In Episode 2 of Clear Blue Skies, I'm talking about what I thought after reading Untouchables: The Children of India's Ghetto, and more importantly, what my dear friend Sumeet thinks about this text. We also discuss Jesús Francisco Cháirez-Garza's paper Touching Space: Ambedkar on the spatial features of untouchability and what it means to find ourselves in different locations (the city, the village).
Ambedkar saw cities as sites of emancipation, and if his dream hasn’t been entirely fulfiled, the fault lies very clearly on the backs of those who diverted and continue to divert Dalit-Bahujan activism and assertion.  
Going to the future requires looking to the past, & the music, defiant politics and courage of Comrade Bant Singh stand tall in this collective memory. 
"We are because he was" is a quote I've seen on a lot of t-shirts and posters about Ambedkar, & it captures the importance of knowing your history. It is also in the present tense, as in the future in flux because we are alive right now & the fight isn't over. 
Even as the farmers' protest and its allies prepare for the coming months, even as Nodeep Kaur & Shiv Kumar remain imprisoned, even though what's ahead looks grim - the fight isn't over.

Thanks so much to Ajinkya Dekhane (@azinzya on Instagram) for letting me use an excerpt from his writing! 

This episode features clips from The Bant Singh Project by Word Sound Power and Comrade Bant Singh (https://wordsoundpower.bandcamp.com/album/the-bant-singh-project)

Lyrics by Bant Singh & Delhi Sultanate @delhisultanate

The songs featured are & were produced by Chris McGuinness: 

01 - Comrades 

02 - Intifada - Shaheedanwali Manzil 

04 - Into The Fire 

It is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (https://creativecommons.org/use-remix/).