Sunday Posts

I have made this point before, that we need less College, and more Coffee-House, learning ( see the earlier post ). Here, I shall attempt to explain, one more time, the difference between the two. Let's start with the obvious. College is formal and Coffee-House is informal. Colleges are state-sanctioned and funded; coffee-houses don't have anything of the kind. Colleges are about teaching; coffee-houses just allow people to meet and talk. The models, expectations and outcomes are very different in these two kinds of places and the learning they enable. And, yet, there is comparability and a form of competition. More college and more formalisation of education mean less time for Coffee-houses and less recognition for the stuff one learns there. Between the two kinds of knowledge - explicit and official for the college, tacit and tentative for the coffee-house - privileging the former means less importance for the latter. If all learning must be validated and recognis...

When we talk about automation, we usually imagine a future without jobs - except for a few nerds perhaps! Therefore, the conversation about this future centres around two things: One, on STEM training, so that more people can join the ranks of the nerds; Two, Universal Basic Income, or suchlike, on the assumption that the rest of the people will need support. So, if we flip the perspective now, and speak about Careers in the 2020s, how would it sound? Be an Engineer or a Gardener, sounds like the best we could do. But that wouldn't be much of an advice really, because most Engineers today work as number crunchers in Financial Services, jobs that are likely to go first, or Programmers in IT Services, jobs that will go next. As for Gardeners, there is global warming. But, seriously? Human beings have been pretty bad at predicting what happened to them in the future. True, in an earlier age, we did not have people who called them Futurists (though what they do, speculate, ...

Automation is coming, to a factory near you - that really is the news. One may wrap the story with the fancy stuff - Robots or self-driving cars - but automation of less glamorous type is already everywhere: Lines of code, bits of equipment fabricated to labour, all the electronic stuff that sits inside our cars and modern homes to reduce manual work. The humble self-directed Vacuum Cleaner whirring away has taken off a few hours from the immigrant worker's weekly engagement; the Train Guards have been replaced by Cameras all over the train.  The point being, automation is an approach. And it is already here. If that makes one queasy about jobs and people, the consolation is that automation brings new jobs with it. This is not wishful talk, the evangelists point out, there is empirical evidence from what happened last time, the so-called Industrial Revolution. In the Industrial Revolution, the machines were introduced to replace workers - there were protests and revolutio...

In trying to explore the roots of the 'closed mind' - the inhospitable environment for new ideas in India - I concluded earlier that this has nothing to do with an unique Indian character, culture or religion; it is not, as some observers put it, a result of India's Hindu heritage, nor a throwback from the Islamic conquest and domination. It is rather a legacy of the transformation of India in the mid- to late-Nineteenth century, when India was reconfigured after the Victorian laws and ideas, and it developed a 'colonial mind'. ( See the earlier post here ) In this configuration, the ideas reside elsewhere - in the metropolitan centre in London - and India is a mere receptor and Indians are recipients of new ideas, not their originators. An Indian idea, to be accepted in India, had to be first accepted in the West; an Indian intellectual needed the blessings of the metropolis to be considered a success (hence, Swami Vivekananda's address in Chicago made a diff...

At some point in 2006, the nature of the Higher Education changed. Many developing countries, led by China and India, embraced the idea that a college educated population is the key to escape poverty and develop the country. So began a great experiment - of opening new institutions, mainly by granting approvals to private entrepreneurs to do so. In doing so, China more or less doubled its college-going population; India's numbers, less spectacular, still grew rapidly between 2006 and 2014, with 10 new colleges, on average, being opened a day. And, this was not just China and India: Many African and Middle Eastern countries had done the same, following similar strategies - granting approval to private entrepreneurs - and ushering in an all-new 'mass Higher Education', the likes of which we have not known before. This phenomenon is now entering a mature phase, and we should be able to analyse what happened. The growth, both of college population and growth of jobs in Hi...

Kishore Mahbubani calls India an 'Open Society with a Closed Mind' - in contrast with China's 'Closed Society with an Open Mind' - and he is certainly right. The apparent diversity of India, its vibrant democracy, quarrelsome TV programming and English speaking middle classes hide more than they tell: The first impression of 'everything goes' is deceptive and India presents one of the toughest environments for new ideas. This may sound counter-intuitive to those who are always afraid of the Chinese stealing their intellectual property. I am not necessarily arguing that the Chinese don't, but rather that they do because they are in the same race of creating new stuff. India is a comparatively safer environment not because Indians are more honest or they have greater regards for intellectual property in the Western sense, but because they care less about new ideas.  The other contra angle is certainly that of the great inventors and thought leadi...

My journeys abroad was to make sense of myself, to see from the outside what can't be seen from the inside. Perhaps predictably, but at once ironically, I ended up in England, mother country of modern Indian imagination, hawking - as I can't find a better word - English manners and experiences to the fawning middle classes. Admired simply as I live in England, it became increasingly difficult for me to leave, as all suggestions of my intent to return were invariably met by premonitions of something being wrong, as no one really ever wants, or should want, to return. Even the rather satisfying moments of canvassing India's economic progress were almost always punctured by grossly embarrassing proclamations of 'special relationship', in full knowledge that the affectations flow only one way; in my stock of trade, Kolkata wants to be London without ever London wanting to reciprocate. Therefore, 'self-colonialisation' as a concept appears real from my vant...