Environmental governance is a tick box measure in India and in the Global South. The ‘permit kahan hain’ mindset of the industry hinders proactive resilience building which essentially environmental compliance and justice is at its genesis. Yesterday it was Uttarakhand, today it is friends in Kerala and Mumbai suffers every year.

And yes, Sustainability spends are not a cost centre to be accounted for in the overall project cost. A flood risk assessment on your plot is a step in bracing for a climate change driven wet future. A well prepared EIA flags off those signals. Read in to them well. Consider them risk abatement. At the regional level get strategic environmental assessments done for your port or airport or the industrial zone, to understand the drivers behind enterprise level risk. The world is getting hotter and climate inequality is a reality. Combine these ESG risks with Geopolitical Risk and the risk levels for your investment amplify.

Development depends upon the environment and not the other way around. The dynamic minister of infrastructure Shri Nitin Gadkari ji just mentioned in the media a few days back the EIAs should not be mandatory for Road and Port projects. I would love to understand his rationale.

If the Gadgil report for the Western Ghats would have been considered, Kerala would be better prepared. A balanced reasoning for environmental governance with science and data at its heart should be the basis of a new paradigm in this alt facts era, good science saves lives in the long term. Environmental mess in terms of an algal bloom in Florida has entered the political realm. When Quality of Life gets impacted, trivial environmental issues become a political risk. Pragati and Parvayavaran goes together.

Footnotes and citations are not possible every time one writes anything as ‘the field’ is the basis of understanding of a phenomenon. I understand that the political economy of knowledge production is based on citations, but let’s not limit understanding to that particular framing.

Migration can’t be studied by literature review and secondary press articles. It is deeply understood by someone who has been a second generation migrant himself.

Reading Prof Devika Charla’s book on Performance and Post Coloniality resonates with me as writing is deeply personal and performance. I started writing in the first year of engineering from a place of insecurity and a feeling of breaking out dominated my thoughts as I was an uncomfortable engineering student in Muscat weighed down by the burden of grades, and that Baba was breathing down my neck that he would send me back to Mumbai to a mediocre college if I failed in a subject. I rather did very well thanks to fear. A child of Gulf knowledge workers, with a Probashi Bangal Mum and a Bihari Father from Shantiniketan, stories of migration with it’s precarity dominated by existence. Thirty odd years of living in insecurity, with a shaky conception of home, does not make me a migration scholar with publications and a PhD scholarship, but as I document voices of migrants over the past few years, I have realised common fears. Such documentation becomes a performance as hardly anyone writes about the gulf workers, and it’s a small community of GCC centric scholars. Gulf migrants are too pre occupied my our immediate fears to write anything, leave alone food pictures on Instagram.

However the migrant story on the converse is a trap, as can be seen from the migrant worker culture scene in Singapore as reducing lives in to a caricature does not add to the story as well.

Complicated yet incomplete,

Is sometimes the outcome it is

The incomplete corners

The reflected selves

The unvarnished post office brings

The one in the mirror

Authenticity Faked

And yet searching

The kernel of rawness

In the midst of the day

Connect with the lost self

Lost somewhere

Not searchable

History first repeats as tragedy, then as farce. Before ‘acknowledging’ independence, from the Brit’s. India had to undergo a surgery to satisfy Nehru ji’s ego- millions killed, raped and injured and displaced so that demographics get inverted. Punjab and Bengal get slaughtered and the post colonial ramifications are felt in 2018 through the NRC debate, where votes will be won on poisoned societies. Inter generational trauma persists through stories of horror and hurt.

We are the same after seven glorious decades of survival inspite of the government. From space launches to malnutrition deaths in Delhi recently, Incredible India has seen it all.

BMKJ. Jai Maharashtra.

Numbers have a story to tell. 80 months back, I started writing on a regular basis in Singapore on this ideation platform. After constant negative feedback and setbacks- this has been my primary repository of ‘dispersed meditations’ along my travels across eight years, three countries, five cities and numerous other places. The field notes have been commentary to poetry to photo essays. I have been recognised by the international media through their reading of my blog from Al Jazeera to BBC to The Gaurdian recently.

I have been rejected from many places from PhD Programs to Journals, but I have found my definite voice through years of scribbling away. This blog/site of ideation is purposefully not a performance, a formal site of intellectual rigidity. It is fluid, meandering through reality and the narratives are a response to the pressing themes of the day.

Thank you for reading my analysis, rants and thoughts. I will keep scribbling away.

#blogging

With all the Filter bubble discourse on the digital, one feels very poignant about little less conversation, little more action please. Sustainability, Climate Change, Diversity have been emptied out of the ethos of social justice and packaged in to MICE categories, where TED talk like conferences substitute reading and thinking which should be done in private. Meetings are the shop floor of the post industrial era, but life is still anchored in the basics. A smart meter can measure energy consumption but most of the energy is still produced from LNG and Coal. Water scarcity is real in Cape Town and Shimla, and as most of the globe is urban by now, we are not talking about utilising Treated Effluents as a value add to the water mix. Real infrastructure is nuts and bolts, no start up can built that. Public sector has to serve public goods.

Sustainability fails as it is hardly understood. It is a multi headed hydra. The human element is missing. The outcomes from any sustainability imperative is improvement of the quality of life. Environmental compliance is not the consent to operate. Thoothukudi happened because something happened. With the fourth industrial revolution, Sustainability will have to converse with tech bros of the Valley ecosystem. As a operational category, how does the construct communicate between commerce and community, tech and talent. The next generation of sustainability leaders will have to breathe in humanity in tech, and be the interculator of convergence between science and society.

Break the intellectual silos, as poetry is an insight in to the soul of the environmental discourse. Rachel Carson, wrote beautiful prose. With the hottest summer globally on record this year, do we still think that Climate Change is theoretical?

As an environmental engineer, I write too little on sustainability as I feel it is turned in to a sales pitch. It’s time that we breathe some real science in to the narrative.

Majulah! Watching the anthem being sung at the Padang on an IPhone on Facebook live during lunch (as Muscat is four hours behind).

#NDP2018

Happy Birthday Singapore! From Tuas West to Changi Beach and from CCK to Esplanade , it is an exemplar of progress. Having worked and studied at NUS and NTU, Singaporean education and training has enabled me able to work on a diverse set of challenges across geographies in Asia.

I spent many a NDP watching the Padang celebrations in a kopitiam. This Clementi Boy would love to be back soon!

PS: Minister salaries is a storm in the tea cup. Let them do their work!

Majulah Singapura!

I am quoted generously in The Gaurdian’s Long Read on Ad Duqm by Urbanist Wade Shepard:

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/aug/06/five-years-ago-there-was-nothing-inside-duqm-the-city-rising-from-the-sand-oman-city-sand-luxury-hotels-housing

Happy Reading!