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Friday, 29 May 2026

Schools now and then

 When School Was Different: A Memory Across Two Eras


When I look at schools today - especially here in the UAE , I see how much has changed. Schools are structured and have clear policies in place, safety is taken seriously, and supervision is there all the time. As parents and educators, there is real comfort in knowing children are safe and looked after through the day, and that does matter.


What stands out today is the system behind it. Schools are not running on assumption anymore. There are clear rules, processes, and checks, and regulators set expectations that schools follow seriously. Teachers are also responsible for wellbeing, behaviour, and safety. There is more awareness, training, and responsibility, and most carry it out well, even in busy classrooms.


Support systems exist now that did not earlier—counsellors, safeguarding teams, structured pastoral care—and children who need help are noticed and supported. Transport, playgrounds, labs, and sports are also properly planned. Nothing is left to chance. It brings reassurance because you don’t just hope a child is safe—you know there is a system around them. And that is a real shift.


I have lived through a very different kind of school life. First as a student at St Joseph’s Allahabad and Boy’s High School Allahabad, and later as a teacher at Boy’s High School and for nearly 20 years at The Bishop’s School, Pune. I have seen it from both sides and i see the big difference . 


Health, safety, wellbeing, and child support were not part of our vocabulary then, and we did not even think to ask for it. We drank water from round school tanks, and sometimes a light pink disinfectant—potassium permanganate—was added, and that faint colour was considered enough at the time. Broken taps added to ' the experience'.


Vaccinations were done in school too, and I remember the nurse using the same needle after dipping it in disinfectant. No one questioned it then, and it was simply accepted practice in those days.


Cameras in schools did not exist. You were expected to behave, and that was it.


At St Joseph’s, even the school bell stays in my memory—a long iron rod hanging in the play area, struck with another metal piece. It stood where we played, and boys sometimes ran into it and got badly  hurt. It was just part of school life.


Breaks had very little supervision if any. If someone got hurt, we went to the infirmary, but beyond that there was not much structure.


Playgrounds were simple—monkey ladders over cement, swings without safety flooring. We learned by doing things, not being told.


Small things stay with me: cleaning blackboards, clapping the dusters , chalk dust everywhere, white hands, dusty uniforms, and that chalk smell through the day.


Discipline was direct. If you arrived  late, you stood outside or were sent home with no discussion. Standing or kneeling outside the class was normal and accepted. In PE, punishment often meant running rounds until exhausted or being made to hop forward in a seated position. That was horrible! 


Teasing, fights, and bullying were part of growing up, with no labels for it. In craft periods, we worked with saws, hammers, and chisels with very little supervision. Cooking and manual work also happened without much formal safety framing.


We cycled, climbed, ran races, used ropes—freely and competitively. We left school alone or in groups and made our own way home - no phones, no tracking, no check-ins, and we just reached. If something was lost, the answer was simple—you were careless, replace it. If you were caught cheating, consequences were immediate. Detention meant staying back, and parents were not informed and rarely  involved.


Looking back now, it was rough in places, but it also built independence, resilience, and the ability to figure things out without being told every step. Today’s schools are far more aware, structured, and caring, and that is a good thing.


But sometimes I still wonder…


Are we becoming a bit too careful—not in safety, but in how we define childhood?


Are we removing the small scrapes, small failures, and unplanned moments that once quietly taught you and me how to deal with life?


I don’t really know.


Maybe children don’t need less care, just fewer reasons to believe we are watching their every step.

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Thursday, 21 May 2026

Why Listening May Be the Most Underrated Leadership Skill

 


Across classrooms, workplaces, and leadership spaces, speaking is often mistaken for engagement, while listening is quietly undervalued

“Pay attention.”
“Listen carefully.”
“Don’t get distracted.”

We hear these instructions so often that we stop truly hearing them.

From childhood onwards, the message is consistent: listen. At home it is “listen to your parents.” At school it is “listen to your teacher.” The settings change, but the expectation does not.

Yet a quieter question rarely enters the conversation: are we actually learning how to listen — or simply being told that we should?

In structured environments, listening is frequently mistaken for silence or polite acknowledgement. Increasingly, it has become performance.

People speak for the sake of speaking, as if every sentence demands a response, correction, or completion. Others feel compelled to contribute to everything — even if it means interrupting a thought mid-air to secure their place in it.

Voices rise over one another — less conversation, more collision. Ideas overlap. Sentences break mid-air. What emerges is often incoherent — fragmented, unstructured, rarely absorbed. Everyone speaks — but very little is understood.

What appears as engagement is often a plausible performance of participation rather than understanding.

But filling silence is not the same as understanding what is being said.

Modern life reinforces this pattern. Speed is rewarded. Silence is uncomfortable. Attention is fragmented across screens, notifications, and constant interruption. In this environment, listening is the first casualty. We become efficient responders, but unreliable interpreters of meaning.

Perhaps it begins earlier than we admit.

In classrooms, listening is often equated with silence. The “good student” is frequently the one who participates, answers quickly, and reproduces expected responses. But whether quiet or vocal, behaviour is mistaken for understanding.

Over time, something shifts. Children are naturally spontaneous — quick to question, quick to imagine, quick to connect ideas without fear of being wrong. But when speed of response becomes the measure of success, listening is reduced to repetition. Curiosity gives way to compliance. Creativity becomes cautious.

That habit does not remain in school. It follows directly into adulthood — and into leadership.

Because leadership is not defined by how much one speaks, but by how deeply one listens.

Real listening is not passive. It is not waiting for a turn to respond. It is the discipline of absorbing what is said — and what is not said. It is noticing hesitation, contradiction, emotion, without rushing to resolve it. It is attention in its most disciplined form.

There is a reason even popular culture returns to this idea. The song “Listen” from Listen is not about voice — it is about awareness. About hearing what lies beneath words, not just the words themselves. A reminder that listening is intentional, not automatic.

As Malcolm Forbes once said, “The art of conversation lies in listening.”

Perhaps the shift required is simple, but uncomfortable: from hearing as reaction… to listening as intention.

Because in too many spaces — conversations, classrooms, and leadership rooms — we are not listening. We are competing. Words overlap, ideas collide, voices rise, and meaning is lost in noise.

And in the end, leadership is not weakened by lack of speech.

It is weakened by lack of listening.

The question remains.

Are we actually listening… or just waiting for our turn to speak?

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Sunday, 17 May 2026

Oh my God

 OH MY GOD ! 


There we were after church, my wife and I doing the weekly grocery shopping. I must confess — unlike many men who wander through supermarkets looking emotionally exhausted beside trolleys full of detergent and spinach — I actually enjoy it. There’s a strange pleasure in grocery shopping. The order, the routine, the small excitement of buying things you probably already have at home.


And then we saw him.


A hefty, slightly scruffy man with a young boy in tow. Flashy branded shoes. Expensive T-shirt. But somehow carrying the general air of a man who had made several inauspicious life choices.


Now our supermarket has one of those fresh soup stations where you fill a proper container and pay by weight.


The man walks up confidently, picks up one of the large soup containers — not the tiny tasting cups, mind you — the actual fill-it-and-pay-for-it containers.


He fills it generously.


So far, perfectly normal.


Then suddenly, right there beside the soup station, he lifts the container and starts drinking the soup straight from it.


Not tasting.


Not sampling.


Guzzling.


Like a man reunited with civilisation after months at sea.


My wife and I looked at each other in complete shock.


Disgusting behaviour.


He emptied the whole thing and then belched loudly enough to wake the dead.


I nearly rammed my trolley into a display of breakfast cereal.


Then, with astonishing calm, he refilled the container AGAIN, snapped on the lid and walked away with the carefree attitude of someone who believed supermarket rules were merely gentle suggestions.


No embarrassment.


No hesitation.


Not even the faintest attempt to appear guilty.


When push comes to shove, most people at least pretend to have shame. This fellow had gone far beyond that stage.


Naturally my detective instincts took over. I kept an eye on him from a safe distance while pretending to compare cereal brands.


Then came the bananas.


He picks up a bunch, expertly detaches one banana, peels it right there in the aisle and eats it casually while continuing to shop.


His son watched in admiration, like a young apprentice observing a master craftsman at work.


The father even handed him a piece of banana as though this was some kind of wholesome father-son bonding moment, rather than a full-scale public demonstration of supermarket rule-breaking.


You could almost hear the silent lesson unfolding:


“One day, my boy, all this shall be yours.”


The father then calmly placed the remaining bananas into a bag as though nothing remotely unusual had taken place.


And I am almost certain he picked up a few grapes along the way too. The sort of man who treats supermarkets like an all-inclusive brunch does not simply walk past grapes without conducting quality checks.


Then, to complete the performance, they wandered toward a young lady handing out free food samples.


At that point my wife and I nearly lost composure entirely.


By now father and son had probably enjoyed:


Soup starter.


Banana course.


Grape interlude.


Sampled appetisers.


Possibly juice tastings near aisle seven.


It was not even the money that shocked me.


It was the breathtaking audacity.


The complete absence of self-consciousness.


The almost majestic confidence with which this man approached supermarket etiquette under the comforting disguise of grocery shopping.


Men like this do not need loyalty cards. They need a gentle reminder over the loudspeaker: “Sir, aisle five, please remember this is not an all-you-can-eat buffet.”


Or perhaps a trolley that beeps loudly every time unpaid produce mysteriously disappears en route to the mouth.

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Friday, 15 May 2026

Empathy is missing

 EMPATHY IS THE MISSING LEADERSHIP SKILL.


(Mental health in the workplace)


We talk a lot about leadership—strategy, targets, performance, delivery—and all of it matters. But what often defines leadership in practice is something less visible and far more influential: how people experience the person leading them.@

That’s where empathy comes in.


Not as a soft skill, and not as an optional extra, but as a core part of leadership that shapes culture, behaviour, and performance.


Most leaders don’t set out to be harsh or distant. Many are capable, articulate, and clear about expectations. But in fast-moving environments, leadership can gradually become transactional, focused mainly on output, deadlines, and correction. Without realising it, tone begins to shift.


People become more careful in how they speak. They hesitate before asking questions or sharing ideas, not because they lack either, but because they are unsure how it will be received.


One of the most common blind spots in leadership is assuming silence means alignment, when it often reflects hesitation, uncertainty, or self-protection.


When that happens, clarity is lost. Teams begin to operate with incomplete information, and the gaps only surface later, usually when pressure is already high.


This is not just a workplace issue. Over time, consistently tense or critical environments affect people beyond work. Stress doesn’t stay at the office; it follows people home and shows up in energy, patience, sleep, and often in family life. The link between work and wellbeing is far more direct than we often admit.


Empathy is often misunderstood. It is not about lowering standards or avoiding difficult conversations.


Strong leaders who use empathy still demand high performance. They hold people accountable and do not dilute expectations.


The difference is in how they engage.


There is a clear line between being direct and being dismissive, between correcting performance and shutting someone down, and between accountability and making people feel diminished. That line determines whether people grow or slowly withdraw.


Most people do not perform better under pressure that feels personal. They perform better when expectations are clear, feedback is fair, and they are not constantly bracing for reaction. Empathy creates that environment. It allows people to ask questions earlier, address mistakes sooner, and contribute more openly, which strengthens accountability because ownership increases when fear decreases.


At its core, leadership is not only about decisions or direction, but about the environment those decisions create.


Some environments are efficient but tense, where work gets done but people remain guarded. Others are equally demanding but more open, where people speak, challenge, and engage without hesitation.


Both can deliver results in the short term, but only one sustains them over time.


Empathy does not require a change in personality; it requires awareness of tone, timing, and impact, and the discipline to listen before responding or correcting in a way that builds rather than reduces the person.


Often, it is small shifts that make the difference: a calmer response, a clearer explanation, or a moment of pause before reacting.


In the end, leadership is not only about what gets achieved, but about what gets built while achieving it—trust, confidence, and the ability for people to do their best work without fear sitting in the background.


As leaders, we owe it to the workplace to get that right.

The 

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Bananas and me

 For most of my life, I’ve believed I’m a reasonably competent human being.


Not perfect, of course. Nobody is. But competent enough: fairly good teacher, decent husband, reliable father, proud grandfather. I drive without causing panic, I speak in full sentences, I write things that usually make sense. Life has felt under control.


And then the banana issue arrived.


Now, I don’t treat bananas lightly. They are a daily ritual. One for breakfast like a responsible adult avoiding chocolate-based moral failure. One after dinner when I’m pretending I’m not thinking about dessert.


We’ve had a long, loyal relationship—bananas and I.


Which is why this revelation feels personal.


According to extremely reliable sources (which I prefer not to name, for emotional reasons), I have been peeling bananas incorrectly my entire life.


That sentence deserves respect.


Apparently, I’ve been doing it the “wrong” way. The stem end. The obvious end. The end that feels like it was designed for humans with logic and dignity.


Wrong.


The “correct” method, I am told, is to peel from the other side. The soft end. The mysterious end. The end that feels like it should come with a disclaimer and possibly counselling.


I tried it today.


It did not feel like enlightenment. It felt like betrayal disguised as fruit handling. The banana resisted. I resisted. There was a brief moment where I questioned my qualifications for basic kitchen independence.


And that’s where the crisis began.


Because once you discover you’ve been peeling a banana incorrectly, everything comes under suspicion.


What else have I been doing wrong with confidence? Pasta timings? Remote controls? The correct way to fold a fitted sheet—which I am convinced is a shared global lie?


This is no longer about fruit. This is philosophy.


People say, “Just change the way you do it.”


As if identity is a software update.


But it’s not that simple. The stem has history. The stem has dignity. The stem has served faithfully for decades without complaint.


So now I stand at a crossroads.


Do I evolve into a modern banana thinker, enlightened and soft-end compliant?


Or do I continue as I am—slightly outdated, possibly wrong, but emotionally stable in my banana tradition?


Either way, something has shifted.


Because now, every banana feels less like breakfast…


and more like a judgment.

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Thursday, 14 May 2026

On a Ship, and on a Precipice

 

On a Ship, and on a Precipice

It begins, once again, with uncertainty.

A cruise ship. An outbreak. A handful of deaths. And almost immediately, the familiar machinery of global response is set in motion — governments, health agencies, and experts trying to steady public concern while the facts are still forming.

Some are quick to insist it is not COVID all over again. Others warn against assuming it is anything benign. Between reassurance and alarm, there is a narrowing space where the public simply waits for clarity that has not yet arrived.

That, perhaps, is the real condition of our time — not the crisis itself, but the way crises now unfold long before certainty is possible.

Authorities describe the situation as “under control,” even as passengers are moved across borders and international monitoring quietly intensifies. To those watching from the outside, the response can appear inconsistent, even improvised. But governments rarely operate in ideal conditions. They are forced to weigh health risk, logistics, diplomacy, and public sentiment simultaneously, often with incomplete and shifting information.

What looks like hesitation is often decision-making under constraint.

Still, in the absence of firm answers, perception fills the gap. And perception rarely waits for nuance. Anxiety grows in the space between evolving evidence and official communication — a space that has become increasingly familiar in recent years.

We have lived through this pattern before. During COVID, guidance shifted repeatedly as science caught up with reality. Terms like “low risk,” “monitoring closely,” and “no evidence of sustained spread” were not evasions so much as attempts to describe a moving target with limited visibility. Yet for the public, repetition of uncertainty can begin to feel like contradiction.

This is not a call for alarm. Panic has never been useful, and it rarely travels with accuracy. But neither is reassurance, delivered too early or too confidently, without cost. Trust depends on something more fragile: the willingness to admit what is not yet known, without losing credibility in the process.

The difficulty is that modern crises do not arrive in a single, legible moment. They emerge in fragments — reports, briefings, leaks, images, speculation — each one partial, each one quickly overtaken by the next. Meaning is assembled in real time, often before understanding has had a chance to settle.

Even now, after everything the world has been through, that tension has not eased. If anything, it has become the default condition: rapid information, slow certainty, and a public expected to interpret the gap between them.

Perhaps that is what lingers most in moments like this.

Not fear. Not certainty. But the uneasy experience of watching something take shape while still being told it is not yet fully visible.

And so we return, again, to the same place — between what is known, what is assumed, and what is still forming.

 

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Tuesday, 12 May 2026

24 hours in a day

 Della d'Souza

Posts

Michael Guzder

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Michael Guzder

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What We Learnt at School—and What We Needed to Know
Having spent most of my working life in education, I should begin with a disclaimer: this is a light-hearted reflection, written with respect, gratitude, and a dash of cheek. For all the good schooling gave us, there are moments when one wonders whether so much time needed to be spent on logarithms, rhombuses, and the reproductive habits of flowers.
I spent a good part of my school years learning trigonometry, logarithms, and the properties of a rhombus—knowledge that, hand on heart, has not once been used in everyday life. Not once in a supermarket aisle have I thought, “Now is the moment for sine and cosine.” Nor have I ever been rescued in conversation by a four-sided figure with equal sides.
There was also the business of quadratic equations, compass-drawn circles, chemical equations, and stalactites and stalagmites—useful perhaps if one is ever stranded in a cave with a ruler, a chemistry set, and an exam paper.
Then came the classics: two trains leaving different stations at different speeds, calculating when they meet—or the length of a platform that could have been measured in a minute with a tape and some common sense. I always wondered why trains were involved at all, and why they always seemed to be travelling at what can only be described as emergency velocity.
Much of school life involved memorising capitals, rivers, mountain ranges, flower parts, and enough of the periodic table to sound confident for forty-five minutes in an exam hall—before much of it quietly faded soon after.
There were also the rituals: books wrapped in brown paper, headings underlined in red, margins drawn with precision, pencils sharpened to a point, and the belief that neat handwriting reflected character. Learning often meant repetition, and repetition was presented as understanding.
Yet many of the things that matter most in life were barely touched.
How money works. How to speak so people listen. How to listen properly. How to handle failure. How to disagree without conflict. How to build relationships. How to think in a noisy world. How to manage stress, sleep, food, and health. How to bend without breaking when life throws a googly.
These lessons were learned elsewhere—through experience, mistakes, and people who stepped in when it mattered most.
Thankfully, that picture is changing fast.
Schools are moving away from the old factory model: rows of silent children, all taught the same thing, expected to memorise and reproduce it, and then move on. In its place is a more connected and practical approach to learning.
There is now greater emphasis on understanding over memorising, skills over repetition, curiosity over compliance, and application over recall. Learning is being drawn closer to the real world students will enter.
Communication, collaboration, creativity, resilience, problem-solving, digital awareness, wellbeing, and ethical thinking are no longer optional extras. They are central to education.
Knowledge still matters. But in a world where information is instantly available, discernment matters more. The real skill is knowing what to trust, what to question, and how to think clearly.
That, ultimately, is what education should aim for—not simply to fill minds, but to shape them to think, adapt, and grow.
And while I remain quietly grateful that I can still recognise a rhombus at fifty paces, I’m glad the next generation may leave school better prepared for life—not merely for exams, but for the far messier business of living it.
Alan Seymour
It is encouraging to hear that modern education is finally bridging this gap between academic rote learning and the "messy bus… 
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Michael Guzder

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WE DON'T FIX THINGS ANYMORE
From repair culture to replace culture—how time, status and convenience reshaped what we discard
________________________________________
Growing up in Allahabad, a quiet North Indian city on the banks of the Ganges, broken things rarely stayed broken in our minds. They were simply waiting—unfinished, not over. A torn school bag, a punctured tyre, a silent radio—none of it felt like an ending. Only a delay in repair.
There was an unspoken rule: if it could be fixed, it would be fixed.
Wastage was frowned upon almost instinctively. “Why buy new if it can be repaired?” was common sense, not advice.
Shoes went to the cobbler until they were barely the same pair. Bicycle tires carried layers of puncture repairs like memory. School bags survived years of use with stitching, patches and reinforcement that made them stronger with time. Furniture wobbled for decades, held together by nails, gum, tacks and refusal to discard.
Repair was practical, not polished. Gum, cello tape, nails, hammer, needle and thread—whatever was available became the toolkit of survival. Broken handles were tied back. Loose joints tightened. Cracked buckets were given “one more chance” that often lasted years.
Every neighbourhood had its repair men—the cobbler, tailor, cycle repair man, carpenter, electrician, mechanic. Small shops filled with grease, spare parts and quiet confidence that most things could be fixed.
Every home had a toolbox, and young boys and men were expected to be reasonably adept at repair—taps, switches, pipes, hen coops, hedges, gates… you name it. Fixing things was part of growing up, not an optional skill.
The radio repair shops were the most fascinating. Radios lay open like mechanical puzzles—coils, valves, wires, tiny components exposed like secrets. Yet with patience and a soldering iron, silence would become sound again. A flicker, a crackle—and music returned as if nothing had ever gone wrong.
Gramophones and record players were treated with equal care. Needles were replaced, turntables adjusted, static patiently removed. Nothing was discarded while it still had a second life.
This habit extended into homes without instruction. Sewing machines were permanent fixtures—heavy, reliable, always ready. Sewing kits held threads, needles, buttons, hooks and safety pins in old tins. Clothes were mended without fuss. Socks were darned, seams stitched, tears closed as routine. A missing button was incidental, not waste.
Books too were preserved, not replaced. School textbooks were stitched when they fell apart. Torn pages were pasted with gum. Brown paper covers were renewed repeatedly. Even notebooks were reinforced, because wasting pages was unthinkable.
The principle was simple: use carefully, repair quickly, discard rarely.
That world has quietly slipped away—and with it, a fundamental shift in how we relate to objects.
Time has become the decisive factor. It is often quicker and more convenient to buy new than to wait days for a repair. What once demanded patience is now replaced at the drop of a hat. Repair, in many cases, feels inconvenient and out of step with modern life.
There is also a social dimension. Objects are no longer only used; they are seen. Phones, cars and everyday items signal taste, status and position. To replace is to appear updated and relevant. Keeping up has become an unspoken paradigm shift in behaviour rather than a conscious choice.
Modern life adds further pressure—more guests, more expectations, more visibility. Homes are more exposed, lifestyles more compared. What once stayed private is now constantly on display. In such a setting, repair can feel like falling behind rather than being resourceful.
And waste has followed naturally. Food is bought in excess, stored in abundance, and discarded in equal measure. Refrigerators are full beyond need. Cupboards overflow. Consumption has drifted from necessity into habit—often wasteful without intent.
The shift is subtle but unmistakable—from repair as instinct to replacement as reflex.
And somewhere in that shift, something quieter has gone missing: not just thrift, but respect—for things, for effort, and for the simple dignity of making something last.
Cirvesh Daga
So true. Partly the issue is cost of manufacturing is so low that repairs are cost prohibitively expensive. It’s cheaper to bu… 
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Michael Guzder

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Carbon Paper
How many remember carbon paper?
That thin blue-black sheet that quietly sat in drawers and then blackened everything it touched. Fingers first. Then face. Then, somehow, your white school shirt.
And one sheet lasted forever. Folded, crumpled, flattened, reused. Again and again. It became faint, tired, half-dead—but still in service. Nobody threw carbon paper away.
We used it for tracing too. One careful drawing, steady hand… and then one small slip. A long black drag mark across the page. Finished. Start again.
Then came typing class. Paper in, carbon in between, keys hit hard. Out came two copies—one clear, one ghostly—and both with fingerprints stamped on them for free.
And yes, some bright sparks in school discovered another use—copying signatures. Teacher’s signature. Parent’s signature. Even the Principal’s grand flourish on report cards. For a few hours, they felt very clever.
Then a teacher looked closely and said,
“Interesting signature. Why is your thumbprint next to it?”
End of story.
Children today have copy-paste.
We had carbon paper—
copy, smudge, stain, and occasional scandal.
Sarita Aston Seymour
During my time at the I.T. College hostel, there was a policy requiring lights to be turned off after 10:00 p.m., even during … 
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Michael Guzder

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25 Years with GEMS Education — A Journey of Gratitude
On the 1st of May 2026, I complete 25 years with GEMS Education—a journey that has been deeply meaningful to me, both personally and professionally.
When I first arrived in the United Arab Emirates, it was with a simple plan to stay for a few years and then return home. I did not imagine that life would unfold here in such a lasting and fulfilling way. Over time, the UAE became home in every sense. It is a country defined by vision, safety, openness, and respect for people from all walks of life. It creates opportunity, embraces diversity, and allows people to grow and contribute with dignity. I remain sincerely grateful for all it has given me.
My journey within GEMS has brought many opportunities to learn and serve. I began as Headmaster at Dubai Modern Academy, then spent 14 very special years as Principal of The Millennium School Dubai. Over the years, I have also served as Vice President – Education, Senior Vice President, and now Executive Vice President.
Along the way, I have been involved in opening and developing schools, supporting recruitment, representing GEMS at teacher training colleges in India, speaking at forums, and leading leadership development programmes. I currently oversee six large schools within the Our Own Cluster, supporting over 30,000 students along with hundreds of dedicated teachers and staff.
I have never really seen these as positions, but rather as trust placed in me—to serve with sincerity, consistency, and care.
If I reflect on these years, what has stayed with me is a simple belief: stay committed, stay consistent, and always approach work with honesty and respect for people. I have tried to remain grounded, keep things simple, be decisive when needed, and focus on getting things done well—while helping others do the same.
In school leadership, I have always believed our first responsibility is to serve students well and earn the trust of parents, who place immense faith in us. Their partnership and feedback remain central to everything we do.
Working in education is a privilege. Being around children is a daily reminder of hope, possibility, and the importance of nurturing every young life with care.
I have been fortunate to work with many colleagues—teachers, leaders, and support staff—whose dedication and kindness have shaped this journey. Whatever I may have contributed has always been part of a collective effort, and I remain deeply grateful for the relationships and friendships built over the years.
I would also like to acknowledge our Founder and Chairman, Mr Sunny Varkey, an exceptional leader whose humanitarian vision and philanthropy have shaped GEMS with deep purpose; Mr Dino Varkey, Chief Executive Officer, whose calm and focused leadership brings clarity and stability; and Mr Jay Varkey, Deputy Chief Executive Officer, whose energy, humility, and warmth continue to inspire those around him. I would also like to express my sincere appreciation to Mrs. Shirley Varkey, whose quiet strength and grace have been a steady presence in the GEMS journey. I also fondly remember Madam Varkey, whose warmth, simplicity, and kindness left a lasting impression on all who knew her.
I am also grateful to MS Lisa Crausby - OBE – Group Chief Education Officer , and the Senior Leadership team at GEMS for their guidance, trust, and steady support over the years.
As I complete 25 years, I do so with a heart full of gratitude—for the journey, the people, the learning, and the trust placed in me.
I remain thankful to be part of this story and continue to find deep meaning in the work we do every day in education.
I thank almighty God for his blessings.
Thank you, GEMS. Thank you, UAE.
Lester DMello
Congratulations Sir on completing 25 years with GEMS Education!

Michael Guzder is in Dubai, UAE.

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Michael Guzder

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Have you ever stopped to think that there are only two days in our lives that are not a full 24 hours—the day we are born and the day we leave this world?
We go through life counting days, birthdays, and years, rarely pausing to think about what they really mean or what all that counting is really leading toward. Everything in between is where our story unfolds. We don’t remember how we entered, and we don’t know how or when we’ll exit, but we are given this time in between to feel, to connect, to try, to grow.
It’s easy to get caught up in routines and worries and forget how precious ordinary days are.
Maybe it’s worth slowing down once in a while, noticing the people around us, being a little kinder, a little more patient, a little more considerate. Say the kind words, make the call, show up, forgive a little easier, love a little more openly. The moments pass quickly, and often it’s the small things that stay with people the longest.
In the end, it’s not just about how long we live, but how we make others feel while we’re here.
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