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.

Upskilling is a matter of joy and survival. It is constant effort to be able to think sans getting hijacked by algorithms and ideologies, which is essentially outsourcing your self to a framework of values. Read what are you uncomfortable with.

A colleague had a good explanation for Cyber City in Gurgaon, upar kamai, neeche party.

In 2008, after my undergraduate engineering degree in Oman- in my first job interview helmed by Mr. Sanjeev Kulkarni – the original mentor of mine and glad to be still mentored by him, told me that consulting is ‘quick, applied research’ related to real life issues. That definition stands the test of time fourteen years later.

Thank you, Sir, for the many opportunities since then.

• The gravest of soul shattering failures are also the greatest of learning curves. Embrace them as much as the spectacular successes in career and in life.

• One of the profound learnings has been to decouple learning with the cv and the certificate. It is a survival skill, a life skill.

• Too few startups and nonprofits do not focus on growing the revenue function with dedicated resources and teams. It is as important as the fancier product conversation.