TEACHERS! LEAVE THEM, KIDS, ALONE.
Article originally written in August 2009 in 3rd year of Engineering at IIT-BHU
Article originally written in August 2009 in 3rd year of Engineering at IIT-BHU
On June 20th, 2020, I completed my two years of return to India. Two years of struggle and success with entrepreneurship, two years of absolute bleak blatant singlehood, two years of extensive entertainment and growth at activities that I love deeply, two years of transformation of my body into a sophisticated powerful machinery, two years of thousands of meetings across the business, finance, tech and environmental community in India, two years of countless rejections and a few acceptances, two years of hiring and firing people, and at the absolute end of the day, two years of sleeping absolutely alone in my bed.
Does the free market mean that you can make transactions of human life freely? Does it mean that one can sell anything anyone wants, regardless of its implications to the world, planet, society, without any limitations? Does it mean arms can be sold and bought “freely”? And in some sense, should it mean “insecticides, pesticides” that destroy groundwater can be transacted freely? Does it mean nuclear missiles can be transacted freely? Does it mean that coal projects that endanger the sheer existence of this planet should be transacted with freedom?
In 2013, soon after the Anna Movement and right in the middle of the 2013 Delhi Assembly Election that was fought on the premise of "Anti Corruption and Honest Governance", I read the 22-page long seminal paper "Corruption" by Andrei Shleifer and Robert W. Vishny published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 108, No. 3. in Aug 1993.
Do you ever wonder what were the regular germans living circa 1935 thinking?
All around the world, from Hollywood to South Delhi, on social media, in elite universities, the Millenials and Gen Z are increasingly more "woke" than the generation of their parents and grandparents. This can be particularly seen across in voting behavior, whereby young Americans typically tend democratic and old Americans are more staunch republicans. This statistical divide in India though is much more complex with layers of urban, semi-urban, and rural; north, south, and east, states with strong local parties vs states with national party hegemony, building a mosaic of liberal and conservative outlooks among the population.
“Don’t allow the doubts of today limit our tomorrow” — FDR