satyalogue // Truthtalk
Anyone who has questions – big and small – about their world will find in Gandhian thinking a helpful and truthful lens through which to frame a response. While not intended as a definitive answer guide to all questions, this book does serve the reader who wants to wrestle with alternative choices.
For his admirers, Gandhiji, as we respectfully call him, continues to inspire. But what about for the other seven billion who think of him as a relic of history if they think of him at all? Is he still relevant in this 21st century, some 150 years after his birth? Do his fasting for justice and his fastidious attendance to truth make any sense in a time of fast food, slow justice, fake news, and alternative facts?
As long as the perplexing dualities of life – truthfulness/duplicity, war/peace, home/away, and change/continuity – are a part of the human condition, Gandhiji’s life remains a humanistic model for how to live, learn, and love. In Gandhiji’s autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth, he used experimentation to test his hypothesis and storytelling to bring the truth to life.
I’ve used a Q&A approach to be in truthful dialogue with readers across the following chapters:
“Prevarication and Manipulation” for queries about lying
“Plowing and Milking” for work questions
“Pita and Mata” for familial questions
“Policies and Machiavellianism” for political questions
“Pedagogy and Matriculation” for education questions
“Physical and Metaphysical” for philosophical questions
GLOBALIZATION, DIASPORA, AND WORK TRANSFORMATION
Using my life story of work and self-identity evolving over 4 decades lived across multiple countries and within numerous companies, I have developed a theory of diaspora and free-agency. Diaspora is established as a metaphor that illuminates the free-agent characteristics of globalization and work transformation. In moving the living theory toward actionable research, a set of 10 rules is developed to help postmodern knowledge workers navigate the evolving social contract between employers and employees. The following 3 rules particularly inform the mindsets of diasporic and free-agent lives:
Movement requires an ability to locate and dis-locate;
One must re-invent oneself in new contexts in order to maintain alignment with changing environments; and
One can retain self-identity – a sense of ancestral culture – while in the midst of re-invention.
P.S., Papa’s stories
A memoir of questions:
What stories have you been told about yourself as a baby?
What were your grandparents like?
What does being Indian-American mean to you?
What was your first big trip?
What things matter most to you in life?
What makes you happy?
double play: A novel
Traveling up and down Chicago’s elevated train system’s Red Line, a professor of sports journalism puzzles through a near-lynching of a peanut vendor at Wrigley Field. At first, the peanut vendor, Ernie, is hesitant to share much. What he does share includes the following: he played for the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro Leagues; he served his country’s military in the Korean War; after the war, his smooth-fielding and power-hitting attracted the attention of the Cubs ownership; he was destined to be one of the first ten Black baseball players in the Major Leagues at a time in America’s history when black lives mattered only so far as they entertained whites or enhanced the economic value of the country’s capitalist engine; and he never played a single game in Wrigley Field because he was convicted of murder.
The racist pain of the 1950s and 1960s is never distant and thus still relevant to the modern reader. During his 16 years behind bars, all Ernie is left with is a one-way correspondence with dead parents whose silent love sustains him. The professor believes he can learn something about Ernie through those letters; but like a worn-out shortstop with a tired arm on a cold April day in Chicago, Ernie is slow to warm up. The professor understands that he needs to build a relationship with Ernie; to do so, he vulnerably shares letters from his newlywed bride who is stuck in India due to the American government’s inequitable immigration laws.
Gradually vulnerability is reciprocated. Ernie shares his prison letters which reveal much: Ernie’s love for his parents; his introduction to prison life; his exposure to the Bahá'ís and Black Muslims; the friendships he made behind bars;; the existential power of poetry; and, most importantly, Ernie’s belief in his innocence. But the letters do not explain why Ernie was wrongfully convicted. For that understanding, the professor and Ernie must piece together elements of a Rashomon-like story.
(To be published by Third World Press in October 2024)