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By:

Divyaa Advaani 

2 November 2024 at 8:58:38 am

The Follow-Up You Skipped

The meeting went well. Everyone agreed on that. He was articulate, confident, well prepared. He read the room perfectly, asked the right questions, left a strong impression. People exchanged cards. There were warm handshakes and genuine smiles. The kind of first meeting that feels like the beginning of something real. And then nothing. No email. No message. No acknowledgement that the conversation had ever happened. Days passed. Then a week. The impression he had worked so carefully to create...

The Follow-Up You Skipped

The meeting went well. Everyone agreed on that. He was articulate, confident, well prepared. He read the room perfectly, asked the right questions, left a strong impression. People exchanged cards. There were warm handshakes and genuine smiles. The kind of first meeting that feels like the beginning of something real. And then nothing. No email. No message. No acknowledgement that the conversation had ever happened. Days passed. Then a week. The impression he had worked so carefully to create began to quietly unravel — not because of anything he said in the room, but because of everything he failed to do after leaving it. This is one of the most common and costliest personal brand mistakes I observe in accomplished founders. Not the dramatic failures. The invisible ones. The follow-up that never came. Most founders understand the importance of the first impression. They prepare for it, invest in it, obsess over it. The handshake, the introduction, the pitch these receive enormous attention. And then the meeting ends and the attention goes with it. What happens next the email sent within twenty-four hours, the specific reference to something discussed, the simple act of saying "it was genuinely good to meet you" is treated as optional. A nicety. Something to get to when there is time. There is never time. And that silence communicates something to everyone on the other side of it. Think about the last significant meeting you had. A potential client, a collaborator, a connection that felt genuinely promising. Did you follow up? Within twenty-four hours? With something specific enough to show that you were actually present in the conversation not just physically in the room? Or did you return to the business of your day and tell yourself you would get to it later? Because here is what the person on the other side experienced. They left the meeting with a positive impression. They may have even spoken about you to someone else — told a peer about this founder they had just met, someone worth knowing. And then the silence arrived. And with it, a quiet internal conversation that went something like this: maybe they were not as interested as they seemed. Maybe I read it wrong. Maybe they do this with everyone. The recalibration is never announced. It simply happens. And the version of you that existed in their mind before the silence is never quite the same after it. The person who seemed so impressive in the room revealed, through their absence, exactly how they operate when nobody is watching them perform. A personal brand is not built only in the moments of visible effort. It is built in the moments of invisible effort the follow-up nobody sees you send, the thank you note nobody required, the specific detail that tells the other person you were genuinely listening. These are the moments that separate the founders who are remembered from the ones who were merely impressive. The irony is that follow-up requires almost no time. A well-crafted message takes three minutes. What it communicates takes far longer to build through any other means. It signals attention, care, professionalism and genuine interest all in a single act that most people cannot be bothered to perform. And for a founder at a serious level where every relationship has compounding potential, where reputation travels faster than any introduction the cost of that silence is never just one missed connection. It is the conversations that never happened. The referrals that went elsewhere. The collaborations that went to someone who simply took three minutes to say it was a pleasure, and here is why. Your brand lives in those three minutes. Not in the meeting itself. In what you choose to do or not do after it ends. If this landed somewhere specific for you, a Founder Brand Audit is a focused consultation call where we examine exactly what your brand is communicating in every room, and in every silence after it. This is the beginning of a specific investment in yourself. Five slots open each week. Book your call here: https://www.calendly.com/divyaaadvaani/founder-brand-audit Divyaa Advaani, Personal Branding Strategist (The author is a personal branding expert. She has clients from 14+ countries. Views personal.)

When Neighbours Become Enemies

Thailand and Cambodia are engaged in their worst border conflict in decades. Since July, the conflict has killed dozens, displaced lakhs, and shattered a peace deal signed just weeks earlier.

The Thailand-Cambodia border disagreement dates back to 1907, when France, which ruled Cambodia at the time, signed a treaty with Siam (now Thailand) to establish their shared border. The treaty stated that the border would follow the watershed of the Dangrek Mountains. While this seemed straightforward, French maps placed several ancient temples and pockets of land inside Cambodia, even though the watershed would have put them in Thai territory.


These were not minor disputes. One contested area includes the 11th-century Preah Vihear temple, which sits on the border. In 1962, the International Court of Justice ruled it belonged to Cambodia, but the wider boundary issue remained unresolved. With no agreed border line, the dispute simmered for decades, with occasional but contained clashes.


Then in 2025, the situation began to deteriorate rapidly.


When Fighting Began

On May 28, a Cambodian soldier was killed near the border, prompting Cambodia to ban Thai imports and Thailand to close crossings. By July 24, the dispute had escalated into open warfare, with both sides deploying heavy weapons and civilians fleeing border areas or sheltering in schools and temples.


The Leaked Call

A month earlier, a private phone call between Thailand’s then Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra and Cambodia’s former leader Hun Sen surfaced in June, triggering a political crisis that reshaped Thai politics.


In the call, Paetongtarn addressed Hun Sen informally, calling him “uncle”, while appearing to criticise Thailand’s military and seek his advice on domestic matters—fuelling claims of undue foreign influence.


Hun Sen later released the recording after relations soured, triggering nationalist outrage and mass protests in Thailand. The fallout proved catastrophic for Paetongtarn’s government: in August 2025, the Constitutional Court removed her from office, reshaping the country’s political trajectory.


Short-Lived Peace

On July 28, just four days after fighting erupted, a Malaysia-brokered ceasefire saw both sides pull back and halt fire. The agreement appeared to hold, keeping the border largely quiet for two months.


In October, a more formal peace deal—the Kuala Lumpur Peace Accords—was signed at an ASEAN summit in Malaysia. It called for withdrawing heavy weapons, deploying ASEAN observers, clearing landmines jointly, and restoring diplomatic ties, with US President Trump attending the signing. But the peace was short-lived.


The Collapse

On November 10, Thai soldiers were injured in a landmine blast, prompting Thailand to accuse Cambodia of planting new mines during the ceasefire—a claim Cambodia denied, saying the area remains contaminated by unexploded ordnance from past conflicts and that Thai troops may have entered known minefields.


On December 7, Thailand reported another ambush on its military engineers and responded with heavy airstrikes on Cambodian positions, which Cambodia said were unprovoked. Fighting quickly spread across multiple border points, leaving at least 52 dead and over 750,000 displaced by December 18.Who's Trying to Fix This?


Multiple countries and organisations are attempting to mediate the conflict because instability in Southeast Asia affects everyone.


Malaysia, as the ASEAN chair, has led mediation and deployed an ASEAN observer team to monitor the border. The United States also stepped in, seeking to counter China’s regional influence and prevent wider instability. China, meanwhile, has positioned itself as a mediator, sending a special envoy amid concerns over arms supplies to both sides and major economic projects threatened by conflict.


What Happens Next

Currently, there is no immediate end to the conflict. Thailand's military leadership has stated that it will not accept a ceasefire until Cambodia demonstrates a genuine commitment to border security and stops what Thailand views as provocative behaviour. Cambodia insists that Thailand is the aggressor and must cease military operations first.


The most likely scenarios are (1) the fighting gradually de-escalates as both countries recognise the costs are unsustainable; (2) one side achieves military objectives and then agrees to a negotiated settlement; or (3) a new mediated agreement emerges that, like the October accord, temporarily stops fighting but doesn't resolve the underlying territorial dispute.


None of these options provides a permanent solution to the border dispute. As long as Thailand and Cambodia disagree on where their border actually is, as long as both countries face domestic political incentives to maintain nationalist positions, and as long as external powers compete to mediate rather than allowing regional resolution, border conflict remains possible.


(The writer is a foreign affairs expert. Views personal.)

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