Sunday Posts

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...

My current project was all about building better technical training programmes, till it was not. At the time of starting, the premise was that technical training is currently offered with a very narrow focus and this needs to be enhanced with human capabilities. The engineer is no longer just an engineer, but a solver of problems with broader human and systemic implications. We were supposed to be building a better model for technical training, a sort of plus-plus model, by which these human capabilities become embedded (or, in other words, don't stick out!). But, as I travel and speak to people, I understand that perhaps we are at a different point than when these ideas started forming in my head. To be honest, the above premise has an origin story stretching back to the 1990s, my coming-of-age era, where education became overtly vocational and technical. It was a gap I perceived first in the classroom and then the workplace, where I met technically trained ...

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 ...

It took me a while. Several months, in fact.  Once this blog was my life, and I posted at least twice a week. But lately, this became a graveyard of new starts. Every time, I was starting afresh - there have been several new starts for me in an extraordinarily short period of time in the recent years - I made posts pledging myself to restart. And, then, I lost my way and became silent again.  I want to make it different this time. I am looking back and wondering why I start and stop. It is perhaps because I did not accept in the past that I failed, either completely or at least to make good of the pledge that I made to myself when I restarted. Therefore, I guess, instead of making statements of hope and looking into the future, as the American self-help books would have us do, these restarts should start with an acknowledgement of failure. That is exactly why these are restarts in the first place.  But, before that, I am questioning myself - why do this publicly? When an...

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 ...

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 ...

Trump Rex!  Okay, I wrote I did not care, but I do. In a different way!  I don't think I should still be concerned who Americans vote as their President. There is no such thing as the 'free world'. If there ever was an iron curtain, it was over a long time ago.  However, even if I haven't voted for Trump, I can't ignore that a large number of people in a very educated and technologically advanced country did. I am also painfully aware that someone like me could have written a similar sentence back in 1932, and perhaps many of them, like me, decided that it didn't really matter. The least I could do is to try and understand why such things happen. To be clear, I don't see these things as strange. There are a number of reasons why such things happen. After all, there is a cognitive bias named after Warren Harding (see ' Warren Harding error '). I have been labouring on Will Durant's Story of Civilisation since the beginning of 2024 (and have now re...

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...

  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...

I did more or less abandon this blog. Not because I was writing less - I was writing more. I was writing a lot actually. And speaking a lot. Doing workshops and meeting a lot of people. It was too exciting for me to find time to reflect. Predictably though, that phase is now over. I have done a lot and learnt, but now it is time for me to get back to blogging. And as I restart, I confront the question again: Why am I doing it? These posts were supposed to be breadcrumbs for remembering, so that I remain grounded. They served this purpose wonderfully well when I look back. But several years now, I fell into the public/private persona trap. There is so much I can't write about, and that made honest writing almost impossible. But I am also at that stage, in life and professionally, when being crazy isn't a bad thing. I have always been on the unreasonable side, trying to push the envelop and eschewing security and money and conventional things, but always followed the rules. My gr...

Katy Milkman points out that the Spring solstice is a good time to start new things. Certain days work well, her research shows, to start new endeavours: New year's day, birthday, anniversary of something significant! I have missed this year's start to do anything new; right now is my next best chance. I am in the middle of a big change. I, along with a few other people, built a business over the years. But it was flawed from the start. My partners had different aims, which they, self-declaredly, did not disclose. It was more like an academic project put together, without proper structures. I went along with it, acknowledging the limits of my power and boundaries of my engagement. The goal for me was learning and doing, which I have done in abundance. But it was never meant to be a successful in its original aims because of its structural shortcomings, and right now, it is being morphed into something other than its intended form. It is painful, as it will be for any creator in...

I have learnt a lot in 2023 and want to put that learning to use in 2024. Chiefly, I have tested and clarified some ideas I have had. I got involved in Higher Education somewhat accidentally. Mine did not follow the career paths of my colleagues - a graduate degree leading to a university job - but rather an unsual one: A technical job leading to a career in professional trainining, which in turn led to recruitment (I worked in healthcare and technology recruitment for almost four years), which, in turn, got me curious about what colleges do. Because of this background, I did not start in any academic role or even an administrative one, but was recruited for transforming an institution trying to figure out the linkage to employment. Everything else, including teaching and curriculum development work, came thereafter. Therefore, while I have now spent over twelve years dealing with details of academic planning and administration, my peculiar experience focused me on transformation of ac...