Category: Life observer

The World We Are Leaving Behind for the Young


Have we become so obsessed with creating wealth that we have forgotten to create possibilities?

I have often wondered whether the world we are building today is quite the world we once imagined for the generations that would follow us.

A recent article in The Hindu, titled How Neoliberalism Turned the World Against Its Young *, set me thinking. Over the past four decades, the world has witnessed extraordinary economic transformation. Markets have opened up, businesses have flourished, technology has disrupted old ways of working and unprecedented wealth has been created. India’s own journey since economic liberalisation in 1991 is a remarkable example of what opening up an economy can achieve.

Yet, there is an uncomfortable contradiction. We have a generation that is better educated, more connected and technologically more capable than any before it. And yet, many young people seem increasingly uncertain about their future. A decent job, an affordable home, financial independence and the ability to raise a family without perpetual anxiety are becoming difficult aspirations for many.

Why?

Perhaps we have become too preoccupied with measuring economic success through GDP growth, stock market valuations, corporate profits and wealth creation. These are important indicators, but they tell us only part of the story.

An economy must do more than generate wealth. It must create opportunities for people to participate in that wealth creation.

I find the growing disconnect between education and employment particularly troubling. (Recently, I have delved into this in some detail through an Employment Education equation study. I am providing the link to that study in the reference below for all who may be interested). We keep telling young people to acquire more skills, become more competitive and reinvent themselves. All good advice. But are we creating enough productive jobs for those skills to find expression?

Not everyone can become an entrepreneur, a technology professional or a startup founder. An economy also needs millions of people working productively in manufacturing, healthcare, education, logistics, agriculture and modern services.

Perhaps the problem is not simply that our young are inadequately prepared for the future. Perhaps the future itself is not creating enough opportunities for them.

This is where I believe the debate around neoliberalism becomes relevant.
Markets are powerful engines of wealth creation. But they are not designed to solve every social problem. What is profitable is not always what is socially desirable. And what appears economically efficient in the short term may carry a considerable social cost over time.

I am certainly not arguing for a return to excessive State control or bureaucratic inefficiency. We have seen enough of that. But neither should we assume that markets, left to themselves, will automatically produce an equitable society.

Education, healthcare, affordable housing, public infrastructure and social security are not merely welfare expenditures. They are investments in human capability and in the future of a nation. For India, this question is particularly important. We frequently celebrate our demographic dividend. But a young population becomes a dividend only when it is educated, skilled and productively employed. Otherwise, an enormous opportunity can gradually turn into an equally enormous frustration.

Artificial Intelligence will make this challenge even more complex. It will create opportunities, eliminate certain jobs and fundamentally alter the nature of work. The real challenge will be ensuring that technological progress expands human possibilities rather than concentrating economic rewards in fewer hands.

I sometimes wonder whether, somewhere along the way, we have confused economic progress with human progress.

We celebrate how much wealth an economy generates. Perhaps we should also ask how many lives it enables to become better.

Every generation inherits the world shaped by the choices of those who came before it. We may not be able to guarantee the young a comfortable life. But surely we owe them a fair opportunity, a sense of security and a reason to believe that effort and aspiration still matter.

A society that creates billionaires but cannot create enough dignified opportunities for its young may be celebrating prosperity while quietly accumulating discontent. The young are not necessarily asking for a perfect world. They are asking for a fair chance in the one we have created.

Perhaps that is not too much to ask. And perhaps the real test of economic progress is not how wealthy we have made the present generation, but how hopeful we have allowed the next generation to become.

In musing ….    Shakti Ghosal

References:

(1) https://www.thehindu.com/business/Economy/how-neoliberalism-turned-the-world-against-its-young/article71635741.ece

(2) The Education Employment equation : https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/india-educationemployment-equation-kolkata-laboratory-shakti-ghosal-c7ihf/

WHAT IF… the real meaning of a festival is what remains after it ends?


The pandals are coming down. The lights are fading. The city is slowly returning to its familiar rhythm.

Durga Pujo has left us with photographs, tired feet, beautiful memories and perhaps a little sadness.

But I wonder whether we sometimes mistake the celebration for its meaning.

What remains when the dhaaks fall silent?

Perhaps the kindness we showed a stranger in a crowded queue.

The laughter we shared with people we rarely meet.

The moment we paused to admire something beautiful, without asking what it cost or how long it took to create.

And perhaps, most importantly, the reminder that life is richer when we make room for wonder, togetherness and joy.

I have always believed that the end of an experience is also the beginning of a question.

So I find myself asking:

What if the true measure of Durga Pujo is not how magnificently we celebrated, but how much humanity we carry into the ordinary days that follow?

Just wondering.

— Rudra Bose, the Last writer of Kolkata

#WhatIf #RudraBose #ShaktiGhosal #Kolkata #DurgaPujo #TheLastWriterOfKolkata #Reflections

Generation Gap…..


or Just a Case of Mutual Misunderstanding?

I am now in my much-retired mode, which apparently qualifies me to dispense wisdom, whether solicited or otherwise. But I have run into a small identity crisis. What is my generation code? And what about my daughters, now in their thirties? Gen Y? Millennials? Or have they been upgraded to a version I haven’t yet downloaded?

I grew up in a world where money was scarce, telephones had wires, and a parent’s “Its dark now, come home and study” was the end of the conversation. Today, a simple “No” may trigger a discussion on boundaries, emotional safety and childhood trauma. In our time, we called it getting on with life. Perhaps we were resilient. Perhaps we simply lacked the vocabulary. Or the Wi-Fi.

We wanted our children to have everything we never had. Better schools, more choices, fewer disappointments. Somewhere along the way, we may have forgotten that learning to live without something is also part of growing up. We gave them wings and then looked rather alarmed when they decided to fly in a direction we hadn’t approved.

We encouraged them to think independently, question authority and challenge convention. They listened. Now they question our authority, challenge our conventions and occasionally treat our advice as unsolicited content to be skipped.

The nerve of it!

We believed adulthood meant a stable job, a house, a marriage and money in the bank. Our children seem to regard these as optional features in life’s subscription package. They are prone to change jobs, and embark on hundred mile car rides on weekends in pursuit of ‘fulfilment’. We call it restlessness. They call it knowing their worth. I suppose both descriptions depend on which side of the dinner table you occupy.

Technology has widened the gulf. They inhabit a universe of reels, stories and disappearing messages. I still believe a good conversation should last longer than a reel. But then, I remember our own youthful escapes into books, radio and daydreams. Perhaps every generation has its preferred method of avoiding reality.

And here is the uncomfortable bit. We cannot spend years telling our children to be fearless, independent and original, and then complain when they refuse to become smaller versions of ourselves.

We may also have mistaken our own survival strategies for universal truths. What worked for us was shaped by our times. What works for them must contend with theirs. Experience deserves respect, certainly. But it does not come with a lifetime monopoly on wisdom.

So, in my much-retired mode, I propose a truce. I shall continue offering advice, preferably before anyone asks for it. My daughters shall continue listening, preferably without checking their phones. Neither expectation is likely to be fully met.

Perhaps the generation gap is simply the distance between the world we grew up in and the world our children are trying to make. We see their choices through the lens of our past; they see our advice through the prism of a future we cannot entirely imagine.

And perhaps that is how it should be.

After all, every generation thinks the next one is getting it wrong. The next one, meanwhile, is busy wondering how the previous one ever managed to get anything right!

The trick, I suspect, is not to close the generation gap. It is to keep the conversation going across it. Preferably without turning it into a family WhatsApp debate.

In musing……………. Shakti Ghosal

The City outside my window


A room with a view

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.

Kolkata oh!

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…


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


Rabindra Sarobar in the evening light

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.

The floating leaves and the patterns

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.

The Jacan Bird and its chick

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.

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.

The white beaches beckon
The Rainforest chalets

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.

….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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What If ……….


We Have Misunderstood Our Place in the World?

I spent the morning watching the animals move across the Kenyan savannah. There were wildebeest everywhere. Zebras moved among them almost casually. An elephant and its cub stood beneath a tree. In the distance, the landscape seemed to stretch endlessly, without walls, roads or buildings to interrupt it. For a while, I simply watched.

A space with no boundaries

There was something strangely humbling about seeing so many creatures occupy the same landscape without any apparent need to possess it. They did not own the land. They did not draw boundaries across it. They did not put up signs announcing that a particular piece of earth belonged to them. They simply lived there.

The Savannah co-existence

And then a thought occurred to me. What if we have misunderstood our place in the world?

For centuries, we have measured human progress by our ability to control nature. We cut down forests and called it development. We dammed rivers and called it progress. We covered open land with concrete and called it urbanisation. We moved mountains, redirected water, altered landscapes and exterminated species after species, making them disappear. And while doing so, we often congratulated ourselves on our ingenuity and intelligence.

The great migration through Mara

But somewhere along the way, we perhaps began to confuse our ability to control something with the right to own it. The savannah seemed to offer me a different philosophy. The animals did not appear to be conquering the land. They were part of it. The elephant did not need to dominate the tree beneath which it stood. The zebra did not need to fence off its patch of grass. The wildebeest did not need a title deed to the earth beneath its feet. They belonged to the landscape without claiming it. Perhaps that is what we have forgotten. We speak endlessly about what we will leave behind. Be it buildings, businesses, fortunes, roads or institutions.  We would strive to leave our names on plaques and our photographs on walls. But perhaps there is another kind of legacy…….

The Zebra did not need to fence off its grass….

What we choose not to destroy. The forest we would leave standing. The river and the waterbody we would allow to remain clean. The animal(s) whose habitat we would protect. The open space we chose not to convert into concrete. The silence we did not fill.

The silence we did not fill….

Standing there in Kenya, I began to wonder whether civilisation should really be measured by how much of nature we can bend to our will. Or how much of nature we chose to leave as it is. Perhaps the more difficult measure is how much power we possess—and how much restraint we exercise. Because restraint requires something that conquest does not. It requires us to recognise that we are not the center of everything.  The realisation that the earth existed before us, the wild existed before our cities, our borders and our ambitions. And, if we are wise enough, much of it will continue to exist after we are gone.

Will this exist after we are gone?

Perhaps we are not the owners of this world after all. Perhaps we are merely its temporary custodians. We arrived without asking permission. We will leave without taking anything with us. Between those two moments lies the brief privilege of being of who we are and our presence here.

We remain privileged to have been here…….

And so I find myself asking a different question. Not simply, what will we build while we are here? But, what will remain because we were here? I closed my notebook. The animals continued moving across the savannah. They had not heard my question. Perhaps they did not need to. They seemed to know the answer already.

— Rudra Bose, the Last Writer of Kolkata

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What if…


….. a city allows danger to become normal until tragedy makes it visible.

August 2026

The fire in the Free School street building which housed hotels, offices and homes may have started with a short circuit. But tragedies of this magnitude are rarely caused by a single spark. Nine people died in a building where hotels, offices and homes had somehow learnt to coexist within a maze of cramped spaces, narrow passages and questions about fire safety.

Times Of India report

I kept wondering: who allowed this to become normal? Perhaps that is the more uncomfortable question. A city does not become unsafe in one day. It becomes unsafe one ignored violation at a time. One certificate not checked. One inspection postponed. One illegal alteration overlooked. One warning that nobody thought was urgent. And then, one night, the building catches fire.

We will now demand accountability. There will be investigations, committees, audits and perhaps arrests. All these are surely necessary. But does governance have to begin only after people die? The real test of a city is not how efficiently it rescues people from a burning building. It is whether it had the courage to prevent that building from becoming a death trap in the first place.

As I folded the newspaper, I wondered whether we have become too accustomed to calling preventable tragedies accidents. Perhaps the most important responsibility of governance is not to manage disasters better. It is to make fewer disasters possible.

— Rudra Bose, The Last Writer of Kolkata