The phone and familiar

People across the screen

Video calling

Chatting

Instructing

Showering care

The mobile unites

Albeit fleeting moments

Where oceans collapse

The grandfather wanting to hug

The little one

Can’t, but those moments

Are the most precious

The migrants lifeline

The communal space

Intimate yet aloof

A duty

A brief interlude

Feel human

Rather than a disposable tissue

I miss Blk 708 A Kopitiam

My dreams were ignited over a Teh Halia

Had genuine friends

Had a life to build

Chatted with Singaporean Police Officer OP Uncle over Rafi in Hindi

Spend many evenings watching Channel 8

Cried when Ah Kong Passed Away

I need my Teh

My noodle soup

Truly soup for the restless soul

#iphone7 #nofilter #karakchaitales

Some days there is simply the image

As sorrow drowns out the story

Then a painful silence dawns

Which itself is the story

We are all data points

Digital tracks us into trends

The outliers are zoomed out

What was the research question

By the way?

The inherent capacity to react to inequalities is itself a privilege. Many just internalise it, as the power to react is just erased. The migrant state of being is one of perennial negotiating as the inequality is simply foreground as a forward in a book. The #metoo or #blacklivesmatter is a signifier of that privileged capacity. Many don not possess the potential to execute their intent to retort.

I am rather dumbfounded that social impact assessment practitioners for permitting and planning projects don’t utilise applied history as case studies to foreground the demographic analysis for the project influence area and the performance of participation which stakeholder engagement yields unless backed up by hard cash or resources. There are so many databases and change mapping tools via spatial analytics that can yield a more meaningful initiative rather than only ticking the box off.

The promise of potential

Stunted in its tracks

The performance never happened

Or did it?

The act of performance

Validates promise

A life however

Is not a start up with

Face value

Where billing has to match receivables

Life, with promise or potential

Or a failure

Is deeply intimate

A life lived

Not a performance for the market

Such as this string/rant

I love the entrepreneurial instincts of folks from Dhaka, with or without Education who want to work in Probash to earn money and do something in life. It’s so refreshingly different with regards to linguistic cousins from Kolkata who are often awaiting sarkari jobs. Although in the past few months I have found restaurant staff from Malda and Bandel too.

Soul, like a sponge is born free

School packages it

To be an employee

To pay taxes to the state

As a consumer to the market

It then becomes a stat

A good citizen

The soul is only important

On the death bed

Where ethical accounting

Kicks in

And the ledger of sins is tabulated

It is a product after all

To be traded in the moral marketplace of souls