Sunday Posts

Narratives matter for the economy. The point is somewhat obvious, but the Nobel laureate economist Robert Shiller re-emphasizes the point in a new book ( a preview here ). Yet, as Shiller argues correctly, we miss this point all too often. We claim that data will speak for itself, but people think in terms of overarching stories rather than nuanced arguments. And, in this, I shall argue, Bengal misses a trick. By Bengal, I mean the state of West Bengal in India. This sliver of the ancient state of Bengal, which became prosperous and pre-eminent in Indian politics for a variety of environmental (changing courses of rivers), historical (the gradual shift of influence from Dhaka to Calcutta, via Murshidabad) and economic (early emergence of capitalist class through privatization of land ownership, spread of English education and emergence of a hub of global trade) reasons, is - by common perception - in a state of decline. When I use Bengal, I am only using the popular shortha...

The trigger for this post comes from a recent conversation at the Nottingham Trent University School of Narrative Arts, where students in the Undergraduate programmes on Multimedia Programme use a blog to maintain a learning journal and many find this useful to construct a narrative identity (and look up narrative identities of their colleagues and seniors) and build their learning endeavours around it. I found such use blogging as a learning tool innovative, though it indeed seemed obvious after I learnt about it. Consider the programme structure and one gets to understand how it helps further. The programme in question leads to a B Sc(Hons) in Multimedia Programming. It starts with a generalist first year, but a specialism starts to develop in Year 2. The students have a choice to pick up one from three available streams - Moving Images, Interactive Media or Animation - and work on it for next couple of years. While it sounds straightforward, the biggest challenge for the students is...