Another beginning

I wrote this blog through my 20 year stay in Britain, some years more diligently than others. 

No one, including myself, would ever look at the archives perhaps, but if one did, one theme would stand out: Restart! 

For the first 10 years of my career, spent in India and then in other countries in Asia, I followed a straight path: Working in companies, growing into more senior role, within the training sector. It was somewhat regular life. I had KPIs and month-ends, appraisals, holiday forms and salary raises, which I worried about. 

However, I left all that and came to Britain in 2004. I came without a job - therefore, it was a proper restart! I assumed that my experience within the IT Training sector would get me a similar or a better job, but the IT training industry was very different in the UK and my skill sets did not travel well. I landed up managing accounts in an e-learning company, a role and an industry in which I had absolutely no prior experience. 

Thereafter, I moved to recruitment, then to Higher Education, and afterwards, to online education, corporate learning and learning design -a number of roles and sectors within 20 years! Both personally and professionally, I started over again and again. Besides, this also meant engaging with different countries and travelled frequently, which added to this sense of flux! I was never somewhere for a long time.

This came back to me as I was recounting my career with a senior academic recently. Listening to myself, I realised that I have made fresh start a cliché! Thereafter, I went looking for constants in my life. Sadly, most of them - my Kolkata identity, my family, Bengali literature - are less relevant now than they once were. Lately, I have come to question my love for books, as this is coming in the way of the footloose life I want to live. The only constant that I lived in the same London suburb for these 20 years is something of a failure: I planned to leave every year and failed to do (primarily on account of my growing, and now unmanageable, book collection). 

It dawned on me at that point that the only other constant in my life has been this blog. I wrote it with purpose once, but lately neglected it. Other things - my travels, writing poetry on Facebook, commercially directed posts - diverted my attention. I was more sincere and reflective on the posts I did on this blog. I got too excited and too emotional about writing poetry, which, with the distance of time, I found unbecoming of myself. The commercial posts were even more unsatisfying: My usual brooding tone was unwelcome and everything was to be simplified to the extent of infantalisation. I accepted that this is what commercial writing is supposed to be, defined by the lowest common intelligence and shortest span of attention. [For a while, I tried adjusting my style, then tried to surrender by accepting the editorial suggestions without argument and engagement, but gave up in the end and stopped writing these altogether.] That made a return to this blog possible, though I dreaded the first post - another beginning yet again - and tried to put off writing it for several weeks.

However, I pledged to myself to make a fresh start on 1st of November. I believe my earlier attempts were somewhat flawed as they were made with the grass is greener on the other side type of assumption (this applied to my biggest leap of all, migrating to Britain) but fresh starts are not about throwing away the constants. They are, if anything, about recentering, finding what really counts in our lives. All my mistakes in life are mistakes of optimism, and these made me believe that things or people can be changed. I have become old enough now to know that that doesn't happen - people don't change! And, therefore, rediscovering what held our lives together and crafting new strategies to rejuvenate them are what new starts should be about.

For me, this strategy consists of identifying what counts and should be continued, and what I am pretending and can get rid of. In the second box fall my being a Londoner, which I have failed to become even after twenty years and the pretence of playing the start-up game, which I see as purely speculative. I am also disinclined to work in Higher Education much longer, because I see this as an industrial appendage to neo-colonialism. Along with this goes my whole history of skills training, which also serves the same interests and does no favour to the receivers of it. The only interest in education I am left with is in liberal education, and I would rather pursue a model of free or publicly funded education than a private one. Serious writing and studies fall in the first box, as do my interests in literature, history and politics. Hence, I am possibly heading back to school, out of town and among a different set of people than what I have done so far. 

Therefore, I am now expecting to update this space more often, but with less of professional and more of personal stuff. I am intending to read more fiction than I have done so far, and connect with people with interests outside business or technology. This was once a space for books, people and ideas: Those are things I really wish to return to.