Sunday Posts

Lenin allegedly said, "there are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen". Living through placid times just as we gave up on history, it came alive in 2020. But that's not the only comeback worth noticing. Prime Ministers, including those who regularly trashed experts or promoted health benefits of cow urine, came to hide behind 'science' to justify what they are doing. Scientists on television, even if only things they are permitted to do are to sheepishly nod or parrot platitudes, have become a regular spectacle. The pandemic seemed to have brought them back from oblivion. But is this the moment of experts or the twilight of expertise? The great hurrah for science may be misleading when its appreciation extends only upto speculative statistics, which, with its magic wand of models, can produce any result that one may want to see. In fact, as this great catastrophe came knocking, it was clear that we were looking the wrong way in t...

There are many different types of entrepreneurs but the Enterprise Culture, the official celebration of enterprise that dominate the media and our talk, highlight just one of them. And, this, a culturally biased version of the enterprise, is not just counter-productive as it does not fit into the context of many societies, but also regressive, it prevents rather than promoting possibilities of enterprise and innovation. The dominant tale at the heart of enterprise culture is what I shall call the Pioneer Narrative. Think of the Wild West, the Gold Rush, the Unattached Man in search of jackpot, a sort of rough, manly version of creation. Played out in the United States, the primary exporter of enterprise culture narratives, this lies at the heart of our portrait of the entrepreneur as an young man, tough, unconstrained, stops at nothing, up against the nature but offered its bounty, its abundant land that lay there to be claimed.  Enterprise existed much longer than the Wil...