After my usual evening run, I usually decompress by sipping chai. The Chai and Sandwich upgraded tapri which I have been frequenting for the past couple of months has been a window into the slice of life moments. The soundscape is chirpy, located next to a jogging area and a prominent hospital. It is a melting pot of people from various backgrounds from paramedics to families.

The tapri is run by an industrious local micro businessperson, employing staff to support his chai business. Today he quipped during our chat, he did not understand whether his sales are making sense after selling three hundred cups at INR 10 per cup. So, I asked him a few questions.

What are your input costs daily?

He said,

Milk -1280 for a 20-liter pack, Chai Masala- 45, Tea- 200, Paper Cups Packet for cups: 200

This is about 1800 per day

And other costs:

Electricity: 10, 000/month, Gas: 2000/month,

Average: 400/Day

Manpower costs: 300/Day

Total costs per day then are approximately 2500 per day only from three hundred cups a day at 10 rupees. The margin for the owner is five hundred rupees only from cutting chai revenues.

He makes coffee, and other snacks which are his main income then.

He also sells cutting chai in a bigger cup at 20 rupees, which I partake. As a good Samaritan I suggested that he should increase the 20-rupee cup sale, as input costs remain the same, doubling the margins referencing a case study that I had read on increasing the toothpaste opening leading to more purchases, and greater daily use.

A ten-minute chat was an insight into bottom-up businesses that focus on cash in the pocket rather than valuations.

#cuttingchai

The community lifeline of the city with an eclectic soundscape and a truly slice of life moment.

An accessible democratic urban space where everyone blends in over INR 10 cutting.

Learning for growth is about challenging yourself to explore the uncomfortable, the unknown in ways of seeing and ways of thinking, which is the spirit of the journey itself. Instead, assessment anxiety and optics demolish the fun in learning mostly.

As an embodied lifelong learner and training junkie, the incline itself trains one to think. The resume was always the last aspect on the agenda.

From Cutting Chai to Chai Karak in the Khaleej to Teh Masala in the Nusantara, chai is an index of connectivity across migration corridors of the Indian Ocean Region.

Biryani is another variant of an edible index from Mandi in Mukalla to Biryani Malabar to Nasi Briani in Melaka la.

The Net Zero or Net Positive Transition is a Human Transition. We are again at the grave risk of another top-down policy and market design where vulnerable voices are not included in these decarbonization dialogues.

The European Heat Wave and the Pakistan Floods should be a case in point

Behavior reflects choice. The ability to respond is also a choice. The choice architecture reflects leverage. Leverage is a function of power.

The crisis which ESG in the current avatar is of underperformance or at least the optics of it. ESG is not a monolith and has to be gauged on a sliding scale. The non-financial risk metrics are weak signals of material risks to be, which is a temperature check equivalent of something which might go wary. ESG itself needs to be assessed on its own terms rather than a proxy for the weight of our collective aspirations regarding climate change. ESG is a proxy for an aspect for which it is, it is a way of doing business the right way.

Barber Shops or Nai ki Dukaan or the gentrified salon is a space of migration and mobility of a trade that is automation resistant and requires hardly any education beyond school. The stylist or the barber usually comes from districts in Uttar Pradesh that supply the salon supply chains from Mumbai to Dubai via Kerala.

When i put a pause on my PhD dreams, which i will hopefully restart – I had told in a social media post that research and writing will take on a new lease of life. I look forward to this prestigious workshop on migration next year at Manipal where I will present my ethnographic work on food spaces as migration infrastructure.

ESG is the flavor of the corporate zeitgeist for all kinds of drivers and is often treated as an acronym which might be a temperature check for ethics. Environment as a domain when double clicked on, leads to drop down menu of number of sub domains starting from climate change to biodiversity to waste management. Governance is a vast sea of knowledge of their own from anti-graft to board diversity to compensation matters.

As an environmental engineer who retrained as an ethnographer by reading PhD level coursework in Human Geography and Sociology while working on Policy Projects, the S is my area of expertise. However Social itself has several buckets from Health & Safety to DEI to BHR to Community Stakeholder Engagement to Inclusive Governance. Now a days i focus on responsible supply chains and modern slavery concerns including decolonizing HRDD.

The intertwined nature of the various elements and their effect brings about the real nature of the weak signals that ESG as a riskfication paradigm is trying to achieve. All these elements need to be mapped along a spectrum and drawn from the ESIA playbook; the cumulative impact is a vital measure. The interpretive nature of the assessment requires an appreciation of the organizational context.

Ratings and rankings are bundled value judgements; thus, the methodology matters in the way that assessments are done, rather than looking at the rankings at face value. Important questions to ask as a ready reckoner are:

Who is assessing?

To what end is assessment driven data utilized in decision making calculus?

For ESG to move from risk to resilience, power dynamics need to be included.