Rabri on the boil, outside a favourite daily in Hadapsar, Pune in a Social Distancing way. The whiff of the intoxicating saffron in the air cannot be grasped in a still photo. The olfactory dimension is the limitation of this artistic medium. The everyday during the pandemic is punctuated by the sensory. Food is a site to gauge the continuity of the everyday.

Where it is Bhojpuri Bidesia folk songs or Malayali Kathu Pattu, letter songs between north Kerala and the Khaleej, or Bangaldeshi migrant poets in Singapore, songs and poetry are oral archives of love and longing for migrants are powerful.

Anniversaries/Birthdays are occasions to make time and consecrate the ritual marking and hence making life, a pause in this pandemic to say a mumbling prayer in the midst of a stillness which all of us have been mulled in to, a normal which has been forced upon us, a language deeply insufficient for our times. Metaphors are empty of valency, and meanings need to be refreshed, hence the residues of normalcy need to be celebrated with souls who care.

Such an honor to be presenting on the social and ethical dimensions of tech in the 5 day Faculty Development Program by BIT Mesra on ‘AI & ML in Healthcare’.

A deep gratitude to Dr Koel Mukherjee and Dr Sahu, the program committee coordinators for their sincere efforts in curating this digital learning space for academics by academics and for placing social and business topics in a highly technical program. In the spirit of interdisciplinary thinking espoused by the New Education Policy 2020, this intervention creates the correct ripples for post event conversations. It was kind off surreal that my former teachers from BIT’s Oman Campus attended my talk.

The talk was based on STS frameworks and the digital-society interface to an audience of scientists. #ThoughtLeadership