Finally visited Khotachiwadi - a famous East Indian heritage village today in South Bombay - today, and I think I need another visit to understand better the complex feelings it evoked in me.

Sending this Kuswar your way this Christmas from the EIMC family ❤️

(Kuswar is this plate laden with sweets and also the custom of exchanging Christmas sweets with friends, family and neighbours that many Christian groups - the East Indians one of them - follow in India).

There's no credible Opposition. So people are protesting in the streets.
There's no credible media outlet. So people are using social media to put out their own coverage of the protests.
This is India.
#CABProtests #IndiaRejectsCAB

Getting ready for today's protest at August Kranti Maidan, by ensuring:

- clothes are nondescript & comfortable
- comfortable shoes
- phone emptied of important data
- enough water
- Bridgefy's installed (in case of a communication blackout)
- traffic, safety & legal information is at hand

Have I missed anything?

#CAAProtest #India #Mumbai

Waiting for my community’s leaders as well as my religious spokespersons to speak out against the Citizenship Amendment Bill and express some sort of solidarity with the protesting students, but sadly, most of them campaigned for the BJP during the recent elections and it’s going to be crickets for a while. Sigh.

#Mumbai

One of the nicest things to hear at airports in this day and age of globalisation and migration is surnames from the subcontinent pronounced awkwardly yet determinedly by mouths not used to the tongue twisting usually required for our names, over the announcement systems.

You’re doing a good job, Sheila/Bob!

@indrani_robbins I’m so very happy to hear this! Excited to see what you make of the draping and the saree - so much fabric to work with too.

Is it alright if I share your toot on the EIMC IG?

@ashwin I’m so happy to hear this!

Please, please do comment if you see any cultural similarities or have any observations to express on anything I share! Shared cultures and practices are also some of the things I want to draw attention to with my work - we don’t talk about this at all, and I would like to help change this 🙂

But for those keen to catch some East Indian cultural action this month, I did share December’s East Indian event list on the EIMC Instagram https://www.instagram.com/p/B5myx92FWOa/?igshid=h5z6pqiocwjo

It’s chock-full of things happening in the US, and Bombay and you don’t even need to be an EI to attend a lot of the events mentioned in there.

#Mumbai #India #EIMCEvents

Posting on Mastodon has taken a backseat as I get ready to wrap up my day job and take off on a much-needed vacation.

Where I will continue to look for stories and unspoken histories anyway, so now that I say it aloud, it’s not really a vacation 🤷🏻‍♀️

A room full of college going women and their professors shut up Arnab Goswami for 15 minutes and didn't give him room to talk.

I am going to hang on to this memory for hope in the coming times.

@ashwin hello, fellow Konkankar (is that the right term?) 😄
My community is indigenous to Bombay and we are spread all over Thane, Raigad, Vasai and Mumbai.

Our heritage includes Portuguese, British and local Maharashtrian influences and farming and fishing are still followed by many in the countryside and coastal belts.

You can get a glimpse of our culture on the EIMC Instagram (same handle) :)

Countering all the depressing stuff coming out of Maharashtra with this colourful photo.

About an East Indian lugra wearer from Bassein/Vasai (a tiny town in Western Maharashtra).

https://www.instagram.com/p/B5UkrYxlQoa/

Bonus: the very ornate entrance door (in the background) from the 16th Century shrine built by the Spanish Dominican Missionaries in 1577 (we have some super-old churches in Bassein).

Look up the #EIMCLugraLegends series on IG for more of our EI traditional saree: https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/eimclugralegends/

@AKanisetti @aadvaark I hear ya. Hope this one turns out a better one 🍀

@AKanisetti @aadvaark Her journey is a nice reminder to me of the better aspects of online communities and the potential small groups have for positive change 🙂

@AKanisetti a lady from Brisbane once found some old money under the lino in the house she had newly moved into & she asked a bunch of people on fb what they thought about it.

The search turned into a crowd-sourced attempt to uncover the house’s history and then became an fb page, the members of which helped her turn it into a book & I met this lady and she turned out to be a Mangalorean & she is now one of my personal indie researcher heroines too 🦸‍♀️

#Delhi friends! Hope to see you at this today - an interactive art Installation I've done with some very talented colleagues. 10 am to 7 pm or so at Max Mueller Bhavan Delhi

Cliff Richards was Anglo Indian and remains one of the most beloved of Western musicians among the #BombayCatlik crowd.

And that is pretty much why I now have an LP of the soundtrack from a movie he acted in rather than an LP if Elvis (whom I adore more).

#Bombay #India #Mumbai

@Surabhi @Dasbolshevik very true. This is what happened in a place like Bombay too. I saw community leaders, despite being from minority communities, campaigning heavily for BJP.

I also saw educated folks justifying BJP candidates because of what ‘progress’ they have made for the constituency.

@hackiechan sounds a lot like gaslighting.