A Rare Disease Is Spreading Through India's Finance Commentariat
A public-health bulletin on the rare anatomical disorder spreading through India's finance commentariat.
Bhuvan
Long-form writing, quick updates, and fascinating discoveries
Latest posts
Watching Train Dreams in the Age of AI
What a quiet movie about a Pacific Northwest logger taught me about living through a world being remade.
Before we had answers, we had stories
A few thoughts after rereading Stephen Fry's Mythos.
Fuck around while you still can
The permanent underclass is coming. Fuck around anyway.
Start the damn blog
On writing, doing, and the momentum of small things.
A few fragmented thoughts on AI
A collection of working notes on AI, writing, work, and what it means to actually use these tools
Escalate your reading
Against easy reading. Reading should be like taking a hostage—you have to escalate steadily. Don't just keep reading easy books; escalate to more challenging ones. Pay attention to the ripples in your mind and follow them down rabbit holes. Good books can shatter your delusions and push you to think differently.
Introducing Dhwani: A directory of Indian public domain works
Why I'm collecting links to books no one will read
On having a philosophy of money
On people doing dumb shit with money
Who are you without a job?
Thinking about one's identity In the shadow of AI.
A ripple and then a rabbit hole
An exploration of intellectual "rabbit holes" as the essence of a life well-lived. When something catches my attention—a "ripple"—I follow it wherever it leads, even if it seems random or pointless. These intellectual adventures have led me to the best books, projects, and ideas in my life. I don't try to optimize my learning or have grand purposes. I just stay curious, pay attention, and let…
Philosophy of life and Seneca’s letters
A site for Seneca's letters.
The heart wants what it wants
I learned that the famous line "The heart wants what it wants" is from a famous letter by Emily Dickinson and not Woody Allen. The full line: > Dear Mary - > > When the Best is gone - I know that other things are not of consequence - The Heart wants what it wants - or else it does not care - > > You wonder why I write - so - Because I cannot help - I like to have you know some care - so when your…
Speculation is like water—it always finds a way
I argue that speculation is like water—it never stops, it just finds new channels. Using India’s gaming ban and global examples, I show why prohibition shrinks what’s visible but pushes play offshore or underground, and why channelization with smart, coordinated regulation works better.
Your next good read
I built [Paper Trails](https://papertrails.rabbitholes.garden/digests/) to aggregate RSS feeds from some of the blogs and newsletters I enjoy reading. It’s become a wonderful place for me to find new rabbit holes 🐰 🕳️ and you may too. Check it out and let me know if you have any suggestions. I add a possibly dumb yet genius new feature called “[Random…
A world without news
For some reason, I’ve long been fascinated by news publishing. At one point in my life, I wanted to be a journalist. Thank God I didn’t become one. As romantic ...
Broken news
“Good times become good memories, but bad times become good lessons.” Uncle Iroh, Avatar: The Last Airbender.
Dear influencers, please stop hurting India
If you are working in financial services, you would have heard or thought about this: "India has 140 crore people, and even if 10–20% of the population starts i...
Death to the banks; central bank accounts for all
Throughout the history of modern banking, two narratives have been constant: "Banks are dead" and "Why do we need banks?"
It’s your grandfather’s banking crisis
In the previous post, I wrote about a few underappreciated aspects of banking panics in the wake of the Silicon Valley Bank collapse. Since publishing the post,...
Stories that cause bank failures and the scars they leave
On March 10th, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), the 16th largest bank in the United States, collapsed. SVB was the bank of choice for US startups, faux libertarian te...
Institutional investors are just as stupid as retail investors
One of the oldest clichés in finance is that retail investors are "dumb money" and institutional investors are "smart money." There's some truth to the cliché. ...
No, it isn’t
Bill Burr is one of my favourite stand-up comedians and also someone you can easily relate to. At the 2014 to Don Rickles—another one of my favourite comedians...
'Revolution in a box: The extraordinary story of the ordinary shipping container'
Can you think of some of the greatest inventions and innovations in human history?
Dear fintechs, please stop hurting India
Sometime in the last decade, _software is eating the world_ became _fintech is eating the world_. The term “fintech” is a portmanteau of “finance” and “technolo...
So long, and thanks for all the fish
The relative calm of 2021 feels like yesterday to me. Sure, we had a virus that was hellbent on killing us, but most of us had made peace with our impending dea...
The boy who cried wolf about an emerging markets sovereign and corporate debt crisis
These are good times for all those who've been crying wolf about market crashes and economic crises for the past couple of decades. It just took two decades, bu...
What’s old is new again
A few things that made me go, _ooh, that's interesting_.
SPACtacular
A few things I learned this week.
Yield curve meets Munger
Here's what I learned this week. One thing is that I'm going to be poor, but here are a few other things.
Making sense of the Russia-Ukraine conflict
If you had the power to bring back someone from the dead, who would it be? I'm guessing a dear one, favorite actor, musician?
Go curate yourself!
I have an embarrassing and pretentious-sounding confession. One of the reasons why I created this blog is because I really enjoy collecting links—the internet c...
Niall Ferguson on money and cryptocurrencies
Niall Ferguson is one of the smartest and the most provocative financial historians of our time. His controversial reading of history has earned him a reputatio...
There’s too much of everything
The amount of new content created every day on the internet is astounding. It goes without saying that a lot of it’s nonsense, but there’s plenty of good stuff....
What a time to be in the markets
Today was a bad day for smallcaps. The Nifty Smallcap 250 index was down by 2.59%. No, this isn't a post about "smallcaps are risky". Although, I don't who read...
Miser and miserable
On balance, the personal finance bloggers and the gurus have done a lot to educate people. But sometimes, it feels like they undo a lot of that work with ridicu...
Never better or getting worse?
If you listen to Steven Pinker, he'll tell you the world has never been a better place: ...
Stop Zuckerberg!
This week's edition of the _Nonzero newsletter_ was quite interesting. It chronicles all the shenanigans of Mark Zuckerberg since he was at Harvard. The post pa...
'Work from home: good, bad, or ugly?'
There was a lot of chatter about work from home last week. A lot of these were the same old debates about whether work from home is good or bad. Is work from ho...
Trillion dollar problems
Microsoft hit $2 trillion in marketcap a few days ago. There was a time when a trillion meant something, but it doesn't seem so anymore. Microsoft and Apple now...
Hello, world!
Yay! I am now another pretentious idiot on the internet with a blog. The reason why I started this blog is I love writing and learning about things, but I am to...