Author page: Girish Ballolla

The long Independence Day weekend gave me pause to think, through the flags, fireworks, speeches, social media posts, patriotic merchandise, and the choreography of national celebration. There is something moving about watching a country honor its beginning. There is also something unsettling about watching a country celebrate itself when so much of it feels unresolved. Maybe that…

Tomorrow, America will celebrate its 250th birthday. There will be flags, cookouts, and fireworks. There will be speeches about freedom, courage, sacrifice, independence, democracy, and the enduring promise of the American experiment. Some of it will be sincere. Some of it will be routine. Some of it will be theater. That is not new. Countries…

Twenty-five years ago, a Bollywood movie gave us one of the greatest cricket matches ever filmed. For those who have never seen it, Lagaan is an Oscar nominated Indian film set in a small village called Champaner during British colonial rule. The village is suffering through drought. Crops have failed. People are hungry. And yet, the British…

There is a new fantasy being sold to students as advice. Yes, there is a growing anger around AI on campuses, the student protests, the booing of commencement speakers, the very understandable grief underneath it all. I still believe some of that grief is real. Students are not wrong to sense that something has shifted…

Everyone, it seems, has discovered artificial intelligence. Or at least everyone has discovered that saying “AI” is now a requirement for staying relevant in the conversation. I find myself using those two letters almost on the hour, every hour.  AI is everywhere. On billboards. In conference session titles. In product demos. In casual conversations. In…

At 1:03 AM EST last Thursday morning, in the middle of NAFSA, SecondContact.app went live on the App Store. I had wished it had happened a couple of weeks earlier. I even asked the universe to cooperate with my planning calendar. The universe, as usual, did not care. But there it was, the email from…

By the time this reaches you, the NAFSA Annual Conference will be drawing to a close. The booths will begin their slow dismantling. The banners will come down. The last meetings will be squeezed between hotel checkouts, airport rides, tired goodbyes, and the small panic of realizing how many follow-up emails are now waiting to…

In a few days, thousands of us who work in international education will make our way to NAFSA, the largest annual gathering of our field. Flights will land. Hotel lobbies will fill. Badges will hang from necks. Calendars will become puzzles. Old friends will embrace in corridors. New introductions will be squeezed between sessions, receptions,…

Dear graduates, And by graduates, I do not only mean those walking across a stage this month in caps and gowns. I mean every student standing at the edge of a next chapter. The high school senior leaving the familiar architecture of school and stepping into college. The college student entering a job market that…

I flew back to the United States from India last night and was reminded, yet again, that some of us spend our lives returning to places that both know us and misread us. Every time I go back to India, my voice arrives before I do. Someone hears the American edges in my accent and…

I have been traveling across India, visiting high schools and speaking with students about their future readiness. Standing in rooms full of young people, I have been trying to help them make sense of a world adults keep describing as full of opportunity, even as the rules of opportunity are changing beneath their feet. Beneath…

The world is addicted to visible conflict. Missiles, borders, retaliation, brinkmanship, the theater of escalation. These are the things that dominate headlines because they are dramatic, legible, and easy to narrate. They allow nations to perform strength in public. While everyone is watching the obvious contests, another one is unfolding with far less spectacle and, I suspect,…

I watched Artemis II with the kind of awe that makes you briefly forget your age. For a few minutes, I was no longer a grownup buried in deadlines, flights, WhatsApp messages, and the low-grade noise of the world. I was just a little kid staring at the moon again, pulled back into that old…

 “Paper or plastic?” It is one of those phrases we hear so often that it barely registers anymore. It belongs to the script of modern life, along with “credit or debit,” “hot or iced,” and the polite, half-awake choreography of strangers moving each other along. We say our part. They say theirs. Everyone keeps it moving.…

It took me longer than it should have to get to the University of Mississippi. Forty-eight states came and went before it. Mississippi stayed somewhere on the list, not avoided, just never urgent enough to move to the top. Until last week, when I finally arrived at Ole Miss for their International Education Week. State number forty-nine.…