Absolute honor to meet my BHR icon and Public Intellectual Salil Tripathi ji in Mumbai.

I have been privileged to read and follow his writings and activist work in the realm of BHR for many years. I had written an article for IHRB a couple of years back as well in the Dhaka Principle series with Adrian Pereira Sir.

The conversation was piercing and eclectic with the great Ratna Pathak Shah, who quipped that one can find Gujarati signage’s in Wembley in England rather than in Mumbai which is a Gujarati speaking city. Bombay or South Bombay Gujarati is different from the one spoken in Amdavad or Surat.

The linguistic competition to Gujarati is from Hindi rather than English as Czech faces encroachment from Russian. The short time was nothing short of a masterclass. The audience comprised of the culture elite of Bombay, I think I saw Dolly Thakore and a few popular faces.

One of the inherent weaknesses of how the sustainability paradigm or the erstwhile ESG variant, now politically retired in the DJT era has been the carbon tunnel overemphasis on indicators and frameworks rather than solutions. Depoliticising ESG did not work as it entailed a particular worldview.

Mining communities left behind in the rust belts in North America and Australia, or in Indonesia caught in the cross hair of transition politics, would have rebelled. ESG meant risk to companies, but the biggest black swan event was missed- the geopolitics or the politics of pen risk is hardly mapped in KPIs.

With AI, traditional consulting is under threat, though deep expertise which solves problems and creates value. Reporting is compliance and impact does more than that, it creates more fundamental ripples.

For my consulting peers, lets get back to research basics- AI is already creating level one reports.

Mumbai Salon’s of the non branded typology, are meeting points for real estate deals, neighbourhood gossip and an expression of minority experiences as most of the barbers are Muslim migrants from the heartlands of Yogi Land.

The soundscape is of Quranic verses on low volume, and of news of Muslim experiences during the Holy Month of Ramadan. The conversations are full of banter laced with masculine innuendos.

A site which exemplifies the ‘Bombay Brokers’, a book edited by Lisa Bjorkman. A space of aspiration and survival which is so Bombay, where everyone has a dream to fulfil where former barbers become owners and double up as real estate agents.

Don’t take writing so seriously, it is a form of expression not some document of record, it is not a contract. Always write on the phone, a blog, on an empty gmail draft, notes.

Life has been quite a torrid ride and a fascinating journey since the past two decades. It was amazing to speak to a family friend academic Uncle from Oman who now teaches in the US and is a teacher of ELT and writing. It gave me an opportunity to reflect on two decades of writing, although a famous supervisor once mentioned that i can’t write well. Well each person has its own take on what constitutes merit. I have written for quite a few platforms over the last fifteen years.

Writing is a deeply personal process, and the performance of it comes only later.

Was at an Iftar, was invited by the Indian Students Association President, a boy who grew up in Jizan, Saudi Arabia. A Nusantara Buka Puasa at Masjid Kolej Islam Malaya next to Universiti Malaya. Had a Palestinian from Ramallah, an Indian from Hyderabad who grew up in Saudi Arabia and a Bangladeshi engineering scholar from Chittagong and a Malaysian from Sabah. Truly Ummah on a table.

When i landed in Changi airport this time, the airport cabbie was a Singaporean Indian who had married to a Morrocan in Holland, and his daughters and grand kids were in Dutch Aruba. He travels to Holland thrice a year and drives cabs as he is a retired businessman.

Kinokuniya KLCC is akin to a spiritual space for a researcher. One can spend hours there, and its shelves turn into archives of excavation for literature review for the PhD, consulting and life in between.

I always serendipitously get the right reads for research which is on carbon markets in SE Asia. The two reads are gems which were present on my reading list for a while. It’s a shame that the Kino at Takashimaya in Singapore is shrinking. Kino in Dubai Mall was my Thursday evening after office spot, in the glitz of Dubayy.

A small anecdote from a major geography conference in a global Asian City, a distinguished Professor of Development Geography at Oxbridge said during one of the many side conversations over the rich week, that her Father served The Sultan’s Armed Forces during the Dhufar insurgency/ monsoon revolution from 1975-83 after he retired as a regular from the British Army. Prof Emma as a young girl went to the frontlines in Salalah in 1977 on a military helicopter as her Father wanted to ‘check’ on the front lines.

Stories from the long shadow of the empire, as her experiences prompted her to study development aid in India from Britain during the 1990s. She learnt to speak Hindi and lived in Delhi for two years. She chatted in Hindi as well, and discussed Shiva Sena, India’s aid policy in Africa and Oman 🇴🇲 ❤️