Humility in Public Discourse

I believe that it’s rather easy to be a ‘good’ person when it’s all going well, it’s when you’re tested that holding on to those ‘values’ gets difficult. In the past two years, few things have tested my composure as consistently as Twitter. What I have realised during my two years on Twitter is that public discourse is driven by perception and emotion as much as by the truth. I have found it very challenging to try and have a meaningful conversation in that setting, while maintaining an unbreakable bond with cold, hard facts.

Working on issues that are seeing a very active and polarised discussion is never easy to start with. I have been aggressively tagged and attacked either personally, or as part of my organisation. The ‘guilt through association’ syndrome and conspiracy theories abound on twitter, and I’ve seen my fair share of that. Some days, I’ve woken up and read something blatantly incorrect being written about my work and it makes me both upset and angry. Towards the middle of last year, I realised that I was carrying that anger with me through the day. It was taking a toll on me, both physically and emotionally.  It just wasn’t working for me – I was neither feeling happy, nor able to convince anyone on twitter who attacked my work.

That’s when I decided that things have to change. I’ve followed a few guiding principles that I now want to try and articulate.

Speak more with less

Twitter is a rather loud place - several people I follow tweet multiple times a day. At times, I found myself tempted to follow their lead by tweeting my reaction to several news or articles I read. That was, however, rather delusional of me. Nobody really cares about my opinion on things. The pressure to react quickly also meant that I didn’t take time to process and read more about things. This was also contrary to my natural tendency, which is to investigate things before making a comment. Therefore, I now try to post if and only if necessary. I try and focus on things where I have something new to say, or to demonstrate my support for an organisation or a cause that I really care about. The contours of what is important will evolve, of course.

The one-day response rule

The beauty of twitter is that with a few jabs of my fingertips, I can post a very public response to someone who’s criticised or questioned me. However, the individual at the other end has exactly that ability as well. Therefore, we end up in a place where we’re constantly going back-and-forth, almost like a prisoner’s dilemma game. Moreover, the initial fight-or-flight reaction, which on full display on twitter, isn’t necessarily the most useful. Time heals everything, and part of the reason that it is able to do so is because it helps us overcome the first emotional reaction, and think through issues. Therefore, I now resist the temptation to reply immediately to a provocation on twitter. By day two, I’m most likely to choose not to respond. Even when I do, it is more likely to be a less confrontational tweet than I’d have put out earlier.

De-escalate and take offline

I have met many people in life who are very aggressive online and yet exceptionally kind and gentle in real life. Our social media profiles, including facebook, linkedin and twitter, are rarely a reflection of who we really are. I continue to believe in the innate goodness of human beings, driven to do ‘bad’ things because of anger, greed, lust, revenge and other vices. Therefore, I believe that meeting a critic in person is a much better way to engage. We will be forced to spend many minutes, not a few characters, getting to know each. I have not yet found an adequate substitute of a face-to-face meeting. Therefore, I try to reach out to individuals and set up a real-world meeting. The few times that I’ve been able to do that, I have found the exercise very effective and cathartic.

Be good, say good

This is the most ambiguous and difficult of all. When faced with a barrage of negative comments, how does one maintain equanimity and continue to engage positively? I have found it next to impossible, for two reasons. Firstly, ‘goodness’ requires more patience than rudeness. Therefore, it is a massive time sink, which few of us can afford with our busy lives. Secondly, goodness is very easy to make fun of, and a ‘good, kind’ person risks very public humiliation. Therefore, this remains an aspiration for me. I hope that one day, I can move towards being a very positive person. For those who know me well, they’ll realise that it is going to be very challenging. But, well, what’s life without challenges.

So, these are my four norms of maintaining humility on twitter. This post, of course, is about public discourse. But I believe that if one can do this on twitter, other interactions should be a cakewalk. Twitter brings out the worst in us, but it is when we are confronted with our worst that we can demonstrate, to ourselves and those around us, our best.

Humility in Venture Capital

Those who've followed my blogs for a few years will know that humility has been a recurring theme. Ever since the high scores in Grade XII exams and the resultant media exposure catapulted me into a position of local prominence, I have struggled to balance my feeling of having 'achieved' with the need to remain humble. As reflected in this post from 2013, I tried to argue that humility is important for a process of continuous learning. Lack of humility, I ruminated, would cause me to filter out uncomfortable discussions and contrarian viewpoints. However, as my professional and personal journey increased, I realised that it was an inadequate behaviour. I came across several self-assured and rather aggressive people whose display of supreme confidence in themselves caught the attention of people around them. Those who were meek and reflective simply didn't seem to have the same gravitas. That's when I started distinguishing between internal and external humility and wrote about it in this post from 2015. The idea was simple - I exist in service of an idea and, sometimes, I would need to demonstrate external arrogance, so that my idea can propagate. However, internally I should always be humble so that the process of continuous learning doesn't stop. In 2016, at the cusp of beginning my journey in philanthropy and venture capital, an incident that I talk about in this blog made me think once more about the qualities that I really value, and humility came up on top again.

Which brings me to the point of this blog, i.e. my continuing reflections about humility. As a funder, especially one backed by the generosity of a single individual rather than just financial returns-oriented investors, it is very easy to get carried away. Even though every such organisation (including mine) has many checks-and-balances and, in any case, I'm at a junior level, such organisational details are mostly unknown to those I interact with. Therefore, the perceived power I have to determine what we fund creates a strange (and unsettling) power dynamic in many conversations I have. A colleague put it well recently - in every conversation, both you and the grantee know that there's a hammer on the table and you can use it any time you want. The key is how to have an honest conversation despite that. There is a lot of hubris in what is called 'the investor community'. For example, a relatively junior peer at another firm gloated that entrepreneurs would "such my c**k" for funding.

The problem with such hubris is that it is only illusionary. Our perceived power comes only from our membership of a particular organisation; that power is as fleeting as our membership of the organisation itself. Our membership itself may be due to several extraneous circumstances that we can barely take credit for. In my own case, my entry into Omidyar Network was because of an internship posting that a friend forwarded to me. There might have been many others, far more deserving of the job, who just didn't happen to see such postings. I happened to be in the right place at the right time - that's very little to gloat about!

Second, I continue to see entrepreneurs as people to look up to. It would be very easy for them to do what I do. In fact, many entrepreneurs I know started their careers in similar organisations as mine. However, I continue to believe that I can't do what they do. Therefore, if I believe that I can turn up at a meeting and tell an entrepreneur how she should be running her business, I'm only fooling myself. At best, I can serve as a knowledge agent, using my networks and wider view of the market to suggest ideas to her. If I really knew so much about what makes a successful start-up, shouldn't I be an entrepreneur myself? Any arrogance, therefore, is merely a delusion.

Finally, I go back to my earliest thoughts around filtering out different viewpoints. Much of investing is to get a grip on different sectors. That is particularly true in my situation because I'm working in a nascent sector where the 'template of success' has not yet been established. Therefore, I need to treat every conversation as a learning opportunity. For that to happen, I need to approach it with humility. Anything else would make me a partially blind investor at best and an unsuccessful one at work.

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.