Author: changethinker

Born and raised in Mumbai, India with an undergrad degree from Oman and a masters degree from the National University of Singapore. I am an Environmental Professional with a passion for Sustainability, Social Innovation and Governance related issues. A Change Agent in the making who believes that small is beautiful and that impact can be achieved -one soul at a time.

Is Cosmopolitan, a ‘new’ identity for India?

The Cosmopolitan I am referring to in my post title is not of the international fashion magazine, but something far deeper and emotional. We are an emotional polity so anything remotely emotional borders on the political. A few months back a municipal school teacher on behalf of the National Sample Survey Organization knocked on my door for some data collection for the local body. Being a person trained in social research methods, I was enthusiastic to pitch in and participate as I then just relocated back to Mumbai. The survey administrator started off the brief survey by starting off in the local state language Marathi. Although I am fluent in Marathi, I opted to reply in Hindi for fear of making embarrassing grammatical errors in front of a native speaker.

The questions were fairly routine in nature which ranged from age to family income to education. The aspect which got me very uncomfortable and irritated was the questions regarding caste and religion. Those questions got me thinking about the fractured nature of India’s politics where the individual does not matter. He is nomenclaturized into narrow and disturbing sub divisions of caste, religion, and ethnicity. In the end, I am just a statistic for the State.  

Prof. Amartya Sen’s theory of ‘Plural Identities’ implies that one can be  culturally Bengali,  half Bihari by birth and a Christian by Faith along with being  Indian by political representation  all at the same time sans any contradictions. I am a product of a mixed marriage- My Dad is an ethnic Bihari born and bred in West Bengal and my Mum is an ethnic Bengali based in Mumbai. My Father speaks fluent Bengali and my Mum speaks fluent Marathi.  I was bred in the polarized Mumbai of the 90′s.  With stints of my childhood in Muscat, Oman, where my Father is an expat educator- grew up listening to Khaled and Cheb Mami along with Euphoria and Lucky Ali songs.

With traditional Rabindra Sangeet playing all day at home (With me listening to Bhoomi and Nachiketa-contemporary Bengali music), my parents tried their best to make me Bengali’ Bangali! Still I am labeled a Bihari many times around!

The Nation State has been poor to catch up with the blurring boundaries regarding cultural identities. People inter-marry between castes & languages and more commonly between faiths and hence their next generations do not have straight laced identities. Globalization and migration leads to love & relationships being fermented in an ‘out-of-the-box’ fashion. Purity of ‘Gotra’ is something Khap Panchayats will find hard to enforce as times move along. The Coercive influence of blatant brute force has its limits.  Arjun Appadurai in the book ‘Fear of Small Numbers’ elucidates the notion that minorities are manufactured as a totem for the majority community to feel good. Ethnocides are not organic, they are engineered.  A Hutu vs Tutsi Battle in Rwanda or a conflict in the Balkans are a classic example. People are not straight laced to be reduced to mere terms for analysts to play with.

A small anecdote from the Tiny Red Dot. The Singaporean Government’s efforts at maintaining effective multi-racial public policy efforts (such as an efficient HDB Allocation Policy) is made harder with greater number of mixed race couples earmarking their children as mixed race although the child has an option to re-categorize him/herself as Chinese, Indian, Malay or Eurasian later on in life. Arranged Marriages in the past have been a powerful social instrument of enforcing a pure blood line in the past. This social Institution is slowly withering away as well. Although there are websites such as community matrimony dot com to maintain the status quo. Films such as Vivaah and the Barjatya genre of films reinforce stereotypes too of caste in the grab of traditional values.

I have felt as much a Bengali in Kolkata as I have felt as a Mumbaikar in Mumbai and in the same breath felt as much at home in Muscat and Singapore where I have lived half my life.  But never felt at home or at ease with this politico-social construct of an ‘Identity’. It is a fluid mosaic with is dependent on the ‘Man in the Head’ in the words of Pico Iyer and not so much on biology or geography. In this age of globalization, we have fluid identities- every place that we live in, contributes a spec in to our soul and we transmit a vector of our emotions in to the place as well.

I would define myself as cosmopolitan rather.

From Cutting Chai to Chai Latte: Cafes as metaphor for globalization in urban India

Globalization as the term Sustainability has been liberally sprinkled in our so called ‘global’ conversation in enunciating (more in terms of drawing a generalization) the social phenomena entailing the web of paradoxes embedding our urban landscapes.  With Social Media & MTV Culture becoming main stream, cafes too are flooding in to have a sip of the growing coffee chain market pie.  We have our home grown Café Coffee Day or commonly known in our lexicon with an outlet at every corner here in Mumbai. The penetration is so ethereal, that I drink CCD espresso at Office as well opposite my apartment block in suburban spheres. I have a Costa Coffee within driving distance and global major Starbucks is growing its footprint at rapid pace too with 4 outlets in Mumbai alone.

India traditionally has been a tea drinking nation apart from a few pockets of coffee lovers down south in Coorg and in the Nilgiris. CCD is run by SM Krishna’s Son in Law and he sources his coffee beans from Coorg itself (the political pocket burrow of the Krishna family). CCD is an apt analogy for entrepreneurial creativity as well as crony capitalism. CCD concentrates on tapping in its target youthful, college going demographic with an emphasis on ice based formulations and sandwiches/samosas for the desi palate. Even Starbucks offers a tandoori sandwich and parathas in its extended food menu for the Indian Consumer with an elaborate tea offering as well. The recent communication by CCD speaks aloud for the brand, which it is trying to position CCD as a social meeting ground for friends to create new value.  This is the essence of a changing Urban India.

Cafes are now a setting for connecting, discussing, flirting and are legitimate hang-out joints for young people to engage on both business which is both personal and professional. The buzz of a café is insatiable. The demographic bulge which India has grappling with is on full display in these youthful spaces. The aspirations and inhibitions of the youth are on vivid display as corporate executives typing away in their PowerPoint’s on one side and one also gets to see public display of ‘emotions’ unusual until a decade back.  The café scene and its skyrocketing growth is an indicator of disposal incomes as a result of IT and BPO sector employment opportunities. Post liberalization jobs canvas as a direct outcome of globalization has driven a need for spaces outside the traditional family type Udupi Hotel for the youth to meet!  The Café Culture has the Cool Factor, which the youth like to get associated with.  A hot chocolate brownie with ice-cream has replaced shrikhand as the preferred desert as a result of places serving the delicious edible.

Cafes in my perspective have played a vital part in bridging the chasm between ‘Bharat’ & ‘India’. Most of the service staff with basic education till high school and basic understanding of English. I am very sure that very few of them had ever entered a café on their own prior to getting employed with the coffee chains. This is the power of globalization in full glory. It is a new platform for jobs via retail and coffee beans for Starbucks being sourced from farms in India which is good news for our farmers. Cafes are slowly becoming a day to day feature of our urban landscape.

Now I can just hope that the guy at CCD next door understands an Americano is a double shot of espresso with hot water as the guy at the Starbucks at Fort, may be globalization fueled competition can make it grow too. Time for a Cutting Chai now at the roadside stall aka tapri in Mumbai lingo at one tenth the price at the cafe 🙂

 

The ‘Identity Project’:Shahbhag and the Politics of Faith in Bangladesh

Bangla is one of the major languages spoken in Asia, and in terms of sheer numbers it is probably the 5th or 6th most widely conversed lingo internationally.  The united Bengal region has been historically under Muslim rule and was the first region to come under British Rule in South Asia.  In 1905, Bengal was split on religious lines under the British ‘Divide & Rule’ policy into East and West Bengal.  The East being dominated by Muslims and West being dominated by the Hindu community. In 1947, under a colonial deal, the Muslim majority areas were carved out of British India into a Muslim majority state of Pakistan with Urdu as its National Language although Bangla was language spoken by the majority.  On February 21st, 1952 students at Dhaka University were shot at brutally for protesting the imposition of Urdu on Bangla speaking East Pakistan. This day is marked as the International Mother Tongue Day. The inflection point in the two state theory emerged in 1969 when Bengali dominated Awami League lead by ‘Banga Bandhu’ Sheikh Mujibur Rehman won the Pakistan National Polls by a landslide in East Pakistan and was not allowed to form the Government by the Punjabi dominated Military.  The Bengali officers in the united Pakistani Army fought the Indians valiantly in the 1965 war.

The Pakistani Army along with East Pakistani accomplices i.e. the razakars (mainly the Jamaat) led a campaign to exterminate opposition especially the Hindu community and the progressive intellectuals who were vehemently in favor of Independence. Genocide of a mind boggling magnitude took place. The Pakistani Army’s agenda was a Bengal without Hindus and a subdued Bengali population to control. There are some counter theorists too. Sarmila Bose, author of ‘Dead Reckoning’ has painted a more realistic portrait of the magnitude of the war crimes episode. The current War Crimes Trial of the Razakars is an evocative issue driving the nation into a more secular language oriented identity driven polity and another perspective which wants a region driven agenda.

10 million Bengalis especially Hindus crossed over in to India to escape persecution from the hands of the Pakistan Army. East Pakistan had a 22% Hindu population in 1947 which is in single digits today.

Whenever a non Awami League administration comes in to power with the Jamaat on board, there has been a systemic persecution of the Hindu community. May be in the words of Social Thinker Arjun Appadurai: it is the ‘Fear of Small Numbers’ which drives the right to marginalize the minority to establish its footing as a force with a voice. The Jamaat has only 4% of the National vote but wields disproportionate power due to its social initiatives and corporate financial muscle. The Islamic Chatra Shibir (Jamaat’s Youth Wing) is known to recruit youth in to its fold by offering scholarships for Higher Education to young bright minds from poor households, in turn indoctrinating them in its narrow world view. Political Islam has always lent grass roots support globally from Hamas to Hezbollah in order, to cultivate a buy in for its thought processes. Political Islam Jamaat style is not popular in a country which prides itself on Language and does not extract its religious affiliations as its only source of Identity.

In 1971, BangaBandhu Sheikh Mujibur lead the Mukti Bahini to create the People’s Republic of Bangladesh supported by Indian Army.  These historic events lead to the death of the original two nation theory and a creation of a Bengali speaking nation on India’s eastern borders (midwived in a way by Indira Gandhi). Originally conceptualized as a secular state, this noble idea died as Sheikh Mujib and his Family was massacred in 1975, allowing the Bangladesh Army to come back to power reinstating the Jamaat as its ban was over turned and gradually was able to come to the national centre stage.

The current Shahbhag phenomenon is Bangladesh’s Nuremburg and Maidan Al Tahrir combined with tens of thousands particularly the youth joining in, who have not been tainted with the experience (either ways) of the independence struggle. The killing of Rajib, the blogger and the counter persecution of the Shahbhag activists with the taint of being ‘Anti-Islamic’ and Atheist is probably the last card in the pack of the Jamaat, everytime it has been pushed to a corner. The Government is playing to the gallery to be fair by supporting the death sentence of the convicted razakars as it wishes to throttle political opposition and return to power via next year’s polls.

This episode is slowly taking on a violent shade of color with the crisis spiraling out of control with multitudes dead in clashes between the government and the activists of the Jamaat.  Hindu Temples and the minority Hindu Community are the scapegoat of choice for the Jamaat , everytime it is attacked. But times are changing; this Shahbhag Square is anti political Islam unlike Tahrir Square which was pro Muslim Brotherhood and pro involvement of Faith in politics.

Whichever side emerges victories, will shape Bangladesh’s identity for the Future. Whether to become a progressive Turkey or a Malaysia or head down its ‘Aager Desher’ (Previous Nation aka Pakistan) path is Bangladesh’s choice.

As a Bangla speaking person I shout a loud ‘Joy Bangla’ in support of my cultural cousins at Shahbhag.

 

 

Is the Green Tape killing Development: a pragmatic environmentalist’s take?

I prefer to read the pink papers as I feel they address more relevant issues of the day rather than the usual general papers which are prone to cover more Bollywood and Cricket than actual news for the people.  But the pink papers are so driven by financial data that they sometimes forget that the economy is not run in silos, but is dependent upon society and natural resources to run the economic growth engine. People and Ecology hold more value than sheer balance-sheet numbers. Capitalism runs on the ideological framework of ‘QSQT’ or Quarter se Quarter Tak. The Balance Sheet counts more than the Biosphere.

Well, India has massive developmental challenges too. We are short on power generation, and the coal which is needed to fuel the furnaces to rev up the turbines of growth is often not available. In Ruchir Sharma’s book ‘Break Out Nations’ an anecdote is shared that it is easier for Indian Mining Companies to procure coal in Indonesia than in India.  It is not available due to so called delay in regulatory clearances. This is the Green Tape which is blamed for the delay.  According to Public Intellectual Pratap Bhanu Mehta this is a perception as statistics show on the contrary, that India has a pretty lenient regulatory regime.

Cases from Orissa and Goa show that regulatory clearances are politically driven by motivation. The centre uses tribal rights as a whip to crack on the opposition lead Orissa government’s developmental agenda. Judicial Activism has lead to mining being banned in Bellary and Goa, although the BJP Government banned it earlier to the Supreme Court order. Environment is inherently political in nature as different ideologies with separate normative ends, conceptualize the utility of ecosystem services in a different context.

Recently, due to the negative criticism of the Green Ministry, the perception has been created that environmental clearances have been speeded up with Hydel Power Projects in Himachal and the North East given the ‘green’ signal. A recent incident of an environmental ministry official taking a bribe, does not help the reputation of the already over stretched body. The delays in clearances are due to the under-staffed employee roster of the Green Ministry, and not due to some malicious intent to derail the progress of the nation. The Single Window Clearance National Investment Board was a good idea in retrospect as the global investment climate is competitive. POSCO and Vedanta sites in Orissa illustrate this matter really well. In a rapidly urbanizing country with increasing living standards, such debates will be perennial in nature but we have to address them with rapid pace taking in to consideration the needs of the native community and the natural environment. This is a million rupee question, but we cannot afford to die from smog as the Middle Kingdom’s Forbidden City is now suffering.

Perception Wars: embedding the ‘drones of the mind’

We live in turbo charged times of information exchanges. A hybrid of information platforms make us abreast of developments in every genre at every microsecond. Facebook, Pintrest, Twitter with the TV and the print media, has made us the most informed generation ever in human history. But information overload makes us vulnerable to ‘subconscious inception’; information influences, overwhelms and ultimately drives people to use their ‘agency’ for ends, that are not well thought enough. Information has a ‘value’ and is usually a ‘fact’ but is often embedded in a larger story which lends its  emotional potential.

Geopolitics and the discourse on the practice of power is grounded on the edifice of information.  The first TV War was Operation Desert Storm in Iraq in 1990 with CNN ushering in the element of visuals in the information war.

The post 9/11 era with its intervention in Iraq and Af-Pak brought wars to our living room. With the advent and evolution of technology shrinking in our pockets, twitter brought life to the 140 character limit into a battle for our minds. The Arab Spring was fueled with social media mediating information through dictatorial regimes of the Middle East made Google Executive Wael Ghonem in to an icon. Islamic Scholar Tariq Ramadan in his book ‘Arab Awakening’ has more pessimistic perspective as he calls such intervention, pre-meditated and manufactured as he writes that the State Department had been making the ground for such a situation years in advance by sharing training to bloggers and coders.

Patrick Meier, an expert on Social Media Technology and its impact on Geopolitics has brought out the various dimensions that information can be used for useful ends such as rapid humanitarian response. Thats a positive externality of Information, but the sheer information we share as we ‘live’ our lives online, makes us susceptible to manipulation if we are reflexive enough.

The Green Revolution, although thwarted in Iran seeded the potential of the forthcoming revolutions from Tunisia to Oman. The war is still on on the warfront of Syria with Al Jazeera, CNN, BBC battling it out for the Opposition on the airwaves. The war is played in the virtual world by bloggers and twitters.  China is known by its ‘Great Firewall’ with its extreme attempts to filter out information from its citizens. Maidan Al Tahrir to Shahbag Square in Dhaka, we can all see perception wars in action.

What is exactly ‘home’

Yesterday, i was watching a fabulous program on NDTV with Barkha Dutt interviewing an Egyptian-British Author and Dr. Shashi Tharoor and the discussion was on the notion of home.  It did stir a hornets nest of emotions as i have lived in three cities in culturally varied parts of the world and never totally totally felt ‘Home’ anywhere. A large part of my life i have lived in Mumbai but never could make it home emotionally.  There has been always a chasm between the physical environment and the ‘man inside my head’. I never could relate to the ethos here. The identity based cultural fabric of Suburban Mumbai has been quite discomforting, as a Bengali  Speaking Half Bengali; it was difficult fitting in.

Muscat is another city where i lived as much time as I have lived in Mumbai. The quiet laziness of Muscat was more affable, but living as an expat without citizenship rights meant that there was always a gulf between the aspiration of creating a ‘home’ away from home and a place i could relate. The Arab/Islamic Culture was something i got immersed in and i truly liked being in that mould.  A Shatti Al Qurum was more my place than Marine Drive although the latter is more majestic.

Singapore is where i found myself, was more accepted as i explored myself. My ethnicity did not matter in this ‘Rojak’ Culture lah! A Mustafa Centre was as Home as the Heartland of Serangoon.  Singapore is truly global, and that provided the canvas to create an emotional home as i found friends, a Church and finally my identity.

I am back to Mumbai, working here and can sense that home is less about a geography and more about feeling an ’emotional connect’ about a place.  The people matter around you and not the structures.

Ultimately, Home is where the soul is.

 

Diaspora Experiences and Narratives of the State: a personal story

 I am a Diaspora-ic boy next door who grew up in the beautiful country of the Sultanate of Oman in its picturesque capital of Muscat.  Muscat is indeed adopted home for me and Yallah Oman- as its Paradise compared to the hustle and bustle of a third world metropolis.  As a normal teacher expat family we came to the gulf as economic migrants, with my parents dream to give me a good education by saving up which they were eventually successfully by giving me a good engineering education in Oman and Singapore. This is just a drop in the ocean in terms of personal stories of migrants to the Gulf who have made careers and livelihoods building up other adopted countries in lieu of a living. My parents have contributed towards educating the first generation of home grown tertiary educated Omani citizens. I did my undergrad degree in Engineering from an Indo-Omani Collaborative School too and can vouch for the multi-faceted character that economic migrants play in creating bridges between societies beyond remittances which have created post office economies in many districts of Kerala and Southern Tamil Nadu. The cultural immersion which I had as result of studying alongside Omani colleagues was an invaluable experience towards understanding Islamic values.

In this post, I am narrating a thin vertical slice of multi layered cultural lasagna of a Gulf Story, which is often tarnished in the media with instances of over exploitation of menial workers. Whenever there is impoverishment and a power differential there is common to have such sad incidents. It is ultimately the person’s call to work in such a context or not. But the Gulf Story is textured and layered as any other story. Gulf workers unlike peer in other regions do not have citizenship or permanent residency rights and are ‘Indian Citizens’. My parents would have got citizenship in any other non Gulf country, if they would have spent that such time in may be say Singapore. It is a different matter altogether that they are very rooted and visit India every three months.

The Gulf NRI Community in the eyes of the political elite in India is portrayed as either very poor or being recent first generation rich. They influence politics in Kerala atleast in a few constituencies and have control over the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs as usually a politico from ‘Mallu-land’ helms over the portfolio.  This minimal recognition was long overdue for a constituency often treated as a piggy bank unlike other applauded NRI cousins from the West. Deira is not as cool as Downtown, I guess.

The Indian Connection with the Gulf is ancient, as Gujaratis from Saurashtra and the Coast have traded with Oman, Yemen and the Gulf over the centuries. The Khimji family in Oman has leaded a diversified business conglomerate over 100 years and many such businesses are found all over the Gulf.  Areas such as Muttrah in Old ‘Masqat’ or Meena Bazar in Bur Dubai are the old commercial hubs of the respective cities controlled by Sindhis and Gujaratis. The unique feature of these two geographies is they have Hindu Temples, a rarity in the Gulf. Commerce has the power to bend Conservatism.

His Majesty Sultan Qaboos bin Said of Oman studied in India, and relations between most of the GCC and India are positive because of people and not because of the lazy consular officers who treat gulf postings as a punishment. It is time that the Indian State takes pro active measures in leveraging our good will and transform into becoming a ‘Hard Power’ in the Middle East. The Jet-Etihad deal is a good sign for the future. 

A conversation on urban politics with an ‘Autowalla’

Mumbai is a melting pot of cultures and i happen to meet a great diversity of folks every single day among the invisible spine of the transportation network of this megapolis; the three tire Autorickshaw driver and of course cabbies. I have written a couple of posts on my interesting conversations with cabbies earlier; one with a UP migrant and another Son of the Soil individual with differing takes on Maharashtra and UP Politics . They are more the eyes of the city and they keep a pulse of the developments on the ground. More real time than Mumbai Mirror anyday. I would suggest any urban transportation planner to speak to this real community of practitioners rather than exclusively refer to planning formulae that fail to be real more often than not. Cabbies and Autowallas are quite a cool repository of oral social history of a city and they give you a sense of where the wheels of a society’s wagon are heading towards.

I took an auto ride from Saki Naka Junction, which is of the busiest intersections of the city to Powai recently and the auto was driven by a gentleman called as Mr. ‘Bappa’ . He is a former Shiv Sena Political Activist from rural Pune area who started the conversation with a mouthful of colorful expletives regarding migrants due to whom congestion in the City is increasing. Our short 30 minute conversation cum ride was sprinkled with the genesis of the anti congress movement in Mumbai in the late 1970’s with the Janata Party to its transition with a saffron color with the Sena. The thing which really caught my attention was his zest for development and good governance. ‘Bappa’ Saheb spoke with the fire of an evangelist about the need for a new leader to lead the opposition in the State. His Faith in Raj Saheb was unshakable and spoke like a true Sena Man when he wanted to know about my origins. He also dissected the irrigation scam by understanding of masonry and poor construction of dams and how much money is siphoned off infrastructure projects which are meant for the poor. He said ” In Maharashtra, development takes place with a price and that price is the corruption, and that development often occurs with the relevance of the project long gone”.

This is surely a man who understands developmental politics better than many an academic.

His experience with Anna Hazare’s model village concept was interesting to hear as well. His nationalistic sentiment was palpable in every statement he uttered while navigating the  chaotic traffic. We need more folks like him who think about functioning of the City and the Nation.

The conversation was abruptly cut short while I arrived at my destination at Powai to have a drink to celebrate V Day eve with my loneliness. I handed over the fare to him with a ‘Jai Maharashtra’ Bhau (Brother), i took leave.

Mumbai certainly has many untold stories to unravel.

I really like p…

I really like pico iyers writing as it is like gourmet cuisine vis-a-vis fast food. Each piece authored has nutrition in every bite of a read. The FMCG-ization of writing (read Chetan Bhagat) along with a tweet a min generation has created an information addicted readership with scant regard for meaning, nuance and style. Good Writing is priceless.

Confessions of the Obsessed

Obsessed is a trait which I have been attributed to many a time. Obsession is a characteristic which i feel is a compliment. Every creative person has idiosyncratic tendencies. This post is one among them. Obsessive is being single minded passion towards a cause. People do not present their best selves if they are not lost in their art. I get lost in my work, in my relationships which make it suffocating for others and also for myself. But thats the person that I am. Respect me or not. Love me or hate me. This is the person i am.  

A synonym for the obsessive is caring but the media has misrepresented my tribe. From Darr to Ghajni obsessive has been painted with an incorrect brush.  

I love my best side as well as i am ashamed of my worst. I am just well, Moni for the folks who love me.