Quoted in The Gaurdian

I am quoted generously in The Gaurdian’s Long Read on Ad Duqm by Urbanist Wade Shepard:

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/aug/06/five-years-ago-there-was-nothing-inside-duqm-the-city-rising-from-the-sand-oman-city-sand-luxury-hotels-housing

Happy Reading!

Conversations with Migrants

Chatting in Awadhi with Ram jee from Banki. Small joys of life. From his upbringing in Mumbai to life as a laundry professional in Dubai and Muscat, he is a treasure trove of wisdom, and you would not have to be conventionally educated for that. Although all his three kids are in good schools and he is a firm believer in the transformative power of education.

‘Like the south we value education now a days’

The entrepreneurial spirit

Academics consider me too Market Wallah, Private Sector considers me too Book Wallah. I am just a hustler who sees art in the ethos of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial ethos in an artist trying to make a living. World is too messy for neat silos ?

#ThursdayGyan

Manufacturing Refugees: unpacking the NRC crisis

All the folks screaming the N Card aka Nationalism Card on social media on the NRC issue are those from states which have not experienced the birth pangs of partition as inter generational trauma. It was Bengal and Punjab who paid the steep price for independence seven decades ago. The Bangal lost his home. I grew up in Muscat with the stigma of a lost ‘Bari’. Nostalgia as a weapon knows no geographies. The Maharashtrian Brahmin in Nagpur would see the episode as history, not lived experiences.

The balkanisation for the Bangal started in 1905 and continued through 1946-47, 1965, 1971, 1985 and now 2018. The landed Ghoti will not realise the pain either. The century plus affair with proving the right to remain in the middle of a global migration crisis next door in Sitwe to the Levant to Niger does not require any more theatres of pain.

The NRC debacle is a powerful signalling tool as it cements a tiered citizenship for minorities with Assamese Cultural and Linguistic Sub Nationalist thought as the epistemic basis. The devices of instilling tiered citizenship continues its thread from low intensity violence to lynching. I am not mentioning larger episodes of violence such as Amdavad and Muzaffarnagar.

Human tragedy harvested as political fodder is an old dog’s trick. State led disenfranchisement of citizenship rights has led to horrors in Sitwe. Rwanda and Bosnia were not too far back. The battle for 2019 will pass through Fancy Bazar.

4IR Skill

The challenge in the easy information retrieval and dissemination era aka digital is the ability to search for the right data point, analyse the importance and place the analytical data point into the larger narrative through meaning making. How does the needed data point fit the client need?

How many colleges teach that?

Musings of an IPhone Visual Artist

Instagram and to a limited extent Facebook are digital exhibition platforms which are moderately democratic based on the typology of the followership (religious term in its origins). There are so many wonderful places where I can’t physically be present but the feeds of numerous scholars and visual artists offer a slice of life previously limited to the white gallery walls in metropolis. In the post text world, which I personally abhor as it dumbs down the story, visual is a powerful medium to solicit immediate response however the ethical minefields of representation.

Good street/documentary photography needs an educated mind. The filters on Instagram are aesthetic choice architecture at best. Choices determine the form and character of the artistic endeavour. Fake news and good photography are defined by empiricism, empathy and a commitment to making the world better, one frame at a time.