What Makes a Culture: An Indian Case Study with Jayant Bhandari
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Well, we're back for another conversation. This one's going to be interesting because we want to dive into recent conversations online about what does it mean to be America? What does it mean to have an American society? It has opened up broader conversations about the sausage-making of culture. And of course,

On our shows, whether it's A Neighbor's Choice or things hidden in our anthropology series, we like to dive into anthropology. So that's kind of our forte here. Now, I'm not considering myself a sociologist by any means or anything like that, but I think we're going to have an opportunity to have maybe learn some things and have some food for thought. So our guest today, first of all, our returning editor at ANeighbor'sChoice.com, Surat Desgupta. How are you doing, Surat?

I'm doing fine, David. And it's always a pleasure to see Mr. Bhandari as well. I came across his work during the pandemic actually, because it was so hard during that time to find Indian voices speaking out against these draconian restrictions, you know, and all of that.

So it was a pleasant surprise to find the voice of Mr. Bandari and very nice to finally be acquainted with him. And thank you for coming on, Surat. And we also have our guest, Dr. It's Jayant Bandari, right? That's correct. Very good. Thank you for coming on. Thanks very much for having me, Mr. Gronowski and Mr. Dasgupta.

Very good. I think this is going to be a trilateral commission because I'm in America and Surit's in India and you're in Asia, right? You're in Japan, correct? Well, I'm currently in Japan, but I live in San Francisco. Okay, very good. Well, San Francisco is another country from America too. That's very true. That's very true. I accept that.

So why, you know, you, you, you know, sir, it showed me a lecture you did at the, at the group that Hoppe does. It's called the private property group or what was the free society? I can't remember the group. I've talked to him before. Property and freedom society. Yeah. And it was very interesting because you were just, you were just going on about the, a lot of the horrible situations that a lot of folks face in India. And I guess you grew up there. Can you tell us a bit about your background as to why you spoke on this topic?

So it's very important to understand that I did not really give the full horror of life of India, because at the end of the day, I watch India, I experience India through my chauffeur driven air conditioned car.

There are a lot of people, there are probably 99% or 99.5% people of that country who live lives worse than I did when I was growing up in India. So I can only understand, I claim, 25% of the depravities of that country.

But once you start talking with the lower caste people, the women, the people who live in slums, you might start to understand the real horrors of that country. But the problem is that those people

can't really communicate anymore because their brains would have been fried because of the experiences that they go through. So the reason I gave that speech was because Dr. Hoppe had heard of me, he knew about me, he had read of me, and he wanted me to give a

Talk on Understanding India. So that was his title. He chose the title and I chose the speech, the content of the speech. Well, that's fascinating. And I wanted to ask you first. And like, so you grew up in India. Where did you grow up in the city of a small town or what was your story there?

So I grew up in the capital city of Madhya Pradesh, which is one of the biggest provinces in India. I grew up in the capital city of Madhya Pradesh. I think the population approximately is currently 80 to 100 million people. So it would be among the biggest countries in Europe, what it in Europe.

I grew up in the capital city. My dad ran one of the only printing presses in that province, which meant that I grew up surrounded by politicians and bureaucrats. Some of the best friends of my dad were chief ministers or even in the ministry of the federal government. So I have known these wretched, degraded people from close distance.

And so most people, when they're a kid, no matter where they live, they kind of have, if everything's okay, a nice time. They run around, they chase a kitty cat, they have a fun time, you know, they watch a movie with their buddies. When did you first realize you didn't like it in India? Was there an exciting...

I wanted to get out of that country. If not get out of that country, I wanted to experience what was on the other side of the world. Now, remember, I had no concept of the television or the refrigerator. I took my first flight when I was about 25 years old. That was the time when I left India. That was a one-way ticket. You were out of there as soon as you got there.

No, I returned back, actually. I returned back and very gladly returned back because I wanted to contribute to help India improve. I did not want to live the rest of my life in an alien society. I wanted to be a part of India. I returned back. So I...

When I was growing up, you know, the idea of fun, the idea of playing isn't really the idea of India, or at least it was in those days. And certainly with my dad being a businessman, I started working with him from as early I can remember.

As a young guy, almost as a teenager, I was doing accounting for him. I was actually doing maintenance of the machines. I was diagnosing the problems in his printing press. I was doing all kinds of things. I was even taking cash away to bribe bureaucrats. So I was doing the whole plethora of things required to do business in India. And you very early on, like what, three years old, five, seven, eight? I mean, what did you said, man, this is the birds. I got to get out of here.

Or you didn't want to get out? Okay, you didn't want to get out at first. No, no, I didn't want to get out. I mean, I found my life very suffocating in that country. And I distinctly remember that maybe I was about five or six years back, five years old.

I was sleeping on the rooftop and those days, again, I did not know what air conditioning was. I did not even know what the air blower was those days. So we were sleep. We used to sleep on the rooftop to keep ourselves cool during the summer season. And I would look at the stars and I have that image hardwired in my brain. I would look at those stars and I would say, hey, these are the same stars which connect me with the United Kingdom and the U.S.,

Now, my understanding of the US and the United Kingdom was very vague and confused because we hardly have any information. We had radio connections of Deutschland, we have BBC and we had Voice of America. But apart from that, our understanding of Germany

of America or the UK was very, very limited. I don't even know when I first met the first guy of European ethnicity. I think that was probably in my university. So with that very vague feeling, I always knew I needed to get out of that country to experience what was in better places. Yeah. And a lot of people, you know, if you live in a small town in America, you watch these movies and you think, I got to go to the big city. So, I mean, that's not a universal thing.

Not necessarily universal, but a very common thing around the people. I want to get out of where I'm at. I don't like my hometown. You know, I got to go somewhere. I got to make it somewhere, you know? Absolutely. Was your child, did you have a good, did you overall have a good experience as a kid there? I mean, in terms of just like good life and good food, having a good time, good memories, just really bad.

No. Yeah. And I grew up in what I would consider to be one of the better families in the country. I grew I went to a Catholic school. I my parents were not I wouldn't call them middle class or even lower middle class, but they were still for those days among the better off people in the country.

I mean, remember, I when I when I used to bring cans of oil on my head when I was five years old, I would go do all kinds of shopping for my family. So that was an everyday thing for me. Life wasn't necessarily a fun. I think it's.

The moment you start having fun, at least those days, your seniors, your elders did not like it. They wanted to suppress that enjoyment. So that was the culture. And I think Indian culture has moved completely on the opposite direction now. Now, hedonism is the way to live. So again, I don't know. They couldn't really find a balance, neither then nor now.

Now, sir, I want to let you jump in here. You know, I mean, you're someone that has a different generational experience, but any thoughts or questions or anything you want to share? Well, I mean, I can't say that I had a typical Indian upbringing. I would not classify myself in that category. I was brought up mainly on, you know, Hollywood movies. We had a television at home.

My dad had been to West Germany to work there as a TV repairman. I don't know if he did this deliberately, but he didn't really expose us to me and my brother. He didn't really expose us to a lot of Indian entertainment, if you know what I mean. So...

So that's why probably it was easier for me to build a bridge to Western people. Whenever I came across people of Western cultures, it was easier for me to talk to them. I wouldn't say it wasn't quite a culture shock for me, but I can certainly sympathize with Mr. Bhandari. I can...

you know, the contrasting that he provides because it certainly is a very tough situation and what he said here about Indian culture moving in the opposite direction, that is certainly true because, you know, this instant barrage of media that is

technology that emerged in the Indian market of television. We went straight from radio to television and all of that. That pivoted Indian culture towards a kind of consumeristic, hyper-consumeristic society where

where you will see a lot of families compare themselves to, you know, like sort of compete with other families.

as to see how much property they have, you know, how much this family, this relative that I know, does that family have television sets? Do they have better television sets than we have? You know, it becomes a kind of competition between Indian families and it's very hyper-materialistic and it may seem surprising to Western people

People who are often led to believe that Indian society is somehow spiritual and very, you know, transcendent in their thinking. But actually, if anybody came to India and experienced life on a day-to-day basis, it's very, very materialistic.

You have a quote here. You say the nurse, Jayant, you have a quote that says the nurses will gossip all night and not tend to you in an Indian emergency room. I experienced that, yeah. Did you hear me? Oh, you're asking me? Yeah, absolutely. You see, you go to an Indian hospital to die. About 10 or 15 years back, Indian medical tourism suddenly picked up.

because India was seen as a place to go for a major surgery by Americans and Canadians. And a lot of people started going to India. And then they realized that these people

the hospitals and the doctors didn't really care about your lives as much as they cared about money. So they wanted to do procedures on you that you probably did not require. They wanted to overcharge you. If you ever ended up in an Indian hospital, you would be at a huge risk because the hospitals would want to charge you as much as possible. But also, a

also a lot of doctors are not qualified. But moreover, in a city like Bhopal, and that's even today the case, that a lot of doctors are not really qualified

trained doctors. They call themselves DR. You know, they have the doctor designation before them, but that is, they could be anything else with a degree, but they call themselves medical doctors to fool people, but they are not medical doctors. And this is rampant in even the elite hospitals of my city, Bhopal. Now, it is certainly true that Calcutta is, you know, Calcutta is one of the

was at least 20, 30 years back, one of the best, better cities in the country. It was a very cosmopolitan city in the country. And also Calcutta,

was where British set up their, started setting up their institutions. Bhopal was where I grew up was very remote from the British control. It was at the fringes. But yeah, doctors and nurses, you can't really trust anyone there. Yeah, you have another quote that says, if I, it's about that kind of issue that you discovered earlier,

if I can make 10 cents and you die, that is of no problem for an Indian. That is absolutely true. I have consistently seen over my life in India, and I regularly go to India, the thing is that people are extraordinarily materialistic.

And people are very atomized. The reason why I say that an Indian organization of two people has one person too many and all they care about is personal acquisition of resources. And as a result, what happens to you is none of their business. Yeah, I want to ask one question here. Mr. Vandari, you mentioned about the

British influence, you know, where they set up in Calcutta, they set up the institutions, but there are certain places where their reach were not, you know, that visible. So do you think that plays a role in how the extent of the backwardness we see in Indian society? Or do you think that's not too much of a factor?

Well, the way I see it, Mr. Dasgupta, is that the British set up the institutions. They became a catalyst through which a renaissance started happening in India, which is what we call as Bengal renaissance.

This all started from Calcutta and the catalyst were the British. They were able to identify smart, good people of the country and they used the very best Indians not just to improve the institutions of the country but even run countries like Myanmar.

Burmese bureaucrats those days were sent from India because British identified and trained the very best Indians to do all these things. And that is why India was seen as the jewel of the crown, because they had done an extremely good job in that part of the world. But then again, because of my guess is that

the wealth and prosperity and the attraction that cities like Calcutta generated, it brought in a lot of poor people from around the country because the greater masses of that country continued to be extraordinarily wretched and poor. And they had no...

no rule of law, no provision of anything. So they were attracted towards the bigger cities, but that has gained pace as time has gone by because now the governments of India really pay no attention to rural places except for offering them free stuff. Didn't they really nail the COVID-19 response though in Uttar Pradesh? Did they do a good job there with the ivermectin and all that?

Well, the COVID response was absolutely horrible in that country. I was stuck in the country for four or five months because they overnight stopped all flights out of and into India.

And I was able to leave about five months later only because I don't have an Indian passport. So I was able to use my Canadian passport to get out of the country. But still, I was stuck for all those months. Now, my guess is that about five million Indians died during COVID-19.

And they did not die because of COVID itself. They died because the hospitals were completely in chaos. You couldn't really get to the hospital if you had any other problem in life.

Pregnant women were made to walk kilometers before they had a chance to get to hospitals. There were no rooms or oxygen available in the hospitals. So the real reason all those people died was because

because of dysfunctionality and mismanagement and corruption rather than because of COVID. If they had done nothing to restrain people from moving around, I doubt if as many people would have died. And also, Andhra Pradesh, didn't they do ivermectin only? They didn't do the... And they were an example over here in America of a country that got over its problems faster than other places.

Well, yeah, I, you know, I know about all those issues, ivermectin, and I was, you know, hospitals were charging thousands of dollars. So, you know, sometimes what you when you hear about other countries in America, you hear very sanitized version of those stories. And because, you know, America, here is one issue with Americans, Americans want to look at things.

the goodness of other people and they want to, they're self-deprecating. So they want to say that we aren't doing all that well, but look at all these other people who are doing so well. I think that was one of the reasons for this exaggerated perception about what was happening in India. But Ivermectin, I'm sure might have saved some lives, but the way they organized things was an utter disaster

Millions and millions of people died just because of mismanagement. I mean, imagine that Indian government overnight stopped everything, bus services, train services, everything, which meant that millions of people living in Calcutta

Delhi, Mumbai, who were earning four, $5 a day had to go back to their villages and they had to walk a thousand or 2000 kilometers. They had to walk. And while they walked, the police beat them up all the way through. Women gave birth to people on the way, hospitals weren't available. So, you know, the hardship that Modi imposed

gave to the people was is really not imaginable to an outsider unless you had experienced what was going on. Yeah, I was about to mention that you had brought that up Mr. Bandari in prior interviews about the police brutality that we had witnessed like there were countless videos circulating on the internet of

you know police beating your you know migrant workers who had were migrating from other states and they had to walk back uh they were beaten up with canes and then they were they were humiliated by you know these punishment school children kind of punishment that they used to you know impose on these poor people poor people it was so heartbreaking to see and uh

And on top of that, you also had the media encouraging these kinds of behavior and the Indian media. And, you know, I would regularly come across people, you know, people whom I knew, you

personally, they would also say, they would also encourage like, yeah, that's the way they should be beaten up, you know, like they should be forcefully injected, they should be forcefully, and there were also forceful vaccinations. Police went into villages, you know, rural areas, and you would see these videos of women being

and skinny people being forcefully vaccinated by the police against their wishes. It was just unlike anything I've ever seen. And I shouldn't say that, of course, because I still live here. I see it almost on a daily basis, but it's so depressing.

Okay, so I might just do a philosophical analysis of what Mr. Dasgupta said. Remember, for an outsider, it might just come have a come across might have come across as a story, but there's a deep significance in what he said.

What he said was that Indians wanted to impose their wishes on other Indians. They did not really care if other people were tyrannized as long as those, the

the tyranny met the objectives of these individual Indians. Now, that is where the seed of tyranny comes from. That is what makes India a grotesquely tyrannical society where everyone wants to run lives of everyone else. And bureaucrats and the government have pretty much a free hand to do whatever they want to. They can beat you up. The

courts will do nothing. And this is regular. This is the story of every police station and every court in that country. Police will invariably across the country beat up people, even sodomize young boys. They would...

beat you into pulp, they will file fake charges against you, which are obviously fake. And my guess is that virtually every charge that police files in the country is fake and it ends up in the court and the court will do nothing about it. And most Indians will say, hey, that's perfectly fine. He's after all a criminal. And there's something called encounter killings, which on which you can see a Wikipedia page

And encounter killing is when the police goes out to kill an alleged criminal and claims that he tried to run away and they killed him. And that's rampant across the country. And Indians just very happily go along with it. They say, hey, that guy needed to be killed.

But the problem is that they don't understand that once they believe in that, they cannot be the rule of law because the individual bureaucrat pretty much gets the authority to kill whosoever he wants to. Yeah, the idea of innocent until presumed guilty is a very hard concept for Indians to get, unfortunately. I don't know if you share this view, but Mr. Bandar,

You often hear of feminism and the family courts running rampant in the West and all of that. But you can see it really in this extreme example in India. Like if anybody is charged with a rape, you know, by the police or somebody else, even before that person is tried in a court, he will be beaten to pulp, you know, like you said, by the police in the local police station.

And it doesn't matter whether if that person is proven guilty or not. He's already suffered the punishment for a crime.

Right there. Mr. Dasgupta, I 100% agree with you. My interaction with Indian, the average Indian is mostly at the airports. And if a girl comes and sits next to me, I get up and go away because I don't want to get into trouble. Because in that country...

she can claim that I raped her in front of those hundred people and the court will take another 20 years to decide on that matter while I would suffer in the prison. And I don't want to take that risk with my life. But I might add, and again, because I know what's happening in the country, most of the filed rape cases are actually fake cases. Any woman who

who has anything against you, for her, the easiest job is to file a fake rape case against you and pay some bribes to the police. At the same time, rapes are rampant in the country. So I'm not denying that at all. The real raped women do not get any hearing in the police station. She might actually get disappeared or might get raped again by the police or the police will just simply refuse to file

her case. So that is where I, a friend of mine, a very good friend of mine likes to say that the people sitting in prisons in India are probably a better quality of people than the people sitting outside the prison in that country.

Wow. I mean, you talk about, and I wrote down some other quotes I saw from you that could stir thought here about the Indian culture needs the noise, the smell, the chaos for their catharsis. What is that? What are you talking about when you talk about that? So.

So this is an extremely important thing. You think people who grew up in a Western civilization or people who grew up in Japan or Korea think that every human being strives for peace and harmony.

Now, that's not really the case. Indians really need the noise to run away from their existential crisis. And it is not just about noise. They need they need smells, strong smells. They need a strong taste. The reason why they need to eat very spicy food as well. There

their movies are full of emotionalism. It's movies have nonstop emotionalism. So Indians need this constant drama to avoid addressing their existential crisis. Now you can't avoid your existential crisis. You can only suppress it by all this thing. And it is like drinking alcohol. You're constantly avoiding, uh,

the suppressed existential crisis that you have. And that is the reason why India is among the most distressed and unhappy countries on the planet, because they are constantly running away and they are constantly finding escapism. They're constantly escaping from the realities of life. Now, you know, we look at this on different levels, anthropological, biological. Dr. Ray Peet is someone we've learned from on this program.

One of the things he talks about is cortisol, the stress hormones that are related to the way in which we interact with one another. Authoritarian mindset comes from excess serotonin. You talk about how they fight as a way of getting catharsis to kick in. That's literally a physiological experience that people all over the world can have. If you are addicted to cortisol, so to speak, to get your catharsis, that relief of going through a ritual combat, even if it's through words,

is a stressed state of being that people become addicted to. You know, how much of this, you know, I want to get kind of to the meat of the matter here for all our cultures to learn from. What's going on here underlying this? You know, I think about different factors like

You know, and I kind of, I think, you know, the seed oils that were mass introduced to India helped exacerbate a lot of the stress state. I mean, diabetes has gone through the roof since industrial vegetable oils were introduced. We've got different things like, you know, lack of proper nutrition. I think being on a vegetarian diet is a very stressful state of existence, in my opinion. Yeah.

So I think all these different factors can kind of be baked into the pie, so to speak, or baked into the cake, however you want to say it. Um, he, he,

Yeah, that is indeed an issue. Indians simply don't have the concept of diet. They don't really understand that sugar is bad, carbohydrates are not good, that proteins are needed for human body. Indians simply don't have that concept. In fact, there's a common saying that

in which people proudly claim that they can pretty much eat anything and digest anything. And this is seen as a sign of pride by a lot of Indians. So that means that they can eat any fried stuff, spicy stuff, oily stuff, and they come out perfectly fine out of it. And they also wear their vegetarianism as a badge of honor

So unfortunately, Indian food is probably the worst food on the planet. If you look at the Indian plate, it is, I would say, at least 90% made up of oil and carbohydrates and sugar. So this is really bad. But at the same time, you know, even among the people who eat some proteins and relatively more nutritious diet,

Self-reflection is not really an Indian thing. Self-reflection, thinking, analyzing your own mind and analyzing your actions and emotions is not really an Indian thing. You're not saying this from a genetic determinist perspective. You're talking about culture, aren't you?

Well, you know, culture is downstream to genetics. You can't deny that culture is downstream to genetics and that could stay on even if you move society. So if you look at Mauritius or Guyana or people who might have left India or sub-Saharan Africa hundreds of years back,

their genetic expression might not have changed very significantly. There's a lot of work on it. So culture is pretty much downstream to your genetics. Don't you think that the heart of this culture, though, is the problem of religion, that religion is the placenta of mankind, wouldn't you say? Yeah, absolutely. But again, religion is downstream to genetics. And also look at this more closely.

My guess is, and I have traveled a fair bit in sub-Saharan Africa, if you look closely at sub-Saharan Africa, Christian societies are no less violent in my perspective than the Islamic societies. What happens to Christianity in Africa?

in Sub-Saharan Africa is that it turns voodoo. The same to a large extent has happened in India. You can Google Christianity India and you will see crazy stuff, crazy superstitious stuff in those videos. So they reformat religions based on their genetics. So I think at the core is actually genetics.

But what about, like, you know, I mean, I'm not... Look, my ancestors, I have ancestry in German. I have, you know, different ancestry. You go back when they were encountering the gospel for the first time, they were a little vicious, and it took a while for that to kind of sink in. It took hundreds of years to still...

fits and starts and stuff like that. But really one of the things that helped folks in the, in my opinion, in the West and especially America is having the literacy of the biblical text to actually read the Bible instead of just being kind of hearing it from a distance to actually engage with it on an individual level opens up the individual personhood aspect about American culture, where we say the human person, you know, is made in the image of God, right? So when you start with that assumption, you,

That's how you start, and you work that out slowly but surely, generation after generation after generation. Isn't that the key to what makes a society actually have foundational principles like liberty? If you don't have any story...

that you can pass on and imitate about the respect for the human person, like the idea that the Bible brings into history. I mean, you know, Tom Holland is good with this. He's a historian. He wrote the book Dominion, and he traces the history of Christianity. And obviously, you can always point to nations where it doesn't seem to take root as well. But there may be a lot of factors into why that is, right?

Well, so this is how I put it. I have been going to China for the last 20 years and Chinese were very, sometimes very vicious, very, very unsophisticated. But when given an opportunity to absorb a good culture, they very quickly absorbed it.

So I can fully understand what you said that at one point of time, Germans and Irish, Irish were known for being stupid in North America at one point of time. Now, when given an opportunity, they absorbed civilizational values. When offered civilizational factors, they absorb those eventually after a few generations.

There are, however, people who have completely failed to absorb those values. And this is Indian subcontinent people, this is sub-Saharan African people, this is a lot of Latinos. They simply, those values slip off their psyche right away. It simply does not, those values simply do not stick.

And that is why I think the only people I think have a hope among all the third world countries is not North Korea, because they are the people who have in many ways the right genetics, but a bad institutional environment. Once that

institutional environment changes, they will be able to absorb civilizational values. But I am very convinced, and we can return back to the same call, we can have this discussion 5, 10, 15, 20 years later, but India will not have absorbed values. In fact,

it will have dissipated the values even more over the next two decades that the British had imparted on India. So it's your idea that Christianity is being processed out of India right now. It's been what little good you think it did, it's been kind of absorbed and...

And it will be kind of digested out of the system and excreted eventually. Absolutely, yeah. Everything, everything... See, civilization does not exist in nature. You have to continue to work on it, to maintain it. And you have to fight with blood to create a civilization. That's very Girardian. René Girard says that human sacrifice is what precedes culture. So...

Yeah, I mean, Europe went through this process for three millennia. They went through hundreds of brutal wars that ran for decades to come to an understanding of civilizational values.

This is very precious. And once we arrive at that stage, we might forget how difficult it was to get there. But I mean, you're saying India has an issue with getting addicted to fighting, but then you're saying that fighting is the key to getting your civilization stuff together, right? So how does that work? Yeah, but Indians are sheepish people.

Yeah, Indians are sheepish people. They don't really fight. They make a show of fighting. They are loud. They abuse each other. They use profanities nonstop.

And when they even if they have a physical fight, they slap, they don't really punch you on the nose. So unfortunately, except for the police, you said the police are pretty brutal, right? Yeah, but also police is coming from a very sheepish and very spineless background.

state of existence because they know that the court will side with them, the politicians will side with them and they can get away with anything. And these are very spineless people, exactly the same people. Once the tables turn around, they start groveling. So, and this is the issue with spineless people. When in weak position, they grovel. When in a strong position, they become ruthless tyrants.

I very much agree with you Mr. Bhandari. I'm only laughing because it's so true what you're saying. I mean, you can just look at the fact that Indians do so poor in combat sports, you know, they don't have any representation at all over there. And the only sport that they're good at is cricket. And like, that's only like played between 12 countries, I think, and they go crazy about it. It's like they're the king of the world when they dominate that sport. Yeah.

So what's your what you don't have any you don't have any hope for India. What would you tell a little Indian boy looking at you right now? Like an eight year old boy, he says, what should I do? So, yeah, so I actually talk with a lot of Indian groups and young people and I advise them firstly that, you know,

try to look for truth. Don't try to fool yourself because Indians are experts at fooling themselves. If you ask an average Indian about Indian economy or Indian...

how much of a superpower India is. The average Indian will tell you that India is a superpower. It's the third biggest economy in the world. Now, of course, in GDP terms, it might be, but on poor capita basis, it's one of the most poor countries on the planet. It's a horribly wretched place. And, um,

there's nothing like a superpower about India. So Indians live in an illusion. And I, you know, there, I think there's something to do with food. Uh,

The hallucination that comes from oil and carbohydrates and sugar is absolutely outrageous. An average Indian, he might be pooping in the open on railway tracks, but he still thinks that India is on a moon mission and a mission to Mars. So, yeah.

So I tell an average Indian... You're talking about hallucinogenic carbs and oils and they're on a mission to Mars. And that's true. And I've been there. And I've been there. So I probably know what I'm talking about. Those are very... You've been to Mars or the guy on the train tracks? Or the carbohydrates really give you a kick in your mind. It makes you really lazy intellectually. Yeah.

I tell people, Indians, to seek truth, irrespective of whatever it might be. And I also tell them that even if you come to an understanding of truth, you will have less existential crisis because once you know the truth, you at least know what you are dealing with. So you don't fool yourself that I'm giving a present, a gift to the bureaucrat. Exactly.

except that you are giving him a bribe and let's not do all that drama and dance behind it. Just do it and be done with it. So I just, that's what I tell them. I also tell them that for most of them, moving to another country is not an option because your heart still belongs to where your friends and family are. Your heart still belongs to your food. And I know, you know, I'm an Austrian guy, Austrian ecologist.

economics guy. I'm a libertarian. And I have known people who have exactly my way of thinking, but they hate leaving India because they still like the noise. They still like their smells. They still like the chaos. Despite that, intellectually, they don't.

but in real life they do. And I keep telling them that come to accept that this is what they like. And they tell me that, yes, Jayant, after much self-reflection, we have come to accept that this is what we like. So at least you get rid of this internal conflict within yourself. I just want to pose a question here. Do you think that...

You have mentioned, Mr. Bhandari, that for many Indians, it's not an option to move abroad. But let's say like somebody who doesn't have the financial capabilities, because you certainly know this, that moving abroad is a very expensive job.

you know, endeavour, like, especially like if you have a bureaucracy sitting in the middle that's ready to, you know, bounce on you with, like, they won't give you your passport if you don't hand them bribes, you know, those kind of things. What would you say to that person? Like, if that person doesn't have the financial capacity or like he's having that bureaucratic hurdle in front of him?

What would your advice be? So let me continue talking about seeking truth. One fact that you come across once you are seeking truth is that Indian bureaucrats are brain dead and stupid. It is extremely easy to fool them and dodge them. So that is not really a big problem. They are so brain dead that you...

they don't really understand anything about life. I remember... Maybe the Calcutta ones are smarter than your region. Well, I mean, you see, Calcutta... You know, I don't really understand Calcutta properly because I've been there many times. It continues to be a very agitated place, but it is a place where Bengal Renaissance, the Indian Renaissance, started, and it created some of the...

the highest caliber people of India, Rabindranath Tagore, for example, who got a Nobel Prize for literature. So it created some fabulous people, but somehow Bengal today is a very stagnant and decaying place. So Mr. Rajasthan, in my view, it is very easy to dodge these bureaucrats.

The second issue is that yes, it's expensive to leave the country, but I know people who are extremely rich, who are multi-millionaire in dollar terms and still prefer to live in India because they prefer the noise and smells of India. And if

If at all they move out, a lot of rich people actually don't move to the US or Canada. They move to Dubai or Singapore so that they can keep returning back to India in a few hours. And they do return back quite often. Do you help work with a lot of clients that come out of India and you help them find business opportunities? No.

No, I could be sometimes very racist when it comes to India. I don't really do much work with Indians or any work with Indians because Indians don't understand the concept of contracts.

But this is not my area. What we're talking about is not my area of life in terms of making money. I advise American institutional investors. That's my job. But once in a while, an Indian company might come to me seeking advice from me. And I usually ignore them because either it goes nowhere or even if it goes somewhere, it's not unlikely that they will not pay me.

Is that, do you advise businesses trying to do business in India? You help them how to do it?

Yes, absolutely. So why would they go to you when you're telling them everything about India is stay away? I mean, I just don't understand it. So my major work is to do with helping American institutions invest in America. So it has nothing to do with India, but I do invest a bit of my time helping American companies invest in India. They come to me saying,

seeking my opinion about how to go about investing in India. And I think usually because one person in that billion dollar company sees the light and he knows that if he says what I'm going to say would make him lose his job, because American boardrooms are very politically correct.

I go to them and I tell them the truth, which would get most people fired from those boardrooms. So I think I do the dirty laundry for them in a way, I tell them what they either know, or they probably can't really discuss enough because of political correctness. But mostly, my advice runs for a few days in which I convince them not to invest in India.

But I have actually helped them invest in India. And in that case, I...

I help them go through contracts and dealing with Indian partners to make sure that your invested money is protected because Indian court system does not work. So, you know, I might tell them that, hey, have arbitration outside in London or Singapore and have collateral outside the country and those kind of things. And I say this with all sincerity, if there's any nation that wants to hire a PR guy to dissuade people from investing in India, they should hire you.

I mean, goodness. Well, I don't dissuade anyone from investing in India. I think people should look at it. But most opportunities that you see as opportunities in India are actually illusions.

India, you might say that India has the biggest population in the world. But hey, so what? They can't consume because they can't produce. They don't have the purchasing power and they will never have the purchasing power. So don't fool yourself into thinking that you can make money. And most multinational companies, if you look at their financial accounts, they don't really make money out of India. India is a marketing gimmick for companies like

Apple or Google or all these companies, because it tells the Wall Street that, hey, there's a lot of growth coming and that growth will never come.

Yeah. And there's a lot of marketing behind like the Hollywood portrayals like that. Have you ever seen that movie by Julia Roberts? Eat, pray, love. Did you like that movie? Have you seen it? Oh, yeah. Before you speak on the matter, Mr. Vandari, there's also like along with that, what David has said, you know, there's a plethora of Western literature. Like, you know, you probably may have heard of this author, William Dalrymple. He

He has produced so many books like how India has changed the world, the brilliance of the Mughals and all of that. What is your opinion on that? Where does all of this come from? Do you think those are genuine observations or do you think those are coordinated campaigns?

So I first arrived in the United Kingdom 30 years back. People in the United Kingdom were not politically correct people those days. And they understood how the world worked. They understood, they had the wisdom about what the third world deprivation was.

degradation and deprivation was like. What you're talking about, Mr. Dasgupta, are the derivatives of political correctness in the Western society because they don't want to see bad things about people who have failed to improve themselves despite that they were offered technology and philosophy on a silver platter. You know, for example, India...

So, you know, the numbers are disputed, but anything up to 40% of Indians still use the open air as toilets. They poop in the open.

Now, Romans had pipelines and drainage system two millennia back. So Indians have been offered a simple technology which actually shouldn't cost much. They have failed to absorb that technology. So the thing is that the reality is right in front of your eyes. But Western people, because of political correctness, failed to absorb, failed to absorb

you know, want to impose... Firstly, they want to project their own ways of thinking on other people. They go to an Indian village and they say, hey, Indian villagers are so happy even in their poverty. No, they are not happy. They just... Because they see a white face, they just feel cathartic. And for them, it's just an exciting moment. Apart from that, they are in drudgery. They, you know, they have...

Yeah, they don't smile when I come. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. So, so I think the,

A lot of glorification of India is based on political correctness, but also there's something else that is virtue signaling, which also comes from a derivative of political correctness. And it's very easy for intellectually lazy people to virtue signal because then you don't really have to put in an effort on virtue.

understanding the history or the basics. So you can always say that, hey, colonizers exploited Africa and most people, because they don't

Most people are intellectually lazy. They will accept it. It's easy to virtue signal when the costs are going to be borne by other people. But at the same time, to say anything against it, you have to really work on the history, understand the realities of those people. But virtue signaling is a combination of laziness and political correctness. You said the answer is to pursue the truth. So what is the truth?

Well, I don't know. I know what the truth is. I'm constantly on that path. And I might just add that when I arrived in the United Kingdom at the age of 25 or so, it took me about a year to really start getting the essence of the meaning of the word truth.

Because in India, at least in my area and the larger part of North India, you don't speak the truth. You speak what works for you, what works for you in acquiring resources. People lie. Everyone knows everyone lies, but everyone lies anyway. And if you don't lie, everyone

the listener is going to degrade what you say by 90% anyway. So you better exaggerate. Otherwise, what you're going to say is not going to stick. So, um,

You know, I'm on a path from telling nonstop lies to seeking truth and becoming rational and objectively grounded. And that removes a lot of existential crisis for you because at least you know you are standing on a solid ground. Yeah.

So are you, do you have, you said that you have this philosophy and you have, I know you're, you have a Vancouver philosophy seminar. Yes. I, by the way, do your grievances with Indian culture carry over with you into Vancouver, the Indian community there? Are you there? Okay. Or are they not as, are they, they keep the same problems you have? Well, uh,

I have left Vancouver. I thought you had a Vancouver philosophy. Maybe I got that. No, I do. I do. I run it every year. I run it every year. So remember I ran, I left India because not because I hated the Indian government because I hated the Indian government, of course, but they are so stupid and dysfunctional. They were not my problem. My problem were Indians. Uh,

And now there are too many Indians in Vancouver. So I have left Vancouver. Do they do they do they are you an enemy of their like, do they put you out on like a wanted poster? Not not literally, but like, are you kind of like a target?

Well, I did see my my my caricaturized photograph in a wanted poster circulated by Indian morons because they are so sheepish and so dishonorable that they they you know, they give gang gang rape threats to girls for saying anything against India. And they think it's honorable.

I mean, stop doing that. That was in Vancouver you're talking about? Oh my goodness. No, I'm just talking about social media here. Oh, okay. But yeah, but no, I still run a yearly seminar, philosophy seminar in Vancouver. The next one is in August 2025 in downtown Vancouver.

And this is a I love it because we talk about Western philosophy and we it's a forum for open discussion on things, things that we don't talk about otherwise. I really want to press more into and I know we're kind of we're going to we won't be able to cover it all today because we're running out of time. But I do I do think that there's something that needs to be fleshed out about.

Where these habits, these dysfunctional habits come from, you know, and I think the biological, I think I think the accurate depiction is not.

I think genetics is always a part of anything, but I think it's overplayed to say it's genetic determinism. I think that there's a lot more to do with metabolism, and ultimately I would still push it back to religion. So obviously Christianity is this radical—in my opinion, Christianity is not an autopilot thing. You sprinkle it on a community, and all of a sudden it produces a certain result. I think Christianity produces radical choice.

And with radical choice comes the opportunity to choose pathways that will negate the values of the encounter with the Christian story. But to say that the West just happened to get to where it was purely through some kind of genetic lottery, I'm not saying you're saying that, by the way. I'm just saying that some people who might say that, I think that is totally wrong.

easily falsifiable and defeated in a conversation. I think Christianity is the missing secret sauce, so to speak, to the gravy that made the good things about the West admirable and worth cherishing and promoting, right?

I give a lot of value to Christianity in terms of holding a moral framework for the Western society. But I still think that the quality of people existed before the moral framework could be developed and absorbed. So if you read, if you, you know, I am not a theologian, but if I, if I read about Christianity,

St. Augustine or Aquinas, I realized that these people refined Christianity and understanding of Christianity as time went by, because the quality of people existed before Christianity came. I don't disagree that it's one of the most important pillars.

as it exists today for the Western society. But I might just respond to one thing there, which is where I think a lot about these days, which is you use the term that Bible says that we are all made in the image of God.

And I think that might be an erroneous belief because that makes Western compassion and tolerance limitless. They think that everyone can be absorbed

and everyone can become a rocket scientist given an opportunity. And unfortunately, as a result, Western people, particularly North Americans, Australians, and Kiwis have brought in outsiders who will never, ever, ever assimilate. And they will actually change you into their ways of thinking because of entropy. So I think that's a concept I want to think about

at the very least. Yeah, that's worth thinking. And I think we talk a lot about how the perversion of Christianity creates some of the worst aspects of, and Ivan Illich talks about this, Surat talks about this, that the victimism, political correctness is a kind of mutated hyper-Christianity that tries to go too far with limitless, no boundaries.

So it's virtue signaling, but that's not Christianity. And I think the image of God concept is, look, you can't have a civilization with the high trust that we enjoy to, to several degrees, to, to, to many, in many ways in the West, like for example, in Tampa, you know, in a Tampa major city, I remember I would go down there and get in the middle of the city. They had a little farm that carve out just away from the city center where a farmer had a little bucket. You come and buy your raw milk and,

fresh from the farm, and it's in a fridge, and there's a bucket. You put the money in, and you select your gallon based on the money. He just has a trust that you're going to give him the right amount and not take his bucket of money and not take his milk. That's a high-trust society that is built on the principle of the image of God and the idea being that this is not—if you treat people like they're animals and you assume that the other person is there to be exploited, you can't get out of that. That's an infinite loop.

of rivalry and fighting. So there has to be something that pulls you out of that cycle of rivalry that you are talking about to pull you to a part where you can have a higher trust society.

Do you see that? Yes, and self-reflection is the key. And what I have seen among the third world people that despite all the effort and help they got from Christian missionaries, they failed to get around to self-reflection. And, you know, as I said, I lived in India for almost three decades. I have continued to spend a fair bit of my time in India.

Although I'm reducing that time now because it's becoming more and more difficult and India is becoming an unsafe place as time goes by. I'm sure you're probably ruffling some feathers with the profile you have of speaking about India. Yes.

Yeah, unfortunately, but I tell you my achievement in India on a face to face basis in terms of changing people has been close to zero. And I think that is a big problem. I cannot get I cannot trigger moral consciousness among Indians. Now, a lot of Indians come to me because I'm

They indirectly read what I did and they came to like me from what I had done. But in my attempt to change people, I have been a failure in India. What would you tell Modi if you were advising him?

Oh, God. I mean, he's a crook. He's a crook. He's mostly brain dead. He has never given an interview in the last 10 years, never given a proper interview. A couple of interviews he has done have been scripted interviews. He is a goon and he is a demagogue.

I don't even know what to do because if I ask him to resign, the next person will be worse. So I don't even know what to do. Wow. Sir, do you have any final thoughts or questions or thoughts or anything?

Well, I would just like to gently push back on Mr. Vandari on one thing. He says that he didn't change people's lives. I would disagree with him because I, like I mentioned earlier in this conversation, when I came across his videos on the Mises India channel during the COVID crisis,

that really gave me hope that gave me hope that at least, at least we have, even though those voices are few, at least we have some voices that are pushing back on this authoritarian mindset of, of, of our society. So I would like to just encourage him, Mr. Vandari, that don't give up hope that there are some of us listening and. I can tell you, I can tell you, sir, sir, it's not that bad. He's pretty good.

I fully understand that. And I mean, there are a lot of Indians. There are literally thousands of Indians who are wonderful. But as a society, I cannot make a change to the society. And I want to really thank Mr. Dasgupta for his kind words. And I think what you're raising are important conversations of people to have about

busting some of the myths about the kind of egalitarian universalism is a myth and it needs to be

it needs to be discarded. That's not inherent with Christianity, though. That's a deviation. Yeah, so as I have grown older, and I have been an atheist, as I have grown older, I have taken more and more interest in Christianity. And I want to explore that thing. I'm not going to claim myself to be an expert in it. But I do want to, because I'm a truth seeker rather than a Christian at heart,

heart. I want to even figure out if there's anything that I disagree with, that I disagree in Christianity. And that's what I meant when I said that. Are you familiar with René Girard, the anthropologist? René Girard, yeah, from France. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, the French philosopher. Yeah. I highly recommend his book, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. I think that helps

kind of understand the framework work that sir and i come from i think you know sir you know sir is one of the most brilliant persons i've ever met and i think you know he always he he had before he was converted to christianity he had his talents but i think christianity would you say sir has really you know pulled you along the way to a whole nother level than where you were right obviously you were younger back then before you're christian right

Yeah, I mean, it certainly shaped my, like, it certainly helped me in my outlook on, and, you know, it certainly helped

It's because of that that I am much closer to Mr. Bandari. I mean, Mr. Bandari, like you said, because of your interest in Western culture, Western values, it's obvious that you love Western values and all of that. And that's why, you know, it's probably not a coincidence that you and I think so much alike, especially when it comes to, you know, self-reflection, what you spoke about.

And I think, I mean, it's not necessarily the case that, you know, that anybody who can become Christian in his beliefs would automatically get these values, you know. But, you know, it takes a real understanding of, like David said, the anthropology and all of those issues behind the Christian teachings, you know.

to really get to the truth so i think like a lot of like you mentioned mr bandaria you know a lot of indians are converting to christianity but it really depends it really takes a deeper understanding of what they're getting into to truly tap into that otherwise it's just like you said it develops into some animalistic voodoo thing you know and it just

ends up contributing to nothing at all. It's our desire that India would come to be baptized fully in the name of Jesus Christ, and that when it encounters Christ in its own time, it's got to wrestle with it itself. When it encounters it on its own time, it will break through, and it will penetrate, because at the end of the day, the truth is that every knee shall bow, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is King.

And that's going to happen. I hope that turns out to be true. But at the same time, I see that most virtually all of Indian educational structure was set up by Christian missionaries. I'm a product of a Catholic school.

But at the same time, all those things are falling apart. The missionary schools are on their way out. Now you have a snobby private schools where people are trained to be show offs. So unfortunately, things are taking a wrong turn rather than the right turn. As a larger society, that does not mean they are not Indians who are waking up, but they are a minority and no more

in numbers than they were in the past. So the end result is that Indian society is degrading. Well, I think what I think is going to happen, this is my prediction, is that if it's not inevitable, but if America and certain countries who are more Christian would get its act together and stop being a policeman of the world, a crooked cop around the world,

And if it starts taking care of itself, John Quincy Adams says, America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy, but it's the well-wisher of all for liberty. And the great example that we set here at home could be the thing that helps catalyze a return and a renaissance to Christian principles. Because when they see the amount of... Because America squandered a lot of its wealth too, and America has squandered its reputation, has not lived up

to a Christian standard with Iraq war and all these endless wars and endless lies and sanctions and taxes. We have the most Goliath government in the world. This is not becoming of a Christian nation. And so if America has a renaissance of Christianity, I think it could catalyze a deeper Christianity penetrating that calcified heart that you identified in the Hindu culture.

Well, you know, the world over people look up to America. They, you know, in India, people usually say even Americans do this and they use this emphasize even, which means that America is the yardstick by which everything is measured. So if America does a lot of bad things, they justify doing their own bad things using America as the example. So I, I,

I really want America to be a purer version of it is what a purer version that it used to be in the past. And I hope it somehow finds a way there. But I agree with the spirit of what you said.

Well, let's leave it there. I appreciate your time, sir. Thank you. Very great to talk to you. Thank you. Thank you very much, Mr. Gornoski and Mr. Dasgupta. Thank you, sir. Thank you. And we'll put your website and the links, the descriptions and everything else. Okay? Sounds wonderful. Yeah. And send me a link once it's ready. All right. Take care. Have a good one. Okay. Great.

Bye.