5 Years of Graduating from Cornell: Stocktaking and a Personal Diary Entry

(In Front of Cornell university Clock tower, Ithaca, New York, May 2018: as a Recent Graduate with a Master of Public Administration Degree from Cornell Institute for Public Affairs)

(Singapore, January 2019: On way to become a Lecturer at the San Francisco State University)

Today, I woke up in a contemplative mood from an afternoon nap and it almost felt like I was in 2019. I was in the US at that time as well, teaching at San Francisco State University. The weather was moderately hot, and news of elections was pouring in from India. As a freshly minted graduate of Cornell University, I woke up with the desire to open my laptop and absentmindedly play a chess game on chess.com, while thinking about what I was going to do with my career and what the future held. When I woke up today, it almost felt like everything that happened between 2019 and now was a dream that passed during an afternoon siesta. A lot had happened in the meantime, and nothing went as per the plans.

I worked on helping set up a policy institution in India, got married, co-founded an educational business with my cousin, attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, G20 meetings, a briefing at the US Senate, a debate at the British Parliament, and moderated discussions with the EFTA trading bloc with parliamentarians from Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, and Liechtenstein for an agreement that got signed between India and these countries, which is likely to bring $100 billion of investments into India over the next decade. In 2019, I used to think how fantastic it would be if I could interview an ambassador. Now, I am fortunate enough to have done so on many occasions and can call many ambassadors mentors and friends.

I created platforms for businesses and technology institutes as well as other academic institutions to come together and mentored many young policy professionals and students who ended up on great career paths, many of them attending Ivy League universities in top policy programs in the US, UK, Europe, and India. I also got married and managed a house with my wife in New Delhi as well as in Ithaca, New York. We got a chance to host a lot of friends from outside of India at my home in India and Indian friends in the US. We travelled many places together including Jaisalmer, Dubai, Edinburgh, London, New York, New Jersey, and Ithaca. Back in 2019, I was the only Cornelian in my family, and now we are three, with my younger sister and my wife also having graduated from Cornell.

Indeed, these years also had their own share of troubles and tragedies. More than once, I found myself thinking and stressing about my budget and racking my brains on how I would meet the monthly installment of my educational loan. COVID hit us, and I lost my grandparents, the two people I looked up to the most in life. For months, I kept struggling to find any meaning in life and instead found solace in the many books that I read, in philosophy, and in mentors whom I met virtually. Eventually, I got to meet Swami Sarvapriyananda and Dr. Kaushik Basu (who had earlier taught me at Cornell). In a chance direct message I sent him on Twitter during his visit to India, he agreed to meet me and offered me a position to assist him. They say that a mentor or a guru appears when you are most in need, and I am grateful that this is exactly what happened.

After an MPA degree, I often thought, as many others have, "What is this degree good for?" Especially for a person from India, where public administration is the monopoly of career bureaucrats. Unlike other friends who specialized in economically viable concentrations such as science, technology, and infrastructure policy, or economic and financial policy, my specialization was government politics and policy studies. I spent a lot of time genuinely thinking about the commercial viability of the specialization while at San Francisco. I interviewed for a big four company back home in India and did not get through. I also, more than once, presented proposals to ministers and legislators and was shown the door. I also sat down with many businesses, who did not really see how what I was doing could be of help to them.

But things have their own way of unfolding. I now advise businesses on political risk, essentially giving them the right feelers, situation analysis, and scenarios of how politics is going to change and how it is going to impact the business. I was also fortunate enough to develop a few business clients who trusted me and saw value in what I was doing. I advised a number of Indian legislators and developed great appreciation for their energy and hard work. I recently got the opportunity to moderate a roundtable with the current Chief Economist of the World Bank and to hang out with the Tabla maestro, Zakir Hussain at a party held at Dr. Basu’s house. Not so bad overall.

But now when I look back, I ask the same question again: What does the future hold for me? And all I can say is that things have a way of unfolding.  In many ways, I feel like I am starting all over again. After my MPA I spent a lot of time re-reading a lot of papers and books that I may have merely skimmed over during the program under the pressure of exams and submissions. The opportunity to teach and be connected to the academic world was my way of ensuring that I actually absorbed all that I was supposed to know during the program. Balancing social obligations and the good things that college life brings to you can come at the cost of deeply absorbing the academic content in a professional program and I feel now, that by assisting Dr. Basu and having taught at various places in the past five years, I have only now completed by MPA degree and am ready to venture out into the world.

What do I look forward to in the next five years? My only hope is that the good things will outweigh the tragedies. I hope that my friends and family members, who have kept me stable and given me confidence in staying power in a world full of chaos, will do well. I hope that I will do well.

In the past five years, I have seen the foundations of the world breaking apart. Institutions that we grew up revering, such as the United Nations, the World Bank, and other national institutions, are losing their sheen either because they are no longer fit for purpose, or people do not believe in them anymore, or both. Cooperation that effectively binds the world and makes progress is crumbling as we stand at the precipice of another world war. I only wish that somehow we will be able to resolve the great conflicts and contradictions of this world, and if not resolve them, then at least find better ways of managing or reducing them to the extent that we can.

Global warming, joblessness, and parochialism knock on our doorsteps, and what I have learned is that there is no fighting it out. The solution lies in intelligently redesigning our systems and shifting mindsets. When Mahatma Gandhi said that in a gentle way, we can shake the world, he was not kidding. Now, when I look at his words, I see such profound game-theoretical insight behind his thoughts, which he essentially gathered by traveling the length and breadth of India and working for two decades on the ground in South Africa. It seems what he was trying to say is that you cannot just fight your way to success. People do not instantaneously change their minds, habits, or ways of doing things. Sometimes a gentle nudge and the re-imagination of a new equilibrium can bring about a lot more momentous change than rolling up your sleeves and getting into a fight to knock the system down. I look forward to what the next five years will bring.