Sarath Ganji
What are you doing now?
Thankfully, taking a bit of a break! I just wrapped up two-and-a-half years at Guidehouse, a management consulting firm, where I helped U.S. Department of State clients design comms campaigns, build strategic partnerships, and mainstream data-driven practices. I spent most of my time supporting the Office of Foreign Assistance’s aid transparency efforts, including during the early and frantic months of COVID-19. I enjoyed the work and valued the mission—but I also missed my family . . . and bar-hopping.
So, I decided to pause my work life for a few months and head back to Louisiana. In between helpings of gator and gumbo, I’ve taken up a few side hustles, including serving as a Penn Kemble Fellow with the National Endowment for Democracy and drafting publications on labor rights in the Arabian Gulf.
How has the Fellowship impacted your career?
The Fellowship gave me the confidence to stake intellectual positions and then present them to external—even skeptical—audiences. I wrote my fellowship paper on U.S.-Israeli relations. A fraught topic, I was worried that the CSPC audience might reject my conclusions and recommendations—and me along with them. Instead, I was encouraged by the Center’s decision to publish the paper and by a CSPC advisor’s interest in adding it to his course syllabus.
In college, I was counseled by professors to write papers that not only analyzed a topic but also advanced policy recommendations. But no one really taught me how to do the latter, so I relied on spaces outside the classroom to experiment with unfamiliar methods and incubate unsettled ideas. The fellowship offered me exactly that. In the years since, I’ve published papers critical of Emirati and Qatari policies and delivered uncomfortable advice to policy principals—and I doubt I’d be up for it if not for spaces like the fellowship’s.
What is your favorite memory of the Fellowship?
My spring conference took place just as the U.S. economy was emerging from the worst of the Financial Crisis, so it’s no surprise that the Center awarded Ben Bernanke, then-Chairman of the Federal Reserve, the Publius Award at its awards dinner. But I was floored when I saw, in the conference schedule, that the Center had also arranged for him to do a private Q&A with the fellows.
The session seemed to go by in seconds, but I remember a couple of things. The first was his candor and humor in describing the flash of emotions he experienced as he began sizing up the Crisis. Even leaders with a reputation for equanimity can be rocked by challenging events—and it’s good to know that’s okay. The second was the role of his decades-long career as an economist in informing his subsequent work in government. Academia has a role to play in policy, but that talking point is usually focused on exchanging ideas across two distinct silos—silos that often blame the other when those ideas fall short of expectations. What the Chairman spoke to was moving not just his ideas but himself across silos, and then owning the potential failures that came during that.
If you could have any job in the world, what would you do?
100% a travel writer. I was fortunate to get a whiff of the life years back, while in the Middle East on grants from Harvard and Fulbright. From sneaking into labor camps to interview the South Asian migrants building Qatar’s World Cup, to visiting medical tourism facilities remaking the UAE’s healthcare system, I found myself—an introvert—surprisingly into speaking with strangers, documenting their stories, and then narrating them for wider audiences.
I’m currently designing a writing project around internationalization—one that'll require a fair bit of talking and traveling. Fingers crossed that I can get the grants to fund a couple years of trekking!
Originally published October 12, 2021.