Indian Debating League MasterClass with Harish Natarajan

0:00 so lovely so harish uh frankly for you uh it's i mean no introduction can be brief but i'm going to attempt a brief introduction uh you frankly don't need an introduction but you are pretty much the first human that beat ibm's ai debater making sure you're standing for humanity in 2019 it resulted in a lovely movie documentary and a new york bestseller you know yourself having been a world champion and having excelled at 30 plus

0:30 more international debates you are also a coach and an envious coach because this week or rather i would say this month harish was also coaching the national team of hong kong that landed up as finalists in the world's school debating championships so harish congratulations on that but also another side to harish is that professionally he's the head of economic analysis at achy international which is based out of london so if you have any parents and kids

1:00 still wondering what argumentative paths or debating parts lead to as a career there's your answer for it uh with that harish i'm happy to hand over the session to you uh to hear your journey from having become a world-class debater to now a world-class coach so over to your rich thank you so much

1:42 you're able to unmuted harish so to the audience we'd like to see more faces it'll be lovely to see you all harish are you able to unmute the mind no yes now i can great

2:13 perfect so much okay well thank you everyone it's a pleasure to be here i hope you've had a good independence day thus far i mean i guess it's been a challenging year for almost everyone uh but hopefully it only gets better from here but that might be a bit optimistic but let's remain optimistic uh so what i just want to talk briefly about is just to start with a bit of what i think you can do with debating just to pick up

2:41 from the last point which i'm julie was making where i think it actually intersects with the real world and i'll talk a little bit about how i approach coaching debating and what i think that can teach you is people who are either interested coaching debating or interested in picking up and improving your debating skills yourself but one thing which i think is often a misconception is that people look at debating often as a statistic as a

3:08 academic exercise or competitive exercise where what you are doing is learning skills which are useful in the small subset of areas to try and convince someone of the value of your argument and that's certainly part of what the value of debating is but only at the very surface because when you look at it and when you spend months get alone years doing debating and one thing which i do believe is everyone should try it for at least six

3:36 months to a year if you love it it's worth doing more of it but the core skills are things which can last a lifetime in a whole range of different areas and just to go through a handful of them which i find myself to be very useful the first one is your ability to logically construct an argument and in and to make that easily understandable to almost any audience because one of the keys of debating at

4:05 least as you do more and more of it is you'll end up with a topic with a short amount of time to prepare depending on the format that can be as little as two minutes more often 15 or an hour but a consequence of that is you don't have a huge amount of time to research all the aspects of the topic not able to read about what everyone else writes or says about it and that may in some ways be a drawback

4:29 because certainly it doesn't at that stage involve in-depth research but the positive of it is it helps us start to realize we can construct logical arguments from what we already know that convincing an audience isn't simply about making a statement and drawing upon a study it's instead asking yourself well if there's evidence for something there must be a logical chain of reasons why it is true something cannot be true in the real world without it logically

5:00 having a set of factors which makes it true and i think at its best debating is partially about knowing what the facts are but partially going well why exactly is that true we know something is true but let's try and construct it from this principle step by step and i think so the first huge values of debating it allows us to be to look at facts and ask ourselves why is that true what's the chain of logic

5:28 which is underlying it and that's valuable in almost everything which we do and part of it is almost irrespective what feel people go into you'll find scientific and empirical evidence but part of the question there is when you compare two studies which give you the opposite results well how exactly do you respond to that well part of it is look at the methodology of course but part of it is asking logically how do you get to these

5:55 conclusions and debating forces us to try and create these logical links carefully and that i think is very powerful for everyone and augments the kinds of fact based studying that many of us do a lot of that's one of the first values but the second is how you communicate that to other individuals and i think you could be the best doctor in the world in terms of seeing a patient knowing exactly what is wrong very quickly or having a good idea

6:27 but that's only part of the skill the other part of the skill is can you communicate that to people who are not specialists in that field are you able to present your knowledge in a way that is useful for other people and their ability to understand it and oddly i think in most of most of what we study doesn't really give us that skill it partially does when you're writing an essay you're at least partially trying

6:56 to communicate but you're still trying to communicate often with a teacher as someone who knows the subject back to front well that's a different challenge than communicating with someone who is intelligent curious but doesn't have a specialist understanding of a topic and i find this to be one of the more useful things when i meet clients in that they can ask me a question um and the reason they ask me a question is i'll have in-depth knowledge which

7:22 they won't have and it's not just about giving them all that knowledge but presenting it in a way where they understand what i'm saying what the important parts are and structured in a way which makes it very easy for them to follow i think that becomes the second skill involved in debating the third one which i want to focus a tiny bit on is independent research having said that debating is often about logic it's really useful at the same time to

7:51 build your corpus of knowledge that's partially about knowing what is happening in current affairs but it's partly about understanding other things as well how does an education system work how does that differ from country to country how does health care differ from country to country and i think debating makes us a little bit more curious about these things and you mainly approach it to begin with from a competitive aspect which is i want to do better in that debate about a

8:20 women's rights so i'll start reading what the theory is about feminism but that's great um it may not be something which you would have ever found that interesting independently but you may only accumulate some of that knowledge because you want to do well in a competitive debate but that is so powerful for the rest of our lives and that works in so many ways over the years the number of things i read which i didn't originally think i would find

8:47 interesting has broadened my understanding extensively on a whole range of topics many of which i don't spend a huge amount of time on now but it certainly has made me more aware of different ways people think different problems groups face different solutions based on the countries based on different kinds of countries it is useful because you start understanding that all of our world views is in some degree myopic that we focus on our own country naturally

9:17 because that's our experiences well here are the ways things could be different either different kinds of problems individuals face and i find that to be another very powerful aspect of what you can get out of debating and all of those are useful in a competitive setting of course but i think actually have huge value into the rest of our lives for the years and years to come and even if you never do a year of debating that could be very powerful in

9:46 just shaping how we present ourselves how we construct arguments and how much we actually know and our willingness to be open to other kinds of positions and i start with all of that because i think it's also very useful when it comes to what kind of insights people get when you start coaching debating and what i look like what i look at from potentially a young debater to say what you need to improve if you have if you actually want to

10:16 become very good at this activity and i had an interest experience of the last year with hong kong so hong kong is has some huge advantages as a potential debating circuit you have it is a rich well what's a word here state a mini state a territory of china what whatever formal set of words would you use there um with people with strong english speaking abilities and a very good school system

10:46 but one thing which it lacks and still lacks is a very deep schools debating culture but to me in a sense that isn't a huge problem because there's three things which i think you look for when you're trying to select a group of students the first one of these is do they have a passion for it which is are you willing to work hard and are you willing to put the effort in and it's different at different levels

11:14 if you're just looking at debate and get some of the core skills out of it it probably isn't something you need to spend uh five hours a week on if you want to represent your nation or your city it certainly then does become something which just like we would train for any sport does involve a reasonable degree of commitment but one of the advantages there is is if you are willing to work hard it's something which almost anyone can pick

11:41 up which is at least from my perspective i could have spent 20 hours a day trying to play football i would have still been terrible at it but debating actually is something which most people will be able to do if you're willing to put the effort in if you're willing to go okay let's let's think about what i don't know let's look at the speech i just gave how would i make it better the next time

12:07 and there's two ways in which you can approach that both of which i think are very valuable the first one is looking at it from the perspective of a judge or a coach someone who externally use your speech and says here are certain things which you could improve and that could probably go along three potential explanations it could be your content is great but it's not being presented clearly enough that a general member of the public or even a

12:39 um well-informed unbiased individual would be able to pick up everything you're saying or even the majority of what you're saying which is in a sense just one of this would be a style critique which is how to present your material in a way which is highly compelling to an audience one of the most valuable skills we have it's never entirely just about what we are saying but it is that we are saying so in a way

13:05 that someone else can understand so the first kind of critique which someone else could give you the second part of that would be a content critique which is here are your arguments well let's take each of these arguments and what we're asking is have you been able to show that this is important in the debate and that and this is true in the debate and every single argument anyone will make in any walk of life is basically

13:37 going to be the same it's going to be for these reasons this statement is true and this statement is important in proving that on balance this side of the debate of the argument is correct and the third piece of critique is sure you made the arguments you selected you made pretty well you explain them well but what are you missing what else could you potentially have said how could you responded better maybe to

14:10 the arguments another team made and one thing which i've learned over the years is you can get a speech you're incredibly happy with which you think is one of the best better speeches you've given that doesn't mean that you can't do it better i think it's always just striving and asking yourself which is you could be satisfied with what you've done but if you really want to excel the question is no matter how well you've done

14:36 no matter whether you won that debate or lost it what would you do differently the next time or what questions would you now ask yourself and now you have however many days to think about that to do it better and i think when you're coaching you're asking these questions and trying to answer these questions how do you present your arguments better of the arguments you made how do you make them more compelling or what gaps are there in the arguments

15:03 you made and what else could you have said and if you and if you look at it that way in a sense it's not that difficult to improve because you're asking the same questions constantly and you keep seeing yourself improving over time but that's from a coaching perspective and while that could be very valuable coaches are always or judges are always going to be very limited in the amount of time that they're going to be able to

15:29 spend with you and they can push you on the right part but for most of you and most people in general sometimes the most important thing is to be self-critical to ask yourself those questions it can be great if you've recorded a debate beforehand one which you spoke and then you could see yourself and go actually was that as clear as it could be how else could i have said it what other arguments could i've made but i

15:54 find these two processes work very well together that what you can do from a coaching perspective is go okay i've seen you in four debates this this and this are what you need to work on but you're going to see yourself in however many more than i ever will and now i'm giving you an idea of what you need to work on well look at your own speeches how would you improve them in future and i think this is probably a more

16:22 general lesson about how you improve in anything and it's partly there's going to be other individuals telling you here are things which you could do better and as long as i think we have the same project we both want to make you better as a speaker a better thinker more knowledgeable about the world i think that could work quite well but it is always also about you looking at yourself and going what would i have done differently and how would i

16:50 have done it differently in the future and that is going to be true irrespective of how good you were in individual debate one final point to make on that often i think we we struggle with the idea of recording ourselves and watching ourselves speak and i think this is even when you don't feel self-conscious when you just talk on a camera often watching yourself afterwards does make everyone feel self-conscious because then you really do start picking

17:20 up on the things which you did wrong but one thing which is really powerful to me is if you were any of you were to give a speech right now and then six months from now re-watch it you would almost certainly cringe at what you did you got like oh how did i give a speech like that were all the errors i made but actually what that's telling you is how much you've improved you know the

17:43 space of those six months and that's one of the great things to me about many walks of life i think debating actually helps a great deal in it which is it's not just the skills the competitive aspect i find to be very valuable here because it gives us constant metrics now these metrics are imperfect like maybe you win one debate maybe you don't but certainly over a period of time it says am i improving um am i doing better as a speaker than i

18:10 was before is my team doing better than it was before how am i making better arguments than i have before some of that is going to be external metrics it's how well do you do in small competitions large competitions etc some which is going to be you looking at your speech now and looking at a speech which you gave in six months and you'll be able to spot very quickly the progress which you have made i think the competitive aspect really

18:36 helps because i think we often struggle a little bit with this which is you know you you can sometimes tell you become slightly better at things but on a week-to-week basis often that change is very small that i become a tiny bit better from one week to the next but really i can't perceive it over three months it probably becomes noticeable but i can't remember how i was and what i was speaking like three months ago or

19:03 how good i was three months ago yet alone six months ago and that's why you often think that recording yourself and using these external metrics can help us get perspective which is don't you will get better every few debates you do not necessarily one debate to another but every few weeks you won't necessarily notice that you get better indeed often better you get higher your standards become and you may not even think and you may not even

19:30 think you're improving at all but one of the things which is very notable is you are and there's some things which happened to me working coaching hong kong which is as a result of a partial lack of experience in the circuit two of the people on the final team had about had had less than a year's experience so they would have attended that first tournament about almost exactly a year ago from now and one of the most incredible things is

19:59 actually watching them progress and you note fairly early in the process we try to select a team which you think has potential and these kids are working really hard they're picking things up very hard very well and then you look at them at a tournament they would have spoken at in january then one in march so only less than six months ago and then looking at what they were doing two weeks ago and it becomes so

20:26 incredible to watch but in fact if you ask them how much have you improved they would have probably have a space of nine months being able to say we've approved quite a lot but ask them from january to march if they've improved they're like uh maybe a tiny bit but then watch the videos and watch results i think it's one of the most useful things the competitive process that you're pushed to do that that you see the external

20:50 metrics and then you start realizing how much you are improving even though you haven't been able to notice it yourself and those are a couple things which i picked up about coaching now for all of you and people who want to do a lot of debating i think there's a couple of things which you can do when it comes to just trying to improve yourself i mean obviously some level of coaching some of the competition is very valuable

21:18 but here i guess would be three other things beyond what i've already said which i think will be useful the first one of these is read widely but don't think of yourself as reading because you want to be good at debating because in the end debating is talking about almost anything which could happen in the world sometimes theoretical sometimes real but if all you're doing is going to read for debating which maybe sometimes you will do but

21:49 it's often just really should find something interesting when you get a topic you don't know a huge amount about it's not that you want to it's not just that you want to think next time you walk into the room you know more about it it's well what don't i know and then you read a bit about it find see what you find more interesting and keep reading and very quickly you'll realize you went from knowing little bits or even a lot about

22:12 a few things to knowing a reasonable amount about many many things and i think helps is a huge a great deal not just when it comes to a debate but what comes to all aspects of our lives the idea that we have the time for better words probably now more time than we've ever had before at home um without all the distractions we otherwise normally would it's a great time just ask yourself what am i interested in let's read about it

22:38 sometimes what am i a little bit less interested in let's read a bit about it and if you then find it interesting continuing down that road so that's the first one i think it's just a great opportunity to do some general reading and making yourself more knowledgeable as a result the second is just to do more debating but do it actively not passively what i mean by that it's not simply the idea of going to a tournament giving three to

23:09 five speeches however many you'll give depending on the format of the tournament and then thinking okay i've done that i gained experience fair enough you probably have gained some experience but it's so much more if after each of those debates you ask yourself what did i learn what would i do differently and how can i make myself better the next time which is i think the big difference between a passive way of doing things which is you're just going

23:36 to do them and hope you absorb knowledge that that happens but if it's instead you do them hope you will absorb knowledge and ask yourself well what could i have done better i think that makes a huge difference because they're much more targeted and often you'll find lots of young debaters or debaters of all ages who improve a little bit and keep improving a little bit this is other individuals who prove really rapidly and a large part of that is the way in

24:06 which you're trying to improve are you looking actively at ways of improving are you looking passively at ways of improving and the assistance of judges of coaches definitely helps along that process but it isn't all of the process and leaves a large part of that is you asking yourself how i would become better and the third and final part of this is to realize that lots of these skills are debated are things which you could be using in

24:36 other parts of your everyday life and sometimes just about noticing that that if you're having a conversation with friends you're arguing what film do you prefer what music do you prefer who's the best sportsman of all time actually what you're doing there is engaging in an argumentative discussion not a formal debate but often the same kinds of skills and you start picking things up about what people say how they are saying it and they're not often presumably you're

25:08 not only talking to debaters they're not thinking of debating mentality they're just thinking here are some ideas i have here are ways i'm going to present it but as you look around all the conversations you have you'll start seeing more and more of that that different people will do slightly different things but you can pick up a lot from the arguments other individuals will be making in different contexts now the flip side of that is sometimes

25:35 you'll realize very quickly they are making bad arguments and they are making arguments badly particularly if you ever turned on the tv news you'll get a lot of that but you'll also see bits where they're using very powerful rhetorical devices where they're using very useful expressions of words and what i find useful is once you start noting that sure you'll take some of it into your own debating that's definitely useful the other part of it just as general citizens in fact

26:04 is that we start taking bits of it and we become much more critical about what we hear around us we become we think about well why are they saying what they're saying is there an argument behind what they are saying or are they simply making a statement with no justification to it to support their personal or political preferences but i think you get to see all of that which is look at the debates in the

26:34 world around you look at what's effective and sometimes look at what you think is ineffective and all of that can help us a huge amount um in everyday life but also in terms of making us much stronger and better as debaters um i've already talked about 20 minutes so i think i'm going to stop a monologue at this point um and turn it over to to all of you thank you harish i think um the most satisfying part for me

27:03 personally was to hear that some of the debaters and the hong kong national team had been debating just for a year so imagine how much more you can achieve if you just put in the passion the hard work and the intent i think that's a that's a great message for the audience so thank you so much for that uh and while you were speaking harish we've had so many uh you know arguments flooded in uh so what i'm gonna do which is what

27:30 we're committed to the group that we are gonna make it into an interesting action based session so i'm going to hand it over to kamal and you uh where he can sort of take you through a few arguments that have been posted by students parents across the hello ugly uh channel and on the chat box but before i go there i do want to reiterate for the audience that this is a master class for the indian debating

27:55 league which we think is the pyramid and the epitome of debating circuits in india the fact is that in this august month of independence day celebrations we are making sure that we invite students to come in and participate representing their home state and union charity team 36 teams are being formed across 28 states and eight union territories uh between the grades of fourth to twelfth so you will have three categories of four to six seven to nine ten to twelve

28:27 where you will be debating on the first theme of the indian debating league which is the sustainable human development news so harish thank you so much for being a panelist on that it was going to be an exciting session where you will be joined in by essene panels of brian and sharmila coming in but i do want to make sure that the students after the session sort of sign up for it where they keep continuing and improving their debating

28:50 journey so come on with that i will hand it over to you if you could just pick out a few arguments where harish could personally give live feedback on the way the arguments have been structured [Music] i think there's a little bit of a connectivity issue we can't hear you at all uh is it okay if i take it back we i think there's a little bit of a jarringness that is coming in

29:21 um so we could pick up a few arguments that i can see on the chat harish we've got an argument by josh mehta you are able to see that i will pick out a few that were personally dm to me so uh josh if you're there on the call you can read it out or i'm happy to just re-paste it down again for harish's reference um and uh read this out as well sorry i'm just repasting it on the group

29:52 so that everybody else sees this as well this is by george um you were able to see it harish yes i can see it yes so josh if you would like to say it it's good otherwise we just quickly articulated for the audience okay so now this house believes that india is the best destination for investment is what josh believes he's pro for it uh he

30:23 believes that it's a large country with popular larger population but most importantly it has the largest potential to be the best destination because it's a powerhouse of information technology and engineering sector vast amounts of lower middle class and new class will be getting jobs and working hard as well as considerable amount of upper middle class and welding who are willing to invest in new companies and startups the average cost of living and investing in a business in india significantly

30:49 cheaper than any other asian country to sum it up asia india is a financial powerhouse and a superpower waiting to be woken up so that's the first one that we can sort of pick up today yeah so i find i find this to be a very well made argument i i think lots of the points you raise are very reasonable that india certainly is both large but certainly has a very large population which is very useful when it comes to

31:17 pushing forward growth when you know the the upper middle class and the wealthy as potential sources of growth one thing which i would say um is there's always this trade-off when it comes to how you make an argument which is how much detail can you have in each of your points versus how many different claims you are going to be making i think what we get here is a very good encapsulation of what the core arguments

31:47 are for why india could be the best destination for investment indeed i think this is almost all of the core arguments as to why india would be the best destination for investment what is potentially worth thinking about is in how many words we were given here which was just over 100 i think um it sometimes can be more effective to go let's pick one of these arguments and let's just look and talk about it in more detail which is let's say it is

32:16 india is it has a huge population well it's not trivial as to how important that is the economic growth and as an investment destination to step back and just look at it logically uh india has simply had one of the world's largest populations for at least the last 75 years um but arguably india was not a great destination for an investment until the 1980s almost in the 1990s and simply not

32:48 the powerhouse it is today so it's sometimes worth just picking one of these arguments explaining them in a lot more detail as to why this really matters and why this is the factor which is most important i think that could often strengthen the argument and this is something where we often do have to make the trade-off between how many arguments we make and the detail of each but sometimes less is more sometimes going for a couple of

33:17 arguments fully explained will have more impact than making seven or eight arguments with only partial explanations of them and i think there's an interesting discussion but i think there are different approaches to it both of which can be very valuable depending on the context yeah this is very interesting and what i'm going to do is i'm going to pick up a corn argument

33:49 a completely different side of the coin over here and i can see so many arguments are coming in so please excuse me because i'm just picking up the ones that are catching my eye over here and we'll make sure that you have an opportunity to put yours across so here is one that i pick up from deep mana who's an 11 uh in summer study called and she shares her views against the argument that india is termed as the best destination

34:17 because of law wages less taxes and more terms but if we talk about the indian economy the fdi leads to long-term growth of the economy it is alive allowing the foreign investors to compress the domestic producers from the market and become only owners and if we talk about atman urban bharat its aim is to make india and its citizens independent self-reliant if the foreign investors keep investing in india do you think india is going to become self-dependent on the future if

34:47 we cut up continue to use foreign funds instead of adopting indian products do you think india can even be self-reliant our only aim is to make the country independent and combating the competition in the global market and that's how she's putting her argument against the motion that india might not be the best destination for investment which i have just pasted for your oh okay so allowing me to please give me a second i'm just gonna pick it up and

35:15 paste it also so that you can see it otherwise i'm sure the audience heard it okay wait i'm not able to paste it just give me one second i'm just seeing if i can um taste it again you able to paste it on the group again

35:47 were you able to hear it or yeah so i think they got most of that argument um okay so um i think actually this is really interesting um and it's curious in two ways which is in a sense that what you're claiming it's not even that india isn't the best destination for foreign investment but whether it would be good for india to get a large amount of foreign investment given the potential consequences that could have in terms of india not being

36:19 self-reliant i think this was really interesting challenges which is in some ways quite radical but also quite involved radical the fact that it breaks away from what i think we think of the dominant economic consensus of foreign investment being good and necessary to drive growth on the one hand and then potentially an emerging if slightly less pronounced issue which is there are serious drawbacks with foreign direct investment and what i think you

36:50 highlight there is that the potential of those drawbacks one thing i would just note on argumentative levels um i think that you're you very much know you're engaging in this large debate about how important how good is foreign investment for a country and i think you provide some of the challenges to it what i think you need to step back and ask yourself a bit about is what you're trying to do is prove on balance is it good or is it bad

37:18 which doesn't mean that there aren't any arguments for foreign investment i think almost everyone maybe even the most committed um ortarkic marxists would probably say that there are arguments for foreign investment the question is do the arguments for are the arguments for it more important than the arguments against it and while i think you highlight some of the arguments against foreign investment for this to be a complete and very powerful argument you want to look at a

37:49 little bit more comparatively which is just sometimes given on that there are positives of foreign investment but there are certainly big risks as well and how are those risks larger than potential benefits yes for this reason and this reason which sometimes just about elevating the importance of the challenges you make so i think it's a very good argument i think to be a complete argument you want to give a bit more of a nod to the

38:17 other side because i think your argument could defeat some of the better arguments for foreign investment but as stated it just seems to give one side rather than providing a let's think about both sides and i fall on the con side yeah and i'm just wondering whether now you are able to see i think deep mala posted the argument for us as well if you can see that she's also put that across for us

38:48 and i'm just posting another one that is against for the motion which is by ananya raj and while you all get a chance to read it she puts her arguments across in terms of saying india is a country with different land forms which makes it uh meet the necessary requirements for almost all types of investments for example the mountain regions help us store house many resources statues loaded with many minerals second one being we are the fastest

39:17 growing economy special packages by the government and she names a few also with statistics of 65 of the rural people which majorly face unemployment investors could easily find employees for an average salary the fourth reason being india has the largest youth population it will continue to be even more in the coming years and it's for the largest group of scientists and investors who can easily find a good amount of skill technicians here so that's by ananya for your view

39:50 yeah so i think i think there's again a lot here um and so i think what's quite interesting here is that you have four arguments but i think at least you have five in this act uh with the hidden one being that india is also one of the world's fastest growing economies which is certainly an independent reason for it to be an attractive future for a destination for for destination foreign investment what i guess it would say is

40:19 i think all of these arguments have a lot of power but maybe there are two things i would think about a little bit more just how you make this even stronger but this is what i said before which is when you're making four arguments one of the consequences is that you're not necessarily fully explaining the importance of any single one of them though i think here you have probably a sentence of explanation which certainly does help so

40:49 um uh 65.07 of the population of zero that very precise statistic there and the majority of whom face unemployment which makes it very easy for investors to find employees for an average salary that certainly has a great amount of truth to it but i guess there's a couple questions i would ask i really want to push that which is sure you have a very large rural population and therefore potentially along with your fifth argument potentially a very

41:20 large workforce but that's a little bit more theoretical than it is practical if i'm to set up a company um on the outskirts of mumbai or in chennai um or in bangalore how useful is it to me that 65.07 of the rural population is said that that amount of the population is rural unless we believe that the largely be migrated so i think in a sense the argument's very much there because

41:51 what you're saying is india's a very large population many people are unemployed they aren't necessarily getting great wages now and that's potentially a very strong market a very strong labor market added to i guess argument four which speaks a little bit of a different direction often a very well educated labor market but if you're a foreign investor you're not looking at the entire size of the labor market make sure i'm not going to be able to employ

42:20 a rural worker in assam if i'm a company in chennai so i think it's often just thinking a tiny bit beyond that which doesn't look beyond the headline figures because i think the strongest argument and what you're claiming here is actually great about it is with a rural population what we're seeing in india admittedly across the developing world is large amounts of rural to urban migration where you have a very sometimes young but often very motivated

42:49 workforce which is growing year by year at urban centers so it's not about the total population rural areas but from the stronger claim is the speed of migration from rural areas to urban areas and that is what really gives sustenance potentially to foreign investors just to look at one of those arguments and how i think if you look at in more detail there's much more to potentially say and how valuable that potentially is for the future of india

43:22 yeah and uh you know harish it's uh it's amazing how many more entries are coming in but because we've taken a few arguments which we can make out the you know students who are of a higher grade i'm gonna unmute or just say if you're okay with we can see you uh for you to tell us about your argument so i'm asking you to unmute good evening ma'am good evening sir i'm from mayo college's marin i am not very experienced with uh

43:53 debating as of now because i am only in the eighth grade and since uh the end of grade six we've been at home so we haven't been given uh many opportunities from the school to represent ourselves or represent our school so um the argument i wanted to present to you was uh regarding the like i'm speaking against the motion of the house which states that india is the best destination for foreign investment

44:23 i oppose the motion of the house because the gdp the stock market foreign investments uh every single thing from the lowest share to the highest share is going down that a that is because of the corona virus that's struck from the past year and that's wreaked havoc all across the world but uh i had also given an example like if you take tata motors for example when

44:54 there is a festive season where people are looking to buy new uh vehicles to buy new appliances i'd say so they reduce their prices so that more people buy but eventually what happens they the the indians and like a few of them are very stingy not all of them are like they're looking to spend a lot that's known all over the world about indians the not the i'm don't want to raise controversies over this but uh like

45:26 the the companies do reduce their prices and then hike them again once the festive seasons are over because they know that people aren't going to buy cars anymore the prices have dropped off like from a box of paper to big uh machines which are being sold so i was uh i am not very uh tech savvy with the stock market at the moment even though my maternal uncle is uh is an investor so he keeps

45:58 talking to me regarding that um so i did not know the exact name of the highest share today but uh the height if you compare it to us's dow jones industry there is a huge difference because dow jones industries has been on a rise for like about a more about more than two months i haven't checked it uh as recently but uh like your buzzer goes now so along with your arguments you also given the reflection of capturing an

46:30 argument so we give it back to harissa to give you feedback is that okay thank you yeah so i think what you say it's very interesting um certainly i think that there's two points in what you're raising the first is if you look over the last 18 months the indian economy in particular has been struggling i think you rightly rightly know a large part of that is because of cover 19 and even when compared with the united states india

46:59 simply had a much worse second wave than almost any other country in the world but certainly worse than the united states or be i think if you look at current u.s coveted statistics that's no longer particularly positive either but i think at least i think that's simply true that if you're comparing india with many other economies in any very bad 2020 um economically and 2021 will only ever point to a slight recovery in part because we saw with the second wave

47:28 now one question which i have is all of that may be true but is that a long term was that a short-term issue and the answer could be either it could it be that india for whatever reason was particularly vulnerable to covet and the economic implication there's simply some truth in that could it also though being the structure of the indian economy has several potential flaws which kovan is

47:59 adding to but not actually the only cause of and certainly there's evidence of that as well if you go back to 2019 the indeed economy has been slowing sometimes quite dramatically for several years so maybe there's something underlying which goes beyond covert which explains india's weaker performance than you otherwise would expect i guess from an argumentative perspective um and this isn't the question is what is that and there are hundreds of potential

48:30 explanations but in some ways that's the big challenge which is it's true the indian economy hasn't been performing well well and has been performing well for probably about four years now um even if you exclude the kova 19 pandemic well what is explaining it i think what your argument does very well is highlights that reality what i think we all need to work out and i say this as an economist as well what is driving the relatively weaker

49:00 performance of the indian economy from what we otherwise would expect for a country as other people pointed out with a very large population with a very well educated population with potentially huge natural resource growth and that i think is in some ways the underlying question of what is going to happen to india in the next 20 years harish i think uh this is a great perspective that we've got from you and

49:32 i'm just conscious of the time check um i can see so many more questions coming in i'll encourage all of you uh to definitely drop us a line so that we organize a subsession or we make sure that we have this answer but having said that i think one of the great opportunities that we are making sure harish when we get children to come interact with you participate is to represent their state teams is to stand up for the sustainable

49:57 development goals that they believe in so i'm just quickly going to ping the link of the you know indian debating league so that you all are able to look it up because the fact is that's where it becomes real i mean the good part is to attend the master class to get over the theory the better part is to be able to practice it because like we say practice doesn't make perfect perfect practice makes perfect okay so with that uh i would

50:23 love it uh you know if you all come and participate and meet uh and get a chance to meet arisa again and uh make sure that you are utilizing this day as a good reflection of thanking our founding fathers for the independence that we all enjoy but more importantly participate in shaping the nation that we have together so with that a warm welcome and a warm good evening good afternoon to you harish and a happy independence day

50:50 once again thank you so much harish any any words that you want to share as we part really happy to well it was my pleasure um hope all of you continue debating and certainly um join the indian debating league it'd be a great opportunity to either continue or start your debating journey a great way to learn more to challenge yourself and potentially to improve all the skills which i think are vital um in life but shine through when you do

51:20 debate lovely thank you so much everyone have a great evening and day ahead bye you