Raghav Agrawal
Almost every problem in India is about scale — having way too many people — so we end up creating depersonalized processes, workflows, institutions, and tools with default setups that can handle a huge population.
Traveling in India, especially outside the big cities, you notice how every solution to a problem that feels pretty standardized and a bit detached is really all about our scale
Raghav Agrawal
How does one scale creative cognition and higher order thinking across a bheed, what sort of cognitive commons can we make that a bheed can draw from that shifts our baseline ways of knowing, thinking
clarity flowers
@impactology imo, instead of thinking "how to make things work across a large homogenous group", the answer is "how to turn a large homogenous group into a fractal of cohesive sub-groups". A big problem is many bureaucratic structures are designed as "services" that individuals directly interface with, which forces us to think of ourselves as individuals! Structures can instead operate on groups, or move through preexisting social graphs.
Raghav Agrawal
Every sucky default for every problem space in every domain we have is because that solution despite being sucky at an individual level scales for a bheed.
Raghav Agrawal
Everything, everywhere, is about distinguishing yourself from the bheed—the overwhelming crowd
Almost every 'default' we have in India—whether in education, hiring, public services—feels rigid, impersonal & often frustrating at an individual level. But it exists because it has to work for a bheed
Raghav Agrawal
Solutions that feel cold or standardized aren't just bad design—they're coping mechanisms for scale
Take our edu system. Teaching to the test, exam-based learning, IIT-IIM prestige monopolies—they’re not designed to nurture creativity. They're signaling & filtering systems, built to sort millions
Raghav Agrawal
The question is: how do you scale creative cognition, higher-order thinking, real invention across a bheed?
What would a true Cognitive Commons for India look like—something a village, a town, a crowd could draw from—not just to sort themselves, but to transform how they know, think, and create?
Raghav Agrawal
To make things manageable, we build depersonalized systems, rigid workflows, and one-size-fits-all tools.
But what we gain in scalability, we often lose in dignity, flexibility
This especially applies to teaching to the test, exam based education
Raghav Agrawal
A realization that I had too late in life as an Indian — You're always solving a problem at a scale here, like that's the one universal constant here in every aspect of life, that you're almost always a part of trying to distinguish yourself from : Bheed (a large crowd)
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