hello everyone and welcome back to conversations with tyler today i'm chatting with barca dot if you have a connection to india she needs no further introduction but if you don't have such a connection she is a very famous indian television journalist she is an owner of a youtube news channel mojo story she's an opinion columnist with the hindustan times and the washington post and she was part of ndtv's team for 21 years she
has two books the most recent one out is humans of covet to hell and back barca welcome thank you tyler and thank you for having me which do you think are the most valuable conversations in india that the west is essentially blind to i think uh the west is able to see india only through certain tropes and tropes that it has gathered from newspapers like the one i write for washington post as well as the new york
times some of these narratives that the west understands about india are true but they are incomplete and therefore the west understands india in terms of let's say debates around whether there is equality for religious minorities whether there is a free press um these are valid questions many of them are raised by you know journalists like myself but they do not tell the full story of a complex paradoxical nation where there
are multiple simultaneous truths and therefore i think that indians are sometimes exasperated by the simplistic reductionist understanding of our very complicated 1.3 billion strong nation so if i'm a westerner where should i go
in western media to find the relatively better coverage of india or is that impossible um i would say just don't go to any one source uh and i think that a lot of indians would would say that the more diverse your sources are
that would perhaps be more representative but we would also urge you to to read and watch and listen to to us uh you know i think there's also a sense that there have been some great foreign correspondents and i'd like to name uh two who have done stellar work on india ellen barry of the new york times and annie gowan of the washington post both made it a point to uh do very very textured reportage uh out of india but
you know then that's in those are individuals i'm naming and not platforms so i don't think that there is a platform that really captures the nuances and the texture of my country in full i i have so many questions about india for you in your earlier book this unquiet land you described india as and i quote essentially misogynistic what do you think is the most deeply rooted structural account of how that came to be
yeah though as i'm answering that i'm struck by the fact that michael that my nation has a much more progressive uh set of laws around abortion and the right to legal and safe abortion uh than the americans might have soon uh so that's just an illustration of what i mean by complexity you know when i studied um at columbia at the journalism school i had a i had a flatmate and i think i write about this in the same book who
assumed that because i was an indian woman i would have an arranged marriage i would have no rights i wouldn't be outspoken and then when we got to know each other better i found that the western rituals of the dating scene were often much more patriarchal than anything i'd experienced that's it that's it um of course uh i have sort of grown up and resisted entrenched patriarchy entrenched misogyny the expectations of what it means to be
female at india come out uh in in very uh sort of insidious everyday way you know the big things right you know about whether public spaces uh are safe or not safe for women we had uh the infamous nirbhaya uh gang rape in the on in delhi
the capital of india a gang rape of a 23 year old medical student that brought hundreds of thousands of indians on the streets to protest there is sexual violence within the circle of trust there is the refusal to
legalize marital rape those are all the big examples but it's the small examples uh that really get under my skin the way roles at home are gendered uh the way that even when you're paid a compliment as a woman and presented as a superwoman that's really code for tying you up in chains of gold so you'll see this advertisement where there's this perfectly turned out woman and uh you know not a hair out of place
a perfect shining a shiny string of pearls a perfectly crisp sari or pantsuit ringing uh her house from her boardroom where she's just closed like a billion dollar deal asking the help to make whatever cottage cheese curry for dinner or tandoori chicken curry for dinner that's supposed to be a compliment but what it's really doing is gendering the home as the space for women to run wherein what ends up happening
is that at the moment the number of women working in india has actually declined instead of increased because most women cannot cope with the multiple pressures of home and work and i always say that we speak so much about equality at work we just do not talk about equality at home that the premium on getting married the premium on parenthood there's so much to unpack here so again i would say to you tyler it's a very
interesting inflection point for the united states where you are uh when it comes to the rights of women the fact that there was so much misogynistic resistance to hillary clinton for example when she was running for president all of those are things that we settled long ago but we've got other some you know really really grave issues that we fight literally every day every hour of our lives would you agree with the common
impression that overall in india women have it better in the south than in the north and if so what would you infer about underlying structural causes of misogyny in india i would agree uh i would agree with that uh and and the reasons uh for that are manifold uh some relate to the fact that some there are some societies for example in the southern state of kerala uh that are matriarchal uh where the very organization of society and the
home itself and it all keeps coming back to home you know that that settles a lot of your other affiliated freedoms so there is the organization of many of these societies as matriarchal uh the the literacy and education rates uh are higher um local units of governance have in fact uh performed better we saw this even in the covid uh management across the board uh in the south so i think a combination of culture and uh governance the fact
that there's been more investment on health care uh on reproductive rights all of this has led to i would say the south being a better place for for women than the north and i say this is a woman who actually lives and has grown up in north india how much of that difference between the north and the south do you think stems from islam which is of course more prevalent in the north no i don't know um i think this is so
this is an interesting question when uh india moved to strike down uh the practice of triple talaq which i'll just explain simply was the practice of a man a muslim man being able to divorce his wife by simply saying the words the lack three times i was all for that change and i am one of those uh who actually as a progressive would typically support a uniform family law uh just to explain if that's got too
complicated we do allow personal laws for our religious minorities which means that triple talaq was supported by some muslim groups with the argument that it was part of their personal law i totally oppose that the hindu sort of personal law was reformed several decades ago and it is time for other personal laws to be reformed as well and modernized under the umbrella of a common family law but i do not believe that one or the other religion
is actually responsible for you know in inequality i believe all the orthodoxies of all faiths militate against the rights of women all faiths and therefore i would in another context and we can speak about why that time is
not now in another context i would be totally for a a family law that is agnostic of religious belief i am not among uh those liberals on the left if india who believe that uh faiths must be allowed to practice their own sort of
personal laws because i do believe that those meditate against the equality of men and women however i don't think that's specific to a religion but yes the hindu law was reformed several decades ago not fully so there are changes that are needed culturally among the hindus among the christians as i said among the orthodoxies of all religious faiths for its level of income and education india seems to have a relatively low
birth rate or total fertility rate and for hindus they seem to be just about at replacement fertility and that's been the case for what seven years why do you think that is why is child rearing so relatively unattractive in india especially amongst hindus that's such an interesting question because one of the most politicized conversations in india is around population growth and of course the suggestion or the innuendo has always
been that one day muslims will outnumber hindus because muslims are growing at a galloping pace actually the data tells you and this is well documented both within india and in a recent survey that was released by pew that though the rate of growth is higher among muslims definitely than it is among hindu communities the rate of decline is also now the sharpest because the you know there was a higher much
higher rate of growth among muslims and that the muslims will never outnumber hindus but would i take that to take your question uh for there being a a sort of lack of enthusiasm uh for child rearing not true this has been a decades old fight to get india's population uh under control and it is finally starting to yield results which is why i actually disagree with um legislations that are now being proposed in several parts of
india to actually either incentivize or penalize those who have more than two children i think penalties don't necessarily work incentives can but penalties penalties certainly don't we also have the added issue of female feticide which is girls who are killed in their womb because before they're allowed to be brought into this world because of the premium that is still placed very much across classes uh on a boy child uh so i think what you're
dealing with when you when you quoted those numbers tyler is actually the success of uh india's um what is called its family planning program uh where there has been a very very strong awareness campaign around urging families to not have more than two children and we are finally within striking distance uh of that figure well will india eventually become underpopulated and it will be quite an old country before it's ever truly rich
and have an inverse pyramid problem of supporting everyone if that's the case uh i think we have a problem of i think we okay so i you know we we've often been told our people our demographics are our dividend and not our weakness i think i think both of those narratives are somewhat simplistic i don't think we're ever going to go to china way where you know china is now having to reverse its one-child policy and i think
the reason that we are never going to go the china way is because we were never up until this point where we're and and once briefly in the 70s when indira gandhi's son tried to enforce a kind of population control program we have never had the state force uh punishments for people who have more than x number of children and i hope we continue to uh to follow the progressive approach to family planning and population management that we have where
people on their own are understanding uh that they should not be adding certainly more than two children um two to the demographics and so no i don't think we're going to ever be in that position where our you know where you're going to have this sort of reverse problem i think we're steady on this what concerns me more is the set of proposed legislations that actually now seeks uh to to to to actually have a kind of
enforced system of family planning which i which i oppose and i oppose it mostly because again to go back to that misogyny that we were talking about it will actually end up penalizing women who are often denied the right to um to let's say contraceptive right well access to contraception and sometimes the right to it as well uh in in relationships that are not fully equal in the bedroom and many outsiders have the impression
that relations between hindus and muslims and the aggregate in india have become worse over the last 10 to 15 years if you put aside particular actions of particular political personalities and you try to think of a structural reason why that might be true because normally the intuition is people grow richer they're more tolerant there's more commercial interaction there's more intermingling what would be your structural account of why in some
ways that problem has become worse well you just spoke of intermingling tyler and i think that one of the biggest reasons for um the worsening relations or the othering uh as it were of communities that are not your own uh is the ghettoization of uh how people live uh so for example you know if there were neighborhoods where people live cheek by jowl um that still happens of course in uh in in many
cities but it also happens less than it used to uh and that is true we are seeing a kind of a muslim quarter and uh you know to give an example or a christian quarter in a way that we wouldn't have before our cities were so ghettoized and i think that kind of uh of of living in the same house housing societies or neighborhoods participating in each other's festivals as opposed to just tolerating them uh those are the structural changes or
shifts that that we are witnessing uh it's also true that it is tougher for a person from a religious minority in particular an indian muslim uh to get a house as easily as a non-muslim and i think i would be lying if i did not um acknowledge that and therefore and also the last point uh is of interfaith marriages or interfaith love uh this is a deeply politicized issue as well while i'm talking to you in the last 24 hours
in the southern city of hyderabad uh one of our big technical sort of technology hubs we've had reports of a muslim family that attacked a hindu man for marrying a muslim woman and in reverse we see muslim you know sort of women also targeted all the time if they choose to marry hindus this is not helped by the fact that you've had several states now talking about what they call love jihad that's the phrase they use for
marriages that are across religious communities in particular between hindus and muslims the percentage of people indians marrying not just outside their religion but also outside their caste which in hindus is a kind of hierarchical system of traditional occupation that you're born into is woefully low uh i don't know if i remember my data correctly but i think less than five percent of indians actually marry outside uh of their own
communities and i i would need to go back to that number and check it but that's what i remember off the top of my head and and and those are the structural reasons the fact that people don't don't love or have relationships outside of their community don't live um enough with people of diverse faiths and don't participate uh in each other's lives uh we used to have this politically correct phase called tolerance which i actually
just hate and i keep nudging people towards the indian military the indian military actually has a system of the commanding officer taking on the faith of his of his troops uh during religious sort of prayers and and and the military has multi religious places of worship it even has something called an mmg which is not just a medium machine gun but a mander masjid gurdwara which is all the different fates praying together at the
same place we don't see a lot of that kind of thing happening outside of the military and another survey done by pew reinforced this when it spoke of indians today being more like a thali than khichri and let me just explain that athali is a silver tray where you get uh little sort of bowls of different food items uh and so pure found that hindus and muslims when surveyed both spoke of the need for religious diversity as being a
cornerstone of india so they like the idea of this thali india is the thali where they were different little food items but separate food items the khichari is rice and lentils all mixed up and eaten with pickle the kitchen is that intermingling the the untidy overlapping and we're just seeing less and less of that overlapping and in my opinion that is tragic where there is social interdependence uh where there is
economic interdependence where there is personal interdependence is when relationships thrive and flourish and get better but when they remain ghettos separations just tolerating each other that i think then remains in the realm of other inc why has cast remain so strong in india it's not supported by the state anymore you would think there are considerable incentives to marry outside your cast or have business relationships outside your
cast yet as you said the rate of marriage across castes whatever the exact number may be it's fairly low uh that's a surprise right and and what what has happened to to cause that that persistence so i'll tell you a little story about uh about myself when i was 18 i studied in one of india's top liberal arts colleges and i used to be asked what is your cast and i used to say i don't know and i was very proud of saying that and i really
didn't know my parents had never told me what my cast was and it was their uh sort of way of bringing me up to be a progressive indian and then many decades uh many not even many decades later a few years later i did one of my first journalism stories in the gang rape of a dalit woman in a village in rajasthan the dalits are the people who are at the very bottom of the social hierarchy they're often treated
as outcasts they often do menial jobs like cleaning toilets or handling the dead skin of cattle which they then work into leather they also uh and it's shameful that this practice still exists manual scavengers which in other words they they carry literally carry the out of toilets that don't have water or clean our sewers and for these reasons they're often treated at completely at the bottom of the cast hierarchy and the the the woman bhavri
devi who had been gang raped she had been working with a government program to stop child marriages in her village and among the men uh who raped her was the father of a one-year-old child whom she had been trying to stop from from from being married after she complained she was made to live on the outskirts of her village not allowed access to the village well um and and when when one of the courts actually
acquitted the men she had accused of rape the judge remarked men of a higher caste would not touch a woman of a lower caste so this rape could not have taken place i tell you the story to say that the disavowal of caste is a is a privilege of sorts um and i've had to be i've had to accept the hard way that you can't disown the reality of caste much as i would like to has there been mobility out of the entrenched car structures there has been
in the in the cities you will see less and less of this kind of discrimination of the kind that i have just described having taken place it was also two decades ago you say the state does not recognize caste in fact the state has special affirmative action which i support for what are called scheduled caste and scheduled tribes which have traditionally been discriminated again against for centuries the problem is
tyler that now we have everybody wanting a slice of this affirmative action which allows you quotas in jobs and education at least in institutes that are run and managed by government so you have something called the obcs the other backward uh classes who say we're you know we're not at the bottom but we're somewhere in the middle and from state to state we've also suffered either economic or social discrimination and so you have this
highly politicized conversation you have the entrenched social tradition even where professional practices are no longer interlinked with with with caste you have just this entrenched social structure and it will not change in my opinion till there is economic professional and social mobility and we're seeing some of that a lot of that in fact a lot of things have changed but not when it comes once again to love and marriage and i
kind of feel that that's where i think the real tests are of you know it's like it's it's like people who say you know some of my best friends are black some of my best friends are muslim yes but would you be comfortable with your daughter marrying one that's where the test is why is there so much talent coming out of india right now now i know you could always say for a long time there's been a lot of
talent coming out of india surely that's true but it does seem there's a discrete break if you look say at the number of indian ceos in silicon valley who also have done extremely well it seems fundamentally different from say 20 years ago what accounts for that well i i actually think that those who are today leading uh the big companies whether it's uh i don't know let's take some of the pichai of of google or any other sort of
big tech uh sort of firm that you pick up tyler the fact is that they actually left india several years ago maybe even more than two decades ago so that talent obviously migrated out much earlier and perhaps is today
acceptable or recognized or taken cognizance off because there's proof of concept right i i think before elon musk took over twitter we had an indian ceo of twitter i mean i can name any number of companies you already know all of them
so so does your audience i think this proof of concept you know i think there have been people who've proven a mark we've long been described in in america as a model uh minority community a lot of it has to do with our excellent subsidized institutes of higher education uh if you were to look at the background of most of these uh ceos who are today leading conglomerates out of the west most of them would have studied
at institutes like the indian institute of management or the indian institute of technology the iit or the iims these are uh very very difficult to get into and uh they are subsidized which means that you don't have to be rich uh or wealthy to actually be able to study at them so they really do draw uh the best minds and literally i mean almost everybody who who's making global headlines today has studied at one of these uh one of these
institutes and i think it speaks to one of the success stories something that india got really right uh which is a very specialized uh highly skilled institutes of technical learning uh you know we may not have got our liberal arts as right at the higher education level but certainly our sciences our management our technical institutes i think we've done a fabulous job with them do you think it boosts the case for
in a validly elitist approach to education which it seems india has done it's very hard to get into those schools they're very very good if you finish uh you're branded right it's high quality in some way and does that interact with with cast in some manner that there's a general an elitist approach and when it comes to the foreign market that pays off big time or no yeah that's an interesting question and i don't know that there's a simple
answer to it because i'm okay with an i'm okay with an educational uh elite actually i think that there is some merit in keeping society competitive uh and and aspiring and pushing people to do better and better as long as uh everybody there's a level playing field to access those centers of excellence and the fact is that many of these um the these whiz kids as they were once called have actually studied at government
government schools or what are called kendriya vidyala systems and so on not all of them have gone to posh um uh you know what are called private schools in in the west and what are called public schools in india uh so i do think that to create a competitively drawn uh elite that is elite not because of what they earned but because of how well they did uh in exams maybe an old-fashioned idea but it's one that i actually support i think
one of the reasons we actually do better and well outside of india is because we come with some of these skills you know we've been brought up to be industrious hard working we've been told in middle class homes and even in lower middle class homes that education is everything education will make or break your life if you get into a good college or a good institute your life will change this is the indian ethos this is
what aspirational india is all about and and i think it answers your question about why so many indians are doing well outside india does it eliminate the caste question yes and no there have been you know as there are more institutes as they draw people from more diverse groups you are still seeing people at who are dalits who are at the bottom of the cast hierarchy who could have an iit degree and still face social
discrimination when it comes to who they want to marry they won't be cleaning toilets and they won't be you know denied access to um to the village well but if they want to marry so so to speak above their cost they will still face resistance and so you know economics doesn't tell you the full story it isn't that if you're at the bottom you get a great degree and you become wealthy that'll just you know buy buy you uh out of all the other
forms of discrimination this is like it is like race right it is it is like it is a little bit like the race debate i mean the the fact is you can be i don't know you can be a music legend a cinema legend a basketball legend but it will not take away what happened with george floyd and and so i think you're you're you're seeing something similar here where uh uh an educated elite person will not face the kind of
discrimination that bhavri devi whom i reported on decades ago did in a village in rajasthan but will not be totally free from all instances in all examples of discrimination and the other important point to note is that where there are quotas not all of them get filled you do need a you know a certain sort of baseline to to get into these higher institutes whether of medicine or technology and that's where i think we really have to work i
think our institutes of higher learning are are excellent i think where we lag behind are the institutes that come below our schools our colleges our first degrees that's where the gap is and that's what leaves some of those quotas at the higher level you know underfilled or underutilized if i look at top ceos in india you know very often they might come from say gujarat and very often they're not brahmanas if i look at the top ceos
outside of india say in silicon valley it seems most of them are brahmanas why that difference that's i know that silicon valley has been grappling with uh questions around caste discrimination i know california in particular has uh i actually know one of one of the women who first raised it wrote a whole book about ayashi kadat about growing up uh as a dalit and then living like as dalit in america and yet i can't say to you that there is a
coincidence between caste and technology and success i think what i can say to you is that there has been an overlapping coincidence of socio-economic backwardness among marginalized groups so that is dalits that is muslims so there is a coincidence because of the jobs and professions that these groups are typically employed in now if you're uh let's say a leather skin tanner or your your job is to cremate bodies i'm giving you
professions that you know are typically so-called lower cars right you're not going to earn a bunch of money to educate your children to do something else uh or it'll be tougher for you and therefore that right that coincidence that you point out between brahmins and um success abroad possibly came from the fact that if you're at the if you're a mar if you're marginalized on the basis of your caste you are most likely also earning less
than other groups which means that your ability to let's say go up outside of india is diminished compared to other cash groups so there will be some coincidence it's a little bit like if you look to the same ceos in india most ceos are men so there is you know so there are there are coincidences interrelated factors that explain why certain groups are able to access resources and opportunities in a way that other groups are not i don't
think it means that somebody set out to make all the ceos of silicon valley brahmins i i think it was a series of factors about access to opportunity and resources and education well plenty of whites in the united states have resources education but is it possible the brahmins of india who come to america they're better at cracking foreign cultural codes they're more used to diversity they're more used
to strange environments the complacency is taken away once they leave their country because it's not just they have done well they have done especially well as leaders in particular kind of leadership roles i i mean i guess my hesitation in answering your question is that i hate essentialism it's the same way that i hate i hate it when people say women are better leaders because we are more empathetic because the problem with
essentialism is the moment you pay yourself a compliment basis gender caste religion color of your skin whatever country of your origin if you're going to accept one generalization as true then you're going to have to suck up the generalizations
and the caricatures that aren't so flattering and and i'm just hesitant in going beyond saying certain caste groups like certain gender groups like certain religious groups were more influential in terms of places that
they occupied at the top of social hierarchies so for example you know maybe exposure to culture uh among what so-called upper caste groups was more because income was higher therefore there was a luxury of let's say being also able to be exposed to classical music and classical dance uh you know all of these things are things that flow from how society has treated you i can't answer for why you know it would play out differently
for let's say the white american male but i i hesitate to reinforce the essentialism of your question maybe i don't know enough but i'm just really uncomfortable with that beyond saying there's a coincidence of money social hierarchy opportunity and education why is indian food the very best food in the entire world that essentialism i can accept and and i can accept it i'll tell you why because there's so many different
kinds of it right i think the thing about this country uh and in some ways an unlikely country in terms of not having a singular organizing principle to it in either rel in terms of religion or language uh but just an abroad idea it is so diverse the best thing about us is our diversity and that diversity is reflected in food i mean i haven't eaten so many cuisines within my country and i'm 50 and i have it and it would take a
lifetime for people to get to know indian food and i think the biggest reason that that it's so interesting is one because there isn't one thing called indian food there isn't one kind of indian food but mostly because of flavor and spices uh the one thing we can never be accused of is being bland um neither our food nor our people uh and there's a lot of sort of obviously uh experimentation with spice
and with flavor and uh the palette has just now i don't know become that so there's no i there's no notion of having ever having a meal that is not flavorful or full of aromas and spices and i don't cook but i eat a lot and i i think as i said that's one compliment i'm happy to take as a generalized truth about my nation as you know there are plenty of reports of food aid say rotting on the sides of the highways not being delivered in time
yet what's also striking about most regional varieties of indian food it's just how extraordinary the vegetables are how does that common picture fit together there's a major infrastructure problem with food transport yet arguably you have the best tastiest vegetables in the entire world how can that be i mean it can be because it's our um it's our cold chain supply lines where the weaknesses are there are weaknesses
in our infrastructure which is why you see in this country where you know people still go hungry uh that there are go downs full uh food corporation of india which is the government-run sort of manager as it were of grains in the country uh every year you'll see these pictures coming out of india which will show you a mountain of under utilized wheat that has rotted that there's a surplus and there's an underutilized mound it has rotted there
are two problems uh that and and i'm not an economist you are so you may have a view on this there are two problems here one is of course in the supply chains how the efficiency of the transport system the other is that governments still buy or procure grains at what's called a minimum support price this was the context for a recent year-long uh unprecedented protest by farmers of north india on the outskirts
of india's capital one that got global attention uh because the modi government moved to uh what to what you to reform or that was the word they used uh how and allow private players to come into this market i don't know enough to to say what is better and what is worse uh there has been the suggestion uh that this minimum support price system has created a mismatch between demand and supply that there have to be more efficient ways of
treating sort of agricultural markets i've read and heard all the arguments i'm not an expert i'm not an economist but i do know that there is this this this often blood of grain in a country where so many millions are still poor and and therefore there is obviously something structurally uh wrong uh that doesn't contradict the fact that there is plentiful a variety of of vegetables it is just whether those vegetables actually manage
to reach the markets in such a way that is a fair price for the farmer let's say you had to pick a single indian city or region to eat from from for the rest of your life probably it wouldn't be delhi but what would it be it would be delhi it would be delhi why it would be delhi um it would be delhi because one i'm a connoisseur or a devourer as it were or a glutton uh when it comes to street food and i think that there is no
food no street food better in the world than in delhi uh especially if you go to the older quarters in a market called chandi chalk uh where you literally have rows and rows and rows and rows of of of shops uh that will you know give you just the best you know both vegetarian and non-vegetarian options but also because i think we managed to combine that street food culture with um a reasonably international food scene
as well as a regionally diverse food scene mumbai would come close it would have to be between one of those two cities i wanted to say bangalore because it's one of my very favorite cities but in terms of my own food experience i think it's also that we are in the north um we eat more and we care about food more uh we're also more unfit for that reason um but it's it it's true i mean again i'm i'm you know you're drawing me into
essentialism that i had disabled myself from but uh you know it's it's culturally the the punjabi or the north indian is obsessed with food and the notion of hospitality of how you treat your guests is very tied into food and you never let anyone go hungry from your home it doesn't matter whether that person is a stranger or you know it's just steeped in the north indian culture and i i picked delhi i i would pick delhi because i think it does
everything it does the posh it does the accessible affordable it does the street food it does regionally diverse and maybe i'm just more familiar with it because other than new york this is the city i've lived in all my life i would pick chennai actually for the vegetables and put bangalore near the bottom i think bangalore has a high average but relatively low peaks there's nothing there that's so special and kolkata you you can't dismiss either
yeah you can't dismiss any of these cities but it's i guess i'm grading them in terms of the sheer variety of options and i just think that the variety of options if you have so when the next time you're in delhi maybe i can prove my point which is your favorite indian novel that is an interesting question there is a novel on the indian bureaucracy and political system called raj derbari which i read when i was in
school which is one of my very favorite books and i'm thinking hard because i don't read a lot of fiction in india i really you know i don't i i tend to i was brought up on enid blyton's and ahmad chitra katha comics comics i don't know if comics count is worthy but really my exposure to my culture was through comics and it was actually really fascinating all the fables the myths the stories of our classics were brought to us in comic
form and i know it's not the answer you were looking for but really um it was how much we've learned from amateur cannot be discounted the other book that comes to mind is english august which was again made into a film later it's also a stellar book and i'm thinking indian novels oh i'm reading a a very interesting book right now by the first indian novelist khitanjali shri who writes in hindi to have been
nominated for the booker and she actually wrote the original novel in hindi but it's now been translated mahindi is not so good that i could read the novel in hindi and it's actually about a woman in her 80s whose husband dies and she's treated as this sort of classic uh widow uh sort of shunned by her family overlooked and how she discovers her zest for life again and it is um an extremely compelling
um sort of feminist fable as it were and an extremely compelling book what would be a good non-bollywood movie for an outsider to watch to understand india better masaan masan is set in varanasi and it is today the prime minister's constituency in uttar pradesh our most popular state and we've been talking so much about caste and love and love across communities and it is a movie that actually uh uh is is set against the backdrop of uh the
guards of the ganga river where uh hindus from all across the country bring those those who have died to be cremated and it is about the community that actually performs these last rites and uh the story of a young man uh who does this
for a living uh and who also falls uh in love outside of um his cast and therefore it actually is at the intersection of many of the things we've been speaking about it is not it's it's protagonist went on to become
a big bollywood star but when the film came out uh it had it had a kind of art house cast it was very sort of low-key and it's a really excellent recommended watch now you majored in english literature in college how did reading jane austen or whatever else you might have read make you a better reporter of indian and international events that that's a great question and i think it didn't make me a better reporter i think
my liberal arts education um gave me a way with words uh gave me a certain sort of confidence and a set of communication skills but i was totally deracinated i was totally uh ruthless you know i i i grew up in a bubble um i am i am what the right wing of india today disparagingly calls the khan market gang uh khan market refers to uh upmarket uh sort of uh sort of bazaar of of delhi and it's used as a metaphor for a certain kind of
liberal um progressive elite who is totally out of touch with her own roots and while of course in a globalized world it's very hard to define what is the product of colonization and what is yours uh there is truth in the fact that those three years uh studying literature at st stephens college were wonderful the happiest three years of my life but completely dislocated me from the complexity of my country
and even in terms of language i regret that mostly i dream and think in english it's not because i think of english as an outsider language in fact i think of it as one of our own languages but you know we have a three language model in india that is now being questioned and i'm against it being questioned but it's basically english hindi and your mother tongue and the point is my mother tongue is punjabi but
my parents never taught me how to write write in gurmukhi they never taught me how to speak in punjabi i can understand it but i can't speak it i can barely i can speak in hindi today because i became a reporter and i traveled all across india and i learnt the language but i mostly grew up speaking reading and writing in english and mostly knowing jane austen over let's face it the indian novels you asked me about i had read every ended blatant
and i hadn't read an indian novelist when i went to school how do you feel when you read kipling is it some kind of offense like oh these these colonial bastards or is it well this was just a thing if it's time or i can't enjoy this anymore or you you side with it in some way or what's your gut emotional reaction i'm able to separate uh writings from their time i know this is a politically incorrect thing to say but it's like i
don't look at you know noddy and gollywalk and lighten and say oh my god how racist i probably should i probably would if i were a child growing up today but because we in turn it's the same for kipling like all of us knew the poem if by heart by rote we could all recite it we all and we learned it in this decontextualized way a lot of our education was completely decontextual right so we would just read
it as a bunch of words often times we didn't know what they stood for what they represented you know we had no idea and because we imbibed them in a decontextualized way they became part of their more childhood associations rather than illustrations of colonization and of course yes you know words matter language matters context matters but i'm i don't know i'm i'm able to separate timing and literature i'm able to like i
would never enjoy austin today but hell bridgeton is the most watched series on netflix i haven't watched it because i don't want to watch like women forcing themselves into core sets looking for an ideal man but why is most of the world watching it so you know i think there's something to be said about entertainment for its own sake memory nostalgia words that formed you shaped you that you could have a good laugh at not take too seriously
for lack of a better word i'll refer to anglo-american liberalism do you think anglo-american liberalism has a future in india say the views of someone like ramachandra guha who is not a hindu nationalist broadly liberal maybe in the 1990s people expected anglo-american liberalism would become much stronger in india as the country globalized it doesn't seem that's happened what does the future look like for that strand of
thought in india i mean i think that strand of thought needs to be uh more open about other strands of thought ram gohar is a friend and somebody who's whose readings and writings i've learned you know a lot from i've sort of read him all my life i read every book that he that he writes i probably would be described in the same way i don't think of myself as that but if you ask somebody uh on maybe you know in india randomly they'd
classify me as that i suspect as an anglo-american deracinated ruthless uh sort of urban liberal who doesn't know anything about her own culture i'm actually trying uh and journalism has enabled that in me tyler to to to to learn more to educate myself to realize that uh simple minded ideas i had of what's progressive what works let's take religion i'm an agnostic i don't believe in any institutionalized religion many anglo
whatever americanized liberals or western liberals don't there's a neheruvian idea for separation between state and religion it doesn't work this is a country where religion overlaps into culture every single day every single moment it's an untidy overlapping and i think we've got to learn uh to return to the language of faith uh to spread uh and protect indian pluralism rather than say hey i don't believe in any religion and somehow
expect people to understand what i'm saying i need a language of mass communication until the indian liberal finds that language whether it's ram guha or whether it's barkhadat or whether it's somebody else we will be destined to fail in this new india in communicating a message to a larger number of our countrymates why is the intelligentsia so prominent in bengal and why historically have those individuals been so left-wing
well not so tell me i mean isn't that true for america as well i've often wondered about this why is there a coincidence between certain professions certain spaces and being left and i don't know i don't know the answer to that i think it's because intelligentsia grows up questioning structures of power and conformity and social norms and therefore you end up being positioned on the left of any establishment that you're questioning
that would be my best guess that said one of the things that i think i didn't speak about when i spoke about the intelligentsia is that we are felled by dogma and one of my quarrels with the indian intelligentsia or sections of it is its failure to to recognize and respect the sentimentalism around institutes of the state uh the military the flag our veterans um our iran you know this whole idea that we are all citizens of the world yes i'm
also a product of a globalized world but we again you know don't understand that there is a constitutional patriotism is what we should be advocating instead of saying oh we're all one world and so i guess what i'm saying is the intelligence and the left probably coincide because of this need to question all accepted norms but i think that if you want to communicate with a larger section of people outside
of your echo chambers you need to be able to pick up the language of some of these norms the ones you relate to and convert them into idioms of modern expression why do you think alcohol drinking has stayed at such low levels in india for so long but now it's rising of course will it eventually converge to western levels of alcohol drinking [Music] has it declined i mean do you have numbers that show that i i don't know i
mean illicit liquor is a huge huge uh it's growing but if you go back 30 40 years ago it seems there's much less alcohol being consumed in india than saying in england you know the former colonial master or america again it's a cultural sort of thing right we don't have the idea for example of a neighborhood pub we don't have the concept of people dropping off after work to get a drink with their workmates um we still have judgments of
women drinking um we are we are a society that is in um a sort of churning a moment of churn uh where where many traditional families have sent their kids for example abroad uh to study where there will be this sort of exposure to different cultures but they'll still be mindful of it when they come back home they may not smoke or drink in front of their elderly family members you know so it's culturally very very different but i do see our cities
are changing i also see a kind of illicit liquor consumption um in in rural india that is extremely uh entrenched and often results in massive tragedies you know because of spurious liquor and so on so and i completely disagree by the way with prohibition uh and and this has led to many uh feminist debates because there are states bihar being one of them uh that actually outlawed alcohol by making the argument
that it led to greater domestic violence um at home and there were women who supported this because they would their men would go and get drunk and come back and and be violent with them but i do not think that restricting anything and pushing it underground is the answer um i do think that there are cultural sort of conformities associated with how you drink where you drink uh do you drink with family do women drink and
maybe that leads to that gap between how the west looks at alcohol and how we do now you're on twitter how is indian twitter different from say usa twitter i don't think it's different i think everywhere trolling is a organized well-oiled machine it can be either political or paid it targets women in a language that it spares men on it is caught in the polarities of right and left it's a whole lot of noise you learn the hard way to not read your
mentions or to speed read them you grow a really thick skin and you use it for what it's good for it's good for a few things it it it connects you to people across continents and cultures it as if you're a journalist and you're interested in being exposed to a variety of thoughts it it exposes you to all of that and it helps you find interesting speakers for your for your programs and for your reports and sometimes you know
i i spent two years covering the pandemic it connects it creates a kind of community of very kind strangers you know we had a massive shutdown of public transport in our first lockdown and i had people from twitter saying oh do you need a place to stay here you can stay here do you need food we'll send you food do you need shows we'll send you shows and and so it's it's it's a community you have to you have to know
what to take from it but otherwise it is political as hell it is noisy as hell it is coarse as hell and it's a terrible place to be for women but say in the united states there's a considerable backlash on twitter against the possibility that elon musk will buy twitter which may very well happen is there a similar feeling in india are people to shrug their shoulders ah you know some other you know rich guy from far away
no no there's a lot of interest in musk taking over twitter india's right wing is super excited they look at twitter as this kind of work far-left platform that took trump off um and and shouldn't have by the way i'm not alone among liberal friends who think d platforming trump was wrong because can i i just don't like cancer culture and that's a whole different uh debate like you can take down specific tweets but i you know
i'm not sure that you should be platforming um people it's a very complicated space but yes the indian right-wing is super excited the indian left is extremely worried and um musk has already made his position clear that he wants a twitter that is free from the far left and the far right i mean good luck with that i think twitter um you know chomsky spoke about manufactured descent in mass media sorry manufacturer consent i think we're in
the age of manufactured dissent and i think twitter amplifies those disagreements even if they don't exist offline your own youtube channel aside which kinds of videos do you watch on youtube i watch a lot of american satirists from colbert to trevor noah i watch some of the sort of believe it or not i watch a village cooking channel out of tamil nadu because as you now know i love food and this is a community channel that is run by
by these farmers who only speak tamil but you can look at that video and it is astonishing i i and i've been thinking for a long time oh my god i have to find out who runs this channel who has done this for these farmers because it's superbly produced and it's beautifully shot and you can just look at how they're cooking they're cooking in the field and every day they cook a new dish and they sort of release
a new video and i know it's a kind of odd example to to to give but yeah i mean i watch a lot of that i watch what would be the name or search term for that just for our listeners village uh village cooking channel tamil nadu should do it okay great yeah and do you watch tik tok at all or that's just too far tick tock well it's banned right now i think because of the india china standoff it was one of the apps but i don't watch i used to scroll
i watch tik tok videos when they're shared on twitter or instagram i'm totally off facebook i use instagram because i'm in a broadcasting industry otherwise the sort of vanity of it and the sort of filtered reality of it really gets to me so actually of all the platforms i still find youtube and twitter the most productive because there's actually something to engage with in terms of content everything else is one big
sort of vanity parade in some ways should india ban tiktok no no i'm i'm not a fan of of the chinese capture of the indian markets and it really for example every diwali it really bothers me i grew up lighting uh sort of you know potter-made diyas and now you see the sort of cheap plastic that the chinese have permeated our markets with so i'm not a i'm not a fan of that that that capture but tick tock isn't going to send the chinese
uh sort of who are in sitting on our territory in the high himalayas out uh and also i think banning technology is useless you can always create a vpn and get tick-tock anyway so it's it it's not even something that works why do you think whatsapp has proven so especially popular in india two reasons i think for most people it is um the way we talk now uh no one smses no one does text messages anymore no one
emails anymore uh you can share pictures videos and have entire conversations but i think it's also a vehicle of fake news and it is used as that by a multitude of of players so anytime you want to sort of set spread
negativity it's you know as good as and useful as it is it is the most effective vehicle of fake news uh and we have to in india at least i don't know how what it's like in other countries and you've got these crazy i for example had a
whatsapp forward sent to me about me which said that i my politics was explained by the fact that i had been married three times to three muslim men i've never been married um and and this explained the fact that i believed in a pluralistic india because i and they made up names of these men and this was on a whatsapp forward that got circulated so heavily that it was forwarded to me as well so whatsapp is is is uh
almost like a political or a weaponized vehicle of fake news now but i use it all the time with friends it's just an easier non-intrusive way of talking barca dot it's been wonderful chatting with you again her new book is humans of
covid to helen back thank you tyler thank you for having me and please do come to delhi so i can prove that we are the food capital of india if not the world i am coming to northern india this august so we'll see thank you