Sunday Posts

As much as we, expats, try to deny it, we are at an inflexion point. The great global wave of migration, that set off in the 90s and that many of us leave home and settle abroad, is beginning to ebb. And, this is not just about a Trump or a Theresa May, not just about some kinds of Visas becoming more difficult to obtain. This is as much about a cultural turn - street-level nastiness combined with resurgent national identities - that marks an ending, as well as a beginning, that we should take note of.  This isn't unprecedented - global movement of people always ebbs and flows - but this time, it appears to be the start of a long term trend, a reversal of opportunities driven by growth in the other side of the world. The emerging markets may have been a mixed bag in the past, but we are perhaps entering the phase of relatively closed economics, which would make the large markets - such as India or Indonesia - a great receptor of local innovation. And, even in the markets wher...

That indeed is the big question that featured throughout the 10 years I have written this blog! What started as a brief educational trip - my stay in Britain - ended up becoming semi-permanent, as one thing followed the other, but my picture of ideal life, deeply attached to the city of my birth, Kolkata, continued to surface at regular intervals. There is a mix of sense of duty, commitment, of finding the zone of comfort - and this drives my thinking, and reinforces my sense of impermanence. However, as expected, this does me no good - and one of the key things I want to do now is to figure out what I really want to do. Apart from my desire to be near my father, and my attachment to my childhood home, there is another, more practical, reason to be in India. It is indeed the most exciting market for the sector I chose to specialise in, Higher Education. Britain, with its declining number of college goers, does not seem to be an ideal location to be thinking disruptively about Hig...

It rained heavily while I waited to board my flight at Pune's Lohegaon airport. It is only a short walk to the plane, but it was the kind of downpour that won't allow even those few steps. The ground staff, who can't but be out and about, were struggling even with their big, workmen-like umbrellas. My cheap folding umbrella, a companion I learnt to keep while living in London, has to remain safely tucked away: This rain is just too mighty for its makers to have imagined. So I waited in the erratic queue ful of busy-looking people, for the bus to do the one minute ride, which the bus was doing, with all its elaborate maneuver around the plane and along the pre-set routes, once in every fifteen minutes. That's when I started writing this post - partly to get around boredom, but also to remember this smell, the smell that comes from such rain. It may be my imagination - in fact, must be my imagination - that I was smelling the wet soil even through all the mixture of fue...

I wish to return to India and I am trying to chronicle my preparations for return here. This is not an immediate plan, indeed this journey is as consequential as the one of leaving India and hence need preparation, but this is one thing I would like to do. I have always stated this to be my intention, but let the life take its course, not forcing the agenda in any way. But, now, a break point of sorts, I am inclined to make a deliberate attempt, even over a period of a few years (as it must be), and intend to keep a record of this journey on this blog, so that it helps me to get into a conversation with others planning a similar journey. I have indeed written about both about Reverse Migration in general (see here, Reverse Migration: India's Chance , and later, Reverse Migration: Is India Ready Yet? ) and my particular desire to return (for example, Reverse Migration: A Personal Note , The Question of Return , The Never-ending Question of Return and in Being Non-Resident ) o...

This does not happen often, so this is special. I read a book from cover to cover in a flight. The flight was late, by an hour, as the SpiceJet workmen hovered around looking lost for a long time before my flight to Bangalore departed from Kolkata. But that's not the reason I could read: It was one of those books which I could have a conversation with, that kept me awake and busy, despite an early start in the morning. This is a book about coming back to India. Written by Shobha Narayan, whose writing I have not read before, but could easily connect with her crisp, well-honed, journalistic style. Indeed, I should have been disappointed: This was an impulse purchase for reading during the flight, but I expected a story of what happened when one returned to India. Instead, this is an immigrant's chronicle of deciding to move back, the doubts, the debates and the challenges. In a way, this was better, closer to my lived experience, and not just an empirical list of disappoint...

If there is one thing I truly want to do, it is to build a college in India offering access to global education to Indian school leavers. Having studied in India and in the UK, and having spent a few years trying to understand the systems of Higher Education in various countries, I am convinced about the need to develop Global/Local offerings for young people, who have to live and work in a world very different from our own. And, with 5 million more people going to college by 2015, India is the place where this demand will be most acute, and if it is not met, the human wastage most devastating. Writing about my future plans in December 2009, I wanted to do three things: Do something hands on, get knowledge and experience in Higher Education sector and go back to India by December 2012. I have done the first two things, and though I acknowledge that it is unlikely that I shall pack my bags and return to India in the next few months, this is something I truly want to do and may actu...

In India, the number of colleges have more than doubled in the last half decade. So, why do I still think that I should try set up a college? In fact, if anything, there is some sort of oversupply in India's Higher Education, with growth in college numbers as well as the number of degree granting institutions outstripping the growth in student numbers. Coupled with onerous and unnecessary regulation, India's Higher Education is almost an impossible business: Last year, more than 100 approved business colleges notified the regulator about their intent to wind up. My thinking is that India has a distinct quality problem, rather than quantity problem (I have written about this before). India's Higher Education so far is a money-laundering mechanism for politicians, at least in most cases, and hence most of the development in the sector was of poor quality. Besides, everyone jumped into the field wanting to offer Business Administration degrees at Undergraduate and Postgra...

Today is some sort of anniversary, 8th, of me living in England. When I first came, I used to keep a count of days I was here, and expected this to be a short trip; now, I keep counting down the time I still have to live here before going back to India.  That's a serious thought. It is no longer an expat's itinerant dream, of which I wrote about before. I have taken the decision that I must, for a host of practical reasons, find a way back to India. That was the plan anyway, when I came here first: I wanted to live and learn, but never wanted to settle for good. But there are other reasons which have arisen since: I obviously do not want my father to live alone, as he is doing now, after my mother's, and then my brother's, unexpected death. And, finally, I see India as the great canvass of opportunity, where I can possibly make a difference: I always thought that way. What changed recently is my view that I would only go back to India if I can go back to Kolkat...

I have written about this before, once rather optimistically ( see here ) and then, after couple of years of emails and dialogues with people who could or could not return, with more caution ( the second article here ). Since then, a number of things have changed, including an worsening of the economic climate worldwide and slowing of growth and employment opportunities in India. In fact, the conversations about India has become significantly downbeat, even despondent these days, and the enthusiasm about return among Indian expats, if the microcosm of a community that I live inside is any reflection, has somewhat waned. Hence, it seemed appropriate to return to the conversation one more time. Admittedly, there is a personal story here. I personally maintain deep links with India and would want to return. My story is somewhat typical: My father lives alone in India, and my brother, who used to live with him allowing me the independence to travel, passed away. I feel worried, guilty...

Someone remarked about my recurring conversations about returning to India some day: I saw it as an unremarkable everyday conversation of any migrant's life. Identities are indeed transient, but home isn't. I may adopt a certain lifestyle and work in a certain way, but having spent the first thirty years of my life uninterrupted in one city, it would not be easy to make some other place my home. This is what it really is: As long as I live elsewhere, I see this as a life out of a suitcase. I am not tired yet, and I see my identity as a traveller, but I am not resting till I finally return home. It is usually a recurrent conversation every morning, when I shall meet other expats on my regular compartment on the 833 to London Bridge and talk about nuances of going back to India: Our realities may be different, but the desires are similar. There is nothing new to talk about - the conversations follow a similar arc, the tremendous opportunity, the stifling corruption, the lack...

The late autumn heatwave in London, which means temperatures of 29 degrees and a clear sky, is having the most unintended effect on me: Melancholy. The sky looks exactly like the autumn sky in Kolkata, and the weather, too warm for a pull-over, exactly the kind people will complain about sitting in Puja Pandals next week. This brings out the sense of disconnection, of loneliness and of things lost, of moments that could have been and priorities that could be reversed. This is seeing past as a possibility of future, which is always the starting point of melancholy. It is at moments like this, one becomes conscious that life is, unlike what it seems to be, full of choices, and the narrative of the past looks like one written by ourselves, rather than just being enacted by us. What could have been is a pointless discussion in our jet-set lives, but one must reach points like this, as real and full of possibilities as any other moment in life, to know what could have been as potent a...

This is the eternal question in an immigrant's life. In fact, in all lives, perhaps, because living is always about moving forward, and being alive is about feeling attached. In fact, this is the unending see-saw, call it dialectics if you are intellectually inclined, which passes off as life. But while return is metaphorical in some contexts, for an immigrant, it is omnipresent, an issue which returns every weekend, every festival, with every bits of good and bad news from home. Return is what one waits for, or, one lives in denial of. So, either, it is 'I wish I could' or 'I must, one day', that sum up the immigrant experience. That way, we all return. Some make the journey, but most bring home broken bits of their homeland. Just as our adult lives are about playing out the questions and emotions that we learnt in childhood, the return of the latter kind is about stocking up India, Pakistan, Africa or Poland, or whichever land one has come from, and carving out...

I am writing after a week. I had no Internet access in between, which is a bit strange, but overall, not bad. I enjoyed a certain sense of calm, lack of noise, while I was online. I tried my best to restore connection, but I am in Mumbai and my residential address in India happens to be in Kolkata , and no one will give me an Internet connection. Not even pre -paid, I am told, unless I prepay for a full one year. I balked at the Rs. 18,000/- price tag, which will actually buy me a nifty HP Netbook . On top of this, I have checked into a not-so-good hotel, one of those which wants to create a premium image by charging premium but offer shady services. So, queries about wifi access in the room raised a few eyebrows and suggestive looks at the reception. I am now reduced to surfing from an one off computer in the lobby, reminiscent of the early days of my business travelling, but feels good in a certain way. I am enjoying India, though I haven't got much done in the last few days. I...