[CTQ Smartcast] Staying Current, Staying Relevant - Lessons from an author-columnist-consultant
Aashish Chandorkar is a public policy analyst and author of The Fadnavis Years. He also heads a management consulting business for a French multinational. But more than that he is a master of gathering info, networking and building social capital through the things you do and the things that interest you.
In this Smartcast CTQ’s Ramanand and Harish tap into Aashish’s brain to understand what works when you are trying to carve out your own presence in an outside world that has little patience and is quick to move on to the next shiny-new-thing.
Listen to his tips on building social capital, gaining knowledge, being future-ready, imbibing the diversity you are surrounded with, and the future relevance of current educational courses, forms of communication and skills.
Read Aashish’s picks for his favourite books, movies, and more in his Curious Case file.
You can follow Aashish on Twitter.
READ THE TRANSCRIPT OF THIS EPISODE
[Start of Transcript]
[00:00:00]
Aashish Chandorkar: In my view, you should not use social media as a tool for validation. The validation really comes from the whole of what you do in your own life and some of it may only be visible to you. The moment you start making everything visible to the world, and then seek their opinion or their validation or their approval of your thoughts, etc. I think that is where the problem lies.
Ramanand: Welcome to this Choose to Thinq Smartcast. Today we have someone who describes himself as a public policy analyst. He's also an author based in Pune. So, you'll hear a lot of words starting with ‘P’ in this conversation. He also helps run our management consulting business for a French multinational. Though he is known for politics, policy, and poha, today we are going to talk a little bit about what makes Aashish Chandorkar so prolific in various themes. In fact, Aashish is someone that we met about a decade ago. We were in fact all working on the same floor. Aashish has grown on from there to do several things.
We want to get a peek behind the scenes as to what makes Aashish tick. Aashish, welcome to this CTQ Smartcast.
Aashish Chandorkar: Thank you, Ramanand and thank you Harish for having me.
Ramanand: Tell us a little bit about how, if you look back at the last decade especially, you've carved out different personas, in some sense. You found some element of compartmentalization. Looking back, what made you embrace these channels? Was it very natural, or was it a very deliberate attempt, because you saw the potential of the panels and you said, this is something I must be part of?
Aashish Chandorkar: [00:02:00] I must say that it all started with my move to Pune. I moved here in 2004. Indian services industry, if you work in that field, basically you get fairly abstracted from the society in some way. Because your lifestyle is very attuned to, let's say, a calendar, which runs in the US or Europe, or wherever you are working, typically. Be it holidays, or be it your own lifestyle, late night calls. If you compare the lives that we have from the previous generation of our parents, our life has been fairly different, at least in the initial parts of our career, who have worked in the services industry. And in fact, some of what we were doing probably couldn't even be explained to our parents or our relatives. People don't understand that I'm in a call and please do not call me or please do not SMS me or disturb me. Those kinds of things.
Life was in the same vein, even for me, it was fairly monotonous and fairly unidirectional until I came to Pune. The good thing was that in the first 3-4 years, obviously, I was a stranger to the city, didn't know much about the history, etc. But then Twitter happened in 2008-09. Through that I met a lot of very interesting folks in the initial years. I think what went right for me was that I actually met a lot of people face to face very early on, like when this was not very popular. People used to talk about tweetups, which used to be like a rarity. There used to be big events called tweetups, etc. I got down to meeting several folks very early on, and that really helped me. Firstly, to understand that there's a lot to know, even just around me.
If I look at Pune as a city, I live in a part of the city where probably a very historic battle was fought in 1817, just over 200 years ago, where the British took control over India, [00:04:00] around that time, defeating the Marathas in the third war. The battles started in 1817, ended 1818. The point is that some of those things were really fascinating. One thing led to another, I met more folks with a lot of interest in science and history, in geography. That really helped me rethink that there's more to life than doing 10 p.m. calls, and then 7 a.m. call followed by a 7 a.m. call.
So, thankfully, there was also a time in between where I did have some time at hand because of some circumstantial situations in the work profile where I was traveling, and I had a fairly easy few months, let's say, where I could really explore some of this. So it all fell in place naturally, but I would credit this to Twitter and of course, I carried from there. I actually then thought that I should read more, understand more, spend more time and then of course, the whole public policy thing I started participating in after a couple of years. It was a chance occurrence.
But once you really think about it very hard, you guys are prime examples, you were working in a corporate situation yourself. And then you went on to carve a niche, a very important niche for yourself, which a lot of people would not have thought about. So I think in that sense, a lot of examples were there around me also. It was quite fascinating and that led me to thinking that I should do something else also. Not just that I should stop working, which I couldn't do unlike you guys, but not as much of a risk taker, I must say. But the fact was that it helped me broaden my horizons. It's been a very fulfilling journey, I would say the last seven, eight years.
Ramanand: While we're on this topic of different styles of how careers have changed. In fact, it's probably even not the right word to use in the singular, because I think a lot of us [00:06:00] now can legitimately be said to be pursuing different interests in a blended sort of fashion. It is not the old fashioned words like balance, or 9 to 5, 5 to 9, it's all one big blend. I think in the last six months, a lot of people are experiencing that first-hand as well in a way that a lot of you and your like have managed to do. So, talk us through living this blended lifestyle, in some sense, wherein you could be doing something related to say, thinking about public policy, that does happen occasionally between 9 to 5. And in a similar way, what you do which is considered your LinkedIn day job, also happens outside that time. What is it like, is this the way things will be? Or are you an outlier?
Aashish Chandorkar: Very good point, Ramanand. We think about our careers in a very unidirectional way, where concepts like work life balance, 9 to 5 job, switching on, switching off, I think some of that has never been relevant, really. I mean, if you really look back on your own careers, let's say over the last 15-20 years, the fact is that all of us have done odd stuff. We have taken breaks during the day, and we've done our 2 a.m. calls. So, it's not that we were always really conscious about that. It's just that we were not accepting of the fact that the work daily, does not have to be cut and dry data. Some of that comes from the legacy of how work life is seen in India. But the fact is that the balance actually was never there in a true sense.
The way I approach it is that you can be task oriented, and you can still devote a full time or full concentration or full focus on a given task. But the tasks need not be arrayed by, let's say, an eight-hour workday. [00:08:00] Any way if you are doing something which really necessitates you to work late in the night, then might as well take a half an hour off elsewhere, to basically just make sure that you don't lose time for yourself. What I mean to say is that, in the pursuit of a long workday, you shouldn't really cut down on other things or other hobbies, just waiting for things to happen.
If you really analyse our work styles, what happens is that because all of us probably worked 10-12 hours a day, the fact is that 3-4 hours a day, you're just doing nothing and just waiting for things to happen. Someone is supposed to send you an email, or a document is being prepared. You are doing one part of it, someone is collating it. So there are actually enough empty spaces in the day, which you can use productively, and which is what I've been focusing on, not really using blinkers to say that for eight hours, I'll do nothing else. For another four or five hours, I'd only do what I wanted to do. I think both the lives are intertwined in that sense.
I think this also helps us because I work in the consulting field, where a broad view of life is generally useful. The more you know about what's happening in the industry, policies, what's happening in different countries, best practices, stories, I think some of that is anyway professionally useful to me. As you grow in the corporate hierarchy, life becomes less task oriented, and more decision oriented or impact oriented, where you are doing stuff which is going to make a big difference. It may not take eight hours a day, but even an eight minutes a day decision can make a big difference to the context in which you're operating.
In that sense, it works well, the fact that I can then use my other interests to bring in the relevant information to my work life also is quite exciting and a unique proposition in that sense. Some of the conversations I have are quite interesting at work also because people don't expect that to come from let's say a vendor or someone who's working in an advisory capacity. [00:10:00] It's actually quite useful, I don't see that as a waste of time. I see that as a good tailwind to, like you said, to my LinkedIn job. That needs to be explored. Again, the context would be very different for different people. Not to say that everyone will fit into what I'm saying or in my definition, but at least in my definition, or in my industry, I could make that dual thing happen fairly productive.
Ramanand: Why do you think more people aren't doing what you're doing? People are still very hesitant, there is this compartmentalization by default. What explains that?
Aashish Chandorkar: Oh, absolutely. One thing, Ramanand, is that people don't realize that at least let's say people our age, or I would say 35 to 45 years’ bracket, I don't think those folks will retire in the same job or in the same industry, where they are. I think they don't realize it. Even in the next 5-10 years, the nature of the jobs can be fairly different from how we see it. Events like the pandemic may only expedite some of that transformation. In fact, a lot of people actually are in the business of giving that gyan to others, but they don't apply it to themselves. You may go and tell your clients that you should do this, you should change this way, that way. But the fact is that you don't apply it to your own life sometimes.
I think the real reason is that people don't know how to productively either monetize or get a sense of satisfaction. Let's say, for example, if I wanted to write something, but if I don't get published in a reasonably important place, then I don't get that intellectual satisfaction of having written something. It's not just about writing your own blogs, etc. So I think that gap, people don't know how to bridge sometimes. Like any profession, or like any interest, it only comes with practice, and only comes with some discipline. It's not that you can't do it. Just that people are probably not aware of those options. [00:12:00] And also because people don't take it so seriously. I actually firmly believe that if I were to work 15 more years, I may not retire from the industry that I'm working in otherwise. I will be doing something else only after 15 years.
So if I don't create a base, now, I may not have the real professional/monetization opportunities in the last five years of my career. That realization people may not have most of the time. I actually think that's a gap for most people.
Harish Kumar: Aashish, one question there. You mentioned people in the age group of 35 to 45 suffer from this? Do you think the younger folks, people who are just entering their work life, because of the fact that they have lived most of their educational career or life in these last few years, do they, in your opinion, look at things differently then?
Aashish Chandorkar: I see two differences. One is that if I compare our, let's say, the broad generation, which I mentioned, we were far too engaged and involved with that single job that we had and we used that as a leverage to practically achieve everything else in life. For us, that was the end of it all. So you had a very linear vision. Let's say, if you were in the IT industry, you knew that you had to go on site, you had to make some savings and dollars or euros or some of the currencies so as to improve your quality of life. The view was a well-defined one.
Once it got disrupted in the 2007-2008 era, when the previous crisis hit us, the global financial crisis, at that point, some of us made adjustments, others did not make adjustments. Some of them are still suffering. People who were 25 years old in 2008, may actually have lost track in 2020, in some ways. They would be doing stuff, which is much below their real potential, because they did not adjust to the reality which dawned between 2008 and 2011-12, when the world really got [00:14:00] rebalanced in a professional sense.
That tendency is a little less, I would say, in the next generation. It could be a little bit negative in a different way. We were far too involved in the jobs; the new generation seems far too detached from the jobs. They almost take it lightly, like a set of activities to be done, and then you switch off. It's almost like a polar opposite situation. But that enables them to then concentrate on other things, be it hobbies or be it learning and I think the smarter of the lot obviously know that once you complete your engineering or graduation or MBA, that is not the end of learning, that is just the end of formal education. You guys are in that business, actually. So I shouldn't be preaching to the choir here.
But the fact is that I think some of those people realize this better and are probably more invested in formally and informally addressing that skillset too, which I think our generation wasn't. I really think that a lot of us basically relied on the very thin and skeletal corporate support for upskilling ourselves, which really, companies were never interested in, because there were commercial issues and issues of losing time. Essentially, in the services industry, time is money. So, you don't want to lose time. A lot of people have really not kept up with what's happening in the world, but the previous generation, even for a negative reason that the fact that they are not as invested in their jobs may be able to do that, once a negative event, a life event strikes them. The smarter ones will probably just do it on their own. So I see that difference, and a little bit more hope for the future in an informal skill augmentation sense, which I think we missed out on.
Ramanand: In general, do you think there is a trend towards this individualization of professional work in the sense that now you have a reason to build a personal [00:16:00] brand. You take charge of your learning, upskilling. The corporate treadmill is no longer to be relied on, or it doesn't completely provide what you need. Therefore, all the other trends like blending in of other fields, like culture, for example, we've seen that play out in the West a lot, where culture bleeds into what you do. There's no strict compartmentalization. But, this individualization, consumerization, looking at yourself as an individual node, is that shaping the way a lot of these things are playing?
Aashish Chandorkar: Yes, I think so. The corporate gyms have become very crowded. The reason is when industries don't grow at a supernormal pace, like they did in the peak of globalization between 1998 and 2008, or maybe 2011 even if we extend it by a few years. That era of globalization, and the world trying to shrink is over for different reasons. Of course, this is not to say that opportunities will not exist, but the opportunities will get limited. They've already got limited due to various factors like geopolitics and the sense of different countries to be more preservationist, and look inwards, and basically ensure that their populations do not suffer on account of real or optical issues, arising out of globalization.
In that sense, the irreversibility has already set in, and a pandemic like this may actually accelerate the process, even in other areas, even outside of let's say, services, or labour movement, etc. Even for goods movement and capital movement, I think those restrictions will become even more stricter. In that sense, yes, once the corporate space shrinks, you have to just run faster on the treadmill to just stay wherever you are. It may not necessarily take you any forward, [00:18:00] just because you were running harder.
That also means that if you had a fairly linear view of your career, that after 10 years, you should achieve something, 15 years after you should achieve something, you will not get there not because you are not good. But just because that space wasn't available for whatever reason. And then, of course, in any corporate setup, like we know, it's not just about personal competence, but there's a lot of situational, exogenous factors, which also matter.
Politics, context of your industry, context of your company, for example, all of that is also very critical. And all of that is not in your hands. Just because you work harder, you can create a delta of let's say, two hours a day, that's not going to impact the outcome, because that's not in your hands. The factors which are influencing the outcome may be completely out of your control. Because that realization, or that situation is there, I would say that it is almost mandatory, or people should really step back and think about this harder, which people aren't doing probably as we discussed. People are not putting time and effort into it, in the sense that you cannot rely on the corporate context to realize your own dreams or your own potential or just do what you like to do, or stay happy with. That blend of things has to come in and the thought process at some point of time.
Ramanand: Just to build on that, a lot of these things relate to optionality earlier, it was just a career. You had someone who set the stage for you and said, walk in, walk out and do this, this, this. Increasingly there is this, as we say it, a lot of these looking at a career not as a ladder, but jungle gym [00:20:00] has been one such metaphor used, looking at it like a network. Network has played a very crucial role in preserving this optionality. How are you seeing the role of networks in the life of professionals or knowledge workers, especially?
Aashish Chandorkar: Networks play a tremendous role. People don't appreciate enough how just by staying in touch with a diverse set of people, you can improve yourself in terms of your knowledge, your worldview, your perspective on a given area. But also, you can actually use it productively in a professional sense also. For example, Twitter is a classic example.
Some of the stuff which I had no clue about, for example, Pune's history or the rich traditions and legacy of the city, where I was living in for three, four years, quite oblivious to the fact that a lot happened around me, and certainly in the city. I had no idea, but only when the network got created, and in fact, some of the social media actually was very useful in that sense, where the first set of people you knew or you followed, or you spoke to, were the ones you did not know in real life. That medium really facilitated the process of discovering people who were quite knowledgeable and experts in their own limited areas. But you wouldn't have met them otherwise, because there was no life context overlap with many of those people.
That networking personally has helped me a lot. I feel that if you really have a set of people who you can rely upon to take advice from or just pick their brains or simply just observe them, a lot of learning happens simply by observation. You don't really have to know someone in person. That is very critical. Yet again, in the corporate setup, corporates are not designed for networking. In fact, corporates are generally designed, like in the modern management theory, if you go back to the Drucker principles [00:22:00] and stuff like that, a lot of it has become a task-oriented type of a model, where you are working in a limited context.
You could be a specialized worker, you could be doing something very unique in your own right, which is fine. But that doesn't afford you the luxury of talking to different people who are not doing what you are doing. You may know tens of people who do exactly what you do, but you may know very few people who do exactly the opposite of what you are doing or something very different in a different area, even in your own industry or in your own company. Because modern corporate life was based on an assembly line type of model, and then work specialization then kind of took over from there, I think the networks have to be informal enough to really break that chain. For that, you need to take some effort. It's not going to happen on its own. But you need to figure out who the people are, who you can learn from and who you can really tap into for your other interest areas.
Ramanand: You're someone that we see as a great example of someone who's built a deliberate curiosity diet. That's what it looks to us and assembling sources of information, whether it be these informal networks, or I'm sure that the books behind you tell their tale. There's a reading habit behind it. A lot of this is expressed in what you then put up because it cannot be something which is a passing or a straight thought. It is informed from various sources. Talk to us a little bit about if you were to look at it as a curiosity diet, what goes into it? And similarly, what have you omitted over the years, excised over the years?
Aashish Chandorkar: That's an excellent point. We all will realize that ultimately there's a mental capacity in which you operate, and also a mental space in which you operate. So, there's also a life outside of learning and skilling and improvement and all of that and work. There's a personal life also. You have to be very careful [00:24:00] about what areas you dabble in, and where you show the humility of not dabbling in. Or deliberately cut down on stuff. I used to be an avid cricket buff and a Bollywood buff. But there was a time when I used to watch every movie that was released. I used to practically live in E-Square, between 2005 and 2009-10, I was practically just living in E-Square every weekend, two or three movies a week. I had to cut down on almost all of that.
I now only watch Salman Khan movies because bhai rocks, irrespective of whatever else he does in his personal life. Barring Salman Khan movies, I don't watch practically any Bollywood, except on flights sometimes where I can quickly catch up on some of the interesting stuff which is released. On cricket again, I stopped watching a lot of the Ranji trophy stuff and Zimbabwe versus Sri Lanka type match which I used to very passionately follow in earlier years. On cricket, I'm still very much glued in, but not in the sense of watching every ball that's being bowled around the world, or following it up in a live score sense. I do watch cricket and football in a very limited sense. But I do keep a track by reading. But yes, that was my first response to the time equation, focus on areas which if I was interested in, let's say, history, or economics or public policy, then let me focus there. I can only watch so many movies with that kind of diverse interests.
Even on social media, I actually stay away from things I don't understand. For example, I stay away from outrages. Social media can actually be a good concoction of self-delusion. For example, if you were always commenting on the event of the day, you may get a lot of traction by writing something completely bizarre or just basically putting fuel to the fire. Lot of people [00:26:00] actually thrive on that, because that's their validation from the society that I said something and people read it, or shared it or favorited it, or retweeted it, whatever medium you're on. I stay away from that, because it's a time sink. Outrages always exist. There's a new outrage of the day, every day. That's how social media works. If you really get into crimes, and outrages and trying to prove a point by having long debates, it doesn't lead anywhere. Again, that was also a readjustment. To some extent, I may have done that in the first few years. But I realized pretty quickly that it's okay to talk to people who you think understand the subject. But otherwise, it's okay to focus on using it as a broadcast medium to a large extent, but also to read very importantly. You don't have to prove that you're reading.
Unfortunately, on social media, if you've not posted, people don't believe it. For example, a lot of people say that I am very active on social media. Yes. But the fact is that that is because I'm actually reading a lot of stuff. I'm not writing about it. So I may only tweet 15 tweets a day, but I may have actually read 150 articles off Twitter in the given day. I don't have to prove that to anyone. Once you understand that thing, you're doing it for yourself, and not to make a point to the world, or to get someone else's attention or validation. That's when it becomes more fulfilling.
Ramanand: In fact, maybe a modern Zen master would say if a tree has fallen in a forest, but no one has tweeted about it, has the tree?
Aashish Chandorkar: True.
Ramanand: Tell us a little bit about the reading side of Aashish. What is it like these days? How has that shifted over time?
Aashish Chandorkar: From a book reading perspective, I've been fairly consistent. I have never been a big fiction fan. [00:28:00] I do read fiction to break the monotony of what I'm otherwise reading. So I do catch up with all the popular stuff like Dan Brown, Chetan Bhagat or Amish Tripathi. I have read every one of their books. People have this very cut and dried view that something is either you make money out of it or something is intellectually satisfying. I don't think either is necessary to justify what you're doing.
Even Dan Brown's books have been quite instrumental in piquing my curiosity on European history, for example. Since I travelled to Europe, almost... well, I used to before the Chinese intervened. Since I travelled four five times earlier to Europe. I think it's actually been quite useful even to read Dan Brown in that sense, which is otherwise derided as a Pulp Fiction or glorification of useless concepts by several critics, which is fine. It's part of people's job to critique also. I read a lot of nonfiction. I think my ratio would be at 80:20, in terms of fiction nonfiction. It could be 90-10 now. It has probably become more skewed in that sense.
I read largely around history, economics, current events, some science here and there, not a lot, but a little bit here and there on the science side, also. Book reading-wise, I have been fairly consistent in that sense. The other reading, which is the daily reading, has changed significantly. What I've done is I've realized that reading a lot of popular stuff or PageRank by Google may not actually be very relevant. I rely on a few sources. What I have done is I use Feedly as a source of my daily reading. I have configured Economic Times, Livemint and Financial Express, which I think are the three relevant business papers. [00:30:00] They are broad in their coverage. So, it's not just hardcore economics. I think ET is the best newspaper in India. They have got a broad coverage of even politics for example. Their writers are clued in and they do good stuff. So I use ET as my base reading for the day. But also I've configured Livemint, Financial Express, and Jagran on my Feedly. Jagran because in the Hindi heartland, I come from MP, and I grew up reading Hindi papers. I still read a lot of Hindi news. Outside of that, I also read a lot of Dainik Bhaskar.
I also follow seven, eight handles on Twitter to just keep track of what's really happening in the hinterland or in North India. That's my base for the day, typically. That would form, let's say, about 50-60 articles, which I don't have to read every word of. But, I go through to understand what's happening. On top of that, I track Pune and Indore very closely, every day in terms of what's happening in daily news. I actually feel that I still know more about Indore than I know about Pune. I think in six years’ time; the time I have spent in the two cities will equalize. But, just in terms of tracking, I think I'm closer even today to Indore than I am to Pune. It is very critical that you understand that you cannot read everything. There's no point in getting overwhelmed by it.
Like in the initial days of Twitter, or when people used to talk about a lot of stuff, a whole range of things, like this one guy is talking about science, someone is talking about literature, someone is talking about some arbitrary cricket record. You may actually have gotten a little lost and even unnerved by the fact that you did not know all of that stuff. And that's fine. The fact is that unlike the two of you who know a lot of stuff about a lot of things, most people will not get there in their lives. I compromise [00:32:00] with the thing that okay, fine, let me just narrow down on these three, four sources and continue to follow that.
Once that happens, you can get a bit disciplined about it also. For example, I know that on Sunday, I'm reading the columns of say, Shankkar Aiyar, or Swapan Dasgupta, or when Open Magazine releases a new edition, I know when it is going to come out. So, I quickly look for, let's say, what Siddharth Singh is writing and stuff like that. A mental map emerges over a couple of years of practice, and then you can fine-tune that.
Ramanand: One thing that we've definitely noticed that you do is not be very apologetic about things like you're a Salman Khan fan. Not too many people might not just say that, but the debate that you brought up about being seen as intellectual versus you can do a lot of things simultaneously, the same is true of following, for example, local news, not seen as cool earlier. If you couldn't talk about, say, the Premier League, but you knew about what's happening in your backyard, it wasn't considered cool enough. One thing that we've seen you do is to just walk away from those kinds of debates and not worry too much about it.
Aashish Chandorkar: The real point here is that, in my view, you should not use social media as a tool for validation. The validation really comes from the whole of what you do in your own life, and some of it may only be visible to you. The moment you start making everything visible to the world, and then seek their opinion or their validation or their approval of your thoughts, etc., I think that is where the problem lies. When you try to fit in with a set of people. In fact, [00:34:00] on every issue that I think I'm passionate about, I may have a fair amount of differences, even with the folks who think are on the same side, for example.
As a base case, let's look at Bollywood. People are very scared about saying that they are Salman Khan fans. So be it. I actually don't care so much about the fact. I practically watched all of his movies, I still do. The thing is that you need to also separate in that case, the person from the actor. It's not that because I am a Salman Khan fan, so I have to endorse what he does in his real life. I don't care what he does in real life. As long as someone is making movies, and I can watch it, it's fine. If he doesn't make movies, that is also fine. It's not really going to make much of a difference for me. That is where social media gets a little edgy when people get to 0-100 debate. It's a binary thing that okay, if you're Salman Khan fan, you have to endorse everything that Salman Khan has done in his personal life, which actually I don't endorse, and I don't really care about. Beyond a point, who am I to judge?
The less people judge, and the less people seek validation, that's where the change happens. It's not easy. It wasn't easy for me either, not to say that I did not behave exactly the opposite, I think I did for a while. But once you realize that the sum total of what you are as a person and that may not really be known to anyone apart from you really, or someone who's really close to you, family, friends, etc. I think that's good enough. But that's a hard transition, definitely.
Ramanand: Since we're midway through this conversation, and you brought up Bollywood and cricket. I don't know if you remember, but you did a quiz a couple of times for our floor. One was Bollywood and one was cricket. Why don't we turn the tables [00:36:00] a little bit and pay you back in your own style? We have a couple of questions for you, Aashish, and Harish hasn't really seen these questions. So, if you want to use him as a sounding board, you can do that. Since we also spoke about reading, and reading regularly, one of the things that we have is we bring together people to read every day.
For every question you get right, we're going to give you a prize, which is not for you, but you can give it to someone else later. That's what's at stake today and the stakes are really high. First question, we have to start with Indore. Now I have a personal connection in life with Indore. I know a few things about Indore now, or so I can claim. I'm going to ask you about two people, two friends from Indore. But I want you to tell me about their mutual friend's father-in-law. So, this is already a complicated question. The two friends are Veerandar Singh Bias, who was the son of a jagirdar at Khajrana, and Jai Singh Rao Kalevar, who was a vegetable farmer. They were friends. They had a third very good friend. I want you to tell me who this third friend's father-in-law is. We're talking about connecting the dots here.
Aashish Chandorkar: Khajrana is it?
Ramanand: Veerandar Singh Bias from Khajrana and Jai Singh Rao Kalevar were good friends in college. They had a third friend who's obviously much more famous. You know that person for sure. This person's father-in-law is what we're looking for. Harish will help you.
Aashish Chandorkar: I have no idea.
Harish Kumar: No, I don't know the answer. But I can give you some [00:38:00] hint, probably if that is right. The names sound like Jai and Veeru. I'm going to go somewhere near Salim-Javed. Now you will have to add the Indori spice to it to get to the right answer.
Aashish Chandorkar: Indore has had a lot of Bollywood connections, actually, right from Salman Khan, for example. But the whole bunch of Bollywood folks have got Indore connections.
Ramanand: Let's ask you to first identify the person. You guys are very close. So who's the third friend? Look at the names, Veerandar Singh and Jai Singh Rao.
Aashish Chandorkar: Jai and Veeru.
Ramanand: The friend I think Harish mentioned.
Harish Kumar: Salim Khan.
Ramanand: Okay. Good. That's the third friend and he used these two names.
Aashish Chandorkar: Sholay characters.
Ramanand: So who's Salim Khan's father-in-law? What's the name of Salim Khan's father-in-law? Same universe.
Aashish Chandorkar: Salim Khan's father-in-law. I know so much about his personal life but never thought about his father-in-law.
Ramanand: And we haven't heard of his father-in-law that's the beauty of the answer.
Aashish Chandorkar: Hari Singh?
Ramanand: That would have been an even perfect answer. Unfortunately, no.
Harish Kumar: Amjad Khan.
Ramanand: It's not Amjad Khan. It's a character from the movie. [00:40:00] Salim Khan's father-in-law was actually a thakur. Let's put it that way.
Harish Kumar: Baldev Singh.
Ramanand: Yeah. Thakur Baldev Singh. So that's the other inspiration for...
Aashish Chandorkar: I thought of Hari Singh because it's one of the favourite Sholay questions for people.
Ramanand: That's the problem of knowing. So we go to the next question, Aashish. And here's your question. This is from the world of energy; which we know you track quite closely. There's an author called Vaclav Smil, Professor, you may have heard of him, he's a Canadian professor. There's a quote saying, "I wait for his new books, the way some people wait for the next Star Wars movie." He's written a lot of books on energy. Whose quote is this?
Aashish Chandorkar: I heard the question. I think that was Bill Gates. Right?
Ramanand: Bill Gates is absolutely right. Well done. That's Bill Gates. That's the second question out of the way. The third and last question is that, Joseph ____, whose name is important to this answer, he was an electrical engineer, later turned a policy think tank kind of guy. He died at 43 in an air crash. He was a libertarian and he said that think tanks should take on the role of doing something which governments usually can't do, or can't afford to do. A concept is associated with Joseph _____. What's the concept? I know, you've spoken about it a few times, as well. [00:42:00]
Aashish Chandorkar: That's the Overton window. It's ironic that I did not know the Bollywood one but I still knew the two more complex answers, which have shifted in the last few years.
Ramanand: That's true, it's appropriate. I think it also tells you there is always a lot more. In fact, one reason that I knew a little bit about the Overton window, I've seen it appear in some of your tweets and your writings. In some sense, we're living in times where the window is shifting. We can also experience the effects of the Overton window. Few more questions before we close up. Just going back to the world of the knowledge worker of the past, the present and the future. Clearly, media skills are playing a role these days, especially in the last six months, like it or not, if you're on zoom, and you're in front of a video, it's a bunch of skills that you have to rewire your senses for. In some sense, you've made a shift a while ago, because you only became comfortable with writing for public outlets and going on podcasts is something that you now do very routinely. You also guest host podcasts.
Taking a cue from Scott Adams, his idea of the talent stack, things that you need to be in the top 25%, maybe in your organization if not in the world. What would a future stack for a knowledge worker look like? What are the things that someone should try and deliberately add to be relevant in the future?
Aashish Chandorkar: I've always believed that there are some basic skills which people need to have, [00:44:00] irrespective of what they study, as a professional career or whatever they do in their real-life to make a living. I think areas like economics, behavioural science/economics type stuff, a little bit of psychology, and appreciation of history and geography. Those are the skills which I think people should really add. What is happening is that we've all realized that since all of us have really moved around quite a bit in our lives, even within India, if not outside, and have travelled a little bit. What I observe is that our reading of the context was pretty poor.
Let's say, I used to go to Chennai very often to work. But I did not know enough about the life there, the culture, the language, the food. That hampers your ability to do what you're doing in a good way. It hampers your ability to be fully productive, even in a professional life, if you don't understand the context. The context cannot be just the common set of rules on which you are working, which is defined by your company or in your industry.
I think people's personal or social context is also very critical. I feel that if you look at these subjects, history, geography, economics, behavioural science, that really gives you a very broad grounding of understanding the ambience in which you operate and also to attune your responses in situations where you may read something in a very different way. But the other person could be interpreting that from their personal narrow frame of reference. That people should really focus on in my view, and obviously, it comes from personal reading and personal efforts, because a lot of that is actually not taught. And it's not taught in a very good way even if that's taught. So, a [00:46:00] personal curiosity there makes a lot of difference.
Ramanand: Earlier, when it came to things like cultural sensitivity, the idea was always to understand a culture outside. Things like what if you were to interact with someone from Europe, Asia, and so on. But do you think that we need to turn the gaze a little bit inwards now?
Aashish Chandorkar: I find it quite shameful that most Indians do not appreciate the cultures inside the country enough. It's such a large and diverse country with very rich traditions and rich beliefs and local practices, but we don't know enough. I remember an incident in 2004.
I was working in the UK in Bournemouth, which is a small coastal town. I met the client manager who was supervising my work. He knew so much about India, and I used to feel that mujhe to pata hi nahi hai. In 2004, he knew more than me. He knew a lot more than me about even simple stuff. He had travelled in India for two years in his life. So, he used to talk to me like a lot of old people do. In Bombay, if you go from this street to that street, take a right turn, there's a tree there. His language was of that type. I was like, 'Okay, I don't even know about Pune that well.' There's a physical city, I did not appreciate as much as he knew sitting in London and his last visit to India was potentially a few years ago. It is changing a little bit.
As people have moved around thanks to the services industry, and even manufacturing now, getting more wider, and in its catchment of talent, etc. in India, I think people have moved a lot, which has really helped them be less cynical about cultures inside the country. It is very important, because the first response when we started working, [00:48:00] let's say 15-20 years ago, a lot of people I realized in our generation used to scoff at what was, let's say, they went to Pune, then they started bad-mouthing Pune, or they went to Chennai and started bad-mouthing Chennai, for whatever reason. But no one really took the pains to understand what the context of that tradition is.
There's a Ganesh Utsav in Pune, so why do we celebrate Ganesh Utsav? What is the big deal about it? I remember people used to say, arrey traffic jam hoga, I need to leave early. The entire focus of their life was a very narrow, personal comfort or discomfort, which really defined your personality and your worldview, which I think was shallow. You can always argue that there should be traffic jams or not. But the fact is that the tradition is very integral to the city's soul. I think that people did not understand. That's the same for me when I was in Chennai, like I know more about Chennai now, having read about it after I left the city. But I actually quite love the city, despite my initial reluctance to accept or blend in what was going on in this city. But I visited the place several times later on, after I left the city permanently.
But some of that is very critical. We tend to know more about, as I started by saying that, especially in the services industry, our lives are closer to... we all take Christmas holidays, or although we may not celebrate Christmas in that big a way in India. We don't understand our own frame of reference, because something is happening. You're basically adjusting your lifestyle because of your work context. We may know more about London or New York or Zurich, depending on where you have travelled, or Singapore, but you may not know enough about the city 200 kilometres away from you, because you never went there to start off. That should change. India has really exciting possibilities also. The richness is so high that there's enough to learn and really appreciate.
Ramanand: Right. We'll end this conversation with [00:50:00] a few quick takes on what we call the future relevance of 'X'. I'll throw out a few phrases, just tell me what you think, is it going to stay relevant, is it going to morph into something very different? Maybe to stay Lindy or not is one way to look at it. What do you think is the future relevance of management?
Aashish Chandorkar: There'll be some relevance. The structures will change, the organizations will become flatter, and self-management will become more critical. But it's not going to go away in my view.
Ramanand: And related to that, the gig economy?
Aashish Chandorkar: Fairly high. India has always been a gig economy, even before someone in New Yorker invented the word. We always have had an army of people doing their own thing, maybe not organized in the platform sense. I think the gig economy is actually the future where personal skills will be very critical. The discovery of those skills is essentially where the technology comes in. That's been obviously the bane of Indian informal industry.
There's been no way to discover, if I needed a plumber, who's the best plumber, I don't know. But several people have always been plumbers in their professional lives, and have earned their living that way. So as such, it's a fairly well-entrenched concept. We are far ahead in the game in a structural sense in that way, just need to create the enabling environment to really make it big in a wage benefit sense in India.
Ramanand: And we also have informal networks that have supported some of these.
Aashish Chandorkar: Yes, absolutely.
Ramanand: Since I have two MBAs with me on the call, what is the future relevance of MBA?
Aashish Chandorkar: I can go first, Harish, and maybe you can add there. I think the relevance of the degree is different from the relevance of the place where you get a degree from. The latter might stay because there is some level of [00:52:00] spookiness in the system around pedigree and stuff. People always try to associate with people like them. That behaviour may not change, in my view, significantly over the years. There's a natural tendency to trust or rely on people who you think are like you, or who are your peers in a "intellectual" or social sense. Like management, I think that tendency will stay. That degree itself, I think, is much less relevant even today than it was 10 years ago. You can learn a lot of that stuff without really having to go through a two-year formal program as such.
Ramanand: The future relevance of private messaging?
Aashish Chandorkar: Maybe let's look at what Harish has to say on the MBA part and we'll come back, Ramanand?
Ramanand: Oh, sure.
Harish Kumar: I would agree with Aashish. There is some amount of credentialing and signaling. I think that's what it is doing at this point. That's the biggest utility of it. For the person himself or herself, it's more of the network that they get out of these business schools, which they can then... they ought to then nourish. If they don't do that, then those two years are wasted, in my opinion.
Ramanand: It's all coming back to networks again. Tell us about the world going to fragment into smaller private messaging platforms or how do you see that?
Aashish Chandorkar: I don't think I'm much of a tech visionary in that sense. I don't think I really can envision that. I was reading something written by @balajis on Twitter. He has been a big proponent of social media becoming fragmented or cartelised. His point was that either there could be some very big player or there could be many small players locally, which then cannot be governed or controlled by the regulations very [00:54:00] deeply. I think that's happening in some ways. Even if you look at Twitter, although it's all public in a single platform, the fact is that you can actually make out that there are various parts of Twitter today in which you operate. There could be a sports Twitter, there could be a politics Twitter, there could be an outrage Twitter. You can choose to be part of any of them and usually they don't overlap.
In fact, in that sense, the Google Plus model was way ahead of its time, when it launched in 2011. I would have loved to use Google Plus today as a base for my social media activity. When there is an IPL match, I can go and join the cricket Twitter and they don't bother about my views on Salman Khan or politics. And when I come back and join the views on Salman Khan, they don't persecute me for not supporting an IPL team. That distinction was not there. It's not that the platform was not physically designed for it, unlike Google Plus was, but I think it's already happening. The networks might narrow down in a more conformance over a period of time.
Ramanand: The future relevance of public participation in politics?
Aashish Chandorkar: Will definitely increase. It has already happened. We have seen that in the last decade. A lot of us ourselves have probably become much more aware of what's happening around us and the root causes. Who to approach if there's a problem, stuff like that. Like when Harish has loud music going on in front of his house, he knows who to call, which I think we would not have known before Twitter or 10 years ago. By the way, this is a very common problem which both of us face, living in the same area. There's a difference and distinction between politics and policy, which a lot of intellectuals miss out on.
A lot of intellectuals approach politics only from a policy lens, while a lot of pure political animals approach it only from a political lens. There is, of course, an intersection point, which is actually where I have tried to work and I'm trying to [00:56:00] create some niche even in a professional sense. But there is certainly a meeting point there. I think the importance of the two has to be understood separately. A lot of people like us do not understand the importance of pure politics. So they take everything very literally saying why did this person say this or why was this word used or that word used? India's a fairly diverse country.
Applying some of these considerations, which a lot of times emanate in the western worldview of a very uniform thought process or conformity to a very strict adherence to a given idea. I think that may not be relevant for Indian politics. But as long as people understand that distinction, and how to play around it, and how to basically influence your representative in a constructive way, I think that participation will increase.
Ramanand: Break into that a little bit. What got you interested in policy? Have you always been interested in policy? And secondly, when you put together an opinion piece on something like policy, what do you do? What is the approach?
Aashish Chandorkar: The first question was very, I should say, coincidental. Swarajya, which is a magazine, which a couple of my friends run, Prasanna and... Prasanna was also our colleague. You may not have come across him, he was in a different city, but same organization, same years, when we were there. I have known him for a while through that association, and there's a personal connection also, because our wives were B-school batchmates. So, when he launched this, he just approached me and said, okay, can you help out? I had written in the past in some small forums, etc. Not that I was completely oblivious to it, but it wasn't very serious. I used to write about general stuff about current affairs, or sports. I had done some cricket writing earlier as well. So he said, Okay, why don't you start with that?
My first few pieces for Swarajya were actually cricket and Bollywood in the first three months. But then, as a chance thing, [00:58:00] that was a time when the power sector discussions were going on in the Supreme Court, the whole coal block allocation discussion was going on. That I was generally interested in as an area around renewable energy. Since I come from that educational background, I understood some of that. He said, why don't you track this part? And then we'll see what we write about the power sector in general. That's where it started, it was a fairly chance thing. What I realized is that there's a lot of material available in public forums, which is an official government document.
You should never start researching either on Wikipedia or with other media news. Because a lot of those folks, as I realized over time, are not specialists. They could be very good reporters, but they're not specialists in a domain sense. They might have acquired that skill, like you or I will be able to acquire, which I think I've done in a few cases. But, there is enough documentation available on public platforms from the government side itself. There's a lot of discussion, which happens in the parliament, which is all available. Parliament website is like a goldmine if you want to really read history, phenomenal debates. Everything is documented, first of all. When the speaker says that this part of your speech will be expunged, it's actually very critical, because if you see the documents of that speech on the website, it actually says that some part was expunged, or there are gaps in the documents. It makes a fascinating reading in a primary source sense. I started to rely more on that.
Now, of course, I've got some context, so I know where to look for data. Like I know who the right reporters are, who really know the subject matter. If I'm writing about power, I know that I need to look up on three-four people that I trust to get things right. If it's about infrastructure... Like when I wrote my book on Maharashtra politics, I knew who the Maharashtra journalists were across publications. So I relied a lot on their writings in Indian Express and Financial Express, [01:00:00] Hindustan Times, Bombay Edition, etc. It's been my approach that you look at the primary sources first, and then look at the analysis or the views part of it later on.
Ramanand: Finally, what is the future relevance of a generalist, or the so-called T-shaped personality, what is the future of that?
Aashish Chandorkar: I actually don't think it's a problem. In fact, it's a feature in my worldview, because I feel that networking will be critical and ability to shift your own jobs or your own professional affiliations will also be very critical in the next 15-20 years until the world settles down in a different configuration, which is around gig economy. I think this is a transition time, the next two-three decades. Someone who's a T-shaped person can be very effective, as long as that person has the ability to narrow down very quickly. It is like how a hawk operates, you can fly at a 30,000 feet level, but you should have the ability to zoom very quickly and dive into an issue very effectively, in a very short span of time.
As long as you have that ability, where you can really narrow down and address an issue when it is needed, which is essentially to acquire expertise or to acquire relevance when the previous relevance is shifting. I think that is good enough. That is very critical as well. It's not just a necessary condition, it has to be a sufficient condition in the sense that you should be able to acquire new expertise in a fairly quick sense. So, people should not worry about it too much if they think they are a generalist, but they should also know how to deep dive if push comes to shove.
Ramanand: Right. In politics, hawks have a certain negativity associated with that. But I'm happy that we're [01:02:00] ending a version of the hawk here. It's been great, Aashish. Thank you so much for spending some time with us and talking us through what you've been up to of late and to a version of this sometime soon.
Aashish Chandorkar: Thank you so much for inviting me.
Ramanand: Thank you.
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