My Next Thought

The sound of feet against stone, moving in unison. The crack of sticks meeting in rhythm. A circle widening, tightening, spinning faster with every beat. Pure exhilaration! When I was younger, Navratri nights meant joining that rhythm — garba with its flowing steps, dandia with its clashing sticks. I used to wonder why it was…

“Where is your presence of mind?” When I was growing up, my dad would ask me this question whenever I seemed distracted or careless. It wasn’t a gentle question. It carried weight — the sense that I wasn’t paying attention, that I was missing something right in front of me. Sometimes it was about…

This week, I’ve been in Gothenburg, where thousands of international educators are gathered for the EAIE annual conference. The days here have been filled with conversations about mobility, belonging, and building bridges across borders. And as I wrapped up another day of meetings, my phone buzzed with news that made those conversations feel both urgent…

Universities in the U.S. are bracing for the headline everyone has been expecting - a significant decline in international student enrollments. But the numbers are only the surface. Behind the drop are policy shocks, an employer market reshaped by AI, and a student pipeline that no longer guarantees mobility. If institutions treat falling yields as…

At our g2 experience last week, a counselor was telling me about what many are seeing this year. Students feed the same prompt into an AI, and out comes the same essay in slightly different clothes. Her instinct was to stop them from using AI. Mine was different: don’t deny the tool - change how…

Last Friday, I was sitting at Changi Airport in Singapore, ready to fly to Bangalore — a flight I was looking forward to, because it was taking me “home”. Everything was as planned. I arrived early to the airport to check out the famed butterfly garden and waterfall. Check in was smooth. Immigration, smoother. My…

On August 6, eighty years to the day since Hiroshima, I found myself espousing the values of being radically human in the age of AI to a room full of international educators gathered in Kyoto. The conversation inside was about the future, but outside that hall, the date itself carried the weight of history that…

Mujun no naka ni, shinjitsu ga aru. Translation: There is truth in contradiction. Two days ago, I began a keynote at an international education conference in Kyoto with this Japanese phrase - because it felt like the only way to name the moment we’re in. I was standing in a city where a thousand-year-old…

Last week I wrote about humanness in the age of AI - the truth that our adaptability, empathy, and imagination will matter even more as technology accelerates. But if that’s our edge, here’s the next question we need to ask: who is truly preparing us to sharpen it? I find myself thinking a lot about the…

At the IACAC conference last week, I co-presented a session on future‑proofing admissions and counseling in the age of AI - and the response was overwhelming. Not because I have all the answers, but because I’ve spent years living at this intersection - working alongside educators, counselors, and institutions - wrestling with the very shifts…

I spent the past few days at the IACAC annual conference - the yearly pilgrimage for counselors, IECs, and university admissions representatives. There was camaraderie in the hallways, genuine collegiality in the sessions, and collaboration everywhere you turned. But beneath that hum of connection, something else was humming too. Something quieter. Something familiar. Rankings. Even…

When I look back at the biggest, boldest, most uncertain decisions I’ve made - leaving India to study in the U.S., starting a couple of companies from scratch, reinventing myself more than once - I don’t remember detailed plans or guarantees. I remember something more powerful: my dad’s quiet support. He wasn’t the kind of…