Sunday Posts

  The two weeks of Covid, it seems, wiped my memory clean - but given me new ones. One of those is a dream - of the most feverish nights - in which I was in a room where all doors out led back into the same room again. Its mosaic floor was of the room I grew up in, back home in Kolkata; its door a white one like the one in Croydon; its windows showed nothing but an endless array of houses nearby, somewhat reminding me of a flat in Hyderabad where I spent some time. In the dream, I was forever trying to go out of the room and turning back up in it, again and again, even when I was not sleeping anymore. It was one of those that extend from sleeping to waking to sleeping back again, making me more desperate to escape in every turn. If I ever write a story about it, would I call it 'No Exit'? I thought about it later on, as I continue to limp back to normal life. The jarring point is the existence of the door though, a wide white-framed one, which was there for a reason. It was per...

The Middle Class is all about paradoxes.  Those who embrace Middle Class claim not to believe in classes at all, or at least in class as a determinant of human behaviour. For Middle Classes then, it's about in the middle in terms of income and not about being a class at all. In that sense, Middle Class is only a temporary, transitional, identity. Also, this 'Middle' is neither the average, nor the exact middle point and nor the most common level of earning, but rather, about being in transition - not being defined by what one is, but what one wants to be. So, the most plausible definition of the Middle Class is not about class, or a point in income distribution, but a mindset. Now what that mindset is, there is no clear agreement on that. One view holds that middle class is about striving, trying to get better, doing better than their parents did. The other is that the middle class is about an endless struggle not to be poor, by mimicking the techniques of t...

Right now, India is one exciting economic story. Its population is young and its economy is growing. The government, with a strong mandate in Union and State levels, have been introducing a number of structural reforms that the previous governments, over a quarter century, could not do. With legislative reforms, private participation in infrastructure building is becoming easier, and there is hope that India's rickety ports, faltering railways and mostly potholed roads would soon appear in a different, shiny, avatar. In a lot of ways, India is at a moment like China in the early 80s: The structural changes should unlock a steep growth, quick growth of employment and a new cycle of private prosperity. This would be a reasonable expectation but for India's deficiencies in Education and Health, which may mean that India's demographic potential would never be realised. Structural reforms and infrastructure building can create the opportunities, but without corresponding g...

The paradox at the heart of middle class lives is this - it is an unending pursuit of mediocrity. I know we want to see it differently. The great middle class dream is the pursuit of happiness, in Jefferson's classic formulation. Happiness is about setting an achievable limit and being content with that. Happiness is an end, it is about stopping at a reasonable level, and not aspiring for more. It is about being what you can comfortably be. Which is, seen the glass half empty way, mediocrity. Surely, pursuit of unhappiness would not inspire anyone. But this is indeed at the heart of educational enterprise, of the idea of an examined life. It is about continuously testing one's limit, a pursuit to escape the comfort zones. Even when everything seems content, the point of education is to question the very contentedness, and to introduce perspectives, spatialities and temporalities: No happiness is complete, all encompassing and lasts forever, is the inevitable verdict...

War is only bad for those who have to fight it, but it is good for everyone else. For governments, war is a good way to remain in power. Every President or Prime Minister wants to be a war leader, which allows them not to worry about hard promises such as economic development or jobs, and keeping power just by sending a few poor people to their death. If things go really wrong, one can just blame that on anti-national elements, suspend rule of law and put them in jail; and indeed, one can suspend elections altogether and stay in power as long as the war goes on. It's a pity we do not have the 'hundred year wars' anymore.  For businesses, there may be a nervousness about risks, but on the aggregate, war is good as it means new contracts, and good replacement demand. A bloated real estate economy can do with rebuilding some houses, and housing some displaced people, as long as the government is paying for it. For the media, it is news. How much better is it to report on real ...

Whether we call it the 'Second' Machine Age or the 'Fourth' Industrial Revolution, the idea that we are at some kind of technological tipping point - that moment in history where society would change - seem to have consensus. Such change, going by historical experience, means different things, doing new things and not doing old things as well as finding new ways of doing old things. This transformation, all these new ways, is a function of education. There are winners and losers of the transformation so far. All economic evidence points to a massive loss of privilege for the middle classes, though the feel-good factor of house prices somewhat soothed the effect. In fact, the stagnation of middle class life, despite all the excitements of Uber-hailing cabs, is present and clear, making the economists question whether the Information Technology revolution has had much beneficial impact on living standards, particularly in comparison with earlier episodes of industri...

To paraphrase Dickens, this is the best and the worst of the times for Global Higher Education. There has never been a time of greater demand and greater desire for it. As millions join the ranks of middle classes in Asia and Africa, the West, its lifestyle, income levels and culture define the shape of the dream - and global higher education represents the pathway to it. On the other hand, these students were never less welcome in the metropolitan centres of Europe, Australia and the United States. For all its high-minded rhetoric of borderless knowledge, the West feels overcome with migration, the modern-era exodus through the heart of Europe being its most visible manifestation. It is under an intellectual seizure, with extremist rhetoric and isolationist tendencies on the ascendance across the continent. Global education, in the form we came to know it, has never been more difficult to attain or costlier. One crucial factor that widens this chasm is the nature of the ...

Conversations change. The idea of a Nineteenth century college education could be, with some generalisation, summarised as one to build the character of the student, with the assumption that with those character strengths, they would be able to learn and lead in different walks of life. But, as professions start to emerge, Character was no longer enough. In the professional society, technical skills came into prominence, and indeed, became the point of education. The conversation reversed - a good technocrat was understood to possess the character anyway. These ideas may be at an inflection point yet again, but before we get into this, it is worth wondering what character meant and why we abandoned its quest for technical skills in the first place. I am acutely conscious of the gross generalisations that one has to make in a conversation like this, including the implication of epochal change - that one thing neatly went out of fashion when the other thing came in. For a fact, we ...

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 ...

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...

India is Education's El Dorado: Everyone wants to go there but no one knows how. I say that often enough, sometimes to my peril. People like to treat me as an Indian Education specialist. My past experiences in Indian education, particularly the hard-fought bit played out in small town India, make me some sort of a tour guide to this El Dorado. It is indeed a problem for me if the place does not exist. However, I don't want to be an 'Indian Education expert'. I am in fact rather weary of the professed experts of Indian Education, those who produce shiny reports and make glitzy Powerpoint presentations talking about the new middle classes and the wonderful opportunity there. Many of them, of course, will dutifully carry mineral water in their bag while in India and end their explorations within the city limits of Delhi and Mumbai, and have never stepped inside, much less taught, in an Indian classroom. The very fact that I have been out to those small cities, a...

How does it feel to be in the middle when average is over? The middle classes know: They feel squeezed, and clueless, as the fusion of ubiquitous globalisation and pervasive automation push the economies to the tipping point of making people in the middle redundant. The middle class values, of moderation, patience, of deferring consumption and long preparation, continuity and persistence, are all baggage in this brave new world of superstars. Bragging, not modesty; consumption, not savings; street smarts, not preparation; opportunism, not commitment; the things that win are instinctively abhorrent to the middle classes - or, the old middle classes, more correctly. They have been left behind, comprehensively and irredeemably, in the world we created. But this means more than just the decline of a class of a people: It may mean a change in the way of life. Civilisation is a big word, but it is not altogether inappropriate to say that we did build a whole civilsation around the emer...

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...

As India approaches the 2014 General Election, and the prospect of a Fascist takeover becomes real, the grand old idea of India - that of a cosmopolitan nation - comes to the fore in sharp relief. This foundational idea of modern India, a nation that welcomed everyone and rejected no one, with an  identity to be conceived on the basis of inclusion rather than exclusivity, is the one up on the ballot paper, so to speak.  But this is a strange contest. Despite the fact that the idea of India is being contested upon, there is not a side standing for it. In the post-modern reality of Indian politics, the parties are jostling for positions on various other issues, ranging from India's pride to the battle against corruption, with various local and parochial issues lined up in between. The idea of India as conceived by the Founding Fathers and enshrined in its constitution is being represented, ironically as it must be, by the 'None of the Above' option on the ballot. Wh...