Sunday Posts

India - with its new education policy - wants to make a new start. In a world of weakening institutions, China-US competition and a rapidly changing climate and disease environment, this is overdue. India's young millions is great power, but also great responsibility: If not tended, its demographic dividend can turn into a demographic disaster. But the first call of duty for an Indian educator is to address the elephant in the room. For far too long, Indian higher education carried on the colonial legacy, casting successive generation of Indians in the empire's shadow. Despite its independence, and perhaps because of the troubled legacy of its partition, India remained a marginal player in the world higher education scene, consigned to following the agenda rather than shaping it. Its higher education system, always big and now the second biggest in the world, curtailed its own aspiration and carried on the business as usual. It has failed its people, comprehensively and spectac...

All humans are not born equal. Some are born in the shadows of a colonial past, with an indelible history embedded in themselves. Whatever they may do - and many of them do a lot - they remain unerringly colonial. Even if they are accepted by kind friends, behaviour with them - towards them - falls under tolerance; and indeed, they are always periodically reminded of who they are by others not so kind. They are confronted with stereotypes of themselves in daily lives, and even when those stereotypes are positive - for me, being considered an IT specialist just because I am Indian, for example - it is often living another person's life: That of a historical person, who we don't know and aren't ourselves, but who was present at birth and will always stay with me. It's hard to explain this experience to someone who is not born into this perpetual coloniality. There are things a colonial can see - even when she chooses to ignore it - which the others may not notic...

As India's universities fail to cling to their already precarious positions on global league tables, old concerns about Indian higher education have been newly voiced. There is much to be unhappy about, not just the position on the league tables. The skewed structure of Indian higher education means the significant number of bright graduates, educated at great expense by the Indian state, leave India every year for fortunes abroad. Despite the overt focus on technology education in India, the technology gap with its neighbour and competitor for global influence, China, is alarmingly wide. And, for the all their swagger, Indian business schools have languished at the bottom of global league tables and their graduates still struggle to find good jobs in India. But I don't want to lament here about the obvious. In fact, I wish to make a point which is its opposite: The obsessions about global league tables, technology lead or employability, the three key factors dr...

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...

My journeys abroad was to make sense of myself, to see from the outside what can't be seen from the inside. Perhaps predictably, but at once ironically, I ended up in England, mother country of modern Indian imagination, hawking - as I can't find a better word - English manners and experiences to the fawning middle classes. Admired simply as I live in England, it became increasingly difficult for me to leave, as all suggestions of my intent to return were invariably met by premonitions of something being wrong, as no one really ever wants, or should want, to return. Even the rather satisfying moments of canvassing India's economic progress were almost always punctured by grossly embarrassing proclamations of 'special relationship', in full knowledge that the affectations flow only one way; in my stock of trade, Kolkata wants to be London without ever London wanting to reciprocate. Therefore, 'self-colonialisation' as a concept appears real from my vant...

I came across the term, 'self-colonialization', in a news report on Arundhati Roy's recent speech in Berlin. She was speaking at the launch of her book The Ministry of Utmost Happiness in German. The news report only mentions the term cursorily: Ms Roy was speaking about the violence the Indian state unleashes on its tribal and its poor and being on the front-line of the battles for the rights of tribal and villagers, such a characterisation of the Indian state is only natural for her. Besides, coming at a time when India has drowned a few hundred villages by making Sardar Sarovar Dam operational, and fighting mini-civil wars in Central India in the name of 'Development', 'self-colonialization' sounds like an appropriate term. Surely, this would be greeted with derision in India as unnecessary bad-mouthing of India by one of the pet Hate Figures of the Indian establishment. But this has nothing to do with the validity of what Ms Roy is saying, and rath...