Beginning blog on potential & talent in India

In 2012, I took a semester off from college to intern with a large education organization in Kishanganj District, Bihar. I met an employee of the organization, Abodh Kumar, who was from the neighboring district. What struck me about Abodh ji from the beginning was his spirit, fire, and the quality and speed of his ideas — ranging from how to use theater to garner community buy-in to how local young people could be supported in pursuing their own ideas.

During organizational review meetings, I saw his ideas shot down, time and again, even when many of them would have likely improved operations and impact. More importantly, caging the spirit of a capable person who deeply cares is antithetical to the larger goals of a specific education project — which is to enable learning and community development at a larger scale.

I could sense Abodh’s integrity and brilliance, so when starting a new organization in Bihar, I asked him to be a co-founder. He was uncertain at first, primarily because the organization he was working with had offered to potentially sponsor a theater training for him in Mumbai. The offer ultimately did not pan out and we became co-founders. While Abodh did not go for that theater training, he has since run programs that have conducted theater performances across 500 villages and trained over 1,250 adolescents in theater. During the pandemic, when child marriages were on the rise, the parents of one such student tried to get her married, but she came to our team to try to oppose early marriage; she cited the theater training as the place where she realized that child marriage was wrong.

—

What does this story have to do with this blog?

I care about the interaction between individual brilliance and creativity, and larger societal change in the direction of beauty, wealth creation, and justice. I believe that in many cases, people like to devote themselves to things which they are good at and/or well-suited to do for reasons of experience or ability; and in many cases, the combination of talented people devoting themselves to what they are uniquely suited to do leads to larger ripples in the world.

Perhaps because I am lucky to be surrounded by a lot of unique ‘forces of nature’ who catalyze important changes in the world, I find it difficult to believe that individual intentions and efforts do not impact larger systems. Of course, individual intentions both impact and are impacted by other forces like cultural norms, status hierarchies, policies, economic incentives, institutions, geography, technology, and the interactions of all of the above.

Much of what I am interested in is people’s efforts to either leverage individual talent as a way to shift systems, or, on the other hand, to shift systems in a way that makes it easier for human potential to thrive. My sense is that it is genuinely difficult to do so at scale, and so we end up with a lot of brute force methods like the school system, which attempts to sort students according to some general qualities like conscientiousness and writing and analytical abilities. Yet, at best, this mechanism often misses out on highly talented people, and at worst, blunts their potential.

So I am interested in defining this set of problems in more detail, along with exploring and describing different alternatives which have been tested across India.

What intellectual or cultural threads might what I am writing about fit into? I imagine a few, at least, to begin with:

1. Socioeconomic mobility
2. Talent identification in cases where the normal ‘markets’ and selection mechanisms do not function well
3. Organizational behavior, specifically as relates to mechanisms for increasing and challenging individuals to aspire for more

I come across many of these initiatives and methods in India, but I find that they are often characterized by sector — education, entrepreneurship, agriculture, etc. — rather than by the underlying principles of identifying, nurturing, and accelerating talent. My goal in this blog is to document these methods as stand-alone short case studies on specific talent initiatives, and then, over time, use these examples to build up a larger perspective on the state of human potential and talent in India.

One final disclaimer — I have spent most of my time in India in and/or thinking about rural Bihar. This blog won’t be about rural Bihar’s challenges per se, but my experiences there will tend to influence what I am interested in and some of the types of initiatives that I profile.

Thanks in advance for reading!

—

A special thanks to the Emergent Ventures program at the Mercatus Center for enabling this blog!