Six things on my mind as we enter 2026

With Spotify Wrapped reminding me that the year is coming to a close, I thought I’d put my thoughts down on just how strange and fascinating this moment in history is. Here are six random things that have been bouncing around in my head.

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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.