Sunday Posts

Higher Ed in India is a serious matter.  It should be obvious, given the size of India's youth population, its importance as a major economy and democratic society and the competition it faces from the other rising powers in the region, primarily China. But education in general and higher education in particular were never taken seriously in India, except as an endless series of examinations. The primacy of examinations and middle-class obsession with exam results (Amartya Sen wrote a book titled 'The country of first boys')  Over the last thirty years, the sector has been privatised, de-professionalised and badly regulated. The institutions often became the front for money laundering, and they were run by politicians, either directly or by proxy. There are ghost institutions without any real student, widespread corruption in regulation and ranking processes, fake degrees and professors without qualification: It is a big and profitable market, which c...

At the core of my enterprise is the idea of personal change. This is not about the neo-liberal doctrine that says, everything is changing around you and therefore, you must change and adapt. I accept that things change but refuse to accept that we are just passive participants, changing as our external circumstances change. At least, I would like to believe that it is an educated person's responsibility to find opportunities for change and influence its course. How this change may happen is also a question mark. Those who know me know that I don't hold a high opinion about the coaches, those self-styled individuals who assume that some sort of certificate from somewhere gives them the right to tell another person to live their lives. No one has the right, or the ability, to tell another person what to do or how to live their lives, I believe. All we can do is to help people find their way and be that guide and friend at the moments of confusion which will invariably come...

My current project was all about building better technical training programmes, till it was not. At the time of starting, the premise was that technical training is currently offered with a very narrow focus and this needs to be enhanced with human capabilities. The engineer is no longer just an engineer, but a solver of problems with broader human and systemic implications. We were supposed to be building a better model for technical training, a sort of plus-plus model, by which these human capabilities become embedded (or, in other words, don't stick out!). But, as I travel and speak to people, I understand that perhaps we are at a different point than when these ideas started forming in my head. To be honest, the above premise has an origin story stretching back to the 1990s, my coming-of-age era, where education became overtly vocational and technical. It was a gap I perceived first in the classroom and then the workplace, where I met technically trained ...

I am scaling back my ambitions. No longer boiling the ocean, no longer trying to transform higher education globally! I tried and failed, but don't regret it. How else would I know what I know now?  I know many things. Higher Education is indeed in crisis, but the people inside the system do not know that. Professionalisation has many good aspects, but being perceptive about changes in the world is not one among these. There will be no revolution in higher ed, just decay. The private higher ed is already everywhere and it has changed everything - from the relationship with the students to what scholarship meant - but most people in public universities don't even know the difference. Higher Ed thinks critically about everything else but not its own practice. Some of it is wilful blindness. Things are going fine for most people: The usual cycle of conferences, papers, research grants - some years are better than others, but that is all. Students still come,...

As I grew up, I was torn between two ideas of success.  First was to be able to sit on the terrace of my ancestral home, a beautiful art deco mansion built in 1940s, on a winter morning, reading something beautiful. This was my idea of vita contempletiva. Second was to travel around the world, doing something meaningful. This was my idea of vita activa. These two ideas are obviously incompatible. My entire life was shaped by this tension. But it was a tension not only in my mind, but in the outside world too. By the time I finished college, Soviet Union disappeared, and the ideas environment I grew up in changed. Even in 1989, one of the subjects in my Undergraduate Economics course was Soviet Economic development, and I spent my paltry college pocket money on buying books published in USSR (primarily because they were cheap). In a sense, my idea of certainty fell away at that point. With that went my first idea of success, one of a quiet, stable life. India was changing, too. This...

The world took time to build. It's not obvious to everyone, particularly those who want to destroy it.  I am always caught between the enthusiasm for revolution and allegiance to tradition. I have been lucky to have been born in a time and place where revolutions came mostly peacefully. The greatest of those I personally experienced was the Internet Revolution, which changed lives and ended things but was bloodless. Therefore, I could worship revolution with relative calm.  It took me time to discover the revolutionaries. I met them and their victims mostly in books. There was some significant absences in my life too, people who disappeared in the midst of a revolution just slightly before my time. But these presences and absences were still romantic, an invitation to escape boredom, as I lived in a largely stable world. But eventually, I met real revolutionaries. These first-hand meetings were different. These people were not trying to fight against phantom power, Tsars and w...

Double life is a bad thing - synonymous of being duplicitous! If one has another self, one can't be trusted - as we won't know what their real intentions are.  I find this logic problematic. Having a double life, for me, could be living two lives, both equally real. This is the opposite of being duplicitous, as that assumes only one 'real' self is possible.  But, I argue, that in the modern life, either no real self is possible, or an infinite number of equally real selves are possible. As we live inside stories scripted by others, it will all come down to how we define 'real'. If this means authentic, as one is, this may not be possible: Put my phone in my hand, and I am already different from who I am! If 'real' means enduring, one could say that they have many enduring selves, which manifest when circumstances for them emerge. Nothing dies in the digital realm, if we come to think of it, and those selves may endure even after our physical selves have ...