Dhondo is Rokro.

The hardest job in any business, particularly in a start-up, is revenue generation, which is the real product market fit. Bringing the money to the table is the most challenging and those who can build profitable businesses are stars and will paradoxically never be out of a job.

Back to Writing the Indian Ocean.

The PhD coursework phase at NUS was immensely enriching; however, I needed a pause to recalibrate my scholarly agenda and to find the writer in me back again. After 9 months of a writing break of sorts, i realized that writing is a whole of the body experience where the vision, research agenda and the will to strive need to align.

I write as a professional services entrepreneur each day, and finding the joy in the words that one writes is something which I had lost. The break has helped. I look forward to writing a PhD again, this time in something I love and have the wherewithal to do excellent work.

In the last nine months, I have traveled the entire city of Bombay, and have visited Delhi, Pune, and Johannesburg and engage with issues of migration in the Indian Ocean deeply. As i was having Baida Roti at Bade Miya at Fort the other day in search of an Arab Bombay, I am eating the popular mutton Murtabak in SE Asia, a Hadrami import to the region.

The waters do connect us via the plate, even if contemporary politics just in a temporary amnesia. The effective networks of food connect us beyond what the national defines us to be. However, I am no theorist, as a supervisor once quipped.

Meanings Evolve.

ESG in the midst of the ruckus in US politics has emerged into the latest turf war for the ideological real estate. In these times it is important to head back to basics and remember sustainability is about quality of living with an eye towards corporate integrity and accountability.

Meanings and nomenclature are sites of contestation yet we reside on one planet with finite resources and that reality does not change.