Vikram Akula: Early Writings

My girlfriend pushed me out of Philadelphia in 1992. She told me to seek my future, if not my fortune, in Washington, DC. I was a 24-year-old with vague hopes of writing about grand issues of economics and the environment, and with deep humility about how a college degree in mathematics suited me for such work---if such work existed. Before moving, I somehow learned that one could order by mail a booklet listing internships in Washington. I ordered, waited, received, and soon began with trepidation to call the phone numbers in the booklet. (Seems a quaint way to network now, doesn't it?) In time I landed an unpaid internship and moved down here. Then I began an earnest search for paid work as I watched my bank account slowly tick down. After four months I got the job that would change my life: a research assistantship at the Worldwatch Institute. I started my new DC job five days after President Clinton started his. Since then, except for the year in Vietnam, my place of employment has been at the intersection of 18th and Massachusetts in northwest Washington, the think tank hotbed. In other words, my girlfriend was right. (She and I reunited in matrimony and a Manhattan apartment in 1995, the year the Internet began to change the world. I telecommuted to 18th & Mass.)I suppose when I am 80 a young professor will come to me to take an oral history of this little corner of the world. When you are young, just arriving, the world seems static. Only later do you realize that everything is transient, and that the mundane memories you acquired in youth could some day make you a precious carrier of the history of the bits of the world you saw with new eyes. While I was laboring at Worldwatch on my first piece of public writing, coworker Megan Ryan (not the famous one) introduced me to a young man whose recent departure from Worldwatch had helped make room for my generation of research assistants. His name was Vikram Akula (yes, the famous one). The encounter was brief. He seemed chipper. Megan later showed me a letter Vikram had fired off before quitting, expressing his frustration about how the place was run and perhaps somewhat naively bemoaning the limited role young people played in decision-making. I suppose I now see in this missile missive a man of impatience and action and ambition. At any rate, I thought no more of him until I attended a U.N. conference in New York marking the end of the International Year of Microcredit, 2005. There in an auditorium in the bowels of the U.N. appeared a young American man with an Indian calling card. I was shocked to recognize the name and face. He spoke with eloquence and humor about the services he was bringing to poor people; about innovative uses of high technology (perhaps hyping); and, somewhat tongue in cheek, about how dirt-poor villagers might one day use SKS for everything from insuring health to investing in initial public offerings (IPOs).You can read Vikram's early writings for World Watch magazine. Disappointingly, they don't seem particularly ironic or predictive of his future successes and controversies, nor particularly well-written for that matter. One reviews a history of U.S. environmentalism and appeared in the same issue as my debut as a policy wonk, to use a term that entered currency as Clinton and I entered office. The other is about the idea of consulting poor people in designing projects to help them.A sign of the times: Worldwatch just shut down its magazine to devote more resources to electronic outreach, including blogs.