A New Beginning

The Coloniser Within

I have been thinking about a rather uncomfortable idea. We fought colonialism to win our freedom. But what if, somewhere along the way, we began surrendering that freedom all over again? What if…. this was happening as I write?

Frantz Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth, explored how colonialism leaves behind something far more enduring than the physical presence of the coloniser. It seeps into the mind. It changes how people see themselves, what they aspire to, and what they come to accept as normal. The coloniser may leave. The colonisation does not.

I wonder whether we are witnessing a new version of this today. Except that this time, there is no foreign flag to pull down. No imperial army to drive away. We are doing it to ourselves. We have willingly entered a world where almost everything has a price, and increasingly, a value is assigned to everything. Our time. Our attention. Our relationships. Even our dreams.

I look at myself; I look at my friends and acquaintances. We measure success by the size of our bank balance, the value of our investments, the houses we own and the lifestyle we can display. We work longer, consume more and keep running, often without stopping to ask what exactly we are running towards. Somewhere in this race, life itself becomes an entry into a balance sheet.

Our health, our years, our quality of life — everything gets quietly converted into economic value. The hours we surrender become somebody else’s profit. Our anxieties feed markets. Our attention becomes a commodity. And the wealth created by millions of such small surrenders accumulates, disproportionately, in the hands of a few. The irony is that the balance sheet records the wealth we create, but not the life we spend creating it. It will record our assets when we are gone. It will not record the conversations we postponed, the sunsets we missed, the friendships we neglected or the years we cannot get back. It will not even note our passing.

I am not arguing against wealth, ambition or enterprise. They matter. Money can provide freedom, dignity and choices. But there is a difference between using money to live well and organising our entire lives around making more of it. Perhaps the real question is not how much wealth we accumulate, but how much of our lives we are willing to exchange for it.

Colonialism once took away our freedom without asking our permission. Today, we may be surrendering it voluntarily, one working day, one unfulfilled promise, one postponed pleasure at a time. And the most disturbing part? We have begun to call this freedom.

Perhaps the last act of liberation is not to overthrow another ruler, but to recognise the one we have installed within ourselves.

In musing….. Shakti Ghosal

AI and Indian Railways: The Real Transformation Is in Our Mindset

Will we compete with machines, or learn to work with them?

*Model of the Fairy Queen, the oldest working steam locomotive in the world*

Early in my career as an Assistant Mechanical Engineer (Heavy Repairs) at the Itarsi Diesel Electric Locomotive Maintenance Workshop, I encountered a problem that used to trouble me. A small engine component called the equalizing yoke would frequently break, sometimes resulting in locomotive failures while the engines were in service.

What puzzled me was that the maintenance records showed no obvious cause for concern. The component had been found satisfactory during scheduled repairs, yet it could fail soon afterwards. I had no convincing answer to why this was happening.

Looking back, I often wonder whether AI, with its ability to analyse maintenance histories, operating conditions and patterns of component failures, could have helped us identify the early warning signs. Perhaps it could have enabled us to anticipate failures that conventional maintenance records and inspection routines could not explain. That is one of the possibilities that makes AI particularly exciting for Indian Railways.

Now, years later, I returned to this world of engineering in a different capacity. Yesterday, I conducted a seminar on Artificial Intelligence: Transforming Indian Railways, at the Eastern Railways Headquarters in Fairlie Place, Kolkata. The seminar was well attended by Railway Engineers and we had the opportunity to explore how AI could help the organisation move from reactive operations to predictive intelligence. From anticipating equipment failures to improving safety and punctuality, the opportunities are considerable. But one intervention during the seminar stayed with me.

A senior railway engineer expressed his strong conviction that AI would lead to a massive loss of jobs. It is a legitimate concern. Technology does disrupt established roles, and we should not underestimate the challenges of transition. But I believe we need to ask another question: ‘Are we looking at AI only as a threat to employment, or also as an opportunity to upgrade human performance?’

Consider my experience with the equalizing yoke. An engineer brings practical knowledge, experience and an understanding of how locomotives behave under operating conditions. AI could add the ability to analyse thousands of maintenance records, correlate failures with operating patterns and identify relationships that might otherwise remain hidden.

The engineer asks the right questions, evaluates the findings and decides what action is required. AI helps uncover what might have been missed. This is the real opportunity: AI as a force multiplier, not merely a replacement for human effort.

For Indian Railways, the challenge is twofold. It must scale up AI applications across safety, security, maintenance and operations. Equally important, its people must develop AI competence relevant to their respective domains. Not every railway professional needs to become an AI expert. But every professional should understand how AI can help them do their job better. This calls for a shift in mindset—from protecting existing ways of working to continuously upgrading our capabilities; from competing with technology to collaborating with it.

AI is not infallible. Its findings must be validated, particularly in a safety-critical organisation. The objective is not to surrender human judgement to machines, but to combine experience with better information and more powerful analytical capabilities.

The lesson extends well beyond Indian Railways. Across professions, the future will demand continuous learning, organisational support and a willingness to question familiar practices. Perhaps, then, the most useful question is not simply, “How many jobs will AI replace?” It is : “How many problems that have puzzled us for years could we solve if we learnt to work intelligently with AI?”

I think back to that small equalizing yoke at Itarsi. At the time, I had maintenance records, engineering knowledge and experience—but no satisfactory explanation for a recurring failure. Today, AI offers us new ways of connecting the dots. The technology has changed. The engineering challenge remains the same: to understand why things fail, anticipate problems and prevent them wherever possible. And that, to my mind, is where the real transformation begins.

In musing…… Shakti Ghosal

#ArtificialIntelligence #IndianRailways #FutureOfWork #Leadership #DigitalTransformation #HumanAI Collaboration

MAHALAYA — The Call of Ma

The first light of the morning came and sat on the window grille, hesitated, then leapt in. Like an old song, tired and familiar, trying to be remembered.

Rudra Bose sat by the window, a cup of tea steaming beside him. The cup was chipped, the saucer mismatched, the tea, a stubborn blend of milk, tea dust, and habit.

Outside, the lane yawned into a waking slumber, its air thick with last night’s incense, stale samosa oil, and the ever-present, low-grade emissions.

“Ma is coming,” he had heard someone shout on the street last evening……

Durga Pujo. Once, it had been magic.

As a boy, he had spent mornings watching Mashis, aunts and Boudis, sisters-in-law, threading marigolds for the Pandal and Thakurer Bedi.

— An excerpt from The Last Writer of Kolkata and Other Stories

What does Durga Pujo mean to you?

Is it the Goddess, the neighbourhood, the people we grew up with—or a Kolkata that lives on in our memories, even as the city changes around us?

This Mahalaya, I invite you to step into Rudra Bose’s world: a future Kolkata where technology has transformed the city, but the longing for what has been lost remains deeply human.

📖 Discover the Last Writer of Kolkata and Other Stories: https://www.amazon.in/dp/9376313402 ( India) , https://www.amazon.com/dp/ B0GYX13WF1 (US)

Some stories imagine the future. Others help us remember what we must not lose.

In musing….. Shakti Ghosal

The City outside my window

From the tenth floor of a hotel room, Kolkata offers an interesting perspective.

Below me, traffic rushes towards destinations I can only guess at. The Metro glides above the road. Beyond the concrete, patches of green survive, almost defiantly, against the advancing city.

At night, the landscape transforms. Buildings light up, roads become rivers of red and white, and the city acquires a certain grandeur.

Yet I find myself wondering about the Kolkata that lies beyond these views.

The person hurrying to work. The family waiting for someone to return. The lives unfolding behind those illuminated windows.

A city is never merely what we see. It is everything that remains unseen.

Perhaps that is why I continue to observe, to question and to write.

Every window offers a view. Every view conceals a thousand stories.

And somewhere among them, there may be another story waiting for Rudra Bose. Shakti Ghosal

In musing ……. Shakti Ghosal

What if…..

….. Education Stops Educating?

I came across a post recently about Palantir that made me pause.

It quoted its CEO, Alex Karp, as saying that the company is no longer relying entirely on traditional university degrees to identify talent. Instead, young people are being given the opportunity to work on real problems, demonstrate what they can do, and learn by doing.

The post made a provocative observation: “The university had centuries to shape the best minds. Entrepreneurs will do it in a decade.” That stayed with me.. Because it raises a much more uncomfortable question: Have our educational institutions slowly forgotten what education is supposed to accomplish?

We teach children what to think. We rarely teach them how to think. We reward the right answer more than the difficult question. We celebrate memory more than curiosity.
We measure achievement through certificates rather than through the ability to see what others cannot. And then we wonder why so many highly educated people struggle to imagine a different future.

I realised that companies like Palantir are beginning to look beyond degrees. Young people are being given real problems to solve instead of certificates to prove that they are ready to solve them. It reminded me of something we seem to have forgotten. Perhaps education was never meant to manufacture employable people. Perhaps it was meant to create unmanageable minds. Minds that question. Minds that doubt. Minds that refuse to accept “this is how it has always been done.”

Perhaps the real crisis is not that AI will replace education. Perhaps it is that AI will expose how little education was actually about thinking.

As I closed the newspaper, the thought came to me. What if the future doesn’t need better educated children…… but freer minds?

— Rudra Bose, The Last Writer of Kolkata

WHAT IF…

THE VOTER LIST FORGOT YOU?

This morning I opened the newspaper to find that democracy had acquired a new battlefield.

Not Parliament. Not the streets. It was about the voter list.

There were allegations, counter-allegations, objections, explanations and demands for resignation. The Election Commission said decisions were unanimous. Others said two Commissioners had repeatedly raised objections. I wondered what happens when the referee becomes part of the argument.

Newspaper report on the ongoing controversy.

Then I imagined something more frightening. What if, one morning, I walked into a polling booth and discovered that my name was no longer there?

Not because I had died. Not because I had moved. Not because I had stopped being a citizen. But because somewhere inside a database, a decision had been made.

And suddenly I realised: Democracy does not merely depend on the right to vote. It depends on the quiet certainty that when you arrive to exercise that right, your name will still be there.

Perhaps that is the real test of an election. Not who wins or loses. But whether the citizen still trusts the hand that counts his vote.

— Rudra Bose, the Last Writer of Kolkata

From Amboseli to Rabindra Sarobar: The Art of Standing Still

There are moments when a familiar place suddenly reveals a secret.

Two evenings ago, we went to Rabindra Sarobar for our usual evening walk. The main lake was as familiar as ever. But somewhere beyond it, we discovered a smaller water body that we had somehow never noticed quite like this before.

It was almost entirely covered with water lilies, hyacinths and lotus plants. There was nothing manicured about it. Nothing curated for the eye.It was nature in its slightly unruly form.And perhaps that was precisely its charm.

The evening light had begun to soften everything. The water reflected the fading sky. The floating leaves formed patterns that seemed almost deliberate. The dense vegetation created the feeling of a little ecosystem existing quietly within the city.

We stopped. And then we saw them. A Bronze-winged Jacana and her tiny chick. The mother moved across the floating vegetation with remarkable ease. The chick followed, scurrying awkwardly behind her, disappearing momentarily among the leaves and then emerging again.

We watched. And suddenly, Rabindra Sarobar transported us back to Amboseli.

Only a month earlier, while visiting Amboseli National Park in Kenya, we had encountered a Jacana there. The bird is often called the Jesus bird, because its extraordinarily long toes allow it to distribute its weight across floating vegetation, giving it the almost mystical appearance of walking on water.

We had marveled at it then. And now, thousands of kilometers away, we were watching the same extraordinary act again. There was something deeply humbling about that coincidence. Two completely different worlds. One a vast African wilderness. The other a lake tucked into an urban landscape in Kolkata. Yet the same bird. The same instinct. The same choreography of mother and child.

Nature has a way of reminding us that the boundaries we draw on maps mean very little to life itself. The Jacana did not care whether it was Amboseli or Rabindra Sarobar. It simply walked. The mother walked. The chick followed.
The water moved beneath them.

The evening slowly disappeared. And we stood there, watching. Perhaps that is the real luxury of growing older—not necessarily having more time, but learning to notice the time we have. To pause beside a lake. To watch a tiny bird crossing floating leaves. To recognise that what appears ordinary may, on closer observation, contain an entire universe.

We are constantly surrounded by such moments. But most of them pass unnoticed because we are moving too fast. Perhaps life does not demand that we always do more. Perhaps, occasionally, it asks something much simpler of us.

Stand still.
Look closely.
And allow yourself to be astonished.

Because one can never cease to wonder at the marvels of life— if only one is prepared to stand and stare.

In musing….. Shakti Ghosal

Nora Ephron, Carl Bernstein and the Sleepless Art of Love

Carl Bernstein and Nora Ephron were the ultimate US media couple in the seventies.

He was the celebrated Washington Post investigative journalist who, with Bob Woodward, helped unravel Watergate and bring down a presidency. She was the sharp, witty writer who would eventually become one of Hollywood’s most distinctive voices.

Then came the irony. Bernstein, a man famous for uncovering other people’s secrets, had a secret of his own. Ephron discovered his affair while pregnant with their second child.

Years later in 1993 , something extraordinary happened. Nora Ephron made Sleepless in Seattle.

At its heart, the film is almost absurdly simple. A widower in Seattle. A lonely journalist in Baltimore. A radio confession overheard by millions. Two people who have never met, yet somehow begin to feel that they are meant for each other. The audience knows what the characters don’t. They belong together. And that creates the delicious torture of the film.

You keep waiting for Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan to meet. They don’t. Not at the airport. Not on the phone. Not through the countless near-misses.

They finally meet only in the closing moments, on the observation deck of the Empire State Building — after the audience has spent nearly the entire film longing for a meeting that the protagonists themselves cannot quite make happen. The film deliberately draws on An Affair to Remember, whose romantic mythology is woven into its story.

And perhaps that is why Sleepless in Seattle feels more poignant than the average romantic comedy. It is not really about falling in love. It is about longing for the possibility of love. About believing that somewhere, somehow, there may still be a person who will understand you.

I sometimes wonder whether, after what happened with Bernstein, some part of Ephron understood that longing differently. Not necessarily autobiographically. Not as confession. But perhaps emotionally. She had experienced the collapse of a relationship she had believed in. And now she was creating a story in which two people, separated by geography, circumstance and fear, somehow find their way towards each other.

The irony is almost too perfect. Bernstein’s betrayal had given Ephron a story about a marriage ending. Sleepless in Seattle gave the world a story about the possibility of love beginning. Because sometimes the most moving love stories are not about the people who are together. They are about the people who are still searching.

And sometimes, the writer who has known heartbreak is the one who knows exactly how much the audience wants to believe in a happy ending.

In musing……. Shakti Ghosal

P.S. ‘Sleepless in Seattle’ is now playing on Netflix but leaving on 30th September 2026. I watched it last night.

THE UMBRELLA THAT NEVER FOLDED

Today is my Ma’s first death anniversary. She left us last year, at the beginning of her 93rd year.

Since yesterday, memories of her have been coming back—not as one coherent story, but as fragments of a life. Faces, places, gestures, little acts of love. And somewhere between those memories, I have been trying to understand what my Ma really meant to me.

She was born in Kolkata in 1933. The fifth child and third daughter in a conservative Bengali family, she never went to school. In those days, boys went to school; girls stayed at home and were educated within the family. Perhaps that is why it is strangely ironic that she became one of the greatest teachers of my life. She was nicknamed ‘Chaini’—’unwanted’. Yet the small girl who was given that name grew up to be sharp, intuitive, positive and remarkably resilient. She inherited her father’s deep faith and took naturally to religious rituals.

At nineteen, she was married to my father, thirteen years her senior, and left Kolkata for a distant Delhi—trustingly holding the hand of a man who was, in many ways, still a stranger to her. And then she did what she seemed to do throughout her life. She adapted. She learnt a new language, a new city, new customs, new people and a completely different social environment. And over the next six decades, she built a home and a family there. For my father, for my brother and me, for all of us.

Ma had an extraordinary ‘can do’ spirit. Problems were meant to be dealt with, not worried about. Her positivity was infectious. Looking back, I realise how much of that quality I have inherited from her. She was our protective umbrella. And I remember the small things beneath that umbrella. The fresh orange juice she would get for me every afternoon from the neighbourhood juice shop. Her familiar assurance—“All will be well”—whenever I was feeling low or disheartened. Her cooking my favourite dishes when I returned home from the hostel. The countless little acts of care which, at the time, seemed so ordinary that I never stopped to think that they were, in fact, expressions of an extraordinary love.

Memories have a strange way of returning when someone is no longer there. And with them comes a painful realisation. I provided for her needs and comforts as she grew older. But did I give her enough of myself? Enough time, enough companionship? Enough of the simple presence that a mother perhaps seeks from her son as the years advance? I don’t think I did. Life became busy. Work, responsibilities, my own family, the endless hurry of everyday existence. And somewhere in that hurry, I perhaps forgot that while I was moving forward with my life, my mother’s world had gradually become smaller. Yet, even then, she never complained. Even till her last days, whenever I asked her how she was feeling, her instinct was to reassure me. As if even at the end, she did not want to burden her son with her troubles.

That was Ma. The umbrella remained open. Till the very end. There was one ritual that stayed with us almost till her last day. In the evening, when I went to sit with her for a while, she would blow her conch shell. That sound has stayed somewhere deep inside me.

Today, a year after she left, I sometimes imagine that she has finally met Bapi, my father, again. Thirty-two years after his departure. I imagine the two of them sitting together somewhere, having a cup of tea after such a long separation. And perhaps, every now and then, looking down at me. I don’t know whether there is such a place. But I like to believe there is. Because some bonds are perhaps not broken by death they simply become invisible.

My Ma came into this world as a little girl called ‘unwanted’. She left it having spent ninety-two years giving love, strength and blessings to everyone around her. And perhaps that is the deepest irony of her life.

Today, I don’t mourn only the mother I lost. I would like to celebrate the woman she was. And I remain deeply conscious of the greatest blessing she left me— a lifetime spent under an umbrella of unconditional love. Ma, the umbrella may no longer be visible. But I still feel its shade. And I always will. ❤️

In musing……. Shakti Ghosal

WHAT IF….

... we have forgotten to slow down?

I came to Langkawi expecting to see another beautiful place. I found that the sea was beautiful. So was the Rainforest, so were the beaches.

But after a while, I stopped looking at the beauty and began noticing something else.

The pace. The trees did not seem to be in a hurry to grow. The waves did not seem anxious about reaching the shore. The clouds moved without consulting a clock. Even the boats seemed to understand that there was nowhere more important to be.

And as I watched, I wondered when we had forgotten this simple rhythm. We hurry to work. Hurry to meetings. Hurry to finish. Hurry to achieve. And then, having spent years rushing towards the future, we discover that the present has quietly passed us by.

Perhaps the problem is not that we don’t have enough time. Perhaps we have forgotten how to inhabit the time we have. Standing by the sea, I found myself asking: What if slowing down is not falling behind? What if it is actually a way of moving forward—with greater awareness of where we are going?

Perhaps we don’t always need another destination. Sometimes we simply need to stop long enough to notice the journey.

I closed my notebook and watched the waves return to the shore. They had been doing it for thousands of years. Unhurried. Unconcerned. And somehow, always on time.

— Rudra Bose, the Last Writer of Kolkata

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From the tenth floor of a hotel room, Kolkata offers an interesting perspective.

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