Before I visited Auroville in Pondicherry, I had always thought of Pondicherry as Goa of the east coast of India. A beach place for Europeans to see India, booze and party, along with some interesting architecture. So when we packed our bags for Auroville, I had no other expectations in…

Dear Zoomers, Over the past few years, I have seen very brilliant, mercurial, energetic, talented people like you take mighty falls due to poor mental health and burnouts, and I am alarmed. Seeing Marvel fed “fresh” graduates with hopes of changing the world with their superpowers and their social feeds…

We survived 75 years! A lot of progress made, but a lot of promises yet to keep. While the challenges always seem insurmountable, personally I am very hopeful that we can fix some of the big problems in the coming years. Here are 25 ideas I would like to find…

Tucked away in the corner of a leafy Dadar neighbourhood lies the final home of one of the founders of the Indian Republic, Dr B. R. Ambedkar. Like many of India’s revolutionary founders, today he is known as a political symbol, a champion of the oppressed, with his suited, bespectacled…

The upcoming book “The Maverick Effect” by Harish Mehta, chronicles the beginnings and rise of the information technology (IT) sector in India. While technology was a globally disruptive force that would have come to India one way or another, without the efforts of a few intrepid entrepreneurs, we might have…

Often I think about the kind of cultural identity that my children will have. They belong to two distinct cultural heritages (Kerala and Gujarat) and there is almost no middle path. The only natural identity they can have is either the global identity or the secular Indian identity. …

DeFi claims to be yet another attempt to remake society for a new generation, but it is capitalism reincarnate in a darker, more subversive form. DeFi (Crypto/Web3/Bitcoin) seems to embody the frustration felt by the 99% against the 1% who keep getting more and more powerful irrespective of whatever changes…

Since childhood we are taught to build up expectations of what we will do in our lives. In the Doris Day song about anxieties of the future, the songwriter first asks, “Will I be pretty? Will I be rich?” and then towards the end of the song, the children ask…

This post is triggered by a very interesting discussion we had at our weekly team call. Most young, smart and ambitious Indians want to leave the country and do so at the first available opportunity. What is the root of this malaise and what can we do to remove it? …