It’s fascinating to observe Bangladeshis speak in accent heavy Hindi/Urdu in the Gulf as they seem to monopolise the service sector jobs here, irrespective of the typology of the eatery or the petrol station. I asked some of them if they spoke Hindi/Urdu prior to the Gulf, as they said that their exposure was limited to Bollywood Films, rather more to Kolkata Cinema. SAARC integration succeeds in the Gulf. Economics is a greater goal to Language.

It’s wonderful when one speaks about with a mathematician this evening regarding historical erasure and memory regarding 1947 partition of Bengal, and how nostalgia is misplaced as a myth in covering up for hard facts, or the inability to engage with hard truths in the Bengali consciousness.

Why is the sordid and gruesome violence happen, by members of a common linguistic community? Was it power or a desire for a different trajectory, which ultimately Bangladesh and Indian West Bengal has experienced?

Equivalence of Violence

The cancelling out of equations

Is in reality lives snubbed out

Theatres of conflict cause suffering

No scenario is the same

Lived experiences are unique

Though share a common humanity

Aspirations, suffering and everything in between

Arakan, Kashmir and Gaza

Are not same, yet similar

All proper nouns signifying

Resistance at one level

And state failure at another

Humanity reigns in the midst of politicking,

blood is shed, not differentiating between categories,

Binaries are real, yet irrelevant

and we ask, whose blood shed was more precious

#SitweSheds

Migrants listen to various genres of music on their smartphones through YouTube and other apps, to kill the mundane solitude of their days overseas. The Pakistani tea shop which I am sitting in with my Karak Chai has the Punjabi chef playing Lahori tracks. During the Eid Break couple of days back, a group of friends from Lahore all engaged in the construction space with their characteristic salwar kameez and infectious Punjabi accented Urdu were playing old early 1990’s Bollywood songs aloud. Those tracks got me humming as well.

The Transporter from Chittagong, with glitzy shades has playing a diet of Jatra and Bangla Band in his car, all of the sugary romantic realm. He is clearly nursing a heartburn as his ‘Bandhobi’ is not considering his marriage request. I was quite shocked to listen to a QSQT track from the late 1980’s (Gajab sa ye dil, dekho zara) blatantly ripped off and transmuted in to a Bangla Band song. Too much syrupy stuff for the soul. Need some Antidote at the moment.

Music is indeed the language of the soul, and plays a critical element in making migrant life bearable.

Ok, my writing is jargon dense/intense as I attempt to collapse the normative and juxtapose it on the contemporary to make sense of complex issues. Dumbing down on reality to frame them for the layman is not my oeuvre.

In the mild winter afternoon of Delhi last year, I saw a bearded man from Kerala chat up with fellow intellectuals on the porch of the hallowed power real estate of India Habitat Centre. Little did I know that man would be India’s tourism minister a few months later. Delhi, is a very quirky place.

The metrics of sustainability would have to evolve in the AI high ‘Future of Work’ era era, which incorporates job losses due to automation and robots/advanced machinery doing shop floor work, and accompanying further disruption by 3D printing and big data. The core anchors are then social inclusion and diversity and how these values can be baked in to systems in an era where de globalisation is again on the radar for manufacturing firms. 

In an era of projectised freelance work, social protection in the globally Distributed Work paradigm is treated as a cost centre by firms hence the so called sharing economy is feted by the neoliberal establishment. Such evolving relationships are changing the way sustainability can be relevant to firms. In order to reimagine, sustainability practitioners have to step back and develop a baseline with power mapping done with regulatory triggers, to develop a blueprint which maps issues versus responses for the sector they are in; in the post Uber era, tech sector needs a standard for diversity and gender protection with legal safeguards. 

In an automation era, how would EHS evolve with the times? More sensors, means more data, but is more data adding up to a psychologically secure workplace?

How these silver bullets are framed as solutions in relevant application contexts, shall enable sustainability to reboot away from the rhetoric of performance to true potential being unlocked. 

The cosmopolitan is sans character

Lacks the bite

Which the vernacular defines

The global is the cultural colonial

Is the gulf migrant local?

Or a statistical subject

Of transnational labor

The cosmopolitan white washes the pain

In a rhetoric of hard work and efficiency

While the vernacular is paranoid with things

More basic,

Such as a data recharge

#spokenword

Archives are the register of the state. There is certain certainty regarding the nature/configuration of the archive, as the way historians wish to structure a particular story. The formality is the strength of the knowledge institution. This formality fashions History with a capital ‘H’.

The common man leaves the job of myth making of the nation state to the professional historian, a paid employee of a museum or an university academic. There is hardly any common man who visits an archive or a museum on a Sunday to learn.

This formality is however being breached or reconfigured by non state actors; civil society activists, educators, artists and solo writers. The entire advent of the Digital archive, in its online avatar is a possibility with multiple windows. Visual memory, multimedia through documentary and audio along with text, is adding new meaning to the ‘act of history making’ away from the register of the nation state. From People’s Archive of India to Calcutta Architectural Legacies to Instagram accounts noting Memory, prior to the hammer of development such as scholar Shaheen Ahmed’s work on Guwahati to Singaporean social Innovator Cai Yinzhou’s initiative on Dakota Crescent, a public housing estate undergoing real estate development, among many in Singapore’s history, notes the voices of the common Singaporean undergoing the transition; a bottom up perspective to understand the human impact of state policies.

A digital archive which is a real time register to map experiences at every stage of the project lifecycle, which attempts to capture insights for posterity. All this with a website and a Facebook page with Architects and Cai working together to register history with a small ‘h’ away from the Gahmen lah.

The power to direct the trajectory of the archive also lies in the ends the curators which to achieve. The process of curating embeds power even if it is decoupled from the state.