The PhD coursework phase at NUS was immensely enriching; however, I needed a pause to recalibrate my scholarly agenda and to find the writer in me back again. After 9 months of a writing break of sorts, i realized that writing is a whole of the body experience where the vision, research agenda and the will to strive need to align.
I write as a professional services entrepreneur each day, and finding the joy in the words that one writes is something which I had lost. The break has helped. I look forward to writing a PhD again, this time in something I love and have the wherewithal to do excellent work.
In the last nine months, I have traveled the entire city of Bombay, and have visited Delhi, Pune, and Johannesburg and engage with issues of migration in the Indian Ocean deeply. As i was having Baida Roti at Bade Miya at Fort the other day in search of an Arab Bombay, I am eating the popular mutton Murtabak in SE Asia, a Hadrami import to the region.
The waters do connect us via the plate, even if contemporary politics just in a temporary amnesia. The effective networks of food connect us beyond what the national defines us to be. However, I am no theorist, as a supervisor once quipped.
Change Thinker 