A spectacular ethnography of a special city, that is close to my heart- Dubai ❤️

Professor @rana_almutawa has gone under the bonnet of this global city, and it has been a joy to have the hard copy of this classic in my hands in Bombay. I have been mentioned in the acknowledgments with other senior scholars such as Professor @nehavora1 @sultanalqassemi among others in the book. So utterly generous.

Can’t wait for it to be signed by the good Professor herself!

Barber Shop conversations are much a reality check on middle and working class notions of masculinity and aesthetics. They are also spaces which offer work to migrants without any schooling, but with skill. No AI here.

Zohran ran his Democratic Party primary election campaign for mayor of the city of New York, in the most creative transnational way possible, reflecting of the global melting pot the Big Apple is. A city of capitalism is also a city which attracts the world for work, and the world arrived at Staten Island or JFK airport to chase the American dream. Zohran, a recent naturalised American citizen is of Gujarati Ugandan and Indian Punjabi heritage. A former rapper, he utilised his Bollywood roots to good use to record campaign reels in Hindi-Urdu and Bangla with Shahana Hanif. His Spanish and Mandarin Chinese campaigns are on point as well.

A template for global city working class politics, as Sadiq Khan in London had shown the way. Their politics might not be compatible with global capitalism, but capitalism needs the very workers that vote for Zohran, the taxi drivers and public housing residents for instance need the social protection and welfare under the precarious neoliberal conditions they serve in.

The November election will be interesting to follow.

Writing is trapped in the lexicon of the h-index, I index and other impact metrics such as grant dollars won, prizes won and so on. There is a life of the mind, beyond the violence of the metric, an Arundhati Roy never did a PhD, but PhDs are written on her work.

Scholarship has lost it’s way, weaponised beyond redemption, whereas it was supposed to offer alternative futures such as the era of wars, or as Roy wrote in the FT article during the pandemic, a portal to a future.

Writing is about giving hope for an alternative, when we are in the midst of polycrisis. Where are the new frameworks or models to grapple with the change, apart from recycling the same ad nauseum?

Is academia truly doing its job, beyond this ranking and that publication? And a grant proposal to be won?

In the age of AI, the knowledge in our communities and cultures will be of utmost value. Meaningful stakeholder engagement is key to understanding materiality and FPIC, as the risk hidden in our communities, through body language and reading between the lines is key to black swan weak signals.

In a poly/perma crisis, each data point can get amplified in a turbulent context of tariffs and hard conflicts. Speak to your communities, do your human rights due diligence and materiality assessments.

Mawsim (Monsoon in Arabic)

The Khareef is here in Monsoon Asia. Tarikh and Trade are intertwined with the Monsoon season, in the pre coal era of globalisation, and there was a globalised world before European colonialism.

Bombay, which was a dowry turned out to the jewel of the Crown on the Western Indian Ocean, as can be read from Nile Green’s Bombay Islam.

As one looks beyond the edges of Bandra Bandstand, a tourist magnet thanks for Bollywood celebrities having one of their homes, the Sea towards Aden, Salalah and Mombasa gives hope, and the Dhow trade continues through Vahan’s as given in Nidhi Mahajan’s book- Moorings.

Looking forward to Fahad Bishara’s new book coming up soon as well.

There has been plenty of AI disruption talk in the professional services space in the digital realm for the past year of so. The LLMs are brilliant, and a fantastic cognitive aid- does entry level analyst work well, but does not solve for why consultants are required by companies. They are hired to augment in house teams, problem solve as an aid, and the most important reason is legitimacy for a regulatory requirement.

The engineering consultants will still write EIAs, design roads and aid with the innovative capital needed to build back better for a world of global heating.

One of the toughest things in business is to sell consulting services, and the client only buys when there is a need. Find the need and the work comes. AI or no AI, people buy from people.

The basics remain the same, no one buys research, they buy a solution.

Tamizh Kuil in the Indira Dock port area in South Bombay amongst the precarious housing which used to be home to Port Workers in the heyday of the Raj.

Bombay is home to historic Tamizh communities from the Tirunelveli area especially in the Bhandup and Dharavi belt. There are a few Mariamman Kuils scattered across the city. These are a part of a larger imperial entrepôt grid from Penang to Durban.