Key Concepts and terms I am developing at the moment as part of ongoing research and artistic practice.

INTERPRESENCE 

A term I borrowed from telecommunications to understand how we can be present with our bodies, across technologies, and narratives, to co-exist across geographies and temporalities.A term I especially like to apply for diasporic experiences in digitally mediated contexts.

Afterisms

A term inspired by esprit d’escalier. While esprit d’escalier comes from a leftover remark that remained unsaid, afterism is what overthinkers do: going through every conversation, worrying, overthinking, and hyper-analyzing everything they have said or done, and judging how they reacted.

Politics of Proper

A term that helps me understand how the Telangana dialect was mocked, seen as merely vernacular to Andhra/Telugu on one ground, while also exposing and examining the norms of respectability, belonging, and exclusion—especially in Telugu cinema. Until recently, it was a dialect kept out, and now the question of who gets to be seen as ‘proper’ shifts, with even Andhra actors performing in Telangana dialect. This shape-shifty politics, where only property and the proper are recognized, becomes conditional.