Sunday Posts

India is higher education’s wild west, so says The Economist. That’s spot on. This is the macho territory, where none of the genteelness of the Higher Education world is in evidence. Those who survive need the mercenary spirit, whether they are on the right or the wrong side, and need, indeed, plenty of luck and firepower. But, then, this is also the land of possibilities, as Wild West was supposed to be. This is a land of an emerging, aspiring middle class, a country of the fastest growing cities in the world, of millions of entrepreneurs, of some of the hungriest companies in the world. Besides, most of the people are young, unlike China’s, and a country poised at the threshold of a huge demographic boom. If someone thinks the El Dorado of education is in India, he won’t be too far off the mark. However, despite all this, the Gold Rush moment is yet to come. Not too far, I shall argue, about six months’ away is the moment when everyone goes to India. The Indian cabinet is finalizing...

No one pays any attention to McLuhan's classic statement - the Medium is the Message - when it comes to distance learning. Call it Online Learning, Blended Learning, Open Learning or whatever you like, the fact that it is learning repackaged in the absence of face-to-face, which most educators understand best. It is learning not just in distance, but in absence. And, like McLuhan discussed in his thesis, distance learning is often dismissed as the distant cousin of 'real' learning, poor men's alternative for education. Most universities do distance learning with this approach, a tiny portfolio item often devoid of resources and ideas; it is only done as it is politically correct. I shall invoke McLuhan's thesis one more time. He was talking about how every new medium comes with its supporters and detractors, people who celebrate its coming and people who deride it as an assault on civility. This happened for TV, and this is indeed happening for the Internet now. For...

There are two kinds of people, those who read history and those who do not know it exists. And, it is easy to tell who is what from a conversation: Reading history gives a view of the world around you and inform you with a perspective. I am a history reader, indeed. For me, history is a living experience, manifested in small details of life. For me, the irony of Gaddaffi , the writer of the Green Book and of the freedom to the people, is ever so apparent: So is the hypocrisy of the current NATO action of bombing the way to a regime change. You can see that everyone is playing for time; they always did, in war and peace. However, reading history also tells me that men make history and it is not the other way round. We are not mere pawns in a great chess game played by an absent master, but we make our own moves. There may be an iota of truth in saying that those who do not read history is condemned to repeat it, but it is equally true that sometimes, we repeat as we read - see a Kenned...

MySpace , going by the latest reports, has lost 50 million users over the last 12 months, of which the last two months, January and February this year, have seen a loss of 10 million unique users. It is now down to 60 million users from its peak of 110 million, and it is expected to fetch a valuation of $50 million, down from $330 million that News Corp paid for it only a few years back. Compare this with the stratospheric rise of Facebook and its multi-billion dollar valuation, and the decline looks stark and irreversible. This will possibly happen, as the executives look rather directionless and talk about MySpace being an entertainment site rather than a social network. That seems like the business-speak that is sinking the company: It is the social context of entertainment which broadcast media executives never get it. But it may be the time for social media to grow up. It is no longer enough just to blame old media thinking for new media failures. Remember Friendster, which took ...

I have one thing against the twenty-somethings: I am not one of them. As it is obvious from the tone, I regret the fact. Because the world today moves around twenty-somethings. In this Mark Zuckerberg era, if you are not twenty- ish , you are unloved. VCs think you are history. You are not licensed to dream. I was told that if you have reached forty without messing up your life completely or doing something insanely great, you are not qualified to dream. My rather feeble protestation that there were always great men in history who found their calling in mid-life, like Gandhi or FDR, was pushed aside. We don't live in that era anymore, I am told. Yes, indeed, life's faster and there is more respect for young businesspeople. Young business-people by itself is a new phenomena - it is much easier to get capital and run a business early in your life. I contend that what really changed is this - starting up has become easier - we have more young people pursuing a business career. A...

The business I am in is facing the full force of change. The immigration laws are changing, forcing us to rethink our business model; the university funding is changing, opening new opportunities for us. I have been here before, indeed. I started my career as a Systems Administrator managing Unix systems, in 1993, just before the advent of Windows. Then, I moved onto another company in a job setting up their private network, in 1995, just before Internet became commercially available in India. And then, we rode on the Dotcom sentiments and ran a Certification Training company in 1999, just before plane-loads of software programmers started returning to India. From these experiences, and others that I studied, I know that the best option available for a small business is to change with the environment. The greatest advantage of smallness is nimbleness, and one must take full advantage of this. The worst thing one can do is to sink in denial; but that's exactly what most small busin...

I would expect a Tory government to be business friendly. But it is clear that the current British government is caught in a web of its own confusion. At one end, it talks global and wants to connect to the rapidly changing world, kick-start an enterprise society and build a competitive modern economy; on the other, it needs to fulfil its promise to take Britain back to the past, play on its islander mentality, and erect, if it could, an wall around the coastlines to keep everyone out. This is obviously spilling out to its approach to Higher Education: It is throwing the whole university sector in crisis with its harshest culling of public funding in two generations, in the hope that private sector will step in to fill the void and meet the British industry’s requirements of skills and knowledge, and then, as if to make up, it is cutting out the Private Education sector from the lucrative international education market, Britain’s third largest export industry by some count, in the hope...