know I'm and I'm just kind of thinking allowed here because it's a really fascinating narrative of how you kind of zeroed into the particular area that you now study one it seems to me that you know if if you want to solve problems there are a number of different ways that one could approach solving problems so for example you could say that I'll do it through the markets I'll be an entrepreneur you know like Grameen Bank for example that okay here's a problem that can be solved here's a whole here something you know whatever I can do let me kind of get in there another way is to possibly do it using the state in some way or form so either you enter politics or if politics is downstream of culture you try to shape the demand you know through the think tank world or whatever and you try to sort of in different ways either be part of the state or work with the state to actually make change happen and solve small problems and then there is the NGO space and as you pointed out that the mindset at that point in time very much is that we shall you know whatever the state isn't doing efficiently we'll try to kind of do something in that domain and and when you point out that as you travel through the country you realized the centrality of the state in the lives of people who are not like us who depend on it for sustenance and welfare and so on and so forth it's a failure of the state it's a failure of the state in two ways and one way is that of course it is not delivering those essential services that a state should like education or health care or whatever and at another level it is still constraining the private sector and private individuals from actually coming in and solving many of these problems and in something like education is really kind of both both of those and it's interesting how systematically you kind of go through this bouquet of options and then you narrow down and sort of realize that okay the place where one can make the most practical difference at scale is getting the state to work better because there you make a tiny little difference and at scale it can impact millions of people you know this is a point that for example Karthik Mulitharan makes a lot has made a lot in his episodes he's done with me that he's obsessed with this because you do a little bit of tinkering in the margins and millions can benefit and you can't get that anywhere else and at a you know I had a civil servant Ashutosh Saleh also on my show and he was also again a driven person and very unlike the public stereotype of the bureaucrat and he was also kind of talking about this aspect of it that I can manifestly visibly change the lives of people by doing something that you know the state is so incredibly powerful in that sense and at the same time it's ironic that as you've pointed out in various places that servants of the state actually find themselves powerless though the state is so powerful but we'll explore that dichotomy later but just to sort of continue that personal journey how is it that you begin to kind of narrow down further from