Superb fare, the best Kerala fare had in a long time. A fine dining experience, with a nice vibe.

A Den of Agents as a friend in the civil society quipped recently about a particular south Asian embassy.

It was an honour to learn about Nepalese Geopolitics and Foreign Policy from Dr Pramod Jaiswal at his talk at IKMAS, UKM. He is a dynamic think tank founder whose work I have following on the digital realm for years.

So many takeaways from his session with elite scholars about the Nepali politics between China and India.

As a sustainability scholar it did hit me that Nepal has enormous potential to export low carbon power both to India and Bangladesh.

Flipping away.

Mamaks are price effective eateries in the heart of KL, where office workers and tourists on a budget can eat a bite.

Options add to the degrees of freedom, and improves the sheer ability to do inspired work. Hand to mouth is the recipe for mediocrity. Always work towards what will increase the optionality in life. Mostly that is money, or the ability to increase the monetary value through specialist skills.

Sustainability Reporting is for transparency, and is performance at it’s minimum, but a necessary evil as it lifts the entire process architecture to include environmental and social data analysis in decision making. Ratings are a critical proxy for many aspects which are really the hidden transcript of every day capitalism, which it tries very hard to shrug under the proverbial carpet.

The simplistic readings of sustainability data is detrimental to corporate performance, as risk is reality in each decision. ESG data reveals as much as it tries to hide, yet the trained eye can read in between the lines, the magic of the architecture is that the data is meant to be read across data sets and against the grain, not to merely consume it on its face value, as the data might not be even assured, even in its limited variation.

The strength of ESG is the plurality in the multiple registers of data it entails, and the attempt to codify it will restrict its ability as a weak signals dashboard for the future.

It’s been interesting to find Bengalis from the Bengali speaking states in India, namely West Bengal and Tripura working in the Indian restaurant sector, aka Mamak’s in Malaysia. Usually Bangladeshi’s were known to be a diaspora all over, but their Indian Bengali counterparts are following suit for very little money.

Not surprisingly Bengali Muslims from Nadia and Mushirdabad dominate, although Hindus are being found too. Bengali migration internally to Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore is well known.

A paper is lurking somewhere for an enterprising scholar from the academic industrial complex of CU JU and PU.

It was a fantastic banana leaf experience at Bala’s in Bangsar in KL, and it truly lives up to its promise.

The food was hot and fresh, and the service was prompt. The Nepali guy serving in Hindi was very nice. The fish fry was the star!

The most wonderful conversations on migration happen at the Pakistani Arabic Habibi Barber Shop, today was on the Yemeni Student Diaspora in Malaysia, and the surge in the 2015-16 during the heights of the civil war. The pandemic was the nadir. His particular salon owner lost a decade long business during the pandemic. Most of his customers were Yemeni students.

During a previous conversation, he recalled his entrepreneurial journey in Al Buraimi and Deira in the Gulf. He then lived for a year in Pakistan then made his way back to Malaysia to rebuild his life.

Migrants have circuitous lives.