Sunday Posts

There is a view that India and China are rivals. It indeed seems so, as the two countries compete for resources and influence. That is how the world systems work, countries, delineated spaces marked off by separate colours and thick lines on the map, compete against one another. It is a zero-sum game, one must lose in order for the other to win. Great theorists have laid out their wisdom regarding these strategies for winning and losing, and we know of different kinds of power too, as in Hard Power, which is about muscle and money, and Soft Power, which is about culture and commerce. International conferences, studies and lectures continually explore whether India is winning or China is winning, national leaders on both sides worry about their findings and seek ways to mend things if it is going bad for them. So, China sends help to Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, and India remembers its old friends in Mongolia, in order to encircle the other and limit their influence. Must it be that ...

In all the celebrations about the arrival of the flat world, we somewhat forgot, that Globalisation has a reverse gear. This was indeed the point made by Joshua Cooper Ramo in his 2012 Fortune article ( see here ). If that sounded alarmist then, some events recently would reconfirm the death of the flat world that we thought we were living in. So, at this particular time, the frontier of globalism really messy right now. Consider these few things 1. There are refugee boats floating on the sea in Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, caught in storm and running out of food and water. Countries like Indonesia are refusing to take them, letting women and children die. Britain is doing even better, with Murdoch Press proposing to send gun-boats to meet them, as immigrants are like cockroaches, they say. 2. Russia has more or less exited the Power system established after the Second World War and is trying to re-establish the old empire. It has dismembered a neighbouring nation ...

I have faced this personally. When I tried to raise money for an Education Start-up in the UK, I would regularly get asked, during investor pitches, what our key markets would be. By default, everyone would assume that we would do India, specifically because of my heritage (UK Private education sector worked like that - minority ethnic founders enrolling students primarily from their ethnic groups), while I, cognisant of the complexities of the Indian market ( see my earlier post here ), would be far more circumspect.  Revisiting those discussions, and the experiences since (our sales efforts will go nowhere in India, but would eventually find traction in China), I still think that an innovative education start-up should have an India plan. The reason is obvious - India would simply be worlds largest market for Higher Education. China has more students right now, but India is at a different demographic point than China, and the growth in India would be far more dramatic. ...

Again, a Sunday and a Sunday post.  After taking on this travelling life, Sundays are travel days for me. Sundays often mean a late morning flight out of Gatwick, with the goal to reach somewhere by Monday morning. Often, my mind is closed on Sunday morning, in anticipation of the sleepless night that would follow. And, indeed, there are other Sundays to play the same chore in reverse, to get into Gatwick early morning and then spending rest of the day catching up on all the sleep missed during the two week sojourns and indeed, the red-eye! This is one rare Sunday without any of that, and that makes me so protective of it. This is my time to think and read, I would like to believe, though the usual life soon catches on - it usually reaches its full crescendo around mid-Morning, usually with the clarion call of Milk (or something else, most inevitably) running out. So, I stop my indulgent reverie and return to Planet Earth, usually manifested as a Shop Aisle, at around 10a...

A few days ago, I was completely bleak about the possibility of introducing Higher Education innovation in India. ( See earlier post here ) However, my key points were perhaps already cliched, and with the benefit of little more perspective, it is worthwhile to review this topic with a different start point - what shape can Higher Ed innovation in India take? First, there is an enormous amount of corruption in Indian Higher Education sector, and it is growing with commercialisation. The students are justifiably sceptical about anything new or disruptive, and would rather put their faith on tried and tested, despite knowing that these public institutions are quaint and could not care less for them.  Second, while the students know that the choices they have are all poor, the default reaction to this realisation is not to try something new or innovative, but to ensure that one does not do anything foolish. So, while Indian education seems ripe for new and disruptive proposi...

What to do with Professional Education? While there is endless discussion about Vocational and Higher Education in the context of what we have come to call Knowledge Economy, no one seems to talk much about Professional Education. One reason for this is that we assume Professional Education to be the business of self-contained professional communities - Lawyers, Accountants, Surveyors etc - and those who pursue them to be self-selected aspirants who have chosen that profession for themselves. It is, however, a quaint view, because most people pursuing Professional Education are just students looking for jobs (or Mid-career employees looking to define a profession for themselves) and it should be as much a part of the conversation about building the knowledge economy as any other form of Education. But if general conversation about Professional Education is off the mark, professional bodies do not do much better themselves. They are caught between two roles - one as the gateke...

Nisid Hajari makes such an obvious point in Foreign Policy ( see here ) that it surprises. Blaming India for the failure of Pakistan is so cliched! What do we not know of the arguments made? That Gandhi was too religious for secular leaders like Jinnah to put up with, and this is why he went on to set up a religious state? Pakistan faltered because it was not given Calcutta, and later Kashmir? That Indian leaders never wanted Pakistan to succeed? These arguments have been repeated since the 1940s, and promoted assiduously by two groups of participants in the drama, who may each have something not to talk about. First, the Pakistani elite. Nehru did indeed scare them off, but this was not about Hindu majority. If anything, ask the Hindu fundamentalists in India, Nehru and Gandhi would be accused of undermining Hindu majoritarianism. Nehru scared them off because he was dangerously socialist and the founders of Pakistan were mostly landowners. Most political leaders, and the Army t...