Finding Soho

Media reporting of stories that involve injuries and trauma are always (necessarily) incomplete. Injuries can be incidental to the story or narrative that is being focalised, and, as such, may appear as a vestigial detail in a report. It is well-nigh impossible to capture the magnitude of the impact on each individual casualty. The word 'casualty' signals that disturbing (but unavoidable) semantic quality of being reducible to a statistic - a part of a tally. A report about a terrorist attack or a mass casualty incident will include some details of the trauma inflicted on a few victims or survivors, but these threadbare details are minuscule and inevitably inadequate markers of the 'reality' of the experience and impact. It is impossible to convey the magnitude of the experience of injury and trauma, and it is completely unrealistic to expect to understand what it was like for each individual person. However, that desire to know and sense of needing to know and underst...

[A blog in progress...] A realisation  In India, the symbolic seems to have greater resonance than the material. By this I mean that the power and potency of symbolic markers, gestures, signage and 'acts', inter alia , is greater than that of material markers, conditions and 'acts'. This is not to suggest that material conditions can be ignored or that they are generally de-prioritised in relation to the symbolic. Certainly not - and it'd be remiss of me to downplay the importance of material conditions as well as the primacy of (what used to be called, with a modicum of dismissive-ness) 'materialism' (essentially commercialism) in contemporary Indian culture. But on a subterranean and more fundamental level, questions of a symbolic nature and significance resonate in a way that questions of a material nature do not.  This is definitely not a contemporary phenomenon but a longstanding one. What does it mean exactly? Well, that is difficult to spell ou...