At the heart of all ESG, BHR and Sustainability interventions is social licence to operate aka trust in a post truth world.

Trust is very pricey in the era of great wars and tariffs, and no longer tick box for the construction permit.

Life in the diaspora is a flicker of feeds
A life that is postponed on a Google Calendar
Like my Father said, i will do it when i retire
Now he enjoys Pujo, but i am absent
The Rial becomes the Ringitt
The Dollar Peg of Life Continues

As a second generation peripheral academic, i find myself at home in university campuses, having worked at three top universities globally as a researcher that happens to be in SE Asia!

This is holy ground as a BHR professional for me, as a practitioner for almost two decades making it to an UN RBHR conference is something of a dream come true, thanks to very kind partners in the ecosystem whom i work with.

This is akin to a executive course in the prevalent debates in BHR, engaging with standard builders and the communities who have been part of movements to build equity.

Look forward to two more days before it’s time to step up, back in the base camp.

Thanks to many for the kind solidarity in the journey.

There is a lot of reasonable chatter regarding AI and the impact on jobs in consulting. But consultants were meant to be experts, no? Start work where the LLM stops, as the client has the same LLM, right ?

Let’s go where consultants were supposed to be, as experts with decades of expertise, solving hard problems. I think there is still a business case for that.

Thank you very much for the kind opportunity, to
@redlanternanalytica team to allow me to
share my thoughts as a person who grew up and still works in the region, my dearest Khaleej.

Foreign Policy is lived by the diaspora, is not some conceptual framework in an IR textbook. There are things which operate at the scale of subaltern spaces rather than flying at 36000 feet on an Emirates Flight.

Time for a ‘Gulf Turn’, for the Desi Khaleeji, i guess! (Prasad, 2023).

The Banana Leaf is a truly Malaysian celebration of flavours where there are more Chinese lining up to eat the Saapadu spread than actually ethnic Tamizh’s.

As the Shankar of @firebyshankar says, Malaysian Tamizh food is very different, The Saapadu on the Banana Leaf, is very Malaysian with sambal, tahu and tempe which we don’t get in India.

For a country so green with plantation cover, the Banana leaf is an apt metaphor.

Selamat Hari Merdeka, Malaysia- a post colonial success story.

It is the plantation plot exhibition, on the politics and the violence of the monoculture plantation world. There is an Anna Tsing reference. The colonialism of commodities such as rubber and palm which are underwritten by servitude labor and modern day migrant workers from Bangladesh and Bihar. The exhibition ends next month, and is a must visit as it is truly a high level public history work of education, although at the atas Ilham Gallery, where the visitor demographic is also well-heeled. The Coolie Chorus Documentary is on the music of pathos in the plantation of Tamizh workers. The exhibition spans from the Chittagong Hill Tracts to Sabah to Peru. The mapping of the world for resource exploitation still continues under the garb of data centres, green credits and solar farms. The question that arises is: who really benefits from the so called green transition, and is it the Wayang Kulit of the post carbon era?