Acknowledgements

Any author has many people to be grateful to for their book’s existence. In this case, if the list was comprehensively created, it might be as long as the book! After all, most interactions with members of Samaaj, Sarkaar, and Bazaar have furthered my understanding of the continuum and its dynamic balance. So let me name a few people who have played the most critical role.

Unusually, I begin with my late grandfather Sadashiv Laxman Soman (Babasaheb), whom I never met, but who is a legend in my family. In his life, he displayed the greatest concern for those less privileged and was among the very first volunteers to respond to Gandhiji’s call in Champaran in 1917. It is easy to give of one’s wealth and hard to give of one’s self. That’s the standard I hope to live up to in my work. In the book, as here, I acknowledge the late Prem Kumar Verma for triggering my thinking on Samaaj. Thanks to Rajni Bakshi for her friendship and our deep discourse. Thanks to my sisters, Meera Dixit and Ameeta Kaul, for their love and constant support.

I thank Arghyam’s whole team over the years and all our partners for helping deploy this thinking on the ground. Indeed, I thank all the partners, more than 200 leaders and their organizations, that I have been fortunate to be associated with over the years. So many of them have been my mentors on this journey.

I thank my colleagues Gautam John, Natasha Joshi, and Sahana Jose, the team at Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies, who always help sharpen the debate over countless discussions, and who, along with my Executive Assistant Aparna Nataraju, have worked tirelessly to bring this book to some order.

My thanks to Ramachandra Guha, for being generous with his time and honest with his valuable inputs to the introduction.

I thank Nadia Nooreyezdan for her skillful editing.

My gratitude to Angeline Pradhan and Upesh Pradhan for the design, layout and typesetting of this book. Thanks to Ruhi Sridhar, and the team at Cracker and Rush for the design of the cover page.

Importantly, I thank my dear husband Nandan Nilekani, my children Janhavi Nilekani, Nihar Nilekani, and my son-in-law Shray Chandra for critiquing my theory and contributing so much to its evolution. Nandan is always a bedrock of support, even when I am irritable during a writer’s block!

Last but never the least, I thank my grandson Tanush, for always inspiring me in my writing. It is for his generation and beyond, that we must focus energies on building a better society.