That’s it. A handshake. The actual degree, the real one, the piece of paper, arrives by post either weeks earlier or slightly too late to feel relevant, and goes straight into a drawer with other important things you rarely look at. I graduated on a sunny London afternoon recently, and the whole thing was over almost before it had begun, the way the best parts of your life have a habit of ending before you’ve quite realised you were in them.

And then, because there isn’t really anything else to do when something ends like that, I did the “correct” thing. Or not correct, exactly. More like the only thing anyone ever does. I met my classmates, took far too many photos, went out, and got drinks. Several, obviously. It would have felt almost disrespectful not to.

What I did not do was open LinkedIn, put my cursor in that little box, and type the four most embarrassing words in the English language: Thrilled to announce that…

Okay. I did do exactly that almost five months ago, when I actually graduated. And more recently, a carousel on Instagram, though I did at least avoid the genuinely overused pun of being “one degree hotter”, so that’s a win.

Right?

Let me be clear about where I stand: I am both the person who performs the small internal eye-roll at the “humbled and honoured” posts and the person who has written them. I have cringed at the genre, and I have, occasionally in the same afternoon, been the genre.

And here is what I have been turning over since: why do we do it? Not why we cringe at it, but why we reach for that little box in the first place. Unfortunately there isn’t one answer, which is precisely the problem. Some of it is pure admin, a degree is a line on a CV and LinkedIn is where the lines live, and posting it is no more meaningful than updating your address. Some of it is simpler than that, the unembarrassed wish to tell the people who would actually be glad to hear it. And some of it, if we drop the act entirely, is the quiet, undeniable desire to be seen doing better than we were yesterday, and, if possible, a little better than the people around us.

A few hundred people you half-know watching you do well, pausing just long enough to register it, to place you somewhere in the invisible ranking we all pretend not to keep. And I would be lying if I said I didn’t feel that too, that small, warm lift at the back of my neck that has very little to do with the degree itself and a great deal to do with being seen to have it.

And yet, knowing all of that, we still flinch when somebody else does the very same thing. Which is the part worth sitting with, because the cringe was never really about the celebration. We would, or at least should, forgive naked pride in a heartbeat. It is the performance that bothers us, pride dressed up as reluctance, ambition wearing the borrowed language of humility. The eye-roll is not squeamishness about emotion, it is a bullshit detector going off, and going off correctly.

The trouble is that we have trained that detector too well. After a few thousand identical “thrilled to announce” posts, it no longer distinguishes between the staged and the sincere. It flags everything. And somewhere in that overcorrection, something real gets caught in the blast radius.

It was not always this complicated. There was, in school, a small, unsanctioned economy of celebration, the one nobody taught us and nobody had to. The packet of chocolates you brought in on your birthday and walked desk to desk distributing. The celebration after an exam, with the entire lot decamping to the same tired place to order the same fried things and dissect a paper you had already, by unspoken agreement, decided to stop caring about. The free kick you scored once during the thirty minutes of break, a goal so improbably, unrepeatably good that your entire team mobbed you on a patch of dust as though you had won something, which of course you had, before you were herded back inside to a gruelling physics class. There was no occasion in any of it. The occasion was being alive on an ordinary Tuesday, which we correctly understood, at thirteen, to be reason enough. And we did not announce a single one of these things to anyone, because there was no one to announce them to and nowhere to announce them. So they happened for the only audience that has ever really mattered: the people in the room.

I am not, to be clear, defending or attacking the Instagram carousel or the LinkedIn “thrilled to announce”. That can go. Or stay. I don’t really know. But I have started to suspect that we threw out something real along with it. Which is the simple human instinct to mark a thing. To say: this happened, it mattered to me, and I am going to interrupt the relentless forward grind of my life to sit in a room with people I love and acknowledge it.

Because it will dissolve. That is the one thing you can be certain of. The handshake fades, the real degree arrives weeks later and goes in a drawer, and a year on you could not tell me, under oath, what the weather was like on the single afternoon that years of your life were leading up to. Unless you stopped, and grabbed a drink, and burned the date into yourself with the small fire of having actually, in your body, in a room, felt it. (And clicked a few photos, of course.)

I don’t think we have lost the will to celebrate at all. And I don’t think the post is the enemy either. A platform can measure visibility, the likes, the reach, the number of people who paused on your face for half a second. What it cannot measure is meaning, because meaning leaves no metric behind. But that was never an argument against putting the photo up. Sometimes the posting is the pause, the small act of stopping to say this one is worth keeping. The only real mistake is the other one, going to the metric to find out whether it mattered, and refreshing the post long after the afternoon it came from has gone cold.

So here is where I have landed. I went out. Partied a little too hard, and chances are I will remember that over the actual graduation. I made the slightly stupid carousel with a not entirely stupid pun. And given the chance, I would do it again, louder, because the alternative is to arrive at the end of a life that was, on paper, full of achievements, and discover that you never once stood still long enough to feel a single one of them happen.

So raise the glass. Mean it. Let somebody see you mean it.

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Piracy spread rapidly making it incredibly easy for people to download and share music for free. The first attempt to restore order came from Apple with iTunes. The idea was simple. Instead of buying entire albums, listeners could legally purchase individual songs and download them instantly. It was convenient, relatively affordable, and most importantly legal. But even that turned out to be a temporary phase.

Over time, downloading music started to feel unnecessary. Why download a song when you could simply stream it whenever you wanted? Platforms like Spotify and Apple Music shifted the entire industry toward a subscription model where listeners pay for access rather than ownership.

Today, streaming dominates the global music business. Almost 70% of recorded music revenue now comes from streaming platforms. This was one of those rare cases where fighting piracy didn’t come from stricter enforcement, but from making access so seamless that piracy lost its appeal.

The players in the music industry?

At a high level, the global industry revolves around three key players: the artist, the music label, and the streaming platform. In India, however, there is an additional layer that plays a central role: the film producer.

In the film ecosystem, songs are usually not created independently and then sold later. Instead, the film producer commissions the music by hiring composers, lyricists, and singers to create songs for the film. Since the producer finances the process, the producer often controls the rights to the music, subject to the contracts involved.

After the music is completed, the producer may enter into an agreement with a music label. This deal often involves an upfront payment and, in some cases, a share of future revenue. The label then handles monetization by distributing the music on platforms such as Spotify and YouTube, managing licensing, and promoting the songs to increase reach and earnings.

Streaming platforms make money primarily through subscriptions and advertising. That revenue is then distributed to rights holders based on how much their music is streamed.

The Hidden Layers: Master Rights and Publishing?

Every song has three creative elements:

The lyrics, written by the lyricist. The melody, composed by the music director. The performance, delivered by the singer.

Legally and economically, these get grouped into two broad buckets: publishing and master rights.

Publishing refers to the underlying song. This includes the lyrics and the melody. The same composition can be recorded multiple times by different artists, but the underlying publishing remains the same.

Publishing generates money whenever the song is used. This could be through streaming, radio, live performances, or even remakes and covers.

Master rights refer to the actual recorded version of the song. This is the file we hear on Spotify or watch on YouTube. This is usually owned by the film producer in the case of movies, by the label if rights have been sold, or by the artist in independent music.

This distinction matters because revenue from a song is usually split between master rights and publishing rights. The exact split depends on the deal and the platform, but the key question is always: who owns the master, and who owns the publishing?

Who actually Has Bargaining Power?

Previously, recording and releasing a song wasn’t something just anyone could do. You needed access to studios, industry connections, and most importantly, distribution. Labels controlled all three. If you wanted your music to reach listeners, you had to go through them. In return, you gave up ownership of the master.

That trade made sense in a world where distribution was scarce. Today, that world looks very different.

Recording music is far more accessible. Uploading it is even easier. An artist can release a song globally on platforms like Spotify or YouTube without ever signing with a label. Companies like TuneCore and Believe can help artists handle the entire distribution layer. They take your music, put it on streaming platforms, collect the revenue, and pass it back to you, typically for a fee or a small percentage.

So in theory, an artist can now keep ownership, and still be on global platforms. Which brings up the obvious question: why do labels still exist?

The way I see it, distribution was never the end game. Attention is. Uploading a song is easy. Getting people to listen to it is not. This is where labels still have an edge.

They bring marketing and promotion, relationships with platforms and playlists, capital to fund production and scale, and integration with films, brands, and other media.

In India, this becomes even more relevant. A large part of the music ecosystem is still tied to films. Film producers have deep relationships with labels. And labels that control thousands of songs on platforms like Spotify have far more bargaining power than an individual artist uploading a single track.

Even if your song is available globally, it doesn’t really matter until people actually discover it. And discovery, more often than not, is engineered.

Today, anyone can self-publish a book on Amazon. The barrier to entry is almost zero. But publishers like Penguin Random House still matter. While access is easy, distribution of attention is not.

The exception is instructive. Taylor Swift has enough attention that she can dictate terms to labels. She can threaten to pull her catalog. She can re-record her albums. She’s playing a different game because she already won the game of getting people to listen. But Taylor Swift is one person. The rule is everyone else.

Globally, close to 70% of all music is owned by three labels: Sony, Universal Music, and Warner Music. This concentration of ownership means these labels hold extraordinary bargaining power. A music streaming platform cannot afford to lose them. Losing one of these labels doesn’t just mean losing a few artists. It means losing over a million songs. It’s like Spotify trying to operate without the Beatles, Coldplay, The Weeknd, and thousands of others simultaneously.

The same dynamic plays out in India, just with different players. T-Series and Saregama benefit from their catalogs the way Sony and Universal do globally.

Where AI Actually Matters

If streaming solved distribution, AI is starting to reshape creation and decision making. But not all AI is the same.

Predictive AI: Quiet, but Powerful

The more immediate impact of AI in music isn’t in creating songs. It’s in deciding which songs get backed.

Labels like Saregama are already experimenting with predictive models that estimate how a track will perform over time. The idea is simple. Feed the model a dataset with multiple variables. BPM, artist history, genre, performance of similar tracks, early social media traction. The output is a prediction. How much revenue is this song likely to generate?

The beauty of this is not that the model is always right. It won’t be. The beauty is that it is consistently useful in a business that has always been stubbornly subjective.

Instead of a small central team deciding what gets funded, decision making can move outward. Regional teams, younger executives, people closer to the ground can take calls on local music. The model becomes a reference point. It says this song is likely to generate a certain outcome. The human on the ground either agrees or disagrees, but now that disagreement is explicit.

The role of AI here is probably not to find the next hit. It is to make sure the misses are less expensive.

Generative AI: Powerful, But Messy

Then there’s generative AI. This is the more visible side. Tools that can write lyrics, compose melodies, and even replicate voices.

In theory, this should make music creation dramatically cheaper and faster. But it runs into a more fundamental problem: ownership.

If a model is trained on existing songs, who owns the output? If it sounds like a known artist, who gets paid? If it borrows from thousands of tracks, where does originality begin and end?

Right now, those questions don’t have great answers.

My 2 Cents on Music labels:

I initially liked this space precisely because it seemed uncorrelated to the rest of the economy. People listen to songs during recessions. During bear markets. During pandemics. It’s a recession resistant business, or so the logic went.

It took about five minutes of actual digging to realize that while the consumption of music is recession-resistant, the monetization absolutely isn’t. Advertising revenue reduce when the economy contracts. And for music labels in India, advertising is still a meaningful portion of the revenue mix.

In the West, subscriptions dominate. That creates a predictable, recurring revenue stream that should be pretty inelastic. India’s music industry is still in transition. Growth relies on a few things:

• Internet & smartphone penetration
  Still growing, but no longer explosive. Most of the easy adoption is already behind us.

• Paid subscriptions scaling up
  Small base, exponential growth. If pricing stays low and free tiers get restricted, this can meaningfully lift industry revenues.

• Better monetization via social platforms
  Platforms like Instagram and YouTube turn music into an input for content rather than the end product. As monetization improves across these platforms, the same song can generate revenue in multiple contexts, which should gradually translate into better unit economics for labels.

• Live events & fandom
  As the world becomes more digital, live experiences become more valuable. Strong fandom built through concerts feeds back into streaming and extends a song’s longevity. It also explains why many labels are moving into artist management, to capture a larger share of that ecosystem.

The risks are fairly straightforward, but meaningful. Subscription growth may not scale as expected, especially in a price sensitive market like India where users are used to free access. A slowdown in advertising would directly impact platform revenues and, in turn, payouts to labels. AI adds another layer of uncertainty, both by increasing the supply of music and by blurring ownership through copyright concerns. At the same time, labels risk overpaying for content in an increasingly competitive market, which can compress returns. And finally, as artists gain more leverage, particularly those with established audiences, they are likely to push for greater control and a larger share of the economics, gradually shifting power away from labels.

The industry is evolving, but the balance of power will continue to depend on who controls attention, ownership, and distribution.

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Disclaimer - This is for informational purposes only and reflects a general understanding of the industry, not investment advice. Please do your own research and consult a qualified advisor before making any investment decisions.

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This piece is split into two parts. The first looks at the state of water in India today, where it goes, why so much of it is lost or misallocated, and whether there is a real structural problem beneath the surface. The second shifts gears and looks at the same system as an investor, asking where value might accrue if these inefficiencies begin to correct.

This is a long one, so take your time. Maybe get a glass of water. (I have written about water before, but mostly in passing. This is hopefully more detailed and useful.)

Part One: India’s Water crisis

Every year, India receives roughly 3,800 billion cubic meters of water, almost all of it from rainfall. But most of this water is never really usable. Because of geography, timing, and the way storage is built, only about 1,100 to 1,200 BCM actually ends up as utilizable water, split between surface water and groundwater.

Now, those are very large numbers. And like most very large numbers, they don’t mean very much. It is hard to know what a billion cubic meters of water is supposed to feel like. Is it a lot? Is it not? Should this worry me?

Per capita numbers are a bit more honest. And on that front, India does not look particularly comfortable.

But even this is only part of the story. Because the more interesting question is not how much water India has, but where it actually goes.

The answer is simple. Farming. Mostly

Agriculture consumes somewhere between 78% and 85% of India’s water usage. Industry takes around 6% to 10%. And everything you and I do, drinking, cooking, bathing, living, sits at just 4 to 6%.

Pause on that for a moment. All the direct water use of 1.4 billion people is a rounding error next to what gets pumped onto fields.

And that’s alright. Farming, of course, matters. People need to eat. The Green Revolution was built on irrigation. Nobody is suggesting we stop. All of this would be perfectly fine, if that water was being used well.

Unfortunately, it isn’t.

The crop problem.

India grows a set of crops that are not particularly aligned with its water realities. Rice in Punjab. Sugarcane and cotton in Maharashtra. All heavily reliant on water.

This is not because farmers woke up one day and decided to be reckless. It is because the system rewards this behaviour.

As Mridula Ramesh beautifully points out in her book, some of this misalignment has deeper roots. Colonial policies pushed Indian agriculture toward cash crops that served imperial priorities, not local ecological realities. The logic was simple. Grow what sells. Not necessarily what sustains.

Independent India did not entirely undo this. In some ways, it reinforced it. Procurement systems, subsidies, and infrastructure continued to reward a narrow set of crops, regardless of whether they made sense for the region’s water profile. More recently, ethanol blending adds another layer. While it may help reduce carbon intensity at the margin, it is not necessarily aligned with water realities.

Groundwater, meanwhile, became the silent enabler.

In India, it is effectively a common resource with almost no meaningful limits on extraction. If you own land, you can drill. If you can drill, you can pump. And if the electricity is cheap or free, you can keep pumping.

The result is a system where the rational thing for each individual farmer is to extract as much water as possible, as quickly as possible.

Because if they don’t, someone else will.

This is not reckless behaviour. It is perfectly logical behaviour in a poorly designed system. In parts of Punjab and Haryana, the water table drops every year. Not metaphorically. In actual, measurable metres. The ground is, quite literally, running out of water.

There is no dramatic moment when this happens. Just a slow, persistent decline until one day the well does not work.

The monsoon problem.
At the same time, the supply itself is erratic.

India receives most of its rainfall in a short monsoon window. For a few months, there is too much water. For the rest of the year, not enough.

This has always been true. What is new is how poorly we manage it. Older systems captured water where it fell. Stepwells, tanks, local storage. They were not perfect, but they were adaptive. Over time, those systems gave way to larger, centralised solutions that never quite solved the last mile.

So now a lot of rain falls. And a surprising amount of it leaves.

The urban problem.
Then come the cities.

Urban India is growing faster than its infrastructure can keep up. Water demand rises. Supply becomes more uncertain. Sources move further away.

On paper, there are benchmarks for how much water people should receive. In practice, it arrives for a few hours a day, if at all. So people adjust. Storage tanks. Tankers. Filters. Workarounds layered on top of other workarounds.

The wealthy experience inconvenience. The poor experience risk. Which is another way of saying the system redistributes the problem downward.

The energy problem.
Water does not just disappear into farms and homes. It also quietly props up the power system. A large portion of electricity generation relies on water for cooling. Which means water shortages can affect power, and power shortages can affect water supply.

This is not a theoretical risk.

Over the years, water shortages have already forced multiple thermal power plants to shut down or operate below capacity. At one point, 14 of India’s largest plants faced disruptions because they simply did not have enough water to run.

There is no single headline moment. Just repeated stress showing up in different parts of the system. And as demand for both water and power keeps rising, that stress does not go away. It compounds.

The waste water treatment problem.

And then, after all that, we do something quite impressive. We take the water we have used, and make it unusable.

A large share of India’s sewage is not treated. It flows back into rivers, lakes, and groundwater. Which means the same sources we depend on become progressively more contaminated over time.

So even when water exists, it is not always usable. Which quietly reduces supply without anyone needing to announce a shortage.

The forest problem.
All of this is made worse by something that does not look like a water issue at first glance. Forests.

Trees are not just decorative. They regulate how water moves through the system. They slow rainfall, help it seep into the ground, and stabilise flow.

Remove them, and the system becomes more volatile. More flooding when it rains. Less water when it does not.

Which is exactly what we are seeing.

The climate problem.
Now add climate change.

Rainfall becomes more unpredictable. When it comes, it comes hard. When it doesn’t, it really doesn’t. Floods increase. Droughts stretch longer. Less water is absorbed. More of it runs off.

It does not introduce new problems.

It simply takes everything that is already fragile and makes it worse.

Part 2: What should I look into as an investor?

Clearly there are a lot of problems. And obviously, a country cannot function when demand for water is pushing up against supply. Especially if it has ambitions of AI, data centres, semiconductors, and the expansion of power grids that underpins all of it. At some point, this stops being an environmental issue and becomes an infrastructure problem. And infrastructure problems, eventually, hopefully, get funded.

Closing this gap means improving India’s water system almost end to end. Treatment plants, pipelines, sewage systems, recycling, storage, leakage control. The unglamorous plumbing that quietly keeps everything else running.

This is not optional spending. It is table stakes. And importantly, this is not some distant forecast. The spending has already begun.

Through programmes like Jal Jeevan Mission and AMRUT, the government is already committing tens of thousands of crores each year toward rural and urban water infrastructure. Add to that river clean up efforts, groundwater programmes, and state level spending, and you start to see the outline of something much bigger.

Will it be executed well? Will it be enough? It’s hard to be optimistic on execution. Water is fragmented across agencies, layered across state and municipal bodies, and slowed down by weak pricing signals and uneven accountability. Even when intent is strong, delivery tends to lag the scale of the problem.

But you also don’t need to track every scheme to see the direction of travel. The broad point is simple. The system is broken, the government knows it, and money is starting to follow.

Water, as a theme, has two characteristics that make it tricky:

• Demand is obvious, but monetisation is not

• Growth exists, but quality varies widely

So rather than thinking in terms of “water companies”, it helps to break the space into a few distinct value pools.

1. Treatment and Recycling: Demand is not the question

This is the most visible part of the theme.

Sewage treatment plants, industrial effluent treatment, water recycling systems. The core idea is simple. Use water, clean it, reuse it.

In a country where freshwater is scarce and pollution is high, this is not optional. It is regulatory. Which means demand here is not driven by choice. It is driven by compliance.

Companies operating in this space tend to work on a mix of government and industrial contracts, building and sometimes operating these systems.

At first glance, this looks attractive. Long runway, policy tailwinds, clear need. But the nuance matters. A large part of this business is EPC led. Projects are won through bids, executed over time, and paid for with delays. Order books can look impressive, but cash flows often tell a more complicated story.

So the real question is not whether these companies will grow. It is whether that growth translates into durable, high-quality cash flows.

2. EPC vs O&M: Where quality begins to change

This distinction is easy to miss, but it matters a lot.

• EPC (Engineering, Procurement, Construction) is about building assets

• O&M (Operations and Maintenance) is about running them

EPC tends to be:

• lumpy

• working capital heavy

• margin constrained

O&M tends to be:

• more predictable

• annuity-like

• higher quality over time

Many companies in the water space start with EPC because that is where projects originate. But over time, the more interesting transition is toward O&M.

Because once assets are built, someone has to run them. And in a system as complex and underdeveloped as India’s, that “someone” increasingly needs to be specialised.

The shift from building assets to operating them is where business quality can quietly improve.

3. Industrial Water: The quieter, cleaner opportunity

A lot of the public conversation around water focuses on municipalities and agriculture.

But from an investor’s lens, industrial water can be more interesting.

Refineries, power plants, chemical and Pharma facilities, and increasingly, sectors like semiconductors and data centres, all require:

• high-purity water

• reliable supply

• and often, recycling systems

Unlike municipal water, this is less politically sensitive and more economically rational.

• Pricing is better

• Counterparties are stronger

• Enforcement is tighter

And importantly, downtime is expensive. An industrial plant cannot afford to run out of usable water. This creates a different kind of demand. One that is less visible, but often more bankable.

4. Pipes, Pumps, Valves: The system beneath the system

Then there is the layer that almost never gets discussed.

The physical backbone. Pipes that carry water. Pumps that move it. Valves that control it. These are not “water companies” in the thematic sense. They are industrial businesses. Water is just one part of what they do. But as the system expands and strains, their relevance quietly increases.

Two things matter here.

First, expansion. More infrastructure means more equipment.

Second, and often underappreciated, maintenance. India’s water system leaks. Significantly. Which means demand is not just about building new capacity. It is also about fixing what already exists.

A lot of companies will sit across multiple buckets. The same business might build a treatment plant, operate it, and supply the equipment that keeps it running. So these categories are not rigid. They are a way to think about where value comes from, not a way to neatly classify companies.

Nevertheless, if you follow the sector closely, a few names tend to show up repeatedly. Companies like VA Tech Wabag, Ion Exchange, Enviro Infra Engineers, Jash Engineering, and Denta Water and Infra Solutions have all garnered attention.

In the broader industrial and infrastructure layer, players like Thermax and Larsen & Toubro have water as a small part of their much larger business.

And beneath all of this, in the physical backbone of the system, companies such as Kirloskar Brothers, WPIL, and KSB Limited sit in the pipes, pumps, and valves layer, where water is just one of several end markets.

These are not exhaustive lists, and they are not recommendations. They are simply some of the more visible ways this theme shows up in the listed market.

It is of course tempting to look at all of this and draw a straight line. Big problem. Large spending. Clear winners. Reality is usually less cooperative.

Execution delays happen. Government spending can be uneven. Order books do not always translate neatly into cash flows. And not every company attached to a theme ends up being a good business.

So think of this less as a list of answers, and more as a map. One of the risks with themes like this is assuming that inefficiency will automatically correct itself. It does not. In fact, systems can remain inefficient for decades if incentives do not change.

So it helps to ask a more grounded question: what actually forces behaviour to shift? In my view, behaviour does not change because it should. It changes when it has to. The real inflection point comes when it starts to make economic sense to care about water. When the conversation moves beyond moral obligations and environmental benefits, and toward actually saving money through better water management.

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If you made it so far, thank you for reading. I hope this was helpful. I really urge you to check out Watershed by Mridula Ramesh, if you are keen to better understand India’s water woes.

Disclaimer - This is not investment advice. The information shared here is for educational purposes only. While I’ve tried to ensure accuracy, I cannot guarantee completeness or correctness, and I am not liable for any losses that may arise from using this information. Please do your own research.

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Anyone who has ever tried to pick a restaurant with five people knows this particular kind of suffering. You ask, “Where do you want to go?” and the entire group suddenly develops the personality of a beige wall.

“I’m fine with anything,” someone says. Which is not only unhelpful, it’s also a lie. (I unfortunately have been this person)

But flip the question. Ask, “Where don’t you want to go?” and suddenly it turns into a press conference. No long drives. No experimental vegan places where the menu reads like a chemistry project. No sushi because “it’s not really filling.” No pizza because “we had that last week.” And definitely nowhere too expensive.

Within two minutes, you’ve eliminated half the city and, miraculously, you’re basically done. That’s inversion. Not glamorous, not complicated. Just figuring out what to avoid and letting the answer reveal itself.

Charlie Munger loved this sort of thing. He once said he wanted to know where he was going to die, just so he could never go there. Which is either very wise or slightly alarming, depending on the day. But the idea sticks. Avoid the obvious disasters and you don’t need to be a genius about the rest.

I’ve realised my own investing style leans quite heavily on this, probably more than I’d like to admit. I find it easier to rule things out than to convince myself something is a great idea. If a business needs too many things to go perfectly, I just sort of… drift away from it.

That’s basically how I approach valuation as well. Instead of building up a story about what a company could be worth, I start with the current price and work backwards. What would have to be true for the current price to make sense? How fast does it need to grow? How long does that growth need to last? It’s an oddly grounding exercise, and I’ve grown to like it. Even if it means missing out on some great ideas.

I’ve noticed this creeping into other parts of life as well, almost by accident.

With friendships, for example, I don’t think I have a grand theory of what makes a great friend. But I do have a fairly clear sense of what a bad one looks like. And most of the time, just trying not to be that person seems to work reasonably well.

Same with decisions in general. When I’m stuck, I’ve found it easier to list what I don’t want than what I do. It’s quicker, and somehow more honest. The answer doesn’t always appear immediately, but the space around it becomes clearer.

None of this is particularly profound. It’s just something I’ve found myself coming back to. A way of looking at things that feels a bit more manageable. Less about finding the perfect answer, more about ruling out the obviously bad ones.

Which, if you think about it, is how that group of five ends up eating anywhere at all. Not because they found the perfect restaurant. Just because they managed to eliminate enough terrible ones.

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I’ve tried to be consistent too. Mental models, investment theses, book notes, interesting ideas. The habit has always been there. The system never quite was. Or maybe it was and I just got bored halfway through, which feels more likely.

Recently I came across Andrej Karpathy, who talked about using LLMs not to write code or answer questions, but to act as a kind of librarian. You feed it raw material. It reads everything, builds structured pages, creates interlinkages between related ideas, and maintains the whole thing automatically. The repository gets smarter every time you add something new, which already makes it more dependable than me.

What really stuck with me was one simple idea. The bottleneck to maintaining a useful knowledge base has never been the reading or the thinking. It’s the admin. Updating cross references. Keeping things current. Humans get bored. Or lazy. Or distracted by something else entirely. An AI agent hopefully does not.

So here’s what I’m working on. An Obsidian vault, which sounds more impressive than it is and is essentially just folders on my computer, with a few clear sections, and linkages. Mental models. People and influences. My Value Tortoise writing. Investing research and journals. And a section I’m calling Sparks for things that are interesting but don’t yet know where they belong.

Some of the documentation I still do myself, partly out of habit and partly because some things really do need to stay in my own voice. Investment journals, for instance, only make sense if they capture what I actually thought in that moment, not a cleaner, more intelligent sounding version of it afterwards.

But some of it I’m happy to hand over. If I read something I really like, I’ll just feed it in and let the system turn it into a clean, structured note that lives in Sparks or wherever it eventually belongs.

All of that is useful, but not especially life changing on its own. Where it starts to get interesting is that I can now talk to the whole thing.

Using Claude Code or whatever you prefer, I can ask it how my views on a business have changed over time, which is not a question I could have answered honestly before without a lot of guesswork and selective memory. I can ask it to point out blind spots in my thinking, which feels like inviting trouble but is probably necessary. I can even ask it to read across everything I’ve written and tell me what I actually care about, as opposed to what I’ve just been pretending to care about because it sounded vaguely intelligent at the time.

Has my writing improved. Who do I sound like. Who keeps showing up in my thinking whether I like it or not. (Hello Ana de Armas.) I have my suspicions, but it’s nice to have them confirmed, or gently dismantled.

And it doesn’t have to stop at investing. If you journal, this sort of thing could become quietly indispensable. If I ever get organised enough to document gift preferences for friends and family, I could ask it for suggestions tailored to each person. Which does feel like cheating, but also like a level of adulthood I have yet to reach.

It’s basically a Control F for your brain. Or at least the part of it you’ve managed to write down before getting distracted and opening another app.

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I should probably add that I am very far from an AI person. I don’t really know what I’m doing half the time, and a lot of this is still trial and error. So some of you who work more deeply in this field will probably have better, more efficient ways of doing all this, or might not be nearly as impressed by it as I am.

But if you’re anything like me, this feels pretty freaking wild.

I’m rambling here, but I’ve probably come to the conclusion that the greatest strength of humanity is our ability to build narratives and stories and then, somehow, convince the world to go along with them.

Now of course, we know this. It sounds like something you’d underline in a book. But sit with it for a moment.

Language, for instance. It’s just sounds. Or squiggles. There is nothing inherently “tree” about a tree. No cosmic reason that those four letters should summon up leaves and bark and shade. And yet, because enough of us agree, tree is… well, tree.

Money is even stranger. At least language has some evolutionary charm to it. Money is, when you strip it down, a story we've all agreed not to question too hard. A piece of paper, or increasingly a few digits on a screen, that we have all decided is worth something. Not just something, but time, effort, stress, ambition, and occasionally, dignity. You can spend your entire life chasing it, losing it, multiplying it, or explaining it away, all because we collectively agreed to believe in it.

And then there are the bigger stories. Nations. Borders. Companies. Even markets. None of these exist in a physical sense the way a rock does. You can’t stub your toe on “India” or “the Nifty 50”. Not literally, anyway.

Which brings us, somewhat uncomfortably, to investing.

Because markets are, at their core, giant narrative machines. Prices move not just on earnings or cash flows, but on stories about earnings and stories about the future. Sometimes those stories are grounded, sometimes they are hopeful, and sometimes they are borderline delusional but told with such confidence that they briefly become reality.

A company is “the next big thing” until it isn’t. A sector is “uninvestable” until it quietly compounds in a corner. And occasionally, something genuinely transformative comes along, but by the time the narrative reaches you, it’s already been priced in three times over.

The tricky part is that narratives are not optional. You can’t opt out of them. We like to pretend that there are “story people” and “numbers people,” but in reality, we are all buying some narrative. The spreadsheet just makes it feel more respectable.

This is where I love Aswath Damodaran’s work. His whole point, if you strip away the academic packaging, is that valuation is a bridge between stories and numbers. A good narrative has to be translated into inputs. Growth rates, margins, reinvestment. And once you do that, the story becomes testable.

Because a story that cannot survive contact with numbers is not a narrative. It’s a pitch. And the reverse is also true. Numbers without a story are just as fragile. A model can look precise and still be meaningless if the underlying narrative is confused, borrowed, or simply wrong.

So the question is not whether to believe in narratives, but which ones to treat with suspicion and which ones to tentatively trust. And more importantly, whether the narrative you are buying can withstand even a slightly hostile spreadsheet.

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As always, thanks for reading.

Second Order Consequences

Mumbai recently built India’s first musical road. A 500 metre stretch on the Coastal Road where, if you drive at the right speed, your tyres play Jai Ho.

On paper, it is delightful. Infrastructure meets culture. A small moment of joy in an otherwise mundane drive. And then reality showed up.

Lane discipline was one issue. But the bigger problem was noise. Not at 6 pm when everyone’s awake. At 3 in the morning, when the same stretch keeps playing Jai Ho and people are trying to sleep. Residents started complaining. A lot. Enough that authorities stepped in. Now, that stretch gets barricaded at night. Not removed. Just… switched off when people actually need silence.

Same road. Same idea. Very different outcome once you follow it a step further. This is the pattern.

First order thinking asks, “What happens next?”
Second order thinking asks, “And then what happens after that?”

Most decisions look good in the first layer. The problems usually sit in the second or third. There is a classic story called the Cobra Effect. During colonial rule in Delhi, the administration wanted to reduce the number of cobras. So they offered a bounty for every dead cobra.

At first, it worked. People brought in snakes and collected rewards. Then people started breeding cobras. When the government caught on and scrapped the program, the now-worthless snakes were released into the wild. The cobra population ended up higher than where it started.

The incentive solved the first order problem and made the second order problem worse. This is something Charlie Munger used to hammer home. Incentives drive behavior. And behavior, when scaled, creates consequences you did not plan for.

You see this everywhere once you start looking.

Cut costs aggressively and margins improve. That is first order. Second order, product quality could drops, customers could leave, etc. Even in markets, this shows up all the time. A strategy works, capital floods in, and the very act of crowding kills the edge that made it work in the first place.

The tricky part is that second order effects are not always obvious. They are slower. Indirect. Often uncomfortable to think about because they force you to admit that a “good idea” might carry hidden costs.

So what do you actually do with this?

First, stretch the timeline. When evaluating a decision, mentally walk it forward. Not just tomorrow, but a year out, five years out. Ask what changes as people adapt to your decision. Because they will.

Second, think in incentives. People respond to what you reward, not what you say. If there is a loophole, someone will find it. Usually faster than you expect.

Third, invert. Instead of asking “how does this help”, ask “how could this backfire?” It is a simple question that catches a surprising number of blind spots.

And finally, accept tradeoffs. Second order thinking does not mean paralysis. It just means you go in with your eyes open. Every decision has downstream effects. The goal is not to eliminate them. It is to choose which ones you are willing to live with.

The musical road still might be a good idea. It just turns out that joy, when looped infinitely at high volume, becomes noise.

Anyway, that’s my brain dump for today. Thanks for sticking around.

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Cover image taken from Unsplash

And yet there have been moments when I’ve carried a book in a Daunt tote bag on the Tube when a normal backpack would have been lighter, easier, and considerably kinder to my shoulder. I genuinely wanted to read the book. I genuinely needed a bag. All of it was true. And yet the tote was still chosen.

It’s a small thing, obviously. No one is harmed by a tote bag. But it’s also not nothing. It’s a tiny decision in favour of looking like the sort of person who reads, rather than just being one quietly, without any props.

And once you notice that sort of thing, you start seeing it everywhere.

Take the Patagonia vest. Perfectly sensible item of clothing. Keeps you warm without overheating you. No sleeves, which feels efficient, somehow. But at some point it stopped being just a vest and started being… a message. It says, without saying it, that you are both relaxed and competent, the sort of person who can build a financial model and still make it to a bar at a reasonable hour without looking flustered.

Or running. I used to think running was about clearing your head, or punishing yourself, or some combination of the two. Now it sometimes feels like it isn’t quite finished until it’s been uploaded somewhere. The run itself is real enough. The sweat is real. The pain is real. But there’s also this faint second layer to it, like a voice in the background saying: this will look good later.

Which, to be clear, I understand. I’ve done it.

We all want to be seen, just not entirely. We’d like to be seen for the better bits. The version of us that runs, or reads, or drinks the right kind of coffee. Not the version that hits snooze three times or spends an hour scrolling through things we don’t even enjoy.

That’s why those “starter packs” are funny, and slightly horrible. They flatten people into these neat little bundles. The tote, the matcha, the vaguely meaningful slogan about boundaries. You laugh because it’s accurate, and then feel a bit uncomfortable because it’s a little too accurate.

The psychology isn’t new. That part is ancient. Social media may have put it on steroids, but what fascinates me is how quickly capitalism industrializes the signal. The moment enough people want to be perceived a certain way, a product appears. Luxury brands understand this at a molecular level.

A logo says, “I made it.”
A subtler logo says, “I’ve made it so thoroughly I don’t need you to know.”

Even the things that are meant to reject all of this end up becoming part of it. Minimalism, for example, which I suspect was originally about owning less, now seems to involve buying very expensive versions of very plain things. Not caring what people think has, somehow, acquired its own aesthetic.

None of which is entirely ridiculous, because a lot of this isn’t really about vanity. It’s about belonging.

At school, you wanted whatever everyone else had. Not necessarily because you loved it, but because it made things easier. It meant you didn’t have to explain yourself. You were already, in a small way, understood.

And if you didn’t want to belong in that way, you found another way of signalling that too. You rejected the thing, which was still, in its own way, a kind of uniform.

Belonging is expensive because exclusion costs.

I don’t think that’s entirely shallow. It’s probably just how people work. It’s quicker to read signals than to get to know someone properly. A tote bag, or a watch, or a pair of shoes can do a surprising amount of conversational heavy lifting.

But there is a cost, even if it’s a quiet one.

Sometimes the costume starts to matter more than the person wearing it. The run becomes about the upload. The book becomes something you carry rather than something you read. The object stops being a small part of the story and starts trying to be the whole thing.

And that’s when it all feels a bit thin.

I don’t have a grand solution to this, and I’m not entirely convinced there is one. It’s very easy to say “just be yourself,” which sounds nice but isn’t particularly helpful, especially when “yourself” is partly made up of all the same influences as everyone else.

I don’t really mind if people are a bit performative. I’ve made my peace with that. I just hope there’s something underneath it. Otherwise it’s a very convincing impression of a life.

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If you made it so far, thank you for reading. Appreciate the support always!

Cover image taken from Unsplash

High Fidelity by Nick Hornby

I have been doing this thing recently where every month or so I read a different book with a different friend. (Hi Sanjit) Yes, I realize that is essentially a book club, but let me have this. February’s book was High Fidelity. So yes, there is probably a fair share of recency bias here, but oh well.

I love writing that feels like someone is talking directly to you. Not performing. Not trying to sound important. Just thinking out loud in a way that is sharp and self aware and occasionally uncomfortably honest. That is what this book does. The voice is so controlled, so specific, that you forget you are reading and feel like you are being let in on something. It’s incredible writing.

The story itself is simple. Rob, mid thirties, record shop owner, recently dumped, decides to revisit his top five breakups to understand what went wrong and possibly mend his most recent relationship. That is it. A man gets left and begins excavating his past. No dramatic twists. No sweeping declarations. Just memory, ego, and slow realization.

And it is funny. Not quite laugh out loud funny, but the kind that keeps a quiet smile on your face while you turn every page. The wow, that is clever writing kind of funny. The wow, that is almost uncomfortably self aware kind of funny.

Rob is a child in a man’s body. Narcissistic. Selfish. Kind of a loser. And the book never really tries to fix that. It simply lets him be all of those things at once. The self awareness, the pettiness, the insecurity. Watching him revisit his past relationships stops feeling like gossip pretty quickly. It starts to feel more like watching someone slowly realize that the common denominator in all of them might be him.

Oh, and the lists. Everything in High Fidelity eventually becomes a top five list. Favorite songs. Worst breakups. Desert island records. Life, for Rob, is something to be ranked, curated, and endlessly reorganized.

At first it is just funny. The way every conversation can turn into a debate about music or taste or cultural trivia. But slowly you realize the lists are doing something else. They are a way of making sense of things that are otherwise messy. Heartbreak is confusing, but a ranked list feels neat. Memory is unreliable, but a list feels definitive. If you can categorize your past, maybe you do not have to fully sit with it.

And that is where the book becomes sharper than it first appears. Rob has spent most of his life confusing taste with personality, building an identity out of cultural knowledge. Even if Rob probably never quite realizes it, as readers we recognize that curating your life is not the same thing as living it.

Some books try to overwhelm you. This one disarms you. It makes you smile, a lot, and leaves you feeling strangely hopeful. I loved it.

And to end this article the only way one really should after reading a book obsessed with top five lists, here is mine: my Top 5 songs to listen to on a road trip with friends.

1. Don’t You Worry Child – Maybe it is just the 2012 nostalgia talking, but something by Swedish House Mafia or Avicii always feels perfect for a road trip.

2. Khaabon Ke Parinday – ZNMD bias? Yep.

3. Heat Waves – Something to be played in the latter half of the road trip, when everyone has settled in. Maybe a little tired, but still vibing.

4. Take Me Home, Country Roads – At some point this song will come on and suddenly the entire car is a choir. Mr Brightside works too.

5. Hot n Cold – Something by Katy Perry, Sabrina Carpenter, or Justin Bieber. The kind of pop you might claim you hate but secretly love. Mostly love, let’s be honest.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading. Which songs would make your list?

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Earlier last year tensions were flaring again between India and Pakistan, two nuclear armed neighbors who have never exactly been relaxed about each other. Before that and still ongoing Russia invading Ukraine, dragging trench warfare and artillery back into European vocabulary. Of course there’s Israel and Palestine, a conflict so entrenched it feels both permanently breaking and permanently unresolved at the same time. Ongoing devastation in Myanmar, a country sliding further into violence and repression. The return of the Taliban in Afghanistan, twenty years of war ending not with resolution but with a kind of geopolitical shrug. Syria, which has been in fragments for so long that its war risks becoming background noise, which might be the most damning category of all.

I’m missing a whole lot, so yes, again: These are wild times.

But here’s the uncomfortable question: what exactly is the benchmark?

Because if we’re measuring against “calm, orderly, morally coherent global stability,” I’m not sure that’s ever been widely available. If you widen the lens properly, things do not get calmer. They get bloodier.

In the fourteenth century, the Black Death tore through Europe and parts of Asia and North Africa, killing tens of millions. Entire social orders shifted because there simply weren’t enough people left to maintain them. That qualifies as wild by any reasonable metric.

Move forward and Europe spends much of the seventeenth century fighting itself in conflicts which devastated large parts of Central Europe. Famine, disease, mercenary armies roaming through villages. Not exactly a tranquil age.

The eighteenth century gave us revolutions. The French Revolution did not feel like a gentle policy disagreement. It felt like the old world being dismantled in public. Heads literally rolled. Stability was not trending.

Then the twentieth century arrived and decided to compete with itself. World War I industrialized slaughter. World War II expanded it globally and ended with atomic bombs falling on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Even the relatively recent past resists nostalgia. The September 11 attacks reshaped geopolitics in a morning. The Global Financial Crisis made the global economy look alarmingly fragile.

None of those eras strike me as especially calm. Which brings us back to now.

Maybe what feels unprecedented is not that instability exists, but that we are aware of so much of it at once. A seventeenth century villager did not have live updates from three other continents. A Cold War family did not receive push notifications about five separate conflicts before coffee.

We do.

Maybe the real difference now is sequencing.

We do not experience one crisis at a time. We experience a feed. India and Pakistan. Ukraine. Israel and Palestine. Myanmar. Afghanistan. Syria. Drones over Gulf skylines. Scroll. Refresh. Repeat.

History used to arrive as chapters. Now it arrives as tabs.

There is another difference, though, and it is not small. For most of human history we were very good at killing each other locally. Swords, muskets, trenches. Grim, certainly, but limited by geography and technology. Now we have engineered the capacity to do it globally. Nuclear weapons sit quietly in silos. Climate systems shift in slow motion. The stakes feel planetary in a way they did not during the Black Death or the French Revolution. Those were catastrophic. They upended societies and erased cities. But they did not come with a shared, press this and it’s over button.

That knowledge hums in the background. Even on ordinary days.

And yet, paradoxically, we also live in a time when life expectancy is dramatically higher than in most previous centuries. When medical science can map a virus in days. When billions have access to sanitation, electricity, education, and yes, hot water at the push of a button.

The same species that once feared crop failure as an existential threat now debates who their favourite Kardashian is and whether matcha is actually pleasant or just a personality trait.

If the standard is absolute stability, history fails repeatedly. If the standard is human flourishing measured over centuries, the present looks surprisingly strong.

So perhaps “wild times” is not a diagnosis. It is just what it feels like to be alive when you can see everything at once and know exactly how fragile it all is.

Smoke drifts past glass towers. Someone, somewhere, refreshes a feed. And for a moment it feels like the world is tilting. But maybe this is what the world has always done. We just have better reception now.

Success = Luck + Skill

Now I know what you’re thinking. “Thanks, Dhruv. I could be watching The Summer I turned pretty, but instead I opened your newsletter and you’re telling me that success involves both skill and luck. Groundbreaking”.

I realize that sounds obvious, but stay with me for a second.

The interesting question isn’t whether success contains skill and luck. Of course it does. The real question, the one Michael Mauboussin highlights in The Success Equation, is how much of each is at play in the game you’re playing.

Because the ratio changes everything.

• Take chess. Stable rules. Minimal randomness. Immediate feedback. Over time, the better player wins. Improvement is visible. Practice compounds. If you lose, it is not because the board had a bad day.

• Long term investing sits somewhere in the middle. Skill matters. Temperament, discipline, cost control, asset allocation. Over decades, good process tends to show up. But even there, luck still whispers. When you were born. What cycle you hit. Whether your prime earning years coincide with a roaring bull market or a lost decade.

• Now contrast that with short term trading. Shrink the timeframe and noise explodes. A good year might reflect skill. It might also reflect favorable conditions. Over short stretches, luck can dominate so thoroughly that it is almost indistinguishable from talent.

• And then there are games like roulette at a casino. Here, the math is structural. The house edge is baked in. You can get lucky on a given night. But skill is mostly absent.

Taleb makes a related point in Fooled by Randomness. Imagine a thousand parallel universes. In each one, the same person becomes a dentist. The outcomes across those universes would not vary wildly. Some differences, sure. Location. Reputation. Financial decisions. Minor execution. But you would not see enormous dispersion outside a few edge cases. The distribution is tight. You are unlikely to see billionaires at one end and abject poverty at the other.

Run that same thought experiment with a trader and the spread gets violent. In some universes they compound brilliantly. In others, a bad sequence ends the game early. Same person. Same intelligence. Different randomness. Here, you are far more likely to see both the billionaires and the bankrupt.

That is the point.

Some domains compress luck. Others amplify it.

So what are some implications?

1. First, know the game you’re in. If you don’t, you’ll misread your own results spectacularly. In luck heavy fields, a hot streak might make you feel brilliant, a slump might make you feel doomed, and the truth is usually somewhere in between, probably closer to “meh.” Before upgrading your ego or downgrading your self worth, just ask how wide the range of possible outcomes really is.

2. Second, try things. A lot of them. If luck exists, and it does, you only encounter it by participating. You cannot get lucky standing still. You have to put yourself in situations where positive variance can find you. Write the piece. Start the side project. DM Ana de Armas. Most attempts will not explode into fireworks. A few might. But zero attempts guarantees zero luck.

3. Third, keep a record. Even when things work out, luck has a way of quietly editing itself out of the story. You remember the win, not the flukes that came before it. Writing down your decisions, your reasoning, your experiments, even the small messy ones, is the only way to look back and separate skill from chance. It does not make the process more glamorous, but it makes it more accurate. That’s literally the reason, I decided to create my own investing journal.

4. And lastly, don’t mistake billionaires for oracles. Take Bill Gates. He became one of the richest people on Earth and he was genuinely brilliant, but it wasn’t just that. He went to a high school with a computer at a time when almost no schools did. He had Paul Allen as a collaborator. And there was Kent Evans, Gates’s close friend, just as brilliant and ambitious, who died in a climbing accident before he could graduate. That is luck or bad luck shaping lives. Trying to copy what he did is tempting. It is a bit like taking swimming lessons from a fish. You will probably learn some stuff but the circumstances are very different.

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This mental model changed the way I look at things. Even if it sounds obvious, it’s probably the one that sticks with me the most. Makes me feel a little less smug when I win and a little less miserable when I lose. Anyway, that’s my brain dump for today. Thanks for sticking around.

Cover Image taken from Unsplash.

One thing does seem fairly obvious, though. The version of the world we are currently inhabiting is just one of many that could have happened. Things tipped this way rather than that, because of a handful of decisions, and an unhealthy amount of luck. If any of those had gone slightly differently, none of us would be reading or writing this. We would be somewhere else, worrying about something else, or not worrying at all. Which is a long winded way of saying that certainty is probably not our friend when talking about the past or the future. The future demands a probabilistic outlook.

When people talk about the future, there is one idea that always shows up early. The reset. The moment where everything breaks. A natural disaster, a catastrophic war, a government with an itchy trigger finger, or a fanatical belief taken too far. In that version of the future, the world does not gently improve or sensibly adjust. It snaps. And whatever comes next is something you cannot easily undo.

The appeal of the reset is that it is dramatic. It looks good on screen. Zombies, asteroids, unmistakable endings. You know exactly when things change. It gives history a restart point.

What is much harder to imagine, and hopefully much more likely, is a future that sneaks up on us. One that arrives through tiny decisions, dull incentives, habits we barely notice forming. The world almost never stops and announces that it has become something else. It just quietly does, while everyone is busy refreshing their phones or arguing about something unrelated.

With that in mind, what follows is not a prediction in the grand, prophetic sense. It is more like a set of guesses. Things that seem likely to happen if we avoid completely wrecking the place.

If the future is split into a hundred different paths, I would expect these ideas to show up in at least sixty of them. Not because they are exciting or inevitable, but because they are already happening. This is not about sudden transformation. It is about imagining a world where today’s slow moving trends have stopped being trends and started being assumptions.

Lets get to it.

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1. Dirty energy is not leaving the party

Every serious conversation about the future eventually trips over the same thing: energy. Not policy. Not good intentions. Not whatever shiny technology is making the papers. Energy. It’s the boring adult in the room. When energy is cheap and plentiful, societies get ambitious. Space programs. Megacities. Crypto. When it becomes expensive or unreliable, everyone suddenly rediscovers the beauty of restraint.

The transition toward cleaner energy does not change this reality. It complicates it. Clean energy reduces some dependencies, but it introduces others, from critical minerals to manufacturing capacity to grid stability. Even the things designed to save us are incredibly energy hungry. Wind turbines don’t grow on trees. Solar panels don’t arrive via good vibes. The steel, the concrete, the batteries, all of it requires enormous amounts of power. This isn’t a light switch moment. It’s a long, messy renovation where you keep discovering new structural issues behind the walls.

Then there’s the awkward bit. The countries that got rich by burning cheap fossil fuels now stand on the sidelines telling poorer countries to do it differently. Preferably cleaner. Preferably faster. Preferably without the same capital, technology, or institutional muscle. For most developing economies, energy access and growth still feel a lot more urgent than abstract climate targets set several conferences and time zones away.

Technology alone won’t fix this because culture has a vote, and culture is stubborn. Agriculture makes this painfully obvious. Livestock emissions matter, and yes, cows burp and fart their way into climate models. But asking entire societies to eat less beef isn’t a technical adjustment. It’s a social negotiation involving farmers, religion, income, and what people consider a proper meal. These are not small asks. These are arguments that last generations.

By 2046, energy unfortunately won’t be fully decarbonized. By 2056, probably still not. Fossil fuels will shrink, but they won’t politely exit the stage. Clean energy will grow, but unevenly, imperfectly, and with its own limitations. The future won’t look like a clean break from the past. It will look more like an awkward overlap, where old systems and new ones coexist, tolerate each other just enough, and occasionally get in each other’s way. Which, if we’re being honest, is how most transitions actually work.

2. The world after Globalization peaked

The modern world is far too complicated and far too intertwined to work without trade, capital moving around, and a lot of shared production. Resources are scattered unevenly. Skills are specialized to the point of absurdity. No serious economy can make everything it needs by itself, unless it is happy with a sharp decline in living standards and a long nostalgic phase. Integration, in some form, is unavoidable.

What is changing is not globalization itself, but what countries want from it and how much discomfort they are willing to tolerate in exchange for efficiency.

The first lesson was fragility.

Recent shocks exposed things we preferred not to look at too closely. Systems that were beautifully optimized in calm conditions behaved badly when stressed. When production runs that close to the edge, failure does not stay contained. It travels. Quickly. The very qualities that once made globalization feel elegant turned out to make it brittle.

By 2046, globalization is likely to feel more supervised. More selective. Countries will remain open where openness clearly helps growth and innovation, but they will want insulation or redundancies where failure carries real consequences. This is not a dramatic rejection of interdependence. It is more like a quiet admission that efficiency without resilience is a gamble, and not everyone is in the mood to keep betting.

The second lesson was Power.

Cersei Lannister put it bluntly in Game of Thrones when she said, “Power is power.” It does not come from participation alone, or from having read the right economic papers. It comes from capability. From having something tangible behind your intentions.

Not very long ago, manufacturing depth, industrial capacity, and control over critical technologies sounded like dry policy phrases. The sort of things people nodded at politely before changing the subject. Somewhere along the way, they stopped feeling abstract and started looking like survival traits. These are not theoretical advantages. They are leverage.

This becomes clearest in places where mistakes are expensive. Military capacity. Energy systems. Semiconductors. In these domains, dependence stops being a neutral condition and starts to feel uncomfortably like exposure.

Large economies with deep domestic markets can afford redundancy. They can decide when openness helps and when it hurts. Smaller economies do not have that luxury. They might have to specialize aggressively or accept a higher degree of vulnerability. In a more fragmented world, the ability to absorb shocks at home becomes a form of power in itself.

Fragility taught states what breaks. Power reminds them what holds.

3. Complaining about immigration is not going away

By 2046, immigration will still be one of the most argued about features of modern societies. Not because the economics are mysterious or unsettled, but because the trade off is unavoidable, and people generally dislike trade offs unless they are the ones benefiting immediately.

On paper, the case for immigration only gets stronger. Much of the world is getting older. Birth rates are falling across developed economies and, increasingly, across developing ones too. There are simply fewer young people turning up to do the work, pay the taxes, and quietly keep the whole thing afloat.

Fewer young workers means slower growth, weaker tax bases, and welfare systems that start to look uncomfortably like a promise no one knows how to keep. In purely economic terms, immigration isn’t a moral stance or a political preference. It’s a patch. One that keeps the system running longer than it otherwise would.

But economics is only half the story, and usually the quieter half.

I say this as someone instinctively sympathetic to the liberal case. The idea of plural societies drawing strength from different cultures, skills and histories is not something I find threatening. It is, in many ways, the ideal. But ideals do not cancel instinct. When growth slows, when jobs feel scarce, when housing tightens and wages stagnate, it is not surprising that people begin to notice who else is competing. Seeing someone who does not look or sound like you succeed in a constrained environment can trigger something older than policy. That reaction may be ungenerous. It may even be wrong. But it is not mysterious.

Part of the tension lies in how immigration is experienced. It is felt long before it is measured. It appears in neighborhoods before it appears in GDP figures. In accents, shop signs, schoolyards, waiting rooms. Even when integration works, and over time it often does, the transition is uneven. The disruption is immediate and local. The gains are diffuse and delayed. That gap is where resentment settles.

This is what makes the argument so stubborn. A country can genuinely need immigration to sustain growth, fund welfare systems and fill labour shortages, while parts of that same country struggle with the pace of change.

Technology complicates the picture further. As automation and artificial intelligence absorb more routine and even skilled work, demand for labour will shift rather than disappear. Care work, services and roles requiring physical presence will still rely on people. Manufacturing and clerical functions increasingly may not. Migration systems will become more selective, more skills focused, more transactional. That may improve efficiency. It will not remove controversy.

By 2046, complaining about immigration will not necessarily signal policy failure. It will signal that societies are still trying to reconcile what they require with what they are prepared to become.

4. Tottenham Hotspur will still not have won the league

Some predictions feel risky because they depend on technology, politics, or human behaviour, all of which have a nasty habit of changing their minds. Others feel safer because they depend on history, which, for better or worse, has a strong preference for repeating itself. Tottenham’s relationship with the Premier League falls firmly into the second category.

Every few years, the conditions seem right. There is a promising squad, young enough to feel exciting but experienced enough to feel serious. A tactically astute manager who says the correct things about process and patience. A season where rivals wobble just enough to create that dangerous feeling known as belief. This is usually the point where supporters begin to explain, carefully and at length, why this year is different.

And then, quietly and without much drama, something gives way. A mistimed tackle. A baffling substitution. A run of games where the ball refuses to bounce kindly. Nothing catastrophic. Just enough to remind everyone of why Tottenham is Tottenham.

By 2046, football will almost certainly look different. Analytics will be sharper. Money will be more global and more obscene. Players will be faster, fitter, and somehow still injured at the worst possible moments. But in a world defined by uncertainty, it is comforting to know that a few constants endure.

5. The monetary shrug

The global economic system currently runs on a kind of collective agreement that feels both powerful and slightly fragile.

Debt keeps rising. Not just household debt or corporate debt, but sovereign debt. Entire countries owe sums that would have sounded fictional a few decades ago. And yet markets mostly carry on. Bonds trade. Currencies fluctuate. Everyone refreshes their dashboards and goes to lunch.

At the center of it all sits the US dollar. The world’s reserve currency. The default language of global trade. Oil is priced in it. Debt is issued in it. Central banks hold it. For decades this arrangement has survived wars, recessions, political drama, and the occasional self inflicted crisis.

But here’s the uncomfortable bit. The system relies heavily on trust. Trust in US institutions. Trust in rule of law. Trust that political volatility remains theatre rather than structural failure. In recent years, that trust has been tested more openly than many would have preferred.

Would I be shocked if by 2046 the financial plumbing looks different? Not particularly. Reserve currencies have changed before. Systems evolve, sometimes gradually, sometimes because someone forces the issue.

Do I know what replaces it? Not even slightly.

A multipolar currency world? A patchwork of regional systems? Central bank digital currencies? Some hybrid arrangement we cannot yet name? All plausible. None obvious.

For now, we seem to be operating on the global equivalent of “if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.” The dollar still works. Alternatives are either smaller, less trusted, or tied to political systems that make investors nervous. And when you are managing trillions, nervous is not a good feeling.

So the system continues. Heavily indebted. Occasionally wobbly. Remarkably resilient. A bit like that friend who insists they are fine while clearly running on caffeine and vibes.

By 2046, the architecture might look different. Or it might look almost the same, just slightly reinforced and quietly adjusted. If there is one safe bet, it is this: money will remain complicated, political, and slightly mysterious. And most of us will still pretend we understand it better than we actually do.

6. Healthcare stops being off the rack

For most of modern history, healthcare has worked like fast fashion.

You show up with a problem. The doctor reaches for the standard size. This drug. That dosage. This protocol. If it mostly fits, we call it success. If not, we tweak. It’s been remarkably effective, but it has always been statistical. You are treated as a representative sample of something.

By 2046, that approach may be changing.

The shift won’t be dramatic. It will creep in through watches that flag irregular heartbeats before you feel them. Sleep trackers that quietly log your bad decisions. Continuous glucose monitors. Smart homes that notice patterns. Affordable genetic sequencing that tells you not who you are, but what your cells are inclined to attempt.

The body is becoming measurable.

Healthcare begins moving away from averages and toward probabilities attached to you specifically. Not a general response to a drug, but your likely response based on genetics, metabolism, history. Medicine starts to look less like fast fashion and more like tailoring.

Tailoring requires measurements. And someone has to hold those measurements somewhere.

Which brings us to the awkward part: the data.

Health data may become the most valuable and most sensitive asset many people own. Insurance companies, whose entire business is pricing uncertainty, will find this hard to ignore.

The more precisely risk can be measured, the harder it becomes to pretend we are all roughly the same. Do we want insurance priced according to our biology? Or according to a broader idea of shared risk?

Personalized medicine promises earlier detection, fewer surprises, treatment plans that adjust before things break. That’s the optimistic version. The other conversation is about ownership, consent, and whether opting out of measurement becomes its own kind of red flag.

By 2046, ignorance is unlikely to make a comeback. The devices are too useful, the incentives too aligned. We might see a quiet normalization of living in ongoing negotiation with our own biology.

7. The AI chaos

I have no freaking idea what AI is going to do. It can already do a frightening amount of what lawyers, accountants, and financial analysts spend their days pretending to do. Some of it is terrifying. Some of it is amazing. All of it is going to feel faster than anyone can comfortably process. I am already learning how to make pizza, in case no jobs exist and I have to open a small restaurant to pay the bills.

This is exactly the kind of period futurist Alvin Toffler described as future shock, the disorientation that happens when change moves faster than we can absorb it. Old habits will falter. Institutions will stumble. Some systems may break. Society may feel dizzyed, anxious, and uncertain. For the next twenty years we are likely to experience that full on “hold on to your hat” dissonance.

But history offers a little hope. When personal computers first arrived, they felt like a tidal wave. (I’m told) Offices scrambled, schools panicked, people wondered how these machines could possibly fit into daily life. Within a couple of decades that shock faded. Computers became ordinary. Social media and smartphones went through the same cycle, first overwhelming, then mundane. The panic does not disappear entirely, but the world adjusts. We adapt.

By 2046 the dust should have settled a bit. AI will be everywhere, still powerful, still shaping work, life, and culture. But it will probably feel less like a tidal wave and more like background infrastructure, something you notice only when it does not work, like electricity or GPS. The headlines will exist, the breakthroughs will exist, but the chaos will feel like history, something we hopefully survived and integrated into our lives.

Or, of course, the other possibility is the Dune option: we remove all AI and hope humanity survives. For now, I’ll stay hopeful and keep practicing my pizza.

8. Inequality

So much of what I’ve written so far, the health tracking, the personalized medicine, the AI chaos, might sound exciting or terrifying depending on your temperament. But let’s be honest, most of it is abstract and not for everyone. Poverty is not going to disappear. Hopefully it eases, but wherever there are shiny new toys, inequality will probably follow.

We’ll have smarter homes and treatments tailored to our biology. Meanwhile, in the same cities, towns, and villages, people will still be juggling basic survival: clean water, reliable electricity, decent food. Access to healthcare, education, and even advanced AI assistants will still be wildly uneven. For some, the future will feel dazzling; for others, barely changed from today. Geography, income, and opportunity will shape how anyone experiences progress.

And then there is gene editing. Humans tinkering with DNA is not science fiction anymore. Ethical dilemmas will multiply. Could we see genetically superior humans? Not entirely out of the question. And yes, that reality will sit right next to people who have none of these advantages. Schools, workplaces, and neighborhoods will be caught in the friction. Social tensions, envy, and resentment could grow, even as technology races ahead.

AI adds another layer. Some jobs will vanish; others will transform. Some people will thrive with AI as a tool, while others may find themselves sidelined, struggling to adapt in ways that no algorithm can fully prepare them for.

By 2046, some of the world will feel astonishing, and some of it will feel painfully familiar. The gap between the two will probably matter more than all the progress itself. Convenience, personalization, and digital brilliance will coexist with stubborn old problems that no algorithm will ever fix.

9. The human touch is here to stay

The world will be smoother in 2046, for those who have resources. In many ways, this is progress. Fewer queues. Fewer wasted minutes. Fewer obvious mistakes. But something interesting happens when everything becomes optimized. You start to miss the rough edges.

Take marathons.

Yes, the shoes are absurdly technical. Yes, your watch will record every heartbeat, stride, and flinch. Yes, the whole thing will be uploaded to Strava. And yet none of that is really the point.

Here is an event where thousands of people wake up before dawn, to run 42.2 kilometers for no practical reason at all. What’s more, they pay for the privilege. They voluntarily experience discomfort, and then celebrate it together.

It is inefficient. It is irrational. It is profoundly human.

And afterwards, no one gathers around to compare recovery scores. They gather to replay the moment they almost quit at kilometer 34. The stranger who shouted their name. The runner who finished with their 1 year old daughter, in their arms. The shared stupidity of having done something so difficult.

Technology is there, sure. But it doesn’t define why they show up. The reason is emotional. Stubbornly emotional. The need to struggle. To be seen. To belong. That instinct predates GPS watches and Strava streaks.

As homes become smarter and entertainment more personalized, the value of places that feel unmistakably human quietly rises. Not because they are efficient. But because they aren’t.

Gyms where the machines wobble and the trainer calls you by the nickname only they know. Small restaurants where the menu changes because the owner felt like it. Bookshops arranged by taste rather than algorithm. Bars with uneven tables and conversations that drift.

Places shaped by preference, not optimization. Technology will still be there. But the reason people show up will not be efficiency. It will be texture. Warmth. The small relief of being somewhere that hasn’t been fully optimized.

By 2046, life may feel increasingly mediated by systems that anticipate our needs. Convenient, yes. Useful, certainly. But occasionally flattening. Here’s to the places that are messy, opinionated, alive, and stubbornly human.

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Many of these thoughts are borrowed rather than invented. They come from reading people who think in systems, constraints, and probabilities. That includes Tim Urban, Alvin Toffler, Nassim Taleb, Ray Dalio, Vaclav Smil, Charlie Munger, and many others. I recommend all their work.

If you made it this far, thank you. Hopefully some of it made sense and not all of it was stupid. Thanks for reading!

Cover image taken from Unsplash.

I recently learned that someone has created a Substack account using my name (Dhruv) and may be reaching out to some subscribers while impersonating me.

Please note that I would never contact you privately to offer financial advice, solicit investments, or request personal information. Any such outreach is not from me.

I am not a financial advisor and will never randomly reach out!

If you receive messages claiming to be from me that don’t come through my official Substack, I’d strongly recommend ignoring them and reporting the account to Substack.

I’m sorry to even have to mention this. As always, I appreciate your trust and support.

Best,
Dhruv

But every now and then, it feels useful to add a little order to the chaos. Last year, I started to write a series about fifty books that stayed with me, and I’ve been really enjoying the process. It’s been slower than expected, more reflective than planned, and I suspect it’ll quietly stretch across a decade, and I am perfectly okay with that.

I felt like trying something similar again.

This is going to be a series on mental models. Fifteen of them. Not because they are definitive or original, but because they have been useful. Some help simplify complex decisions. Some act as filters. Some are reminders of how easily we can fool ourselves.

There is no particular order and no finish line in sight.

Just one mental model at a time.

Here is 1 out of 15.

Ergodicity

Ergodicity is one of those concepts that feels abstract until it hits you in real life: what’s true for a group isn’t necessarily true for an individual.

Imagine a casino. 100 people walk in for a day of Roulette. Five of them go bust. You might be tempted to say, “Ah, the probability of going bust is around 5%.” Sounds reassuring, right?

Now imagine one person goes to the casino for a hundred days. The odds are much worse, in fact, unless they get incredibly lucky, they’ll likely go bust long before the 100th day. That 5% daily probability for the group does not translate into the probability for one person over many trials.

This is the essence of ergodicity: a system is ergodic if the expected value of a process over time for one individual is the same as the expected value across a group at a single moment. Most things in life are not ergodic. Treating them as if they are is where people get into trouble.

The definition sounds abstract, but it shows up in very ordinary places. Investing is one of them. Imagine you’re handed a list of annual returns. Nothing exotic. Just ten numbers. Some good years, some bad ones, a couple of disasters, a couple of bangers.

• +10.51%

• +8.75%

• +19.42%

• +4.32%

• +24.12%

• −51.79%

• +54.77%

• +39.83%

• −24.62%

• +17.95%

Now imagine three parallel universes.

• In Universe A, these returns arrive exactly in the order you saw them.

• In Universe B, all the bad years get out of the way first and the good years come later.

• In Universe C, you get the good years upfront and the bad ones at the end. Same returns. Same years. Just rearranged.

Here’s the deceptively simple question.

Does the order of returns matter?

Case 1 - Lump sum

You invest 1000 once. You do nothing else. You sit on your hands and let compounding do its thing. Run the math. Whether the worst year happens first or last doesn’t change the final number. The multiplication of returns is commutative. The path might feel very different emotionally, but mathematically, it lands you in the same place. This is an example of an ergodic outcome.

Case 2 - Annual Investment (SIP)

Now we change one thing. Instead of investing once, you invest 1000 every year. Same returns. Same three universes. Now run the math again.

Suddenly, the ending balances are wildly different. If bad returns come early, your later contributions benefit from recoveries. If bad returns come late, they crush a much larger capital base. Same returns. Same behavior. Completely different outcomes.

The path matters.

Once you see it in investing, you start seeing it everywhere.

Take health. Smoking a cigarette today doesn’t do much. Smoking one tomorrow doesn’t either. Look at it across a group and at a single moment in time and you might conclude that the damage is marginal. Plenty of people smoke and seem fine. The expected outcome doesn’t look catastrophic.

But health isn’t experienced as a group average. It’s experienced as a path.

The harm compounds quietly. One person smoking for thirty years is not the same as thirty people smoking for one year each. Health is deeply non ergodic. Small, repeated exposures accumulate until they don’t. The same logic applies to sleep, diet, exercise, stress.

And then there’s risk.

In non ergodic systems, survival comes before optimization. You don’t get rewarded for having a high expected return if you don’t make it to the next round. This is why leverage is dangerous even when it looks attractive on paper.

Buffett intuitively understands this when he says “To succeed, you must first survive.”

Nassim Taleb has been circling this idea for years, often without using the word itself. His obsession with fragility, ruin, and survival all links to this. Ole Peters approaches it from the other direction, putting math around something people like Buffett and Munger seemed to grasp intuitively: that time changes the rules of the game.

The common thread is simple. You don’t experience life as an average. You experience it as a sequence. If this mental model does nothing else, let it remind you to respect the sequence, not just the destination. Think about the path. You only get one.

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If you are still reading, thank you! Appreciate the support.

Cover image taken from Unsplash

Instead of getting into a debate about which of these stories is the real one, I wanted to ask a much simpler and much more boring question.

Over a really long time, what has the metal delivered?

So I went and pulled monthly silver futures data going all the way back to 1975 and just let the numbers speak.

The annualized return over those 51 years comes out to about 5.94% in USD. That sounds neat and tidy, but it doesn’t tell the full story. It takes more than half a century of market chaos and compresses it into a single number, quietly skipping over what actually happens along the way.

Because along the way, silver can be… difficult.

There are long stretches, sometimes entire decades, when it does basically nothing. And then there are years like the last one, where if you happened to be holding silver, you more than doubled your money. Depending entirely on when you invested, the experience could have felt boring, frustrating, euphoric, or all three in rapid succession.

To understand what owning silver has really been like, it makes far more sense to stop looking at one big number and start looking at rolling returns.

Rolling returns are basically the market equivalent of asking, “Okay, but what if I had started at a different time?” Imagine taking a one year investing window and sliding it across history one month at a time. Start in January 1975, hold for one year, note the return. Then start in February 1975, hold for one year, note the return. Then March 1975. And so on, month by month, through fifty one years of market history. Instead of getting one clean answer, you get hundreds of answers, each representing what a real investor could have experienced depending on when they jumped in. Some of those investors look like geniuses at dinner parties, some of them quietly question their life choices, and all of them end up with very different outcomes despite investing in the exact same asset. Rolling returns turn long term performance from a single tidy number into a messy but honest picture of what actually happened.

And once we have all these hypothetical investors lined up, some lucky, some unlucky, we can start to make sense of the chaos. By looking at medians and quartiles, we get a picture of what a normal journey looked like for someone holding the asset instead of obsessing over the extreme winners or losers.

So let’s start with one-year rolling returns.

Anywhere between -12.49% and 23.16% is not out of the ordinary, if we are looking at a 1 year investment horizon. The median is 1.46%. I now look at the same thing across 3, 5 and 10 year investment horizons.

A few things immediately stand out.

• If you are investing for 5 years, anywhere between -4.95% and 12.72% is not an unusual return.

• A decade of no returns is not unusual for silver. (At least when we look at the last 50 years)

• The range of outcomes predictably reduce as we increase the time horizon.

Lastly, I look at the probability that you made no money in silver, while still looking at rolling returns over the last fifty one years.

If you stare at that chart for long enough, one thing becomes painfully clear: silver has not been a “buy it, forget it, and go live your life” asset.

Silver has been more like that friend who is occasionally brilliant, frequently difficult, and sometimes disappears for a decade. That alone should inject a healthy dose of caution into any “silver always wins in the long run” story. Timing, cycles, and macro regimes seem to matter a lot here.

And yet.

What makes this moment uncomfortable in a good way is that the past year does not sit in the middle of history’s distribution. It is not close to the median. It sits well beyond the third quartile of past outcomes. That means something unusual is happening. Not unprecedented, but rare.

So when people start talking about monetary hedges, energy transitions, or silver finally “waking up,” they are not hallucinating. The data agrees that this kind of setup does not happen often. There is clearly some merit in the narratives and the numbers lining up at the same time.

But how should all of that translate into what silver is worth?

I wish I knew.

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As always, thank you for reading. If you are looking for a similar analysis on gold you can head here.

Disclaimer This content is for informational purposes only and is not investment advice. While care has been taken to ensure accuracy, errors may exist. The author makes no guarantees and accepts no liability for decisions or outcomes based on this material.

Cover image taken from Unsplash

1. Fantastically fragile

Human progress over the last century has been incredible. We’ve reduced extreme poverty, connected the entire planet, built global supply chains, and unlocked science and technology that previous generations couldn’t dream of. But the same forces that made this possible have also made us structurally fragile.

Oppenheimer is a symbolic turning point. The moment humanity created tools powerful enough to reshape (or end) civilization. But even beyond nuclear technology, we’ve built systems that are deeply interconnected, and heavily optimized.

Deeply interconnected.
Almost every part of the world seems to depend on every other part functioning smoothly. A ship stuck in the Suez Canal can delay factories in Europe, retailers in the U.S., and production schedules in Asia — as we saw in 2020. And in our daily digital lives, a single outage can cascade wildly. If Cloudflare goes down for an hour, suddenly trading platforms, LinkedIn, Substack, etc., become inaccessible. One failure ripples across dozens of industries instantly.

Optimized to razor-thin margins.
“Just-in-time” supply chains work brilliantly, until they don’t. Efficiency has come at the price of resilience. When Indigo grounds flights, weddings get cancelled, business trips collapse, and holiday plans unravel. Small disruptions create outsized chaos because the system leaves no room for buffers.

The world today is like a massive Jenga tower, where each new piece of progress adds height and capability, but also makes the whole structure wobblier. One wrong move, and the effects can cascade far beyond what anyone expects. This is not doom. It is simply the reality of a highly optimized world. We’ve created something brilliant. And brittle.

2. The Return of Muscle

For a long time, progress was framed as a move from muscle to mind. From factories to finance. From making things to designing them. Manufacturing was treated as something to outsource and forget.

That story is beginning to break down. Supply chains are no longer seen as neutral infrastructure. They are instruments of power.

The technologies shaping the next decade are not weightless or virtual. AI, electrification, defense, and energy are deeply physical systems. They require copper, rare earths, lithium, graphite, steel, energy, cooling, and factories that can operate at scale.

Over time, much of the physical backbone that supports these technologies became geographically concentrated. Many economies retained ideas, intellectual property, and financial systems, while the harder work of refining, smelting, and fabrication moved elsewhere. This looked efficient and rational for years. It also created quiet dependencies that are now becoming visible.

Today, the ability to convert raw materials into usable components is far more important than it appears on paper. It is not just about who controls resources underground, but who controls the factories in between. Owning the blueprint matters less if the workshop is somewhere else.

Rebuilding manufacturing capacity is slow, expensive, and politically tricky. These industries are noisy, energy hungry, and not very Instagrammable. Yet without them, even the most advanced economies risk becoming brilliant designers who can’t actually make anything when it matters.

Code still matters. But code without muscle? It’s fragile.

(Yes, I have been rereading the Chip war and the New Map. Recommend them both.)

3. The data centers hype

Everyone’s talking about data centers in India lately. Backed by data localization rules, exploding traffic, and AI workloads that need ridiculous amounts of power, a lot of the hype seems warranted. But the interesting part is how many industries plug into this story.

Real estate developers benefit from long term leases and the growing demand for data center parks. Companies that make electrical equipment see more work, since these massive facilities need a lot of power and backup systems. Cooling and HVAC companies are busy as AI servers push heat loads to new extremes.

Network and telecom providers benefit from the high bandwidth and low-latency connections these hubs need. IT hardware and AI infrastructure makers gain as India builds more local servers, storage, and high-performance computing. Data center operators and telcos see multi-year growth as cloud, enterprise, and AI workloads shift to domestic facilities.

So yes, the space is hot, but it’s not a single bet. It’s land, power, cooling, networks, silicon, and operations. Very emblematic of our modern world: a huge opportunity built on a tightly woven, highly complex value chain. And as investors, it’s interesting because it gives you multiple routes to play a theme.

4. The Middle seems to be Disappearing

Social platforms have turned politics into a kind of arena where only the extremes trend. You either get content from people who sound exactly like you, reinforcing everything you already believe… or content designed to make you furious at “the other side.” Both formats work because they keep you scrolling, reacting, arguing. The algorithm feeds on certainty and outrage. Not on nuance.

And because of that, we start thinking the whole world looks like the far-left vs far-right wrestling match happening on our feeds. We see more AOC or Trump style activism, more hard-edged rhetoric, and almost no one in the middle holding a boring, reasonable line.

The danger is that perception becomes reality. If people believe only the extremes exist, they begin to act like it. Politics shifts. Media shifts. Even policy shifts. And soon the middle isn’t just invisible, it’s irrelevant.

(More on this here.)

5. India will struggle with autonomous cabs even in 2050

Autonomous taxis and ride-hailing services are already taking off. Tesla is pushing forward with its robotaxi plans, and Waymo is making strides too. The technology should not be a problem in the long run.

But in India? The road ahead is far trickier. (Literally and otherwise)

India’s challenge is not technological; it is social and economic. An enormous number of people rely on driving as their primary source of income. Whether it is auto-rickshaw drivers or cab drivers, the massive ecosystem built around transport means fully autonomous cabs would take a significant bite out of employment. Something that would not go down well.

Then there is the issue of entrenched interests. Take Goa’s taxi mafia. Despite years of complaints about inflated fares and poor service, they still wield enormous power. If local transport unions can push back against app based services like Uber and Ola, one can only imagine the resistance to driverless cars.

Regulations, unions, and the sheer scale of employment in the sector mean India’s adoption of autonomous taxis will be slower and messier than in other countries. So even if the technology to handle the absolute chaos of Indian roads is not far off, there are enough challenges to prevent it from unfolding the same way it might for China or the USA.

6. What is it with all these weddings?

I said these were six things on my mind, not six smart things. And right now, a lot of that mental bandwidth is taken up by weddings.

Turning 27 apparently means every other month you’re traveling to another city, reusing the same three outfits, and doing dance practice. What’s strange and beautiful is how weddings sit alongside everything else. Global uncertainty, political noise, technological shifts, and then suddenly you’re arguing about outfits and hotel check-ins. Life doesn’t pause for big structural changes. It just keeps layering moments on top of each other.

Maybe that’s the point. Even in a world that feels fragile, optimized, polarized, and in flux, people are legally committing to spend the rest of their lives with each other. Families are still gathering. Photos are still being taken. Flights are still being booked. (and cancelled)

It’s grounding in a way. Amid all the systems and abstractions, weddings are messy, human, and beautifully imperfect. Just people showing up to celebrate, gossip, laugh, and dance.

And to my friend Mishri, who recently got married, thank you for reminding me that even in the middle of all this thinking and overthinking, some people and celebrations are genuinely, effortlessly, ridiculously wonderful.

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And that, feels like the best possible note to end the year on. Hope you all had a wonderful 2025. This will be my last article of the year. See you in 2026! As always, thank you for reading.

Haruki Murakami is… divisive. To put it mildly. His writing can feel slippery, dreamlike, sometimes frustratingly opaque. His female characters are often criticized, and not without reason. I want to acknowledge all of that upfront, because it’s important context. And yet, Norwegian Wood remains one of the most affecting, quietly devastating books I’ve ever read.

On the surface, it’s a coming of age story: Toru Watanabe, a university student in Tokyo, navigating love, grief, memory, and the strange loneliness of early adulthood. But beneath that, it’s an exploration of loss in all its forms. The kind that doesn’t explode your life so much as seep into it, quietly, relentlessly, until everything feels tinted by it.

What struck me most was how Murakami captures the ache of being young and not having the emotional language for the things happening inside you. The way friendships blur into love, how love blurs into dependency, and how some people walk into your life and quietly rearrange the furniture and you’re never quite the same after.

Some novels demand effort; others are breezy and forgettable. For me, Norwegian Wood sits in that rare, delicate middle space. It’s accessible, heartbreaking without being manipulative, and written with a tenderness that sneaks up on you.

It’s a sad book. Not melodramatic. Just sad in the way life can be. Beautifully so. Of the little fiction I’ve read, this remains one of the best.

And lines worth starring? Many. But I’ll leave you with this one:

“What a terrible thing it is to wound someone you really care for and to do it so unconsciously.”

Oh, also

“Don’t feel sorry for yourself,” he said. “Only arseholes do that.”

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The Business of the NBA teams

Just like other major sports leagues, NBA teams rely on a variety of revenue sources to stay profitable. Broadly speaking, these include:

• Broadcast Revenue: This is huge, especially with the NBA’s massive national TV deals. The league signed a $24 billion deal with ESPN and TNT back in 2014, and that ensures teams see a chunk of that money. On top of that, teams also negotiate local broadcast rights. The big-market teams like the Lakers pull in much more from their local deals, thanks to their larger fan bases and media markets. In contrast, smaller teams, don’t have the same earning potential from local broadcasts. To help level the playing field, the NBA works to redistribute some of the revenue across the league to make sure smaller-market teams can still compete financially.

• Ticket Sales: Every home game generates revenue for teams through ticket sales. This of course can fluctuate based on the team's performance, star players, and the overall popularity of the team in its local market.

• Merchandise Sales: Jerseys, hats, shoes, and other team-branded products are sold through a mix of official stores, online platforms, and partnerships with retail chains.

• Sponsorships and Partnerships: Major corporations pay to have their logos displayed on uniforms, in arenas, or across digital platforms. These sponsorships can range from the NBA’s official partners to individual team-specific deals.

• Arena Revenue: Revenue generated from events held in the team's home arena, including non-NBA events like concerts, conventions, and other sporting events, also contributes to a team's income.

One more thing worth noting: the luxury tax. To help maintain competitive balance, the NBA imposes a luxury tax on teams that exceed the salary cap. It’s basically a financial penalty for spending too much on players, but some teams are willing to pay it if it gives them a better shot at winning.

Decline in viewership

So, why is NBA viewership dropping, even with some of the most recognizable athletes on the planet? There’s no single answer, but here are a few key factors:

• First off, people just have a lot of options, but limited time.
  With so much entertainment competing for attention, most fans want the best content, fast. And sometimes, NBA just might not be that.

• The rise of highlight culture.
  Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, clips are everywhere. You can catch the best the game has to offer in under 60 seconds. For casual fans, sitting through a 2+ hour game just doesn’t feel necessary anymore.

• Modern NBA games feels repetitive.
  Most teams now play a similar style: launch a ton of threes, switch everything on defense, and optimize for efficiency. It’s smart basketball, but also predictable. When every team plays the same way, the product starts to feel stale.

• Games only feel meaningful in the final minutes.
  A lot of viewers check out early because they feel like nothing truly matters until crunch time. The first three quarters can feel like a warm-up to the real action, which means fewer people stick around, or tune in at all.

• Too many stoppages.
  Between timeouts, fouls, and commercials, the flow of the game is constantly interrupted. It breaks momentum and stretches out the experience, especially for younger fans with shorter attention spans.

• Access to games is frustrating.
  Half the time, fans can’t even watch their own teams without paying for extra streaming packages. Games are split across different networks, and it’s confusing, especially for casual fans.

Some of these issues are structural problems that can hopefully be tweaked, like making content more accessible and streamlining the broadcasting process. Others, like the overemphasis on three-pointers, might just be the “old heads” complaining. One thing I personally keep coming back to, which I think could make the game more exciting, is the scoring system itself.

Tweaking the scoring system

I'm fascinated by how different sports use various scoring methods, and how that shapes overall engagement.

For instance, some sports are strictly time-based, meaning the contest runs for a set duration, and the team with the most points (or runs) at the end wins. Others are organized around sets or rounds, where players or teams must win a certain number of segments to claim victory. There are also hybrid systems that mix elements of both approaches.

Consider these examples:

• Tennis: Matches are scored in sets and games. Players must win a predetermined number of sets (typically best-of-five in Grand Slams or best-of-three in other tournaments). Each set is made up of individual games, and the match is decided by who wins the required number of sets.

• Basketball (Current NBA): The game is strictly time-based. The clock runs for four 12-minute quarters (48 minutes total), and the team with the most points when time expires wins.

• Football: Also a time-based sport, with ninety minutes of action.

• Cricket: In limited-overs formats (like One Day Internationals or T20), matches are based on a set number of overs rather than a time limit. In Test cricket, however, the game is played over five days, and the team that scores the most runs across two innings wins. Or the match can end in a draw if time runs out.

One thing I’ve always admired about tennis is how its scoring structure preserves competitive tension almost indefinitely. Even when a player is down two sets, the match isn’t functionally over because each set is scored independently and there is no cumulative margin that carries over. This creates what you could call reset equity: after every set, the trailing player starts from zero with a fully renewed chance to flip the momentum. The point by point structure also means that there is virtually no garbage time because every point materially affects the pathway to winning the next game, which affects the next set, which affects the match. Tennis uses a kind of modular scoring architecture, where each segment is self contained but consequential, ensuring that the match is not decided early unless one player actually earns it. That is part of what makes big comebacks feel so possible and why viewers stay locked in: mathematically and psychologically, the door is never closed until the very end.

Now, imagine a NBA scoring system that blends elements of time-based and set-based formats, similar to a concept from boxing. Instead of having four quarters, the game could be broken into five 10-minute quarters, with each quarter counting as a set. The team that wins three out of the five sets wins the game. (Or think 7, 7 minute quarters and first to four)

This creates a sense of urgency in each quarter as every minute counts. It’s not about staying in the game. It's about winning that quarter.

This system also mimics the NBA Finals series, where it’s a first-to-four-wins format in a best-of-seven series. But the beauty of this would be that it’s condensed into a single game, keeping the excitement up throughout.

Of course, this kind of change would be a bold move. Very bold. It would drastically alter how stats are compared and how the game is played. For example, moving from 48 minutes to 50 minutes is a small change, but the real shake-up comes in the structure itself. Teams would need to adjust their strategies in real time, and the current metrics (like individual points per game) could become harder to compare. Some games would end in three quarters and others go till five.

Food for thought, I guess?

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Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh

If you’ve spent any time on the internet in the last decade, you’ve probably bumped into Allie Brosh’s work. Bright, chaotic drawings paired with an almost unnerving ability to articulate what it feels like to be human. Her book Hyperbole and a Half is exactly that.

I can’t really classify this book. It is part memoir, part comic, part therapy session disguised as a cartoon. One moment you are smirking about a cake obsessed child version of Brosh staging a rebellion, and the next you are reading one of the most honest depictions of mental illness you have seen anywhere. It is that tonal whiplash of funny, then profound, then funny again that makes the whole thing work. Life is often like that. Brosh captures it.

Her illustrations are expressive in a way that sneaks up on you. A crude, wide-eyed drawing of despair communicates something that paragraphs may not. Its art and it works.

By the time you are done, you may notice something subtle the book encourages. It lets you laugh at yourself without being cruel, and it lets you take your own struggles seriously without feeling self important. Brosh’s honesty and humor sit side by side, and the result is a kind of gentle permission to see your flaws without judgment. For me, it was a reminder that everyone is dealing with something, everyone feels strange or broken or ridiculous at times, and that this is simply part of being human.

It’s the kind of book you finish in an afternoon, then think and smile about for weeks. And like the best books, it’s impossible to read without feeling a little more human afterward. I loved it. Maybe you will too. That’s all for now. Thanks for reading.

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The first bite of a warm chocolate chip cookie. The smell of rain on concrete. Singing off-key at karaoke, a little too loud, with people you adore. They’re not big milestones. Just the little in-betweens that make life feel alright. That’s what this deck is about.

Each card has a doodle. Scrappy little sketches of things I’ve noticed, remembered, or stumbled across over the years. Most of them are objectively terrible drawings, but maybe they’ll make you smile. Or at the very least, make you feel better about your own drawing skills.

I’ve printed around hundred decks. Just something I wanted to put out into the world. If this resonates with you, and you’d like to buy one, you can fill this form, and I can get back to you.

As always, thank you for the support, and if you are a new subscriber, Sorry!! Something more investing related will be coming out soon.