An evening with Michael Sandel

NS Ramnath
Updated: Mar 18, 2012 12:03:47 PM UTC

At one point in the promotional video of Michael Sandel's Harvard course on justice, you get an aerial view of his lecture room, which will demolish any preconceived notions you might have about a philosophy class. It’s huge. When Sandel stands on stage, it's more like a pianist performing for a large audience at a huge opera house than a professor teaching in a classroom. You see rows and rows of students — at least a thousand — tightly packed into the two levels of the auditorium.

Sandel is popular not just at Harvard. "He’s a rock star in Asia", Thomas Friedman wrote last year, “and people in China, Japan and South Korea scalp tickets to hear him”. His 2007 Justice course was filmed by PBS, and it's one of the most watched on iTunes University. On Youtube, the first episode*, which lasts about an hour*, has been viewed over 3.57 million times. (In terms of total hours spent, it comes close to the 'Kolaveri di' video).

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Sandel is touring India right now. A friend who attended his first lecture at Infosys campus in Bangalore tells me the auditorium was jam-packed, and she could get in only by showing her press card. “You should have seen the crowd and the response. He is a rock star,” she says. I wanted to attend his second lecture in Bangalore, scheduled to be at 6:30 p.m. at Nimhans Convention Centre. I decide to play safe, go early and get myself a good seat.


It’s 5:30 p.m. A huge screen on stage has a photograph of Sandel, above the topic of discussion today: “Equality, Affirmative Action and Meritocracy.” There are half a dozen people with Infosys tags scurrying around. (The lecture is organised by Infosys Science Foundation). Otherwise, not a single seat is occupied. “It will get filled up in no time,” I tell myself. I walk to the middle of the auditorium and take a seat by the aisle. I spend a few minutes looking at people setting up the cameras and the mike on the stage. I am bored, I step out to a stand selling Sandel’s book Justice. I buy a copy, find my way back and settle down.

Some more time passes. Now, Sandel walks into the auditorium with a case in his hand, and accompanied by an Infosys Science Foundation official. He positions himself at the centre and surveys the territory. About eight seats are occupied now. The ISF official tells him, “There are three cameras, and there will be one on the stage behind you”. Sandel nods, and turns around to look at the rear end of the arena and then at the balcony. “After this level gets filled up, we will open the balcony,” she says. Sandel seems satisfied. I start leafing through the book.

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6:30 p.m. It’s time to start now. But, there is hardly anyone in the hall. I look around, and see just five or six partly-filled rows. I desperately try to reason. Maybe 6:30 p.m. is peak hour, and people are caught up in traffic. Maybe they are just outside, waiting in a queue to register. Or God forbid, they didn’t know Sandel was here and might not even come. Maybe this is the entire audience. 50? 60? 100? 150? Whatever, it seems too small for such a big hall.

I feel bad for Sandel. After all, he's accustomed to crowds even in a classroom. The kind of person who gets energised by vast numbers of people. And by the way he looked up at the balcony, I thought he imagined it to be Sanders Theatre at Harvard, waiting to be filled in with eager students.

Then I spot NR Narayana Murthy and feel bad for him also. He too probably expected a big turnout.

NRN looks like a strict grandfather, but at the same time a very likable and reasonable one. The kind of person who will buy ice cream to his grandchildren, take them to the park and to the zoo, let them play forever and still make sure they do their homework.

By 6:45, NRN walks to the front and calls out: “Why don’t you all come to the front? It will be more intimate.” I go down to the fourth row, thinking 'intimate' is a very good euphemism for 'small' and making a mental note to use this soon. Maybe at my first book launch.

People settle down in their new seats. Rohan Murty, NRN’s son, who studied at Harvard and invited Sandel to India, goes up to the stage to give the introduction. He is dressed in jeans and t-shirt, and carries an iPad with him. He speaks with confidence and a good sense of humour. In the course of his introduction, he compares Sandel to Sachin Tendulkar, and heave a mental sigh: everyone seems to want to hitch wagons to that star.

Sandel is now up on the stage. I expect him to begin his talk with no prelude, pretty much the way he starts his classes in the PBS series, and the way most TED Talks begin, as if to say, let's get down to business. But, he spends some time thanking the Murthy family and telling us how he feels at home in Bangalore, his first visit to this city. He then walks down the stage, and gets closer to the audience.

It now really seems like an intimate gathering now. There are 7 or 8 chirpy school students by my side. Half a dozen grey-haired couples are scattered across the hall. But most people in the audience seem to be in their 20s or 30s. Two rows ahead of me, I spot Rohini Nilekani, and a teenager next to her busy with his iPad. And one row ahead of them, there is NRN with wife Sudha Murthy, Rohan Murty and daughter-in-law Lakshmi Venu. There are a few other important-looking people in the audience, but I am not able to identify any. I turn my attention back to Sandel.

He is now talking about a law that Germany tried to pass soon after 9/11, giving the government the right to shoot down airplanes hijacked by terrorists with the intention of turning them into weapons. Is shooting such a plane down right thing to do, if it means saving many people? Heated arguments follow.

It's not so much a lecture as it is a discussion. Sandel moves from one side of the hall to another, asking questions, summarising, prodding, provoking. The audience seem to be up to it. I sit amazed, watching some of the kids jumping up to answer, and sharing their views. They seem to have thought deeply about these issues, and are capable of articulating them well.

At one point, a school student sitting next to me gets up to say that he doesn’t agree with an argument made by a girl in the front, because it was similar to Bentham’s own argument, with which, of course, he disagreed. Sandel seems to be impressed and gives him a smile. Until a few years ago, the only thing I knew that was remotely close to Bentham was Botham, the cricketer! (Well, you know, they sound alike to Indian ears.)

Beefy Botham apart, I see now that Rohan Murthy's Tendulkar comparison was pretty apt: Sandel is a master, a superior artist, sound of technique and ready, and able, to improvise. He gives a kind of immediacy to age-old concepts by drawing on what happened yesterday, events that are clear in our memories, events that we feel strongly about. He probably draws his examples from the same newspapers and magazines that you and I read, but he lifts the veil to reveal the moral problems behind the events and conflicts. He is amazingly quick to not only grasp the core of an argument put forth by a member of audience, but also to show how it’s similar to ones proposed by say Aristotle, or Rawls, or Mill, or Nozick.

Suddenly, philosophy seems accessible, and even practical.


It’s over an hour since he began. Sandel invites questions.

Someone asks him about affirmative action. Drawing on Rawls's philosophy and the idea of morally arbitrary factors, Sandel makes a persuasive case for it (or so it seems to me). There is another question about a Simpsons character, supposedly based on Sandel. In the series, Mr Burns — who has a broad forehead and thin lips like Sandel — is not a very likable person. The questioner suggests that perhaps the character is actually the opposite of Sandel. Sandel smiles and says he hopes so.

The event slowly draws to a close. I have the distinct feeling of having attended a music concert or a play rather than a philosophy lecture.

By the time I switch off the recorder and put it, along with Sandel’s book, inside my bag, about 20 people have gathered around Sandel. Some are talking to him, some are waiting to take an autograph. I look around and realise that the rest had already dispersed. His Harvard class would still be filing out of the auditorium!


As I make my way out, the low turnout continues to bother me. Perhaps this has something to do with my own job as a business journalist, where there is a constant pressure to find answers in numbers and to seek validation in scale.

The thought persists even as I rev up my two-wheeler and ride back home. The road is free of traffic, and the breeze is pleasant. It cools my head, and sets me thinking.

Am I subconsciously stretching the idea of 'show me the data' a bit too much? Is my botheration really an indicator of that clever question: 'If he is so good, how come there were so few people?'

That's probably the case, and two points strike me as important.

First, it's easy to forget that metrics have limitations. That they can be manipulated is a risk that we are probably well aware of. But we tend to be blind to our own biases. We might be tracking a certain number just because it's easy. (That perhaps explains the shortage of value investors. Relative valuation is much easier than discounted cash flow). Or we might be looking at a specific metric just because they can be accurately measured. When I was reporting for a story on Nachiket Mor, I heard that one of his favorite quotations was: ‘It’s far better to inaccurately measure something you care about, than to accurately measure something that you don’t care about." I am probably guilty on both counts. If I wanted to get a sense of Sandel's influence, I should have spent some time talking to people to find out what his impact was. A part of my mind was stuck on the number of people, because that was easier to track.

But the second is the more important point. It relates to excluding the morally arbitrary factors in our calculations, and in our thinking. For example, when we think of meritocracy in colleges, we anchor it on the exam scores. Yet, our performances in examinations do not depend on our efforts alone: they are affected by the family we were born in, the natural talent we were blessed with, or at times, as Satyajit Ray has shown us in Jana Aranya, random things like the glasses of an examiner!

In case of Sandel, the low turnout had nothing to do with the merits of the event. And if I had not known anything about Sandel earlier, and if I had decided to walk away, going by the small crowd in auditorium, I would have missed a superb session, and worse, gone away with a bias against him. The mistake here is letting the certainty and the comfort of what we see in front of our eyes and the illusion of analysis replace a more thorough examination.

Perhaps that's the point of Sandel's method of teaching. To remind us of what a Greek philosopher said centuries ago: The unexamined life is not worth living.


* Sandel's lecture, referred to above:


[My colleague, Mitu Jayashankar, attended a far more crowded Sandel lecture. And she also attended a dinner in his honour. Her post is here.]

The thoughts and opinions shared here are of the author.

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