Sunday Posts

This worked for me before. When I am feeling stuck, lost and unable to progress, I have set myself up for a change. 100 days worked for me best - a commitment to become something else in roughly three months! This is one such time. Pandemic is over, at least psychologically, and I am in the middle of a flurry of activities. But I am starting to feel burnt out. Too much bad work, the sort one has to do at a workplace but which leaves a bad taste at the end of the day, is cramming my schedule. On top of all this, I have this feeling of going in circles, not moving forward. I know I have to change something quickly. The pandemic has taken its toll. It induced a strange career see-saw: My work stalled at first and then I took on a project that sucked me in. I initially enjoyed getting back into action and did more than I was required to do. But, at the same time, I got into my comfort zone. The regularity of this engagement made me more secure than I like to be. I enjoyed some of the work,...

Today, I wish, would be the first day of the rest of my life. I am in that honest mood: That I feel stuck, of going nowhere, yet again. I knew this was coming. Against my better judgement, I was getting sucked into company life. I was telling myself a lie - I enjoy it! After eschewing this path for many years, I suddenly felt that illusion to be in control, of getting things done. What was it - the pandemic-induced pathos? - that led me down this path? But, sure enough, I now have that unmistakable feeling of getting nowhere. I did what I usually do at moments like this: I got away. I came to Istanbul. I possibly needs the strange combination of hustle and the 5000-years of history around me to recharge my senses and temper my self-importance. I am reading this beautiful little book called 'The four thousand weeks' which is about embracing the limitedness of life and focusing on what counts. And as I do this, I know I am on the wrong path. My trouble - and I shall call it troub...

My Saturday morning was a mild mayhem because I disobeyed the alarm clock.  I am always optimistic with my alarm, allowing me at least one snooze. Usually that action gets the phone in my hand and the combination of email and facebook notifications do the rest. But this Saturday, as my watch told me later, I had this very deep sleep just in time for me miss the pathetic everyday sequence altogether. This, on a day I promised myself a fresh start: A formal beginning of the post-pandemic life when I should switch from forever waiting and compromising to getting on with my ideas in a hurry. This perhaps was the deep sleep as I was dreaming I have got there already. Therefore, I woke up with a start and started as I woke up.  But - if I could get back my faith in omens - this disregarding the alarm was a good sign. I was raised on a certain ethic - getting up early is good, slumbering around is bad - but the very thing that I want to do now, raise my awareness about the underlying...

There are moments when choices have to be made. This is perhaps one of those, for me. Ever since 2020, I kept my life in a holding pattern. Not thinking about the future, living a day at a time! It worked well - it was the right mode for the pandemic. But now I am getting tired of not dreaming. I must concede that the year has been extremely productive for me in a variety of ways. It's not just about overcoming my earlier entrepreneurial failure - which I have been brooding over for seven years and still dealing with its consequences - but also about learning a few things about entrepreneurship itself. As a result, I live a very different life now: I have gone back to being a company man I once was. Along the way, I became conscious of my baggage. I now have a clear idea what success looks like - how singularly focused, totally unconcerned about nuances one needs to be - and how my fundamental assumptions about business life were always too idealistic. I grew up in an entrepreneuri...

I have been off blogging for over a month.  But this was not because life took over or I got tired of blogging. It was not even the writers' block that I dreaded so much. Instead, I would say my life got somewhat simpler, though not as simple as I wanted it to be. I even took my first holiday in almost 18 months, somewhat making up for my aborted Munich trip and somewhat as a part of the plan to try to shift to Spain, but a holiday nonetheless. I also wrote quite a bit. I started keeping a diary, something I did several years ago and which now make very interesting reading. I wrote up a page a day, usually rambling about life in general, but that definitely was effective in keeping the habit of writing. So here is the real reason why I did not write the blog: I was preparing. I am at a significant point in time in my life. I am almost fifty now, and this presents an important existential question. I have lived most of my life through compromises: Now I don...

I am psychologically there already, to the end. Or, rather at the beginning of the next.  But, it is different this year. Since I migrated, I always measured my progress asking a question to myself - have I done better than the previous year? In most years, the answer was yes. Except in 2017, which started badly and ended indifferently for me, and I had this distinct sense of going backwards rather than forward. Remarkably for a single year, not one but two projects that I spent time on failed to take off; I lingered on unnecessarily in a job even when my wages were in arrears; I still had my dreams intact but it seemed I was chasing shadows interminably. So, at the end of 2017, I was not sure - I was drifting and dabbling, not paying attention, not making progress - and I wanted the year to end, quickly. In that sense, this was a completely different sensation. 2018 has been a good year for me, not just in terms of recovering from my mini mid-life crisis, but also to reg...

If you live a life like I do, you will know one never really fails - only pivots. So it is and I am in the middle of one now. To be sure, I am well into it: The difference between a pivot and a failure is whether one gets started at all, and I have done. And, as I have started feeling comfortable in my new skin, it's time to write about it. Indeed, it must be written about, as I have just been weighed down by this massive writers' block, the very thing I wanted to avoid through blogging, and that's because I was ending one life and beginning another. It was a bit of crazy time too, over the last few weeks, with a perfect storm of deadlines, with my course of studies in History of Ideas coming to an end and my work on Education Technology going through a period of approvals and validation. So, I was writing, a lot, but all of that was out of urgent compulsion and not out of any creative urge. So, there is more than one reason to start writing again, and to writ...

A lot happening at my end, which impeded my blog writing for a while. As I restart, I thought I would do so by doing an update. This will, I hope, not only get the conversation started, but also return this blog to its intended purpose. It has been almost a year I left my job, and I spent the time doing various projects while I explored the idea of setting up connected global network of learning spaces for competency-based learning. Not necessarily I wanted to go back to doing another start-up: Having lived through successful and unsuccessful ones, I have learnt that start-ups can be boring and established organisations can be interesting. Also, after six years of trying to establish an alternative model of education, I have come around to the view that doing it by working with others is a better way than trying to go solo and try to reinvent every cog and wheel of an educational institution. In fact, I came to see that start-up ecosystem in Education to be what it is: A lot ...

Ideas are fascinating and exciting. We live in a culture that celebrates ideas. In a sense, we see all history as history of ideas now. It is ideas that make men great, and the great men are those who belabour with ideas, either to bring it into being or to create impact with it. Entrepreneurs, our modern Heroes, are the idea-warriors, who puts everything on stake to make their idea work. Ideas, in short, are divine inspirations, whose blessing we all seek and whose existence makes us meaningful. But there is a dark side of ideas, which never gets talked about. All the monstrosities for the last two hundred years have been committed in the name of ideas. And, indeed, if one counts religion as an idea, the history will go back much further. Just as we transformed the Great Men doctrine into a narrative of great ideas, we should also perhaps replace our evil men doctrine with a narrative of bad ideas. However, I anticipate an objection coming: Many ideas, which turned out to be...

A week into my 100 day plan, I have kept most of my pledges except doing a daily update on this blog. And, that is perhaps for better: It is best to let the mind settle when embarking on a new enterprise before starting to write about the experience (Remember, in a different context, Robinson Crusoe made the same argument - that it was better that he started writing his diary long after he arrived on the island, as, if he started writing immediately, his desolate mind would have filled the narrative with trivial and boring details). However, I kept most of my other pledges, including arriving at a more health-conscious daily routine, getting back to serious reading, and pursuing my commercial endeavours in a more focused manner. Getting back to creating checklists and maintaining them was the first step: I fished out my checklist book from under the pile of books where it had disappeared, and the act itself made me feel more focused. The start was predictable - I listed out 10 ta...

My attempts to write a true Sunday Post failed in the past.  I started this blog to maintain a scrapbook of ideas, as I live through my immigrant life (which, presumed I, would only be a temporary phase). But the overarching priorities of the migrant life - to 'prove' myself - soon took over. Over time, this blog became more like a 'billboard', an advertising space, an extended CV of sorts, where I, somewhat desperately, wanted to show off and make a point. Indeed, all that was counter-productive: Experts write papers, not blogs. But it is that the charm of expertise, even if limited to occasional recognition by complete strangers through my blog, which subverted my motivation. This is what I want to undo now. It is important to undo this for several reasons, but primarily as I change myself. At this very moment, I am at the end of one journey and embarking on another. It has been three years that I stepped out of my boot-strap enterprise and got into working ...

I am sure 'career indulgences' appears an oxymoron, there can't be such a thing! But in my quest to do things I love, and also to work with people I like, I have created, at least, the possibility. At this time, a penny-dropping moment of sorts, I am reflecting when I started indulging in dreams! And, indeed, there are many forkways to look back at, like these: 1. Walking out a secure job and an impending promotion, I jumped on the dotcom boat in 1998: Not many people around me were doing that at the time and I had no idea how to deal with investors and their contracts.  2. A couple of years later, when the enterprise became boring and investors became bosses, I pursued my dreams of adventure - going to a country in the middle of political turmoil and business decline - and lived through bomb threats, general strikes and all that.  3. When all that was sorted out and I had won, four years later, I gave up yet another promotion and promises of a predict...

I have always maintained that Start-ups and established companies, small, medium or big, are two kinds of organisations. Rules that make one thrive at Start-ups do not necessarily hold in larger companies, and indeed, they could jeopardise one's prospects seriously. But then, it is hard to distinguish between Start-ups and Small companies. This is because, however much we talk about company cultures and values, it is people who carry them. So, it is not whether a company is a start-up or not, but whether the people that run the company are company-people or startup-people. And, indeed, one could have a start-up full of people who succeeded at big companies, because that is what investors really want. The other is quite rare - companies full of start-up people - though it is now a deliberate cultural objective, and even IBM would say that they want to hire 'failed entrepreneurs'. All this is relevant because of a strange third kind of people, who work for start-ups...

I resume the rest of my life today.  That sounds good. All it is, though, is a return to work, after a forced break of two weeks, as I had to go away to India to attend to my father. But, as forced breaks do, this was a break in all senses - a reordering of priorities and focusing of minds - and there is nothing better to restart on an unusually warm, sunny, mid-September morning in London. Timing is right otherwise too. It has been two years I had to step back from entrepreneurial life, primarily as money was running out. It was like going back on time, taking on a limited role, doing what I would have done several years ago in my career, and settle into the usual balancing acts characteristic of 'corporate' life. In my mind, it was always temporal, a compromise, a tactical retreat - two steps forward, one step back - meant to build up to the point that I am at today. The trick, though, was to keep remembering this. For all its faults, monthly paychecks can serio...

Sometimes manic workdays provide the best opportunity to reflect: Why am I doing all this?  Today is one of those, and I am pausing to write this post after a few crazy hours of clearing my inbox, so to say. In a few hours, I am off to catch a flight, in anticipation of a family event in Kolkata over the weekend, where I get to see almost everyone I call family (including some who I have not met since emigrating, though Facebook was handy). But, for that, I am squeezing in a week's worth of work in a day - and that brings out, in sharp relief, what I do and that my life has become way too complicated. At this very point, as the diverse nature of today's work tells me, I am doing far too many things, for far too many reasons. The truth is, I already know this, and have started pulling out of activities. The first casualty of this quest of simple is a community event that I got interested in, and spent some time exploring. However, this realisation - that I am doing far...

I have an aversion to the word Great! This is one of the words in English language, employed to describe a little island, which has taken an altogether new level of superficiality in the usual American habit of splashing it onto anything: For example, "the Great Country of North Korea" - ok, except that! I was, therefore, naturally suspicious when I come across The Great Courses, the audio/video learning content aimed at Lifelong Learning (another meaningless expression, admittedly, except that it has a specific meaning in the European Union). I came across these through the regular advertisements in The New Yorker and The London Review of Books, and also, in a Bill Gates interview, where he mentioned that he uses The Great Courses to learn about different subjects. Gates' point was interesting: He was arguing that more than the MOOCs, The Great Courses, high quality recorded videos on a rage of subjects, designed for self-study, has great potential to change Educat...

My whole project of 100 days, which, by the way, I am doing well with, is about changing my life. However, changing my life to what is still perhaps unresolved. The overall goal, to go beyond the compromises I had to do after my last experiment at a breakout, remains: But what the next breakout is about needs more thinking. As I noted in an earlier post, my enthusiasm about the world of education ventures have now somewhat dampened. The reason for this is a realisation, which comes with the exposure I have had over the last several years, that all the talk about education innovation is really neither about education nor about innovation. It is, mostly, about some desperate excess money following concepts and ideas past their sale-by date. And, this does not excite me enough: Or, let's say, it does not make me feel that any hardship is worthwhile to build another of those education apps that no one wants to pay for, or, for that matter, that For-Profit school that would peddle...

India is set to face a jobs crisis.  One needs to look at three things to understand that a crisis is imminent. First, the numbers. On average, 69,000 people turn 25 every single day in India, or more than 2 million every month. Women's participation in the workforce remain small and a large number of people get absorbed in family enterprises. There are about 12 million new people enter the workforce every year. Against this, about 5.5 million new jobs are created every year, many of these being in the informal sector, and lowly paid. The key sectors, the Government identifies 8 of them, usually creates about 200,000 jobs a quarter on average, nowhere close to what may be required. Second, the most spectacular job growth in the last two decades have come from Indian IT Services sector, which is going to face a crisis of its own. A large proportion of workforce in the sector is engaged in low-cost, process based work, the kind of work which is being automa...