to begin with mayors of cities and it was like a school for governance
#
for them. And we don't have that here at all. So there is no sense of city administrations
#
being empowered. Now, my question is that what strikes me about London and this narrative is
#
you have the Tory John Major being receptive and saying, let's go ahead. You have the new
#
Labour leader Tony Blair being gung-ho for it. Later on, you have Ken Livingstone, who is far
#
to the left of Blair, being mayor of London for many years and giving you his full backing.
#
You know, so you have politicians from across the spectrum just basically saying, let's do
#
the right thing. And I feel so jealous of this because it doesn't really happen here. And also
#
because the deep state would fight back, I imagine. You've spoken of and I'm sure going
#
into more detail of how these 14 government departments were broken down into one, right?
#
And so no longer in silos. And I can't imagine such a thing happening here because they would
#
all dig in their heels and fight like maniacs, right? So explain this to me, how did this
#
confluence of political will which carried across administrations come about? Take me through the
#
process because it might seem commonplace, this is the right thing to do, let's do it. But hello,
#
I'm in India, things have never worked like that here. So, you know, institutional reform
#
does not come easy to bureaucracies. I think, you know, that's a fundamental fact of life.
#
Bureaucracies are created with lofty motives, but suffer from the fact that one of their
#
objectives is self-perpetuation. That's just the nature of bureaucracies around the world.
#
And that problem was endemic in London. And frankly, that was what was recognized by all
#
this work that was done by the business community. So there's a clear objective there that had to be
#
collapsed. Now the triggers for when that happens are very rare, right? I mean, change happens in
#
government. Somebody has to invest a lot of political capital in it, right? One of the
#
points at which that change becomes easier is when you have an incoming government that is not
#
beholden to the past, right? It's almost like, you know, we're labor, we've been in government
#
before, but, you know, it's almost not my problem, that of somebody else, right? So we can start
#
afresh. And those points in history are rare. I mean, they happen, of course, around a cycle
#
all the time, but they only happen ever so frequently, right? So when they happen,
#
you know, it has to be the case that the ideas have to be there to be seeded at the right time,
#
right? And this is actually a very fundamental thing about how people think about governance.
#
You can't just expect the government to be doing something. You have to be seeding ideas into,
#
you know, a space that may or may not be fertile for it, but you have to capture the moment when,
#
you know, the rains might come at just the right time. But if you don't have the seed ready at
#
that time, nothing will ever germinate. And I think this was definitely one of those occasions,
#
right? You know, there's a very interesting anecdote that I tell people. So P N Dhar was
#
principal secretary to Indira Gandhi. He's written an autobiography, which is worth a read.
#
One of the points that he makes in there is that when the elections happened in 1977
#
and the Janata government came in, so it was clear that Muradji Desai would become the
#
prime minister. On the day he was supposed to be sworn in, it was late in the morning,
#
he showed up in the office before he'd been sworn in. So P N Dhar got told that, you know,
#
Muradji is in the office and he's like, he can't go into the PMO. He can't sit on the
#
prime minister's chair because he's not been sworn in. So P N Dhar ran into the prime minister's
#
office and he found Muradji sitting in a corner. So Muradji said, you know, I understand, I can't
#
sit on that chair, right? But come here, we've got business to do. So the cabinet secretary got
#
called in as well. And there's some interdepartmental sort of administrative memo
#
that sets out the allocation of departmental responsibilities, right? And Muradji wanted to
#
reshuffle all of that before any minister was sworn in. As soon as the minister was sworn in,
#
at that point, the bureaucracy is ossified once again. So this moment, you know, this is like a
#
a shooting star, right? You have to capture that moment for that brief period when a government
#
is about to be sworn in, but hasn't been sworn in. And remarkable that Muradji knew the structure
#
because he had been finance minister 10 years earlier. So he had, you know, with the deep
#
experience of government, I make this point to a lot of people here, right? Actually, I mean,
#
that may not be the only example. I mean, that's one that I know. But you have to use occasions
#
of that kind to embed this kind of monumental change to governance structures because they
#
are very difficult to institute any other way. I mean, one sort of narrative that I have explored
#
at great depth across episodes and that is heartening to me is the 91 reforms. And the
#
truth is the 91 reforms didn't happen in 91. The seed for them really happened in the late 60s.
#
Manmohan meets Montaigne at the World Bank, you know, etc., etc. Then Manmohan gets Montaigne to
#
come back to Delhi in the late 1970s. And there is a group of reformers, you know, working through
#
a decade playing the long game. And then that moment comes in 91. And the, you know, the
#
rains pour down and the seeds are all there and, you know, beautiful things happen. And, you know,
#
91 is, that's absolutely true. But 91 is also true because, you know, many reforms happen only when
#
your hand is forced. And our hand was forced because the financial crisis meant that you
#
could not ignore the change that needed to happen. So my earlier narrative was that, yeah,
#
the balance of payments crisis, the IMF intervention, all of those forced it. But the more I sort of
#
look at the history of that period, sort of the hidden history of that period, you know,
#
Montaigne's M document the year earlier and all of that, it was that, my God, these reformers were
#
ready just for that moment. Look, you know, I think it's important to realize that as bright as
#
somebody may be, and, you know, Montaigne can, you know, they are proper, you know, in hindsight,
#
you would call them visionaries. They were probably, even at that time, they were visionaries.
#
And they were probably not the only ones. There were probably many other people who were working
#
on these ideas as well, you know, whose ideas never fructified. So we don't know about them.
#
But people don't come up with ideas like this overnight. Exactly. Let's be clear, right?
#
It takes a long time to think through these ideas. You know, the fact is that the basic crux of the
#
reforms that they carried out was very simple. But it's being implemented in an environment that is
#
about as complicated and as messy as it can be. So being able to think through, you know, all the
#
consequences of what you're trying to do and still test whether your idea works is not something that
#
anyone can pull off overnight. So, you know, the credit that these people need to be given is not
#
just for the fact that they pulled it off in 1991, but the fact that they had the tenacity
#
to keep at it, even when they were not finding themselves in a very supportive environment.
#
Abraham Lincoln once said that if you give me six hours to chop a tree, I'll spend the first five
#
hours sharpening the blade of the axe, which is beautiful. And I want to now talk about,
#
before we actually go into the actual narrative of the change at London and your time with TfL,
#
I want to talk about the different schools of thought on how do you sharpen the blade of the
#
axe. So take me through a potted intellectual history of how one thinks about urbanization.
#
Like my brief sort of the little bits of knowledge I have about this up by reading Jane Jacobs and
#
reading Robert Caro's great book, The Power Broker, about how Robert Moses built New York. But
#
a lot of that is sort of like pre-war stuff, 1920s onwards. Give me a potted history of how
#
there have been different ways of thinking about cities
#
through the century and how they arrive at the point where you are where you are.
#
If you look at London, the one thing that leaps out at you is that a lot of London's development
#
was very commercial. It was done by private entities. A lot of the metros, the underground
#
was largely built by private entities. A lot of the housing development was done by private
#
entities. They realized that there was demand and they found that there was a way to fulfill that
#
demand. We can go into it in any depth you want, but that's basically the process. There was not
#
a great system of planning. By comparison, when you look at the example of Moses in New York,
#
it's a bit odd to think of it this way as the US doing top-down thinking, but that's what it was.
#
It was completely top-down thinking. There was an idea. London was not like that.
#
It changes in the post-war period. Now the change is not just because of the post-war period. The
#
result is something else. The fact is that railways and the underground were commercially
#
profitable as long as there were no automobiles around. The advent of automobiles, we talked about
#
the five waves of innovation. The advent of automobiles changed the economics of transport
#
so much that the railways were no longer economically viable. In London, there was a big
#
wave of railway building in the first decade of the 20th century. By the 1930s, the entire
#
underground system was struggling. The first wave of what you might call nationalization happens in
#
1933 with the creation of an integrated body called London Transport, which is still a private
#
company, but it's got various kinds of guarantees from government that allows it to still function
#
as a private company, still raise capital and all that. By 1948, in the post-war period, even that
#
facade had dropped, and that's when everything gets nationalized. It's fundamentally a recognition
#
of the fact that you need the railways. The city doesn't work without it, but you can't really run
#
it on a commercially viable basis. It then leads to a lot of hand-wringing about how do you carry
#
on investing? What is a good investment? How do you decide whether something is viable as an
#
investment or not? What is the metric that you're using to decide whether something that is not
#
commercially viable is still worth doing? Starting in the 1950s, there's a whole stream of economics
#
around cost-benefit analysis that comes up in the world of transport. When I joined TFL in 2002,
#
one of my first projects was what's called Crossrail. It's now opened as the Elizabeth Line.
#
It's the biggest piece of transport infrastructure we've ever built in London. It cost about 19
#
billion pounds. That's like two lakh crore rupees for one project. Frankly, it was clear from day
#
one that we were trying to do something different and much bigger than anything that had been
#
attempted before. One of my advantages at this point, and I'll connect up the journey with
#
post-war London, one of my advantages was that I had not been steeped in transport.
#
I was able to come and look at it from the perspective of asking some very basic questions.
#
If you've been steeped in transport, you were told you take this number and add that number
#
and that's how you get a number at the end. I was like, why would you take those numbers?
#
What's the relevance of those numbers? Let me tell you what used to happen.
#
The way cost-benefit analysis is done in transport, pretty much worldwide,
#
is that you look at a city and how it works with or without the infrastructure for which
#
you're trying to make a case. There are transport models that do these things.
#
And the creation of new infrastructure saves time. So all of the things fixed, it saves time.
#
You ascribe a value to that time and that becomes your economic benefit. You divide that by the cost
#
that becomes the benefit-cost ratio. And so long as your benefit-cost ratio is above whatever
#
threshold you've set up, two to one, whatever it is, you call it a good project and you invest in it.
#
So I looked at this and said, great, how do you take this to the chancellor, the finance minister,
#
and make a case for this? Because at that point, what you're confronted with
#
is the chancellor having to decide about whether to invest in transport and big numbers
#
or whether to put that money in schools and hospitals.
#
So how many schools and how many hospitals can you build for 19 billion pounds?
#
It's a recipe for being laughed out of the chancellor's office. And especially if you
#
say that our benefits are based on saving time and say, what's your problem? People are getting
#
to work. So if they save five minutes a day, what do they want to do? Go and make another cup of
#
tea? What is it? And honestly, I'm not trying to caricature this. This is exactly the sort of
#
discussion that we were confronted with in my very early days. So this is where I go back to the point
#
about start by asking the right question. The point of new infrastructure is not to save
#
people time. Because as long as anyone could remember in London, people have commuted for
#
about 35, 40 minutes a day. So clearly all this investment that's gone into transport has not
#
changed the complexion of time spent in commuting at all. But something different has happened with
#
all this infrastructure, which is it's allowed growth. So clearly the purpose of investment in
#
transport is not about time saving, it's about growth. But that's not what the metrics are trying
#
to measure. So I went back all the way to where did this metric come from? And I found a series
#
of papers in the 1950s and 1960s written by two incredibly bright economists, Christoph Foster and
#
Michael Beasley, who are in the world of transport economics, they're absolute legends. So they're
#
the ones who came up with this whole method of cost benefit analysis back in the 50s and 60s.
#
But the question they were being asked was different. The question was, we have decided
#
that we're going to invest in a new highway or a new railway line, but there are multiple
#
options for what we invest in. Please find us a mechanism to rank them. So it was not a cardinal
#
measure, it was an ordinal measure. And so they came up with the ordinal mechanism, to which later
#
people added a lot of economic theory to say, actually it's more than an ordinal measure,
#
you're trying to measure the consumer surplus, and it's not illegitimate to try and measure the
#
consumer surplus, especially in an environment where prices are controlled and so on.
#
So great, from an economic theory perspective, they were not wrong. We're still asking the wrong
#
question. Not they, but they were being asked the wrong question. So what is the right question?
#
That was my worry at that point. The right question is that cities exist for only one reason,
#
which is that they allow economic activity to organize itself in a much better way than spreading
#
the people across the entire country. There is no other reason why cities exist. And if you go back
#
to all the history through Mesopotamia and everything else, that is exactly the reason why
#
cities have always existed. Now you can add any layer to that and say it's about academic
#
institutions. Fundamentally, the academic institutions exist because that's also a way
#
of agglomerating economic activity. And the word agglomeration came out of this.
#
So agglomeration had been kind of talked about as an idea, but no one had ever developed it.
#
So we took that idea, me, but also other people in my organization and academics that we were
#
working with, and we said we need to get to the heart of what this agglomeration actually is.
#
And so basically, one observation that you have in every economy around the world is that the
#
productivity, the level of economic output per person is much higher in cities than it is in
#
the rest of the country. In the UK, in London, it was about two and a half times higher than
#
the rest of the country. In India, it's more like six to one. So what is causing this higher level
#
of output? And the answer is it's the nature of the industries that establish themselves in cities.
#
It's the nature of face-to-face contact, which would not happen if these things were distributed.
#
Access to labor markets, there are many factors that are coming together,
#
and you can ponder about each one of them and you can spend a lot of time talking about each
#
one of them. But it's a combination of all of these things that are coming together in cities
#
and they won't come up in any other way. So now there's a very big insight there, right?
#
That cities are kind of engines of agglomeration, and that's where the productivity is coming from.
#
So the question then is why don't cities just carry on growing forever?
#
So why doesn't Mumbai become a city of 200 million people? And it goes back to the point
#
we were discussing earlier about there's London in the 19th century, you've got all the benefits
#
of London, you've also got to deal with all the waste and everything else. You've got to deal with
#
the hassle of living in a city. And so one of the biggest constraints is transport.
#
So if you want an agglomeration, remember, a city that is dispersed is not a city,
#
it's just a collection of villages, right? You're only getting that benefit of agglomeration
#
if you allow for the face-to-face activity, the access to labor markets and everything else to
#
happen. But that means you're creating a very tight cluster, which has to be fed with people.
#
So you need the transport to get people in and out of that cluster all the time.
#
So the biggest constraint to growth in a city is the availability of transport.
#
If you extend that logic, there are a few things that come out. So we've answered the question
#
about whether cities are more productive or not. The answer is yes. The question is, if you allow
#
the city to grow more by solving the transport problem, does it become even more productive?
#
So there's some very careful econometric work that was done in the UK, cross-sectional work
#
across the UK. And it said that it's not true of all sectors. There are some sectors that benefit
#
from more agglomeration. There are many that don't. And in fact, there are some that actually
#
disbenefit from agglomeration, right? So agriculture is the classic example.
#
Agriculture is not about agglomeration. It's about access to land, right? Total
#
disbenefit from agglomeration. But when you look at the other extreme, financial services,
#
right? It's the classic example of where agglomeration is so key. And when you look
#
at the major financial centers around the world, whether it's London and New York or Hong Kong,
#
they all look the same, right? They all have tall buildings in a very tight cluster.
#
There's a reason for it. So the point was not just that cities have higher productivity,
#
but that they can have even higher productivity if you allow them to grow.
#
And so that has two impacts. One is that you're taking jobs from less productive areas and putting
#
them in more productive areas, but you're also making the entire cluster more productive.
#
That is the source of the value that transport brings.
#
A tangential thought, you know, if the whole idea is that you make a city more livable and
#
more attractive to people so that the city grows, one way of doing that, of course,
#
is transport so you can spread the people out more easily. But another way of doing that is
#
just by having taller buildings with the elevator as a mass transit vehicle. And, you know,
#
unfortunately, the big thing that holds Indian cities back is our incredibly stupid FSI laws,
#
which don't allow buildings to go beyond a certain point. Alex Tabarrok on the show,
#
you know, used a memorable phrase with me that Bombay has so far been reclaiming the sea,
#
you should reclaim the sky. So what's a related thinking on that in London, for example? What is
#
your FSI like? How does, you know? Look, you know, London has a very different sort of form
#
of planning, you know, there's no FSI restriction as such. But before I answer that question,
#
let me just get into the philosophy of what agglomeration actually means. So agglomeration
#
means that as far as the jobs that can cluster are concerned, you should let them cluster very
#
tightly. Don't distribute them. This is a mistake that every Indian city has made. Bombay doesn't
#
have an urban cluster anymore. You know, we're sitting here in Andheri. This is a business
#
cluster. You know, BKC is a cluster. You know, the mill grounds are clustered. I mean, you know,
#
where is the center of Bombay? In fact, I remember from the show that you did with Pritika about
#
the whole debate about what is the center of Bombay? And is it Colaba or is it Andheri?
#
Frankly, Bombay doesn't have a center anymore. On this point, I'll disagree with you. Andheri
#
is very much the center. This is where the podcasting industry is centered, which is basically me.
#
This is the parochial view of life. So, you know, the point is the economic activities
#
that benefit from clustering should be allowed to cluster and cluster as tightly as they want.
#
It's a very different question about, you know, what kind of housing you want to provide and is
#
that in very dense clusters or not in dense clusters? You know, that's about the quality of
#
life. You know, London actually doesn't have very dense housing by and large, right? It has density
#
of type, but you know, there are, I mean, I have a nice garden at home living in the center of
#
London, you know, which is not something that you would find in Mumbai, right? That's a matter
#
of choice that cities have made. It can be different, but where you destroy value is in
#
not letting economic activity, jobs to cluster, right? And this is a mistake that India has made.
#
Every city in India has made the same mistake. You know, Bombay had a well-functioning business
#
cluster in the Fort area. You know, we took that and very heavily fed by public transport.
#
When we started outgrowing that, the answer was BKC, you know, a huge office development
#
built in the middle of two railway lines, but not connected to either one of them.
#
The result is people started driving, you know, the bulk of the traffic in BKC is driving.
#
Then we went and built the, developed the mill lands. You know, you go to some of these buildings,
#
you can't even figure out how to get inside them if you don't have a car, right? So for a city that
#
was so heavily dependent upon public transport, we're designing these sort of automobile
#
kind of hellholes, right? I mean, that's what they are. I mean, they may look very attractive
#
for the small sliver of the population that is able to use them, but they're totally disconnected
#
from their environment. And some of it is isomorphic mimicry, right? You're just following
#
what's been done in the West without thinking about local conditions. Totally. You know,
#
when I look at glass buildings over here, I think like, you know, do you not realize
#
that this is a hot country, right? Why are we creating greenhouses over here? I mean,
#
to build a greenhouse in London is great because, you know, you're trying to get the soil again.
#
Why are we trying to do that here? Right? So, I mean, a lot of this is very lazy thinking of,
#
you know, mimicry as you call it, but that's not the only problem in India. You know, there are many,
#
if you trace the arc of urban development in India, right? There is a pre-1857 kind of,
#
pre-1857, pre-1900 kind of urban development, you know, which you see in Fort. And the Fort area
#
looks very much like London does, you know, it's built on very similar principles. And of course,
#
with some differences like arcades, because this is a hot, wet environment, you know,
#
which is not true in London. But, you know, it's fundamentally got the same relationship
#
between the building and the street space. You see the same thing in Dalhousie in Calcutta,
#
you know, which is now BB debug, built on very similar principles. There are several things that
#
changed in India. You know, so 1857 brought this concept of a cantonment in every city,
#
which didn't used to be the case. Along with the cantonment came two things, civil lines
#
and railway lines, right? So, these were the three big instruments of control for the British
#
in India. And they were basically set up to fence out everybody else. So, the whole concept of
#
boundary walls and, you know, these massive estates comes from the post 1857 environment.
#
We've never given up on it, despite the fact that it's highly unproductive.
#
It's deeply embedded into our planning process, where even today, you know, if you plan to build
#
a house, there's offsets and, you know, there's so much space on the side of the house and so
#
much space in front of the house. Bimal Patel is one of the leading exponents of critiquing all of
#
this to say, when you look at the land utilization in India, it is terrible, right? So, for a
#
commodity that is so scarce, how are we so wasteful about it, right? I mean, a couple of years ago, I
#
was here, I was staying at the Trident. You look out of the window, it's absolutely shameful what
#
goes on in that area. Every building has this fenced off compound where the land is not being
#
used for any productive purposes. It's not accessible to anyone. It's full of, I mean,
#
thankfully in that area, it's not full of rubbish. In many other areas, it is full of rubbish.
#
But where there is empty lands being used for parking, I mean, it's incredible that, you know,
#
for a commodity, I mean, South Bombay land being used for free parking, I mean, how would you ever
#
allow that to happen? And one of the points I make on this one is that, you know, we don't provide
#
free housing to anyone apart from people in government service and people in jail. I mean,
#
those are the only people who get free housing. But we allow cars to park on public spaces for
#
free. So how is it that we've put the needs of a car over and above the needs of everybody else?
#
So this is where the challenge comes in, in that, you know, a number of planning policies in India
#
have been very unproductive, but they're so deeply embedded in the planning process that it's
#
difficult to get people in the planning system to even recognize that these things are a problem.
#
Yeah, I mean, it just appears that there's no foundational thinking at all. Nobody's asking why.
#
If you just look at all the offset spaces around building and, you know, Bimal Patel has promised
#
to come on the show sometime, so we'll do an episode about it. But if you just look at all
#
the things that defy reason, there is no way to justify them. And yet they continue and perpetuate
#
themselves and free parking is, of course, another of those. We'll come back to India. But let's go
#
back to, you know, your time at Transport for London, that, you know, you arrived there.
#
And what is it that you see? What is your task? What is the challenge in front of you? What is
#
the challenge in front of the organization? Take me through some of that. Well, let's start with
#
the challenge for the organization. TFL was set up in 2000. The first mayor gets elected in 2000.
#
The first mayor is Ken Livingston, who was known as a Trotskyite socialist. You know, his politics
#
are extremely left-wing. And he kind of, you know, he was the one who got fired by Margaret
#
Thatcher and Mayor Alty got abolished in that process. He was a thorn in the side of any
#
government, including Tony Blair's government, right? So Blair didn't want him to be mayor of
#
London. He rebelled from the party, left the party, ran as an independent and got elected.
#
So we had a rebellious mayor, but a person who was deeply steeped in London politics.
#
And he understood kind of every square inch of London and he had grand visions for what he
#
wanted to do in London. What he didn't have was the kind of experience of being a really powerful
#
mayor. What he did interestingly is, I mean, he had a very, sometimes very condescending view
#
of people he didn't like, right? And so he was very condescending towards managers of transport
#
systems in the UK. They're all useless. I'm going to go and do something else.
#
So he went out to New York and hired a guy called Bob Kiley. He used to be chairman of the New York
#
MTA in the 1980s. So Bob Kiley became the first commissioner of Transport for London. And Bob had
#
experience of working with very powerful mayors and governors in New York, right? So he brought
#
some of that thinking with him. And you know, the two of them ended up in a very powerful partnership.
#
Bob also brought along with him a few people that he had worked with in New York,
#
one of whom was Jay Walder, who I mentioned earlier, who I knew because in the interregnum
#
between Jay leaving New York's MTA and joining TFL, he was a lecturer at Harvard and that's how
#
I knew him. So he brought this team of very, very dynamic individuals. So just think about the
#
conditions that are being set here. We have a political leader with a megaphone and some grand
#
vision and some grand ideas who's willing to use that megaphone on the one power that he's been
#
given, which is transport. So that's a fairly interesting set of circumstances. The second is
#
that he's infused the organization that he is running with people who are willing to be disruptive
#
and again, very talented, very bright thinkers with a lot of relevant experience, but who are
#
willing to go and change the mold. And the third is that this is a period in which the UK economy
#
was doing really well. Remember, this was one of Blair's big political initiatives. He had spent a
#
lot of political capital and they were willing to spend money on making it a success, right?
#
So the political megaphone, good management and money all come together to create this organization
#
that has unbounded ambition at this point, right? We don't know quite what we want to do,
#
but we want to do stuff, right? So that's the environment I joined. It was a really,
#
really invigorating environment. And remember, I was coming out of McKinsey,
#
the idea that you would come out of McKinsey and find an even more invigorating environment
#
in the public sector tells you something about what was there. And again, this is not exposed
#
to rationalization. It was very clear when I walked in there, there was something going on
#
here that was interesting. In fact, there were two of us who were running what eventually we set up
#
as a corporate finance team. And this guy used to say to me all the time, you know, this is like the
#
mad scientist laboratory. We've just been given the keys to it. Let's see what we can do with it.
#
So that was the kind of thought process that was going on. When I came in, you know,
#
the remit that I was given by Jay Waldo was like, you know, you'll come in, you'll figure out what
#
you want to do. You need a bright enough guy. So it was again, very unusual to be walking into a
#
job with that kind of open remit. So, you know, I realized very quickly that we had many projects
#
that we needed to work on. The dominant philosophy in those days was what was called the private
#
finance initiative, which is the government basically saying, if you want investment in the
#
public sector, it has to be a public-private partnership. That was what the PFI, the private
#
finance initiative was. So we realized that, you know, we had a long list of projects that needed
#
to be done and we really didn't have the capability to execute this PPP type contracts.
#
So the first thing we needed to do is to set up a corporate finance team so that we could do these
#
transactions. So that was almost like my task in the first few weeks. We set up an incredibly
#
bright set of people got brought in to set up this team, a team of only 12, but we shook up the whole
#
place with a team of 12. You know, the kind of work that got done, the kind of thinking that got done
#
was truly path breaking. Many of these things have, you know, an impact even today. The second
#
thing that I realized is that in that list of projects, the one that was sitting at the top was
#
Crossrail. And there were a lot of people working on it. You know, it was not my project at that
#
point, but we were fundamentally lost. We didn't know what the project was. We didn't know how to
#
get it done. There were lots of problems with it. So I kind of started thinking about this very
#
quickly. And, you know, what I mentioned earlier, you know, this is a process in which I read
#
Chris Foster and Michael Beasley's work, the whole process by which benefit cost analysis gets done.
#
And as impressed I was with their work, I realized it would never ever work for Crossrail.
#
We had to come up with an idea that was clearer and more compelling than benefit cost analysis.
#
And the only way to do that was to link the impact of transport more directly on the economy.
#
That's when the people who hold the purse strings really start to pay attention. So the whole work
#
on agglomeration, which is that cities are productive and they can be more productive.
#
And not just that, it's not just the new jobs that will be more productive. It has an impact
#
on the whole cluster. That was the core of the thing. You know, economists will call it an
#
externality. And that's exactly what it is. This is a positive externality, which can be unlocked
#
with just one key, right? And so that became the first thing that I started working on.
#
Now, you know, it took me kind of three or four months to put my kind of head together on
#
just what this was, at which point our commissioner Bob Kiley heard about this, right?
#
And very unusual character, you know, in the sense that he couldn't be bothered about the little
#
things, but he was deeply bothered about the big things, right? And he was willing to spend any
#
amount of time thinking about the big things and all that stuff. So a date got arranged
#
where I was supposed to go and present to him sort of how I was thinking about it. And I was told,
#
you know, don't need any papers. Let's go and talk. So Jay Walder, of course, knew him very well.
#
I mean, at this point I'd met Bob Kiley. I mean, I had an office right next to him. So I'd see him
#
every day, but I'd never sat in a deep discussion with him. So time got set for an hour on a Thursday
#
afternoon. We went on for three and a half hours, right? I was laying out for him how we could
#
make a case for the project. I was also laying out a case for how we could fund the project.
#
And he was probing incessantly, you know, very inquisitive. He was testing the
#
kind of integrity of the thinking and the depth of thinking. But again, you know,
#
look at the environment that we had after three and a half hours. He says to me,
#
it's your project, kiddo. Go get it done. So I said, what do you mean? And he said,
#
well, you're the only person who's figured out how to get it done. So go get it done.
#
If he put you in charge.
#
Put me in charge. No, you know, there's the formal structure. You know, there's a company
#
and there's a chief executive. It didn't matter. As far as he was concerned, he was putting me
#
in charge, right? Now, not to ignore for one minute, I had the very broad shoulders of Jay
#
Walter behind me, right? And I will forever give credit to Jay for creating the environment
#
in which I was able to do all this creative work because none of this would happen without him.
#
And frankly, he's a guy with two brains. You know, he's a guy who pushes your thinking very hard,
#
very often comes up with the thinking himself. But when he's not coming up with the thinking
#
himself, he's pushing you to think hard. So that was the environment in which we started to get
#
Crossrail done. And I tell you, you know, I look back at it and say,
#
had I not done that work, would this project ever happen? I suspect not.
#
Tell me more about Crossrail. What was the challenge? How did you think about it?
#
What were the questions you asked that no one else had asked before you in the organization,
#
which, you know, which made him say, you see your project kiddo, go ahead and do it.
#
Well, the core of the question was what is the point of the project? The point of the project
#
is not that it has a benefit cost ratio of, you know, 1.9 or whatever it is.
#
The core of the project was that, you know, London is a unique asset, unique national asset for the
#
UK, the biggest export center for the UK, you know, globally distinctive financial center,
#
et cetera, et cetera. And if you want to be more successful at it, the way to solve that is by
#
investing in transport. You know, so that was the crux of the idea. Now, what it does is it starts
#
to put definition to what the project actually is, right? Where does it go? Where does it connect
#
to? You know, what is the nature of, you know, if you leave it to just say, I mean, tell an engineer,
#
go and design a railway line. You know, anyone can design your railway line. That's not the issue.
#
But the question of how it gels in with the whole economic geography of a city
#
is where the value comes from, right? That's not a question simply of, you know,
#
can you do me some drawings for the railway line on it, right?
#
So, you know, understanding the purpose for which that railway was going to be built
#
became fundamental to what that railway ended up being and where it went. So it was very clear,
#
we were trying to connect the city of London with Canary Wharf. You know, we had two financial
#
centers that were not connected with each other, at least not connected well.
#
We had to connect them up with Heathrow Airport because that was a very big part of connectivity.
#
We were trying to open up new areas of housing because, you know, with more people working,
#
we needed to open up housing. There was some definition that was put to that project.
#
And, you know, I mean, you know, I can talk about this at length, but the reality is,
#
that is the sound bite. What I've told you so far is how the project was sold. And the reality,
#
I mean, again, it goes back to the point we were discussing right at the beginning of the show,
#
that the best ideas are simple ideas. They don't need to be complicated.
#
Now, it doesn't mean that there's no depth behind that thinking. We can go through that
#
in any detail anyone wants. But the simple idea is, look, it's about productivity.
#
It's about enhancing productivity. The constraint is transport. That's what we need to do.
#
What are the core functions? It's about connecting up the economic centers with housing and the
#
international links. There you go. That's your railway.
#
So now, TFL was really a consolidation of 14 different organizations. They worked in different
#
silos. You've been through the economic logic of these. You've pointed out elsewhere that,
#
any project that reports to one of those silos will do well, but the moment responsibility is
#
split, the project goes to hell because nothing gets done. It becomes a battleground. You've
#
reduced all of that into one organization, but there is still a bureaucracy within that organization.
#
And you're like a 30-year-old who's kind of been given charge of running this project.
#
So tell me about that, because it seems to me that what happens at this point
#
is that you have to invent a new facet of yourself, the facet of being a manager,
#
being able to work with vast amounts of people, many of whom might be older and whiter, if one
#
may say, than you. So how did you kind of tackle all of that? It seems like an entirely different
#
skill. Well, and it was. I had never managed teams of people. You're learning to manage teams
#
of people at this point. You're learning to influence other people who have a different
#
interest from yours. So bit by bit, you're learning new tricks. Nobody comes equipped with all of
#
these tricks from the very beginning. So each of these has to be learned. I think the environment
#
makes a big difference. The fact that there was an overall permissive and supportive environment
#
from the top of the organization, not just from the commissioner, but also from the mayor,
#
made a huge difference. We were not getting dictates from the mayor, but we were getting support.
#
And that is a huge factor. A lot of people in the bureaucracy struggle, including in India,
#
because they have no political direction. I don't know to what extent people are able to have these
#
kinds of intellectual discussions on something that is groundbreaking. It's different from the
#
way things have been done before. And for politicians to then decide, well, this is
#
worth my investing my political capital. Because the point at which that happens is a point of
#
departure from the past. I'm very proud of all the work that I've done, but I can't ignore the
#
fact that there was that fertile environment in which that work could be done. So that became a
#
huge part of success. The day to day working here is that you find resistance. There's no doubt
#
about it. Sometimes the resistance is because it's a different way of doing things and people
#
can't see why you're arguing for something different. And a lot of that with agglomeration
#
theory, the whole government machinery sort of rebelling against it and saying, no, no,
#
we know what we're doing. We've done cost benefit analysis for the last 50 years.
#
We can't be wrong. And you have to slowly tell them, I'm not saying that you're wrong. I'm just
#
saying you're missing something. And it took a good two years before that became the norm.
#
In terms of the engineering of the project, very experienced engineers are telling them how to do
#
tunneling differently and who's this upstart who's telling us to do things differently.
#
But in general, the whole idea that there's a young guy with no experience in transport is
#
going to come and tell us what to do. Look, it's a very threatening thing for many people.
#
And I was getting that response from many people, not from everyone, but I was getting it from most
#
people to say the initial response is to be dismissive. And it then takes a bit of time
#
to be able to persuade them and all that. Your question about white and non-white, I think this
#
is worth reflecting on. There are many facets to it that I think we should unpick. But the one
#
that's relevant here, I have never ever felt that I've faced discrimination
#
of being dismissed on my ideas for not being white. And Amit, I can't emphasize enough how
#
profound a statement that is. I am still an Indian citizen. I've been a director in my company for
#
the last 20 years. The fact that they're not bothered. What they want is high quality work.
#
They pay me to do high quality work. I do high quality work. The rest of it does not matter.
#
This is a profound statement, just to pick this point on, because I think this is quite important.
#
To go from, and we talked about the whole culture of privilege and all that stuff,
#
we're all born. People like me are born into a club unknowingly, not realizing that we have
#
automatic membership of a club of connections and elitism and everything else. And for the bulk of
#
the people in this country, that is not the case. Now, the first point at which I felt like I was
#
outside that club was actually when I joined McKinsey. Because actually going from India to
#
Harvard was easy. Harvard is a very open, very kind of inviting environment. Go from there to
#
McKinsey, and you realize very quickly there's something going on in this organization,
#
and I'm not a part of it. There's a dynamic in the organization that is alien to me. I go from there
#
to TFL, and it's absolutely the case there as well. That there is a dynamic in the organization.
#
There's a way in which people interact socially and all that, and I'm not part of it. Whether
#
that's had an impact on my career or not, I don't know. Maybe it has, maybe it hasn't, but I've never
#
felt it. Now, you bring that back to India, and you say, so I've gone from outside the club to,
#
I won't say being accepted in the club, but at least being heard in the club.
#
Running the club in some way. Well, running the club. Whether it's a club or not,
#
it has not been a hindrance to being heard. It's not been a hindrance to getting things done.
#
It's not been a hindrance to being creative and productive and all that. You bring that back to
#
India and say, are we treating people who are outside the club with the same degree of openness
#
and respect? My problem is we're not. It's profoundly the case that we're not. You look at
#
the structure of the corporate elite, they all look the same. You look at the structure of
#
government apart from reservation, they all look the same. There's a nice dividing line between the
#
people who come from the general quota and the reserve quota. In my view, these are quite big
#
questions. We complain about racism in the West all the time, with very good reason, because there
#
is racism in the West. I have not faced it, but it's very clear that there is racism in the West.
#
But the way these countries have become successful is by being able to delineate where racism doesn't
#
work. By creating environments in which you can still talent, you can still prosper and thrive.
#
As long as you're contributing your share into that overall ecosystem, you're part of it.
#
Before I head underground with my next question, an overground question,
#
that's a bit of a tangent. Why are you still an Indian citizen?
#
I think it's a lot of this to do with nostalgia, to be quite honest. The sense of commitment.
#
I've carried on working in India, pro bono. I've done a huge amount of work for the last 15 years.
#
That sense of commitment to things that are going on in India has never gone away.
#
I'm employed in the UK. My primary commitment is there. I'm not trying to take away from that.
#
I still have to do 100% of my work there. But the sense that I can bring something
#
of that work here has never stopped me and has sort of propelled me always. From a practical
#
perspective, carrying on with an Indian passport is tough because travel and everything else is
#
much, much harder. But the honest fact is that it has never stopped me from doing the things that
#
I need to do in the UK. And therefore, the sense of commitment and nostalgia always wins.
#
Let's go in for a quick commercial break now, have a cup of tea and then on the other side,
#
we will continue. We have barely just begun. I think I'm going to scratch the surface a little
#
bit more. Long before I was a podcaster, I was a writer. In fact, chances are that many of you
#
first heard of me because of my blog, India Uncut, which was active between 2003 and 2009
#
and became somewhat popular at the time. I love the freedom the form gave me and I feel I was
#
shaped by it in many ways. I exercise my writing muscle every day and was forced to think about
#
many different things because I wrote about many different things. Well, that phase in my life
#
ended for various reasons. And now it is time to revive it. Only now I'm doing it through a
#
newsletter. I have started the India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com where I
#
will write regularly about whatever catches my fancy. I'll write about some of the themes I cover
#
in this podcast and about much else. So please do head on over to indiancut.substack.com and
#
subscribe. It is free. Once you sign up, each new installment that I write will land up in your
#
email inbox. You don't need to go anywhere. So subscribe now for free. The India Uncut newsletter
#
at indiancut.substack.com. Thank you.
#
Welcome back to The Scene and the Unseen. I'm still chatting with Shashi Verma. He showed a lot of
#
patients building London's transport network and now he's showing a lot of patients again today.
#
So something you said reminded me of an anecdote I heard from a friend about Mukesh Ambani
#
that around the time Mukesh Ambani was building Jio, this friend of mine, close friend of mine,
#
happened to be in a room with Mukesh and he said that he was blown away by the fact that
#
Mukesh had taught himself telecom engineering to the extent that he knew more than most of his
#
engineers, right? And I was reminded of that when you said that some of your engineers would be
#
surprised where you would tell them about tunneling and here not there and etc etc. And I sort of
#
wonder about this because whenever I've been in any kind of managerial thing there is that tendency
#
of mine to go into rabbit holes and want to learn every aspect of it myself so I know what
#
the hell I'm talking about but there is only an optimal level to which you can do that because
#
if you get too much into the weeds then you can't do the broad management that you sort of want to
#
do and equally the danger there of any subject that I try to figure out is that I am still talking to
#
the person who is an expert in it and you know I might be held back by diffidence and there should
#
be a rightful caution and humility I should feel anyway. So how did you handle all of that? Like
#
what was your approach? Was there an intentionality in saying that I shall learn these different key
#
aspects of the project or were you just naturally curious and you learned that stuff anyway?
#
You know you can divide things into a few different boxes you know so one is there are places where
#
you do need to be an expert right because it's your problem to solve there are places where you
#
need to know enough to know that what you're being told is broadly correct and be able to
#
question it and query it and all that and there are places where you need to know a bit more
#
than that to be able to hack the problem right you know we talked earlier about you know how
#
you get to sub-optimal outcomes with people who are only dealing in one discipline and you know
#
one of the advantages that I think I bring to you know my organization is the ability to think
#
through in a multi-dimensional manner right it does not mean that I need to be the expert
#
and you know it's very disrespectful to the people who spend a lot of time being experts
#
in their own field right so you know it's not that I was a better tunneling engineer than the
#
people who are tunneling engineers you know frankly I mean I would not I won't even pretend that
#
but I was seeing an aspect of the tunneling problem that they were not seeing right so that's
#
the point that that's the advantage that you can bring as a manager as a leader you know about how
#
to connect dots that people are not able to connect on the ground right but I think people
#
are delusional if they think that you know they can read two books and figure out what people have
#
accumulated over decades and you know one of the biggest areas in which this happens is there's a
#
complete sort of excess of information about health care on the internet you go onto google
#
and you can find you know remedies for every problem that you have and the ability to diagnose
#
everything and all that and people think that doctors are all fools
#
my own experience is that I don't self-diagnose anything what I find is when doctors have asked
#
me a series of questions I'm perplexed about why they're asking me those questions and then they
#
give me a diagnosis and I go back and look at if you had this diagnosis you know what questions
#
would you start with and they were asking the right questions now those questions could have
#
led them off in different directions how the hell am I supposed to figure that out right this is
#
where the experience comes in and I think this is where in my own experience this is where you can
#
add value without pretending to be what you're not tell me about oyster now because you know oyster
#
and contactless payments in a sense is something I think you should be celebrated more far more
#
than you know you are right now so tell me a little bit about that and what was the thinking
#
behind it which led you down that direction so the oyster card system has been in london since
#
about 2003 I was not the creator of the oyster card system you know it was created by other
#
people in fact the genesis of the oyster card system goes back to about 1990 so there's a whole
#
generation of people who'd worked on it my predecessor and my boss Jay Walder you know
#
who was also very steeped in this whole world were you know very responsible for creating what they
#
did but Jay is the one who took me out of Crossrail and said you know you've done enough on it
#
go do something else and go go down oyster and initially I took the role on with some
#
trepidation because you know here I was working on one of the biggest projects in the world
#
what's this little thing called oyster but you know we discussed my about my career being a
#
series of accidents and it's about what what you make of the opportunity that's being put in front
#
of you right Jay is a guy that I trusted completely you know he was asking me to do something for a
#
reason so I took on oyster so oyster was kind of in the delivery stage at that point and I had to
#
finish off the delivery but more importantly make it a more popular product than it was at the time
#
right it had a great reputation but very low usage only about eight or ten percent of all journeys
#
were being done using oyster so over the first few years you know I took that from eight percent
#
to eighty two percent on the tube a long story behind how that became so popular and all that
#
huge number of challenges to be overcome in that process and look you know I mean I feel proud of
#
the oyster card system even today you know it's a it's a piece of work you know it integrated
#
transport in London made travel more convenient you know we used to have a system of paper tickets
#
that went back for decades before that replaced all of that and made life you know more convenient
#
for people who were traveling on our system but for me you know the big moment of the light bulb
#
moment was almost in my first peak of running oyster you know as I said you know it felt like
#
a bit of a descent coming down from crossrail into oyster so I was thinking what do I do with
#
this job right forget about what the job requires what can you actually do with it so the question
#
I was asking myself was you know if I did this job for you know two years four years whatever it is
#
what would I have wanted to achieve to say that my time in this was fruitful and you know there
#
was some talk of the cost of fair collection so I latched myself onto that one the cost of revenue
#
collection is something that had been assessed to an extent but not comprehensively so we knew
#
that it was a big number which we just didn't know how much so the first piece you know it's
#
again in terms of evidence-based policy making the first thing is you go and get the data right
#
now the cost of revenue collection doesn't leap out at you from any financial reports
#
not just an art organization it doesn't leap out from any organization you know you have to
#
really go back and construct it out of you know detailed financial analysis which took us a few
#
months we had a very bright intern from MIT who I let loose on this project and he you know he
#
produced a very concise report after about four months of work which I still cite as one of the
#
you know great pieces of work that's ever been done because this was you know a piece of analysis
#
that led to real decision making right what it showed is that we were spending 14 and a half
#
percent of our of our revenue just in collecting it so you know one pound out of every seven
#
went into collecting the revenue now if any of our customers found you know realized that that's
#
what was going on with their money they'd be horrified because they pay us to run a transport
#
service not to collect their money we also did some benchmarking with other cities around the
#
world and what we found is that this was not unusual this is actually in a par for course
#
with fair collection now you know fair collection is a tough thing to do you know it's a proper
#
high intensity micro payment environment in fact one of the most challenging micro payment
#
environments right because this is not just about banking micro payment this is actually physical
#
transactions that are happening you know pound two pounds three pounds each time and the speed
#
requirement is insane right so there are micro payments that happen in many other environments
#
but the the interface is not as demanding in our case if you can't do the transaction really fast
#
queues will build up behind you so you know great thing so you know now we know how big the number
#
is we also knew where the money was being spent so we knew what to target I didn't know how much we
#
could bring the cost down but you know it was clear that you could take the big areas of cost
#
and you could attack them and you could do something with it I mean that doesn't mean that
#
we weren't doing about the small areas of cost either you know it's just that the effort that
#
you spend on something is proportionate to what you think the opportunity is so all the usual
#
things about looking at products looking at channels looking at contracts all of that stuff
#
you know we were doing all of it but at the heart of it was the realization that a lot of the cost
#
was embedded in the act of exchanging your money which is basically what a ticket is right you go
#
to a coffee shop you pay for your coffee you go to a transport station you first have to buy a ticket
#
before you're allowed to travel it's a very unusual environment in that it forces you to
#
take this intermediate step before you can consume the service and that step is where the cost is
#
embedded right so again you know a sort of light bulb moment again which said you can try and beat
#
the system into as much efficiency as you want but the real price lies in people not having to
#
exchange their money that's where the fun is right so how can you create a system
#
that doesn't require people to buy a ticket and the answer was almost obvious right everybody
#
carries two things in their pocket they carry you know a bank card a credit card debit card
#
whatever it is and they carry a phone how could you use one of these two or both to pay for
#
transport without having to buy an oyster card in other words you know how can you make a bank card
#
work like an oyster card so we started looking at both phones and cards at that point we were
#
getting more engagement from the world of mobile telephony right so we ran an experiment in 2007
#
we put an oyster card inside a phone this is this is before the day of smartphones
#
so we had a nokia clamp phone you know nokia 6131 we worked with nokia we worked with visa you
#
know the whole sort of whole ecosystem got put together and the trials were incredibly successful
#
right we were getting approval ratings that were off the chart 92 percent of people were saying
#
that if that product was on the market they would use it and our you know people were doing this
#
customer research were saying you know typically if you get 10 to 15 percent you're good to launch
#
you know 92 percent is almost unheard of the problem then was that the telephony industry
#
changed all the standards which became very difficult to work with it it only gets solved
#
you know much later with the you know with the iphone and google phones and all that
#
so you know having put all this effort into the mobile industry we kind of backed away from it
#
but in parallel we were working on bank cards and so the idea of you know a contactless bank card
#
was kind of floating around right people had talked about it and somebody had kind of even
#
written they've taken the core standards for chip and pin cards and converted them into a standard
#
for contactless cards right but you know like with the many cluttered things it was something
#
that didn't work so what we brought to it and i think this is where i can claim some invention
#
rights right was the clarity of thought what is this card what does it need to do
#
you know what's the minimum that it needs to do and therefore how does it need to work
#
and we hacked it completely right so we took the technical standard we just tore it apart and said
#
you know this kind of very lengthy technical standard most of which is doing
#
it's doing things that are not needed how do you compress it down to the bare minimum
#
that you need to do a contactless transaction securely so we looked at the technical standards
#
we looked at the security standards you know the speed at which the transaction happens is very
#
critical a lot of the burden comes from security so how do you again how do not so much as reduce
#
the security because you know of course you can't you know these are payment cards so you have to
#
have a very high level of security how do you craft the security standard that you're not getting
#
a time penalty on it and lastly and absolutely critically how do you create a commercial model
#
in which the transaction flows and the money gets paid and the risk gets accounted for properly
#
the risk sits with the people who are best able to control it and all that
#
so it took us a phenomenal amount of effort to put all of this together but we did and interestingly
#
the bulk of the banking industry was not even interested in this
#
wow so you know bachles were our partners in it and bachle card were absolutely dead keen on it
#
very very supportive partner everyone else not interested mastercard sort of supportive visa
#
not interested it took a lot of persuading to get them on board intervened by very badly by
#
the financial crisis in 2008 where the entire banking industry went into a shell they didn't
#
want to talk about anything new certainly anything that required them to take on new
#
risks was just not on i mean they would just not be able to get it through their own internal
#
process so the interregnum was kind of frustrating in one respect but on the other side it forced us
#
to sharpen our own thinking right and actually that was not a bad thing because you know it
#
just brought the crispness of how this product works everything the security the user experience
#
everything you know if you use a contactless card anywhere in the world the user experience is
#
something that has come out of that work meanwhile this whole question of how do you build the
#
technology so you know we had no technical capability inside tfl i was building that up
#
so actually that interregnum allowed us to build up that capability a lot of the technology for
#
contactless that we have now implemented was built in-house in tfl inside a public sector
#
organization doing not just invention but implementing it as well it's only 2011 that
#
finally you know the planet started aligning on this one internally people in tfl got started
#
getting excited about it because initially there was a lot of pushback to say we have an oyster
#
card you know it's so successful why do we need to go and disrupt it and my point was always that
#
you know if we don't disrupt ourselves somebody else will come in and disrupt us right so let's
#
not be let's not be you know what called lodytes in the uk you know which is people who don't like
#
new technology just for the heck of it you know let's assess it on its merits to say you know is
#
this a good idea or a bad idea but again you know danny kahneman just passed away you know but he
#
and m os twersky were the ones who came up with this concept called the status quo bias i said
#
you know we can't be trapped in this status quo bias we've got to break out of it so it's only
#
2011 that you know we started getting the support internally but also you know enough support
#
internally to be able to go and do a much harder negotiation with the banking industry and that's
#
when the dominoes started falling in the banking industry starting you know with one bank and then
#
the other and the other until pretty much every bank had committed to issuing contactless cards
#
by the end of 2011 we launched acceptance of contactless payments in at the end of 2012
#
first on buses and then in 2014 on the rest of the network you know i was supremely confident
#
that this thing would work and that it would be popular i had no doubts in my mind at all
#
and that's not because of sort of a sense of false hubris or anything else you know we'd done the
#
work we had done the analysis we knew what this thing was and some of that was you know it went
#
back to the very basic question again talking about history to the very basic question of
#
what is a ticket why do people buy tickets why do we force them to buy tickets you know and so again
#
the historian in me came alive and i went back to the middle of the 19th century again in london
#
to say what brought about the invention of tickets so you know there are two kind of parallel stories
#
that come together one is on the railways where you know people were selling tickets on the railways
#
on mainline railways but you know there used to be a guard and they used to sell tickets on the
#
train and all that as soon as it came to the underground that method changed because
#
the intensity of the operating interface meant that the ticketing had to happen
#
away from the train so people were being given little pieces of cardboard to say this is what
#
your entitlement to travel is so big learning in that you know which is that speed matters
#
the second big learning came from buses where buses started operating in london in 1829
#
for the first 50 years payment for buses was in cash you paid the conductor the problem was that
#
with no method of accounting for the money between the driver and the conductor they used to pilfer a
#
lot of the money right and it got to a point where bus companies were no longer running a bus service
#
so hiring out buses which the driver and conductor would take out and they would keep the takings for
#
the end of the day but people realized that that was not a very productive way of running the bus
#
service so it's in 1878 that somebody came up a mr bell came up with a bell punch ticket
#
interestingly there's a bell that so there's a little piece of metal and there'd be a strip
#
of paper by the way you know this is no different from the tickets that get sold on buses today in
#
mumbai that's what i was thinking right there's a strip of paper with all the bus stops written on
#
it and the idea is you make two holes on either side one to show where you got on and the other
#
to show how far you were allowed to go with the ticket right this is basically the way ticketing
#
still happens here the thing that is different about the bell punch ticket was that this little
#
metal box that people the conductors carried on them had a punch on it right so if you punch
#
the ticket two things happened one is that the little chad that had been punched out would fall
#
inside the machine so at the end of the shift when they went back to base all the charts could be
#
collected from inside the box so you knew how many fares had been sold right so it became a method
#
of accounting from that perspective the second thing is a bell would go off every time you
#
press the punch right so everybody knew whether a ticket had been sold or not
#
and that became a mechanism of keeping the conductors honest right it's a beautiful
#
invention you know it's just a little metal box about four inches by four inches but it
#
stopped the pilferage of money so two things right one is the need to create a very fast
#
method of money exchange and the other is a means of accounting to stop pilferage right
#
and honestly everything that has been added on to tickets is an add-on the fact is those are the
#
only two core requirements out of ticketing so now that i had kind of deconstructed ticketing
#
down to its bare minimum the question now is well how do you solve that problem with today's
#
technology right and everything that we've done on contactless cards was to sheer down everything
#
else that was happening with the standards down to its core requirement of solving those two
#
problems so you know i had absolute conviction that the technology would work it would be safe
#
it would be secure and it was joined by one very simple realization which is that nobody wakes up
#
in the morning thinking that the high point of the day is buying a ticket you know we force them
#
to buy a ticket that's why they buy a ticket they want to get somewhere whether it's to work or
#
whether it's to meet their friends whatever it is you know ticketing is a hindrance in that process
#
and if you could alleviate the need to buy a ticket it would take off like wildfire we
#
wouldn't have to do anything at all and the reality is that that is what the evidence has
#
shown after 10 years of having this out there you know just thinking about the little black box
#
again makes me full of wonder because once you explain it like that the needs that it comes out
#
of what a miraculous invention you know both the chat falling so it can be counted and the sound
#
of the bell and it feels miraculous and equally you have lived through we are all living through
#
miraculous times in which technology helps us in our work in so many different ways like the fact
#
that you could go beyond the little you know metal bell box and you know come up with
#
contactless payments give me a sense of how technology you know helps tfl
#
in you know fulfilling what it does because you know like you've pointed out i think you've said
#
that there are 20 million data points that you get from oyster card usage every single day
#
and this helps you you know understand the transport system much better plan it much better
#
you've mentioned the system called scoot which is there too you know which used to be there to
#
organize the 7000 traffic lights and how that can actually now be done much better in real time
#
because of technology and data so give me a sense of how you work with technology because
#
typically what happens is that the bureaucracy tends to be most resistant to new technology
#
because there is a learning curve you have the status quo bias your tools are reliable your
#
methods are things that have worked for you in whatever way but what you seem to have done at
#
every step of the way is take the latest technology and use all the tools whether
#
it's a tech itself or the big data that it produces to dramatically turn things around
#
so take me through your journey of so there's a there's some depth in the question you're
#
asking so let me answer it in the same way right i told you the story of cross trail you know the
#
whole theory of agglomeration and productivity and all that there's a really important point
#
that came after that that we've skipped over which is and again this was sitting in Jay
#
Waldo's office having this debate and this is where it all came out of there's a question that
#
if the justification for investment in new infrastructure is productivity is that not what
#
we do every day we run a transport service because it enables a highly productive city to remain
#
productive right not increase it but to remain productive right and you know so we debated this
#
sort of you know at length one afternoon and it fundamentally changed the nature of what we
#
thought about as our work right so if you ask a transport organization you know what are you here
#
to do you know are you you know the people say you know we run trains we run buses whatever it is
#
that afternoon you know there was a moment when we realized that actually our purpose is to support
#
the economic activity of the city it's the economic health of the city support the you
#
know economic growth of the city i mean these are the things that we're there to do and in the
#
process of doing that we have to run trains and buses and do all these other things but actually
#
there's a lot more that we have to do right we have to provide a quality of service that improves
#
the quality of life air quality has been a huge area of focus in tfl for many years now it's not
#
something that you would find a transport organization being so passionate about but it
#
is because it's part of our overall responsibility so i think that's one data point that needs to be
#
added to the question you're asking there's a second data point and you know we were debating
#
this about the respective roles and responsibilities of a public organization versus the private
#
organization so it's true that in a public organization you don't have a profit motive
#
but you still have a value motive right so i mean i've certainly driven been driven by the
#
fact that if i go into work i want to feel like i'm earning my pay it's not an entitlement right
#
and that i'm not just earning my pay but i'm contributing something that's a multiple of
#
of my pay and that can only come from you know thinking about how you can improve things
#
right there's a very strong sense certainly for me but it's shared by many people in tfl
#
that we are custodians of public money you know we're custodians of the money that people pay us
#
and they expect a service in return for it so again this is not a you know this is not typical
#
monopoly mentality you know we are a service delivery organization so we're supposed to deliver
#
against the thing that people want us to do and to the extent that we receive public funding you
#
know we're custodians of public money as well and therefore we have to demonstrate value against
#
that public money that is how you compete for public resources right so it's not competition
#
in the sense that a private company would engage in but still a competitive framework of a very
#
different kind so what can you do right you know the things that you can do are how can i make my
#
services more efficient how do i reduce the cost of services because if you reduce the cost of
#
services you can expand them the second is if you want the public to be on your side what is it that
#
they want that that you can do better that would that would make them turn around and say yeah you
#
know these guys and they're sort of okay they're on my side and every time an opportunity comes
#
along you know with with technology or indeed with anything else but technology is really
#
key to this to either reduce cost or to improve services or to create a service that's not been
#
there before we can't be shy of exploiting those opportunities right and i think this is where
#
there's a big difference between you know the caricature of a public sector monopoly
#
versus the sort of organization that we've tried to create
#
it yeah but at some level it also seems to be a bit of an outlier in terms of a public sector
#
organization because i look around me in india for example i mean eventually the incentives kick in
#
maybe you know in some ways this worked so well because ken livingston made the early decision
#
because he was an iconoclast anyway of going against the grain and getting the people that
#
he did including jay who then got you on board and you know that has a domino effect but uh
#
look i think even so you know it's absolutely true i'm not the only person who's doing this
#
in tfl there's all ecosystem that's doing it but you know the the fact is that you don't need
#
everyone to be doing it right there's a core day-to-day service that needs to keep on running as
#
long as people are doing the right thing it's okay to turn an organization into a very productive
#
very creative organization requires very few people and again without trying to sound arrogant
#
and pompous and all that you know i've had my fingerprints on many of the big ideas that
#
you know are counted as innovations that have come out of tfl you know whether it's crossrail
#
or oyster or contact i mean contactless is by far the most iconic innovation that's come out of
#
not just tfl but out of transport for many many decades you know an invention that has changed
#
not just transport but radically changed the world of payments you know in india people talk about
#
upi right the thing that's really revolutionized payments around the world is contactless payments
#
something like 93 percent of card payments in the uk across the uk not just on transport
#
are now contactless amazing you started this so you know every time somebody uses a contactless
#
card is like yeah you know interestingly i have a bank account in india but it's my card is not
#
set up for contactless payments every time i try paying people say oh you know can you tap
#
i said no i can't tap and i can tell you exactly why i can't tap but i won't bother telling you
#
you so look i think there is a subtle magic to make organizations in the public sector
#
a bit like what we are it's not easy but equally it doesn't require you know everyone to behave
#
differently just needs enough people to behave differently tell me about the use of data because
#
that particularly fascinates me because earlier you said that you know before oyster started
#
getting all of this data 20 million data points a day as you put it now data gathering would be
#
very slow in the sense every five years you'd go to a particular station and take a survey of where
#
people were going that day and now it is real-time data of everyone who's traveling and and from this
#
information also comes understanding and from that understanding comes action you know i think you
#
mentioned somewhere at the oyster card data helped you plan bus stops which are the optimal places
#
where there should be bus stops for example so give me a sense of how all this data helped you
#
understand the city better and were there counter-intuitive learnings you got from it
#
so look first thing is that we've been a very data rich organization for a long time right there are
#
consistently procured data sets going back to the 1970s that allow us to do analysis on demand and
#
all that you know there were fairly small data sets collected out of surveys and all that you
#
know so it's very expensive to maintain to collect those data sets but the fact that they
#
exist is you know a huge feature right because they don't exist for many organizations where
#
things changed you know about 20 years ago is the world of what we call automatically collected data
#
exploded the oyster card system started giving us records of every journey that was being made
#
not just the small number of journeys that were being selectively surveyed
#
175 years at each stop so you know that was a huge change in the availability of data
#
it's not just the oyster card system you know we have a system called ibus which is an automatic
#
vehicle location system and buses basically gps and buses it's a huge amount of effluent of data
#
coming out of of gps you know likewise signaling systems on trains that were giving us information
#
about movement of trains i mean and then umpteen other data sources of this kind so in about 2004
#
or 2005 we started looking at this data say well what can we do with it right this is all before
#
the terms big data and data analytics and all that stuff had become popular interestingly one of the
#
first points of analysis was the 2005 terrorist attacks on the tube right so we were trying to
#
figure out you know how user behavior changed before and after the attacks now this is the
#
point at which the number of people using the oyster card was still very small i mean tiny
#
absolutely but you could take that small sample and see how their behavior had changed and it
#
started providing us with some insights that frankly our previous data sources would never
#
have allowed us to have you know one is survey data would be useless that because you're only
#
serving at such a low frequency that it doesn't matter and the aggregate data on overall journey
#
levels overall ridership levels is useful for answering some questions but not for other
#
questions and you know frankly so much of the behavior gets suppressed by all the other noise
#
in the aggregate data that you often cannot make sense of it so the fact that we had this granular
#
data was allowing us to answer questions that we were not able to answer before and that was the
#
genesis of a series of work that we started so one of the things we did very early on which is now
#
used every day is you know we had we used to conduct origin and destination surveys on the
#
underground and on the buses but we never connected them up but the reality is that
#
people make multimodal journeys so you know what we really needed was an origin destination
#
matrix cutting across all modes of transport and we could never connect it up before so
#
what oyster allowed us to do is to track people through their entire day or you know through their
#
entire life cycle right and to connect up their journeys and see you know if you get off the tube
#
do you go into a bus if you're going to get off a bus do you go into the tube you know what are
#
the interchange rates and there were very counter-intuitive things that came out of it you
#
know the belief in our bus world was that the number of people the proportion of people
#
interchanging from one bus to another was something like ridiculously low like seven
#
percent or something else turned out to 38 percent you know it's a massive insight
#
because the way you do bus planning is radically different if you know that there's that much
#
interchange happening because you then also need to know when people get off from one bus where
#
do they go you know and this is not at a system wide level you know this is at a bus stop by bus
#
stop level you know what is the nature of interchange because then you can organize your bus stops in
#
such a way that you can make the interchanges the least hassle hassling right so whether it's a
#
bus to bus or tube to bus or rail to whatever it is you know i mean unlike train stations so that
#
you can't move you can move bus stations so you know it started providing us insight of that kind
#
it also started providing us insight on how demand changes through the week
#
how it changes through seasons how it changes because of events or disruptions and bit by bit
#
we have fine-tuned our planning to take account of all of these different factors and none of
#
this was available through survey data and you know what i should also point out to the listeners
#
is that one thing i particularly like about it is the separation of personal and non-personal data
#
so personal data is like strictly private and you don't have access to it and all
#
but you look at non-personal data as a public good so all of this data that you're getting is
#
anonymized you can't actually figure out that a person is getting off this train station and
#
you know taking that bus give me a larger insight now into buses v trains v road v walking etc
#
you know like how do all because people have a lot of sort of fallacious folk beliefs about
#
these for example in india met you know there's this newfound faith in the tech solutionism of
#
metros metros will solve everything and even for london i would have thought till i heard
#
otherwise from you that you know trains we use more than buses but as you point out buses are
#
actually the largest form of public transport apart of course from walking over there so give
#
me a sense so give me some insight into how it is in london how it tends to be worldwide and is
#
there a sense of what is optimal in terms of that mix one of the things to point out here is that
#
you know tfl is one of the most integrated transport organizations in the world you know
#
we're responsible for pretty much everything that moves there are some exceptions but there
#
are not that many so we have the ability to look at this holistically across all forms of transport
#
and you know we as i said you know we're very data rich so we look at all this data
#
quite comprehensively you know there's a very nuanced picture that comes out of the way in which
#
a city works as a visitor to london people hang around the center of london and you would be
#
completely within your rights to believe that the city runs on the underground
#
but as you move out to outer london the entire complexion of transport changes it's much more
#
power-dominated environment it's also an environment in which buses play a very important
#
role so when you look at the overall a mix of transport in london you know about 36 35 36 30
#
percent or so of journeys get made by car which is not a sense that you would get in the center
#
of london about 25 get done on buses you know another sort of 18 percent of that about get done
#
on the underground and rail and there's a big chunk of walking and cycling is very small but
#
growing very fast so there's all mix of transport that that you get that mix is very different
#
depending upon where you are this is an overall london picture that i'm talking about in the
#
center of london it's of course very heavily dominated by the underground and as you move out
#
the complexion changes there are about six and a half seven million journeys by buses every day
#
it's four and a half million on the underground which is as you said that's not a picture that
#
you would assume if you were a visitor to london because you know you've never been to outer london
#
you don't know how important buses are to outer london if you compare this with what's happening
#
in india so here's my kind of uh ported version of what's happened in india for the longest time
#
you know we followed a development model that was based on minimum expenditure and infrastructure
#
right so you know you build a road people get their private vehicles and that's the way cities
#
grew and if you look at movies you know bollywood movies from the 1970s or before
#
mumbai used to look beautiful you know nice beautiful roads hardly any vehicles on it
#
you watch you know amal palakar's chhoti si baat or you watch even earlier you know i was watching
#
devan and skala bazar you know marine drive absolutely empty right there are no cars in
#
1960 in marine drive and i love these scenes because you know they're the same buildings
#
you can recognize the buildings but life looks very different today so that model of development
#
worked in india as long as people were reliant upon public transport because they didn't have
#
the money to buy private vehicles so people were being forced into public transport but that model
#
started breaking down in the 1980s you know as people started becoming affluent and at least
#
some people started becoming affluent as people started to get private vehicles the result was
#
congestion right and i think the mistake that was made is we flipped from a model of zero investment
#
to picking the most expensive investment and investing all of our energies into it
#
so we went from no investment to saying metros will solve this problem right so we've now had
#
starting with the calcutta metro you know in the 1980s but if you leave aside that exercise start
#
with the delhi metro where construction really started in the late 90s you know we've now had
#
a good you know 25 30 years of experience of building metros after 30 years of building metros
#
there is about 850 kilometers of metros that are live in this country right now in the entire
#
country about half of that is the delhi metro london alone as one city has over a thousand kilometers
#
of metros right so this exercise of building metros and i have nothing against metros by the
#
way and i'll say a lot of things that are very critical but that's not to say that i'm being
#
dismissive of metros at all but you can carry on this exercise for a very long time
#
how long will it take and how much investment will it take to get to the levels of metro density
#
that you find in a city like london you know it's a long exercise so let's be clear about at the
#
very least the gestation period that's required in solving this problem but the second insight
#
is even more important that after you've done all of it you know in a city with a thousand kilometers
#
of metro in london there are still more journeys on buses than there are on the underground
#
so where is the focus on buses in the same manner in india right and i think this is the point that
#
i've been pushing for a very long time you know this has been the crux of the work that i've done
#
in india is to put buses on the agenda and it started off with the work in delhi with the
#
private buses that came in in 2011 and then it went quiet for a long time and then it picked up
#
again with you know with the current government and you know you know without wanting to take
#
too much credit for it i feel like i have put buses back on the agenda where people are now
#
talking about buses they're talking about the franchise model of bus service that we have in
#
london mr gutkary is you know quite a fan of that model you know which i've had the privilege of
#
hosting him in london and explaining to him how london works he mentions that experience quite
#
publicly in many on many occasions you know there is clearly a lot more that needs to be done you
#
know i don't think we are working on buses at either the pace or the intensity that we need
#
but we do have to understand that that is the root salvation so there are a couple of things
#
you've said about delhi which i want to cite and then ask you a couple of related questions
#
at one point you've pointed out and again this got me thinking a lot that delhi is one city that
#
is distributed it does not have a city center and the question that you therefore ask is that if it
#
doesn't have a city center does it even need a metro because you know the the core function of
#
a metro seems to be greatest in cities with great density and where there is a city center like
#
london for example or hong kong etc etc and the other factoid is that you've pointed out that
#
london is a city of 90 lakh people with 9 000 buses on the road about 80 percent of them are
#
double decker so effectively 15 000 buses and delhi has about two crore people and about 6 000
#
buses so you know more than twice the size running less than half the buses and you've kind of
#
therefore recommended that look fix a bus problem first that solves a you know a big part of the
#
puzzle two questions question number one is that are there characteristics of a city by which you
#
can determine what the ideal mix should be like do you look at a particular city and say that hey
#
over here a metro is the right solution or over here you prioritize buses or over here and i guess
#
maybe venezia do something about the waterways so how does one think about it in that sense because
#
all the major indian cities and maybe you can comment on delhi bombay bangalore are fundamentally
#
different from each other with different challenges and just going in there with one
#
hammer and say build metros obviously cannot work and also as you pointed out buses have a
#
much shorter gestation period so there is an endogeneity in the problem that we need to unpick
#
here right so the fact that delhi is a distributed city does not mean that we should invest in
#
transport to embed that at that distributed nature forever right so we have to start by
#
asking the question what is the right shape of the city not just for today but for the future
#
i've made the point repeatedly today that in agglomeration is a very serious effect
#
agglomeration is not promoted by creating the form of distributed city that we have in delhi
#
right this problem of people living everywhere and working everywhere it is genuinely very
#
difficult to support it with public transport and no matter what you do with it you know
#
bombay has the same problem today bangalore has the same problem today you know bangalore is one
#
where you know people tell me if you live in south bangalore don't ever take a job in north
#
bangalore right so you know is bangalore a city or is it two overlapping cities right and i think
#
my critique of this is that the way this distributed model has worked is that we have ended up being a
#
collection of villages where yeah you can sort of some people venture out from their village to the
#
next one but you know by and large people stay within their villages right and so it's not a
#
very productive model right so you know i said you know i'm not against metros but you know
#
everything that i say about metros will sound very critical one of my challenges the delhi metro for
#
example is that you know when you look at the investment that has gone in it is phenomenal
#
right has it done anything to alleviate the problems of delhi right now before i get too far
#
you know i'll say that you know you can take a counterfactual and say what would happen if
#
there was no metro in delhi of course life would be harder right but if you think about the problems
#
that the delhi metro set out to solve you know which is congestion on the roads and all has it
#
solved any of that the answer is no so i was in delhi yesterday you know you look at this massive
#
highway infrastructure that's been built huge elevated four lane six lane roads they're all
#
clogged every single one of them is clogged you know i was yesterday i was in delhi on sunday
#
and monday sunday hey great every you know you can travel around for free very freely everywhere
#
monday everything is a mess right so you know after all this investment congestion is worse
#
right and the delhi metro itself is being used quite intensively as well so
#
you know you can't force the delhi metro for the fact that it's being used it is it is being used
#
but look at the you know look at what problems it has solved and not solved right there are some
#
remarkable things that the delhi metro has done which is you know which is very commendable right
#
one is that for many people who are at the borderline of you know can i afford a private
#
transport or not it is providing an alternative that is an absolute lifeline right it's providing
#
you know economic empowerment to people who would otherwise be excluded from the economy
#
absolutely wonderful has it done anything to reshape the city the answer is it's not what it's done
#
is with its layout it's perpetuating this distributed model that is fundamentally not very
#
productive right now this is not a critique of the delhi metro and it's not a critique of the
#
people who run the delhi metro it's a critique of the planning process and it's a critique of
#
the overall philosophy with which this investment is going in and i think you know i think this is
#
in my mind this is a very serious issue because you know if we really want to be you know a
#
highly productive economy you know at par with the developed world and all that you need instruments
#
for productivity to be there and you can't have that if you end up destroying that productivity
#
with this distributed model a thought that struck me when you know i read your factoid about buses
#
in delhi is that let's say we have more buses in delhi but the first thought that struck me is
#
that there is a tremendous class barrier and a gender barrier there the buses in delhi are
#
notoriously a nightmare for women riding because they will always get harassed and assaulted and
#
all of that an absolute nightmare so for me in one sense the changing the culture first matters
#
or maybe you could argue that this could play a part in changing the culture but then the point
#
is culture mitigates against it and i think interestingly of how you know designs of transport
#
can change behavior in the sense that people behave much better in the mumbai metro lines
#
that i have traveled in than in the mumbai local trains in in our metro you will find them behaving
#
like they are in dubai or singapore and there's no spitting and none of that shit is happening
#
everybody's walking in the right line it's organized but it's a different thing in a
#
local train so just within the same city the same people changing their behavior and you know so
#
how does how does one think about this because what you do with the interventions that you make
#
is not just respond to the culture but shape the culture in a way like how would then one think
#
about putting more buses out of there if women are just reluctant to use them and then the argument
#
would be that look the metro empowers women because they can travel relatively safely
#
look you know it's a chicken and egg problem there's no doubt about it but also it's not
#
just a chicken and egg problem it's also an enforcement problem right people feel secured
#
in a day in the delhi metro environment because there is a system of enforcement behind it you
#
know if something happens there's somebody who's going to act on it people don't have that sense
#
with buses and these are you know we talked about incomplete contracts this is part of that
#
incomplete contract it's the set of institutions are layered on top of that very basic transaction
#
of taking a bus that makes it easier and safer for people to to use it you know there is safety in
#
numbers we should not lose sight of that you know more people using public transport is a good thing
#
and because more people using public transport will mean that more people are looking out for
#
each other but you have i have i mean i have no hesitation in agreeing with you that there is an
#
aspect of cultural change that needs to come along with this and that you know simply putting buses
#
on the road is not uh not enough you know there is a lot more that needs to happen with it you
#
know interestingly you know if you compare this with other cities that have also gone through a
#
similar transition the first metro line in hong kong opened in 1974 and there was a very very
#
aggressive campaign on you know let people get off the train before you board it didn't happen
#
in delhi right and therefore the behaviors in delhi never adjusted right it's only much later
#
now that they've put lines on the ground and all that stuff and you know it's a lot better than
#
it used to be but it's still not quite the same right now you might argue oh hong kong is hong
#
kong and this is different but you know the behavior was equally atrocious in hong kong before
#
it was you know there was an exercise to go and change people's behavior nothing happens
#
automatically right you have to work on these things and i think the softer side of things
#
are things that we ignore at our peril goes back to the point where you know if you give an engine
#
on the task of building a railway they'll build a railway right but these softer things are
#
absolutely critical in making that investment productive a necessary foundational moment for
#
tfl it would seem would be the 14 organizations being you know merged into one so there is central
#
decision making over here you mentioned layers of institutions and layers of institutions i think
#
is very much a big problem because there'll always be different agencies that are looking after roads
#
that are looking after buses that are looking after a particular kind of bus on a particular
#
kind of route that that are looking after local trains that are looking after metros they're all
#
over the place how does one then come up with a holistic vision because every department will
#
essentially argue for greater budgets and greater power parkinson's law you know
#
government's departments just tend to expand and expand and seek more power and greater budgets so
#
what is the political economy of that like like you can you know go to a central minister like a
#
gut curry and get him to agree with you but how difficult or easy is it to actually then make
#
change happen in this complex web of relationships so the first thing to realize here is that transport
#
is a state subject so as much as the central government may be interested in this and you
#
know they have the ability to grease the wheels and make things happen faster and all that you
#
know the reality is that the decision making and the ability to implement is all down at the state
#
level right the fact is it should be down at the urban level but as we've talked earlier you know
#
that's the one thing that's missing from our constitutional settlement now you know one
#
revolutionary idea would be to you know re-engineer the urban environment and all that and have proper
#
devolution i don't hold any hope for that happening anytime soon because you know there's
#
sort of conditions under which that would happen just don't seem to exist but there's a second
#
best answer that we can contemplate right and and it you know it's a little bit of a paradox for me
#
as to why this hasn't happened so far i do have a hypothesis which i'll come to which is that you
#
know if you are the government of maharashtra or the government of karnataka or you know the
#
government of orissa there's no doubt about where your votes are coming from you know so we talked
#
about that earlier right but there's also no doubt about where your money is coming from
#
right so you know you only need to get to the level of enlightenment where you understand who's
#
the golden goose and that feeding the golden goose is important for you know if nothing else
#
being able to take the money and spend it in the rural areas every large city in the world is a tax
#
exporter you know without fail this is what happens by definition cities are more productive
#
therefore they get taxed more by definition every other area is poorer and that redistribution is a
#
well-known factor of life so if you have no interest beyond just redistribution you should
#
still care about the health of your cities i think the problem with this is that politicians will
#
have a short time horizon where they'll be looking to the next election which at most is five years
#
away and very often much less than that and you know a lot of what we are talking about requires
#
longer time horizons to actually you know i completely agree this is where the role of the
#
business community becomes critical right they have to be able to sell the idea not just to the
#
government but also to the opposition say look this is a 30-year project you'll take your turns
#
but all of you will be in power at some point right we're not even asking you to do anything
#
monumental we're not asking you to go and sort of crack heads or there's none of that right we're
#
asking you to create an environment in which everybody can prosper right and where i agree
#
with you is that if we rely upon this to happen purely by political initiative then that ecosystem
#
doesn't exist but who's the most self-interested party in all of this it's the people who've
#
committed to being based in cities you know if you are a any of the major corporates based in
#
mumbai well frankly you're going nowhere you're stuck here so the fact that the city is not working
#
as it should is something that you can't ignore now look you know again i'm not trying to be
#
critical of the business community here because you know it may be that they think that irrespective
#
of anything they do nothing will happen and that may well be informed by prior experience because
#
they may have tried some in some cases they have and nothing has happened or it may be that they
#
have their own commercial interests that are more narrow as well you know they're more shorter term
#
narrow but in my view the most enlightened view of this needs to come from people who've made the
#
immovable investments in the cities like barclays in london but i would i would just respond to that
#
by saying and i'm thinking aloud here that you know the uk is a mature democracy india is and
#
i'm coining a term here india is a juvenile democracy and the way the interplay between
#
money and power pays out here is that if a corporate entity or a corporate lobbying group
#
is going to give money to the government the roi they expect is not necessarily something
#
broader like a better ecosystem for everyone but something narrow like give me a government
#
contract or restrict my competition etc etc and i think that is where we are stuck but
#
even juveniles do grow up sometimes so who knows look you know i mean what you're pointing out amit
#
is there's nothing that i can i can disagree with but there is an element of this that is
#
facile as well which is that with every argument in india you know we always find the reasons for
#
why something will not work and you know and and and you know you're not wrong in that right
#
but the question is you know if you want to really be on the path to development the spark has to
#
come from somewhere right i am simply making the point that you know there are there's no shortage
#
of people who are semi-retired you know who've been around seen it all but no longer have that
#
direct commercial responsibility right because they're senior they're connected they have the
#
they have the credibility to make big points but they've not geared themselves up to do these things
#
right keep in mind that you know i mean back in the 1980s when this happened in london
#
you know it wasn't coming from the chief execs of the bank i mean they have their job is to go run
#
the bank right it's coming from senior grandies who are sitting on the board and the chairman
#
of companies and all that stuff you know who whose job it is to kind of sit aloof and atop
#
all of these things and think broader term longer term and so on i think you know my exhortation
#
is to people of that variety right it's not to the chief exec of companies whose frankly
#
whose whose interests will always be much shorter term no and i didn't want to be an
#
assayer in the sense that i fully think of myself as someone embodying pessimism of the intellect
#
but optimism of the will as that saying goes and and you're just showing i think optimism of
#
both kinds in fact so a sort of a final question on india that again if you narrow down on these
#
specific cities delhi bombay bangalore what is your impression of how we should think about these
#
three cities in terms of transport and urban planning and what are the directions which
#
would be suited for them given what they are look you know there are some common elements between
#
all of them there are also some uncommon elements but you know let me just broaden the problem a
#
little bit as well you know we tend to think about the mega cities because that's the most
#
iconic and most visible the bulk of urbanization in india is happening at a very different place
#
it's happening with the blocks because you know what is the first port of call from for somebody
#
coming out of a village it's not mumbai it's their local block it's their local district right
#
so it's happening in all 600 districts in india it's happening in all 4000 or 5000 blocks in india
#
so you know we have to come up with solutions that are not just geared for the big cities but
#
also work across if you look at the big cities i have a very fundamental question right if we
#
carry on with the model of development what is the end state that we can aspire to you know there's
#
a very simple challenge you know give or take over whatever period of time you want in whether it's
#
30 years 50 years whatever it is india's urban population will double right we are not in the
#
business of building new cities like china so all of that population has to be absorbed in our
#
existing cities and frankly the only way it's going to get absorbed is that if all cities become
#
twice the size right all the way from your block headquarters to a mega city like mumbai everything
#
has to become twice the size right you think mumbai is difficult today try overlaying another mumbai
#
on top of the city and see how it works right this model of development that we're following
#
is a dead end except that nobody's willing to call it out as a dead end
#
define this model of development well this distributed model of you know people working
#
everywhere living everywhere you know very difficult to overlay public transport on this
#
you know huge amount of dependence upon private transport as income levels increase there's more
#
and more dependence on not just in private transport but on bigger and bigger public
#
or private transport you know i mean look at the sort of explosion of four by fours in india and
#
if you think like you know what is going on think about the challenges that are coming with climate
#
change is this a model that works the fact that this distributed model of development is a dead
#
end right so the question is you know what what seeds do we need to put in the ground now
#
that allow us to re-engineer our cities so that in 30 40 50 years time they've become more efficient
#
in terms of the economy more efficient in terms of the environment more efficient in terms of
#
social inclusion and economic empowerment these are the things that eventually drive cities right
#
and they can that can only be done by looking at cities that have been productive over centuries
#
and you look at all of them you know the bulk in europe they all have a common characteristic they
#
have a small core highly dense people can live out there you can give people a quality of life
#
a quality of home that's very different but this principle of agglomeration is not going away and
#
by the way you know people talked about our pandemic everybody's working from home and all
#
that it's made not a jot of difference to the way cities work right i mean it's all sort of
#
peripheral to the way cities actually work so we have to come up with policies that re-engineer
#
the way cities look the way cities work the way cities are governed and so on so if you look at
#
a city like we're sitting here in mumbai let's start with mumbai right so how do we go back to
#
reconstruct a court now you know in mumbai we had the opportunity with bkc
#
messed it up we had the opportunity with mill lands messed it up how did you mess it up well
#
i mean bkc you know it designed the whole thing to look like california you know with kind of
#
car access and all that stuff when unless somebody goes and demolishes bkc and starts all over again
#
it puts very good public transport access it's not going to happen but how would you have seen it like
#
denser buildings much denser buildings built to very high density fed by public transport
#
you know so you know no need for private transport that's the way it would have developed
#
you know you look at the mill lands i mean the mill lands are the sort of the ultimate tragedy
#
because they're actually in an area where there is public transport right but built to be completely
#
isolated fortresses you know a few years ago i had to go to the india bulls building and i literally
#
felt like driving into a fortress right so at the end of the day i had to meet a friend at the end
#
of it i walked around the building to say if i was on foot how would i enter this building and you
#
can't it's impossible right that's what we've done right now mumbai has one big opportunity
#
and this may well be the last real opportunity to reshape the city which is the port now you know
#
the port is i mean even for people who live in mumbai the port is a bit of a hidden gem
#
right because it's fenced off you don't you know you're not allowed to go there
#
this you know there's no waterfront activity which allows you to see what is there
#
i got special permission and went in there about five years ago it is striking you know you come
#
out of chattarpati shivaji terminus and you know as you come out you turn right that is where the
#
bulk of the activity is if you turn left the entrance of the port is 700 meters away
#
that's it 700 meters away right and as soon as you enter it basically what you're entering is empty
#
land there's about 760 hectares and 1800 acres of more or less empty land you know you go to
#
canary wharf in london you know a whole financial district of its own 150 000 jobs the entire
#
canary wharf estate is 40 hectares right we've got 750 hectares in the port right this is the
#
opportunity for building you know a canary wharf like development you know a real proper high
#
rise high density high quality not congested right remember canary wharf is not congested
#
it is just built to very high density fed by public transport which is why it's not congested
#
the port is what allows us to rethink mumbai right and i would go further you know with the port to
#
say you know when you look at the areas adjacent to the port you know baikala and all these areas
#
you know i've gone and spent time sort of looking around that area you look at what is actually
#
happening what is the economic activity happening in baikala you know drive along that main road
#
and there's like a hardware shop where they're selling pipes and all you think
#
this is the heart of one of the most expensive districts in in india why is it that we've got
#
hardware shops over here right now again you know you don't need to uproot anyone you don't need to
#
do anything coercive what you need to do is to set up the set up the planning framework to say
#
in the future this is what the street layout is going to look like this is what the land
#
layout is going to look like this is the kind of building footprints that will be allowed some of
#
which will require consolidation of land nothing else will be permitted and just let the economic
#
pressure sort it out right set the incentive structure and just sit back and and let the
#
economic structure take it out right and you can build you know between the port and the adjacent
#
areas you know redevelopment of the adjacent areas you can build a modern city that is as good
#
as any city in the world right built to high density you know it will require a lot of
#
investment in transport but remember what it will enable in terms of upliftment of
#
productivity will pay for the transport well it will pay for all the infrastructure
#
and you know once you've got good transport the fact that people live 20 30 40 kilometers away
#
will not matter that is what it needs it needs a grand vision of that kind because that is what
#
will unlock the you know the economic productivity the response to climate change the response to
#
social inclusion and all these things now you know if you look at delhi there's a very similar
#
thing you could do in delhi you know so for anyone familiar with the geography of delhi you know
#
there's the latin bungalow zone which is this kind of almost sacrosanct you cannot touch it you
#
cannot mess with it so i said fine okay let's forget about the latin bungalow zone but if you
#
go north of the latin bungalow zone start roughly at where the limeridian hotel is from that point
#
north you know a lot of it is private property what is not private property is government
#
property but with very very low density use you know i mean there's a few kind of low
#
rise bungalows and all that stuff i mean not even bungalows that's low quality housing that area
#
look at that place from you know roughly where windsor place is to where ito is draw a red line
#
around all of it that's a good 20 square kilometers it's 2000 hectares about two and
#
half times the size of the port right and 50 times the size of canary wharf 50 times the size of
#
canary wharf right so you know think about the opportunity that that enables again you don't
#
need to be coercive you just need to set up the planning framework and say this is what will be
#
permitted and going back to the point about the delhi metro the point has to be that every metro
#
line will go through that area so no matter where it is in delhi that we're connecting
#
it will connect into that area right and just sit and watch the fun for 30 years
#
it'll all reshape now the same thing applies in bangalore right bangalore is a different case in
#
the sense that you know people have been very protective about the center of bangalore this
#
nice beautiful garden and all that and so all the development has gone on this periphery on the
#
ring road please don't mess with carbon park but you know you don't need to mess with any parks
#
i'm kidding you don't need to mess with any parks in fact i had this debate in calcutta
#
right to say would you ever destroy uh like the grand hotel i said no no i'm not even touching
#
the grand hotel right but if you went to talhousie the bbd park bbd bug and all that area right i
#
mean you know maintain the historical character and all that stuff but allow it's already a dense
#
place but allow it to become 10 times denser with public transport right and you know i mean people
#
talk about uh you know we can't destroy the heritage i mean we've got the buckingham palace
#
in the center of the city we haven't destroyed buckingham palace to make london denser right
#
you can do all of this while protecting the historical character and the amenities and i
#
mean london is a city of parks you know you can create a lot of open space if you stop the misuse
#
of land if you just aggregated all this land that's sitting behind boundary walls it's a
#
phenomenal amount of space you can create so you know my point i mean is that i'm talking
#
about something radical here and and i understand that this is kind of outlandish i would like
#
someone to tell me that there is an alternative plan to absorb our urbanization i don't think
#
there is one here's my next question a city is basically a technology for enabling economic
#
networks and and the means by which it does so is bring them together and you have density
#
and etc etc but in modern times what is also happening is that the nature by which economic
#
networks form and sustain themselves is changing and doesn't always require geography now you know
#
and tech is enabling this now work from home fine it hasn't transformed the world yet but i think
#
you've mentioned somewhere that during kovid what you found was that about half the jobs in
#
london can be done from home but about half can't which are you know your taxi drivers and
#
whatever that if you look 10 20 30 years ahead and obviously actually i mean i won't ask you
#
to look ahead because that's a fool's errand the future is full of unknown unknowns but in general
#
what role do you see there because for me i am a huge sort of watery of urbanization i think is
#
the best possible thing that can happen for me cities are the best place in the world i don't
#
even think they're hellos to live in i think but you know every city that i go to i just love it
#
for being a city and the peoples and the markets and it's it's incredible the density is what i
#
love but at the same time it it is instrumental it is a means to an end that some of those ends
#
can be fulfilled in other ways so what is your sense of the future of cities in that broader sense
#
so this is the question that of course you know has exercised my mind in quite a big way since the
#
pandemic happened you know intriguingly some again history matters here but of course history
#
is not necessarily an indicator of everything that might happen in the future in london there
#
is a reasonably good sort of documentary evidence on two previous pandemics one is 1919 so i went
#
back through you know when the pandemic started the first thing i was like i went back to all
#
my history books to say all of my books about london transport say what actually did people
#
write about the pandemic because i didn't remember reading anything about it you know the striking
#
thing about about 1919 is that no historian bothered even mentioning it if it came and went
#
and that was the end of it right nobody saw any impact now part of that was because it came at
#
the end of the war and the war had already had quite a big impact but the other was the black
#
death in 1760s so 1763 to 65 over a two-year period something like a quarter to a third of
#
london died right and it was followed immediately by the great fire of london in 1766 and in 1781
#
london's population was higher than it was in 1761 so all that did is it allowed the city to
#
regenerate but that's before the internet that's before the internet right now so so this is why
#
i say that you know i mean those points are important the question is are they still relevant
#
the point about the internet is that if you look at the early advertisements for the telephone
#
right they said oh you know no need to make sales calls anymore you can do that from home
#
did it reduce the number of sales calls that are being made no what it did is it sort of allowed
#
reshaping of the way sales happens and you know the door to the salesman got replaced by something
#
else and all that stuff if you look at it today what is happening is that of the half of the jobs
#
that can be done from home the reality is about you know 75 percent of the time people are going
#
into the office right that is the reality of what's happened so you know it's not that it's had no
#
impact but it's not had the kind of binary impact that people thought it would
#
do that's actually not a bad thing you know the economy reshapes from time to time
#
and you know when new technologies appear you know the economy reshapes you know the most recent
#
example is the whole wave of outsourcing so back offices used to be based in the banks in the city
#
of london then they realized that actually that was very expensive real estate and they got
#
moved out into places like lewisham it was five miles away so in fact city bank had an office in
#
canary wharf and they had a outsourcing center also in a tall building in lewisham and you could
#
see the two buildings from each other right but they were five miles apart and eventually you
#
realize that if you know if you can move something out to lewisham you can move it out to somewhere
#
else and eventually the whole thing's now sitting in india did it reduce the employment in city bank
#
no i didn't so so the fact that you know activity that can be separated gets separated actually
#
clears up the space for other economic activity that can come in and the productivity gains that
#
is the whole power of agglomeration right and you know where the history matters in this is that you
#
know when you've seen 10 000 years of evidence of agglomeration what it tells you is that you know
#
it doesn't follow a nice linear path there are new things that come in into that right and other
#
things get pushed out but that's fine you know that is churn that happens in in urban environments
#
churn is not a bad it's not a bad thing at all but the overall direction is very clear
#
one of the things i like to do when traveling is even if i've taken a ticket from a to b i'll
#
sometimes just sit and go to c and therefore i want to do the same thing in this conversation
#
where we've been speaking about your life and your career in transport and all these insights
#
you've given me on urbanization and transport will be you know things i'll process over many days so
#
thanks for so much food for thought but now i want to go a little bit more into your private
#
passion specifically your passion for history and this rumor that's been swirling around
#
that you wrote a book a couple of years ago which you have to complete but you know which is again
#
very history based and i will convince you at the end of it to turn you turn it into a podcast
#
because that's what i do but so tell me a little bit about this particular passion project and how
#
it came about so look you know i have a passion for history it's grown over many years as we've
#
discussed earlier you know but there's a difference between being passionate about
#
history and being able to write it i mean writing is you know it requires a different level of
#
expertise and i'm not a primary researcher by any means you know and there's a difference between
#
being a primary researcher in history who are producing new things new insights and all that
#
versus being something somebody who's a secondary writer who you know i'm benefiting from the
#
primary research that other people have done for me you know the moment the moment of need
#
really again came during the pandemic you know the thing that happened right at the beginning
#
of the pandemic was the murder of george floyd in the us right in my view it's an event whose
#
repercussions are still being felt and probably being felt in ways that we know we may or may
#
not fully acknowledge you know we were you know we had a transport to london as a very london
#
based organization our entire work culture was to come to the office remote working inter-office
#
working on none of that you know we have all of we have multiple offices in london but if a meeting
#
got arranged people used to show up physically the idea of video conferencing the idea of working
#
from home and all that these are all fairly alien to us so you know being the chief technology
#
officer you know one of my first tasks was to flip the entire organization to work from home
#
and thankfully i had the foresight two weeks before the lockdown to do that so with just two
#
weeks of preparation we had done enough that on day one everybody could work from home
#
wow anyway you know our method of engagement with staff was also you know was to call them in and
#
used to have face-to-face sessions i have a very big team so i used to do 16 face-to-face sessions
#
you know twice a year very time intensive so when the pandemic hit that method of engagement of
#
course stopped and we'd never used teams for this kind of stuff or zoom or anything of that kind
#
so the first teams call got set up you know it's 20th of april or thereabouts
#
as a real exercise in figuring out how to make a team's call work with 2000 people you know which
#
is i mean we were new to teams frankly you know we'd never done anything of that kind
#
but anyway we got that all set up and a very interesting call happened at the end of it
#
you know there's a question that came up which four years later i still pondered over it
#
so there's somebody who asked me you know look at the george floyd murder and the black lives
#
movement you know which is not just in the u.s but it's happening in the uk as well
#
and there's a big protest being planned for that weekend
#
so there are two questions from here you know why hasn't tfl said something about this
#
and will you support people taking part in the protest i was completely taken back you know
#
caught off the hoof my response to the first question was very clear you know because i mean
#
this is although the question was being asked differently i have a very clear view on this
#
you know we are not a political organization we don't comment on political issues you know the
#
mayor is a political person he can do what he likes entirely within his remit to do what he wants
#
but we are not a political organization and therefore we will not comment on political issues
#
but as far as the you know you're wanting to go in and participate in the protest you know you are
#
your own free individual you can go and do what you like right in this case you know go and do
#
it with my support right it then made me reflect and i wrote to the team later on to say look this
#
is not my lived experience you know what a black person is feeling as a result of the murder of
#
george floyd is not my lived experience and i talked about the closest i had come to it
#
was meeting you know one of my counterparts from washington dc
#
whose nephew had been shot by the police and died and she has four children who are all now grown up
#
she didn't want any of them to study in the u.s so it was you know i still i still get goosebumps
#
you know when i recall that discussion so i wrote back to the team to say look it's not my lived
#
experience this is my understanding of what it feels like but i have no idea what it feels like
#
you know and honestly it is not possible to really put yourself in the shoes of someone
#
with something so profound anyway this whole thing kicked off a huge debate inside the organization
#
and in society in general about you know what it feels like to be under such aggressive policing
#
and all that stuff so much later in october we celebrate october as black history month
#
and i was kind of thinking you know given this whole george floyd and black lives matter movement
#
what can i do to be supportive of the black lives of the black history month
#
and you know one of my realizations was that it's very difficult to have a dialogue
#
if you can't set the terms of the dialogue right you know without setting the terms of the dialogue
#
it's a dialogue of the deaf you know people are only shouting at each other i can't understand
#
your perspective and you can't understand mine right you know i don't need to agree with your
#
perspective but i at least need to understand it right and we need to have a common terms of
#
debate and one of the problems that you find is the terms of debate are hard to define because
#
people are ignorant about each other fundamentally ignorant about each other right so i said look you
#
know with my passion in history how about i try to illustrate some of these things with some
#
you know some insights about black history so on the first of october
#
after finishing work i sat down and started writing and i posted this on our internet you
#
know just for internal consumption i said so my first story was that you know when people think
#
about pyramids they think about egypt but do you know there are more pyramids in the sudan than
#
there are in egypt i didn't know that till just now wow yeah built by you know multiple empires
#
you know newbian empires you know meroitic and kushitek empires and actually a lot of them are
#
meroitic kingdoms you know they were built much later than the egyptian pyramids but there are
#
many more of them in sudan and were they built with the same purpose and philosophy they're
#
burial pyramids so you know the the expression of surprise that you had is the expression of
#
surprise i got from many people right so how is it that the world doesn't know this right and then
#
you know at the end of that day i said look you know i'm going to see if i can keep this up
#
and then it just became a passion project where it started off with you know an hour of writing
#
you know a short passage and then it became longer and longer and i was staying up later
#
and later in the night trying to finish off each of these articles and you know the closer you get
#
to time you know to the contemporary time the more complicated issues become and therefore
#
unpicking them is harder but you know there's an image that comes out of those 31 stories that i
#
wrote over that month you know one is that people in the west are very kind of condescending and
#
dismissive of black culture because they think there was nothing there were much of savages
#
right which is not true the second is that the the process of corruption around slavery is not
#
understood at all right and therefore you need to bring that into life and you need to bring into
#
life you know the absolute trauma that that left behind not just in the enslaved populations
#
but in the populations that remained again not understood at all you know you have to look at
#
the repercussions of not just slavery but the abolition of slavery so there's a direct link
#
between indentured labor from india and the abolition of slavery
#
like literally 1833 slavery gets abolished 1834 indenture starts a new kind of supply for the same
#
demand new supply for the same demand is also dressed up nicely and all that stuff
#
but frankly a new form of slavery right until you draw these links people don't know these things
#
right the whole process so for example you know we talk about the uh the whole movement around
#
decolonization right which of course you know india being the leader in that movement
#
did you know that there was a new wave of colonization after became india after india
#
became independent there was a new wave of colonization in the 1950s of white settlers
#
you know especially people returning from the war being settled on land expropriated in africa
#
you know why don't people know this right so there's a whole series of these kind of things
#
that that i was writing about the whole sort of process by which the the attempts at creating
#
black republics were were frustrated especially in the haiti and you know the effect of that is
#
visible 200 years later just look at haiti it remains a mess today it doesn't there's an arc
#
of history that's very continuous over there it sparked off you know a debate inside the
#
organization you know in fact many of my black colleagues saying this is our history and i
#
didn't know it why didn't i know about it you know why was i not taught about you know people who'd
#
grown up in the uk saying our education system in the uk completely glossed over all of this
#
but interestingly people who'd grown up in africa you know recent immigrants people who'd grown up
#
in the caribbean saying i don't know any of this either oh right so it's not just the fact that
#
the uk education system was ignoring it actually it's not taught anywhere right so the colonial
#
mindset that you know europe was great and these guys were savages has actually percolated even
#
into the education systems in africa and in a sense i'm not surprised with that because that
#
is part of the colonial legacy that we took their institutions and their education systems and all
#
of that and lost our own innocence and you know what happens which is happening to an extent in
#
india is that the rebellion against that colonial institution is to make up history right which is
#
also not right right there's actually a critique of all of this that doesn't require you to invent
#
facts you know and i think that so you know that it really was a passion project for 31 days right
#
i have something that's about half the length of a book right there's much more that i can and
#
probably should write about it it also has a very direct reflection on things that go on in india
#
right because we don't have the legacy of slavery in the same way but you know the legacy of
#
colonization is still to be unpicked but actually our own social inequities have to be unpicked
#
in the same manner please write that book please and you can tell like you know i was telling you
#
before the podcast turn it into a 31 episode podcast well i'd love to do that yeah yeah yeah
#
so i'm glad to help in any way i can that would be great i have taken up a lot of your time today
#
the world needs you to go out and do more important things but a couple of final things before
#
we go and one of them is about another of your great passions which i happen to find out on the
#
break and i will ask you to demonstrate it for us so you've been clearing your throat a bit so i hope
#
you are able to do that which is your love for singing and the fact that you're you know you've
#
been singing all your life and now you've actually taken to learning it tell me a little bit about
#
that and what the process of learning it is like what is the mindset you take into the learning
#
you know how do you learn and if you'd like to sing a little bit for us you will join the
#
illustrious ranks of kartik mulidhar and ashwini deshpande though not t.m krishna sadly who has
#
been on the show but i didn't ask him to sing because i felt he has more important things to
#
talk about and people keep castigating me for that but you can certainly i'd love it if you
#
were to sing if you feel like it okay i've had a passion for music since childhood but never
#
actually got serious about it so i was one of these kind of amateurish singers i just think
#
i was very good and then again going back to my iot days you know you arrive there and you realize
#
the depth of talent that some of my students you know i mean this is again one of those points
#
about you thinking you're the cleverest person in town then you realize that actually there are
#
people who are leagues ahead of you so you know at one point at one level it was very motivating
#
to see these people at one level it was very demotivating as well like i'm never going to
#
catch up so why bother and so that's where my singing stayed you know it's all kind of
#
a private passion not even a passion it's like sort of private pastime but never really serious
#
but i started taking singing lessons recently partly for lung training you know and that's
#
how it all picked up and i realized that you know there's a difference between being a
#
a bathroom singer and being able to sing properly so this fantastic teacher who's taking me through
#
the paces right and in her own sort of very gentle but very firm way she's kind of putting
#
some structure to the music you know so when you sing the notes have to come out exactly right you
#
know you can't sort of meander here and there and all that stuff you know so i'm still a very
#
very much of a beginner right i mean i wouldn't claim to be anything more than that but it has
#
sparked off you know a new interest which i think is very enjoyable lovely would you like to sing
#
your favorite song a little bit of it uh so you know one of the things that i was chatting with
#
my teacher about you know i mean i most of my passion is for much older songs you know which
#
some will appreciate and not others and she said to me so i was singing a song that i heard of
#
kale cycle which interestingly i'm a big fan of kale so but i'd never heard it before
#
and so she said yeah this is in rag desh and then she said to me did you know that our national
#
song is also composed in rag desh i have no idea i mean i i don't have a knowledge of music that
#
would allow me to recognize rags like that and she said you know i teach this to my students and
#
i make sure that they don't just sing the notes but they pronounce the words exactly because it's
#
in sanskrit right so i said well i'm going to try this out and see how well it sounds
#
so this is something that she really appreciated and you know uh i mean you may you may remember
#
this from our childhood days the vande mataram used to play on the radio every morning at seven
#
o'clock and it was followed by you know all that stuff so deeply ingrained in my mind so
#
let me finish off by singing
#
mataram vande mataram vande mataram
#
i often like to say on this podcast that we contain multitudes and just in the course of
#
this one episode we have traveled from mesopotamia to contactless payments in london to black history
#
to one day matram so well done shashi but before i go one final final question
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which is a tradition on the show for me and my listeners recommend books films music which mean
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a lot to you and you love so much you want to share them with the world well look guns germs and
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steel i think is a book that i would recommend everybody read right it's not often i mean i'm
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one of these people who's very few books have a a singular impact on me i'm one of these people who
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accumulates information out of many books there are very few books that have been sort of mind
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bending for me right and that was definitely one of them it just gave me a very different
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perspective in life it doesn't explain everything in the world but explains a lot so if anyone has
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not read guns germs and steel i would recommend it you know it's a book that's now about 25 years
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old it remains as relevant today as it was back then it embodies a body of research that i think
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in that whole field is unparalleled agree entirely what else the other one that has had an impact on
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me again from being mind-bending is actually a show that you've done before with peggy mohan
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wondrous merchants kings was again one of these utterly utterly mind-bending books and you know
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you can probably put that in the show notes again to just link back to that show what i found
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fascinating about peggy mohan's book is and by the way i've talked about this with my friends at the
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bridge museum i don't think anyone else could have written that book her unique background you
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know as somebody who grew up in trinidad and who understands creole who understand the whole
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process of realization was deployed with such great effect at unpicking our own linguistic history and
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therefore you know a lot about our cultural history it's a book that i found revealing
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in ways that very few books are both these books are masterpieces and and peggy's book i remember
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when i read it it was like jaw-dropping it is so good and so full of great insight and i can imagine
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the historian and you getting so excited by the fact that this is not a person looking at you know
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reading older history or going to monuments and figuring out the past from there but figuring out
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the past through languages which is incredible when you think about you know how people study
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history in fact you know when i when i take people into tours on the british museum i tell them often
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that you know the way people read the way people study history is you first look for written
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sources right and then you have to apply the layer of fake news and written sources because frankly
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all of it is embellished all of it is biased in their own ways and in fact when you find
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historical events where there are two sources very often you find that the narrative is
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diametrically opposite there are many instances of that kind on my tour when i take people to
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the british museum when you run out of that you start looking at objects
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so archaeology has been a huge source of knowledge about the past so if you look at
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indian history you know you look at written sources which are very very difficult to deconstruct a lot
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of that work has been done still going on you look at archaeology it's adding a lot of insight
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although not as much more recently where indian history has been opened up quite a lot in the
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last 20 or 25 years is genetics that's adding new insight and you know you've talked about
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that in previous shows as well i think peggy's book adds a completely new dimension
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which did not exist before and i think it is invaluable for that reason because it's providing
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a way of looking at things that is independent of all the other sources that we've looked at before
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sir i must complain you forgot one source whatsapp of course of course yeah any films or music
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that you love uh look you know i mean i watch movies from time to time you know i went back
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and watched pyaasa after a gap of multiple decades i think the last time i'd seen it was when it was
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on the do-session in the 1980s and frankly as a teenager i barely understood what it was
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i have to say it's counted as a classic it's only when i watched it recently that i realized
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how much of a classic it really is every classic lives in the current day doesn't it
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it is i mean it's timeless in it and it's portrayal storyline the acting everything it really is
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again there's so much content out there these days you know half of it you watch just to sort
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of fill in the time and a bit of entertainment before bed and all that it was profound thank
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you so much and shashi thanks so much for giving me so much of your time may you always be pyaasa
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for progress and purpose and this was great you've given me so much to think about thank you thank
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if you enjoyed listening to this episode share it with anyone you think might be interested
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check out the show notes explore rabbit holes at will shashi doesn't seem to be on social media
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why would such a productive person and fine thing could reach this time on social media but
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you can find me on twitter at amit varma a m i t v a r m a you can browse past episodes of the
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scene and the unseen at scene unseen dot i n and every podcast wrap of your choice thank you for
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listening did you enjoy this episode of the scene and the unseen if so would you like to support
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