Sunday Posts

Indian universities are not known for area studies programmes though there are some shining exceptions. I have been advocating, for some time now, that an open programme - open in terms of who might be able to participate, rather than how it is delivered - for Asian studies may help educate the type of graduate professionals India might need.  For me, it is an old idea - a college of Asia ! I was serious about it in 2014, but that was perhaps the wrong moment. My interest in going back to India and starting again cooled after 2014, with political changes around the world and the focus of my career shifting into a different domain.  It feels like meeting an old friend when I discuss the idea now. I am older, perhaps wiser, and less idealistic than I was then. I have learnt more about education as a business, and more about the concepts such as Asia, about which I had an unquestioning romanticism before. But the idea still attracts me, and I believe its moment has come....

I made an optimistic observation: That India might be able to make the restrictions against its people (H1B visa fees) work for itself, just as China made the restrictions on sending advanced processor chips being sold to them to build its own tech stack. Facebook knew how I felt and continues to recommend reels and posts, made by thousands of Indians around the world, saying similar things. But there is an issue I did not talk about, and I think it is very relevant: How Indians see its diaspora. I don't know what it is, but it is very different from how the Chinese sees it. For the Chinese, the diaspora is a source of strength and ideas. For Indians, these are people who got away and didn't take any responsibility.  But it is more complicated than that. I see that in the posts and counter-posts being made now. One clear trend is jealousy: Many express glee that the non-resident Indians are in trouble. There are others who see this as an affront to India and its govern...

By making the changes in the H1B visa, Trump has just done a huge favour to India. It doesn't seem that way right now, and there will be a doom-and-gloom in the Indian IT services sector. Its knock-on effect would be felt in many other sectors, including in Higher Education, which, after working as a conveyor belt for IT services jobs, must find a new purpose altogether. However, these changes are bad for Indian companies, but not necessarily for the country. This is one thing we should learn from China. The Trump-Biden restrictions on selling advanced chips to China created the Chinese 'tech stack'. It was not just the restriction on chips: The Chinese students were also barred from advance science and technology research programmes at the top universities. This hurt a lot of people and some companies (remember Huawei?), but China has turned the table in a few years. In fact, a Chinese friend told me that the Chinese policy makers now think that the US restrictions ...

I had a fascinating discussion today which I need to record here.  The point is trivial - which kind of courses are in demand in Indian Higher Ed - but it was a big surprise for me.  In the last several weeks, I have been talking to a lot of people in India. I spent a couple of weeks there, trying to figure out, after a gap of several months, what's exactly is happening so that I can put an India specific business proposition together. These conversations gave me a vague sense that a major shift is underway, but I couldn't quite figure out what that shift really is. Today, the penny dropped! On the surface, the higher ed conversation in India remains the same as before. There is a lot of talk of industry-academia gap, though not much action! The hackathons and boot camps are everywhere. Academic calendars reflect an amazing variety of holidays and excruciating and endless sequence of examinations. Except for some campuses which are more political than any academic instit...

Higher Ed in India is a serious matter.  It should be obvious, given the size of India's youth population, its importance as a major economy and democratic society and the competition it faces from the other rising powers in the region, primarily China. But education in general and higher education in particular were never taken seriously in India, except as an endless series of examinations. The primacy of examinations and middle-class obsession with exam results (Amartya Sen wrote a book titled 'The country of first boys')  Over the last thirty years, the sector has been privatised, de-professionalised and badly regulated. The institutions often became the front for money laundering, and they were run by politicians, either directly or by proxy. There are ghost institutions without any real student, widespread corruption in regulation and ranking processes, fake degrees and professors without qualification: It is a big and profitable market, which c...

At the core of my enterprise is the idea of personal change. This is not about the neo-liberal doctrine that says, everything is changing around you and therefore, you must change and adapt. I accept that things change but refuse to accept that we are just passive participants, changing as our external circumstances change. At least, I would like to believe that it is an educated person's responsibility to find opportunities for change and influence its course. How this change may happen is also a question mark. Those who know me know that I don't hold a high opinion about the coaches, those self-styled individuals who assume that some sort of certificate from somewhere gives them the right to tell another person to live their lives. No one has the right, or the ability, to tell another person what to do or how to live their lives, I believe. All we can do is to help people find their way and be that guide and friend at the moments of confusion which will invariably come...

My current project was all about building better technical training programmes, till it was not. At the time of starting, the premise was that technical training is currently offered with a very narrow focus and this needs to be enhanced with human capabilities. The engineer is no longer just an engineer, but a solver of problems with broader human and systemic implications. We were supposed to be building a better model for technical training, a sort of plus-plus model, by which these human capabilities become embedded (or, in other words, don't stick out!). But, as I travel and speak to people, I understand that perhaps we are at a different point than when these ideas started forming in my head. To be honest, the above premise has an origin story stretching back to the 1990s, my coming-of-age era, where education became overtly vocational and technical. It was a gap I perceived first in the classroom and then the workplace, where I met technically trained ...