Origins

Going Underground

I was born in Newham in 1969 and grew up in the northern boroughs of Edmonton and Enfield. If you know the area: from Forest Gate Station the Elizabeth line runs west toward Paddington and Reading. Growing up an Arsenal fan in the shadow of White Hart Lane, home of their bitterest rival Tottenham Hotspur, was an exercise in managing everyday risk. In that tumultuous and inflationary era of rebellion, football was a lens for understanding arbitrary tribal loyalty. It was one perimeter within which a boy could define culture (a shared experience).

My parents, born in Kenya, brought with them perspectives of identity informed by a diaspora's story of migration and prosperity kept at a certain remove. Dad started his working life on London's Underground, eventually saving the money to buy a shop at a busy junction of the North Circular and Great Cambridge Roads. My own formal education was supplemented therefore with summers in Kenya combined with an apprenticeship in my father’s shop. The shop was in those days referred to as a 'Newsagent and Confectionist' and by ten I wasn't just restocking sweets and cigarettes or delivering newspapers along the North Circular but learning the weight of dead-stock and carrying inventory instead of cash; the value of goodwill in one's freehold; and of course the art and basic maths of earning a fair margin on the goods we carried.

It was a practical education in political economy not unlike, I suppose, the one Margaret Thatcher had as a grocer's daughter. We sold every national newspaper and all kinds of sweets which we'd sell by the ounce, scooped out and measured by weight. I saw electronic technology evolve too; the mechanical horse outside was replaced by a Space Invaders machine that drew crowds of young boys.

My childhood was a collision of boyhood obsessions: the "rough and tumble" anarchy of Star Wars and Superman comics. I collected the trading cards like hard cash. These were tokens traded or gambled in schoolyard games invented to hone our ability to spin for distance or force. Harrison Ford was an early bromance. His easy American swagger as Han Solo and Indiana Jones mattered. Such is the power of cinematic narrative.

The shop flourished but by the 1980s plans for an underpass at the Great Cambridge Roundabout began circulating among long-established denizens and they began to sell out to newcomers. The ebb and flow of traffic tapered as familiar customs and attendant customers peeled away. Foot traffic responded by reflexively diminishing to a trickle. My father saw his take begin to plateau, even as he nursed ideas of retiring to a coconut plantation in Mangalore.

In 1982 my brother and I bundled onto a plane bound for Bombay, sent ahead to settle while Dad wound up the business before joining us later. We moved in with a grand-uncle and aunt in idyllic and provincial Baroda (now Vadodara), where, lacking the modern conveniences of phones, televisions, a refrigerator and even hot water, I learned quickly how little was needed for contentment. Even the power frequently went out for sporadic 'load shedding' to manage demand. We lay perfectly still watching the ceiling fan for signs of life during after-school siestas. Later in the afternoon, following tea, we'd saunter to the bus stop as scooters, mopeds and Royal Enfields gathered where the boys who called themselves the HYC (Harinagar Youth Club) reclined under the shade of a massive tamarind—some climbed for fruit while others lobbed banter below. Someone pulled out a bat and ball. Another grabbed the crate by the milk ration stand on the corner—that's the wicket—and then we were out on the quiet wooded lane playing cricket. As dusk descended it was home for dinner. Meanwhile, at school, I was an exotic novelty as everything about me marked me out as different and foreign even as most of the class shared my last name. I was, I thought, vilayati (विलायती)—an imported, exotic quality. The word became a colonial nickname for England—Blighty—still used today. For the first time I made truly fast friends: thick as thieves, close enough for their studious culture to rub off on me as girls gazed curiously. I was esteemed and it had a telling effect. For the first time I studied well, trying gamely even with the impossible task of catching up to my Standard 8 classmates in Sanskrit, Gujarati and Hindi after being dropped in at the deep end.

We passed a year in India before we were called back to London by our parents who had decided instead to move to Canada. We arrived in 1983 and settled in Richmond Hill north of Toronto. It was another transition but by now adjustment to change came easily. It was just another opportunity to experience yet another turn. Over the years the capacity to adapt to change became a hallmark and something I leaned into heavily to develop. Whereas most people deliberately crave stability I came to thrive on and harness the volatility around me. But the change now was towards the placid. In comparison to the turbulence of England and India, Ontario felt ordinary: always rather pleasant, at times almost torpid, and—by turns—tame.

Canada, and in particular Ontario, for me remains among the most fortunate places on earth; its qualities and privileges, though, are taken for granted by those who create their lives there, and we can grow into a dull complacency and misapprehension about the state of the world. At the same time, for the same reason, it has a reputation for being dull, boring and safe. The sort of place where one has to go out of one's way to get into legitimate 'trouble'.

There are neither poisonous snakes nor alligators. Nor is there any organic sacrament, peyote say, at hand with which to set off on a test of endurance or to perceive doors to another plane. One has to conjure up proxies for them in response to a Call to Adventure—that desire some of us have to create a myth out of our all too common or garden realities of suburban truth (or beauty); a manufactured crisis from which to draw out from ourselves the divine; a deus ex machina—a being or a manifestation of it in our consciousness even as we dwell in our stagnant salvation; one to lead us into a conjured temptation so that we might have an opportunity to learn what it is to prevail over the damnation of the 'fine' ways of our 'not bad' purgatory.

This is important to understand in a time when we may be prone to an annihilation of identity in a misanthropic search for redemption and reconciliation—drawn as we are, since time immemorial, by an evolutionary penchant to exercise a capacity for existential exorcism when cast adrift into the absurdity of a banal reality that contrasts so profoundly with the majesty of creation.

In response we provoke from within a spike in collective or personal adrenaline and cortisol so that we know the full limit of what we will endure from society, such that we never again bow to the demands of others while compromising our own soul. From which we may then settle back to a sense of balance, but now with an enduring remembrance: one that runs cold even while we remain warm to the touch.

Internationalists

In Ontario I graduated from the last of three high schools I attended on three continents, in 1987. In the bucolic and provincial Forest City, London—the namesake of my English hometown—I studied History and Political Science. By 1991, as I approached graduation, an imperial war over oil (or rather the inexpensive supply of it) entangled my countries. Thoughts of entering the military as a second lieutenant were entertained; such was the force of the propaganda that I succumbed to it as a passing thought. It was at least a job, and I was still susceptible to the notion that we waged war in defence of liberty and democracy in Kuwait. Recession, after all, had landed on my graduating class in 1991, and it was at least a job—even if it might have led to the short life of one taken with an irrational exuberance for the just cause of saving the world from calamity and calumny. I set off instead to Wakayama City, Japan, to teach English in the city's junior high schools. This was somewhat of an unexpected detour as the country hadn't been a particular interest of mine until then. I hadn't studied Asian philosophy, religion or history. Nevertheless the country made an abiding impression on me and I'd be back twice. In 1993 I returned home to Ottawa, to study International Affairs, majoring in Political Economy at Carleton's Norman Patterson School—the country's elite finishing school for diplomacy (and anywhere else the private sector meets the public). While at Patterson I returned to Japan as an exchange student to study Japanese politics at IUJ (International University of Japan) in Niigata. I came home to write my thesis, Foreign Direct Investment in Japan: The Socio-Economic Impediment. It was a study of the networks in Japanese stakeholder capitalism: the keiretsu—clusters of enterprises gathered around the large Japanese trading houses—to instill discipline, stability, and continuity in an integrated, often volatile, global marketplace for debt and equity. What was striking about these groups was their intrinsic human-centric anarchy. There were no contracts, as such, dictating their transactional proximity—only an intuition founded on a shared history, one no amount of capital could easily compromise without undermining their cohesion. That was particularly frustrating to Americans, who arrived with a framework more legalistic than their European counterparts', and who struggled with barriers to trade that were neither tariffs nor quotas, and with acquisition too (because nobody dared sell a stake).

I returned to Japan one more time as a Monbusho Scholar at Tokyo's Hitotsubashi University. The intention was to use the school's library to research my thesis; however, I completed it before arriving, so I spent my time on language studies and coursework. There was also the extraordinary opportunity to socialize with an internationalist, cosmopolitan crowd: Japan is a ready alternative for those on the periphery of the dollar regime, and for those outside it who are wary of the core administration. There were Chinese, Brazilians, Taiwanese, Koreans, Russians, Ukrainians, Moldovans, Romanians, Bulgarians, and Poles; Australians, Swiss, French, German, and Dutch; and Iranians, Indians, Bangladeshis, Nepalis, and Malaysians.

Japan was also my base from which I explored Asia—Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and Korea—countries rapidly emerging from the Cold War to create prosperity, albeit within capricious and fickle capital markets. Before Japan, it had been my deeply ingrained conviction that modernity, sophistication, and even equity correlated with liberal pluralism. I came away from Japan with a greater sense of what might constitute credible and legitimate governance. It was not lost on me that this modern, technologically sophisticated country's dominant faith tradition, Buddhism, originated in my own ancestral traditions in India. I could not glean much about the petty frictions ordinary people encounter when dealing with government, but in Japan, at least for me, it never involved corruption—only the usual tedious, aggravating form-filling that has become a characteristic of modern life everywhere, as governments take pains, at whatever cost, to ensure everyone has only what they are entitled to.

At home I had sought to get involved on campus with Western's Liberal Club and Amnesty International but became disenchanted, finding them to be largely ineffectual means to salve one's conscience rather than achieve key objectives. There was so little to choose between our political parties: any creative or visionary impulse for change was quickly shouted down by a reflexively dialectic opposition, jockeying for advantage over the other side. I became disaffected by an emphasis on rights and entitlements that seemed to me, increasingly, collectively applied crutches—make-weights for an inability to hold ourselves accountable for basic outcomes in our own lives, and in turn diminishing the resources required to serve those who need them most: specifically, the vulnerable.

Modern World

I first discovered the internet at Carleton in 1993 and used it, steadily, to keep in touch with a globally dispersed network. I still recall the first time I saw the World Wide Web—in the form of AOL's homepage—on a computer in a graduate office associated with Lorraine Eden. My thesis advisor and joint seminar leader was a renowned expert on transfer pricing: the mechanism through which the multinational enterprise plays sovereigns against one another in a global prisoner's dilemma to maximize income after tax. The dilemma was an aspect of game theory, first introduced to me by my other seminar leader, Max Cameron. Our conversations around the seminar table were robust; in a room of Liberals, Tories, Socialists, and one Marxist, I quickly marked myself out as a generally disagreeable spoiler of ballots.

By my third stint in Japan, Hitotsubashi had a bustling internet room, and I spent a good deal of time there using Netscape's then-innovative browser to keep up with the news. Coming home in 1997, I decided to pursue a career in the private sector, with finance, management consulting, and public relations as the directions I would explore. I took the Canadian Securities Course and, seeing a confluence in those three streams, went on to an expensive post-graduate diploma in team-based application design, full-stack development, and team-based delivery at the now-defunct ITI (Information Technology Institute). I joined IBM Global Services as a consultant in 1999. In some sense, that is when my education really began.