For all the experimental work I have done across the sectors, engineering, environmental, non profit, public policy and creative practice, I sometimes feel the space for trying out new skills and techniques is shrinking as the age of the specialist is inhibitory. Problems are multidisciplinary and several approaches need to be taken to understand how and why the world is disaggregated and integrated in the same breath. I do not think in silos. I have written papers in climate change to Digital Archives to Film Studies. All have meaning and I am not clueless, rather the word is Polymath. #karakchaitales

A technology is an imagination, such as the Digital which is hoped to be a silver bullet to all problems. Every technology creates externalities, and should be perceived as a lens to shape the future by understanding the present deeply. A digital lens is political as it is not just science but commerce undergirding the mechanics as a technology or innovation is only as good as the money it can generate. E Retail, Uber or Privacy issues all are linked to the ability to generate revenue, and kind off easing and improving standard of living along the path. As Prime Minister Modi recites in every address practically, ‘the transformative nature of technology’ through digital india and start up india, pointing to the possibilities of digital to bypass the bureaucratic inefficiencies that riddle the country. I have wish to Ask in my book project, is the transformation really changing lives, saving lives by creating jobs or improvements or it is only for the Gartner Tech Hype Curve?

Children who grow up in the Gulf are a cocooned species, within the family, community events and schools. The Father is usually overworked and too worried about his next mortgage payment to worry about his kids. The kids of south Asian decent grow up speaking better English and Arabic rather than Malayalam. Hometown visits once in a year or two are rituals in growing up non resident in the Gulf. The play station and FIFA become his best friend, or the latest series on Netflix. The weekly trip to Lulu or the Church/Temple is the extent of social interaction in physicality. The brief playing around in the clothes section at Lulu in a very impromptu manner is one of the simple pleasures of Gelf life.

There is a hollowness about growing up here, I did and I did not love it until I realised way later in life that my parents bled their rials to raise me up. My father did not make it to my commencement at NUS nor at Waljat, but he paid for my education. The precarious life of the Temporary People has its unique characteristics. The children of the Gelf expat bears it in his or her lived experience.

I had read Dr M’s biography ‘The Doctor in the House’, in 2012 while in Singapore. A voluminous read with plenty of anecdotes, very usual for a biography published by local imprint MPH. I remember this line however, which has got printed on my mind. I am an accidental doctor, I was always destined to be in politics.

His decision upon starting his own clinic in Kedah, and upon becoming successful, hiring a Chinese Driver spoke volumes about him. I have heard that he is half Malayali. A complex man. Back in action at 92. His biography certainly needs an update.

The Doctor back at the helm. Malaysia 🇲🇾 Boleh.

Malayali Owner, Bangladeshi staff, cook from Kolkata. Mixed clientele from the truck driver, the daily wager to the office worker. Businesses navigate the everyday. #karakchaitales

Youth means dreams are audacious

Adulting means bills increase

Aspirations contract

As the current account

In the last days of the month

Dreams, are energy

Colonial thinking is’nt merely Geography, but in imagination as well

Reality shrinks our dreams

Shrinks hope

In self Prophecy, our potential

In income

As everyday, materiality

Hence, the audacity of hope

The Middle Aged Filipino Lady

Jostling for space as she buys Samak

For her curry

The Bengali from Chittagong

Selling farm fruits

In a wet market

In the heart of a Gulf Capital

These days,

Informal spaces as far from available

These days every inch is urban planned

The geotagged cartography

And food quality control regimes

Have no space for the informal

Wet markets have character

More than economics

Adds meaning to the terrain

The fish, fruits and the sugarcane juice

Beyond the Carrefour’s

A supply chain of the original kind

Where a bunch of bananas

Are a rial

The ethos in the shared space

Is however,

Priceless

The history of the Indian Diaspora is not one of software engineers in USA, UK and Canada, and sometimes an occasional entrepreneur or businessman….. but of a subaltern history in Africa and the Caribbean: Ram Guha in the NIF conversation with Amrita Shah

With Moinul, who has worked on a farm in Suwaiq, Al Batinah North for eleven years. From Dhaka, he has worked in the farm sector only in Oman, and is far more fluent in Hindi rather than Bangla. He was kind enough to take me and my colleagues on a detailed tour of the farm.

#experienceoman #migranttales

We take the everyday in the Gulf with a pinch of salt, as something mundane and insignificant. When i announced the #KarakChaiTales series, I was met with the quintessential snigger, as something so minor that it is not valid enough to document, to write to bring it out in to the public discourse on ideas. Small things are interconnected with the larger canvas. There is very limited literature on the GCC except a handful of scholars whom I know very well. The life of the South Asian Migrant is worth noting down and making a story out of it. We are not, just remittance nodes?

#changethinker #KarakChaiTales #episodeone