Ashwini Vaishnaw recently told a room full of startups that India will move from a “services nation” to a “product nation” on the back of chip making. The government now backs 24 fabless design startups and wants 50. He is right that design is where India’s real edge lies. We...
Most people believe one thing about money: to become rich, you must earn more. A bigger salary, a better job, a side income. We chase the number on the payslip and assume wealth will follow. But it often does not. People who earn well still end up in debt. People...
Is It Really Just ₹24? The True Price of a Single Cigarette There was a time when buying a cigarette did not make you think twice. Today, one Gold Flake Kings cigarette in many Indian cities costs around ₹24. A full pack costs about ₹240. For many smokers, paying ₹24...
Switzerland sits in the middle of Europe with no coastline, no oil, no gold mines, and almost no useful minerals. Most of its land is steep mountains where farming is hard. By every old rule of economics, it should have stayed poor. Yet today it is one of the richest...
Next month I turn 49. Forty-nine. Just one year away from the magical number where people suddenly start saying things like, “Age is just a number.” Funny how nobody says that when you’re 19 waiting for your driving license. When I was 20, I had life all figured out. By...
On June 17, 2026, Donald Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian put their names on a document that few people thought possible a year ago. Trump signed it at a dinner in the Palace of Versailles in France. Pezeshkian signed his copy in Tehran. The “Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding,” brokered...
There is a comfortable lie going around that India has produced nothing in artificial intelligence. It is wrong, and it is worth correcting before we get to the part that should actually worry us. In February 2026, a Bengaluru company called Sarvam released two large language models built from scratch,...
When A. P. J. Abdul Kalam died in Shillong on 27 July 2015, the whole country stopped. People who had never met him cried as if they had lost a family member. But the most powerful part of his story was not how he died. It was what he left...
The Story Behind the AI Model That Triggered a U.S. National Security Response When Anthropic unveiled Claude Fable 5 in early June 2026, many AI researchers described it as one of the most capable publicly available language models ever released. Within just a few days, however, it disappeared. Many people...
Every Indian has lived this moment. The 10th or 12th result day arrives. A student who studied for two years sits in front of a screen, types the roll number, and waits. The page spins. It times out. It throws an error. The family refreshes for three hours. A railway...
