Building Bridges
Written by Natasha Joshi, Associate Director — Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies. This article was first published in Bolti Bandh’s The Unheard Table Book, March 2021.
Twenty-seven thousand years ago, homosapiens won over the neanderthals, and emerged as the modern human species not because we had bigger brains or made better tools — evidence reveals Neanderthals did better on both counts — but because we collaborated better, and used language more relationally as opposed to instrumentally. This role of language has never been more pertinent than it is today. Where before, physical public squares required people to enter into a dialogue with another, digital channels of today have increasingly become one-way exchanges where a lot said, and little understood.
The last decade has witnessed a rise in political polarization.
Social media — given its nature — has propped shrill binaries in place of nuanced, complex ideas, and technology has spread more rapidly than society’s ability to harness all of it constructively. Ideas are also in flux. Colleges and universities across the world, including India, have grappled
with clashes between students and faculty or between different student bodies. Meanwhile, the wealth gap in India has increased by a staggering amount [1] while millions of youth struggle to find viable employment. These socio-economic factors frame the psyche of its time.
For instance, by some reports, young people today are less satisfied with democracy than the generations before them [2], and “elections in the liberal west are increasingly acquiring the feel of referendums, in which
supporters are mobilized around a binary logic of “for and against”[3]”. It can be argued that where the electoral process was seen as an opportunity to dialogue through canvassing, it has now taken the form of “revenge by representation”. To make matters more urgent, these socio-economic and political trends have met with a global pandemic that has left large sections of
society in turmoil. As society traverses the aftermath of COVID-19, we are sure to need more spaces for healing and working together.
The Uncommon Ground portfolio (now rebranded as Kshetra Center for Dialogue) at Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies is an endeavour in that direction. The work at Uncommon Ground aims to operationalize a model/approach that helps strengthen samaaj’s capacity for dialogue with itself, as well as with actors on the sarkaar and bazaar side. It is important to note that we are not the first people to talk about building consensus, or negotiating fault lines. The average Indian entertains contradictions effectively, and on a daily basis; our families are large, our cities diverse, and our politics extremely colourful. At the same time, the rapid transformations being brought about by technology have started to outstrip samaaj’s ability to make meaning and re-orient as quickly. As history stands witness, periods of spectacular technological progress induce stress on the social compact which if left unattended, can lead to backlash or other distortions. For this reason, the next decade for us is ever more important in terms of ensuring that everybody is taken along and shared interests are constantly generated and explored.
To this end, we have started by developing an Uncommon Ground curriculum that is rooted in a mediation framework. By way of modules that are delivered through workshops, we engage participants in the core principles of what we are calling the “uncommon ground” approach — namely, seeing conflict as a non-negative thing, viewing resistance as an opportunity for dialogue, and actually understanding how one can dialogue effectively.
We see our work with Uncommon Ground as a horizontal, and believe that for it to be effective, it must be co-created with civil society organizations, researchers, representatives of business as well as other donors. Through Uncommon Ground, we hope to say it as Rumi did — out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
[1] Oxfam International, India: Extreme Inequality in Numbers
[2] The Ken, November 2020. A small error could upset Facebook’s big ad clients.
[3] The Guardian, November 2020. William Davis, Forget unity — now elections deliver revenge as much as representation.
