Type: Keynote

Rohini’s Comments at The Annual Desh Apnayen Awards Ceremony

This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani’s address at the ACTIZENS awards ceremony hosted by the Desh Apnayen Sahayog Foundation. In her speech as Chief Guest, Rohini Nilekani discusses how we can harness India’s latent potential to shape extraordinary citizens who will make India the world’s greatest democracy.

You and your friends, and all the young people like you in our country, have a really joyful responsibility to hold a brighter future and not to get weighed down by it, but see yourselves as trustees of a bright shining future for our country. I truly believe that if we can get our country right, if we can get India right in so many ways – including on the front of equity and justice and environmental sustainability, and opportunities for all – it is much easier for the whole world to be in the right path, because we are soon going to represent 1/5 of all humanity. So, think of the future as a road on which we will all walk together, carrying a light, joyful responsibility on our shoulders, because we are poised for so many good things. But as Vallabhbhai said, “Each one of us if we’re not active, this potential can fall apart.” They keep saying that what we call a demographic dividend can become a demographic disaster. And I must apologize for my generation, we seem to have left young people with a host of problems. But, in some sense, I think sometimes the crisis as we saw last year, the crisis of the pandemic, showed how much marvelous humanitarian energy could be put forward into the world.

So if we decide to look at the potential of abundance everywhere, I think we can genuinely collaborate to make a better future than some people claim that it might become. And democracy is a very important part of this, I believe. Because what do we want when we all sit and quietly think, what kind of society do we want to belong to? Just like you and I, all want our freedoms – the right to act, to speak, to wear what we like, to work, to improve our opportunities, and to improve the opportunities of the people around us. Everyone wants the same thing. So, the minute we step out of ourselves and into our communities, we realize that pretty much everyone wants the same thing. And therefore, what can I do? Because all of us here, some of us are more privileged and I accept that. Definitely, I belong to the very lucky privileged class. But all of us who are gathered here today are very, very privileged people in this country. And we know there are so many people out there who are not as privileged as we are, and yet, they have the same dreams, the same aspirations, and the same hopes that all of us have. So, one of the first things I believe we need in this century, which is already somehow 20 years old, is empathy.

I keep telling young people to stay curious, because there’s so much that we don’t know. And life is full of so many possibilities. So one: Stay curious. Two: Stay connected, because everyone is dependent on everybody else. And sometimes we forget that we are part of this big web. So stay connected, understand all the connections. This small little virus has taught us that. And third : Stay committed. Because all of us, especially when we are young, are trying to find our little space in the world, right? Who am I? What do I want to be? What about my personal ambition? But what about everything else? And from what I’ve seen and heard of all of you, you’re already much more mature than I was at your age. You are very clear about what you want to do. And I salute you. Really, I meet many young people in this country, except in the last year, which I feel so sad about. But they have shown me the limitless possibilities of India’s future. So again, I thank you for taking on this project, which Vallabhbhai started a few years ago.

So, when I was like you I must say that I was an activist. I was a bit aggressive, which I don’t recommend. But I was like that. And I used to say everything must be right. I grew up in Bombay and actually, I was very lucky because we had very good public services. Some of you who are in Bombay may not have even experienced what I had in the 70s and 80s. We had a good bus service, good electricity, good water, public safety, and women could go safely out at night. It was a different time and a different city. But sometimes people used to throw garbage. I used to get very upset and I used to go and pick up the garbage in front of everyone and glare at the person who had thrown it. Now, while that seems like the right thing to do, I soon realized that it didn’t make me any friends. Why? Because even though I was doing the correct thing, which is picking up trash from the public, I think my attitude was not right. I was doing it in a superior way, not accepting that I also have so many faults, other people have faults, we are all on individual learning journeys. So even as you pick up that trash and put it in the dustbin – we had proper dustbins in those days – something was not right, okay? And I had to learn, my young friends, over the years that the ‘what’ is less important than the ‘how’. So, I grew up and became more mature over the years.

When my husband was working for the government, outside our house in Delhi there was a tea stall and people used to drink tea and throw the paper cups right there. Now I said, “Should I go and make a big fuss? What should I do?” Then I said, “Be calm.” And I used to go everyday and very quietly, without making a fuss, picked up those cups and disposed of them correctly, and smiled and did namaste to those people, because really I’d learned that we cannot sit so much in judgment of other people. And when I did that, young friends, to my great surprise, within two days, the throwing of those paper cups stopped. After that, till I left that house, not one single piece of garbage I saw anywhere around me. Why am I telling you this simple story? It’s because we all evolve, yes, but I would like you to learn from my journey that sometimes when we do the right thing in the wrong manner, it really doesn’t help anybody.

So, having said that, always participate. All of us know things around us are not right. Some child may think, “Oh, why are we wasting water?” Some other young person may say, “Oh, what about our rights of expression?” Some other young people may be interested in other environmental issues. Please learn more about that thing which you care about and are passionate about and you want to change, and then think, talk to your elders, talk to your friend, “How can I participate in making real change and not make the mistake which Rohini did?” Participate with humility, participate without judgment, participate with self-reflection, and you will see the difference between doing it one way and doing it another.

Young friends, I was very lucky because Infosys, the company my husband set up with Narayana Murthy and others, that we became very wealthy, but not immediately. Infosys had to work for a very long time, very hard. It was after 15 years or so that Infosys succeeded wildly and beyond anybody’s expectations. And I had made a very early investment. From my small amount of money which I had in Infosys, I turned into a wealthy woman. Now, why do I tell you that? It is because in my family, wealth was not considered something great to be proud of. One of my grandfathers was very wealthy and did a lot of philanthropy. The other grandfather, my father’s father, Babasaheb Soman, was a lawyer who half the time didn’t want to take his case to court and asked his clients to settle issues out of court, and so he got no fees.

So he was certainly not wealthy, but both of them had wealth of mind. My father’s father joined Gandhiji when Gandhiji made his first clarion call for volunteers to come to Champaran in 1917. He was among the first people to go and was there with Kasturba and Gandhiji for several months. They built schools, they built toilets, they did a lot of work and then my grandfather joined the freedom movement. But always we were told that wealth is not what you aspire to, you aspire to high thinking. So, when I came into so much wealth, I was very confused, “What should I do?” Because I was on the other side before, and now I was on this side. Now I was the wealthy one. And it took me a long time, my young friends, to accept that wealth because it was ethical wealth. It came about the right way. And what was the responsibility of that wealth in society? I slowly learned that I was only a trustee of that wealth, and that it must be used for society.

The responsibility of wealth in a democracy is to be useful to society. And then I started my more serious philanthropic journey over the years, working with several organizations. Today, my husband Nandan and I have signed the Giving Pledge, which is a global pledge, where we have committed publicly to give half our wealth away to good causes in our own lifetime. And I tell you, it’s not easy at all to do that well, okay? It’s a huge responsibility, but we take it very, very seriously and if God forbid anything happens to us, our children have promised to fulfill that pledge.

The last point I will say is that in the continuum of the state, society, and markets, my strong belief is that society must come first because at the end of it, no matter who you are, you may be a student, you may be a teacher like Vallabhbhai, you may be a very successful investor, you may be doing very well in the Army or in politics, or anything, but who are you first? Of course, you’re a human being first, but after that, you’re a citizen. You’re a citizen of your society, you’re a citizen of your nation, and you’re a citizen of this world. So you’re a citizen before you are an employee, you’re a citizen before you are a consumer of market goods.You are a citizen before you are a subject of the state and good citizens together make a good society, and a good society can make sure that governments are accountable for the larger public good. They can also make sure that markets don’t become runaway powers and are accountable for a good society. So,by being the first building block of a good society, as citizens and actizens, together we can build a democratic society, where we can hope that, that child whose face you sometimes see when you’re coming to school or when you go for a vacation somewhere, who doesn’t have the benefits that you do, even that child can be included in a brighter future. So again, I say, stay curious, stay connected, stay committed and magic will happen.

Comments at SVP, Kolkata 3rd Anniversary Meet

This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani’s comments at SVP’s 3rd Anniversary Meet in Kolkata.

My Journey to Structured Philanthropy

I have been on my philanthropic journey for about three decades now. When I look back at it now, I think the real journey started much before, with my ancestors, because it is what you learn that you take forward. In my family, there was always great respect paid to my grandfathers, who were very philanthropic individuals especially my father’s father. He gave up a lot of the income-generating part of his livelihood to join Gandhiji and the freedom movement. He was among the first few people to go to Champaran in 1917, and spearheaded the development work that was done in the first Ashram started by Gandhiji in Bhitiharwa. So, our family credo was to live simply and that life is about sharing and giving forward. It doesn’t mean that you have to wear loincloths, you can certainly enjoy your life but there was an emphasis on a larger responsibility towards society.

So we inherited this idea that our lives are not surrounded just by the walls of our home, or even our community. We need to look much further than that. I was a bit of an activist right through my college days, and as a journalist I got to see the way different people live and how most of us take for granted what is valuable to others. Especially because I grew up in Mumbai, I took for granted our relatively good public infrastructure, and only later did I learn the importance of how simple public infrastructure can help people rise up to their own potential, even if they are not economically well off. But when they’re stuck with bad public services, every day is a battle. When I was growing up, we had water, electricity, roads, which sounds very basic but many people don’t have assured access to these things. We had public safety, parks, and the beach to walk on – all the things that make urban city life much more meaningful for individuals to prosper. We can’t say this is true of present day India, we have not kept pace with public service delivery.

We grew up in that kind of middle-class atmosphere in a cosmopolitan city like Bombay. Later, when I went to America I was once again a beneficiary of amazing public infrastructure. We had no money in the early days of Infosys, we only had an allowance of $500 for the month. Luckily, in America, food and public transport was cheap, and best of all, public libraries were free. For me, it was like discovering a treasure trove of knowledge at my fingertips. I mention these details because I feel that we always rest on the shoulders of our forefathers and foremothers, and that the level of public infrastructure that we are exposed to really helps us move forward.

At the time, I had decided to invest all of my money, Rs.10,000, in a small company called Infosys, mostly because I trusted in its founders. We got lucky, and that Rs.10,000 multiplied. The idea of Infosys was bigger than all our personal ideas of ourselves and our families, and it succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. But when I came into my own 100 crores, it took me a long while to become comfortable with that kind of wealth. I decided to put all of it into a foundation and thus Arghyam was born in 2001. I saw it as public wealth, not private wealth and so I put it into a trust even though I wasn’t sure what to do with it. And so my structured journey of philanthropy truly started, although I was involved earlier with setting up institutions and joining Akshara Foundation and the Pratham Network. I started to learn the ropes of giving in a more structured manner through Arghyam. For the first few years, I would randomly try things out with learning grants, and from 2005 onwards I focused on water because it was clearly a sector that impacted everyone at all levels and that we were not managing sustainably. So there was a system play and also a human play where it impacts everybody’s quality of life if you don’t have access to water.

Arghyam has been around for 16 years now and I’m pleased to say that we have been able to impact the water sector in a positive way. Alongside this, I co-founded Pratham Books, which was one of the most joyous phases of my life because we decided to put a book in every child’s hand. We started with this very big mission and over the years, we were really able to democratise the joy of reading for children. Today, Pratham Books is 17 years old and we have reached hundreds of millions of children, with good stories from around India and the world. Nandan’s philanthropy also scaled up his own institutional philanthropy, making very large grants to organisations such as IIHS, NCAER, ICRIER, and eGov, where he focuses on impact at scale using technology as a means to achieve this.

Creating Resilient Societies

Over the years, I learned that what I really believed in is the power of people, of citizens to do things for themselves. I built this construct, that in the continuum of Samaaj, Bazaar and Sarkar, the Samaaj or society is the first sector. It is the basic sector for which the markets and the state are developed, because society needs institutional authority so that we don’t collapse into disorder. We need markets to create prosperity and innovation, but they have to work for the larger public interest; and we need order and rule of law, but the state exists to support societies, so that citizens could be their best selves. All of us are citizens first, not subjects of the state or consumers of the market. Even if we work in government or are heads of large corporations, we are citizens of our communities and our nations first.

When people understand that we, as citizens, can come together to solve our problems and co-create the structures to hold markets and state accountable for collective public interest, then you get a thriving society where all of us can hope to flourish. There’s no such thing as a perfect society, but there is such a thing as the imagination of a society that is constantly striving to be better. So my philanthropy is based on this simple premise – if we can support moral and ethical leadership of the Samaaj and the building of better institutions that serve the Samaaj and contextualize local problem solving, then we create resilience. If we want good societies, we need resilient societies so we have to look out for the opportunities in the Samaaj, to support good people, good ideas, and good institutions, so that we can continuously innovate our way to a better future. With this in mind, I support people in many areas such as access to justice, education, independent media, young men and boys, and the environment. I believe that we are all philanthropists because all of us feel that something needs to change, something is not right, something can be better. And we all want to be a part of that positive change.

Many younger philanthropists ask how we should prioritise our focus, especially in India where there’s so much poverty and inequity. To me, philanthropy is love for humanity, and it can be expressed in a myriad of ways. People must go where their passion is, whether it’s to alleviate poverty or whether it’s in relation to art, music, culture, or sports. There are many pathways to the same goal, and arts and culture is one way that we create the energies and creativity that allows people to understand poverty and justice. It allows us to make meaning of our journey on this little planet, and so I don’t think art, culture, or sports is in any way less important than feeding the hungry. After all, there are many institutions for feeding the hungry. But when we talk about philanthropy, we are allowing ourselves a creative expression of our humanity, so I would urge young philanthropists to do what comes from their hearts first. For those who are just starting out, I would encourage them to experiment with different organisations to figure out which of them will be able to scale. When you make learning grants, you’ll quickly be able to tell which organisations show potential. Once you identify them, then double down. The other thing I would suggest is to lead with trust. My whole philanthropy is trust-based philanthropy.

Trust-based philanthropy also involves open communication with your partners. One of the issues in the development sector is that founders may sometimes get too attached to their creations or sometimes organisations lose their way if their founders have to leave. We’ve seen that happening to many NGOs. So when we talk to our partners, this should be a question on the table. What is their succession plan and who are their next level of leaders? This is crucial for institutional sustainability. One charismatic founder is good for some time, to draw in other people but it’s not enough for the institution to last. We need to talk more openly without partners, without sounding prescriptive, and ask these questions. For people who are actively engaged in philanthropy, it’s crucial to be empathetic. However, feeling other people’s pain more sharply also takes its toll on us mentally and emotionally. Personally, I had to train myself over the years to be detached, so now my credo is maximum concern but minimum attachment. We need to keep doing the work that we can, but we should detach ourselves from the result so that we can continue. Otherwise, if we allow empathy to override our abilities, we won’t be able to do this work in the long-term.

Reimagining the Culture of Giving

My parents grew up in an India where people had to work very hard to make a living and usually people were only born into wealth. So there was a sense of potential, but not enough security to say that we need to start giving. In India, people give anyway to their family, their community, and their temple. But in order to do what we call ‘structured philanthropy’, society also needs to reach a level of confidence in its economy and its future. Today we are seeing this, with many young people becoming independently wealthy. Even if they are not super wealthy, they have some surplus money. They’re also very aware of what’s happening around them, through social media and communication channels, and realise how intricately their lives and futures are connected to others. So they are getting interested and stimulated by the question of how they can be part of creating a better system.

I have met many young people who want to give back early, rather than waiting until they retire. My young friend from Healthify was also saying, “We came into money, but we just took out a little for ourselves and we are going to immediately set aside 20% of that. Please tell us how we should invest.” So I think the culture is shifting and changing. The pandemic has also taught us that the elite can’t just secede to its own private world. The virus doesn’t recognise gated communities. So we have no choice but to swim in the same water, and make that water healthy for all. Finally, the ecosystem around giving is also improving in India. It’s much easier to give transparently and organisations range from working in the arts to media to sports and healthcare. They are more discoverable, and bridging organisations have grown so it’s also easier to give back. Retail giving in India is increasing with civil society organisations and not just temples. Especially during the pandemic, giving by citizens who are not so wealthy shot up and we raised hundreds of crores. This is the spirit of India that we have to tap into. Kindness to strangers is a value that is an integral part of our culture, we just need to revive that idea.

We need to reimagine the culture of giving. It has to become the norm and we need good storytelling around it and institutions that show that the people can come together for a much larger purpose – to solve large societal issues. Even if we are small, we can become part of a very large stream of giving forward. Our brains are wired for joy by giving, and there are multiple rewards for society and for individuals in this giving journey. So we must re-imagining a culture of giving small and big, and carry that story forward.

Rohini Nilekani’s Keynote at DH Changemakers

This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani’s keynote talk at DH Changemakers, an annual feature by Deccan Herald to honour people who make a difference in Karnataka.

What do we mean when we talk about change? We all know that change is the only constant in our lives. Change keeps happening, but I think as we get older we come to realise that change is the rule, but it does not need to be our ruler. We can embrace change without getting swept away by it. This past year is a perfect example of how humanity had to cope with so much change. Anthropologists, scientists, and evolutionary biologists all tell us that human beings can’t change easily. But within a matter of months, nearly two billion people learnt how to cover their faces with a mask to prevent a virus from infecting them. We were able to change and adapt to our circumstances very rapidly. So each one of us has had a marvellous year of learning how to deal with change. Of course, a lot of people suffered tremendously which we mustn’t forget. But to me, change represents an opportunity. When something is not right, that’s when we use the opportunity to create change. My philanthropy is based on the optimism that there are many people in the world that want to be changemakers and we must support them so that we can collectively create positive change.

All of us wear many different hats and sometimes we think we can have different perspectives when we wear different hats. But I actually don’t believe that. I think there needs to be a single, unifying principle through all your identities. This does not mean that we can’t change our minds though, otherwise I don’t think we can make progress in this world, either personally or as societies. So I have learnt how to change my mind because when we are younger, we are full of hubris. I thought I knew everything – I soon found out that I don’t know anything at all. I had to keep my mind open and allow my world views to change as I learnt more about the world. It’s important to keep your mind open enough that you can change it in response to change, and I’ve tried my best to do that. This has been challenging in my experience. I was brought up in a middle-class family and all the stories I was told were about selfless service, simple living, and high thinking. In college, I was a bit of a leftist and an activist, so when we suddenly came into a lot of wealth later, I was not ready for it. As a shareholder of Infosys, we became more wealthy than we ever thought was possible, and to deal with that change took years for me. I had to change my mindset and view this wealth as an opportunity for me to help people change the world as they see fit.

When I look at this year’s 21 changemakers that have been chosen, I feel extremely hopeful. My philosophy is that all of us must work together to create a good Samaaj or society. These 21 people are perfect examples of this, where they are not waiting for someone else to create change for them. They don’t want to remain part of a problem, they want to be part of the solution. For that, I salute them because that’s exactly how we create a good society. To me, a good society is the foundation for all human progress. What they do next will depend upon their ambition, persistence, commitment and the circumstances and opportunities that come their way. But I hope that each one of them will continue to draw in other people to expand their work, so that even if they and their organisations don’t scale, their ideas and their mission for society continues to scale.

If changemakers have the ambition and the desire to create a large impact and if they are able to collect the resources for it, they should be able to achieve that goal. Inaction is never a good thing, you must continue to try. With any project, the goal is never to just mindlessly scale, that won’t work. But if you have a passion in your heart and a fire burning in you to improve on something in your communities, you may attract many others to your cause. I think people should connect with other changemakers to widen the impact that is possible. Rather than chasing scale for its own sake, I would urge young changemakers to say, “Even if my organisation doesn’t scale, even if my effort alone doesn’t grow, how can I keep connecting more dots so that my ambition and my mission for society can scale?” That’s how we should approach this challenge. My team has come up with something called Societal Platform Thinking, which tackles the challenges of getting impact at scale by distributing the ability to solve. For example, if one individual or organisation is able to make a difference, they can share their story and methods so that others can also take up what they are doing – that is a way in which scale can happen. So there are many pathways to scale and we must aim for more impact through more action.

Some questions to keep in mind then are ‘Why and with whom are we trying to scale?’ and ‘Are we keeping our core values while scaling?’ It’s a very challenging thing to do – I liken it to a small child growing up and the problems that parents have to face become more complex in the process. Just like parents, we have to face these problems and sometimes we will fail, sometimes we will succeed, but we must face them head on. We should know what our core values are and that those should not change, so each new member joining our team when we want to scale should share those clearly articulated values and goals. This reduces the risk of sudden scale. Throughout my 30 years of working in the philanthropy space, I’ve had to deal with scale and I’ve tried to abstract the lessons by which we can scale in the proper way.

An Introduction to Uncommon Ground

Introducing Uncommon Ground – a Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies and CAMP Arbitration and Mediation Practice initiative – that looks to develop the individual and organisational capacity for deploying dialogue as the primary method for resolving conflict. Using a multi-disciplinary framework, including principles of dispute resolution through mediation with its emphasis on self-determination and collaboration, we are building an approach to effectively catalyze dialogue and would like to share the broad outlines of this work with.

This is an edited version of Dr. Krishna Udayasankar on Uncommon Ground – a Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies and CAMP Arbitration and Mediation Practice initiative that looks to develop the individual and organisational capacity for deploying dialogue as the primary method for resolving conflict. Using a multi-disciplinary framework, including principles of dispute resolution through mediation with its emphasis on self-determination and collaboration, we are building an approach to effectively catalyze dialogue and would like to share the broad outlines of this work.

Dr. Krishna Udayasankar holds a BA.LLB (Hons) from the National Law School of India University and a PhD in Strategic Management from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

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In its previous iteration, Uncommon Ground was a book and subsequent TV show which brought together leaders from across the Samaaj, Sarkaar, and Bazaar i.e. society, state, and markets, to engage in dialogues to find some degree of common ground. Those were important conversations to have, in order to facilitate discussions at the influencer and leader level. However, Dr. Krishna Udayasankar asks how we can further those ideas and engage with them in our everyday lives. What are the ways that we can build that societal muscle and engage with these issues in our interactions, so that we can work towards positive outcomes?

 

Dr. Udayasankar is a Bangalorean of Tamil descent, and says that he loves festivals because he gets to enjoy both the Kannadiga and the Tamil side of the food that’s prepared. One of his favourite dishes is tamarind rice, puliyogare, the way his mother makes it. She boils the tamarind in oil and spices for four hours until it forms a kind of sauce. Then she adds the rice and allows the mixture to marinate for a couple of hours before adding dry species, and serves it. Dr. Udayasankar describes a bite of the dish – a seedless red chilly which has been marinating for hours along with a burst of tamarind that fills his mouth. Our reaction to this description, he tells us, comes from the ‘thinking’ part of our brain. When we talk about food or other things that we may enjoy, or when we hear about someone else’s experiences in a way that we relate to, our brain’s mirror neurons are triggered. Certain triggers help us learn, relate to one another, or co-experience things that others are experiencing. Mirror neurons are intrinsic to social interaction and the social behavior of mammals, including humans. This social function is located in the same part of the brain as the cognitive or rational part, which is not to say that emotion and instinct don’t play a role in it as well.

The emotional brain is where we process most inputs from, whether they are responses or threats. This triggers the instinctive brain which typically gives you three responses – flight, fight, or freeze. For example, if you are taking a jungle walk and you run into a particularly nasty looking panther, you may decide to run instead of freezing or fighting. The instinctive brain makes sure that the adrenaline runs through you, and you are able to think on your feet and even run faster than usual. This knowledge of neurobiology helps us because it’s an important connection between the social and the rational, cognitive functions of the brain. If we are able to get the human brain to experience a social engagement, interaction, or experience, that will trigger the thinking brain which allows us to understand and balance all the messages that the emotional and instinctive part of the brain are putting out. That social process we are trying to use, on the basis of this science is the dialogic process, states Dr. Udayasankar.

The Dialogic Process

What is dialogue? The dialogic process is a social process that we are using to trigger neurobiological functions towards a determined end, but what exactly is a dialogic process? Dialogue could mean lines from books, entertainment, audiovisual experiences, or simply two people exchanging words, an interaction through communication. ‘Dialogue’ comes from ‘dialogos’, a Greek word which broadly splits into ‘dia’ i.e. through and ‘logos; which can mean ideas, words, speech, or even thoughts depending on the context. When you put these together, the meaning implies a certain degree of community, relationships, and cooperation. In Indian languages as well, there is a sense of coming together and co-creating, cooperating in an exchange of ideas and words. So the notion of dialogue in itself has to do more than just speaking or exchanging words. It is rooted in the co-mixing and co-mingling of ideas in order to create something. This is reflected if we take a social-constructionist view of dialogue, which informs a host of applied disciplines including management sciences, leadership or behavior. It is a process that provides a space where multiple ways of looking at a situation can be brought together, people can vocalise different perspectives, and there is an end goal to it that may be actionable. Whether it is something more intangible like advancing our thinking and knowledge or coming to a conclusion on next steps, the process of dialogue involves coming together, communicating ideas and perspectives, and drawing benefit from the multiplicity of perspectives involved in order to create new possibilities and alternatives. 

Dr. Udayasankar asks how we can use this approach, involving dialogue that allows for different perspectives and communicating those to achieve an end goal. He gives an example of a restaurant where two chefs are having an argument because each needs to use an orange in their dish and there is only one left. In this situation, the first solution that might occur to us is to divide the orange and give half to each chef. But another approach would be to ask the chiefs what they want to use it for and how much they need. This information can help us reach a solution that may address both people’s interests. It’s possible that one chef only wants the peel and the other wants the juice of the orange. In this case, we had the opportunity to metaphorically create two oranges, where there was only one. This is important because often when we look at a conflict or problem, we tend to find solutions that distribute value. But when we move from a question of “what” to asking “why do you want this”, it allows us to look at various other options. There could be several other solutions to the orange problem – perhaps someone could go out and get another orange or perhaps one chef can be persuaded that the recipe tastes better with an apple instead. But we will not figure out any of those solutions unless we move from ‘what’ to ‘why’. In today’s world, when positions are so often presented as binary, it’s important to see that there’s actually a multiplicity of views and dimensions in any given situation, even in conflicts. The idea of Uncommon Ground, says Dr. Udayasankar, is to understand the elements that we can use and evolve the skillset to be able to see these solutions. 

The other element of the dialogic approach is to be able to put multiple perspectives on the table so that when we take a decision, we benefit from an abundance of ideas and address as many needs and concerns as we can. In the case of the orange problem, we also need to involve the chefs in this process. It is their decision and if they are engaged in finding a solution together, it will also improve their relationship and efficiency. Our goal is to co-create a consensus or instead of simply splitting the difference. Rather than simply looking at a way to solve the problem, if we use a dialogic approach we can identify the underlying needs and concerns and find a sustainable and lasting solution.

However, what if there is a power difference, which often happens when different stakeholders come to the table. What if both chefs did not have equal say in claiming the orange? This is one of the most important things that we face when implementing this method. Power equations may be different, but the aim of the process is to give a voice to everybody who is impacted by the final decision. There will be invisible stakeholders, people who are not part of the discussions but ought to be, as well as invisible influencers i.e. people who don’t have much to do with the situation but have a huge impact on it. So we must make sure that the process allows for the vocalisation of all perspectives. Biases may also lead us to see a situation in a particular perspective. We must be aware of our own bias and understand when inherent or unstated biases may be playing a role in the communication process.

Building Societal Muscle 

Dr. Udayasankar says that his aim is to be able to build a societal muscle for engaging in this process. These elements are crucial in terms of creating the space, generating multiple perspectives, sharing information, being able to listen, and actionizing new solutions or alternatives. Building that societal muscle is not just about being able to get people to think from the perspective that this is possible, but also to equip people to be able to engage with the process and realise that we don’t have to necessarily share similar views in order to achieve common goals. With Uncommon Ground, we try to change perspectives and get people to think differently about what can be achieved through a dialogic process, and then invite them to engage and develop skills by which they can continue to do this, says Dr. Udayasankar. So far, they have worked across the Samaaj sector, with young changemakers and NGOs. They have also been working with women in rural Karnataka along with Buzz Women, an organisation building human and social capital in the area for over eight years.

Together they worked on engaging women with interventions and games where they had to look at a conflict as a problem to co-solve. For example, one of the biggest conflicts for women at home is about money, which usually starts with accusations of spending too much or not earning enough. So the idea was to shift the conversation to identifying the problem at hand i.e. not enough money, and then finding a solution together, as a team. They were able to re-examine their existing curriculum and incorporate these exercises without increasing the time of the sessions for women. With this curriculum, they hope to reach 2.25 lakh women over five districts of South Karnataka. In the case of one woman who had undergone the course, she was able to solve a 15-year-old family property dispute because she was able to build the skill and took charge of the problem to look for sustainable solutions. They are now working to develop a module for women to have the capacity to facilitate the dialogic process in groups and communities themselves. Dr. Udayasankar shares that they are also looking to develop the practice support and community building verticals, and experimenting with different ways of doing this.

Moving Beyond Binaries 

Everyday, we negotiate various kinds of micro and macro-conflicts. The intent of Uncommon Ground is to build a structure around this as a method so that it can also have a learning component for those who want to get better at it and become more aware of how to build their capacities in this direction. Practice is a big part of behaviour change, and learning to listen or learning to dialogue, taking a leap of faith, suspending bias, and sometimes even suspending that instinct to react immediately, are all very instinctual. It takes a tremendous amount of practice to curb these instincts, which is another facet of the work of Uncommon Ground. 

Dr. Udayasankar mentions Sriram Panchu, one of the pioneers of mediation in India, and his thoughts on the use of mediation to be able to resolve conflicts. These ideas are not new – in villages you don’t go to court, you still try and figure it out with the village elders and have a dialogue. It’s based on the idea that we must put our heads together to figure out the problem and come up with a solution that is based on cooperation and understanding. These are not new ideas, but the goal is to be able to bridge this uncodified but culturally held element with the very formally defined, commercially tested, well-used method of mediation on the other. If we take the example of the farm bill, three different newspapers give completely different impressions of it because perspective position is reduced to a headline. But behind it are the nuances that a dialogic process can hopefully bring out. When those nuances are brought out, it is possible to focus on a solution rather than just deciding who to agree with. We must move away from binaries of right and wrong to ask, “How do we fix this?” says Dr. Udayasankar. How do we make everyone happy? How do we give everybody what they really need? How do we address their concerns?

One of the objectives of the Uncommon Ground project is to be able to influence our response to issues like the farm bill issue, in a manner where dialogue is possible. Right now, our instinctive response is not to be able to facilitate a dialogic process. When a conflict begins, we have systems in place that support the resolution of that issue through the dialogic method. This is a classic example where this process is far more amenable to the resolution of the issue than a formal court system, but that is the response mechanism that we know. However, if we as a community were able to set up systems from the get-go so that our response to it would be different and would allow a facilitation of dialogue, that’s when we would see real change. 

As Rohini Nilekani suggests, we need to encourage a culture where we can go beyond binaries, and to find good, simple, understandable methodologies by which we do so. Everyone understands this concept at an intellectual and emotional level, but how do we do it? The Tällberg Foundation in Switzerland’s tagline is, “How on earth can we live together?” and they mean every word of that because the planet’s sustainability is what they care about. So how on earth can we live together? I think the weariness that has settled in as a consequence of our increasingly polarised world is exactly the wedge we need to push in a new positive energy of dialogue and conversation. 

Romancing the Black Panther – Rohini Nilekani with Usha KR

This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani in conversation with Usha KR about conservation, our connection with the environment, and her fascination with the black panther of Kabini. This was held as part of BIC’s Bangalore Literature Festival, 2020. 

 

Picture this – we are all in Kabini, waiting for Blacky, the panther of the forest. We are holding our breaths. He is just next to us behind the lantana bushes or maybe in that ficus nearby. I can almost feel him and so can the langurs and the chital. Their continuous alarm calls reverberate through the forest. The morning mists have cleared but our human eyes can see nothing, no shadows, no movement at all; nor can the super lenses of all the photographers and array of modern Canons on a hair trigger ready to shoot. Cut. We have to leave this story unfinished again. It is 9:11 AM, and we have to get to the gate by 9:30 AM at the latest or the poor safari jeep driver can lose his license for several days. So the photographers pack up their expensive cameras and the tourists grumble, “Sha! Almost, almost.” Frustratingly, this pattern has repeated itself for me several times, especially in the past few months.

Just Another Leopard? 

Through 2020, this year of the virus, I have often escaped the forlorn city of Bengaluru and lodged myself in Kabini, my favorite part of the Nagarhole forest in Southwestern Karnataka. Even though I appreciate every inch of the forest, from the spider, the ant, and the jackal, to the trees and the water bodies, and all the creatures in between, there is one animal that I very much want to find. He is the fabled Blacky or ‘Kariya’ as he is locally called, the melanistic leopard who has lived in the tourist zone of Kabini for the past six years. This black panther has been the focus of numerous viral photographs, documentaries, and articles. Arguably, he is the world’s most famous black panther. People come from all around the world to see him. Often, they return without a glimpse, but when they do see him, their “Oohs” and “Aahs” and their photographs only serve to add to the mystery and glamour around this elusive creature. Quite objectively, he’s a beautiful animal. He’s perfectly imperfect, evenly black with magnificent yellow eyes and a sleek muscled body. When found paired with a normal female leopard the contrast creates an even more striking image.

Moreover, he is the one black panther in the world who is relatively possible to find as he has a well-documented territory, mercifully overlapping the tourist area of the forest. So it’s no wonder that tourists and photographers flock there to see him. In Kabini, all conversations among strangers are likely to begin with, “Have you seen Blacky?” and then begin the endless stories of how many times and of all the near-misses. But all this hype and hoopla leaves real environmentalists and foresters rather cold. “What’s all the fuss about,” they ask. “It is just another leopard,” they say, shaking their heads at the frenzy on display.

This is true. The black panther is just another big cat in the wild. He’s just another leopard with a melanistic condition that leaves his spots intact but darkens the rest of his coat as well. There are many melanistic leopards in Karnataka alone, so there should be no reason to think of this one as special. And yet I am one of the humble hordes who has fallen under his spell, happily participating in the fantasy. For me, it has been a magical journey thus far. I first heard of this panther in 2015 when my friend and world-renowned wildlife documentary filmmaker and photographer Sandesh Kadur showed me some really stunning images. Till then, the term, “Black panther” for me was more about the radical political movements in the West. But I was strangely drawn to the pictures and started watching out for the animal on the regular safaris that my husband Nandan and I would anyway take to Nagarhole two or three times a year.

Over time, as the fame of the black panther grew, my interest in him began to peak as well. He appeared often enough at safari time to keep people interested, but not often enough to become a routine sighting. All sorts of legends begin to build around him, of his prowess at mating with many leopards and fighting competitors. This peaked in 2019, when Shaaz Bin Jung’s film for National Geographic came out. It came in on the heels of the successful superhero movie, ‘Black Panther’. The documentary was rather cheekily called ‘The Real Black Panther’. Shaaz posted some spectacular shots on social media that of course went viral and throngs of tourists headed to Kabini. By this time, I had been seriously searching for him whenever I could because Blacky was in his prime and seen regularly enough in the public zone for Shaaz and others to get some remarkable sequences of him and his various mates and dueling partners.

However, domestic issues including the very joyful responsibility of helping out with my grandson kept me tied to home territory in those years. Then came 2020. Strangely, the pandemic set me free. My domestic issues were resolved. The lockdown had been lifted. My travel commitments had almost vanished. I was finally in a position to go to the forest more often because I could continue my virtual meetings anywhere. And I used the new freedom to the hilt. This year, I have clocked more than 40 days and nights in Kabini doing dozens of safaris, soaking in the forest with all its amazing flora and fauna. And yes, desperately seeking Blacky, whom I’ve still not seen. I think I’ve become a little notorious in the Kabini Jungle. There are many other photographers, filmmakers, and even tourists who are seen regularly on safari, but I have become a bit of a fixture, a woman in a strange-looking sun hat and a colourful face mask, perpetually doing the rounds in Zone A, since this is where Blacky lives.

I have come to know all the safari Jeep drivers and many of the forest guards and officials as well. I have learned that their opinion of me is a bit divided. Some feel sorry for me, and they often say, “Don’t worry, madam. We’ll show you Blacky soon. This time definitely. Khandita.” Others who have neutrally observed that Blacky never seems to show up when I am on safari worry that I’m a bit of an ill omen as far as this coveted cat is concerned. One cheekily asks me when I’m leaving for Bengaluru so that this panther can come out. Sandesh Kadur’s film crew joked that they can strategize their filming of the panther based on my safari schedule. My little grandson, Tanush, is kinder. Once when I rued, “Maybe Blacky doesn’t like me,” he said, “No, no ami. He’s only playing hide and seek with you.” But the annoying fact is that the data shows that too often, Blacky comes out on the safari just after I have left the forest. This has happened too many times, especially this year. No matter whether I stay for one day, three days or five days, Blacky shows up soon after I am back in Bengaluru.

A Symbol With a Larger Message 

I wonder, why we want the things that we cannot have. We are partly excited by the thrill of the chase but psychologists also say that often, when we want something or someone, we begin to ascribe characteristics of value to it which may not actually be possessed by that object of interest. I consider this as I watch myself be drawn into romancing the black panther who has no clue that any human is remotely interested in him. I looked up one definition of romance. It says it is ‘a quality of or feeling of mystery, excitement and remoteness from everyday life’. I think that’s a great way to describe this adventure that I have undertaken, to find a single unique animal among hundreds of his species in a forest of 625 square kilometers, where tourists are only allowed into 10% of the area for a limited amount of time each day. What are the chances?

Many people say to me, “Oh, it is just a jinx. It will be broken soon. Once you see him, you will see him often.” So, I persevere in joyful pursuit of the presumed pleasure of sighting Blacky. I keep tabs on his comings and goings. I plan my trips to Kabini after much speculation on when he is likely to emerge. People say, “The dark one likes moonless nights.” Others swear he comes out on festivals and full moon nights. I try all options. Results? Nada. With or without Blacky, I still love my forest bathing or shinrin-yoku, as the Japanese call it. The rhythm of my safari visits, day after day, waking up at 5:00 AM, doing my two safaris, squeezing in all those virtual meetings, and having early dinners – I have created a sort of rhythm that becomes like a substitute for happiness itself. Once I’m in the forest, it’s an experience like meditation, of being hyper-aware of the slightest rustle, of being in the present moment for long periods of time. No past, no future.

As Henry David Thoreau urged us centuries ago, “I am trying to find my eternity in each moment.” I am taken up with a sense of wonder, marvelling at something so tangibly bigger than us all and perhaps this is what humanity is desperate for now. Perhaps we have lost our way somewhere, somehow. Alain de Botton, the popular TED speaker, Swiss-born British philosopher, lectures on modern society and its many anxieties. “We have nothing,” he says, “at the centre that is non-human. We are the first society to be living in a world where we don’t worship anything other than ourselves. We think very highly of ourselves. Our heroes are human heroes and that’s a very new situation.” “Most other societies,” he says, “have had right at their centre the worship of something transcendent; a God, a spirit, a natural force, or the universe, whatever it is. That is why we are particularly drawn to nature for an escape from the human ant hill, an escape from our own competition and our own dramas.” Botton’s analysis seems very authentic to me. Unlike our tribal communities in this country, we urban folks like myself have winnowed out our animistic cultures. But this yearning for Blacky definitely has some renewed yearning for the mystical at its very core.

Especially in a year that has made us confront our own mortality and forced us into closeness and isolation, the promise of the open, untamed, and unregulated has been too much of a lure, which brings me to a far more serious question, “How does this particular obsession tie into my broader work on environmental sustainability, biodiversity conservation, and greener livelihoods? Are these two interests at odds?” After all, the idea of biodiversity is quite opposite to the emphasis on any one animal. There’s a strong criticism of people’s devotion to a few flagship species such as the tiger. Some conservationists believe that the excessive attention on these species allow people to ignore all the other species that are as critical, each in their own way, to sustaining the web of life. Urbanites especially, who are often quite deracinated from the wild, may not be aware of the consequences of an imbalanced reaction to a few species or to one particular celebrity animal for that matter. For example, all the tourist Jeeps crowding noisily, their cameras clicking away like gunfire around Blacky or around the beloved tigress Machali of Ranthambore or Tadoba’s famous Maya, do disturb the animals and makes their cubs skittish too.

A narrow focus on some animals can do genuine harm, not just to them, but also to other species or landscapes because the whole system is so intricately interconnected that it eventually may be detrimental even to the species that people claim to love. Some environmentalists are therefore dead against giving human names to wild animals and taking a very anthropocentric approach to conservation. And there is some truth there for us to consider. We have to be very vigilant not to let the symbol become bigger than the message it carries. We have to be careful, especially as tourists, to go into the wild not to extract value alone, but as trustees of the forest’s innate worth. Yet, maybe the love for one kind of animal can also lead people to understand more about how that animal is connected to the food chain and the environment in which it must thrive, and how all that connects back to human well-being as well.

A Lesson in Humility 

Many conservationists themselves have been victims of the emotional attachment to a particular species because it is a very powerful thing, and maybe we humans cannot conserve and cannot renew our ecology without that pull, that undeniable attraction. We can’t seem to feel drawn to ants or cockroaches, so understandably, it must be a charismatic species that becomes the objects of our attention. Perhaps this can be a powerful way to harness a much broader public constituency and to engage local communities who are very critical for conservation. People have been obsessed with all sorts of animals throughout human history. Love, it seems, can have many forms. The innovator, Nikola Tesla, used to love a white pigeon. He said he loved it as a man loves a woman, and he also claimed that the pigeon loved him back. Literature and art have celebrated the possibility of such passion enthusiastically, and many writers have also talked of these practices all over especially in India. Some of the best stories, especially for children, have been about the human love for animals. Think of ‘Black Beauty’, ‘The Yearling’, ‘My Friend Flicka’, and ‘Lassie’. It’s not just domesticated animals that evoke love and passion in books and in movies – there was ‘Free Willy’, ‘King Kong’, ‘Hachiko’, ‘The Black Stallion’, ‘Beethoven’, ‘The War Horse’, ‘Seabiscuit’, etc. There are also stories and movies inspired by real-life heroes who have had a passion for animals like Joy Adamson and Elsa the lioness in ‘Born Free’ and ‘Living Free’; Jane Goodall and her bond with Flint, the chimpanzee, in the film ‘Miss Goodall and the Wild Chimpanzees’ and much later in the documentary simply called ‘Jane’.

More recently, there was a Netflix documentary called ‘My Octopus Teacher’, about Craig Foster’s journey of self-learning with a common octopus in the South African kelp forest. I feel similarly – my experience also has allowed me to see Blacky as a kind of a guru in the sense that I have learnt many lessons from him and from my journey chasing him. They are lessons of perseverance, patience, grit, and learning how little we really need in life. I have personally understood what might be the foundations of happiness in the sense that, in the suspension of my normal self, I’ve experienced a complete loss of control. Occasionally, I joked that I feel like a hapless puppet. When Blacky calls, when he comes out, I must go and I have experienced such a loss of control as a kind of a freedom, a kind of a joy. But most of all, it has taught me that my wealth and the power that undeniably goes with it, has been pretty worthless in this case. Blacky has not revealed himself to me no matter what I do. Through this, he has taught me more about humility than all my other teachers combined.

By taking his non-appearances personally, I make myself vulnerable, open, and Blacky entreats me to surrender to a grace not defined in material terms. I’m invited into another realm of possibility. In every sense, of course, it has also exposed my own privilege and my own sense of that privilege. In a pandemic, when most people have had other problems, I have not had to worry about things like the cost of my visits. I can leave at a moment’s notice, my hapless driver in tow. I can reschedule my meetings. I can even change other people’s plans.

Unfortunately, access to the forest in the safari has become an elite privilege. It is expensive and time consuming. Barely a kilometre away from the gate that the forest department controls is a buffer zone, dotted with many hamlets. The little children living there watch us all coming out onto the road. We look so alien, so aspirational, as we take off in our Jeeps while they can only wave to us from the roadside. Sometimes I take storybooks for them, especially this year as they have suffered because of the school closures. They take the books happily, but they plead with me, saying that they also want to go on safari. The villagers have extricated some livelihood opportunities related to tourism, but they themselves cannot get in, to marvel at the forest which they help to conserve. Ironically, the opposite is true of the tribal communities who live even closer to the forest, sometimes inside the forest, and have access to its resources such as honey or gooseberries. They cannot experience other basic conveniences that we take for granted outside the forest, like running water or a choice of cuisine.

All this has forced me to rethink my priorities for my environmental philanthropy. Recently, I signed an MoU with Nagarhole Conservation Foundation to start giving forward to Kabini and its people a small portion of what I have so blessedly received. I feel as though I have been exposed to all the wisdoms locked in all the self-help books in the world all at once, and now I must dedicate myself to internalising those lessons better.

People ask, what happens if and when I meet Blacky at last? The truth is that I do not know. I meet many people in the forest who keep chasing Blacky, no matter how often they have seen him. Maybe my journey will follow their path from ‘ase’ which is hope to ‘nirase’ which is disappointment and back to ‘ase’ again, and then to ‘durase’, which is greed. Kariya may call again and again, and I may respond again and again. But as the classic ‘Charlotte’s Web’ by E. B. White reminds us, “We are constrained by lifespans. Time is draining away on both sides of this equation of no name.” I do hope I can meet my mystery friend soon, but if I do not, I salute him. He has enriched my life beyond measure. I will redouble my efforts to help secure ecosystems that support the diversity of life, especially in India. After all, as Leo Tolstoy put it, “One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between man and nature shall not be broken.” This is so true in this year of the pandemic with the zoonotic diseases that we have begun to understand. And why is this even a story worth telling? Because somewhere in it I hope there is the same redeeming quality that describes so much of literature.

There is the sense of a better future because it is so good to know that all of us together  have nurtured a space for a vulnerable animal like Blacky, who has to work so hard to camouflage himself from prey and predator. He has a fighting chance to live out his full life. John Muir, the founder of the US-based conservation NGO, the Sierra Club famously said, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” It’s often quoted, but remains my go-to quote always. More than ever, we need to immerse ourselves, in our own way, in the deep mystery of this interconnectedness of all living beings. After all, Blacky, Kariya is only a symbol. We are the possibility. 

Keynote address at TiE Global Summit 2020: Scaling fast – Social Entrepreneurship in India

Rohini’s speech at the TiE Summit 2020 where she talks about Societal Platform Thinking, and the need for restoring agency to create a more resilient Samaaj.

 

 

Namaste, everyone. Thank you to the TiE team for inviting me to deliver this keynote. TiE does amazing work at binding the energy of entrepreneurship to the spirit of service and I am so glad to be able to address you all today, though, sadly, only virtually.

I want to use my ten-twelve minutes to talk of how we can together achieve more impact at scale, with speed and sustainability, a phrase my husband Nandan often uses. 

Scale – because the response has to be at the size of the problem itself. Speed – because there is an urgency to some of society’s problems that will escalate if not solved soon. And while I am not a big fan of speed for the thrill of it, and we need to focus on the what and the how of scale, the fact is that this pandemic has made humans fall so far back on our commonly agreed to SDGs, that we have to run a little faster to catch up and surge ahead. And Sustainability – so that we aim for resilience among people and institutions to cope with new issues as they arise.

The last ten months has been a testament to the need for such an approach, and many people are experimenting globally on how to achieve this.  Our teams have put together what we call Societal Platform Thinking or SPT. It is an attempt to help reduce the friction to collaborate between samaaj, bazaar and sarkaar, or society, markets and the state. Its goal is to engage all three sectors in addressing complex issues by allowing all stakeholders to have agency to innovate in their own context.

SPT keeps some important questions on the table. How can we create a more holistic approach to addressing societal issues as they constantly evolve? How can we work together? How can we discover and deploy people’s own talent? How can we give people choice and freedom to innovate? How can we ensure that India’s huge diversity is put to good use to solve problems in their own context? How can we use technology in the service of these goals? 

Let me give you an example of societal platform thinking from the education sector, an area that has been globally hit very hard in this year of the virus. 

In 2015, my husband Nandan, Shankar Maruwada and I set up the EkStep Foundation to increase access to learning opportunities for 200 million children by 2020. We believed then is using emerging digital technologies to fuel our mission Little did we know then that the pandemic would make our work more relevant than ever before. 

As in many countries, India still faces challenges in getting every learner to be where she needs to be. In the past three decades, tremendous work has been done, and the country HAS shown progress, as surveys ASER shows year on year. But it is still not enough. We have a long way to go to ensure that every child is learning well. And now we know we have to ensure this regardless of whether children are physically present in school.

Something that we learned in our journey in education is that we need to be able to leverage existing infrastructure and meet the system where it is rather than expect the system to come to where we are.

With EkStep, we had to learn and iterate over the years to arrive at something that would work. Based on Nandan and Shankar’s work on India’s unique ID system, Aadhaar, and based on my work at Pratham Books to put a book in every child’s hand, we knew that to achieve anything at scale, you have to unleash local innovation. You have to design in such a way that people can get anywhere, anytime access to a service or product. You have to put the grammar to the power of your intent of inclusion and equity.

This led us to work with the government to help them build the digital infrastructure for learning now called DIKSHA. Diksha is the government’s national teacher platform for India’s nearly 3 million teachers. It was designed keeping in mind the DNA of the public education system, which has many layers. Diksha kept evolving as an open, public digital good, to empower many people to participate in the societal mission of improving learning.

The platform serves as a bridge between the online and the offline world. Through QR codes embedded in existing textbooks, hundreds of millions of children have gained access to quality curated content. On Diksha, teachers can avail of just in time bite sized training; they can connect with each other, they can curate special content for their classrooms, and much more. They can learn digitally to improve their teaching physically. 

Diksha also allows parents to be more involved and engaged in the learning that their children partake. It allows communities to be involved; civil society organizations to be a part of improving access to learning. Importantly, it also creates space for markets to play, whether it’s the tuition teacher or the afterschool program to all build off the same public infrastructure. 

Diksha has really taken off as an incubator for innovation. Everywhere, people have come up with ingenious ways to use digital to bridge the digital divide itself. For example, there’s the story of teacher Revati, who has been active on the digital platform. She talked about struggling with low engagement and poor reading levels in her classroom. DIKSHA allowed her to curate high quality content online, customize it to her offline context, and then feed her lessons back into a knowledge common of a peer group of teachers. 

DIKSHA currently supports 35 States in India, across 33 languages with over 90,000 pieces of co-created content. The usage numbers really speak for themselves. There have been cumulatively over 3 billion page views and 275 million content views.

The platform really came to the rescue of the education system during the pandemic, with its massive school closures, and frustrated students. This year, on Diksha, there were 1 billion training sessions for teachers and over the last 60 days there have been close to 700 million learning sessions across pretty much all States in India. These mind-boggling numbers show what becomes possible when digital infrastructure is animated with human intent, when we build technology that works for society.

But the real credit goes to the teachers, the students and the parents who bravely adopted unfamiliar digital technologies and pedagogies. And our teams learnt that once individuals and communities feel empowered with new tools, they quickly create the enabling environment in which change can be scaled up.

The example of Diksha shows how sarkaar can embark on creating a societal platform together with samaaj. The infrastructure is now in place to invite in the bazaar as well.

All this work embodies the lessons that Nandan and I have learnt in our respective journeys over the last three decades as active participants in samaaj, bazaar and sarkaar. It is not something that we believe is unique or new to us. It’s a distillation of things that many of you have already learned and worked on over the last few over the last decade. The biggest pivot around which we built the idea of this type of platform ecosystem thinking is on the importance of restoring agency and choice. 

Societal platform thinking hinges on four fundamental design principles. Let’s design for diversity at scale so that every actor can create solutions for their own contexts. This requires a unified but not uniform structure because the solutions that work in Karnataka are different from the solutions that work in Assam. Instead of pushing A solution down a pipeline, let’s distribute the ability to solve. This is how we bring resilience into our samaaj. For all this, we must use all emerging technologies, but we must be careful to be technology enabled, not technology led. Technology is only a tool, and amplifies intent, both good and bad. I care most deeply that we should build an ecosystem of platforms that are in service of society. Platforms that allow our expressions as citizens rather than as subjects of the state or as consumers of the market. 

If we want to achieve greater impact as social entrepreneurs, this thinking is one way, though not the only way, to move ahead together. We invite more discussion around these goals and themes. 2020 has shown us how one event, or one tiny virus can affect us globally and personally. It has invited us to understand just how interconnected we are, and to design for more inclusion, more access, more agency, so that more of us can become part of the solution and not remain part of the problem. The next time around, we will be better prepared. Through greatly enhanced co-operation, we are all learning, how to scale our responses with urgency, and towards resilience, with empathy, and last but not least with renewed humility.

Thank you and namaste.

 

Keynote address at the Belongg Library Network Launch Event

This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani’s Keynote Address at the Belongg Library Network Launch Event.

Belongg Library’s vision for inclusion and diversity is very welcome and timely. We need to find spaces and tools for people to be able to explore beyond their narrow horizons. People must be allowed the luxury of moving beyond blind certainty through blurry doubt to finally emerge in the dazzling sunshine and the humble knowledge that there is always more to learn, and a well-stocked library can enable just that. Libraries have always stood for something that is very important and close to my heart. My childhood was spent between the pages of books, where I would lose myself in stories with incredible characters who were so different from me but whose aspirations and adventures felt strangely familiar.

Back then, we didn’t have TVs or mobile phones to distract us, so books became my first glimpse of a larger world. To a young person, there is such a thrill in finding a bigger, wonderful universe that exists outside your small space. Books allowed me to enlarge my imagination and satisfy a deep curiosity that all children have and books continue to exert a hold over me – that is the involved nature of reading that makes them such a powerful tool for shaping the mind. For this reason, it is important that children and adults have access to a diverse range of books, because it helps us see beyond the binaries of black and white, and lean in to occupy the rich hues of grey that actually describe all our lives. These nuances can help children to be sensitive, empathetic, and critical thinking adults, but unfortunately, despite the advances made in the last 15 years, many children are still growing up without proper access to books.

In India, there is still only one book for every five children in urban India and one for every 10 in rural India, compared to countries like the UK where there are six or more books per child. And in our linguistically rich country, with 22 constitutional languages and 150 million people speaking in hundreds of other languages, most of our books are only printed in English and Hindi. This was the problem that some of us decided to tackle in 2004. Through the Pratham network, we had created so many readers who had nothing to read, so we felt that we had to do something to address this. We founded Pratham books then, with the mission of a book in every child’s hands, to truly democratise the joy of reading that so many of us have experienced ourselves. We wanted children from every corner of India to get good books in their own languages that were affordable, attractive, and inspiring. They needed to be stories and characters that were culturally approachable for them, but also ones that introduced children to the diversity of India, with people who may live differently, love differently, or think differently than them.

At Pratham, we learned the nuts and bolts of the publishing industry and soon we had dozens of books for young children, all simultaneously printed in up to 12 languages, which was a huge breakthrough. Since we were a non-profit, we could afford to subsidize the books, but we hope that this will create new opportunities for the entire publishing industry for children in India. We took a risk in trying out things that hadn’t been done before, and fortunately we succeeded in quickly becoming India’s largest children’s publisher. We realised the importance of innovating various new models, especially if we wanted to achieve our goals, so in 2008 we put all our books online under the Open Source Creative Commons license, and suddenly lots of books in many different languages became available to parents, children and teachers, completely free. It created a whole ecosystem, unleashing illustrators, writers, and translators from every corner of the country, collaborating to put out great stories for children to enjoy. Today, Pratham books has continued to innovate, taking the digital idea much further with Storyweaver, which I hope will be an important resource for the Belongg Library Network as well, providing incredibly diverse books in hundreds of languages free to access with just a click of a button.

But when it comes to digital, there’s often the concern that our beloved bookstores or libraries will become a thing of the past. I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Research shows that we should not worry too much about readers accessing digital material, and that children who are able to access both digital and physical books are able to sustain their reading habits better than others. Increasing access to books through online mediums creates more readers, which is good for everybody including writers and publishers. Of course, we have to be vigilant about screen time and must not lose what Maryanne Wolf describes as our ‘deep reading brain’, which has evolved over millennia to help us decode, reconstruct meaning, and stay with something till the end.

Libraries do play a vital role in that respect, and in my work with both Pratham books and Akshara Foundation, we have invested a lot of time in creating and activating libraries in the classroom as well as community libraries. For example at Pratham books, classrooms received small, portable bookshelves, which could be kept at a low level so children can easily access them. Similarly, Akshara had a classroom library initiative which provided classrooms with foldable bookcases, each holding 122 age-appropriate books in multiple languages, and the number of books borrowed and the reading levels were recorded. This infrastructure is needed, not just in schools, but also outside in society, as gateways to knowledge and culture. Libraries play a fundamental role and the resources and services they offer create opportunities to support not just literacy and education, but also to shape new ideas and perspectives that are central to creative thinking and innovative society.

According to the 2011 census, India only has one rural library for 11,500 people and one urban library for 80,000 people. Moreover, there is no precise information on the functionality and the level of service capabilities of these libraries. Per capita expenditure on the development of public libraries is 7 paisa. Contrast this with the country like the US, where the public library system provides services to 95.6% of the total population, and they spend $35.96 per capita annually. I have to acknowledge my own personal debt to the public library system of America. Right after I got married in 1982 until 1989, my husband and I would often travel to America because Infosys used to do a lot of on-site software projects. I spent those years in different cities with really not much money to sustain us. It was the free public library system that came to my rescue, especially in the cold dark winters where you couldn’t do much else. In some ways, I believe that my support for Pratham books, Akshara Foundation, and other educational initiatives like Ekstep, is my effort to repay a part of this huge debt.

The important thing to note here is that funding for libraries in many Western countries is primarily local. In the US and Europe, 80% of funding comes from local councils rather than national funds. This is really something for us to think about in this country, especially in urban India. Out of India’s 29 states and seven union territories, 19 states have passed State Library legislation, but only five of them have the provision of a library cess or levy, and even when there is a cess level it may not reach the library system at all. I remember in Janaagraha, we did a public citizen budgeting exercise and we realised as we did the research that the municipality of Bangalore owes lakhs and lakhs of rupees to the public library system, but nobody knows how to extract this.

In this dysfunctionality, efforts like Belongg have a really valuable role to play to just enhance the public culture of supporting libraries. Decentralised initiatives are terribly important, not just from a resourcing perspective but because libraries are not just to our houses for books, they are spaces to build community around, where people can create a common vision for the kind of society they want to build, and this works best at the local level. It will help in advancing inclusion, reducing the terrible polarisation we are witnessing, and strengthening our democratic processes. These ideas of inclusion and diversity should not end up making Belongg an island or silo, but should be mainstreamed, and the work folded into a larger, growing, evolving philosophy and practice of making our societies the best they can be for everyone.

How Citizens and Communities Shape our Cities

This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani’s keynote address at eGovernments Foundation’s Connect For Impact Webinar on how citizens and communities can shape our cities.

Recently, I have been travelling from Bengaluru to Kabini a lot in these last few months, and every time I return from the forest to this megacity, Bengaluru, I’m able to see my home city from a new perspective, with fresh eyes. The overwhelming impression I get is of a city undergoing a painful renewal, masses of threatening concrete overhead, piles of rubble underneath, and with all manner of dangerous spikes poking outward. Through this grey canvas, hapless citizens can be seen as dots of colour, doing their best to head on through traffic without signposts or proper visibility, and navigating through large trucks and haulers, past moody traffic signals or perplexing roundabouts.

It seems as if this city, like many other towns and cities in the country, is actually testing its residents. The unfinished infrastructure is a poster promise of a better future at the far horizon, and the city demands patience, faith, and hope. The residents, on the other hand, experience resignation, weariness, and a kind of lasting numbness. When I finally get home, I enter an urban version of the forest that I left behind because my neighbourhood in Koramangala has a dense canopy of trees with a mix of mammals and avian diversity. But Bengaluru is not at all homogeneous. It has a criss-cross of diverse identities and designs. It has layers upon layers, like all cities, of privilege on top and tears of disenfranchisement below, yet the dysfunctionality of the city is a perverse equaliser. It brings an end to the secession of the elite. Our bubble breaks with the chaos of the traffic, the pervasive pollution, and the squeezing of personal spaces. But it’s these visible cracks that have left us with an opening and there are now new opportunities to engage with our city’s future.

Many groups are engaging citizens to reimagine the city and make it their own. The question has moved from whether the city will grow and change to how it should grow and change, and who should participate in the change making. In his 1960 classic, ‘The Image of the City’, Kevin Lynch says that the metropolitan region is now the functional unit of our environment, and it is desirable that this functional unit should be identified and structured by its inhabitants. The good news is that many new citizens-based nodes are challenging the supremacy of the state in urban futures. Whether it is the thriving RWAs in the city or the many new dynamic CSOs and non-profits, there seems to be a growing determination to take back the city. These new efforts are building on many movements in Bengaluru that began in the ’80s with the aim of improving the governance of the city.
I always joke that there are more urban reformers per square foot in Bengaluru than anywhere else in the world. And these efforts were made both on the supply side and the demand side. BATF was set up in the SM Krishna administration to bridge the demand side to the supply side and make the supply side more coordinated. Then Janaagraha came along to broaden the scope and ambition of citizen engagement in the governance of the city. eGov Foundation came along to help the government use technology more effectively to collect and analyse data, to create better access to its various services. These are only three out of dozens of examples, and today’s Samaaj is evolving even further. Our present technologies can enable mass participation in civic design for the first time ever and the better delivery of public services.

This is happening in all the major metropolitan areas of the country, and it’s now extending beyond. For example, sometimes, even the simplest data is not available to the public and RTIs need to be filed for even the simplest of information. So when the lockdown was announced, Yugantar in Hyderabad filed an RTI to get the total number of slums and their population in the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation. That data was shared with local non-profits, who started to target relief and health work in those areas. Another example is Haiyya in Delhi, which addresses the issue of access to sexual and reproductive health services, especially for unmarried girls. They did a campaign called Health Over Stigma, spearheaded by young women. Haiyya helped to hold service providers accountable for giving safe and non-judgmental sexual and reproductive health services. As a result, the Delhi Medical Council has committed to providing these services throughout the New Delhi region.

Reap Benefit has developed an open civic platform that comprises a WhatsApp chatbot, a web app, and a civic forum, to guide first-time users with simple steps using a variety of civic challenges that are fun and engaging. Through decentralisation and communitisation, as they call it, many people can now get better access through WhatsApp. So if you see a pothole on the road, you can type that into the chatbot and send a photo, and then have a discussion on what you should do about it. So that agitation and anxiety can turn into real action. During COVID they were able to reach more than a million people with direct relief using this sort of decentralised community model. Jhatkaa also uses mobilisation and awareness building to aggregate citizen voices. Last year, they organised one of the biggest climate strikes in Bengaluru with 1,500 people, and created a lot of awareness videos which got three million views, and 14,000 people signed their petition for cleaner air. On the other hand, Civis looks at environmental legislation, which is usually so technical that regular citizens or civil services find it difficult to understand, even though we are impacted by what those laws are framing. So in March 2020, they put up a simpler version of the Environmental Impact Assessment Notification, and they received more than 400 comments which will hopefully be taken into consideration when the final rules come out. We must applaud and encourage all these Samaaj-based efforts, but more importantly, each of us has to find a way to participate in these attempts. We need a broader collective action of the Samaaj because urban design is not a spectator sport. Good governance is not an entitlement – we have to co-create it. No matter who you are, you are a citizen first.

For years now, my work has been devoted to the premise that it is only the Samaaj and institutions of the Samaaj that can hold the state and markets accountable to the larger public interest, and can uphold our individual rights and freedoms. This is where we can creatively work together on the most complex problems that we are facing as a society. Luckily, today’s new technologies do allow us to participate more effectively with relative ease. But I’m not talking about clicktivism. I’m talking about Societal Platform Thinking i.e. how a technology-enabled social ecosystem can create discoverability of solutions. It can create better access to services because we are all engaged in making the whole system better, and it can improve our ability to make meaningful choices. We need civil society itself to get much more digital in this inevitable digital age, so that a digital Samaaj can keep tech corporations from amassing unconscionable power and from creating tools and products that distort the political and democratic processes as we are beginning to see.

It’s more important than ever that organisations like eGov and other civil society organisations work together from the demand side and the supply side to strengthen societies’ own interactions and interfaces with the Samaaj. Of course, we have to be careful that we prevent technologies from amassing power that will reduce individual or collective agency and strip meaning from social connection. This is not ideal speculation, and the time has come for us to persevere patiently but creatively and challenge any technology future that is more of a dystopia than a solution to our current problems. So this battle has to be engaged in by the Samaaj, and hopefully represented by civil society organisations so that technology can be an enabler of our common intent for a good society. I think we’re at a very exciting inflection point where urban spaces are going to be reimagined and redesigned.

This year of the virus has forced us to speed up our thinking on what cities can look like in the future. This is not the last pandemic we shall see, and it is only the beginning of climate change, so how are we going to adopt urban resilience? Technology and civil society will play a huge role in this, but moreover, every single one of us has to believe that we can participate and therefore we will. We must start thinking about how each of us can build on this momentum and build back a better, new normal. We must create cities that we are proud of belonging to, and cities where our children can breathe.

Booked & Hooked: Bringing Stories to Every Child | Keynote Address at Neev Book Award 2020 Special

Rohini Nilekani’s Keynote Address at the Neev Book Award 2020 Special. The title of her talk is “Booked & Hooked: Bringing Stories to Every Child”

Namaste and good morning, book lovers. It is truly a pleasure and an honour to be giving this keynote address at the Neev Literature Festival, and to be taking part in the award ceremony as well. Thank you, Kavita, thank you Neev, for this opportunity. This festival, with the beautiful title Imaginary Lines is a very important signpost in the journey to ensure that all of India’s children get a chance to immerse in good books. As a society, we need to do many more things that are focused on the intellectual and cultural development of our 300 million children. It is no exaggeration to say that it will determine the very future of this country. Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. A reading nation is a thinking nation. Which is just so important to lift us out of the multiple predicaments we face as a society today.

Today, I will speak to you about my journey as a reader, a writer, a publisher and then back again to being a writer and a reader.

I started my love of books very early, learning to read long before I was formally taught in school. I would peer over my sister’s shoulder as she read the fun books borrowed from the nearby library. My entire childhood was spent between the pages of hundreds of books. My mother had to wrench me away from the book I was clutching so that I could do my daily chores, such as helping to set the table.

Thank God for all those authors and illustrators who carried me off into a world of make-believe, letting me entwine myself into the lives of strange and wonderful characters to whom I could talk, whose stories I could extend, and who would always be my secret friends.

What an innocent time it was.

No TV, no computers, no Internet and no mobile phones. It was so much fun to walk down to the library, choose our books, pay the few paise of reading charges from the pocket money that our mother gave us, and come home to read, read and read. If we were lucky, we were allowed to buy a crunchy snack to add to the enjoyment. It was sheer bliss.

I started out with the Noddy Books of Enid Blyton. Noddy was this strange little creature with whom I could still identify with for the scrapes he kept getting himself into. Toyland became a magical place for me, and I kept returning to the books again and again. By the age of six, I was reading the Malory Towers series, and all the other Enid Blyton books I could lay my hands on. I also read the William books and of course Winnie the Pooh.

One of my biggest regrets is that I did not read much in our own languages. Not even in my mother tongue, Marathi. Not even when my own mother was a Marathi and Sanskrit scholar. My mother wanted us to be fluent in English, the upwardly mobile language. Also, it was not so easy to find books and stories for young children in Marathi or Hindi. We did get to read comics – from Vikram Betaal and the Panchatantras to Akbar and Birbal. Occasionally, I would see them in Marathi at my cousin’s home. But unfortunately, I did not sustain my reading in Marathi. I now realize just how important it is to read in many languages, especially in a country like ours. It may be the glue that will keep the many threads of our social fabric from unravelling in the future.

Luckily for me, that did not prevent me from getting stories in Marathi. Thanks to my beloved grandmother, Atya, as we called her, I got thousands of stories, mostly about the bhakti saints of Maharashtra. She was an amazing storyteller. Till today, my eyes can water remembering her tales of the difficult life of the orphaned Sant Dnyaneshwar and his siblings. Atya truly taught me the power of a story to inspire, to evoke empathy and to capture the imagination. I try to repay that debt by channeling Atya while reading and telling stories to my 3-year-old grandson.

Millions of children have grandmothers like mine to tell them stories. Ours has been an oral society, a nation of storytellers, passing the epics down from generation to generation.
But we cannot say the same thing for books and for reading.

If, like me, you were surrounded by books, you were fortunate. The sad truth is, that even now, even after the strides we have made in the past two decades, a good book is a rare thing for children to access. Look at the numbers. In the UK, there are 4 books available for every child. In India, there is one book for every 5 children in urban India and one book for every ten children in rural India. Worse, in a country where we have 22 constitutional languages, and hundreds of other languages, most of the books are in only two languages. English leads by a huge margin, followed by Hindi.

This was exactly the problem some of us decided to tackle, way back in 2004. Through the Pratham network, we had helped thousands and thousands of children to read more fluently. But then they had very little to practice their newfound skills on. The only book that truly reaches every household in India is the school textbook, and you can hardly curl up with one of those. When we started libraries, we could find only a few books in a few languages other than English. And we decided something had to be done.
That’s when I cofounded Pratham Books, with the mission of A Book in Every Child’s hand. We wanted to truly democratize the joy of reading. We wanted children from each corner of the country to get good books, in their own languages, that were affordable, and attractive and inspiring. If that meant we had to become publishers ourselves, so be it. We learnt the nuts and bolts from scratch. Soon we had dozens of books for young children, each simultaneously printed in up to 12 languages. Because we were a non-for–profit organization, we could subsidize the books. Because we were unafraid, we could try things no one had before.

We had to think big. We had to disrupt. We had to be creative. We had to be bold. We had to be fast.

Within a few years, Pratham Books became the largest publisher of children’s books in India. We published hundreds of books across many languages. We reached out to every writer, illustrator and translator we could find. We used every channel of distribution we could think of. We partnered with samaaj, bazaar and sarkaar. With other publishers, with government, with other NGOs. We wanted to reach just as many children as we could.

We succeeded beyond our expectations. Millions of children got to own their very first book thanks to Pratham Books. Millions of children got to read stories in their own languages, about situations like their own, children like themselves. These were Indian stories, indigenous tales, freshly written. They were true to the many cultures of the country. To be honest, we were more focused on diversity than on quality, in the early days. We wanted stories from every geography, every community. We wanted to showcase Indian motifs, art and culture. Books that could help children understand and enjoy the diversity of this country. Its geography and climate, its people and cultures, its flora and its fauna,

Books that could help children engage with ethical issues. Children may begin with binaries of black and white but good books help them move into the grays, where all the rich nuances of life are. Books can help kids move beyond blind certainty towards a blurry doubt and then on to a dazzling yet humbling knowledge of how much more there is to learn. We wanted to offer them all that.

In fact, to fill in the gaps, some of us began to write books ourselves!

And my innings as a writer began. Over the years, I wrote several books for Pratham Books. I tried my best to come up with unusual stories, interesting characters. Sringeri Srinivas the farmer was born. Annual Haircut Day was the first in a series of six. It is not at all easy to write good books for young children. Many famous authors I approached told me they would love to help us but were nervous to write for children! I could understand why. It would take days and months to make those 500 words just so. Sometimes, one succeeds. Often, one doesn’t.

But the process is most absorbing and enjoyable.

And to know that we were creating something for so many first-generation readers was soul satisfying.

And nothing has ever given me more joy in my work than the sight of a child happily reading one of our books!

I believe we need to create story-writing courses so that we can have a whole new generation of young authors who could write for children, especially young children.

Because there is still a long way to go before we can declare that there are have enough books for India’s 300 million children.

At Pratham Books we soon realized that if we really wanted to get closer to achieving our mission, we would have to think differently. There was no way we could create enough physical books to reach every child. Nor would it be environmentally sustainable, even if one could.

That’s when we cracked open the model. We went digital. We put up our books in the Creative Commons. Our books could then be freely read online, downloaded, printed, shared, even sold! Our goal was not to monopolize the market, but to create wide access. We went from being a publisher to a platform. We still produced physical books. But to reach the unreached child, we had to go virtual too.

And it worked! We helped build a vibrant new community of writers and illustrators, translators and editors. We unlocked the door to books for parents and children. We were inching closer to our dream.

When I retired from Pratham Books after 10 adventurous years, the team took the organization to new heights. They pushed forward on the digital journey. Under the new name Storyweaver, they made the space for hundreds more books by hundreds of new writers in hundreds of languages to reach millions more children.

The numbers speak for themselves. Hats off to the Storyweaver team for what has been achieved. My books too were lifted by the tide. People read them and translated them and even retold them in their own ways. It is a whole new world!

I continue to write. In fact, I hope you will permit me a little promo. My latest book, this time from Juggernaut Books will be out next month. My grandson was the inspiration, but I so hope little children all over the world will enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

With my grandson, my biggest competitor now is the online version of Masha and the Bear. He has fixed quotas of screen time, and eagerly waits to see the next episode. His absorption is complete, his attention riveted to the ipad. He can’t even SEE me then.

It is really tough to parent children in this digital age.

So many questions arise. How much screen time should a child have? Is it ok to read books online? How does one keep the child interested in physical books?

There is a lot of research that tells us that children are not well served by too much screen time. Your recent guest – Dr Maryanne Wolfe talks about the deep reading brain and the perils of digital reading. She believes that digital mediums tend to push us towards skim-reading or browsing, and that skimming is bad for the brain.

This study by the National Literacy Trust (UK) on children and e-reading finds data to support Wolf’s theory that skim reading is bad But it also gives a sense of how one can move forward, by showing that it is digital alone that is bad – mixed medium reading ends up being good. The takeaway here is that to cultivate a reader, you need some physical books. But to sustain the reading habit, a mix works just as well.

Which brings me to an important point. We know that the digital age is here to stay. Today’s generation are digital natives, compared to their parents, who were digital migrants. So it is useless to fight against the myriads screens in their lives. Instead, how can the whole community of experts come together with the communities of creative artists to design a new digital pedagogy ? How can we de-risk from fractured attention? How can we protect children from digital addiction? How can we challenge the algorithms based on artificial intelligence that keep children glued to the screen? How can we bring in a new code of ethics? How can we help parents to better understand how to find the good stuff online? At the same time, how can we help them not to fear technology and its ill effects? After all, these are ancient problems. Parents and educators had the same issues with TV too. Groucho Marx famously said – “ I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.” It illustrates the same issues we face today. How can we all engage in making technology work better for us all?

That is the real challenge before us. It is a call to action, which will require creative collaboration and perseverance. I do hope there will be much more of a discourse around this, and literature festivals may be one place to begin.

Meanwhile, we must continue our efforts to surround children with good physical books.

The earlier the better. Now that so much more is known about how children learn, and how quickly they start to map their world, I believe we need a new societal mission – ‘A book in every baby’s hand’.

And not just A book. As Thomas Aquinas said so long ago – ‘Beware of the person of one book.’

Let children read many, many books, all kinds of books, the more diverse the better. I am so grateful that my grandson now has so many Indian books from so many publishers that help him understand other lives. If we have to counter the polarisation that is threatening democracy all over the world, we need to start with good books for young children. After all, as Ray Bradbury said, “ You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” We simply cannot afford that for our country. We need a generation of children who are open-minded, curious, empathetic and capable of critical analysis. All these qualities can be nurtured by reading through a library of good books. Truly, to give the gift of a reading life is the best gift of all to hand over to future citizens.

The Indian publishing industry has come a long way in a short time to rise to the challenge of producing good literature rooted in the country’s diverse cultures. Literature festivals and book awards are pathways to spread the joy of reading those books to every child in this country. So, thank you, Neev, and thank you to every single caring adult who brings a child to the magical moment at which, as Marcel Proust so wisely says, the end of the author’s wisdom appears to us at but the beginning of ours.