Small Man, Big World

  The futility of life is difficult to accept. Many of us are troubled by the fact that our actions and our very existence is meaningless in the bigger scheme of things. We turn to creative ways to mollify our bruised egos and battered souls. Some of us turn to religion, an archaic institution that should find no place in a rational scientific society. Religion helps us feel that each life has a direct connection with a supreme being, and is therefore part of a cosmic plan. Others turn to little acts of kindness, and try to make a difference in the lives of those immediately around us - friends, family, the downtrodden etc.

The latter path is certainly appealing, but it runs into a dead-end when one realises that the primary determinants of their lives are systemic issues like the economic models countries follow, or the level of freedom and liberties it guarantees to its citizens. Of course, little act of kindness can make a material difference to the lives of the beneficiary, but can individual action ever fully compensate for systemic failures or oppression?

My profession takes me to the core of the problem. For years now, I have been working on social protection and digital rights. The very foundation of these issue is the nature of the citizen-state covenant. Both are determined by the nature of government we created, how this government views its citizens, whether it trusts and empowers them, and how it deals with perceived threats to its existence.

When working on these issues, I cannot but feel overwhelmed by the enormity of the forces I'm encountered with. Let's take the example of India. The nature of the Indian state was determined by the cataclysmic events during partition, and the need felt by our founding fathers to create a strong government to hold the country together. Therefore, they created a constitutional architecture that borrowed heavily from colonial-era laws, and which provided the government significant freedom to impinge on human rights. This led some like Constituent Assembly member Somnath Lahiri to remark that the fundamental rights have been 'framed from the point of view of a police constable.'

Over the years, there has been a steady and gradual accretion in the power of the state. This process has been further accelerated by the advent of technology and the ability to place digital leashes on an individual's behaviour and even thoughts.

Therefore, every time I think of where my work is really headed, I experience feelings of despondency and anxiety. Despondency because I feel that my work cannot really make a difference, and that forces that are exponentially larger than me are at play. Anxiety because of the fear that those who feel threatened or offended by my thoughts might retaliate.

Quite ironically, then, I think I might find refuge in what the Bhagwat Gita says - "कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन, or that you have the rights over your actions, but never over its results. Therefore, perhaps my limited role in all of this is to keep doing what I think is the right thing, without worrying about whether it leads to anything at all.

Perhaps the collective strength of thousands like me, each chipping away at that elusive goal, might mean something substantial in the larger scheme of things. And even if it doesn't, perhaps I will end this lifetime with the satisfaction that I tried my best.

I worry about the state of liberal democracy.

As 2019 draws to an end, I can only look back and be thankful for a year where I learnt a lot. But, like for many of you, these past few weeks of the year have been an emotional roller-coaster. Many of us found ourselves questioning the direction of our country and the values of those around us. Many of us realise that this is the beginning of issues that will polarise our society in year to come. As preparation for that long haul, two reflections stood out for me.

First, there is an urgent need to defend the right to protest peacefully, even of people that you disagree with. On 16 December, I took a major step in my journey to be a responsible member of society when I showed up at Town Hall in Bangalore to join a peaceful protest. While I certainly had a view on the merits or demerits of the CAA, that wasn't the point. I was protesting to protect the right to protest peacefully. That week was an eye-opener for me! The police repeatedly created impediments for the peaceful protests I joined, first by detaining and threatening some of us, and finally by taking away the fundamental right to assembly by imposing Section 144 in Bangalore. There have been many other instances of disproportionate use of state power to quash protests - bones broken, libraries tear-gassed, private property damaged, and families separated.

At the macro level, I believe that creating an outlet for citizens to voice their discontent is good for the stability of the country. If such outlets are not created, the discontent will brew within individuals and then find more extreme manifestations later.

Closer home, I have taken many decisions in my life where I respectfully disagreed with someone in power, and am much better off as a result. Right from the job I chose, the MBA I didn't do, or the relationships I engaged in - I have been fiercely independent in each of these decisions. Of course, many of these decisions turn out to be wrong. But the very act of standing up, taking ownership, and being able to speak truth to power has helped me grow. To me, this freedom is the foundation of my life.

Therefore, I want each of us to be able to experience that freedom. It could be something as banal as the freedom to hang out with your friends, to choose what you wear, to stay out as late as you want, to study what you want, to take up the job you like, or to love and marry whoever you want. Or it could be something as consequential as the kind of government you want or the policies you think it should follow. It all really boils down to the same fundamental concept - should you have the right to live your life without being unduly restricted by those in power - family, society, businesses, or governments - as long as you don't harm others? I believe yes, and which is why I was on the streets protesting the disproportionate use of force on protestors and to protect the right to protest.

Second, I have also realised that there's so much misinformation and hate circulating on social media platforms like twitter, and communications platforms like WhatsApp. And as Amber Sinha rightly points out in his book 'The Networked Public', this issue cannot be addressed simply by providing the right information. Such misinformation campaigns work because they exploit underlying social and cultural factors to drive hate and outrage. Moreover, the sheer volume of misinformation will likely make constant fact-checking difficult. In fact, Gartner has said that by 2022, we will be exposed to more incorrect than correct information.

I am still very overwhelmed by the complexity and scale of the issue at hand. Societies are complex structures, and therefore require careful and thoughtful application of mind in order to succeed. But misinformation and inciteful content are like termites eating away at the foundations of modern society. Over the past few weeks, I have seen it play out both on mainstream news channels, as well as WhatsApp groups. It is a different experience to read about it, and quite another to see it play out on an issue that you care about.

Put together, these two issues threaten the very basis of liberal democracies. It's not just an Indian problem - the world over, we are seeing the gradual slide of democracies. For years, I have grown up under the assumption that liberal democracies are the 'steady state' of humankind. But let's be honest - these are very new forms of governance that have gained traction only over the past seventy years or so. It is fairly possible that democracy as we knew it will soon die.

That worries me because freedom has meant so much to me. With it, I have everything; without it, I am nothing.

-------
* - I saw commentators and acquaintances speak about how the violent crackdown was an appropriate justification to damage to public property. But that's looking at this all wrong. In my work on privacy, we often talk about 'proportionality', and these incidents brought the concept to life. Should police break your car if you jumped a traffic signal? If someone from your neighborhood murders someone, should the entire neighborhood be lobbed with tear gas to find that one person?

Taking a break

Let me start with a confession. I think I am a workaholic. That doesn't mean that I work all the time. In fact, I regularly take out time to go to the gym and meet friends. But even when I'm doing those things, I'm usually obsessively checking for emails and thinking about work. The next major meeting I have, or the documents I'm working on, or the feedback I've just received on my work. In fact, I meet most of the 7 signs and 3 character traits of workaholics that this Forbes article enlists.

Because I don't really work long hours, my physical health continues to be unaffected. I get time to eat healthy, work out and sleep well. So far, so good. But the mental stress and exhaustion from constantly thinking about work takes a toll. Every 4 months or so, I find myself completely disengaged from work and unable to carry on. Then I take a few weeks off for a vacation. But even when I'm on vacation, I refuse to stay away from work. I check emails and work on flights, during breaks, at nights and any other time. Research published in the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology found that workaholism is correlated with higher prevalence of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), anxiety and depression. Many of the findings are behaviour patterns that I observe in myself. Compulsively checking emails, sometimes every 2-3 minutes, is one. Trying to organise my workday and fretting over irrelevant deviations from schedule is another.

Vacations can be an excellent way to unwind and rein in your workaholic tendencies. Over the past two years, vacations have become an integral part of my life. But these vacations weren't always what they were meant to be. I still remember my first vacation after joining Omidyar Network. Nico and I went to Thailand and Cambodia, but I used a lot of that time catching up on work. The next trip to Japan was even worse. I signed myself up for an investment committee meeting, constantly read work-related documents, and stressed non-stop about an investment proposal that I had been championing internally. I came back from these 'vacations' slightly refreshed, but experienced burn out within a few months.

I then thought a lot about how I can make my vacations work for me. I took inspiration from the four rules of an effective vacation that writer Chidike Samuelson enlisted - pause everything that suggests work, treat your mind, treat your body, and catch up with your life. So, this time that I'm in Australia, I successfully kept myself completely cut-off from emails for a week. I tried to replace the phone with a physical book. I tried to spend my meals either having a conversation, or reading the book. I take the time to sit and ponder, without feeling the pressure to do anything. Not all of that has been successful, of course. I still go on twitter, which has become a major part of my workday. On Friday, a Government committee released a report on a topic that I had been following closely. That led to a few days of disequilibrium.  But the general upward trajectory is encouraging and gives me hope that the next vacation would be even better.

But vacations will only come once every few months, if not years. It is important to keep the body and mind healthy in the meantime. That will help me avoid the kind of brain-splitting burnouts that I experience every few months. There is plenty of advice out there on how to deal with work. I found these seven tips especially useful - eat nutritiously, exercise, uni-task, breathe, schedule non-work stuff, take tech time-out, and know that balance is constantly evolving. The one that I find most challenging is uni-tasking. One of the most important differences between management consulting and my current job is the explosion in the number of things I need to work on. At any given point, there are 8-10 major streams of work that are screaming for attention. Some of my days are spent just jumping from one to the other, addressing the most urgent things in each. That leaves me very dissatisfied because my brain doesn't feel particularly challenged, and I start wondering if I'm even contributing anything. Uni-tasking could therefore be something I focus on when I go back to work.

Incase you're wondering if I'm all negative on workaholism, I'm not! Being in love with my work has helped me tremendously in life. I look back at the frenetic pace of things back at college and I wonder where I got that energy from! But now that I'm in a slightly comfortable position in life, and possibly at a mid-20s crossroads, I need to think about where to go from here. The sprint is over, and the marathon requires a different set of skills. Writer Jessica Stillman has talked about five differences between workaholics and high performers - having specific goals, setting targets, varying level of effort, being proactive, and not seeking external validation. As I head back to work from my two-week vacation, these could serve as useful goalposts to keep in mind.

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!