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 feedback loops 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 and long-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 Lee 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.