Sunday Posts

It has been a while I blogged, but my life has completely changed during these couple of months. Overall, these changes have been positive. An idea that a colleague and I developed became a company by itself and received investment. We were pursuing this possibility for several months, but in the last twelve weeks or so, it actually happened.  The other change that happened is in my role. Given that we were working inside a larger business, I confined my role to innovation and product development, leaving the financial and revenue responsibilities to the owner of the business. However, this became untenable after the investment came through. There was a clear requirement of disconnecting from the other group businesses and necessity to have control of finance and operations aligned to the business goals of the entity itself. Therefore, when offered, I took on the CEO role, assuming, along with my thousand other things to do, the responsibility for money and investment.  In a w...

Journey is an over-used metaphor. It presents a particular relationship between space and time. But the inherent assumption in a journey is that one moves forward. At a time when someone feels going in circles, journey is not a good metaphor to cling to. Such is my situation. After a long time, perhaps the first time in my career, I have lost the enthusiasm for my work. I have always traded financial reward and security for interesting work, so such enthusiasm was never in short supply. But as Christmas holidays draw to a close and I look out to New Year, I am so not excited!  May be I am getting old. It seems finally my attitude towards work is becoming like a normal person's, which I have always failed to understand. I hated the moaners and those who complained, and i changed jobs before I got to that point. This is possibly the first time I feel unenthusiastic but also stuck! I have made some big commitments lately, trying to assemble a team around me with whom I can work long t...

I am still wandering. But I have one dilemma to add to my list of dilemmas. This is about my political belief. I am one of those liberals who feel increasingly homeless. At a time when everyone is choosing sides and all conversations are increasingly ideological, my attempts feel increasingly futile. My biggest trouble is that I don't know what's right or wrong anymore. All 'experts' seem compromised, driven by agendas of their own. After the demise of subscriber-sponsored media, ad-supported news have very little credibility. Some high-value media brands, perhaps they can afford to attract subscribers paying for it (such as The Economist, which I continue to read), are perhaps exempt, but they struggle to escape the Anglo-American neo-imperialism which offends the Indian in me.  Further, I do get questioned whether I am right-wing or left-wing. In the past year, I have been classed as Fascist at least once (though not through an action of my own, but as a matter of col...

I am officially ending 2022 in my life. It was one of those years which one would wish to forget, but can't. My father's illness and death dominted the year, but also my work project which took shape. But even on that front, it was a series of misjudgements that I would remember, rather than anything that I achieved. As I approach 2023, I seek to correct, recover and rebuild. One of the key things that I wish to change is how I blogged. This blog is an important part of my life and yet, I neglected it through the year. Part of the reason was extensive travelling, but also that I was all over the place. Emotionally I was at my lowest: I became dissatisfied with where my life was going, saw no point in my work and mis-prioritised. I was over-optimistic and aimed for implausible things. And, as I learnt my lessons along the way, my intellectual project dissipatated: I had almost nothing to write about. This is what I seek to correct and return this blog to being a blog. A log of t...

I got into private higher education by mistake. Like any outsider, I looked at the prospect of setting up a college and got excited. It was only when I got inside and started understanding how private higher ed worked, I realised that it was a mistake. I sometimes think I was courageous to carry on and try to change things from inside; other times, I recognise the sheer futility of the enterprise and wish I chose another career instead. But there are now few routes of escape available to me. I have done several things in life, but all of them are always around education. More specifically, the common theme across all my various careers spanning thirty years has been workforce education. Some of the times, I dealt with students before they start working, and other times, I have been on the other side, dealing with people who have started working already. I have done technology roles, written courses, taught and ran business units, but all of them were always around this one thing: Prepa...

I may be wrapping up 2022 a month in advance. This has been the most terrible year in my life, and I would like to make this a short one. Particularly as I embark on a new start, possibly in a few weeks, I would rather get into 2023 mode. My 2022 is, on balance, a failure. Beginning of the year, I was working towards two projects: Setting up a new institution in London and transforming an existing one elsewhere. The first one failed even before we started, as the potential partners, after months of negotiation, backed off, due to problems at their end. The second project also ended in failure: Innovation within a diploma mill mindset is never easy! I should have known: I have tried similar things before and failed. However, this time, the failure was a bit of a relief, as my optimism was tempered and freed my hand to focus completely on education innovation. However, it's my personal life which made 2022 even a bigger failure. Ever since I had to fly back from Melbourne as an emerg...

My work is in international education. So my mantra is that education must be global! If we are not preparing our students for the global workplace, we are doing them a disservice, I say!  However, an interesting conversation with an young colleague made me pause and think. Her point, on reading India's new National Education Policy, was that the policy talks a lot about being Indian while promising to prepare Indian graduates for the global workplace. She saw this as an anomaly and hoped I would agree!  But here is my own confusion perhaps. I do think Indian education should be more Indian. I actually find the educated Indians disdain for their own countrymen disconcerting and believe that this is a crucial weakness of the Indian society. It weakens India as the Indian middle classes are increasingly disconnected from the real problems of their own country and try out various Made-in-America solutions rather than thinking on their own. And, I believe education, and particular...