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I like quoting Bob Dylan's great line, he not busy being born is busy dying.
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But what does this mean?
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Well let me try to narrow it down to one quality that will always ensure that we are busy being
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That quality is curiosity.
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The kind of person who grows, who does not ossify or stagnate, is the kind of person
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These kids, many of us, if not most of us, tend to be curious and to always ask why this,
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But alas, we lose this as we become adults and settle into a comfortable groove.
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But this asking why is so important.
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It keeps your brain active.
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It allows you to enjoy serendipity, to soak up the many wonders of this world.
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Curious people know more than just their domain of expertise and therefore they are better
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than other narrower experts in their field.
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Everything is everything.
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And only a curious person can train herself to see the bigger picture as well as the smaller
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details others may miss.
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So I implore you, gentle listener, no matter what else you do in your one wild and precious
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life, don't stop asking the question, why?
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Welcome to The Scene in the Unseen.
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My guest today is a brilliant thinker Tanvi Madan, who works in Brookings in Washington
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D.C. and is considered one of India's finest foreign policy experts.
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I would object to such a narrow way of defining her though.
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And so will you after you hear this episode.
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Tanvi is someone who started asking why as a kid and never stopped.
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She hasn't been a one-track person.
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She's worked in a travel agency, done coding, graphic design, animation.
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She's toyed with the idea of opening a pub.
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She studied history, international relations and public policy before becoming one of the
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most respected voices in that field.
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Her work is a rigor of an academic but is rooted in the reality of the real world.
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Her book, Faithful Triangle, is filled with novel insights about the role of China in
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This conversation was recorded on July 22nd when I was travelling through D.C. and the
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one thing I loved about it is Tanvi's combination of clarity and energy.
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She sought deeply on many subjects.
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We had a great time talking about genderless versus specialists, the think tank world,
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the foreign policy world, the different imperatives of political science and history and so on.
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At the same time, she could skip from subject to subject with perfect ease and whether she
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opens a pub or not, I have a feeling that Tanvi Madan will always be busy being born.
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She will never stand still.
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Before we begin this conversation though, let's take a quick break because after that
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you're going to have a blast.
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Hey, the music started and this sounds like a commercial but it isn't.
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It's a plea from me to check out my latest labour of love, a YouTube show I am co-hosting
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with my good friend, the brilliant Ajay Shah.
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We've called it Everything is Everything.
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Every week, we'll speak for about an hour on things we care about, from the profound
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to the profane, from the exalted to the everyday.
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We range widely across subjects and we bring multiple frames with which we try to understand
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Join us on our journey and please support us by subscribing to our YouTube channel at
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youtube.com slash Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
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The show is called Everything is Everything.
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Please do check it out.
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Tanvi, welcome to The Scene in the Unseen.
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It's great to be on the podcast.
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It's such a pleasure to actually come here and be able to do this in person because as
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you know, being a podcaster yourself and in-person conversation is always great.
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I want to start by something that sort of intrigued me when I was sort of, you know,
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watching everything you've done on, you know, on YouTube and listening to your podcasts
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I was struck by how when you were growing up in Delhi in the 1980s, you mentioned that
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you enjoyed watching the world this week.
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And I was also growing up in the 80s and I loved watching world this week as well.
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And I now realize that the world has changed in the sense that today we have so many different
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disparate sources of information and news about the world, right?
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It's just all over the place.
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There are so many of them.
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But at the same time, it's bewildering, like along with the fact that the consensus on
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the truth has broken down, mainstream media is, you know, becoming more and more irrelevant.
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Everything is narrative battles.
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There was a charm about the world this week that you could in that half an hour capsule
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or one hour capsule, you could just know everything about the world, right?
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And everything today is sort of diffused.
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So what is your sense of how that landscape, I won't even call it the media landscape.
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It is also our internal landscape of how we understand the world, how we take knowledge
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in what is your sense of how that has changed and what that has meant for you?
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I think one thing about the world this week that I liked, and I think there is a market
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for even today, which is that a lot of what we've seen, even on regular TV these days
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in the evening, you see it is opinion.
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What was good about world this week was that you saw facts and analysis.
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The other thing I think there's generally been a move and maybe the market is it demands
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this to a certain extent and, you know, I'm not in the business of the media side of it.
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But the general sense I've got is that you have even in foreign policy, and this is globally
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not just an India issue, is you've seen people's political views or political prisms now shape
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their not just opinion on foreign policy, but analysis.
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So I'm trained as a historian.
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And when governments tell me that something's happening for the first time or is unprecedented,
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my initial thing is let me actually go and look.
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It's true some things are unprecedented, but you can if you're calling everything unprecedented,
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that is a and it's fine for politicians to do it.
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I think you have seen where even analysts have started, you know, starting with a conclusion
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and then moving from there.
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So I think, you know, between I think a lot more opinion analysis that has started getting
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framed that I think is one.
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Those are two trends that I've seen.
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To me, in some ways, it is good, though, to see just the number of platforms.
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I would like to believe, I hope that people just don't go shopping for the people who
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have their own opinions.
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But to me, the fact that if you do want this information, it's much more accessible.
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So growing up in India in the 80s, you know, the idea of a part of the reason we're this
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week is because we only had Doordarshan.
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It wasn't exactly, you know, I don't want to have nostalgia about that period.
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Sometimes we do about, you know, DD when the logo comes on and things like that.
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But part of it was we had very limited sources of information.
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And I was lucky enough that my father, who was not an international relations foreign
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policy person, he was in the business sector.
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But in those days, the private sector obviously also, you know, the salaries were capped,
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for example, by government, etc.
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But he had a thirst for knowledge about the world.
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And so he used to subscribe to Time and Newsweek when Time and Newsweek were what they were
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And so for me, it was it was good, great storytelling.
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So for me, also, I have deep respect for good journalists, because one, I can't do my research
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But also, I think their writing helped me develop an interest and they could tell a
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But again, it was facts.
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To some extent, it was analysis, but it was literally just here's what's happening in
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So to me, I'd like to see more of that, because I do think there is a market for it.
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And I think, you know, your podcast is a good example of this.
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I do think it's not a bad thing that we're seeing so many different platforms.
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The issue always is, you know, where can you find sometimes there's information overload.
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So then the question is, you probably had people on who've talked about this is, you
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know, how do you assess credibility?
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How do you assess quality?
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Those are the things I think that you start to think about, you know, even we all like
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to beat up on Twitter or X these days.
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But for me, one of the reasons I stay on, despite the fact that I do think it's a more
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toxic platform than it used to be, is I still find that I learn things on there.
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If I follow, you know, I have lists, Twitter lists, or whatever they're called now.
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But you can still whether it is, you know, so it's TV, which I think less so even in
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the US you see news channels, they don't have news, they have talking heads talking about
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So I, for example, here will listen to in a US context, I'll listen to I still listen
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I listen to NPR, which is National Public Radio here, and we'll just have this is what's
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happening in the world.
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So I still think what you said about the world this week, you can still tune in and get a
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You know, I say I read The Economist, if I can A get through it and B, I read it, I usually
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listen to the audio version.
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Because again, you know, yes, they have a view, but they're the reporting is I get a
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good encapsulation of what's happening in the world.
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I totally agree that, you know, it is an incredible superpower that we all have that anyone can
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just start a podcast or a blog or a publication like War on the Rocks, for example.
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And it strikes me that, you know, why will this week work so well was that even in that
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time, at that time, you didn't have an overload of information.
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But what Pranayaraj did was he was an excellent curator from what was out there, he chose
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And it was a great capsule.
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And today we have an overload of information, but we still need curators.
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And we still find curators like I like for me, you know, Twitter slash X is so remarkable,
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because if you can shut out the toxicity and not engage in conversations, it's magical.
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You can wake up every morning and listen to the best minds in the world thinking aloud.
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That was unimaginable 30 years ago for us.
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It's also if I if I may, I think the other thing I think you alluded to is I think it's
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You don't need, you know, gatekeepers don't have the same kind of power they did.
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It's not that they don't exist anymore, they do.
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But to me, the fact and I think especially for younger people, and especially for women,
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and especially for other disadvantaged groups who could not have broken through, you don't
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have to be from particular schools today.
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You don't have to be, you know, a former, for example, in kind of either in India or
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You can actually have a view, hopefully it's an informed view, and you can even debate
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with people who, you know, do have more experience and the and the good folks amongst them actually
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do engage in a good way rather than just ignore or yell at people who have different views
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and say, you know, you don't have the rights credential.
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So to me, you know, gatekeeping, I think was a big problem.
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And even on TV, for example, you know, the same people including, you know, I'd get calls,
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but it's not clear that you get a wider set of views.
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And so to me, that's the other good thing about the environment we're in today.
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Just before we started, you sort of lamented the 800 word appeared and it, you know, strips
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away nuance and etc, etc.
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And I often think about the influence of form on the work that we do.
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The last time I was a columnist a couple of years back, I decided I'm not going to write
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for anyone else again, just do my own thing.
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But I had columns for Times of India and Bloomberg Quint.
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And with Times of India, it was the standard 800 words.
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And with Bloomberg Quint, they said, do whatever you want.
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So I would do 2500 word essays.
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And that just gave me the ability to stretch out and it just felt way more satisfying with
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It almost felt as if you've got one message to give and you're getting it across and much
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And I realized that most intensely with the podcast itself, that if you're doing a half
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an hour conversation, you don't have to go deep.
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You don't even have to read the person's book.
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You know, you can just ask standard questions.
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You can take them from chat GPT and you can just get by.
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As I started doing longer conversations, I realized that I have to listen and I have
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to listen to understand and not respond to a book Stephen Covey's quote.
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And therefore my ego has to go out of the window.
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It is an act of much deeper engagement.
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And then that can shape you in other ways.
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So I wrote an essay about how the form can shape the content and then that can shape
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Because what you do day in and day out is what shapes you as a person.
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The rhythms of your life come from there.
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What are your thoughts on form, for example, like both in terms of being a thinker and
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a writer who's putting her work out there and has written one super book and also in
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terms of someone who is consuming because in this modern world, like my lament for myself
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is that too much of my consumption is at this choppy rhythm of scroll scroll swipe swipe,
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you know, and it almost takes an act of great willpower to sit down and read a book which
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would have been so reflexively natural earlier.
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What is that been like you at both ends?
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To me, if I had to boil it down to one word, I'd say diversity, which is I like that today
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we can have diverse forms that are considered acceptable and that get consumed.
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You know, here at Brookings, we have this we still have a book writing culture.
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It's some considered old fashioned.
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It's one of the reasons I work here.
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I get to do book's length research.
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I was just I spent a week in the Reagan archives last week.
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I like that I work at a place that not just says it's OK for you to do that.
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It encourages me to write a book that involves actual research.
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So that we do do the book.
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Having said that, our attitude here again, I absolutely agree with it is that that is
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the basis for a whole lot of other things you do.
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The way I often put it is you should be able to take that research and analysis and produce
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it in a form from everything to a tweet to that book and everything in between.
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So you should be able to, you know, I lament the 800 word op-ed because I'm frankly not
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I tend to be more wordy as listeners of your podcast will learn.
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But I do think that is a certain discipline that everybody should have and be able to
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do because you should be able to distill your key points into an 800 word op-ed.
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You know, in the policy world, you also have a memo.
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Nobody's going to read more than a page.
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Sometimes people, you know, they have the what they call the bluff, the bottom line
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up front. It's a paragraph up top.
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You have to. So it's a good discipline to be able to do, you know, one tweet or a Twitter
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thread, you know, or the 800 word op-ed.
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My preferred form tends to be the 2500 to 3000 word because I feel I can explain a little
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You know, today in online world, yes, you can put links into that 800 word op-ed.
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But if it's a newspaper, that's all a person is going to read.
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So if somebody actually does want, you want to develop an argument, you want to give some
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historical context, you want to bust some myths as I like to do with some of my work,
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you know, try to question some of the received wisdom, conventional wisdom you have.
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It's easier to do in a 2500 to 3000 word thing.
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And then even longer reports, right?
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You do if you're an academic, you do kind of the six to eight thousand word journal
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article or you do, you know, ten to twenty thousand word reports.
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And then you have the book.
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So to me, the good thing about where we're going with form is that there are outlets
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And I will say there's another form.
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I had a brief stint where I learned about graphic design and visual representation.
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I always joke, you know, sometimes really complex ideas.
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You wrote, I'll give you an example, the Quad, the Australia, India, Japan, US grouping.
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I have done a fair bit of work on that.
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And I wrote a kind of a long report for Rand on this a few years ago.
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I think maybe, I don't know, maybe five people read it.
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Thank you to all of them.
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I did, based on that, a set of graphics charts that essentially represented the visual version
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of the point I was trying to make in that argument, which is the Quad is reflective
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of this coalition building, minilateralism world and what it was actually doing and why
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these four countries made sense from that.
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Those charts got, you know, tens of thousands of views.
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People put them on their syllabus and stuff.
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I'm not saying this to say, oh, look, people looked at my, but to point out that you have
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to figure out, you have to keep up as an analyst, as a scholar, as a policy person with how
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are people consuming information, who is your audience.
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And for me, part of that audience is I do want to appeal to young people.
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So I'll do, you know, what can Pride and Prejudice tell us about the Quad or, you know, explain
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the Quad through Pride and Prejudice.
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I'll do a whole thing, a thread on that.
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Because to me, if it conveys information, that is the point.
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It's not about, you know, I have to kind of figure out who my consumer, ideal consumer
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audience is and what best form does that make sense.
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So, you know, it's visuals, it's podcasts.
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This wasn't even a thing, right?
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Sometimes, you know, you think we're reinventing radio.
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So you think about all those forms, not just written, but I think in other forms as well.
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Look, I'm even open to, you know, not on Instagram, but, you know, Insta-reels, YouTube shorts.
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I think whatever works to get your message out there.
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And for me, it's not so much a message.
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For me, it's analysis and information and putting that out there for people.
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And so it really depends on, I like the diversity of form, but it really, you have to know what
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I keep telling my writing students that there's a two-way relationship between writing and
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It's not just true that a clear thinker is likely to be a better writer, but it works
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That, you know, writing helps you think better.
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And the nuance that you've added to that, and I agree with completely, is that different
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forms teach you to think in different ways.
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If you're writing a tweet or if you're writing a two para summary, you have to really just
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get to the heart of the matter, you know, capture the essence of whatever you're talking
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Whereas if you're writing a book, you have to go deep and think in a different way.
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And it's important to think, to do all of this, because if you do one or the other,
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then you get stuck in that.
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If you're always just tweeting, then you are bound to be superficial and, you know, not
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Whereas if you're just writing books, sometimes you need to just kind of get your head out
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of there and, you know, focus on what's essential.
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My other question is about, you know, when you speak about reaching people, like I did
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an episode with our friends from Takshashila, Pranay, Khyati and Anupam, and they did this
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great graphic book, We the Citizens, which I absolutely loved because it is just so accessible,
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it's done so well and huge credit to Khyati for that.
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As a thinker and as someone in the business of knowledge, how do you think of the dual
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responsibilities of on the one hand, you understand the world better and put down that knowledge,
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and on the other hand, you communicate that to people and it actually gets out there.
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So how do you view that sort of balance between doing the work where, you know, it must be
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so pleasurable to be able to go to an archive and just dive into a rabbit hole and you might
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feel like, hey, I could spend months doing this, but also of taking a step back and coming
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out of yourself and thinking of the other person and saying, how do we shape this in
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How do we shape that in that form?
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So you know, what's your evolution been like when it comes to these two?
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So I think some of this is briefly and then I'll kind of elaborate is I have a mentality
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but if it's the tree falling in the forest thing and there's nobody around to hear it,
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then it's just, it's me sitting and having a great time.
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And there's nothing wrong with that because I've learned a lot from, you know, big tomes
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that people have written and put it only in that form.
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So I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
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Sometimes you always wonder, you know, if you had the luxury of doing what the kind
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of old European scholars used to do, sit somewhere on the side of an island or on an island
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and sit and write and pontificate and read.
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But I think to each their own and my philosophy has been is that, and that's why I'm at a
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think tank and not in kind of pure academia and again, I learn a lot from folks at universities,
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but my attitude has been that I do want to actually engage with various kinds of stakeholders,
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not just policymakers, but the public.
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I do want to shape the public conversation.
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And so for me, part of that is, and then as you said, you know, depending on what you're
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trying to do, then you have to adapt in terms of what forms you're going to engage with.
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I think maybe some of this comes from my sister's a landscape architect, my mother's a doctor,
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my father worked in the private sector, so there isn't like a family business as such.
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You get used to having to engage outside your own little world.
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The example I tend to give is when I wrote the first draft of my book, I gave my sister
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It was based on my dissertation and my sister read it and she said, this is too dense, the
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first couple of chapters.
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And that made me actually go back, reread it and try and try to make an effort to try
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to make it more accessible.
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Now, my first book, it's the first book, it also it still is, I would say it's still hopefully
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will be the densest book I ever write, but it improves your thinking about your audiences
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when you when you think I actually do want to speak to a maximum number of people.
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So it's I don't just want to speak to my peers.
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I also think the other things that you always think about who shaped your views and it's
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So the reason I have a lot of respect for journalists, for professors is those are the
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people who helped through their work, you know, when professors, you know, people say
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who has policy impact professors, because they're actually training the undergraduates
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who then go and become, you know, go on.
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But that's when your minds are really shaped.
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And so for me, I often think about, you know, who has kind of inspired my thinking.
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And I try to say, OK, I want to be able to maybe get people to think again.
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And second, I want to also speak to the professors and the journalists and others.
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So I think some of it really depends on what it is.
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If you're lucky enough to have a job that allows you to do different kinds of things,
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you have to prioritize.
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So in my current job, there's less incentive to write a journal article, say it takes too
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It's I mean, it's still a great form, other than the fact that, you know, maybe some
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companies make way too much money out of scholars IP.
#
But I do think, you know, for me, I just have you have to prioritize.
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So you have to prioritize in your own space about who your audience is, then then think
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But for me, I think I've always had this idea that I want to speak to people outside my
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And so I want to make things accessible.
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And I particularly think, as I was saying, because professors inspired me, I always think,
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you know, trying to speak to younger audiences because they have an interest and they have a
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passion, you want to encourage it about the world in a way that that's what inspired me.
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So I and that stuck with me for life.
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And, you know, so for me, that's what I think I need.
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I want to engage with everybody across age groups, across different sectors.
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I also think it makes you a better analyst, because if you're thinking I want to think
#
about stakeholders across different sectors, for example, then you want to make an effort
#
to learn something about economic policy, about domestic politics, about energy policy,
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And so then I'm not just kind of a foreign policy pointy head person focused on my lane,
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you're thinking about it in a broader context.
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And again, this is my preference.
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Some would say, OK, that means you end up being too broad and not deep.
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That's a fair enough criticism.
#
But, you know, I learn a lot from those who do deep dive.
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I'd like to believe I can deep dive, but also put it in a broader context.
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But you do make choices about these things.
#
One of the laments I have about what I see of academia from the outside and what I see
#
of economists, certainly, is that there is a drive to specialize too much and they're
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driven into silos and they're not engaging with the outside world.
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And the Renaissance man or the Renaissance person, as it were, no longer really exists.
#
You know, it's sort of a dying breed.
#
And for me, like we, Ajay and I named our YouTube show, Everything is Everything, just
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the idea being that everything is everything, that, you know, you can use frames from one
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field to look at another field.
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Everything is connected.
#
You can't just focus on one narrow specialization.
#
The dangers of also focusing on one narrow specialization is that you start thinking
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in narrow ways because each field has its fads and fashions and there are incentives
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that drive you to, you know, follow particular paths.
#
Are you an outlier in your sort of focus on being multidisciplinary or, you know, is there
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more multidisciplinary thinking happening in the think tank world or is there a similar
#
Because I meet very, very, very few people who are, you know, who think of going beyond
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specialization and one thing.
#
I think there are a couple of aspects to this, right?
#
So, I mean, as you know, there's been a lot of criticism of the IAS that they are too
#
generalist, that they are too generalized about their thinking.
#
So I think it really depends on what you're doing because, you know, some jobs they do
#
require or you want to, even if you are a generalist, you want to know, you want to
#
read and engage with or bring in people who are specialists and be open to that and have
#
So, you know, I am, I always say I'm a bit of a mutt in the sense, mutt as in the dog,
#
not the religious sites, I should clarify.
#
That would be very weird if you were a bit of a mutt like that.
#
Which is, you know, I was, I did history for my undergrad in Delhi.
#
I did a subsidiary in economics, but then I worked in kind of tech for a couple of years.
#
I actually did a little bit of a lot.
#
And then I did an IR degree, an international relations degree, which actually forced you
#
to do at least two courses in history, two courses in political science, two courses
#
in economics, and then a whole lot of other things.
#
And again, and then I did my PhD in public policy, which again, forced me, even challenged
#
me to do things like I'm not a very quantitative person, but I had to do statistics and things
#
So some of it is you develop over time.
#
I think we are our own backgrounds.
#
Everybody's joking about a quote that Kamala Harris's mother said, something about, you
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know, you just didn't fall out of a coconut tree.
#
You are kind of the context in which you grew up in.
#
And I think that is, it's the lived experience.
#
And for me, you know, when I was a research analyst at Brookings many years ago, I did
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a kind of a report on, I was supposed to do a paper on energy security of various consuming
#
You know, how is energy, how are energy needs of major consuming countries like India going
#
to shape their foreign insecurity policies?
#
And at that time, oil prices were very high.
#
They were kind of over a hundred dollars a barrel.
#
And so this was kind of, it was really about, you know, the supply not outstripping demand.
#
It's a very different context.
#
But I said, I can't write this paper without understanding the energy markets or, you know,
#
India's energy picture.
#
So before I got to the foreign policy part, I did a deep dive into, went and talked to
#
people, understood the government view.
#
I went and talked to business folks.
#
I went to talk to energy experts, people who covered the energy beat, because you have
#
to be able to, I just thought this is going to make my analysis better.
#
Otherwise, you know, it'd be superficial.
#
So some of it is your own experience.
#
Some of it, I think you do make choices.
#
I couldn't, I probably couldn't get a job in mainstream academia because I am a little
#
I've done a little bit of a lot there.
#
The incentive structure is to specialize, maybe in some schools, colleges, where they
#
are, they're looking for that.
#
But I think there's still an emphasis in training on thinking through, you know, specializing.
#
So for me, the question isn't if you specialize, I think you have to specialize in something.
#
So for example, even when I did my dissertation, I specialize in Indian foreign policy.
#
But if I only know, you have to stress to yourself, I'm interested in the world.
#
So if I only know Indian foreign policy, then I see everything through that decision.
#
And so, you know, that's why sometimes I find analysis where people will say only think
#
about a country, even India-U.S. relations.
#
People will talk about whether an individual in the U.S. is pro-India or anti-India.
#
But that's not what is driving.
#
It's about structural factors like, you know, what is their worldview?
#
What are their other priorities?
#
Where does India fit in and stuff?
#
If you don't have an openness to understanding, say, U.S. foreign policy, even policymaking
#
structures in the U.S. or what's going on in the Middle East or Europe, etc., you will
#
think that India is the only country that people in those seats in Washington, that's
#
the only country they're thinking about.
#
So for me, it's not, I don't think there's a, you know, perfect specialist or generalist.
#
If you're a generalist, you should be able to find the places or, you know, find those
#
who have the knowledge of the specialist areas.
#
If you are a specialist, you should be able to think about it in a broader context.
#
For me, I, the bit of a mutt part also is that I find the value judgments that people
#
make about one or the other, it's fine.
#
We have our own experiences.
#
But having an open mind more broadly to saying, okay, maybe this is right for me.
#
It might not be right for the other person.
#
And it should be fit for purpose.
#
It depends on, you know, if for a particular job it makes sense to have a specialist there,
#
But you ideally want a specialist who can put those things in a broader context that
#
will make them better at their job.
#
So I'm struck by how, you know, all of the sort of the examples you gave are all about
#
avoiding simplistic narratives.
#
And when I think about simplistic narratives, I think there is a drive towards simplistic
#
narratives that can really come from three places.
#
And one is personal, that if you adopt a simplistic narrative that can become your one
#
hammer for every nail, and you can think to yourself that I have figured everything out
#
and that takes away some of the confusion and ambiguity you might have about the world.
#
Another can be from media itself.
#
Like, you know, we spoke about how news television is just talking heads and etc, etc.
#
The sort of experts, quote unquote experts, who are valued today by the world are people
#
who have a definite opinion and are willing to fight for it.
#
And that necessarily makes you simplistic, you know.
#
Harry Truman once said, give me a one handed economist, because all his economists kept
#
saying on the one hand this, on the other hand that.
#
And the point is the nature of the world is on the one hand this, on the other hand that.
#
And the third kind of drive could be from within an organization, where if you're working
#
in a particular organization, whether it's a university or a think tank or whatever,
#
you know, you might feel that you are paid to arrive at conclusions.
#
And therefore, arriving at a conclusion is a good thing.
#
Do it quickly and, you know, back it up as forcefully as you can.
#
So what is it that then makes someone like, like I'm guessing obviously an organization
#
like this is not like that, that you are encouraged to write the books and go deep and
#
the nuances sort of encouraged and you're selecting out the simplistic thinkers.
#
But within you, when you think about yourself, like how did you fight the temptation to just
#
adopt one frame and stick to that?
#
And also, is it a natural part of you as a person?
#
Is it something that also comes from people's personalities
#
that they just like to dig deep in different things?
#
There's no like, you know, a lot of the rushing to judgment that happens on social media is,
#
I think, cognitive laziness.
#
And it's so convenient because every time you rush to judgment on someone or something,
#
you're basically saying, I am more virtuous and I am more knowledgeable,
#
you know, and it is such a terrible thing.
#
And it's so tempting, right?
#
So tell me about your sort of journey with that,
#
because I have definitely fallen prey to that.
#
I have also realized in the past.
#
I think all of us have.
#
I mean, it's a human tendency.
#
And so what's your thinking on this?
#
So I think for me, I am one of those people who, you know,
#
I can go down all sorts of research rabbit holes.
#
I mean, the example I'll give you is, you know, I'll watch.
#
And I'm just a researcher at heart.
#
I think I'm curious at heart.
#
I was probably that kid who asked why all the time when I was a kid.
#
And, you know, in those days, we used to have Encyclopedia Britannica's of various,
#
they were very expensive.
#
So mostly the libraries had them.
#
And you'd go and read all sorts of random entries, right?
#
And so that's, you know, that is the way I think I just am curious about the world.
#
I also don't think one discipline has a monopoly over explaining the world.
#
Some of it is you read books and if they're well written,
#
and to me this is again the point,
#
specialists should be able to write for a general audience
#
because it actually will bring more people to that,
#
to your own discipline of frame if you can write, convey things better.
#
So, you know, for me, anything I just, I want to know more.
#
So the example I'll give is, you know, I'll see some reference to something on climbers in Everest.
#
I think there was something about a few years ago.
#
There was actually when the Nepal earthquake hit
#
about the number of people who were affected.
#
That got me saying, you know, how come there's so many people climbing Everest?
#
Then I go and consume everything there is to know about, you know,
#
I'll go watch documentaries, I'll listen to mountain climbers,
#
I'll read Outside Magazine, which is, by the way, a great magazine,
#
even if you're not interested in outdoors or adventure sports,
#
they do some great long reads.
#
I'll figure out, you know, why is Nepal suddenly giving so many permits?
#
What is going on between Nepalese mountain climbing companies
#
and Western ones and the dynamics there?
#
You know, why this has something to do with Nepalese kind of budgets, etc.
#
So I just go on this deep dive thing where suddenly I watched a gazillion documentaries,
#
read books, learn, you know, and from various people,
#
people who are like in the finance ministry in Nepal,
#
people who are, you know, climbers who own expedition companies.
#
To me, you know, it's, I just want to know and I want to know more.
#
And I'm really curious about how all this is connected.
#
You know, there's always that meme on Twitter or that GIF or GIF,
#
however you like to pronounce it,
#
where there's that guy, you know, standing and I'm not a conspiracy theorist,
#
but I like to know how those dots connect, you know, somebody standing with,
#
you know, people or that beautiful mind thing where somebody's looking around
#
how all these things connected.
#
I want to know how one thing affects the other,
#
how, you know, perceptions in different parts affect outcomes.
#
I am a person who actually likes to think about process.
#
I like to think about, you know, how budgets matter, how politics matters.
#
And so to me, it's basically about trying to see, you know,
#
who, how can I understand various dimensions of the world?
#
And I've just found in life that I don't think one prism explains it all.
#
You get a view, but if you are just trying to say,
#
okay, this is about the safety of mountain climbing,
#
how do you understand why Nepal, which doesn't want people to die on Everest,
#
why is it then continuing to give hundreds of more passes a year than it used to?
#
And you cannot understand that without thinking about
#
their incentives on the budgetary side.
#
So I just don't think that you can understand the world with just one prism.
#
I think, you know, like when you, now there are fancy eye tests,
#
but it's like you go to a, in the olden days, when you went to an ophthalmologist
#
and they were trying to test out your number of, if you needed glasses,
#
they would, you know, you go and then they'd have that kind of lens structure
#
that they'd put on your face.
#
And then they'd keep experimenting with different lenses and putting one in front of the other.
#
To me, that's how I see the world, which is you might have a primary lens
#
and then it's about seeing, okay, how does this filter look?
#
How does that put that in?
#
And then how does the world look?
#
I just think it's a richer look at the world if you can look across.
#
And like I said, I like connecting the dots to me.
#
That lensing is an incredible metaphor.
#
I'm going to use it now.
#
I'm going to steal it from you.
#
And, you know, I often say that-
#
I don't know if people these days will understand it though,
#
because I think they have fancier tests now.
#
We are old enough to understand.
#
Yeah, now you just go and you sit and they put some laser in your eye and they get it.
#
But you know, we used to do it the old fashioned way, which was a good way.
#
You know, I often say that, you know, we sort of draw pictures of the world
#
So more dots you have, the more HD your picture will be.
#
But my tendency often is exactly what you just, you know, kind of described about
#
the Everest thing, that I'll go into some random rabbit hole
#
and then I'll become like within a few days,
#
I'll be like a world expert in that random rabbit hole.
#
And I'll be like, why did I waste all this time?
#
I could have been doing something else that makes sense.
#
But that's, I mean, there's just so much joy in that.
#
So let's kind of go down the random rabbit hole of you
#
and talk about your childhood.
#
So tell me, you know, where were you born?
#
What was childhood like?
#
I was born in the late 70s in Delhi.
#
Like many people in Delhi, Punjabi family, there was a partition family
#
that mostly from like the Lahore area and then moved to India
#
after partitions on both sides.
#
And so, you know, pretty typical 1980s Delhi childhood is very different.
#
I mean, it is, you know, you think simple in hindsight seems so much simpler,
#
but they were that also meant for your choices.
#
That's why, you know, I sometimes miss the simplicity,
#
but I also always have to remind myself we didn't have a lot of choices then.
#
So, you know, when you think about how people's views and ideology
#
or, you know, their preferences for economies and what kind of develop,
#
it's partly I know what a socialist or a mixed economy
#
with a socialist bent look like.
#
And I know it meant little choice beyond the point.
#
Beyond the point, I also meant and, you know,
#
you start to understand that that is not it was not just a government choice.
#
It was a choice made by Indian businesses as well.
#
But it came with a historical understanding of,
#
okay, you know, India is a country when I was growing up,
#
it was only it was less than 40 years.
#
I was born about 30 years after independence.
#
So it's there was a memory that's still very strong that, you know,
#
yes, foreign companies had actually had had been, you know,
#
the thin edge of the sphere in terms of even colonialism.
#
So you understand all these things, but that was the, you know,
#
it's pretty you don't think about these things when you're growing up in the 80s.
#
To me, you know, it was also we went to school in Delhi,
#
but there was so much happening in the 80s.
#
It's often and I'm looking forward to reading Srinath's Raghavan's new book
#
because there's actually very little work done on the 80s
#
and even the 90s for that matter.
#
But it was such a transitional period and there was so much happening in the world.
#
So in the 80s alone, you know, you have two Indian prime ministers
#
in the start of coalition politics in, you know, for if you're growing up,
#
you suddenly see two Indian prime ministers getting assassinated.
#
There was, you know, problems in Punjab, in Kashmir, things happening in down south.
#
So in Indian domestic politics, the neighborhood, there was a lot going on,
#
you know, General Zia's aircraft being blown up and things like that.
#
But you also saw the beginnings of India thinking differently about the world,
#
not thinking differently necessarily, but willing to question some conventional wisdom,
#
whether it was Mrs. Gandhi when she was prime minister,
#
exploring engagement with China to then you see a major crisis in 86, 87 with the border crisis.
#
And then you see, you know, Rajiv Gandhi reach out to China.
#
Now, the reason I'm bringing this stuff into my growing up
#
is this was to watch Doordarshan for news.
#
So this is the stuff that was reported.
#
And you start thinking, okay, what has changed?
#
And I was, you know, I was interested.
#
You also saw, you know, I grew up in Delhi.
#
You saw riots in Delhi.
#
And, you know, to me, I think that's my first kind of political memory was one vaguely.
#
I remember the Asian Games, which was held in Delhi.
#
And then I remember 84.
#
And then for me, actually, you know, while you're seeing all this happen,
#
so much change, Mandal Commission, and, you know, you go to school.
#
You're going to school.
#
You know, things are going on because again, one, it's in the newspapers
#
and we have in our house to this day, there are lots of newspapers subscribed to
#
and everybody sits down and reads them together in the morning.
#
And so, you know, you're reading about all this.
#
And again, great journalists who are doing this work.
#
But you're also seeing your life affected by it.
#
I went to a Loretto in Delhi and that's in the controlment area
#
where there were people from families whose and those days was fathers,
#
just fathers, it was serving on the front or, you know, they were involved.
#
So you suddenly become exposed to people who come from very different, you know,
#
And you start thinking about a broader world that starts affecting you.
#
You know, your schools would be closed for Mandal protests, for example.
#
So there was a lot happening.
#
And then globally, right, you see everything that people had known
#
for decades in terms of the global Cold War, which had affected India.
#
Suddenly, you know, you see Eastern Europe.
#
And this is when towards the end of the 80s, early 90s,
#
India starts thinking about, you know, you start getting outside news
#
and outside platforms, CNN, BBC.
#
Suddenly, you're hearing about, you know, in the late 80s,
#
you start to see authoritarian leaders around the world.
#
Suddenly, the public's pushing back against.
#
You see Tiananmen Square, the protests there and, you know, the Chinese pushback.
#
You start to see the Soviet Union eventually collapse.
#
See India needing to liberalize.
#
You see the wars in the Gulf.
#
So, you know, every time we think today, oh, my God, so much is happening in the world.
#
I think even then it was such a massive,
#
especially that like late 80s to through the 90s.
#
But the 80s and 90s, especially for India, such a transitional period.
#
And so that's the India I grew up with.
#
Obviously, no internet then.
#
You still had to like, you know, try to book STD and ISD calls
#
for those younger people listening.
#
Those were domestic and foreign calls and domestic meeting.
#
If you from Delhi needed to call Calcutta, where some of my family was,
#
you had to kind of book those calls or have that service.
#
And that also was a thing too.
#
Everything was an effort to get done.
#
So for me, I just grew up in an extremely, you know, transitional India.
#
And then, you know, you apply for university like everybody does.
#
I probably wouldn't have gotten to college in Delhi today
#
because the kind of marks that are required, I did not get.
#
I ended up doing at Lady Sheeram College history.
#
And in some ways, I'm glad I didn't get the marks to get into economics
#
because I think, I don't know if it's still true, but it was true then
#
that if you got sufficient marks, you essentially did
#
bachelors in commerce, BCom, or you did economics.
#
Part dependence to the mark.
#
It was entirely, it wasn't like what you wanted to do.
#
I didn't have those marks in hindsight.
#
I'm very glad I didn't.
#
And then I did history at LSR and it's such a wonderful institution
#
and shows what good leadership.
#
And it was Dr. Manakshi Gopinath then who was principal.
#
It's such a wonderful institution because it actually didn't teach you just to test,
#
You had professors who, I was that annoying kid who would always ask questions,
#
I mean, sometimes weren't used to people asking questions,
#
We had a great library and there was very good professors
#
and they also had a culture of not just, you did history and you studied that,
#
but also of things like social service, of extracurricular activities.
#
It was a very vibrant atmosphere to be in.
#
And I still remember thinking that's where I had a kind of vague interest in history
#
where I really started to think about myself as wanting to do
#
more on the historical methodology front.
#
I also just thought historians told better stories.
#
Now, you also realize some of the constraints we often say today,
#
but while a place like LSR didn't just teach to the test,
#
we used to have tutorials.
#
They were very clear that the dominant view at that time was not just dominant,
#
it was almost kind of imperial in its kind of capture of academia,
#
was you had to write the Marxist interpretation of history.
#
If you went and when you did your city exams or Delhi University exams,
#
and if you didn't, you wouldn't get the marks that you needed for getting through or whatever.
#
And so to me, again, when people say unprecedented,
#
no, the system was set up that you have preferences in terms of,
#
it wasn't about knowledge and analysis.
#
It was a certain prism that was being prioritized.
#
And I was not comfortable with that because we did learn the other views
#
and it was actually more complicated.
#
So there was just a different kind of intellectual hegemony happening then.
#
And that's the part I didn't like about the system.
#
There was also still too much.
#
I did the CBSC system in school that might work for some people.
#
It didn't work very well for me.
#
I was more an ICSC brain.
#
And so you learn these things about yourself,
#
which is I did better in certain kinds of systems and with certain kinds of training.
#
So I did my undergrad and then was kind of lost actually a little bit.
#
People, when you look back, we don't often talk about our failures.
#
So people always think you go for these career talks and
#
people always ask you, how did you get to it?
#
And I think there's not enough talking,
#
especially in an Indian context where we tend to be quite risk averse
#
and we don't talk about failure.
#
And for me, I was quite lost after doing my undergraduate.
#
I didn't want to do what everybody who did at that time is,
#
you either went and got your master's or if you were a girl,
#
you actually went and got married.
#
And I actually was lucky enough to have parents
#
who didn't pressure me to do really anything.
#
They were like, do whatever you want, but do it well.
#
And that actually though can make you, when you're 21 years old,
#
it's just like, what do you do with life?
#
So yeah, I did a little bit of a lot.
#
I first thought I wanted to do travel and tourism management.
#
Today, I would have actually turned that into a business in those days
#
because I just thought, as a history student,
#
you realized there's so much history in India.
#
Why don't we have more tourists?
#
And second, when you went to a monument or something,
#
there were people who were either not explaining it properly
#
or were giving a version of history that wasn't quite accurate.
#
So it's like, why can't we make, this should be combining
#
the history, people who've done and know the history
#
to thinking about tourism as a business in India and increasing it.
#
Today, I'd have created an app or done something of that sort
#
and raised some money in those days.
#
And so part of it was thinking about how do you actually do these things.
#
So I think that day, those days, the stepping stone was go work in a
#
closest somebody, go work in a travel agency.
#
And so I actually worked in an international travel house,
#
what was then Moria Sheraton.
#
And so if nothing else, I learned and my thing is I've done a little bit of a lot
#
and you always learn something.
#
So if nothing else, I now know how travel agent systems work and bookings work.
#
So I always take away certain things.
#
I learned how to wear a sari every day to work.
#
I learned how the hotel function,
#
including the business size because the travel agency was in the hotel.
#
So you always take away from these experiences,
#
but I realized that was not for me.
#
That wasn't quite what I was looking for.
#
And, you know, I dilly dallyed for a while.
#
And then I had taught myself computers had, you know, was what a thing.
#
But, you know, we still had dial up internet,
#
but I had taught myself how to code HTML.
#
And some friends had started a startup in family friends,
#
had started a startup in Bangalore.
#
And so because I was kind of going around a little kind of lost,
#
said, OK, this is a skill I have.
#
I didn't want to go straight to another degree.
#
I had applied for graduate school.
#
And in fact, got in to a UK university with, but I wasn't quite ready.
#
So I said, I want to work a bit, but you're not really very skilled.
#
And, you know, so in those days was not today.
#
I think there are more opportunities in those days.
#
So this is the late nineties.
#
And so I went off to Bangalore and where I worked was one of the old,
#
in those days, portals were city portals with a big thing, one stop shops.
#
I mean, I was helping design things,
#
but they also made me better as a coder.
#
And that's where I learned kind of graphic design and things like that.
#
So I worked there for a bit, went back to Delhi, worked another,
#
another company for a bit, again, designing.
#
And I learned animation, funnily enough, then.
#
So, you know, this is the kind of this is the long version, Amit.
#
But since this is a long, the podcast is a long version of explanations.
#
I just ended up then in the course of while working, I said, OK,
#
since my father told me, OK, since you have time, since you're going to be working,
#
why don't you also apply to the US for graduate school?
#
And because I deferred that UK program.
#
And I said, OK, I have time.
#
Gave the SATs, the SATs, sorry, the GREs at that time and ended up coming to US.
#
So I always, you know, when people talk about linear paths that they've had,
#
I'm envious in some ways.
#
But also, you know, had I chosen to go to the UK for that degree,
#
I think my life would have been very different.
#
I'm not saying it would have been bad or good.
#
It just would have been very different.
#
So sometimes forks in the road and decisions you make.
#
And for me, yeah, I ended up coming to the US for my masters at Yale.
#
And I felt like I found what I was meant to do,
#
because that was the kind of program that was multidisciplinary,
#
learned a lot from other students around the world and from here.
#
But yeah, that was that's the long version of me growing up.
#
Not nearly long enough.
#
No, no, I, you know, nonlinear paths for the win,
#
because even I have been much more nonlinear than you.
#
And I think it's a good thing.
#
I think I think there's a danger that if you get too linear,
#
you get stuck in a groove, you, you know, your vision isn't broad enough.
#
I want to sort of go back in time a little bit again and tell me about,
#
you know, you've beautifully described India and the world,
#
how it was changing in the 80s.
#
I also want to know about how you were being shaped
#
and what was it like in your home?
#
Like, for example, you mentioned your dad was in the private sector.
#
What were the conversations you heard around you at home?
#
Like, I'm very struck by the fact that in the 1980s,
#
your dad made an effort to get time in Newsweek
#
because I remember back in those days, it was really rare.
#
You know, it cost a lot.
#
And for someone who's actually going out and getting them,
#
it is not for signaling purpose or to have around.
#
You really want to know that is the only reason you're really getting it.
#
And I think for a child, it is such a great privilege
#
to be around the world of knowledge, be around books
#
and be around those kind of conversations.
#
So give me a sense of that kind of mahal at home when you're growing up.
#
What kind of conversations did your parents have?
#
Did you have arguments?
#
What were the books around you that shaped you?
#
Lots of arguments on the dining table,
#
but it teaches you how to debate and it teaches you how to debate
#
with people who you don't, you know, agree with necessarily.
#
And you learn different worldviews.
#
So dining table also included my grandfather,
#
maternal grandfather who had been in the civil service.
#
Occasionally, my uncle who was in the foreign service.
#
You had conversations with other parts of family
#
who were either, you know, in different parts of the country.
#
So whether you heard about what was happening in Calcutta
#
or, you know, Bombay or other then still Bombay.
#
You know, you had a lot of different viewpoints.
#
I think in general, my father and mother both like reading.
#
My mother was just very busy.
#
I think the other thing that was very apparent.
#
So my mother is a doctor.
#
She's a hematologist and pathologist, but she chose to work.
#
She didn't have a clinic on her.
#
And those days, if you wanted to teach, you had to work at a government hospital.
#
And so she worked at the hospital and she taught as well.
#
And so particularly looking back, the fact that she did that
#
brought us up as kids, me and my sister,
#
and also, you know, did everything else that is required of, you know, women in India,
#
was then and now was, you know, I have a deep admiration for it.
#
I think now I appreciate it a little bit more.
#
That also meant, and I'll come back to the debates and stuff,
#
but I think, you know, when people talk about role models,
#
and people will sometimes criticize me for saying, why is something a man of?
#
And I say it because I know the difference it made for me to see my mother
#
and that I could do it too, that women did actually go to the workplace.
#
And of course, that's not, you also realize how little work at home,
#
you know, was, I mean, how much if it was required.
#
But I also had deep admiration.
#
And again, looking back for women's employment at home, so to speak, right?
#
We don't think about that as work.
#
We don't think about those as jobs, but they are.
#
I mean, they're more than full-time jobs.
#
I also grew up with, you know, whatever you think about her policy,
#
the fact that India had a female prime minister,
#
when many parts of the world didn't, that these things were even possible.
#
So to me, you know, people will sometimes say, why do you talk about representation?
#
One, I actually think it brings diversity of views.
#
But second, I think it's important for that next generation
#
to be able to see that things are possible.
#
So that was one of the shaping aspects, which is to see a woman
#
who went out of the house to work and, as my father would often joke,
#
was more qualified than he was in terms of credentials.
#
And so that was the other thing.
#
I grew up with a father who was perhaps very different
#
from a lot of men in that generation.
#
When my mother got a USAID fellowship to come to Kansas City
#
for a few months to do some medical research,
#
he's the one who encouraged her to go.
#
She had very young kids at that time.
#
He encouraged her to go.
#
And same thing when she got another,
#
she got a Commonwealth fellowship to go to England for a year,
#
to Oxford and to London, to different hospitals.
#
Her then talking about her experiences about those two places
#
also helped shape my views, about those two countries,
#
And she had a better experience in the US in terms of what people talk
#
as a typical American experience, which is you come here, you work hard,
#
you're treated as a, you get places.
#
Whereas the UK, I think she dealt with, this was 80s,
#
so it was not exactly the least racist country,
#
the least racist country in the world.
#
And there was the class system that still continues, I think, to matter.
#
So her views do, you know, when people come back and shape your views.
#
And so I always joke that one of the reasons I was an 80s kids
#
who didn't grow up anti-American is that my mother had a good experience here,
#
not very long, but none this, and my father was in the private sector.
#
So that starts to shape your view.
#
It's not, you know, people will sometimes say, you know, you don't like Russia.
#
I'm like, no, it's got nothing to do with that.
#
I'd like to believe that I've actually written some good pieces
#
about why India continues the relationship with Russia.
#
But I don't have, like, this nostalgia or love for Russia that some do,
#
because I think all countries act on interest and not about emotion or affection.
#
But also, I didn't grow up anti-American.
#
So I think that was a, or anti-Western for that matter.
#
I didn't grow up anti, you know, thinking about corporates.
#
It wasn't, it wasn't that.
#
I also didn't grow up anti-government because, you know,
#
that everything government does is wrong,
#
because I did have people around the table who also had worked in government.
#
So some of the bringing up thing is there's so many different people in your lives,
#
and you, there wasn't one family, extended family business.
#
There were people in business as well that you start to see different,
#
there are faults and advantages with everything.
#
And so sometimes it can be a bit like, you know, everything is everything, as you said,
#
but I do think that very kind of diverse views, diverse backgrounds,
#
those things can shape your views about how to see the world.
#
And you come to realize that, you know, the private sector isn't perfect.
#
Government isn't perfect.
#
You know, professionals, that they are good and bad to each of these areas.
#
And the idea is how do you spot them?
#
What I knew I didn't like is, which is why I do have a view, at least in my personal view,
#
I still think governments deal with governments defined everywhere, but a deep love for debate
#
And because I'm a generation that knew when we had limited choice,
#
and I'm assuming my parents generation had even more limited choice, I don't like,
#
I still have this preference for government, for example, not to necessarily be in business,
#
because I've seen what that was like.
#
So those kinds of things do shape your views.
#
I think, you know, public servants, government officials have a lot of value to add.
#
So when people say, you know, we'll be dismissive of babus, I don't like that either.
#
I don't think the country can run, India can't run without them.
#
So it's not about good or bad.
#
It's about how do you become more effective?
#
So I think, you know, as you're saying, you know, what is the shaping views?
#
It is really having that diversity of people with diverse backgrounds around the table.
#
Books, I think, you know, I just, we read a lot, we read a lot of fiction,
#
we read a lot of nonfiction, I used to like biographies and histories,
#
because again, they told stories.
#
We didn't have internet, so there wasn't, you know, you'd play outside and you'd read.
#
Those were the things you did.
#
You know, and then you read, of course, this is where I do think textbooks matter,
#
it is your kind of entry point to a lot of these, but yeah, you just read a lot.
#
And my father in particular had a nice book collection,
#
we had access to a library, which was good.
#
And privilege, something you recognize.
#
And so you, you know, so just read a lot,
#
because frankly, there wasn't really very much else to do.
#
Yeah, and I'm struck by how, you know, we realize so many of these things,
#
as you said, in hindsight, that you look back and you see it.
#
And at the time, of course, you're just going through life,
#
you don't really realize it.
#
And then you look back and you begin to sort of, you know,
#
realize the influence of these many things that you kind of took for granted.
#
Just a quick digression before we continue on this narrative.
#
You said you were more of an ICSE,
#
you had more of an ICSE brain than a CBSE brain.
#
So I think for one, my brain didn't really do well
#
with the rote system, learning by rote system.
#
Second, CBSE was, and I understand why they did it,
#
but it was more about, you had very succinct, specific answers.
#
It wasn't about putting it in a broader context.
#
So the way I would think about it is CBSE was about sentences,
#
ICSE was about paragraphs.
#
Again, we talk about simplistic narrative and this is a simplistic answer,
#
and maybe I'm generalizing.
#
But I'm not saying one system over the other is bad or good,
#
it's just my brain was more kind of, and we didn't get to do it
#
because I think the system was switching while I was in school
#
and Delhi had by then pretty much, actually not entirely,
#
but they were still in the process of transitioning.
#
And so, and the other thing for me was my sister was older
#
and I used to read all her textbooks before when she used to get them.
#
So I would often also get bored easily.
#
It wasn't till college and then my MA where I finally felt like,
#
you know, intellectually I was being satisfied in terms of,
#
I would, I recognize this about myself.
#
My attention, I get distracted and you need to,
#
you have to recognize these things about yourself.
#
But this is why Twitter in some ways is terrible for me
#
because I do go down those research rabbit holes.
#
But it's also what makes me a good researcher I'd like to believe is
#
I do want to know more about a thing.
#
You just have to learn how to then step back at some point and say,
#
okay, I know enough or for now I know enough
#
and you have to put it out there.
#
But yeah, I think it was, that was kind of how I saw the CBSE, ICSE thing.
#
CBSE was much more and maybe that works better for other people.
#
It just didn't work very well for me.
#
Yeah, I remember ICSE is kind of rote also,
#
but that sentences versus paragraphs distinction is great.
#
I am also going to borrow this frame from you
#
and I'm going to tell people you're a CBSE kind of person, Twitter pigeon.
#
But so talking about that period before you came to the US,
#
I'm also interested in like, what was your conception of yourself?
#
Like I can see you as someone who's got a lot of initiative.
#
So you get doing the travel thing and then you're doing the graphic design
#
and you're learning coding and you're getting into new stuff.
#
But you know, if someone were to ask you
#
ki bete bare ho ke kya banon ge, you know.
#
So in that sense, what was your conception of yourself
#
that what do you want to do in life?
#
What kind of life do you want to live?
#
Were you just not thinking of that stuff
#
and just, you know, going where the currents took you or?
#
You know, again, in hindsight, it seems like it all worked out.
#
But I have to say to some extent, sometimes you can feel quite untethered
#
when there's too many choices.
#
And now I will say I've been incredibly fortunate in my parents
#
in the sense that they weren't the kind of people who said,
#
you know, mom's a doctor, you must become a doctor.
#
Occasionally, I would say, I wish you told me to do medicine that way.
#
I would have known exactly what to do.
#
And I think, you know, had I become a doctor,
#
I'd probably have become really taken to it.
#
I feel like whatever I would have done,
#
it would have been something I would have embraced.
#
But, you know, I don't know that I thought that much about myself.
#
You don't really think about, you know, there was just things going on.
#
So I don't think I sat and thought about myself in the way that maybe,
#
I don't know if that was good or bad.
#
We just didn't really have time or, you know,
#
sometimes you thought you read about something and you said,
#
oh, you know, I agree with that.
#
So you learned something about your own beliefs or shaped it.
#
So for me, I don't think I really had,
#
I wasn't thinking that much about, you know,
#
myself or what kind of person I was.
#
I did know, like I said, that my attention would,
#
you know, go down many different seams.
#
I had to learn how to focus.
#
I was interested in a lot of things.
#
And so the concern partly was that when you're interested in everything,
#
you end up being interested or good at nothing.
#
So, you know, those are the kind of things.
#
But like I said, I was incredibly unfortunate when my parents said,
#
The world's, you know, to some extent, your oyster was still,
#
I mean, there weren't as many choices available then as they are today.
#
My father was very clear.
#
He said, because he had seen, he says, you know,
#
said to both my sister and I, you have to become financially independent.
#
And so, and he was very keen that we go to graduate school.
#
So in fact, when my sister and I both worked after undergraduate,
#
he was very worried we'd never go back to graduate school.
#
But he was very keen as somebody who didn't go to graduate school himself,
#
that he wanted us to have that opportunity.
#
You know, what did I want to become when I grew up?
#
I think I wanted to open, as I said,
#
I either wanted to create this travel and tourism management, this thing,
#
or I think the other thing that I would always say I wanted to do
#
is I wanted to open a bar, a pub.
#
I used to call it a pub.
#
I mean, those days, that's what it was called.
#
And I think a few years ago, my mother asked me,
#
what happened to that plan of yours?
#
Again, maybe today, I would have, you know,
#
raised money and you do these things now.
#
And, but in those days, it was, I think we, the, you know,
#
Gungroo existed at Maurya Sheraton as kind of a disco.
#
And there weren't really too many, you know,
#
I think gin's when it opened.
#
And I kind of remember there was one other place
#
that had opened in Delhi later on.
#
But yeah, I think I used to say my friend and I from school,
#
we used to say we wanted to, we wanted to open a bar.
#
The other thing I knew about myself is I love traveling.
#
My parents had, you know, like you said,
#
it was a choice for my father to subscribe to these magazine,
#
but that meant, you know, not spending money on other things.
#
We didn't do a lot of shopping.
#
We didn't go out to eat, you know, all that much, but it was you.
#
The other thing, my parents made a choice that when my father
#
had an opportunity for both of them to go traveling abroad,
#
And again, there were decisions made that meant other choices weren't made,
#
but he wanted us to see the world.
#
We used to go see family domestically a lot.
#
You travel around, you see new places.
#
And I just, and then with college friends, school,
#
I mean, in school, they take you to these trips up to Hill stations in Delhi.
#
And to this day, I've been to Corbett many times and never seen one tiger.
#
So I hope other people have better luck.
#
But yeah, I just discovered I love seeing new places.
#
What do you think it was about a pub that made you want to start a pub?
#
Like, I know people who want to, you know,
#
have this vague fantasy of starting a restaurant because they're into food
#
or a particular kind of food and et cetera, et cetera.
#
But what was it about a pub that made you start that in particular?
#
I like talking to people.
#
I, you know, I, now I see my, I think people are always surprised when I tell them this,
#
but I was, I was actually a fairly shy person.
#
I wasn't the kind of person.
#
And I, you know, I didn't take the initiative.
#
My father would always say, you know, go, go talk to somebody or go ask.
#
I'd even say, no, you know, if you go into a shop and you had to ask somebody,
#
he said, you go and ask.
#
So I wasn't that kind of person, but I really enjoy listening to people,
#
And to me in those days, you know, it was like an adda of sorts,
#
but a kind of a, you know, a different kind of adda.
#
So I thought about it as a place where, you know, you could have really good conversations
#
and you could get different people together like a dining room.
#
I mean, I'm, I'm quite a foodie, but I did not.
#
I think I had, we had some family friends who had restaurants
#
and it seemed like a lot more work.
#
That was before I knew about things like how hard it was to get liquor licenses
#
So, you know, some of this was pie in the sky too, but yeah, I somehow restaurant,
#
because I also didn't, I didn't cook at that time.
#
And so that wasn't, but I used to bartend for family functions and things.
#
I used to be kind of the home bartender.
#
And so, and I used to like making cocktails and things like that.
#
So there was different aspects.
#
One, I like people and I think I, I thought I've got, you know,
#
now it's become a big thing.
#
I used to think about cocktail making as an art.
#
So, and, and, and being able to be a good bartender was a thing.
#
I'm also struck by what you, you know, you said about,
#
you had to teach yourself how to focus.
#
And that's something I've struggled with all my life.
#
I don't, it's a constant thing.
#
It's not, it's not gonna be.
#
It's a lifelong struggle and lifelong learning.
#
So, you know, since you put it like that, I'm guessing that you actually
#
thought about it overtly and made an effort.
#
What were the kind of efforts you made?
#
How did you manage to do that?
#
You know, I think it's, it was easier then.
#
I think it's the internet world has made it harder today
#
because there's so many distractions.
#
So many of those rabbit holes that you can go down.
#
So it was stuff like you develop little techniques.
#
I mean, some deadlines help.
#
But the other thing was for me, I'd even do things.
#
There used to be this little app that you put on your laptop
#
called Internet Shutdown or Mac Shutdown or whatever it was called.
#
And I would literally force myself to, I put that on and say,
#
I want two hours of no internet.
#
And, you know, when you try to switch it off, it asks you three times.
#
Are you sure you want to do this?
#
And funnily enough, that stuff worked.
#
I'd even do things like put my phone away in the separate, in a different room.
#
So, you know, you develop techniques.
#
And then one of the things you learn, especially in graduate school here in the US,
#
sometimes you have to read multiple books a week.
#
Is you just realize that, look, you have to focus.
#
You learn how to read a big book and you just have to get things done.
#
Otherwise, if you don't focus.
#
So for me, it was, you know, you just have to force yourself beyond the point
#
and shut off distractions to the extent that you can.
#
And like I said, I think it was somewhat easier then.
#
I also think in terms of, you know, trying many different things in life.
#
One, I had the luxury of doing that.
#
You know, I kind of knew I wasn't going to be out on the street.
#
So it is kind of a privileged existence on that front.
#
But I do think once you find what you really want to do,
#
and I was lucky enough to do that, that brings its own focus, right?
#
You're doing it not because anybody's forcing you to,
#
but because you're genuinely interested in it.
#
So I think that helped as well, which is actually finding something
#
that I liked doing and in an ideal world got paid to do.
#
Tell me about coming to the US and studying here.
#
Like I'm intrigued that, you know, you read history in college
#
and then over here, IR at Yale.
#
And, you know, so how did that work out?
#
How did you choose this?
#
Like, was it one of a bunch of equally acceptable fields
#
and you just happened to kind of get into this and went with that flow?
#
Or were you specifically interested in this field itself?
#
And, you know, what expectations did you bring here with you?
#
And then what were your experiences here?
#
I think I'd always, I kind of always known,
#
I wanted to do foreign policy, IR sort of things.
#
I'd contemplated, my mother was keen that I gave the UPSC exam.
#
But my thing at that time was I only, if I did it,
#
I only wanted to do the foreign service.
#
And in those days you needed to be like top, you know, five, seven ranks.
#
And I didn't think I was going to be that good at doing it.
#
So I didn't want to go through the whole process
#
and then not get the foreign service.
#
So I kind of ruled that out.
#
In fact, they increased the age.
#
I remember at one point my mother said, it's still time.
#
But it was just, honestly, I admire people who get through the system
#
because I clearly didn't have the discipline or the drive to do it.
#
But I always, I was interested in kind of foreign policy, international relations.
#
and I don't think they've changed the syllabus that much in history undergrad
#
because I noticed they still make people choose
#
whether to do American or Russian history,
#
like everybody's still living in the Cold War.
#
But you did a fair bit of international history.
#
You did a lot of Indian history in BA,
#
but you also did European history.
#
Again, they would make you choose between American and Russian.
#
And you did Chinese, Japanese history.
#
So I kind of knew between, you know, growing up,
#
listening to conversations, but also actual coursework.
#
This was something I wanted to do and explore more.
#
So I kind of knew that I didn't,
#
I did contemplate doing some other things, including law in the middle.
#
I remember I gave the National Law School entrance exam.
#
Clearly didn't succeed.
#
Otherwise, maybe I'd become a lawyer.
#
But so I did think about a few different things.
#
But applying abroad, I pretty much,
#
whether it was in the UK or the US, I had applied for IR.
#
I think my experience, it was different things.
#
One, I mean, it did take time to adjust.
#
I had lived outside home, but I had never lived in the US.
#
I hadn't been at that point in the US for 20 years.
#
I think I came to the US when I was six or seven.
#
And it was New Haven, which is kind of a small town.
#
It's the first time I was on a campus.
#
One thing I had gotten to a couple of places.
#
I was keen because LSR is right in the middle of town.
#
And it's a nice campus, but it's not like, you know,
#
it wasn't like even going to North Campus
#
where, you know, there was a campus culture.
#
So I was keen to go somewhere where there was an actual campus.
#
But that also came with its, you know, challenges in the sense.
#
I mean, it was small stuff like adjusting.
#
I couldn't sleep because it was too quiet.
#
It was stuff like that.
#
But, you know, this is the kind of stuff
#
which you think about in hindsight.
#
I actually found the classes quite easy
#
because there's so much pressure in India.
#
And so much pressure on grading and marks.
#
And it's not something at Yale that people were,
#
their idea was you've got in.
#
They used to have what they call a pass, high pass,
#
honors system, that's it.
#
And it didn't really end up mattering.
#
It wasn't like a grade point average or something.
#
So part of it is I had to push myself
#
because I hadn't done certain kinds of, you know, IR theory
#
and even some kind of, you know, macro and micro economics.
#
I did some of it as a subsidiary, but not.
#
So I had to push myself a little.
#
But in terms of actual coursework, for me, it really was.
#
I felt it was easier than a system in India
#
where there is a lot of pressure, particularly on marks.
#
And other thing was I was just, you know, flabbergasted by just,
#
for me, it was like being in Disneyland.
#
You're suddenly getting, you can take all these courses
#
and outside a set, this thing, I could do whatever.
#
It was like, you know, going to a restaurant
#
and after having a prefix menu,
#
suddenly you can get a la carte and choose your own options.
#
And there was so much on the menu.
#
And so to me, I was thrilled.
#
And I felt that I found, I used to think I was an odd duck.
#
In, there was too much of a nerd, really.
#
And then I discovered that there,
#
we used to call ourselves super ducks.
#
We're not just like ducks, we're super ducks.
#
There were people like me there in the world
#
who also had this interest in all sorts of.
#
Everybody was, almost everybody in that program had worked.
#
We had about, it was a small class, 25 people, two years.
#
So 50 people in the program, half international, half American.
#
And people came from also different backgrounds.
#
Some had worked in the private sector.
#
Some had been in the Peace Corps.
#
Some had, you know, worked in governments.
#
Some had worked in, you know, think tanks.
#
So I just, you know, it was, it was in that sense for me,
#
a really formative experience.
#
I felt like I found my people in some senses
#
and I found my calling because really interested in that work.
#
So, you know, there was some adjustment issues,
#
but it wasn't, but in terms of the intellectual side,
#
I actually found it easier.
#
And even like the learning by what there was in that system.
#
So in terms of writing papers, things, I just really enjoyed it.
#
I think when we were young, especially,
#
we suffer greatly from the anxiety of fitting in.
#
And no doubt the heterogeneous nature of the classroom
#
helped that half the people were international.
#
But nevertheless, then, and perhaps throughout your career,
#
it would have sort of marked you out that one,
#
you're not a white person and two, you're a woman.
#
So how do you, how do you deal with that?
#
Did you find it easy or hard to fit in?
#
Did you sort of develop stratagems or ways of thinking about,
#
you know, how to tackle that?
#
What was that experience like?
#
I think, you know, for one,
#
I'm trying to think about especially that experience.
#
I think there are two aspects of it.
#
I mean, one is sometimes you don't,
#
when you're going through it,
#
you don't notice some of these things.
#
You just think, okay, it is what it is.
#
There was certain, I knew there were certain career parts
#
at that point that were not open to me.
#
I couldn't have come and worked in government.
#
Sometimes that was a more restrictive thing.
#
So you're not thinking about it.
#
Later on, when you think about it,
#
you might think about moments.
#
But I will say at that point,
#
maybe because one, I actually saw other international students,
#
particularly from countries where there wasn't so much use of English,
#
And again, this is part of privilege, right?
#
Where you, I was lucky enough to grow up in a household where
#
English and Hindi and actually Punjabi and English.
#
But I spoke English and Hindi.
#
It wasn't a big stretch for me.
#
So from the kind of, I don't remember kind of the non-white
#
or white aspect mattering that much.
#
I don't think, you know, it was a very international bunch.
#
People had lived in many parts of the world,
#
parts of the world I'd never been to.
#
And so that wasn't actually, I don't, at least at Yale,
#
don't remember that being as much of an issue.
#
Or for that matter, I think we were, even on the gender side, it was divided.
#
You start to notice these things later.
#
You start to, particularly, I think the gender aspect,
#
but also age, you know, we don't, and especially in India,
#
sometimes I think, you know, it's not the gender thing comes later.
#
It was to me what I struggled with.
#
Particularly if you decide to work on India is, you know, youth is called,
#
not even youth by then, you know, your 20s and 30s.
#
And in the US, that's actually, there are people in, you know,
#
who run policy here who are in their 20s and 30s.
#
But I remember kind of being frustrated as if you had a view sometime in Delhi.
#
It was like, no, you haven't had the experience.
#
You don't have the gray hair.
#
And so your view actually get in line kind of.
#
So for me, I think the biggest, you start noticing these things later,
#
where certain, as I said, as an international student,
#
you just became conscious that certain pathways were not open to you.
#
When I came to Washington to work, having said that,
#
I realized how accessible a town this was in the sense that
#
it didn't matter that I was not American.
#
What I realized about this town was people are very practical.
#
You have some knowledge.
#
It is of, you know, it is of interest.
#
Therefore, it mattered.
#
There were certain jobs I couldn't have gone up for.
#
I saw, you know, think tank world when I first started.
#
I started as a research assistant in 2003.
#
One of the things you realize is you rarely see women at the scholar level,
#
at the senior fellow fellow level.
#
There were a lot of research assistants like me who were women.
#
And my big question used to be is what happens between
#
that time when 70 percent of the research or 50 to 70 percent are women?
#
And then at the scholar level, it was totally flip in those days.
#
You'd be lucky if you'd go to a room where you'd have
#
that many women who were at those tables.
#
And I mean, remember, this country still has not had a female president.
#
So there was part of that.
#
But it was also just in, you'd see this.
#
And there was very much kind of an old boys club or even a younger boys club in those days.
#
You do start noticing these things.
#
But some of it is I also didn't let it, you know, in those days, for example,
#
in think tank world, you don't or even when I came back,
#
a lot of the people around were men.
#
I also were very lucky to have good male mentors.
#
So you also start thinking beyond the box in terms of these issues that, you know,
#
that you cannot have male colleagues can be good allies or mentors who help you.
#
I have mostly actually worked with men, but I've had incredible female role models,
#
even in think tank world, that kind of inspire, you know,
#
you talk to them about the issues you have, you know, how do you break through.
#
But to me, you know, honestly, it's I was, I think I also in my mind,
#
I guess I didn't put boundaries on my own where I said,
#
just because there are only men in the room, I'm not going to stop myself from going in.
#
So you have to push yourself, but you go in and then you have to remind yourself,
#
speak up, speak up, because otherwise, you know, you'd be around a table and I'd notice
#
all the guys would speak up and the women wouldn't.
#
And as somebody whose natural instinct wasn't to speak up,
#
I realized that if I didn't speak up, I wouldn't get heard.
#
So for me, part of it was not blaming the guys.
#
It was saying if I don't speak up.
#
But I also realized that because I saw other women doing this for me,
#
which is you can be a woman who can be either kind of person,
#
you either said I had it tough.
#
And so I'm just going to let women go through this thing on their own.
#
Or you say, I actually somebody made the path easier for me,
#
and I'm going to make sure that for the next generation.
#
And for me, it's not just women.
#
It's also for younger people, because I do think that age thing breaking through,
#
I'd like to do what I can.
#
It's not always perfect.
#
You don't always get it right.
#
And younger people have sometimes told me, we wish you'd done that.
#
I take that as a good critique that, you know, how do you become better at these things?
#
So when I'm thinking about it, you know, you're making me think about this,
#
because I didn't really I don't think I think I was lucky enough.
#
And this is sometimes a question of chance so that I didn't have it
#
necessarily as constrained as some people have to deal with these systems.
#
But sometimes you don't notice it while you're going through it,
#
that maybe I just I didn't even think about thinking certain options were
#
close to me for being a woman.
#
I do think as an as an international student, it was it was
#
there were certain options that were that were closed.
#
I'd done this episode I really enjoyed with Kavita Rao,
#
who wrote this great book on lady doctors of the 19th century.
#
And one of the things I realized while reading a book is that
#
if you were a male doctor in India in the 19th century, it means,
#
OK, you were born to privilege.
#
You got lucky. Good things happened.
#
You worked hard. You got there.
#
If you were a female doctor, you were extraordinary just by dint of being a doctor.
#
You were absolutely extraordinary because barriers and obstacles
#
you had to overcome to get there.
#
There's a selection effect in that.
#
So I would say that every female doctor of that time
#
was likely to be like way ahead of the standard male doctor.
#
And I wonder that if when the world is changing in such a way
#
that gradually that imbalance is correcting itself out over time,
#
that are that early generation of women who actually make it,
#
are they just by dint of that selection effect more outstanding?
#
Because like you said, you had to remind yourself to enter that room.
#
You had to remind yourself to speak up.
#
So you're taking that initiative.
#
There is a force of will there.
#
No doubt you also, I would imagine,
#
motivate yourself to learn more than the average person around you
#
because you might feel you have to prove yourself.
#
So is that the case without driving you to self-praise?
#
But is it generally the case that it is just so much harder for women that
#
if you look at a woman at the top and a man at the top,
#
that woman must be really something.
#
So, I mean, and I'm not just being bashful about this.
#
I do think it's my generation probably at least here in the US had it easier.
#
I do think, you know, in Delhi and, you know, people scholars like
#
Rajeev Rajagopalan, who was at ORF, et cetera.
#
You know, they were amongst the first female scholars at think tanks
#
and you didn't see too many.
#
They probably, I mean, I'm not putting, Rajeev is not saying this.
#
I have, I think I would say somebody like her is more pass breaking.
#
For me, you know, I would say the generation before me,
#
including when I came to Brookings, there were scholars, not too many,
#
but there were female scholars who, those were the path breakers.
#
So I'm not just being bashful about it.
#
I genuinely think it wasn't me.
#
I do think what you're saying though about having, because you do.
#
I know very few women who don't have imposter syndrome.
#
It's true that men also can have it, where you are constantly saying,
#
And so you push yourself.
#
You also have, I mean, I actually have come to think of it as a bad habit.
#
You had to train yourself out of a little bit where you think
#
unless you have perfect knowledge, you're not going to speak on a subject.
#
And that perfect knowledge can take a long, long, long time.
#
And you'll never speak up.
#
So some of it is you have to fight against, you know, imposter syndrome on a daily basis.
#
You have to, when you're not seeing too many other women speak up,
#
you have to push yourself.
#
And so those things, yes, I mean, they affect me to this day.
#
You learn things though, and some of it is you benefit from watching,
#
including watching your male counterparts and seeing what do they do.
#
And, you know, sometimes they're men in the room who will talk about subjects
#
I wish they weren't talking about because they don't know.
#
But you also learned about how male experts, for example, in our field
#
who don't know everything about a subject, but they know enough and they speak up
#
and that's how they get it heard.
#
So you learn things from those ideas.
#
I think now, at least in D.C., we're seeing men who are much more conscious of calling,
#
We have think tanks who get called out when they're not, when they have manuals.
#
That's changed culture.
#
But I think it's more in terms of, you know, I can say that imposter syndrome
#
sometimes paralyzes you, but it also does make you better in some ways
#
because you do work harder to be prepared.
#
People would say this about Hillary Clinton, that she would really prepare
#
That didn't surprise any woman because you felt that you had to be better prepared
#
than everybody else because in some ways you were almost, you know,
#
if you weren't prepared, people would say, see, they've included a female expert
#
and she doesn't really know very much.
#
So, you know, there's that kind of pressure.
#
So it makes you better because you have imposter syndrome.
#
It's like, why am I here?
#
So I need to work extra hard.
#
But to me, in certain jobs, yes, I think you do, especially generationally.
#
They're just different kind of pressures.
#
I think, you know, anybody who gets to certain jobs, it's quite impressive.
#
But I think, yes, particularly foundational generations.
#
I don't think I'm foundational in that sense.
#
I do think the women above me who like put those cracks in the glass ceiling,
#
so to speak, I wouldn't have, I don't think I did that to the extent they did.
#
So I'm not just being bashful.
#
I think there were people who were much more path breaking than I was,
#
at least in this field.
#
Let's go back to university.
#
Tell me about how different was it in terms of how you learned?
#
Like in India, in college, you know, the school is of course Rattamaro
#
and college is also, you know, better than that, but still, you know,
#
a different kettle of fish.
#
But what was it like in the US in terms of learning how to love,
#
learn the environment, being able to, you know, look at different
#
perspectives and not just a Marxist school, as it were.
#
And you also mentioned that, you know, you had to learn how to read.
#
You had to often go to two, three books a week and et cetera, et cetera.
#
So tell me about how your mind and how these habits of learning
#
and reading are getting shaped in that period.
#
I think, you know, some of it was I learned, I mean, you learn things
#
like methodology, which nobody really teaches you, which is, you know,
#
how do you write a research paper?
#
So at Yale, at least even in the, it was a master's in international
#
relations, but you did PhD classes with PhD students.
#
And so, you know, it was about there was a syllabus and you read what
#
was in the syllabus and you realized it could be quite eclectic.
#
It was, you know, books, it was journal articles, but you were also
#
then expected to do your own research.
#
So it wasn't just on the syllabus, right?
#
You had a question and you went and kind of then looked for additional information.
#
At that time, I also did a lot of Cold War history class.
#
I learned how to deal with primary documents.
#
And that time, the Soviet and Chinese papers, to some extent, had started
#
coming out, official papers.
#
I had never seen even a primary US documentary.
#
And you suddenly start to see, wow, I can actually get access to what,
#
how people were thinking about the world.
#
And I have to say, for me, learning about working with documents, archival work,
#
et cetera, has been shaped my thinking, including about having a lot more
#
humility about what I thought about government.
#
You know, I was amongst those people who thought, oh, how can they have,
#
you know, especially India's founding fathers and mothers, like, how could
#
they have made such stupid choices?
#
And then you kind of, you know, when you start looking at papers, you get a
#
But it was eye-opening for me.
#
You also learn about different perspectives.
#
You know, where you sit or where you stand is where you sit because you're
#
reading different kinds of books.
#
So the system that going beyond the syllabus, also, you know, you're lucky
#
enough to have access to libraries.
#
I still think, you know, if we have a lot of philanthropists in India doing a
#
lot of things and there are a lot of demands, but setting up just good
#
libraries or giving people access like the way to online resources that are
#
libraries would be huge because it opens up a whole world, a whole world to
#
And for me, having access to a library where you could go track down different
#
There was great electronic resources.
#
So I used to go back and read old, you know, Times of India articles because
#
they had at Yale, they had an access to the whole, you know, however many tens
#
of decades worth of Times of India articles.
#
And so you just had more access to resources.
#
You're paying for it quite a bit too, but you had those access and then looking
#
beyond the syllabus, really understanding different points of view, learning that
#
there were different schools of thoughts and how to kind of synthesize, analyze
#
information, learn how to question sources and your own biases.
#
You also learn because you, political science and history have a very different
#
view of going into a research idea.
#
So you learn about that.
#
So, you know, political scientists often start with a hypothesis and then you
#
kind of a historian started the question.
#
Now, this is again, very simplistic, but nonetheless, I experienced different
#
disciplines for the first time, I guess.
#
I learned about IR theory.
#
So some of it was substance, some of it was methodology.
#
You just, you start to think, and then you had access to a lot of talks.
#
People would, you know, come and give academic talks, but you had policy makers.
#
You had sometimes people who, you know, were just in different athletes used to
#
come and give, you know, talks.
#
It was kind of, you know, now that happens at universities.
#
But earlier, unless you had access to like India International Center, those days
#
Habitat Center didn't exist.
#
So unless you had access to those things, those talks didn't exist.
#
You also couldn't, there was no YouTube too.
#
So that was the other aspect, which is listening to experts from the around,
#
And then Yale had a lot of big name professors.
#
And so, you know, there was a lot of it was seminars versus big lectures.
#
So I also realized I really liked that kind of more graduate school seminar
#
atmosphere, the back and forth.
#
You also recognize that, you know, you were actually professors were open to you
#
It wasn't just a, you know, they were teaching you, they expected you.
#
So there was much more what they call here, the Socratic method.
#
People would ask you questions, you'd answer.
#
It wasn't just, I'm delivering a lecture that does happen, but it was much more
#
So that was the other thing, I think, about university.
#
There was, there was quite striking to me.
#
And the other thing, finally, which is not to do with in the classroom, two other
#
One, you learned a lot from the people around you.
#
And this might be more true of people who went to boarding schools or in colleges
#
I went to school and did my BA in Delhi.
#
And so and I was going to day scholar.
#
And so but when you are essentially in kind of a small town like New Haven, and
#
you are surrounded, you you learn a lot from conversations with each other.
#
And so that was different.
#
And second, the thing is, one thing I developed an appreciation for is thinking
#
about life beyond the classroom.
#
So things like, you know, going to the gym, you know, going to do some
#
extracurricular things, it made you a fuller person.
#
There was so much emphasis on school, but high in in India.
#
And there's so much pressure on kids, right?
#
That, yes, people do classes and now you're doing other things, but that it was
#
important to even think about, you know, going to a gym, that that was something
#
It was just not something I had experienced.
#
So it was a total aside and non-intellectual, but it actually does help you switch your
#
brain off for a bit and do something else and refresh you.
#
What were the big influences on you, both in terms of people and books and just ideas
#
like and, you know, if you have any concrete examples, for example, what you mentioned
#
earlier about you'd have to question your own biases or you'd realize that one way of
#
looking at something was too narrow and too flawed and, you know, it opened your eyes
#
So one was, I mean, it was actually a class that I think all of us used to in our programs
#
to grumble about the time and it was called IR 700.
#
It was the core course that everybody had to do.
#
And it was essentially a class where you had to work with teams.
#
So you started with it was a practical class where you had to write memos on policy
#
subjects, but you started off doing individual.
#
They give you a policy problem.
#
So you learned, I mean, there was a technical skill of actually writing for policy and
#
writing a policy memo that it was different from academia.
#
It was also where you learned harder that you have to think about budgets and politics
#
and because you had to, one of the things that became really, that was very influential
#
was this idea, which I learned later that Alexander George, the political scientist,
#
put this well, which is your policy suggestions don't have to just be desirable.
#
They have to be feasible as well.
#
So some of that with that memo writing is you had to figure out and it was really good.
#
It used to taught you how to think about policy design, which is think about stakeholders,
#
think about, you know, different perspectives, how you had to factor in budgets, politics,
#
the guy who's sitting in a finance ministry is going to have a different view from the
#
guy sitting in, you know, say security, one of the security ministries, foreign or defense
#
So that cost you, you started out writing individual memos, but then they made you
#
work first with one other person, then with larger and larger groups.
#
And so you suddenly start to realize, and remember, this is a group, as I said,
#
people from around the world, people with very different views, different politics,
#
different experiences and different, you know, areas of expertise, you suddenly
#
learn teamwork and then writing a collective memo that then you had to present.
#
And so you briefed as well.
#
So at the time, it was just a lot of work and, you know, working with other people
#
and teams and we had to come up with the consensus.
#
One of the final end of your project was before that, you know, now people remember
#
the Copenhagen summits in the Paris, it used to be the Kyoto agreement on climate change
#
And they used to make us split us into countries and we had to renegotiate Kyoto.
#
And you realize how hard it is.
#
So, you know, it's very easy to sit and say, how could these people not do these things?
#
And when you're doing it, when you're representing, you put yourself in and they
#
used to make sure you were on country teams that weren't your actual country.
#
And then you start having to see, okay, I now have to think about how this process works.
#
So that was quite, to me, quite influential, both in terms of thinking about the way of
#
working, but also, you know, research products in terms of it's very different to write for
#
The other thing that was very good is they allowed you to take classes in different schools.
#
So I did a couple of classes in the business school.
#
And one was this professor, Paul Bracken, who used to do this class called Business
#
Government and Globalization.
#
Mind you, this is the early 2000s where people didn't really think.
#
Now people just, you know, you have political risk analysis, consultants, others.
#
In those days, it was actually quite new that he was saying, look, geopolitics and local
#
And he was teaching this in the business school, Yale, it was called the School of
#
And so there were a couple of us, it was a Chinese friend of mine and I were the two
#
people who were non-MBA students who take that class.
#
And the end-year project there was to try to, different teams that were going to purchase,
#
there's a company for sale, Telecom Italia, which was the Italian telecom.
#
And most of the others were in, you know, somebody was representing Goldman Sachs, somebody
#
We, Chinese friend of mine and I, were the team that represented the Italian government.
#
And we essentially did this project where whoever came to say, we've got this great
#
purchase idea, we'll present, you know, this, we'll make the pitch.
#
We'll help you sell this for this much.
#
And we kept, we're saying, okay, we imbued ourselves in terms of the Italian government
#
and the Italian government was in this process because it has a 3% golden share.
#
So it had to agree or could veto any deal about the purchase of Telecom Italia, this
#
Italian, the telecom company.
#
It was like MTNL or BSNL.
#
I don't know if your younger audience knows what MTNL was, but it was the kind of monopoly
#
government provider of telecom services.
#
And what we did is we just looked at a thing and said, the Italian government's never going
#
So, you know, the part of this thing was the people used to pitch each other.
#
You had to go and so people come and we just say, keep saying, no, because you're not giving
#
And these business students were thoroughly frustrated because their end goal is, of course
#
you're going to do a deal.
#
And we were like, look, from a government point of view, this doesn't make sense because
#
it is, it's a Navaratna, it's a sacred cow to sort of thing.
#
And these business kids, at the end of the day, this thing finishes this interactive,
#
it was like the business equivalent of a war game.
#
And they thought that the professor would really, you know, give us a bad grade or whatever
#
it was because we had blocked the whole deal.
#
And he was just like, no, that's exactly what the Italian government would have done.
#
But it was a learning experience because we learned a lot about, you know, I learned about
#
how consultancies and the kind of pitches they make.
#
And I was never going to go into that world, but it's very interesting.
#
So to me, also that ability, again, going back to that, how we first started, was just
#
thinking outside your own comfort zone.
#
I think amongst professors, the person who was probably most influential was the historian
#
John Lewis Gaddis, because I had never really done Cold War history or diplomatic history
#
And I did a couple of seminars with him.
#
And it just opened my world to, as I said, learning how to deal with archives.
#
He's a great storyteller as well, in terms of also engaging with students, writing,
#
he used to have a writing checklist.
#
So writing well, thinking about, you know, working with documents, questioning, you know,
#
understanding your kind of where you're coming from, that it does shape the world.
#
Also, you know, things like you learn.
#
And this, I also, when I later did my PhD, I did a lot of history classes at the University
#
of Texas in Austin as well.
#
And you learn this, which is when I first take a book, I open it and I look at when
#
I always look at that copyright page where the date is.
#
Because it tells you something about the milieu in which this book was written.
#
And second, I learn about the author before.
#
Especially nonfiction books.
#
I learn about the author a little bit, because then I go into a book with a little bit of
#
And so these are the things that I, you know, and that I learned and what I appreciated
#
about John Garris was, and he was a very well-known historian, and still is.
#
But he was very, there were other parts of the history department in Yale that were
#
not so friendly to having non-disciplinary people come in.
#
I have to say the history department in Yale was much friendlier about that than the political
#
But he was very open to having us international relations students come and sit in his class
#
And it's something I also learned about when you, you know, being more inclusive.
#
And then there were other younger professors there also in the kind of associated, he had
#
something called international security strategy, international security studies, which now
#
has become more well known because they came up with the grand strategy program that other
#
But even in terms of some of the younger postdoctoral fellows who were there, who, you know, we
#
wanted to do another Cold War class and there wasn't enough.
#
They just created a course for us.
#
And, you know, those are the kind of things where you really, they could have easily said
#
But now you've ended up, you know, shaping our views on things.
#
So this idea of trying to be more inclusive rather than saying this is my club and I am
#
not going to let you in it because you, you know, you don't have the right kind of, you're
#
not in the right programs.
#
You don't have the right credential, which is you want to try to bring people into conversations.
#
That's how you create also knowledge about.
#
Is there a kind of ossification that can happen?
#
Like these guys could easily have said, no, there aren't enough people who want to do
#
Cold War or you could, you know, get ossified in terms of these are the things we study.
#
These are the things we believe.
#
These are the directions that you're going to go in like more and more in universities,
#
especially in the humanities.
#
I feel that a lot of that has happened where there are prevailing fashions of the day and
#
there are dominant trends.
#
And then if you want to get tenure and if you want to get funding, you've got to, you
#
know, get with the program as it were.
#
So what was it like at the time?
#
Was there a sense of that happening for you as well?
#
And during this period, when you are thinking about what are you going to do next?
#
I'm sure academia is an option, but then so is the policy world and et cetera.
#
So, I mean, some of it was at Yale.
#
I was still, you know, just come from my masters.
#
I wasn't really thinking.
#
I didn't know I wanted to work.
#
I didn't want to go straight to a PhD.
#
And then I got this job at Brookings for three years to do, to be a research assistant.
#
And, you know, it was also interesting there because it was too different.
#
And we can talk about more of that.
#
But I didn't, in fact, I wasn't even hired to do anything to do with India or South Asia
#
I kind of stumbled into that in addition to the job I had.
#
But part of it was you did start to notice at Yale, I think much more because it's much
#
more transparent than, you know, in Delhi University.
#
Yeah, you knew there was stuff happening with the Delhi University Teachers Association
#
or with the Students Union or whatever.
#
But you didn't really focus on it that much.
#
I think at Yale you start to discover things like bureaucratic politics within academic
#
departments and between them and different views of the world and how universities are
#
You know, I did know this about the political science department and that did shape my view
#
of political science, which was becoming much more quantitative.
#
That wasn't really my preference.
#
One thing I started noticing, which was not something I particularly liked, is that the
#
methods were driving questions rather than the reverse.
#
But you want to ask your question saying what's the best methodology to answer this?
#
It was I need to use these methods.
#
And so to me, that was the part that I started becoming aware of.
#
This was not a time that I was still kind of thinking about.
#
It gave me enough awareness that when I did think about when I was working at Brookings
#
as an RA and I was thinking about my PhD, I will admit it turned me a little bit off
#
going to political science, both because I mean, particularly because I felt that it
#
was very it seemed to be getting into a very quantitative, heavy direction.
#
Now, having said that, I have learned a lot more.
#
I learned a lot more since that you can find programs that have a little bit more diversity.
#
But at the end of the day, at the end of the day, I think it did shape my view of I just
#
had and this is where you have good professors in history.
#
This is why for me, John Gaddis had a lot of impact.
#
You have good people who good teachers can matter and they end up shaping your preferences.
#
And in this case, it was a perfect example.
#
The history department was welcoming or the historians were welcoming and it was they
#
And it did shape my preferences in terms of what to do now on academic incentives that
#
we can we can talk about this more.
#
But there's a reason I'm as a think tank and not in academia is because I as I said,
#
for one, I don't have I'm not kind of a single discipline, discipline person.
#
I think there is an incentive, especially till you get tenure.
#
And second, I'm not sure I'd ever get tenure with the kind of things I'm interested in
#
and the papers I'm interested in doing.
#
And, you know, I'm not one of those people who says I do think there are problems with
#
tenure, including in terms of, you know, workplace cultures.
#
But I still think from academic freedom perspective, I think it has had benefits.
#
And so I'm not one of those people says, you know, but throw it out entirely.
#
But I do think, you know, the incentive structure that was required, I'm not saying it's good
#
or bad, it's just it wasn't for me because I was not going to do that kind of work.
#
It just didn't interest me beyond the point.
#
So I did know going in that this desire to have particular fads in particular areas,
#
you know, in history, the equivalent at the time was that, you know, people there were
#
a lot of cultural historians at that time.
#
Diplomatic history was considered, you know, oh, you're doing old white man's history.
#
And I used to always say I'm doing old white man and one brown woman is because Indira
#
Gandhi was so dominant at that, you know, in terms of diplomatic history.
#
So, you know, there was there was almost kind of a desire to say that states didn't matter
#
very much or, you know, we were thinking about postmodernity and all that.
#
And I actually think when waves come, this is the good thing about academia.
#
I think it does progress, new kind of interpretations come.
#
To me, that is a good thing about academia.
#
Younger generation comes in different.
#
But I'd like it to be more additive that, yes, the subaltern matters, but that doesn't
#
mean the state doesn't matter.
#
So it doesn't mean, you know, the people who say only what governments are saying
#
matters, that's also wrong.
#
So it's good that we're getting different vantage points.
#
But there's this tendency to say, you know, my way or the highway is, you know, the same
#
academia that complains about hegemony ends up indulging in it by saying, this is the
#
This is what we'll hire on.
#
And there's this tendency for like to hire like.
#
And I actually don't think that's a that's a good thing.
#
But but, you know, you also do see that I, for example, if somebody came along, read
#
my book for younger scholar came and said, actually, you got this wrong.
#
That's how academia moves.
#
I also saw this aspect where there were people who were gatekeepers, who, you know, instead
#
of saying, OK, new information has come to light, we had more documentary evidence, maybe
#
there's something different.
#
If you had a different view, I saw in some parts of academia, and that's not an academia
#
that is on people, particular scholars who really go out of their way to criticize or
#
demean that younger scholars work because they'd say it's not my view and they're
#
critiquing me, in fact.
#
So to me, it's in some ways a it's a it's flattery when younger scholars take on your
#
work, because they at least they're engaging with it.
#
And you should encourage them to do it.
#
I don't believe in people getting personal and ad hominem with criticism.
#
But absolutely, there should be that that is the kind of going back and forth is how
#
knowledge moves and analysis moves forward.
#
So let's take a quick break and continue with the journey on the other side of the break.
#
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I think part of it is Brookings was one of the few think tanks I knew about.
#
So there was that kind of name recognition.
#
So I kind of knew what think tanks did, but I didn't quite know because now, for example,
#
you see a lot more think tanks in India.
#
CPR, Center for Policy Research, existed.
#
NCAER, ICRIER, the Economic Policy Think Tanks existed.
#
But they were pretty inaccessible.
#
And it's not like you regularly saw op-eds by think tank people necessarily in papers
#
And so I kind of vaguely knew what a think tank was.
#
I liked the idea that it was a policy research institute.
#
It was more accessible as an international student at the time.
#
And I knew of people there, so scholars.
#
And Steve Cohen, who had written a lot in South Asia, was at Brookings.
#
I actually didn't come to work for him.
#
I'd come to work for Jim Steinberg, who had been deputy national security advisor
#
under the Clinton administration and then was the director of foreign policy at the time.
#
And he had been looking for somebody who knew IR and national security,
#
but also had some experience or knowledge of tech policies.
#
So I got my job thanks to that random aside that I had done in terms of working for tech.
#
And that's why I always say you never quite know what experiences come in handy when.
#
And then when I had joined, Steve Cohen had said he was looking for an RA.
#
So it was supposed to be a temporary thing that I also worked for him.
#
And then I ended up working.
#
He was working on a book on Pakistan at the time.
#
And I ended up working for him for three years as well.
#
So part of it was I kind of got to know what a think tank was.
#
It was, in those days, a very uniquely almost American thing.
#
I think even today, kind of the interaction between think tanks and government,
#
it's very different in the US than it is anywhere else.
#
And so for me, this idea, I'd already kind of thanks to that IR program,
#
like I said, that class was very influential that you could speak to policy from outside.
#
It wasn't just policy was too important to be left to just officials.
#
And that there were ways of actually thinking people were interested in ideas.
#
And some of this was because people in government didn't have time.
#
It wasn't that they didn't know things.
#
It was just they had to do a lot of the day-to-day thinking.
#
So think tanks could actually, like Brookings, could do research long term.
#
This is one of the places that contributed significantly to the idea of the Marshall Plan.
#
But it started out as an economic policy think tank.
#
So a lot of the think tanks in the US were set up by business leaders who
#
realized that it was important for government to have access to more research and analysis.
#
And therefore, they invested in it.
#
It was less about convening, more about this kind of research and analysis that was policy relevant.
#
So the way I think about then and now, what I learned is you could do
#
academically rigorous policy relevant work.
#
For me, those three years as a research assistant was really, it was an apprenticeship.
#
It taught me how to take the book knowledge or the university knowledge I had and kind
#
of adapt them to policy questions of the day or of the future.
#
And then you learn skills also like grant writing, like convening, like putting together an event.
#
And one of the things you learn is, in those days we were a smaller place,
#
you learn how to do a lot of things because, and to me, if you're asking somebody to do some work,
#
ideally you've done it in the past because you understand what it's like.
#
And so it was a very good experience.
#
It was wonderful being in a culture where there were very smart people,
#
but also very good people who were interested in mentoring.
#
And you just learned a lot about also how, you know, I'd grown up in Delhi,
#
so it wasn't like I was unfamiliar with how a capital city functioned.
#
But it was also fantastic to be able to see how Washington functioned
#
and all the impressions I had about Washington, including, you know, you learn things that,
#
you know, somehow you, like I was saying earlier, that, you know, you think if you're looking at,
#
say, U.S.-India relations, you start to realize, well, India is barely actually, even today,
#
you know, everybody always thinks somebody in the U.S. is sitting and plotting about something to
#
do with India. And it's like, no, I can't tell you how hard it is to actually get India any attention.
#
It was definitely true in the early to mid-2000s. But even the case today is you learn things like,
#
you know, you have to think about what else is going on in the world. You learn about
#
different stakeholders and how you have to build constituencies or understand different
#
constituencies. You have to understand Capitol Hills. You have to understand also politics,
#
engagements with the legislature and executive. And, you know, you learn about kind of diplomatic
#
missions here and there, incentive structures you come across. That's the other thing when you do
#
convening, you know, you come across media, you see your supervisors at the time doing media,
#
engaging media, sometimes spending an hour on the phone with the journalists, not to get their
#
quote in the thing, but to help, they want to help, you know, understand, you want to help explain
#
particular issue areas. So it was a really kind of eye-opening experience for me. And I was lucky
#
enough to have two very different bosses also in terms of subject areas. Another reason, like,
#
I don't think in one slot is because Jim Steinberg was working on everything from broad U.S. foreign
#
policy to transatlantic relations to the Middle East to Asia policy. And Steve was kind of specialist
#
on South Asia, but I got to do both. And so you recognize actually their connections there that
#
you start to see that, okay, this is South Asia policy, but it's connected to all those other
#
things. So it was definitely an impactful time for me in D.C. So I'm going to ask you some really
#
basic questions because as I mentioned before the show, I've realized that, you know, sometimes we
#
commit the curse of knowledge and we'll talk in jargon and language that is completely basic and
#
obvious to us, but may not be to others. And this is something even I'd like to actually dig a little
#
deeper into. So tell me, what is a think tank? What does a think tank do? Like, why does a think
#
tank exist? What is the origin? How does this whole game work? And how has a notion of the think tank
#
evolved over the years? So I think, you know, a kind of a one-stop-shop version is it is
#
think tanks are essentially policy research institutes, if you want to put it differently,
#
or research analysis institutes. They are not generating knowledge or information for its own
#
sake, but to be able to shape the public debate or shape policy itself. And so
#
it is supposed to be on policy relevant questions. Now that might be today or it might be down the
#
line. They do this through different aspects. You write, you convene, you engage with media,
#
you do briefings, you meet with government officials, you meet with private sector, etc.
#
I do think, I mean, there are some places that call themselves think tanks that really aren't,
#
but also there is no one kind of think tank. It really depends on, and this diversity comes from
#
different parts. Some, it depends on, do they have a partisan view? Do they take an institutional
#
view? So, you know, a number of think tanks, Brookings, Carnegie, Council on Foreign Relations,
#
they don't take an institutional perspective. They say that scholars can take whatever. So,
#
you know, you'll have people who have very different views. Now, the critique, of course,
#
of think tanks is you might have different views, but you're still all kind of, you know,
#
DC style or New York establishment. And therefore, the challenge is to get outside that and get
#
different views. But the idea is like that, you know, some are, don't take an institutional.
#
Other think tanks too, they have an institutional view. And you as a scholar, as an analyst, as a
#
former policymaker, you go and work there because that happens to be your ideological perspective,
#
or if it's on a particular country, you know, you have that particular view on that country.
#
So, one way it's different is, you know, whether you're independent or nonpartisan or you take an
#
institutional view. Second could be, you know, the kind of research or the areas you focus on. So,
#
for example, some only focus on foreign policy, some think tanks will only focus on economic
#
policies, some will be very specific, it will be on defense budgeting, for example, or you will
#
have like Brookings is we've been a one stop shop. Some, you know, the other kind of some institutes
#
do essentially contract research. I don't know that those would necessarily be considered think
#
tank in the traditional sense. But they do kind of, you know, that somebody is going to like a
#
consultancy almost that say that I want now that could be business, that could be government.
#
But essentially, you are working on projects. So, Rand Corporation is now they have very good
#
people who do who are scholars who do have PhDs who have done this work. Or even if not PhDs,
#
they have experience in a particular government or others. And they do very good work, but it is on
#
contract, like they've been given a contract by either government or business. And that policy
#
question is shaped by their priorities. So, you can either have that or you have people who, you
#
know, I develop my own research agenda, and nobody gets to sign off on my results. So,
#
it depends also from that. Other thing that matters is, you know, there's diversity in where
#
your funding comes from. Sometimes you have one person has funded the entire think tank,
#
others, you know, they'll take they are. So, for example, some think tanks, there's an endowment,
#
but only certain amount of operating budgets, others don't have in the amount of monies raised
#
every year. So, there's a diversity of viewpoints. Others have a preference on, you know,
#
they do mostly convening versus events, or round tables, even the public events round tables,
#
or they do task forces. Others, you know, have a very different model, some kind of specified
#
teamwork, others have individuals. So, there's a very, there's a diversity. So, when people say
#
think tanks, part of it is is generating knowledge, analysis, etc. But it is it can
#
be in very different forms. The idea essentially, you know, it's this goes back in the US at least
#
to this interwar period, where, you know, you'd had a World War, but you also had a depression.
#
And people needed ideas. And even business realized that you needed ideas in terms of policy
#
ideas. So, sometimes it was that they didn't actually like what the government was doing,
#
they said, actually, government needs to understand. Other times, you know, there was
#
a recognition that these policy problems were so big. You know, so, for example, the people
#
talk about Carnegie, Carnegie is the Carnegie endowment of international peace. So, in, you
#
know, the idea was that you needed ideas and work done to ensure international peace, it's in the
#
name. Brookings started off as an economic policy think tank, it really was about coming up with
#
ideas, because the problems were considered so big. And so you often had business leaders who were,
#
when they were thinking about their philanthropy, decided to set up these institutions.
#
And over time, you know, they've been different phases, you've had, you know, you they're kind
#
of the older think tanks, and then you had newer think tanks that developed in Washington,
#
including for example, you know, you would had heritage and American Enterprise Institute or
#
more think tanks of the right or center right, you then had Center for American Progress that was
#
considered kind of more progressive. So it was really about waves of think tanks that came.
#
And then you had some, you know, recent, because tech has become a big thing. So either the bigger
#
older think tanks have got people who now work on tech policy, or there were some think tanks that
#
were set up that really just came focus on technology policy of different aspects. And so,
#
you know, it's, it's a very, and then the other thing that's actually quite different in the US,
#
I think, much more so than elsewhere, is you get a lot, it's a, it can be a revolving door. So you get
#
people, it's not the people when they retire, they come to think tanks. It's that when they're out of
#
sometimes that happens, but often all they don't retire, necessarily, they take early retirement
#
come. But often it's, you know, you have people who, in an administration, say there'll be a
#
Republican. So to give you an example, during the late 90s, early 2000s, the president of Brookings
#
was a Republican, Michael Armacost, and the director of foreign policy was Richard Haass.
#
When the Bush administration came about, they, Richard Haass went into government.
#
And people who were coming out, they took over. So like my former boss who'd served in the Clinton
#
administration, they came out of office and came to a think tank. So it, it's, it was a revolving
#
door. This obviously happens less, I think, I wouldn't be surprised if you start seeing that
#
in India as like kind of lateral entry becomes a more of a thing. But it's very different in
#
parliamentary systems too, because you have a permanent bureaucracy here, there are a lot
#
of political appointees. And so that's kind of been the other thing, which is the idea that
#
it's almost policy and academia and conversation with each other. This is the space. And I think,
#
increasingly, since its origins, it's also that there are various stakeholders, including
#
business, including, you know, NGOs and others who have something to say, or are stakeholders
#
in the sense that you can sit and have all these discussions. But if the implementers of the private
#
sector, you don't have them in the room, it's not going to be an ideal scenario. So it's quite
#
different. And to me, it's also been really interesting to see the development of think tanks
#
in India and how much we're seeing that now in a way that we didn't 20 years ago.
#
So a couple of days ago, a friend of mine was standing with me outside DuPont Circle and giving
#
me an introduction to two things simultaneously. And one was Washington, DC. And the other was a
#
fine art of stone throwing, where he said, if you throw a stone in that direction, you will hit a
#
banker. If you throw it in that direction, you will hit a lobbyist. If you throw it in that
#
direction, I think he meant this particular street, you will hit a think tanker because
#
you've got Carnegie right beside you, American enterprises. So now we're going to zoom back up
#
from think tanks alone and tell me a little bit about DC. What is this ecosystem here where
#
you have the state, you have interest groups, you have finance in the private sector, you have
#
think tanks. What is happening in the belly of this particular beast? What are the incentives
#
that drive these different players and how are they colliding and what's going on? So give me
#
a sense at how this machine works. It's not all that different from how any capital city works.
#
The difference is that, you know, it's the emphasis or the kind of the dominance of. So,
#
you know, you might see business a lot more here than you would in Delhi, or you might see lobbyists
#
because it's, you know, it's a legalized form. But it doesn't mean, doesn't exist in an Indian
#
policymaking structure. It's just much more subtle. It's dirtier, yeah. I don't know. I mean,
#
you know, that is a relative concept. It's just that even in terms of, you know, you don't see,
#
now you're starting to see governments, I mean, businesses in India that have government
#
affairs offices, for example. This has existed here for the longest time. There's a great book
#
by Jonathan Rauch called Government's End, which is exactly about this particular.
#
Yeah. And, you know, even, and I will say this, you know, there are, everybody has a certain,
#
you know, they're coming, they're in the city for a certain reason, you know, they're, and to be
#
fair, their critiques, for example, of think tanks as well, it is everything from, you know,
#
irrelevance to nature of independence. Great book by Dan Vrezner called The Ideas Industry.
#
And if you want to read a critique of, and this is an older critique, but nonetheless of experts
#
and kind of bias, but also there's a book called Blind Oracles that's made to read in graduate
#
school, partly to, so that we have some self-awareness about, and part of the critique
#
was, you know, about how government uses think tanks and uses the ideas industry as much as you
#
think you're influencing them. So I think the ecosystem is, you know, like any place,
#
who are the stakeholders that, you know, you hear you have a legislature that's quite strong,
#
it's a presidential system, you have not just, you know, the executive branch,
#
but understanding the various departments and agencies, you have a strong national
#
security council, but then you have, say, on the foreign policy side, you've also seen the stage
#
where you, the traditional departments that matter, the state department, defense department,
#
now joined by, because pretty much everything has a foreign policy angle, you have, you know,
#
the treasury department that is closer to the finance ministry, you have commerce department,
#
some mix of corporate affairs and commerce in India, you have USTR, the trade representative,
#
which commerce in India does. So you have, I mean, the ecosystem is partly, you have the executive
#
branch, within that, you have the various agencies, you have Capitol Hill, which has both Senate and
#
House, and they have a staffer system. So yes, they're the members of Congress and the senators,
#
but there's both a subject area, sort of their committees, kind of like the parliamentary
#
committees, but much stronger, you see on TV, people holding hearings and things, each of those
#
committees has professional staff members from both Republican and Democratic sides. And then
#
you have every senator member of Congress has their staffers. And, you know, people sometimes
#
are quite, you know, I see this particularly when people come from an outside DC context,
#
everybody can be quite dismissive of staffers. But they're incredibly influential, they're the
#
ones who do a lot of the drafting, they have a lot of experience, you can learn a lot also from
#
listening to them. So, you know, you have kind of the government side of it, you then also have
#
businesses that either, I mean, there's lobbying, but they also have government affairs, there's
#
consulting, people are now, because people are realizing in that business government globalization
#
sense, that businesses also have to understand and engage with governments, but also understand
#
the world. So you see, now you see political risk analysis, firms that have come up, you see,
#
you know, the consultancies who are often former government folks, or who have some area expertise
#
who are helping businesses navigate other parts of the world. So you have those kinds of consultancies,
#
or navigate the city here. You have think tanks, media is kind of another set of stakeholders,
#
again, not all that unfamiliar. But I think in some ways, you see more, still more of the
#
kind of engagement with media, including kind of interaction in a way that you used to in India,
#
I think a lot more. And then, you know, you have both think tanks and academia as well.
#
There are also a lot of lawyers in this town, they often don't practice law, but are in various
#
parts. So you do see an ecosystem that has various stakeholders, it is a little bit of a
#
one horse town in the sense that, you know, they used to joke that Washington is Hollywood for
#
ugly people. I'd like to believe we, our fashion sense has improved as has cuisine in Washington,
#
but nonetheless, it is, you know, it's either government or things associated with government
#
and policy. Now, the DC area has started, and this is a total aside, but has, you know, there
#
is tech in the suburbs, and you're starting to see a lot of medical research, etc. But
#
nonetheless, it is, you know, the power matters in this town. And it is about shaping
#
policy and what people do with power that that like a lot of capital cities is is kind of what
#
this ecosystem is that revolves around. It's a much more accessible town, I would say than Delhi is
#
in the sense that, you know, you would be easier to meet people in government and in business.
#
And there's a lot more interaction, I think, amongst the various groups. But particularly,
#
it's an incredibly accessible town where people are interested in learning. So knowledge actually
#
and information does matter. So let's go back to sort of your decision to get a PhD. Like you did
#
the three years at Brookings was that why did you feel you needed the PhD? Was it for the learning?
#
Was it for the credential? Was it just, you know, part of that process that you have to go through
#
to be taken seriously in this work? All of the above. And, you know, one of my advisors called
#
it a hunting license, you have to get the hunting license. So it is about credentials. But it's
#
also particularly about credentials, because as a woman, I knew that it's especially when you're
#
younger, you don't get taken seriously. And particularly by that point, for various reasons,
#
I decided that I actually I wasn't going to work on India. And then one of my bosses told me, look,
#
we need more India experts, we need more people to actually understand India is going to become
#
more and more important to the US to understand how India is thinking about these things. So
#
I actually didn't want to be slotted as the Indian who does India stuff. But I ended up
#
choosing to do that. But as you you know, as you're kind of thinking about what to do,
#
yes, you need to know substance, you need to learn. It's also about learning how to write a book.
#
It's not an easy task to do. And it's the one time that you get to deep dive and research and
#
actually do that big project. But especially as a woman, I knew that working on Asia related things,
#
yes, I did. I would probably need a PhD because I'd be taken more seriously.
#
There was also a little bit of a ceiling at that time, particularly if you
#
were an international student, that you didn't have a situation where you could go into
#
government and get the experience. Plus some think tanks, you know, even if you did have
#
government experience, it had to be pretty high level or you and then and you still need a PhD.
#
And so to me, it was yes, credential, but it was also just I always kind of knew that I wanted to
#
do a PhD because I did want to develop a expertise while you know, so it was about developing some
#
sort of expertise while being able to put it in a broader context. And a PhD gives you that it,
#
you know, the the part that people often talk about as a PhD is the substance. But to me,
#
equally important was things like research design. How do you actually design a project like that?
#
How do you, you know, do such a large project where frankly, you are responsible for the
#
entire project? It's not like an edited volume or anything. It's your you have to do it from and you
#
have to think about something original, you have to add something. So it was as much about the
#
process, you learn how to deal with people because you're dealing with your peers,
#
you're dealing with the university, but you're dealing with your committees. So it's, it's a
#
it's a kind of a pretty good experience. I don't you know, I'm not one of those people who thinks
#
you have to have a PhD to be a good scholar or analyst. I'm not but I think it benefited me.
#
And so for me, when I talk to younger people, if they are interested in research, I do think they
#
should consider it. Because I think it helps you move from those shorter papers to kind of a larger
#
project. But like I said, I don't and it gives you that methodological training that yes, can you
#
develop it outside? I'm sure some can. But it does give you a certain discipline in terms of being
#
able to do that. So I'm not like I said, I'm not one of those people thinks you have to have a PhD
#
to be in this business. But it definitely benefited me. Tell me about how you were growing during
#
this period, because your dissertation was actually following a novel insight that China
#
played a bigger role than understood in India, US affairs, much later became your book, Fateful
#
Triangle. And you know, so what was it like to actually not, you know, do research in something
#
that's already kind of known about, and you're just doing incremental progress, but this is
#
fairly novel, what you were doing, you were busting a conventional notion of the world.
#
And equally, what were the processes of the research teaching you teaching you like you've
#
spoken elsewhere about you were lucky enough to be in Texas, where you know, the Lyndon Johnson
#
archives were open to you, you did a lot of primary research, what was that process like,
#
how are you being shaped, because I imagine what is happening here is a combination of the
#
exhilaration of actually entering new territory, where you are, you know, making progress in the
#
knowledge of the world. And also, along with that exhilaration, I guess, what for me would be the
#
sheer joy of just surrounding yourself with all this new knowledge in terms of the primary
#
material you're looking at and being able to look at it through a prism that no one else had before.
#
So what was it like? And how did it aid in the shaping of you?
#
I mean, one of the things you learn is that ideas you go in with even questions aren't
#
necessarily what you end up doing. So I remember when I applied for kind of PhD programs,
#
I kind of knew I wanted to look into US-India relations a little bit more. But that was
#
basically it. I didn't have any idea. I just thought, you know, the last some of the last
#
big books that were written, it was Dennis Cux's Strange Democracies, it was Robert McMahon,
#
the diplomatic historian had written Cold War on the periphery, which I think kind of ended in the
#
60s. And so you hadn't seen, there actually hadn't been that much recent work. And so part of it was,
#
you know, I knew some, there had been documents that had come out, both on the US side and on
#
on the Indian archives, actually, while I was thinking about this, was just starting to open
#
if there was more access, I don't know if they were probably always open, but there wasn't as
#
much access. And so I had gone in thinking, there must be, let me look into US-India relations. I
#
actually didn't, like I said, I was trained as a historian. So I had a question, what shaped US-India
#
relations. And when you apply in public policy programs, which is what I went, you do have to
#
kind of give a general's, you know, do a two pager about what you and you know, I think I'd broadly
#
done, I want to see how personalities, I think I had like four or five P's long before the Prime
#
Minister. I loved these alliteration, you know, four P's and five P's. So I think I had, you know,
#
looking at how personalities, politics, policymaking, etc shaped US-India. So I had some
#
vague thing like that, that I was going to do. And then I started kind of drilling down, I used to,
#
you know, as you mentioned, I was at the LBJ School of Public Policy and right next to it
#
is the LBJ Presidential Library and Museum. And to those who do come and visit the US,
#
they shouldn't go to these presidential museums, because they're a lot of fun. And it tells you a
#
lot. I mean, they are definitely the fan that those presidential foundations version of history,
#
but nonetheless, they're good to visit. But each of these presidential museums
#
has these kind of the library side, which is where the archives are, these are the presidential
#
papers. So, you know, if you there's separate places where the State Department papers are kept.
#
Each of the presidential libraries has the White House papers. And frankly, they give you a more
#
of a sense of what the president's office was thinking, because it's not because you're seeing
#
different aspects of it. And so I used to go just, I mean, as I said, as a bit of a nerd,
#
so I used to go, you could go to the archives, and I'd sit and look at files. And I was looking
#
at US-India files just to see, okay, you know, give me a sense while I was developing my you have
#
to develop a two page, not two page. So first, you do a two page concept note, then a broader
#
dissertation proposal. And I didn't go in with an idea, I just said, I want to look at US-India
#
papers. And what I, you know, I received wisdom had been that the only thing that mattered was
#
that the reason I mean, the lines were A, US and India had been estranged during the Cold War,
#
and they became engaged after. Second, that the reason for that had been is that during the,
#
you know, 1947 coincided, I mean, Indian independence also coincided with really the
#
hardening of Cold War lines. And so India's, and people use the word alliance really,
#
India being allied with the Soviets, and US and Pakistan being allied, this was destined for
#
estrangement. And that's what the story of the relationship was. And also the third aspect of
#
that was that basically, the triangle that mattered was only US-India-Pakistan. Maximum,
#
you might get the quad aspect, which is you bring the Soviet story in, but it was basically that,
#
you know, impression even I had this growing up that Pakistan, US loved Pakistan, and therefore
#
was anti-India. That is the general story. And that these two, it was just the pushes and pulls
#
and the Pakistan prism shaped India relations and the India relationship to some extent at
#
different parts, shaped the Pakistan relationship. So it was really about that South Asia and even
#
within South Asia and India-Pakistan story. When I started sitting in the archives and looking at
#
the files, I'm suddenly seeing all this mention of China. You see Lyndon Johnson himself, and by
#
then his audio tapes had come on, is he kept talking about not letting India lose to China
#
fall while China succeeded. And even when he's frustrated with India about whether it stands in
#
Vietnam or its economic performance, he'd say, but we have to hang in there because of China.
#
And then, you know, there were papers on the 65 war. And, you know, what we do know, what we did
#
know then is that, oh, the US had remained neutral and cut off supplies to both India and Pakistan.
#
What we didn't know, which was a lot of discussion about that I saw in the papers,
#
is that the Chinese had threatened to enter that war. In fact, came closer in 65 than 1971
#
to entering an India-Pakistan war, to intervening. And that the US had, A, been worried about,
#
B, India and the US had discussed this, and three, the US had started, had took action to
#
warn the Chinese off and intervening. And they had operational plans about what happened if China
#
did intervene in terms of entering the war. Remember, this is three years after 62.
#
So, also, when I discovered that there was something known as an air defense agreement
#
between India and the US, which is pretty close. It's at least a one-sided unilateral commitment.
#
And, you know, all this while, you keep hearing India didn't do these things, but India had signed
#
this mutual consultation agreement if China threatened to attack India again.
#
Because at some point in these papers, you discover in the middle of this India-Pakistan war,
#
the US officials are asking Indian officials, are you invoking the air defense agreement?
#
Do you want to start mutual consultations to start planning? And you discovered that the US
#
actually had operational plans to intervene on behalf of India. So, suddenly, I'm just like,
#
wait, there's a China angle to US, how the US saw India. So, then I started looking into it.
#
And, you know, there was some stuff online, but you start rereading even the secondary sources,
#
you start reading contemporary analysis, the University of Texas at Austin, where the LBJ
#
School is, was one of the PL 480 libraries, had a great collection of South Asia books,
#
Indian newspapers, all this. And then you start to see is actually we were looking at the 40s,
#
50s, 60s from our prisms today. And so we thought the only thing that mattered was US India-Pakistan.
#
The other thing that you discovered is a lot of the books that had been written hadn't had access
#
because they hadn't opened up to White House papers. And if you were just looking at State
#
Department papers, you only looked at the South Asia Bureau, and the South Asia Bureau is only
#
going to mostly going to write about South Asia. So, my book didn't say that Pakistan didn't matter.
#
It did. There's no doubt about it. All that India's relationship with the Soviets didn't
#
share. Absolutely did. But I was saying there was this missing angle that I wanted to add.
#
And so part of the process is to say, is there enough there there? And so you have to have an
#
open mind when you go in to say that it can change your mind about what you want to do. And that's
#
part of the learning process. And I said, okay, now I want to look and see how did I didn't say
#
China mattered more than any others. I said, when did it matter? How did it matter? How much did it
#
matter? And in what ways? And so, to me, it was that process of discovery of does this angle. So,
#
when you're doing this prospectus, you know, if it was just the LBJ thing, then you say, okay,
#
it's not worth maybe a nice research paper, but not. And so you start saying, okay, this matters,
#
A, because it's a missing angle, but from that's the academic part, what is the new angle you're
#
adding? But then there's a policy part, which is you'd started to see in the mid 2000s, you saw it
#
in the Bush administration, which was there at the time, it was the understated aspect of the US
#
India nuclear deal. Condoleezza Rice in 2000 in Foreign Affairs had written a piece that was
#
going to shape how she had been an advisor to the Bush campaign, then the George W. Bush campaign,
#
and she had written a influential foreign affairs piece that said, for too long, we have seen India
#
through a US India Pakistan prism, we need to start seeing India in relation to China as well,
#
because China is seeing it in relation to the US. And that was the view that this China angle
#
now matters. So from a policy perspective, what I wanted to look at is, if there is the fact that
#
China had met had helped shape US India relations the past, what do we know about how to shape it?
#
What was the extent to which it shaped? And what were the limits? And so there was both an
#
academic angle to why I looked into this and a policy angle, which is what does this tell us?
#
Can we learn something from the past about today? And then you could always say there's enough
#
differences. Mind you, this is before today's thing where now it's all about China. In the 2000s,
#
people actually asked me, this is another thing I learned. There were people who told me, why are
#
you doing this? This is a dissertation on US India China will be irrelevant. So one of the things
#
you learn is navigating people actually saying, this doesn't matter. So if you have, if you say
#
that it's not just about trends, and which way, because the other thing people are telling me,
#
why don't you do a dissertation on India's nuclear program? And frankly, I didn't,
#
wasn't really interested in that. And with a dissertation, you really have to be interested
#
in it. Otherwise, you won't finish it. And so this was the question that I wanted to do,
#
I was lucky enough to have, and you have something to do with shaping your committee. But I also knew
#
with this kind of dissertation, if I was going to do it, there was, there was not a likelihood,
#
because I was planning to do 30 years of this history from kind of 49 to 79. That it's not
#
a typical academic PhD, and I would not probably get a job because it was neither going to be a
#
pure diplomatic history dissertation, you were not going to be a very political science. My
#
views were shaped by both disciplines. But it was not going to be a pure,
#
pure enough PhD to get an academic job. So some of what you learn is you can't get everything you
#
want. Which means I was kind of maybe not entirely closing the door, because you could teach at
#
policy schools, I guess, but that I also knew going in that you're making choices as you're
#
deciding what to do a dissertation on. It wasn't trendy, believe it or not, now it seems like it
#
was, but at that time, it wasn't a trendy thing to do. So you kind of and then there's the then
#
there's the part about you just the substance and process you learn. You don't just go into
#
opening documents. Sometimes I worry a little, you know, since I see this in the media, somebody
#
will take one document out of context, and it'll be like a big thing. Oh, my God, this is it.
#
There's you have to start with reading the secondary source work first, what have people
#
already said, not just because you're like, I'm going to critique it, because you can actually
#
learn things, somebody has already done the work before you look at what they have to say.
#
And then you add to it, it's not about entire rejections of sometimes, you know, it's building
#
on you're also humble about the fact that you had access to archives that those people didn't so you
#
we just know more. And down the line, when more papers become available, more knowledge will get
#
built. And so some of it is about saying, okay, you start with a secondary source work, you see
#
what the people have said, you go to different archives. In those days, what was just happening
#
is people were saying, okay, earlier American or Western archives are open, then you say, okay,
#
we're going to get more access to the Soviets and Chinese archives. India, both the personal papers
#
at the multi were available, mind you, the Nehru papers were not. But then national archives were
#
MEA files, some of them were available. You also you know, you learn about archival work that
#
you have to acknowledge that the papers we do have are selective, because we don't have the
#
entire collection. They haven't been made available. So you try to build a story with what you have
#
while acknowledging that you don't have perfect knowledge. And that's another reason somebody can
#
come along and say, look, I found a new document that totally contradicts your point. That's fair
#
enough, because that's how knowledge builds over time. So some of it is just you learn by doing I
#
never been to an archive before. And I did a workshop, it was called the Summer Institute
#
for Conducting Archival Research to learn a little bit about the skills, how you make the most of
#
your time, how you approach papers, and you learn about different archives. So for example, you know,
#
if you go to in the national archives and see MEA files, those are MEA is Ministry of External
#
Affairs files. But when you went to the Moorthy, you saw PN Huxer file, then he happened to be
#
especially the bulk of the papers that we have from him, he happened to be the key aid to
#
India's Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi at the time, and the file looks very different.
#
In MEA, it's like different cables, different memos, the file that you see in PN Huxer papers,
#
which also makes you realize that this is how policymakers have to make policy. It's not like
#
only foreign policy consideration, because as you go through a PN Huxer file, you see what was in
#
Indira Gandhi's desk, or something similar, which is there's something about economic policy,
#
there is something about defense policy, there is something about some political thing that's
#
happening. And that's what's going through, there's something happening with China, there's
#
something happening with Lebanon. You learn even as somebody, I wasn't somebody who served in
#
government, either in the US or in India, but you learn about how a little bit about how government
#
functions, the different incentives that people have. One of the things I discovered how in the
#
70s, Indira Gandhi was both in the late 60s and even before Nixon, she tried for an approach
#
mount with China, it really stabilized ties in the 70s. And the people who were blocking her were
#
partly suggesting against it, were the Soviet hands within the government. So there's actually
#
a really interesting debate between the China hands and the Soviet hands. So, Brajesh Mishra
#
was one of the kind of so-called China hands, and he was arguing that, look, we can stabilize
#
ties, it'll actually give us more space with both the Soviet Union, because we will get
#
over dependent after 71. And there was a lot of pushback from the Soviet hands. For example,
#
the treaty that India eventually signs with the Soviet Union in 1971, you discover things that
#
actually Indira Gandhi didn't want to sign it. They first wanted to sign, approached it in 69,
#
and she resisted. It was the Soviet hands who are saying, we should sign this. And then
#
you also learn about things in a very influential book I read in graduate school,
#
that a professor suggested was Louis Menon's Metaphysical Club, which isn't about metaphysics,
#
it's about how you can have the greatest ideas in the world. But they actually had implemented
#
when the environment exists for them to fit. So it's not just you have the idea,
#
it's a policy environment, and you have to recognize moments where you say, I have the
#
idea. And he looks at it through how the theory of evolution got on, and says that it's not like
#
Darwin was the first person to talk about this. It's just that it came out at a time, and he
#
pushed it out at a time when the atmosphere was ready for an idea like this. So you see this in
#
1971, it's just a better moment for these same people who were making the argument for that
#
treaty with the Soviet Union, now it becomes possible. So you learn while you're doing these
#
kind of abstract ideas you read about, you start seeing it in these papers that you're seeing,
#
the debates between people. You also start to understand things like there isn't like
#
in one Indian view, there are debates. You learn how to read MEA documents. This is a skill that
#
every, you know, people will say, I remember the first trisena dialogue, maybe. There was
#
a one speech a day from government, different, there was a foreign minister, minister of state,
#
foreign secretary, and somebody wrote an entire article saying, you know, it's very weird, these
#
three officials gave speeches and didn't mention China at all. But if you look at their speeches,
#
and you know how MEA writes speeches and documents, because you've seen it in the drafting, etc.,
#
you realize those speeches were entirely, almost entirely about China, they just didn't mention
#
China. So every once in a while I say, you know, I'll do like a YouTube video on how to read an
#
MEA document, the stuff that is not being said. MEA has been subtweeting long before
#
subtweeting was a thing. So you learn these things, not just about what was being said,
#
but you learn about how particular governments function, how they draft things, how the process
#
exists, how a file moves. And so, to me, archival work also has all it helps you question your own
#
ideas. You know, I went in like a lot of people who grew up in India in the 80s, probably even
#
after Nehru was so naive about China. I still think he made some mistakes. I just think now having
#
access to the papers, the judgment calls that he made that were, I think, in error, were not the
#
ones we thought it was. And you learn, you learn that also to have a little bit of humility,
#
if not a lot of humility, that it's when you're looking at, oh, India should have prevented China
#
from taking over Tibet, you know, should have sent troops. But then you actually when you're
#
going through files, and you see what an Indian policymaker, whether Nehru or Patel was dealing
#
with at that time, consolidating the country, budget, there no budget, a military that had to
#
figure out what was going on, because Pakistan, remember, was trying to take over Kashmir.
#
So, in an ideal way, and then there's the reality of the Himalayas that exists between India and
#
China, you start to learn that, look, in hindsight, everything seems easier, but you can't
#
do hindsight analysis, you have to see what the logic was at the time, you can disagree with it.
#
It is not my job, I don't see it as my job to be kind of calling out people by today.
#
I will point out that what the other options discuss, would might they have led, you have to
#
be careful about counterfactuals, but those things are fine. But it is not for me as an analyst,
#
I'm not passing value judgment, I can think it's wrong. So, in the op ed, I write, I can say, I
#
think, so and so got us wrong, and for this reason. But you see, we learn different things
#
about people we thought we knew when you start looking at the archives. So, for me, it was
#
fascinating, because in some ways, I love my conventional wisdom being questioned, because
#
partly then you think, okay, then I have something to add to the literature. But also, it was just
#
fascinating to learn about how different people saw, and you learn a lot about human nature,
#
including, you know, people foibles, like, you know, you start wondering about the Nehru
#
relationship with Krishnamurti, and why did this man listen to this other man,
#
then you start reading more about it, and you think about worldviews, you think about how
#
that person is looking. So, very long answer, but you know, some of it is about, to me, whether the
#
PhD process, or when you're working on a new research project, if you're not driven to answer,
#
if you're not actually curious about the question you're asking, you don't, it can't, it's, if a
#
project is that big, you won't sustain. But to me, the curiosity of, it goes back to, like I said,
#
I was probably that kid who asked why. So, I want to know why I have a little notebook, when
#
I'm in the archives, I'll say, okay, there's a reference to this, I need to go check up
#
what's happening on this front. So, you know, you, you start off with, okay,
#
say that 65, oh, you say, oh, wait, they keep talking about an air defense agreement,
#
I don't know what this is, I've never heard about this. So, you make a note, and you say air defense
#
agreement, then you go to that research rabbit hole thing, what was this? Did India sign it?
#
So, then you start seeing the drafts, say, but did India ever sign it? So, then you see that in
#
compilation, document compilations, in the US, there's something called the foreign relations
#
of the United States series that puts together, and it's an excellent resource, and now they're
#
all online and searchable. And you see the, you know, the kind of some documents, because there
#
are, there are kind of curated aspects to try to give you a general sense of, say, how a Kennedy
#
administration looked at South Asia or China or whatever. But then you go to the archives,
#
and if you've done your research by then or homework, you've done, read the secondary source,
#
you've seen the document compilation, you've maybe read newspapers, which I think also from
#
contemporary newspapers add a lot. And then when you're in the archives, you can go follow up on
#
those links, or you can just go to an archive before, and it's good to go in with some knowledge,
#
because you know what you're looking for. But sometimes you actually learn things that aren't
#
in any of those other things that you did. For younger scholars in, you know, in India, there's
#
if nothing else, even if they're not interested, they should go and read the selected works of
#
Jawaharlal Nehru, they're all online. And part of it is, don't just go and look at the memos you're
#
interested in, read them cover to cover. Because again, it tells you what else was happening in
#
the world. It's not just, this is that one memo I'll pick, and I'll just give you one final example
#
of how you know, you can, you can, because you learn how to, you learn about your own biases,
#
you also learn, you have a question. And by this, by the time I'm doing this work, you know, you
#
start to see, okay, there's a China angle, you don't want to start finding a China angle everywhere,
#
you don't want to start cherry picking information, because then you can say, okay, this was mentioned,
#
like, there are some periods where I actually say, actually, China didn't matter anymore.
#
And therefore, the relationship actually didn't matter. You have to have the discipline to say
#
that. But, you know, in terms of taking things, you have to put documents in context. So the one
#
that I always like is think about as an example is, oh, you know, India turned down this 1955
#
offer for to be put on the Security Council, because Nehru didn't want China to be moved off
#
or something. You take that out of context, we said, yeah, it fits into this idea of Nehru as naive
#
and, you know, doing this. Then you start looking at the papers, you start considering and this is
#
a broader thing. One, you notice that this wasn't just a US offer just like that. The offer was
#
contingent on two things. One, yes, China being removed. But second, on India essentially agreeing
#
to become a quasi US ally or ally, the same people who now say don't want to become a US ally,
#
don't like India doing alliances. So people forget that contingent aspect, which when you go and
#
actually look at the documents, you see this is not just an out of the blue. This would have come
#
with those strings attached. The third thing that people don't look at is that the Soviet Union
#
had never agreed to this. So when they think this was going to happen, the Soviets would have vetoed
#
it. They were China's closest allies at that time. Why would they? India wasn't that close to the
#
Soviets. And after all, that's when the Soviets choose ally China over friend India, even in
#
1962 during the war. But why does anybody think that Khrushchev would have signed off on India
#
taking China's seat? So it's all very well to say. Now you can, it's a reasonable argument to say
#
that, okay, Nehru was, you know, bought into this idea of interdependence. It's actually,
#
he was doing this long before either the West or India was in the 2000s and 2010s, 2000s at
#
least or 90s that, oh, you know, if we bring China into the international system and interdependence,
#
it will lead to a, you know, more hugger, softer, cuddlier China. I'm not saying that that didn't
#
happen. But to say that otherwise, this counterfactual that had Nehru not been naive,
#
India would have had a seat at the Security Council. If once you start looking at the
#
documents in context, you realize these are Mungeri Lal ke Haseen Sapne essentially,
#
that it wasn't actually plausible, that the critique that you're going to make could be that
#
Nehru could have used that moment to go get something else. So for example, 54 Panchil
#
agreement. Nehru could have at that time China needed, at least now we know China needed that
#
agreement as much have wanted. Could Nehru have extracted more than, could he have, you know,
#
argued for, got a border settlement then? Those are the questions that are worth asking,
#
even from a policy perspective. But some of these things which are not plausible at all,
#
even in hindsight, I find them, you know, they're only when you go, you find one document and then,
#
you know, it's all over the newspapers, you'll have entire TV channel debates about it. But it
#
doesn't actually reflect the reality of what was happening at that time.
#
Wow, so much food for thought. But first, I must say that you revealed yourself as an 80s kid by
#
mentioning Mungeri Lal ke Haseen Sapne. For listeners who might be wondering what it is,
#
it was a Doordarshan show starring Raghuveer Yadav, which was based on The Secret Life of
#
Walter Mitty by James Thurber, classic short stories. And before I get tempted to talk about
#
Thurber's battles with Harold Ross about the Oxford comma, I shall instead kind of go back
#
to this conversation. And I want to double click on some aspects of what you spoke about. But before
#
that, a digressive larger question. Earlier, you spoke about the distinction between history
#
and political science in the sense that one will begin with a question and the other will begin with
#
a hypothesis. How important is that distinction to you? Because just thinking about it now as you
#
speak, it strikes me that my personal inclination would always be to start with a question. You know,
#
I can understand the value of having a hypothesis to start with because then there is some particular
#
focus that you can zero in on. So what is kind of your sense of that? Was your inclination also
#
towards an open question, which eventually like, you know, uncovered, unrolled all of this for you?
#
Or do you feel that there are situations in which your hypothesis is fine? Do you think that,
#
you know, just as earlier we were speaking about how, you know, the method can drive the questions,
#
do you feel that there is a similar kind of part dependence in the approach of either
#
starting with a question or starting with a hypothesis? So to me, there isn't, you know,
#
there isn't just one and I stereotyped those as well, like I made it very simplistic in terms
#
of the distinction. But I don't think there's necessarily one path. I always joke that, you
#
know, it is not, I grew up with the idea that you can actually have two contradictory ideas or two
#
different paths to the same outcome, that there isn't one road, partly because in Delhi, sometimes
#
if you were sticking on one road, you never go anywhere, you had to find other ways to get to
#
your destination. There are other ways that there isn't that sometimes you can have two
#
contradictory ideas in your head. And partly that means isn't to me, it's situational is,
#
it depends on the research that you're trying to tackle. It's not that political scientists don't,
#
I mean, initially, even they start with a question, but then they develop a hypothesis
#
and then test it. Hence, the, you know, politics becoming a more of a science that they test it
#
through different case studies, etc. I don't think there's anything that one or the other
#
lends itself. I think it depends how honest you as a scholar, when you're looking into these things,
#
and the question that you're interested in the skills you have, I would not, you know, I don't
#
have the skills necessary to be a very good political scientist. So I'm not, I don't go in
#
with that. If I if I did have them, then maybe I would, I would do an equally effective study
#
looking at that angle. I also learn a lot from political scientists, some do really good,
#
you know, I think particularly political scientists are open to other methods,
#
beyond kind of quantitative, who do really good case studies that are, you know, some political
#
scientists do a lot of work on that is using historical methodology to for their case studies.
#
To me, you know, his people, and this is not just true of political scientists who are
#
historically minded, but same historians who are willing to instead everything must be a battle,
#
there's only one way or the highway that they are also shaped by thinking about IR theory in the
#
literature. You know, when you look at Robert Jervis, who did pathbreaking work on perceptions
#
and misperceptions amongst others, that generation also had a lot of respect for historians, they
#
could do very good historical work, they kept up with the literature. To me, you know, I sometimes
#
see entire political science theories will be based on some old history that historians have
#
moved along. And sometimes historians can get very focused on a very small area and say, you know,
#
there's too much generalization. So that's the other thing that you see with both, which is
#
historians will say, I know a lot about this one thing, and this cannot be generalized.
#
There isn't parsimony is what they're saying. And they're not trying to be whereas political
#
scientists will say this too general, it has no, you know, historians can be, we can give you a
#
generalized falsifiable, and therefore, something that's been used for prediction that we can give
#
you that and historians will say that it's too generalized. So to me, again, I somehow in my
#
mind think both have their uses. And but it is about you have to keep yourself disciplined,
#
if you are going to go in with a hypothesis, if you're disciplined enough to not cherry pick,
#
for example, when you're approaching, say, archives, when you are the kind of rules of
#
the discipline you maintain, which is you ensure there's some what they call external validity,
#
the case you're taking actually can be used beyond that you are choosing cases that are
#
representative, etc. I think you can have a make a very good case. And that is a value to be able
#
to generalize to be able to think about. But same thing, you know, for historians, if you if you
#
aren't thinking about, you know, being a good historian in terms of using methodology,
#
properly, etc. You could also not necessarily make for a good book if you aren't considering
#
other alternative explanations, if you are kind of, you know, writing with hindsight bias,
#
those things don't if you're not paying attention to what else was happening at the time, and you're
#
very siloed, then that has its own issues, right. And to me, when you bring in area studies, you
#
have to understand something. So whether it's anthropological or sociological, you have to
#
understand something about the society on which you are writing, you have to understand something
#
about politics, you have to understand that, you know, budgets mattered. So I think, you know,
#
when it comes to these things, I don't have I have personal preferences, how I was trained,
#
but I don't think there's necessarily only one way. It's about once you've chosen the path,
#
you make sure that you are sticking to the road rules, you are keeping, you know, your car filled
#
with gas or petrol, depending on your country of preference. And you are, you know, not kind of
#
going off on getting off on every exit, that seems kind of like a good idea, but you have kept some
#
discipline about what you're what you're choosing. I think as you get older, and not just older,
#
but as you progress in your career, you have more flexibility. One, especially in academia,
#
you get tenure to do different kinds of things. And particularly multi methods work, I've been
#
glad to see a number of I've been speaking for a number of years, it's something called the
#
Clements Center History and Statecraft seminar, where they bring together PhD students who are
#
historians, PhD students, political sciences, one, it's an opportunity for them to talk to each other.
#
And then people like me go to talk to them about, you know, how history and academia can inform
#
policy, or how we use it in our work, or how it can actually inform better policy. But I do think
#
there's today you're seeing a lot more interest in kind of this, you know, both qualitative
#
methodology, but also to do more multidisciplinary work. When you mentioned that during your PhD,
#
you mentioned, you know, your line of inquiry to someone, they gave you the advice that hey,
#
this is not fashionable, don't do this, etc. And I remembered this great essay by Paul Graham called
#
the Four Quadrants of Conformism, where he draws this quadrant where you are conformist and
#
nonconformist and aggressive and passive. And his point was that the biggest impediment to progress
#
in any field are the aggressive, aggressively conventional minded, right, where you are
#
conventional minded, but you can't shut up about it, you're aggressive, and therefore you get in
#
the way of progress. And that's like true in every single field. And I guess this must be true
#
in your field also. And I guess it would be tempting to, in a sense, apply it to your field,
#
because the world is deeply, deeply, deeply complex. Once you acknowledge the complexity,
#
it might seem incredibly hard to come to any conclusion at all, because every conclusion
#
seems necessarily simplistic. So how much of a barrier is this? And how much like how much of
#
this have you encountered? And has it gotten a little better? Because there used to be a time
#
where there was a stereotype of the American establishment having this condescending paternalistic
#
view towards the world where they are applying one prism to look at the world, and they don't
#
really get it, they don't really know anything, it is deeply ludicrously simplistic. And I'm guessing
#
that if it was true in the first place, it would be much better now, because you have a lot more
#
diversity within the think tanks and within the knowledge industry, you have India programs,
#
you've headed one yourself over here. So give me a sense of this, this tussle between acknowledging
#
the complexity of the world, but at the same time, having conclusions and then within organizations,
#
within establishments, having the openness to new ideas and avoiding the dangers of just sticking
#
to convention. Groupthink is what and people have written about the dangers of groupthink.
#
There was, I'm trying to remember the name of the book now, but there was a pretty famous book
#
about the young, well the youngish people who, the groupthink around Vietnam and the US intervention
#
in Vietnam, not the smartest boys in the room, it'll come to me, but it was essentially the,
#
I don't know why I'm forgetting this, this is what happens in old age or not eating your
#
seven badams a day to your memory. But one of the things you do in terms of the complexity is true,
#
and that's the criticism of historians, right? That you start to say everything matters and then
#
if you're sitting there as a policymaker, like, yeah, but you're telling me everything is
#
contingent so it doesn't. So the way I did it in my book, which was my dissertation, which is,
#
you know, I could have written a kind of a straightforward history, but I did want to draw
#
out, IR theories helped me and thinking about policy research design helped me then try to
#
generalize a little bit. So one of the things you can help do is you can say, okay, so my book said,
#
A, China actually did help the China factor help shape US-India relations. Here are the ways it
#
did it. But I also then kind of, and this would have been a more political sciencey way of doing
#
it, what are the conditions under which China actually brings the US-India together?
#
Historians wouldn't have necessarily done this. And so I identify kind of different, that one
#
thing I noticed, China did bring the US-India together, but it didn't last.
#
So what happens, you can only do that if you actually identify
#
when China, so under what conditions does China bring US-India? Now, I'm saying this as a normal,
#
I'm sure political scientists would have words to describe, you know, independent variables,
#
independent variables. And I haven't done it enough recently that I can remember all that.
#
But I, for instance, said, okay, China mattered or China brought the US and India together,
#
not only when they agreed that China was a challenge or a threat, but when they agreed
#
on the nature, urgency and approach to the threat. And that China, an agreement on China
#
being a threat is a necessary but insufficient condition to bring US-India together.
#
Because there were times, for example, in the 60s, so this goes back to the history part,
#
where you see that both China, India and the US are very concerned about China. But that convergence
#
is not enough on threat perception is not enough, because they start to disagree on, one, the nature
#
of the threat. The Johnson administration is telling India, actually, the bigger threat to you
#
is that you'll economically not, and remember, this is when India had famines, economically
#
wasn't doing well, that economically, you won't be able to deliver. And there'll be internal
#
subversion, the communists will come and take over from inside. Now, mind you, this was actually a
#
threat that Nehru used to be concerned about. In fact, he used to say to the US, you're too
#
concerned about external threat, it's really internal subversion. In fact, Patel and Nehru,
#
this is something they disagreed on. And so, Johnson is saying the biggest threat to India
#
is not, and to a number of countries is not external thing, it's internal. And, you know,
#
remember, they're going through the Vietnam War, so that was their sense. India says, just having
#
had to deal with 62, and having realized that actually, Nehru should have spent more on defense
#
and didn't, because he was so focused on the development, the butter versus guns. Indian
#
policymakers are like, no, we do need to, so Johnson is saying, you let us take care of your
#
defense, you need to spend more on development, because your bigger problem with China is the
#
possibility of internal subversion. Here, you have Indian policymakers saying, actually, no,
#
we spent too much time worrying about internal subversion, we stopped, we didn't have enough
#
to defend our borders, we need to spend on defense. So, you start to learn, one is this nature of the
#
threat problem, you start to, they disagreed on the approach to the threat, in the sense that
#
US was saying, India, you should make peace with Pakistan, you together can take on China.
#
India is saying, no, but China is actually part of our, Pakistan is part of our China problem.
#
So, they disagree on approach. The US saying, actually, you have to, you know, if you make up
#
with Pakistan, then you can focus on China, and India saying, actually, no, we, that is not the
#
path, they are actually part of the problem. Also, things like the US thought, if India
#
actually invested more in the Western system, even if it didn't become a formal ally,
#
then it was more effective, but as India didn't want to do alliances, wanted to remain diversified,
#
wanted to keep the Soviet option open. So, some of this is, you know, that conditionality,
#
okay, here are the conditions, can you draw out these factors, because then you can say that in
#
a contemporary, and that's a much more, you know, that's not a historical, methodological
#
thing, task that necessarily people do. And then you go to the next step, and you say,
#
okay, there are a lot of things different about today's environment than then, this is not the
#
Cold War, you know, China's economically engaged with both India and the US, etc. But those lessons
#
still matter, that China can bring the US and India together. But
#
that convergence will not be enough if the two sides do not agree on how to handle the Russia
#
difference, or where Russia fits in, or can figure out if, you know, if the US starts believing that
#
actually, India is not up to the task of tackling China or the reverse, then you start to see this
#
thing. So, this way, if you actually, if I just did a history, straightforward history, yes, there
#
would be other lessons, but I'm not sure I could get to that granular thing that would be more
#
useful from a policy perspective, than if I had done taken some inspiration from political science
#
from IR theory. In terms of groupthink, I think it really depends on the environment in which you're
#
there. I mean, I do think groupthink exists, it's a thing, it's not an imagined, it does happen,
#
countries come into fads, I've seen at least, you know, but it also gives you perspective,
#
because I remember in the mid 2000s, there was a lot of building up of India talking about the same
#
thing as China. And so when we've seen that hype now, and everybody thinks this is new, I'm like,
#
no, actually, we've seen this before, but it only sustains if India can deliver in terms of performance.
#
So, you start to see these patterns, you also see groupthink, you know, sometimes it benefits you,
#
they're really thinking that, you know, if just from a career perspective, if you're, if people
#
actually care about India, and this groupthink about India matters, then yes, people certainly
#
care about the area you're working on. To me, yes, there is, there are these various parts where,
#
you know, the war in Iraq, and that intervention, which to me, I still think it was one of the
#
biggest foreign policy mistakes the US has made. But it wasn't just, you know, the Bush administration,
#
there were a lot of people at around the time. Now, yes, some of them said the US should have
#
gone to the UN got permission, but there were a lot of people who thought Saddam Hussein had
#
nuclear weapons, and that therefore military intervention was justified.
#
It wasn't just a partisan issue. Now, that's not to say that they weren't people. I joined
#
Brookings in spring 2003, war had just started. And the dominant, there were a number of people
#
who were like, yep, he has, they had served in government, yep, but what I liked about a place
#
like this is there were two scholars, one of whom went on to become a national security advisor,
#
but at the time, said, this is a mistake. So some of this is, there is groupthink. But
#
in an ideal world, you have space for other voices. You know, right now the big debates in
#
the US, for example, are about, there are a lot of debates on foreign policy, but some of them go
#
back to the founding of the US, where about how much to intervene and how engaged to be with the
#
world. And is what happens in Europe, Europe's problem, or will it eventually spill over and
#
drag the US in. And so, you know, you even have, there's kind of this liberal internationalist
#
view, but then you have kind of a more geopolitical realist competition view. And then you have people
#
who are restrainers who say, you know, we shouldn't really, now, even amongst the strainers, they're
#
kind of people who are kind of more go all the way to from isolationism, but others saying the US just
#
has to be smart about where, much more targeted about where it takes an interest. So, yes, this
#
is a town like many that, and I think this happens in academia, fads come. And especially, it can be
#
quite hard if you're a younger person trying to make your way to stand up and say, and it's not
#
like I did something very brave in the sense that I was not, I wasn't going too much. The only, I
#
think the bigger thing where I was going against the grain is I was actually doing kind of history
#
that put the state at the center of it. You know, one of the critiques during my dissertation defense
#
was, you know, we don't know enough about what the person on the street in India thought about these,
#
about the US-India-China triangle. Now, it was on me to make the case that look on these decisions,
#
it actually didn't matter necessarily. I did have, you know, there was some polling data, etc.
#
But it's a fair critique, but you make those choices. And maybe I couldn't have done that,
#
like I said, that dissertation in a department, because there would have been, it would have gone
#
against the trend and where I think the discipline was. But I think the, you know, it is a challenge.
#
I don't think there's any challenge. I mean, I'll give you the example. For the longest time,
#
the groupthink was in Delhi of a certain kind of engagement with the US. It took, you know,
#
slow and it was slow and steady, but eventually you start seeing, you know, prime ministers
#
particularly push their own bureaucracies, their own cities, their own strategic cultures to move
#
beyond. I also think sometimes we think there was a groupthink historically that didn't exist. So,
#
you know, people will often say, including I, you know, you'll see some people from previous
#
governments say, oh, you know, the current government is doing too much with the US.
#
It's doing operational things. And I always point out, people do realize that Jawaharlal Nehru,
#
father of non-alignment, signed off on American spy planes taking off from the US. In his government,
#
and then his daughters as well, the Central Intelligence Agency and India's intelligence
#
bureau did operational things together, including create the special frontier force, including
#
help create and set up the aviation research center. So, you know, when we say that sometimes
#
our groupthink is about, we think there was a certain kind of conventional wisdom, which there
#
wasn't. And so some of it is my job is, is to, you know, I feel to point out
#
if I have a difference, sometimes I'm part of that groupthink, is maybe to question my own judgments.
#
When I get something wrong, I like to go back and look at things. What did I get wrong? What did I
#
get right? But it's also to try to highlight our, what we think was conventional wisdom,
#
or groupthink at the time, wasn't really. And so to try to actually break through that groupthink
#
and our understanding of what lies beneath the one here often is, is that, you know, India's
#
kind of what I call diversification strategy, what others, you know, call whatever strategic
#
autonomy, non-alignment, you pick your favorite term, is, has really been the fact that it's lasted
#
so long across governments. It's not just some idealistic thing about staying aloof.
#
It is about what India has thought of as its interests, which include
#
independence of, maintaining independence of action, not just as a means to an end,
#
but in an end to itself. And that India thinks of it as an objective, as an interest,
#
not just nice to have. And it's not ideological. It is because they think that this is, it's partly
#
Indian strategic culture. So it's not what, you know, realists would consider an outcome
#
that involves a balance of power or those security kind of goals. But you have to understand things
#
as, as people saw them, not take contemporary conventional wisdom and, you know, put it back
#
on others. So I'm going to ask you another basic question. Just as a while ago, you indulged me
#
when I asked you to give me a view of the belly of the Washington DC beast and how think tanks
#
function and all that. I want you to take me into the belly of another beast, which is the
#
state itself. And I want to ask you, what is foreign policy? Like in concrete terms, how,
#
what is the expression of foreign policy? Like the American version of the foreign ministry deals
#
with India's foreign ministry. What is being negotiated? What does a partnership mean in
#
concrete terms? What do the two have to do with each other? Where is the thinking coming from?
#
Can we look at it in homogeneous terms? In the sense, if I remember correctly,
#
I had done an episode with Srinath on the Bangladesh war. And he pointed out that the
#
State Department and Nixon at the time were actually at opposite ends. They wanted different
#
things. So it is obviously not even the case that American foreign policy is one thing. There are
#
tussles within it. But what are the tussles within it like? And what is the outward expression?
#
Like what does foreign policy involve doing? So, you know, put some meat on these bonds.
#
You know, the reason these are tough questions is the kind of back to basics questions are
#
actually things you almost forget to think about and, you know, kind of what they mean,
#
but it's good to kind of go back to first principles sometimes. And I think foreign
#
policy is basically the ways people, countries engage with actors beyond their borders.
#
And today, I'm not sure it was ever true that they were only the purview of State Departments
#
of Foreign Ministries. But I think even more so today, you cannot just look at, because the
#
natures of issues involved, that engagement with the world is not just diplomatic notes on who's
#
going to take whose side in a war or try to prevent war. So diplomacy, yes, there is the
#
diplomacy aspect, which is you negotiate deals, you try to shape the nature of your own environment.
#
It is about, you know, thinking. So it's a negotiation of treaties. It is about
#
trying to prevent war. Those things still exist. But it's also about shaping the world around you,
#
depending on how many capabilities you have. But it's also today, the nature of that engagement
#
is everything from energy policy to technology policy to, you know, you have chief ministers
#
in Indian states who are trying to attract businesses and compete with each other for
#
foreign businesses, or American governors who are, you know, speaking to Indian companies saying,
#
come set up in my state. So today, because the nature of the engagement doesn't A, just involve
#
the state anymore, but B, involves different kinds of policy and therefore will involve even within
#
the state a lot more agencies. And it involves the public in a manner that may not have been the case,
#
you know, 10, 20 years ago, just because the nature of communications.
#
So today, I think foreign policy, you have when you're looking at it, you have to look at every
#
one of these things, which is, if you're going to if you're going to come up with a more a better
#
holistic analysis, which is, how do you think about who within particular governments are influential?
#
So, for example, either in the India and the US, you're going to say, okay, I have to think about
#
the US-India relationship. What are the issues that are involved? There is the diplomatic
#
negotiations, there are regional security issues, including China and Pakistan, this trade and
#
economics. There is diaspora issues. And today, there are things like even within economic policy,
#
it's even more specific, right? It's education, it's tourism, it's technology, it's energy,
#
it's space, even within technology. And once you look at the issues, and I should say,
#
before you ever get into the first principle question that always needs to be asked about
#
both countries, any country's foreign policy, what are your objectives? What are your objectives?
#
Sometimes, you know, you sit through these exercises, like, okay, develop a grand strategy,
#
people will start talking about policies and issues. First question, what are your objectives?
#
Then you move backwards and say, okay, how am I going to get there? What is the policy?
#
And then you decide, okay, within how am I going to get there? What are the issues that matter?
#
But on US-India relations, today, it's just a more diverse set of actors, because there are
#
diverse set of issues. So, then you figure out what are your landscape of stakeholders?
#
You do an environmental study, who are the stakeholders that matter? What are their views?
#
What is driving them? What are their objectives? What, then you understand, so you understand
#
power centers, so to speak, or policy stakeholders, then you understand process.
#
How is policy actually made? So, the, I don't know, I'm just throwing this out there,
#
the Department of Homeland Security might have very strong views, but where does it fit in the
#
process? Who's actually making the decision? Is it the State Department or the White House?
#
Why did it end up in 1971? Srinath's book, 1971 and Global History, is very, very good,
#
because it drills down both on these issues within governments, but also across different
#
governments, it actually takes that global view. Because it shows that, yes, the State Department,
#
which people consider, you know, this is what somebody is saying, has a very strong view,
#
but at the end of the day, the White House matters, they're the deciders, to use George
#
W. Bush's terms. The President is the decider. Now, having said that, even the President had
#
to deal with the Congress that was criticizing Pakistan and cutting off aid, and so was trying
#
to go around it. So, one of the things was, you know, Nixon wanted to send weapons to Pakistan,
#
because Pakistan is like, we don't have weapons. And he realizes, or actually Kissinger did more
#
than Nixon, because he realizes he can't do it, because State Department is not on board,
#
and Congress is bandit. So, what does he do? He tries to see if Jordan, I think it was Jordan,
#
if I remember correctly, or Turkey or others could supply, because the US couldn't. So,
#
then you had to understand not just the landscape within government, but the landscape of the city.
#
Or the government decision making broadly. Does Parliament matter? Does Congress matter?
#
How does it matter? How much does it matter? So, I always start with, and this was something that
#
understood at Yale, and I think policy schools are good at teaching you is,
#
who are the various actors involved? What are their interests? What is the policy process?
#
Where does politics fit in? Where does budget fit in? Because these things matter.
#
I like to think that one of the things I brought up in the book, which again, I had not thought
#
about before, is how much Indian decision making on China and what to do about it was shaped by
#
the guns versus butter argument, is that one of the things Nehru did, which turned out to be a
#
wrong judgment, is he thought, he didn't think China wasn't a threat. He just thought India
#
had 10 years to 10, 15 years to deal with it. And therefore, and he worried more about this
#
internal subversion threat. So, the logic of that was we also need to, but there was also some sense
#
of, he wanted to focus on development. And so, he didn't want to spend on defense as much because
#
he thought that was going to, and that Pakistan was the more, the greater problem to national
#
integration. And so, then you start seeing, because your preference is not to spend on
#
defense, you start seeing that this threat is not going to come. You start telling yourself,
#
I'm going to mirror image that just like me, Mao really just wants to spend time developing,
#
he doesn't want to start these get into hit bits. Once you start doing that, so then you understand
#
about these different aspects, because it comes down to budgetary decision. It was a resource
#
issue that was shaping and priorities. So, then you also understand people within organizations.
#
So, it's not just a State Department view. Are there different people within the State Department
#
or within MEA who have a different worldview, who are going to make the same case?
#
And this idea of a unitary actor, it sounds good in theory. Anybody, and I have spent most of my
#
life in either Delhi or DC, two capital cities where this is very apparent,
#
it's just not reflective of reality. You have to understand where the combination of structure
#
and agency, what are the structural factors? India needs partners to develop. Where's the
#
agency and individuals matter? How much does Prime Minister Modi matter or President Biden?
#
How much does it matter who is in their team and what is being said?
#
So, to me, this is actually what is fascinating about looking at this,
#
it can sometimes be overwhelming. But this is where you have to learn about the city.
#
This is why I actually think there needs to be, especially on the US India side,
#
there needs to be a lot more understanding of how India works here. So, even when say people
#
know, why is India partnering with Russia, you have to understand not just the history,
#
but the current realities, including current dependencies that India has.
#
On the flip side, I actually think today, I see more investment in studying India in the US.
#
I think an equal if not bigger problem is there's very little studies of the US in India.
#
And it is if not India's most important partner today, at least one of its most important partners.
#
Where are the experts on the US? And I don't mean experts on US India relations.
#
Where for a country that is now whose decision making right or wrong matter to Indian companies,
#
Indian government, where is the investment in expertise on the US in terms of politics
#
process, understanding US policy towards China, US policy, not our feelings about them,
#
actual studying of it in a way that there are China studies programs. Why aren't there
#
US studies programs in India? So, to me, it's both because you have to understand, as you're saying,
#
these nuances about how things get done within certain cities, preferences, priorities,
#
prisms, these things matter. Overall, I'm still a believer that countries engage with each other,
#
not because of emotions, but because of interests. And so the way I put it is,
#
if you're thinking about India and the US, why are they moving forward? Because the theories
#
of the case that each country has about the other are largely in sync. The moment they're not,
#
things will start stalling. And I'm just thinking that therefore, part of the fields, like one of
#
the fields that you have had to master, along with the other fields of history and IR and so on,
#
is also human psychology, because you're looking back and you're thinking, what was Nehru thinking?
#
Was he rationalizing stuff to himself? And you've got to apply that to current actors and say,
#
you know, what is Modi thinking? What is Biden thinking? What are his people thinking?
#
And so on and so forth. And just in terms of objectives, it strikes me that that is also
#
very complicated. And I wonder how one internally sorts that out. For example,
#
when the US looks at India today, on the one hand, they could say that, you know, that we need some
#
levers to do something about India's stand on the Russia-Ukraine war, because obviously they would
#
want India to be less, you know, to turn away from Russia and more towards Ukraine. At the same time,
#
you want to build India as a bulwark for China. At the same time, you realize that we have business
#
interests and India is a big market for us and, you know, the trade helps us. At another level,
#
there is this, you know, another strand of thinking that wants to make America more insular
#
and perhaps doesn't care about the trade relationship so much. So how do these play out
#
within the establishment? Like, is there eventually one voice on, you know, how to deal with this?
#
Like, America is, of course, a place where, you know, the institutions are really strong. The
#
president doesn't necessarily have so much power. It's not one man saying, hey, let's do this.
#
As you pointed out in the Nixon example, he might have wanted to give arms to Pakistan,
#
but it wasn't happening. So how do these play out? Is it like, is it simplistic at any point in time
#
to say this is America's policy, while it could actually be different things happening simultaneously?
#
So I do think there are dominant views. Presidents do matter on foreign policy in particular. They
#
do tend to have a lot to do with shaping the dominant prism on things. But they are also
#
products of structures and institutions and priorities and preferences. So, I mean,
#
one of the things you do, and you know, all of us have to be careful, like I have to remind myself
#
that, you know, we know a lot more about what Nehru thought and stuff, because we have access.
#
You can learn something about leaders. And so you read some literature and leaders as well,
#
but we're never going to have that kind of paperwork available for recent prime ministers,
#
just because they also don't put everything down on paper in a way that used to be then
#
for various reasons. But you also kind of learn in terms of thinking through,
#
and you can, by the way, one of the things when you're trained as a historian, you do is,
#
you know, when you have somebody like a new leader come, like when Prime Minister Modi
#
first became prime minister, your natural instinct is to do your analysis, because you
#
can have theories. But my initial instinct, because that's how I'm trained, is I actually
#
went back and looked at his chief minister and think what has he actually said? What did he do
#
there? And if you'd actually gone back and looked at his tree, he's actually been quite predictable.
#
So it wasn't as, you know, it wasn't as unpredictable as people thought. Now people
#
are sitting and saying, surprise, that he's more pro-business than pro-market. But if you heard any
#
of his speeches or gone back and look at what he did, we actually know that that was all it was
#
going to be. His preference for working with bureaucrats, we know that. So, you know, sometimes
#
those are the things that you see just in terms of, I'm using the Indian examples there,
#
American examples, Joe Biden, you know, we know a lot about his foreign policy preferences,
#
because he's been on the beat for a long time. But and then sometimes when you have, like in
#
America, a lot of governors become presidents, sometimes now I think they have more international
#
experience. Some come with very little, Bill Clinton, for example. Then you look at, you know,
#
who are the people around them? What are their own experiences? So I'll give you the Trump example.
#
People in 2016, people weren't taking his candidacy seriously, 2015, 2016. I mean,
#
it was considered, my colleague, Tom Wright wrote a piece, I think it was for the Politico,
#
the online magazine, where, and Tom is a, he's a good example. He's a political scientist,
#
trained as a political scientist and did IR, but is also a historically minded political scientist.
#
So what did he do? He just actually went back and looked at, he said, I'm going to write a piece on
#
what a Trump foreign policy would look like. And he went back and looked at things Trump had said,
#
how he'd behaved, you know, even with somebody who didn't have, you know, like a formal foreign
#
policy legacy, or track record, he went and said, and he drew out that there were three things that
#
Trump personally himself cared about a lot, trade, alliances, and immigration, and migration,
#
that he had strong views on this, the others you could, you know, use transactional and all that.
#
But these were three issues that, and he drew that up, and it was, it has proved to be the most
#
accurate prediction of what we've seen. So presidents, I mean, yes, some of it is Trump
#
in particular matters a lot, but actually Trump reflects why the presidency still matters in
#
terms of preferences, because their preferences, and if there's a Trump too, you'll see that
#
sometimes there's a lot of analysis being done, assuming Trump too will be like Trump 1.0.
#
One of the things that won't be is Trump himself has had experience, including had experience of
#
parts of government trying to stall or stop or redirect what he was trying to do. And so this
#
time, he'll come in with people who recognize that, and they will try to be more effective
#
at following what his own preferences. So I think, you know, presidents do still matter
#
in the system. You have to learn about them. You have to figure out
#
what the equation is with different parts, but that they does tend to be a view. And you can
#
tell there is an American policy, because you've seen now four or five very different presidents
#
essentially take a broadly similar view of India, whether it's towards the end of the
#
Clinton administration, George W. Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden. And this is where structural
#
factors come in, is you have different constituencies come at this from different,
#
but the US theory of the case has been, A, on the strategic side, that India is a growing actor.
#
And so even globally, it's going to be globally and regionally, it's influential. And so therefore,
#
good equation is, or a working good working relationship is, and cooperating with India
#
is a good thing. But you also have as, as America becomes concerned about Asia, Indo-Pacific,
#
and rising China's assertiveness, then it becomes a balance of power thing.
#
Then you say, okay, who are the countries who are willing and able,
#
who share a threat perception or perception of challenge, and who are capable of doing something
#
about it and willing to do it with the US. And then you see, from that angle, strategic,
#
this is across the board. So, and I could do the Indian version of this on the US.
#
You know, sometimes we focus on, again, like I was saying, so and so is pro India, anti India,
#
pro this. It's not about that. It is where does, what is the prism of the world? Where does India
#
fit in? So, the fact that four different leaders have taken this view, or at least the administrations
#
have, tells you it is, you know, so people, the reason I'm saying this is also problematic when
#
you get into this pro and don't understand the broader things, is then you say, okay, it's pro
#
India or anti India, then what you need to do is somehow either wait for that person to move away,
#
or second, you try to shape their view of you. And that's not it. It is just like for India,
#
the same people who had problems with the US are now deepening ties. I mean, you know,
#
the BJP objected to the nuclear deal. They have done now, this government has done more with the
#
US than the previous three or four governments in India. And it is because of an interest-based
#
reason. And so the US side is there, that's strategic. So there are certain, you know,
#
that is the broader argument. Then you have the, you know, folks are making the economic,
#
that India is going to be a large growing economy. Now you add in a new world, earlier it used to be
#
market size investment opportunity. Now you're saying supply chain actor, we can help diversify.
#
So as new interests come in, then you see, then the question is, where does India fit in?
#
Now, India is trying to, India is also, Delhi is seeing, okay, these are the things, how do
#
I convince them? Because each of these lines that are talking about for the reasons to deepen ties
#
is a constituency for the relationship, you know, who says we need to do it.
#
Then you have, you know, the people who are saying from a technology perspective,
#
it's a source of talent, etc. If you are, you have today actors, universities who are making,
#
getting revenue from international students, they want more Indian students. So they become
#
a constituency in the relationship. States who want Indian companies to invest here,
#
or who want to sell their agricultural products in India, they take an interest.
#
And then there's the values argument, right? So it's strategic, economic,
#
tech values. Now the values is different, different sorts. It's, you know, it's things like
#
people-to-people ties. It is democracy. It is people who think that actually India is a better
#
actor in terms of rules-based order and sticks to the rules it has. So they're different kind
#
of values. Just like these, all these people who are making this argument, these are constituencies
#
who want to deepen the ties. But there also continue to be differences and divergences.
#
And so there's a set of constituencies who are saying either don't bother improving ties,
#
or in fact, India is a problem in amongst these buckets too. So there are people on the strategic
#
side who said, yeah, in theory, it'd be good, but India is actually not going to ever do things with
#
us beyond the point. So why bother? Why invest so much? There'll be others who say, see, India
#
taking Russia's side actually shows that it is, you know, Russia and China are our problems,
#
and they are actually helping Russia at the time we are fighting, or the Ukrainians are
#
fighting a war with Russia. So they'll be arguing against it. So you have the convergence side,
#
constituencies, and you have the divergence side. So on the strategic side, they'll say,
#
we kind of disagree. You'll have people on the economic side saying, it's actually not such a
#
big market, or they'll say it's a really difficult place to do business, or there'll be another set
#
they'll say, actually, you know, Vietnam is a better place to diversify rather than India.
#
On the tech side, we'll say, can we really trust them? You know, are they, whether on the defense
#
tech or others, no, we can find other sources, or we should, you know, we should not have those
#
jobs go abroad, they should be in the US. And then you have on the value side, people to people can
#
be a tie, but you know, if India starts playing politics here, then diaspora becomes the Indians,
#
the spillover of domestic politics comes into diaspora, you have the diaspora start starting to
#
the people within the diaspora say, actually, we this government is not reflective.
#
So they'll start saying, we need we you actually shouldn't or should press India on something,
#
or people who have concerns. So the challenge that the where a relationship ends up is
#
there is a ledger of it's like assets and liabilities. The end result is if you have
#
more people constituencies pushing for a relationship to move forward,
#
then the people saying either stall, stop, reverse, then it moves forward. And this is
#
true on both sides, right? It's a tali ek had se nahi bajte. So the same thing I did on the US
#
side, you can do it on the India side. And countries can do things to help themselves like,
#
if you do things that are going to increase the constituencies against you, then even if they
#
don't reverse or stop, they start stalling the moment slowing down the relationship.
#
Because those people who are arguing for the relationship, they're not just moving forward,
#
they're having to tackle the arguments of those saying actually note. So when there are more
#
differences, it's not that they can't be managed or that they will totally reverse. But every one
#
of those things that is done that adds to the constituencies arguing against a deeper relationship
#
with India, once it starts adding up, it can be an obstacle or at least, you know, a very big
#
speed bump that will slow down the relationship. So in any bilateral relationship, it moves the
#
fastest when you have and every one of those constituencies have different weights. So a
#
president will have a higher weight than you know, some of the country's president has a
#
different weight than a university's president. But nonetheless, it's about this addition and
#
subtraction. And it's for the US, it needs to, you know, ensure that constituencies for the
#
relationship are the same thing for India. If there are more constituencies who are arguing
#
against a deeper relationship, then it can either stall. So I never think, you know, people think
#
things move in a linear fashion and will always be no, I think the structural factors exist.
#
But these constituencies matter, because especially in in in democracies, there are various
#
actors. And the president's word does mean I mean, does have a lot to do with shaping American
#
policy. But there are various parts of government and constituencies that matter as well. And I'll
#
give you the example of when China's mistake was getting a lot of concern in the US, why did the
#
conventional wisdom on China change? Because its behavior in various formats,
#
ensure that those even those people who are arguing for a deeper China relationship,
#
they went over into the other, the liabilities side. That's when things change.
#
So you know, I've done tons and tons and tons of episodes on the economic establishment. And this
#
sounds exactly like that is deeply complex or conflicting interests, you know, no simple
#
narratives to be had. But one of the things that I have realized is true about the economic
#
establishment in India is first, it works in an internal scene way behind the scenes, regardless
#
of what is happening in politics. So I've done, you know, episodes with Montaigne and various
#
others. And you realize that from the late 70s onwards, they are planning for the reforms,
#
and then that moment comes. And when that moment comes, you know, Louis Menon's point in
#
the metaphysical club, when that moment comes in 91, they strike. And then for around 20 years,
#
you have a continuity, it's a golden period, the reforms are happening, the continuity is
#
across governments and across administrations, you know, so the new pension scheme is designed
#
under the watch by government, but the same bureaucrats are pushing for it and carrying it
#
out under the Manmohan government. Similarly, you know, the inflation targeting is designed under,
#
you know, Chidambaram's finance ministry, but is ratified under Jaitley's finance ministry.
#
So there's almost a seeming consensus, which kind of breaks down in 2014, where the politicians get
#
it that this is a direction we need to go in. And you have a similar, I mean, deep state is
#
normally a pejorative term, but there is an underlying layer of policy people and bureaucrats
#
who are kind of together and in unison, who are moving it forward, to the extent that you think
#
that the politicians aren't actually that necessary to the process. I completely buy your
#
point that if an American president says, let's do this, it carries a lot of weight. But equally,
#
if he was to just ignore it completely, it would just run on its own because that whole machine is
#
kind of purring. So is that the case? Is there a foreign policy establishment that, you know,
#
carries on and drives a nation's foreign policy, regardless of what is happening at the political
#
front? Like earlier, you also spoke of that revolving door, that, you know,
#
Clinton people come to Brookings and Brookings people go to the Bush administration like that.
#
So what is this underlying establishment? Is there continuity there? Is there a consensus?
#
There is. There is an establishment. It can have diverse views, but yes, on big picture,
#
broad things. So, for example, establishment view, even on economics is that, you know,
#
market economics is good, but all you can see in social policies, things that
#
would never be considered an establishment view, it changes over time. And suddenly, you know,
#
even the idea, actually, the US is a good example, there was isolationism in the US. And then not only
#
does the US enter the Second World War, but it's a pretty cross party view. I mean, they are,
#
they've constantly been differences about, you know, regions that matter, etc. But yes,
#
on broad things, an establishment view for years that said, Republicans and Democrats,
#
there were enough of a consensus that the US should be engaged in the world. And then what
#
happens in various countries that the US should be seeking markets, etc. And you start to see
#
this breakdown, right, where partly in this happened after the US's intervention in Vietnam,
#
too, after these things happen, like the Iraq war, in particular, less Afghanistan, that was
#
more considered a war of choice than necessity. But you know, what the younger generation calls
#
a forever wars, you start seeing people is people then question the establishment view itself,
#
saying that you guys got this wrong, and partly you got this wrong, because there was group think.
#
So then you start then that moment exists where there's a, the voices who earlier they get a
#
larger voice. And so, you know, now, when you look back, and it's true that every it's true,
#
many American, maybe not every, but in recent years, every American president is coming,
#
come in saying, we will do less abroad, we will do nation building at home.
#
And then they do a lot everywhere. And so, some of it is it, there are these established views
#
that sometimes reflect structure preferences. You know, one of the points I try to make is sometimes
#
here in Washington, it's the flip side of, you know, the people who have deep state conspiracies,
#
which they say, here, people think that everything that happens in the world, somehow,
#
we can either do something about it here, or that we are the ones who caused it.
#
The flip side, of course, of that is that everything that happens in the world,
#
when I was growing up in the 80s, we used to joke, because, you know, there was always there's a lot
#
of it's like, oh, it's raining, it must be the CIA. Right. So it's like, you know, the flip side is
#
that there's somebody here sitting and actually controlling everything. And I think, you know,
#
the funniest analysis I always find is one that assumes that the US government, which is powerful,
#
but that it acts in a much more coherent and coordinated and efficient manner than it does,
#
and cares about more parts of the world than it actually does. And so, you know, you do see these
#
ideas that sometimes there's this exaggerated view about it. But nonetheless, I will say,
#
while the structural establishment things do matter, presidents do matter here, which is why,
#
I, yes, when India is watching an election comes up, it will be sitting in assessing,
#
because the government does understand particularly somebody like a Trump who's a
#
very different kind of, you know, maybe if, you know, in the olden days, people say, you know,
#
there was a Romney presidency, he'd, even he would care about some particular thing. So, for example,
#
I'll give you the President Carter had a very different view of India, the Nixon and Ford.
#
And therefore, he ended up making it a priority. And this is a little known thing about Carter,
#
but because it gets overtaken by after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan,
#
where his government then starts re-engaging Pakistan. But when he first comes in, his
#
national security adviser, Shabigna Brzezinski has this idea of what today we call middle powers,
#
influential middle powers, they were called regional influentials. And India was on and why?
#
Because part of it was, you know, for Carter, the fact that India had had two years of emergency,
#
but then elections are called, it's the one that he cared about human rights and values. And so,
#
this idea that India had recovered its own democracy. But second, his mother had spent
#
time in India in the Peace Corps. So, he had heard her talk about it. So, it's different things,
#
you have to understand where presidents are coming from structures shapes their own preferences,
#
what they can do, structural imperatives, you know, when people, people, I remember in 2020,
#
were concerned, not just in Washington or Delhi, but many places that Joe Biden would take a very
#
different view of China. He would take a more Obama-esque view of China. And he didn't, he
#
actually continued a lot of, in fact, kind of the more hawkish view, I would say the more realistic
#
view of China and either did more of what Trump or fixed what Trump was doing. I mean, Trump people
#
would say didn't do it enough. But nonetheless, there is that consensus. Why? Because China had
#
changed, the US view of China changed. So, even Joe Biden, who had been one of the as vice president
#
had discussions with Xi Jinping, recognizes that this now, if Joe Biden had decided that actually,
#
India doesn't really matter as much, that would have made a difference, you wouldn't have had the
#
quad being elevated, you would have seen much more, he wouldn't have decided to prioritize
#
India in a priority, I mean, in a foreign policy. Now, some of that is shaped by an India that says,
#
okay, I'm willing to actually work with him. Otherwise, the US would have worked with other
#
countries and prioritize other countries in the first few years. And that actually does make a
#
difference. Because then it's not just if India says, I don't have interest in cooperating with
#
you, then you kind of move on or you your own worldview, you say, oh, India is not going to do
#
these things, survive and bother. Other thing that happens is, it becomes, you know, if you're not,
#
if you're not cooperating, people move on. But then all those divergences also become the biggest
#
things in the relationship. Then you have a very alternate view of US India relations in a Biden
#
administration, where Russia actually the differences on Russia derail the relationship,
#
the differences on kind of the state of Indian democracy, derail the relationship, then all those
#
differences suddenly become bigger. Instead, you had an administration, partly because that's what
#
I said, you have to look at the worldview, the president is administration and the country that
#
you're dealing with. There, they see China as the pacing challenge. If you're looking at the vision
#
of that the world through that, then you see India, and an India that's willing, not just an India
#
that exists, willing to cooperate with you as important, sometimes has more of a shared world
#
with you, worldview with you on China than you or some of your allies, then you say, okay, I'm going
#
to see if I can work with this country on this. And then I'm going to manage those differences
#
better, because that is my primary strategic viewpoint. And so to me, yes, there are establishment
#
views, there are moments that come that others who are disagreeing. But I do think we always have to
#
all of us can fall into the trap of falling into a particular
#
set of assumptions, set of conclusions, arguments. And I think even I do, I mean,
#
you kind of struggle to see beyond it. So I recently wrote an article on is there going
#
to be an India-China rapprochement or deal. Now, I also wrote a piece in 2018, when everybody around
#
the Wuhan summit was saying there's going to be a reset in India-China relations saying there's not.
#
But now sometimes you get those things wrong, turns out, one of the things that, you know,
#
yes, the structure, I said structural differences matter much more, that won't last. Now, Xi Jinping
#
could have proved me wrong. He didn't. But one of the reasons I wrote this piece on is there going
#
to be an India-China deal is, I personally don't think one will last. And I think there are too
#
many. But I wanted to put myself through the intellectual exercises of saying, okay, I can
#
see signs. I've studied like India-China, I can see signs of a desire on both sides, I can figure out
#
why a Prime Minister Modi might want to do this. I will still say that these are the reasons I don't
#
think it would go very far might be a tactical thought, as I put it. But why I don't think
#
there'll be a strategic shift. But even if that is not a my own necessary policy preference,
#
but as from an intellectually honest point of view, I need to push myself to see what that
#
would look like. Same thing on Russia. I actually think India is in some fields become over dependent
#
on Russia. And it constrains India's strategic autonomy. I don't think that's about Russia. I
#
think that's just the legacy of the relationship. I have to put aside whatever my view in my analysis,
#
Twitter is different. My analysis, while I think Putin's invasion of Ukraine was an invasion,
#
and has been really bad for a lot of Indian interests, and frankly, bad for Russia,
#
not to mention bad for Ukraine, and this is not what countries should do. That is my view.
#
But my when I'm analyzing an India Russia relationship, I have to put myself in
#
why is Delhi doing the things it's doing? I can still eventually on an opinion piece say I think
#
it might be mistaken. But I will say I have to say this is why.
#
You know, I might not think it's a great idea. I said before the invasion that even if the
#
Russians invade, India would take this position. And they're going to stick to this Russia
#
relationship. You have to have that ability to say, I agree with it. But if I'm in the job,
#
I am I have to think about these alternate pathways, or I have to be able to analyze
#
something I don't necessarily agree with. So you know, we've almost spoken for four
#
hours. And I realized that if I carry on with the original intention of this episode, which is to
#
take a deep dive into foreign policy with you, we'll be here for another 12 hours. So rather
#
than doing that, I'll just ask you to sort of give me potted answers to the next handful of
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you can you can think of it, you know, you have that rapid fire around coffee with current.
#
So something like that, but not too rapid fire, because hey, you know,
#
but you're not to CBSE as it were so paragraphs and not sentences. So here's sort of the first
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of my questions, which is, what are the myths in the conventional thinking about Indian foreign
#
policy that you would like to dispel, for example, you've, you know, you've dispelled a bunch of them
#
in your excellent book where you've spoken about how it isn't the case that everything was only
#
through a Soviet lens or a Pakistan lens, it was also a China lens, that we actually moved closer
#
to the US when you know, in 6263, with that air defense agreement, another tilt, as you call it
#
comes in 71 with the agreement with the Soviets. So there's actually movement happening. It's not
#
one thing which was very interesting to think about, because it goes completely against the
#
conventional wisdom. What are the grand myths regarding India's foreign policy and the narratives
#
that we built around it, that, you know, that you've learned about? I think one of them,
#
the one of the primary ones is that India's, especially early decision making, and this is
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something that both in India and abroad people have is that it was ideological, and is somehow
#
airy-fairy. And it comes down to, again, I don't necessarily agree with some of the choices made,
#
but the fact that the resultant outcomes have lasted in terms of, you know, strategic autonomy,
#
non-alignment, or as I like to call it, a diversification strategy has persisted, is because
#
it came from a set of decisions that were quite realist. And Srinath's first book, War and Peace
#
in Modern South Asia, I think it was called, makes this point well, which is, Nehru is actually
#
a Nibirian realist. But the other thing that, aspect of that, that I found is actually,
#
it wasn't some airy-fairy view of the world. Those leaders in those days, for understandable
#
reasons, had a very dark view of the world. And what they were, they weren't striving for world
#
peace for some airy-fairy reason, but because they understand in a way that you started hearing
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again in the 2000s and the 2010s. In fact, even Prime Minister Modi tries this with China, right,
#
when he first comes, which is that you actually want time to develop and grow, and so you want
#
a peaceful neighborhood. So you want to try to make deals. So this one aspect that these instincts
#
were somehow ideological and not practical or rational. I think the second thing, which I think,
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you know, there's been a lot of new work that has busted some of these myths. Srinath's book
#
pointing out that India didn't have, like, there wasn't some thing against the use of force. When
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India, India thought it was the true, it was needed, India used force. I think the third,
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one of the third things that I would say is, you see this view that non-alignment has meant
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no alignment. And one of the things I try to point out in the book is actually India has aligned,
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it has aligned, it aligned with the US in the 60s and the Soviet Union in the 70s. And this
#
wasn't just a closer than these were as close as India's got to signing alliances. In fact, the US,
#
the Soviet India Treaty has a mutual consultations provision, even like India would have to
#
consult with the US if the Soviet Union was attacked. And so some of this is about thinking
#
that, you know, we think that these boundaries that actually Indian policymakers have been much
#
more pragmatic and flexible when it's come down to it. And then one final one that maybe I'll
#
throw out is a lot of myths about what non-alignment or strategic autonomy has been.
#
And that's why I prefer the idea that it's a diversification strategy of maintaining multiple
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options to ensure as much independence of action as possible. And the myths about that include that
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somehow there's some pure, the perfect version of strategic autonomy that you're going to have all
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the freedom of the world just doesn't exist. There's also a myth that these relationships
#
are therefore equidistance. That is also not. So the way I think about it, it's more like a
#
portfolio, like an investment portfolio. The weight of some stock, some partners is there,
#
but sometimes they grow over time, sometimes they lessen. So today, India's portfolio has a
#
lot more Western, the weight of the West has grown. The weight of Russia hasn't disappeared,
#
but India is investing less and less in it. And because that portfolio has grown, even if Russia
#
continues to be, it's just become a smaller part. And the part about, you know, China used to be
#
considered somewhere, India is going to put more investment and it hasn't. So how does then India
#
diversify? It starts investing in relationships in the Global South and the Middle East to dilute
#
that pool, again, to create space. So to me, that is the biggest myth that somehow these are
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equidistant relationships that India doesn't align, isn't willing to put in and that, you know,
#
I actually think sometimes analysis of Indian foreign policy has been more inflexible than
#
Indian foreign policy. Wow, that's a great line. Next part of the question is about China. Like,
#
I've done a bunch of episodes on China, including with Manoj Kevalramani last, I think, and I love
#
his work. But I still can't grok, what does China want? Like, what is the deal? Like, when we look
#
at the West, you know, you can look at US interests and things seem to make sense. And you know,
#
there are different pulls and pressures, but everything seems to make sense. It's coherent
#
at whatever different level we are talking about and ditto with India. But with China,
#
it almost seems sometimes like a black box that what do they want? And that's especially important
#
in the context of, you know, the fact that the power differential is huge. I mean, they can
#
basically do incursions whenever they want. Like, what are we going to do? So, you know,
#
what is your sense of how their foreign policy establishment thinks and what they want? And
#
what is your sense of, you know, what are the different levers that we have to do something
#
about it? What is our approach towards China? What are the mistakes that we are making?
#
Give me a sense of that. So I, one, I will caveat this with, I don't consider myself a China expert.
#
I look at China from the outside in, I think, you know, there are a lot of very good experts,
#
including Manoj on China and India. And I'm really glad to see, you know, they've been doing
#
podcasts and newsletters and a lot more discussion. And so I think there's a lot
#
of good work now being done in India on China. I take issue when sometimes people say, oh, you
#
know, we've been, that there's somehow we've been taking too much from Western things and we need
#
to develop our own. For me, these are not battles. There's not like, just because the Western view
#
is not. After all, a lot of studies on India that Indians read came from the West. Yes, do more,
#
but then you had to invest more. But regardless, I think there's a lot of, it's good to see a lot of
#
expertise, even beyond the farmers who are also very good China experts that are coming up in
#
academia and in business that sees this now as something that they need to invest in.
#
So give the caveat that, you know, what, that I am not an expert on China. I look at kind of
#
how India sees China, but I think we seem to know a few things, right? That one, from what work
#
people have done is that regime security, party security is a priority concern and the prism
#
through which everything flows. That Xi Jinping has centralized leadership to an extent we haven't
#
seen for decades. The problem as you point out then is trying to use a cliche, read the tea leaves,
#
because inherently, and this is partly what makes authoritarian governments hard to,
#
and therefore can be quite destabilizing, is that we, at least outside governments that don't have
#
access to intelligence, and even that can be faulty, is that we then have to kind of make
#
assumptions, look back at history, understand Xi, understand his father even, understand his
#
preferences, because we don't actually know what he is thinking. You have to read, you know,
#
China experts will tell you, read these speeches, it's different, this is what he's saying.
#
And so I think it's just incredibly hard to figure out what's going on. And so, like,
#
when governments have to do this, you act on the basis of, okay, what can we see? We can see
#
capabilities, we can see actions, and then you try to derive intentions from those. And sometimes
#
it can be faulty, sometimes we can get into a spiral of a security dilemma, but nonetheless,
#
this is what makes, you know, democratic peace theory, it's not perfect, but one of the arguments
#
is that we can actually see the sausage making, see the debates and differences in a democracy,
#
whereas you can't in, you don't know what intentions are, because you're still trying to
#
figure these things out. So I think the kind of, why is China doing what it's doing? We
#
can have theories, but we don't really know. And so the fact that we are still debating why,
#
you know, there's still lively debate on why China took the actions it did in 1962,
#
let alone during the 2013, 2014, 2017, and then 2020 border incursions, it's, you know,
#
there have been various theories, including is, is there something broader that this is part of
#
China's more regional assertiveness? Is this India specific? Was it just trying to salami slice? Did
#
they not expect an Indian response? Or was Xi Jinping coming out of COVID? Did he want to kind
#
of show his strengths somewhere and try to tell people I'm not weak? Was it opportunistic? India
#
didn't have, you know, had withdrawn kind of the military exercises at the time. So, or does the
#
China want to put India in its place? You know, some have a theory about China did this because
#
of Article 370 revocation. I'm a little bit more skeptical about that, because I don't think we
#
have, it doesn't explain many other things that happen. But, you know, again, these are things to
#
debate, we don't know the answer. And so, whatever our pet theories, we say, you know, it shows it
#
shows that I think more broadly, I think, in general, we'll see, you know, there's talk in the
#
in the in the budget of now reversing economic restrictions on China and things like that.
#
I think broadly, India is following the policy, a policy of recognizing that the deals,
#
part of these border agreements that everybody talks about, and why there's so much emphasis
#
in India on those were violated, is they were not just a diplomatic serve, diplomatic function,
#
various governments of various tribes, everybody from Rajiv Gandhi to Modi, for them, it was
#
part of the deterrent strategy against India, they thought these these agreements would deter
#
China from acting. And that has broken down. So, some of what India is doing is trying to
#
restore some deterrence, and you do it through different ways, right? So some of it is building
#
your own capabilities, including at the border. So it's what political scientists call internal
#
balancing. And there's a long line of that. And this is not going to be kind of the rapid fire
#
at all, but should have ended this answer long ago. But just I think the you see with internal
#
balancing everything from at the at the kind of border, making sure you have better roads,
#
villages, military capabilities, redeploying forces. Even for that, it has to go back to you
#
need to improve your economy. And this is where the contradictions come in, right? But to improve
#
your economy and even take advantage of people diversifying, then the economic restrictions you
#
put on China to try to create resilience, you're going to maybe consider easing them,
#
because you think that will help your economy, which will then pay for the military budget,
#
right? So it's internal balancing and external balancing, which is, you know, making partnerships,
#
those partnerships with like minded countries on China can both help you build your own
#
capabilities, but also shape a favorable balance of power offer alternatives in the regions that
#
you can't alone, you know, deal with China in regional and global institutions.
#
So I think broadly, the Indian government has has been doing it has the right idea,
#
to me, the big question is it doing it fast and far enough.
#
And I worry sometimes that the prioritization and don't get me wrong, I think India needs to
#
develop an indigenous defense industrial base, I think it's so I'm not one of those people says
#
India needs to buy foreign, that's not the issue. But even if you're going to develop a defense
#
industrial base, indigenously, then you need to if defense is your priority, you need to actually
#
shake up things where that is going to be your priority. If you are prioritizing job creation,
#
I'm not saying that's wrong. But if you are prioritizing, you know, job creation is not
#
even a distinct but say strategic autonomy over security, eventually that's going to be a problem.
#
And I think the vice chief of staff said something like this is, and you know, people always criticize
#
and somebody like him comes out, they say, oh, you just want to import weapons. No, what he's
#
trying to tell you is tomorrow, don't blame the Air Force when they don't have squadrons, because
#
it's been a 20 year effort to purchase to upgrade your fighters, because you're still trying to
#
figure out, I don't think it's wrong to say produce at home self reliance makes sense.
#
But then you have to ensure that you do everything to ensure that people are going to come in
#
co producer. So it's those things, which if you think you have time with China,
#
or you can buy time with China, then you have a very different set of urgency,
#
and you will take a different. So to me, I think the direction is right. To me, you just,
#
this has it's a it's a tougher environment in which to make this policy. But I just think
#
on both those strands will internal and external balancing, I think the from what I see,
#
the assumptions are that India has time. And with China, and we'll see if that's a right or
#
wrong assumption, some of what you'll see with even in trying to talk to talk to China is to
#
buy that time to try to push that likelihood that Xi Jinping makes that choice further and
#
further on. And then I think the second thing is there, this is not the only thing going on
#
for India, right? There are those other very real goals in terms of other priorities. And to me,
#
the answer is not, you know, because people will say, well, you know, we have to divide the
#
economic pie. The only answer to that is you grow the pie. Which means you have to make certain
#
decisions that will go against some of your ideological preferences, whether economic or
#
otherwise. And so to me, if if China really is the challenge, and the generational challenge that
#
India has to face a country that's now five times India size economically, I think that urgency
#
aspect, and being even bolder is something is the is the one critique that I would make, I would
#
have been had more critiques, you know, 10 years ago, because I actually eight years ago, because
#
I think India was telling it's a stealthy story, or at least Prime Minister Modi was telling was
#
doing some of the mirror imaging about China. And what we found out with Xi Jinping is he there's
#
probably a debate from a lot of what China expert says there's a debate and some people think India
#
is a country that China shouldn't push and there are others in the Chinese establishment who are
#
telling China Xi Jinping Yes, you you should and can push it. And so the question is figuring out
#
which one is the one that is going to be the case and we'll find out.
#
My friend Nitin Pai of Taksha Sheila likes to say that a rising GDP is the best foreign policy and
#
I couldn't agree more. I mean, and unfortunately, all our parties are true, but you can you can take
#
that I do think that's one of Nitin's best lines, but I do think you can take that to
#
the extent that you become Germany then that only cares about GDP and has left your security
#
outsourced your security to others. So it's also what you do with the GDP.
#
It's also what you do with the GDP. And unfortunately, all our parties are ideologically
#
aligned against the rising GDP, because I don't think any of them really care about growth. So
#
anyway, that's an entirely different issue. The last of my potted foreign policy questions is
#
about the US but also about the world. Like, you know, Trump too is very likely. If that happens,
#
that impacts what happens in Russia, Ukraine, you know, he's probably going to throw in his
#
lot with Putin and the world can just go to hell in many different ways. How does all of this impact
#
India because there is also, you know, under Trump, there is also a rising insularity that happens at
#
the same time, they might see India as a counterbalance to China. So, you know, what are the
#
best case and worst case scenarios for India in, you know, given the possible changing shape of
#
the world over the next few years? So I think, you know, I wrote a piece in I think it was 2020
#
because or 2021 looking back at how India dealt with the Trump administration. And, you know,
#
it was interesting to go back and look at it. I think one thing we know is we actually we have a
#
broad sense of Trump's preferences, but we actually don't know what that will lead to in terms of
#
outcomes. Even on Russia, Ukraine, I think there was a lot of hope in 2017 when he came in, in
#
India that, you know, he will reach equilibrium with Russia and that would actually ease the
#
Russia difference. And during a Trump administration, Congress passed the CAATSA sanctions,
#
which then created problems for so, you know, there are, there's a sense that this could happen,
#
but, you know, you also don't know necessarily. After all, you know, Putin doesn't actually want
#
to have a negotiation with Zelensky. He wants to talk to the US. But Trump is actually saying,
#
in fact, I'm going to get, I want to be the grand peacemaker and get everybody in the room together.
#
You know, is Putin going to agree with that? So we don't actually know. But I think if you're
#
India, what you're doing is you're looking at a combination of what your experience was in the
#
past and you're trying to assess through his preferences, et cetera, who might go in,
#
because that's the other thing, right? There's a lot of assessments. It's hard for us to figure
#
this out. But we know what Trump 1.0 look like. But as I was saying earlier, a Trump 2.0 won't
#
have the same people who've gone in, who actually India was very lucky. It had a lot of people in
#
positions that matter to India policymaking that either knew and understood India or they
#
had a sense that India was important to whatever their priorities are.
#
So I think they're going to be different aspects. As you said, there are things that
#
the government might say, okay, and I think this is going to be different, right? The Indian
#
parts of Indian government will have different views. I think also India, the Indian government,
#
I suspect will have a different view than even the party and definitely Twitter on this. I think
#
given India's previous experience, the hope will be that Russia will ease, as you say,
#
as a point of difference, because there will also be additional hope in the part of India that
#
if Russia can get sorted, the US can once again focus on the Indo-Pacific.
#
So this is all hope. This is the second thing people will say is, oh, good, he's not going
#
to care about democracy and human rights. They'll stop caring about this in India.
#
The third, people will say, look, he, after all, he's the one who helped shake things up on China.
#
He, we think he'll be tough on China and that we can work with them and we can show that, look,
#
between Quad and what India is doing with defence budget, we're not a free rider. And that these
#
guys will be set off the chain of and a lot of the people around Trump that they agree that
#
should be tough on China. And you could see that argument is generally and that at the end of the
#
day, India handled Trump fine. Those are going to be the arguments that he's transactional. We can
#
figure out a way to speak to that transaction. I think on the other side, you will have
#
and the biggest concern across the board will be volatility and uncertainty
#
for an Indian government that actually doesn't need any more volatility and uncertainty in the
#
world. And that will be including on not the people around Trump who tend to be China hawks,
#
but Trump's own preferences on China. He has said, I will not ban TikTok. I'll reverse the ban.
#
He has now said, I don't care about Taiwan. Why should I care about Taiwan? What have they done
#
for us? India might not be an ally. But if he starts questioning alliances and commitments
#
outside, if he takes that more isolationist view, that's a problem for India, because it won't just
#
be that he'll be doing it directly. It won't affect India directly. There'll be things around
#
what signal is going to send to China is the signal sent to China. Okay, China, you can push
#
India and we're not actually going to care about it. Or you can push the Philippines take over the
#
South China Sea. That is a direct, China that controls the South China Sea is of direct interest
#
to India. Sometimes people think this is a Western problem or an American. It is not.
#
Most of India's maritime trade goes through there. So, or a lot of it does. And so,
#
it's that uncertainty. Will he wake up one morning and do a deal with Xi Jinping?
#
Will China play transactionalism better than India does? You could even say this on economics. He
#
said, I will impose tariffs, including on every country. So, 10% on India.
#
He has said, will he do what the Biden administration has done, which is tech
#
transfer to India, encourage American companies to produce in India? Not clear that he will,
#
because he's saying bring business back. But here, he will say, why is GE going and doing
#
this with HAL in India? They should produce here and export. Why should we give India this tech
#
transfer? What have they done for us lately? And then, you know, finally, on even on the
#
value side, on that values pillar basket, on the one hand, Trump himself, I think, and this goes in
#
that might not be, he has no problem with high skilled immigration. But on the immigration side,
#
in his previous administration, they did come down hard on high skilled immigration.
#
You now have an unprecedented number of Indians coming through this undocumented migrant route.
#
Last year, they were saying 100,000. This will definitely be a problem with the Trump administration.
#
And even his constituencies care about at least one internal politics issue in India, which is
#
Christian NGOs and the safety of Christians, because that is part of his vote base.
#
So, to me, when people say so and so is going to be good and bad, one, I think if you're the Indian
#
government, you're saying, I will deal with whoever, I don't get a vote here. But second,
#
I actually think the conventional wisdom that Delhi will be very happy with the Trump, no,
#
Delhi will deal with the Trump administration if it has to. And relatively, they'll be better off
#
than say maybe a European government. But I think the thing that would be a concern, and not a small
#
concern for India, which is why I don't think this view that, oh, they'd be very happy, is this
#
volatility. And keep in mind how much India had to change and adapt and become more transactional,
#
had to swallow insults, everything to be able to keep one person happy. Because that country matters
#
to many Indian goals. So, the hope will be that Trump sticks to the China thing, that he'll have
#
people around him who by the, you know, for the structural establishment reasons that I said,
#
by the India case, India will try to do its past to shape views of it. They will do business with
#
Trump in a very different way if he becomes president. And so, countries adapt because they
#
don't get a vote. But I think what it will mean for Indian foreign policy is that we've seen what
#
it meant last time, more emphasis on self-reliance, more diversification. So, doubling down on
#
relationships, not just for with the US, but Europe, Middle East, Australia, Japan, so other
#
countries. And then finally, the piece I wrote on is there going to be an India-China deal, I think
#
in some ways, you could argue that along with making sure India can protect itself against China,
#
there will also be this question of should, can India find a way to ensure that that doesn't
#
escalate again, and potentially even think that, okay, China is also going to have a tough time
#
with China, with Trump, if he becomes president. And so, see if there's some space there. So,
#
I think we'll see India do what India did last time. But I don't think that's necessarily the
#
constant uncertainties, is the whole world going to change? Is Trump going to walk out of a Paris
#
deal again, or an Iran deal again? And what India also benefited from the Abraham Accords,
#
which a lot of people said wouldn't have happened otherwise. But now we're seeing that those are
#
breaking down in the Middle East. So, some of this is, I think it's just going to be,
#
for if Trump comes back, I think for India, it's just going to be every morning, like the whole
#
world is going to be a new day with uncertainty. Foreign Minister Jaishankar once said it was like
#
being on a roller coaster, and I think we will return to the amusement park that will be the
#
case. But with the likelihood that, not likelihood, with the possibility that depending on how things
#
go, you could see the India-US relationship move forward, or you could see major problems. But it
#
really depend on, I think, much more so than usual, what Trump himself prefers. The fate of the world
#
will be decided at 3am. But let me tell you something, even if the world goes to hell,
#
even if we enter a vicious cycle and it spirals out of control, you and I can take refuge in art.
#
So my final question of the show, for me and my final request rather, for me and my listeners,
#
recommend books, films, music that fill you with joy and mean a lot to you and that you'd like to
#
recommend to all of us. It's a great question. I mean, I think I mentioned some of the books,
#
including, you know, I noticed James Scott passed away. One of the influential books,
#
Seeing Like a State, was very influential for me. To me, you know, I'm, there's so many books
#
and music. I also, when I was growing up, my dad had, we used to have cassettes then,
#
things like country music. So I even like country music. I listen to a lot of music. I couldn't tell
#
you who I listen to these days because it's on my kind of Spotify playlist and it comes on.
#
I think in books, to me, I don't know if Metaphysical Club would translate because
#
it's very specific, but I, it was very, it was, it really, for me, was helped shape my idea of
#
when policy ideas fit. I watch a lot of kind of murder mysteries or, you know,
#
spy shows and things like that. So let me just, otherwise I'll go on and on and won't be able to
#
remember all the books. But since we're, I'll tell you the recent ones that I've watched that I think
#
are good. Slow Horses on Apple. I think there's, there's Spy Among Friends. Like I don't know what
#
channel it'll be on in India. But I'll tell you another show that actually is very good. It's
#
like the Yes Prime Minister of, or G. Mantriji, which was with Farooq Sheikh, the Indian version,
#
but about kind of the intelligence community. Again, it shows the internal thing and these
#
kind of things I actually think are quite good for understanding. It was this show,
#
I think it's on YouTube, very, you know, 80s, 90s production values called the Sandbaggers,
#
which is, which is worth watching. There's very little activity outside the office. So I would
#
warn people this is not that kind of, that kind of show. Deutschland 83, if people haven't seen that.
#
And then since I like kind of niche stuff, very interesting also about a country that was neutral,
#
so to speak, during the Cold War, which is a Finnish show called Shadow Lines about the Finnish
#
intelligence service during the Cold War, and how they play that role between. I would love to see
#
more Indian shows that look back at both documentaries, but also TV series set in
#
kind of historical settings. I always say, you know, for those who have read John Le Carre novels,
#
there's Smiley, the character, and his nemesis is Carla, and the one time they meet is in a
#
jail in Delhi. Oh wow, I didn't know that. And so they're all these stories that I keep thinking,
#
you know, I'd love to kind of see more. There's this fascinating story, I think it was about
#
Stalin's daughter who escaped to India, and it was a dramatic thing. It is just waiting to be made
#
into a show. So I'd like to see more of that. But I wish I'd been prepped for this because there's
#
just so much to read. And, you know, I even find things like mythology of different sorts very
#
interesting to read in terms of even as I think about human interactions, about international
#
relations. If you start reading these things in negotiations, you learn a lot from mythology.
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I read fiction to improve, I mean, partly for fun, but also it helps me improve my writing,
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make it more accessible. But yeah, I think I've spent all my time talking on the 80%, 90%, and
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I can't think of too many other things in terms of books and music at the moment.
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So you need to come to India, and you need to start your travel app, and you need to start a
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pub, and you need to turn some of these stories into films, and you need to do more episodes with
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me because there's still so much we haven't spoken about. But I'm so grateful for, you know,
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your sharing your time and insights with me. This is wonderful. Thank you so much.
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It was great. And you indulge your speakers or your guests by letting us go on and on and on.
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I just hope it is of interest to the audience. And thank you so much for taking the time as well.
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It was more than interesting to my audience. I'm very sure of that you will hear from them. Thank
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book, Fateful Triangle. Links to all her other writings is in the show notes. You can follow
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her on Twitter at Tanvi underscore Madan. You can follow me at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-B-A-R-M-A.
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You can browse past episodes of The Scene and the Unseen at sceneunseen.in or any podcast
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app of your choice. Thank you for listening. Did you enjoy this episode of The Scene and
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the Unseen? If so, would you like to support the production of the show? You can go over
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to sceneunseen.in slash support and contribute any amount you like to keep this podcast alive
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and kicking. Thank you.
