It started with students asking for more teachers. In September, students at a school outside Paris joined their teachers to protest overcrowded classrooms, absent staff, and inadequate resources. The…
What is the value of a university degree today? I posed that question to a panel of university leaders last weekend at the inaugural Future Ready Festival in Bengaluru. It may…
“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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…