What is Privilege? Luck And Lives...
"Exploring the unseen forces that influence our success and opportunities"
Today is my father’s birthday. Papa feels so proud that I am a blogger. It makes him happy that I can think and write about the world. When my blog comes out, he is the happiest person that day. He rarely gets time to read what I post, but this fact gives him solace that I am writing and learning every day. Today’s post is just a small gesture of love for him.
Learning a new framework to think about something is one of the great joys of my life. Today, while listening to The Seen and The Unseen discussion of Amit Varma with Samarth Bansal, I got a new framework for thinking about privilege. In this post, I want to build on this line- “The worst-case scenario you can think of while taking any risk is your privilege.”
If we take a pen and paper to write down the role of luck and accidents of being at the right place at the right time in our life, I don’t think we can give ourselves credit for much of what we believe we have done or where we are.
The first accident of life happens when we are born. Out of millions of families in the world, we were born in the one we did. The probability of this event, in simple terms, chances of our birth taking place in a family where we were born, calculated mathematically, is just infinitesimally low.
Probability:- No. of favorable outcomes / Total Number of Outcomes
P (Our birth)= 1 / 3,000,000,000 = 3.33 x 10^{-10}
Negligible value. By the way, there is no perfect estimate of the number of families in the world, so I took 3 billion randomly.
So the first accident of our life happened as the greatest lottery. Extending this, though, there were hundreds of countries in the world, thousands of states, districts, villages,… What if, instead of India, I were born in America, Pakistan, or Gaza, would my life be the same? No. If I had a different gender, religion, socio-economic status, parents, school, teachers, or government, anything could have been different, and I would be an unrecognizable person from what I am today.
You are smart enough to apply this lens in other areas too. What I want to emphasize is that 99% of our life is due to accidents and luck, only if you think that 1% is our free will and not the dance of our fluctuating hormones.
Now, I have established that today, whoever I am is because of the happy accidents of life and my luck, not disregarding the efforts I have put to reach here, but they are also part of my upbringing and the environment I grew up in.
This means that privilege is random luck. Let us get ahead and talk about privilege.
I am a post-graduate student at the University of Sydney right now. Last year, I decided to leave India and come to Australia to do a post-graduation in Economics and experience the world outside of India. This was a risk; a risk of leaving the family and familiarity; it was a risk to embrace the new, to accept the unknown.
I hope to secure a well-paying job after this degree to cover my tuition and living expenses in Australia. But what’s the worst that could happen? I might not land a job, and others in my position could face the same, especially if the economy takes a downturn or the job market tightens. That’s where my privilege comes in—I’d still have a roof over my head and food on my plate. I could return home, take time to reassess, explore different paths, and have options to fall back on.
There may be many students like me who might not have family support, and they might not have the luxury to rely on their families. The gap between my worst-case scenario and the worst-case scenario of another student like me is the privilege that I have.
As we grow up, we often live in neighborhoods where everyone seems the same. We go to schools filled with classmates from similar backgrounds, and our friends and relatives share the same world as us. To us, this feels like the whole world—everyone is just like we are. With no visible gaps between our lives and those around us, the idea of privilege doesn't even exist. It’s only when we step outside this familiar bubble that we begin to see the differences.
As we grow older, read more, explore more, and see the world (if we are privileged enough), we start to observe the different lives people live; we come out of the bubble we have grown up in. In my case, I did not need to go around the world to see that difference. I was born and brought up in Banswara, a town in Southern Rajasthan, India; with a majority of the population belonging to the tribal indigenous communities. For me, I was getting introduced to the stark lifestyle differences between us, the minorities in the district, and the tribal communities who had concerning human development indicators.
Growing up, I was always sensitive but hadn’t yet grasped how the world works, or the role of probabilities in shaping our lives (though I’d like to think I know a bit more now than I did ten years ago). A guilt complex began to form within me—what had I done to deserve all this? Religions and faith offer many answers to such questions, but none ever felt truly satisfying.
Over time, I came to realize that it was just a random lottery. I was fortunate to be born into a loving family with enough resources. Recognizing this is only the first step. The second is to use that privilege, however small, to help those less fortunate gain a greater chance at success, so the next generation might win that lottery too and share in that 'privilege.'
If you’re thinking, “I don’t have any such privilege; whatever I achieved was through my hard work and talent,” I’d like to remind you—that privilege isn’t just about being born into a well-off family. It’s about many unseen advantages that shape our paths in ways we often don’t realize. If you are a man, you are privileged.
If you are white, you are privileged.
If you are an Upper caste person in India, you are privileged.
If you have an education, you are privileged.
If you know English, you are privileged.
If you have loving parents, you are privileged.
If you have a house to live in and food to eat; you are privileged.
If you have true friends to share your emotions, you are privileged.
I can go on and on… But if you can read this blog; you are privileged.
A story to explain Privilege.
Mr. Rahul was a primary school teacher. He loved explaining complex life lessons with practical games and links to everyday life.
One day, he decided to teach 'Privilege' to the early teenagers in class. He placed a dustbin in the center of the class and purposefully arranged the benches randomly all over the classroom to explain the complex structure of multiple privileges and marginalizations.
The teacher then gave the students a piece of paper and asked them to crumble it and throw it in the dustbin. The students who were nearest to the dustbin could throw it easily, and hence, most of the students sitting in the first row around the bin got the correct aim and achieved it.
Several students in the second row could throw correctly, fewer students in the third row, and it decreased with the increasing distance of the students from the bin.
Mr. Rahul, their teacher, explained that it's not that the students in the front rows are smarter or more hardworking than those in the back. The ones in the front had fewer hurdles on their way to success. The backbenchers, on the other hand, faced many challenges that made it harder for them to cross that distance. That’s why most of them struggled.
This is the privilege- Mr. Rahul explained. The no obstruction and the lowest distance from the bin for the first benchers is the privilege they have.
In today’s world, with increasing hatred towards people who are left behind or are marginalized, we fail to understand such a simple thing. In India, I am referring to the increased polarization on the issue of reservations in government jobs, education, and other opportunities. We need to understand that we will have to acknowledge our privilege and then have the desire, courage, and intention to move forward, together as a society.
I dedicated this post to Papa, Jayesh Joshi because he is the reason that my lottery of birth gave me ‘privilege.’ The privilege of being his son, observing him, loving him, getting back his love, learning from him the lessons of life and the world. He is an amazing human being, an amazing father, an unparalleled visionary, and a leader.
This special post is for him because he worked hard so that I can be privileged, and now he acknowledges that he is privileged and therefore works with the tribal communities as a development practitioner to ensure that their sons and daughters can also one day call themselves ‘privileged’.