In some life, i would like to be a historian of the Indian Ocean and speak in Arabic, Farsi, Bahasa, Kutchchi and Tamizh.

The S dimension of the ESG is more than Human Capital , DEI , BHR and Community Affairs which are the sub components of a poorly quantitative matrix of the risk trifecta. The Social category is about us, which includes the employees as sustainability is about quality of life rooted in the epistemic foundations of ecological justice.

The posh literary crowd snigger at Chetan Bhagat, seem to miss the point. He is a cultural phenomenon. Most writers struggle to pay bills being so called literary; he maintains a mini media empire.

I have read the Harvard Business Review since 2004 from Muscat to Mumbai via Singapore, Dubai, and Delhi. Fortunate to have academic parents who never shied from spending money behind books and magazines. Our wealth is in our library at home in Mumbai residence.

Lucky to have found bookstores like Border and Kinokuniya in the Gulf, Bahrisons in Delhi to Thambi Magazine Stall at Holland Village in Singapore who stock up on HBR.

I have never managed to attend business school due to monetary constraints but have been an entrepreneur since I was in college writing and building stuff. HBR for eighteen years has been my Business School each month.

After being unable to find a bookstore in Mumbai which stocks up on HBR since August, I ordered a hard copy (better format for learning) on the Harvard Business Publishing Website for the first time, paying 2.5x of the retail price in Singapore. Well, it reached me in four days at home, right in time for the reading weekend.

Learning compounds each day, and it is an investment that I never shy away from as a consultant, entrepreneur and para-academic.

The purpose of a moonshot activity is not the outcome, but the output of the steep learning curve that comes out of it. Yes, the pain of failure does hurt, but learning would have never happened without the attempt.

The caricature of the ‘lalaji’ or the trader as the hereditary custodian of capital as a lesser intellect in popular discourse is partial at best as risk taking is a contact sport and entrepreneurship needs the most amount of quality information for decision making.

Think Kunal Shah 🙂

#entrepreneurship

I am enlightened as an interdisciplinary sustainability/ESIA/ESG professional to find three hundred odd pages of high-quality research emerging every second day from think tanks, regulators, consulting firms and non-profits on various aspects from carbon, biodiversity to blended finance. In the hierarchy instituted by the political economy of knowledge production, these are ‘grey’ literature that would not push the boundaries of our understanding epistemically while these might enable policy understanding at best.

These are certainly not Nature or Science grade or even peer reviewed.

I wonder as a professional who in sustainability leadership has the time, energy, and resources to read and digest these frameworks and deploy them. As sustainability professionals we miss the woods for the trees, and do not think of ESG as a sunk cost to business before the impact starts to flower into ‘green shoots’ of sustainable growth.

While practitioner research or analysis is a plus as far as the master narrative of climate change is concerned, we also need to think who our audience is. Where is the impact?

#sustainability#leadership #climatechange

The National Hindu Hotel at Ballard Pier, Mumbai

Udupi hotels in Mumbai are constant in an ever-changing city.

The food, the smell, the space is an archive against forgetting.

Edible Migrant infrastructure for the migrant.

#mumbai

As a practitioner and dare say theorist of resilience, I am interested in how power works through/between/in systems and at all scales. Between the dialectics of class struggle, there are elites within the Davids which navigate power through a Foucauldian and Latourian framing.

Things I wish were taught during university:

1. Learning to manage energy better

2. Learning to sell better

3. Learning to deal with failure

4. Learning that there are alternative paths to success

Glad to see new possibilities emerging in real education.