Incomplete wins

Tolerable loses

Dreams deferred

Sounds familiar?

Also known

As Adulting

Got chatting with a barista at Starbucks from Thimphu who studied English at Fergusson College Pune, who was very articulate, and nostalgic about Juhu Beach. From Thimphu to Pune to Dubai, The Land of Gross National Happiness is having a low but rising representation in the diversity in the Khaleej.

Pema Eden was a great barista in Muscat from Thimphu.

#migration

I belong nowhere

The paycheck is the destination

Hence I belong everywhere

The belonging is to an imagination

The physical destination, is however a luxury

Few can belong to

Ten years back (no photos here), I was working at a consulting firm for projects in South Sudan in Oman, and moved in to NUS, Singapore for my terrific masters, an idealist who wanted to make the tiny red dot home to now after 4 countries, two masters and a few gigs later, a man who is just revved up for life more than ever.

I am blessed to have been on international media numerous times, written articles and papers to been rejected by PhD programs for grades to being not wanted by organisations for whom I had given my everything. It’s been a good decade, richer by experiences although with little money left in my account. A house library in Mumbai and a repository of writings is all I have to show for.

Had a fascinating evening chatting up with a bewildering cast of characters in Bur Dubai from a Moradabadi Barber who landed up in a salon via his time in Trissur, Kerala. He was talking about the entire economics of survival in Dubai. Years of maturity than his 9 grade education and his young demeanour.

I met a cabbie from Cameroon who graduated from a cleaning professional to a cabbie in 5 years. He spoke about his 12 hour journey from Cameroon to Dubai and ultimately as a cabbie. He is French speaking but picked up English in Dubai.

In the spirit of Prof Amit Chaudhuri @amit_chaudhuri ‘s Exhibition on Sweet Shops in Kolkata, I caught a few pics of an artisanal sweet shop in Bally, Howrah. The sweet maker was blissfully crafting his Gur Sandesh, sitting on the ground, while customers were entering the shop, while the winter sun was shyly making its comforting presence felt.

The ambience was humbling but the product was world class. Everything in the world need not be branded and e platformed.

Airports, these non places

Sites of aspiration

Conveyer belts of dreams

Nodes of emotion

Hot spots of commerce

When, Skype is limiting

Airports, melting pots

For middle class Modernity

More than civil engineers

Aim for

How do you write the history of a place which is yours, but not yours. Relegated to the margins, where survival is a everyday negotiation, is documentation and memory that vital? If our lived experiences are not noted, who else will? How do I acknowledge my privilege in this process. How does History writing with a small ‘h’ change when the margins become the core. When the temporary becomes the mainstay?

Middle class consumer citizenships in the Khaleej are a proxy, and consumerism is a mode of negotiation rather than aspiring to the ideal as the social contract is one of work and the life apart from work is considered marginal.

Temporary People by fellow Gulf Kid Prof. Deepak Unnikrishnan at NYU Abu Dhabi paints these narratives of the ‘Pravasi’ in the labour camp is a powerful start. Please don’t write about Migrant lives with cushy offices in the west. We are not narratives for your PhD dissertation.

Migrant eateries are fragments of home or Bari/Basha/Ghar in the Khaleej/Gulf. A cramped coffee shop turned rotir dokan or a bread shop which offers murgir jhol, daal, cholaar buut and the sujir halwa, is like a panacea for the migrant looking for a pocket friendly but a sumptuous bite. The chicken curry was like for me in a typical Bengali kitchen in Kolkata and the tandoori rotis were baked hot. The Dal was homely, and the Suji Halwa was ideal, not sweet and brought back memories of a past which recedes in memory. Taste is a rich node of memory and recollection.

The bylanes of towns in the Gulf hold such spaces, which are geographically interchangeable. This dhaba could have easily been in Bengal but it is in an overseas realm. The atmosphere was buzzing with prantik bangla or the vernacular and it was a spatio temporal continuum demarcated by the door, with no signages, which makes its Bangladeshi character evident. The plastic table and stools and the cramped area, was symptomatic of a Dhaba.

I was transported to a different slice of the Bangladeshi Diaspora in Singapore at Rowell Road/Desker Road where Ghorowa and Khana Basmati served similar fare. Me and my friend from Lucknow paid a bill of an equivalent of SGD 6.

#migranttales @ Al Khuwair Muscat, Oman

I encounter Bangladeshis everyday here in the Gulf from the office to supermarkets to restaurants, watching poll related videos and the discussions can be rather heated. People are subconsciously connected to their notion of Desh, Gram and Bari through watsapp, the digital wonder kid and Facebook. For Bangladeshis, the poll is really vital. Usually they are BNP supporters but they do acknowledge the infrastructure growth and development work done by AL. They seemed to like the idea of the Dhaka Metro, as Modernity finally arriving home.

Politics back home is never back home, it is embodied through the digital.

#migration