 Hello everyone and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I'm chatting with Barkha 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 COVID to hell and back. Barkha, 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 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. These are valid questions. Many of them are raised by 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 a 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? I would say just don't go to any one source. And I think that a lot of Indians would say that the more diverse your sources are, that would perhaps be more representative. But we would also urge you to read and watch and listen to us. I think there's also a sense that there have been some great foreign correspondence. And I'd like to name two who have done stellar work on India. Ellen Barry of the New York Times and Annie Gowen of the Washington Post both made it a point to do very, very textured reportage out of India. And then 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 have so many questions about India for you. In your earlier book, The Sun Quiet 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 my that my nation has a much more progressive set of laws around abortion and the right to legal and safe abortion than the Americans might have soon. So that's just an illustration of what I mean by complexity. You know, when I studied 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. That's it. Of course, 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 in very sort of insidious everyday way. You know, the big things, right? You know about the public spaces are safe for not safe for women. We had the infamous a near by gang rape in on in Delhi, the capital of India 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 that really get under my skin. The way roles at home are gendered. 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. You'll see this advertisement where there's this perfectly turned out woman and, you know, not a hair out of place, a perfect shining, shiny string of pearls, a perfectly crisp sari or pantsuit, ringing 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 a 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 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 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 with that. And the reasons for that are manifold. Some relate to the fact that there are some societies, for example, in the southern state of Kerala that are matriarchal, where the very organization of society at the home itself, and it all keeps coming back to home. That settles a lot of your other affiliated freedoms. So there is the organization of many of these societies as matriarchal. The literacy and education rates are higher. Local units of governance have in fact performed better. We saw this even in the COVID management across the board in the south. So I think a combination of culture and governance, the fact that there's been more investment on healthcare, on reproductive rights, all of this has led to, I would say, the south being a better place for women than the north. And I say this as 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. I think this is, so this is an interesting question. When India moved to strike down the practice of triple talak, which I'll just explain simply what the practice of a Muslim man being able to divorce his wife by simply saying the words talak three times. I was all for that change. And I am one of those who actually as a progressive would typically support a uniform family law. Just to explain if that's got too complicated, we do allow personal laws for our religious minorities, which means that triple talak was supported by some Muslim groups with the argument that it was part of their personal law. I totally opposed 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 inequality. I believe all the orthodoxies of all faiths, military 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 family law that is agnostic of religious belief. I am not among those liberals on the left if India who believe that faiths must be allowed to practice their own sort of personal laws because I do believe that those military 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 in most 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 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 for there being a sort of lack of enthusiasm for child-rearing? Not true. This has been a decades-old fight to get India's population under control and it is finally starting to yield results, which is why I actually disagree with 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 certainly don't. We also have the added issue of female fetusite, 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 on a boy child. So I think what you're dealing with when you quoted those numbers, Tyler, is actually the success of India's what is called its family planning program, 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 of that figure. Will India eventually become under-populated 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? I think we have a problem of, I think we, okay, so we've often been told our people, our demographics are our dividend and not our weakness. I think both of those narratives are somewhat simplistic. I don't think we're ever going to go the China way where China is now having to reverse its one-child policy and I think the reason that we're never going to go the China way is because we were never up until this point 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 punishments for people who have more than X number of children and I hope we continue to follow the progressive approach to family planning and population management that we have where people on their own are understanding that they should not be adding certainly more than two children to the demographics and so no, I don't think we're going to ever be in that position 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 to actually have a kind of enforced system of family planning 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 let's say contraception, right well access to contraception and sometimes the right to it as well in relationships that are not fully equal in the bedroom. 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 the worsening relations or the othering as it were of communities that are not your own is the ghettoization of how people live. So for example you know if there were neighborhoods where people live cheek by jowl that still happens of course in many cities but it also happens less than it used to and that is true. We are seeing a kind of Muslim quarter and 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 intermingling of living in the same housing societies or neighborhoods participating in each other's festivals as opposed to just tolerating them those are the structural changes or shifts that we are witnessing it's also true that it is tougher for a person from a religious minority in particular an Indian Muslim to get a house as easily as a non-Muslim and I think I would be lying if I did not acknowledge that and also the last point is of interfaith marriages or interfaith love 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 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 sort of women also targeted all the time if they choose to marry Hindus this is not helped by the fact that you 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 I don't know if I remember my data correctly but I think less than 5% of Indians actually marry outside of their own communities and 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 those are the structural reasons the fact that people don't love or have relationships outside of their community don't live enough with people of diverse faiths and don't participate in each other's lives 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 troops during religious sort of prayers 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 Mandir Masjid Gurdwara which is all the different faiths 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 a thali is a silver tray where you get little sort of bowls of different food items and so Pew found that Hindus and Muslims when surveyed both spoke of the need for religious diversity as being a cornerstone of India so they liked the idea of this thali, India as the thali where there were different little food items but separate food items the Khichri is rice and lentils all mixed up and eaten with pickle the Khichri is that intermingling, 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 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 othering why has caste remained so strong in India? it's not supported by the state anymore you would think there are considerable incentives to marry outside your caste or have business relationships outside your caste yet as you said the rate of marriage across castes, whatever the exact number may be it's fairly low that's a surprise, right? and what has happened to cause that persistence? so I'll tell you a little story 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 caste? 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 caste was and it was their sort of way of bringing me up to be a progressive Indian and then many decades, 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 it's shameful that this practice still exists manual scavengers which in other words they literally carry the shit out of toilets that don't have water or clean our sewers and for these reasons they're often treated completely at the bottom of the caste hierarchy and the woman Bhavidevi who had been gang raped she had been working with a government program to stop child marriages in her village and among the men who raped her was the father of a one year old child who she had been trying to stop from being married after she complained she was made to live on the outskirts of her village not allowed access to the village well and 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 privilege of sorts 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 caste structures that has been 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 against for centuries the problem is Tyler that now we have everybody wanting a slice 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 classes who say 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 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 it's like people who say 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 discreet break if you look say at the number of Indian CEOs in Silicon Valley who also have done well it seems fundamentally different from say 20 years ago what accounts for that well I actually think that those who are today leading the big companies whether it's I don't know let's take some of the Pichai of Google or any other sort of big tech 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 this proof of concept right 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 does your audience I think this proof of concept I think there have been people who've proven a mark we've long been described in America as a model minority community a lot of it has to do with our excellent subsidized institutes of higher education if you were to look at the background of most of these CEOs who are today leading conglomerates out of the west most of them would have studied institutes like the Indian Institute of Management or the Indian Institute of Technology the IIT or the IIMs these are very very difficult to get into and they are subsidized which means that you don't have to be rich or wealthy to actually be able to study at them so they really drew the best minds and literally I mean almost everybody who's making global headlines today has studied at one of these institutes and I think it speaks to one of the success stories something that India got really right which is very specialized highly skilled institutes of technical learning 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 an avowedly 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 your branded right is high quality in some way and does that interact with cast in some manner that there is in 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 elite actually I think that there is some merit in keeping society competitive and aspiring and pushing people to do better and better as long as everybody there's a level playing field to access those centers of excellence and the fact is that many of these these with kids as they were once called have actually studied at government schools or what are called kinder systems and so on all of them have gone to posh what are called private schools in the west and what are called public schools in India so I do think that to create a competitively drawn elite that is elite not because of what they earned but because of how well they did in exams maybe an old fashioned idea but it's one that I actually support and 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 hardworking we've been told 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 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 who are Dalits who are at the bottom of the caste 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 to the village well but if they want to marry so so to speak above their caste 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 you 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 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 so I think you're you're seeing something similar here where an educated elite person will not face the kind of discrimination that Bhavidevi 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 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 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 Brahmins if I look at the top CEOs outside of India say in Silicon Valley it seems most of them are Brahmins why that difference that's I know that Silicon Valley has been grappling with questions around caste discrimination I know California in particular has I actually know one of one of the women who first raised it wrote a whole book about about growing up 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 socioeconomic 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 let's say a leather skin tanner or your job is to cremate bodies I'm giving you professions that you know are typically so called lower caste you're not going to earn a bunch of money to educate your children to do something else or it will be tougher for you and therefore that coincidence that you point out between Brahmins and success abroad possibly came from the fact that 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 outside of India is diminished compared to other caste 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 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 on value Brahmins 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 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 is true then you're going to have to suck up the generalizations and the caricatures that aren't so flattering 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 maybe exposure to culture among what are so called upper caste groups was more because income was higher therefore there was a luxury of also being able to be exposed to classical music and classical dance all of these things are things that flow from how society has treated you I can't answer for why it would play out differently for let's say the white American male 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 I can accept it I'll tell you why there's so many different kinds of it right I think the thing about this country and in some ways an unlikely country in terms of not having a singular organizing principle to it in terms of religion or language but just a broad idea it is so diverse the best thing about us is our diversity and that diversity is reflective in food I mean I haven't eaten so many cuisines within my country at 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 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 the one thing we can never be accused of is being bland neither our food nor our people and there's a lot of obviously experimentation with spice and flavor and the palate has just now I don't know become that there's no notion of 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 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 is 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 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 that there are go downs full food corporation of India which is a government run sort of manager as it were of grains in the country every year you'll see these pictures coming out of India which will show you a mountain of underutilized wheat that has rotted that there's a surplus there's underutilized mound it has rotted there are two problems 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 unprecedented protest by farmers of North India on the outskirts of India's capital one that got global attention because the Modi government moved to to reform or that was the word they used and allow private players to come into this market I don't know enough to say what is better and what is worse there has been the suggestion that this minimum support price system has created a mismatch between demand and supply that they 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 often glut of grain in a country where so many millions are still poor and therefore there is obviously something structurally wrong that doesn't contradict the fact that there is plentiful variety of vegetables it is just whether those vegetables actually manage to reach the markets in such a way fair price for the farmer let's say you had to pick a single Indian city or region to eat 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 it would be Delhi because one I'm a connoisseur or a devourer as it were or a glutton when it comes to street food and I think that there is no food no street food better in the world than in Delhi if you go to the older quarters in a market called Chandni Chowk where you literally have rows and rows and rows and rows of shops that will give you just the best both vegetarian and non-vegetarian options but also because I think we managed to combine that street food culture with a reasonably international food scene as well as a regionally diverse food scene whereby it 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 we eat more and we care about food more we're also more unfit for that reason but it's it's true again you're drawing me into essentialism that I disavowed myself from but culturally 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 picked Delhi I would pick Delhi because I think it does everything it does the posh it does the accessible affordable it does the street food 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 can't dismiss either yeah you can't dismiss any of these cities but 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 in 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 Radh Darbadi which I read when I was in school which is one of my very favorite books and I'm thinking hard I don't read a lot of fiction in India I don't I tend to brought up on Enid Blightens and Amar Chitra Katha 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 I know it's not the answer you were looking for but really it was how much we've learned from Amar Chitra Katha cannot be discounted the other book that comes to mind is English August which is again made into a film later it's also a stellar book and I'm thinking Indian novel oh I'm reading a very interesting book right now by the first Indian novelist Gitanjri Shree 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 my Hindi 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 widow sort of shunned by her family overlooked and how she discovers her zest for life again and it is an extremely compelling 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 Masan 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 is set against the backdrop of the Ghats of the Ganga river where Hindus from all across the country bring those who have died to be cremated and it is about the community that actually performs these last rites and the story of a young man who does this for a living and who also falls in love outside of his caste and therefore it actually is at the intersection of many of the things we've been speaking about it is not, it's protagonist went on to become a big Bollywood star but when the film came out 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's a great question and I think it didn't make me a better reporter because my liberal arts education gave me a way with words gave me a certain sort of confidence and a set of communication skills but I was totally deracinated I was totally rootless I grew up in a bubble I am what the right wing of India today disparagingly calls the Khan market gang Khan market refers to upmarket sort of bazaar of deli and it's used as a metaphor for a certain kind of liberal 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 there is truth in the fact that those three years studying literature at St. Stephen's 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 am against it being questioned but it's basically English Hindi and your mother tongue in Punjabi but my parents never taught me how to write in Burmuki they never taught me how to speak in Punjabi I can understand it but I can't speak it I can speak in Hindi today because I became a reporter and I traveled all across India and I learned 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 end of Blighton and I hadn't read the novelist when I went to school how do you feel when you read Kipling is it a kind of a fence like these colonial bastards or is it well this was just a thing of its time or I can't enjoy this anymore or you side with it in some way or what's your gut emotional reaction I'm able to separate writings from their time I know this is a politically incorrect thing to say but it's like I don't look at naughty and gollywog and Blighton 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 so we would just read it as a bunch of words oftentimes we didn't know what they stood for what they represented we had no idea and because we tried them in a decontextualized way they became part of they're more childhood associations rather than illustrations of colonization and of course yes words matter, language matters context matters but I'm I don't know I'm able to separate timing and literature I'm able to like I would never enjoy Austin today but hell Bridgerton is the most watched series on Netflix I don't want to watch like women forcing themselves into corsets 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 form 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 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 more open about other strands of thought Ram Guha is a friend who's reading and writing I've learnt a lot from I've sort of read him all my life I read every book 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 in India randomly they classify me as that I suspect as an Anglo-American deracinated ruthless sort of urban liberal who doesn't know anything about her own culture I'm actually trying journalism has enabled that in me Tyler to to learn more to educate myself to realize that simple minded ideas I had of what's progressive, what works let's take religion I'm agnostic I don't believe in any institutionalized religion many Anglo whatever Americanized liberals or Western liberals don't there's a Nehruvian idea of a 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 to return to the language of faith to spread 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 and till the Indian liberal finds that language whether it's Ram Guha or whether it's Barkha Datva 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 country mates 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 filled by dogma I'm one of my quarrels with the Indian intelligentsia or sections of it is it's failure to recognize and respect the sentimentalism around institutes of the state the country the flag our veterans our anthem this whole idea that we are all citizens of the world yes I'm also a product of a globalized world but we again 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 intelligentsia on 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 has it declined I mean do you have numbers that show that I don't know I mean illicit liquor is a huge huge it's growing but if you go back 30-40 years ago it seems there's much less alcohol being consumed in India than say in England 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 we still have judgments of women drinking we are a society that is in a sort of churning a moment of churn where many traditional families have sent their kids for example abroad 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 in rural India that is extremely 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 and this has led to many feminist debates because there are states Bihar being one of them that actually outlawed alcohol by making the argument that it led to domestic violence at home and there were women who supported this because their men would go and get drunk and come back and be violent with them but I do not think that restricting anything and pushing it underground is the answer I do think that there are cultural sort of conformities associated with how you drink, where you drink 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 I think everywhere trolling is an 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 learn to read you grow a really thick skin and you use it for what it's good for it's good for a few things it connects you to people across continents and cultures if you're a journalist and you're interested in being exposed to a variety of thoughts it exposes you to all of that and it helps you find interesting speakers for your programs and for your reports and sometimes I spent two years covering the pandemic it creates a kind of community it's a community it's a community you have to know what to take from it but otherwise it is political as hell it is noisy as hell it is course as hell and it's a terrible place to be for women I would say in the united states there's a considerable backlash on twitter against the possibility that Elon musk will buy twitter which may vary but it's a community it's a community that Elon musk will buy twitter which may very well happen is there a similar feeling in India or people that shrug their shoulders some other 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 woke far left platform that took trump off and shouldn't have by the way I'm not alone among liberal friends who think forming trump was wrong because I just don't like cancel culture and that's a whole different debate like you can take down specific tweets but I'm not sure that you should be deep black forming people it's a very complicated space but yes the indian right wing is super excited the indian left is extremely worried and 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 you know chomsky spoke about manufacture descent in mass media sorry manufacture consent I think we're in the age of manufacture descent 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 cobert to trevon noir 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 these farmers who only speak Tamil but you can look at that video and it is astonishing 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 release a new video and I know it's a kind of odd example to give but yeah I mean I watch a lot of that what would be the name or search term for that just for our listeners village cooking channel Tamil Nadu should do it okay great and do you watch tiktok at all that's just too far tiktok 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 use to scroll I watch tiktok 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 not a fan of the Chinese capture of the Indian markets and it really for example every Diwali it really bothers me I grew up lighting sort of you know Potter made Diaz and now you see the sort of cheap plastic that the Chinese have created our markets with so I'm not a fan of that capture but tiktok isn't going to send the Chinese sort of who are sitting on our territory in the high Himalayas out and also I think banning technology is useless you can always create a VPN and get tiktok anyway so 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 the way we talk now no one SMS's no one does text messages anymore no one emails anymore 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 players so anytime you want to sort of spread negativity it's you know as good as and useful as it is the most effective vehicle of fake news and we have to in India at least I don't know 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 my politics was explained by the fact that I had been married three times to three Muslim men I've never been married and this explained the fact that I believed in a pluralistic India because 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 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-inclusive way of talking Barkha 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 it would be great ok thank you take care