The Poet Who Toppled The British Empire

Pushkin.

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London, the 1st of July 1909.

It's South Kensington.

a quiet but immensely wealthy neighborhood full of grand townhouses, even mansions.

This particular evening, a retired army officer, 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 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 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 resistance together, how to fire a rifle, how to make weapons, how to evade the police.

One of those housemates, a man called Biran, wrote a letter to the Times of London supporting the assassin.

Biran secretly visited him in prison, then fled the country.

The assassination had been senseless.

No matter how passionately you opposed the British Empire, Curzon 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 this cautionary tale isn't about the assassin or about his sympathiser Birun.

It's about someone who found a different way to bring about revolutionary change.

Biran's sister, a woman called Sodorjani.

I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to Cautionary Tales.

She's 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 Sirogeni Naidu to the coast to make salt.

But they've 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 60 policemen all holding steel-tipped clubs.

And there are soldiers too, with heavy rifles pointed at the marchers.

The year is 1930, 21 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 lead India's independence movement is Sirojani Naidu.

Naidu and her marchers want vast change against a hard opponent and they want it without violence.

Sirojani has decisively rejected the murderous approach that her brother Biran endorsed.

India's fate, Naidu believes, depends on a non-violent 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.

This story comes from his forthcoming book, How to Change the World, Lessons from Three People Who Did.

When David first told me Naidu's story, I was fascinated.

Sirogeni Naidu was an unlikely revolutionary.

When she was growing up in the 1880s, her family worshipped England.

In her childhood 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, Naidu said, It was considered the height of ignorance and misfortune not to be acquainted acquainted with English.

She grew up believing it was fair for Indians to be colonised.

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 princes who were ostensibly in power, but who knew they had to do what the local British representatives wanted.

And Naidu thought this was a fine thing.

As one Hindu elder she looked up to explained, Man for man, the English are better than ourselves.

They have a higher standard of duty, higher notions of organised work and discipline.

As a teenager, Naidu got a scholarship to study in Cambridge.

When she landed in Britain in 1896, just 17 years old and terribly shy, she discovered even more reasons 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 the Women's College, Girton.

After her first day, she wrote to her boyfriend at home, effectively her fiancée, 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 a curiosity.

She was touched when the girls invited her for bicycle trips to the all-male colleges.

Those bicycles were a revolutionary invention, giving women a real sense of independence for the first time, time, even if senior faculty would ride alongside as chaperones.

Even more exciting than the bicycles was getting to meet the male students, the best of whom might rule her country one day.

She wrote to her family breathlessly about how they were so educated and so civilized.

Everything might have stayed like that, with Naidoo remaining a proud subject of Queen Victoria's Empire.

But it turned out that although women at Cambridge could 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 Naidoo's College, a woman named 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 alumni could.

and special trains were arranged to bring former students from London to Cambridge.

By early afternoon on May the 21st, 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.

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 cockcrow.

This was the signal, wrote one witness, for the commencement of operations.

Occupants of the front rooms at Keys immediately began to hang out banners that mocked women.

Other male students leaned out of an upstairs window and started lowering a papé-mache figure of a woman, life-size, an effigy.

They'd made it with bright red hair, looking silly in a cap and gown.

Another group of students, 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 they'd painted the underwear bright blue so no one could miss it.

Down below, the men 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 on a journey round 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 street was rabid, wild.

These were the future rulers of Naidu'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 obscenities and throwing fireworks into the girls' windows.

They rammed fragments of the effigy through the college 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 effigies to the main market square in Cambridge.

One was of the tutor at Naidoo's College, Catherine Jex Blake, the one who'd dared petition for the degrees.

These effigies too were stripped and mutilated before being burnt in another bonfire.

The men kept 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.

They hadn't even succeeded.

And yet the very idea of this sparked hour after hour of harassment, humiliation, and riot.

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On the morning of May the 21st, 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 few days, it became clear she had to leave Cambridge.

Something deeper became clear too.

She couldn't be a porn in this empire anymore.

Sorogenie went to London and spent time with a number of writers, including the great Irish poet Yeats, 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?

Naidu was inspired too, and encouraged that someone of Yeats' 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, to the arguments for fairness.

Sirogeni Naidu Naidu was 19 years old when she returned to India and determined to push back against British rule.

In Hyderabad, however, her partner Gorvindu expected they would quickly get married and start having children, 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 veranda with a swing where she could look out, decorated cages with chirping songbirds inside.

Everyone thinks I'm so nice and cheerful, she wrote.

All the banal things, but I've merely taught myself to be commonplace.

Everything is slipping away.

After all she'd seen in England, after all that she recognised was still going on in India, it felt 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 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, Sarojani Naidu immersed herself in the Indian National Congress, a group dominated by Bengali intellectuals who politely, calmly, lobbied the British government for fairer treatment.

It's there where, despite her terrible shyness and slight stature, Naidu discovered that speaking out in public, she felt different.

What is it that we demand?

She called out from 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'd 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 and New Zealand had.

Everything seemed agreed.

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 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 13th of April 1919, a large crowd gathered in the Jalyanwala gardens in the centre of the old city of Amritsar 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.

The garden was mostly dried out and a few acres in size.

Since families were large, there were a lot of children.

Perhaps 15,000 people total.

To Major General Reginald Dyer, the man in charge of the city.

This 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 Amritsa well and didn't realize that hardly anyone had seen them.

Rather, he was insistent that proper order was not to be thwarted.

There was a 10-foot-high stone and brick wall around most of the garden.

At the one narrow entrance he parked armoured cars sideways on blocking any exit.

Then he and his mostly Indian troops advanced inside, 50 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 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 50 of his men open fire.

Then 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 500 or 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 violent mob.

The response to the massacre from the authorities in London was half-hearted criticism.

It was a few weeks later that the young Indian assassin gunned down a retired army officer.

and a good Samaritan doctor outside a reception in South Kensington.

It's a point like this, rock bottom, that it's tempting to give up.

Sirojani Naidu 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 Biran had endorsed random murderous violence.

That was no good either.

But then,

what was left?

Naidu had to find a different path.

And for that, she turned to Gandhi.

Naidu and Gandhi had first met in 1914 and quickly became friends.

At the time, she was already the voice of the Indian National Congress, as well as a well-reviewed poet.

Gandhi would later become world famous.

but back then, he was a little-known activist based in South Africa.

Five years on, after the massacre at Amritsar, Naidu and Gandhi discussed their options.

What if, instead of violence or politics, you 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 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.

To hold firmly to the truth, but in a manner that doesn't create new injustices.

In short, disobey, but without violence.

A fair idea that, it turns out, is incredibly hard to carry out in practice.

In 1921, Gandhi and Naidu targeted the visit of the Prince of Wales to Bombay.

Huge piles of imported British clothing were burned.

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 offence taken by the locals taking part in the welcoming ceremonies.

How could an honoured guest be treated 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.

The police counter-attacked.

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 Naidu had hoped for.

The vision for Setyagraha was in jeopardy.

And with Gandhi often in jail,

everyone was looking to Sirogeni Naidu to help them figure out what to do next.

Cautionary Tales will return.

In today's super competitive business environment, the edge goes to those who push harder, move faster, and level up every tool in their arsenal.

T-Mobile knows all about that.

They're now the best network, according to the experts at OOCLA Speed Test, and they're using that network to launch Supermobile, the first and only business plan to combine intelligent performance, built-in security, and seamless satellite coverage.

With Supermobile, your performance, security, and coverage are supercharged.

With a network that adapts in real time, your business stays operating at peak capacity even in times of high demand.

With built-in security on the first nationwide 5G advanced network, you keep private data private for you, your team, your clients.

And with seamless coverage from the world's largest satellite-to-mobile constellation, your whole team can text and stay updated even when they're off the grid.

That's your business, supercharged.

Learn more at supermobile.com.

Seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the US where you can see the sky.

Best network based on analysis by UCLA of Speed Test Intelligence Data 1H 2025.

Cautionary Tales is proudly sponsored by Amika Insurance.

As Amika says, empathy is our best policy.

That's why they'll go above and beyond to tailor your insurance coverage to best fit your needs.

Whether you're on the road, at home, or traveling along life's journey, their friendly and knowledgeable representatives will work with you to ensure you have the right coverage in place.

Amika will provide you with peace of mind.

Go to amika.com and get a quote today.

There's more to San Francisco with the Chronicle.

There's more food for thought, more thought for food.

There's more data insights to help with those day-to-day choices.

There's more to the weather than whether it's going to rain.

And with our arts arts and entertainment coverage, you won't just get out more, you'll get more out of it.

At the Chronicle, knowing more about San Francisco is our passion.

Discover more at sfchronicle.com.

A few 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 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 as the outlet for the goods of Great Britain.

We conquered India by the sword, and by the sword we should hold it.

In 1930, the leadership of the Indian National Congress decided to try to reclaim one small piece of what Indians had lost under British rule.

Salt.

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.

78 members of Gandhi's ashram walked 200 miles to one of the big salt-making regions on the 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 Naidu in her long sari.

Gandhi in 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?

Gandhi collected more mud.

So did most of 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 the marchers look like fools.

A few weeks later, he had Gandhi arrested.

Quickly, at night.

Bright flashlights in the face, armed troops.

Much of the rest of the nationalist leadership was thrown into jail too.

Naidu, clearly, was next.

And support 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 Satyagraha, a third way to get the freedom they wanted.

Some people were calling for more violence.

Naidu was convinced that would only lead to 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 Dharasana.

There,

Britain had built a large saltworks, where salt was collected from large lagoons, then purified and stacked in high pyramids.

The mud flats were surrounded by barbed wire and deep, moat-like ditches.

By the time Naidu got there, danger was in the air.

Some nearby protesters were being led by Gandhi's son Manulal, who was excitable and prone to 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.

Naidu spent long days going from one small group of protesters to another, explaining their purpose.

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 be like Amritsar.

It would become fair for the soldiers to shoot back.

Naidu 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.

Britons 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 Gujarat coast, but if they could remain non-violent, 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 meant.

On Wednesday, May the 21st, they went ahead.

Naidu was at the front.

Gandhi's son, Manulal, wasn't far behind.

It was terrifying as they got close.

And Naidu started a group chant.

In Inkilab Zindabad

long live the revolution the peaceful revolution

before Naidu'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.

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.

320 marchers had been seriously wounded.

Many were still unconscious.

The British government announced a few days later that nothing had happened, that there had been some slight confusion at Durasana that day, but no shots were fired, and at most four people were wounded.

Viceroy Irwin wrote to the King how amusing it was, and all was peaceful, easy,

just.

And there, perhaps, the story might have ended.

Except that Naidu's attempts to draw journalists to Darasana had succeeded.

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 1,000 newspapers worldwide.

He had seen everything, and his reports were 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 non-violence could make any real change.

Didn't they realize it would never work in Mussolini's Italy or Stalin's Soviet Union?

But that was the point.

Most Britons were proud their nation was nothing like those dictatorships.

That was what Naidoo 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 questioned what their government was doing in India.

And a few years later, after the Second World War, Prime Minister Clement Attlee's post-war government granted India its independence.

That alone would be a staggering achievement.

350 million people finally free from colonial rule.

But similar freedom campaigns spread around the world.

To Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement in America.

to Nelson Mandela and the end of apartheid in South Africa, to women's rights and disability rights, and much else.

Sirogeni Naidu and Gandhi found their third way, and then they shared it: this powerful, gentler path

to transform nations.

That finishes our series of four episodes, inspired by my friend David Badanis' book, The Art of Fairness.

The story of Sirogeni 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 DeRoscha.

He was famous for saying, nice guys finish last.

Well,

David was watching DeRoscha at his prime as a manager.

David is back in the studio with me now.

David, nice guys finish last.

What do we think about whether that statement holds up?

There was a real lot of what DeRocher 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.

And so you need to be a bit tougher.

But that doesn't mean going to the other extreme.

Well, see, that's the whole thing.

Remember Naidu's brother that you were talking about in the assassination in London in 1909, 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.

So we're going to shoot an old guy in the face and that'll work.

Exactly.

They're going way too far.

The Indian National Congress used to begin their meetings in the 1890s and 1900 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 looked differently and would be nice to them.

This is a case where DeRossier's sort of right, purely being nice.

The British establishment would keep on 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.

Right.

So you need to find a middle way.

And that is really what these tales have been exploring.

So DeRosha lost to a baseball banisher 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.

But there's a problem.

There's always a problem.

What is the problem?

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 is hard.

You saw it in these 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 elegantly was William Bly,

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.

He couldn't adapt.

That's what happens.

You vow, okay, I'm going to be calm.

I'm okay.

I'm going to be calm.

And then your kids are crying at 9 p.m.

and you really want them to go to bed and you become less calm.

We know what we should do, but actually carrying it out is 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 is how to apply it when times are rough.

And that links into a couple of things we hear a lot in cautionary tales.

So one of the things that people really need 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 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 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 he was going to deal with them.

Whereas William Bly,

he never quite seemed to be able to think that through or to think ahead.

Even when stuff had gone wrong and then it had started going right again, he wasn't able to go, okay, hmm, you know, I had a near miss.

How am I going to make sure the things don't fall apart next time?

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 forget the enemy has a vote, the environment has a vote, chance has a vote.

But if we practice it a little bit and say, okay, what do 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.

David, these are just amazing stories, amazing insights.

Thank you so much for bringing them to us.

With pleasure.

David Badanis' forthcoming book, including the life story of Sirogeni Naidu, is How to Change the World, Lessons from Three People Who Did.

It is scheduled to come out in 2025, and of course, you can reserve a copy in advance.

Just check out our website.

If you can't wait, David's many other books, including The Art of Fairness.

Well, they're available wherever books are sold.

Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright.

This mini-series is based on David Badanis' book, The Art of Fairness, The Power of Decency in a World Turned Mean, and it was written with David Badanis himself.

For a full list of our sources, see the show notes at timharford.com.

The show is produced by Alice Fiennes with Marilyn Rust.

The sound design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise.

Sarah Nix edited the scripts.

Cautionary Tales features the voice talents of Ben Crowe, Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford, Gemma Saunders and Rufus Wright.

The show wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilley, Greta Cohn, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey, and Owen Miller.

Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries.

It's recorded at Wardore Studios in London by Tom Berry.

If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review.

It does 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.fm slash plus

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