Cultural Clusters: The Missing Link Between Education, Culture, and Economic Development

I learnt a new term last week. Cultural Cluster.

It came up in a conversation with friends far more fluent in the art world than I am, while we were discussing the idea of organising a Conclave on EduCulture. They used the term as part of their regular lexicon, so not formally knowing about it stood out even more. So I did what I usually do. I went and read, and realized that I had never properly defined it for myself, despite having built an entire framework around ideas surrounding this concept.

There are at least three serious definitions floating around. Urban economists define a cultural cluster as a geographic concentration of cultural and creative industries, generating what they call agglomeration benefits, shared labour pools, supply chains, and knowledge spillover between neighbours in the same trade. Think of a ‘film city’ where editors, sound engineers, and writers all live within a few kilometres of each other and informally train one another simply by proximity.

Heritage institutions define it differently. To them, a cultural cluster is a grouping of tangible and intangible heritage assets, monuments, crafts, performance traditions, treated as a single conservation and economic unit rather than scattered, disconnected sites competing for the same tourist’s attention.

Policy bodies define it as a third thing entirely. A deliberately designed zone, government-backed, that fuses production, education, tourism, and retail around a single cultural identity, built on purpose rather than emerging by accident.

Basis these best is to define cultural cluster as a bounded geography where heritage assets, creative production, skill transmission, and economic activity reinforce each other in a closed loop, designed or organic, dense enough that proximity itself becomes the value driver.

To me this is also a description of how EduCulture has to be implemented if it is going to mean anything beyond a LinkedIn post or a classroom discussion. We need a destination where it is lived, practised, and economically sustained. And, travel and tourism become the implementation tool. CulturalClusters become the natural destination tourism organises itself around.

This is where a half-formed idea I have been mulling over suddenly found its proper name. India needs a TravelTech hub. A geography where travel-tech startups, heritage tourism operators, craft economy ventures and aviation infrastructure sit close enough to feed each other the way a cultural cluster’s theory predicts. NewNoida, with a brand-new international airport at its doorstep and an entire investment region being built from scratch, may be the most logical place in the country for exactly that cluster to form.

I am testing this idea out loud, not announcing it as finished. If you know this space, urban planning, travel tech, cultural economy research, I would value your inputs immensely.

Indigenous Design: How Local Traditions Can Shape Global Innovation

My Director and DoP called sounding destroyed that the shoot in Darbhanga and Nepal had collapsed. They advised strongly to shut production down, walk away and cut losses.

I trusted my gut and asked the team to carry on, and ‘Mithila Makhaan’ became the first Maithili film in over 50 years of film making in the language to win a National Film Award.

The story was deceptively simple. Our protagonist Kranti returns from Canada to revive his grandfather’s Makhana cultivation. A parallel track follows a woman fighting to bring Madhubani painting back into a living economy. Two characters. One argument. Local craft, rooted identity, and entrepreneurial courage are worth more than a distant and foreign career.

That film was, at its heart, a design story.

Steve Jobs, in his 2005 Stanford address, described how a calligraphy class at Reed College shaped everything. He learned about typefaces, letter spacing, what makes typography great. He called it “beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture.” Ten years later, every lesson went into the Macintosh, the first computer with beautiful typography, thereby an art class built a trillion-dollar company.

When I lived in Tokyo for over two years, I watched Japan do this at civilisational scale. Traditional craft aesthetics became industrial competitive advantage. The minimalism of Zen became Sony and Muji. Japan understood that art and industry are one conversation conducted across different time horizons.

India has Madhubani, Warli, Kalamkari, temple geometry that anticipates fractal mathematics. And design education largely stripped of this inheritance, training students in aesthetic vocabularies borrowed wholesale from elsewhere. We export raw craft. We import designed products. We buy back at a premium what our hands originally created.

EduCulture says design education in India has to begin at this point, in the village, in the craft, in the living tradition before it reaches the studio. Kranti in Mithila Makhaan chose his grandfather’s farm over Toronto. Steve Jobs chose a calligraphy class over a conventional degree. Both were design decisions before they were anything else.

We all need to explore what indigenous design vocabulary we are sitting on and need to go deep enough into it to build something the world has never seen.

Ramayan Beyond Religion: An EduCulture Perspective on Civilisational Heritage

Ramayan Beyond Religion An EduCulture Perspective on Civilisational Heritage

A friend called last night and asked me after my last post — why Ramayan specifically? Are you trying to make this about religion?

Fair question. Here is my answer.

Do you know who wrote the dialogues for B.R. Chopra’s Mahabharat on Doordarshan? The one that stopped the country every Sunday. The one that 100 million people watched without fail.

It was Dr. Rahi Masoom Raza. A Muslim scholar from Ghazipur, Uttar Pradesh. A Urdu poet with a doctorate from Aligarh Muslim University.

When people objected and asked why a Muslim was writing a Hindu epic, Dr. Raza’s response was simple and final. “I am the son of the Ganga. Who knows the civilisation and culture of India better than I do?”

And the actor who played Arjun in that same series? Firoz Khan. Born into a Pashtun Muslim family with roots in Peshawar, where I have never been to but have known the name growing up in the town of Sher Shah Suri and crossing GT Road almost on daily basis. Firoz became so completely one with his character that he eventually changed his legal name to Arjun. His own mother started calling him Arjun.

This is the point I am making when I talk about EduCulture.

The Ramayan and the Mahabharat are more of civilisational inheritance tham only some religious property. There is a difference. Religion is about belief. Civilisation is about the shared values, aspirations and imagination that holds a people together, the stories they dream in, the values they reach for when they need language for something important.

Bali is a Hindu island in a Muslim nation and it has built a thriving cultural economy around the Ramayan. Indonesia does not seem to be seeing a contradiction there, we may be creating a fuss out of it on our own. Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Trinidad, Fiji, all of them treated this inheritance as a living thing worth tending, worth performing, worth building institutions around.

The gap in India is an hashtag#EduCulture gap. We stopped asking what our stories are actually for. We reduced them to ritual on one side and controversy on the other, and lost the vast middle ground where Rahi Masoom Raza lived, where Firoz Khan lived, where the Kecak dancers of Bali live every single evening.

An hashtag#EduCultured person does not need to be Hindu to understand the Ramayan. They need to be Indian. Or, as the rest of the world has amply demonstrated, they do not even need to be that.

The story belongs to anyone willing to live by what it teaches.

That is all I am saying.