The Margins Review · Culture-Centered Approach

  Desi Alert At the end of all her travelling, Shobhaa De comes home to Mumbai and writes the most revealing lines in either of her columns, and she has no idea she has done it. She is relieved. The airport is gorgeous, the immigration officers are polite and efficient, and best of all there are porters and loaders to carry bags that somehow weigh a ton. She has missed this abroad. She calls it a basic requirement rather than an indulgence, and says the absence of such service might make her rethink certain destinations. She means it as the tender gratitude of a tired senior citizen who has earned her comforts. It is the most honest sentence she writes in two columns of scolding. And the man who makes it true, the porter bent under her ton of luggage, is the one person she never once thinks to see. That is the whole problem, standing right next to her in a uniform. De has spent two columns cataloguing the sins of the loud desi. The pushing past the queue. The pack travelling tog...

  The Freeloader's Frame A small nation built its standing in the world on the things it refused to do. Washington came to Singapore to make it forget. There is a tell in the title Pete Hegseth now carries. He walked onto the stage at Singapore's Shangri-La Dialogue at the end of May not as Secretary of Defense but as Secretary of War, a cabinet name the Trump administration dug out of the era before the United States learned to disguise its intentions in softer language. People treat the change as theater. It is grammar. A government chooses its nouns the way an army chooses ground. Defense describes a crouch. War describes an appetite. The word announces, before any policy does, how the men running American power would like the century to be read: as a field of contest in which strength is the only language anyone is permitted to speak, and peace is merely the name we give to a balance held at gunpoint. What Hegseth delivered from that stage was less a speech than a litu...

  When Enough of Us Stand The last thing I wrote ended with a man alone in a doorway, which is to say it ended with me, and I meant it as defiance. If I am honest, it was also a little lonely. Then the essay went out into the world and the world wrote back. A message arrived in the small hours, from someone I have never met, in a city I will probably never see. I will stand with you, it said, and nothing more. I read it at my desk in Palmerston North with the house asleep around me and the Manawatū running dark past the window, and I felt the arithmetic of the thing shift under my feet. The doorway that had held one was now holding two. This is how it begins. It always begins this way, with a number so small it looks like nothing to the people who count in millions. One is easy to dismiss. One is a man shouting into a feed engineered to drown him. But one becomes two the moment a single other person decides the shouting is worth joining, and two is already a different kind of fac...

  Why I Stay There is a particular sound a phone makes when a swarm arrives. It is a stutter, a fast run of notifications that does not let up, that keeps coming while you hold the thing in your hand and watch your own name turn into a target. I have heard it more than once. I have learned what lives inside it. Death threats. My home address, posted for strangers to keep. The venues of my lectures, named so that someone might come. Rape threats aimed at the women in my life. The flat medieval promise that I will be hanged. I have read these in the small hours of a Palmerston North night, in a quiet house, with my children asleep down the hall and the Manawatū running dark past the window, and I have felt the precise thing the swarm is engineered to make a person feel, which is alone. I know how these swarms are built, because I study them for a living. I have watched a sitting member of parliament point the machinery at me and then sit back while it ran. That is the part people o...

  An Emmy & The Rage of the Few I learned of it before the house had woken. Autumn comes early to Palmerston North, and at that hour the light is the colour of weak tea, sliding low across the Manawatū. The dogs had not stirred. I was holding a phone, which is a foolish way to receive good news, and there it was. Prime Minister , the documentary about Dame the Rt. Hon. Jacinda Ardern, had taken the Emmy for best documentary. I have watched the film three times. It breaks me in the same place each time, and each time I let it, because some things are worth being broken by. I came to this country in 2018. When I was head hunted in 2017, I was Provost Chair Professor and Head of Communications and New Media at the esteemed National University of Singapore, and there were other offers in front of me, the kind that arrive on heavy letterhead and measure a man by his salary band and his citation count. I turned them down for a cluster of islands at the bottom of the world. I did it ...