Modi ji started his re election campaign for 2019 today in Hindi with Sanskrit chanting and quotes from Rabindranath Tagore, and Buddha. The only difference was, it was in Davos. The annual celebration of the Global neoliberal elite, Davos is the space of the movers and shakers of the A players.

As SRK and Mukesh Ambani listened to Modi ji speak, while everyone else was plugged in to the translation headphones, there was a sense that the audience was the Hindi Heartland rather than the quaint ski town in Switzerland.

Jai Maharashtra.

Airports are ‘Non Places’ in the words of French Anthropologist Marc Angie; where the location is a node of a circulatory system, of the veins of Globalisation. These places, mean trolleys where migrants from South Asia pack their dreams away. Photographer Natan Dir speaks in an interview:

“In a place like that, I experienced that people stopped paying attention to themselves, they don’t pretend to be anyone different, they come as they are. I had never realised that this was exactly what I felt when being in the underground; it was a human and real space for me. A place where everything is democratic. It doesn’t matter if somebody has more money, you’re all even.” [1]

The same sentiment is valid for an airport.

Reference:

1. http://www.gupmagazine.com/articles/notes-from-the-underground-an-interview-with-natan-dvir