Sunday Posts

In an interesting TED talk (see below), Rainer Strack underscores the urgency of thinking about global workforce crisis. The numbers, as projected in the work of BCG (to which he was a contributor), are indeed telling: The workforce crisis may cost $10 trillion worth of GDP between 2020 and 2030 ( see the BCG work here ). This is not any doomsday talk urging people into action, because the facts are in plain sight anyway: The population in developed nations are aging and there are not enough new births to take the place of retirees. The solutions are common sense but politically impossible: Import workers from countries which may have surplus labour or worse working conditions. Indeed, Messers Strack and others see the limitations in this formula and suggest a mix of measures, not just geographical migration but also non-geographical ones (such as offshoring) and bringing more women and retirees into workforce (Child labour is indeed a taboo subject). This conversation is im...

I did write about developing countries and western education before (see What's Wrong with Western Education , and its Part 2 and Part 3 ). But it is also interesting to see how far this agenda can be carried forward, and how this argument about an indigenous education plays out in the face of globalised politics. These are exactly the issues on the table in India, where the newly elected government wants to push through a neo-liberal economic agenda along with social conservatism. India is hardly unique in this, it must be mentioned, many governments, including United Kingdom's, is doing the same. But the debate in India warrants some consideration, given that this is predominantly young country setting off in a quest for a past. Usually, the conversation about foreign education, as I noted earlier, is painted in black and white - either you like it or you don't. That this may be a far more nuanced issue than just liking or disliking it, is usually ignored, because ...

Business Education in India is in some sort of crisis. The applicants for Combined Admission Tests are falling, indicating sluggish demand even for the top business schools. The lesser schools are in deeper crisis, their lack of placements making headlines in the newspapers.  There are a number of reasons for the dead-end that most schools are facing. Chief among them is perhaps lack of innovation, despite the changing marketplace. Indeed, the Indian regulatory structure is decidedly anti-innovation, and it rewards conformity rather than trying to do anything new. But, there are structural reasons for lack of innovation in the business schools - that they are really too small in most cases, with only a few hundred students at best! In turn, the small number of students is a result of these business schools depending on a narrow range of courses, MBA and its variants, and being completely oblivious of the fact that a large number of students may want to study business at the u...

The year isn't over yet, so I can't say I have survived it. But that was the theme of this year for me - survival! The optimism that I had this time last year - plotting different things to get the business off the ground - was lost somewhat halfway through 2014, primarily because I was having to do myriad things simply to keep my bills paid. But I look back to the time not with regret, but with some kind of affectionate pride. When I started the business, my business partner did ask me how I plan to survive with the limited savings I had. My reply essentially was that having survived my months as a penniless, jobless immigrant, I have started believing I could survive anything, resetting my life altogether if necessary. I almost had to, in 2014, and the fact that I may have survived yet again gives me a sense of achievement. But then, I don't really want to just 'survive'! That's not why I set out on an unusual career course choosing to set up businesses ...

Speechwriters never get the credit they deserve, but they have changed the course of history more than once. The metaphor of an 'iron curtain' or the uncertain promise of a 'tryst with destiny' etched in people's minds a concept that would become permanent by the power of imagery, even if the reality may have suggested otherwise. Fast forward to the society of ours where sound bites and TRP points trump any real experience, the speech writers are enjoying unprecedented powers to change destinies of nations: This comes with a huge responsibility that most are not even aware of.  So, for the future speechwriters, following the case of the person who would have made the Leader of the Conservative Party in Britain, David Cameron, promise to bring down immigration to 'tens of thousands' might be beneficial. Exploiting the resentment about immigration when an open-door policy had resulted in a surge of migration to Britain and the economy had just turned sou...

Rabindranath Tagore got a Nobel for Literature in 1913 and became institutionalised as a poet and a mystic. His ideas about education remain largely unknown, outside the scholarly work that appears from time to time. True, his educational practise gets some prominence because of Viswabharati, the university he created, but the fact that this has since become a Central University subsumed in the bureaucracies like any other university obscures most of its foundational principles. Instead of being an expression of the creative and integrative spirit that Tagore wanted his institution to represent, the university today is little different from any other than the curiosities such as its open classrooms and its annual rituals. The education in India, however, has come to a full circle. The doctrine of Higher Education in independent India did not draw much from Tagore's thinking, but rather depended on the technocratic ideals of the West and aimed at creating an elite who could as...

Has the professional society reached its limits? One way to see the development of western societies in the last hundred years, as Harold Perkin indeed did, is to see it in terms of the growth of the professional society. A society increasingly built on expert knowledge, independence and recognition of the professions, has emerged as an unique structure in the West, creating a 'viable' class structure, and providing a certain kind of legitimacy other than power and coercion.  The key to the maintenance of such social structure was the underlying meritocracy, that everyone has a chance. Professional society was, and always will be, antithetical to the social structure where one is 'born' into privilege, rather than having to work for it. In an age when enlightenment and scientific inquiry undermined the claims of authority derived out of divine will, ability and expert knowledge as defined by 'professions' became the new claim for social leadership and ...