I speak more Bangla in Muscat and Singapore and other spaces in the south Asian Labour Diaspora than in Mumbai, the city of my birth. I speak Bangla with my Baba- a Bihari by birth who grew up in Bolpur than my Bengali mother from Bombay. I speak with my linguist mother in the Queens Tongue.

Ami Banglai Gaan Gaai.

I understood the essence of Ekushe in Singapore at Banglar Kantha where I learnt culture travels, anchors, and offers a sense of belonging in the Probash.

Joy Bangla.

ESG risk can be mapped at scales, and each scale will result in different magnitudes and characters of affect. Labor issues at the plant level is an operational issue at the shop floor level aka scale, but it is a crucial culture data point at the level of human rights reporting to the bourses.

The micro and the macro scales juxtapose and intermingle when we consider decision making for responsible business. Is carbon a local and regional scale pollutant first, or a planetary scale GHG impacting climate impact?

Thinking in nodes and networks rather than as binary fixtures shall help practitioners grapple with ESG risk which is evolving and mutating at each spatiotemporal juncture.

The unquantifiable ‘S’ in ESG is the operational glue which is the circulatory system at various scales. The numerous studies within the large tent ambit of the Social are:

– Stakeholder Engagement Plan

– Social and Labour Audits

– Human Rights Risk Assessments including Due Diligence

– Worker Well Being Studies

– Social Impact Assessments for Infrastructure Permitting and ESG Compliance for sustainable finance

– DEI Strategy Mapping

– Resettlement Action Plans

– Community Investment Plans

– M&E Studies

– Human Resources Training

Communities of practice include your employees and vendors and motivated people who are good for business.

It has taken me 7 months after my graduate school stint to realize that writing is what keeps me going. I have hardly written anything out of a pause to heal. I will write again, this time with the PhD theory training, with a vengeance.

The more risks, the greater the iteration the more the learning and in turn the more useful one is in the skills bazaar. There is no substitute to failing aka learning. Do not be kiasu lah.

As a perennial migrant across three generations, and three countries at the very least- I have the embodied experience of racial capitalism across the Indian Ocean Region. Our anchors to the home while we create new roots while on the route to life evolves.

There are certain cultures of aero mobilities at 36k feet which we observe while I travel. I am a migration ethnographer, and the site of the body is an instrument to gauge phenomena. On a recent visit to Johannesburg from Mumbai via Addis, the traditional Indian Ocean pathways of migration from Kathiawar to Natal were mapped, as a bunch of vernacular skilled forced bachelor migrants from Jamnagar were enthusiastically exchanging khakra in the cabin and chatting loudly which sharing space with Khoja Ismaili South African Citizens chatting away in Gujarati visiting Mumbai.

I spotted a Jamaat Khana in a gas station above a restaurant next to a China Mart in Johannesburg. On the way back I found a group of young Sikh restaurant workers on the flight back to the Addis leg, taking the connecting flight to Delhi. There were so many working-class Indian men and traders working in the capitals and towns of East and Southern Africa, which are totally hidden from the scholarly gaze.

The airline cabin is a cultural space of migration corridors and is a melting pot of globalization. I sometimes wish the migrants know how to navigate these spaces respectfully.

ESG is about mindset, an impulse towards inching towards responsible capitalism. The individual building blocks of E and S are worlds in themselves, however they work very differently when they are together as ESG risk, as scale and context play a role. The plurality of definitions and understanding about ESG is a key strength, as the world of business is diverse as business itself.

ESG is a business value driver in the climate zeitgeist. ESG is an actor network, and each node will have different weights. ESG is thus:

1. A Risk Mitigation Lens

2. A Responsible Capitalism Lens

3. An Investment Thesis

4. ESG as Culture

And ESG is a subset of the normative paradigm of sustainability, as an operational meta framework from the floor to the boardroom and its meanings shape shift at each scale.

Although climate change is a global phenomenon, there is a climate divide based on power. The variegated geographies of globalization will map a climate spectrum in which there will be leaders and laggards in the downstream adaptation end to ones which are leaders in the transition.

There is an implicit expectation that the climate journey towards net positive will be linear and uniform. Like development, it will be refracted through the residues of colonialism and capitalism, with power at the heart of it.