Grit expectations

We credit our success, in urban India, to hard work and discipline, but these are not free-floating virtues. Merit is real, but so is luck. It matters that we acknowledge them equally

- Charles Assisi

The Sheltered Path (1873) by Claude Monet: 'I chose my steps. But I did not build the road. Failing to acknowledge this distorts how we view others.'

(WIKIMEDIA)

I have worked hard; shown up on days when I would rather have rested. Done more homework than was required. Treated discipline as a virtue.

But if I'm being honest, I have also been lucky. That is the part of the story most of us rarely narrate.

The ability to work hard is itself a form of luck. In India, we confuse stamina with virtue. But stamina comes more easily when one has been well-fed as a child; when one isn't worrying about unpaid fees, or the lights going out. Growing up, these didn’t feel like privileges. Which is precisely how privilege disguises itself: as default.