My icons have been Polymath Medical Doctors such as Atul Gawade, Siddhartha Mukherjee and President Kim of the World Bank who is a physician-anthropologist. Siddhartha and Atul are writers par excellence and practising doctors.

As a biotechnology major, global health has been a passion as it is a critical aspect of Social Development.

I was able to work on Health Communication based advocacy at CARE under Prof Mohan @mjdutt in Singapore. I later led healthcare at a market intelligence firm in Delhi. I wrote up a paper on the myth of big data in healthcare then.

While eating my lunch, a restaurant staff came to me and asked where I am from in Bangla, and i answered for a matter of convenience, Kolkata. I understood that the person who asked me was from Bangladesh, and was asking me about Jorasanko, Netaji Subhash’s home, Jibananda Das as these were the topics from his school days, his youth. The interest in poetry was palpable and was quite disjointed from the surroundings where he worked. South Asia and the Bengali ethos is very much alive here in the GCC.

#migrantscholars

Faith is the residue of home we carry in our souls when we are earning dollars in the pardes, to feed mouths. From the Coolies in the Caribbean to Chettiars in Malaya, temples are vital to preserving the self.

Analysis is more than data points, it’s understanding the textures of a phenomenon leveraging imagination, critical thought and nifty risk communication without operating on spivak mode.

This Yemeni man was injured in the conflict in his country and is in town for medical treatment. There were quite a few of them soaking in the twilight sun in the evening outside their hotel. All of them without legs and amputated. We can sometimes see the cost of war in the neighbourhood, in person rather than on Al Jazeera. It was uncomfortable at the least.

A Good Samaritan told me ‘when countries fight, Oman helps’

This is Oman. Respect. 🇴🇲

DeMo was a watershed event in contemporary history, as millions were impacted and the nation was split in to two over the nationalists who thought it was a silver bullet and independent observers such as me who were against the shock doctrine madness that was DeMo. I covered the event from day zero till yesterday when it was definitely said by a RBI report that DeMo was a damp squib. From DeMo to the narrative spins such as Remonetisation by Jayant Sinha and Times Now to the case of shift goal posts from Black Money to Terrorism to standing in the serpentine lines in front of ATMs as National Duty, to Anand Mahindra calling it as a ‘Signalling Effect’ to Vijay Shekhar Sharma basking in its windfall, the technological society was the shangri la for Pragati.

The informal economy was crippled, millions lost jobs, family events were devastated, the personal lived experiences were mapped through my articles on Alochonaa (thanks to Dr Mubashar) and changethinker.com and media coverage in Forbes (Wade Shepard thank you) and the BBC. Big shocks to a complex economy fail if they do not have the right conditions for structural reform. The After DeMo (AD) era has been pretty Before DeMo. The delta is insignificant. Kudos for attempting the Big Bang reform though, however brashly thought over and delivered.

I have written a few thousand words over almost two years, which is my book project, although embedded in the larger realm of digital and looks through the lens of social change and sustainability. I was labelled many unkind epithets, during this process as I wrote and traveled independently over months all over the country cataloging these voices, drowned down by the hubris of epistocracy and nationalism sentiment. History however vindicates and public is never wrong. Yeh public hain, yeh sab jaanti hain.

Every few kilometres in the regions outside Muscat region there are petrol pumps aligned to a eatery and a Masjid. This configuration repeats pretty much everywhere.

#weekendhistorian

Remaking is happening

We live in an era of great churn

TUNA is not the name of a fish

Hunger and unemployment prevail

But are paranoid with narratives

Data is more important, than underground sewage networks

The stink is everywhere

Uncertainty is the term of the times

It’s not everyday, when you feature in a documentary (in the first few frames) on Ad Duqm in Oman by the incredible Wade Shepherd @wade_shepard , Author, Writer, Film Maker and Globe Trotter.

Thank you Wade for the solidarity and generosity.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iWKchegTdUY

Histories in the Gulf are hardly bottom up as state led/dominated discourses lead the landscapes of the past. My conversations series with cabbies and now with migrants attempts to recover these silences, about to be lost memories. Migrants in the Gulf are a practical lot, they are interested in earning their riyal and counting their days to the next trip home. The people who had built the cities of the region in the 1960’s and 1970’s are a lost tribe, currently in their 70’s and mostly retired back in their hometowns in South Asia. So to meet and chat about the development of Muscat with a Rajasthani man in his sixties still working for his Arbab, is rare. I meet him almost everyday in the Lahori Karak chai store in my building in Al Khuwair. But, today the conversation extended to more than the customary Salaams. We actually spoke for an hour on the History of the city from 1975, and the evolution that it has undergone in the past four decades of unprecedented transformation. Uncle as I call him, is from Pilani in India, and came to Muscat in 1975, via ship from Mumbai. He said that visa and labor card stamping used to be done offshore up to a kilometre in Mutrah where the ship was docked.

He said that Muscat was old Muscat and Mutrah, and the Lawati Quarter used to be shut after 7pm. Mutrah was is/still populated with old Lawati origin traders. The emphasis on education provided by community was salient in the conversation. He compared the Lawatis with Marwaris from his home state, calling them Bania’s in an affectionate manner. Uncle, a Marwari himself is a small time civil works contractor rising from worker grade picking up skills along the way.

The currently touristy Mutrah Corniche was residential and with a few concrete houses and full of shops where even the legendary Bahwan Brothers initially started with a cycle shop before venturing in to automobile retail. The mercantile communities of Mutrah, the Lawatis and the Banias had their focus on trade between Oman, India and East Africa. Shah Nagardas Manji arrived from Djibouti in 1908 for instance. He was keen to state that the Indian Rupee was legal tender until the 1960’s.

RC Cola was a prominent soft drinks brand in 1990’s when I was growing up. The RC Cola factory is in the contemporary heart of Muscat, in the same area where I was raised. Uncle’s Arbab was the General Manager of RC Cola in 1970’s when he returned from Bahrain as his Father used to work at the Manama Airport long before the oil boom. Uncle’s Arbab roots lie in the Makran Coast of Iranian Baluchistan. He spoke about various philanthropic initiatives carried out by various businesses in Oman including his owner traveling to Pakistan to help out his staff in the aftermath of an accident. He spoke of his employer’s humble origins as a driver behind its humanity.

Uncle also spoke about the various idiosyncrasies of various expat communities in Oman and he came down heavily on the Bangladeshis, saying that most of the blue collar jobs have shifted from Kerala to Bangladesh over the past decade.

An encyclopedia of memory regarding Oman, he dug in to various aspects of life here over the years as he has almost spent 43 years in Muscat. He thanks his employer to keep him in a job after all these years, as finding work would be a challenge at his age.

Although his Construction work is slow, he seems generous of his time to share stories of a past which no one is interested to find out, as most are invested in their smartphones rather than of the work previously invested to make space for current day migrants trying to make a living here. Some of the stories made me have a lump in my throat, as I too grew up here on Omani rials which my parents earned teaching two generations of students here. My father met his students peppered all across Muscat, where ever he went addressed as teacher, including my former intern’s partner who was probably the last batch taught by him before he retired. He was remembered as a tough teacher who was stingy with grades. We all have stories to share, more than the Mustafa Sultan remittances at the last of the month. Stories make us human.