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.

It’s about time India had an internal migration governance framework. The circular nature of migration makes India truly federal.

On the international front, we can learn from Philippines and Indonesia on how to negotiate at the state to state level for better terms for low skill migrant workers , who lift their families out of poverty. If there is no shame in earning remittances than there should be no issue in treating labor migration as a legitimate export as well.

Unlike our green card H1B cousins, they come back.

Saudi Maids in Qatari Households; this fact disrupts a few notions. The region is changing for a while on migration governance and the post oil reality. The pandemic brought it ahead.

Qatar: A Modern History
Allen J Fromherz, 2012
Georgetown University Press.

Watching the HealthServe Panel on migrant workers in the COVID era with an an all star cast. Had met Mr. Bernard Menon of MWC Sg with @mjdutt when I was working at CARE while it was at NUS. Good to see such a high powered mainstream conversation. #Singapore #MigrantWorkers

Most migrants are focused on earning a living, however the issue is that even middle classes and trade diasporas do not write their stories. If it was not my interest in history and museums, I would not not known that there are Indian trade communities in Oman since the past four hundred years from Kutch. These histories are not seen in national museums in the GCC, neither in India where diasporas are not considered mainstream enough apart from when it comes to enjoying remittance riyals.

There are hardly any contemporary work on trade or migrant diasporas of the Gulf. There are documents available in the vernacular within communities, but scholars are more interested in mainstream archives. British Historian James Onley confidently writes of hardly any written archives of Indian communities in the Gulf, which may be the case in English. What about Kutchi, Gujarati, Sindhi and other south Asian languages?

Such because it is not available in English does not mean it does not exist.

Upon researching up an article on Omani Bania last month for the American Gulf State Institute in Washington DC, I could hardly find one book by Prof Fahad Bishara in recent literature which talks about the community, based on documents reviewed from the Ratansi Purushottam clan and a paper by Sandhya Rao and well James Onley again.

I partially count Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Temporary People although it’s deceptively termed as fiction.

I am happy that migrant workers in Singapore and Malaysia write their own stories and poems, in Bangla, Tamil, Bahasa and Tagalog. If we don’t write the histories ourselves some western academic will write in for us, on a Routledge contract. The book which will cost a hundred quid.

History writing is too important to leave it to academics or the state. There are good non fiction writers researching through the popular publishing route such as Manu Pillai, Anam Zakaria or Aanchal Malhotra.

If one cannot write much, take photos, archive them and create digital spaces, on Instagram such as Gulf in South Asia page. Instagram is a digital museum from the ground up.

I write sans any formal training in history or politics. Read up. Collaborate. Soon the time will evaporate, and the stories will be lost.

When I was growing up, with a massive shutter and severe confidence issues including periodic bouts of obesity- all that I wanted was to write, and immerse myself in worlds I have not travelled. One of the pluses of a policy consulting life has been travel, meeting people gauging in lives much more interesting than mine. I admire folks who are well traveled such as marine engineers who have been friends and mentors in Singapore not necessarily the most well read, but their tales can fill up a library.

I admire polymaths, who translate their complex work lives in a mellifluous manner in to words, think of a Atul Gawande or a Siddhartha Mukherjee.

Experiences we obtain are a privilege. Education is a singular dimension. Traveling with an authentic spirit to learn, is true education. Not for Instagram but for oneself. No Zoom call can replace physicality of experience which comprises the ‘ruuh’ or essence of being. I hope we can travel again, sometime.