Haegwan Kim: What is your personal definition of success?
Sunil Abraham: I don’t have a personal definition of success because I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it. When I say I don’t spend much time thinking about it, I mean in a personal sense, that I, myself, am successful. I don’t think about that question very much. What I think about a little more is when the projects that we run, the programs that we run, the institutions that we support that we work for, that those things have become successes.
And often you might have to do something which is very, very counter intuitive, so I started a social enterprise called Mahiti 12 years ago. And today, about 70 engineers work there, they do hundreds of projects a year. It became successful when I left my Mahiti, when I gave up my shares in the non profit company, when I gave up executive control. So when can parents, for example, say that they have successfully raised their children? They can say it the moment their children don’t depend on them anymore to have a full and complete life. Similarly, if a change that you worked towards happens and then that change or that new condition is no longer dependent on you, then, to some degree, you must have been successful. When you are no longer required then you have been successful. If you are still coming to the office and you’re still working, then that means that you have still not become successful.
HK: Wow, that’s a really interesting one. Can I ask why you’re focusing on social enterprise rather than for profit companies?
SA: In any society there is a mix of motivations behind organisations and institutions. And some organisations work only if there is the right motivation. If you have a prison in society and the prison is run by a private company, then you would, obviously, have problems because for a private company, the more people in prison the better. For most private organisations, more is necessarily an indicator of success. So in any society you need a variety of players. You need individuals who are diverse and independent, as you said. You need organisations of individuals. You need organisations that work to create more wealth. You need organisations that work to spread the wealth. You need regulatory organisations that monitor other organisations.
The modern society that you and I live in is a very complex society. So this question is not very meaningful because in modern society, all of us have to finally do some job. I have to make bread or you have to cook fish or somebody else has to fly a plane, there are a variety of jobs. For some people, the moment they were born, they knew they were going to grow up and become a fire engine driver or they wanted to become an aeroplane pilot. Some people end up in places because of accident. The accident of your life means that you end up in a place. For me, my father was born in the social sector, so I was born into the sector; I didn’t really choose so much.
HK: Why did you choose the Internet as a tool of your works?
SA: I think, again, it was a bit of an accident. I joined the voluntary sector organisation and I worked in their computer department. And at that time, this is 1995 or so, my boss asked me if I’d heard of the internet. I said yes, I’ve heard of the internet. He said do you know how to use it? I said no, I don’t know how to use it. He said if you’re willing to learn, then we will give you some work on internet related areas. So I got onto the internet, I got a modem. I used the internet to learn more about the internet. There were some textbooks, but the internet was the biggest resource.
So you could think that this non profit organisation has given me my main vocation in life. Before that, I was trained as an industrial production engineer. A non profit organisation gave me my main skill, which is internet technologies. I decided to repay that debt because a non profit organisation gave me my skill, I decided to now use my skill to repay the voluntary sector. That is really my personal motivation, which is, of course, a very dramatic and new technology, so it’s exciting to work there. But I feel obligated to the non profit sector because they gave me an area of expertise that I do not have and now I’d like to use that area of expertise to serve them.
HK: Many people say the technological exposition is going on in India, can you tell me about your opinion?
SA: No, it’s a very small phenomenon. Only 18 million people have ever used the internet out of 1.2 billion, so it’s less than 1%. And only 20 million broadband connections, very different from Korea. In Korea, South Korea, if I’m not mistaken, maybe even 87% of everybody has broadband.
HK: Correct.
SA: Everybody uses internet. So it’s a very different country. Something happens on the internet in Korea, it will influence many people. Many people will be affected. If something happens on the internet in India, only 1% of the population is impacted, even less. But they are rich people. They are educated people. Therefore, there’s an indirect effect on others and there is a big opportunity which is there are 600 million mobile phone owners. Maybe more data services should be available on mobile phones and then more people will jump onto the internet, maybe in the millions, we don’t know. But as of now, internet is a very small phenomena and that’s why the work that we do here is not very important. From a national importance perspective, it’s not very important.
HK: What I really feel from what you’re doing is the sense of democracy. Is that related to Indian government’s democracy or is that your personal preference of democracy?
SA: I think connecting the internet to a particular form of governance is very complicated. You can have internet in all sorts of countries, and just because you introduce the internet, it doesn’t mean you will have democracy. It doesn’t even mean that the internet will strengthen democracy. That’s not guaranteed. There is no direct correlation between forms of governance or quality of governance and internet. What we can definitely say is that internet shifts the power balances. If there is an existing power balance in context and if the internet or technology is deployed in a particular way, there’s a possibility that it can shift that power balance.
Because children have bit torrent the power balance between big Hollywood studios and children is affected because the children have an enabling technology. It can be the reverse also. The big Hollywood studio can come across some powerful technology to monitor the behaviour of children and then children will lose out to the big Hollywood studio. So the only relationship that we know is certain is that the technology has a relationship on the power balance, it can change the power relationship. There’s no guarantee that the technology will spread a particular type of margin of government or the technology will result in more democracy. This is not guaranteed. And each person in my organisation has a different idea of democracy. So it’s difficult to arrive at a standard form of democracy that we want to promote.
HK: As the final question, let me ask your general advice to achieve success.
SA: I think there are some dimensions of success that actually don’t make very much sense. If, for example, you wanted your idea to succeed, so success, if you take, as I said, I haven’t talked about this, but if you take a very rudimentary definition. There is a person and the person would like to achieve an objective and if the person achieves the objective, the person considers himself successful. And a successful person will have many such objectives and he’ll achieve many objectives. That’s roughly, I guess, what we define as a successful person.
Now, if an objective has to succeed, sometimes it can be very testing and you might need many people to share the objective. And, at that point, it’s no longer your objective. So if you want to succeed, it’s better to have an objective that you share with many people and not a personal objective. That’s the first thing.
Then the next problem is if you try to take all the credit for the achievement, if you keep saying this is my idea, and if you succeed, you should go around and tell the world that Sunil’s idea succeeded or Sunil’s objective was accomplished. Then, again, usually you will fail because people don’t like to give attribution. People don’t like to contribute to somebody else’s idea. So success at the individual level is a bit of a paradox.
If you do anything to be successful at the individual level, usually, you will undermine it, unless it’s something very small like making a cup of coffee or something. If that is your objective, then you can be successful. But if you have a really big dream, you want to eradicate world’s poverty and then you say that you’ve been successful, then in order to be successful, you have to be part of a collective. True success, in a sense, is collective accomplishments. Individual success is usually trivial and meaningless I think.
Sunil Abraham is the Executive Director of the Center for Internet and Society.
Haegwan Kim is a writer who was born in Osaka, Japan in 1989 and grew up near Tokyo where went to a Korean school for 12 years.
