Sunday Posts

I believe my life of start-ups is over now. There are personal reasons behind it - this has forced me to rethink my priorities - but this is as much triggered by professional considerations. I have come to realise the essentially speculative nature of start-ups, and also that in the industry I have chosen to be in, its unsuitability. Speculation may be permissible and even productive in other industries, particularly where the customers are also venturesome, as in consumer technology; but in education, there is an added layer of responsibility, which speculators disregard. I would call it an 'alignment problem', just as in machine learning, where the ways of doing business and the desireable objectives may be in conflict with the expectations of its intended customers and socially desireable outcomes. This objection is only to the private higher education, however. The idea of higher education is enmeshed in the modern, middle-class-dominated social structure. The degree is the...

I have the wrong idea about what entrepreneurship is. I must blame my grandfather. An austere man, he built a business by working hard, paying his taxes and keeping his word. He created something. He made money, invested in blue chip stocks and lived within his means. He would turn down opportunities, much to my uncle's disappointment, if he thought he couldn't service the contract. The first English sentence I learnt - from him - is 'Cut your coat according to your cloth'. Growing up, I had plenty of disagreements with him. Most of it was political. He never voted, which enraged me. His reason was simple: In India, once one votes, a mark of indelible ink used to be put on one's index finger. He hated that and objected to the implicit lack of trust this implied. He also told me that Gandhi destroyed the country by teaching people to disobey the laws, which did not go down well with the revolutionary sympathies of a twenty-year old. However, I watched him ru...

When The Economist starts saying that debt levels are unsustainable and a market crash is imminent, one should take notice. This was a lesson I learnt in 2007, before many others woke up to it.  If anything, this time it would be different. In my mind, 2008 was just the beginning of the breakdown. This time, we have multiple bubbles to burst: All those extra money from the bank bailouts, all those extra money from Covid, and all those valuation excesses from AI - the world economy is just several times bigger than what it should be. I am not a doom-monger, and right now, I am terribly unprepared for a market meltdown. Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong for me in the recent days and I am not ready for another crisis. But purely intellectually, this appears like the judgement day. That the global financial system works like a giant hoover, sucking labour, time and ideas from people who believe in hard work, good work and honest work, has been clear to me for some time. Thi...

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....

I had a fascinating discussion today which I need to record here.  The point is trivial - which kind of courses are in demand in Indian Higher Ed - but it was a big surprise for me.  In the last several weeks, I have been talking to a lot of people in India. I spent a couple of weeks there, trying to figure out, after a gap of several months, what's exactly is happening so that I can put an India specific business proposition together. These conversations gave me a vague sense that a major shift is underway, but I couldn't quite figure out what that shift really is. Today, the penny dropped! On the surface, the higher ed conversation in India remains the same as before. There is a lot of talk of industry-academia gap, though not much action! The hackathons and boot camps are everywhere. Academic calendars reflect an amazing variety of holidays and excruciating and endless sequence of examinations. Except for some campuses which are more political than any academic instit...

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...

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...

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 ...

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, ...

Dear M Do you believe in dragons?  I know many people who doesn't. Because they are grown-ups, and it is not fashionable for grown-ups to think about dragons. But I would like to believe that they are real. At least as real as the things we believe in. For that matter, we call investors dragons in some countries - in Britain, start-ups go to the Dragons' Den - while the other countries have Sharks (India) or Tigers (Bangladesh) for that. The investors changing the world for better as real a story as my having a dragon which can fly me from one country to another, coming to my rescue when bad guys really corner me. You would say that is literally not possible. I would say - cliché but true - that literal is a metaphor. Language creates the world we live in, in our minds: That indeed the only world which matters to us, the only one we can ever know. In reality, there could be other worlds - one where dragons fly around, for example - but we live in our own literal bubbles, where ...

Dear Me, I write because there is nothing else I can do. Someone said that before, but I am not quoting - I am speaking for myself. I write not because I have something special to say. But I feel that I am inside an endless stream of words and ideas, and I live to explore them. Through me, then, they find expression. Perhaps that is imprecise and I don't have the right language to say what really happens. What I want to say - the Word exists. With or without me, it exists. I write them not because I want to, but they find me to become. So, I see writing not as a craft. Rather, I surrender to writing. I realised this when I started writing poetry. I wrote it once, when I was young and in love. I don't remember how I wrote it then. But much later in life, when another moment came, I wrote not to impress anyone, but because I couldn't do anything else. It was not to tell anything to anyone, but just to surrender myself to the feelings which took hold of me.  Reading those poem...

It is almost over and it is starting.  I am finishing 2024 wiser. This has been one of those pivotal years of my life, comparable only to 1993 when I started working or 2004 when I migrated to the UK and started my life again. In the sense that those two years taught me a lot and made me a different person: 2024 did that too. I am also wiser because my optimism is tempered. I have finally gotten rid of my youthful assumption that it is possible to change people or systems (in other words, I have now, finally, become old). I am not cynical - at least not yet - but far more conservative than I was. I know things change only very slowly, and only organically, and forcing the change, however desireable, is beyond the powers of human beings. We seem to think that we are at the centre of the universe, and therefore the changes are really brought about human action. I can wake up one morning and command the Sun to rise, and when it rises, can claim my supernatural powers, but ...

I wrote this blog through my 20 year stay in Britain, some years more diligently than others.  No one, including myself, would ever look at the archives perhaps, but if one did, one theme would stand out: Restart!  For the first 10 years of my career, spent in India and then in other countries in Asia, I followed a straight path: Working in companies, growing into more senior role, within the training sector. It was somewhat regular life. I had KPIs and month-ends, appraisals, holiday forms and salary raises, which I worried about.  However, I left all that and came to Britain in 2004. I came without a job - therefore, it was a proper restart! I assumed that my experience within the IT Training sector would get me a similar or a better job, but the IT training industry was very different in the UK and my skill sets did not travel well. I landed up managing accounts in an e-learning company, a role and an industry in which I had absolutely no prior experience.  Therea...

I had a conversion this week. I did not fall from any horse, nor I did see a vision. But rather it was a mundane walk on a city evening, to the gym of all places, when I allowed myself to be criticised. It was painful - I had to hold back from justifying or explaining several times - but it was like looking into a mirror. My old, tired, failed self in full view, my introlocutor did not see what I was seeing (just as the mirror does not see you, only you can see yourself) - but I saw something. In fact, I saw many things, but one thing more importantly than others - the problem and the solution lie within me! It is obvious to be a big deal, this discovery, but it is still significant. To submit myself to such a brutal critique, I needed to be despondent. My entire world was falling apart around me. I was beset with doubt about what I was doing. My recent life was crumbling - all that I cared for was gone. I felt old, which I am but the feeling was new. I felt alone, which again I am but...

  For us humans, it seems to be  the best of times, and the worst of times.   It is indeed the age of having information at our fingertips, but also to let misinformation rule our sentiments.   It is a time when technology can talk back to us in a human-like manner, and yet many people struggle to read , understand and write properly.   It is a time when the OpenAI’s o1 can do complex reasoning, and yet most of our readers would find this Dickensian rendering of human  plight incomprehensible.   Our newspapers would claim that we are all going downhill , and yet we are now at the threshold of delaying ageing and death, s eeding  rain and synthetic fuel, space travel for leisure and being present everywhere at the same time through holograms.   In short, we are having a normal day, complaining that things could be better and forgetting that we have come a long way.   Of course, as Paul Virilio says: “ When you invent the ship, you also...

Like millions of my compatriots, I am watching the news coming from Calcutta (now Kolkata) with anger and a sense of shame. First, there was a horrific act of rape and murder of a Junior Doctor inside a government hospital. This showed not only how insecure women are, but also how broken down the healthcare and education systems are in the city. Then, it was apparent that this was no ordinary murder. The hospital administration, the police and the State government rushed in to destroy evidence and cover up through any means possible. After that, when people protested and took to the streets in an unprecedented way, the arrogance of the administration was plain. The Police Commissioner, despite the litany of failure (including Police Officers getting arrested for destroying evidence), would not resign; the Chief Minister would not meet the protesting doctors in a transparent way (they are demanding the meeting be recorded or live streamed); the bureaucrats from once-glorious Indian Admi...

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...

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...