City Scapes at Night

Gleaned by Lights

Dark Spaces are proxies

For expanse

One Gleaming Minaret

Makes up for all

Seminar room is sacred, a site of intellectual production, a space of and for discourse, whether the conversation moves ahead or not is rather not the objective, but the sheer space where the breath of neoliberal drivers, have not convoluted the conversation.

Response to New Technology

Dude Bro: Great idea, can this tech get actualisation through Block chain now and monetised through an early stage investment. How many early users can we get?

Artsy Dude: What is the community implication of this technology intervention in the receiving community? Is this tech even needed? How many jobs will be lost?

(Con)sultant Bro: Both responses are valid and we need to do an market entry analysis for this tech through a proprietary framework we have developed? This is our Vale based billing for the engagement.

Entrepreneur: when are we launching the product?

Environmental permitting spends are mandatory spends for business continuity, however there is hardly any effort to extract more strategic value from them by the procurement folks of industries. It can rejigged to obtain insights for resilience building, extend an ESIA into a flood risk assessment to understand your insurance premiums in a climate unequal world. Leverage environmental monitoring data as an entry point to map your ecosystem footprint, and then utilise the data analytics via models into actionable intelligence for gauging product supply chains.

The context varies, but an extra dollar worth of value can be extracted from existing spends.

Writing which connects to the soul, is the essence which remains as a residue somewhere. That writing articulates unlocked/unsaid emotions about a place or a feeling of a place. Normally exceptional writing is simple, and self organises a vocabulary which is not present in discourse, such as how do you write about a city which is in the peripheral vision of a regional imagination? Does its coffee shops and Karak chai corners anchor a non existing articulation of a place? Is the non place important enough? Or is the economic core, the engine of communicative infrastructure. Not having a palate of words, leads to erasures. Spatial discourses are fluid and the past is recorded in some vocabulary, in some archive.

Writing in to action a place is an art. Amit Chaudhuri’s writing on Bombay has an archival feel. Sadly cities of the Gulf are not written yet in that vain.

Tell your younger self

It’s ok to be slow

It’s alright to fail

And fail again

Parents,Teachers and Friends

Are not the finale

They are after all

Waiting for you to get off

Their laundry lists

Chart your own journey

No one waits for you

It’s you

To tell your story

Life will be your script

Non profit and business start up founders often sabotage their vision of the organisation by turning into to mutual admiration club rather than a mission driven organisation. Having worked with a committed Mohsin Malhar Da and a few others and also a award winning tent maker who did not bother to remunerate, the activist and social good space has a bunch of interesting ideas to munch on!

Social good is like any other profession. Making it a vanity trip defeats the cause.

Ultimately it is the everyday politics with a small p that is the proof of the seewaiyaan, the grand theories of Geopolitics, Race, Faith and Class does not cut any sand if it’s translation to the institutions such as family, workplace and the retail sphere is half cooked.

Too much grand theoretical noise. The activists depend on foundations run by business people for money and academia also needs the same grants.

I am just looking back at the detritus of dreams

The scars are not seen

Gleaned by fancy restaurant selfies

The delta of unrealised dreams

Is Deep

The Question

However is whether to fight on

Or change course

But those are the dreams which shaped the inside of me

The fights, the joys

The meals, the laughs

Those are the screenshots

Of dreams

Of life itself

Today at a cooked food counter at a supermarket in Muscat, this Malayali spread reminds me of Indian Restaurants/Restoran in Singapore and Malaysia where cooked food is displayed. The cultural commonalities are obvious, southern India.

#migrantscholars