Three Wishes at Midnight: India Turns Seventy-Nine
India's 79th Independence Day: two nations born a day apart, three decisions that split them, and three wishes for the 80th year.
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Sirens, Ships and Sovereign Wealth
Homer’s oldest lesson in self-restraint, watched on a very big screen in Singapore, and the machine nations have built to actually practise it.
No Vacancy: How the Patels Bought the American Motel
They own 60 per cent of America's hotels, employ more people than FedEx and Home Depot combined, and could not eat, drink, or check into a single room of the empire they built.
Money as a Third Culture Kid
Wealth management’s quiet confession: what asset managers buy with their own money, and why fear does not scale with net worth.
Farewell, My Forties.
A valediction in verse, written at the border between decades.
The Young Old Man: A Letter to My Daughters on Turning Fifty
Turning 50, Victor Hugo’s border crossing, the arc of a life, and the sunscreen in between.
The Republic of Invention: America at 250 and the Five Conditions Behind Everything It Made
America's masterpiece was never on the list of things it invented. At 250, the only question is whether it can keep the conditions that made the list
Daughter of the Sky
The gods of ancient Greece and India turn out to be one family, separated by five thousand years. A child’s remark in an Athens museum, a father’s last rites, and everything two civilisations shared.
Rules for an (Extra)Ordinary Man
A Father's Day tribute to my father, Ajit Narain: what an ordinary man taught me about cricket, character, and never once swinging for the boundary.
Gods on Loan: The Tourism Fortune India Squandered and Thailand Treasured
India’s tourism punches far below its weight while Thailand monetises the gods, epics and serenity that India itself once exported.
Secrets, Sensors & Settlement
Prediction markets stopped being a politics business. Eighty per cent of the volume is sport, and ICE just paid $1.6bn to buy the sensor, not the casino. (📚 ~13 min read)
This Month I Discovered I Was Richer Than I Thought I Was
What thirty years of friendship looks like at 35,000 feet
Watch This Space: A Patent Lapses, a Queue Forms, the Wrist Reclaims Its Silence.
How the Royal Pop frenzy, a lapsed patent, and a quieter wearable revolution rearranged the wrist in one weekend.
Below the Boulevard: The Subway and the Shape of the Modern City
What ten days of riding the Tube and the New York Subway reveal about the most civilising piece of infrastructure any city ever builds.
A2Z Fintech #40 by AMWB: Machines, Mandates & Money.
Agentic commerce shipped while the world was still arguing about the buy button. The 4 protocols, the 4 horsemen, and why China already won the first lap. Part 2 of 2 Stripe special. (📚 ~12 min)
The Brahmin in the Sky: The Last Caste System That Works
Singapore Airlines built the most psychologically sophisticated caste system in the modern world. Last week, my five-year membership ends.
A2Z Fintech #39 by AMWB: Lines, Lobby & Launch.
From seven lines of code to indexing the economy. Inside Stripe's 288 launches at Sessions 2026 — Tempo, Bridge, Privy, the Agentic Commerce Suite, the Machine Payments Protocol — and the structural argument that Stripe is no longer a payments processor. It is the next Google.
Life, Love & Liquidity at Fifty
Two boys from Calcutta, thirty years on: one builds systems, one makes fun of them
From Bhai-Bhai to Buy-Buy
India's move from non-alignment to multi-alignment. The first was a principle dressed as a strategy. The second is a strategy dressed as a principle.
A2Z Fintech #38 by AMWB: Predictions, Podium & Pie.
The Q1 2026 scorecard: four wins, three close calls, one spectacular flop. Plus four new predictions for the rest of the season. (📚 ~11 min read)