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The world is changing rapidly and our brains are slow to keep up.
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We form frames to understand the world, simple heuristics to navigate it, but the world keeps
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changing and the way we think about it stays the same.
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We experience the world so differently, scrolling, scrolling, swiping, swiping, lost in the maze
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of our black mirrors, our entertainment has changed, our ways of gathering and processing
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knowledge has changed, human relationships have changed.
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How do we make sense of it all?
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Welcome to The Scene and The Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and
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Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to The Scene and The Unseen.
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My guest today is a journalist Shefali Bhatt, someone whose work I have been following for
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Shefali writes deep dive feature stories on subjects like popular culture, how we are
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changed and shaped by it, mental health in this modern world, the contours of our changing
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I have learnt a lot from her work and we have been talking via Twitter DMs for a long time.
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After I finally invited her on the show, I thought to myself, which past guest is she
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most like and I thought of Santosh Desai.
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Now the reason I thought of Santosh is his insights on our society.
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Shefali's insights remind me of that and this is the highest praise I can give.
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But the difference is that while Santosh writes contemplative or analytical essays about what
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he sees around him, Shefali does deep reportage, talking to actual participants in the change,
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taking us into their heads and into the belly of this beast of modern media.
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The method is different but the insights are just as powerful.
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I also found Shefali to be just an all-around good person and thinker and this is one of
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my favourite conversations.
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Listen in but before we do that, let's take a quick commercial break.
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Shefali, welcome to The Scene in the Unseen.
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Thank you for having me.
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I have read your amazing pieces for many years and it's such a delight to have you here
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and I want to start by asking you about something you mentioned just as you entered the room
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where you said this room reminds you of your mamaji's library.
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So tell me about your mamaji's library.
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So I've grown up in this place called Karukshetra which I remember at one point about 10-12 years
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ago I was telling somebody about it and they said, oh, it's nice to know that that place
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So that is where I've seen my mamaji's library and he had this, as I was telling you, this
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collection of Maxim Gorky books which at one point I'd asked him to just keep for me in
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his will at some point.
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He's a retired history professor, I think he was also the head of the history department
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at one point in the university, Karukshetra University and I think a lot of what I feel
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about my work today and have for the last 15 years, I owe it to him and his sort of
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dedication towards just learning and just being around books growing up, I was academically
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inclined growing up but not into books like so many of your other guests and I think at
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one point I remember he was the one who nudged me into actually reading something outside
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of my textbooks as well.
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So the numbers that you score in class aren't the only thing that matters, there's a whole
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world outside of it as well and I was able to discover that thanks to him.
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So even though I didn't read much growing up, I think I'm really glad that the work
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that I did get to read was a lot of sort of Maxim Gorky and Plays was one of the first
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few books that I had read which is his anthology and there was this one line in one of those
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stories in Plays by Maxim Gorky which was something to the effect of when, I don't
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remember it quite well now because it's been like whatever 20 years since I last picked
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that book up but it was something to the effect of when work is joy, life is magic and life
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is beautiful so you have to ensure that work is joy and that is something that I got from
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a book that I picked up from his library because he said that you should go beyond your textbooks.
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So I have happy memories of just sort of standing in that study room, it wasn't really a library
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library, it was a study room and you had some of these sort of open sort of shelves and some
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that were covered by glass and maybe then I didn't think of it but now I'm just thinking
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that some were more special than the others so they had to be preserved a lot better and
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there are these books on history, medieval history, modern history so I think he was
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a student of and teacher of modern history but he had a lot of books on medieval history
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and in seventh or eighth standard when you were sort of like trying to understand that
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books or textbooks are not meant to just score marks but also to understand the world that
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has been before you, you're getting that consciousness just around that time I believe is when I
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started actually going to his library a lot more because I felt that whatever I'm reading
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in those textbooks there is like a bigger reference material to that that he has and
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I would sometimes go and just you know get some of those books and then he would remind
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me to return them I think that's very good we should do that for our books and yeah so
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really happy memories of his library I think some of the you know those formative years
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the happy memories that you have from that time I think this is right at the top.
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Yeah I loved that Maxim Gorky quote it reminds me something the editor of my YouTube show
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Namsita who she once said which really struck me as a beautiful virtuous cycle where we
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were speaking about happiness and she said you know when I'm productive and that makes
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me happy and when I'm happy I'm just more productive and I thought my god if you can
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get yourself into that equilibrium it's such an awesome space to be in.
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I want to double click on your mamaji which you may not be expecting but I'm just thinking
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that at one level it's such a sort of a romantic notion almost that there's a teacher of modern
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history who at night is reading medieval history and ancient history and and I wonder
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about you know the shape of his life and the texture of his life and how much it was shaped
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by those times like what would he be doing today you know maybe instead of introducing
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you to interesting books maybe he would be one of these curators that you you know mentioned
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in this column of yours that in the modern age there's so much around us and there's
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a space for curators maybe he would be one of them what kind of life would he be leading
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maybe he'd be living a different kind of life which could find expression in so many ways
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like one of the truly poignant sort of things I you know get through this podcast and you've
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mentioned what a regular listener you are so you've also picked up on it I'm sure that
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you know a lot of people when they speak about their parents it's it's so touching and poignant
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because you realize in most cases that their parents in a sense have to live vicariously
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through them you know one of my recent guests spoke about how her mom because she did not
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have the freedom she would have liked to have you know pushed her to do things and to go out
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in the world and all of that and I'm just thinking about your mama ji the person he was what shaped
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him what he could have been and I mean I don't know if there's a larger musing in this not just
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about that one individual but what is your thought on how lives have changed like
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you know you and I in a sense if I can take the liberty of putting us in kind of the same
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generation different edges of it but we've had a commonality in that we were born in an analog
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world where you have to live in communities of circumstance and now we live in a digital world
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where you can form communities of choice which is how you and I know each other in the first place
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to begin with so what is your sense when you look back on those days and you look back on
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these times yeah you know it's it's it's so true what you said about I think if you mention him
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it's it's impossible to not sort of delve deeper into what kind of a life he would have led
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and I remember growing up sort of hearing stories of how during 84 right he was in
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Punjab University studying and at one point basically because he wanted to sort of go back
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from the canteen to his room to study you know basically he just escaped riots in that moment
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and I've grown up sort of hearing that just seeing sort of you know him writing books after
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books all this while and I remember at one point three years ago I guess he even or maybe even
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more than that when he was on the verge of retirement and he said that you know life
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begins at 60 and it was such a refreshing thought given that you know in the ageist world that we
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live in it was just something that that really charged me up so yeah now that I see him sort
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of navigating Skype you know for conversations with professors around the world navigate going
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from Yahoo to Gmail or or you know just basically understanding passwords remembering passwords and
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all of that I see this person you know who basically has a wealth of knowledge and who's
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trying to now sort of make use of the ability to sort of you know amass all of that knowledge
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and all of that information and you know to kind of you know put that in a very different structure
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which is trying to make sense of the internet because of this understanding that you know
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that is something that is essential to to survive these days yeah it just it's it's beautiful I
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remember at one point asking him I think I was in school at the time isn't it isn't it boring you
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know the monotony of basically teaching the same chapters to different sort of set of students over
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and over again and then I remember him very very sure of himself and saying no you've got to love
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what you do and because I love what I do it's you know it's something that I never get bored by
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and yeah I think a lot of these things sort of have kept me in good stead I think when I think
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about I mean thankfully my life is not monotonous by any stretch of imagination but you know there
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are times when you feel that you know when when you see things not changing you know at least at
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the pace that you would want them to and therefore some sort of monotony therefore setting in in the
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process of wanting to try and change certain things I think that is when I think back to
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to the things that he said it doesn't really answer your question though no I mean I don't
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think I was asking a question per se I mean everything was just basically double clicking
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on my mamaji and you know the interesting double clicking on your mamaji never thought you'd hear
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that phrase as as he as he tries to navigate clicks and double clicks himself so you know
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staying on that subject you sort of like firstly I find it so inspiring that you know that whole
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notion of life begins at 60 because I think it's so easy when time passes and it and time
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tends to pass very fast as you're growing older let me warn you of that you know before you know
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it boom you know five years gone ten years gone and one tendency there is at some level just to
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despair and give up especially if you feel your faculties recline and etc etc and it's pretty
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amazing that he hasn't done that and there are tons of people of course who are you know late
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bloomers but I would imagine most of them outliers but but you mentioned that you know while we were
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talking earlier that one of the your three big themes in your journalism which you really care
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about is the lives of people over 50 and up basically and that actually seems to you know
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be a very natural extension of the great work you otherwise do covering pop culture and tech
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because I mean that is the changing world so how do you adapt to the changing world and how do you
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live and ways of living are so different and people's mindsets are so different and
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you know the universe is so fractured into different little slivers which it wasn't in
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our time broadly you know so how did you get interested in this specific sort of area of
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inquiry I think it could probably be because I was really close to my grandfather my maternal
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grandfather my Nanaji, Bauji as you know we in Punjabi and Multani households call them
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I spent a lot of time growing up with my Bauji and I think during my college years you know the
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I think every morning I would wake up and we didn't have milk basket and daily ninjas of the
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world and and now blink it and and insta marts of the world sort of dropping milk cartons off at our
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doorsteps back then so we would go to a dairy you know close by and basically fresh milk one would
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procure and so you take this thing called dolu which is basically like a container
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and you know two dolu's basically from the two households my mother's and and you know my Bauji's
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and we would go together he would have his cycle sometimes sometimes we would just be walking
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and we would talk and I would just you know sometimes excitedly tell him about what I studied
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you know sometimes he would tell me something and just listening to him just just made life
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feel very fulfilling and I think from then on at you know I think I understood that there is there
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is there is both merit and magic in listening to the you know to the ones who have you know lived
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far more years over you and the kind of stories they have that you would not get right because
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you don't that time is not there so you know and and just so many such things that I wanted to
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at some point I mean now you know I lost him in 2017 and I think one of the biggest regrets that
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I have is is not being able to to record his voice I did try at some point you know to try and sort
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of ask him to teach me how to how to write in Urdu because you know that's one of the languages
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that he knew how to read and write growing up and so I have like one page where he basically
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taught me the alphabet so at least I have you know some sort of written you know sort of that
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sort of tangible memory of you know some association with him but but nothing in voice and again that
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is just something we have in excess right now right like our that it doesn't even feel like
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you're archiving anymore you know you're just basically filling up your already limited you
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know gbs on your google drive but those were the people whose you know whose stories were the
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treasures that we should have archived and we didn't so I think I through my work at least
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especially ever since I started sort of writing about the internet at the you know intersection
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of you know humanity and and politics and everything I really wanted to kind of look
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at how the internet was was changing the the older generation and you know their aspirations
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and how they were adapting to it and the you know the things that you would learn
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while speaking to them like I remember sometime in 2018 I think I'd written about
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50 and above year olds on Instagram you know including people like Chinnadu and
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you know the the excitement that that they felt about just being popular on Instagram how they
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navigated Instagram how they navigated brand collaborations or gifts that that brands would
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want to send to them and and you know there was one I think 70 year old gentleman at the time who
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had said that you know there's nothing much for me to do so you know I cook and I like cooking and
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then somebody suggested that I record it for Instagram and I do that and I find other people
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sort of interacting with me and that you know it's something so innocent and so beautiful and it
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also tells you so much about about a person's life at a certain age I remember during the
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pandemic I had written about how you know again the boomers as we call them were adapting to
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to the internet and now they they were forced to because you know everybody had to you know sort
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of like move to a digital world from the analog world that we were kind of you know still sort
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of traversing before the pandemic and there was this one woman who said something to the effect of
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I you know I want myself and you know other women in my circle I think she was in her
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mid-50s at the time I want us to to learn how the internet works especially these apps like
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you know google maps and how to read google maps and how to use navigation on maps because
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you know sometimes when you're going somewhere and you now ask people for directions they think
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that you can't read or write they think you're illiterate and that you know connotation and the
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way they look at you and look down on you basically in that moment is something that I don't want
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and such a powerful insight right of a woman who doesn't want to be looked down upon just
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because she can't read a map and so she wants to learn how google maps work and
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and it also sort of tells you then as someone who writes about the internet and and looks at
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you know how how you know the internet changes the way we live it tells you just how little we
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think about such a huge chunk of of a population you know and how the internet alienates them
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entirely because we want to make it friendly to to people like us who are digital migrants and the
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digital natives and I feel these stories are important to be told because more than anything
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else these people are not going to be around for a long time for them to be able to tell their
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stories and while we have found so many channels to tell our stories in so many different ways
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the only way they know is by talking to people around them unless someone actually gives them
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the you know the the avenues and and equips them with some of these digital tools to tell them that
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you know you you can actually archive your stories on your own plus I think the whole idea of
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archiving from that time I think very few people sort of had that cognizance also and and and
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therefore you would hear from a lot of the people who are in their 50 plus age gap you know age group
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in on social media they would tell you including somebody like Azina Taman right that you know my
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sons do this and you know they handle social media for me so so you need that right so I think in
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some ways I am just that but not related to these people but I want to bring their stories out
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because I firmly believe that their stories you know are are a treasure trove that that need to
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be preserved and digitally archived yeah something that I keep telling my writing students is that
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you should you know sit down with your parents or the elders in your family and just ask them
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about their life and record that and all of that and I did that with my dad a couple of hours of
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conversation but you know one thing I've when I started thinking about that a bit more I realized
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that what's happening there is not just that you're archiving something which may be lost
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but that you're actually having a directed conversation which is in a sense long form
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and slow and taking them back into the memories and based on your listening to them rather than
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you know the constant sort of the the shallow rhythms of conversations that modern day life
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kind of encourages and perhaps there is value in that perhaps just doing that can
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even change your relationship and and and when you speak about the 70 year old gentleman who's
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making these cooking videos and then and that's also very poignant because it's a striking
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contrast from a young creator a young creator is hustling a young creator is thinking
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you know you have to be authentic in front of the camera but you're also playing at being
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authentic because that is what is supposed to get you whatever performative authenticity
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is performative authenticity thank you and there's a generation which is not like that and and I
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wonder if there there is this severe crazy insane disconnect which has never been there
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between generations in the past like sure you always have a generation gap in the past and
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young people rebel and old people are like but now I think it's worse because now I think that
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at one level you're living in different worlds the rhythm of life for an older person must be
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so different where you're taking in things around you you're thinking more slowly and moving more
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slowly and I don't mean slowly in a pejorative way as an effect of age but just the whole rhythm
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whereas young people are swiping swiping scrolling scrolling you know unable to be at ease if they
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don't have a black mirror in their hands so and that's something that once you see it you can't
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really unsee it right so what is your you know what is your sense of that and is that something
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that you kind of watch or have to need to watch out for in yourself that you find yourself slipping
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into one mode over the other you're so right about the not being able to unsee it amit in fact I
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often when I'm discussing the stories that I'm working on you know with people who are sort of
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maybe not clued into the the you know the high voltage world of social media I tell them that
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you know I should change my bio to say that I write about how the internet is effing up humanity
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because it really is slowly but surely and and you know there's so many researches that we have
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done and yet I think it doesn't hit you unless you know somebody asks you a pointed question about
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yourself and your behavior and and so I guess I you know I'm really glad that I get to do that
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as part of work which is making people think about how the internet is changing them
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in ways that they don't even realize you know something about just sort of you know I keep
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harking back to this movie the artist you know about like you know artists from the silent movie
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era and how how much they had to sort of struggle to adapt to to the changes in their time and yet
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there was this one person who's like you know just guarding onto onto their art and and the
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magic of of silent movies and and then also simultaneously aware of the fact that they're
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not going to be relevant for long so you know the the peaks that they've seen are are a thing of the
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past and you see basically you know how there is uh every generation sort of struggles right and
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even my generation like I know I completely bypassed the snapchat era um uh you know so many
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things even now I think I completely bypassed the crypto era at work uh and it's because you
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know there's uh I think for me the the thing that I keep telling myself is that you know there is
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just so much ground to cover just with the internet and you know basically just 5g changing our lives
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or basically how we've gone from sort of the 2g 3g geo era to the pandemic internet era to you know
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now the sort of post-pandemic internet era that there is so much one has to sort of there's so
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much that is yet to be chronicled that I will get to ai in a bit um and then you know you you see
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this with the older generation every time I speak to them about their internet habits and them such
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sort of just not being able to keep up with the little things you know on netflix they will not
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realize that you know there are these three different accounts for a reason so that you know
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one person's watching history remains and so I remember I had written the story about how the
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again the 50 and above were using ott or streaming platforms and the kind of things that they're
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watching and you know what what does that look like when you know when we're curating and creating
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content for the younger generation there is a generation that actually is trying to find
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something for themselves over there because again time and you know what what is it that they like
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watching and you know are they also watching like maybe a grace and frankie or you know I remember
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my mother told me how she had watched so being exposed to you know the conversation around
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lgbtqia and then topics like that and finally opening yourself up to that when you've never
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sort of been exposed to it all your life and how that's changing them but sort of not realizing
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that you've actually gone into your son's netflix account and messed up their sort of watching list
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because it's just too much for them to keep up with so things that us that streamline our internet
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consumption experience just complicate things for them so you said that you know you recorded
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things with your father so I my mother you know briefly stayed with me in in bombay in mumbai
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a few months ago and I would just really ask her to to kind of chronicle you know some of
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you know some of her life because a you know I have that regret about not being able to do
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that with my grandfather her father and b I just feel like you know there is you know the kind
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of life that my mother has led is just like you know even though I'm I'm a biased I have a biased
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view to it but I think it's an exceptional life that she's lived lived very very courageously and
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and I feel that you know after she is like she should be the one to tell her story right
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more than anybody else and so she should probably record some bits of it and so I actually recorded
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an episode you know on her phone just like voice recording me probing her asking her questions and
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you know amid during that exercise I realized that I actually nudged her into doing that by
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saying that why don't you record things about your father and your grandmother because these
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are the people that you keep talking about and they meant so much to you after you're gone we
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will not know what kind of people they were you know because how would we where is like where can
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we go back to to listen to those stories so far you were the storytellers that we had you know
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that like live sort of a jukebox that we could just play but the realization that that is not
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going to be there for a while you know after a short while just sort of hits hard and so I said
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just talk about your father just talk about your dadi ma because you know you keep talking about
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and then the things that I found myself asking her because I realized that I did not know basically
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you know sort of what is her dadi's name my pardadi's name you know something as basic as
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that and so for the first time in 35 years when she recorded that is when I realized okay this
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is her name and I have heard her speak about her so many times in the last you know 35 plus years
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so you again you also realize there are just there's just so much about you know where you
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come from you know that you don't know you know but but again you know coming back to the whole
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thing of the dichotomy that one sort of sees between that generation and our generation and
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our different sort of adoption towards the internet I keep telling her to do this on her
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own but the way it comes so naturally to us to send voice notes you know to just have conversations
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or even when we are thinking aloud about a story you see that in movies right you know journalists
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would just like quickly switch their dictaphone on because they're just like in they're talking
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as if like a feature is being written right there and it's always fascinated me how we are able to
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do that but for them it's a chore it's something that doesn't come naturally to them so they might
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actually do it after you know if it's transactional if it's some you know somewhere
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where they have to have a conversation with someone who's even less equipped than them to type
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and especially type in a particular you know script but otherwise things that are convenient
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for us on the internet are complicated for them and and so you know the adaptability is
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that that much harder for them and you know you mentioned sort of algorithms and accounts on
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netflix and all that and i'll double click on an aspect of that like you you had an interesting
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piece a while back about how people are kind of shaping their own algorithms which starts with
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this uh talking about a tick tock reel i think where this woman is trying to be therapy for men
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yeah yeah so her boyfriend isn't there so she picks up his phone and she's just talking into
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it so that the algo picks all that stuff up and and i have of course tried an experiment where
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i wanted to kind of see what the right-wing ecosystem was like so i did an incognito
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window and you know opened another google account and then you know went through youtube rabbit
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hole through that and now i have two different youtubes they will never ever i think never ever
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yeah never the twain have met and uh at one level what happens here is that there is a certain
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path dependence happening that you get down a certain set of algorithms and that is it
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and there's a certain hardcore part dependence there and i'm just thinking back to how we were
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shaped when we were growing up back in the day where you don't have these algos pushing stuff
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at you and it's actually very limited and i'm thinking aloud here i'm thinking that people of
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the analog generation would therefore have exposure to very few things but they would be deeply
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embedded within them whereas people of this generation would have a much wider array of
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things in terms of quantity but which have made a really shallow impact and nothing really stays
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and even there it's a part dependence that is not really broad once you're down a particular path
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that is the only kind of uh world that you know and what are sort of your thoughts on this i don't
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think they're just two worlds but then two worlds that shine one is the world that is just so aware
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of the algorithms working to the point that so much of uh like i hear this from uh you know a
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bunch of people in my in my inner world not in a circle as much that you know i just went and
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watched a particular thing and now my feed is just that so i have to go and think of a random topic
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to basically realign my algorithm so that i start seeing different things then there are obviously
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people for whom social media is work instagram is their you know workplace and so then they will
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have like seven eight different instagram accounts because they need to actually ensure that they are
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seeing you know different kind of content across those different verticals that they are following
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yeah and it is overwhelming right uh but but at least there is some sort of uh you know there's
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some sort of classification at least that they have it's still mind-boggling how they're able
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to manage uh you know keep track of uh because it's also toggling between different accounts is
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also not easy right and trying to remember okay which account i'm at right now and which which
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hat i'm wearing at this point so it's all very hard to sort of keep keep up with even when you're
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extremely aware of the algorithm and then there is the world that uh you know the analog world
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basically that doesn't probably understand and is not aware of like they are not reading articles
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or or listening to podcasts or or you know hearing people talk about like you know conversations
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where basically algorithm is just thrown about as as a keyword these are the people who basically
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when they were in college their librarian was their algorithm where they were you know they
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read a particular author and then the librarian tells them oh by the way this other book from
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this author that you were reading has come up you know that used to happen right and i've seen that
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in movies and maybe maybe it happened with me a few times before you know i i jumped into the
#
digital world but in your analog life your lab librarian was the the trusted algorithm that
#
basically understood okay this has been your your reading trajectory so far so maybe this is a new
#
book that's come or this is a new author that's come librarian or you know you're basically you
#
know the seller at the bookshop that you would frequent um now that has been replaced by a
#
machine that is basically tracking everything that you're doing everywhere and uh is uh is taking
#
pride in the fact that they get you they understand you but what happens as a result of that is that
#
you know the recommendation engine that that takes birth as a result of that
#
is uh projected at you in a way to tell you that this is going to make decision making easier for
#
you but what is what it is slowly doing is making us think a lot less about what we want to do in
#
life so and you know this is something i'm sure that story will be out by the time this this goes
#
out so i can you know happily talk about it just the way search has changed from you know keywords
#
to longer sentences to basically getting so personalized that you will now get you know you
#
go on any of the food ordering apps and you will see the top three restaurants that you frequently
#
order from within that restaurants page you will see the top three items that you frequently order
#
and more often than not like the you know the about half a dozen people that i've spoken to said that
#
there's only five percent of the time that they scroll down and so 95 percent of the time they're
#
just ordering the same things and what happened to our sense of adventure what happened to sort
#
of experimenting and trying something new uh which is uh you know recommendation engine it was was
#
basically created to make decision making easier for us but i ask like what is what are we saving
#
all of that time to do you know basically all this time saved in decision making what are the
#
important decisions we're making with that time that we saved it's the it's a classic that uh that
#
meme right with that charlie and the chocolate factories meme where you know this this actor is
#
basically staring into the abyss uh you know very gleefully asking oh please tell me what did you
#
do with the all the time that you saved by writing k instead of okay so why are we i mean sure there
#
is there is cognitive overload but you know is it in deciding what we want to eat or is it in
#
deciding what do we want to do with our time uh you know when we are actually browsing reels
#
so maybe we're actually trying to reduce cognitive overload on the wrong things
#
uh and and by doing that continuously and by not caring about the fact that that's actually turning
#
into a habit what is that doing to us as sentient beings uh you know who used to think for themselves
#
and we are just so comfortable now letting machines think for ourselves and make decisions for
#
ourselves and we like the convenience of it without realizing that this this is changing us
#
uh you know in ways that we'll probably realize at one point where basically the machine is doing
#
everything for us making every decision for us i mean you know because where does this stop it's
#
this is just the beginning it's just started with the you know tags on amazon that tell you this is
#
a best seller or this is what we recommend and so you're just not scrolling down you're just not
#
um you know doing enough thinking before making certain decisions and does it just stop at that
#
or would you want basically the machine to take over and do it for you in in other like
#
walks of life as well i think that is something that really worries me about the algorithm about
#
recommendation engine about and again in general like i said about how the internet is changing
#
us bit by bit but broadly yeah no lots to double click on and firstly you know the moment you
#
said that you know the the librarian played that role for us i was just thinking oh no you know
#
you and i belong to this tiny sliver of this weird category of people called readers and my sense is
#
whenever people say oh people are reading less my uh response to that is that always in every
#
generation there were a tiny percentage of people who read and that percentage remains what it is
#
and it is just that the non-readers are very visible now and uh you know they are also
#
holding books sometimes so it's you know it's illusory dancing deals yeah so it's it's kind
#
of weird that way but you know to sort of double click on that aspect of it like i'm waiting for
#
the story to come out and weirdly enough you know it's sort of everyone listening to this has
#
probably read the story but uh already before the episode comes out but my uh it strikes a chord
#
with me because that's exactly what happens to me on swiggy uh you know i'll just end up ordering
#
from the first two or three restaurants and the same things i do that's what happens to me on
#
spotify so you know i'll go in for my shower and i'll say okay let me just play some music and
#
i'll put on the spotify and there'll be an on repeat cutting and i know that is stuff i like
#
so i play it and then there's more of that how does that ever change like often of course i will
#
just let a random playlist play and i will you know like whatever i like and uh but generally
#
the tendency is you just go into that comfort zone and my sense is that this is not new i i
#
think technology is amplifying this aspect of us but this is who we always are like my sort of
#
pessimistic view of this is that we are really not as smart and autonomous as we think we are
#
like whenever people dis ai and llms and all of that and firstly ai is a lot more than llms but
#
whenever people say oh llm so autocomplete and i'm like what do you think humans are
#
you know we are exactly autocomplete the same cliched shit comes into our head you know when
#
i'm bored i still sometimes have the same daydreams as i do when i was 10 years old
#
did you daydream by the way i'll ask you later but dreams is an important subject yeah i don't
#
daydream no but you dream so i dream yes i remember my some of my dreams as well yeah oh my god so
#
we'll be another thing to triple click on so so yeah so i think that we are more autocomplete
#
machines and we realize that we get into a groove and then the comfort of the groove just keeps us
#
there and we never wanted to think you know where did you get this impression from you silly
#
outlier reader you know people are just happy getting into a comfort zone and going with the
#
group the same group of friends will meet every day for 30 years and they'll talk about the same
#
freaking things except the specific cricketer name has changed and there's some new film out
#
and so i have that sort of pessimistic view of human nature that that is kind of how it is but
#
technology has of course amplified that massively and this particular aspect is one aspect that
#
gets played up a lot like i remember there was this great essay i forget the term Robert Nozick
#
wrote in the 1970s about the experience machine i think where basically the thought experiment is
#
that you plug a guy into something that has sensors going into his brain and he can just
#
experience everything as if it is real he can go on a holiday at a beach he can go
#
windsurfing he can do whatever the hell he wants and it is his brain is experiencing it like it's
#
real so do you actually need real you know you know to that i think because i think i am an
#
over thinker and so i find joy in in also being able to do work that makes others at least think
#
if not overthink and i think again you know i'm really grateful for the fact that that i'm able
#
to do that with my stories like you know i think the best feedback that you can get you know after
#
someone has read your stories is them saying this made me think can you give me some examples
#
i'm trying to think of a of a recent story
#
again this would i think probably be out by the time by the time this goes live i think just the
#
cognitive dissonance of instagram stories right and how sure the you know there is dissonance
#
across our social media feeds but what happens because of the the construct of an instagram
#
story is that you are seeing these sort of like you know very diverse and very contrasting
#
emotion a burst of emotions within less than 30 seconds from one person you know and it just
#
thug thug thug okay you know one you've just gone you know you went for a for a book launch
#
uh then after that you're at a funeral then after that you're sharing a meme and then there's a
#
like you know shitpost after that and then there is a birthday dedication and suddenly you just
#
like or or in our times right you're sharing something about about the horrors that that
#
palestine is is suffering right now and the second thing is a meme uh you know about something and
#
the third thing is is you know basically a funny video about like uh you know a basic sort of um
#
life observation and in my head i'm still there i'm still on the first story you shared because
#
you know that's it's just heart-wrenching and from there how do you expect me to just go and
#
laugh about a you know a meme and then suddenly how does that sort of we don't realize how in that
#
moment we view this person whose whose story we we've been sort of you know watching and how it
#
makes us feel about that person and how it makes us feel about the things that we have seen in in
#
those 30 seconds and so so things like that right so when i was talking to people just for this
#
story i remember a bunch of them saying wow i never thought about this and and so i think
#
every time that that happens in in conversation during reporting or you know when when a story
#
is out that makes you go okay maybe you're doing something right and you know even though it may
#
obviously not ever garner the kind of numbers that that this turning into a you know a 15 second
#
video would uh it's it's fine like like like you said right there's always going to be a very small
#
percentage of people who would want their brains to be to be poked and provoked and so i think one
#
is writing for for that population at least in the hope that they keep getting something to stimulate
#
their brains so that they don't stop reading so that they don't stop thinking you know it's also
#
i think some of the the widely known joys of life is just discovery right and i think algorithm just
#
because it decides that discovery part for you it takes charge of that you would want to do that
#
when you're going into uncharted territories and you'd want someone else to do the thinking
#
for you and then give you a few options but then you to decide okay i'm going to new zealand what
#
are the interesting things to do over there but then you get 30 options and then you figure out
#
what you like from that but imagine like someone just giving you a set itinerary and because it's
#
convenient you just pick that up where's the joy in that if you don't you know in our world if you
#
don't scroll down to see you you would miss out on so many funny things sometimes you know like
#
you know funny items that are basically there on display in some of these places and and just how
#
they're named like i think pret has a lentin curry or something just literally dal that they're
#
basically selling for i think 300 to 400 bucks but it just it's also a moment of you know to just
#
basically rejoice at just the many wonders of the internet and because of the recommendation in
#
general a lot of it we just sort of deprive ourselves of so where is the joy in basically
#
in not thinking enough is is what i say to to you know the argument of how we always
#
didn't want to think as much i think for those who for those who care are also now turning into
#
you know not thinking as much because they're not realizing that you know this the tags and
#
the nudges of you know even this happens even on the grocery apps where basically they'll just
#
you type detergent and they'll actually tell you this is the one that you previously bought
#
and then because you just you tell yourself that you are caught up there is too much cognitive
#
load i don't want to do any more thinking and therefore you just pick that maybe there is a
#
brand that has come up that's actually better you know that's actually cheaper that's actually
#
giving you more quantity for for less and they're all you know more or less the same like when was
#
the last time we actually thought that a detergent was better than b but we just you know we have
#
somehow i think convinced ourselves that we don't have the time to think whereas actually
#
we're using that time to just scroll reels so we do actually have the time to think we just need
#
to sort of rewire ourselves into thinking what are the things that we actually are okay with sort
#
of letting the machine decide for some time and then sometimes we want to actually do the thinking
#
for ourselves the worry i have is that that latter part of having this cognizance that okay
#
machine was deciding for me all this well and now i want to take take charge the the awareness that
#
at some point i have to take charge before it gets too late i think that really worries me
#
that that awareness is what we are losing as sentient beings so one of my friends vasanthar
#
who i also read an episode with and i produce this podcast wave new world he once came up
#
with an interesting idea where he said that what he would like to see big tech gravitate towards
#
is that you don't get a default algorithm you get a bunch of algorithms to choose from
#
a basket of algorithms so then you can optimize for serendipity and all of that
#
and my response was that you know for people like us we'd probably make some use of it and you know
#
try and figure it out most people actually don't care most people are like that dude if i'm going
#
online to order food it is a feature and not a bug that you know that my favorites pop up and
#
it is a feature and not a bug that i don't have to scroll down and look for the you know dal fry
#
or whatever i had last time it's right there on top and i can kind of pick it so my my cynical
#
view would still be that you know most people go through life along said grooves and and they're
#
happy doing that you know that is uh and it's not like they're consciously thinking that i'm going
#
to you know save my cognitive burden and i'm not going to you know by default why should they waste
#
time thinking about that i think my experience to this has been that we're happy doing it till
#
such time someone actually shows us the mirror and that's the the actual mirror not the black
#
mirror so we need to take the black mirror away and show the actual mirror and say this is what
#
we are doing you realize this is what we have been doing and then you see a pause because uh
#
when we're doing it it's just convenient it just like you know we're going through the motions and
#
so it it goes it happens but the moment someone actually puts like articulates it for you that
#
this is what is happening i have noticed people take a pause and say am i okay with this am i
#
okay with because it's then then they do start to sort of think okay this is not just happening
#
where does this where does this go from here so i i do agree with with the argument that most of
#
us are actually it's it's also the same argument with privacy right most people don't care but
#
i think apar had said this uh you know for one of the stories um i'd done i think on on third
#
party cookie deprecation actually it is again a very complicated topic about the internet and how
#
it's going to change but one thing he said which made a lot of sense to me is that you need to also
#
you need to first make people aware of of you know what privacy is and what their rights are
#
and then ask them okay is this something that you're okay with so and i think that is the
#
part where i feel like okay you know i have some contribution to make some value add to make which
#
is i can at least tell people hey you realize we're doing this now it's up to you to decide
#
whether you're okay with it and how much of it you're okay with so yeah that that is where
#
i stand on this i feel that we genuinely uh you know would would think at least about what we
#
are doing if we are told hey you realize you're doing this most often there's nobody to actually
#
tell us that we're just you know going through the motions i love that i think about you know
#
having an actual mirror and not a black mirrored in front of you what i gotta tell you that i had
#
like a metaphor for an actual mirror in the sense that you know we all struggle with this so on my
#
phone i got one of those apps which tracks your time and you can actually restrict your time my
#
phone by default has some app and you know digital well-being and blah blah and you can decide okay
#
twitter only 30 minutes instagram only x time and you said that i have that setting for instagram
#
as well yeah and what i have kind of found is that it doesn't really work that i'm aware i've read
#
all the books i've read digital minimalism and all the books on how to kind of fight it and it
#
simply doesn't work because your default action at any given point in time even for someone like
#
me who thought deeply about this who is utterly disgusted with how decades of my life have passed
#
away without productive work happening even someone like me will just reach for twitter and
#
insta and in the moment i won't even think about it and that kind of self-control is really hard
#
and i and i understand that self-control viscerally from a pre-internet era also because i was like a
#
professional poker player for many years before you know digital addiction was a thing and there's
#
this great book by natasha on what casinos do and casinos basically mastered this way back in the
#
60s and 70s so first of all all casinos have no windows to the outside world they're completely
#
dark and the lighting is uniform so you have no sense of daytime or night time many casinos will
#
pump out oxygenated air so that keeps you going longer than you'd realize and there are all these
#
crazy design tricks to just keep you gambling for example if you're at a slot machine now obviously
#
the lights and sounds and everything are optimized to almost keep you in a stupor where you just
#
keep going you will win in between an optimal number of times to keep you playing and from
#
your patterns and your how your speed is changing they can know 10 minutes before you're about to
#
get up that you're going to get up and then a guy will come and offer you a free drink to
#
keep you playing you know and in a sense i think what big tech has kind of done is rational they're
#
just trying to maximize engagement they're just trying to give you convenience right in a sense
#
it's not like they're evil or something all these things are supposed to um so i had i had to do a
#
dramatic pause there yeah you know i will ask you to i will double click on your dramatic pause and
#
which will hopefully the double clicking will not be more dramatic pauses but
#
yeah so i i just feel like what the fuck do we do about this because uh to me it is clear that
#
government regulation is absolutely no way out because you know we think of regulation of big
#
tech companies or something that will happen in a benign way we'll get the beautiful world we want
#
but you don't want to empower the state the moment you empower the state they are just yeah that's
#
not a solution that's not a solution and uh my sense from what i hear from the big big tech
#
companies is that oh we are sincere we want to but yeah now i'll ask you to elaborate on your
#
dramatic pause uh you know to your point about the screen time restriction not working i think
#
there obviously needs to be like a you know cohesive study on that across sort of countries
#
and across sort of different you know diverse sort of set of people because what happens in
#
our day-to-day lives no matter how hard we try you know and despite our awareness uh the world
#
view often gets limited to you know plus which is people like us so again for for this piece
#
on cognitive dissonance of instagram stories i i spoke to i think there were four human case
#
studies and out of those four two had the the same instagram setting that i i told you about
#
and one of them did say that you know it's it's hard even after that sometimes i sort of go back
#
uh but the other said something interesting which is that you know because i have that setting now
#
i think of instagram as as you know something where it's not just mindless scrolling but i
#
actually consume content within those 10 minutes in a very mindful way and so i think uh it is it
#
is hard so i i can say i can say at least three to four out of ten times when i get that block on
#
instagram saying uh you know you you you basically need to log out now i do click on not now but
#
largely it's also because i'm working on something and instagram is also work right and so it's only
#
then that i would do it otherwise what happens is normally you're just like sharing memes with so
#
many people you just go out and then you just ping that person on chat so i can at least think of
#
one person who knows uh that i have that setting and therefore every time we are chatting on
#
instagram and i go away they realize and they actually ping me on whatsapp because they figure
#
out and and you know then the conversation also goes on for longer because there are fewer
#
distractions so but i also do understand that i'm speaking from a very you know this is all very
#
anecdotal this needs to be researched better but i think just having these mechanisms in place is
#
a good start then you take charge right this is about you taking charge so then it's about the
#
kind of person and and how their sort of level of awareness that they've had and also the kind
#
of experiences that they've had on the internet for them to understand that this is not the real
#
world which obviously a younger generation struggles massively with right because they
#
were born into this world so unlike you know unlike us they've not seen the the pleasures
#
of an analog life but we have we've had that time to get enamored by the digital world and you know
#
find our 15 seconds of fame that sometimes last for 15 years but then you you realize the value
#
of of the analog world as someone who writes about the internet i find great pleasure in
#
being away from the internet because i feel it's so important for me to do that so that
#
i can preserve some of my sanity so that i continue writing about the internet
#
and therefore i will proactively find ways to actually you know not scroll as much and it also
#
i feel somewhere inadvertently helps because then you're able to sort of see broader sort of trends
#
as opposed to seeing okay which which is happening on twitter on a day and you know what what meme
#
or what trending audio is is you know viral in the moment on instagram so at least i'm able to
#
you know sort of have that you know larger sort of zoomed out view but i do understand that for
#
a lot of people it's really hard to do and one is also kind of seen you know all sides of the
#
internet and and you know seen how ugly the internet can get for you so i think that also
#
informs a lot of my choices of you know how much time i want to just be on on a platform but i
#
also hear this from a lot of people in the tech sector right where i remember having this
#
conversation with someone where i said that there was this one time that my i had no network or
#
something to that effect basically how as a woman you know you've grown up sort of feeling unsafe
#
in the in the real world like that is something that is ingrained ingrained in you you know in
#
you're in a physical public space you're watching out for yourself you're looking out for yourself
#
and yet you know there are certain experiences that you go through on the internet that actually
#
make the physical world a safer place for you than the internet which is just so mind-boggling
#
and then i've had men who have felt similarly where they said that you know when they're out
#
in the world where they're they don't have network or something uh you know for some reason they've
#
not had the chance to look at their phone and they felt safer like you know there is there's
#
something about like you know that constant sort of notifications even if again people like us
#
would not have their notifications on we would you know probably not even have pop-up notifications
#
on for so many apps right barring maybe email and whatsapp and and yet just being on you know on a
#
particular app when it's buzzing and you know you're getting like 20 to 200 notifications
#
there is very little documentation of what that does to you know to your nervous system and it's
#
it's not largely pretty so i think people who have gone through that because we've also had
#
millennials at least you know who were like you know twitter celebrities at one point 10 years
#
ago have gone through that cycle so a lot of those people have evolved now to understand that
#
the value of the real world and the analog life so you will one will have to wait for more and
#
more people unfortunately to go through that you know that cycle for them to realize that
#
there is merit in sort of when the app is telling you you've already spent the stipulated time on
#
this app then after a few times you will realize if you you know care for yourself and if you're
#
not destructive that you know there is merit in listening to yourself because you did this right
#
you have put that setting so you want there is a version of you that wanted you to be better do
#
better or just self-preserve and so you will take that call once twice and then maybe it'll increase
#
so now i think from three to four times now i think it's one or two times where i would actually
#
click on not now and stay on the app and i'm i'm actually on this one i'm optimistic that
#
once you have the awareness the chances of you doing taking better decisions are higher so it's
#
it's the it's the that that whole sort of journey of being made aware or or find discovering that
#
awareness yeah and you know i remember this study i read about i think taxi drivers in london and
#
how their brains were rewired by all the manual navigation they had to do just remembering all
#
the streets and ways and all that and then map changed that because then they had maps and
#
etc etc and and you're right i wonder how like i i can't help but think that certainly people
#
start thinking in different ways and living in different ways because the rhythm is so choppy
#
choppy choppy it's that choppiness that i really think about the scroll the swipe every 30 seconds
#
something new etc etc and i which leads me to thinking that you know we are you are actually
#
very very very very very very though i hate i tell my writing students never use the word very
#
but having said that since i've already committed that sin you're extremely lucky to
#
have a mamaji's library and i am now going to take you back to your childhood
#
and you know so where were you born where did you grow up tell me about that
#
so i was born in kurukshetra which as we have established is a place that actually exists and
#
it's not just in our epics i was born in chandigarh so i am aware of kurukshetra you certainly are
#
yes i know but yeah that i think used to be like this one of those exotic things that you would
#
tell people over here so i spent 21 years of my life in kurukshetra in my hometown and
#
yeah i'm really glad for that because i think a lot of growing up years you were just sort of
#
exposed to sort of say the bhagavad gita and and i remember in seventh was it eighth or ninth
#
standard i would you know i had taken part in some of these shloka charan pratyogitas so
#
so which is like you know reciting the the how how what is what is shloka called in english
#
verse versus i guess yeah it's closest yeah verse
#
so you know the the fourth chapter so i think fourth chapter 11th and 12th maybe some from the
#
second chapter uh and i would uh i mean you know you know the basic ones right
#
so some of these you'd remember by heart because they also they're also tenets of
#
life that you swear by right which is karmakal for karmakal kar phal ki itchha mat kar wow
#
that's such a tongue twister i never realized yeah that's what all poker players learn very
#
fast and don't be results oriented focus on the process oh well um yeah so i think some of these
#
like there was this one uh i'm not sure if one is uh yeah you can actually say it just half
#
there was this one i think in the 11th chapter uh which was about you know just like the shedding
#
of clothes right and then you know and that's and how it it is related to life um something like
#
that so some of these just i think in in that uh in that time you know being exposed to that
#
and finding meaning in that i think really uh you know kept me in good stead i remember we used to
#
have a bhagavad gita in like sanskrit to english translation at home and so i would uh i would i
#
would love reading that yeah now i'm just thinking i was too harsh on myself thinking i was as buried
#
in textbooks i did read outside of textbooks as well thank god so i remember in i think fifth or
#
sixth standard or something i i you know i used to read this bhagavad gita which is sanskrit to
#
english bhagavad gita and uh it would uh it became my window into these uh you know words
#
like renunciation uh uh ascetic uh words that you would otherwise not find in your textbooks but i
#
i could uh you know understand okay this is what this particular thing that the the you know b.r
#
chopra's uh uh mahabharat uses these words in in their show and this is what they're called in in
#
english and i think that was fascinating to me uh growing up so uh mahabharat is something that
#
i feel i don't know if i were born in any other place i don't know if i would have had that kind
#
of sort of an attachment uh to you know to the epic that i do now i think just just growing up in
#
in that uh city i don't know if everybody around me also felt that but i i certainly did you know
#
it just felt special it just felt like i was more invested in in you know knowing about that story
#
and everything around it so many of my um i think even to this day a lot of the times you know the
#
analogies that i give or the way think about so many things in life i can tie back to mahabharat
#
i remember a couple of years ago or even more than that i think there was some conversation about
#
journalism and journalists and you know how we are supposed to be and what we're supposed to do and
#
you know something about uh you know our role and i remember uh you know sort of again uh you know
#
evoking uh sort of invoking whatever is the right word here mahabharat and thinking about
#
about ganesh and and thinking about sanjay you know where you know ganesh was was merely sort
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of like taking dictations from vedhyas and you know who was who's telling you know the story
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of mahabharat and and ganesh lord ganesh is writing it um as is verbatim and then there is sanjay
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who is basically given this uh you know chance to kind of just you know get like a 360 degree
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view of of the the battlefield and is contextualizing the battlefield for dhritrashtra that is what
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journalists are we are you know we're not only just just seeing and reporting we're contextualizing
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and that is the most important part of our our lives as chroniclers of history of the first act
#
of history is that we contextualize and i think that just uh again so i feel like i'm really
#
grateful to the fact that i had that exposure to to that world and that story that epic story
#
growing up and therefore it just like you know really you know was embedded in me during my
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formative years and i think it just the urge to actually understand the difference between dharm
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and karma and understanding the importance of ethics i wouldn't be surprised if a lot of it
#
has to do with with just just how invested i was in in mahabharat um so you know that's that's one
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sort of uh you know major theme from i think my childhood days i also uh you know um simultaneously
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also had a very sort of um i would say difficult childhood like many other kids growing up around
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the world because uh you know because of because of seeing you know a dysfunctional sort of family
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at play uh but i think that's more than me that's my mother's story so you know without getting into
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too much of it i could just say that uh you know at an early stage sort of watching these movies
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the rajshri production movies that tell you okay you know this is what the idea of a family is
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and and sort of seeing a contrast sort of play out at home is very jarring but um and and then
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i think even as you grow older you realize how that kind of becomes a part of your personality
#
and how that is also used in some you know sometimes to kind of make you feel bad about
#
things that you had no control over uh i think that part of my childhood was not pretty obviously
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but then it's one of those things right i think they just uh they they form you into the person
#
that you are and and you know uh like my this one friend of mine she says that because of that we
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have a personality uh because you know we we saw a lot of uh you know dysfunctionality at play
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growing up and and had to wisen up a lot earlier uh you know than than most people around us who
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who had a lot of privilege to to maybe unsee that dysfunctionality in their households
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which we did not um uh so i think that was there was a huge part of of growing up years
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for both uh you know my brother and me but i only speak for myself i i think um you know at one point
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it was just that that uh you know there was uh that my mother was suffering you know a lot in
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her marriage which which you know was very painful for us uh you know for me to see and um i think
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shortly after that i think in my teens it was my mother dealing with an illness
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which i just yesterday discussed with her if it was okay to talk about and you know she was actually
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quite okay with with me talking about it from my vantage point so my mother dealt with
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schizophrenia uh you know for the longest time and um you know and it's uh as a caregiver i think
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for for me just to to understand and make sense of what was happening around me during those years
#
and to to also sort of um you know become the the elder one in the family because you know my mother
#
was a single parent even you know while while there was a semblance of a marriage i think she
#
practically raised us on her own uh you know uh financially and socially and for everything i
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think was just my mother who was doing everything for both of us um but even after you know like my
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parents separated i think even after that uh you know when when we were sort of dealing with the
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with being caregivers of my mother uh just without realizing it that you were assuming the you know
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this position of of being the protector uh i think that really you know shaped me into the person
#
that i am and i think it also gave me the awareness of of just mental health and and uh which is so
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again in contrast with with everything that we had seen in pop culture back then and
#
often continue to see uh you know to this day so uh which again i'm really grateful for because
#
i don't think i would have had probably the kind of and that's for every experience in life right
#
like every experience informs you into the person that you become and for me i think this just became
#
one of the major uh formative experiences of my life being a caregiver uh you know to my mother
#
which is that the understanding of mental illnesses and and that they're curable
#
and and that like you know it's pure science i think that is something that again pop culture
#
just completely failed to to inform our understandings on and um i am just so glad
#
that i was able to get that in my late teens itself uh it also kind of i think um yeah i
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think it's all it also i realized later on that i would attract a lot of people who would also
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not talk about it publicly because again you know now the world we know is very different but
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you know but then it wasn't so i noticed when i moved to mumbai i would actually you know
#
gravitate towards people who also had you know a history of that sort in their family and then
#
you realize that actually everybody almost has has uh you know somebody or the other that they've
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seen go through something you know something really hard like an episode in their in their
#
family but there is very little understanding of it and there is even little sensitivity towards
#
the language that you use to describe it or or to you know even in conversations with with somebody
#
who's been through something like that so i think just having gone through that uh you know as a
#
caregiver along with my mother really um made me the the person that i am today in terms of
#
the sensitivity that i have towards people and their hardships and and just the basic understanding
#
of the importance of of uh you know how they say in our line right hard news versus soft news and
#
i think anything to do with health and mental health would be categorized as soft news but
#
boy it's not um and i think just just having that understanding is something that i've got
#
because of you know that lived experience and uh um yeah and i feel that it's also something that
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also makes you realize that once you go through an episode an experience like that you never want to
#
have to go through that again especially when you've gone through it at that age
#
so i also realized that my 20s were all about ensuring that other people also realize that
#
and so when you know there is someone around them that is veering towards it that you tell them
#
this is your experience that please don't learn from your mistakes here and you know just make
#
sure that you know there is medical intervention and a doctor's intervention intervention as as
#
soon as possible because this is not something that you should wait on or you should you know
#
try and talk out that's that's something that i remember in those days used to be the thing
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that you know talk to this person make sure that they're not alone and everything it just
#
it's pure science you know it's uh so the the earlier people realize it because they don't
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sometimes have that exposure the better it is for them to deal with it
#
and i think just just having that understanding comes from you know certain lived experiences
#
that are completely invaluable so um it's it's really harsh to have to go through that and i
#
can't imagine how many people have gone through it and not been able to talk about it but i also
#
feel that you know it just like it it gives you this this sort of amazing strength to deal with
#
life that sometimes you know comes out in in the most miraculous of ways where you do not expect
#
yourself to be able to deal with certain situations as well as you think somebody else could but you
#
are able to and and it's because your body is you know somehow has been trained to to deal with
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certain situations so i have noticed in you know in my adult life that i'm actually very bad at
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dealing with normal life but very adept somehow at dealing with the with the spikes and you know
#
the shoots and the spikes and i think it's got to do with the fact that my body has trained itself
#
you know early on to deal with crisis i share half of that i'm also bad with normal life but
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i'm also bad with shoots and spikes so uh you know i i did this great episode with jerry pinto where
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he of course spoke about his mom and um part of it is in his great book i'm in the big home and
#
all of that and i spoke about my mom as well and i remember many people have reached out to me after
#
that episode which is when i got to realize that firstly this is incredibly common and like you
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said and secondly so many people are in denial about it like back in the day and even today in
#
most of india it's it's just considered like a stigma you don't want to speak about someone that
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way if you speak about someone that way you are kind of letting them down you should not do that
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and we try to rationalize it away to ourselves and exactly as you said that if somebody is
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depressed or cheer them up what happened and blah blah blah and and i wonder like you know jerry
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spoke about something that i think i'd also experienced about there being this swaying
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sometimes between a compassion on the one hand but also resentment on the one hand of the person
#
sometimes i think what can happen is you see someone behaving really badly and you hate them
#
in that moment and later you think that no wait a minute you know it's a disease and but then
#
if you think one step deeper the truth is and and robert sipolsky's books i think especially
#
behave kind of gave me a better understanding of this that the truth is that all of us are
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you know our characters are contingent there are uh you know there are chemicals in our head all
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kinds of strange things are happening all the time and what that leads me to thinking is that
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you can look at someone with a mental health problem and look at someone not with a mental
#
health problem and you think it's a binary but actually it's not you know actually it is a
#
spectrum and all of us are swaying back and forth cluelessly across that spectrum and that is kind
#
of uh and that is kind of therefore a call to greater compassion and less judgment yeah
#
what are your thoughts on that because you said you bet so enthusiastically that i feel like
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yeah you know i i couldn't agree more and in fact now that i think back it's been so long ago
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uh you know it feels like another lifetime especially i i don't know people say right
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so much that happens in life that uh you know but it just becomes like you know one of those
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things that sparked in your uh you know somewhere in your childhood memory in that moment it didn't
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feel like that because you felt like an adult even though you were a teen and uh yeah i do
#
distinctly remember moments of of you know pure anger rage resentment but i think i have to give
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it to like you said right you know it's also so character specific my mother amit um you know just
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after uh you know two to three days of sort of uh you know when i kind of intervened and you know
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had this conversation with my mama and thankfully he also like normally you know adults don't tend
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to listen to kids but i'm just so grateful to him for listening to me i just got the internet at
#
that time and you know we had got like a dial-up connection or something and i looked up her
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symptoms and i saw like it you know showed up terms like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia
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and this and that and i said you know it says that you know this is curable and there's medicine for
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it and he just like i remember him just like we were um on our way back home and it was like a
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very bad situation at the time where uh you know how people get when you know they're just like
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constantly doubting uh everyone around them is conspiring and everything so it was really
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hard to get out of the house as well for the longest time my brother didn't go to school i
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didn't go to college we would like you know sit at home like circle work from home opportunities
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when i was in final year of college uh all of the amidst all of that like i was able to sort of step
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out for this brief moment and i told him this and he said you know let's actually go and speak to a
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psychiatrist now and um i think that just changed our lives for the better and how
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i mean i i you know i shudder to think how our lives would have turned out if you know that
#
moment hadn't happened in our lives and that medicine hadn't arrived and the psychiatrist
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told me like i told him about the symptoms and i said she's obviously not going to take meds and
#
then he said okay i'm going to give you something which is colorless odorless and you have to make
#
sure that she takes it and then he said by the way this will have uh side effects and uh you know
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like you know joints uh will get weak and everything and i think she's obviously there
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are side effects right so she's taken that meds over the years and now it's obviously a very
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diluted uh you know salt of it but like i said right it's to my mother's credit that not only
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did she recover she resumed work and uh you know up until the last day and then i know for a fact
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because i saw it in a video i wasn't here i mean i wasn't in kurukshetra when she retired because
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it was the pandemic uh but she said and you know i could see it for a fact that you know she got
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like a you know the celebration of like that retirement she's like i've never seen anyone
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else get that kind of uh you know a farewell and it was because of you know the work that she put
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in and i think people over there may not have had a very good understanding of what happened to her
#
during those few years but the way she bounced back after that i think it's got to do with her
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willpower the sheer will of this woman who knew that she had two kids to raise and i think she's
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done a fabulous job of you know basically holding herself together the moment that medicine started
#
working after like the first two times and and then having that cognizance okay something is
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wrong with me i need help and after that for you know maybe this went on for a few months maybe
#
but after that she was the one who said that you know something was wrong with me and i think i
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need help and i think i need to speak to a psychiatrist and i need medical intervention
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and i need medicine which again does not happen with a lot of people struggling with mental health
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illnesses so i give it to her amit this is entirely her willpower and and her maybe love
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for her children that she had this um you know awareness that you know i am all my children have
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and therefore i have to get better for them and um you know she gave us you know the education
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that we wanted uh you know for both me and my brother actually you know did like uh you know
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he basically did his masters and then he went abroad to study and then you know she was basically
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uh you know paid for all of that she paid for my wedding uh you know i barely had to do anything
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and again you know single mother raising her kids and uh in a capitalist environment and never saying
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no to anything that they wanted thankfully the kids were also aware of uh
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right like kids were aware of you know what what other means that are available to them so i think
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we weren't very demanding we were slightly demanding but uh yeah she never made us feel
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that you know we we had uh lesser than others around us and i don't know how she did that um
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i mean it it figures now right because now when i ask her what are your hobbies what are what are
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your interests what do you like to do um there's not much that she can think of because i think
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she devoted her life to her kids so i think that's how mothers are right but in this case i guess uh
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you know the you know the person who whom i got to see through battling through their mental illness
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was this resolute woman so i guess you know my experiences that uh you know my experiences is
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is a lot less bitter and a lot more just sort of awe inspiring where uh which gives me hope so
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like and the reason i said oh you bet is because you know you you see so many people on that
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spectrum right and uh you i just hope and pray that you know they have you know even a percentage of
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of the uh resolve that my mother uh you you know showed and that i saw in person through these
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years because uh because then they can get out of it and you know you just uh and and the kind of
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and i don't think she also had the support system that a lot of people around us have now because
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there is a certain sort of modicum of understanding of mental health so the fact that she was able to
#
do this with so little uh you know help around her it gives me hope it tells me that while you
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know this continues to be a taboo to the point that i had to actually ask her for permission
#
you know to make sure that she's okay that i talk about this uh so we're still there but the fact
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that she was now okay with me talking about it and the fact that this is probably the first time
#
that i'm publicly you know talking about it at least it this is this feels like a safe space
#
but i know at some point anybody can access this right so this is this is new for me uh you know
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it's it's also taken me almost 20 years to kind of you know be okay with the fact that now a larger
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uh population on on this planet will know that this has you know been such a significant part
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of my life uh but yes i think you know it just it's something so hard uh you know that one goes
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through that it's uh you know it's hard to kind of uh it's it's hard to ever be able to condense it
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even in in books uh i guess and um which is one of the reasons that i've actually not read uh
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read jerry's book because it just feels like it's also something that you don't want to relive
#
um but you also cannot help but acknowledge the fact that uh you know it it matures you
#
you know like anything in the kind of patience that you know that that gives you the kind of
#
understanding of human beings and their vulnerabilities and and uh and their uh you
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know sort of grit because i saw that in my mother right i saw how she suffered but i also saw how
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she came back uh it just it gives you hope yeah and and do you feel it shapes your character in
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terms of because you've seen the big problems the small ones don't really matter it's it's like
#
water over your back so is that the case or uh you know is that perhaps over interpreting i think uh
#
i think you are able to remind yourself that you've seen something much bigger than this and you
#
were able to tackle that and you were able to weather and overcome that and therefore
#
it gives you perspective i think the small problems will continue to bother us
#
because uh but it just basically then you just your conversation with yourself your dialogue
#
with yourself that you're constantly having right in that dialogue there is at least this one very
#
like you know like one line in bold that comes in brackets all the time which is that
#
you've gone through something worse and and therefore and and because you've uh you know
#
sort of sailed through that this this person within you is telling you that you know this
#
too shall pass and you'll be able to overcome this as well because this is nothing compared
#
to what you've gone through so let's take a quick commercial break and continue your story on the
#
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welcome back to the scene on the on scene i'm still with shefali isn't it amazing none of
#
my guests storms off during the break it says i'm not coming back and all of it they all stay
#
of course i haven't had that kind of guest so yeah so uh so you know let's let's kind of
#
go back to your childhood and you're growing up years you know 21 years you said you were in
#
kurukshetra tell me about that because i i find that also fascinating because the vantage point
#
from a small town even with the internet there must be quite different and must also be very
#
different for you than for say maybe the the kids 10 years older than you because the internet has
#
come in so you you're in the small town but the internet has come in you may not have tiktok and
#
insta yet but you you you know or or could was there or could was there just about yeah yeah
#
and and and and the net was kind of their early youtube uh but so what was like i'm always you
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know when i think of how people are shaped and i think that in every generation up to us people
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are really shaped in very circumscribed and limited ways by whatever happens to be around them
#
you know the extraordinarily fortunate get mamaji in library but otherwise it's like whatever little
#
books you have he was just discussing outside that you know like you were just remarking how
#
it's nice to be in a room with books that you've never heard of or read and back in the day i
#
remember that you know in a typical home you'd have the same set of books you would have your
#
paulo coelho and your gandhi and for some weird reason mind conf and you'd have the same set
#
that was there was a perennial bestseller in india for some reason uh and so i'm i'm very
#
interested in this shaping of you like you know who are you becoming what are you reading what
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is your conception of yourself what do you want to be yeah i think dictionaries come to mind so
#
growing up i remember we used to have a lot of dictionaries again because pre-internet era right
#
so there was uh the bhagava dictionary which was the the hindi to english to hindi dictionary
#
and uh then you had obviously uh your cambridge dictionary i remember getting a webster uh for
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my birthday on in college at some point my mother had gifted it to me because she knew that i loved
#
dictionaries and i think uh i would actually spend you know a lot of time just just sort of
#
you know parsing through pages of dictionary i just love discovering new words through that
#
so i remember doing that a lot and then i remember again the you know the natural progression from
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there to when we got the internet uh only for a year actually when you know after that i moved
#
out but for that one year that i had the internet i remember uh looking up dictionaries online and
#
what because we had a cambridge dictionary at home so so what does what did that look like
#
online and i really found the the offline version of it to be slightly better
#
than the online one for some reason even though it had i don't remember if it had pronunciation
#
at the time i don't know if it was that advanced back then i can't seem to remember actually
#
but then i also remember somehow very weirdly because there was an internet wanting to sort
#
of just learn different languages and so the same sort of words and what they mean in different
#
languages like i distinctly remember this one page from one of the registers that i had
#
where i have written what some of the basic words uh you know are translated to in japanese
#
and for no like i had absolutely no connection to japanese well now that i think about it maybe
#
sometime around the same time i also so youtube i had some i think cognizance of youtube at the
#
time because i watched this movie grave of the fireflies from uh you know ghibli studio uh on
#
youtube across i think nine videos it was somebody had posted it across nine 10 minute videos and
#
so maybe maybe it was before or after that that i felt like sort of looking up japanese words i
#
i'm not sure but but i did that and it also makes me think of how languages were such an
#
integral part of my childhood you know growing up in in kurukshetra where you know you would
#
have people around you speak in punjabi in haryanvi and because you know mine was a household which
#
was you know half kashmiri from my father's side and multani from my mother's side so i would
#
notice uh you know my father talking to his family in kashmiri and my mother talking to hers in
#
multani which is the dialect of punjabi and they would both speak to us in hindi and so we would
#
pick up these different languages from a very comprehension level but not at a you know not
#
having the speaking efficiency i think that just got me i was just fascinated by languages i think
#
because of that then in between there was also this brief period where i was i think in fifth
#
standard i was overseas i think my father had got a job there so he'd taken me along with him
#
and i was there in an italian medium school because he hadn't taken the transfer certificate
#
from here it was like a very dramatic thing he hadn't told my mother that he was literally
#
sort of her daughter so it was very dramatic childhood like i already described so uh yeah
#
so because of that i couldn't get an admission in an english medium school over there so i was
#
enrolled in an italian medium school which meant learning italian you know this was a place where
#
you know they had their own sort of this was in northeast africa so they had their own local
#
language tigrinia so i learned to read and write that as well i mean italian was just sort of like
#
you know the same script right latin so at least writing part wasn't as hard and you could draw
#
similarities but then tigrinia was like a whole different language and script i don't even remember
#
what the script is called i'm today years old when i learned there's a language called tigrinia
#
so yeah this is a editorial just next to ethiopia so their official language is i mean not official
#
but they're like you know uh local languages is tigrinia and uh yeah so there were a bunch of
#
languages that basically i was exposed to growing up and i think that has also i i think i have just
#
like with mahabharat right i feel because there was an exposure to it early on in life uh because
#
of just proximity geographically i think just the proximity to different languages made me open
#
to absorbing different languages and just being fascinated by by language and and you know its
#
impact in in our lives and just just the cultural nuances uh that that come up because of of
#
languages uh so that was i think uh i in hindsight i feel that was a major part of of growing up
#
for me but essentially i think i mean growing up in in a small town and then coming to a big city
#
you always have a have a chip on your shoulder i think that uh you know most people who come from
#
a small town would tell you that and i am no exception to that rule also because uh i grew
#
up in an environment where again you know the the acceptable professions to to go into were
#
engineering and and medicine uh and i was good academically so then it was all the more obvious
#
that it will have to be one of these two but then my mother i remember at one point had said that
#
no i actually want you to become a corporate executive and so you should do an mba i i always
#
had i was always drawn towards sort of writing in general i think growing up and i think it's also
#
to do with just basically your environment right i think it used to be very morose like the the
#
kind of poems that i used to write i remember at one point my mother had told me please don't show
#
them to me because they used to be sad uh i think i was just finding an outlet uh you know in
#
have any on your phone no i don't even have my blog link up in public i don't want anyone to
#
see any of that but uh yeah so i think uh but i also i also remember uh writing poems about uh
#
about accountancy economics so the subjects that i liked and and you know sort of romanticizing
#
them so i think there was a part of me that also found joy you know through through poetry so i
#
think that was nice now that i think back at it growing up in a small town those were the the sort
#
of accepted professions and if you were good in studies then more so my mother wanted me to to
#
do an mba and that's why i kind of prepared for cat while i was at home i had really bad percentile
#
you know both both the attempts and thank god i did not pursue it any further but i also remember
#
like i said right writing was was something that was always kind of a part of me i found outlet
#
i think for everything that i was feeling through writing and and i remember sometime in seventh or
#
eighth standard i was at a neighborhood uncle's house and we were having some conversation about
#
i don't know where how this conversation started but i remember telling him what are the things
#
that i like doing and then he said journalist banja fir and then i go uh what does that mean
#
like book out there and you know what do i do and then he describes it to me and i thought okay fine
#
yeah that makes sense okay that is something i think i could do but even that i think was not
#
as um defining a moment as uh as was this just reading cosmos by kaal sagan and there is this
#
one line uh sagan or segun not sure there's one line i think in the book which again is so
#
inconsequential in the larger scheme of things but i think it became my line which is um somewhere
#
something incredible is waiting to be explored and i don't know amit it just it you know sometimes
#
just the most inconsequential things speak to you and become of huge consequences to you i think
#
that is what that line did to me i just immediately added to that saying i you know i wish to be the
#
medium that explores the incredible and shares it with the rest of the world yeah so then
#
after college after taking cat i had to actually tell my family that i want to pursue journalism
#
it wasn't readily welcomed as an idea at first but then i was able to somehow find and all this
#
by the way happened around the same time that my mother was unwell so it there was also this like
#
brief break so i took a year's break in between because we had to sort of stay at home because
#
until then there was no understanding of how to deal with this illness and so the only way
#
we were dealing with it is by by sort of staying at home and so i dropped for a year because of
#
that and uh after that i think i you know sort of took charge of my life when she started getting
#
better and i remember uh reaching out to this somebody that i knew who used to write for
#
like freelance you know write for htntoy and i would do reporting for him and the stories would
#
actually go under his byline and i didn't know any better and but he gave me like a thousand
#
rupees stipend at the end of it i think and then because i did that and i would show some of those
#
pieces to to my mama and and my mother i remembered like at one point there was this
#
like i showed it to my mama and he had like this tiny smile like you know slightly the lip
#
moved upwards and i thought okay now this won't be very difficult convincing him and and yeah it
#
wasn't after that so i you know took some of these entrances for for journalism courses
#
around the country and got through some of them and then i think the one that seemed more feasible
#
like i think i'd got through acj in chennai and iij and i'm in bangalore the one the institute that
#
has recently sort of announced that it's shutting its journalism course so that is the one that i
#
got through as well and for some reason in our family there was a history of people sort of
#
not doing well in chennai so they were like maybe bangalore is a better bet than chennai
#
and i had no understanding of basically like where the two institutes stand right like or
#
that acg is like so much more popular so i also thought that you know bangalore seems more
#
cosmopolitan and everything so you know let's go for that and so my mama actually came with me to
#
you know sort of to bangalore and dropped me off and i remember there was in our room almost
#
everybody else had you know some or the other sort of had figured out or had a plan or had some sort
#
of inkling of like you know how they're going to had had network and we had none of that so
#
and and i remember him when he was about to leave the hostel asking me you know you sure you want
#
to do this right you sure you'll get a job right because it was important in our family that
#
and i'm so glad for that that that was always a given that you will have to work and you will
#
have to be financially independent it's just so much important when that is just like ingrained
#
in you and that you know that there is no other option but to sort of on your living i remember
#
and in my head i'm just like i don't know it just it just got here but yeah i mean i think 15 years
#
ends i guess it did work out somewhere along the way but but it was there you know so while i was
#
in bangalore obviously there were other people also who were from small towns uh and you know
#
i'm sure they would have also felt this right you constantly felt like this you're constantly
#
sort of trying to prove yourself to yourself to your family to people around you who don't
#
understand how much more they've had compared to you in terms of just sheer exposure um and
#
and just to the world at large and uh that i think among other things where uh you know so much of
#
sort of just the kind of opportunities that you'll get if you're in the same city
#
you know you know in a big city versus you know coming from a small city not having
#
for the longest time i had no family in bombay uh you know and and what that feels like uh you
#
know to someone who's come from a small town and a woman it's it's very daunting but again you know
#
these are things that that teach you how to figure life out on your own uh you know and and i think
#
it just combines with with everything else that i had already sort of seen right like i'd seen my
#
mother being a single parent and raising both of us uh sure she had you know help and support from
#
her family but ultimately she was doing it on her own and you know there's no substitute to basically
#
sort of you know having a partner to to raise a family with so i had seen her be both the mother
#
and the father and and you know to to me and my brother and i i'm sure that that left an
#
impression on me on on you know sort of how to live life independently and and sort of be self
#
sufficient um so you know while there would be moments you know where you would feel like you
#
know you really nobody to sort of like fall back on but i think there was somewhere this deep down
#
there was this understanding you are on your own you've always been you know so so that's the
#
reality and you've got to deal with it i think that is another thing also at this point i feel
#
like um you know in five years i would have spent as much time in in bombay as you know i did in
#
kurukshetra so i'm as much like now i feel like a mumbai car and uh maybe that's the beauty of of
#
your podcast amit that you make us sort of like like i was telling you when i came here you force
#
us into thinking about that part of our life that we've long forgotten and so now that i think back
#
to it i remember at one point 10 years ago this used to be a major theme like you know running
#
parallel in my head that oh i come from a small town and now i don't remember the last time i
#
thought of myself as a small town girl i i now think of now bombay is home to me and you know
#
there's just you know so many memories that i have created in the last 14 odd years that i have been
#
here and uh you know i've created uh i mean you know i you know i found great friends here i found
#
bad boyfriends here i found uh you know an exceptionally uh amazing human being as my
#
husband i mean you know we are separating now and it's it's mutual and amicable but like that's
#
you know that that gave me the chance to sort of build a family here and then now that you know
#
it's it's something that i have to bid adieu to there is i'm finding that even besides that i
#
created uh you know a family of friends in in the city so yeah i i think i have forgotten that part
#
of me that you know existed 10 years ago that could only think of herself as the small town girl
#
now i think i am a big city girl for all intents and purposes i uh there's a lot to double click
#
on but the first thing i will do is i will confess that even i don't know sagan or segan
#
tomato tomato potato potato but you know actually i this is like first of all my
#
pronunciation is absolutely horrible like i remember i was doing an episode with irfan saab the great
#
presenter who runs red show and at one point during the thing i mispronounced some
#
the name of his town or something and he corrected me and then at another point he said that i am
#
very particular about pronunciations well like not telling me that i've done something wrong but in
#
general as a speaking for himself speaking for himself and i was just kind of saying that you
#
know you forget my urdu pronunciation my english pronunciations are terrible and i actually think
#
that when i come across another person with bad pronunciations to me it raises my respect for them
#
it doesn't lower it and it raises my respect for them because then i realize that this is a person
#
who did not come across this word in everyday conversation among their peers where they could
#
learn how to pronounce it they had to freaking read it which shows a hunger which shows a desire
#
which shows a certain attitude you know and that's kind of something i admire and in different
#
contexts i felt like that small town who can't pronounce a word but in more contexts i've also
#
come from a certain privilege where as a young person i'm afraid to say that i did sometimes
#
have that snobbish attitude that i you know would look from on high at people and say are
#
this person doesn't know this or this person can't do this and etc and one of the lessons i learned
#
in my life is that ultimately all of that doesn't matter ultimately what just matters is attitude
#
that is the whole game are you working hard and i'm remembering early memories from my 90s from
#
my first job when i was 21 or 22 you know and i remember that everything was hard work that
#
someone could come to a place where they don't have the language and they don't have the initial
#
bright spark idea and they're not clever and they're whatever but they will just chip away chip away
#
and they'll come out with something fantastic and you're like what happened in that is sort
#
of the whole game and so i you know in in some context i was a small town hick in some context
#
i was a extremely privileged elite all of that and uh somewhere the twain met but uh my i just
#
sorry i i wanted to finish this but because i don't think this will connect to what you're going to
#
ask me next so i want to add to this uh because i don't remember that part of my life all that
#
well because there's so much that has happened in the you know last decade and especially in
#
the last two years for me specifically i just realized when you mentioned this that when i
#
used to love sort of like going through these dictionaries i had a thing for phonetics for some
#
you know weird-ass reason i would actually write words and their meanings and i would also write
#
you know the phonetic sort of representation of their pronunciation and so you know not not as
#
much as and not as well as irfan sab but i also care about pronunciation that's why i said it out
#
loud i'm not sure if it's segan or sagan because i care i care about you know how the word sounds
#
and you know it should like i should at least know you know whether it's you know it sounds
#
right or not because again for me also i was not exposed to unlike the current generation by the
#
way and i know this well because i recently wrote a story about it how this generation is discovering
#
new words you know through the audio stream whereas for us most of us it was through the
#
written text so while we probably faltered on pronunciations this generation does not know
#
how to spell and they don't know how to spell well for all sorts of other reasons like autocorrect
#
and and autocomplete but yeah phonetics is also something that has deeply sort of fascinated me
#
growing up and and you know now you you know it just it's the charm of that that world where you
#
could care about you know some of these things because there wasn't so much of sort of you know
#
the sensory overload that you know that we are kind of buried under now so i am only
#
rediscovering all of those things that i you know about me through your podcast as we speak and so
#
that's why i just wanted to kind of like like you know do a hat tip to that part of me like you know
#
growing up who basically cared about so many of these things and who cared to learn so much and
#
would make these notes diligently about phonetics about words and their meanings and
#
you know factoids so yeah i mean and you know that that like you know shefali of her teens and
#
20s you know she she really like believed in a lot of things that you know that one should have and
#
i really hope i can sort of bring some of that back into my mid mid and late 30s as well so yes
#
now you can complete your thought no i'm not going to complete that thought i'll come back to that
#
thought later but i'll take a digression uh and one you know you i mean that was a lovely story
#
about how people are relating to language differently and don't know how to smell and
#
all that but that also reminded me of uh you know my editor gaurav shintamani his son ishan lovely
#
singer he's got instagram superstar uh he apparently learned to write or learn to spell or whatever
#
through following lyrics on spotify during covid amazing and i love that story because it's just
#
when you think about it it makes so much sense that they're listening to language and the lyrics
#
are right there and that's how you learn to read he learned to read yeah that's what he learned to
#
do so uh spotify that is mind-blowing that just blows me away but here's my question and the
#
reason i'm i'll take a further digression into your digression is about phonetics that
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it strikes me that when you pay so much close attention to language that you're looking
#
through a dictionary all day and my initial impression when you told me that is that oh
#
she must be doing that because dictionaries are also great storybooks which of course they are
#
so maybe it's the stories but then i realized that no it is the sounds and the words themselves
#
and uh what that makes me think is that that could also explain your relationship with
#
language in terms of being the writer that you are because too many of us what we do is we don't
#
pay attention like you know when you came here i asked you what should i order for lunch you
#
said prawns i said okay we ordered prawns and while we were eating and these are great prawns
#
south asia's best prawns from tanjo tiffin room we have not been paid to say that yeah yeah i just i
#
just i plug whatever i like out of love yeah yeah they have some kadai kudi fried prawns or something
#
is mind-blowing and and you pointed out that the reason you uh you know loved a lot of the food
#
that you were having is that you'd recently turned on veg and you were discovering all this food
#
and i just thought to myself that oh my god she is so mindful while eating while my cardinal sin
#
is that i am not mindful you know i could eat an entire meal and you could say how was it and i'll
#
have to like think back think back or you know imagine a memory or whatever and i'm thinking
#
it's the same thing with life and languages also you can just go through an autopilot i might be
#
reading something and i'm reading it on autopilot and i imagine when i come across a word i haven't
#
read before my instinct would just be to kind of okay i have a sense in this context what it
#
must mean and i just go on and i have a feeling you'd go to the dictionary and you'd figure out
#
what it is and how it sounds and all of that and therefore that extra mindful attention that
#
you're paying to language uh would uh you know just change your relationship to it and make you
#
much better writer is that the case yeah probably and that is why it bothers me the the whole
#
algorithm conversation that we had right because i feel like there is there is merit in in actually
#
doing that you know in sort of going that extra mile and finding more digging deeper and going
#
in depth and and as opposed to sort of like you know making decisions based on whatever has been
#
offered to you at the surface level so so yeah you're probably right subconscious level that is why
#
that is something that you know may have actually helped me
#
so i'll go i'll go back to the question where i was and and and the question was really about
#
like we're talking about pronunciation and the question was really about fitting in like at one
#
level i think what must have been really useful for you is that knowing that there's no choice
#
you have to make a living you have to grok it you have to cope you have to get the job done
#
and i think that's fantastic and i wish everyone could have that i mean sometimes privilege is a
#
real curse you know so i i think that's awesome but what was that process like of coming to terms
#
with yourself like that classic anxiety which young people have that they want to fit in
#
you know that moment of panic perhaps they feel when they think that oh my god you know this is
#
a different crowd i'm not cool i mean on the one hand you of course have no option but to
#
manage but on the other hand you know you're a young person you want to fit in you want to be
#
cool you may not know the books these people around you are talking about you may not get
#
the cultural references you're like oh my god i'm you know so what was that process like of
#
becoming comfortable in your own skin finding who you are yeah you know now that now that you ask
#
me and i i know this is something that we talk about in context of the younger generation peer
#
pressure and and you know just fitting in for so many people in so many contexts right
#
yeah i i don't i don't recall ever doing anything to fit in and it's it's a surprise that i could
#
get by because uh you know when you were talking when we were talking about sort of phonetics and
#
we were talking about sort of you know being in a big city coming from a small town it i i was
#
reminded of these like few instances of you know mild bullying at workplace purely because i was
#
from a small town and therefore you know maybe hadn't heard of a rock musician or did not know
#
what uh you know what was uh you know the the word that i was looking for or i remember very
#
distinctly there was this one time where basically somebody uh you know mocked me saying because i
#
had used a certain word because i knew words right i knew what my journey had been but this person
#
assumed that because i come from a small town i wouldn't know what this means and maybe i've just
#
like you know uh you know used it without realizing so i remember this person mocking and saying chef
#
do you even know what this means and i said yeah this is what the context was and you know in in
#
that context i've written this so for them to basically say that you're using a saying that
#
you're using a word that you don't know the meaning of and b also the implication that you know that
#
is coded within i've seen that i think uh you know as um as late as 2014 uh um you know so i had been
#
in in bombay for three four years by then so i remember that but i also don't like i think it
#
was on it was more uh a commentary on them i never sort of felt that there was something lacking in
#
me like i said right because of everything that i had gone through by then already i had such a
#
strong personality amit i did not feel the need to fit in i would uh i was able to sort of find
#
people with with the common interests or even if that weren't the case uh i i remember when i was
#
in uh my first year in mumbai i was in a working women's hostel in in bandra and there were women
#
from all across like you know all through from all walks of life who were working there and
#
who obviously weren't making you know very good money just like me and that is why we were all
#
in a working women's hostel um so that was i think the binding factor which is that you all
#
come from reasonably middle-class families and therefore cannot afford to sort of you know have
#
a pad in bandra and uh and but there was one who was a banker there was one who was uh you know
#
working at pavanhans and you know so and there was somebody else who was working in in corporate
#
just different people different lives and you know we would come back together and watch
#
that one tiny tv that everybody would watch together which is where we watched the the
#
the 2013 world cup no 2011 world cup was it 2011 uh and um yeah everybody had their stories and
#
everybody kind of listened uh i think i was just very lucky that i was i never had to sort of uh
#
you know be in largely in a situation where i had to fit in and i was also
#
i was also such a diligent uh walker yeah i remember uh i used to be so prolific back then
#
like you know writing so much and just had the kind of energy also and you know the drive of
#
a young person to just meet new people and you know just be fascinated by stories in general
#
i was so busy working that i actually did not ever even have a proper circle for me to be wanting to
#
fit into that circle so i think yeah you know some of these basically the friends that i had
#
initially were from that hostel so maybe that is what really helped that i was in a working
#
women's hostel so i had a you know it was just by virtue of being there i had like some roommates
#
and so you know we would all go out together even though we had diverse interests there was
#
never a need to fit in for me so i think i think i got saved by some of these decisions that one
#
had to make out of majboori uh and you know that brought me close to uh to people who also
#
did not have that hang up right that they did not feel that you know they were a certain way and
#
therefore you had to kind of fit into their mold so it worked out pretty well for me that way that
#
a i had such distinct life experiences that um you know that i could sort of find like-minded
#
people and even though i had not been exposed to sort of western music i would somehow you know
#
find people you know who who cared for you know indian uh and you know these basically are the
#
pop cultural uh aspects that that i enjoyed and i relished um and now that i think back at that
#
time i'm relieved because that is uh in in today's day and age you know if you've not seen uh like i
#
have not seen breaking bad so far i have not seen uh house of cards i have not seen um the wire wire
#
what is that like the the best show of all time basically it's a visual yeah there you go so i
#
know and i'm sure i would love it when i watch it but i haven't uh and you know the the the thing
#
about sort of not being able to get a reference you know with people who have not seen say harry
#
potter or there are people who have not seen friends and how how much of an outcast they become
#
because of that i don't know how it was back then because i didn't have to face it because i think
#
i was just so sure about the person that i was even back then uh that uh it didn't matter to me
#
like i would actually judge somebody else for making me feel bad about the fact that i came
#
from a small town because i knew i was you know uh like you know an exceptionally hard-working
#
person and i had a bit of a brain as well that i used every now and then and so i i think uh i
#
mean i'm sure i had insecurities back then but none to the level that i would want to change
#
anything about myself to fit in i i love the thought of a community of outsiders in a hostel
#
like that so no one can make you feel like an outsider then and that's that's beautiful i i
#
want you to double click on a phrase that you use where you said everyone listened and the the fact
#
that you should say that at all indicates that there is something unusual about that that everyone
#
listened and tell me a little bit about that listening like now i'm totally thinking aloud
#
and it just strikes me that most men have to learn to listen you know listening is not natural i
#
think i was also not really a listener in a sense the show taught me to listen but when you say
#
everyone listened what did you mean like is it that it was unusual and therefore deserved to
#
be mentioned or and do you feel that women listen better than men do perhaps because they have no
#
choice you know i think it in first of all what is the context in which i said that in the hostel
#
that you would hang around and then everyone did this everyone did that everyone listened yeah i
#
guess that was more uh maybe it came from a place of you know there was no one sort of bringing
#
anyone down and and you know everybody was just open to sort of hearing how the other person's
#
day went and there was just like you know a bit of that so the whole sort of women discovering
#
sisterhood at that age in life and all on all through their lives growing up they've been taught
#
to compete with each other um i know but in general as well uh amit i think uh i feel very
#
grateful for people who listen i do it for a living you know where you have to listen
#
uh and and you know then sort of think about okay what what is an appropriate question which
#
would make that listening a useful exercise as well um partly because of that and uh also because
#
there is just so much everyone wants to tell about their lives right because we feel that
#
we are not understood that if there is someone who's willing to listen to you it's a luxury
#
so so yes i i do genuinely feel when someone listens because there is so much commotion that
#
they might be going through in in their head about their life that they are hoping to find
#
someone to listen to without saying our time now is over and this will be 1500 rupees if if you can
#
afford to do that basically if you can find a therapist who will listen to you for which you
#
have to pay so someone listening to you for free in these times it's yeah it is something to be
#
grateful for so i and i think i have always been this person um you know who who has been grateful
#
for for people giving their time so this is uh i think just an extension of that that you know
#
someone listening to you not not hearing you out right that's the the other difference right which
#
is very important uh how they say right hear me out i think that also comes from a place of
#
the paucity of listeners that you're just okay with people just hearing you out
#
but therefore when you say thanks for listening instead of thanks for hearing me out maybe this
#
is the part of me that cares about language and words so much and so i i pay close attention to
#
the choice of words as well but i would not say thanks for hearing me out i would say thanks for
#
listening if i feel that the other person actually did listen um and uh yeah like they
#
say in twitter language right i think it's beautiful yeah i don't know twitter language but
#
yeah it is uh beautiful and maybe you know just as in japan they have these
#
sex dolls maybe they love listening dolls so you just get a doll and the doll listens to you
#
but uh so here's another question something that i like saying something that was an impression
#
that i have but that i'm now beginning to wonder if uh it uh stems from a cognitive bias is that
#
when i look around me i find that young people from small towns just have tremendous hunger like
#
if i'm to work with someone for a gig or hire someone for a job or as an intern i'll always
#
be massively biased towards a young person from a small town because they're hungry because
#
you know they're going to work hard they don't have attitude they're probably not coming from
#
great privilege and therefore are not spoiled in many different ways and they'll have you know all
#
of that falls into place but lately i'm wondering that maybe it's a selection bias maybe the people
#
from small towns that i am exposed to happen to be the outliers in those small towns who are married
#
to the big city i would like to think so isn't that that is the case from you know what you've
#
seen in the hostel so what was your journalistic career like then like in fact even before that
#
what was journalism college like because you spoke about how now looking back you figured out that
#
many of your values as a person could have come from you know whether it's a mahabharata or the
#
geeta or you know when you're growing up and uh they buy osmosis you take shit in and all of that
#
happens but something that i've often wondered about journalism is that when i looked at it
#
in the 90s so i became a journalist in the 2000s but when i looked at in the 90s what was clear to
#
me is that the quality of our journalism was extremely low and that becomes apparent when you
#
you know look back in hindsight as well my impression then perhaps a harsh one but i
#
think largely true for most people was that people who got into journalism had failed to do anything
#
else and this was like engineering neva medical neva and also and all of it changed obviously
#
with time but also that from what i could see from my friends in the profession that
#
there were no systems in place where you could really pick up the values of good journalism or
#
the values of good writing you would be very lucky to have a good editor as a mentor and in
#
my pre-internet times you had no way of reading the best journalism in the world today you can
#
go online and you can read the new yorker and the atlantic and blah blah blah and you get a sense
#
you know by osmosis you pick up construction writings all of those things so what was that
#
process of learning journalism like like did any of it happen in journalism college did a lot of
#
it happen in the workplace how do you figure out how to write how do you figure out um you know
#
what are the values that you have to keep in mind while reporting and so on and so forth
#
so i think like most people will tell you about most other uh disciplines in life it's it's the
#
you know how they say right the school of hard knocks that actually teaches you whatever needs
#
to be taught which is i think the same large largely for journalism as well but what i am
#
immensely glad for uh you know uh for having sort of chosen to pursue studying journalism before
#
getting into it also because i had no network right i didn't know anyone so i didn't know how
#
i would get a job and that sort of gave you like a provided a path for you to to then sort of find
#
a job in journalism but what i value those 10 months uh for immensely is is some of the
#
teachers and and some of the things that they said in class so i realized uh i don't think i
#
had this before that like in college but in my journalism school i found myself very sort of uh
#
uh unconsciously just taking no taking quotes like you know it is one thing which is making notes
#
but then i would there would be times when i would just like go on the top of the page and i just
#
write a quote based on something that the the faculty had said at the end of the 10-month
#
course uh you know we uh some of us they they'd asked if we wanted to do something like present
#
something so uh i had an option to you know either sort of recite a poem or or speak and
#
i you know thought that i'd speak probably because by then i think i'd just like the whole idea of
#
writing poems i'd i'd just kind of gotten bored off but i picked it back up in between i think
#
in 2012 to 14 and then just like again uh left it but yeah so i decided to speak and then
#
i didn't know what i would be speaking about but i had just raised my hand saying that i i want
#
to speak something uh for our conversation and uh i think a day before the convocation then
#
you know the classic journalistic uh discipline right where you only wake up a day before the
#
deadline so i was just wondering what do i have to do and what do i do and then i realized that i
#
had collected all of these quotes over the last 10 months from these faculty members that you know
#
something that stood out for me so i went through all of my notes and then looked at the top and
#
you know there were these sort of nuggets that i had extracted out of those lessons
#
and some of those things till date are the ones that i have sort of uh you know uh kept with me
#
there was a broadcast faculty of ours dipti koti and she used to say you always do a great job of
#
a story you care about and i think she must have said it only once in passing in some class but
#
somehow like it just it stayed with me and it's suddenly like you know sometimes even in a session
#
that you're not interested in it suddenly just wakes you up where you realize okay this is
#
something really meaningful and i think i you know want to come back to this and you know maybe want
#
to hold on to this so i remember having noted that down you always do a great job of a story
#
you really care about and so that to me was was like a signal to to to how you should be as a
#
journalist which is that you should care you should care about your stories i mean the lesson and
#
that is not to only do stories you care about but to care about every story that you do exactly
#
that's the whole point that you know you need to care about the story that you're writing
#
and also basically to choose and you know therefore filter it out saying that is this
#
something that you care about and you know why you should care about certain things so you know
#
also basically it just like covers all aspects of caring as a human being that was one thing i
#
remember then i also remember one thing that another faculty member guest faculty member
#
arun subramaniam had said which is you know you this is like the you can't think of a better
#
profession than this you get paid to learn every day and that is just the most beautiful thing
#
right it just makes so much sense and at another point he had also said the whole world is your
#
oyster which is again you know another version of this like an extension to this and it just again
#
you know things like those i think i you know even after 14 years i still sort of uh you know
#
carry with me um so you know so um yeah to that extent i think it was useful journalism school
#
also sort of especially for a small person from a small town right where you have no exposure it
#
also gives you an exposure into what this world is like you know what are the major media houses
#
like i remember we watched some of these movies uh you know about the watergate uh all presidents
#
men in and then i remember the first movie i forget uh what was it uh what was the title or or the
#
you know plot of the movie but there was this one line in the movie which was about
#
you know this one person asked this journalist is it true and then she says it's accurate
#
and my god like it's just such a loaded sort of phrase right but again you know the the tussle
#
between truth and accuracy and then knowing that one is is good to sort of protect you legally but
#
the other is what you strive for so you know you're sort of striving to to get the truth out
#
illustrate this for me from your work like tell me what is accurate and tell me what is the truth
#
behind that not just from your work yeah that's why i was wondering from journalism in general
#
maybe in gen you know in general i think in journalism in so many ways you know when
#
something is accurate it's it's largely half truth right because uh you know if you're talking about
#
say crime against uh you know crime where the perpetrator is from a minority religion and you
#
know trying to sort of play that up in you know their religion up it's accurate but the truth is
#
that you know there are crimes that have been perpetrated against you know there's the same
#
set of victims by people of majority religion as well and that is the truth that's exactly
#
the example i thought of actually when i asked yeah so i guess i mean yeah great minds in these
#
times no no and great minds in these times great minds in these times yeah so yeah that's that's
#
the difference between accuracy and truth right and we have to remember again like sanjay you know
#
context is so much important in in our job and context is what separates accuracy from truth i
#
guess and it's interesting because you're getting into journalism at this time and the country it's
#
a bit where everything is changing the country is changing technology is changing the entire
#
landscape of journalism and whatever is online how people figure everything out and in a sense you
#
could say that the truth has become more important than ever because you know that consensus in the
#
truth which all through our lives we assumed was there you know is no longer there everything is
#
narrative battles and etc etc yeah so uh tell me about the times tell me about you know you're in
#
college you're doing the course or you're in your first job and you're doing the job but also
#
everything is changing how do you look at that how are your frames of looking at your country like
#
the way that you look at india how does it change from when you're in kurukshetra to when you're in
#
bangalore to when you're working in bombay because i would imagine that the process would be something
#
like discovering one layer at a time peeling back one layer at a time and you know figuring out more
#
and more so what is that like for you i think up until 10 years ago or even up until 2019 i guess
#
my job just gave me joy uh and and you know it was just a job that i enjoyed doing but after that it
#
just became really real yeah i think there is no other way of saying it now it's uh now you feel
#
that it's essential and you know you want more people to feel that way i think that's one big
#
change if i think back to the time i was in kurukshetra wanting to pursue journalism
#
or or when i read cosmos uh and and you know thought of sharing the incredible now it's
#
you know i don't remember the last time i thought of something as incredible now it's more about
#
you know somewhere something important is being suppressed from being heard and uh you know you
#
need to be the medium that tells it to the rest of the world so the incredible has been replaced with
#
the unheard and and oppressed and and important so there is just so much of oppression of truth
#
that that we find uh you know to be you know living amidst that that the the whole romantic
#
idea of of journalism that i had uh you know 15 years ago has ceased to exist now it's now it's
#
it's a job that anybody would agree is is one of the most dangerous jobs to to stick to
#
and uh that is is a c-shift i don't remember
#
at any point sort of being worried about my physical safety because of my line of work
#
it was just about you know making rent and you know because you always kind of were sort of
#
conditioned to believe that okay this doesn't this job doesn't pay well but you know this whole
#
romantic idea of doing public interest work and you know therefore it's something that you know
#
gives you meaning and value and purpose etc but now it's about you know it's it's about more than
#
that it's it's about just knowing that there is just uh even though there are just so many
#
exemplary journalists that you know one is surrounded by and feels so glad to be sort
#
of living amidst you you still feel that it's it's nothing compared to the number of of people who
#
are spreading fake news and misinformation right that you want you realize the importance of your
#
job now more than ever and you're you're also like you're simultaneously glad for and at sometimes
#
wonder what were you thinking when you thought you wanted to be a journalist so yeah it's just
#
it's very different it's the incredible has been thrown out of the window long ago now it's just
#
now it's it's a fight to to make sure that you know the speak up for those told to shut up and
#
you know speaking truth to power like all of those things that you thought other people in movies do
#
you know the the the protagonists in a movie you know who's very brave and and you know making
#
these calls you are that protagonist now whether you like it or not if you're a journalist now you
#
are that protagonist so it's it's it's very different from the idea that i had you know back
#
when i was in kurukshetra wanting to do journalism when i was in bangalore learning how to to practice
#
journalism and when i was practicing journalism for the first five to six years i mean the people
#
who are getting into it now and that is probably one of the reasons that ijnm has shattered
#
journalism course right because there's so many people who are already aware of it and and they
#
don't want to pursue journalism and you can't i mean you're not surprised the fact that nobody
#
is surprised that that you know that this is happening it just tells you just how much more
#
important this job is now tell me what you found incredible
#
lots of things actually i mean surabhi right like everything about i'm just trying to think of
#
basically pre 2016-17 which is when i actually moved to to mainstream journalism i used to
#
write about advertising and marketing and we were doing a special edition on brands of bharat
#
and for some reason out of nowhere i decided to think of surabhi as a brand of bharat did that
#
this is a tv show renuka shahane and siddhartha yes yeah so and reached out to somebody who was
#
whom i could see was a mutual friend with of siddhartha on facebook this these were facebook
#
days so and then siddhartha reached out to renuka both of them were very generous with their time
#
we all met at the club in in andheri and we spoke about the incredible journey of surabhi and how
#
with the very little resources the way they were able to pull off that show in in those times and
#
how they were able to find a backing in in amul at you know you know at different junctures of the
#
show and and just everything about that show i think was incredible so i remember the headline
#
was the unplanned glory of surabhi and i think from before i moved into sort of writing about
#
you know outside of you know world the world outside of advertising and marketing i think
#
that was one of the most incredible stories that i had the pleasure of sort of
#
putting out in the world so yeah that was incredible i felt very jealous when you said
#
that you know in your early years in journalism you would you were full of joy you would do it
#
with joy and and i want to ask here about purpose because it it it seems to me that you can come at
#
purpose from two directions and one direction could be that you have a grand higher purpose
#
however you define it you can say that these are difficult times and this is an important profession
#
and we must fight for truth and we must you know truth to power and comfort the afflicted afflict
#
the comfortable all of those cliches and we must do all of that and that is those cliches have
#
become very real now is that they've become very true yeah and uh and i'll come back and double
#
click on those as well um but first talking about purpose so one way of purpose could be that that
#
okay xyz is my purpose that's the thing that's a higher thing another way of finding purpose
#
which i think is perhaps more sustainable and even from my vantage point uh feels
#
genuine and doable is you find purpose in routines and processes and in the approach
#
you bring to your everyday life so if you're doing a story you do it with joy you know like
#
what dipti said that's a beautiful quote again the main message in that is is that throw yourself
#
into every story that you do make it important you know just that whole dharma of it and i think
#
that that's the best way of finding purpose that you find meaning in the everyday things that you
#
do you're gonna make an omelette make the best fricking omelette be mindful don't just go through
#
the motions right i don't know why i thought of an omelette or etc etc hey i screwed up my sunny
#
side up just yesterday so yeah i feel this yeah but i mean the another way of putting it is you
#
screwed up your sunny side up but you made the best half fry in south asia
#
i like i like this yeah so uh so these are two different ways of looking at it and my sense is
#
that early on it feels from whatever you're describing that your sense of purpose comes
#
from the first thing that i'm gonna have a blast right every day i'm learning something new i'm
#
talking to someone new i'm gonna have a something that has not been told yet and uh just just also
#
again because you come from a small town and sure you've read a few maxim gorkis but that's
#
where it stops you've just been like you know fed on textbooks for years on end and then you
#
know you're out in the real world where people have stories to tell and they've had these
#
experiences that you know you're trying to just make sense of and somehow you have a very fertile
#
mind so you can think of uh you know story ideas i think that would all throughout my career so far
#
you know thinking of story ideas has never been a problem it just i think i don't remember a dull
#
moment it's also because you know life basically political did not become personal back then i
#
think it's also largely to do with with just how ignorant one was uh because you know i was
#
writing about advertising and marketing and uh basically it's also like you know that early
#
days of twitter where twitter fights were between individuals and there was nothing political about
#
twitter fights which is not the case now right so you know now there is an ad that comes and then
#
you know a jewelry showroom just gets ransacked so maybe if i was still if i was still writing
#
about advertising and marketing maybe it would still be there but not as much as now right now
#
the internet is heavily political so if you're writing about the internet there is no way you
#
can shield yourself from from the politics of it and why should you when you're actually in the
#
business of telling the truth so and uh going back to sort of all of those cliches you know
#
true to power comforting the afflicted etc etc and something that i wonder about when it comes to
#
journalism is that you know you can believe in all of those values at the same time you know the very
#
act of journalism on one hand it's it's an enterprise which has to make a certain commercial
#
sense for the organization that's doing it they've got their bottom line to think about
#
at some level it is always like you know people in the creator economy it's like forward-facing
#
what does the audience want how do you get the audience's attention what do they want you to
#
write about etc etc all those considerations come into play so in a broader sense perhaps not with
#
reference to yourself per se but just in a broader sense when you look around you like when i look
#
around me i think all the big media houses have a problem that they can't go too far out on a limb
#
because they have too much at stake you could be a big media house that also has a chemical factory
#
which can get raided by the ed so you got to play it careful and etc etc it's a balancing act
#
you've got brave independent uh outfits like you know the scrolls and the news laundries and the
#
news minutes of the world who are out there who are doing the good fight uh but again it's like
#
in dylan's words if you ain't got nothing you've got nothing to lose uh you know the smaller you
#
are the easier it kind of becomes to fight that good fight till they come after you so how does
#
one think of journalism because it what happens is that when you take that notion of speaking
#
truth to power all the time uh or afflicting the comfortable all the time there is a danger
#
that it can shade over into activism as well and then you have to ask yourself that okay what am
#
i doing exactly that is my job to only speak truth to power is my job to you know etc you you
#
get the drift so how does one sort of disambiguate one from the other like i i look at like people
#
i admire though they're not really journalists per se but i really admire for what they admire
#
them for what they do are the old news guys you know oh yes oh yes absolutely are doing all the
#
time is that they are you know they're very clear about what they are pursuing which is
#
which is truth which is fighting fake news and they do it on all sides they don't just go after
#
one after the administration you know if the congress says something stupid they'll debunk
#
them they'll debunk quite often which they do so often right so they're going after all sides
#
on the other hand the wire is never going to carry a pro-bjp story it simply ain't gonna happen
#
right ditto caravan while i can imagine scroll carrying something of that sort so even within
#
these guys i'm sort of distinguishing so how does one think about that because then there is a
#
danger that in times like these without even meaning to good journalism can shade into activism
#
and how does one think about that because the moment you kind of cross that boundary it's not
#
journalism anymore you know it's not truth anymore there is an agenda you're so right amit and it
#
it happens so often you see it play out in front of you with with journalists that you admire as
#
well and you know you clearly see the biases i think uh and and you know senior journalists as
#
well more so with senior journalists actually i feel that i'm also somewhere in the middle right
#
i've had like i've been doing this for 15 years there are people around me who've been doing this
#
for 50 you cannot lose sight of objectivity and you a cannot i mean it's it's you know the same
#
with journalism as it is is you know with my politics which is that what makes sense to me
#
is that my politics is pro-humanity and it is not uh you know biased towards a side or a party
#
it is biased towards human beings and their welfare and as long as you have that clarity
#
and you're able to sort of be firm on the fact that i am not going to side with the you know a
#
faction i think it's it's not hard then to be objective basically you know some somebody would
#
just pin it to say that oh i am neutral because i am you know right if there is criticism against
#
party a i'm publishing that if there's criticism against party b i'm publishing that as well and
#
therefore i'm neutral i think i think that's very dangerous and and i am glad that now conversation
#
is happening on how that needs to stop because it's important for us to be objective but not
#
neutral and as long as your objective and you don't lose sight of this there's one very good
#
piece that you wrote about tribalism in this context so i would just quote you know quote that
#
and say that that makes absolute sense to me you you cannot you cannot lose sight of the truth
#
sometimes the truth is not favorable and you may not like it you know journalists have been
#
persecuted for basically doing their job well in in the previous regime as well one one cannot
#
forget that so i think you know just because a particular regime is you know is draconian
#
does not make the other i mean may look make the other look better in comparison but comparison is
#
not what you're going for what you're going for is truth and the truth is that everybody has
#
has made mistakes and it's your your job to question them on on what happened and and also
#
ask them how are they going to work around i mean when the upi was in power
#
raju narisatti had to leave mint and when the bjp was in power bobby goshe had to leave ht so
#
yeah shit happens in all directions and that's of course a big sort of media house another question
#
i'm going to ask you is about the different forms of journalism right which is not something i think
#
we often think about but the thing is when you are in journalism there are many different
#
um forms you can write in there is a 600 word news story there is a feature story
#
you've done a lot of long-form feature stories in your times even the rhythm of doing the story
#
sometimes a news reporter may have to do two three stories a day sometimes they do three at least
#
you know in in financial papers the the idea i mean the broad sort of kras three stories a week
#
oh yeah so even that is tough and some people have a luxury of doing whatever so i'm just
#
wondering about how the form impacts that because like you mentioned that you're a good listener
#
but having said that uh the scope of your reproducing a lot of what you're listening
#
is still severely limited say compared to me i can listen for seven hours and it's all out there
#
right so i have the extreme luxury and privilege of you know having chosen a form for myself where
#
i can really unwind you can't do that you have to sort of distill the essence of everything and
#
then try to so tell me about your experience with the different forms that you worked in
#
and uh you know what it took for you to learn the craft yeah this was uh i think very recently
#
i was having this conversation with another journalist who's a field reporter and and uh
#
i said you know i have to do these calls and then they said oh for quotes i said i mean
#
yeah for quotes insights like you know normally they think that uh you know people would think
#
that it's a conversation if it's a you know not a narrative story then basically you're just looking
#
for quotes but but here my conversations actually go into 40 minutes each conversation so essentially
#
a particular long-form story on average is like about 1600 words and for that i try and speak to
#
like over a dozen people and you don't have to uh i do because i remember there was this one time
#
when i was writing actually a single pager which is a thousand word story but it was right after
#
the pulwama attack and uh because because i'm half kashmiri so i think there was this uh you know i
#
also felt strongly about what was happening there and i was just uh you know telling uh you know my
#
desk person about this and then they said you know why don't you write about this and what's happening
#
over there and what's the situation like for kashmiri muslims right now um and so i was
#
struggling to to find people to speak uh at that time because it was you know a tough time and i
#
was in mumbai and you know this was all happening there so i was not on the ground reporting
#
and i remember them saying uh you know chef speak to like you'll speak to 10 people and
#
then you'll find at least two to three people who'll have something of you know something
#
concrete to say and uh this is you know uh chami harikrishnan who's basically again you know
#
played a vital role in sort of shaping me to be the journalist that i am right now
#
uh you know at least in the last five to six years and uh that just made so much sense to me so i
#
i'm sure even before that i would speak to you know a lot of people for stories but i think after
#
that i would just very consciously also try to sort of uh you know look at the quality of of the
#
number and you know try to just make sure that you know there is a diversity in in terms of the views
#
that i'm seeking and you know diversity in terms of gender in terms of uh you know their
#
socioeconomic status in terms of religion in terms of caste uh so especially because i write about
#
the internet right we we try to fall into this trap of uh again speaking to plus which is people
#
like us and so i have over the last at least five years made a conscious effort to actually seek
#
people from diverse backgrounds because i know that makes the story richer somebody who who has
#
faced caste-based oppression will view the internet very differently from from somebody who
#
doesn't has never had to know what their caste is because of a certain privilege uh you know
#
somebody you know who comes from uh you know a minority religion that gets heavily targeted
#
on the internet in our country and otherwise will see you know a world of the internet very
#
differently from the way you know somebody from a majority religion does and all of these things
#
are important to to to be sort of brought out in generic stories about the internet and not
#
just about a story which is about caste or which is about religion i think a lot of this happens
#
very sort of seamlessly when you're writing long form you know where you don't really have to kind
#
of belabor on that point that you know this is someone who is from so-and-so caste and so-and-so
#
religion and yet they make their point across um i just uh i i i don't know why i said that maybe
#
because i was trying to draw parallels and trying to sort of find a way to say how long form writing
#
is is my favorite form because but i don't think there is a because i think i have thought so many
#
times especially because i write about a world that is obsessed with 15 second videos to to sort
#
of like write something in praise of the written word but i i sometimes feel that
#
it just uh it's something that is hard to put into words how why i love words so much
#
and and why i care for this form more than the others uh so so i think i'm just going to leave
#
it at that i think this is a favorite form and uh you know if i'm if i'm pushed into a room to
#
say that you have to bring out a thousand word essay to explain why so maybe i will but right
#
now i'm just going to leave it at that um i have uh so i studied broadcast journalism actually
#
because uh you know growing up i think there was little understanding of just how much i love the
#
written word um and therefore i am familiar with the you know broadcast journalism so and in recent
#
times i've also sort of edited uh you know a few podcast episodes that i've hosted as well and
#
it's it's magical how you know technology when it marries storytelling what what kind of stories
#
it can tell i don't quite enjoy the production aspect of it and the time that goes into it
#
there is i think there is some sort of beauty to to sort of speaking to over a dozen people for
#
40 minutes and then you know trying to distill the best out of it and trying to then put it into
#
words in a in a way that that feels coherent and that you know people would sort of um you know
#
read for 12 minutes and like an average reading time is 12 to 16 minutes for almost every story
#
that i do if you think of it in terms of you know watching an episode it's maybe just the
#
you know the first sort of one third of of a basic sort of half an hour episode so it doesn't feel
#
much but when you're reading it feels like a lot therefore i understand the commitment that i ask
#
of people and and i at the same time i also understand that you know the world is moving
#
towards video it is easier to grasp and and you know gets a larger audience and maybe at some
#
point i will have to kind of like the silent actor from the artist i will have to make peace
#
with that and see if i want to perish or or thrive and therefore switch over but at this
#
point it's it's the the written long form for me i think i i love it and i believe you know when
#
there are people who actually come and say you know i noticed in the end this is what you did
#
and i liked and i'm just like thank you for reading till the end because i know it's it's
#
you know something that not a lot of people are able to do because of the environment that we
#
are in again and you know where there is just it's just a lot easier to sort of just watch
#
an executive summary in 15 seconds of something that that you've spent like so many weeks putting
#
together into 1600 words and yet i am not ready to give up on it just yet your dramatic apocalyptic
#
words because i was in for a moment suggesting that the firm is dying or something i mean at one
#
organic biological level of course we will all perish but i see it every day not dying but i see
#
you know more and more people who who basically prefer to like uh you know watch and and listen
#
as opposed to read but that's my point they always did they were always just a small sliver of
#
readers uh in a sense you know that that point about diverse voices is great because
#
like one illustration of that which became very stark for me was when i had the great
#
scholar chandrabhan prasad ji on my show on our episode on caste and full of tils and those
#
tils were all about different perspectives for example he would talk about how when he
#
goes back to his village and the elders in his family have potbellies and diabetes and he feels
#
proud you know that a dalit can get diabetes is a sign of progress in his mind because earlier
#
that would simply never happen and equally he says that while outsiders city slickers like us
#
can look at the goongat as a sign of the patriarchy and oppression and all of that
#
in his village when dalit women now get married and they wear the goongat they celebrate because
#
earlier they weren't allowed to so for them it has exactly the opposite thing which is can you
#
think of more examples from your storytelling where just the effort to go beyond the typical
#
plu voices actually opened up something for you in this way chandrabhan prasad thanks to your
#
podcast where you had mentioned him at some point i was writing a story on food and and you know
#
the whole sort of food creator space you know in india and i spoke to him because he had i think a
#
few years ago started like a dalit food brands and you know he spoke about how he had to shut it
#
because you know you know people from the community you know do not want to sort of celebrate and you
#
know openly talk about having food you know which is basically a part of their community and their
#
culture you know it was such a i also remember again you know i sort of just slid it in into a
#
story which is largely about food but i remember somebody had actually just taken a screenshot of
#
that saying harsh truth and then you feel like okay you know at least like at least one person
#
has noticed this so yeah that that's what happens when you when you try and and get diverse inputs
#
for a story as basic as food right where you know there's just so much that's happening in that scene
#
but i was so glad that i was able to speak to him and and the kind of uh you know it's basically
#
so stark right compared to the rest of the uh food space where people are just like aesthetically
#
posting their food and and you know how the kind of traction that it gets here's someone who actually
#
thought that you know they will you know basically let the whole world know that this is our legacy
#
this is our culture and the you know the people their own people were just not ready to sort of
#
embrace it and and that's why he had to shut it and uh and so therefore that is also going
#
to be a journey i believe right like in in being able to openly celebrate you know food from your
#
own community and that was a big learning and for me and for the reader who who pointed it i mean
#
there was a sole reader who who did but at least someone did right i mean if one guy punched it
#
out that means a thousand guys noticed it's just right one is the hope is the hope hope is very
#
much the case talking of perishing and all that sad sad so realist yeah moving on from the subject
#
but also staying on the subject like you mentioned about you know how uh you know mr prasad had to
#
do this because other dalits didn't want to talk about their food they felt it was infraday again
#
they didn't want to uh celebrate it and there's a similar thing that used to happen with languages
#
for example i did an episode with when i singled and no doubt you've heard that yeah
#
off stage and when they pointed out how it used to be the case and was the case with him and he
#
also was from a haryana village where first he went to a town and his big challenge when he
#
joined the school in the eighth standard was learning english but he did and he topped the
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class and then his next big challenge when he went to delhi was learning hindi which took me by
#
surprise because you think haryana but then you realize that no a language is a dialect with an
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army and so many dialects like haryan we don't have an army and more to the point tying it up
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with what chandrabhanji said more to the point people who come with these dialects to the big
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cities or even the big towns um will often feel that it's infraday there people will call them
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bernie i remember bernie was the word when i was in college for you know people who spoke in
#
languages and then uh they'll be embarrassed about it and what we needed with stage was stage for
#
those who haven't heard that episode please do it stages what when i call the netflix for bharat
#
but not bharat in terms of major languages like hindi bengali etc but in terms of dialects like
#
harianvi bhojpuri maithili and that's mind-blowing and what when i said that for the first there were
#
people who would get in touch with him and say that bhaiya for the first time in my life i felt
#
proud of my language i didn't have to feel ashamed and i i i just feel that that is such a wonderful
#
thing and there is such a sort of churning happening in this interaction between small
#
town india and you know big city india as it were and a lot of that churning has to do with
#
these complexes both expressing themselves and beginning to disappear in different ways and
#
so tell me a little bit about what is your sense of that because you also written different columns
#
about how for example english is so aspirational you know sringta mohan had a whole chapter in a
#
book about exactly sringta punam a whole chapter in a book about exactly that you've spoken about
#
how coffee with karan became such a sensation because that's how small town india figured out
#
how to speak english how the hoy polo is um you know speak english as it were so tell me a bit
#
about what is happening there at one level there are these complexes that play itself out but then
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there's also this growing self-confidence where you know they don't care english doesn't matter
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the same you know hindi doesn't matter you've been in that same food story i think you spoke
#
of a gentleman named chef pillay who became a superstar in malayalam yeah you know so tell me
#
a bit about this melting pot of languages and are we going to finally break down the fucking
#
hierarchy which has english at the top of everything and then you know there's a ladder all the way
#
i think it could be a function of the fact that when so many of us moved to these aspirational
#
cities to make something of our lives we also realized that we were missing the languages that
#
we grew up listening to you know all around us and this is something that i feel so strongly
#
about every time i see a punjabi meme i will send it to like five or six people i know and i realize
#
there are fewer and fewer people who can speak the same that same language as me or who speak
#
it right now even with their parents and i also remember at one point just getting the you know
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talking to some of these people and saying that let's just do screening of some punjabi movies
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so that we can at least hear this language you know around because we get to hear so little of
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it and this is not just us i remember in 2018 i was in muhali speaking to you know the one of the
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co-founders of speed records and him saying that you know his kid would just not speak in punjabi
#
and this is muhali we are talking about so i think there is more and more realization at least in
#
people in our generation and slightly older and then it's percolating down to i think some of the
#
younger folks as well who now realize that just like you know just like with the stories that
#
you know people who are 50 and beyond will take with them to their graves if they're not told
#
and chronicled now the same is going to happen with their languages i feel this very strongly
#
that you know because i never could find that sort of a comfort in you know speaking in in
#
punjabi or or learning how to write punjabi properly or urdu for that matter which my
#
grandfather knew that these languages will die with them i will not have you know i will not
#
basically find that set of people to to talk to in in that language anymore and i think more and
#
more people at least my age are now acutely aware of that and and so are sort of you know seeking
#
seeking you know stories in in that language so that they can retain some of it i was at this
#
you know versova homage screening vhs which is an initiative by you know my good friend balram
#
vishwakarma and you know two of his friends and they select some of these you know sort of beautiful
#
independent cinema you know from you know from the last decade or so and they screen the disciple
#
two days ago and and somebody asked him you know this is a story that basically could have traveled
#
you know farther if it was not in marathi then you know why that choice and then he said that
#
you know in that it just made sense to me in that setting to to have it in marathi and also because
#
i am you know this that is my sort of native language and you know it just comes naturally
#
to me and it just made so much sense and you know i i like that you know people are sort of making
#
those conscious calls right now to even tell stories in in their native languages which which
#
probably explains the reason that there is an audience for stage because sure not in droves
#
not in huge numbers but there are people who are now realizing that you know their own language
#
it wasn't just about a language it was also about stories of the people around them who spoke that
#
language and how consuming something in that language also brings them back to those roots
#
and that is something that you know we we secretly crave for more and more now now that we have been
#
uprooted from uh you know our sort of bases uh for so long and that could be the reason that
#
you know we've become so comfortable sort of co-existing in in these two sort of language
#
spheres where we understand that there's one language which is important for our aspirations
#
and then there's one language which is important for us to not forget our roots and uh yeah that
#
is how i make sense of it and i'm really relieved that you know there are more people who care about
#
languages and their own language now and trying to sort of preserve it and and i guess this would
#
be part of the reason that you regret not recording your grandfather's voice because it's not just
#
him telling stories but it is a language it is a flavor it is a whole world yeah it is also the
#
the pace that bauji would talk in right which you would not find right now because the the therav
#
that people from that era had is is something that we we severely lack is therav a question of an
#
era or is therav also to do with the person one is or the journey one makes is that therav new
#
uh there is some now to an extent but there wasn't uh uh until a few years ago i think
#
therav comes from having lived life you know and it it depends on on how much life can happen to
#
you like if life happens to you at its own pace then maybe you know by the time you're 60 or 80
#
you'll have that therav which i believe that people from that generation did by virtue of having
#
faced life and if you're made to face it early on and you know in sort of like you know too
#
much life has been faced in in too little time then i think that also brings therav
#
so so yeah you're right i don't think it's it's a function of age alone i think it's a function of
#
age plus uh experiences and were you always given to this sort of uh what i think of is almost out
#
of the body self-reflection where you can almost step out of yourself and look at yourself and all
#
of that is that something that's happened more over time or were you always given to that because
#
i imagine at one level there's a certain gaze that you're turning on the subjects of all of your
#
story and that is a gaze that is coming from a higher level that is looking at them very
#
objectively or whatever but in general even when even for those of us who are journalists or have
#
you know uh written about people or things it is very hard to apply that gaze to yourself
#
so what has been your journey with self-reflection like today when you look back
#
on your teenagers and you talk about your travails and you talk about getting your
#
values perhaps from the mahabharata and all that how much of that is hindsight how much of the
#
shaping of yourself is consciously by you rather than just what is happening and how much has that
#
proportion changed as you have grown older yeah i think so in the present while one were one was
#
exercising their values or sticking to them i think it was i think it was very ingrained
#
because i think my mother you know is someone who has like a high value system and i remember
#
for the longest time i would say everything that is good about me is because of my mother because
#
she was an exceptionally wonderful human being uh and also because because she was an exceptionally
#
wonderful human being she would also talk about the uh sort of you know sort of the things that
#
had impressed her over the years right so she would constantly talk about my baaji my nana
#
and and you know how he would say things like
#
i think right from you know a very young age you know she would basically say
#
now it's become so you know there is that distinction but i think therefore
#
at at any given point i i think one was always aware that one has to do the right thing
#
you know and and uh that cognizance was there even in you know in my teens in my 20s
#
and also therefore the guilt if you have you know not done the right thing it would weigh really
#
heavily on me but i think this out of body experience amit because uh you know i only
#
started therapy uh post october 2018 which is when you know the indian me too movement happened and
#
you know i sever ties with some of my problematic male friends and also called some of them out
#
etc so that is what pushed me into therapy and uh so maybe not at that time but after that like
#
i did that for about a year and after that discontinued it and then and during and post
#
the second wave of the pandemic the news was really affecting me everything around me i think that
#
was happening and we were also kind of at the forefront of it so i remember uh you know asking
#
my friend nikhil taneja who's been on your one of your podcasts so he recommended a therapist to me
#
who basically also understood that this is a real problem that you know the news can affect you
#
especially if you're a journalist in that uh basically uh basically uh that season of therapy
#
is when i would get a lot of how did your body feel about this and i think that trained me into
#
understanding how to read my body so this whole out of body experience is something or just
#
basically being a spectator to your own life is something which is very new to me and i you know
#
i think it's uh it's very healthy for me and i really enjoy it it also makes you take yourself
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a little less sort of seriously but also be sort of aware of uh you know what is important for
#
your self-preservation at the same time and that's like i said right so i you know i've told you
#
about the this a particular sort of legal matter that i was involved in at 1.2 years ago and i
#
think after that a lot of changes happened in my life which really forced me into thinking about
#
how my body is feeling about a certain situation and in a certain situation and it's it's beautiful
#
that understanding of your body and once you start reading your body's signs uh you know to
#
be able to understand where i think our bodies have always been good at detecting danger
#
but our minds have not been very good at reading our bodies so once that that match starts to
#
happen is uh is when you kind of uh you know get into a much better place of of understanding
#
yourself and like you said right this whole out of body awareness that that comes uh very
#
naturally then in one of your great pieces you've written about how wedding reels have
#
changed our weddings are being conducted because you know shooting or i and the groom is told oh
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you got to look sad now when the bride is entering and blah blah blah and their whole behavior
#
changes because there's a gaze of the camera on them and i think in a sense the complete opposite
#
of this is your own gaze being on you in the sense that you speak about being a spectator
#
in your own life and all of that so how has that changed sort of the quality of your life
#
the fact that you're a spectator and and can you like when you say listening to the signs of your
#
body like in what sense what are the signs that tell you something is wrong that you know maybe
#
someone listening to this might you know get an epiphany from dad that yeah i can't ignore this
#
yeah i'll tell you two instances amit and and because they kind of surprised me and then
#
when i tried to make sense of it is when i realized with the help of another friend whom
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i was narrating this to that i am actually just like observing things that are happening
#
to me as opposed to you know sort of you know often being the active person you know taking
#
those actions last year around september we were in srinagar two journal friends of mine and me
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and in we were in pehelgaon and we were taking that sort of trek and there were these
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mules that we kind of hopped on and then it was obviously a rocket rain the mule that i was on
#
was a novice and so had to be supervised uh the other two were just you know basically following
#
me and and i was ahead because there has to be a guy who had to kind of man this this mule at one
#
point uh he's he or she started moving towards the khai the mule yeah and it happened so fast
#
that uh you know anyway like you don't that you couldn't like this guy couldn't like hold him
#
back from going there and he just or maybe he was just like you know i think he was a bit distracted
#
in that moment and this guy just started going towards the khai and uh at the like you know at
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the last point basically from like you know basically he just like uh sort of reigned him
#
in before he tipped tipped over and uh not only did i not make a single sound i did not move i
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did not you know like how sometimes you feel this like you know nervous energy and you know you know
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your body is feeling something like you have some like you know some like pit in the stomach or
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not in the stomach or like you know this in the chest uh and none of that i was just watching it
#
i was just watching everything unfold in front of me my two friends scrammed at the top of their
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lungs they were like what are you doing take care of my friend and everything which was also very
#
heartening that they they had got my back but because of the the pitch at which they scrammed
#
i realized the the gravity of the situation that i could have died or i mean worst case like
#
i was just not for the life of me able to understand why i had no reaction to it
#
obviously like i said right i think there was also a part of me that had just gone through so much
#
you know in in you know on the internet by then that i felt that maybe you know i've just subdued
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my reactions so much that nothing really seems to hit you anymore nothing surprises you anymore
#
but i think uh you know i was discussing this with a friend uh you know who said that you know it
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you also realize that if you had actually so much has made even a single movement
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it would have agitated the mule even more and maybe there wouldn't have been any time for the
#
guy to actually help uh you know pull him back which is true i was basically even in not reacting
#
i was looking out for myself or like my body was maybe my body somehow knew that you need to stay
#
calm right now you don't need to do anything my brain was not working i was not thinking in
#
that moment but it was just a very surreal moment and till date i can only guess what
#
happened or why there was no reaction that is one instance the second is uh you know that happened
#
this january where basically a bunch of us girlfriends were out uh you know we were doing
#
a staycation somewhere in lanavala and basically there were a few boys in the next villa who
#
came uninvited into our villa there was some miscommunication and
#
seemed drunk obviously and then uh you know bunch of the girls just froze and you know some went
#
inside and some just like were very like awkwardly saying hello to them and then when they looked at
#
me i just looked one of them in the eye and i said i think you did not hear us properly we told you
#
this is a private party and you have to leave immediately and there was some back and forth
#
that happened but i stood firm on my like i stood the ground and i said you have to leave now and
#
i looked them in the eye i didn't look away now this is also something that is very new to me
#
because uh you know someone who's sort of like grown up in haryana and studied in kurukshetra
#
university and you know just sort of dealt with like you know a lot of uh you know these kind of
#
situations in the past your instinct is to run away uh if not run away then avoid eye contact
#
at at every point uh you know you just like you just want to because that's your way of avoiding
#
the situation altogether the fact that i was facing it head on was something very new to me
#
and i think that's another thing basically that has changed you know post this uh you know uh
#
deformation case that i had to deal with uh you know which now doesn't exist but because of that
#
i think uh every experience that i went through on the internet uh as a result of that uh you know
#
being sort of verbally attacked verbally threatened and then you know sent all sorts of like you know
#
graphic images and and threats and my picture morphed onto all sorts of things i think that
#
you know at one level it's dehumanizing but at another level i think it also
#
somehow prepared me to face dangers in in a very weird way where i was just like okay at the most
#
you're going to try to harm me right i already know that i've already pre-empted that and uh it's
#
it's also one of those things right so i don't know at this point i was
#
you know i'm just sort of guessing it could be one of these many things but because of that
#
what has happened is that i have become very okay having confrontations i do not uh shy away from
#
you know having a confrontational conversation with people i am not a people pleaser anymore
#
i also know that you know sometimes your body has this need to be
#
you know that that you as a person are liked by the other person and that's where like you know
#
signs you know reading the signs of your body sort of comes into play where my body now tells me
#
chill i don't care about this you know i don't care that you as a person are liked by this other
#
person anymore and that is just so freeing like uh i remember uh you know because of this uh you
#
know case because i never publicly addressed it uh and now i feel like there is no need to
#
i would find out that you know there were people who basically on the right side of history who
#
knew about it and and you know somehow found it okay to actually enjoy it and and you know relish
#
in the fact that this was happening as opposed to checking on me and asking hey is everything okay
#
or i hope everything is okay i know that for a fact that the older version of me would have
#
actually tried to make an attempt to make them see the human in me and and you know not the
#
version that they are either insecure of or jealous of for whatever reason but this version of me
#
because this body is now just so secure in its own existence does not give a damn and a lot of
#
this awareness is very physical and not mental because i know the mind is very conflicted still
#
saying yeah but this is not who you are you want to be liked by people so what happened there
#
but the body is just somehow stopped giving her access and that is very new and i'm still figuring
#
it out i'm still figuring out what that means but it's very liberating it's it's very freeing when
#
you know when your body tells you that it doesn't need validation from anyone anymore oh it's
#
yeah it's uh yeah body over mind in some cases
#
tell me about the case i can tell you about how uh how i wasn't surprised by some of it
#
and then some of it made me go okay this is you know going to get ugly but i can tell you how
#
how it changed me as a person and i also want to before that tell you about the lawyer that i
#
had to hire for it uh first for the listeners just give a gist without taking names obviously
#
but just give a gist of what happened yeah so basically i wrote a piece that was critical of
#
a certain practice in creator economy and it took uh you know a creator as an example and you know
#
that that's the sort of broad structure of it and then it uh you know basically you know there was
#
one defamation case and then there was another defamation case which you know which was uh you
#
know made communal because to sort of you know suit uh play to the gallery and the gallery played
#
well that happened and i was honestly initially taken aback that that narrative was being bought
#
but i think that also taught me that you know it's not something that you should be surprised by
#
because people are actually looking to the whole algorithm thing right whatever is being fed to
#
you you want to believe it because it you know it confirms your biases uh and don't want to question
#
it and that is why i want people to do their thinking instead of you know being just accepting
#
of whatever is being recommended to them because where does it stop right it starts with your app
#
and then it goes into the content and the news that you're watching so so i think that happened
#
and i i think i genuinely did not think that it would be communalized to the extent that it did
#
but what happened as a result of that is that i was able to
#
understand a lot of things very quickly so for instance uh just the fact that i had been
#
you know sort of a business journalist all this while and you know did not know many lawyers
#
there was this one white hat junior case that had happened a few years before that and because i
#
was reporting on tech at the time as well and you know white hat junior was was as tech as it gets
#
so i was reporting on it and so there was this uh the lawyer who was defending pradeep punya who
#
was the whistleblower in that case um there was something that she had said which which stayed
#
with me and i wanted to sort of confirm the court with her before it went to print and that's how
#
i had her number and so when when you know this you know entire thing was unraveling there was
#
nobody else that i kind of knew and and you know could turn to and i just asked her and then
#
her name is swati sukumar by the way and you know she's based in delhi and i asked her and
#
she readily came on board and not only did she do that amit uh you know within a day she was able to
#
sort of like you know get some sort of a protective order uh you know in my favor and uh you know we
#
had no time uh you know between when things started to sort of when you know she hit the fan
#
to to the point that uh you know she was able to get this order we had no time to discuss the
#
monies and so after things were over and you know i wasn't even sure i was not in the country at the
#
time and all of this happened so when i came back you know we spoke we collected notes and
#
and then i said by the way your fee and then she goes uh yeah you know i never had the chance to
#
sort of talk about it but i'm sure somebody from my uh you know office has already sent you an
#
invoice are you okay with it and then i told her listen you know you were able to help me and that
#
too at such a short notice i really don't want to haggle with you but for future because this is
#
going to go on uh this is how much i make in hand and uh i so you know what she had basically what
#
their invoice uh had asked for was maybe 15 extra compared to the in hand one month salary that i
#
used to make at the time i mean she said uh okay just forget about that mail i'll send you a
#
revised invoice just just forget about it and i thought okay maybe she'll give me a concession
#
and she'll just basically charge me you know whatever it is that i make in hand in a month
#
when the mail came it was actually 15 lesser than what i made in hand and you know after that there
#
were multiple hearings over the last two years and she never asked for money after that you know
#
when you know the basically the you know the the plaintiff withdrew the case recently and
#
i asked her and her assistant uh you know to basically tell me
#
you know what's you know what's the fee now that i can pay they still haven't sent me an invoice
#
and i just wanted to talk about her right now because you know for for anyone out there
#
especially journalists who are just like me who you know don't know the right people in a world
#
that they have you know been pushed into you know you'll somehow you know things will you'll figure
#
things out or or things will get figured out for you sooner or later because there are people like
#
swati sukumar who still exist yeah it just i think now that while it's not a story that i have written
#
is incredible so that's that's about you know my lawyer i think how this has changed me besides
#
sort of not you know caring about what people think about me but because when you have like
#
a million people paying for your blood you really cannot and there were actual real life mobs
#
essentially which you know you were in danger from i i had to go to the police station to file
#
an FIR against two very specific threats which which was was a beautiful experience in hindsight
#
again because uh you know i they asked me to get a printout of some of these things because they
#
said that you know you can't take a printout in the police station and so i went to the nearby
#
um uh you know stationary uh shop to get a printout and there are these graphic images over there
#
right of uh i don't know how uh like you know how sort of family friendly this podcast is so i'm
#
just going to avoid the details it's it's uh you can be as detailed as you want there were basically
#
three men in the nude with their dicks out and i think the connotation there i think the the
#
caption was uh you know basically you would have to resort to prostitution to you know to sort of
#
you know pay up this there's also i think they had this whole concept that i have already lost
#
a case that hadn't even gone into trial because obviously they didn't read right they were just
#
like they just fed on whatever was served to them so came from very little understanding a lot of
#
malice and uh you know uh basically this this whole idea that basically showing me a dick pic
#
is something that is going to put me off as opposed to you know whatever it is that it should otherwise
#
be doing which is making me want to laugh but i i did laugh internally only when i was at that
#
stationary shop getting a printout of that and basically that entire picture loaded on their
#
screen and there were other people around who were just looking at it and i'm just like okay
#
at some point this will be funny today's the day it feels funny so you know i i don't even
#
know where to begin talking about this because it's just absolutely horrendous and you know
#
i've experienced very minor level internet cancellations and mobs coming after you and
#
from both the left and the right and i've you know been privy to how they kind of coordinate
#
on whatsapp groups and how you'll get like 2000 angry retweets in an hour and all of that and it's
#
pretty terrible and it's like i think a 100x worse for women because of the kind of things
#
that are said and the kind of threats that are made and it's just horrendous but what i'm trying
#
what i can't wrap my head around is where does all the anger come from why are people so willing
#
to join a mob to go after someone they do not know on an issue that they have no knowledge of
#
no desire to know like why you know it's and and that kind of troubles me so you know what
#
are the theories on that why like when i've been mobbed in the past including by people who have
#
they met me otherwise would be perfectly civil but suddenly there's an online mob and they're
#
jumping in gleefully saying things they would never say to you in person yeah right and i've
#
just been baffled by that i i can't understand where is it coming from like what happened to you
#
so i'll tell you what basically uh something that i did during that time which got me thinking this
#
is a great story idea to to basically work on at some point which is just understanding how
#
how ill-equipped platforms are at at you know shielding you from all of this right
#
which was probably the only time that i felt like okay you know instagram is my new best friend
#
because instagram actually hands down has the best settings to protect you from online mobs
#
and then you know the the threat factor remains but at least it will not come into your dms or
#
you know they won't be able to tag you so that they have got some amazing settings i think props
#
to to their team i think they worked really hard on it compared to any other platform
#
what are like the specific measures they have so there was a i could change a setting whereby
#
if i don't follow you you can't tag me and that just basically takes i mean see first of all
#
making your account private takes just a whole sort of load off of your chest right away right
#
because you don't have to then censor yourself you just basically shield you know put up basically
#
gatekeep your content the tagging thing that i told you about then at one point when i made
#
my account public i had made in fact my comments i think the comment setting is still to if i follow
#
you then you can comment there's another person who told me that they can you can also make a
#
setting whereby if they follow you then you know then they can comment at least they'll have to
#
follow you so your follower count will go up for their vitriol then obviously you know the dm
#
setting which is that if i don't follow you then you can't dm me a lot of this is actually you
#
know it was just very good for sort of you didn't have to worry about that one platform at least
#
twitter you basically just you know just thrown into that sort of bullfight and you know you've
#
absolutely nothing to protect yourself against what's coming at you i obviously made my account
#
private but once i and i was away right i was out for my brother's wedding you know in a different
#
country and continent so therefore you needed to kind of just like you know block it all out so
#
i made my account private on twitter as well but once i came back i realized that i have to share
#
my stories right so i think also by you know because you are someone who writes about the
#
internet it also feels like a disservice to your own stories if you can't sort of you know use that
#
medium to to make sure that they travel far and wide and so i you know turned from private to
#
public again and that's when i you know so i had got like some i think i had i mean at that point
#
i was probably the only time that i actually noticed how many followers i had
#
but i think my follower count went up to some 31 000 or something within a few days of you know
#
this person directing their mob at me and um i started to sort of just like block all of those
#
new followers that i had so that i could sort of manually count and i brought it back to 21k or
#
whatever it was back then and then i lost count of like how many people's follow requests i had to
#
uh you know block after i made my account private so i am guessing that there was an average of
#
like 10 to 15 to 20 000 accounts that i manually blocked on twitter at that time and it was very
#
like will smith in pursuit of happiness like you know like how he had figured out this mechanism
#
with his fingers i had i was literally like with my eyes closed i was doing it at one point
#
and checking into flights i was doing it waiting to board i was doing this so for a few days i
#
just kept doing this to now i'll come to answering your question i had to block a grand total of
#
four people on linkedin so roughly 16 000 to 20 000 to four and there was one thing common in
#
all those four people their dp had open to work tag and i think that tells you everything about
#
this mob and i think that i mean it doesn't make the the process of dehumanizing you any less
#
severe but i think it also it also gives you a sense of okay please try and understand they
#
are doing this because they want you to stop doing the work that you're doing and so i think
#
through this process while you know i have no qualms in admitting the fact that it did get
#
to me it was very you know traumatic and you know my therapist at the time had also diagnosed and
#
said that you're dealing with systemic trauma because you know there is an entire system
#
that's working against you and you can't do much to control that and to change that but even then
#
the fact that you know i had this sort of uh resolve that i have to keep working because i
#
know some of the colleagues had said you know i'm just surprised how you're continuously working
#
still without even addressing any of this publicly and i also felt you know at a certain level you
#
also feel that yeah why are you doing this are you doing this for some reward at some point
#
because there isn't any you know because there's so many people who are suffering far worse you
#
know consequences of of doing their job well and there is no reward at the end of it so don't think
#
that there is glory at the end of it so if you want to stop you stop now there would be so many
#
times when i would tell myself why do you have to kill yourself to do this but i think there was
#
now that i look back at some of the i mean not some all the stories that i did post uh you know
#
july 2022 i'm just so freaking proud of those stories because only i know what i was going
#
through mentally and how my timeline was buzzing for months on end after that especially sometimes
#
during the on the day that i would have to file you know a thousand to sixteen hundred word story
#
and and yet you know i was somehow able to find it in myself to to be able to write so i think on
#
those it also i think helps a part of you that you know will will always remain in self-doubt no
#
matter how many years of writing and reporting experience you get under your belt i think it's
#
good for that part of you to to be reminded that you were able to write a very good story
#
when you were going through all of this trust me you're better than this you will overcome this
#
so i think in in moments of you know in those weak moments which which we all should have as
#
human beings i think it it helps to know that you know that the part of you that was uh you know
#
able to deal with the you know real life crisis in in your personal life is is also shown sort of
#
exemplary behavior when you know a similar sort of a very different kind of crisis uh you know was
#
was meted out or you know was basically thrown at you in in your professional life um and i think
#
yeah i think after my you know everything that my mother had to go through and and you know being a
#
being her caregiver during that time after that if there was something that was
#
life-changing for me it was everything that happened after this case and and how i changed
#
after this case to the point that like i told you right before you know we started recording i
#
i was so comfortable sort of sharing my vulnerabilities with with the public uh you know
#
in a public platform on a public platform before july 2022 but after that it just you know at one
#
point it just you they weren't there wasn't just one reason for not wanting to share it they were
#
multiple and and they do exist even today and and you know um maybe they will for a while
#
but i think one of the reasons i wanted to still sort of address it sure maybe is because it's the
#
truth and and you know at at some point you have to like people say right sometimes when you actually
#
own your truth it's it's also freeing in in some ways so i don't know whether this is going to
#
lead to any sort of uh you know liberation from from everything and whether it'll help in the
#
process of healing but i think amita i'm tired of staying quiet now and i think you know at
#
at some point you you just sort of have to acknowledge the fact that it did affect you and
#
it uh cliche as it may be it didn't kill you so
#
from what it looks like i think it has only made me stronger
#
like at one level you said that you know at at one point you were wondering whether you should
#
go out there and explain yourself and i totally get that dilemma because at one level
#
to people like us it is obvious that there is nothing to explain the story speaks for itself
#
and at another level there is nothing you can explain to those people right so i mean that is
#
pointless anyway but when i wonder about you know when you speak about speaking out
#
does that therefore involve taking on the larger issue in the picture like the issue is not this
#
person the issue is not it never was this person it never was this particular mob the issue is what
#
you spoke about in your original article and the issue is a malaise that grips our country today
#
and which is very much a social malaise yes so give me your specific thoughts on that because
#
what you would in all the coverage that you would have done of popular culture of instagram or
#
whatever you know somewhere in the background there is also that yeah this is about a large
#
part of the audience is like the and when creators care about audience and when creators think of
#
being supplied to whatever demand is out there it is also you know this demand that is getting
#
fulfilled this is whether we like it or not the zeitgeist as it were this is the spirit of the
#
moment this is the country we are in yeah right so how does that make you look at your work
#
differently and how does it make make you look at what you cover differently like what can one do
#
what can a journalist like is that a question you ask yourself that what are the kind of stories
#
i should be doing that at one level you could do a story about the creator economy and okay 12%
#
of the people earning more than this and that's a legitimate kind of story and you're looking at that
#
but at another kind at another level there is a cancer in our society and the creator economy
#
obviously speaks to that as well so how do you think about all of this because in a sense you've
#
been sort of a feature writer from you know the whatever i followed of your work and a fantastic
#
feature writer i mean when i was thinking about this episode i was the closest parallel i could
#
draw is that this is like doing an episode with santosh desai you know in terms of the quality of
#
insights and what you cover but at another level you can't you know really decouple it from
#
everything else can you so what are your thoughts on that wow i think that is
#
is that is one of the reasons that that i continue to write about what i write about
#
right because because it is a malaise that needs to be addressed at least that needs to sort of
#
be told that you know it exists amidst us we need to sit up and take note can't even say before it's
#
too late because it is too late already and i noticed that you know after i wrote the story
#
that i wrote you know on that particular specific topic right of basically
#
you know at a certain level basically bringing a lens of you know making your life public
#
you know for public consumption and for monetary gains but what is it doing to
#
to the people in in your life who are being sort of featured you know in in that content
#
the us ever since then has done multiple stories on just this very topic there is a particular
#
journalist i i think her name is for tessa latif i could be wrong but she has done a series of
#
of these articles i'm actually going to like tell you you know send you a link and you can
#
probably like link them in the notes yeah because it's a very important series that she did on just
#
this particular topic so so i i see basically the awareness amongst journalists
#
and even you know other sort of content creators who do enjoy a certain kind of reach now where
#
they understand that it is important to talk about it it's important to talk about the impact of
#
you know like when you use the term a content creator it has a very you know it people take
#
it very lightly but and and even at the term influencer has been sort of banded about so
#
much that it's kind of lost the the heft that that actually it should have carried these these
#
are people who you know who have a following in millions and you know sure you think of it in a
#
very light way that okay they'll be used to sell soaps and shampoos but you know they are the ones
#
who are selling ideas at this point and they're not the ones who are basically
#
you know pitching these ideas to to corporates you know in their boardrooms they're actually
#
propagating these ideas to you know somebody who had very little expo who has very little
#
exposure to the real world and and you know has got their black mirror uh affordable black mirror
#
basically at their disposal and it is it is so important to basically talk about the responsibility
#
that that kind of following brings with itself and therefore the way I see my work is is that
#
like I said right in in the past when we were discussing just the the responsibilities as
#
as a journalist right now is that you know you just need to sort of keep doing it because
#
you know the fact that it it was resisted so much it got so much resistance means that it was
#
important you know it was something that people didn't want to be said and therefore you need to
#
keep saying it you need to find different ways of saying it because it's important and it was
#
probably having some effect because if it wasn't then why would they even bother yeah and I think
#
after that a lot more people like I said started talking about it right language is also powerful
#
just like gives you that way to articulate okay this is what's wrong I was feeling something is
#
off about this but this is what it is uh you know so you've seen in recent times as well you know
#
people have you know sort of called out this behavior in other people as well and you know
#
so now there is an awareness of of you know what what is objectionable behavior and what is
#
objectionable behavior that definitely should not be uh you know put out for for a large public to
#
consume um and and therefore you know the one thing I can tell you amit is that you know I know
#
it's easier to say it now but I said it to my therapist back then and you know to uh I'm sure
#
to you in dms at some point I think whatever happened just made my resolve to to pursue
#
to continue to stick to journalism even stronger because you know one had done incredible things
#
one thought uh you know for the first five years of journalism and then for the next five years one
#
was trying to figure out how to sort of you know do meaningful journalism that makes an impact and
#
makes people think and this felt like okay you were doing something that you know um basically
#
you know was sort of unsettling to people who had a certain kind of power
#
and you know therefore now more than ever you have to continue doing it
#
the the the point you made about you know that's a lovely phrase affordable black mirror because
#
you know it's it's something that people from our vantage point don't realize the how constricting
#
they can be we think of them as liberating they open the world to us but they can also be
#
constricting in the sense that a thought experiment I like to think of is you've got a 15 year old
#
kid in a small town and he gets his affordable black mirror and somebody sends him a link and
#
he opens a link and it's some random youtube video random experiment and you know it's
#
like he's chanting about something or the other and then the algorithm takes over and that is his
#
whole life and that is a whole world and everything else is a lie and he's stuck in that echo chamber
#
for the rest of his life and it's not even his fault right he really so there's a part dependence
#
to all of this and therefore all of it matters like tell me a little bit about your insight
#
into uh the creator economy and the influencer economy because the way I would imagine it would
#
is right in the beginning it's a wild west yeah and there's no sense of values or ethics and
#
everybody's like you know race to the bottom everybody's trying to go for the lowest common
#
denominator and etc etc and then gradually a mature ecosystem evolves there are conventions
#
of behaving and all this can maybe take years if not decades or whatever but it happens kind
#
of gradually but meanwhile uh the explosion of content and of the creator economy as it were is
#
far from gradual it's exploded massively and you know when I was a kid I used to think he are
#
a celebrity endorsement what is this bs doesn't work why should I buy a car because Shah Rukh Khan
#
has it I mean that's the reason to not buy it but then over time uh and and I 10 years ago I would
#
have said I have the same attitude towards influencers like isn't it a waste of money
#
today I realized that it's a complete opposite it is so incredibly powerful you know I've done
#
episodes with luke burges and mimetic desire and all of that you know where the basic theory is
#
everything that we want is because somebody else wants it and there are very few deep desires that
#
we have and therefore the power that influencers have scares the hell out of me and at one level
#
it is a power of an influencer pushing um you know a crypto scam or pushing a homeopathic
#
nonsense or whatever uh you know where they are simply being irresponsible but at the end of the
#
day caveat emptor you know but on the other hand what is far more worrying is pushing these kinds of
#
narratives and I don't really want to get too specific because we don't want to talk about
#
these people but pushing these kind of toxic narratives that have uh you know a larger effect
#
out there and I've just seen plenty of this content I you know if you enter the right
#
wing rabbit holes yeah because you said right you have this one youtube which is uh not like
#
yeah there are there are videos abusing mulana modi because he's uh you know not right wing
#
enough because you know he hasn't changed the syllabus where is the syllabus he promised to
#
change the syllabus and he's let the hindus down and and this was years ago it's gotten far more
#
rabid now it's uh you know and there is of course in all of these uh social media uh sort of an
#
incentive to go towards the extremes so give me a sense of that ecosystem like how is it evolving
#
what's really uh you know going on there like you've from various of your pieces I've got
#
figures like like there are 7 000 mega influencers were more than a million followers
#
you know um uh one lakh twelve thousand creators make over a lakh of the month which is 12 percent
#
of the total content creators and for many of them it's like a side hustle like 73 percent of
#
them work more than 10 hours a week and these are really interesting uh figures which gave me you
#
know different sharp insights but give me an overall picture of how is the ecosystem uh evolving
#
how do creators kind of see themselves is there a professionalization happening within the thing
#
is there a sense that there are certain bounds of behavior that we should not kind of cross like
#
you know the government can't legislate this behavior no one can legislate this behavior
#
you can't really set rules against it how this ecosystem has to sort itself out is through social
#
pressure and social opprobrium and society itself you know the the the the incentives coming from
#
there so that people don't behave in too crass a manner because hey they also care about what
#
people think and they don't want to go too far so what is your sense of the evolution are we still
#
in that first wild wealth phase where nobody gives a damn and yeah I'll I'll take a lakh and
#
I'll promote any damn thing is it still in that phase where um you know religion and communalism
#
is still a drought give me a sense of what it's like so you know it exploded during the pandemic
#
so there was a very sort of external you know force that basically led to the explosion of
#
creator economy it wouldn't have had happened at this scale and this fast had it not been for the
#
pandemic and us sort of you know being cooped up in inside our homes and some people making the
#
most of it by creating content and most others by consuming content so this was a pandemic and this
#
was a virus I mean it was it had already sort of see it's it was already inserted into our systems
#
way before the pandemic you know you I've also been now tracking what is called the creator economy
#
since the days of AIB and TAVF so you know those people were also you know content creators at the
#
time but it was just like there were fewer of them and there's mostly stand-up comedians slash
#
content creators you know then you had basically like you know a different sort of breed of
#
entertainers that came in who were specializing in the 15 second format which is TikTok
#
and then the pandemic happened and then obviously fame became accessible to people through TikTok
#
in India and you know that changed you know this game you know a fair bit then you had
#
TikTok getting banned then you had at least a dozen alternatives coming up and then you had
#
people throwing money at creators to be able to have exclusive tie-ups for their
#
apps so money came in you know in in droves at once but very soon people realized that it doesn't
#
stay and you know it is that just that one time check that you would get but after that to sustain
#
that kind of income just became an impossible task for so many and so right now right from people
#
who are over a million to you know people who are in the 500k bracket to people who are you know
#
upwards of 10 000 everybody is struggling with retention with engagement everybody is caught
#
up with their dashboards and you know very few people are still able to sort of retain the joy
#
that they got in in creating this content which also then brought monetization for them
#
there is you know there is again a very small percentage of them who consistently make a few
#
lakhs a month which is great money but bear in mind that most of these people who are making
#
a few lakhs a month already come from rich families so you know again within them also
#
there's very few who are actually you know rags to riches stories so while this might be one of the
#
most lucrative or the most lucrative career option that people not just in india but around
#
the world see what what i have been sort of writing about for the last four to five years
#
in the hope that it'll reach at least some more more years you know with time is that very few
#
people are able to consistently make a respectable amount of money which is which is where your side
#
hustle point sort of comes into play and and and yet i think money is not directly connected to
#
influence you know because you know you can have a huge audience and still struggle to make money
#
because for some or the other reason the brands are not coming at coming to collaborate with you
#
maybe because you know there are more creators coming up in the same field and they want to
#
reach out to newer creators because they want to get a newer audience set the brand's budget is
#
tight or you know there's a change in in you know their campaign and therefore you know they want
#
to sort of look at a different category or you know the the brand manager actually has sense and
#
therefore does not want to align with a creator who is otherwise you know a very problematic
#
creator so there could be many reasons the bottom line is it's very hard for you to sustainably make
#
money off of ads and and that continues to be the chief source of income for most content creators
#
when i say most it's above 90% and then again like i said you know there are examples of people who
#
are doing really well but one has to look at the fact that 90% of those creators who are doing
#
really well right now already came from affluent families but to answer your question as to where
#
it's at it's not the wild wild west anymore in many ways because there's a lot of paperwork
#
that happens now there's a lot of contracts there's a lot of agencies that have come up
#
trying to streamline so we're at stage two at this point there have been government
#
regulations and interventions also in many of these spheres right so i think in finance
#
you know say we had to intervene because it just really had snowballed and you know got completely
#
out of hand very recently i think you know the mental health regulatory body is also trying to
#
sort of come in and create some rules because there are a lot of quacks that have come up as
#
mental health practitioners on instagram especially so you you see that happening in
#
india you you've seen that happen in in the u.s in europe even in china you know you you have these
#
uh i think there are these rules that if you're a doctor and a lawyer and and on instagram then
#
you and basically sort of you know spewing gyan about your field on instagram then you need to
#
not instagram i mean their equivalent of the instagram then you need to have proof that you
#
know that you're a legitimate person belonging to this field so these guidelines are coming in i
#
think you know some some of the new guidelines also hold the endorser responsible for whatever
#
it is that they are you know going to sort of be endorsing through collaborations there are
#
issues there obviously because you know sometimes brands force you to not disclose that this is a
#
paid partnership so then it gets a bit murky so the murkiness continues to stay in many ways
#
but the initial sort of high of of you know suddenly sort of getting too many followers
#
and then you know getting a lot of attention and becoming you know famous overnight a lot of that
#
has now diluted because there are a lot of creators that have come up right so when so many people are
#
famous who is really famous you know it's just that so when somebody says oh you know this is
#
a creator with like there are so many times when i discovered these people that i have never heard
#
of and they have over a million instagram followers and i'm not even surprised by the
#
fact that i don't know them because i don't expect myself to know 7000 content creators and track
#
them like that is not what might be it requires me to do i think it requires me to just look at
#
larger trends and so i tell myself not to feel the pressure of knowing how all 7000 of them are doing
#
because they're also they're just at such a tiny sliver of the entire creator universe right
#
so imagine if that tiny sliver itself has you know amassed so much of following so
#
you know there is a very different problem that they face with earning and there is a
#
different problem that we face as you know observers and critics of that world
#
because of the number of views that they amass because you know watching them is free
#
and so these are two very different sort of challenges that that you know have come
#
up and because a lot of for the lot of these people fame was something that they yearned for
#
which you know a lot of people do in general and it became accessible through this route
#
what i think they don't many at times realize because it's also something that has not come to
#
them over time or because they have not like with celebrities obviously you have an entourage
#
telling you a lot of things right and shielding you from a lot of things and therefore giving
#
you a sense of that now you're a public figure with with a lot of these people they revel in
#
the fact that they are now famous and they are being spotted in public but they don't want to
#
sort of come to terms with the fact that that also means that you know they need to act responsibly
#
so i think you know that conversation has now thankfully started happening over the last two
#
years that that it's important for them to understand that there comes a responsibility
#
with the kind of following that they amass those conversations have started to happen now which i'm
#
really like glad about because you know when i started as probably one of the first few people to
#
to say that these conversations need to happen and then there were consequences of basically
#
saying that but i guess i guess someone had to start right so so i'm glad at least like you know
#
i was able to do that maybe not not now but you know history will remember me kindly
#
and then say that you know at least you started this and now you know it's it's become sort of
#
more possible for people to actually ask of of responsibility from content creators because you
#
cannot just get away by saying that oh we are entertainers when you know when you have so many
#
people following you and you have to take the responsibility of of what you are actually putting
#
out there see don't say things like history will remember me kindly like i object to that
#
at multiple levels like first of all you're still going on right so what history you're still here
#
and secondly history will remember nobody in the area so what is that so here's sort of my next
#
question about the creator economy and this at one level is very good this is great but is also
#
discombobulating for someone like me that in our time there was one mainstream and that was it
#
and obviously that meant that most artists make no money at all and it's very top heavy and you
#
have to scale to be successful today that has changed you have all kinds of niches and in india
#
every niche is also an absolute numbers pretty damn big including thankfully the niche for long
#
broadcasts and there is in a sense a very restricted mainstream if there is one
#
at all so that whole mainstream there is no mainstream strut whole kevin kelly thing of
#
a thousand true fans has happened and therefore when you talk of 7000 mega influencers with more
#
than a million followers yeah the truth is i will also not know 6998 of them yeah and and that's
#
fine and people from within these streams may not even know each other yeah absolutely and therefore
#
when you know the kids today are 50 they were they may not even have common cultural references
#
because they grew up with different algorithms in different worlds with different entertainers
#
to look at and all of that so what do you think about this world and what do you think about the
#
consequences of this world and like my bias is that hey may a thousand flowers bloom it's a huge
#
net positive also many many more creators make money than before you know which so in that sense
#
i think it's great but does it then also become a sort of a social disconnect where we don't have
#
sort of common symbols or ways of talking to each other i mean what what's your sense of this very
#
diffused phenomenon i actually want to because i realized that the whole dramatic history will
#
remember me kindly the moment you said it i also realized dude this was a bit much and extra as
#
as the younger generation says but i actually took a second to think why i would say something so
#
dramatic and i think what makes sense to me is the fact that because i have not spoken about it
#
in real time and you know now that it's been so long and i've still not been able to sort of
#
process most of it because just haven't had the time um i think there is by the way i was kidding
#
like you said right i think i i do agree that history doesn't you know history will basically
#
not remember anyone and i think also it goes against the whole view of taking yourself
#
seriously right so i think i realize why i said it is because i i am aware of the fact that
#
it is something that i was not able to chronicle in real time as it was happening
#
and for for various reasons right you know one of them being just like you know trying to protect
#
my family from from the the strife and effect that this would have caused and because i was
#
still trying to make sense of it but the other part of me is also felt like you know imagine if
#
you know tomorrow morning you wake up and everybody else around you has forgotten that the pandemic
#
existed and you know now you have to basically live with the the collective trauma of of you
#
know something that that went on just just on your shoulders and i have felt like that for two years
#
and and therefore you know a part of me feels that maybe maybe at least you know history will
#
have some record of it if if not the you know the current stream so so there's i think that's
#
where this this whole dramatic cliche came from but there's an incredible thought experiment
#
actually could be a great novel have you ever wanted to write fiction and all that poetry you
#
did mention but i have never wanted to write a book because i've just been so caught up with
#
deadlines all my life but also because now there is this realization it doesn't pay
#
okay and rent is to be made so most things don't pay and beyond the time beyond a point there are
#
some things you have to do for love no huh so i think once i get to that stage where rent is
#
not a worry and you know i can do something for love and i have something compelling like i
#
remember i was you know in in michigan we were all there joy jeet you know who's who's an
#
academician there at the university of michigan he had invited some of us there and you know
#
everybody had these great topics that they spoke about i somehow you know ended up talking about
#
something that i had taken away from a bunch of my stories over the last few years which made me
#
realize how words are disappearing from our language at least on the internet and so it
#
was basically just an amalgamation of like you know eight to ten of the stories that i had done
#
in the last few years and i realized as a result of that that we are using fewer and fewer words
#
in our communication online and i remember you know somebody else who was a part of this cohort
#
when we were going back you know to the airport said that i think there is a book here and maybe
#
that is a book i am not opposed to writing because it's about language it's about words
#
and and it's about the internet so i think it's you know some of the best words that i care about
#
so so i think that was the first time when someone said there is a book here where i was not opposed
#
to the idea altogether so maybe i'm getting there you know at some point at some point maybe i will
#
write a book yeah because i was just thinking that at one level like sure you're doing the long
#
form stories and that's great compared to your news reporter colleagues who might be doing much
#
smaller stories which is very hard by the way you know equally if not more i have immense respect
#
for them yeah yeah i mean all forms all the good practitioners of all forms are great they've
#
mastered their craft whatever that is but don't you even feel that even within that
#
uh freedom that the 1600 word form gives you that you are always sort of like it would be terrible
#
for me because i would feel that i've just started getting into a story i've just scratched the
#
surface and oh god i gotta file it and move on to something else you feel like that i think for me
#
it feels like i just want some time you know during uh like take a break and just read all of my
#
stories because you know you pack so much in in you know that one or two weeks when you're
#
entering a different world and then you know bringing it out for the rest of the world to
#
make sense of and then you move on to something next that you forget about that world very quickly
#
sometimes it stays because you know you're you know it's part of the same beat so you're able
#
to sort of follow through but otherwise you know there's just so many fascinating worlds that you
#
know you just open one door to and then after that you just move to a different building altogether
#
sometimes i feel like i want to come back to this building and see what's what's been happening here
#
uh to that effect yes i think there is uh there's definitely i mean i love reading books so uh you
#
know i've never sort of been averse to writing one to that extent just going in depth into one world
#
is i think one of the best things that you can do in life right um but it's the reason i have not
#
written a book so far the reasons have been very logistic uh so far i'm at it just about the the
#
money and and you know the time kind of aligning so uh maybe if at some point it aligns i'm not
#
sort of averse to that idea so but yeah coming back to your question i you know wanted to explain
#
my dramatic insertion at that point but your question is very important which is about the
#
the fickle nature of creator economy which is absolutely true you will see that the people
#
that you were following during the pandemic uh are nowhere on your feed right now you will see
#
that the people that you were following a month ago are also nowhere on your feed right now and
#
that is something that hits them really hard for you just you just keep on moving on to different
#
uh creators who are putting out the same kind of entertaining content but you know in basically
#
just like different sort of uh outfits uh by outfit i also mean like you know different sort
#
of formats but uh you know it's it's entertaining content ultimately this is a profession where
#
more and more people are now realizing that they have a very short window to make the most of
#
their fame and they all realize it's all very short-lived so you'll see all the ones who
#
who had the who had this vision have actually you know then branched out to basically start
#
their own line of products to you know make sure that you know they've built a distribution now
#
they will use it for a consumer goods business you know some people are doing have been doing
#
courses i'm not sure how well people's courses are working though you know in some cases i know
#
there are people who are making you know 50 to 60 percent of their annual income just through courses
#
so minus probably 90 there you go so so it works then you you basically have people who are
#
making money who are doing live streams because they realize that you know while
#
instagram gave them instant sort of short of recognition but youtube is where the money is
#
because youtube gives you the maximum avenues to to monetize your content instagram has only
#
started that now but on instagram you have to reach a certain you know critical mass for you
#
to be able to even ask people to subscribe and then paid subscription happens otherwise you're
#
totally dependent on brands to to collaborate with you so you know you'll see a lot of these
#
people who are then moving from instagram to youtube and then they realize the the
#
mercilessness of youtube where you know on instagram there is there are certain things
#
that give you the kind of engagement they do and youtube has a completely different algorithm it
#
has a completely different machinery that works sometimes in your favor sometimes against you it
#
just figuring all of that out takes you know some time and work and it's a it's a constant you're
#
constantly sort of working here you know so the whole like i said right the whole part of enjoying
#
the process very few people are able to do that because you're just constantly just obsessed
#
with your dashboard so it's other people who are doing the content thinking for them you know they
#
after a point you have a team that is basically thinking of the kind of content that you can do
#
so i've seen people sending these mails for interns where the requirements are that you have to think
#
of like six to seven ideas for these people so many content creators now hire other content
#
creators who are not as famous who basically write reels real ideas for them and they you
#
know jam together and they get paid instead of getting highlighted as a collaborator you know
#
to to just basically to keep that machine churning so the fun part of this game i think is long gone
#
and you know now it's serious business and you know it's it's extremely competitive because
#
we just discussed the kind of numbers that are there so but the business is going to thrive
#
because advertisers have figured out that there is you know that this works for them and you know
#
influencer marketing is something that works for most of them but they also understand that
#
people are following content now and not creators and more and more people are following more and
#
more content and are remembering fewer and fewer creators so while the industry will reach a certain
#
level of maturity real soon the shape and the shape it will take is going to be more content
#
driven and format driven than creator driven and you know you will basically you'll keep having
#
newer and newer names that will come up and be relevant for a very short cycle and that's that's
#
how it's going to be so i have you know i i see two distinct sort of phenomena here and one has
#
to do with the larger question i'll ask you first and the larger question is that to what extent
#
does the kind of content coming out and the kind of direction that creators take to what extent
#
is it dependent on the accidents of what a platform chooses to do at a given point in time
#
so instagram will do something and then youtube is going in one direction and then they'll say no
#
shorts and they'll you know prioritize shorts and their algo will favor that and you know and then
#
reels will start determining the kind of people music make because i think one of your columns
#
was about you know how musicians are now making music so it can be a hit on reels and that is
#
what will make the song a hit and what what the the picture that this paints is that a lot of
#
this is accidental some platform will decide to do some freaking thing tweak their algo a bit
#
and then all the creators have to jump because that's where they're uh you know they have to
#
you know follow that particular pipe piper and constraints are good in creativity
#
you know but having said that if you are just going from constraint to constraint and
#
not getting a chance to discover who you are and to follow your heart and to all of that
#
i think there's a great danger there and the the second part of what i was going to say is that
#
you know like personally uh the philosophy that i have adopted for myself possibly because i'm
#
incapable of playing the particular creator game of you know uh doing whatever it takes to maximize
#
for the algo and doing the marketing and etc etc the game that i chose for myself is i'm going
#
to follow paul graham's dictum and i'm going to aim to be loved by a few and like instead of being
#
liked by many right and that pays off for me because what i see in my case is that uh my
#
numbers are really good in terms of audio podcasts but they're obviously not uh you know the youtube
#
superstars level with a million followers and all that obviously not but the engagement is super
#
deep you know my average session for a podcast uh the last i checked on some particular app was
#
like 40 minutes which is like completely off the charts your youtube typical channel would have
#
15 seconds 20 seconds or whatever and obviously people listen across sessions and all of that
#
and and it's not just two of me so it's not a humble brag in that sense i think audio podcasting
#
as a medium has this kind of immersion and this is my favorite podcast so i can totally believe
#
this well thank you for that so yeah uh selection bias uh because uh you are a listener so therefore
#
those are the two directions now i really lucked out that i managed to find a sustainable way of
#
making money out of this and that's not necessarily the case so i didn't have to go out there and say
#
okay i got to optimize for the algo what is the algo should i really do seven hour episodes should
#
i really you know initially when i began i thought 15 minutes hooking them in the first 15 seconds
#
etc etc which audio podcasting is completely wrong but i can imagine that if i was dependent
#
on this for my income i would basically be not be who i am i think i just have given up podcasting
#
frankly right i i had the good fortune to luck out and to be able to just do what i do now i
#
don't know whether i am a complete outlier or whether because i think in the long run for any
#
creator you've got to find that space where you are comfortable where you're doing things you love
#
which need not be as off the off the wall as eight hour podcast but be in a space that you love
#
not chase the numbers in the algo and eventually you know have faith that a loyal audience will
#
form around you that they'll be willing to pay for your content and support you and etc etc
#
and that is a hope so that is my romantic vision that a good product is the best marketing what i
#
would like to see good creators do and all the creators that i follow the people i followed
#
last month i follow them today i followed them two years ago i'll keep following them because
#
i'm following them for who they are and what they bring to the table however i am neither
#
the typical viewer nor am i the typical creator so what is your sense of all of this like if
#
there are confused creators listening to this how should they approach it assuming that they
#
don't have the good fortune that i had to kind of look into an audience and for whatever reasons
#
it worked for me but so i don't have to think about the monetary aspect of it but assuming that
#
there's a creator out there who's saying that boss i'm starting from a pure place i want to
#
experiment i want to find myself i don't want to all the constantly all the time try to second
#
guess what people want and you know turn myself inside out to give that to them but i also want
#
to be sustainable i also need to make my rent how do i approach this yeah see the thing is
#
when when sustainability is an issue i have noticed this in creators over the years that
#
they automatically get wired into they don't even it's very unconscious when it happens that
#
okay you know i will i'll stop doing this and then i'll get brand deals like i hear them saying
#
things like that that i think they don't hear themselves out loud when they're saying it
#
it just it's it just becomes hired wide into you to basically then start to be okay with
#
being a slave to the algorithm and its changes and again you know it started off as something
#
which is you know a creative pursuit where you know you have a certain skill and you are able
#
to sort of hold people's attention for 15 seconds it was fun but then you know it became very
#
mechanical and now it's at that mechanical stage and people who are still able to sort of find joy
#
in that are the ones who are able to go on and thrive i am not sure for how long and so like
#
i said right i am bullish on on the industry thriving and content thriving and and you know
#
this this format sort of thriving it seems to be working now unless something radical comes up
#
but not on creators being able to sustain this for a very long time most of them and you will
#
sort of keep seeing a churn in in you know in the creators so i think for someone who's starting off
#
now i think a they need to be aware of the fact that there is so much competition in every field
#
now you know so a year and a half ago financial influencers of influencers were like this rare
#
breed that was making a lot of money but then everybody figured out that finances where the
#
money is and everybody started making finance content and so now they have you know so much
#
competition that some of them have had to start consultancies and you know then it gets into
#
that tricky area of like you know are you allowed to basically give financial advice and everything
#
so how do you monetize your content consistently is something that everyone is going to struggle
#
with and there will invariably be people who will who will have to you know either compromise on
#
their ethics on their values on their principles or you know or sort of just move out and you know
#
basically like give in and say that you know i can't do this i need to find a
#
i'm not sure if i can say a stable job because what is a stable job in these
#
times but but maybe not something that is as volatile as this yeah that's the sounds almost
#
paradoxical that content will thrive but creators won't yeah most creators won't yeah there's ai as
#
well right that is one thing that like you know i completely sidestep because i think i am still
#
in that phase where i'm trying to make sure that i cover every aspect of the internet
#
fucking up the humanity that i've not even gotten to ai yet but yeah with ai things are just going
#
to be uh even harder i mean it ai is going to make things and is making things easier for a lot of
#
creators as well who are able to kind of use that uh you know very diligently in very interesting
#
ways but you know there is this uh uh you know startup entrepreneur varun uh varun maya and
#
he does a lot of content which is entirely on ai and you know he tells you about the different
#
use cases of different software that has come up and it's very interesting it's very informative
#
it's it's very sort of to the point i i think uh you know he's actually become the go-to person
#
for all things ai across twitter and instagram over the last few months and he's also not someone
#
who's you know i don't see the trappings of of you know what what entails uh or the trappings
#
that i find in content creators i don't see in him so and and it seems that you know he's he's
#
got a sense of sort of how to go about sort of uh you know having a business on the side while
#
while you're doing this and there's this certain vision so i think that is a good example of
#
someone kind of using ai you know in a more productive way in a more positive way then
#
there's obviously the use case of sort of finding uh an audience in a different language right that's
#
the most basic one i guess but i i was having this conversation with someone and they said that
#
it's not something that you know it's not as effective as you know one would have thought
#
it would be so i think that is something that i'm yet to explore but i think you know being
#
able to sort of have your content churned out in different languages i am hoping that that
#
will have some sort of effect but then if that were the case then we would have seen examples
#
of that in the us already at least and that hasn't happened so clearly there is something that
#
you know the ai has not perfected yet and thank god for that one day there will be an ai version
#
of you writing the stories on ai that you are not writing that will deserve you right i know right
#
it's karma yeah what has happened recently and you've been writing a lot about it you've got a
#
number of pieces about it is the uh is popular culture beginning to impact politics like you've
#
written about how these elections were really a youtube election in a sense while the previous
#
elections were a whatsapp elections you've written about the use of memes in this election
#
and you know how effective they were we've seen a lot of youtubers not just ruvrati but abhisar
#
sharma and you know and various other people i'd never heard of before the elections doing
#
enormously well and building audiences on their own while talking about politics so give me a
#
sense of how this has happened because at one level you'd imagine that it was bound to happen
#
sometime but you know in these elections particularly technology pop culture etc etc
#
has really sort of come into play so give me a sense of what this landscape is and does it then
#
pose a danger for the future as well okay i think i'll get to the danger part later because that's
#
that's a heavier question to address but let me paint the paint a picture of this landscape for
#
you this shift from you know 2014 elections being a facebook election and then 2019 being
#
whatsapp and then 2024 being youtube is is a very natural progression all thanks to the failure of
#
television news shows and uh and add to that basically the the stream of fake news and
#
information that you saw everywhere uh people needed to like the likes of a druvrati or an
#
abhisar who's who's actually uh you know a journalist uh but you know now very popular
#
on youtube as well um they needed to be on a medium where the you know the debunking of fake
#
news had to be public and that is why it couldn't be in those uh you know videos that were circulated
#
via whatsapp forwards five years ago it now that we think back to it it's a very natural progression
#
that this moved to youtube people also after a point i think realized thankfully that uh you
#
know television news was basically you know not serving the purpose of news to them anymore and
#
then they went on youtube the only difference is that some of them went on the propaganda channels
#
while others went on on you know the channels of people who were actually trying to to present
#
news and and informed views to them and you know instill sort of some sort of critical thinking
#
what has happened as a result is that a lot of these times and i i believe you have also recently
#
faced this a lot of the people who who have been critical of of policies uh and politics uh you
#
know of certain parties have had to face very technical sort of challenges that would sort of
#
thwart them and and you know uh obstruct their their regular sort of workflow which is exactly
#
what all of this essentially is right to just basically get you so embroiled in in you know
#
these these uh how do i say this like you know this bureaucracy of of being on the internet
#
that you have actually you don't have the time and the bandwidth left to do the actual work
#
so one of the ways this happens is by someone putting a copyright strike on your channel
#
because you've used the 40 second clip saying that uh and and then you know eventually basically
#
your video getting demonetized because of that now for somebody like you who does not depend on
#
youtube ad revenue for sustenance this is no biggie and you'll just move on but somebody who
#
is expecting that you know this the subscriber base that they were masked after you know sort
#
of working so hard for so long is going to pay their rent and when that you know video basically
#
is is rendered demonetized it is also demoralizing and and therefore uh you know it's it's kind of
#
hard to sort of keep going on doing this uh when you when you have little to no monetary sort of
#
motivation or reward coming on the other side of it that's one thing that is happening and yet i
#
think um i'm glad that you know that more and more people are still choosing to do this and
#
and trying to find ways to kind of uh monetize through largely courses i believe because that
#
is where you also get an engaged audience uh you know that is willing to learn and know more to
#
also shell out money for it so that seems to have emerged as one of the more sort of
#
uh reliable ways for for people to sort of make money consistently because things like
#
you know a super chat which is you know someone sort of giving you a tip during a live stream
#
it's a very inconsistent and you know you can't sort of have any kind of targets on this because
#
it really depends on who's going to come and watch you on that day so that's not something that you
#
can rely on for or money is on a monthly basis the one part so basically how this happened uh
#
you know we've covered it happened because somebody needed to counter fake news and they
#
needed to do it in a in a more public space and you know what helped also is that uh you know
#
the fatigue that people face because of tv news is what brought people so these people got an
#
audience as well uh the monetization is an issue and monetization is also an issue amit because
#
because of the supply and demand and the bidding that happens for digital ad inventory online
#
there there are settings whereby you can actually just like completely
#
uh overlook an entire set of like news-based content or political content and so
#
the the chances of them making money further reduce because of because of aspects like that
#
because some brands really don't want to associate or be seen next to content like that so that is
#
another reason uh you know there is a lot of struggle in making money directly through you
#
know to add revenue on youtube that is something that tends to happen i think going forward
#
to address your danger bit there these are uh you know largely one person led channels so while
#
they may have like a tiny machinery working alongside them they don't have the resources
#
to cover the length and breadth of our country so we need reporters to do that and uh if the
#
ad monies are you know a large chunk of that is going on a platform um away from publishers
#
then uh you know a lot of these youtubers will also then struggle to find uh you know the news
#
that they want to sort of disseminate to a larger audience so there are silver linings to this
#
because we have seen the impact of some of this youtube journalism that has happened in this
#
this particular election but it's it's also a scary world out there for for journalism and
#
journalists and across platforms and uh yeah i don't know what the future looks like but i am
#
pretty sure it's not rosy i mean the the future always has unknown unknowns which is why the
#
next question is kind of unfair because it's a question that i can't get a handle on answering
#
but if any of my guests so far uh can come close to answering it is probably you so i'll take a
#
shot anyway no pressure no pressure at all yeah it's easy game yeah you've tackled worse
#
so so here's the deal i look back at the paradigm of entertainment and journalism and uh content
#
as it were in the 1990s right and i've spoken about this many times so maybe you're familiar
#
with it from listening to my show but nevertheless for those of my listeners who haven't that you
#
have a mainstream dominance a means of production are with the mainstream so for example if i want
#
to write an article i have to send it to a times of india or a hindustan times and they will pay me
#
a pittance and they will aggregate eyeballs and they will sell those eyeballs to advertisers
#
and a tiny chunk of that goes to the creator and it's kind of the same with television you'll pitch
#
a television show you'll make a television show for a fee and then your channel will get eyeballs
#
and they'll get advertisers and that is the way it works and the creator doesn't have the means
#
of production they can't build their own communities and they can't monetize themselves from the
#
viewers or the readers as a case maybe now thankfully every aspect of that has changed
#
we have the means of production yes we can publish stuff ourselves these platforms allow us to
#
distribute our content as well and we can monetize directly from our consumers like many of us do
#
with courses and communities and patreon and whatever many different areas are many different
#
ways of coming up and the friction of individual supporting creators has diminished massively so
#
it's far more possible to find a thousand true fans or even a hundred true fans as it were but
#
you know there is a lag in terms of institutions adapting
#
and changing accordingly you still have the same institutions institutional setups largely with
#
mainstream media houses and etc etc and the role of the advertiser in between is something
#
that i can't figure out like in the end in the end game in the new paradigm i don't see where
#
that role is all creators will like i put out content it is valued by the consumer and we are
#
making that journey maybe it takes 10 years 20 years but at the end of the day like if you spend
#
one hour listening to an episode that i have put out you are already paying for it you're paying
#
for it with your time your attention etc etc opportunity cost one day we will figure out
#
ways to seamlessly transfer what you value to me directly without anything being in between
#
and what do advertisers do then for example is an interesting question like in one of your
#
recent pieces already you wrote that they're constantly shifting the metrics they realize
#
the numbers alone don't matter that some of them are you know looking at the sales and looking at
#
you know the conversions happening and and that's fine but over a period of time you know i feel
#
even that will be under threat so i can't imagine a new paradigm something's got to come up the old
#
system is broken but the old system is still there you know it's it's still there it's broken
#
but still working it's broken but still working in a weird kind of way and i feel we are only a
#
small part of the way of the journey there and i accept that the future is unknown unknowns
#
and there will be brilliant entrepreneurs no doubt hopefully some of them are listening to this
#
who will solve all the various problems on the way but what does that world look like like we
#
have made it so normalized right if i am a creator i am at somebody's mercy this person
#
whose mercy i am at is really an intermediary and he's aggregating attention and then he's
#
selling it to advertisers and that is one structure and actually the structure is not required but no
#
other structure has come in its place to really replace it you know we get glimpses of it you
#
know i can't picture that future and what is your what what is your sense what do you see in the
#
us you've had some publications thrive on the back of just pure play subscriptions right so and
#
netflix has has had a turnaround just recently so these there are these two success stories that we
#
have advertising is changing and and the fact that the conversation about reducing dependence
#
on advertisers has been going on for so long tells you that yeah we are moving towards a world where
#
more and more creators publishers are going to find ways to to reduce that dependency on advertisers
#
advertisers themselves are struggling right right now with you know with the way basically
#
i mean sure google was supposed to phase out their third party cookie tracking by the end
#
of this year which is not happening anytime soon again but it will happen at some point because
#
you know they have to abide by government regulations and so on and so forth so
#
at advertisers themselves like their own sort of future is in jeopardy at this point and they
#
are also trying to figure out how the the changing regulations are going to make it harder for them
#
to reach out to their audience so i think reaching out to the audience is is the struggle
#
that everyone has right publishers have that struggle creators have that struggle advertisers
#
also have that struggle so i guess are the fears are the same it's just the
#
advertisers also have a budget to basically reach out to their audience creators have a
#
structure that they need to align towards and then maybe they will be able to reach out to
#
the audience probably at the cost of you know creative liberty publishers are the ones that
#
have suffered the most in in this entire sort of you know structure so far and they are the
#
ones to be honest that will continue to find it the hardest to sustain and that is why you have
#
you know for every sort of you know one content creator that goes into oblivion there are
#
hundred thousand that come up in the world but that is not the case with publishers
#
and you know so i think advertisers will find a way to reach out to their audience and and
#
creators more and more creators will figure out it for some time i think i'm more worried about
#
the publishers at this point in in this whole future of advertising game and yeah i
#
i also don't have an answer to that question except to just say that yeah you're right
#
this is we're clearly moving towards a world where fewer and fewer entities want to depend
#
on advertising and advertisers themselves are struggling to to find an audience to buy their
#
products that is what the world looks like what black mirror episode this will turn into is is
#
something that i'll probably have to think about and maybe then pitch to netflix instead of
#
discuss your that's the next phase of your life and you know so i've
#
that's a thought i've taken a lot of your time today and i actually want to
#
talk about a bunch of more things but this need not be your last appearance on the show it is
#
only your first and i hope you will agree to be back at some at regular intervals so we can talk
#
about culture and technology and all of the things that you cover so well so a couple of sort of
#
final questions and my penultimate one is this that i've got a lovely sense of your journey so
#
far where you're coming out from a small town and you are in search of the incredible you you
#
discover journalism which allows you to learn something new every day and allows you to search
#
for the incredible and that passion takes you forward into the journey and here you are and
#
interesting things happen which you've described and here you stand right now in 2024 what is
#
your notion of your own self-actualization in a sense or if i cut out the jargon and the big words
#
like how do you want to live your life like what do you want to do what are the things that make
#
you happy what what is the story that you're telling yourself about yourself right now like
#
so far i'm guessing that the journey to some extent has been sustained by your natural curiosity
#
and the dharma of just doing everything well with full interest and intention and you know just those
#
processes just that way of living yeah so is it sort of more of the same or is there a sharpened
#
focus to that or uh you know what what is that story you're telling yourself about yourself right
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now you know i'm i'm just relieved to to hear this question because uh somebody else asked a
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version of this question to me just a few days ago and uh normally you don't pay mind to it but
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i actually sat down and i thought about it diligently so i have i actually have a half
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decent answer for you which is that i'm it you know so far like how you rightly pointed out
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right my work has given me a lot of meaning and purpose and i i think uh you know what i want from
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life is to be able to be in a position where i continue to do meaningful work but at the same
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time i think i've also been really grateful for the kind of people that i've gotten in this life
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and i know for a fact that uh you know while when work you know does well you're just constantly
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concerned about you know that being a consistent uh you know like the nature of consistency is
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what sort of takes prime importance in that moment but with people it's it's it's not that right you
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just you kind of in the moment when you know when there's joy and warmth that you feel with them
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or at least for me that's the thing that you know i am able to cherish that moment and you know be
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more present in that moment and be more grateful for that moment than worrying about whether this
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is going to last and uh i i think i just want to you know what i take away from that is that
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there is especially in the last few years right when it's been tumultuous for me in you know
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multiple ways there's just so many people in family and friend circle who have been there for me i
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think i want to pay pay back and and and pay it forward as well you know maybe be there for i
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think part of like you know me talking about swati or you know just just whatever i went through
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i i want to i'm not sure if i you know mention at any point that i've been extremely exhausted
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in the last few years but also at the same time when i look back at the journey i also there is
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a tiny part of me that feels like wow a human being is is capable of you know doing so much
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you know when when they put their mind to it and um you know like you will you will figure this
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out you know you know if something like this happens to you so so i hope you know i am able
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to kind of pay it forward as well in that way um i i think more than anything else i think what
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matters to me at this point i think i have that clarity is that i want a life you know that has
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grace and integrity i mean it just i think those two things are very important so um you know to
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be able to to have the strength to to you know to to fight for your principles to never be found in
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a situation where you have to compromise on your principles and and if such a situation arises then
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then you are able to sort of face the consequences of standing up for your principles i think that
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is just very important to me and i think the fact that i was able to do that in a tiny way in the
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last few years again gives me hope that that you know uh no matter how much you know the the
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consequences the real life consequences uh you know of of taking a stand for your principles
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scare you because you're only human uh ultimately you know you when when you tell yourself listen
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no matter what i am going to fight the good fight i think that is something that i never want uh you
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know to let go of and uh yeah i think a life lived with grace and integrity is a life well lived
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there's nothing more than that that i need in life it's it's been i'm just so extremely grateful
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for every experience that i've had and every person that i've you know met in this life who's
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taught me something uh that i you know something about life that is good or something about life
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that is avoidable and uh there is uh there is immense gratitude for for just being alive and
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and um and and you know looking forward to you know the incredible that one may still
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find and the important that one must find and write about beautiful words very inspiring so
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you know the last question you know the drill from recommendations yeah for me and my listeners
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books films music you absolutely love can i also recommend some of your podcast episodes that if
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they may not have uh you know listened to so i think uh because uh because i i really love
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this podcast okay so um i think the episode with shanta gokhale because i feel that you know it is
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a very long episode so if somebody by chance has not listened to that episode please listen to it
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the episode with murnal pandey please listen to it uh the episode with the uh urvashi battalia
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please listen to it um the episode with jerry pinto please please please listen to it i really
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doubt there is a single listener of seen unseen who hasn't but if there is uh you know by chance
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then please please please go and tune into that episode it's the most beautiful episode ever
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quite a few others uh you know you know basically friends who have featured here
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and i don't want those biases to let in so i think i'll just keep it to these people
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for now in books i think the one book that i think is essential reading for everyone across age group
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is uh kim jeong born 1982 which is a korean translation that you'll find everywhere it's
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a best seller so it's very easy to source women should especially read it but more than that i
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think men should read it across age groups so kim jeong born 1982 please go and read that book
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um i think the second all-time favorite book is is rasidhi ticket amrita pritam's and uh you know
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you'll find you'll obviously find it in punjabi in hindi you'll also find an english translation
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so please read that book for anyone who still cares about journalism maybe uh you should read
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good girls revolt which is about you know these women journalists from newsweek magazine newsweek
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right who basically fought for their right to get a byline because they would not get bylines
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for the stories that they would do so much work for like both research secondary and primary
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reporting and the men would get bylines so unpaid labor in office also exactly there you go yeah so
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it was also turned into a mini series for amazon prime but like most other you know things that
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go in in this particular field the book is better than the series so please please read good girls
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revolt does it have to be three can there be more no as many as you want we can go on oh actually
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let's keep it to three i don't want to grow people's anti-library as many or as few as you
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want uh what what are the other things i'm supposed to recommend films music anything at all whatever
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you feel like instagram reels tiktok videos uh films i think uh some of my all-time favorite
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movies uh there is uh i think just the premise is just so uh soul stirring and and i think
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especially for these days and age i think some of these movies are are important to kind of
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visit i won't even say revisit because uh it gives you a sense of who we are as people and
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you know no matter how much the world changes you know that i think that realization is very
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important and that is very important that you get when you're watching that movie so is an
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all-time favorite is a movie that's very close to my heart but it's it's also a you know painful
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watch um then uh i think i also love grave of the fireflies which is this jibli studio movie that
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i told you about initially and uh i'm again i'm not sure if it's jibli studio gibli studio
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even i'm not sure i just say gibli but i don't know yeah but that's good it reflects well on
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both of us that's my line and i'm sticking to it we need to find out yeah so yeah so i think
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grave of the fireflies is a movie that one must watch uh you know while they're still alive
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i remember i was after my brother for 10 years asking him to watch this movie and uh
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the day he said uh i i watched grave of the fireflies today i said okay now i can die in peace
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so it's it's an essential and important watch i think with movies uh i don't know i feel like
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that way i think i'm better with remembering you know the books that basically made an impact as
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opposed to the movies so there are just so many more and i'm feeling bad for the universe of
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movies that is feeling relegated right now because i can't think of any more but there
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have just been so many movies in recent times that have been moving so uh please do not go
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just by my recommendations i'm just like blanked out on this music um so i listen to a lot of
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instrumental for work uh i also have like a punjabi playlist uh you know for basically
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like you know when you need to sort of a be can you share it it's public on spotify yeah
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so yeah you have a bunch of public spotify playlists i think you've written something
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yeah yeah yeah i i wrote about in your curator column yes yeah yeah so i also have public
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playlist so i have a punjabi playlist which is called punjabi must punjabi which is also
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from a song called punjabi must punjabi uh and i love i love punjabi folk songs because again
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you know grew up sort of listening to them and uh uh love the the you know sort of the stories
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behind them and how women of that time uh you know found a way to kind of tell their stories
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through through punjabi folk songs so uh you know that is something that it's also very hard to
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find these days but you know if you're able to sort of source some carefully curated playlists
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you know that is something that i would definitely recommend to kind of delve into and you know it
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will give you a window into a world where women you know found their voice even before finding
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your voice became a cool phrase so yeah that's that's that and uh i'd love for these people
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whoever is listening because i think by virtue of being on my favorite podcast i'm sure that
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a lot of people would listen to it but if somebody has made it till the end i would love for you to
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actually recommend some nice stuff for me to to kind of uh you know consume because i'm always
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looking to to to sort of uh you know uh consume something which is uh interesting but comes from
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a very different lens than than my own and that of people like me and people like us are you too
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modest or is this now going to be one of your favorite episodes i think my favorite episodes
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are still the ones about the ones that i mentioned to you i guess it's it's all about uh i think i'm
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hardwired to sort of just learn from others i mean sure there were i think some truths that i kind
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of embraced today that i've not done you know in the last few years many years in fact so i think
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to that extent uh you know maybe once i i listen to it i would probably give myself a slight pat
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on the back i really hope i've also not made a fool of myself too much so so there's that but
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no i think uh i think the the the journalist in me and and also the woman in me and and the human
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in me would would still sort of value those episodes a lot more than this because this is a
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story that i i knew most of it i was just trying to figure this out right but those are the things
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that just like you know that are part of my memory and they've just been special they've just
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invigorated something inside of you and they've just uh you know at different points in time
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nilanjana roy as well sorry i was i knew i was forgetting an episode uh you know some of these
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episodes uh came to me at a time when i really needed to sort of you know they came not as a hug
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but as like a you know sort of a gentle nudge to sort of keep propelling you in a certain direction
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and and i'm just so grateful for those so while yes i'm i'm i'm i'm grateful to myself for
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continuing to live i don't think there is a comparison so i i don't think uh you know i
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that favorite list of episodes is going to change just because i was here but i'm glad that i was
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here so i you know the one thing that among the many things that i love about your podcast is that
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you know it's it's not uh you know the visual is not face driven and i think it just uh it therefore
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forces you to again focus on the idea and and on ideas in general and on insights and
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that is uh that is who i am as well i i think as a person largely and uh therefore uh for
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multiple other reasons i think this is uh you know one of the many reasons for which i feel
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glad that you thought that i was also worthy of being a guest on this podcast no i mean the
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visuals aren't face driven but it's very much people driven and all the people you mentioned
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have grace and integrity uh you know i love this conversation i learned a lot from it
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and i think you're incredible so thank you so much and let this uh let us let this just be
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the first of many conversations i'm into that if you enjoyed listening to the show share it
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with whoever you think might be interested check out the show notes enter rabbit holes at will
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shefali's work is linked there you can follow shefali on twitter at shefali but one word and
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the fur is a p h not an f so it's s h e p h a l i b h a t t and you can follow me on twitter
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at amit varma a m i t v a r m a thank you for listening
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did you enjoy this episode of the scene in the unseen if so would you like to support the
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production of the show you can go over to scene unseen dot i n slash support and contribute any
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