Category: Uncategorized

An Afternoon Masterclass with Danny Quah and Ong Kian Ming

With Professor Danny Quah

Former Minister Dr Ong Kian Ming and Professor Danny Quah from the LKYSPP chat geopolitics of trade in an indie bookstore in Kuala Lumpur. The masterclass on the new world disorder, is something we don’t think with through shocks, electric vehicles and new geometry of alliances. The EV is a common good, for the planetary commons and the global supply chains.

Tintabudi is a chic bookstore and events space with good coffee where this ticketed event was hosted on a Saturday afternoon. Great audience of think tankers, policy wonks, researchers were around to ask the sharpest questions in the Q&A and the after the event.

A sense of intellectual community was found certainly. And Kuala Lumpur/Penang have amazing independent bookstores.

I took copious notes on the New World of Disorder and the China/US Shocks.

The esteemed panel with the moderator Ainil

Public History on a Friday Evening in KL

I love the fact that Malaysia creates spaces in the civil society to articulate thoughts and narratives which are alternative in character. This evening Imagined Malaysia, Malaysia Design Archive and Rumah Attap come together to host an archivist’s talk on a Friday evening in the heart of Kuala Lumpur.

The archivist spoke about social history and private manuscript collections as a window into everyday life.

@im.imaginedmalaysia does public history amazing work, and is totally volunteer driven by historians who are trained in Cambridge and Yale.

Last year i had attended a fun talk by the history doyen Barbara Andaya organised by Imagined Malaysia on a Saturday morning and it was packed with researchers and historians.

Alternative spaces give life to researchers who work on micro histories and oral histories.

Wish there are similar places in Mumbai although Sarmaya does a great job.

The archivist from Indonesia did a great job
Cool Heritage Space

Nasi Biryani Index of Indian Ocean Circulations

This decadent plate of Bukhara Biryani Kambing is a site of edible Indian Ocean circulations. The taste is a blend of South Tamil Nadu biryani with the format of a mandi, where the laham and biryani rice is separate.

The aachar is deeply satisfying with the mutton soup and the gravy on the side. Food is not merely a source of succour rather than a site of unravelling, a Indian Muslim Place, with a bent towards the Malay culture and a biryani which could easily be a Shuwa sans the spice overload. The patrons this evening were predominantly Malay.

With migrant workers from Tamil Nadu and Indonesia cooking and serving the fare, these are also migrant Foodscapes, although the prices are not migrant friendly at all.

I had presented about the Indian Ocean Nasi Biryani Index of Circulations at ICONSEA 10 in 2023. The index i must say is alive and well.

At Syed Bistro

Yellow, The Literature Magazine Launch in KL

At the launch of the Literary Magazine, Yellow on South East Asia by South East Asia. Minh Bui Jones of Mekong Review Fame launches his latest platform. He is based in Vietnam, and hence is not a diaspora magazine. Eddin Sir gave a sublime rendition of his essay on his father.

Learning from the masters, is an education especially on a Saturday afternoon. A lot of familiar names in the audience.

Happy to a writer, on some days of the week. Theory or not.

Consulting Entrepreneurship Venture Building Notes

Sustainability+Impact Consulting Entrepreneurship is equal parts science and arts. Identify client needs through cultural intelligence is the moat which does not arise overnight. A knowledge of context through history and cultural values informs what constitutes value in a specific juncture. And value through ROI and capacity building towards resilience, often undefined and fuzzy, is the key selling point in a crowded market powered by LLMs.

And clients hardly buy a report, they buy resilience through a pain point solution.

Fun fact : The famed physicist Richard Feynman, also did industrial consulting by the side earning him a good income to support his family. His solutions often saved his clients a lot of money through optimisation work.

Where is the resilience, stupid?

The elephant regarding the sustainability question, at all levels and scales is the dreaded undertone which almost every sustainability practitioner struggles to give a clean answer: what is the ROI of this sustainability spend, when business is volatile in this era of wars, supply chain disruptions and AI mayhem? Sustainability for long has been the feel good enabler and soft compliance imperative for market access.

In the polycrisis, where are the interventions which deliver long term value and cost savings?

And the meta question, where are touch points which create resilience?

Marking Birthdays, Marking Time

It’s my Mother’s birthday today. A woman who has the zeal to live fully despite multiple health challenges over the past three years. She is my anchor when my world collapsed a few years back, and gave me the ballast to live again. She loves the classroom, and even taught when we told her to rest. The zest comes naturally as she went to the mountains of Dhofar on the Yemen Border to teach in government schools in the early 1990s, learnt Arabic and taught two generations of Omanis. She misses Muscat, our home dearly. I am hence a Gulf Scholar by accident of destiny.

So grateful for her, and even today she tells me to keep writing my PhD thesis which she wants me to complete. I told her, i will do it for her.

Ustaza Smita, still continues to read and analyse today while taking a barrage of medicines to keep healthy.

May Day 2.0 : Thinking for the Polycrisis

Most F&B jobs are informal

May Day is a vital remainder for the struggle for dignity, in a time where there is a fog of multiple intersecting crisis, automation, wars, climate and a deliberate attempt to frame anything to do with the rights based approach as one which is anti business. People work inherently to support families, and not to oppose the employer. Yet the labour question is one framed by precarity. The welfare state in India is extensive for the poor, on the one hand and on the other a new labour dispensation streamlines many matters which may be perceived as pro business. The reality is often context based.

We frame the May Day narrative as one which has the industrial worker in mind, but what about platform workers who deliver in the scorching heat of summer?

My sense on the ground in India, is that this precariat will drive politics in urban seats as India goes in for delimitation which will increase seats in Mumbai and Delhi from 2029 will be the way labour politics will eventually move.

The trade off is delicate, where formal jobs are few without a good safety trampoline in President Tharman’s words at St Gallen. The AI disruption is a blood bath in the Indian tech space, which was the middle class social mobility escalator for three decades, has been switched off. For all the business friendly banter, how does May Day relate to them.

The labour question is gendered and intersectional, and a reparative archipelagic approach is required as we look at Noida or the Farmer protests. The questions are political, and need to be baked in to legislation.