Sunday Posts

I was in India for a week and I heard one word repeated over and over again: Scale!  India is trying to do something unique. It is trying to create a prosperous society with a huge scale. This isn't about a small proportion of a small population of a small European nation becoming rich: This is about hundreds of millions of people being pulled out of deprivation and empowered to shape their own lives. The ambition is staggering. My engagement, I should admit, is only with higher education. I am not as familiar with the workings of the other sectors of the economy. And Indian higher education is, in many ways, peculiar: While the commercial activities of the country have been 'liberalised' and faced global competition and benchmarking, Indian higher education is still very protected. It has been privatised but through a license raj where politicians called the shots. Indian higher education is, therefore, a strange beast: It has the characteristics of the pre-90s Indian busi...

Sir Keir Starmer is a man in a hurry, as he sets upon his task. He seems to know that he needs to get things done quickly, or otherwise his government may crumble under its own weight. That's what super-majorities such as these do - they allow the hangover to spoil the work-day. Britain is in decline and another decade later, when the rest of the world has fixed its financial infrastructure and the Americans have finally gone home, no one will care about this little isle. This last opportunity to reverse that fate lies with this government. Supermajorities do another thing. For example, I shall now be voting Green, as I would feel no longer threatened that my vote can give a little filip to people like Sunak. And so will do millions of others next time, as thousand parties may bloom in the aftermath. Labour's big win is obscuring the other stories - the growth of Greens - and the Reform party is being seen as a breakaway faction of the Conservatives, and not as the up-and-comin...

Despite all my worries, I woke up happy today. It seems all of the UK has finally woken up and paid back the Tories for their freak show.  We have paid them back for Brexit. It is justice that Nigel Farage spoilt their party and Reform got 14% of the votes. Conservatives let Fascists in, of course - isn't that how it always happens! No one, of course, has a clue what to do with the UK. But the labour is likely to look for a new playback, because they are not tied to any dogma. Rachel Reeves can be trusted to take some kind of Green New Deal path, which I presume the only option to get out of the morass. I also look forward to David Lamy as Foreign Secretary to end the empire hangover finally. Yvette Cooper has a brain and known to have used it, so we may have a Home Secretary who has more to offer than some flights to Rwanda as the solution to all our problems.  I am also happy that the two-track campaign of Rishi Sunak - appearing hurt when someone (one of the Fascists of Ref...

One of the great regrets of my life has been that history ended too soon. I was not even out of college when Soviet Union collapsed, and all ideology seemed to end. Everyone, right and left, agreed that there is no point arguing about how to build a good society and all difference is about the difference in emphasis. But I was already past twenty and arrived in this post-ideology world rather stuck in old-fashioned cocktail of idealism, values etc.  Worse still, I found my nirvana in Internet. That became my place to run away from life. My Indian suburban life, all its expectations, restrictions and pre-conceptions, could be left behind at the first crack of modem handshake. After that, I was transported to the world where people spoke my language, a different type of friendship, dream of an unmoored life. I could be ideological again, at least for those connection minutes I could afford to pay for.  But then it became more user-friendly. The browser was the start of the frami...

I did more or less abandon this blog. Not because I was writing less - I was writing more. I was writing a lot actually. And speaking a lot. Doing workshops and meeting a lot of people. It was too exciting for me to find time to reflect. Predictably though, that phase is now over. I have done a lot and learnt, but now it is time for me to get back to blogging. And as I restart, I confront the question again: Why am I doing it? These posts were supposed to be breadcrumbs for remembering, so that I remain grounded. They served this purpose wonderfully well when I look back. But several years now, I fell into the public/private persona trap. There is so much I can't write about, and that made honest writing almost impossible. But I am also at that stage, in life and professionally, when being crazy isn't a bad thing. I have always been on the unreasonable side, trying to push the envelop and eschewing security and money and conventional things, but always followed the rules. My gr...