He's a son, a JNU student, a husband... and also happens to be India's Foreign Minister.
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00:00I was I was 18 when I went to JNU. My cohort were the first set of people who
00:05actually politically took on the left. My father was a bureaucrat, had become a
00:09secretary, but he was removed from his secretaryship. I speak English, I speak
00:16Hindi, I can speak Tamil. I actually studied Russian. A rudimentary sense of
00:21Japanese because I do need to talk to my wife from time to time.
00:30I'm from a bureaucratic family, you know. My father was a bureaucrat, I
00:46have an elder brother who was a bureaucrat, my grandfather was a bureaucrat, and my
00:49aunts, not aunts but uncles, who were there. So our world, if I can put it to
00:57you this way, was very very bureaucratic. Our goals, our dreams were bureaucratic.
01:04What do you mean by that? Meaning, you know, if you had asked me if you and I
01:09had met, which we had, let us say in 2010 and say, okay, Jai Shankar, what's your
01:17dream? I said, I want to become foreign secretary. That's a dream of any foreign
01:21service officer. Now in our household there was also, I would say, I won't call it
01:26pressure, but we were all very very conscious of the fact that my father,
01:30who was a bureaucrat, had become a secretary, but he was removed from his
01:36secretaryship, you know. He became, at that time, probably the
01:42youngest secretary in the Janata government in 1979. So in 1980, he was
01:48secretary defense production. In 1980, when Indira Gandhi was re-elected, he was
01:55the first secretary that she removed and, you know, he was by, I mean, he was
02:01the most knowledgeable person everybody would say on defense. He was also a very
02:06upright person. Maybe that caused a problem, I don't know. But the fact was,
02:12as a person, he saw his own bureaucratic career in bureaucracy actually kind of
02:20stall and after that, you know, he never became a secretary again. He was
02:26superseded during the Rajiv Gandhi period for his, you know, somebody junior
02:31to him became cabinet secretary. So it was something he felt. We rarely spoke
02:39about it, but it was obviously something which which must have been inside him. So
02:46he was very, very proud when my elder brother became secretary and in my case,
02:54he passed away in 2011. At that time, I had got what you would call grade one,
03:01which is like a secretary rank ambassador. I didn't become secretary. I
03:04became after he passed away, but for us, you know, at that time, the goal,
03:10you could say, was, okay, we must become secretary. See, JNU was different. I was
03:1618 when I went to JNU. Okay. And JNU was very, very firmly leftist at that time.
03:23And I think everything, you know, at 18, what you intuitively believe is either
03:31formed by your friends and acquaintances or what is reflective of your home. And
03:37definitely in our home, my father, who was a very strong influence on us, was very distrustful of
03:48ideologies and people who he believed were not, who did not have the loyalties in our own country.
03:58Such as?
03:59Well, you look, you know, you're, we are not talking, remember, he had his own views about
04:06what was happening in the 40s and 50s at that time, you know, who was for the
04:11national movement, you know, where did different people, you know, how did they
04:17switch? He was very, very distrustful of the left, you know. So, of the communist
04:24left. And I think some of it, so, in a sense, we grew up very unspokenly, but
04:33very strongly as very patriotic children, you might say, you know, we kind of went
04:39to this military institutions. I went to Air Force School, to King George's Bangalore
04:47Military School. My siblings went to, some of them went to Naval School, to
04:55Sardar Patel Vidyalaya. So, I think that was the kind of mindset I took into JNU. So, in
05:04fact, in JNU, which was a dominantly leftist outlook, where the teachers, the
05:10students, the administration, everybody was very leftist. My lot of people, my
05:15cohort were the first set of people who actually politically took on the left. I
05:19was very clearly with what was called the free thinkers.
05:21How many languages do you speak? You're a polyglot.
05:24Obviously, I speak English. I speak Hindi, I won't say at a very high standard, but with a
05:30kind of a street smart fluency.
05:35The Tamilian Hindi, or is it a JNU Hindi?
05:38No, no, it's actually a Delhi Hindi. I mean, I grew up in, I was born in Delhi.
05:43Okay. You were born in Delhi.
05:44Yes, I was born in Delhi. I was born in Delhi. I grew up in Delhi. I spent, you know, most,
05:48whatever time I've spent in India is largely Delhi. So, it's a very Delhi
05:52person's, I would say, fluent, not always complex Hindi. Because I grew up in
06:01Hindi, I didn't have the advantage of ever studying Tamil. I can speak Tamil,
06:05but not with, you know, with the kind of fluency and command of vocabulary that I
06:11would like. Russian is different because I actually studied Russian when I was in
06:15the foreign service. We are allotted a language, so I went there. So, I actually
06:19properly studied it using books and so on. I have a certain, I would say, working
06:26rudimentary sense of Japanese because I do need to talk to my wife from time to
06:30time. We've kind of evolved something which is peculiar to us. And this happens,
06:36you know, in this situation. I mean, it could be your food, it could be your slang
06:40language, you know, what you say to each other. I mean, we use phrases which
06:44somebody else listening in would find very difficult because they could be
06:46Japanese slang put in an English sentence, sometimes with a Hindi twist
06:50because my wife, my wife's linguistic ability is much better than mine. I
06:54learned Hungarian, but unfortunately, it's very rusty. So, people make more
07:01claims about me than I do myself.