The Cube

The MPP: A Window of Opportunity
Arushi Tangri grew up in New Delhi, a bustling
metropolis and the center of India’s political power. With
a population of 19 million people, New Delhi offers many
contrasts to its rich cultural and historical legacy. As in other
capital cities such as Johannesburg, La Paz, and Mexico
City, in New
Delhi poverty
persists. And so
Arushi grew up
understanding
poverty issues
from up close.
Although she
knew she was
fortunate to have
the opportunity
to study law for
her bachelors
and achieve a
very successful
legal career,
Arushi wanted to
do more to help
those around
her experiencing
vulnerablilty.
She saw in the
struggle of women and children a need for action, and she
understood that if she could help in some way, then the
cycles that trap people in poverty and inequality could
be disrupted. And so as a law student she led students in
a project to frequently give legal aid to families living in
poverty in the slums. Once she became a lawyer Arushi
had a successful early career as a legal practitioner at the
Supreme Court of India and the High Court of New Delhi. While
her work included varied cases, Arushi was motivated to
find time to do pro-bono work and help the vulnerable with
legal matters as a lawyer just as she had done as a student.
The issue of poverty has a personal significance
for Arushi. In her visits to the impoverished people of New
Delhi, Arushi quickly developed a connection with women
and children, and she realized that they were the most
vulnerable whose rights were frequently violated. As a
woman she knew that in a patriarchal society women
are often discriminated against, but her experiences with
the most vulnerable women of the weaker sections of the
society showed her the extremes of this injustice. It was
then that she realized that the cycle of poverty needs
to be broken for this particular section of the society
to come out of it, and that she had a calling to work for
the rights of women and children living in poverty. Arushi
decided to do some research to determine her next career
step. And you can probably guess where a research trip
like Arushi’s leads to. Many of us one day in our corners
of the world decided to study public policy and began
that research trip to choose the best program. For many
of us the choice of UNU Maastricht was a clear choice, for
others the choice was not easy and with good reason since
there is much to consider. Moving to a new city across the
world? One year of your life for the Master’s programme,
many more for the PhD, that is a lot to consider. Then, there
are the lucky ones, the ones that already knew Maastricht
before moving there, and the luckier ones maybe even
studied European Studies at FASoS? But being “lucky”
only helps you with the move, the program still had to
be completed, and all of us shared the same challenges.
Moving from New Delhi to Maastricht was a big
decision but it was an easy one. Arushi herself confesses
that she had come down to two choices: a well known
university in London and Maastricht. Once there, the choice
was a straightforward one for Arushi, the MPP of UNU-
MERIT and Maastricht University was the best choice for an
aspiring policy-maker. Even in London she was not going to
find as much diversity as in the United Nations University.
When I ask Arushi how she feels looking back at the MPP
programme she is happy to talk about it. A center of
innovation in policy research and policy-making, MERIT
gave Arushi all the tools she needed to be a public policy
professional. She feels that now she can go beyond legal
aid for those in need, and engage in policy interventions to
achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030.
For Arushi the MPP was much more than excellent
training in international public policy, it was really the
people that Arushi remembers with most affection. I can see
her smile and she tells me how much she loved the MPP. She
even tells me that “sitting in the cube with everybody and
finishing those assignments for the tutorials” is something
she misses a lot. I listen to Arushi and feel the need to
reflect for a moment. Those long hours in the cube could be
brutally frustrating and exhausting. But I know immediately
she is right, those learning sessions together were really
memorable. That is where most of the practical learning
was done. For those who were not used to the Problem
Based Learning system or the Dutch educational model, the
PBL sessions were a truly new learning experience, and in
the end it proved to be a very successful training method.
The Cube | 16