Long-Form Writing

A collection of working notes on AI, writing, work, and what it means to actually use these tools

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.

Why I'm collecting links to books no one will read

On people doing dumb shit with money

Thinking about one's identity In the shadow of AI.

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 serendipity surprise me.

A site for Seneca's letters.

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.

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 ...

“Good times become good memories, but bad times become good lessons.” Uncle Iroh, Avatar: The Last Airbender.

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...

Throughout the history of modern banking, two narratives have been constant: "Banks are dead" and "Why do we need banks?"

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,...

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...

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. ...

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...

Can you think of some of the greatest inventions and innovations in human history?

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...

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...

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...

A few things that made me go, _ooh, that's interesting_.

A few things I learned this week.

Here's what I learned this week. One thing is that I'm going to be poor, but here are a few other things.

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?

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 is one of the smartest and the most provocative financial historians of our time. His controversial reading of history has earned him a reputatio...

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....

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...

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...

If you listen to Steven Pinker, he'll tell you the world has never been a better place: ...

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...

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...

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...

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...