Short pieces
Shorter takes, and the reasoning under them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not against VC in general. Against it for danadone.
I'm not against venture capital universally. But Indian VC is largely blind right now: a mix of status-seekers who don't know what works, and tech people biased toward IIT and IIM credentials in a year when AI has flipped the asymmetry. Founders who live the hard grind in 2026 are more in touch with the landscape than VCs who were good tech founders five years ago.
danadone doesn't need VC money, and we don't need the pressure that comes with it. That's the calibration today. It might change. The principle won't.
An alter ego, not an assistant.
Eight months ago I had multiple active projects, a calendar I didn't trust, and work eating into my evenings. mineOS is what I built to fix that: a personal operating system that runs as my alter ego. A markdown vault, a set of agents, a few rituals around the edges. The hardest part wasn't building it. It was accepting the truth it showed me: the things I was avoiding and the patterns that repeat.
The idea underneath it: AI works best as the quiet layer that does what I can't, keeps moving toward goals I'd otherwise lose track of every time I switch tasks, and turns ADHD into something I can work with instead of fight against. A second self, not a co-pilot. Despite giving up some control over the calendar and the admin of life, I feel more in control now.
How I learn anything new in 2026.
Build first, books second, podcasts third. Action beats analysis of other people. Books have their place, and so do long-form podcasts; I just can't sit through them, so I read summaries or pull the crux and focus on where I can actually use it. The primary surface is an LLM, used as a tutor. The protocol I've refined over the last year:
- Create the curriculum. State the destination.
- Integrate every good source into one notebook: papers, talks, threads.
- Dedupe to bullet points. Build a concept map, most fundamental to most complex, like a dependency tree.
- Take the points in batches of five. Repeat each one back to the LLM in my own words. Get clarification where I'm fuzzy.
- Consolidate every twenty points. Compress into chunks I can hold.
- Spaced repetition on the load-bearing ones.
- Use cases, real-world links, metaphors, links to things I already know.
- If five points won't stick, iterate on those five until they do, even if it breaks them into more sub-points.
Courses are sometimes useful, but nothing beats this loop. Mastery, not exposure.
Whatever we plan is plan B.
Plan A is the better alternative that surfaces in the moment and sometimes carries the real upside. The only thing to be clear about is whether the new thing is genuinely better than the current plan, or whether it's the novelty-seeking brain pulling us into a gravity well that feels urgent but isn't. The discipline is in the quality of that decision. The plan is the floor, not the ceiling. Recognising the better opportunity is the edge.
The popcorn queue PVR won't fix.
We went to a movie recently. During the interval I stood in a queue long enough to miss the first five minutes of the second half. Why leave such an easy problem unfixed, when the queues probably cost 15 to 30 per cent of food sales? A QR code on the interval screen solves it, and I'd happily order and pick up within the window. Two guesses why it persists. Maybe the queue itself creates social proof that sells more popcorn. Or queue-abandonment is simply invisible to the operator, who measures food sold but never the people who tried to buy and gave up. If you don't measure the gap, you don't fix the gap.
Why time speeds up as you age.
Someone in their 70s told me time was moving very fast. Not a complaint, just a felt thing. The mechanism is well-studied: the brain stores memory as novel chunks. A routine day collapses into one indistinguishable chunk; a day with something genuinely new splits into several. Subjective time is the count of distinct chunks per unit of calendar time. That's why childhood feels long and adult years compress.
The cure is new experiences, and they can be small: a different road home, a flavour you haven't tasted, five minutes of music outside your taste. Slow living and slow travel are really about this, unhurried exploration that enriches the experience instead of reliving the same day over and over. A few deliberate hours of non-destructive novelty a week, and the richness that comes with it.