A few evenings back, I sat in a cab shuttling between malls, when I flagged down a cab which was driven by Salman, a massive Bollywood buff. When he heard that I was from Mumbai (my passport address is a Navi Mumbai one at least, a bureaucratic anchor for a fluid identity at best) he was very keen to discuss movies. I am a cheap Bollywood movie enthusiast, He said that his favourite actors were Nana Patekar and Mithun Da, and honestly I was startled as usually the Khan’s are a perennial favourite here in the region with locals.

We then moved to the debacle that was Thugs, and in the brief trip spoke about Manoj Bajpayee’s acting in Satya as Bhiku Mhatre and also a scene from Gangs of Wasseypur. The passion regarding movies was palpable and he was really analytical in his feedback.

It’s nice that these events happen spontaneously and makes life lively.

A prolonged conversation on migrant workers with an old friend, based in SE Asia ignited a part of my life which I have parked by the side at this bend of my life. I worked on migrant worker issues for a research think tank in Singapore and am associated remotely with Mohsin Malhar Bhai on his amazing grassroots work, that has none of the fluff but meaty collaboration with the fresh worker from Bangladesh. I am astonished that I remember research paper references to the year and author. It’s in my genes. Migration Studies or Anthropology departments would demand for better grades for a PhD application rather than years of writing and understanding if I plan to write a formal academic work. Hence, I scribble here.

I am raised in the Gulf as a second generation migrant of educator parents. Migrant/Expat/Temporary Guest Worker/Pravasi are terms embedded in the consciousness with Passport, Visa Categories and Labor Cards since I realised that am not a zombie but a thinking human being. Academia churns our lives experiences in to quotes and are reduced by the home countries as remittance data. But migrants live lives at the glorious intersection of transnational labor networks and monetary flows. His life is far more richer than Policy documents from ILO and IOM.

The middle class temporary guest worker is turned in to labor, and his normal life is converted in to a parallel life within the community away from the mainstream. Life is defined by the next trip home. The perennial negotiation to earn and save for his precarious life, is a colourful one, ingesting humiliations and taunts as pickle with sambhar and sadam.

The entrepreneur migrant is a unique species in the gulf, as money making becomes his calling. He listens to election rally speeches on YouTube while commenting on the winning candidate. He listens to BNP campaign songs on Watsapp as Bangladesh goes to the hustings and NaMo speeches as Rajasthan goes to the ballot box as well.

It’s a life defined by risk and uncertainties. He makes his life better with a Biryani after Jumma prayers, on a weekly basis. But, the decision to come and work is his, hence the accountability lies with him.

Theorists hope for

A Post (Post1,Post2…..Postn)

A line of iterative code is easier

To write

Reality is a complex of complex adaptive systems

Power flows not through the power bank

But through your Apple Pay

Spoken word social media poetry

Packages feels

Everything however

Is a backhand coping mechanism

At best

And lame auto play at worst

The problem with millennial low income is a resultant of a perception trap; Instagram worthy life, ‘Eat Pray Love’ mindset, work life balance and retire early as if work is jail and not something productive.

There will be no post capitalist utopia, and free lunches (apart from a privileged few), head back to good old working hard, living frugal and saving for a retirement. Life is not about party and travel. Very few actually end up doing what they are good at. All this passion BS is poison. Get good at something that pays, and relearn all the time.

On a beach, over mishkak, paaya slowly cooked over three hours and piping hot milk tea or doodh wali chai, the subcontinent converged over a warm meal under the winter moon in the Gulf. The event catalyst was from Lucknow, the Paaya was made by a boutique owner from old Delhi, who has been to Karachi three times in the 1990’s to a real estate manager from Mangalore who was insistent on explaining the Christian community’s focus on Konkani, rather than Kannada to jolly academics from Islamabad to Lahore, extolling the inadequacies of Imran Khan. With the moon above and the warm waters of the Arabian Sea under our feet, we left our selves to one under nature and India and Pakistan sat together and enjoyed chai, politics and Dhindchak Pooja.

#experienceoman #SouthAsiainntheGulf #latergram

Failure frees

Shackles broken

White Space created

Unlocks potential

While learning from past bloopers

Who said then falling/failing is terrible?

Some months back, a former colleague had an issue with my chai pictures, saying that these were irritating. Chai is not only a volatile drink, of flavour and of character as Aditi Sriram writes in her interview with Playright Ayad Akhter in Guernica in 2014, it is a distinctive sense of home for the migrant in a bubbling hot broth in a paper cup, in short it is, home in a cup.

It is very easy to arrive at hasty conclusions, harder to take the effort to understand the context. #karakchaitales

Blank spaces

Road blocks

Are dead ends

Ripples of failure

Flutter

These are starts

Growth

Starts from nowhere

In the various technicolor masks

We slip on,

the performance of the office amphitheater

The real self for a flicker

Peeping through the various iterations

Of mental costumes,

Between meetings, small talk

The performance of the ‘face’

In front of the open office

Real work just about, happens

Inspite of the mask

Lean in, authenticity is feel good

Work life integration is (actually) work all through

The real self often wonders

Was it better to born as an AI chat bot?

Or

Is it possible to be the self again?

May be 4IR will download consciousness too, one day

Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Temporary People is the best migration oriented book on the Gulf and in general in a while. The power of this poetry and prose has an experiment texture but delivers the message about the Indian ness or the sheer lack of it once one has never lived in India, and the conception of an Indian Citizen is constructed in Indian Schools in the Gulf.

The precariousness of the gulf migrant is depicted vividly in a variety of narrative forms. I can resonate with the book so much that every time I read it, there is an emotional explosion within me. The Alienation, the distance, the hurt and the perennial negotiation to survive while working to feed mouths back home, is the Pravasi, who is marked by this absence.

#TemporaryPeoplethebook