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One of the most influential things I've read about the discipline of Philosophy is that we don't read Philosophy, we do it. Having done Philosophy in an academic context for the last three years, I now find myself doing Philosophy outside it as well.

I have been working with JharConnect, an ongoing project in which we call up migrant workers who have returned to Jharkhand and help them with their needs regarding PDS entitlements, NREGA work, and pension allowance primarily. At JharConnect, I find myself using skills I learnt while doing Philosophy which the following paragraphs discuss.

Learning Philosophy has helped me hone my evaluating skills. The question ‘Is this worth pursuing’ is one that keeps coming to my mind often. Each day, while working for JharConnect, we subconsciously evaluate the impact of each step. Teams specialising in PDS, MGNREGA, loans, gender, etc. work on this question and educate the rest on what works best in their area of specialisation. This evaluation becomes very crucial to bear in mind because of reasons like it occupied the workers' time, efforts, other resources, and so on

I believe I have learnt this skill from the exercise of eliminating wrong answers in the pursuit of answering a difficult, philosophical question. The process of answering the question involves eliminating wrong answers. Wrong answers sometimes look too much like right answers, and that is what makes the job difficult. Philosophers are often accused of not being productive. I believe, and from experience, that the job of eliminating potentially wrong answers camouflaged as right ones is good progress.

On a personal note, the question of ‘how worthwhile this is’ is what pushes me through the everyday ups and downs and keeps me motivated even in an unprecedented social and personal situation such as this. When I look back at my earlier internships, I can now think of better strategies that could have optimized the impact of the initiative.

The goal- of helping people- can get lost in the everyday business of serving the public. The process of problem solving in both philosophy and the public service sector can be filled with nitty gritties that are not apparent until one is knee deep in a problem. There are obstacles one feels one can do absolutely nothing about. But it is the skill of re-focusing on the goal and directing every step taken towards it is something that has helped me become more efficient in my work in this project. Philosophy has taught me how to be precise and the importance of it.

It is something I picked when pursuing a method or an argument to successfully answer a philosophical question. Because when one delves deeper into a problem, the ultimate goal is often difficult to continuously bear in mind. Failing to do so, may often lead us to a path or conclusion that is not helpful for that particular philosophical question, and can make us go in spirals, making us feel puzzled and dejected. I remember making this mistake almost every time in the initial months of my philosophical training (and losing a considerable amount of grades over it!).

Learning Philosophy has made me more emotionally resilient. For someone who would do anything to avoid talking to strangers on the phone, the initial phase was quite difficult for me. I was excited to be involved in something like this. However, I soon knew my performance was not optimal. I was not helping the workers out to the best of my abilities. I had to sit tight, watch others make progress, and learn new things, one day at a time. Slowly, things started picking up. Being regular to morning meetings, being in touch with a senior member, being in conversation with Kit about my cases- are a few things that contributed to my progress. Lastly, it was when I joined the NREGA team, learnt more about the scheme, and started helping out others with doubts regarding it that I felt I had achieved my desired potential at JharConnect. It reminded me of how learning philosophy can often be frustrating because of a number of things. One of the reasons is unfamiliarity- with the discipline, the style of writing, or also it is the nature of questions we are trying to answer. Every new step taken in the direction of achieving our goal in Philosophy is most often out of one's comfort zone. And it becomes slightly easier to bear with as I continue to ask myself ‘how worthwhile is this’.

Philosophy has changed me as a person both cognitively and helped me grow at a personal level. Being someone interested in education also, I have used a lot of this understanding in getting a clearer understanding from different perspectives in this field.

From the way I look at the world and understand it, to the way I understand my thoughts, have conversations with people, construct better arguments to writing a paper or just to get a better understanding of something, learning philosophy has really guided the way, with different courses helping in different ways.

For example, doing a course on Philosophy of Science gave me a better understanding of why and how science evolved through various theories, which even today constructs my understanding. While a course on Political Philosophy allowed me to understand and look at the world from a political perspective, while looking at it critically and questioning it. That way I could make sure I critically looked at whatever happened around me, without accepting any argument as it is.

I now realise the need to look deeper into something whenever I try to understand it by even questioning the obvious. Though it was a slow process, and I am still continuously learning to get better at it, the introduction to such an area of study allowed me to realize how we do it and its importance. Without this, a lot of how I looked at the world, understood it, understood the happenings in my life and around had a lot of assumptions and prejudices which I didn’t quite realize.

Learning to be clear about what we read, see, think and understand has been an important part of my journey as a philosophy student. It’s not until then that I understood that my understanding in a lot of circumstances had many gaps, with arguments not looked at clearly, concepts and assumptions not questioned at a fundamental level.

A lot of the time we end up categorising philosophy as just abstract thoughts, which aren’t necessary and can’t be connected to real life. I used to think so too. But in reality, thinking from a philosophical perspective is very much grounded in reality. For example, taking from my interests, an understanding of aesthetics and ethics allowed me to reimagine and understand the realities around me through the perspectives that we were introduced to in our classes.

On a personal level, it also made me more aware and conscious as a person looking around me and trying to understand from an aesthetic perspective.

Today, I read my papers for masters, listen to the news and arguments made, read articles and have conversations with people, and thinking critically, clearly from a philosophical perspective has become an important part of it.

Every time I try to write down any idea in the field of education or read and place it in reality, philosophy really helps me understand what I really need to work on, understand helping me improve my understanding and focus on what I want to work on, while also building a much better clarity on it at the same time. Which otherwise could have remained a vague thought without me even realizing it, and focusing on what we intend to focus on could also be difficult. I could assure, no matter what field we choose, learning to think from a philosophical perspective would definitely help us.

Philosophy didn’t just help me in papers and understanding the world, it also helped me grow a lot on a personal level. It encouraged me to look at the world through a broader, deeper lens. It encouraged me to focus on bigger things, to become a person who didn’t narrow down to just some very few things around, me but rather thought about the bigger picture, while also encouraging me to believe in myself, with confidence that I could keep learning and growing as a person.

Philosophy has been often thought of as something done by people who sit on rocks and contemplate weird questions. The philosophy that I have come across in APU is very different from the image the word philosopher brings to mind. I was once told when I was doing my bachelor's program that philosophers are what are needed in the social sector and at that moment, I was highly skeptical of that statement. I am now part of the Azim Premji Foundation, which does amazing work in the sector by running various programs for teacher development. In our work, philosophy helps in many ways than one, I will talk about 3 areas which are clarity of thought, the way problem solving is looked at and how we deal with views that are different than our own.

When I was doing my perspectives in education, one of the things that stuck with me that time was that ‘loose talk is worthless’ and ‘philosophers don’t like loose talk’. The text where I read this was trying to express its concern on the loose talk that is present all over the field of education, everyone has an opinion on it. Philosophy demands serious engagement from our side, so if we think of contributing, it needs to be crisp before it comes out. When we do contribute, the responses that come help us further carve our ideas. When we are engaged in a philosophical discussion we find ourselves exchanging serious thoughts(Even if it is philosophy of humor!). When this back and forth of thoughts happens in the end we are left with clarity on the ideas, multiple perspectives on the same thing and a sense of fulfilment.

The social sector demands something more than scrutiny of the problems that are present in our country. It wants us to come up with solutions to the problems, to think and come up with new ways to tackle problems. Philosophy helps you do this, when you philosophize, which is to seriously engage with an idea. It makes us brainstorm and solutions to a problem start surfacing. When this is applied in the social sector what comes forward is, we don’t fall into old patterns of thinking, but a problem is evaluated slowly. We anticipate what will work and what will not and the best part is you are doing it with other people. Philosophy is best done with other people where we can bounce off ideas and see different ways of thinking.

In the work we do, we often come across people who may not think about things the way we do. They hold their views with some reasoning to support it and they are often vocal about it. Philosophy constantly puts us in a place where we need to put ourselves in the chain of thought of a person with an opposing viewpoint. If someone wants to do good philosophy it happens with understanding the opposing viewpoint seriously and then further thinking of a response to it. It’s like weaving a sweater, we start with our thread of thoughts and then pair it with the opposing viewpoint then we respond to it and anticipate a response and then respond to it again. These layers of depth to a given idea is what to me feels like the magic of philosophy.

Philosophy was the subject I was most curious about, coming into the APU Humanities program (as it was the most novel), and it also the subject I took the most away from, among the three major subjects.

The first thing that happened in philosophy class was changing the structure of how we put down our thoughts. Giving clear assertions and reasons helped me to refine my thoughts. Anything that could not be filtered down to that format in a few words was probably something I had not understood very well, or was not clear about.

It was very interesting to be able to see this structure and clarity even in branches like political or ethical philosophy that initially I had thought might be very different.

The other effect of this was that I had to learn to break down my thoughts into the distinct parts, and look at the logic behind each of them. Rather than using large webs of connections that had various connections, I had to learn to first question if each individual part fit. Class discussions and lots of back-and-forth with peers meant that such assumptions would not go unquestioned, we would be pushed to break our thoughts down even more.

Today, that helps me get clarity. I work as a programme coordinator at an educational non-profit, and this clarity helps me to refine my own thoughts and communicate them better.

We also learnt that we had picked up a whole new approach, as we were pushed to apply philosophy to science and economics. While we knew that science worked very differently from the other (humanities) subjects we were studying, we also learnt that there was a common underlying approach that could be used across disciplines - more systematic and clear thinking.

The style of writing we had to learn for philosophy was quite different than we were used to using for other essays. I personally highly appreciated that the focus was not on complex language and nuances, but rather simplification to clear thesis statements, short arguments, even equations. But this actually required a lot more attention to detail, and this too would be elegant. This is useful for me as I can write for simple communication, that is more approachable.

Connections with philosophy of education and Public Reasoning (philosophy courses outside the humanities major) also helped me. PRE made me aware of each argumentation technique that others and I use. This is quite beneficial (though sometimes annoyingly so for others!) in any discussion, which we do a lot at my workplace. While we did learn to use logic, it was not for its own sake (which is interesting enough), but for a specific purpose outside of us, which is equally useful as the techniques themselves, for me to keep in mind. Philosophy of education is something that made me think and continues to come up every single day when reflecting on my own education or at work.

So the novelty of the subject of philosophy did actually give me an entirely new approach, one that I use in many other subjects or at work, but also in my own reflections and thoughts.