CONGRATULATIONS SONAL SHAH!

On top of the historic Obama win, there is some additional great news.  Sonal Shah, one of the founders of Indicorps, has been named as a member of Obama's transition team.

Warm congratulations, Sonal!

I know the entire Indicorps community couldn't be happier that Sonal has received this honor and the unique opportunity to make a difference.  She will be a fantastic addition to President-elect Obama's team.

As a 2006-2007 Indicorps Fellow, I find it easiest to talk about Sonal's impact as a founder of Indicorps.  Indicorps is a phenomenal organization that places young people of Indian origin on development projects throughout India.  Its website captures its message best:

Indicorps is a non-partisan, non-religious, non-profit organization that encourages Indians around the world to actively participate in India's progress. Indicorps' programs are designed to build principled leadership, empower visionaries, inspire collective action, and unite India towards a common vision for the nation by productively engaging Indians around the world with the development of the country that defines their identity. 

Indicorps doesn't simply send its Fellows out into the field; it makes a deeply personal and intense investment in each of them.  Indicorps embraces the Gandhian philosophy that change starts from within and urges its Fellows to adopt a self-reflective and culturally sensitive approach that embraces a diversity of viewpoints.  From a one-month orientation to several workshops to weekly phone calls with staff and alumni, Indicorps ensures that no Fellow is an island.  At the same time, the support structure continually pushes and challenges Fellows to strive for excellence and test their limits. 

Indicorps created an enduring sense of inspiration unlike anything I have found elsewhere, and I know many others feel the same way.

Sonal, along with her sister Roopal and her brother Anand, built an exemplary, inclusive, and highly effective organization that embodies her integrity and strength of character.

The entire community of Indicorps fellows and staff is deeply indebted to Sonal for her vision, courage, and determination, all of which have profoundly touched so many of us.

We're thrilled to hear of Sonal's role on the transition team, and wish her the very best.

I'll be back in the U.S. as of May 12th -- after 21 months in India -- and I thought some broad-themed posts on my time here were in order. Even though I started this blog to share reflections from India, I plan for it to continue (more regularly) when I am back in the U.S.

Here's the first post, on a topic I feel very strongly about.

Hurry Up and Invest in Leadership

The Indo-U.S. nuclear deal. Violent clashes between the CPI-(M) and the BJP. Agricultural distress. Inflation. India’s foreign policy on Tibet. What do these issues have in common? They were all justifications for disruptive acts of protest that rendered India’s Parliament nonfunctional in 2008. The situation is so bad now that Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee notes: “Considerable time is lost in Parliament due to disruptions, having gone up from five per cent in the 11^th Lok Sabha to 21 per cent in the present one.”

Chatterjee might have one of India’s most thankless jobs. He resolutely insists that shutting down Parliament to make a point “subverts the very process of functioning of our legislatures” and threatens to erode people’s faith in “our democratic polity.” He’s right. But who’s listening?

These fractious parliamentary disagreements don’t just waste taxpayers’ money; they point to a problem that is arguably the biggest threat to this young democracy. KPS Gill wrote in The Pioneer: “The political discourse in India has grown so muddy, so partisan and so utterly adversarial, that there is not a single issue – however critical it may be to the national interest – on which a minimal consensus can be reached.”

The political wrangling over the nuclear deal is one example. Even if the nuclear deal goes through, the UPA’s hand-wringing indecision has damaged hopes that India can tackle tough domestic or international challenges with constancy of purpose. The deal has its share of real controversy, but one can hardly dispute that political theater has prevailed over what could have been a valuable debate on the trajectory of Indian foreign policy.

A plea for some consensus is not a plea for political homogeneity. The problem is that meaningful consensus eludes leaders on issues far more urgent than the nuclear deal, like declining agricultural productivity and farmer suicides. Consensus also goes missing on issues that should trouble leaders of every ideological hue, such as structural crises at all levels of education. When confronted with massive challenges, a smoothly functioning democracy must balance lively debate with the formation of credible coalitions that act swiftly.

Instead, partisan rancor has prevailed, and many Indians are angry. The media calls for political courage and denounces the short-term calculations that drive political parties’ decision making. It’s easy to blame self-serving and short-sighted political parties, but the fact is that there are still well intentioned and well qualified politicians. What we need to ask is why their good intentions aren’t enough to overcome factionalism and political opportunism more often. There are two primary root causes.

The first cause is something we hear about fairly often – structural impediments to cooperation. India’s diversity of ethnicity, class, caste, language, and religion is tremendous. Second, its election cycles are unpredictable and often held at the whim of a ruling party. Third, the first past-the-post electoral system encourages politicians to spend more time on electoral math than on building broad-based coalitions or investing in first-class support staffs. The result of all these factors is a short-term politics dominated by vote bank politics and cash handouts. Dissatisfied voters routinely pull the plug on incumbents, and both sides are caught in a web of mutual mistrust. It’s no surprise, then, that electoral politics has produced a plethora of competing interest groups that diminish the possibility of consensus.

We certainly can’t wish away India’s diversity, nor should we want to see a homogenized India. Diversity ought to be India’s greatest strength not just on paper, but also in reality. But it’s a formidable challenge to change the rules of the political game so they enable more constructive expressions of this diversity. Amending these rules depends upon parties and politicians forging the most improbable of non-partisan accords, and will take time. Even as they lobby for these changes, reform-minded Indians must start finding ways to exert more influence right now.

The second – and most fundamental – cause of divisive politics is a collective failure to make a serious investment in developing and training political leaders. Unlike the structural impediments, we don’t hear enough about this. It’s a shame, because this is an area where much can be done and where many are asking for change. Young people, in particular, are clamoring for change. According to the World Bank’s World Development Report of 2007, the percentage of Indian youth who were ‘very’ or ‘rather’ interested in politics climbed from around 35 per cent in 1990 to approximately 50 per cent in 2000. Interest is one thing, but youth are also ready to act. The buzz over the ‘Lead India’ campaign – which attracted over 30,000 applicants – is one sign of the growing enthusiasm for political participation. On its website, Lead India highlights the need to find and nurture ‘men and women with the vision and ability to empower India with the kind of political leadership that is so conspicuous by its absence.’

If India is serious about reaching this goal, it needs more than high-profile talent searches. It needs creative thought about how to design institutions that impart crucial skills and values. Student politics is not the answer for political training. It is already too steeped in the destructive cycles of party politics, and is often so messy that it detracts from the main aim of universities. In a twenty-first century that demands a seamless marriage of specialization and broad vision, India requires world-class political training institutes and public policy schools.

Establishing these institutes would send a strong message that Indians affirm the value of engaging with politics. These institutions must attract the best faculty from around India and the world, and they must carefully tailor their curricula to the Indian political context, drawing as much from Kautilya as from Plato. They must stress a national, collaborative ethos that makes politicians and bureaucrats think of working with, not against, each other. And they must equip India’s young leaders with the vision to dream boldly, the acumen to plan down to the smallest detail, and the will to ensure that the last details are implemented. If all this happens, it will be another small step in a long struggle to change well entrenched defeatist attitudes.

In both India and the U.S. there is a growing middle and upper-class sentiment that our most important task is to keep politics out of business and to keep ourselves out of politics. Privatize everything, and we will be just fine. No one is disputing that the excesses of the License Raj are undesirable. But the notion that we can solve all of our problems without the government is a fiction that overplays recent economic successes and ignores the realities in which most citizens live. More dangerously, it is an expedient fiction that lets us abdicate our civic responsibilities. Indians are kidding themselves if they believe that, without engaging the state, they will somehow solve crises in education or healthcare, wish away separatist demands, or help India to negotiate favorable international agreements. No solutions to national challenges are viable without citizens’ political engagement.

India’s democratic institutions won the country its freedom and weathered post-independence storms with remarkable resilience. Its macro-economy The 2008-2009 budget boasts a non-planned expenditure total of over Rs. 500,000 crores and a planned expenditure total of more than Rs. 750,000 crores. It’s clear that India faces a crisis of leadership, not a crisis of capacity. Instead of blaming politicians and parties, Indians must empower their elected representatives and bureaucracies to meet national challenges by making critical investments in leadership. One of the chief aims of Indian foreign policy is to establish the country as a great global power. It is no secret, though, that much of this battle must be won at home.

The recent commotion over 'alleged' racism directed by Indian cricket fans towards Andrew Symonds, an Australian cricketer, can be used positively if Indians are willing to call each other out on the very palpable racism that permeates this society. There needs to be a lot more of that, and a lot less of the shameful attempts to deny that this was a racist act at all. I've pasted a piece below, by Mukul Kesavan, that provides the context for unfamiliar readers.

In short, I think it's important that Indians confront the issue of racism in their own ranks, especially since so many of them lament being on the wrong end of racism, both as individuals and as groups. Specifically, I'm talking about some Indians' racism against dark people, both brown and black. There's a considerable amount of racism that I have witnessed in the Indian American community, and certainly since I've been in India. In particular, in both countries I've heard shockingly off-hand, 'statement-of-fact' style derogatory comments about black people.

I think it's important that people challenge these racist sentiments rather than trying to sweep them under the rug or countering with the claims that others are racist, too. I bet there are plenty of Indians mightily disturbed by this behavior and the fact that it's pretty deeply rooted in our societies; let's hope they make their views clear.

If you're interested in the background to this incident, I've pasted Mukul Kesavan's article on Cricinfo below.


No room for bigotry

Mukul Kesavan

October 20, 2007

Making monkeys of themselves: the spectators who were ejected from the Wankhede © Getty Images

In Vadodara and Mumbai, Andrew Symonds, the only non-white, Afro-Caribbean member of the Australian side, was heckled by spectators who called him a monkey, and made ape-like motions in case he hadn't got their point. The Sydney Morning Herald published a photograph of two middle-class, middle-aged Indian men making like monkeys. Symonds, his captain, his team mates, and Australian newspapers thought this was as patent a form of racism as you were likely to witness on a cricket field and said so. The ICC wrote to the BCCI expressing concern.

Sharad Pawar said he hadn't received the ICC's letter. He borrowed the theme of cultural difference that Ricky Ponting had used earlier in the series in another context - that of sledging - to make his point. In the days that followed, this became something of an Indian theme: the Australians had misunderstood the crowd's gestures. There was no racism intended. The police commissioner in Baroda even supplied an alternative explanation: the monkey chants were no more than the spectators invoking the simian god, Hanuman.

The non-official reaction was similar. The newspapers were slow off the mark. Some suggested that Indian crowds had always jeered combative cricketers like Symonds; the monkey business was volatility, not racism. Indian crowds had been known to call West Indians "kaliyas" or "hubshi" and English cricketers "goras" because they were, respectively, black and white. The implication was that Symonds with his dreadlocks and face paint, more or less invited the heckling by turning out in a contemporary version of blackface. Looked at reasonably, it was possible, the argument ran, to see it as no more than a kind of empirical teasing where unsophisticated spectators named what they saw: gora, kaliya, bandar.

Some opinion pieces struggled with the large question: are Indians racist? And if they are, are they racist in the same way as white people who are racist? Critics referred to the Indian obsession with being light-skinned, a preference happily specified in classified matrimonial ads and further borne out by the sale of fairness creams. One writer described this preference as a form of "soft racism", an attitude similar to notions of white superiority in western societies, but different in two ways: a) there was no republican history of state sanction for racist prejudice, unlike in white settler colonies like Australia and South Africa in the past b) the variation in skin colour within networks of caste and kinship in India made "hard" bigotry, genetic racism, difficult. Others made the point that caste discrimination, specially the practice of "untouchability", was as vicious a form of discrimination as apartheid or segregation.

As the days passed a pattern emerged in the public response to the taunting of Symonds. The reaction after Vadodara was defensive. After the Mumbai match, where Symonds was booed at the prize-giving, and where the monkey taunts were repeated, the Indian response changed: the police evicted the worst offenders and charged them in court, Pawar denounced racist behaviour as unacceptable, and newspapers carried editorial mea culpas. It was Hamish Blair's brilliant photograph of two middle-class Indian men in the Wankhede stands, trying to look like apes and succeeding, that swung Indian public opinion away from denial towards an acknowledgment that there was a problem that needed to be named.

It's silly to look for anthropological explanations that will turn racist behaviour by Indians into something subtly different. Cricket writing by Indians in English sometimes makes the mistake of thinking of the "average" Indian fan as non-English speaking and therefore naïve and unsophisticated. This assumption makes it possible for "us" to explain "their" behaviour away as a kind of unschooled brutishness that is unfortunate but not wicked

And its name is racism. It's silly and deluded to look for anthropological explanations that will turn racist behaviour by Indians into something subtly different. Cricket writing by Indians in English sometimes makes the mistake of thinking of the "average" Indian fan as non-English speaking and therefore naïve and unsophisticated. This assumption makes it possible for "us" to explain "their" behaviour away as a kind of unschooled brutishness that is unfortunate but not wicked. This is why Blair's photograph is so important: it shows you upwardly mobile men - who probably discuss the virtues of one malt whisky over the other, who possibly holiday abroad, whose children certainly go to private schools that teach in English - using one of the many international codes they've learnt in their cosmopolitan lives, the Esperanto of bigotry. The mudras they're making aren't derived from Kathakali : they're straight out of the international style guide to insulting black men.

It's hard for Indian fans to cede moral advantage to an Australian team. They are so much better at the cricket that outrage is often the only consolation we have. It's hard to fault the Australians' behaviour on the Symonds affair: they've made their point, done the BCCI the favour of not lodging an official complaint, been appreciative of the board's belated denunciation of racism, and have signalled their willingness to move on. The Indians, after a slow start, have redeemed themselves by booking the bad guys. To keep up the good work, we need to do the same again. And it doesn't have to be a racial insult the next time round: it could be, given our versatility in the matter of prejudice, a religious slur.

To say this isn't to concede some civilisational defect but merely to point out that we can't enjoy the glow of self-righteousness without the rigours of self-examination. Our virtue as a nation is that we committed ourselves to an inclusive pluralism. Our aim as a cricket-playing nation ought to be to live up to that ideal.

Mukul Kesavan is a historian, novelist and essayist based in New Delhi

Some similar views, in stronger (and appropriately so) language, voiced by Antara Dev Sen.

The bold parts are my emphasis.

Racist? Who, us? What a ridiculous thing to say! Why, we are the target of racism, yaar. Those Whities are perfectly horrid to us. Ask Shilpa Shetty. Racism is their middle name. Never mind their nationality – it’s all the same. Remember the Arcelor-Mittal bid? It’s everywhere – from reality shows to corporate acquisitions. Hai! What we have to suffer just because of the colour of our skin. And they call us racist!

Why, they won’t call the Americans racist, will they? Even when Dr James Watson (yes, yes, the DNA guy and Nobel winner) says that Blacks are not quite as bright as Whites. Nope, they will think of something suitably wishy-washy to say about the old man’s scientific views not reflecting the general views of the American public. Stuff and nonsense!

So now the chauvinistic Australians are trying to call us racist. Hah. Since when have they become so politically perfect themselves, eh? Ask the Aborigines. Yes, okay, our boys and girls got a little excited and made certain monkey noises. Granted, it’s not very dignified behaviour, all this hooting and scratching like chimps. Especially in front of guests from overseas. But then, why is that such a big deal?

Well, actually, it is. Racism is a very big deal. Silly monkey noises and gestures may seem harmless, but are in reality acts of violence. They attack your very humanity. They imply that because you are a Black person, you are less than human. Of all types of discrimination, this is the most de-humanising. And we targeted Andrew Symonds, the only Black player in the Australian team, with such juvenile violence. To make us seem even more pathetic, Symonds responded with dignified silence, protected from our hostile taunts by his armour of quiet confidence and fantastic performance. Just the press photos of our Mumbai fans scratching themselves and hooting obscenely makes us cringe in shame.

But much as we may insist, this obnoxious behaviour is not atypical of us. We are indeed very racist. At every level. Take the most obvious type of racism, like the Symonds case, prejudice against Blacks. Even in our biggest metros, visitors from Africa are discriminated against. They find it more difficult to rent houses, are routinely harassed and often called names. Blacks from other regions also face some discrimination, but it is significantly less, especially if they are from America or Britain.

We disrespect dark skin, of course, even though we are primarily dark-skinned ourselves. Our attempts at whitening our faces have continued for centuries – through grandma’s remedies to today’s fairness creams. We even have fairness creams for men, a new trend in men’s style. But a lighter skin colour does not always protect you from taunts. We are downright racist and rude to the people we call ‘chinks’ – even if they are rich or powerful like the Japanese or Chinese. And it doesn’t stop with foreigners.

We are amazingly nasty to the Indian from the Northeast, the home-grown ‘chinky’. Students from Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh, often even Assam, Tripura and north Bengal have a terrible time in ostensibly cosmopolitan cities like Delhi and Mumbai. Apart from making fun of the way they look and the way they talk, the name-calling and stereotyping that all students of the northeast are subjected to, the girls also face sexual harassment. It has a terrible impact on these youngsters who have come to a big city seeking higher education. It destroys their self-confidence, often forcing them to leave or driving them to suicide.

It is pretty much the same with Dalits. The discrimination against them is so well-entrenched that we don’t even see it anymore. They face prejudice at every step, are systematically deprived of their fundamental rights as Indian citizens and are treated with astonishing hostility if they attempt to claim their Constitutional right of equal opportunity. But then, we cannot even call this racism, since our Government believes that casteism is not racism, and refuses to discuss it at international forums. Casteism is our internal matter, we say. Very well. Let us internally accept it as a kind of racism, where a set of people are discriminated against on the belief that they are fundamentally inferior to the guys who make the rules. Then let us deal with this racism effectively. Racism can be a wider concept, it isn’t always about race.

We also need to deal with our discrimination against Muslims and other religious minorities. All puffed up with power, feeling superior because we belong to the majority community – something we didn’t earn and very often don’t know how to handle – we are most offensive towards fellow citizens from a minority community. We air our prejudices against Muslims at every opportunity, stereotyping them, treating them with suspicion, disrespecting their beliefs, attacking their very Indianness. It stems from an arrogance of ignorance that bigotry is usually based on. (Don’t believe me? Watch out for the hate mail below – if you don’t see any, come back in an hour, it’s bound to be there – and get a taste of the obscene arrogance of ignorance that the poor little bigots love to flourish.)

So when it comes to discrimination, we are unmatched. Which is surprising, given that we belong to a pluralistic tradition. We have, through the centuries, been sired by various races and ethnicities, nurtured by several religions, cultures and languages. We are proud of our diversity, of our multiculturalism. Yet, at every opportunity, we show how terrifyingly xenophobic we are, how intolerant, how scared and suspicious of the Other. It is as if our pluralism floats on the rough waters of racism, ethno-centricism, sectarianism, casteism and other fundamental discriminations that fly in the face of the equality guaranteed by our Constitution.

Anyway, let’s get back to cricket. On Saturday, we have another match with the Aussies. And this time the administration is prepared. Instead of depending on onlookers and the press for proof of bad behaviour to arrest people, the police are coming out in full gear. Apparently there will be 100 cops with videocams, shooting not the match, but the people watching the match. There will be 500 and more plainclothes cops from the special branch among the audience, ready to pounce on badly behaved people. There will also be a contingent of security guards to protect the country’s honour against hoodlums. And there will be the regular police force too, like there always is. Only this time they will be looking out more for hoots and taunts than bombs.

And they say they enjoy cricket because it’s a gentleman’s game.

Oh, another terrific hiatus. I'm deliberately unambitious in this entry; I just want to get the monkey off my back so I can get back into the habit of posting. A whirlwind update of everything since I last wrote:

I left Lok Satta and Indicorps having had a blast, but I was definitely sad to go. Still miss everyone from both organizations. But I had a chance to spend a day at the Indicorps orientation for the latest group of Fellows, which was great.

After Indicorps' Final Workshop, I went to Chandigarh for a few days, which was super fun and relaxing.

I came to Delhi on August 6th, and officially entered into my Fulbright research 'grant status' on August 10th. My grant status officially ends May 10th. My research here focuses on the culture of student politics at Jawaharlal Nehru University. It's a young university, founded by an Act of Parliament, and has been dominated by Leftist politics since it's inception. In fact, Prakash Karat, General Secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and Sitaram Yechury, a senior Politburo member of the same party, both launched their careers in the JNU Students Union (JNUSU). The Left Parties have been in the news a great deal lately, chiefly because of their opposition to the the Indo-U.S. nuclear deal. I'm sure I'll write about this many times later, but for now I'll just provide a link to the text of the 123 Agreement, which I know a bunch of people have been looking for.

Back to the student/campus politics in India: the connection to national politics is far more palpable than in the States. Youth often launch their political careers by contesting campus elections. So national (and regional) parties are essentially 'parent' parties to their student affiliate parties. At most universities that means a lot of money (and sometimes muscle) power flowing into student elections. JNU is quite the exception, with a totally autonomous Students' Union and Election Commission, and a remarkably peaceful culture of political contestation.

Here are the matchups for some major national and student parties:

Indian National Congress (INC or just Congress) --> National Students Union of India (NSUI)

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) --> Akhil Bharatiya Vidhyarti Parishad (ABVP)
Communist Party of India (Marxist) -->Students Federation of India (SFI)
Communist Party of India (CPI) --> All India Students Federation (AISF)

Check out a few posters at JNU's campus. The political art is astounding, the students do everything by hand!

JNU's campus is huge, and it's pleasantly green.

In a nutshell, I'm conducting sustained interviews with student office-bearers, other involved student activists, and a still-wider cross-section of the student body. Later on I will distribute focused questionnaires to reach out to the broadest possible swath of students. My objective is to explore how the campus environment impacts the development of political identity. Specifically, I want to understand what these students think about the normative role of politics, and how they envision themselves as catalysts of social change. It promises to be a fascinating next 8 months; so far things have already been great.

In more mundane news, I just recently moved from flat number one (where I've been since August 8th) into flat number two, in an area called Vasant Kunj. It's quite close to JNU, which will definitely be helpful.

Alright, I'll do my best to keep posts regular.

Long time no work-related post. Things are going pretty well here, the think tank/NGO has organized a bunch of ‘expert committees’ to discuss problems and solutions in certain sectors in Andhra Pradesh. There are committees on healthcare, primary education, and higher education. I’m working with the last of those three, we’ve had a number of meetings that have thrown up some interesting ideas, and I’m currently working on putting all of them into a coherent, action-oriented policy paper. We're also starting a couple of new committees, one of which is on vocational education and I'm pretty interested to see what shape that takes.

While working with this higher education committee I’ve thought about a lot of different things, some of which I thought I’d share here. What follows is almost word-for-word from an Indicorps bi-weekly report I submitted a few days ago. A bunch of people responded to it, so I thought perhaps it might be of wider interest too. In brief, these are some musings on institutions and people:

True to pattern, my life here continues to serve as a mirror to reflect on my behavior and habits before, and the same goes for India giving me a chance to reflect on the U.S. in general, even if the mirrors are a bit distorted. I’ve spent a lot of time recently reading about higher education in the U.S., and I’m pretty stunned at how little I knew about the way it’s developed, the way accreditation systems have evolved, etc. etc. The challenges that India faces in primary and higher education are staggering, almost to the point where I forget one could argue that the U.S. education system is facing a crisis of its own, even if the statistics, photos, and stories aren’t often as gut-wrenchingly compelling as the ones you will see here. In general I’m just not well-informed about a number of things in the U.S., and ironically, I’m better informed about India in a lot of ways. That’s not a bad thing by itself, but I think it’s having the welcome effect of making me take interest in things stateside that I otherwise might not have.

Another attendant lesson: the big picture is important, but you have to have some serious respect for details. This seems obvious, but it’s becoming internalized. I really enjoy the big picture and don’t have a natural inclination for details. Actually I have had a disinclination for them. Obviously they’re vital to any kind of informed argumentation, but looking at details is also starting to become a lot less of a chore. At times they can even be beautiful. I guess in touchy-feely social science classes, among other places, we’re taught to consider how small stimuli, whether historical or social or psychological, can be foundational in determining something big (wars, etc.) Though it’s a lot drier when looking at university regulations or something like that, it’s pretty neat to see that the same pattern applies to systems. Setting up X body in Y manner or Z manner can produce very different results.

Which brings me to the next point. The distinction between systems and people is, at some level, total crap. It’s really easy to feel like organizations or governments are divorced from people, and easy to forget the cliché that systems in fact are people. Right? Well, sort of. Let me use a terrible analogy, a really bad habit I’ve picked up recently: Ideal systems are kind of like the new-fangled athletic gear coming out these days, they fit the contours of the body and the body’s movement, and provide support but no hindrances. That’s what systems should do, right? Mirror and match the actions of people, and enable them to work in concert with one another? And here details are supremely important. You can come up with the greatest body sleeve, but if you get something wrong near the shoulder joint, that athlete is going to fail.

Coming back to reality. It’s very easy to understand how strictly human, personal details are important. In fact I have started to recognize their importance a whole lot more during my Indicorps year, but I sort of expected that. Personal details are interesting because of their obvious importance and immediate resonance – of course a death in the family, your mother’s political affiliation, or a relationship gone wrong can profoundly impact a life. It’s procedural or non-human details that are a bit distant and daunting for me, and I don’t think I expected that to change during this year. But once you start to see a system in a more human way, you appreciate the power of systemic detail. Whether a university president or vice-chancellor is chosen internally or externally and for how long, how exactly an autonomous regulatory body is convened, these things are ‘details’ that profoundly impact the functioning of educational institutes and the character of higher education. There’s almost some kind of beauty when you start to intuitively personify an organization. It also gives you a lot of hope for change because incremental adjustments can have disproportionate effects, just like in your daily life. The same rules apply everywhere, in a manner of speaking. I definitely am not surprised to embrace people more after Indicorps, but learning to love institutions? That was an unexpected turn…

On an unrelated note, after Indicorps ends, I'm starting (on August 6th) my Fulbright project on student politics at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. I’ve cleared a few procedural hurdles so far: opened a new bank account and got my Overseas Citizen of India card, which eliminates the need for a research visa and enables me to travel to and work in India without applying for visas in the future. But I still need to get JNU details squared away, including housing and course registration. Setting it up remotely is harder than anticipated.

Again, if anyone's passing through Delhi between August 2007 and May 2008, you'd better look me up!