Sunday Posts

I hope some people will agree with me if I say EdTech is over-rated. It's a nifty term, much broader than the older, nerdy, E-Learning; it is also a conscious claim to affinity with its famous and richer cousin, FinTech. What one gets to hear in the EdTech conference circuit is boasts about how many millions companies are raising, which is really meaningless in a world of loose monetary policy and inflated private valuations. The other most common refrain is how Educators don't get EdTech, which really means that this may be a set of characters in search of a play. Most of its boldest claims - Clouds of Schools, Self-directed Learners, Universal Access - remain forever in future, and only companies dealing with boring stuff - compliance training, video content, Learning Management System etc - make any money.  However, the overselling of EdTech creates bigger problems than sub-prime investment and pointless conferences. It crowds out the conversation about Education Innov...

It is easy to overestimate the potential impact of urban development initiatives, public or private. Because as high level concepts, we delve in a culture-free world, assuming that everyone will do what makes best economic sense; or, more accurately, we treat those who wouldn't pursue economic prosperity as outliers - oddballs - and keep them outside our calculations. But this is where culture gets in the way of our best intentions. More so, if a City needs regeneration, at the heart of the problem there is, more often than not, a 'culture trap', a negative feedback cycle of despair and denial. Any effort of new thinking must acknowledge the cultural challenges first and foremost. But while culture is important, it is also hard to change. A culture emerges and solidifies over time, and it is inherent in assumptions and behaviours of a given people, hard to scrub out with a few conferences here and there. This is the other mistake well-meaning initiatives often make - ...

Kolkata needs a fresh start.  One of the first mega-cities in Asia, and $150 Billion economy, has fallen from grace, somewhat. It is no way a 'dying city' as Rajiv Gandhi, then Prime Minister of India, called it, but it has decisively lost its urban glory. The seat of a brilliant creative 'awakening' in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth century, now the city loses its aspirational young people as they migrate to other cities in search of educational and economic opportunities.  Once the home of many of India's largest corporations and many of the big multinational corporations, the City experienced an exodus of business and talent in its dark days in the mid-seventies, something that never came back.  Steeped in dreams of changing the world, this City lived through its street-fighting years of the late Sixties, something that was brutally crushed by the authoritarian Central Government of Indira Gandhi; the end of dreams meant degeneration, as th...

Don't be perplexed. I know you may be wondering how on earth can someone love bureaucracy, which stands for all the bad things - slowness, indifference, complexity, lethargy - but I argue back: If we don't love bureaucracy, how does it persist?If we hate it, why the first thing when we start a business is to draw an org chart? Why, when things go wrong, we want to see a manager? Or, better still, why most of us want to be managers? Why we want a job description? Why we fill so many forms and want to fill some more? Why we love emails and calendars, show off our smartphones and smart watches, want to prove how busy we are? I love bureaucracy because it's everywhere. Call it any name, but our lives are bureaucratic. Every morning, when I plan the day and write down my to-do list, I am bowing to bureaucracy. As I run for meetings, cut short conversations, skip lunch or feel guilty about not responding to a message, I am celebrating it. There is no escape. The only way I ...

Working in Education, I have to confront the conversations about Automation all the time: Are there enough jobs there for us to educate so many people? As with other things in life, there are 'Many Sides' in this debate too. One side of the argument is that there are enough jobs, and the unemployment is resulting from a skills mismatch. As evidence, one can cite simply the number of unfilled positions that the companies report, or the poor applicant-to-job offers ratio.  The other side of the argument is that the jobs are really shrinking and many jobs are being automated, and we should be preparing for a future when most people would not find work. There is strong evidence for this as well: It is possible to show that the job numbers, when compared like-for-like (without counting the new positions created by new companies or sectors), are often decreasing, not only in the developed countries but also in supposedly high growth areas such as manufacturing in China....

As Brexit starts to bite, the politics of it has come alive again.  There are some clear signs that the British economy has started cooling. In a way, the experts were right: We have started paying the costs of Brexit. Indeed, they were wrong at the same time - the effects are slowly beginning to emerge, rather than appearing as a morning-after apocalypse. But it is inescapable that a long winter is around the corner. This makes the politics of Brexit come alive again. The Remainers suddenly see a light, as the Leavers' claims are exposed as hoaxes and lies, and the economic effects of Brexit become clearer. Their moods are a combination of 'I-Told-You-So' and denial, as the weak and unstable government proves itself to be clueless about how to deal with Brexit. Suddenly, leaders who bailed out - David Miliband, for example - are back in conversation, urging the MPs to push for a second referendum; there is talk of leadership changes, and even of a new party of Re...

The idea came to me from various conversations in China and India: That teacher training in Higher Education is an urgent need and a significant opportunity. This is counter-intuitive. Most Western institutions of Higher Education, autonomous as they are, train their own teachers. For Continuing Professional Development, the emphasis here is on Research, and an established network of Conferences exist to foster the community. Teacher training is for schools, where the volume and turnover of teachers are high, and it needs constant refreshing. However, the expansion of Higher Education in the last decade in China, India and elsewhere brings into play a different reality altogether.  First, the Higher Education institutions created in these countries in the last decade are different from research-led institutions in the West: They are teaching institutions operating at a mass scale. The focus is on teaching at scale, and the appropriate teacher training is therefore of ...

I remember this awkward dinner conversation. I was with my colleague in Northern Ireland, and a friend of his joined our table. After we were introduced, he wondered at my name and asked me what religion I belong to. I went for the simpler answer and kept my doubts aside: "I am Hindu", I said. That made him even more confused. "What's a Hindu?" he said, "Is that some kind of Muslim?" When I tell this story to my friends in India, they are usually outraged. What an ignorant person, they would say. Particularly treating Hinduism as a branch of Islam, when Hindus love to believe that everyone was originally a Hindu, upsets them. I have also reflected upon this conversation later. It may indeed be that he did not know. He was particularly ignorant, just as ignorant as the lady, who, standing inside the Irish Bar at Mumbai's ITC Grand Central hotel, asked my colleague - the same person as it happened to be - where Ireland was. But the confusion ab...