Listen to Premji!
Like the Oracles of the bygone eras, the Number Goddess almost always talks in terms of sufficiency, an evolutionarily wired feature, but sorely inadequate for the compexity that we are dealing with.
As India struggles to chart a path out of the mayhem created by the ongoing pandemic, my mind took me back to an article that I had read in 2015. It was an op-ed piece by the famous Indian industrialist and philanthropist Azim Premji titled: How to Make India Great. In Premji’s recipe to make India great,1 wisdom oozes from the final words of his article (written on December 22, 2015):
“Let me end by saying that all my life, I have learnt that ordinary people are capable of doing extraordinary things. For this, they need to be trusted, encouraged, and empowered. This is not the only thing that needs to be done, but nothing else will work unless we do this.”
Some would squirm at the emphasis on soft ideas like trust, encouragement, and empowerment. The lack of hard evidence for what purported to be a recipe to make India great would sound blasphemous to some. Some would wonder where the incentives are in Premji’s recipe! Will things work without some explicit financial incentives? Many will naturally have their doubts, but he is aware of that.
Not just that, he is also cognizant of something that many economists kowtowing to the Number Goddess fail to appreciate. And that is the crucial difference between the necessary factors and the sufficient factors.
And not just that, many don’t even realize that the Number Goddess that they genuflect to does not necessarily speak in terms of the necessary conditions—for that one has to look into history, anthropology, psychology, mythology, philosophy, sociology, political economy, evolutionary biology, etc.
Like the Oracles, Gods, and Goddesses of the bygone era, the Number Goddess always talks in terms of sufficiency—something that sure will actualize the wish of your heart. The Number Goddess does not like wishy-washy talk of ‘necessary but not sufficient’ or ‘anything else will fly only in conjunction with these factors’ kind of talk.
We all like heuristics—the cognitive shortcuts—and when we want to feel mature and nuanced, we look for contingent silver bullets. Alas, in the siloed world of academia, very few know or are aware of those contingencies, as they are shoved inside the carpet of a good research design dedicated to the gatekeeper named ‘ceteris paribus.’
I tried to make these points without knowing what I was talking about for a long time; what was intuitive then now has become logical and obvious—the numbers are very obstinate, even twisting their arms do not make them tell you the truth, though at times they can’t bear tortures and show you whatever it is that you want to see.2
Those days are not far when a temple in India is dedicated to ‘Goddess Evidence or Number.’ So when I tell my friends about the newest addition to the pantheons of Indian gods, which will soon be ‘GPS or Siri Devi’ after the Visa Devi in Telangana in Southern India, they burst into raucous laughs.
In this modern age, we Indians are still caught in the proclivities of our past, when our poor health made us relegate the idea of thinking to a chosen few twice-borns, defying the natural order of things or, at best, delegating it to some invisible gods in a land of many gods.
Like the importation of the idea of modern cities from the small European nation-states without anything beneath the ground—sanitation and water supply—starting from the late 19th century, India once again has imported the idea of evidence without thinking about what makes the numbers speak.
In the absence of a nuanced understanding—in a land that prides itself on giving the world a decimal system—of the language spoken by numbers, it is people's mindsets that interpret the stories hidden behind the numbers. Anyone with even the slightest bit of introspective mind would know the minefield that intelligence would then have to negotiate.
The debris of the body politic and policies that have been blown away in the pursuit of sense-making can be seen everywhere in India—most significantly among the Mandals and Kamandals. Leaving India divided and emaciated. In no other country have I heard people coming on the street to demand being declared backwards and oppressed to ensure demotion in the hierarchy so that they could access the seats reserved by the state in educational institutions and state offices?
To know is damn difficult, and the tragedy in India is that those who know don’t know how they got to know what they know. They are busy writing yet another book, yet another public speech, and giving yet another interview. However, they don’t have time to look beneath and beyond to follow the trails of their own mental flourishing. I have not read a good autobiography of a single Indian scientist or any intellectual based in India after the ones penned down by Gandhi, Nehru, and a few others!3
The collateral damage is that most Indians are left to reinvent the wheel every day. The knowledge has not been accretive. I guess that the culture of sharing the travails of mistakes and misfires ended with Gandhi and then escaped and returned with Naipaul—but only for a handful of Indians comfortable with English.
Not many of the globally venerated Indian minds seem to have access to a variety of vantage points to articulate their journeys in the language that millions in India could understand, as reading habits remain shockingly poor in India. Patrick French has created a tomb that would guide many for the times to come about the dos and don’ts in life. I wonder how many Indian languages his biography of Naipaul has been translated into.
I can venture my guess: 0, Zilch, Sifar, Shunya. I would love to have got it wrong.
Given that not many ‘modern’ texts exist that can create vantage points for Indians to take a peek at their own Indian selves, Indians in this modern age have yet to cognitively mature and develop the ability to look deep within and see beyond and far to have the capacity to manoeuvre and manipulate their environment to create ‘mass flourishing.’
A complex system like India can be governed only by locating its center of gravity in the future that all aspire to and love to live in.
When I read the grim picture painted in a study by a group of economists a decade ago about the high rate of absenteeism among public-sector workers like teachers and health professionals, I could scarcely believe the tone of indifference and the apparent loci of the blame on government employees.
A more nuanced picture painted by Premji is a much better way to state the facts than just stating the facts without the nuanced stories behind them.
A Personal Story:
My sister-in-law is one of those public sector workers in the State of Bihar that a group of social scientists studied and judged in India.
She is a brilliant and ambitious AYUSH doctor. She was extremely motivated to get into the MBBS program. However, her dad didn’t have the wherewithal to make donations or bribe the medical colleges. As a result, she could not make it to the competitive exams—anathema for the Indian minds and most likely rigged. She opted to study Ayurveda, and after she graduated, there was hardly a way for her to use her knowledge except by opening her own clinics. She did start her own private practice, but patients would always demand pills wrapped in plastic and paper; they all looked quite skeptical about the herbs and nutrition-based treatment. My life was once saved by one of these desi-doctors whose daughter’s story I am recounting here.
Being the son of a desi doctor, Bihar’s CM Nitish Kumar’s sympathy for these lowly cousins of more venerated allopathic doctors saw her get a formal job in her early 40s. She had three children, and she was expected to relocate hundreds of miles away to a place with scant educational and basic infrastructure. She would often leave her children locked inside the apartment while she and my brother went to their respective work.
Her action would leave her extended family fuming while she struggled to save enough money for her children’s education so that she could help them have a life of dignity and a sense of self-worth. She would spend 6-7 hours commuting on the local trains, and while away, her mind would naturally have been with her little children. I am not aware of how well she performed, but I doubt her performance would have been excellent.
Rather than sitting and cogitating with the state administration, researchers seeking an audience with their peers sitting thousands of miles away gloating over the inefficiency that they find in the societies that we all are part of, and many of them have contributed in the making, fail to see the faultlines when they look inside India. Anyway, it is hard to make sense of anything in the sea of 1.3 billion human bodies and many millions of invisible gods among them.
Putting blame squarely on the public servants, while the issues might be with the organizational design, indifference to outcomes, and pure absence of an empathetic culture, does not help anyone.
I have seen at least an iota of much-needed healthier perspective in Premji's nuanced take on the state of the public sector social workers. Of course, we will go far if we learn to empathize with the struggle that most in India have to go through to get the simplest of things done. But, it will also help if we do not forget about the poor health and the barrage of health, social, and economic shocks that most in India have to go through in their day-to-day lives.
The cruellest war that has been waged against India—that many are not even aware of—is by the demons of poverty and fatalism and their three children—Inertia, Ignorance, and Ideology (the 3 I’s, powerfully delivered in the book ‘Poor Economics’ by Banerjee and Duflo). The most wayward among the three is ignorance, as so aptly captured by the Economics Nobel Laureate, Daniel Kahneman:
“Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.”
Ignorance has grown into a mighty demon in India, and it has pushed India into a Cold War. Many claims that had India not been dealing with unfriendly neighbours, India would have become great again. Compared to the annoyance coming from Pakistan, China, and other neighbours, the civil war that India’s own collective mind, led by Ignorance, has waged on itself is much bigger and pernicious. If India wins that war, getting rid of annoyance from the neighbours would be a nice spillover.
A healthier India would be much better in cognitively taking the route of talks and negotiations—and then charting a new path to greatness.
Premji has provided a beautiful strategy. If India again forgets to listen to its great minds, it will miss the train out of the stench created by poverty and fatalism. However, I doubt if India will choose to listen to Premji's words.
An individual and her society must be in good mental and physical health to listen to and reflect on an idea. Unfortunately, centuries of poverty and poor health for the Indian masses have left most biologically compromised to pay much attention to the ideas enunciated by the likes of Premji.
Respecting and trusting someone is not as easy. One has to transcend the constraints put by our evolutionary past, but that is the cheapest route to leaving behind the stench and stupor that millions of Indians have to bear day in and day out, centuries after centuries. The privileged ones in India are well-placed to be more empathetic to those who have fallen into the chasm created by ignorance, time, and history.
Living in the heart of Africa for the last 15 months has taught me one thing: We cannot change the world without finding reasons to respect people (and also animals and plants) no matter who they are or where they come from.
Anything that can grow, move, and multiply is the source of awe and wonder. Trust, encouragement, and empowerment become operationally meaningful if social narratives respect others no matter what, even if they are absentees and corrupt in their deeds and words.
It is soothing to see a profit-oriented individual getting it squarely right while the number crunchers are busy and full of doubts. But, whether experimentally induced or not, numbers remain insufficient to capture the nuances that would help India become a society of mass flourishing.
[…TO BE CONTINUED]
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Disclaimer: Nothing I have written here is set in stone. I am putting these ideas to start a conversation, to bring people to talk, discuss, and debate the issues captured here. Give me feedback, and it will help me learn, and I will keep updating this article.
The ongoing deaths and mayhem in India in the wake of the second Covid wave have kept me restless. I have been going through many years of my notes; during one scavenging round, I bumped into a note written in December 2015 while living in Rwanda (Africa).
I loved it when I read Judea Pearl in 2018, for the first time, discovered his no-nonsense style of bluntness: “data is stupid.”
Last year I did manage to read the autobiography of Prof. Subhash Kak, a scientist of Indian origin based in the U.S., and while reading it I realized how much I was missing by not knowing about the journey of other contemporary thinkers from India.