Understanding shoe size

By Dr. R. Balasubramaniam

I have spent a considerable part of my life trying to understand shoe size. Not in the literal sense. I know what a size nine is. I have worn one for decades without philosophical confusion. What baffles me is the way we use the idea of shoe size as a proxy for wisdom, authority and the right to an opinion.

The principle, as I have observed it operating in our public life, is straightforward. The size of your shoe determines not only what you may say, but whether anyone is expected to listen. A person wearing a very large shoe walks into a room and speaks. The room adjusts itself accordingly.

A person in a modest shoe makes the same observation and the room waits politely for someone in a larger shoe to repeat it. When the repetition occurs, the room nods as if encountering the idea for the first time.

I first noticed this in a development organisation I was associated with many years ago. A field worker who had spent six years working in remote tribal villages in the Western Ghats offered an observation about what was not working in a particular programme. She spoke from experience so direct and granular that no study could have replicated it. The room received her comments with the warmth one extends to a child who has said something unexpectedly coherent.

A senior consultant who had visited the field once, for half a day, then offered the same observation in different words. The room leaned forward. Someone took notes.

The field worker had the smaller shoe. The consultant had the larger one. This explained everything.

In the world of public policy, the shoe size calculation becomes quite elaborate. It accounts for where you studied, what designation appears on your card, how many international platforms you have addressed and whether your name appears in the programme before or after the tea break.

The person listed before the tea break has the larger shoe. Their ideas are consequently larger. The person listed after the tea break is dealing with a structural disadvantage that no quality of thinking will easily overcome.

I have been on both sides of this. Early in my career I had a small shoe. My ideas were received as promising, which is a word that means not yet ready for the table. As my shoe size grew, through the accumulation of institutional affiliations and published work, I noticed that the same ideas I had been offering for years began to be received as insights. The insights had not changed. The shoe had grown.

This is not a problem unique to India, though we have refined it to a particular elegance. We have added layers of complexity around seniority, qualification, gender and the specific hierarchy of which institution you represent.

A young woman from a rural background offering an observation about rural livelihoods is received as a data point. A distinguished gentleman from an elite institution offering the same observation is received as analysis. The difference between a data point and analysis, in this context, is shoe size.

Swami Vivekananda famously wore very little when he walked into the Parliament of the World’s Religions in 1893. He had no institutional affiliation, no letters before his name and no large shoe. What he had was something the room had not encountered before, which is the kind of clarity that does not require permission. The room was startled into listening. This remains, in my reading of him, an exception of instructive rarity. Most rooms do not reorganise themselves around clarity. They reorganise around shoe size.

The productive response, I have concluded, is not to pretend the system does not exist. It exists with great persistence and will outlast any individual’s irritation with it. The productive response is to understand it well enough to work within it without being entirely captured by it. This means occasionally using whatever shoe size one has accumulated to amplify the person in the smaller shoe, not to speak on their behalf, which is a different and more patronising transaction, but to create the conditions under which they are heard directly.

It also means retaining, regardless of one’s own shoe size, the capacity to recognise a good idea when it arrives without a large shoe attached to it. This capacity diminishes with institutional seniority in ways that should alarm us more than it typically does.

I check my own shoe size periodically. It has grown over the years, as these things tend to. I try to remember that the shoe is not the foot and the foot is not the person and the person is not the idea. The idea stands or falls on its own terms, in a room that usually does not know this yet.

That is the work. It is slow work. But it is the only kind that does not eventually embarrass you.

Dr. R. Balasubramaniam is the Founder of Swami Vivekananda Youth Movement (SVYM). ‘The Lighter Side’ is a series of satirical articles meant to bring a smile by highlighting the funny side of everyday life.]