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.

For a people who are considered mere statistical numbers, in terms of money sent home; where are the narratives of the subaltern? Are our histories, not important enough to the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs?

In a corporate funded theological dynastocracy called Bharat, the poor man is not even a footnote. Hundred plus people died in queuing up and in the inability to pay for medical treatment. The plastic money elite is finite with functional ATM’s even more scarce. Only Mr. Sharma, can rap his way to the bank, oops that he he has a payment bank now and talks about past poverty to justify anything and sugar coat it with national progress.

Demonetisation would not be relegated to the archives soon. In the spirit of Big Bang decision making, justifying the majority in Parliament, reform cannot mandate taking the people for a ride.

In the Jugaad Nation, you can get away with almost anything including DeMo.

BMKJ. Jai Hind.

Attention span and concentration allocation is the new normal of time management of the digital era

As per the latest statistics released by the RBI, Demonetisation has been a successful political program as economy wise it is a disappointment. The lived experiences of deprivation cannot be washed down by an intoxicating brew of nationalism. The entire meta narrative belittles the experiences of the poor and marginalised especially farmers, who protested and died a few months back.

As a digital paradox/paradigm, DeMo was an earth shattering move, with the tax net expanding. But the project was an exercise in optics rather than radical reform. In a month where it has been a sombre August for the government from Uttar Pradesh to Mumbai, this is the last thing the spin doctors required. BMKJ.

The guy who takes me to work here is a high school drop out from Chottogram. He is a man Friday by career and has worked previously in Doha as a house boy. He has family here, as is mostly the case with Bangladeshi families in Probash, with remittance riyals fuelling the household economics in many districts. He is multinational in character as he holds driving licenses of three countries; two in the GCC and one back home. Economic mobility has many nuances that cannot be comprehended over a scotch at Tolly Club.

He speaks in a dialect which is barely comprehensible tonne when he talks to his elder brother on the phone. He is young and brash with colourful shades as he zooms his ageing car across town. He thought I would be an uppity Kolkata bong who would sneer at his lack of refinement. Little did he know that i am a child of migrants myself, and am at ease in Hamriya rather than Shatti.

He was taken aback when I started chatting with him on the latest tv soaps on Star Jalsa and the songs on Sangeet Bangla. The migrant feels at home in the few moments he connects with his cultural milieu via the music and the cultural consumption through the smart phone. The ice broke when both of us hummed to the tune of 2010 hit film ‘Autograph’ track by Anupam Ray ‘Amake Amar Moto Thakte Daoo’. Human emotions are universal, from Chottogram to Kolikata to Masqat.

#MigrantDiaries