Supplemental Essay for grad school

Economic policy brings to my mind the image of the Indian Finance Minister, pacifying restless

Opposition members, in the middle of his budget speech. I had recorded and followed the
speech, soon after studying National Income Accounting in high school and although I may not
have fully understood the specifics of budgeting, the tactful oratory certainly remained with me.
Since then, I have always been conscious of drivers and forces beyond text-book economics. I
believed that a legal education, with its own fair share of oratory and grand-standing, would
provide me with the academic wherewithal to tackle these forces. For reasons explained below,
law merely whetted my appetite I am hoping that X University will satisfy my curiosity.
Law opened doors for me within the domestic administration system. I took the opportunity to
intern in each semester break, sometimes in fields not immediately connected to mainstream
legal practice there were always avenues of mutual collaboration, if one looked long enough.
My internship with Transparency International gave me complete freedom from critiquing and
re-drafting their brainchild, the Integrity Pact on public procurement; to meeting their trustees
with a controversial questionnaire on judicial independence. An internship with the Law
Commission of India involved considerably less field-work; nevertheless, it introduced me to
comparative research for the first time. My report drew upon psychological profiles of offenders,
and sociological trends of victimization in human trafficking; the flexibility of research was
exhilarating.
On the downside, some of this research is institutionalized and inaccessible to the general public.
Development in India has been clustered around isolated outreach activities, for instance in the
limited deployment of Right To Information Act. This renders social change a top-down,
bureaucratic and unsustainable process.
My internship at The Hindu Business Line (Indias leading newspaper), in contrast, insisted on an
exacting differentiation between fact, verifiable fact, and conjecture. Any further theorization
was discouraged; but this exercise has drastically improved my clarity of thought. It gave me a
tremendous advantage in working in private legal practice.
My policy background has remained invaluable even within the private sector. For example, in
arguing hard cases, such as software patenting, or online trademarks, the quest for elusive
determinacy is replaced with what can only be termed strategy. My most recent internship,
with Ashoka Foundation fellow Dr. Sampath, brought all these components together, in building
a coherent intellectual property strategy. I had to be realistic, in advising protection for different
creative products; but I also had to go the extra mile into legal fine-print to ensure
comprehensive protection.
More so today, than in high school, I love the discursive, conversational element of law and
economics. I enjoy combining so many different perspectives, towards an end service called
strategic management. To paraphrase Rudyard Kipling, a diplomat walks with conflicting
interests simultaneously: the rich and the poor, the international community, and indigenous
interests. And two years at X University should enable me to find this middle path.