Author page: Girish Ballolla

“Tuning a piano is about creating harmony out of chaos, and to do that, you’ve got to be comfortable with imperfection.” It’s a line from a movie called Tuner, which I watched on the flight to India earlier this week, and it got me thinking. The main character is tuning a piano when the woman he is…

I arrived in Morocco yesterday. That sentence, by itself, is not especially unusual for me. I travel constantly. Over the past few years, airports, hotel rooms, unfamiliar streets, and waking up in places far from home have become part of the rhythm of my life. What is unusual is that this time, I do not have…

I recently had one of those conversations with a friend that left me thinking about something much larger than either of us intended. He was raised Muslim and had spent much of his life accepting the faith he inherited, not unusually, but in the way most of us inherit the foundational assumptions of our lives. We…

I am a rabid fan of the Kansas Jayhawks and the Kansas City Chiefs. Anyone who knows me reasonably well knows both of these things. I will rearrange schedules around Kansas basketball. I have yelled at televisions during Chiefs games, experienced the peculiar combination of irrational confidence and impending doom that comes with caring far too…

102 minutes. That’s how long it took for the Twin Towers to collapse. Anyone who watched it happen live on television can never forget where they were or what they were doing. We watched in disbelief as smoke poured across Manhattan and two buildings that had defined one of the world’s most recognizable skylines simply disappeared. I was driving…

Life is meant to be full of curiosity, not certainty. I liked the sentence when I wrote it. It felt true. I was having a conversation with a sixteen-year-old student who had reached out after one of my school visits. She was anxious about whether neurosurgery was really the career for her and whether the…

A few conversations I’ve had lately got me thinking about insecurity. Not the obvious kind. Not the insecurity we associate with adolescence, awkwardness, or self-doubt. But about the insecurity of successful people. People who have built companies, accumulated wealth, earned titles, won elections, filled stadiums, published books, received awards, attracted enormous audiences, or reached whatever summit the…

India just celebrated its 80th Independence Day. Seventy-nine years after independence, there is a growing confidence about where the country is headed. India wants to become a developed nation by 2047, the centenary of its independence. It wants greater self-reliance, greater economic strength, greater influence on the world stage. Governments are courting India. Companies are investing…

My name is Girish Ballolla. I have an Indian name. More specifically, a Hindu name. Not that most Americans would necessarily know the difference. To an unfamiliar ear, a brown man named Girish could be Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Jain, or something else entirely. In the thirty-five years I’ve lived in the U.S., I remember being more aware of my…

Last week, I lost something. Not my phone. Not my passport. Not my sense of direction. Just my address. For the first time in my life, I no longer have a place I can instinctively write into forms or give to someone making a delivery. Everything I own is either in storage or packed into…

I have to admit something that I’m not especially proud of.   Every so often, I catch myself saying the same thing I’ve heard countless people my age say.   “Kids these days just don’t want to work.”   It's usually after reading another story about "quiet quitting" or another post about someone refusing a job because the work-life balance isn't…

Over the past few months, I've been trying to understand why the world feels heavier than it used to. Not necessarily more dangerous. Human history has survived darker chapters than the one we happen to be living through. Not more uncertain. Every generation eventually discovers that certainty was always an illusion. And certainly not more…

Every city gives something to carry home with me. Sometimes it is tangible—a postcard from a neighborhood bookstore, a photograph I know I’ll revisit years later, the memory of an unforgettable meal. More often, it is an idea. A conversation with the hotel security guard. The philosophy of an Uber driver. A mural that tells a…

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…