Why I am Misunderstood as a Blogger

Acronyms used in this post:

Healthcare IT [Information Technology used in hospitals, clinics, insurance, research, and healthcare operations]

FHIR [Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources, a modern standard for exchanging healthcare data between systems]

HL7 [Health Level Seven, a family of healthcare messaging standards used by hospitals]

VA [Veterans Affairs, the large United States healthcare system serving military veterans]

The Kolkata morning begins with a milk packet at the door, a damp patch on the wall, and the small suspicious silence of a phone that has not brought work.

Sometimes I wonder what people think when they read this blog.

Probably something between “this fellow talks too much” and “this man needs a long walk and a quieter neighborhood.” Fair enough. Kolkata itself sounds like that many days. Every para has one uncle shouting at television news channels as if the anchor can hear him personally.

But there is one thing I quietly worry about.

Some readers may think I am useless.

You know the typecasting. Middle-aged Bengali man. No stable senior corporate designation attached to his name. No startup exit. No TED Talk. No smiling LinkedIn photograph holding a coffee mug beside the words “Honored and humbled to announce…”

That sentence alone can raise my blood sugar.

So perhaps I should explain a few things before history appoints the wrong stenographer.

I did not spend the last decade sleeping under a tree eating chanachur and composing philosophical forwards.

I burned through almost everything I had trying to build something meaningful in healthcare.

Money first. Then patience. Then confidence. Then sleep. Sleep goes quietly. One day you are solving architecture diagrams at 2 a.m. because of excitement. A few years later you are awake at 2 a.m. because the mind has become an unpaid night security guard.

Trying to build a healthcare venture in India without connections is like trying to open a five-star restaurant inside Sealdah station during rush hour while the kitchen staff argue about who owns the stove.

You think I am exaggerating. I am reducing.

People imagine corruption as dramatic cinema corruption: fat politicians, briefcases, ceiling fans, someone whispering that a deal will happen. Modern corruption is often softer and more exhausting. Relationship fog. Invisible gatekeeping. Endless polite delays. People who smile warmly while quietly burying your proposal under seventeen committees and one nephew.

In India, many systems do not run on process. They run on social gravity.

Healthcare is special in this regard.

A hospital can have three backup generators, robotic surgery, imported marble flooring, and a reception desk that looks like an airport lounge, while inside the data systems two departments are still emailing Excel files to each other like former allies exchanging border notes.

Meanwhile every second person shouts “AI! AI!” as if artificial intelligence is coriander leaves sprinkled on top of spoiled curry.

You sit in meetings hearing words like innovation and transformation while someone in the background is manually copying patient IDs from PDF files because two systems refuse to speak properly.

That was my world for years.

And here is the uncomfortable part.

I am not good at corporate theater.

This is not virtue. It is professionally damaging.

I cannot grin continuously. I cannot flatter mediocre people with dangerous confidence. I cannot attend networking sessions where everyone speaks like motivational fridge magnets. Some people glide through rooms. They know when to laugh, when to nod, when to say absolutely. They survive organizations the way expert swimmers survive fast water.

I am more like a man in polished shoes on a wet marble floor.

The older I became, the worse this mismatch got.

Senior healthcare roles increasingly demand performance in both senses of the word. You must know the technology, yes, but you must also perform certainty, optimism, leadership energy, and resilience. Even difficulty must arrive neatly packaged with lessons.

Inside many organizations, meanwhile, everyone is frightened.

Budgets shrink. Outsourcing expands. Younger workers cost less. Executives talk about AI replacing jobs they themselves barely understand. Entire departments live one restructuring away from extinction while the slide decks remain calm.

Age in technology is a strange thing.

At twenty-eight, staying awake all night fixing production interfaces makes you hungry.

At fifty-one, it makes management wonder whether you are still current.

Same exhaustion. Different branding.

These days I wake in my small Kolkata neighborhood to electricity fluctuations, humidity thick enough to chew, consulting work if lucky, worry if not, and sometimes both together. People ask, “Why not just go back abroad?”

That question lands heavily.

Because I am afraid.

There. Plainly.

Not afraid of work. I worked in brutal environments before. Real healthcare systems. Real pressure. Real consequences.

I am afraid of returning and discovering that the world I loved no longer exists.

America gave me some of the best years of my life intellectually. For a middle-class Bengali boy who grew up counting coins before buying books from College Street, walking into large healthcare systems there felt extraordinary. I learned systems thinking there. I learned scale there. I learned what competent infrastructure feels like when it works.

Not perfectly. America has its own madness. The healthcare billing system alone looks like something designed by Kafka after a long committee meeting.

But professionally, there was oxygen.

Now the atmosphere feels different.

The job market is colder. Immigration conversations have hardened. Foreign workers are tolerated less gracefully during economic strain. Especially brown foreigners. Especially aging brown foreigners.

Nobody needs to shout at you. Modern exclusion is subtler. Rooms become slightly colder. Patience shortens. Your margin for error feels thinner than everybody else’s.

And I do not know if I can emotionally survive watching my happiest memories become contaminated.

People underestimate this fear.

Memory is fragile furniture.

A city can remain beautiful inside your head for twenty years. Then one bad season can smash the whole arrangement like a cheap plastic chair.

So I remain here. Suspended.

Not fully belonging in India anymore. Not fully brave enough to return abroad either.

That in-between condition is becoming common. Thousands of educated migrants float psychologically between countries like old satellites that lost orbit but did not completely crash.

Meanwhile the internet continues its circus.

One fellow becomes rich explaining productivity while appearing to sleep four hours and frighten his pancreas daily. Another shouts about hustle culture from a rented luxury car. A third posts Monday motivation while employees somewhere are calculating whether the bathroom is the only quiet room left.

The world rewards performance heavily now.

Depth? Not always.

Still, I write.

Because despite everything, I know things. Real things. Difficult things. I understand why large systems fail quietly before they fail loudly. I understand why “data quality problems” are often human workflow problems wearing fake moustaches. I understand how organizations slowly become prisoners of their own paperwork.

And maybe more importantly, I understand ordinary defeat.

Not cinematic defeat. Not movie defeat where violins play and life lessons arrive in golden light. I mean the slow boring defeat of middle age: the ceiling fan rattling at night, the bank balance being checked too often, the best years seeming either behind you or hidden behind a door that no longer opens from this side.

But here is the strange thing.

I no longer feel ashamed of surviving.

That took time.

The world trains men especially to measure themselves using salary, title, property, promotion, car, square footage. As if a human being were a refrigerator specification sheet.

Survival itself is not small work.

Remaining decent while disappointed is not small work either.

Remaining honest in a civilization increasingly addicted to performance may be one of the hardest jobs left.