Festivals : Diaspora markers of the Past

On a crowded Deepawali or Hari Raya eve in Little India, we can observe a sea of humanity passing by, the excitement palpable in the air and faces gleaming with joy. Festivals in Singapore serve as cornerstones of a multicultural society founded on respect for different beliefs and cultural affiliations.Various communities and sub groups within it have observed festivals as days to mark their togetherness and to celebrate diversity as the cultural fabric of this city state. In that nuance, festivals are registers of memory, emotion and a past that a person tries to cling to as time fizzles away like sand in a glass jar. I remember spending Hari Raya eve with Bangladeshi and Indian friends at Usman, a Pakistani food joint at the intersection of Desker Road and the main Little India fareway over masala chai and pakoras will 3am in the morning chatting away in anticipation of something more than a public holiday.

The Thaipusam procession along Veerasamy Road to Bencoolen with packed devotees and bystanders is a spectacle of culture and faith for the Tamil Hindu Community in Singapore.

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Pic: Thaipusam Celebrations 2016 in Little India, Singapore (Photo: Author)

Likewise, the Bengali Hindu Community from India and Bangladesh celebrate Durga Puja in differing ways but the cultural importance of the festival is salient.

Hari Raya or Eid Ul Fitr is celebrated by different communities in their varied traditional flair, with the values faith, community and family as the bedrock after a month of prayer, penance and fasting. As a perennial migrant who has lived overseas in Oman and Singapore for many years, festivals were days i looked forward to engage as spaces of culture and memory along with donning the traditional attire and digging in to good food. Festivals serve larger purposes of social integration in multicultural societies as nodes of interaction between the mainstream and the margins of metropolis.

At the human level, Festivals are about celebration of values and bonding.

This is the true essence of a festival.

Writing as more than Communication

Writing is more than dishing out information, it’s about expression, aesthetics and shattering the silence. Mediocre writing is insincere at its heart. Great writing is not verbose, yet detailed enough, engaging and not indulgent. Writing is the mainstay of communication as we write emails, chat or write consulting reports. Great writing as a skills takes years of practice and mentoring by seniors who are amazing communicators themselves. Read material which expands ones imagination rather than sheer vocabulary. Writing after all is more than articulating data in words but about informing new visions for the future.

Pragmatic Hillary

Sanders is like Paul, with great optimism and no structural strength to carry all the way through. Inspiring ideas, do not get you the top job as in politics as business who you know matter and what you can do really does not. Only political entrepreneurial initiatives such as AAP can succeed as they back their ideas with action. Hillary is one sharp political operator, preparing the ground for years. I wish her the best against ‘The Apprentice’

Nil Battey Sannata:A Short Quip

Nil Battey Sannata is a damn good film. Swara Bhaskar as a trained Sociologist from JNU stars as a house help with a grit and determination with an aspiration larger than her reality. ‪#‎NBS‬ depicts the condition of government school education. The true measure of poverty is the paucity of dreams rather than a material construct. Good cinematography is a stand out feature of the film along with some solid performances. More power to indie films.‪

Thoughts on the Trinamool Win

Trinamool is a novel political experiment now, rather than a resistance platform to the Left. Populist semi-socialist measures, minority support and strong leader from the urban fringes makes the appeal real. The corruption is a dampner and is not terribly attractive to the intelligentia although everyone in the Film Industry has been offered a political ticket by now. With an absent opposition, TMC is a monolith. The message which is missing in the narrative is that Trinamool is a Bengali Party, which the Left was not. A Malayali Central Leadership of the Communist Party, with Rajya Sabha seats from Bengal, was not taken by the Bengali middle class well. As much as JDU-RJD is a Bihar Project,NCP is a Maratha party and ADMK/DMK are Tamil Political platforms, Trinamool is a post ideological party, with Bengali voices in the legislature. The Alimuddin Street Culture was too elitist and removed from the realities of Bengal. The Left and the Congress are looking at the end of the barrel now in Bengal. Left won in Kerala as left is still alternative. In Bengal, it was not.

Migrant Workers as Cultural Practitioners: Singapore’s new ‘in-thing’

Cultural Conversations at Dibashram

Poet Dr Gwee Sui Li opening a May Day photo exhibition

mohsin da — Mr. A K M Mohsin speaking about Dibashram’s work at Bicara Titian Budaya, a SG50 celebration event in December 2015

Singapore is a hub of economic activity in this region, with one of the highest Gross Domestic Product in Asia. Migrant workers from South Asia have been attracted to Singapore for its proximity to home geographically and due its higher pay compared to the Persian Gulf.

Migrants from South Asia in particular from Bangladesh are bred in a rich cultural milieu as the descendants of the artistic legacy of Kazi Nazrul Islam and Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore. A normal Bangladeshi school going child composes poetry and song as a way of living due to the environmentally varied nature of the country rather than a special subject at school. Thousands of Bangladeshi Workers make Singapore their temporary home as guest workers to make their living. Half of them have a school-leaving certificate and a small number of them possess diplomas and college degrees.

These brothers often work at 18 dollars basic per day building and maintaining Singaporean Infrastructure in grueling sun and torrential rain. They have a voice which is stifled by structural constraints such as lack of fluency in English and being at the bottom of the labor hierarchy holding work permits, often at the mercy of the employer’s whims and fancies as their visa can be cancelled anytime. An average migrant in the construction and shipyard sector makes about 600 to 700 dollars per month. Often his salaries are not paid in time and take a minimum of two years to pay back the economic cost of migration back home.

I observe a lot of migrant related activity (if not activism) over the past one year in Singapore, with plenty of events, competitions and citizen centric engagements, which brings the migrant regularly back into the mainstream conversation. Most of these events are kind, create mini celebrities out of migrant brothers, who release books, music cds and perform in theatrical plays. We ‘like’ them on social media, sometimes without realizing that many of these brothers have attended college, and have been performing/published artistes back home. They are made migrants due to economic realities back home. I am fortunate to know them in person and is a delight interacting. They are also normal writers and artists who are innovative in plying their trade and have a day job to pay their bills. Many of the strategic diasporic elites do that too, right?

A lot of these famous migrants are nurtured by Mr AKM Mohsin, Editor of Singapore’s only Bengali Language newspaper Banglar Kantha and Founder of Migrant Cultural Space Dibashram who started off as a pioneer helping out migrants in the early 1990’s writing letters for migrants back home. He then started a community paper in 2006, to serve as the voice of the diasporic subaltern. His platform has helped catalyze the Migrant Poetry Competition and Migrant Awareness Week among other events.

Migrant Poets such as TEDXSingapore Speaker Zakir Hossain and newly minted author Md Mukul are products of the Banglar Kantha platform. They are invited to be toast of town at Poetry events at Artistry, a chic downtown cafe and national poetry festivals. This celebration is needed but how much of this celebration is helping redeem real issues such as injury claims and unpaid salaries?

Migrant literature as a genre promoted by Mr Mohsin and his cultural group Banglar Kantha Literary Association is a long term effort even when the spotlight was not shining. Migrant culture is a long term endeavor with sweat and toil, with lots of personal sacrifices with financial hits and burning volunteer weekends rather than one event every year for publicity sake.

Migrant activism should create space for silent conversations through cultural mediation rather a tick the box measure.

We are Widgets: Evolution towards a new social contract

May Day should be more than a public holiday, as employees in the knowledge economy are nothing more than widgets now a days to be replaced when a cheaper alternative comes across invoking Jeff Bezos sentiment . Organizations are high performance teams to execute, deliver and disband and not networks of conversations and aspirations anymore. These days, the pink slip is celebrated as ‘graduating’ and work alumni networks are created are automatically encouraged. The central driving force behind corporate teams at present is adaptability and productivity where permanent jobs are a figment of my Father’s generation. We are in the freelance and sharing economy where medical benefits and spouse/family packages are a thing of the past. Employee welfare is an overhead cost, and hence the vendorization of all non core assets is the norm.

The employee has to be an intrapreneur to drive their own projects, drive revenue and excellence. That’s the only way to revel in the uncertainty and chaos.

The fourth industrial revolution (already under way) is rather scary prospect with Artificial Intelligence taking over cars and jobs. With impending mass unemployment on the anvil as most fresh graduates in the developing world are not employment ready, it’s a huge challenge for the organized labor sector over all globally. And I have not even commented on the unorganized rural sector till now. The rural poor, with impending climate change, is not earning to support families with declining land holdings and yields, contributing to aggressive urbanization iterating the viscous cycle.

The factory worker in the sweatshops of China, Vietnam and Bangladesh will be soon replaced by enhanced automation as it is cheaper over the longer run and the bogey of labor rights impacts corporate reputations. The future for mass based prosperity is endangered as local jobs are getting displaced everyday to cheaper offshore centres from garments to call centres. Governments across the developing world including India are diluting social protection platforms for workers in the name of attracting investment. Uncles and Brothers in the early forties are being laid off as they get expensive or do not have the ability to adapt when they have kids in school and medical bills rising. Re-aligning for the future should the mantra for Skills India/StartUp India or any Skill Credit points in Singapore labor policy platforms.

Happy International Labor Day.

Activists as Entrepreneurs: Boot Strapping to Fund Raising

Activists are pejoratively called ‘professional dissenters’, who do not create ‘value’ by the business community at large. In fact, to invert the lens, they are intellectual entrepreneurs who are bringing their thoughts to life. An idea is undergirded by tangible resources to last a while. Activists are traditional organizations in a very corporate sense. The bottom line lies somewhere else, only the quarterly reporting format differs. Ask any fundraising manager for a non-profit the reality and he would be speaking the same lexicon as a corporate manager. Boot-strapping for scaling is the forte of an activist, working on scant resources, long before the term became cool in contemporary literature. Hiring the correct talent becomes as headache as cash is often in short supply unless it is an INGO such as the International Rescue Committee which can hire David Miliband as its CEO. There is no Series A Funding round for an activist, as the funding rounds are perennial.

All social movements need resources and are limited by the same variables which start-ups are limited. Non-profits need war rooms to coordinate efforts for large scale projects. ‘Blitz scaling’ as coined by Venture Capitalist Reid Hoffmann (HBR April 2016) is performed out by mobilizing the common spirit of the times. #FeeltheBern or the Sanders presidential campaign is classic example of reaching out to small donors and scaling a movement. A performing social movement like a political campaign for elected office, serves a purpose. Activism such as selling a product is also selling an idea. The idea becomes the basis of the product cycle. The campaign for the food security legislation in India took decades to be written in to law, but the ground work intellectually started many years back by activists such as Aruna Roy, Jean Dreaze and Amartya Sen.

Activism needs the same skill set as an entrepreneur as the buy in is needed. The product being a normative idea makes it a very challenging sell in comparison to a FMCG product. Let us have the humility and listen to these struggles as lessons to learn.