DEVELOPMENT: ITS AMBIGUITY EQUAL TO ITS WORTH?

I can never seem to explain the profession I am in. Even more frustrating is my inability to explain it to my own parents, let alone training them to explain it to my extended family in India.

As I am in this strange stage in my life, the interim of graduating from my Masters and finding a job, I have all the time in the world to wonder if the career I have chosen for myself is the right one. What is Development? If I can’t explain it accurately in a couple sentences, is something wrong? My instincts are to shout, YES! Some say it is just a made-up profession designed to appease colonial guilt. Others say it is an outrageously arrogant and selfish profession that allows the privileged to tell the less fortunate what to do. Others say it is a selfless profession that is going to change the world – THE END OF POVERTY as we know it!

Anyone who knows me, knows that I strongly believe Gramsci’s: ‘pessimism of the mind, optimism of the will’. Naturally, I find the real answer to the above listed ones somewhere in the middle. Yes, I do think that the motives behind development efforts can vary – some may be purely about the image of an organization or perhaps an entire country, others may be about good intentions but flawed processes, and others still may be about a combination of personal wants and selfless actions, belief in an alternative and belief in calculated baby steps to get there. So even though I find myself in a period of doubting the ‘realness’ of the career I have chosen to pursue, I will continue to follow the latter most belief and hope that the worth of my efforts become apparent as my still undetermined future dissolves the ambiguity surrounding it.