On the twenty-second of January, 1984, something intriguing happened, and for the first time. During a break early in the third quarter of a football game, a sixty-second film played on American television. An Apple ad.

A woman in red sprinted down a grey corridor carrying a sledgehammer. Rows of shaven-headed men sat watching in the glow of a giant screen. She threw the hammer and the screen exploded.

Apple’s board hated it. The chief executive instructed the agency to sell the airtime back. They managed to offload the thirty-second slot and found themselves stuck with the sixty. It is the only reason one of the most famous advertisements in television history ever aired at all.

The number usually quoted is the wrong one. Super Bowl XVIII drew a Nielsen rating of 46.4, which means roughly seventy-seven million viewers. The number that matters more, seventy-one. Seventy-one per cent of every television switched on in the United States that evening was showing the same ad, at the same moment.

Eyeballs were available elsewhere, then as now, at a fraction of the cost. What Apple bought was something no cheaper channel could sell. The certainty that everyone watching knew that everyone else was watching too.

There is a line in game theory that separates two states of awareness which look identical but behave nothing alike in practice. The first is shared information. I know something. You know the same thing. Neither of us has the faintest idea what the other knows. The second is common knowledge. I know it. You know it. I know that you know it. You know that I know that you know it and so on, without an obvious end to the chain.

The second sounds like something a mentalist would say, while they are trying to read your thoughts. But it is, in fact, the idea that determines whether anybody actually moves collectively.

Consider two prisoners in separate cells. Both want to get out. Both happen to know that the night guard falls asleep at two in the morning. The escape works only if they run at the same moment. Either one of them runs alone, and he gets caught.

Now slip an identical note under each cell door: The guard sleeps at two.

Both men now hold accurate, complete, and identical information. Neither can touch the door. The first prisoner is probably thinking, I know the guard sleeps, but does the other prisoner? And even if he knows, does he know that I know? If he thinks I’m asleep, he won’t run, and if he stays put, my running is suicide.

Perfect information. Total paralysis.

Let’s change one detail about this scene. Instead of the quiet notes, the warden accidentally broadcasts it over the prison loudspeaker: The night guard will be asleep at two.

Nobody has learned a single new fact about the guard’s sleep habits. Yet both men run immediately. The loudspeaker did not add information. It added the certainty of mutual awareness.

Nobody stands first

Think of the end of a performance that has genuinely moved an auditorium.

The applause begins, and it hovers in that awkward, low-energy middle gear. Almost everyone in the room would happily stand. Almost nobody wants to be the solitary idiot standing while everyone else remains seated. So the room collectively hesitates, each person scanning the periphery of their vision, waiting for someone else to take the lead. Someone finally does, and within three seconds, five hundred people are on their feet.

It is the same mechanism, where the only cost is mild social embarrassment. When real money is involved, things get considerably more expensive.

A bank holds a small fraction of its deposits in cash and lends the rest out into the world. It works because depositors do not all arrive at the counter on the same Tuesday morning, and they stay away because each expects the others to do the same. Every depositor can privately lose sleep over the bank’s balance sheet and do absolutely nothing about it indefinitely, provided they believe everyone else remains calm.

The line outside the branch is what breaks the illusion. The moment you can see other people pulling their money, patience becomes an expensive mistake. This is documented well enough to have collected a Nobel Prize. Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig’s model of bank runs, honoured in 2022, rests on an unsettling premise. The bank in the model is entirely solvent. Its loans are good. If nobody panics, everyone gets paid in full. The run is not a reaction to the failure, but the failure itself.

When Silicon Valley Bank unravelled in 2023, depositors attempted to pull forty-two billion dollars in a single business day. The regulatory disclosure that triggered it altered very little about the underlying assets on the ledger. What it changed overnight was what depositors knew other depositors had just read.

If common knowledge is this potent and this difficult to assemble, human societies should have spent thousands of years building machinery specifically designed to manufacture it. We did and just call it culture.

No monarch ever governed by slipping private scrolls under household doors in the middle of the night. A royal decree was read aloud in the public square, only after brass horns had been blown to compel silence, from a stone platform where every citizen could watch every other citizen hearing it. No one could plead ignorance to a crowd that had just watched them listen.

Even ancient architecture quietly solved this problem. Greek amphitheatres and Roman arenas were not pitch-black rooms with forward-facing seats. They were open bowls where the audience faced one another across the sand, ensuring the crowd’s collective gasp or dislike was as visible as the spectacle down on the floor.

The political scientist Michael Chwe has a published work on it, Rational Ritual. He argues that public ceremonies are not powerful because they transmit data from a central speaker to individual listeners. They work because they allow every person in the crowd to verify that everyone else received the transmission.

This also explains a persistent oddity in modern advertising budgets. A thirty-second Super Bowl slot in 1984 cost three hundred and sixty-eight thousand dollars, the current rate runs north of seven million. A targeted digital ad can place a running shoe in front of an active twenty-eight-year-old marathoner for fractions of a cent. If advertising were merely the mechanical task of inserting a product image into an isolated brain, broadcast television should have died fifteen years ago.

It survives because the two things are not selling the same product.

A targeted digital ad persuades an individual that a shoe is well-cushioned. A Super Bowl slot and a massive billboard in the middle of a city square convince millions of people that the brand is culturally recognised, funded, and socially legible. You cannot purchase collective social proof through a private tracking cookie.

The targeted ad comes with a spreadsheet. It hands you impressions, click-through rates, and a clean customer acquisition cost on a dashboard that looks impeccably rigorous in an executive meeting.

The stadium broadcast comes with nothing of the sort. Nobody has ever cleanly traced an individual shoe purchase back to a sixty-second film watched by seventy million people at once. Attribution remains marketing’s favourite unsolved argument.

What the feed cannot do

The mid-century tools for manufacturing common knowledge were crude, and exceptionally easy to abuse. A handful of newspapers, three national networks, and state-sanctioned airwaves were tools of political control at least as often as they were instruments of solidarity. Yet they were remarkably effective at one specific task. When everyone read the same front page over breakfast, everyone knew that everyone else had read it too.

We traded that world for a system that distributes more data to more human beings, faster, than anything previously conceived. It is also engineered, brilliantly and deliberately, so that no two people ever see the same thing.

The modern feed is an extraordinary engine for shared information. Ten million people can scroll past the same breaking report within an hour. But each of them meets it alone, on a private screen, with no way of knowing whether anyone else saw it. Everyone can know the same thing today. Almost nobody can be certain that anyone else knows it too.

So we created a different world. The thing that turns seventy-seven million private viewings into one public event is now the scarce part.

Every group has its own version of the room that refuses to stand. The thing everyone has separately noticed and nobody has said where the others could hear it. In a family, among old friends, or on a street. We spend an enormous amount of energy making sure everyone is individually informed. We spend almost none making sure they know what everyone else has seen.

What do you know that everyone around you also knows, and nobody has said out loud?

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What we're watching at Wyzr

Art & Copy (2009). A documentary about the people behind the advertising everyone remembers — "Just Do It," "Got Milk?", including how the 1984 Apple ad actually came together. I stumbled onto it thanks to Youtube recommendations, and found it far more interesting than I expected. Hope you enjoy it too.

Until next time.

Best,
Amlan

Image Credit

October 1984. A hardware store in South Pasadena, California, caught fire during business hours. The fire moved with unusual speed. A woman and her two-year-old grandson died along with two others in the fire. The investigators who examined the wreckage ruled it an accident. Faulty wiring, most likely. It was an old building after all.

One man at the scene disagreed. He was an arson investigator from the neighbouring town of Glendale, a rising star in his field, and he called the investigation sloppy. This fire was set, he insisted. Somewhere out there was an arsonist.

He knew, because he had set it himself.

John Orr spent the next seven years posing as two different people. By day he was one of California’s most celebrated fire investigators, a man with supernatural instincts. He could walk into charred rubble and find the point of origin, the incendiary device, the tell-tale signs his colleagues missed. His lectures were a hit at conferences. He wrote for fire journals. He taught other investigators his craft, including a maxim he liked to repeat.

The bug is in the crowd.

By night, he was the arsonist. Orr set close to two thousand fires across Southern California. Some of them broke out, with remarkable convenience, near the very conferences where arson investigators had gathered. He was finally caught in 1991. Ironically undone in part by an unpublished novel he had written about a firefighter who secretly sets fires.

The FBI called him the most prolific serial arsonist of the twentieth century.

The system that made John Orr was not malfunctioning. It was working exactly as designed. It rewarded the man who found fires. Almost nobody sets literal fires. But nearly every organisation runs a mild, legal, entirely unconscious version of the same selection.

Think about who gets celebrated at work. The manager who parachutes into a collapsing project and drags it over the line. The executive who takes a division in crisis and turns it around. These are the stories organisations tell about themselves. Something was on fire, and someone put it out.

Think about the person whose projects never catch fire. The engineer whose code does not break at 2am. The manager whose launches are so well-prepared that they are, frankly, boring. What story do we tell about them?

Nothing happened. And nothing is what the best preventive work produces, week after week, on purpose.

What the spotlight cannot see

Paolo Maldini, one of the greatest football defenders ever, is remembered for a line that puts the principle better than any management book. If he had to make a tackle, he had already made a mistake.

The tackle makes the highlight reel. The positioning that makes the tackle unnecessary is invisible. There is no camera angle for the pass that was never attempted because the defender was already standing where it would have gone, and made the passer change his mind.

Prevention’s output is an absence. Absences leave no evidence. Counterfactuals do not photograph. You cannot put “nothing happened” on a CV, and no appraisal form has a column for fires that were never lit. The spotlight is not biased against the best people in the building through malice or oversight. It had no way of noticing where the fires came from.

Between the years 138 and 161, the Roman Empire was ruled by a man under whom almost nothing went wrong. No wars of conquest. No purges. He inherited a full treasury and left it fuller. When provinces suffered earthquakes, relief arrived. The machinery of the largest state on earth simply worked, for twenty-three years, which remains one of the longest reigns Rome ever saw.

His name was Antoninus Pius, and his reward for all of it is that you have probably never heard of him. He sits wedged between Hadrian, the restless builder, and Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher. The sources on his reign are famously thin. Historians complain about it. There was, they note with some frustration, nothing to write down.

The best surviving portrait of him comes from Marcus Aurelius himself, who opens the Meditations by listing what he learned from the adoptive father he served beside for two decades. Antoninus was a man of even temper, indifferent to flattery, and listened to better counsel.

It is a description of the perfect leader, written by the most powerful man alive about his predecessor. Antoninus is not remembered despite being exceptional. He is forgotten because of the precise way in which he was exceptional. Twenty-three years of fires that never started, and not one of them left a mark.

The modern professional world has built an entire class of Antoninus figures, and it treats them about as well as history did.

Consider the technology chief at a company whose business is not technology. Their systems are plain. Some of them are old. The stack would bore a Silicon Valley engineer to tears. The orders flow, payroll lands, the warehouse scanners work on Monday morning. For this, the person responsible is quietly regarded as a lesser talent.

The engineering world has a counter-tradition that says the opposite: choosing boring technology. The premise is that every unproven tool is a fire waiting to happen. It even has a name for the opposite tendency, résumé-driven development. The practice of building with whatever is newest and most complex, because complexity is legible on a CV in a way reliability never is.

An engineer who builds needless complexity is creating, in a small and entirely legal way, the conditions for future rescues. It is not arson. Nobody intends it. But it is the same idea John Orr pursued. The system pays for extinguishing, so the system quietly fills up with things that will need extinguishing.

The scholars Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel have spent years documenting the wider version of this phenomenon. Their findings show the language of innovation soaks up prestige and money while the maintainers stay underpaid and invisible because their success is that nothing remarkable happens.

Which brings us back to John Orr.

Orr understood the system too well. So he manufactured the only thing it knew how to reward. The bug was in the crowd, and the crowd had built a world in which the bug was the best-adapted creature.

Most of us are not bugs, but we are all part of the crowd. Applauding the 2am rescue, glazing over at the uneventful status report, promoting the turnaround artist over the person whose division never needed turning around. We own the spotlight. We decide, every day, where it points.

History saw Antoninus clearly in the end, centuries too late to thank him. I am not sure current systems allow us to do better than history.

Here is a question for you.

Who is the Antoninus in your world?

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Subscriber Spotlight

ST on ’s article

“Bang on ! The tribe continues to grow in office and outside it. And they take away a lot from others in their lives. Learn to spot them and get back at them.”

What we’re reading at Wyzr

The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
Taleb makes similar arguments about human blindness to what goes unseen. The book itself talks about much more, but his observations inspired much of this edition.

Until next time.

Best,
Amlan

On the morning of April 21, 1961, John F. Kennedy walked into a press conference with nowhere to hide.

Four days earlier, a CIA-trained force of approximately 1,400 Cuban exiles had landed at the Bay of Pigs on Cuba’s southern coast. The plan, inherited from the Eisenhower administration and approved by Kennedy three months into his presidency, was to trigger a popular uprising against Fidel Castro and topple his government. Castro’s forces were waiting. The invasion collapsed within seventy-two hours. Over a hundred men were killed. More than a thousand were captured. The United States had planned, funded, and orchestrated one of the most humiliating foreign policy failures in the country’s history, and the entire world knew it.

The press corps was assembled. The questions came fast. Kennedy deflected most of them, saying he would not discuss the details of an ongoing situation. But on the central question, he did not deflect at all.

“There’s an old saying,” he told the room, “that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan. What matters is only one fact. I am the responsible officer of the government.”

Kennedy had expected public humiliation. Instead, his approval rating went from 78 percent to 83 percent.

Kennedy was baffled. He had just presided over a catastrophic military and diplomatic failure. Khrushchev had concluded he was weak. Allied governments privately questioned his competence. And the American public had rewarded him with the highest approval rating of his presidency.

He later quipped, with characteristic dry wit:

He was, without knowing it, demonstrating a psychological phenomenon that would not be formally named for another five years.

In 1966, a psychologist named Elliot Aronson ran an experiment at the University of Minnesota. Forty-eight male students were asked to listen to tape recordings of a candidate auditioning for a college quiz bowl programme. The recordings had been staged. The actor playing the candidate was working from a script.

In one version, the candidate was exceptional. He answered ninety-two percent of the difficult questions correctly, described a stellar academic record, mentioned his track team. In another version, he was entirely average. He answered thirty percent of the questions correctly, described mediocre grades and forgettable extracurriculars.

In some versions of each tape, a sound was added at the end. The clatter of a chair. Then a voice: “Oh my goodness, I’ve spilled coffee all over my new suit.”

The students were then asked to rate how much they liked each candidate.

The results were counterintuitive enough that they have been discussed ever since. The exceptional candidate who spilled the coffee was rated more likeable than the exceptional candidate who did not. The average candidate who spilled the coffee was rated less likeable than the average candidate who did not. The same action had produced opposite effects depending entirely on who had performed it.

Aronson’s explanation was precise:

The mistake does not lower the exceptional person. It brings them down to a level where they can be liked, not merely admired. The gap between perfection and the observer collapses. Something warmer becomes possible. Aronson called the effect the Pratfall, from the theatrical term for a staged fall.

This is not an accident of Kennedy’s particular charisma, nor was it unique to 1961. The pattern has been documented across half a century of research and has surfaced in contexts ranging from corporate crises to election campaigns to product launches. When Apple's Maps application debuted in 2012 with catastrophic inaccuracies, shrinking Chicago's Sears Tower into a neighboring building, erasing Paddington Station from London, and conjuring a non-existent airport in Dublin, CEO Tim Cook published an open letter saying the company had "fallen short" and was "extremely sorry." Apple’s reputation recovered faster and more completely than most analysts had predicted. When Avis, the car rental company, had been losing money for thirteen consecutive years to Hertz, they built a campaign around the admission: “When you’re only number two, you try harder.” The campaign transformed a loss of three million dollars into a profit of more than a million within a year. The confession of inadequacy had done what the performance of competence had failed to do.

There is a caveat that Aronson himself was careful to establish, and it is worth naming because it is the part most people prefer to forget. The effect only operates when a foundation of competence has already been laid. The average candidate who spilled the coffee became less likeable, not more. An unknown founder who tweets about their startup’s failures is not practising the Pratfall Effect. They are simply describing a failing startup. The blunder works only as a contrast to something the observer already trusts and admires. Without that foundation, vulnerability is not charming. It is merely evidence of incompetence.

This makes the effect less useful as a tactic and more interesting as an observation about how human beings process perfection. We are not, it turns out, as impressed by the flawless as we think we are. Or rather: we are impressed, but we keep our distance. Admiration and liking are not the same thing, and they are not produced by the same inputs. The person who answers every question correctly earns our respect. The person who answers every question correctly and then spills their coffee earns our affection. The second is harder to manufacture but far more durable.

Which raises a question that is quite relevant for all of us trying to display our perfect lives on social media.

If you scroll through LinkedIn on any given morning, you will find it populated by a specific kind of content. The achievement announced with performative humility. The lesson learned from failure that is actually a thinly disguised brag. The carefully curated origin story, sanded down to its most inspiring edges, all the randomness and mediocrity removed. The platform has developed a grammar of performed vulnerability that manages, somehow, to feel less human than outright boasting. Everyone has learned to say “I failed and learned” in a way that makes clear they would prefer you focus on the implied success.

What almost nobody posts is the actual failure. The product that collapsed. The hire that destroyed a team. The quarter that cannot be explained away. The thing that happened, without a lesson attached, that was simply bad.

Kennedy did not announce a lesson. He did not frame the Bay of Pigs as a growth experience. He did not explain what the disaster had taught him about leadership. He said, in effect: this was my fault, and I have no more to add. The simplicity of it was the point. The absence of the lesson was what made it land.

Aronson’s experiment was conducted on tape recordings, with strangers, in controlled conditions. The real world is messier, and the effect is not guaranteed. A mistake that strikes at the core of what a person or institution is trusted to do does not produce the Pratfall Effect. It produces ruin. The surgeon who drops the scalpel on the operating table does not become more endearing. The accountant who loses the money does not become more relatable. The blunder must be peripheral, clumsy, human, outside the domain of claimed expertise. The coffee spill works because it has nothing to do with knowing the answers.

Kennedy’s mistake was not peripheral. He had authorised a military invasion that failed. In most political contexts, that would have been fatal. What saved him, and what turned the moment from catastrophe into the highest approval rating of his term, was the quality of the response: unadorned, unqualified, with no lesson attached, and no blame distributed. Defeat was an orphan. He claimed it.

There is something worth thinking about in the gap between what we perform and what we reveal. We are trained, in most professional and public contexts, to perform competence, to sand down the rough edges, to present the version of ourselves that is always learning and always improving and always moving toward something better. The Pratfall Effect suggests that this performance, while it earns respect, creates distance. The thing that closes the distance is the unplanned, unvarnished, unrehearsed moment, the coffee spill, the honest admission, the absence of spin.

Kennedy quipped that the worse he did, the more popular he got. He was wrong, strictly speaking. The worse he did and the more honestly he admitted it, the more popular he got. The honesty was doing the work, not the failure.

Most people have the failure. Fewer have the honesty about it. And fewer still have the discipline to leave out the lesson.

So, here’s a question for you:

Think of the last time something went genuinely wrong in your professional life. Did you admit it plainly, without a lesson attached? Or did you wait until you could frame it as growth?

What we’re reading this week

Yuganta: The End of an Epoch by Irawati Karve. Written originally in Marathi in 1967 by one of India’s finest anthropologists, this slim book does to the Mahabharata what the Pratfall Effect suggests we should do to the people we admire most: it strips the superhuman aura away and looks at what is actually there. Karve treats Bhishma, Karna, Kunti, Draupadi, and Duryodhana not as mythological archetypes but as people with comprehensible motives, recognizable failures, and consequences they did not always deserve. The usual veneration is gone. None of them emerge wholly good or wholly bad, and that, it turns out, is what makes the Mahabharata the more extraordinary work. A book about imperfection that proves Aronson’s point across three thousand years.

When Covid hit in 2020, it was unprecedented for nearly everyone. Overnight, entire workforces were sent home, and neither bosses nor employees had any playbook to manage it. There was no established etiquette for remote work, no clear understanding of what “productive” was supposed to look like. Everyone was improvising.

And like most unfamiliar situations, it revealed things about people that a normal office routine had kept hidden.

My boss at the time was particularly concerned about productivity taking a hit now that his employees were working from home. So he made us install a “productivity-tracking” tool on our laptops. It gave a daily productivity score by measuring activity on your system — how often you typed, how often you moved your cursor. Basically, more activity meant more productivity. A flawed inference, obviously.

But my boss assured us that this was just an experiment and he wouldn’t read too much into it.

My job didn’t involve much typing. It involved thinking, reading, researching, occasionally being on calls, most of them taken on my phone. So my “productivity” score hovered around a disappointing 11-12%. But I wasn’t worried because I believed my boss. I was stupid.

Every day the business didn’t move — it was early days of Covid and nothing much moved anyway — my boss made sure to bring up my awful productivity score as proof of my laziness. Eventually, just to keep his mouth shut, I started aimlessly moving my finger across the mousepad for hours, thereby improving my productivity in his eyes.

Not surprisingly, I left the company soon after and burnt that bridge to good effect. But looking back, this wasn’t about productivity at all. A study published recently gave me more clarity about it.

Who resists hybrid work?

Some roles and jobs just can’t be done remotely, and necessitate daily in-person coordination. So I will keep those exceptions aside. But we can agree that most white-collar roles aren’t like that, even in the most trying times.

Earlier this year, three researchers — Marissa Shandell, Courtney Elliott, and Wharton psychologist Adam Grant — published the results of a six-year study into why certain leaders resist remote work so fiercely, even when nothing about their team’s output justifies it.

They tested for the usual suspects — industry, company size; genuine, evidence-backed belief in the productivity gains of in-person work. None of these held up particularly well. The one trait that consistently predicted a leader’s opposition to remote and hybrid work was, interestingly, narcissism.

In one experiment, the researchers asked a group of CEOs to spend a few minutes reflecting on the role a bold, assertive ego had played in the success of Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison. This was just an attempt to prime them with the idea of ego and audacity in leadership. The CEOs who did this came out significantly more opposed to remote work than those who hadn’t been prompted at all. A small nudge to think a little more highly of their self-importance, and their stance on where you should sit five days a week changed with it.

This study, by the way, was aptly titled Worship Me at the Office Altar.

How narcissism gets rewarded, repeatedly

The office mandate is just one visible symptom of something much older. In narcissists, the trait is present even in the early days of their career, and it finds fuel at different stages in different forms.

Think of the job interview. Most of it runs on snap judgement and mental shortcuts, and few shortcuts are as seductive as “this person sounds sure of themselves.” Narcissists can appear notoriously confident. That’s how many of them hack their way into good organizations.

The pattern then continues. Promotions don’t reward the person who did the most work as much as they reward the one who was seen doing it — the loudest voice in the room, the one who claims a shared win as an individual one, the one who looks indispensable rather than becomes it. Bosses making these decisions are running the same mental shortcut the interview panel did, just with higher stakes. Our propensity to mistake confidence for competence allows such narcissists to thrive.

But what’s the effect on the people below? Juniors absorb the credit-stealing, the absence of mentorship, the erosion of morale, mostly without protest, because Indian workplace culture still runs on a fairly servile respect for hierarchy. You don’t question the boss. You adjust. So the behaviour that should have been caught early never is, and the person keeps rising, unchecked, because the people suffering that problem are the least empowered to call it out.

By the time this person is running a team of their own, remote work is a direct threat to everything that got them there. Their career was built on being seen. A screen strips that away. Which is why the resistance to hybrid work was never much about output or efficiency for them. It’s the same pattern that got them promoted in the first place, showing up in another form.

How to spot a narcissist

If you’re looking to spot this early, before it starts costing you, three signals are worth watching for.

1. Credit asymmetry. Watch how they handle a win versus a mistake. A narcissistic boss is quick to absorb credit for work the team did, often reframing “we” as “I” somewhere between the team meeting and the leadership review. But when something goes wrong, that same person is just as quick to point downward, finding a junior to blame rather than owning the call themselves. A secure person does the opposite.

2. Allergy to being questioned. Everyone dislikes criticism to some degree. But with narcissists, you get a disproportionate reaction to even mild, well-meaning pushback. Healthy leaders treat questions as information, but the narcissistic leader treats them as a threat to be neutralized. It shows up in the smallest, most ordinary moments of disagreement.

3. Control dressed up as concern. This is the hardest one to catch, because it usually comes wrapped in the language of care. Excessive check-ins, disproportionate tracking. The framing is always diligence, or wanting the best for the team, or “just making sure everyone’s aligned.” My ex-boss used to say, “I’m just trying to mentor you!” The real function is surveillance, because this person needs to see and assert compliance to feel secure.

Looking back, my old boss had all three. I just happened to learn this the hard way.

At work, if you spot any of these signs consistently, don’t wait around for further proof. These patterns don’t reverse on their own. Rather, they get better funded with every promotion. So make your move while it’s still a choice, and not an escape.

Have you ever had to “perform” work rather than actually do it, just to satisfy a boss who needed to see busyness rather than results? What did that experience teach you?

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What we’re reading at Wyzr

Originals by Adam Grant. Fitting, given this week’s subject. Grant explores how people champion new ideas and challenge the status quo, and why the most confident voice in the room is so often mistaken for the most original one.

Until next time.

Best,
Yashraj

Like most movie-buff millennials, I count Christopher Nolan among the great filmmakers of our time. The Odyssey sold out IMAX screenings a full year before it released, opened to enormous numbers, and a 2,700-year-old poem is again one of the loudest things in popular culture. But this edition isn’t about Nolan. It’s about another piece of Homer news you likely missed.

In the linen wrappings of a 1,600-year-old Egyptian mummy, archaeologists recently found a page of Homer.

A fragment of the Iliad had been folded, sealed, and worked into the wrappings, the first literary text ever found inside a mummy. Nobody yet knows whether it was placed there as a charm or simply reached for as paper. The mummy came from Oxyrhynchus, whose rubbish heaps and mummy casings have yielded much of the lost Greek literature ever recovered — texts that survived because workshops pulped discarded papyri into packing material.

In late-antique Egypt, Homer was not yet sacred. Copies were plentiful, the reverence we now attach to the text didn’t exist, and a workshop with a body to prepare reached for the cheapest suitable paper on the shelf. The canon we now keep behind glass was, to them, Tuesday’s packing material, not unlike the newspaper wrappings we get peanuts and vada pav in.

Most of what survives from the ancient world survived by accident, because it lined a coffin, or was too dull to be worth scraping clean and writing over. Value, it turns out, is not a property of the thing. It is a verdict passed by an era, and revised by the next one.

I’ve been thinking about that mummy while reading the venture funding numbers for the first half of 2026. Because that is exactly what venture capital is: an era deciding, in real time and with money, what counts.

The Verdict of 2026

By Crunchbase’s count, startups worldwide raised a record $510 billion in the first six months of 2026, more than all of 2025, packed into half the time. CB Insights, counting slightly differently, put it at $498 billion, up 139% on the year. The trackers disagree at the edges, as they always do, but the headline is the same: more venture money moved in this half-year than in any before it.

Sounds like a rising tide. Founders everywhere flush with capital.

Actually the number of deals fell. By CB Insights’ tally, global deal count dropped more than 22%, its lowest in a decade. Record money, fewer deals.

Two companies, OpenAI and Anthropic, took $217 billion between them. Forty-three percent of all startup funding on earth, to two firms. In the United States, PitchBook found that 86 cents of every venture dollar went to AI. Not to technology broadly. To AI specifically.

A record amount of capital, chasing a record-narrow idea of what deserves it. The tide didn’t lift all the boats. It drained the harbor and poured everything into three or four ships.

The era has passed its verdict. And every verdict has a password.

In the story of Ali Baba, a fortune sits behind a stone door that opens for exactly one phrase. Open sesame. Say it and the rocks part. Say anything else, however true, clever, or earned — and you stand waiting while the door stays shut. The door only listens for the word.

If you are building something that isn’t AI, you already know what this feels like from the inside. The verdict reaches you as a question. You are in the room, you have the numbers you were told to bring — real revenue, a cohort that stays, a moat earned the slow way — and somewhere in the first few minutes a partner asks the only question that now decides the meeting.

The honest answer, for a great many good businesses, is: not really, not much, not yet. And that answer, in 2026, is the wrong one.

Depending on whose data you trust, a seed-stage startup that can honestly call itself AI raises at something like 40% above an otherwise comparable company that can’t. By some readings of the broader market, the premium runs to several times that. The exact multiple is contested and depends on who is doing the counting; the direction is not, and it matches what every founder reports feeling in the room.

In the first quarter, on Crunchbase’s quarterly data, non-AI companies took home about 19% of all the money raised, roughly $58 billion out of nearly $300 billion. The other four-fifths went to the password holders. For everyone standing outside the word there are down rounds, extended raises, and venture debt: the financing you accept when equity has stopped believing your story but hasn’t yet said so to your face.

So founders adapt, the way founders always do. They find the AI in what they were already doing. The feature becomes the headline. The roadmap grows a model it may not strictly need, and the deck grows a slide it cannot afford to omit. Some of this is genuine and overdue, there are real businesses that were one model call away from being better. Some of it is a costume, stitched in the week before the raise. The trouble is that from the outside the two are hard to tell apart. The incentive, in any case, is unambiguous: the absence of an AI story now reads not as focus but as risk. You are no longer asked to prove that you are good. You are asked to prove that you hold this year’s word.

The issue is when capital rewards a password, it stops funding the things that don’t hold it, because they are illegible to the moment. The climate company, the unglamorous logistics business, the patient biotech that needs a decade: none of them defeated in argument, just not the word. The market isn’t choosing against them. It has simply stopped being able to see them.

Why Eras Misprice

Markets are supposed to be the cure for this. Many independent judgments, pointing in many directions, should cancel out any single fashion. Concentration breaks that mechanism. When 86% of the money holds the same thesis, you no longer have thousands of bets hedging one another. You have one bet, made thousands of times. A market that agrees with itself this completely is not disciplined. It is blind in the same direction, all at once.

It is worse than simple agreement, because for a while the agreement is self-fulfilling. Capital flows to AI, which lifts AI valuations, which confirms that AI was where the capital belonged, which pulls in more. The signal and the thing it is supposed to measure begin to feed each other. From inside that loop, record demand and record delusion draw the same chart.

This is exactly why the honest arguments on both sides never quite resolve. The optimists have a real case. Today’s AI leaders trade at roughly 35 times forward earnings, where the internet darlings of 1999 traded closer to 60, and the largest of them throw off something on the order of $200 billion in cash a year even after their staggering capital spending — a far sturdier floor than the dot-coms ever stood on. The skeptics have a real case too. The Bank for International Settlements used part of its 2026 annual report to warn about the circular financing knitting these firms together — the chipmaker taking a stake in the startup that buys its chips — and the arithmetic underneath is genuinely strange: the money the giants plan to spend building AI infrastructure this year outruns the revenue the AI software actually earns many times over, by some counts close to 20:1.

Both sides are looking at the same numbers. Inside a loop this tight, the bull chart and the bear chart are the same chart held at different angles, and you cannot tell which you are looking at until the loop is stressed.

We have watched this before, and the tell is always a password. In the early 1960s the magic suffix was “-tronics.” Investors were hungry for anything that sounded like the electronic future, so companies obliged: firms with names like Astron, Vulcatron, and Circuitronics drew feverish multiples, and more than a few of them had nothing to do with electronics at all. The suffix did the work. The boom ended, as these things do, in the crash of 1962, with the “growth” names falling hardest. Thirty-seven years later the suffix was “.com,” and simply appending it to a company’s name measurably lifted its stock, sometimes for businesses that did nothing online whatever. Each password felt, in its moment, less like a fashion than like a fact about the future.

And each era was partly right, which is the genuinely uncomfortable part. Electronics did reshape the century; the internet did change everything; AI is not “.com” with the numbers filed off, and a great deal of this money will look prescient. The password always points at something true. It just also points away from everything true that doesn’t happen to share its name.

Hindsight Cuts Both Ways

The embalmers in that Egyptian workshop were craftsmen, working carefully, doing sensible things with materials their moment had priced cheap. Their only mistake, if it can even be called a mistake, was to live before the verdict changed. They could not have known that the packing paper in their hands would one day sit under museum glass, or sell out cinemas a year in advance, or that some would find the fact of a body wrapped in Homer faintly barbaric.

Every era mistakes its password for permanence. That is the one thing eras reliably get wrong.

None of which makes payroll. The squeeze is not softened by the knowledge that it is temporary; the companies starved this year will not be revived by a revaluation in the next. Being early and being wrong feel identical from the inside, often for a long time. This is not consolation. It is only perspective.

But it changes the question worth asking. The interesting question about this half-year is not whether AI deserves its money. The question is the one the mummy asks of every era that was ever sure of itself.

Every age wraps some part of its future in cloth, mistaking what will matter for mere material, because the word for it hasn’t been coined yet.

So: what is 2026 embalming?

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Subscriber Spotlight

Shyju Varkey on Utkarsh’s piece last week,

“Loved reading this!”

What we are watching at Wyzr

Insomnia (2002). Nolan's third and a very underrated film. A remake of the 1997 Norwegian film of the same name, it has Al Pacino opposite Robin Williams, cast wonderfully against type.

Until next time.

Best,
Amlan

On the night of September 7, 1940, the German Luftwaffe turned toward London and did not turn away for 57 consecutive nights! The bombers came after dark, when the city was blacked out and the streets were empty. By morning, whole neighborhoods had been reduced to rubble, and Londoners were pulling their dead from the wreckage of houses that had stood for generations.

What the British government expected was psychological collapse, and psychiatrists had actively prepared for it. 36,000 hospital beds had been cleared across the country in anticipation of what the medical establishment called “bomb neurosis” - a mass breakdown of civilian morale under sustained aerial bombardment. The planners had studied what happened when cities fell under siege and were not optimistic.

What they found instead, after five months of bombing, was that only five percent of air-raid admissions were for nervous shock, and most of those recovered within two weeks. A psychiatrist at Guy’s Hospital named Felix Brown observed that psychoneuroses induced by air raids in patients with no prior history were, in his word, comparatively rare. There are those who argue the trauma was real but hidden, that stigma kept the broken indoors and out of the statistics. However, what is not disputed is what people saw with their own eyes in the shelters, and that the expected collapse never came.

What came instead was something stranger. In the Underground stations where Londoners sheltered through the night, strangers shared food and blankets, kept each other’s children, and sang to one another in the dark. A duchess and a dockworker sat on the same bench, equal in their fear and their relief at being alive. The social distances that structured every other hour of English life, the careful calibrations of class and accent and address, dissolved in the shelter of a tube station at two in the morning. People who would never have spoken to each other above ground spoke to each other below it, and meant it.

The British called this the Blitz spirit, and then immediately worried that they were mythologising it. Historians have pointed out, correctly, that the misery was not equally shared. Working-class neighborhoods bore the worst of the bombing. The poorest areas had the fewest shelters. Within the first six weeks, a quarter of a million people were left temporarily homeless, and they were not duchesses. Communal warmth did not undo structural inequality.

And yet something real happened in those shelters. Something that the psychiatrists, trained to look for pathology, had not thought to look for and almost missed.

The British anthropologist Victor Turner spent most of his career studying rituals in small African societies, trying to understand what happened to people during the transitional phases of rites of passage, the moment between what a person had been and what they were becoming. He called this in-between state the liminal phase, from the Latin word for threshold. And he observed that in this threshold state, something reliable and remarkable occurred. The normal structures of society, the hierarchies of rank and status and wealth and class, temporarily ceased to operate. In their place, something else emerged: a direct, unmediated connection between people that he named communitas. Not community in the ordinary sense of a group sharing a postcode or a profession. Something more foundational than that. A recognition, momentary and egalitarian, of shared humanity stripped of its usual decorations.

Turner introduced the concept in 1969, in a book called The Ritual Process. He was writing about initiation rites among the Ndembu people of Zambia. But he understood almost immediately that he had named something universal. He spent the rest of his career finding it in pilgrimages, in countercultural movements, in the margins and thresholds of industrial societies wherever ordinary structure had been temporarily suspended.

The question was what else could unlock it.

The answer, documented across a century of disaster research, is that catastrophe can. Not always, and not equally for everyone, and never permanently. But reliably enough that sociologists have a term for it: disaster communitas.

In the aftermath of the 1995 Kobe earthquake, researchers documented extraordinary mutual aid among people who had been strangers hours before. After Hurricane Katrina, an armada of volunteer boats called the Cajun Navy descended on waterlogged neighborhoods without being asked. Rebecca Solnit, in her landmark study of disaster behavior, observed that in the wake of an earthquake, a bombing, or a major storm, most people are altruistic, urgently engaged in caring for themselves and those around them, strangers and neighbors as well as friends and loved ones. The joy she found in these accounts was not the joy of the disaster itself but the joy of discovering, under pressure, a quality of human connection that ordinary life almost never produces.

This past July, at Jantar Mantar in Delhi, strangers slept under the same tarpaulins, shared food with police officers who committed atrocities against them, and used each other’s first names before they knew each other’s surnames. The threshold closed when the protest dispersed, and everyone returned to being strangers in a city of twenty million.

I witnessed a much smaller version of this on Saturday night, on a road in Jaipur.

A speeding SUV (zero points for guessing which one) jumped a red light at full speed and struck a car on the crossroads. The car toppled. The SUV reversed and disappeared into the dark before most of us had registered what had happened. A few of us had noted the number plate and the make.

What happened next took perhaps five seconds to begin. People who had been sealed inside their own cars, behind glass, behind the particular privacy that a vehicle creates, were outside and moving toward the overturned car before any of them had decided to do so. Nobody organised it. Nobody was asked. A man in a suit jacket was pulling at the door alongside a delivery rider who had been passing on a motorcycle. Someone called for a jack. I had already dialed the police. The driver, when we got to him, was shaken but uninjured. He sat on the pavement and a man he had never met, and mostly never would again, held his hand and said nothing, which was the right thing.

We stayed until the police arrived. When they did, something shifted. The structure returned. There were questions to answer, statements to give, forms of address to observe. One by one, the people who had been a unit for twenty minutes became individuals again, exchanged brief nods, and left. I drove home and did not know the names of any of them. I still do not.

Turner would have recognised it immediately. The liminal threshold opened with the sound of the collision and closed with the arrival of the police. In between, for twenty minutes on a Jaipur road at 11pm, the normal calibrations dissolved and something else operated in their place. It was not heroism or altruism in any deliberate sense. It was closer to reflex, as if the usual architecture of social distance requires active maintenance, and the shock of the accident had simply interrupted that maintenance long enough for something more basic to surface.

The honest counter-pressure to Turner’s concept is that communitas does not erase the structures it temporarily suspends. The Blitz spirit was real, and the East End still bore the worst of the bombing. The disaster volunteers are real, and the communities with the least prior social capital recover the slowest after the disaster ends. Communitas is not justice. It is not a solution. It is a glimpse, and then the ordinary world reassembles itself around the glimpse and leaves it with no permanence.

Which is perhaps what makes it feel the way it feels. The people in the Tube shelter at two in the morning were not experiencing a different version of their ordinary social world. They were experiencing the temporary absence of it, and in that absence, something that had been there all along became briefly visible. The duchess and the dockworker were always capable of sitting on the same bench. The structure had simply not required them to know it.

Turner’s deepest question was not what produces communitas. It was why we require catastrophe to produce it. Why the threshold has to be opened by disaster or darkness or shared emergency, rather than by ordinary human will. He did not answer this, perhaps because the answer is uncomfortable.

The twenty minutes on that Jaipur road were not extraordinary because the people involved were extraordinary. They were ordinary people who briefly stopped performing the ordinary maintenance of ordinary social distance, because something had interrupted it. That is all communitas ever requires. The threshold is always there. Most of the time, nothing opens it. Most of the time, we don’t need it to.

But the capacity is there. Turner spent a career proving it. On Saturday afternoon, a resignation tweet proved it. On Saturday night, a speeding SUV proved it again.

Subscriber Spotlight

Hetal on Utkarsh’s piece last week: I think that the cause is right. But the movement really needs solidarity,not just in numbers, but in ideology, especially if it wants to become a revolution and bring about real change…..

Wisdom is what Gen Z needed and still needs for the execution, especially if this is to be taken seriously and to build something meaningful for the future....

They have a lot of courage and a lot for us to learn from!!

What we’re watching this week

Student Protests on Instagram.

No thoughtful recommendation of a book, film, or documentary this week. I did watch Odysseus recently, and it speaks to everything this edition is about. But this week belongs to the students.

Until next week.

Best,

Utkarsh

On the morning of May 15, 2026, the Chief Justice of India was presiding over a Supreme Court bench when he said something that would, within 24 hours, escape the courtroom entirely and take on a life nobody planned for. The case before him was a petition about the designation of senior advocates, a procedural matter about professional credentials, not the kind of hearing that makes history. But in the middle of his remarks, Chief Justice Surya Kant reached for a metaphor. There are youngsters, he said, who do not get employment and have no place in their profession. Some of them become media, some become RTI activists, some become other activists, and they start attacking everyone. “There are youngsters,” he said, “like cockroaches.”

He later issued a clarification. His remarks, he explained, were directed specifically at people who had entered professions using fake and bogus degrees, not at unemployed youth in general. “It is totally baseless,” he said, “to suggest that I criticized the youth of our nation.”

The clarification was issued the following morning. By then, it was already too late.

The night of May 15, a political communications strategist named Abhijeet Dipke announced the launch of a new party on X. The Cockroach Janta Party, he wrote, was a platform for all the cockroaches out there. Eligibility criteria: unemployed, lazy, chronically online, and able to rant professionally. The slogan was “Voice of the Lazy and Unemployed.” Within days it had amassed more than 21 million Instagram followers. The insult had become an identity before the apology could catch up with it. What had started as a joke, a sardonic one-line response to an unguarded moment in a courtroom, had, with extraordinary speed, turned into something else entirely.

This is the story of what happens when the line between a performance and reality dissolves. It has a name.

In August 2005, a user named Nathan Poe was arguing about creationism on an internet forum when he posted an observation in passing:

What a beautifully penned line!

After insane popularity, it eventually got called as Poe’s Law. The idea was simple: when a position is extreme enough, any parody of it becomes indistinguishable from the real thing. You cannot exaggerate what has already exceeded exaggeration.

Since then, the law has been generalized far beyond its original context. It applies to any situation in which sincerity and performance become impossible to tell apart, where the winking smiley has been lost, and the reader has no way of knowing what is meant and what is merely said. But the more interesting, and more unsettling, version of Poe’s Law is not about parody being mistaken for reality. It is about reality becoming indistinguishable from parody. And then, past that, about what happens when a performance, begun as pure joke, slowly becomes sincere.

This version has a lighter illustration before it reaches the tragic one.

In September 2020, Indian satirical website The Fauxy published an article claiming Facebook had launched a new feature: users could now mark themselves safe from Shiv Sena goons, in the manner of the platform’s disaster-response safety check. The article was clearly labeled as satire. The Fauxy’s own account carries an explicit description of itself as a fictitious news source intended for sarcasm and satire. Nevertheless, Kangana Ranaut, then one of India’s most prominent public figures, quote-tweeted the article and thanked Facebook for their considerate action. “Free speech must be protected in a democracy,” she wrote. “People need to be protected from Sonia Sena goons much like COVID-19 virus. Well done.”

She had not read the label. She did not need to. The content fit so precisely inside what she already believed that the question of whether it was real simply did not arise. Confirmation bias had closed the gap between satire and sincerity. The winking smiley was invisible because she was not looking for it. This is Poe’s Law in its benign register: a public figure, embarrassed, the satirists amused, and nothing of consequence at stake beyond a deleted tweet and some pointed laughter.

But there is a darker version, and it appeared not on a satirical website but in a German film.

In 2015, director David Wnendt released Er ist wieder da, Look Who’s Back, an adaptation of Timur Vermes’ satirical novel. Oliver Masucci plays Adolf Hitler, who wakes up in contemporary Berlin and is immediately assumed by everyone he encounters to be a method actor or a comedian who refuses to break character. The film is part scripted, part unscripted: Masucci, in full costume, walks through real German streets and talks to real people. What the filmmakers found, and what makes the film deeply uncomfortable rather than merely funny, is that people agreed with him. One official, told by the crew that the camera was off, admitted on camera that he would vote for Hitler if he ran. People who believed they were laughing at a performance were, in fact, revealing what they genuinely thought. The joke was the permission. Under the cover of satire, the real slipped through.

Poe’s Law, in its full form, does not just describe parody being mistaken for sincerity. It describes how the collapse of that boundary can be used, consciously or not, as a kind of shield. Say the true thing under the guise of the joke. If it is accepted, lean into it. If it is rejected, retreat behind the wink that was always there. What begins as performance becomes, over time, a vehicle for something that was never entirely insincere.

Which brings us back to Jantar Mantar, on the morning of July 15, 2026.

Sonam Wangchuk, 59 years old, the engineer and activist whose life inspired a character in one of India’s most beloved films, has been on hunger strike for 21 days (and counting). He was lying inside a tent at the protest grounds (before being forcibly removed by authorities), following a public interest litigation has been filed in the Delhi High Court seeking urgent medical intervention. The demand is the resignation of the Education Minister over irregularities in the NEET examination, and sweeping reform of the examination system that determines the futures of millions of young Indians seeking entry to medical colleges and government jobs.

He is doing this under the banner of the Cockroach Janta Party.

The party that began as a one-line joke on the night of May 15. The party whose eligibility criteria included being lazy and chronically online. The party whose name was the punchline, whose existence was the performance, whose winking smiley was visible from a mile away.

That party now has a man dying in a hospital on its behalf.

This is where Poe’s Law arrives at its furthest edge. The Cockroach Janta Party did not deceive anyone. It announced itself as satire, wore the joke openly, invited people in on the premise that it was all absurdist performance. And then, somehow, without any single moment of transition, the performance became real. The satirical party became the vehicle for a genuine democratic demand. The laughing crowd became protesters sleeping under the open sky. And the man lying in the tent is not performing.

Wangchuk said recently that if not fasting, what was left? Riots in the streets were what he did not want. So this, the peaceful version, the non-violent version, was the way. He said democracy should be guided by empathy and compassion rather than rigidity. These are not the words of someone doing a bit.

There is something worth sitting with in the fact that a serious activist, a Ramon Magsaysay Award winner, a man who has spent his life in careful and patient democratic engagement, chose a satirical party as his vehicle. Perhaps it was strategic. But no matter what your personal opinion about Mr. Wangchuk is, perhaps in a media environment so saturated with noise that sincerity struggles to break through, the joke was the only container visible enough to hold the cause. Perhaps the Cockroach Janta Party’s 21 million followers were the amplification that a serious party could not have generated. In that reading, the satire was always in service of the sincerity, which was always there underneath.

Or perhaps that is giving it too much credit for planning. Perhaps what actually happened is simpler and stranger: that the joke created the space, and the cause moved into it, and at some point nobody could tell anymore where the performance had ended. Not the organisers. Not the followers. Certainly not the government, which has so far not responded, as if uncertain whether the correct response is to take it seriously or wait for the punchline.

Nathan Poe wrote his law in a throwaway post on a forum that most of his contemporaries had already forgotten. He could not have known that twenty years later, it would describe something happening at Jantar Mantar in real time: a satirical party, a man in failing health, a government standing at a distance trying to determine whether any of it is genuine.

It is all genuine. That is the point. It was always genuine, even when it was a joke. The winking smiley was never really there. Or if it was, it stopped meaning what it was supposed to mean.

The question that the Cockroach Janta Party leaves us with is not really about NEET, or about one hunger strike, or even about one government’s silence in the face of it. It is about something more foundational. In an age where satire and sincerity have become structurally indistinguishable, where a joke can amass twenty-one million followers before the serious version of the same argument can find an audience, where a man can lie in a tent under a banner that began as a punchline and nobody can say with certainty when the joke ended: how do we know what is real? And once we cannot tell, what happens to the things that genuinely are?

Subscriber Spotlight

Hetal on Yashraj’s piece last week

“This gave me a lot of food for thought, especially around the trade-off that comes with increasing documentation, clauses and legal safeguards. While they undoubtedly make transactions safer and more scalable, I feel that....psychologically they can sometimes diminish the human element of a deal- our willingness to trust, to take calculated risks, to build relationships beyond what's written on paper........”

What we’re watching this week

Ghalib in New Delhi, written and performed by Sayeed Alam, staged by Pierrot’s Troupe. India’s longest running comedy play, performed more than five hundred times since 1997, it imagines Mirza Ghalib reborn in contemporary Delhi, navigating a press conference where journalists care more about the snacks than the poet, a Punjabi landlady who thinks he is a ghost, and a city that has made him famous without particularly understanding him. The script changes with every production, absorbing whatever is happening in the country at the moment of performance, which means the play has been simultaneously satirical and sincere for nearly thirty years without anyone being entirely sure where one ends and the other begins. Ghalib himself did not always know what he was saying in jest and what he meant in earnest. Nor, watching this, will you. It’s absurdist humor at its finest.

Until next week.

Best,

Utkarsh

JRD Tata once made an unusual request to fellow industrialist GD Birla. He wanted Birla to hold a meaningful stake in Tata Steel. Just become a friendly, influential shareholder on the register, but do not get involved in any business decisions.

The proposition might seem bizarre today. It was like being asked to become a stakeholder without exercising the power that came with it. Why would anyone agree to it?

Yet, it made sense back then. Under British rule and even after that, Indian industrialists knew they needed to be united to ward off any external interference. Together, they had greater power to resist the British or any hostile foreign element. This request by JRD Tata was to safeguard Tata Steel from any potential future threats. Any attempt to interfere would run into an ally as powerful as the Tatas themselves.

Remarkably, there was no long-drawn paperwork to support this arrangement. Just the word of two men and a handshake to seal it.

In the spirit of the deal, Birla didn’t just agree to what Tata requested, he handed his entire voting rights to him and left them there for years.

As the story goes, there was a point when the Birlas actually held more of Tata Steel than the Tatas themselves. Yet, they never once used it to seek control or demand any say in the business. We’re talking about potentially thousands of crores worth of shares governed by nothing more than a word given between two men who trusted each other. And it held for decades. It was only in the 2000s, long after the two men were gone, that the Birlas sold down and moved on. By then, the arrangement had done what it was meant to do.

It might be the most high-stakes handshake in Indian business history.

I find it impossible to imagine anyone doing it today. A few weeks ago, I was asked to sign an NDA to obtain information that would, at best, bore a competitor, let alone endanger anyone. But somehow, these signed documents give a sense that something critical has been protected.

In most such cases, what’s being protected isn’t really the information but the self-importance of the one insisting on the NDA. It basically says, “I can send you to jail if you utter a word,” even when the word isn’t worth uttering anyway. And even if the intention may not be send someone to prison, it’s still an expression that they’re not fully trusted.

And as trust thins, the paperwork thickens. A recent academic study built a large corpus of publicly filed contracts and tracked how they’ve changed over the decades. Two things stood out: the contracts have grown longer over time, and they’ve also become harder to read. So we aren’t just signing more documents, we’re wrapping each transaction in a heavier cotton wool in anticipation of the other party letting us down.

So the instinct does check out that trust is falling. Except that when you look harder at why the handshake worked in the first place, you understand the utility of the contract better.

~

The thing about the handshake was that it worked because the world was small.

Tata and Birla didn’t trust each other because people were nobler back then. They trusted each other because they moved through the same few rooms. It was one small circle where everybody knew everybody else. If either man had broken his word, everyone who mattered would have known by the following week, and neither could have afforded that. Their handshake was backed by a reputation economy so tight that betrayal was like professional suicide. Trust like that is genuine, but it also doesn’t scale.

And most of us don’t live in the small circle anymore. The whole story of modern commerce is a person in Surat safely doing business with a stranger in Seattle. There is no reputation economy to hold them. The signed page is what lets you transact with someone you have no earthly reason to trust. When you look at it that way, it’s arguably one of the great inventions of the modern economy.

The economist Francis Fukuyama put it aptly. As societies grow and strangers must deal with strangers, the law steps in as a substitute for trust — lawyers codifying in elaborate detail the unwritten moral obligations that a close-knit community once enforced for free. The contract doesn’t kill the handshake so much as replace it and let it scale. Not surprisingly, in the US, formal institutions and legal contracting expanded most rapidly in the decades when waves of migration were dissolving the old face-to-face communities. The clause is what let a nation of strangers do business.

So the NDA isn’t only a symptom of decay. It’s also what democratised trust.

And yet.

None of this quite explains away the feeling. The contract may have built a magnificent system for transacting safely with people we don’t trust. What we seem to have lost is the expectation that we should be able to trust them at all.

Which brings me back to Tata and Birla.

The most telling part about that deal was not the deal itself, but the fact that it held for decades and transcended generations. The handshake outlived the hands. Even though times have changed, there’s still evidence that business can be done purely on trust. And in low-risk scenarios, simply trusting the other person is a far more efficient and cost-effective choice. If it works out, it also builds a closer bond between the two parties because they now know the other side can be trusted even without signed documents.

Contracts and handshakes both have their place. The trick is knowing which one to use when. JRD Tata and GD Birla could have signed something. They chose not to perhaps because it gave them something more.

The paperwork protects what you have, but the handshake is a bet on what you might build. Insist on the paperwork too often, and you may never find out what the good old word could have achieved.

A question for you:

What has your experience been with trusting someone’s word? At what point do you insist on getting things in writing? Is there a particular incident that caused you to adopt this approach?

Let us know in the comments below!

What we’re reading:

Same as Ever by Morgan Housel. The second of the three books by one of my favourite writers. Housel’s argument is that while the world changes constantly, human nature doesn’t. The same greed, fear, and longing for certainty show up in every era. I found it a useful companion to this piece: the instinct to trust may be timeless, but what we now demand before we’ll act on it clearly isn’t.

Until next time.

Best,
Yashraj

Imagine driving on a highway and the rain arrives faster than expected.

You reach for the wipers but find yourself clicking through options on a broad glass screen.

The wiper control lives three taps deep in a menu now. Behind a home screen and a sub-screen. To reach it, you have to look. Away from the road, for the second and a half it takes the water to blur the windscreen and the car ahead to be dangerously close.

For years, the inside of a car kept getting smoother. Knobs vanished. Switches vanished. The dashboard, once a small city of dedicated controls, resolved into a single luminous rectangle.

It felt like progress. It photographed beautifully. But from January 2026, in Europe, it began costing carmakers their safety stars.

The disguised storefront

A physical button never asks much of us. Cognitively, our hands learned where it was and then the button stopped needing our eyes. We could find the hazard lights in the dark, mid-conversation, without thinking. The knowledge lived in the fingers, not the attention.

A touchscreen works on a different arrangement. Every control, however familiar, has to be found again with the eyes. Every single time. Glass has no texture a hand can read.

So why did every carmaker move towards this?

Part of the answer is the obvious one. Screens look modern and are cheaper to build. In the showroom, where cars are actually sold, a screen does much more than a button ever would.

The other part is troubling.

A button is finished the moment it leaves the factory. It earns its money once. A screen keeps earning. It is a shop window mounted in the dashboard. It is the channel through which a carmaker can sell us products after we have already bought the car.

BMW famously charged a monthly subscription to switch on the heated seats already available in their cars. Intense consumer backlash forced them to drop the seat fee in September 2023. But the strategy itself remains. Carmakers still gate software-based capabilities—adaptive cruise control, high-beam assistance, parking assistance—behind digital paywalls.

None of that works without a screen.

And it is a storefront that watches. A screen is also a sensor. Glass that shows us things can just as easily record us: where we drive, how we drive, and in newer models, the cabin itself. All of it is sent quietly home. The same surface that sells to us after the sale is the one that studies us for the next one.

Which reframes the whole design. The interface was not optimised for our hands. It was optimised for the moment of buying, and for every moment of selling that comes after.

The people at the helm, the one choosing the layout, the one polishing the render, the one counting recurring revenue, are not fumbling for the wipers in the rain.

A button we press ten thousand times becomes invisible. We stop thinking about it. The action drops below conscious thought and our attention is freed for the thing that matters—the road, the conversation, the child in the back. A skill sinking out of awareness until the hand does it alone.

A screen never lets that happen. There is no fixed place to learn. The layout shifts with the next software update. There is no edge or click or resistance to tell our fingers they have arrived. The glass holds every driver permanently at the beginning.

In 2022, the Swedish magazine Vi Bilägare put this to the test. On an airfield, it timed drivers performing four ordinary tasks—nudging the climate up, changing the radio station, resetting the trip computer, dimming the instrument lights—while driving at 110 km/h. In a button-laden 2005 Volvo V70, it took ten seconds, barely three hundred metres of road. In a Tesla Model 3, which routes everything through a single screen, twenty-three and a half seconds. In the worst of them, the MG Marvel R, forty-four and a half seconds—more than four-fifths of a mile driven effectively blind, over four times the old Volvo’s distance.

Other studies confirmed the trend. Two seconds of eyes off the road is enough to double crash risk. Working a car’s nested screen menus slows a driver’s reaction times as much as being over the legal drink-drive limit.

From January 2026, no new car earns Euro NCAP’s coveted five-star safety rating unless five critical functions retain real, physical controls that a driver can work by touch alone: turn signals, hazard lights, the horn, windshield wipers, and the emergency SOS call.

Volkswagen has restored buttons for climate and volume. Peugeot is walking it back. Mazda mostly never left. Tesla remains defiant, still routing even the indicators through steering-wheel touch zones.

The rest of the industry is performing a slow, expensive U-turn to arrive roughly where it started. They learned something they could have asked an aerospace pilot at any point in the last seventy years: cockpits never surrendered their physical switches.

In an environment where attention is the scarcest resource we have, we do not want to hunt for a control. We want to reach for it.

The digital affordance trap

It would be easy to end here with a verdict that screens are bad. They aren’t.

For rendering a detailed navigation map, configuring complex system settings, or performing a task we do rarely while parked, glass is the right surface. Over-the-air software updates can fix vehicle recalls without a trip to the dealership. The screen is not the mistake.

The mistake is forgetting the difference between two kinds of action: the rare, complex, eyes-on kind and the constant, simple, eyes-off kind. We put both behind the same sheet of glass because the glass sold. We designed for the moment of buying, and forgot the ten thousand moments of using.

We can find this design failure everywhere the screen has arrived. It replaces universal affordances with flat, friction-filled surfaces.

I recently went on vacation with my family and stayed at a fancy Airbnb. Not because we could, but because it was a university town which only had two Airbnbs, and the other one was too small for us. After arriving at the Airbnb, we realized we were short of a few supplies, but our host was kind enough to help out multiple times even late into the evening.

I finally bid him good night and realized 10 minutes later that I hadn’t asked him about the air-conditioning in the apartment. The apartment was centrally air conditioned, but the interface was complicated enough for me to give up after having travelled for 6 hours. I did not want to trouble my host any further and hoped the weather would hold up and we would not either freeze or sweat uncontrollably for the night. Thankfully, the system was smart enough to auto-regulate.

When an “advanced” version of a product leaves a capable (humility is not my strongest suit) user guessing in the dark, the advancement was for someone other than the user.

Consider a smart fridge with a tablet bolted to the door—a novelty for a week, then a smudged panel we ignore on our way to open the door. The induction hob we can’t adjust with wet fingers. The hotel room where the bedside switches have been replaced by a glowing panel we can’t read without our glasses.

Cars are simply the place where the cost of losing physical affordances grew large enough, and deadly enough, to force a correction. Everywhere else, the same trade rolls quietly on. Sold to us as progress.

This shift to flat glass is a sensory barrier. By forcing all interaction through the eyes, it locks out anyone who relies on touch—the blind, the elderly, or anyone with a hand tremor. And yet, this does not mean the underlying technology is the enemy. When we use these tools to build sensory bridges rather than barriers, the result can be close to miraculous.

Take the new generation of smart assistive glasses. By placing a camera on the face and routing the feed through a multimodal AI, these devices take the visual world and translate it back into description. A blind traveller can ask what street corner they are standing on, and a voice narrates the intersection into their ear. They can read a menu, locate a friend in a crowded room, or read a letter. These technologies hand back a piece of the physical world that flat glass had taken away.

But even these borrowed eyes come at a price that is not money.

The glasses that read the street corner also request the user’s contacts, photos, and location history. A camera worn on the face records everyone who walks into frame, not just the obstacles the user needs to avoid. The helpful version is rarely clean.

Which is the second half of the question. The half that is easy to forget while marvelling at the first: not only who a technology is built to serve, but what it quietly helps itself to while serving them.

We are very good at building the version of a product that demos well in a showroom or a slide deck. So it is worth asking, every time something arrives smooth and screen-lit and freshly modern: how much of what is sold to us as the future is just the old thing, made harder to use and easier to sell?

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Subscriber Spotlight

Wu Chan on ’s piece last week,

“The choice part is so apt. Just like how you took Mr. Simons concept of 'satisfice' from economy let me give 'Hicks law' from user experience design. Hick's law states that "the time and effort required to make a decision increase exponentially with every additional option provided" and in a world where we are constantly exposed to multiple options, sustaining any aspect of our life seems difficult to the point of having an unsustained mental functioning which results in a lower feeling of content, peace and comfort. Also it was a really great read, thanks to your supple way of writing.”

What we are reading at Wyzr

Enshittification by Cory Doctorow.

Everything around us today is optimised for the seller. Cory does a remarkeable job at being funny while talking about the current reality and its absurdity. Or maybe it’s the other way around. I will let you decide.

Unitl next time.

Best,
Amlan

One short story by Haruki Murakami goes somewhat like this.

A boy and a girl meet on a street corner one spring morning in Tokyo. Both are single and young, in their early twenties. They’re strangers, but when they meet, there’s an obvious spark, an unmistakable sense of attraction between them.

So they sit on a park bench for hours, talking, holding hands. It is a perfect moment. Even though they haven’t known each other for long, they somehow instinctively realize, with complete certainty, that this is the person they are meant to be with.

But then a small doubt creeps in. It feels too easy to be true. What if they’re just imagining it? So they devise a test — if they walk away from each other now, and if this chemistry is truly real, they will find each other again. They say goodbye. One walks west, the other walks east.

They never meet again.

Even though they were both indeed perfect for each other, which even they felt, they walked away because they couldn’t get themselves to decide if that was the case. They thought it was wiser to browse through all the options before they made that decision. That is the tragedy of this story. And perhaps of many others we know.

~

Of late, there’s been a growing, troubling incidence of my friends separating from their spouses. Besides a few cases of deceit, they’re all perfectly decent people, and were in what seemed like fine relationships. Unfortunately, I personally know of over a dozen such cases, and I’m barely in my mid-30s.

It’s hard to have a clean explanation for it. After all, every relationship is unique, and it’s not easy to understand the specific challenges they’re dealing with.

But a lot of times, even their own explanation makes little sense. I still can’t wrap my head around what “we were not compatible anymore” really means. Or the fact that they “fell out of love”. It’s perhaps a good thing that I don’t understand this, but when well-educated, cultured, successful couples are separating in such large numbers, there must be some underlying phenomenon.

I got a part of my curiosity addressed recently, and accidentally. I came across the work of a Nobel Prize-winning economist who had spent his life answering a completely different question, but gave me some rationale for why divorces may be on the rise.

~

Conventional economics is based on rationality, on the idea that humans survey all available options, weigh them carefully, and pick the best one. But if we have to believe Herbert Simon, this version of rationality is a fantasy.

So instead of maximizing, Simon argues that humans must satisfice. The word is his own coinage, combining “satisfy” and “suffice”. It means that you consider a limited set of options, and you pick the one that is best among them. It may not be perfect, but it is good enough.

Even though this sounds like settling for less than we deserve, it isn’t.

As a lighter example, it explains why we spend forty minutes on Netflix scrolling, reading descriptions, watching trailers, googling reviews, and finally watching a FRIENDS episode for the thirty-sixth time. The abundance, not the absence, of good options causes this agony. The same thing happens when you’re building an investment portfolio and get numb somewhere around the fourteenth mutual fund you’re comparing. Or while swiping left and right to potential matches, while waiting for that perfect one. There’s no end to it.

All such examples have different weights in our lives. Choosing a partner and choosing a movie rightfully demand different levels of analysis. But in all such cases, what we never calculate is the cost of the search itself. The time, the energy, the cognitive fog that engulfs us after too many comparisons. Simon’s point was that if you counted those costs honestly, satisficing wouldn’t just feel acceptable, it would be the superior strategy.

Remember, satisficing is not about settling for the first thing that comes your way. But it is accepting that the first seemingly great option can actually be the best option for you. Most importantly, it is also about deciding that it is indeed the best and committing to not changing your mind once you’ve done it.

Simon himself lived this with almost painful literalness, and I certainly don’t recommend emulating him. He wore one brand of socks his entire adult life, so he never had to think about it. He had the same breakfast every morning — oatmeal, half a grapefruit, black coffee. He lived in the same house for forty-six years. He had decided, on each of these things, that good enough was good enough, and so he never revisited them. Every decision he had already made was one less decision draining his mind. It was extreme, but he won the Nobel Prize in Economics, the Turing Award in Computer Science, and a lifetime achievement award in Psychology. It must have worked for him.

~

The boy and the girl on the park bench in Murakami’s story weren’t uncertain about each other. They were uncertain about their certainty. And that cost them everything.

I think something similar is happening in a lot of relationships today. Not because people are with the wrong person, but because they never fully decided that they were with the right one.

What I’ve observed is that relationships that struggle aren’t always the ones with the most incompatibility. Often, they’re the ones where at least one person never truly committed to the idea that this was it. They stayed, but kept a part of themselves hovering, mentally auditing the relationship against an imagined alternative. And because there are always alternatives visible today, always someone more interesting to compare with, that audit never quite ends.

This is satisficing’s dark mirror. Instead of making a great choice for once and committing to it fully, people make a good enough choice and keep the search running in the background. That’s perhaps an accepted behaviour in early stages of dating, but if the same phase extends for a prolonged duration, and spills over into marriage, you know it will always hang by a thread. It breeds incompatibility and becomes the root of the numerous problems that eventually lead to the separation.

That slightly-less-than-full-commitment is the worst of both worlds — you’ve given up the freedom of being single without fully embracing the depth that commitment makes possible. You become miserable and impose the same upon your partner.

I must admit a personal bias in this explanation. Years ago, I met someone at a cafe in Delhi. We got talking regularly thereafter. After the second meeting, I felt certain that this was the one. I told her so, and she felt the same. But it seemed too fast and easy. Yet, unlike the boy and girl in Murakami’s story, we didn’t foolishly go east and west. We did what made sense then. A year later, we were married and have been for over six years.

We tell ourselves we’re waiting for clarity. But clarity doesn’t always arrive before commitment, it often arrives because of it. The search for better options doesn’t end when you find the right one. It ends when you decide to. And that’s true for most things in life.

A question for you:

Do you think more options have made you better or worse at making the important decisions in your life? Do you ever feel, “right, this much is enough for me to decide” or do you tend to keep seeking for more?

We’d love to know your thoughts — comment below.

What we’re reading

Inside The Box by David Epstein. I loved his previous book, Range, and I don’t miss follow-up works of writers I enjoy. This one is about how imposing constraints in our work and life actually make us better. It supports one of my core beliefs that we rarely need to think ‘outside the box’. There’s a lot to be explored inside the box, which we don’t always do before looking out.

Until next time.

Best,
Yashraj

In the winter of 1951-52, India went to vote for the first time. It was the largest election the world had ever seen, more than 170 million people eligible to choose a government in a country only four years old, most of them unable to read the ballot they had been handed. The Congress, led by Nehru, swept it. And in the manifesto it had placed before that vast and hopeful electorate, the party named the two enemies it intended to defeat: poverty and unemployment. The plan was to plan. Five-year plans, state-led industry, modernized agriculture, all of it aimed at lifting a desperately poor nation into something better.

Seventy-three years later, in the spring of 2024, a different party released its own document of promises. The era was unrecognizable. India was now the world’s fifth-largest economy, the Congress was in opposition, and the men on the posters belonged to a movement Nehru had spent his life arguing against. The BJP’s manifesto, titled Sankalp Patra, promised (surprise, surprise) jobs across a dozen modern sectors, welfare for the poor, and a war on the unemployment that was rising even as the economy grew. Five years earlier, the same party had pledged to bring poverty down to single digits and then eliminate it altogether.

Different party. Different ideology. Different century, almost. The same two words - poverty and unemployment.

It would be easy, and lazy, to read this as proof that politicians lie, or that nothing in India ever changes. But that explanation is too small. The promises persist not because the people making them are uniquely dishonest, and not merely because governments are slow and clumsy, though they are. They persist because of something stranger and more universal, a pattern that, once you see it, you cannot stop seeing. It hides in plain sight inside almost every institution built to fix something.

In 2010, the writer Kevin Kelly gave this pattern a name. He was reflecting on an observation made by the technology thinker Clay Shirky, and he distilled it into a single sentence so clean it has stuck ever since.

Read it again. The claim is not that institutions fail to solve problems. It is that an institution built to solve a problem slowly acquires an interest in that problem continuing to exist. Its budget, its headcount, its reason to wake up in the morning, all of it depends on the problem being there tomorrow. A parasite that kills its host dies with it. An organization that fully solves the problem it was created for has just made the case for its own abolition. And so, consciously or not, it learns to manage the problem rather than end it.

This is the part worth holding onto, because it is what separates this idea from ordinary cynicism. Nobody in the system has to be a villain. There is rarely a room where someone decides to keep the poor poor. What happens instead is far harder to fix. An entire apparatus grows up around a problem, ministries and schemes and subsidies and the careers of decent people, and that apparatus develops a gravitational pull toward its own survival. The incentive gradient tilts, gently and permanently, away from the cure and toward the maintenance. The promise renews every five years precisely because the machinery built to deliver it has no structural reason to ever finish the job. Solving poverty would dismantle the very institutions whose existence is justified by fighting it.

You can watch the same logic operate in places with far less moral weight than a nation’s poverty, and seeing it there makes the pattern unmistakable.

In April 2018, an analyst at Goldman Sachs sent a research note to clients with a title that reads like something from a dystopian novel.

The note was not being deliberately monstrous. It was being honest about an incentive most of medicine prefers not to say out loud. A one-shot cure, the analyst observed, carries enormous value for patients and for society, but it presents a real challenge for a company that needs recurring revenue, because a cured patient stops paying. The example offered was a hepatitis C treatment so effective it cured most patients within weeks. Its American sales peaked around twelve and a half billion dollars in 2015, and then began to fall, not despite the cure working but because of it. As the pool of sick people shrank, so did the market. The medicine had done the one thing the business could not afford.

A chronic disease, by contrast, is an annuity. The patient never recovers, never leaves, never stops needing the next prescription. An industry organized around recurring revenue will, without anyone choosing it, find itself more comfortable managing a condition forever than ending it once. The cure is bad for business. That is not a conspiracy. It is just the shape of the water.

I have spent enough time inside the book trade now to recognize this shape when it appears closer to home, and in publishing it appears in a form I find genuinely sad, because it corrodes something I love.

There is a practice in the book business, almost a century old, called returns. Booksellers can send unsold copies back to the publisher for full credit. It began as a rescue. During the Great Depression, with book sales collapsing and shops too frightened to stock anything risky, publishers like Putnam and Norton and Knopf began letting retailers return what they could not sell, and in 1932 Viking offered ninety per cent credit on unsold new titles. It worked. It coaxed nervous booksellers into filling their shelves again, and it kept books in front of readers through a terrible decade. It was, for its moment, a good and humane fix.

But the fix never left. And here is what it slowly did. When a bookseller can return anything that does not sell, the cost of stocking the wrong book disappears. And the moment that cost disappears, so does the reason to be good at the job. The whole point of a great bookseller was once that they read widely, knew their shelves intimately, took real risks on unknown writers, and then worked to put the right book into the right hands. That craft existed because getting it wrong used to hurt. Remove the downside, and the craft has no soil to grow in. Why learn to curate when the warehouse will absorb every mistake? The system built to protect the bookseller from risk also, without meaning to, removed the bookseller’s reason to be excellent. A solution designed to keep books on shelves slowly hollowed out the very expertise that once decided which books deserved to be there.

None of these institutions set out to fail anyone. The welfare state did not decide to preserve poverty, the pharmaceutical company did not decide to keep people sick, the bookseller did not decide to stop caring. Each was, at the start, a real solution to a real problem. What happened is subtler and sadder. The solution settled in, built a structure around itself, and that structure developed its own appetite for survival, an appetite that turned out to be quietly served by the problem never fully going away.

It would be dishonest, though, to leave it there, because the principle is a tendency and not a law, and some institutions do the opposite. They solve the problem so completely that they argue themselves out of existence. In 1980 the World Health Organization declared smallpox eradicated, a disease that had killed hundreds of millions, and the global apparatus built to fight it simply wound down, its job finished. The campaigns that have pushed polio to the edge of extinction are trying, in effect, to make themselves unnecessary. So the harder question is not why institutions preserve problems, but why some manage to escape the gravity and others do not. Part of the answer is the nature of the problem itself. Smallpox had a clear and final end state, a last case after which there were no more. Poverty does not end that way; neither does disease in general, nor the unpredictability of which book will sell. A problem with no finish line gives the institution managing it no moment at which it is obviously done, and it is precisely in that absence of an ending that the appetite for self-preservation quietly takes hold. The principle bites hardest exactly where the problem is murkiest, which is also where it is easiest to mistake genuine difficulty for deliberate self-interest. Poverty may persist less because anyone is invested in it and more because it is genuinely, stubbornly hard. Both things can be true at once, and the honest reader has to hold them together.

Upton Sinclair saw the human version of this a century ago. It is difficult, he wrote, to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it. Multiply one such man by an entire institution and you get the Shirky Principle, the same blindness scaled up into architecture, hardened into something no single person can be blamed for and no single person can undo.

Which leaves a more uncomfortable question than the one we started with. We tend to ask why our institutions fail to solve our problems. Perhaps the better question is whether solving the problem was ever the thing they were, deep down, built to do. And once you start asking that, the next question follows you home. What problem in your own life, in your work, your habits, your relationships, are you perniciously invested in keeping alive, because some part of who you are depends on it remaining unsolved?

What we’re watching this week

The Light Bulb Conspiracy, a 2010 documentary by Cosima Dannoritzer. In 1924, the world’s largest lightbulb manufacturers met in Geneva and discreetly agreed to make their bulbs worse, capping their lifespan so that customers would have to keep buying more. The film traces how an industry that existed to light the world developed a stake in the bulb burning out, and follows that same logic forward into the things we replace today without quite knowing why. Some historians argue the real story was messier than outright sabotage, with genuine trade-offs between how long a bulb lasts and how brightly it burns. Watch it anyway, and notice how familiar the pattern feels by the end.

Until next week.

Best,

Utkarsh

Moscow, the winter of 1922.

The civil war is barely over, the city is freezing, and basic goods are scarce. But word is going around that something strange is about to happen at the Hall of Columns. A full symphony orchestra is going to play the heavy repertoire — Beethoven, Tchaikovsky — without a conductor.

Not a string quartet small enough to breathe together through a phrase. Around a hundred and fifty musicians, many of them drawn from the Bolshoi and the Moscow Conservatory. Some of the finest players in the country. And no one on the podium. In fact, there was no podium at all.

They called themselves Persimfans, a Soviet acronym for the First Conductorless Symphony Ensemble. The logic was openly political. The country had just thrown out its Tsar; the orchestra would throw out its dictator. If workers could run a factory without an owner standing over them, surely musicians could play Beethoven without a man waving a stick. They sat in a circle so every player could see every other. They held the music together by listening, by glances, and by long argument over how a passage should go.

And they made it work.

This is the part that is easy to skip on the way to the moral. Persimfans was not a stunt. It ran for roughly a decade and became one of the most important orchestras in the Soviet Union.

What critics could not quite accept was that nobody was in charge.

They kept writing that there had to be a hidden conductor somewhere — a man behind a curtain, a secret signal, one player quietly steering the rest. Order this clean surely needed an author. By one account, a guest maestro invited to lead them eventually set his baton down and let the orchestra carry the piece on its own.

We seem to be built this way. Show us something coordinated and we go hunting for the one who coordinates it. We want a face to hang the order on.

What the baton was hiding

Strip away the politics and the charm, and Persimfans was quietly running an experiment in what a conductor is actually for.

Some of what a conductor does is exactly what it looks like. Keeping the beat. Bringing the horns in on time. Telling the strings to ease off so the woodwinds can come through. This is the visible work—the stick-waving. Persimfans proved that most of it can be handed back. A skilled orchestra can keep its own time. It can cue itself across a circle of held glances. It can balance itself by ear. Take that work away from the front of the stage, and the music does not collapse.

Underneath the visible layer lies another, and this is what the baton was hiding.

Someone has to hold the entire score. The whole architecture, every line at once, so that each player can safely know only their own part and trust that the pieces will meet. And someone has to decide what the music is for: how fast, how heavy, where it strains and where it breathes, what the thing is finally meant to say.

Integration, and Interpretation. Neither is optional.

That work did not disappear when Persimfans sent the conductor home. To play without him, every musician had to carry the whole score in their head, not just their own line. And it reportedly took the orchestra around a hundred rehearsals to prepare a programme a conducted ensemble would have covered in twenty.

That is the cost nobody prints on the poster. The holding of the whole, and the decision about what the whole is for, did not vanish when the visible leader did. They were spread thin and even across every person in the room. And they were paid for in time and exhaustion.

This rehearsal cost has a very familiar corporate name: the coordination tax.

In a team with no boss, there is no end to the meeting about who decides. When you remove a central coordinator, the coordination work is not eliminated; it is merely distributed. It is paid for in endless consensus-seeking loops, alignment syncs, and the mental fatigue of trying to align fifty separate perspectives before taking a single step.

Which suggests a different way of reading what a leader is.

We tell the story of leadership as a story about power: who commands, whose ego fills the room, who takes the applause for work other people did. Persimfans suggests a quieter and less flattering reading.

A great deal of hierarchy is simply bandwidth. It is a way of not making everyone think about everything. The conductor exists so that the second oboe can safely ignore the cellos. An org chart is not only a ladder of status. It is also a map of who is allowed to not know what.

Sometimes that trade is worth paying, and paying it buys something rare. And sometimes the same trade just buys exhaustion with better branding.

The orchestra disbanded around 1932, as the country’s politics hardened. The revolution that had made room for the experiment morphed into something that no longer tolerated experiments. But the question it raised has outlived it by a century.

Firing the conductor, again

Because we are, at this exact moment, firing the conductor again.

“The Great Flattening” or “The Great Unbossing.” Between 2022 and 2025, manager headcount at large public companies fell by around six percent. Google cut roughly a third of its small-team managers. Amazon’s chief executive set targets to push more individual contributors under each remaining boss, explicitly seeking to remove managers who “want to put their fingerprint on everything.” Gartner predicts that by late 2026, one in five companies will use AI to flatten their structures, removing up to half their middle-management layers.

If you look closely at the teams where this is happening, the reality is far from a clean, flat utopia. It feels less like empowerment and more like a quiet, exhausting chaos. Managers who used to shield their teams from corporate noise are gone. Direct reports double. The calendar slots that used to hold quiet 1:1s are replaced by a void. Employees find themselves feeling directionless, drifting without mentorship or clarity on how their daily tasks connect to the company’s broader goals.

The pitch for these restructures is almost word-for-word the Persimfans pitch: Throw out the layer in the middle. Empower the players. Let software handle the timekeeping, the scheduling, and the status reports.

And some of it is fair. A lot of what middle managers did was the removable part of the conductor — the routine cueing and reporting that software now does instantly. That work really can be handed to a machine.

But notice what that has led to.

In Korn Ferry’s 2025 Workforce: Power Shifts survey of more than fifteen thousand professionals, about four in ten said their organisation had cut management layers in the past year — and roughly a third said the missing managers had left them feeling directionless. The mentorship thinned. The translation between strategy at the top and execution at the front, the quiet work of integration, slowed to a trickle, because the people who used to do it were the layer that got cut, and the executives above them sit too far up to fill the gap.

This is the rehearsal cost, arriving on schedule. Flatten the orchestra and every player suddenly has to hold more of the whole score, except this time nobody told them they would have to, and nobody gave them the months to learn it.

When everyone can play everything

AI is the most powerful compressor of specialization we have built. It turns a single individual into a designer, coder, researcher, writer, and analyst overnight. It dissolves the old boundaries between roles. The junior who could once only manage their narrow part can now reach across the whole score. In Persimfans terms, AI is the technology that finally makes it plausible for every musician to play more than one instrument well.

You can see it most starkly in India, in the industry that taught a generation what a career looked like. For decades, the IT services giants ran on a pyramid: a wide base of young engineers, a narrower band of leads above them, a thin tier of architects at the top. The famous arithmetic was five Indian engineers for the price of one American, and it built an industry that now employs millions. It was the primary engine of upward mobility for India’s middle class for three decades, a reliable conveyor belt from engineering campuses to corporate stability.

AI has gone straight for the base of that pyramid. During the 2025–2026 fiscal year, TCS underwent its first major structural realignment, affecting approximately 12,000 roles due to a skill mismatch. The mass-recruitment engine of hiring thousands of “freshers” is slowing down, traded for leaner, more specialized shapes. The pyramid is flattening from the bottom up, rewriting a generational economic contract.

When everyone can play, the scarce thing is no longer playing. It is deciding what to play, and making the parts cohere. In fact, because AI makes it so easy to generate raw output, it actually magnifies the chaos of a leaderless system. If a hundred capable soloists are each using AI to generate code, text, or designs at speed, you do not get a symphony. You get a hundred fast, confident, slightly different pieces of noise.

The two jobs AI cannot absorb — interpretation and integration, the decision about what the work is for and the holding of the whole — do not become less important as capability spreads.

When integration and direction live inside one experienced person, you never have to make them explicit. The good manager held the context in their head. The senior architect simply knew how the system fit together. The conductor carried the score so that no one else had to read all of it.

Flatten that away, and the knowledge does not transfer on its own. It has to be rebuilt out loud.

Clarity stops being bureaucratic residue and becomes infrastructure. The conductor’s silent competence has to be turned into a visible, shared score. That is real work, and it is exactly the work that gets skipped when “flatten it and let AI handle coordination” is treated as a finished thought rather than the start of a much harder one.

The score has to live somewhere

The companies that come out of this well will not be the ones that fired the most managers. They will be the ones that worked out which of the conductor’s jobs were a man waving a stick, and which were the score — and then made sure someone, or something, was still holding it.

In the old photographs of Persimfans, the podium is empty. It is a striking image, and it was meant to be. The musicians wanted you to see that no one was standing there.

The score instead moved into a hundred heads, and it cost them a hundred rehearsals to put it there. We are about to learn the same thing about our own orchestras, the ones we are flattening right now in the name of speed: that you can remove the person at the front far more easily than you can remove the work they were quietly doing.

A question for you.

When the coordination got hard, where did the work actually go — and who ended up paying for it without anyone naming the cost?

Leave a comment

What we are watching at Wyzr

Jacob Collier Improvises With Orchestra — Live in San Francisco. A room of fans, no rehearsal and no sheet music, and a conductor’s interpretation brought alive by amazing integration of talented musicians.

Until next time.

Best,
Amlan

A few weeks ago, Tamil Nadu got a new Chief Minister. Thalapathy Vijay, the name that has made millions of fans lose their minds in cinema halls, was sworn in on May 10.

In his first speech as CM, Vijay wanted people to know something important about him. “I know poverty and hunger,” he proclaimed. “I did not come from a royal family.”

Basically, he was just like the very people watching him, listening to him, and who had voted for him. Except that he probably wasn’t.

One of those who followed this speech was Manu Joseph, a novelist and columnist, one of India’s sharper writers, and also someone who knew Vijay for longer than most people.

About the poverty and hunger remark, he wrote on X, “It’s bullshit because he was my classmate in the third standard at Loyola School. His father was a filmmaker who set up his son for a career in films.” He added: “A lot of affluent boys confuse being broke with poverty. Two very different things. The great bulls of our era are rags-to-riches stories.”

In a Mint column, he even wrote that one of the reasons he knew of Vijay in school was because he was clearly, distinguishably rich. It’s possible that his family saw hard times, and they might even have gone broke, but he never actually lived in poverty.

Vijay had just won an extraordinary election, yet he felt compelled to establish (or manufacture) his relatability with the masses. Because he understood that people don’t just want a powerful leader. They want someone who struggled, someone who worked hard and beat the odds, just like everyone thinks they do daily. There’s no glory in having a leader who’s sailed smooth. We all want a hard worker at the helm. And what better way to establish that than to project ourselves as the underdog?

We are, it turns out, deeply wired to seek out the underdog. And almost equally wired to perform being one.

~

One of the most reliable ways to earn people’s support — in politics, in business, in sport, in life — is to convince them that you are one of them. That you started where they started, with odds heavily stacked against you. The underdog framing is not just a political tool, but one of the oldest tricks to foster better human connections. Even if we don’t consciously reach for it, we still instinctively drift towards it, because deep inside, we know it works.

Sometimes we do it to motivate ourselves. Feeling like the underdog can be a powerful engine. Ask any sportsperson or even an entrepreneur who has ever used a slight, real or imagined, as fuel.

Science has a more precise explanation for why this works so well.

In 2007, psychologists at the University of South Florida published a study that tested how people respond to underdogs across different competitive settings — sports, politics, and conflict. The finding was striking: simply labelling a competitor as an underdog was enough to increase support for them, regardless of their track record or promise. Just the label. The framing alone did the work.

The follow-up study the next year was even more telling. Researchers showed participants animated clips of geometric shapes. Some shapes were described as struggling, others were not. And people rooted for the struggling shapes. They felt sympathy for them. We are so primed to support the underdog that we will project that feeling onto a triangle if it’s struggling.

The researchers identified two forces driving this. The first is effort. We instinctively attribute harder work to those who appear to be fighting against the odds. The second is fairness. Inequality feels wrong to us, and cheering for the underdog is our way of correcting it, even from the stands.

Put these two together and you have a formula that politicians, founders, and athletes have been using, consciously or not, for as long as there have been audiences to win over.

It shows up on our social media feed too. Think about how most entrepreneurial journeys are narrated on LinkedIn.

“I quit my high-paying job to build something of my own.”

Nobody ever writes: I quit a job that wasn’t going anywhere or I got laid off and figured I’d give this a shot. The sacrifice has to be real and deliberate. The thing you gave up has to hurt. Because without that, you’re not an underdog. You’re just someone who tried something.

And it shows up everywhere we are asked to narrate about ourselves. The startup founder who mentions the dozens of funding rejections before the raise. The author who lists the publishers who said no before the one who said yes. The athlete who brings up the selection they missed before the medal they won. We have become remarkably skilled at finding the moment in our story where we were the one fighting against the odds.

And when we can’t find one, we manufacture the framing. I’ve seen plenty of such instances. Most “I could have taken the easier route, but I chose not to” stories hide the stability offered by a well-off family or a supportive spouse.

But it still works. We don’t just sympathise with underdogs, we like them more. We trust them faster. We are more willing to root for them.

~

The relatability factor’s correlation with fandom is clearly visible in sport.

By now, even if you have no interest in cricket, you know about Vaibhav Sooryavanshi — the 15-year-old prodigy from Samastipur, Bihar, and the most talked-about cricketer in the world right now. The batting is obviously the most important part of it. But there’s something else that’s earned him fandom across age groups.

What he has, and what no coaching staff can manufacture, is the immense relatability factor with the Indian masses. He dives for the feet of senior cricketers when he meets them, shows up to interviews as exactly the person he is: a Bihari boy, unpolished, unfiltered, and seemingly very grounded. That authentic innocence is what people love about him, apart from the batting. And that’s why everyone doesn’t just want to watch more of him, but wants him to succeed. It’s like one of them taking on the world. The young Sachin Tendulkar had the whole country rooting for him for the same reason.

But if you’re a cricket fan, go back a few years from now, and think about the young Virat Kohli. Even as a youngster, he was winning games that India had no business winning. His talent and performance were beyond doubt. But he was a brash, combustible lad who would splurt expletives at every opportunity he got. He was the quintessential Delhi brat, easier to hate than love.

He was the opposite of an underdog. For every fan who loved the fire, there was someone who found him too much and wanted him to fail. I have no doubt that had he been a quieter, more innocent individual, his fan following even in his initial years would have been unparalleled.

~

The bottom line is — we love underdogs. But once you understand the mechanism, you cannot unsee it being used. Because not everyone who performs humility has earned it. Not everyone who invokes sacrifice made one. Not everyone who says I know poverty and hunger actually does.

The underdog narrative is one of the most commonly manufactured. Whether it’s a LinkedIn post or a casual remark in person, people are intrinsically incentivised to amplify their struggles. None of this means we should become cynical about every story of struggle we encounter.

But the next time someone makes a similar claim, it’s worth asking whether it’s genuine or just a performance before being impressed.

A question for you

Like me, have you also noticed a surge in the underdog projection narrative of late? Have there been any interesting artificial cases you came across?

Leave a comment

Subscriber Spotlight

Shlok Vaibhav made an insightful remark on the last week’s edition by Utkarsh, titled The Window That Won’t Close:

“Another poignant politics example by Fukuyama- Ask any Russian the origin of the repressive russia state - be it the czar, kgb or Putin, they will say a single word - Mongols. The Mongols utterly disregarded and persecuted the Russian nobility - The Boyars that future russian rulers always remembered it and so Russia never had the strong aristocracy which West had, it instead became the Gendarme of Europe.”

What we’re reading

Hidden Potential by Adam Grant. The book argues that the people who achieve the most are rarely the most gifted, but are the ones who know how to grow. It makes the case that we’ve been measuring talent wrong, and that the most interesting stories of success are almost always underdog stories.

Also, do check out Wyzr’s latest release, Destiny Avenged by Karthik Reddy. Karthik is the co-founder & Managing Partner of Blume Ventures. The book features eight inspiring journeys of founders who built mega successful companies, with a particular emphasis on their earliest struggles. When they were truly the underdogs! Find it here.

Until next time.

Best,
Yashraj

On the night of June 25, 1975, India went to sleep a democracy. By the time most people woke up on June 26, it was something else.

President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed had signed the proclamation just before midnight, on the advice of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. At 8 AM, her voice came over All India Radio:

The President has proclaimed Emergency. There is nothing to panic about.

What she had done, in a single night, was move India’s political imagination further than it had moved since Independence. Suspending civil liberties, jailing opposition leaders, censoring the press, cancelling elections - none of this had been anywhere near the range of legitimate political action in a constitutional republic barely twenty-five years old. Then, overnight, it was. Not just thinkable. Enacted.

The Emergency lasted 21 months. Indira Gandhi lost the 1977 election decisively. Commentators at the time said the window had snapped back. Democracy had self-corrected.

But political windows don’t snap back. They stretch.

Around the same time that India was recovering from this episode - though on a different continent and for entirely different reasons - a man named Joseph Overton was trying to understand why good ideas go nowhere. He was not a politician or a philosopher. He had been, until recently, an electrical engineer at Dow Chemical in Michigan. Now he worked at a small think tank called the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, and what frustrated him was this: ideas that seemed obviously correct for the populace - school choice, limited government, free markets - could not influence the choice of the electorate.

It wasn’t that the arguments were weak, he concluded. It was that the arguments lived outside a window. At any given moment in any society, there is a narrow band of ideas considered legitimate to even discuss publicly. Outside that band, ideas are either radical or simply invisible. Politicians, regardless of their private views, will only operate inside the window. Not because they lack courage necessarily, but because the window is where voters live.

Overton sketched this on a yellow legal pad. He called it the Window of Political Possibilities. He never quite finished the brochure he had planned to illustrate it, and died in an ultralight plane crash in 2003 at the age of 43. His colleague Joseph Lehman named it the Overton Window in his honour and released the idea into the world.

The name became famous. But what Overton most wanted people to understand was less about what the window is, and more about what happens when it moves.

Certain things that entered India’s political imagination during the Emergency never fully left it. The 42nd Constitutional Amendment, passed during this period, significantly expanded Parliament’s powers and curtailed judicial review. Parts of it were repealed after 1977. Parts were not. The Maintenance of Internal Security Act, used to detain tens of thousands of people without trial, had existed before 1975, but the Emergency demonstrated how expansively it could be applied. The legal infrastructure of mass detention, once shown to be usable at scale, remained in institutional memory.

This is the mechanism Overton identified but that most people miss. Moving the window doesn’t just change what is currently happening. It permanently changes what is considered to have happened, which means it permanently changes what can be justified next.

This is where whataboutery enters, and it is not merely a debating trick. It is a structural consequence of a shifted window. When the window moves, it supplies precedent. And precedent, in political argument, functions as permission.

When any government today uses a draconian law against a journalist or an activist, and someone objects, the first response is almost always: but what about the Emergency? What about MISA? What about the Congress record?

The response isn’t wrong, factually. The UAPA - now the primary legal instrument for detaining dissidents without bail - was originally enacted by Congress in 1967, expanded by Congress in 2004, and expanded further multiple times since then. The sedition law is colonial. Every government since Independence has used the machinery of the state against its critics. The connection being pointed to is real.

But that is precisely the point. The real injury of a shifted window is not just what it enables at the time. It is that every future expansion of power can point backward and say: this is not new. And because it is not new, it is not unthinkable. And because it is not unthinkable, it is inside the window.

Each generation of transgression becomes the baseline for the next. The window doesn’t just stay stretched. It gets stretched a little further each time, using the previous stretch as its foundation.

The Overton Window is usually discussed as a political phenomenon. But it operates identically inside a life.

Every person carries their own window - a narrow band of choices they consider legitimate to even think about. Options that sit outside it are not rejected after consideration. They are simply not seen. Not forbidden. Just invisible.

Where does your window come from? Almost certainly not from yourself. It comes from the family you were born into, the institution that trained you, the peer group you moved through in your twenties. It comes from the choices the people around you made and treated as normal. You absorbed these not as rules but as reality - not as one way of doing things, but as the way things are done.

The Indian professional Overton Window has a very particular shape. A certain category of employer is legitimate. A certain income level marks success. A certain kind of ambition is acceptable and a certain kind is embarrassing. Career breaks are suspicious. Building something uncertain is risky. Dependence on equity rather than salary is unstable.

Most people never examine where these limits came from. They navigate inside them efficiently and confidently, never quite noticing that the window was built by someone else.

Here is what makes this harder: unlike a political window, which moves visibly and publicly, a personal window tends to shift slowly and covertly, usually in the wrong direction. With each year spent inside a life that doesn’t quite fit, the window narrows a little more. The unacceptable slowly absorbs the uncomfortable, and the uncomfortable absorbs the merely unfamiliar. By the time someone realizes they are living inside a window they did not choose, the window has become load-bearing. Moving it feels dangerous.

But windows, once moved deliberately, stay moved. That’s the other half of what Overton noticed. The same mechanism that makes political windows hard to close also makes personal ones, once shifted, hard to collapse. You don’t have to move the whole window at once. You move it by making one thing thinkable that wasn’t before. The thinkable becomes the possible. The possible becomes the done.

Joseph Overton never got to see his framework become famous. He spent his working life trying to help people understand that the limits of acceptable thought are not natural laws - they are contingent, moveable, and often chosen by someone other than you.

His idea outlived him. Which suggests that even the most unthinkable things, with enough time, have a habit of becoming the obvious.

So here are the questions worth sitting with this week:

Which ideas in your own life do you treat as unthinkable - not because you’ve examined them, but because they’ve never made it inside your window?

Where did your window come from? And who decided what belonged inside it?

Subscriber Spotlight

Hetal commented about the systems around charity being broken on our last piece by Yashraj titled *Charity is Broken, But Something Else Works:*

Very inspiring once again!! 🙌🏻 And really really loved the idea and the need for more people to actually build and solve REAL problems

But it also got me thinking that maybe charity itself was never really the problem. Charity feels almost fundamental to human society and nature itself, something essential for sustenance and for people to survive together. What gets corrupted is everything we build around it later: the systems, administration, greed, image, power, and incentives that slowly creep in.

Our Week at Wyzr

We have been on a book launch tour for our latest release, Better Never Stops, authored by Shyam Srinivasan. The outpouring of love and warmth we have seen for Shyam from all walks of his life has been an inspiration for all of us. The book has been acing across all platforms, both online and offline, across India. Check it out here: https://amzn.in/d/01O9qhnc

What we’re reading

The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt. Haidt spent years trying to understand why smart, well-meaning people disagree so completely on politics and morality, and his answer is uncomfortable. We don’t reason our way to our beliefs. We feel our way there first, and then reason follows, mostly to justify what we already concluded. It is a book about the stories we tell ourselves about why we think what we think. Read it and you will find it harder to be certain that your window is one you chose.

Best,
Utkarsh

India manufactures more vaccines than almost any country on earth. Roughly 60% of the world’s vaccines are produced here. And yet, half of the world’s under-vaccinated children also live here. One child dies every four minutes from a disease a free shot could have prevented. The problem isn’t supply or cost. The problem is that many mothers don’t know when to show up.

In 2019, two people decided to change this. Varsha Venugopal had spent years working on global development at the World Bank and the Open Society Foundation. Fiona Conlon had worked in public health at WHO.

Together, they built Suvita. They started sending personalised SMS reminders to parents before each vaccination appointment, and recruited trusted voices within communities to spread the word. No pathbreaking innovation, just a text message, and a neighbour to nudge. This simple approach increased vaccination uptake by 25%. Today, Suvita has sent over 73 million reminders and reached the caregivers of more than 3 million children.

When I speak to friends who are usually consultants, bankers, designers, investors, or engineers, all of whom are good at what they do and are paid well for it — many of them possess this strong desire to do something that has a larger impact for the good. Not just donate to a cause they found on Instagram, but actually do something. Perhaps build something and fix something real. Most of them don’t know how, and there doesn’t seem to be a transparent, credible place to help them how to go about it.

But what if it did? What if there was a programme that took talented and driven people and gave them the training, the resources, and the right problem to work on? Not another opaque charity asking for your money, but an actual incubator for people who want to found something. A place that identifies the world’s most pressing, most solvable problems, and then finds the right people to go fix them.

What if I told you it already exists, and that it’s where Varsha and Fiona first met?

~

The programme behind that meeting is called Charity Entrepreneurship, now part of a larger organisation called Ambitious Impact. It was founded in 2018 by Joey Savoie and Karolina Sarek in London, and it operates on a simple premise: the world’s most important problems are not short of compassion, but woefully short of well-intentioned and well-directed talent.

Every year, CE’s research team spends over 5,000 hours identifying the most neglected, most solvable, highest-impact problems in the world where a new, well-run organisation could make a measurable difference. It then recruits a small cohort of ambitious people from across the globe, puts them through an intensive two-month training programme, matches them with a co-founder, hands them one of these pre-researched ideas, and sends them off with seed funding of up to $200,000. Unlike regular startups, the founders don’t bring the idea. Instead, the idea waits for the right founder.

The people who show up come from all walks of life. There are doctors, development economists, former NGO workers, consultants, teachers, university students, and even investment bankers. They come from every continent, range from their twenties to their mid-fifties, and share one thing: a drive to do something that can actually be measured. In six years, over 70 individuals have gone through the programme and launched more than 50 organisations, which together have raised over $68 million and now serve 75 million people and a billion animals. Like Suvita, there are dozens that have gone on to create tremendous impact through remarkably simple solutions.

Fortify Health, for instance, works on anaemia. Over half of Indian women and two-thirds of children under five are anaemic — a deficiency that stunts development, reduces productivity, and raises risks during pregnancy. Fortify Health works with flour mills across India to add iron, folic acid, and vitamin B12 to wheat flour before it reaches the market. Today, the organisation works with close to 300 mills and reaches more than 20 million people every month.

The Lead Exposure Elimination Project (LEEP) was founded by a British NHS doctor and an NGO executive. Lead poisoning causes irreversible neurological damage in children, and in many countries, it comes from something as ordinary as paint on walls. LEEP goes into a country, tests for lead in paint, builds the evidence, and pushes the government to regulate. Within eight months of launching, they had convinced the government of Malawi to change its lead paint policy, a move estimated to protect 215,000 children. They are now running programmes in 14 countries.

Then there’s the Shrimp Welfare Project. Over 440 billion shrimp are farmed every year, more than five times the total of all farmed land animals combined. Almost no one has thought seriously about their conditions. SWP works with farms, corporations, and governments to improve welfare standards at scale. Through signed agreements alone, the project is on track to affect over 2.7 billion shrimp annually.

Vaccination rates in India, anaemia in flour, lead in paint in Malawi, shrimp farms in Southeast Asia — these are all unglamorous but structural, evidence-backed problems that most people never think to work on. That’s exactly why CE picks them.

~

There’s another reason why CE caught my attention. Most of what people call charity is a black box.

Until 2017, India had over 3 million registered NGOs, roughly one for every 400 people. But a CBI investigation found that only 10% of them filed annual returns. In 2013-14, 82% of NGOs with permission to receive foreign contributions hadn’t submitted their accounts to the government. A major cleanup ensued and the number of NGOs came down to just over 5 lakh. While things are better now, we know it’s not too hard to game the system or build a narrative of doing more good than is actually done.

Globally, more than 60% of people say they don’t trust nonprofits to accomplish their stated missions. And the larger the organisation, sometimes the murkier it gets. The philanthropic foundations run by the world’s wealthiest individuals have come under increasing scrutiny, not for doing nothing, but for doing far less than they imply, and in ways that happen to be very tax-efficient. It’s well known that donating to a foundation can shield wealth from taxation while giving the donor outsized influence over how public problems get solved, with no mandate or accountability. Charity at that scale is often less about changing the world and more about controlling the conversation about how it gets changed.

This is the gap that makes CE remarkable by contrast. It publishes its intervention research. It tracks outcomes. It is evaluated by independent organisations like GiveWell and Founders Pledge. Its charities report what they do and what it costs. The whole model is designed around one question: does this actually work?

India has no shortage of problems that meet CE’s criteria — neglected, solvable, enormous in scale, and responsive to basic well-designed interventions. CE’s own research repeatedly identifies India as a high-priority geography. Suvita and Fortify Health are already here. The problems that need solving are not in short supply. And neither are people wanting to make an impact if given the opportunity.

What’s missing is a homegrown version of the engine. Not another foundation or a CSR mandate, but something closer to CE — a system that finds the right problems, recruits the right people, and sends them off with the tools to go fix something real.

India has the talent and also the wealthy individuals who speak of giving back with genuine feeling. The question is whether any of them have the appetite to build something more rigorous than a charity, and more ambitious than a donation. Yes, there are investors who invest in social entrepreneurship ventures, which is commendable. But not everyone will build a company first and hope to get funded. The goal is not to test one’s entrepreneurial ability, but to solve important problems. What’s needed is a more intense version of a social incubator, supported by researchers, which has the problems and their solutions ready on paper, but requires the right people to hammer away on them.

Is anyone going to build one here?

A question for you

If you got the right resources and support, and a well-researched, large problem handed to you, would you leave what you’re doing to go work on it? The catch is, it would pay you 70% of what you earn today. What’s the honest answer?

Subscriber Spotlight

Tulsi Sreepathy wrote about being more intentional in our last piece by Amlan titled Permission, Not Possession:

I’d probably be more intentional about the things that make it onto the bill. Something meaningful, Something that could be passed down. Or maybe even one or two Kindles. They’ll get outdated eventually, but they’d still remain little souvenirs of these times. :)

What we’re reading at Wyzr

Better Never Stops by Shyam Srinivasan. An honest, refreshing book about leadership and doing the right thing at different stages of your life and career. Shyam was the MD & CEO of Federal Bank for 14 years, and transformed it from a regional bank to a national institution. He draws from his career spanning 35 years, and shares the tough calls, the hard-won victories, and the lessons they taught him. This is also a recent Wyzr release, so yes, do check it out! :)

Until next time.

Best,
Yashraj

I spent over ten years in Bangalore as an employed bachelor, which meant moving apartments more often than I would have liked. However civil my friends and I were, being a bachelor was a cardinal sin in the eyes of most apartment owners, and we rarely stuck around for than a year at one place.

For the first couple of years, I carried an ever-growing collection of books with me from one place to the next. Reading had been a passion, and I was proud of my collection. By the third year, I needed help from friends to move all the books into my new place. That was when I seriously considered a Kindle.

A single notebook-sized device that held every book I could ever want to read. The prospect was difficult to argue with. In principle, a reader’s utopia. But of course it was not the same. Walking into a bookshop and finding a book you were not looking for. The smell of the pages. The corner you folded down so you could come back to it later. All of that is part of an experience that a technologically brilliant, good-for-your-eyes Kindle cannot deliver. I gave in anyway. Over the next year I fought myself at every turn and slowly became used to reading on a screen.

A couple of years ago, my parents had to move cities. As I helped them pack, I kept finding things that were staples of my childhood memory. A collection of tattered books my father has held on to for decades. A set of music cassettes we no longer have anything to play on. Old photographs. A handful of small trinkets that had belonged to my grandparents.

My father pulled out a yellowed scrap of paper, carefully wrapped in plastic. An autograph of Pandit Ravi Shankar. “You’ll inherit this when I’m gone,” he said, casually. He slipped the paper back between two pages of Anandamath and waved the book at me. “This one too.”

Today my Kindle lies on my bedside. It contains some 130 titles. None of them can be passed on. The license is tied to my Amazon account, which, depending on how Amazon’s bereavement process goes, will either be closed or quietly maintained under credentials handed off to someone else.

My Spotify “Liked Songs” will disappear the moment the account is de-linked.

What do I actually own?

It is a small, specific question I find myself pondering while watching my son find new ways to hurt himself at the playground.

The autograph inside Anandamath is doing five things at once.

We tend to treat any purchase as a single act, but it was always five.

It transferred a right — my father obtained the paper, the encounter was his, no one else could claim it.
It enabled use — the autograph could be looked at, shown to a guest, pulled out and explained; the book itself could be read, marked, returned to.
It had permanence — it has survived multiple house moves, multiple decades, multiple eras of Indian music.
It allowed inheritance — my father has already decided what becomes of it, and the transfer needs nothing more than the gesture of placing the book in my hands.
And it signalled intention.

The whole arc, from being in the hall where Pandit Ravi Shankar happened to be playing, to choosing which book the paper should live inside, is a statement about the kind of life my father has been trying to live.

For most of human history the five-part bundle was so seamless we never noticed it was five. We bought coats. We owned them. We wore them. They outlived their first owners. The coats were also, underneath, expressions of taste.

Two of those five are now optional. Sometimes more.

Whose right is it anyway?

The fine print of every “buy” button we have clicked says the same thing: this is a license, not a sale. The seller reserves the right to revoke it. Most of the time we do not notice, because most of the time the seller does not.

But sometimes they do. On December 31, 2023, Sony deleted 1,300 seasons of Discovery shows from PlayStation users’ libraries — full series people had paid for, gone overnight, no refund. In July 2009, Amazon deleted copies of 1984 from Kindle devices over a publisher dispute. An irony Orwell would appreciate, I am sure. In 2024, Ubisoft’s director of subscriptions said that players would need to “become comfortable with not owning their games.” The quiet part being said aloud.

BMW tried to push the same idea into hardware. In 2022, they began charging eighteen dollars a month for heated seats. The coil already installed in the car, paid for, sitting there, waiting for a subscription. The backlash forced them to retreat. The lesson they took was not to back away from subscriptions, but to keep them invisible. ConnectedDrive now charges for adaptive cruise, parking assistance, even “Apple CarPlay preparation.” Tesla charges monthly for Full Self-Driving and recently removed the one-time-purchase option entirely. Hyundai’s BlueLink, Tata’s iRA, and Mahindra’s AdrenoX all renew on subscriptions after the complimentary period.

The 130 titles on my Kindle cannot legally be transferred to anyone. The library dissolves when the account does. A wall of physical books still flows through generations the way an inheritance is supposed to. The Kindle, holding ten times more, does not.

The pattern is consistent. Right, permanence, inheritance — the three slowest, most boring functions of buying are being quietly unbundled out of the transaction. What is left is access for as long as the seller decides.

We chose it. We traded the weight of permanence for the frictionless ease of access. We outsourced the maintenance, the storage, and the physical footprint of ownership to the cloud. But in doing so, we handed over the keys.

The intention is the act

There is another perspective at play.

My Kindle holds 130 titles. I have, generously counting, read perhaps 70 of them. The rest sit in the library because a sample drew me in, or someone recommended a book, or a review made me feel like the kind of person who should be reading it.

There is a Japanese word for this: tsundoku. The habit of acquiring books and letting them pile up unread. The pattern is everywhere. WordsRated found that 28.76% of people who start a book never finish it. Kobo, which can see exactly when readers stop tapping their screens, reports that most bestsellers do not get finished by most buyers. Gym memberships peak in January and the actual visits collapse by March.

What is interesting about most of these is when the value arrives. Not at the moment of use. At the moment of purchase. The buying is the consumption. We bought a book about discipline. The buying was the discipline. The reading is optional.

We have quietly invented a category of object whose function is to signal intention and the audience for the signal is internal. We are not buying Kahneman so visitors will think we have read Kahneman. We are buying him so we — the person on the metro, the person on the couch, the person we might become — can think of ourselves as someone who reads Kahneman.

Put a few ordinary objects against the five-part test and the shape becomes visible.

A paperback bought twenty years ago and read three times passes on all five counts. Owned. Used. Permanent. Inheritable. Intentional. The full bundle.

An unread hardcover on a shelf passes on four counts. Owned. Permanent. Inheritable. Intentional. But not used. The future self never arrived. Still, the book remains, and someone else could pick it up. The hardcover is patient. It does not need a password.

A Kindle library reverses it. Used, mostly. But not owned, not really permanent, not inheritable. The signal of intention was there but the library itself does not survive its buyer. A car with subscription features. Used, but parts of it evaporate at title transfer. A Spotify “Liked Songs” list. Used, but vanishes at account closure. A streaming plan. Used, lapses, renews, but never accumulates into anything inheritable.

The shape becomes visible only when we tile them next to each other. The only one that the modern transaction always delivers is the signal of intention. The click, the swipe, the moment a card is read. That part still works.

We are running an economy where the signal is the entire product. The thing that follows the signal is increasingly negotiable. Sometimes it does not arrive. Sometimes it arrives and disappears. Sometimes it arrives and never gets used. What is reliable is the brief flash of becoming, for one moment, the kind of person who bought this.

What passes on

There is a word we use in India — vasiyat — for what is left behind. A house. A piece of farmland. Jewellery. A grandmother’s recipes. An autograph wrapped in plastic, tucked into a particular novel for safekeeping.

The objects of vasiyat were not always expensive. They were almost never the most valuable things in the household. What gave them their weight was that they had been with someone for a long time. They had soaked up a life. When they moved into the next generation, the life moved with them.

Of course, this romanticizes the physical. Physical objects can be a tremendous burden—they burn, they flood, they take up space, and they demand upkeep. We shed that burden when we moved to the cloud. But we also shed the capacity for an object to carry meaning across generations.

The new economy is not really capable of producing objects like this. A Kindle does not soak up a life. A Spotify account does not. A subscription does not. A licensed digital file does not. What survives a person in 2026 is increasingly the receipts. A long string of email confirmations from companies that may or may not still exist when someone tries to retrieve them.

The autograph in Anandamath will go to me one day. I do not know what I will pass on to my son.

A question for you.

What would you do differently if you knew, walking out of every store, that the receipt was the part you’d keep?

Leave a comment

Subscriber Spotlight

Nandini Chandra shared thoughts on Utkarsh’s piece, Where Are You From?

“Made me pause, made me think and after a lot of thought, I have come to the realization that - 1) the idea of home is deeply personal ergo subjective and 2) home is not a place to survive but is a place to live (given that one understands the difference between surviving and living).

Not sure if I was able to articulate my very intense and emotional response after reading this piece but glad that I came across it. Thank you for sharing. :)”

What we are reading at Wyzr

Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier. A very early work on concentration of power and money in digital networks. He saw most of our current reality coming a decade ago.

Until next time.

Best,

Amlan

“I am a citizen of the world.”

Asked where he came from, the Greek philosopher Diogenes gave an answer that scandalized Athens.

It was 4th century BC, and in ancient Greece, this was an oxymoron. Every Greek derived their identity from their polis - the specific city-state that gave them language, law, ritual, and belonging. To claim citizenship of the world was to claim membership of nothing. It was, by the standards of the time, a kind of homelessness dressed up as enlightenment.

Diogenes meant it as a provocation. He lived in a barrel. He owned nothing. He belonged nowhere deliberately, as a statement against what he considered the smallness of tribal loyalty. History has remembered him as a philosopher. What history tends to forget is that he was also, by every conventional measure, a man without a home.

The pertinent question his answer raised has never been satisfactorily answered. What does it mean to belong somewhere? Is home a place you are born into, or one you choose? Can it be carried, or must it be rooted? And what happens to a generation that has, largely without noticing, answered Diogenes in the affirmative?

About two and a half thousand years after Diogenes, a very different group of people attempted a very different answer to the same question.

In 70 AD, the Roman army destroyed Jerusalem and scattered the Jewish people across the known world. What followed was one of the most extraordinary experiments in collective identity that human civilization has ever produced. For nearly two thousand years, a people maintained a coherent sense of who they were, what they believed, how they lived, and where they ultimately belonged - without a physical homeland.

Their secret has been a deliberate process.

In the absence of land, the Jews built a portable homeland out of four precise ingredients: shared text, shared ritual, shared memory, and physical community. The Talmud became, as the scholar Daniel Boyarin has argued, a diasporist manifesto: a traveling homeland. Wherever a Jewish community gathered, they carried the same book, observed the same calendar, recited the same prayers oriented toward the same city. Jewish prayerbooks were maps of sacred geography, reminding worshippers of Jerusalem whether they were praying in Casablanca or Kraków. As the Talmud itself declares: “Wherever Israel went into exile, the Shekhinah went with them.”

The result was belonging without land. Identity without fixed coordinates. Portable homes - by virtue of carrying them deliberately across every displacement.

The average American moves 11.7 times in their lifetime. Most of those moves happen before 45. They move for education, for jobs, for relationships, for cheaper rent, for better weather. Each move is individually rational. The cumulative effect, across a generation, is a civilization in permanent transit.

The story is no different in India. The 2011 Census counted 450 million internal migrants - roughly 37% of the population. One in three urban Indians today is a migrant. The IIT graduate in Bangalore who grew up in Patna. The MBA from Ahmedabad who spent a decade in Singapore before returning to Mumbai. The consultant who has lived in four cities in eight years and answers the question “where are you from?” with a pause to ascertain his own answer before answering it for the world.

I have asked this question to many people of my generation, and the answers always fall into three categories.

Some say home is where they have built their new life - the city where they met their partner, raised their children, built their friendships. Home, for them, is not inherited. It is constructed. This is the diaspora answer, and it suggests that belonging is something that you make happen.

Some still long quietly for where they came from. The specific quality of an October evening in their hometown. The chai at a particular corner. The feeling of being known without having to explain yourself. They have built full lives elsewhere. Yet, the longing doesn’t go away. Bollywood has raked in millions leveraging this yearning of the millennials.

🎵

Mitti ki hai jo khushboo, tu kaise bhulayega?

Tu chahe kahi jaye, tu laut ke aayega

🎵

Tooti Chaarpaai Wohi

Thandi Purvaai Rasta Dekhe

Doodhon Ki Malaai Wohi

Mitti Ki Suraahi Rasta Dekhe

And some others call themselves citizens of the world. They have lived in enough places that no single one holds a claim. They feel comfortable everywhere, and entirely at home nowhere. They have chosen Diogenes, whether they know it or not. What they feel about that choice, in their most honest moments, is something only they can answer.

What all three have in common is this: the conditions that once made belonging automatic - staying close to where you were born, within the reach of the same community, the same landscape, the same rituals repeated season after season - have been replaced by conditions that make belonging something you have to build deliberately, or go without entirely.

And most people were never taught how to build it. Because for most of human history, they didn’t have to.

The diaspora communities understood something that modern mobility has forgotten. Home is a practice. It requires shared text - the stories a community tells itself about who it is. It requires shared ritual - the repeated acts that mark time together. It requires shared memory - the accumulation of experience that makes a group of people feel witnessed by each other. And it requires physical proximity - the simple, irreplaceable fact of being near the people who matter.

Modernity has made all four harder to sustain simultaneously. We move too often for memory to accumulate. We are too busy for ritual. We are too scattered for proximity. And the stories we tell ourselves are increasingly individualised - about personal achievement, personal growth, personal freedom - rather than about the communities we are part of.

I have moved between enough cities to have lost count of the version of myself that each one briefly held. I know what it is to arrive somewhere new and feel the particular exhaustion of having to rebuild from scratch: the friendships, the routines, the small anchors of daily life that make a place feel inhabited. And I know what it is to leave a place before that work is finished, carrying the half-built version of a home to the next city, where it will have to start again.

What I have come to understand, slowly and not without significant resistance, is that what I am craving is not a place. It is a set of conditions. A commune surrounded by nature, with the people I love close enough to walk to. Animals on a farm. Bread broken together. The basic needs of existence met in abundance, and the rest of the world held gently at a distance. I know how this sounds: utopian, impractical, all kinds of unfathomable. I have stopped being embarrassed by it. Because underneath the impracticality is something quite simple: the desire to be deeply rooted, in a place and among people, in a way that modern life seems almost architecturally designed to prevent.

The realistic version of this is what I will keep striving toward. However long it takes.

Diogenes was not wrong that belonging can be portable. The diaspora proved it. But they proved something else too - that portable belonging requires deliberate construction. You cannot simply call yourself a citizen of the world and expect to feel at home in it. You have to build your home. With specific ingredients. Over time.

The question worth sitting with this week is not where you are from. That answer is complicated, and probably getting more so.

The better question is: what are the ingredients of home, for you specifically? And are you actively building them, wherever you are? Or are you waiting to arrive somewhere that will finally feel like the right place, not quite realising that the feeling you are waiting for is not found. It is made.

Subscriber Spotlight

Garv Malik shared his thoughts on Yashraj Sharma’s piece The Wrong Kind of Ambitious.

“It also comes down to purpose. A luxury car or credit card points might keep the consulting monkey keep running on the hedonistic treadmill, but you never taste fulfilment.”

What we’re reading at Wyzr

The Other Side of Silence by Urvashi Butalia. In 1947, the Partition of India displaced fifteen million people in a matter of weeks - the largest forced migration in the 20th century. Butalia spent years collecting oral histories from survivors, and what emerges is a piercing human account of what people carried when they left, what they left behind, and what it meant to lose a home not gradually, as our generation has, but in a single, violent rupture. It’s heart wrenching, and yet, necessary reading to understand our history.

Did you enjoy this edition of Plain Sight? Write to me with your thoughts, including the homes you have inherited or the ones you have built. We will share the most compelling responses in a future edition.

Until next week.

Best,

Utkarsh

If you know anything about basketball, you probably know that it’s dominated by the United States. That’s where the sport originated and grew, and became a cultural phenomenon in the years since it was first created by Dr. James Naismith in the 1890s.

At the global level, although the US was always the dominant force, other countries still competed with it. Across the 12 Olympic Games between 1936 and 1988, the US won gold 7 times. A formidable record, but not a monopoly. It was a competitive global sport, with talent distributed across continents.

Since 1992, though, the US has won gold in 7 of the 8 Olympics. The equation completely flipped.

In the Barcelona games in ‘92, the United States won every game. Their average margin of victory was 44 points. Opponents would ask the Americans for autographs at halftime.

What changed?

In April 1989, FIBA — the international governing body for basketball — allowed professional players to compete at the Olympics for the first time. Until then, it was restricted to amateurs. The NBA was by then the most competitive, the most watched, and the richest basketball league anywhere. Its players were the best players on earth, but they couldn’t participate in the Olympics. When the restrictions fell, everyone knew who was going to dominate.

Even the single exception where they didn’t win, in Athens 2004, came when the team was assembled without the league’s biggest stars.

The NBA itself hadn’t always been this dominant. Founded in 1946, it spent its early decades as a financially fragile league struggling to fill arenas. It was in the 1980s that it became a phenomenon. By the ‘90s, the NBA was the most sought-after stage in basketball on the planet. Today, young players across the world dream not of representing their nation as much as making it to the NBA. National jerseys are still worn with pride, yes. But NBA jerseys are the ones worn with the greatest ambition.

Top NBA players earn upwards of $50 million in salary. The median pay for an NBA star is estimated to be around 6-7 million. In the EuroLeague, the second best league, top salaries are in the 5-6 million range, lower than the median NBA star, and about a tenth of the top players. It shouldn’t be a surprise that the world’s best basketball talent is concentrated in the NBA, and that the US comfortably dominates the Olympics in both men’s and women’s categories.

Talent goes where money is, and when there’s enough talent at the same place, it creates a thriving ecosystem where quality and ability keep compounding. The moat created is so large that it’s nearly impossible to compete with it. It’s true both for sport and business. Let’s look at what’s happening closer home.

Cricket fans will tell you the T20 World Cup is the most prestigious competition in the game. They’d be right. But ask a slightly different question — which T20 competition has the most competitive cricket? — and if you strip away emotion, the answer will unanimously be the IPL. It has been for a while now.

The IPL is already going the way of the NBA, and the numbers tell you why.

An average IPL contract is worth INR 4.4 Cr. The top ones earn over 20 Cr, with 27 Cr being the highest. Outside the IPL, the top salary across all leagues is ~8.3 Cr in INR terms, for Dewald Brevis in South Africa’s SA20. Across BBL (Australia), PSL (Pakistan), and The Hundred (England), the highest salaries are in the INR 2-4.5 Cr bracket. An average IPL contract is equivalent to the highest pay for other leagues. And in general, except in India, Australia, and England, national contracts don’t come anywhere near what these leagues offer.

Essentially, for the best cricketers, these leagues offer more money than playing for their countries. And among these leagues, the Indian Premier League is a clear, outright winner.

The money ensures that the best cricketers in the world leave no stone unturned to participate in the IPL. And not just cricketers, even the support staff, the match officials, and the commentary and presentation teams comprise the best available resources on the planet. No wonder then that the quality of cricket on display is the best in the world.

What it has also done over the years, and it’s now becoming increasingly clear, is the creation of an excess of talent within India. We have more elite Indian T20 players than there are spots in the squad. Many of them who would walk into most international teams will never represent their own country.

It also means that international competitions, including the World Cup, feature not the best talent in the world, but the best talent available in any country. Therefore, the quality of cricket we see in a World Cup is significantly below what we see in the IPL. Yes, there’s higher prestige attached, but over the long term, the lack of quality will first turn viewers away, and then the advertisers.

One solace for international cricket, unlike basketball, is that players can participate in multiple international leagues, which should also raise the quality of those leagues. The same support staff work across franchises worldwide, so players in each league benefit. That means the gulf between the IPL and other leagues should not be as large as the one the NBA has with its competitors. That’s what we can hope.

Either way, the economics will continue to incentivise participation in these leagues over international cricket for top players, and we’ll see an increasing number of cricketers retiring from international cricket much before their time is due.

The economics of IPL, combined with the enormous talent pool of India, have created an unmatched ecosystem. There’s a clear, proven system to nurture talent. And there’s fierce competition at every level. The quality of cricketers we’ll see in the next generation will be far, far above the global average. Most of them will never play international cricket.

My prediction is that a few years from now, international cricket in the limited-overs format will be limited to the World Cups and a couple of marquee events. Representing the country will be a matter of pride, but playing in the IPL and other major leagues will be the primary professional goal.

That’s what money does not just to sport, but to any domain where economics and ambition intersect. Let’s look at some examples from business.

Silicon Valley began with defence contracts and university research — economics, again. Talent first arrived because of the money. Then the talent became the draw. For decades, the world’s best tech talent lived within a 50-mile radius in the Bay Area. Apple, Meta, Google, Nvidia, Cisco, Stripe, Uber, Dropbox, OpenAI, Anthropic — the list is endless. In 2025, the Bay Area captured 60% of all global AI funding. In 2024, 57% of the entire venture funding in the US went to Bay Area startups. If you’re building something groundbreaking in tech, that’s where you need to be.

Something similar played out in China in a different field.

In 1980, Shenzhen was a fishing village of 30,000 people on the southern coast of China. Deng Xiaoping designated it a Special Economic Zone — a small patch of China where market forces were allowed to operate freely. The economics came first — cheap land, simplified regulations, tax incentives. Factories followed next. Companies came in, and with them engineers. Then more engineers, drawn by the growing list of companies. Within a decade, Shenzhen had found its identity: electronics manufacturing. In four decades, it had become the world’s hardware capital, producing an estimated 90% of the world’s consumer electronics. Today, it is home to Huawei, Tencent, DJI, BYD and many others. The ecosystem that economics built eventually became unassailable.

The pattern is hard to unsee. Economics attracts talent. Talent concentration builds an ecosystem. And the ecosystem compounds, creating a moat so wide that competing from the outside can start to feel beside the point.

The IPL didn’t set out to eclipse international cricket. But it did set out to make money. Money attracted the best players, the best coaches, the best analysts, the best storytellers. And now, year after year, the ecosystem deepens and the gap with the rest of the world widens.

What it does to the future of sport remains to be seen. But one way or the other, the pattern will play out.

What do you think?

Do you agree that money eventually is the ultimate moat? If not, in what ways can the excess of capital be beaten at a large scale?

Leave a comment

What we’re reading at Wyzr

The Geography of Genius by Eric Weiner. The travels to places — Athens, Florence, Silicon Valley, Calcutta — asking why certain places, at certain moments in history, produce a disproportionate concentration of genius and innovation. It’s a question I’ve been thinking about. If you find the ideas in today’s newsletter interesting, this book will take them much further.

Until next time.

Best,

Yashraj

Someone once asked Peter Thiel what the opposite of a cult is.

His answer: a consulting firm.

It reads like a joke until you think about it. A cult, at its worst, is a group of people fanatically wrong about something. They will likely lack wisdom, but what they never lack is belief, even if misplaced. They are organised around a conviction so strong it borders on madness. A consulting firm (Thiel specifically named Accenture) is the opposite, almost. Smart people, impressive credentials, but no conviction of their own. They parachute into companies, solve the problems they’re handed, collect their fees, and move on. There’s no long-term stake and mission.

The bite in Thiel’s observation is less about consultants, but more about a certain kind of life. One where you rent out your intelligence to whoever can afford it, optimise for income, call it a career, and never once ask, “What am I actually building, and does it matter?”

If you look around, that life isn’t just common, but even aspirational. Think about where the world’s smartest young people are headed.

Walk into any premier engineering or business school’s placement season, and the most coveted offers come from the same handful of names. McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, Google, Meta, and the worthy competitors of each of them. These are the destinations that make parents proud, and signal to the world — I made it!

But for a moment, think about what the work actually achieves. Not for yourself but at large.

For instance, if you’re among the brightest engineers at Meta, all of your intelligence is ultimately directed at one goal: making people scroll for a little longer. Getting one more eyeball to linger on one more reel, so that one more advertiser pays Meta a little more money. That’s the output. That’s what your talent is in service of.

To be fair, when social media first emerged, it genuinely changed the world. It connected people across continents, gave voice to movements, and democratised information in ways that were previously unimaginable. But today, the marginal value of one more brilliant mind optimising your feed is, at best, negligible for the world, and enormously profitable for the company.

Consulting isn’t much different. McKinsey and BCG have some of the sharpest young minds on the planet on their rosters. What do they do with them? They solve other people’s problems. And when they’re done, they move on and solve someone else’s problems. The clients change, the industries change, but the fundamental transaction doesn’t: a smart person helps a company make more money, regardless of what that company does or who it serves. I’ll go to the extent of saying that if every consulting firm in the world shut down tomorrow, it wouldn’t take too long for the world to adjust.

None of this is an indictment of the people making these choices. They’re doing exactly what a rational person would do in a system that rewards prestige and pay over purpose. But that’s precisely the problem. The system has convinced an entire generation that optimising for their own outcome is the same as doing something meaningful.

It isn’t.

Dutch historian Rutger Bregman has a name for what we’ve been describing. He calls it the opposite of moral ambition.

In his book Moral Ambition, Bregman makes a provocation that the brightest minds of our generation are not working on the world’s most important problems. They’re working on the world’s most lucrative ones. And the two are rarely the same thing. He points out that nearly half of Harvard graduates go into consulting or finance — not because they’re bad people, but because the system around them makes that the path of least resistance and maximum reward.

This can even extend to entrepreneurship.

In India, we’ve recently seen a surge in the celebration of entrepreneurship. That’s a good thing, but what bothers me is the shape this entrepreneurship sometimes takes. I’ll give you an example. When sattu powder is repackaged in sleek branding and sold at a premium, or when makhana is dressed up in pretty pouches and marketed to urban millennials at prices that would seem offensive to the farmers who actually grow them, what incremental good does it eventually do?

I don’t say this to be dismissive. These businesses do create value. The supply chains do reach farmers and hopefully leave them better off than they were. But is this really what we want our sharpest minds spending their best years on? Will it even matter if a company like that shuts down? Someone else will just step in and offer the same thing in a different cloak. This is what happens when intelligent people only aim for the lowest-hanging fruit.

The harder fruit, the ones that actually need reaching for, are hanging much higher. Energy transition, last-mile healthcare in poorly connected districts, primary education in far-flung villages, access to clean water for all, better and safer roads, etc. These are not feel-good causes but intellectually brutal problems that demand the best minds available. But most of the best minds are, by and large, making you scroll, helping entities strike deals, or figuring out which regional snack hasn’t been gentrified yet. That’s where I feel we do a disservice to ourselves and to the world we live in.

Now, I also want to acknowledge the reality that we in India live in. Because without it, this just comes across as preaching from a privileged position.

Most of us grew up in homes where stability was never guaranteed. Where the ambition was simply not to repeat the struggle of the generation before. Where a government job, a steady salary, or a house of your own weren’t modest goals. They were the whole dream. And when that dream is finally within reach, nobody has the right to tell you it isn’t enough.

So let me be clear: I’m not talking to that person. I’m talking to the one who has already crossed that threshold. The one for whom the question is no longer can I survive? but what do I do with everything I’ve been given?

There is a meaningful difference between survival and ambition. Survival is what you do when you have no choice. Ambition is what you exercise when you do.

I studied at some of India’s best educational institutions, including an IIM. Most of my peers are engaged in jobs that precisely fit the ones I described above. These are my friends. They’re all extremely smart people with perfectly noble intentions. But I still have a gripe.

If you have a premier education, a set of skills that put you in the top few percent of this country’s talent pool, and genuine options in front of you, then choosing the path that pays the most and asks the least of you is a choice that, in many ways, you’re free to make.

Making that choice isn’t wrong by any measure, but it most certainly shouldn’t be worthy of emulation. Because that’s exactly how we breed a culture of pushing smart people into mediocrity. And that’s exactly what happens in the best of institutes even today.

The question is not whether you are smart enough. It’s whether you will aim at anything worth being smart for.

A question for you

If you had the skills, the education, and the financial cushion to work on anything, would you be doing what you’re doing now? And if not, what’s actually stopping you?

Leave a comment

What we’re reading at Wyzr

Moral Ambition by Rutger Bregman. The book states that the most talented people in the world are solving the wrong problems, and makes an uncomfortably convincing case that the rest of us already know it. This is Bregman’s third book, and I enjoyed his earlier work, Human Kind, tremendously as well.

Until next time.

Best,

Yashraj

Let’s begin today’s edition by answering three super-easy middle-school grade questions, basis our world map illustrated above:

1. Is Greenland smaller, similar, or larger in size than Africa?

2. Is South America smaller, similar, or larger in size compared to Europe?

3. Where is the centre of the world on this map?

The map above has hung on classroom walls across the world for over four centuries. You have almost certainly grown up with some version of it. It has shaped your intuition about which countries are large and which are small, which civilizations dominate the globe and which sit at its fringes, and about where the centre of the world lies.

Almost everything it has told you is wrong.

In 1569, the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator faced a specific, practical problem. Sailors navigating open ocean needed to be able to draw a straight line between two points on a map and follow it as a compass bearing. For this to work, angles had to be preserved consistently across the map’s surface. The only way to do that on a flat sheet was to stretch the landmasses, and the further from the equator, the greater the stretch. Mercator made a deliberate, rational trade-off: sacrifice accurate size in order to preserve accurate angles.

It was a brilliant solution. For 16th-century seafarers, it worked perfectly. Mercator was not lying, he was merely optimising for a specific navigational challenge, and he was right to do so.

The problem is what happened next.

A map designed to help European ships navigate open ocean became the default image of the world in schools, government buildings, newsrooms, and living rooms across the globe for four hundred years. Nobody made a conscious decision about this. It simply was the map that existed, and so it became the map that was used. The sailors who needed it were long gone. But their map stayed, carrying all its distortions quietly into every room it entered.

The distortions, it turned out, were not politically neutral. The Mercator projection was created at the height of European colonialism, by a European, for European navigators. Its stretching effect inflates the global North and compresses the equatorial South. Russia looks larger than the entire continent of Africa. It is, in fact, almost half the size. India looks smaller than Scandinavia. It is, in fact, three times larger. These are not minor distortions. They are the image of the world that billions of people have carried in their heads as simple geographic fact. And as much as we wouldn’t like to admit, size matters.

Interestingly, since then a lot of other maps have come into being. The Peters Projection corrects area at the cost of shape. Countries look stretched, but their relative sizes are accurate. When Boston public schools switched to it a few years ago, it was reportedly the first US school district to do so. Students who had grown up thinking of Africa as a middling-sized landmass were suddenly looking at a continent that dwarfs Europe and North America combined. The South-Up Map simply flips the Mercator on its head. North is up only by convention. In 1154, Arab geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi drew his map with south at the top and the Arabian Peninsula at the centre. It was no less accurate than the map we use today. It was just made by someone from a different place, optimising for a different vantage point.

And then there is the AuthaGraph, invented in 1999 by Japanese architect Hajime Narukawa. He divided the globe into 96 triangular sections, projected them onto a tetrahedron, and unfolded it into a rectangle, preserving both shape and area as faithfully as any flat map has ever managed. In 2016, it won Japan’s Good Design Grand Award, beating over 43,000 entries. It looks profoundly strange to anyone raised on Mercator (have a look below). Antarctica sits in the lower right rather than stretching across the bottom. The Pacific Ocean, which covers more of the Earth’s surface than all landmasses combined, finally appears at its true scale. Strange, because accurate.

No flat map is perfect. The planet is a sphere and paper is not, and something must always be sacrificed. The question is never whether a map distorts, that’s bound to happen. The question is what did the mapmaker choose to preserve, and what did they choose to sacrifice, and for whom.

I want you to stay with that question. Not for geography, but for everything else.

A physical map is just the most visible version of something that happens continuously in human life. Every system we are born into, every family, religion, government, profession, culture, hands us a map. It tells us what is at the centre and what is at the edges. What is large and important. What is small and marginal. Which direction is up. Most of us spend our entire lives navigating by maps we did not draw, without ever asking who drew them, or when, or what problem they were originally trying to solve.

The career map handed to most middle-class Indians places engineering or medicine at the centre, a specific set of institutions as the route, and financial stability as the destination. This map was drawn when the primary navigational challenge was genuine scarcity, when those routes were among the very few reliable paths out of uncertainty. It was a good map, for that terrain. But the terrain has changed. The map has not. The success map places wealth, title, and visible achievement at the centre, and care, meaning, and deep relationships at the edges as things you get to once the important work is done. Someone drew this map too. It reflects a very specific set of priorities from a very specific historical moment. It is not a description of reality. It is a projection. So is the social map of what a good life looks like, drawn by families and communities that are doing their genuine best to help. The distortions are not malicious. They are, like Mercator’s, the result of optimising for a navigational challenge that may no longer be yours.

I lived the Indian dream faithfully for a long time. Best institutes, great companies, clear next steps. The path was well-marked and I followed it well. But, I was completely broken inside. Not because the path was wrong in some abstract sense, but because it had been drawn for a destination I had never actually chosen. I had been navigating by someone else’s map so fluently that I had mistaken fluency for direction. Ripping it apart was the most disorienting thing I have ever done, and the most necessary. What I found on the other side was not necessarily a better map. It was the uncomfortable, clarifying experience of having to figure out, for the first time, what I actually wanted the centre of my world to look like.

The most unsettling thing about the AuthaGraph is not that it looks wrong. It is that it looks wrong to people who have spent their whole lives looking at the Mercator. The world has not changed. Only the frame of reference has.

I would love to leave you with a few questions to ruminate on, this week:

Which map are you currently navigating by? Who drew it? What were they optimising for when they drew it? Is the destination it points you toward the one you actually want to reach? And, perhaps the harder question, are you certain you would recognise a better map if you saw one? Or would it just look strange?

PS: Oh, and yes, these are the answers to the mini-quiz we started this edition with:

1. Africa is 14 times the size of Greenland! Yes, now look at the map again, it’s hilarious that they appear similar.

2. South America is nearly twice the size of Europe. Nowhere even close to being comparable.

3. The centre of the world on the Mercator map is Greenwich, London. The reason? Britain stationed its Royal Observatory there in the 19th century. That’s it.

Subscriber Spotlight

Shweta shared her thoughts on our piece,

“I always felt a loss because my children and my husband don't know my Mother tongue. I thought it's something I can always go back to when I'm with my parents, siblings - turns out I'm slowly forgetting the words too. And more so because not all languages have scripts so mine would die with the native speakers. What a lovely article”

What we’re reading at Wyzr

Factfulness by Hans Rosling. Rosling spent his career demonstrating that the mental map most educated people carry of the world, who is poor, who is rich, how fast things are changing, where progress is happening, is systematically wrong. Not because of ignorance, but because the map was accurate once and never got updated. The book is, at its core, an argument for the discipline of checking your assumptions against reality rather than against other people who share your map.

Did you enjoy this edition of Plain Sight? Write to me at with your thoughts, including the maps you have inherited and the ones you have torn up. We will share the most compelling responses in a future edition.

Until next week.

Best,

Utkarsh