Category: Opinion

You can totally dismiss this piece as a conspiracy theory. I will advise don’t. Everyone wins when citizens actually show interest in understanding where their policy comes from. Many of my colleagues in the technology industry are ambitious, well meaning and have great plans to impact lives. But respect for on-ground realities, structures and due process is the difference between agritech of 2013 and 2023. We came in as an impatient lot. There was so much inefficiency, so many middlemen, so much data and potential….Continue Reading “Farm laws, digital platforms and vested evangelism” →

The man is dead. Why speak evil of him? Asked a concerned friend. Why does the right speak evil of dead Mahatma and dead Nehru? Why is the right writing new fiction about a dead Savarkar? Why do we not even remember which royalties sided up with the British when we visit their palaces and see their wealth in museums? Death is not an end. It is the end of a man. It is the beginning of archive, memory, legacy and legend. How will history…Continue Reading “Why we must speak ill of the dead” →

The Indian summer and our search for a house have begun together. Despite the pains, I am sticking to ethics. And, the ethics of making jokes is to punch up. So, after South Delhi, let us talk about Noida. I can’t afford a house in either, so it is a punch up for sure. A friend is buying a house, so we tagged along just for a look see. The first property we saw was a NOIDA housing scam elevator pitch. The houses are complete….Continue Reading “Househunting in Noida” →

A political commentator is expected to discuss dying, decaying state of politics. Not celebrate it. A streetfood commentator should be expected to comment on dying, decaying streetfood culture that is drowning under mayo and amul butter, right? Not celebrate it?? Show me one. If food had journalism, we won’t have a single journalist amongst us.All of them fall over each while running to a omlette guy who uses half a kilo butter or some paratha guy who uses thirty eggs or some pani puri guy…Continue Reading “Streetfood bloggers needed” →

Age moves your cogs not so silently. You don’t run into walls and wonder how much you hurt the bricks. It’s your joints you worry about. From winning the world, your dreams are resized to fit a plot in a second-tier city. Youth is fire that you want to burn the world with. With age, you are happy if it cooks the omelette well. Middle age. When the cloud of your dreams has rained down as years gone by; when the rivers of your plains…Continue Reading “Middle Age” →

The constant feeling of being inadequate is the only constant in life. The flurry of social media doesn’t distract it. The busy corporate life doesn’t drown it. The million dead is nothing but a longish blur. The shopping, the dining, the friends and their banter – all but faint brush strokes on the background that has inadequate written all over it, in small fonts, like a gift wrapping paper. Only there will be no gift, and no wrapping. The feeling of inadequacy. Meaning is as…Continue Reading “Being inadequate” →

Watching IPL after a decade. So, watched regular ads after ages. Says a lot about our economy. FMCG has completely vanished.Now, ads fall under 3 categories: 1. Cricket betting which is betting. 2. Bitcoin investment which is not betting but being positioned as. 3. Mutual funds which return less than last year’s LIC. 4. Savings on paying billsMuch like our politics and society, our economy now hinges on betting. Legal, govt encouraged betting.

Okay. One does not have to point at the other side of everything. But I feel compelled to, so will try not to change. India is filled with great people. Baba cries on camera. There are folks at his shop and Zomato adds them and my LinkedIn is full of it etc etc. India is kind, generous, jannat. A fruit sellers fruits are looted. Someone floats his account number. Money flows like water. When we were collecting groceries for Delhi riot victims, many did contribute….Continue Reading “Baba Ka dhaba and drone charity in times of apathy” →

Okay. Personal opinion. Strong opinion. Don’t like it, stay away. Bad day at work. I seriously don’t understand married women taking on surnames of their husbands. Let’s forget about feminism and identity and power equations etc etc. Even the liberated women who have a choice don’t think twice before erasing half of thier identity because a man married them. Tanu and me joked a couple of times that Om Bhowmik sounds way more cooler than Tanushree Routray. But we were very clear that beyond jokes…Continue Reading “Love and last name” →

When they say sometimes destiny is thrust upon you, they have Umar Khalid in mind. He would have been a very good student, a well known academic, worked in a think tank or whatever. But he would never have been The Umar Khalid. One evening of some planted students, corrupt media houses and he is Public Enemy Number 1. He could chose to vanish, be selfish and become irrelevant. Do what we all are trying to do – stoop a little lower in the last…Continue Reading “Umar Khalid and destiny’s thrust” →

Food for work programs like MNREGA are aimed at keeping the pressure cooker of anger among the poor from bursting. There is always a possibility, a hope, the bare minimum assurance that they will get food for that day. Mutual funds is that pressure cooker valve for the middle class. It is an elaborate scheme in which they will never win anything. But there is hope, a possibility, a bare minimum assurance that they will have their get rich by working hard dreams for that…Continue Reading “Mutual fund sahi hai?” →

The answers to goonda raj of Jai Shri Ram are two fold – secularism and Krishna. First we all know, let’s talk about the second. Krishna and Ram are both avatars of Vishnu. But Ram lends himself to caste bigotry, patriarchy and religious violence much more easily than Krishna. Krishna is a complex, worldly and intelligent character. He goes beyond the judgemental black and white of Ram. Krishna is the master of grey. He didn’t have the arrogance of a maryada purush etc. He was an…Continue Reading “The answer to Ram is Krishna” →

What happens when a bank loses public money due to carelessness or due to malpractice? There are repercussions. Now, consider this. About 57,676 tons of foodgrain stored in Food Corporation of India (FCI) godowns between 2013-2018. What happened? Nothing. It looks like 2020 will set a whole new record due to high previous stock and new stocks being added. The value of the food lost – Rs 92,000 crore — is nearly two-thirds of what it costs the government to feed 600 million poor Indians…Continue Reading “Food waste should be a criminal offence” →

Doing a weekend post after a while because this one issue has been bugging me. Both me and my wife have massive interest in rice. We write about it, we did a pop-up and an rice exhibition that showcased 32 kinds of rice and are now planning a book. The biggest issue in rice is sourcing. And, that is how we have met the most passionate and amazing people and institutions. How many of you have heard of these two: https://www.juhaal.com/https://amarkhamar.com/ Most would not have….Continue Reading “Why ignore great startups with no funding?” →

No matter how badly the economy is doing, India has enough food to ensure that no one will grow hungry doing lockdown. It is not about resources, it is all about intent. Food Corporation of India (FCI) should have stock of 21 million tonnes of food grains. Currently, FCI holds 55.5 million tonnes – over two-and-half times more than mandated. As on March 1, the FCI had 30.97 mt of rice and 27.52 mt of wheat, totalling 58.49 mt. The FCI also has unmilled paddy…Continue Reading “Covid19, FCI, Hunger Deaths and Govt’s Intent” →