[Photo by Nadine Shaabana on Unsplash]
Good morning,
Most people know of Lucy Kellaway as a celebrated columnist at the Financial Times. But that was in another avatar. She is now a qualified teacher. To get here, she had to travel a long way and look at many hard truths. That is a story she talks about in her memoir Re-Educated which hit the shelves earlier this year.
“In 2000, … the property itch got to me again. Looking back now, all this constant moving seems suspect. Was I so restless because I realised something wasn’t quite right with my life and my marriage and by moving house I thought I’d make us different and somehow better? Possibly; though I fear the truth was far shallower than that: I just loved property. Now with four children, I had a more-or-less legitimate reason for another move as we needed more bedrooms. After an immersion in the top property porn of the time—freebie property magazines that were shoved through the letter box—I spotted a house both bigger and cheaper up the road. It had wide steps up to the door, many rooms with doors that closed and a separate flat downstairs that our nanny and her boyfriend could live in. This, I decided, was going to be our permanent home. We now had a big family and this place was going to be its proper headquarters. For once, David expressed an opinion: he liked the new place because it was solid and didn’t shake when he went upstairs. I liked its solidity too—and was prepared to swap the romance of the old house for the idea that this new one was big enough to keep us safe.
“Subsequently I discovered that size of house cuts both ways. It may have kept us safe from the world outside, but it also kept us safe from each other…
“During our 15 years in the big, solid family house, David and I started to fall apart. I don’t know why a marriage ever ends (even less do I know how one ever stays together), but the two of us, through years of over-work, distraction and mutual neglect, had somehow lost the thread that had once tied us to each other so securely. The house was oblivious to our distress and doggedly continued in its role as family headquarters. It was big enough to accommodate any dysfunction we threw at it.”
It takes time to accept the truth.
In this issue
- Shakti Sinha and his quest for liberalism
- The problem with bans
- The subtle art of saying ‘I don’t know’
Shakti Sinha and his quest for liberalism
Shakti Sinha, a former IAS officer, private secretary to prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and director of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library for three years, passed away earlier this week.
A tribute by Prashant Jha in Hindustan Times captures some of the qualities that endeared him to many across ideologies. Jha writes, “Shakti Sinha was a deeply democratic man in his everyday personal interactions. He did not grudge someone for sharply differing with him in political beliefs. He barely expressed resentment even when he felt like he had been dealt an unfair hand. He lived in proximity to power, but his instinct was to spend time with those on the margins of power—because he wanted to understand all points of view before arriving at his own. He understood viewpoints were a result of socialisation, beliefs, and life—and he respected it. He was also deeply humble, and this reflected most deeply in his respect for scholarship—he kept feeling, till he wrote his book, that he was a pretender who did not have a book to his credit and therefore was a bit of a lesser man.”
Jha adds, “Shakti Sinha organised the launch of my book on BJP—in which, on his platform, I criticised what I saw as the party’s bigotry. He called me later that evening and laughed, saying, ‘Kahan phasa diya yar! Acha tha par. Where did you trap me! But it was good. My aim is to make NMML a truly liberal space.’”
Coincidentally, Sinha had also organised the launch of The Aadhaar Effect, written by our colleagues Charles Assisi and NS Ramnath, and they remember the interactions with Sinha and the event itself with fondness.
Dig deeper
- Shakti Sinha: The liberal who found home in Vajpayee’s BJP (Hindustan Times)
- ‘Exclusion does not come from Aadhaar, but from its uses’ (A video recording of the panel moderated by Shakti Sinha during the launch of The Aadhaar Effect)
The problem with bans
Late last month, the Karnataka Legislative Assembly passed a bill that bans all kinds of gaming where monetary stakes are involved. There is a camp that has argued vociferously in favour of this and has pinned the blame on technology addiction. Such voices are not unique to India. Earlier this year, China placed a cap on the number of hours minors can spend on video games. South Korea had such rules that date back to 2011 and Japan had clamped down as well last year. How are we to look at it? Since then, learnings have emerged and it is a theme Priyesh Mishra of the Koan Advisory Group wrote about in The Print earlier this week.
“An ideal regulatory approach requires a shift from hard paternalism to libertarian paternalism. The former justifies the restriction of personal liberty for an individual’s own good, while the latter adopts a non-coercive approach. According to Professor Richard H. Thaler, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, libertarian paternalism attempts to steer people’s choices in welfare-promoting directions without eliminating freedom of choice. Thus, instead of limiting the scope of individual choice, it seeks to nudge people to make more informed decisions.
“Towards this, regulators must consider alternative solutions. For example, South Korea is shifting towards a ‘choice permit’ system, which allows children, their parents or their legal guardians to request a permit per game and designate hours for playing these titles. Similarly, regulations should leverage technological measures to achieve policy objectives. Examples of such measures include fatigue systems, which discourage users from prolonged gaming by cutting down in-game rewards. Another example could be in-game warnings, which entail notifying users about the risks of excessive gaming, analogous with the health warning messages that appear on tobacco and alcohol packaging.”
Dig deeper
The subtle art of saying ‘I don’t know’
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Warm regards,
Team Founding Fuel
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