#
Many of us who claim to study the world, like economists, sociologists, anthropologists are
#
not so much studying some abstract thing out there called the world, they're studying people.
#
People are complex, shaped differently by nature and nurture, buffeted by emotions in
#
ways they themselves cannot understand, mostly beyond rationality, and using language in
#
subtle ways that others can't often fully understand.
#
And yet, any field of study has to, by force, simplify what it is studying, for that is
#
the first step to understanding.
#
The first step, and often the last step.
#
Academic fields that were born out of that primal and essential urge called curiosity
#
can often become slave to dogmas and methodology that miss the central point.
#
In fact, this has happened, and for the sake of curiosity, for the sake of knowledge and
#
truth, for the sake of humanity itself, we must fight this.
#
We must fight this with every breath we have, but occasionally we can take a break and save
#
our breaths for other worthy endeavors, such as, well, singing.
#
In the end, they will be singing.
#
Yes, they will be singing.
#
Welcome to the Scene and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and
#
Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
#
Welcome to the Scene and the Unseen.
#
My guest today is Vijendra Rao, better known to his friends and fellow economists as Biju
#
Biju is a lead economist in the development research group of the World Bank.
#
And while you may hear that designation and imagine his work must be boring and conventional,
#
Biju is a passionate iconoclast who rails against the fashions of his profession.
#
He laments that economists and anthropologists and sociologists no longer talk to one another.
#
He feels that while data is important, so are human stories.
#
And we must not forget the people who might appear from a distance to just be numbers,
#
but are so much more than that.
#
Biju began his career with radical papers on dowry and domestic violence, an early paper
#
on dowry has a title I love, The Rising Price of Husbands.
#
And his recent work spans disciplines and goes close to the heart of Indian democracy.
#
He is also a student of Hindustani classical and his singing at the end of this episode
#
So if you listen to this conversation on double speed, please slow down when you reach the
#
I recorded this episode during a recent trip to Washington DC, where Biju lives and works.
#
We were so close to the center of global power, and yet Biju's concerns could hardly be
#
This is one of my favorite episodes.
#
This was the first time I met Biju and I loved hanging out with him.
#
But before we begin, let's take a quick commercial break.
#
Hey, the music started and this sounds like a commercial, but it isn't.
#
It's a plea from me to check out my latest labor of love, a YouTube show I am co-hosting
#
with my good friend, the brilliant Ajay Shah.
#
We've called it everything is everything.
#
Every week we'll speak for about an hour on things we care about, from the profound
#
to the profane, from the exalted to the everyday.
#
We range widely across subjects and we bring multiple frames with which we try to understand
#
Please join us on our journey and please support us by subscribing to our YouTube channel at
#
youtube.com slash Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
#
The show is called everything is everything.
#
Please do check it out.
#
Please do welcome to the scene on the on scene.
#
You know, so we are recording this at the Mercator Center in Arlington.
#
And while you were very kindly driving me here, you mentioned that, you know, the World
#
Bank's loss could have been cinema's gain and once upon a time you wanted to, you know,
#
join the film institute and you thought of directing things, which actually looking at
#
your work doesn't surprise me at all because your work shows a deep engagement with society
#
and what's actually happening in human stories and all of that.
#
But tell me a little bit about this side of you, like, you know, these passions of yours
#
because the other thing that I'll also double click on and deep dive into is your love for
#
classical music to the extent that in your mid 40s you actually started learning again
#
and are extremely serious about it.
#
So I want to know about this side of you first, the movie side.
#
Firstly, it's a pleasure to come and talk to you.
#
I've been a fan for many years.
#
The film thing started because my aunt was an actress, her name was Elvi Sharda Rao,
#
and she acted in Girish Karnat's first movie, Vamsa Riksha.
#
She was the heroine of that movie for which she won a national award and all that.
#
So in that process, and I was very young, it was, you know, I think 72, so I must have
#
been eight or nine years old, I was introduced to that world because I had to go, you know,
#
watch her and then she acted in all these Kannada movies that did quite well.
#
And in the process, I met all the greats, you know, who were involved in that movie,
#
Karnat, Girish Karnat, that lot.
#
And I'm told that Girish Karnat saw me running around and he said, I want him for my next
#
movie, which was Kadu, he wanted me to play the young boy there.
#
But then, you know, there were two problems, I shot up in height very quickly.
#
And secondly, my Kannada wasn't that great, so that didn't happen.
#
But that sparked a germ in me.
#
And I've always had this great fascination for Indian cinema and for, particularly in
#
those days, art cinema.
#
And when I was in college, I was part of the film club and, you know, we used to organize
#
film showings and stuff and I used to belong to that circle of friends.
#
My classmates included people like Shehnaz Patel, Farah Khan, you know, that crowd.
#
So I used to hang out with them and lost touch, unfortunately, and I used to act.
#
So I was very, very serious.
#
And in fact, I spoke to, I remember speaking to a gentleman whose name unfortunately I
#
have forgotten, who had got his economics in the US and then become a filmmaker.
#
And he was telling me, you will regret becoming an economist, you should become a filmmaker.
#
I remember sitting with him some restaurant and he was advising me.
#
But then I think what happened was, you know, I come from a long line of economists.
#
So my father and my grand uncle others really influenced my decision to go in the other
#
Also, you know, there were family issues at home.
#
So my parents got divorced when I was 11, so I had to take care of my mother.
#
And consequently, I sort of felt that this was the safer option.
#
So I went in that direction.
#
And I, you know, when we were in the car, when you told me this, I told you about another
#
friend of mine who, you know, runs a bank but was deeply into cinema in a similar way
#
But then he said that, no, no, I've got a cushy life and now he's super successful and
#
just wants to continue doing that.
#
And but one thing he complains to me about is that he says, whenever I go out with other
#
people in the CXO suite, the conversations are incredibly boring because it will only
#
be cricket or Bollywood or very cliched things.
#
And they don't read books, they don't watch movies, they don't listen to music.
#
There's no widening there.
#
It's like they're all on a track and it's so frustrating and, you know, very much painting
#
himself as an outlier, which I believe to be the case.
#
How is that in the profession that you are in, for example, like one, is it the case
#
that many people are too narrow and don't have these wide ranging interests that are
#
important for making you a more rounded person and a better thinker?
#
Is that kind of the case?
#
And like in your case, how important are all of these other sort of interests?
#
So the other interests are central to my life.
#
And from the beginning, I mean, from the time I was an undergrad and then, of course,
#
going to get my Ph.D., I've always hung out with non-economists as well as economists
#
and, you know, expanded my horizons that way and, you know, broaden my reading that
#
way. And I wouldn't continue to do it.
#
I mean, my job is in the research department of the World Bank, but I'm also part of the
#
Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, which is a collection of philosophers and
#
political scientists and sociologists and psychologists and so on.
#
So I love that. I once described it as if economics is the rhythm, that's the melody.
#
And so I wouldn't do it any other way.
#
So I consciously try, I don't even try very much.
#
It happens naturally and organically to have to have circles of friends, acquaintances,
#
people I can debate with on all sides and music, of course.
#
Tell me about the musical journey.
#
You know, what often happens in life is when we are young, when we want to do something,
#
we want to do something with the aim of achieving something and not for its own sake.
#
Right. And if you want to be a filmmaker, you will dream of making films that in your
#
case, because you're into art cinema, I guess, winning at Cannes and Venice rather than
#
the Oscars. But you have those sort of goals that I will do this.
#
I will do that. And then as you grow older, I think some of us on that journey figure
#
out that the goals and shit don't really matter.
#
It's a joy of doing something and just immersing into it.
#
That is the whole big deal.
#
And, you know, in your arc, what I found really interesting is that, you know, in your
#
mid 40s, you start learning Hindustani classical music, you learn it very seriously.
#
You find one guru for Drupad, then you find another guru, Pandit Rajshekhar Mansoor
#
in 2013. And you and there is almost a sort of a devotion to that, which I find really
#
beautiful because it's not goal directed in terms of achieving some particular thing.
#
You just love it. You're immersing.
#
You're you're kind of getting better.
#
So tell me more about that aspect of life.
#
Like, you know, why did you come back to Hindustani classical so late in life?
#
And, you know, how do you when you think of your own self actualization or self
#
fulfillment, it is obviously clearly not in terms of just your job important as
#
network is. So, you know, how do you think about these things?
#
No, thanks. I mean, so my interest in music goes back to my early childhood.
#
Both my parents were very much interested in it.
#
My mother studied sitar with one of Ravi Shankar's students for a little bit, and
#
she had a lot of musician friends.
#
So I remember as a child, it must have been six or seven visiting Ramran
#
Pandit Ramran's house and him showing me how to play the sarangi.
#
And I realized it was too difficult for me.
#
So I ran away. So, you know, that kind of thing.
#
So I grew up then in college.
#
There was I went to St.
#
Xavier's College in Bombay and there was something called the Indian Music Group.
#
And of course, my classmates were Taufik Qureshi and Fazal Qureshi and all these
#
guys. So I was in that world in addition to the film classmates.
#
And we used to organize concerts, hang out with just the music people.
#
And they had this lovely music room full of recordings, you know, and of course, the
#
concerts. So it's been a longstanding interest and always been a bit of a regret
#
that I never took that seriously.
#
So actually, I started training first when I went to Chicago as a postdoc in 1990.
#
That was my first job at the University of Chicago.
#
And there was a wonderful man that is still there, Dr.
#
Tapan Bhattacharya, who is from the Patiala gharana.
#
So I started taking lessons with him for a couple of years for the two years that I
#
was there. So that's where it started.
#
Then it ended because, you know, I just didn't have any time to practice and all
#
that. Around 2007, my first marriage ended.
#
So it was part of the healing process.
#
I said, I've got to start taking this seriously.
#
I started hunting for a teacher.
#
And then I met Shubha Shankaran, who is a very dear friend, still remains a very dear
#
friend. And she was a Ustad Imrat Khan student and then a surabhar player.
#
And then she started studying dhrupad and became a dhrupadya.
#
So I started studying with her very seriously.
#
And the thing with her is, you know, she had her previous life in addition to being a
#
musician. She was a computer programmer and a computer engineer.
#
And she worked for digital and so on.
#
So very precise person and not at all a precise person.
#
So her sense of teaching was basically first to get your sur right.
#
You know, and that was the that was that constantly every time she heard a little
#
bit of variation, you're going off there, come back here, come back.
#
That sort of really got to me.
#
And I found it extremely healing in that time.
#
Then around 2012, I think my cousin Usha, who was a student of Pandit Raj Shekhar Mansoor,
#
And somehow, luckily, knowing I mean, I was already, you know, no spring chicken.
#
He said, OK, come and study with me.
#
So every time I was in Bangalore, I would go morning, evening, study with him.
#
And that continued from 2012 till just before the pandemics around 2019.
#
I was looking at my music notes and the last lesson was 2019.
#
And then the pandemic stopped and he died at the end of the pandemic.
#
Unfortunately, we lost him.
#
So, you know, it's not one of those things.
#
I mean, I love Hindustani music.
#
But I know less about Carnatic.
#
But Hindustani music for me is, you know, I listen maybe two, three hours a day while
#
I'm working and all that.
#
So it was a way of entering to me.
#
And remember, I remember when I was in St. Xavier's,
#
they used to have something called Malhar, which was music concerts around Republic Day.
#
And every year Malik Arjun Mansoor came and Rajshikar Mansoor was his Sangat.
#
I mean, he came with him.
#
So I was introduced to my guru then from as an audience member.
#
And I went with my friend Aditya Goenka for the first time.
#
I mean, we saw Malik Arjun Mansoor.
#
Aditya is a professor at the University of Birmingham.
#
And I was talking to him about it recently.
#
You know, just he comes on stage and he opens his mouth and you're in a different universe.
#
You just transported somewhere else, you know,
#
and it's like, what's happening to me?
#
You know, I just, that, you know, because this Jaipur Atroli Gharana,
#
which he had Malik Arjun Mansoor himself, his soot is so perfect.
#
He pulls you in and then he's like a method actor.
#
He's a different person with every raga.
#
And his sense of rhythm is extraordinary.
#
So everything comes together.
#
There was nothing like it, you know.
#
So I was hooked from that time on.
#
And of course, all the greats used to come to Bombay in those days.
#
They're all passed now.
#
It's just, I mean, the senior dagger brothers, I mean, one of them was still alive.
#
The other one had passed away.
#
Of course, Ravshankar Ali Akbar Khan, you know, all the great ones were there.
#
M.S. Subbalakshmi, you know, and that really got to me in a big way.
#
And that's when I really got hooked.
#
So it's been a part of my life, at least as a listener.
#
To me, studying music is not about being a performer.
#
It's about getting to be a better listener.
#
You know, and now I'm 60 years old.
#
I find that I've listened to things that are now long gone memories.
#
They're just recordings, you know.
#
And I still have these buzorglog guys to know who's to listen to the great ones.
#
Amir Khan, all these people who I never met, right?
#
So I think that is, yeah.
#
So it's been a very, very, it is a very important part of my life.
#
You know, you wrote an essay on Pandit Mansoor and also a moving obituary in scroll.
#
And in that obituary, you mentioned that the first time you went to meet him,
#
he said that, look, I'll take you.
#
But my condition is that you've got to do every single thing I tell you.
#
You've got to follow the process and all of that.
#
And I was struck by how there is a life lesson for learning in that also.
#
That when you learn something, you have to, in a sense, devote yourself to the craft unquestioningly.
#
And later, the beautiful stuff that happens, happens later, happens afterwards.
#
But initially, you have to just put yourself through those spaces,
#
even if it seems like drudgery or boring at times and whatever.
#
So what do you think of that?
#
Like, what was your experience during that learning process?
#
And am I overthinking it when I say that as a metaphor
#
that can apply to anything you learn anywhere?
#
I mean, so Rajshikar Mansoor never taught ABC stuff.
#
He assumed that he would know the basics.
#
And you knew Drupad when you went to him?
#
No, Drupad is nowhere near that.
#
I mean, I knew Sarangama and all that, right?
#
What he basically said was, look, I mean, he didn't say this.
#
It was implicitly implied.
#
The reason I'm teaching people like you,
#
because you don't want to be a professional musician.
#
So you're going to listen to whatever I say.
#
What he was obsessed with was the gharana.
#
Because he felt that the dilution of gharana was a terrible thing.
#
I mean, I agree and disagree with him,
#
but he felt very strongly about that.
#
And his gharana was Jaipur Atharvati.
#
And so he wanted to be sure that everybody he taught
#
was dedicated to preserving that gharana.
#
And that gharana basically is different from the other gharanas
#
in its utter and complete reliance on the bandish
#
as the core of where you go from.
#
You don't learn the raga first and then the bandish.
#
You learn the raga through the bandish.
#
That way it's like Carnatic music.
#
And then, of course, the elaboration, the improvisation,
#
the upaj as they call it, all of that happens via the bandish.
#
So he actually also told all of his students, not just me,
#
that while we were studying with him,
#
we couldn't listen to any other gharana.
#
So I was allowed to listen to Kesar Bhai.
#
I was allowed to listen to Moghubai Kurdhikar.
#
I was allowed to listen to Malik Arjun Mansoor, of course.
#
But I could not listen to Kishori.
#
Because he felt she had gone away from the gharana.
#
And he tells this story about how Moghubai Kurdhikar,
#
Kishori's mother and guru,
#
asked Malik Arjun Mansoor to talk to her daughter
#
when she went off and became a rebel.
#
He said, please bring her back.
#
Look at what she's doing.
#
So he gave us an example of how even her own mother
#
thought she had deviated from the gharana.
#
So God knows if that's true.
#
Stick within the gharana.
#
And there is a lesson there,
#
which is necessary for somebody like me who's a wanderer.
#
I have a very short attention span.
#
So for me, it was immense training to be stuck there.
#
I didn't start listening again to other musicians
#
till he passed, actually.
#
And then now, of course, I listen to everything again.
#
But that particular period that's getting steeped in that
#
It's a part of my life that is very important to me.
#
That period particularly.
#
And I wonder if there's an analog there
#
with the other part of your life.
#
For example, I think the steeping in the gharana
#
is super important to really understand it
#
and to know it inside out.
#
But it's also important to let other winds blow in,
#
as it were, and listen to other stuff.
#
And I wonder if that can also apply to the social sciences.
#
Like, among your papers, one I most enjoyed reading,
#
and I just think it's a masterpiece,
#
Can Economics Become More Reflexive?
#
Where the argument you make is that,
#
where these weren't separate social sciences.
#
You know, you referred to Charles Booth
#
making the poverty maps of London a century and a half ago.
#
And it's, you know, there's qualitative stuff,
#
there's quantitative stuff, there's data,
#
there is what would be called anecdote,
#
or you could also talk of them as human stories,
#
and all of it is creating this rich tapestry of understanding.
#
And the central case that you are making is that,
#
after that, we've gone into all of these different silos,
#
that sociology has become one thing,
#
economics has become one thing,
#
with a disregard for the qualitative,
#
and putting the quantitative on a pedestal.
#
Anthropology has gone in different directions,
#
and it often seems that these don't even speak to each other.
#
So does that same gharana metaphor work,
#
that to get methodological rigor,
#
it is important to have training in one of these,
#
but to really make something out of that,
#
you should open yourself up and let the others...
#
In my social science work,
#
I think that's absolutely right,
#
the Guruji wouldn't like that metaphor.
#
Yes, I mean, thank you for mentioning that paper,
#
that actually is my favorite paper that I've ever written.
#
My wife tells me I always struggle with writing,
#
it takes me a long time,
#
that one apparently sat and banged out,
#
I don't even remember writing it,
#
I just sat and banged it out in one week.
#
My friend Ashwini Deshpande,
#
who you know, she was editing a book,
#
and she wanted me to write something along these lines,
#
it just came out of me.
#
Coming to that subject,
#
around the 1920s, 1930s,
#
is when the serious divergence between the disciplines
#
really starts becoming very strict.
#
particularly after the Second World War,
#
with the coming of people like Paul Samuelson, Kenneth Arrow,
#
all of whom were wonderfully broadly read people,
#
that's the interesting thing to remember.
#
The two great economists that we can think of at that time
#
were Kenneth Arrow and Paul Samuelson,
#
and if you actually read that,
#
I think they're very broadly read,
#
but they're also brilliant mathematicians.
#
So they brought that into economics,
#
that mathematizing of economics,
#
particularly Samuelson wrote a book
#
called The Foundations of Economic Analysis,
#
which revolutionized economics
#
in showing that economics could be done
#
really well with calculus.
#
There were people like Jemons who did that before that,
#
but he really put that on,
#
you know, made it fashionable.
#
What happened with that?
#
And then, of course, Keynes,
#
who never mathematized anything he wrote,
#
he was very good at it,
#
he wrote a book on probability theory,
#
he knew his math, but he never did that,
#
he never went in that direction.
#
But his sort of successors,
#
Lawrence Klein, a bunch of people,
#
Paul Samuelson himself,
#
started mathematizing Keynes.
#
And then that became the way you did economics,
#
and I think I have no problem with that,
#
I've done some of that myself,
#
but when that becomes the only way you did it,
#
that's when the problems start, yeah?
#
We're sitting in the Mercator Center,
#
which I think is still old fashioned in that way,
#
it sort of mixes things.
#
And I was deeply influenced
#
by my grand uncle who was a student of Keynes,
#
So anyway, so that has stayed with me
#
and it's been an interesting journey
#
in the sense that I work,
#
one of my co-authors is a fellow called M.R. Sharan,
#
who you might, he's written a beautiful book,
#
anyway, that's another story.
#
And when we work together,
#
we work together on Zoom,
#
and I once said, I'm not an economist,
#
and he got very mad at me,
#
of course you're an economist,
#
but I don't think of myself as an economist,
#
I think of myself as a social scientist,
#
mainly because I feel a bit rejected by economics,
#
I mean, I don't want to make this sound too grand,
#
but it's been a struggle,
#
it's been a struggle to persuade economists,
#
even in my own department,
#
that I'm a serious economist,
#
because I do this kind of stuff,
#
that deviation, that's the problem,
#
it's not punishment is too strong or whatever,
#
all that is not the problem.
#
It is the perception that economics is this,
#
the old days, but particularly less so now,
#
the application of mathematical theory,
#
with quantitative data.
#
That is slowly changing now,
#
because of behavioural economics,
#
because of Texas data work,
#
but it's still dominant in the discipline.
#
So I don't know if that answers your question,
#
but I've always rebelled against that,
#
because I think it is just empirically wrong,
#
it just doesn't make sense to me.
#
If our job is to understand societies,
#
understand human behaviour,
#
to try to find ways of making people better off,
#
or making societies better off,
#
how can we think that there's only one narrow way of doing
#
that makes no sense to me, right?
#
And so that logic, unfortunately,
#
I think a lot of people share that logic in economics,
#
but they're constrained
#
by needing to make a career in that discipline,
#
and they get, so when they deviate,
#
Yeah, no, that's very resonant,
#
and it strikes me that,
#
I just thought of the blind man and the elephant,
#
and it is like the economist will see only the trunk,
#
the sociologist will see only the tail,
#
and there is a great danger in saying this is all there is,
#
and you can become the world's best expert in elephant trunks,
#
but that doesn't mean you know the elephant.
#
I'm interested in the why of this,
#
looking at just human behaviour,
#
in fact, through the lens of economics,
#
through trying to understand incentives,
#
why has these shifts taken place
#
in each of these social sciences?
#
Is it that once you get systematized into something
#
that is taught in a university,
#
that is part of academia,
#
then all the incentives force you to conform
#
to one particular dominant fashion,
#
to the extent that other fashions completely disappear,
#
and that, you know, like econometrics took over economics,
#
that one becomes a dominant strain,
#
and soon, you know, the past is washed away,
#
and there's a homogenization,
#
there's a flattening sound,
#
and that's all there is.
#
Yeah, so that's a good question.
#
I don't think there's one why.
#
There are a couple of different whys.
#
Let me talk about economics.
#
I know less about the disciplines.
#
I mean, if I talk, I'll be talking as a lay consumer,
#
so let me talk about the discipline I know.
#
In economics, it's basically physics envy,
#
you know, and it's kind of sitting there saying,
#
we want to be a science.
#
We're not just a social science.
#
Social sciences are somewhat lesser than science,
#
so we want to be science.
#
How do we know how to do science?
#
I mean, those are the days of the Manhattan Project
#
and all that, you know,
#
so coming from World War II,
#
all these Oppenheimer and all these guys
#
have become, you know, the big gurus.
#
We want to be like them.
#
So we're just as good as the mathematics.
#
The economists who started all of this.
#
So let's start introducing that economics,
#
make it more scientific.
#
That is then turns into a Nobel Prize of economics,
#
Memorial Prize in Economics,
#
Swedish Bank Memorial Prize in Economics,
#
whatever you want to call it.
#
I think that's been not a good thing
#
because it has reified that way of thinking.
#
And if you look at the rationale
#
for the Nobel Prize in economics,
#
and it first came in 72 or whatever,
#
it is basically because this is the most scientific
#
of the social sciences.
#
So that then awards these prizes,
#
but there are a few exceptions,
#
and there are some exceptions,
#
but they award it to people
#
who have mathematized economics,
#
Arrow, Debreu, Samuelson,
#
all of them being amongst them.
#
And what then happens is that they start,
#
that starts dominating the editorial boards
#
filtering into what you're taught in class.
#
For instance, the history of economic thought
#
stopped being taught in most economics departments
#
about 40 years ago, 50 years ago.
#
there was no history of economic thought.
#
Which I think is a mistake.
#
I got history of economic thought as an undergrad
#
because I went to St. Xavier's College,
#
Bombay University, we got this.
#
most economists I know,
#
again, with the exception of people
#
in the Mercator Center where we sit,
#
don't know much about the history of thought.
#
why you're doing what you're doing.
#
This is the way we do it.
#
And of course, the latest version of that,
#
which I think Lan talked about with you,
#
is this business of trying to become
#
Everything becomes a randomized control trial.
#
Everything becomes a behavioral experiment
#
because you're obsessed.
#
Economists have for a long time
#
been obsessed with causality.
#
So that becomes a thing.
#
You have to start looking for stupid old metaphor
#
for what was under your light
#
because that's what you can identify really well.
#
Which basically means that
#
it's almost like a hegemonizing thing.
#
You know, it's a hegemonizing logic.
#
And as Kuhn said, it's a paradigm.
#
You know, and you cannot break that
#
because even if you want to,
#
you get deeply punished.
#
I know several people who, like me,
#
were, you know, trying to deviate away
#
and couldn't find jobs.
#
You know, they'd go into other things.
#
They quit economics after the first year
#
because they can't stand it.
#
I have a wonderful friend, Nepali guy
#
called Pratyusha Ontha.
#
He also started his PhD in economics
#
He was three, four years younger than me.
#
And after the first year, he gave up.
#
I don't want to study this stuff.
#
He went to history, got his PhD.
#
He's now one of Nepal's leading intellectuals.
#
But he just wanted to study economics.
#
And there are many people like that.
#
Not as successful as Pratyusha
#
in that alternate career.
#
But there are many people like that.
#
So that, I think, is sort of the reason.
#
It's the logic of a profession.
#
It's the logic of a paradigm
#
that is then professionalized,
#
which makes it difficult to deviate
#
and then attracts people like that.
#
So people attracted to economics
#
were those who were good at mathematics.
#
Your GRE score in mathematics
#
had to be at 99 percent.
#
Otherwise, you're not going to get
#
into the top economics department.
#
So that's the person it attracts.
#
It doesn't attract somebody
#
who may be more sociologically oriented.
#
Now that's, again, I think we're reaching
#
a point where that's slowly changing
#
because of these sort of new developments.
#
But it has been the case
#
for the last, you know, since the 78 years.
#
And what is the cost of this?
#
Like one beautiful sentence
#
in that paper of yours,
#
which I think is a masterpiece
#
because it's so clearly written.
#
It's not like an academic paper.
#
But one quote I picked up from there
#
which really spoke to me was
#
the methods lead the questions
#
where you're making the point
#
that if you restrict yourself
#
to one method of inquiry,
#
you can only ask a set of questions
#
through that method of inquiry.
#
And therefore, I would think that,
#
you know, the pursuit of truth,
#
all of these fields emerged
#
in the pursuit of truth
#
give you different ways of arriving at it.
#
But if you restrict yourself
#
to one particular sort of method
#
of arriving at the truth,
#
then you are asking questions
#
that are more and more constrained
#
and it really becomes difficult
#
to get a sort of a holistic understanding.
#
Yeah, I'm absolutely right.
#
It's the tail wagging the dog, right?
#
so concerned about making a career,
#
We all have to make a career.
#
We have to make livings.
#
means you cannot go somewhere else.
#
that I work with a lot of young people
#
I sort of let's go in that direction
#
and then I have to check myself.
#
Hey, they're not me, you know.
#
They're starting their careers.
#
And I've been accused, by the way.
#
I'll never forget this.
#
A very famous Indian economist,
#
told two people who worked with me,
#
He will take you along the wrong path
#
and you won't get a job.
#
And I'm not going to mention names,
#
This famous economist is actually right
#
because it will harm them
#
because they will not be able to find jobs
#
in order to find your job,
#
a job as a good economist,
#
of doing all these methods
#
and you have to flash your stuff,
#
And so a ballet dancer,
#
the Bharatanatyam dance has to do in Rita.
#
You know, they have to go really fast.
#
You have to show your technique is fantastic.
#
What happens in that process
#
is a whole bunch of interesting questions
#
and they cannot get asked
#
with those methods, right?
#
And because you cannot deviate
#
from that set of methods,
#
Kaushik Basu made this point
#
interestingly a long time ago
#
a lot of important issues
#
don't come into economics
#
because we have to be so concerned
#
with modeling everything, yeah?
#
I mean, basic, basic stuff, right?
#
but he made the following point
#
that he is that core of philosopher
#
and he says something along these lines.
#
that I had to show people
#
that I was a good economist.
#
the only reason I'm taking seriously
#
is because I've proved myself
#
better than anybody else, yeah?
#
And I made fundamental contributions
#
You look at his Nobel Prize citation,
#
there's none of this philosophy stuff comes out.
#
It's all his economics,
#
you know, all this stuff
#
is what he won the Nobel Prize for,
#
not for his philosophy, right?
#
Which is what he's known for now.
#
he was able to manage a career
#
and becoming a great proponent
#
and exponent of both types of thing.
#
And it takes a genius like Sen
#
to be able to pull that off.
#
affects the questions we ask,
#
I mean, for obvious reasons, right?
#
And I think the problem I have is,
#
who cares about whether a discipline
#
It's the influence economics
#
That's where I start getting really,
#
I sit at the World Bank
#
and you see every economics fad
#
affecting every policy decision.
#
So I've been there long enough
#
to now see three economics fads go past.
#
Structural adjustment in the old days.
#
Then they came and they started
#
RCT stuff has taken over.
#
So what is evidence-based now?
#
It's only if it passes the test of an RCT
#
Otherwise, it's not good evidence.
#
I mean, you get tired of this, right?
#
The fads affecting people's lives
#
because the obviousness,
#
these are not good methods
#
There are other things also.
#
But it's like, I mean, for me,
#
the way I disagree with Lant
#
are evil in themselves.
#
I think they are a method.
#
It's like the standard tooling
#
in any social science, the regression.
#
So that dominance of the method
#
then affects people's lives.
#
really, really getting worried.
#
is that if one way of thinking
#
like inky development, as he calls it,
#
crowds out other ways of thinking
#
there's a danger there.
#
there's anything wrong with them,
#
the whole pie, as it were.
#
That I 100% agree with.
#
Well, Lant in his writing
#
is a lot more stringent on that point.
#
there is a point to be made
#
obsessed with causality,
#
but they would do causality badly.
#
So I need to make that point
#
because it's very important.
#
So you would, you know, run
#
some sort of regression
#
with national level data
#
and you make these big grand claims
#
over something or the other.
#
I mean, I could run another regression
#
get completely the opposite result.
#
So you cannot make causal claims
#
when you cannot show causality properly.
#
So if you want to make causal claims,
#
you have to follow these methods.
#
Only point I'm making is
#
why be obsessed with causal claims?
#
is sometimes extremely rich,
#
nothing causal about it,
#
just watching how things happen.
#
the obsession with causality,
#
is that it took us away
#
as I say in that reflexivism paper,
#
connecting with the people
#
That word again is the problem.
#
It's a word in economics and psychology.
#
Those are the people we study.
#
They are down there somewhere.
#
studying them like some Greek gods.
#
what we're trying to study
#
and build it from there,
#
ask questions that are important on the ground.
#
the greatest exponent of that
#
in my view is Jean Drez.
#
That's how he does for a living.
#
And he's a good economist too.
#
I want to double click on something else
#
because there's something
#
that I think about a bit.
#
that Amartya Sen is a great philosopher.
#
That's a fundamental way
#
I think of him more than his economics.
#
And if you think of philosophy,
#
when you study philosophy,
#
you do study the history of philosophy.
#
That's the first damn thing you do
#
because it is important
#
because the world is complex
#
because nothing is settled
#
and you go in with that humility
#
and therefore you have to
#
And philosophers in a sense
#
are proto-scientists or proto,
#
they are asking the questions first.
#
And I think there is value
#
as thinking of themselves
#
as fundamentally first a philosopher
#
and then everything flows from there.
#
And I guess all of these people
#
we would think of as renaissance men
#
who you mentioned like Keynes himself
#
had wide ranging interests
#
and they brought it all to bear
#
on the way they saw the world.
#
And are there fewer of them?
#
obviously there's a selection effect
#
that if I look back on the past,
#
I'll obviously see the guys who were.
#
And when I look around me today,
#
I'll see the vast swaths of mediocrity.
#
But what is your sense that
#
does the system disincentivize you
#
from wide ranging interests?
#
and again, an orthogonal question,
#
we are shaped into what we do.
#
And when you talk about your students
#
that you now worry about
#
taking them in a wrong direction,
#
that wrong is from a perspective
#
of whether they live a goal-directed life
#
or the goal is to get ahead
#
But if their goal is to,
#
you know, be better thinkers,
#
understand the world better,
#
then your direction is absolutely right.
#
in that particular career game,
#
the academic circle jerk,
#
of the shaping of the self?
#
who are naturally inclined
#
to becoming Renaissance people?
#
Or is it that the system
#
sets powerful incentives in place
#
so we will have less of them?
#
that comes from those incentives.
#
if the incentives are structured somewhere,
#
you're going to find people
#
who are good at those incentives
#
entering that system, right?
#
So that's a basic story.
#
The best economists to this day
#
are those who are widely read.
#
And I can think of many.
#
I mean, I just mentioned a few,
#
Debraj Ray, Kaushik Basu,
#
people who are Indians,
#
but, you know, Daron Ashimoglu,
#
all these are Jim Robinson.
#
very widely read people.
#
They're brilliant people,
#
I mean, there are many,
#
But in their academic expression,
#
they have to be extremely strict
#
they will not get published.
#
You see, so unless, I mean,
#
and they finish that journey.
#
Otherwise, in order to make that career,
#
you have to publish a certain way.
#
that you are very good at what you do.
#
So that's entirely structured
#
And those incentives are not
#
set by some grand figure or something.
#
evolves to a certain point.
#
My sense is that economics
#
are slowly changing now.
#
One is that there are new methods
#
The analysis of text data,
#
which opens up, for instance,
#
top economists in top places
#
have started analyzing text data.
#
So in macroeconomics, for instance,
#
Shilha gave a presidential address
#
and wrote a book on that subject.
#
That's slowly coming in,
#
which I think is enormously healthy.
#
I wish it was everywhere.
#
It's only in macro right now.
#
Hopefully it'll come other places.
#
Of course, behavioral economics
#
which has its own set of problems
#
we can talk about, I think.
#
because there were certain people
#
who were able to bring in,
#
but do it within economics
#
and show economists the value of that.
#
So that will slowly change.
#
It's not quite a paradigm shift.
#
It's a movement from the core
#
of what a discipline is
#
Again, I want to reiterate this.
#
None of this would matter.
#
Who cares about where economics goes?
#
It's the effect it has on policy
#
that at the end really bothers me.
#
So and why should policy,
#
particularly policy and development,
#
that's what we care about, right?
#
Why should that be so deeply affected
#
of the economics profession?
#
Let it go on its journey.
#
And that's its journey.
#
Why should that affect policy?
#
That, to me, is the dangerous part.
#
Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
#
I mean, one rant I keep going about
#
many people think that,
#
oh, economics is just about
#
and why does the GDP matter?
#
to make that connection
#
that economics has a humanitarian impact.
#
and the other way around.
#
And that's why they sort of matter so much.
#
We'll come back to all of this,
#
including to this paper,
#
but let's go back to your life.
#
Tell me about your childhood.
#
What were your early years like?
#
What was the mahal at home, as it were?
#
I was born in Bangalore,
#
but that's because my mother
#
came to Bangalore to give birth.
#
But I'm really a Bombay kid.
#
And my father worked for
#
and all those companies in Bombay.
#
he's very much with us.
#
Got his, was one of the early batches
#
from the Delhi School of Economics.
#
His father was a stenographer
#
in the Bombay High Court.
#
So he really was the guy who made it out.
#
And one of the reasons he did it
#
was because of my grandmother.
#
His mother's brother was VKRB Rao,
#
who was the Doinam Indian economist.
#
He was a great inspiration to my father.
#
So my father always, you know,
#
and because he had came from a poor family,
#
he couldn't get his PhD.
#
He decided not to do that.
#
He got admission to Harvard and all that.
#
But he said, no, I have to be here
#
and I have to make a living.
#
was a completely self-made man.
#
He was, he ran away from home
#
and he was 12 and went in the,
#
there's all mythology a little bit,
#
I think some of it is true.
#
He badly stowed away on a ship to Aden
#
When he was 14 or something
#
and then learned the stockbroking business from there.
#
Never went to school, never finished.
#
and started the first stockbroking business
#
in South India called Lokur & Company.
#
I don't know if it's the first.
#
One of the first called Lokur & Company.
#
That was 19, I think it starts in 1922,
#
And he became very well off
#
and, you know, used to drive
#
all these fancy foreign cars.
#
the freedom movement came along
#
and he gives up everything to the cause.
#
And so 1942, I've got a copy of,
#
he has a copy of The Economist of Khadi by Gandhiji.
#
And I've got a notated, his notated version of that.
#
And the chapter on trusteeship,
#
he goes on and on, keeps underlining.
#
So that's, that was what he did with his wealth.
#
He gave it all away, basically.
#
He died bankrupt in 1972.
#
So my mother grew up as a bit of a princess
#
in that world, plus with ideals.
#
One thing my mother did not know how to do very well
#
She wasn't, my dad came from a very middle-class background
#
and, you know, expected certain things
#
because of the gender inequality.
#
So they got divorced when I was 11.
#
And that was a huge thing for me.
#
I was sent to boarding school when I was nine,
#
luckily to a place called Rishi Valley
#
where I was exposed to Krishna Murthy
#
who's had a profound influence on my life
#
as he has on anybody who's encountered him.
#
And, but I think the marking moment for me
#
was my mother, after she got divorced,
#
she came back to her father's house.
#
Her father dies a year later.
#
So there are financial constraints.
#
And consequently, you know, she becomes a divorcee
#
as it's said back in the 70s.
#
She was, it was 1975, all this happened.
#
She comes to Bangalore in 74.
#
74 later than the year my grandfather dies.
#
So she then struggles like crazy.
#
And she was already, she had a very sort of vital
#
but volatile personality, right?
#
But she sort of slowly starts going over the edge
#
and she was, I mean, all this diagnosis came later
#
but she was clearly, she became schizophrenic basically, right?
#
You know, and as schizophrenics do,
#
alienated a lot of people around her
#
because that's the nature of the disease.
#
So, and then because of that divorce,
#
because of other things,
#
I started doing very badly in school.
#
So my father got worried and he said,
#
the Rishi Valley is not the place.
#
Rishi Valley is a do what you want kind of place.
#
and you would watch the sunset every evening
#
where the thing called last thatch, a beautiful thing.
#
The classes would be held outside.
#
If you didn't want to go, you didn't have to go.
#
And my father felt that wasn't for me.
#
So he sent me to a military school called Sanar near Simla,
#
which was the worst experience of my life.
#
It was absolutely horrible.
#
I was the darkest kid in class.
#
And secondly, you know, I was a,
#
You know, I'm no good at these things.
#
And there was a very famous movie,
#
now a famous movie star called Sanjay Dutt,
#
who you might've heard of, who was my senior.
#
And he bullied the heck out of me, right?
#
Every time I see Sanjay Dutt, I gag, you know,
#
I remember this guy is the bully.
#
So, you know, I saw that Munna Bhai and all that.
#
I said, this is Sanjay Dutt.
#
You don't know the real Sanjay Dutt.
#
Anyway, so there was a lot of bullying.
#
There was a lot of violence.
#
So, and I was going through a very, very tough time.
#
Thankfully, there were a couple of lovely teachers.
#
Manjari Khan was one of them who really noticed this
#
and, you know, took me on and which was really lovely.
#
Matthew Parel, two people, I'll never forget.
#
And so, you know, I guess I've grown up with this thing
#
and my mother essentially struggled with money as well, right?
#
And so it has always been in my head
#
that I need to make enough money to take care of her.
#
So that then leads to my college where I went to Xavier's,
#
which was the most beautiful experience of my life
#
because I went to this place that was totally opening.
#
I never went to class for economics,
#
but I read everything and they encouraged me to read everything.
#
And, you know, and they didn't seem to mind.
#
I got 49% in my first year, 49% in my second year.
#
And then for some reason, my teacher, Professor Nadkarni,
#
nominates me for the best student of the college award.
#
That's what the principal said.
#
My God, what are you doing?
#
How can you give it to this guy?
#
Because third year results hadn't come.
#
And somehow, you know, that happened.
#
And I was like, okay, I'm being myself, watching movies,
#
I was going to music, all this.
#
And I just felt very, I mean, the confidence came back.
#
But then, you know, always this business of trying to be free
#
in how you think, but needing to do it practically
#
because of the need to make enough money
#
to take care of my mother.
#
Because as a schizophrenic, as it happened later,
#
I'm glad I went that way because she needed,
#
there was a fair amount of money needed for the care,
#
for the, you know, she had to live alone,
#
you know, all those things.
#
So that disciplined me, I think.
#
If that discipline wasn't there, I don't know what would have happened.
#
I would have certainly joined films.
#
There's no question about it.
#
So that shaped me a lot.
#
I mean, without getting into great details,
#
that's sort of the basic gist of my childhood.
#
And then I went to the University of Pennsylvania
#
after Xavier's for my PhD,
#
which, you know, opened up this different world of,
#
and I was no good at mathematics,
#
even though I was okay in my GRE, obviously, because I got in,
#
but I didn't know all the math that they needed.
#
So I had to sit and go from, I mean, you know,
#
one consequence of going to Sanar is that I was so depressed,
#
So 11th standard, I was doing mathematics.
#
I got 7% in my mathematics.
#
So I didn't know what calculus was.
#
And then I plunged into grad school in economics.
#
So I had to sit and study all this stuff and come up to speed.
#
We were sort of in the first year of differentiating,
#
you know, optimizing Hamiltonians,
#
you know, just dynamic programming.
#
So I had to do all this stuff.
#
I'm never still not very good at it, but I can manage.
#
You know, so I got to that point.
#
And then there, I was apprenticed to Jerry Berman
#
and Anil Deolalekar as a research assistant.
#
And that really taught me the practice of looking at data.
#
That's where all that came in.
#
And they were very encouraging, particularly Jerry,
#
He said, you know, study whatever you want.
#
And then I studied the economics of dowries there
#
because he had some data and all this.
#
And then things proceeded.
#
I went and got my postdoc.
#
I became a postdoc at the University of Chicago
#
and then at the University of Michigan,
#
where I started expanding the interdisciplinary work.
#
So it's always been part of me from the beginning.
#
The PhD was very strictly economics.
#
There was one chapter in Brazil that I wrote with a friend of mine
#
that was mixing qualitative and quantitative methods.
#
It was, you know, she had done a lot of qualitative work in Brazil,
#
but that never got published.
#
The work that did get published was the straightforward economics work
#
on odd questions like dowry.
#
Like, you know, I did my paper on vegetarianism.
#
Yeah, I love the title of your, you know, the dowry paper,
#
The Rising Price of Husbands.
#
Couple of things to double click on.
#
First, it's, you know, I'm really sorry you had to go through that
#
as a child about having your mom with schizophrenia.
#
It's a subject that has actually come up on this podcast.
#
Jerry Pinto and I discussed raw mothers.
#
A recent guest of mine also spoke about how it really toughened her up
#
because in a similar situation, her mom was a single mom
#
and she had to look after her.
#
And so she had to get a job.
#
It shapes you in that way.
#
And do you feel that at some level that that played a foundational role
#
that you can't, in a sense, be an intellectual dilettante for too long,
#
that you can't just follow curiosities,
#
that there is a sense that I have to start earning a living,
#
that if I can't grok the math, I don't have a choice.
#
I've got to stay up nights and I've got to figure it out.
#
I'm not a disciplined guy.
#
I mean, in fact, at this stage in my life, I'm quite indisciplined.
#
It disciplined me, you know.
#
I suspect, you know, if I was, interesting,
#
I was on a, there was a family marriage a few months ago, last May.
#
And I was talking to all my nieces and nephews
#
and many of them are diagnosed with ADHD.
#
And then I said, man, this must be a family thing.
#
So I bet you that I'm in that, I've never been diagnosed,
#
but I'm sure I'm there.
#
So I find it very difficult to focus, concentrate, discipline.
#
The need to make a living that, I mean,
#
it's an anxiety, you know, that if I don't succeed,
#
my mother will be on the street, you know.
#
I mean, as to go to Bangalore on holiday and stay with her
#
and watch this up close, I'll never forget once, you know,
#
she couldn't pay her, she belonged to some club
#
and she couldn't pay the bill.
#
And she goes, I must have been 16,
#
she goes to that billing office and say, you know,
#
this was her little, a little sort of enclave in the club,
#
you know, it was a haven for her.
#
And she had to, she was kicked out because she couldn't pay the bill.
#
And, you know, watching that,
#
having a sort of a basically a bankrupt parent walking out
#
and remember that accountant guy then doing a rude gesture
#
behind her back, watching that.
#
And I was a big guy, I was 16,
#
I was already five foot nine or something.
#
I just socked him in the jaw.
#
I just, I couldn't, you know, I couldn't take it.
#
And they didn't do anything, nobody,
#
because people saw what had happened.
#
And I said, how dare you do that?
#
You know, and so it did two things to me.
#
It made me disciplined.
#
Maybe enormously conscious of gender issues,
#
because everything my mother went through was a gender issue
#
But why did she reach, go over the top?
#
It was because she was a divorced woman in the 1970s
#
in the Brahmin part of Bangalore, yeah.
#
Which means that she was going through hell, you know.
#
And I don't blame my father for this at all.
#
The divorce happened long before that.
#
But, you know, watching my mother go through this
#
was wrenching, disciplining, shaping, you know.
#
And it also, I think, on a very personal level,
#
made me a very awkward person, you know.
#
And it took a long time for me to get out of that awkwardness.
#
But, so it had a profound effect on my life as I think about it.
#
And I've studied a lot of weird things,
#
but I've never studied mental illness,
#
mainly because I feel it'll be just too close.
#
And it'll just, it'll be too hard for me to do it.
#
Tell me about the effect of Jiddu Krishnamurthy on you,
#
because you said you discovered him in school
#
and it meant a big deal.
#
You know, so my father's family is, you know,
#
they're a Matunga family.
#
So, very disciplined, very goal-oriented, you know.
#
It's a very, you have to succeed, success, success, success, you know.
#
And, you know, so everybody's like that without exception.
#
And I go to the school where I walk in,
#
I went with my friend, Garendralal,
#
you know, we both joined on the same day.
#
He came for other reasons, I came for other reasons.
#
And just watching this gorgeous place,
#
firstly, the beauty of the Rishi Valley.
#
We were privileged to be there.
#
So Rishi Valley in those days was not the Rishi Valley of today,
#
where, you know, Rahul Gandhi was supposed to go and all.
#
It was a relatively inexpensive school.
#
And even if you couldn't afford it,
#
they would give you a scholarship to go.
#
Of course, we had the money, but others didn't.
#
And it didn't have that prestige aspect to it, right?
#
And then for two months a year,
#
Jiddu Krishnamurthy would come into campus.
#
I remember the first time I saw him,
#
he was just walking along a path near some trees.
#
He was a profoundly beautiful man.
#
I mean, in the sense of there was an ethereal quality to him.
#
And he would dress in these starched, crisp kurta pajama.
#
He would walk past and he would watch him and say,
#
I mean, there's something special about that.
#
You're a nine-year-old kid, you don't know anything, right?
#
You just see this figure.
#
And he would then come and he would talk.
#
He was talking in those days about the Vietnam War.
#
And I didn't understand 90% of what he said.
#
It just went over my head.
#
I would just sit there.
#
There's a picture that showed up on the internet recently
#
of me watching it from the audience.
#
It was just an atmosphere, a mahal in some ways.
#
I think the one thing I took was
#
society imposes constraints on you that sort of make no logical sense.
#
Because at the end, the search for meaning
#
is about breaking out of dogma and finding your own journey
#
in ways that help you, in effect, realize the ultimate reality within yourself.
#
And that's basically his basic message, at least my interpretation,
#
that's his basic message, at least my interpretation of his message,
#
Be free in how you think, in what you observe,
#
and how you experience the world.
#
And of course, many people have interpreted
#
Krishnamurthy in many, many different ways.
#
He's had an influence on everybody from George Lucas
#
to all kinds of people, right?
#
The famous young Indiana Jones.
#
Krishnamurthy is a character who meets the young Indiana Jones.
#
So he's had a profound effect on a lot of people.
#
And for me, the effect was, at this very young age,
#
getting this atmosphere of freedom,
#
and of not tolerating people who impose idiotic constraints on you.
#
And to this day, that remains with me.
#
So that's been a huge effect.
#
But also, it's a lifelong quest for a spiritual journey that he put me on.
#
And then I think, at the same time, I'll never forget one instance with him.
#
So the big thing, he would come and give these talks in school.
#
And people would raise their hands to ask questions.
#
And if he called you to ask the question, that was a big thing.
#
So that's a bit of a stupid story, but I should tell it because it's funny.
#
My dad was working in Madras in those years, in Chennai.
#
And he had just become a single guy.
#
He wanted to show his son a good time.
#
He said, you pick your own clothes.
#
You pick what you want.
#
So I said, we went to the beanie shop to buy some material.
#
I'm going to make a pair of pants.
#
And I loved these pants.
#
There was some material which had printed patches.
#
In those days, you'd wear patches.
#
So they were printed patches.
#
I wanted brown color pants.
#
Made a pair of jeans with that, with bell bottoms and everything.
#
I was very proud of those pants.
#
So I was wearing those.
#
One of the times Jiddu Krishnamurthy was there, I raised my hands.
#
I'd never raised my hand before.
#
I must have been 11 years old or something.
#
And the greatest achievement for a kid in Rishi Valley was being called to the stage,
#
to the podium where Krishnamurthy was sitting.
#
They said, he jesters to me to come to the stage.
#
So I'm like, oh man, wow.
#
So I walk slowly to the stage.
#
He puts his hand next to him.
#
He says, sit down, sit down.
#
And he's looking at me for what seems like 20 hours,
#
but it must have been 30 seconds.
#
And of course, Krishnamurthy was a very silent man that he would speak.
#
Young man, where on earth did you get those awful trousers?
#
So this man was so elegant.
#
I don't know if that taught me any life lesson, but it teaches me that this man was human.
#
My wife and I recently went to Ojai in California where he lived and went to his house.
#
And he was a very human guy.
#
And he lived for many, many years with Mary Zimbalist.
#
And they didn't have a physical relationship, I don't think,
#
but they were roommates in that house.
#
Mary Zimbalist was the wife of, I think I forget his name,
#
Sam Zimbalist, who was the producer of Ben Hur, which is a great movie.
#
This Zimbalist made so much money from Ben Hur, and then he died.
#
He died before the movie won an Oscar.
#
In fact, his wife went to Mary Zimbalist and picked up the Oscar for him.
#
And she inherited all the Ben Hur money.
#
And she gave all that to Jidya Krishnamurthy.
#
So Jidya Krishnamurthy's life has been financed by Ben Hur.
#
That's something people don't quite know.
#
Yeah, so he's had a tremendous, tremendous influence on me, I think,
#
much more in hindsight than then, because as I think about how I function,
#
it's very much in what had been unconsciously brought to me as a child.
#
And I've read a few things by him, of course, since then,
#
but it's not his writings, it's his being, his personhood in some ways,
#
and what he would say in his lectures.
#
I'm struck by what you said about that awareness that you got from him,
#
that you have to free yourself of these constraints and so on.
#
And when I look back on sort of my growing up,
#
I think of a whole bunch of whether you call them constraints or circumstances
#
that we normalize, we take them for granted.
#
And it is only with time that one by one we peel the layers off.
#
And I'm curious about what layers peeled off for you earlier
#
than for others through the childhood.
#
I'm guessing seeing the way your mom was treated would have peeled back
#
layers of gender, perhaps layers of caste,
#
since you mentioned that that was a Brahmin-dominated area.
#
And so what other layers were there?
#
I think what I too often find young people doing,
#
and it's a trap that people can get into,
#
is that they don't question anything around them.
#
So you just get drawn into a groove almost by default.
#
You assume this will be my career, I will get married, I will have children.
#
You lived that groove all your life and you never kind of question it.
#
But it seems that through circumstance, you were questioning some of that stuff.
#
So tell me about that process.
#
That's a really good question.
#
I see why you're such a good podcaster.
#
I think the first thing is when I had a very happy young childhood.
#
I had two extremely loving parents.
#
And that fell apart when I was around eight, seven, eight.
#
My parents used to fight like crazy.
#
They would throw plates at each other, they would scream at each other.
#
It happens to a lot of divorced kids.
#
So you try to leave the house.
#
So at seven or eight, I would leave the house.
#
We lived in a building in Nippon Sea Road in Bombay.
#
I would run down and I would then hang out with all the kids in that area.
#
But the kids were not the building kids.
#
They were the kids of the drivers and the cooks
#
who lived in the servant's quarters downstairs because they were the kids around.
#
So I got into that gang and they were all kinds of kids.
#
I mean, who knew who's a religion, caste, you don't know anything about.
#
They were just kids, right?
#
But then they were in the habit of going to the nearby Kirana shops
#
and stealing chocolates, stealing BDs.
#
So I started doing that with them.
#
And that's when I think my parents decided to send me to boarding school.
#
So watching me go through that.
#
But what it indicates is the end of security.
#
I don't want to make a too big a deal of this,
#
but I think it's really, really important in not having a safe place.
#
There's nothing is safe except you.
#
You're the only safe place, right?
#
And then, of course, in boarding school,
#
my safety came from Rishi Valley itself, from the school, from the nature of it.
#
And the message there was be free, right?
#
So I've been brought up, because it's my mother's life,
#
to sort of wonder about societal constraints and what they tell you.
#
The things that are given to you are actually not what they seem, you know?
#
So why follow them? Question them.
#
You may take a few things, but why question them?
#
So, I mean, that's been enormously important to me.
#
Part of that interesting, it can go in both ways, by the way.
#
It doesn't necessarily have to go in a liberal way.
#
That's the point I want to make.
#
And that later on, I mean, I'm going forward to my college days.
#
I took a class of sociology of religion
#
with a very wonderful sociologist called Father Masiya,
#
who's also the director of the college.
#
He's a Jesuit and a lovely man.
#
And he started teaching Radhakrishnan and Hinduism and everything.
#
And, you know, and I was missing my Rishi times a lot.
#
And I started reading all these things.
#
I started reading the Gita.
#
I started reading Radhakrishnan.
#
I started reading the Upanishads.
#
And that brought me to Hinduism
#
and has made me an extremely, I don't know what, devout,
#
but a very observant Hindu, right?
#
I mean, so that's very much part of me,
#
because to me, that's a freeing experience.
#
Because steeped in that, then I can expand the world.
#
And at the end, Jiddu Krishnamurthy, I'm realizing, was extremely...
#
I mean, he never spoke about this explicitly,
#
but he is at the end of Vedantin.
#
That's where he's coming from in the end.
#
It's a modernized version of that, right?
#
So it leads you in all kinds of directions.
#
Of course, in my work as well, that's where I'm coming from.
#
And the practical side comes with needing to make a living.
#
So what I think my specialty has been
#
is trying to have all this while not going crazy.
#
While trying to make a living and staying in a way
#
that there is money in the bank
#
and I can take care of my mother and so on and so forth.
#
I'm very fascinated by how people find different kind of anchors in their lives.
#
And I'm guessing that at one level, therefore, Hinduism
#
and getting into that was also an anchor for you.
#
And when you call yourself a Hindu, someone to whom the religion means something,
#
I'm guessing you don't mean it in the sense of a literal belief in the religion
#
or even a belief in God.
#
That's not necessarily, I mean, that's completely orthogonal.
#
In fact, I would imagine it's more about the philosophy
#
and what it means to you and the different ways in which it anchors you.
#
Can you elaborate on that?
#
I mean, obviously, the philosophy is what matters the most.
#
I read the Gita every day.
#
I start my day with that.
#
I start my day with puja to Lord Krishna.
#
So it's part of what anchors me.
#
I never talk about this.
#
In fact, when people come home and they see a puja room
#
and a puja area in my house, they're a little bit shocked.
#
Recently, my wife and I went to the Udupi Krishna temple.
#
She's not like this at all because it meant something to me, you know,
#
I mean, I think because of whatever I went through as a child,
#
my father is like this, but not at all.
#
You know, he's not a religious guy.
#
In fact, my grandmother was very religious,
#
and I think all of this comes a little bit from that.
#
It's a sense of security that that provides.
#
But to me, Lord Krishna is about the Krishna of the Gita.
#
And the bhakti comes from there.
#
And of course, music leads me to bhakti as well.
#
You know, all the bhakti poets of Karnataka,
#
I strongly feel a lot of kinship with Dasarapada Guru,
#
as they say, the songs of Dasars.
#
And as it turns out, because of my exposure to the Mansur family,
#
the Lingayat tradition and the Basvanas vachanas and all of that,
#
you know, Aka Mahadevi, all those vachanas also mean a lot to me.
#
And of course, the great traditions of the Hindi traditions of Krishna poetry
#
and Geet Govinda from Jaideva, from Orissa, all that are very much a part of me.
#
So all of that, in the sense, it's anchoring the part that I refuse to tolerate
#
that doesn't have to go with bigotry.
#
That's the part I cannot stand, yeah.
#
I can be all this, but then there are great traditions from Islam,
#
the great traditions with the idea of caste and so on.
#
These are things that we can have this and not have to have that.
#
Do you think that just as you know, I wonder about the inevitability of certain movements,
#
like earlier we were talking about the about academia.
#
And I wonder if it is inevitable, given incentives and given the way
#
we are as human beings, that splintering would happen,
#
that each discipline would go into its silo.
#
And in a similar sense, I wonder if it is inevitable,
#
given our tribal hard wirings and so on,
#
that religious traditions would often sort of progress in such a way
#
that the worst aspects of them become highlighted and pick up in popularity.
#
Like with Hinduism, the aspects that have actually gotten amplified in recent decades
#
are these worst aspects of bigotry and casteism and so on and so forth.
#
So, this debate I actually have with my wife all the time.
#
She is of the perspective of what you're saying.
#
She believes that to be true.
#
I'm a little more hopeful in the following sense.
#
I think I've been, like so many of us Indians,
#
deeply influenced by Gandhiji and his approach to these things.
#
And I think he showed us a way.
#
And we have to modernize his message in some ways.
#
We have to think of what the relevance of his message is for today.
#
I mean, if you look at the research on this,
#
two friends, Ashu Varshney's book on Hindu-Muslim relations
#
and his finding that when they traded,
#
when they engaged in commerce, that resulted in greater harmony.
#
Then a former student of mine and now a great friend,
#
Somitra Jha was at Stanford.
#
He's built that into a whole career of empirical work, causal empirical work,
#
showing that in the poor cities of India,
#
which had a lot of Hindu-Muslim trades, you have much less violence now.
#
And that trade happened centuries ago.
#
That tradition still continues.
#
It's the interaction that makes the difference.
#
When you're able to see people as human beings
#
But you're quite right.
#
The tendency we have as human beings is to separate.
#
And I think the internet's amplified that.
#
So what I spend a lot of my time doing nowadays
#
is to think about what institutions can we build
#
so that we're able to listen to the other.
#
And if you think of the rise of the MAGA movement in the United States,
#
of even the Hindutva in India,
#
people have these points of view.
#
We cannot think that we are better than them
#
because they have that point of view.
#
We have to find ways of engaging that treat everybody equally.
#
And that's, of course, Charles Taylor's politics of recognition.
#
How do we engender that politics of recognition?
#
I think the first thing, as many of my liberal friends
#
have a problem seeing somebody who expresses a fondness for Hinduism
#
as being somebody they can hang out with.
#
Which is why I try to say I'm a Hindu, because I am.
#
That doesn't mean that you shouldn't be hanging out with me.
#
Similarly, I'm going to hang out with my relatives and friends
#
who are maybe former RSS,
#
because I'm going to find the point of commonality I have with them.
#
How do we build institutions along those lines?
#
Which is why I did this book with Parmita Sanyal called Oral Democracy,
#
which is really a way of...
#
We have this magical institution in rural India called the Gram Sabha.
#
And you read those transcripts,
#
you see people of all kinds coming in
#
and engaging in equal rhetorical terms with the other,
#
whether they're lower caste, upper caste, different religions, gender or even.
#
So there is some hope there, I think.
#
So the rest of my life, I want to find ways of researching,
#
building, thinking about how we can do that better.
#
because something that I've been thinking about for a long time
#
and something that I keep talking about on the show as well.
#
So those are my listeners for whom I'm repeating myself, please excuse me.
#
But it's about the distinction between the abstract and the concrete.
#
I did an episode with Aanchal Malhotra
#
and she had done this book on partition
#
and looking at people's memories of partition.
#
And she had gone over to I think Lahore or Karachi, I forget where,
#
and she was talking to a family who had crossed over.
#
And at one point they got carried away in the emotion
#
and they were saying, Hindus are like this, Hindus are like that.
#
And then they notice she's sitting there and they say,
#
tum nahi beti, tum theek ho.
#
And for me, it's a great story that brings about
#
that in the abstract you can hate someone,
#
but in the concrete, when they are in front of you,
#
it becomes practically impossible to hate them, right?
#
And what I feel is happening in modern life
#
is that we are retreating more and more into the abstract
#
through our black screen, through our black mirrors, right?
#
Where often, even if you and I are sitting together at a cafe,
#
we may be sharing into our respective phones.
#
And in our respective phones is not the real world,
#
but the abstract space where we don't see, you know,
#
the person as a person with all their multitudes
#
and all the beauty that every human being contains.
#
And, you know, you asked as a rhetorical question,
#
what can we do to ameliorate this?
#
You gave one concrete example of the Gram Sabha.
#
But, you know, what are the other possible ways
#
out of this is something I think about.
#
So this is my CIFAR group,
#
which is called Boundaries, Membership and Belonging.
#
They're all people who think about this question.
#
So we are all writing a paper on the subject.
#
We've not, I mean, it's still got some ways to go,
#
so I can't really talk much about it.
#
But I think that's the big challenge of our times.
#
I can tell you what is not working.
#
I think the way we currently structure democracy
#
is not working, yeah, because it's become
#
the first past the post sort of electoral democracy.
#
And that brings out the worst in us.
#
And of course, it's then dominated by corporations
#
and elites and everybody has to suck up to everybody else.
#
And in India, there's an enormous amount of corruption
#
There are many other bad things.
#
But this is another thing, you know,
#
because you have to otherize
#
and engage in clientelist politics in order to win
#
in many, many democracies, including the United States.
#
So I think there's some, and let me, if you don't mind,
#
I want to indulge me on that trajectory of thinking.
#
What is democracy after all?
#
I mean, fundamentally, and John Elster made this point
#
beautifully some time ago, where he says,
#
that it is basically a version of collective action.
#
And we have a diversity of people.
#
We have to make things happen.
#
We have to do things, policy.
#
So we find ways of collectivizing.
#
Electral democracy is one route towards that,
#
which is you elect a representative
#
who then represents your interests.
#
So Elster calls it aggregative democracy,
#
you know, where you're adding up votes.
#
And of course, first past the post
#
is the way we normally do it.
#
It is the simple way of simple majority,
#
which then has all these perverse consequences.
#
It's what I've been calling the three Cs,
#
capture, clientelism, corruption.
#
They're all consequences of it.
#
Now, why I'm fond of deliberative democracy
#
is because I feel that face-to-face interaction
#
humanizes people, is exactly what you're saying.
#
And by encountering the other in a way
#
that is materially important, which means
#
that to make a decision that's going to affect your lives,
#
you have to get along at least in one,
#
there's one point of intersection.
#
Many points of non-intersection,
#
there's one point of intersection,
#
and that point of intersection
#
means that you see them as human beings.
#
People have criticized that by saying,
#
they may be subject to elite capture and so on.
#
We don't see much of that going on in Gramsavas in India,
#
maybe because they're non-consequential,
#
I don't know, but we don't see evidence of that.
#
What I think we have to find ways of doing
#
is bringing the electoral
#
and the deliberative forms of democracy together.
#
That's what is the answer.
#
How we do it, where we do it,
#
there's an enormous amount of thinking
#
that needs to be done there.
#
There are some countries,
#
and one country I do want to visit is Estonia,
#
which apparently is learning how to do this
#
in the digital sort of virtual environment.
#
I was just in Switzerland,
#
which has been doing this for a long time,
#
but the Swiss evolved it over many centuries
#
of various things that they went through.
#
I think there's a lot to be done
#
and a lot to think about in this direction,
#
about how do we make collective decisions,
#
how do we govern ourselves
#
in ways that don't result in this separation.
#
I think that's the big challenge
#
that we all have to worry about
#
along with climate change.
#
Ironically, I think if we figure this one out,
#
we'll also be able to cope
#
with climate change a little bit better
#
because at least at the local level,
#
we'll know how to collectivize.
#
So I think climate change will actually help that process
#
because we are all suffering the same problem
#
that will bring us together,
#
One of the sort of important insights
#
in your work for me when I was going through it
#
was this distinction between electoral democracy
#
and deliberative democracy
#
and how we don't pay enough attention to the second.
#
But just to think about the first for a moment,
#
it often strikes me that
#
in practically every area of the world,
#
we are left with forms or system designs
#
that are an artifact that came about
#
because of an earlier time and an earlier need
#
For example, the first-past-the-post system
#
is an artifact of a completely different time,
#
you know, and there are many different kinds
#
of proportional representation which can help.
#
You can design different kinds of incentive systems in them,
#
so you can actually incentivize moderation and dialogue
#
and away from extremism and so on.
#
I think one system that's been proposed
#
is that people rank one, two, three,
#
and then, you know, you look at the weightages.
#
So the polarizing guys who are like number one
#
and number five won't win so often
#
as the guys who are two and three more often.
#
So that's like one example of incentivizing moderation
#
and appealing to whatever.
#
But, you know, what's happening is that
#
the world is changing incredibly rapidly.
#
You know, technology is empowering individuals
#
and globalizing them even if nation-states
#
become more and more insular in their politics.
#
And, you know, by the time a new design comes up,
#
the world will have changed again.
#
And a new design is extremely unlikely to come up
#
because no one who is benefiting from the current system
#
is ever going to, you know, give away any of the power they have.
#
Like I did an episode with JP Narayan
#
where he said that he, circa 2004-5,
#
actually got all the parties to agree
#
to proportional representation
#
and only Sonia Gandhi stood against it.
#
And her logic must have been that,
#
Why should I give away some of it?
#
And which is ironic, you know, given the current situation.
#
So what is your sense of that?
#
Because it's not just politics.
#
It's not just electoral systems.
#
Across everything, I see the mainstream has broken down.
#
You know, all existing forms are an artifact,
#
but nothing has taken its place.
#
But, you know, in the context of democracy, what do you feel?
#
There is an ideal world, isn't the practical world, right?
#
And I want to stay with the practical world.
#
And the practical world, at least as a human being,
#
there's nothing that I personally can do
#
about fixing national electoral systems.
#
I don't know how to do that.
#
And I don't know if anybody is going to listen to me anyway.
#
I'll give you a small example on proportional representation.
#
I was in Uber yesterday, actually.
#
And the Uber driver was a woman who lived in Anacostia in D.C.
#
And she was just complaining about Biden and all this.
#
You know, she was a delegate, a last term, a democratic delegate.
#
I don't know why she's driving an Uber,
#
but I didn't get into that story.
#
But she was complaining because D.C.
#
is going to deduce proportional representation.
#
And she was seeing my people.
#
So the way D.C. structures wards seven and eight,
#
we call them ward 15, when you add them together,
#
the poorest wards of the city.
#
And they're largely African-American.
#
And she was saying, my people just are confused by this.
#
They don't know what to do with it.
#
They don't know how to work with it.
#
So there's another problem with all of this.
#
Simple majority is easy.
#
Proportional is very hard to get.
#
How do I game the system?
#
How do I represent my interests?
#
Even though it shouldn't be, but it is.
#
I said, what about, can't we have information sessions and so on?
#
She said, no, that's not going to work with my people.
#
But D.C. again, there was a mayor called Anthony Williams 20 years ago.
#
That was when D.C. for a long time was under receivership.
#
Congress would run D.C.
#
There was no democratic election.
#
And Anthony Williams was the guy who was appointed by Congress to run the city.
#
And then when elections came, he did a great job.
#
Then he sort of persuaded them to bring elections back.
#
And he ran for mayor, and he won the first time.
#
He was actually a mixed race guy, but he won with a white vote.
#
I think he was adopted by a white family or something.
#
I forget his personal history.
#
But anyway, he won with the white vote.
#
Ward 7 and 8 did not touch this man.
#
He starts introducing what he calls town halls in Ward 7 and 8.
#
And I was sent by the bank to help with this at some point.
#
Where in these wards, you would have these Gram Sabhas.
#
They would discuss their priorities.
#
Mayor would be there sometimes.
#
Maybe sometimes he would have been sitting in one of those town halls.
#
And at a table, I was the only Indian guy there.
#
And the only person who recognized me as an Indian came and sat next to me
#
was the great Marion Barry.
#
Marion Barry was a great man of D.C.
#
And he had a very, very interesting up and down life.
#
You know, Dr. King really was very fond of India.
#
So we had that conversation.
#
We went to Gandhi and all that.
#
But what was very interesting to me was how that ability of Mayor Williams
#
to go and talk to these people and learn the needs of the ward
#
and then change his policies along the line
#
helped him in his next election.
#
He won an overwhelming majority even from Ward 7 and 8.
#
So there are electoral gains to doing deliberation.
#
That's the lesson I took from that.
#
Since then, it has stopped.
#
They don't do that anymore.
#
So I feel that connection, going from the bottom up,
#
being reflexive in policymaking, bringing that bottom up perspective
#
into how you make decisions really makes a huge difference.
#
There are practical advantages to that.
#
So that then leads me to the second point.
#
And of course, I've done a lot of work on the panchayat system in India
#
because I think it's an example of that.
#
I think at the local level, we can make it happen.
#
I think that's where I'm coming to.
#
I don't know what to do at the national level,
#
but I think at the local level, we can happen.
#
At the local level, I'm doing some work in Nepal along those lines.
#
Because in Nepal, for instance, what we're finding
#
is the effects of climate change on people's lives.
#
Whether you go to the high mountains, you go to the hills,
#
or you go to the valley side,
#
the effects of climate change have been devastating on all three levels.
#
And floods, landslides, hugely confusing weather patterns
#
so people don't know how to farm.
#
But that local, strengthening the ability of local people
#
to deal with it by collectivizing themselves.
#
As we walked down to the studio, we saw a picture of Eleanor Ostrom
#
bringing her perspectives in.
#
But Ostrom, of course, she was talking about not democracy
#
but of collective action largely.
#
But I think if we institutionalize it,
#
we get a form, a constitutionalized form of democracy.
#
Now, the constitutionalization is important.
#
We have it in India in the 17th Amendment.
#
You have it in Nepal with the 2015 Constitution.
#
The other countries, Switzerland, of course, has it.
#
Many countries don't have it.
#
That's something we can fight for.
#
If you constitutionalize it, then it's there.
#
And I think the answer to your very important question,
#
that's one answer that I can give.
#
Others may have other answers.
#
That's one answer I can give.
#
To what extent does a part dependence of the early design of the system,
#
a lot of which happens to happenstance shape it?
#
In the sense, I had an episode with Subhashish Bhadra
#
where he made the interesting point
#
that if you look at our different constitutions,
#
the American Constitution is the way it is
#
because of the circumstances of its founding.
#
So there's an emphasis on individual liberty.
#
Federalism is a big deal.
#
Whereas when the Indian Constitution happened,
#
the nation hadn't come together yet.
#
The sort of the fast-track colonization of hundreds of princely states,
#
that Sardar Patel and V.P. Menon carried out was just underway.
#
There were riots all over.
#
The Constituent Assembly sits in Delhi.
#
You don't know if the center will hold.
#
So there is that centralizing impulse.
#
And as a result, power is centralized too much.
#
And as a result, the federalism is really a federalism only in name.
#
It's not decentered enough.
#
Plus, there is a simultaneous sort of debate
#
between Gandhi and Ambedkar on the role of villages
#
where Ambedkar quite correctly points out
#
that hey, villages are a sink of localism and ignorance and blah, blah, blah.
#
And therefore, local self-government is too dangerous.
#
There'll be elite capture.
#
The upper caste will just, you know, continue a pace
#
and we can't have that.
#
And that, you know, that logic is completely sound.
#
And therefore, we centralize.
#
And now it's like, you know, and there's a part dependence to that,
#
to the nature of the state.
#
And that breeds all the vices that are currently sort of wrong with our system.
#
So how do we think about this?
#
Like far as the 73rd Amendment went, you know,
#
Shruti Rajgopalan, our friend, had an episode with me where she spoke about
#
that even within a city, you know, the people I vote for
#
don't have the power to help me.
#
And the people who have the power to help me, they don't need my vote.
#
You know, just because of the way state politics is structured
#
is a great episode in Urban Governance.
#
I'll link from the show notes.
#
So what is your sense of that, that is this inherently
#
a more frustrating and difficult exercise in India than in the USA?
#
There are many questions in that one.
#
Let me start with one and we can expand on that if you're interested.
#
And let me focus on the India case.
#
I mean, the US is another story.
#
The magic of the 73rd Amendment is that it brings to...
#
Actually, I just finished a paper on this called 250,000 Democracies
#
with M.R. Sharon and Siddharth George.
#
So if people want to read that, they may find that interesting.
#
The magic of the 73rd Amendment was that it brings in both Ambedkar and Gandhiji.
#
Because it has within rural India, reservations for women,
#
reservations for Dalits, reservations in many states or other backward castes,
#
and of course, reservations for scheduled tribes.
#
And now that we have more than 30 years experience on this,
#
we can see the results of that effect.
#
And the basic story with reservations is as follows.
#
And I'm not talking about reservations for jobs, just for these political reservations.
#
Initially, it results in a lot of tokenism.
#
Over time, people take power.
#
And it sort of starts really showing a more equal politics.
#
Different states are on different trajectories on this,
#
but I think that's where it's going to evolve.
#
That's the broad thing.
#
Also, because I think it has, in the Constitution, the idea of the Gram Sabha.
#
So they will elect their local representative who they know personally
#
because it's a small space, and they have to meet in meetings
#
where the fellow has to encounter them and have a discussion with them.
#
There are other problems with it which people can read that paper for.
#
So, yes, Ambedkar was right.
#
But I think the Semitera Amendment addresses Ambedkar's concerns
#
while bringing in Gandhiji's ideas.
#
And remember, it's not just Ambedkar who was against villages.
#
Nehru was also against it because he was interested in socialism
#
and this macroeconomy and socialist growth, in effect, was his idea.
#
And he wanted big industries and all that.
#
So he wasn't terribly interested in this.
#
He was not a village guy.
#
He was an upper-class, upper-caste city guy.
#
He evolved in a different direction.
#
I remember your wonderful episode with Ramchandra Guha.
#
He talks about this, about his evolution.
#
But, I mean, the way I see Gandhiji is sort of like this NRI
#
who comes back and then, of course, discovers India, right?
#
And he discovers India through a chap called Henry Main.
#
Karuna Mantena, who you might want to have as somebody you talk to,
#
has written beautifully on this.
#
And Henry Main, I mean, I'm digressing,
#
but the thing for the East India Company was...
#
Okay, if you don't mind.
#
The East India Company, the closest analog to the East India Company,
#
other people have made this argument, today, is the World Bank, okay?
#
Which is largely an institution still steeped.
#
I mean, the East India Company was explicitly colonial.
#
The World Bank is still steeped in the memory of colonialism.
#
We can talk about that if you're interested.
#
But John Stuart Mill was the chief economist of the East India Company.
#
It was his father's job, James Mill's job.
#
And he's a genius, so he spent two hours doing his job.
#
Rest of the time, he wrote all his books.
#
Henry Main was in the research department of the East India Company.
#
And in particular, he was the guy who was tasked
#
with looking at rules around land and property rights in India.
#
In the process, he did an enormous amount of field work.
#
You know, there's also the time of Charles Booth and Charles Dickens.
#
So there was a lot of this business,
#
you need to go to the ground to understand what's going on.
#
He was one of those guys.
#
He goes and discovers all these village democracies in India.
#
And he says, what the heck is going on here?
#
I'm walking everywhere.
#
And Mill talks about village democracies, he sees it.
#
Mill gets influenced by them and goes and says,
#
hey, we need to start thinking about democracy's grassroots.
#
And Mill actually writes about this.
#
I think, I don't know if this is explicitly true.
#
Main discovers these village democracies and what we found in our paper.
#
And there's a lot more work to be done on this.
#
I don't know if I'll do it or somebody else will.
#
About the history of local democracy in India.
#
And it goes back to the Rig Veda.
#
I mean, you'll see hints of it right back from there.
#
Of this idea of collective action coming via deliberation.
#
It's an old idea in India.
#
In fact, Thomas Droughtman has an article in the India Forum about this.
#
So I think we need to take that very, very seriously.
#
Democracy is as much of the subcontinent as it is of the Greek islands.
#
Who knows who got it first?
#
I'm not going to make any claim on that.
#
But it certainly happened at the same time.
#
So I forgot my train of thought.
#
I think where we need to take that seriously is
#
how do we turn that into something that doesn't fall into the Ambedkar trap, if you wish.
#
And I think that's what the Semitera Narendra has done effectively.
#
Because there is no question.
#
Whatever endowments we have a democracy in India,
#
old democracy with the electoral and deliberative,
#
goes back we have from the Cholas, from the Vijayanagara period.
#
There are lots of things.
#
It was dominated by elites, dominated by apakas.
#
You don't even hear of Dalit in that process.
#
So that was the mistake.
#
And Ambedkar was right about that.
#
So, you know, just thinking aloud,
#
it strikes me that when we speak of democracy,
#
actually it's two separate things.
#
There's a democracy of a nation state,
#
which is sort of imposed from the top down
#
and a bunch of constitution makers will sit down
#
and make a constitution and design a system and etc, etc.
#
And its origins very much lie
#
in the origins of the nation state itself,
#
which is a violent origin,
#
that you're collecting taxes
#
and you're sending people to war and etc, etc.
#
And the second vision of democracy is
#
that it emerges from the bottom up
#
as something that is necessary.
#
That you're no longer a tribe,
#
you're gathering in, you know,
#
whether it's with agriculture or whatever,
#
you're gathering in larger groups.
#
How do we manage our affairs?
#
The old ways don't work.
#
And therefore you have your Gram Sabhas as it were,
#
and you have deliberate democracy
#
and it is rooted in the people
#
and therefore it is rooted in the culture.
#
It is a natural way of solving problems.
#
And I think, again, I'm just thinking aloud
#
that one of the tragedies perhaps of our nation
#
is that top down version of democracy
#
imposed a design on a system
#
that, you know, subdued that second bottom up vision.
#
But if I understand you correctly,
#
what you're sort of saying is that,
#
you know, the bottom up vision is just natural.
#
It is already, you know,
#
it's DNA is in the DNA of our culture
#
that it can emerge, that it will work
#
if it's just enabled and given a chance.
#
Yeah, so I'm going to go even further than that.
#
I want to make sure I keep my train of thought here.
#
It's the nature of people who think they're very smart
#
to think they can fix everything,
#
which is what results in top downism.
#
And that top downism goes back to the post Marxian thinking,
#
it goes back to, you know, Keynesian thinking,
#
it goes back to many, many forms of thinking.
#
I mean, we are again sitting in the Mercator Center,
#
Hayek versus Keynes is exactly that debate, right?
#
which means he was a top down thinker.
#
He was a bottom up guy.
#
What does top down mean for a socialist?
#
It is that I am so smart
#
that I can fiddle with the systems to make people better off.
#
I don't care what people think I know better than them.
#
That train of thinking continues to post,
#
I mean, I'm not necessarily saying it's bad or good.
#
I'm not going to make a value.
#
I will make a value judgment there.
#
Right now, I don't want to.
#
If you think about how policy is done,
#
let's say, tax policy or monetary policy,
#
it's all about fiscal policy,
#
any programs and we throw in,
#
what were programs we throw in, you know,
#
whether it's on health and education.
#
It's all about the top working through
#
bureaucratic system to fix things.
#
This is certainly true of India,
#
Karthik's book, of course, talks all about that.
#
Implementation becomes central
#
because implementation is all about the top
#
flowing down to the bottom.
#
And of course, they've been great gains from this.
#
I don't want to deny any of that.
#
There's an even worse version of this,
#
which is what land goes on about,
#
which is that basically,
#
when we are so smart that as social scientists,
#
we think we can do RCT for everything
#
or nudge everything and by using nudges,
#
At the end, this is my problem with behavior.
#
What is the nudge at the end?
#
that I know better than you what is good for you.
#
You read Cass Sunstein on this.
#
He may be a liberal philosopher,
#
He will tell you explicitly.
#
There's no such thing as he writes about liberal nudges.
#
I don't use any such thing because
#
so long as I think I'm better than you
#
then I know what's good for you.
#
Now, it's another story if I say,
#
I need to lose some weight as I do,
#
and I'm going to subscribe to an app or something
#
that's going to help me lose weight
#
because it's going to incentivize my losing.
#
I am choosing the nudge.
#
Nobody's telling me to choose the nudge, right?
#
But when there is a world that says
#
you are poor because you don't sleep enough,
#
that's what my research has found, brilliant research.
#
So I'm going to disperse blankets to all of you
#
and make you sleep better
#
rather than give you some cash, okay?
#
That's telling me my research
#
has shown you what's good for you.
#
So this is very paternalistic.
#
So post-Keynesian thinking is not paternalistic
#
in the sense that it is always rooted
#
And there you can sort of go into, say,
#
look at the Tory sort of labor debate in the UK.
#
But paternalism, what I call new paternalism,
#
is very much driven by universities at MIT
#
and Harvard and places like that
#
that have turned into this causal,
#
the nature of causality.
#
Why are you so obsessed with causality?
#
Because you want to fix things.
#
Why are you doing an RCT?
#
Because you want to fix things.
#
And maybe there's a lot of good in that.
#
But it denies the primacy of the people
#
whose lives you're trying to make better.
#
Don't they know certain things better than you do?
#
That's where the bottom-up comes in.
#
And I think it's been extraordinarily neglected.
#
We talked about the paper on reflexive economics.
#
This is the policy analog of that.
#
How do we reduce the distance between people
#
and what is done to people?
#
I don't think we can make it zero.
#
And most things we can't make it zero.
#
We can reduce that distance.
#
And that's the basic challenge.
#
And I think, as I said,
#
that's what I want to think about
#
for whatever time I have left as a scholar
#
is how do we make that better?
#
The Gram Sabhas are one example.
#
You come to what Nepal has tried.
#
And I think this is a very,
#
it should be sort of studied a lot more
#
what's happening in Nepal.
#
Nepal, as you know, had a civil war.
#
there's a lot of debates about why that civil war happened.
#
But one clear thing is it's a war of ethnicity
#
because Nepal is 300 types of people there.
#
And they were all very sort of geographically located.
#
So at the end, a lot of that war was about
#
the dominance of the newars and others and the ranas
#
and people saying, hey, listen to me.
#
How did they resolve that at the end of the war?
#
They come up with the Nepali constitution
#
that divides up Nepal into 750 something local governments
#
and the central government.
#
And minimizes the role of the state government,
#
what they call the provincial government and the districts.
#
They were very important earlier.
#
So most of the power is now divided
#
between the center and the local.
#
50% of power, you read the constitution,
#
look at the jurisdictions,
#
50% goes to the center, 50% to the local.
#
So it's much better than the Indian system in that way.
#
And the Nepali tradition on participatory democracy
#
In fact, they used to call their democracy the panchayat system.
#
I mean, that was when they still had royalty.
#
They always had a system where within the ward,
#
within the village, people would have collective decisions.
#
And it goes back to the 40s and 30s.
#
I'm actually writing a paper.
#
There's a couple of Nepali scholars.
#
So what the constitution does is to at least have on paper
#
all those institutions.
#
In practice, it is not working.
#
Its practice is not working because at the end,
#
the nature of Nepali politics,
#
which is coalition politics at the center,
#
is what is dominating everything.
#
And local governments are free for all.
#
And some places are great.
#
Some places are terrible.
#
We actually don't know which is good and which is bad
#
because we have no data.
#
I think in Nepal, what needs to be done is better data,
#
better understanding, incentivizing,
#
figuring out what to do better.
#
I gave a talk just last month in Kathmandu on this
#
and trying to strengthen the constitutional processes
#
because the constitution is amazing in that sense.
#
The potential of the constitution is amazing.
#
India, the problem is slightly different,
#
which is we have this wonderful 73rd Amendment,
#
which has been around for 32 years.
#
We completely underfund village governments.
#
So there's a lot of democracy with no money.
#
Mostly, what they do is implement NREG and other things,
#
which is important, but they're implementing shops.
#
Even in that space, they're doing wonderful things,
#
better things than, I mean,
#
we've just finished a paper in Karnataka showing,
#
Karnataka had this very interesting thing happen
#
during COVID, which is the panchayat elections
#
are supposed to be held at the COVID period, 2000.
#
COVID hit, lockdown happens,
#
they postponed the election by two years.
#
Postponed the election by two years,
#
according to Karnataka law,
#
when you postpone election,
#
a bureaucrat takes over the governance of the village.
#
there were about 300 villages with panchayats,
#
one panchayat of three to four villages
#
where we're on a different election cycle
#
for pretty arbitrary reasons.
#
So we're able to compare those 300 panchayats
#
to the others that were bureaucratically run.
#
So we can compare the bureaucratically run places
#
top-down places with the bottom-up places
#
And we find on a variety of indicators,
#
the bottom-up is doing better.
#
Except in, the top-down is doing badly on most things,
#
but they're also not discriminating.
#
The bottom-up is discriminating.
#
So you find that difference,
#
which I think the discrimination part is fixable
#
because we can have incentives,
#
we can have methods to fix it.
#
So I think if you take a practical approach
#
to this very profound problem,
#
we may not be able to solve all of it,
#
but we can make some headway
#
in a new form of democracy
#
that combines electoral with deliberative,
#
understands the Ambedkarian concerns
#
and those apply all over the world,
#
and tries to figure out how to make it better.
#
So I think that's, yeah.
#
In fact, I was, you know,
#
you wrote a paper called
#
The Added Value of Local Democracy
#
on exactly what you're describing
#
and I was struck by this line from that
#
quote, the finding showed at local democracy
#
align spending more closely
#
with citizen preferences,
#
but those gains accrue more to men, upper-caste
#
and other advantage social groups.
#
And it seems that, you know,
#
both Gandhi and Ambedkar
#
could cherry pick part of the sentence
#
and say, see, I was right.
#
And that's exactly right.
#
And I think the big difference
#
and the Ambedkarian perspective
#
is bringing them together.
#
Ambedkar's concerns can be fixed with policy.
#
Gandhi's concerns require a social movement,
#
require a different way of thinking.
#
So, you know, and that's the challenge.
#
I think partly we are at a very early stage,
#
you know, 200 years from now
#
we will have different forms of,
#
if we survive as a species,
#
we'll have different ways of governing ourselves.
#
actually I worry sometimes
#
that electoral democracy at the highest level
#
I think we may well move
#
towards a more autocratic form of government
#
in many parts of the world
#
because people are not finding themselves
#
listened to in the electoral process,
#
many people around the world.
#
And there are many reasons for that.
#
If we are going to preserve
#
some form of citizen participation,
#
we really have to both think and experiment
#
and mobilize towards that
#
because otherwise we're likely to lose it.
#
let's take a quick commercial break
#
and come back more cheerful and well-fed.
#
Have you always wanted to be a writer
#
but never quite gotten down to it?
#
Well, I'd love to help you.
#
I've enjoyed teaching 27 cohorts
#
The Art of Clear Writing
#
and an online community
#
has now sprung up of all my past students.
#
a newsletter to showcase the work of students
#
and vibrant community interaction.
#
through four webinars spread over four weekends,
#
I share all I know about the craft
#
and practice of clear writing.
#
There are many exercises,
#
and a lovely and lively community
#
The course costs rupees 10,000 plus GST
#
head on over to register
#
at indiahankar.com slash clear writing.
#
That's indiahankar.com slash clear writing.
#
doesn't require God-given talent,
#
just a willingness to work hard
#
and a clear idea of what you need to do
#
Welcome back to The Scene on the Unseen.
#
I'm still with Biju Rao.
#
And let's go back to your life now.
#
No, no, I go into these regressions myself
#
because as themes occur to me,
#
I just can't help but ask all these questions.
#
But I also want to know about your life.
#
You've taken us to the point
#
where you've kind of grown up
#
I'm interested in a couple
#
of simultaneous processes
#
when we are around that age.
#
One process is that we feel that anxiety
#
of fitting in with the world
#
and fitting in with the people around us
#
getting their validation.
#
And that is an interesting process
#
and that can play out in different ways.
#
perhaps unexpressed or unbeknownst to one,
#
the quest of finding oneself.
#
What do I want to do with my life?
#
Sometimes you go into a particular stream
#
because that's expected,
#
that's respectable in our times.
#
engineering medical was like the rigor
#
if you're not studying for civil services.
#
And you can get into a group
#
or you can choose what you do
#
depending on what you're good at
#
rather than what you're necessarily interested in
#
without putting too much deep thought.
#
So I'm interested in that shaping of yourself
#
in your teen years, perhaps,
#
along these two dimensions.
#
the two directions in which I wanted to go,
#
or some sort of interdisciplinary social science
#
have been there since I was 17.
#
they were both shaped by very early on.
#
because of my aunt was an actress
#
and my exposure to all of that
#
and to movies therefore.
#
And social science is because of my grand uncle
#
who, so my grand uncle,
#
Viker B. Rao, was one of India's great economists
#
and he founded the Delhi School of Economics
#
and he was Nehru's chief economic advisor
#
all that sort of stuff.
#
And by the time I got to know him well,
#
I mean, I first met him as a child
#
as to be very scared of him.
#
I mean, he would come and just his forbidding presence
#
and he was not very good with children.
#
He had a lovely wife, Kamalanti,
#
who was much more gentle
#
and she was, you know, just wonderful.
#
Anyway, but he was a forbidding presence.
#
But as he got older and became lonelier
#
and I was then in 10th standard
#
and his name would appear in the textbook
#
and he and I have the same name.
#
His name is also Vijendra Rao.
#
And that's not a coincidence.
#
So I would see his name
#
and see, you know, this planning commission
#
or that thing or this thing.
#
I better get to know this guy
#
and I could talk to him.
#
So I started talking to him.
#
And I think he found it very, I mean,
#
very nice that some young person
#
would want to talk to him
#
about his life and about these things.
#
So that was enormously influential.
#
And he was a strong believer
#
that whether the Delhi School of Economics
#
or the Institute of Economic Growth
#
or whether the Institute for Social Economic Change
#
in Bangalore, all the institutions he founded
#
which exist and thrive to this day.
#
He insisted that they be interdisciplinary.
#
That the economics should be very good
#
but they should be sociologists, political scientists.
#
He's the one who brought M.N. Srinivas
#
to Bangalore, for instance, from Delhi.
#
And he is the one who hired M.N. Srinivas
#
into the Delhi School, right?
#
He effectively started the Delhi Sociology Department.
#
And he, and to some extent,
#
I should give my dad credit for this as well.
#
He, my dad was a huge reader
#
and one of the best things we did with each other
#
was to go to bookshops, you know,
#
whether it's Strand in Bombay
#
or secondhand bookshops all over Bombay.
#
And basically, I started by following his interests
#
which were in science fiction and non-fiction.
#
And science fiction I never took to,
#
So that shaped my understanding
#
of how to understand human beings.
#
I could have, for instance,
#
gone in the history direction and stuff like that.
#
But economics, I think moving in that direction
#
was largely my grand uncle.
#
Even though my father's an economist,
#
it was really my grand uncle talking to him
#
and realizing that I am somehow lucky
#
to have this man in my life
#
with whom I'd had many, many hours of conversations.
#
I mean, I wrote a piece about,
#
in tribute to him on his centenary,
#
they had a book that came out.
#
But I sort of realized as I was writing the piece,
#
I mean, there's no way out of that.
#
And that was the age of,
#
between the ages of 15 to,
#
So I guess I was 28, 29 years old.
#
and then when I went to college,
#
I was fooled into what economics was
#
because Bombay University in those days,
#
to some extent it's still true,
#
had a very old fashioned approach to economics.
#
It wasn't so mathematical.
#
There were some of that.
#
But mainly it was reading Marx and Ricardo and Keynes
#
and Smith and, you know,
#
learning about the old models
#
that Bombay University used to produce,
#
the Pyaar Brahmananda's work,
#
I mean, all these great Indian economists,
#
and of course learning about Indian planning systems,
#
These are the people we read.
#
We didn't read so much about Paul Samuelson's work.
#
This came much later to me.
#
And my father, to his credit,
#
once presented me and he said,
#
read this, which was Paul Samuelson's introduction to economics.
#
So that brought me into that world a bit,
#
which I didn't like as much.
#
But I felt, hey, this is fun.
#
You know, this, I can read all this stuff.
#
I can bring everything together.
#
I can do all so many things with this.
#
So that, the issue of making it and so on,
#
being shoved into a certain stream never came up.
#
That I give full credit to my parents.
#
I think my mother, if she had her way,
#
would have wanted me to be an artist or a musician.
#
And maybe if I'd gone to FDII,
#
she would have been happy.
#
But that didn't happen for the reasons I explained.
#
So I never had any doubt that this is where I was going to go.
#
The challenge wasn't making it happen.
#
But I was never, there was no pressure to go into engineering.
#
My father just absolutely didn't believe in that,
#
which to his credit was hugely beneficial to me.
#
How did you evolve sort of your frames of looking at the world?
#
Like when we are young,
#
we tend to kind of grab the first frame that seems to explain everything.
#
And then there is a danger that that can become our one hammer
#
for every nail for the rest of our lives.
#
But when I was in college, I was also reading Marx, as were you.
#
But you move on from there and you look at the world
#
and realize the complexity of the world and grow.
#
So what were your frames and how did those frames come about?
#
Part of it would be personal experience,
#
but who are the influences?
#
Were there any light bulb moments
#
where you learned something about the world,
#
which you still remember?
#
I mean, it goes back to J. D. Krishnamurthy.
#
It's experiential and it is not conditioned by what somebody else gives you.
#
So that I think came to me unconsciously in Rishi Valley.
#
What I was reading, I mean, I was reading everything.
#
I mean, whatever as a lonely child, as a lonely child,
#
It was reading, reading, reading, right?
#
And so I would read, oh my God,
#
I mean, I'd read, I don't know where to begin.
#
Enormous amounts of fiction.
#
Enormous amounts of nonfiction.
#
And not much philosophy and so on until I went to college.
#
And then I got a little bit more social science when I went to college.
#
Because of my father, I started reading the foundation series of Asimov
#
that I got hooked onto.
#
And there's a funny story about that that I'll tell you anyway.
#
And I think what I got very early on because of Krishnamurthy is
#
that as human beings, and also I think,
#
so my father was one of the early proponents of liberalization in India.
#
He ran something called NCR at the same time as Narsimha Rao's prime minister.
#
So he did a lot of the economic analysis for liberalization.
#
So I grew up in that world where we didn't like the idea of the licensed Raj,
#
And I was drawn to people like Smith as well.
#
And, you know, that seemed to gel well with Krishnamurthy
#
in the sense that it is saying leave people alone
#
and have them experience and discover the world.
#
And I actually have not thought about this.
#
I'm thinking about it now.
#
And so maybe I'm wrong.
#
So I'm thinking about it as I tell you these things.
#
I think, you know, it was not just books.
#
I mean, I watched so much.
#
And, I mean, one of the lucky things I have in D.C.
#
is the American Film Institute, which is up the road from where I live.
#
I'm there in 15 minutes, 20 minutes.
#
And you get 70 mm, 35 mm screenings of all the classics.
#
They show Nauras of Arabia every year, right?
#
And in those days, whatever I could watch, I could watch.
#
I mean, remember the USIS in those days had a retrospective on Frank Capra.
#
So I saw all of Capra's movies as a teenager.
#
You know, and these really, the idea of that American idea of freedom
#
really steeped into me as I think about it.
#
But the notion of being in the field and going directly to the field
#
comes from Krishnamurthy, came from reading Gandhiji, who I read from the beginning.
#
You know, I think, I think actually not from the beginning.
#
It was a Gandhi movie, to be honest.
#
I mean, just watching that Gandhi movie got me into Gandhiji.
#
So I read the story about my experiments with truth,
#
absorbed it and got me reading the Gita at the age of 17, 18.
#
Gandhiji did as well as Padmasaya.
#
So all of that, again, to me, the Gita is about
#
understanding the limitations of the senses
#
and trying to figure out the meaning of life by understanding those limitations
#
and about what is self-regulation and all of that.
#
You know, people take different things.
#
What I take, of course, the notion of action that comes from that.
#
So all of that, I think, shaped how I saw the world and it wasn't a particular stream.
#
To the extent that I was surrounded by people like my father and my grand uncle,
#
my version of engineering was perhaps economics.
#
That it was a natural thing to do because everybody around me was doing that.
#
And my father, I remember, made me meet all these economists,
#
you know, that he knew and they influenced me.
#
The other, I mean, thinking of going back,
#
my father had three friends who had a great influence on me as a child,
#
not because I talked to them at great length, I did to some extent,
#
but because they were around and led lives very different from my father.
#
My father is a corporate executive.
#
He made a lot of money, not assets, but he made a good income.
#
One of them was Krishna Raj, the editor of the EPW,
#
who was my father's classmate in Delhi school.
#
And he would come home and I would see him struggling
#
and him and his wife, Maitri Krishna Raj.
#
Both, she's one of the great feminist scholars.
#
He is, of course, the editor of the EPW.
#
And just watching his life, he would come with these, you know,
#
these bata sandals and I was, that's why I wear sandals to this day.
#
So that learning about how he, the kind of dedication he had to his craft
#
and the lack of ego with which you,
#
my dad approached things with a great deal of ego,
#
It was an act of service and that really taught me a lot.
#
K.T. Acharya, Tamu Acharya, who was one of my father's closest friends,
#
who then became, was a nutritionist in the days that I knew him
#
and then became the father of food history,
#
one of India's fathers of food history.
#
He was another childhood friend.
#
He was actually the brother of my grand uncle,
#
Vikar B. Rao's wife, Kamal auntie's brother was K.T. Acharya.
#
So he was another great thing.
#
And the third one was Rajmohan Gandhi and was simply
#
another friend of my father's from Delhi University.
#
And the emergency and what Rajmohan Gandhi had to go through
#
because of he edited Himmat in those days,
#
my father in the time of the emergency lived in Madras.
#
He co-founded the PUCL in Madras in Tamil Nadu with Joe Ramaswamy.
#
My father was the deputy chair.
#
They ran the PUCL and they were doing a lot of stuff during the emergency.
#
And we would get these, you know, things shoved under the door.
#
And I was just, I don't know if this was perception or reality.
#
I was always scared my father would be thrown in jail.
#
And then from the film side, my aunt's friend Snehalatha Reddy was,
#
in fact, thrown into jail.
#
Patabi Ram Reddy, her husband was thrown into jail.
#
Snehalatha Reddy dies in jail.
#
She died shortly after that, yeah.
#
All of that as a child had a great resonant impact on me.
#
So I really, really strongly, I mean, as you're telling me,
#
I sort of, it really made me despise authoritarianism,
#
really made me despise it.
#
And I think my inclination towards this democracy life
#
that I lead comes from there.
#
So the only thing that I think I was perhaps nudged into very strongly
#
was getting a PhD in economics.
#
Yeah, I first read about Snehalatha Reddy and her tragic story
#
in Kumi Kapoor's book about the emergency
#
and pretty heartbreaking and makes a blood boil.
#
From all these people who were sort of, you know,
#
your heroes in different ways, were you also picking up an ethic for living,
#
like a way of living, a value system, like by osmosis,
#
I think one often takes from the people who are around one,
#
you know, an approach towards life.
#
And there's a lot of luck involved there who you happen to be surrounded by.
#
And in this case, it seems that you were surrounded by people who had
#
A, a love of knowledge and B, not a desire necessarily to,
#
you know, indulge in the material life,
#
even though your dad was doing well as a manager, as you've pointed out.
#
And I'll link his great memoir from the show notes.
#
So when you look back today in hindsight,
#
does it feel like that a certain way of living was kind of ingrained in you?
#
Absolutely. There's no question about it.
#
Along with my grandparents, you know, my father's father and mother,
#
who my grandfather, my father's father ran away, not ran away,
#
he had to leave home very early on.
#
He was in Trirangam and Tamil Nadu because his father died
#
and he had to just survive.
#
So and then he married my grandmother and my grandmother's father
#
also B.K.R.B. Rao's father was an astrologer, also a gambler.
#
So whatever money he made, he lost.
#
So they both grew up in poverty, one with the other.
#
So that then made them extremely concerned with needing to work hard to succeed.
#
I mean, that was their focus and that's the Matunga culture.
#
Anybody from Matunga will tell you the same thing, right?
#
That was very much part of my father's family.
#
Mother's family, you know, was my grandfather,
#
who I barely knew because he died when I was 12.
#
But the little bit I knew of him, I saw his idea,
#
the idea of trusteeship was so deeply ingrained in him,
#
trusteeship in the Gandhian sense,
#
that whatever money he made, he was holding in trust.
#
And the fact, and I knew this very well.
#
I mean, he died a broken man because he joined the freedom movement,
#
gave all his money to the freedom movement.
#
And then joined politics.
#
And ironically, in those days, when you join politics, you lost money,
#
because he neglected his business.
#
And he handed the business that was put in charge of one of his nephews,
#
I mean, basically robbed from under his nose.
#
I understand he was two crores in debt,
#
which in those days was a huge amount of money.
#
My uncle, his son, to his credit, you know, paid it all off and revived the business.
#
But in any case, that resonated with me a great deal.
#
My grandfather's example.
#
So the notion that life is not about yourself,
#
life is about trying to do some good,
#
although that was very obviously there, you know.
#
And the life of the mind, which was all around me,
#
I had no inclination to do anything else,
#
but lead a life of the mind.
#
And even as I became a filmmaker,
#
I would have been a life of the mind.
#
Probably I would have made no money.
#
I would have probably died bankrupt myself.
#
So it would have been, you know, then I think,
#
I mean, as I've explained,
#
the need to take care of my mother,
#
feeling that responsibility disciplined me
#
to make sure that I was able to earn a little bit.
#
So that was the counterpoint to all of this.
#
So it wasn't all dispersed.
#
I would have not been a discipline to anything if it wasn't for that.
#
How did going abroad to study change you?
#
Was it, you know, did it come together with the anxiety
#
that, oh my God, I have to make a living.
#
I could have already had a job in India, et cetera, et cetera.
#
So, you know, every Indian economist you'll talk to
#
has a master's from the Delhi School of Economics.
#
That is the economist of my generation.
#
Many of them also Bengali, but that's another story.
#
I did not go to the Delhi School of Economics.
#
Because my father went there and my grand uncle founded it.
#
And I have my grand uncle's name.
#
So I knew I'd go there.
#
I would be expected to perform a certain way.
#
I didn't want any part of that.
#
So when I was an undergrad, I finished my Xavier's bachelor's
#
and then, you know, I decided to apply to U.S. universities,
#
not knowing anything about U.S. universities.
#
So I did my GRE and I sent it to three different places, I think.
#
Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, because I had some family friends
#
were living in Washington.
#
And the University of Houston, because I had an uncle in Houston.
#
Both wrote to me after that.
#
And Houston wrote to me with a $700 a month stipend, 1984.
#
They said, come to us, we'll give $700 a month.
#
I mean, like 20 years old, I'll make more money than my father did.
#
He may have been a corporate guy, but $700 in those days
#
was more than my father made.
#
So that's how I ended up.
#
And I wanted to avoid Delhi School.
#
I just didn't want to even deal with it, even do the exam.
#
If I flunked the exam, God knows what would happen to me.
#
I was very lucky there in that it was actually full of young, good economists.
#
Maddy Baltaji, I mean, many others, all of whom had got their PhDs
#
at the University of Pennsylvania, but for some reason.
#
So somehow they liked me and they said, hey, you need to get out of here.
#
You need to go to Penn and we will write you a nice letter so you get in.
#
So they wrote me nice letters and I got in.
#
And I got in with a tuition waiver.
#
I didn't get a stipend.
#
So I went to Philadelphia where, you know, State of Pennsylvania,
#
as I was knocking on people's doors.
#
And I remember seeing a door with the name Anil De Lalikar on it.
#
The Indian guy, I mean, I didn't know what Anil was, knocked on his door.
#
And Anil said, do you know SAS?
#
Those days SAS with the programming.
#
I said, I know, I was a research assistant in Houston.
#
So they gave me a stipend of $550 a month.
#
So I went there and that's how I ended up.
#
So it wasn't about escaping from anything.
#
It was trying to, other than the Delhi School of Economics.
#
I always thought I'd come back.
#
I knew I wanted to do my PhD in India, I mean, on Indian issues.
#
And I wanted to come back.
#
So when I finished my PhD, I came, I talked to people at the Delhi School.
#
I talked to people at the, then the Indira Gandhi Institute
#
were just being set up in Bombay.
#
And I remember going and talking to Kirit Parekh.
#
But then the reality hit of the salary difference, you know.
#
And I said, hey, I can't afford this.
#
So I can make a little bit of money in the US.
#
I can send, even I send $100, that will take care of my mother.
#
So that was where the reality hit.
#
And I said, I have to stay in the US.
#
So that, and then of course, partly joining the World Bank
#
was also because of that, because the expenses built up.
#
Yeah, so that is that story, yes.
#
And what was your sort of intellectual development like
#
when you actually went abroad and started studying?
#
Like what happens often in India is that
#
we normalize the way everything is around us.
#
And we normalize a lot of received wisdom that we get.
#
Did that distance help?
#
Did you look at it differently?
#
Like this is, again, the 80s, well before liberalization,
#
we are still in that hellhole.
#
So no, my, yes, I mean, it did.
#
And let me explain how in two or three different ways.
#
One is, my first day at Penn, I remember,
#
you know, Lawrence Klein was the big name at Penn in those days.
#
And he had just won the Nobel Prize in economics.
#
Very distinguished looking man.
#
He always was a bow tie, handsome guy.
#
He came to, I took his class, first year,
#
and he come and sits in the class and he says,
#
Hello, I'm Laurie Klein.
#
I said, this is the great Lawrence Klein,
#
us telling me who he is.
#
This never happened in India.
#
I mean, my grand uncle was not like this.
#
He was an enormously huge ego, right?
#
So it reminded me of Krishna Raj and Tamu Acharya,
#
these people who I knew were enormously brilliant people,
#
but very simple in how they approached the world.
#
That really had a huge impact on me, you know,
#
that arrogance has no place in research.
#
That's what that taught me.
#
And my advisor, Jerry Berman, was exactly like that.
#
He's still with us, very much like that.
#
These are, they just do their research because they love it.
#
You know, so that was a huge influence.
#
That approach, this American approach to academia.
#
The second way America shaped me was in the exposure,
#
I mean, in the same university at Penn, more than Houston.
#
Well, Houston, I took a class with Edward Albee.
#
He was teaching a course in writing.
#
So anyway, but coming to Penn,
#
my father had a friend whose brother was a professor at Penn.
#
His name was Arjun Appadurai.
#
He was an anthropologist.
#
And so I remember doing my first year of economics.
#
I hated economics in the first year.
#
I mean, there's all this crazy math.
#
We're just deriving equations, you know,
#
doing algebra, doing calculus.
#
And I said, where are the human beings here?
#
So I'm going to switch to anthropology
#
because I already had an interest in anthropology.
#
So I went to the anthropology department.
#
Arjun Appadurai happened to be the graduate chair of anthropology.
#
He was already a professor.
#
And I went and I'll never forget the sitting in Arjun's office.
#
I must have been, what is it, 1985, so I was 22.
#
And I said, Arjun, I want to move.
#
I mean, of course, in India, never say Arjun.
#
I want to move to anthropology.
#
So he said, well, tell me how you see the world.
#
So I said, I see the world,
#
but I think human beings are essentially rational actors.
#
And, you know, of course, my issue of not thinking of everything
#
being human beings not able to shape their own lives.
#
This idea of, you know, in social sciences and anthropology,
#
particularly the notion of structure and agency,
#
anthropologists really emphasize structure more than agency.
#
In those days, it's sort of changed.
#
And of course, there's a lot of that stuff going on.
#
And at the end, I'm a liberal, I mean, liberal in the old sense person.
#
And I think he sensed that.
#
And he said, you won't be happy here.
#
He said, you'll take six years, 10 years to finish.
#
You won't get a job at the end.
#
It's tricky to get a job.
#
He said, stay in economics,
#
but be an anthropology spy in economics.
#
That was his advice to me.
#
And that is unforgettable advice.
#
And to this day, I'm in touch with Arjun.
#
Later on, we did many things together.
#
But to this day, I would be grateful for that phrase
#
because it shaped me, gave me a direction.
#
Said, OK, I'm going to tolerate this bloody first year,
#
but I'm going to try within that to be an anthropologist.
#
All your World Bank colleagues are listening to this and saying,
#
yeah, we knew it was in house.
#
So that's been, it shaped me immeasurably coming to America.
#
I've always been uncomfortable with the idea of being in American academia.
#
I think in that sense, the World Bank is probably a better fit for me.
#
But all I really wanted was to be a professor at the Delhi School or ISAC.
#
I spent a lot of time in these places since.
#
I'm still very comfortable in these old-fashioned research institutes
#
in the developing world, as they say.
#
And I feel very comfortable in those places
#
because that's where the people I respected lived.
#
That's where they worked.
#
What are the kind of things that you then worked on,
#
like during your PhD and after?
#
Like I had an episode with Mukulika Banerjee,
#
who did a PhD around the same time, in fact.
#
And she said that when she asked her advisor,
#
should I do a PhD or not?
#
His advice to her was that if there is something that keeps you up at night
#
and you can't stop thinking about it, then do a PhD, otherwise don't bother.
#
Absolutely right. I 100% agree with that.
#
PhDs have now become more of a, like getting an MBA or something,
#
I don't think that's the right approach to a PhD.
#
I mean, one has to have a professor used to say,
#
if you're happy to live on potatoes for three years, then do a PhD.
#
And yes, and to me, the first year was horrible.
#
The second year, once I was able to work on my own ideas,
#
work on my own research.
#
And as I said, I had these tremendous people around me,
#
like Jerry and Anil, who allowed me to think very early on.
#
And I was an apprentice to them in a sense.
#
So what they did was what I absorbed.
#
And then I was struggling with how do I bring these anthropology ideas into economics?
#
Even then, that was my struggle.
#
And the first paper I wrote had nothing to do with that.
#
I was a research assistant for a summer
#
with this famous PPP project, the Purchasing Power Parity project,
#
this PPP numbers that I used to convert exchange rates to real terms.
#
So I was working with Alan Heston and Robert Summers.
#
Robert Summers is Larry Summers' father, as it happens.
#
And as it happens, Kenneth Arrow's brother-in-law,
#
that's a whole different story.
#
So I was their research assistant for a summer.
#
So I had access to all this PPP data that they had collected.
#
And I noticed that there was all these data on the diets that people had,
#
how much they spent on vegetables and meats.
#
And I said, let me do it.
#
And I was also at that time doing a...
#
My funding was from demography.
#
So I had to take a class in demography
#
and I had the great Sam Preston as my demography professor.
#
And my classmate, there was an equally great Marie Bhatt,
#
who then passed away anyway.
#
So I made a lot of good friends.
#
And Sam, his first big success in demography
#
was looking at the effects of smoking on mortality.
#
That was his classic work he did.
#
He said, hey, I'm going to look at the effects of diet on mortality.
#
So I had all these data.
#
I wouldn't ever write that kind of paper again.
#
And I found that countries that had a greater proportion of vegetarian food
#
in their diets had lower rates of mortality.
#
High rates of infant mortality.
#
So it was interesting, but lower rates of overall life expectancy.
#
Lower mortality, higher life expectancy.
#
So I remember taking that paper to Sam and him saying...
#
And Sam smoking a cigar in his office.
#
In those days, you could smoke.
#
He said, you know what I did in my earlier work?
#
I said, no, your work on smoking.
#
So that whole atmosphere of being steeped in that,
#
then making the link with Arjun in anthropology.
#
And he encouraged me to attend all the seminars in the South Asia Center there.
#
So I was exposed to all these great anthropologist historians who came.
#
Sanjay Swarbraniam came.
#
He came as a one-year visiting fellow when I was there.
#
And we didn't have any history of thought requirement,
#
but we have an economic history requirement.
#
And this is an interesting story, if I think about it.
#
My choice was to study economic history with Claudia Golden.
#
And I found that too bloody American.
#
I was not interested in it.
#
And I said, Sanjay is here.
#
He's two years, three years older than me.
#
He's already made a name for himself.
#
And he is a very good pianist.
#
He's got a lot of interest in jazz and stuff.
#
And so he's got this notion of music.
#
So we sort of became friends.
#
And I did a special course with him.
#
Me and my friend, Arun Banerjee.
#
We both did our economic history with Sanjay Swarbraniam.
#
So he had to create it just for you?
#
He created it as a tutorial.
#
So he gave us things to read.
#
And we would go to him.
#
And I didn't do very well.
#
But still, I don't think he liked my paper.
#
I was trying to apply Dumont to growth or something.
#
He didn't quite like what I did.
#
But regardless, I had ex-
#
He's only now, I think in one of your episodes,
#
Ramchandra Guha calls him India's greatest historian.
#
But I knew him when he was in his 20s.
#
And he was still not had made that famous name for himself.
#
But the brilliance of the man steeped in.
#
I mean, I was very lucky, I think, in that PhD.
#
And then going to the University of Chicago,
#
being in economics in the University of Chicago,
#
with exposure to all the great economists,
#
Gary Becker, Sherwin Rosen, Jim Heckman,
#
all these characters who were there, Robert Willis,
#
at the same time sitting in the South Asia Center.
#
So there, Mickey Marriott, Singer, Barney Cohen,
#
then getting exposed to Foucault and Bourdieu through that.
#
Derrida was giving lectures.
#
I couldn't understand a word, so I walked out.
#
But anyway, I saw him speak.
#
And then I went to the University of Michigan.
#
My job story is another story.
#
But I ended up with another postdoc at Michigan.
#
I was an adjunct professor in economics.
#
And I was a Mellon postdoc.
#
And that's where that postdoc gave me the funding, the money.
#
Because part of it was going to field work.
#
So that was my first field work was in my second job.
#
That's when I did my first round of serious field work.
#
And that was also because I always tried to find these
#
interdisciplinary opportunities, I think, from the beginning.
#
I want to talk about that field work.
#
Because what often happens is we go to university
#
and we study things and we learn ideas and we build frames.
#
And we are floating in that abstract world in our heads.
#
And then we enter the real world.
#
You've described beautifully that you were doing that field work
#
And at one point you were at a village talking to a group of local women.
#
And suddenly one of their husbands entered the room
#
and dragged her away and said,
#
how dare you be here when I'm waiting for lunch?
#
And later you learned that he used to beat her regularly.
#
And later, after immersing yourself in that place for a few days,
#
the women opened up to you and said things they weren't saying earlier,
#
like our husbands beat us regularly and it's so bad.
#
And eventually you got a paper on domestic violence
#
But you and your co-author could not publish the paper as it was
#
because it was both economics and anthropology
#
and you had to separate it into two separate papers.
#
So tell me about that period of time and how it shaped you
#
and what it made you feel about economics,
#
what it made you feel about, on the one hand, the economics profession,
#
but also on the other hand, the possibilities of using economics
#
to understand the world.
#
That's a very good question.
#
You know, JSTOR started in Michigan.
#
And when I went to Michigan, that was the early days of JSTOR.
#
The first thing, one of the first things they did was to put
#
the top economics journals, economics journal called Economic Journal.
#
There's the Journal of Political Economy, American Economic Review,
#
and I think the Quartier Journal of Economics, if I'm not mistaken,
#
they were all online going back to the 19th century.
#
And I had access to them because I was faculty, right?
#
And I started going back reading all these articles
#
and I sort of realized economics profession is obsessed with publishing
#
in what they call these top five journals,
#
and that's shaping everything, everybody around me.
#
But when I read this stuff, I didn't make any calculation,
#
maybe others have since, I don't know.
#
And I'm making this number up.
#
So just think of it as a rhetorical number.
#
About 5% of those ideas survive, 95% disappear.
#
So it's great for your career, but nobody remembers that paper five years later.
#
So what's the point of this?
#
I just don't see why should I be struggling to publish in these places?
#
Maybe to make a career, but what's the point?
#
At that point, I had a revised resubmit at the Journal of Political Economy
#
as it happened, which was my dowry paper from Chicago.
#
But that was a struggle.
#
All of us, every economist goes through that.
#
But doing the field work, so I have a cousin, her name is Rama,
#
who at that time ran an NGO called Mricha Khatika,
#
because she worked with potters in Karnataka.
#
And that was my entry to the field.
#
So I said, I'm coming to your villages.
#
And my Kannada is much better now.
#
In those days, it wasn't that good.
#
But her, she's completely fluent.
#
And so I went with her.
#
I just found a team of social workers, and we went.
#
And there was one man, and the driver was a man,
#
otherwise four of the people in the team were women.
#
And there was Rama, he calls himself, I call her Rani.
#
So Rani and I went with this team.
#
And she taught me how to enter the field.
#
And if there is the theory of reflexivism,
#
there's the practice of reflexivism,
#
I think I got that from her.
#
How do you enter in a spirit of humility,
#
not in a spirit of superiority?
#
You are encroaching their space.
#
They're not privileged to have you there.
#
Because I was with an NGO,
#
there was maybe something that,
#
good stuff they got out of that, hopefully out of it.
#
But that's not the approach you take.
#
First time, I remember going and talking to a Dalit family,
#
and it was early on, and being invited in to have a meal.
#
And clearly they didn't have much,
#
but they were sharing whatever they had,
#
because they were visitors from the outside,
#
And by the way, every caste doing that,
#
that happened with the Dalit family,
#
but a Brahmin family would do the same thing.
#
you know, and that really, you know,
#
I sort of realized this is a whole world
#
with which I'm unfamiliar,
#
and I'm presuming to study these people.
#
my friends will tell you I like to talk,
#
as we are noticing in this conversation as well.
#
I had to learn to listen.
#
And that was when, that's what Rama taught me,
#
is that learn to listen.
#
Now, the particular instance you're talking about,
#
I was going there to study marriage markets,
#
because that's what my paper in dowries was.
#
And so I said, okay, let me understand marriage markets
#
from the field, from the ground up.
#
And I was going to study dowries and all that sort of stuff.
#
But in the process of studying it,
#
we, you know, this particular instance
#
that you're talking about,
#
when this woman was beaten in front of me,
#
because in effect I was talking to her,
#
or we were talking to her,
#
And I said, two things hit me.
#
One is this violence is rampant, violence against women.
#
And secondly, my own presence can sometimes cause it.
#
Okay, but it turned me into making that
#
the focus of that particular project.
#
And then there were other things that we studied,
#
festivals, I studied price variation, all that came.
#
These are ideas that came from the field.
#
But the instance that you talked about,
#
where they started opening up after a week of listening to them,
#
talking to them, because basically having their namak,
#
we sat and had food with them.
#
They cooked for us, we brought food to them.
#
That exchange of food was very important in opening them up.
#
And then, of course, having Arak with them,
#
it was very funny, it was a small digression.
#
One of the women, social workers in my team,
#
she was from one of the Karnataka tribes.
#
So I remember sitting in the evening,
#
we would have these meetings in the evening,
#
we would discuss the field,
#
what we found making notes and stuff.
#
And I had never had Arak in my life at that point.
#
I said, anybody has Arak?
#
So does anybody know what it tastes like?
#
So everybody's saying no.
#
Then slowly this woman, she says in Kannada,
#
I know, I said, really, what does it taste like?
#
And she's looking around,
#
it's a little bit like buttermilk.
#
So, you know, those little moments of,
#
you know, one thing I think I was brought up by both my parents,
#
at least as a child, is don't treat anybody differently than anything.
#
So that's always been part of, at least I try.
#
But I think learning, it's not some false notion of humility,
#
or I'm not a humble person.
#
And it is about not thinking that you're better than anybody else
#
by definition of who you are.
#
If you approach the field in that way,
#
with, again, keeping Taylor's notion of the politics of recognition,
#
and the same thing with the Gram Sabha, people open up.
#
I think we Indians are so conditioned by status,
#
by trying to compete on status.
#
We are conditioned that way because of the caste system.
#
I'm reading a beautiful book on Buddhism now.
#
And I'm realizing, you know, how,
#
when you come up with the Indian philosophy that lacks caste,
#
how it can, I'm sure that's what appealed to Ambedkar.
#
But the idea of caste is so deeply ingrained in us
#
that we're always competing to be better than the other person,
#
more than other primates, I think.
#
All primates have it, Indians have it the worst.
#
Maybe I'm wrong, but I think the Ambani wedding has shown us that.
#
But the understanding how lives that are very different from mine work,
#
the logic that applies to them that is different from my logic,
#
where this idea that you cannot choose who you marry.
#
I mean, we all hear about arranged marriage,
#
but there are different degrees of arranged marriage.
#
These young women will be getting married at 12, 13, 14,
#
sterilized by 17 because they've had their two children.
#
And then after they get sterilized,
#
husbands start getting jealous thinking they're being unfaithful.
#
You know, so that results in one of the causes of violence
#
was women being sterilized.
#
Yeah, things like this, you know, and then with my history with my mother,
#
realizing that, you know, firstly, gender is a very complicated thing,
#
but women are placed in positions
#
that make them bear the brunt of society's problems.
#
I mean, that came across very, very, very clearly.
#
So that sort of shaped the kind of work I did for the next 10, 15, 20 years after that.
#
You know, it was a transforming experience going to the field.
#
And I've tried to do it ever since.
#
I do it much less now because I try, but I do it less.
#
A beautiful phrase I learned from your work, in fact,
#
is Mario Small's phrase, cognitive empathy,
#
which is of being able to understand someone else's predicament
#
And you've posited that it's one of the four things
#
that economics should learn from ethnography.
#
And we'll talk about the others later,
#
but I'm just curious about what this depth of insight can add
#
to what an economist might otherwise get.
#
Like an economist studying the same village or whatever,
#
you know, they would look at data that is at a much more surface level.
#
They would draw different kinds of conclusions.
#
A lot of people would say that what your cognitive empathy gets you
#
is a subjective and impressionistic view of a situation.
#
You cannot extrapolate from it what is the value.
#
That is how an econometrics person may think of it.
#
And yet I totally buy your point that it can just add layers
#
of insight into a situation.
#
So can you give me examples of this where, you know,
#
the econometrician's view would fail
#
because it did not take the particular into account.
#
And that particular suddenly, you know, added those layers to it.
#
I'll give you three examples.
#
But let me first start with the non-economics.
#
It's not just economists.
#
It's anybody who works with data that somebody else has collected
#
or has collected data in a way that is not cognitively empathetic.
#
Let's stick with domestic violence.
#
I told you when I went to the field,
#
I felt that my interview with this woman
#
instigated an instance of violence.
#
I saw that in front of me.
#
Since then, domestic violence has become IPV, as they call it,
#
has become a huge field.
#
The DHS in India, it's called the NHFS.
#
All over the world, they collect data on domestic violence.
#
In India, they collected from a huge sample, 10, 20,000 households.
#
But they're asking women these very sensitive questions.
#
I mean, it brings me to a Nuremberg ethics kind of problem.
#
You know, how much violence have you caused
#
by asking these questions in an insensitive way?
#
We just have to send some enumerator and throw that question in.
#
Firstly, I don't know what nonsense data you're collecting.
#
Secondly, look at the ethical implications.
#
The UN, by the way, has a beautiful set of criteria
#
that how you collect these kinds of data.
#
I bet you with a sample of 20,000, you cannot do that.
#
And they're doing it all over the world.
#
They don't have the resources for that.
#
That is deeply cognitively unempathetic, right?
#
So, I don't trust any work done with domestic violence,
#
interpersonal violence, with that data set.
#
And it's the most used data set all over the world,
#
just what we know about this.
#
When you look at numbers, incidences, everything we know,
#
I don't trust it on this subject.
#
Other things, they're all right.
#
So, what we try to do, and I don't want to say myself,
#
because it is the entire team that collected the data,
#
And because of that, and you said we had to split the papers,
#
because the paper that I was undermining,
#
that I published in the Social Science and Medicine on this,
#
found three or four different things.
#
One was, of course, dowries.
#
The second one was this female sterilization.
#
And it almost became a marking event,
#
the idea of the woman getting sterilized
#
at some very young age,
#
because they were incentivized to get sterilized.
#
And there was a family planning program going on.
#
There was puberty, there was marriage, there was sterilization,
#
as marking events in a woman's life.
#
And her life really changed after that.
#
And seminal marking moments all before she's out of her teens.
#
Out of her teens, out of her teens.
#
And that was clearly there.
#
Alcoholism, a huge cause.
#
And rampant alcoholism.
#
There's a ad-hoc I was talking about.
#
Yes, maybe we all get around over a beer or a glass of wine
#
and become more sociable as a result of that.
#
Does it taste like buttermilk?
#
But what they would do was to get it in these plastic packets,
#
some racket that the government used to run.
#
And it was a huge source of revenue for the government.
#
That was also the time, it's still the case,
#
where you had a lot of unemployed youth,
#
because they would get their stupid,
#
whatever, so-called degrees and not find jobs.
#
And they had to come back to farming,
#
or some sort of wage labor that everybody else was doing.
#
And they felt they were above that.
#
So they would get drunk.
#
Addictions and how it affected.
#
This was clearly there and affected domestic violence.
#
The inability of women to fight it, to counter it,
#
except if they had, there was one case,
#
we were in a place that was in a monastery
#
where the head monk did something about it.
#
And that change, he was a Lingayat monk.
#
So unless they had that backing from some more powerful source,
#
they were facing the brunt of these things.
#
So that whole inequality wouldn't have been,
#
I mean, you can read about structures of patriarchy
#
but you really can't get at that without getting to the ground.
#
So that's just one example on domestic violence.
#
Let's go to a positive example.
#
Where does NREGA come from?
#
And people have talked about this, of course.
#
I'm not saying anything that others don't know.
#
That was because Jean is the most cognitively empathetic economist I know.
#
He lives what he talks.
#
So he came up with it because he felt that this would work.
#
Of course, he knew the history of wage for labor programs,
#
guaranteed income programs in India and other parts of the world.
#
And he said, okay, let's try this out.
#
So that is good policy, you could argue,
#
coming out of cognitive empathy.
#
So there's a positive aspect to that.
#
Let's talk about all these RCTs that are done,
#
slowly changing, but not there,
#
where they find an impact on a question that they're interested in.
#
The question is not emerging from the ground.
#
It's what can I get published?
#
What does my advisor tell me?
#
Whoever you talk to, 90% of RCTs are done by people
#
who are trying to get published.
#
Or they're trying to evaluate a program
#
because the World Bank has told them to evaluate it.
#
That's the other reason.
#
They have no clue where that impact came from.
#
We have this, you know, this falana intervention
#
has this 20% improvement in something.
#
And that tells us that it works.
#
That'll be the sort of gist of the thing.
#
Mechanisms, as they say, you have to do some, you know,
#
you may or may not have the data to sort of try to look at
#
what correlates with that,
#
what interaction term will tell you something.
#
What actually happened, you never know.
#
And they'll come up with some big theoretical model
#
that might tell you something.
#
Why don't you follow up with people,
#
talk to them, ask them how that process worked?
#
That's quality to work.
#
That's cognitively empathetic.
#
You'd find slowly it's coming in.
#
I think I'm noticing some papers more doing more of that.
#
Chris Blatman, there's some others doing this kind of work.
#
For the most part, it's not, not most,
#
but for the vast majority of papers, it's not there.
#
It's, you know, if research came more out of the ground,
#
it would not be paternalistic.
#
Whether it's an RCT or whatever else,
#
that's the part that I wish would change a little bit more.
#
When I joined the World Bank,
#
the reason I joined, among many other reasons,
#
there was a president called Jim Wolfenson,
#
that was just after structural adjustment.
#
And he was a huge critic of the World Bank.
#
And he said, I'm going to come and fix it.
#
Arrogant man, Australian guy, he was Olympic fencer.
#
He was a multi-millionaire, billionaire kind of guy.
#
And he took one dollar a year as salary,
#
had his private plane, was a character.
#
But he came in having read all the anthropologists
#
who had critiqued the World Bank.
#
He came in with that knowledge, I'm going to fix it.
#
He said, I'm going to hire people who follow this approach.
#
So he brought in Robert Chambers,
#
he brought in all that crowd.
#
And he recruited, he created the opportunity
#
for people like me to be hired.
#
My friend Michael Wolcock is also my sociologist.
#
We were all hired, Monica Dasgupta,
#
we were all hired at the same time, yeah,
#
in the research department.
#
And he insisted that any new person
#
who comes to the World Bank has to spend at least one week
#
in the home of a family, of a project
#
that the World Bank is trying to target.
#
So people went to Gujarat, they stayed in Seva,
#
they went to, I remember somebody went to Ghana,
#
somebody went to Colombia, Bolivia.
#
They would live in these houses,
#
come back with a transformed understanding.
#
My God, this is nothing like what I learned in my textbooks.
#
That's all eroded, by the way, that's all gone.
#
We're back to the old fashioned world of structural,
#
I mean, the world that used to do structural adjustment,
#
I don't know what it's gonna do now,
#
but it's not an empathetic world, yeah.
#
That's considered too costly, it's considered not necessary.
#
Everybody wants to go really super fast.
#
So that's a different world that we're in.
#
But that was a good moment in big development, I think.
#
Just thinking aloud, it strikes me that,
#
you know, research done without this kind of cognitive empathy
#
is possibly not just as good as it could be,
#
it is also unethical in the sense that
#
when a researcher is doing a study
#
based on an extraneous reason like this will get me published
#
or my supervisor will approve of this,
#
they are essentially using the people in their study
#
as a means to an end, you know,
#
Kant's categorical imperative never treat people
#
as a means to an end but as an end in themselves.
#
And that is a cornerstone of morality as per Kant.
#
And it strikes me that they're just doing that
#
and it feels almost evil that from the top down
#
you are doing, you are researching people
#
and doing all of these studies on people
#
when you don't actually give a damn about the people themselves
#
or give them the respect or the agency, you know,
#
which a different kind of study would
#
where the questions would emerge from them
#
and would be reflexive.
#
I may not use those adjectives.
#
I think people are well-intentioned.
#
If you go into developed economics,
#
you're generally well-intentioned.
#
It's not the easiest road.
#
And there's been a lot of attention paid
#
to the ethics of doing this by people like Rachel Lennister
#
and others have written about all of these things.
#
But yes, I mean, actually in some ways,
#
our cities have had a good impact, you know,
#
in the sense of at least they have to collect their own data.
#
In my day, when I got my patient,
#
nobody collected their own data, right?
#
You just use somebody's data, else's data.
#
So at least they have to go to the field
#
whether they like it or not.
#
Every young development economist you find,
#
I don't care what race they are, where they're from,
#
they would have spent some time in the field
#
because they have to go collect data.
#
The question is, do they do it reflexively?
#
Do they do it with cognitive empathy?
#
No, I don't think that's the case at all
#
because even if they want it,
#
they don't get rewarded for it.
#
In fact, they might even get punished for it
#
because it's a waste of time.
#
The paper doesn't come out as fast.
#
That is, I think, an incentive problem.
#
And it goes back to our earlier conversation
#
about how disciplines are structured.
#
So I would hesitate to pass judgment,
#
but I would rather say, please change
#
because you're doing something
#
that could be done much better.
#
So I think I would like to phrase it that way, perhaps.
#
Yeah, I mean, I was just thinking aloud
#
and I'm allowed to be harsh.
#
It's okay, I don't work in the world, man.
#
So the other points you make
#
of what economics can learn from ethnography
#
besides cognitive empathy is narrative economics
#
where you take words seriously, not just numbers.
#
Break this down for me because the typical view
#
of someone who deals in the numbers is that
#
numbers at least appear to be from a vantage point.
#
They appear to be reliable.
#
They are what they are.
#
But words, they can just be anecdotes.
#
They can be subjective.
#
You decide what words you want to listen to.
#
So, Anshula, of course, has a book on this
#
called Narrative Economics, as you pointed out.
#
Tell me a little bit about this aspect of it
#
and how you came to recognize its importance.
#
You know, the analysis of words, the analysis of text,
#
let me start with a negative thing.
#
It can be just as unreflexive as quantitative data.
#
There's a, so what's happened, basically,
#
is the computer scientists and the linguists,
#
for now, 20 years, have over time
#
developed enormously powerful methods to analyze text.
#
They call text as data methods.
#
Natural language processing is the more technical term.
#
Part of machine learning, if you wish.
#
So, there are lots of papers in many disciplines
#
There's a very fast-growing field.
#
My little sort of part in this is to argue,
#
can we start using the analysis of text
#
in a way that is reflexive?
#
The challenge with ethnography and economics,
#
and economics from the beginning,
#
and it goes back to Charles Booth,
#
has been interested in large numbers.
#
They're not interested in small studies
#
because they want to influence policy.
#
With policy, you need to be representative
#
of the population you're studying.
#
So, there's a problem of statistical representatives
#
that economists have been obsessed with from the beginning.
#
Of course, you cannot be reflexive with that,
#
with that size of thing.
#
So, in my early work, it was about combining things.
#
That is, I'm going to do my qualitative work
#
in a small sample and then see if the quantitative data
#
can generalize from that.
#
Get the ideas from the hypothesis
#
and get the ideas from the hypothesis
#
tested with larger data.
#
That is the way I try to resolve that.
#
I did, others have done it.
#
In other words, that's the way I did.
#
What this development of these new techniques
#
have taught me, at least, is to say,
#
let us try to do qualitative work at scale
#
with representative samples.
#
So, that's the big leap.
#
We don't have to do this with small samples.
#
So, then, how do we make it reflexive?
#
So, what we tried to do during COVID and we,
#
because my wife and I were together in COVID in DC
#
and we were doing everything virtually
#
like everybody else was,
#
we had the opportunity to do phone interviews
#
in Bangladesh with Rohingya refugees
#
and their Bangladeshi hosts in Cox's Bazar.
#
I got some funding for this.
#
There was some interest.
#
So, I said, okay, this is our opportunity to,
#
at least on the phone, let's do open-ended interviews.
#
Let's not ask these hard questions.
#
We will ask one question and then have a conversation
#
like you're doing, very much along these lines
#
and probably not for this long,
#
where we'll train interviewers
#
so they're able to ask these responsive questions,
#
listening to people responding,
#
asking other questions, probing.
#
And Monica, my wife, runs a qualitative research firm
#
called Qual Analytics that tries to teach people
#
how to do these things.
#
So, she trained them and her team trained them.
#
And we asked, with a sample of, I think it was 2300,
#
representative of Cox's Bazar,
#
divided equally between Rohingya refugees
#
the first set of questions we asked
#
about parents' aspirations for their children.
#
What do they want their children to be when they grow up?
#
And I've had an interest in aspirations
#
I mentioned Arjuna Padre.
#
I did a book, started working on it in 2002,
#
finished in 2004 called Culture and Public Actions,
#
Arjuna wrote an article there called The Capacity to Aspire,
#
which has become a super hit, that article.
#
And he wrote it partly because, you know,
#
Mike Walton and I had many, many conversations with him
#
about it was his way of trying to think
#
about sense capabilities and saying,
#
what can an anthropologist say?
#
So, he did that article.
#
And him and Debraji also did some work in parallel
#
on looking at aspirations and so on.
#
So, there's a lot of interest in the subject,
#
but I felt that it's taken a very economics angle,
#
the aspirations literature,
#
because they're looking at very specifically goals.
#
So, Agnes Callard, the philosopher,
#
has got a book on aspirations,
#
but she by the way, neither sides of Padre or De Ré
#
or anybody, so it's her own trip, right?
#
Which I wrote to her and I hope she's read it now.
#
But Callard distinguishes between goals
#
and other types of aspirations.
#
So, and the economics literature and aspirations about goals,
#
how much education you want your kids to have,
#
what job you want them, what salary they want you to have,
#
rather than I want my kid to be a good person.
#
And a Padre's take on aspirations is,
#
all this is fine, but how are you going to get there?
#
What he calls the capacity to aspire.
#
And he says that capability is unequally distributed.
#
So, the notion of capability
#
and the notion of Callardian aspirations,
#
and I felt qualitative work could give us these things,
#
while quantitatively give us the goals.
#
So, let's combine them.
#
So, that was the first set of questions we asked.
#
What do you want your kids to be?
#
Goal question, how are you going to get there?
#
So, that was the capacity question.
#
And then, you know, and from that,
#
we use these Texas data techniques to sort out
#
what the determinants of each of these are.
#
Now, the big innovation in that paper, I think,
#
is that we developed a set of tools
#
that allowed us to do this more reflexively.
#
Now, what do I mean by that?
#
Firstly, the open-ended questions are
#
at least in a marginal sense,
#
more reflexive than a structured question.
#
But secondly, the techniques that exist
#
in machine learning to do this
#
are what are called supervised or unsupervised.
#
Supervised techniques rely on a dictionary,
#
you know, like a sentiment dictionary,
#
and they look at sentiments.
#
It's some dictionary that comes out of somewhere else.
#
Unsupervised is the computer will go through it
#
and come up with topics and tell you,
#
hey, this is what the kinds of categories
#
of things people are talking about,
#
what useful tools, and I've used them in other work.
#
None of them are sociological.
#
How a sociologist does qualitative work
#
is that you go and collect all that data from the field,
#
then you sit and you stare and read and read and read
#
and start coding, start to summarize that
#
what you're reading in a certain set of codes.
#
You have a coding tree, and then with that coding tree,
#
you construct a narrative of what that's saying.
#
That's a very inductive process you don't see in this work,
#
and that's more reflexive.
#
How do we then develop a method
#
that we can do sociological coding,
#
a sort of sensitive reflexive coding,
#
So that's the nut we've cracked in some ways,
#
because our simple solution was
#
the training set we will use
#
will be with a sub-sample of, in our case, 400 interviews,
#
that we will have trained sociologists read and code
#
like they would do any other standard type of qualitative work,
#
and then we will use machine learning
#
to expand that course to the full set.
#
So that's the crux of the method.
#
trying to take that text as data
#
and make it more reflexive.
#
Now, my colleagues and I had another chance to collect data.
#
So we asked questions on well-being.
#
We asked them two questions.
#
What is your notion of the good life?
#
And then we asked them three questions.
#
A question on a cantril ladder that is a score of 1 to 5,
#
happiness survey, how happy are you?
#
And then third question, why did you pick that number?
#
So the first question, the last question are open-ended.
#
So we really get a rich sense of their understanding of well-being.
#
We're still in the process of analyzing that.
#
That's work I need to finish, and we all need to finish.
#
So what I want to do with that, and that's really been my goal.
#
I'm now heading off in a different direction.
#
I don't know if you want to, if this is of interest.
#
No, no, actually go on.
#
We'll come back to this.
#
Okay, so I want to talk about well-being a bit.
#
And take your question and apply it to well-being and welfare.
#
Welfare is a term, Leon Walroth goes back even further.
#
I mean, if you read Tom Holland, not the actor, Tom Holland, the historian,
#
his book Dominion, I think it's called,
#
he makes it very clear how deeply all of us
#
have notions that emerged from the Bible ingrained in what we do.
#
I think welfare is one of those concepts.
#
I don't mean it's, this is bad.
#
It's great, but it's about finding out who's deserving through data,
#
through a conception of what welfare is and then doing something to help them.
#
Then since Leon Walroth, that's turned into his utility theory and Bentham, of course,
#
which means that we are going to see what matters in a utility function
#
and what people are maximizing and then use that to then derive,
#
say, notions of how well people are doing, how much utility they have,
#
you know, what trade-offs they make.
#
And of course, then emerging from that,
#
notions of things like the poverty line come, right?
#
And that's, so the poverty line obsession is,
#
I mean, literally millions of dollars spent measuring poverty lines around the world.
#
And I am the center of that, not because I do it,
#
but because next to me for 20 years was Martin Rebellion,
#
who was a big guru of this.
#
It was interesting when I joined my department,
#
I had Martin Rebellion on one side of my office,
#
Branko Milanovic on the other.
#
Both these folks, and Martin was my boss also,
#
so it is deeply influential, tremendous man.
#
Anyway, that's another story.
#
But I found this deeply troubling, this way of measuring poverty,
#
partly because when I was back doing my field work with the domestic violence stuff,
#
one of the things I noticed, which is pretty obvious,
#
is that poor people were paying more for the same products than rich people,
#
mainly because they were buying things in tiny quantities.
#
So they would get a hundred grams of dal rather than a kg of dal.
#
And the price, the unit price was about 40% higher when they did that.
#
So I collected data on all of that and I wrote a paper with that.
#
And once you have prices varying for the same good,
#
not for different goods.
#
It's not like you're buying better rice and I'm buying poorer rice.
#
You're buying the same, whatever, you know, jaggery say,
#
but I'm paying more for it than you because I'm poorer than you.
#
That screws up the whole idea of a poverty line.
#
Because if you and I face different prices,
#
then what is, what line are you going to use?
#
You have to adjust it to those prices, right?
#
So what I found when you did that adjustment,
#
poverty is actually much higher, inequality is much higher.
#
So I started, and of course it results in not a poverty line, but a poverty schedule.
#
It gets much more complicated.
#
There's no such thing as a line.
#
And then I discovered there are many, many critique,
#
you could use many critical lenses on this multidimensionality.
#
Why should there only be poverty lines emerge from actually the nutritional thing?
#
What is the minimum amount of food necessary so you can have a day's work?
#
That's dandekar and rat, you know, that's all of this comes from there.
#
But then Sukhatme, there's a whole debate in EPW from the 70s,
#
but Sukhatme comes and says, dandekar and rat, you have this line.
#
I have done experiments with the men making chapatis.
#
Actually, there's a whole debate in EPW is fascinating.
#
And I find that if they're starved,
#
and they eat less food over time and they have much uncertain food consumption,
#
their metabolism becomes much more efficient.
#
So if you're hungry, you're actually able to process more energy from the same amount of food.
#
I think that's one reason Indians become fat.
#
Our ancestors used to be constantly starving.
#
But that metabolic critique also then affects the notion of a line.
#
The line might be, in fact, you might have two people,
#
one of them is much more than the other,
#
but the nutritional criteria they need is less.
#
That's kind of ethically screwed up, right?
#
So I said, hell, and then, of course, the happiness work.
#
That's a whole different, that's not from economics.
#
That's from psychology, Halper and all these guys.
#
That work, basically, can you believe this?
#
I come to you and I say, Amit, on a score of one to 10, how happy are you?
#
You say I'm seven, and I'll say I'm four.
#
I mean, okay, then you say you're happier than me.
#
The threshold might be different between you and me.
#
I mean, if I'm a depressive person,
#
my four might be because I'm a depressive person.
#
Actually, my life is just as good as yours, but I perceive it as worse.
#
How do you account for that?
#
So you have this, the Finns are the happiest people in the world,
#
somebody else is the most miserable.
#
All of these methods of measuring well-being are screwed up,
#
also because the philosophy behind them comes from elsewhere.
#
So I said, it's pretty obvious to say that why don't we understand
#
people's well-being from their definition of what well-being is?
#
If I sit with you, I mean, you've sat with me now for some hours,
#
as you've done with so many others, you have a real sense of the person.
#
If you ask me, and which you haven't, what makes a good life for me,
#
I've given you some hints on that, but maybe there's more I can say,
#
and you go from there to measure it,
#
then we get a better sense of what matters to me, right?
#
Now, certain things will be, of course, non-negotiable,
#
having some income, having a lack of debt,
#
I mean, these matter to everybody, education, these matter to everybody, right?
#
And those are quantitative, those can be quantitatively done.
#
So what we're trying to do with this is to sort of say,
#
if we ask people open-ended questions of what they define well-being,
#
can we find from this some way of understanding,
#
perhaps even measuring well-being, that is more ground up?
#
So that's the perspective around it.
#
Again, these new methods that exist give us this opportunity to do it at scale.
#
So what you're saying is that you can do this kind of large language processing
#
and actually get insight into this particular question?
#
Yes. So that's what we're attempting to do.
#
We've certainly done it with aspirations already.
#
In fact, that aspirations work has shown clearly that goals matter,
#
but some people, you know, really more than the goals,
#
they want their kids to be good people, you know?
#
And of course, in Bangladesh, many of them are very devout Muslims.
#
It comes from an Islamic perspective, what that good person is, that those matter.
#
I mean, the idea that somehow welfare should be divorced from religion is stupid,
#
or spirituality, or some ethical frame, it makes no sense, right?
#
It's a point of what Sen has made, but even Sen insists on the economic definition of welfare.
#
Capabilities, functionings, yes, but at the end,
#
that's it's all at the end boils down to certain numbers.
#
Why not let people decide, you know, let them tell you, right?
#
And what have you found so far in terms of how differently people define well-being?
#
So, as I said, one is the importance that people give.
#
So people give a lot of importance to goals.
#
There's no question about it, that does matter.
#
But they also give importance to wanting that kids to be good people.
#
And that good person, for the Rohingya particularly, and for the Bangladeshis,
#
hosts, is from a sense of someone who is able to regulate their needs,
#
that comes out very, very clearly.
#
We should not want more.
#
So the definitions of good would also vary according to...
#
Would vary, and so that also matters.
#
There's a lot more work we can do on this, but this is the stuff we've got.
#
If I was going to do this again, I would not do phone interviews.
#
The second thing, and that in some ways has policy implications,
#
is that the capacity to know how to navigate your way towards
#
the ambitions you have for those kids is very different.
#
And it really helps that there's a perpetuation of inequality.
#
When you have an educated parent, I mean, we've been talking about my life.
#
Clearly, I'm shaped by the fact that I was privileged to be born into this world
#
where all these people were there, so I'm able to navigate.
#
What if I was not able to navigate, right?
#
What if I wanted to be some kind of interdisciplinary economist from somewhere,
#
but I had no clue how to get there?
#
I think, just in my case, the fact that I'm able to have this weird career
#
is because I have a lot of cultural and social capital that I'm able to exploit.
#
What can policy do about that?
#
Can we bring that to people?
#
So that's what that capability question gives us,
#
and there's no question that it matters a lot
#
and is, as Apadre says, unequally distributed.
#
And at some level, do capacities also determine your goals?
#
Because it's a different matter that you wouldn't have been able to achieve the goal
#
without the social and cultural capital,
#
but you may not have had the goal in the first place if you weren't there.
#
On education, we find that that's not the case.
#
Because, I mean, if you go to any poor part of India,
#
you'll find a lot of kids and a lot of parents saying,
#
I want my kid to be a doctor.
#
I mean, whatever, because social media, media, movies,
#
they make everybody aware of what the ambitions can be.
#
I'm sure most Indians will say they want a wedding like Ambani.
#
I mean, you know, whether they're going to do it or not is another story.
#
They try, it's another work of mine.
#
But, you know, so I don't think those aspirations are necessarily,
#
I mean, they could be, but they're not.
#
Well-being may be, notions of well-being may be,
#
but aspirations, I find people can say all kinds of things.
#
I think the Ambani wedding has spanned like 50 episodes of mine
#
because it just goes on and on, pre-wedding, post-wedding.
#
Six hundred million dollars, I understand.
#
Okay. So, you know, your other two instances
#
of what economics can learn from ethnography are the notion of process,
#
participation, many of which you've alluded to indirectly in this.
#
And I'll just encourage everyone to read your paper.
#
Supposing you do this, you have the cognitive empathy,
#
you go down, you spend time with the people who you're studying.
#
Is there a danger that you could get too tied up in the proximate?
#
For example, Jean Drez's example, right?
#
If you have that cognitive empathy for the people around you,
#
then, you know, coming up with NREGA is a natural thing
#
and you can see the good it does.
#
At the same time, if for people who see the bigger picture,
#
they might say that number one, welfare creates dependencies
#
and that's a bad thing.
#
A friend of mine has a phrase for this called PPP,
#
perpetually planned poverty, which is also a critique of socialism.
#
Equally, you could say this has a crowding out effect
#
at a time where jobs are the need of the hour
#
and it's not really sustainable.
#
Another example to move away from NREGA is say farm loan waivers.
#
If you're hanging out with farmers themselves,
#
the immediate anesthetic they need for their visceral pain
#
that they feel in their lives is certainly farm loan waivers.
#
But it may not be visible to a researcher in the field
#
with the farmers that there's a different kind of structural reform
#
needed entirely, which is not perceptible
#
because you're too close to the problem.
#
And in a sense, this is also a question about
#
the trade-off between a view that is too broad
#
and from too much of a distance like multilateral organizations
#
like World Bank, etc. might have,
#
where they only look at the data from a distance
#
and the other part of the trade-off where you're really too close
#
and you can't see the bigger picture.
#
Absolutely. There's no question about that.
#
But the only point I'm making is one is super-dominant,
#
the other one is non-existent.
#
So there's to be some balance.
#
When you just have one view dominating, that's also wrong
#
and that results in screwed-up policy.
#
But otherwise, your point is very well taken.
#
Let me make a slightly different point.
#
And this is not a point I make in the paper
#
but you made me think about this.
#
You know the principle of subsidiarity.
#
That principle of subsidiarity should apply to research
#
and what we learn from research as well.
#
So I think if you start applying that,
#
treat knowledge with the respected
#
deserves for the level at which it is coming from.
#
That doesn't mean you don't do macro stuff,
#
you don't do meso stuff or micro stuff.
#
But we need to get away from saying that the macro,
#
I mean the kind of attention paid to macroeconomists
#
in the world and in India bothers me.
#
I wanted to be a macroeconomist.
#
I studied with Lawrence Klein, I did all of this.
#
And I studied the expectation ratio.
#
I was in Chicago with Robert Lucas.
#
I mean, I know this stuff, right?
#
Because at the end, the principles,
#
whatever math you use, the principles are ABC, you know?
#
Why do Indians spend so much,
#
give so much attention to every damn macroeconomist,
#
chief economist, this, that, economic, all macroeconomists
#
when this work is much harder and more interesting?
#
So I'm not saying I'm saying that bit and yes,
#
but it's sort of, you know, all of them matter.
#
All of them have to be paid attention to in making policy.
#
That's a fantastic insight.
#
For those of my listeners who don't know
#
the principle of subsidiarity, it basically is that
#
if you look at the structure of governments,
#
each thing should be done at the level of government
#
at which it is best done.
#
So if you have like water supply and plumbing problems,
#
it is a local government, the village government,
#
or the city government which should do that.
#
If you have something like defense, for example,
#
that a national government has to do.
#
So, you know, whatever can be done,
#
you do it basically as locally as it is possible.
#
And the point you're making is that
#
when it comes to research, it's the same thing.
#
So if I might think aloud,
#
when it comes to understanding well-being
#
in a particular area, you want to do
#
reflexive ethnographic study to understand
#
what people themselves mean by well-being.
#
And that's the only way to do it.
#
It has to be at the most local level.
#
But when you look at a larger structural level
#
of how can you bring about economic prosperity
#
in that area, then maybe you need
#
to take a broader view.
#
Yes, I mean, that's one way of seeing it.
#
I mean, I think the work I'm trying to do now
#
is to see if we can raise the level
#
at which we understand how people see well-being
#
So maybe technology allows us to sort of
#
do different things with that subsidiarity.
#
The granular understanding can finally scale.
#
Wow, that's incredible.
#
Like you've done papers also on using LLMs
#
for this kind of stuff of parsing language,
#
you know, especially when it comes
#
to the oral transcripts you have from Gram sabhas,
#
participation of women in them,
#
participation of Dalits in them.
#
So what have you found using machine learning
#
Yeah, so LLM is a slightly different story.
#
I'll tell you what we've done
#
and that's slightly different.
#
But with machine learning,
#
we use something called topic modeling,
#
which is old-fashioned unsupervised methods
#
from Texas data to study Gram sabhas.
#
I did that with Ramya Parthasarathy
#
and Netrapaldi Swami in Tamil Nadu.
#
And that was a, you know,
#
so that was a, we approached it that way
#
because of a practical reason.
#
Paramit and I collected our data on Gram sabhas,
#
the 300 Gram sabhas in South India.
#
And I collected it first.
#
Paramit had joined me the project later.
#
But that was old-fashioned,
#
hand-done qualitative analysis.
#
It took us in between lives ups and downs
#
took us eight or nine years to analyze all that.
#
And then I had the chance to collect some data,
#
Gram sabha data from Tamil Nadu
#
because of a project we were doing.
#
I don't want to do this.
#
So I said, I want to use,
#
I didn't know anything about machine learning
#
I said, this has to be a method.
#
So I approached a friend of mine at Stanford,
#
Swamit Rija I mentioned.
#
I said, hey, Swam, come and do this with me.
#
You're smarter guy than me.
#
You can probably figure this out.
#
I don't know anything about machine learning.
#
But there's this kid I know,
#
Ramya Parthasarathy in political science.
#
She's studying these things.
#
Why don't you work with her?
#
She's also looking for a topic.
#
So Ramya and I joined together with Netra.
#
And Netra helped, of course,
#
manage all the data collection.
#
And the method used there was topic modeling,
#
which is basically we had all these transcripts,
#
I think 100 transcripts.
#
And the computer goes in,
#
sorts all that data out into bags,
#
bags of words it's called.
#
So in our case, we experimented how many bags.
#
But then the human interpretation comes.
#
The computer will give you bags of words.
#
You have to stare at those bags.
#
What's the meaning of these words?
#
Thankfully, I know a lot about Gram Sabha.
#
I kind of was able to interpret what those are saying.
#
And then we did various regressions with that.
#
We found some very interesting things.
#
In that paper, we found that there's no question
#
that there's an enormous amount of citizen participation,
#
but that men are listened to much more than women.
#
And so there is gender bias.
#
But that gender bias is rectified
#
when you have women presidents.
#
So women presidents listen to women more,
#
and that corrects their gender balance.
#
So that was the summary of a reasonably complicated paper.
#
The LLM story is slightly different.
#
So the LLMs are a technique
#
that's also in the Texas data family,
#
but I think an entire world has already started
#
and increasingly dominated by LLMs.
#
I like to think of them as a version of supervised learning,
#
but we don't know what the training set is.
#
Even LLM people don't know what the training set is
#
because it's training on everything.
#
So it's a form of collective knowledge,
#
if you wish, that's being distilled and it's going mad.
#
The particular issue Julian Ashwin and I
#
and our co-authors Aditya Chhabra were interested in is
#
for our Rohingya-Bangladesh data,
#
which was firstly in the Rohingya dialect,
#
the Rohingya language is, I understand,
#
very close to the Chittagongan dialect of Bangla.
#
And so there's already a step of translation
#
that the person who's been doing these interviews
#
is then putting that into regular Bengali.
#
And then, of course, the Bangladesh is being a regular Bengali.
#
Now, we can analyze the Bengali text directly with machine learning.
#
You don't need to translate it.
#
We take that additional step so we can read that data.
#
So that's that because I don't read Bengali
#
and neither do my colleagues.
#
Then we use our method of bottom-up coding training set
#
where the sociologists have sat and coded everything.
#
And then we're coming with a dictionary.
#
We're coming with codes.
#
That's our method, our reflexive method.
#
But there's a literature starting in computer science.
#
There was an article in PANAS at that time,
#
there are many others now,
#
saying that LLMs can do this for you automatically.
#
You just let the LLM in, it'll do the coding for you.
#
LLMs do programming anyway,
#
so I can't do this kind of coding,
#
qualitative coding also.
#
And why waste our time doing human coding?
#
LLMs will do it for you.
#
Some have found this quite bothersome.
#
So Julian and Aditya, I should give credit to them,
#
then basically applied these LLM coding methods
#
and our coding method that we had developed
#
and found that the LLM coding was massively biased.
#
So we put it as a working paper.
#
It's got a revised resubmit
#
in a good sociological methods and research now.
#
We've got a lot of pushback from computer scientists saying
#
this is because you're looking at these
#
Bangladeshis and Rohingyas.
#
If you look at our kind of people, you're fine.
#
And also second criticism, this is early LLMs.
#
Let chat GPT-5 come, 6 come, it'll be much better.
#
This is probably true, but at least at this point,
#
it's a cautionary tale.
#
Don't think LLMs are some magic solution.
#
They can be in fact severely biased
#
when they're looking at people
#
that LLMs are not trained to look at particularly.
#
So don't use them for this purpose.
#
Our method is better also.
#
So you mentioned your work with Parumita.
#
You've got a book, Oral Democracy,
#
with her published I think in 2018.
#
You'd written a book previously called
#
Localizing Development with Ghazala Mansoori.
#
Here's a digressive question on the subject of books
#
and knowledge, which is that
#
how does an intellectual think about their role in society
#
beyond the particular mandate of knowledge creation
#
that you have within the World Bank?
#
So you work for the research department of the World Bank.
#
You do what you do there.
#
Many other people may work in universities
#
or various places and they're creating knowledge.
#
What is the responsibility for getting the knowledge
#
out there in an accessible way?
#
Because I'm guessing that
#
if you think the knowledge and the insights matter,
#
it almost becomes something also your duty
#
to kind of get it out there
#
in a way that people can understand.
#
Whereas a lot of the academic world
#
is a little bit of a circle joke.
#
It's academics speaking to other academics
#
in journals that only academics read,
#
if anyone reads them in language
#
that only other academics can understand
#
if they are read at all.
#
Do you think that in a sense
#
there's a larger role to be played
#
for people within this knowledge society
#
that there's a larger responsibility out there
#
of getting these ideas out there at scale
#
of building a body of work?
#
Like I have recently sort of been using
#
the economic concepts of stock and flow
#
and thinking about intellectual endeavors
#
where I think papers and blog posts and articles
#
are really a sort of flow of content.
#
That is how you constantly make yourself think better.
#
You throw them against the real world.
#
It's super important, but it's transient.
#
Hardly anybody notices it comes and it goes,
#
specifically if you're an academia.
#
Maybe World Bank reports also translate into policy,
#
but otherwise they're not really read widely.
#
And I think of the stock of intellectual content
#
as being maybe things like books or documentary series
#
like Friedman's Free to Choose or whatever,
#
That issue of transience isn't there
#
and it becomes something that others can build on.
#
They can be foundational.
#
I love Philip Larkin's phrase,
#
it deepens like a coastal shelf.
#
It's in a different context.
#
Man hands on misery to man.
#
It deepens like a coastal shelf,
#
but just as intergenerational misery
#
can build up like that, so does knowledge.
#
You provide one sedimentary layer of understanding
#
on top of that there's another layer.
#
All of your work and your knowledge
#
is based on many layers from different places,
#
from economics, from sociology, from ethnography.
#
So your layers are different from other people's layers,
#
but those layers are there.
#
Do you feel that intellectuals in general
#
have this responsibility to think about it in this way,
#
that a lot of intellectual work,
#
if not intellectual energy to begin with,
#
because you're asking the wrong questions
#
and chasing the wrong goals.
#
But A, is a lot of that wasted,
#
and B, whenever good work is done,
#
you also have a responsibility to think
#
about that coastal shelf and what you're contributing.
#
Absolutely, and I take this much more seriously
#
You know, we come back to this notion of incentives.
#
Academics, researchers, whether the World Bank or outside,
#
we are rewarded by publishing.
#
The World Bank we're rewarded,
#
I think it's slightly better because we're also rewarded
#
for our impact on policy.
#
But at the end, it's a game, you know?
#
It's a game of how can I take this data,
#
collect this data, construct it in a way
#
that will get me to the highest possible journal.
#
And if you look at all the famous economists,
#
they've all made their careers playing that game very well.
#
They're all published in the top five.
#
They're obsessed with publishing in the top five.
#
Any good, well-known economist has done that.
#
I think any kind of academic has done that.
#
Now, to me, the impact that has outside academic circles
#
is derived in the sense of derived demand.
#
You know, it is one particular idea might take off.
#
Somebody might resonate with that.
#
They might do something with it.
#
Now, the RCT world has had a great impact on this.
#
So that's both good and bad for the reasons we discussed.
#
Everybody's obsessed with deworming now
#
because of the original RCT work of Ted Miguel and Michael Kramer.
#
I mean, everybody's obsessed with microfinance
#
and what is this, the kind of programs
#
that they're starting doing in BRAC and others
#
because it's passed the RCT test.
#
So that is having actually a policy impact
#
without needing to be translated
#
because the translation is very simple.
#
Our impact was so much.
#
If you do this, you get this.
#
There is a challenge, though,
#
in how you synthesize all of that into a body of work
#
and sort of say, how do we understand this as big picture?
#
The kind of work I work on is bottom-up stuff broadly,
#
which is particularly tricky
#
because it's a multidisciplinary literature.
#
It's also looking at not simple but complex interventions.
#
So deworming is very simple.
#
I mean, like a headache, it's a simple intervention.
#
Give a pill, somebody's better off.
#
That is very amenable to an RCT
#
because the intervention doesn't vary
#
depending on the person you're giving to.
#
The body may vary, but not the intervention.
#
In bottom-up stuff, every bloody village is different.
#
The interventions could be slightly different everywhere, right?
#
So Gazala's book and I,
#
that book that Gazala, Mansoori and I did,
#
Localizing Development,
#
was an attempt to say the bank at that time
#
was spending $80 billion or something
#
on bottom-up development.
#
We said, what is the evidence on this?
#
And very consciously, we said,
#
we're not going to go just for this RCT evidence
#
because RCTs have a limitation in studying this
#
because the intervention varies.
#
If the intervention varies,
#
effectively the RCT is underpowered, as they say,
#
has less sample than it needs, always.
#
You're going to find no impact
#
because you don't have enough data.
#
So we have to be a much broader interpretation of this.
#
And that was an act of synthesis because, by the way,
#
some of the people who were my RAs on that,
#
Inderjeet Roy, who's now a professor at York
#
and is doing all this brilliant work.
#
He did this book on democracy.
#
What is that reason for?
#
Audacity of hope, I think, that did very well.
#
So he was my Aari on that.
#
Brikupati Singh was my Aari on that,
#
who wrote this beautiful book on well-being.
#
And so a lot of wonderful people worked on it with us.
#
What we did in that book was to bring in
#
this interdisciplinary literature
#
and the quantitative literature
#
and sort of say, what is the big picture here?
#
And we found, essentially, that bottom-up stuff,
#
bottom-up big message was that bottom-up stuff
#
The top has to want the bottom to be better off.
#
And therefore, the top then protects
#
the bottom from the local elites
#
and are able to counter that
#
and implement better because of that process.
#
And when that's done, it works well.
#
What Jonathan Foxx has called a sandwich.
#
Now, the second thing we said,
#
if you want to do this as the World Bank,
#
these are the things you need to do
#
to make all of this happen.
#
And don't do it in a place
#
where you don't have top-down support on this.
#
I think we have affected policy a lot by that
#
because that book, by the way,
#
there's a bit of a digression on that.
#
The president of the bank at that time,
#
a fellow called Jim Kim,
#
who along with Paul Farmer,
#
started Partners for Health and all that.
#
And he thought he was a big participation advocate.
#
So as soon as, and we're not against
#
participation at all, clearly I'm not.
#
This book, he hated because he felt
#
we were attacking the participatory agenda.
#
So he tried to censor it.
#
First thing he did when he came to the bank
#
was he tried to censor the book.
#
He wanted literally all the copies
#
that had been printed to be burnt.
#
There's a man who's got a page in anthropology.
#
I mean, if you were not on a podcast,
#
I'd use stronger language about him.
#
But you know, he is such a horrible guy.
#
And anthropologists without an anthropological sensibility,
#
Anyway, so that book, I think,
#
is one of the things that I'm proudest of
#
in the sense that because it was an attempt
#
at synthesizing a complicated literature
#
in a way that was understandable
#
to large numbers of people,
#
it continues to be read, I think, because of that,
#
because we tried very hard to write it reasonably simply.
#
The second thing is a book,
#
paper I've just finished with Sharan and,
#
M.R. Sharan and Siddharth George,
#
which is a synthesis of the literature on panchayats.
#
The same thing with 250,000 democracies,
#
where we bring all of this together.
#
It's been downloaded some more than 3,000 times
#
Because we're trying to say that,
#
look, there is something very, very interesting
#
going on, which there's a lot of good evidence
#
that tells you how to fix it.
#
I really think that that kind of work,
#
I want to do more of it.
#
Now, I think many disciplines are catching onto this.
#
There's many annual reviews in every discipline.
#
They're trying to do that.
#
At the end, I think there is still a challenge.
#
At CIFAR, I try very hard to push my colleagues
#
to sort of do this more and more.
#
And I find that they always struggle.
#
And they're from all disciplines.
#
They find a real struggle to communicate
#
to a broader public, let alone other disciplines.
#
That's slightly easier.
#
But to the public, it's very hard for them.
#
Some are better than others.
#
It's a different part of your brain
#
you're trying to employ.
#
And it's not just about,
#
they know how to teach students,
#
but that's not the same thing.
#
What I find a very difficult kind of thinking to do
#
is a thinking where you don't just go along
#
the lines of current research
#
and try to take it forward in incremental ways,
#
but sometimes you rethink
#
what a concept means entirely.
#
I was struck by this line
#
in your Localizing Development,
#
where in the conclusion you wrote,
#
the value of participation is clear.
#
What is far less clear is whether
#
participation can be induced
#
through the type of large-scale government
#
and donor-funded participatory programs
#
that have become a leitmotif
#
of development policies.
#
And the useful frame that I found in this book
#
was the distinction between organic participation
#
and induced participation.
#
And that seems at the heart of,
#
in fact, what organizations
#
like the World Bank perhaps got wrong once.
#
So can you talk a little bit more about that?
#
Because I think what can often happen
#
is that you can have this lazy sense
#
that once you have this notion
#
that yes, we should have participation,
#
let's get it done like this,
#
physics envy, we'll do it from the top down,
#
And you think your job is done,
#
but actually you're just getting participation all wrong.
#
And you know, your book was like a cautionary,
#
we need to relocate what we mean by it.
#
So can you elaborate on that a bit?
#
So if you look at successful participation,
#
whether the American Civil Rights Movement
#
or the Gandhian Movement
#
or the Anti-Apartheid Movement in South Africa,
#
they're all coming with a strongly perceived need
#
to make the world different.
#
But social movements scholars talk about
#
sort of imagining a better world
#
and then figuring out how to get there, right?
#
That act of imagination
#
and the act of mobilization
#
that follows that act of imagination
#
is organic participation.
#
It comes with leadership
#
and it comes with mobilization.
#
Leadership, both intellectual
#
and actual practical leadership.
#
And every great change that's happened
#
on this planet to human beings
#
has come because of that at the end.
#
that came from that in the bank
#
not just the World Bank,
#
every development organization was
#
to the Ford Foundation in the 50s.
#
They saw the Gandhian Movement,
#
we can make the Gandhian Movement
#
So that's induced participation
#
and we can make people into Gandhians.
#
You need a Gandhi for that.
#
The World Bank is not going to make it happen.
#
In fact, all you can do is throw money at people,
#
have them organize themselves into groups.
#
You'll find the elites stealing all the money.
#
That's basically what happens with these projects.
#
So that was, I think, what we tried to show in that book,
#
is that you're wasting your money
#
when you could be doing something different.
#
Now, all this other work,
#
the work on panchayats,
#
all of that is asking a slightly different question.
#
How can we scale up organic participation?
#
And the best example I know of this,
#
which was partly involved with
#
is the livelihoods movement in India,
#
the self-help group, SAGs,
#
which is now broadly called the NRLM,
#
the National Rural Livelihoods Mission.
#
Now there's a National Urban Livelihoods Mission as well.
#
What is the genesis of that?
#
I'm writing about that right now with Paramitra.
#
so let me digress a bit if you don't mind.
#
You think about gender and gender issues and policy,
#
and I'm sorry to put it this way,
#
but it's largely about,
#
I don't know if anybody's going to listen to this,
#
white people telling brown and black people what to do
#
and how to be good women.
#
So where the policymakers are coming from,
#
of a Betty Fried Friedan or that crowd,
#
the American feminists, the British feminists, the suffrages,
#
But that's a particular view of what gender equality is.
#
you have Savitri Bai Phule,
#
you have Iravati Karve,
#
you have a long tradition of Indian feminists
#
who have developed an Indian notion of feminism
#
that is kind of different from this kind of feminism.
#
1974, you have this beautiful status woman report
#
produced by the government of India,
#
Umar Chakravarty, others involved in writing it.
#
I mean, I would recommend everybody reads it.
#
It may be old, but you read that darn thing,
#
you talk about interdisciplinary writing, policy writing,
#
it's a masterpiece, masterpiece.
#
And you see why the kind of work that went in,
#
full of ideas of how to make gender equality happen in India.
#
you have Mahal Samakhya,
#
you have all the women's development programs,
#
all of that starts coming.
#
Of course, in parallel,
#
you have organizations like SEWA doing what they do,
#
Bangladesh BRAC and Grameen doing what they do.
#
Grameen and BRAC, slightly different trajectories.
#
But SEWA very much along the Indian feminism,
#
it's a Gandhian idea of feminism, if you wish.
#
SEWA, Ella Benn, if you read her book,
#
I mean, you see where she's coming from,
#
she's an Indian feminist.
#
She's clearly a feminist.
#
Maybe it'll be the kind of feminist that
#
will be recognizable to Hillary Clinton.
#
I hope Hillary Clinton recognizes I should say that.
#
I'm sure they know each other.
#
But I don't want to be told
#
if I was an Indian woman
#
by somebody who doesn't understand my context,
#
what my life should be like.
#
The good thing about the NRLM
#
and the livelihoods projects that started before that,
#
those were Jeevika in Bihar,
#
Velugu in Andhra Pradesh.
#
I have other problems with Velugu, but not this one.
#
Guna Bhushri in Kerala, many, many projects.
#
Is that they came from that Indian idea of feminism,
#
which was what we need is collective action,
#
form women's collectives with the excuse of credit and savings.
#
But that will just be a highway
#
that we built to form women's collectives
#
and we'll roll out all kinds of things on top of them.
#
And we're finishing a book now in Bihar showing,
#
I mean, what a remarkable impact that's had on Bihar.
#
I think it had an impact in many other places,
#
but at least in Bihar we have the data now.
#
Firstly, that this is an RCT we did with that in Bihar,
#
Vivian Hoffman and a bunch of us,
#
where in two years, Jeevika was able to reduce,
#
I mean, it had a huge impact on those who participated
#
and they refinanced their debt from moneylenders
#
to the 24% interest rate, that much lower,
#
moneylenders 300% interest rate.
#
But it reduced the moneylenders interest rates also,
#
because they were competing against this by 57%.
#
I mean, that's a huge impact.
#
And then other work subsequently has found
#
that these women are now running more for office.
#
They have much better ability to deal with risk
#
and uncertainty, but all kinds of good stuff happens.
#
That's just one study and then many others, right?
#
And the reason it happened is because it creates
#
cultural and social capital for women
#
in ways that work within that context.
#
And that context is getting out of the caste patriarchy,
#
the caste hierarchy patriarchal trap.
#
And have them identify themselves
#
as collectors of poor women.
#
So that's a big transition they make through via the project.
#
And there are many, many things that they do
#
To me, that's Indian feminism, yeah?
#
And I'm sure there is an equivalent, you know,
#
Tanzanian feminism and Mexican feminism, yeah?
#
And again, it goes back to this idea of reflexivity.
#
Let's do, if you're going to look at gender,
#
let's, and importantly, with all these NRLM projects,
#
they're trained, the facilitators are trained
#
to not confront men, but to incorporate them,
#
to make them part of the process.
#
You know, and in fact, we see in our book,
#
the criticism they got was Nitesh has become a woman,
#
Nitesh Kumar, because it's his project.
#
So, but that support from the chief minister downward,
#
again, the sandwich, helps the bottom-up process happen.
#
So that to me is an example of an organic process scaling up,
#
which is the way it should happen.
#
Not, hey, this livelihoods project worked in,
#
God knows, Indonesia, let's bring it to India.
#
What is the Indian version of this?
#
And you can do an Indonesian version.
#
What's unfortunately happening with livelihoods projects
#
a little bit, they're taking the Indian SAG thing
#
as importing into other countries,
#
which is going to have the same effect, yeah?
#
It's not dealing with the context well enough.
#
Shruti Rajgopalan and Alex Traverock had this great paper
#
on premature imitation as public policy,
#
you know, the concept of isomorphic mimicry.
#
If it worked there, it must work here,
#
let's bring it here, no nuance, et cetera, et cetera.
#
That concept actually goes back to Peter Evans,
#
And then, of course, Landt and Michael Wolcock
#
have written on that as well.
#
So is it, in a sense, inevitable that the greater
#
the distance that you have from the ground,
#
both in terms of actual physical geographical distance
#
that you are likely to miss the wood for the trees?
#
In the sense, I would imagine for a big
#
multilateral organization, it is actually natural
#
to think in simplistic terms,
#
because that's the only way to actually, you know,
#
grok what's in front of you, the deep complexity of it.
#
And it is natural to have that kind of paternalistic attitude.
#
And the incentive towards self-correction
#
may not be that high, because you are also
#
getting your funding from somewhere.
#
You have to show your funders
#
that you're making interventions,
#
that you're making a difference.
#
How you make a difference could also come from
#
how you gather your data and what your metrics are.
#
And it can just become, like you put it,
#
it can just become a game,
#
and it can become a bit of a problem.
#
There's a natural equilibrium, absolutely,
#
that's along those lines.
#
The same point you were making earlier about,
#
you know, becoming an engineer or a doctor,
#
you know, it's just, it's the natural equilibrium.
#
I think it can be corrected.
#
And that's what Jim Wolfenson tried to do, to his credit.
#
Because of the force of his personality,
#
you know, Jim Wolfenson was a kind of a character.
#
He was one of the rudest, most arrogant men
#
But I think that arrogance and that so on
#
was in his actions, in the way he talked to people,
#
in his thinking he was not.
#
So he used that to make change happen, you know.
#
And what he did was basically say three or four different things.
#
As I said, every World Bank staff
#
has to spend a week in the field.
#
Living with a poor family and figuring out
#
what life really is that they're trying to fix.
#
Secondly, we're going to,
#
when we sort of start developing policies for countries,
#
we're going to have a participatory process
#
of discussing those policies with large groups of people,
#
see what civil society says,
#
conversations with civil society.
#
Thirdly, people are going to be rewarded
#
for doing this kind of work.
#
Even if they don't deliver necessarily,
#
they're going to be rewarded for the process.
#
It's not necessarily always going to work that way,
#
it doesn't work that way,
#
but that's what the principles are.
#
I'm going to hire people who think in this way.
#
And I think it did make a difference.
#
And that he changed the World Bank
#
because now it's all going back to form
#
in many ways, for many reasons.
#
And we're ending up, you know, becoming a,
#
rather than a multilateral development agency,
#
a multilateral corporation.
#
I think that's also happening
#
because of these imperatives,
#
the need for speed, the need, you know,
#
everybody saying, where is the change happen, change happen.
#
Change doesn't happen quickly, boss.
#
If you don't understand that, go run a corporation
#
because you can do that there.
#
You cannot do it in these places, you know.
#
So that thinking has to change
#
and it's going to, it's going to come back.
#
I mean, you know, so I think.
#
I mean, you're in the World Bank.
#
Do things move in the right direction?
#
And I'm sure you're not the only one who feels this way.
#
Look, I've been at the World Bank 25 years,
#
I've been there 25 years.
#
I came, I think the Wolfensohn Bank
#
was the best bank that I have personally seen
#
because of attention to these things.
#
It wasn't necessarily successful.
#
In fact, localizing development
#
was a critique of the Wolfensohn Bank
#
in many ways because they spent so much money
#
on this community development.
#
But I think all of those imperatives,
#
which is basically slow cooking.
#
At the end, we're looking at cooking
#
in McDonald's versus some beautiful restaurant, right?
#
That slow cooking process
#
people are having less and less patience for.
#
And everybody wants results yesterday.
#
Everybody wants to disburse money as fast as possible.
#
That need for disbursement results in,
#
at the end, misguided policy
#
because you're not doing any checking.
#
You're not doing checks and balances.
#
Pushing money out the door.
#
That is increasingly happening,
#
I think more than it did when I joined.
#
And I think my views are shared by a lot of people.
#
They may not have the willingness to express them.
#
I think there's something more fundamental going on
#
talking about development.
#
Let me digress a bit into that.
#
I think when I started out in this field,
#
it was essentially the Global North
#
supporting development of the Global South.
#
The money came from one direction to the other.
#
That has completely changed now.
#
Between China, India, other countries,
#
there's a fair amount of money in the Global South
#
that they can fund their own work.
#
In fact, India's now banned all NGOs from operating, as we know.
#
So the places like the World Bank
#
or even the bilaterals, even worse,
#
FCDO in Britain, the Scandinavians,
#
they all have to shift how they do this kind of work.
#
Everybody's trying to navigate in this new world.
#
And I think part of that is to sort of...
#
I don't know how that's all going to settle in,
#
but the world of development
#
I think needs to change in the following way
#
that development is not a Global South issue.
#
It is basically the field of how we make
#
people better off, period, in every sense of the word.
#
In other words, places like the World Bank
#
should be advising everybody
#
and providing funding where necessary for everybody.
#
It should be much more open
#
like it was when it first started after World War II.
#
So moving on to broader questions.
#
What are the big questions that
#
A, you feel more people should be focusing on,
#
but aren't yet including in this field,
#
and B, that mean a lot to you personally
#
and that you want to spend time tackling.
#
You've already spoken about deliberative democracy
#
and the structures of what enables that.
#
But what are the big questions
#
we should all be thinking about, in your view?
#
I mean, the two big questions,
#
and they're very, I think it's not just my view,
#
they're broadly recognized as backwards.
#
How do we heal a broken world?
#
In other words, how do we improve
#
process of collective action?
#
It's another way of phrasing that,
#
which is all the work that I was talking about earlier.
#
The second one is like Game of Thrones, you know,
#
It's already what descending, it's there.
#
How are we going to function?
#
What are we going to do?
#
So these are very obvious things.
#
The approaches to them, I think,
#
can be done a little bit differently.
#
And there's actually a third thing, which is
#
the fact that machines are getting so bloody good
#
at what they do, and they're going to get better
#
which means that not only will we have paternalism,
#
I don't know what the equivalent is, you know.
#
Machines will be ruling us, not benevolent dictators.
#
How do we make all of that,
#
make all of that more reflexive?
#
How do that, how do we make,
#
and I think it's going to work better
#
if it's more reflexive for us as human beings.
#
So my little part of that is to try to think
#
about deliberative democracy and collective action.
#
But all of these are such bigger fields than that.
#
So I think some of the work I was talking about
#
with narrative well-being and with, you know,
#
trying to make qualitative analysis scaled up
#
using natural language processing tools
#
and those methods we're trying to develop
#
is one attempt at that.
#
But I think there's got to be much, much more than that,
#
and people are doing that kind of work.
#
The part that I think less know less about,
#
and I wish I knew more about was climate change.
#
A bunch of us in Nepal have been conducting,
#
we conducted 100 interviews divided equally, small sample,
#
but we hope this is going to be scaled up
#
in all three parts of Nepal,
#
which is the mountains, the hills, and the valleys,
#
And as I said, those narratives are revealing
#
the kind of struggles people are going through
#
dealing with this stuff.
#
You know, they think that their livestock,
#
all kinds of strange new diseases,
#
of course, human diseases,
#
uncertainty about when to crop, when not to crop,
#
and basic stuff like they get trapped by landslides.
#
And then in the very high hills,
#
they find it's some good impacts.
#
You know, this is more of a growing season.
#
So all kinds of stuff that we don't quite know.
#
So we have to be in my world where to get a lot better
#
and listening to the bottom on the impact of climate change
#
so we can address those questions of resilience better.
#
Mitigation is a whole different story.
#
I don't, you know, that's much more global.
#
That's other people who know much more than me on that.
#
But I think we're going to have a tough few decades, you know.
#
If there's a young scholar listening to this right now,
#
someone inclined towards scholarship
#
and they're thinking this is a great field,
#
I should get into it, maybe they're already in it.
#
They recognize what you say about the incentives
#
of the academic world or the incentives
#
and organizations such as this.
#
But they're thinking that, hey, that can get me a good life.
#
I also need to have a good career, et cetera, et cetera.
#
And yet they care about knowledge.
#
So what would your advice to them be in terms of,
#
A, how should they think in terms of their path?
#
What mistakes should they not make,
#
which you might have made or other young people
#
might have made that one can learn from?
#
And, you know, what area should they focus on?
#
Yeah, let me start with scholarship,
#
because I think I know a little bit more about that.
#
I mean, as we said, discussed earlier,
#
you should have a passion for it first.
#
They should have the passion for the intellectual life
#
and I think for the life of the intersection
#
between intellectual life and practical life.
#
If you have that passion and you have a passion
#
for amongst the subject,
#
it doesn't matter which field you're in.
#
I think these three big questions
#
are where you should be broadly.
#
If you're going to go in that direction,
#
my little bit on that was, would be,
#
please try to bring in as much of the bottom
#
But don't be discriminatory as to discipline.
#
Don't be discriminatory as to method.
#
All methods are useful.
#
All discipline is useful.
#
Computers, yes, they might take over the world.
#
They also give us all these tremendous tools,
#
whether they're LLMs or whatever else.
#
How do we bring that into the society?
#
How do we bring that into the service of reflexivity,
#
in the service of people?
#
And it's not just people, it's all living things.
#
It's not just people, right?
#
It's animals, it's plants, it's an ecosystem, right?
#
How do we bring that system's approach
#
to make it more reflexive, to make it matter in ways
#
that don't presuppose that you as a researcher
#
are smarter than those you're trying to help, as it were.
#
And I think increasingly,
#
I mean, one of the things I'm finding very fascinating,
#
I don't see those YouTube videos of dogs talking
#
because they can press buttons through AI, you know?
#
So I think that's not a joke.
#
I think soon we're going to be in Dr. Doolittle's world.
#
We'll be able to understand animals and fish
#
and everybody else much better than we can.
#
We're already doing it with crows and dogs.
#
So then that starts going to start mattering.
#
And how do we bring all those views in?
#
What is animal welfare?
#
They already have a friend, Burk Osler,
#
thinking about these things as do others.
#
So it's going to be a fascinating world of scholarship out there.
#
How do we meld that into practice?
#
I think that's where there's got to be a collaboration between
#
practitioners have to stop seeing scholars with this day
#
and scholars have to start not seeing practice
#
as something that they don't know how to do
#
or they don't know how to talk to.
#
That intersection has to be better.
#
I hope the World Bank Research Department survives and strengthens
#
because it actually gives you an opportunity to embed a research department
#
in this crazy, big, mad organization that is supposed to be doing good.
#
If you have researchers inside that,
#
it really helps rather than importing them from academia,
#
which is what people think will be a solution to this.
#
It won't because academics have very different incentives.
#
So I think that being completely obsessed with a disciplinary career
#
is going to be less necessary and less valuable in some ways.
#
I mean, I hope that also changes.
#
What I find, unfortunately,
#
I mean, I try to do as much of this as I can and just have so much time.
#
People don't have access to people they can seek advice from,
#
one-on-one counseling on these things.
#
As I said, I was very lucky in the world I lived in.
#
I think all of us should be trying to do more of that.
#
If a young person is looking for direction, try to find the time for them.
#
When I leave my World Bank job and I retire, I want to do a little bit more of that,
#
but I hope others and many people try.
#
Academics do it naturally because they do it with their students,
#
but all of us should be trying to do more of that.
#
And I think how we do it, I noticed that you were doing it in D.C.
#
I'm sure you do it in other places.
#
You talk to young people.
#
That's for us as the older generation, I think is really necessary and important
#
because people are directionless, and that's part of the challenge.
#
It's just that part of that also is, I think, a good consequence,
#
a good thing, which is social mobility.
#
Folks are coming from very different backgrounds
#
that are able now to have these opportunities but don't have direction.
#
So we have to help that process.
#
So I don't know if that answers your question and I don't know this guy.
#
They're very wise words.
#
It absolutely answers my question.
#
For my third last question, see how organized I am.
#
For my third last question, I'm actually going to ask you to turn inwards
#
and answer a question that you almost asked yourself earlier in the show.
#
What makes a good life?
#
I've actually not thought about that for myself.
#
I think for me, the first point is that the notion of a good life changes.
#
Constantly, it's not one thing.
#
At every point in life, whether it's Buddhist notion of constant change,
#
I think we have to take that very seriously for all of us,
#
that we have to be in a process of constant assessment and reassessment
#
Sorry, I don't think we all grow, but circumstances change.
#
Second, a good life requires you to reflect upon yourself and to learn constantly.
#
We are frail creatures.
#
We are very vulnerable creatures.
#
We are creatures full of failings and we are in a network of other failed individuals
#
and people full of failures, good things and bad things.
#
So this network of neuroses, if you wish.
#
And things are constantly changing everywhere all the time.
#
Everybody's going through their own process.
#
If you lack the capacity to reflect and to see your own life and the lives of others
#
and not judge, but adjust, I don't think you will have a good life
#
because otherwise you'll be stuck with the notion of what matters
#
and you will constantly see yourself as a failure.
#
Let me just give you a simple example of that in my field of economics.
#
Constantly, and I would say once in two years,
#
you hear of a very prominent economist who's committed suicide,
#
usually around the time of the Nobel Prize.
#
I didn't know that, my God.
#
Yes, the sense that there's only one way, you're stuck in this thing and the two examples
#
I'm thinking of are both very, very successful, famous economists.
#
Yes, depression matters.
#
Many of us are depressed people, right?
#
But the idea that you think it's so overwhelming that you're going to kill yourself,
#
that comes from a sense of who you think you should be,
#
which I think is a huge problem.
#
If we stick with that notion in our heads,
#
and that happens across social classes,
#
I talked about in the field of these kids who got some BA degree
#
from some college in the district headquarters
#
and feel they're superior to everybody else in the village
#
and then get depressed and they have miserable lives.
#
If they simply said, okay, this is my opportunity set,
#
I'm going to make the best of this, they'll be better off.
#
So I think the need, the ability to constantly reflect and adjust at every stage
#
is central to a good life.
#
Would it be fair to say then that a good life is not a state,
#
but a process, a process of just thinking about yourself,
#
adjusting to the reality of the world?
#
Absolutely, I think that's exactly what a good life is, a process.
#
I think if I've talked about anything in our few hours together,
#
it's been about process.
#
And I think whether it's policy or your own life, it's process.
#
And to think entirely of outcomes and to judge people with outcomes
#
and to judge yourself with outcomes of how high on the pecking order are you,
#
that is endemic to our fellow subcontinentals,
#
Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis,
#
Sri Lankans, I don't care who you are, you're all the same way.
#
I wish the Indian obsession with some magical growth number
#
that's going to make us a trillion dollar economy,
#
all of this is part of that thinking.
#
Instead, worry about how do we make people better off?
#
Money matters, no question that growth matters,
#
I'm not putting down all of that.
#
But to judge yourself on that basis,
#
rather than on how the average person is better off,
#
whatever that better off is that we've talked about,
#
we can complicate that notion.
#
And then it results also in this business of I'm better than you,
#
therefore my religion is better than your religion,
#
my way of being is better than your way of being,
#
all of that follows from that.
#
It all follows from not thinking of process and of change as being central.
#
All of that is so toxic and a road to unhappiness,
#
So my penultimate question to you is really the
#
final question for most of my other guests,
#
but I have something else for you which I will unleash upon you.
#
But the penultimate question is this,
#
for me and my listeners, recommend to us books, movies,
#
music that you love so much,
#
just sure love that you want to share with everyone.
#
Oh boy, that's really hard.
#
Music, I would say follow me on Twitter,
#
because I constantly post music.
#
And this is all music that I think is just extraordinary.
#
There's a treasure trove of Hindustani classical,
#
Karnataka classical music now available.
#
All these precious private recordings have become public.
#
It's mad what's out there.
#
So filtering through that I think is really useful.
#
We can talk about music in a bit, I'll come back to it.
#
your podcast introduced me to Aarti Kumar Rao's Marginlands.
#
I was blown away with that.
#
I'm already blown away by work along those lines,
#
This is reflexive work,
#
because I think that's why it appeals to me so much.
#
And it's so beautifully written
#
and beautifully photographed and illustrated.
#
Boy, so I always think of the last book I read, right?
#
And so going back further from that,
#
I'm going to say something that other people you've interviewed
#
are not going to understand, so Bhagavad Gita.
#
Read it, read it carefully,
#
without anybody else's interpretation but your own.
#
And find a translation,
#
you can read Gandhiji's translation,
#
there's so many translations out there.
#
That is such a font of wisdom.
#
I mean, it's extraordinary.
#
As we know, a distillation of Upanishads.
#
Don't read all the Upanishads, read that one.
#
Read Gandhiji again, read the story of my experiments.
#
Don't judge him, because he was of his time
#
and he evolved as a person.
#
Just read it for what it is.
#
These are books that shape me, so that's why I'm saying.
#
Read the Bible, read the Quran, you know.
#
They're all books that have a lot of wisdom in them.
#
You may agree with some stuff,
#
you may not agree with some stuff.
#
You know, to me, one of the people,
#
one of the biographies that I really, really loved,
#
and unfortunately, I'm sometimes very bad with authors' names.
#
There's a professor at the University of Edinburgh
#
who wrote a biography of Adam Smith.
#
And this man, what a guy, right, and what a thinker.
#
And the fact that he was ahead of his time
#
in the disciplinarity and in bringing philosophy
#
and economics together in all these interesting ways,
#
I think, oh, God, you've really got me.
#
Does everybody get stuck like this in this question?
#
Well, some people come prepared,
#
because they know I'm going to ask.
#
I wasn't prepared, I didn't want to ask.
#
I didn't want to ask, I didn't want to ask.
#
I didn't want to ask, I didn't want to ask.
#
I didn't want to ask, I didn't want to ask.
#
I didn't want to ask, I didn't want to ask.
#
I didn't want to ask, I didn't want to ask.
#
I wasn't prepared, I shouldn't have.
#
In terms of movies, I mean, look.
#
The biography you were referring to,
#
was it Adam Smith in Enlightened Life?
#
Nicholas Philippson, yeah.
#
Yeah, so I just love that.
#
I think going back and reading in economics
#
the work of Eleanor Ostrom
#
in philosophy and in political philosophy
#
reading the work of Jane Mansbridge
#
both on collective action and deliberation
#
not just exit voice and loyalty.
#
Anything he's written is tremendously
#
I mean, I can go on and on, so I'm going to stop with that.
#
I mean, I read a lot of history, so I suppose
#
all of that, you know, that whole
#
that whole world that's out there
#
if you haven't seen The Nell Lodons of Arabia
#
you know, it's a great movie.
#
If you haven't seen The Nell Lodons of Arabia on the big screen,
#
you missed a huge opportunity.
#
If it ever shows on a Serenity MM screen,
#
drop everything, go see it.
#
video basically, television,
#
Not the same thing. To see it on Serenity MM
#
with that sound, I mean, the whole thing
#
starts with an overture and then it
#
goes into, I mean, it's just
#
the grandest movie ever made.
#
Mughal-e-Azam, big screen similarly.
#
In fact, I like the colorized version better.
#
I loved Samskara, Girish Karnad's Samskara.
#
I just loved that movie.
#
I can't say I knew him.
#
I knew him as a child, which is not the same thing
#
as knowing him, right? I didn't know him as an adult
#
at all. He knew my aunt obviously
#
very well. Wow. You know,
#
I think increasingly we have to go
#
to TV series rather than movies.
#
The ethnographer in you would love The Wire
#
The Wire is mine and everybody else's
#
favorite TV show of all time.
#
the western version of The Wire.
#
So, that's worth watching.
#
I'll tell you a TV series I don't like,
#
And I'll tell you why I don't like it.
#
I told Shruti this as well, so I'm going to repeat that
#
story here. I was once in
#
Bangalore at a party and I met
#
this old Jewish lady. She must have been
#
she had grown up somewhere
#
in Poland or something and ended up in
#
India, divorced her husband, married
#
a Mysorean guy and settled in and all
#
of that. She had this interesting
#
life. She was escaping the Holocaust.
#
So, I asked her, have you read
#
Vikram's Hates Two Lives?
#
it, but I didn't like it
#
at all. Why? My life is much more interesting.
#
Because that's about, you know, his uncle
#
who marries a Holocaust survivor.
#
I feel the same about Panchayat.
#
In the sense that it's too
#
trite. Panchayat life is
#
far more interesting than that. It's anodyne.
#
It's anodyne and it's a cute story,
#
but I don't enjoy it. Music
#
I can spend a little more time on.
#
going to stick with classical music because that's
#
I think what I know best.
#
Indian classical music.
#
me because I'm going to be a stupid
#
It gets worse with every generation.
#
And the current Instagram generation is the worst
#
of the lot because they're also, if you watch them
#
they're auto-tuning their
#
Sur, you know, it's terrible. And they
#
seem to highlight this, what I call
#
machine gun classicism, which is your ability
#
to say your taans as fast as
#
possible rather than with interesting things.
#
process by which you expound on
#
Malik Arjun Mansoor to me is the greatest,
#
the senior Daga brothers,
#
of course Pandit Dhivin Sen Joshi,
#
One of the most brilliant
#
in mind, if I forget his singing, the mind
#
You know, people look down on
#
this Ravi Shankar, Vilayat Khan debate, that's
#
really idiotic. They're both great,
#
amazing sitar players and very different
#
Ravi Shankar's ability to say,
#
haikus, you know, within 10 minutes
#
he'll show you what a raag can do.
#
That's extraordinary. And Vilayat Khan's
#
craziness, his romantic craziness is
#
different. So they're both worth
#
listening to. Ali Akbar Khan Sahib, of course,
#
and the jugal bandis that Ali Akbar Khan
#
Sahib has had, both with Ravi Shankar and Vilayat Khan
#
are worth it. Bismillah Khan Sahib.
#
of course Ustad Lara Khan and his son
#
Zakir Hussain, and my friends,
#
their sons, Fazal Qureshi,
#
going in that direction.
#
well, let's go in the Thumri direction.
#
Shobha Gurtu, you know, the older
#
it a little bit as she grew older.
#
the Bharat Ratna. I mean,
#
her violin really makes you
#
want to, and of course her guru,
#
Omkar Na Thakur, I mean, it's just
#
and Kishori Amankar, both mother and daughter,
#
are extraordinary musicians in their own
#
lives. I thought you weren't allowed to listen to Kishori.
#
I do now. My guruji is passed, so I can do
#
what I want. And I listen to,
#
I mean, I like, so there's a,
#
Arun Dravid, who is her senior
#
gathering the older Kishori recordings.
#
So those are much more, my guru would be very
#
happy with me listening to them, because they're much more
#
in the old Jayapuram trolley style.
#
Oh my god. And Carnatic music, which
#
I should mention, because I listen to it a lot, even though,
#
as I said, I know less. You know,
#
the thing, the magical thing about Carnatic music
#
is, it is such a different
#
style. It is so close to
#
the composition, and then elaborating
#
on that composition. And there, the younger
#
musicians are extraordinary,
#
O.M.D. Ramanathan is the grandest,
#
the greatest of them all, in my view.
#
he opens his mouth, it's like you're watching God
#
sing. I mean, he's, to me, the, he
#
and Aamir Khan Sahib, these two are,
#
you know, they're Carnatic and Hindustani equivalents.
#
generation, T.M. Krishna
#
can give you a profoundly
#
Aruna Sairam, you know,
#
T.R. Mahalingam, the flutist in that older
#
generation, you know, T.M.
#
Krishnan, who's the brother of N. Rajam,
#
and they're Jugalbandis, you know, there's a beautiful
#
recording, I might post it on Twitter
#
one of these days, where they're performing Hansad
#
Dhani in the Hindustani and
#
Carnatic style, and of course, Rajam was trained as
#
a Carnatic musician, because he knows it really well.
#
I'll stop there, but I can
#
continue, but to me, focusing
#
the percussion, I studied Mridangam
#
in Rishi Valley for four years
#
with Krishnan sir, Krishnan Yair,
#
of Palgad Mani Yair, and listening to Palgad Mani Yair
#
play the Mridangam is another crazy
#
experience, and another one is
#
Umayapallu Shivaraman is another great
#
of, it takes a lifetime
#
to go through all of that, and all their
#
so many of their recordings are now available
#
on YouTube. I'll link all these guys from
#
the show notes, but to make it easier for my listeners
#
and me, I'll also request you
#
to send 10-20 links, as many as you feel
#
like, to particular performances,
#
so that, you know, we can kind of sink into
#
all of this. Happy to do that. Great.
#
So my last question is not really a question,
#
it's a request, but I would like you to
#
say yes to the request before you know what it is.
#
Are you willing to trust me and do that?
#
Okay, yes, what is it? Okay, I'd like you
#
to sing for me. Oh my god, yaar.
#
After talking for so long.
#
Drink some water, I can get you some more water
#
if you wish. I'll do it for you.
#
with the caveat, that you'll edit
#
that part out if I don't like it.
#
Is that okay? Yes, I mean, like I said,
#
anything that you say, that you want
#
me to cut, I'll cut, but I didn't say anything
#
that you sing, but okay, I will
#
Because I feel I'm not in full practice.
#
No, no, done, I agree. But thankfully
#
I haven't put on my phone, so...
#
based on the composition, it
#
follows from the composition, and
#
the idea is within that avartan, within those
#
whatever, 10, 16 beats, whatever the taal is,
#
you're supposed to express
#
to say, and you have to land on the sum.
#
You cannot go beyond those.
#
within that. You don't improvise
#
at alaap. So there's no alaap without
#
rhythm, everything starts with the rhythm.
#
The alaap comes within the rhythmic
#
structure, so that's the big difference.
#
The second thing is the genius
#
of Aladhya Khan Sahib, who
#
invented the Jaipur Atroli Gharana, is that he kept
#
rag that I love, which maybe I'll sing
#
that a little bit, is called Basanti Kedar,
#
which is a mix of rag Basant and
#
Let me give you a little bit of
#
flavour of Kedar and Basant, if I can,
#
and then I'll plunge into
#
Let's take rag Basant, let me switch ragas here.
#
I'll sing the one I like,
#
the original composition is by
#
Raghunath Panagri, but I've
#
So the thing with Basant is a
#
Ashtra Pralang rag, so you're singing at the upper reaches.
#
Now you see how Aladia Khan brings them together
#
absolutely beautiful such such magic thank you so much for doing this you know if people at
#
the world bank ever say Biju you got to come in line now you got to sing for your supper you can sing
#
thanks Aamit that was wonderful exhausting but wonderful thank you so much
#
If you enjoyed listening to this episode, share it with anyone you think might be interested.
#
I think the ideas we discussed in this are super important.
#
Check out the show notes.
#
Enter Abit Holes at will.
#
A lot of Biju's work is linked there.
#
You can follow Biju on Twitter at Biju Rao, that's one word.
#
You can follow me at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
#
You can browse past episodes of The Scene and the Unseen at sceneunseen.in.
#
Thank you for listening.
#
Did you enjoy this episode of The Scene and the Unseen?
#
If so, would you like to support the production of this show?
#
You can go over to sceneunseen.in slash support and contribute any amount you like to keep
#
this podcast alive and kicking.
