Sambandh: Driving Progress through Research - A chat with Dan Banik

Fantastic.

You used the term

evidence-based hope.

Let's turn to India for a moment, where we

are right now.

What are the causes in your mind? What are the reasons to be hopeful? What evidence is there to be hopeful? I was born in India a long time ago, right? And I've been in Norway for 35 years.

I've begun to see, of course, India and appreciate India, what India does, the challenges as well as the successes from a different vantage point, from a Norwegian perspective.

So the first thing I would say is the thing that fascinates me is the resilience of Indian democracy, right? The fact that since 1947, apart from one brief period, there's just been uninterrupted democratic rule.

If you think about one of the definitions of democracy that I really like by Adam Przewski, democracy is a system where parties lose elections.

If you use that criteria, you see this happening at the state levels in India, the national level.

So that is one thing.

The second thing from an economic perspective, I left India in 1991.

That was an era of power cuts.

That was an era where one couldn't get access to foreign goods.

You know, it was this era where the economy was closed.

It was in 91 that liberalization started under Dr. Manmohan Singh and things opened up.

And now India is the bastion of capitalism.

If you think about 200 million people who've been lifted out of poverty, I should mention this.

35 years ago in Oslo, Iran, people thought India was like, they associate India with Mother Teresa and elephants and, you know, the British Raj, you know, the British serials that, you know, we would watch on Norwegian TV.

And now that picture has changed.

India is about fantastic authors.

Arundhati Roy, you know, you have diplomats.

There's yoga and there's Bollywood.

Shah Rukh Khan is apparently quite well known in Oslo.

I didn't know that either.