It’s been a long time since I last wrote. It’s been nearly 3 years since I last published a blog piece. I have been wanting to do that for the last 2 years, if not longer. I have at least 20 pieces drafted, most of which are more than a year old. But it’s been really hard to get back on the bandwagon once I fell off it. I have given many excuses to myself to not publish.

The pandemic struck and changed the world. In an early interview during the pandemic, Bill Gates said that it will take at least 2 years for things to get back to a more normal state. I laughed it off then (like the misquoted comment of his about no one ever needing more than 640 KB of hard drive space). But he was right. It did take 2 long years for things to normalise after the horrible COVID-19 pandemic. I was lucky that no one close in my family or colleagues or close friends suffered directly. But the pandemic caused so much suffering – most of it unavoidable, but some of it avoidable, at least in hindsight.

More recently, Russia invaded Ukraine on a rather flimsy pretext. Ukraine has put up a much better fight than anyone expected. NATO has played its cards well – has supported Ukraine in all possible ways except entering the war themselves, which would be disastrous as it could lead to WWIII. So, apart from causing misery for everyone involved – not just Ukranians and most Russians (many of them being conscripted compulsorily),  the war hasn’t proven anything, except what havoc inflated egos can play. But this gives me further fodder to a piece that I am writing – about the challenges that humanity faces in governing itself, whether through monarchy, dictatorship, autocratic rule or even democracy; and how it might be an unsolvable problem because consciousness may well be the root of all evil.

Of course, in May 2023, I published my long-in-the-works book on education called “Reimagining Indian Education”. And you might cut me some slack for not having blogged, because I wrote and published a 350+ page book, but the truth is that most of the writing of the book was done before the pandemic struck. The challenging part was getting a reputed publisher on board – but having met a few of them, it was clear that the audience was rather limited for the book – mainly educationists and policy makers. So finally a small publisher did come on board but before that each line in the book was put through 3 rounds of grammar and meaning check, which really took a lot of time, given that people involved were not doing this full time. At one point, I was frustrated enough to tell my team to publish the book as it is, no matter how many errors or issues it contains. In addition, for a brief period, I was really worried that the pandemic would change education with online learning; but that was a flash in the pan considering the inevitable truth that kids need physical schooling. So thankfully I didn’t have to rewrite anything – except adding a note at the beginning acknowledging that technology can have hugely positive effects on education, but they are yet to be seen, like in the case of generative AI.

ChatGPT announced the arrival of AI late in 2022, to both the delight and the misery of many across the globe. Generative AI has shaken up the tech world and the rest of the world in innumerable ways. The capabilities that generative AI has shown over the last 9 months is astounding. I don’t think that most people deeply embedded in the tech world also expected such fluid responses to all kinds of queries. Of course, there are obvious and not-so-obvious issues of the sources being hidden, or hallucinations, or inaccuracies but what it can do at such a nascent stage is simply astounding. Generative AI does to Google search what Google search did to libraries. It’s an exponential jump with huge future potential rather than immediate impact. It will change the way people research, ideate, write, respond, and communicate at work. A lot of otherwise mundane tasks will get automated (the cover image of this post is a case in point, having been generated using DALL-E). Education however is one area where much work remains. As long as students are assessed on a fixed body of content through narrowly defined tests, generative AI or technology generally doesn’t have much of a role to play. Very few teachers or schools will bring in technology into their classroom if the final tests essentially expect students to memorise information in the textbooks without any actual understanding or engagement with that content. Educational goal posts need to change to building necessary skills and attitudes through experiential learning, through project based learning and being assessed on work that students actually produce rather than their ability to memorise and regurgitate content. All that and much more is addressed in great detail and with much passion in my erstwhile referred book on education.

I have talked and written about starting a second innings, which can happen at any time of life, but makes a lot of sense at the stage of life that I am. I wrote a mission statement in 2009. I am on track in pretty much all the areas. However, I feel the need to be challenged. When I chose to get into education, I was sure that I wanted to create a deep impact rather than work at a large scale but with limited impact. Setting up a preschool and school was a consequence of that choice. The last 3 years have demanded a lot of introspection into my life’s work choices. Having created “deep impact”, I now want to create a wider impact while keeping the impact as deep as possible. I have strongly considered many areas other than education, but education is something I am both good at and passionate about. It’s just that I am searching for a bigger canvas and to that effect, publishing the book and starting some outreach programs in progressive education is a start.

Coming back to the reasons why I didn’t publish for so long, I would say that when I started, I had many deep well thought out ideas that I needed to share for my children, for my readers and for the world in general. But somewhere down the line, the lack of large scale adulation, the lack of mass deals and promotional events, got me thinking whether the effort was worth it. What exactly was I gaining by continuing to write (apart from a few appreciation messages). I guess this was largely influenced by the social media phenomenon, where large scale influencers, for the right or wrong reasons, get thousands and lakhs of likes and hates.

But the reality is even if I crave impact at scale, but I also know that I can’t work on scale by sacrificing impact. In the context of ideas, this implies not giving up on the depth that I can achieve when unfolding a complex nuanced idea with multiple facets into short text or video messages on social media. Of course, putting together diverse complex ideas into one post requires coherence, depth and editing that I started finding tedious and it’s the kind of job that I would outsource but that doesn’t really work when it’s your own ideas that you want to expound in a certain manner. I much prefer my self-declared subtle-to-explicit humorous method to explore ideas and presenting them with my own brand of conviction.

Finally – it was just one reader who made me get back to publishing; a neighbour of mine who I keep meeting in the elevator; he first started off with a disclaimer that he knows I don’t like small talk (as expressed here), but wanted to ask me anyway why I wasn’t writing any more. I realised that I didn’t have much to offer but excuses and the lack of motivation. That got me writing something – and I didn’t want to start off by publishing one of the many drafted posts as that just didn’t feel right. I just wanted to write because I enjoy writing, playing with words, stringing together ideas in a coherent flow that engages the reader as much as I am engaged when reading a good piece of writing. So all that ado about not so much – here’s the piece that hopefully shakes off the cobwebs.