Long read: The quiet and fierce courage of the women in Shyam Benegal’s cinema
From hit movies made by Indian women about Indian women, we move on to celebrate the late Shyam Benegal (1934-2024) whose movies were amongst the first in Hindi cinema to give women agency and to give them – rather than male actors – centrestage. Growing up in India through the 1970s and 1980s meant being […]
Long read: How feminism, not Bollywood, drew global audiences to Indian cinema in 2024
India is undergoing a pivotal shift wherein women are pulling ahead of men in many different spheres of life. In Chapter 4 of our bestselling book “Behold the Leviathan: the Unusual Rise of Modern India” we have given our take on the ascendancy of Indian women (see here). As always, cinema is a reliable barometer […]
University Education and the Illusion of Learning
In a year in which, over 80% of India’s latest crop of graduates failed to get jobs, we find that university education in India neither increases the probability of employment nor gives an uplift to earnings. These challenges are being exacerbated by the rise of AI & automation. Specifically, the skills necessary to thrive in […]
Short read: Ravichandran Ashwin, the Encyclopedist
If you have watched Test cricket on grounds across the world, you are likely to have found Chennai to have the most cricket-aware crowd and enjoyed discussing the intricacies of the game with a stranger in the stands. Ravichandran Ashwin is the embodiment of such a Chennai cricket fanatic. Following his retirement, as one would […]
Short read: Quantum Computing Is Finally Here. But What Is It?
Over the past month, we have been bombarded with news about how Quantum Computing is here and how it will change the world and our lives. It followed Google’s announcement that its quantum computer ‘Willow’ had cracked a problem that would take a traditional computer billions of years to solve, an indication of the exponentially […]
Short read: The Indian family that built a business empire in Hawaii from scratch
Indians dominate business life in some of the most remote corners of the planet. This BBC article is about the Watmull family from Sindh (now in Pakistan) who moved to Hawaii in 1915 and now dominate business life in Hawaii. It is a remarkable story of industry and intelligence spanning several generations and a century: […]
Long read: How Elon Musk and Taylor Swift Can Resolve U.S.-China Relations
Over the past few weeks, we have featured a few pieces on the sheer strength of Chinese manufacturing and how the world’s lack of relative competitiveness and hence dependence on it will define geo-politics as well. Here’s another piece which endorses that view, except it also focuses on China’s weaknesses which if fixed will likely […]
Long read: How Microfinance and Data Capture Pushed Tamil Nadu’s Most Disadvantaged Into Debt Distress
This long article in The Wire is a critique of how regulation impacts the lives of the most vulnerable sections of Indian society. The first stage of this drama unfolds during the first wave of Covid in April-June 2020: “When the COVID-19 pandemic began, microfinance operations came to a complete standstill in India. The state […]
Long read: Why Starlink’s India troubles signal the next big battle for space internet
In case you haven’t kept upto the date with the battle between Indian and global galacticos for control of the satellite internet you should read this article to get upto date. Over the next 12 months, this battle between the masters of the universe promises much entertainment, frenzied Indo-American lobbying and phone calls at the […]
Short read: Viswanathan Anand is creating an Academy of Grandmasters
2024 will likely go down in history as the year when India began to dominate the world in Chess. Starting with Gukesh’s win in the candidates round to India winning the world team championship and last week Gukesh beating Ding Liren to become the world champion. Whilst we celebrate the players, it is important to […]
Short read: The longest-living Vertebrate could offer Clues to Extending the Human Lifespan, Scientists say
Did you know that some sharks live for over 400 years? And did you know that we still don’t know exactly how long sharks live? This article from CNN informs us that: “Due to the marine animal’s slow metabolism, scientists long suspected that the Greenland shark had an unusually lengthy lifespan, but there was no way […]
Short read: Whale makes epic migration, astonishing scientists
First, the good news from the BBC: “A humpback whale has made one of the longest and most unusual migrations ever recorded, possibly driven by climate change, scientists say. It was seen in the Pacific Ocean off Colombia in 2017, then popped up several years later near Zanzibar in the Indian Ocean – a distance of […]
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