Sunday Posts

The problem of connecting educators and employers is not a new one. There are many organisations and institutions working at creating this interface, some more successfully than others. The field is full of well-meaning individuals and fascinating ideas, some more workable than others. However, one key lesson, a common one, has perhaps been ignored by most of the people: That no closed, proprietary solution may actually work. This should have been obvious in a field where the key problem arise because of the closed, proprietary approaches. The Educators mostly believe they are doing a great job - at least, the best possible one - and the degrees and grades they give out, under the full authority of the state and with the gravitas of their quality assurance, should be accepted at the face value by the employers. The employers, in turn, believe that the people they require should appear, with right skills and attitude, a perfect understanding of their cultures and customers, an...

I have been working on Projects-Based Learning, and recorded my experiences and reflections on this blog as I went along. Through this engagement, I have learnt the following things: 1. Content is over-rated. Because it costs money and effort to create, content owners believe Content equals Learning. Yes, the learners use content to learn, but they do not learn from content. It is the baseline, not an end in itself. 2. Teachers make a lot of difference, but not through 'teaching'. The relationships that underpin teaching, rather than the process of teaching, as in delivering lectures, is fundamental to learning. A good teacher knows the learners - not just their 'strengths and weakness', but their fears, aspirations, what inspires and intimidates them, what they love and loath. The act of 'teaching' is more about inspiring, empowering and connecting, than delivering, disciplining and evaluating. 3. Because the way we have come to see learning, a...

A lot of conversations about Kolkata is about its past; I want to talk about its future. Most conversations about Kolkata is about its decline - its golden moments and how times changed; I want to talk about its rise, how its best may lie ahead and how we can change the times. In place of pessimism, I seek optimism; instead of inertia, I am looking for imagination.  It is not about catching up, I am arguing; it is about making a new path altogether. It had, indeed it had, a glorious past: One of the first Asian cities to reach a million population, the Capital of British India, the cradle of an Enlightened Age and a new politics of Cosmopolitanism. And, it had stumbled - losing the hinterland that supplied its Jute factories, overwhelmed by the refugees that came after the partition, devoid of its professional class who chose to emigrate - the City's commercial and professional culture evaporated in a generation, and it transformed into a corrupt and inefficien...

That India has a secular constitution, seems to be a great progressive leap for many people. India was, and is, the world's largest Hindu country, with a long history and heritage. Hinduism, and its 'sacred geography', seemed to have provided Indians their common identity, despite being divided by language, castes, customs and preferences! And, Hindu (and Budhdhist, the other major religion that originated in India) icons are everywhere in the imagination of Independent India, from the invocation of the 'Mother India' to its national flag and anthem. It seems the secularism of India is a deliberate, progressive turn, a statement of aspiration to build a modern nation by leaving its religions and superstitions behind. And, indeed, it was. The leaders of Modern India, particularly Nehru, was intent on building a nation based on economic independence (from the West) and technological progress. With the horrors of racialism in context and battling the 'two n...

One can, and often does, read history as a narrative of conflicts. The school-book history is designed as a sequence of wars and winners, its causes and aftermaths. Even when one wants to get away from the history of celebrities, which our stories of Kings, Queens and great men (and some women) usually are, our thematic narratives of Colonialism, Class Struggle, Revolutions and even Scientific Progress are usually built around conflicts - of powers, institutions and ideas - progressing and regressing in some sort of eternal motion.  One may claim that all history, therefore, is history of conflicts. However, it is equally possible to see that our ideas shape conflicts. I have three favourites - the Iron Curtain, the Clash of Civilisations and the Thucydides Trap - ideas that defined our past, the present and possibly the future conflicts. So, when Churchill was speaking at Fulton, Missouri, in March 1946, he conjured up the Iron Curtain , a dividing line from the 'Fre...

To me, democracy, of late, has been a disappointment. Or, to be precise, I have been on losing side of the argument all too often in the last couple of years. For example, the Indian electorate in 2014 voted overwhelming to bring in a Hindu Nationalist government: This was due to a combination of voter fatigue with the previous administration, which proved to be inept and corrupt at the same time, but I did not want a Fascist leader, which Mr Modi most certainly is, to be India's Prime Minister. Also, I was on the losing side of Britain's EU referendum, where the British electorate apparently voted for a closed economy and inward-looking society. And, indeed, like everyone else, I am now bracing for Trump victory in US Presidential election; whether or not that eventually happens, I wouldn't, like many US voters who will vote against Trump, feel elated about a Hillary Clinton presidency either, as she is only the lesser of the two hard-to-like candidates. Despite thes...

How to create a model of global Higher Education fit for post-recession world? This is not about private equity initiatives spanning the world, the kinds that the American majors such as Apollo and Laureate do: That is about global finance capital buying out assets in different geographies. Nor this should be about what the Academic community dubs as TNE, Trans-National Education, which is essentially about exporting degrees from metropolitan centres to the hungry nations in the periphery.  Indeed, global is, in common use, all about finance capital buying out assets in poorer countries, and extending the cultural influences of the metropolitan centres. But that model is coming under pressure lately: The 'Global' steamroller has perhaps gone too far. The richer nations are increasingly wary of the immigrants, and the poorer nations are facing existential crisis as its 'comprador bougeois', the ones that collaborate and benefit from global finance capital, has ...