New Year's Resolution

I welcomed 2018 with a sky full of fireworks around Lake Pichola in Udaipur. Brightly lit palaces, loud Bollywood music, serene waters and celebrations – all blended together to create a surreal experience. My mind raced back to exactly a year back, when I was on a beach on Phuket, with thousands of revellers from across the world, looking at another set of fireworks. A new year is a time of many emotions, but one that stands out is hope. The hope of a new beginning, to be more precise. This hope often manifests itself as a new year’s resolution. Expectedly, the internet around this time is flooded with memes about new year’s resolutions that people make and then abandon within a few weeks.

Why such resolutions fail is understandable. Having studied economics, the analogy with the time inconsistency problem is obvious. No matter what I today commit to, in future I will react primarily  to the incentives that I face on that day. This is not to belittle human resolve, but a resolve that is opposed to incentives will be difficult to keep. Therefore, I believe that a new year’s resolution should meet a few criteria. Firstly, it should be something that one cares about deeply, on a daily basis. This will give confidence that future preferences are not very different from today’s. Second, one must actively think about ways to create incentives to naturally achieve the resolution. The more the disincentives, the harder adherence will become. Thirdly, it should be something intensely personal. A publicly-declared resolution which eventually fails can undermine one’s self-confidence. I believe that positive reinforcement is important to lead a good life.

This thinking around resolutions drew from my experience of the last year. While I was in Phuket, I had once again fallen ill and felt that I should lead a healthier lifestyle. This was not on a whim, but reflected years of sporadic exercising. When I came back to Bangalore, I began exercising twice a day, four or five days a week. I experimented with different exercise patterns, different gyms and different times till I found my rhythm. Even now, I keep changing the mix to keep things interesting. I began eating more healthy things. I brought back the morning cup of hot milk, drew from the fruit basket at work, added curd and generally reduced over-eating. I experimented with different foods in different ways, at different times of the day. It’s been a great learning experience about continuous improvement. I don’t know if all of this has resulted in better physical outcomes, but I feel that I’m in a much better place mentally. I also feel quite proud to have kept a resolution.

I look forward to making a new resolution for 2018 and trying to keep it. I look forward to a year of experimentation and getting to know myself better. I’m quite full of hope and raring to go!

My Year Back in India

October 8, 2016 was the day I returned to India after spending two years in the UK. To be fair, I had visited India frequently even while I was at Oxford. However, the experiences of seasonal visitors and residents are very different. While I was gone, things had changed in India – for better or for worse – and I returned to a country that seemed far more divided than the one I remembered.

While the UK provided a very nourishing environment for me and helped me grow in many ways, the feeling of being ‘othered’ constantly bothered me. The colour of my skin had never occupied such centre-stage in my life before. Therefore, even as I made friends from different countries and learnt new skills or life-lessons, there was a yearning to go back home. Funnily, the place where I chose to return was Bangalore. The city is, at the surface, just like the cities I grew up in; and while the feeling of being ‘othered’ reduced substantially, it didn’t quite disappear. I under-estimated language as a factor that divides individuals. However, I share with Bangaloreans the underlying values that I have come to embody. Therefore, the relationships I have formed here have been much deeper than the ones I formed in Oxford.

The highlight of coming back has been the re-engagement with my friends. While I would meet them even when I was visiting from Oxford, I can now meet them for more than a few hours a year. Not only do I meet my friends more frequently, I get to spend a lot more quality time with them. Friends have visited and stayed over at my little place in Bangalore, some friends live in Bangalore and others have been co-travellers. I had feared that I will miss out on the weddings of many of my friends. But as the marriage engine cranks up, I have enjoyed sharing with my friends their lives’ special moments!

On the work front, I found myself in the middle of a maelstrom. As part of the Digital Identity team at Omidyar Network, I was working on Aadhaar-related issues. This was a topic that soon emerged as a polarising one with very little space for neutrality. In this situation, trying to be a voice of reason has been personally very exhausting. Yet, I feel that we’ve started making a difference. The State of Aadhaar Report and Digital Identity Research Initiative that we’ve funded will hopefully fill a vacuum of data that exists in this debate. Personally, it has been a steep learning curve, which has allowed me to have a well-informed discussion on this topic.

Therefore, as I look back at the year that I’ve been in India, it has passed by very quickly. Working on an issue that is central to the country’s future has been a highlight. It has motivated me to work harder, late at nights, over weekends and even while waiting in hospitals! I also realised that work doesn’t feel like work when you’re working on something that excites you.

My journey to Oxford started with me saying in my Rhodes interview that helping people is not something that I see as a distinct task, but a part of everyday life. Relatedly, while coming back to India wasn’t motivated solely by a burning desire to make a change in the country, I’ve been fortunate to get that opportunity and have tried to run with it.

On Twitter

It's been a few months since I became active on twitter. I use my handle to share things that I'm learning about digital identity. Given the active and often acrimonious discourse around Aadhaar, my twitter feed is often full of tweets from individuals who are very passionate about this subject. There have been a few times that I've been attacked either personally or as part of the organisation that I am part of. Of course, my nature is to not be drawn towards anything I perceive as negative or aggressive. But the way discussions play out on twitter leaves me dejected.

I feel saddened that people fail to realise that, at the end of the day, it's just an individual on the other side. An individual who has similar aspirations, fears and motivations as us. As much as we highlight the differences between us and ascribe ulterior motives (greed, lust for power, etc.) to the 'other', I strongly believe that there's something unifying between us. It is true that our values differ and those values result in different actions. But, in any case, values are social constructs. The foundations underlying human actions are emotions. And here, we have more in common.

If this is true, then respecting another individual irrespective of the opinion he/she holds is paramount. If I cannot respect the individual on the other side, how do I respect myself? If respect and courtesy becomes a function of opinions and other things, what will prevent me tomorrow from expanding the set of independents to include more and more variables?

The viciousness and aggression that media like twitter unleash, even among so-called 'liberal' circles, has surprised me. In such an environment, self-reflection becomes all but impossible. And if self-reflection becomes difficult publicly, it would lead to a deterioration in public discourse because all of us would only put our best (and safest) foot forward.

But what does this mean for me personally? The train has left the station on this one and I feel powerless before the larger forces that drive this medium. I'm glad that twitter didn't exist when I was younger, impressionable and more prone to hurt. Today, I can carry on a difficult discourse on twitter, while at the same time turning to Facebook, a smaller circle, to talk about my own learnings in life. I shudder to think of a world where the aggression of online fora would silence me and many others. Till then, this is perhaps a battle worth fighting. A battle to create safe spaces online.

Three times they said I can't

As the nation celebrated its 70^th year of independence, the word ‘independent’ means different things to us. Both patriotism and cynicism can be seen in ample measure on social media. Many of us will refer to the independence from British colonial brutality. While that was an important objective by itself, independence is much more than freedom from oppression. To me, independence is the freedom to be the navigator of one’s own destiny. As a nation, that’s a path that we finally got on to 70 years back. We’ve done quite well for ourselves. Even our worst outcomes, including corrupt politicians and demagogic leaders, has all been the result of our democratic process. Good or bad, whatever decisions have been made were ours.

Independence is also something that we fight for in our everyday lives. So many of my female friends need to fight that battle with society and their families, which have a particular expectation of what females should and (more importantly) shouldn’t do. We also strive for independence from society’s pressures, expectations and fears. It’s a battle that all of us navigate all the time. Therefore, this independence day, I want to talk about three times when those around me provided advice that I eventually discarded. I see many friends get discouraged by what people around them say; they let their thoughts be coloured by the fears and biases of those they listen to. I believe that independence from fear is important as we strive towards something that we believe in. If there’s one lesson that I hold very dear, it is the lesson to not let others dictate the path of my life.

1) You will not get the Rhodes Scholarship

After spending a year as a management consultant at McKinsey, I decided to apply for the Rhodes Scholarship. When I was at St. Stephen’s, we perceived the scholarship as some sort of mythical distinction bestowed upon those who displayed a high degree of academic, extra-curricular or sports achievement. When I reached out to my professors for their recommendations, one of the senior professors remarked, “but they won’t give you the scholarship now.” I protested and said that my break from academics won’t prevent me from doing well in the course. “It’s not about the coursework – that’s not the hard bit. Once you’ve been marked with the corporate sector, they wouldn’t want to give it to you.” One of my closest friends at that time said later, “I support you in this, but realistically, there’s no way you would get the scholarship. You’ve worked in the corporate sector, after all.” On the day of the interview, I felt I had nothing to lose and had an interesting interview experience. While one of the panel members later told me that my inclusion had been a contentious decision, I did finally make it.

2) Indians don’t get a distinction on the M.Phil.

After having done poorly on my first-year macroeconomics paper, I thought that I might fail the first year of my M.Phil. At a party that evening, I ran into an Indian senior from the course, who comforted me that I would easily pass that particular paper. However, she added, “Doing well will be difficult because Indian degrees don’t prepare us well for this course.” Throughout the year, I heard about how difficult the math was, how demanding the assignments were and how competitive the classmates were. The pressure weighed quite heavily on me, especially the insinuation that it has something to do with my country and its economic degrees. I also wanted to prove that one could do well in the degree without studying all the time. I lived the two best years of my life through parties, dinners, dancing and travel. The challenge of it all egged me on. I remember listening to patriotic Bollywood songs right before my M.Phil. exams. I did well eventually, easily getting a distinction on the degree.

3) Non-engineers, non-doctors don’t do well on the CAT

This is one that I had heard way too often. The story went that engineers and doctors are so much better at math, and in general so much more hard-working, that they easily outperform others on the CAT. This, it was said, led the IIMs to relax entry requirements for non-engineers and non-doctors. Having not taken the engineering entrance examinations, I didn’t know how I stacked up against engineers. I internalised the logic to such an extent that I started believing that I’m bad at maths. I worked hard, very hard, on the quantitative section of the paper. Eventually, that paid off. I scored a 100 percentile on the CAT. The only non-engineer, non-doctor to do so.

Over time, as we earn more - money, reputation, relationships - we become more risk averse. We start wanting to protect what we have and lose the fearlessness of youth. Fear creeps in. That is when I find it useful to remind myself that there were times when people who mattered to me said that I can't do something, that I listened to myself and did it anyway, and that I succeeded. I look forward to listening from you about the times when you ignored those negative voices and your stories of personal triumph!