India in the Age of Ideas: Select Writings: 2006–2018

Economist, environmentalist and urban theorist Sanjeev Sanyal brings the deftness of a polymath to explore completely new ways to think about India and its place in the world. The idea of constantly and organically updating one’s views/actions through feedbackoops shows up in many places in my writings. This derives directly from the view that the real world is fundamentally unstable and unpredictable (i.e., it’s not a matter of having a better forecasting model). The best response to such a world, therefore, is to have a good grasp of what is currently happening and to respond quickly and flexibly to the evolving situation. My worldview derives from many sources ranging from religious philosophy andong-range history, to Chaos Theory and Network Theory—with many of them integrated under a broad CAS framework. Some of the foreign writers and thinkers who have influenced me include Friedrich Hayek, Joseph Schumpeter, Daniel Kahneman,ee Kuan Yew, Nassim Taleb, Karl Popper, Charles Darwin, Sun Tzu, Vidiadhar Naipaul and Jane Jacobs, to name a few. The Indian influences are even more varied and range from ancient texts, such as the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and Kautilya’s Arthashastra, to more modern thinkers, such as Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo.