Sunday Posts

I have been, admittedly, a constant sceptic of the inflated valuations of online higher education companies.  Part of the reason is practical: Most online education companies focus much more on sales than creating sustainable institutional structures, looking to create an educational sub-prime. Their aim is often to 'uberise' - commoditise the inherent trust and respect that make an educational community work. That focus on scale, without a proportional attention on the outcome, makes an irresponsible business. Indeed, the Chinese government has recently stepped in to make this precise point. But there are also other reasons why I think these edtech valuations are frothy and unsustainable. I think the investors misunderstand the nature of education, particularly higher education, and therefore, their estimates about the prospect of online higher ed are wildly wrong. The pandemic was an aberration, when people were forced to stay home; as we return to normal, online education wi...

The new year 2022 will be like no other. The shock of 2020 and the grappling of hope-and-despair of 2021 will be behind us. The pandemic, which seemed to threaten civilisation earlier, will become a mere logistics problem.  At the year-end party, we would celebrate modern science, for putting the shape-shifting killer genie back into the bottle. As the seconds are counted down, we would shed our fears and look at the future in its eye. At that hooray moment, we will know that there will be no going back to 2019. Our lives, societies and businesses, may have just been reinvented in the shadow of the pandemic. The memory of the 'pandemic years' will linger on: Therefore, in all our hope, there will be sobriety; our fetting of the new heroes will embrace the mourning for the dead; in our new exuberance, there will be the anticipation of payback time.  More than the outward changes, the changing ideas will matter more. The economic principles that we lived by - sound money and sma...

In 1921, just after the Influenza pandemic, H G Wells was writing "Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe." As we strive to look beyond the pandemic, it's a useful place to start. Of course, we are still counting the bodies and the public health challenge must be met first. But it will be a mistake not to think about what comes after, as otherwise, the after-effects will linger on and may eventually break the society as we know it. In the influenza pandemic, India lost approximately 5% of its population. This time around, even with the near-collapse of the healthcare system in some cities, the toll is likely to be lower. But the economic and social impact of the Pandemic would be far more severe, with the global supply chain reaching a breaking point and the dislocation of the health and education systems due to the pandemic.  However, my objective here is to try to look beyond the pandemic and what needs to happen to contain the afte...

While we all are weighed down by sadness of the human tragedy of the pandemic, it is clear that we know how to end the pandemic. Vaccines are working, testing has become more accessible and there is a treatment around the corner. From now, it is a question of political will and logistics, and not an intractable battle with nature (as is the case with AIDS, for example). It is time to be thinking the post-Pandemic world. If history is any guide - and it usually is a reliable guide - this worldwide disruption should set off a new 'golden age'. Pessimism, at the end of such disasters, usually turn to optimism. Who would have imagined that the daily commute to office can ever be something to look forward to? Therefore, getting back to normal with a vengence is indeed a distinct possibility. Such a scenario has already been factored into the expectations, in stock markets, house prices, in all those loans given out to keep the companies afloat.  However, there is another school of t...

India loves global kudos: They were credulous that their Prime Minister was declared by the United Nations the best Prime Minister in the world only recently. Therefore, I believe that the honour of being the world's most neo-liberal country would be received with enthusiasm.  Of course, this honour had to be hard-won. The standards set by United States and United Kingdom are high. India joined the bandwagon early, of course, signing up to go down the road early in the 1990s, but it only took a lot of hard work of dismantling institutions and buying up the democracy to finally arrive at the billionnaire raj. While other nations had to tread with stealth, careful not to completely wreck the modern social contract their nations are based upon, India was bold, cheered on by its middle class - which hoped to be a beneficiary - and went about marginalising minorities, steamrolling the environment and tearing up constitutional protections in a breakneck speed. All in the name of developm...

Last spring, people who could not understand, or could not accept, the difference between a Computer virus and a naturally occurring one, were pushing hard the idea that the Novel Corona Virus - which was raging through Europe and the Eastern Seaboard of North America at the time - was made in a Chinese lab and then sent out to the world. Whether or not one believed it then, come Winter 2021, there is no doubt that we have made this pandemic our own. Then, I believed that the simpler explanation - that the Pandemic occurred from Bats and through Pangolins - was more plausible; a price we paid for careless exploitation of the natural world. China was guilty, of delayed action, of obfuscation and of - at another level - allowing potentially dangerous practice of eating exotic meat, but not of making the Virus which would affect and kill a lot of their own citizens and dent its global prestige.  Now, as the contagion shows no signs of slowing down and the virus is creating new, potent...

Among the many victims of the pandemic, it will be easy to forget the students who graduated this year. While we focus on the elderly and the vulnerable and try to support those who have lost their jobs or businesses, the graduates - young and relatively less at risk - may appear less worthy of our sympathy. And, yet, the pandemic and the resulting destruction in its wake would mean all carefully laid plans, all the years of toil and dreaming, may fall apart, consigning many to shaky starts and entire lifespans of underachievement. But a further tragedy is also unfolding in slow motion: Those who will come after, next year and further out still. Corona virus may be tamed with a vaccine, but the pandemic has exposed the inherent weakness of the world we were building: Connected economies with disconnected polities, interdependent lives lived by atomistic individuals, a world faced with long term changes where rewards are all here-and-now. The euphoria of the 1990s, after the fall of Ber...

As our world falls apart, we have learnt to take comfort from Conspiracy theories. Dean Koontz did write about Wuhan-400 years ago, didn't he? Have you not watched the South Korean documentary from 2018 which uncannily predicted just this? How could China contain the virus, one that is tearing apart Europe and the United States, so quickly? Maybe this was accidentally released from the laboratory where they were building up this nefarious bio-agent? After all, Trump and Pompeo have said they have seen the evidence! We live in the age of credulity. We would like to believe what we are fed, without questioning. If something is written in English and published on WhatsApp, it must be true.  Once this crisis is over - and it will be - we will be scarred more by our indulgences in conspiracy theories than this virus itself. That is indeed my case for resistance - I don't want to get into the habit. I would rather keep my brain slightly active and neurons alive and no...

As I wrote about technology and online learning earlier, this pandemic is condensing the Hype Cycle and, within a few short weeks, establishing what technology may or may not do for us. Observations that would have taken a full career cycle otherwise - from the claim that everybody will soon be doing online learning to the admission that the server can only take a thousand people at a time to the realisation that there are too many operating system versions out there in the world - are all happening right in front of us.  But this is not just for online learning. Our claims and assumptions about technology ecosystem have been tested quickly and thoroughly as the pandemic brought the world to a sudden stop. In many ways, this is quite a predictable pandemic: A respiratory virus, with similarities with the ones we have seen before, following an infection route mirroring the pattern of global commerce. But Big Tech could do little in anticipating, tracing or responding to th...

We have been told that among the many changes that the Corona Virus will bring to our lives, one of the most significant will be education going online.  With the forced shutdown of schools and universities, online education has become normalised. The moment many technologists were long predicting - classrooms have disappeared and people logged onto online learning sites in millions - have arrived.  I am not so sure though. For a start, I did not know whether veteran professors discovering this 'wonderful new tool' called Zoom is good or bad news. I work in online learning and I like the attention, but I feel uneasy that the whole business is basking a little too brightly in its association with the lockdown. It's not being normalised; it's like Joe Wicks, a routine for exceptional times. Besides, not sure the Internet economy has stood up to the scrutiny. It did not certainly come through the end of the world scenario unscathed. Amazon has failed to del...

After undermining the threat and overdoing the panic, we are starting to discuss, if only very gradually, the possibilities of a post-Pandemic world. After Donald Trump's April 12th came and went, we are pinning our hopes on the ever-so-slight flattening of the slope of the curves in various countries. France's 11th May target to reopen the schools, on the sound logic that digital deprivation is now turning into an educational gap, is being taken more seriously.  However, we know this is not going to be a return to normal as we know it. There is increasing speculation whether this is the end of Capitalism. At least one serious thinker, Slavoj Zizek, believes that this is the moment we will start taking communism seriously (not of the soviet variety, but rather of the war economy type that we are living with now). Though this is rather unlikely - socialism of the temporary kind ends up concentrating ever more resources in fewer hands, as we have seen from the last fina...