I’ve been a little perplexed about where I stand these days.
I spent more than a decade in design and media before entering academia. I worked on campaigns and projects I’m proud of, learned from some very good people, made mistakes, survived deadlines, difficult clients, bad briefs, good briefs, and everything that comes with actually practising a profession.
Three years ago, I moved into ‘full time’ teaching with a fairly simple thought: perhaps I could bring some of that lived experience into the classroom. Perhaps I could be, in some small way, the kind of teacher I often wished I had.
For a while, that gave me an enormous sense of purpose. Lately, though, I’ve started questioning it.
Teaching design, media or film is a strange space to occupy. There’s still that lingering assumption that if you were really successful in practice, you wouldn’t be teaching it. That academia is where practitioners eventually “settle.”
I’ve never quite believed that.
A good practitioner doesn’t automatically make a good teacher, and a good teacher doesn’t need to be a failed practitioner. Teaching is a different craft altogether. At its best, it asks you to take years of instinct, failure and experience and make them useful to someone who hasn’t lived through them yet.
But the classroom is changing too.
Attention is becoming harder to hold. Screens compete with conversations. In private education especially, the relationship between student and teacher can sometimes feel strangely transactional. And yes, there are moments when genuine mentorship seems to be taken for granted.
I don’t want to turn this into another complaint about “this generation.” I’m probably the last person who wants to do that.
Maybe they have a point that I’m not getting.
Maybe the classroom I imagined no longer exists in quite the same way. Or maybe I need to rethink what being a teacher means now.
And somewhere in all of this, another question keeps returning. Maybe it’s time to go back to practice.
There are unfinished projects waiting. Ideas I’ve postponed. Ventures I’ve been meaning to start for years. Things I still want to make rather than merely talk about making.
Maybe this is the curtain call for Professor Sourav Mukherjee.
Maybe not.
I have a lot left to learn, and probably even more to unlearn. Perhaps it’s time to sign off from this side of academia for a while and see what the other side has been keeping for me.
I don’t know yet. What I do know is that I’m nowhere near finished.
As a dear friend once told:
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