LEAVING A CAREER PATH

 Deciding to leave a career path is often easier than identifying a new one. 

Herminia Ibarra, management professor, finds that as people consider career choices and transitions, it helps when they think like scientists.

The first step towards this is to entertain possible selves. 

Identify some people you admire within or outside your field. Observe what they do at work day by day. 

The second step is to develop hypothesis about how these paths might align with your own interests, skills and values.

The third step is to test out different identities by running experiments - doing informational interviews, job shadowing and sample projects to get a taste of work.

The goal is not to confirm a particular plan.

It is to expand your repertoire of possible selves.

It keeps you open to rethinking

Adam Grant
Think Again

IDENTITY FORECLOSURE

 Identity foreclosure can stop us from evolving. It is the opposite of an identity crisis. Instead of accepting uncertainty about who we want to become, we develop compensatory conviction and plunge into a career path. Very often students who are most certain about their career plans at twenty turn out to be the ones with deepest regrets by thirty.

Identity foreclosure is a Band-Aid.

It covers up an identity crisis. But fails to cure it.

Do not get trapped in an overconfidence cycle, taking pride in pursuing a career identity and surrounding yourself with people who validate your conviction. By the time you discover it was the wrong fit, you'd feel it's too late to think again..

The stakes seem too high to walk away. The sacrifices of salary, status, skill and time would appear to be too much. 

To put it straight, it's better to lose the past two years of progress than to waste the next twenty years of your precious life.

Adam Grant
Think Again

MOMENTS OF JOY

 Passions are often developed, not dscovered.

Happiness depends more on the frequency of positive emotions than their intensity. 

We must savour our moments of joy than ruminating about why our lives aren't more joyful.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

You can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.

BREATHING NEW MEANING INTO OUR DAYS

 

Some people are perfectly content with their fields of work. But they are dissatisfied with their current roles. Others may be too risk averse to make a geographic move for a job or a partner. Many may not have the luxury of financial independence. Many may be economically dependent on a job. Many may be emotionally attached to an extended family that curtail their options.

Whether we have opportunity or appetite for major changes in ourselves or not, it is still possible to breathe new meaning into our days. 

At work and in life, the best we can do is plan for what we want to learn and contribute over the next year or two. Then we have to stay open to what might come next.

Adam Grant

Think Again

INCLUSION AND EXCLUSION - TWO DIFFERENT JOURNEYS - 25 YEARS AFTER 9/11

Swaminathan S Anklesaria Iyer writes in The  Times of India, September 20, 2026

25 yrs after 9/11,  two different journeys for Muslim Inclusion

Democracy should be about minority rights as well as majority rights. That makes the comparison with America so poignant. India started much further ahead. A generation ago, its Muslims could look at Rashtrapathi Bhavan and see Abdul Kalam. They could look at the Union Cabinet and see Muslim ministers. They could see that political power was open to all. 

That was an India worth marveling at.  One that could teach the world. None of this means America has conquered Islamophobia. Far from it. Pew Research found this year that "public attitudes toward Islam have become more 'negative' and more 'partisan'  than they were in the wake of the attack. 

Twenty five years after the al-Qaeda attack on 9/11, something remarkable has happened in the US. While Islamophobia has not disappeared - by some measures it has worsened - democracy has overcome hate at the ballot box.

No one  could imagine this on Sept 11, 2001.

The US had just suffered  the deadliest Islamic terror attack in history. Almost 3000 people had been killed. Mosques were threatened. Muslims were attacked. Hate crimes soared.                   

The US Congress did not have a single Muslim.

Yet Muslims did not retreat from American democracy. They entered it. 

Today, there are four Muslims in the US Congress. 255 Muslims have been elected in 26 states  - 46 state legislators, 11 mayors, 18 elected judges, 98 council members and 63 education officials. 

43%  of the elected are women.

The latest is the election of Zohran Mamdani as the mayor of New York, the target of 9/11.

It is truly a triumph of democracy.

Now turn to India. Twenty five years ago, India was hardly free of communal hatred. But its political landscape offered striking examples of democracy at its best. Vice President Dick Cheney marvelled at this in 2006, noting that "the religious majority is Hindu, the largest political  party is led by a Christian, the President is Muslim and the Prime Minister is Sikh."

However it doesn't conform in the current scenario.

 'Bulldozer justice' has become part of India's political vocabulary. India's Supreme Court has spoken words that should shame any democracy. "Justice through bulldozers are unknown to any system of jurisprudence."

America provides an unexpected lesson in how political Inclusion can grow even while prejudice survives. India provides a warning about how political Inclusion can shrink even as elections continue.

The pupil and the teacher have exchanged places.

ROAD RAGE AND THE INDIAN DRIVER

 Indian roads demand something Indians are not properly trained to handle - Equality between strangers.

A traffic signal in any modern society means that people with unequal money, class and muscle mass have to accept the same rules.  A Fortuner and an Alto must stop behind the same white line. This is disappointing for a man who bought an SUV and who srongly believes higher ground clearance is synonymous with higher hierarchy. His philosophy of a public road is private property with other people on it. 

Hence, the constant restlessness to prove, to himself and to everyone around him, that he is a VIP, a very important person, stranded among VOP - very ordinary people. 

This phobia of ordinariness turns his car into a low grade art installation. The windows are blacked out, the number plate has an official looking red strip, and the rear windscreen displays the ultimate Indian brand: caste. You might mistake this for a thoughtful gesture towards overworked caste census workers, saving them from the trouble of going door to door. 

Every slight inconvenience injures his ego. Every driver who refuses to move aside becomes a junior artist wandering into the hero's frame. The back ground music consists of  popular songs that scream, "We will go where we want, turn as we please and break every traffic signal."

Caste supplies the most important assurance behind this VIP performance. He wants to announce the protection available to him, where the surname announces the possibility of ten men arriving after one phone call, if you dare to say anything to him.

In that sense, the Delhi- NCR man is the freest of all men in the world. 

In a viral Thar reel, the driver who drives proudly on the wrong side explains with the calmness of a meditation practitioner, "The biggest benefit of a Thar is, you can drive on the wrong side and no one will flash their dipper or say anything." 

The car has five star safety. 

Everyone, outside it, is on their own.

Recently, a video from Pune showed a Fortuner fitted with a button operated device that concealed its number plate. My first reaction was reluctant admiration. At least  the man had worked to hide his identity. Across NCR, so many vehicles don't have any number plates at all.

It's no surprise that lane discipline remains such an unfinished project in India. 

Civic sense demands a small surrender.

It asks a man  to believe that  a stranger's claim to the road is as valid as his own

But surrender is not something the NCR man practices.

He has spent his whole life learning to occupy space, not share it - or in some cases collecting rent from it.

This attitude is so difficult to fix because, for this particular variety of men, the white lines marking traffic lanes are the bars of a cage and a traffic signal turning red dares the bull inside him to smash through whatever stands ahead

Anurag Minus Verma
The Times of India
20 September 2026