Sunday Posts

At the core of my enterprise is the idea of personal change. This is not about the neo-liberal doctrine that says, everything is changing around you and therefore, you must change and adapt. I accept that things change but refuse to accept that we are just passive participants, changing as our external circumstances change. At least, I would like to believe that it is an educated person's responsibility to find opportunities for change and influence its course. How this change may happen is also a question mark. Those who know me know that I don't hold a high opinion about the coaches, those self-styled individuals who assume that some sort of certificate from somewhere gives them the right to tell another person to live their lives. No one has the right, or the ability, to tell another person what to do or how to live their lives, I believe. All we can do is to help people find their way and be that guide and friend at the moments of confusion which will invariably come...

My current project was all about building better technical training programmes, till it was not. At the time of starting, the premise was that technical training is currently offered with a very narrow focus and this needs to be enhanced with human capabilities. The engineer is no longer just an engineer, but a solver of problems with broader human and systemic implications. We were supposed to be building a better model for technical training, a sort of plus-plus model, by which these human capabilities become embedded (or, in other words, don't stick out!). But, as I travel and speak to people, I understand that perhaps we are at a different point than when these ideas started forming in my head. To be honest, the above premise has an origin story stretching back to the 1990s, my coming-of-age era, where education became overtly vocational and technical. It was a gap I perceived first in the classroom and then the workplace, where I met technically trained ...

I am scaling back my ambitions. No longer boiling the ocean, no longer trying to transform higher education globally! I tried and failed, but don't regret it. How else would I know what I know now?  I know many things. Higher Education is indeed in crisis, but the people inside the system do not know that. Professionalisation has many good aspects, but being perceptive about changes in the world is not one among these. There will be no revolution in higher ed, just decay. The private higher ed is already everywhere and it has changed everything - from the relationship with the students to what scholarship meant - but most people in public universities don't even know the difference. Higher Ed thinks critically about everything else but not its own practice. Some of it is wilful blindness. Things are going fine for most people: The usual cycle of conferences, papers, research grants - some years are better than others, but that is all. Students still come,...

As I grew up, I was torn between two ideas of success.  First was to be able to sit on the terrace of my ancestral home, a beautiful art deco mansion built in 1940s, on a winter morning, reading something beautiful. This was my idea of vita contempletiva. Second was to travel around the world, doing something meaningful. This was my idea of vita activa. These two ideas are obviously incompatible. My entire life was shaped by this tension. But it was a tension not only in my mind, but in the outside world too. By the time I finished college, Soviet Union disappeared, and the ideas environment I grew up in changed. Even in 1989, one of the subjects in my Undergraduate Economics course was Soviet Economic development, and I spent my paltry college pocket money on buying books published in USSR (primarily because they were cheap). In a sense, my idea of certainty fell away at that point. With that went my first idea of success, one of a quiet, stable life. India was changing, too. This...

The world took time to build. It's not obvious to everyone, particularly those who want to destroy it.  I am always caught between the enthusiasm for revolution and allegiance to tradition. I have been lucky to have been born in a time and place where revolutions came mostly peacefully. The greatest of those I personally experienced was the Internet Revolution, which changed lives and ended things but was bloodless. Therefore, I could worship revolution with relative calm.  It took me time to discover the revolutionaries. I met them and their victims mostly in books. There was some significant absences in my life too, people who disappeared in the midst of a revolution just slightly before my time. But these presences and absences were still romantic, an invitation to escape boredom, as I lived in a largely stable world. But eventually, I met real revolutionaries. These first-hand meetings were different. These people were not trying to fight against phantom power, Tsars and w...

Double life is a bad thing - synonymous of being duplicitous! If one has another self, one can't be trusted - as we won't know what their real intentions are.  I find this logic problematic. Having a double life, for me, could be living two lives, both equally real. This is the opposite of being duplicitous, as that assumes only one 'real' self is possible.  But, I argue, that in the modern life, either no real self is possible, or an infinite number of equally real selves are possible. As we live inside stories scripted by others, it will all come down to how we define 'real'. If this means authentic, as one is, this may not be possible: Put my phone in my hand, and I am already different from who I am! If 'real' means enduring, one could say that they have many enduring selves, which manifest when circumstances for them emerge. Nothing dies in the digital realm, if we come to think of it, and those selves may endure even after our physical selves have ...

It took me a while. Several months, in fact.  Once this blog was my life, and I posted at least twice a week. But lately, this became a graveyard of new starts. Every time, I was starting afresh - there have been several new starts for me in an extraordinarily short period of time in the recent years - I made posts pledging myself to restart. And, then, I lost my way and became silent again.  I want to make it different this time. I am looking back and wondering why I start and stop. It is perhaps because I did not accept in the past that I failed, either completely or at least to make good of the pledge that I made to myself when I restarted. Therefore, I guess, instead of making statements of hope and looking into the future, as the American self-help books would have us do, these restarts should start with an acknowledgement of failure. That is exactly why these are restarts in the first place.  But, before that, I am questioning myself - why do this publicly? When an...

It was fascinating to watch the very public breakdown of US-Ukraine relationship yesterday. It was realpolitik in real time. There are many explanations on offer, but I shall reject both the extremes. Trump was not standing up for the American people, and neither is he a 'Russian asset'. In this season of conspiracy theories, I have one to offer: That he pushed for a minerals deal, putting American business interests ahead of anything, and his administration realised that either such a deal is not on offer (without security guarantees) or not practical, and perhaps both. In that sense, US-Ukraine relationship did not break down in that extraordinary press meet at the White House, it had broken down much earlier when this quid pro quo was established. There is obvious moral outrage in Europe about Putin winning. But there is a practical side of it too: For too long, Europeans, and particularly Western Europeans, have enjoyed a lifestyle whose burdens were borne by other people. ...

Are we witnessing the end of an imperial era? Usually, these periods are fraught with violence and uncertainty. Empires are power structures, which crumbles from inside, and everything that stood on its edifice, values, ideas and systems, go down with them. Empires are stable - that's their raison d'etre! Even those who are disadvantaged by the empire support its existence because people would rather tolerate tyranny than anarchy. The end of any empire is therefore accompanied by instability. I know it is odd for me to think this is the end of an empire. The second Trump Presidency is as imperial as it gets. The United States, the world's overlord, is throwing its power around, threatening other countries with tariff and even invasion. It has approached major world issues unilaterally, pulling out of multilateral institutions or conventions, sitting down with Russia without other parties around and proposed to turn Gaza, in defiance of the all norms and wishes of everyone...

Grow up. Don't fall for an American trope.  For my generation - I would be Gen X by label - United States of America, its style, its messages and what it passed on as its values, provided the model. Older now, I see the deception. It is not subjective view of a post-colonial - the Americans themselves have elected Donald Trump and let us know that they don't believe in what they preached.  I am not just a Gen Xer, but one that grew up in a post-colonial nation. So, United States was not our first disappointment. We already knew the trajectory with Soviet Union. Claims of universal values that come to nothing. I know this bitter disappointment and learnt its lesson - universal values don't work! Don't import the ideas about how life should be from a dominant culture, look deeper and look wider, look inside and challenge everything! Therefore, do not fall for the infantalised version of yourself. Be attentive - there is no glory in being scatter-brained and attention is, ...