Some months back, a former colleague had an issue with my chai pictures, saying that these were irritating. Chai is not only a volatile drink, of flavour and of character as Aditi Sriram writes in her interview with Playright Ayad Akhter in Guernica in 2014, it is a distinctive sense of home for the migrant … More Chai as Migrant Metaphor
Blank spaces Road blocks Are dead ends Ripples of failure Flutter These are starts Growth Starts from nowhere
In the various technicolor masks We slip on, the performance of the office amphitheater The real self for a flicker Peeping through the various iterations Of mental costumes, Between meetings, small talk The performance of the ‘face’ In front of the open office Real work just about, happens Inspite of the mask Lean in, authenticity … More The Human Chatbot
Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Temporary People is the best migration oriented book on the Gulf and in general in a while. The power of this poetry and prose has an experiment texture but delivers the message about the Indian ness or the sheer lack of it once one has never lived in India, and the conception of … More Temporary People, by Deepak Unnikrishnan: A Tour De Force
Museums are repositories of a national narrative, a core register of the state. Having been associated with Oman for the past twenty five years, a visit to its National Museum opposite the Al Alam Palace is poignant especially on the extended National Day Weekend where Omani families, with tourists were in full force to understand … More National Museum of Oman: A Photo Essay
Ideologies are thought infrastructures, it’s nuts and bolts are implemented in how people think, that is routinely the politics of the text, the text book, the seminar circuit, the media information flows, and the intelligentsia who formulate these thoughts in the first place, as Marx said (paraphrasing him) ‘many have interpreted the world, the point … More Ideologies as contested spaces
Crossing the Tropic of Cancer into Sur, the historic Omani Trading Town on the Sea of Oman/Arabian Sea interface is a journey into the past and how well it juxtaposes with the contemporary reality of Oman as a shipping and tourism hub is a wonderful case study for Gulf Studies Scholars. I visited the unexplored … More Sur Fort: Photo Essay
In an ocean of opinions Where is the vague moral compass Contexts shuffle Realities splinter Converge and merge The I, We and the Us Traded in for positions On life’s chessboard Is it important For the ‘I’ To emerge?
Life is not a resume and obviously can’t be one that is accepted by hiring managers. It is as if we wrap our lives into lines on a resume. There is something called living as well. In all the conversation regarding re-skilling, automation, big or small data, deep learning and smart cities we tend to … More More than resume bullets
Survival, short hand for a migrant Residue of self Caste, Class,Faith, Race Find meaning In art In the words that are carved Sculptures of the mind To hold the person Deep within The world outside Needs paper Passport,Visa, Bank Statement To construct the self Borders and passport stamps Delineate the migrant In the amphitheater of … More Self.
