Archive for the ‘Ideas for India’ Category

If you have always wanted to create an institution of learning here in India that actually teaches children to construct and nurture a model of the world that empowers them, and not one that simply equips them with skills for corporations to exploit, Colleges That Change Lives: 40 Schools That Will Change the Way You Think About Colleges is one of the books you need to read. It debunks the idea of a degree from Ivy League colleges in the U.S. being the wildcard it’s promoted to be for all opportunities its holder comes across.

Elizabeth Coleman’s incisive TED talk on the current state of education, which seems to encourage fragmentation and super-specialization in every area of knowledge, expanded upon in her speech delivered at her institution’s 75^th anniversary, will act as a clarion call to your capacity to build and deliver a more meaningful educational system to us.

The Shakespeare Festival at St. Louis. Absolutely wonderful. They build mini theme parks to stage plays, with dummy life-size buildings in pretty surroundings that look delightful. Fantastic intellectual stimulation. I wonder why we do not have such things in India. All the outward trappings of success matter so much more to us than these. I guess that’s because the majority of the middle class are still just one or two generations forward from times of poverty and scarcity. Hence, everyone programs us into hoarding up stuff that would secure our future and demonstrate our superiority.

We need to sensitize people a whole lot more to their own country. Writing books, making videos and developing knowledge-based theme parks next to common attractions in India where we could expose a whole lot more to the people about the wonders of their own country would do us all a world of good. It’s going to be tremendously exciting to get such knowledge out to people.