Ram jee, a father of three daughters from Lucknow Rural is an Experienced Laundry Professional (Dhobi). He grew up in Worli, downtown Mumbai and Juinagar in Navi Mumbai. We shared notes on the movies watched at Meghraj Meghdoot, the original single screen theatre in Vashi, Navi Mumbai where I watched my first movie in the … More Voice of a Dhobi in the Gulf
In a certain city of the oil rich Persian Gulf, I encountered the recession due to the low oil prices first hand as I met a middle aged man fluent in Urdu, from the premier coastal commercial city, ‘selling pens’ to generate an income as the Tissue Uncles and Aunties do in Singapore, both certainly … More Voices of Migrants: Recession, South Asia and Everyday Life
During the course of writing my book manuscript and researching it for seven months across five cities; I felt a pressure like no other, to deliver as I was doing it full time. I lose words in the process. I learnt one plain fact; writing is about the process, and the process is a great … More The Creative Mindset
In order to make Meaning out of disparate piecemeal events, the language to string together the phenomenon has to be different than the data points. Innovation is a non linear thought project; real time, fresh, with a appreciation of history of what can work and what could be skipped. Demand orientation makes time, the most … More Language of Innovation
Gulf Futurism invests (literally) an outlandish belief in mega infrastructure projects to catapult it to a future as as advanced as South Korea or Japan. Modernity in the Gulf appropriates modern technology while rooting it in a traditional anchor of family values. Oil wealth has accelerated the tech curve with high disposable incomes. Everyone has … More Digital Modernity, Gulf Style
In 2010, I enthusiastically watched ‘The Lady’ at the Golden Village in Vivo City Mall in Singapore with an Indo-Burmese Couple. I came out of the movie with a proverbial lump in the throat moment. This is the case of taking the international community for a ride. Ofcourse, I remember, Aunty Suu, speaking a few … More The (Fallen) Lady
With India and China betting big on electric cars through legislation drivers, the internal combustion engine based fuel economy will go for a massive overhaul over the next decade. Energy storage, material science, rebooting the infrastructure for electric cars along with automated mobility (a liberal dollop of Extended Intelligence in the words of Joichi Ito) … More Mobility for Chindia: The Electric question
The era of the digital eschews a hollow politics of symbolisms, rhetoric, and of political correctness. All the barrage of likes, shares and comments are click bait activism. Fill in a change.org protest and share, not quite realising that we have successfully registered purse on the surveillance roster. These feel good measures extend to crowdsourcing … More Real Skills and Digital Modernity
All the critique and most of it noise; is lost in the morass that is quarterly capitalism. No incentives cause no action, on Climate Charge and other vexed issues. Disaster Capitalism is all is well. All the trillions of words on equity, gender, conscious capitalism and reform is meaningless without any focus on the long … More Create Incentive Structures for Climate Change
India is a story of many diversities, pluralities and possibilities. As a subcontinent with 30 odd sub narratives of sub national identities, the sheer melange is mind boggling. This chaos cannot generate a linear narrative, although the English media sounds monochrome. Modi, the master craftsman of narrative shifts, spin doctor par excellence brings the Bullet … More India: Lens, Chaos and Diversity
