Books; People; Ideas : These are few of my favourite things. As I live between day-to-day compromises and change-the-world aspirations, this is the chronicle of my journey, full of moments of occasional despair and opportune discoveries, of connections and creations, and, most of all, my quest of knowledge as conversations.
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Indian Election 2014: Seven Fragmented Thoughts
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1.
Rahul Gandhi must have read Lincoln, "I will study and get ready, and perhaps my chances will come".
Instead, he should have followed,
"Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle."
Lincoln, again!
2.
There are three kinds of people in politics, Self-Made, Never-Made and Self-Destroyed.
Good that there is never a category called 'Born Into" in democratic politics.
3.
Larry Summers had a brilliant idea in the 1980s. He suggested all the polluting industries should be relocated from the First World to the Third World because the life costs less in the latter.
They just did that with Organised Political Marketing.
4.
I was reading about the world's luckiest man, Frano Selak. Prakash Karat will somewhat come near him if he still survives this election being at the helm of the Communist Party of India (Marxist).
Perhaps he knows how to do what this man in video is doing.
5.
India will have a Great Leap Forward under Narendra Modi. It will surely turn out to be like the last one. (Read Tombstone)
6.
There are no contradictions in Mamta Banerjee's attitude towards Bangladeshis.
She does not want to give them water, so that their farming dies and they starve; that way, they ultimately have to become destitute, come to India illegally and vote for her against a ration card she would give because she is so humane.
7.
May 16th 2014 is not like 15th August 1947. It feels like 30th January 1948 already.
A friend has recently forwarded me a quote from Lord Macaulay's speech in the British Parliament on 2nd February 1835. I reproduce the quote below: "I have traveled across the length and breadth of India and I have not seen one person who is a beggar, who is a thief. Such wealth I have seen in this country, such high moral values, people of such calibre, that I do not think we would ever conquer this country, unless we break the very backbone of this nation, which is her spiritual and cultural heritage, and, therefore, I propose that we replace her old and ancient education system, her culture, for if the Indians think that all that is foreign and English is good and greater than their own, they will lose their self-esteem, their native self-culture and they will become what we want them, a truly dominated nation."
The email requested me to forward me to every indian I know. I was tempted, but there were two oddities about this quote. First, the language, which appeared …
Business gift giving has always been common and contentious at the same time. Business gifts are usually seen as an ‘advertising, sales promotion and marketing communication medium’ (Cooper etal, 1991). Arunthanesetal (1994) points out that such gifting is practised usually for three reasons: (a) in appreciation for past client relationships, placing a new order, referrals to other clients, etc.; (b) in the hopes of creating a positive, first impression which might help to establish an initial business relationship; and (c) giving may be perceived as a quid Pro quo (i.e. returning a favour or expecting a favour in return for something).
The practitioners of gift-giving generally argue that doing business is often an aggregation of personal interactions and relationships, and gift-giving should be seen as a natural way of maintaining and enhancing these relationships. ‘Business gifts, especially one given in the course of the festive season, is …
In most societies today, making profits are accepted as moral, if not especially praiseworthy. This was not as obvious as it appears today – people used to be embarrassed about making a profit not so long ago.
Crazy as it seems today, it is worth thinking why it was so.
Profits, as economists will put it, is the reward for risk-taking, for putting a business enterprise together in the pursuit of an objective. In this definition, remember, profits are not what it is commonly understood to be – the gross middle-line towards the bottom – but a figure net of entrepreneur’s earning [wages for his labour], dividends and interests on borrowed capital, and provisions for building and other physical assets [a sort of rent, offsetting what these assets could have earned if leased out]. This pure profit – surplus – accrues to a business as a reward to its organisation, for the act of entrepreneurship itself.
Economists were divided on how this surplus comes about. The conventional wisdom was, as I …
Since October, as I walked out of my job, I have been looking to fine-tune my ideas about Education-to-Employment transition.
The first step of this was to look at the experiences of last six years, which I spent developing, first, an online competency-based education programme and then on building employer-engaged online project-based education. These were all good ideas, and the reason that I am not doing these any more are partially operational: The first business was underfunded, and the second one was poorly conceived and implemented. But those are discussions for a different day. I am focusing currently on understanding the key conceptual elements - what works and what doesn't work - of a successful education-to-employment transition.
Indeed, the claim that we can make a student employable with a few months of training is apparently pretentious. The years of schooling, family background and the students' dispensation, and luck, plays a much bigger role than any traini…
Even when the limitations of an education system are quite obvious, innovations are hard to come by. This is a lesson many well-meaning investors and hard-charging entrepreneurs have learnt at great cost, yours truly included, but why this is so has evaded them completely.
Usually, one finds soul-comforting explanation in bureaucracy or in institutional politics. But this do not explain why there is so little demand for all these 'innovative' offerings and why, unlike other sectors, the customer preferences - employer demands and students' desires - do not overwhelm the traditional sectors and ease the path of innovation. And, even where swelling demography and broken education seem to be hurtling towards certain disaster - like in Asia and Africa - new ways of educating appears more, and not less, difficult.
For example, India, faced with the task of educating a huge workforce at a time when automation and reversal of globalisation threaten most jobs and industries, to…
Business Schools are a great success story in Higher Education. What may have started as a Correspondence training was transformed by the establishment of University department in Pennsylvania with Joseph Wharton's money, to train the captains of American industry, in 1881. A generation later, with the founding of Harvard Business School in 1908, the whole global phenomenon has got started, though it took until 1954 for Cambridge University to start Management studies (which became a separate business school in 1995, while Oxford started its Business School in 1996). By the turn of the millennium, Business has become the most popular undergraduate subject, and increasingly Engineers and other technically trained professionals were coming to Business Schools to get credentialed. By this time, Business Schools became the most successful sector in Higher Education, with unparallelled prestige, and had developed an entire ecosystem of ranking, funding and accreditation of their own. …
In an ironic twist, many large employers in India complain that the education Indian graduates receive are too narrow.
Surely, the same employers, riding high on growth of IT services, helped model a tertiary education system - second largest in the world in terms of student numbers - as one narrowly, vocationally, defined. The glamour of the IT services industry, with an urban cosmopolitan life and the chance of lottery-draw for offshore opportunities, completely transformed Indian middle class life over the last two decades: That the whole ecosystem of Middle Class education, from Senior School to Business School, aligned itself to these new opportunities, is no surprise at all.
But this expansion has now stalled, offshore is becoming off limits, and the industry is transforming rapidly. Rather than each corporation trying to develop their various enterprise-wide systems from scratch, and thereby, handing out huge multi-year development contracts to be executed by an army of low…
In an earlier post, I pointed out that the application of 'platform thinking' in education misses the mark, as it fails to understand how value is created in education. Since this apparently contradicts my earlier enthusiasm for the university as a 'user network', this statement needs further explanation.
To start with, Clayton Christiansen's idea that the universities of the Twentieth Century needs to evolve from its current 'value chain' model - wherein its value lies in its processes - to a form of User Network, where its value emanates from its community, still resonates with me. The Value Chain model, with departments, examinations, textbooks and degrees, that we know the university for, is very much a late Nineteenth/ early Twentieth century formulation. And, indeed, one can claim that the universities were always communities, and its value came from being a member of that community rather than its end product - the degrees - for much of history. It …
For those who want to change the world through Powerpoint, there are some fundamental beliefs about Education.
Like, education is about 'human capital', making the individuals receiving education economically productive.
And, that, education is important for national competitiveness, the better educated its people are, the more competitive a nation will be.
That education is really about skills - being able to do things - rather than learning: Knowledge can be acquired on-demand and at leisure.
That educators should build close connections with employers and look to align themselves with their future talent needs.
These are ideas everyone - at least everyone who count - agree on. And, such agreement means that all the attention, along with all the money, gets diverted to certain specific things. And, with money and attention, a certain kind of education - a specific idea of education - becomes pre-eminent. It crowds out other ideas, drives out all the alternatives.
This &…
Ten years ago, I wrote a post on this blog about Lord Macaulay, or, more specifically, about a statement which he allegedly had made about India. I meant to debunk one of those Internet memes that seek to revise the history with a specific agenda: Now we call these things 'fake news'. Sent to me by a well-meaning and unsuspecting friend, it was a crude hoax, giving itself away in modern language and openly conspiratorial motive, apparently at odds with Reform Era English Intellectual manners and ideas. It took me a few minutes on Google to figure out that the quote came not from Macaulay, but a Hinduvta journal published in the United States in the 70s, which invented the statement.
At that time, almost exactly 10 years ago, this blog was a hobby, my scrapbook of ideas, something I did with no other purpose than keeping the habit of writing. The post about Macaulay changed all that. Little did I suspect how popular and widespread the usage of that quote was, and how many peo…
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