October 11, 2024 • 43 mins
India, 1930. Sarojini Naidu is marching towards a British-controlled saltwork; behind her is a long column of protestors all dressed in white. The great campaigner for India's Independence, Gandhi, is now in jail. In his place, he's chosen Naidu to lead this movement against the hard and fearsome British Empire.
Naidu and her marchers want change, and they want to achieve it peacefully. India's fate, they believe, depends on a non-violent path to resistance.
Today, there will be violence. But it won't come from them.
This is the final episode in a four-part series about how to succeed without being a jerk. This episode is based on David Bodanis' forthcoming book How To Change The World, which is scheduled to be published in late 2025.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin, London, the first of July nineteen o nine. It's
South Kensington, a quiet but immensely wealthy neighborhood full of
grand townhouses even mansions. This particular evening, a retired army officer,
(00:38):
William Hutt Curzon Wiley, is attending a grand reception at
the palatial Imperial Institute, celebrating his efforts assisting students from India.
As the evening draws to a close, Curzon Wiley leaves
the venue and begins to walk down the elegant steps
(00:59):
of the Imperial Institute. Suddenly, a young Indian man in
gold rimmed spectacles steps forward, raises a pistol, and shoots
him twice in the face. As the old man sinks
to the floor, his assailant keeps shooting. A Parsi doctor
rushes to help. The young man turns, aims and kills
(01:22):
him too. The assassin was acting alone, but he wasn't
the only person to feel that the only way to
break the British occupation of India was with a violent uprising.
The assassin lived in a house in North London with
dozens of other young Indian men. They'd been practicing violent
(01:47):
resistance together how to fire a rifle, how to make weapons,
how to evade the police. One of those housemates, a
man called Byron, wrote a letter to the Times of
London supporting the assassin. Barron secretly visited him in prison,
then fled the country. The assassination had been senseless, no
(02:12):
matter how passionately you opposed the British Empire. Coursin Wiley
was a harmless old man. The assassin had killed him
in cold blood, and a bystander who'd only tried to
help and would a violent murder prompt the British to
rethink their role in India or to crack down. But
(02:34):
this cautionary tale isn't about the assassin or about his
sympathizer Bern. It's about someone who found a different way
to bring about revolutionary change. Barren's sister, the woman called Sorgeny.
I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to cautionary tales. She's
(03:24):
a slight woman, not even five feet tall. The long
end of her sari is pulled over her head. The
expression on her face is apprehensive. There's a long row
of marchers behind her, all wearing white. They followed Sir
Augeny Naidu to the coast to make salt, but they've
(03:47):
stopped now outside a British controlled saltwork on the northwest
coast of India. The Arabian Sea shimmers just a few
hundred yards ahead, but the marcher's path is blocked by
the barbed wire that's wrapped around the saltworks and by
sixty policemen, all holding steel tipped clubs, and soldiers too,
(04:10):
with heavy rifles pointed at the marchers. The year is
nineteen thirty, twenty one years after the assassination in South Kensington.
The great campaigner for India's independence from the British Empire,
Mahatma Gandhi, is in jail. The successor he's chosen to
(04:30):
lead India's independence movement is Sir Erogeny Nidu. Naidu and
her marchers want vast change against a hard opponent, and
they want it without violence. Sirrogeny has decisively rejected the
murderous approach that her brother Bren endorsed. India's fate, Nido
(04:54):
believes depends on a nonviolent path to resistance. She steps forward,
her marchers follow. There will be violence, to be sure,
but it won't come from them. This is the final
episode in our series. Inspired by the work of David Badanis.
(05:17):
This story comes from his forthcoming book How to Change
the World Lessons from Three People Who did. When David
first told me Nidou's story, I was fascinated. Sirrogenny. Nidou
was an unlikely revolutionary. When she was growing up in
the eighteen eighties, her family worshiped England. In her childhood
(05:40):
home in Hyderabad, volumes of Shakespeare and Wordsworth filled their shelves.
Stories of Britain's military and intellectual heroes came up frequently
in conversation. Servants might speak native languages, but with her
own brothers and sisters, Nidou said, it was considered the
height of ignorance and misfortune not to be acquainted with English.
(06:06):
She grew up believing it was fair for Indians to
be colonized. By that time, Britain had controlled India for generations.
That control was more forceful in some parts of the country,
with garrisons of troops and machine guns and artillery at hand.
In other areas, British control was wielded indirectly through local
(06:28):
princes who were ostensibly in power but who knew they
had to do what the local British representatives wanted, and
Naido thought this was a fine thing. As one Hindu
elder she looked up to explained Man for Mann the Englisher,
better than ourselves. They have a higher standard of duty,
(06:50):
higher notions of organized work and discipline. As a teenager,
Nido got a scholarship to study in Cambridge. When she
landed in Britain in eighteen ninety six, just seventeen years
old and terribly shy, she discovered but even more reasons
(07:10):
to look up to the British. There were underground tubes
for trains that cut through the very soil beneath her feet.
There were complex vehicles that propelled themselves without horses. The
future had arrived. Everything seemed incredible. She took the train
on to Cambridge, where she was going to study at
(07:32):
the Women's College Girton. After her first day, she wrote
to her boyfriend at home, effectively her fiancee, and told him,
everybody makes a pet of me, though I've been here
only a few hours. You see, I am by far
the youngest and the curiosity. She was touched when the
girls invited her for bicycle trips to the all male colleges.
(07:56):
Those bicycles were a revolutionary invention, giving women a real
sense of independence for the first time, even if senior
faculty would ride alongside as chaperone's. Even more exciting than
the bicycles was getting to meet the male students, the
best of whom might rule her country. One day, she
(08:18):
wrote to her family breathlessly about how they were so
educated and so civilized. Everything might have stayed like that,
with Nido remaining a proud subject of Queen Victoria's empire.
But it turned out that although women at Cambridge could
(08:40):
attend lectures and take exams, they weren't allowed to receive degrees.
If a woman studied biology, for example, she might be
top in the exams, but since she wouldn't get a diploma,
she could never go on to become a doctor. One
energetic young classics lecturer at Nidoo's College, a woman named
(09:02):
Catherine jex Blake, was fed up with this system. She
was a suffragette and she thought women should have the
same rights as everyone else. She lobbied successfully to have
the university vote on changing their policy. A date was
set in May. Undergraduates couldn't vote, but male faculty and
(09:26):
alumni could, and special trains were arranged to bring former
students from London to Cambridge. By early afternoon on May
the twenty first voting day, over a thousand voters had
passed through the Senate House. There was a crush of
many thousand more students pressed outside, mostly men, a few women.
(09:51):
Just as the result was to be announced, a group
of students on the roof of Keyes College across the
way mockingly let out the sound of a vigorous cock crow.
This was the signal, wrote one witness, for the commencement
of operations. Occupants of the front rooms at Keys immediately
(10:13):
began to hang out banners that mocked women. Other male
students leaned out of an upstairs window and started a
lowering a pape mache figure of a woman life size,
an effigy that'd made it with bright red hair, looking
silly in a cap and gown. Another group of students
(10:33):
at another upstairs window brought out another effigy, this time
of a woman straddling that symbol of female freedom, a bicycle.
They'd torn her dress off so she was exposed humiliatingly
in her underwear, and then painted the underwear bright blue,
so no one could miss it down below. The men
(10:57):
started jeering. When the result was announced women would not
be granted degrees, pandemonium broke loose. The bicyclist effigy figure
was lowered to the ground. Hundreds of undergraduate men struggled
forward to attack it, tearing at its exposed body. Then
they put it on top of a cow and went
(11:19):
on a journey around the town. Crowds of male students
and graduates ran alongside, blowing horns and yelling out the
rest of the men at the Senate House vote started
running through the town too. Women everywhere were groped or
pressed up against walls. Others were tugged into the mob
and flung around for fun. Seemingly every man on the
(11:42):
street was rabid wild. These were the future rulers of
Naidoo's land. Now they were humiliating every woman they could catch.
A large group of men ended up outside another women's college,
where they were shouting of senaties and throwing fireworks into
(12:03):
the girl's windows. They rammed fragments of the effigy through
the cottage gates. They stayed for hours, setting up a
bonfire in front of the building, trapping the women inside. Meanwhile,
an even bigger group of students police estimates were in
the thousands, brought other life sized female effiges to the
(12:25):
main market square in Cambridge. One was of the tutor
at Naidu's college, Katherine jex Blake, the one who'd dared
petition for the degrees. These effiges, too, were stripped and
mutilated before being burnt in another bonfire. The men kept
(12:45):
on adding fresh fuel. The flames and the jeering went
on long into the night. Cambridge's women had merely asked
to be awarded the degrees their studies and examinations deserved.
(13:09):
They hadn't even succeeded, and yet the very idea of
this sparked hour after hour of harassment, humiliation and riot.
Cautionary tales will return in just a moment. On the
(13:34):
morning of May the twenty first, Naidoo had been polite
and trusting, thinking British culture the pinnacle of civilization around
the world. But by the end of the day her
British idol had fallen. What right did men like that
have to control her people at all? Over the next
(13:59):
few days it became clear she had to leave Cambridge.
Something deeper became clear too, she couldn't be a pawn
in this empire anymore. Sir Rogereny went to London and
spent time with a number of writers, including the great
(14:19):
Irish poet Yates, who happened to be her friend's roommate.
They met at home for drinks and conversation, and she
was impressed with the way he was inspiring Irish nationalists
with the force and eloquence of his writing. Why should
Ireland be subservient to England? For that matter, why should India?
(14:44):
Naido was inspired too, and encouraged that someone of Yates's
stature would take a young Indian woman seriously. The Cambridge
riots had shown her a dark truth about the alleged
superiority of the British, but London reminded her that the
British weren't all bad. Many Britons were open to reason,
(15:09):
to the arguments for fairness. Sir Rogerie Naidoo was nineteen
years old when she returned to India and determined to
push back against British rule in Hyderabad. However, her partner
Gorvindhu expected they would quickly get married and start having children,
(15:31):
which they did soon. She was a housewife, her whole
life enclosed. She started writing poetry, but with little children
it was hard to find much time. There was a
verandah with a swing where she could look out decorated
cages with chirping songbirds inside. Everyone thinks I'm so nice
(15:57):
and cheerful, She wrote all the banal things. But I've
merely taught myself to be commonplace. Everything is slipping away.
After all she had seen in England, after all that
she recognized was still going on in India, it felt
(16:18):
terrible to be passive. Right outside Hyderabad, for example, there
was a large British military base. Just by their presence,
they made sure that industries and rail lines were arranged
to benefit investors in England, not farmers or other workers
(16:42):
in India. She had to find another way to work
toward freedom from British rule. Could politics be the answer?
When her children were older, Sir Orogini Naidu immersed herself
in the Indian National Congress, a group dominated by Bengali
(17:02):
intellectuals who politely, calmly lobbied the British government for fairer treatment.
It's there where. Despite her terrible shyness and slight stature,
Naidou discovered that speaking out in public, she felt different.
What is it that we demand, she called out from
(17:24):
one podium, Nothing new, nothing startling, but a thing that
is as old as life. You shouldn't be disinherited as
exiles in your own land. The day is over when
we were content to be slaves. Finally, it seemed she
(17:48):
had found the right way forward. During the First World War,
she pushed to get India to support the British cause,
trusting that afterwards, in reward, the subcontinent would be awarded
dominion status, that it would have more freedom from British
rule as Canada in New Zealand. Had everything seemed agreed,
(18:12):
London was on board, but at the last minute, just
after the war ended, the British Empire's most senior representative
in India, the Viceroy, undermined it all. There would be
no relaxation of the rules and no dominion status. He
(18:32):
wanted everything to go back to how it had been
before the war. In fact, there would now be harsher rules,
the rights to arrest anyone with no trial, and no
controls against torture. Indians across the continent began to protest,
but the protests were disconnected not especially organized. On the
(18:57):
thirteenth of April nineteen nineteen, a large crowd gathered in
the Jalianwala gardens in the center of the old city
of Mritzar in the Punjab region. Many were families in
town for a cattle festival. Some were meeting to discuss
the new legislation, others were just enjoying the sunny day.
(19:20):
The garden was mostly dried out and a few acres
in size. Since families were large, there were a lot
of children, perhaps fifteen thousand people total. To Major General
Reginald Dyer, the man in charge of the city, this
(19:41):
wasn't local citizenry at ease or even patriotism. It was fanaticism.
He had put up a handful of notices that meetings
weren't allowed, but he didn't know amritz so well and
didn't realize that hardly anyone had seen them. Rather, he
(20:02):
was insistent that proper order was not to be thwarted.
There was a ten foot high stone and brick wall
around most of the garden. At the one narrow entrance,
he parked armored car sideways on, blocking any exit. Then
(20:24):
he and his mostly Indian troops advanced inside, fifty of
them carrying heavy rifles. They didn't say anything, just took
up position on a slight rise. Once they were a
few yards in front of the crowd, a few of
(20:45):
the Sikhs near the front, with military training, had a
sudden ominous feeling and tried to get families near them
to begin walking out now, but this made no sense.
Hardly anyone had moved when, without warning Dyer had all
(21:07):
fifty of his men open fire, and they reloaded and
fired again and again till the thousands of shells they
had were all gone. It was the greatest massacre in
the history of British India, with probably five hundred or
(21:29):
more people dead. As one former Prime Minister Asquith called
it the worst in the history of our empire. From
its very inception. The Army justified its actions, arguing that
soldiers had been firing in self defense faced by a
(21:51):
violent mob. The response to the massacre from the authorities
in London was half hearted criticism. There was a few
weeks later that the young Indian assassin gunned down a
retired army officer and a good marat and doctor outside
a reception in South Kensington and to points like this
(22:17):
rock bottom that it's at tempting to give up. Sir
Rougerie Nidou had been working with the Indian National Congress
for over a decade and she saw clearly that lobbying
and negotiation did no good. Her brother bern had endorsed
random murderous violence. That was no good either. But then
(22:42):
what was left Nido had to find a different path,
and for that she turned to Gandhi. Naido and Gandhi
had first met in nineteen fourteen and quickly became friends.
At the time, she was already the voice of the
Indian National Congress as well as a well reviewed poet.
(23:06):
Gandhi would later become world famous. Back then, he was
a little known activist based in South Africa. Five years
on after the massacred and Ritzer, Naido and Gandhi discussed
their options. What if instead of violence or politics, you
(23:27):
directly oppose the way the authorities have arranged society, not viciously,
but so that it would make the injustice clear to everyone.
What about civil disobedience of an emphatic sort. New concepts
need new words. Setya is the Sanskrit for truth. Graha
(23:53):
means to hold firmly. The idea behind what was now
called Setyagraha is that an unjust law violates the right
order of the universe, and we need to rectify that
hold firmly to the truth, but in a manner that
doesn't create new injustices. In short, disobey but without violence,
(24:24):
a fair idea that, it turns out, is incredibly hard
to carry out in practice. In nineteen twenty one, Gandhi
and Naid targeted the visit of the Prince of Wales
to Bombay. Huge piles of imported British clothing were burned,
(24:45):
and as the Prince was welcomed into the port, he
found himself surrounded by protesters, politely but firmly demonstrating their
disapproval of British rule. What the protesters hadn't reckoned with
was the offense taken by the locals taking part in
the welcoming ceremonies. How could an honored guest be treated
(25:08):
so As those locals left, fights broke out between them
and the demonstrators, and when the police showed up, the
fights got worse. Once a mob is roused, it's hard
to stop. Soon almost anyone in Western clothes was being attacked,
(25:28):
the police counterattacked. Fighting of all sorts spread and lasted
for four days. By the end, dozens of innocent people
were dead. It was awful, the reverse of everything I
do had hoped for. The vision for Sacha Grajo was
(25:51):
in jeopardy and with Gandhi often in jail, everyone was
looking to Sir Rogereni Nidol to help them figure out
what to do next. Cautionary tales will return. A few
(26:16):
years after the debacle in Bombay, Naidu was elected head
of the Indian National Congress. She was the first Indian
woman to reach that position. Responsibility for Indian independence sat
heavily on her shoulders. There had been little progress. The
(26:38):
country was still run for the benefit of the British
at the expense of Indians. One senior British politician was
at least honest about it. I know it is said
at missionary meetings that we've conquered India to raise the
level of the Indians. That is Kant. We conquered India
(27:01):
as the outlet for the goods of Great Britain. We
conquered India by the sword, and by the sword we
should hold it. In nineteen thirty the leadership of the
Indian National Congress decided to try to reclaim one small
piece of what Indians had lost under British rule salt.
(27:27):
For centuries, salt had been free, with anyone able to
collect whatever they needed, but when Britain took over, they
also took over salt production and put a tax on it.
Seventy eight members of Gandhi's Ashram walked two hundred miles
to one of the big salt making regions on the
(27:47):
coast in April. However, when the marchers reached the sea,
the British Viceroy Irwin had a remarkable response. He did nothing.
The marchers collected their salty mud. Press cameras caught the images.
There was Naidoo in her long sard hurry, Gandhy in
(28:10):
his usual loincloth with a shawl over his shoulders. The
point of non violent resistance was to have something to resist.
Without a response from the authorities, what were they supposed
to do. Gandy collected more mud, so did most of
(28:32):
the marchers. Still, Irwin did nothing. Over the next few days,
journalists began to mock the marchers. All they saw were
Indians milling about on a beach Soon the journalists left,
and then almost everyone else left too. Irwin had made
(28:55):
the marchers look like fools. A few weeks later, he
had Gandhy arrested quickly at night, bright flashlights in the face,
armed troops to the rest of the nationalist leadership was
thrown into jail two. Nido clearly was next, and support
(29:19):
for their movement was waning. Indians had had enough of
British excuses, and now enough of the Indian National Congress
saying there was some magical sechagaha, a third way to
get the freedom they wanted. Some people were calling for
more violence. Nidu was convinced that would only lead to
(29:42):
more repression. She realized that she didn't have long to act.
She sent out messages to people she trusted, trying to
get journalists interested in a new protest, and then hurried
back to the coast to a hamlet called d Rasana. There,
Britain had built a large salt works where salt was
(30:04):
collected from large lagoons, then purified and stacked in high
pyramid The mudflats were surrounded by barbed wire and deep
moat like ditches. By the time Nido got there, danger
was in the air. Some nearby protesters were being led
(30:24):
by Gandhi's son Manulal, who was excitable and prone to violence.
The salt works were guarded by police with their vicious
clubs and troops with rifles. They were itching for an
excuse to use them. Naidoo spent long days going from
one small group of protesters to another, explaining their purpose.
(30:49):
They weren't just there to get salt. They were there
to expose the unfairness of taxes paid by Indians to
keep Britons in luxury. If there was violence, that violence
is all the world would see. Each marcher's self control
was indispensable. If even a few acted out, it would
(31:11):
be like Amritza. It would become fair for the soldiers
to shoot back. Naid warned the marchers that the police
would be violent. You will be beaten, she said, but
you must not resist. You must not even raise a hand.
(31:32):
Briton's would be watching. The world would be watching. All
the forces of the universe were watching this isolated hamlet
and beach. It might seem to be just a speck
on the Gujarak coast, but if they could remain nonviolent,
(31:52):
they could make it the most important place on earth.
If anyone wished to step back now, they should feel
no shame. But for the others, they had to show
the world what British rule really mean. On Wednesday, made
the twenty first, they went ahead. Naidu was at the front.
(32:18):
Gandhi's son Manuelal wasn't far behind. It was terrifying as
they got close, and Naidu started a group chant Bin
kilab Zindabad, Long Live the Revolution, the Peaceful Revolution. Before
(32:39):
Nidou's marchers could reach the barbed wire, scores of Indian
police rushed forward, wielding clubs. They rained down on some protesters'
heads with sickening crunches, cracking skulls. Men fell bleeding, but
the next row of marchers calmly continued, accepting the same beating.
(33:03):
When they refused to fight back, the police became enraged.
They kept beating people, stamping on them, leaving dozens and
then hundreds writhing on the ground. It only came to
an end at noon, when Naidu herself was arrested. Three
hundred and twenty marchers had been seriously wounded, many were
(33:28):
still unconscious. The British government announced a few days later
that nothing had happened that there had been some slight
confusion at Durrasana that day, but no shots were fired
and at most four people were wounded. Viceroy Irwin wrote
(33:53):
to the King, how amusing it was, and all was peaceful, easy,
just and there Perhaps the story might have ended, except
that Naidou's attempts to draw journalists to Durasna had succeeded.
(34:17):
One man, an American from the Midwest, had made it
along just one, but he worked for United Press, an
American wire service that sent articles to over one thousand
newspapers worldwide. He had seen everything, and his reports were
(34:39):
read by tens of millions around the globe. The heart
went out of the British establishment. A few die hards
said how preposterous it was that Indians thought nonviolence could
make any real change. Didn't they realize it would never
work in Mussolini's Italy or Stalin's Soviet Union. But that
(35:04):
was the point. Most Britons were proud. Their nation was
nothing like those dictatorships. That was what NI do was
brilliantly banking on that if violence was the only way
to keep India submitting to British rule, then the British
didn't want it, and it worked. More and more Britons
(35:30):
questioned what their government was doing in India, and a
few years later, after the Second World War, Prime Minister
Clement Atli's post war government granted India its independence. That
alone would be a staggering achievement three hundred and fifty
million people finally free from colonial rule. But similar freedom
(35:52):
campaigns spread around the world, to Martin Luther King and
the civil rights movement in America, to Nelson Mandela and
the end of Apartheith in South Africa, to women's rights
and disability rights, and much else. Sir Rogenny Nidu and
Gandhi found their third way and then they shared it.
(36:18):
This powerful gentler path to transform nations that finishes our
series of four episodes inspired by a friend, David Bidanas's
(36:41):
book The Art of Fairness. The story of Sir Rogenny
Naidu is told in his forthcoming volume How to Change
the World Now. All of the stories have been grappling
with the question we dealt with right at the start.
With the American baseball manager Leo du Rocha. He was
famous for saying, nice guys finish last well, David was
(37:03):
watching Derochia at his prime as a manager. David is
back in the studio with me now, David, nice guys
finished last. What do we think about whether that statement
holds up.
Speaker 2 (37:14):
There was a real lot of what Durocher was saying
that was true through most of that summer when I
was there watching them. He succeeded. Nice guys do finish
last almost all the time. If you're only nice, if
you're only polite, you're like a doormat. You get walked
all over all the time.
Speaker 1 (37:33):
And so need to be a bit tougher. But that
doesn't mean going to the other extreme.
Speaker 2 (37:38):
Well, see, that's the whole thing. Remember and I Do's brother,
as you were talking about, in the assassination in London
in nineteen oh nine, the one that he supported, he
went to an extreme. It's kind of a logical opposite. Oh,
being nice and polite hasn't gotten us anywhere for freedom
from England.
Speaker 1 (37:54):
So we're going to shoot an old guy in the
face and that'll work.
Speaker 2 (37:56):
Exactly. They're going way too far. The Indian National Congress
used to begin their meetings in the eighteen nineties and
nineteen hundred by singing God Save the Queen. They actually
did because they thought if they were really, really, really polite,
the nice people in Britain would forget the fact that
they look differently and would be nice to them. This
is a case where DeRosier is sort of right purely
being nice. The British established in want to keep on
(38:18):
going indefinitely. But the temptation to go to the opposite extreme,
that's what we have to fight. The Russian Revolution was
about as violent a revolution as you can get. The
result was Lenin and Stalin. People get into that mood.
It's easy to overshoot.
Speaker 1 (38:32):
Right, so you need to find a middle way, and
that is really what these tales have been exploring. So
Durochia lost to a baseball banager who knew how to
keep control, but he wasn't a bully. And the Empire
State Building went up faster than any other skyscraper of
its time, with its builders keeping that ethos firm but fair,
they trust, but verify, they checked. And I like that.
Speaker 2 (38:55):
But there's a problem.
Speaker 1 (38:57):
There's always a problem. What is the problem.
Speaker 2 (38:59):
The problem, Well, the thing is, the idea is a
great one. I've loved writing these books that show this
firm but fair in action. Your books show good ways
of acting also. But the thing is your books also
show the great ingenuity people need to make these principles work.
We have these ideas, we know what we're supposed to do,
turning it into action as hard you saw it in these.
Speaker 1 (39:21):
Four episodes absolutely. I mean the struggle, for example, that
Naidu and Gandhi had when they organized this protest of
the Prince of Wales the future king coming to India,
and it just got out of control. So it's easy
to say, oh, you know, we're going to protest in
a non violent way, but actually those protests became incredibly violent.
Or One of the stories that really explored this so
(39:44):
elegantly was William Bligh, the captain who suffered the mutiny
on the Bounty, and I found it so interesting that
the challenge that he faced was that his approach worked
in some contexts, but the context kept changing and he
couldn't adapt to the context.
Speaker 2 (40:00):
He couldn't adapt. That's what happens. You vowed, okay, I'm
going to be calm. I'm okay, I'm going to be calm,
and then your kids are crying at nine pm and
you really want them to go to bed and come
less calm. We know what we should do, but actually
carrying it out as hard. So in a sense, when
we do books of instructions, we need meta instructions. Also,
here's the instructions, here's the principles. Now here's how to
(40:21):
apply it when times are rough.
Speaker 1 (40:23):
And that links into a couple of things. We hear
a lot in cautionary tales. So one of the things
that people really need is this alertness to what is
going on around them and this responsiveness to feedback. So
rather than just setting their course and following the course
that they planned all along, it's never going to be
right first time. They've got to have that opportunity to
spot that something's going wrong. And a lot of the
(40:46):
disasters that happen in cautionary tales are ultimately because of
broken feedback loops. Something's going wrong and the people with
the ability to make change don't get told or they're
not listening. And then the other thing is just preparing
yourself for something going wrong mentally rehearsing that. I mean,
that's something that Paul Starrett, for example, who was the
(41:07):
project manager on the Empire State Building, he did a
great job of thinking through all the things that could
go wrong and working out how I was going to
deal with them. Whereas William Bly he never quite seemed
to be able to think that through well, to think ahead,
even when stuff had gone wrong and then it had
started going right again, he wasn't able to go, Okay,
you know I had a near miss. How am I
(41:29):
going to make sure the things don't fall apart next time?
Speaker 2 (41:31):
I think that's probably our best practical solution. Practice it
and imagine it going wrong. My mother used to say, David,
if you want to get to know somebody, well, go
on a trip, but have something go wrong. Then you'll
see how people respond. It's sort of like theatrically acting
out the different ways things can go wrong. If the
military says do this and everything will act perfectly, you
(41:54):
forget the enemy has a vote, the environment has a vote,
chance has a vote. But if we practice it a
little bit, say okay, what'll I do when I'm a
bit stressed here? What will I do when I'm a
bit tired, Then when it actually comes into action, you
at least have a better chance.
Speaker 1 (42:08):
David, the amazing stories of amazing insights, Thank you so
much for bringing them to us. With pleasure David Bandanas's
forthcoming book, including the life story of Sir Rogeny and
iid is How to Change the World Lessons from Three
People Who Did It is scheduled to come out in
twenty twenty five, and of course you can reserve a
copy in advance. Just check out our website if you
(42:31):
can't wait. David's many other books, including the Art of Fairness,
while they're available wherever books are solved. Cautionary Tales is
written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright. This mini
series is based on David Bandanas's book The Art of Fairness,
(42:51):
The Power of Decency in a World Turned Mean, and
it was written with David Bandanas himself. For a full
list of our sources, see the show notes at Timharford
dot com. The show is produced by Alice Fines, with
Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music the work
of Pascal Wise. Sarah Nix edited the script. Cautionary Tales
(43:15):
features the voice talents of Ben Crowe, Melanie Gustridge, Stella Harford,
Gemma Saunders, and Rufus Wright. The show wouldn't have been
possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilly, Gretta Cohen,
Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey and Owen Miller.
Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded
(43:39):
at ward Or Studios in London by Tom Berry. If
you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review.
It doesn't really make a difference to us and if
you want to hear the show ad free, sign up
to Pushkin Plus on the show page on Apple Podcasts
or at pushkin dot Fm, slash plus
Pushkin, London, the first of July nineteen o nine. It's
South Kensington, a quiet but immensely wealthy neighborhood full of
grand townhouses even mansions. This particular evening, a retired army officer,
(00:38):
William Hutt Curzon Wiley, is attending a grand reception at
the palatial Imperial Institute, celebrating his efforts assisting students from India.
As the evening draws to a close, Curzon Wiley leaves
the venue and begins to walk down the elegant steps
(00:59):
of the Imperial Institute. Suddenly, a young Indian man in
gold rimmed spectacles steps forward, raises a pistol, and shoots
him twice in the face. As the old man sinks
to the floor, his assailant keeps shooting. A Parsi doctor
rushes to help. The young man turns, aims and kills
(01:22):
him too. The assassin was acting alone, but he wasn't
the only person to feel that the only way to
break the British occupation of India was with a violent uprising.
The assassin lived in a house in North London with
dozens of other young Indian men. They'd been practicing violent
(01:47):
resistance together how to fire a rifle, how to make weapons,
how to evade the police. One of those housemates, a
man called Byron, wrote a letter to the Times of
London supporting the assassin. Barron secretly visited him in prison,
then fled the country. The assassination had been senseless, no
(02:12):
matter how passionately you opposed the British Empire. Coursin Wiley
was a harmless old man. The assassin had killed him
in cold blood, and a bystander who'd only tried to
help and would a violent murder prompt the British to
rethink their role in India or to crack down. But
(02:34):
this cautionary tale isn't about the assassin or about his
sympathizer Bern. It's about someone who found a different way
to bring about revolutionary change. Barren's sister, the woman called Sorgeny.
I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to cautionary tales. She's
(03:24):
a slight woman, not even five feet tall. The long
end of her sari is pulled over her head. The
expression on her face is apprehensive. There's a long row
of marchers behind her, all wearing white. They followed Sir
Augeny Naidu to the coast to make salt, but they've
(03:47):
stopped now outside a British controlled saltwork on the northwest
coast of India. The Arabian Sea shimmers just a few
hundred yards ahead, but the marcher's path is blocked by
the barbed wire that's wrapped around the saltworks and by
sixty policemen, all holding steel tipped clubs, and soldiers too,
(04:10):
with heavy rifles pointed at the marchers. The year is
nineteen thirty, twenty one years after the assassination in South Kensington.
The great campaigner for India's independence from the British Empire,
Mahatma Gandhi, is in jail. The successor he's chosen to
(04:30):
lead India's independence movement is Sir Erogeny Nidu. Naidu and
her marchers want vast change against a hard opponent, and
they want it without violence. Sirrogeny has decisively rejected the
murderous approach that her brother Bren endorsed. India's fate, Nido
(04:54):
believes depends on a nonviolent path to resistance. She steps forward,
her marchers follow. There will be violence, to be sure,
but it won't come from them. This is the final
episode in our series. Inspired by the work of David Badanis.
(05:17):
This story comes from his forthcoming book How to Change
the World Lessons from Three People Who did. When David
first told me Nidou's story, I was fascinated. Sirrogenny. Nidou
was an unlikely revolutionary. When she was growing up in
the eighteen eighties, her family worshiped England. In her childhood
(05:40):
home in Hyderabad, volumes of Shakespeare and Wordsworth filled their shelves.
Stories of Britain's military and intellectual heroes came up frequently
in conversation. Servants might speak native languages, but with her
own brothers and sisters, Nidou said, it was considered the
height of ignorance and misfortune not to be acquainted with English.
(06:06):
She grew up believing it was fair for Indians to
be colonized. By that time, Britain had controlled India for generations.
That control was more forceful in some parts of the country,
with garrisons of troops and machine guns and artillery at hand.
In other areas, British control was wielded indirectly through local
(06:28):
princes who were ostensibly in power but who knew they
had to do what the local British representatives wanted, and
Naido thought this was a fine thing. As one Hindu
elder she looked up to explained Man for Mann the Englisher,
better than ourselves. They have a higher standard of duty,
(06:50):
higher notions of organized work and discipline. As a teenager,
Nido got a scholarship to study in Cambridge. When she
landed in Britain in eighteen ninety six, just seventeen years
old and terribly shy, she discovered but even more reasons
(07:10):
to look up to the British. There were underground tubes
for trains that cut through the very soil beneath her feet.
There were complex vehicles that propelled themselves without horses. The
future had arrived. Everything seemed incredible. She took the train
on to Cambridge, where she was going to study at
(07:32):
the Women's College Girton. After her first day, she wrote
to her boyfriend at home, effectively her fiancee, and told him,
everybody makes a pet of me, though I've been here
only a few hours. You see, I am by far
the youngest and the curiosity. She was touched when the
girls invited her for bicycle trips to the all male colleges.
(07:56):
Those bicycles were a revolutionary invention, giving women a real
sense of independence for the first time, even if senior
faculty would ride alongside as chaperone's. Even more exciting than
the bicycles was getting to meet the male students, the
best of whom might rule her country. One day, she
(08:18):
wrote to her family breathlessly about how they were so
educated and so civilized. Everything might have stayed like that,
with Nido remaining a proud subject of Queen Victoria's empire.
But it turned out that although women at Cambridge could
(08:40):
attend lectures and take exams, they weren't allowed to receive degrees.
If a woman studied biology, for example, she might be
top in the exams, but since she wouldn't get a diploma,
she could never go on to become a doctor. One
energetic young classics lecturer at Nidoo's College, a woman named
(09:02):
Catherine jex Blake, was fed up with this system. She
was a suffragette and she thought women should have the
same rights as everyone else. She lobbied successfully to have
the university vote on changing their policy. A date was
set in May. Undergraduates couldn't vote, but male faculty and
(09:26):
alumni could, and special trains were arranged to bring former
students from London to Cambridge. By early afternoon on May
the twenty first voting day, over a thousand voters had
passed through the Senate House. There was a crush of
many thousand more students pressed outside, mostly men, a few women.
(09:51):
Just as the result was to be announced, a group
of students on the roof of Keyes College across the
way mockingly let out the sound of a vigorous cock crow.
This was the signal, wrote one witness, for the commencement
of operations. Occupants of the front rooms at Keys immediately
(10:13):
began to hang out banners that mocked women. Other male
students leaned out of an upstairs window and started a
lowering a pape mache figure of a woman life size,
an effigy that'd made it with bright red hair, looking
silly in a cap and gown. Another group of students
(10:33):
at another upstairs window brought out another effigy, this time
of a woman straddling that symbol of female freedom, a bicycle.
They'd torn her dress off so she was exposed humiliatingly
in her underwear, and then painted the underwear bright blue,
so no one could miss it down below. The men
(10:57):
started jeering. When the result was announced women would not
be granted degrees, pandemonium broke loose. The bicyclist effigy figure
was lowered to the ground. Hundreds of undergraduate men struggled
forward to attack it, tearing at its exposed body. Then
they put it on top of a cow and went
(11:19):
on a journey around the town. Crowds of male students
and graduates ran alongside, blowing horns and yelling out the
rest of the men at the Senate House vote started
running through the town too. Women everywhere were groped or
pressed up against walls. Others were tugged into the mob
and flung around for fun. Seemingly every man on the
(11:42):
street was rabid wild. These were the future rulers of
Naidoo's land. Now they were humiliating every woman they could catch.
A large group of men ended up outside another women's college,
where they were shouting of senaties and throwing fireworks into
(12:03):
the girl's windows. They rammed fragments of the effigy through
the cottage gates. They stayed for hours, setting up a
bonfire in front of the building, trapping the women inside. Meanwhile,
an even bigger group of students police estimates were in
the thousands, brought other life sized female effiges to the
(12:25):
main market square in Cambridge. One was of the tutor
at Naidu's college, Katherine jex Blake, the one who'd dared
petition for the degrees. These effiges, too, were stripped and
mutilated before being burnt in another bonfire. The men kept
(12:45):
on adding fresh fuel. The flames and the jeering went
on long into the night. Cambridge's women had merely asked
to be awarded the degrees their studies and examinations deserved.
(13:09):
They hadn't even succeeded, and yet the very idea of
this sparked hour after hour of harassment, humiliation and riot.
Cautionary tales will return in just a moment. On the
(13:34):
morning of May the twenty first, Naidoo had been polite
and trusting, thinking British culture the pinnacle of civilization around
the world. But by the end of the day her
British idol had fallen. What right did men like that
have to control her people at all? Over the next
(13:59):
few days it became clear she had to leave Cambridge.
Something deeper became clear too, she couldn't be a pawn
in this empire anymore. Sir Rogereny went to London and
spent time with a number of writers, including the great
(14:19):
Irish poet Yates, who happened to be her friend's roommate.
They met at home for drinks and conversation, and she
was impressed with the way he was inspiring Irish nationalists
with the force and eloquence of his writing. Why should
Ireland be subservient to England? For that matter, why should India?
(14:44):
Naido was inspired too, and encouraged that someone of Yates's
stature would take a young Indian woman seriously. The Cambridge
riots had shown her a dark truth about the alleged
superiority of the British, but London reminded her that the
British weren't all bad. Many Britons were open to reason,
(15:09):
to the arguments for fairness. Sir Rogerie Naidoo was nineteen
years old when she returned to India and determined to
push back against British rule in Hyderabad. However, her partner
Gorvindhu expected they would quickly get married and start having children,
(15:31):
which they did soon. She was a housewife, her whole
life enclosed. She started writing poetry, but with little children
it was hard to find much time. There was a
verandah with a swing where she could look out decorated
cages with chirping songbirds inside. Everyone thinks I'm so nice
(15:57):
and cheerful, She wrote all the banal things. But I've
merely taught myself to be commonplace. Everything is slipping away.
After all she had seen in England, after all that
she recognized was still going on in India, it felt
(16:18):
terrible to be passive. Right outside Hyderabad, for example, there
was a large British military base. Just by their presence,
they made sure that industries and rail lines were arranged
to benefit investors in England, not farmers or other workers
(16:42):
in India. She had to find another way to work
toward freedom from British rule. Could politics be the answer?
When her children were older, Sir Orogini Naidu immersed herself
in the Indian National Congress, a group dominated by Bengali
(17:02):
intellectuals who politely, calmly lobbied the British government for fairer treatment.
It's there where. Despite her terrible shyness and slight stature,
Naidou discovered that speaking out in public, she felt different.
What is it that we demand, she called out from
(17:24):
one podium, Nothing new, nothing startling, but a thing that
is as old as life. You shouldn't be disinherited as
exiles in your own land. The day is over when
we were content to be slaves. Finally, it seemed she
(17:48):
had found the right way forward. During the First World War,
she pushed to get India to support the British cause,
trusting that afterwards, in reward, the subcontinent would be awarded
dominion status, that it would have more freedom from British
rule as Canada in New Zealand. Had everything seemed agreed,
(18:12):
London was on board, but at the last minute, just
after the war ended, the British Empire's most senior representative
in India, the Viceroy, undermined it all. There would be
no relaxation of the rules and no dominion status. He
(18:32):
wanted everything to go back to how it had been
before the war. In fact, there would now be harsher rules,
the rights to arrest anyone with no trial, and no
controls against torture. Indians across the continent began to protest,
but the protests were disconnected not especially organized. On the
(18:57):
thirteenth of April nineteen nineteen, a large crowd gathered in
the Jalianwala gardens in the center of the old city
of Mritzar in the Punjab region. Many were families in
town for a cattle festival. Some were meeting to discuss
the new legislation, others were just enjoying the sunny day.
(19:20):
The garden was mostly dried out and a few acres
in size. Since families were large, there were a lot
of children, perhaps fifteen thousand people total. To Major General
Reginald Dyer, the man in charge of the city, this
(19:41):
wasn't local citizenry at ease or even patriotism. It was fanaticism.
He had put up a handful of notices that meetings
weren't allowed, but he didn't know amritz so well and
didn't realize that hardly anyone had seen them. Rather, he
(20:02):
was insistent that proper order was not to be thwarted.
There was a ten foot high stone and brick wall
around most of the garden. At the one narrow entrance,
he parked armored car sideways on, blocking any exit. Then
(20:24):
he and his mostly Indian troops advanced inside, fifty of
them carrying heavy rifles. They didn't say anything, just took
up position on a slight rise. Once they were a
few yards in front of the crowd, a few of
(20:45):
the Sikhs near the front, with military training, had a
sudden ominous feeling and tried to get families near them
to begin walking out now, but this made no sense.
Hardly anyone had moved when, without warning Dyer had all
(21:07):
fifty of his men open fire, and they reloaded and
fired again and again till the thousands of shells they
had were all gone. It was the greatest massacre in
the history of British India, with probably five hundred or
(21:29):
more people dead. As one former Prime Minister Asquith called
it the worst in the history of our empire. From
its very inception. The Army justified its actions, arguing that
soldiers had been firing in self defense faced by a
(21:51):
violent mob. The response to the massacre from the authorities
in London was half hearted criticism. There was a few
weeks later that the young Indian assassin gunned down a
retired army officer and a good marat and doctor outside
a reception in South Kensington and to points like this
(22:17):
rock bottom that it's at tempting to give up. Sir
Rougerie Nidou had been working with the Indian National Congress
for over a decade and she saw clearly that lobbying
and negotiation did no good. Her brother bern had endorsed
random murderous violence. That was no good either. But then
(22:42):
what was left Nido had to find a different path,
and for that she turned to Gandhi. Naido and Gandhi
had first met in nineteen fourteen and quickly became friends.
At the time, she was already the voice of the
Indian National Congress as well as a well reviewed poet.
(23:06):
Gandhi would later become world famous. Back then, he was
a little known activist based in South Africa. Five years
on after the massacred and Ritzer, Naido and Gandhi discussed
their options. What if instead of violence or politics, you
(23:27):
directly oppose the way the authorities have arranged society, not viciously,
but so that it would make the injustice clear to everyone.
What about civil disobedience of an emphatic sort. New concepts
need new words. Setya is the Sanskrit for truth. Graha
(23:53):
means to hold firmly. The idea behind what was now
called Setyagraha is that an unjust law violates the right
order of the universe, and we need to rectify that
hold firmly to the truth, but in a manner that
doesn't create new injustices. In short, disobey but without violence,
(24:24):
a fair idea that, it turns out, is incredibly hard
to carry out in practice. In nineteen twenty one, Gandhi
and Naid targeted the visit of the Prince of Wales
to Bombay. Huge piles of imported British clothing were burned,
(24:45):
and as the Prince was welcomed into the port, he
found himself surrounded by protesters, politely but firmly demonstrating their
disapproval of British rule. What the protesters hadn't reckoned with
was the offense taken by the locals taking part in
the welcoming ceremonies. How could an honored guest be treated
(25:08):
so As those locals left, fights broke out between them
and the demonstrators, and when the police showed up, the
fights got worse. Once a mob is roused, it's hard
to stop. Soon almost anyone in Western clothes was being attacked,
(25:28):
the police counterattacked. Fighting of all sorts spread and lasted
for four days. By the end, dozens of innocent people
were dead. It was awful, the reverse of everything I
do had hoped for. The vision for Sacha Grajo was
(25:51):
in jeopardy and with Gandhi often in jail, everyone was
looking to Sir Rogereni Nidol to help them figure out
what to do next. Cautionary tales will return. A few
(26:16):
years after the debacle in Bombay, Naidu was elected head
of the Indian National Congress. She was the first Indian
woman to reach that position. Responsibility for Indian independence sat
heavily on her shoulders. There had been little progress. The
(26:38):
country was still run for the benefit of the British
at the expense of Indians. One senior British politician was
at least honest about it. I know it is said
at missionary meetings that we've conquered India to raise the
level of the Indians. That is Kant. We conquered India
(27:01):
as the outlet for the goods of Great Britain. We
conquered India by the sword, and by the sword we
should hold it. In nineteen thirty the leadership of the
Indian National Congress decided to try to reclaim one small
piece of what Indians had lost under British rule salt.
(27:27):
For centuries, salt had been free, with anyone able to
collect whatever they needed, but when Britain took over, they
also took over salt production and put a tax on it.
Seventy eight members of Gandhi's Ashram walked two hundred miles
to one of the big salt making regions on the
(27:47):
coast in April. However, when the marchers reached the sea,
the British Viceroy Irwin had a remarkable response. He did nothing.
The marchers collected their salty mud. Press cameras caught the images.
There was Naidoo in her long sard hurry, Gandhy in
(28:10):
his usual loincloth with a shawl over his shoulders. The
point of non violent resistance was to have something to resist.
Without a response from the authorities, what were they supposed
to do. Gandy collected more mud, so did most of
(28:32):
the marchers. Still, Irwin did nothing. Over the next few days,
journalists began to mock the marchers. All they saw were
Indians milling about on a beach Soon the journalists left,
and then almost everyone else left too. Irwin had made
(28:55):
the marchers look like fools. A few weeks later, he
had Gandhy arrested quickly at night, bright flashlights in the face,
armed troops to the rest of the nationalist leadership was
thrown into jail two. Nido clearly was next, and support
(29:19):
for their movement was waning. Indians had had enough of
British excuses, and now enough of the Indian National Congress
saying there was some magical sechagaha, a third way to
get the freedom they wanted. Some people were calling for
more violence. Nidu was convinced that would only lead to
(29:42):
more repression. She realized that she didn't have long to act.
She sent out messages to people she trusted, trying to
get journalists interested in a new protest, and then hurried
back to the coast to a hamlet called d Rasana. There,
Britain had built a large salt works where salt was
(30:04):
collected from large lagoons, then purified and stacked in high
pyramid The mudflats were surrounded by barbed wire and deep
moat like ditches. By the time Nido got there, danger
was in the air. Some nearby protesters were being led
(30:24):
by Gandhi's son Manulal, who was excitable and prone to violence.
The salt works were guarded by police with their vicious
clubs and troops with rifles. They were itching for an
excuse to use them. Naidoo spent long days going from
one small group of protesters to another, explaining their purpose.
(30:49):
They weren't just there to get salt. They were there
to expose the unfairness of taxes paid by Indians to
keep Britons in luxury. If there was violence, that violence
is all the world would see. Each marcher's self control
was indispensable. If even a few acted out, it would
(31:11):
be like Amritza. It would become fair for the soldiers
to shoot back. Naid warned the marchers that the police
would be violent. You will be beaten, she said, but
you must not resist. You must not even raise a hand.
(31:32):
Briton's would be watching. The world would be watching. All
the forces of the universe were watching this isolated hamlet
and beach. It might seem to be just a speck
on the Gujarak coast, but if they could remain nonviolent,
(31:52):
they could make it the most important place on earth.
If anyone wished to step back now, they should feel
no shame. But for the others, they had to show
the world what British rule really mean. On Wednesday, made
the twenty first, they went ahead. Naidu was at the front.
(32:18):
Gandhi's son Manuelal wasn't far behind. It was terrifying as
they got close, and Naidu started a group chant Bin
kilab Zindabad, Long Live the Revolution, the Peaceful Revolution. Before
(32:39):
Nidou's marchers could reach the barbed wire, scores of Indian
police rushed forward, wielding clubs. They rained down on some protesters'
heads with sickening crunches, cracking skulls. Men fell bleeding, but
the next row of marchers calmly continued, accepting the same beating.
(33:03):
When they refused to fight back, the police became enraged.
They kept beating people, stamping on them, leaving dozens and
then hundreds writhing on the ground. It only came to
an end at noon, when Naidu herself was arrested. Three
hundred and twenty marchers had been seriously wounded, many were
(33:28):
still unconscious. The British government announced a few days later
that nothing had happened that there had been some slight
confusion at Durrasana that day, but no shots were fired
and at most four people were wounded. Viceroy Irwin wrote
(33:53):
to the King, how amusing it was, and all was peaceful, easy,
just and there Perhaps the story might have ended, except
that Naidou's attempts to draw journalists to Durasna had succeeded.
(34:17):
One man, an American from the Midwest, had made it
along just one, but he worked for United Press, an
American wire service that sent articles to over one thousand
newspapers worldwide. He had seen everything, and his reports were
(34:39):
read by tens of millions around the globe. The heart
went out of the British establishment. A few die hards
said how preposterous it was that Indians thought nonviolence could
make any real change. Didn't they realize it would never
work in Mussolini's Italy or Stalin's Soviet Union. But that
(35:04):
was the point. Most Britons were proud. Their nation was
nothing like those dictatorships. That was what NI do was
brilliantly banking on that if violence was the only way
to keep India submitting to British rule, then the British
didn't want it, and it worked. More and more Britons
(35:30):
questioned what their government was doing in India, and a
few years later, after the Second World War, Prime Minister
Clement Atli's post war government granted India its independence. That
alone would be a staggering achievement three hundred and fifty
million people finally free from colonial rule. But similar freedom
(35:52):
campaigns spread around the world, to Martin Luther King and
the civil rights movement in America, to Nelson Mandela and
the end of Apartheith in South Africa, to women's rights
and disability rights, and much else. Sir Rogenny Nidu and
Gandhi found their third way and then they shared it.
(36:18):
This powerful gentler path to transform nations that finishes our
series of four episodes inspired by a friend, David Bidanas's
(36:41):
book The Art of Fairness. The story of Sir Rogenny
Naidu is told in his forthcoming volume How to Change
the World Now. All of the stories have been grappling
with the question we dealt with right at the start.
With the American baseball manager Leo du Rocha. He was
famous for saying, nice guys finish last well, David was
(37:03):
watching Derochia at his prime as a manager. David is
back in the studio with me now, David, nice guys
finished last. What do we think about whether that statement
holds up.
Speaker 2 (37:14):
There was a real lot of what Durocher was saying
that was true through most of that summer when I
was there watching them. He succeeded. Nice guys do finish
last almost all the time. If you're only nice, if
you're only polite, you're like a doormat. You get walked
all over all the time.
Speaker 1 (37:33):
And so need to be a bit tougher. But that
doesn't mean going to the other extreme.
Speaker 2 (37:38):
Well, see, that's the whole thing. Remember and I Do's brother,
as you were talking about, in the assassination in London
in nineteen oh nine, the one that he supported, he
went to an extreme. It's kind of a logical opposite. Oh,
being nice and polite hasn't gotten us anywhere for freedom
from England.
Speaker 1 (37:54):
So we're going to shoot an old guy in the
face and that'll work.
Speaker 2 (37:56):
Exactly. They're going way too far. The Indian National Congress
used to begin their meetings in the eighteen nineties and
nineteen hundred by singing God Save the Queen. They actually
did because they thought if they were really, really, really polite,
the nice people in Britain would forget the fact that
they look differently and would be nice to them. This
is a case where DeRosier is sort of right purely
being nice. The British established in want to keep on
(38:18):
going indefinitely. But the temptation to go to the opposite extreme,
that's what we have to fight. The Russian Revolution was
about as violent a revolution as you can get. The
result was Lenin and Stalin. People get into that mood.
It's easy to overshoot.
Speaker 1 (38:32):
Right, so you need to find a middle way, and
that is really what these tales have been exploring. So
Durochia lost to a baseball banager who knew how to
keep control, but he wasn't a bully. And the Empire
State Building went up faster than any other skyscraper of
its time, with its builders keeping that ethos firm but fair,
they trust, but verify, they checked. And I like that.
Speaker 2 (38:55):
But there's a problem.
Speaker 1 (38:57):
There's always a problem. What is the problem.
Speaker 2 (38:59):
The problem, Well, the thing is, the idea is a
great one. I've loved writing these books that show this
firm but fair in action. Your books show good ways
of acting also. But the thing is your books also
show the great ingenuity people need to make these principles work.
We have these ideas, we know what we're supposed to do,
turning it into action as hard you saw it in these.
Speaker 1 (39:21):
Four episodes absolutely. I mean the struggle, for example, that
Naidu and Gandhi had when they organized this protest of
the Prince of Wales the future king coming to India,
and it just got out of control. So it's easy
to say, oh, you know, we're going to protest in
a non violent way, but actually those protests became incredibly violent.
Or One of the stories that really explored this so
(39:44):
elegantly was William Bligh, the captain who suffered the mutiny
on the Bounty, and I found it so interesting that
the challenge that he faced was that his approach worked
in some contexts, but the context kept changing and he
couldn't adapt to the context.
Speaker 2 (40:00):
He couldn't adapt. That's what happens. You vowed, okay, I'm
going to be calm. I'm okay, I'm going to be calm,
and then your kids are crying at nine pm and
you really want them to go to bed and come
less calm. We know what we should do, but actually
carrying it out as hard. So in a sense, when
we do books of instructions, we need meta instructions. Also,
here's the instructions, here's the principles. Now here's how to
(40:21):
apply it when times are rough.
Speaker 1 (40:23):
And that links into a couple of things. We hear
a lot in cautionary tales. So one of the things
that people really need is this alertness to what is
going on around them and this responsiveness to feedback. So
rather than just setting their course and following the course
that they planned all along, it's never going to be
right first time. They've got to have that opportunity to
spot that something's going wrong. And a lot of the
(40:46):
disasters that happen in cautionary tales are ultimately because of
broken feedback loops. Something's going wrong and the people with
the ability to make change don't get told or they're
not listening. And then the other thing is just preparing
yourself for something going wrong mentally rehearsing that. I mean,
that's something that Paul Starrett, for example, who was the
(41:07):
project manager on the Empire State Building, he did a
great job of thinking through all the things that could
go wrong and working out how I was going to
deal with them. Whereas William Bly he never quite seemed
to be able to think that through well, to think ahead,
even when stuff had gone wrong and then it had
started going right again, he wasn't able to go, Okay,
you know I had a near miss. How am I
(41:29):
going to make sure the things don't fall apart next time?
Speaker 2 (41:31):
I think that's probably our best practical solution. Practice it
and imagine it going wrong. My mother used to say, David,
if you want to get to know somebody, well, go
on a trip, but have something go wrong. Then you'll
see how people respond. It's sort of like theatrically acting
out the different ways things can go wrong. If the
military says do this and everything will act perfectly, you
(41:54):
forget the enemy has a vote, the environment has a vote,
chance has a vote. But if we practice it a
little bit, say okay, what'll I do when I'm a
bit stressed here? What will I do when I'm a
bit tired, Then when it actually comes into action, you
at least have a better chance.
Speaker 1 (42:08):
David, the amazing stories of amazing insights, Thank you so
much for bringing them to us. With pleasure David Bandanas's
forthcoming book, including the life story of Sir Rogeny and
iid is How to Change the World Lessons from Three
People Who Did It is scheduled to come out in
twenty twenty five, and of course you can reserve a
copy in advance. Just check out our website if you
(42:31):
can't wait. David's many other books, including the Art of Fairness,
while they're available wherever books are solved. Cautionary Tales is
written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright. This mini
series is based on David Bandanas's book The Art of Fairness,
(42:51):
The Power of Decency in a World Turned Mean, and
it was written with David Bandanas himself. For a full
list of our sources, see the show notes at Timharford
dot com. The show is produced by Alice Fines, with
Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music the work
of Pascal Wise. Sarah Nix edited the script. Cautionary Tales
(43:15):
features the voice talents of Ben Crowe, Melanie Gustridge, Stella Harford,
Gemma Saunders, and Rufus Wright. The show wouldn't have been
possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilly, Gretta Cohen,
Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey and Owen Miller.
Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded
(43:39):
at ward Or Studios in London by Tom Berry. If
you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review.
It doesn't really make a difference to us and if
you want to hear the show ad free, sign up
to Pushkin Plus on the show page on Apple Podcasts
or at pushkin dot Fm, slash plus
Host
Tim Harford
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.