Follow your passion is a really good way to be poor. Work is meant to move the needle, as someone is paying your salary as there is a job to be done. More than any degree ‘How can the job be done’ should be the only metric in the post pandemic world.

AAP is a party built on NRI donations and talent, is hell bent on spoiling relations with Singapore- a dear friend to India.Many Singapore NRI’s also have worked with AAP. They should ask for accountability from AAP. Kejriwal should apologise to Singapore. This is just terrible. I still carry an Indian Passport having grown up in the Gulf, and am thankful for all the support the country and its people have given me over the past 12 years. I am sorry for all the stupidity. The Delhi NCR Government, a glorified municipality does not speak for India.

With the kind of anti Bengali venom spewed by the ‘Hindu Nationalist Intellectual Architecture’ (I coined the term) post Bengal Polls i am surprised how will the 75 odd legislators serve their constituents with such hatred of the idea of the Bengali.

The optics stopped on May 2.

Jumma Mubarak.

Eid Mubarak.

Dum Biryani is an edible ritual. This one is from southern Tamil Nadu style. No seewaiyan or payasam, so milkshake is a pale substitute.

And no Salman Khan Phillim in the theater.

As Singapore moves into a stricter lockdown Sunday onwards, grabbing a meal in a built environment should be noted. Be Safe.

Take care Guys.

#Eid2021

What does a Desi Khaleeji do on Eid in Singapore; head to Arab Street!

Eid Ul Fitr Mubarak/ Selamat Hari Raya Aidulfitri !

There is a sense of celebration of poverty in liberal arts and social sciences academia. There is no romanticism in being poor, only the privileged write on the subaltern while sipping chardonnay.

In academia one has to win grants, can a person with limited networks have the information or the cultural capital to break into funding circles.

Teach graduate students grant writing, and the value of networks.

A sonic landscape of Quranic recitations transported me back to my college years in Muscat where the bus driver would play the recitations during the fasting Holy Month of Ramadan. I did not expect this in a food centre in Singapore, and was pleasantly surprised by the innate familiarity of the space at the Geylang Serai Ramadan Bazaar. The colors and the narrow lines of traditional attire was a global space, trans locally connected to the bazaars in the Gulf or South Asia.

The colorful salwar kameez for both men and women, the gem stone rings, the head scarfs are a remainder that Singapore was an important port for the Hajj from Java to Mecca as Eric Tagliacozzo has written in his book. Arab families still feature in the physical landscape in Singapore. As i wrote in a recent academic essay for my Global Cities Module in the PhD Program:

” Singapore as a part of British Malaya was a transit point for Haj Pilgrims from the Bahasa speaking world to Ottoman Mecca stopping by ports such as Bombay, Cochin, Karachi, and British controlled Aden (Tagliacozzo 2013) (Mandal 2018).

Hadrami Diaspora connected ‘the balad’ (the homeland in Arabic) which is Al Hadramout in current day Yemen to Singapore, where Arab traders such as the Al Kaff or Al Juneid families were once the largest property owners in colonial Singapore. Al Juneid MRT and street names such as Muscat Street in the Kampung Glam neighbourhood is an indelible physical signifier in the everyday life of the city regarding the transregional connections to the Middle East (Ho 2006). With the Little India, Bugis and China Town configuring the city as ethnic enclaves in a traditional sense which was ordinary for colonial cities such as Calcutta (still has a China Town enclave) and Penang (Kooria & Ravensbergen, 2018).”

Thanks a ton to my friend Mr. Colin Pang for his time and care to show me around the area, as there are different ‘Global’ Singapore’s to be seen and experienced and may be written about.

Today, i went to a Putu Piring Place at the Haig Road Market Centre in the eastern part of Singapore which my friend and digital marketing expert/start up maven, Colin Pang introduced me. This particular hawker centre stall has been featured on Netflix. Putu Piring is a steamed sweet, filled with gula melaka quite similar to Pithe had in Bengali speaking parts in India, and of course Bangladesh. The similar flavor profile is an edible evidence of a common cultural grid, one bite at a time.