What a college for Asia may mean

Indian universities are not known for area studies programmes though there are some shining exceptions.

I have been advocating, for some time now, that an open programme - open in terms of who might be able to participate, rather than how it is delivered - for Asian studies may help educate the type of graduate professionals India might need. 

For me, it is an old idea - a college of Asia! I was serious about it in 2014, but that was perhaps the wrong moment. My interest in going back to India and starting again cooled after 2014, with political changes around the world and the focus of my career shifting into a different domain. 

It feels like meeting an old friend when I discuss the idea now. I am older, perhaps wiser, and less idealistic than I was then. I have learnt more about education as a business, and more about the concepts such as Asia, about which I had an unquestioning romanticism before. But the idea still attracts me, and I believe its moment has come. 

The world has changed quite a bit now and while things have gotten darker, I am gradually rediscovering my identity and my faith. 

I feel more Indian now than ever before, just as the Indian diaspora is being marked out, their earlier benign attempts at integration notwithstanding. I always maintained that I belong to the nation that I can be ashamed of, and I felt that even after the scandalous British collaboration that allowed the government of Israel to continue the genocide in Gaza, I couldn't be ashamed of the British government: What else to expect from the beneficiaries of colonialism, something in me said! I felt far more ashamed about India, which, despite its pacifist past and commitment to the global south, failed to stand up for the Palestinians, on account of its business and military ties with Israel and the Islamophobia of its middle class. This shame affirmed my identity as Indian: I still deeply care what India does, wherever in the world I might live.

At the same time, I understood my agnosticism is a deeply Hindu agnosticism. Not for a moment I think the practitioners of other faiths have got it wrong - in effect, accepting that there are many true paths to God - and who else but a Hindu can think like that? I am no atheist, I discovered, even if my God (or gods, true to form) is only nature, and like Spinoza's, doesn't interfere in the world. Without pretension of knowing the final answers, I accepted that the only path is through humility and learning. And that presents me with a very good starting point for the college for Asia. 

Most importantly for me, I have tried and failed in-between and learnt a lot. When one fails, the best thing that happens to the person that everyone feels emboldened to offer advice to him. Accepting those without protestation is the greatest learning of all. The great learning there is that how knowing the limits of our own is the only thing to learn.  have been lectured on leadership by the selfish, on transparency by the deceitful, on entrepreneurship by the privileged and on being focused by the speculators.

Those lectures told me that not failure, but the lack of self-awareness is what one needs to fight against. Failures are moments when the veil of success is discarded and one is allowed to view life as it is, and I have been granted that privilege. Whether or not I bounce back from here, this learning is for me to keep. And I believe this can be a core proposition of the college for Asia: Asia needs to find itself after two-hundred years of humiliation, and only by being self-aware it can do so. 

This quest of self-awareness is central to Indian spiritualism, and despite the modernist corruption of Chinese psyche over the last 200 years, this is at the core of East Asian virtues. Of course, this was at the heart of the Greek way of thinking too, but power corrupts, and the inheritance of Rome gave Europe none of the humility that one requires to learn. Dan Wang has lately popularised the contrast between the lawyerly society of United States and the Engineering civilisation of China, but this is a very North American reading of what's going on. The European civilisation is mostly about rhetoric - the Greek fear of the demagogue was forgotten by Rome - whereas Asia, living with other people's language and thought had to find different things to value. 

What these are is the precise subject of studying Asia. I have spent long enough on capabilities that work of the future would require: But work of the future is a choice that we have the power to make. This unspoken part is where the difference between Anglo-European or Western ways of thinking and being - material, physical, rhetorical - contrasts against Asian - spiritual, ephemeral and substantiative - way of making the choice. In more than one way, my quest to create this Asia-centric institution is to educate on these alternative ways of making the choice.

I shall write more as I progress on the practical aspects of the project. While I see some continuity between what I am doing now to what I shall be doing next, there is a big chasm between an opportunistic business venture and an idealistic educational project, which the college for Asia is meant to be. My life is bound to be different and may involve leaving the role of a business exec and becoming a full-time evangelist and escaping the self-doubt whether I was ever meant to be a businessperson.