An interesting day!!!

Date: December 3rd
Time: 11 am
Venue: Narayanpet, Andhra Pradesh

I roamed around in a municipality called Narayanpet in Mahaboobnagar district of Andhra Pradesh for identifying feasible sites for developing Municipal Parks and Pay & Use Toilets. The town, which was the second biggest town of Andhra Pradesh after Hyderabad some forty years ago, has become one of the least developed municipalities due to negligence by politicians over the years. The town with around 70,000 population has few houses with toilets. Men, blatantly and women, with terrible sense of shame, attend to their natural calls publicly. There is no underground sewerage system in the town.

You always hear about how poor the rural India is!!! You know all the statistics and all the figures. Par woh tumhare Zahan (consciousness) pe asar nahi chhodta. Visiting these places has a very deep impact on one's consciousness. On one side, the selfishness in you shouts "Thank god I wasn't born here" and on the other side, the benevolence in you cries "Something ought to be done about this". After a few minutes the pessimist in you laments "There's hardly anything that I can do about this. I am too small a player in the big game." and the optimist in you responds that "These are the problems which attracted you to this field. Now you can't run away from them."

I bid an emotional farewell to the town.

Date: Same december 3rd.
Time: 6 pm
Venue: Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh

I had to make a presentation to secretary, Information Technology department, Government of India in Hyderabad International Convention Center. Since my boss was on a vacation, I was asked to make this presentation.

Everything about the occasion inspired a sense of awe in me. The truly international level of infrastructure, the tight security, amazingly well trained receptionists, lavish conference room, smooth leather seats, terribly impressive qualifications and designations and the wealth of experience of my audience, importance of the presentation, potential impact of issues that were to be discussed on IT industry in Hyderabad!!!

Ya, ya, I have written in another blog that I feel I am ready for the next challenge. But that is a comment on analytical ability. Here I had to call upon my experience. And if you know me, you know that there is nothing to call upon in that department, apart from a couple of years of trivial coding experience.

As always, I ended up wandering... What is more important? Is it developing public toilets in rural India or developing IT investment region in Andhra Pradesh? I was reminded of one of my courses in IIMB, Public economics, which talks about social welfare functions.

Let us suppose that there are n people in the society, n = 1,2,...,N, and let us denote the utility of nth Individual by Un. Let us simply say that society's welfare is some function W = f(U1 ,U2 ,..., Un) of the individual utilities. There are various possible forms that this function may take. The classic utilitarian form can be defined as the particular functional form W = SUM (U1, U2,.....Un). This effectively treats all people as equal - though it does assume that the utility values actually mean something.

The Rawlsian Utility function takes the form W = min( U1,U2,...,Un) - this is based on the argument that society's welfare should be based on the 'worst-off' member of society.

There is no right or wrong answer here. But everyone in policy making has to make a choice in what he thinks is the ideal utility function. The answer will determine your ideological choices. It will answer whether you are capitalist or a socialist. It will require you to answer whether you prefer to spend on industrial infrastructure or on irrigation.

Aaahhhhh!!! I hate choices!!!!
An interesting day nevertheless!!!

Experiences!!!

I have been roaming in interior parts of AP for one of my projects these days. This is precisely the kind of experience I was looking for when I joined PwC GRID. It again reminded me of my project trip for study of NREGA scheme for Social Entrepreneurship project. I have been talking to various people about how life is in villages? How they spend their days and nights and what are their favourite childhood memories...

On a different note, the other day I was wondering... When I meet my batchmates in a 10 or 15 year reunion at IIMB, how will I decide who is the most successful of them all... Will it be who is the biggest newsmaker, or the one with the fanciest designation or heftiest pay package? Then I came to the conclusion, that I will feel that the person who has done what he really wanted to do in life... and probably contnues to have that freedom of doing what he wants to do everyday of his life. He doesn't have the pressure of running round the clock to meet the deadlines. He can take a day off without asking anyone etc... etc...

Coming back to the original point, life's very different in villages.
People say villagers are poor...
They don't have money...
They don't have knowledge...
They don't have economic freedom...

But they have time...
They have health...
They have sharp senses...
They have experiences...
They observe things...
They have stories to tell...
They have friends to die for...

Lives in cities are at best going to be a series of experiences none which will have enough impact on our consiousness to last the lifetime. For an experience to enter into our consiousness as a fond memory, it has to be either very high impact event like marriage or it has to be a repeatative phenomenon and you have to observe it carefully, giving it a lot of time and thought.
Village life gives you the opportunity to do the later.

So do I believe that they have better life in villages than what we have in cities?
No matter how much I think, I don't seem to be able to find answers to this question...

The answer lies in answering the question: What makes the life fullsome? Breadth of experience and thinking? or Depth of feeling and emotions...

Today my heart is leaning towards emotions, tomorrow it will prefer rationality.

One thing's for sure... I no longer pity the villagers and I no longer feel as fortunate...