The Petri Dish Analogy and The Angsty Anti-Developmentalist

NGOs in southern India make me think of alien bacetria things in a petri dish. If you are the person looking through the microscope then you are The Man, the microscope is the international donor organisation that will give you a different picture of what happens in the petri dish depending on your control over it, and the petri dish is swarming with single-cell organisms who supposedly work for poverty alleviation and in pursuit of reaching the Millenium Development Goals but they are too busy pushing their own agendas that they are unable to co-habitate in this one confined space. The problem comes from competition to access limited resources and the fact that there are just TOO MANY NGOs!!!! Each organisation competing with each other for the same bloody thing. I've read about this, I've heard about this, but this is the first time I am seeing how blatant it all is.

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You know what it is? I'll tell you what it is. It's that you can be into Edward Said and postcolonialisms and gender issues and comparative politics and third world histories and still be practial: engineer, advertising executive, teacher, doctor. Employable. I, obviously, have chosen otherwise.

No one told me what 'development' is. I abhor the notion that a student creates their own definition of development through an evolving process - it is not practical! The world already has their definition, they're replacing coal mines with wind turbines in the North, meanwhile replacing local grocers with Wal-Marts in the South. Why turn me into a chest-thumping, social-justice-loving diva if the world is just going to ruin the romance? Fuck you, world!

At university, we were never told the practical aspects of any of it. We were not told, look, here is a list of the different fields of development: gender, water, AIDS, renewable energy, micro-credit, etc, etc. Choose one and stick to it, because the workforce expect you to specialise!! My project management courses were tedious and uninspiring, I kept waiting for someone to bust out the "well, when I was in Africa.." line but even the obnoxious girl in the front couldn't be bothered. If they taught it well, if they taught it properly, IDS can be a useful and employable qualification. But they're too busy making girls like me fall in love with Amartya Sen and Vandana Shiva. And now I wonder, will Vandana Shiva donate me some skills sets, please?

Is it enough to have only opinions outside of academia? Because I have a basket full of really good ones, but it's pretty much all I have, and it's not transferable.