my first trip to asia - jakarta indonesia 1982- the first 10 years of my working life as a statistician had taken me to leeds london and paris so i never understood how the other half lived until my trip to indonesia

i enjoyed what was possbly the best intro possible for me -MA mathematical statistics, Cambridge U,  Corpus Christi - to make some impact however small

i was working for unilever - then still a multinational where huge livesmatter responsibility was retained by national offices - particularly in indonesia a top 10 country in population terms, the largest muslim nation,  and the netherlands main colonial play - remember unilever and royal shell are most unusual corporations being anglo dutch as well as stock-marketed

i was helping research the first time the national office had been charged with a totally new product and brand customised to indonesia

pretty well everywhere in asian developing countries unilever had great rapport with poor women- the lux brand of toilet soap being the one connection with the outside world

so the product was to be unilevers biggest mass seller beyond lux in indonesia

a body lotion -golden silk locally to be called maya sutra - had been chosen as that could still be made as affordable for a third of women though admittedly with more profit potential per sale item rhan lux toilet soap

to maximise empathy the best unilever womens products do the opposite of almost every other cosmetic brand - instead of nagging at a women in terms of making you beautiful to men, they convey the message you are beautiful a person as you are self confident

to do research on the hopes and dreams of poorest but extremely hard working women has become the greatest privilege i can think of as a statistician and one that helps me over5 decades intuitively feel out  which sdg-projects/ngo/national aid policies are real and which are greenwash

i was later invited by unilever to help train their researchers across asia in those days unilever had a training retreat in a village about 30 miles out of jakarta called medamongmong? i didnt know when i first visited jakarta that most of my working life was to converge with my fathers who norman macrae at the economist 1  2  who since 1962 had been celebrating every rising asian nation - part of his own idea of reconciling all the poverty traps the british empire had spiralled across asia between 1760 and 1945