There are ways to process rejections
Either take it as the dead end
Or the spark of a new beginning
Vulnerability, ought to be embraced
The market treats it as a loser
But the human grows
Vulnerability is the path of winning

Celebrating NDP through my Instagram/Facebook feed. Now a days we are transported to events in our desire through visual stimulation to ones imagination. Social media feeds create realities every second through updates. One cannot though recreate the experience of watching the events at the Padang on the common TV with volume switched off, at the Block 108A Food Park Kopitiam at Sunset Way where I spent many a national day where my eyes used to swell and tear up when the Singaporean National Anthem used to play. Yesterday at Chillis in Muscat, there were two Singaporean middle aged men chatting away in Singlish lah, was music to my ears.

Oman is home to some really strategic talent from Singapore running the largest corporations here including a new SEZ and an Oil Refinery

The city, The Air Conditioned Nation where I found myself, as my own man ( never mind the rejected PR application)

Happy 52nd Birthday Singapore. Majulah Singapura. Majulah PAP.

Happiness is discussing Pakistan's new PM with a friend from Pindi in Urdu and the popularity of Star Jalsa soaps and Mirakkel Comedy show with another friend from Barisal in Bangla, in an Andhra Restaurant over Karak Chai in Muscat. The ferocity of the popularity rather the addiction of nonsensical Star Jalsa soaps causing a shutdown in daily activities at home in Bangladesh was a surprise. This soft power is not our best cultural export.

SAARC is a success in the GCC.

There are the fancy landed properties of Bukit Timah
Then there are the old HDB's of Kallang
Then, the newly gentrified Potong Pasir or BOT land
Housing is social geography
The stratification of the Lion City
Is spatial
The Smart Nation
Is also Survival Nation
Technology is for an ever buffering future
The card uncle and kopitiam aunties in Sunset Way
Matter as much as the Hip Set at Chip Bee Gardens
A city which is the beckon of development
Has paid a steep price

Passport Country and Home are divorced concepts
Often mistaken for married
Identities are plural
Preferred to be straight laced by nationalists
Third Country (Gulf) are mosaics
Low Globalisation's children
Grew up drinking RC Cola
Binging on Sohar Chips
Shwarma is staple fare
Mostly obese they are
Disconnected from holiday homes
In Kerala
Watching Asianet in a distant way
Connect more with lands that are arid
But are oasis of love

Virtual or Globally Distributed Work is quite the norm now a days with start ups or behemoths, in the digital economy work via Skype on the smart phone with declining data pack prices. I have consulted with social enterprises and start ups who work lean and digital in Singapore in the recent past and non profit initiative in Kolkata coordinated over Watsapp groups. Virtual work is about fifteen years old, exemplified by the ITES outsourcing space. But as tech is on our phone, distributed work teams can be in Singapore, Manila, NY and Dubai at the same time on the project/product. AECOM has an engineering centre in India catering to projects internationally.

Consulting firms have knowledge offshore centres all over the world tapping into cost advantage and talent pools in a de globalisation era driven by populist sentiment, is a work authorisation minefield. The theory is elegant and aspirational, though the mechanics of the fine print in the digital mode work era is something to consider:

Trust in Globally diverse and distributed teams is at a premium.

Maturity and Discipline from team members is a pre requisite. When in person meetings are not possible for extended periods of time, trust attrition is an affliction.

Digital Natives such as centennials are better at adapting to work cultures; others might have to learn up a steep curve culturally to survive in an outcome only environment

Project Managers/Start Up Leaders have to be situational leaders in a digital work era, sliding on a scale between micro managing to strategic in a blink; adaptive is the ethos here

Technology is hardly a constraint for Digital work mode. The software is free, and cloud sharing is affordable.

Trust and Culture of Collaborative work is the basis of digital work. Leaders need to build that for value creation across geographically distributed teams

Reading is an unknown chore
Speed glance through the headlines
The click baity, the better
Click share, Like or both
It's about metrics
Instant gratification, instead of understanding
No wonder, fake news wins
Not enough time to read
Research is for the nerds
Critique as a mode of reading is for humanities
We will glance through BuzzFeed
Or MenXP, Listicles are easier
Populism wins where critical thought falters
Tech class likes it crisp
Brevity is not everything
As life needs to be fleshed out
In a long read or a book

Lives were spent planning for the future
While the present was withered away
Now the trade offs are now between the losses, trivial and significant

Dunkirk has three points of departure for the rich Nolan Cinematic Enterprise. Nolan firstly returns with a historical adaption of the Dunkirk evacuations during the Second World War by small shipping trawlers of four hundred thousand men, as the survivors at the end of the movie reading off a newspaper, Churchill's statement to the British Parliament as a monumental failure on the battlefield inspite of a successful evacuation. The soldiers after coming home greeted by an old man as 'Well Done', while the soldier exasperated spits out 'All we did was to survive', the old man who is visually challenged reverts: ' That is enough' and continues saying well done and bravo while he distributes food to the oncoming soldiers. Unlike Interstellar and Inception, he has taken on archival material rather than applied his craft to the world of science education, space and subconscious theft and imaginary worlds folding and collapsing surreally. Real events have a narrative truth bandwidth to adhere to and the artistic licence can be rather limited.

Dunkirk was one of the theatres of the Second World War mapped across the globe. But, this plot is unusual for two more reasons; the movie withdraws from the grand geopolitical master narrative to focus on the human elements of war, one of civilisation's vehicles for destruction. Thirdly, this is a losing battle, an evacuation of the British soldiers from a theatre of war, where there is no victorious element to round off the film. The movie liberally borrows from the Nolan film tool box with excellent background music from Zimmer and grand but muted/detached surreal cinematic visual treatment with critical juxtapositions.

The film is stripped off war movie tropes of high energy war sequences such as Black Down Down, where the action sequences are in the face. The three sub parts of the movie are enmeshed with an air bombing stream, a boat stream which is most touching with two young men rescuing an air pilot and sailor in Mid sea and a ship rescue track.

The captain of the moonshine boat who has lost his pilot son in the war, is sailing the boat to Dunkirk with his younger son and a young man who joins the journey to win favour in his fathers eyes as a war hero, dies on the journey and is ultimately feted in the local paper as a war hero as the captains son makes sure his efforts are not in vain.

War movies are exercises in popular history and particularly in this digital era, where history is unimportant for the tech class as attention spans and delusions of the future captures contemporary attention: History is synonymous with silence, erasure and memory. There has been considerable online debate on the erasure of voices of soldiers from the colonies in Britain's war effort in this movie as can be read in Dr Raghavan's book on India's involvement in the war effort.

Representation and Cultural Appropriation are contested issues in visual art. But, this movie succeeds in bringing out primal instincts of soldiers to survive in a war environment; French versus British and an effort to escape the action. 'Survival is Greed and agreed is Selfish' is told by a soldier in the movie.

War changes people and changes them forever, as the captain of moonshine boat says as he speaks with his son who is trying to serve tea to the rescued sailor, and he is to too shocked by his experience to accept the warm gesture of the tea offer, in Mid sea. Lived experiences of war is the strength of the film.

In this age of low intensity conflict and wars raging all around and being numbed by violence; Dunkirk is an incredible remainder that is beyond the political, war is intimately personal. Must watch for all history buffs.

#Dunkirk

#Nolan

Met a Bhutanese national for the first time who is fluent in Hindi at a Canadian Cafe in Muscat. Asked her how she knew India's so called national language as I heard her speak to her south Asian colleague and the tall yet petite woman quipped in a shy manner 'I am a big fan of Bollywood and especially Salman Khan movies' I then asked her how did she find Tubelight (the latest Salman Khan release, and she was emphatic that Salman did not suit the role and that Hrithik suits such emotional roles better. Globalisation is cross cutting with intersectionalities, as soft power and newer avenues for migrant labor open up as far as Thimphu.

#voices