Author page: Girish Ballolla

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…

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…