After diligently using Twitter for almost ten years and acquiring a writing style marked out by its use of 140-character bursts, I’ve decided to revisit the idea of a blog. Ironically, for me this represents a move into long-form writing. The catalyst for the change of heart, or extension to my repetoire? A two-week university tour of duty to a country I love, India. More specifically, as Pro Vice Chancellor at Oxford Brookes University holding the senior management portfolio for intenational student recruitment, I will be hosting alumni events over the coming fortnight in Chennai, Mumbai and New Delhi.

I have always enjoyed writing and have engaged in most of the available forms over the years. Banging out a word count to order has been a big part of my adult life. Writing whilst travelling though has a special place in my working life. It’s part diary, part observational documentary. Passing through places and past people forces you desperately to hold your gaze and attempt to make sense of things quickly. Being an outsider in a foreign unfamiliar country, of course, is tourism, pure and simple. In my previous life as a documentary film and television director I tended to avoid these kind of engagements, preferring the work produced over time, from inside communities. I tended to be disparaging towards those filmmakers or journalists ‘just passing through’.

India is not an unfamiliar place to me. I have visited the country fairly regularly over the years and have friends in the UK who moved there from Tamil Nadu and Kerala. My wife, Debbie Fionn Barr, has been rehearsal director for a Bharat Natyam dance company all of the time we’ve been together (over 20 years) and she’s now a full-time research student at Coventry University completing her PhD focusing on this classical Indian dance form. By way of evidencing my love of the country, I can also profess to be fairly proficient in the kitchen at preparing South Indian cuisine. All that said, my love of India goes much deeper than this list of encounters with a country’s culture and people. But more of that later.

Today, after 17 hours of travel from Oxfordshire via Dubai, I am holed up in a hotel in the centre of Chennai. As an aside, this city has many aspects to it of interest to the visitor, but one thing it lacks is a defined centre. Like so much of India, the city presents intself as a maelstrom of chaotic activity. There is very little left of what urban design may have been undertaken hundreds of years ago. The ITC Grand Chola is where we will host our latest alumni event in south-east Asia tomorrow night (Tuesday 18 October). I will be joined by our External Relations Director, Alison Bond and the manager of our India office, Gaurav Sharma, later this evening as we all converge on Chennai from different parts of the world.

It is a particularly exciting and challenging time for international student recruitment and engagement at the moment. Challenging because of the British governments conflation of two very separate issues – immigration and universities’ global engagement. If we don’t want to make it difficult for UK universities to continue to be world market leaders, then we really should decouple the recruitment of international students from the contentious issue of immigration targets. Again, more later.

Oxford Brookes University is in a very good place regards the diversity and richness of its student body and staffing profile. Listed in the world’s Top 200 Most International Universities in 2016 and attracting large numbers of highly qualified, talented postgraduate students from over 120 countries, the University is fortunate to be based in a city that many commentators regard as the intellectual capital of the world – Oxford. The University has always attracted large numbers of students from Asia, and in particular, India, China and Malaysia. Almost 18% of our student population are from outside the UK, so with a view to protecting and building on this profile in an increasingly competitive marketplace, we have decided on a strategy that sees us bringing together our alumni activity with our international student recruitment operation. This means that students holding offers to study at the university can meet up ‘in country’ with members of our alumni network. Over the past 6 months we have been working on events in China and Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore, India, North America and across Africa. Even without Brexit we had decided to focus our efforts outside Europe.

I have always focussed my ideas about global education on seeking out cultural similarity, rather than difference between national and peoples. I recently was engaged in presenting some scholarships to international students and found myself recalling one particular story from a project I had led in West Africa just after 9/11. At the time I was bringing together my Filmmaking career with the British Council’s desire to engage more meaningfully with the developing world. I had assembled filmmakers, media academics and students from five West African countries (Senegal, Cameroon, Sierra Leone, Ghana and Nigeria) to work with their UK counterparts on ‘Storyline’s. The aim of the project was to make a series of short student films about cultural semblance with African students partnering with UK students. FIlms were made home and away, so to speak.

The recent awards ceremony (and its attendant duty to make a speech) sparked a memory of a moment in time in Senegal fourteen years ago. Filmmakers deal in the currency of moments so I make no excuses for using narrative in my second (or third?) career in university leadership and management. Anyway, the slice in time involved a young student from the south of England who was a promising filmmaker but as of yet hadn’t found his voice. It was a particularly hot day in Dakar, the capital city, and we were doing some test shoots. The young man was obviously struggling because, as he confided in me, he couldn’t find any African women carrying water pots on their heads. Despite the awkwardness of the conversation, I used his line as a way of engaging everyone in a seminar and workshop about visual cliche. We were in one of West Africa’s most vibrant cities, and looking for the cliche (a rural one at that) was causing him to not see the obvious all around him.

As I boarded my connecting flight to Chennai from Dubai last night I witnessed another moment of cultural universality, played out with me as unwitting participant. In a packed plane, a young family of two adults and four children had decided to requisition six seats together and then re-direct the seat ‘owners’ to other parts of the plane. These weren’t particularly wealthy or privileged people, but they were very forceful in their behaviour. Almost immediately, I was reminded of the middle-class parents of children at my daughter’s primary school in West Oxfordshire who arrive early at every school concert and occupy all the best seats in the house using their coats and bags. Both sets of ‘occupiers’ see their action as their right. Different cultures, same beliefs.

Enough for now.

The photograph accompanying the blog post? We live in a world where young people photograph everything they eat. Don’t get me started on the problematic territory that this sub-genre enters. But in the spirit of youthful endeavour (I’m very old), this was the first meal I consumed on Indian soil this time round. A South Indian breakfast, and one of my particular favourites from around the world. If you knew me well you’d have been treated to this in my kitchen at home all those thousands of kilometres away in England.