TRANSCRIPT: Shashi Tharoor on Celebrating Failure – ILS Masterclass

And if they tell you they’ve never known failure, well, there’ll be one coming around the corner, believe me. That’s the way the world is. It’s exactly when you think you’re sort of timing the strokes well and hitting the fours off the meat of the bat that the unexpected shooter comes along and bowls you, if the cricketing metaphor makes any sense to all of you here. And life is like that.

That’s the way it tends to be. But I was thinking about failure very much in the Indian context from which you’ve all emerged. Because for us, failure has a very special place in our consciousness because of the fact that we are in an environment in which success means so much more. Intensely competitive environment, it’s tough to get into a good school, tough to get into a good college, tough to get a good job. At every stage of our life, we are being driven on towards success, towards fear and rejection of failure, which has a couple of interesting results.

The Indian Education System and Failure

First of all, of course, we start off with a situation where right from the start, toddlers have to take an entrance exam to get into kindergarten or first grade. Then you’ve got examinations at the eighth and ninth of the pre-boards, then you stream, then you get your board exams in the tenth and twelfth. I believe tenth has again become optional. Then you come out sort of wiping the sweat off your brow of all those hours of burning the midnight oil, and you then have to sit entrance examinations for the prestigious schools you want to join or colleges you want to join, whether it’s the IIT, JEE or any other examination. Then you have examinations in the colleges and universities.

And then if you want to go on to graduate school, a place like the Indian School of Business, you again have to take the GMAT, right? And coming in, of course, you also need a couple of years of work experience, in a company that didn’t require the management degree in the first place. The great paradox is some management schools say you need a couple of years of work experience and all the places you want to work at say you need a management degree. So how do you manage to reconcile those two? That’s another challenge.

But in all of this, inevitably, there are hurdles, measurable expectations, doing well in exams, leaping over them and success and failure is measured that way. That has created in our country very much a culture of exams as an end in themselves, exams as almost too much of a lodestar in which honestly, as far as I’m concerned, I’ve seen too many examples of people who are only good at doing well at exams and don’t have very much else to offer intellectually or otherwise, but are very good at coming out first in class. And sometimes your star performers may be the ones who didn’t do quite so well at the examination table. But in India, it doesn’t matter. Exams are what defines success.

Well-Filled Minds vs. Well-Formed Minds

And it strikes me that what we often forget about success in examinations is that the big exam called life tends to ask you questions that you couldn’t prepare for out of a college textbook or a school textbook and that a lot of success is about actually finding answers to unexpected problems, is about finding responses to situations you couldn’t anticipate, which is not actually what our exams test. Our exams tend to test whether we have listened well in the classroom and studied well out of our textbooks. That’s what the exams tend to test. Whereas in life, though that kind of preparation will not get you very far, it’s not so much what you think, but how you think that will determine success or failure in the real world.

So the first problem in our society is we define success through examinations. The examinations often involve a great deal of studying, memorization and regurgitation of remembered facts, which is a very out-of-date model in most of the world but is still the model in our country. And the result is that we privilege people coming out of school with well-filled minds, whereas what they really need to get on in the world is well-formed minds. Not well-filled minds because whatever you can fill your mind with out of a textbook, you can also find out with two clicks of a mouse on Google or anywhere else, whichever your favorite search engine is. Everything is available. It’s not so much the skills that examinations test that’s required in the twenty-first century.

It’s skills that unfortunately, our system hasn’t yet woken up to testing. Now compounding this is the social pressure of parents. There’s a wonderful cartoon I tweeted a few years ago, of a big elephant saying to a baby elephant, “You know, son, I want you to do everything that I couldn’t do. You’re going to fulfill my dreams. For instance, I never managed to fly.”

Parental Pressure and Unrealistic Expectations

Yeah. I’m glad you see the joke of it because too many Indian parents are like this. They have unrealistic hopes and dreams. They are convinced that fate thwarted them in getting there, and they put pressure on their children unnecessarily to do that, to attempt to fulfill their dreams. And that’s not really failure.

When these kids fail, they fail because they’ve been set up for failure because they genuinely didn’t have what it took, neither the circumstances, the physical makeup or the intellectual capacity or the interest to do what their parents wanted them to do. Both as minister and subsequently, as an MP who frequently attends convocations at educational institutions and so on, I am appalled by the amount of parental pressure in our society to get kids to go in for engineering. I have talked to so many young people who did engineering only because their parents wanted them to. They had no interest in the subject. Their fantasies were in other fields, but they were driven into engineering because their parents had this old-fashioned conviction from their childhood that that was a desirable subject to learn.

Do you know that sixty-two percent of all the five hundred thousand engineers we graduate every year in India end up in jobs that do not require an engineering degree. And I’m not even counting those who don’t end up in jobs at all and end up as our prime minister prefers selling pakoras on the sidewalk. But this is the challenge we have, that they’ve done engineering because their parents wanted them to.

I just had a case very recently, you know, as an MP, I get a lot of cases of people coming, asking for help and things that they run out of ideas for. Visa denial is a frequent case. In one case, a guy got into LSE with excellent credentials, first class degree, first throughout. But his visa was denied by the British because they said, “Are you going to study international relations and political science when your bachelor’s degree is in engineering and you come first in engineering?” So I asked the boy the same question. I said, “What is your reason?” And he said, “My reason is I didn’t want to study engineering.”

“I wanted always to study international relations and political science. And my parents said, no. What’s the use of that? That doesn’t get you a job. Engineering is what you must do.”

And the poor boy ended up doing a subject he didn’t want. And when he got admission into LSE, he thought my life is made. I can go off and study what I really want to study. And because it’s a prestigious institution, my parents won’t stop me. Well, instead, the British visa officer stopped him.

So we—I mean, I’m going to try and deal with the appeal to the British officer separately, but I’m just saying failure takes unexpected shapes, and it’s often not the fault of the person who fails. In our system, it’s very often not that. And particularly, if the yardsticks we apply from examinations to the kinds of subjects we impose really set you up for failure, then it’s wrong to blame the person who’s failed.

Personal Reflections on Failure

The other aspects that I thought I would address on this, I thought I would may as well get into the confessional mode and address my own life because I’ve had a few failures, and I think the only good thing about them is that I’ve learned from each of them. And I’ve learned some lessons I’m happy to share with all of you.

So I’m one of these kids, by the way, who actually was very good at taking examinations. So I came first in everything throughout, including subjects I didn’t care about. And when we streamed between science and humanities, in those days at the end of the eighth and the beginning of the ninth, I opted for humanities. And my teachers were so upset, they called my parents to the school and said, “This guy has been our best science student throughout. He’s come first in science throughout. Why is he opting for humanities?”

And my parents, like every middle-class Indian parent, wanted me to be a doctor or an engineer, said, “What’s the matter with you?” And I said, “Because I don’t like the subject.” But they said, “You come first.” I said, “Yes, I know how to study for examinations. But two days after examinations, I’ve forgotten everything I wrote in the answer sheet. But you ask me about history or literature or whatever, and I’ll talk to you even now about things that I didn’t even learn in school but learned out of my own interest outside.” And I was blessed to have parents who allowed me. At that time, we’re talking more than a generation, two generations ago, to study what I wanted to study, but many others didn’t have that good fortune. But still the expectation of doing well was very much there.

I remember the only year in my entire school and college life that I didn’t come first. I’d come third in class that year. It was like there was a funeral going on. I mean I was greeted with this look of utter despair and horror and devastation on the part of both my parents and I slunk into a darkened room and nursed brooding thoughts about whether my life had come to an end and whether there’s anything, any purpose in going on. That was the kind of tyranny of expectation that my parents also did impose on me.

Could study what I want to do, but I better do it well. And that, again, I suppose, could have driven me to drugs or something. Instead, it drove me, I think, to want to excel and make them happy, and most Indian kids do end up making that second choice.

My First Major Failure: The UN Secretary-General Race

But then after all of that and leading the life I did and so on, I came up against my first experience of defeat. I’d had a few other successes. The most enjoyable being elected president of St. Stephen’s College Student Union on the slogan, which actually worked out. And then I also was the first elected staff representative of all the UN High Commissioner for Refugee staff around the world. So I’ve had all of these. I’ve never really known a setback until I was invited by the government of India to run for Secretary-General of the United Nations.

And I kind of allowed myself to believe this was destiny. I did have a very unusually extensive experience in all the important domains of the UN’s work, humanitarian peacekeeping, the political work of the Secretary-General’s office, been in the Security Council, been in the fundraising business, been in public information, manage budgets, been an Undersecretary-General. So I thought this is it. My entire life has been a preparation for this. And then I went out and campaigned, though my nomination had been rather last minute.

And as you all know, I didn’t make it. In the very first ballot, I came two votes shy of Mr. Ban Ki-moon. And in the final ballot, I was vetoed by the, as we all now know, the United States, but by a permanent member is all we knew at that time. And in the UN Security Council, when a permanent member votes against you, you’re out.

Now for me, that was a very major blow, and one can look back and think about all things that might have gone wrong. But I had to essentially deal with the first major failure of my life, the first major professional setback in my life. And I found myself dealing with it in two ways, not by minimizing the significance of it. A defeat is a defeat. As Groucho Marx cruelly said, “Close but no cigar.”

Lessons from Failure

DR. SHASHI THAROOR: I didn’t get the cigar to celebrate. And therefore, at the end of the day, there was a defeat one had to come to terms with. I was, to some degree, comforted in the idea instilled in one from the Bhagavad Gita that ultimately you do your duty without expectation of reward and the reward is not the only purpose of the effort. You make the effort because it was worth making in its own right.

For India, we never put forward a formal candidate for Secretary General ever before. Under the system we have in the UN Security Council for Secretary General, it has informally evolved into a situation where there’d be ten years for each continent. So if Asia got it in 2006, then 2016 would be a European, 2026 would be a Latin American, 2036 would be an African, and it would be 2046 before India got another turn.

If India was going to bid for it, this was clearly the only time it could in the foreseeable future. And certainly for me, I’d be ninety in 2046, so I wasn’t going to be a contender later. When this opportunity came, this was the right thing to do, and it was the right thing to make the best and most sincere possible effort to make this work. It didn’t work.

Now one thing you have to recognize is to understand the circumstances of why it didn’t work. And I’m not talking about assigning blame or pointing fingers. You have to understand one basic fact. In something like this, it’s not about the best resume. It’s not about the most relevant credentials.

It’s not even about the fluency in both the UN languages, English and French, which I had. It’s not about any of those things. It’s ultimately about the political choices made by the fifteen members of the Security Council and most important, the five permanent members. And if for whatever reason their political calculation was one way, the rest was irrelevant.

So you had to accept that failure is not necessarily because you were not the right person or didn’t try hard enough or whatever. Failure is because often in life, failure comes from circumstances you cannot control and which are very important to those who are making the decisions that reflect your failure. And those are important considerations and relevant considerations, but they may not be ones that you could do very much about.

Every Setback Is an Opportunity

From that experience, however, came a second thing, the realization that every setback is always also an opportunity. The victor, Ban Ki-moon, invited me to stay on at the UN, and I politely said no. I could have stayed on because I was still relatively young. I was fifty-one. I wouldn’t have been obliged to retire till I was sixty in those days. It’s now gone up to sixty-five. But I felt that having sought the top job and lost, my staying on would be in bad taste because anything I said or did would seemingly cast a shadow on the person who had won. And I thought it was best that I leave a free hand and not hang around.

And then I had to rethink my life. And rethinking my life, abbreviating a process that took a year and a half, eventually led me back to India and into Indian politics, where despite my failure, one consequence of that failure had been a greater awareness of who I was, what my credentials were, what my background was that gave me the name recognition that led two or three of the parties in our country to offer me an opportunity to contest the elections of 2009. And I took what I believed to be the right party for the country, fought the election and won.

And arguably, I might not have been in a position to do so had I not achieved the prominence that failure had given me. So there’s one more example.

I know it’s a cliche. Everyone says, if life shuts a door on you, open a window and all of these Easter card kind of one-liners, but there’s actually some truth to these cliches. Very often, cliches are cliches because they’re true and so people keep saying them.

Facing Media Challenges

But here was an example of something that happened. Came into politics, won a thumping majority, entered, somewhat perhaps blissfully unaware, and became minister of state for external affairs and was soon hurtling around the world and meeting world leaders for the government of India.

And then I was tripped up by another failure, a completely artificial and fake media charge against me, in fact, following a series of media charges I won’t bore you with, which finally led to my resignation. Now that seemed to be a complete failure and disaster. Here I’d come back, reinvented my life, given up all the comforts of a high dollar figure salary to return to India to a salary of sixteen thousand rupees a month, which is what as an MP and a minister I was earning in 2009. And here I was after all that, I even lost the job I had come to do. So I was feeling terribly, terribly down.

Even though I knew there was no justice in what had brought me down, I was also conscious that the world is unjust, that life is unfair, and sometimes you have to cope with it. So I was determined not to let this failure define me. I didn’t know what else was going to be possible. I’d after all come into the political world. I’d been put through many agnipariksas in my first year.

I think my back was pierced with so many stilettos, some of which had been lovingly planted by my own side that it was difficult to resist the temptation of thinking why don’t you just quit and go away. But I’m not a quitter. And I said, no, I want to show those people who believe in me that I came back with the best of intentions, I’m determined to make a go of it. So I devoted myself instead to my constituency and set about being the best constituency MP I could possibly be in the course of the next couple of years. Meanwhile, of course, all the fake charges were demonstrated to be fake and I was reinstated into the ministry.

Finding New Paths to Success

But meanwhile, I had learned another couple of valuable lessons. In Indian politics, for example, if I had carried on from day one being minister of state for external affairs, I would never have been reelected from Thiruvananthapuram because I was literally traveling five days out of seven, having meetings the other two. I was hardly seen in the constituency during my one year as an external affairs minister. And in Kerala, there is a perception that the job of a politician is by their side, by the side of the voters. Being there responding to local needs and demands, attending to their problems, etc., and not gallivanting around the world serving the government of India.

So that defeat and failure of losing that ministry gave me the opportunity to demonstrate how much I could do for my voters, and that again was one more door shutting and one more window opening that again led to new success. So one more opportunity that failure provides is an opportunity to do something different that may actually give you a different success.

In fact, my hard work at that time made it possible for me despite very many adverse circumstances to win reelection simply because things I had done had made a difference to the lives of so many people in my constituency that they had a reason to vote for me despite all the problems we were facing in 2014.

Key Lessons About Failure

And when I speak about failure in this very intensely personal sense, I am essentially encouraging all of you to think along these lines. As I learned from the UN race, do the best that you can do and then you cannot reproach yourself for failing because if failing is for circumstances beyond your control, all you can reproach yourself for is if you didn’t try to do everything you could have tried.

If you’ve done your best, worked hard and sincerely, then it is not truly failure. It is merely a lesson. Secondly, as I said, allow failures to open doors for you. Try and do something different that may actually create opportunities for you to find a different meaning for success in your own life. And third, when, as we saw in that last example I gave you, when a failure and a setback seems to be one that actually there’s no redeeming feature for.

You just knuckle under, do your very best at whatever it is you can be allowed to do and demonstrate through your excellence at that, that you are not to be defined by the failure that set you back. So these are three examples from my own life that I learned that I’m happy to share with you all. There are probably broader questions we could discuss in the Q&A, including institutional failures, political party failures, governmental failures. Failures can take many, many dimensions. But I thought since every one of you is a human being, a human story of an individual and how they deal with failure might be the most relevant way of addressing the topic.

Don’t Let Failure Define You

It’s another cliche I’m going to toss at you that it doesn’t matter how hard you fall, it only matters how quickly you pick yourself up. And that is again a sort of greeting card line, but it’s a very, very real line. Ultimately, you need to be able to stand up and show what you’re worth.

One of the things, by the way, a small tip on the margins for those of you who encounter failure, try not to let it show. I remember Kofi Annan, my late boss as UN Secretary General, telling me once during a particularly hard moment in his life, an African proverb that his father had taught him. And I couldn’t understand the proverb. When you read it, the proverb is “when the sharks bite you, do not bleed.” I thought, how can that be? When the sharks bite you, of course, you’ll bleed.

And I finally understood the meaning of it when I started going through. This is not so much a failure as a lot of unjustified accusations amongst very vested interests in and outside the media and in politics relating to the passing away of my wife. When all these accusations are coming, I realized suddenly what he meant. They want the satisfaction of seeing you bleed. If you deny them that satisfaction, they’ll soon give up biting because they’ve got nothing to gain out of it. And it turned out to be a very valuable lesson.

It also applies to failures. When you fail, don’t show yourself to be a defeated person, rather show yourself to be a determined person who will succeed the next time. There’s another cliche of Robert Bruce who kept on trying and trying and trying until he succeeded. And there’s another, I think, an American sportsman who said, if you fail, it doesn’t matter. You may not succeed next time. You may fail again, but fail better.

So let me just say, all of us will have failures, but we can fail better by learning the kinds of lessons I’ve tried to tell you. And at the same time, if each of us is determined to do the best we can for ourselves, ultimately, the simplest lesson in life is be the best you that you can be. Right? Nobody else can be a better you than you are.

You know what you’re capable of. You know what yardsticks you can set yourself. You know what your talents are. You know what you can do that will that’s within the realm of possibility or even a slight stretch. We should always stretch our possibilities, see how far we can go.

But you also know that if you can’t sing, you can’t sing. You can’t be made a failure in a singing contest because somebody else sings better. Well, you’re not a singer. You may have some other talent. Develop that talent, explore it, and be the best you can be at that.

And it seems to me that as long as you’re the best you that you can possibly be, you may not ever avoid or escape the risk of failure, but you will bounce from it to go on to future success. Thank you very much.

INTERVIEWER: Thank you, doctor, for this very enlightening session. I think I might just start by saying that my parents would have had a great time having him as their son rather than me, considering his academic record. I personally really enjoyed the fact that he spoke about the well-formed as compared to the well-filled mind. It is a very essential part that we all sometimes get lost in when we’re thinking about the drudgery of working in whatever stage of academic career we are in. And I think that’s a very important lesson that we should be cognizant of.

The other thing that I think we all take away is that do the best that you can. And as he rightly quoted from the Bhagavad Gita, there isn’t much more that you can do apart from what is in your hands. And I feel that a lot of us can pick up this lesson and hold on to it. He briefly mentioned about resumes not mattering, and I think our class will be very happy to hear that in real life, I don’t think it matters too much. Right?

Now we move on to the next part of our session. I’m going to take this opportunity to introduce Miss Rima Gupta. Miss Gupta is the head of the Center of Learning and Management Practice and Corporate Relations at ISB. Her interests are in the area of women empowerment with a specific focus on women-led micro and small enterprises. Rima has been instrumental in launching many innovative programs like the CIO Academy, the Executive Eminence, and the Certificate in Business Analytics, which is a very relevant program these days.

The Interview Session

INTERVIEWER: Thank you, doctor Tharoor, for a very enlightening and inspiring session. It’s a pleasure to be here. I agree with you. I think failures don’t define us. If that was the case, I wouldn’t have made the progress.

Although I’m diametrically opposite to you, so I did fail. I was not the person who came first in class. I did fail in my seventh grade, actually, in quite a lot of subjects. And one of the things was the good news was my parents were also very open. They said, she’ll find a way.

But by the time I got to college, I kind of made up for those failures. And it’s been a great journey letting failures not define me. And I think there’s a lot of things we can learn from the life lessons. I think, as you said, in India, especially, it’s the exams, what performance you have on exams that our parents put a lot of pressure.

Innovation and Failure in Indian Society

INTERVIEWER: And maybe I’d like to follow that up because you gave the Indian context. One of the questions was, how does our meritocracy-focused Indian society relate to innovation? And maybe from your experience in working with UN and many other countries being exposed to it, can you tell us if there is a positive relationship between acceptance of failure and innovation?

DR. SHASHI THAROOR: Actually, oddly enough, I think, first of all, our system does not privilege innovation. We actually privilege a lot of regurgitation. Too much of our system requires students to essentially shut up and listen to the teacher rather than questioning the teacher, questioning the assumptions.

I mean, we used to joke that school is where you learn to answer the questions and college is where you learn to question the answers. But in truth, you rarely do that even in college in India today. It’s also, of course, a problem of scale and numbers. When classrooms are forty-five, fifty people, it becomes difficult for teachers to indulge the creative student to challenge the basic assumptions. It makes it easier for the teacher to just say, listen to me, and I’ll explain it as we go along and never really address the question.

We train people to say why. We don’t train them to ask why not. And I think these are genuine handicaps when it comes to innovation. We were a very innovative culture. I mean, we came up with so many of the foundational ideas of mathematics and metallurgy and astronomy and various disciplines couple of thousand years ago.

The country that invented the zero, let’s not forget. And yet today, it seems that all we do invent is zero. So we really have a lot more to do. I think there’s this wonderful line that Einstein wrote in a letter to a school in Brazil, which was unearthed a couple of years ago by accident in old box. And the letter said, in encouraging creativity in the classroom, he said, “dear children, why would you want to be a chicken when you can be a lark?”

You know, why would you want to just be content with squawking what the teacher has told you when you can be soaring in the skies and singing? And to my mind, this is the very, very important lesson. We don’t encourage our children to be larks, to be songbirds. We encourage them, in fact, to be chickens and that’s really very sad. Einstein also said that the mark of an educated mind is what is left behind in your head when you’ve forgotten everything you studied for your examinations.

And that again is something which in our system we don’t sufficiently value and privilege. So I would love to see much more creativity being encouraged than it is. There are some schools which in the extracurricular domain will encourage creativity. I was very lucky to go to a pair of schools where I ended up doing a lot of debating, a lot of theater, a lot of creative activity outside the classroom, which inevitably affected the way I thought and spoke and behaved and so on. And that certainly helped.

College debates and high school debates were very useful in forcing me to think originally. But what about all the kids, the vast majority of kids who weren’t in the debating team or in those exercises? And that’s what I worry about that we require conformity socially, educationally, culturally and conformity does not create innovation. Conformity merely repeats all that already is there.

INTERVIEWER: And I think to add to that point, one of the things I’m very happy about when we have a question in our ISB classroom and the students are asked about a case question or something, the best answer is “maybe.” So there’s not a definitive answer. It’s how you give the answer and how you make a point across. And I think one of the things that I think you quoted Einstein and Edison say the same thing. Right? It’s not that I failed ten thousand times. It’s that I found ten thousand ways that it does not work. And I think part of it is, as you rightly pointed out, to encourage that creativity and failure because innovation comes from failure. And we need to build that into a classroom.

DR. SHASHI THAROOR: Absolutely right. Innovation does come from failure. And Edison is a very good example, as was Robert the Bruce in Scotland who tried nine times before he won. And the case of Edison, yes, I think it may not have been ten thousand times, but it was several, several efforts to find out an effective way of transmitting electricity to a light bulb, which he finally successfully did.

India’s Economic Growth and Demographic Challenges

INTERVIEWER: So the next question I have – I’ve collected a bunch of questions from my colleagues and also my own thoughts. One of the things is that India right now is at a growth trajectory. We have a great GDP that’s eight point two percent.

DR. SHASHI THAROOR: The Brookings report says seven point two currently, but it’s alright. We will get to eight point two. After 2019 elections, we’ll get to eight point two.

INTERVIEWER: You know, the Brookings report points out that we have – we are not the lowest in the poverty number of poor people. Actually, Nigeria is now beneath us, and we are moving forty-four people dropping out of the extreme poverty line every minute. And, of course, you can argue which way you define the poverty line. There’s also doctor Surjit Bhalla who mentioned that we have created fifteen million jobs in 2017.

DR. SHASHI THAROOR: And I know you have jobs only exist in Surjit Bhalla’s comment. They don’t actually, I’m afraid, exist amongst real people doing real work.

INTERVIEWER: So exactly. So the question is, is this a poll bugle or is there some reality to it? Also we talk a lot about demographic dividend. But I think one thing to consider is the demographic liability. And at what point if we don’t do certain things, the demographic dividend becomes a demographic liability.

DR. SHASHI THAROOR: Exactly. No, I mean there’s no question about it that the earlier figures you mentioned, I’m afraid are rather suspect, particularly when it relates to job creation because this was based on one report by one pair of scholars from an institute in Calcutta, government funded institute, which in fact relied only on provident fund pension fund data and completely overlooked the fact that the pension fund system had actually redone its software, thereby admitting sort of ten years’ worth of new enrollees into the pension fund into a new list that was then deliberately misinterpreted to constitute fifteen million new jobs.

If there were fifteen million jobs in our economy, we’d know it, we’d see it, we’d meet people doing it. If anything, all other indicators by all other measurements suggest a very, very negative picture of the economy. We have sadly seen the worst mishandling and misgovernance of the Indian economy in recent memory, certainly for a generation in the last four and a half years.

And the sad truth about this is that these are real human beings who are at peril. One hopes that the voters having been sold a bill of goods as it were just four and a half years ago will wake up and realize that fine speeches do not a government make, that one does actually need tangible results on the ground and one needs concrete policies with defined outcomes.

So I resisted the temptation to give you a speech about governmental failure because it would have gone on too long as I was speaking about the present government because they failed in every single yardstick that I can think of. I’ll be very happy to give you that speech one day. But for the moment, all I will say is that on that part of your question, I’m sorry to say reality doesn’t bear that out.

But on the other part of your question, we have a serious challenge for us as a nation. Forget party politics for the moment. There is no doubt that the demographic dividend ought to have worked for us. We have six hundred and five million people under the age of twenty-five, and the point is that even in terms of just objective numbers against other countries, we are a young country while the rest of the world is aging.

In 2020, the average age in Japan is going to be forty-seven. Europe is going to be forty-six. In the United States, it’s going to be forty, whereas in India, going to be twenty-nine. So we have theoretically the young youthful dynamic workforce that other countries are losing.

In fact, the ILO did a report saying that in the job starting age group from between nineteen and twenty-three, India will have, in 2020, I believe it was, I may have got the year wrong, but not by much, we will have a hundred and sixteen million young people, and the Chinese will only have ninety-six or ninety-three. So we’ll have twenty-three million more young people ready to start jobs.

The problem we have, however, is have we equipped them to do any jobs in the twenty-first century, and have we created an economy that actually offers them the jobs that they could do? If you look objectively at our situation at the moment, many of these kids are going to remain unemployed or underemployed and disguised in unemployment.

And that’s been the sad reality that Mr. Modi rightly tapped into in 2014 when he said to so many young voters, I’ll create two crore jobs a year. Well, he’s created exactly 1.18 lakh jobs instead of the 8 crore that four years should have given us, and that’s the problem that’s facing us demographically.

Because if people realize, I don’t even know how many of you here, highly educated, well qualified people know that there have been Maoist incidents not in two or three, but in a hundred and sixty-five of our six hundred and twenty-five districts. That’s the actual statistic. Now who are these Maoists? These are largely unemployed, uneducated or undereducated young men and some young women who precisely because their lack of opportunity gives them no stake in our economy and no stake in our society, are prey to the blandishments of misguided ideologues with a thousand rupees and a Kalashnikov.

That is essentially the national security threat. It would not just be, not a demographic dividend, would be a demographic disaster. And this disaster is something which we can only forestall by a mix of two things.

Number one, far more effective training and education. And I know we’ve been saying this certainly since Pallav Raju and I were in MHRD. This has been a very strong message. But sadly, it has not been translated into anything in terms of implementation. The BJP government created a ministry of skill development, but we see no evidence of any skills having been developed anywhere. And this has become a major problem.

And the second thing, so skilling and training and education is one. And the second is putting a serious emphasis and priority on sectors of the economy that can generate and absorb jobs, that can actually hire people for things that they can do.

I have long argued, even the days when I was a backbencher in the UPA, I have argued that very frankly our country needed to put far more money into tourism, for example. There have been global studies that have demonstrated that a thousand dollars spent on tourism, invested in tourism, employs eight times as many people as a thousand dollars invested in industry.

So there’s no question that this is necessary in a surplus labor economy like ours, and we need to be able to, for example, create better tourist infrastructure so more tourists will come, create all the ancillary stuff around the hotels, the restaurants, the gift shops, and so on because these are all things that actually can absorb not just people, but even semi-skilled and unskilled people. It doesn’t take much training to be a waiter, to be a busboy, to be a Mali’s assistant, to be a dharwan at the door, all of these things which tourists and hospitality industries need.

Sustainable Jobs in a Changing Economy

DR. SHASHI THAROOR: We need to focus also on things like how we can actually generate jobs that can be done in a sustainable way in an environment in which more and more jobs are disappearing. Right? We can’t say “make in India” to people who are going to be making their products somewhere else because they don’t need human beings to make them anymore. They’ve got machines making them.

I read an alarming study from the Oxford Martin School, and I’m cursing myself for not having kept the reference because I can no longer find it, which said that by 2030, 65 percent of the jobs in the world—I must mean the developed world, I guess, the western world—65 percent of the jobs will be jobs that don’t exist today.

So that’s the kind of situation where you’ve got to be so much on your toes to acquire skills to do the kind of work that literally we cannot imagine today because these jobs don’t exist. And conversely, the report said, a substantial percentage, I’ve forgotten the exact number, but a substantial percentage of today’s jobs will cease to exist by 2030.

And one example I often give, because I’ve seen this in my own years of speechifying. If you had invited me to speak on our economy ten years ago, I had just, you know, nine years ago, just come into politics, I would have made a big song and dance about a great Indian innovation called medical transcription.

In the 1990s, when we got connected, India came up with this brilliant business process offshoring idea, which was that an American doctor would see his patients during the day, would dictate his notes into a dictaphone or machine. It would be zinged overnight by fiber optic cable to India. While he slept, an Indian with some medical training and qualifications would type all his notes up with the right medical terminology. And when he went to sleep or she went to sleep, they’d zing it back to America. And when the doctor came in the morning to work, all his medical transcription notes were typed up. It was a great thing.

India became a world leader in this profession that Indians had invented that was very much emblematic of the way in which IT had transformed opportunities in India’s economy. By about 2005-2007, it was about a 1.5 billion dollar business, and India had 90 percent of the world’s market dollars. And the Philippines was trying to catch up.

Then what’s happened today? All the medical transcription businesses are going under, shutting down or changing. And why? Because voice recognition software has got to a point where that American doctor no longer needs to zing his notes over to a person in India to type them. He speaks into his computer, having paid one time for a piece of software, and his notes are appearing in text on his screen even as he speaks them and with sufficient degree of accuracy that even if he has to make some corrections, it’s much less of a problem for him than paying somebody in India to do them and send them back.

But there’s an example of the way in which what had been a sunrise story for us twenty years ago is already a sunset story. That’s how quickly technology is moving, and that’s how quickly we have to be on our toes.

INTERVIEWER: Sure. And I think to your point, one of the things we are doing research on is the future of work and especially within the Indian context. What is it? How is it changing? And I think you had actually, when you were in the HRD, worked also on education, like, while working and education post right?

Like, in India, the concept is you finish all your education and then you start working. And I think now things are changing so fast, this whole concept of ongoing education, ongoing learning. So maybe you could talk a little bit about that. How do we need to equip ourselves in this brave new world? Singapore is doing some amazing things in this area. I would love to hear where India can do, I mean, skilling.

DR. SHASHI THAROOR: Singapore has advanced to being a very controlled microclimate, right? It’s 3.5 million people in an island. They can shut off immigration whenever they want. They have exactly the number of bodies they need. They can bring in the ones if they need additional ones. And yes, they’re doing very well on things like retraining, continuing education, mid-career education and training. All of these things are happening in Singapore.

Some Indian companies and government ministries are trying to do the same thing, but with arguable questions about how useful that’s been. As I said, I was at ISB to address a mid-career training program. I’ve seen officers in the Foreign Service and the IAS going abroad to foreign universities for a year or two of study. I’ve also seen some of them trying to improve their skills by spending a stint elsewhere, often in another ministry. There have been one or two, very few cases where they’ve tried to improve their skills by going to the private sector and then come back to government. All of these things we need to set up on a much more stable basis and make this much more common.

Now having done that, the challenge for us remains what happens to jobs that disappear. I mean, obviously, I don’t think driverless cars are coming to India in my lifetime and maybe not even yours. But if they did, that would mean 25 million Indians out of work. That’s because there are 25 million Indians whose only profession is driving, whether it’s cars, lorries, whatever. And they would have no other profession. What could you skill them to do?

It’s becoming increasingly apparent that we need to equip our people to do things that they can do in India by themselves or in countries that are willing to accept Indian labor. We’ve seen Indian labor in the Gulf, but Japan has a labor shortage. Are they going to borrow Indian laborers? They’re not. At least not for the foreseeable future.

So we’ve got to see what we can actually equip them with. And one of my concerns, as I said earlier, is that we need to get the right skill sets and give that training, and we need to involve everybody in this. I often challenge the private sector. Why should we leave it only to the government and the labor ministry to set up its ITIs and train people and operating equipment that’s already out of date in the industry? Why can’t we get industry to actually set up and make it obligatory for every company of a certain size?

I would even do it by law. Make it obligatory for them to have a skill training center attached to them where they train people, and then they can absorb the best of them in their own companies if they want, but the rest have a certificate and go out into the job market elsewhere. We have a crying need for this kind of thing and a crippling shortage of many skilled requirements.

INTERVIEWER: And I think just to your point, like, we had Taiwanese delegation here visiting us of higher education institutions, and they are facing the opposite of our problem. Right? They have that inverted pyramid in terms of demographics. And their universities, a part of it could be that we look at alliances and form policy around that where we leverage the east network of the east and maybe leverage their universities’ infrastructure to do joint initiatives. And I think there’s an opportunity that we have not tapped in as much, and there’s a potential to build on that.

So the last question from me, and I know the audience has been patiently waiting. This is with respect to—I was just reading up, and it mentioned that you had introduced a private member’s bill in the parliament, most notably to amend the Article 377. And it is phenomenal to see the Supreme Court now finally coming out with this verdict and for the 377 article and striking down this article. And my question to you would be regarding the role of judiciary versus the policymakers in a democracy?

Judiciary vs. Policymakers in Democracy

DR. SHASHI THAROOR: Okay. Well, before responding to that, let me say there was actually an example I was also going to use in my speech on failures because I failed. She said I introduced the bill. I didn’t succeed introducing the bill. Twice, it was voted down at the stage of introductions. It was never formally introduced. So it was actually a failure. But I left out the example simply because we were running out of time.

Let me say, however, what I would have said now that she’s raised the issue. It was a failure that opened the way to another kind of success because when I tried to introduce it and the homophobes in the BJP shouted me down and voted me down, and I tried three months later once again, and the same thing happened. At that point, people said, “Will you keep trying?” And I said, “No, not because I don’t want to keep trying and failing better, etcetera. I said, No, because I remember Einstein’s definition of insanity as being doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”

So there are two different lessons here. But in any case, I also said, it’s very clear that parliamentarians are not going to change this dreadfully outmoded law. The only ones who will be in a position to address the issue would be the judiciary, and you have to try that route. And indeed, the NGOs concerned and some individuals took that lesson to heart. Had I not failed and failed so visibly at getting this bill introduced, maybe they would not have. But they really were convinced now there is no other recourse but to go back to the Supreme Court. There was already a curative review petition pending, which could have taken years to come. So they filed a new case claiming violation of their civil rights, and as you know, they won.

Now when you raise the larger question, I think we have to accept that in a democracy, one of the challenges is finding parliamentarians with enough political courage. Because political courage means sometimes being prepared to take unpopular stands that many of your voters may not like.

When I introduced 377, a very prominent religious figure in my constituency called me and said, “We like you. Why are you doing this?” And I said, “Because I believe it’s about freedom.” And he said, “No, no, no. It’s about sex.” And I said, “No. It’s about freedom. I don’t believe that the government has a place in human beings’ bedrooms.” He said, “No. No. We’ll talk about this.” Fortunately, he didn’t stop supporting me so far, but the fact is that that is the kind of pressure that any parliamentarian would come up against because there are traditional views, there are religious views, there are conservative views in every society.

And on some things, politicians are privately relieved to leave it to the judiciary. The problem is, of course, that while the judiciary may take a progressive stance since they’re not accountable to anybody of their own conscience and their interpretation of the constitution. And we’ve got these wonderful judges like Justice Chandrachud who seem to have a very liberal orientation towards principles as he interprets them as he finds them in the constitution, and that’s exactly the role of a judiciary.

Change in every democracy can come through democratic books. They can also come through mass movements, but the quickest way very often is through judgments. Because let’s say when America had its famous Brown versus the Board of Education that essentially desegregated America’s schools and made blacks and whites study together, arguably, the politicians would never have voted for that. It was only a progressive Supreme Court that could take the stand it did, and the same would apply in our country.

There will be case after case in which the judiciary will be ahead of the politicians because the politicians will worry about what they can sell to their voters, to the influential community leaders and so on. And they will therefore inevitably be more cautious than a judge who is not accountable to anyone for a vote. Once he’s there or she is there, they’re there till they are 65 or 62 depending on what rank they get to. And until then, barring the very unlikely possibility of impeachment, no one’s been impeached in the history of independent India, they can certainly decide to rule on the basis of their conscience, and that’s what the court has been doing.

INTERVIEWER: Thank you. With that, we’ll open the forum for open questions from anyone. So I hope the students will moderate it. We’ve received a lot of questions. Thank you all for the same. However, in the interest of time, and since doctor has to catch a flight as well, we’ll be limiting to a few questions. The first one is by Mr. Akshay Thakur. Please identify yourself and ask your question.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Good evening. I wanted to ask—Sorry. Hi. I wanted to ask you about your opinion on the recent verdict on the Aadhaar. Given that the Aadhaar has already leaked a lot and there are massive privacy issues, millions of people’s Aadhaar details have been leaked and privacy has been compromised. Do you think in a rush to fix issues of identity and providing a better PDS system, the government has forgotten about privacy?

DR. SHASHI THAROOR: Oh, it definitely has. Absolutely. But don’t forget when Aadhaar was introduced, there was no privacy. In fact, we actually had the BJP government arguing that there is no right to privacy in the constitution.

Privacy and Rights in India

DR. SHASHI THAROOR: Privacy has been recognized as a right only by a Supreme Court judgment last summer, July of 2017. So that’s how new the whole idea of a right to privacy is in our system. Once the right to privacy has been established, a lot of things flow from it. I would argue the Section 377 decision has itself been made possible by the prior recognition of a right to privacy. If you have a right to privacy, you should have a right to privacy in what you do in your private life, provided you’re not breaking any criminal laws in other areas.

And so the government has to stay out of your bedroom. I would argue the government should also stay out of your kitchen. What you eat should be up to you and not to self-appointed guardians of Bharatiya Sanskriti to tell you what you can eat or not. And I speak as a vegetarian, by the way. The fact is that these principles need to be enforced.

As far as Aadhaar is concerned, there’s been this really dismaying realization that we have given a lot of information that is indeed leakable, hackable, everything else. Secondly, we have also, thanks to the BJP’s far-reaching behavior, entrusted the same information to mobile phone companies, private commercial banks and all sorts of entities which could have misused that information, including by selling them to third parties. We have essentially created a system that may give convenience to government bureaucrats but could have put all of our private lives at risk. And that’s why I welcome this judgment.

I also have amongst my private members bills this time successfully introduced a data protection bill that would call for a much more robust data protection law than the one that Justice Srikrishna has offered the government. I’ve also sent a copy of my bill to the government saying please consider these as well. I don’t care about pride of authorship. If you can take these provisions on board and strengthen the draft that Justice Srikrishna has given, we may have a data protection bill that will keep us all much safer when we entrust our data to the government.

India’s Foreign Policy with the US

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Good evening, doctor. My question is about India’s foreign policy with respect to US. We see that almost every country that has grown close to the United States, US somehow ends up pressurizing them to cater to its needs. And India has healthy relationships with Iran. Right now, we are facing a lot of pressure from the United States to cut back on oil. So do you think our sovereignty will prevail in the long run with respect to dealing with our neighbors?

DR. SHASHI THAROOR: That’s actually a particularly interesting issue that’s risen right now. You see, the earlier sanctions on Iran, pretty much everyone abided by because there was a general perception that Iran was developing a nuclear weapon and that it would be a menace to the region and beyond. Therefore, there was pretty much worldwide support for that first set of sanctions.

Then as you know, there was the Iran-US nuclear deal. And when the nuclear deal was concluded, these sanctions were lifted, trade resumed. What was interesting was by all accounts of international inspectors, the Iranians were honoring their end of the deal, and they were indeed complying with the requirement not to do things that could have led up to the production of a nuclear weapon.

Given that, there is much less understanding, acceptance, or sympathy for the new US position today than there was the last time around. Because now Mr. Trump seems to be acting irrationally. The Iranians have done nothing wrong. And yet, not only are the Americans sanctioning Iran, they have denounced the nuclear deal, they’ve said that any country or company that violates their sanctions can itself be sanctioned by the US.

In other words, if an Indian company were to buy oil from Iran, then that Indian company will no longer be able to deal in dollars with American banks or sell goods to America. Its CEOs may not get the visas to go to the US, and so on. So it’s a very intimidating set of sanctions.

Now many are expected to knuckle under. Some are showing some resistance. The EU has very interestingly come up with a collective position saying that they will work out their own arrangements to trade with Iran despite the US sanctions and in euros rather than in dollars.

Now it will be interesting to see how that works and whether there is some way for a country like India to either do something similar or be part of that sort of arrangement because for us, Iranian oil is the cheapest and easiest oil to get. It’s the closest oil producing country to India. Oil comes literally at a fraction of the cost that it would have to come from anywhere else.

If tomorrow, we have to shut down all our supplies from Iran and already we are in trouble with Venezuela going through various convulsions, we may have to end up buying American oil and that’s a very expensive thing to do, both the price of the oil and the distance it has to be shipped.

I don’t want to give you a definitive answer because I’m not in the government. I don’t know what the government is thinking. But I would think that we should resist for as long as possible shutting down our oil from Iran because we need it. Keep it going for as long as possible. But at the end, explore whether we can find another way of sustaining those supplies rather than giving in to the US and ending up having to pay much more for our oil than we’ve had to do so far.

Religious Sentiments vs. Women’s Rights

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Hello, sir. So my question is a follow-up on judiciary versus political implications. Whatever verdict had come out, it didn’t go well with a lot of people, including many women. So I would like to know your views on this debate on the religious sentiments versus women’s rights versus political implications?

DR. SHASHI THAROOR: It’s a genuinely tough one, and it’s one of those questions where it is indeed safer for the judiciary to answer than for a politician. Because one of the issues that confronted the Supreme Court in deciding this case was precisely that question: Does the yardstick of rational legislation and constitutional language and constitutional reasoning apply to matters of faith, which by definition are beyond rationality?

As you know, of the five judges, one, ironically a woman, Justice Indu Malhotra, dissented saying that you cannot apply constitutional reasoning to issues of faith. And it’s very interesting. There’s another case coming up shortly regarding women’s access to the Haji Ali mosque. Having taken this decision on Sabarimala, the court will have no choice but to take the same decision on Haji Ali mosque, and we’ll soon find outraged Muslims on the streets, just as you’ve got outraged Hindus on the streets right now in parts of particularly South and Central Kerala.

It’s a tough question. Now having said that, I, as somebody who’s been a student of history as well as an instinctive liberal myself, I obviously have my own sympathies. And I’m very conscious that every time any historic change came, there were a lot of traditionalists who resisted it.

You will be startled to go back to look at the archives of the 1920s and 1930s and see what very respectable members of society were saying about Dalit entry into temples. How objectionable they found it, how they thought it would completely destroy the sanctity of a sacred place, and how Dalits coming into temples was going to be the death knell to the Hindu religion.

It took a Hindu Maharaja, the Maharaja of Travancore, in 1936 to unilaterally declare a temple entry proclamation. He could get away with it because even his title was not Maharaja, but Padmanabha Dasa. He was the servant of Lord Padmanabha of the Padmanabha Swami temple in Thiruvananthapuram in whose name he ruled. And as the Maharaja, he thereby was able to decree with god’s sanction something which a civilian government would have found much more difficult to do.

We abolished untouchability in the Constitution of India. By that time, the traditionalists had got used to the idea that the skies wouldn’t fall if Dalits went to temples. So maybe one could argue that the traditionalists will soon find that the deity remains blissfully celibate even if women of menstruating age wander into his presence.

But, without being frivolous, those women who do feel very strongly that this is wrong need not go. The court’s judgment doesn’t require anyone to go to Sabarimala. It just says if you want to go, you can no longer be prevented on the grounds of your age or menstrual situation. And I think that’s the judgment that we all have to follow.

Closing Remarks

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: I would like to now call Jamia on stage for the vote of thanks.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: As we come to the end of the first edition of ILS Masterclass, it’s my utmost honor to thank Dr. Tharoor for being gracious and taking time out of his unimaginably busy schedule and talking to the ISB community about the role that failures play in our lives.

We hope that ISB was a memorable experience for you as it has been for us, and we wish that this collaboration will be long lasting. We would like to take this opportunity to thank Dr. Tharoor’s team, especially Mr. John Koshi and Mr. Rahab Sharma for their unconditional support over the last month.

We would also like to thank our very own dean and faculty members for making this process smooth for us and giving us unwavering support whenever needed. And, of course, our ILS team and volunteers who are constantly working hard behind the scenes to bring events like these to life. Last but not the least, thank you all for being a wonderful audience. All we do is for you.

I now request Ms. Palari Ramanujam to present a token of appreciation from ILS team to our guest.

DR. SHASHI THAROOR: Just saying since I’m heading for the airport, I’m delighted it’s something that can fit into my hand luggage. Thanks very much. You’ve been a great audience.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: I would request everybody to please remain seated while we escort Dr. Tharoor out. Kindly comply with us so that the process is smooth. Please be seated. I’ll let you all know when you all can go out. It won’t be too long. I would also like to mention that the doors are locked at present, so please be seated.

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