About This Site

This blog is where I write about what I encounter as an anthropologist studying the digital divide in the world, especially in education, and about my journey as an activist trying to fix some of that. I try to write weekly reflections in the form of short posts and poems, and sometimes post my art here, alongside photos and videos shot on my Nokia feature phone.

This blog is also a space for me to connect with like-minded people, who believe in the possibilities of alternative education, and who are as much willing to unlearn as learn things on the way.

Every image on my website is either hand-drawn by me (sketched digitally, or coded in Python/ Javascript) or captured on my Nokia phone.

On that note, I think it's not foolish of me to assume that you have already taken a note of the dumbphone-like interface of my website. This is to make my readers reflect upon their digital presence and technology usage.

We're often sold the idea that data centres and rare-earth minerals are effectively limitless, and a phone costs nothing more than its price-tag (that, too including the profit margins), and that resolution, storage, and streaming are effortless and affordable as long as you can pay for your data plan. Such convenient narratives are misleading and very much disconnect us from the physical world computing runs on (the mines, the water, the electricity, the e-waste, the exploited labor, and the societal inequalities). When I think about the cost of apparently small, everyday choices, such as what quality/ resolution we choose as the default for our photos, music, and videos to how frequently we upgrade our iPhones (and other phones ofc), and how we trust cloud services without knowing (or sometimes caring about) where our data actually exists, and whom it impacts, I can't help but feel that we are collectively ignoring the environmental and social costs of our digital lives.

Read my blog to know more about how and why I'm trying to opt out of some of the super convenient digital and technological practices to reduce my negative environmental impact.

And by visiting my website (static, built on astro framework), you can get a glimpse into some of my experiences, starting with how you'd navigate this Dumbphone-styled website, using arrow keys, number shortcuts, and adjust to the small-sized screen (In case you get bored, press 7 for the snake game).