My earliest memory with my grandmother is from a summer during elementary school, where we binge-watched over 200 hours of two 1980s Hindi-language TV shows. These shows told the stories of kings, princesses, deities, and demons in the format of an extended fable, with a new lesson to be learned in each episode. My grandmother, visiting from India, patiently answered my incessant questions – were there demons living in her town when she grew up, were the crowns on the kings’ heads heavy, and so on. One of her explanations from this summer of excessive television consumption has stuck with me since then. Loosely translated, “A swan has two wings – knowledge and action. One without the other is useless, for it needs both to fly.”
As I grew older, I took this to mean that I should accompany my intellectual interests with action, and only take action after doing my research. I thought this principle would manifest in finding a meaningful problem, and starting a tech company to solve it. I began to identify the problems I most wanted to solve.
In high school, I tutored students living in downtown Detroit who couldn’t afford the home broadband connection they needed to do their homework, often due to high prices set by local monopolists. Years later, as an election volunteer, I met voters who showed up to the wrong precinct after receiving assertive voicemails spreading voting disinformation. During my time as an economic consultant, I learned how inmates are often charged exorbitant rates to simply communicate with their families, which has negative implications for their success once released.
Encountering these system-level problems led me to understand the importance of the means by which one takes action. Inequitable systems create costs borne by all of us, and thus require government leadership. I’m excited to be a TechCongress fellow because it’s a rare chance to approach questions of how technology can be developed and deployed equitably with knowledge, the intent of action, and the right means to create change.
Divya is serving with the Senate Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee, under Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and supporting a multitude of issues related to technology and competition issues, including data privacy and broadband access.