Aditya Chaturvedi

This redundancy is what leads to @Peter_Turchin's Elite Overproduction'. Too many people with vaunted higher education and superfluous diplomas that the market doesn't value, leading to bitter turf wars and zero-sum competition to grab limited spots available in high echelons.

In the village clubhouses they talk politics; politics absorbs all their frenzy. Speech and elections are free; real power is unobtainable; and politics is the opium of the people. ~ The Overcrowded Barracoon, VS Naipaul

Morgan Stanley has called NSE 'the growth engine of Indian capital markets'. The exchange, established in 1992, has outpaced BSE, Asia's oldest stock market founded in 1875, in equity as well as derivatives F&0. It accounts for over 90% of all stocks traded in the cash delivery market, and enjoys a total 100% share in stock Options and Futures. In index options and futures, its share is 60%+ With an EBIDTA margin of 76%, it is also the most profitable stock exchange in the world, outperforming the bourses in Hong Kong, Singapore, London, as well as the NASDAQ. Complementing the ongoing pace of digitalization, financialization, securitization, and capital formation will grow by leaps and bounds over the years. As per estimates, over 3% of Indians invest directly in the equity markets, compared to 18% in China, and 60% in the US. This figure will expand as digital divide reduces further, and the share of economic formalization and bankable population increases as public sector banks, rural NBFCS and micro-credit firms cater to more underserved areas. The potential is huge, especially since the widening participation in capital markets signals a massive youth-led shift decisively away from the famously risk-averse sarkari-samajwaadi scarcity mindset and povertarian tunnel-vision philosophy. Agro, Infra, and BFSI have massive potential to be soaring outliers in the India story even if we discount future gains from EMS, next-gen innovation, clean energy, semiconductor gambit, and agentic AI deployment at scale. India's redoubtable moat will be through a combination of Digital Public Infrastructure, highly liquid financial markets, agro-modernization, and last-mile logistics and supply chain network. Together, these will create a very powerful positive ripple effect that will increase incomes and opportunities over the years. The baseline of affordable digital connectivity, with the cheapest mobile internet rates in the world, and the vast array of services at one tap, from ecommerce to payments, have enhanced exposure, aspiration, as well as given a medium for upward mobility.

Colossal feat. With the exception of China and India, there's no other country in the world with a population of 500 million. This means India has pulled more people out of poverty than the population of the USA and Russia combined. And equivalent to the population of EU.

As the pop philosopher Madonna said, I am not sorry, it's human nature.

Hegel is so damn cryptic and inscrutable that anything and everything can be attributed to him. From End of History to March of Geography, to Space Race to fully automated luxury communism, to the juche system in DPRK.

Classic exhibit of the Tyranny of Experts – and Moral Crusaders. Adaptive interventions, local knowledge, tech transformation, market integration, and scalability does more than mis-diagnosed policy prescriptions or self-righteous zeal.

Thompson College aka IIT Roorkee is Asia's oldest civil engineering institution. College of Engineering - Guindy, founded as School of Survey in 1794, is the oldest engineering & tech institution anywhere in the world outside Europe. It is older than @MIT, which was founded in 1861. Syndenham College, Bombay is the oldest college of commerce and economics in Asia. Calcutta Medical College, founded in 1835 by William Bentick, was the pioneer in english as a medium of instruction in medicine in the world. The colonial British contribution to the induction of India into the modern world via enquiry, education, research, scientific knowledge and training, was a colossal feat with very few parallels. No amount of inferiority complex, melodrama, opportunistic nativism, and cheap de-colonization or Indic power max slop can rebuke that.

The recent debate between Paul Kedrosky and @azeem at @nytimes Ezra Klein Show is very insightful on the trend of hyper concentration and the traditional markers of froth and bubble formation. In August 2022, three months before the launch of ChatGPT by OpenAI – which kick-started the profusion of Generative AI – I did a long-form interview with Azeem regarding his book 'The Exponential Age'. The points that he raised regarding the broader tech shift towards convergence, the economics of clusters, specialization, arbitrage, and the friction between globalization & re-localization, still offer food for thought four years down the line. The key takeaways are still pertinent amid the gold rush for GPUs, hyper-scalers, and the fast-transition towards agentic engineering: – The Asymmetric Power of Convergence – Network Effects – Positive Feedback Loops – Scalability – Exponential Acceleration – Learning Curve – Moore's Law – Information to Insights to Intel pipeline – Causal Link between Policy, Performance, and Pricing Power – The Four Cs that redefined the modern world: Containerization, Chips, Computing power, and Convergence. The Catch-22 collision between the push for far-reaching regulations and guardrails v/s laissez-faire deregulation & accelerationism is still the hot-button issue on AI. From the interview: "Technology has led to an unprecedented decline in price. All complex engineered technologies are susceptible to learning effects. The Ford Model-T declined in cost by 75% between 1909 and 1929 due to learning effects. They became more and more efficient. There were also economies of scale, which is impressive, but it doesn’t compare with the decline in cost of a computer from 1960s to today. One of the fundamental units in a computer is an engineered product called a transistor. In 1958, a transistor cost about $1,500 in modern money whereas today you can get 100 million transistors for a dollar.That’s a decline that you don’t get to see in other markets. One of the first thing is to get these technologies that witness drastic decline in price which drives their market ubiquity."

The four original metropolitan cities + the new IT hubs, the colloquial engines of the new economy, as well as fast-expanding mid-sized cities aspiring to a noveau chic modernity of the high street and the spacious and prim concourse, is well represented in the urban imagery. These are also the hubs of experimental and stylistic fusion, and a medley of ideas and lifestyles. The stomping ground and the kaleidoscope of the digitally-savvy glocal Indian. The romance of the bucolic countryside or closely-knit ramschackle hamlet is eternal - and unlikely to fade anytime soon, at least in the imagery it evokes and the gushing portryal of it. What gets under-represented and overlooked, as the article argues, is the humble, dusty, and the often disorganised qasbah or the market town.

Comprehensive reportage.

Intelligence and brilliance will carry you for a few days or months, but wisdom and common sense will endure. Keep your emotions under control and trust the universal principles of nature. Whatever goes up must come down. You cannot sow today and expect to reap tomorrow. There are no shortcuts in life. ~ Parag Parikh