A post which I wrote on my blog 6 years back has a generous comment today.

Writing The City: The Tour Bus As The Lens

One of the reasons why I keep writing

Thinking of Stone Town.

The Zanzibar discourse at ZMO Berlin

I grew up with the Al Kindi, Al Harthy, Al Rawhy and Al Barwani in Masqat. I worked under an Al Rawahi, and they are the sharpest one can be.

Batu Caves is the performance of heritage and the performance of the Hindu Faith. The Hindu Tamil diaspora comes together with Chinese Buddhists with migrant from Nepal, India and Bangladesh to mark their identity where the tourism gentrification is clear as a locus of income generation.

A clear favourite with North Indian Tourists as a Kartikeya Mandir though.

A continuum of the Indic Sacred Geography.

A site of Malaysian/Global Hinduism and the wider Diaspora.

Batu Caves.

June 2024.

This trip is a akin to a trip back home and a pilgrimage, the space and the teachers who shaped me, the masters in engineering, the PhD coursework in Human Geography with masters of the discipline while doing work on a SSHRC research project on labor and automation, the work has been published in an Antipode paper, super chuffed to have my name there. I also was a research staff at a health communication think tank at CNM FASS on a Bangladeshi migrant worker food security project for a couple of years.

A long term relationship, which keeps giving.

It was great to meet friends today as well, and learn from their wisdom.