[CTQ Smartcast] How to Look at History to Think about your Future Relevance? With Chinmay Tumbe

Chinmay Tumbe is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad. He is the author of India Moving and Age Of Pandemics (1817-1920).

This insightful Smartcast, hosted by CTQ co-founder BV Harish Kumar, is an excellent opportunity to understand the role of history in staying future relevant and why leaders must invest in reading business history.

 
 

Prefer an audio version of the Smartcast? Listen below.

 
 
 

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(Read the shownotes below or skip to the transcript)

SOME OF THE THINGS WE SPOKE ABOUT

  • How and why must one read history?

  • How to deal with the media literacy challenge?

  • Chinmay’s take on counterfactuals

  • How should individuals and corporations be thinking about business and economic history?

  • How did the Indian merchant community become historic economic colonizers?

  • How and why Indian companies must improve archiving

  • Chinmay’s course: The Hitchhiker's Guide to Business and Economies across Five Centuries

  • Age of Pandemics: What could we have done differently?

  • India Moving: A History of Migration in India

  • Chinmay’s own history

  • How can academicians stay relevant for the future?

PLUS

  • Future relevance of MBAs

AND

  • Future relevance of Test Cricket


LINKS TO BOOKS, PEOPLE AND PODCASTS MENTIONED IN THE SMARTCAST

BOOKS

PEOPLE


PODCASTS

If you enjoyed this Smartcast, you will also like Lessons In Culture And Decision-Making From The Indian Army, With Col. Vembu Shankar

TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE

00:00:00

Harish: Chinmay Tumbe is an Assistant Professor in the Economics area at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad. And he's written two fantastic books called India Moving, which is about migration and Age of Pandemics, which chronicles the many facets of cholera, plague and influenza pandemics in India between 1870 and 1920. I personally have been fascinated by his work and also feel envious of the interesting courses he offers, including one which has a reference to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. So we decided to talk to Chinmay about the role of history in thinking about future relevance. Why should leaders read business history? Why should they seriously consider updating the ‘About Us’ section on their company website, creating living memories of companies and institutions, and how it helps people get a sense of the place where they work. This was an insightful discussion. If you want to know more about our work in those areas, please do check out our Website and consider subscribing to our Telegram Channel and Weekly Smartletter. First, listen to this fascinating chat with Chinmay about history, pandemics, migration, counterfactuals, multiple futures and some cricket. You’ll love it.

00:01:41  

Harish: Hi, Chinmay. Welcome to this CTQ Smartcast. 

00:01:43

Chinmay: Thanks a lot for having me over. 

00:01:47 

Harish: Yeah. So we'll dive straightaway into this. And I'm going to ask you an existential question here. Right. So I read this interesting quote, ‘Destiny can sometimes be history coming back to bite you.’ So why should we learn history?

00:02:01  

Chinmay: Yeah, I mean it's often said that history repeats itself, but it doesn't really repeat itself exactly the same way. But we say history often rhymes, and there are patterns in history, which are obviously useful, in a way we live our lives based on heuristics, which are conditioned by our own immediate histories. So we don't touch hot stuff. Because in the past, when we've touched hot stuff, you know, we get a shock or something. So we are conditioned by our past in any case. When we say history, we're talking about stuff, which is typically a bit older than our lives. And which means something that happened before we were born. And that often is fascinating, because since we were not there, we can't experience it. And all we can base our information on is other people's narrations or perspectives on it, which also means that history can be written from so many different angles. And that is why one needs to know the different views on history to make a broader understanding. But I do think, just broadly, people with a sense of history, and I would say, with a better sense of history, do tend, I think, to make more meaningful decisions in terms of because this sample set of experiences is wider. So you know, maybe what to do, what not to do, that's just my gut feeling about this whole thing. 

00:03:21

Harish: Right, right. Yeah. You know, whenever we were studying history in school, there used to be two schools of thought, right, some kids would treat it as stories, and they would really love it. For some, it would be really very boring. So how was it for you when you were back in school?

00:03:42

Chinmay: I never was a big fan of history in school, definitely. And I'm a trained economist. In fact, I’ve not taken a course in history since last 10, something which I tell my students, because I teach history now. And they have taken more history courses than me. But, you know, I got interested in history much later on in life. And I do think, the way it is taught, and also particularly, in school, there's a lot, there's a lot to absorb, and the curriculum demands that you know, you need to know X, Y, Z. That's why I think especially in India, which has such tremendous history, I mean literally 3000 years and so on. It's just too much information to absorb. Compared to American history; Americans learn literally like the last 300 years. So is a national starting point that we Americans, when they do their history, there is much more engagement, because it's kind of much more familiar. Whereas we have to go from 3000 years, it's a lot to absorb. So to be honest, I never really wasn't a big fan. I mean, it's not like I hated it. And I do think this charge that Indian history, the way it's taught is often boring. You know, is it true now, you know, I went to an ICSE board, I thought it was very engaging. I don't come under a school of thought that it was boring. But at least in my personal experience, you know, I wasn't in the school of, you know, I love history and a lot of stories. And so I must say like, you know, in my family I learned a lot about Shivaji because I come from Mumbai. And we've kind of grown up with those stories. And so there's one history which is taught in schools. But there's a history, which is also taught from family members, and especially the epics like Mahabharat, Ramayan. And so that kind of sense of what might have happened in ancient India is alive in India, even outside the schooling system, which I think is very precious.

00:05:32

Harish: Right. That's a very interesting one. Because, you know, I'm sure everyone has this history told at home, which is very different from what is taught in school. So that’s a very interesting thread. And that brings me to the next question, and this is probably true in the case of Indian history, right? Some complaints are that history is usually written by the victors, right? Whoever has won writes the history, then there are other things like all accounts will have survivor bias. So how should people try to read history? So right, not just addresses your curiosity, but also, you know, you can pick up some true lessons which you can actually apply in life. And I'm talking about history in general, we'll get to business history and economic history slightly later.

00:06:23

Chinmay: Yeah, I think there are two things to say to this, you know, one is that history is never static as a discipline, which means what you're taught in the year 2021, will be very different from what's taught 50 years down the line, and you know, what's taught 200 years out of the same period, say, like, 1500. You know, for two reasons. One, is because we learn more information over time, right? I mean, if you were in 1900, you would not have heard about the Harappan Civilisation. We unearth this information at some point. And today, we know a lot about it. So that is the process of discovering history, which for me, is very exciting. And we continuously learn more even about more recent periods, like the 1600s. And that is what historians do. Historians sit in archives, you know, uncover these materials. So that's very exciting because that's often what people think, what do historians do? Well, they are actually literally uncovering new historical material. Right. And from the time that is unearthed to the time till it comes into our textbooks and so on, there's of course, the lag, but eventually, that same period will be, you know, updated with new material. So that's just about acquiring new material for every period in the past. But the fact is that history, as you say, you know, written by the victors, it does serve political agendas. And obviously, there's whole ideological baggage attached. And there's really no, you know, my perspective on this is that, if you're truly interested in history, you know, you should try and read different viewpoints. And you should know what these viewpoints are. And I think good historians typically tell you the prefacing, “Look, this is what I presented” and you know, an example that I do tell early on that these are my biases, and where my view is there, I emphasize. The part of history, which is this narration, you want to get the accuracy, right, but something happened in a particular year, and so on. But a lot of it is cause and effect. Because the Mughal Empire fell, the British came to power, that is a huge statement to make, and there are so many different perspectives on it. So ideally if you can get attracted to, I think history is often useful to provide the initial spark. And then you should try and read, you know, different authors, but there's simply no way that you can like in management because I'm based in a management school, we have 10 ways to be a good manager and stuff like that. In history, it's very difficult to say the 10 lessons from history, it's, it's very tough. I mean, there are books like that. But that's not the school of thought I wouldn't be in, so I tell people to keep an open mind. And in my classroom, I tell people that look, I try to be as non-partisan as possible. But there I have a view and I do have views on history or any history, I make that very clear that this is my view. And I think that's the way I engage with this subject. 

00:09:17  

Harish: Right, right. Yeah. And also given how things are these days with the whole fake news, and you know, how things are in general with respect to the propagation of information, right? A lot of people just refused to do a simple fact check, to wonder, also if whatever is being told, is too good to be true, right? So if you're talking about things that are happening right now, it's going to be very difficult to expect people at large to actually do any kind of verification for what has been told about the past, right? So how do you deal with this kind of media literacy challenge that we have currently?

00:10:00  

Chinmay: Yeah, that's a good point you raised because obviously, the University of WhatsApp is probably the biggest teacher of history. And I would say incorrect history. In fact, I save the screenshots I get of, you know, all variety of topics. I mean, I got one on the Nizam of Hyderabad and how great he was, and all the stuff he did. And I mean, obviously, there are a lot of achievements, but they were clearly incorrect stuff written in that particular WhatsApp forward. I think social media makes it much quicker, easier to click on and, you know, just absorb information quickly. Unfortunately, I think there are two ways. One is, how much of this is retained by people, you know, is it at a subconscious level people are observing this, my sense is that a lot of this is not written at all. So even though we say that this is all fake news being spread, I don't think retention is that strong in social media in general, as opposed to reading in school or other ways. So in that sense, I'm not overly concerned. But I do have a concern that people who do history professionally, because there is a discipline like people are scientists, and botanist and so on, there is a field called history where people spend their entire lives on, and that can often get very academic, in which case, they're just writing for each other. And I think that conversation between professional historians and the wider public has to grow tremendously. And that will go on if you write more general audience books that will grow even if you're on television or a tie-up with the documentary series or something. So basically, making history more popular from the professional side is something that is definitely lacking in India. And I think that's what will eventually correct a lot of the fake news and you know, blatantly fake news, as we just said just earlier, there will always be different views on any time period and so on. But even within that, there is something called broad accuracy. And if you think India got independence from the British, you know, in 1657 instead of 1947, I mean, that is what we're calling as broadly factually wrong.

00:12:00

Harish: So, one more question, because you mentioned India's independence, I think I was listening to Niall Ferguson's interview with Tyler Cowen, and he talked about how the generally maintained view is that when the British were ruling over India, you know, India's economy went downward and all of that. But according to him, it was actually a good thing for India, when he compares different contemporaries of that time, different countries and during that time frame. So that, for me, was a bit of a counterfactual. We often don't think about this. So how do you generally deal with these kinds of left off the field ideas? It is definitely left off the field because that is going against the grain of what is generally believed? And this is a belief, like you said, it's not factual, but it is a counterfactual that he's talking about. So how do you deal with things like this? And what's your take on that particular statement? 

00:13:03

Chinmay: Yeah, I think there are a lot of puzzles that history throws up, and you want some evidence. Now, this is a big question, what is the British legacy in India? And Shashi Tharoor has written a book on it, but I disagree with his book. In the sense, I think it is overly polemic. I think he wrote it to kind of counter this view that nothing bad is happening and so on. For example, I would highly recommend Tirthankar Roy's book, it's called the Paradox of the Raj, it weighs the different things going on. Yeah, I think, especially listeners may want to know that history in general, what we learned in schools and outside is political history. This means often the object of interest is the king or the ruler, or the queen of the ruling power. So how would the Cholas or the Mughals, how the British and so on, and there is, of course, these other fields like business, economics, social history. For a large part of India, I mean, I would say, the British rule was so light in touch that is, the average village, you know, Lagaan kind of paying exorbitant taxes. I mean, they were paying taxes even before, of course, the tax rates varied across India, but in the day to day lives of India, you know, there's this lovely book, I think, for the Limited Raj by Anand Yang, which basically says that in the day to day lives of Indians, it's not like the British were there in each and every village, so hardly some 100,000 British in the country of so many people. So how do you really assess that? And that is why I think, in any history, you have to look at the larger contextual factors of the geography of the economy. And what you mentioned are counter facts. Now, Neil Ferguson has written a lot on counterfactuals. I think counterfactuals are very useful in drawing these big questions about did the British destroy India? The counterfactual is what if they never came? Right. And, of course, like Shashi Tharoor picks on Japan saying we could have industrialized with Japan. What he doesn't tell us is that we could, in that same counterfactual way, have invaded China. Japan also became an imperial power. But at the same time, we have a counterfactual in India called the princely states. And it's not like the British ruled each and every part of India directly, we have 40% of the landmass and 20% of the population ruled by the princely states and some were extremely progressive, like Travancore or Mysore and some were not like Rajputana and Hyderabad, in my view, in central India, agencies much of North India. So when you compare, like princely states and British India, on many dimensions, there’s not really much to choose from. And as I've written a book on pandemics, the British also really got a bad deal, they got three of India's worst recorded droughts in history, and they got three pandemics, irrespective of who was in power, they will be struggling and, and they did struggle as a point out in the book. In the flu of 1918, Rajasthan was hit massively and Rajasthan was not ruled by the British and so on. So counterfactuals are useful, having said that my particular take on this is a British rule did not impoverish India. That was Shashi Tharoor’s argument. I don't believe that, but there was stagnation. and India could have obviously done much better, arguably, without British rule, but there are all these other things going on in this time period. But again, the accent isn't political, and really not focused on many of the other factors that constrain India's protection, in that it's not just the prediction. I mean, it's the social structures. It is stuff like gender, caste, things which we grapple with still today. So another way to look at the same question is the British left, what happened after that? And I think, as Ambedkar said, you know, we could blame the British then. But now who do we blame? so that sort of thing. And it's been, what, 75 years or so. And we are still not, you know, where we should be ideally. So that's a good moment of introspection. It was not just about the British, it was much more, it was about low investment in education, health, it could be so much more. So history is exciting for me because it is a way I know history is because if you remove just the focus on the political gaze of who was in power, right, you kind of broaden the set of meanings. And in India, we're obsessed with this. So our history right now is 2014 and pre-2014. Your Modi Ji is like the saviour. And then before that, 1947 and each ruling party thinks that you know, they've done something extraordinary, and they have broken with the past. So for the BJP it is breaking from 2014, for Congress it’s breaking from 1947. And the British, by the way, said they were doing a great job compared to who came earlier. And so this is what I call ‘beggar-thy-predecessor-history’, right? Whoever's in power blames their immediate predecessor, and says we're doing much, much better. And to me, that's not a very attractive way of doing it.

00:17:52  

Harish: Right, yeah. Let's move to the business and economic history bit now. We talk about future relevance. You know, in future relevance, you should be prepared for multiple futures. And not just try to predict one future, forecast one future and work towards it. Because that is foolish, and now we're talking about multiple histories as well. So that's interesting. So given this context of history, and what you teach about economic history, how should individuals and corporations be thinking about business and economic history? Is that a knowledge blind spot? And, you know, does that leave them ill-prepared for multiple futures? And if that is so, how should corporations and leaders be thinking about fixing that? 

00:18:42

Chinmay: And I think two parts to a very good question. One is the general thing about business history? Why should anybody know the business history and so on? One is we do have a tremendous business history of the last 200 years. I mean, compared to many other colonized countries, what is not really known is that India in 1947, had a fairly vibrant indigenous, industrialist class. Now, you don't really see this happening in Africa, you don't really see this happening in Southeast Asia, where we had industrialists like Tatas, Birlas, and a variety of others, yes, they came from now social groups, castes and communities. But it was still there, many other countries did not have that. So that is, I think something which India can really build on. Unfortunately, in the last 60 years, because we've also had this kind of turn on labour history, where we understood a lot about labour, which was fantastic. But in that, we also sidelined the role of the creative entrepreneur class. And I think these histories need to be told, especially because we are now at the cusp of this, you know, tremendous startup movement. Saying that we were literally in the 1860s 1870s phenomenon where people were looking forward to setting up the first industrial cotton mills of India and so on. So again, there's a lot to be like, I would say proud of but there's a lot to be aware of India's entrepreneurial history and so on. Because there's one view that India could not have sustained on entrepreneurs, which is completely wrong. And that's one simple reason why people need to engage with history. At the same time, we also need to know about all the bad actors of the past. And there's no doubt that the East India Company came into India with the support of a lot of the Indian merchants and so on at that particular role, or the role of these merchants with opium trade of the 19th century, which is a narcotic. So there's a lot of amazing stories and amazing, these crazy stories as well, of people doing really, really bad, bad things. And I think this huge learning of that, because those lessons are very apt today. You still have firms doing extremely bad things, or seemingly good firms collapsing because of fraud. And that's why because I'm in a management school, I think one of the reasons why the course has really taken off so well, is precise because students can relate with many of the things which are happening. The second part is that remarkably, in India, all companies, and by all, I'm saying, you know, just more than 30 years, not like 100 years ago, do a really bad job in maintaining their history. It's almost as if we've not seen institutions and corporations as having a possible history. And that, again, comes from this focus of political history. Political history means kings, queens, political parties, but you know, the fact that a company like Reliance, Tata can have a history, and how do we kind of preserve it? And how do we make it accessible for researchers, and that is very, very important. And a few companies are doing it. It's a great space to be in with a lot of archivists, there's a whole community of archivists, and I think corporate archives, it's definitely something which is a huge market opportunity in India. But right now, maybe, I can think of maybe 10 or 20 firms, which have archives, but the scope is, you know, literally 1000s of companies. If you do have these archives, it can be very inspirational. The fact that, you know, these companies have sustained through many years and provided inspiration, not only for general people who are interested in business, but for the people who work in those corporations. It's tremendous, I mean, we have set up an archive now in IIM-A, and we send these stories out every month about the history of IIM-A, and it's amazing the kind of feedback we get, and so on. So there's engagement with your own stakeholders, with your own employees, in our case our alumni. When you can tell these stories and snippets from the past, it has amazing touchpoints in various aspects of it. 

00:22:34

Harish: So that's very interesting, the IIM-A archives, we get that at home. So I make sure that I also read it, though I'm not an alumnus. One thing that struck me well, while you were talking about Indian entrepreneurs, and correct me if I'm wrong, there are other countries that have gone and colonized other parts of the world, but probably Indians are the ones who have been most entrepreneurial in the sense that they've gone to different parts of the world and sort of immersed themselves in the commercial/business landscape of that country, whether it's Africa, in Southeast Asia, US, these days, Europe. Is that a factor is that just a bias of mine? 

00:23:21

Chinmay: I mean, of course, it looks at the time period, if you go to Bali, for example, you'll find the whole Indian connection out there. The Chola Empire had a huge part in the Southeast and that was not only commercial and so on. But you're right that in the last 200 years, there are two major ways in which Indians went around the world. I write that in my book India Moving. One is the labour migration, indentured migration, people moving to the Caribbean Islands and so on. But with those migrations, there was also this undercurrent of merchant migration. I mean, the most famous being Gandhi and Gandhi was a professional, but he also belonged to the merchant community. And you know, he went to South Africa and so on. And these guys moved all around the world and among these, Sindhis are the most widespread network because of multiple dislocations. But then you have the Gujaratis, the Punjabis, the Marwaris and all the famous traditional business communities of India. And you find them literally everywhere in the world which is quite amazing. And you are right that I mean, because they were merchants, their whole objective was to train and then eventually get into the industry and so on. So it was not really a colonizing imperative. Having said that, in many of the countries they went to, they were seen as colonizers, even though they were not political colonizers, they were seen as economic colonizers. And that's why they got a very rough deal in many of those countries. As I write in my first book, when decolonization happened, it's not just the British or the French who were thrown out, in many of these countries it was the Indians that were thrown out not because they were not seen as political colonizers, but as economic colonisers. So Burma for example, Myanmar, huge communities like the Chettiars in South India. We were talking of 10s of 1000s of these guys out there. And they lost their wealth and there's still a group in India by the way, which wants to reclaim the money that they lost seventy years back, and so on because they had so much land in Burma. Because a lot of these guys were into money lending and some money lending has this particular perception attached, negative perception right from Merchant of Venice and Shylock, and so on. And then East Africa is another place where Idi Amin came to power. So that's another dislocation. And somewhere in Southeast Asia, often Indians are on the receiving end, because of this mercantile perception. So it's interesting that there was no political colonization, but they were often perceived as outsiders, and mind you, wrongly perceived as outsiders because these communities typically did good for those communities, wherever they went to. And it's funny, because in East Africa now, many of those countries are now going back to the Gujaratis from the UK, “Please come back, we made a mistake 30 years back, we need your skills, we need your capital,” and so on. So it's also interesting how the arch was

00:26:05  

Harish: They were known as the Sahukars in Uganda. And now they happen to outnumber the local Britishers in Leicester when they moved there after Idi Amin..

00:26:14

Chinmay: That’s true. Actually, in many countries, Indians outnumber the British pass. But yeah, they never thought of taking over the political reins. As long as I'm making money, they are happy. In some countries, Indians, like Mauritius, ethnic Indians are more than 80% of the population. So you know, it's as good as Indian in terms of the majority of the population. And now because it's broadly democratic and so on. In that sense, it's not colonization, but effectively, they're running these places. And so that's a really interesting way of how Indians have immersed themselves in many societies, right? 

00:26:57

Harish: And I think now we have people of Indian origins being in the political class as well, right? I mean, you have presidents, vice presidents all over the world now of Indian origin. 

00:27:10

Chinmay: Yeah. So you just have to see the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas and all these people are seated.

00:27:17  

Harish: Right. So you talked about Indian companies not doing a great job of archiving, right? I mean, it's usually seen as the Tatas, Birlas, Godrejs of the world who should be archiving, which in our opinion, is a very wrong notion. In fact, we when we talk to companies about building a culture, we actually talk about collecting these stories and anecdotes of people living their values, what does you working in that company really mean because those stories are what are passed on as part of your watercooler conversations and that's the mythology that you're building. That's how cultures and tribes are formed. Right? And it is a tough job for us to just get them to start documenting and we're not even talking about the archival kind of just basically, okay, in this client situation what did you do because typically the stories are very limited it's the founder acting as the hero, how they came up with this brainwave and all of that. Or the company origin, product origin, outside of that very few stories that are captured. So what's your take on that? How should you know people think about improving this? What can they do to get better at this?

00:28:37

Chinmay: There’s a lot that companies can do but at the very simple basic levels, almost zero cost. For example, I'm still amazed by so many companies for example which have been around for at least 30 years which means that there's some history and so on. If you go to their About Us section, you know, which is probably the most important, everyone clicks the About Us section typically. They'll say, you know, we are into these lines and so on, we established in 1985. Now that is a great opportunity right there in that About Us section to tell many things. You can have some photographs of the first how it started, as you pointed out, inspirational stories that started so just having a good curated About Us page. I think it is literally zero cost and you don't have too much for that. I think it improves, your website can have traction tremendously. So that's one then you know, with nowadays, digital technology, you should also have video snippets. So like our oral history project has like these two-minute, not more than two minutes, I would say two minutes short stories. So for that, we need to do interviews with you know, you can have a team which does interviews with your key founders and family, key employees and so on. Now, what you should do in those interviews, you should get those transcripts of those interviews. And then you should see the interesting bits of this transcript that might appeal to a wider audience. And you can capture, you can bring that one hours video interview into like a two-minute capture, package it nicely and put it on that About Us section or put it up somewhere on your website. So we have a dedicated archives page. And we put videos about Narayan Murthy and so many people out there, and it's getting good traction. And whoever joins the institute, you know, now sees that website. So they get a sense of many of these stories because what you said is very true, what management schools call as organizational memory, right? What do you say is basically culture, but let's call it memory. The founders take it for granted that memory persists in the organization. But if it is not cultivated, it very quickly fades away, right? And a good example from my own institution, where when I joined the institution, literally, nobody had heard of a lady called Dr. Kamla Chowdhry. And you know, today, now we're building a new exhibit space, she has like a photograph of her there. Turns out, she's the most important part of the founding of IIM-A. But, I mean, I read the 1960s and 70s. Yes, everyone attributes a lot of this stuff to her, you know, when in the first year when they wrote what happened in the first 10 years book in 1971, or something. She was clearly thanked saying that she played a very important role and just 30 years down the line, when I came in, literally nothing on her and the memory was there on other figures, which it can be erased, if not deliberately, it’s strangely enough, right. And what organization memory can do then is, of course, bring important stories. And now this story is so important because it really is a huge inspiration for the female students on campus. And so it's amazing how that one story has connected across batches, with our current students, and so on. So for me, it's also been a great learning process. When I started out on this archives project, I thought of it as just a simple service to history because I engage with history. But I've realized now that really, it can actually change your employee engagement level substantially, and people can start taking pride in many things. Obviously, every organization also has some sort of a dark underbelly to it, right. And so typically, in these archiving stories, obviously, you're not going to put that. It's interesting that some companies are also engaging with that, these are extreme stories. But I think of IBM, which was selling these things to Hitler, and so on in Nazi Germany. Now, that's a story which is out in the open, right, and IBM now kind of engages in that saying, “Yeah, I mean, so like a public apology is, this is a particular time and we should not have done that.” But they were not the only ones, pretty much every American MNC was involved. But it's also interesting how you can also then engage with those dark bits. I think, in India, companies are very scared to do this, precisely because we've come out of that License Permit Raj, which had so much corruption, and so much underhand dealing, that people are scared. And you know, if you put our material out there, people get to know a lot of dirty secrets. I think that's, I know, for a fact that a few big firms of India, with a lot of history are very scared to put any material out there. And I think that's unfortunate. Because of course, as an archive, you can always curate it as to your needs. But there's just so many things, which are relevant for people's understanding of organizations, that the net benefit is huge. So I don't see why companies actually are not doing that. I think people often see it as a cost centre. Right? And maybe if you're a big company, yes, it's not going to give you revenue, but the intangible benefits of employee engagement, I think, is huge. And that needs to be conveyed to top management. 

00:33:54

Harish: Right. In fact, where we've managed to create this repository of stories, it actually serves multiple strategic objectives because it can be used for hiring, onboarding of employees, it becomes a potential showcase of behaviour. That you want to encourage that if your story goes up in that repository, it's like a badge of honour that you're doing exactly what the company wants you to do. So it can be a strategic asset, you know, addressing multiple objectives but it does take us time to convince people to actually start doing this. Start from the basic thing that, “Oh, we don't know who actually knows all the stories other than the founder.” Right? So we have to find these well-connected people, do these interviews, talk to them, record, transcribe like you said, but when it has been done, it serves multiple objectives. Coming back to your course, it's very interesting that the title itself is very interesting, it’s called The Hitchhiker's Guide to Business and Economies across Five Centuries. So why five centuries is the first question. And what do students in a typical MBA course learn in this subject, which they can apply in a typical MBA job?

00:35:16

Chinmay: Yeah, so this course, the acronym is HITCH, partly because when I first offered it, I did a quick survey, just to get a sense of what people might be interested in. And people say history is typically boring. And so the first objective was not to have the word history in the course title. So it's a very jazzed up course titled, Hitchhiker's Guide to Business and Economies across Five Centuries. And five centuries, for many reasons. One, because I don't know too much about what happened 500 years ago. In fact, I don't know too much about what happened in the last 500 years, but you know, 500 years seems more manageable, 2000 years is just impossible. In terms of economic and business history, it is a fact that we know much more about what happened after 1500 than before. The data quality sources, everything improves after 1500. So it's useful to do that. But the other reason why 1500 is a useful starting point is that this is pretty much the start of the European New World, where the Europeans are going around the world. And in a way, European ascendancy kind of starts out there. And of course, kind of brings us to the present, where now it's slipping, right. And so India and China are kind of coming back, so to speak, on this global economic reordering. So it's kind of this large view of the world. And I think it clicked for two reasons, one, because of the history and non-political aspects, business and economic aspect, but also because not just India, and people see them, the interconnections between different economies that have happened at various points of time. So in terms of this course, it starts by saying, it's not got core skills, which one can directly apply. But it's great to understand the world where we live in the interconnections about why we see certain investments or trade happening to certain countries and not other countries. Why is it that you see more stock market activity in some countries and not others? So these are kind of big questions that people have often had on their minds. And I think it gives, so it's a perspective building course, the amazing thing is I get emails from students after the course and they have at least told me, “Look, it's helped us, especially in travelling,” When they travel, now they have a much better sense of what they're seeing and what's happening. And also in conversations, I think a large part of a corporate job is not just the skills on the computer, which is important but is the art of conversation. And knowing business history is fantastic for conversation in the corporate circles. Just having a thing and saying, “Oh, did he know that, you know, this happened in 1920.” It's a great kind of, again, non-core skill, as I would say, soft skill. Very delighted that, you know, when I first offered the course, more than five years back, I really didn't know how it’s going. And earlier people would say it’s history, nobody would come, boring subject and so on. But I think it's a lot about the fact that it's beyond India, which I think is a huge appetite for knowledge. Because history also is kind of skewed to Indian history. So people really don't know what's happened in the world. The migration, the mass migration flows, the mass trade flows, investment flows, the introduction of the telegraph, the introduction of steamboats, and how that ultimate global economy, the Suez Canal. For example Suez Canal was in the news a few months back, but the development of the Suez Canal is such an important inflection point in global trade. And again, I think when people now see, for example, the pandemic as well, you know, I think they appreciate that these big events can disrupt. So if you try to understand disruptions, a course on history, I think is, you know, typically very nice. 

00:38:57

Harish: Right. And do you have some easter egg, like having a top score of 42? Or you take only 42 students in the course?

00:39:07

Chinmay: Yeah, so as you say, I'm a huge Douglas Adams fan. And 42 is obviously a core number and it is actually a number in the course, and not students but in the assessment weightings. Evaluation is that you have to write an essay, and there's some group projects so the essay is 42% intuitive, and the group work is another 42%. So that's how it comes and the course pack cover has the words ‘Don't Panic’ in large font, which is Douglas Adams. So a lot of cheesy references to Douglas Adams in our course. 

00:39:46

Harish: And can you get away by not writing an essay if you just send a picture of yours with a towel?

00:39:55  

Chinmay: Ya I usually sign off the course with you know, thank you for the fish, yeah.

00:40:03

Harish: Okay, next, moving to your books, Chinmay. Age of Pandemics is the most recent one that you've written. My big takeaway from that book and we spoke about it in another context earlier in this conversation was the lack of visual memory of pandemics, right? And that's one reason why people, society, policymakers, they don't have the learnings from the past to rely upon because they've basically forgotten about what has happened. Because unlike other natural disasters, pandemics don't have a visual aspect to it. Right? So if, and this is a counterfactual that we're going to delve into. So you've written this excellent book, for me, it opened up quite a few things. So if decision-makers and policymakers had read your book as part of their school curriculum, how would we, as a country or society, have dealt with the current pandemic differently? 

00:41:08

Chinmay: It's a good question. Obviously, if they had read the book, they would have forgotten about it all by the time the pandemic came. So they will be back to scratch. But I do think, this is a real thing that happened, a person on the COVID Task Force, India, who has been interacting, messaged me saying that if only we had this book earlier, which is, of course, a great compliment to the book, but also it shows you that obviously some certain important things were said, and this was in reference to the migration crisis. And the book came out in late 2020. And the migration crisis happened much earlier. And so the book talks about migration to a certain extent. But that was completely anticipated. I mean, you could completely anticipate the migration crisis in 2020, that is one thing. This pandemic, there are many things, which I think even the best minds, there's no way, like the Delta variant, it's crashing through all the countries of the world right now. But the fact, the migration crisis, literally and created in fact, more congestion, more density, people going into those camps, and so on, have defeated the purpose. And in a way the migrants went back anyway at a time when the infection rates were higher than in March. So that is a learning from the past, because every pandemic of the past in India has led to migrant flight. And so we have to anticipate, which means if we're going to try and contain them, which we'll have in the cities, which was a strategy last year. You better have a good strategy. That is you go all out on relief, you go all out on communication, right? Unfortunately, all of that was lacking, we just got a lockdown speech, which had nothing to do, there was nothing for migrant workers. So that was a big kind of self call. I do think that happened because the epidemiologists advised the government, because the lockdown had good objectives. That is, you don't want to spread the virus around. And that's why we need to curtail migration. But if they had this knowledge of history, that it's inevitable, these migrants will want to go back and how long are you going to contain all these other things, we're kind of kept on the policy. People would have had a better way about going but I do think I'd written that on that day itself, that we should send the migrant workers back now, just like the British did 100 years back, actually, instead of later. And that's exactly what happened. So that was like a clear, classic human tragedy, which was avoidable. When the book came out in November-December last year, it did talk about waves. The book ends with this line that, you know, we need patience and humility. Nobody knows when the pandemic is going to end. But what we learn from the past is that hubris doesn't take you too far. And again, I think about what happened after the book was published. I was just amazed. You know, in December, Jan, Feb, I went from a conference in Patna in February, and it was a bureaucrats conference. And they were all just patting themselves on the back saying what a great job we've done. And to the fact that look, we have a look at Maharashtra struggling. Nothing has happened in Bihar, and they will also have lots of theories and again, learn from the past. This is a regional variation. We don't know why it is hurting some parts of the world and some parts of India. Not yet. Right? I mean that science is still evolving. It's happened so many times in the past, the British patted themselves after the plague went off in 1896-97, you know, it haunted India for 25 additional years and at much greater intensity. And so you need to be patient and be very humble that there's a lot modern science cannot explain. It can be explained eventually. But right now, we're still searching. And that hubris, I think really caught us. There's no doubt that the Delta variant is a fundamental reason for the terrible mortality of April and May earlier this year. But if you paid more attention, if that hubris was not there, we would not be seeing those crazy election rallies as late as April 20. April 20, I think was the inflection point, everything stopped. But by then we were already very, very high on that. So unfortunate. I do think the learnings from history, just two quick learnings. One is the migration aspect and other that pandemics come in waves. And we need to understand to make full-fledged claims on immunity when you still don't understand the virus was really premature. You should see the number of articles which claim herd immunity in January, which seems so foolish now, given what happened.

00:45:39

Harish: Right, yeah. This is always tricky, right? People want to take credit, you know, and that's their incentive. Maybe they want to take credit and say that, yeah, these things are all good and back to normal and all of that. But we know that there are some things which are inexplicable, it may be foolish to take credit for what you really don't know anything about. A question for you is, how do you personally deal with that frustration, when you know that, oh, things are not going the way they should, you know something which others don't? In some cases, it's out of malice that they know, and they're still going ahead. In a lot of cases like this. People didn't even know about, you know, what could have happened in the past and think things could repeat. But you knew, so how do you deal with that personally? 

00:46:33

Chinmay: Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. You know, it was really disappointing, and especially during April and May, it was literally reliving many of my research points of the book like the bodies in the Ganga, thankfully, not as gruesome as what happened in 1918. The bodies literally choked rivers at that many points, but it had happened and so I thought many things would happen again, but I did not even once think that we'll see bodies floating on the Ganga this time around. And so when that happened, that really hit me in the head saying, look, after a 100 years, surely we should have been in a better place than seeing those gruesome sights. And so that was a real disappointment. But I'll say this frustration, I'm also going through right now, on this particular matter of how many people died. The governments and it's not just The Union Government, but the State Governments across political parties are very silent about this issue. Because in a way, it affects all of them, right? Because we have different states, we have different political parties within different states of India. And because the virus has been pretty much uniform across creating havoc. Every state has a bad number. Rajasthan has Congress, it is a bad number. Gujarat has BJP, doesn't matter. And in this collective silence, we are losing sight of the fact that this has been India's worst disaster since independence. Actually, it's India's worst all-India disaster since 1980. And that is really not conveyed. Even now, people actually are defending this number, 400,000 deaths in India. Our estimates are 3 million. If you don't believe our number, that's fine. You know, I think there are about six studies now with different data sets, and they showed the lower bound is now 2 million. So there's a huge difference between 400,000 and 2 million. And that completely alters our understanding of how, because there's still a lot of people who say 400,000 is not big, many people die of tuberculosis or something. No, but we're saying this is an order of magnitude different. So people who think COVID is completely mild. Now it is mild for younger age groups, of course. But we know the steep age gradient. And we know now, I think the frustration for me right now is a little obsessed about reported cases and reported deaths. And the larger context, which is seroprevalence and excess deaths has not really been communicated regularly to the public, and a very disingenuous exercise nobody's talking about from the government side. Seroprevalence, they do one survey and they say,” Oh, the state-level estimates are not robust.” So by now we should have been having, if not weekly, fortnightly seroprevalence surveys to tell us the level of exposure overall, because I simply don't believe these numbers. You know, I mean, these reported cases and reported death numbers, they might be useful to see on a day-to-day basis that things went up or down. But the overall context, which is what past pandemics tell you, you need to get the data right to be able to understand where you are in the pandemic. Unfortunately, one is the government but the public needs to be updated. And so you see the range of views. Now there are some people who think that the pandemic is completely over. There are some people who think that no, things are very bad, it's gonna start next week. There's just so and that's because of the poor communication, I think what where we are currently in the pandemic, from the government. And that's learning from the past. All the pandemics eventually were one by metadata, and better in prevention, cure or vaccination or different strategies. 

00:49:57

Harish: Right. Coming to your other book, India Moving and you've written a lot about migration, migrants. I think one thing that struck me was that the migrant workers this time were, again, you had a visual reminder of how things were with them. But about the silent migration, you wrote about it in your book as well about how women actually migrating post marriage to the husband's household was the biggest migration in India. One thing that has struck me this time and I'm just trying to draw parallels here has been the migration of these IT workers from these cities like Hyderabad, Bangalore, Pune, Mumbai, and NCR as well, right. They've gone back to their native places, you now have people working from some remote part of Andhra, you know, where you would never have had an IT company headquarters, right? Do you think this is some kind of an inflection point with respect to these people going back to their native places. And this is something which we are probably not giving enough attention to, given the tech infrastructure that we now have, it is perfectly possible for them to work. So working, adding, contributing value to the company is not a problem anymore. So do you think there is an inflection point here with these cities having been clogged earlier places like Bangalore and Pune, the infrastructure is going to get eased out now? What's your take on that? 

00:51:35

Chinmay: Yeah, My take is maybe counter to the usual one that this is an inflection point. I think the long arc of history tells you that agglomeration is the way human beings love to be. And the counter-question, you're right, that there has been a tech breakthrough in India, that is bandwidth availability has been improved tremendously in the last few years. And so that is something that could not have happened in the past. Right. But to take you back, look at the IT industry, you would think that the IT industry would be the least clustered industry in the world, precisely because everyone knows how it works. You can work from anywhere in principle, and yet the IT industry is a classic example of clusters. That is the IT industry across the world, whether it's in Silicon Valley or Bangalore, they form in any very high density clusters. That comes from what economists call economies of agglomeration that is usually that cluster to sharing of skill, sharing of knowledge, assets. And that's why I think this is a very temporary phenomenon, which is kind of because of the restrictions and all of this. As you pointed out, I have many friends who are working from home at different points. There's no doubt that at this point of effect, the cross section of today a lot of people have moved from the big cities, to smaller towns, and many villages and are working from home. But I also think that this is a very, very temporary phenomenon. And we'll be moving to even more agglomeration faster than we think. So this idea that this is an inflection point where people were rural urban migration in India slows down and so on. I don't think that's happening. And we know we are a relatively low urban country with 30-40%. And as you get richer, the fundamental law in economics, around the world, even within India, is that those regions get more but so we just want to see urbanization become, there's nothing I'm seeing in the data, eventually, that will see India stuck at 30-40. And I think that's a good thing. We need more urbanization, of course, more cities, not just a handful of cities. But I think that's important. And that's the only way to get rich, is if people actually start congregating in cities. You are right that this infrastructure build and so on, but there's also what economists would call diseconomies of agglomeration. But there's also a natural way like so many people have left Mumbai. At a point it became so unlivable, that you will be surprised that between 2001 and 2011, the island population of Mumbai fell in the census. And I mean, there's suburban growth, but there's also people leaving. I'm from Mumbai and I have literally none of my friends living in Mumbai anymore. They all moved out to the south or abroad. Obviously, some people are still going, especially finance and so on, but the growth centers also shift over time. And we need those. I don't see India growing to be a rich country through a non-urban led strategy. I think it's going against every stylish fact of economic development, right? And if we do, it will be a miracle. And it would be, I'd be happy to be proved wrong on this one. 

00:54:59

Harish: Yeah, I think that's an interesting one. That deserves another episode probably five years later where we can fish back this episode, talk about what we discussed now, and see. An interesting anecdotal piece that I heard recently was how somebody had gone to Hyderabad. So, the driver was actually telling me that he had gone to Andhra and in a village, he saw a showroom of Jockey underwear. And he said, this is because people who were earlier working in Hyderabad and Bangalore have now come back and they want all these kinds of places to spend money.

00:55:42 

Chinmay: Anyway, they're working in an environment where only the top half of the body needs to be seen. So I can understand why Jockey underwear sales are going up, must be using that and sitting more in just that.

00:55:58 

Harish: So urbanization is definitely happening. Right. And what's your take on this current narrative of differential pay for people based on where they are located? Do you think that is also going to be a factor in people heading back to cities? Because, you know, why would anyone want to lose money simply because they're working out of a Tenali instead of Hyderabad, right? 

00:56:22

Chinmay: That's a tricky one. I don't know how corporate payslips work these days, because now I've been in academia for quite a long time. But you know, we have something called a dearness allowance, right? And so ideally, I would assume that corporations will just adjust the dearness allowance. You have the basic pay, which is the same, and you adjust the dearness allowance for how costly It is to be there. I think that would be the most simple adjustment. Now, I think the question is, is there an argument to be made to not do that, so that we will see we want to retain this person, and maybe this person is more productive? If this person was there, and so then, the cost to the company is more to be seen in productivity terms . Yes, we're paying a bit more relative terms to this person, because the person has less cost. But should be taken as more productive. So if I was an employee of a company, I would obviously want the same salary, irrespective of where I'm working. But I think the answer to this comes to that one line item called dearness allowance. I don't know, firstly, if this is a practice followed in many companies, what part of the overall salary is this component, but I can tell you, for me, this is a big part of our component in academia, because this is where universities actually eye.  Basic pay is pretty much fixed by the government and you can’t do much on that. 

00:57:46

Harish: So let's move on to the last section where we're going to talk about your own history. Right? So was your career a very deliberate set of moves pre-planned? Or was it just a series of opportunities that you just grabbed as they came? Moving from Lehman Brothers to academics? What does that whole journey look like? 

00:58:08

Chinmay: Yeah, I just found out that PTR, a Tamil Nadu politician, even used to work for Lehman Brothers. At some point, I think there's a whole alumni of Lehman Brothers who are doing different things in life now. So we should probably have a meeting at some point. So your short answer to the long question is that it has been a series, it's been serendipity, it's been a chance. And I've always been extremely privileged. I went to an outstanding boarding school in my childhood called Rishi Valley, close to Bangalore. And since then, in school, we learned that we should pursue excellence. That is, for example, we didn't really have rankings, we didn't even have exams till class 10. So I come from a mould where you try and do what you like to do from a very young age and I've been blessed by having people around me who've never said you will do this or that and just follow your dreams. So extremely privileged in that sense, and I always wanted to be a cricketer first. And so I moved to Mumbai, you know, to play cricket from school in class 11-12. Played a bit of professional cricket quickly realizing I'm not going to make it to the Indian Cricket Team and my father actually was a professional cricketer who played in Bombay and so on for a long time. So he had basically said, look, if you're not gonna play cricket, if you're not going to, if you don't think you can make it to the Indian Cricket Team, and then there was no IPL, it’s not worth it. Because he had played for a long time. So I made the decision very early saying, Okay, this was a dream for a long time. I used to play for Chittoor district in Andhra in school. So I was completely out and out, you know, life is to play cricket for India. That was a dream. So then I moved away from actually playing sports. And then I realized I love maths and economics. So then I grabbed that opportunity. And I chose the one college in Bombay, which offered both these, there's only one college called Ruia College. And then I thought I should go abroad, I was always fascinated by many things outside India, and so on. So at that age, you just feel like you want to see the world. But I was also very clear, if there's anything planned as such, it was that I want to be in India. I think I never had this idea that I wanted to settle abroad. And I always knew if I go abroad, it would be for a few years. So in the event that I spent three years in London, and then I would say, an investment bank like Lehman Brothers is part of, because you're in London, the financial hub of a lot of time. It's not just peer pressure, it's also a way you get kind of acclimatized to what people around you are doing and stuff. So that's how I worked there for a bit. And it's out there that I realized that look, I really love reading and writing. And I must say, I enjoyed my job, I learned a lot about financial markets and so on. But at the same time, I just felt that maybe I'm cut off outside the corporate world. And I think making the decision that time is more important than money, for me at least. And what I really value is time and having flexibility of time as well. You know, my ambition. And again, that time there were no pandemics. Nowadays, I think even in the corporate world, you can just work however you want, whenever you want. But then, there's nothing like that. And so that's why I got into IIM Bangalore for my PhD. But again, I really think that move also was linked with like, you know, my girlfriend was there so I moved. So it's been like a series of chance opportunities. And if I look back now, yes, I mean, there was no reason. But the reason was never very focused on career types. Since then it's been academia, but it's taken me to Italy, to different countries. And then eventually, Hyderabad and now Ahmedabad. And again, the history part isn't completely out of the blue, because now I'm a trained economist, but I was exposed to history in London. I took some classes on economic history, and so on, and I wrote my PhD on migration history, and economics. So in a way that history interest got captured up there. Even then in Hyderabad in Tata Institute of Social Science, I was not teaching history. It's only when I came here to IIM Ahmedabad. And again, because I had the legacy of engaging with the subject of business history, under prof called Vijayant Tripathi in the 60s, 70s, 80s, that's when I thought I should restart that legacy, and that's how I started majorly getting in history. So I still do some stuff in economics and so on. But I'd say a huge part of my time now was history. And it's a very niche field, business, economic history, and understanding that cuts across many fields. And I think the most recent thing that's happened in my life is writing business, and writing books for a general audience. And that's addictive. That's again, something I never set out to do. It's not, if you asked me five years back, do you see yourself as a writer? There is absolutely no chance. But now, clearly, writing is something which I'm definitely going to be doing going ahead. So a series of chances which I’ve been happy to take along.

01:03:09

Harish: Right. And as an academician, as a professor, how do you ensure you stay relevant in the future? How do you push yourself beyond those boundaries? Where do you put yourself in an uncomfortable position? Like is writing something that is in that lens?

01:03:28

Chinmay: I mean, you have to continuously adapt in any profession, you have to be right on top of your toes to understand what's happening. And writing, of course, for a general audience, which many academics don't do, and most academics don't write is a very conscious decision, because I think one needs to engage. But for example, this book on pandemics. I mean, again, two years back, if you'd asked me, would you write a book on pandemics. I’d have said no way, but I thought I had to do it, because it's just topical. And it's amazing. After writing it, I've been invited now on this Lancet commission, it is an independent body tasked  to provide some mobility input on migrations. One or two years back I was really not that much into public health or stuff like that. And today I got invited for talks in the US and Emory University, a public health unit. I think what's really exciting about some of the stuff which I've been doing is I present at corporate leadership events, many over the last year. Presented at sociology departments, economics departments, history departments, public health departments. So really a range of, I never thought I would go to med school and present, two years back. So that's been really fun. Now that we are living in a pandemic context, I made this pivot last year. I have to really get on top of all the information possible and my core USP is history and economics. So I really need to understand that. But that's why now I'm offering a course at IIM Ahmedabad called Pandemics as a short course. And so I think it's important to stay relevant. And so if this pandemic had not happened, you know, there'll be no course on pandemic. It's an example of adaptability. And it is very important, a lot of people, I think, in academia also, it's very possible that people stick with their research subject for life, and say, okay, this is what I do. And if you're interested, so fine, but you're not. But I think the way I see academia, you have to respond to what's happening around the world. And we're essentially in the business of education. And we need to impart that in whatever way we can to students. But I think academia also needs to engage with much wider reporting. Historically, the IIMs have engaged with industry, executive education, and corporate programs, I want to kind of expand that even more. So for example, literature festivals, this is something a world which I never knew about, before I wrote my first book. But there you get to meet artists, painters. So it's amazing in the universe of the kind of people you interact with, is amazing. If you're in academia and engaging with the outset. 

01:06:13

Harish: Right. And what are the different futures that you are preparing for? 

01:06:16

Chinmay: Yeah, I'm not going to tell you, but I don't want to jinx it. But for at least the next few years, I love my current job. I mean, literally love it as if it's truly blessed, you know, you don't think about the fact that it's a Monday morning, or it's a Friday. That kind of a job where literally, it doesn't matter which part of the day it is. So touch wood, that's great. But at some point, obviously, I will try out new things, for sure. For the next few years, at least, I mean, I have a son. So by that time, it's important that he has stability, and so on. So in a few years, definitely something radically different should be on the cards. But yeah, I mean, definitely do many things in the career, and not just academia. But academia will always be a pillar because as I said reading and writing are my first love.

01:07:13

Harish: Right, we're going to use this question as well, when we do our next episode in 2026. All right, final section. Chinmay, where we are going to ask you, we're going to give you some words, terms, things, and I want you to give your hot take on the future relevance of that thing? Right? So what do you think is the future relevance of MBAs in India? 

01:07:38

Chinmay: I was about to say, none, then I checked myself there, saying that no, I am in the business of training MBAs. Future relevance of MBAs is just, let me just say that if earlier, you could do an MBA and have a great corporate career. Today, it's not enough. I mean, I think that's the way I would pitch it, that is the future relevance is hugely diminished, unless you keep reinventing yourself. And so, there is a relevance of the thing, but it is highly diminished from where the MBA program stood 10 years or 20 years back. And one quick way to understand this is just see the latest rankings of the MBA schools in India, six of the top 20 are IITs, so you can just be an engineer and fly a unicorn. In a sense, the MBA degree now suddenly seems, if you're, especially if you're an IIT and management course on the side, you don't need a full-fledged MBA. So that's the reality of the changing market. And we of course, as the IIMs have to reinvent ourselves.

01:08:46

Harish: What is the future relevance of academic/any other conferences?

01:08:53

Chinmay: Great question. Zero, if you're not engaging with the general public outside academia. I think it's very important that academic conferences in particular start engaging, not just with academia, which is what the typical conference will be. But otherwise, it's interesting while you really need to interact more and more with people outside what you're doing. I think I'm very convinced with that part. So for example, we had a history conference. Yes, most people who attended were historians, but it was advertised widely and we got a lot of emails from people who just have a passing interest in history, whether they are in full-time corporate jobs, who are keen to know more about a particular session, which I think is a good sign. So academic conferences, future relevance is only going to come if you start interacting with people outside your circle.

01:09:41

Harish: Okay. The next one and the final one, what is the future relevance of Test cricket? 

01:09:48

Chinmay: You have a class on dinosaurs. On the side, tell your kids they were the dinosaurs and then you have Test cricket. As a cricket lover, and I wouldn't say purist but you know, obviously as someone who loves Test cricket, I generally hope it doesn't die out. I think there's a lot of ways in which it can die out, but I hope it does not. So the question is, what is the future relevance? I think there is relevance. I think Test cricket has its own unique beauty and charm. And I was seeing the stats, the scores, on average, are getting smaller and smaller in the last five years, which is a great thing, because we're getting to test with more results. Earlier Test cricket was often boring because they're no results. If you're getting Test cricket with results most of the time, I think it's still exciting. And it is the last few series, the Australia series and England series. I think there was huge, huge interest in what was happening. So hopefully fingers crossed that the relevance remains.

01:10:48

Harish: Yeah, this is more of a hope for us. But I think yeah, given the kind of results that we've seen across countries, not just the ones involving India, I just hope and wish that Test cricket remains relevant. So on that note Chinmay, I think this is a fantastic one-hour long conversation on a whole range of topics that we wanted to cover. Business history, migration, pandemics, a lot of things which are very relevant in today's context. But I think these are things that everyone whether they're individuals or corporations or leaders should be thinking about, and extremely important parts of thinking about your future relevance. So thanks a lot for this conversation. 

01:11:41

Chinmay: Thank you so much. Really enjoyed it.

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