How to Walk from Mumbai to San Francisco: Saumya Roy Navigates the Cracks in the American Dream

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. Earlier this month, we did a show, with Madeleine Schwartz, on the United States. She's based in Paris. She was born in the US, but lives in Paris. She's the founder of The Dial, an interesting new online magazine which operates out of Paris. And they've just come out with an interesting book called How We See It: The World Looks at America in the Age of Trump. Schwartz did the introduction, but the book is made up of a number of essays of contributors, including, my guest today, Saumya Roy. She's the San Francisco based correspondent of Al Jazeera, and she writes an interesting piece in, in as, How We See It, comparing, I think, in some ways, her hometown of Mumbai with San Francisco where she lives, just actually down the street from me. Saumya, congratulations, on your contribution, and very nice to have you on the show.

00:01:36 Saumya Roy: Thank you. Thank you for having me on.

00:01:38 Andrew Keen: So how do you see America, Saumya? Before we get to your piece and maybe the comparison of Mumbai and, and San Francisco, in a broad sense, how do you see the United States?

00:01:53 Saumya Roy: You know, I first came here, more than twenty years ago as a graduate student. And I have to say, I, I loved it because with sometimes as far as we are able to dream most of all. Right? I could see that America was that place that allowed you to become whoever you wanted to be, that you could live a dream. Right? I think many of us grew up seeing that the dream of America and, being here as a graduate student many years ago allowed me to see how you could make your life and your yourself and your personality in the way that you, could imagine the best you could imagine the best for yourself and then live it out. And so it really fascinated me in those early years as it does to me, except that as I see it more and more closely, I see that the dream can be fulfilled and the dream can be cracked. And so I see a fuller picture the more time I spend here.

00:03:00 Andrew Keen: What does a crack that's interesting you choose that word cracked. What does a cracked dream look like, Saumya?

00:03:07 Saumya Roy: Yeah. Just the other day, you know, I was taking a cab in the city and I met, you know, the cab driver. I think he was Indian and I began talking to him. And I asked him, well, how did you end up coming here? And he said, I walked from Mumbai to the US. And I think there was a lot unseen in that. Okay? So as Indians over the years, we have we've lived that dream of, we what we always see is Indians who are in the tech sector here in San Francisco who are doing very well, who are the CEOs of all the way of many of the big tech companies. It is, you know, the American dream is one where you come and you, you know, make an amazing life for yourself. But it's like a wave, right? Like San Francisco is a city, which is a boom and bust town and we always in popular imagination, we see America for its boom, for the great waves of success. But if you get left out of that wave, then you could be one of those, you know, there are also those taxi drivers or so many millions of Indians like that or people who come here, you know, literally walk, whatever their status might be.

00:04:21 Andrew Keen: I mean, when he says he walked, I assume he meant that symbolically, did he?

00:04:26 Saumya Roy: I okay. So my — the way I filled out that gap was to think he literally may have walked through, like, you know, through the border or something like that if I felt it best not to ask further. But there are a lot of undocumented Indians in this country as well. While we are known to many Indians work in the tech sector and are highly successful, there are many who literally also are undocumented, come here and do small jobs and, crave success and get left behind by that wave. And that to me is a crack. When I came here a few years ago and I would ride the trains and I myself came here thinking that, okay, this was, you know, the this San Francisco to me symbolized, one of the great economic booms of our age. And I thought of it as a city of great wealth. But when I came here and I saw the sidewalks full of or in not maybe not full, but suddenly dotted with people living on the sidewalks, I thought, well, how is it that this is a probably a city that has, you know, it that produces that yields more money, generates more money than the entire economy of India, which is now the most populous country in the world, and yet there are people living on the street just riding subway cars as their home. That to me was a crack.

00:05:53 Andrew Keen: You also wrote a well known book that was acclaimed, certainly, in the United States. It was one of NPR's favorite books from 2021, Castaway Mountain: Love and Loss Among the Wastepickers of Mumbai. So you're familiar with homelessness and poverty in Mumbai. I know in your essay in, How We See It, you compare poverty in a place like Mumbai with poverty in San Francisco. How do they compare?

00:06:27 Saumya Roy: Oh, yeah. So at as I said, first of all, I came here expecting great wealth, which certainly there is. What came as a surprise to me was the similarity when I saw homeless people, like, when I would ride subway cars and on the side, of, of the train tracks, there would be people living in homes made of bedsheets, homes made of plastic sheets, very much like I had seen the homeless in Mumbai live. Except that I feel when I saw it and it reminded me of the images of what I had seen in Mumbai and the difference being that when you see homeless people in Mumbai and they're living on a sidewalk, even in the distance, you will see cooking smells, you will see cradles with babies, which is to say that they live as families, they live with a sense of community. Whereas here, what would always strike me is with deep sense of isolation. They're walking with a shopping cart in a subway car. Everything they own is on the shopping cart. They don't know where to get off because there's no one waiting for them, and nowhere to go. So they could get off on one stop, then they get back in, then they go back another few stops and, you know, they could just go anywhere. They're aimless. And I felt there was so I felt there was a deep sense of isolation here, which is not something I saw there. In Mumbai, I would say the scale of poverty is just humongous compared to what it is in the US. It's dehumanizing. It's at a huge scale. But what I saw here was a sense of isolation. And also, I think the American dream is very much about a sense of personal responsibility. Like, if you work hard, you do well. You'll have a house, a car, a pool. And therefore, the reverse is true as well. I suppose they believe that a reverse is true the reverse is true as well. So if they are on the street, they feel somewhere responsible. I often would meet people who said that for Christmas, they would go to meet their families, they would go to a gym, have a bath, go to meet their families, but not tell them where they were living.

00:08:30 Andrew Keen: Does this fragmented, isolated nature of poverty in the United States make it somehow worse? I mean, as you know, Mumbai is a city in many ways dominated, at least when I've been there, dominated by terrible kinds of poverty. But does it make it, if it's more social, somehow more acceptable, more manageable, more palatable, both for observers and for the people actually experiencing it?

00:09:01 Saumya Roy: I mean, none of it is act it's not I would just say that it's not acceptable on either side. It's not acceptable in Mumbai just because, there are I mean, I've seen young children have tuberculosis, asthma, etcetera, die in their teens. So it's I wouldn't say that either is ex it's acceptable. And certainly, I mean, here, if you think about San Francisco is like eight thousand people in one survey who were homeless, whereas in Mumbai, maybe, I mean, good maybe over a 100,000 people on the street. So either way is unacceptable. But having said that, I feel what I write in the essay is that there is a double burden here. There is the burden of being homeless and the burden of being judged for it. And that is a it's a heavy burden to carry.

00:09:48 Andrew Keen: Yeah. It's disconcerting as you know. I mean, San Francisco, in some ways, is one of the wealthiest cities in the world. Enormous tech wealth. Real estate is inflated and inflationary and completely out of control now given the AI boom, and yet there is this I would call it a small army. I mean, sometimes it's a little exaggerated, but there is a great deal of homelessness as you walk around, Saumya, isn't there?

00:10:18 Saumya Roy: Yes. Absolutely. There is and I suppose there is an outsider sense that this could be dealt with given the money that there is.

00:10:30 Andrew Keen: And some people might suggest, given American prosperity, given the fact that the United States, at least in economic terms, continues to pull away from, certainly, from Europe and there's a current AI boom going on, that this is a cost, maybe even a necessary cost of its economic domination. Do you see it in those terms?

00:10:57 Saumya Roy: I see that narrative. Yes. I suppose that, like, this is, as you know, a boom and bust town. Right? San Francisco, they've seen every a new wave of growth. We could go back into history, which you may know better than me, but certainly even with the tech world, there was the dot-com boom, there was the social media boom, which is probably still going on, and now the AI boom. Right? And I suppose the narrative, which is certainly true to an extent is that it is when you allow innovation, you allow, the freedom for businesses to grow. That is when growth happens. And if you were to kind of shackle them with, oh, you know, you need to pay so much, you need to have so much of a social security net that would bump them down. I understand that. But I do also feel when you see that sort of avoidable homelessness, you do wonder that what is growth really if it doesn't translate to a better quality of life for people who need it most? That growth has to deliver not only for the very wealthy, but for those who are extremely poor as well.

00:12:13 Andrew Keen: How do you think, Saumya, how are Americans dealing with this reality of such radical poverty? The book came out a few years ago by, Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, which got a lot of awards. Your book in some ways, I think, is written in that tradition where Americans think of India as a place of massive poverty. But now, of course, as you know, there's similar kind of poverty in the United States. Are Americans aware of it?

00:12:50 Saumya Roy: Well, we I mean, the way I would put it is maybe there's not that level of poverty in the US, but what I will say my sense as an outsider, I'll again say that I'm an outsider. Well, my sense is that there is a degree of anger and frustration at them maybe people maybe not having the life that they their parents had. Right? Like, having that how maybe affordability that the affordability and the quality of life that their parents had maybe is becoming a little more of a distant dream for young people coming into the job market today. The real estate, like, where if their parents had a home, today the dream of home ownership of, all of those markers of a good quality of life are becoming harder and harder for young people to reach. And there is a sense of, frustration about that, and you see that coming out in different ways.

00:13:45 Andrew Keen: The book, that you've contributed to has a subtitle, The World Looks at America in the Age of Trump. You've lived in America, Saumya, before the age of Trump. Do you see a radical disjuncture in America, in the America that you came to compared to the America today of Donald Trump?

00:14:06 Saumya Roy: I would say that when we live in San Francisco, I mean, it's a little bit of a bubble for sure, so I don't, you know, experience maybe what many other Americans do. So I may not be the best example of that. Yeah. I mean, something seems to have changed in America for sure. And some of it comes from this. I feel some of it comes from this generation maybe finding that dream of a great American life that their parents have just always seeming out of reach. I was reading somewhere that for many Americans just filling gas in their cars is getting harder and harder. When I speak to younger Americans, the idea of owning a home is harder if you lose a job. Even in the tech sector, finding a job again is taking longer and longer. If you're a young college graduate, getting a job could take you up to a year. So all of those markers of a good life are just becoming somewhat harder for Americans as I see. That is leading that is people are grappling to change that in different ways. And so possibly you see people moving in very different directions sometimes. Some are moving to the right, some are moving to the left. But there is that sense of dissatisfaction about that, if I may say.

00:15:29 Andrew Keen: Many foreign correspondents are describing America in almost apocalyptic terms. An old friend of the show, Stephen Marche, for example, had a piece in the New York Times a few days ago on the zombification of America. Do you think that I'm not sure if you saw the Marche piece in the New York Times. But do you think some foreigners, outsiders, and perhaps even Americans are exaggerating how dark and depressing and zombified America currently is?

00:16:06 Saumya Roy: Some of it seems to be like you know, when you say zombification, I think some of it describes an emotional, sort of sentiment in the United States and that, like you said, a dark sentiment. When you look at sort of economic numbers necessarily in as darker space, but emotionally, I think there is that there are people who feel that this is not what they kind of thought, America. It's the idea of America that they are kind of concerned about, that they feel, okay, this is not the America that I grew up in. And so that is the kind of darkness that I sense.

00:16:50 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And it's a weird experience because another person we had on the show recently is, Mehran Gul, whose book, The New Geography of Innovation, has won all sorts of awards. And he knows that all the innovation these days is concentrated in the United States and China, not in Europe, not in India, for that matter. So what's odd about America is on the one hand, it's in a remarkably innovative place, and on the other hand, it's increasingly dark dominated by poverty, homelessness, anxiety

00:17:23 Saumya Roy: Yeah.

00:17:24 Andrew Keen: And, of course, these great political divisions in the country.

00:17:31 Saumya Roy: You know, absolutely. And I would say I think I would say that there has been a there is a very deep and rising inequality, because especially with AI, if you see a lot of the economic growth that is coming in America today comes from investments in AI and data centers and that sort of space. This is not wealth that is very well distributed. So the if you are riding that AI wave, if you are a research scientist working in AI, you could be earning $250 million salary. But if you're not in that and you're in any other sector, people Americans are not necessarily feeling that sense of growth or stability or, any kind of cushion. Like, even a small medical expense could make life difficult for you. And I think that innovation certainly is keeping growth going. It's driving growth tremendously. As you know, we have $23 IPO [unclear — possibly "two, three trillion-dollar IPOs"] from San Francisco based companies. And I suspect those are going to change the face of this city for a long time to come. Right? But having said that, I think it's that wealth is not necessarily getting distributed very well and people are not feeling the, impact of that across different sectors or any or across like, AI actually might lead to people losing jobs rather than it to improve quality of life. And I think that is something that policymakers have to kind of contend with and deal with. That what is that innovation going to mean in terms of standards and quality of life for people or job security for people? And that is part of the anxiety. I think poll after poll is showing that seventy or eighty percent of all Americans, one of their main concerns is that their job they could lose their jobs because of investments in AI. Not only because of innovation caused by AI, but because of investments made in AI.

00:19:32 Andrew Keen: As I said earlier, you're the Al Jazeera correspondent in San Francisco focusing on the environment and on tech. You recently wrote a piece about California mulling a billionaire tax. How is California and this remarkable prosperity and poverty existing in parallel? How is it seen in the Gulf? Al Jazeera, of course, is a Gulf, Gulf owned newspaper. Do many people in the Gulf, in Qatar, in the Arab Emirates, is it seen as a place they want to emulate or avoid?

00:20:16 Saumya Roy: Oh, wow. I mean, so Al Jazeera actually, I suspect is read really all over the world. I moved here from Mumbai, and many people in India read Al Jazeera as well. It is right across Europe in the US as well. The I mean, how it seemed how the you're asking me how the US is

00:20:42 Andrew Keen: Right? I'm curious as whether people see it as a model clearly for its innovation. It's the enormous wealth. You note that there are two where, on the brink of two more trillion dollar IPOs. We've already had one with SpaceX, although, of course, they're based in, in Texas. So that's the on the one hand. On the other hand, we have all the familiar problems in the United States. So is it seen as a place, not just in the Gulf, but in India, which you know intimately that people want to emulate or avoid?

00:21:16 Saumya Roy: Yes. Yes. Absolutely. I will say I mean, as, in India, I remember, like, just last year or so, I was doing some reporting in India on unemployment in India. Alright. So I went to a slum in Mumbai and, you know, walked up a steep staircase to meet a young guy who had probably been a gig worker. And we began to chat and I said, well, what do you wanna do? What is your dream? Who do you wanna be like? And he said, I wanna be the Elon Musk of India. So I think that is certainly the dream. We, there are many young people who, as you know, I mean, we had also a more controlled economy and the dream for many Indians that we have our own little, sort of startup sector. There are many Indians who grow up with this dream of being like Sergey Brin and Larry Page's photographs you showed to have their own startups, to have their own, to come up with a solution for a problem that many Indians face that we will come up with our own solution and scale it all over the world. I know that many of the gulf funds are invested in many of the tech companies that are changing the face of the world including Uber and BB [unclear] and, you know, many of the new tech businesses do have investments from gulf sovereign funds. Many Indians has, you know, dream of being startup innovators very much in the vein of Elon Musk or Sergey Brin or Larry Page. So yes, with that dream is sometimes I wonder even burns brighter for many young Indians or maybe people in the Gulf than it does even in the US. That is what brings them to the US and makes them pursue that dream, like, you know, with so much passion.

00:22:54 Andrew Keen: Do you think, Saumya, that, as I said, you recently wrote about a potential billionaire tax in the United States or at least in California. OpenAI now is talking about 5% of the company being owned by the government or perhaps by other American citizens. Do you think that the world looks to California and the tech industry for these kinds of innovations?

00:23:25 Saumya Roy: It does. It absolutely does. And I think for the US government, it's as well, they'll they want to. It made sense, I think, in some ways to be a part of either to have their own kind of innovation and computing capacity or to be a part of, you know, to have a stake in these companies because we look at it as a sort of, interest. I mean, maybe I won't use the word security because, I mean, what do I know? What is in there? But certainly national interest. And I do think the world like, India is also a great consumer of AI, of social media. Some of the largest number of users of, many of the social media platforms, including WhatsApp and, Instagram, YouTube, etcetera, do come from India. So they consume much of this and they look at this innovation. The their lives are changing. We are, India is now the greatest, has more smartphones than any I think more smartphones than anywhere else in the world and the fastest growing smartphone market in the world because they're consuming all of this social media. Right? And so they look at the US to for this kind of innovation that is then going to change their lives, that they are going to use to upload content, create their own ads, create their to build innovation on that.

00:24:46 Andrew Keen: What can America, Saumya, learn from India or from other

00:24:52 Saumya Roy: Yeah.

00:24:53 Andrew Keen: countries outside the United States? What I mean, you the book that you contribute to is about how the world looks at America in the age of Trump. Trump, of course, I think, would probably resist acknowledging that he could learn anything from anyone, anyone outside the United States, probably anyone outside himself. But are there things that Americans can, for example, learn from, Mumbai, for example, where you're from or from India or from the Gulf?

00:25:26 Saumya Roy: Yeah. I what I write in this piece, I won't sort of make it too broad, but what I did see in my piece was that, one of the things that worked in Mumbai, I remember way back when I went to college, as I said, I saw very similar scenes of homelessness. And I remember my editor at The Dial saying, when you're writing about Mumbai, why are you not saying homeless? And why is it that when you're writing about San Francisco, you're saying homeless? And I it made me think that it was not just a word problem, but really an issue that we see a lot in my own lifetime. I have seen much less unsheltered homelessness in Mumbai. It has come down from what it was before, and the way that they did it, I think there's a pretty successful model of reducing unsheltered homelessness. Like people live in slums, right, and still the quality of housing may not be great, but unsheltered like people living on the street, people living on sidewalks has certainly come down in my own lifetime. And the way that it was done was by involving communities, by involving women in communities, giving people a sense who live on sidewalks, that they're going to be safe, they're going to be comfortable when they move to houses. We will give you alternate housing, and you will feel comfortable and happy and safe and secure there. And that allowed more than a 100,000 people to move out of sidewalks along railway tracks and move into housing in Mumbai. And I think, that is something that you that at least San Francisco could kind of adopt is to increase, community participation, to give people a sense that, look, look, the city is not, kind of demonizing you. You know, I find this, narrative that, oh, anyone who lives on the sidewalk is someone with substance use issues, someone who's just crazy, someone who's just come to avail of benefits, come to take, sort of free social benefits. Whereas what I always found was these were people who were working and they were essentially priced out. So clearly there is a problem of substance use and mental health issues, but I also found many, many people who were working, who had just been priced out, who couldn't afford to live in the city anymore. I would often meet people who lived in their homes, couldn't afford rent, moved into their car. When parking tickets piled up, they moved out of their car into the sidewalk and became homeless. And so I think rather than demonize them to find alternate housing, to find ways to reach out to them is something I saw. I saw these things happen in Mumbai. I saw them work, and I feel having a more sort of community based system of humane approach really might be a wonderful way of dealing with this.

00:27:59 Andrew Keen: Yeah. We've done a number of shows, particularly on homelessness in San Francisco. We had one author who talked about our moral responsibility, I guess, to, if not hug a homeless person, certainly befriend them, to humanize homelessness in the way in which some people just walk past homeless people in the street as if they don't exist. You seem to be suggesting that, in a sense, is perhaps what Californians can learn from India.

00:28:30 Saumya Roy: Yeah. I mean, I yeah. I mean, I wouldn't necessarily say hard, but, yeah, I mean, in the spirit of that, yes, I think this sense of demonization that they pose, I often hear this now that they pose a kind of a threat to the safety of the city. They pose a threat to, life and liberty in the city. I think that there may be some truth to it, but that's not necessarily I think I found that just about ten to twelve percent people were reporting substance use or mental health issues as a reason for their homelessness. So essentially, people eighty eight percent people who are homeless is because they just can't afford rents in the city. Rents are just through the roof. Right? And people can't afford it and they're working two jobs, they're working three jobs, they're walking long distances back home. And those are people who deserve a hug more than they deserve to be evicted and, you know, sweeps where their things are thrown into, you know, locked up and things like that. That's not what these are not criminals.

00:29:34 Andrew Keen: Saumya, you're not as much a political writer. You're based in San Francisco. Of course, the, the politics of this country mostly takes place in Washington, DC. But what's your take on the crisis of democracy or what some people see as the crisis of democracy in this country? Not just perhaps associated with Trump, but with media, conglomeration of media. Yeah. And it would seem at least, in some people's eyes, less and less of a freedom to express oneself.

00:30:06 Saumya Roy: Yeah. I mean, what I would say is that there is a sense, of a disconnect, where I think people are kind of some what you see on the right and what you see on the left is that there is a the growth of the right and the left, I suppose, shows a sense that the two parties are not necessarily reflecting, what people maybe want them to reflect or what they're feeling. They're feeling that their lives are not getting better, that things are increasingly out of reach. And so out of whether it is for economic reasons or other reasons, political reasons, foreign policy, they feel maybe that their party, the traditional party system is not necessarily reflecting their, their, the crises that they are experiencing. And so they are moving in, there is a fragmentation where they are moving in different directions, looking for answers, grappling for them. And that's we a sense that I get, that sense of people grappling for something different from what has been the social political structure for several decades that people are looking to break out of that.

00:31:22 Andrew Keen: And what about technology? Some countries outside the United States, Australia, France, other countries in Europe are banning social media for kids. There's more and more of a reaction against technology, although that's certainly not true in China or probably in India. As the world looks at America critically, are they looking against progress, against technology?

00:31:53 Saumya Roy: I think there is a realization of how much it is seeping into our lives and how much it is shaping lives across the world. As I said, more Indians are consuming, you know, social media and all of that, than maybe anywhere else in the world. There are people uploading content and consuming it, influencers and people consuming all that content in India, maybe more so than anywhere. And so there is a deep sense of awareness and growing sense of awareness of how this is shaping us, what our learning gaps are, what our social isolation and disconnects are because of this. And so I think actually it is possible that even in India, we may now see some kind of regulation on social media. We see that young people as they grow up, how is it impacting their ability to make social connection? I actually recently wrote about a young teenager in the Bay Area who was speaking to ChatGPT about having depression, having anxiety, and in the end, planning his own suicide and then committing suicide. So and I don't think it's only in the US cases like this have happened elsewhere. And there is a deep recognition that technology is shaping our lives and our being more than, ever before and that something maybe need we need a regulation for.

00:33:25 Andrew Keen: And finally, what about the environment? I know you've written a lot about water in California, wind energy projects that the Trump people have canceled. The Chinese seem to be pioneering a lot of alternative energies. Do you see from your perch in San Francisco Americans falling behind the rest of the world and, again, learning about alternative energy from, China, India, Europe?

00:33:53 Saumya Roy: Yeah. I think in many technologies, or renewable energy, sustainable energy related technologies, California has been a world leader. But I think over the last, you know, couple of with the new federal administration, there has been a sharp pivot in policy, where there is a greater emphasis on fossil fuels going back to fossil fuels to coal, to gas, to oil refining, bringing back oil refining, oil exploration within California. So there has been a sharp pivot. There has been a lot like I wrote about these offshore wind energy projects that the administration paid the developers not to do the projects, because we they are increasingly looking at fossil fuels rather than solar, rather than wind, rather than EVs. EVs subsidies are gone. Charging station subsidies are gone. So there has been a very sharp pivot. What impact that is going to have will be very interesting. For cars, for instance, it write about disconnect between the global car market, which is moving increasingly towards, EVs, electric vehicles, whereas the US carmakers the US market is still using gas guzzlers, and it might move increasingly in that direction thanks to policy.

00:35:08 Andrew Keen: Well, Saumya Roy, Al Jazeera's person in San Francisco and a contributor to, an excellent new volume, How We See It, put together by Madeleine Schwartz of The Dial. I really wanna thank you for your time and for reporting. So, honestly, I think on America, you don't seem to be someone who's falling into either camp, either the MAGA camp or everything in America has gone bad. Thank you so much.

00:35:36 Saumya Roy: Thank you. Thank you for having me.