Sunday Posts

'Spiky' world I am, of course, referring to Richard Florida's observation that the world was not flat (as Thomas Friedman observed) but spiky. The demise of Berlin Wall, the fall of Soviet Union and the rise of globalism might have undermined the national borders, but its most important resource - talent - tended to be concentrated in certain geographies. This is a very much 1990s idea marked with the celebratory mood of globalism. But the vision was empirically sound: the new globalism not only propelled Silicon Valley to unparalleled dominance, it also regenerated the great urban clusters of New York and London. There were newly affluent and expansive cities brimming with cosmopolitan talent, such as Bangalore, Singapore and Gurgaon. Each country and every region had their own centres of attraction and the history of the last two decades has been a history of migration of talent into these vast ecosystems of enterprise and commercial creativity. But the magnetic attractio...

Liberal Education had a particular meaning at its origin. Or, rather, it had two or more different meanings at the origin: the 'liberal' in English-Scottish sense, an education to be critical and to seek the truth and the German idea of 'Bildung', of continuous self-cultivation. This is a self-consciously gross generalisation, but I think those two ideas should remain at the heart of modern liberal education. It should both be sceptical and hopeful, never a slave of received wisdom and forever in the faith of cooperation and progress. And, this is exactly the same core values modern, secular, democratic societies need: The belief that we can work with one another, better our lives and can make decisions without being told - by some divine or dictator - what we should do, is essential to its existence. The above is rather obvious and well-trodden ground, but importantly, these ideas are historically defined. Some of these ideas, of questioning, of progress, of ...

Higher ed needs a refresh.  One may love how it once was, but we live in a different world. Enlightenment university may be described in glowing terms, but this belonged to a world in which millions of people were sold into slavery every year and Colonial masters imposed their rule on much of the non-European world. A return to that pristine ideal as an escape from our broken times is no less indulgent nostalgia than Brexit, the collective calamity that Britain's closet colonialists imposed on the country. In this brave new world world where the Indian, the Chinese and the African dreams have to be taken account, when democracy demands a fair opportunity to be offered to even the non-posh citizens, and when new technologies of production and of communication make obsolete the twin realities of big factories and unionised labour, higher education needs a model other than nostalgia. And, it may be, like the world of today, different from the stable, rear-mirror-fixatated, p...

Working in Education, I have to confront the conversations about Automation all the time: Are there enough jobs there for us to educate so many people? As with other things in life, there are 'Many Sides' in this debate too. One side of the argument is that there are enough jobs, and the unemployment is resulting from a skills mismatch. As evidence, one can cite simply the number of unfilled positions that the companies report, or the poor applicant-to-job offers ratio.  The other side of the argument is that the jobs are really shrinking and many jobs are being automated, and we should be preparing for a future when most people would not find work. There is strong evidence for this as well: It is possible to show that the job numbers, when compared like-for-like (without counting the new positions created by new companies or sectors), are often decreasing, not only in the developed countries but also in supposedly high growth areas such as manufacturing in China....

It may seem I am making contradictory statements when I say that learning has to change and that humanities must be back in agenda. This is my attempt at a clarification. Humanities is not the rusty old subjects without practical significance. We have made it so, and built a modern education system overtly with a technical - technology, business, accounting etc - focus. This served us well in the past thirty years, but as things change at the workplace, this needs to change. Now, this is not a defence of Liberal Education, now fashionable among American writers. Following Eric Hobsbawm, I tend to believe that Anglo-Saxon education systems of the past, based on a narrow classics curriculum, made culture a luxury product, for a few, of the few, a sign of class privilege rather than opportunity. Against this, technical education opened the gates of opportunity, and was rightly embraced. But, we may have overdone this and now is the time to re-imagine again. We are staring at...