Sunday Posts

My day two in Rome was , predictably , spent in Vatican . In sharp contrast to the squalor and graffiti of the backstreets of Rome , Vatican is a neat , fabulously wealthy , glittering affair . It is expensive too - a total of 22 Euros just for the museums - but it is all worth it being able to spend a few minutes inside The Sistine Chapel ( above , the photo I took before being told not to use my camera). But , while I, like many others , went to Vatican to see Sistine Chapel in person , the real show is in the St Peters Square . Being accustomed the Hindu holy places , which are bare and serene, the St Peters Square was very different from what I was expecting : This was , in my perception , more about power than piety . This looked every bit as imperial as the Roman ruins I saw yesterday . I was almost thinking of the idea of one unending empire , that of Cesare and Augustus , carried o...

One thing I realized about Italy , within the first 24 hours , that time is a relative concept here . It didn 't matter to the clerk at the ticket counter at the airport : The train to Termini in three minutes and I was trying to get a ticket, but he needed to take two calls on my mobile and made me wait . It didn 't matter at the Ticket Collector at the gate of the Termini station, who wanted to do a deal with a waiting cabbie and tried to sell me a cab ride of less than 500 meters for 20 Euros , because it was nearly midnight . But the hotel manager didn 't think it was too late to send me temporarily , for one night, to another place because they sold the pre - booked room to someone for that night. Night is still young , he said . The other thing about Rome is the conversation is mostly about the past . Indeed , Italy 's future seems a bit Bunga - Bunga with Berlusconi a...

The project I have worked on for a full year is coming into some shape now. We are going to shape up a school within a school - a specialist business school within the college which offers a range of courses in different subject areas. In a way, this is indeed something to feel good about. However, at the same time, this is a strange time to set up a Higher Ed entity in Britain, when the universities are in turmoil and there is a full scale clampdown on student visas. But this post is not about the business environment, but about my personal journey. The last year was my self-defined period of recuperation, from my burn-out experience from the previous job. I have traveled little: In fact, except a short trip to Malaysia and the Philippines, I have not traveled at all during the year. I have focused on just one thing - setting up of this school - and made building network within the British Higher Ed sector my first priority. I have also invested a lot of time studying about higher edu...

I am asked, very often, why I write this blog. People wonder how I can find the time. Others conclude that I don't have much to do. Even my protestations that I usually get up at 5am to try writing the blog does not clarify the point: Surely I can find something more worthwhile to do even at that time, they would so. This blog, when I started writing this in October 2004, started as my 'morning pages'. I just read about the concept then. I used to write, and my aspirations during late school years (when I grew beyond the dreams of being a cricketer) was to become a journalist. I did do some fiction and poetry writing and published some of them in amateur magazines. Then, as I started working and traveling, I gradually lost the habit. I did give up and thought I couldn't write anymore. In October 2004, after having just come to England, life was tough. I did not have a proper job and was working in a Cash and Carry intermittently. It was a strange time to go back to writ...

I have just finished Nicholas Carr's The Shallows . I am usually not one to give in to technology scepticism, having built my life and career around the advent of Internet. However, Nicholas Carr, whose previous efforts Does IT Matter? and The Big Switch made nuanced but well-argued points about the usage of IT at work, brings it home with Internet's effect on our thinking, reading and writing habits. After having read it, I must admit, I shall not stick the techno-sceptic label on this book the way I shall do it on other similar efforts (For example, I found Andrew Keen's The Cult of The Amateur a pointless effort to complain about the erosion of power from the perspective of Oxbridge trained editors); this book instead is quite a balanced effort to ask the question whether Internet is truly a 'mind-expanding' technology, or this may be contributing to dumb us down. It is indeed common to have such arguments thrown at us with the advent of every new technology...

Business is a social organization: It is important to see all stakeholders as having a 'stake', not just the shareholders. In the face of conventional wisdom that countries must run like businesses, what about thinking business must be run like countries? I am indeed not talking about turning all businesses into shabby, insolent government offices. There are good and bad businesses, and there are good and bad examples of countries. And, a country isn't just its government offices, but its people, culture, enterprise, institutions everything. So, this suggestion is about making employees and customers feel like citizens, all of whom own a piece of the country - metaphorically - and have a voice. Business as an entity which exists solely for its financial owners and for reasons of financial prosperity of a small group of people is a flawed concept and need to be retired. However strange this may sound, some businesses already know this and behave accordingly. But vast numbers...