Skip to main content

Reductive Seduction

Nice essay on the concept of reductive seduction which in summary is the fallacy of the first world that they can wave a magic wand and solve basic third world problems like access to clean water and toilets. I can speak to problems in India having been in the midst of them for decades. The first thing to understand is that if a problem were easy to solve it would have been solved already. There is no lack of smart people with ingenious ideas and the desire to roll up their sleeves and do the work. It might not be enough to eradicate the problem but good enough to make a visible impact. 

With that being said, if the problem continues to exist, suffice it to say that is hard and bordering on impossible to solve. The best efforts will yield marginal results, it will be a case of two steps forward and one step behind for decades until some visible signs of change can be seen. If anyone home or abroad comes with the desire to take on a big problem without the right mindset, their failure is just about guaranteed. India can humble the best of the best by size, scale and complexity of what needs to be dealt with. The author has the right advisory for the young social entrepreneurs who want to take on challenges in Mumbai or Kampala

But don’t go because you’ve fallen in love with solvability. Go because you’ve fallen in love with complexity.

Don’t go because you want to do something virtuous. Go because you want to do something difficult.

Don’t go because you want to talk. Go because you want to listen.

I would add to the list, be prepared to fail big and have your ego right-sized so you return with a better sense of self and calibration of what you can really do for the world. Reading this essay brings to mind B, the daughter of a distant relative who spent time in Dhaka and Kolkata after graduating from an elite college in America, followed by graduate work in very fancy European university. B's resume was top-notch by any measure. After spending close to a decade pursuing her goal to save women in the third world, she returned home to a regular corporate job. 

At a human level I am sure B has been a source of hope and inspiration to the poor, uneducated Bengali women who would look up to her as a role model, the art of the possible. For B herself, her time in that part of the world was a learning experience but if she had hoped to bring about real and lasting change that never happened. I am sure there was a lot reductive seduction involved in her decision to go there.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...
Post a Comment
Read more