5min chapter

Ep 315: Arshia Sattar and the Complex Search for Dharma

The Seen and the Unseen - hosted by Amit Varma

CHAPTER

What I Learned From Wendy Donnegger and Ramanujan

Sally Kohn: I'm going to double click on the Ramayana much more, especially the Dharma aspect of it. But before that, what I'm also curious about is you mentioned the great influence that Wendy Donnegger and Ramanujan separately had on you. So both of them together and separately, and they were very, very good friends, personal friends, as well as academic, collegial friends. Both of them taught me how to read a story, which is pay attention to what you've seen before,. or what you've heard before, or what it reminds you of. Those connections are very, very important.

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Transcript

Episode notes

Speaker 2

Well, it seems to be the week that everybody's panicking, but don't panic. We're here to talk about it. This week, in fact, is the week of Vice President Kamala Harris's long-awaited media blitz. Please welcome back the next president of the United States. Joining everyone from the ladies of The View to veteran radio host Howard Stern to 60 Minutes. The vice president told us she has lost track of how many states she's visited. Harris's mission, get the one in four voters who say they still don't know enough about her to find out more. As the fastest presidential campaign in modern history prepares for the final stretch, we'll talk about what else we've learned about Kamala Harris and what we're still learning about Donald Trump, whose longstanding admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin once again made headlines this week. OK, deep breath. End game. Evan, I do want to start with you because you've been immersed in deep reporting on the Harris campaign ever since it began in late July. Hard to believe it was late July. That seems like just yesterday or maybe about 10 years ago. But if we're trying to understand who exactly Kamala Harris is, I guess the question that I have is, what don't we know? What is it that we haven't figured out yet that we need to know?

Speaker 1

Yeah, no, I mean, I was thinking as I was listening to how you were describing the last week, which is exactly right. In some ways, there is very little that a person can get as a voter, as a reader from listening to, you know, one of these sort of entertainment themed interviews. That's, you know, she's doing a media blitz. You understand why she's doing it. What people actually need is something else, which is to go deep into a life, into their originating influences, what has actually shaped a person's choices, their self-narrative, their motives, what really underlies their thinking. And it's, you know, very often the pyrotechnics of the campaign are distracting. And I think too much of our business is about that. And luckily, it's possible now by talking to people who've known her for a very long time, by people who have been involved in her life, either as opponents or as advisors or as allies, who can begin to help you answer the big question, which is fundamentally, politically, is she more like Berkeley or more like Biden? Let's be honest. That's the core that people want to know.

Speaker 2

That's a good framing.

Speaker 1

And by the way, she would tell you that that is a one of her favorite slogans, a false choice. She says the slogan, no false choices, so often that her staff once got that printed up on blue stress balls that they distributed around the office. Gives you a little window into the workplace culture, too. But the answer is really interesting, which is that to understand her politics, you have to understand something that is missed in the usual cliche about San Francisco politics, which is that it is not all hippies and crystals. It is actually a place that produces these very pragmatic politicians like Nancy Pelosi, the knife fighter in chief, or Dianne Feinstein, who was in fact one of the most conservative institutionalist Democrats in the Senate. And the reason is to succeed in that city, you have these centrist real estate fortunes that go all the way back to the gold rush. You've got these new money libertarians from Silicon Valley. And then, of course, you've got the movement politics around the environment, around gay rights. And all of these are contending. So if you actually look at who succeeds, who rises up out of that world, they tend to be quite practical in their politics. And that's Kamala Harris.

Speaker 2

I mean, I just think that's such a compelling sketch of who the person is because of what she comes out of and where she comes from. The other thing that I don't think gets talked about nearly enough, and I know you've looked at this as well, Evan, is, you know, you've got her political biography, but also her biography, biography. I find the issue of Harris and her parents to be absolutely fascinating, because I have a theory of the case about American presidents. If you look back, many of them have what might be charitably described as daddy issues. And clearly there's a lot going on there with Harris's father is, you know, still alive, still around, but not a big part of her life. Her mother was this incredibly dominant presence. I wonder what you learned from looking at her biography.

Speaker 1

There's this incredibly important theme here that runs through her life, which is about where does she get this sense of self-worth, which is an essential piece of defending her against what has been, let's face it, a sort of onslaught of negativity, of what can be pretty demoralizing inputs from the world. going back to being the daughter of a single mom living in the Bay Area as a kid. And it starts actually even before they get to the United States. Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was one of the people who would tell you, I am a Brahmin, as she said. My name goes back a thousand years. Her heritage in India was coming from a priestly caste, meaning she was raised, as her mother described, to see herself as worthy and capable of leadership. Meena Ahmed, who's writing a book about Indian Americans, helped me understand. She said that sense of her heritage and being a Brahmin insulated her from, inoculated her really from the kinds of moments that would knock somebody off course. She says it's very common that if their kids would encounter discrimination, the answer to that would be just get ahead, just keep moving, just go. And when you listen to how Kamala Harris received messages from her mother, one of the things her mother would say if she would come home from school and had had a bad day and somebody had been nasty to her, her mother's answer was to say, well, what did you do about it? What did you do about it? Now, you hear that sometimes as a political line, but actually embedded in there is a pretty powerful sense of this locomotive of motivation, of energy that goes all the way back to how her mother saw them as part of this much larger arc of history. We

Speaker 2

don't

Speaker 4

hear as much about her father, but my sense is that he too had a complex and accomplished background of some sort. I

Speaker 1

mean, he's a fascinating story. You know, he was this brilliant young economic student who comes out of Jamaica, at that point also somebody who'd grown up under British colonial rule. Most of the students who got the scholarship that he got, they went to the UK, but he went to Berkeley and almost immediately distinguished himself as this very charismatic figure in what was emerging as a new locus of the black freedom struggle. There was an organization in Berkeley called the Afro-American Association. Don Harris was one of the people who helped create it. So was Kamala's mother. That's where they met. And it had this very distinct sense of not just reading writers who were typically ignored by the establishment, but it was also forming this much stronger sense of what it meant to be African-American. Some of the members of the study group went on to create Kwanzaa. There were other people in the group who went on to form the Black Panthers. So there was a way in which it had a very strong sense of self-worth. By the time she was five, her parents had really, their marriage was falling apart. But even after they divorced, her mother stayed very to the black community in the Bay Area. And that became the core of their social life. It became the core of her intellectual development was this very strong sense of closeness to black excellence.

Speaker 4

This sounds a little in your framing of your initial question, Berkeley versus Biden, as if Berkeley really wins and tips the balances on this. I don't think so, actually, though, Jane,

Speaker 1

because I think, remember, what we talked about in the beginning, too, was this sense that she is ultimately a very pragmatic politician. I remember somebody saying to me about Joe Biden once, really astute observation from somebody who worked with him in the White House, who said, look, he is an almost perfect weather vane for where the center of the left is, meaning it moves around. And at times it's in one place. You know, Joe Biden, after all, you remember, got ahead of Barack Obama when it came to same-sex marriage because he saw that's where the politics were heading. In Kamala Harris's case, that kind of, call it mobility or pragmatism, can be a detriment at times. That's what got her into trouble in 2019 when people said, I'm not sure I know what she believes in. But it also means that she's been able to find where the party is at any moment. And I think if you looked at her policy prescriptions today, they are more or less fairly centrist for where Democrats are. And the hard part for her is making that case, breaking through, getting people to actually see her for the politics she describes today.