Sunday Posts

I have been on the road for almost two months and now heading back to London. As I write this using the inflight wifi, I have a strange feeling: London is no longer home. It feels just like another stop in a much longer journey, the time for which may have come now. The last year was rather exceptional in my life. This time last year, two things happened. We were doing a little project, as consultants, preparing students for digital economy careers: We decided to showcase what we were doing at a conference in India. One thing led to another and suddenly, we were in the venture game, raising money etc. The project became a company and the goals fundamentally changed. I feel sad about that loss of innocence - there was once a time I could look forward to building things rather than being a part of the speculative world of venture finance! The other way my life fundamentally changed is that this time last year, we got to know that my father has pancreatic cancer and doesn't have long ...

It has been repeated so many times, it is now a cliché: Our next thirty years will not look like the last three decades! If anything, ever since the end of the Cold War, it was mostly peaceful, mostly prosperous for most of the world. However, One can clearly see that some of the building blocks of that world are shifting now and a new ideas environment is emerging. We don't have to be pessimists to know that the lives of our students would be very different from ours. If we are to design a higher education system today, many things must change. Particularly, there are five foundational assumptions behind how we think about Higher Education, which need rethinking. First, the idea of SMART - a version of the idea of general intelligence ('g')! We may talk about diversity and inclusion, but fundamentally, higher education and the idea of merit are closely linked. This comes from how we organise the school system, which attempts to separate students into academic and vocationa...

  An AI turn In conversations about education these days, something about ChatGPT must be mentioned. Otherwise, the speaker appears out-of-date. Like the MOOCs a decade ago, everyone seems to have an opinion about it. Everyone thinks that this is going to change education beyond recognition. One can guess what happens next. This is what we saw with MOOCs; It was changing all education; shortly after that, it was not. Initially, everyone wanted to show off that they have heard about Coursera; in a few months, everyone wanted to sound smart by expressing concerns about the MOOC's low completion rates. There were even reasonable-sounding debates about whether completion is the right parameter to look at in the MOOC world. However, all this is ancient history. Today, if anyone brings up MOOCs, the eyes will roll and dropping pins will be heard. Its moment has come to pass! ChatGPT brings us to a similar moment, though it was adopted faster and therefore, opinions about it are more nume...

The last year was chaotic for me. My father passed away, and this resulted in a profound shift of perspective. For the first time in my life, I felt disconnected from India. I did not know before what India meant to me. Like other immigrants, I saw it as a source of nostalgia; and like others in International Education, I saw it as an economic opportunity. I wanted to go there once in a while, but did not want any of its dust and grime. My father's death made nostalgia a source of pain; the real life business engagements in India, which I am in the middle of, reminded me why I left the country in the first place. But, I forgot what India is really to me: My root! As I indulged in the mental drift away from India, a deep uprootedness took over.  I was oblivious to it, though. There were other things happening in my life. Somewhat contradictorily, I was discovering my romantic, twenty-something self all over again. I was able to write, first time in many years, and found beautiful fr...

I switched my career to what I thought was Higher Ed (in reality, private training) about thirteen years ago and never stopped being fascinated about it. My fascination, however, is always about how little Higher Education sector knows about itself and wants to learn. A lot has changed in the last thirteen years though. About when I was getting started, a number of studies started coming out. This was also the time when private investor attention turned to Higher Ed and many 'ventures' were launched. Impacted by the global recession, public universities became more entrepreneurial. India started its rapid - and unplanned - expansion of the sector. New frontiers, Africa mainly, were opened and private Higher Ed moved in. Just predating it was the rapid expansion of International Education, which was driven by the growth of private sector. Soon, private Higher Ed, with its teaching focused, no-frills education, was out in the open.  Yet, when I defended my thesis on the sector se...

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...