Today many(Sarvarna Hindu)Bengalis will ponder about 1947 and 1971 again. Was religion worth the decision to surrender rule to Delhi, via Lucknow and now Gandhinagar. Bengalis saw 1905 as a snippet.

The gross indifference seen today would not have been any different from Rawalpindi or Dhaka as we have seen today from the masters in Delhi. Non hindi speaking states effectively don’t matter in our governance. 42 seats out of 542. Not even ten percent.

The reading of history makes one to revisit counter factuals. India needs to rekindle the federal ethic again. Bengal did give the BJP 18 seats in 2019. I wonder what are they doing. Will not blame others.

Got to know that there is ‘Maharashtra Studies’ at Columbia University which Prof Anupama Rao helms whose seminal work ‘The Caste Question’ was/is path breaking. This thesis is on Farmer Suicides in Vidarbha. All the good work is in the US, it seems.

I read The Mint on migration by Prof Priya article with great interest as a migration researcher and the concerns are known, but is there intellectual infrastructure in the country willing to take up the challenge. Migration academia is seen to marginal within the development studies mandate and the entire load is on NGOs on the ground and the media, both mainstream and non profit.

There are few stand-alone think tanks and research organisations on migration governance as well. When more focus is placed on migration, institutional capacity is built for the long term.

Independent labor and migrant oriented media portals and think tanks are needed to research the evidence to inform policy discussions such as economy and national security in India and wider South/South East Asia. The real issues are not covered but Bollywood movie premieres are sadly.

An exception is the so called bland Singaporean mainstream media where there are actually reporters covering the migrant beat.

The biggest problem in this pandemic climate is hopelessness. What was sold by the dream business as what life should be and what the earning reality is, is a massive delta. When hope crashes, what else do we clutch on as an anchor? What makes it so hard to recalibrate ones choices, or reboot to the new normal. We are in a collective mess, a narrative collapse in the words of writer Venkatesh Rao. The world will still need food, water, sanitation, data and education. And yes good health care. The world has just graduated to a new job.