What the Kid Who Asked Too Many Questions Found Out

I was the kid teachers pulled aside after class. Kindly and, at times, not so kindly. The message to me, often, was to ask fewer questions so things could move along.

I understood their constraints. But I could not make peace with the logic. I was not asking to be difficult. I was asking because I genuinely wanted to know how something worked, or why it was done that particular way, or whether there was a better way nobody had tried yet. That habit followed me out of school and into everything I built afterward.

When I first came across global citizenship, during conversations around the time the UN Sustainable Development Goals were being shaped, most people I spoke with had not heard of it. What does that mean? I heard that more than anything else. Their confusion and skepticism sparked further curiosity. Looking back, that drove me to get deeper. That curiosity is what led me to start the Global Citizenship Foundation. And staying genuinely open along the way is how I ended up in rooms with some of the most interesting education leaders I have met.

More than a year into running the Foundation, I was working on something that did not yet exist in India: bringing global citizenship education (GCED) into every part of a school's life through a whole-school approach to GCED. I brought the idea to people whose judgment I trusted. Several of them told me, with varying degrees of diplomacy, that it would not work. I heard that sentence enough times that I started to notice something about it. Nobody who said it ever followed up with a real explanation. It was a conclusion with no reasoning attached, and I genuinely did not know what to do with that.

So I reached out to Principal Sunita Mattoo. When I told her what I was trying to do, she did not offer a verdict. She had two questions. "How will you know if you don't try? And did you ask them why not?"

That exchange reminded me of something simple. Even if others had tried something similar, it was not this, not here, not now. The context was mine. So was the responsibility. That conversation stayed with me. Looking back, it was a turning point for the Foundation and the work I continue to do.

That work is now in its tenth year. All along, I have carried that question through all of it. Not because it made everything easier. It did not. But it changed what I did with uncertainty. Moments of uncertainty stopped being a reason to stop and became a reason to find out. Many had said it would not work. In 2023, integrating GCED into formal education became official policy in India's National Curriculum Framework. Nobody who told me it would not work said anything about that. The kid who asked too many questions had found out.

The question did not go away once things were working. If anything it became more useful. I ask it when something is not working. I ask it when something is. If I do not understand why something is working, I cannot sustain it or build on it.

The most useful things came from the detours. Nobody could have told me that in advance. I am glad nobody did. Most of what I learned came, in fact, from the parts I did not plan for. That is what curiosity does when you let it run.

If there is something I would want a young person to take from any of this, it is not a formula. Ask the question, then actually listen to what comes back, even when it is uncomfortable, even when it does not confirm what you hoped to hear. Stay open to learning along the way, because the path will keep revealing things you did not expect and could not have planned for.

It is not easy. Nobody else will have walked it in quite the same way, with the same context, the same questions, the same set of people and moments. That is precisely why open questions matter. And how the journey becomes uniquely yours.

I am still figuring things out. But I have never regretted asking why not.

Note: These are the notes I wrote when AMNS International School, Surat invited me to contribute to their Annual School Magazine.