Conversations: 1

-
Half year gone - should I repeat the cliche that time's flying - and I am on the threshold of a new thing. A new 100 days plan will be handy, and I intend to set this in motion from tomorrow. Let things change and fast.

So, here is the last six months: Our plan to get the business off the ground with a strategy that we decided upon late last year has failed. Focusing on one territory and a couple of partners was a risky plan - I did foresee this bit but didn't win the argument - and rather predictably, when this under-delivered, we were out of time. I spent a great amount of time as an Adjunct Tutor, feeling claustrophobic and waiting for a miracle, but kept my already overdrawn bank account on a life-support. And, towards the end of a rather tentative, but boring, six months, things started coming together in the form of interesting ideas and interesting projects. I am just on time to make a fresh start.

It is not that I have not achieved much in the last six months. I always planned to achieve the Chartered Marketer status with Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) but managed to do my CPDs only very unevenly for several years. The last two years were different: I did focus on this and finally got to the stage when I can get to the top membership grade. I don't intend to get back to a formal marketing career anymore (though serendipitous that my journey has been, who could tell) but it is still a conclusion of a long-standing commitment. 

I have also discovered a new interest, which I shall now focus upon: Ethics. I have been studying this, on and off, through a few MOOCs. I did Michael Sandel's course on Justice first, and then Peter Singer's course on Practical Ethics. These two courses together led to my reading various books, including Professor Sandel's and Professor Singer's books accompanying the courses. Now, I am planning to do a short project of making a reading list and reading them over the next 100 days. 

This project started off well as I completed an eminently readable 'Created from Animals', James Rachels' presentation of what I have come to understand as 'Darwinian Ethics'. Indeed, this is a revelation as I had a different conception of what Darwinian Ethics may mean, the dog-eat-dog conception of the world. Rachels' book presents the development of Darwinian thought and clearly points out its paradigm shifting nature, such as the questions it raises about human dignity and the place of humans in the world. I could not have chosen a better starting point in my endeavor to read moral philosophy.

I also decided to live my life differently, and writing these short, daily notes, under the heading 'Conversations', is one of the things I intend to do. The idea is to capture what I did the last day, the conversations or thoughts I had, and anything I would have done towards moving forward with my life. This may sound incredibly pretentious, but my objectives are modest: I am expecting this period, the next 100 days or so, to be incredibly important in my life, and an honest, reflective account may help me in similar inflection points that I may indeed have to face at different times in the future. I could have written a diary, but I am so used to writing it this way, here on this blog. Besides, when I conceived this blog, this was supposed to be my scrapbook of ideas. That moment has come.

In the next few days, my plan centers around three things: First, to practice a new way of living, which includes writing these short notes publicly, presenting a transparent account of what I am thinking and doing. Second, to decide on what I do next. One thing I know (and have written about): I want to give up teaching. I am certain that teaching within a traditional environment gives me nothing, except the money I need, and I am confident that I can do better things to earn money than teaching. I have therefore started several conversations for projects that may replace my teaching duties: Some of these will require me to spend more time in Asia, just as I want to do. I want to finalise on one of these opportunities as soon as I can, and get working on it. Third, I want to clear a significant backlog of work that I have accumulated over the last couple of months, and bring my current commitments, particularly that of teaching, to a close. This will mean some frantic work in the next two weeks, but this is what I intend to do, starting today. 

I am looking forward to this journey-within-a-journey and hopefully, this will be a good story to tell.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Lord Macaulay's Speech on Indian Education: The Hoax & Some Truths

-
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
Read more

Abdicating to Taliban

-
Nations are ideas. We try to fashion them as territories. But how can a river, a mountain ridge or sometimes an imaginary line in the middle of a field can explain the wide division in the lives, thoughts and futures of the people who live on different sides? Nations are not the people too. Indeed, people build nations and become its body. But the soul of the nation is an idea: People come together on an idea to build a nation. While that's what a modern nation is - an idea - and that way exceptionalism is not an American exception, very few nations are as completely defined by an idea as Pakistan. There was hardly any political, geographic or military rationale of Pakistan other than the idea of an Islamic homeland in South Asia. [In that way, the ideological brother of Pakistan in the family of nations is Israel] This, abated by the short term political calculations of some backroom colonialists, created a modern state which must be solely sustained on that singular idea. Religi
Read more

India versus Bharat

-
Image
This post is a reaction to Aatish Taseer's evocative obituary of secular India in the Atlantic ( read here ).  While I agree with it mostly - and share the reservations about the direction and the future of India - I differ with the author on one key aspect: I do not agree with his portrayal of a resurgent Bharat eating up a secular India.  In fact, I believe while Mr Taseer regrets the Indian elite's loss of connection with the realities of day to day life of the country, his very presentation of Bharat and India as oppositional entities stems from that incomprehension. While I understand that he is only using these categories as RSS uses them - to effectively other the English-speaking elites and non-Hindus - I believe it is a mistake to describe the profound changes in contemporary India as the ascendance of Bharat.  I grew up in Bharat. I never learnt English until late in life, when I started working. My growing-up world was one of small-town India, vernacu
Read more

When Does Business Gift Become A Bribe: A Marketing Policy Perspective

-
Introduction : The Business of Gift Giving 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 et al , 1991). Arunthanes et al (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 s
Read more

The Curious Case of Helen Goddard

-
Image
Today, Helen Goddard, 26, a highly popular music teacher of a City School for Girls, has been sentenced to 15 months in prison. Her crime was to carry out a year long lesbian affair with one of her pupils, who appeared in the court and admitted that the affair was consensual and it was she who pressured Helen into the affair. For Helen, a bright musician and a devout Chistian, this is an extraordinary lapse of judgement. Also, she was teaching in the £13,000 private girls only school in London. She was surely aware what the consequences of her action will be. The fact that she still could not stop herself tells us that lovers do not always act rationally, something we always knew. There is more in this affair than personal tragedies. For a start, this has all the dramatic elements: a bright, beautiful teacher more in Julia Roberts mould [as in Mona Lisa Smile], a stiff upper lip school [not unlike Wellesley] and a story like Notes On A Scandal with an added twist. Indeed, Helen was gui
Read more

‘A World Without The Jews’: Nazi Ideology, German Imagination and The Holocaust[1]

-
Image
Introduction Erna Petri née Kürbs, a farmer’s daughter from Herressen in Thuringia, arrived in Ukraine with her three year old son to join her husband Horst in June 1942. Horst, an SS leader inspired by Nazi ideologue Dr Richard Walter Darré, settled in the plantation of Grzenda, just outside today’s Lviv, to become a German Gentleman-Farmer. Erna saw Horst beating and abusing the workers in the plantation within two days of arriving there, which was, as Horst explained, necessary for establishing authority. Erna joined in enthusiastically, settling into a combination of roles of ‘plantation mistress, prairie Madonna in apron-covered dress lording over slave labourers, infant-carrying, gun-wielding Hausfrau.’ [2] However, there were clear rules in the plantation, and Erna was very much expected to play the woman’s role of being a Cake-and-Coffee hostess. When four Jews were caught in the estate while trying to escape from a transport to a death camp, Horst told Erna and her female
Read more

The Morality of Profit

-
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
Read more

The Road to Macaulay: Warren Hastings and Education in India

-
Image
Introduction: Hastings in the history of Indian Education Whether or not one includes Warren Hastings in the history of Education in India is a matter of perspective. If writing the history of education means writing the history of schools, the impact of Hastings' administration would be quite limited. If anything, the rapid implosion of local rulers in Eastern, Southern and Northern India during Hastings' tenure had meant a bleak period for the indigenous education system, as patronage and funds would have dwindled away for many of them. The Company administration really concerned itself with the schooling of the natives only after 1813, as Nurullah and Naik rightly pointed out ( see my earlier post ) and one can legitimately start the story at this point. However, if history of Education in India is to encompass the transformation of Indian Scholarship, on which foundation the new, colonial, system of Education would be built, the story must start with Warren Hast
Read more

A Conversation About Kolkata in the 21st Century

-
Image
A lot of conversations about Kolkata is about its past; I want to talk about its future. Most conversations about Kolkata is about its decline - its golden moments and how times changed; I want to talk about its rise, how its best may lie ahead and how we can change the times. In place of pessimism, I seek optimism; instead of inertia, I am looking for imagination.  It is not about catching up, I am arguing; it is about making a new path altogether. It had, indeed it had, a glorious past: One of the first Asian cities to reach a million population, the Capital of British India, the cradle of an Enlightened Age and a new politics of Cosmopolitanism. And, it had stumbled - losing the hinterland that supplied its Jute factories, overwhelmed by the refugees that came after the partition, devoid of its professional class who chose to emigrate - the City's commercial and professional culture evaporated in a generation, and it transformed into a corrupt and inefficien
Read more

The Road of Macaulay: The Development of Indian Education under British Rule

-
Image
The story of British influence on Indian Education, to which Macaulay's Minutes of 1835 belong, has been told in six distinct phases. Syed Nurullah and J P Naik's very popular and influential History of Indian Education calls these 'six acts' of the drama:  From the beginning of Eighteenth Century to 1813   The British East India Company received its charter in 1600 but its activities did not include any Educational engagement till the Charter Act of 1698, which required the Company to maintain priests and schools, for its own staff and their children. And, so it was until the renewal of its charter in 1813, when the evangelical influence led to insistence of expansion of educational activities and allowing priests back into company territory. From 1813 to Wood's Education Despatch of 1854 The renewal of Charter in 1813 re-opened the debate, which seemed to have been settled in the early years of the company administration, between the Orientalis
Read more

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

AddThis