Aadhar is nir Aadhar. Digital Governance and Privacy are intertwined and the highest court of the land acknowledged it. Digital Modernity is shaped by law, business, society and least of all technology. My book project speaks aloud on these issues.

Archives are nodes of Memory, Nostalgia, Remembering and a narrative power. This power is hardly interrogated by the common reader. In this distraction led post truth era, the Archive is hardly a major concern for the listicle reader, mostly of the tech class genealogy.

Billions of data points of perspective and persuasion are circulated through social media through hashtagged debates on contemporary issues. Automated Bot led Propoganda is a critical limiting factor towards authentic conversations online. Or what is authentic in the social media discourse? Social media draws exciting conversations on issues and they do have the power to frame content in real time mode. But, when the issue has died down, the discourse is lost in the dark matter of the cache.

Here is where technology and historical narrative intersect, fuse, deflect in the form of the digital archive. Interesting projects to capture Memory are being curated across the world from Dakota Adventures in Singapore to Jewish Calcutta to an Instagram project to document old Calcutta buildings to the vagaries of real estate sharks.

All of these projects are led by independent scholars and professionals who attempt to disrupt mainstream narratives through voices which would be lost under the bull dozer of late modernity. P Sainath’s People’s Archive of India or PARI is doing a fascinating job to record arts and disappearing languages for the future. The traditional register of the colonial archives is a state driven intellectual project, where these digital archives are decentralised, ‘non state actors’ (pun intended) that are determined to add to history with a small ‘h’.

These Digital archives can suitably be leveraged as vehicles to retain social media conversations which are lost, unless Facebook reminds of them as memories! Algorithms curating memories can be powerful. But, who determines who remembers what, is the curatorial question. This is the operative probe that historians have to deep dive critically, to unearthed biases in the method. Power undergirds instruments/institutions of Memory.

The paradox of knowledge is that one creates cutting edge ideas as lone entity, and the digital era has enabled that completely but decision making power lies with the ‘structures’, the power elites who have the authority to execute, often to propel the status quo.

Bharat, has Clean India

But, people who clear the sewers are dying

We can send satellites to space

Win spelling bee

Have billionaires

Dream of Smart Cities

But can’t remove manual scavenging

Bezwada gets Magsayay

But, still sanitation workers choke to death

What happens to the Clean India Tax?

The conundrum of caste does not make their living days

Any easier

Innovation can be inoculated by a diversity of experiences gained by travel, interacting with interesting people and reading extensively. The operative keyword is ‘diversity’. Even Times of India is encouraging reading with its latest campaign.

The various, multifarious manifestations of the universe of the Digital, with the capital D, indicating privilege is surprisingly not changing anything fundamental. Livelihoods access, public health and political power remains unchanged. Oxygen would have saved seventy kids earlier this week. Smart phones cannot change that, although sensors could have helped. Train travel in India still is unsafe. IRCTC App can buy you the ticket, but can’t make your life safer.

Main Street retail and banks are transformed by aggregator economics, giving cashless a sense of everyday comfort. The fundamentals of Digital Modernity are still underwritten by old school choices, of life, of survival.

Googling food can give you the nearest eatery, the direction and the menu, but is the digital economy creating more jobs or taking it away? If so, can the majority buy the meal on Swiggy?

Complex Adaptive Systems and Ecosystem Thinking have synergies. Sustainability needs them as it is as complex as ever. Linear thinking is for kindergarten.

Yesterday, an initiative about encouraging reading in Muscat was kicked off by a non profit group, and the event focused on why people read and what motivates them to do so. The responses ranged from reading as understanding other people’s perspectives to improving attention spans. While all of them scratched on the surface, reading is an urgent response to the post truth, alternative facts era that we reside. Reading against the grain of the text as a mode of critique is popular with the social sciences fraternity is a vital pivot in separating the wheat from the chaff, and in honing ones one thought in a distracted mind. Information through digital means may have become democratic, though the ability to analyse, digest and articulate is still a task, Siri cannot help with yet.

In an AI driven future of work world, reading the correct curriculum may actually immunise communities against the next wave of technology led disruption. Out of the box is certainly obsolete in a complex adaptive systems dynamics space, where stochastic is norm rather than the normative.

The future of content is video, but the ability to distill, distinguish and disseminate complex ideas and make sense of them, in order to apply them has reading as a critical core in a learning tool box.

Reading to make sense and meaning is the fulcrum of the ability to discuss various sources of data and skim through to the central argument. Time or the pack of it is a lazy excuse to not read. Wait till the better read, colleague takes the better pay hike in front of you as reading diversely helps one develop an innovative tool box. It helps unlock imagination.

So what are you reading currently?

We all have our own journeys
The terrain of narratives is a flux
Some collide, some negate
All stories need a ear
Some need to be spoken to be heard

On this Independence Day eve
I have a prayer
Let's not make a media spectacle out of it
Let's respect the 'peripheral' rather than the centre
National identity is a mosaic
Rather than a monolith
Save new born babies
Not cows
India, a tapestry of colors
Can do better then 'Gerua'
Gerua suits a SRK song better
And in Iceland not Imphal
The Kerala Beef Fry is tasty
As the Jalebi in Benaras
Work towards creating better support structures for our sena folks
Than pellets to blind our children in Islamkot
More jobs for laid off IT folks
Than debates on nationalism on Republic
Is a humble prayer
Happy I Day Bharat, BKMJ