Walnuts Are Not Smoky, and Orchards are Blissful

India: Give Machines a Chance

My Most Recent Podcast

My most recent guest on Brave New World was Piyush Gupta, who has been the CEO of Singapore-based DBS Bank since 2009. Piyush is a unique CEO. He has his roots in Tech and Banking, starting with his early years as a protégé of John Reed, an iconic former CEO of Citibank. My conversation with Piyush is particularly timely, considering the emergence of AI language models such as ChatGPT, and how is AI poised to transform banking, insurance, and business in general.

So, tune into my conversation with Piyush. It was a lot of fun.

Pink Floyd’s Time: Home, Home Again

The last year has gone by in a flash. I’m in Kashmir again, for my 187^th annual family ritual that was started by an ancestor in 1836. On a specific full moon, family members converge annually at a beautiful spot in Kashmir where this ancestor erected a temple after he found a gigantic “shiv ling” (stone phallus) at the bottom of the main river in Kashmir.  The ceremony  includes honoring the ancestors and the deities while tossing dry fruits, spices and grains into a fire, orchestrated by chants from a “pandit” in singsong Sanskrit verses.

It’s also a unique olfactory spiritual experience! It reminded me of my recent conversation with Dima Rinberg on smell, and the kinds of memories it evokes. It’s hard to describe burning walnuts and applewood in language. “Smoky” just doesn’t cut it.

I hope this tradition goes on for a few more centuries. It’s so cool, and makes me appreciate what that ancestor started almost two centuries ago, perhaps unknowingly. There’s something special about coming to a physical spot every year, especially one that is ringed by snow-capped mountain ranges. For the last ten years, the pandit who performs the ceremony can’t help but exclaim “Ananda Ananda” (bliss, bliss) every time he walks into the orchard, and at multiple times during his mantras!

It’s never too late to start an annual family tradition of your own. Or join mine in an apple orchard on what is typically the Strawberry Moon of the year.

And while we’re talking about Kashmir, I’d like to thank all my readers who donated to the animal shelter in Kashmir through my “Minimalist Kashmiri Cuisine” video on Youtube earlier this year. I inaugurated an animal ambulance this week in Kashmir (I’m a little embarrassed that it has my name on it!) with animal activist Maneka Gandhi. Again, thank you all for your donations. Animals need our support.

India’s Broken Code

I love spending time and traveling in India. New York is home, and I consider myself American, but I’m still an Indian citizen, which always registers surprise with Indians who ask why I’ve been willing to tolerate the abuse associated with traveling the world on an Indian passport all these years. I’ll save that colorful subject for another time.

India is ascending on the world stage. It’s gaining agency. There’s no shortage of young talent. Progress is visible. India became a major tech hub in the 90s thanks to the “Y2K problem,” which turned out to be a non-event, but it fed India’s nascent tech industry at the time.

India has now taken a lead in developing “public digital infrastructure,” beginning with the success of its real-time authentication system called Aadhar, led by Nandan Nilekani, an early guest on Brave New World. Aadhar eliminated a lot of the “bleed” in government payments of subsidies to individuals. Subsidies make up roughly a fifth of the country’s GDP. In my conversation with Pramod Varma, chief architect of Aadhar and a key player in India’s emerging public digital infrastructure, we discussed how a new generation of interoperable digital systems is poised to transform the delivery of services at scale.

But while India goes online, its bureaucratic processes that involve verification and controls are much harder to change.  Administrative systems require controls to ensure they run correctly. But controls in India typically involve the heavy hand of its bureaucracy that require multiple verifications of all kinds of things that keep changing. This has created a massive asymmetry of power between the state and society. I’m reminded of James Robinson’s theory in his book The Narrow Corridor, which argues that strong democracies with a high state capacity maintain a healthy balance of power between the state and the people through strong trusted institutions. India doesn’t have it. Robinson argues that the Indian state reinforces an ossified caste-based social structure – “a cage of norms” – that limits its capacity to govern well.

But I’ll go one step further and argue that Indian citizens are complicit in accepting and even encouraging corruption as a way of life. In this amusing NPR story on corruption in India, Gagan Singh talks about how he learned to live with the system and even appreciate it, since he gets better future service from the recipient of a bribe. But there is zero trust in such a system. I’ve experienced this personally multiple times during the last year in connection with my late father’s house sale. An income tax officer made several thinly disguised overtures for a bribe by demanding more documents at every turn. When I refused, he issued an order with a large fine. It cost him nothing, but imposed a significant financial and emotional burden on me. While I can afford the lawyers, the bribe might have been cheaper and more effective after all.

Indeed, some economists argue that corruption serves a useful market-like function in countries where institutions don’t work. While this might explain a banana republic, it is bizarre that such a situation is acceptable to a society that is the world’s fifth largest economy. Economists estimate that corruption costs India roughly 1.5 percent in GDP. That’s’ staggering.

Is there a solution?

One is to design digital processes so that human involvement becomes largely unnecessary. As long as information is authenticated to the point that risks can be eliminated or “mutualized” as Piyush Gupta put it in our conversation, standard rules can be applied, and human intervention is reserved for appeals and true exceptions. Controls are an inherent part of the system where processes are properly designed.

An equally important issue is the collection and use of data. While India aims to create a “data empowerment and protection architecture” to put users in control of their data, the reality is that all kinds of intrusive personal data are collected by its institutions. For example, when you travel, a destination address is required. (This is a COVID-era introduction, but it has become permanent.) If you pull out some cash from your account, the teller asks you for the purpose of the funds. When you transfer funds, you must specify a reason. I could go on. The larger point is that too much data are being collected needlessly which creates an incentive for misuse. We’ve learned this from the US, where the culprit wasn’t the government but the big tech companies, who now face a backlash against the unbridled collection and misuse of data. Dina Srinivasan, one of my early podcast guests, described how Facebook and Google created data monopolies, thanks to the absence of laws around data collection and use. At the current time, there are serious concerns in the US about the use of data that impacts political polarization, mental health, and privacy.

India faces similar issues around data governance, but it first needs to build trust in its systems and processes. My guest Andrew Yang proposed that a state should look beyond reporting economic data on inflation and growth, and create other kinds of indices based on large amounts of reliable data that reflect things like happiness, frustration, and satisfaction with governance. Such indices appear especially relevant to India with its bloated government and bureaucracy. A particularly useful index might be the number of human roles eliminated and created every month by leveraging a superior intelligence like ChatGPT.