Ep 452: Harini Nagendra is Woolgathering and Ground Truthing

Amit Varma (0:06)

Sometimes, we put ideas of people in a box and we can't get them out. We think that a creative, dreamy sort of person is unlikely to be a scientist with rigor. We think that the city and nature don't go together. We behave as if development and the environment must be at cross purposes, that trees get in the way of productivity, and that ideas and action belong in different domains. Well, in this episode, like perhaps in every episode of mine, you will find that the world is complex and beautiful and all of us contain multitudes. Like, I'm a different person before my first coffee of the day, I'm hardly even human. Keep me hungry for long enough and I become a veritable beast. But don't worry, we are not going to talk about my multitudes today.

SPEAKER_2 (0:51)

Welcome to the Seen and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral science. Please welcome your host, Amit Varma.

Amit Varma (1:04)

Welcome to the Seen and the Unseen. My guest today is Harini Nagendra, who is a director of the School of Climate Change and Sustainability at the Azim Premji University. That sounds boring, but it isn't. Harini started off studying biology, became an ecologist thanks to her encounters with the great polymath, Madhav Gadgil, then expanded her horizons further when she met another great polymath, the legendary Elinor Ostrom, with whom she wrote influential papers. She's written extensively on Bangalore's biodiversity, urban sustainability, and apart from books on Bangalore's ecology, she's also written a series of fantastic detective novels, starting with The Bangalore Detectives Club. I really enjoyed them, you gotta check them out, they're awesome.

Harini is driven by curiosity, she's full of life, she wants her work to make a difference, and really, really cares about the big problems she sees around her. Her clarity is amazing, you will love this conversation, I know it. But before we get to it, let's take a quick commercial break.

Gather around me friends, I have exciting news for you. I've launched a new YouTube show called Watching the Wheels, in which every week, Shruti Rajagopalan, Pranay Kotasthane and I will gather to discuss what is happening in the world around us. What have we been thinking about? What do we want to brainstorm? We'll discuss ideas, share stories, argue furiously, and punish each other with bad jokes. It will be fun, it will be fast, it will be fantastic, and you are invited. There will be an audio version soon on every Podcast app, but our primary home is YouTube. So head on over to complicatedurl.alert, head on over to youtube.com/atwatchinghyphen the hyphen wheels. At watching the wheels with hyphens. I'll also link it from the show notes so you can just search for it. But remember the name of the show, Watching the Wheels, with Shruti, Pranay, and Amit, where the world unfolds and finally makes sense.

Harini, welcome to the Seen and the Unseen.

Harini Nagendra (3:03)

Thanks, Amit. Great to be here.

Amit Varma (3:04)

Such a pleasure having you on. Just before we started, Amit made an interesting comment and I think that's a nice way to double-click. Your colleague, Shashwath, who's helping us with the recording, happened to mention that he's turning 50 and he's feeling angsty. And I said, hey, I'm 52, you're a couple of years older, so we will make him feel positive about turning 50, etc. And then you said something that really intrigued me, and I want to double-click on that, which is you said that actually for many women, it's a blessing to finally get the gray hair. So elaborate on that a bit. Sure.

Harini Nagendra (3:33)

I'm happy to do that. So I, the guy I get my hair cut from, for many years, I would go there, started graying maybe in my early 40s, and he would keep saying, after he's done with the haircut, come sit here, I'll put color on your hair. I said, no, no, no. At some point at the fourth or fifth time, I said, why are you keeping on asking me? Then he said, no, you're never, you're graying rapidly. I said, you have no idea how useful white hair is in my profession. Because if you're teaching and you're a woman, it automatically gives you a lot of gravitas.

It makes no difference to whether you know you're content or not. But I think there's something about young women that you often get discounted. I see that now with many of the young women in the university and it's a little sad. But I think it makes a lot of difference if you grow older. It just gives you the license to say a lot of things that you can now say openly, and people take you more seriously.