For a long time, I wore that number as a badge of honor. It sounded impressive. It felt productive. It gave me a sense of identity.

Then something strange happened.

I realized I was no longer reading for the joy of reading.

I was reading for the number.

The target had quietly shifted.

The books were no longer the point. The scorecard was.

And that realization led me to an uncomfortable conclusion:

You probably should not read 100 books a year.

Not because reading is bad. Not because learning is overrated. But because metrics have a nasty habit of hijacking meaning.

When the Number Becomes the Goal

At first, a target can be useful.

Read more.

Exercise more.

Write more.

Learn more.

But somewhere along the way, the target stops being a guide and becomes an identity.

You are no longer someone who enjoys reading.

You are “a person who reads 100 books a year.”

That sounds harmless until you notice what comes next.

You only watch movies with IMDb ratings above 7.0.

You only appreciate the “right” artists.

Your walls display Salvador Dalí’s melting clocks because they signal sophistication.

You would never be caught dead reading a Chetan Bhagat novel. God forbid one of his books accidentally appears on your Goodreads profile.

You dismiss masala Bollywood films without watching them.

You appreciate the paintings you’re supposed to appreciate.

You consume culture not for pleasure but for status.

At that point, you are no longer living.

You are curating.

Your self-image becomes a prison.

The Tyranny of Being the Person You Think You Are

The problem with a self-image is that once you create it, you spend enormous energy defending it.

As my reading numbers climbed, so did the pressure.

I was not asking whether a book deserved my attention.

I was asking whether it counted toward the total.

I was not finishing tasks because they were important.

I was finishing them because that was who I believed I was.

I was the person who cleared every email.

The person who completed every meeting note.

The person who tied up every loose end before sleeping.

Nobody demanded it.

Nobody was monitoring me.

Yet I routinely found myself awake at two or three in the morning, cleaning up the day’s work simply because my self-image required it.

The irony is that the universe did not care.

Vienna did not wait for me.

The roses bloomed and wilted without asking whether I had time to smell them.

Life continued while I was busy maintaining an identity.

And I suspect many of us are doing exactly the same thing.

Pavlov’s Smartphone

Today we live inside a giant behavioral experiment.

A notification appears.

We respond.

An email arrives.

We respond.

A message pings.

We respond.

Like Pavlov’s dogs, we have been trained to react.

The modern economy runs on our inability to sit still.

Every app wants our attention.

Every platform wants engagement.

Every news cycle wants outrage.

Every metric wants improvement.

We spend our lives chasing targets we never consciously chose.

Which brings me to AI.

And Thanos.

Why AI Is Really Thanos

Most discussions about artificial intelligence revolve around a familiar fear.

The machines will become smarter than us.

They will take over.

The Terminator will arrive.

Humanity will fight a war against robots.

I don’t think that is the most likely future.

I think AI is something far more dangerous.

AI is Thanos.

Not because it wants to destroy half of humanity.

But because it may destroy half of what keeps us occupied.

For centuries, human beings have structured their lives around work, effort, and achievement.

AI is steadily removing those requirements.

Tasks disappear.

Processes become automated.

Creative work becomes easier.

Administrative work becomes trivial.

Knowledge becomes instantly available.

The result may not be oppression.

It may be idleness.

And idleness is not necessarily a blessing.

The Unbearable Silence of Being

Imagine a world where many of your current pursuits no longer require your participation.

The chase slows down.

The targets disappear.

The deadlines become less important.

The notifications lose relevance.

What happens then?

Are we prepared to face the silence?

Can we simply exist?

Can we sit in a room without reaching for stimulation?

Can we be content without constantly becoming?

Or do we descend into conflict because we no longer know what to do with ourselves?

I sometimes wonder whether the greatest challenge of the AI age will not be economic.

It will be psychological.

Human beings are remarkably good at solving problems.

We are far less skilled at living without them.

In Indian mythology, after Lord Krishna departed, the Yadavas did not fall to some external enemy.

They destroyed themselves.

The threat came from within.

That possibility feels strangely relevant today.

AI may not conquer humanity.

It may simply remove enough friction from life that we are forced to confront ourselves.

And many of us may not like what we find.

Building the Avengers

If AI is Thanos, then what are the Infinity Stones we need to protect?

I suspect they are surprisingly ordinary.

Reading for pleasure rather than achievement.

Sports.

Friendships.

Conversation.

Community.

Walking.

Music.

Creating things that nobody pays for.

Learning things that nobody measures.

Developing an identity beyond work.

An identity beyond achievement.

An identity beyond productivity.

The challenge is not technological.

It is human.

Can we cultivate habits that make life meaningful when efficiency ceases to be scarce?

Can we slow down enough to rediscover things that were never optimized in the first place?

The Wealth Metric Nobody Talks About

Over time, I have come to a different definition of wealth.

It has nothing to do with money.

Nothing to do with title.

Nothing to do with designation.

It is measured by a single question:

How many hours a day can you safely switch off your phone?

Not silent mode.

Not airplane mode.

Not turning off notifications.

Actually switching it off.

Completely.

My personal aspiration is simple.

Work for eight hours.

Switch off for sixteen.

People who truly need me will still find me.

My family knows how to reach me.

Emergencies have always found a way.

Everything else can wait.

Because the ultimate luxury in the AI age may not be intelligence.

It may be disconnection.

Take It Slow

There is another lesson hidden in our mythology.

Lord Krishna did not react instantly to every provocation. Shishupal was forgiven again and again before the final line was crossed.

Patience mattered.

Deliberation mattered.

Restraint mattered.

Yet modern life trains us in the opposite direction.

Immediate replies.

Instant reactions.

Continuous engagement.

Permanent availability.

The future may belong to those who relearn the ability to pause.

To think.

To wait.

To be.

Thanos Is Already Here

The future is not coming.

It has arrived.

Thanos is not a purple alien descending from the sky.

Thanos is sitting quietly on your desk.

It is ChatGPT.

It is Gemini.

It is Claude.

It is every system that makes human effort cheaper, faster, and less necessary.

The question is not whether AI will change the world.

It already has.

The question is whether we can build lives that remain meaningful when work is no longer enough to define us.

Thanos is here.

Whether you become an Avenger is up to you.

I set out without a destination in mind. I set out without a duration in mind. It felt wonderfully liberating.

What I should have had in mind, however, was a dhaba.

After being thoroughly appalled by the pathetic quality of food available and enduring an interminable search for breakfast, I have decided to return to the good old Delhi.

I have learned that a traveler can survive without a destination. A traveler can survive without a duration. But a traveler should never set out without a dhaba.

The three Ds.

Destination. Duration. Dhaba.

I thought I could conquer the first two through sheer spontaneity. It turns out the third one conquered me.

The 3D where I finally met my match.

So, Lord giveth and Lord taketh away. In this case, He gave me freedom, took away my breakfast, and sent me home.

Delhi, here I come.

Vada pav, here I come.

Now, when I go on a trip, I am also pretty anal about it. (just like I am painfully anal about almost everything in life). Anal about everything in life. The font size, the colour, the size, the beard, the bedsheet, the pillow placement, the mess on my table. I do like to keep things my way. That will not be a very unreasonable request in today's world. Unfortunately, for those who get married, that simple freedom just disappears. You sit in your home, which is becoming a bigger and bigger and more and more beautiful castle. People who come to the home are wowed. You guys really live in luxury. Awesome. You must be really happy over here. To tell you frankly, I am miserable beyond belief. I find the aesthetics ghastly. I find the Egyptian mummy sitting next to my father's photo anachronistic. If I had my way, I would have thrown that bloody statue off my window long, long back. But unfortunately, I have chosen peace over freedom, and as Milton Friedman Milton Friedman said, if you trade off some freedom for more prosperity, you actually paradoxically end up having less of both. I think the same principle applies here. if you trade off some freedom for more peace, you actually end up with both less peace and less freedom. It took me 44 years to figure that out. Now, I don't want to waste another second. I'm done. I'm done dealing with people I can't understand. I can't understand why people drink. I can't understand why people smoke. I can't understand why people have drugs. I can't understand why people dance. I can't understand why people drive. I can't understand why people love their family. I can't understand why people love their country. I can't understand why people love people. I can't understand why people love earth. I can't understand why people love universe. As you would have figured out by now, I am a man with very little knowledge, but what I do have is the intense curiosity which makes me shameless in asking the questions. I am the kid in search of the emperor's new clothes. Let’s tear them apart.

I am also hearing that the Europeans may soon award themselves a Nobel Prize for this discovery.

I am a desi fellow. I have lived in perhaps fifty countries. I have spent years in China, the UAE, and elsewhere. Yet I always come back to India.

Every morning I wake up and check the democracy weather report.

Let’s see what V-Dem says today.

“India is one of the world’s leading autocratisers.”

This sounds serious.

Are we certain they didn’t confuse an autorickshaw with an autocratiser?

Never mind. Same difference.

We must remain worried and vigilant. The wise men across the ocean have spoken.

All together now:

“Pakistan has freer media than India.”

Excellent. Let us proceed.

Since V-Dem appears to possess supernatural insight into the state of Indian democracy, perhaps we should ask it another question.

How democratic is India?

Kaboom.

India: Rank 106.

Countries ranked above India?

Somaliland.

Interesting.

What else?

Lesotho.

Wait.

Lesotho is ranked around 60 while India is 106.

This Modi fellow must clearly be stopped. V-Dem has spoken.

But a small question arises.

What exactly has democratic life in Lesotho looked like?

A brief journey through the democratic history of our superior democracy:

1970: Prime Minister Leabua Jonathan loses an election, annuls the results, suspends the constitution, and declares a state of emergency.

1986: Military coup. Government overthrown. Military rule begins.

1991: Another military coup. The previous coup leader is himself overthrown.

1994: Royal coup. Parliament dissolved. Constitution suspended.

1998: Major political crisis. Foreign troops from South Africa and Botswana enter the country to restore stability.

2014: Attempted coup. Soldiers seize key facilities. The Prime Minister flees the country.

2017: Political violence culminates in the assassination of the army commander.

Meanwhile, India’s democratic record since independence includes:

Zero military coups.

Zero suspended constitutions.

Zero generals seizing power.

Hundreds of millions of people voting repeatedly to remove governments they dislike.

Thousands of newspapers.

Tens of thousands of television debates.

Millions of citizens expressing opinions, often at unbearable volume.

But please, do not confuse yourself with facts.

The index has spoken.

Anyway, we are constantly told that India has become deeply unfree. Nobody can speak. Nobody can criticize. Nobody can question authority.

Interesting.

Who exactly is this authority?

Modi?

The same Modi who failed to secure a parliamentary majority in the last election and had to form a coalition government?

That seems like an odd dictator.

Perhaps we need a bigger man.

Ah yes.

Mr. Xi Jinping.

Now there is a man.

A familiar argument has resurfaced in recent years.

China succeeded because it transformed its people before it transformed its economy.

India failed because it never did.

There is some truth in this.

Human capital matters.

Literate workers are easier to train.

Healthy workers are more productive.

Disciplined institutions matter.

China invested heavily in literacy, public health, and state capacity between 1949 and 1980. India did not achieve comparable outcomes. The difference is visible in manufacturing, exports, and infrastructure.

But beneath the statistics lies a more important question.

What is the purpose of development?

If development is simply the maximization of industrial output, then perhaps China chose the superior path.

A state unconstrained by elections, dissent, courts, journalists, or public opinion can move mountains.

It can also move people, ideas, and freedoms out of the way.

India attempted something no country of its size, diversity, and poverty had ever attempted before:

Universal political freedom before economic prosperity.

China’s sequence was straightforward.

No political freedom.

No economic freedom.

Then economic freedom.

India’s sequence was far messier.

Political freedom first.

Economic freedom much later.

The comparison often assumes that only the final GDP figure matters.

History suggests otherwise.

The twentieth century demonstrated that a state can eliminate illiteracy while simultaneously eliminating millions of people.

It can build highways while bulldozing communities.

It can create disciplined workers by making disobedience dangerous.

Human capital is not free.

The question is not whether it is built.

The question is how.

China’s transformation was achieved through campaigns, coercion, political violence, social engineering, and a degree of state intrusion that few societies would willingly accept.

The results were remarkable.

So were the costs.

Success creates optical illusions.

As long as growth remains extraordinary, every sacrifice appears justified.

Every restriction appears temporary.

Every compromise appears prudent.

But economic growth is not the same thing as human flourishing.

A society can become richer while becoming less free.

A population can become more productive while becoming less creative.

A nation can gain wealth while losing the ability to question how that wealth is being used.

Rabindranath Tagore envisioned a different destination:

“Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high.”

Not where the factory is most efficient.

Not where GDP grows fastest.

Not where dissent disappears.

Where the mind is without fear.

That distinction matters.

The deepest form of human capital is not literacy.

It is curiosity.

It is the freedom to challenge authority, question orthodoxy, invent new ideas, and pursue unconventional paths.

These qualities are difficult to measure and impossible to command.

The same political system that can force rapid industrialization can also suppress the intellectual disorder from which great innovations emerge.

Today, China stands wealthier than India by almost every conventional economic metric.

That is undeniable.

But wealth is only one chapter of a nation’s story.

The more interesting question is what happens when growth slows.

History contains many examples of societies discovering that economic freedom cannot permanently substitute for political freedom.

The bargain works magnificently during expansion.

It becomes more fragile during stagnation.

As Ernest Hemingway wrote about bankruptcy, it happens “gradually, then suddenly.”

The same can be true of political legitimacy.

The danger for democracies is paralysis.

The danger for authoritarian systems is brittleness.

India’s path is slower, noisier, and frequently exasperating.

Elections delay decisions.

Courts obstruct governments.

Citizens protest projects.

Journalists criticize leaders.

Coalitions collapse.

It often looks inefficient.

It is.

Freedom is inefficient.

That is precisely the point.

The challenge before India is not to imitate China’s methods.

It is to achieve China’s gains in literacy, health, infrastructure, and state capacity without abandoning the liberties that make democracy worth preserving.

That task is harder.

But if successful, it may prove more durable.

The debate is not really about China versus India.

It is about what kind of human beings development is supposed to create.

Workers who obey?

Or citizens who think?

The answer determines not just how nations become rich, but what they become after they are rich.

And if all of this sounds objectionable, offensive, dangerous, irresponsible, anti-scientific, or contrary to the approved conclusions of the global democracy priesthood, then please report this article immediately.

After all, V-Dem has already informed us that nobody in India is allowed to speak.

When everyone can write well, the only thing left to compete on is whether you have something worth saying.

The latest insult in polite intellectual society is not “idiot,” “hack,” or even “sellout.”

It is a far more devastating accusation.

“AI slop.”

The phrase drips with contempt. Its effect is more devastating than cooties. Once you are slopped, your life is over. You have fallen below the standard of what can be called human.

It conjures images of industrial feed poured into a trough, unfit for refined human consumption. According to the guardians of culture, AI slop is text written by AI and therefore contaminated. It lacks authenticity, soul, craftsmanship, and whatever other virtues we conveniently assign to things that happen to emerge from a carbon-based life form.

The pure stuff, they tell us, is what comes directly from a human being. A bag of flesh and bones staring into the abyss, wrestling with language, producing sentences unaided. That is organic. Free-range. Ethically sourced. Artisanal prose.

Everything else is slop.

The anti-slop movement has developed a theology remarkably quickly.

There are now self-appointed priests who can allegedly detect AI writing at a glance. They announce their findings with the confidence of medieval witch hunters.

“Ah yes, I see a structured argument. Slop.”

“Three coherent paragraphs in a row. Slop.”

“Reasonably good grammar. Definitely slop.”

We already have thousands of software programs that examine every sentence and produce a scientific verdict.

SLOP: 87%

EXTREME SLOP: 94%

NUCLEAR-GRADE SLOP: 99.7%

Fountains of “knowledge” have brainlessly joined the bandwagon, with top universities perfecting slop-hunting as the newest collegiate sport. The National Slop Academy will soon achieve a trillion-dollar valuation and take its rightful place beside Big Tech.

The beauty of this system is that it can never be wrong.

If the writing is bad, it is AI slop.

If the writing is good, it is suspiciously good and therefore AI slop.

The machine loses either way.

What fascinates me is not the technology.

It is the psychology.

Human beings have always attached moral virtue to unnecessary suffering.

If someone writes an essay after spending six painful hours staring at a blank page, we admire the struggle. If another person produces something equally good in thirty minutes using tools, we become uncomfortable.

We love effort almost as much as results.

Sometimes more.

A machine threatens a deeply cherished belief: that difficult things are valuable because they are difficult.

The peace that comes from believing this is intoxicating.

You can sleep better clutching the certificate the software just printed out.

SLOP: 0%

You can frame it. Display it. Lick it with flavored ink if necessary.

Anything to preserve the feeling that the hierarchy remains intact.

Because beneath the debate about AI lies something far older and far more human.

Status.

The Machine Climbs Over the Wall

“The machine has not merely learned to write. It has trespassed onto private property.”

The accusation of AI slop is often less a criticism of the text than a defense of a hierarchy.

For centuries, writing well signaled intelligence, education, discipline, and membership in a particular tribe. It was a gatekeeper skill.

Then the machine climbed over the wall.

The machine has not merely learned to write.

It has trespassed onto private property.

And that is why the reaction feels so emotional.

Nobody panics when a forklift lifts more than a human being.

Nobody writes essays lamenting that excavators have destroyed the dignity of digging holes.

We accepted long ago that machines could outperform us physically.

The outrage begins only when they wander into territories we reserved for intellect.

And to be fair, the critics are not entirely wrong.

Most AI-generated writing is terrible.

Then again, most human-generated writing is terrible too.

The difference is that we spent centuries getting used to one category of bad writing and about five minutes getting angry about the other.

The Real Fear

For centuries we celebrated tools.

The calculator was progress.

The spreadsheet was progress.

Search engines were progress.

Word processors were progress.

Then AI arrived and suddenly assistance became a moral failing.

The same people who would never perform long division by hand now insist that every sentence must emerge from some sacred internal spring untouched by technology.

Apparently using a calculator for mathematics is civilization.

Using a language model for language is decadence.

The argument is not merely inconsistent.

It is funny.

What the critics really fear is not AI.

They fear competition.

As long as writing was difficult, writing itself was a credential. The ability to organize thoughts, structure arguments, and produce readable prose acted as a gatekeeper.

AI does not eliminate talent.

It simply eliminates some scarcity.

That distinction matters.

A talented thinker using AI remains a talented thinker.

A mediocre thinker using AI remains a mediocre thinker.

The machine can generate words, but it cannot manufacture insight, curiosity, judgment, taste, or originality.

In fact, the rise of AI may expose those qualities more clearly than ever before.

“When everyone can write well, the only thing left to compete on is whether you have something worth saying.”

And that is a much more frightening contest.

Why AI Gives People the Creeps

Because, deep down, nobody actually believes this is about writing.

Nobody lies awake at night worrying about paragraphs.

Writing is merely the first domain to fall.

The real fear is that the machine keeps moving.

First it helped us search.

Then it helped us write.

Then it helped us code.

Then it helped us reason.

Then it began to know us better than we know ourselves.

The critics think they are arguing about essays.

They are arguing about the future of human cognition.

In The Matrix, Neo gets an insect-like tracking device implanted in his body. It is horrifying because it violates a boundary. Something alien crosses from the outside world into the self.

That boundary is now dissolving.

Not in our stomachs.

In our minds.

“The machine is no longer a tool sitting on a desk. It is becoming a cognitive prosthetic.”

And unlike Neo, there may be no red pill left to choose.

Only a question:

What happens when the most important technology in history moves from extending our muscles to extending our minds?

The Bigger Question

So yes, build your detectors.

Create entire industries dedicated to identifying traces of machine assistance.

Feed every article, essay, email, and grocery list into the Great Slop Machine.

Declare victory whenever the algorithm flashes red.

But understand what is happening.

The battle is not between humans and machines.

The battle is between people who care about ideas and people who care about the provenance of ideas.

History has generally been kind to the first group.

As for the second group, they remind me of someone standing next to a printing press complaining that books are no longer being copied by monks.

Perhaps they were correct.

Perhaps something was lost.

Every technological revolution leaves a few professions wounded and a few certainties dead on the roadside.

But history is not a museum curator.

It does not preserve.

It replaces.

We thought writing was proof of intelligence.

Then a machine learned to write.

We thought coding was proof of intelligence.

Then a machine learned to code.

One by one, the certificates hanging on the wall are being called into question.

Perhaps that is what frightens us.

Not that the machine is becoming more human.

But that we are being forced to discover what is uniquely human in the first place.

“We are being forced to discover what is uniquely human in the first place.”

AI will not destroy thinking.

It will merely force us to discover whether we were thinking in the first place.

And no amount of shouting “slop” is going to stop it.

Arise. Awake. Stop not till you are one with the machine.

Postscript: A Modest Proposal for Measuring AGI

One question remains.

Where exactly is AGI?

The debate often sounds strangely theological. We are told that AI lacks authenticity, soul, craftsmanship, consciousness, humanity, and a dozen other qualities that conveniently remain difficult to define.

Fair enough.

But if AI is so obviously inferior, a simple test presents itself.

Take any piece of writing.

Show it to a sufficiently large number of people.

Ask a simple question:

“Was this written by a human or by AI?”

Suppose 90% of people can tell the difference.

Then perhaps AI is 10% of the way there.

Suppose only 30% can tell.

Perhaps it is 70% of the way there.

And if one day nobody can tell at all?

Perhaps that is the day we stop arguing about AI slop and start arguing about what, exactly, made us special in the first place.

After all, the entire concept of AI slop rests on a hidden assumption:

That there exists a meaningful difference between human output and machine output.

The day that difference becomes invisible is the day the argument collapses.

Not because the machine became human.

But because we could no longer explain why it wasn’t.

And if that day comes, the question will no longer be whether the machine has achieved AGI.

The question will be whether we ever understood GI.

It is for work, they explain. Build a public profile. Increase prestige. Become visible. Attract opportunities. Have people seek your advice. Generate business. Earn money. Create a virtuous cycle where your reputation feeds your work and your work feeds your reputation until both rise together in a neat upward curve.

They have a complete theory of the case.

Incentives. Signaling. Personal branding. Rational self-interest. Microeconomics applied to human behavior.

Everything has a reason. Every action has a payoff. Every move advances a hidden objective.

I do not know whether to laugh or cry when I hear these explanations.

To be fair, I understand why people think this way. They have seen countless examples of individuals who masterfully combine public writing with professional advancement. The profile grows, the ghost writer gets hired, the opportunities multiply, the speaking invitations arrive, the clients follow, and eventually the entire machine becomes self-reinforcing.

There is nothing wrong with that. To each his own.

The problem is that it has almost nothing to do with why I write.

How can I prove that?

Let me offer a few pieces of evidence.

First, I do not publish most of what I write.

Not half. Not even close.

Thousands of words are written only to remain in notebooks, folders, and forgotten documents. They were never intended for an audience. They existed because I needed to write them, not because anyone needed to read them.

Second, there are numerous essays sitting in my Substack drafts right now. They are complete. Some require nothing more than a click on the publish button.

They will never be published while I am alive.

Not because they are unfinished. Not because they are bad. Simply because they were written for reasons other than public consumption. And publishing them may trigger some really nasty things.

Third, I have often unpublished pieces that were public in the past.

At the time of writing, I believed they were worth sharing. A few days later, I no longer felt that way.

A man obsessed with building a profile does not voluntarily reduce his own output. He does not hide completed work. He does not take down material that is already attracting attention. He certainly does not spend hundreds of hours writing things that nobody will ever see.

If profile-building were the objective, my behavior would be irrational.

Which leads to an uncomfortable possibility.

Perhaps writing is not a means to an end.

Perhaps the writing itself is the end.

Perhaps I write for the same reason some people run marathons, climb mountains, solve equations, or play music long after the audience has gone home.

Because something inside demands it.

The published essay is merely a small visible fraction of the activity. Most of it happens in private, unseen and unrewarded.

The public post is not the purpose.

It is the residue.

His genial and open nature makes it easy to forget how improbable his story really is.

His genial, open demeanour and, if I read correctly, slightly sad eyes make me imagine the many versions of him that existed before the world knew his name.

A Punjabi boy growing up in a time when uteruses of pregnant women were cut open like plastic balloons only due to Radcliffe kept his stick at a point on the land. Millions cut like vegetables for the right of the frightened to take a flight while ignoring that most of the fearful remained where they were. Will they remain fearful? Or will they create fear in the minds of others?

Then an eighteen-year-old arriving in Australia, looking across Sydney Harbour and ready to kiss the world. Was he scared? Almost certainly. But ambition seems to have outweighed fear. He would have accounted for the ambition, he was studying accounting.

Few would have predicted that he would go on to build one of the world’s most valuable digital infrastructure companies.

He founded the company in 2010. Barely a decade later, it would become one of the defining platforms of the cloud and AI era, operating hyperscale data centres across the Asia-Pacific region and attracting a transaction valuing the business at tens of billions of dollars. Today, at an age when many executives are still climbing the corporate ladder, he has already built what most entrepreneurs can only dream of building once in a lifetime.

Yet the version of him that interests me most is not the billionaire founder or the builder of a company that has become a strategic partner to the world’s largest technology firms.

It is the entrepreneur who reportedly extinguished the savings of a lifetime to keep the business moving forward when success was far from assured.

The founder looking at dwindling resources. The husband and father carrying responsibilities that could not be deferred. The entrepreneur facing the possibility of bankruptcy and pecuniary ruin in his forties because the business had to keep chugging along. The rejuvenation of the career of an accountant or the more hip Fractional CFO.

I often wonder whether the smile left his face at that moment.
My guess is that it did not.

* * *

Today, we spent an hour talking about everything except the investment. I found myself searching for traces of the pressure that comes with stewarding a business worth hundreds of billions, or the anxiety that accompanies bets of this scale. I could not find either.

Most people see him today as the founder who built a multi-billion-dollar company and secured one of the largest investments in digital infrastructure. What they do not see is the eyes ah the burning eyes.

I feel like smashing the mirror.

Not because I hate what it shows.

And not because I enjoy the act.

The mirror is useless for what I need.

It gives me another image when what I need is another mind.

So how do you create a friend?

Not by looking for someone exactly like you.

The mirror already tried that.

Not by looking for someone completely different.

You would have nothing to talk about.

A friend is built at the boundary.

Close enough to understand your sentences before they are finished.

Far enough to finish them differently.

Close enough to know what hurts.

Far enough to tell you when you are wrong.

The mirror fails because it only gives me myself.

Friendship begins when another mind arrives.

Not identical.

Not alien.

Just different enough that the conversation can continue forever.

I told him something that sounded absurd:

“I already know what the next 1,000 books I will read are.In fact they are on my kindle ordered in the sequence in which I will read them.”

I do not suffer from the paradox of choice.

In fact, after calculating books read per day and average life expectancy, I probably know the last line and the exact word I will read with the last breath of my life.

Discoverability is overrated.

It’s the same reason I never buy IPOs.

Most people spend their time hunting for the next book. I spend mine reading books that have already survived.

The older the book, the more likely it is to contain something worth reading. The newer the book, the more likely it is to be forgotten, or worse, proven wrong.

Fat is bad for you.

Fat is good for you.

Fat is bad for you again.

Every few years the experts reverse themselves and the crowd dutifully follows.

The human body has not fundamentally changed for hundreds of thousands of years. Neither have the great challenges of mastering it: desire, fear, greed, anger, envy, distraction, status, meaning, mortality.

And neither have the means to conquer them.

Discipline. Reflection. Restraint. Purpose. Wisdom.

The gold is not hidden in this week’s bestseller list, the latest podcast, or the newest intellectual fashion.

The gold lies in ideas that have survived generations because they correspond to something permanent in human nature.

Most novelty is marketing.

Most wisdom is old.

I trust the judgment of centuries more than I trust this week’s New York Times bestseller list.

Time is the harshest critic and the most reliable curator.

मुझे लगता है, हर रेस्टोरेंट भी कुछ कहता है।

वह अपने खाने से कम, और वहाँ आने वालों के बारे में ज़्यादा बताता है। वह बताता है कि लोगों को कैसा भोजन पसंद है। वह यह भी बताता है कि भोजन के साथ-साथ उन्हें और क्या-क्या परोसा जा रहा है: हॉल का आकार, कुर्सियों का आराम, कमरे की ठंडक और आसपास मौजूद भीड़ की सामाजिक प्रतिष्ठा।

दिल्ली के जनपथ को मैं कभी-कभी “डोसा पथ” कहता हूँ। वहाँ दक्षिण भारतीय भोजनालयों की एक पूरी श्रृंखला है। और जो लोग मुझे करीब से जानते हैं, वे यह भी जानते हैं कि मेरा अधिकांश भोजन 'सरवणा भवन' में ही होता है। स्थिति यहाँ तक पहुँच गई कि कुछ मित्रों ने प्यार से मेरा नाम ही “सरवणा गुप्ता” रख दिया।

कई बार जब कोई कहता है, “चलो, साथ में लंच करते हैं,” तो मेरा दिमाग तुरंत सरवणा भवन पहुँच जाता है। लेकिन सामने से जवाब आता है, “नहीं, नहीं, इम्पीरियल चलते हैं, या लोदी।”

और मैं मुस्कुराकर कहता हूँ, “ठीक है, जहाँ आपकी इच्छा।”

शायद आप थोड़ी गोपनीयता चाहते हों। शायद अधिक आराम। या शायद एक अलग तरह का संभ्रांत अनुभव। यह सब अपनी जगह पूरी तरह उचित है।

हालाँकि, कोई यह तर्क भी दे सकता है कि सरवणा भवन में भी पर्याप्त प्राइवेसी और आराम उपलब्ध है। बल्कि वहाँ तो एक एक्स्ट्रा वीआईपी सुविधा मुफ़्त मिलती है: वहाँ कई बार आपका फोन नेटवर्क काम ही नहीं करता। आज की दुनिया में जिस 'डिजिटल शांति' के लिए लोग हज़ारों रुपये ख़र्च करने को तैयार हैं, वह वहाँ बिना किसी अतिरिक्त शुल्क के मिल जाती है।

इसके विपरीत, कुछ लोग सिर्फ एक 'खास सामाजिक परिवेश' का अहसास पाने के लिए भोजन पर दस गुना अधिक खर्च करना पसंद करते हैं। मैं उनके इस चुनाव का कोई मूल्यांकन या आलोचना नहीं करता।

मैं केवल इतना जानता हूँ कि वह शख्स मैं नहीं हूँ।

यहाँ और हमेशा,

**सरवणा गुप्ता**

As Modi Government compeltes 12 trail blazing years, I was invited on NDTV yesterday and I was asked: “What is the one game-changing thing India can do to improve ease of living?”

My answer was simple.

We spend too much time discussing what PM Modi should do, what Minister Gadkari should do, what governments should do, what businesses should do, and what everybody else in the world should do. Very little time is spent asking what we ourselves should do.

The founders of the United States spoke of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Not happiness. The pursuit of happiness.

“Nobody can give you happiness. You have to pursue it yourself.”

The same is true of ease of living.

“Ease of living is not something the government gives you. It is something you pursue.”

Governments can build roads, simplify regulations, improve public services, and create opportunities. All of that matters.

“If you carry resentment, neglect your health, treat people poorly, refuse to learn, avoid responsibility, and leave your own little corner of the world worse than you found it, no government can deliver ease of living to you.”

Some solutions are physical. Some are economic. Some are spiritual. India’s civilizational wisdom has understood this for millennia.

As Sri Aurobindo reminded us: “We do not belong to the past dawns, but to the noons of the future.”

“The India of that future will not be built by governments alone. It will be built by millions of citizens who take responsibility for the small areas of life they can actually control.”

So, to adapt President Kennedy:

“Ask not what the country can do for you. Ask what you and the country can do together.”

How are you gonna use your next second, maybe the only one you have left…

Yes this will not be your last day but your last second on this earth. Steve jobs was wrong and Elon right.

For decades, Corporate India has been obsessively center-focused. If a business wanted to scale, clear regulatory hurdles, or seek fiscal incentives, the path almost always led to the ministries of New Delhi.

But while the national media remains transfixed by central politics, a quiet, massive decentralization has taken place over the last few years. The financial and regulatory center of gravity has shifted [01:04]. Under the banner of “cooperative and competitive federalism,” the real battle for India’s economic future is no longer happening at the center—it is being fought in the states [03:58].

The Silent Fiscal Revolution

The foundation of this shift is deeply structural. Following the recommendations of the 14th Finance Commission, the central government executed a massive, silent devolution of wealth: the states’ share of the divisible pool of central taxes was bumped from 32% to 42% [01:22].

Suddenly, state governments found themselves with a level of financial independence and leeway they had never experienced in independent India’s history [01:34].

At the same time, the central government changed its legislative strategy. Instead of dictating rigid, one-size-fits-all mandates, New Delhi began building foundational frameworks, deliberately leaving the upper limits open for states to aggressively customize [01:42].

The 100-to-10,000 Leap: Labor Law as a Weapon

Consider the sweeping labor law reforms [01:58]. Historically, Indian companies faced a massive growth trap: if a factory or firm hired more than 100 people, they needed explicit government approval to lay off workers during a downturn [02:12]. To avoid this bureaucratic nightmare, Indian businesses intentionally stayed small, fractured, or relied heavily on inefficient outsourcing [02:16].

The center stepped in and raised that baseline threshold from 100 to 300 employees [02:22]. But the real masterstroke was the caveat: states were given the explicit freedom to alter this limit as they saw fit [02:27].

What happened next defines the new era of state competition:

• One southern Indian state immediately jumped on the opportunity and raised its threshold from the national baseline to 10,000 employees [02:37].

• With a single stroke of a pen, that state offered businesses a 100x increase in operational flexibility compared to the old regime [02:42].

How Bihar Becomes a Tech Capital: Playing to Asymmetric Strengths

This decentralization means states can no longer complain about their geographic limitations; they have to play aggressively to their unique strengths [02:49].

Coastal powerhouses like Tamil Nadu possess natural maritime advantages, allowing modern ports like Vizhinjam to operate at 30% above installed capacity right out of the gate [00:04, 02:54].

But what about a landlocked state like Bihar?

Bihar cannot offer a coastline, and moving physical goods across borders will always be inherently costlier there [03:00]. However, in a decentralized India, Bihar holds a devastatingly powerful alternative: extreme policy deregulation [03:13].

Take the Global Capability Center (GCC) sector. GCCs—the technology, R&D, and operations hubs of global multinational corporations—are booming in India, with some single hubs employing upwards of 50,000 people [03:26].

Imagine if Bihar capitalized on its massive pool of human capital by introducing a radical labor policy: “If you operate in the GCC or tech space, you can hire up to 100,000 people with zero government intervention or termination approvals needed.” [03:13]

Traditional State Mindset: Focus on geographical disadvantages (landlocked, distant from ports)
Modern State Playbook: Deploy aggressive policy levers (hyper-flexible labor caps) to attract digital giants

By substituting physical infrastructure with unparalleled regulatory freedom, a landlocked state can instantly neutralize its geographic disadvantages and position itself as the ultimate destination for massive, white-collar digital employers [03:42].

The Room with No Key

This isn’t a hypothetical future; it is the current reality of corporate migration within India. There are now routine instances where a global corporation evaluates a shortlist of states for a massive capital investment, and the local leadership pulls out all the stops [04:04]. Chief Ministers will literally sit with executives in a locked room, figuratively throw away the key, and refuse to let them leave until the state has accommodated every single regulatory requirement needed to secure the deal [04:16].

We’ve seen it with Tamil Nadu’s hyper-efficient industrial ecosystems, and we’ve seen it with Andhra Pradesh, where visionary leadership turned Vizag into a massive, unexpected data center hub practically out of nowhere [04:32, 04:43].

The Takeaway

For businesses, founders, and citizens, the lesson is clear: stop holding only New Delhi accountable [03:48].

The regulatory levers that dictate how easily you can scale, how fluidly you can hire, and how fast you can build are now held tightly by your local state governments and municipalities [03:48]. The states are where the rubber meets the road—and it’s exactly where businesses need to focus their energy [04:55].

Which Indian state do you think is winning the policy war right now? Let’s talk in the comments.

He laughed and explained that Bahushruta refers to someone who knows a lot about a lot of things. Around the same time, during a television debate, I was introduced as an Arthashastri. A politician from the opposition interrupted and accused me of actually being a “BJP Shastri.” Later somebody said I have been on so many debates on so many topics that the more appropriate title is “Sarva Shastri”

Beneath the humour was an interesting question: how does someone end up thinking across so many unrelated fields?

The answer is hiding in plain sight.

When I was studying at IIT Madras, one of my favourite places on campus was the library. Endless stacks of books stretched across disciplines I had never heard of. I would spend hours wandering through those aisles, surrounded by the smell of old paper mixing with Chennai’s humid air, feeling as though each section opened the door to an entirely different civilization of thought.

I had a strange habit. I would walk through the stacks not searching for a specific title or preparing for an exam, but wandering intellectually. History was already a subject I loved. Then I would walk into another aisle and see a section called sociology. I had no clue what sociology even meant. But curiosity would take over. Then psychology, anthropology, economics, political theory, technology, philosophy, physics, evolution. I suspect the librarians thought I was deeply confused about my major.

I remember pulling V.S. Ramachandran’s Phantoms in the Brain from a shelf I had no business visiting. I was an engineer. Neuroscience had nothing to do with my degree. But Ramachandran was doing something I had never seen before: using broken brains to reveal how normal brains work. People who could not see their own paralysis. People who felt sensation in limbs they no longer had. He was not describing disease. He was describing the architecture of human self-deception. I was twenty years old and I have never looked at a confident man the same way since.

“He was not describing disease. He was describing the architecture of human self-deception.”

My objective became strangely simple: finish every stack in the library. Not by mastering every field academically, but by exposing myself to how different disciplines think about the world. Only years later did I realize those aimless walks were quietly rewiring how I thought.

In 2020, I read 24 books. Then something unexpected happened. The more I read, the easier reading became. Curiosity stopped feeling effortful and started becoming self-reinforcing. One field led naturally into another. History led to geopolitics. Geopolitics led to economics. Economics led to psychology and technology. By 2021, I had read 37 books. Then 84 in 2022. Then 99 in 2023. Then 131 in 2024. Then 126 in 2025. Something was changing, but the numbers alone did not explain it.

In technology, there is a concept called Metcalfe’s Law: the value of a network grows exponentially as more users join it. A telephone with two users has limited value. A network with millions becomes transformational because connections multiply exponentially. Reading works the same way. Every new book changes the meaning of books already within your mental framework.

“The first book gives you information. The tenth gives you perspective. The hundredth gives you pattern recognition.”

I read Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene and Nassim Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness within months of each other. Dawkins argues that genes are not trying to preserve the organism; they are trying to replicate themselves, and the organism is just the vehicle. When I read Taleb describing how financial traders survive not because of skill but because the system randomly selects survivors and calls them geniuses, I realized he was describing the same thing. Markets do not reward the best strategy. They replicate whatever happened to survive. The gene does not care about the organism. The market does not care about the trader. The pattern was identical. I was not reading about two different subjects. I was reading the same operating system running on completely different hardware.

“The gene does not care about the organism. The market does not care about the trader. The pattern was identical.”

“Facts accumulate. Connections compound.”

Many people secretly stop reading difficult things once they leave formal education. Curiosity narrows. Familiarity takes over. Intellectual surprise disappears from life. People read enough to collect facts, but not enough to generate synthesis. And synthesis is where original thinking comes from.

“People read enough to collect facts, but not enough to generate synthesis. And synthesis is where original thinking comes from.”

The people who appear exceptionally insightful are often simply people with denser networks of ideas. Original thinking is usually just unexpected synthesis. Innovation often comes from importing ideas across disciplinary borders. History starts explaining technology. Biology starts explaining politics. Psychology starts explaining markets. Empires start resembling corporations. Platforms start behaving like nations.

“The people who understand the future best are often not specialists. They are connectors.”

Bahushruta is a compliment today. But somewhere in the education system, a child is being quietly discouraged from wandering between the stacks. We are producing more specialists than the world has ever seen, and understanding it less than we ever have.

“We are producing more specialists than the world has ever seen, and understanding it less than we ever have.”

For decades, navigating the Indian bureaucracy felt like a study in a slow, arithmetic crawl. Large-scale public works were bogged down by a “business-as-usual” mindset, where progress was measured in decades rather than fiscal quarters.

But over the last ten years, a fundamental shift in logic has altered how the Indian government operates. In a recent discussion, a former government insider revealed the exact blueprint behind this transformation—headlined by an infrastructure feat that squeezed a 30-year projection into less than three years.

The Scale and Speed Mindset

If you had to define the current administration’s governance philosophy in a single sentence, it is the ability to think and implement at massive scale with astonishing speed [00:43].

For outsiders and newly inducted officials alike, the sheer velocity of execution is jarring. The ultimate proof of this framework lies in the rural electrification drive.

The 30-Year Problem

Around 2014–2015, India had roughly 20,000 villages completely disconnected from the power grid [01:21]. At the historical pace of governance, these villages were being electrified at a rate of only about 1,000 villages per year [01:31].

Simple math suggested a 20-year timeline [01:40]. However, basic arithmetic didn’t account for compounding difficulties: the remaining villages were the hardest to reach—perched on treacherous hilly terrains, isolated in deep forests, or cut off by massive river systems [01:52]. Realistically, under old operational models, reaching these final frontiers would have taken 30 to 40 years [02:08].

The 1,000-Day Ultimatum

The paradigm shift occurred during a Red Fort Independence Day address. Without warning, Prime Minister Narendra Modi publicly announced that every single remaining village would be electrified in less than three years—1,000 days to be exact [02:38].

For the bureaucrats and ministry officials sitting in the audience, the announcement was staggering. They went from managing a multi-decade horizon to staring down an immediate, hyper-accelerated deadline [02:52].

To pull off the impossible, the ministry worked backward from the target date [03:00]. They engineered an execution model anchored on three pillars:

• Technology: Deploying modern tools to track, map, and navigate inaccessible terrains.

• Transparency: Creating public-facing metrics to keep executioners accountable.

• People-Centric Mobilization: Actively involving local communities to clear hurdles on the ground [03:12].

The result? The final village was connected to the grid 13 days ahead of the 1,000-day deadline [03:23].

The Playbook for Innovators and Businesses

This case study isn’t just a retrospective on infrastructure; it is a vital playbook for anyone looking to engage with the modern state.

Whether you are a startup founder, a corporate leader, or a policy expert, the rules of engagement have changed. The government is no longer looking for slow, incremental pitches. They are looking for partners who match their appetite for velocity.

If you want the state to be receptive to your ideas, you have to align with this new reality. Don’t just show up with a product. Approach the table by signaling that you understand their hunger for rapid, large-scale problem-solving, and clearly demonstrate how your organization can help them cross the finish line faster [03:51]. When you realign your pitch to fit the scale-and-speed framework, the institutional openness you encounter will be night and day [04:13].

What are your thoughts on this governance shift? Have you seen similar execution models work in other sectors? Let’s discuss in the comments.

A decade ago, policymakers grappled with the twin balance sheet problem: stressed corporates on one side and stressed banks on the other. Excessive leverage, optimistic assumptions, delayed recognition of losses, and evergreening created distortions that eventually weakened investment across the economy.

Cleaning it up was politically difficult and economically painful. But the process mattered. Insolvency reforms, bank recapitalisation, tighter supervision, and greater financial discipline gradually reduced NPAs and restored credibility to the banking system.

Today, India’s startup ecosystem may be confronting its own version of a twin balance sheet problem, what we describe as a “twin khata problem.”

One khata is the external narrative. It contains valuation jumps, GMV growth, funding rounds, expansion announcements, and market-share storytelling. The second khata is the underlying operating reality: unit economics, profitability, customer stickiness, governance quality, and sustainability without continuous capital infusion.

During the era of abundant global liquidity, the divergence between these two ledgers widened. Investors prioritised scale, founders prioritised growth, and markets often rewarded narrative velocity over operational resilience.

That environment is now changing.

Capital is becoming more selective. Public markets are more skeptical of businesses without a visible path to profitability. Even consumers are showing limits to discount-driven loyalty. In this new environment, the gap between the two khatas becomes increasingly difficult to sustain.

This does not diminish the importance of Startup India. India remains one of the world’s most important entrepreneurial ecosystems, with extraordinary opportunities across AI, manufacturing, logistics, fintech, healthcare, defence technology, and digital infrastructure.

But the next phase of Startup India may depend less on how many unicorns are created and more on how many durable businesses survive.

India solved the twin balance sheet problem because the alternative was long-term financial fragility. Startup India faces a similar moment of reckoning. Resolving the twin khata problem, by aligning investor expectations with sustainable business fundamentals, may ultimately determine whether India produces not just highly valued startups, but globally enduring companies.

Co-authored with Madhu Sudan.
Original article in Moneycontrol: https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/opinion/the-twin-khata-problem-of-startups-13929217.html

The first time I heard it, I made myself a solemn promise. This was it. This was the operating system for a meaningful life. The key to unlocking potential. The antidote to hesitation. The philosophy that separated dreamers from doers.

There was just one problem.

I am a procrastinator.

A deeply ambitious procrastinator. The kind with endless ideas, intellectual curiosity, initiative, and urgency in theory. But in practice, I somehow managed to postpone life with astonishing consistency.

For years, I lived exactly like Steve Jobs advised and waited for 23 hours, 59 minutes, and 59 seconds every day.

It was only in the final second of the day, usually while lying in bed, staring at the ceiling and negotiating with guilt, that I remembered: “Wait. I was supposed to live today as if it were my last.”

And perhaps, in that one final second before sleep, I actually did.

That’s when I realized something uncomfortable:

Steve Jobs was wrong. Spectacularly wrong.

And I suspect I am not alone. It does not take a Sherlock Holmes to figure out that my suspicion is the gospel truth. I think there is a very large tribe out there that understands exactly what I mean. That tribe is 8 billion people.

* * *

So over time, I created a modified version of Steve Jobs’ philosophy.

I do not try to live every day as if it were my last.

I try to live every second as if it were my last second.

It sounds like a small semantic shift. But for me, it changed everything.

A day allows postponement. A day gives you psychological credit. You can waste the morning because the afternoon still exists. Waste the afternoon because the evening still exists. Waste the evening because tomorrow still exists.

But a second?

A second offers nowhere to hide.

A second forces clarity. If I had only one second left to live, would I spend it doom-scrolling? Delaying a difficult conversation? Sitting on an idea? Suppressing affection? Postponing courage?

That question has quietly transformed how I make decisions.

Not perfectly. I still procrastinate. I still drift. I still lose hours to distraction and indecision. But this framing repeatedly pulls me back to the present.

It reminds me that life is not really lived in years, or months, or even days.

It is lived in seconds. One at a time.

And perhaps the quality of our lives is simply the accumulated quality of how we choose to spend those individual seconds.

Maybe you should try it too.

In the next second.

If this resonated with you, share it with someone who needs to read it this second. Not today. I propose this and I am sure Steve will say iSecond.

Hindi movies have immortalised Kanoon ke haath bade lambe hote hain (The law has long hands). Such large hands of the government can give Adam Smith and his invisible hand sleepless nights.

We often speak of Adam Smith’s invisible hand as if prosperity emerges automatically from markets left alone. But modern economies reveal another invisible hand at work: the credibility of government.

Economies do not run only on capital, labour, and policy. They run on trust. People invest because they trust rules will remain reasonably stable. Businesses hire because they trust future demand. Consumers spend because they trust tomorrow will not suddenly collapse around them.

This is why two political leaders making similar statements can trigger completely different economic reactions. The credibility environment around President Trump and PM Modi today is fundamentally different. Whether one politically agrees with either of them is secondary. That credibility itself becomes an economic asset.

“The real invisible hand shaping markets today is not always the market. It is often the credibility of the state.”

The Asian Tigers Did Not Grow in a Policy Vacuum

I will be honest. When I first entered government, I carried the instinct that the state should be largely irrelevant to markets. That industry would figure things out. That the best government was the most invisible one.

The evidence forced a rethink.

Look at Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Southeast Asian economies. None of these became what they are through unguided market forces. Government-led industrial policy was a structural part of the architecture of their growth. The state co-designed the economy. It directed capital, protected infant industries, built export capacity, and held industry accountable to national developmental goals.

“We always think industry will figure out what to do. But the real invisible hand is sometimes the government.”

This does not mean all government intervention is wise or efficient. It means the binary of markets versus government is an intellectual shortcut that history repeatedly contradicts.

Trust as the Operating Variable

When Trump says a civilisation will die today, you think the tweet will die before the civilisation does.

When Modi says this decade is one of conflict and shocks, you listen. Carefully.

Same category of statement. Completely different weight. The difference is not the content. It is the track record.

“Trust is not a soft variable. It is a track record of doing what you say, largely and consistently, over time.”

PM Modi’s statement that this is a decade of conflict and shocks deserves serious engagement. Not because of political alignment. Because when you look at the sequence, COVID, the Middle Eastern crisis, wars compounding after one another, and the very real risk of wiping out decades of progress that lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, the warning has structural foundation.

He made a stark statement. Given his record of connecting declared intent to policy action, a significant number of people will take it seriously. That is how credibility functions as economic infrastructure.

The Fuel Price Test: What the Facts Actually Say

Let us bring this to earth with something concrete. Fuel prices.

The instinct, and the dominant political narrative, is to blame central government taxes. It is not an unreasonable instinct. But consider what the data actually shows.

Over the last four years, central government taxes on petrol and diesel have come down by 65%. The central excise was approximately Rs 33 per litre in 2022. Today it is approximately Rs 12 per litre. Most people, including well-informed, engaged citizens, are unaware of this.

“A fact most people do not know: central government taxes on petrol and diesel have fallen 65% in four years. From Rs 33 per litre to Rs 12 per litre.”

The larger driver of price variation today sits at the state level. Some state governments charge three times what the central government does on the same product. The result is a 40% price gap across the country. Petrol costs Rs 85 a litre in Andaman and Nicobar. It costs close to Rs 113 in Telangana.

This is not to absolve anyone. The poor still need to live a life of dignity with a lower cost of living. That imperative does not disappear. But the question of what to do, and who to hold accountable for what, becomes precise only when you understand the structure of the problem.

Peel the onion. Identify which hand, central or state, oil marketing company or global crude market, is actually pulling which lever. Then engage accordingly.

What This Means for Citizens and Business Leaders

As someone who engages with government, whether as a business leader, policy professional, or citizen, the obligation is not to treat every policy statement as gospel. Nor to dismiss all of it as political noise.

The obligation is to understand the facts behind the announcement. To know who controls which instrument. To hold the right party accountable for the right outcome.

“One must prepare and understand the facts. And we will probably be a lot less frustrated.”

Government is not going away. Its decisions shape industries, prices, investment climates, and futures. The invisible hand that determines outcomes is sometimes not the market at all.

The better prepared you are to read that hand, the more effectively you can engage with it.

And the less time you will spend being angry at the wrong person in the room.

And then, almost casually, he admitted something that stayed with me long after the conversation ended.

He can no longer really read books anymore.

Not because he lacks intelligence. Not because he lacks education. Not because he lacks curiosity. But because somewhere along the way, he seems to have lost the ability to sustain attention long enough to disappear into a book.

I found the admission strangely heartbreaking. Not dramatic. Not catastrophic. Just quietly tragic. Almost something worth screaming about.

Because I increasingly suspect this is not an isolated phenomenon. I see versions of it everywhere around me. And if I am honest, sometimes within myself too. Even my daughter, growing up in a world infinitely richer in information than the one I inherited, rarely experiences the kind of immersive reading that once shaped entire inner worlds for generations of people.

And I cannot fully explain why that saddens me as deeply as it does.

Reading was never merely about information. Books were not simply containers of knowledge. They were environments. Places where the mind learned how to stay still long enough to think deeply, imagine freely, argue internally, and slowly construct an independent self.

A serious reader does not merely consume words.

A serious reader enters into sustained dialogue with another mind, sometimes across centuries.

And increasingly, I worry that we are losing the cognitive ability required for that dialogue.

Every screen competes for fragments of attention. Every platform rewards immediacy over reflection. We skim endlessly, react instantly, scroll compulsively, and confuse exposure with understanding.

We consume extraordinary quantities of information while often struggling to sustain concentration on a single difficult page.

The modern mind is becoming conditioned for velocity rather than depth.

And perhaps that is why reading now feels unusually difficult even for intelligent people who once loved it. Because deep reading demands something the modern world increasingly trains us away from: sustained attention.

To read seriously is to submit to another rhythm of time. A book does not compete for your attention every three seconds. It does not flash notifications. It does not reward emotional impulsiveness. It asks something far more demanding.

Patience. And patience itself is becoming culturally endangered.

I sometimes wonder whether future historians will look back at this era not merely as the age of artificial intelligence, but as the age of attention impairment. An era in which humanity gained infinite access to information while gradually losing the ability to sit alone with a difficult thought long enough to transform it into wisdom.

Because wisdom has always required duration. You cannot compress reflection indefinitely without consequences.

Civilizations are not built merely on access to knowledge. They are built on the ability of human beings to absorb, interpret, question, connect, and internalize knowledge over long periods of time. That process is slow. Books train the mind for slowness. And slowness, paradoxically, may be one of the last remaining intellectual advantages humans possess.

The frightening possibility is not that machines will begin reading books. The frightening possibility is that humans may slowly stop being able to.

And if that happens, something larger disappears alongside reading itself. Not merely literature. Interiority. The ability to build a rich inner world. The ability to think independently rather than algorithmically. The ability to sit with ambiguity without immediately demanding emotional stimulation. The ability to encounter complexity without reducing everything into slogans and tribes.

Reading once played a civilizational role far beyond entertainment. It cultivated attention spans capable of philosophy, science, law, history, diplomacy, theology, political theory, and serious democratic discourse. A society incapable of sustained reading may eventually become incapable of sustained thinking. And sustained thinking is the foundation beneath every serious civilization.

To cultivate attention may become an act of intellectual sovereignty.

This is why I cannot dismiss the decline of reading as a harmless cultural shift. Something profound may be eroding beneath it. Not suddenly. Quietly. One shortened attention span at a time. One abandoned book at a time. One generation growing up without the experience of disappearing fully into a text at a time.

Perhaps I am overstating the danger. I hope I am. But I cannot shake the feeling that when societies lose deep reading, they lose something essential about what it means to remain fully human.

And yet, despite all this, I remain oddly hopeful. Because every era creates its own forms of resistance. And maybe reading itself now becomes one of them. A quiet act of rebellion against fragmentation. A refusal to surrender the mind entirely to velocity, distraction, and endless stimulation.

To sit with a difficult book for hours may increasingly become a countercultural act. To cultivate attention may become an act of intellectual sovereignty.

So perhaps the answer is not despair. Perhaps the answer is simply this:

We shall read. We shall read in quiet corners and restless places. We shall read with growing curiosity and growing depth of understanding. We shall read on journeys, in pauses, in solitude, in chaos, and on sleepless nights. We shall read when there is no applause, no recognition, no reward. We shall never surrender.

Because somewhere inside the act of reading remains one of humanity’s oldest and quietest ways of becoming more fully alive.

If we forget to charge our mobile phone one night, we feel miserable the next day. Now imagine living without reliable electricity at all. No fans in peak summer. No refrigeration. No television. No internet access. No laptops. No ability to charge devices. Entire generations were denied not merely comfort, but productivity, opportunity, and participation in the modern economy.

That statistic haunted me. But it was a single letter that made it visceral.

One day at the Ministry, a letter arrived from a family in rural India. A father had written in to say that his daughter could not get married. No family, he explained, would marry their son into a home without electricity. A young woman’s entire future, her dignity, her place in society, was being held hostage to the absence of a wire and a bulb.

This shattered whatever remained of my conventional understanding of what economic deprivation actually means. We think of poverty in terms of income, calories, square footage. We rarely think of it in terms of a girl who cannot find a husband because her home sits in darkness.

I was happy to play my minor role in getting that connection sanctioned. And then something happened that I did not expect. I was invited as the chief guest to their wedding.

It remains one of the best days of my life.

That letter also forced a harder question I could not stop asking.

How did a civilisation of this scale and depth allow so many of its own people to remain poor for so long?

I have never been able to make peace with the fact that India is so poor. It is something which nibbles at my logic and my conscience almost every moment of my life. A civilisation so glorious was reduced to widespread poverty through deliberate policy choices that denied economic freedom to people. Independent India trusted citizens with the wisdom to choose governments, but not with the wisdom to choose their own economic destiny.

“Independent India trusted citizens with the wisdom to choose governments, but not with the wisdom to choose which soap to buy.”

The result was not merely economic stagnation. It was economic damnation on a civilisational scale. We often hear that nearly 27 crore Indians came out of multidimensional poverty in the last decade. While that is an extraordinary achievement, I often think about the other side of that statistic: how many more decades were lost before that?

India’s greatest asset is not merely its geography or market size. It is the sheer scale of human aspiration waiting to be unlocked.

One of my deepest-held beliefs is that people must be allowed the freedom to make choices, including choices that others may consider wrong. The essence of being human lies in choice itself: the ability to pursue ambition, take risks, fail, recover, and define happiness individually. Once the state begins deciding every aspect of economic life on behalf of citizens, it slowly strips people of agency itself.

“Economic freedom is not merely about markets. It is about human dignity.”

I lived in both Beijing and Shanghai nearly fifteen years ago. Before going there, I assumed China would simply be a somewhat more advanced version of India, perhaps a decade ahead. What I encountered completely changed my worldview.

Shanghai, especially areas like Pudong, was practically marshland until the early 1990s. Within a decade, not even a generation, it had transformed into one of the world’s most futuristic urban landscapes.

I still remember sitting inside the Maglev train as it tilted around curves in Shanghai.

“As the train tilted, it felt as though my own worldview tilted with it.”

For the first time, I truly understood what vision, execution, state capacity, and long-term thinking could achieve at civilisational scale. That experience fundamentally altered the course of my life. I realised that large-scale material transformation was not theoretical. If such transformation was possible elsewhere, there was no reason India could not achieve it too.

That conviction eventually pushed me away from a comfortable corporate career and towards public policy and politics.

I spent nearly a decade working in politics and the Government of India, an experience that profoundly shaped how I think about nations, institutions, and scale. I worked nearly seventy hours a week during those years, and strangely enough, that made me deeply happy. I was operating at the intersection of policy development, large-scale implementation, and communication, and I enjoyed every single bit of it.

I also made tremendous mistakes and still, to my amazement, did not get fired for them. Those mistakes were often costly, but they gave me invaluable lessons about institutions, execution, people, and decision-making under pressure.

My years in government taught me one lesson above all else: in a country of 1.4 billion people, scale is everything. If an intervention cannot materially improve the lives of a billion, it is probably not worth doing. Governments in countries like India cannot think in boutique solutions, conference-room pilots, or isolated experiments. They must think at civilisational scale.

That became my operating philosophy. Do not pick small battles. Do not optimise for symbolism. Build systems that can transform lives at scale.

At the same time, my experience inside the state also taught me its limitations. Governments are not always good at innovation, wealth creation, or rapid adaptation. Markets and individuals are often far better at discovering solutions organically than bureaucracies are. Yet there are also moments where the state must become the actor of last resort. No private market alone would have electrified crores of homes in deeply unviable geographies within compressed timelines.

The challenge is not state versus market. The challenge is understanding where each works best.

After leaving government, I realised that my experiences naturally positioned me at the intersection of business, policy, and public narrative. Today, I help some of the world’s largest companies navigate the intersection of markets and public policy.

I sometimes joke with clients that I will only take up a cause if I believe I would be willing to do it for free. By that, I mean the work must ultimately benefit a billion-plus Indians in some meaningful way.

One of the unexpected lessons of my journey is that influence and authority are not the same thing. Governments possess authority, but societies are often shaped by people outside formal office: entrepreneurs, intellectuals, industry leaders, media voices, and institutions that shape public imagination.

“Sometimes a narrative changes policy faster than a notification from a ministry ever can.”

Educational learning outcomes are at historic highs. Nearly 50 crore Indians today possess some form of health insurance coverage. Crores now possess access to electricity, banking, sanitation, and digital infrastructure that previous generations could not even imagine. Yes, all those 25 crore people did get connected to the grid too.

The foundations of a prosperous India have finally been laid. But statistics, however staggering, can only tell part of the story.

The full story is a father’s letter. A daughter’s future. A wedding where a minor bureaucratic act turned out to matter more than anyone in that Ministry conference room could have imagined.

India’s greatest tragedy was never merely that we were poor. It was that we accepted poverty for so long as inevitable.

I know it is not inevitable. I have danced at the wedding that proved it.