Starting with my usual caveat:

• At the time of writing, I am an Indian citizen, currently living in the United States. I have an Indian passport, and have legal permanent residence to live and work in the US. As per current laws and guidelines, my family and I are eligible for American citizenship in about 12 months.

• At the time of writing, I haven’t decided yet on whether to pursue American citizenship. I know that my children, currently dependent on me, have a higher career prospects, should they be American citizens, but I myself will be closer to 50 by the time I do get it, if I do take up the option, so I don’t really know how much of a difference US citizenship will make in my life.

• At the time of writing, I have friends in a similar boat as I, who have been advised not to comment on social media on ongoing political and social events in the US, so as to not jeopardize their prospects of naturalization. I must also clarify that this advice is from “well wishers” and is absolutely NOT legal advice.

• At the time of writing, I have published quite a few posts on this very site which have wondered why my own nation went to war on (what I thought at the time) was a flimsy premise, which actually lowered the threshold for future skirmishes with neighboring nations - one in particular. So what I am thinking of writing below, is hopefully not seen to be very duplicitous or hypocritical. Also, using the same logic as above, it could jeopardize any future that I might see for myself in India.

• All that said, the very fact that all these disclaimers that need to be explicitly stated is an indictment of where things are going. Whether that’s a good thing or not, is not for me to decide. Regardless of where we want to be, this is where we are.

For those who don’t know, Hindu mythology believes that whenever the path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil, the ever supreme deity of Vishnu descends on to earth in the form of an “avataar” (or incarnation) to strike down upon them with great vengeance and furious anger restore the order of dharma, which also in a way “resets” time in the form of a “yuga”. At this moment, we are in “kal-yuga”, which Wikipedia tells me is "the age of darkness", "the age of vice and misery", or "the age of quarrel and hypocrisy", and will be ended by the 10th avataar of Vishnu - Kalki.

I must say, "the age of darkness", "the age of vice and misery", or "the age of quarrel and hypocrisy" etc., does sound like a good way to describe the planet at the moment.

Anyway, in my homeland, the eighth incarnation - Prabhu Shri Ramchandra (PBUH)1 - has been the rage for the past thirty or so years. Popularly known as “Ram”, he is considered the “maryada purshottam” or the epitome of dharma. When faced with an ethical doubt, following the path of Ram is considered to be the best way forward. “Ram Rajya” or the reign of Ram is considered the paragon of good rule, so much so that the political party in power in India has consistently promised to deliver us back to that era, even if the latest possible evidence of Ram is that he existed in the 5th century BCE, and from the evidence of what I am seeing, I doubt our “GenZ” wants to go back to that era.

But today’s post is not about the eighth avatar of Vishnu, but about the fourth2 - Narasimha - Depicted with a human torso and a lion's head and claws, Narasimha is venerated as a fierce protector who destroys evil and safeguards his devotees. He is most widely known for protecting his devotee Prahlad and for slaying the tyrannical demon king Hiranyakashipu

The story of Hiranyakashipu is quite interesting. Depending on who you ask, either his brother was killed by one of the previous avatars of Vishnu, or he was so powerful that his ego didn’t keep in check, but somehow, he was able to get a boon from the creator god Brahma that made him nearly invulnerable. The conditions of the boon prevented his death by man or beast, indoors or outdoors, during day or night, on earth or in the sky, and not by any weapon. After receiving the boons, Hiranyakashipu felt invincible and conquered the three worlds, assuming the throne of Indra.^[12] According to the Skanda Purana, Hiranyakashipu ruled the universe for 107.28 million years, or 24.8 yugas. He could have been fine forever I guess, but he had a personal vendetta against Vishnu and his devotees. He persecuted Vishnu’s devotees, including his own son Prahlad. To circumvent the boon, Vishnu incarnated as Narasimha—neither man nor animal—and killed Hiranyakashipu at twilight, on a palace threshold, placing him on his lap and tearing him apart with his claw.

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What follows is a bit of a rant. You may move to the next section if you don’t like it. I strongly believe that every democratically elected government on the planet (especially the ones in the US and India) is an extremely popular government, adored by all its inhabitants.3

Sandgroper’s Musings

Abdullah Deewana (a.k.a. The Fool on the Hill)

It is unfortunate, but I have decided that going forward any post which remotely covers any politics, will have this disclaimer…

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a month ago · Chirag

Two posts ago, I wrote about the “Cockroach” protests in India. Those are now mostly done. The minister in question resigned and the establishment wrested back the narrative. My Instagram feeds are still afloat with memes about policemen and a small 56” tall monkey but that is now dwindling, and my Facebook feed is now full of “children of good families should not be using abusive language” and “I love my nation and I respect my elders” type of posts from people roughly my age and above. Even politically, everyone and everything is back to normal. Those who participated are being hounded, those who helped are being harassed. Elected representatives from opposing parties are back switching sides onto the government side, and the government is back making plans to pass legislation that takes us back to the Ram Rajya era. A party that won less than half the seats in Parliament has realistic aspirations of passing legislations that requires more than two-thirds majority. Political machinations at its very best. Meanwhile, the treasury is mostly empty. Money is being shifted across government balance sheets, and in some cases flat out not being shown in order to keep up the facade. This from gives you even more details.

Smoke Signals

What disappeared is not money, but accountability

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a month ago · 27 likes · 11 comments · Prem Panicker

How he ended the post was what caught my eye (emphasis mine):

The question is, what remains of Parliament’s control over public money when taxes do not reach the funds named for them, allocations are not spent, expenditure is not recorded where it belongs, and grants cannot be followed to their stated purpose.

In a word, what the CAG report points to is a word that has been increasingly surfacing in the public sphere: accountability. Or the lack thereof.

(PS: A CA helped me prepare this report. His name is withheld at his request.)

Essentially, the government didn’t even bother to fake the report. They just didn’t care what the repercussions would be if their financial shenanigans would become public. The accountant who did the math only requested that his name be withheld, very likely knowing that even though the government doesn’t care about propriety, they can still make his life hell. Elsewhere, the Parliament in the Mother of Democracy didn’t function for the pretty much the entire last session, because the Opposition kept demanding that the Home Minister make a statement to Parliament on who ordered the firing on the protestors at the Cockroach Protests. The Leader of Opposition then said that the Home Minister is either “culpable or incompetent”4, and in either case must resign. Forget making a statement in Parliament, the Home Minister didn’t even bothered to speak in the press or on social media. He came, he saw, he sang Vande Mataram.

It’s almost like there’s a cloak of invincibility like Hiranyakashipu. They even had the chutzpah5 to replace the education minister with a guy named (…wait for it…) “Prahlad”!

Hubris. Nothing more, nothing less.

Anyway. Rant over. I strongly believe the great nation of India truly deserves the era of Ram Rajya that this wonderful government is bringing upon us. See disclaimer above for more details.

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Democracy, as we know it, is pretty much dead. If you want to know when it died, I can’t tell you, I don’t know when it died. On paper it still exists, as in almost everyone has elections - even Russia and North Korea have elections, would you know? But in reality, the “concept” of democracy is long dead.

I think what happened, was that it started out with noble intent. The concept of “of the people, for the people, by the people” (in whatever order that Lincoln said it), worked really well, as long as the people were all like “us”. The whole problem started when we realized that this also benefits “them”. While we wrote in the constitutions that “we” are all equal, we didn’t really expect everyone to be really equal, did we? How could “they” be equal to “us”?? And if this continues, can you imagine, they will take up power!! What if “they” do to “us” what “we” did to “them” for centuries??

In some form or the other, this is the conversation in every single supposed democracy at the moment.

And so, the elite (i.e. people like me) are taking back the power that they have always possessed. Setting up virtual barricades around our power, so that we never lose it. Like the mythical Hiranyakashipu, setting ourselves up for invincibility, such that we can never lose or even consider having to give up our power. And we will never give up our power, because power is an aphrodisiac unlike any other. It gets you things that you never thought possible. You have to be crazy (or Bhishma) to give up on power. But that is the foundational requirement of a democracy - giving up power voluntarily. More so than elections, or institutions, or anything else. You have to willingly step aside for the next person. Time and time again, this has been the biggest challenge, even in supposedly mature democracies.

And so for the longest time, I’ve had this question in my mind - would the current dispensations ever willingly give up on power if they lost? And the old cynical me came to the conclusion that they will do it, on paper. But they will make so damn sure that the playing field is tilted so drastically in their favor, that they will never “lose”. They might take out some some weird intensive revisions to get rid of a fifth of the electorate, or have the Election Commission cook up some scheme by which votes are accumulated magically, just enough to get them across the finish line.

And old, cynical me would roll my eyes, say “not my circus, not my monkeys” (or maybe “naa mera mela, naa mera 56” ka chhota bandar”?), write some cynical semi-political post and move on.

But now I think I am wrong. Horribly.

The lesson to learn from all this, is not that nothing can be done. It is that whether Hiranyakashipu or Queen Victoria or Hosni Mubarak, whatever they represented ended. They woke up one morning, and the reality of the previous night was no longer real. A Narasimha, a semi-naked peacenik, a Tunisian fruit seller, or a cockroach, comes along when they least expected it and finishes their rule. It has happened before, it will happen again (and again). Whoever thinks they can get away with it, will not. They might have the watch, but they can’t control time. Their end will start at the exact moment that they think they’re invincible. All the king’s horses and all the king’s bureaucrats men, then cannot put them back again. If they don’t give up power voluntarily, power will give up on them voluntarily.

What comes out of it, may not be democracy, it may not be comfortable, but this too shall pass.

One of the things that the school was maniacal about, was the complete and utter ban on the game of cricket in school. We were one of the few schools in town without a cricket team. Mind you, this was weird to us boys, because sports was an effing big deal at the school. Our track & field team won the district championship for something like 57 years in a row, and I think still hasn’t lost in the 30 years since I’ve graduated. Football and field hockey were big, so big that the U-18 football captain was THE school hero that every boy was held up against.

But no cricket.

Juxtapose that against the fact that we’re talking about an era where cricket was becoming the main sport in the social dynamic. The whole country, other than at the Republic of St. Vincent’s High School, was besotted by the game. from 1987 when the World Cup was hosted in India, and the early Sachin Tendulkar era was the time that I was in school. I mean, here was a guy who was younger than some kids at school, playing for the national team of the most popular sport in the country. But we were not allowed cricket bats or stumps in school. The only time one could be even seen with a cricket bat at school, was during school picnics.

So, obviously, there were enough conspiracy theories about why cricket was banned at school. Someone said that there was a time that cricket was played, but once two boys got into a fight and one boy hit the other and the kid died, so cricket was banned. But we were allowed hockey sticks, and those were even more dangerous. Someone said that it was because two European priests, Fr. Oesch and Fr. Schoch - both former principals at the school - and who still played an outsized role in the school administration, almost like the social conscience of the school was another factor, I mean do Germans get cricket?? Someone said Fr. Oesch (or maybe Fr. Schoch) was biased towards football because he actually played for Austria as a goalie in the 1930s. Since this was pre-internet, pre-Google India, we had no way to verify all this, so obviously was considered the most logical reason.

Anyway, boys being boys, it never stopped us from playing cricket in school - we just didn’t use cricket bats. We played book cricket in free periods (take a text book, open a random page, the last digit of the page number is the number of runs scored, and 0 is out). We played hand cricket, where your hand was the bat; leg cricket, where your foot was the bat, full length cricket, but with a hockey stick as the bat, and then the best of them all - French cricket - where you made the batter stand in a circle, and you threw the ball at them, they had a hockey stick as a bat, which they hit the ball and then swirled the hockey stick around them with every rotation counting as 1 run. “Bowling” was 360-degrees, and you basically had to stay in the circle, and your feet could not be apart. If the ball hit your foot, or the shot you hit was caught on the full, you were out. There’s a whole video about it on YouTube if you’re interested.

If you go looking for the technical definition of “sport”, the Merriam-Webster dictionary website gives a whole plethora of possible answers:

The surreptitious game of cricket that we played all those years ago, met most of these criteria. It wasn’t “cricket”, I mean there was no cricket bat and there weren’t any stumps, and how can you have cricket without a cricket bat or stumps? But it was sport for sure. It definitely was “physical activities according to a specific set of rules” (which did not involve cricket bats or stumps) and we did compete against each other. We definitely did it for our enjoyment. And yes, some of us were good sports, and some took a lot of time to come to terms with the results on the field. It was also a form of protest against “the man”. We got to do something that was explicitly prohibited, and in our own way, we got to fulfill our teenage angst of sticking it to “him”. Whatever it was, it was fun. It was sport.

What it was not, was an asset class.

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In today’s day and age, where attention is limited, and everyone is competing for eyeballs, sport has to be run like a business. For kids to play for fun, they need to be exposed to those sports - on TV, at the stadium, wherever. For them to experience the dopamine hit that will reel them in for life, they have to compete with the likes of TikTok and Netflix and Instagram. And so sports need to be run in a more professional, business-like manner. To do that, someone needs to invest money, often large sums of that. Very often, very likely, the people who have access to that level of money, are also expecting the kind of returns that exceed what they would get from (say) investing that in NVidia shares. These are the kind of people who are looking to “diversify their portfolios” and “hedge against inverse fluctuations” through alternate investments. .

I get that elite sport is expensive. The level of competition in any sport at the elite level, is insane. Anyone who says sport was “better” in their era is delusional. To be able to achieve that level of skill requires an army of specialists who are all performing at their peaks, and therefore is very costly. And so sport, needs money. If it needs that kind of money, it needs “investors”. If it needs investors, it needs “returns”. To get returns, you keep looking for efficiencies and redundancies. It doesn’t help to have a football team own a stadium. That stadium needs to be operational 12 months a year, so that it can host concerts and other galas when the football team is not playing. It needs stadiums with drop in cricket pitches, so that you have rugby and Aussie rules football, and NFL games, and concerts, and your asset is producing returns at all times. Sport is now just an avenue for money - money that the actual sportsperson gets very little of. You now have football games with hydration breaks and super focus on over rates in cricket games, just so that we can add a few more advertisements for which slots are sold in the millions.

Eventually, you end up replacing all “fun” with “use cases”, which is all a slippery slope to something like this -

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I don’t know, man! I am very conflicted. I guess the confusion of this post can be seen in that I have no clear point that I am trying to make. In the old days, there was a romance in amateurism. Like the Olympics, that pinnacle of sporting achievement, was strictly amateur participants only. As were all the tennis Grand Slams, and also, to some extent was cricket. Was sport really so much better then? I don’t think so. The skill levels in every single sport today are so much better, and the final product for the viewer is so much better. But the actual sport, any sport, has now become a sideshow to the business of high finance. The cow no longer wags the tail, but now the tail wags the cow.

Beyond a point, before it stops being fun, enough is enough.

For the longest time in my life, I have not been the praying kind. Over my 48ish years on the planet, my success rate with prayers is roughly the same as my success rate with homeopathy. So there have been occasions when I’ve felt like praying is a waste of time.

I wasn’t this always this way. With both parents working full day jobs, a lot of my childhood was shaped by my grandparents. Both my grandmothers were big believers in the power of the prayer, especially to the Sai Baba of Shirdi. My dad’s mother would not just pray every day for everyone’s happiness and wellbeing, but at the slightest hint of anything untoward - say a family member didn’t arrive home from work on time, or someone’s train journey taking a little longer than anticipated - would actually immerse one of her many idols in a bowl of water, literally subjecting the deity to third degree waterboarding, until said family member was back home. On my mom’s side of the family, there would be daily pooja, and a special big aarti on Thursdays. I think my dad’s mom did it too, but that ritual stopped about 40 years ago, and my memory is now hazy. My mother, to this day, prays every day to Sai Baba, and is steadfast in her belief that He has been there for her in times of despair. Mind you, this isn’t an ignoramus, but a lady who has a Ph.D. in a scientific field, and has sat on the boards of the Indian Bureau of Science.

Anyway, I grew up in this environment, and was quite the believer. But as I started to make sense of the world around me, I realized that my father wasn’t one. He’d do stuff to keep his mother - and later on his wife - satisfied, but he wasn’t the type who’d default to divinity as an explanation for how the world turned. Also, he had more rational explanations to why we did something, which tallied more with my lived experience. His simplest formulation was that a lot of the “divine” rituals that we followed in our home, were basically good hygiene practices, but since science wasn’t developed well enough, and everyone in that age was scared of God’s wrath, we termed it a divine requirement. In short, calling it a divine decree brought better compliance. His logic was that if you followed all the good practices in life, you don’t need special events to pray for good health. Of course, he hardly lived up to this philosophy, since he smoked like a chimney pretty much to his last day, including one a couple of hours before he was gone. Or maybe, in his own way, he did? He didn’t want anyone praying for him.

Suffice to say, I have been skeptical of the power of prayer. So when I read this personal post by last week, I found myself nodding quite a bit in agreement at how similar it seemed to my own lived experience growing up with my grandmothers.

A blog Daily by Suryansh

When my mother prays

Every morning I wake up, the first thing that I do is to pluck yellow flowers from the tree in our little fenced garden outside our house. The flowers are for my mother’s daily prayer. She is a devotee, an astute believer in God. During the off season, I buy flowers from the market…

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a month ago · 8 likes · 6 comments · Suryansh Tomar

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Till about 10 years ago, this post would have possibly ended here.

Yesterday I went to a local Sai Baba temple here in Cary. Our daughter starts college next week, and as is ritual, every new beginning should start with divine blessings. Also, some other things going on which have been occupying the mind space, for which this is not the appropriate time to share. I could say that I went because my wife wanted to go, but that would be not the whole truth. The whole truth is that my wife suggested that we all go to the temple, and it was I that said we should go to the Sai Baba temple.

I felt a lot better coming out of the temple. Felt like it gave me some clarity on what I wanted to do on the things that are occupying my mind space. Someone, maybe even my own mother, might read this and say that this is evidence of the divine. I wouldn’t go that far. All I’d say is that there are things that are occupying my mind space, and I felt very jumbled in my thoughts, and now it’s a lot less jumbled. I am not sure if everything will work out as such, but at least I have a path that I am comfortable taking, and some of that came from just spending some quiet time in that temple. So maybe that would have come from sitting in a library or a coffee shop too. Or may be I was taken back in time where everyone in my household would gather around and pray to the Sai Baba, and here I was with my own family reliving that experience, and it brought about a sense of calm.

The point is, over the past few years, I’ve stopped wondering about why something happens. So much random stuff has happened to us, that it is impossible to say it is the doing of a human brain. But it is also impossible to say that it is the doing of a divine brain. If anything, in my brains, all it is ever evidence of is that we are not the center of the universe, and mostly irrelevant in the larger scheme of things. Most of the things - good and bad - are essential collateral damage.

But if all this is just random stuff, then what even is the point? There has to be some point to all this. Because without that, is a lifetime without meaning and purpose and a path which leads to nothing but despair & cynicism. Or as puts it in his wonderful essay from a week or so ago:

And

Santosh’s Substack

Prayers first, Gods afterwards

Prayer is everywhere. It begins the school day, and it ends the political speech. It hovers with fervid anxiety in the waiting room outside an operation theatre and catches at the throats of millions who watch a World Cup final. It slips out unannounced when the traffic light turns red and you’re late for a meeting. We offer it before exams, before…

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a month ago · 22 likes · 1 comment · Santosh Desai

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And so, I guess, the point of this whole post is to say that my relationship with prayer has changed a little bit in the past few years. Maybe “evolved” is a better way to put it. So now, while I was battling this relationship with prayer and the divine, came this post from . If 38-year-old me had read it, my immediate reaction would have been to term him as a “sanatana dharma” nutcase and completely disregard what he is trying to say. That was also because 38-year old me, did not know him from Adam. Fortunately, I have gotten to know him personally, and I know that when he writes something there is a lot of research and study that has gone into every word of his writing. Without knowing you, I’d take good odds on the fact that he has more Ph.Ds than you have children. When Bhaskar writes, I know there is no fluff.

Dr. Bhaskar Dasgupta

The Gods Came Afterwards

The oldest religious literature in India ends one of its most famous hymns with a shrug…

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a month ago · 1 like · Dr. Bhaskar Dasgupta

And so I read it. And read it again. And read it a third time. And this line stays rent free in my head:

So maybe, there is no “God” as such. Or maybe there is a “God” and said Lordship is whoever or whatever we want it to be. Maybe we’re all in a computer simulation run by the rats and the answer really is 42. Or maybe it’s all something that’s lost in translation, and me writing and you reading in English doesn’t really do justice to explaining the mysteries of life. Maybe it’s not something we need to go searching for, and it’s been something we’ve known all along - like the title song of a TV show you saw when you were 10 years old, and all you remembered was the tune, but had no clarity to the meaning of it all.

Who knows!!

It is unfortunate, but I have decided that going forward any post which remotely covers any politics, will have this disclaimer.

1. At the time of writing, I am an Indian citizen, currently living in the United States. I have an Indian passport, and have legal permanent residence to live and work in the US. As per current laws and guidelines, my family and I are eligible for American citizenship in about 18 months.

2. At the time of writing, I haven’t decided yet on whether to pursue American citizenship. I know that my children, currently dependent on me, have a higher career prospects, should they be American citizens, but I myself will be closer to 50 by the time I do get it, if I do take up the option, so I don’t really know how much of a difference US citizenship will make in my life.

3. At the time of writing, I have friends in a similar boat as I, who have been advised not to comment on social media on ongoing political and social events in the US, so as to not jeopardize their prospects of naturalization. I must also clarify that this advice is from “well wishers” and is absolutely NOT legal advice. It is also one of the reasons why I might delay the publishing of this post - I am literally up in the air on my way to land in the US as I type

4. At the time of writing, I have published quite a few posts on this very site which have wondered why my own nation went to war on (what I thought at the time) was a flimsy premise, which actually lowered the threshold for future skirmishes with neighboring nations - one in particular. So what I am thinking of writing below, is hopefully not seen to be very duplicitous or hypocritical. Also, using the same logic as above, it could jeopardize any future that I might see for myself in India.

5. All that said, the very fact that all these disclaimers that need to be explicitly stated is an indictment of where things are going. Whether that’s a good thing or not, is not for me to decide. Regardless of where we want to be, this is where we are.

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When I used to be busy on the Xitter, I used to follow the writings of the social commentator Pratap B Mehta quite a bit. I moved away from that hellhole for my own sanity, and with it lost touch with the one Indian social commentator that made most sense with me. Also, for the same reasons of sanity, I have been deliberately avoiding news about India. And so it was great to stumble upon his Substack through notes, while droomscrolling the internet, although I guess it’s more like scanned copies of his articles in the Indian Express.

Now you might ask, why I was doomscrolling the internet?

A couple of days ago, I was enjoying the variety of Substack with my morning cup of coffee, when one of the first posts I saw was this by

And this from :

So something had happened. But what?

Obviously, I had to go looking, and I looked and looked, and eventually landed on this:

Now I was even more confused. What was going on in Delhi? I’ve been avoiding all sorts of political news - both American and Indian - in my social feeds. The World Cup has definitely helped. But I woke up hoping to read all about how Spain thrashed Argentina, and instead spent a long time getting the lowdown on the Cockroach Janata Party and its protests in Delhi. For those interested in knowing more, you can google it, I have zero interest in sharing videos with background music.

At this point, the old me would have gotten all angry and upset about how the incompetent the current Indian government is, and how it is playing with the futures of children and all that. How it is unconscionable for anyone to “lathi charge” kids, kids who would be my daughter’s age who are just asking for what is their right - the right to say that something is rotten in the system, and that things need to change. The old cynical me would have written about how India is getting exactly what they asked for, and how when they had absolutely no issues with all sorts of political shenanigans that have taken place in the past 12 years, it’s a little too late for them to complain. Maybe, since it is a new me, I would have used a more optimistic tinge, and said that the children are protesting, because they still believe that there is a future, and that we should all commend their optimism.

But you see, I am not going to talk about it, because see disclaimer above. India is going through its long awaited Ram Rajya period, and that’s that. I cannot risk it, boss! Also, someone once said that now that I live in the US, it’s not right of me to comment about things that happen in India - oh wait, that was me from fifteen years ago!!

So maybe I should speak about the happenings of American politics. I must say, Lindsay Graham’s sister being nominated for Senate got a chuckle of out me. For all the handwringing that used to happen in India anytime a politician would die and their immediate family member would be running for their seat, turns out these guys are exactly like us!! Or I could talk about illegal tariffs, or illegal wars, or illegal midterm election interferences, and whatever.

Oh wait! Never mind. See disclaimer above.

See! I don’t know if I am allowed to have political opinions anymore. Worse, like an unhappy customer getting a chatbot on the service center, I don’t know who to complain to! Like Mr. Mehta says above, there is no one to blame! Stuff just “happens”. But this is my blog, and I can write here. Because it's tough to stay quiet, and nobody reads it anyway. So I guess you have to read all about it. If you don't like it, you can always move on to something else.

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So here goes:

• At this point, if you think that we live in abnormal times, then you are wrong. These, are the normal times. The last 30 years were abnormal.

• Let's look at India: The globalization era of 1992 - 2015, where governments gave up power voluntarily, per capita incomes rose, educational opportunities flowered, mind-blowing improvements were made in healthcare and overall very few conflicts everywhere, was the abnormal era. My grandfather's generation was shaped by the struggle of independence from the British. My father's generation was honed by the Emergency and the horrors there. In the US, you can replace that with World War II and Vietnam. My generation? Diddly squat. The downside of this, is that for our generation, “politics” has stopped being on the street, and is now entertainment. Politics is what we see on TV, and discuss after three drinks, and that's it. Then we move on to our day jobs where we maximize efficiencies and unlock value and drive untapped synergies, where we proudly say we're “non political” but only because we are sober at the time.

• Because politics is now on TV, all it is, is a TV channel that competes with sports and entertainment for eyeballs. Previously, all sides had their own TV channels, now someone wised up to the scheme, and captured the means of information first. And so it’s no longer a news channel with a higher democratic purpose, it’s just a startup looking to maintain ARR with a high TAM. I blame Prannoy Roy and if you got that reference, you are probably an Indian of my age. India, US, UK, whatever. Does not matter. A loud majority of people have assumed that their democratic responsibility is limited to voting once every two, four or five years, and then watching someone else’s kids beaten up or worse on TV, while all my worries about my kids are sorted by Life360. If you don’t believe me, let’s do a thought experiment and imagine how different the current situation in Iran looks with mandatory military service for men and women of eligible age?

• The prosperity of the past 30-50 years, has insulated me and my type from having to hustle our way through daily life. I mean we hustle, but do we really? We don’t need to make the same sacrifices that our fellow countrymen and women need to make, we can just buy our way out of it. No electricity? Let’s ensure we have generators in our house. Someone needs urgent medical support in a pandemic? Let’s call some friends who can get us a backdoor entry into a hospital. Poor education system? Let’s get our kids some private tutors. Even better, let’s send them abroad!! The roads are a mess and traffic is a pain? Let’s get a driver. Oh! competitive exam? Let’s see if there’s someone who can leak the exam paper for us? 1300 AQI? Let’s get some air purifiers to add to our air conditioners. There’s always a market for everything, and we can afford to pay. Gandhi is the father of the nation for a reason, and the more Gandhis you have in your pocket, the easier it gets.

• And at some level, we know. We know that we’re doing a lot of bullshit in our day-to-day lives and milking it right royally, so it’s hypocritical of us to demand the accountability from our elected leaders. Deep down, we know this, and there’s a guilt about it. But you can’t give it up. Giving it up means giving up on everything. It means you go to the back of the line, with everyone else who is hustling, the cattle class, as we call them. And now they know how to hustle, while you don’t. And they have had years of you taking advantage of them, and they can do unto you what you did unto them. All the value we unlocked and synergies we tapped and efficiencies we maximized will be unable to put this Humpty Dumpty together again.

• We also know that messing with the powers that be is also not worth it. We know it, because we’ve been using the help of these very same powers that be to get ahead in the line. We know exactly how retributive they can be. We know that they can do unto us, what we have them do unto others. Our fragile “don’t ask, don’t tell” arrangement works very well only if we keep our end of the bargain. And so we nudge our kids, not to upset this arrangement. We nudge them not fight for what’s “fair”. We disparage their thoughts with titles like “woke” and “unpractical” while also reminding them that the motto of life is “Truth alone Prevails”. It’s this mendacity of ours that our kids don’t quite get. But then what do they know? How would they know that life isn’t built on pithy slogans, when we’ve made sure that all options of struggle and hustle are hidden from them? That in real life, Harry Potter is pointless, and it is actually Voldemort that wins?

• And so we come up with the most ridiculous of justifications for everything that they do. You have no idea, life is so much better now, we tell our kids. Don’t look around, just trust us, we tell them. You think 1300 AQI is bad? It was just as bad when we were your age, and we had to cycle to school, while you are being chauffeured. You think a leaked entrance test is bad? Well, you have it so much better, we had to give an entrance exam for every institute. Why do you need a job ? Let’s not point fingers now, shall we? Four fingers will point back at us. And why are you worried any way? Just finish this quickly, and you can go abroad to do your Masters’, na! All these protestors, oh my god!! Traffic is bad as it is, now oopar se why they want to do more nautanki?? Look, Cheetah!! Look, fancy expressway!!

• The reality is every choice we make in day to day life is political, whether we like it or not. My decision to opt for private tutors for my kids, or sending them abroad for higher studies, is a political choice I am making that I am satisfied with the quality of education the state is providing me. My decision to pay a bribe or two, to get that hospital bed, or to get out of that little legal tangle, is a political statement that I make saying I am perfectly fine with this, and that nothing needs to change. My choice to quietly install generators and air purifiers and not do anything about it, is an acceptance of the way things are and that really, it does not bother me. Accepting that our soldiers should be sent into that war, even though none of it makes sense, is also a choice. Every time we accept our fate, is an acceptance of the status quo, and the status quo has historically worked in our favor, and so we go on with the charade.

  

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But if there is one truth to life, it is that a status quo is not sustainable. It NEVER survives. Something has to change. Our kids are growing up. They are asking questions. Questions that have come from their observations of the world around them. Questions, where “trust me” is no longer an acceptable answer. Questions that my father asked of his father, and my grandfather asked of his, but I never really asked my father. “How can this status quo be acceptable to you?” is what they’re asking. “How can you say that good always triumphs over evil, when everywhere it looks like good people are the ones suffering?” “How can you say that you should fight for what is right, and then tell me not to fight for these good people who are doing everything that they’re being asked to do, and still not getting what we have?” “So what if they are Muslims or immigrants, when every one is a child of God, and God loves all his children the same?” Questions that our mendacity can no longer suppress.

They are calling us out on our bullshit, and all our years of unlocking value and driving synergies is not going to help us get the answer. We know we don’t have an answer. They know we don’t have an answer. Because they know that all we will give them will be dumb platitudes and pithy cliches. Our answers have no depth, and our words have no credibility. We haven’t gotten our hands dirty. Because all we have, are PowerPoints and Excel sheets unlocking synergies and maximizing efficiencies.

And because we don’t have the credibility in their eyes, I don’t know if anything we offer will help. I really don’t. Like I want to say it’s so good to see these kids taking matters into their own hands, because while they’re angry, they still believe that change is possible. But I am old enough to remember protests in Delhi screaming for change, some even took on prominent political roles, and nothing changed. Like I want to tell them that while Mamdani might look better than Modi, but I really don’t know. I’m old enough to know that 15 years ago, Modi said all the things that people wanted to hear, just like Mamdani does today. I am old enough to know that Dharmendra Pradhan was once a student leaders who fought against exam paper leaks. The list of heroes I had who then went on to disappoint me is so large, that I could write a book on it. A hero today, will most likely disappoint me tomorrow.

Maybe, like AI, this time it’s different.

My intent of paid subscriptions is NOT to make money to pay my bills, but rather to gauge if there is a wider audience for my writing. Not to mention that the Substack algo promotes writers who activate paid users more than those who do not.

I recently found out that Substack has the ability to create lifelong discounts, and so I will be starting every post with the discount link that entitles readers to a 95% discount on a paid subscription. Effectively, that is cheaper than a Starbucks coffee

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The past 2 weeks or so in our household have been mostly about one thing, and one thing alone - the Football World Cup! The timing worked out perfectly. My daughter graduated high school this past month, and activities related to that took most of the first two weeks of June, and then the World Cup has been our daily dose of entertainment. 3 or 4 games a day, almost all of them in a time zone that suits my schedule, and no other major commitments going on. What’s not to like?

I even got a chance to knock off a bucket list item!!

I must admit, I was skeptical of the 48 team concept. I thought (and some part of me still does think) that this was a classical FIFA cash-grab. More teams = more matches = more money. But watching the games on the field has been a revelation. As someone who is watching his tenth World Cup, this one surely has been the best. Very few blowouts, almost every team gave a good account of themselves - except maybe you, Tunisia. Some politics involved, but then we’re talking FIFA here. (btw “Sycophantino” has to be the best nickname in the history of nicknames).

There’s a nation named Cape Verde? Or is it Cabo Verde? Curaçao is a nation, and not a medical diagnosis? And they play football?? And where is India??

Who knows? Who cares?

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Of course, true fandom is not restricted to just watching a game is it?

When I was younger, I would scour every newspaper article there was about the World Cup. Sportstar would have a centerfold calendar and bracket which I would diligently update. It was almost impossible to watch every game, for one we had Doordarshan, but for another, the World Cup was played when school was in session and the time zone didn’t quite help. The one time it was played in Asia, I was living in the US. But that never deterred me. I knew everything there was to know about every player. Of course there were only 24 teams at the time - but still. Which team they played for, their entire history, if their kids names were public, I knew it.

Like a good manager, I have now outsourced this activity - to my son.

But still, now that the World Cup is on, I am fully into it. I spend most of my spare time reading up on the backstories. If anything, with 48 teams there are now twice as many backstories to read up. Of course, any topic related to India or Pakistan catches my eye first, like the 3 players of Indian heritage who are playing this world cup or Zidane Iqbal - who became the first player of Pakistani heritage to play at the World Cup, or even this one -

More and more though, there was a trend that was catching my eye.

Out of 48 teams, only 7 teams had all their players born in their own country. This doesn’t even count lucky accidents like Folarin Balogun - who is playing for the US purely because some airline attendant denied permission to his Nigerian mother to fly back to the UK - or second generation immigrants. 4 pairs of brothers (or half brothers) lined up on different teams, while only 3 pairs of brothers played on the same team. 98 players this World Cup - almost 8% - were born in France. In the game against Brazil, Morocco became the first team in World Cup history to field an entire XI born abroad when Moroccan-born Azzedine Ounahi was replaced in the second half by the French born Samir El Mourabet. Even Zinedine Zidane’s son is playing for a country not named France!!

I don’t know how much you can trust Reddit, but here’s a startling graphic.

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At this point, it might be easy to complain about how nothing is sacrosanct any more and how this has led to the dilution of everything that was holy. How all this immigration has made a mess of society and culture and all that. If that’s your stance, I don’t have much time for you. You really shouldn’t be spending much time here.

For one, athletes playing for a country that they were not born in, is not a new thing. The Migration Policy Institute did a study in 2018 which showed that of the 10,137 soccer players to compete in a World Cup between 1930 and 2018, 996 were born in a country other than the one they represented on the field. This is almost 10 percent of the selected players per World Cup. Some players may have held citizenship of the team’s country since birth, and others acquired it later in life. Key point:

Famous examples include Argentina-born Alfredo Di Stéfano, who played for Argentina and Spain from the 1940s to the 1960s, and Hungarian-born Ferenc Puskás, who represented Hungary and Spain around the same era. Perhaps most memorably, Argentina-born Luis Monti represented his country of birth in the 1930 World Cup and four years later represented Italy, the country where his parents were born. With both teams Monti reached the finals, making him the only man to play in multiple World Cup finals for different national teams (he lost with Argentina but won with Italy).

Second, barring some extreme cases of some powerful government officials pulling strings (look up Almoez Ali and Pedro Miguel), none of these players have broken any of the laws. They are following the existing laws of the land to avail what is their right. In the eyes of the people selecting the national teams, these players are better than those not selected. It’s not like they kidnapped someone’s family to get picked on the team. Also, FIFA’s post-2021 eligibility framework has made some switches easier under defined conditions, especially for players with limited senior appearances before the age of 21.

Neither of these points though come to the crux of the matter.

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One of my favorite blogs on the Substack portal is . Their blogs have nothing to do with football. I follow the blog more for the autopsies it conducts of where organizations went wrong. From past writings, I knew that the writer is a woman who grew up in Sweden, but there’s a wall of anonymity that is now possible in writing blogs, and I never really peeked beyond that wall to see the person behind.

Her latest post, though not really about finance, blew my mind away. Notice they are all Somalians, but they are not all “my people”. As someone who grew up in Independent India, it hit me deep. This line especially lingered in my mind long enough to go down the rabbit hole of this post:

The story of humanity is one of migration. Human beings have been migrating for years centuries. It is a proven fact that without migration, we would all be sitting in Africa. And this is not a prehistoric thing, humans migrated all the way to the Middle Ages, and they did this to escape famine, droughts, floods, epidemics, wars, strife, exploitation, whatever. Moving lock, stock and barrel in the search of a better life was what life was. Given the difficulties of travel, going back was impossible, and so they stayed there. They learned the norms of the new place, and over generations, their descendants became one with the new place. For most of human history, this migration was never a problem, just the way things worked. You had global trading hotspots, where people of all religions and cultures lived and coexisted, not always peacefully, but they did coexist. The worst you got was probably a nickname about your origin story and everyone moved on.

That was until nations started colonizing other nations.

Because after colonization, we started getting hierarchies in humanity. There were “masters” and there were “subjects”. The masters never even set foot on the land they “owned” to know what life was like out there. They were noble and “civilized”, while their subjects were “barbarians”. One set of people became more worthy than others. And then one fine day they left. They left their subjects, not as they found them, but in terms of their own administrative convenience. And so what was left behind was a British & Italian hodge-podge called “Somalia” and not “Darod”, “Hawiye” , “Isaaq”, “Dir” or the “Majeerteen”.

This lack of common history as a nation society meant most countries were never stable to begin with. Unrest, civil wars, and plenty of upheaval followed. Humans migrated again, this time in search of law and order and peace. In search of jobs and some sense of stability. The jobs existed in the developed world - ironically, also the former “masters” - which had long industrialized and spent a couple of centuries figuring out how to avoid unrest while they were using cheap raw materials from their administrative regions in the third world. They still needed cheap raw materials, but this time the raw material was human labor, which also was available in plenty in the form of those fleeing their homelands. The labor they provided was cheap enough for the host nations to prosper, and yet high enough for them to survive. Rules of trust that were built in homogenous societies of the industrialized nations, also helped them with securing a foothold in their adopted new land. Over the next 40-50 years, they built their own lifestyle around this new world, with their children and their children now having no other identity than that of the new nation. They go on to rule in the nations that their ancestors came as immigrants. They go on to win Nobel Prizes, and (gasp!) even represent their football teams. That the countries with zero foreign born players in that world map above are also economies without a well established industrial base is no coincidence - except Brazil, but then you really think Brazil will let a foreign-born player represent their fútbol team?

Some sons (and some daughters, but mostly sons) of the soil complained, but on the whole, the arrangement worked well for everyone.

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Around this time last year, I had written about nations are increasingly becoming irrelevant. Individuals are taking matters in their own hands, such that boundaries set by some distant bureaucrats of a bygone era do not matter any more. World Cup 2026 is yet another example of that. Many of the players in that world map up there are foreign-born, but they are also playing for the nations that their ancestors would have been in, had they not moved. So Zinedine Zidane’s son is representing the land of his ancestors, while he may or may not hold the passport of that nation. Michael Olise’s Wikipedia page has this quote “Growing up in a tight-knit and multicultural family, Olise characterizes himself as coming "from four countries: France, Algeria, Nigeria and England" all of which he regularly spent time in during childhood.” Turns out he could have played for any of those four countries - and if you play like Michael Olise, all four of them would have had him on their team. The University of Oxford's Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS) page has an excellent research paper on the changing demographics of the Moroccan national team with this telling quote:

How is this happening?

Technology, for one. It is fairly easy now to travel back and forth between nations. You can talk to your “people” back home every day on a WhatsApp call. You can maintain fluency in your language and culture through movies and YouTube videos on a 7” phone screen. You can follow up to the minute updates on what’s going on in that culture. You are now allowed to take on multiple identities and be comfortable in both (or all four) skins.

You can be yourself in your entirety, and not hide behind a mask 24x7.

Your children can be American and they can be Indian and they can be French and Moroccan and Spanish and Australian, and depending on where their journey takes them, they can be something more. The Tebbit tests of the past are now history.

This is not the World I grew up in. But it is the World I want to live in.

Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us, only sky

Imagine all the people
Livin’ for today
Ah

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too

Imagine all the people
Livin’ life in peace
You

You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man

Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world
You

You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one

One of the The biggest drawbacks of having a blog that you have to write continuously. We are, after all, in the attention economy, and if you want to make some money out of your writing works, then you have to keep writing for two main reasons.

First, you have to keep writing, because the practice of writing, and converting the million thoughts in your brain into a steady stream of coherent sentences is bloody hard, and so the more you do it, the better you get at it. This is a scientifically proven fact.

But the other, also scientifically proven and more practical fact, is that social media algorithms work on promoting your work, only if you prove that you can generate eyeballs and revenue. So the more you write, the more chances that people will like it, share it, more people will see it, algorithms will see them liking and sharing my work and send them my way and then more and more people will see it and on and on and on. You get the picture. And if you harbor aspirations of making a living out of it (some day), the practical logic far supercedes the actual scientific process.

And while I write as often as is possible, writing for me is often not very high on the priority list, and when have to choose between writing and doing something else, very often - at least more often than I would like to admit, it is the something else that wins the race. Again, now that I think about it, there are possibly two reasons for it - One, the other activity is possibly lower hanging fruit i.e. the time it takes me to get the other thing accomplished is far less than it takes me to write a blog, and for reasons stated above my writing muscle goes deeper into a state of atrophy, every time I choose not to write, and the opportunity cost of writing gets lower and lower.

But even here, there's a more practical reason for being unable to write consistently - reality seems to change at a rate faster than the time it takes me to consume the information, process it into thoughts and then convert those thoughts into a coherent sentence or five. If something happens on (say) a Wednesday, and I take a couple of days to process what happened and then sit down on Friday evening to jot down my thought process, with the hope of having the final draft ready by Saturday morning and published Sunday evening, there's a very very good chance that whatever happened on Wednesday is irrelevant by then. In other words, my current situation feels kind of like a newspaper from the 1980s got magically teleported into the age of Twitter.

What changed today though, is that this past weekend, I travelled alone to London on a “boys trip”, and I'm now on my way back home. I'm sitting here at 35,000 feet, trying to stay awake in an 8 hour flight and a decent internet connection. None of my excuses listed above are valid in this scenario.

And so, I thought why not restart with my standard feature of writing down about all the thought strands that have been circling in my head. That said, before we proceed, I'm going to put all my cards on the table.

1. At the time of writing, I am an Indian citizen, currently living in the United States. I have an Indian passport, and have legal permanent residence to live and work in the US. As per current laws and guidelines, my family and I are eligible for American citizenship in about 18 months.

2. At the time of writing, I haven't decided yet on whether to pursue American citizenship. I know that my children, currently dependent on me, have a higher career prospects, should they be American citizens, but I myself will be closer to 50 by the time I do get it, if I do take up the option, so I don't really know how much of a difference US citizenship will make in my life.

3. At the time of writing, I have friends in a similar boat as I, who have been advised not to comment on social media on ongoing political and social events in the US, so as to not jeopardize their prospects of naturalization. I must also clarify that this advice is from “well wishers” and is absolutely NOT legal advice. It is also one of the reasons why I might delay the publishing of this post - I am literally up in the air on my way to land in the US as I type

4. At the time of writing, I have published quite a few posts on this very site which have wondered why my own nation went to war on (what I thought at the time) was a flimsy premise, which actually lowered the threshold for future skirmishes with neighboring nations - one in particular. So what I am thinking of writing below, is hopefully not seen to be very duplicitous or hypocritical. Also, using the same logic as above, it could jeopardize any future that I might see for myself in India.

5. All that said, the very fact that all these disclaimers that need to be explicitly stated is an indictment of where things are going. Whether that's a good thing or not, is not for me to decide. Regardless of where we want to be, this is where we are.

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Now that we have the disclaimers put up, let's go!!

• I was recently doomscrolling when whatever it was that I was doomscrolling on sent me clickbait to tell me which was the most impactful event of the 21st century. You'll be glad to know that I did not click on the link, but I realized that the 21st century is now 25 years old, and I have been an adult for all those 25 years. For the longest time, I held the opinion that 9/11 would be the likely winner of this “competition”, but now increasingly I think all things considered, the Global Financial crisis of 2008, and more specifically the policy choices of the various governments of the world to the crisis is by far the most impactful event of this century. To explain further - they propped up the companies and the economy by throwing money at the problem. Quantitative Easing is what kept companies and 401(k)s afloat. Common people were able to keep a roof on their heads and after a short little downturn, things seemed to be on the up and up again. And the message was that the crisis was averted.

• Now I get it, the decision makers at the time, had a very short window of opportunity to make choices, and so they made choices. Maybe I would have made the same choices. But by not letting things “fail”, and propping up everything by throwing money at the problem, I think the decision makers effectively moved away from fundamental principles of a market based economy. They prioritized protecting “people” rather than protecting “principles”, and as a consequence demonstrated that the rules don't apply anymore. And the longer-term consequences of those decisions are still rippling away, in a world where no rules apply anymore.

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• One might argue that the rise of Trumpism / Brexit / MAGA / Hindutva / pick your ism, is the most significant event of the 21st century. Fair enough, but my counter to that would be that this was a direct consequence of people going through the 2008 crisis and seeing that not only were the people whose mistakes caused the financial crisis not punished for their mistakes, but they were actually prospering, while the “common man” was living in a world where their income wasn't helping them make ends meet. So, in that sense, the complete shitshow that you see around you, has a lineage whose gene pool originated from the choices people made in that era.

• Now the nerdy ones among you, might argue that the AI revolution that is upon us, is actually the biggest thing of the 21st century. I'm open to this line of thought, but I'd argue that we haven't seen the global impact of artificial intelligence yet, and also that all the developments of the world of AI have been funded on the assumption that it WILL work, not that it DOES work. Most of this funding has been in this 0% low interest era with plenty of money sloshing around in search of “yield”. An interest rate era that is a direct consequence of the global financial crisis.

• Someone might say surely COVID-19 had a wider impact on humanity. I would probably not have a clear response to that, but I do think that the policy responses were still informed by the decisions that were made in 2008. The ability to isolate, work from home, even stimulus cheques, all of that has the genesis from the policy responses during the financial crisis.

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• Essentially, the reaction to the global financial crisis has led to a world view where consequences of your actions are someone else's problem. This is a message that we have internalized as a society and that is the world that we live in now. And when viewed through that lens, you can see that the people who are considered “successful” are those whose worldview is based on this one dimensional formula. This is now a world where money is the only scorecard you are judged on, even if that money has been devalued so much (also thanks to the GFC) that you can basically just invent numbers out of thin air, and the consequences of that swindle really don't matter anymore.

• This has been going on for 18 years now. An entire generation of humans now knows only one way to live. I'm supposed to teach my kids that values need to be “lived”, when the world is telling them that values should be “unlocked”. In such a world, values become exercises not in first principles, but in headline and narrative management. Two people can now look at the same fact, and have completely different reactions and opinions about that fact, simply because how that fact fits into their narrative. Like I'm sure your opinion of whatever actions Donald Trump / Narendra Modi / Vladimir Putin / Keir Starmer / Elon Musk /whoever take, will be determined not by how that decision compares with your lived values and beliefs, but by the narrative you have set in your mind about these individuals.

• Let me digress a little and give you a couple of examples. In the run up to the American general election in 2024, the top 2 priorities for the Democrats were to cut the profits that large corporations make at the expense of the common people, and a future powered not on oil and gas, but on renewable energy which is sustainable. Cut to 2025, the Republicans, have successfully cut the profits from large corporations thanks to the tariffs, and pushed the world towards renewable sources of energy thanks to all the uncertainty in the global energy sector. Whatever his merits, Donald Trump has made more progress towards the top 2 agenda items of the Democrats in 18 months, than his own declared agenda, and what the Dems could achieve in their own 4 years. In the 2019 elections, the Indian National Congress declared their top agenda item was a Universal Basic Income for every family. The BJP ridiculed it as an insult to the hardworking Indian who liked to earn his own living. Cut to 2026, and every single election won by the BJP has been on the basis of this exact policy. I'm fairly confident that your opinion of each of these policy decisions is based, not on the principle behind the decision, but the person(s) making said decisions.

• Anyway, it is in this zero consequence world of narrative management, all thanks to the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, that we have facts change from Wednesday to Friday and then different ones on Saturday and a completely different one on Sunday. A war is not a war any more, but a Preventive Defensive Procedure or whatever. Where you build your opinion of a movie like Dhurandhar based on what you think of the government in power. Where a tariff can be raised, dropped, raised again, dropped again. Where it's a ceasefire that is agreed upon, but no one agrees upon what was agreed upon, but come on man, we need to declare something before futures markets open at 6pm Eastern on Sunday. Where two nuclear powers went to war, kinda sorta maybe, and nothing really changed after that? It's like this real life game of “Whose Line Is It, Anyway” where the points are made up and the rules don't matter. You can just make them up as you go along.

• And all this, because 18 years ago, someone decided that people should not have pay the price for their mistakes and face the consequences of their actions. What worries me, is not that this happened, or even that is where we are, but right now we are at a point where things could get really bad. There could be massive upheaval in society where you and I will be impacted in ways we could not have imagined in our plans. Be it disruption through AI, or a credit market blowup, or financial catastrophe or even another pandemic. We've learned the wrong lessons from the last time something like this happened, and I'm worried we are only going to get worse.

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So here I am, on yet another weekend road trip for a competitive event that one of my children needs to be at. Road trips in our household have a single rule - the driver has final veto power on the music that plays in the car. In most cases, that driver is me. This is important for me, since everyone else is very well capable of nodding off while in a car. I have found that singing along with the music in the car helps me stay awake when everyone is dozing. Hence the music should be something that I am used to singing along. As someone who grew up in an India of the 1980s & 90s, where Vividh Bharati ruled the roost, Hindi (and specifically Bollywood) music are my go-to playlists for staying awake.

Red Bull for some, A. R. Rehman (or equivalent) for me.

And so, on yet another road trip, with everyone in the car knocked off, either in dreamland or on their mobile device, played yet another 1980s Bollywood playlist in our car. Traffic was sparse, the route was easy, and I had 4-ish hours to drive. So while the songs kept playing, my mind wandered to some deeper thoughts:

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10. I don’t know why but it bothered me that Ranbir Kapoor in Animal was older than what Rishi Kapoor was in Deewana. Trust me. I looked up Wikipedia to confirm. 43 > 40. I remember being old enough watching Deewana in the movie theater wondering why Rishi Kapoor was still playing romantic roles and had the guts to sing and dance on Nadeem Shravan tunes. Some might say patriarchy (very likely), some others might say Rishi Kapoor in the 1990s was guaranteed quality like Rahul Dravid. But regardless, he looked “uncle type”. Ranbir Kapoor definitely didn’t look uncle type in Animal. But he’s older than what Rishi Kapoor was at the time. Not to mention, both are younger than I am today.
    
    Maybe that’s what bothered me.
    

9. Spotify killed the Antakshari star: Road trips used to be communal experiences. Whether it was school trips or family trips, music used to be an excellent denominator to bring everyone together. School trips involved someone with a guitar or some musical instrument and everyone singing along. Then there was the staple of every road trip - Antakshari. I heard somewhere that when you sing together, the breathing pattern of everyone gets in sync, and there is a connection that comes with it. And you really didn’t have a choice but to participate. You couldn’t read a book, the noise around you meant you couldn’t have a separate conversation with your friend (or family member), there was really nothing outside that would capture your attention, so all you did was sing along. As a child I used to get terribly motion sick, and I worried about it all the time, and then I found that singing distracted me enough from thinking about it.

   Then came smartphones and Spotify and YouTube and Instagram Reels and TikTok or whatever, and everyone in the vehicle has an outlet of their own. I mean, I don’t blame my kids preferring that to my out of tune belting of Hindi songs. And I think the kids on their school trips still have a boat load of fun. But still, somewhere the common bond that came out of road trips is diluted, and I think the lack of music has something to do with it.

8. Stars don’t act in B-grade flops anymore or maybe the B-grade slop that they act in has fantastic production values. I remember walking into many a movie theater to watch a movie simply because I had nothing better to do. A Govinda & Sanjay Dutt movie that I think was directed by David Dhawan. The movie was so bad, but it wasn’t even the worst movie of either of the three that I have seen in my life. There was a movie called Inderjeet (or something) featuring Amitabh Bachchan and Sunny Deol and Chunky Pandey, all legit stars. Featuring is the right word, because none of them wanted to be in the film at all. They all were doing it out of some favor for someone or had a gun pointed to their heads. This used to happen all the time in the 80s & 90s. Producers would call in favors with stars to guest star in movies launching their kids. Producers would run out of money mid-movie and then suddenly the actor looked about ten years older, because that’s how long it took the producer to find the money to complete the film. Mithun Chakravarty created an entire business model based on moves that ran like a production line. The joke was he didn’t even know what movie he was shooting for - everything in a Mithun movie in the 90s was plug and play. It was almost like he didn’t care. He was making money, the producers were somehow making money, everyone was happy. Once in a while those movies succeeded, but then he had way more chances to hit the lottery. He just made so many of them - the original Bollywood venture capitalist.
   
   You rarely get B-grade movies any more. I’m told the Mithun model is now commoditized by the corporate takeover of Bollywood. Actors get producer rights, so they make money regardless of how the movie does. Worst case, sell it to a streaming platform and make more money. But the plus side of corporatization is that the end-product is super slick. Like the difference between the State Bank of India website and the ICICI website, it’s the same thing, but packaged so much better. The professionalism expected from people in cinema today is phenomenal. Ranbir Kapoor is 43 but he has the means to transform himself for one role and play a 25 year old or a 65 year old. Not all his movies are “great”, but even his “bad” movies look great. Shah Rukh Khan and Amit Shah are born a year apart, but you wouldn’t be able to tell looking at him. I watched Pathan & Jawaan because I was told they were amazing. They were crap. About as crappy as Inderjeet. But man, they looked so cool!! They even took you in about the YRF Spy Universe or some nonsense like that. Everyone is chiseled to perfection even in the most inane movie.
   

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7. When the history of Bollywood music is written, Laxmikant-Pyarelal barely get a mention and that is a sad thing. Some things become clear only when you look back years later. Growing up, I always associated Laxmikant-Pyarelal with the mediocrity that ruled in 1980s Bollywood. By the time I came to my senses, they were “yesterday’s music”, their only hits were item numbers like “Jumma Chumma De De” or “Choli ke Peechhe”. Not to mention the puritanical fervor with which those songs were ridiculed meant that I never really took a great liking to their music. But in this day and age, where creating music really isn’t that difficult, and now with some exposure to instrumental music thanks to both my kids, I have grown an appreciation for their music. I can only imagine that their compositions must have required large orchestras working in perfect synchronization. That too in an era where music was performed live in the studio instead of recording in bits and pieces and then patching it together. Film music was composed and performed, not produced. They also played in an era where songs were used to extend the film - I don’t have exact data, but I can bet the average film song from the 80s was at least double the length of today’s songs. I listen to their songs, and the clarity of the orchestration and composition comes through so clearly.
   

   Also, once you strip Ila Arun’s suggestiveness from the song, “Choli ke peechhe” is unusually feministic for the era in which it was released. Maybe the whole hoopla about the song had more to do with that, than anything else.

6. Gulzar was the better poet. Javed Akhtar was better at writing film songs. For a 90s kid, this is the classic dilemma. Not Kishor / Rafi, not Lata/Asha, not any of the Khans. Gulzar or Javed Akhtar.

   
   I used to be in the Gulzar camp. Songs by Gulzar are high poetry. The imagery and the word play. OMG, so amazing!!! People bought soundtracks purely for the lyrics - always accompanied by excellent music - RD Burman, Vishal Bhardwaj, even Rehman. Javed Akhtar meanwhile wrote rhymes. Everything fitting perfectly in the meter. He could work with everyone and everything. Complete “down market” stuff. But I think now, the centerpiece of a Gulzar song, is Gulzar, while in a Javed Akhtar song is the song. And from a film viewer perspective, the difference is critical.
   
   Listen to a Gulzar song. Any song. The poetic imagery will make you feel “Low key jealous, bruh “ as my teenagers will say. Gulzar might call it “halka halka uns”. But I’d bet any amount that this song contains at least one phrase that you don’t use in your daily Hindi/Hindustani usage. You will find often that the words often don’t reflect the kind of words the character in the film will actually use. Hardened criminals sing “Hasey toh kamaal hai, doodh ka ubaal hai” type stuff. Many times the singer has to stretch themselves to accommodate the lyrics into the tune. In a Gulzar song, the poetry is primary and the tune is secondary.
   
   Akhtar on the other hand will rarely use a phrase that doesn’t meet the character playing it on screen. He can go high or low. Dard-e-Disco or Ek Ladki ko Dekha toh aisa laga, both flow with the same smoothness. For Javed Akhtar, what you see on screen is the primary focus, everything else, including the lyrics are secondary to that. The words fit in the tune - the only time I remember the singer going far is “Aaware Bhaware” from Sapney and even that was a tune that was originally in Tamil.
   
   So maybe a better way to put it, is Akhtar is better on screen, while Gulzar is better on Spotify.

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5. Rehman changed Hindi Indian music forever. But it probably would have happened anyway. This one is a little personal. It was our 10th standard picnic. It was some caves near Lonavala, that we had gotten a picnic out of our school after a lot of negotiating (our batch was quite the unruly batch, and focus should have been more on the SSC exams, but anyway). I don’t think I’ll forget that scene. A friend of mine had his Walkman in which he had the Roja OST cassette. Rukmani Rukmani was the hit that all teenage boys wanted to listen to - for obvious reasons. My friend offered me his Walkman while he went to play cricket with the rest of the troop. Said I was fine to play it. Rukmani came and did her magic - who knew Baba Sehgal could actually sing? But those were the days of cassette players and it was a bloody pain to rewind to the song, so I let it play. And the 3rd song on that cassette was Yeh Haseen Vaadiyan, and there’s a point on that song where the music goes into a crescendo.
   
   That was absolutely unlike any that I had heard up to that point.
   
   Hindi, English, whatever. Just an absolute banger. Even today, almost 30 years later, that song and that crescendo take me back to those caves in Lonavala, where I am just transfixed. Rehman’s discography is unmatched. There is no one who has till now got the range that he has created over 30 years. The sounds he created and the melodies he has generated will never be bettered. To do it in 2 languages that have no connection, is unthinkable. I don’t understand a word of Tamil, but if I had an 11th hill to die on, it would be that Thiruda Thiruda is Rehman’s best album.
   
   But now that I think about it, Rehman becoming Rehman is also a function of the time and place. Had he come to the scene 10 years earlier, he would have been called a down-market Bappi Lahiri. We didn’t have the kind of access to information in the 1980s that we started getting in the post-liberalization phase. Had it been 10 years later, I don’t think we would have seen this version of him. I don’t know - maybe genius would have shone anyway, but I think had it not been Rehman, there would have been someone else who would have created similar sounds. Karthik Raja, M.M. Kreem, maybe even Pritam. Rehman just got there first.

4. Among male playback singers in Bollywood, there are many greats but only 4 legends - and Arijit Singh is one of them. I am now at the age where people who are holding gainful employment call me “uncle”. I am an uncle. This entire post has been effectively about the songs of the ‘80s and ‘90s where I am implicitly saying that the songs and the music that I grew up listening to, was better than what it is now. But be that as it may, I am more than happy to say that Arijit Singh is head and shoulders a better singer than anyone that came around in the 80s & 90s. So much so, that I believe he belongs in the “Mt. Rushmore” of male Bollywood singers - Saigal, Mohd. Rafi & Kishore Kumar. Probably even above Kishore Kumar.
   
   Now you might have a problem with me saying this. You have your opinion, I have mine. But my case is this - Imitation is the best form of flattery, and Bollywood does this better than anyone on the planet. Each of the four I have mentioned above were so good, that each of them had influenced their own set of imitators - Mukesh, Mahendra Kapoor, Kumar Sanu to name a few - who became stars in their own right. Arijit Singh has so many copycats, that there are times I cannot tell if it is him or someone else.
   
   Where I give him extra points, is that he’s also gifted guitarist and sound technician. He has figured out exactly what works, sound wise, pitch wise & rhythm wise, and a lot of that comes from his knowledge of instruments and instrumentation. Now that he has officially retired from singing playback, I think it is fair to rate his career, and I cannot think of a single reason why he would not fit in the legendary pantheon.
   
   Can you?

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3. Aamir Khan’s movies stopped being fun after he started playing Aamir Khan on screen. In the 90s, there were mainly 3 male movie stars - and all of them shared a last name. Of them, Salman Khan started believing his own hype first. Not sure exactly when, but there came a time when it became pointless to watch a Salman Khan movie. In fact, I am trying to recall when was the last time Salman Khan did a serious job in a movie, and I have to go all the way back to Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam and that was like 30 years ago. Not to say that he didn’t do good work. I enjoyed Dabangg tremendously, and his Jaan-e-Mann was a fun movie too. But in each of these, he was Salman Khan, if you know what I mean. The movie, the story, the other actors, nothing mattered. In his mind, he was bigger than the rest of the film. The second Khan, Shah Rukh Khan, became a bigger star than the other two, and indeed every one else. Through a series of shrewd career moves, SRK built his own brand. Once in a while, he would play a character (Paheli, Chak De India) in most cases, his brand was so big, that he needed to play Shah Rukh Khan. It was almost he could switch his aura on or off depending on his take of the film he was working on.
   
   The third Khan, used to be my favorite. Aamir Khan was the chameleon. He could be anything and anyone. He could be a younger brother who would avenge his brother’s cycling defeat, or an Assistant Commissioner of Police who could nab the duplicitous Ghazal Singer. Unlike Salman Khan playing Prem or SRK doing Raj or Rahul, Aamir Khan played characters across the spectrum. Raghu Jetley, Munna, ACP Ajay Singh Rathod, Akash Malhotra, he could be anyone. An Aamir Khan movie pulled you in, unlike any other. Because you rarely got the feeling you were watching a star. You were watching an ensemble cast playing out the director’s vision on the screen. I never missed an Aamir Khan movie, even it meant I had to watch a Mela or a Mann. And then, sometime around 2008, he seemed to have decided he’d had enough. He would play Aamir Khan the star on screen. His comedy became more slapstick rather than rhythmic, stories became more formulaic. Unnecessary villains were invented - I am looking at you, Dangal - and all of a sudden, Aamir Khan movies started to drab around.
   
   I wonder if his age had anything to do with it. If I place a finger on when this started, it would be post Ghajini. Wikipedia tells me he’s born 1965, so I guess he was in his mid-40s when Ghajini came around. I wonder if he decided that he was done reinventing himself for every single movie, and he was going to play Aamir Khan every time. And then he had Ghajini, 3 Idiots and Dhoom 3 which ended being the biggest hits of his career. All that has meant, is that the quality of his movies have gone up and down a lot more.
   
   As an Aamir Khan fan, that is a very sad thing to see.

2. Anu Malik is the most unlucky music composer in the history of Bollywood music. If Rehman was “right place, right time”, then the absolute antithesis of that, “wrong place wrong time”, would be Anu Malik.
   
   I used to make fun of him and his ability to be inspired by just about anything. From Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, to Khaled, to Michael Jackson & WHAM, Anu Malik stole shamelessly was inspired immensely by world music. Somewhere in between he would put in some really good songs, and even in those he would lift some of his old tunes to play in the orchestrations. There wasn’t a film he would refuse and there wasn’t a song he wouldn’t lift.
   
   But now I feel for the guy. Courtesy YouTube, there are now entire playlists where you can see which Hindi film song has been lifted from which song. Music composers in the Hindi film industry would routinely “lift” tunes from all over the world. Some of the songs ended up becoming extremely big hits. This was the industry that Anu Malik came into. You never knew when you’d get the next chance to play your original numbers. The producer wanted a quick hit, and a straight lift was the easiest way to get that hit.
   
   Anu Malik ended up becoming wrong place, wrong time simply because his peak came at the same time that India liberalized and the regular Indian listener now had access to Channel V and MTV and could understand that a song was lifted / inspired, whereas previously we had no idea. Not that it stopped Anu from lifting tunes. But because he got this label of being inspired, some of his real good work - Border, Papa Kehte Hain, Daddy, even Judwaa - did not get the credit it deserved.
   
   Anu Malik could’ve been a genius had he honed his craft. Instead he chose the short cut. Unfortunately that’s the world he grew into, so I don’t know if I can blame him for it. That was the only way he knew.

1. Bollywood is better than it has ever been. Bollywood is worse than it has ever been. Top movie makers putting their money on a serious, relevant movie is not something you saw in the 1980s & 90s. You had masala movies and you had art movies, and the twain never met. But now you have the avenues for movie makers in different languages create their vision for a broader audience Nagaraj Manjule or Sandeep Vanga can make movies in Hindi starring Amitabh Bachchan or Ranbir Kapoor and find backers for their vision. Mani Ratnam or Atlee can make movies in Hindi and the biggest stars line up. That is so amazing to see. The diversity of creators in the Hindi film industry is just so vast these days. Streaming services have created even more profitable outlets for creators to put out original content. Marveling at western movies and being jealous at their abilities while watching Hindi cinema was a rite of passage in the 80s and 90s. I don’t think anyone who watch Baahubali will say it was in any way inferior had it been made by a top western film maker. The techniques and technology available to Indian film makers today is world class, and the quality of the end product is right up there with the best in the world.
   
   Which is why it really hurts to see Bollywood constantly revert to unoriginal thought processes and churn out mediocre storylines so regularly. Movies that subtly hint at an ideology, or some fantasy cinematic universe that make absolutely no sense. Everything is formulaic, with sequential set pieces leading up to an Arijit Singh song. It’s almost as if with the increased corporatization, the risk taking ability of movie makers has gone down, instead of going up. There’s just too much money at stake now to risk a flop.
   
   The last Bollywood movie I watched was Supermen of Malegaon. I went to watch it with my mom when I was in Pune last. It did not have any “stars”, and I don’t think it would have been a hit. But it was a good movie. It was the kind of movie that previously would be called an art movie, but this one wasn’t very abstract. There was a story, a set of protagonists, adversity - lots of it, and eventual conquering of adversity. What’s more, it was based on a real story. I think it was made by Zoya Akhtar - a film maker in the top echelon - or at least blessed by her.
   
   There were 6 of us in the movie hall.
   
   Something is rotten wrong in Bollywood now. Not to say that it was perfect in the 80s and 90s when I was growing up. But we always had an excuse. Lack of technology, an unscrupulous financing system that basically acted as a front for laundering money, lack of diversity in our film makers, overall lack of awareness of good cinema, the list was endless. None of those exist anymore. But the original voices that briefly started out in the early aughts, don’t exist anymore either. I don’t know when Dibakar Banerjee last released a film. I don’t know when an original movie like Vicky Donor last released and received popular acclaim. There’s now a formula to create a blockbuster, and original content is the first scapegoat. There’s plenty of mediocrity and very little originality now in Bollywood.
   
   If things don’t evolve, it will die a natural death.

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I know today’s topic is Cricket, but before we begin, a lesson in evolutionary Biology from Charles Darwin.

It is a well established fact that for every 100 female humans born on this planet, there are about 105 male humans born. This is to account for the fact that apparently the male zygote is more predominant in the mother’s uterus due to a higher potential of miscarriage for male fetuses, and post-birth male infants are more vulnerable to disease. This has been the case for centuries.

One of the outcomes of this ratio is that for there is more than 1 man vying for the attention of every woman on this planet. This creates a competition at a subconscious level where every man is trying to outdo every other man. You never know who could be a future competitor, so establishing some level of primacy over them would establish a hierarchy. In that sense, it’s not that different from other primates or even other animals you see in the wild. Some species of Babboons, for example, have red colored bottoms for exactly the same reason, the redder the better.

These things used to cancel each other in medieval times when wars and mass illnesses would basically take care of any such urges of competition. But now we rarely have any wars, and as long as RFK Jr. wakes up from the right side of the bed that day, you have vaccines which take care of mass illnesses.

But men gotta men.

So us males now indulge in inane competitions. All sorts of stupid shit trying to outdo each other. They will indulge in stupid bets trying to see if coins can derail speeding trains, they will try to compete in the yarns they spin - “You mean you have only 3 girlfriends? I have 7, one for each day of the week”. They will try to lift heavier, run faster, eat bigger, just to show that they can do more than the other guy. If two guys enter the urinal at the same time, odds are good that at least one of them will try to pee longer than the other guy.

A man will do anything, absolutely anything, to outdo the other guy. Evolution demands it. Survival of the fittest.

But speaking of men doing stupid, inane competition to outdo the other guy, nothing in Darwin's theories could ever predict the pissing contest that's currently going on in the game of cricket.

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To those who don't quite know what happened, here's a quick recap.

India doesn’t want to play Pakistan, Pakistan doesn’t want to play India, but India wants to play Pakistan as long as they can be guaranteed to win, and actually Pakistan kinda-sorta wants to play India, but they insulted me the last time and I will not for the rest of my life and my future generations lives forget that insult, and the future of the whole game basically hinges on India and Pakistan playing at least once a year.

It’s way too long drawn and there are way too many subplots to this. I mean you have to go all the way back to a World Cup from 2007 in the Caribbean to find one root cause, or maybe go all the way to 1947 and Mountbatten and all that. But the basic bullet point version of how we got here goes something like this:

• The nations of India and Pakistan have a complicated history over the last 79 years and their cricket teams are now an extension of their political masters. They have not played each other in a bilateral game for almost 13 years, and given the political situation, I don’t know if there will be another bilateral game in my lifetime.

• In 2007, there was a World Cup in the Caribbean. The time zone was ungodly, but there was a possibility of India and Pakistan playing, and the broadcasting contract was basically set up in the hope that people would stay up late to watch the game at least once and maybe a second time in the final. Unfortunately neither team played their part in qualifying for that game, and the world was regaled by the spectacle of a Bangladesh v. Ireland game instead. Of course, the broadcasters were not happy about it, and raised a stink the next time the broadcasting rights were being bid upon.

• Now, if the International Cricket Council had lived up to their name, they would have said something like, “yeah, but that’s the nature of the sport, the uncertainty that comes along with it, and we think it’s completely fair for the broadcasters to hedge their bets for future tournaments”.

• But then they would not be the International Cricket Council, would they? Instead they asked something like “what are we, a f#@*ng charity?? Of course not!!” - which was ironic, since they actually are a non-profit / not for profit organization. But anyway, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

• So somehow, since 2015 every time there has been a global or Asian cricketing event, no matter how the draw is created, there is at least one India v. Pakistan game assured. If the stars align properly, you even get three games in a eight team tournament, where everyone else plays everyone else just once. Vegas has nothing on the ICC1.

• Now that the “stakeholders concerns have been amicably addressed”, the ICC, the benevolent non-profit / not for profit organization that it is, has raked in billions thanks to the broadcasting rights.

• Which, I guess was fine - I mean we’re all passionate supporters of the game, and if that little convenient shenanigan outcome basically funds the growth of the game in Rwanda or Nepal, that’s a price worth paying, no?

• And so, everyone held their noses and posted such banal platitudes every time India the two countries faced each other while conveniently sweeping under the carpet the fact that the two teams did not play each other outside of these tournaments.

And all this hall of fame worthy mendacity was BEFORE “Pahalgam 2025”2, after which it has gone to an even more legendary level. This is roughly where we are now:

• Because their government does not give them permission, India will not travel to Pakistan.

• So India will play Pakistan only if the ICC tells it to, and only on neutral territory. And Indian cricketers will not shake hands with any Pakistani citizen. Or at least not be seen on TV doing so.

• The ICC will bend over backwards to accommodate this condition. Any connection with the ICC chairman being the son of India’s Home Minister is purely coincidental.

• There’s an ICC Event scheduled every year. This year it is the T20 World Cup. Why? Because Money. That’s a different topic.

• Pakistan’s government says forget shaking hands on neutral territory, their cricketers do not have permission to play the Indian cricketers anywhere during said T20 World Cup, jannat, jahannum, wherever, period, full stop, bold, italics, underlined.

• The ICC says Pakistan MUST play India as they have signed a contract to play.

• Pakistan says as per said contract, denial of government permission constitutes Force Majeure - literally the Act of God - which makes it perfectly acceptable.

• Because, you see, the ICC agreed to moving India’s games against Pakistan to neutral territories, for precisely the same reason. But, as we know India is not Pakistan. At least you cannot say so publicly.

• Meanwhile the broadcaster threatens to sue the ICC for breach of contract, because apparently the contract they signed with the ICC pretty much guarantees an India-Pakistan game every time there’s an event. Almost everyone agrees that this is just a negotiating tactic because they overpaid for the rights way back when, and all they want to do is extend the contract by 2 years without having to pay a dime.

• The CEO of the ICC who has to deal with this potential lawsuit, is the guy who negotiated the broadcasting contract - WHEN HE WAS THE CEO FOR THE BROADCASTER!!!

• Oh, and all this started because the BCCI woke up one fine morning and ordered the Kolkata Knight Riders to release a Bangladeshi cricketer from a mutually agreed, signed IPL contract.

• At which point, the Bangladesh Cricket Board said their team had no permission to travel to India, and so should be accommodated by the same rule to play outside of India.

• The ICC said go to hell with the threats, and replaced the Bangladesh team with Scotland the highest ranked team not in the World Cup, even though teams qualified through a rigorous qualification round in each continent, and Scotland was neither the highest qualifier in Asia (that would replace Bangladesh) nor the highest qualifier in Europe (Jersey, which did better than Scotland in the European qualification).

• In a supreme irony that would make Gen. Yahya Khan cringe in his grave, Pakistan says all this is to support Bangladesh.

• Meanwhile the World Cup starts tonight. And we don’t know yet whether the marquee game is going to be played.

Phew!

Needless to say, there are only men and their shiny red bottoms egos involved in this entire pissing contest.

And if you think this is just a “Cricket Problem”, then I say you are eligible for the next FIFA Peace prize.

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Why do we play sport? Why do we watch sport? This is what I had written just a few months ago:

Sport is enthralling, because in that limited time horizon, you are seeing life play out. Sport, like life, throws stuff at you and you are supposed to react appropriately. Sometimes you do react appropriately, other times you don’t - just that people who are successful at either tend to react more appropriately than others. What happened in 2022, or a week ago, or 17 years ago is of zero consequence to what is happening right now. Sometimes you do everything right, and still you lose and be called a choker. Or someone rolls an ankle and you end up playing a tiny bit in an epic World Cup semi final that will be remembered for generations to come. You can be dropped for poor form and drag your team single handedly to an improbable victory all in the same fortnight. Whether you win or you lose today, life or sport will give you a second chance. When that happens, regardless of what you did today, you are starting from zero. When you see that play out right in front of your eyes (or on TV), the end result goes out of the window, the narratives around it go for a toss, and you have the most spiritual experience.

And that is why we follow sport.

Sport teaches you so many things. It shows you what you are capable of, it shows you how to go beyond what you think is possible. It shows you elation and dejection and every emotion in between. Whether you play it or watch it, sport teaches you respect and camaraderie, for those on your team and those on the other. If Javed Miandad is playing, most Indians will not rest easy, purely out of respect for his abilities even though he must be in his 70s now. Most importantly, sport teaches you to give it your best and respect the result. Win or lose, the sun will rise tomorrow from the east and set in the west.

That life goes on. It’s just a game.

But professional sport now, is something else totally. It is now a money making exercise for those that control the sport. And more and more, those that control the sport have never played the sport. All they have done is made the money. All they know is how to make more money. The whole point of the game for them is not the sport, but the money. If the sun rises from the east tomorrow, they will make money, and if it rises in the west, BREAKING NEWS - they will make more money!! They might be players on the field, but in the bigger picture the sportspersons are just NPCs in the game that the red-bottomed baboons play.

It’s time to end this pissing contest.

My intent of paid subscriptions is NOT to make money to pay my bills, but rather to gauge if there is a wider audience for my writing. Not to mention that the Substack algo promotes writers who activate paid users more than those who do not.

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Jan. 24, 2026. 06:28am EST

I woke up three hours ago, thanks to a nightmare where there was a killer snapper ninja turtle that was being used by a mega villain like a wheel barrow terrorizing common people on the streets of Raleigh, NC and the turtle caught up to me while I was slipping and sliding on the ice all along the road1. Haven't been able to sleep since.

If you’re not following the news, or reading this years from now, we’re expecting a major ice storm this weekend with projections of significant transportation issues and major power cuts. Even the wise leader of the free world has taken the time off his busy schedule resolving eighteen and a half wars (or whatever the latest number is), to remind people of the benefits of a scientific temperament.

I don’t mind the possible transportation issues, but I draw a line at power cuts. And please, if there’s a God up above, may she ensure we have no frozen pipes. I mean, it’s not a tragedy (hopefully) and more like a disruption of my regular routine, but I think I have reached that age, where I go to bed every night just thanking my stars that I was able to maintain my routine that day. Every disruption that comes along reminds me that I am getting to old for this sh!&.

Enough reason to be woken up in cold sweats at 3am by killer snapper ninja turtles.

After tossing and turning for the better part of three hours, I finally give in, and start doom scrolling. I thought resisting the temptation for three hours almost deserves that prize.

As I go Instagram to Facebook to Instagram to Substack, this post by catches my eye, especially the screenshot of a tweet he made:

As someone who spent many a Thursday in 2000s Pune, this hit home even more. And then once the high of nostalgia wore off, my mind went down a completely different path than what his post actually was about2.

If you lived in Pune for a decent amount, anytime after Indira Gandhi was Prime Minister, you probably knew that Thursdays meant there was a day long power outage. “Load Shedding” is phrase that many a Punekar has grown up with. Has nothing to do with Indira Gandhi, more to do with how long this has been the case. Basically, there's a heavy industrial belt in and around Pune, and their requirements for continuous and reliable electricity meant for a power deficient system, some jugglery was needed. So the arrangement that they worked on with the government and power distribution authorities, was that they would have their weekly day off on Thursdays, when the cash strapped authorities could balance their load by just cutting off power. There were many modifications to the arrangement, but the basic premise remained the same. Thursday = Lights Out all day. As irritating and frustrating as it was, especially in the summer vacation days, that's what we all knew and adjusted our lives around. “2000s Pune” was no different.

You don't hear about Thursday load shedding much these days.

Ordinarily, this end of Thursday load shedding business should be heralded as a win for how democracy should work. Using the feedback loops that are in built into the democratic framework of institutions, a long standing civic problem was seamlessly resolved. Democracy works. This is an example. End of story. Power management is one example, but you can think of many other examples and say the same thing.

Democracy works.

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Jan. 26, 2026. 7:28pm EST

I thought of all that, and then I fell asleep and then the weekend took over3. You could argue that’s the state of modern-day democracy too.

The truth, like almost everything in India, is slightly nuanced.

Pune, for the most part doesn’t have much load shedding any more. The truth is more like urban Pune doesn’t have much load shedding any more. Rural parts of Maharashtra have the same issues with electricity, if not worse than what we had in the 90s in Pune. Everyone is better off than what they were in the 90s, since at the time, there was barely any electricity in rural areas. Also, the power situation in Pune, is a little difficult to elaborate on. Almost everyone you know has their own inverter, which ensures that whenever there’s a power outage, there’s no power outage. The government has done some things, but the problem hasn’t been solved so much by the government, as it has been by enterprising individuals who have ensured that the chattering class doesn’t have to chatter about the electrical situation.

24x7 electricity, the great leveler and creator of social upliftment, is therefore available to only those who can afford it.

Electricity is an anecdote in this case. The same is the case with water, sanitation, education, even property. Everyone is better off than where they were 25 years ago, but the gap between the have’s and have-nots has gone up even more. And this isn’t just India, this also the case with the United States, the United Kingdom, and most other democracies. Corruption is rampant, while investment into public services is reducing. If you don’t have the right contacts, stuff happens slower than ever before.

In this situation, would you blame someone if they are disillusioned with the concept of democracy?

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Little over 15 months ago, we had an election in the world's oldest, and supposedly most robust democracy. One party kept banging the drum on how “democracy was on the ballot” and how “democracy is under threat”. The other party nominated a guy that was impeached for literally inciting a coup.

Guess who won?

Six months ago, the opposition party in supposedly the world's largest democracy, said that democracy was being stolen by the people in charge through electoral ballot malpractice for one of the state elections.

Their opponents won more than 85% of the seats at stake.

My own state of Maharashtra, did not hold municipal elections for almost 4 years, running solely through central diktat. State assembly level politics is now so murky that whichever politician you vote for, ends up joining the ruling coalition. I don't live there any more, but I seriously don't know how many people in Maharashtra will honestly say that their life is better now than what it was in 2014 ten years ago . You would think the people would be so frustrated with those in power that they'd vote them out.

Nope. When I asked some folks, they said they voted for the party that created this whole mess, and then went on to blame the opposition for “not being strong enough”.

Anywhere you look, the checks and balances instilled in democracy are weakening. There's a very real possibility that, come 2028, Donald Trump will be the Republican candidate for President for the fourth time in a row. Modi and his cronies are already talking about 2047. When the caretakers of democracy are in no mood to take care of it, and there's absolutely no push back, what do you do?

As the old Bollywood song goes “माँझी जब नाँव डुबोए, उसे कौन बचाए?”

The questions therefore that keep me awake when 3am nightmares strike -

1. Has Democracy served its purpose?

2. Does it deserve to die a natural death?

3. And if so, what comes in its place?”

To Be Continued…

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Many moons ago, when I was in the third (or may be fourth year) of college, we had a 4 day study tour of a nuclear power plant, combined with visit of the beach that just conveniently happened to be there. No prizes for guessing which activity was the higher priority.

As it happened, the bus that we had rented for the trip broke down on the way to the beach. Which was fine, but there was a problem. There was no way to get back home. So the only option was to hitchhike our way to a railway station and then take a train to Mumbai and then take another train back to Pune.

Anyway, after spending an hour on the back of a Indian truck, and a few rickshaw rides we landed at Boisar station around 3.30pm waiting for a local train that would arrive at 5pm1. So 30 or so teenage boys were now shooting the breeze at a dilapidated train station with absolutely zilch to do for an hour and a half.

The devil's workshop was in full swing.

With about 30 minutes to go, we heard a loud horn of a train. The superfast Rajdhani express was to pass by on the clear lane. As the train drew closer, some arguments arose among some of our classmates, and before we could figure out what was going, out sprinted Siddhesh Paranjape2 straight towards the rushing Rajdhani. The train must have been not more than two seconds away from him when he bent down, placed something on the train track and then dashed the other way. It all happened so fast that just as he dashed the other way, the train sped past him, and we all had the biggest lump in our throats.

As the train sped away, we see our man again, smiling away and then bending over to see whatever it was that he placed on the track, shrugged his shoulders, came back to his group of friends and asked them to pay up. The talking to he got from the station master and the actual slap he got from our chaperone assistant professor was all worth the money he recovered from his friends.

Apparently, the whole thing was a bet on whether placing a coin on the train tracks could derail the train3.

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Looking back, I wonder if 25 years from now, teenagers would have such instances of mind boggling stupidity to recount. Because in the event of the same circumstances arising, they could just unlock their phones and check out this video.

(I wonder if college reunions thirty years from now will essentially be spent on discussing which TikTok or reel or meme was so much fun. But that's a story for another post, I guess.)

The bigger point is that the youth of today don't do stupid shit anymore. I guess, all things considered, that's a good thing? I mean, big picture, teenage pregnancies are down, teenage drinking is down, as is teenage smoking. The whole “WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU THINKING??” conversation tends to be about insanely mundane things, which while quite infuriating as a parent, is still miles away from all the stupid shit that our generation (not to mention the generations before ours) would do.

There’s a downside to this easy availability of information though. Not only do you know what could go right with a choice, you also now know what could go wrong with it. And more often than not, loss aversion kicks in, and then you don't commit. This is behavior that I generally associate with people my age, i.e. people who have quite a lot at stake if the choices they make go haywire.

So I wonder if how many of these statistical improvements of teenage pregnancies and teenage drinking etc., also reflect some loss aversion behavior on part of the youth of today. For generations, the youth have taken leaps of faith, many with disastrous consequences, purely because they had zero idea of what lay ahead of them. Life was essentially a whole bunch of leaps of faith with the hope of having at least one that would work out. Maybe 9 out of every 10 choices you made would be insanely stupid but that 1 choice would work out so spectacularly, that your life and sometimes the lives of everyone around you would change forever. It's just not like that anymore. If everything starts becoming an informed decision, how do you luck out?

Not sure what the implications of that will be, so we’ll see. In another 25 years, I guess.

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“The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait.”

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Many years ago, like when I was a teenager, my parents met this white American guy on a flight back from Hong Kong or Bangkok or something. He was en route to Puttaparthi - the town where the mystic/Godman/fraud/take your pick Satya Sai Baba had his ashram. I don’t remember the guy’s name or have any recollection of what he look like, so let’s for argument’s sakes call him Dave.

Dave created such an impression on my parents, and vice versa, that on his way to Puttaparthi he stopped by in Pune. He was the first “American” I met in my life. I put the American in quotes, because you know? Dave had brought us a gift - the one and only tradition that he said America had contributed to the kitchens of the world - Peanut Butter. We didn’t have it in our hearts to tell him that Peanut Butter was nowhere to be found in most of the planet, but whatever, Atithi Devo Bhava. Anyway, one of the things that Dave mentioned was that he wanted to be back home for Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving?? Why would anyone randomly want to be thankful and for what?

Bear in mind, this is like the early 90’s when India had just started liberalizing it’s economy, but we really had no clue what the rest of the world was like. The World This Week was our main gateway to the rest of humanity, and even that never told you about Thanksgiving. You knew Christmas from school & Hollywood, you kinda knew Easter from being in Catholic school. But this Thanksgiving thing was new.

Or so my teenage brain thought.

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Cut to present day humanity, and Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday of the year. And I am not even American, in spirit or on my passport (as the current setup takes pains to remind me). But I am at that stage in my life, where I think I would celebrate Thanksgiving no matter where I am.

That quote that I’ve posted up top, pretty much sums up my current mental state. There are some things that just cannot be explained, and while some of them are, let’s say, not great, there are some which are unexplainably good. And if I can complain for the rest of the 51 weeks about the things that are not great, I think I owe this week to the world about some of the things that are actually good, and that I am thankful for it. You never know when the band you’re in starts playing different tunes, so it’s good to sing your blessings while you can :)

Like having children who are ready to take on the world. The point where it’s just my wife and I in the house is not that a small blip on the radar anymore. My daughter is now “college hunting”. This time next year, she’s going to be very likely out of the nest. And while there is some trepidation as a parent, looking at her, she is definitely way more capable than I was at that age - and significantly better at Calculus. There is a sense of pride I get when I see her on stage playing her flute, or the confidence with which she is handling her admission process all by herself. Or my son, who is now literally and figuratively stepping into my shoes. Finding his own niche on the soccer field and the robotics world, truly enjoying what he does and confident in his own way, exuding that aura that only teenage boys have. I cannot explain it. The best I can do is that a few years ago, someone told me that there is no joy than having a conversation with your grown-up child and now I know what they meant.

But the kids wouldn’t be there without the wife, and for the life of me I wouldn’t know what to do without her. For many years, I thought it was love, but now I think to describe it in words, is to do a disservice to the feeling. It’s unexplainable to me that all the stars in all the universes and metaverses aligned in such a spectacular manner, that the my favorite person on the planet, the one who understands me best, the one who shakes her head and giggles at my stupid dad jokes, and now after 22 years of married life actually makes the same dad jokes, was raised in the same apartment complex as me at the same timeframe as me. I mean, what are the odds? There are days when I wake up, and she’s still in her stupor and I can’t help but think I am the luckiest man on the planet because she’s still there right next to me.

Or that somehow I hit the genetic lottery such that my parents did the best job they could to raise my brother and me? I saw the struggle, not often told to my face, but now that I can put two and two together it becomes so much clearer. I could write an entire book on them - maybe I should - but our upbringing and experiences could have been so much more different that what it was, and I would not be the person I am today without them. Now I talk to my kids about perseverance and grit and all those fancy words, and I don’t even need to speak mythology, just straight up examples from my childhood that I saw first hand. Experiences that maybe at the time hassled or embarrassed me, but I don’t think I would do it any other way. I don’t think my kids quite get it, like I said words don’t do justice sometimes, but we all must try.

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Or the fact that, all things considered life is net positive.

Net positive, because there no other way to call it. There is no numeric value I can put to the ability to go to India on short notice because the family needs one of us to be there on short notice, or the ability to access all the world class sports action at the flick of a switch or even sometimes in person. Net positive in that I belong to a generation that has seen first hand how humanity has progressed so amazingly in one generation that I can hold real time conversations with pretty much any person on the planet if I wanted to, or that I have my own name on my email address. Net positive in that while there are some ailments for those that I hold dear to me, we are in this era of medical magic, where these are no longer the death sentences that they once were. Or the possibility of writing this missive for no one in particular, and someone somewhere on the planet will read it and like it and I will be notified of that connection.

Yes, life isn’t perfect. But I have stopped that quest for the perfect life. I don’t think life can be perfect. For a long time I spent this life hoping and praying that it all worked out well. And then when it didn’t, I would fret and mope around and wonder why it always happened to me alone. Then I decided that I need to try the scientific / rational “there are no coincidences and everything has an explanation” school of thought. And I would try and go out of my way to prove how whatever tiny little coincidence that happened could very easily be explained. But now I find that there are way too many things happening (good and bad) that I just cannot explain. I still think that the scientific method is the better approach, but I have now stopped looking for explanations. Stuff happens. Nothing is 100% certain. It is this lack of certainty that maybe some call “God”, or some others call “the next frontier for scientific study” or whatever.

But, like I said, all things considered, life is net positive. And every passing day, I get that much more thankful for that.

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A few years ago, when Michael Schumacher had his terrible skiing accident that left him permanently comatose, I saw an editorial faux pas that ranks among the funniest / saddest in my life, and I had to click a picture of the newspaper with what was at the time a novelty - a camera phone! Mind you, this was a Marathi newspaper from Pune, so I'm unsure if you will get the joke, but it was super funny and sad to see the headline “शूमाकरची प्रकृती अजूनही गंभीर” (Schumacher's battling for his life) with a picture of the Indian cricketer Gautam Gambhir. They even got a picture of the normally morose Gambhir, of the one time in his life that he actually smiled.

If you are not following sports news from India, Gautam Gambhir is quite the rage currently. Because on his watch as the Coach of the Indian National Cricket Team, India has gone on to lose 2 of their last 3 test series played on home soil. Which actually isn’t so bad, but then the last time they lost a test series in India was like 2011 or something. And it’s not like they just lost barely, they were walloped by New Zealand last year, and by South Africa this past month, including their worst loss of all time. I mean, I’ve grown up watching the India team do nothing but lose, and even I haven’t seen India lose by 408 runs at home.

Gambhir though, true to his name, was very serious when asked about this performance and pushed back with some serious forward defense, bat very close to his pad. Unlike his batters, he knew exactly how things could spin without such solid defense.

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Now the extent of my own cricket playing experience was a few club games during my graduate school days. Right arm fast medium, (more medium than fast) and half decent tail end bat. Basically the Shardul Thakur of my club. So I really don’t have the cricketing nous to find fault in what the team did. Plus, one of the “benefits” of living on the American east coast, is that I am fast asleep while they are playing the test match in India. So I didn’t see a single ball of the 5 test matches in question. All I know is from what I saw on the scorecards online, and chatter on WhatsApp groups. I could point holes in the team composition - I mean who plays 3 all-rounders, 3 wicket keepers and 3 full-time bowlers when playing the World Champions of Test cricket? - but then who am I to say? Maybe Washington Sundar is among the best six batters in the country? Maybe Nitish Reddy is among the top 6 bowlers in the country?

Who knows? Not me.

But then Gautam Gambhir is in charge, and at the end of the day, the results are what they are. No Indian coach in known history has lost 2 test series, ever let alone inside 13 months. And we don’t need to go way back, India played England in 2023, with an even less experienced team and many of the same players but with a lot less experience at the highest levels, and walloped them 4-1. So, transition or no transition, difficult questions must be asked.

Let’s start with a simple one - a loosener, in cricketing terms.

What is Gautam Gambhir’s vision when it comes to the test team? The last 3 of his predecessors - Rahul Dravid, Ravi Shastri and Anil Kumble, each had an idea of what sort of team they wanted to play. Kumble didn’t get enough time in the hot seat (for mostly non-cricketing reasons), but Shastri and Dravid definitely had an idea of how they wanted to play. In both cases, it was fairly simple - (A) a decent opening pair, (B) followed by the best 3 batters in the country, (C) a wicket keeper would could bat in the top 6, (D) an all-rounder good enough to bat in the top 6 and good enough to be the fifth bowling option, but batting at 7, (E) the three best bowlers for the conditions, and (F) a fulltime fourth bowler who could hold his own with the bat. The math was simple, order flexible.

So in any conditions, the team lined up generally (A) 2 openers - generally Rohit Sharma and 1 other opener (B) 3 batters - Cheteshwar Pujara (later Shubhman Gill), Virat Kohli & Ajinkya Rahane, (C) Rishabh Pant, (D) Ravindra Jadeja, (E) any three out of Ravichandran Ashwin, Jasprit Bumrah, Mohd. Shami, Ishant Sharma, Mohd. Siraj, Kuldeep Yadav, Umesh Yadav and (F) Axar Patel or Shardul Thakur. The team basically lined up in this fashion, regardless of conditions and everything was plug and play. You were bowled out for 36 away from home, and bounced back to win the series with almost the entire first team out injured. You played an English team that played more tests in India than the Indian team and still won. Each player in the XI had a definite role, and that role was in line with the framework vision of the team leadership. The message to the team was simple - you do what you do best and the results will speak for themselves.

In his public pronouncements, other than banal platitudes like “playing for India is an honor” or “backing youngsters throughout” or my absolute favorite of “When you are playing for India, you should give 200%”, Gambhir hasn’t really shown any skill in managing difficult conversations. Everyone knew that Virat Kohli, R. Ashwin & Rohit Sharma were on their way out, but it was handled in a haphazard manner. The team selection seems random and all over the place. There is no such thing as giving “200%” in professional sport. All there is, is that you have to squeeze every single drop of talent that you have out there on the field. To do that, you need to have clarity of your role and how your role supports the vision of the team. If there is no vision, there is no clarity. 200%, 1000% or whatever mathematically impossible number doesn’t matter. So, when Washington Sundar bats at 3 in one test, and then at 8 in the next, or Nitish Reddy keeps getting picked while bowling six overs in the entire game, I am left wondering what the vision was. I don't know, so maybe someone who has been watching the team can help?

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Which then brings me to my next question -

Let's assume there is a vision, then how much does Gambhir follow domestic cricket to know which cricketers would fit in his vision?

Gambhir's predecessor - Rahul Dravid was the coach of the India A and India U-19 teams and then the director of the NCA before he was picked to coach. Ravi Shastri wasn't involved in domestic cricket, but his assistant coaches - Bharat Arun and Sanjay Bangar were involved with the India A side, where they had a clear idea of the ability of the players.

Meanwhile, what was Gambhir's resume after his playing days ended? 1 year as coach mentor of an IPL team and prior to that he was a Member of Parliament from East Delhi. His assistant coaches are Morne Morkel and Ryan Ten Doeschate - neither of who have any idea what happens at the domestic level. The one guy who was watching some domestic cricket - Abhishek Nayar was let go after the Australian tour. Does Gautam Gambhir have his finger on the pulse of the game in India? Forget Shreyas Iyer or Rajat Patidar who were injured, but why is Washington Sundar batting 3 Nitish Reddy on the field when there are five other bowlers in the XI and the likes of Devdutt Padikkal are in the dressing room and Sarfraz Khan & Hanuma Vihari are still playing Ranji?

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But those two questions are secondary to the biggest question in my mind - Gautam Gambhir never captained India. The extent of his “leadership” experience was captaining the Delhi Ranji team for a few years, where his main highlights included winning the whole thing one year, and getting suspended by an independent committee for inappropriate behavior another year, and also the KKR IPL team in between. He was an excellent cricketer, hard nosed and gritty, but one who could easily be instigated into a “reaction”. Maybe, as he's mellowed down now, I really don't know. He still seems to have a perma-growl on his face.

But what he did do for 5 years, was to play the perfect useful idiot for the powers that be - as Member of Parliament for East Delhi. He warmed the bench, and really did nothing of note. He was rarely in Parliament, rarely had any private member bills, was mostly commentating and coaching in the IPL when Parliament was in session - and nowhere to be found when his own constituency was engulfed in massive communal riots. At the end of his five years, he was so popular that the party where he did everything that was expected to do decided that they didn't want him to run again.

A few months later, he was coach of the Indian national team. So the question is -

How much of Gambhir’s selection as India coach is due to his political connections?

And that is the 800-pound gorilla question that has been staring his tenure right in the face which he is unwilling to address. The doubt that Gambhir is in his chair, not for any cricketing and talent development abilities, but due to checking all the boxes that satisfies the powers that be in Indian cricket.

Even more than Caesar’s wife, the coach of the Indian national team, first and foremost, MUST be above suspicion. Unless Gambhir addresses this question head-on, there is no moving on. By associating himself with a political party, Gambhir risks being seen as a rubber stamp. So while the team may have moved on from Mohd. Shami due to his age and fitness issues, and Sarfaraz Khan may have some technical issues as a batter, but as long as Gambhir is in his char it risks being viewed as them being out because they don’t fit in the BJP’s world view. Shreyas Iyer has a back problem, but his continuous non-selection can be seen as “punishment” for his reaction when meeting the Prime Minister after the 2023 ODI World Cup. Hanuma Vihari playing for Tripura instead of India gets viewed as him publicly rebuking a then-BJP MP on social media for getting his name wrong.

And therein lies the problem with Indian cricket and India in general at the moment. Loyalty gets higher priority over competence. Even the most competent person has to be demonstrating fealty loyalty to get anywhere ahead. The more obsequious you are, the further you will go (Exhibit A - Rajeev Shukla & Devjit Saikia). In such an environment, regardless of reality, Gambhir will forever be tagged as loyal first and competent second. Of course, that is assuming I am being unfair to him and he really is the best thing to have happened to Indian cricket since sliced bread.

Indian cricket cannot afford a re-run of the horror years of the 1980s and 90s where it was just a horrendous stream of mismanagement and incompetence. It is risking a return to those ages, and if Gambhir cannot see that, maybe it is time for him to the patriotic thing of giving his best to the country and getting the heck out of there.

Let’s just say, in simple Marathi - “भारतीय क्रिकेट संघाची प्रकृती अजूनही गांभीर”

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Before I start the actual post, a confession.

As a young man, the word “passion” for me meant only one thing - the game of cricket. I was crazy about the game. Unfortunately, today the game of cricket, and international cricket especially, has left me cynical beyond belief. I believe that the dominance of India is not a good thing for the game, and the BCCI needs to be called out on its bullying. But that's for a different day and a different post.

Moving on.

As I mentioned, I was crazy about the game. I knew the history, the stars, and (I think) I even got the nuance. It was not just the international game. I followed Ranji trophy, Sheffield Shield, County, Women’s cricket, Shell Shield, whatever. My then girlfriend, now my wife, would be frustrated when I would stop my bike on the Wadia college bridge to watch a random game of cricket that was going on at the ground.

Every game was a contest, and every contest was game. I would pick a team that I wanted to win, and would be the virtual twelfth man of that team throughout that game. Of course, matches featuring India were even that much more passionate, since it was a matter of patriotism, and involved everyone who had access to a television. And we were a cricket mad family. My grandfather had his second heart attack (true story) because the excitement of the India v. Australia Champions Trophy game in Nairobi was too much to bear. For about 15 years, the ceiling of our apartment bore the mark of a half-eaten apple which my brother threw in excitement because Yousuf Youhana edged Scott Mueller (of “can’t bowl, can’t throw” fame) and Mark Waugh caught it like only Mark Waugh could and threw the ball up and all my brother had in his hand was this half-eaten apple.

That level of passion. I even wrote about it a while back when I was contributing to another cricketing blog.

Cricket With Ash

How Deep is your Love

My earliest memory of cricket is sitting on my grandpa's lap, reading out the scores on the last page of the Times of India. The game didn't matter. From Test cricket at Lord's and the MCG to Kanga League scores, everything was digested with equal gusto. Then the same game was replayed in my drawing room where I was batsman, bowler, umpire, fielder, aud…

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6 years ago · 1 like · 2 comments · Chirag

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Of course, when there is sport, there is winning and there is losing.

As a kid I was a sore loser. I hated losing, I still do. Just that India lost at cricket so bloody often in my younger days, that if I didn’t have a coping mechanism, I would have been a perennial sourpuss1. After years of trial and error I hit on an error proof mechanism - watch the match with all the passion, and then if it’s a result I didn’t like, just don’t read about it the next day in the newspapers. If it’s a result I did like, read all about it not just in the newspaper I got at home, but every single newspaper that was accessible and relive every single experience all over again. I don’t know how, but it just worked. I guess, it allowed me to get over what happened and have something to look forward to. Either actively looking to reading the newspaper the next day, or actively looking to avoid reading the newspaper the next day. Over time, newspapers have been replaced by websites and YouTube channels, but the coping mechanism has remained the same. If my team, generally India, loses, I just don’t go online to check what the heck happened. If they win, I devour everything available.

The problem with this mechanism, is that the more information you have access to, the more you are likely to build a narrative in your head about why something happened and then everything you read, is just reaffirmation of your own confirmation bias. So the more you read about a loss, you build theories that X is not a big-game player, or how that team is a team of chokers, or how Pakistan wins on Fridays. Or when your team wins, you start coming up with how “destiny” is on your side and how this game you just saw, is a recreation of that old game that you remember from when you were 18, and how therefore this is part of a general pattern of life. Or that one side were “hungrier”, “angrier”, “wanted it that much more” or some mumbo-jumbo like that.

Then the world starts to make some sense, and you go to bed satisfied.

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But there is more to sport, than just pithy headlines. Why do we put ourselves through this anguish, every single time?

There is nothing I can write about Jemimah Rodrigues and the World Record chase in Mumbai yesterday that you won’t glean from somewhere else. would probably have better, more eloquent posts about the game and the innings. can keep you captivated with the backstories of each and every player and their 8th standard history teacher. Or there are playlists about what this game means from the wider perspective of the sport. If you google a little more, you might find someone here who will tell you this is the either the “1983 finals” of the women’s cricket game, “or the Yuvraj - Raina partnership to dethrone the dominant world champions”.

Sport is all that, and more. And it is none of that.

Sport is enthralling, because in that limited time horizon, you are seeing life play out. Sport, like life, throws stuff at you and you are supposed to react appropriately. Sometimes you do react appropriately, other times you don’t - just that people who are successful at either tend to react more appropriately than others. What happened in 2022, or a week ago, or 17 years ago is of zero consequence to what is happening right now. Sometimes you do everything right, and still you lose and be called a choker. Or someone rolls an ankle and you end up playing a tiny bit in an epic World Cup semi final that will be remembered for generations to come. You can be dropped for poor form and drag your team single handedly to an improbable victory all in the same fortnight. Whether you win or you lose today, life or sport will give you a second chance. When that happens, regardless of what you did today, you are starting from zero. When you see that play out right in front of your eyes (or on TV), the end result goes out of the window, the narratives around it go for a toss, and you have the most spiritual experience.

And that is why we follow sport.

My intent of paid subscriptions is NOT to make money to pay my bills, but rather to gauge if there is a wider audience for my writing.

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India, as you know, is a nation of contradictions. Or as one of independent India's greatest citizens, Dr. Manmohan Singh once said “Whatever you think of India, the opposite is also equally true”. There are rules and laws, but they are mostly just guidelines, that are used when and how someone who can feels like it. In India, Right can be Left, Up can be down, vice can be versa.

If “Jana Gana Mana” is our national anthem, “sorry, haan! Thoda adjust?” is our national motto

In all this, about 20-odd years ago, came along this guy of half-Italian heritage, and a convenient last name that made him very likely to be India's next leader. Immediately everyone got their knickers twisted about how India wasn't someone's dad's fiefdom1 . On top of it, for the most part he seemed clueless. Opportunistic politicians, acutely aware of the vacuum created, immediately labeled him such, that it has been over 10 years, that he has not been able to shed the image of a privileged know-all.

You all know who I am talking about.

That said, whenever Rahul Gandhi spoke, he seems like a nice guy. I mean, he's articulate in English and Hindi - something I don't know too many politicians today. At least on YouTube, he seems like someone who has a lot of empathy for everyone. He is open to people asking him unscripted questions, and answers those extempore thoughtfully, and places his opinion in the proper forum, with a lot of thought and preparation. He never comes across like a guy who does everything with an eye on his public image. All in all, I'd rather my son grew up to be like him, compared to the alternative.

So with great disappointment, I must report that this week, Rahul Gandhi proved his detractors right and publicly showed why he would not be a good leader for India.

He just doesn't get India.

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If you are wondering what happened this week, then it is fairly obvious that you are based in India. The poor deluded soul went ahead and had a solo press conference for over an hour, where he very meticulously showed data for one single विधान सभा constituency in Karnataka, where during last year's Lok Sabha elections, there was such rampant cheating, and his party lost the election. In a seat that Gandhi's party, the Indian National Congress, lost by about 32,000 votes, there were more than 100,000 fake voters in that one विधान सभा constituency. Not satisfied with just the numbers, he went on and showed the names of every single one of the fake voters, and prepared dossiers for everyone present to go through and dissect his numbers.

Additionally, he made a very convincing case (to me at least) as to how this set of fake voters could only have been created with the connivance of the Election Commission of India, and that the ECI, having realized that they could get caught out, went out of their way to prevent anyone from catching their shenanigans. As I was watching the press conference, I was already picturing an Indian version of “All The President's Men”2 for all the hoops that the INC investigators had to jump through.

If these allegations are true, there was an elegance with which the election of 2024 was “fixed”, something that even the odds-makers in Las Vegas will take notes on. The scale at which something like this could have been managed, could only have been done with the full knowledge that it would work, and that the perpetrators would go scot-free.

If this is true, and if this is a just world, where there is a just God, surely those who did this from top-to-bottom, will get punished in this life, and not in the eternal afterlife.

But alas, two fictions don't make a fact.

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Anyway, why do I think that Rahul Gandhi lost my vote in that press conference?

Firstly, who spends six whole months these days meticulously researching and joining various dots of seemingly unconnected information to come up with a very plausible story? I mean, who? We have a very decisive leadership, that takes strategic decisions like demonetization in a matter of hours. We lockdown the whole country in four hours. That's who our country wants, not someone who gives proof of everything he says!

We do, not think3!

I mean, yeah, if all this is true then sure the world's largest democracy is a sham, but we always kinda knew that? The game was always kinda sorta rigged, wasn't it? And then who asked for democracy, that we should have to fight for it? We are a culture of centuries of brave kings, the merciful autocrats that they were, and not some hodge podge “everybody is equal in the eyes of the law” system that some “western educated elites” came up with to stay with the times! And what even is the bloody point of power if you have to play by the rules and voluntarily give it up, haan?

But most importantly, why I think that Rahul just proved to me that his detractors were wrong and that judgment is actually suspect, is that he just doesn't seem to get it. He is just so dogmatic about his idealism that things can be improved, even though he himself makes a very convincing case of how rigged it is against him. He still thinks there's value in him pushing towards a better tomorrow. Smarter people would have given up. Even smarter people, (like me, of course!) would have taken all the supposedly ill-gotten gains from the corruption from the time they were in power, and taken complete advantage of potential Italian citizenship and left the country for some easy life in a more laidback setting, where the a catastrophe is defined by the unavailability of toilet paper. Ours is a culture and a system of “साम, दाम, दंड, भेद” where the ends have always justified the means. We recognize winners and justify everything that they do, because they are winners. Our Gods have killed their families, and forsaken their spouses, and it's all ok because they are our Gods. Good does not triumph over evil, as much as, whoever wins is automatically justified in whatever they've done to get there.

Only an idiot, who has zero idea of the Indian mindset, will truly believe that the struggle to make it a fair and equitable system, that ideal where everyone is truly equal in the eyes of the law, a culture where the mind is without fear and the head is held high, where there's absolutely no guarantee of success, is even remotely worth it.

And who will vote for an idiot, tell me?

When I'm driving in my car / When a man come on the radio
He's telling me more and more / About some useless information
Supposed to fire my imagination

~The Rolling Stones. “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”

Recently, like last week, after spending something like 46 years, 9 months, and 20 days on the planet, I realized I’d been leading my life all wrong.

Apparently there’s a scoreboard that we’re all supposed to be following, and you can then “win” or “lose” at life based on how you’re doing on this scoreboard. And it’s not a very complicated scoreboard. I just need to follow the instructions provided to me by someone, and presto! I start winning!

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A few weeks ago, someone contacted me on LinkedIn with the following message:

Normally, I just ignore such messages. I have zero desire to grow my “visibility and engagement” on any social media, let alone LinkedIn. I knew he was bullshitting me just from his attempt at sycophancy. But I had some vacation time free, and no one at home, so I decided to engage with the guy. We set up time to meet.

It was a virtual call, but when I called in, there were three attendees already waiting. It was this guy and his business partner on camera sitting in their respective living rooms in Gurgaon, while the third guy was off camera. I realized later that this third guy was actually an AI note taker. The meeting started, and after all the pleasantries were exchanged, these guys started reading out “engagement metrics” of my own LinkedIn posts.

Apparently they weren't good enough!

Then they went on to show me how, for a “paltry” $2000 per month, I could get 10x the engagement and about 50x the network, as long as I followed their instructions to the letter. The details of the instructions are irrelevant here, though if you are really interested in that kind of stuff, I can connect you to them. If you ghost them after the first meeting, their rate could come down to roughly $750, which is what happened to me. Based on what they told me, I'm fairly sure a lot of the people I see on LinkedIn are employing someone like them. Perversely, this makes me feel a little happier, since now the mystery of how someone like them is so “popular” is now solved.

Before we move on, I’d like to make 2 points - First, I am not dissing the job that engagement farmers do. There is a market need, and everyone wants to be popular, and everyone is being told that you need to be seen to be heard, and they’re providing that service. In a gold rush, the best business is to provide shovels. In that sense, it’s no different that the GRE preparation classes that so many of my friends went to in 1999-00. Everyone has mouths to feed and mortgages to pay. Secondly, for the same reasons, I am also not dissing the people who employ the engagement farmers. They know something needs to change, and they've seen some people and they want their share of that gold rush.

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The bigger point here is not about engagement farming.

Everywhere you look, the scoreboard seems to have changed. “Metrics” are all the rage everywhere. Engagement metrics, financial metrics, health metrics, falaana dhimkaana metrics. And because metrics drive everything, Goodhart’s Law is at play everywhere. I was going to write about it in much more detail, but I found that already covered some of that in the series on “Attention as infrastructure”. I found this portion quite interesting:

• Attention is infrastructure: Determines what gets funded, elected, or build

• Narrative is capital: It drives flows of money, policy, and sentiment.

• Speculation is the operating layer between the two - it’s how belief is tested, priced, and converted into outcomes before institutions act.

What we’re seeing isn’t just a media trend. It’s a shift in the architecture of power. Attention → Speculation → Allocation. This is the new supply chain.

Traditional economic theory assumes information flows serve resource allocation. But increasingly, resource allocation serves attention flows. We've moved from an economy where attention supports other forms of value creation to one where attention is the value creation.

If you’re wondering where this form of ADD has come from, your guess is as good as mine.

I’d like to think that people have always been this way. Lotteries and get rich quick scams have been around since the invention of time. Humanities graduates from the 1990s are computer scientists today purely because someone told them there was more money in doing an MCA after their B.A. Econ (Hons.). What has changed though is the inordinate amount of money freely available for this form of speculation. Where did this money come from? I don’t know. In a different life, I would have asked my friend who trained to be an economist in her college years and she would probably blame the 15+ successive years of quantitative easing by the world’s central banks, but that trained economist gave up her economics credentials for an MCA from Indira Institute of Information Technology in Jalgaon and is today running an AI-startup that just got valued at $30B based on $82M of revenue.

Jokes apart, with all that money freely flowing everywhere, money now acts as the scoreboard on which winners and losers are determined. I found out from that post I linked to above, that there exists a company whose motto is literally “Cheat at Everything”, and that it has received millions of dollars of venture funding. Even the engagement farming that I mentioned is a piece of the same scoreboard. More followers, more engagement, more invitations to influence and peddle stuff, more chances to make money and go higher on this imaginary hedonistic scoreboard. In all this, what is lost is depth and nuance.

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Somewhere, something is broken.

There was a time when you set a objective to achieve something and metrics informed you if you were on the right path. They informed you what more you could do to achieve your objective. I recall telling someone that Virat Kohli’s objective is to be the best batter he can be, and his metric of that was his batting average.

But now the metric has become the objective. Your successes and failures are determined by these metrics, and people who know little (or nothing) about you or the work you do, are making judgments and decisions, just based on the metrics and little else. Like Virat Kohli is defined by his batting average and nothing else.

I don't have data for sure, but I am starting to think that I'm not the only one who is feeling like this. In the past six months, I've had really good “heart to heart” conversations with a few of my friends. Most of them are my age, mid-40s, and almost with all of us there is a realization of some kind of dissonance. A dissonance between what we're hearing and what we're seeing. They We are being asked to do something - often in the name of improving some “metric” - and that just does not tally with some of the fundamental principles that we were raised on. Many are just shrugging their shoulders and trying to get on with the program, but their struggle to make sense of it all is clear for all. Many others are taking the “I'm too old for this BS” approach and just checking out.

The map is not the geography!

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Gary Barve needs your help.

I don't know Gary personally, but from what I've gathered, he spent his formative years in the same city that I grew up in - Pune, India - around the same time, maybe a few years later, that I did. I probably even bumped into him somewhere, because Pune in those days was a small city, where you knew almost everyone within two (max three) degrees of separation. Details of his life are somewhat sketchy, his LinkedIn profile suggests he completed kindergarten in New Jersey in 1987, and then did his MBA from Southern Methodist in 2012, and pretty much nothing in between. If I was betting anything, based on his last name and his desire to show how smart he is, I’d say he spent a decent percentage of his time in Pune, very likely at the Abhinav Mahavidyalaya, with possibly an engineering degree somewhere in between. But I don’t know for sure, and I don’t want to presume. That said, Gary, or Gautam as he was known in those days, is in possession of something very few people raised in Pune have - an American passport, since he was born in the US.

But we're not here because Gary was born in the US. We're here because of what that has allowed him to do.

Run for President of the United States of America in the 2028 elections as a Republican supporter of our President Donald J. Trump. (If you follow Gary, I'm sorry but you have to say the whole thing)

You see, Gary has been running for office for a long time now. In 2020, he ran for City Council in Santa Clara, CA. Needless to say, he did not make it. Then in 2022, he ran (and later withdrew) for the U.S. House Virginia District 7, in Virginia. Not satisfied with the resounding failure of this campaign, he tried his shot at a open US Senate seat in the state of Virginia in 2024. He even set up a PAC for his candidacy, but then decided that his efforts were better placed running for the Republican primary for the U.S. House Florida District 23. He ran an admirable campaign, getting almost 2000 people to vote for him. However he did end up last among all the candidates, (joint last, to be fair)

But Gary has way too much to offer to the public, and now with his President Donald J. Trump (possibly) term limited, he's going to run for President of the United States of America in the 2028 elections as a Republican supporter of our President Donald J. Trump. (Like I said, you have to say the whole thing). In the man's own words, this is the job he’s been literally born to do.

I mean, why else did God ensure he was born in the United States, that One Nation Under that very God? Unfortunately, the voting public doesn’t seem to be heeding this very God’s edict!! Which is why I am here posting about how you need to drop what you’re doing and do your religious duty of voting for Gary whenever it is your turn to vote in the Presidential Primary for the 2028 election cycle!! In fact, I am strongly considering applying for citizenship of this great country as soon as I get eligible, just so that I can cast my first presidential vote for Gary Barve, a Republican supporter of our President Donald J. Trump (I told you, you have to say it).

Why Chirag, I hear you ask? Why should we bother with voting for a candidate that has failed struggled to win even a basic Santa Clara City Council seat, and entrust him with the responsibility of leading this country, let alone the free world?

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In P. L. Deshpande's story “असा मी, असामी” (this is me, a common man), the narrator-cum-protagonist Dhondo Bhikaji Joshi poses the question why an uninteresting, run of the mill, common man like him should even bother with writing an autobiography. To which, he then proceeds to take inspiration from his keertankaar uncle and his fairly nondescript keertankaari career. “Just because there are world-famous keertankaar like Nijampurkar buwa, Kavishwar buwa, Rashinkar buwa, Badodekar buwa”, the uncle would say, “does that mean this Digambar Kadmadekar should never do a keertan?”

I often think of Digambar buwa Kadmadekar whenever I come across Gary Barve on my social media feeds.

To all the doubters I ask, why not? Whatever happened to the good old values of dogged persistence in the face of debilitating adversity? When did the result become the reason for doing something?

Seriously, I do think there is something wonderful about my man Gary running for President. There’s something teachable here. He hit the lottery by being born in this country, and is trying to maximize his winnings by going for the biggest prize there is. Every child born in the country is told that they can be anything, literally anything they want, even the President of the United States. In my career, I’ve always advised people to focus on building their talent and squeezing every possible drop out of that talent. Winning and losing is just part of the game, but giving it your best shot is what it is all about. The talent needed to be President of the United States is to be born in the United States and Gary is squeezing every drop of whatever talent juice he has for it. Not to mention, I am a sucker for irony, and the irony of an Indian guy succeeding our President Donald J. Trump is just too juicy to let go.

Gary’s persistence requires recognition, not ridicule. There’s a potential Oscar-winning documentary waiting to be made on Gary’s journey to the White House. There’s pathos and loneliness and exhilaration and satisfaction all in one story. The ultimate Hollywood all-American underdog story, with some DEI thrown in to satisfy the liberals.

Gary Barve needs your help! Donate today to his campaign.

For the longest time, I have believed that the world grows on two things. Knowledge and Money. I don’t know, maybe this comes from all the years of growing up in India and praying to the Goddesses Sarasvati and Lakshmi. If I wasn’t feeling as lazy as I am right now, I would have linked to previous articles, but then this is the third avatar of my blog, and I have little desire to go down the rabbit hole of my old post, so I will type out the entire hypothesis again.

Throughout history, humankind has organized itself based on knowledge and finance. Millennia ago, as farming practices formed, knowledge was shared and humanity prospered. People found the benefits of grouping up as a community. And then they discovered the concept of the exchanges. So instead of a farmer having to grow wheat and rice and vegetables and fruits, you had one farmer grow wheat, another grew rice, yet another grew vegetables and a fourth grew fruits. As long as all of them had output enough for all four of them, this was more effective and efficient. Eventually the bartering of goods gave way to this thing called “money”. It therefore created the concept of “value” for your money. If you felt you were not getting enough value for the money you spent, you can go to a different knowledge holder. If the knowledge holder feels like she isn’t getting enough money for her knowledge, she can try some other things that she knows of that will bring more money.

Broken down into its bare bones, the exchange of knowledge using a form of money has always lubricated the world.

However there has always been a major constraint in the free flow of this knowledge and money. That has been geography. Centuries ago, the flow of knowledge and money was somewhat exclusive within the boundaries of your village. Rarely anyone traveled outside their village. But then, for whatever reason, someone felt their village restrictive and moved out. Some were able to find greater value their skillset in a different village. Some brought the knowledge from other villages back to their own village, starting the concept of trade. This began the need to improve transportation, since walking was a pain. So someone used their knowledge to come up with a bullock cart, then a horse carriage, ships, Industrial Revolution, so on and so forth.,

And that, in 2 simple paragraphs, is how we got from the Mesozoic era to June 2025.

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For the longest time, both knowledge and finance was restricted. Someone defined what was knowledge and what was finance and you had to live with it. You had to hit the lucky sperm lottery for you to have access to either (or both). Knowledge was restricted to the men of God, (always men, regardless of religion) and finance was restricted to whatever the man divined by God (granted, not always a man, but you get the point). Put another way, if you violated any of these “rules” of Laxmi and Saraswati, you faced the wrath of Durga.

But then some German guy invented the printing press and the grip on knowledge loosened. The written word could spread farther and faster than the spoken one. Fast forward to today, and you have people doing root canals using online instructions1 and you now hear stories about people winning Olympic gold medals after picking up the sport on YouTube. You're also reading this very article, sitting I don't know where, but I'm pretty sure you are not where I am. No one in their sane mind believes that there is a geographical restriction on the spreading of knowledge. If you want to learn, then there's no restriction on how much you can learn everything is avaliable.

But that's not the same case with money and finance. At its core, there is a geographical restriction on money. Indeed, the whole concept of the “state” is its ability to control money matters within its realm. If you are in India, and you want to buy something in Japan, you can't pay them in rupees. Neither of the governments will let you. If you figure out a way to get the yen needed, those yen are useless in India to pay your neighborhood dhobi for the clothes he ironed for you. In India, you need rupees, in Japan you need yen. For all the knowledge you have successfully shared beyond geographical boundaries, YouTube still pays you in the currency of your country, and not some mythical global currency.

So while Laxmi and Saraswati have gone hand in hand for years together, technology has made Saraswati a lot more accessible, but Laxmi is still somewhat playing by the old rules. But what if there was a globally acceptable currency? No currency conversion headaches, no purchasing power problems. I pay my Japanese counterpart in this currency, and they get the right price for their “knowledge”.

If the internet has demolished the boundaries to knowledge, can it also do something similar to the boundaries on finance?

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About a month or so ago, my friend posted this on LinkedIn.

Now, full disclosure, Bhaskar is the Chairman of the Middle East Stablecoin Association, so him going gung-ho on Stablecoin isn't really earth shattering discovery. But I've also known Bhaskar for years now, and have come to value his opinion on matters of finance. He's got more PhDs than I have fingers on my right hand on subjects as wide as History, Philosophy, Artificial intelligence and International Finance. He's not one who will give cookie cutter PR drivel. If it needs to be said, he will say it.

That said, this absolutely NOT investment advice.

Until now my own personal opinion on all crypto currency was something on the lines of an internet era version of the hawaala system. I believed (and to some extent still do) that the “Code is God” tech bros are promising to redefine ____ (enter field of choice here) but actually delivering century old wines in fancy new bottles.

And then there's the whole trust problem as mentioned in the Financial Times article2. The article is behind a paywall, so the critical part is

The BIS, the forum for the world’s main central banks, said in a chapter from its annual economic report released on Tuesday: “While stablecoins’ future role remains uncertain, their poor performance on the three tests suggests they may at best serve a subsidiary role.”

Stablecoins “have been the go-to choice for illicit use to bypass integrity safeguards”, the report said, pointing out that they lack the “know-your-customer” controls of traditional finance.

It found they “fare poorly” in the settlement function of money due to their lack of backing by central banks, which act as lenders of last resort in a crisis.

“Stablecoins often trade at varying exchange rates, undermining singleness,” it said. “They are also unable to fulfil the ‘no questions asked’ principle of bank-issued money .”

Seems simple!

That said, just like my friend Bhaskar has a potential conflict of interest, so does the BIS, which is the forum for the world's major central banks. It is literally the competition for the Stablecoin concept.

Also if you read the problems with the Stablecoin, the engineer in me sees all the problems and adds an implicit “yet” at the end of all the objections. When I do that, it seems to me like these are solvable problems. Also while the BIS tells you all that's bad about stablecoin, they also go on in the same report to say that basically they don't have a problem with digital currency, they just don't have the confidence in the offerings available today, and if you really want to get into this, they'd much rather you use their format of digital currency.

Again, this is absolutely NOT investment advice, nor is it legal advice. But twenty-five years ago, when I was a graduate student from India constantly converting my USD spending into INR, if someone had told me that there is a good chance of having a global currency, I'd have laughed my head off at them. Now I don't know, maybe it's not so crazy?

More importantly, if the restrictions of geography and national boundaries are not really restrictions any more, what happens to the concept of a nation state?

Viewed under this prism, does the whole popularity of violent protectionism and nationalism in the past decade or so, just a case of the nation state concept trying to maintain their relevance in the face of the technology onslaught? I mean, if the nation state is losing its control over the knowledge and finance, and can see the day when they no longer hold the reins on these goddesses, all that remains is the state monopoly on violence, isn't it?

In other words, now that the nation state has completely lost the narrative on defining what is “Saraswati”, and is fast losing the narrative to define what is “Laxmi”, is it resorting to its monopoly on “Durga” to maintain its relevance?

And given its track record, would you bet against technology to win that battle when it happens? What happens to the concept of the nation state then? Are we back to a one (wo)man nation?

Interesting times ahead!

July 2008.

I had just spent the better part of 7 hours watching an exhilarating tennis match between the two best players on the men's circuit. It was non stop action with two contrasting styles. The game was just mind boggling. My favorite player lost, though to this day, I strongly believe that he would have won the game had it been played a year earlier or a year later, but that's for a different post1. How could two players go at it with so much passion and not inspire millions of people all around the world?

I was one such.

I read somewhere that a man has only two ages - 22 and 45. In 2008, I guess I identified as a 22 year old (even though the math said otherwise) and decided in that moment of stupid inspiration that I too would start playing tennis. We had a tennis court in the complex, and another 30 - turning 22 - year old similarly inspired friend.

And thus started a journey of my battle with the inner game of tennis2 learning to play a game, but also learning to live a life.

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The door to the most famous court on the planet has the inscription “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, and treat those impostors just the same.”. Unfortunately, I never had the pleasure of experiencing that feeling. I don't think I have won a single tennis match in my life. But I've learned so much about the game and about myself.

I've learned that the last point you played makes no difference to the next point you are going to play. I've learned that it's a bloody physical game, especially when playing singles, and there are times when just completing and competing in a close tennis match gives a sense of satisfaction unlike any other. I've learned that practice does not always make perfect, but perfect practice is something worth aspiring for. I've learned you can play a hundred tennis matches or you can play the same match a hundred times, and the results would be different.

Why I bring this up now, is that I just spent 5hrs and 29 minutes watching the two best players on the planet bashing the living daylights out of a tennis ball to all corners of the tennis court. It was exceptional stuff. I won't be able to do justice for the quality of the match with my writing, and I'm sure will be writing something so beautiful soon (if he hasn't already), so it's better you bookmark his writing.

What I did find is that my own lessons playing the game were applicable at the highest level of the game too. Every point was played as if their lives depended on the result of that point. It was exhausting just to watch the physicality of the game. Watching both players not dwell on lost opportunities and focus purely on the next point and giving nothing short of their hundred percent on it, was mesmerizing to watch. But most importantly, it was the spirit in which the game was played that stood out so much! They were the living embodiment of treating those two imposters of Triumph and Disaster just the same.

That said, it was also clear that the game I've been following for the past 17 years, has changed. More importantly, I have changed and my priorities have changed. While I sat through the entire final in 2008, through rain breaks and all, this time around I was doing other things while the TV was on. I cleared bird nests from our porch, I even went and picked up lunch! I just don't have 5 hrs and 29 minutes to spare anymore. A 22 year old and a 23 year old are the best players in the world, while I now identify more with that 45 year old that I had dreaded becoming. The irony of the math was so juicy. Tennis is a younger person's game. The infant that I was putting to bed in 2008, now drives a car. I just don't have the bandwidth to engage in it anymore.

And so, for the first time in my life, I picked up a paddle and went to play a game of pickleball with a fellow 47-turning-45 sufferer.

Time for some new lessons!

While I read as much as I can, there are still some essays and web posts that leave an impression on me. And since they left an impression on my mind, and hopefully will mould my thoughts that you will see in my future writings, I figured you were just as entitled to reading these for yourselves. The idea is to share this feature once every 7-10 days, and build some conversation on the various topics. I don't read enough to segregate on topics, but I'll try to weave a theme through the posts wherever possible. Feedback as always, through comments and messages will be appreciated!

So without further ado, here's some of the best stuff I saw in the past few days1.

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First up, writes about the impact of Artificial Intelligence and the need for the political establishment to take AI seriously and for some nuanced articulation on what real world problems are worthy of AI based solutions. In the current click-bait driven, low attention span environment, there's either complete doom and gloom or complete boosterism, neither of which give the complete picture. This can only come through healthy debate and political will.

As Yglesias says of the politicians:

But actual politicians can’t wave their hands about this kind of thing; they are the ones who need to deliver the solutions.

Interesting throughout.

Slow Boring

Politicians need to take AI progress seriously

It’s hard to predict the future, but I think it’s possible that, by 2028, many of the issues that are crucial today will be swamped by concern about AI and its impacts on the world…

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a year ago · 249 likes · 422 comments · Matthew Yglesias

On the same topic, talks about the fundamental problem that new technology - EV and AI in this case - faces when it comes to scaling up. The need for a connected strategy in order to give the solutions the scale that they need make the whole venture profitable. Existing technology has its tentacles so deeply entrenched, because while it is large, it is still a small cog in an entire ecosystem based on linked adjacent technologies. So removing just one cog, will not make it work, unless there's coordination with the first order and second order derivative technologies.

Someone has to build the grid, and without the political will, this venture is bound to go kaput very quickly. Where that someone will come from, in the absence of state funding is probably where the solution is.

That healthy dose of realism aside, we must agree that the scale at which change needs to happen is staggering and I hope we can get to that goal, because getting there would be truly amazing!

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Speaking of amazing, one of my favorite essayists on the internet is and his Everything is Amazing newsletter which captures little discussed events and happenings that are simply amazing when you sit down to think about it.

Reading this story of how in September 2023, geophysicists across the world started monitoring a very odd signal coming from the ground under them and what their findings showed left me speechless. Not to mention, while all this is amazing, it is also a timely reminder of how fragile everything is, and every single moment is feeling like we're heading closer to the precipice.

Everything Is Amazing

For Nine Days, The Earth Rang Like A Bell

Hello! This is Everything Is Amazing, a newsletter about distracting oddities in science, like weird sky smells and nasal hallucinations…

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a year ago · 142 likes · 27 comments · Mike Sowden

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There is a lot to be worried about, but I hope we never forget that humanity has overcome significant problems in our history, many of which had much less odds of success. Thousands of years ago, humans walked across the Siberian Tundra with nothing more than their wits to survive. What we have in front of us is a massive challenge, but we can solve it. If you think I'm wrong let me tell you that I'm an engineer, and like reminds us, I'm perfectly fine with being wrong about (almost) everything!

Incautious Optimism

Become an engineer! Be wrong about (almost) everything!

When I added a sawtooth leading edge to the vortex finder of a Dyson cyclone, I thought it would stabilize the vortex and improve performance. I didn't expect it to scream so loudly that technicians fled the lab…

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a year ago · 37 likes · Incautious Optimism

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I graduated engineering college about 25 years ago, and my last job as an engineer ended about 15 years ago. Since then I've earned my bread through managing people - directly and indirectly. If there's one thing I've seen my thoughts evolve in, it would be that life isn't linear in the way that engineers would like it to. While most problems have a cool engineering solution, the best engineered solution is pointless if it doesn't consider the human element.

What should happen is not always what does happen. And that's because humans act weirdly. Not all choices are rational choices. People making those “irrational” choices are just as human as those of us who pride ourselves on our rationality. Unfortunately, we - experts, supposedly - started to look down upon those whose self esteem isn't based on their desire to show how much they know. You and I might be good at ten things, maybe you can tell the socio political impacts of the tariffs on the indigenous populations of Chile using fancy graphs or whatever, while all “they” know is the price per bushel of corn. And as shows so eloquently, decades of this classist superiority is now backfiring. There's a crisis of legitimacy that the expert class is facing, and it is not going away any time soon.

Conspicuous Cognition

Status, class, and the crisis of expertise

I In one of the most memorable scenes in The Brothers Karamazov, the saintly protagonist Alyosha offers the impoverished and desperate Captain Snegiryov a significant amount of money. Shortly before, Alyosha’s brother had publicly humiliated Snegiryov by dragging him out of a tavern by his beard. The money is presented as compensation for the incident…

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a year ago · 412 likes · 125 comments · Dan Williams

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And finally, speaking of building status, here's a wild and amusing idea from the genius at - a personal IPO. Sell stakes in yourself and your success. Get other people to not just fund your dreams but also have a vested interest in your success! What's not to like?

No Dumb Ideas

The big idea: A personal IPO

Most people will, at some point in life, take out debt: a mortgage, credit cards, payday loans, and more. Businesses have another option: they can sell equity…

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a year ago · 12 likes · No Dumb Ideas

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Every long piece deserves a musical coda.

One of the recurrent themes that I've spoken about out here, has been how many options we have these days to express our creativity. What pays for your bills need not be what gives you the joy of fulfillment. And technology allows that.

This also a small, but great example of how a grid mindset works to enhance technology deployment. What you will see in this video, couldn't have happened without the easy availability of digital editing tools, immense computing powers and the omnipotent YouTube algorithm!

But what drives it the most, is the desire of the creator to satisfy their curiosity. In today's day and age, if you have the curiosity to explore, you have the availability of technology to make it happen.

So if there's one thing that I think you can do, it is to put yourself out there. This opportunity comes once in a lifetime!

Lose Yourself!!

For the uninitiated, the Law states

The law seemed so easy to comprehend. At a high level, this is something that everyone learns growing up. Get the basics right. Focus on your work, and the results will follow. Even the Bhagwad Gita says something similar on focusing on your karma and not on the end results. They even made 4 Kung Panda movies on essentially the same concept.

I found myself nodding in agreement with the concept and felt compelled to write something about how in today’s day and age the quest for money is taking over the thirst for knowledge. How in this over-complex world, business leaders are prioritizing financial metrics over actually adding any value to the end users.

Since knowledge was to be prioritized over money, I even decided that this post should not be behind the paywall.

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Needless to say, since the first principle was that knowledge trumps money, I decided to do some research on this law before I actually wrote about it. Who was this Robert Wilson who said this, when did he say it, what were his qualifications and motivations etc., You know, the general stuff to do before you put your name on a product, to ensure that it has the best in you.

First step - Google.

If you google it, you will find thousands of hits on Wilson’s Law, so it takes quite a lot of effort to parse. There’s this very detailed Substack -

Psych

Wilson's Law

🤖: Hi there…

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2 years ago · 2 likes · 2 comments

and, of course, this video on YouTube -

or if TikTok is your poison of choice

@themodernphilosopher28#selfimprovement #discipline #motivation

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And then of course, there’s LinkedIn with this essay on Wilson’s law where this comment caught my eye.

Indeed!! Who IS Robert Wilson?

For all the gyaan that you can find online on Wilson’s Law, there is actually no record of any Robert Wilson saying anything on the record about prioritizing knowledge and intelligence which will then lead to money flowing through your bank account1. You could substitute Robert Wilson with your uncle who you meet at weddings and family dinners and who loves to talk even if no one is listening, and it would basically be one and the same thing. But calling it “My Uncle’s Law” does not carry the same heft as calling it Wilson’s Law.

So while I started to write about Wilson’s Law is now extinct, apparently it never existed in the first place!!

Someone decided to randomly paste a comment from their uncle (boss / mentor / whatever) on the internet, and an entire industry was abuzz. Infinite content was generated on a point that was basically an off-hand comment during a Thanksgiving dinner (or something like that). In a perfect encapsulation of this online era, people asking you and me to prioritize knowledge over money, actually made money off of that content, with demonstrably zero increase in anyone’s knowledge.

As my teenagers would say “TSPMO, bruh!2”