On a day where a dear loved parent is back in hospital, I am blessed to meet a mentor- Mohsin Bhai in KL who has meant so much to me, taught me how migration really works over the past 9 years, as the founder and editor of the only Bengali Language Monthly Paper for the Labour Migrant Community in SE Asia, Banglar Kantha and runs a vibrant cultural space for migrant workers on Desker Road in the Little India District in Singapore.

As the pioneer of the migrant movement in Singapore, he has brought out issues way before migration work was considered mainstream in Singapore. As a contributor to the initiative I have learnt more about migration and it’s inner workings especially the civil society dynamics in Singapore more than any human geographer can write about in the Geoforum or Progress in Human Geography Journals.

Sustainability at its heart is about delivering better standards of livability. Human Rights in the business context as a block within the ESG Lego structure is fundamentally about operationalizing dignity within our communities of affect. ESG gives sustainability to its legs; the indicators, the frameworks, the risk roster expressed through publicly facing ratings which drive trust and transparency.

But are we measuring impact through ESG within the Corporate Human Rights Indicators? We are trying to establish a ‘humanity hygiene’ baseline, the complaints, incident statistics, resolution numbers, access infrastructure etc. It gives a reliable performance snapshot to the investor class regarding social risk, the subliminal cues of reading between the data lines, the grid of numbers flashing in front of our screens. ESG data, as I have written earlier in a LinkedIn post, is an early warning detector of an impending crisis.

The global progressive values paradigm often colloquially labelled as woke, which is often carried over to the ESG meta framework, reflective of the culture wars in US Politics ahead of the presidential polls.

In the era of acute geopolitical crisis with the Gaza humanitarian debacle, the Ukraine War which has been moved to the backburner despite the European Winter coming up, Human Rights and its applicable iterations will gain salience, as a human tragedy is pinging on our news alerts and saturating our Instagram feeds every few hours.

‘Being Human’ is good for business and society as live in a hyper ‘risk society’ in an Ulrich Beck vain.