Baby Driver is a different car thrill and chase film. It’s cute, with a heart and great fun watching the film. The film’s anchor is in urban freeways and music and the iconic iPod is a symbol of urban culture. As an underworld, gun totting and horse power fuelled visual narrative, it does not have the cool appeal of FF franchise, but tugs at emotional strings for traction. A Good Samaritan who does crime to survive while caring for his step father and lives in the memory of his singer mother. A transporter who moonlights as a DJ. An out and out American road movie. 
#changethinker
#moviereview

Hipster Boutique Cafes in my neighbourhood in Muscat. I still prefer my Karak Chai for 10 percent of the cost of my double expresso shot machiatto though. Globalisation as I quip often, comes in various shades, rather weird. This picture is so geographically mundane that it could have been taken in Mumbai, Jakarta or elsewhere. Joining the global economic grid comes with such creature comforts. 
The steep pricing structures will however be a dampener for individual entrepreneurs trying to bring in the Seattle Artisanal Coffee Culture to the Gulf as this region has an independent coffee shop culture typically south Asian and Turkish. 
Al Khuwair is not Tiong Bahru. @boomba_oman
#muscat #iphone7 #foodwriting

Life is beautiful 
Lived in various eras and frequencies

Challenges propel us on to higher levels

To move on needs an escape velocity

Managing ones self at various nodes

If often the hardest bet

Happiness after long is hyphenated by the other 
Takes the lustre away 

Life is meant to be a journey 

Often bears an albatross around the neck

The synonym for neoliberalism is powerlessness
All are interconnected in this food chain

Each subservient to the other layer

Individual rights are championed 

Collective decision making is reduced to a farce

Companies are the new empires

Knowledge is a hammer 

Enlightenment is commodified 

Consumption is Culture 

Relationships of note are passé

In an era where twitter followers can be bought 

We are all Data

Available to the highest bidder

Such is the ‘transaction cost’ 

Efficiency and Productivity are priceless

Social Darwinism is a close relative

Words are able to quell the pain

Well, not quite

Till a few voices are alive 

An Arundhati here, Naomi there

Monbiot in the middle 

A Vandana for the lecture circuit 

Some wine and cheese for washing down the capitalist/activist guilt

The powerless will be muted 

As the middle class are no better

Silenced with jobs taken away

Libel suits thrown at them

There is no better way than poverty to silence the rebel

Filters on Instagram/Facebook is aesthetic choice Architecture in a visual discourse, where Instagram is a near anthropological enterprise, with a key role in documenting everyday lived experiences, a field note of sorts.

The paradox of monetisation and perennial branding for the creative soul. The art declines when the focus is on the market. 
Cutting edge often means sleeping hungry. Many artists struggle to pay their bills even if they are the flavour of the season. And we talk about the creative economy.

More than just a mere imageLoaded with Meaning

Nostalgia saturates the senses

Where precious years were lived

Time is not my best friend 

When regional film song shoots happen overseas with bystanders overseas curiously observing the exotic nature, it exemplifies the global served for the vernacular audiences in small town India. Globalisation comes in weird shades.

In the act of translation, the literary translator lends his/her spirit to the text, many a time transforming the mechanics of the text to be accessible to a different cultural legacy. In that case, the translation is a ‘superior’ work of literary art, isn’t it? 
The base text is often rudimentary.