Grand Tamasha

This week on the show, Milan is joined by New York Times journalist Sopan Deb--author of the brand-new memoir, Missed Translations: Meeting the Immigrant Parents Who Raised Me.

Whether it’s Hasan Minhaj’s comedy--OR the spectacle of the “Howdy, Modi” rally in Houston--OR Aarti Shahani’s heartbreaking memoir--listeners of this show know that getting inside the Indian immigrant experience is one of Grand Tamasha’s obsessions.

On the surface, Sopan is a successful journalist, comedian, and cultural commentator. But in his new book, he explores a side of his life that existed well below the surface--his estrangement from his parents, the alienation he felt as an immigrant kid in a mostly white New Jersey suburb, and the heartbreak he endured watching his family life not so much fall apart as melt away.

Milan and Sopan discuss his toxic family life, his Indian-American coming-of-age story, and his life-changing journey to meet the parents who raised him.

YOU'RE INVITED: Join Milan, Tanvi, and Sadanand for a special LIVE episode of Grand Tamasha on Tuesday, May 19, at 11am EST / 8:30pm IST. Tune in as they break down the week's news - and join the live chat to ask questions! Add it to your calendar, and join the live show here. 

YOU'RE INVITED: Join Milan, Tanvi, and Sadanand for a special LIVE episode of Grand Tamasha on Tuesday, May 19, at 11am EST / 8:30pm IST. Tune in as they break down the week's news - and join the live chat to ask questions! Add it to your calendar, and join the live show here. 

After a six-week nationwide lockdown in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, on May 3rd the Indian government commenced a calibrated relaxation of this unprecedented shutdown. To discuss the economic impacts of the crisis and what steps government can take to cushion the blow, this week on the show Milan welcomes back the economist Arvind Subramanian. Arvind served as the chief economic advisor to the Government of India between 2014-2018 and is currently a professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and a Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute.

Milan speaks with Arvind about how Indian authorities should respond to the economic crisis, the utter failure of global economic cooperation, and whether China’s reputational hit offers India an opportunity. Plus, the two discuss Arvind’s long-standing support for a universal basic income (UBI) for India and whether the country has the necessary infrastructure in place to deliver an effective UBI.

In a much cited 2009 essay, economist Lant Pritchett argued that India is not a failed or a failing state, but a flailing one. In Pritchett’s words, India is “a nation-state in which the head, that is the elite institutions at the national level remain sound and functional but this head is no longer reliably connected via nerves and sinews to its own limbs.”

A new book the author and journalist Shankkar Aiyar takes the argument one step further. Aiyar’s new book, The Gated Republic: India’s Public Policy Failures and Private Solutions argues that the failure of India’s public sector to deliver on its most essential functions has created a massive gap, which the private sector has had no choice but to fill.

On this week’s episode, Milan speaks with Aiyar about the causes and consequences of the proliferation of India’s “gated republics,” what the COVID-19 crisis reveals about the Indian state, and whether democracy is part of the solution or part of the problem.

This week, Milan sits down with podcast regulars Sadanand Dhume of the American Enterprise Institute and the Wall Street Journal and Tanvi Madan of the Brookings Institution for a special “Happy Hour” edition of the “Grand Tamasha” news round-up.

The three discuss how India is faring in its pitched battle against the Coronavirus, the reasons behind festering anti-China sentiment among many Indians across the political spectrum, and the impact COVID-19 is having on India’s domestic politics.

Plus, the trio discuss their personal lockdown strategies for staying sane during self-isolation.

India is in the middle of an unprecedented 21-day countrywide lockdown as it tries to contain the growing threat of Coronavirus. This virus has wrought so much fresh destruction but it also has the potential to exacerbate pre-existing inequalities in Indian society.

This week on the show, Milan speaks with Amitabh Behar, the Chief Executive Officer of Oxfam India. For seven decades, Oxfam India has been providing humanitarian and development assistance across India in an effort to address gaps in service delivery, gender equity, injustice, and livelihoods.

Amitabh and Milan discuss India’s response to the crisis, the precarious lives of India’s urban poor and migrant labor, the pandemic’s particular effects on women, and the connection between entrenched social norms and violence against women.

When it comes to the matter of relations between India and Pakistan, you’ve heard all of the familiar tropes. Two nuclear-armed rivals with hundreds of thousands of troops amassed along a contested border. A Hindu-majority India pre-destined to be at odds with a Muslim-majority Pakistan. A vibrant democracy in the east, a military-dominated polity in the west.

A new book by the historian Pallavi Raghavan offers a very different account about relations between these two South Asian rivals in the immediate aftermath of Partition in 1947. Contrary to the conventional doom-and-gloom narrative, Raghavan’s book Animosity at Bay: An Alternative History of the India-Pakistan Relationship, 1947-1952 shows how amity and a spirit of cordiality infused relations between India and Pakistan in the first five years of their independence.

This week on the podcast, Milan speaks with Pallavi about her book and the lessons it holds for today. The two discuss why yet another book on India-Pakistan relations was necessary, how India and Pakistan developed constructive relations in the wake of the traumas of Partition, and why the declining power of the state explains the difference in bilateral ties between the 1950s and today.

If you listen to National Public Radio, chances are you’ve heard the journalist Aarti Shahani report on some of the biggest technology stories in the world. Microsoft. Google. Apple. Facebook. Aarti has covered them all.

But there’s one story you may not have heard of--and that is Aarti’s own. In a new memoir, Here We Are: American Dreams, American Nightmares, Aarti documents her family’s harrowing journey--from Partition-era India to Casablanca, Morocco to Queens, New York.

Aarti’s parents came to America with little money in their pockets and no legal documents to remain in the country. Battling poverty, discrimination, and wayward business partners, the Shahani family manages to make it. Until one day, nearly everything falls apart. Aarti’s father was arrested and accused of operating an electronics store that was a front for the Cali drug cartel. What followed was a jail sentence for Aarti’s father in New York’s notorious Riker’s Island prison and a years-long struggle to fight off deportation.

This plot sounds like a made for Netflix special. But this is real life. This is Aarti’s story.

This week on the show, Milan talks to Aarti about her new memoir, her immigrant story, the “unsung heroes of low-end globalization,” and what she learned about America’s broken immigration system along the way.

In the wake of her mother's untimely death, a young woman from Bangalore--born into a life of privilege--drops everything and travels to the opposite end of India--to the state of Jammu and Kashmir--to search for a long-lost figure from her childhood--an enigmatic Kashmiri man named Bashir Ahmed.

What follows is a tale of romance, intrigue, conflict, politics, self-discovery, and tragedy. Readers will find this and much more in the best-selling novel, The Far Field, written by author Madhuri Vijay. The book won the 2019 JCB Prize for Literature, one of India’s most prestigious literary awards. The Washington Post book critic Ron Charles says that The Far Field “offers something essential: a chance to glimpse the lives of distant people captured in prose gorgeous enough to make them indelible — and honest enough to make them real.”

This week, Milan speaks with Vijay from her home in Hawaii. They discuss Vijay’s journey as a writer, her decision to set her book in Kashmir, and the surprising connections between her idyllic adopted home of Hawaii and the conflicted state of Jammu and Kashmir.

Since the end of the Cold War, it has become commonplace to view America’s relationship with India through the prism of China. But a new book by the Brookings Institution scholar Tanvi Madan argues that China’s centrality to U.S.-India relations is hardly a product of the past few decades.

Tanvi’s new book, Fateful Triangle: How China Shaped U.S.-India Relations during the Cold War, offers a historically grounded yet readable guide to the ways in which China has influenced the trajectory of U.S.-India ties--directly and indirectly--since India’s independence in 1947.

This week on the show, Milan and Tanvi discuss the twists and turns in the U.S.-India relationship over the decades, what India’s policy of “non-alignment” really meant, and whether nature and nurture are finally converging to forge a common American and Indian view on China.

In 2018, the World Health Organization (WHO) published a list of the 15 most polluted cities in the world. 14 of the 15 were in India. This is a troubling statistic that has been repeated ad nauseam in the media, by environmental advocates, and by concerned citizens of the country. But what are the causes of this environmental crisis, what are the social costs, and what—if anything—can be done about it?

To tackle these questions, Milan sits down with Jessica Seddon on this week’s show. Jessica is the Global Lead for Air Quality at the Ross Center for Sustainable Cities at the World Resources Institute and she has spent more than a decade living and working in India on issues related to urbanization, infrastructure, the environment, and decentralization.

Milan and Jessica discuss air pollution’s wide-ranging social impacts, why the crisis is so acute in India, the impact of Delhi’s “odd-even” experiment, and what—if anything—policymakers can do to turn the tide against toxic air quality in India’s cities.