Things I am Grateful for from 2022

On gratitude and curiosity

Dear readers, 

I write this newsletter once every month or so. It features my reflections on the deployment of creativity to making the world’s economic systems (and by extension social and to some extent political systems) more inclusive and, therefore, fairer.  That sounds like a tall order – and it is! 

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At the end of the calendar year, typically in the last week, I try to reflect on things I’ve learned. For 2022, my mind gravitated to the idea of gratitude, as a meditative and restorative act, especially in a time when tribulations abound (war in Ukraine, COVID-19 resurgence in China, inflation wreaking havoc, despair around climate change inaction).

I’m grateful for much, health and family first and foremost, but also for an abstract attribute that feeds my professional life but also is, simply, enjoyable – curiosity. I’m glad that I find myself fortuitously in avocations – as an academic and entrepreneur – that nurture and reward curiosity in myriad forms. So, I thought I’d reflect on the sorts of settings have most taught me things and allowed me to indulge my curiosity, as silent thanks.

Colleagues in the academy of course are the bedrock. These are the folks with whom I get to exchange ideas in small research group meetings, in academic seminars, over a cup of coffee or celebrating a colleague’s accomplishments over a bold late evening cabernet.  And in the classroom, with impressionable 18-year-old undergraduates, all the way to ambitious CEOs, financiers and politicians from around world in the prime of their careers in their 40s and 50s.

But there are unconventional settings too from which I learn more, that feeds back into these formal systems.

First, I’d mention my fellow entrepreneurs with whom I try to put my research into practice, creating ventures for the mass markets across the fast-growing developing world, primarily in India, but also in China, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and often leveraging my Boston base. Many, though not all, are my former students with whom I’ve kept in touch. The creativity needed to address intractable problems – which I have iteratively tried to improve in a course I’ve taught at Harvard College over the past twelve years – is no less than that needed to write a beautiful research paper.  As an example, a venture from my past, Aspiring Minds, used machine learning to identify pockets of ignored talent so as to ‘make the market’ between these folks and mainstream corporates. It unlocked white collar employment opportunities for hundreds of thousands. That had a good run before being acquired by a global talent assessment company, but its algorithms are now being redeployed as part of Aspire Institute, a five-year old non-profit headquartered in Cambridge (with hubs in Bangalore, Lahore, and São Paulo) that works to improve the career trajectories of first-generation, disenfranchised learners in colleges across 130 countries.

It would not be hyperbole to say that the flood of research questions coming out of these ventures, and a half dozen others, informs my research and teaching daily.

Second, I’d say that every so often – perhaps once a decade – I come across someone who in turn truly inspires, teaches and touches me deeply. Such colossi bestride the world. I want to mention two to whom I owe the deepest gratitude. Paul Farmer, the Harvard physician-anthropologist, humanitarian, creator of Partners in Health, passed away in untimely fashion in Africa earlier this year.  Within an hour of my first encounter with him in 2010, he had urged me to go to Butaro in Rwanda, near the Ugandan border, and to see if I could leverage connections with doctors across South Asia to help out.  I did, almost immediately. That was vintage Paul, building bridges to everyone, the quintessential entrepreneur out to address the moral outrage of poor health for most of the world’s nearly eight billion people.

In comparable vein, the quietly charismatic Sir Fazle Hasan Abed, Bangladeshi entrepreneur, creator of BRAC, the world’s largest NGO, now giving the poor dignity and means of economic self-advancement across a dozen developing countries in Asia and Africa, taught me enormously, both from his Dhaka base, by partnering with my own ventures in the region, and by enabling my Harvard students to conduct research at BRAC.  Abed bhai, as we referred to him, like Paul, created a platform which organizations, financiers, and individuals could access in a plug-and-play format.

Third, and directly related to the curiosity attribute, a colleague asked me what I’d read recently. I mentioned an article on quantum entanglement, for which the Nobel in physics was handed out, and one on new large sample data on how metabolism evolves during a human lifespan; that struck her as oddly rambling. Au contraire! It’s the eclecticism that fuels me.  I’m fortunate that, from early childhood, my parents surrounded the home with books and magazines. Sitting in my Boston study now, staring at me is my friend Moises Naim’s meditation on autocracy, The Revenge of Power, the Booker prize winning novel ‘Narrow Road to the Deep North’ about Japanese POW camps, and a political economy essay on how wars shape society, which has macabre resonance with Bucha in Ukraine in the news.

While the ubiquity of devices has its downsides for sure, one feature is that it allows everyone to easily indulge curiosity.  Last week, I struck up a conversation with an electrician, an immigrant from the Cape Verde Islands, who was installing a charger for a hybrid vehicle in our garage, as he seemed engrossed in his headphones. It emerged that he ‘reads’ books on tape incessantly, while holding a full-time, manual job. That day, he was listening to a best seller called ‘Atomic Habits,’ which he recommended to me. A quick calculation suggests that he ‘reads’ a book a week (it takes eight to ten hours to hear a 300-page book, and I assume he listens a quarter of his working hours). This far eclipses my capacity even as a full-time academic. I had a blast debating this gentleman, even managing to ignore the bone-chilling Boston cold that day.

In September of this year, Harvard’s Mittal Institute, in an event with over a thousand attendees in the university’s iconic facility, Sanders Theater, celebrated academic work done by our community on the 75th anniversary of the 1947 partition of British India. Two stalwarts who had borne witness to that trauma graced the occasion – the Pakistani industrialist, philanthropist and one-time Finance Minister, Syed Babar Ali, and the Indian philosopher-economist, Nobelist Amartya Sen. I dedicated my welcome address to thank these two ‘teachers,’ Sen taught me in graduate school, and Babar sahib in myriad ways over past decade. To Sen I remarked that, while his academic work on social choice theory was enlightening, the way he had touched me was his childlike delight in describing a local primary school, Shady Hill, as a sort-of Shantiniketan on the Charles, referencing an idyllic learning environment created in Bengal by the family of the poet Rabindranath Tagore in the early 1900s, where Sen had studied. Shantiniketan privileges playful learning, as did Shady Hill, where Sen encouraged me to send my then primary school age kids. My wife and I did. We were thrilled by the love of learning that resulted.

To Sen, I said at that event, and repeat now in gratitude to all who have taught me this year, a Sanskrit invocation taught me by my mother.

Gurur Brahmaa Gurur Vishnu, Gurur devo Maheshwarah/

Guru Saakshaat parabrahma, tasmai shri guruve namaha.

A teacher embodies the creative force like Brahma, sustenance like Vishnu, destruction like Shiva. A teacher is the presence of the limitless. We bow to such a teacher.

Curiosity has helped me find my place in the universe, I daresay it will be a compass that guides me through the turbulence we’re living through. Tagore’s poem Akash Bhora Surjo Taara (literally, the sky is full of suns and stars) ends with this paean to curiosity that I invoke here to conclude:

I have pricked my ears
I have opened my eyes
I have bared my heart to the world
In the midst of the known
I have sought the unknown
And in wonder and amazement I sing.

PS. This reflection and the newsletter was written in the last week of December.

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