Sunday Posts

I love reading books. My idea of a perfect day would be one spent reading a good book. And, if I must try to imagine what kind of book that would be, I can answer it in two ways. First, I can attempt to answer this by recounting a recent experience of one such day, one of those Saturdays inbetween two long overseas trips when I was at home, and I frittered away all those precious time reading Irving Yarlom's 'When Nietzche Wept'. I hardly read any Fiction recently, and I must admit that I did not realise that I was reading a book of pure fiction till I reached the afterword of this beautifully written, almost believable, book. At the end of it, while I noticed the day has almost ended and I did not do anything that I planned to do using the rare weekend at home, still I felt good, satisfied - fulfilled! The other way of answering this is to say what I do no want to read, which is indeed a more common experience. I hardly get perfect experience with books - some I ...

This blog is one long conversation, though it may appear to be fragmented in between different ideas, reflections and interests. A blog must have a purpose, I am often told, and mine is apparently without one. I have indeed understood the powerful commercial potential of the blog as I have carried on for ten years, and come across opportunities of different kinds, including advertising, paid posts, content creation for others, and all that. Every time I refused, because I wanted to maintain the pleasure of writing this (as I do now, completely unprovoked, on the day of the Holi sitting in a Mumbai hotel), I was asked this - what is the purpose of this blog then? At other times, people who are close to me, complained - justifiably, as I could perhaps give the time to them instead of writing a completely pointless piece - and indeed, if this had any purpose, if not commercial even an artistic one, it would have made more sense of this sacrifice. But I have found all purpose, other than...

Why do you do what you do - someone asked by email.  Is this a life of drift that I live, doing what I like at any given moment, or is there a design, a career plan as one may call it, was perhaps the intent behind the question. My answer - that I search for serendipity - perhaps answers the question and it does not, at the same time.  It does, because that is precisely the plan. It does not, because that looks too much like a convenient excuse for drifting. How could one plan for serendipity? My answer, by expanding possibilities, by setting off in a journey, by doing various things, by engaging in myriad endeavours, by meeting many people and by pursuing many ideas, is logically correct - this is the only way to find possibilities that one otherwise may not - but falls outside what we mean by planning. It is being deliberately unintentional - something along the lines of Churchill rehearsing his impromptu remarks - an oxymoron. But, at the same time, it may exp...

Right now, the theme of my life is getting rid of legacy!  2015 has began positively for me, and I am able to focus on the tasks at hand and also starting to think about the future. There were some minor strokes of luck too, after I thought it had abandoned my path altogether. So, into the third week, as the expression goes, I am looking forward! Which should start with stopping to look rearward. I have been clearing my desks - and indeed my inbox - as quickly as I can, and have started to say no to many of the propositions that come my way. I am indeed tempted by academic life, something I want to live and some of the proposals I have will perhaps allow me that, but I have now resolved to be in business for a little while longer. In fact, after my experiments with living through 2014, I can not afford not to. So, here I am - intently focused on one problem, which, after Mckinsey, everyone seems to call the E2E gap. My day job concerns bringing the educators and emplo...

My agenda in 2015 is to be able to build the kind of institution I keep talking about - a global, entrepreneurial, practical, creative school.  I know the idea but I dont know where I should eventually build it. One tempting answer is, everywhere, which was indeed at the heart of my earlier venture. The technology to reach out to people wherever they are exists today, and building an institution on them is a sort of no-brainer. But, having tried this, I want to build a more traditional institution enabled by those technologies, so that it can reach everyone, but at the core, it offers a rich experience and cohesive purpose for all its learners. One of the things I learned through all my ventures is that it is the purpose that defines an institution, rather than its physical locations, courses or technologies. Too many people think too much about everything else, but forget to ask the why question. My essential starting point is indeed the why question - I see that to be t...

I have resisted Kindle, again. Despite the state of my room, and the fact that I plan to relocate to another country sometime soon. It is slightly ironic that I am studying the relationship between technology and knowledge, and yet I am reluctant to surrender my book-reading habits to Amazon, however much I may love it.  The reason is, for me, serendipity trumps convenience. In Too Big To Know, David Weinberger talks about our two kinds of attempts to organise the world: Algorithmic and Social. The first one is to let the machine organise, based on a secret sauce of behavioral prediction. The other is to let our friends recommend what we may like, leveraging the possibility that we may now have a network of 'weak connections', who might be able to provide us with insights beyond our immediate environment. The holy grail of this organised world is indeed to optimally combine the two, because we can easily point to the limitations of each approach on its own: This is ...

Stricken by Jet Lag, I am up and wondering in a hotel room looking into the sea in Kota Kinabalu: Somewhat the perfect setting to be thinking about 2015! One may think these moments are more suited to think about past than the future. But, despite all the ups and downs in my professional life in 2014, I have not spent too many sleepless nights last year. And, the ones I did, I owe them less to anxiety and more to Jet Lag, something, when I was younger, I would have considered to be some kind of badge of honour! And, in this saga of sleeping and not sleeping, I guess lies the big story for me for 2014, and the things to carry forward next year. The fact that I am even looking forward to 2015, despite the fact that I have effectively failed to do what I set out to do (and in the process, incurred debts), is a good starting point. Through 2014, or even through 2013, I somewhat acquired one crucial twenty-first century skill, the ability to live on the edge! I emerge with a sense of ...

I often talk about creation of a brick-and-mortar college as a part of my future plans. However, my current work is all about online, as was most of my past engagements. Therefore, the question that I often face is why I think Brick-and-Mortar college is a good idea: In fact, whether I think brick-and-mortar colleges have any future at all, in this age of dramatically improving education technology. The starting point for me is that I see a college as a community, first and foremost. It is a community of teachers and of learners. We have systematically undermined this community aspect over the years, as we promoted individual success over collective goals and reduced the education proposition to the mere degrees and college brand names. The community of teachers was undermined by increasing managerial domination over academic life, as well as by disconnecting academic life from the life on the main street. What was left - as many of the proponents of the online college point out ...

Time to make up my mind! By 2015, I wish to complete a very personal 'pivot' to Asia.  I am one to dream but not set up goals. I like serendipities, chance connections, even drift. And, life has so far been exciting, full of unexpected twists and gifts, full of meeting great people at unexpected places. I have done crazy things and got away, more than once! I have moved from one continent to another, gone back to school and started businesses. I have lived knife's edge as well as creatively and contently, at the same time. And, now, it is time for me to conjure up my next big thing.  I went to England exactly 10 years ago because I wanted to have experience. This I certainly have had. Many things changed - I have got wiser by making many mistakes - and I feel prepared now to graduate out of this 'prep' phase and do something significant. Which, in a way, means doing less things than more. I have lived a life of drift for a while, primarily because ...

Elizabeth Losh of University of California San Diego contends that it is a mistake to view education as a product and not as a process. But even this is stopping short, because the question, process towards what, also must be asked. Burying ourselves in the process paradigm, powerful as it is, may obscure our inability to find a purpose. Many of today's debates centre around the question - education for what - and not answering this adequately may inevitably lead to this idea of education-as-a-pill. Indeed, the purpose question can be limiting too. The proposition, education is for an employment, is presented as a self-evident and universal truth all too commonly. While an education-for-employment must undoubtedly have its place in a modern economy, in many ways, this also serves as the key rationale for stripping education from its all other functions, that of joy, discovery and of being, and this is the process element Professor Losh is concerned about. Besides, this is the...

Universities seemed to have lost the plot when it replaced its sense of purpose - whether theological or nationalistic - with the vacuous pursuit of quality, which really stands for nothing. The term we all came to love, 'quality education', is actually a pathetic postmodern posturing, a surrender to the consumer ethic and an abandonment of any grander project of shaping human futures. And, this framework of valuelessness, one could argue, leads directly to the current state of crisis in the university ranks: We may not need them anymore if only we need a conveyor belt of making consumers. But, then, this is only one conception of the future ahead of us. This is a powerful conception, reinforced by all things we live by, and it seems there is no escape. And, as it happens, we can already glimpse into the brave new world of technologically enabled societies built around a few superstars and lots of indebted consumers: The whole story seemed incongruous with our middle clas...

I am currently in Manila. It is good to be back here after almost four years, and meet old friends and new people. Most of the people I meet here, I met them first time for business reasons (I met others through them, so that was business too). However, now that I have no obvious business proposition to meet them, I still feel like seeing them - and they do too. I would like to believe this is a very Asian thing, but perhaps not, because the same thing happens to me in England too: I meet people without business reasons, or at least, without ones that are apparent. While this may sound incredibly pointless to some of my more business-minded associates, I have come to realise that this is my style. I don't meet people to do business, I meet people and then may end up doing business with them. For those who may wonder why I am not very successful in my business career, this should be an easy explanation: That I don't begin with an end in mind. If I appear to lack a sense of...

This blog has become my space to converse, learn and reflect about education. Education, however, is a forward looking enterprise: While I explore motives and purposes of education, which is what I tend to do, such ideas are invariably embedded within our view of the future. My sense of urgency to work for educational innovation comes from the sense that we are at a discontinuous point in our history, and the magnificent model that we have built over last two hundred years may have run its course. This sense of urgency drives all my work, my current endeavours to set up online competency-focused higher education, to organise conferences around education innovation, of writing this blog and my studies and conversations. But, all these, as I am as aware as anyone, are laden with assumptions about the future.  While we may all anticipate a discontinuity - because our recent living experience has been a journey of continuous discontinuity - we may not necessarily all agree on the...

Two conversations in a space of a few days give me an aha! moment: A vexing problem seemed to have become clearer. This is what I intend to write about here. The first of these conversations happened in Delhi. I was speaking to a senior official in one of the large employer organisations. The Indian government, after blundering around with vocational training and wasting huge sums of money on it, has recently asked this employer organisation, along with other similar organisations and trade bodies, to set up sector skills councils. The idea is to focus on the skills needs of India's most promising industries, and draw up some kind of list which the education providers could follow. Such specifications, concluded the policy makers, will remove the ambiguity that educators face, and hopefully bridge the education-to-employment gap.  The person I was speaking to, a senior Director of the organisation leading one such project,  recounted to me how difficult it is to draw...

In the last few weeks, I travelled to several cities in India talking to employers, listening to their plans and concerns about people hiring. I got some numbers - it is evident that they are hiring people in thousands - and I also realised how hard it is to do so. I met some of these employees, bright ones, and listened to their aspirations and how employers help and do not help them in furthering their careers. This was not one neat piece of market research, I was not going around with some kind of questionnaire in hand, but rather a series of overlapping conversations. However, they collectively give me an idea on what's happening in India, though this perspective is limited to the middle class, 'white collar' jobs. Admittedly, my engagements were actually quite specific. It was, first of all, limited to certain industries, those which could be serviced by the new kind of Higher Education I am engaged in. The agenda was narrow - I wanted these employers to partner ...

My weekend, spent boringly in Bangalore, was about catching up on some readings and watching some TED videos, including this fascinating talk by Malcolm Gladwell. In fact, this made me so interested that I ended up watching his longer talk at Google (below) which covers the same ground and more. In fact, this next talk highlighted one more issue close to my heart, which is, when you are at a disadvantage, you need to learn to play a different game. Indeed, this comes from the story of Vivek Ranadive, recounted here in this second talk, and this has profound implications, or so I think, for what I do. Without saying much more about Gladwell except that I shall surely read his book next (and recommend everyone to see his profile on CBS by Anderson Cooper), let me try to summarise what I am learning from all these discussions. My obsession remains with how to educate someone who did not have the advantage of a selective education so that s/he can live a productive and happy ...