Malini Goyal is the Curious One

**Amit Varma** (0:06)
There is one human quality that I believe all of us should have, curiosity, the desire to know the world better, the desire to engage. If you are not curious about the world and our fellow humans, we might as well be the walking dead. And you would imagine that one profession that curiosity is perfect for, one profession that surely draws curious people, is journalism. The dharma of a journalist is surely to try and seek the truth about the world, to peel off one layer at a time, till we get closer to understanding the true nature of things.
And yet, in my time in journalism, I found few people like this. More than 90% of the people, just as in any other profession, were just going through the motions, ticking boxes, un-curious about the terrible beauty around them. That's why it filled me with energy to speak to my guest today. She's been a journalist for three decades, but she's never allowed herself to be jaded. She looks at the world through fresh eyes, chases big stories, runs after deep truths and doesn't care about mundane matters like career and so on. She's written a wonderful book recently and is constantly busy doing so many things.
And she reminded me that without this lust for life, there can be no meaning.

**Malini Goyal** (1:14)
Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral science. Please welcome your host Amit Varma.

**Amit Varma** (1:27)
Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen. My guest today is Malini Goyal, a veteran journalist who has done much acclaimed work for Economic Times in India today and is known for her deep dive stories and massive features. Malini has also recently co-written a wonderful book called Unboxing Bengaluru, a fine work that works at multiple levels. At one level, it is a history of Bengaluru. In fact, many histories in different overlapping timeframes.
At another level, it's a portrait of a society in flux as young people struggle to adapt their desires to both a globalized world and a local churn. It also contains many portraits of Indians of different types. Young people from small towns figuring out life and companionship, migrants trying to build a home, even visionaries trying to look to the future while the past still lives around them and drags them down. This book contains multitudes, including a fascinating look at what Tinder data reveals about young people in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. There's much to dig into, but first, let's take a quick commercial break.
Hey, the music started and this sounds like a commercial, but it isn't. It's a plea from me to check out my latest labor of love, a YouTube show I am co-hosting with my good friend, the brilliant Ajay Shah. We've called it Everything is Everything. Every week, we'll speak for about an hour on things we care about, from the profound to the profane, from the exalted to the everyday. We range widely across subjects and we bring multiple frames with which we try to understand the world. Please join us on our journey and please support us by subscribing to our YouTube channel at youtube.com/amitvarma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A. The show is called Everything is Everything. Please do check it out.
Malini, welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.

**SPEAKER_3** (3:10)
Lovely to be here, Amit. Look forward to this conversation.

**Amit Varma** (3:14)
Yeah, and you know, you were just telling me a horrifying story just before we begin of how you once lost your notebook when you were in Israel. And for a journalist to lose a notebook with contacts and all of that is absolutely frightening.
And tell me a little bit more about the sort of tools that you have used in your life, which meant something to you from the time, you know, you started doing what you're doing.

**SPEAKER_3** (3:38)
I think notebook and pen, it's something that I'll always have. And pen, not an expensive one, never an expensive one. That if I lose them, it's okay. And a couple of pens, notebook and pen are always there. And I always number my notebooks, always. And the key words that I put on the notebook. So for example, it's Israel. So Israel will be written on the notebook somewhere prominently so that if I have to refer sometime later. So there was a time that I had hundreds of notebooks that I had collected and through many, many years. And then often there are themes, right? So as a journalist, what I did, sometime around 2008, 2010, I began every year I would pick a theme that I would want to focus on, right?
And then for example, jobs is the theme that I want to focus on that year. This is besides many other sort of themes that I'm chasing that year.