'People-work'

  The Examined Life of Masculinities  (First published https://www.tarshi.net/inplainspeak/the-examined-life-of-masculinities/)   The Man-Woman binary is now, thankfully, nearly dead. The 2019 guidance [1] from the American Psychological Association gives us the good news that minus stereotypes and expectations, there isn ’t much difference in the basic behaviours of men and women. Some studies [2] , have established that, for example, men enjoy caring for their children as much as women do. And a 2013 meta-analysis [3] has found that adolescent boys, for example, contrary to expectation, displayed fewer externalizing emotions such as anger than did adolescent girls.   Almost unwittingly, the man-woman binary has left behind a progeny that we are still getting to know – the dualism of the masculine and the feminine, characteristics of which, we now know, reside in each of us.   The masculine and the feminine have been in bed with each other’s powers...

  A Critique of Randomised Control Trials in Poverty Alleviation Last week, Michael Kremer, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo received the Nobel for Economics for "their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty” and for addressing “smaller, more manageable questions,” rather than big ideas. This experimental approach is based on so called Radomised Control Trials. Simply put, in such experiments, a randomly selected group of individuals (randomization is a method of removing bias) receive an intervention whose efficacy is being tested. Changes that result in the conditions of this random experiment group is compared with those in another ‘similar’ group of individuals (referred to as a ‘control group’) that was not provided the intervention. The difference in outcomes is directly attributed to the intervention. The RCT as a scientific research method is primarily widely practiced in clinical research to test the efficacy and safety of new pharmaceutical products/tr...

  Rahul Gandhi has found his voice—Can Congress match it? In problem solving, first ideas are usually worthy of being discarded. They tend to be jaded and borrowed, reflecting established patterns of thinking and stereotypes, without bringing the future into the process. One such first idea appeared in the aftermath of the just concluded general elections in which the Congress party was left gasping for air. It should find a substitute for Rahul Gandhi as its president. Some said, the Congress needs an Amit Shah. Truth be told, even an Amit Shah would fail at leading the Congress, because unlike the BJP, it has an array of people with some intellectual heft, significant domain expertise and an argumentative culture. Lets not forget - Amit Shah is leading a BJP of ‘disciplined soldiers’ sans people like Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi, Yashwant Sinha, Arun Shourie and others. The Congress and the political landscape of India needs Rahul Gandhi for only one vital, and counter-intui...