Sunday Posts

We are all consumers now. That's the mantra of the market: You are what you consume! And, we consume everything. The new keyword of our age is 'Taxpayers' money': It is not just the newspapers, but even the politicians, whose primary task is to squander it, use the term. The greatest public service we can all do is to buy stuff - as we are told by various pundits on TV shows - and not buying will mean recession and job losses. Our identities are shaped by brands we wear, indeed we shape our identities around the brands we wear - that's how the things are.  This is everywhere. The fastest growing nation, not a 'city', is Facebook. Such notions just come to us naturally: Nations are just a community which one can join and leave at will. Most people believe that nations don't matter anymore: Budgets and other pompous exercises have lost their magic. When in college, I listened to budget speeches and then went to hear various experts speaking about it i...

Kolkata, I would always point out, is unique among the major metropolises around the world as its population is FALLING. Even if this fall is only marginal, at this time of unparallelled urbanisation, that marginal fall in population indicates decay. Ghost cities aren't that unusual: A walk down the Piotrkowska Street in Łódź, the third largest city in Poland and one with declining population after its textile industry disappeared, is highly recommended if anyone doubted that this could happen in modern times. I know from my time in Łódź what happens when an inward-looking city meets globalisation: I imagine in my nightmare the side streets of Kolkata completely abandoned, an inescapable darkness and decline, where despair brings more despair and lead people to give up and abdicate to a self-interested, lumpen-bourgeois leadership.  However, even Łódź is turning around. The nightmare of Piotrkowska Street ends as one steps into Piłsudskiego and the all new steel-and-glass outs...

All Higher Education is intensely local. Its form and agenda are defined by who pays: As long as most degree-granting institutions are funded by local and national governments, this will remain the case. For all the talk about 'global higher education', the idea is mostly to export locally constructed ideas of education, to promote national brands abroad, to import students where possible. Indeed, it is only fair to acknowledge that Higher Education is also one of the most regulated of the sectors, and most nations only want the Higher Education institutions they can control. Whatever the rhetoric, the national governments don't want global higher education: They just want global investment in local Higher Education. But Higher Education needs to be GLOBAL. This relates to the purpose of higher education, which, I shall claim, has expanded beyond the making of citizens to, in the era of mass higher education, making workers and consumers. And, since the expectations of...

In 2009, while I was working to set up a global chain of English Learning and Employability centers, I was being told - by the educators I met and the employers I tried to persuade - that I should focus on global higher education instead. My pitch was that with the additional English language and employability skills training, the millions of graduates in India and elsewhere in Asia would be able to meet the demands of the employers: However, I was being told that the education system was somewhat broken and there was a need for a more global system of education altogether. This was outside the scope of what I could do then: While I was having conversations with customers and reporting this back to my colleagues, the business of Global Higher Education was  complex, investment intensive and difficult, and could hardly be achieved without deep commitment and long term vision, which my employers lacked. My design of making English training a loss-leader and building on a model of gl...

The Economist says it succinctly - India is losing its magic . Trapped by a petty political class who has no imagination or integrity, the country's progress is stuttering, and may come to an abrupt halt or even reverse, as in the form of a full-blown economic crisis, in the next few years. There is no leadership at sight: A leader that never arrived, as I wrote about in an earlier post. The big problem indeed is that at this time in its history, India simply can't sleep: Declining peacefully into geriatrics is not an option for a country where millions of young people are just looking to move from their villages to the cities and aspiring for a better life than their parents. End of hope will mean as a deep and bloody social upheaval, and even the break-up of the country. We are staring at the face of a disaster. At the risk of oversimplifying the problem, I feel that today's problems stem from the same causation which has helped to keep India democratic. I am indeed ...

If I am working for one thing, it is to create a truly global college, which prepares the students to take advantage of the global opportunities that are in front of us. I am conscious that there are many generalisations in that goal: The globalisation that we see is at best semi-globalisation, and the world is still a very divided space; the opportunities are still very skewed, and biased in favour of a few; and the model, education for profit, may have its own inherent biases that may change how and what the students can be prepared for.  However, it must be said, my approach is informed by my background, and therefore, despite these apparently insurmountable challenges, I remain optimistic. I come from a suburb near Calcutta, a metropolitan city in India, but growing up in the suburb, it seemed a million miles away. I had not been out and about on my own in the big city, which was only few miles away from where I lived, till I was almost 18. Indeed, I had a fairly protected...

Rick Santorum's now infamous comment in which he called Obama a snob for wanting everyone to go to college was widely criticized and ridiculed. Santorum, obviously, chose some extreme words to voice the discontents of his culturally conservative supporters—those who are likely without a college degree and are struggling to make ends meet. This is blatant pandering at its cheapest, but as someone who attended a private, top twenty university, I wonder if Santorum, in his own simple-minded way, may be onto something that makes at least a smidgeon of sense. A recent New York Times article cut through the rhetoric to point to an indisputable truth using facts and statistics—if you are already from an affluent family, you will do well in college; if you aren't from an affluent family, you are much less likely to enroll, and even if you do, you are much less likely to graduate. The reasons for this are various, and much of it has to do with the astronomically rising cost of college...