Sunday Posts

August was somewhat the crucial month, with a both a week-long walking tour of Paris and a work trip to India, allowing me to the perspective that I desperately needed. It has been a year that I chose to take up a job after a few years of bootstrapping, and it was most appropriate for me to reflect on what happened since. Besides, I wanted to figure out what I really want to do, and travelling and engaging with different things in different countries was one of the best ways to figure this out. This allowed me to test the assumptions I had, about work and about myself, and while there are no definite answers in these kinds of things, I am much better informed now than I was only a year ago. For a start, I know adult education is something I enjoy being involved in, and I would rather stick to this, despite some tempting offers to work for the technology sector. Even an education technology company is not an education company, I keep reminding myself, and nor an investment bank pu...

The MOOCs did not save the world or changed Higher Ed, as promised. But Coursera's new round of funding point to a redefinition of sorts for MOOCs, and perhaps a firmer founding. It seems Coursera has found a new strategy in Professional Development, as did Udacity with their nano-degrees earlier. Instead of changing the Higher Education and emerging as replacements of college, Coursera, along with its partner colleges, have become an attractive place for people who already have degree level education and want to keep developing their knowledge and skills. This is a new perspective in the Education Innovation conversation. The initial investor interests, which picked up around 2011, were driven by some sort of apocalyptic death-of-the-college thinking. Looking back, the trigger for this may have been the Great Recession, which brought out the middle class employment crisis in sharp relief, and made the US student debt look dangerous. However, in many a sense, that moment has ...

I look forward to read Karen Armstrong's Fields of Blood , which is waiting for me at one of the stops of my inevitable work tours. Ms Armstrong's point, as I picked up from the reviews, that religion can not be held directly responsible for violence, intrigued me, because that is precisely what I believe. I, therefore, look forward to engage with her argument and understand the other point-of-view. I am indeed not dismissive before I managed to read the book, but hoping that she has something to offer more than the assertion, oft-repeated, that no religious doctrine is actually founded on violence. It must be noted, at this point, that while this is a common defense (that no religion encourages violence), it is, by no means, the common understanding. A large number of people in the world believe Islam directly encourages violence, given the acts of Islamic terrorists in the recent years. Indeed, a previous generation, having experienced worldwide bloodshed incited by imp...

I see this interesting debate in India that one may have had too much of freedom. The public, by that I mean of the urban middle class, attitude is that freedom to do anything and to obstruct is coming in the way of order and development. The model is indeed China, whose growth rates, wide roads and fast trains are seen with envy, and the attitude is not unlike the one Dambisa Moyo recommend for Africa - a Chinese model that prioritise development over liberties, even human rights. To be more specific, one can talk about the land acquisition bill that is pending at the Indian parliament, which will make it easier to acquire land - by evicting people - for infrastructure projects, industries and mining operations. It is important for India to build infrastructure fast and cheap, and tenancy rights are often coming in the way. As someone told me, for an underdeveloped country, freedom is a luxury one can ill-afford - we can get freedom once we have got the roads. We all know th...

I am in India (again) and have the opportunity to follow a conversation about teaser loans, which, in my mind, goes on to show the madness of middle class economics. ( Read the news here ) Teaser Loans are loans offered below the base rate (which is 9.70% for State Bank of India, for example) and which banks to want to give out. The idea is not to change the eligibility criteria in anyway (anyone remember subprime?) but offer loans at an attractive rate for the first few years. The reason why this is back in conversation is because the Indian Real Estate market is close to breaking point. The transactions are at all time low and the inventories are at all time high. However, despite the lack of transactions, realtors refused to reduce the prices - so prices are at all time high - hoping for the Central Bank to bail them out with a rate cut. The Central Bank (Reserve Bank of India, as it is called in India), under the very able leadership of Raghuram Rajan, has so far resisted th...

Reading history is one of my favourite pastimes. In fact, more correctly, reading history is my key professional development activity, if I take the view that writing this blog and talking about ideas are the most important things I do, and treat my day job as what really is - an instrument to pay my bills! Though my reading list may seem haphazard to some who only read on purpose, those lists - as I am becoming conscious of them recently - are around the big questions I labour with at the time, and most of these big questions, for me, have a historical nature. For example, consider the question that dominates my conversations, and readings, at this very moment. It is - how does a society fall under the spell of an autocrat? I know why this question troubles me. In India, my origin country, democracy is taken for granted - various television talk shows proclaim that democracy in India is irreversible because it is so chaotic - and various democratic institutions, both at the Unio...

It was interesting to listen to Yuval Noah Harri's TED talk and the subsequent interview. The last thing first. He paints a picture where the human species may divide into two, with the rich and powerful forming a different species with designer babies and long lifespans, and others getting relegated to the existence of useless people. By no means, he is alone in this apocalyptic vision of the future. This is indeed a fairly logical view of the future, once one fuses the ideas of technological progress, economic inequality and political domination of the rich together. There is this rather fatalistic view - that future will be better because the past has been and the human beings found a way to better themselves - but this is not the only possibility. Best to watch his TED talk then with this perspective. His central argument that the human beings did better than the other species because of its ability to cooperate flexibly, in a large scale and with imagination needs to...

One of the great contrasts between India, the world's most populous democracy, and America, one of the oldest surviving republics, is the differing approach what, paraphrasing the Founding generation (of United States), should be called the "Fear of the Caesar"! The American approach to this is perhaps best captured in the story of Benjamin Franklin. When a reporter asked, "Mr Franklin, what did we get - a Monarchy or a Republic?", while he was coming out of one of the meetings of the Constitutional Convention,  Franklin reportedly answered, "A republic, if you can keep it!" That fear of a Caeser, a strong leader who would undermined the republic, persisted. Another story, later recounted by Jefferson (told to Benjamin Rush in 1811), described a dinner that Jefferson hosted for John Adams and Alexander Hamilton. Three portraits adorned Jefferson's room, and Hamilton reportedly inquired who those were. Jefferson said they were of the three...

Tony Blair says a Corbyn win would annihilate Labour. Failing to elect him as the leader would do so too. Blair misses the point that the sanitized, undifferentiated party that he helped create in 1990s is now irrelevant. This is one of the problems with change - that it does not stop. Today, after 9/11 and its wars, recession and Greece, the world is a difference place than it was in 1990. The politics must be different, too. The triumph of centrism, as witnessed in the decades since 1970s, was not the end of History. An opportunity was provided and missed, as the lack of working class activism was used by the powerful to advance their agenda of marginalisation, inequality and power-grab. The moment may be now, or in the future, but the push-backs have now started.  It comes just after the Tory win in the UK, but it should not surprise anyone. We should be able to see beyond Tory win and Labour loss. The Labour lost for two reasons. One, because the Lib-Dems got anni...

Graham Doxey, the Founder-CEO of Knod*, oft-repeats this one statement, that Content does not drive Learning Outcome. (Full Disclosure: I am currently employed by Knod)  This is counter-intuitive. The usual conversation about education revolves around the title of this award or that, and the laundry list of topics that is covered by them. Course validation meetings are all about the details of what goes in the courses, and the related textbooks and library resources. The big story in educational innovation since we started talking about it with some urgency was about the MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), which were principally about opening the content from the finest universities in the world to general public, using digital technologies. Khan Academy, which is about learning videos, got headlines all over the world. Lion's share of private investments in education went into companies producing content, and the most eye-catching deal in the space in the recent years was t...