Sunday Posts

I spend a lot of time speaking with educators. Most of these conversations are about two things: How the world is changing and how higher education does NOT need to change. The assumption is that there is an unmutable core of higher ed: Some type of transcendent purpose beyond the question of practical application and economic returns, beyond here and now, something that can not be or should not be measured. This is very hard to argue against. What kind of lowlife I would be to question an educator dedicated to building better lives?  But I usually leave with a question. If we want to improve lives, is getting the students to attend school and making them read textbooks the best way to do it? Besides, we don't even do it for free: We make them pay for the pleasure of becoming a better person and often their parents have to sell their land (or liquidate family savings) to be able to afford it.  For me, there is indeed an unchanging core of higher education - that to be able to ...

Is there anything I believe in? This is one of those profile questions that pop up in diversity and inclusion forms. I prefer not to tick 'prefer not to say' as it seems disingenuous. I believe in something  though it is hard to categorise within those neat boxes. I was born a Hindu and believed in something. It was not just the festivals and holy days, not just the prayers and wishing for a blessing - those were all part of my childhood! But it was more than that: I thought like a Hindu and still do. I feel a part of the universe in me; I feel the debt I incurred to the universe, and to my ancestors, at my birth, and live everyday to pay it off; I know the I came from the universe and to it, I shall return.  But few beliefs I grew up with fell away with time. The caste hierarchy, in a sublime way, was part of my social sense. I was conscious that marriage to a non-brahmin would be unacceptable. It took time, travel and engagement with more enlightened people for me to move be...

Today, I wish, would be the first day of the rest of my life. I am in that honest mood: That I feel stuck, of going nowhere, yet again. I knew this was coming. Against my better judgement, I was getting sucked into company life. I was telling myself a lie - I enjoy it! After eschewing this path for many years, I suddenly felt that illusion to be in control, of getting things done. What was it - the pandemic-induced pathos? - that led me down this path? But, sure enough, I now have that unmistakable feeling of getting nowhere. I did what I usually do at moments like this: I got away. I came to Istanbul. I possibly needs the strange combination of hustle and the 5000-years of history around me to recharge my senses and temper my self-importance. I am reading this beautiful little book called 'The four thousand weeks' which is about embracing the limitedness of life and focusing on what counts. And as I do this, I know I am on the wrong path. My trouble - and I shall call it troub...

I am in India. I have forced myself into a 'discovery' trip - sitting across the table with potential customers and partners to understand if our ideas have any validity. This has been enormously valuable, as it should be. I have now lived through the rituals of being challenged, rejected, questioned and occasionally supported - the usual rite of passage of product creation! I am exhausted but full of ideas, and I think I know what to do next. As it was necessary, I came with an open mind. Like a start-up, I came not to 'sell' but to 'learn' [I have always taken Steve Blank's point seriously: Start-ups are learning organisations] I was not pitching, I was connecting. Coming to India after a gap of two years, I wanted to know everything that is happening, that is important. Even when people were telling me that there was no market for my idea, I was eager to know what other ideas were there. I wanted to step out of my comfort zone to step into the other perso...

The ability to fall in love makes us human. It is a complex feeling, the interplay of hormones and the perfect poise of rationality and the irrational, sitting just beyond our understanding - only just! And, therefore, it's hard to explain. We try poor explanations too often: Something to be, something to possess. And, yet, at the core, this is to give, give away, care for something, or someone, other than ourselves - making us greater than we really are. This feeling sustains our most intimate bonds, nations, humanity, but we neither understand nor control it. And that's perhaps for the better: If we knew where the kill switch was, we would have killed it a long time ago. Contra Darwin, falling in love perhaps serves no evolutionary purpose. At its core, it is about giving away, working against the selfish gene, just enough to keep it in check. However, this gives us poetry, art and all what is beautiful and non-essential in our language. The creative impulse wouldn't exis...

On a rather gloomy day in Melbourne - a sad one when the city has lost its greatest cricketing son ever - I came across the latest idea of government innovation: A minister for loneliness!  Election season, so Victorian politicians are confronted with many catchy manifesto ideas. Emerging from one of the most stringent and longest lockdowns anywhere in the world, mental health is indeed at the top of the agenda here. Therefore, the ministry to tackle loneliness sounds right - and timely! I am not a huge fan of governments looking to address social issues. A friend helpfully pointed to me to the Ministry of Silly Walks, which is indeed as innovative and perhaps as needed for our dour times. The effects of the lockdown were devastating, but a minister to solve the problem? I almost misread the proposed title as a minister OF loneliness! To my surprise, though, it turned out not to be a new idea at all. That I did not know that the UK was the first to have such a minister in 2018 was ...

I always knew - I am one of those three princes of Serendip. Amnesiac, or perhaps lost in reincarnation, but in a perpetual journey to I-don't-know-what. Because like those princes, once I left the port, I never knew where I would be going, or if I would ever come back. Just transpose this strange feeling onto a somewhat idyllic, somewhat forced, and unprecedented holiday at home - in Calcutta - for 28 days! I have never had a holiday that long since I started working, that was a quarter of a century ago, and never stayed in Kolkata at a stretch for such a long time. Halfway through it, I counted the days and the penny dropped! I was obviously trying to dodge the Christmas-induced astronomical airfares more intently than I was thinking about anything else. But then this holiday was anything but monotonous. The first half of it was a big family gathering, a four-day event around the Hindu celebration of coming of age of my son. Some of my friends indeed saw the 'th...

As one must, I look out to 2017 for a new start. The time is appropriate to think what this should look like, on the morning of the first working day of 2017. 2016 was a strange year. I spent the year grounded, in a kind of suspended animation thinking about the next big thing, but doing it. Seen more graciously, this was a long recovery, from the burn-out of my earlier attempt but also from the two years of being on the road. It was not meant to be a year of reset, but rather of going back to drawing board, rethinking the assumptions and reworking how I start again. I did not want to be grounded for a full year surely, but as is always the case with such things, I had a lot of false starts in 2016. False starts are very much part of my life and I am rarely discouraged by them: In fact, I take those as badges of honour, as proof that I went outside my comfort zones. Those, failures and disappointments, are symptoms of me living. But, a sober eye could also see them as sym...

As the Eurostar emerged from Channel Tunnel and the train announcements switched to first English and then French from the other way around, I had that feeling of being back at home, which is paradoxical. I have lived in England for 11 years now and familiarity is a factor, particularly after being reprimanded at the Left Luggage facility at Gare Du Nord for not speaking French. But then, English is still not my first language, and my schooling was not in English - it is a language I have learnt much later in life. But, as it seems, my worth today is defined by English I speak and write - as I make my living as a rainmaker and enjoy my occasional Warholian 15-minutes on this blog. But, before I get to the point about an English-speaking Indian, let me say a few things how it felt in Paris, where I spent a week (which should explain my silence on this blog). I took off to Paris for many reasons, one of them being able to reset the clock back in my own mind - I once spent a particu...

July and I complete a year of travel. I spent most of the year on the road, travelling mainly to India and sometimes to the Philippines. This was some kind of reset, just as my project in global education seemed to have stalled, which, at the least, allowed me to regain the confidence that ebbed in the midst of a failure. When I launched the previous project - where the cardinal sin was optimism and we set out despite knowing we were underfunded - I told my business partner that i felt confident that I could rebound from a failure, if it might come. This last year was just that, my effort to rebound from a failure, and I feel reasonably satisfied with where I am now. Satisfied but not content, which is a curious feeling, as I know how much is still to be done. So, I am not counting the chickens yet. However, I needed to test some assumptions, restore faith in my own abilities, and clarify some of my own objectives, all of which I have done now. This meant three weeks of travel ev...

In India, Education is not supposed to develop Skills. At least, that is what various policy-makers prescribe, as they use the two terms, Skills and Education, with two very specific meanings. Accordingly, business groups and consulting organisations will have Skills Departments and Education Departments, accepting that these are two different things.  Seen from outside, this is indeed one of those idiosyncrasies that one has to put up with when dealing with India. But it is not just about some government official, perhaps goaded into it by some clever consultant, coming up with the Skills mantra as distinct from Education. It is also two other things that ail India. First, it reflects, rather than mandates, a deep division between Skills and Education that is already there in the Indian psyche. Doing anything with your hand is indeed considered inferior in India, a legacy of the Caste system which defined a hierarchy of labour. Skills, that is the ability to do something, ar...

India is facing a Higher Ed recession! Okay, the students are still coming, as they always do in India, but the colleges have now started failing. There are some colleges in India with less than 10 students. The rapid expansion of private colleges, when at least 10 opened every day between 2006 and 2012, seems to be over. Business Schools are in even deeper crisis, with a crisis of confidence on MBA as it fails to fetch anything more than jobs undergraduates can easily do. So, the fees are falling, marketing expenses are rising, seats are going vacant and yet, the admission queues in the tried-and-tested colleges are getting longer. This is a difficult time to talk about new ideas, and new ideas are sorely needed. Even those traditional institutions, enjoying a sudden popularity in the wake of widespread disillusion, have crisis of their own in their midst, not least the political interference and widespread corruption in the Public Education sector. While these may stand solid i...

I am now in Mumbai, the sprawling commercial capital of India. 16% of the country's GDP is in this one city, where 70% of its capital transactions take place. This is one of those big populous metropolis, home to more than 20 million people, that represents whatever the popular perception of India is. Even before the flight touched down, a perceptive traveller can clearly see the islands of California-esque prosperity in the middle of Sub-Saharan poverty, the apt expression Amartya Sen used to describe India. Professor Sen surely touched a raw nerve when he said that. The comment came just before the last year's General Elections, at a time of resurgent Indian nationalism. He was accused of selling out, undermining India in front of the world for personal gain. Anyone flying into Mumbai can indeed see what Professor Sen meant - the metaphor would appear quite literal - but such acts of truthfulness are usually considered unpatriotic. It was only coincidental that to...

I promised to write about my travels in India in an earlier post ( see here ) and here is an update. I have completed a week in India, traveling through Mumbai and Bangalore. Just as I expected, travels in India are always full of surprises. Once I open my mind, I always do, I can find anything and its exact opposite in India. This time, I was looking out for hope. I got hope and despair in the same measure. India is, indeed, no country for someone looking for new ideas in education. And, it is not just because the country can not lift itself up from the colonial hangover of privileged classes. It is also because Indian education is, at least mostly, deeply corrupt. The new private universities in India, which have expanded rapidly, have come about mostly through a rigged accreditation process, oiled through donations to whichever party remains to be in power in a given state (and indeed, if you are too sympathetic to the opposition, you dont get a license). But, also, public uni...

I am on my way to India, again. This has now a two-week cycle for me. So, all this, Sunday morning breakfast at Gatwick, midnight queues at Indian airports to scan my body for African diseases, the familiar food in Emirates, feel usual. I am already tired from journeying so much (an experienced traveller told me, only those who don't travel think travel is glorious!) and the journeys now are marked by a strange combination of boredom, tiredness and total lack of enthusiasm, which is unusual for me.  Particularly because I am going to India, and as it happens, I would spend a few days in Kolkata this time, a city I still consider my home. Notwithstanding the fact that I am so disheartened by the illiberal turn in India, Kolkata never fails to attract, amaze and make me feel comfortable. Yet, it is one of the cities which are too ensnared in its comfort zone - and surely it attracts because if is my comfort zone too, one thing I try so hard to escape all the time - and it fails to m...

I am in India, and one conversation that I notice is the aspiration to grow beyond the Back Office. More specifically, I am in Bangalore as I write this, the city which indeed built itself being the global back office, and one could perhaps both see the idealistic and pragmatic logic why India should grow beyond the back office. The idealist rationale is about capturing a greater portion of the value that is created, as evident in the aspirations of the start-up networks here in Bangalore. These new entrepreneurs, unlike the generation before them, are not content building Development Centres, which will do the jobs of the Western clients. One hears conversations about building software applications that will potentially change the way things are done, here in India but also abroad. The confidence deficit that defined the Indian businesses in previous decades seemed to have lifted, and the talk of taking on the established global brands and players have started in all earnestness...

In my various conversations in India, I get to hear that business education is in crisis. The applications and enrollments are falling, and the MBAs from most institutions are not getting jobs that justify the effort, and investment, in an MBA. Several schools are up for sale, and everyone is generally pondering about the future. Most conversations are focused on the Quality Crisis - they point to the three or four top-ranking and extremely selective Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) still maintaining their value proposition - and most new institutions are desperately trying to replicate their strategies around them, often hiring people who leave or retire from IIMs. However, what gets missed is that this is not just a quality problem. There is a whole lot more here, though it is difficult to analyse this appropriately in a country like India where innovation and courage are not really associated with education. However, a good place to provoke a discussion is indeed to look...

Whoever said it: The maxim of corporate dysfunction is when someone discusses their airmiles on the dinner table. While I scrupulously avoid it, making some of my friends what I really do when I frequently disappear for business trips, I can't avoid another frequent flyer syndrome: Having my moments of existential crisis at Airline lounges! So, here I am, in the quiet poshness of the Gatwick Lounge, and devoid of any conversations; the assorted Golf and Lifestyle magazines rather useless, staying off food in consideration of my soaring weight, with a touch of Internet fatigue (this post is being done retrospectively, or should I say, posthumously, after the thoughts have died). It was one of those moments when I don't want to start reading the books I am carrying in my bag, because I have to read them anyway for the next 7 hours, as I have seen all the movies that are there on Inflight entertainment (one less spoken about downside of Carrier loyalty) - and therefore, plunged in...