At Jaipur Literature Festival 2026, Gurcharan Das, Naushad Forbes and Shinjini Kumar explore India’s historic trading communities—Sindhis, Parsis, and Chettiars—and how their legacy shapes modern enterprise, resilience, and global commerce.
#JaipurLiteratureFestival2026 #JLF2026 #IndianBusiness #TradingFamilies #GurcharanDas #NaushadForbes #ShinjiniKumar #BusinessHistory #IndianEconomy
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#JaipurLiteratureFestival2026 #JLF2026 #IndianBusiness #TradingFamilies #GurcharanDas #NaushadForbes #ShinjiniKumar #BusinessHistory #IndianEconomy
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NewsTranscript
00:00So it's it's great to start with some mistake, so I was supposed to sit here for some reason.
00:13So now I'm here. It is so wonderful to be in this conversation with you about a subject
00:22that I have spent my time on a lot over the last three years also.
00:27So I am going to start with the idea behind this series of books that we will be having the next 40 minutes of conversation about.
00:39And I'm going to just right away give you the mic and ask you to talk about what is the series about.
00:47And because there are these this is a series that we will be talking about.
00:51It looks like this, but it's extremely readable and a wonderful collection.
00:57So let's start from there.
00:59Well, I wrote a book called India Unbound and it was this book about
01:091991 economic reforms, Neuruvian socialism and all that.
01:15And frankly, Penguin found suddenly that this book was selling well,
01:21which is meant to be they thought was a book on economics.
01:25But it turned and the reason for the success, of course, is the stories that was built out of stories of lived experience, not AI created stories.
01:37And so they suggested that we create a and originally the idea was half a dozen books.
01:46And these books started coming out right from the Arthashastra and to the Marwadis and the Sindhis and East India Company and so on and the Roman trade.
02:02So every few years we've had a book and it's been I've always looked for the best writer, the authority in the subject.
02:15And the odd thing is that 80 percent of the authors have turned out to be foreigners.
02:22Even the Marwadis is not written by a Marwadi.
02:26It's a guy called Tom Timbug who wrote his Ph.D. thesis at Harvard on the Marwadis and wrote a very successful book afterwards.
02:34And he's authored that. And so the problem, of course, when you have authors writing, we have a conflict back there.
02:48There is another session going on there. If we can. Yeah, not a session.
02:53It's a rather loud conversation. Anyway, the point is that all academics are not good writers.
03:01I'm sorry to say. And so what we my biggest challenge was to make them think
03:11not theory, but stories, which is a way to communicate.
03:20And India is the oldest storytelling culture in the world.
03:23So that's really how it all began. And now it's reached 17 volumes and 10 of these are here
03:32from the bookstore that Crossword has lent us today.
03:37And so I just heard that the announcement said 14 and you've already gone up to 17.
03:44And with the number of stories that we have, we don't know where this is going to stop,
03:49but it's really a wonderful journey. We'll get to the stories.
03:52But before that, because you are here and you're a writer and this festival is all about writing and reading.
03:58I want you to also tell us a little bit about your process of writing. Like you're so prolific.
04:04You have written and you have curated this collection with so many different writers.
04:08You've collaborated from people across the world. What is it like? What's your day like?
04:13Well, for the last 30 years, I've been a full time writer. And before that, for the previous 30 years,
04:21I was a weekend writer when I wore two hats, a Monday-Friday hat and a Saturday-Sunday hat.
04:30And my schedule of the day is, I write from 6 to 12, 6 in the morning till 12 in the noon.
04:43And then I go for a swim to sort of loosen up the body, which has been sitting on the computer.
04:51But the process is very simple. First, I make sure in the mornings I don't do anything that puts me on someone else's agenda.
05:02Meaning I don't do email. I don't do WhatsApp. I don't read the newspaper.
05:10So I'm very selfish that way. I don't do yoga because I might meet somebody or take a walk with someone.
05:18All good things you're supposed to do, but not in the morning.
05:22So that's the discipline. The second part of writing, I envy people who write with great felicity, great facility.
05:36It's a pain. I'll tell you, you have to be a bit of a masochist to become a writer because it's hard work.
05:50And in my case, I'm a, I'm a addictive rewriter.
05:56My wife, in fact, often introduces me not as a writer, but as a rewriter.
06:02Because I see a paragraph, you know, I, I, I stop and I say now in the morning, I start and I say, let me see where I ended up yesterday.
06:13So I'm reading those two, last two paragraphs and I start changing those.
06:19And so I'm spending the, instead of quickly reading them, I'm spent first hour rewriting them.
06:29And so, but I think it gets better.
06:32And so I, what I want to say is that writing is a struggle.
06:37It's, yes, there are rewards at the end, if your books sell well.
06:45And, but it's, it's, it's, it's, don't have illusions about nirvana.
06:54Nirvana, it's, it's a hard road to nirvana, writing, writing a book, getting, I mean, in my case, of course, I just want to make sure I get the right word.
07:07But I mean, that's where my problem with AI is that AI, it doesn't go through the struggle that I go through.
07:14And so I'm very envious of AI's ability to deliver in two seconds, everything.
07:20So we will listen to a lot of the stories from him and for the rest, you will read the books.
07:28But I just do want to bring Noshad into the conversation and, and ask you, because you wrote a book and we had a nice conversation about that, you know, a few years ago.
07:39And do tell us a little bit about that.
07:41So, so, so I'm, I'm not as disciplined as Gurcharan.
07:45I, first of all, it would be impossible for me to get up at six in the morning and do anything productive.
07:51So, so, so my style for writing was to actually find chunks of time and then allocate it in whichever day I could make that time.
08:05And I did find that you need a certain amount of dead time.
08:11of just letting things stew.
08:14And then when you start writing, it becomes easier.
08:18At least for me, I found that I needed at least a two to three hour chunk for me to do anything productive in terms of writing.
08:28In terms of rewriting, I fully agree.
08:31I think rewriting is a greatly underappreciated skill.
08:36You know, there's a, there's a session this evening on PG Woodhouse, and PG Woodhouse, I think, is one of the great writers of all time.
08:46And PG Woodhouse, there was this description in his autobiography of how he wrote.
08:51And he would write, he would type his, his books on an old, if I remember correctly, Remington typewriter, and a page at a time.
09:03And he would type, put the page up around the room.
09:08And then he would rewrite page by page.
09:12And each page that he rewrote, he would paste either above or below that particular page.
09:19And if it was above, he liked it more.
09:23And then when he figured he was done, he would just go around the room and collect the top page from, from, from the room.
09:31And that was his finished chapter.
09:33But he would, in some cases, you know, you, you get this idea when you read him that it was completely effortless because his, his, his way with language is so perfect.
09:46Yes.
09:46It's not.
09:47It's the reflection of lots of rewriting, lots of hard work.
09:51And when I, when I worked on my book, I mean, I, I tried very hard to find the right quote, the right joke, the right cartoon, because that's what you want to do.
10:07You want to do the best job you possibly can with the writing.
10:11And I think rewriting is an essential part of it.
10:14Amazing.
10:14So as a new writer, I'm taking notes and being selfish, but I'm now moving to something for which we are all here,
10:20which is to listen to, uh, you, sir, give us some of the stories that are so, um, incredible in your book.
10:28And, uh, maybe we start with, uh, something from because, because it's, it's a lot of history that has been documented in these books.
10:36So maybe we start with something really interesting in our history, which connects us to the rest of the world,
10:42because the theme of us being a global civilization is a very important one for you.
10:47So let's start with, uh, with the story of what we taught the world, which is most important.
10:52Yeah.
10:53So, you know, today we glibly say India's Soneki Chediati and we were a very wealthy country and we leave it at that.
11:06But these books show you that how we actually were one of the great trading empires in the world.
11:19And we were, with the 5,000 miles coastline, we really created enormous wealth.
11:26By trading.
11:30And, and that is something we forgot when we became independent.
11:36Anyway, the, it begins really, uh, and I don't know where to start, but let's begin.
11:44Let's, I think, begin with the fact, let's go back to the Roman empire.
11:49In India, one ship from Rome would arrive at a South Indian port every day and the Romans would buy a lot of Indian usual, as always, textiles, cottons.
12:04And they bought perfumes, they bought, uh, pepper and these, the Roman women had got very fond of, they discovered pepper from India, actually.
12:15Uh, and so, and muslin, muslin, and, and actually Pliny, the, uh, was a famous senator.
12:29And he got up in the Senate in Rome and he says to the Romans, he says to the Romans, he says to the Romans, stop wearing those togas.
12:44Tell your women to stop cooking with pepper.
12:48What is this business of pepper in everything that we are putting in?
12:51And stop using Indian perfumes because we are losing 68% of Rome's gold and silver, our bullion, to India.
13:04Or you Romans sell something to the Indians that they want.
13:09The point that he is making is really what Mr. Trump is making today about America.
13:17It's the trade deficit and they, the trade, India had a positive trade, uh, surplus with the world right up to the industrial revolution in a couple of hundred years ago.
13:37And, and, and also if you go by Madison's figures, you, it, it was 25% of world trade, 25%, 28% of world GDP.
13:50I mean, this was what the United States basically is today.
13:55India was, but why and why is because of our openness and Rome is only one example of it.
14:06In the middle, uh, when East India Company came, East India Company introduced to the Europeans at that time, fine, dhaka, muslin.
14:22And for the first time, the Europeans discovered the wearing of underwear because they had had only wool or coarse cotton,
14:33which was unsuitable for underwear.
14:36Originally, the aristocracy could afford it only.
14:40And it began with the aristocracy.
14:42But in the 19th century, it became a mass middle class grew.
14:48The middle class started wearing underwear.
14:50And the 20th century was a mass consumer century.
14:53And everybody started wearing underwear.
14:56But underwear began with the discovery of fine Indian cotton.
15:03Now I could go on and on with stories, uh, uh, stories like this.
15:10So I also want you to talk just one more story, at least before we move on to the next, uh, part of the conversation.
15:16And that's the story you were telling me about startups.
15:19There's something which is, uh, you know, you know, today we live in the world of startups and India has done well.
15:27A hundred of our startups are more.
15:30I've become unicorns, meaning a billion dollars in size.
15:34And the reality is that there's a wonderful, there's a 13th century Kashmiri anthology of stories called Katha Sarit Sagara.
15:50And in this Sanskrit anthology is a story of a mouse merchant.
15:56And if you don't mind, I'll take a minute and a half.
16:00Sure.
16:00To tell you this story.
16:01Uh, it's about a boy who becomes 17 years old and his mother tells him, now I've educated you, son.
16:13And I want you to grow up to do something.
16:17You have destiny, she says, to do something else and not be like me.
16:24She has been cleaning houses.
16:27Uh, she's a widow and she's been cleaning houses.
16:30And she says, you're going to do something else.
16:33And so she says, over there is the house of the richest man in town.
16:40And he's a kind man.
16:42And go and stand outside his house and when he comes out, ask him for advice.
16:51And so the boy dutifully goes the next day.
16:54And while he's waiting for the great man to come out, he sees a dead mouse in his courtyard.
17:01And so when the man comes out, he says, greets him.
17:10And, uh, the man says, what can I do for you?
17:14And the boy says, can I have the dead mouse?
17:18And the man laughs.
17:20He says, you'll be doing me a favor, but don't you want anything else?
17:24People come to me for a loan or a job.
17:28The boy says, no, thank you.
17:30And he takes the dead mouse and he knows and he goes away.
17:36And he knows a widow who has a cat and she lives nearby.
17:42And he goes with the dead mouse and sells the mouse as cat food to the widow.
17:52And with the few paisa that he gets, he goes to the bazaar and buys chana chor garam, a snack.
18:03And he makes these puriyas of chana chor garam.
18:06And he takes a big ghada of pani, of water, and he takes it to the town square where he sits down and waits.
18:22And he knows in the afternoon, loggers come from the forest and they put down their load.
18:33And they rest before they go into the timber market.
18:39And at that time, he offers each of them a pani, water, and a snack.
18:50And nobody has ever done this to them.
18:53And when they have no money to give this boy, so each gives him a log of wood.
18:58And so he repeats this.
19:03He sells one log, gets better snacks the next day.
19:09And for the next three months, he repeats this process.
19:13Until the monsoons come, the logging in the forest stops.
19:20The price of wood starts climbing up in the timber market.
19:26And he has a house full of logs by then.
19:29And he starts unloading his logs of wood in the timber market.
19:36And by the end of the season, he's made enough money to buy a shop in the timber market.
19:45And he sets himself up for the next season as a timber merchant.
19:54He has one competitive advantage.
19:58The suppliers know him.
20:01They love him.
20:02Nobody has done what he did for them.
20:05And so they bring him the choicest logs first.
20:10And so he prospers.
20:13And he prospers and so on until he has quite a bit of surplus.
20:18When he realizes that actually the margin in converting the logs, I mean the timber, into something else, the margin is higher.
20:36And they live near a shipyard.
20:38And so he finds a master carpenter shipbuilder who is now kind of retired.
20:48He makes him his partner.
20:51And he now enters the shipbuilding business.
20:55So he has a subsidiary, which again is successful.
20:59And after a few years, he realizes that actually shipping is even more profitable, meaning shipping cargo, shipping passengers.
21:12And so he finds a retired captain, ship captain, makes him his partner.
21:17And he has a second subsidiary, which also does very well.
21:21And by the ripe old age of 24, he has, in fact, become the richest man in town.
21:29And he goes to a jeweler and tells the jeweler to make me a gold mouse.
21:35And he takes that gold mouse to the old richest man in town.
21:42And he presents it to him as, in today's language, he would say, this is my return on venture capital, which was the dead mouse.
22:00And the old man, when he hears the story of this boy's life, he's so happy that he gives his daughter in marriage.
22:09Oh, wow.
22:09So, that, just that one story has so many themes of entrepreneurship and capital.
22:22And, you know, in today's, today, every youngster dreams of a startup.
22:29And this story, it really inspires them.
22:32And so what I'm trying to say is that stories like these, I don't know if I, the mouse merchant is here.
22:39But it's been translated by Arshya Sattar.
22:45And she's done a wonderful job of this book, of that book and stories.
22:51But there's another wonderful story from the Panchatantra in the book.
22:57You know, we don't think of ourselves as a country which is philanthropic.
23:01But, in fact, you know, there's another story of two merchants.
23:08I mean, one is an older merchant who has become successful and a new one who's starting out.
23:14And the young man is asking advice from the old man.
23:18And he asks him, and so the older man says, look, you've got to learn four things if you want to be successful as a businessman.
23:31One, you've got to learn how to make money.
23:36Two, if you've learned how to make money, then you must learn how to conserve money.
23:42Don't put it under the carpet.
23:44You can make it grow.
23:46Third, you must learn how to spend money.
23:52He says, businessmen are not good.
23:53They don't know.
23:54These are different skills.
23:56Spending money is a very different skill.
23:59They are either, businessmen are too mean or they are too extravagant.
24:04And that's not the right way.
24:06And fourth, you must learn how to give money away in your lifetime.
24:12Now, imagine a second century B.C. text talking about giving money away in your lifetime.
24:23So that's just the example of how, you know, this is how we are and this is how we were.
24:30But we forgot this.
24:32In fact, that is my next landing point on, and we were talking about it at breakfast.
24:38This country, with that tradition that you just spoke about, of entrepreneurship, of wealth building, of having an attitude to, you know, to build that wealth, collaboration, and communities, which is what a lot of your book is about.
24:56How did, I don't want to talk about how did we get to the point where we got to, but I do want to talk about the 90s, which is the period that a lot of your book and Noshad's book talks about.
25:08What has been the business community's experience in that period and what have been the lessons from the history of our current phase of liberalization and entrepreneurial growth?
25:22One quickly, I think when we became independent, we learned the wrong lessons from history.
25:32And so the whole stories that I have told, whether it's about the Kachi merchants, whether it's about the Marwadis, or whether it's about Gigi Boy, Premchand, Roychand, all these are stories of success based on openness.
25:56And we closed our economy from the 1950s.
26:02We felt that East India Company had made us poor, and that was a sure way to become poor instead of rich.
26:12And so that's one lesson, certainly.
26:17And only that openness began from 1991 till 1990, from 1951 to 1991 was a real betrayal of our young people, frankly.
26:31You couldn't have made a startup in that period.
26:35You needed a license.
26:37And to need a license, you had to take suitcases to Delhi.
26:41So that certainly would be one lesson.
26:45So I agree that the importance of openness, which comes across really powerfully in the whole series.
26:56I think one of the principles is, and it's your Roman example, you cannot say, I want to export, if you don't import.
27:08And I think the two are two sides of the same coin.
27:12And I think this idea, which President Trump is still to learn, that if you restrict imports, you will restrict exports, is a lesson that we've learned.
27:28We've learned since 1991.
27:30In fact, economists will tell you that a tax on imports is actually a tax on exports, because of the costs that show up in the processing of goods.
27:41But I wanted to come back to the point about business communities and the business communities that this series talks about.
27:52Because these business communities were enormously powerful at a time when, and very international, at a time when it was very difficult to be international.
28:00I mean, you couldn't take a flight and get somewhere.
28:04The journey from when the first British ambassador to India came to India, his journey took nine months.
28:14And he had to time it so that he caught the right winds, because otherwise, he may not have reached at all.
28:22So it was a difficult thing for people to move around the world.
28:28But we did.
28:29Community after community, you know, the Parsis in Hong Kong, the Chetiyars in Burma, the, you know, that one of the new books is on the Chetiyars and the Chetiyars from the current state of Tamil Nadu.
28:46At one point in time, there were, I believe, 1600 Chetiyar businesses in Burma and they, in Burma, and they owned, and they owned a quarter of all the arable land in the country.
29:01Now, the good bit to learn is openness.
29:06The bad bit to learn is that these communities trusted each other, but there wasn't trust between the communities.
29:14If you read Sam Dalrymple's book, which was launched yesterday evening, he has, his first partition is the partition of Burma from the rest of the Indian Empire at that time, the British Indian Empire.
29:28And the, he describes the very great dislike that the Chetiyar community in Burma aroused in the local population.
29:40Some of it came from envy.
29:43Some of it came because the community, by definition, was somewhat closed.
29:47And I think that's a lesson that we should also take, which is that we need to be open as businessmen to dealing with others on a principle of trust and well beyond the community.
30:01Because that's also the 1991 story, which is that you see the flowering of entrepreneurship and successful businesses of business communities, but you see the flowering of entrepreneurship and business from non-business communities as well, from the IT sector and the pharma sector and from a bunch of new sectors, the FMCG sector that come in for the first time and really flourish post-1991 because of a much more open system.
30:28But you know, Nasha, I also argue that, frankly, businessmen and certainly Marwadi businessmen or other communities, you're talking about Chetiyar, there's a bad order around what a businessman is.
30:52And there are certain people who think, instead of wealth creation, they see exploitation.
31:01We use the term hoarding.
31:03Yeah, so I just, the point I make is that, and this is a point I think I made actually in India Unbound in the beginning, that something like 60 countries did the same reforms that we did in the 90s.
31:22And the fact is that India became the most successful of the democracies, the free countries.
31:33Only China did better in the last 30 years.
31:39You know, India has grown at 6.5% from 91 and which, you know, for a democracy.
31:46But the reason, the initial spurt, why did India pick up the baton so quickly, is that there were people here who knew for centuries, they knew how to grow capital, they knew how to conserve capital.
32:07And this is, it's easy to say, you know, to look at a businessman and see an exploiter, but the reality is, it's these people who made it all happen.
32:25And after it reached a certain point, then you have the startup phase, you have all these other effects take over.
32:33So the initial advantage, the first mover advantage came because we had these, these, these people.
32:43That's what my...
32:44Actually, you sort of see a sorting of entrepreneurs and you see a sorting of entrepreneurs from business communities, actually, where you see the decline of many prominent businesses owned by business communities.
32:58And you see the rise of others who start doing more and more of the right thing.
33:06Correct.
33:06So I do want to keep like five minutes for Q&A, but I wanted to pick on this point of, you know, the business communities and the lessons that they have learned, but also about where do we go from here?
33:21And what are those lessons about not just opening of the economy, but also opening of the mind, because there are various pockets that we talk about, right?
33:28Like the political setup or the bureaucracy or the deregulation, or there are so many ideas that are in these books as well as in your other books.
33:38So just give us a little bit about your outlook for the future.
33:41Yeah.
33:41And then we can have a question.
33:43The first is the happy part, which I've hinted at already, that before 91, our growth rate was about 3.5%.
33:54This rose to 6.5%.
33:58Our population growth rate was 2.2.
34:02That has come down to 1.6 or something like that.
34:08Under 1 now.
34:09Under 1 now.
34:10So the reality is all that from being 3.3 to minus 2.1% net per capita income, most of that is going down to the per capita thing.
34:27But also, I mean, today we are going through a phase where people are trashing the whole area.
34:39A period of globalization.
34:44We are going through a phase of nationalism again.
34:49And just to take one lesson, that in the last 80 years has been a period, unprecedented period, of the rise of the poor in the world.
35:05Just between India and China, over a billion people have risen over poverty.
35:12India, 428 million people have risen out of poverty.
35:18And the middle class in India has gone from 10% to 30%.
35:2435%.
35:25And we have not done as well as China, but a lot of it is a result of that openness that led to the creation of jobs.
35:39IT was a driving factor in all this.
35:43So that's the good side.
35:46The bad side of the story is that the job of 91 is still not complete.
35:53The reforms are not complete.
35:55And why is it that China has done so much better or the East Asians have done so much better?
36:03And really, the one mantra we've learned in the last 80 years is from the East Asian tigers.
36:12Because it's a one simple, no country became rich without the export of labor-intensive manufacturers.
36:24Labor meaning we've talked about textiles.
36:27Now, textiles, we had already become the third largest producer of machine textiles by the time we got to independence.
36:37But the license raj actually has killed that whole Bombay and Ahmedabad's textile.
36:46And Bangladesh has been a lot more successful.
36:51And for various reasons, in fact, yesterday, Subramanyam and Divesh Kapoor talked about that.
36:59So the fact is that, bottom line, we have still not created an industrial revolution.
37:08And that means that we seem to have skipped from a green revolution to an IT revolution.
37:15And no country did it without going through the factory stage.
37:19And 45% of Indians are still stuck on the farm.
37:26And that farm, the agriculture needs about one third of the people that are there.
37:31So that two thirds, we have let them down.
37:34So if we want to achieve that Vixit Bharat goal or whatever, this is the job that needs to be done.
37:41And Mr. Trump today is our best friend because he has called us the king of tariffs,
37:48which is another word for saying we closed our economy and we have to open up.
37:54And we are now, I think, we are going to open up as a result of this.
38:00And we know the job that needs to be done in the future.
38:06But one quick point.
38:07You know, I'm just wondering whether we have that time.
38:15Yeah, we don't have much time.
38:16I think we should go to the audience.
38:17Yeah, let's speak.
38:18I really wanted to give the mic to some really young person in the audience who can frame a question in 30 seconds and no more.
38:26If you think you qualify for that, get the mic.
38:28There's somebody over there.
38:32Yeah.
38:32My question is, would you classify yourself as libertarian?
38:37Who got the mic?
38:38Would you classify yourself as libertarian?
38:40If so, which kind of libertarian?
38:42And how far do you think we should take libertarianism?
38:45So China would arguably have a larger government than India.
38:47Okay.
38:48Yeah.
38:49Very quick answer.
38:50And I'm speaking for both of us.
38:53Let me decide.
38:54I'll decide that.
38:56Okay, you decide.
38:57Okay.
38:58He's right.
38:59During the License Raj, I was a victim of the License Raj.
39:10And that story is here because one year there was a flu and I was selling Vicks Vaporub.
39:16And we sold a hell of a lot of Vicks Vaporub.
39:19And we crossed, we broke our license, meaning our license allowed us to make only so many tons of Vicks.
39:27And there was a two-year jail sentence associated with disobeying that law.
39:34Making more Vicks Vaporub than you should.
39:36Exactly.
39:37Luckily, I didn't go to jail.
39:39But I became, I joined the Swatantra Party and I became, but I've also then later realized that the state has to play,
39:53and a libertarian believes in a night watchman state, you know, Chokidar state, law and order only.
40:01But I've, I mean, I've certainly believed that the state must be responsible for education, health, for the, for the, for a poverty, for a safety net.
40:14He is speaking for both of us.
40:16Safety net for the poor.
40:18I think that's it.
40:18So I call myself a classical liberal.
40:21A classical liberal is different from a left liberal.
40:25No, I'm pointing at her.
40:27Yeah, he pointed at me.
40:28Okay.
40:28But there are left liberals out there.
40:30I can tell you.
40:32It's your husband.
40:34So the fact of the matter is the left liberal distrusts the market.
40:43And, of course, you need regulation, there are market failures, but you also have to realize that there is no other way.
40:54Since the collapse of communism in 1989, we have learned this lesson, and we should make capitalism responsible.
41:05But, yes, long answer to your short question.
41:09I'm not a libertarian, classical liberal, not a left liberal.
41:12And, yeah, so libertarian is on one end and left liberals on the other end.
41:20Classical liberal is right in the middle.
41:23And am I not speaking for you?
41:25Speaking in the center.
41:27Take another question.
41:28Is there another question that can be short and sweet?
41:32Over there on the right.
41:32Lady, here.
41:34Yeah, quick.
41:35So this was a very insightful session, I would say.
41:38Yeah, and my question is, as you are a time-tested entrepreneur, so any one lesson you would like to give to the budding entrepreneurs, which we can have from you today?
41:48Okay.
41:49Should we ask Rasha to give that?
41:50I mean, I think, you know, first of all, I would just say, you need a differentiated idea, right?
41:57So you need something that people need.
42:00And if you identify, as I think the mouse merchant is a great example, right?
42:04Find that dead mouse, right?
42:06Find that dead mouse.
42:07Find that dead mouse.
42:08And then keep investing, keep building your own differentiated proposition, but start, you know, the skill was in the idea that this boy had to turn a dead mouse into something valuable.
42:25And into capital, because the capital won't always be available to everybody.
42:30So it's been a great conversation.
42:31I do want to ask everybody to buy this book, because the man himself told me that after writing so many books, this is his favorite book so far.
42:41So please do buy the book.
42:42And it's called Another Sort of Freedom.
42:45Yes, it's called Another Sort of Freedom.
42:47It's in the bookshop.
42:48And of course, read these books.
42:50They're valuable.
42:51Thank you so much for having this conversation.
42:53I've really enjoyed it.
42:54I'm sure so much for the audience.
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