E21: Nitin Pai - Public policy thought leader

“Some amount of anchoring and mooring toward identity is important. But that’s the word – your identity should be a mooring: it tells you who you are and from there you can depart to wherever you want. It tells you where you started and which direction you want to go in. But if instead of being a mooring, it becomes a straitjacket – you are held together and your mooring is also a radius beyond which you cannot move, then it becomes naturally constraining.” 

That is Nitin Pai, founder of the Takshashila Institution (A think-tank and school of Public Policy based in Bangalore). Nitin is a public policy intellectual and has been my go-to thinker on the topics of geopolitics, defence economics and public policy choices.

Nitin once said - “The stories we tell ourselves shape the reality we live in” – and it is this avatar of his as a teacher – and student - of narratives that I wanted to know more about on this podcast.

In this episode, we dive into several topics around narratives and storytelling:

• Nitin talks about how narratives are at the most fundamental level about identities and how that means - we can become prisoners of our own narratives. He shares the evocative analogy of how narratives can serve as a mooring or an anchor for who we are, but can sometimes also become a straitjacket, severely constraining the space that we as societies create for ourselves
• On public discourse, I liked Nitin’s frame of the four levels of stories that societies (and organisations) can grapple with.  Level one being the story of ‘Who we are’, our identity; Level 2 deals with ‘What are the key problems’ that we want to focus on, Level 3 being the ‘What are the right Solutions for these problems’ and Level 4 that dealing with ‘Where do we want to go’, our vision. Unfortunately, a lot of societies often get stuck at Level 1, making very little progress on the higher levels.
• In sharing these stories, there are two broad types of narratives that Nitin says we can use – narratives of hope and narratives of fear. While narratives of fear can get short term electoral gains, over time, people become tired of being fearful… and look forward to more optimistic narratives.
• Nitin also shares why the medium of narrative dissemination also matters – specifically, how Nitin himself started with blogging, then got into Twitter in the early 2010s, how he got disillusioned with it and what alternatives he’s exploring now.

We also geek out about the meaning and utility of frames and frameworks in storytelling.

Finally, Nitin shares why everyone should read philosophy and fiction.

It’s an eye-opening conversation.

Let’s dive in.

Show Notes:
Nitin Pai's website
Nitin on Twitter, Mastodon, LinkedIn
Takshashila Institution website and Nitin's interview on the organisation
Nitin's book, The Nitopadesa
His article on the Four Levels of Public Discourse