YouSaid · the spoken record

Barkha Dutt

lines on the record: 54
first: 2022-06-29
most recent: 2022-06-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“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.”
2022-06-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Barkha Dutt on the Nuances of Indian Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Two reasons. I think for most people it is the way we talk now. No one SMSs, 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 as good and useful as it is. It is the most effective vehicle of fake news. 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. 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 almost like a political or a weaponized vehicle of fake news now.”
2022-06-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Barkha Dutt on the Nuances of Indian Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no. I'm not a fan of the Chinese capture of the Indian markets. For example, every Diwali, it really bothers me. I grew up lighting sort of portermade dias, and now you see the sort of cheap plastic that the Chinese have permeated 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. It's not even something that works.”
2022-06-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Barkha Dutt on the Nuances of Indian Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 used to scroll, I watched 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.”
2022-06-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Barkha Dutt on the Nuances of Indian Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I watch a lot of American satirists from Cobert to Trevanoir 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 sort of 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 I watch all of this”
2022-06-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Barkha Dutt on the Nuances of Indian Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 de-platforming 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 de-platforming 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 manufactured consent. I think we're in the age of manufactured descent. And I think Twitter amplifies those disagreements, even if they don't exist offline.”
2022-06-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Barkha Dutt on the Nuances of Indian Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2022-06-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Barkha Dutt on the Nuances of Indian Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think it's different. 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 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 spend two years covering the pandemic. 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 it's a community.”
2022-06-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Barkha Dutt on the Nuances of Indian Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It led to greater 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, 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.”
2022-06-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Barkha Dutt on the Nuances of Indian Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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 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. 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.”
2022-06-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Barkha Dutt on the Nuances of Indian Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 intelligency 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.”
2022-06-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Barkha Dutt on the Nuances of Indian Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, 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 intelligence here 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 recognize and respect the sentimentalism around institutes of the state, the military, the flag, our veterans, our anthem, you know, this whole idea that we are all citizens.”
2022-06-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Barkha Dutt on the Nuances of Indian Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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.”
2022-06-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Barkha Dutt on the Nuances of Indian Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think that strand of thought needs to be more open about other strands of thought. Ram Goha is a friend and somebody whose readings and writings I've learned 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 maybe in India randomly, they'd classify me as that I suspect as an Anglo-American de-rasinated, ruthless sort of urban liberal who doesn't know anything about her own culture. I'm actually trying, and journalism has enabled that in me, Tyler, 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.”
2022-06-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Barkha Dutt on the Nuances of Indian Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because I don't want to watch women forcing themselves into course 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 can have a good laugh at, not take too seriously.”
2022-06-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Barkha Dutt on the Nuances of Indian Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 blighted and say, oh my God, how racist I probably should, I probably would if I were a child growing up today. It's the same for Kipling. Like all of us knew the poem if by heart, by wrote, we could all recite it 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. Oftentimes we didn't know what they stood for, what they represented. We had no idea. And because we imbied them in a decontextualized way, they're both childhood associations rather than illustrations of colonization. And of course, yes, you know, words matter, language matters, context matters, but I don't know. I am able to separate timing and literature. Like, I would never enjoy Austin today. But hell, Bridgeton is the most watch series on Netflix I haven't watched.”
2022-06-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Barkha Dutt on the Nuances of Indian Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a great question, and I think it didn't make me a better reporter. I think my liberal arts education gave me away with words, gave me a certain confidence and a set of communication skills. But I was totally deracinated. I was totally ruthless. 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 Delhi 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”
2022-06-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Barkha Dutt on the Nuances of Indian Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Masan is set in Varanasi and it is today the Prime Minister's constituency in Uttar Pradesh, our most populous 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 hearts 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. Its protagonist went on to become a big Bollywood star but when the film came out it had a kind of arthouse cast. It was very sort of low-key and it's a really excellent recommended watch.”
2022-06-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Barkha Dutt on the Nuances of Indian Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By the first Indian novelist Gitanjri Shri Shri Shri Shri Shri 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 by 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.”
2022-06-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Barkha Dutt on the Nuances of Indian Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ah, that is an interesting question. There was a novel on the Indian bureaucracy and political system called Radh Darbari, 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 was brought up on Enid Blyton's and Amar Chitra Katha comics. So Amachitra Katha comics, I don't know if comics count as 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 it was how much we've learned from Amachitra Katha 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. I'm thinking Indian novels. Oh, I'm reading a very interesting book right now.”
2022-06-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Barkha Dutt on the Nuances of Indian Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you can't dismiss any of these cities, but I guess upgrading them in terms of the sheer variety of options. And I just think that the variety of options, so when the next time you're in Delhi, maybe I can prove my point.”
2022-06-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Barkha Dutt on the Nuances of Indian Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About 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 it's just steeped in the North Indian culture. And 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.”
2022-06-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Barkha Dutt on the Nuances of Indian Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 street food better in the world than in Delhi, especially if you go to the older quarters in a market called Chandi Chalk, where you literally have rows and rows and rows and rows of shops that will give you just the best vegetarian and non-vegetarian options, but also because I think we've managed to combine that straightforward culture with reasonably international food sane 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 to this 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 true. I mean, again, you know, you're drawing me into essentialisms that I had.”
2022-06-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Barkha Dutt on the Nuances of Indian Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the outskirts of India's capital, one that got global attention because the Modi government moved 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 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 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 that is a fair price for the farmer.”
2022-06-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Barkha Dutt on the Nuances of Indian Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it can be because 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 people still go hungry, that there are go downs full food corporation of India, which is the 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 rocked it, that there's a surplus, there's an underutilized mount, 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.”
2022-06-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Barkha Dutt on the Nuances of Indian Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. As I said, that's one compliment I'm happy to take as a generalized truth about my nation.”
2022-06-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Barkha Dutt on the Nuances of Indian Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That essentialism I can accept. But accept it. I'll tell you why. Because 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 reflected in food. I mean, I haven't eaten so many cuisines within my country. And I'm 50 and I haven't. 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 and neither our food nor our people. And there's a lot of sort of obviously experimentation with spice and with flavor.”
2022-06-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Barkha Dutt on the Nuances of Indian Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Able to be exposed to classical music and classical dance. You know, 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. But 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.”
2022-06-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Barkha Dutt on the Nuances of Indian Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Abin, I guess my hesitation in answering your question is that I hate essentialism. It's the same way that 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 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 so-called upper caste groups was more because income was higher. Therefore, there was a luxury of, let's say, being all”
2022-06-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Barkha Dutt on the Nuances of Indian Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To earn a bunch of money to educate your children to do something else, or it'll 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, more CEOs are men. 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 think it was a series of factors about access to opportunity and resources and education.”
2022-06-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Barkha Dutt on the Nuances of Indian Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know that Silicon Valley has been grappling with questions around a caste discrimination. I know California in particular has, I actually know one of the women who first raised it, wrote a whole book about Ayashikadat about growing up as a Dalit and then living like as a Dalit in America. 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 are typically so-called lower castes, right? You're not going to”
2022-06-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Barkha Dutt on the Nuances of Indian Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's an interesting question, and I don't know that this is a simple answer to it because 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 there's a level playing field to access those centers of excellence. And the fact is that many of these whiz kids, as they were once called, have actually studied at government schools or what are called Kendriya Vidyale systems and so on. Not 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.”
2022-06-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Barkha Dutt on the Nuances of Indian Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 do draw 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.”
2022-06-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Barkha Dutt on the Nuances of Indian Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I actually think that those who are today leading the big companies, whether it's, I don't know, let's take Sunday Pachai 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 of because there's 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, you know, 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 at institutes like”
2022-06-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Barkha Dutt on the Nuances of Indian Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Entrent 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, 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.”
2022-06-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Barkha Dutt on the Nuances of Indian Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 castes and scheduled tribes, which have traditionally been discriminated 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 institutes that are run and managed by government. So you have something called the OBCs, the other backward classes, who say, 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 caste. You have just this.”
2022-06-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Barkha Dutt on the Nuances of Indian Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 who raped her was the father of a one-year-old child whom 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. 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? There has been. In the cities you will see less and less of this kind of discrimination of the kind that I have just described.”
2022-06-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Barkha Dutt on the Nuances of Indian Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. 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 then work into leather. It's shameful that this practice still exists. Manual scavengers, which in other words, 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 completely at the bottom of the cast hierarchy.”
2022-06-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Barkha Dutt on the Nuances of Indian Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Done by Pew reinforce 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.”
2022-06-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Barkha Dutt on the Nuances of Indian Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 media machine gun, but Amandir Majj 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...”
2022-06-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Barkha Dutt on the Nuances of Indian Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 sort of technology hubs, we've had reports of a Muslim family that attacked a Hindu man for marrying a Muslim woman. in reverse we see Muslim 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 systems of traditional occupation that you're born into is woefully low. I don't know if I remember my data.”
2022-06-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Barkha Dutt on the Nuances of Indian Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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”
2022-06-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Barkha Dutt on the Nuances of Indian Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 access to contraception and sometimes the right to it as well in relationships that are not fully equal in the bedroom.”
2022-06-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Barkha Dutt on the Nuances of Indian Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've often been told our people, our demographics, 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 Indra 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 I”
2022-06-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Barkha Dutt on the Nuances of Indian Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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 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.”
2022-06-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Barkha Dutt on the Nuances of Indian Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 has finally starting to yield results, which is why”
2022-06-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Barkha Dutt on the Nuances of Indian Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For inequality, I believe orthodoxies of all faiths militate against the rights of women, all faiths. And therefore, I would, in another context,”
2022-06-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Barkha Dutt on the Nuances of Indian Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I don't know. So, this is an interesting question when India moved to strike down the practice of triple talak, which I'll just explain simply, was 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 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.”
2022-06-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Barkha Dutt on the Nuances of Indian Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 and 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 is a woman who actually lives and has grown up in North India.”
2022-06-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Barkha Dutt on the Nuances of Indian Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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 others some really, really grave issues that we fight literally every day, every hour of our lives.”
2022-06-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Barkha Dutt on the Nuances of Indian Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source