Futures in Motion: July Roundup

Who is a creative you are inspired by in 2026? 
I find Jayasree Kalathil’s work in literary translation, Mad studies, survivor research and activism endlessly inspiring. 

My father and I have been engaged in a decade-plus long practice of translating some of our favourite Malayalam poetry into English, together, for the sheer joy of it. I obsessively watch all the interviews I can of Kalathil talking about the art and politics of literary translation from Malayalam. I read her writing. I read her writing about her writing. And then I enthusiastically WhatsApp all the clips and articles to my dear father in Kerala. It’s one way in which we try to bridge the thousands of miles that separate us. 

As someone who has spent years organising against the pathologisation and criminalisation of people on the margins (including those with unmet social and mental health needs), I deeply appreciate the work Kalathil has done to challenge clinical “symptom-illness-recovery” frameworks of understanding mental illness, by centering the knowledge of people who have actually experienced those alternate states of minds. She helped set up Kerala’s first community-based mental health peer support group – which she called “unionising mad people” because it best approximated what they were trying to do. She’s also translated N. Prabhakaran’s iconic “Diary of a Malayali Madman” and I can’t wait to follow everything she does next.

What is one of your favourite places to recommend to people in your city? 

One of my favourite places in Ann Arbor is the Arb, or Nichol’s Arboretum – a 128-acre botanical garden and arboretum by the university hospital that I used to work in. The valleys, peony gardens, trees and glens of the Arb have held me through many seasons of my life. 

I’ve conspired with friends on long winding walks by the river there, and spent hours reading books up trees. I’ve played Hermione in a summer production of The Winter’s Tale, declaiming lines from Shakespeare under the stars as nightfall transformed the Arb into one of the most magical places I’ve ever seen. 

I love places that I can disappear into and I’ve gotten lost in the Arb’s wild expanse, accidentally and on purpose, many, many times.

What is an Internet hot take/discourse you loved recently?

I’ve really enjoyed all the young people at college graduations vociferously booing out-of-touch pro-AI commencement speakers.

A myth of the inevitability of AI is being shoved down our throats. Tech oligarchs are aggressively overselling its capabilities, using it to hollow out job prospects for these new graduates, and to justify mass layoffs, all while AI fuels real harms, and acts as a force multiplier for deepening inequities in medicine, criminalisation and incarceration.

It is no surprise then that people everywhere really, really hate the data centers that fuel AI. As Astra Taylor and Saul Levin write, the growing populist resistance to them “represents a critical new front in the fight against tech-enabled authoritarianism. Where else can people push back on job-eating algorithms, distorting deep fakes and autonomous drone strikes?” And it makes me so happy to see all these visible and vocal rejections of soulless, dystopian tech-bro dreams.

What is your perfect way to spend a Saturday?

I’m an incorrigible night owl. A perfect Saturday would involve some lounging around followed by a midmorning Madras filter kaapi on the deck overlooking the green fields and little pond behind our house; a call with my friends, Pavi and Snigs; a walk; and doing something fun with my kids (baking, bike riding, impromptu kitchen dance party, making art together or just generally goofing around).

So much of our connection, relationships and relationship building happens over food. If you’re having a group of people over, what are you cooking?

I’d make Appam, stew (or “ishtu”) and motta (egg) curry. The coconut stew is so easy to make a big vat of with whatever vegetables are locally available, and I love a spicy motta curry with its rich base of well-caramelised onions. For a small group, I’d make the fermented batter and use the appachatti I’ve brought with me from home to make delicate lace appams. If it’s a large group of friends, I’d get packets of frozen palappam (which I’ve found to be surprisingly decent, especially when you use them to sop up a homemade curry) from the local Indian store and steam them in batches.

Could you give a recommendation of something you love to do offline?

I really, really love to dance.

What makes you most inspired or excited about the future?

I’m inspired by young people, including middle, high school and college students in communities across the US and abroad who have been organising against ICE occupations and to get their universities to divest from genocide and apartheid. I’m inspired by parents and neighbours organising community defence in schools, and workers and trade unionists bargaining for the common good, against the war machine and to get ICE out of our communities. 

I’m also constantly humbled by the organising that continues to happen within detention centres and prisons. I’m inspired by the art, music and writing that is created under the most inhumane and repressive carceral conditions. Our incarcerated comrades have every single move of theirs controlled, surveilled, punished, and censored, and they are STILL able to create masterpieces like Songs From the Hole. They are still able to find ways to reclaim their humanity, parent their kids from behind bars, care for each other and dream together. 

The ingenuity, creativity and brilliance that is needed to survive in these systems is unfathomable. When the repression “outside” feels suffocating, my friends inside help me reground. They expand my sense of the possible and my faith in the invincibility of the human spirit because they surmount impossible challenges, day after day after day. They remind me that if prisoners can fight a system from within its chokehold, hold their heads up high, forge deep life-sustaining friendships, find hope and connection, hold firmly to a belief that a different future is possible and work to make it happen, we can and must (with the many more resources we have at our disposal) too.

Where do you turn to when you get writer's block/looking for inspiration?

I mostly turn to poetry (Urdu, Malayalam and English). I find different poets help me access different frequencies, registers and emotions in myself when I read them. Some old faithfuls I return to, and whose words I think alongside are Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Rafeeq Ahamed, Safia Elhillo and June Jordan.

If you could live in any world from a book, film, series, or album - what would it be?

It would be in the world of Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052-2072 — possibly in the Crotona Commune. I loved the character of Tanya John, a “dance kid” whose dad is from Karachi and whose mom is from the DR. 

When repressive governments and groups like the NYPD were shutting down internet connectivity and cell networks, John’s tight-knit community of dance kids helped entire cities and communities get back online through “mesh networks” and through their travelling dance barges which had servers, hacked satellite uplinks and transmitters to port cities all over the Global South. I could see myself being a dance kid on one of the boats, feeling connected to music, dance, freedom, and a world without borders.

The dance kids knew how to run massive scale logistics, look out for each other’s safety and take care of each other. These skills helped them play a pivotal role in setting up the first free assemblies of the NY communes where a lot of decisions about shared governance were made. When describing how they invited people from all over the city and how different factions came together in this radical new experiment John says “to pitch the vision of an assembly...we’d have these cars full of like one enthusiastic tweaked out dance kid, someone from the commune, and some jacked street fighter from an org” and I love that image so much.