Exploring the complexities and absurdities of life, this book delves into the unexpected twists and vibrant experiences that shape our existence. It highlights the magic found in everyday moments and encourages readers to embrace the joy and love that come from these unique encounters. Through a rich tapestry of emotions and memories, it invites a celebration of life’s privileges, urging us to find meaning and connection amidst the chaos.
Exploring the concept of Green Academia, this book emphasizes its role as a sustainable, long-term strategy to combat future pandemics in the post-COVID world. It highlights the integration of environmental practices within academic institutions as a proactive response to health crises, advocating for systemic changes that prioritize ecological responsibility and public health.
This book engages with how the Siddis in Gujarat and the South African Indians in South Africa perform different forms of creolized socio-cultural practices in the contemporary era. Since the precolonial times, India and South Africa have developed commercial relations through sharing clothing materials, minerals, precious stones, and spices. Besides exchanging physical objects, varieties of cultures, traditions, and rituals were also exchanged between these countries. With the emergence of colonization in both these countries as Africans were brought to India as slaves and Indians were taken to South Africa as indentured laborers, a lot of objects like musical instruments, plant seeds, cooking utensils, and hand-woven clothes were carried across the Indian Ocean as cultural memories. With the passage of time, the cultural practices of the Indian Diaspora and African Diaspora got intermixed with the native local cultures of South Africa and India, respectively, and gave birth to porous, fluid, multi-rooted, and creolized cultural practices. This book brings forth some of the creolized culinary, spiritual, and musical practices of these communities, and how these performances can expand the archives of creolized cultural practices of Diaspora communities in the Indian Ocean World.