Towards a life of simplicity

My persistent fear during the last few days in London over the summer was whether I would once again be consumed by Oxford. Oxford in general, and Rhodes House in particular, are full of people with strong opinions, and the courage and fortitude to bring change. There are strong movements, and counter-movements. At around the same time, it seemed to me that opinions on my facebook wall reached a new level - with frequent exchanges between those who like Modi and those who dislike him. It made me agitated, and gradually that agitation made way for sadness.

I often wanted to sit down on my laptop and talk to some of those issues. I wanted to pose some questions, answer some that I knew about, and to generally try to put structure around these emotionally charged discussions. But I felt overwhelmed. Overwhelmed that my voice would be drowned. Overwhelmed by the fact that lines had already been drawn. Overwhelmed by the fact that maybe, just maybe, I am actually ignorant - that those who've taken positions understand it much better than I do.

But then I remembered that being overwhelmed is something I have felt before. I felt overwhelmed when, on seeing 'predicted scores' given by my teachers, my foreign admissions counsellor scoffed "as if you're ever going to get these." I felt overwhelmed when, long back, I worked very hard but never performed well academically. I felt overwhelmed when my friends were unfairly and unceremoniously ejected from student bodies. I felt overwhelmed when, despite my academic and extracurricular performance, I was never considered for any college awards. In each case, I felt hopeless and lost as I now do. And in each case, I did what my parents taught me best - to quietly work hard - to finally find redemption.

Today, I have come to a position of extreme privilege. I started life riding the wave of opportunities that my parents created for me, an already privileged existence in the Indian context. Mile by mile, I have travelled so far that I am now well entrenched in the system. Where do I go from here?

For the answers, I looked back. My greatest journeys were ones of service. Service towards friends, acquaintances, and even strangers. At those times, when I was faced with heart-break, humiliation, jealousy, angst and so, so many strong emotions, the idea of service lead me to the state where I am. If there is something that has motivated me unlike anything else, it is this idea of service. And that is something I have tried to do over the past few weeks. For example, this year my birthday was preceded and followed by several days of doubt, like it has for the past 5-6 years. I wanted to do something meaningful, and found that meaning in donating money at milaap. I have immersed myself with RSSAF's consulting work so that I can find myself creating change in people's lives. One of the organisations I consulted came back with the case of a severely handicapped girl in Uganda. I have no context or specialisation - with disability, with gender, with sub - saharan Africa. And yet, I was moved to action. By an unspoken, yet compelling bond. By the idea of service.

What does this imply for my participation in discussions and movements that I am surrounded by? The idea of service, to me, is to reduce myself to zero - to nothingness. Because my service will remain insufficient if I look at it with eyes tained with myself, and my experiences. This insignificance brings clarity, and clarity brings a fortitude that is unshakeable. Towards this simplicity, and that strength, I seek to move.

Ferment Within

Last Friday, I made my way to London to visit a Durga Puja pandal. I reached just in time for the last anjali of the year, and sat through the dashami puja. At the same time, many Rhodes Scholars were in London to express solidarity with protestors in South Africa. They made their way to the South African High Commission and even made the High Commissioner sit with them on the ground and listen to them.

It's been a frequent occurence through the year. As part of the Rhodes Scholar community, I am exposed to a large number of inspirational (and often intimidatingly brilliant) young men and women seeking to disrupt the existing system. There is a revolutionary fervour in the air. There is impatience with status quo. And there is boldness in attacking the system. 

However, my battles have mostly been within. This experience at Oxford has given me the opportunity and the distance to be able to look at my own actions and try to make sense of them. It has given me the opportunity to be critical of thoughts I have had and actions I have undertaken. It is a process that has gained momentum since I read Gandhi's autobiography. Gandhi, a deeply flawed political leader and activist, showed a great deal of self-awareness and honesty. That is something that I seek to replicate.

I was recently asked in a professional conversation what I want to do in life. I said that I wanted to earn enough money, and keep myself professionally excited and engaged. But what I really seek to do is to initiate and contribute to, and to learn from, a conversation about this internal ferment. I want to continue to push myself to be a better and more sensitive human being, and I want people to know about my thoughts (so they can learn) and I want to learn from them so I can advance myself.

I also believe that this kind of clarity will help me be more impactful professionally. At work, I have often found myself face the temptation to confirm to what is common. However, over time I have come to start giving shape to what I believe would be my way of navigating workplaces. I sought to, and at least partially succeeded in, harmonising how I behave in my personal and professional lives.

The Durga Puja in London was my way to reconnect with my cultural heritage. But it was also a way for me to engage with my past and to reflect. The festival will return again next year - reminding us of the circularity of life, the ebb and flow of this mortal existence. The only hope is that the next time it comes around, we'll be in a better place.

Communal Violence and Politics in India

The discussion about communalism has come to the centre stage in national discourse once again. The allegedly beef-related lynching in Dadri, followed by the protest by writers, has raised fears of a saffron - induced surged in communal incidents. The fact that communal riots are driven by political considerations is well - understood. However, there is a large number of bbooks about what increases the probability of communal riots. The book 'Votes and Violence' by Wilkinson was one such book that I happened to read. It is a painstakingly put together econometric analysis of communal incidents in India since independence. The results, while reinforcing certain widely-held beliefs, also discredits other notions that we have.

While researching for my article on Islam for The Indian Opinion, my focus was very much on the question of law and order. Wilkinson's book helped me think through many such issues. Some facts were validated - for example, that communal incidents saw a major spike in the 1990s (coincident with the rapid rise of the BJP). Wilkinson set up several different specifications of his basic model with the probability of riots as the dependent variable. In each such specification, whether there were elections in the next 6 months was a statistically significant independent variable. Using instrumental variables, Wilkinson also argued that economic competition between Hindus and Muslims does not impact communal incidents at all. Evidently, the premiss for a communal conflagration has to be conjured up from nothingness. Hence the freak incidents of the kind we saw in Dadri are either engineered or exploited to create communal tension.

What is interesting, however, is the role of caste - based politics in containing communal riots. When Lalu Prasad talks about 'mandal' (caste) versus 'kamandal' (communal) politics, he is (intentionally or unintentionally) making a very valid point. Communal riots are seen to be more likely in bi-polar states, where political consolidation between two parties reduces the importance of the muslim vote. Caste politics, by fragmenting the Hindu vote, makes the muslim voters more important at the margin, and therefore reduces the likelihood of communal incidents. Law and order is a state subject, but communal riots are no less likely to happen in Congress-ruled states than in other states. There are many other such findings that Wilkinson presents; I would therefore strongly recommend the book to anyone interested in this topic.

Question of technology

Modi's visit to the facebook headquarters generated much debate in India regarding net neutrality in general and facebook's intentions behind the tricoloured display pictures in particular. This subsequently spilled over into an access vs. neutrality debate, and a few branches of the debate reached the technology vs. basic services debate. It is the last one that I seek to talk about in this post.

The trouble with evaluating the impact of most technology - based products is that the major impact happens through externalities. Therefore, if we try to measure the outcomes by the impact on individual households, we will always underestimate the impact of such products. There are also other issues. For example, increased attendance in couchsurfing gatherings has been observed to be positively related to a sense of belonging to the community; and hosting a guest shown to have a positive relationship with trust. However, in case the causal relationship runs in the opposite direction, could products like couchsurfing be making society worse off by segregating between two sections? Ignoring questions about negative consequences, let us focus on the more positive aspects. For example, independent media has often been shown to lead to many positive societal outcomes. However, the impact on the life of the marginal consumer would be quite low due to the externality problem. To add to that, because the consumer may not fully internalise the long - term benefits of these products, making fair comparisons inherently a difficult task.

If we narrow down to products which have immediate returns to consumers, we run into many that impact the middle segments of the population - ones who are significantly more prosperous than the BOP populations, but not wealthy enough to be excluded from other things. Take credit, for instance. Due to asymmetric information (and general risk aversion on the part of lenders), markets left to themselves lead to under-provisioning of credit. Technology, therefore, turns out to be an excellent tool to remove informational barriers. One might argue that access to facebook doesn't have any benefits (thought many will disagree). However, when social media activity becomes a gateway to credit access, facebook can turn into a tool for social empowerment. Companies such as Lenddo are creating a new industry where big data can be unsed to create the next wave of financial inclusion. Removal of informational barriers can also lead to benefits in more traditional goods markets. This is especially true for small producers and traders, for whom access to information (and storage) can often be prohibility expensive. For example, the introduction of mobile phones in the early 2000s was seen to lead to an increase of 8% in the profits of fishermen in Kerala[1]. There were also more wide - ranging benefits, including a 4% reduction in the average price of fish in these areas.

However, we are still talking in the realm of the middle class. What has technology got for the people at the bottom of the pyramid? Can technology reasonably impact the lives of those struggling for food, energy and shelter? Once again, technology as a medium for spreading information can help address some of the very basic issues of survival for large swathes of the population. The Chhattisgarh PDS turnaround was aided by technology, albeit alongside other systemic changes. Something as simple as sending SMS notification to villagers when the PDS truck leaves for the fair price shop can reduce pilferage and increase foodgrain availability to the poor. Having reduced wastage and pilferage from 40-50% to less than 10% in a short span of time, Chhattisgarh has shown that technology can help address the needs of the poor.

In conclusion, if one views technology as an end in itself, the impact may be too diffused and long - term to care about, especially for a country like India with more pressing concerns. However, if one looks at technology as an enabler, and as a disruptor of non - tech sectors, then one can start seeing some of the benefits of technology vis-a-vis other more traditional interventions. At the end of the day, few interventions - including technology - would be effective in a vacuum. It needs to be supported by government will and space for innovation.

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1 - The Digital Provide: Information (Technology), Market Performance and Welfare in South Indian Fisheries Sector - Robert Jensen (The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 122, No. 3 - Aug 2007)

A year in the UK

Poorva yesterday pointed out that it has been exactly a year since I left India to start a new chapter of my life in the UK. I am trying to remember how I felt. At the time of applying for the scholarship, I was just very unsure - I thought that I would be immensely unhappy in a foreign land, and therefore doing a degree abroad was simply not worth it. Then I got the scholarship, decided to pursue it, and continued with life at McKinsey. After spending a few months on a project in Amsterdam, I started feeling more confident. As I got closer to leaving, I was almost defiant. I had been told things about life in the UK, and I was determined to continue life as it is.

One year down the line, I feel like I have completely yielded while maintaining the pretense that I haven't yielded at all. Many things have changed. Many more have remained the same. I coped up much, much better than I had expected. In fact, it was something I realised about myself - that I am designed to cope well with solitary life. It goes back to my childhood when I could keep myself entertained for long hours. It's quite wonderful how these idiosyncracies of the childhood can become great strengths (or weaknesses) when grown up. But that's a tangential point. I want to write about my most significant learnings this past year.

My biggest learning is that, willingly or unwillingly, we become ambassadors for communities we come from. Despite not being overtly 'Indian' in what I talked about or what I wore or how I behaved, just my familiarity with all things Indian made me some sort of representative of India. I then felt a burden of trying to be a good representative of my country - positive and neutral at the same time. Many of my ruminations this past year have been about India, about its victories and its contradictions. Some of my thoughts are captured in the blog post I wrote earlier this year.

The second learning has been about how valuable discipline is in the western world. Being lazy can be very costly here, just because the entire burden of one's world is on one's own shoulders. Unlike India, we do not have cheap labour to help us discharge the mundane activities of daily life. It's not even necessarily the maid (or servants), but even the ubiquitous families that set up an ironing shop in every housing complex. Which makes me wonder how this world is essentially a treadmill - we earn more, drive up prices so much that the standard of living may be the same, or even lower. Of course, that doesn't justify not correcting the historical injustices of the cheap labour that we silently exploit. However, it also calls for discussion on where we as humankind are heading. Keeping social or cultural aspects away - even economically, do we want India to become like the UK? Or do we want to create a different society? If yes, what will that society look like? And are we heading in the right direction, then?

Travelling has been one of the highlights of my time in the UK. Europe has been a frequent hunting ground just because of physical proximity. Travelling has given me some new perspectives in life, and as I look ahead to a long time of no travel (except to India), I have the consolation of having travelled very frequently recently. I have made friends from across the global, and some of the conversations I have had have been very encouraging. It has also been most exciting to compare and contrast those with India. All in all, I am glad that I made the decision to come here - it has added to me in very significant ways. Staying in India and working there would also have surely added to me, and I am in no position to compare whether I would have been better off or worse. I can also look at my present contentment, and justify that decision.

Good night.

Humilty

I have recently been in a long-drawn unpleasant experience. For weeks, I tried to be extremely understanding. My patience was tested, and at times I experienced my body giving me very evident signs of stress that I tried to hide. Finally, one fine day, I let it out as verbal aggression towards another person. Things have improved since then, and I find this individual's behaviour towards me having become much better. I have since then returned to my old peaceful ways.

I have been thinking lately about humility, and found my dilemma analogous to this situation. Till what point do I try to be humble, and at what point do I crack the whip and use arrogance (or at least high-self esteem) as a tool to discipline my world? Humility, in my experinece, is one of the most valued traits people want to see. The esteem in which humble and successful people are held is amazing. I have sometimes craved for that kind of adulation, creating a perverse incentive within me to display humility that I don't really feel within. As I find my feet in the world, that tendency has thankfully been going away.

But my initial dilemma remains. I like to differentiate between public and private humility. Private humility is what one experiences in the conversation one has to have with oneself. To me, this aspect of humility is absolutely necessary. I have found that arrogance breeds a tendency for self-preservation; and therefore stagnation. Arrogance is status quo-ist. Humility, by keeping me on my toes, makes me look for avenues to grow. Very important, also, is humility towards one's past. I have seen around me people who show condescension towards how they were in the past - the way they looked, talked, behaved, etc. However, I find this pointless, and perhaps a bit damaging. At the end of the day, it is the hard work of that "past I" that brought me here; that "past I" has achieved more than the present I has, and therefore deserves respect. Internally, I find peace in reminding myself that I am only a reflection of the "past I"'s, which itself is a reflection of other people - friends, families, peers, teachers, situations etc. The more I think about it, the more I realise how much my inner values are shaped by my parents, especially my father. I realise how much my external relations are shaped by my mother's relation with me, and my friends' unflinching love for me. From the Sanskrit teacher in Grade 8 who talked about the benefits of breathing through the nose to the English teacher in Grade 5 whose pronunciation of my name I have now retained - it is only over time that someone's influence becomes clearer. It is disarming, and comforting, to know that very little of who I am has anything to do with me.

Humility externally is the bigger struggle. Arrogance is often useful to establish presence or to demand respect. However, the more I think about it, the more I find 'success' to be found not in being a leader, but in either being a follower or finding followers. Teams, and not people, are what create success. And for this purpose, humility is what helps forge teams. A willingness to acknowledge mistakes, and to go the extra mile to make teams work. And then, external and internal humilty creates harmony in life that'll probably make you happier. At times in life, I have found myself so split between internal humility and external arrogance - and that is something I'd rather avoid. Of course, given the stage of life I am at, I know very little about what works and what doesn't. Some day, hopefully, when I will be genuinely successful, I will have a more developed point of view about this.

Till then, if you're reading this and have an opinion you feelI could benefit from, feel free to email, WhatsApp, message, whatver. 

On love. And companionship.

It has been a quiet summer, away from the hustle and bustle of regular life. I have had some time to absorb the new experiences of the past year, and reflect on what I have learnt and where I have come. The transformations within myself have been natural and building up over the last year, but now was a good time to reflect.

One of the major learnings I have had is my new way of dealing with this thing called love. I belonged to the school of fanatic, all - encompassing love. I loved intensely, and at several points in the past found myself on the verge of falling apart, but picked myself up, achieved something professionally and then glossed over the injuries festering within. Working for two years had numbed me to an extent, but when I came to Oxford and was pulled into the cacophony of new relationships, I found that my healing process hadn't been completed. I found myself drawn once again into the cycle of attachment - expectation - disappointment - disillusionment. Once again, my response was a strong professional comeback. I exercised. Did yoga. Did a bunch of extra - curricular stuff. That created a distance between my mind and my experiences, and have since then helped me weave myself away from that to new beginnings. To companionship.

Companionship, to me, is love on slowburn. The flames of passion are subdued, and the bond of duty is what guides the ship towards a destination. Companionship enables. It holds your hand gently and walks with you. It helps you grow. It is there for you to talk to. It is there to admonish you gently, and yet come to your rescue whenever you're in trouble.

My recent life had only been an attempt to be a magnanimous and generous lover, but now I see how short - sighted I had been. Relationships, like much of life, need much investment. Good relations probably have lots of patience. When one wraps love in these layers, that is where it starts becoming companionship for me. My thoughts on this subject are still evolving, and I'll post next when I've matured my thoughts a bit further.