Sunday Posts

Howard Rhinegold saw it before anyone: That, in the digital age, 'crap detection' (euphemistically  'critical consumption of content', if you like) would become a critical skill. If this needed any validation, one should look at India in the middle of this epidemic - not the one inflicted by the Bat-virus but rather one unleashed by the deluge of fake news. It's a sad spectacle: A billion people endlessly manipulated by WhatsApp messaging! And, true to form, the Indian trolls don't do nuanced nudges, carefully skirting around the boundaries of civility: They go naked, hairy, big and clear - flaunting falsities with confidence, certain that their forward-happy audience will spread the message with gusto. There are two things such a deluge of detritus are designed to do. It is supposed to manipulate a vast majority of people and make them believe something (that the Virus is a Chinese bio-agent), exaggerate something (that the crisis has been caused main...

It only came to me slowly, through a confusing mist of ideas: That I really never escaped the empire. I live in history. My mind is trained to see things with its submerged past, with its layered stories. The blue plaques of London - like the one on the flat near St Pancras where Shelley lived with Mary when she ran away with him - take me back in time often. But I missed the most obvious place where I should have looked for history - my mind in itself. It's hard to explain why I came to London. I did not exactly come looking for money: I left a great job and prospects of a career rather. I had no job offers in hand. I came to learn but didn't enrol in a university until several years later. I dearly loved my life in India and never gave up the plan to return. And, yet, I came. It may seem unsound but I came to see, not as a modern tourist who moves sight to sight and takes a country as a package, but rather as an ancient one who comes to wonder, to observe and to ret...

The surprising popularity of Liberal Education Just as Liberal Arts colleges are closing in the United States, in Asia, Liberal Education is the new hot thing.  Most surprisingly, in India, a country where university education was created as a gateway to government jobs and where students, especially male students, pursue formal education for the sole purpose of employment, Liberal Education is suddenly very popular. Private universities, whose fortunes are closely tied to their students' earning potential, are surprisingly keen on liberal education, as they seek to follow the example set up by Ashoka (and a few others), an US-style High-End liberal arts college set up at great expense by a group of Indian entrepreneurs. One could say that this is not surprising and India is following a path China has followed for some time. Or, for that, even Japan. It may be a common trend that (as in Japan), Engineering and other disciplines draw most high calibre students in a poo...

I am writing this from Bhopal: First time in Bhopal, I am stunned by its beauty and serenity. I somehow imagined it to be a provincial town and somewhat of an industrial wasteland, my perspective informed, perhaps, by my adolescent memories of Union Carbide gas leak. Instead, I see a city wrapped around a lovely lake, pleasant weather and mountainous roads. Such 'discoveries', however naive, make up for all the troubles of travel, spending nights at nameless hotels, and irregular patterns of life this entails. But apart from the beauty of this city, I see ambition: The giant malls straddling the city centre not just changing the consumption patterns of the city, but also its social life. The private universities, only a few years old in the province, churning out a new generation of graduates, and international schools forming a new ambitious pattern of parenting. My initial assumption that the new India is being shaped in smaller towns is proving to be accurate, at least ...

If India has to grow to the next level, it must look beyond its Middle Class. In a classic case of narcissist obsession, India seems to think of itself in terms of what the outside world sees of it - the immense consumption potential of the middle classes - but its own reality is both richer and more diverse than that. So, the model of development that the country must pursue is one that must look beyond the middle classes, and release the enormous human waste that the country continues to endure through poverty. In short, the New India needs to be new, not the old one in some shiny garb. Everyone seems to admit that India's biggest problem is its politics. It may be blasphemous to say so, but democracy has failed India. May be more correctly, India has failed democracy. For all the fine rhetoric and a constitution written in fine English, Indian citizens have little rights or respect from the state. The state that Nehru built ended up being a Desi replica of the Raj, a distant p...

I have just read the Siddhartha Deb's Sweet Smell of Success: How Arindam Chaudhuri made a fortune off the aspirations - and insecurities - of Indian Middle Classes . I had to read it from a blog, as the original article had to be taken down by the Caravan magazine which published it first after Arindam Chaudhuri sued them, and other miscellaneous companies, for publishing it. It is somewhat ironic that the article has been taken down, because it is beautifully written. Mr Chaudhuri may not see this, but the article is as fair and as balanced one could be under the circumstances. Mr Chaudhuri is surely not an one-off: Arvind Adiga has already written about his kind of White Tigers. Mr Deb alludes to this, in a short reflective section somewhat buried under the burden of the fascinating narrative of Chaudhuri and his IIPM, and writes about the tension between the new, aspirational India and India of the old, as symbolized by the IIM kinds. This is possibly the key message of t...