I am really piqued by the imperial routes of forced/economic migration during the heydays. Tamils in Reunion to Morocco Soldiers in Vietnam in the 1940’s during the world war to Bhojpuri speaking Guyanese to Hindi Speaking Fijians. Fascinating stories, not captured, not known, and not disseminated. How many of us know of the Gujarati traders in present day GCC or East Africa? The History behind the pravasi should be known as Prime Minister Modi visits the Khaleej.

The flavours of South Asia are boxed up in a plate called the Biryani. A Malayali owned eatery with Bangladeshi service staff, with a Cook from Kolkata.

A RO 1 is a good bet.

Hossain and his friends are from Chittagong, Bangladesh working on date farms and gardens in Wadi Tiwi, Wilayat of Sur. They work for OMR 60 per month which is 12000 Taka per month. This place is 130 kilometres from Muscat, the capital of Oman. Wadi Tiwi is fairly inaccessible through the mountains and 30 odd kilometres from the Town of Sur. These guys supplement their income by playing your guide through the rocky terrain from the main road to the Wadi Tiwi springs. Hossain has been in Wadi Tiwi for six years and he and all of his friends wear the lungi, a draped garment for men, popular as a home attire in Bangladesh and India. This is unusual in the Gulf, and they wear the lungi only on the farm rather than in the Town area of Sur.

They were very keen to chat up with me in Bangla, especially in their dialect which is not very clear to me. But nevertheless it was informative to speak to them and understand that the blue collar migrant manpower in the governorates of the country, the non capital areas are manned by brothers from Chittagong and Dhaka, where the good Malayali from Kannur used to rule. But cost dynamics have slowly overshadowed Indians, and Bangladeshis have taken the lead to make my mother tongue, a dominant language of conversation in Oman and the wider Gulf.

#migranttales #latergram

Canadian Poet Rupi Kaur, is a marvellous communicator. The visuals are as important as the words. The Protest to Project mode as an artist is common. She is certainly disrupting literary structures of English Literature Academia. I seen a Chetan Bhagat in Her. Insta Poets matter as I write spoken word poetry too and I have has criticised by folks who are professional English walas. Emotions are important and we connect and narrate.

The city tour is the mantle piece of any tourism experience. In this age of Instagram filters and stylised aesthetics, the tourist imagination is framed by them. In my creative practice, responding to the themes and times we reside in is the core value as a writer. So, today thanks to a couple of good friends visited Muscat, on their way back to Kuala Lumpur. They were in town for less than 12 hours, hence how does one pack the drift of the city, in such a short time?

Well, the Big Bus Muscat Tour Bus came to the rescue. An international franchise, they are professional and have all the luxuries on board; wifi, water and availability of multilingual commentary. This ofcourse comes at a steep premium. The bus started at Mutrah Souq went around the city, in a crisp overview of the city. Marina Bandar Vantage Point snd the Royal Palace were popular draws for photography feeds. I went to parts of the city which I had not been in the last twenty years. This was special. It also prompted me to question our notions of the places we have lived in. The tour bus is a disruptive lens. It problematises the notion of the home town. Do we really know our cities? Or do we know the city as a sequential array of places constituting our daily lives? I have taken city bus tours in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Mumbai. All of these tours were small starters of all these three cities, out of which Singapore and Mumbai have been cities that I know well. The first time I took a tour bus was in 1994, as a kid where Baba and me took the Mumbai Darshan tour from Vashi in Navi Mumbai. Baba took the bus as wanted to show me Hanging Gardens and Juhu Beach.

It was also a way to show Mumbai to our relatives wanting to see the city upon visiting us; absolving us of this serious moral responsibility.

The tour bus gave me an opportunity to revisit my hometown and understand it from the vantage point of the visitor. My friends found Muscat to be clean to a fault, beautiful and inadequately marketed. Some major pluses for an Oman keen to promote tourism, as an alternative to the hydrocarbon economy. These are authentic voices that are paying tourists.

Today the tour, made me recognise my blind spots. It ruptures the routine of everyday life. Although the tour bus route is a familiar drill; the experience reboots the vision of the location.

Muscat is a marvellous city with tremendous natural endowments. These should be leveraged to promote a tourism based economy, as Muscat is just a trailer for Oman!

#ExperienceOman is more than a hashtag, rather it is a call for the world traveller to experience a special place, many of us call home.

Just spoke to a Filipina Muslim in a mall in Muscat who is here for 6 years from Mindanao, who is a die hard supporter of President Dueterte, as he is from the south as well and that most of his administration is from Davao City instead of Visayas or Luzon; she said emphatically ‘in the History of the Philippines’. She loves Oman for the quiet and lack of opportunities to spend money, so she could save more. She spoke very good English, with a clear tonality, and must be having a college degree.

My memory of the Indian Budget Day during growing up years whether in Mumbai or in Muscat was spent in front of the TV waiting for a middle aged man, with a black briefcase to orate the nations vision in an economic sense. Yashwant Sinha and Jaswant Singh were very good, crisp and to the T. P Chidambaram was fluent with Thirukkal quotes punctuating the speech. The last day of February was the day to calculate tax slabs. The middle class wage earner is a genius in saving her/his tax rupee in all sorts of strange nomenclatures 80 A, 80 D and what not. The salary earning middle class is complaining all the time.

Now a days, the budget day is February 1st. Jaitley ji is a veteran presenter, with the obvious verbal precision of a lawyer. The first of the lot, in terms of being a technocrat, Jaitley ji will hope to present a few more budgets in the future.

With digital mediating our discourse, tomorrow will be a day when everyone will have an opinion and a hashtag to boot. #budget2018 will trend on Twitter, and smart phones not people will buzz with stock market updates all the time. During my teens, the stock market direction was a validation of the Street sentiment. The same is true now a days as well. Some things never change, although the Sensex is not a particularly democratic barometer to gauge perceptions. May the bull run continue. I hope for a populist budget prior to the general election next year.

The economic survey 2018 is wonderful at first glance with intersectionalities in big data, intriguing questions and cross tie in’s. Last years survey was amazing read with GIS data and heat mapping visualisation. I personally thanked Dr Arvind Subramanian after the survey last year at Alliance Francaise Delhi at Milan Vaishnav’s book launch, when I incidentally sat beside him. The focus on Climate Change is refreshing, with a linking with agriculture. The focus on science and technology research is fantastic is volume one of the report.

A work of practical scholarship, a must read.

It is the thought process behind the writing which is priceless. The aesthetic moulds the thought, as a scaffold waiting to be seeded. But, where is the perfection, the full bloom. Is perfect, brilliant? Do we have to cage art in the metrics of neoliberal KPI’s?

The outcome is often the thought, fully expressed, in response to the probe, the world around us. Let work be art. Be creative, push envelopes. Be beyond click bait work. There is a difference between an artiste and a hustler. May be, be both. Be comfortable in the skin? Does running around help?

The journey matters, and the CV is only the byproduct. In the AI era, what one builds as a solution is the performance metric. New methodologies, new pedagogies to tackle real time issues in trouble shooting, project turnarounds and crisis management is the real deal. Value is delivered at the intersections of theory, praxis and reality. Be a tri sectoral athlete in the words of IR scholar Joseph Nye.

Too many people expect organisations to deliver when individuals don’t deliver on expectations themselves. It is like the common citizen in the Global South expecting the world out of the public sector institutions when capacity and finances are missing. Institutions are reflections of market realities, and do not operate in a separate universe.

Organisations are a sum of people and their conversations. We have to focus on the little wins, which make the big picture; delivering projects on time and budget, writing the winning proposal and making a better workplace where we spend most of our waking up hours.

Outcomes (we desire) converge when the little things are done well. To young graduates who pass on resumes to me for internships and jobs, I tell them; please understand what you want, as everything adds up. But I often see a desire not to learn but to have a slot filled in the resume. The hiring manager knows when a cv is designed, versus a skills based paper. Don’t gold plate your resume by fancy student government titles. Designation inflation is a malaise. Lead without a title, sounds familiar?

People survive and win in the market by knowing and learning on the go. Accept feedback graciously and learn. Make time for quality interactions and me time. Travel, not for Instagram but to understand a place. The sense of place is lost in the midst of the update. These are things I have gathered amongst the journey.

Travel far and wide, but most importantly within.

Understand the self, understand the world.

#sermonfrommysofa #pravachan #bhaktjano