Goodbye to my neighbors in Kolkata

My neighbors and me bond over the clamour of our fears that our little groups voice into the air. Fears anxieties, insecurities. Dilemmas about belonging for example. The politics of description. The fight over names, their meaning and associated idioms. Living in Kolkata, a migrant is often described as a Bangladeshi. Mainly because of the history of migration from there.

Language is a cemmenting tool for community. I pick up on the intonation in the conversation by the sidewalk. It's animosity. Neighbors fighting among themselves, calling each other - voicing their expectations. To whom? Among ourselves to be sure but also I suppose to God. Understood here as both the total stranger to these mores while also being a complete insider, capable of breaking through them.

As a sociologist I study the structure of networks. The way life meamders along the banks of the streets, among new tenements. Children playing on streets, a carrom club in the corner illuminated by a single hanging bulb. Among more professional things of course.

But I don't believe you are truly alive when just obeying an order. Even then, you interpret them. Placing yourself as the one who may have to execute them. Taking responsibility for the act committed to. And trying to reconcile this tension in the ambient life that we traverse. 

Signs. How do we interpret them? A touch of the nose by a passerby in shorts and an afro, does it draw attention to the sense of smell? Tentativeness, is it a reaction to fear? These are the questions which concern the domains of semiotics and phenomenology.

Yet, there are those who would say that drifting into an examination of such 'intricacies' are best left to the ivory towers of the university. Forgetting, all the time that it is like any other building built by us, to serve purposes indigenous to the world we inhabit.

Where is alterity then? Difference? I would argue that it may we be omnipresent, and yet requires a labelling into forms, categories, words and idioms recognisable to us. For what you may ask? Always, for the self-enriching of life.

This is what I learn, hear and remember from my neighbourly acquaintances. 

Leaving for Hyderabad tomorrow morning. National Industrial Security Academy (NISA) Almost another universe. In the state of Telangana, India.