Positions I hold today

Meritocracy is a useful myth — it motivates effort and provides a shared language of fairness. But it becomes harmful when it is used to justify outcomes as deserved. Most of what we call merit is prior advantage compounded over time. A child born into a family with books, calm, and high expectations does not arrive at any finish line on equal terms with one who didn’t. The system then calls the gap between them a reflection of ability.

This matters enormously in the context of education. When we say a student is struggling because they lack ability or motivation, we are often describing the downstream effect of a thousand small disadvantages we have chosen not to see. The measurement confirms the story. The story justifies the measurement. The cycle continues.

I have benefited enormously from privileges I did not earn — caste, family stability, access to quality education, the freedom to take professional risks. Acknowledging this is not self-flagellation. It is accuracy.

The question I am sitting with is what responsibility follows from this acknowledgment. I do not think guilt is the answer, and I do not think token gestures are either. I think the honest response is to build things that actually expand access, and to stay honest about the gap between intention and effect.

What I am less clear on is the concrete demands this places on how I live and work day to day. I am wary of the comfortable conclusion that building a useful product discharges the debt. It might. I am not sure it does.

Most contemporary analysis is ahistorical — it explains present inequalities as if they emerged from current conditions alone. They did not. The caste system, colonial economics, land distribution, access to education: these are not background context for understanding India, they are the explanation. You cannot understand poverty without understanding how it was constructed and reproduced.

This has made me deeply skeptical of purely technocratic solutions that treat symptoms without touching roots. It has also made me more suspicious of my own tendency to reach for solutions before I fully understand the problem. Understanding the history first is not pessimism. It is accuracy.

I build technology for a living, and I am genuinely excited by what it can do. But I have become increasingly wary of the implicit belief in tech circles that better tools fix broken systems. They don’t. A better exam tool still serves a broken theory of assessment. AI tutoring still operates within a schooling model that wasn’t designed to develop understanding in the first place.

Technology amplifies what is already there — the existing logic, incentives, and power structures. If those are broken, you get faster failure, not transformation. The honest version of building in EdTech requires holding this simultaneously with the belief that incremental improvement still matters, that a better tool can still make a teacher’s day slightly less impossible, even if it doesn’t fix the system.

I have not resolved this tension. I am not sure it can be resolved. I think it has to be lived with carefully.