Finding Soho

Cultural differences between Australians and Americans can extend to and visibly play out in performance spaces. Australian audiences can expect performers to be ‘relaxed’, and to engage them in a jokey, jovial or even blasé manner. Australians might appreciate some self-deprecating humour and like artistes to not take themselves too seriously. They might giggle loudly during breaks in the music to provoke the performer on stage, for example - generally in a good natured way. Americans, on the other hand, can be much more earnest, serious, passionate and intense about their work and perhaps life in general. They might find the Aussie vibe slightly disconcerting. I’m not suggesting that Aussies are unserious. They are very focused and dedicated but appreciate good humour and a self-deprecating disposition, especially in performers and public figures. American performers tend to engage with audiences in a more earnest way. In general, for most of my life, I have also been an earnest and...

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...

I think the way in which we use the term Asian-Australian is important. The hyphenation is a critical part of that. The term evokes hybridity and interaction, rather than straightforward identification. It’s necessarily much more complex than either of its two components considered individually. An Asian-Australian, to me, is someone who is conscious of their migrant status, whatever stage of temporality or permanency their journey might be at, as well as of their continued investment in a new homeland. Asian-Australian is an intercultural concept rather than a strictly political one. It conveys a sense of coming-into-being and expansiveness that is quite distinct from the authoritative, established and assertive sense that underlies both strictly ‘Asian’ or ‘Australian’ identification. It conveys a sense of commitment to an ongoing project of discovery and negotiation. Is it a tentative concept? Some might argue that it is. But perhaps that is authentic to the experienc...

Link:  International Brand Forever 21 Just Copied The Kolla-Puri Chappals And What They Call It Is Hilarious! This is the kind of cultural appropriation that gets my back up. The sheer impossibility of enforcing any semblance of an IP claim when traditional crafts - learned, produced, marketed and transmitted within communal frameworks - are appropriated by giant MNCs is far more of a substantial concern than any of the other gimmicks that provoke debates around cultural appropriation. These products are sold by craftsmen as merchandise in their own geographically delimited markets,  so it's really a question of MNCs taking advantage of the artists' lack of market access and capitalising on (or 'stealing') their designs. But the legal or even philosophical dilemma here is, how can one address issues of ownership, proper attribution, etc., when no proper framework exists for the recognition of 'IP' (which is invariably a nebulous concept when one is talking...

The calm and joyful atmosphere at the banks of the river Main in Frankfurt, where large and small groups of people sat together, chatted, drank beer, ate their picnics, played music and relaxed. The large Hauptbanhof with its constantly shifting flow of passengers, and innumerable small shops selling a large variety of sandwiches and other small eats at very reasonable prices. The large numbers of foreigners hanging out at the train station, with the station serving as a site of both recreation and reception for friends, family and other contacts. The beautiful river Rhine with its ceaseless flow of ferries and cruises, carrying both passengers and cargo up and down the river. The constant rush of trains on the tracks along the river, connecting all the villages and towns in the Rhine Valley. The large numbers of old medieval castles dotting the hills flanking the river. The gorgeous villages of Bacharach and St. Goar in the Rhine Valley, with their old castles and old houses...

Published in Peril Learning All my life, English served as the only language that I could read and write reasonably well – the only language that I could express complex thoughts in; the only language through which I could feel deeply; the language that I could argue in; and the language that formed the basis of my critical faculties. My grasp of my two other primary languages was always less than adequate for any of those higher-order tasks. The foundations for this were laid during school.   However, in school, even though English was the medium of instruction and we studied English Literature quite seriously, our learning of the language was flawed. The absence of an organic link between what we read and how we spoke reflected this most markedly. While we read (or were supposed to read) Wordsworth, Dickens, Shakespeare, and all the rest of the “traditional” canon—our curriculum was developed by English classicists in the early twentieth century, and changed very margin...