#
How should we live in this world?
#
One way of approaching that, something I think I made the mistake of doing in the past, is
#
to think of oneself as a player, someone whose consequences have an impact on this world.
#
You will do ABC, you will achieve XYZ, and things will change and you will be happy,
#
but too often, this way of thinking can bring about anxiety and suffering.
#
As I grow older, I've also become a bit more humble and a bit more aware of the limits
#
A great way to deal with the world, and to understand it and to navigate it, is to be
#
an impartial spectator.
#
This is a phrase coined by Adam Smith, and my guest today reminded me of it.
#
And I think this is not just an excellent philosophy for a journalist, it is also the
#
route to personal happiness, the Buddha would approve.
#
Watch the world closely, but don't get emotionally involved in tribal thinking.
#
Be equanimous, for everything will pass.
#
Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and
#
Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
#
Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen.
#
My guest today is Niranjan Rajadaksh, a man who is like an elder statesman in three domains
#
in India, journalism, policy and economics.
#
Niranjan started out as a young buck in economics journalism, rose to the top of his field,
#
entored many writers and columnists through the years, indeed he gave me my first weekly
#
column in a mainstream newspaper, and then moved to the world of policy.
#
He is now an executive director at Artha Global, and many many people I know think of him as
#
their personal Dronacharya.
#
His wisdom stems from more than just his journalistic and policy experience.
#
Both his parents are legends in the world of Marathi culture, and he is steeped in that
#
As you will hear in this conversation, he is a man of many parts, and there is much
#
But before you get that rare honour, let's take a quick commercial break.
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Do you want to read more?
#
I have put in a lot of work in recent years in building a reading habit.
#
This means that I read more books, but I also read more long-form articles and essays.
#
There is a world of knowledge available through the internet.
#
But the problem we all face is, how do we navigate this knowledge?
#
How do we know what to read?
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How do we put the right incentives in place?
#
Well, I discovered one way.
#
A couple of friends of mine run this awesome company called CTQ Compounds at CTQCompounds.com,
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which aims to help people up-level themselves by reading more.
#
A few months ago, I signed up for one of their programs called The Daily Reader.
#
Every day for six months, they sent me a long-form article to read.
#
The subjects covered went from machine learning to mythology to mental models and marmalade.
#
This helped me build a habit of reading.
#
At the end of every day, I understood the world a little better than I did before.
#
So if you want to build your reading habit, head on over to CTQCompounds and check out
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New batches start every month.
#
They also have a great program called Future Stack, which helps you stay up-to-date with
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ideas, skills, and mental models that will help you stay relevant in the future.
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Future Stack batches start every Saturday.
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What's more, you get a discount of a whopping 2,500 rupees, 2,500 if you use the discount
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So head on over to CTQCompounds at CTQCompounds.com and use the code Unseen.
#
Niranjan, welcome to The Scene on the Unseen.
#
We've been planning this for so long.
#
I've known you for so many years, but now I think 2007 is when we first met and so it's
#
a pleasure to finally be doing this 17 years later and as in a sense, you know, there's
#
a passing of so much time.
#
I want to ask you a question by first quoting from what you have earlier somewhere else
#
spoken of as one of your favorite books, which is Peter Drucker's The Adventures of a Bystander.
#
And I'll just read this bit out before I get to my question.
#
And Drucker writes, quote, Bystanders have no history of their own.
#
They are on the stage, but are not part of the action.
#
They are not even audience.
#
The fortunes of the play and of every actor in it depend on the audience, whereas a reaction
#
of the bystander has no effect except on himself.
#
But standing in the wings, much like the fireman in the theater, the bystander sees
#
things neither the actor nor audience notices.
#
Above all, he sees differently from the way actors or audiences see.
#
Bystanders reflect and reflection is a prism rather than a mirror.
#
And you said this at the start of a talk, which I'll also link from the show notes.
#
And while quoting from this, you mentioned that you saw yourself as a bit of a bystander
#
And I want to ask a bit about that because just reflecting on my own life, I think I
#
have realized that as time goes by, however much you want to be an actor, you realize
#
after a point in time that there is that you are a bystander in most things, that there
#
is value to being a bystander and the value can't be underestimated.
#
And that is one way in which I kind of contextualized it to myself.
#
But even otherwise, when I look at the bare bones of your biography and we'll double
#
click on it in much more length, you know, your parents in a sense were actors.
#
They also did their bystanding, but they were actors.
#
They played their part and are sort of remembered for that.
#
In a lot of what I have seen you do from a distance, whether it is as an editor in journalism
#
where you're quietly in the background mentoring people, commissioning pieces, or whether it
#
is even as part of the policy ecosystem where you're on the board of advisors of this helping,
#
you know, universities, set curricula, etc.
#
It's almost as if you have, you know, mastered that art of being a bystander and taken a
#
So, I'll ask you to elaborate on this, right, when you said, you know, you know.
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So, I would agree with you.
#
I think temperamentally, I am a bystander, you know, perhaps you can put it down to a
#
certain, you know, inborn element of laziness.
#
So, maybe, you know, I'm the guy who stands at the boundary line and watches cricketers
#
rather than actually takes the trouble.
#
You Marathi, you can't compete with us on laziness.
#
So, the polite word is being laid back, I suppose.
#
But more seriously, this Peter Drucker book actually struck me a lot, you know, it resonated
#
with me, this image of the bystander.
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If you remember that book, in the beginning, he explains what he means by this and it's
#
in I think 1912 or 1913 in Vienna, the height of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, you know,
#
I think it's the Emperor's birthday.
#
And there's this march past and, you know, there was a lot of prestige to which student
#
of the school held the flag, you know, and Peter Drucker says that after a lot of attempts,
#
I was given the honour of, you know, holding the flag for the march past, you know, which
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the Emperor would take and halfway through, he suddenly says that this is not his game
#
and he turns around and he gives the flag to somebody else and then walks past and stands
#
in the audience, you know, and he says, that is when I realised that I was temperamentally
#
I agree there are certain advantages of being a bystander, there is a certain distance.
#
Another imagery which has sort of deeply resonated with me is what Adam Smith writes
#
about as the impartial spectator, you know, so a lot of people, I know, say that people
#
who write should have skin in the game and I can see where they're coming from.
#
But I think the way Adam Smith puts it that there is an impartial spectator who almost,
#
you know, the distance itself is his advantage.
#
And I think, in fact, I for some years in Mint Lounge wrote a column called impartial
#
spectator and then as luck would have it, our dear friend Shruti Rajagopalan also wrote
#
a column called impartial spectator.
#
So I think that's another idea which appeals to me.
#
So yeah, it's interesting in my years as a writer on economics and economic policy,
#
I have had two responses, especially when I'm writing on current affairs from people
#
in government because I largely write on macro policy.
#
So it's the RBI, the finance ministry, Nithya Ayog.
#
One set of responses has been that, hey, you guys or you specifically, you write what the
#
pure version of a policy should be.
#
You don't understand that it's difficult, that we face constraints, etc.
#
So that's the classic thing that you guys are having skin in the game.
#
What you're writing is fine in a perfect world, but that's not how it works.
#
But on the other hand, I've also had senior bureaucrats, policymakers tell me an exactly
#
opposite, give an opposite reaction, which is that, hey, don't, you know, you write what
#
should be, how it is going to be done, let us manage the politics, you know.
#
So I think there has been in a way a skin in the game sort of response and bystander
#
or impartial spectator response.
#
So I think there is value in both, in people who write as if they were insiders and people
#
who write as if they were outsiders.
#
I'm comfortable being an outsider.
#
I think it adds some perspective, some, a different view of the world.
#
And in fact, if you remember in that last scene of the, what do you call it, the ratatouille,
#
that film, you know, where the critic has his monologue about what the food critic brings
#
to the table, I think I sort of identify with some of those thoughts.
#
You know, what you just stated so beautifully, skin in the game versus impartial spectator,
#
you know, another way I used to sometimes think about it is of, you know, the Overton
#
Like where are you in the game?
#
If you can be an outsider where you are just trying to shift the Overton window and taking
#
the pure position and laying that way out, or you can be sort of, you know, within the
#
game you're an insider and you're just pushing from the margins and trying to make things
#
In a sense, like I've always seen myself as the person ranting on the outside, the
#
Overton window shifter.
#
You are not quite that, you know, you are much more nuanced in a sense.
#
You don't have the activist urge that I must shift the window, rather you have the truth
#
seeker urge of let's find out what works and how it works and all of that.
#
Yeah, I suppose that would be a fair comment.
#
I try to bring on board what the constraints people making policy are facing.
#
But again, as an outsider, you know, I don't think that at least there are various ways
#
of writing on economics on economic policy.
#
I don't see my way as, you know, trying to think like a insider, it is going to be an
#
outsider's perspective, but with due respect to the fact that people do and in fact, one
#
of my favorite economists Avinash Dixit, you know, has this great line saying that the
#
second best is actually the best, you know.
#
So in the world of economics, you have this first best world where the pure world of frictionless
#
trade and you know, perfect information, perfect competition and then you have the real messy
#
So I try to take the messy world on board, but I would like to push the envelope every
#
Is there an element of realizing that the first best is unachievable and therefore the
#
second best is the best in the context of in the context of one's personal journey
#
Like, and again, sorry, another question about aging, because I just have had reason to think
#
about it a lot recently.
#
But it's, you know, in the sense that when you go through life, when you're young, you're
#
full of passion and energy and all of that, you are always thinking of the first best
#
And as time passes and the years and the decades kind of slip by, you sometimes realize that
#
that first best isn't even the first best, that there's no need to go for that shit.
#
And you, you know, come to peace with your role in the world and what you want to do
#
Have you made, you know, is it that kind of an arc in your life?
#
I think so, because I think you rather than make peace, I think you learn as you go that
#
the world is more complex than you started off in your 20s.
#
And I think complexity is different from being complicated and complicated is different.
#
There are too many moving parts in the real world, you know, and again, if I may use a
#
quote which has always stuck with me.
#
So there is this essay which John Maynard Keynes wrote on his teacher Alfred Marshall,
#
where I think this is the essay in which Keynes cites something which Marshall wrote.
#
And Marshall says that when I began my life as an economist, I had more answers than
#
And as at this stage of my life, when I'm, you know, wrapping up my career, I have more
#
questions than answers.
#
And I think there is something profound there, which, you know, I try to learn from that,
#
you know, you learn to learn to be modest.
#
And I think, you know, sometimes the questions interest you more than just the quick answers.
#
Let's you know, go to biography now and talk about your childhood.
#
So tell me about your childhood, you know, wherever you born, where did you grow up?
#
So I'm a hardcore Mumbai cut, right?
#
I have been brought up in Mumbai, I have stayed almost my entire life in this city, a city
#
It can be exasperating at times, but nevertheless, you know, there is an undercurrent of affection
#
So I had a pretty privileged life, childhood, and I don't mean privileged in the financial
#
sense, it was very much a middle class existence, but privileged in the cultural sense, you
#
know, my parents, both my parents were very famous Marathi writers.
#
My father passed away a few many years ago, and my mother has stopped writing.
#
But at their peak, they were, you know, highly respected, they're still respected.
#
So I grew up in that milieu, you know, and just to give a bit of background, my father
#
was a professor of English at Elpinstone College.
#
He also taught in a few other colleges in Bombay, in Ahmedabad, etc.
#
And he was a bilingual writer.
#
So he wrote both in English and Marathi, which was quite common at that point of time in
#
And he was largely a critic, he wrote some very celebrated books on Marathi poetry and
#
like history of Marathi literature.
#
He was also an essayist, a humorist.
#
He wrote on cricket a lot because he was a big fan of cricket.
#
And he was one of those people, you know, in the 1940s, Marathi literature took a turn,
#
you know, towards modernism.
#
So it's like in Hindi, you had the Naee Kahani movement, we had this Navakatha and Navakavita
#
And I think my father was in the forefront of the people who actually back this shift.
#
And later also when the rural and Dalit poetry came in, I think my parents saw the importance
#
of both these trends much earlier than many people.
#
My mother was a professor of Marathi again at Elpinstone College.
#
And my mother began her career as a short story writer in Marathi.
#
And she was one of those writers in the 60s, 70s, like broadly in the early days of early
#
decades of post-independent India, who wrote a lot on the dilemmas of female life, also
#
the female body, female sexuality, female, you know, life in general, everything.
#
And I think to, you know, great, great appreciation.
#
She then also became a critic.
#
She wrote some very celebrated books on Marathi poetry.
#
And her PhD thesis was on the modernist poet, Maridhekar, who broadly you could say is like
#
Eliot of Marathi, you know, means he turned the direction of Marathi poetry and that won
#
the Sahitya Academy Award.
#
Then my mother also became the president of the Marathi Sahitya Samayalayan, which is
#
the annual literary conference and that is a very prestigious position.
#
So, yeah, so the point is that I grew up in this family with two very celebrated writers.
#
So one thing which it meant is naturally I grew up in a house full of books, you know,
#
and English books, Marathi books, and because my mother wanted to watch Satyajit Ray without
#
subtitles and she wanted to read Camus without, you know, in his own language, he actually
#
even picked up some Bengali and French.
#
So there were some Bengali and French books also.
#
So this was true, you know, so this perhaps this like passion for ideas, I think it came
#
growing up in a house full of books.
#
I think the other thing which now in a look back Amit is that in those years, you know,
#
your formative years, some of Maharashtra's most celebrated writers, poets, thinkers,
#
social activists were coming and going out of our house, you know, so in a way I got
#
to see at a very young age people of great achievement, you know, so I think that keeps
#
you rooted, you know, means you do not you do not you do not judge yourself too highly
#
when you have seen these people at from a very young age.
#
So I think that was and not just Marathi, I think my parents had, you know, the pan-India
#
So you are Ananthamurthy, Bhairappa, Uma Shankar Joshi, Kartar Singh Duggal, lots of writers
#
from other parts of India also were close to my parents.
#
So yeah, it was in that sense when I said it was a privileged childhood, it was this.
#
And if I may continue, so this was the house but we are also living in a housing society
#
So just about every one in this society called Sahitya Sahas is, you know, most of them are
#
no longer there with us, but they are of that same type, you know, means writers, professors,
#
Interestingly, you know, our entire lane was interesting because all this, you know,
#
all the societies in that lane, like ours was a writer's colony, then there was a Patra
#
Karnagar, there was a colony of architects, there was a colony of artists.
#
So the Thakres, for example, were our neighbours, also they were in Kalanagar and a lot of other
#
So in that sense, that entire stretch and our colony was very active, you know, in terms of
#
And like a sidebar, so to say, it is interesting that in this entire world of artists and writers
#
and journalists and architects and scientists also, out comes some economists, you know.
#
So in this lane was where I grew up, Ajay Shah grew up, Mahesh Vyas grew up, Ratan Roy grew up
#
and Rupa Nitsuri grew up, you know.
#
So it is interesting that five economists from my generation, it just so happened,
#
you know, grew up in this lane.
#
So it was, it was great fun.
#
There is a lot I want to double click on.
#
I mean, we'll just speak about this period for a long, long time now.
#
And I want to sort of start with your parents one by one.
#
Like, what I found fascinating while reading about them was the sort of the multiculturalism,
#
not only were they deeply steeped in Marathi, but your dad actually taught English at Elphinstone,
#
at Gujarat College in Ahmedabad, Rajaram College in Kolhapur, etc, etc.
#
And there's a beautiful Pithi obituary of his which came in the TOI, which describes him thus.
#
It says, quote, eminent critic, essayist and erstwhile professor of English,
#
Mangeshvithal Rajadhaksha died on Monday at the age of 96 after a brief illness.
#
His essay is collected in seven volumes brought to Marathi literary criticism earlier,
#
perspicacity, candour and impatience with Kant.
#
His style was economical, precise and always lined with irony.
#
He also co-authored a seminal history of Marathi literature with Kusumvati Deshpande.
#
And in Lok Sattva, in an editorial, it described his death as a death of a Puran Purush, forgive
#
my pronunciations, but a Puran Purush which, you know, was someone who was a scholar in both
#
the English critical tradition as well as a Marathi intellectual, right?
#
Almost in my mind, like, I obviously with my Western lens translate everything.
#
So for me, therefore, a Renaissance man with wide ranging interests across languages and subjects.
#
And I want to sort of ask about this because this seems to me to be like the greatest form
#
Like I did an episode with Sugata Srinivasa Raju where he introduced me to the term rooted
#
cosmopolitanism, right?
#
And my lament was that I am cosmopolitan, yes, but I'm not really rooted enough.
#
And reading about your dad, what struck me was that he was not just a rooted cosmopolitan,
#
obviously, but even that cosmopolitan-ness was deeply rooted.
#
Because he was actually teaching English literature.
#
He was, you know, writing about Shakespeare in India and how it plays over writing all
#
of these incredible books on the culture and all of that.
#
So give me a sense of, you know, what that give me a deeper sense of what it meant to
#
grow up with all of these books around you, not just in English, but also Marathi and
#
an equal respect for both.
#
Like I grew up surrounded by English books, but I also inherited for a while the snobbish
#
attitude that this is it, you know, Western learning, Western culture is the pinnacle
#
and which is a horrible thing that happened because my understanding of all other cultures
#
to this day is much more superficial, you know.
#
So give me a sense of what that was like, like what languages would you converse in?
#
What was sort of, you know, what was the discourse at home and what would you read?
#
Were you reading in both languages equally?
#
So it's interesting what you just read about my father and I think it's a fair reflection
#
of his attitude towards life.
#
I think he thought Western learning and Indian culture were both important and in our case
#
So his great friend P.L. Deshpande, you know, who's perhaps the iconic cultural figure in
#
Maharashtra and a very close friend of my father's, he wrote an essay on my father
#
many years ago, maybe 50, 60 years ago and where one thing he says is that, you know,
#
my father was equally at home with Tukaram and John Donne with Ram Ganesh Gadkari and
#
So I think my father perfectly kept his feet in both worlds, you know, and I think, you
#
know, it's interesting that perhaps he was not the only one.
#
Many years ago, I remember Ramchandra Guha had written a piece on bilingual intellectuals,
#
you know, and at that point of time, there were so many of them, Dr. Harivansh Rai Bachchan,
#
Firag Gorakhpuri, you know, lots of these writers across the country who could write
#
with equal ease in both their mother tongue and in English, you know, and I think perhaps
#
that's something which is dying out unfortunately in India.
#
The second thing actually is that my father was also very fluent in Gujarati, you know,
#
for various reasons. So, in a way, he knew two Indian languages also very well. He never
#
wrote in Gujarati, but he would sometimes, you know, write to his friends in Gujarati,
#
but he spoke Gujarati very fluently. So, I think that that experience broadened my horizons and
#
also at home, it was Marathi definitely and as I said, in my colony, so I actually went to an
#
English school and I think there is a lot of thing that if your parents were Marathi writers,
#
why did you end up in an English school? There is an entire story behind that.
#
I went to a South Mumbai college, but when I came back into my housing society, it was always
#
Marathi was spoken, you know, with my friends, with everything. So, I think I in a way also
#
implicitly grew up with my, you know, one part of my life in cosmopolitan Mumbai, one in very
#
middle class Marathi Mumbai and both enriched me. So, I really do not want to see this as a binary,
#
you know, I am grateful for both what both these worlds have given me. I think that is the key
#
thing, you know, that what happens is that I sometimes fear that because we have lost at least
#
large parts of the elite have lost touch with their languages. I think we are losing a connect
#
with a lot of, you know, sensibility, culture, thinking in which is rooted in the Indian soil,
#
you know, and no culture can be completely divorced from that places soil, you know,
#
soil metaphorically I am saying obviously. So, I think that was important. I actually, you know,
#
did not read much Marathi when I was in school and college. I did read some stuff in college.
#
My Marathi reading actually caught up much later, you know, when I was I think I can say with
#
confidence I am a pretty fluent Marathi speaker to the extent that even today I can give an entire
#
lecture in on economics in Marathi. But Marathi reading picked up a little later when I became
#
more conscious of the fact that hey, you know, I am reading so many English books, why am I not
#
reading Marathi books and it in the early days, so I would say, you know, perhaps in my late 30s,
#
I decided which is about 20 years ago, I have to give away my age now. And I sort of made a
#
conscious decision that I should read more Marathi and my wife, Silie, she studied in the Marathi
#
school. So, she reads more Marathi than English, I read more English than Marathi but I think she
#
also, you know, then gave me a lot of, you know, new stuff to read. So, the reading came a little
#
later but knowledge and speaking in Marathi was right from my childhood.
#
I also want to ask you about another aspect which fascinates me and Peggy Mohan first
#
opened my eyes to it in her episode with me where she spoke about the distinction between
#
being bilingual and being diglossic. And being diglossic is really when each, you might know
#
two languages but each language is restricted to its context. So, at home you might think and speak
#
in, you know, whatever your language is, in my case Bengali perhaps and but at work you are always
#
in English. So, you will never think about economics in Bengali, you won't even be able
#
to express it and you of course won't because you don't know Bengali but even otherwise and so on.
#
So, what is the relationship there between these two? Like, are you always code shifting,
#
you know, when you sort of shift from one language to the other, are the contexts different or
#
do they flow into each other easily? Wow, that's an interesting question. I haven't actually thought
#
about it. So, let me bullshit my way through this one. I think, I mean, I haven't thought about this
#
but I think I shift seamlessly between them, you know. So, sometimes for example, simple thing is
#
when you are counting, you know, sometimes I find myself counting in English sometimes in Marathi.
#
So, maybe that's a very basic way of thinking about it. So, there is this dichotomy in our lives,
#
because English is the language we speak during most of our professional lives.
#
Hindi is important because it is the language which is most commonly spoken in India. So,
#
today I took an Uber, obviously, I spoke to the Uber driver in Hindi. But I think that I
#
I'm actually both, you know, I really don't think in only English or only Marathi.
#
It depends, it's not just about who I am with, you know, sometimes it's just
#
my mind drifts into either English or Marathi. Thankfully, not Hindi because as you know,
#
Mumbaikar Hindi is awful. Mumbaikar spontaneous order, how do you say spontaneous order in Marathi?
#
That's a tough one. I thought you were going to ask me simple questions,
#
not tell your listeners how stupid I am. No, no, because just moments ago,
#
you said that you gave a full lecture on economics in Marathi. No, I'm kidding, I'm kidding.
#
Technical words are always a challenge. So, yeah, I'll come back with that.
#
So, you know, your erstwhile neighbor, your still neighbor, Ajay, you know, and obviously,
#
my co-host for the YouTube show I do, he told me something months ago, which I have been thinking
#
about since and which sort of, you know, got me thinking. And that was about studies done by Jim
#
Heckman, where Heckman essentially, Nobel Prize winning economist, you've obviously must have
#
read all his work. So for the sake of the listeners, so what Heckman essentially finds,
#
to put it simply, is that a child's most important developmental years are between zero to five,
#
because the brain kind of comes out of the womb kind of small, and then it's expanding,
#
it's exploding, I think, one million neurons a second or some shit like that for the first five
#
years. And then it slows down massively. So the development you get in the first five years is
#
everything. And one of Heckman's studies apparently shows that kids who grow up listening to 10-letter
#
words around them, which we can think of as a proxy for complicated discourse, for evolved
#
discourse, have this extra layer of cognitive ability that other kids don't have, right? And
#
you cannot, if you miss that between zero to five, you cannot get that in future, you cannot do adult
#
learning for something like that, because it's just that extra layer which is there. And Ajay's
#
point was that this is a layer of privilege we all ignore, we think of money, you know, but even in
#
a well-to-do family, like in a new or rich family or whatever, you may not be surrounded by books,
#
you may not have those kinds of conversations, and therefore you miss out on that layer completely.
#
And I am now just sort of thinking aloud and riffing, but thinking that in a family that is
#
as deeply bilingual, where you are literally getting 10-letter words in two languages,
#
you know, I think the advantage that you get, and even if you don't want to call it an advantage,
#
the difference that you get in the way that you see the world from others who don't have that
#
privilege is kind of enormous, right? And I was just thinking aloud this morning and thinking that
#
today we are in a globalized world where languages can speak to each other in a sense,
#
but for most of human history, every language and every culture was reinventing the wheel
#
in a sense, you know, like what is art, what is literature, what frame do you apply to it,
#
everything is evolving from within a tradition in an indigenous way, in a language or a dialect,
#
and today, okay, it's a melting pot, and you can apply, you know, a western cinema lens to
#
a Bollywood film and say, hey, Shah Rukh Khan can't act, which of course he can't,
#
but without realizing that that's a complete category error, you know, so when you think back
#
on that, what do you sort of think of that? Because I would imagine that if you compare
#
somebody like you with somebody of your age, growing up in the same economic affluence or
#
circumstances, whatever that was, but without either of these languages, you are just looking
#
at the world very differently, and this is something I've noticed even with, you know,
#
of the economists who've been on my show or the thinkers who've been on my show,
#
I just find that the people who've grown up reading Hindi or whatever the local language is,
#
just think really differently, you know, people like Suyash Rai, Rahul Verma,
#
they just see things that they're purely English speaking colleagues like me,
#
you know, don't grok at all. So what sort of your sense?
#
No, I, so Heckman, of course, has done really fantastic work, I think, in a country like India,
#
also basic nutrition also makes a big difference and also, but, you know, many years ago, I had
#
written, I had read a piece in the New York Times, where they made the same point about
#
what you're making that bilingualism actually gives you long term cognitive advantage, you know,
#
and I think there is something to it, of course, it doesn't mean that somebody brought up with one
#
tradition or one language and necessarily not intelligent, but I think bilingualism,
#
as far as I am concerned, as I said, it has given me exposure to a very different sensibility,
#
you know, and I think, as far as the Marathi world of ideas goes, and I think that's been of immense
#
value to me. The other thing, you know, Amit is that I feel that, you know,
#
there's no need to have a hierarchy of languages that English is better,
#
Marathi is better, Hindi is better. I think people can be naturally multilingual means,
#
I've always been fascinated by areas where actually there is multilingualism in the air,
#
so to say. So example, if you look at the border districts of Karnataka, which border Maharashtra,
#
people speak both Kannada and Marathi equally fluently, and my grandmother came from there,
#
so I know my grandmother spoke two languages, Indian languages, my father, as I said, spoke
#
Marathi and Gujarati. And I see that, you know, it's possible and in some parts of Mumbai,
#
you know, like especially where my cousins grew up, Dadar, Girgaon, Gujarati family spoke Marathi,
#
the Marathi families spoke Gujarati, so I feel that, you know, it's not as much of a,
#
you know, issue that very often that this linguistic wars which people, you know,
#
talk about. Obviously, we've chosen a system of linguistic states, so administratively one
#
language will be important, but I think it's very possible to have, you know, just in any city,
#
especially in cities which are melting pots, people speaking different languages.
#
So, let's sort of shift attention to your mom, right, and I find your mom also very interesting,
#
like you said, not just a writer, but a feminist writer, someone who also taught, who, you know,
#
was a critic as well, who engaged with sort of all of that culture, and in times where such ideas
#
would not have been floating in the air, like today it's so easy to be feminist, you have world
#
literature around you, you're reading, you know, all the great feminist writers, and it's easy,
#
but, you know, to actually, you know, in a sense, you're not inheriting frames,
#
when your mother was born in 1933, I think, so, you know, so she's not inheriting those frames
#
of thinking too naturally, or if she is, please tell me about it, because I'm not really familiar
#
with, you know, the traditions in Marathi literature of that sort of thing either,
#
but she's figuring a lot of that stuff out for herself, and writing about that, and your dad,
#
I think, was 20 years older than her, he's 1930. It was a famous love marriage between
#
a professor and a student, famous, infamous, controversial, whatever, but yeah, they lived
#
a happy life, so my mother actually grew up in a very small town, you know, so at least my father
#
had the advantage of growing up in Mumbai, my mother grew up in Kolhapur, and which was at that
#
point of time, really a small town, you know, but I think there are two things, you know, one is
#
Kolhapur at that point of time, at least what my mother tells me, and what I've read, was socially
#
a very progressive place, you know, so Kolhapur for many years was ruled by this extraordinary
#
king called Shahu Maharaj, you know, so from, you know, in some way a descendant from the Shivaji
#
line, and Shahu Maharaj was someone who was way ahead of his times, you know, so at that point
#
of time, he tried to make, you know, his administration more inclusive, he promoted,
#
he promoted education, I think some element of gender equality means another person,
#
I've written about him was Sahajirao Gaikwad of Baroda, you know, so I think my mother benefited
#
from growing up in a pretty liberal institute, city, and it's interesting that, you know, looking
#
back, my mother was part of a literary group, and many of them became, you know, big names, I think
#
if I remember right, there were six men, six boys and two girls, you know, from that college.
#
And in those years, you know, I'd asked my mother that, you know, you all used to go
#
out for picnics, and she says, there was, you know, she says, it's hard to believe, but there
#
was no pushback that, you know, what are these girls going out with these boys for etc. The
#
second thing, which is so the first thing, I think, just looking through it, that Kolhapur
#
was an exceptional place to grow up. The second is, since again, we have to like shift back to the
#
Marathi issue, is that within Maharashtra, by then, there was around about 50 to 70 years of
#
feminist writing, right. So, Savitri Bai Phule, obviously, there was this Tara Bai Shinde, you
#
know, who wrote this very famous book called Sree Purush Tulana, where she asked whether, you
#
know, what is the difference between men and women, I think written in the 1890s. So, I was
#
very happy when Ram Guha actually included her as one of the makers of modern India. Then you had
#
by then some, you know, there was a very famous book called Kayanthi Nishwas, I think, published
#
in 1933. It was written under a pen name Vibhavari Sherurkar, but then the author revealed her real
#
name later. So, there was already, you know, in Maharashtra, a move towards gender equality, etc.
#
So, my mother was exposed to a lot of this, you know, and then I think, in college and then when
#
she comes to Mumbai, I think, you know, the more contemporary Western feminism, you know, which is
#
Sumanthi Bhuvar and Germaine Greer and all, she started reading but I, this is what I mean, you
#
know, that within our own culture, there are these, you know, deep sort of veins of, you know, social
#
reform, even Ganesh Agarkar, you know, I have mentioned this, right, there is this wonderful
#
essay by Agarkar, where he says that, you know, this is written in the 1880s, mind you, Amit, where
#
boys and girls should get the same education in the same school, in the same classroom.
#
And he says somewhere in the early paragraphs that, you know, I will be asked by men, that if the
#
women learn and go out to work, then who will take care of the children who will clean the,
#
wash the clothes who will cook for us. And Agarkar says, is there any divine law that only women have
#
to do this work? In 1880s, you know, it is a Marathi essay. I have actually shared it on Twitter
#
a couple of times. So, I think that there was, you know, there was a progressive streak, at least,
#
I am quite sure in other states, I am not aware, but in Maharashtra. So, I would assume that my
#
mother, you know, sort of drove again in her own way from both the domestic, the local tradition
#
of gender equality and the international one. My favorite story about Agarkar is that this is in
#
the early days of Ferguson College and he was teaching a biology class and he asked the students
#
that if donkeys had a God, what would that God look like? And then he put his hand behind his ears
#
to indicate like a donkey. And, you know, at one point, I think I got this from B.R. Nanda's
#
biography of Gokhale that he describes how Gokhale once tells this English lady that, you know,
#
I am at Ferguson College and she says, oh, that hotbed of atheism. And I actually studied there
#
and I had absolutely no idea of this history of the place and the Deccan Education Society in the
#
late 1880s, 1890s. And my next question draws from that fact that I had no idea of this.
#
Like, I think that one of the things that people often kind of talk about and lament is on the show
#
is that there is this increasing sort of homogenization where a lot of these local
#
cultures or local traditions are sort of being drowned out by the larger homogeneous mainstream
#
noises that are coming from the cities. Like I did an episode a couple of months ago with
#
Roshan Abbas and Vikram Sathe and Sathe told me about how he'll meet these people in the
#
film industry and there'll be these Marathi kids who'll come from a small town and they'll be
#
talking Pula Deshpande and they'll be, you know, quoting from all their great Marathi writers and
#
all. And a year later he meets them in a party and they're like dressed sickly and they're saying,
#
hey, bro, what's up? And it's completely kind of gone. And I guess, you know, what you said
#
earlier about the hierarchy of languages, A, I couldn't agree with that more, but B, what has,
#
you know, in our post-colonial society somehow happened is that English has first had that
#
flattening sound where it's kind of, you know, become the aspirational language.
#
And beyond that, as the administrative state from the centre has become powerful in a sense,
#
Hindi has also had a flattening sound. And you could argue that even within a region,
#
you go to a city, whatever is the language of that city will have a flattening sound when it
#
comes to the dialects around it. And you could lose something. So I want to ask about, you know,
#
that is that narrative of loss true, not just in terms of language, but also in terms of
#
different strains of thought competing with each other. Like you've spoken about the sort of the
#
Kolhapur more liberal kind of way of thinking, but that has coexisted also with other equally
#
deep rooted in Marathi culture strains, which are much more conservative and whatever. And there
#
also, I get the sense that sometimes the conservativeness wins out because the conservative
#
voice is always more shrill and you know, so on and so forth. And it's not always an easy journey
#
towards liberalism as it was. So what's your sense? Yeah, that's true. I think it's inevitable
#
that in any society, there will be a diversity of opinion and views. I think in that sense,
#
19th century Pune, you know, in the last decades of 19th century Pune, encapsulate this entire
#
tension, you know, because it had very strong conservative voices like Chopra and Kerr, like
#
and it had the reformists and then there were some people in the middle.
#
I and some of those debates became very personal, very acrimonious. So, way before Twitter took up
#
or took over our lives, then, you know, poisoned it. But I think, I would, you know, I would
#
actually dismiss the conservative view also. So, if you read, you know, means it's remarkable
#
that man. So, I refuse to again, you know, say that, you know, with the benefit of hindsight,
#
that the conservatives are always wrong or the liberals are always right. I think what
#
matters to me is the directionality. I mean, are you taking society forward? I don't think
#
you necessarily, I think, you know, again, Agarkar, I think he writes in one of his essays about
#
who is a Sudharak, you know, who is a social reformer. And he says very clearly that,
#
I don't want to destroy what is there senselessly, you know, I just want to
#
ensure that what is not relevant to our times. So, it's, I think, you know, at least the social
#
reformers of that time, they had, you know, they had a respect for what existed. It's not that
#
they were like blindly trying to pull down the entire edifice. Actually, their argument was they
#
are going to strengthen the edifice by, you know, dealing with the cracks. And I think that is
#
important. So, I wouldn't, you know, at any one point of time, this conservative versus liberalism
#
argument, you know, it gets heated, but in the loggers thing of history, I think the conservative
#
argument is important. Amit, sometimes you talk about path dependency, whatever, but I think
#
institutions or ways of thought which have emerged through long years of history,
#
have a certain value, you know, means, I don't see the reason to dismiss everything that is
#
old as bad. So, you know, James K. Hardy once described the moderates of that time as extreme
#
in moderation and the extremists as moderate in extremism. So, they weren't that far apart. And,
#
you know, when I like my heroes are really, you know, the reformers of that time, as it were,
#
Gokhale Agarkar and so on. And I think of them as people who were actually liberal in their ends,
#
but conservative in their means. Even they weren't, you know, radical and in favour of
#
kind of breaking everything down. And like you said, those debates are really important. But
#
when you mentioned that essay by Agarkar, which is only, you know, there in Marathi, and earlier
#
you have spoken of how so many of the writings, whether it's Tilak or whether it's Savarkar,
#
for example, and we can speak about him later, are only in Marathi. And people don't, you can't
#
get a full sense of all of that from English. And that kind of makes me wonder about that,
#
you know, what do we learn from history if we lose history? Because none of that is really part
#
of mainstream knowledge. Like at one level, one imagines that why is humanity, you know,
#
so successful as a species? And it is because we are building on knowledge upon knowledge.
#
The knowledge of the previous generation becomes part of the bedrock of this generation.
#
In a different context, you know, Lakin uses the line, it deepens like a coastal shelf,
#
right? He uses it in the context of miseries. But I see knowledge also like that,
#
knowledge and a civilizational understanding should be deepening like a coastal shelf.
#
But instead, what happens is that what I find in modern times, what I worry about is that
#
simplistic narratives, you know, start dominating the discourse, especially in these modern times
#
where the discourse is so polarized with social media playing its part on that. And therefore,
#
we reinvent the wheel and sometimes we reinvent the wheel ineptly,
#
you know, and the fact is that these arguments like Agarkar saying that no girl should study
#
in school and you know, there's no reason, etc, etc. All of that is lost to us. And there's a
#
certain kind of futility there. And, you know, and I've heard you comment on this in limited
#
context. But overall, do you feel that there is just this massive incredible loss that all
#
of these debates in Marathi, all of this writing in Marathi simply isn't there as part of the larger
#
consciousness of the English educated elites? To be frank, not just the English educated elites,
#
I think even large parts of Maharashtra now has lost touch with this. And I think that's unfortunate
#
no means, I think we need to know our history, right? Even if you want to transcend history,
#
you should know the history first to transcend it. I think that's what it's in fact, you know,
#
Amit just to pedal back a bit when you said about what Vikram Sathe told you about people
#
coming from small town Maharashtra and within the year, talking this lingo and this hierarchy, you
#
know, it's not that people who, you know, sort of judge others who speak in Indian languages and
#
who speak in English speak very good English, you know, means, we know that, you know, there is some
#
of it is just pure social arrogance, it's not that they have great mastery over English either,
#
but I think that, you know, these, how do you keep these debates alive, you know, I think that's what
#
is important, at least the knowledge about these people. And I think, you know, if I may, again,
#
just tangentially, something I've always tried to grapple with that, what makes the Marathi
#
identity, you know, and I've always thought about it in terms of three elements, you know, and
#
if you write it in English, it is semi alliterative, which is I think, the poets,
#
Sant poets, you know, the Bhakti movement, then there is Shivaji and then there is a Sudharaks.
#
And I think all these three have, you know, the Sant poets gave a basic call for equality before
#
God, you know, I know, there is an Ambedkarite critique that they questioned whether they should
#
be anybody between them and God, they didn't actually question their role in society today.
#
So, they didn't question the caste system, they just said that, you know, we can have a direct
#
communion with God. But nevertheless, a certain sense of equality was rooted, you know,
#
because of them. I think Shivaji was an extraordinary figure and he's, you know,
#
it's, you know, a lot of is known about his military achievements and his military genius,
#
I think his vision for the state was radically different from what we had till then, you know,
#
and the third is the Sudharaks who basically, when Maharashtra was grappling with modernity
#
for the first time, you know, they helped the entire society sort of, you know, go through that
#
process. So, I think, like, Sudharaks play a very, very big role in the Marathi identity, the Marathi
#
milieu, you know, and therefore, like, I would think that, you know, just like they made the
#
argument that, you know, what is their 100 years ago need not be relevant today, so that everything
#
they said has to be taken as a certain stone, you know, I mean, you can question them, you can
#
abandon them, but I think their role is important. You know, you also face a Marathi identity and
#
the thought that strikes me is that what has sort of happened with the narrative that we grow up with
#
is that these local identities almost are treated as a subset in the minds of people.
#
So, you're Indian and then below that there is a subset and that is Marathi and Marathi identity,
#
whereas, if I look at, you know, Marathi literature and culture or if I look at Kannada
#
literature and culture, you know, as different guests have gone into, you know, different
#
local cultures, you realize that they're all incredibly huge, powerful nationalities of their
#
own with really rich traditions, but the danger is that that automatic thinking in terms of nation
#
states, lines on maps, that it becomes like a subset and then you just want to log on and
#
listen to Taylor Swift to see what the fuss is about and you lose whatever,
#
you don't even give yourself a chance to discover the beauty in your own culture.
#
Is there a sense that that Marathi identity as it were could just be getting lost? Is it in danger
#
or you feel confident that it can continue to flourish? There will be some level of
#
homogenization in India, you know, I'm a strong believer that, you know, our best bet is the
#
Indian nation state, you know, so I completely dismiss ideas that each state can have its own
#
existence, etc. I don't buy that. So, I think some level, I think the spread of Hindi is
#
inevitable, you know, means, whether it should be forced on people or whether it will happen
#
organically, we can debate it, but I think, you know, Hindi is understood across the country and
#
I think some of it is. So, then the question is of Marathi and, you know, Kannada and Gujarati and
#
I really feel this is where our system of linguistic states actually promotes national
#
integration rather than, you know, means, in the 50s, there was this fear that actually it would
#
create a separate identity and therefore, but I think actually it's been a great success, you know,
#
so within the broader Indian nation state, Indian national identity, if we can have one,
#
some area of cultural autonomy, I think it works, you know, and it's interesting that,
#
I remember many years ago, Balasaheb Thackeray had said this, you know, he says that remember
#
that the salutation we use is Jai Hind, Jai Maharashtra. So, we first say Jai Hind and then
#
we say Jai Maharashtra. We are not never for a moment are we saying that, you know, so I think
#
therefore, some of this is an evolutionary process. Am I 100% confident that Marathi will be able to
#
flourish for the next 100 years? Who knows, you know, I mean, it's a lot because if you see,
#
you know, gradually, we have migration, we have the spread of English education,
#
these things happening organically, I do not think the state can whip people into a cultural,
#
you know, sort of box. I think you'll agree with me there. So, some of these evolutionary things
#
we'll have to and you know, this happens, I think there's this famous, I think, maybe Marzini
#
with that or Garibaldi that when Italy was finally united as a single country in 1860,
#
I think just some 10% of people spoke Italian, you know, and there were so many regional dialects,
#
languages and I think either Garibaldi or Marzini has reportedly said we have created Italy,
#
now we have to create Italians, you know. So, this is a process, you know, I do not,
#
but I think which goes back to the point, if my guess is that Hindi will become more,
#
will spread and it will become more widely spoken and you want your local language also to prosper
#
and English will be there as something, then you have to think about a multilingual existence
#
and a non-hierarchical multilingual existence, right. So, as long as these languages co-exist
#
rather than any one of them suppressing the other either through state action or through
#
social pressure or whatever, it is fine. So, I am just thinking aloud that, you know,
#
going back to Ram's lament about bilingual intellectual sort of dying out or they are
#
not being so many, could one possible reason for that be that mentally we give this hierarchy
#
in our heads, you know, like most people who have not had the kind of upbringing you had,
#
mentally in their heads there will be a hierarchy that, you know, English will have one role and
#
it will be aspirational and if they are in Delhi or whatever, then, you know, if they migrate to
#
one of the big cities, you have to learn the language of that city and so on and so forth
#
and is that perhaps then a reason for the loss of bilingual intellectual because you can only be
#
an intellectual in two languages if you are deeply steeped in from childhood.
#
Yeah, no, it is something I really wish I could but I cannot give a definitive answer but,
#
you know, I think that, I think phrase you use that English is the language of aspiration,
#
I think this is something the Dalit community has also, you know, articulated that, you know,
#
let us children learn English, you know, I think. So, there are different ways of looking at
#
this issue of bilingualism or, you know, multilingualism.
#
So, I think coexistence is, you know, it is an evolving situation on the issue of, you know,
#
I think it is about the judgmental thing which I sort of an uncomfortable with I think in your
#
discussion with Rohit Lamba, Rohit says that somebody told him, you know, why you are reading
#
Tulsidas, you know, are you like reactionary or something of that sort, I do not remember the
#
exact, this is what is really irritating, you know, means why do you think that if you read
#
a Tulsidas or you read a Tukaram or for that matter if you, you know, sort of are active in
#
the local Ganesh Otsav Mandal of your city, why would that typecast you as progressive,
#
backward, fascist, liberal means, I think this just goes back to your point, right, that very
#
often people jump to conclusions, both means, I do not think any part of the political divide is
#
innocent of that crime. So, I think we need to generally sort of be more in tune with
#
what can broadly be called Indian tradition. Yeah, and the superimposition of the political
#
on the cultural is just incredibly toxic because then you just close your mind off just so much
#
which is. It is interesting, after your talk with Rohit, I had a small WhatsApp exchange with him
#
and this Tulsidas thing reminded me, it is a bit of a, you know, ditto Ramit, so just bear with me.
#
Dittos are encouraged. So, Rahul Sankritan wrote this famous book,
#
Volga Se Ganga Tak and this is the sweeping history of humankind and I tried to read in Hindi,
#
it did not come naturally to me. So, I bought the English translation.
#
Interestingly, the first English translation was done by a Russian scholar, right, because
#
Sankritan, among other things, was also a member of the Communist Party.
#
And this Russian scholar in this was in the 60s, he writes in his introduction
#
that I was goaded to translate this by comrade PC Joshi who was that time a very big figure in the
#
communist movement and he says somewhere in that thing that PC Joshi had read Tulsidas 18 times.
#
So, now here is somebody on the left who has read Tulsidas 18 times and then here is Rohit's,
#
you know, sort of comment that if you read, you know, he has been asked that, you know,
#
if you are reading Tulsidas, are not you like. So, this I think is, you know, this broad sweep
#
that everything that is comes, you know, from a certain Indian tradition is necessarily
#
backward and all, I just do not buy that. I will take a detour from the detour and
#
ask about, you know, since you mentioned, you know, reading that book in the introduction
#
and trying to read it in Hindi and then going to English, you know, your deep interest in economic
#
history has of course been remarked upon by many of your colleagues and the little sense that I
#
get from whatever of your writings I have read over the years is that you are just reading very
#
deeply and you are reading very widely and so on and so forth. And my question therefore is that,
#
you know, what I notice around me sometimes is that there are a lot of people who rather than
#
sinking in are reaching out. So, you are going on social media and you are constantly swiping,
#
swiping, skimming, skimming, reaching out to the wider world and the engagement is often incredibly
#
shallow while what someone like you seems to be doing very often and, you know, I do not know how
#
much you read, how many hours a day, but feel free to talk about that as well. Someone like you is
#
just sinking in, just reading a lot. There is no hurry to get anywhere, you know, just
#
and actually the world is fascinating, history is incredible, it is mind blowing, you know,
#
there is so much more of it than the present time because there is so much more of it.
#
So, give me a sense of that like was this always like a childhood habit with you that you will just
#
sit down and read and you will not have the anxieties of constantly keeping up with the
#
latest books, the latest trends, the latest tweets as it were in the modern time or?
#
Honest admission, I enjoy social media as long as you do not go down the, you know,
#
the usual noise, you know, if you use Twitter, I have made great friends on Twitter, I get
#
rid of reading material, but yeah, I do not engage as much as I used to say five years ago.
#
I see the two things about my reading, you know, one is I am pretty aimless reader, you know,
#
so it is not that I have decided that I am going to read on whatever, you know, like
#
artificial intelligence, I am buying five books on artificial intelligence and reading and it is
#
pretty much random, you know, and it is pretty much erratic.
#
The reason I am fascinated by economic history and history of economic thought,
#
I think goes back to again, some of our earlier thing, I see I think a lot of,
#
you know, economics, there is a science and there is an art. In fact, the book which Dr.
#
Kilker and Ajay wrote, it is art and science of policy and I think that what is this difference,
#
that obviously, there is a technical economics which is the ground, you know, is the foundation
#
which I immensely respect. But when you think about how do you bring it to the real world,
#
the same messy world, the second best world which we spoke about, there are so many institutional
#
complexities, there are cultural complexities, etc. So, it cannot, you know, the same principles
#
need to be used in different contexts, right. It is a bit like medicine in a doctor, you know,
#
every patient is different for a doctor. And for that, I find economic history very useful,
#
you know, and in fact, the history of economic thought, you know, I am fascinated by
#
Indian economists. Again, I do not want to make a hierarchy that we have, you know, that
#
Indian economists, you know, are better than Western, I have no such claim to make.
#
But I think that economic history is important because in the real world there is path dependence.
#
So, just to quickly something which came to my mind an example, right, you ask yourself that
#
why are within Europe, why are the Germans the most hawkish on inflation? And they have been,
#
their memories are still scolded by the great inflation which led to the collapse of society
#
and the rise of fascism. That is my theory, right. Or a lot of American economists of a
#
particular generation, the Solo, Arrow, Samuelson, all these people, if you see that the importance
#
they gave to the, you know, the problem of labor markets, you know, and I think that comes from,
#
you know, they grew up in the great depression. So, I think a lot of what people write, say,
#
research depends on the specific context and how do you take that into your own context.
#
And I think economic history is important. So, therefore, I feel extremely like unhappy that
#
economic history and the history of economic thought is not taught seriously in universities
#
these days. I think it is important because, you know, the art of economics is and I have learned
#
this from, you know, people I have met that how do you think about the application of economic
#
theory or economic principles to our times, to our society. And one aspect of my question also was
#
about the personal rhythms of your life, like in terms of... I am an extremely unstructured reader,
#
you know, and you said that you read widely and deeply, I would, you know, with no false modesty,
#
correct you and say I do not read deeply, I read widely. But good reading has to be unstructured
#
because only then can... So, I do not, I am not a deep reader in the sense that
#
do I really can claim total mastery over game theory or can I claim total mastery about,
#
say, whatever, you know, monetary history, I cannot. But I read widely, right. And as I said,
#
it is pretty erratic. So, currently, I am reading a book on East Asian economic policy,
#
Mike Brearley's latest book on cricket, and I am reading the Slow House series, you know,
#
the new book. So, it is a very strange mix, you know. So, I am an... I just like the act of reading,
#
I find it extremely relaxing. I do not think I have ever read because I want to get anything
#
out of this or I want to be more informed. Sometimes, you know, just sometimes you read
#
things for the sure beauty of the writing, sometimes because it is informative. The other
#
thing is that, you know, I have learned over the years is that I find myself going more and
#
more to the classics, you know. So, I prefer sometimes rereading the classics to reading
#
some book which has been promoted by the book industry right now, you know. So, you are hit by
#
reviews and this and that and I would rather spend going back and for 6 hours and reading
#
something I really enjoyed. And sometimes, you know, they say that, you know, what is a great
#
book? A great book is one which changes with you, right. So, it is the same book but every time you
#
read it, it is as if the book has transformed because, you know, you are getting a different
#
view of things. So, there are those books where I reread and reread, so. Tell me about some such
#
book. So, forget the technical economics stuff, right. So, one book which I enjoy immensely is
#
Post War, you know, this book by Tony Judd on the history of Europe after 1945. So, it is,
#
I think it is absolutely magnificent, you know, the book. It starts off when Europe is
#
at the nadir of its existence, right. It has a 20 years of depression, civil war, war and then,
#
you know, basically destruction of the war and then how Europe rebuilt itself. And I think
#
that is a book I keep rereading, you know. There are some other books which I find myself
#
going back to strangely, Gideon Haig's book on one, you know, I think it tells you so much,
#
not about just cricket but about life, you know, I think that is one book I have read. Maybe
#
more names will come to me but I think, I think these some of these books are Keynes, you know,
#
I think besides all his, again, the general theory, the treatise of money,
#
Keynes' journalistic writings, you know, I enjoy them thoroughly. I can just go back and
#
read them every year, you know, so. I mean, many, many, many, many years from now, we will
#
reach the end of the episode and I will ask you for your recommendations. So, no doubt you will
#
remember more by then but let us go back to biography, you know. So, there is your childhood
#
in the society, these are your parents, you are surrounded by Marathi books, you are surrounded
#
by English books. What is it like to kind of grow up there? Like, what is the texture of your day
#
at that time? There is no internet, there are no smartphones, how are you spending your time?
#
So, I think one thing we should make clear is that it was not, it was not some very bookish
#
existence, right, because both my parents loved cinema, they loved travel. So, I do not think it
#
meant that we had some very academic upbringing and actually, in school, I spent more time, I
#
think, playing cricket than, you know, studying. So, like my, I think during the examination,
#
we used to have two volumes of the wisdom cricketing almanac, which used to be strategically
#
hidden during my exams, you know. So, that another book which you keep reading, although you know
#
everything what is in it, but so it was not, it was not, it was not like intellectual in that sense
#
that everything else was shut, you know, means, you ate good food and I, you know, it was in
#
many other ways and normal, but what I got the most is this group of friends, you know, and I have
#
spent 55 years of my life in that colony, right, and I am close to 60. So, almost my entire life,
#
I have lived there and most of these friends came from very similar backgrounds and you will be
#
surprised that even today, every Sunday for three hours, we meet in our colony garden over cutting
#
chai and we talk about everything under the sun, you know, and most of my friends today have reached,
#
have done very well in their chosen profession. So, we have doctors, engineers, lawyers,
#
corporate executives, entrepreneurs, one of my friends is a photographer, another is like a
#
leading Marathi theatre director and when we talk everything under the sun and in such a big group
#
of about 15-20 childhood friends, they are bound to be different political persuasions, right.
#
So, there are some people, BJP, Congress, Shiv Sena, MNS, some of the old socialist, you know,
#
types but we have never allowed political differences to ever come in the way. So,
#
I think that is something which I really value that this rootedness in my among my friends and
#
in fact, I joke, you know, that everybody says that India is country of migrants, you know,
#
and Chinmay Tumbe has written this book, India Moving, it is a lovely book and here I am,
#
complete loser, I have stayed in one housing society for my entire life and so, my friends
#
but I think again that has brought me. So, it was otherwise a very normal, you know,
#
like we would play cricket, we would, you know, we would have our local Ganpati festival,
#
we would have our annual colony day where there would be the usual plays and music etc.
#
But occasionally bunk college and go for films and it was nothing out of the ordinary. I think
#
that is good, you know, because I would hate it if I grew up in this only academic or only bookish
#
atmosphere. I think it was a much more relaxed upbringing, yeah, in school.
#
So, couple of questions first, how was your conception of yourself evolving during this
#
time? Like what did you want to be? Like did you at any point want to be a cricketer because you
#
were playing cricket and all of that? Sachin of course is one of your young protégés I have heard.
#
So, what was it like? Like obviously, I do not think when you are very young, you are like I am
#
going to be a journalist or I am going to be in policy. So, how did you see yourself? How did that
#
evolve? So, curiously, by the time I was in the seventh or eighth standard, I had decided I want
#
to be an architect, you know, see everybody hopes to be a cricketer but I realized very early on
#
that I am just not good enough, you know, I wanted to be an architect. I was pretty
#
passionate about architecture. And so, after my tenth standard, I joined college and I went into
#
the science stream because my plan was after 12th, I will apply to architecture school and be an
#
architect. And then, you know, some of these accidents of life, I was standing in queue for
#
admission at Elphinstone College. And then when my turn came, the professor said, okay, fine, you
#
know, for my marks is that which went to be very frank were not exactly something to boast about.
#
And she asked me that, okay, you are doing science. So, what do you want to do after that? So, I said,
#
I want to be an architect. So, I am trying to be an architect. So, he said, okay, fine. So,
#
you are going to do physics, chemistry, mathematics, that is your, I said, yeah.
#
So, then she says, would you like to drop biology? And I was pretty good in maths and physics, but
#
I was not very keen on biology ever. So, I said, sure, you know, it was amazing. So, I said,
#
but what do I take? So, she said, no, from this year, we are offering economics as an option for
#
biology. I had no clue what economics meant. So, I asked a very stupid question. So, I said,
#
in economics, do you have labs, you know, lab hours? So, she said, no, no, no, there are no lab hours.
#
So, I quickly calculated that wow, there is so much time saved, you know, from lab work. So,
#
I said, okay, fine, I will do economics. That was my introduction to economics. It was just
#
that accident. And so, my idea was to be an architect, but I think somewhere in the
#
late, in the my 11th standard, middle of the 12th standard, I figured out that I am liking
#
this subject and then I made the switch. So, yeah, journalism and all was not on the picture, but
#
I was, I sort of fell in love with economics. Were the teachers that helped you do that? Because
#
one of the big factors and happenstance in terms of, you know, what goes on in college is if you
#
have a good teacher in a particular subject, will start loving it. If you have a terrible teacher
#
and a great subject, you might just be turned off completely. So, what was that sort of process
#
like? Because when I think back to college education, I think of all of it as being incredibly
#
dull and dreary. And my sort of amateur fascination with economics came much later when I started
#
realising how is basically a study of human behaviour and human society and, you know,
#
it was almost a freelance fascination as it were. So, in your case, how was?
#
So, to be very frank, in the first two years where I sort of stumbled into economics,
#
it was nothing, you know, I mean, I do not think the classroom teaching was anything extraordinary.
#
I think what, looking back, I mean, what perhaps sort of drew me to economics gradually,
#
was the fact that I was finding it useful to make sense of life around me.
#
So, when you move from school to college, you are suddenly, at least in Mumbai,
#
exposed to a different life, right? You are walking to the station, you are seeing,
#
you know, you are seeing a different life, you are seeing the poverty, you are seeing
#
that and the famous Mumbai textile strike was on. So, you know, that entire thing you could see.
#
So, I found economics helping me make sense of this and at some point, I remember my father had
#
when he figured this out, he had asked me to read John Kenneth Galbraith's The Age of Uncertainty,
#
which was a BBC programme, but which was made into a book, you know, just like
#
Bronowski did Ascent of Man, this was the parallel economics.
#
And if I remember correctly, he gave me Gunnar Myrdal's Asian drama. It is a three volume work,
#
but we had a bridge one volume and I really found that fascinating. So, teaching was okay,
#
I sort of my first attraction to economics was, it is a good way to understand the world around
#
me. There is some logical way to, you know, sort of arrange your thoughts. I was lucky at
#
undergraduate level to have an extraordinary teacher called Professor Malapur at Elphinstone
#
College. And he really brought economics alive, you know, and like some of our college friends,
#
we still remember that he used to take the nine o'clock lecture. So, basically meant that you have
#
to leave Bandra at eight o'clock, which means that you have to drag yourself out of bed and,
#
you know, so not exactly the most attractive lecture to take in the but he used to take the
#
nine o'clock lectures he would take on economics. And he would never take attendance. It is in those
#
days, you know, and you will not believe with Amit, the lecture hall used to be packed. So,
#
that was the power of a good teacher. So, I am, I think he really in that sense, fired my, you know,
#
and I was doing statistics along with economics. So, I think I was happy that I did an empirical
#
course with economics. But I think the really transformative teachers, Professor Malapur like,
#
you know, fanned the flame so to say, but the truly transformative teachers were in university.
#
So, I joined the what used to be called the Bombay School of Economics. And at that point
#
of time, it was perhaps at the last, you know, stage of its golden age. And I had an absolutely
#
wonderful time there. And in the Bombay School of Economics, one at that point of time, it was known
#
as a centre of dissent against the Nehruvian consensus. So, the Brahmanand Vakil model,
#
etc. And Professor Brahmanand actually was heading it for the first year of my MA, he retired in the
#
second year. So, that was one, you know, so, in a way, second, it was a very eclectic sort of
#
education. So, we studied Keynes, Marx, Friedman, Joan Robinson, Sharafa, Kolesky, you know, so,
#
it was like we studied game theory. It was just the range of things we were exposed to was
#
quite astonishing. And third was very collegial atmosphere. And I think, as I said, we had really
#
good teachers, but three young teachers really made a mark on me, you know, and I think I am
#
eternally grateful if I became an economist and an economics writer, it is because of them, you
#
know, eventually. So, there was Manohar Rao, Abhay Pethay and Ajit Karnik, you know, and that time,
#
they were all in their 30s. And unfortunately, Professor Rao at the peak of his power, he passed
#
away a little early at the age of 51. But I am still in Ajit Karnik, I am still in touch with,
#
he is now in Dubai teaching there and Professor Pethay is like the closest I have to a guru in
#
life, you know, and he, I did my PhD under him as well. So, I think they were in their 30s,
#
they were fired up, I think we were a decent bunch of students. So, they took, you know,
#
special care. And of course, cricket never leaves our lives. So, we used to have, you know, Saturday
#
cricket matches. In fact, the first again detour. So, first empirical project I took on was because
#
of them, I thought of helping them. At that point of time, there was, you know, there was some list
#
of the most impactful cricketers or batsmen in the past 50 years. And it was not just based on
#
average, it was based on some, it was based on some slightly more sophisticated empirics.
#
And I think Sunil Gavaskar wasn't in the top 10. So, that sort of got my professors worked up. So,
#
we actually, the first time I actually used statistics for a practical project was to prove
#
that Sunil Gavaskar actually is what should be among the top 10. And you managed to do that?
#
I think so. I don't know. I don't remember. Yeah. I'm struck by what you mentioned about
#
your college about how you're studying Marx and Keynes and Friedman and John Robinson and
#
all of these people. And I'm reminded of sort of Gandhi's famous quote of, I don't want my house
#
to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the culture of all lands to be
#
blown about my house as freely as possible, but I refuse to be blown off my feet by any stop code.
#
And a beautiful sort of expression of that openness, which in many places of,
#
in most places in India, I think at that time it wasn't there. So,
#
tell me about how your frames of thinking about the world evolved. Like when we are young,
#
we are often in our attempt to make sense of a complicated world, we are often drawn to the
#
first simple narrative, it seems to explain everything. And then of course, there is a
#
danger we get dogmatic about that. But if we keep exploring, then more and more winds blow
#
through as it were, and then you come to a different sort of understanding. And it is a
#
journey that takes a lot of time. In my case, certainly 10, 15 years of just kind of figuring
#
out what I think about the world to begin with. And thankfully, I didn't go through the
#
university system to such an extent that I could be indoctrinated in any one way or
#
fall prey to the fashion of the time. But what was that process like for you about
#
just the frameworks of understanding the world? Yeah, no, undoubtedly, I think when you I think
#
I'll go back to the Marshall, Alfred Marshall quote, right? You start off with more answers
#
than questions, you know, so I think, in all this, like you're exposed to a whole range of schools
#
of thought, a whole range of ways of doing economics, but you sort of latch on to something
#
which makes sense to you at that point of time. And then you say, Oh, I'm a Marxist, I'm a Keynesian,
#
I'm a, you know, XYZ, it's based on just heuristics more than anything else, you know,
#
sometimes it's just that you want to be part of the coolest group in, you know, in your college
#
or in your university. So that happened, I think it's only very gradually that just had sedimentation
#
or whatever, you know, I think I get the sense that understanding economic life is very complicated
#
and it's complex and therefore, you have to keep an open mind, I don't think that, you know,
#
labels are very useful at after certain point of time, fine, there are, you know,
#
there are identifiers maybe but beyond the point, I think, and you know, if you read,
#
like, any of the great economists, you see even their views change, evolve, you know, means,
#
again, just to go back to Keynes, the Keynes who wrote the treatise of money in 3031 and the Keynes
#
who wrote general theory in 36 are very different, you know, and you see it in Hayek, you know,
#
means Hayek sort of becomes more, you know, at peace with like a social welfare state in
#
the constitution of liberty, then he moves back to, you know, denationalization of money.
#
So, I think, you see that even within, you know, the greats, they keep, they evolve,
#
they try to understand. So, if the greats are doing this, you know, what makes you think that
#
you have the final answer. So, it took a long time, I mean, I think there were many, I think
#
first 10 years at least after getting my masters, I would say I was comfortably in the camp of easy
#
answers, I know everything, you know, and then gradually life teaches you hard lessons.
#
So, tell me about the progression from there, like when you did your MA, like, what were you
#
thinking? Was it just a natural thing that, oh, I've done my BA in economics and I love the subject
#
and I'll do an MA and then I'll figure it out, maybe I'll be an academic or blah, blah, blah.
#
What was, because in those times options were incredibly limited, the things were not as fluid
#
as they are that you flow from one thing to the other. After BA, MA was like a conscious choice,
#
you know, I remember my professor taking me aside and in college, your undergraduate and telling
#
me, listen, why don't you apply to the one of the IIMs, you know, means, your mathematics is
#
quite good, you know, you've got decent scores, give it a shot and I said, no, no, I'm quite sure
#
I want to do MA in economics and as you say at that time, it wasn't, you know, opportunities
#
were restricted. So, there was academia, if you are sitting in Mumbai, especially you could apply
#
to the RBI and there was organic CMIE were just starting off, the Tata's had an economics department
#
and then there was economic journalism and actually, if you look at it, you know, today,
#
like virtually every investment bank, every company has these battalions of economists,
#
it wasn't there. In fact, I chose to go into academia, you know, so I for two years actually
#
taught economics at undergraduate level. But I had my moment of epiphany, you know,
#
I like teaching, but I didn't see myself doing it and I was always interested in
#
both academia, both like economics and writing. So, I said, I'll try my hand at
#
economic journalism. There was a short period between academia and journalism where I actually
#
worked in a small consulting firm, not much to share about that. But yeah, so, you know,
#
and it's interesting that I have a very close friend Anish Pradhan, you may have heard of him,
#
he's a very famous tabla player. And like Anish is my closest friend from college, almost a brother
#
and he also, you know, he had done his masters in history and you know, should I be a professional
#
musician? Should I go teach history? So, we were all struggling with that. So, I tried my hand at
#
teaching. It was fun, but I eventually decided to move into economic journalism. Yeah, so,
#
that actually then you know, perhaps we can talk about it, the exposure to economics and action
#
also, you know, sort of gave me, you know, sort of more, a more nuanced insight into economics.
#
Let's dig into that in some detail after a quick commercial break.
#
Hey, the music started and this sounds like a commercial, but it isn't. It's a plea from
#
me to check out my latest labor of love, a YouTube show I am co-hosting with my good friend, the
#
brilliant Ajay Shah. We've called it Everything is Everything. Every week, we'll speak for about an
#
hour on things we care about, from the profound to the profane, from the exalted to the everyday.
#
We range widely across subjects and we bring multiple frames with which we try to understand
#
the world. Please join us on our journey and please support us by subscribing to our YouTube
#
channel at youtube.com slash Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A. The show is called Everything is Everything.
#
Please do check it out.
#
Welcome back to The Scene in the Unseen. I'm still chatting with Niranjan Rajadak, who's,
#
you know, hanging on here for many hours to come. Let's, so let's talk about, like,
#
journalism and give me a sense of, you know, which year was it? What was it like? Because today
#
journalism is a completely different beast, but back in the day, I remember it was just a very
#
small world, a world where not many people entered by choice. Like, I used to joke in
#
the 1980s when I was a teenager myself, little knowing that I would one day also be a journalist,
#
that, you know, when people fail at everything else and they get into journalism, which is
#
terribly cruel, but also that there was something to it. So give me a sense of what that world was
#
like. So it was a very small world and I joined a subset of that, small subset called financial
#
journalism. So there was really a very small group of people in that field, especially in
#
Mumbai. So I, as I said, I moved hopefully out of choice, or you could say I couldn't
#
do anything in economics, so I moved, but I joined a magazine called Business World, you know, and
#
I spent many years there and it was a, it was a great learning experience because I
#
actually between, you know, I jumped a few jobs, but like 1990, I joined Business World
#
and it was like opportune timing because this was just when the Indian economy was opening up, you
#
know. So I sort of, sometimes you're just lucky to be at the right place at the right time and
#
by 1991, the reforms began, obviously in Delhi, but very often not adequately appreciated in
#
Mumbai as well, right. The RBI opened up the banking sector, you know, current account,
#
convertibility, the rupee became market determined, etc. So in a way, it was a great time to sort of
#
be a financial journalist. It's, you know, you got a ringside view of
#
economics and action and also the privilege to speak to the actors and that, we can talk about
#
it, was also a form of learning very different perhaps from the classroom learning I did at
#
Elphinstone and the Bombay School of Economics. And I had good editors, but I think, you know,
#
T. N. Ninen was my editor for some time and he's obviously the most towering figure in the world
#
of economic journalism. So I benefited immensely from Mr. Ninen's guidance. I was at that point
#
of time largely covering the financial sector, the Reserve Bank. So I was in charge of the finance
#
section of the magazine and that was the time when, you know, business magazines had a very
#
large readership, which, you know, we were doing more in depth stuff than the newspapers, perhaps
#
a little behind the news cycle, but there was a fair bit of research involved, you know. So
#
I thoroughly enjoyed my time in business world and again working with Mr. Ninen and generally,
#
you know, in business world, there were lots of colleagues who, you know, we had great fun and I
#
learned from. And then after a long stint, I moved to Mint.
#
So a bunch of things to double click on for that period. And the first of them is that
#
I remember that, you know, when I sort of and I kind of came on into journalism first as a
#
freelancer and then with, you know, Wisden and Crick and Fo in the 2000s. But one thing I remember
#
looking at the journalism around me even as late as that period is that in a sense, there was no
#
like the ecosystem didn't have that kind of bedrock of values built in where you would get in and
#
there would be a particular sort of way of doing things and you would imbibe all these values from
#
on high and you would kind of, you know, be shaped in that way. A lot of it was very ad hoc. If you
#
were lucky to get a good mentor, if you were lucky to get a good editor that worked for you,
#
otherwise you were just kind of fumbling around doing a lot of writing, but you didn't, there
#
would be no way to really judge it. And especially early 90s, there's no internet. So you aren't
#
seeing the best journalism in the world. All you're seeing is what there is. And there's no,
#
you know, you haven't actually studied journalism in any way. And the best way to study it, of
#
course, is on the job. But even there, you know, you want to have good mentorship, good editors,
#
and you were, of course, lucky to have 9N. But so what was that period like where you are figuring
#
out your values as a journalist, because as a journalist, it is not just the mechanistic
#
task that you get information and you construct a story out of it. It is also figuring out what
#
kind of stories to do, what matters, what angles to take, what are your ethics as a journalist,
#
etcetera, etcetera. So what was that formation like? Yeah, so you're absolutely right. You know,
#
I think that was a time when many of these questions were not settled. You know, they were
#
maybe individual cases of this type or that type, but there were no broad, you know, accepted rules
#
of journalistic conduct. There were no, you know, like simple thing like after press conferences,
#
taking a gift from the company, you know, means today it is absolutely impossible that to do it.
#
No, but in those days, it was common practice. I like to believe I didn't do it. But I didn't
#
think, you know, that it was wrong in that sense, you know. Similarly, what constitutes a good story,
#
you know, how do you do sourcing for a story? A lot of it was like we learnt as we went along.
#
And as I said, I was very, very lucky to have Mr. Nainan because I think in the 80s, India today
#
had already set up systems of, you know, of professional journalism and Mr. Nainan was at
#
India today for through much of the 80s. So, he had in a way brought some of that to our world. So,
#
it was, they were still very, I would say very good journalist, but I think the system of
#
journalism was especially financial. I can only speak about financial journalism. I have no
#
experience of political journalism or sports journalism. But I think what Mr. Nainan did was
#
to drive to us the fact that our stories have to be very well sourced. Our stories have to be written
#
in a particular way that you should think about data. You know, a lot of these things, just
#
watching him or sometimes when informally when we spoke to him, we learnt. So, it was a learning
#
curve for sure. It's not that when we went in, we were given something saying that this is how we
#
practice journalism. And where does, you know, in any, every profession, I've sort of noted that
#
95% of the people, if not a greater percentage, are really just going through the groves,
#
ticking boxes, kind of fall into a groove and that's a whole thing. That's a whole game. And
#
Bob Dylan has this famous line about, he not busy being born is busy dying. And honestly,
#
most people are busy dying. And there are a few people who, on the other hand, and I think most
#
of the, because of selection bias, most of the people who come on the show are really actively
#
engaged. They really care. They're really trying hard. I think the last journalist I had on the
#
show was Malini Goel from, you know, a similar period of time, a few years younger than you perhaps,
#
but also did the business journalism and all of that. And what I noticed there is that what keeps
#
them going is one of two things. Either it is a sense of purpose, however that is expressed,
#
or it is just the love of doing what they are doing, the process itself. You know,
#
Ajay memorably, we did an episode on Unix for our show, Everything is Everything. And he spoke
#
about this quality that he learned from his friend, Ayush, that the quality of devotion,
#
that you are devoted to it, that if you are doing a story, you're devoted to the process of doing
#
that story. It can be a boring story, but you make those five phone calls and you don't cut
#
any corners and you craft the prose as well as you can and you do it in time and you do it with
#
intensity because that is just your dharma. That is who you are. So what was it like for you? Like
#
were there times where the work was really boring and it was just pain by numbers or?
#
Amit, you know, this may seem like an exaggeration, but I've never been bored with my work. I've always
#
enjoyed it. So whether it is editing, whether it's writing, whether it is trying to think about how
#
to graphically represent something. So I don't think boredom came into it. I've enjoyed my stint
#
in journalism. I have known about 95% of the people going through the motions. Perhaps again,
#
I was lucky, but at Business World and then at Mint, I just had colleagues who were very, very
#
good. And see, many of them actually chose to be in journalism. I had colleagues who were from IITs,
#
from top business schools, colleagues who had other choices in life and were chosen and not
#
everyone, but significant number of people. So there was a sort of a culture of, if not
#
excellence, at least doing your best, which I think was there at least in those years in
#
the magazine I worked in. You know, the thing is that, remember, in one sense,
#
working as a journalist in those years was easier than today and in one sense, it was more difficult.
#
The easier part was access was not a problem, you know, because there were so
#
such few journalists that you could actually pick up the phone and speak to anybody, you know,
#
you would at least reach that person's personal assistant, you know, and then sometimes the CEO
#
or the banker or if you are lucky, the RBI governor, you know, that was the level of
#
ease of access. This is before the PR industry came in, spin masters took over, etc. So access
#
for us at that stage of our career was far easier. What was more difficult was another type of access,
#
which was access to data, access to, you know, so if you were doing a story on a company,
#
you actually had to get five years of balance sheets and do the numbers yourself, you know,
#
or if you are doing a story on inflation, you have to actually sit, go to the RBI,
#
get from their weekly statistical supplement, whatever the money supply numbers, this that.
#
So, in a way, what today you have, you can call up an analyst or you can just go to the web and
#
quickly pick up data that was not possible. So, but that became an advantage in the sense
#
that you actually learned how to look at numbers, you know, means, I learned on the job how to
#
understand monetary statistics, how, of course, economic education helped economics education,
#
but how to read a balance sheet. I think these were important and that time, you know, also,
#
perhaps I was working a fortnightly, you could travel much more, you know, so you could actually
#
go to a factory, you could actually visit, you know, distributors or you could, you know, so
#
I think those times were in one way easier, one way more difficult.
#
And, you know, when you mentioned, you know, just being surrounded by other people who were
#
deeply involved and none of the 95%. And I'm thinking that there's also a sort of clustering
#
effect that happens there. Like earlier, when we were having lunch, you spoke about how you liked
#
Visnisha Cricket, the magazine I was part of before we bought Cricket for. And again,
#
they are editors, Sambit Baal just put together an outstanding team and I was just lucky to be
#
one of those. And everybody was brilliant. And if I look back on those eras, the best writers of the
#
decade in terms of cricket writing were all essentially in one place. And then you realize
#
that okay, you know, you had that one happenstance of someone like Sambit who was like a magnet for
#
good writers, there were no other outlets and they all got drawn there. So is there something
#
that happened perhaps with India today in the 80s and later with business world in the 90s,
#
that it's a new field and you've got a brilliant editor and then like a moth to a flame, they're
#
all coming. I would say yeah and at a third, I would say Mint later, I think we'll come to it.
#
But you know, again, now I will play your role and to your listeners,
#
it is my, you know, reasoned view that Wisden Cricket Asia was the best written magazine
#
in the past 20-30 years. And Amit, you were there, Rahul Bhattacharya, Chandrahash Chaudhary,
#
Sidvi was there, I think. Sidvi was there. Samant, our friend Rahul Bhatia, I guess the names can just
#
go on and on. So, I used to actually buy that magazine every, it was not available easily. So,
#
I remember there was one guy and the other who used to stop the monthly magazine. I used to go
#
and every month buy it from him. You will not believe it Amit, even today I have some old issues
#
of wisdom cricket. It's that good a magazine. So, I agree with you. I think that, you know, of course,
#
the editor and his vision is a magnet, but having good people around you. So, you know, just to
#
flip back into economics for some time, you know, means, if you look at, you know, Michael Kremer,
#
who won the Nobel with Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo for RCTs. The O-ring theory, right. The
#
O-ring theory is that actually that, you know, people with the same skills are more productive
#
in one company than in another. The reason is basically the complementarities. So, just being in
#
a team which has immense talent forces you or incentivizes you to raise your game, you know,
#
and I think that happened in BW and later Mint as well undoubtedly. So, I think it's a combination
#
of factors. One is that, you know, the 90s saw economic issues becoming more important,
#
more people were keen to understand what was happening, you know, what is this, you know,
#
what are these reforms is that. So, leadership was expanding. Second was information was more
#
easily available for your own research. And third, I think in some of these places, just the quality
#
of people. So, I think it all played together to make it an enjoyable experience. Tell me about
#
how, you know, moving from studying the economy in an academic sense to actually covering the
#
economy in the real world. And as you said, in your case, the whole process was accelerated
#
because you had insane access. You know, I don't think a 24 year old of today or, you know, someone
#
who's in his twenties today would have anywhere near that kind of access or near that kind of
#
responsibility. You know, their publications, he may not even give them the big stories to do,
#
but in a young place, you get to do things which, you know, in other places, like I remember,
#
you spoke about with Nisha Cricket that, you know, one of the sort of what I would hear from
#
veteran sports journalists on the beat were that, you know, you are covering a test match,
#
you are only 20 something years old, you know, in my first 10 years in Times of India, I only
#
once managed to get to cricket and that was some, you know, minor Ranji Trophy game, the fifth day
#
of something. It took me 18 years to do my first test match and here you are, young buck, you
#
barely started shaving, you're doing a test match. But the advantage of being in a young new place
#
is you just get to do everything, the responsibilities come. What was it, what was that learning process
#
like where you're seeing the economy in action? So, you know, this point about having studied
#
economics and how does it, so I have generally tried to stay in touch with technical economics.
#
Now, I still continue to read economics papers, you know, I try to read up on new empirical
#
research etc. But it's again, you know, I was trained in the science, the art I learnt in
#
on the job, you know, at where do you apply what, you know, and just this access to these,
#
you know, like policymakers who in a way transformed India was astonishing. So,
#
so let me give you a few like examples, you know, like moments of epiphany or whatever you call it.
#
So, I remember once when I was at the RBI and the governor had, I won't name names as far as
#
possible, the governor had called us in because it was just another of those weeks when, you know,
#
there was a run on the rupee. In those days, it was a little fragile, the balance of payments
#
and he had called us about 10, 12 of us, you know, to basically off the record, deep background,
#
explain what the RBI is, viewers, so that his point was that when you are writing or when you
#
are editing, just remember that this is what our, you know, this thing is. So, then this option,
#
that option and then the meeting got over and we were walking to the lift and just by chance,
#
I happened to be parallel to him, you know, and so I asked the governor, I said, sir, you know,
#
you said this etc., that this guy, have you run out of options? So, he smiled, you know, and then
#
he said, Niranjan, remember one thing, the sovereign is never out of options, you know,
#
and then he came in with a whole lot of, you know, unusual like, you know, out of the textbook
#
policy things to stabilize the rupee. So, this sort of idea that the sovereign is not, you know,
#
or this time I will name, you know, in 2008 during the, this was before the big crisis.
#
So, if you remember, in August 2007, the first jolts took place, the European money markets
#
froze, some money market funds went into trouble, then things stabilized a bit,
#
then they were like, you know, concerned through the summer of 2008. So, it must be July,
#
Dr. Reddy had called for a similar meeting YB Reddy. And he said that, I want to just brief
#
you, I have come back from the BIS meeting of central bankers. And you know, what, at that time
#
everyone was saying that, you know, August 2007 is a distant memory, you know, this will all be
#
under control. And Dr. Reddy basically in, you know, said that like, if you remember,
#
Anne Hathaway in The Dark Knight, you know, that third movie says, she says, no, Mr. Wayne,
#
there is a storm coming. So, he in a way said that, you know, and so he said, basically,
#
we have to, you know, we will have to protect the Indian economy, you know, this is not something
#
which comes from economic models or empirical model, it comes from a deep understanding of,
#
you know, how an economy operates. And like, you know, I have been very lucky again to be,
#
as I said, Professor Pethay is one guru like Dr. Vijay Kelkar, you know, who wrote this book with
#
Ajay as well. I think I have learned so much from him about how to think about, how to think about
#
how to use policy, how to think about why would certain decisions be taken, not taken. So, this
#
art of economics, you know, because that I think I learned on the job. And my guess is, you said
#
access. I think knowing economics helped or at least people thought that this guy
#
follows what I am saying, you know. So, I remember in, you know, Dr. Rangarajan's time,
#
I would ask him on monetary statistics, he was quite happy to meet me, you know, or I remember
#
in April of 1997, Dr. Jallan, April of 98, I think Dr. Jallan's first big monetary policy,
#
RBI swung away from monetary targeting, you know, and in this entire document there were like one
#
paragraph mentioning something about the stability of the demand for money. So, I caught it, you
#
know. So, I sort of in the evening, I asked him, I said, so I have just one question. So, he said,
#
what? So, I said, what does this paragraph mean? I said, does it mean that you are going to stop
#
doing monetary targeting and you are moving to, you know, a different. So, he was very like,
#
he was happy that, you know, so I think some, you know, besides giving a framework, I think having
#
some knowledge of theoretical economics also was a good signalling that, you know, it is not a
#
complete waste of time. Of course, it does not mean that you only have to, you can only be a
#
financial journalist if you are trained in, you have a business degree. I know so many of my
#
friends who did very well without a formal training, but it helped. But yeah, so I think
#
the big difference was, I think, I was trained pretty well in the science of economics. I think
#
I really learnt about the art of economics as a journalist, largely through my interactions with
#
these very, very distinguished policy makers. Can we take a detour and can I ask you to double
#
click on some of these mentors like Professor Pethay, like Dr. Kelkar and others who played
#
an important part in sort of mentoring you and tell me a little bit about like, what were they
#
like? What were the key things you learnt from them? So, yeah, I would basically, Dr. Pethay,
#
Dr. Kelkar and Dr. Reddy. So, Dr. Pethay, as I said, we had very good teachers and we had,
#
like I was close through all those three young professors and actually there was another one,
#
Ritu Diwan also who was very friendly with us. I think what I learnt from Dr. Pethay is to think
#
of economics as a system of thought. So, he actually is as a unique, not unique, but he has
#
like rare ability to talk about the deep mathematics and the deep philosophy,
#
like almost in one adda, you know, and his background actually is that he first did his
#
masters in mathematics. So, he is a trained mathematician and then he did his second
#
masters in economics. So, he can actually speak on like, hardcore technical economics,
#
sometimes very frankly, the mathematics is beyond my understanding and then he can talk about like
#
the deeply philosophical issues of it. So, I think how to think about economics as a system of,
#
you know, of understanding, I think I learnt a lot from him and some of his lectures were
#
just brilliant and he was not necessarily a teacher for the examinations, you know,
#
there are some teachers who will, if you quickly copied on everything on the board, you know that
#
you covered, you know, I think he was not that, you know, he was more like, you know, open ended
#
lectures, of course, he did stick to the syllabus. So, you got a lot from him and then of course,
#
in the canteen as well. Dr. Kelkar, I think I have been really lucky to know him since I think
#
well since 99, you know, and I think his understanding of Indian political economy
#
and how to think about India's problems and his overall optimism about life in general.
#
I am amazed that even today, if you go and meet him, he will have like five new
#
projects that you wanted to help me with this or you know, why are you doing this.
#
So, he is extremely lively and he is a natural mentor, you know, so I, you know, there was a
#
time when it is okay, I can name people like Urjit Patel, Arvind Subramaniam, Ajay Shah,
#
so many people who basically said that, you know, Dr. Kelkar has been one of their mentors.
#
So, I think his ability to connect with young people and but it is not just that, as I said,
#
you know, means we can go into it but like the sometimes when you have these aha moments with
#
Dr. Kelkar, when you have read economics, you know, like a classic paper in economic theory,
#
but you never know what it actually means, but certainly makes this passing remark and you know,
#
Dr. Reddy the same thing, you know, Dr. Reddy because he moved,
#
Dr. Kelkar was a lateral entry, Dr. Reddy started from the district level, so his deep understanding
#
of Indian federalism, the political economy again, I learnt a lot, you know, means he is like,
#
he always like he would ask him a slightly more complicated question, he will say, have you read
#
the constitution, do you know what the constitutional assembly debate, so he has a really deep
#
understanding of what drives India and of course, he is very very good policy maker.
#
So, these are some of the people, you know, I think you are lucky to have such people,
#
you know, who do not, who are not explicitly saying beta-bedge either, you know, I am going
#
to tell you something, it is just through multiple interactions, you learn hell of a lot from them.
#
So, you know, taking off from your mentors, I also want to sort of ask about how during
#
your trajectory through journalism, your roles also changed, like initially you get into journalism,
#
you are a reporter, you are doing the reporting bit, etc., etc., but you rose pretty fast within
#
the ranks, within the editorial ranks and you then also have to learn managerial skills,
#
you also then have to figure out how to commission people, how to manage them
#
and at a later point in time, even mentorship, which is perhaps a separate question, but
#
various people have described you as being just a tremendous mentor to them in different ways,
#
in different places. So, tell me a little bit about how all of that happened, how natural was
#
that, because by the time I, when I got to know you in 2007, you were already, I think, a managing
#
editor at Mint by then and you, you know, been in that sort of position for many years, but how was
#
it, how did you sort of, like in a sense, the way you learnt values as a journalistic writer on the
#
job and through looking at, through learning from whatever editors and mentors you have,
#
in a similar sense, you would have had to learn the managerial aspect of it, the editorial aspect
#
all over again. So, tell me about that journey. Yeah, so I was lucky that I progressed through
#
the ranks pretty quickly, you know, and as much as I would like to believe it was because of my
#
individual brilliance or whatever, I do not think that is the story, you know, because
#
I think what happened is that in the late 90s, there was an explosion of financial media.
#
So, new magazines came in, new newspapers, television channels had appeared,
#
Reuters, Bloomberg, they had expanded. So, and a lot of journalists of my age also went abroad,
#
you know, to Far Eastern Economic Review and etc. So, I think just basically what happened,
#
there are so many new jobs and fewer people. So, I think that helped a lot. So, you know,
#
as tempted as one may to think that it is a reflection of your qualities, actually it was
#
just again, you know, being at the right place at the right time. So, I just had enough of that
#
experience. So, I would say by 30, I was already running a large team. It was, I do not know what
#
tough in the sense that I never had people pushing back in that sense, but you have to learn
#
again on the job, you know, I have never learned business management or anything. And
#
I think I decided to sort of be true to my temperament, you know. So, I think I am not
#
temperamentally a micromanager. So, like, I prefer to be more like a, you know, curator or whatever.
#
So, I think that if I look back and again, I am not taught through this very clearly, but
#
what I have done or tried to do is one, hire very smart people, you know. So, I think I spend a lot
#
of time in the hiring process because half the battle is won if you get very smart people to
#
work with you. The second, I think, is as a manager, you have to give clarity to the people
#
who you employ or you hire about what you expect from them. You know, it is very often there is a
#
lot of very loose talk about what your role. I think there is clarity about what has to,
#
and then once you do that, I think it makes sense, at least given my temperament,
#
to let people be free, you know, especially in journalism. I do not know, I am not sure
#
it is same on the shop floor. Perhaps even make their own mistakes as long as they are not
#
catastrophic mistakes which land you and your organization in trouble. So, I think
#
these are the three like, you know, founding ideas or principles which I have tried to
#
do as a manager. I do not really like to micromanage people and as long as they know
#
what is expected and they are smart, I think most people do turn out to be good, you know.
#
So, I think that is been my style. It is not that I learnt, I knew about it from day one. That is how
#
I sort of grew into it. That is very interesting to me because, you know, earlier we spoke about
#
Sambit Bal and how he ran Wizard and then Trick and Four and one of the things when I look back
#
on him now is not just that he had this bunch of really fine writers working under him, but that
#
he gave them all complete space. Like, I look back at some of my writing then. I am in my 20s, man.
#
I am just playing all my shots. I am totally flamboyant. It is cringeworthy, some of it,
#
and yet he just, he would not say much. He would just let me learn from my mistakes.
#
Maybe he had the maturity to realize that these people have to go through these phases. They will
#
come out of it, etc., etc. And I found that to be a very enlightened attitude. Equally, I remember
#
when you curated the mint section, column section when it began and you asked me to do a column and
#
I remember at that time that one, your line up was refreshing because your line up was of people who
#
mostly were otherwise not writing anywhere else. You just, you curated a bunch of new voices and
#
suddenly these people are writing. And in the time that I wrote that weekly column for you,
#
I do not remember you once micromanaging or you once, you know, cutting something down or telling
#
me do not write about this or why do not you, you know, I just felt intensely free. Whatever value
#
you added would have been in subtle ways in the background without me even realizing that, oh,
#
you know that. So tell me a bit about how you arrive at that because to be honest,
#
I mean, I've evolved to the same style in the editing gigs that I've done, but it's taken time.
#
Like, you know, like you, I was, you know, I became managing editor at Clickin for Really Fast,
#
but that was just because it was a young place and it was just a few of us and I was perhaps the
#
least likely to mess it up. So it was that kind of thing. But initially I remember that there is
#
that learning phase where initially you want everything to be kick-ass, you want to micromanage
#
everything, you want to look at every paragraph in decision and all of that. And later on,
#
you learn to just sit back and chill out. So I think even I must have learned on the way,
#
you know, means because there is the first tendency of an editor is to rewrite, you know,
#
mean, just start. And I have given that up many, many, many years ago. And there is this
#
book by Ved Mehta, which is on William Sean, who was a legendary editor of the New Yorker.
#
And the subtitle is beautiful. It's the invisible art of editing, you know. So basically,
#
how do you keep the writer's tone and his thoughts intact and then just add value?
#
And I have seen the best editors do it, you know. So I think, if I may again,
#
Bitor? Amit B. Parma? Please, please, please.
#
So jumping to my mother's story, you know, so one of my mother's legendary or
#
most celebrated short stories was called Videhi, which actually is considered to be one of the
#
greatest short stories in sort of, you know, Marathi, modern Marathi short story writing.
#
And my mother tells me that she wrote the first story. She took it to her editor at, you know,
#
at a very famous literary magazine called Satya Katha. He read it. He said, it's a good story,
#
but it's not working. You know, he says, just give it another shot. My mother gave it two more
#
rewrites. He said, see, I think that within this, there is something very good. But I don't think
#
you're doing justice to your idea. So he said, can I tell you a piece of advice? So my mother
#
said, what? He says, tear this story up for six months, let it rest in your head. And then after
#
six months or eight months or whatever, come back and write it. And my mother, like almost
#
dramatically in his office, tore up her story. She walked out. After six months with that same
#
kernel of an idea, she sat down and she wrote a completely different story based on that theme.
#
So again, like, you know, the editor's name was Ram Patwardhan. I think this is, you know, I don't
#
think I can ever aspire to that level of editorial excellence, but I think editing has to be invisible.
#
You know, you have to keep the voice of the writer, the thoughts of the writer intact. Obviously,
#
if you see, you know, you see sometimes contradictions, you see too much flamboyance
#
or, you know, overuse of adjective adverbs. You know, Amit, we know all the standard rules and like
#
you yourself are a great coach or trainer of, you know, so many writing schools, etc. So
#
I think that was my thing. You know, first is, as I said, these three principles that hire smart
#
people, tell them clearly what you expect and then give them the freedom, including the freedom to
#
make mistakes. Editing should be light touch, you know, means there will always be some time
#
when there are disasters and you need to do more, but generally editing should be light touch.
#
The American version of Ram Patwardhan would probably be Gordon Lish. So Raymond Carver,
#
you know, legendary short story writer and he used to publish his short stories in Esquire and
#
they were edited by a guy called Gordon Lish. And it was only after Lish stopped editing him
#
and Carver's stories came out as they were written that people realized a difference Lish had made
#
to his writing. And basically the famous stripped down Hemingway-ish style of Carver really came
#
from Lish's editing, which kind of gives you a sense of, you know, and in a sense, you know,
#
when you are, say, curating a column section like you did at Mint or when you are hiring people for
#
a team, regardless of which publication or which place that is, in a sense, you're setting the whole
#
character of that section of that publication and all of that. So how conscious a sort of a decision
#
is that, you know, that? See, I think it's very conscious. So let's stick to Mint for now,
#
you know. See, first of all, I think Mint, its success grew out of this extraordinary partnership
#
between Raju Nari Seti and Sukumar Ranganathan. So I again say it very bluntly that I think
#
the success, a large, like just huge part of it goes to these two guys, you know, means
#
their vision and the way they set the systems up, you know, the direction they gave the paper.
#
When I was given the charge of the opinion section, I think first thing which Raju did was
#
he said it would be like the American system where it's independent of the news operation. So
#
you're not reporting to me on a day to day basis, you're running your own thing.
#
Of course, I consulted Raju, I consulted Sukumar so many times, but I was given extreme freedom,
#
you know. The second thing, you know, Amit, I, so Raju and Sukumar, they were very clear that
#
Mint would be not another pink paper, you know. So first of all, the primary way to
#
distinguish yourself is size, right. So we've started with this Berliner format.
#
And, you know, the idea was that it would, you know, news is now ubiquitous, it's all around you,
#
right. Wherever you go on your phone, on your television screen, you get the news of the day.
#
So how do you adapt? So it was a post internet, more analytical paper, more, you know, like more
#
features. At one point of time, we even thought of calling it your daily magazine, you know, it was
#
that. So Raju would always say, you know, try to do day two story on day one. So the day two stories,
#
day one story is this has happened, day two stories, why has this happened? What does it mean?
#
He was saying, you know, always try to do the day's true story. So we like strategizing about
#
the editorial page. I think one thing I was very clear about is that we need new voices because
#
a lot of the editorial and op-ed pages at that time were dominated by
#
people within a certain ecosystem, you know. And I said that, you know, this is cannot do so. I
#
sort of started figuring out new writers. That time blogging was taking off, if you remember. So,
#
so many good bloggers I approached, including our friend Nitin Pai, if you remember.
#
And the second thing is, you know, you have to also take some risks. If you write the same,
#
if you just do the same thing, oh, RBI has done this, it has to be more interesting, engaging. So,
#
editorial pages should be as engaging as the news pages. That was my idea. And I think what I can
#
say I am reasonably proud about is that Mint gave a platform to many new writers, you know, means,
#
I am just sort of like Sajid Chinoy wrote his first time in newspapers with us. You know,
#
Nitin Pai, Gulzar Natarajan, Amul Agarwal, Shruti Rajagopalan. Then on the commentaries,
#
on the column side, you know, I invited you to write. Anant Nageshwaran, that time,
#
had written a few pieces here and there, but as a columnist, we took him on.
#
Salil Tripathi made a comeback into Indian journalism with his column. So, I think that,
#
you know, these were like younger writers with more flair and also, you know, fresh views on
#
things. So, I think there was a bit of risk taking, which I think Raju and Sukumar backed me on.
#
Yeah, so, I think in that sense, you have to cast the net wide, you know, means, you shouldn't have
#
this thing that, oh, this guy is a blogger, so he is not fit to write for my thing. You know,
#
it could be anyone, right. So, very often, I got like some, some people, sometimes people just
#
send blank, like, you know, mails without any, you know, whatever you call them and
#
read and you say, wow, this is something good, you know. So, you take it and I think that's how we
#
built this roster of new journalists. I like, just example of our friend Shruti, right, she was 23.
#
I'll introduce her to you. So, I will take credit for this.
#
Crosswords over coffee, I remember. Rajiv Mantri and Harsh Gupta, I think, again,
#
Rajiv and Harishma must have been in early 20s, you know, precocious talent and I got them to
#
write for Mint. So, again, it's not about this ideological persuasion on that. I just got a whole
#
bunch of people. So, yeah, that, that I think that is something I can say I'm reasonably proud of.
#
You spoke about day two news on day one and, you know, this reminds me of a fundamental way in which
#
cricket journalism changed in the 90s, where earlier the job of the cricket journalists was,
#
say, what happened? You know, there was a day's play, your reader is picking up the newspaper,
#
she has no idea what happened, tell her what happened. That obviously changed when information
#
became a commodity. You had Crick-N-Foo, you had television, you had live broadcast,
#
you had everything. You already know everything that happened to whatever detail
#
you wish to find out in and therefore, and I think the British broadsheets probably
#
pioneered this in terms of cricket writing. So, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Times,
#
where it wasn't a mere match report. It had color, it had perspective. You know,
#
often the writer would have the liberty to focus on one big theme for the day and go through that
#
and it was really a day to piece to use a parlance which you just introduced me to.
#
Through your time as a financial journalist, then, how was it changed? Like, how did this change?
#
Because you have all the TV channels and coming on, your CNBCs of the world and NDTV Profit and
#
all those guys kind of come on. All the information stuff is kind of already a commodity. So, how does
#
the shift happen? Because, for example, I guess a journey that you make, and I'm just thinking
#
aloud here, but the journey that you would make as a financial beat reporter is first you do just
#
the reporting, you get the quotes, you put the stories together, etc., etc., and then you move
#
on to higher order stuff. But in a sense, here in this new world of post internet, this thing where
#
you're doing the data news first, you've kind of, you have to get into the higher order stuff almost
#
immediately. So, what was this world like? What was it changed like?
#
So, I think it was a very, very major shift and, you know, since you mentioned reporters,
#
obviously, I have immense respect for beat reporters because they face some very, very
#
difficult task, because deadlines can be immensely tight, you know, means, something happens at 5
#
o'clock and by 8 o'clock, you have to file a story. Then you have to make the story stand out
#
from the competition. And for a general life, daily life of a beat reporter, the noise to
#
signal ratio is very high, especially in the financial sector, the financial markets buzzing
#
with all sorts of rumours, this, that. So, I think that it's very difficult to be a beat
#
reporter. And again, just to reiterate, I'm talking purely about the financial. So, I have great
#
respect for how a lot of beat reporters have tried to become more, bring more analytical insight into
#
their writing, not just in Mint, but in many other. I think some of it is really high quality. But,
#
you know, Amit, I think just on a meta point to what you said that the rise of the internet,
#
television channels, now, information is available all around, you know. So,
#
at one point of time, people who had a funnel for information had a comparative advantage,
#
you know, your ability to collect information. Now, people who have filters are better off,
#
because that funnel job is now not important. It's all around you. So, then the filters.
#
And I think this is again where editorial judgment matters, you know, what to play up,
#
what to not play up, because I think these filter, besides the discipline of having a second eye,
#
look at your story or, you know, bolster it or whatever. I think this filtering process,
#
which a good editor can do, you know, both on the opinion side and on the news reporting side
#
is of value. And I think it's of more value now, because you just can't, carpet bombing readers
#
with information is not very useful because anyway information is all around you.
#
Tell me a bit about Mint, because Mint was a pretty dramatic shift at the time, you know,
#
when it came and you spoke about, you know, the remarkable teamwork of Raju and Sukumar and what
#
they respectively brought to the party. So, tell me a little bit about that, because it seems that,
#
you know, in that business of a whole bunch of media houses and everything is same old, same old
#
and everyone's trying to build a slightly better mousetrap, along comes Mint and says, no, we are
#
something completely different. So, I remember my first, I've stolen one line from Raju, you know,
#
but in my previous answer, but first time I met Raju in a small restaurant in Mahim,
#
one thing he told me is that we don't want to create another pink paper, means, he says,
#
they are good, but they already own that space, another of that is, so we are going to basically
#
try to shift the game, you know, and I think that was really and, you know, it's this is interesting
#
that, like, if I may again bring in old economist Shumpeter, you know, in his book, Capitalism,
#
Socialism and Democracy, he says that the real source of competition in a market is not on price,
#
you know, we always think price cutting and all, but he says it's the new technology, the new way
#
of doing thing, the new idea, that is what actually makes the biggest shift, you know, means,
#
eventually Nokia lost out to Apple or Samsung, not because of their pricing, but because they
#
just changed the game with, you know, smartphones. So, I think similarly, I think, you know,
#
Raju's idea and I think Sukumar's idea is that, you know, we'll create something new, but I think
#
it's not only that, I think Mint had for the first time, so we spoke last time when you were
#
talking about business world, you know, about whether, you know, were they the systems, I think
#
what Raju really brought in was internal systems, you know, so how a story should be written, you
#
know, what was the struggle, you know, what are the essential requirements of a story, how should
#
it be sourced, how much time do you give a company to get back to you, do you need an outside voice,
#
how much data do you need in a story, secondly, there was actually a code of conduct and then
#
a code of conduct not in the just the way of, you know, don't take money from your sources, but
#
a more nuanced code of, you know, code of conduct, for example, that a Mint journalist will not
#
misrepresent himself, that you will not do this not, so it was a very clear code of conduct and
#
I think also what they brought in were international standards, Raju had come as
#
editor from, he was managing editor of Wall Street Journal Europe and Sukumar at that time
#
was managing editor of Business Today, which was another excellent thing, so I think they brought
#
in, you know, besides the vision, they brought in these systems, which made a big difference and
#
then, you know, just on a day to day basis asking simple questions, you know that, so suppose
#
inflation has been announced, inflation number and somebody would say pitch it for page 1 and
#
Raju would say why, you know, by the next morning everybody who cares would know this number, so
#
tell me something more, you know, so he would like, you know, push, push, push, Sukumar would push,
#
push, I think that helped and besides that, you know, just like I said on the opinion side,
#
there was risk taking, just the type of stories we played on the page 1 or, you know, sometimes full
#
like we did a series on economics of religion and, you know, there were some like ground stories and
#
Saman Subramaniam was there, Pallavi Singh was there, so like really Priyanka was there, so really
#
good feature writers had a very prominent role, so I think it was vision, it was this, you know,
#
this system they set up and then the day-to-day, you know, raising of standards and I must say
#
in the early days it was tough for some people but I think eventually everybody lined up behind
#
the vision. Tell me a little bit more about these systems in place, for example, earlier you said
#
that he brought, Raju when he came from WHJ brought certain standards in terms of this is how much time
#
you give a company to respond and this is where you need data and you do not and etcetera, etcetera
#
and you are kind of setting a template in place and at one level you might say that hey there is
#
an art to journalism as well but at another point I completely buy this that once you have those
#
templates in place that gives you the solid framework that nothing is going to go wrong
#
and you are guaranteed a certain minimum kind of quality or integrity or whatever it is.
#
Even Bloomberg has this, you know, this famous 3 para intro, you know, and I think basically,
#
for example, I am just like now thinking off the top of my head but no story will,
#
story should preferably be on record. If they are not on record, they should be at least
#
two independent confirmations from two separate sources, it cannot be from the same investment
#
bank, the same company. If somebody does not come on record, you have to explain to the reader
#
without revealing that person's identity why that person, you know, is not authorised to speak to
#
the press or whatever, you know. This should also be an always be a nut graph for the Americans
#
called which is, you know, explain early on why the story matters to the reader. So, just putting
#
this reader upfront, you know, do not write for your sources, write for the general reader.
#
I think some of these things, you know, always have an independent voice. So, if you are doing
#
a M&A story, you will obviously speak to the company, you will speak to the investment banker,
#
you speak to the lawyer who has done the deal but try to get a business school professor who can
#
say that does this, you know, what will happen in terms of the competition law or something,
#
you know. So, try to get an independent voice if not two. So, I think just simple these, you know,
#
reporting rules which Raju and Sukhu put in were quite remarkable. I think
#
Mint did make an impact. I think other papers started gradually picking up on that,
#
at least on the financial journalism side. And how did the, how was journalism changing
#
in those times because Mint started 2007? Yeah, so 2006 we joined, 2007 was when you started.
#
And a lot changed in the years after that. During this period of time, what also happened is that
#
political pressures increased, that partisanship became more common and of course, simultaneously
#
the discourse became much more polarised on social media and so on. And you began to see a lot more
#
stories which would break, like for example, that rule about always being on the record. But if you
#
look at a lot of the long-form stories by someone like Caravan, for example, where you speak to,
#
you know, a whole bunch of people off the record because you are determined to do a hit job on a
#
person and wipe them out completely and, you know, it's a pretense to rigor but there is really no
#
rigor out there. So, it just felt that there was a sea change within journalism itself and a lot of
#
people within, you know, kind of lost faith and from the outside lost trust because, you know,
#
you and I grew up in a time where there was a consensus on the truth. You got it from mainstream
#
media. There might be that, okay, Wall Street Journal slightly right, New York Times slightly
#
left but basically they agree on, you know, 99% of things. And today we live in a world of narrative
#
battles where none of that is there and that changes the pressures on the journalists completely.
#
So, you know, in this kind of environment. So, what is your sense of what has happened over the
#
last 15 years? Well, the atmosphere has changed not just in India but, you know, I think the divide
#
has become, you know, more obvious. But I think if you remain true to honest journalism, you know,
#
and as you say not everyone does and your stories are well reported. See, my own view or my own
#
experience is that A, you have to build up credibility with readers like story by story
#
by story, you know, I do not think, you know, there are no quick gains in this and also but
#
if you build your reputation as a credible newspaper, I still feel readers respect you,
#
you know, and in most cases, Amit, you know, despite this, you know, the sort of sharpening
#
of the divide etc. I have realized that as long as people do not sort of question your motives or
#
you do not give them reason to question your motives by being blindly partisan, I think even
#
people take criticism on board, you know, I think it is important to like again to come to the
#
editorial pages and you keep a mix of people as long as they do not cross certain red lines about
#
bigotry or something of that, you know, I think it is fine, you know, means, you know, so,
#
it has become more difficult for sure and of course, I have been away for now,
#
close to 7 years. So, I cannot, I do not know, I do not have a direct experience of the situation,
#
but I think the, you know, a lot is said about the pressure from outside on the media, right,
#
from corporate advertisers, from governments on this and that, but I think there is an internal
#
question also and which is again why, you know, the editor matters, the internal processes matter.
#
So, I used to sort of write, I have written columns for every Indian publication basically by now,
#
but I used to write for one of the major dailies and every Sunday and one, their whole game was
#
exactly what you said that have a viewpoint diversity, have people from left, right, whatever
#
right columns for us and it was great. So, during demonetization, for example, the harshest critique
#
of demon came from me on those pages and that got shared widely by the congress and up and everything
#
and, you know, they were carrying it even though in the public imagination they were viewed to be,
#
you know, for the dispensation, but then that gradually changed, like what happened circa 2020
#
I had written a very harsh piece about the government and my editor called me practically
#
in tears and she said that, listen, I know you don't like me to cut anything, they would always
#
send me a playback if they wanted to cut something and I know you're very particular, but there's
#
just this one line or two line, I forget how much it was, that I absolutely have to cut because
#
there's pressure from above and it's, you know, they've complained specifically about you and
#
was also then a columnist there and no longer, I mean, he told me later he was fired by them
#
and I thought about it and the piece was overall very critical, the bit that she wanted to cut
#
didn't really make a difference, so I said, fine, you know, cut it, it's not a big deal and then I
#
thought long and hard that should I just walk away on principle and I thought, look, if I walk away
#
on principle that space will go to somebody else who might be more pliant, so why don't I keep
#
trying to make a difference. Eventually I stopped writing because I just came to the decision
#
after a couple of more columns with them, I just came to the decision that I just want to write for
#
myself, I don't want to write for any other platform ever again because luckily by now I
#
have a large enough following that it makes sense for me to do my thing, whether on the newsletter
#
or the podcast or whatever, so I just feel that like I'm not leading to a question here, but I
#
just feel that the atmosphere has come there and I and my sense is a lot of it has to do with sort
#
of structural incentives that all the big mainstream publications are attached to business houses that
#
might run other businesses if you have a newspaper but if you also have a chemical factory and the
#
ed can rate that and the income tax can rate that then your incentive change drastically which is
#
why some of the people fighting the good fight today are the smaller players like scroll and
#
news laundry and news minute and so on and so forth but moving on from that another aspect of
#
journalism that I want to talk about is also the changing environment within newsrooms like one of
#
the pieces of praise that I've heard about you is that long before me too happened you had laid
#
down strict guardrails at mint and against harassment and you you know very clear policies
#
on that you had told everyone that if there's any problem you come straight to me and you know you
#
guys took a sort of a no tolerance line on that so it just wasn't about sort of journalistic standards
#
in terms of what you do with your pieces or how you report your pieces but also within the workplace
#
itself and I find that really interesting because a problem that India has had and I
#
think it's much more in advertising and corporates and perhaps in newsrooms but I'm sure it was
#
there in newsrooms to a large extent is of toxic environments so very sexist environments and
#
just stereotypes being perpetuated I remember the late Sujata Anandan was once on this show
#
and she told me in her time she was lucky to be given the political beat when she started in the
#
80s but otherwise the default was that if girls are there they do the soft stories they do the
#
features etc etc and you know coming from the kind of background that you do where your mom was such
#
in a sense a path breaker and a warrior herself I'm not surprised but give me a sense of how the
#
newsroom evolved over this period yeah so first of all it was not just me right I mean I think
#
Raju and Sukhu as I said they set up the broad framework and I think you know the Vishakhara
#
guidelines of the supreme court had been of course now it's compulsory to have a posh committee etc
#
you know but I think at that point of time the Vishakhara guidelines were broad guidelines and
#
the idea of course was that you know the workplace should be a safe workplace but
#
how do you operationalize it you know because what happens is very often you know especially
#
younger girls who come into a workplace they're not very sure you know whether
#
what has been said or done is it harassment is it just you know because you have no previous
#
experience right so I think the idea of telling you know young girls that you come directly to
#
me because the chances of an HR guy taking it up were a little you know slim so I think that but
#
I think generally the mint newsroom I think was I mean I don't know whether there are there may
#
be examples I don't know of but I think it was generally a safe space for general people
#
irrespective of their gender their sexual orientation their religion caste etc so you
#
know after all these years where you you pretty much you know in a career sense people would say
#
you're pretty much at the pinnacle you decided to sort of leave journalism and come into a world
#
which in a sense you already knew you had one foot into which is a world of economic policy and which
#
is a world of the political economy and so on and so forth so tell me a bit about you know what was
#
your mindset through these years like how are you looking at your life in terms of the story of your
#
life the trajectory of your life that you know what prompted the shift where others would say
#
that hey you know you are at the top you're an editor you're doing you know you are you've got
#
everything now just chill and you know but you chose to sort of yeah so a bit of restlessness
#
there was no push factor right means so Kumar and I had this absolutely wonderful working
#
relationship I still value him as a very good friend I learned a lot from him so there was no
#
push factor although by then Sukumar had moved on to Hindustan Times I was you know sort of
#
thinking that you know something kuchar karna chahiye so actually you know Amit if you look back
#
I have although I didn't change jobs too often I changed my job profile within companies very
#
often you know so even in Mint I was I did the opinion section then I was the managing editor
#
so I ran the like I was in the news operation then for some time I did the features section then I
#
helped promise and all launch the data journalism section so I tried to always you know sort of
#
seek new challenges so I had come to the there was it was just internal restlessness it was
#
nothing else there was no that I should do something else you know and in the meantime I
#
had finished my PhD etc so I said now what you know and then so I said one thought always has
#
been academia to go back to where I started from because I love teaching I at the Meghnad Desai
#
academy I do teach on and off I've taught here and there in some other institutions as well
#
but I thought that this area of policy research was something I would be interested in and enjoy
#
know and then of course IDFC institute was in Mumbai it happened to be led by Rubin who's a
#
very close friend of both of us and both of us have you know a lot of respect for him so
#
that's how it happened you know so it was a build up of this thing that
#
restlessness that I should do something else now.
#
And is it somewhere in this journey a sense of purpose built in or is it simply
#
not so much a purpose at doing something specific but more of the purpose of following
#
your curiosity and doing what excites you? I think the latter you know I don't think I've
#
thought of my career in that structured manner and I just sort of taken decisions which at that point
#
of time I find interesting you know so I just thought that if I do something like this it will
#
be a new experience for me it'll be a fresh start so that was it there was no like purpose of this
#
will build to that and that will build to that. And in a sense what you're doing and I'm thinking
#
aloud again here is that like IDFC and IDFC was and Artha is today a think do tank as Rubin calls
#
it that you do a lot of thinking but then you try to work together with government and actually
#
implemented on the ground and these seem to be polar opposites in the sense that thinking is
#
about in a sense it comes from a pure place you apply first principles you figure out what to do
#
and then of course you take into account the messiness of the world and you try to come up
#
with practical solutions and and the doing is really in a you know once you get into the
#
political economy there's nothing pure you just try to figure out what is the best that I can do
#
if not the second best or third best or fourth best whatever and as a journalist you could have
#
a ringside view of the world of ideas and the world of action and you know look at them completely
#
differently what would what was it like to be thrown into this like in terms of the thinking
#
in terms of the research that you wanted to do what attracted you and in terms of the doing
#
how was it to be thrown into the doing end of things what was that like.
#
So it was you know because I obviously as a journalist as an editor I had access to
#
policy makers but it was always at the you know slightly verified realms I think that
#
you know just practical practical questions which which policy makers faced you know and
#
I think it's been a learning for me over the years you know you grow up with this
#
classic middle class thing our entire government is corrupt politicians are useless but I have
#
actually you know in my years later as a journalist I've come to also appreciate what politicians
#
what are the good politicians the good bureaucrats even the good you know junior people running
#
maybe a police station or taluka office you know how much they work and how much they bring to the
#
table so and this so first of all there was this thing that it's not a complete lost cause that
#
nothing can happen and I think that there are reformed champions there are you know people who
#
are ready to take the risks I thought that also some of the more micro issues which I had not
#
applied my mind to you know those were often you know came to came to us as you know research
#
projects etc I mean this is like really brass tacks plumbing work you know and I think this
#
also I realize is of immense importance you know means you can have the greatest broad framework
#
but you know as Vajpayee ji had once famously said magar ye hoga kaise you know I think that
#
magar ye hoga kaise issue is very important. Give me an example of the broad framework and
#
the plumbing. So one of the projects we did was in the with the government of Bihar you know and
#
MR Sharan and Chinmay Kumar were actually doing the work they were they were in Patna but I was
#
technically the lead investigator for that project of course most of the work was done by Sharan and
#
Chinmay so the Bihar government had passed a grievance redressal law which basically meant that
#
all citizens can you know for their salaries public services whatever the government is
#
supposed to deliver to them if the government fails to deliver a the citizen can complain
#
and b there is a system where that grievance is redressed through a system of you know hearings
#
etc. Now this was amazing empowerment right and Nitish Kumar was the chief minister and I think
#
what the chief minister's office found out that despite this there was you know just a very poor
#
uptake of this so the question was why and when Chinmay and Sharan actually went down they saw
#
that well lots of interesting you know reasons something sometimes as simple as the poorest people
#
living on daily wages just can't go for a day to a government office you know so then can the
#
government office come to them or you know people don't know so suppose you you record a message in
#
the chief minister's voice and you know play it will that so there are a lot of the RCT type of
#
work one of the things they found interesting is that although citizens were not using it the ward
#
members which is you know the panchayat they are these ward members ward members were using this
#
system to represent the grievances of their constituent so some of these things are not
#
evident from a bird's eye view you know many years later in Punjab we had this thing about
#
vaccination you know why vaccination during the covid thing was not taking off and we did a survey
#
and we found that people think a vaccine is not it's not a preventive but it's a palliative
#
or whatever you know it's after you sort of so people thought after you get a after you get covid
#
you should take a vaccine they didn't think it's a preventive vaccine and when we found this in the
#
survey we took it to the government and the government said you know we should redesign
#
the communication on the vaccine so these are the micro issues you know which sometimes
#
policymakers face so I think some of these insights are very very important so this is
#
the sort of plumbing issues I spoke about give me a theory of change like how does change
#
happen in the government like at one level if you just apply like a public choice lens you're
#
looking at the incentives of politician it is towards winning the next election it is towards
#
populism and it is towards short-termism doing what is attributable and you know etc etc
#
and at the same time if you look at the incentives of bureaucrats you know as
#
Parkinson's law famously says every bureaucrat wants to expand his budgets and have more people
#
under him so if you if you just take a cynical view of the world like that you think that hey
#
nothing can possibly change now change has happened some of the change you know external
#
events like the crisis of 91 might have played a small part in it but the fact of the matter
#
has and I've had many episodes about this is that the 91 reforms were in the making since the late
#
70s you know when Manmohan got Montaigne back and for years and years these people silently
#
worked behind the scenes and so much really happened and you know I'll link in the show
#
notes to an episode of everything is everything called the reformers which is about exactly this
#
but my slightly cynical question to Ajay often is that my sense is that when I think about
#
this line long line of reformers from Manmohan and Montaigne to whoever the last reformers were
#
it seems that these are individuals within the system who you know we are lucky to have them but
#
they are fundamentally outliers that the way the system is you will have bureaucratic sclerosis
#
you will have a status quo bias within the political class or even worse a drive to populism
#
and nothing will really get done and even if a politician wants to get things done he might not
#
be able to because a bureaucracy gets in the way a recent guest of on this show in fact told me that
#
you know people blame modisha for so much the fact is modisha might do one or two signature
#
things but basically the deep state is running everything now you can look at this as a positive
#
or a negative but it's also a sign of how difficult it is to kind of get things done
#
and added to that is I think the complexity in these modern times where back in the day
#
you know you had politicians across parties understanding when something was a good idea
#
and letting it happen like the new pension scheme the nps was prepared under the vajpayee
#
government who left it for the next dispensation and then manmohan and chidambaram were all for it
#
similarly inflation targeting was again the document was prepared under the chidambaram
#
ministry in 2014 and as a courtesy because of the elections he left it for the next guy
#
and mr jaitley immediately said let's do it it's a great idea and you know the keep my episode
#
with k.p krishnan has the details of this and it's quite mind-blowing and that is over whether
#
it is over because something has fundamentally changed in our politics or whether we have we
#
just happen to have the wrong set of politicians in place i don't know but it is over to the point
#
that today the opposition will reflexively and unthinkingly oppose everything the government does
#
and vice versa and you cannot you know it seems that movement is impossible and the farm laws
#
being a classic example now again ajay and i have an episode on that it was in political terms a way
#
it was carried out it was a disaster the way the government treated the protesters was you know
#
deeply wrong and not something that should happen in a democracy but the reforms were great and
#
needed they were in fact part of the congress manifesto but they were opposed because hey the
#
opposition had to oppose everything the government did you know similarly i think there's been
#
consensus among economists that our labor laws need reform we've had this consensus for decades
#
that they harm workers more than they help them they keep the country poor and yet because it
#
was adityanath who did the labor law reform in up there was this reflex reflexive anger from
#
everybody who opposes adityanath saying that hey you know people who've not studied the actual
#
issue and what the laws are for 30 seconds so in a sense it's a triple worry you know different
#
sources of cynicism towards change that one what are the incentives of politicians let's look at
#
them to consider the the way the deep state is structured and what the incentives are within that
#
and three the political environment today so what is sort of your sense because you've actually
#
been within that world and you've managed to get a fair amount of incremental reform done
#
so first of all i'll just start off with the public choice view you know and i think
#
the public choice view when it came to prominence in the 50s etc it was a it was a very
#
welcome shift because otherwise there was almost a naive view that the government works for social
#
welfare and by drilling down to as you say the individual incentives but i think that i think
#
the public choice guys overplay their hand you know because if you take at one point of time you
#
see this permanent lock of special interests you know but over a period of time you see that change
#
does happen so you know if you read like mansur olson i economists i really like on this euros
#
sclerosis sort of issue you know logic of collective action you think that nothing is
#
going to happen but people you know over a period of time actually think so i think that
#
the fact is that people the public choice view overstates the ability of interest groups to
#
understand the future you know if you say that there are uncertainties in the future or deep
#
uncertainties then you actually have a opening for change you know so in fact it's interesting
#
that you know Buchanan in his book calculus of consent right actually talks about this
#
veil of uncertainty which is very close to rolls's veil of ignorance so i think uncertain once you
#
say uncertainty you know i don't know as a interest group you know assuming that the interest group
#
can think collectively rather than what my interests over 20 years are so people do change
#
course you know there is a learning so i think that the public choice while important i think
#
is too dark a view i think i think ideas have you know especially during crises when
#
uncertainty is very high ideas matter and this is the entire idea of the overton window etc i'm
#
quite sure inflation targeting it was coming off this massive surge in indian inflation which
#
made inflation targeting particularly attractive to mr jaitley and so that is one coming back to
#
india so change does happen i think that my experience is that at every point of time in
#
the system there are reform champions you know it's not just in politics in economics i think
#
that various i've seen enough bureaucrats who they're not a majority right but i've seen enough
#
bureaucrats who want change but my firm belief is that politicians are the entrepreneurs you know
#
means i think it is the politician who takes the risk and if you speak to any of these reformers
#
they'll tell you that end of the day it is the man who has the government position so whether it
#
is narsimha rao whether it is mr vajpayee whether it is manmohan saying whether it is narendra
#
moldi i think eventually it is their big call you know so i'm not i think i'm not pessimistic
#
about change i think change happens but change happens in like bursts you know rather than
#
because of these various factors but i think the the the the bureaucrat the outside academic all
#
are important but i think it's the political entrepreneur who actually is at some point of
#
time saying that you know i'm going to take this big risk yeah and and that's a very wise point
#
and and the nuance about incentives there which you know you can reconcile public choice theory
#
with the fact that change does happen is that just as individuals contain multitudes people
#
respond to a multiplicity of incentives so a bureaucrat is not only responding to the one
#
narrow incentive or bigger department bigger budgets but also that hey i can actually make
#
a fucking difference to this country and what incentive could be bigger than that if you are
#
aligned to think in those ways i've seen some and in fact you know may not want to name that
#
bureaucrat because she's junior in the system so i don't know how it all works there but you know
#
just at the district level so many young bureaucrats have brought about change you know so i don't think
#
we should as i said amit over the years from starting with this standard indian middle class
#
view that every politician is useless every bureaucrat is useless everybody is an end seeker
#
i have substantially changed my view over the past 20 years i mean i had an episode with one
#
such uh enterprising bureaucrat called ashutosh saleel few months back and my question to him
#
was look i love the stuff that you've done you're amazing but i fear that you're an outlier and i
#
think that you know like my view of the design of a good system is a good good system is one in
#
which even the worst person produces good results because the incentives are right and that systemic
#
design worries me but you know we'll come back to that but i'll double click on the point you made
#
about politicians being the key drivers of change and my sense there is that look politicians as you
#
said they are entrepreneurs in the political marketplace right but they are the supplier
#
responding to demand to me the the demand is critical the demand is what really matters so
#
how much uh what do you think about that demand side of the political marketplace
#
so the demand side obviously is not necessarily uh you know so i i if i may disagree with you
#
amit i think the the hallmark of an entrepreneur is that he or she takes that risk not necessarily
#
knowing that there is demand you know you create you create a market for whatever you're producing
#
right so i think that a really good politician who has the ability to sell a program or to
#
communicate a program can actually get the you know the public mood behind him or her so i don't
#
think a really talented politician is necessarily only a hostage to the immediate political demands
#
of his constituency i think he can he or she can reshape and we've seen that right we've seen
#
politicians reshape things ahead of what their societies uh perhaps are ready for
#
can you give me examples of that within an indian context and within the specific context that a lot
#
of the economic ideas that we talk about are deeply counterintuitive like spontaneous order
#
which you still haven't told me a marathi word for or homework homework or the positive someness
#
of things and yet people in general by and large because of rational ignorance etc etc tend to
#
think of the world in zero-sum ways they tend to think of redistribution as a solution to problems
#
of poverty etc etc so you know there is no constituency for example for the kind of
#
deep-seated agricultural reforms that we need it's a small constituency maybe sharad joshi for a
#
while led a movement that had some of that was in on the right track but all the demands will come
#
for what is a short-term anesthetic perhaps a necessary short-term anesthetic but an anesthetic
#
regardless of farm loan waivers which then becomes a hygiene factor so everybody is really offering
#
that it's not making a dent on the problem it's creating moral hazard and the deeper issues are
#
not addressed because a politician can say that hey you know we've done this so in a positive sense
#
when you talk about a politician actually creating a demand for policies that you and I would consider
#
good you know what examples come to mind just stick the farm laws right it was a big political
#
risk means it was you know if you had just taken the calculation that you know people will not
#
accept it but they did move ahead yeah means I you know you have to you know all labor laws
#
these are most difficult ones right I think the 91 reforms full respect for everything done
#
for executive decision right means do you want to decontrol import of gold do you want to
#
you know cut your fiscal deficit but once you go to these factor markets it's extremely complicated
#
political economy out there and see sometimes Amit also you know it's not it's not just people
#
are stupid switch the poor you have to understand that the risk taking abilities of the poor are
#
very low you know means or to use technical language their discount rates are very high
#
you know so I really when I'm leaving hand to mouth I cannot take the risk with something
#
which says that in five years your life will be better because of this I don't have that
#
time frame to my life you know so these are some of the practical problems but I think just the
#
farm laws you know means the fact that the prime minister took that risk tells us something now
#
you may say that you know should it have been done by Delhi or should it have been done at the
#
state level those are valid things but I think that was you know an attempt of exactly what I'm
#
saying so here's another question about change you know 20 years back I would have thought
#
slightly simplistically that the state of things is a and the ideal state of things is b and if
#
you have a correct sort of confluence of bureaucrats and politicians and things working
#
in tandem you can just shift a to b now that is clearly not the case right so even if you
#
look at something like the farm laws you look at doing away with apmcs right we agree that doing
#
away with apmcs is of massive good to the farmer effectively what is happening because of apmcs is
#
that you are creating both a monopoly and a monopsony the farmer can only sell to an apmc
#
and a buyer can only buy from the apmc so the farmer will sell something for two rupees the
#
retail customer will get it for 20 rupees while the farmer could have got 10 rupees and the retail
#
customer could have paid 12 rupees right very standard and it's an easy economic case but when
#
you come to it in the real world you run into two kinds of problems one is that you have the people
#
who are benefiting from the current system either people who are benefiting from the current system
#
or people who are surviving within the current system and have that uncertainty
#
and therefore you are kind of you know that becomes a hassle and two even if you can implement the
#
law the way the ecosystem is set up is that it might seem for a long time that nothing is happening
#
or there's a disruption and that disruption itself can be harmful and and these are really
#
complicated sort of wicked problems so what is your sense of how one goes about this because
#
these are so complicated that at one level my mind boggles when i think about you know what
#
are the incremental changes i begin with what is even the process of change because i know what is
#
the ideal end state but getting to there from here involves just so many uncertainties yeah so i
#
i think this is again you know this first generation second generation third generation
#
reforms the first generation reforms were the clean break from the past but they were executive
#
decisions the second generation like especially electricity markets you know telecom you know the
#
the big oligopolistic sectors they were more complicated you had to you know you also some
#
many of them you have to take state governments into account i think really these third third
#
generation you know especially of factor markets they're going to be very very difficult means i
#
if there's one area i'm generally an optimist but one area where i think that it's going to be very
#
so i think the optimum strategy in such a thing because especially given what happened with the
#
farm laws is to chip away you know by incrementally reducing like even labor laws you know very states
#
have in their own way included elements of flexibility into labor laws i think it's going
#
to be a slow burn battle i don't think you're going to see a day where you wake up one day and
#
say oh you know indian labor laws have been overhauled happy to be proven wrong but i don't
#
think it's because all land labor and this thing agricultural it's not exactly a factor market
#
but land labor markets and i think it's we've seen that there have been attempts but they're
#
very very messy so what is the fundamental driver of the people within an organization like artha
#
because it seems to me that at one level if you were a pure research organization you can say hey
#
the pursuit of truth and that can kind of drive you forward within artha the thing is that it's
#
a pursuit of truth towards a particular end and that end will only be partly achieved at best and
#
you will get no credit for it when it happens and nothing is attributable and you are essentially
#
playing a long game but even if you succeed you will not know you have succeeded and you
#
certainly can't take credit for your success so how does that sort of play out so i think the
#
first thing is that as you said it is a long game right means we're not a patch on what
#
the kilkers and the montex and the rangarajans did but literally you know it's year after year
#
they kept at it in fact look at gst right 2002 it was the idea was floated in the budget of 2002
#
or rather announced and in 2017 we actually so 15 years so it's a fair thing about how some things
#
move you know in the system so i think it's a long game so you have to be patient number two is that
#
our idea is that we have to work with governments end of the day the government of india is the
#
biggest potential change maker in this country you know so working with the government working with
#
at least with the reform champions within the government i think that's the second i don't
#
think we know that we will not get credit you know and it's not that our research or our thing has
#
single-handedly shifted the needle right i think there are lots of people working in similar areas
#
but that's that's okay you know i don't think that the idea is that you should you know get
#
some great recognition etc i think if you see some change and that change builds on some earlier
#
change i think that's good enough so you know another of the sort of factoids that came about
#
about your dad was that he was involved with this great magazine called abiruchi and he wrote a
#
column for them called what some bad for 10 years so like you were columnist but many decades before
#
you obviously and i'm sure much much better but and there's no trace of that column online
#
obviously at least i couldn't find it maybe you have a copy somewhere but that got me to thinking
#
about journalism per se about how transient journalism can be columns can be a lot that is
#
in the world of ideas can be and recently when i think of creators or writers or whatever
#
you know much as economists talk of money in terms of stock and flow i've been thinking about what
#
we do in terms of stock and flow that in a sense the columns or podcast episodes etc etc they are
#
the flow they are your constant engagement with the world you're putting something out maybe you
#
get feedback maybe you don't but it's just a constant flow it is necessarily transient it is
#
bound to piece of you know it's timely and it's of a particular time and place so i try my best to
#
make my episodes timeless in a sense with these sort of oral history type life and times episodes
#
but it's it's like a flow and on the other hand there is a stock where people are building up
#
bodies of work which again in that sedimentary way they form they continue to increase a bedrock
#
of knowledge on which a future generation can rest and my complaint about a lot of my friends
#
in this world is that you guys haven't written enough books you know like i ajay and vijay of
#
course wrote in service of the republic and that is one such book which is part of that bedrock
#
karthik's just written a book on engaging with the state and policy you know just from that
#
one prism and you know pranay kutaswini keeps writing what appears to be two books a week
#
so there is you know some work happening but my sense is that we need kind of more of a stock you
#
you know you wrote one book the rise of india in 2007 of course and you mentioned you're writing
#
another book now so i'll ask you about that also shortly but in a large in a broader sense tell me
#
about how within this ecosystem of ideas how important is it to also create this stock because
#
the complaint that i will have of all of you and the last time i hung out with ruban in the
#
artha office i was telling him the same thing that i have met few people as brilliant and
#
wide-ranging as that yet where are the fucking books you know what have you left of yourself
#
at the very least come on my show and do an eight-hour episode but in general i just feel
#
that that is a positive because many people will you know including many people listening to this
#
will get interested in a particular aspect of what you've said and they'll say amit i want to
#
and i get this question all the time that amit i want to learn more about this maybe it's economic
#
history of india or whatever and suggest suggest a book and 90 percent of the time i realize there
#
is no book that i can suggest that through osmosis and living and conversations like this i have
#
picked up whatever half-baked knowledge i have but there is no one source so what's your sense of
#
this ecosystem of ideas and do you agree with me that there is uh you know a lack here that has to
#
be filled guilty as charged i see first of all one thing i'm clear about is my columns will never
#
be a book you know because you know columns are transient some friends do say that you know within
#
that you've written some like economics have fun or some economic history ones which are timeless
#
you know so you know some of these fun columns or some of these offbeat columns which perhaps at
#
some point i may expand and put them but generally i don't think column writing it's for the moment
#
it's transient so that's the first thing you know i i don't think i am interested in converting
#
my columns as such who knows maybe i'll put some together but at some point i don't think that's
#
see about book writing i think you have to have something to say because i am very cognizant of
#
the fact that great books are written by scholars you know and i i think and extreme clarity in my
#
mind that scholarship is something different from engaging writing and also i think the sort of work
#
which goes into books i i think i need to inculcate the discipline and you have to say something to
#
see which is because you know there is otherwise just non-fiction books keep coming and going
#
coming and going you know so there's really no point in just putting one for the sake of your
#
cv so my own thing is that i need to be confident i have something to add to the existing stock of
#
knowledge and then whether i have the discipline to write it you know i am very very very very
#
very and i don't use the word very as you know writers should not use words like that i would
#
cancel those very you would have canceled me only like not one very this bugger is using 15 very is
#
second but no but one thing that i want to push back strongly on is this notion of something to
#
say because you know the thing is what many of us tend to do is we suffer from the curse of
#
knowledge that something seems incredibly obvious to us so we assume that everyone else will know
#
it's stating the obvious it is so banal why should i say this and yet as many of my listeners will
#
know that often i will say something that i feel is completely commonplace and yet somebody will
#
write to me and say man t i l you know it really opened my eyes and for and for that reason i feel
#
that people like you and other intellectuals within the system should never take our knowledge for
#
granted that it is of value to put it out there in a systematic manner so again you know avinash
#
dikshit you know so there's one essay he wrote on his research style you know and he says somewhere
#
that he you know he says there are marathon runners there are middle distance runners and
#
there are sprinters you know and he said that i'm a middle distance runner and then i moved
#
the marathoners take one question and then they pursue it for the rest of their lives
#
the middle distance runners you know after five years they move to some new thing and also
#
i think i've been a sprinter i've got a fundamentally roaming mind a distracted mind
#
so i'm very happy every you know fortnight to pursue some other thing i need to perhaps at
#
some point figure out how to become a middle distance runner you know at the risk of niranjan's
#
planning may i postulate that while in your output it might appear that you have been a sprinter
#
in your interests and in what you have been taking in you have very much been a marathon runner for
#
example if you look at something like economic history you have been a marathon runner you have
#
that and and that is kind of your next book kind of covers that also would you like to
#
i haven't told too many people but i maybe i should so i'm working on a book
#
on the history of economic ideas in india i see there are lots of books on western economic
#
thinking right so classics include worldly philosophers by robert heilbronner and then
#
i said galbraith's book and you know you keep larry white has a great book on the history
#
of economic but i don't think there is enough of that on indian economic thinkers and i really
#
don't want to go back to kautilya and you know the this thing you know the mahabharat has lectures
#
in the i think shantiparva on governance i don't want to go back that i'm basically talking about
#
the modern era you know and i'm trying to connect them with specific points of india's economic
#
history so it's it's been thought yeah but that's the book i really want to do you know i mean that
#
i find it quite amazing that even students of economics and this goes back to my training in
#
bombay university back then they are not they don't know much about indian economic thinking
#
you know means who has read asukumai chakravarti who has read a vk ramaswami who has been these
#
names you know and these people like you know just to give a random example bs minhas buggy
#
cha singh minhas right minhas wrote a paper with kenneth arrow robert solo and hollis chennery
#
right means the four people who wrote it two of them got nobels right and it was built on minhas's
#
own phd thesis so that was the quality of and then he came back and joined the government of india
#
so you know these people are really not known you know so we know some of the debates around
#
the mahalanobis plan but you know we don't know like you know even ambedkar one of the first
#
trained economists like do we really know his economic ideas you know in the interwar period
#
there were so many economists you know jahangir koyaji i think these are just names so the idea is
#
to write a book on indian economists indian economists economic thinking and link it to
#
indian economic history absolutely can't wait it will be educational and speaking of educational
#
another question i want to ask you is about the ecosystem of ideas within india in disseminating
#
these ideas like you know you're on the advisory board of the migna desai academy as you pointed
#
out you're on the board of trustees for center for civil society you have helped in creating
#
the economics curriculum for mumbai school of economics and public policy ramnara and ruya
#
college wellington institute of management etc etc so you've got your fingers into these different
#
worlds equally your work in artha equally of course you know within this world we are all
#
friends with each other takshashila is doing an incredible job out there in bangalore both in
#
terms of you know housing scholars like pranay and anupam and manoj who are just remarkable and
#
nithin himself of course but also training you know hundreds of thousands of people and you
#
know building that world of ideas that ecosystem of ideas so what is your sense of the way it has
#
grown because you know from when uh you would have started your career it would practically
#
have been zero you know maybe in um you know the mumbai school of economics where you have
#
you know maybe there's a different kind of line there but geographically it's one little campus
#
with a handful of profs maybe i'm imagining and not really more than that but today it is
#
an entire burgeoning ecosystem of people who are training other people who are writing op-eds who
#
are blogging who are doing podcasts etc etc so give me a sense of all of this yeah it's definitely
#
deepened so more think tanks more people i think also you know some of this new policy thinking
#
has broken out of the walls of academia or just government organization right once upon a time it
#
was all concentrated like within some sort of an ivory tower i think this broader you know
#
ecosystem i think is extremely important it's still early days it's still fragile so i don't
#
think it has the depth of what you see in many other countries but it's welcome and well i mean
#
your podcast right means there is so much in that podcast which like if i was teaching i would you
#
know i would actually recommend it many of the episodes to students you know so i think that has
#
changed i think what worries me um it is the decline of public universities you know and i
#
tell you why we have all these new think tanks are small you know means but we have the growth
#
of these private universities etc but i think the public university has the deepest connect to
#
the average citizen you know means i have a friend of mine from the mumbai department
#
economics department had told me once he said that's like the student like when a dalit student from
#
marathwada central maharashtra comes very poorly trained at his undergrad thing he comes here for a
#
master's degree and we sort of you know take a lot of trouble and then he joins city bank you know
#
he says that is when you feel achievement you know if you i think what happening is a lot of
#
the private universities there is an element of self-selection you know that you anyway taking
#
people from the cream of society and very often they are headed abroad so i think the means as
#
much as the you know i am not at all saying that you should not have private universities
#
india needs more universities india needs more think tanks research organizations etc but i
#
think the decline of the public university is very important and you see that you know means so much
#
of now the best indian economists are now sitting in foreign universities and i don't know what it
#
will take to bring many of them back the second i think is platforms you know i think india does
#
not have really top quality journals and what's happened is these big so-called top five journals
#
they are dominated by a few universities you know western universities so epw used to be that but
#
so i think that has to be strengthened you know i think you need to rebuild public universities
#
or build public universities you need more conferences you need more journals and then
#
this entire flowering of you know podcasting of op-ed writing that's always welcome if anybody
#
from ashoka is listening to this please write in and tell me if it's true what i've heard that
#
ashoka is basically woke rich kid smoking ganja all day so i have i didn't say that no no you
#
never said that but obviously but others have said it in exactly so many words so i wonder if
#
that's true i ask mischievously and obviously universities also contain multitudes so i'm sure
#
it's not entirely true but it's at least partly no it's not entirely true so you know let me
#
since you're being the troublemaker that you are let me backpedal a bit i don't mean every professor
#
every but i think generally the private universities are welcome but they can't cover up for the
#
decline of public universities no no i i absolutely agree and even for ashoka you know i've had people
#
like ashwini deshpande on my show and other ashoka profs and at least those of the faculty
#
who've been on my show are awesome but that could be the selection bias because after all they have
#
been on my show and you know there's a larger kind of problem there at when you mentioned that a lot
#
of indian like what i see is a lot of elite rich kids will go to foreign universities and they will
#
come back brainwashed in the ways that foreign universities do and their ideas will often have
#
no relevance to this world and even when they are well-meaning and they haven't been brainwashed
#
there'll be a lot of isomorphic mimicry at work they won't have risen up from the ground and i
#
feel that the future of india lies in really in young people in small towns and then the question
#
is how do you empower those young people with small towns not just with the economic growth but
#
also with access to knowledge and certainly public universities are a part of that and certainly
#
whatever other disruptive solutions are marked so i think also then you know circling back to our
#
initial discussions on bilingualism i think it's very so you know amit whenever i write for
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laksatta which is a marathi paper and i don't write very frequently i'm astonished at the reader
#
response you know because sometimes when you write in a mint or something it's preaching to the
#
converted you know and i think sometimes if you write for a you know i think it's very important
#
in fact many years ago if you you know mr sv raju who kept the flag of the swatantra party flying
#
against all odds mr raju and i would keep discussing this you know that how do we actually
#
you know reach out to you know marathi speakers gujarati speakers canada speakers etc etc
#
with you know you know economic liberalism with political liberalism etc and i think
#
that's also very important i think that the reach of this videos etc is very very important so it's
#
it need as i said you know even the growth of intellectual output outside the university
#
system is a good thing but yeah i agree with you i think small town india is really something to
#
admire and watch out for and i think if i may share an anecdote from like unusual source so
#
i don't know if you've seen this netflix documentary on the yasharaj movies called
#
dream merchants i hated it you have seen okay so fine so at one point aditya chopra says that
#
you know after liberalization the first round of films they made were the typical nri films you
#
know shahrukh khan nri market films and and then he said sometime in the late you know 2000 to
#
2010 period they pivoted towards small town themes you know the sort of the bunty or bubbly type of
#
theme then he said because that's where he saw a lot of change and new i think so i think it's
#
interesting you know i think and i think this is the broader story of the transformation of india
#
where it's no long and you know to give another like unusual example like look at the cricket
#
team right it means when i grew up the cricket team was largely metro boys and today you just
#
see the composition of this cricket team it's astonishing and everywhere you look at our space
#
program you look at our athletics you look at our you know people coming from diverse backgrounds
#
which you wouldn't have expected 30 years ago so you know just on bollywood a slight tangential
#
point i often make and i made this when tiktok first came i was you know until it got banned
#
unfortunately i was a big champion of tiktok because i felt that what was happening before that
#
was that just as our government in india is too central entertainment was too centralized like
#
the hindi cinema entertainment was too centralized in bombay and there were really two groups of
#
people who were kind of running it one is the kids of all the producers of the past who'd gone
#
abroad studied come back had a shallow understanding of society and one is the older producer directors
#
who had a shallow understanding of the market as it were and for me tiktok was a bottom-up
#
expression of what the country really feels and you know wants to be and wants to be entertained
#
by and it kind of got nipped in the bud which i don't know rant on bollywood because i watch
#
a lot of bollywood films but it's quite amazing you know that so many actors and actresses in
#
bollywood who basically earn their living from the hindi language cannot speak the hindi language and
#
i'm astonished and if you compare it with say the generation of raj kapoor or even amita bachchan
#
you know i think it's it's quite astonishing this sort of you know divergence from the the realities
#
of india i mean for anybody listening and i'll think aloud here but for anybody for any young
#
person listening who can solve this problem i feel that there is a tremendous lag here like in many
#
industries the mainstream has crumbled but new paradigms haven't emerged to replace the old
#
paradigm and there is a lag in that and i think what is happening in cinema is is that in other
#
medium like music for example you could say that okay you might have a taylor swift and whatever
#
who are super popular but by and large you have this expression of the long tail you have creators
#
who found a thousand true fans or one lakh true fans or whatever the case might be and you you
#
have people who found miniature markets niche markets are all profitable they're all doing
#
well it is a mystery to how you do that in cinema because traditionally the barrier to entry has
#
been huge because production costs were so incredibly high and then the distribution
#
i feel that in terms of production cost being incredibly high that matter has kind of gotten
#
sorted out like there is this great documentary i was watching by vim vendors called i think it's
#
sweet 360 sweet 666 something like that or 366 or whatever it's on movie i'll link it from the
#
show notes where in 1982 at the carn film festival he gets a bunch of directors to sit down and talk
#
about their fears for cinema and all of them are you know kind of already they sound absurd today
#
like spielberg says that look i took eight million to make 80 i am worried that 20 years later
#
eight years later i might have to spend 20 million to make 80 even though it is shot only in a house
#
and a backyard and one shot in a forest and the truth is today you could probably do it for 10
#
lakhs literally so that barrier has changed but the barrier of distribution the barrier of how
#
you find that long tail how you find your niches how you build a profitable business model that is
#
a mystery and i think that it is a problem waiting to be solved and whoever solves it
#
is really the next amazon or the next youtube or the next big success story that's true although
#
to be fair ott has provided a plaque like 20 years ago a film like lapata ladies may not have
#
got a theater release you know and here it is today i think one of the top grossing or most
#
watched movies so uh yeah but i think this goes back to the thing that change comes not from
#
pricing but change often comes from you know new technologies which entrepreneurs bring in new
#
ways of doing business new demographic segments so uh it's it's it's like what you could call
#
exogenous shocks which actually change you know uh things so at the risk of getting sacked for
#
the second time in an episode by you i'm going to say very 20 times again and say that i am very
#
very very into 20 times passionate about one thing that you said which is the importance of the
#
languages of getting content out in the languages because within english you have all the content
#
of the world available to you whereas within the languages you don't have the same richness
#
in the ecosystem and that's where the hunger for information is more and it is there that the
#
change makers of future india will come from so my question to you therefore my very pointed
#
question niranjan is that within the intellectual life and i know you wouldn't want to use such a
#
sort of the phrase almost seems too grand the intellectual life but within the intellectual
#
life that you've lived you've been a curator you've been a writer you've been a thinker you've
#
done you've been a researcher you've tried to get things done in whatever ways artha is enabled
#
but what you haven't done is you haven't been a popularizer in the sense that 90 of your knowledge
#
you would probably take for granted because of knowledge you would think how it's so obvious
#
it's banal i would argue it is not it is very important and i would find that there is perhaps
#
great value in people like yourself saying that no i will do a marathi youtube station it doesn't
#
have to have fancy values but there is nobody else in that language talking about these ideas in these
#
ways and obviously your first best solution is that some young kid from a small town from satara
#
comes and has a superstar channel with all your ideas and everything is great and that's what
#
that's what would be the dream but you and i know economics policy first best solutions
#
don't come about and and and and to me i think that a lot of people in the intellectual world
#
including you including just absolutely anyone i can think of doesn't think this is worth doing
#
but oh my god this is a one thing we're doing especially in languages so you know so amit i
#
said early on that i'm lazy and now i see that there's some conspiracy you are building against
#
me first you say write a book now you're saying start a youtube channel not fair not fair i thought
#
friends are not supposed to do this no you know our mutual friend ajay shah says that everyone's
#
going to live till 120 so you have half your life yet to go and all of these are doable no no but
#
i'm serious genuinely i i've one of the thoughts i've had is not so much doing it myself but i
#
know lots of again you know given my limit world it's more on economics but i know a lot of
#
friends who are economists who are pretty good at you know they've already studied at marathi
#
school or they've they write marathi well of trying to get some sort of explainers you know
#
means very i remember like i had written a loksatta a piece on this new pension scheme and you know
#
this entire thing about going back to the old pension scheme and i didn't even say this was
#
good or that was bad i just did an explainer and a fact check for maharashtra that what is the
#
pension bill of the maharashtra government what are the tax revenues look like and i was quite
#
surprised you know means there is a hunger for this information so let's see i don't like the
#
way this is going you're adding more and more work for me but purpose i'm adding more and no purpose
#
no no but i i mean selfish in a sense i i i really think this is worth doing if whether you wrote
#
alone and you get together with your friends or whatever and i'm sure funding would be super easy
#
to find and the you know there is no greater bank for the buck to everyone who is you know
#
putting money on content in english i would just say that man the bank for the buck for marathi
#
or hindi or any indian language is 100x so you got to kind of do it so you know before i wrap
#
up i want to ask you a question about the current time this is it's 12 june when we are recording
#
right now this episode will probably be out in three weeks or something give me a sense of
#
what you feel about the economy as it stands today like you know a lot of the bickering
#
that we see on mass media is about this policy or that policy is devoid of frameworks is devoid of
#
a broader understanding so give me a broader understanding that does the indian economy make
#
you feel optimistic pessimistic what are the worries what is your sense of where we stand today
#
yeah so let's look at it this way amit you know that india is in the midst of
#
three big transitions right and that's the general story of structural transformation the first is
#
the transition from farms to factories and offices right means people have to move to
#
high productivity sectors the second is the transition from informal enterprises to formal
#
enterprises and the third transition is from villages to cities right so basically the shift
#
in productivity that's a structural transformation now india has it's a halfway job yet i am pretty
#
optimistic about the indian economy you know so if you take the really long-term you know forget
#
this government previous government etc etc if you assume that indian growth took off in 1980
#
then over these 40 years or 40 plus years we've averaged about 6.3 to 6.5 annual growth you know
#
there have been ups and downs business cycles shocks etc but that's the sort of thing so
#
i think that that's not like that's very very creditable but that's not a china like growth
#
i guess that we will continue along this path you know so maybe six and a half becomes seven i i
#
don't see six and a half becoming ten on a sustained basis but even that will you know
#
definitely take us from what is currently lower middle class middle income country to upper middle
#
income country so i would assume that by the early years of the next decade we india will be
#
a upper middle income country now the question really is that what will that mean you know and
#
this is a worry i have and i have expressed this in columns over the past 10 years
#
that when india reaches that point will it resemble east asia or will it resemble
#
latin america so east asia the growth was more inclusive latin america it's a much different
#
model and i think the difference really is that in east asia they could create the jobs to pull
#
people out you know so i think that is the key thing you know that how do we create jobs how do
#
we offer opportunities to people to make these shifts you know from as i said from farm to factory
#
from informal to formal from so if we can't make these then there's a large class of people stuck
#
in like small enterprises you know living and this has profound implications for other things also
#
because if we can't provide jobs as the main tool of or the main vehicle of inclusion then
#
the other option then becomes welfare right so you then have all the pressures on your
#
fiscal system etc so i think this question which east asia or latin america has been troubling me
#
for some time unfortunately we seem to be headed towards latin america not necessarily not 100
#
percent but you know that's the sign so i think that is something see the other thing which makes
#
me confident about the indian economy otherwise on a macro basis is that if you think about
#
the over the years since independence the structural impediments to indian growth
#
so we had a food constraint we had a savings constraint we had a balance of payments constraint
#
and we had an energy constraint now gradually these have come down so the food constraint was
#
broken by the green revolution today even if you have one bad monsoon the indian economy
#
doesn't go into a tumble or we don't go to the imf the you know post bank nationalization the
#
savings constraint has eased a lot you know domestic savings have climbed and the foreign
#
exchange say constraint because of the 91 reforms opening up you know we have money coming in what
#
remains is the energy constraint and i think i always say that indian macro when oil is at 50
#
and indian macro when oil is at 150 is a completely different thing so my you know the
#
reason for optimism is that if this green transition and the rise of you know
#
alternate sources of energy etc does play out over the next 10 years we will have broken the
#
energy constraint also so these major supply side constraints then become much easier so i
#
i think now with this i think a lot much of the debate will have to pivot to the demand side
#
you know that who then buys everything so you know is it going to be foreigners through exports
#
is it going to be domestic consumers but then how do domestic consumers do it if there is not
#
no job creation government has its fiscal constraints that of course now corporate
#
investment so i think generally i am positive but i think that we have to think about now
#
the next 10 years a different sort of you know set of structural issues for the indian economy
#
there's an episode of everything is everything i link from the show notes where ajay gave a master
#
class on the future of electricity and how we can kind of reform that so i share it optimism let me
#
ask you one more question like one of land pitchett's sort of great findings and something
#
that animates him and drives him and you know i share the fervor is about the role of growth
#
in getting people out of poverty like he studied the the the trajectory of a whole bunch of countries
#
with a whole bunch of different policies across the decades and the one factor that is responsible
#
for 99 percent of people's rise out of poverty is a per capita gdp which is essentially what
#
growth is delivering to you you know you know so welfare schemes and redistribution are less than
#
one percent of the puzzle all of it will come from growth like you said jobs are critical jobs will
#
only come from growth you can't you know redistribute jobs per se and in much of the indian discourse
#
the easy answer of welfarism the that kind of zero-sum thinking it's just pervasive if you
#
look at the latest congress manifesto for example it's all about wealth tax redistribution
#
zero-sum thinking which is missing the point entirely even this government i would argue has
#
just been far too statist and a lot of the credit for the 2019 win and in fact went to welfare
#
delivery and all of that is okay fine you do welfare delivery but your jobs your economic
#
growth getting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty is only going to come from growth which
#
so i completely agree with land pitchett you know means eventually it's growth right and it's not
#
just per capita it's not just you know all development indicators whether it's you know
#
longevity child mortality everything it's like you know if you were to draw a line of best fit
#
it is almost about 45 degrees so i completely agree that we have to i i think that you know
#
we need some welfare system but as a backstop it can't be your first line of attack it has to be a
#
you know it has to be a backstop if things fail if things go badly but i don't see how
#
india is going to offer opportunities adequate opportunities for 1.5 billion
#
people most of them young if we don't have job creating growth so as we start winding up my
#
sort of penultimate question is that if i ask you to look like 15 years into the future and i'm not
#
asking for a prediction here but if i ask you to look 15 years into the future what is kind of your
#
best case scenario for where we could be and your worst case scenario for where we could be
#
so my my best case scenario is that india will continue to grow at this you know this
#
this sustained rate of six and a half seven percent which i continue to say is not a small
#
achievement you know if you look at the history of the world or even post world like lot of you
#
know countries have grown but as you climb up the you know income or as you go closer towards that
#
you know frontier it becomes harder and harder to increase productivity right so
#
you see that richer countries by definition grow at two percent you know or just grow slower than
#
so the catch up will end at some point of time and then you will have to have another set of
#
very you know significant reforms to you know to make the next push you know so this
#
infamous middle income trap we no longer there yet but maybe by 2035 we'll have to figure out
#
ways so i think some that's a big question i am confident of that india will continue to progress
#
i'm not a india pessimist by any stretch of imagination but sometimes what happens amit
#
is that we settle into hubris you know means this we are the fastest going economy in the world is
#
that but i think the question is that at this stage what was the rate of growth in korea or
#
china at this level of income they were like doing eight to ten percent sustained growth so
#
it depends on how you sort of slice the cake you know or how do you look at the problem
#
so hubris is it's a it's a touchy feely thing but i think we should not be hubristic i continue to be
#
confident or optimistic and i think in like we'll reach that position of you know middle income
#
you know where the middle income trap kicks in about 10 years from now and maybe you start
#
thinking now about how to avoid that trap it would be a most delightful trap to reach
#
i don't you know means if you look at barry ashengrin's pieces you know on the middle income
#
trap largely it kicks in at about 15 000 per capita income ppp india is about 9 000 so it's
#
not that it's not that far it's not that far yeah so you know if you assume that broadly five
#
percent growth per capita per year it's maybe five ten years and ten years later okay let's
#
let's but optimism underlying is optimism underlying is optimism so my underlying
#
optimism for my next question is that you will take at least one or two answer it because i know
#
that your answer can be very rich which is i'm going to ask you to give me and my listeners
#
recommendations for books films music that you love and i'm actually going to go out on a limb
#
and say that please feel free to recommend books films music that i can't exactly consume because
#
they're in marathi i don't mind marathi recommendations because there must be many marathi listeners
#
who would love to be introduced to you know that rich cultural world that you know maybe
#
they miss something there so yeah so feel free to read out your favorite poems to sing your
#
favorite songs i don't want to drive away people with my voice but okay so as i said as much as i
#
read marathi i still english dominates my reading because partly because of the subject i read more
#
non-fiction and i read more of economics and cricket sort of stuff and i like crime thrillers
#
as well so so let me just like list out randomly some of the books i really like i mentioned tony
#
judge post-war i don't know recently i read this very nice book by amitav ghosh called smokes and
#
smoke and ashes on the opium trade it's a non-fiction book his obviously he has this
#
trilogy right on the opium trade that i thought was wonderful i you know in marathi books now
#
just i haven't prepared for this question this is like an exam you know take your time you don't
#
prepare and then you say oh how do i bullshit my way through this book you can you can google your
#
notes yeah so recently actually this was something which came up on twitter you know i think
#
uh on on independence day i think salil tripathi was asked to recommend
#
books in gujarati on freedom etc and i think somebody asked him that in that entire list in
#
that why were no marathi books there no marathi person was so he asked why so there's one book
#
at that point i had mentioned which is not very well known but it's a book called sata uttara chi
#
kahani and it's it's it's a great book because it comes back to some of the points we discussed
#
that how friendship should transcend political views etc so it's by a person called like in
#
marathi gopura pradhan you know he was again a professor at ferguson college your college
#
actually i don't know if you ever taught you so he wrote this book sometime in the eight early
#
eighties and the theme is eight friends you know who grow up in the 19 late 30s early 40s
#
and then they all have different political beliefs so one becomes a communist once joined the rss
#
once joined the socialist party somebody joins ambedkar somebody joins the non-brahmin movement
#
somebody becomes the royess somebody joins vinoba bhave i think this covers seven and there's an
#
eighth friend who's apolitical right he's a writer and like i've never said this publicly
#
but my suspicion is that he is partly based on my father because my you know and that book the way
#
it is written is that actual he's built it on real events from maharashtra's political history
#
and real people also walk in and out of it now so you actually have a ramban horlohiya coming into
#
the story you know golwalkar guruji coming into the story and as i said my father for a very short
#
brief moment so i think it's an outstanding overview of marathi of the politics of maharashtra
#
broadly from 1940 i guess before the quit india movement to around 1980 you know which is after
#
the janta experiment failed so that's a book which thanks to twitter it sort of came to my head i
#
think that's one good book see i always you know think that we should read the classics in
#
original you know so i see lots of these these debates about nehru savarkar you know gokhale
#
telak you know and my thing is that as far i can't get everybody in totality right but at
#
least to get at least one book in one flavor of what somebody has said i think i find you know
#
readings in marathi as well in english reading some of them there's a particular way i think
#
this should be read so i think you should always read the old classics in the context of their
#
times you know first and foremost secondly i think you should always judge a historical figure
#
at his best or at his worst what people do is they judge the person they like at his best and the
#
person they dislike at his worst you know i think and the third is that if you find something which
#
is obviously wrong i think very hard because these are people who have you know immense intelligence
#
and great achievement so could they be that stupid there must be something you know so especially if
#
you find something you disagree with think harder so but i think reading all the classics as far as
#
possible not all the classics that's too much but so that's one any specific ones you would recommend
#
so my like i think at home i have in marathi the collected works of agarkar of telak i think some
#
of savarkar's own rationalist essays i really like you know and what what can you tell us about
#
savarkar which people who have read the english biographies wouldn't know yeah so i wouldn't you
#
know sort of say anything or judge the english biographies my my point is that you know every
#
like savarkar grew up in a very marathi milieu right means he had an extraordinary life he was
#
in international revolutionary circles then he was a national leader but he also i think
#
the way he came from was immensely important you know and going back to that old 19th century
#
great debate in pune between the between the sanatanis and the sudharaks so to say
#
or the political radicals and the social radicals would be a better way
#
i think what savarkar did was he tried to i think he said this also he says i draw my political
#
inspiration from telak and my social inspiration from agarkar which i think explains a lot you
#
know and i think you know i see savarkar in that context you know that he was you know he was he
#
was sort of trying to bring these two things or things together and i i personally you know
#
although that hindutva essential of hindutva is his most famous book it's not a book i particularly
#
like you know but i think some of his marathi essays are very powerful you know on politics
#
on social affairs so really i you know someday hopefully and don't tell me niranjan you should
#
i mean i was just i just want to say that it's dangerous of you know joining the amrit varma
#
i can translate it and you can edit it for context i mean but i think some of this would be
#
i'm quite sure this is the same you know means i'm i don't know but maybe lala lachpat rai wrote
#
in you know urdu and punjabi or you know there are maybe so many bengali nationalists so i i think
#
that this janki bakle's book in that sense tries to you know or not tries quite quite successfully
#
sort of engages with the not just savarkar's marathi writings but marathi scholarship on
#
savarkar so there are three savarkarite intellectuals who whose books on savarkar i
#
really like one is i'll use the marathi you know way of saying it one is sahar deshpande
#
who was also an economist the second is shesha rao more and who's who's still a current writer
#
and the third is a thing of dana gokhle and i think there and i think for a critical view
#
of savarkar yadif adke's book on shod savarkar and so i think marathi scholarship on savarkar
#
also is pretty is pretty sophisticated and worth reading so yeah so i think i going back to my
#
point about my sort of you know i'm slightly partial towards rereading books rather than
#
all of course i sorry i don't read new books because there are new things happening new
#
thoughts new writers but i i like to read reread books movies music movies so my tastes in movies
#
are extremely low brow you know so i means i don't i'm not a big you know like i i love
#
the average hollywood movie i love i love the average hindi movie you know so i've enjoyed all
#
the right from the like navketan movies which devan and they to sometimes the govinda movies
#
to sometimes the you know amitabh bachchan movies nothing wrong with govinda so i think he's
#
like you know not that every movie was good but i think his like his comic timing was quite
#
something i in in english movies i have a preference for like political stroke historical movies and
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for crime thrillers you know okay so there's so many in fact recently i just rewatched the
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original version of taking of pelham one two three you know then the batman series is actually all of
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christopher nolan's movies i like in the current lot of thrillers in in i like sriram raghavan a
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lot you know i think i haven't seen merry christmas but all of sriram raghavan's movies i've immensely
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enjoyed have you met him no never and because sriram raghavan is a fan of vijayanand who's
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another person i you know means i really like his movies so so this is weird no so it's like
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you're in bombay he's in bombay he's like a top filmmaker you're like a top economist and policy
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person and journalist how come you haven't met it's like different cities yeah actually another
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one which i liked is in the hindi thrillers are few and far-bidden but i don't know if you've seen
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manorama six feet under which is very chinatown flavor it has but i think abhid awal has done a
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absolutely astonishing part there so yeah so my my my film tastes are like what you could call
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timepass you know means i don't you know i really don't i'm not in a position to talk about you know
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really high quality cinema it's not my thing i don't believe in hierarchies again like yeah
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absolutely so i uh and it's true you know means it's just like you can you can read a scholarly
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book and you can read pulp fiction at the same time i still i still love reading agatha christy
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i still love reading you know the frederick four i as i said the nick herons that sloves house series
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i'm currently reading so i think you scratch different teachers in different ways yeah yeah so
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but i i i normally watch movies to relax you know so i uh then i think it's you can just talk on and
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on music unfortunately i don't listen to much english music i of course being of certain age
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there was some you know 60 70 years music i'm i know but my daughters try their best to educate
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me on in english music but i've always enjoyed hindi cinema music you know both the old hindi
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cinema music and then the sort of i think in between there was a period of awful music and then
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the rehman shankar ahsan loya amit trivedi sort of music shantanu mitra i like that and in the old
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time they're all very good but perhaps i would say salil chaudhary rd barman oh yeah these are
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my favorites so i will cheat and i will throw in a final final question as it were and this is related
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to two f words one of which just came up another came up earlier earlier and now you've spoken
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about friendships and just now you mentioned your daughter so fatherhood being the effort there
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so friendships and fatherhood and what are the things that you are intentional about in your
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life like what happens is for too much of life we go through doing things by default not really
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thinking about stuff not being intentional like in my own case i certainly realized that
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i used to let friendships drift and not make an effort to keep people close to me close to me and
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to and all of these things require some work at some level even when it comes to something like
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fatherhood some people could just do it in default mode and with the roles that society gives you
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and the mother does most of the work and etc etc but some people and i'm pretty sure it's true if
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you would put in work into it and think about it what does it involve what do i have to be
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etc etc so how have these things changed you and what are you intentional about in your life so
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i think that both these you know they're precious to me right so friendships i
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think i'm you know i have really a lot of friends you know and i'll go back to my colony friends i
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think this is just so relaxing you know because we're all now in our late 50s early 60s some of
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a couple of younger people in their 40s and early 50s and what i like about our sunday adas is that
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you know you may be anybody you may be the best neurosurgeon in the city you may be the photographer
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who is you know most sought after in hindi film industry but there you are treated just like
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you know as if you're a nobody and if anybody tries to boast or something it doesn't take much
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time for old friends to pull you down you know so i think that sort of healthy friendship you know
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which has sustained over the years i think that is very precious you know to me of course i have
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friends again professional friends i have you know friends from college but i think to me
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like friendship is the second thing you know before i come to you know two things before
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i come to fatherhood i think one is i generally like to be around younger people you know because
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i think i learn a lot you know so i know you asked me this question about mentorship etc but
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i think it's a two-way street amit you know because what i have learned from the likes of
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pramit or roshan or sidharth singh or you know kunal so many so many means vikram i think is
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you know so it's not that it's some you know one-way street that oh you you know you sort
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of help them in that i think i've learned so much i continue to learn you know i mean i call them
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up for so many things i read what they write so i think that's one big thing you know that you
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shouldn't you shouldn't ever slip into this zone of nostalgia that oh i come from a golden age and
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now everything is shit you know i i just don't buy that and i think i learned that from my parents
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as i said you know they they welcomed newer you know like when when dalit poetry came in when
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when sort of what they call grammine poetry or grammine katha you know village from rural
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short stories i think that's very important the other thing i think you know
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since you're making me asking a difficult question man i think that i have come to the
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sort of conclusion but i see the point that the small things in matter in life matter you know
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it's so much of our life is based on grandstanding of economic ideas political ideas this thing that
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and i say you know what i really like you enjoy eventually is like you know as i said sitting on
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the sidelines of shivaji park and watching a kanga league match you know or a cutting
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chai with your friend or cutting chai with a friend or sometimes you know if they're up to
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eat a beer you know just spending time with your family here just you know eating good food i think
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some of this or just you know listening to a good piece of music i think some of this to me is very
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important you know i i refuse to reduce my life down to the books i have read or the articles i
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have written about fatherhood i don't know that this is something which you know since you're
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being troublesome maybe you should ask siley but i think i have been an attentive father but i think
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what again you know my my daughters are now in their 20s means 25 and 28 and unfortunately both
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are economists but family curse but i think that again you know same point i think there was a
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time when the relationship switched and now actually learn more from my daughters means
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they are the ones who tell me are you baba you must see this film or you know this is this new
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restaurant let's go so i think the dynamic also so you have to you have to basically be
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uh friends you know with your children i i sort of right from their childhood i would read
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whatever they read i i would watch all the cartoons they watched not all but whatever
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work schedules allow me currently i'm watching an anime series on volleyball but anyway so
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but that's it you know so i think family is so just not father like df is family i think for me
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it means a lot if any of niranjan's daughters are listening to this my request to them is
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please go to niranjan and tell him baba please write a book or baba please do marathi videos or
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something like that because there is you know so much rich rich insight you have on so many
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things and i wish you'd share more of it with the world and since you are such a polite and
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graceful man that you will not forcibly get up till i let you i will ask you one more question
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two-part question finally final as yes minister says okay which is yeah man who's worked a lot
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with the state will of course think of yes minister which is that if there are and it's
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actually two questions in one i didn't want to you know sort of intimidate you but if there are
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young economists listening to this a and if there are young journalists listening to this b what
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would your advice to them be and i don't mean this in a general sense of giving feel-good life advice
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but these are both critical because for example with economists our mutual friend ajay has this
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very strong and deeply held view that most economists today are sort of you know following
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traditional paths without thinking about them too much and they are wasting their life chasing
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small problems and they should really devote themselves to the country and go after bigger
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problems and etc etc and at another level that might also appear to be impractical because like
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what the hell so there are pulls and pressures either ways so your advice to young economists
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and young journalists well i would say to young economists i think one is just as training i think
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it's very important these days to understand the the quantitative techniques very well you know i
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think that's means economy as you said economics is a social science it is about human behavior but
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i think the quantitative revolution which has happened is important i think they should
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read a lot of economic history i think as i said the art is as important as the science
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the third thing i would say is that you know understand economic data i think what happens
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i think pramit writes about this very often that you are working with data so you have to
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understand how data is collected what it means sometimes what i see is that because you have
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now access to statistical programs and you have access to computing power you know it's very
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easy to quickly do a regression etc but i think unless you understand what the data is about what
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you're trying to understand i think that's important and fourth is i always feel that
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economists should sometimes leave their offices and go out and you know see the real world you
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know i i think why do people take choices which make choices i think you know although i'm a
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skeptic of the rct business i think one of abhijit's banerjee's point in poor economics
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is that you know people make rational choices you know means why do you know i think some morocco
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or something he was stunned that people at the edge of poverty had had you know tv antennas why
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they're spending money on televisions when they can't eat food and he says that you know the lives
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of the poor are very boring you know means they need it's a very rational thing for them to make
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their lives give meaning to their lives so i think actually you know going out and seeing the real
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world helps a lot i think the young journalists i would say that one don't you know i think
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journalism is under attack and the general idea is that nothing is done everything is of a poor
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quality i don't believe it i i still know lots and lots of very talented young journalists so
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journalism is in a thing of transition but i think it's a worthwhile career you know and if
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you if you enjoy writing if you enjoy you know it's a it's a rare privilege somebody's paying
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you to follow your curiosity you know which who does it you know means you can you can basically
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you know use that so i think it's a thing i think you have to understand though that
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the audience has changed the technology has changed so you have to adapt a lot you know but
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i'll tell you again going back to the mint experience amit i don't think that people
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only want dumbed down thing or only want sound bites there is a demand for you know you can
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always carve a niche means your own podcast is an example but again i mentioned rohit lamba before
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rohit lamba wrote a profile of dilip ebru i think at that point of time very few people knew about
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it turned out to be one of in mint it turned out to be one of the most read op-eds in mint so i
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think there is a demand for quality so if you can stick to the path of you know quality i think
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there are then there are editors you know i mentioned sukumar and there i'm quite sure
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there are lots of others who appreciate good work who are going to back you wise words and
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optimistic words to end on niranjan thanks so much because you spent the whole day here today
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i know i know thanks i'm it's been a long time since we actually caught up
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if you enjoyed listening to this episode share it with whoever you think might be interested
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check out the show notes enter rabbit holes at will you can follow niranjan on twitter at cafe
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economics you can follow me at amit varma amit va rma you can browse past episodes of the scene
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