Pembangunan: whose agenda?

After reading Farmer's account, I stayed silent for a long time; it pushed me into deep introspection. It reminded me of the displacement colony in Koraput. There are some unique tribal families living there in the colony. They were once very prosperous with acres of land and beautiful home in the ravine land irrigated by the Kolab river. Then came "Pembangunan". Orissa constructed the Upper Kolab hydroelectric project to electrify the capital towns and business hubs thousands of miles away and these families' houses, lands and villages were submerged by the Kolab dam reservoir. The villages are still visible when the water goes down, an eerie, beautiful sight. The families moved to a nearby place. They again dug up foundations and built their houses. "Pembangunan" came again in form of a huge factory which manufactured aircraft parts; the proud leaders declared that we have been blessed with the important project by the Indian government. It produced jobs, thousands and most of them needing skilled labour and a smattering of education, english, western education. The local tribals did not have that qualification, most qualified as daily laborers, at least they knew how to communicate with nature and so they worked to break earth, cut trees, make roads, buildings. The families had to make way for the factory and they were resettled in another hamlet. They again busied themselves in rebuilding their lives, some moved elsewhere, some went deeper into inaccessible jungles. The "resettled" families made good of their land and homes till the government decided to exploit the minerals in the mountain ranges. "Pembangunan" took over; the behemoth NALCO (National Aluminium Company) decided to exploit the Bauxite deposits in the mountains. Now there is a huge township, metalled roads, lights, electricity, english medium schools, modern markets, internet cafes and so on, all accoutrements of modernity. The tribal families have concrete roads, brick houses with fans, piped water, and stay in a huge colony called Nalco resettlement colony which they share with other resettled refugees from Bangladesh and migrants from neighbouring state Andhrapradesh. The colony is a hotbed of crime, disease, prostitution, gambling, liquor and so on. Certainly, "pembangunan" has done wonders. The area abounds with Acephies and Chouchous.

I still do not have the answer after reading all the excellent readings about culture, structure, marginalization, agency, privileging a medical approach, constitutive strategies, traditional medicines, embodiment etc..The current flavour is getting everyone on the table to agree on common approaches and framing strategies for the "poor", the "deprived"; and who is the "everyone"? All the dominant actors, the policy makers, implementers, (government, donor agencies, NGOs, UN organizations, learned academics, local intelligentsia, tribal leaders)....In today's society where do we effect the change? I do not think there is any meaning in articulating words like "center" and "periphery". These are for us, educated in critical theory and reading these excellent erudition. Quo Vadis...

I leave this unfinished as I am lost..lost in my search for answers however contested...

The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe

The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe An Indian in Aotearoa reflects on resistance, complicity, and the solidarities we have yet to build Mohan Jyoti Dutta I watched the haka. I watched it several times, in fact. Each time, I tried to sit with what I was feeling before reaching for what I was supposed to think. Let me be honest about who I am in this conversation, because that matters. I am an upper caste, upwardly mobile Indian man. I am a professor at a university in Aotearoa. I carry the accumulated privileges of Brahminical socialisation, of English-medium education, of institutional access that was never designed for the communities I now write about and alongside. I say this not as confession but as orientation — because where you stand shapes what you see, and I have learned, through years of working with communities at the margins, that the refusal to name your own location is itself a colonial habit. The haka directed at Parmjeet Parmar did not offend me. It ...

The Suit Walks the Corridor

The Suit Walks the Corridor At ten past nine on a Monday the corridor on the top floor of the administration building fills with the sound of expensive shoes. The carpet up here was laid in the last refurbishment and still gives slightly underfoot, the way a good hotel lobby does, and the doors along it close with the soft, well-engineered thud of a German car. Along this carpet, in the direction of the lift marked Executive, comes the suit. It comes in navy and in charcoal, in the odd daring pinstripe, in the female version too, a tailored jacket over a silk shell, and heels that announce themselves on the tile of the lift lobby a full three seconds before the person arrives. The suit carries a flat white from the good cafe, the one that closed the student cafe to open, and a lanyard that swings with the confidence of a thing that opens doors. The suit passes the framed founding professors, who were photographed in gowns and look, at this distance, like a row of disapproving pe...

Whiteness, NCA, and Distinguished Scholars

In a post made in response to the changes to how my discipline operates made by the Executive Committee of the largest organization of the discipline, the National Communication Association (NCA), one of the editors of a disciplinary journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs (RPA), Professor Martin J. Medhurst, a Distinguished Scholar of the discipline, calls out what he sees as the threat of identity (see below for his full piece published in the journal that he has edited for 20+ years, with 2019 SJR score of 0.27). In what he notes is a threat to the "scholarly merit" of the discipline, Professor Medhurst sets up a caricature of what he calls "identity." In his rhetorical construction of the struggles the NCA has faced over the years to find Distinguished Scholars of colour, he shares with us the facts. So let's look at the facts presented by this rhetor. It turns out, as a member of the Distinguished Scholar community of the NCA, Mr. Medhurst has problems with w...

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