The mad rush for the digital aspects of governance in India is certainly more than achieving innocent efficiencies and increasing the tax net. The move to transform citizens into tax payers, costumers and employees is a grand neoliberal economic project in which delusions and escapism is the over riding sentiment undergirding the initiatives without focusing on the basics such as increasing the budgets for innovation research where automation is eating away thousands of IT jobs as the traditional bell weather destination for middle class jobs. Farmers are protesting and getting killed as political class has neglected farm reforms for decades to safeguard the rural middle class vote, while one farmer commits suicide every 41 minutes. All the talk is about ‘smart’ : from phones to agriculture to cities. We need is a dose of hard nosed focused towards implementing safeguards and creating opportunities for farmers, and not only telling them to download an application to check the weather, and join the market. Aadhar is creating an informational grid to underwrite the economic project called India, but is more about manufacturing an aspiration, rather than the tough decision making towards creating employment. The deleterious impacts of Demonetisation are coming to the data sets released by the government as well. Rethink, retrain and imagine.

Mr Shahid Chougule from Mumbra on the outskirts of Mumbai, a Muscat resident since a decade has made this beautiful antiques shop in the winding bylanes of Mutrah Souq, a charming old Musqat commercial neighbourhood, evoking the maritime trade routes of the empire. We spoke on the tourist seasons of Oman, and the off season during summer that we are in at the moment. The Urdu and Marathi medium educated Chougule quipped in Marathi about his interests in old coins and spoke about how Bengali is taking over as the language of the street when once Gujarati and Malayalam reigned.

Sport is a backhanded way of expressing Nationalism, paraphrasing Prof Amit Chaudhuri’s statement in a recent interview in the Indian Express on his new book, which I thoroughly adored gorging on. The media hype in the aftermath of the London Attacks were insensitive, but we have normalised and internalised violence in our daily lives with Manchester,Berlin and Paris in the recent past.  
The theatres of Nationalist exuberance have been the same since the India Pakistan Test Match in 1999 test at the Eden Gardens, where a Lakh people had gathered and Geoff Boycott had famously quipped that when ‘ these two countries are not exploding nuclear bombs, they play cricket’, as this game is a metaphor for phenomena more than the humble sport itself in India. 
Sport is about a game, evaluate it for the ‘beef of the matter’ BMKJ
#lifeasawriter #muscat

Modiji extolling the virtues of the Digital through JAM at an economic summit with President Putin. The third anniversary speech in Hindi, at a foreign policy summit. The perennial election campaign mode from Mumbai to Moscow. 

I thoroughly cherish the opportunities which I receive as a writer-researcher, trained as an engineer and I happily work as one(!) and believe engineers have a duty to communicate better especially environmentalists who are in the business of risk communication – working on a book draft and other shorter projects. The journey has been arduous, and I count all the blessings in the form of mentoring, support and plain hand holding at times. Glad to be in worlds of praxis and theory and navigating it everyday.