On a misty London morning, I walk past an exuberant stream of tourists on the Westminster Bridge while listening to Amartya Sen’s ‘Development as Freedom’. Today, I personalize all the freedoms that he talks about in his book and his Capability Approach.

According to Sen, “The Capability Approach is defined by its choice of focus upon the moral significance of individuals’ capability of achieving the kind of lives they have reason to value. This distinguishes it from more established approaches to ethical evaluation, such as utilitarianism or resourcism, which focus exclusively on subjective well-being or the availability of means to the good life, respectively.”

Never have words sounded so true in the context of my own life. After all, what is ‘subjective well-being’? What is ‘the good life’? Isn’t ‘the good life’ just as subjective as ‘success’ is?

It’s almost as if Sen had the answer to everyone who questioned my reasons for giving up a software career after 17 years.

19 years ago, I left India to pursue a Masters in the US and here I am, again, choosing to focus on the kind of life I would have reason to value, perhaps…

The last four weeks have been exhilarating, exhausting, exciting, did I mention, exhilarating. I feel I have learnt more about the world in the last 4 weeks than I did in the last 4 years- and it’s not just the lectures with all the statistics on a powerpoint, it’s really the who, the what and the where, in particular the who- the people I am surrounded with and who I learn from everyday.

The colonized and the colonists sit next to each other and offer their perspectives on colonization. The constant questions of ethics, philosophy, media, and religion that I discussed with friends back in the US and India take on a new meaning in the context of humanitarian work. It is truly refreshing when a 23 year old hesitates to ask what ‘Oracle’ is and then proceeds to tell me about their experiences working with refugees and their survival stories. While they may not be following the NYSE, they have been following more ‘human’ challenges the world is facing.

While creating software products presented its challenges, the solutions presented there feel finite compared to the ones we discuss in classes here.

In comparison, at times, the Silicon Valley seems to be a self-reflecting bubble while LSE seems to have a multi-faceted, kaleidoscopic view into the world through the eyes of its diverse student population traveling through its doors every day.

and for all those reading who still don’t know who or what Oracle is, here is a start…