DRAMA EDITOR Neilesh Bose Neilesh Bose is an historian, theatre artist, critic, and the author of Recasting the Region: Language, Culture, and Islam in Colonial Bengal , among others. He is Associate Professor of History and Canada Research Chair of Global and Comparative History at the University of Victoria. DRAMA EDITOR WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

Masthead GRID LIST ASSOCIATE EDITORS Hira Azmat Miriyam Ilavenil Vrinda Jagota DESIGN DIRECTOR Anita Zehra SENIOR EDITORS Sabika Abbas Nazish Chunara Sarah Eleazar Abeer Hoque Nur Nasreen Ibrahim Naib Mian Mushfiq Mohamed Mehr Un Nisa Shubhanga Pandey Mahmud Rahman Zoya Rehman Vamika Sinha Zahra Yarali WEB DESIGNER Ammar Hassan Uppal LEAD ILLUSTRATOR Mahnoor Azeem ART EDITORS Soumya Dhulekar Shreyas R Krishnan Clare Patrick Priyanka Kumar DESIGNERS Hafsa Ashfaq Mukul Chakravarthi Prithi Khalique Neha Mathew Divya Nayar DESIGN EDITORS Ali Godil Mira Khandpur DRAMA EDITORS Neilesh Bose Esthappen S FICTION EDITORS Rita Banerjee Kartika Budhwar Ahsan Butt Jever Kohli-Mariwala Hananah Zaheer MULTIMEDIA EDITOR Zeeshaan Nabi POETRY EDITORS Zara Suhail Mannan Chandramohan S Palvashay Sethi ADVISORY EDITORS Senna Ahmad Vishakha Darbha Aditya Desai Aparna Gopalan Aruni Kashyap Aishwarya Kumar Sarah Thankam Mathews Tisya Mavuram Seyhr Qayum Sana Shah Zuneera Shah Hasanthika Sirisena FACT CHECKERS Sameen Aziz Uzair Rizvi Aliya Farrukh Shaikh NON-FICTION EDITORS Kaashif Hajee Miriyam Ilavenil Shahzaib Raja Jeevan Ravindran Aisha Tahir Zobia Haq BOARD OF DIRECTORS Manan Ahmed Asif Kamil Ahsan Tehani Ariyaratne Gaiutra Bahadur Aditya Desai Nur Nasreen Ibrahim NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati Meena Kandasamy Rajiv Mohabir Sumana Roy Tooba Syed Suchitra Vijayan Ather Zia Chief Editor Iman Iftikhar FOUNDER Kamil Ahsan Chief Editor Iman Iftikhar Associate Editor Hira Azmat Associate Editor Miriyam Ilavenil Associate Editor Vrinda Jagota Senior Editor Sabika Abbas SENIOR EDITOR Zoya Rehman Senior Editor Nazish Chunara SENIOR EDITOR Sarah Eleazar SENIOR EDITOR Abeer Hoque SENIOR EDITOR Nur Nasreen Ibrahim SENIOR EDITOR Naib Mian SENIOR EDITOR Mushfiq Mohamed SENIOR EDITOR Mehr Un Nisa SENIOR EDITOR Shubhanga Pandey SENIOR EDITOR Mahmud Rahman SENIOR EDITOR Vamika Sinha SENIOR EDITOR Zahra Yarali WEB DESIGNER Ammar Hassan Uppal DESIGN DIRECTOR Anita Zehra Art Editor Priyanka Kumar LEAD ILLUSTRATOR Mahnoor Azeem ART EDITOR Soumya Dhulekar ART EDITOR Shreyas R Krishnan ART EDITOR Clare Patrick DESIGNER Hafsa Ashfaq DESIGNER Mukul Chakravarthi DESIGNER Prithi Khalique DESIGNER Neha Mathew DESIGNER Divya Nayar DESIGN EDITOR Ali Godil DESIGN EDITOR Mira Khandpur DRAMA EDITOR Esthappen S DRAMA EDITOR Neilesh Bose FICTION EDITOR Rita Banerjee FICTION EDITOR Ahsan Butt FICTION EDITOR Kartika Budhwar FICTION EDITOR Jever Kohli-Mariwala FICTION EDITOR Hananah Zaheer MULTIMEDIA EDITOR Zeeshaan Nabi NON-FICTION EDITOR Kaashif Hajee NON-FICTION EDITOR Shahzaib Raja NON-FICTION EDITOR Jeevan Ravindran NON-FICTION EDITOR Aisha Tahir POETRY EDITOR Zara Suhail Mannan POETRY EDITOR Chandramohan S POETRY EDITOR Palvashay Sethi FACT CHECKER Sameen Aziz FACT CHECKER Uzair Rizvi FACT CHECKER Aliya Farrukh Shaikh ADVISORY EDITOR Senna Ahmad ADVISORY EDITOR Vishakha Darbha ADVISORY EDITOR Aditya Desai ADVISORY EDITOR Aparna Gopalan ADVISORY EDITOR Aruni Kashyap ADVISORY EDITOR Aishwarya Kumar ADVISORY EDITOR Sarah Thankam Mathews ADVISORY EDITOR Tisya Mavuram ADVISORY EDITOR Seyhr Qayum ADVISORY EDITOR Sana Shah ADVISORY EDITOR Zuneera Shah ADVISORY EDITOR Hasanthika Sirisena FOUNDER Kamil Ahsan BOARD MEMBER Tehani Ariyaratne BOARD MEMBER Manan Ahmed Asif BOARD MEMBER Gaiutra Bahadur BOARD MEMBER NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati BOARD MEMBER Meena Kandasamy BOARD MEMBER Rajiv Mohabir BOARD MEMBER Sumana Roy BOARD MEMBER Tooba Syed BOARD MEMBER Suchitra Vijayan BOARD MEMBER Ather Zia

SENIOR EDITOR Mushfiq Mohamed MUSHFIQ MOHAMED is a lawyer, writer, and activist based in London. SENIOR EDITOR WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

ARTIST Nazmus Sadat NAZMUS SADAT is a freelance artist and a student at Dhaka University's Department of Drawing and Painting. ARTIST WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

ARTIST Arulraj Ulaganathan ARULRAJ ULAGANATHAN is a member of the Malaiyaga Tamil tea plantation worker community, and an artist. His work has previously been exhibited at the JDA Perera Gallery, the Kochi Muziris Student Biennale, and Colomboscope. His most recent solo exhibition, "A Life in Tea" at Barefoot Gallery Colombo, combines elements from the tea estates, such as name cards, tea pruning knives, and bruised feet. ARTIST WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

Solidarity failed when it came to a dire Afghan refugee crisis, decades in the making. THE VERTICAL Everyone Failed Us Solidarity failed when it came to a dire Afghan refugee crisis, decades in the making. VOL. 2 ISSUE 1 OP-ED AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Photograph courtesy of Arash Azizzada (November 2019). ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Photograph courtesy of Arash Azizzada (November 2019). SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Op-Ed Afghanistan 24th Feb 2023 Op-Ed Afghanistan Refugee Crisis US Imperialism The Failure of the Diaspora Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. “A group of women leaders are badly in danger and one of them is my mom. I really searching for a person who can help us. They attack our home at first…. I hope you can help us. Every one of us really get depressed, please help us to get out of here.” THE BARRAGE of messages I receive, like the one above from western Afghanistan on almost a daily basis has not stopped, even a year later. Desperate daily emails from Afghans seeking refuge and safety flood our inboxes. Some are social activists, human rights defenders, former interpreters, and women leaders at risk of retribution from the Taliban. Other marginalized groups such as Hazaras and Shias have already been victims of ethnic cleansing by the Taliban and remain targets of ISIS attacks. Women activists have been disappeared by the Taliban authorities. Afghans seeking evacuation hold onto hope in what seems to be a hopeless situation. No longer expecting the international community to come to their rescue, for governments and institutions to do what they’re supposed to do, they rely on community organizers like myself and others. For two decades, America bragged about what it was building in Afghanistan. Last summer, the “Afghanistan project” was exposed for the facade that it was: a hollow rentier-state that only held ever legitimacy with Western donors and not with the Afghan people. Despite obvious bubbles of progress where hope flourished amidst the violence, the impending threat of a drone strike or Taliban suicide blast was always around the corner. Some rural areas were battered and mired in misery due to violence and poverty; others flourished, led by Afghan women and marginalized communities. The only constant was never-ending conflict. It seems as if the U.S. built a house of cards in Afghanistan, created in its own image, a house that started falling when the chains of dependency were challenged. The alliance with human rights abusers, the elevation of notorious pedophiles, and funding of endemic corruption brought back to power an oppressive, authoritarian regime that is erasing women, marginalized ethnic groups, and the disabled from public and daily life. The U.S. ran prisons where innocent Afghans were tortured. Entire villages were wiped off the map, and this was excused away as collateral damage. The U.S. spent years telling Afghans to pursue their dreams, break barriers, and challenge cultural norms. Then, it turned its back on them and betrayed them. Perhaps those of us who dreamt of a better Afghanistan were at fault for having expectations of a country whose very existence was kickstarted by genocide, a country where American presidents attempt brazen coups and its own citizens storm its political headquarters. The grim reality that we bore witness to these past few months is one that anyone who has paid attention to Afghanistan could have seen coming. There is even a U.S. agency–the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR)--which is dedicated to overseeing how reconstruction money was used in Afghanistan. In report after report, year after year, quarter after quarter, SIGAR wrote about the ghosts that the U.S. created–schools and hospitals that didn’t exist and a 300,000-man army that only functioned on paper. The Washington Post even devoted a series titled “The Afghanistan Papers, ” to showcase how policymakers and Pentagon officials had lied and deceived the American people about its success and accomplishments for 20 successive years. Nobody cared. The failure to value Afghan lives, however, lies not just with policymakers and elected officials. Certainly, the list of those responsible for the current situation in Afghanistan is long, ranging from Afghan elites to American elected officials from both parties going back four decades. Administration after administration has deprioritized Afghan lives and centered the needs of American hegemony. Congress held hearings on Afghanistan and yet rarely featured any Afghans. Policy discussions on Afghanistan in Washington D.C. at influential think tanks left out Afghans entirely. Afghans were left invisible in an occupation that lasted so long that it became not the “forever war” but rather the “forgotten war.” Afghanistan had disappeared from the psyche of the American people. Even when SIGAR released a report on rampant corruption that was wasting billions or when the Washington Post talked about lie after lie coming from the Pentagon, America just didn’t seem to care. The right-wing was too busy destroying democracy, the Democratic party was too busy fundraising from defense contractors, and the anti-war Left was too white to put Afghans and other impacted communities at the forefront. In our own Afghan American community, too many in our diaspora were profiting off the occupation. Their kids will go to prestigious American colleges, while Afghan girls will not be able to go to school at all and are robbed of a future. An international audience did finally pay attention to us last summer. American media, though, centered on the feelings of almost a million veterans who served in Afghanistan rather than asking Afghans how a withdrawal would impact them. The images of Afghans clinging onto the bottom of a military cargo plane had the world hooked. What does it say about our humanity that it took those tragic images for everyone to ask what we can do to help? For just a few days, people across the globe valued Afghan life. But moments like that are fleeting–Afghan history is littered with broken promises. Some of us have read enough history to know that the international community will not learn the lessons of its failure in Afghanistan and begin centering on the needs of the Afghan people. The Taliban spends every day perfecting its repression while the world has moved on, despite empty tweets and statements of solidarity. Today, as a year has passed since the chaotic withdrawal, wide-ranging sanctions on Afghanistan and theft of Afghan assets by the U.S. continue to inflict immense pain on innocent Afghan people, causing a humanitarian crisis that will likely lead to mass-scale death through malnutrition and starvation, a policy that disproportionately impacts Afghan girls and women. The United States’ attitude remains the same: focusing only on self-interest, even if it harms Afghans, except now it is done through economic warfare rather than through bombs built by defense contractor companies like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. Afghans deserve justice and reparations for the harm America has caused in my home country. Despite that vision for the future, what America leaves behind are closed immigration pathways and a desire to pretend Afghans don’t exist in the first place. Perhaps if a few more Afghans clung onto a plane leaving the Kabul airport, someone would care. ∎ More Fiction & Poetry: Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5

Author and translator Jenny Bhatt in conversation with Editor Kamil Ahsan. COMMUNITY Authenticity & Exoticism Author and translator Jenny Bhatt in conversation with Editor Kamil Ahsan. Jenny Bhatt Often when we get invited to public arenas, we end up having to talk about immigration, or discrimination—and we never really get to talk about craft. RECOMMENDED: The Shehnai Virtuoso and Other Stories , the first substantive English translation of the Gujarati short story pioneer, Dhumketu (1892–1965 .) The first book-length Gujarati to English translation published in the US, translated by Jenny Bhatt. Often when we get invited to public arenas, we end up having to talk about immigration, or discrimination—and we never really get to talk about craft. RECOMMENDED: The Shehnai Virtuoso and Other Stories , the first substantive English translation of the Gujarati short story pioneer, Dhumketu (1892–1965 .) The first book-length Gujarati to English translation published in the US, translated by Jenny Bhatt. SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Clare Patrick (Our) Worlds and (Plant) Wisdoms Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Interview Dallas Diaspora Short Stories Debut Authors Writing After Loss L.L. McKinney Gujarat Riots Gujarati Modi Kuchibhotla Hindutva Paratext Authenticity Exoticism Desi Books Internationalist Solidarity Literary Solidarity Community Building Translation Affect Personal History Perspective JENNY BHATT is a writer, literary translator, and book critic. She is the founder of Desi Books , a global forum that showcases South Asian literature from the world over. She teaches creative writing at Writing Workshops Dallas and the PEN America Emerging Voices Fellowship Program. She is the author of Each of Us Killers: Stories (7.13 Books, 2020) and translated Ratno Dholi: Dhumketu’s Best Short Stories (HarperCollins India; Oct 2020), which was shortlisted for the 2021 PFC-VoW Book Awards. Her nonfiction has been published in various venues including NPR, The Washington Post, BBC Culture, The Atlantic, Publishers Weekly, Dallas Morning News, Literary Hub, Poets & Writers, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Star Tribune, and more. Sign up for her weekly newsletter, We Are All Translators here 4 Sept 2020 Interview Dallas 4th Sep 2020 Fictions of Unknowability Torsa Ghosal 28th Feb Chats Ep. 9 · On the Essay Collection “Southbound” Anjali Enjeti 19th May Kashmiri ProgRock and Experimentation as Privilege Zeeshaan Nabi 21st Dec Dissident Kid Lit Saira Mir · Shelly Anand · Vashti Harrison · Simran Jeet Singh 20th Dec Nation-State Constraints on Identity & Intimacy Chaitali Sen 17th Dec On That Note:

In the 2010s, local blessing pills made in the Arunachal Pradesh town of Tawang were replaced by those made on the Indian mainland. The shift in production is also a story of nationalist transformations in this borderland. THE VERTICAL Tawang's Blessing Pills In the 2010s, local blessing pills made in the Arunachal Pradesh town of Tawang were replaced by those made on the Indian mainland. The shift in production is also a story of nationalist transformations in this borderland. Bikash K. Bhattacharya Spend a week traversing circuitous trails, deep gorges, and high mountain passes in Arunachal Pradesh of the recent past, and you might have come across something otherworldly. Situated atop a hill in a small town called Tawang, a region that has long been disputed between India and China, is a majestic 400-year-old monastery with intricate and colorful artwork. It is the largest Tibetan Buddhist monastery in India. Every three years, monks and volunteers here would chant the mani dungyur mantra one hundred million times. They would do so to bless mani rilbu , red globule-size pills made from roasted barley flour, herbs, and a fermenting agent called phab gyun . “We would sun-dry these pills for weeks and chant the mani dungyur mantra round the clock seeking blessings from the deity Avalokiteshvara,” recalls Rinchin Norbu, an octogenarian who volunteered in the Tawang monastery in the 1960s. These pills, which were highly valued by Tibetan Buddhists and took weeks to make, were eventually distributed to the public because they were believed to ensure the well-being of the people. The practice continued until the 2010s when these local blessing pills were replaced by ones made on the Indian mainland. Intriguingly, this shift in production also tells the story of nationalist transformations of this borderland. In 1959, Tawang became a major asylum route for Tibetans fleeing Chinese occupation . The 14th Dalai Lama entered India via Tawang and a large number of Tibetan refugees who followed him settled here. Thus, the population of the region grew to include Indigenous Himalayan tribes who follow Tibetan Buddhism as well as ethnic Tibetan refugees. Upon settling in India, Tibetan refugees started rebuilding famous Tibetan monasteries across the country, from Himachal Pradesh in the north to Karnataka in the south west. These monasteries produced various blessing pills of their own, which started to circulate among the Himalayan Buddhists. They have become so popular since the late 1990s that they have replaced the mani rilbu made by the Tawang Monastery. Eventually, by 2010, the Tawang Monastery decided to stop making mani rilbu due to lack of demand. Thus, Tawang blessing pills, among the most prominent locally-produced Tibetan “power objects ’ in the region, disappeared. Today, Rinchin Norbu mourns the disappearance of the Tawang mani rilbu tradition. But his 37-year old son Leki Wangchu, who is an ardent supporter of India’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) party, says he has always preferred blessing pills produced by Tibetan monasteries in mainland India over Tawang’s mani rilbu. “The pills from Dharamsala [Himachal Pradesh] are produced by doctors and monks trained in Sowa Rigpa [Tibetan medicine]. Most people these days choose these national jinden [pills] made by Sowa Rigpa experts rather than local mani rilbu. The mani rilbu produced in Tawang Monastery was only a local tradition brought over from Tibet by some monk in the nineteenth century,” Leki tells me emphasizing the ‘Indianness’ of the mani rilbu from Dharamsala in contrast to the obscure Tibetan origin of Tawang mani rilbu. Sowa Rigpa was recognized by the Indian government as an “Indian system of medicine” back in 2010. The popularity of the practice is rising across India following its government recognition. Anthropologist Steven Kloos has captured in rich ethnographic details the tussle between the Himalayan Tibetan Buddhists and the exiled Tibetan community in India over the ownership of Sowa Rigpa. He wrote in the journal Medical Anthropology Today , “While Tibetan medicine had been known and practiced for centuries in the Tibetan-influenced Indian Himalayan regions, it was only with the arrival of Tibetan refugees in India in 1959 and their subsequent institutionalization of Tibetan medicine there that this health tradition developed into a ‘medical system’ with sufficient standards, popularity, and political clout to be recognized by the Indian state.” While Leki Wangchu attributes the decline of Tawang mani rilbu to the rising popularity of standardized Sowa Rigpa medicine, the disappearance of various local, spatialized care practices is also triggered by the rise of right-wing nationalism in the region. In the last two decades, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangha (RSS), the ruling party in India and its affiliated cultural organization that champion Hindu majoritarian religious and cultural nationalism, have made a strong ideological inroads in Arunachal Pradesh. As their vision of ‘greater India’ gains acceptance in this borderland, there is an increasing tendency among the locals to assert “Indian” identity through various means, including through purchase of commodities made in India or consumption of cultural products associated with the Indian mainland. Sowa Rigpa's increasing popularity rests to a considerable extent on its supposed “Indianness” following its recognition by the Indian government. For old-timers like Rinchin Norbu, however, the locally made mani rilbu was much more than just a medicine. It was a care practice deeply rooted in the relations humans and local deities share in this landscape and their local understandings of disease etiology. People here believe in a range of deities and spirits connected to mountains, rivers, and other geographical features of the landscape, such as yulha (land deity), tsen, and nyen (deities of the mountain). Some of these deities are like human beings with worldly emotions such as anger and jealousy. “If you contaminate the dwellings of yulha or tsen, or offend them by visiting their places in ungodly hours, they may catch you and cause illnesses such as skin disease and nerve pain,” Rinchin Norbu tells me, “If you eat mani rilbu the spirit will leave you.” Not only did mani rilbu help the local people navigate the anxieties of unpredictable encounters with local deities and spirits, but it was a traditional way of co-production of care in a specific landscape. “The production of Tawang mani rilbu itself was a localized collaborative process between monks, nuns, and lay people, as well as Avalokiteshvara, the divinity that blessed these pills,” writer Yeshe Dorje Thongchi, an acclaimed writer and novelist from Arunachal Pradesh explained to me. In contrast, Rinchin Norbu says, the blessing pills brought over from outside are “just medicines” with no relations to the landscape. “They aren’t as effective as the Tawang mani rilbu we used to make simply because these pills [and their makers] don’t know the local deities causing illnesses in our bodies.” The rise of Hindu nationalism in India has triggered new spiritual practices intended to reify a sense of homogeneous “Indianness.” They often emerge at the expense of long-standing local traditions that relate to place, community, and tradition. The replacement of Tawang mani rilbu by blessing pills made by Sowa Rigpa practitioners from the Indian mainland is just one of many such examples.∎ Spend a week traversing circuitous trails, deep gorges, and high mountain passes in Arunachal Pradesh of the recent past, and you might have come across something otherworldly. Situated atop a hill in a small town called Tawang, a region that has long been disputed between India and China, is a majestic 400-year-old monastery with intricate and colorful artwork. It is the largest Tibetan Buddhist monastery in India. Every three years, monks and volunteers here would chant the mani dungyur mantra one hundred million times. They would do so to bless mani rilbu , red globule-size pills made from roasted barley flour, herbs, and a fermenting agent called phab gyun . “We would sun-dry these pills for weeks and chant the mani dungyur mantra round the clock seeking blessings from the deity Avalokiteshvara,” recalls Rinchin Norbu, an octogenarian who volunteered in the Tawang monastery in the 1960s. These pills, which were highly valued by Tibetan Buddhists and took weeks to make, were eventually distributed to the public because they were believed to ensure the well-being of the people. The practice continued until the 2010s when these local blessing pills were replaced by ones made on the Indian mainland. Intriguingly, this shift in production also tells the story of nationalist transformations of this borderland. In 1959, Tawang became a major asylum route for Tibetans fleeing Chinese occupation . The 14th Dalai Lama entered India via Tawang and a large number of Tibetan refugees who followed him settled here. Thus, the population of the region grew to include Indigenous Himalayan tribes who follow Tibetan Buddhism as well as ethnic Tibetan refugees. Upon settling in India, Tibetan refugees started rebuilding famous Tibetan monasteries across the country, from Himachal Pradesh in the north to Karnataka in the south west. These monasteries produced various blessing pills of their own, which started to circulate among the Himalayan Buddhists. They have become so popular since the late 1990s that they have replaced the mani rilbu made by the Tawang Monastery. Eventually, by 2010, the Tawang Monastery decided to stop making mani rilbu due to lack of demand. Thus, Tawang blessing pills, among the most prominent locally-produced Tibetan “power objects ’ in the region, disappeared. Today, Rinchin Norbu mourns the disappearance of the Tawang mani rilbu tradition. But his 37-year old son Leki Wangchu, who is an ardent supporter of India’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) party, says he has always preferred blessing pills produced by Tibetan monasteries in mainland India over Tawang’s mani rilbu. “The pills from Dharamsala [Himachal Pradesh] are produced by doctors and monks trained in Sowa Rigpa [Tibetan medicine]. Most people these days choose these national jinden [pills] made by Sowa Rigpa experts rather than local mani rilbu. The mani rilbu produced in Tawang Monastery was only a local tradition brought over from Tibet by some monk in the nineteenth century,” Leki tells me emphasizing the ‘Indianness’ of the mani rilbu from Dharamsala in contrast to the obscure Tibetan origin of Tawang mani rilbu. Sowa Rigpa was recognized by the Indian government as an “Indian system of medicine” back in 2010. The popularity of the practice is rising across India following its government recognition. Anthropologist Steven Kloos has captured in rich ethnographic details the tussle between the Himalayan Tibetan Buddhists and the exiled Tibetan community in India over the ownership of Sowa Rigpa. He wrote in the journal Medical Anthropology Today , “While Tibetan medicine had been known and practiced for centuries in the Tibetan-influenced Indian Himalayan regions, it was only with the arrival of Tibetan refugees in India in 1959 and their subsequent institutionalization of Tibetan medicine there that this health tradition developed into a ‘medical system’ with sufficient standards, popularity, and political clout to be recognized by the Indian state.” While Leki Wangchu attributes the decline of Tawang mani rilbu to the rising popularity of standardized Sowa Rigpa medicine, the disappearance of various local, spatialized care practices is also triggered by the rise of right-wing nationalism in the region. In the last two decades, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangha (RSS), the ruling party in India and its affiliated cultural organization that champion Hindu majoritarian religious and cultural nationalism, have made a strong ideological inroads in Arunachal Pradesh. As their vision of ‘greater India’ gains acceptance in this borderland, there is an increasing tendency among the locals to assert “Indian” identity through various means, including through purchase of commodities made in India or consumption of cultural products associated with the Indian mainland. Sowa Rigpa's increasing popularity rests to a considerable extent on its supposed “Indianness” following its recognition by the Indian government. For old-timers like Rinchin Norbu, however, the locally made mani rilbu was much more than just a medicine. It was a care practice deeply rooted in the relations humans and local deities share in this landscape and their local understandings of disease etiology. People here believe in a range of deities and spirits connected to mountains, rivers, and other geographical features of the landscape, such as yulha (land deity), tsen, and nyen (deities of the mountain). Some of these deities are like human beings with worldly emotions such as anger and jealousy. “If you contaminate the dwellings of yulha or tsen, or offend them by visiting their places in ungodly hours, they may catch you and cause illnesses such as skin disease and nerve pain,” Rinchin Norbu tells me, “If you eat mani rilbu the spirit will leave you.” Not only did mani rilbu help the local people navigate the anxieties of unpredictable encounters with local deities and spirits, but it was a traditional way of co-production of care in a specific landscape. “The production of Tawang mani rilbu itself was a localized collaborative process between monks, nuns, and lay people, as well as Avalokiteshvara, the divinity that blessed these pills,” writer Yeshe Dorje Thongchi, an acclaimed writer and novelist from Arunachal Pradesh explained to me. In contrast, Rinchin Norbu says, the blessing pills brought over from outside are “just medicines” with no relations to the landscape. “They aren’t as effective as the Tawang mani rilbu we used to make simply because these pills [and their makers] don’t know the local deities causing illnesses in our bodies.” The rise of Hindu nationalism in India has triggered new spiritual practices intended to reify a sense of homogeneous “Indianness.” They often emerge at the expense of long-standing local traditions that relate to place, community, and tradition. The replacement of Tawang mani rilbu by blessing pills made by Sowa Rigpa practitioners from the Indian mainland is just one of many such examples.∎ SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Clare Patrick (Our) Worlds and (Plant) Wisdoms Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Courtesy of Mihir Joshi. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Reportage Arunachal Pradesh Tibet Hindutva Hindu Nationalism Tawang Monastery Indigeneity Buddhism Asylum Himalayas Himalayan Tribes BJP Steven Kloos Blessing Pills Medicine Health Chinese Occupation of Tibet Space Indigeneous Spaces Spatial Relations Respatialization Labor Northeast India Sister States BIKASH K. BHATTACHARYA is an independent journalist and researcher with bylines in YES! Magazine , LGBTQ Nation, BuzzFeed, Earth Island Journal, Mongabay, The Third Pole, and The Diplomat among others. He has reported from northeast India, Myanmar, and Timor-Leste. 7 Jun 2024 Reportage Arunachal Pradesh 7th Jun 2024 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

News-oriented pieces in our curated column "The Vertical." Check back periodically or subscribe to our newsletter for updates. The Vertical Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

India’s archive of the COVID-19 pandemic is incomprehensive, and a rhetoric of ghostliness has been employed by the political class to deem insignificant the lives of migrant laborers most affected by the pandemic. Analyzing the statistics, politics, and poetics of disappearance in the case of India’s migrant crisis extracts truth from darkness; this work seeks to translate forced absentia into a historical record in its own right, relaying a clear manifestation of alienated labor amid global calamity. India’s archive of the COVID-19 pandemic is incomprehensive, and a rhetoric of ghostliness has been employed by the political class to deem insignificant the lives of migrant laborers most affected by the pandemic. Analyzing the statistics, politics, and poetics of disappearance in the case of India’s migrant crisis extracts truth from darkness; this work seeks to translate forced absentia into a historical record in its own right, relaying a clear manifestation of alienated labor amid global calamity. Thomash Changmai An indescribable journey of survival (2022) CGI (blender 3d) Artist Mumbai AUTHOR · AUTHOR · AUTHOR 15 Nov 2024 th · FEATURES REPORTAGE · LOCATION X Marks The Ghost The first case of the COVID-19 pandemic in Mumbai, India was reported on 11th March , 2020. Thirteen days later, a nationwide lockdown was announced – bringing India to a grinding halt. Except that is not what actually happened. Those who could afford it shielded themselves within their homes, rations packed to the rafters and N-95 masks stockpiled. For the over 600 million internal migrants in India –those whose homes are in villages but who work in informal labor markets in the city–the lockdown announcement triggered a mass exodus. Droves of people fled the cities they worked in to return to their rural communities, largely on foot. With their wages coming to an abrupt standstill, they left deeply fearful of what lay ahead. Much has been written about the lack of statistics regarding this exodus. Many lives were lost to hunger, fatigue, heatstroke and, of course, disease. Yet “ there are no numbers ,” Santosh Kumar Gangwar, then Indian Minister for Labour and Employment, stated the same year when asked to enumerate the tragedy’s scale at a national level. Migrant workers have already long been considered “fringe figures” within the Indian urban social network. With the rupture caused by the pandemic, their existences have only been further invisibilized. The initial guidance provided by India’s central government was to ensure that migrants did not leave the cities. However, given the sheer volume of panicked people desperate to rush back home, this guidance was impossible to actually implement. When the stay-where-you-are orders failed, the center tried creating quarantine camps at state borders .This, too, did not prove successful. Attempts to build a database of the departing migrants were also abandoned halfway. The pandemic was already seen as an arithmetic problem : a problem of numbers where a solution could purportedly be reached by just pinning down the right formula. This notion was only compounded upon by the use of terms such as “rate of infection” and “doubling time” in the media, which made the actual lack of data and data collection efforts regarding migrant workers result in a particular kind of disenfranchisement. Despite the magnitude of the exodus, India’s national mood was to dismiss the migrants’ long march as simply an aberration. Since the event was caused by the deep distrust that migrants displayed in the state’s ability to provide them with safety nets, any acknowledgment of the tragedy’s nuances would misalign with the government’s narrative of complete control over the crisis. A Vocabulary of Ghostliness In retrospect, the lack of numbers eventually became an object of interrogation. A particular trope came into play within the media discourse surrounding the migrant exodus: a vocabulary of ghostliness. Words used to describe the state of the migrants essentialized their identities to solely their forced absence from the labor market. News reports in publications like the BBC and God Save the Points , spoke of “ghost workers” and “ ghost towns .” In a Telegraph India essay written shortly after the first lockdown, academic Manas Ray describes the migrant workers trekking to their native villages as “ghost mutineers stalking the country in search of a home.” “These lives are, of course, not entitled to the city's culture and taste, to its intellect and leisure; these are gross lives,” Ray writes further. The word “gross,” a mathematical term for excess, is specifically used here to capture the unnumbered migrants’ lives. “What seems like a relatively stable social order is constantly being modified, added, subtracted, maintained, and cleaned by the invisible labor force mostly made of migrants,” Ray continues. While terming the migrants as ghosts evokes a certain poignancy, it also dehumanizes and homogenizes a diverse, marginalized group of people. Although the tragic scale of the exodus could not accurately be enumerated at the time, it is now possible to retrospectively analyze Indian media archives and give an approximate number to the verbiage that was in play. As an intervention into this archive of absence, I formulated a dataset containing newspaper (e-paper) stories that appeared when I ran a Google Search with the following phrases as keywords: Migrant Haunting Mumbai Migrant Ghost Mumbai Covid Haunting Mumbai Covid Ghost Mumbai I delimited the database both spatially and temporally. The city of Mumbai became a stand-in for the urban, chosen for being the country’s financial capital. Temporally, I limited the selected articles to those published between 15th March, 2020 and 10th August, 2021. I downloaded the text from these news articles from relevant pages of search results as raw TXT data and eliminated the duplicate results, making sure that each webpage was represented only once in the TXT data file. This data was subsequently input into a Word document where, using the “Find” feature, I located the words “haunt” and “ghost,” highlighting the sections they appeared in. I further transferred these sections to columns to see the frequency of the words and the contexts they were phrased within. Finally, I color-coded repeated phrases, numbering each occurrence. My goal through this exercise was to locate patterns within this particular media discourse which evoked a metaphoric vocabulary of ghostliness. The data I analyzed for these patterns encompassed roughly 106,000 words in total, including headlines, by-lines, articles, conjunctions, and prepositions over the four keyword searches. It is important for me to say that by no means did I conduct a perfect academic study which incorporated all the work that has been produced relating to the migrant exodus. The formulation of the data set was restricted by resources, paywalls, and availability of time so it is meant to be indicative rather than declarative. Therefore, this is not a quantitative analysis, but a qualitative exploration of the use of a specific vocabulary and its implications for understanding a certain media archive. Why is it necessary to think about the vocabulary used to describe this, or any, tragedy? First, without numbers, we have no other way to understand the scale of the lives lost and destroyed. Secondly, understanding language allows us to understand who is permitted to be forgotten or remembered, and who media discourse renders invisible. The absence of numbers of lives can then be understood by investigating who is made a ghost–who is seen to haunt rather than live as a full human being–and how. When we cannot account, we must articulate. There is a long tradition in the social sciences of using the vocabulary of ghostliness and hauntings to explain societal relations. In a 1919 essay titled The Uncanny , Sigmund Freud describes how any change in the way society functions bring with it a sense of deep unsettlement. Karl Marx takes this even further at the beginning of the Communist Manifesto , where he terms communism itself as a specter haunting Europe, invoking ghosts to signify societal churn. More recent scholarship in anthropology has built on tradition, hypothesizing how societies often tell ghost stories as a way of integrating uncomfortable memories into the cultural fabric. In scenarios with no actual historical record or archive, hauntings and ghosts become a means to combat “ institutional forgetfulness. ” With the COVID-19 pandemic and migrant crisis in India, we can see deliberate institutional forgetfulness in action. Here, the vocabulary of ghostliness becomes a tool to grasp public sentiment. Even three years removed from the worst of the pandemic, which disproportionately ravaged the Global South , understanding its impact on human lives is to grapple with ambiguity–intellectual, pragmatic, and experiential. It is to be faced with something that is not quite historical, not quite normal, and not quite visible. It is to engage with a ghost. Gloomy Sunday, 2023, courtesy of Thomash Changmai. In the depths of the night, a lonely soul weeps, Tangled in shadows, where despair seeps. A heart, heavy with the weight of solitude's sting, A melody of sorrow, a dirge I sing. (Inspired by the song Gloomy Sunday composed by Hungarian pianist and composer Rezső Seress and published in 1933.) Accounting, Articulating Within my data set, the word “haunt” in various conjugations (haunted, haunting, et cetera) occurred 29 times. The term was used most often to describe images of the migrant exodus and how the city folk were haunted by the visuals of it. To ascribe a numeric value: out of the 29 references, 11 referred either to “haunting images” or “haunting visuals.” As anthropologists Benjamin Smith and Richard Vokes write in their 2008 article “ Haunting Images ,” the photograph and the ghost “are never far apart.” The two can be interchangeable in their function, “standing in for relationships that cannot or can no longer be performed directly,” and share the similarity of embodying present absences . They further activate an “emotive force through their representation of absent objects, kin and places.” Images from the pandemic are rife with this emotive force as they represent moments of death and tangible devastation, evoking significant grief, and by extension of the vocabulary of haunting, horror. Through images, citizens of the city are forced to reckon with the structural collapse of urban labor networks. In my study, a second pattern emerged: the use of the word “haunting” to describe memory and recollection. There were four references to being “haunted by memories.” Comparing it to the previous pattern, where photographs produced ghosts, memory here is where the lost “normal life, or the remembrance of normality,” resides. During the pandemic, the phrase “new normal” was commonplace. In such an unprecedented time, recent memories felt historical, and indeed haunting given the sense of loss they invoked. The word “ghost” itself appeared in my study 28 times. 21 of these occurrences concerned a place, with 11 referring to “ghost towns,” nine to “ghost villages,” and one to the ghostly nature of abandoned roads. In media discourse during COVID19, the term ghost town was clearly used to describe the emptied urban centers, while ghost villages referred to the rural settings where the population had previously been sparse due to internal migration. During the pandemic, these became the sites of return for the working class who were seeking safety and familiarity. In five instances across the data set, “ghost” was an epithet transferred to the laborers themselves leaving the cityscape. Coupled with migrants already being othered and alienated, this deployment of the language of haunting only served to further exacerbate their marginalization and cement their erasure. A 2022 report from the World Health Organisation suggested that India’s real COVID toll may never be known. According to the report, more than 4.7 million people – a nearly ten times higher statistic than estimates by Indian officials – might have died from COVID-19 infection between 1st January, 2020 and 31st December, 2021. It is not a stretch to postulate that the missing numbers from India’s state statistics might be deaths that occurred in villages or at the homes of those who could not afford medical treatment. Data paucity within India is not a new phenomenon, and it is well-documented that the ones left out are often from marginalized communities . A poem written by Indian filmmaker Kireet Khurana during the lockdown turns attention to the migrant crisis with the following stanza: “Hum to pravasi hain, kya is desh ke vaasi hain? Agar nahi hain insaan to maar do abhi, de do farmaan” (We are migrants, are we (not) residents of this country? If we are not human, kill us now, Give the command) The stanza juxtaposes “ pravasi” (migrant/traveler) with “ desh ke vasi ” (residents of the country). The value of this wordplay comes from the etymology of the terms and their meanings. The root word for both pravasi and vasi is the same–“vas” meaning abode. Therefore, a vasi is one who is of the abode, so its negative suffix pra(vasi) implies one who is separate or othered from their place of abode. However, the term desh ke vasi (residents of the country) often signifies being a citizen. Citizenship and residency are therefore interchangeable in this context. The poem questions the disenfranchisement of migrants by declaring “if we are not human, kill us now,” criticizing the political leadership's unwillingness to provide migrant laborers with humane means of returning to their native communities. In his celebrated essay collection Politics of the Governed , historian Partha Chatterjee categorizes individuals afflicted by infrastructural disenfranchisement as occupying a fringe space. In this fringe or margin, they reside within the city but cannot rely on it for social safeguards. Thus, they are rendered beyond the comfort of being a vasi . This only became more explicit in India through the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite numerous assurances by the government that migrant workers would be safe within the cities , a precedent of haplessness and lost livelihoods led to large masses attempting to leave cities. For most migrant workers, the uncertainty of a treacherous journey back home was preferable to relying on the state for sustenance. The distrust created by constant erasure simply could not be erased by politicians’ promises and press broadcasts. Specters and those who witness David Torri , an anthropologist of shamanism, describes the ghost as first and foremost a story: it “needs listeners more than it needs witnesses.” As researchers charged institutionally with the creation of knowledge, the onus is upon us to bear witness to the lacunae within archives and acknowledge our failures in listening to those who fall through the chasms of documentation. India’s COVID-19 migrant exodus was a humanitarian crisis born out of rightful mistrust held by laborer populations towards urban administration. The ghosts resulting from this exodus, and further exacerbated through media discourse, are not new, but have always existed – the pandemic simply made visible the cracks within India’s neoliberal urban apparatus. Indian cities have continued to grapple with their failure to integrate migrant laborers into their social and cultural fabric in the three years since the pandemic. Despite the significant cost to human life, there has been no socio-political change aimed at remedying the gap between those seen as citizens of the city, and those essentialized as mere bodies for labor. “I felt betrayed twice: by society, because no one around me lent a hand – my landlord kicked me out – and by the state,” a construction worker from Kanpur, Ram Yadav, said in a 2022 documentary made by The Guardian . At the time of the lockdown, he vowed never to return to the city he’d left. A few months later, however, he had no choice but to head back to Delhi. By November 2020, large sections of migrant workers , much like Yadav, had returned to the cities they had left. There was no newfound love for the urban–just desperation in the face of limited job opportunities within rural communities. The disenfranchisement they continue to face is deeply institutionalized. Within most archives their experiences are secondary. The fact that there are no numbers is potent; the state does not account for the working class body, neither in life nor death. In life, they have no stability or voice in the functioning of the very urban centers that rely on their migrant labor; in death, they are merely erased. This erasure reaffirms migrant workers as Chatterjee’s term of fringe figures, or outsiders to the city’s social and cultural fabric. Devoid of agency, the migrant becomes the object of urban anxieties, rather than a subject experiencing them. The city is thus simultaneously run by migrants yet haunted by their absence, with the urban populace haunted in particular, albeit at a comfortable distance, by migrants’ trauma. In other words, the laborer is subject to the whims of the megacity and those who administer it. They become the “other,” pitied by middle-class citizenry, yet still not seen by them as human or equal. As Jacques Derrida puts it in his book Specters of Marx (1994), disjunctures in society, like pandemics, make apparent the anxieties of a place, and the “ghosts” that emerge here are testimonies to alienated labor. By reconciling these specters through scholarship, at the least, we can move forward towards marking the absences within existing records. It is an attempt to integrate significant institutional failure into cultural memory. The production of knowledge is never perfect, but the use of alternative vocabularies as interventions allows us to pinpoint deliberate erasures. Fully understanding the effect of a crisis, of course, does not encompass just metrics, even if imprecise, for its impact. Yet, it is an honest start. ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Features Mumbai State Government Narrative Internal Migrants Migrant Laborers Ghost Workers State Erasure Vocabulary of Ghostliness Data Paucity Shamanism Complicity Cosmopolitanism Displacement Alienation Institutional Forgetfulness Precarity Refugees State Modernization Narratives Archive Pandemic Kireet Khurana Migrant Traveler Health Epidemic Town and Gown Rural Urban Media Discourse India COVID-19 Archive of Absence Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

AUTHOR Sumana Roy SUMANA ROY is the author of How I became a Tree , Missing: A Novel , Out of Syllabus: Poems , My Mother’s Lover and Other Stories , among others. Her newest book is entitled Provincials: Postcards from the Peripheries. She is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Ashoka University. AUTHOR WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

“Loneliest star, shining so brightly / For no one to see. / Loneliest star, tell me your secret / You shouldn't keep it.” COMMUNITY Quintet Priya Darshini · Max ZT · Shahzad Ismaily · Moto Fukushima · Chris Sholar “Loneliest star, shining so brightly / For no one to see. / Loneliest star, tell me your secret / You shouldn't keep it.” The closing set from our event on 30th March 2024, "Solidarity: Beyond the Disaster-Verse," at ShapeShifter Lab in Brooklyn, New York, capped off two stimulating panels and marked the close of Volume 2 Issue 1 of SAAG. The performance by the quintet of Priya Darshini (vocals), Shahzad Ismaily (piano, drums/percussion, synth, guitar), Moto Fukushima (bass, shamisen) & Max ZT (hammered dulcimer), and Chris Sholar (electronics, ableton) ushered in new emotional registers, and another period of interpretive possibilities for SAAG, as reflected upon by Darshini. Their set showcases many of the songs from Darshini's debut album, as well as songs about hope and solidarity, and a showstopping rendition of a composition of Emily Dickinson's "Hope is the thing with feathers." Event Photography courtesy of Josh Steinbauer. SOLIDARITY: BEYOND THE DISASTER-VERSE Panel 1: What Does "Solidarity" Mean? SOLIDARITY: BEYOND THE DISASTER-VERSE Panel 2: On the Relationship between Form & Resistance ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Live Brooklyn Solidarity: Beyond the Disaster-Verse Jazz Music Classical Music Experimental Music Vocals Hammered Dulcimer Drums Guitar Electronics Composition Contemporary Music Shamisen Alternative Jazz Love in Exile On Becoming House of Waters GRAMMY Periphery Emily Dickinson Atahualpa Yupanqui Protest Song PRIYA DARSHINI is a vocalist with a fresh, imaginative and fascinating sound influenced by Carnatic and South Asian classical music, and deeply syncretic global traditions including Americana, folk, and jazz improvisation. Her debut album Periphery (Chesky Records, 2020) was nominated at the 63rd Annual GRAMMY Awards for Best New Age Album. Based in Brooklyn, Darshini also serves on the Board of Directors of the International Wildlife Coexistence Network , and is a trustee of the Mumbai-based non-profit Jana Rakshita which aids underprivileged pediatric cancer patients, Adivasi children's education, amongst other initiatives. MAX ZT is a Chicago native now based in Brooklyn who had his first encounter with the hammered dulcimer at the age of two. He has been lauded as the “Jimi Hendrix of dulcimer” by NPR , and performed with musicians like Ravi Shakar, Tinariwen, and Jimmy Cliff, among others. Max ZT and Moto Fukushima together form the Brooklyn-based power duo, House of Waters. The band has released two albums, with its debut album, Rising , reaching #2 on the iTunes World Music chart, and the second album hitting #4 on the iTunes Jazz chart. Its sophomore album, On Becoming (GroundUP Music, 2023), was recently nominated at the 66th GRAMMY Awards for Best Contemporary Instrumental Album. SHAHZAD ISMAILY is a largely self-taught composer and musician, having mastered a wide array of instruments. Ismaily has recorded or performed with an incredibly diverse assemblage of musicians and has also composed regularly for dance and theater. He was a two-time nominee at the recent 66th GRAMMY Awards, for both Best Alternative Jazz Album for Love in Exile (Verve Records, 2023) with Vijay Iyer & Arooj Aftab, and Best Global Music Performance for the track "Shadow Forces" from Love in Exile . Most recently, Ismaily is part of the new quartet Beings which will release its debut album There is a Garden (No Quarter) in July 2024. MOTO FUKUSHIMA is a Japanese artist currently based in NYC. He is a six-string bass player, composer, and shamisen player. Along with Max ZT, Fukushima forms the duo House of Waters. The band has released two albums, with its debut album, Rising (GroundUP Music, 2019), reaching #2 on the iTunes World Music chart, and the second album hitting #4 on the iTunes Jazz chart. House of Waters' sophomore album, On Becoming (GroundUP Music, 2023), was recently nominated at the 66th GRAMMY Awards for Best Contemporary Instrumental Album. CHRIS SHOLAR is a world-renowned music producer and composer and one of the most in-demand guitarists in the world of R&B and Hip Hop music. He has worked with Stevie Wonder, Beyonce, A Tribe Called Quest, Frank Ocean, and Snoop Dogg, amongst many others, and as performed at numerous concerts, and arenas, including Carnegie Hall, the Glastonbury Festival, and the NFL Super Bowl Gala. He is a two-time GRAMMY Award winner from his collaborations with Jay-Z and Esperanza Spalding. Live Brooklyn 25th Apr 2024 JOSH STEINBAUER is an award-winning filmmaker, musical composer, and visual artist. His work has been shown in Heaven, Third Ward, No Moon, Gen Art, H. Lewis galleries, Harvard Art Museum and American Folk Art Museum , and published in Nowhere Magazine, Terrain, The Offing, Moving Poems, Scroll.in, BrooklynOnDemand , and the Times of India, amongst others. Some of his portrait drawings are currently exhibited at the Long Island City Artists' (LIC-A) newest show Drawing Beyond the Surface , curated by Jorge Posada. On That Note: Heading 5 23rd OCT Heading 5 23rd Oct Heading 5 23rd Oct