Change Thinker

We live in an ironic era where five Bengali Muslim Workers are killed by militants in Kashmir, a Muslim majority state, sorry UT. They would have been under the scanner for NRC if they would have been in Assam or Karnataka and their Indian ness made suspect, but they died as one

As a stakeholder engagement specialist in the Khaleej working on social impact assessment work, forms of public consultation in the region are hardly understood under a western democratic lens. Twitter discourse in the Khaleej is robust and people are highly intelligent and opinionated. The Majlis is informal and nuanced, should not be read as a … More Majlis and Public Participation: The Khaleej Way

It is easy to breathe, to live Although, much harder to be alive Life is more than a checklist to tick When was the last time We world wait to read the paper And drink chai As if it was 1999?

You can take the desi khaleeji out of the Al Jazeera Al Arabiya, but not the Kabsa out of him. Pune has a large Arab student diaspora here, studying including Omanis and a large Gulf Return population as well. Gulf in South Asia. Wagid Zain.

There are writing projects which have staggered from 2012, with these projects piling up into massive amounts of field notes over the years. In 2017 I managed to complete a poetry collection, which is on my laptop somewhere unpublished, hoping to get a publisher or an agent to read it. The original book project has … More Writing, Representations and Voices

Migration of the middle class or the professional classes has been a theme undergirding major literary works such as Suketu Mehta’s new work, Mohsin Hamid and Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island. More than Digital Humanities, Migration Humanities as a genre should be formalised as Diaspora literature is a window into the multi local experience. Now where … More Understanding Migration Humanities

A lot of Bengali Muslims over the years have been working in Maharashtra along with other states right down to Kerala and also in the NCR belt. I have encountered with them in Gurgaon and now in Pune. I wonder if some academics study internal migration patterns. These data points also point to the lack … More The Bengali Muslim Conundrum

Had a conversation with a chatty Autowallah, who was in full sale mode with an attitude to overcharge on the pretext of Navratri. He was however critical of an old strongman from western Maharashtra, and very pro Modi, as he finds graft at the local level especially in hospitals reduced. ‘Na khauungaa, Na Kaanedunga’ seems … More Conversation with an Autowallah: Pune Diaries