The Tale of a Wandering Prince

Friends, Queers, Gentlefolk!

Gather, for we have an urban fairytale especially for you. 

Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental and a figment of your imagination (or is it?). Please read aloud the following text in a suitably dramatic style.

Once upon a time, a tall blue-eyed saviour burst onto the urban Indian scene. Let’s call him the Wandering Prince.

After travelling across African and Middle-Eastern kingdoms, he descended upon the dynamic lively kingdoms of South Asia. The blond Prince of global hope was here to do it all: fight climate change, champion sustainability, defeat gender apartheid, and and and - highlight the immense potential that developing (read neo-colonised) countries had to reimagine the world, because without him, nobody would notice. The Prince came down from the happiest kingdom in the world, giving up his comfortable life there to bridge gaps, create collaboration, and have interesting conversations with young creatives & entrepreneurs. His camera roll and ledger boasts of enchanting stories featuring partnerships with local grassroots organisations and independent creatives to make sustainable change and solve problems at scale, thanks of course to his generous and timely interventions. 

Tangible outcomes, you ask? How pedestrian of you.

How does that matter, when the unnoticed street dancer, the genius but underutilised coder, the talented designer with no platform, the lawyer who wants to do good, ALL just need to be in the same room with the Prince in order to be suddenly valued by the world and magically able to change it. We applaud the Prince who speaks up for the marginalized and comes to non-beginner kingdoms simply to find foot soldiers, err, collaborators for his imagined globally unifying force. The opportunity to be touched by the Prince’s magical wand came in many forms, but primarily in the form of open online invitations to grand lunches and coffee gatherings (Which of course you’d pay for, one must take accountability— after all the Prince has done most of the work by travelling to your dump of a neighborhood while offering curation and leadership. This is not an opportunity for you to cash in on a socialist lunch just because you are a creative with the misfortune of living in the third world). The Prince’s self awareness is unmatched, imagine, he can speak of his own white-saviour privilege in our small kingdom of Information Technology where caste- and class-privileged  men and women can barely digest or accept the benefits of their own social location. 

The Prince is not here to tell you what to do, or how to do it.

Our Prince is not here to set up shop or extract your labour for cents to the dollar.  That is what the old coloniser princes did, and that is SO 1800s. This neo-colonial Prince has mastered the language of decolonization, inclusion, and participatory design— he is not a run-of-the-mill  top-down savior, but an equal-footed collaborator, here to to help us  bring together people from all over the developing world, because without him we’d be mere glimmers of potential that were stubbed out by the toxic AQI levels. 

And what does the Prince want in return? Only some light social capital extraction—where the labor, ideas, and credibility of local creatives are leveraged for his tales, while we are left with treasured photographs of lunch with our elusive hero. We are only grateful that our cultural insights are deemed worthy enough of his larger kingdom, and so grateful to be the unnamed (untagged) faces of his living archive.

We are mesmerized by his visionary anthropological crusade for a better world— for, dare we say it —a utopia.

And so we became the brown and black figures gleefully smiling into the camera, his sustainability henchmen grouped around his pale face, his postcards from far off lands, his quixotic dreamers for a world that could only emerge from these beautiful gatherings.

We are left to wonder, where is the Prince parachuting off to next? Be still your beating heart, because your kingdom might be next!

Farewell, sweet Wandering Prince!