Forty five years of a person’s life is pretty much most of what can be termed as active life of any person…And that’s the number of years I have spent as a teacher, trainer, researcher, advisor and academic administrator within an institutional framework. I have had the privilege of experiencing academic engagements in various leading educational settings like a Medical College, a liberal Arts autonomous college, a liberal Arts and Science University, a liberal Arts autonomous minority College, India’s number one management school in the public space and India’s number one management school in the private space. Out of this close to three decades were in the premier public management school in Western India from which I retired.

Look at it from any angle, the verdict is unanimous – it has been a fascinating journey. Especially every time, yes every time I walked into a classroom in these institutions to engage and be engaged by students.

And to think that most of these forty five years I have spent looking searchingly at just one human, social, organizational skill in most of my engagements with intellectually stimulating postgraduate students in the world of management education as well as with the experientially questioning students from the world of practice. Every engagement with every group of students meant deeper and deeper insights into what I became more and more convinced was a vital skill in human, social and organizational settings. It has indeed been a voyage of discovery…

The skill in question is the most fascinating of all skills – the skill of negotiating – a skill which has all but consumed a life time’s intellectual, emotional and ineractional energy. And once I signed off from institutional academic life and moved into the space of independent academic life housed in the Skills and Methods Academy, my energies are now centred on researching and writing as an Independent Sociologist.

The main focus of my current research is towards the long held passion to understand intensely the unique features of negotiations methodology as evidenced in the life episodes, speeches and writings of four world leaders who honed their negotiations skills and methods in the cauldron of what can best be termed as deep rooted conflicts and the method of research is based on direct interpretations of their biographies – Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson, Mandela, Malcolm X.