the professor with eclectic taste in theories and fashion is back home to discuss literature and the sea its a small relief that even harvard brand intellectuals worry about angles that make midriffs look unrestrained professor homi k bhabha is trying to counter this by asking our photographer how he should sit in marathi mee ithe basu should i sit here asaa basu sit like this he says later well talk about clothes the rings on his fingers and his long unfulfilled wish that someone would light up in his carefully curated living room and blacken the antique marble ashtray we cant stray too far from his work his literary theories of how mimicry hybridity difference and ambivalence have been the ways of the colonised to resist the coloniser bhabha is a padma bhushan awardee and the director of the humanities centre at harvard university hes also a bombay boy its my home he says simply i come here and i am hugely comfortable theres an unusual sense of return here is at his cuffe parade apartment which he visits at least twice a year this thursday hell deliver the 16th vasant j sheth memorial lecture titled treading water reflections on an intemperate medium at the chhatrapati shivaji maharaj vastu sangrahalaya in preparation he has spent the morning reading w h audens poetry and revisited bits of freud particularly the case studies where he talks about dreams concerning water and their significance much before this morning he completed his homecoming ritual a stop at the sai baba math near the university on his way home from the airport i dont have the language to describe it but i have felt enriched and protected in a very deeply intimate way by the figure of sai baba he says then he immerses himself in the news of the city i ask my family to buy all the magazines from the political journals to book reviews and lifestyle magazines all the gossip and society magazines everything before i arrive the first night when i am quite jetlagged i immerse myself in these bhabha has also invested time in familiarising himself with key political players through aap its interesting to see how a difference can be made through movements that are small and sharply interventionist though he is aware this is no herald of the messiah i have an issue with the notion that if you are honest people you have an honest party politics is not only about good or bad individuals its also about the law and about institutions i think they have to focus as much on remaking institutions as they do on reforming individuals but he wont be vouching for narendra modi in my view mr modi is not a representative of all of the people all of the time he says his record is severely damaged in the respect of minorities and i think democracy requires particularly in presence of the president or the pm that