Professor Shahram Khosravi in his seminar on power and pedagogy, why human rights does not work as some people were not meant to be identified as human.

The power of Facebook or the digital is the access to the best thinking in anthropology and history while being in the global south.

Professor Shahram is a former refugee and a taxi driver, turned anthropologist. His work is something I have followed for years via the Critical Border Studies group on Facebook.

His lecture refreshes the intellect and the soul. The pedagogy of non commodification of knowledge production is a contrast to the h index fundamentalism in Asia.

Poignant during Lent.

Catholic Bombay, a Creole Bombay.

Mount Mary Church Darshan.

The person on the right in this frame from an Instagram reel is Chacha, my neighbor from Muscat- a reminder of a life lost when my parents moved back to Mumbai, due to retirement of my father. Chacha runs a legendary paratha shop, and his chicken cheese naan was a staple of my childhood. I grew up in the neighbourhood over two decades plus. The paratha is truly stuff of an entire research paper, of transnational ties over stuffed paratha. South Asia gets forged in the Gulf, in its Karachi Darbar restaurants in Al Khuwair and Karama. Chacha from Lahore runs the bakery for the last three decades with his sons and the extended family.

For many Gelf kids, home is a place in the past, a country which we had to renew visas every two years. Muscat fortunately is a home which I follow closely even if I have not travelled for four years.

My stoic economist father, who was a civil servant in Oman for the entire time for the Ministry of Manpower saw the reel and got emotional. Alas, Bayt is an emotion.

🇴🇲❤️

Margins in the Maximum City.

Sanjay Nagar, Kurla West

There are invisible spaces being built where not even an auto wants to go, usually these are on the margins. Today was a reminder that there is a BKC or a Fort but there are chawls in Kurla too.

Was going through my home library in Mumbai today, and stumbled across a few works that I contributed to over the past decade on migration in the Gulf and SE Asia and was humbled to find this mention by Mohsin Bhai, by original migration mentor in Singapore. I am touched by his kind mentoring and is ever grateful to him.

I have often been cancelled by academics who think that they can easily cancel a non PhD researcher, but they don’t see that I do migration research in praxis as a calling as a second generation migrant, and not for the h-index. You know who you are, and the news is that I will around for a long time.

Another notable mention is Adrian Pereira, who has been incredibly supportive in the journey as mentor for the last few years.

Gratitude as always.

Airport is hardly a ‘non-place’ as these are spaces bubbling with affect and aspiration, of splintered dreams and quiet whispers of a u turn back. (Auge, 1995).

For the perennial migrant worker in me, airports are more than passages, they are windows to a world which are finite, and in many ways opens to the possibilities of the modern.

Recording reels has been a necessary transition from the sacrament of the written language and the visual text of the photograph, key resources of ethnographic work. These reels are spontaneous field-notes from the sidewalk of life.

I have been resisting the allure of videos which have already attracted attention across my feeds. I will record them when I have something important to share. This one below was my first video blog ever, which was recorded at a drop of a hat.

As a consummate consumer of content myself it was I guess only a matter of time. The I-Phone has a good camera, and records audio even in noisy situations. I have been blogging for 13 years now, so do let me know of this humble attempts.