Ramadan Bazaar, Masjid Jamek/ Jalan TAR

Vibrant sense of community, with families and couples out past midnight. Crowded and packed as a sardine but safe. Malaysia does it well.

The hardest thing for an entrepreneur is growth, there is no secret sauce to that. As a start up wala, I have helped start and scale professional services firms in Oman, Singapore, Malaysia with the latest being in India.

The joy of first Purchase Order is unparalleled.

Kedai Dobi.

The laundry in Malaysia is called Dobi, a clear loan word from Hindi. Indian Ocean Circulations in the quotidian.

I used to be based in the Gulf from 2017 till the pandemic hit. Oman is where I grew up, and has been an intellectual interest even now as I have done pioneering social impact assessments for infrastructure projects in the region. Stellar travel writer @wade_shepard visited Muscat in 2018 and we had a blast. He interviewed me for his YouTube channel documentary and a Guardian Article on Ad Duqm, where I have worked since 2014, including the recently inaugurated Duqm Refinery by His Majesty The Sultan of Oman and the Kuwaiti Prime Minister.

One does not necessarily need a degree in Middle East Studies to write on the region.

As Eid 2024 is around the corner here is image work from 2017 from Mutrah Souq in Muscat at Iftar time. The Mutrah corniche is magical, a space which defeats time.

A master class on creative city making by the Urbanist Charles Landry by Think City as a part of their Creative KL talks.

As an environmental and social planning practitioner I have been interested in the urban question, and having read the global cities class at NUS geography in the coursework phase that I completed while working on a SSHRC project.

The key takeaway is the notion of intimacy in cities which is social capital, and how to promote it through the existing heritage in the city.

The audience questions were tough and excellent. How does the idea of the creative city accommodate the homeless? And the urban is a work in progress and does accommodate the good, bad and the ugly as the Think City Honcho, Abdul Majeed quipped.

The civil society ecosystem in KL with its independent bookstores are an understated gem of its creative ecosystem.

It was a privilege to visit the SDG think tank at Sunway University in Kuala Lumpur and learn of its powerful policy research programmes. A special thank you to Mr. Yi Jian for the generosity of time.