The Pleasure of Being Enough

November 9, 2026 Leave a comment

I have always found my own company deeply satisfying, whether to introspect, ideate, read, explore intellectual curiosity, or enjoy the small things that make life interesting. I like sitting alone with a cup of cappuccino, a book, reading blogs or playing a game on my smartphone, or following a thought that often leads me somewhere unexpected, imagining possibilities that might never materialise, or simply enjoying something I like without interruption. There are no specific occasions to celebrate and nothing extraordinary is happening around me. Yet, in those moments, I feel a sense of contentment that is difficult to explain to anyone who equates happiness with being surrounded by people.

I have never felt that every empty hour needs filling with plans or that every interesting thought needs an immediate audience. Sometimes, an idea is enjoyable simply because I can explore it at my own pace, allowing it to grow, change direction leading me down a completely unexpected path. Sometimes, I want to do something as ordinary as read, listen to music, or sit quietly with my thoughts without having to account for my time. I enjoy the freedom of these moments and the absence of interruption, the luxury of following my curiosity, and the comfort of not having to be anything other than myself. Being alone has rarely felt like waiting for life to begin. More often, it has felt like being fully present in my own life.

I have come to realise that this contentment with solitude can be difficult for others to understand. When you are comfortable spending time by yourself, people sometimes assume you must be lonely, that you are missing out on something, or that your preference for your own company is a sign of withdrawal. Questions like, “Don’t you get bored?” Why don’t you go out more? are often asked with genuine concern, but they reveal an assumption that a person who enjoys being alone must somehow be deprived of something essential.

Perhaps this is because we have learned to recognise happiness most readily when it is visible. Shared laughter across a coffee table, photographs from a holiday with friends, or the excitement of a crowded gathering are familiar expressions of a life well lived. The quiet pleasure of an uninterrupted afternoon, or the simple ease of doing something alone, is less visible. There is no audience to witness it and no photograph that can adequately explain it, but its invisibility does not make it any less real.

Over time, I have come to appreciate a distinction between being alone and feeling lonely. One describes the circumstances in which we find ourselves, while the other describes how we experience them. They can overlap, of course, but they are not the same. It is possible to feel lonely in a crowded room and entirely content in an empty one. It is possible to long for meaningful connection while still cherishing the hours we spend by ourselves. And it is possible to build a life in which solitude is not something we endure between social engagements, but something we genuinely look forward to. This is the art of being alone without feeling lonely is learning to recognise solitude not as an absence that must be filled, but as a space in which life can unfold on its own terms.

We have become accustomed to treating being alone and being lonely as though they were interchangeable experiences, but they are not. Being alone is a choice, whereas loneliness is an emotional experience. The former describes the absence of other people, while the latter describes the absence of a connection we need or desire. One can be alone and feel entirely content, just as one can be surrounded by friends, colleagues, family members, and acquaintances and still feel profoundly lonely. Anyone who has attended a crowded gathering and felt like an outsider or sat at a dinner table full of people while wishing for a more meaningful conversation understands this distinction intuitively. Physical proximity does not guarantee emotional intimacy, and the presence of company does not automatically create a sense of belonging. The important question, therefore, is not how much time we spend alone but how we experience that time. Does solitude feel like a space we have chosen, or a condition imposed upon us? Does it offer freedom, or does it reinforce a sense of exclusion? The same empty room can become either a sanctuary or a prison, depending on what is happening within us.

Perhaps my appreciation for solitude has something to do with being an INTJ, a personality type often associated with introspection, independent thinking, strategic imagination, and a preference for depth over superficial social engagement. Though personality classifications are imperfect maps of human complexity, no four-letter combination can fully explain an individual. Still, the description resonates with an aspect of my experience. There are ideas to examine, connections to discover, questions to pursue, and possibilities to imagine. Sometimes a passing observation becomes an intellectual rabbit hole, and sometimes an unresolved problem occupies the mind long after the practical demands of the day have ended. At other times, there is no grand intellectual pursuit at all, only the pleasure of doing something without interruption or obligation. Solitude offers the freedom to follow one’s curiosity without having to explain it, justify it, or make it useful to anyone else. It creates room for a particular kind of mental wandering that is difficult to sustain amid constant conversation, notifications, meetings, and the expectations of everyday life. For a mind that enjoys thinking, being alone can feel less like withdrawing from the world and more like entering it through a different door.

There is, too, something restorative about not having to perform. Much of adult life involves inhabiting roles of professionals, partners, parents, children, friends, colleagues, mentors, and caregivers. Each role carries its own responsibilities, expectations, and unspoken rules. We learn when to speak, when to listen, when to be agreeable, when to be decisive, when to offer reassurance, and when to suppress our own concerns because somebody else needs our attention. Relationships and responsibilities give life meaning, and caring for others is an important expression of being human. But even meaningful roles can become exhausting when we never step outside them. Solitude provides a temporary release from the obligation to respond. Nobody needs an immediate answer, nobody expects us to maintain a conversation, and nobody requires us to be entertaining, helpful, available, or emotionally present. We can be uncertain without explaining ourselves, unproductive without feeling guilty, and quiet without having to reassure anyone that we are not upset. In our own company, we can simply exist without turning existence into a performance. Sometimes the most restorative thing we can do is spend a few hours being nobody in particular.

Society is not always comfortable with people who are content in their own company. We are taught early that happiness is something we experience collectively. Birthdays, festivals, holidays, weddings, dinners, and celebrations are organised around togetherness. Our milestones are marked by the people who witness them, and our experiences often seem to acquire legitimacy when they are shared. Even leisure has become social: a restaurant visit, a holiday, a concert, or an afternoon spent outdoors can appear incomplete unless there is a photograph proving that we were there with somebody. Social media has amplified this tendency by making other people’s visible togetherness a constant backdrop to our private lives. We see groups travelling, couples celebrating, friends gathering, and families posing for photographs. What we rarely see is the boredom, awkwardness, emotional distance, or quiet dissatisfaction that can coexist with those apparently perfect moments. The result is an unspoken hierarchy of experiences in which being socially connected appears desirable and being alone requires justification. A person eating alone may be assumed to have no friends. Someone travelling solo may be pitied for having nobody to accompany them. Someone who declines a social invitation may be suspected of being unhappy, antisocial, or difficult. We have become so accustomed to interpreting solitude through the lens of social deprivation that we sometimes struggle to recognise it as a legitimate preference.

Of course, there is a difference between choosing solitude and using it to avoid the difficult work of human connection. It would be too convenient to romanticise every form of withdrawal as independence or intellectual depth. Sometimes we stay away from people because we are tired; sometimes because we are disappointed; sometimes because vulnerability feels uncomfortable or the risk of rejection seems greater than the reward of intimacy. A preference for solitude can occasionally conceal fear, unresolved hurt, or an unwillingness to accommodate the imperfections of other people. Independence can become a flattering name for emotional avoidance. The distinction matters because a fulfilling solitary life does not require us to reject relationships. It requires us to stop depending on constant company to feel whole. Healthy solitude is chosen freely and can coexist with meaningful intimacy. Unhealthy isolation, by contrast, may gradually narrow our world until we no longer know how to reach out, even when we want to. We should be able to enjoy our own company without feeling compelled to prove that we need nobody, just as we should be able to seek companionship without feeling that we have somehow failed at independence. Emotional maturity lies not in choosing one extreme over the other but in having the freedom to move between them.

The ability to enjoy solitude also depends on the relationship we have with ourselves. When external stimulation disappears, we encounter the contents of our own minds more directly. For some people, that experience is uncomfortable. Silence allows anxieties to become louder, regrets to resurface, and unresolved questions to demand attention. In such circumstances, constant company can become a convenient distraction from thoughts we would rather not examine. This is one reason solitude cannot automatically be assumed to be restorative. Its quality depends partly on what we bring into it. Learning to be alone comfortably involves developing a degree of inner companionship: the ability to observe our thoughts without immediately judging them, tolerate uncertainty without urgently seeking reassurance, and acknowledge difficult emotions without treating them as emergencies. It means learning that an unpleasant thought does not necessarily require an immediate solution and that a quiet evening need not be filled simply because silence makes us restless. Introspection can help us understand ourselves, but it can also become rumination if we repeatedly circle the same worries without reaching new insights. The art is to create enough mental space for reflection without turning every moment of solitude into an interrogation of our own lives.

One practical way of cultivating this relationship with ourselves is to reclaim small, ordinary experiences from the expectation that they must be shared. Go for a walk without arranging to meet anyone. Visit a bookstore and spend as long as you like browsing its shelves. Sit in a café with a book, a notebook, or nothing more ambitious than a cup of coffee. Watch a film without needing to discuss it afterwards. Take a short trip in which the itinerary can change according to your mood. Spend an evening cooking, listening to music, reading, or following an idea that serves no purpose beyond satisfying your curiosity. These activities may sound unremarkable, but they offer something valuable: the experience of being the author of our own time. When we are alone, we can move at our own pace, change our minds without negotiation, and pay attention to things that might otherwise be overlooked. The objective is not to turn solitude into another self-improvement project. It is to discover that time need not always be productive, memorable, or socially approved to be worthwhile. A life that allows for unstructured pleasure is often a life with more room to breathe.

It is equally important to develop a life that feels rich enough to sustain periods of solitude. Enjoying one’s own company becomes easier when that company is not merely an absence of other people but an active engagement with the world. Curiosity is an excellent companion. So are books, music, art, nature, writing, learning, making things, and pursuing questions that have no immediate practical value. A person who continues to learn and explore does not have to wait for someone else to make life interesting. There is always another idea to examine, another place to discover, another perspective to consider. This is especially relevant as we grow older, when social circles can become smaller, friendships may require more deliberate effort, and the familiar structures of work and family life may change. If our sense of fulfilment depends entirely on other people’s availability, we may find ourselves vulnerable to circumstances beyond our control. But when we cultivate interests, habits, and sources of meaning that belong to us, we develop a more resilient relationship with life. We can appreciate company without being dependent on it, enjoy a busy week without fearing a quiet weekend, and welcome an unexpected free afternoon rather than treating it as a problem that needs to be solved.

There is also a deeper freedom in learning not to seek constant validation for our preferences. Not everyone needs to understand why we enjoy spending an afternoon alone. Not everyone will appreciate the pleasure of a solitary meal, the satisfaction of an uninterrupted train of thought, or the excitement of pursuing an idea that nobody else finds particularly interesting. That is perfectly fine. The desire to be understood is human, but the need to have every preference understood and approved can become its own burden. We can explain ourselves when we wish to, but we do not have to turn our temperament into a defence case. Being comfortable alone means accepting that our lives need not resemble the lives of our friends, colleagues, or neighbours. Some people come alive in crowds; others thrive in smaller gatherings. Some draw energy from constant interaction; others need quiet intervals to recover and think. Most people occupy a position somewhere between these descriptions, with their needs changing according to circumstances. There is no moral superiority in being an introvert, just as extroversion is not evidence of greater emotional health. The goal is not to celebrate one personality type at the expense of another but to stop treating difference as deficiency.

And yet, even those of us who cherish solitude need other people. We need the friend with whom a conversation can wander into unexpected territory, the person who challenges an assumption we have held for years, the companion who makes an ordinary experience unexpectedly joyful, and the relationship in which we can be understood without having to translate every part of ourselves. Human connection provides things that introspection alone cannot: the opportunity to encounter perspectives outside our own, to practise empathy, to be surprised, to love, and to be changed. There are experiences that become more meaningful when shared, just as there are experiences whose meaning depends on being lived privately. A fulfilling life makes room for both. It does not turn independence into a wall against intimacy or companionship into an obligation to remain perpetually available. It lets us be present with others without losing ourselves and to return to ourselves without abandoning others. Perhaps the healthiest relationships are those in which solitude is not interpreted as rejection, where two people can occupy the same room without needing to fill every silence, and where time apart strengthens rather than threatens the connection. To love someone well should not require us to surrender the parts of ourselves that flourish in solitude.

Ultimately, the art of being alone without feeling lonely is the art of building a life in which our own presence is welcome. It is knowing that an empty evening is not necessarily a wasted one, that a solitary journey can be an adventure rather than a compromise, and that silence can hold possibility rather than absence. It is understanding that happiness need not always arrive through an invitation, a conversation, or somebody else’s attention. Sometimes it arrives quietly, in the middle of an ordinary afternoon, when we are reading something fascinating, following a thought to its conclusion, enjoying a meal at our own pace, or simply feeling at ease with the person we have become. This does not mean that we will never feel lonely, nor should we expect ourselves to. Loneliness is part of being human and recognising it can remind us to seek the connections we need. But we need not interpret every moment alone as evidence of loneliness waiting to happen. There is a difference between wishing someone were beside us and believing that our experience is incomplete without them. The first can be a tender expression of connection; the second can become a lifelong dependence on external circumstances for our own sense of wholeness.I have come to believe that one of the privileges of growing comfortable with oneself is that it changes the nature of companionship. When we no longer seek people merely to escape our own company, we can choose them for the richness they bring to our lives. We can appreciate a conversation without needing it to fill a void, enjoy a gathering without fearing the silence that follows, and care deeply for others without expecting them to be perpetually available. We can be alone because we want to be, not because we have nowhere else to go. And when we do feel the desire for company, we can honour that desire without treating it as a contradiction of our independence. Perhaps that is the balance worth striving for: a life in which we are capable of genuine intimacy but not frightened of solitude, connected to the world but not dependent on its constant noise, and curious enough to keep discovering things even when nobody is watching. In the end, the measure of a complete life may not be how many people surround us at any given moment, but whether we can find meaning both in the company we keep and in the quiet company we keep with ourselves. To be alone and feel at home is not to have less of a life. Sometimes, it is to have made peace with the life that is already ours.

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Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

November 2, 2026 Leave a comment

Author: Alice Munro | 336 Pages | Genre: Fiction | Publisher: Vintage | Year: 2013 | My Rating: 9/10

“There’s the intelligent sort of love that makes an intelligent choice. That’s the kind you’re supposed to get married on. Then there’s the kind that’s anything but intelligent, that’s like a possession. And that’s the one everybody really values.“
― Alice Munro, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

The novel, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, offers a complex look at human relationships with devastating emotional precision. This collection of short stories reads less like a set of plots and more like a series of lived lives, paused at moments where something small tilts and changes everything.

Munro’s genius lies in her attention to the invisible emotions like the subtle humiliations, everyday compromises, half-spoken longings that slowly harden into habit. Her characters are often ordinary people in small towns and unremarkable houses, women tending to domestic routines, men locked into moral inertia, children looking on and misunderstanding. Yet what emerges from these ordinary settings is a startling emotional depth that feels intimate and uncomfortably real.

The title story, “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage,” begins with mischief and deception and slowly transforms into something almost miraculous. These are stories on resilience and the baffling ways in which people stumble into love. Munro does not romanticise happiness; instead, she portrays it as something awkward, delayed, and often born out of misunderstanding, which somehow makes it feel more true.

Reading this collection feels like being allowed into private rooms of consciousness. Munro’s stories don’t depend on climaxes in the conventional sense. Instead, they accumulate meaning through small gestures like a pause before a sentence, a memory resurfacing at the wrong moment, a realisation that arrives too late. The emotional power of these stories lingers long after you have completed reading the book. It remains with you like a bruise that only begins to ache after you’ve forgotten how you got it.

One of the remarkable qualities of Munro’s writing is her treatment of time. She moves across decades within a few pages, slipping effortlessly from youth to old age, from memory to present, from imagined lives to the ones her characters never lived. In stories like ‘Floating Bridge’ and ‘Family Furnishings,’ time is fluid, looping back on itself in ways that feel closer to the way memory actually works. The past is not a closed chapter; it is a constant, restless presence that presses itself into every decision made in the present.

The women in this collection are particularly memorable because they are not rendered as symbols, but as fully contradictory human beings. They are passive and courageous, bitter and generous, trapped and defiant, and often all at once. Munro does not offer easy feminist triumphs or moral clarity. Instead, she shows the true complexity of women’s lives and the ways they adapt, endure, and sometimes betray themselves in order to survive emotional, social, and economic constraints.

What makes these stories so piercing is Munro’s refusal to provide comfort. There are no tidy resolutions, no sweeping redemptions. People make the wrong choices and live with them, opportunities are missed and cannot be recovered, and love arrives too late or in the wrong shape, and yet there is a strange tenderness in her writing. She does not condemn her characters but describes them with a kind of grave, compassionate clarity.

The prose is clean, restrained, and almost modest. But within this apparent simplicity lies a tremendous control of rhythm and emotional pacing. She knows exactly when to withhold and when to reveal, when to let a scene breathe and when to cut it short. Reading her feels like walking through a quiet house where every floorboard holds a memory, every closed door suggests a life not fully examined.

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage is also a book about the violence of loneliness. Many of the characters exist in emotional isolation, even when they are surrounded by family. Marriage, in these stories, is not always a sanctuary, and sometimes it is simply a structure people inhabit because there is nowhere else to go. Friendship is fragile, courtship is awkward, laced with misunderstanding, and love is unpredictable and often arrives in disguise.

And yet, what ultimately makes this collection so moving is its deep belief in human endurance and the way people survive suffering. Her characters are not heroes in the usual sense, but they persist, adapt, sometimes fail, sometimes surprise themselves. Life, in Munro’s vision, is not a straight line toward fulfilment, but a winding path of accidents, compromises, moments of clarity, and long stretches of confusion.When you finish this book, there is no dramatic sense of closure. Instead, there is a haunting awareness of how much of life happens in the margins, in rooms like the ones on the book’s cover, in conversations that never quite reach the truth, in choices that seem trivial but reshape an entire future. Munro leaves you with the unsettling knowledge that ordinary lives are not simple; they are vast, complicated, and full of unspoken stories. Reading this collection can leave you with a softened, sharpened sense of what it means to be human. In the end, the novel changes the way you look at lives that resemble, disturbingly closely, your own. And that is its greatest, most unsettling achievement.

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Why donors keep asking for sustainability

October 26, 2026 Leave a comment

I have often been asked by the funding partners, ‘How will this project be sustained after the funding ends?’ While it is a reasonable question, it is also often the wrong one. The development sector has turned ‘sustainability’ into a synonym for ‘what will happen when the donor stops paying?’ The donors ask NGOs to build lasting solutions while often funding them through short-term, restricted projects that make long-term institutional and financial resilience harder to achieve. The real test of sustainability is the possibility of value created by the funding that can continue beyond the project cycle, and whether the economic, institutional or public systems exist to carry that value forward.

If a donor spends money on training women entrepreneurs, establishing community institutions, improving health services or creating livelihood opportunities, it is entirely reasonable to ask what happens when the grant ends. Nobody wants an intervention to disappear the moment the donor’s logo disappears from the last banner. But before asking how a project will survive without the donor, we should ask what exactly is supposed to continue, who is expected to take responsibility for it, and whether the conditions exist to make that possible.

A three-year project can be financially unsustainable but socially transformative, and it can end because its purpose has been achieved. A community institution can survive without the NGO but require continued public or market support. A livelihood intervention can become sustainable because participants increase their incomes, while the organisation delivering it remains dependent on philanthropy. And sometimes ‘sustainability’ simply means that the NGO promises to find another donor, which often is the least convincing of all. For years, development organisations have been encouraged to think about sustainability as an exit strategy. The donor funds the intervention often for 1-3 years, the NGO builds capacity, creates local ownership, establishes linkages and prepares an exit plan, and then the donor leaves and the model is expected to continue. While the logic is attractive, ending external funding and creating sustainability are not necessarily the same thing.

The OECD’s longstanding definition of sustainability in development evaluation focuses on the benefits of an intervention continuing after donor funding ends. That is a useful starting point, but it immediately raises a more important question of what will allow those benefits to continue? Government may take over, communities may contribute, users may pay, markets may generate revenue, or another institution may assume responsibility. Or the intervention may change behaviour or strengthen systems sufficiently that continued external support is no longer necessary. These are fundamentally different pathways, yet grant proposals often treat sustainability as a generic quality that can be added through a paragraph near the end of a concept note.

Consider a women’s entrepreneurship program that trains 5,000 rural women, organises producer collectives, provides business support and connects them to markets. If a donor asks how the program will be sustained after three years, the answer depends entirely on the model. Perhaps producer collectives will become commercially viable, or an anchor company will continue purchasing from the enterprises, while the financial institutions in the entrepreneurial ecosystem will provide working capital, and women will eventually pay for business services. Each possibility requires a different intervention design. If sustainability depends on markets, the project must build a viable market proposition. If it depends on government, public institutions need to be involved from the beginning. If it depends on producer collectives, those organisations need governance, capital and commercial capability. If another donor will be required, the project should be honest about that rather than presenting donor substitution as financial sustainability.

Donors increasingly expect NGOs to be resilient, adaptive and financially sustainable, while many NGOs are funded through short-term, restricted project grants that make precisely that difficult. Recent evidence from Bridgespan’s 2025 research, based on responses from 460 nonprofits and interviews with 51 nonprofit leaders, funders and intermediaries from India, found growing movement towards multiyear funding and greater recognition of core organisational costs, but continuing gaps in organisational development and financial reserves, particularly among smaller and non-metro organisations. Earlier Bridgespan research found that 83% of Indian NGOs surveyed had difficulty securing funding for indirect costs, while more than half had fewer than three months of reserves. Only 18% said they invested adequately in organisational development. Another analysis of 40 relatively well-funded Indian nonprofits found that actual core costs ranged from 5% to 51% of total costs and averaged 19%, while the average coverage provided by key donors was only 9%.

Funders ask organisations to be resilient while funding them as if their only legitimate expenditure is the activity that can be photographed and counted. Donor grants fund the field worker but not always enough of the management system that supports the field worker, training but not necessarily the organisational learning required to improve it, and program delivery while hesitating to fund reserves. Funders ask NGOs to diversify their funding while providing little unrestricted money with which to build their fundraising capacity. Then, three years later, the funder asks why NGOs are not sustainable.

Instead of asking an NGO, ‘How will you sustain this project when our funding ends?’, donors should instead ask, ‘What needs to be true for the benefits of this intervention to continue, and what role should our funding play in creating those conditions?’ This question recognises that philanthropy is often most useful when it finances a transition between two states. A grant can demonstrate that an idea works, absorb early-stage risk, strengthen institutions, develop markets, improve technology or support innovations that government and commercial finance are not yet prepared to fund. The grant should help create the conditions for the next stage. That may mean public financing, market revenue, community ownership, institutional adoption, commercial investment or another form of philanthropy. The appropriate pathway will vary by intervention, for example, a rural entrepreneurship program and a community health program should not be expected to arrive at sustainability through the same route.

This also means donors should sometimes be prepared to fund the less glamorous parts of sustainability. Financial systems are not exciting, NGO reserves are not photogenic, good middle management rarely features in impact stories, and neither do information systems, HR, audit, leadership development or fundraising capacity. Yet these capabilities determine whether an organisation can survive shocks, retain good people, manage resources and deliver programs consistently. Flexible funding is therefore not necessarily the opposite of accountability. It can be an investment in the organisational capacity required to deliver accountability well. A strong organisation with adequate systems and reserves may actually be better positioned to manage restricted program funding, and respond to changing circumstances and protect donor resources.

Then there’s another very important aspect of development programs, where everything cannot be sustained. Some projects end and achieve the desired results/purpose during their lifecycle. A delivery model may become obsolete, a technology may get replaced, a program may fail to produce meaningful results, or a community may no longer need an external intermediary. Continuing to fund something simply because it has existed for five years is institutional inertia and not sustainability.

The objective should therefore be sustainable value, not sustainable projects. This matters because many development challenges are systemic. Poverty, women’s economic exclusion, malnutrition, tuberculosis, climate vulnerability and the lack of decent employment cannot generally be ‘solved’ by a three-year project. At best, a project can change part of the system like improve a service, strengthen an institution, alter incentives, demonstrate a model, influence policy or help people acquire assets and capabilities.

Sometimes the honest answer will be that an intervention requires long-term funding, and there is nothing inherently unsustainable about that. Governments continuously spend money on education, public health, roads, social protection and environmental management. We do not ask whether a public hospital will become financially self-sustaining after three years, but are more interested in it producing sufficient public value to justify continued investment. Perhaps philanthropy should adopt some of the same logic. A community health program that requires continued financing may still be highly valuable if it prevents disease at a cost society is willing to pay. A program supporting children with special needs may never generate revenue, yet its social value can be substantial. 

So sustainability cannot always mean, ‘Can this generate its own revenue?’ That is a business-model question. For many social interventions, the better question is that, Who has a legitimate reason and capacity to pay for this value over the long term? The answer is an appropriate combination of market, government, communities, and philanthropy as per the need. This also places a responsibility on NGOs to become more honest in how they answer sustainability questions. A reassuring paragraph about capacity building, community ownership and exit strategies is not necessarily a credible plan. It’s better to be honest about it and say that the interventions may require continued public expenditure, or a livelihood project would need several more years beyond the grant cycle before it can cover its operating costs, and show the pathway. If another donor will be required, explain why and what will be different by then.

Sustainability becomes more credible when it is treated as a theory of how an intervention will continue to create value, rather than as a promise that the NGO will somehow find money after the current grant ends. We have turned a ,legitimate development objective into a ritual of grant writing. Every proposal has a sustainability section, a sustainability framework, and an exit strategy. Yet none of these, by themselves, answers the fundamental question of what will make this intervention continue to work when the source of money ends. A serious answer requires thinking about incentives, markets, institutions, behaviour, public finance, community ownership and organisational capability. It may require more than one source of funding and more than one institution. It may take five years rather than three. It may require unrestricted funding rather than another tightly earmarked project grant. And sometimes it may require accepting that the value created by a program is important enough to warrant continued investment. Perhaps, then, donors should stop treating sustainability as the final question in a grant proposal, but should be one of the first. So, instead of ‘How will you survive without us?’, the donor should ask, ‘What will exist, who will own it, who will pay for it, who will maintain it, and what should our role be when the grant ends to make the impact sustainable?’ While these are harder questions, I think, they can also lead to better projects. The most sustainable thing a donor can fund is NGOs capability, institution, market, public system or community ownership that makes the original grant less necessary over time.

(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.)

The cover image is generated using AI

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The price of stability in an unstable world

October 19, 2026 Leave a comment

We have been sold a dangerous idea that stability is normal and disruption is the exception, but is it? Yes, stability is an achievement, though an expensive one! Every morning, when the electricity is on, the internet works, the bank processes a transaction, food reaches you from a quick-commerce platform, a child gets to school, a salary arrives on time, and a hospital has the medicines it needs, it means thousands of invisible systems are doing their job in the background. We notice them only when they fail. For most of modern history, perhaps the greatest privilege was not wealth but predictability, the reasonable expectation that tomorrow would look broadly like today. That expectation is now harder to sustain as wars are disrupting supply chains, climate events are destroying livelihoods, artificial intelligence is unsettling occupations, financial volatility travels across borders in milliseconds, and demographic change is altering the very structure of families and work. We are entering an era in which instability may no longer be a temporary interruption to ordinary life but may become the usual.

So, who pays for stability in an unstable world? The obvious answer is governments, which build roads, maintain electricity grids, regulate financial systems, run hospitals, banks, police, and borders, subsidise food, respond to disasters, and provide social protection. But businesses pay too, as they maintain inventories, assets, diversify suppliers, retain cash and build redundancy into systems that would otherwise be cheaper and more efficient. So do families, as they keep emergency savings, buy insurance, invest in education, maintain social networks and sometimes make profoundly conservative choices because the consequences of failure are too high. Individuals pay in ways that don’t appear anywhere on a balance sheet. They stay in jobs they dislike because they’re secure. They postpone starting a business because they cannot afford six months without an income. They choose a predictable career over an uncertain vocation. They save instead of spending. They remain in cities they don’t particularly love because the city offers better healthcare, schools and employment opportunities. Stability, in other words, is not free, and we purchase it every day, often without realising that we are doing so.

But we don’t all pay the same price for instability. A wealthy household can absorb a medical emergency, while a poor household may have to borrow, sell an asset or withdraw a child from school. Likewise, a large corporation can survive a temporary collapse in demand, whereas a small enterprise may shut down permanently. A professional with savings can spend six months learning a new skill, and at the same time a casual worker may not be able to afford six days without income. The ability to absorb a shock is itself becoming a form of wealth. We have traditionally measured inequality through income, consumption and assets. Perhaps we now need another measure: the unequal distribution of uncertainty. Two families earning the same amount can live completely different lives if one has savings, insurance, secure housing, social capital and access to credit while the other survives from one monthly payment to the next.

Consider the millions of informal workers in India whose economic lives were disrupted during the COVID-19 lockdown. For many, the crisis was not simply about losing a job. It meant losing the entire architecture through which survival happened, like their daily wages, transport, access to urban work and sometimes food itself. The images of migrant workers walking hundreds of kilometres home became one of the defining visual memories of the pandemic. The crisis revealed how much of India’s economic stability was being privately financed by people with almost no financial cushion. When formal systems failed, the burden was transferred to households, communities and individual workers, where families became the insurance company of last resort.

Something similar happens every day, at a smaller scale, when an illness strikes a low-income household. India has made enormous progress in expanding healthcare access, insurance and public health infrastructure, but for millions of families, healthcare expenditure can still become a destabilising financial event. The difference between a middle-class household experiencing a serious illness and a poor household experiencing the same illness is not simply the quality of medical treatment available. One family may recover financially after recovering medically, while the other may spend years repaying debt. The illness turns into a crisis cascade of healthcare expenses, debt, reduced consumption, interrupted education and sometimes the sale of productive assets.

Climate change is producing another version of the same problem. Take a small farmer in Bihar, Assam, Odisha or Rajasthan. Agriculture has always involved uncertainty, but climate volatility is changing the scale and frequency of that uncertainty. An unexpected flood, prolonged heat, irregular rainfall or pest outbreak can wipe out months of effort. We often respond by telling farmers to become ‘climate resilient’, adopt new practices, diversify crops or use technology. All of these can be useful, but we tend to forget that resilience requires resources. A farmer with savings, irrigation, crop insurance, access to credit and market information has options. A farmer who owns little land and depends entirely on one seasonal harvest has very few. We cannot keep asking the poorest citizens to become more resilient without asking whether we have given them the financial and institutional infrastructure with which resilience can actually be built.

The same contradiction is visible in India’s growing, small-enterprise economy. We celebrate entrepreneurship and tell young people to become entrepreneurs, women to start enterprises, rural communities to build businesses and small producers to enter digital markets. Yet entrepreneurship is, by definition, an encounter with uncertainty. A person with substantial capital can afford entrepreneurial failure, but, say, a woman investing her family’s only savings in a small enterprise cannot. When a rural woman starts a tailoring unit, food-processing business, handloom enterprise or digital service centre, she is not merely creating income but is taking a financial risk on behalf of her household. This is why access to credit alone is not enough and entrepreneurs need markets, digital access, business capabilities, working capital, insurance, peer networks and, perhaps most importantly, the ability to fail without falling into destitution.

And then there is the instability coming from new-age technology. AI may create extraordinary new opportunities, but it will also change the value of many existing skills. We tell older workers to remain employable in a labour market changing faster than the institutions designed to train them. But learning itself requires time, money and psychological space. The person working ten hours a day to pay rent cannot effortlessly become an AI-enabled professional at night. The person supporting a family cannot always afford to experiment with a new career. Adaptability is not simply an attitude; it is an economic resource.

This is where our understanding of resilience needs to change. We have increasingly turned resilience into an individual virtue of being adaptable, keep learning, diversify your income, build an emergency fund, exercise, take care of your mental health, prepare for the future, etc., etc. There is nothing wrong with any of this, but we risk creating a society in which structural instability is increasingly privatised. At some point we have to ask whether we are confusing resilience with the ability of individuals to absorb risks that should partly be shared by institutions.

How to prevent uncertainty from becoming catastrophic for ordinary people, perhaps, will be the central economic challenge of the next few decades. We cannot promise a farmer that the monsoon will behave, a worker that her job will exist for thirty years, or that the next pandemic, financial crisis or geopolitical shock will never happen. But we can design systems in which these events do not permanently destroy a person’s future. That would require a different conception of social protection. The welfare state of the industrial era was largely built around protecting people from particular risks of unemployment, old age, illness, disability and poverty. The unstable world ahead may require something more dynamic, like systems that help people move through disruption. 

The cost of living without psychological certainty is another hidden cost of instability that economists struggle to capture, where uncertainty consumes mental bandwidth. When you don’t know whether your job will survive, whether a medical emergency could wipe out your savings or whether your child’s education will remain affordable, some part of your mind is permanently occupied by contingency planning. And that has implications beyond individual wellbeing. A society in which people are perpetually afraid of falling backwards is unlikely to be as entrepreneurial, innovative or creative as a society in which people know that failure will not destroy them.

This produces a fascinating paradox as we want an innovative economy, but innovation requires risk. Perhaps, therefore, the goal should not be stability in the conventional sense. We should stop trying to build a world in which nothing goes wrong, as such a world does not exist. The goal should be recoverability, where the capacity of people, families, businesses and communities to recover when something inevitably goes wrong should be present. This is ultimately a question of what kind of social contract we want. The price of stability will rise as the world becomes more volatile. Governments will spend more on resilience. Companies will pay more for redundancy and security. Families will save more. Individuals will invest more in skills and insurance. But if we allow every emerging risk to be pushed downwards from governments to companies, from companies to workers, from institutions to families and finally from families to individuals, we will create a society that appears economically efficient while becoming increasingly fragile.

We have become obsessed with efficiency precisely when the world is demanding resilience. We have spent decades removing buffers because buffers looked like waste, including excess inventory, spare capacity, multiple suppliers, idle infrastructure, permanent workers, and generous social protection. Everything had to be optimised, become leaner, faster and cheaper. Until the world reminded us that the things we call inefficiencies are sometimes the very things that keep systems alive when they break. So, the question we should be asking is not how much stability we can afford. It is how much instability ordinary people can afford to absorb before a temporary shock becomes a permanent change in their lives. Because the future will not belong to those who successfully predict every disruption. Nobody can. It will belong to societies that make disruption survivable. And if we fail to build those societies, we may discover a deeply uncomfortable truth that the poor will not merely be the people with the least money, but they will be the people who can afford the least uncertainty.

(The cover image is generated using AI)

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Behavioural Systems Approach to Rural Entrepreneurship Development

October 12, 2026 Leave a comment

The popular approach to rural entrepreneurship in India often includes providing poor households with access to credit, skills training, subsidies, or market linkages, which will naturally lead to entrepreneurship development. This assumption has shaped countless development programs led by governments, NGOs, microfinance institutions, and multilateral agencies. Two individuals living in the same village, receiving identical training and similar financial support, often experience vastly different entrepreneurial trajectories. One may build a sustainable enterprise, expand into new markets, and improve household income, while another may abandon the effort entirely despite possessing comparable resources. Conventional development frameworks struggle to explain this divergence because they remain overwhelmingly focused on material inputs rather than behavioural systems.

I am proposing the READ Framework (Readiness, Exposure, Aspiration, and Direction), which can shift the analytical lens from resource scarcity to behavioural conditions that shape economic action. Rather than treating entrepreneurship as a linear outcome of financial or technical support, the model suggests that enterprise creation depends on a dynamic interaction between psychological preparedness, social exposure, aspirations for mobility, and clarity of execution pathways. This perspective is particularly important in contemporary India, where entrepreneurship has become central to the national development narrative, and yet rural livelihoods remain constrained by social inequality, institutional gaps, and behavioural barriers that are often invisible within conventional policy frameworks.

India’s economic transformation over the past three decades has generated significant growth, but it has also exposed structural contradictions. Although India aspires to become a major global economic power, a large proportion of its population continues to live in rural areas dependent on fragile agriculture-based livelihoods. According to the World Bank, nearly two-thirds of India’s population still resides in rural areas, while agriculture contributes a relatively small share of GDP. This imbalance has intensified pressure on rural households to diversify income sources beyond farming. Rural entrepreneurship is therefore increasingly viewed as a pathway for employment generation, women’s empowerment, local economic resilience, and reduction of distress migration. Government initiatives such as Startup India, Mudra Yojana, and the National Rural Livelihoods Mission reflect this policy emphasis. However, despite substantial investments in microcredit, self-help groups, and skill development programs, many interventions continue to produce limited or unsustainable outcomes. The limitations of conventional entrepreneurship models arise partly from their assumption that individuals act rationally once economic barriers are removed. The prevailing logic can be summarised as a straightforward sequence of inputs leading to skills, enterprise, income (Inputs -> Skills -> Enterprise -> Income).

Development economists such as Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo have demonstrated that poverty fundamentally shapes cognition and decision-making. Scarcity creates what behavioural economists describe as a ‘bandwidth tax,’ reducing people’s ability to plan long-term, tolerate risk, or experiment economically. Poverty is therefore not merely a shortage of money, but a condition that influences imagination, confidence, emotional resilience, and perceptions of possibility. The READ framework is developed upon this intellectual foundation but advances it further by conceptualising entrepreneurship as an interconnected behavioural ecosystem rather than a collection of isolated economic variables.

The framework proposes that entrepreneurial outcomes are a function of four interacting dimensions: Readiness, Exposure, Aspiration, and Direction.

E = f(R,Ex,A,D)

The formulation is simple and treats entrepreneurship as emergent behaviour rather than a direct consequence of inputs. This framework rejects the assumption that entrepreneurship automatically emerges when capital or skills are introduced. Instead, it recognises that deficiencies in any one behavioural dimension can undermine the entire entrepreneurial process. An individual may possess technical capability but lack confidence, another may have ambition but no understanding of viable business pathways, making entrepreneurship an emergent behaviour shaped by multiple interacting conditions rather than a predictable economic reaction to incentives.

The first dimension, Readiness, refers to the psychological and situational preparedness required to undertake entrepreneurial activity. This includes emotional resilience, confidence, time availability, family support, and willingness to tolerate and adapt to uncertainty. In rural India, readiness is deeply shaped by social structures such as gender norms, caste hierarchies, and family expectations. A rural woman may receive training in tailoring, computer operations, or food processing yet still hesitate to establish a business because domestic responsibilities, mobility restrictions, or patriarchal control limit her ability to act independently. Similarly, entrepreneurs belonging to marginalised communities may face exclusion from traditional market networks or social resistance when attempting to enter certain occupations. Readiness, therefore, is not simply an individual psychological trait but a socially conditioned state shaped by power relations and everyday realities.

Readiness also resonates strongly with the capability approach developed by Amartya Sen, who argued that development should be understood not just in terms of resources but in terms of people’s actual freedoms to pursue lives they value. Sen distinguishes between capabilities and functioning. Individuals may possess capabilities in theory, yet structural and social constraints may prevent them from converting those capabilities into real economic action. The READ framework extends this insight into the domain of entrepreneurship by recognising that the existence of opportunity alone does not guarantee participation.

The second dimension, Exposure, is about the importance of social learning, networks, role models, and market visibility. Entrepreneurship is rarely an isolated individual act, and is deeply influenced by social environments. Individuals often become entrepreneurs because they observe others navigating similar pathways successfully. In many rural communities, however, exposure to growth-oriented enterprises remains extremely limited. People may encounter only subsistence-level economic activity and therefore struggle to imagine entrepreneurship beyond survival-oriented self employment. A young person in a remote village who has never interacted with digital commerce, branding strategies, or scalable enterprises may lack exposure to viable economic possibilities, and not necessarily ambition or intelligence.

Economic sociology has consistently demonstrated the importance of networks in shaping entrepreneurial success. Urban startup ecosystems thrive partly because of dense social environments that provide mentorship, peer learning, investment access, and visible examples of success. Rural entrepreneurship programs often fail to replicate such ecosystems because they focus narrowly on asset distribution or technical training. The READ framework’s emphasis on exposure therefore addresses a major gap in existing development practice. Exposure is not simply informational, as it also creates legitimacy. Seeing people from similar social or economic backgrounds succeed changes what individuals believe is socially and economically possible for themselves.

The third dimension, Aspiration, is socially conditioned and unevenly distributed. Development programs frequently assume that poor households naturally aspire toward upward mobility. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argued that social structures shape individuals’ ‘horizons of possibility,’ influencing what they perceive as achievable for people like themselves. Similarly, economist Debraj Ray has written extensively about the ‘aspirations window,’ suggesting that exposure to successful peers influences economic ambition and long-term planning.

In many rural contexts, especially among historically marginalised communities, entrepreneurship may not appear imaginable as a pathway to transformation. Young people may aspire primarily toward government employment or urban migration because these trajectories are socially visible and culturally validated. In contrast, business ownership may appear risky, uncertain, or inaccessible. The READ framework recognises that aspiration is not simply a motivational issue but a socially produced cognitive condition. This insight has profound policy implications because it suggests that entrepreneurship promotion requires more than financial support, and often also requires interventions that expand people’s imagination of possible futures.

The fourth dimension, Direction, refers to clarity regarding viable pathways, execution strategies, and market navigation. Many rural entrepreneurs possess determination and ambition but lack strategic guidance. They may not know how to identify profitable sectors, understand customer demand, access supply chains, navigate regulations, price products competitively, or scale operations sustainably. Traditional entrepreneurship programs frequently provide generic training but fail to offer long-term mentoring or strategic support. Participants may learn technical skills without understanding how to build viable enterprises in dynamic market environments.

Direction has become increasingly important in India’s digital economy, where market participation requires familiarity with e-commerce platforms, logistics systems, digital payments, and branding practices. Without adequate guidance, rural entrepreneurs often remain trapped in highly localised, low-margin markets vulnerable to competition and economic shocks. The READ framework’s emphasis on direction therefore highlights the need for sustained mentoring ecosystems rather than one-time training interventions.

The proposed READ framework uses a systems orientation, with an understanding that human behaviour does not operate through isolated causal pathways. Entrepreneurial action emerges from interactions between psychological, social, economic, and institutional conditions. A person may possess high aspiration but lack direction, leading to frustration rather than enterprise creation. Another may have exposure to successful entrepreneurs but insufficient readiness due to household resistance or emotional insecurity. By recognising these interactions, the framework aligns with broader systems-thinking approaches increasingly influential in public policy and development studies.

The framework can prove to be useful when examining women’s entrepreneurship in rural India. Many livelihood programs targeting women measure success primarily through participation rates or loan disbursement numbers. However, women’s formal inclusion in enterprise programs does not necessarily translate into genuine entrepreneurial autonomy. Women may technically own businesses while male family members control decision-making and finances. The READ framework suggests a more nuanced understanding of these realities by examining the behavioural and social conditions surrounding enterprise participation. A woman may receive training and capital yet still lack readiness because of household opposition, exposure because of mobility restrictions, aspiration because of internalised gender norms, or direction because she lacks mentorship networks. This multidimensional perspective provides a richer understanding of why many women-led enterprises remain small-scale and economically vulnerable despite extensive policy attention.

At the same time, the framework raises important conceptual and methodological questions. Behavioural dimensions such as aspiration or readiness are difficult to quantify reliably. Self-reported surveys may suffer from social desirability bias, contextual inconsistencies, or cultural variation. Constructing a robust ‘READ Index’ would therefore require careful psychometric validation and adaptation across diverse social contexts (I am working on defining and designing the Index, and will publish once I am ready). Rural India is not a uniform behavioural landscape, as aspirations, gender norms, and economic expectations vary significantly across regions, castes, religions, and linguistic communities.

Another concern is that behavioural frameworks can unintentionally shift responsibility onto individuals while underemphasizing structural inequalities. Entrepreneurial failure is not always the result of behavioural deficiencies. Infrastructure gaps, poor logistics, corruption, climate shocks, monopolistic market structures, and digital exclusion remain major constraints. A highly motivated entrepreneur with strong exposure and clear direction may still fail because of unreliable electricity, exploitative intermediaries, or lack of transportation infrastructure. Behavioural systems approaches should therefore complement rather than replace structural analysis. Otherwise, there is a risk that development discourse becomes overly individualised, framing poverty as a problem of mindset rather than political economy.

The framework also raises broader questions about the increasing romanticisation of entrepreneurship within contemporary development policy. Entrepreneurship is often presented as a universal solution to unemployment and rural distress. However, not every individual seeks or benefits from entrepreneurial risk. Many rural households prioritise stability and security over growth-oriented enterprise. Excessive emphasis on entrepreneurship can obscure the state’s responsibility to generate decent employment, strengthen public services, and reduce structural inequality. The READ framework has the potential to become most valuable when used as an analytical and program-design tool rather than as an ideological justification for reducing state responsibility.

Despite these concerns, the framework can offer substantial practical relevance for policymakers, NGOs, and development practitioners. If empirically validated, it could reshape the design of rural livelihood programs across India. Interventions could move beyond transactional models toward more relational and behaviourally informed approaches. Programs might assess behavioural readiness before enrollment, create peer-learning ecosystems, facilitate exposure visits, incorporate aspiration-building modules, involve families in sensitisation processes, and provide long-term mentoring rather than short-term training alone. Such approaches would recognise entrepreneurship as a socially embedded process rather than merely an economic activity.

The broader significance of the READ framework is in its attempt to bridge economics, sociology, behavioural science, and development practice. It recognises that poverty is not solely material deprivation but also a condition that shapes agency, imagination, and action. By integrating behavioural insights with systems thinking and capability theory, the framework challenges simplistic assumptions about how development occurs. It asks a deeper question than most entrepreneurship programs currently address, that why do some individuals act on opportunity while others facing similar conditions do not? The answer to that question may be central not only to rural entrepreneurship policy but to the future of inclusive development in India itself.

References

  1. Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, Poor Economics, PublicAffairs, 2011.
  2. Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom, Oxford University Press, 1999.
  3. Debraj Ray, Aspirations, Poverty, and Economic Change, Oxford University Press, 2006.
  4. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge University Press, 1977.
  5. World Bank rural population and development indicators.
  6. International Labour Organization reports on informal economies and entrepreneurship.
  7. NITI Aayog policy papers on women entrepreneurship and rural livelihoods.
  8. National Rural Livelihoods Mission (Government of India) operational and policy documents.

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

The cover image is generated using AI.

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Manu Mayank

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