Digital Literacy vs Digital Confidence

June 15, 2026 Leave a comment

The digital divide in rural India is often described as an access problem. Smartphones are becoming increasingly common, data is becoming more affordable, and women are increasingly present on digital platforms, sharing messages, watching videos, and making video calls. However, this apparent inclusion masks a deeper exclusion. When it comes to using technology for business, like sending payments, managing accounts, registering enterprises on platforms, or selling online, many rural women hesitate. The contradiction is striking as access and skills exist, but ownership and confidence do not. The real barrier to digital inclusion is not digital literacy, but digital confidence.

Consider the experience of a rural woman entrepreneur who runs a home-based food business. She owns a smartphone, uses WhatsApp comfortably, and receives digital payments from customers. Yet she avoids sending money digitally, hesitates to use business apps, and depends on a family member for anything that she thinks is ‘important.’ Her fear of ‘what if something goes wrong?’ is not about a lack of knowledge, but about a lack of trust in oneself. Across rural contexts in India, women are digitally present but not digitally empowered. While they are users of technology, but unfortunately not the decision-makers within it.

Most development programs approach this challenge through the lens of digital literacy. Literacy is usually defined as the ability to operate a phone, navigate apps, recognise icons, or complete basic digital tasks. Training programs, device distributions, and short workshops are designed to tick these boxes. Once completed, women are counted as digitally included. However, literacy does not translate into agency. Knowing how to open an app does not mean feeling confident enough to transact independently. Watching a demonstration does not prepare someone to make decisions in real situations. Literacy teaches what to do, whereas confidence determines whether one dares to do it.

Digital confidence, unlike literacy, is rarely named, measured, or funded. It refers to a person’s trust in their own ability to use technology without fear, their willingness to make mistakes, and their sense of belonging in digital spaces. This confidence is more psychological than technical, emotional rather than instructional. For rural women, digital confidence is shaped by years of social conditioning that discourages experimentation, independence, and risk-taking. Without this confidence, technology remains something to be handled carefully or delegated to others.

The reasons for low digital confidence among rural women are structural and gendered. Financial fear is a major factor, with stories of fraud, which are often exaggerated, circulating widely. A single mistake can lead to loss of money, blame from family members, or public embarrassment. Cash, by contrast, feels safe and visible as it can be counted, corrected, and recovered. In this context, avoiding digital tools becomes a rational choice rather than a sign of ignorance.

Gendered control over technology further weakens confidence. In many households, men act as informal gatekeepers of digital systems. Even when women own phones, passwords, banking apps, and registrations are often managed by husbands or sons. Over time, this creates dependence and reinforces the belief that digital decision-making is not a woman’s responsibility. What begins as ‘help’ slowly turns into exclusion.

Men are often allowed to experiment, fail, and learn, while women, especially in rural settings, are not afforded the same grace. A mistake made by a woman is quickly interpreted as evidence that she should not be engaging in business or technology at all. This low tolerance for failure discourages curiosity and reinforces caution. When the social cost of error is high for women, playing safe becomes the only viable strategy.

Design and language barriers also play a role, as many digital platforms are not built for first-generation users. Interfaces are cluttered, English-heavy, and filled with technical or financial jargon. For women with limited formal education, each unfamiliar term reinforces a sense of exclusion. Technology begins to feel alien, designed for someone else, and confidence erodes further. The consequences of low digital confidence are visible in how rural women run their enterprises. As a result, businesses remain informal, small, and dependent on intermediaries. Family members or middlemen step in to handle digital aspects, capturing control and value. Instead of reducing inequality, technology ends up reinforcing existing power structures.

Evidence from the ground suggests that when confidence is addressed, outcomes change. In India’s SHG networks, women who participate in repeated, hands-on digital practice sessions gradually begin to transact independently. Rural women entrepreneurs who learn in peer groups adopt digital tools more confidently than those trained in isolation. The turning point is rarely a new app or feature; it is the moment a woman completes a task on her own and realises she can do it again.

Building digital confidence requires a different approach. Repetition matters more than certification. One-time trainings raise awareness, but confidence grows through continued practice. Peer role models are powerful, especially when women see others from similar backgrounds navigating technology successfully. Safe spaces for failure are essential, allowing women to learn without fear of financial or social consequences. Trusted human support through community facilitators, SHGs, or NGOs provides reassurance and continuity that technology alone cannot offer.

For policymakers, donors, and practitioners, this demands a rethinking of program design. Success should not be measured by the number of women trained or devices distributed, but by independent usage, decision-making, and willingness to explore digital tools. Budgets must allow for handholding, follow-ups, and time. Behavioural change cannot be rushed, and technology should not be treated as a shortcut to empowerment.At the policy level, digital public infrastructure holds enormous promise, but only if it is designed with gendered realities in mind. Women-first user experience, local-language interfaces, and community-based support systems are essential. Digital inclusion must be understood as a question of agency, not just access. Until rural women believe that the digital world belongs to them and they are confident to click, transact, and decide, technology will remain an accessory rather than a catalyst for entrepreneurship and change. The future of rural women’s enterprise will be built not just on smartphones, but on the transformative moment when a woman says to herself, ‘I can do this,’ and acts without fear.

(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the views or opinions of any organisation, foundation, CSR, non-profit or others.)

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The cost of saying Yes 

June 8, 2026 Leave a comment

I used to think that saying ‘yes’ was a virtue as it made me feel useful, reliable, even noble at times. I often ended up saying yes to a meeting, yes to a request, yes to a friend, yes to a ‘quick call,’ yes to a ‘small favour,’ yes to that extra responsibility that would ‘hardly take any time.’ My life looked like a well diversified portfolio of yeses. And like many portfolios built on optimism rather than fundamentals, it was collapsing. No one teaches you this early on in life, but every yes is a transaction. It has a cost, a return, and often hidden liabilities. Unlike money, the currency you are spending here is time, attention, and energy, and those accounts don’t send monthly statements! They just end up depleting until one day you find yourself staring at your calendar, wondering why everything feels full and nothing feels meaningful.

When someone says, ‘Can you just hop on a quick call?’ it sounds harmless, as ‘quick’ is a very reassuring word. It suggests efficiency, minimal disruption, and a small and contained transaction. In reality, a ‘quick call’ is rarely just a call. It is context switching, mental preparation, the call itself, the afterthoughts, and the residual distraction that lingers long after the call ends. Economists would call this a hidden cost, and I call it the reason my day disappears in fragments. I remember agreeing to review a document for a colleague. ‘It won’t take long,’ they said, and they were technically correct, as the act of reviewing took about only 20 minutes. But the real cost was closer to an hour. I had to pause what I was doing, understand a different context, switch cognitive gears, and then find my way back to my original work. The 20-minute task came with a 40-minute tax. Multiply that across a week, and you begin to understand how entire days vanish without a trace.

Then there is the opportunity cost of the yes you don’t see. In economics, every choice comes with the value of the next best alternative you give up. When I say yes to a meeting at 6 PM, I am not just committing to that meeting, I am also saying no to my evening unwind, a conversation with family, reading, thinking, or simply doing nothing. The problem is, I don’t feel that loss immediately, and so I consistently undervalue what I am giving up. This is how you end up living a life where your time is fully allocated but poorly invested. I once agreed to attend a weekend workshop because it sounded interesting and, more importantly, because it felt rude to decline. That weekend, I missed a relaxing lunch at home that I didn’t realise I needed. The workshop was fine, but if I am honest, it wasn’t worth what I gave up. The return on that yes was modest, but the opportunity cost was high. The economy of my time had a deficit, which I wasn’t accounting for properly.

If saying yes were purely an economic decision, we would all be much better at it, but it is also deeply social. We say yes because we want to be liked, and we don’t want to disappoint someone. We say yes because somewhere along the way, we learned that being agreeable is a sign of being good. There is also a subtle reputational economy at play, and saying yes signals availability, cooperation, and enthusiasm. It makes you look like a team player, a dependable friend, a responsive colleague. Saying no, on the other hand, feels risky as it might signal disinterest, arrogance, or boundaries. And so, we keep saying yes, not because it makes sense, but because it feels safer. I have done this more times than I can count—agreed to calls I didn’t need to be on, events I didn’t want to attend, responsibilities that stretched me thinner than I should have allowed. Each yes was small, reasonable, and socially acceptable, and together, they created a life that felt crowded but curiously unfulfilling.

There is also the law of diminishing returns quietly operating in the background. The first few yeses in your day are productive as they move things forward, create value, and strengthen relationships. But beyond a certain point, each additional yes adds less value and more strain. The sixth meeting of the week on the same thing is not as useful as the first. The fifth commitment in a day is not as meaningful as the second. The twentieth favour you agree to does not make you twenty times more helpful, and only makes you feel exhausted. I realised this one evening when I found myself in a meeting, nodding at the right moments, contributing just enough to appear engaged, but mentally somewhere else entirely. I wasn’t adding value anymore and was just present in body, absent in mind. That was a negative return on yes, a clear sign that my internal economy was out of balance.

There is a phrase I have used liberally in my life, ‘I will manage.’ It is a beautiful phrase because it is optimistic, confident, and slightly heroic. It suggests resilience, capability, and a willingness to take things on. It is also, more often than not, a lie. ‘I will manage’ is what we tell others when we overcommit. It is what we tell ourselves when we ignore constraints. It is the verbal equivalent of taking on more debt without checking your balance, which keeps accumulating steadily. Until one day, you are not managing, only barely coping, moving from one commitment to another with a vague sense of urgency and a constant feeling of being behind.

If saying no is so rational, why is it so difficult? Because no is final and forces you to prioritise. Yes, on the other hand, keeps options open as it delays decision making. It allows you to feel helpful without immediately confronting the cost. There is also a psychological discomfort in saying no. It creates a moment of tension, however brief, between you and the other person, and we are wired to avoid that tension. But every time we avoid that small discomfort, we create a larger one for ourselves later. The stress simply shifts location from a brief external awkwardness to a prolonged internal burden.

What I have slowly come to realise is that no has compounding benefits. The first few noes feel awkward, even slightly uncomfortable. You second guess yourself, wondering if you were too blunt, too inflexible, or too selfish. But over time, your calendar starts to breathe, your days have space, and your work becomes more focused. Your relationships become more intentional because you are choosing them, not squeezing them in. When I started saying no more consciously, I noticed a real shift. I had time to think, to read, to do things without constantly rushing to the next commitment. The quality of my yeses improved because they were fewer and more deliberate.

For me, saying no is not about rejecting others, but more about protecting something. Sometimes it is protecting my time, energy, attention, and occasionally, my sanity. Instead of thinking, ‘I am letting someone down,’ I think, ‘I am choosing where to show up fully with intent.’ Of course, saying no does not require bluntness or indifference. There is an art to it, though I am still in the learning phase. A thoughtful no acknowledges the request but remains clear about the boundary. You need not overexplain or apologise excessively. ‘I won’t be able to take this on right now.’ Or ‘I would love to, but I don’t have the bandwidth this week.’ Or ‘I am focusing on a few priorities at the moment, so I’ll have to pass.’ These are decisions and not rejections, and they make life coherent.

The goal is not to eliminate yes, but to make it meaningful again. A well placed yes to a project you care about, a conversation that matters, a moment that enriches your life has immense value. But for that yes to exist, it must be protected by many noes. In economics, scarcity creates value, therefore, if your yes is abundant, it is cheap. If it is scarce, it is meaningful. I still say yes, probably more than I should, as old habits die hard. But I am more aware now, as I try to pause a little longer before responding. I ask myself simple questions, like what is the real cost, what am I giving up, and is this the best use of my time right now? Sometimes the answer is still yes, but increasingly, it is no. In the end, the economics of saying yes is not about maximising how much you can take on. It is about optimising what truly matters, because a life filled with yeses may look productive from the outside, but a life shaped by thoughtful noes is a life that actually adds up.

If this essay made you pause and think about your life and the hidden cost of being a ‘YES’ person, subscribe to my blog for one article every week in your mailbox.

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Are you time-poor?

June 1, 2026 Leave a comment

Somewhere between the invention of the pressure cooker and the arrival of 5G, we Indians collectively misplaced something really important: Time. Not lost in a dramatic, cinematic way, without violins or slow motion, but more like a wallet lifted from your back pocket in a crowded Metro. One moment it was there, lazy afternoons, unplanned conversations, the comforting stretch of doing nothing, and the next moment, gone. In its place, we now have Google Calendar reminders, WhatsApp notifications, and a persistent feeling that we are always slightly late for something, even when we are sitting still. Welcome to the era of time poverty, where your bank balance may look respectable, your Zomato order history may be thriving, and your LinkedIn profile may be aggressively inspirational, but your time account is permanently overdrawn.

Let’s rewind a bit, not to some sepia-toned village fantasy, but just a generation ago, in the same cities we inhabit today, where life had a different rhythm. Time was not abundant in a literal sense, as people still worked hard, commuted, raised families, but it felt less fractured. Evenings were events in themselves, when people sat outside their homes discussing politics and cricket over multiple cups of tea, and that one neighbour who always seemed to have too many visitors. Children played gully cricket until the ball inevitably landed in someone’s kitchen, leading to heated negotiations that doubled as character-building exercises. Mothers called out from balconies and verandahs with a mix of authority and affection, summoning children home before darkness turned into parental anxiety. There were fewer choices, yes, but also fewer decisions to make. Dinner was whatever was cooked, and nobody spent fifteen minutes comparing paneer butter masala across twelve delivery apps while reading 237 reviews written by people who clearly have too much time.

The great unifier, television, had one channel, Doordarshan, maybe two if you were fancy. If you missed your favourite show, you missed it, as there was no replay, no binge-watching, no existential spiral at 2 AM where you question your life choices while watching the fourth episode of something you don’t even like. And waiting, ah, waiting was a legitimate activity. We waited for letters, for phone calls on the clunky telephone sets, for exam results. Waiting was not seen as wasted time; it was just part of time itself, like monsoons or power cuts. Our minds wandered, conversations happened, and occasionally, we even ‘thought’ our own thoughts without an algorithm suggesting what to think next!

Now fast forward to urban India today, where time is not just scarce but seems to be actively hunted. A typical weekday begins with negotiation between you and your alarm clock, which has now evolved into a relentless life coach with a snooze button. Before your feet even touch the ground, your thumb has already scrolled through emails, news updates, Instagram reels, and three subtle reminders that everyone else seems to be doing better than you at 7:17 am in the morning. We often eat breakfast alongside a call that begins with ‘Can you hear me?’ and ends with ‘Let’s take this offline,’ a phrase that has single-handedly consumed more human hours than traffic jams.

If time poverty had a national symbol, it would undoubtedly be the urban traffic. Whether you are inching along the Delhi-Gurgaon expressway, contemplating your life choices at Bengaluru’s Central Silk Board junction, or performing advanced geometry in Mumbai’s local trains, your commute is not just a journey, but a full emotional experience. You begin with hope, perhaps even optimism, maybe today will be different, maybe traffic will be lighter, signals more cooperative, humanity kinder. Ten minutes later, you are recalibrating your expectations, bargaining with Google Maps, and listening to podcasts or FM radio not out of curiosity but as a coping mechanism. By the time you reach your destination, you have experienced a full spectrum of human emotion and possibly learned a new cuss word, none of which you will remember by lunchtime.

And then come the meetings, those sacred rituals of modern work culture where time doesn’t exactly die, it dissolves. Meetings to prepare for meetings, meetings to debrief previous meetings, and meetings that exist solely because someone somewhere feared the silence of not having a meeting. Entire hours are spent discussing action items that could have been bullet points in an email, that could have been a message, that could have been… nothing. Ironically, in our relentless pursuit of productivity, we have created systems so elaborate that they ensure we have no time left to actually produce anything. Efficiency has become a performance, and everyone is performing.

Of course, technology was supposed to save us, and in many ways, it has. Tasks that once took hours now take minutes, information is accessible instantly, and communication is effortless. But somewhere along the way, technology stopped being a tool and started behaving like a very needy companion. Your phone, that sleek little rectangle of promise, is now a workplace, an entertainment centre, a social hub, and an anxiety generator rolled into one. You pick it up to check the time and resurface twenty-seven minutes later, having watched three reels, replied to two messages, ignored five, read half an article, and completely forgotten why you picked it up in the first place. Time isn’t just being spent; it is being nibbled away in tiny, invisible bites.

Urban India today offers an abundance of choices in the form of food, experiences, careers, and content. But abundance comes with a hidden tax in the form of decision fatigue. Earlier, dinner was simple, and now it is an exercise in research, comparison, and occasional soul-searching. Even leisure has become labour, as watching a movie involves navigating multiple platforms, genres, languages, and algorithmic suggestions, each insisting it knows you better than you know yourself. By the time you decide what to watch, you are too tired to watch anything. The freedom to choose has quietly transformed into the burden of choosing.

Friendships, once spontaneous and effortless, are now managed with the precision of project timelines. ‘Let’s catch up’ translates into checking calendars, blocking slots, rescheduling due to unforeseen commitments, and finally meeting for exactly sixty minutes before someone inevitably says, ‘I have an early morning tomorrow.’ Even weddings, those grand celebrations of chaos and joy, have been optimised for efficiency. Destination weddings over long weekends, carefully curated guest lists, and itineraries that resemble conference agendas. Nothing says romance like a well-managed Google Sheet.

But perhaps the most insidious aspect of time poverty is lack of attention rather than the lack of hours. You may technically have free time, but your mind is rarely free. You are at dinner, but thinking about work. You are on vacation, but checking emails. You are resting but feeling guilty about it. The boundary between work and life hasn’t just blurred; it has politely excused itself and left the building. What remains is a constant hum of ‘I should be doing something,’ a background noise that turns even moments of rest into opportunities for anxiety.

In India, this phenomenon feels particularly intense because of the unique cocktail of factors at play. Rapid urbanisation has stretched infrastructure beyond its limits, turning simple commutes into endurance tests. Aspirational pressure ensures that everyone is constantly striving for better jobs, better salaries, better lifestyles. Digital adoption has been fast and enthusiastic, compressing decades of technological evolution into a few short years. And social expectations are layered on top of all this that rarely reduce, even as professional demands increase. The result is a society trying to operate at first-world speed with third-world infrastructure and fourth-world patience.

So are we truly poor in time? Or have we simply allowed time to be colonised and constantly interrupted? The uncomfortable truth is that it is a bit of both. We are busier, yes, but we are also more distracted. We have more tools, but less control. We are connected, but not always present. Time poverty, then, is not just about scarcity, but more about how we experience the time that we have. It is the difference between a long, uninterrupted conversation and a series of half-hearted replies. Between a meal savoured and a meal consumed while scrolling. Between living time and merely passing through it.

The solution, if there is one, is unlikely to be dramatic. Most of us are not about to quit our jobs and retreat to the Himalayas like some of our friends have, and even if we did, we would probably post about it online. But small shifts are possible, like protecting pockets of uninterrupted time, reducing unnecessary decisions, and occasionally allowing ourselves the radical act of doing nothing. These are not grand gestures, but they are meaningful ones. They remind us that time is not just something to be managed but something to be experienced.

We often say, ‘I don’t have time,’ when what we really mean is, ‘Something else has taken priority.’ Time poverty is not just a condition but a consequence of choices, both ours and the systems we inhabit. In a country that has mastered the art of jugaad, perhaps it is high time we apply that ingenuity to time itself. Because somewhere between the past we romanticise and the present we rush through lies a simple, almost rebellious idea that what if we stopped trying to save time and started trying to live it?

If this essay made you pause and think about how you spend your time, subscribe to my blog for one article every week in your mailbox.

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Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!

May 25, 2026 Leave a comment

Author: Richard Feynman and Ralph Leighton | 368 Pages | Genre: Autobiography | Publisher: Random House UK | Year: 1985; My edition: 1992 | My Rating: 10/10

“I don’t know anything, but I do know that everything is interesting if you go into it deeply enough”
― Richard Feynman, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!

Richard Feynman’s ‘Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!’ is a collection of humorous anecdotes by a Nobel Prize-winning physicist. The book is based on taped conversations between Feynman and his friend and drumming partner, Ralph Leighton. But to read it just as a funny memoir is to miss its deeper magic. For readers like me, especially those who have spent their childhoods peering into dismantled radios, mixing mysterious liquids in bottles, or trying to build impossible machines from scrap, the book becomes a reunion with a forgotten version of themselves.

While reading this book, I found myself constantly drifting back to my own childhood. We had a small shed behind our house that I had quietly converted into my own science laboratory. It was hardly a lab in the formal sense, just a chaotic kingdom of wires, bent glass tubes, Bunsen burners, mirrors, batteries, magnets, flasks, tools, and endless curiosity. I tinkered with electronics, experimented with liquids whose chemical properties I barely understood, and spent entire afternoons building strange contraptions that had no practical purpose except satisfying my fascination with how the world worked.

I invented instant drink mixes long before I knew anything about food chemistry. I tried constructing radios that could capture the ‘sound of wind.’ I assembled crude telescopes and spent nights searching the sky for constellations I had only read about in books. Sometimes, when I discovered a cluster of stars I could not identify, I gave them names of my own, convinced for fleeting moments that perhaps I had discovered something unknown to the rest of humanity. I built magnetic toys and small windmills that generated weak electric currents. None of it was commercially useful, scientifically rigorous, or even particularly successful. But it gave me the feeling of living inside wonder. Reading Feynman felt like meeting an older, wiser version of that child.

What makes Feynman extraordinary is not simply his brilliance, but an almost rebellious purity of his curiosity. He approached life as an endless playground. He learned to crack safes at Los Alamos Laboratory during the Manhattan Project because locked systems irritated his curiosity, and it has nothing to do with espionage. He learned to play the bongo drums, decipher Mayan hieroglyphics, sketch nude models, repair radios by ‘thinking,’ and wander into entirely unfamiliar worlds simply because they intrigued him.

The joy of the book lies in how effortlessly it demolishes the myth of the ‘serious scientist.’ Feynman was serious about understanding, but never about preserving intellectual image, as he distrusted pretension. Again and again, the memoir reveals his refusal to worship authority, academic rituals, or social performance. He could converse with elite physicists one moment and spend the next chatting with mechanics, bar workers, or artists with equal enthusiasm. Knowledge, for him, was not hierarchical, and curiosity democratised the world. That spirit resonated deeply with me because childhood curiosity often exists free from the burdens we later acquire as adults with career anxieties, social expectations, professional respectability, and fear of failure. In that shed behind my house, I never worried whether my experiments were ‘important.’ I simply wanted to know what would happen. Feynman reminded me that the purest scientific instinct begins there.

One of the most beautiful aspects of the book is how it captures the emotional texture of curiosity itself. Feynman describes discoveries as the delight of figuring things out. There is a childlike excitement in his storytelling, whether he is discussing quantum mechanics or the mechanics of picking locks. Even his failures become adventures, transforming the memoir into something profoundly human. It is not a book about genius descending from the heavens, but about attention, playfulness, persistence, and freedom from intellectual vanity.

In many ways the book is also about reclaiming permission to experiment without fear of looking foolish. Modern education systems, especially in countries like India, often reward correctness more than curiosity. Children who endlessly ask ‘why’ are gradually trained to seek marks, degrees, and stable careers.

Feynman stood in rebellion against that entire process where labs became exam halls, science became syllabus, and wonder became productivity. He reminds us that science was born from restless minds staring at ordinary phenomena and refusing to accept easy explanations, rather than institutional structures. The child dismantling a radio to understand its circuitry may possess the same essential impulse that drives theoretical physics. The scale differs, but the instinct is identical.

While reading the memoir, what moved me most was recognition and not nostalgia alone. Feynman validated a type of childhood that many adults later dismiss as impractical. The lonely hours spent experimenting in sheds, building things nobody asked for, or imagining invisible worlds are not wasted time. They cultivate a relationship with reality that is deeply creative and alive.

The book also reveals that true intelligence is playful. Feynman’s mind remained flexible because he never stopped playing with ideas. He explored problems the way children explore abandoned buildings with excitement rather than intimidation. This perhaps explains why he could move fluidly between profound physics and absurd adventures without contradiction. For him, existence itself was interesting enough. Many children possess the raw spirit Feynman celebrates, but adulthood often erodes it. We become specialists, managers, administrators, professionals, and optimise ourselves for systems. We stop wandering intellectually, building strange devices simply because they fascinate us, and stop naming stars!

The book made me wonder how many potential inventors, scientists, artists, and thinkers disappear because the world slowly convinces them that curiosity without immediate utility is indulgence, and not because they lack ability. Feynman resisted that domestication throughout his life. The memoir never turns self-important despite its philosophical depth and remains wonderfully entertaining. The stories are filled with humour, mischief, embarrassment, and unpredictability. His adventures in Brazil, his interactions with academics, and his fascination with puzzles and systems are narrated with disarming honesty. He never tries to appear morally perfect or intellectually invincible, and this vulnerability makes the book remarkably accessible even to readers without scientific backgrounds.

The prose mirrors Feynman’s personality, which was conversational, energetic, and unpretentious. You feel less like you are reading a formal autobiography and more like you are listening to a brilliant, eccentric friend narrate impossible stories over coffee late into the night. The accessibility is deceptive because beneath the humour lies a radical philosophy of life to think independently, remain curious, distrust intellectual conformity, and never lose the ability to be astonished.

For me this memoir became more of an archaeological discovery of memory than a literary experience. Every chapter reopened fragments of my own forgotten experiments, of the smell of soldering wires, the excitement of designing new circuits on cardboards, the thrill of discovering patterns in the night sky, the irrational confidence that perhaps something extraordinary could emerge from homemade inventions. Feynman did not merely remind me of science; he reminded me of a mental state. In the end, Richard Feynman emerges as a defender of intellectual freedom. His greatest lesson may have little to do with equations and everything to do with attitude. The universe, he suggests, is too strange and beautiful to approach with boredom. And somewhere behind my childhood home, in that cluttered little shed filled with mirrors, magnets, circuits, wires, and impossible dreams, I suspect I understood that once too.

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Coffee and Concept Notes

May 18, 2026 Leave a comment

There is a very specific kind of person who measures time through cups of tea/coffee consumed, number of smokes, and versions of concept notes. I am that person. My day does not begin at 9 AM like everybody else. It begins when the first sip of tea and a puff of grey poetry hits my bloodstream and convinces my brain that solving structural poverty through a two-page document is a reasonable life goal. By the third sip/puff, I am ready to change the world. By the fourth, I am opening last year’s concept note and renaming it “Final_Updated_Latest_UseThisOne_v3.0.”

There is something deeply optimistic, almost delusional, about writing a concept note. It always starts innocently: ‘Let’s improve livelihoods in rural communities.’ Twenty minutes later, I find myself writing sentences like, ‘This integrated, community-led, multi-stakeholder convergence model seeks to catalyse sustainable socio-economic transformation…’ At this point, I pause and admire my own ability to say absolutely nothing in 21 words. Concept notes exist in a strange parallel universe where every problem is solvable, every intervention is scalable, every outcome is measurable, and every budget is ‘indicative.’ Of course, the reality is sitting quietly in the corner, waiting for implementation to begin so it can laugh.

Starting a concept note is a ritual that starts with my caffeine fix, opening a blank document, and staring at it as if it owes me money. The blinking cursor is not neutral as it blinks with judgment. ‘Go on,’ it seems to say, ‘design systemic change.’ So I begin with writing a suitable title, then change it, make it sound more ‘strategic,’ add the word ‘transformative,’ remove it because it feels too ambitious, and then add it back because the funder likes ambition. Thirty minutes later, the only thing I have finalised is the font.

At some point in my career as a fundraising professional, I have accepted that coffee/tea is a programmatic input and not just a beverage. Without caffeine/nictone fix, there is no Theory of Change, no LFA, no pathway to impact. With the ‘fix’, there are frameworks, diagrams, and a dangerous amount of confidence. This fix makes me believe things like, ‘Yes, we can align community aspirations with institutional frameworks through participatory convergence.’ Without the fix, I would simply say, ‘We will try our best and see what happens,’ but that is not a fundable language.

Every concept note reaches an uncomfortable moment, usually around page two. I have written the problem statement, objectives, and proposed intervention, and now I am staring at the section titled ‘Expected Outcomes.’ This is where things get philosophical. Will this actually work? Are we solving the problem, or just describing it better? Is this impact, or just well-structured optimism? I leave my desk, go for a quick fix, and look at the skies as if answers are stored there, but they are not.

If you have written enough concept notes, you develop ‘the donor voice’ in your head as your second personality. It appears uninvited and asks uncomfortable questions like, ‘Can you make this more scalable?’ ‘What is the innovation here?’ ’How will you measure impact?’ ‘Can you reduce overheads?’ The last one hurts the most. So I return to the document and start adjusting reality. I make things more efficient on paper, outcomes more certain, risks more ‘mitigated.’ At some point, I realise that I am not just writing a concept note, instead I am negotiating between truth and fundability.

Have you heard about a fine art in fundraising called strategic vagueness? You must say enough to sound intelligent, but not so much that you become accountable. Instead of writing, ‘We will train 1000 farmers,’ you write, ‘We will build the capacity of local stakeholders through targeted interventions.’ Who are these stakeholders? What interventions? That is a journey for another day.

One of my favourite moments is when a concept note meets the field. In the document, community participation is enthusiastic, systems respond efficiently, and timelines are respected. In reality, the meeting starts late, half the participants are confused, and the system is ‘on leave today.’ And yet, the report will still say, ‘The intervention was successfully initiated with active community engagement.’ Because technically, there was engagement, and someone did show up!

Concept notes also have a strange relationship with time, as they do not end, but they evolve. There is Draft, Final Draft, Final_Final, Final_Reviewed, Final_Reviewed_Updated, and the legendary ‘Final_Reviewed_Updated_Latest with version 1.0 to versions n.n. And just when you think you are done, someone sends an email saying, ‘Can we make a few small changes?’ This is how legends are born.

What concept notes really offer is the illusion of control. You design inputs, outputs, outcomes, and impact, and everything flows neatly in arrows and boxes. But development work is not a flowchart; it is more like a messy, unpredictable, human conversation. And yet, we keep drawing boxes, because boxes are fundable.

Every now and then, after multiple cups of coffee, endless sticks of ‘(un)holy smoke’ and several minor existential crises, something magical happens, which is clarity. I suddenly see the program for what it is, what matters, what is unnecessary, what is real. I delete half the document, simplify, and write something honest. For a brief moment, the concept note feels true, and then, almost instinctively, I complicate it again. My colleagues say that I write in Russian! (No offence to Russians here). Because honesty is risky, I add a framework, a diagram, and a few strategic words, and just like that, I am back in the safe zone.

Despite everything, including the caffeine and nicotine dependency, the document gymnastics, and the existential crises, we keep writing concept notes. Somewhere in between the jargon and the formatting, there is a real intention. A belief that things can improve, systems can shift, and people can live better. The concept note is simply the translation of that belief into a language that institutions understand. At the end of the day, I close my laptop. The concept note is sent, the cup is finished, and the existential questions remain unresolved. And still there’s satisfaction, not because the document is perfect, but because I tried to make sense of something complex. Tomorrow, there will be another concept note, another fix, and another moment of staring at a blinking cursor. And I will begin again because this is what we do. We drink coffee and smoke cigarettes, we write concept notes, and occasionally, we question the meaning of it all, preferably before the next deadline.

If this article made you think differently about development, work, or life choices, subscribe to my blog for one article every week in your mailbox.

(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the views or opinions of any organisation, foundation, CSR, non-profit or others. This is a humorous attempt, and not angst, and certainly no disrespect for fellow fundraisers, donors and funders of social impact.)

(Cover image is generated using AI)

Filed under humour, Opinions, Social Impact Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

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