Dear President Trump,

Congratulations on your recent victory.

Like many others, I remain hopeful that, despite your administration’s numerous missteps during your first month in office and despite several indications to the contrary, you do aspire to have a positive impact on the world in which we live. I am writing to you today with a request that you use your business acumen to support sustainable development in communities across the globe in need by promoting investment in enterprises that aim to create positive impacts on society and the environment.

This is the second time in my life that I…

Dialogue Across the Pacific: In the Quest of a Magazine…

Eddie Hartman (Co-Founder of Legalzoom) and I (Founder of IIX and Shujog) are friends who like to muse about life across the little pond called the Pacific Ocean. I live in Singapore and Eddie lives in Palo Alto. Despite the separation of 16 hours of time zone, work, family, friends and life we find a lot of mundane things to ‘muse’ about or more appropriately ‘amuse’ ourselves with…

Nov 12, 2016

Dear Eddie,

I know you are as depressed as I am about the US elections so I am not…

I recently received Asia Society’s Game Changer Award..completely unexpected but thrilled to have received such an incredible recognition. Here is my award acceptance speech…

I would like to thank the Asia Society members and Trustees for bestowing this incredible honor upon me. I am indeed very humbled.

As a child of a country first devastated by war and then grown dependent on development aid, I grew up with a strong sense of defiance — defiance to break down barriers that tried to hold me back as a girl, later a woman, in a conservative society; and defiance to break the…

I had a simple goal in life — to make finance do good for the world. That is why I joined Morgan Stanley at 21 and saw how finance brought amazing opportunities to the society (it did some bad things as well but let’s not go into that today). I wanted to take the magic of capital markets back to my poor country Bangladesh. Thus, with a head full of idealism and heart full of optimism, I left Morgan Stanley and returned to Bangladesh. There I joined Grameen Bank and worked on Grameen Bank’s first financing round, in effect bringing…

Open Letter to the Well Wishers of Aliya

Dear Friends of Aliya,

On Monday, June 6, I wrote an open letter to Mr. Tony Fernandes, CEO of the airline AirAsia titled ‘I Could Not Protect My Child’, informing him and you all about the horrific treatment by his cabin and ground crew towards my 10-year-old daughter Aliya who is affected by Ichthyosis.

While the incident took place a few weeks ago, the episode has been haunting me since. It has been hard to accept, especially since I have tried to do everything in my power to teach Aliya and her…

An open letter to Mr. Tony Fernandes, CEO of AirAsia

Dear Mr. Fernandes,

As a father you know that the most basic instinct as a parent is to protect one’s child. You want to protect your child whom you love more than life itself from anything that can harm him/her. I am a mother and I wanted to protect my child, but I couldn’t protect her. …

Eddie Hartman (Co-Founder of Legalzoom) and I (Founder of IIX and Shujog) live across the Pacific Ocean. Eddie lives in California and I live in Singapore. Eddie and I are fellow entrepreneurs and good friends who over the past few months have been sharing snippets of our lives as we see it. Here is one of our latest exchanges…

April 1, 2016

Dear Durreen,

I hope you are back from your various travels across Asia.

I am on the train from San Francisco back to San Mateo, where I will pick up my car and head back home.

This is…

Eddie Hartman (Co-Founder of Legalzoom) and I (Founder of IIX and Shujog) met few months ago at a human rights conference. Eddie has dedicated his career in democratizing access to legal service and I in bringing finance and development together.

Eddie and I come from very different backgrounds. I grew up in Bangladesh — a poor, Muslim country where opportunities were limited for a girl. Eddie grew up in New Jersey in a non-religious Jewish family with an expectation of great success. …