This newsletter took a slightly longer break than expected following Eid, because of a death in the family. For those to whom this might be of interest, a few years ago, I wrote a piece for the Museum of Material Memory about my Thatha, my grandfather, who wrote the same phrase in Tamil over and over, every day for more than three decades.
Meanwhile, there is much to cover: The horrific terrorist attack in Pahalgam and its aftermath (read Pratap Bhanu Mehta on this), Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Saudi Arabia (cut short following the attack), US Vice President JD Vance’s visit to India and the mounting pressure to finalise a trade deal, plus ongoing debates about how New Delhi should handle China, some of which we will hopefully tackle in coming weeks.
On this week's episode of The Political Cycle, we're talking to Yamini Aiyar, senior visiting fellow at the Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia at Brown University, author of a recent book titled Lessons in State Capacity from Delhi’s Schools and former president of the Centre for Policy Research, India’s premier think tank (where, full disclosure, I also worked with her). She is also the co-author with Dan Honig, of a piece in Foreign Policy entitled ‘Efficiency isn’t Everything’, which examines the fetish for hyper-efficiency in government, and why that is the wrong goal for the state.
With Elon Musk's DOGE bringing the idea to a mainstream audience, do we need to better interrogate the motives behind this trend? Here, she talks to our Cyclist Rohan Venkat.
Here are the Trike Recommendations from this episode:
The Nehru Years: An International History of Indian Non-Alignment by Swapna Kona Nayudu
Elizabeth Popp Berman’s Thinking Like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy
Jennifer Pahlka’s Recoding America: Why Government is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better
Subscribe below to our contributors' Substacks:
ET Write Home by Emily Tamkin (via Emily's Substack you can also listen to an ad-free version of the show)
The Political Tricycle is a Podot podcast.
It's presented by Emily Tamkin, Tom Hamilton and Rohan Venkat.
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