2020-08-19 14:23
India's New Education Policy makes the clearest statement yet about India's intent to attract foreign universities to set up campus in the country. It recognises the need and makes a promise… Read More
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Books; People; Ideas : These are few of my favourite things. As I live between day-to-day compromises and change-the-world aspirations, this is the chronicle of my journey, full of moments of despair and of discoveries, of connections and creations, of the quest of knowledge-as-conversation.
2020-08-17 16:32
Meritocracy is a convenient lie, as Socrates foretold, and it is the ballast of the social system we have built.The story goes like this. Once upon a time, we had kings and queens and their… Read More
2020-08-14 18:51
73 years ago, on this day, India was divided. Of course, this is a well-known fact. But it's worth repeating. We must remember that the division of India and creation of Pakistan was an… Read More
2020-08-13 13:35
Over the years, competency-based education has become a central focus of my work. This started with a simple assumption: That the transition from education to employment would be… Read More
2020-08-12 11:33
India's new National Education Policy argues for a new Higher Education system, which will have a Liberal Education undergraduate curriculum at its heart.This is great news. Globalisation si… Read More
2020-08-05 11:01
Universities are at an inflection point; so too is private higher education.The education entrepreneurs and private equity backing education ventures may present private higher education as… Read More
2020-08-02 08:48
India's New Education Policy, which got cabinet approval on the 29th of July, is to be celebrated just for itself. A nation of 1.3 billion people, most of whom are young, which claims its po… Read More
2020-07-28 14:10
For the students in India, 2020 changes everything. It's been a while that the usual formula - entrance examinations, engineering degrees and IT jobs - was looking shaky. But, now, with the… Read More
2020-07-27 11:18
Among the many victims of the pandemic, it will be easy to forget the students who graduated this year. While we focus on the elderly and the vulnerable and try to support those who have los… Read More
2020-07-20 11:35
The most creative university in India today is what folks refer to as 'WhatsApp university'. In a country of young people hungry for knowledge, the spontaneous beast of social media has trul… Read More
2020-07-10 09:48
China and India stepped back from the brink, at least for the moment. But the flare-up in June - and indeed the ongoing tensions - has strained relationships and nudged India closer to the U… Read More
2020-06-27 20:19
We have an ambiguous relationship with history. We did genuinely suppose that history had ended, with the collapse of the Soviet Union - and yet we claim to be making history all the time, w… Read More
2020-06-24 13:42
'Spiky' worldI am, of course, referring to Richard Florida's observation that the world was not flat (as Thomas Friedman observed) but spiky. The demise of Berlin Wall, the fall of Soviet Un… Read More
2020-06-23 09:15
Never has so simple an emotion - love of one's own country - invoked in so many people so complex a feeling. This is not because loving one's country is hard; on the contrary, it is one of t… Read More
2020-06-20 13:25
The simmering geopolitical tensions between India and China came to blows earlier this week, but then didn't. As the deaths of personnel being mourned in both countries, the leaders were sen… Read More
2020-06-18 20:26
'Self-reliance' has come to India. However, in its current avatar, it looks less like a confident country aspiring for a great future but rather like this staged street-corner bonfire of for… Read More
2020-06-17 11:04
When India was made, no special need for making Indians was felt.That should be somewhat surprising. There was this great aspiration of building a republican polity based on universal suffra… Read More
2020-06-16 12:04
Given that there is no dearth of bad news, I was not paying attention to the steadily rising din of the China-India conflict in the Himalayas. I surmised - and remain of the same opinion - t… Read More
2020-06-10 18:18
Bridge India hosted a conversation about Remote Learning in Indian Higher Education yesterday. As we do in the Bridge India webinars, we brought diverse voices, including some from the diasp… Read More
2020-06-03 15:47
Lenin allegedly said, "there are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen". Living through placid times just as we gave up on history, it came alive in 2020. B… Read More
2020-06-01 15:19
My blogging is inextricably connected with Lord Macaulay. Indeed, the root of all this is my belief that even if India was made, the task of making Indians is still unfinished; an education… Read More
2020-05-30 18:35
As they scramble emergency measures together, the university leaders are gradually coming to the conclusion that the changes will be long-term. If only reluctantly, they are accepting that r… Read More
2020-05-14 12:59
The pandemic made the universities scramble into online education. What happens next is the question.One line of thought is that this is just a temporary disruption. Life will return to norm… Read More
2020-05-13 14:16
1How would it sound, if many years hence, a novelist starts his novel with It was a time of uncertainty, it was a time of prediction, it was the age of realisation, it was the age of illusio… Read More
2020-05-11 15:35
In the middle of the ongoing economic chaos, many in India find solace in the hope that many manufacturing companies would now leave China and shift their factories to India. They enthusiast… Read More
2020-05-05 14:33
As our world falls apart, we have learnt to take comfort from Conspiracy theories.
Dean Koontz did write about Wuhan-400 years ago, didn't he? Have you not watched the South Korean docume… Read More
2020-04-28 14:24
It's not often that I get to do things
I like, but, as it happens, the lockdown came with a little gift. I was asked to develop, by an Indian entrepreneur with a strong commitment… Read More
2020-04-21 17:59
Howard Rhinegold saw it before anyone: That, in the digital age, 'crap detection' (euphemistically 'critical consumption of content', if you like) would become a critical skill. If thi… Read More
2020-04-17 12:20
As I wrote about technology and online learning earlier, this pandemic is condensing the Hype Cycle and, within a few short weeks, establishing what technology may or may not do for us. Obse… Read More
2020-04-15 15:07
We have been told that among the many changes that the Corona Virus will bring to our lives, one of the most significant will be education going online.
With the forced shutdown of… Read More
2020-04-14 12:46
After undermining the threat and overdoing the panic, we are starting to discuss, if only very gradually, the possibilities of a post-Pandemic world. After Donald Trump's April 12th came and… Read More
2020-04-10 22:08
This post is a reaction to Aatish Taseer's evocative obituary of secular India in the Atlantic (read here).
While I agree with it mostly - and share the reservations about the direc… Read More
2020-04-02 18:41
Yesterday, I posted my thoughts on the Corona Virus pandemic and the pivot, or lack of it, that this may represent (see here). I was optimistic and concluded that while science will rise to… Read More
2020-03-31 13:13
A week into lockdown and things are beginning to change. Mornings are late, afternoons are lazier and evenings never end; meditations are filling out the time for Yoga routines and Netflix p… Read More
2020-03-21 21:12
I spoke more than I ever did.
I thought this would be a day of quiet. I pulled out the books and papers I used for writing my dissertation on the history of Higher Education in India, wit… Read More
2020-03-20 17:26
This lockdown couldn't have come at a worse time for me. I was just about to start travelling and was looking forward to fusing my ideas and lessons learned in a new form of global education… Read More
2020-03-19 13:27
It's almost spring. Mildly cold, with occasional rain and green shoots everywhere. I am waiting for summer like everyone.
This was the mildest of the winters and yet, this is going… Read More
2020-03-12 21:06
There is an argument, common in the education start-up scene, that one doesn't need to have prior education experience to create a successful education company.
The reasoning goes - what'… Read More
2020-03-11 12:10
I am back in International Education again.
I had a three-year break from international education. Part of the reason was my own work preference: In 2016, fatigued from years of constant… Read More
2020-03-07 19:56
The use of the English language has always been a contentious subject in independent India.
It was after all the language of the colonialists, imposed on a subject people by force… Read More
2020-03-05 10:42
Prediction is a perilous business but it pays to be ready. If 2016 was the start of a worldwide reconfiguration of ideas, institutions and alliances, 2020 is poised to be the year when the c… Read More
2020-03-03 17:29
There is a jobs crisis within the global supply chain. Squeezed between trade tensions and process automation, the global service economy that would have lifted all - or at least most - boat… Read More
2020-02-27 16:29
In this day and age when political labels are liberally applied and some impossible categories, such as left-liberal, it's really confusing where anyone stands.
Indeed, the wise opp… Read More
2020-02-19 08:17
International education is growing, in spite of all the barriers various nations put up to stem the flow. I have written earlier about the limitations of how the universities treat internati… Read More
2020-02-17 19:22
I must admit that I find the 21st Century part a cliche, an overused term which doesn't mean much. The conference circuit did it: They slapped the label everywhere, stretching it out all the… Read More
2020-02-06 20:32
Many entrepreneurs around the world are working to 'disrupt' education. They sincerely believe that the traditional model of education can be improved, can be made more inclusive and more re… Read More
2020-01-30 12:01
The coffee-houses were once called the 'penny universities', for a good reason.
These enlightenment era spaces - free spaces, as one commentator has called them - allowed trading of infor… Read More
2020-01-28 15:54
A particular tension defines how I think.
Growing up in a poor country that lacked self-confidence in the aftermath of a devastating colonial rule, I learnt to distrust the wise Whi… Read More
2020-01-23 11:59
Employability is now serious business. Governments ask about employability outcomes and rankings depend upon it. 'Disruptive' start-ups raise millions of dollars to fix student employability… Read More
2020-01-21 14:09
Civilisation is a race between education and catastrophe: If H. G. Wells meant education only in a broad sense, in this third decade of the third millennium in the common era, the same can b… Read More
2020-01-20 14:34
Going back isn't the best way to go forward. But that's exactly why the keepers of the existing world order, besieged by popular discontent, want to do: They are desperately clinging onto th… Read More
2020-01-16 19:58
The trouble with writing the history of modern Higher Education in India is its non-autonomous nature. The first Indian universities were set up more as government departments rather than ac… Read More
2020-01-09 11:54
I always knew - I am one of those three princes of Serendip. Amnesiac, or perhaps lost in reincarnation, but in a perpetual journey to I-don't-know-what. Because like those princes, once I l… Read More
2019-12-05 12:55
'Brain-drain' used to be big: Textbooks had sections on it, conferences bemoaned it and it was seen as a serious problem holding back the 'Third World'.
But, that was then: Suddenly… Read More
2019-11-27 17:35
Once upon a time, I was a believer. I believed that the wonderful possibility of online higher education will make available affordable, high quality higher education for the aspiring middle… Read More
2019-11-24 16:48
Brexit-busy Britain is due for an election. Amid the clamour, it’s quite difficult to bring up something other than the big BoJo-Jezza battle. However, the noise obscures the rapid and… Read More
2019-11-07 14:49
Liberal Education had a particular meaning at its origin. Or, rather, it had two or more different meanings at the origin: the 'liberal' in English-Scottish sense, an education to be critica… Read More
2019-11-06 10:59
I watched a popular Indian mythologist expound on an Indian Business TV channel that Indian organisations are essentially different from Western ones. His reasoning is that the Western organ… Read More
2019-11-03 20:23
The most intriguing - and the most timely - policy pronouncement in India's new education policy is its emphasis on a Liberal Education undergraduate. While this is inspired by the American… Read More
2019-11-02 17:29
The new education policy that the Indian government is rolling out is significant, only if it's the first such policy pronouncement in over 30 years.
The last one was in 1985. As th… Read More
2019-11-01 12:58
Every Sunday morning, I miss Kolkata.
Yes, that crowded, polluted, malarial city at the frontline of climate catastrophe? That slow city, just off the tropic of Cancer, where people still… Read More
2019-10-30 09:07
History is the result of human actions, but not of human design, wrote Friedrich Von Hayek.
‘Brexit’ bears that out. Globalisation was not supposed to go backward. The L… Read More
2019-10-28 13:03
None of the human inventiveness that has broken new ground in science and technology can be readily seen in today's politics, which has become a narrative of regression and despair. The earl… Read More
2019-10-24 13:54
Narratives matter for the economy. The point is somewhat obvious, but the Nobel laureate economist Robert Shiller re-emphasizes the point in a new book (a preview here). Yet, as Shiller argu… Read More
2019-10-14 12:15
The feeling that my life is drifting away is perhaps the most creepy one to have.
Yet, it's a non-feeling. One doesn't really feel the drift until after the fact; otherwise, it will not b… Read More
2019-10-07 17:17
When manholes started disappearing around the world in 2004, the world discovered China. Re-discovered, we should say, as, in the Chinese eyes, China was merely reasserting its historical ma… Read More
2019-10-03 16:06
On the surface, it's a paradox: As the fortunes of political liberalism decline in India, the popularity of liberal arts at the Indian universities increase.
Indeed, one may see no… Read More
2019-10-01 11:09
All humans are not born equal.
Some are born in the shadows of a colonial past, with an indelible history embedded in themselves. Whatever they may do - and many of them do a lot - they r… Read More
2019-09-24 14:28
As Brad Smith invited us to think - any technology can be a tool or a weapon. Which one we make it is our choice.
Often, though, technologies start as weapons before becoming a tool… Read More
2019-09-19 11:11
As India's universities fail to cling to their already precarious positions on global league tables, old concerns about Indian higher education have been newly voiced.
There is much to be… Read More
2019-09-10 11:35
Universities today are as national as the Flag or the Anthem. They are expressions of the national idea, carriers of national message and embodiment of national achievement. Their places in… Read More
2019-09-05 16:03
It's time for educators to acknowledge what even a first-time recruiter knows - that Purple Squirrels do not exist.
Employability has become a buzzword in education for several reasons. G… Read More
2019-08-28 11:17
Sometime in 2011, the conversation about Higher Education changed.
It may have been 2009, or it may even be that no one noticed until 2012. But there was a transformation, even if it may… Read More
2019-08-20 12:14
The big idea in private higher education is Skills.
With a big S.
The argument goes that the traditional Higher Ed spends too much time disseminating Knowledge, and does not focu… Read More
2019-08-12 10:51
It only came to me slowly, through a confusing mist of ideas: That I really never escaped the empire.
I live in history. My mind is trained to see things with its submerged past, with its… Read More
2019-07-24 17:34
We needed an ugly word like 'employability' because we have a crisis: Despite all the promises and all the efforts, an unacceptably small percentage of people that we educate in our schools… Read More
2019-07-12 18:20
The venture-funded 'disruptive' higher education start-ups often claim that they can offer a better education than the universities, because, apart from other things, they have great instruc… Read More
2019-07-06 11:44
Employability training is big business.
As the disconnection between education and work gets wider, the efforts to bridge the gap moves from the fringes of the education enterprise… Read More
2019-06-30 09:08
The digital economy demands a new form of higher education. This is not just about teaching with or about technology. This is about changing the whole paradigm of how higher education should… Read More
2019-06-24 08:53
Higher ed needs a refresh.
One may love how it once was, but we live in a different world. Enlightenment university may be described in glowing terms, but this belonged to a world i… Read More
2019-06-07 09:47
India is an impossible nation.
In fact, that's exactly what the British colonialists used to say: India is no more a country than the Equator, Churchill quipped. A geographical expression… Read More
2019-05-29 18:53
Before I make the case for hiring failed entrepreneurs, I must state that I have heard this - for the first time - from someone else.
Sure, I can passionately argue about the failed entre… Read More
2019-05-21 15:36
Last year, I went in search of serendipity. It was part recovery - my previous stab at entrepreneurship not having worked out - and part exploration - of living unexpectedly. So, I took on s… Read More
2019-05-20 22:09
International education provides the angle of vision to understand how higher education has changed over the last few decades: It neatly layers the usual academic rhetoric - that of research… Read More
2019-05-02 15:21
There is something deeply dysfunctional about living in an age of ideas when all ideas look the same.
To understand this, one needs to stand outside the bubble that we all live in… Read More
2019-04-21 09:48
Democracy is being contested.
It didn't take too long for history not to end. Thirty years tops and the democratic euphoria is all gone. It's no longer an export product - Chinese made auth… Read More
2019-04-11 19:25
The business of Nationalism has been left to the Fascists.
Those who cherish freedom of views, opinions and beliefs, accept the global condition of existence and strive for peace and harm… Read More
2019-04-10 16:59
In the conference circuit, there are usually two mutually exclusive strands of conversation about the nature and purpose of universities.
First, there is this misty-eyed nostalgia a… Read More
2019-04-07 18:14
I argued previously that a carefully crafted myth about 21st-century education - that the experts know what the learners will need and it will be radically different and defined by market fo… Read More
2019-03-27 19:22
Smart presentations don't mean valuable insights. So it is with the current fad of presenting the vision of an all-new 21st-century education - through presentations, conferences and infogra… Read More
2019-03-20 13:28
War and geopolitics are not my focus, invested as I am in the history of universities and the role of intellectuals in society. But a combination of factors, the recent India-Pakistan skirmi… Read More
2019-03-07 13:49
India's unemployment rate has reached a historical high and the government is panicking. It has rejected and suppressed the report and committed itself to inventing a new set of numbers. Mem… Read More
2019-03-05 18:20
It is common to see the lament about the death of expertise. People don't believe in experts anymore, commentators say, and blame this tendency for the allegedly irrational direction that th… Read More
2019-03-03 20:23
Last summer, I was at lunch at a Mumbai restaurant when the host asked me whether I can help in facilitating international partnerships for an educational institution he has been planning to… Read More
2019-03-02 12:52
I was protesting against cynical war-mongering by South Asian politicians on Facebook when a friend called me out: He blamed my 'liberal' ideology rather than my oft-expressed and admittedly… Read More
2019-02-27 12:08
I have been off blogging for over a month.
But this was not because life took over or I got tired of blogging. It was not even the writers' block that I dreaded so much.
Instead… Read More
2019-01-24 17:21
There are those who believe History has ended. No, seriously, even after the man who made that claim bluntly and famously, Francis Fukuyama, has recanted and wrote a new book explaining why… Read More
2019-01-21 11:31
It seems that the Chinese economy is coming to a screeching halt! If the latest growth figures indicate a trend, it seems that all that public debt/investment-fuelled growth on steroids that… Read More
2019-01-15 15:50
Over the last decade, India has set in motion one of the largest ‘skilling’ missions in the world. However, despite the grand ambition, unparalleled political and media attention… Read More
2019-01-08 23:14
In this day and age of progress, India has just taken a massive leap - backwards - over the last few days.
First, came the Indian Science Congress. It made news for all the wrong reasons. Th… Read More
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