Hend
My life in
What wise man first said that time flies? Whoever he was, he was right, at least partly. Time also waits for no one. It heals all wounds. It’s just an amazing thing, this time. And somehow, it goes faster when you’re having fun. I always wondered how that was possible, that time could go faster at one point and slower at another. I think I get it now, though. When you’re having fun you don’t have the time or the desire to stop and think, wow, this is fun. But when you’re waiting in line at the post office and there are twenty people in front of you, then there’s really nothing to do except think, and perhaps pray for your boredom to be mercifully ended by such things as the chance to buy stamps, spontaneous public nudity, or a tornado.
What if you’re not really bored but you still have lots of opportunities to stop and think? Then time is especially slow, but not necessarily in a bad way. If not tainted with a few dash of homesickness, the past six months (almost) would have felt like a never ending lazy a summer afternoon. I don’t think I’ve ever done so much thinking, although I might have been close when I was a kid, when my awareness was at an all-time high. Back then I watched cartoons on the weekends and wondered what the Cocoa Puffs people meant by “collect ‘em all”. Did I have to? What if I didn’t like Cocoa Puffs? What if I only had enough money to collect half? Am I still expected to collect ‘em all? I mean, they told me to… what a dilemma. Of course, like everyone else I grew up to automatically zone out and stop thinking while watching breakfast cereal commercials, opening up junk mail, or listening to campaign speeches.
Not all the thinking I do is philosophical these days. These are the top thoughts I have these days, with the percentage of brain power I normally spend each day on each:
Holy cow, I live in
Is this guy cheating me? (15%)
Uh! I almost got hit by a bus (12%)
Is that person speaking Hindi, Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam… or
English?(11%)
I wonder if I’ll get sick if I eat this… what the hell (11%)
I wish I had NBA TV right now (8%)
Assorted deep philosophical thoughts (1%)
Now, that 1% is huge, just
because of the sheer volume of total thinking going on (which give you rough
idea of how often the I live in
I’m working in the development
field, more specifically what’s called governance, which is new to me. This is
my first development job, although when I was in college it took up a big
portion of what I studied and wondered about. Last year, I was in a cozy
cubicle in a 32 story building, analyzing housing rent data in
Like Groucho Marx, I wouldn’t want to belong to any group that would have me as a member. I don’t think I’ll ever stop cringing when I think that my industry, so to speak, is development, even though it clearly is, and even though it probably will be for at least a big chunk of my career. In a similar way, I hate to say yes to people who ask if I’m religious, just because I don’t want to be linked to the religious people I see on the news on TV, or the ones handing out pamphlets on the subway.
You see, I’m growing more skeptical about how much the
entire development industry is really accomplishing. So much paper,
electricity, and oxygen is wasted in bureaucracy, corruption, and ideological
nonsense. I still write letters to a high school friend who’s out in
People in the developing world aren’t stupid. And there are a thousand development success stories that show that a lot of these little projects are making a big difference to big groups of people. But in the even bigger scheme of things, these projects are drops in a limitless ocean. It is like building grass huts on the beach when a tidal wave is coming. This tidal wave is different things to different people – economic growth, globalization, industrialization, the spread of technology – but fundamentally it is one phenomenon. At one point, sooner or later, it is going to level the remaining cultures and societies that it still hasn’t reached.
This is a reason for both despair and celebration.
Some of the structures and institutions washed away will be sorely missed,
including thousands of languages, customs, and foods that will be preserved
only in libraries and journals. This is not news. But what’s easily overlooked
is the fact that some of these leveled structures and institutions will not be
so sorely missed, or at least we’ll be better off without them. These include
not-so-subtle examples like sati¸ the
all-but-extinct practice among some rural communities in
Some people don’t want this to happen, because they believe the value of the lost structures will be greater than the value of the new ones. That is a fair and reasonable argument. But the thing is, there is no choice. We can pump millions of dollars into a project to teach rural women how to weave baskets, allowing them to remain in their villages, culturally untouched, still generally poor but no longer fighting away starvation. And then a few years later a textile factory will open up in a nearby city, and all those women will drop their baskets and flock to that city, hoping to quintuple their earnings by working 12-hour days in a damp warehouse.
That is the tidal wave. It is ugly and messy, but it’s the only way to get from A to B. Rural literacy programs and microfinance schemes and basket weaving training are fine and commendable, but at some point, every remote village will have to join the rest of the world. You can’t weave baskets forever.
I’m reading a couple of books that take a
very optimistic stance on all these issues. The first one is The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman,
the famously pro-globalization New York Times columnist. The other is The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs,
probably the world’s best known development economist. I should have read these
before coming to
The beauty of ideas is that they can be used over and over again, without ever being depleted. Economists call ideas nonrival in the sense that one person’s use of an idea does not diminish the ability of others to use it as well. This is why we can envision a world in which everybody achieves prosperity. The essence of the first Industrial Revolution was not the coal; it was how to use the coal. Even more generally, it was about how to use a new form of energy. The lessons of coal eventually became the basis for many other energy systems as well, from hydropower, oil and gas, and nuclear power to new forms of renewable energy such as wind and solar power converted to electricity. These lessons are available to all of humanity, not just for the first few individuals who discovered them (41-42).
So to me, the question is not if, but rather when the
rest of the world will catch up to the world’s developed countries. You
couldn’t stop it if you tried, because ideas and culture travel unwittingly on
the crest of the tidal wave. Those ideas range from how to use coal for energy
to encouraging little girls to study math and science. Ideas also seem to
splash back in the opposite direction, which is why there are
more people practicing yoga in
If this is in fact inevitable, is it better to help the process along, or to try and make it less painful as it takes place? Teaching basket weaving I see as the latter, while funding literacy and education I see as the former. That’s a horribly oversimplified way of looking at things, I realize, and it’s also naïve to think that those two choices are mutually exclusive. There’s also a third choice: helping to lay a moral foundation to deal with the massive changes that are happening and will continue to happen in all corners of the earth. That might not sound important, but consider that as millions of young Indians move into cushy software jobs, they are also gradually shedding a moral system that goes back thousands of years and replacing it with …. the mall. This is the beauty of the Ruhi study circles that Baha’is in every country are putting their blood, sweat, and tears into, a project that I think will be remembered very favorably by history. And in a way, what I’m doing now is making a similar contribution, in that our group focuses on raising people’s awareness of certain civic issues, like corruption.
Yes, I actually think about these things. I do not have the answer, but according to my calculations, at this rate I should have it sometime by the year 2083. It may seem like a waste of time, but then again, I spend 8% of my time and energy thinking about how great it would be to have NBA TV.