I like to go to barber shops or aspirational salons to understand the soundscape of a metro non cosmopolitan space where they would juxtapose the saddest track to disco beats and the barber with all kinds of piercings and tattoos would lip sing to it.

I quite like studying the relationality and materiality of liminal spaces.

The more a person tries new tasks and jobs and fails fast and iterates the greater the learning curve. Often the resume is a shadow of the actual skills and networks that can be leveraged and marshalled at the point of delivery.

Sustainability needs to be translated into project dollars, and a clear ROI/ROCE. Feeling good does not last long and that is the main critique of the green washing counter narrative of #ESG and Net Zero. Where does ESG matter to you?

This ittar perfume boutique next door to Cafe Mondegar and less than five hundred meters from the Gateway of India was a remainder of the Gulf which was the informal raj of the empire ruled from Bombay Presidency. Ajmal, a perfumery from Dubai with roots in Assam, has a loyal Arabic clientele. It was like entering a space time compression in the Gulf, such as the Ajmal store I grew up next door in Al Khuwair in Masqat.

I asked for a well-known ittar which my Baba was fond of and has yearned for since his retirement. I found a close analogue and his smile upon smelling the ittar was beyond any cost.

The area in Colaba has a history of an Arab Bombay next to the coast. There was a settled Arab merchant community in south Bombay until oil made the Gulf the site of a gold rush. The Kuwaiti Government support an Arabic language school as well. Pune is a popular destination for education and Mumbai for medical treatment with Jaslok a popular choice with Gulf nationals.

The sales professionals were fluent in Arabic and the clients were all Gulf nationals with Gahwa and Dates served like back in the Khaleej. The olfactory sensory scape was like Bayt.

Chants of khamsa miya, sitta miya and wahid did make my heart go back to Muscat again, a home that I lost in 2019.

Transnational spaces pay homage to shared histories.

Problem solving is always multidisciplinary, and ESG needs to be looked through the jobs to be done lens. ESG is as multi register as it can get.

Food spaces are such an important aspect of migration infrastructure in general in particular the labor diaspora in the Gulf and SE Asia. Why are these creolized nodes not written about? Is it considered too, un theory worthy by the wannabe Spivak’s of migration studies?

Within #ESG, carbon is not the only metric, but an easily quantifiable one. The fuzzier, messier stuff such as #modernslavery mitigation for responsible supply chains is a harder bet and context matters there. There must be efforts to measure the #materiality though.

There is no fear when there is an ability to restart from scratch and do another Zero to One journey. There is fear when there are others who have the power or the power to abuse. Create your own demand in the ecosystem.

I always enjoyed building stuff whether it was the social innovation program at AIESEC during my engineering masters at NUS or winning business, forging partnerships for multiple consultancies and think tank research projects in the Gulf & Southeast Asia. I prefer having an impact and mission led focus.

Revenue generation and rain making is under rated and hard and there is no template for it.

Let’s normalize the effort, as the outcome is not always in our hands. Work hardest as the needle is moved when personal capabilities are stretched.