Final post before vacation.
This week has been a really insightful professional journey spending time with some remarkable people from FICCI and our Indian friends in Manchester.
It has also been an important personal journey.
Few people know of my heritage; my father was from Bangladesh and I grew up with key cultural experiences that shaped my identity. I don't talk about this much, as it's a complicated past. He was an alcoholic, we grew up in a violent household, and were eventually estranged.
However, up to the age of 16, I spent a lot of my childhood in the back of an international Indian grocery store he owned; my father created the first of these in Norwich.
I would also go to cash and carry outlets in London with him, leaving at 5am on a Sunday in a truck, bringing back large volumes for goods.
I'd help move the large bags of rice, ghee, and vast bulk items of stock for the shop. I'd mix spices in large barrels to create bespoke mixes for customers. I'd stack the shelves in the shop, serve customers and, through this, discovered a lot about people.
The relationship between Bangladesh and India is complicated. My father was born in 1935, before partition and still when Britain was deeply embroiled in India rule.
I learned about some of the consequences of this situation while still at school. When I was a teenager, one of the most memorable school experiences was watching the movie Gandhi with Ben Kingsley, such a remarkable - and long - film. (Side note: teachers showing children videos is important)
Through this film, India became powerfully embedded into my consciousness, as a site of powerful, historic injustice and of eventual empowerment through through civil disobedience.
My own commitment to social change through the acquisition of power through knowledge remains central to my own philosophy.
I have yet to travel to India, but the 2030 Commonwealth bid and the 2036 Olympic bid, coupled with my involvement with World Technology Games with our first summit in Mumbai and Pune this year will be a welcome opportunity to visit and re-encounter this absent past of mine.
Sport often emerges as the single most important vehicle for cultural and geopolitical conversations that can lead to a more empathetic world, and this is why it matters so much that these Games find their way to India soon.
A few years ago, I was included in the British Bangladeshi Power 100 List and was also nominated for a British Muslim Award (I'm not Muslim).
These two experiences brought me back into thinking about my heritage, but what I really look forward to is thinking about the future and how my own identity might be shaped, not by my past experiences, but by the new people from the region who are bringing positive change to our global community.
