Sunday Posts

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.  Therea...

I had a conversion this week. I did not fall from any horse, nor I did see a vision. But rather it was a mundane walk on a city evening, to the gym of all places, when I allowed myself to be criticised. It was painful - I had to hold back from justifying or explaining several times - but it was like looking into a mirror. My old, tired, failed self in full view, my introlocutor did not see what I was seeing (just as the mirror does not see you, only you can see yourself) - but I saw something. In fact, I saw many things, but one thing more importantly than others - the problem and the solution lie within me! It is obvious to be a big deal, this discovery, but it is still significant. To submit myself to such a brutal critique, I needed to be despondent. My entire world was falling apart around me. I was beset with doubt about what I was doing. My recent life was crumbling - all that I cared for was gone. I felt old, which I am but the feeling was new. I felt alone, which again I am but...

Katy Milkman points out that the Spring solstice is a good time to start new things. Certain days work well, her research shows, to start new endeavours: New year's day, birthday, anniversary of something significant! I have missed this year's start to do anything new; right now is my next best chance. I am in the middle of a big change. I, along with a few other people, built a business over the years. But it was flawed from the start. My partners had different aims, which they, self-declaredly, did not disclose. It was more like an academic project put together, without proper structures. I went along with it, acknowledging the limits of my power and boundaries of my engagement. The goal for me was learning and doing, which I have done in abundance. But it was never meant to be a successful in its original aims because of its structural shortcomings, and right now, it is being morphed into something other than its intended form. It is painful, as it will be for any creator in...

We are the stories we tell about ourselves. I am one of those writers in search of a story. That story has not appeared, yet. But I am always crafting one. In this, it is not the start that confounds me. It has already begun - I am in it! The reason I have never written because I can not end it.  Because I lack courage. Around me, so many stories begin and end everyday. In fact, I also see beginnings are endings too. But I still can't write about it. Happily-ever-after is cliché, death or departure is beyond contemplation, something dramatic is too unreal! In that sense, I live in the precipice of the story, that kind of safe bourgeois existence where nothing really should happen. Therefore, I am just going from chapter to chapter. But the script is becoming quite predictable now. Characters seem to be desperate for something to happen now. The narrative is becoming one of those overextended TV series whose writers have run out of ideas. Something got to happen - and I am waiting. ...

This is a personal post: Not how to live, as I must accept that I have nothing insightful to offer, but how I should live.  As 2021 draws to a close and Britain is gripped, again, by a raging pandemic, I am desperately searching for a new start. This year has been better than the last: This time last year, I was in bed afflicted by Covid and barely able to speak; besides, I have made some progress towards my goals, at least in terms of knowing which ones of those are utterly meaningless. Despite my desperation, I am optimistic though. Even if this new year will not be the day of freedom that I hoped it would be - there would perhaps be a lockdown soon after Christmas - but it would most surely be a new start. I saw some commentators writing that 2022 will mean the end of the pandemic as a social phenomenon when our conversations will move on. We wouldn't be talking about whether to take the vaccine or not, fighting about whether to wear masks or not, whether to restrict travel or t...

1 How would it sound, if many years hence, a novelist starts his novel with It was a time of uncertainty, it was a time of prediction, it was the age of realisation, it was the age of illusions, it was an epoch of science, it was an epoch of leaping in the dark, it was the season of end of the world, it was the season of new beginnings, it was a spring of staying home, it was a summer of giving up, we had everything behind us, we had nothing before us, we were all together in saving the civilisation, while we were tearing each other apart to save ourselves - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only. Would we recognise the time - or, is it indeed like any other time? 2 Would we miss the lock-down once it's over? Once the busy life starts again, if it does. Do we miss the packed trains, hurried lunches, noisy evenings, attachment-fr...

Every Sunday morning, I miss Kolkata. Yes, that crowded, polluted, malarial city at the frontline of climate catastrophe? That slow city, just off the tropic of Cancer, where people still rehearse for plays, read books, debate politics and go home for lunch. Where to be poor - which is not being consumed by money-culture - is still glorious. Where, despite their new-found love of shopping malls, young maidens may still fall in love with the do-nothing poet next door. Where, despite the 'free' life of apartments, people still live in large, crumbling, houses, negotiating idiosyncrasies of the joint family.   Of course, that place, of my youth, may not exist anymore the way I see it. Globalisation has reached Kolkata in the form of ugly, overpriced apartment blocks; glass buildings of IT sweatshops; separated, by malls and brands, lives of the rich and poor; chain schools and hotels by the hour; badly done replicas of global landmarks; noisy politics of religious div...

It only came to me slowly, through a confusing mist of ideas: That I really never escaped the empire. I live in history. My mind is trained to see things with its submerged past, with its layered stories. The blue plaques of London - like the one on the flat near St Pancras where Shelley lived with Mary when she ran away with him - take me back in time often. But I missed the most obvious place where I should have looked for history - my mind in itself. It's hard to explain why I came to London. I did not exactly come looking for money: I left a great job and prospects of a career rather. I had no job offers in hand. I came to learn but didn't enrol in a university until several years later. I dearly loved my life in India and never gave up the plan to return. And, yet, I came. It may seem unsound but I came to see, not as a modern tourist who moves sight to sight and takes a country as a package, but rather as an ancient one who comes to wonder, to observe and to ret...

There are times in politics when being in opposition isn't a bad thing. With Brexit tearing the Tory Party, and with it, politics as usual, apart, Jeremy Corbyn feels lucky to be sitting on the opposite side, watching the hapless Prime Minister trying to achieve the unachievable. So far, he has played the usual political game of obfuscation, never really taking a stance, letting the Tory Brexit fall apart on its own. Self-consciously, he stood up every day at the PMQs and got through it never really challenging the Prime Minister on the subject, almost making the point that her incompetence is self-evident.  It was a clever stance. It is hard to do what-ifs, but one can possibly argue that Corbyn's lack of stance unleashed the Tory civil war in full view. The political calculation of the Labour front bench was perhaps to enjoy a period of calm, after all the Blairite sniping of the past couple of years, and keep everyone guessing. Without this, Jacob Rees Mogg...

I wrote a post earlier about my reading enterprise in 2016 ( see here ), something of a narrative account of my book diary and a Goodread's Reading Challenge that I indulged myself with. As an aggregate, it showed a failure - I only finished half as many books cover to cover as I set out to do - and fragmentation of goals and enterprises, as I followed several different agenda and did not complete any of those in any form. In a way, this is fine. I wanted to follow my heart in what I chose to read, and it really could not have been otherwise. In a sense, I want my relationship with my books to be impulsive yet profound, momentary yet forever remembered, free of commitment but laden with meaning. This is what I am, perhaps: Long ago, someone promised me a relationship with 'all the dimensions, but no destination', and though all the details of that conversation have faded, the idea remained with me, and now morphed into a quest for me to be lived in the books. But,...

The unacknowledged symptom of middle-class midlife when personal arguments and political choices converge into a farce. So was last week for me! For me, with a 9 year old, it is that time when the conversation about school choice starts. The British middle class wisdom - State (schools) till 8! - knocks on the door. The juggling of post codes, entrance examinations and school ratings overwhelm dinner table conversations. The conversation about happy children looks quaint, and the intense race for 'future' starts.  My protestation that the Secondary school is still a good two years away is pointless. I live within an enclave of Indian professionals, striving suburban middle-classmen who grew up in scarcity and embraced oneupmanship as a positive virtue: I am starting the race for future way too late.  But, indeed, there is some truth in the obsession about schools, and that hits home as I google the local state schools. The story I see is consistent, ranging...

My silence over the last few weeks - I did only a few posts since the beginning of April - was only partly intentional. As much I would like to claim I was busy, I was on holiday, traveling through Middle Europe and taking a train journey through the Alps, something I wanted to do for a long time. A family of friends joined us, so all this was family and friends time, as relaxing I could perhaps ever expect. It was full of beautiful sights, the grandeur of Vienna rather overwhelmed by dark romantic Prague and natural magnificence of Salzburg mountains, and of contrasting experience, very touristy Sound of Music trip around Salzburg contrasted starkly with a monastery stay at the centre of Vienna. It was my time to be with others, and go around in a bus ride across Schonbrunn Palace endlessly for a day, and of being myself, an early morning walk through Bergstrasse to stop across the road from No. 19, where Freud lived and worked most of his life.  But, this holiday, and the f...

The unveiling of the statue of Mahatma Gandhi in the Parliament Square in London is a moment of triumph for the British Asian community. The statue of the man, who, like no other, represented an unique resistance to British commercial imperialism, being put at the very heart of such institution indicates the prominence and influence of the British Asians in the public life of the UK. The representatives of the community turned up in large numbers, along with a number of students from Hindu faith schools in London. It was a great moment of asserting a community identity and of celebrating integration in the life of their adopted country. This is a triumph without a corresponding defeat though, fittingly for the man being celebrated. This is not one identity getting better of another - which is the usual zero-sum meaning we associate with the word 'triumph' - but the realisation of a much subtler message Gandhi embodied in his work. Vijay Merchant, the ex-Indian Cricketer...

I am through with a fairly busy Conference Week. My silence on this blog was because of this, though the reason may be slightly less obvious. It is not that I did not have time, I actually never have any time to write this blog, but because I was in the middle of too many words through the week, and I did not add more to it.  Conferences are wordy affairs, as some people they should be. They are usually places without windows, full of people carrying around conflicting agendas and expectations, judging the person sitting next to them with the corner of an eye to see whether they are worth wasting a business card on. They are words, words, words, and indeed, some numbers, graphs and charts. They are about big statements, and going by the consistency of the statements that get made, never to be followed up again till the next conference, when those statements are to be remembered and repeated.  But conferences are also great places to chart the fortune of words, as the...

Global Citizenship has a problem. Despite being a suitably high sounding thing often appearing in management literature, it has no apparent meaning: In an age citizenship has come to mean where one pays one's taxes, Global Citizenship is an empty term to be used as a feel-good, like Rotary membership in some countries.  However, global citizenship is more than just that: There are people who believe Global Citizenship is possible. They live in a neoliberal bubble that the world is going through a transformation - being homogenous, using Internet, drinking Coke, speaking English and living the local version of the American dream and even watching MTV - and therefore, whatever is the politics, we are all global now by our consumption. 'Democratisation of Commerce' is what underlies global citizenship: Global citizens don't vote, they buy. But, if Global Citizenship is to be defined this way, the concept is divisive and hierarchical, rather than being integrative and democ...