Sunday Posts

Once upon a time, I was a believer. I believed that the wonderful possibility of online higher education will make available affordable, high quality higher education for the aspiring middle-class students everywhere. Of all the vistas opened up by the Internet, this was the most transformative. This would have made a truly flat world; this would have resulted in a convergence of values and ideas, desires and languages.  That was then, the late nineties. Before the dot-com bust, before 9/11, before Facebook conquered the world. Most importantly, before I did a day's work for the online universities and met the first students who enrolled in them. Before the wonderful rhetoric met the real world and billions of dollars of venture capital was poured into online universities! And, before various failed schemes to improve higher education in the 'third world' came full-circle. In between, I was in the frontline. I have this odd enthusiasm about what I do. Though I

Brexit-busy Britain is due for an election. Amid the clamour, it’s quite difficult to bring up something other than the big BoJo-Jezza battle. However, the noise obscures the rapid and fundamental changes in British public life of a transformational sort. Long after Brexit is forgotten and today’s debates turn into stale pub-jokes, these changes will continue to shape British politics, life and ideas, and serve as raw materials for the future theorist. One such trend is the increasing marginalisation of female MPs, 18 of whom decided not to run again. Just when it seemed that political participation of women is irreversible – Britain had a female Prime Minister only until a few months ago and two of the three shadow ‘great offices’ are held by women – history seems to be going back again. The women MPs stepping down cited the climate of harassment and intimidation, often unleashed very publicly on social media. Those who remained in the fray say that they feel afraid to knoc

Liberal Education had a particular meaning at its origin. Or, rather, it had two or more different meanings at the origin: the 'liberal' in English-Scottish sense, an education to be critical and to seek the truth and the German idea of 'Bildung', of continuous self-cultivation. This is a self-consciously gross generalisation, but I think those two ideas should remain at the heart of modern liberal education. It should both be sceptical and hopeful, never a slave of received wisdom and forever in the faith of cooperation and progress. And, this is exactly the same core values modern, secular, democratic societies need: The belief that we can work with one another, better our lives and can make decisions without being told - by some divine or dictator - what we should do, is essential to its existence. The above is rather obvious and well-trodden ground, but importantly, these ideas are historically defined. Some of these ideas, of questioning, of progress, of

I watched a popular Indian mythologist expound on an Indian Business TV channel that Indian organisations are essentially different from Western ones. His reasoning is that the Western organisations are supposed to be separate, stand on its own, entities, Indian organisations are extensions of its owners, and hence, not just culturally different but organically distinct too.  I am sure this is an attractive opinion. In this season of celebration of Indian exceptionalism, what's better to think of a culturally exclusive form of business? Also, one that makes all the idiosyncrasies of Indian businesses look explicable and even desirable! I am sure a lot of this Business Sutra will be sold - I can see many presentations blooming around this central thesis. Except that, leaving out the soundbites and mythologies, it reflects a profound misunderstanding of both Western businesses and Indian business culture. In fact, the whole premise is based on a false dichotomy, or, to

The most intriguing - and the most timely - policy pronouncement in India's new education policy is its emphasis on a Liberal Education undergraduate. While this is inspired by the American model (at a time when Americans seem to be going the other way) and also the more recent Chinese example, this cuts against the grain of the structure of Indian higher education.  It will be an exercise of fresh imagination altogether, as what a Liberal Education would mean in context have to be defined from scratch. 'Liberal Arts' may have become a trendy subject area to study in some of the new private universities in India, but its object and structure remain largely undefined ( see my earlier post ). The high-level policy intention of unveiling a 'Bachelor of Liberal Arts' gives little detail on what this means. And, indeed, the current theocratic mood of Indian politics anticipate this to mean the opposite of 'liberal'; more scholastic and revivalist, but n

The new education policy that the Indian government is rolling out is significant, only if it's the first such policy pronouncement in over 30 years.  The last one was in 1985. As the saying goes, past was a different country and they did things differently then. In the meantime, India has grown to be reasonably prosperous, demographically vibrant and disproportionately confident. The geopolitically realities have changed: The cold war is distant past, Russia has fallen and risen again in a new guise as China shook the world in the meantime. This new education policy, therefore, has to be really new and see the world with a fresh pair of eyes. From that perspective, the refreshing honesty of the draft of the policy is a great start. One huge obstacle of any change in India is that no one wants to admit that there is any problem. Kishore Mahbubani's diagnosis of India being an open society with a closed mind is right on the money. What's worse is that any dis

Every Sunday morning, I miss Kolkata. Yes, that crowded, polluted, malarial city at the frontline of climate catastrophe? That slow city, just off the tropic of Cancer, where people still rehearse for plays, read books, debate politics and go home for lunch. Where to be poor - which is not being consumed by money-culture - is still glorious. Where, despite their new-found love of shopping malls, young maidens may still fall in love with the do-nothing poet next door. Where, despite the 'free' life of apartments, people still live in large, crumbling, houses, negotiating idiosyncrasies of the joint family.   Of course, that place, of my youth, may not exist anymore the way I see it. Globalisation has reached Kolkata in the form of ugly, overpriced apartment blocks; glass buildings of IT sweatshops; separated, by malls and brands, lives of the rich and poor; chain schools and hotels by the hour; badly done replicas of global landmarks; noisy politics of religious div