Sunday Posts

I am working on a school for entrepreneurs. It is still work in progress and I am approximately halfway to securing funding and collaborators, and therefore, my ideas are still radical and reflect what I really think about entrepreneurship. I know, after having been there a few times, that I may not be able to implement these ideas in the pure form: There will be adjustments and compromises made along the way, and at this stage, I am better off defining clearly what is non-negotiable and which parts are open to modification.  Let's take for example one of the things I want to do: Start the entrepreneurship education programme by dissecting business failures. I want to have an intensive examination of not just how businesses fail, but what happens when they do. This, for me, is an useful corrective for the celebration of start-ups, which obscures how painful setting up a business is. In fact, it is a good starting point to know that if a business doesn't work, the entrepreneur i...

Recently, Britain got really bad press. The American right portrays it as a failed state, with violent streets and gangs reminiscent of Danny Boyle's 28 Years Later. And so does the Indian right - bashing up Britain is a parlour game for Indian news channels.  Britain has many problems. But it is not a failed state. British cities, despite their lack of economic growth and slightly boring life, are far safer than either American or Indian cities. There is indeed knife crime, which is declining, but we don't have school shootings. We had grooming gangs, for sure, but we don't have vigilante gangs poking into our homes checking what we eat or who we worship. Most of the Britons know Nigel Farage what he is - a charlatan - and even when someone suggests that all asylum seekers should be castrated on Live TV, no other panellist rushes to defend her with whataboutery. The public transport is rickety and costly, but I don't have to drive every day to go to my office; the NHS ...

I am having a conversion: It seems there is a case for setting up a Transnational Education (TNE) campus in India after all. I used to think that this was a bad idea. After all, foreign - particularly Western - universities wanted Indian students but did not want to embed themselves into the Indian society and economy. The TNE projects were exercises of 'crack-up capitalism', the neo-liberal project of creating extra-territorial communities. The education they offered were designed for a self-loathing elite which wanted to run away from India, offered by patronising white men who thought who knew better.  Nothing changed here: This is exactly what the TNE projects continue to represent. But the world has changed and the neoliberal ideas are now well past their heyday. We are in a world of '3 hards': Hard border, hard culture and hard money! The student mobility is reducing and one must find opportunities at home. At the same time, we now have a generation of Indian stud...

President Xi invoked Thucydides Trap, yet again. Therefore, it is now back in fashion, yet again. This has left me perplexed. I have read Graham Allison's book and I get it: A rising power makes the hegemon uneasy and this leads to war, just as it did in the Peloponnesian War. But what I don't get is why Xi is talking about it and why everyone else is getting excited. For starters, let's set the record straight: Despite the historical reputation of Athens, it was Sparta which was the hegemon and Athens was the rising power, and at the end of the war, Athens lost. Assuming that Xi, like everyone else, sees China as the rising power, he should know better than invoking Thucydides. Besides, Thucydides knew better than projecting history to the future and making predictions. It is a story we want to tell ourselves, but there is no inevitability that history has to play out in a certain way. It never does. For example, Allison's thesis draws much from the Britain vs Germany ...

 Many people around me think I am a socialist. After all, I laugh at the late night TS posts from Donald Trump, talk about the follies of regime change wars and generally foo-foo right wing propaganda. I work in democratising access to education, believe in public provision of health and schooling, and think technology is leaving too many people behind. I failed to support Hinduvta and its new god in my homeland; I broke ranks with my friends in London and didn't vote for Brexit or Boris Johnson. My right-thinking associates consider me to be beyond redemption, perhaps a red! But apart from my sartorial preference for red T-shirts, there is nothing red in me. I believe that from the 'crooked timber' of human nature nothing straight can ever arise. I believe that history works with timespans much longer than our lifetime and we have imperfect knowledge about the world, and therefore, neither we can change our society intentionally nor can predict the future. Not just regime ...

I am a lifelong learner. I became serious about learning only after I left college. In fact, my 'conversion' came much later in life, once I left my comfort zone, migrated to another country and went back to college, first with an instrumental objective to get a qualification but eventually for learning.  I grew up a Brahmin in India. My upbringing was traditional. I was surrounded by books, music and theatre, but no one was talking about going back to college at a late age. It was not 'learning' but self-cultivation that I saw. My grandfather, in his eighties and with fading eyesight would still read, by holding the books very close to his eyes - that is the image I carried in my head. We would have guests from town (we lived in the suburb) on some Sundays, when the best cutlery would come out and we would eat on the dining table, talking about cultural events around us. However, though my father taught English Literature at a local college, there was no hint of academ...