
Deep Joshi
So it was just a confirmatory news when a Ramon Magsaysay was announced for Deep Joshi, the humble identity who already has spent 30 years working to bring positives to the real India. A Magsaysay to him is also a revisit to the thought process that was initiated in me after a Magsaysay to Sandeep Pandey. Pandey belonged to the most elitist institutes in its class, Florida Institute of Technology and IIT Kanpur, and then moved on to rekindle his spirit for an ordinary Indian. Deep is in the same league. A Masters in Engineering from the MIT and a Masters in Management from the Sloan School, MIT, Joshi has worked for the Ford Foundation, and is a known name in rural development, sustained livelihoods and poverty alleviation works. Development sector in India has very few names like Joshi and Pandey and it raises the natural question, what is stopping them? Probably most of us, the furnished professionals, are not ready to understand or realize the intellectual challenge that one would face if she or he decides to take a dip in these turbulent waters as most of the time she or he would be facing the state to be acting like an opponent. And probably this is the biggest reason, excluding a hoard of others, to choke flow of the intellectual capital to the Development sphere. But fearlessness is the only supplementary virtue that one needs to have if someone has to work for a ‘process of change’. What we need is a synergy of such a fearlessness with intellectual capital and commitment to a ‘cause’. Joshi says, "Development work is considered intellectually inferior, unlike high science, industry or diplomacy. We want to prove that it is both a challenging and a noble choice.”