Musings On Change, What It Means And How It Comes About

As a young graduate working at non-profits across India, bringing about change that I believed was positive for the world was my primary driving force. This was before I began questioning what exactly the nature of this desired change was, who it intended to benefit and why this was my goal. Regardless, it was a useful exercise to ask the people I interacted with to describe the biggest changes they were thankful for in their lifetime. The answers to this question were unsatisfactory at first given they had no common themes or patterns. Eventually, I came to accept that change means different things for different people and comes in different timeframes, initiated by different sources, many of which are seemingly unintentional.

The elderly woman

I worked in a small hamlet in Rajasthan that had been connected to the electric grid a few years before I began working there. The woman I spoke to recollected as a young child waking up at 4 in the morning to grind wheat. She would use a manual method called “chakki” that took hours to grind and would be exhausting. Electricity had made her life comfortable, she said. Now she wakes up at 6 and sometimes even 7. She also wanted a washing machine someday but her husband believed then she would stay idle all day if everything was done by machines. Electricity had been the biggest positive change in her life.

The young upper caste farmer

The fact that this farmer was a Rajput is important as we’ll see in the next section. He was in his thirties and grateful for cell phones which he claimed helped him get better prices for his produce. He complained of being fleeced by traders who would often short charge him on prices when there was no cell phone connectivity in the hamlet. Now he usually makes a few phone calls to nearby cities and markets and finds out the latest price. Cell Phones had changed his life.

The old tribal leader

He remembered not being allowed into the tea shop in the main village square as he grew up. He doesn’t remember how this changed exactly but he honestly never believed as a lower caste he would ever sit and drink tea with upper caste men in his life. Drinking tea in the village square has been the biggest change in his life.

There were countless other people I spoke to to inquire about the biggest changes they witnessed in their lifetime but these three encapsulated something I’d begun to identify early in my time in social work.

I’d sought to work at a non profit to help people more directly. It was a desire centered around my own need to make others happy. But this can be achieved in many ways, often unintentional. The work it took to bring schools, roads, electricity to villages across India was truly incredible. The fact that it barely got done in most places, often with sub standard execution doesn’t take away from the fact that it took millions of people to coordinate across regions, languages and communities.

Challenges of coordination faced by large social structures makes large-scale change incredibly hard. This applies equally to creating physical infrastructure as much as changing social norms. Non profits were pivotal in reducing caste discrimination and changing social norms such as sharing meals across caste boundaries. Urban upper caste elites, who usually dominate Indian non profits, normalized certain behaviors that led to the rural upper caste elites reducing some of their more extreme social norms. Most of the social change, debatably though, were caused by the difficulty in maintaining existing barriers and norms. It was economically unwise to decline lower caste customers who were slowly gaining some economic clout.

Similarly, cellphones and electricity benefited everyone regardless of caste. Such positive change was hard to gatekeep unlike the temples and social networks that remained very much closed to outsiders. Roads and schools had the same effect. Though there was great inequity in the way these changes came through, often being designed for the rural elites (roads often ended at village centres where the upper castes lived, for example) the benefits still in some ways trickled down (for lack of a better term) to everyone.

Roads, electricity, internet and connectivity changed lives. These were brought by governments, scientists, and entrepreneurs. Some of the more regressive social norms weakened over time, ushering in a more equitable distribution of power. This was aided by activists, social workers, media and the government. Thus, my takeaway from my time working at non profits was that it is unnecessary to abandon your life and go help the poorest of the poor directly. Depending on what your aims in life were, pursuing what you are good at and enjoy doing and being kind to those around you could go a long way in bringing about large-scale change.