A Reflection on a Year in Oxford as a Skoll Scholar

Stepping Away to Fall in Love

There is a version of India that only makes sense when you are inside it. A morning chai at a tapri (a corner shop). A conversation with a friend about where the country is heading, which goes nowhere and everywhere all at once. Going back to your hometown and noticing a railway bridge that wasn't there before, and feeling something you cannot quite name. The country moves fast and slow at the same time, and it holds you close. It allows you to be in ways that are difficult to explain to someone who hasn't lived inside it.

India is hard to leave. And if you have spent years building something you love inside it, surrounded by people who care about the same things you do, watching something grow from nothing into something real, it is harder still. You are not just leaving a place. You are leaving something you love.

I decided to leave it anyway. Saajha, an organisation that was built through years of commitment by a group of the most caring people I know, mid-flight. I was 24 when I started it with my co-founders, and I had spent the last decade focused on building greater recognition of parental support in the public education system. A lot was happening in the organisation—a hundred people, an RCT underway with results due next year. And Oxford on the other side. Not a natural moment to go. But then, is there ever a natural moment to leave something you love?

Some people thought it was selfish. I understood why. You leave something that needs you at the worst possible time, for your own growth. That looks a lot like choosing yourself over the work. But bell hooks, an American philosopher, educator, and author, sees this differently.

Love, she says, is not a feeling. It is a practice. And years of running an organisation quietly replace practice with management. I realised I was trying to scale the organisation using ways of thinking that had once served us well. My team knew the questions I was going to ask in a discussion. I had become too predictable while the world around me changed rapidly. 
Staying in that state is not loyalty. It's a slow harm to the work, to your people and to yourself. There comes a point when staying becomes the less courageous choice. 

What I needed and could not give myself was permission to love more deeply again. Not just the financial permission, though that mattered; the Skoll Scholarship gave me that. The deeper permission: that stepping away was an act of love, not an abandonment of it. That I could come back to see myself, the people around me and work more clearly than I left it. That the pause was an act of commitment and was worth more than the continuity.

Finding Love 

And so here I was in Oxford after twelve years away from the classroom. Having built something for so long, I had forgotten the deeply analytical side of myself. Learning how decision trees, random forests and artificial neural networks work, and then building them in R, made me rediscover a way of thinking I had missed. My finance courses taught me to appreciate the rigour and courage required to be transparent. To be upfront with all the assumptions you make on a spreadsheet. Together, the courses gave me a new language to connect with other people and to be understood. Exams got no part of that love. 

As the year progressed, I joined a team working on a decarbonisation startup. Brick kilns in India, carbon credits, a market none of us had properly entered. I knew nothing about any of it. That was the point, and we named it Hawa. 

I had to build rigour from scratch, in unfamiliar territory, with people I had just met. We had conversations with kiln owners in Haryana. We built financial models. We argued about assumptions in front of investors. The learning wasn't about decarbonisation. It was about what I look like when I have no advantage. There is something about being a beginner again. You remember that not knowing is not a failure. It is the beginning of paying attention. 

And then there is Oxford itself. There is something that happens to you when you run beside the Oxford Canal. You hear a lecture on how ideas have evolved in history, and you are spellbound by it. You attend an exhibition where the bones of the very first cat that might have been domesticated are displayed, and you feel you are living in the past. You have dinner next to someone who is figuring out how antibiotics reduce the absorption of blood pressure medications, and you start feeling humble. People are three years into a question that will not be answered for another decade. Nobody is in a hurry to conclude. 

When the next decision is always urgent, that relationship with time does something to you. It slows the clock. It reminded me that the problems worth working on are usually older and harder than any single intervention. It gives you permission to sit with a question rather than immediately reaching for an answer. And the point "is to live the questions." (Rainer Maria Rilke) 

And amid all of this, you make friends. Friends that you travel with across Europe to play Frisbee with another school. You trek with them for 20 km. And sometimes they run with you for 21 km to ensure you can meet the target you set for yourself. You understand the pain of finding a job, finding love and figuring out life, helping you see the diversity of struggles that each one is going through. 

I had spent my twenties building an organisation. Many of my classmates had spent theirs studying, travelling and experimenting. Being one of the oldest in the batch, I expected to feel older. Instead, they reminded me what curiosity without responsibility could feel like. I had forgotten that version of myself.

Going Back 

I am planning to return to Saajha, not to do the same work but to see it differently. To understand where the commitment needs to be stronger and where the effort needs to go to ensure the next generation of young people are loved and cared for in their homes and country. 

I will not return with answers but with better questions. Not with a plan but with perspective. Not with more certainty, but with more ways to practice living with uncertainty. 

For anyone thinking about applying, the people at the Skoll Centre and within the Skoll Scholar community are among the most honest, caring people I have met. They are not incidental to the experience. They are part of what makes falling back in love possible. And there is never a right moment to fall in love. 

The MBA and Skoll Scholarship are not for people who have it figured out. They are for people mid-flight who care deeply and who want to step away long enough to remember why they started. The application will ask you hard questions. Answer them honestly. That honesty is the beginning of permission. 

The hardest part is not getting in. It is letting yourself want it. Believing that stepping away is an act of love rather than a betrayal of it. 

If you are waiting for that permission, this is it. But you have to mean it when you go. 

To summarise (सारांश) 
हम सब एक सीधी ट्रेन पकड़ कर 
अपनेअपनेघर पहुँचना चाहते 
हम सब ट्रेनेंबदलनेकी 
झझं टों सेबचना चाहते 
हम सब चाहतेएक चरम यात्रा 
और एक परम धाम 
हम सोच लेतेकि यात्राएँदखु द हैं 
और घर उनसेमक्तिुक्ति 
सचाई यूँभी हो सकती है 
कि यात्रा एक अवसर हो
और घर एक सभं ावना 
ट्रेनेंबदलना 
वि चार बदलनेकी तरह हो 
और हम सब जब जहाँजि नके बीच हों 
वही हो 
घर पहुँचना 
— कंुवर नारायण 
English translation 
We all want to board a direct train 
and reach our own homes 
We all want to avoid 
the trouble of changing trains 
We all want one final journey 
and one ultimate destination 
We tell ourselves that journeys are sorrowful and home is freedom from them 
But the truth could also be 
that a journey is an opportunity 
and home is a possibility 
Changing trains is like changing the way we think and wherever we are, whoever we are with that is arriving home 
— Kunwar Narayan 
Translated using Claude AI

About the Skoll Scholarship

The Skoll Scholarship is a prestigious opportunity for social entrepreneurs to pursue an Oxford MBA with full financial support and gain access to a lifelong global network of peers, mentors, and social innovators. 

Supported by the Skoll Foundation, the scholarship is awarded to social entrepreneurs who demonstrate a strong commitment to creating and leading social ventures that tackle deep-seated social and environmental issues. Learn more about the Scholarship and find out whether you are eligible for 2027/28 applications here.