PhD Economics Tutor | IGCSE, A-Level & IB | Exam Prep & Past Papers for students

Find out more about Dr Ashish

• Tell us more about your subject. How did you develop an interest in this field?

  Economics found me before I formally chose it. Right from Class 10, it was the subject where things just clicked, and the marks followed me through BCom and into my MBA at Indus Business Academy, Bangalore.
  
  The real turning point came after my PGDBM, during an interview at Graphic Era University. I had just delivered a demo lecture on Managerial Economics, if I remember correctly, and one of the professors on the panel said something I still remember word for word: “If you had an MA in Economics, I would have selected you right now.”
  
  That single sentence rerouted my career. I went back, completed my MA in Economics, cleared the UGC NET, and committed to a PhD — registered in 2014, defended in 2021. Seven years of evenings and weekends while teaching full-time.
  
  I had started teaching in 2007, so by the time the doctorate came through, I had already spent fourteen years in classrooms, schools, colleges, and universities. The PhD didn’t make me a teacher; the classroom did. The doctorate just gave the work a deeper spine.
  
  What I love about Economics is that it is the rare subject where the same diagram — say, demand and supply — explains why onions cost what they cost, why your favorite Instagram reel is free, and why countries fight wars over oil. When a student realizes that, Economics stops being a chapter to finish and becomes a lens for seeing the world.
  
  That shift, for me, is what teaching Economics is really about. The diagrams are not the destination, but they are the door.

• What or who is the motivation behind your choosing to teach & why?

  Honestly, teaching wasn’t a plan — it was a pull. I started teaching in 2007, just after my MBA. My PGDBM was in HR and Marketing, which meant every corporate door was open. I kept walking back to the chalk and the whiteboard anyway.
  
  Looking back, the motivation came from two places.
  
  First, my own teachers. The professor at the Graphic Era interview I mentioned earlier didn’t have to take five minutes after a rejection to tell a candidate what was missing in his profile. But he did. That small act shaped a decade of decisions for me. Good teachers don’t just teach a subject — they redirect lives in five-minute conversations. I wanted to be the person on the other side of that table for someone else, someday.
  
  Second, the students themselves. There is a particular satisfaction in watching a Class 11 student who walked in, convinced that “Economics is too hard for me,” walk out three months later, debating elasticity at the dinner table. That moment — when a concept stops being foreign and starts feeling obvious — is the closest thing teaching has to magic. And it never gets old.
  
  A colleague nudged me towards UGC NET, which led to the PhD, which led to university teaching. Each step deepened the work, but the core never changed. Inside, I think, I have always carried the heart of a teacher who wants to share — that is the part I cannot turn off, regardless of whether I am in a Class 9 batch or a postgraduate seminar.
  
  Seventeen years in, the best moment of my week is still the same: a student looking up from a problem and saying, “Sir, I finally got it.”
  
  That is the only KPI I have ever cared about.

• How does your work help society?

  A few times a year, my phone buzzes with a message I have come to recognize. It usually begins, “Sir, you may not remember me, but…” — and then a former student, sometimes from ten or twelve years ago, tells me about a sentence I once said in class that they are still carrying with them. A line about opportunity cost that shaped a career decision. A throwaway example about inflation that they finally understood the day they paid their own electricity bill.
  
  That, more than any exam result, is how I measure whether my work helps society.
  
  I’ll be direct about why this matters to me. A lot of Economics teaching in India still leans on rote learning — mug up the definition, reproduce the diagram, paste it on the answer sheet. I saw this with unusual clarity when I was working with Chegg.com, solving questions from American Economics textbooks while teaching from Indian ones. The US books ended every chapter with thoughtful application questions: What would you do in this situation? How would a firm respond? What does this policy mean for ordinary people? The Indian books, too often, ended with a definition to memorize. That gap shapes a generation.
  
  So in my classroom, I try to close it. When I teach demand and supply, we talk about why Uber surge-prices on a rainy evening. When I teach inflation, we look at what a student’s family grocery bill looked like five years ago versus today. When I teach opportunity cost, I ask what they gave up to come to tuition that evening. The point is for the student to realize that Economics is not a chapter in the textbook. It is the operating logic of their daily life.
  
  When a sentence from one of those classes resurfaces a decade later in someone’s actual decision, that is the only proof of impact I have ever needed. An economically literate citizen is harder to mislead, in markets, in politics, in life. That is the dividend I am still trying to earn, one student at a time.

• If you had to think of a role model for your work, who do you think of & why?

  If I had to pick one person, it would be Dr. Raghuram Rajan.
  
  What I admire about him is not the résumé — IMF Chief Economist in his early forties, RBI Governor, Chicago Booth professor — though that is formidable enough. What I admire is how he uses his expertise. In 2005, at the Jackson Hole symposium, he stood in a room full of central bankers and warned that the global financial system was building toward a crisis. He was largely dismissed at the time. Three years later, he was vindicated. The courage to be unfashionably right is, to me, the highest form of intellectual integrity an economist can practice.
  
  But the reason he is my role model for teaching, specifically, is something else. Read Fault Lines or The Third Pillar, and you will find a Chicago-trained economist deliberately writing for the general reader — not for fellow PhDs. He takes ideas like financial regulation, community decay, and global imbalances, and reduces them to sentences a thoughtful undergraduate can understand. That is exactly what good Economics teaching demands. The subject is full of concepts that sound forbidding — opportunity cost, marginal utility, elasticity, deadweight loss — but every one of them can be explained with a teenager’s pocket money or a family’s grocery bill. The teacher’s job is to find that bridge. Rajan finds it on the page; I try to find it in the classroom.
  
  I draw, in a quieter way, from thinkers outside the discipline as well — Naval Ravikant’s line about having “the soul of a teacher who wants to share” describes my own posture more accurately than any teacher-training manual ever has. Economics gives me the substance; that line gives me the stance.
  
  A role model, in the end, is not someone you copy. It is someone whose questions you start asking yourself.

• Tell us about your hobbies outside teaching.

  Outside the classroom, my main hobby is reading — though not always the kind people expect from an Economics PhD.
  
  My bedside table currently has Becoming Supernatural by Dr. Joe Dispenza, which I am using to deepen my meditation practice. Alongside it sit Atomic Habits, The One Thing, The Art of Learning, Made to Stick, The Coaching Habit, and a small stack of books on sales and persuasion.
  
  People sometimes ask why an Economics teacher reads books on coaching and persuasion. The honest answer is that a teacher is, fundamentally, a salesperson of ideas. If I cannot get a 15-year-old excited about Giffen goods, I am not doing my job. So I borrow from people who have studied attention, decision-making, and habit. Most of what I read eventually finds its way back into the classroom — a sharper hook, a cleaner analogy, a better closer for a difficult chapter.
  
  Meditation has become the other anchor. After seventeen years of teaching and a PhD defended in 2021, I have come to believe that the quality of my teaching is directly tied to the quality of my attention. Twenty quiet minutes in the morning make a calmer, sharper teacher in the afternoon.
  
  Beyond books and meditation: long walks, unsolicited Economics conversations with friends, and a curious — slightly chaotic — exploration of what AI will mean for education over the next five years.
  
  That last one may end up being the most important learning of all.

• Do you have an anecdote to tell us about your student or professional life?

  Here is a small story from a class I taught recently.
  
  I was teaching the difference between wants and needs to a student — one of the most foundational ideas in Economics, but also one that students often memorize without really feeling. I wanted the concept to land, so I turned to a student in the front row and asked, “Have you asked your father for an iPhone 17?”
  
  She grinned and said no.
  
  I said, “Good. An iPhone 17 is not your need — it is a want. Now, have you ever asked your father for a helicopter?” I went on, “A helicopter is also a want — but notice, you wouldn’t even dream of asking for one. Where is the invisible line in your head that decides what is reasonable to want? That line is exactly what Economics is trying to study.”
  
  The concept landed, but after class, I sat with the example and realized something uncomfortable: by using the iPhone 17 as my benchmark, I may have unknowingly seeded a desire in a child’s head that wasn’t there before, and a want I had planted, in trying to explain wants.
  
  So the next time I teach that lesson, I will skip the iPhone and go straight to the helicopter. It is funnier, safer, and pedagogically cleaner.