Ideas are valuable, execution is critical — Except when neither works

For any enterprise to succeed, ideation and execution have to work together. Execution has nothing to execute if there’s no idea behind it. And an idea, however brilliant, stays a thought on paper unless it’s carried through well. Still, since the idea comes first, the person who conceives it usually earns the higher valuation. Investors have known this for as long as there have been start-ups to fund.

The same logic applies to governance. Good government, in my view, rests on exactly two legs:

·         Conceiving and instituting policies that deliver equitable, sustainable, accelerated growth.

·         Executing those policies through structured programs, efficient delivery, and honest, timely course-correction.

Judge any government on these two counts, and only these two.

On execution, I’d give the incumbent government a reasonably good score. It has carried forward policies inherited from its predecessor — food security, direct benefit transfer, financial inclusion, FDI in retail, infrastructure push, defence procurement reform, privatization, the manufacturing thrust — and executed them competently. It built out delivery rails — digital payments, GST, the 14th Finance Commission’s recommendations — for ideas that were formulated in the UPA’s last years. And it squeezed real value out of a couple of foundational bets, particularly Aadhaar and digital payments. That execution muscle is a big reason the economy came through Covid and the global slowdown as well as it did, and why UPI is now a genuine export success and road-building runs at a pace India hasn’t seen before.

Ideation is a different story. In twelve-plus years, the list of genuinely new policy ideas is short. Where the government has innovated, the results have been mixed at best — demonetization being the obvious example: a big idea, thin preparation, questionable payoff.

I would put the newly enacted Prevention of Insults to National Honour (Amendment) Act, 2026 in the same bucket. It isn’t going to achieve much of anything constructive, and it carries real potential to disturb public order, hand police another discretionary lever, and generate avoidable litigation and harassment.

The backstory

Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay wrote Vande Mataram; it appeared in Bangadarshan in 1875 and was incorporated into his novel Anandamath in 1882. The Congress sang it at its sessions from 1896 onward. On 24 January 1950, the Constituent Assembly adopted the first stanza of Tagore’s Jana Gana Mana as the National Anthem. Article 51A of the Constitution makes “respecting” the anthem a fundamental duty, and Parliament backed that with teeth via the Prevention of Insults to National Honour Act, 1971, which criminalized disrespect to the Flag, the Constitution and the Anthem.

That same day, Constituent Assembly President Rajendra Prasad made a statement — not a resolution, not a constitutional provision, just a statement — that Vande Mataram’s first two stanzas be honoured equally with the Anthem, with wording changes left for later. The later stanzas, invoking Durga and Lakshmi, were dropped from that honour, partly on the reasoning that overt religious imagery sat awkwardly with a plural republic. The Constitution itself, worth noting, doesn’t mention a “National Song” at all — the status rests entirely on Prasad’s 1950 remarks.

It’s a genuinely unusual arrangement. No other country runs a separate anthem and song; a few, like Denmark and New Zealand, have two anthems of equal standing, which is a different thing altogether.

What the law actually does

What the 2026 Act does is narrower than the noise around it suggests. It doesn’t touch the Constitution — it’s an ordinary statute — and it doesn’t itself declare the full six-stanza composition the official National Song. All it does is extend the 1971 Act’s existing anthem protection (up to three years’ imprisonment for intentionally preventing its singing or disrupting an assembly singing it) to Vande Mataram, citing Prasad’s 1950 statement as its rationale.

Where I think the trouble starts is in how it’s being sold. The government and its supporters have been framing this as conferring National Song status on all six stanzas — when what actually has that status, per Prasad’s own words, is the first two. That framing may not survive judicial scrutiny, but it hands police the discretion to act against citizens who are doing nothing more than honoring the version the Constituent Assembly actually blessed.

The legal exposure

There’s a genuine constitutional exposure here too. The Supreme Court’s Bijoe Emmanuel ruling on the Anthem established that no one can be compelled to sing a national symbol against conscience — only stopped from disrupting others who choose to. A penal provision built around Vande Mataram invites the same challenge on Article 25 religious-freedom grounds. And any attempt to stretch the song’s status toward something constitutionally binding runs into the Basic Structure doctrine from Kesavananda Bharati vs State of Kerala — Parliament can’t amend around secularism, one of the Constitution’s basic features, through the back door.

The groundwork that was never laid

Then there’s the sheer absence of preparation. Unlike the Anthem, which has a government-notified tune, tempo and duration, Vande Mataram has never had an official musical setting — Tagore’s own 1896 tune, Hemant Kumar’s from the film Anandamath, A. R. Rahman’s version, and others have coexisted freely for decades. Nothing in this law fixes that. Which means a constable on the ground, not any statute, effectively decides whether a given rendition counts as respectful — a recipe for selective, motivated enforcement against whoever happens to be inconvenient that day.

And one more data point worth sitting with: per the 2011 Census (language data released only in 2018), just 24,821 people in the then population north of 1.2 billion listed Sanskrit as their mother tongue — the least-spoken of India’s 22 scheduled languages. Only Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand give it second-official-language status. None of that bears directly on the law’s validity, but it’s a reminder of how thin the on-the-ground constituency is for turning a freedom-movement anthem into a criminal-law flashpoint.

There’s a sequencing problem too, and it’s the clearest tell that this was written on the back foot rather than thought through in advance. Back in February 2026, the Home Ministry had already directed that all six stanzas be sung at official events and school assemblies — using the word “may” not “shall” and attaching no penalty. When that directive was challenged, the Supreme Court in March declined to intervene precisely because it was voluntary and toothless. The 2026 Act reads like the fix for that gap — except it still doesn’t define “intentionally prevents” or “causes disturbance”, so the ambiguity the Court flagged hasn’t been resolved, only criminalized. That’s not ideation. That’s patching a loophole after the fact and calling it policy.

The bottom line

None of this required rushed legislating. The Constituent Assembly’s own words already drew the line — first two stanzas, equal honor, details to follow. A government with a genuine appetite for ideation would have used the space “details to follow” left open: notify a tune, define “disrespect”, settle the six-stanza question through consensus rather than executive push. Instead, what we have is a law that recycles a 76-year-old ambiguity, dresses it up as settled history, and leaves the actual grey areas — much like demonetization before it — to be sorted out later, in public, the hard way.

Good execution can carry a government a long way. It can’t make up for an idea nobody thought through.

The price tag not to be ignored

Over the past week I sat with a stack of very different headlines side by side - a proposed cash payout to women in Uttar Pradesh, an old World Bank note on how Indian states balance their books, a parliamentary panel’s numbers on school dropouts, and a district-level count of doctors in Bihar and UP. Read separately, they are four unrelated stories. Read together, they are one story – sustainability of growth.

A season of generosity

Uttar Pradesh’s government is reportedly weighing a cash payout of up to Rs 50,000 for women in the state, timed just ahead of the 2027 assembly election. The principal opposition, the Samajwadi Party, has countered with a promise of Rs 40,000. This is not an isolated UP story. Over the past three years, the number of states running large unconditional cash transfer schemes for women has gone from two to twelve, and by my reading of the available data, these twelve states will together spend around Rs 1.68 lakh crore on such schemes in 2025-26 alone - roughly 6% of their combined revenue expenditure. Add farmer and youth-linked transfers, and some estimates for women-focused transfers alone run closer to Rs 2 lakh crore across fourteen states.

None of this makes any single scheme wrong on its own terms. Direct transfers can be an efficient, leakage-resistant way to put money in the hands of households that need it, and I don’t doubt many families are genuinely better off for it. My concern, as an investor rather than as a commentator on any party’s politics, is arithmetic, not intent.

Where the money is going

A quick snapshot of what's on the table this election cycle

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Six of the twelve states running these schemes are already sitting on a revenue deficit in 2025-26. Strip out the cash transfer spending, and several of them - Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh among them - would show a revenue surplus instead. That gap is not academic. A revenue deficit means a state is borrowing to fund its day-to-day running costs, not its future.

The capex we’re quietly deferring

Zoom out to the national picture and the aggregate numbers still look reasonably disciplined - states’ combined gross fiscal deficit is budgeted at about 3.3% of GDP for 2025-26, broadly where it has held for two years, and outstanding state debt has actually eased slightly as a share of GDP. On the surface, fiscal prudence looks intact.

But the composition worries me more than the headline number. Over the past decade, a large share of the adjustment states have made to hit their deficit targets has come from squeezing capital spending - roads, power, water, hospitals, schools - rather than from trimming recurrent, non-development costs or from mobilizing more revenue. Capital investment has repeatedly acted as the shock absorber whenever a state needed to tighten its belt, in richer and poorer states alike. There are genuine signs of recent improvement - the ratio of revenue spending to capital outlay across states has come down from roughly 6.2 in 2015-16 to about 5.0 last year, which is progress. My worry is that this progress is fragile, and a fresh wave of poll-driven transfer commitments is exactly the kind of pressure that reverses it, because cash transfers are far easier to cut from next year’s capex line than from a promise already made to millions of women voters.

The children and the doctors we don’t have

While states debate the next round of transfers, the human capital numbers tell their own story. A parliamentary panel has just flagged that nearly 73% of Indian students drop out before completing higher secondary school. The number of schools shrinks at almost every stage as children get older - from about 9.1 lakh primary schools down to under 91,000 at the higher secondary level - and enrolment falls in step, from 6.18 crore children in primary classes to just 1.64 crore by the time they reach classes 11 and 12.

Forestation targets, a proxy for longer-horizon public investment discipline, have seen only about a fifth of the decade’s goal met.

Healthcare tells a similar story. India ranks 145th out of 194 countries on WHO health parameters, and the shortfall is starkest exactly where the new cash schemes are being rolled out. Against a WHO benchmark of one doctor per 1,000 people, rural India averages one per roughly 11,000; Bihar is close to one per 28,000, and Uttar Pradesh near one per 20,000. By one estimate, India needs another 6 lakh doctors, 20 lakh nurses and 2 lakh dental surgeons just to close the existing gap - a gap Gujarat’s own recent numbers put in sharp relief, with close to 80,000 new cancer cases and over 43,000 deaths from the disease in a single year.

I don’t read any of this as an argument against welfare spending as a category. I read it as evidence that the current mix of state spending is tilted toward transfers that buy loyalty “this election cycle”, at the expense of the schools, hospitals and roads that would have built durable growth over the next one.

Who actually pays for this

The other half of this equation is who is funding it. Personal income tax has now overtaken corporate tax as India’s single largest source of direct tax revenue, with net direct tax collections crossing roughly Rs 24 lakh crore in 2025-26. That burden sits overwhelmingly on the organized, salaried middle class - a narrow base of taxpayers now effectively out-contributing corporate India, while agricultural income of any size remains untaxed and a large informal economy stays largely outside the net. The compliant formal sector - salaried professionals and organized businesses - carries a growing share of the state’s obligations, including the welfare commitments being made on its behalf without much reference to its own capacity to keep paying.

My takeaway for investment strategy

This is not an immediate crisis - state balance sheets remain broadly sustainable and debt ratios are not alarming today. But sustainability is a medium-term question, not a one-year one, and the direction of travel worries me more than the current level. A political economy that finances consumption ahead of capacity, and funds it by leaning harder on a narrow, already-stretched taxpayer base, is not a formula for the kind of broad-based, decade-long growth story that equity markets like to price in.

For portfolio positioning, I continue to prefer businesses and sectors with pricing power and limited dependence on state fiscal transfers to sustain demand - I’d be cautious of consumption plays whose growth story leans heavily on scheme-driven cash rather than organic income growth. I also continue to doubt a case for holding long-duration debt, given that state finances, like the broader macro picture I have written about before, look calmer on the surface than they may prove to be underneath. 

Gen Z isn’t one crowd

Over the past two months, “Gen Z” has moved from a demographic label to the center of India’s political conversation. Politicians, judges, religious leaders and social influencers who had never before troubled themselves with youth slang are suddenly trying to speak it fluently. Everyone wants a piece of Gen Z’s attention, because everyone has just watched what that attention can do.

The trigger was concrete. A leaked paper in this year’s medical entrance exam, the NEET, forced a retest and set off protests that grew nationwide. What began at Jantar Mantar in early June spilled into a march on Parliament by late July, drew in high-profile supporters, and ended - within weeks - in the resignation of the union education minister.

In a political system that rarely bends quickly to street pressure, this was a genuinely unusual outcome, and it has understandably convinced a great many people that Gen Z is now a decisive force in Indian public life.

A comfortable but misleading assumption

My conversations with a range of people over the past few weeks suggest that most of this new enthusiasm rests on a shaky premise: that India’s Gen Z is a single, homogeneous bloc, united by common grievances and common demands. It isn’t. India’s youth are enormous in number and radically different in circumstance, and that difference matters more than the label suggests.

“Gen Z” conventionally covers those born between 1997 and 2012 - roughly the 15-to-29 age bracket today. The Azim Premji University’s State of Working India 2026 report puts this group at about 36.7 crore, or 367 million people - the largest youth population of any country in the world, and close to a quarter of India’s population.

On the report’s own numbers, this is also nearly a third of the country’s entire working-age population.

That scale is precisely why treating them as one voting bloc, one consumer segment, or one protest movement is a mistake.

Four Indias, not one

The people with the greatest economic grievances often have the least ability to sustain political mobilization - and vice versa.

Break the 36.7 crore down by economic reality and the group splits into at least four distinct constituencies, each shaped by a different set of pressures and each with a very different capacity to act on its grievances.

Read the table left to right and a pattern jumps out: the people with the most acute economic grievances have the least ability to sustain a protest, and the people with the most ability to sustain a protest have the least reason to want the system torn down​

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Why the loudest group is also the smallest

For a young person from an economically constrained household, life runs on a tight sequence: employment, then income, then family security, then any hope of mobility. Whatever the depth of frustration with the system, weeks spent on a protest site carry a real cost when you are preparing for a government exam, working informally, or simply trying to help your family get by.

The established middle class has a different problem. It has already invested years and real money into education, professional qualifications, and career-building, and it has something to lose from prolonged instability. Its anger, when an exam is compromised, can be intense - but its preferred remedy is to fix the system, not overturn it. This group wants exams conducted properly and merit to count, not disorder.

Rural aspirers - roughly 7.5 crore of them - are arguably as affected as anyone by the gap between promise and opportunity, but they are geographically too dispersed to organize at scale.

That leaves the urban aspirer: highly educated relative to the national average, digitally native, aware of global benchmarks, and carrying a strong, often justified, sense that the system has failed to deliver on its own promises. This is not a group protesting for survival. It is a group protesting because it believes it has been denied something it was told it would earn. At an estimated 3.5 crore, it is also the smallest of the four segments - and the one that just forced a sitting minister to resign.

An old echo, correctly placed

There is a historical parallel worth drawing, though it is often misplaced in casual conversation. Older readers will remember how a wave of student radicalism swept through parts of India in the late 1960s and early 1970s, drawing educated, idealistic young people toward Naxalism and organized Left politics. That movement’s roots were not in Delhi’s university campuses - it began in the Naxalbari uprising in West Bengal in 1967, and its most committed student wing formed in Calcutta, around institutions like Presidency College and Jadavpur University, before spreading to pockets of Bihar, Andhra Pradesh and beyond. What is instructive is not the geography but the mechanism: it was educated, urban, relatively privileged youth - not the poorest of the poor - who supplied the ideological energy, precisely because they had the time, literacy and networks to organize. The same mechanism is visible in this year’s protests.

What this means for anyone allocating capital

·         Policy responsiveness has been demonstrated. A government not known for quick concessions to street protest reversed course within weeks. That is a data point on this administration’s sensitivity to organized, visible, urban discontent - relevant to how markets should price policy risk around education, employment and youth-facing reforms going into any electorally sensitive period.

·         The protest constituency and the consumption constituency substantially overlap. Urban aspirers are also disproportionately the segment driving discretionary spending, digital adoption, and white-collar labour supply. Their frustration with job scarcity - not the exam leak itself - is the more durable signal, and it bears on how confidently one should extrapolate India’s consumption and services growth story forward.

·         The demographic dividend has a shelf life. The same report that supplies today’s headline numbers also flags that India’s youth cohort, currently near its peak, is projected to start shrinking within a decade. The window to convert this population into productive employment - and to avoid the kind of frustration now visible on the streets - is narrower than the growth-story narrative sometimes implies.

·         Civil unrest risk is being independently flagged. Verisk Maplecroft’s Civil Unrest Index has rated India among the highest-risk countries this year. That is a signal worth tracking alongside GDP prints and earnings, not dismissing as unrelated to markets.

The unfinished agenda

None of this means today’s urban aspirer-led movement is destined to fade. It has already shown it can move a government. But 3.5 crore people, however visible and well organized, are a fraction of a 36.7 crore youth population. If this energy is to translate into something more durable than a single ministerial resignation, it will need to broaden its agenda well beyond exam integrity to include the very different concerns of rural and economically constrained youth - jobs, wages, migration, and basic security - rather than assuming those groups share its priorities by default.

Until that broadening happens, my own reading is that this remains a powerful but narrow force: capable of extracting concessions on specific, well-defined grievances, but not yet the singular, unified “Gen Z” movement that the current wave of political and corporate courtship seems to be betting on.

Highways are about human lives, not cement & steel

A highway built only for speed, without regard for the land and the people it passes through, honors only half that duty. True development binds kilometers to the wellbeing of those who live alongside them.

Last week, a section of the Dehradun-Mussoorie Road caved in after overnight rain weakened the embankment beneath it. The road was shut, and hundreds of vehicles were stranded on both sides. This is the same hill road that now absorbs every additional vehicle the new Delhi-Dehradun Expressway sends toward Mussoorie, since the expressway itself terminates at Dehradun and goes no further.

This was not an isolated event, either. Just weeks earlier, a stretch built barely six months ago at Mussoorie’s Paani Wala Bend developed a large crack and began sinking, prompting a former legislator to allege negligence and demand an inquiry. Landslides and road damage in the Garhwal Himalayas are not new, but their frequency and severity have risen noticeably over the past decade.

Rapid deforestation for road widening, a sharp rise in vehicular traffic on wider roads, growing tourist and pilgrim inflows, and hurried construction of hospitality infrastructure to house them are all straining the fragile ecology of the region. This raises a pertinent question: is the impact-assessment process followed by governments and public authorities before approving and building infrastructure projects, especially highways and expressways, actually adequate?

The newly built Delhi-Dehradun Expressway is a useful case study. Inaugurated in April 2026 at a cost of roughly ₹12,000 crore, the six-lane, access-controlled corridor has cut travel time between Delhi and Dehradun from about six-seven hours to roughly two-and-a-half hours, and to Mussoorie from around seven hours to under four.

The government has projected that this faster connectivity will boost tourism and support industrial corridors around Dehradun. What I find missing from that projection is any visible reckoning with the fact that the expressway does not reach Mussoorie itself. Every vehicle it delivers to Dehradun in a fraction of the earlier time still has to funnel onto the very same unwidened hill stretch that collapsed last week. That is not a coincidental juxtaposition of two unrelated news items; it is a supply chain, with the expressway as the intake and the old Dehradun-Mussoorie Road as the choke point.

I say this carefully: last week’s collapse was triggered by rainfall saturating the embankment, not by traffic volume directly, and I do not want to overstate a mechanical link that isn’t there. But higher volume raises the stakes of every such failure, in how many people are stranded, how much pressure builds to keep a weakened road open, and how much rushed widening work gets done on unstable slopes to cope with the load. The two roads appear to have been evaluated, if at all, as though they belonged to two entirely separate projects under two separate agencies, rather than as one continuous journey for the traveler.

Part of the reason such downstream questions may never have been asked is structural. Under India’s (Economic Impact Assessment (EIA) Notification of 2006, many highways and road-widening stretches below defined length thresholds are exempt from a full environmental impact assessment. If that exemption applied here, then the absence of a study covering hotel capacity, sanitation load or the old road’s carrying capacity is not a gap in my research; it may be a gap the law itself permits. This would not be the first time Himalayan carrying capacity has been flagged as inadequately assessed before construction. The 2023 land subsidence in Joshimath, and the Supreme Court-mandated High-Powered Committee set up to review the Char Dham road-widening project, both arrived at the same underlying finding: that road-building in this terrain proceeded well ahead of any serious study of what the land and the towns at either end could actually absorb.

It is worth asking whether the following questions were part of the impact analysis for the expressway, and what measures were put in place to manage the consequent burden on regional ecology and local civic life:

·         How much will passenger and commercial vehicle inflow into Dehradun and Mussoorie increase, and is there adequate parking capacity to absorb it?

·         Was the additional load the expressway places on the existing, unwidened Dehradun-Mussoorie stretch modelled as part of the expressway’s own clearance, or was it treated as a separate agency’s problem because the two roads fall under different jurisdictions?

·         What is the likely impact of higher vehicle inflow and construction-linked deforestation on local air quality, and what mitigation measures, if any, are built into the road contract?

·         How many additional hotel rooms will be needed to house the increased tourist inflow, and do local regulations even permit new tourist accommodation at that scale?

·         What additional water supply, sanitation, sewerage treatment, garbage disposal and healthcare capacity will the higher tourist inflow require, and is augmentation of these civic amenities planned alongside the road itself?

·         How will the expressway affect local residents through higher land and home prices, increased transit traffic, and food and hospitality inflation, and who is accountable for measures to protect local affordability and traffic-handling capacity?

·         Is the road designed for safe traffic flow at every exit and interchange, particularly at points where a 100-120 kmph expressway meets local roads?

·         How will a high-speed, access-controlled expressway affect villages along its route whose residents are used to a slower pace of life, and what safety awareness and training do they need for themselves, their livestock and their property?

·         What systems exist for periodic safety audits and disaster management, including medical response and rapid evacuation in the event of a major accident, and has responsibility for these systems been fixed before the road opened to the public?

Despite genuine effort, I have not been able to establish whether the impact study for the Delhi-Dehradun Expressway addressed any of these points. I raise them not to oppose the project, but to draw the attention of policymakers, regulatory authorities and civil society to what I consider a critical gap in how highway development is planned and executed in ecologically sensitive regions.

At minimum, a corridor of this kind should require a mandatory downstream carrying-capacity study covering every connecting road it feeds traffic into, an independent post-construction audit rather than a one-time pre-approval clearance, and a single accountable authority spanning both the new expressway and the older roads it terminates into, rather than the current split between agencies.

Investor takeaways

Faster connectivity is a genuine tailwind for Uttarakhand-linked hospitality, real estate and consumption stories, but the pace of civic infrastructure build-out (water, sewerage, healthcare) is the real gating factor for how much of that tailwind converts into sustainable earnings.

Where a new expressway feeds traffic into an older, unwidened connecting road under a different agency, that jurisdictional seam is itself a risk; closures on the connecting stretch can strand demand the expressway was built to capture.

Recurring landslide-driven closures are a direct operating risk for logistics, tourism and construction companies with revenue tied to these corridors, and are worth factoring into weather-linked earnings volatility.

If regulators tighten carrying-capacity and post-construction audit requirements in response to episodes like Joshimath, future Himalayan infrastructure timelines and costs could extend; this is worth watching as a sector-wide execution risk, not just a single-project one.

 

Think about simpler solutions

We have a habit of ignoring simpler solutions for our problems and love to over complicate things. Energy security and air pollution are two specific issues where the policymakers have often ignored simpler and sustainable solutions and favored adhoc solutions, often with uncertain outcomes.

When petrol prices rise, we cut fuel taxes, burdening fiscal balance with economy wide ramifications. When crude oil prices rise, we worry about the import bill. When Delhi’s air turns unbreathable, we restrict traffic and close schools. When accidents climb, we call for stricter enforcement. Each problem gets its own emergency response.

One question, however, rarely gets asked: why do we engineer ordinary family cars to run at 200–240 kmph when the highest permissible speed on any Indian road is 120 kmph, on access-controlled expressways, with 100 kmph the norm on national highways?

This is not a question of engineering capability. Indian manufacturers can build fast cars. The question is whether a country that imports the bulk of its crude oil, battles severe air pollution, and records one of the world’s highest road-accident tolls should keep paying, in fuel, cost and emissions, for a top-speed capability its drivers are legally barred from using.

The case in numbers

Consider two hypothetical family cars of similar size and utility, one engineered for a 240 kmph top speed, the other purpose-built for 150 kmph. Directionally, the trade-off may look like this:​

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The distinction matters: this is not about bolting an electronic speed limiter onto an existing 240 kmph car. It is about designing the vehicle, from engine and transmission to tyres and aerodynamics, around a lower top speed from the outset.

Caveat

India’s fuel-efficiency and emissions norms (BS-VI, CAFE) are measured over standardized drive cycles, not top speed, so a car’s advertised maximum speed does not feed directly into its certified mileage; efficiency gains would have to come through the weight and drivetrain changes described, not from the speed cap itself. Second, high-performance engines are frequently shared across model variants and export markets, so the cost and engineering savings from a lower top-speed design would vary widely by manufacturer and platform, and are unlikely to be uniform across the industry. The reader should treat the table as a plausible order of magnitude for the direction of the argument, not as a verified engineering estimate.

Why pay for speed we cannot use?

An ordinary Indian family car can often exceed 180–240 kmph, well beyond the 120 kmph ceiling on our fastest roads, and beyond what most global markets permit. Even in the United States, the highest posted speed limit is 85 mph, about 137 kmph, on a single 41-mile stretch of State Highway 130 in Texas; most US interstates cap out at 70–80 mph.

A car engineered for 240 kmph is not simply a car with a bigger engine. Reaching that speed safely requires a stronger transmission, larger brakes, higher-speed-rated tyres, more sophisticated suspension and cooling, and greater structural strength. Each addition adds weight, and weight compounds fuel consumption. It is an expensive chain: more speed capability leads to more power, a heavier drivetrain, bigger brakes and tyres, and ultimately more fuel burned, on every single journey, regardless of whether that top speed is ever used.

The oil, pollution and safety angles

India imports roughly 85% of the crude oil it consumes, so every additional liter burned adds to the import bill, pressures the rupee and widens the current account deficit. Fuel-price policy gets debated in detail. The amount of fuel a given vehicle needs to burn in the first place gets far less scrutiny.

The same logic applies to pollution. Reactive, winter-only restrictions on traffic and construction treat a structural problem as a seasonal one. A lighter, more efficient vehicle fleet reduces emissions at source, every day of the year, not only when air quality crosses a threshold.

On safety, the physics is straightforward: kinetic energy rises with the square of speed, so high-speed crashes are disproportionately more destructive. A lower speed ceiling will not by itself curb reckless driving, but resources currently spent engineering unusable top-end performance could instead fund better brakes, more airbags, stronger crash structures and wider adoption of electronic stability control.

Performance need not suffer

A 150 kmph ceiling does not mean a sluggish car. Top speed and usable performance are different things. What matters on Indian roads is strong 0–100 kmph acceleration and confident overtaking in the 80–120 kmph band, not a theoretical capability twice the legal limit.

Policy levers, not a ban

A blunt speed cap is not the only option. Fiscal policy could nudge the market toward efficiency without dictating design: lower registration fees or GST for lightweight, fuel-efficient vehicles, insurance incentives for safer and lower-risk cars, and taxation more closely linked to vehicle weight and engine capacity. The aim is to let the market reward efficiency rather than horsepower.

Investor takeaways

·         The oil-import and current-account channel is the more durable investment link: any structural reduction in average vehicle fuel consumption reduces India’s crude import intensity over time, a theme relevant to INR trajectory and to companies exposed to the import bill.

·         Passenger-vehicle OEMs face a genuine strategic question on where to allocate engineering spend, high-performance variants versus efficiency and lightweighting, as regulatory and fiscal incentives evolve; this is a multi-year theme, not a near-term catalyst.

·         Ancillary segments tied to lightweighting, efficient braking systems and advanced driver-assistance technology stand to benefit disproportionately if policy shifts incentives in this direction; treat any related exposure as a slow-moving structural theme.

Cockroaches, rats and termites

Three unlikely teachers

Cockroaches, rats and termites are not creatures anyone invites into their home. Biologically, though, they have a lot in common. All three live close to us, mostly unseen, active at night, and multiply quickly once conditions favor them. Cockroaches and termites even share a common ancestry, both belonging to the insect order Blattodea.

But it isn’t their biology that has made them part of everyday language. It’s the role each has come to symbolize. The cockroach stands for resilience — something that survives almost anything thrown at it. The rat stands for opportunism — quick to sense danger and quicker to leave. The termite stands for quiet, structural damage — weakening something from the inside, often before anyone notices.

I want to borrow these three ideas — resilience, opportunism and internal decay — not to describe people, but to describe what I observed at the protest site in Delhi last weekend, and what it might mean for how India’s political landscape shifts over the next few years.

Resilience: a movement that keeps showing up

I visited the student protest site at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi over the weekend. The immediate trigger was the NEET paper leak controversy, but what struck me was how the grievance has broadened. It no longer reads as anger about one exam. It reads as a wider demand for accountability — a demand that keeps resurfacing, gathering more voices each time it does.

That resilience is the interesting part. Protest movements in India have a habit of losing steam once the original trigger fades from headlines. This one hasn’t, at least not yet. What it currently lacks is a clear ideology or political vehicle — it is closer to a demand for competent governance than a platform with a defined manifesto. Whether it can convert that energy into something more durable, the way the anti-corruption movement of 2011 briefly did before losing momentum, remains an open question. The Tamil Nadu assembly election result is one template worth watching, since it showed how anti-incumbency sentiment can be organized into an electoral outcome rather than staying confined to a protest site.

Opportunism: how firm is the base, really?

At the protest site, I met several people who described themselves as long-standing supporters of the ruling government, and of the prime minister in particular. A few admitted, candidly, that their support isn’t unconditional — that a credible alternative could make them reconsider. That kind of honesty is more common in private conversation than in public commentary, but it points to something real: political loyalty, even where it looks solid from the outside, often has more give in it than the visible numbers suggest.

The journalists at the site were speculating on a related question — which coalition partners within the ruling NDA alliance might reposition themselves if public sentiment shifts further. This is ordinary political calculation, not disloyalty; coalition partners across the spectrum, in every country, recalibrate when the wind changes. It’s worth remembering that the government has its own counter-narrative here — pointing to welfare delivery, infrastructure execution and macro stability as reasons this loyalty should hold. Which reading proves correct will only be visible in hindsight.

Internal decay: the part that worries me most

The third theme is harder to pin to a single event. It’s the slower, less visible erosion of institutional trust caused by (i) the unholy nexus of corrupt public servant, unscrupulous businessmen and opportunist politician, and (ii) the perception, fair or not, that enforcement agencies and the judiciary are not always able to move quickly or independently against wrongdoing, whichever side of the political spectrum it comes from. I want to be careful here: I’m not asserting guilt against any individual or institution, only noting a pattern of public perception that shows up repeatedly in survey data and in conversations like the ones I had this weekend. Perception gaps like this matter for investors too — they show up eventually in governance risk premiums and in how foreign capital prices India relative to peers.

What this means going forward

·         A protest movement that refuses to fade (resilience).

·         A political base that looks firmer than it may actually be (opportunism).

·         A slow erosion of institutional trust that no single election result fixes (internal decay).

None of these three, on their own, changes an investment thesis overnight. But together, they are worth tracking as a governance risk indicator — the kind that eventually shows up in currency stability, policy continuity and how comfortable foreign capital feels holding Indian assets through an election cycle. 

Some random thoughts

 West Asia crisis

In June 2026, the US and Iran signed an agreement to extend their ceasefire by 60 days. This gave both sides time to negotiate a lasting solution to a long conflict. Most West Asian countries seemed to support this process. But Israel, the most important player in the region, kept its distance and did not fully sign on to the terms.

This week, Iran held the funeral of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, its Supreme Leader, who was killed in joint US-Israel air strikes in February 2026. Leaders from several countries attended the long-delayed funeral, and millions of Iranians came out on the streets of Tehran to mourn him. His son, Mojtaba Khamenei, has since taken over as Iran's new Supreme Leader.

Even as the funeral was underway, the fragile ceasefire came apart. In the past two days, Iran attacked commercial ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz. The US responded on 7 July with what it called “powerful strikes,” hitting more than 80 targets inside Iran, and reimposed the oil sanctions it had lifted as part of the ceasefire deal. Iran, in turn, said it would deliver a “crushing response” and struck US bases in Kuwait and Bahrain on 8 July. On the same day, speaking at the NATO summit in Ankara, President Trump said he now considers the ceasefire “over” and a “waste of time.” Oil prices jumped sharply on the news.

Looking at the mood of the Iranian people, the stance of Iran's leadership on its right to enrich uranium and control the Strait of Hormuz, and Israel's position on Iran's rights, it seems to me that this conflict is far from over. This week's exchange of fire, coming barely three weeks after the ceasefire was signed, confirms that hoping for a lasting solution within the 60-day window was always more wishful thinking than realistic expectation.

A more likely path over the next couple of years could involve four things. First, Iran may push ahead with building a nuclear deterrent against Israel and prepare to avenge the killing of its former Supreme Leader. Second, GCC countries may continue to keep an equal distance from Iran, Israel and the US, even as some of them, like Kuwait and Bahrain, get drawn into the crossfire. Third, Israel may keep trying to weaken Iran's ability to strike it. And fourth, the US may keep swinging between war and peace, as it has done again this week.

Ethanol blending

The government's policy of blending ethanol with petrol has drawn sharp criticism from citizens. There have been complaints of vehicle damage and lower mileage due to blended fuel. Several environmental groups have also opposed the E20 policy, saying it uses too much water to produce ethanol.

The government has strongly defended the E20 policy, pointing to its environmental, agricultural and economic benefits. Automobile companies have also said that E20 fuel does not damage modern, compatible vehicles. A review of thousands of service records suggests there is no widespread evidence of engine damage, wear and tear, or corrosion caused by E20 fuel.

Even so, opposition parties and civil society groups have turned E20 into a popular campaign against the government. They allege that the blending policy mainly benefits the family of a minister who is in the ethanol production business.

This could well become a major election issue. It is not clear how the government will restore public trust in blended fuel and put this controversy to rest. If I were asked for a suggestion, I would say the government should make blended fuel optional rather than mandatory, and offer incentives such as a lower price for blended fuel or a subsidy on insurance premiums.

Infra construction quality

Poor quality of infrastructure, especially roads, along with allegations of large-scale corruption in awarding and executing key infrastructure projects, has become a common topic on social media.

While corruption cannot be ruled out, a more likely reason for the poor condition of newly built roads is rushed construction to meet deadlines, which are often set for political reasons. Poor design and inadequate safety audits are also major concerns for road quality in India.

Whatever the reason, the fact remains that India spends much more than the global average to build its highways, yet the quality of these highways remains poor in terms of design, durability and comfort.

It would help to open up infrastructure construction to global competition and make it mandatory for all projects above Rs 50 million to be awarded through global tenders.

It would also be worthwhile to set up a dedicated highway police force to ensure the safety and security of highway travelers and to quickly address complaints of damage and accidents.

 

Who will teach the next generation?

Every week, a new wave of articles warns us that AI is killing jobs. The argument is always the same: automation replaces human work, and workers lose. It is a tidy story. It may also be the wrong one.

The real problem may be quieter, slower, and more damaging. AI is not destroying jobs. It is destroying the willingness of organizations to grow people. And that distinction matters enormously — for firms, for the economy, and especially for anyone entering the workforce today.

The Jevons Paradox is not the point

Most commentators reach for the Jevons Paradox when discussing AI and jobs. Jevons observed in the nineteenth century that more efficient steam engines led to more coal use, not less — because efficiency unlocked demand. Applied to AI: if AI makes workers more productive, we will want more output, not fewer workers.

That is a reasonable argument in some contexts. But it sidesteps the real question. This is not a story about wanting more output. This is a story about who would pay to grow people — and right now, the answer is: nobody.

The training problem nobody wants to own

Here is the economic reality that most commentators might be missing. Training a junior employee is expensive. It takes senior time, patience, and a long horizon. The company that invests in training a twenty-two-year-old today may collect the benefit in seven years — long after the person who did the training has moved on, and long after the manager who approved the budget has left for another firm.

AI changes this calculus sharply. With AI tools, a small team of experienced people can produce what used to require ten. The temptation to stop hiring and training juniors is not irrational — it is the logical response to short-term incentives. Every individual manager, evaluated on this quarter’s output, makes the same rational choice. Stop building the bench. Use the tools. Ship faster.

The result is a collective action problem. Every firm does what makes sense for them individually, and the system as a whole would stop producing the experienced mid-level talent it will need in a decade.

A few firms will win big — Later

There is an investment angle here worth watching. A small number of firms with genuinely long-time horizons will continue to train juniors, precisely because everyone else has stopped.

In five to seven years, when the hollowing out becomes visible, experienced mid-career professionals will be scarce. You can poach a few senior people. You cannot manufacture an entire generation of capable thirty-year-olds who simply were never trained. The firms that built bench strength quietly during the AI adoption frenzy will collect a meaningful scarcity premium. The firms that cut training entirely will find themselves unable to grow — not because they lack capital or technology, but because they lack people who know how to do things.

This is not speculative. It is a predictable consequence of the incentive structure described above. The only uncertainty is timing.

 So, what should a young person do?

If the market has stopped training you, the question becomes: how do you train yourself? And here, of all places, the Bhagavad Gita offers the clearest answer available.

Chapter 4, verse 34:

तद्विद्धि प्रणिपातेन परिप्रश्नेन सेवया |

उपदेक्ष्यन्ति ते ज्ञानं ज्ञानिनस्तत्वदर्शिन: ||

 

Seek this knowledge through humble surrender, sincere inquiry,

and devoted service — the wise who have seen the truth will teach you.

Shankaracharya, in his commentary on this verse, is precise about what each word means. He is not offering a general sentiment about being a good student. He is describing a method.

The three-part method

Pranipata — prostration. Not the performance of humility, but the actual thing. Approaching someone who knows more than you without the armor of your credentials, your opinions, or your need to appear capable. This is harder than it sounds, especially for people who are technically skilled and used to being the smartest person in the room.

Pariprasna — inquiry. Not asking surface questions to seem curious. Asking the real ones: Why did you make that call? What were you wrong about? What does this look like when it goes badly? These are the questions that extract genuine knowledge rather than polished answers.

Seva — service. Making yourself genuinely useful to the person you are learning from. Not networking. Not managing up. Actually doing work that helps them, so that the relationship is built on something real.

Those three words describe the entire apprenticeship model. And it is precisely this model that is being dismantled by the current AI adoption cycle.

Jnani versus Tattva-Darshi

The sharpest line in Shankara’s commentary is a distinction he draws between two kinds of knowers.

The jnani is the person who is learned, credentialled, fluent, and well-read. In today’s terms: someone who can produce polished output on any topic, speak confidently in meetings, and appear competent across every domain.

The tattva-darshi is different. Shankara says the word means one who has seen the truth. Not read about it. Not synthesized it from other sources. Seen it — through direct experience, through having done the work long enough to understand where it actually breaks.

His point is direct: knowledge imparted by those who have seen the truth takes effect. Knowledge from the merely learned does not, or not in the same way.

This is the whole game now. AI will make everyone look like a jnani. Fluent, articulate, able to produce output on anything within seconds. What AI cannot manufacture is the tattva-darshi: the person who has done the work long enough to know when the confident answer is wrong, to make a sound call on incomplete information, to see the thing beneath the surface that the tool cannot access.

The practical implication

For young people entering the workforce, the advice follows directly from the analysis.

Do not optimize your first job for title or brand name. Optimize it for how fast you get good — which means: how close you are to people who have actually seen the truth in your field.

A well-known firm where you spend three years producing AI-assisted output with minimal senior exposure will leave you fluent and shallow. A less prestigious role where you sit next to someone who has been doing this for twenty years, who makes real decisions and lets you watch — that will make you rare.

Approach those people through pranipata, pariprasna, and seva. Stay low. Ask the real questions. Earn your place by being useful. This is not advice about networking or impression management. It is a description of how knowledge actually transfers between people.

The market is quietly eliminating the apprenticeship. Your job is to find one anyway.

(This piece is mostly based on a post written by a dear friend, who is a great exponent of Shrimad Bhagwat Gita, and regularly delivers talks on Gita.)