Highlights of work, Life, and activism
“Food is power in the rawest, the cruelest, and the divinest form.”
My work examines how entrenched power structures of the industrial Global North’s geopolitical hegemony erode and rob the rights of peoples and communities, with unprecedented concentration of wealth and influence in the hands of a few elite, mostly white, men. When AI algorithms and oligarchs behind them determine the matrix of humanity, then misogyny, jingoism, majoritarianism, racism, xenophobia, and religious extremism become obvious weapons with which societies can be divided, making them easier to conquer.
To reclaim the relationship of care, reciprocity, peace, and honor with the natural world, ecological richness, and nourishing food systems, the fundamental power asymmetries need to be dismantled, reimagined, and then co-created with deep alignment with the ancestral wisdom, guided by scientific rigor, and demands for political accountability.
Women are playing an instrumental role in ensuring this wholesome reclamation of power. Again and again.
“Cultures, histories, and lifeworld of the Global South must teach us to dream of a new global order built on peace and accountability.”
Defining the “Global South” in policy and research in any restrictive and definite taxonomy risks evading or obscuring the abundant wealth of oral histories, individual struggles, collective punishments, and lived stories of the peoples who have borne the worst wounds of the Western colonial systems of extraction, subjugation, and slaughter.
By identifying and uplifting the heterogeneity and the prosperity of the Global South regions for their sociohistorical differences, cultural diversities, indigenous lineages, and political economies, one can embrace pluralism in thought and practice.
This can allow for humility to guide the design of democracies, for dignity to be the key precursor for health and wellbeing, and for accountability, toward eachother and between the state and the society, to be the foundation of a solidary-based thriving international community.
“Feminism is not working for women. Feminism is working with women, to create a just, joyful, and thriving future for all.”
I embrace feminist methodologies across all my work, and life.
And I am beyond pontificating about what feminism must mean, should never mean, or has always meant. For me, it is the centering of women’s voices, wisdom, and vision, and certainty that this is the only plausible way forward for the accomplishment of any social change and advancement of any meaningful scholarship.
I embrace this cognizance to analyze, archive, and amplify lived, local, and indigenous knowledge systems of women’s longings and lessons at the grassroots in the Global South. The throughline across all my work has been to elevate these experiences and the experiencers as the lead contributors to and co-creators of our shared futures, specifically our food futures. I have committed to utilizing liberatory feminist approaches to highlight women’s agency and acumen in academic inquiries, policy advocacy, and social activism.
With these ethics, my research and policy workstreams endeavor to decolonize conventional constructs, such as of “food security,” “social entitlements,” “power,” or “commercial determinants of health,” from being institutional, instrumentalized, socio-legal processes, to be reimagined as holistic pathways for freedom, power, and dignity.
“Rights and justice are far more than legal victories. They are lived realities that become collective memories.”
In the age of the tyranny of anti-immigration violence, perilous geopolitical uncertainty with newfangled imperialist wars, outrageous economic inequities, the extant climate crisis, imminent pandemics, a billion people at the verge of going to bed without a morsel to eat, and not to mention every 10 minutes a woman or a girl being killed by an intimate partner or a family member, the fight for rights and justice has a renewed urgency today.
This is when the world produces enough food to feed double its population, girls are more likely to complete schooling than boys, more billionaires are consolidating their wealth than ever before, and more people have been brought out of extreme poverty than in the millennia prior.
The paradox is palpable.
Today when the rule-based international order is at the brink of macabre collapse, and systemic dispensation of legal rights of masses at the behest of the profiteering class has become tacitly normative, it is imperative to ensure that rights and justice based international jurisprudence and legal institutions are urgently safeguarded and strengthened. From small to large projects, my analysis is often subversive and always intersectional in exploring radical strategies and realistic policies to reinstitute the responsibility of the state to protect the people and the planet, especially from the profiteering private actors and the neoliberal free marketeers.
“A meandering across privileges and pillages of caste, class, spirituality, and womanhood in South Asia…”
Educated at a school founded on the Gandhian thought in India, from a young age, I learned about the colonial confiscation of my people’s freedom. But, as I grew older, I began to witness how even after defeating the colonial powers, the modern democracy had failed to uproot ancient dogmas of patriarchy, misogyny, caste apartheid, and communalism.
When India began embracing neoliberal capitalism in the 1980s, we saw another wave of crimes against humanity unleash, by the likes of the giant transnational corporation Union Carbide, unraveling extreme atrocities with utmost impunity. Democratic governance and public accountability were fracturing in front of our eyes. And, we were confronted with the uprising of a totalitarian fascist movement.
Amidst these evolutions, being a mother of two children who will inherit the tomorrow we create today, I have become viscerally aware of my own responsibilities toward future generations. This has instilled in me the determination to work toward galvanizing ideas and actions to expose, challenge, and transform the covert architecture of power and politics that continually annihilate our freedoms and our dignity, an architecture that will one day become the foundation of our children’s destinies.
