Positions

Nine things I currently think are true.

Directional, not absolute. Calibrated to 2026 specifically, from where I'm sitting. I write these down because writing makes me notice when I'm vague — and because if any of these are wrong, I'd rather find out from someone who disagrees than keep being wrong quietly.

India and the world should shed socialistic vestiges.

Government's job is welfare, regulation, and facilitation of the private sector. Not running businesses. The best system we have so far is capitalism, with calibrated limits and enough intervention to prevent massive losers — taxation, redistribution, a floor under the worst-off. Politics rarely brings total fairness; it rewards the majority and sometimes the vocal minority. So we keep the engine that grows the pie and we cut the parts of government that try to drive it themselves.

It is better to have an unequal world where the worst layer is continuously getting better off, than an equal world where everybody is miserable.

Government exam prep is where Indian talent goes to die.

I taught UPSC aspirants for six years and sat the exam five times myself. The system absorbs the country's most disciplined young minds and pours them into a funnel that admits a fraction of one per cent. The rest emerge a decade older, with a CV the private sector treats as a gap. The fix isn't to scale rank-clearing — it's to redirect that hunger toward the right skills and the right risks. Entrepreneurship, not rank-clearing. Build something, sell something, ship something. The country needs a million founders more than it needs another batch of officers.

Younger generations are getting better and more trustable, especially in India.

I have a lot of trust and faith in Gen Z and Gen Alpha. They have better information, less tolerance for theatre, and a working defence against the kinds of authority that used to coast on title alone. The cynicism aimed at them is mostly older people surprised that the new lot reads them. If you're hiring or partnering, calibrate up, not down.

Regulation should always be two steps behind innovation.

Wait-and-watch by default. Intervene only when catastrophic consequences are visible — and then case by case, light-touch, until the shape of things becomes clear. When we invented fire, some people burned their hands; we got smarter, we got more careful, we did not put the fire out. The asymmetry is hard: a delayed regulation costs a few harms; a premature one throttles a generation of progress. Two steps behind is the discipline.

Build a thousand new cities from the ground up.

I'm against anti-urbanisation. The density of population, paired with tech, creates possibilities that simply cannot be reproduced in villages — at least until movement gets close to teleportation speed, at which point the whole world becomes a city, so to speak. The right move isn't to slow the migration; it's to build a thousand cities that are 100x better than what we have now, and let people choose. Romanticising the village is how a country stays poor.

AI should be the invisible layer that lifts humans, never the master.

It shouldn't replace what humans do for fun. It should consult us on value-loaded decisions, or follow normative rules we have laid down. It can — and probably should — replace much of agriculture, industry, and services, eventually as robots, so humans get time and meaning for higher pursuits than survival: art, creation, travel, expansion to other planets, time with the people we love.

The boundary isn't what acts, it's who decides.

Building is better than giving.

Building in such a way that it solves a problem in perpetuity, with incentives aligned so everyone is better off as it runs, beats feel-good temporary giving by a wide margin. I'm not anti-charity; I'm anti the kind of charity that has to be performed again next year because the underlying thing was never fixed. If you can ship a structure that keeps solving the problem after you walk away, do that.

Fix the system before reaching for the substance.

For ADHD, for sleep, for almost any complex-system problem in a human body — sleep, exercise, nutrition, capture, ritual, in that order. Meds as last resort, only if required, and only to the extent they are required. I'm not anti-medication. I'm against unnecessary intervention in complex systems with active substances when the system itself hasn't been built yet. The reversibility of an intervention sets the threshold for trying it.

Curiosity is the default. Hostility gets one line and an exit.

I'm in general open to changing my mind if someone can put forth a compelling argument with facts and evidence and show me the flaw in my thinking. I would enjoy that, because it means growth. If the other side is hostile rather than curious, the line is short — you're entitled to your opinion as I am to mine — and we move on. No counter-attack, no block-and-mute theatre. The goal is truth, not the contest.

Tell me if there's another point of view.