Conversations with tyler is produced by the mercatus center at george mason university, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real world problems. For a full transcript of every conversation, enhanced with helpful links, visit conversations with tyler dot com. To day, i'm chatting with barka dot if you have a connection to india, she needs no further introduction. But if you don't have such a connection, she is a very famous indian television journalist. She is an opinion columnist with the hindustan times and the washington post. And she was part of n d t v's team for 21 years.
Growing up, Barkha Dutt was totally rootless. She spoke English, not her parent’s Punjabi. She devoured Enid Blyton and studied English literature during college, but read few Indian novelists. She didn’t even know her caste. This has opened her up to criticism as being a progressive elite who is out of touch with her heritage, and challenged her to be especially thoughtful in the way she examines the many overlapping values in Indian society. A successful broadcast journalist and columnist, she currently runs the YouTube-based news channel MoJo Story and recently published a new book, Humans of COVID: To Hell and Back.
Barkha joined Tyler to discuss how Westerners can gain a more complete picture of India, the misogyny still embedded in Indian society, why family law should be agnostic of religious belief, the causes of declining fertility in India, why relations between Hindus and Muslims seem to be worsening, how caste has persisted so strongly in India, the success of India’s subsidized institutes of higher education, the best city for Indian food, the power of Amar Chitra Katha’s comics, the influence of her English liberal arts education, the future of Anglo-American liberalism in India, the best ways to use Twitter, and more.
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Recorded May 5th, 2022 Other ways to connect