Latest Narendra Podcast Episodes
The Dilemma of an Indian Liberal
Grand Tamasha - June 26, 2024 01:00 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 75 ratingsGurcharan Das is one of India's best-known authors and thinkers. He had a celebrated career in business, most notably as the CEO of Procter and Gamble in India, before devoting his full attention to writing. He is the author of numerous best-selling books, including India Unbound, The Difficulty...
India's 2024 Election—and its Aftermath
Grand Tamasha - June 19, 2024 01:00 - 54 minutes ★★★★★ - 75 ratingsThis week on Grand Tamasha, Milan is joined by Grand Tamasha’s India news roundup regulars: Sadanand Dhume of the Wall Street Journal and the American Enterprise Institute and Tanvi Madan of the Brookings Institution. On the show this week, the trio discusses the 2024 Indian general election an...
Making 'Make In India' Come Alive
Grand Tamasha - June 12, 2024 01:00 - 40 minutes ★★★★★ - 75 ratingsOn Sunday night, India’s new National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government was sworn into office, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi at its helm once more. We have a new group of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) allies, a new group of ministers, and a new look in terms of how the Modi government wil...
Decoding the 2024 Indian General Elections
Grand Tamasha - June 06, 2024 01:00 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 75 ratingsWe’ve finally come to the end of the 46-day Indian general election. And we have a surprising result which many experts did not see coming. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Prime Minister Narendra Modi failed to secure a single-party majority in the Lok Sabha in what is being interpreted as a...
The Lessons of Gujarat Under Modi
Grand Tamasha - May 29, 2024 01:00 - 56 minutes ★★★★★ - 75 ratingsGujarat Under Modi: Laboratory of Today’s India is a new book by the scholar Christophe Jaffrelot but one that has an old backstory. It is the definitive account of Narendra Modi’s tenure as chief minister of the state of Gujarat. And it helps place into context the changes we’ve seen in nation...
A Blueprint for India’s State Capacity Revolution
Grand Tamasha - May 22, 2024 01:00 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 75 ratingsOver the last five years, Milan has interviewed authors of big books, that have brought innovative new ideas to the India policy debate. And he’s also interviewed authors of lengthy books. On the show this week, he sits down with an author who’s written a big book in every sense of the term. I...
How India's Economy Can Break the Mold
Grand Tamasha - May 15, 2024 01:00 - 51 minutes ★★★★★ - 75 ratingsBreaking the Mould: India’s Untraveled Path to Prosperity is a big new book by the economists Raghuram Rajan and Rohit Lamba. The book is both a critique of India’s development model as well as a manifesto for reform. Most notably, it challenges the conventional wisdom that India’s primary goal...
What Rahul Gandhi Wants
Grand Tamasha - May 08, 2024 01:00 - 47 minutes ★★★★★ - 75 ratingsThe third phase of India’s 44-day long polls took place this week with voting held in 94 constituencies across 12 states. Thus far, the elections have been marked by lower-than-expected turnout, intensifying communal rhetoric, and a sharp debate about inequality and redistribution. Against this...
Inside the BJP Campaign
Grand Tamasha - May 01, 2024 01:00 - 45 minutes ★★★★★ - 75 ratingsThe incumbent Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Prime Minister Narendra Modi entered this election as the clear favorite with every single pre-election survey pointing a decisive victory. However, the party is leaving no stone unturned in its effort to notch a third consecutive parliamentary major...
The Great Indian Poverty—and Inequality—Debate
Grand Tamasha - April 24, 2024 01:00 - 55 minutes ★★★★★ - 75 ratingsAs India heads to the polls, a new chapter is being written in a very old debate about poverty and inequality in India. This debate has been stirred up by the release of new data from a government-sponsored consumption survey, which some have argued shows a massive decline in poverty in India. O...
Previewing India's 2024 General Election
Grand Tamasha - April 17, 2024 01:00 - 49 minutes ★★★★★ - 75 ratingsIn just a few days, India’s eighteenth general elections will get underway with voting in the first phase kicking off on April 19. Between April 19 and June 1, India will have seven separate polling days culminating in a final counting of votes on June 4. Every single pre-election survey to dat...
Is India Ready to Launch?
Grand Tamasha - April 10, 2024 01:00 - 53 minutes ★★★★★ - 75 ratingsOn March 11, the Indian Defense Research and Development Organization conducted the maiden test of its Agni-V MIRV (Multiple Independently Targetable Re-Entry Vehicle) missile. MIRV capability is a complex technology and there are only a handful of countries that have developed it. The test rep...
Decoding the Indian Economy
Grand Tamasha - April 03, 2024 01:00 - 38 minutes ★★★★★ - 75 ratingsIt seems wherever you turn these days, there are stories about India’s status as the fastest growing major economy in the world. Its growth rates remain the envy of both the developed—and the developing—world. But what is really happening under the hood? What are the opportunities for India in a...
Savarkar, In His Own Words
Grand Tamasha - March 27, 2024 01:00 - 50 minutes ★★★★★ - 75 ratingsIn today’s India, there are few historical figures whose writing and thinking help explain the current ideological zeitgeist more than Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. Despite this newfound attention, Savarkar is often viewed in black and white—as a staunch Hindu nationalist who devoted his life to ex...
The Citizenship Amendment Act's Next Chapter
Grand Tamasha - March 20, 2024 01:00 - 59 minutes ★★★★★ - 75 ratingsA few weeks ago, the Indian government formally notified the rules implementing the controversial 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act, or CAA. The law provides persecuted religious minorities hailing from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan an expedited pathway to Indian citizenship, provided they ...
Eating India, One State at a Time
Grand Tamasha - March 13, 2024 01:00 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 75 ratingsZac O’Yeah is a Swedish novelist, rock musician, and author of the Majestic Trilogy—a trio of detective stories set in his adopted home of Bengaluru. And if that were not enough, he’s also the author of the brand-new book, The Great Indian Food Trip: Around a Subcontinent à la Carte. In the boo...
Dalits in the New Millennium
Grand Tamasha - March 06, 2024 02:00 - 41 minutes ★★★★★ - 75 ratingsOver the last several decades, there have been monumental changes in the social, economic, and political lives of Dalits, who have historically been one of the most oppressed groups in all of South Asia. A new volume edited by three leading scholars of India—Dalits in the New Millennium—examine...
The End of the Electoral Bond Era
Grand Tamasha - February 28, 2024 02:00 - 48 minutes ★★★★★ - 75 ratingsTwo weeks ago, a five-judge bench of India’s Supreme Court ruled that electoral bonds—a controversial instrument of political giving introduced by the Narendra Modi government—violated the Constitution and would immediately cease operating. Under the court’s ruling, the State Bank of India will...
A Fresh Look at India’s Neighborhood First Policy
Grand Tamasha - February 21, 2024 02:00 - 51 minutes ★★★★★ - 75 ratingsWith general elections just months away, it is the era of the ten-year retrospective—a chance for India watchers to reflect on what has changed over the past decade under the Narendra Modi government—and what has not. One area especially deserving of scrutiny is India’s relations with the neigh...
Pakistan's Political Earthquake
Grand Tamasha - February 14, 2024 02:00 - 40 minutes ★★★★★ - 75 ratingsLast Thursday, voters in Pakistan went to the polls in the country’s first general elections since the July 2018 election that brought former prime minister Imran Khan to power. In 2022, Khan was ousted in an unprecedented no confidence vote and now finds himself behind bars. In the months befo...
Separating Fact From Fiction
Grand Tamasha - February 07, 2024 02:00 - 41 minutes ★★★★★ - 75 ratingsFrom the Obama “birther” movement in the United States to the fringe politicians who believe congestion pricing in London is part of an international “socialist plot,” it is no exaggeration to say that conspiracy theories have become part of the standard political playbook the world over. But w...
India and the Emerging Chip Race
Grand Tamasha - January 31, 2024 02:00 - 56 minutes ★★★★★ - 75 ratingsIt seems like you cannot open a newspaper, listen to a foreign policy podcast, or open Twitter/X without somebody somewhere sounding off on the emerging geopolitical battle over semiconductors. Semiconductors, which we colloquially refer to as chips, have quickly moved from the periphery to cent...
Governing India's Digital Revolution
Grand Tamasha - January 24, 2024 02:00 - 50 minutes ★★★★★ - 75 ratingsThis week, Grand Tamasha kicks off its eleventh season with a special return guest to the podcast. The Third Way: India’s Revolutionary Approach to Data Governance is an important new book by the lawyer-scholar-and-author Rahul Matthan. Rahul is a partner at the law firm Trilegal, where he heads...
Grand Tamasha Unveils the Best Books of 2023
Grand Tamasha - December 20, 2023 02:00 - 22 minutes ★★★★★ - 75 ratingsBack in 2019, we started the Grand Tamasha podcast on a whim. India’s 2019 general elections were around the corner, and we sensed that there might be a (temporary) marketplace for a weekly audio podcast focused on Indian politics and policy for diehards hoping to keep up with the campaign actio...
The Indian Supreme Court in the Modi Era
Grand Tamasha - December 13, 2023 02:00 - 44 minutes ★★★★★ - 75 ratingsOver the past decade, India has witnessed significant conflict within—and around—several democratic institutions meant to act as a check on executive power. One of the most important theatres of conflict has been the judiciary—more specifically, the Supreme Court. A new book by the legal schola...
What the 2023 State Elections Tell Us About 2024
Grand Tamasha - December 06, 2023 02:00 - 50 minutes ★★★★★ - 75 ratingsOn December 3, votes were finally tallied in four Indian states which went for elections this past month—the last test parties and candidates will face before the general elections in April-May of next year. After much anticipation, Counting Day left very little to the imagination. In a big se...
Tackling India’s Air Pollution Crisis
Grand Tamasha - November 29, 2023 02:00 - 42 minutes ★★★★★ - 75 ratingsAnyone who has even casually glanced at the news over the past several weeks would be hard pressed to miss the plethora of headlines about north India’s air pollution crisis. Every year as late Fall rolls around, air pollution across north India—including in the nation’s capital of Delhi—climbs ...
The Downfall of India's Princely States
Grand Tamasha - November 22, 2023 02:00 - 55 minutes ★★★★★ - 75 ratingsOne of the most remarkable episodes in modern Indian history is the story of how the leaders of over 550 sovereign princely states were convinced that they should give up their independence to become a part of a free India. This monumental task of accession was carried out over weeks, not months...
Demystifying the Indian Supreme Court
Grand Tamasha - November 15, 2023 02:00 - 51 minutes ★★★★★ - 75 ratingsIn recent years, there has a growing concern that the Supreme Court of India is not firing on all cylinders. Critics have argued that the court functions in an opaque manner, exhibits excessive deference to the executive, is sluggish in concluding cases, and is hampered by an excessive reliance ...
The India-Canada Conundrum
Grand Tamasha - November 08, 2023 02:00 - 51 minutes ★★★★★ - 75 ratingsIt’s been six weeks since Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took to the floor of Parliament to announce that Canadian security agencies had evidence of credible allegations that Indian authorities had a hand in the killing of a Canadian citizen, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, on Canadian soil in Jun...
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