The Shaili Chopra Show | Rohini Nilekani on Money, Life Lessons & Gender Equality

Transript:

[Shaili Chopra]
We’re breaking the rules. The question is, what rules are we breaking? Rohini, welcome to the show.

[Rohini Nilekani]
Namaste, Shaili. Thanks for having me on the show. What rules does Rohini Nilekani break?

Yeah, I don’t know how far back we want to go, but let’s stick with the present. I think sometimes I get into areas where nobody has gone before, especially in my work, in my philanthropy, like working on water before any other Indian foundation really did it full time, going and working on gender, but with men and boys, not focusing on women, which was, I think, I broke some kind of rule there. And maybe sometimes speaking when I shouldn’t.

Sometimes, that may be how I break the rules. In one way, you’re being apologetic for speaking up when you should. Yeah, I’ve learned over the years that sometimes holding back is smarter and achieves your goals better.

But I’ve made mistakes before. So that’s when I was trying to break the rules. Now I do it less.

Live and learn.

[Shaili Chopra]
You know, you’re not the first person who said that sometimes I should have held back, but didn’t. What have been such instances in life, both personal and professional?

[Rohini Nilekani]
No, it’s not. It’s that, you know, sometimes when you express your opinions without thinking, I think that can get you into trouble. Not that I’ve got into any serious trouble or anything, but I think today, looking back, I’m 67 years old when I look at my 40-year-old self or my 21-year-old self.

I was a journalist like you. And sometimes I got into trouble with some celebrities asking the wrong questions, which they didn’t want to answer, for example. Then you slowly learn.

Yes, you get people to say something, but there’s an art to it, which you learn over time.

[Shaili Chopra]
But did Rohini grow up with her children wanting them to be troublemakers?

[Rohini Nilekani]
My children think I’m the wild one. They follow all rules. They’re very stable and they are just very mature, both of them.

So, no, I never had to, I never had to ask them not to do something at all. So they’re very different from me.

[Shaili Chopra]
Put this lens for me, be Jahnavi for a minute and say, why is Rohini the wild one?

[Rohini Nilekani]
My daughter, my daughter thinks I get myself in, you know, I go out in the wild literally a lot. So she thinks like I recently had an encounter with a tusker on foot. And she thinks one should be smarter than to get into those kind of situations.

She wouldn’t. So stuff like that.

[Shaili Chopra]
Animal instinct. Lovely. What are you changing your mind about now, Rohini?

In the now.

[Rohini Nilekani]
At this age, I think, what am I changing my mind about? It’s an evolution. It’s not like a, you know, a sudden break in anything.

But as I said, I’ve learned that what they call Gandhigiri works rather than being aggressive. You have to find ways if you want to be effective and not just prove yourself right. You have to work.

It’s a continuation of what I said before, that you have to take it very differently, your approach. What would do I, what are the other changes? I mean, as you get older, you settle into a different idea of yourself.

It’s calmer. It’s more peaceful. It’s more practical in some ways.

And yet I now feel the freedom that my grandchild is going to be 10 soon. So he doesn’t need us so much. You know, there’s more freedom.

My mother-in-law, my last of my four parents, just passed away. So there’s new freedoms. So I hope to travel more, to do more writing, things that I maybe couldn’t do before so much because of other responsibilities.

So, yeah, so I’m changing my mind on my own freedoms, I guess.

[Shaili Chopra]
And how do you feel about, especially since, you know, the picture you’re making, many of our listeners and viewers have, is that there has been a Rohini who was breaking more rules than sort of keeping them. Today, there’s a lot around us youngsters. You said a 10 year old grand grandchild.

Yes. My grandson. Yeah.

We’re all constantly being told to sort of toe the line. And the idea of freedom is very different. I mean, we saw this with the Gen Z protest.

We see people just every day on Instagram talking about what they want, what they expect the freedoms to be like. What do you feel about the freedoms of the future?

[Rohini Nilekani]
I think we’re lucky to be in a democracy and democracies require eternal vigilance. I think young generations will have to define their own idea of freedom. How much personal freedoms and choices are they looking for?

How much political freedoms are they willing to engage themselves for? I think every generation, they used to say, has to find out that the stove is hot. So this generation will have to do differently from what happened to us when we were growing up.

I was born in 1959 at the cusp of the 60s. Right. The 60s in India was so different from today.

It was a young country with new ideas, you know, fairly progressive thinking about equity, justice, democracy, industrialization. Many things were opening up. Urbanization, etc.

And then in the mid 70s, we went through the emergency. So we all woke up a bit and said, oh, this is why we need our freedoms. This is what it means to actually have a living, functioning democracy.

So those years taught us a lot. And then liberalization brought a new kind of idea of how India could thrive, how every person could economically prosper if it went right. And now today we are seeing it’s nothing to do so much with India isolated.

So much global is happening with climate change, with what’s happening in other countries, with trade issues and so many things that now again, India is going through a new kind of churn. And with such a young population and yet young for some time, in 30 years, we’re going to be a country having the oldest population in the whole world. And a very bulging middle.

Yeah. No, we’ll have more people over 65 in just 30 years than any other country in the world. So just imagine right now we saw all the young people asking for things.

Imagine if the old people like me started to make our demands. We want more wheelchairs than Lamborghinis now. We want health care.

We want very, very different things for an aging population. So what is freedom? What is choice?

Really depends on so many circumstances.

[Shaili Chopra]
Yeah. I want to talk to you about health in a bit, but I wanted to sort of pick something you said, because I hear this a lot from people, not just our interview, but even sometimes at home, right? Older people say, oh, I’m so glad we raised our kids in this non-social media world.

You know, and every generation has a so glad about something. So I’m wondering, like, how you feel about the moments that we today live in? You know, this podcast is going to go viral on social media.

[Rohini Nilekani]
Yeah. No, no, no. I completely agree with that point of view.

I feel I really feel empathy and sympathy for young parents today or even parents whose children are now 13 to 19, for example. The impact of digital media is staggering. And if parents try to toe the line too much, that doesn’t work either.

So it’s very difficult choices to be made. And I think it’s time to shift the focus to. So therefore, what are the policies and guidelines that are needed to help parents?

It can’t always be parents saying, no, you can’t do this. No, you can’t do this. The young people have to be protected also by good law and good policy.

So I think that’s going to be the next next area of contention and activism, too, where people with their state, with their representatives will have to come together to stem the violence, the hate, the exposure for children to things which they should not be seeing and make it easier for the poor parents. I really believe that.

[Shaili Chopra]
Yeah. So, you know, recently, I know I’m a mother to two kids, both at the cusp of 10 and 12. And I wrote a piece called Anatomy of a Protest on Substack.

And one of the conversations that triggered was that. Would you like your child to be a protester? Now, you talked about 60s.

I went to college in the 90s and I swear to God, how many protests have shaped me? There’s so many kinds of protests. You went to silent ones, you know, drawing of the flag.

There’s a there’s a journey one undertakes. I wonder what do you think of that as a grandparent?

[Rohini Nilekani]
I think, as I said, in a democracy, people should have the right to express themselves. But really, they have to do it peacefully. Otherwise, as I said, they can’t be effective anyway.

You’d be wary of your grandchild going out to protest today? It’s not my call. No, it’s not my call.

I did that with the children. I can’t do that with the grandchildren. That’s the parent’s call, not mine.

Your children went out. No, my children didn’t. At that time, they were the Valley School, you know, which is Krishnamurti Foundation product.

Their school was all very no competition. There should not be reward. There should not be fear.

There should not be competition. So they grew up in that kind of thing. So and then they went off to college to the US for undergrad.

So they didn’t really get a chance to protest.

[Shaili Chopra]
Got it. You know, you’ve spent decades now trying to solve problems. You mentioned water, you mentioned climate and many others and many times ahead of the rest.

What is it that you have now figured is impossible to fix?

[Rohini Nilekani]
You know, social change and, you know, the most successful people on the planet, when I have spoken to them and I’ve been lucky enough to meet some of them, they all agree that social change is the most difficult thing. And because social change is not one end point. Define that a bit for us.

So, for example, if you want equity of access to say water, everybody understands that. Everyone should be able to have the water they need for their life, their health and their livelihoods. And you think that’s easy, but it’s absolutely not because it depends on so many things.

So suppose you go in and say, OK, in this small area, you will be able to give everybody drinking water. OK, for some time it works, but every success creates its own problems. For example, OK, after you do that, you realize that maybe the source of that water is not sustainable.

Then you have to do the next round of work to make that source more sustainable. And also, as they say, we all live downstream. So this source may be affected by what somebody else does somewhere else.

To give you an example, all social changes, it’s like a chain of complexities. You unravel one thing, something else is hidden. So it’s continuous work.

And so it’s impossible to solve everything. But I’ll tell you, I really believe that the effort and the process of trying to achieve more equity of access, that’s the important thing not to give up on. Of course, there’ll be new problems all the time.

But if we create the kind of society that engages itself in understanding the problem, the root of the problem, and working and creating new processes, institutional mechanisms and leadership to address it, then that’s the best thing. How can we distribute the ability to solve something? So for us, that’s very important in our work.

[Shaili Chopra]
For sure. But does it worry you that even after decades, the question is still front and center?

[Rohini Nilekani]
No, because I understand. And I really, when I say this, it’s not facile. कर्मन्यवादिका रस्ते मा पलेशु कदाचिना You cannot be guaranteed the fruit of your action.

But your action is the important thing. You have to continue acting. So I don’t see that I must get the outcome because I have done this philanthropy or we have done this work in this sector.

You have to keep at it. There is no other way. So no, I’m not disappointed.

We keep trying. Your intent has to be good. The power of your intent matters.

The grammar of your intent matters even more.

[Shaili Chopra]
What does that mean?

[Rohini Nilekani]
Means how do you execute on the power of your intent? It’s all very well to say, everyone, nobody should be poor. Everybody should have equal access to education and health and everything.

But then how do you translate that intent in a way which gets you closer and closer to that vision? You may never reach the perfect vision, but how do you translate your intent? And that’s where I’ve learned over 35 years to work alongside civil society organisations that work very closely with the people who are affected in whichever sector.

Learned to work very closely with the local and state and union governments as well, well needed. And also to work with people from the corporate sector. That’s why my theory of Samaj, Sarkar and Bazaar is what drives everything I do, whether it’s in mental health or environmental issues or gender or anything else that I do.

[Shaili Chopra]
When you look back at Rohini in her, when she was 40, 45, what do you think she was unnecessarily worried about?

[Rohini Nilekani]
I think one is always worried about the children. They were getting into their teens, I guess, at that time. So, yeah, you worry about your children.

And then I’d begun to start looking at environmental issues. So climate, I’d begun to get climate anxiety for everyone else, including myself.

[Shaili Chopra]
That must be at an all time high right now.

[Rohini Nilekani]
Now, again, as you get older, you realise that we don’t know what the future holds. And I don’t want to be deterministic about it. I’m determined to be optimistic.

Hope is my new religion and I practise it faithfully.

[Shaili Chopra]
You know, we talk endlessly about ambition, what one is capable of, how much more one can do. And our conversation is very much so. But somehow in these conversations, when it comes to women and women’s health, it’s always on the back burner.

What were disastrous decisions around your health that you could have taken, but didn’t? Didn’t have time to pay attention to? What was it like?

[Rohini Nilekani]
I think my team keeps telling me that I push myself too hard because one is always doing something. Your body must be telling you that as well? No, no, my body this year is definitely saying, listen, you do whatever you want.

I’m not coming. Basically it’s saying, I’m not coming, you go. So this year, I really had to try and slow down.

I mean, Rohini is as much as Rohini can slow down. But no, I’ll have to. And now I realise after 65, I feel Shelly, that we have to become really much more aware of what your body is trying to tell you.

I’ve always been talking about people needing, including myself, needing more body intelligence. Because our body is always telling us things, but many times we don’t want to listen. We are busy doing something else.

So but this year, my body has decided that I better get smarter.

[Shaili Chopra]
So a lot of women today are sort of, you know, exposed to more and more other women, especially older women, telling them what the path ahead may look like. What was it for you like when you had your perimenopause or going towards your menopause?

[Rohini Nilekani]
I would say I had all that quite easy. My mother did too. And my mother, same age as her, I had my menopause.

Of course, the small things like we all face, but we were so well read about everything. So we knew what precautions to take, what to expect. What did you know?

Like the hot flashes. I mean, we knew about hormones. Nowadays, I’m reading much more about hormone therapy.

At that time, we didn’t take hormones. We were suspicious of hormone therapy.

[Shaili Chopra]
Even now there’s suspicion, there’s just information.

[Rohini Nilekani]
Yeah, but a lot of people are doing it now that I’m reading about, especially in the West. And apparently at 65, 70, 75, they’re in much better health. We should wait for more research, definitive research, I guess.

But I think younger people are readier to try new things in terms of health and supplements, etc. than we were, that’s for sure. We were always told food is your medicine, natural.

You have to be as natural as possible. And that also made a lot of sense to us then. But so much more is available through good evidence and science today, that maybe if I was 45 today, I would have taken a different path.

[Shaili Chopra]
Yeah.

[Rohini Nilekani]
How did you invest in health or for whatever information? Yoga. I believe in yoga.

Exercise, six days a week minimum. You have to do whatever exercise you like. That is absolutely, there’s no choice.

You have to do that. And obviously, you have to eat right. Exercise, eat right.

And you know what? I was just reading, maybe pseudoscience, I don’t know. But I love it that 30 seconds a day, at least you have to hug one person.

I luckily have a grandson. He says, must I do 30 seconds? I said, yes, start counting now.

He says, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. But yeah, I think what that means is just, you know, making human connections as much as you can every day. That’s good for your health.

[Shaili Chopra]
It’s interesting you say that because a lot of people I meet now who are undergoing or are navigating perimenopause, when a bunch of women get together, it’s like next time you feel like you’re not feeling yourself, get up and leave the house and find somebody else to go chat with. Maybe this is the equivalent of that jaadu ki chappi.

[Rohini Nilekani]
Friendships are so, so, so critical. I would say for my health, I think my friends have played, of course family, but friends and cultivating good girlfriends, women friends, I think has kept me sane. So what does your gang of girls mean for you?

I think a lot. Sometimes London says, you know, you don’t need any therapy or anything. Your friends are there.

And it’s very true, right? You can tell them anything. You can have fun with them.

You can laugh with them. You can gossip with them. And, you know, it won’t go around.

And just that feeling of being safe and cared for is very important. So I make sure that my groups of friends, several groups that I have, that we meet regularly and we have fun together and we learn from each other and we support each other. Of course, if something goes wrong.

Critical, critical. We have to learn to keep up friendships for sure. And you know that Harvard, there was a longevity study of happiness, one of the biggest studies ever done over time.

And very clearly it shows that those social connections seem to matter the most for both happiness and longevity.

[Shaili Chopra]
Yeah. Since you mentioned Nandan, just for this one question, how is he a support, aware, unaware partner during your menopause, perimenopause?

[Rohini Nilekani]
You know, perimenopause and menopause is so far away that I can’t remember all these things. You forget how old I am. But no, he was totally supportive.

He was a very supportive husband when he was around. In the early days of infusion, not around. So you should ask about childbirth, not menopause.

Till that time, all the infusion spouses were not there. But no, of course, we all grew up at a time where we were reading about women’s rights and empowerment and so many things. So no, no, of course, he was very supportive and I needed him.

[Shaili Chopra]
I want to take you to since you mentioned Infosys, I just want you to take a leaf out of today’s tech world. What is the tech world of Infosys? A lot has shifted.

Is it making you feel that there is there’s euphoria? You know, AI is so different from the era of Infivipro and the others. And you’ve been not just a spectator and investor, you’re there.

You know exactly how this rolled out in your backyards. What do you feel about the way tech is taking shape today?

[Rohini Nilekani]
I mean, it’s absolutely exhilarating and absolutely petrifying at the same time. Right. So how will we balance the possibilities, both positive and negative?

Again, it’s not going to be easy. But the way I look at it is I’ve met many people in AI now. And I listen to what Nandan says as well, that look at how when we grew up in the 70s, there was a nuclear threat around us.

Will somebody throw another nuclear bomb? Will humanity extinguish itself by being idiotic with nuclear weapons? And then a whole regulatory regime came up around it.

Right. And God, I mean, touch all the wood you can find. So far, at least, there has been no nuclear war.

Even the talk of tactical nuclear weapons and all is just very thrown about. But hopefully nothing will happen. So if humans were able to get together against a threat like that, can they now, now is the time, again, get together and find the institutional restraints that will stop AI from going as rogue as some people are fearing?

I think we should remind ourselves that we’ve done it before and therefore we can do it again. But that’s a very different world. My goodness, how quickly AI is moving.

It is, as a writer, you have to be really, as I consider myself a writer. So you have to be really careful not to get tempted to let AI enter your head and start writing for you. I don’t.

[Shaili Chopra]
What all in your life have you permitted AI into?

[Rohini Nilekani]
You know, not much, because surprisingly, both Nandan and I don’t use much technology in our lives. We understand the power of it, but in our lives, we are still a bit old fashioned and, you know, we prefer analogue to digital, many things. So the kids have pushed, my daughter pushed me a bit to understand what Claude and Jack Dippity and all can do for me.

I think I’m using it and I think AI will be most useful in health. Yes. So I’ve been using it to ask questions about my current state of health, which, as I said, my body is saying, don’t you think you should be looking at that more?

But sometimes I get very clear, concise, frighteningly well-written answers on questions compared to. I mean, I love my doctors, but, you know, because you can keep asking the next question and the next question. So that’s what I found myself using it for most.

[Shaili Chopra]
Yeah. We actually built an AI agent for menopause.

[Rohini Nilekani]
So it’s been exciting to see how. Menopause is on your mind, clearly, Shaili.

[Shaili Chopra]
Is it because of the program that you’re doing? No, it’s because now I run a full-fledged startup, which is only dedicated to perimenopause. I feel like just like young children need guidance.

I think women over 40 need it. Congratulations. Much needed gap to be filled.

Yes. I hope people are listening. We’re always looking to get funded.

But I’ll come back to my story in a bit. I want to ask you about money. You know, you’ve.

You all have had it at a time when in volumes and quantum at a time, perhaps Indian companies had not even seen that kind of, you know, tech wave. Now that you’ve had money, what’s your relationship with it? Do you feel it’s less and less important in life?

[Rohini Nilekani]
Yeah. When I came into money itself, I had a huge problem with it. Coming from a middle class family where from my father’s father’s side, very Gandhian.

And we were told that, you know, service before self and stuff like that. So money was not supposed to be important. And in those days, remember, we should live in a till the liberalization into fairly socialist mindset in the country.

Yeah. Five year plans. So wealth and the wealthy were looked at very differently from how they are today.

So when I came into wealth, I had a little trouble. I sort of had to hide from it. How did you do that?

You know, not a little bit, not acknowledging it or ranting against. And then I looked at myself in the mirror. Excuse me.

Now you’re the wealthy one. So you better figure this out quickly, what you’re going to do. Because people will call out.

Yeah. So then I realized there could be an opportunity to do what I said I wanted, to be in a society which can be better, more, have more justice, more equity. So then the money seemed like a pathway to do something about what I believed.

So that’s when I began to settle down. And again, there are many studies. People know this, that after a point, the next amount of money makes no difference at all.

So you have to figure out. So I’ve developed a better relationship with it. I know how I use it for my work.

We have signed the Giving Pledge. I’m almost at the point where I can say I have fulfilled the Giving Pledge, which is giving away 50 percent of our wealth. And what will I do with the remaining 50 percent?

Well, it really depends how long I live, I guess. But we live very well. Let me be very clear.

We live very well. But the money doesn’t occupy our heads.

[Shaili Chopra]
Yeah.

[Rohini Nilekani]
Yeah. It’s our work. We get excited about our work, both my husband and myself, about large, big ideas that can change the world, meeting interesting people, that sort of thing.

That’s what we like. And in my case, just going out into the wild.

[Shaili Chopra]
That’s nice. But, you know, that’s the segue to my next question, which is that wealth and wealthy people determine what should be the country’s or the world’s next big problems to be solved. Sometimes that…

[Rohini Nilekani]
I’m not so sure of that.

[Shaili Chopra]
Well, you certainly need money to execute a bunch of them.

[Rohini Nilekani]
Yeah, but most things, most things that create lasting societal change don’t necessarily need money. They need some philanthropic support. They need some state support, of course.

But they have to start from below and swell up and become public movements that are then supported by philanthropy and the state. Because otherwise it’s shallow and narrow. So it’s not the money, it’s the volunteer spirit.

It’s the spirit which tells you, I want this community or the society or this country to be much better than it is in whatever regard, in whatever problem is trying to be addressed. That’s what creates the change, not the money. The money plays a supportive role only.

It’s not an originating role.

[Shaili Chopra]
You know, I wonder when people see philanthropy or philanthropists or impact and what problems are being solved from the outside, there is one version of philanthropy and philanthropists and then there are other versions of it, right? Some wear it with bells and whistles and frills and others are quieter about it. As from within, is there that much politics in philanthropy as it appears from the outside?

[Rohini Nilekani]
No, not that I’m aware of. Some people, many of the people we associate with in India and abroad who do philanthropy, we are very serious about the questions that we are asking and the work that we are doing. And in the Giving Pledge community also, there’s a lot of seriousness.

People are not giving away enough because they still don’t know how to somehow, but they want to. And you can see the intent. And so there’s a lot of sharing about how should we do this?

What more can we do? How can we do it? Now, there may be some people who do philanthropy to show off.

I have been fortunate not to bump into too many of those. So I wouldn’t know. I don’t consider, oh, the politics is not very big.

Either you give or you don’t give. Either you give seriously or you don’t. So that’s it.

But since we’re on the topic, I wish especially the new wealthy would learn quickly how to give much more in whatever area they’re interested in. So I’m keeping my fingers crossed. I mean, there have been unequal societies, but I’ve always believed that any nation or any society allows so much accumulation of private wealth only because it believes that accumulation is good for the society or the country.

If it proves not to be, there’s going to be a very quick backlash, right? Why would any society tolerate it? So I think the wealthy have to introspect much more.

We are so lucky. Nobody is born to deserve wealth of this kind ever. There have to be good policies.

The time has to be right. The people around you have to be right. So many things have to be right for you to succeed monetarily that you can’t see it as, oh, I was so great, so I became so wealthy and now I can do whatever I want.

That argument doesn’t hold water. So in that case, how much more introspection do we especially have to do? If they say that a great power brings great responsibility, but great wealth brings even greater responsibility towards your families, towards your communities, towards your countries and eventually for the whole world.

And it’s also a very exciting journey. It’s so wonderful to be able to have the privilege and the opportunity to support people who are doing good work. So it’s intellectually stimulating.

It’s very good for the heart. I bet it’s good for the health too. We have to figure this out.

And it’s certainly good for society.

[Shaili Chopra]
Yeah, but something that you said about new wealth, there’s this always polarized argument, and I hear this in different forums, including on social media sometimes. Like we don’t need, as new, the new wealthy, some people at 21 or 22 are saying, we don’t need lectures of how this was done before. Why can’t we yet enjoy our money?

Right. We hear this a lot because people say that, oh, you know, I thought of the idea. I made this startup and now it’s mine.

Right. Do you think it requires a certain amount of age to start thinking like a philanthropist? Or is there a gap between what people think money should be used for?

[Rohini Nilekani]
No, no, no. They’ll come into it. Let them enjoy their money.

I mean, so long as it’s legal wealth, they should. Let them buy whatever they want. Diamonds.

I don’t know people, whatever people buy nowadays. Apparently now people want more experiences than things. So very good.

Then they generate more livelihoods around that experience also. So no, no, they should. If you don’t, you should go through that journey of experiencing your wealth and understanding at some point that it is like you drop off that cliff of enjoyment.

And then what? Then you want more meaning. You want more purpose.

You want to be more connected. You realize that the wealth has a different purpose. They’ll all come to it if they’re that young.

I like your optimism. You’re right.

[Shaili Chopra]
Hope is your new story, Rohini. You know, as you said, hope is the big thing for you now. But when you look at the next 10 years, what’s the one thing that scares you the most?

[Rohini Nilekani]
You know, in India, what scares me is the potential for a lot of disasters because climate change is so bad and we don’t even know what’s coming. I look at some of the models and they’re not perfect, but just heat, just take only heat in India and how many million people will suffer and how, with the best of intentions, we don’t have the public insurance in place for people. Nights have to be cool.

Even nights are not cool. If you can’t sleep in a cool place, the sort of cascading impacts on public health, that’s something I worry about. We are working on it, but we can do only this much for such a large problem.

So that’s one of the things. The other thing, again, are reducing forests, are polluting rivers. Again, our natural world, we are so lucky to be in a country with so much biodiversity, so gifted naturally, and our people for 5000 years have understood that we are dependent on it and it is dependent on us.

Now with the pressure on land, with the idea of development that is so prevalent, how are we going to achieve the prosperity we desire without cutting off the branch on which we are sitting? That question bothers me a lot.

[Shaili Chopra]
And we’ll see so much change. I mean, it’s surprising how much change we’ve already seen in just one decade with climate.

[Rohini Nilekani]
It’s moving faster than all the models had predicted. And India, of course, for India is going to be huge. Droughts, floods, cyclones, heat, glacial melt.

Glacial melt is slightly less of a problem, apparently, for various reasons, but we have to understand it. And just when we are going to need people to be much more empathetic about people in distress, in disasters, I think people are so weary of being always asked to give, because every day there’s a call, Asa mein floods hua, idhar hua, uzhar hua, and people are displaced, there’s so much they need. I hope we can keep our empathy muscle strong and resilient, because the people of India are going to be asked to do much more for their fellow citizens.

[Shaili Chopra]
I want to just do a hard shift to a few questions on raising boys. And I suppose the term raising men should also be valid.

[Rohini Nilekani]
I don’t talk about raising men. Who are we to raise men? No, no, no.

[Shaili Chopra]
It’s true. But I guess, you know, one has to make a shift. And that shift doesn’t always happen if there’s so much stereotypical legacy.

What is the work you’re doing with boys?

[Rohini Nilekani]
So when I was working in water, I used to go out a lot into the field and we would see that women were stewards of water because they needed water for their domestic and small livelihoods. And that was wonderful to see empowered women. And we were supporting that work.

But I would see men on the fringes and I was observing them in different situations and saying, maybe we’re not paying enough attention to what is happening there. I think over the last few years, 50 years, we’ve had very good public policy for women. And we’ve achieved some some goals.

Long way to go still. You mean on equality? On equality, on giving women more chances, scholarships, so much support against abuse through law.

A lot of good laws made, a lot of good policy and public finance behind it. But we haven’t been able to do the same for, I think, men because we’re not looking at them that way. For example, you’re talking about perimenopause, but adolescent boys, there’s no space for them to understand their emerging sexuality, for example.

And education. More women are in education today than boys. They’re dropping out in India and globally as well.

Also, this whole patriarchal idea of what they should be, breadwinners, the responsibility of it, that’s deepened into them so early. But the opportunities outside are reducing. The combination of that frustration and anxiety about the future of work, about maybe their sisters and their girlfriends or partners or whatever, doing better than them in some opportunities.

It’s creating a backlash, which is not good for us women either. So we’ve been working on this for 15 years almost now. All kinds of small experiments, not at scale yet.

But recently we helped support something called the Centre for Men and Boys, which has now been set up to do a lot more research and advocacy around on men and boys. The Centre for Men and Boys. How do we help men and boys to be the best human beings they can possibly be?

What are the gaps? Because when men are feeling scared and anxious, they tend to be aggressive towards the women in their lives. And we don’t want that either.

But in their own right also, we have to understand what kind of support structures teenage boys and young men need. So that again, you cannot have a flourishing society, a peaceful society unless we are looking at the question of what’s happening. What do men want?

We always say, what do women want? But what do men want? What do they need?

That’s what we’ve been trying to do.

[Shaili Chopra]
I just want to ask this question, because obviously I’ve worked with women for the last 11 years and somehow it feels that I shouldn’t have existed as a platform today. But I still have so many issues so alive that were around a decade ago. So I wonder when we look at, and I always say this, that women are the world’s largest minority because that’s how they’re treated.

In the light of that, and this is not a question of whether or not there needs to be institutional support for men. The question is that do you think that there is this notion and you know, you voiced it and I’m hearing this from others. Women have got too much policy intervention.

Somehow it seems very click-baity.

[Rohini Nilekani]
That’s a terrible thing to say. How can there be too much policy? I would never say that.

Women have got some policy support because we have recognized centuries of discrimination, right? So there was correction and there’s much more correction needed.

[Shaili Chopra]
There’s much more financial support needed.

[Rohini Nilekani]
Look at what’s happening to women. I told you in the first part of our conversation, social problems never get fully solved, right? The work on women’s empowerment has to continue forever.

But that doesn’t mean that we can’t look at 50% of the other side also. As women itself, we should be able to clearly feel empathetic about what’s happening on the other side. Eventually, we want real gender equity, right?

Yes. So then the men also have to be comfortable in their own skins to be good partners to the women that are marching ahead, hopefully, in an empowered way. So I just feel there’s a different form of imbalance that has now occurred.

And if it is not corrected, neither is it good for the men, of course, but it’s not good for the women either. So we have to look at it in a balanced way. Certainly, we are not talking about taking away resources from what women need.

Of course not. We’ve seen in the US though, right?

[Shaili Chopra]
But it’s not shrinking pie.

[Rohini Nilekani]
You shouldn’t think of it as a pie that has to be divided up so that the men will get something more again and the women will get less. We are never talking about that sort of thing. There are enough budgets.

They have to be reoriented for the right emerging need is all the argument we are making.

[Shaili Chopra]
Last question and then one quick, what I call the rule breaker segment. If the next chapter of Rohini Nevekani had nothing to do with philanthropy, what would Rohini choose to do?

[Rohini Nilekani]
I’m going to write. I already write. I’ve written 20 books for little children.

I’ve written three books for adults. My fourth one is coming out in January. It’s a collection of my environmental writing.

I’m going to continue to produce films on the environment. I made one called The Shared Wilderness. Please watch it on Jio.

And I’m making another one now. I hope to make more and support more. And I want to go travel and see very different ecospheres, animals, birds, as much as I can.

Which means I have to be healthy, like what you are talking about. Women have to be careful to be healthy to achieve all the other ambitions that they have. Absolutely.

[Shaili Chopra]
Now the rule breaker segment. First thing you bought with your own salary.

[Rohini Nilekani]
I mean, the very first thing I bought with my own salary was a saree from my mother. It was the obvious thing to do. But my salary at that time in Bombay magazine was 450 rupees.

So I got her a cotton saree. What does fame mean to Rohini Nevekani? An ability, an opportunity, a privilege to spread my ideas.

GLP-1 drugs.

[Shaili Chopra]
Yes or no? No. Last time you were properly tired.

Day before yesterday. One thing you don’t fail to do every single day.

[Rohini Nilekani]
I do prayers with visualization, positive visualization. Books or films? I mean exercise.

[Shaili Chopra]
Books or films? Books. And what has turning 60 taught you?

[Rohini Nilekani]
Slow down lady and take life as it comes at you. Don’t push so much. Wonderful to have you Rohini.

Thank you Shaili. Thank you very much.