Life Notes #82: A57

I recently upgraded my mobile from the Samsung A52 to the Samsung A57. There was nothing wrong with it except perhaps the battery life. After a scary incident where my iPad just refused to reboot, I decided that 3-4 years was good enough for a device. (I did manage to get the iPad battery replaced and it started working again.) So, I decided to go in for a new phone.

I wanted something which was an almost exact replica of my A52. After some discussions with a couple of friends and ChatGPT, I settled on the A57. I didn’t have to learn anything new; it’s the “same old.”

This is deliberate. We are sold upgrades as transformation – a new interface, new gestures, new places for everything. But for a device I use for a narrow set of things, every change is a cost, not a benefit. The best upgrade is the one that gives me a working battery and asks nothing else of me. The hours I would have spent relearning where things are is the real price of a “better” phone, and it never shows up in the comparison charts.

Many people ask me why I don’t use an iPhone. As it turns out, I had bought an iPhone in the US a few months after it was launched in 2007, and then had a colleague at work jailbreak it so I could use it in India! For some reason, a couple of devices after that, I switched to Android and Samsung, and have stayed loyal.

I don’t use the mobile as much. I always carry my iPad and notebook in my BB wherever I go, so the activities I do on the mobile are quite limited – WhatsApp, email when I am away from a desktop, and a handful of utility apps. As I wrote in My Life System #16: Digital Devices, my devices are not my life; the spiral notebook and pen are. The mobile is the least important of my primary devices, which is precisely why the upgrade decision could be so boring.

Perhaps that is the test I would offer for any device: if replacing it is an event, it has too much of your life in it. Mine took an evening’s research and no adjustment at all – which is exactly how I want it.

Thinks 2088

NYTimes: “The act of engaging with written texts — the basis of our cultural, political and intellectual life for over 500 years — is not coming to an end. It’s changing to meet new needs by offering the kinds of experiences digital technologies can’t provide: synchronous, IRL encounters with other human beings. In other words, the future of reading is a party.”

FT: “India is rapidly installing solar panels and, helped in part by investment from large groups such as Adani and Tata, now has the world’s third-largest solar capacity. Solar supplied 9.4 per cent of total demand in 2025, according to green energy think-tank Ember. This has helped to meet rising power demand during the day, driven in part by air conditioning as people try to cope with summer temperatures that reach well above 40C. But the country’s combined wind, nuclear, hydropower and battery storage resources are not enough to cover night-time demand, meaning that once the sun fades more coal-fired power stations have to kick back in.”

NYTimes: “After roughly two decades of ultralow interest rates, a period of rapid readjustment is ahead for the United States, the world’s largest economy and most important financial system…Rates are being driven higher by a variety of forces. Stubborn inflation is being exacerbated by the war with Iran and there are questions about how forceful the Federal Reserve will be to tame it. Aggressive borrowing by artificial intelligence companies and hopes that the A.I. boom will lead to faster economic growth in the future. And long-brewing concerns about the federal government’s ability to manage its mounting debt load, which this week topped $40 trillion for the first time.”

Atanu Biswas: “Tintin or Asterix? Two ways of seeing the world through comic-book genius…Tintin makes us curious. Asterix makes us irreverent. Tintin tells us to discover the world. Asterix reminds us not to take its powerful people too seriously.”

Life Notes #81: Singapore Vacation

We had not taken a family vacation for 4 years. With Abhishek in the US, summers were at home and winters were too short to go anywhere. This time around, we finally decided to take one – so Singapore. I had to go to Bali for GAMS and we then converged on Singapore. I had plenty of Marriott Bonvoy points accumulated to cover part of the stay at the Orchard Road Marriott (Tang Plaza) – we couldn’t have asked for a better location.

After New York, Singapore is our favourite vacation destination. We like the big cities – they have something for all of us. And in both New York and Singapore, Jain food is not a problem. Of the numerous options, we zeroed in on Balaji Bhawan, right across from Mustafa. They had plenty of options and just the right taste to suit all of us.

This time, we skipped the Sentosa attractions. We walked around Orchard Road, did Bugis Street, Holland Village, Mustafa, IMM Outlets (got a great price on new ASICS shoes), and Chinatown.

Kinokuniya was once again a favourite, as it has been. Its collection is unparalleled, and in each of my three visits, I found interesting books which I had not come across. While Kitab Khana is the Mumbai equivalent, the scale of Kinokuniya is absolutely amazing.

Abhishek and I also did what we used to do when he was a kid: take a long bus ride to a random destination. One of the mornings, we did just that for a couple of hours, and went across Singapore in perhaps the best possible way: the upper deck of a bus! What struck me was how little the ritual needed to change. The boy who once needed lifting to see over the rail is now studying in New York, and yet there we were, two hours of no particular destination, watching a city go by. Some of the best things one does with children do not have to be outgrown – they just have to be repeated.

Singapore’s taxi drivers always provide interesting stories. One of them told us about the construction that’s underway to connect the North and South. (Mumbai too is seeing its fair share of construction in the past decade with the Coastal Road, Metro, and more. We had stagnated for far too long.) Cities need to reinvent themselves and Singapore has done it very well through the years, since the first time I stepped there in May 1992 on my return to India after my four years in the US.

Overall, it was a good short break, and left me longing for more. When I am with Bhavana and Abhishek, I am a bit keyed up to ensure everything goes right for them – which is perhaps its own kind of holiday.

Thinks 2087

WSJ: “Should AI become far cheaper to deploy, the so-called Jevons paradox, named after a 19th-century economist, would likely take hold. That would mean people respond to lower costs simply by using the technology more, eating up just as much if not more computing power. That is one reason chip companies have largely welcomed open-weight models.”

Ajay Shah: “The transition away from some price controls was a milestone in Indian economic history. It was achieved by looking past narrow desires in price control, and understanding the consequences of price controls for Indian economic growth. The management of the dollar/rupee exchange rate requires the same maturity. The costs encompass fiscal burdens, inflation volatility, stunted financial markets, systemic risk, and degraded state capability. Exchange-rate policy is not a narrow concern of monetary-policy strategy. It is a fundamental choice about the broader economic-growth strategy. India requires a modern financial system, a capable state with high accountability, and a private sector focused on innovation rather than government arbitrage. The path to Indian economic success begins with a full reckoning of the costs of exchange-rate management.”

Technology Review: “Transformers are starting to show their age. Many of the recent advances in LLMs, such as the development of so-called reasoning models and their ability to handle large amounts of input at once, are not neat extensions of that core technology but workarounds that patch over some of its fundamental flaws. A growing number of scientists and engineers are now asking what’s coming next. LLMs are not going anywhere, but the way they get built is up for grabs.”

WSJ: “Something inherent in the human psyche still pushes us fiercely toward the rabbit warrens of outlier theories. Mythmaking is still a large part of how people understand the world, even if they now apply it to suspicions about the powerful institutions and advanced systems they no longer trust…A well-read person grows body armor against the rigid conspiracy theorist, against flat artificial intelligence that manipulates without emotion. It is no coincidence that humanity shot forward when Gutenberg invented his printing press. Books are super fuel for the human mind, the mightiest intellect on earth. And right now, that intellect needs all the collective nutrition it can find.”

Life Notes #80: Benne

Until recently, I had never eaten (or even heard of) a Benne dosa. And then “Benne – Heritage Bangalore Dosa” opened its outlet at Sukh Sagar (in Mumbai) a few months ago. And what an experience it was! The entire process – ordering on a screen, self pick-up, standing and eating, and all done in under 30 minutes at under Rs 200 a person.

While I have been eating dosas for as long as I can remember (both in restaurants and at home), the Benne dosa was so very different. The restaurant’s own site asks what actually makes a dosa memorable – the butter, the crunch, the masala, the chutney, the hands that serve it – and settles on the idea that it is all of these at once. As Wikipedia explains, the benne dose is a Davanagere speciality made by working butter into a batter of parboiled rice, black gram and puffed rice, cooked traditionally on a wood-fired griddle, and served with still more butter and coconut chutney. It is smaller and softer than the dosa most of us grew up with.

I then did some more research. The dish has a history longer than the chain that brought it to me. It traces back to 1928 in Davanagere, where a woman named Chennamma began selling dosas at a street-side stall near a drama theatre. From there it travelled to Bangalore, where institutions built their reputations on it – Central Tiffin Room in Malleshwaram has been serving benne masala dosas since the 1920s, and Vidyarthi Bhavan in Gandhi Bazaar since 1943. What is new is not the dosa but its reach: a regional dish from central Karnataka is now something Mumbaikars queue up for on a Sunday morning. India’s food map is being redrawn by people willing to carry a hyper-local speciality a thousand kilometres and bet that others will love it too.

The other aspect of the experience is how the restaurant chain has turned the eating experience on its head. Self-order and self-pickup. Almost like a QSR. And the stand-and-eat helps them process a lot more customers (and presumably, keep the prices low).

Though this, too, is less an invention than an import. Bangalore’s darshinis – self-service vegetarian fast-food counters – emerged in the early 1980s, more than a decade before McDonald’s came to India, and worked out the same economics from first principles: no waiters, no table service, a small footprint, and customers who eat standing and leave. What Benne has done is take that format, give it a design language and a brand, and put it in a city that pays for the high rents! The founders, Akhil Iyer and Shriya Narayan, came from outside the restaurant business entirely – he a producer, she a psychologist – which may be exactly why they saw the opportunity. The constraint is the strategy: a tiny space with high turns can charge Rs 200 and still work.

I have already gone back twice after the first experience and expect to do so many times more!

Thinks 2086

NYTimes: “India’s working-age population, already the world’s largest at nearly one billion, grows by about 12 million people a year. For families with money to spare, education is one of the few apparent routes out of low-paid farming and wage labor. The best option is a place at one of the country’s highly competitive public universities. For those who cannot get in, private colleges offer another route. That industry has exploded. The number of private colleges tripled in the decade after Mr. Modi became prime minister in 2014. By 2024, India had 45 million students in higher education, up 41 percent from a decade earlier, according to a government survey. More than two-thirds of all students attend private institutions. But the expansion of higher education has far outpaced the creation of good jobs.”

WSJ: “People who switch employers a lot are often seen as red flags. New evidence suggests they get up to speed much faster than others.”

Manu Joseph: “When a system is rotten, a diligent person endures by digging deep into the quirks of his own personality. Some good things happen in India because some people are eccentric.”

FT: “China is beginning to construct its own self-sustaining, internally reinforcing AI ecosystem — and is increasingly offering it abroad. Beijing’s geopolitical foothold in critical infrastructure is increasing and countries adopting Chinese AI will, over time, absorb Chinese approaches to technical standards and governance principles…The original China shock came with the manufacturing revolution that followed the country’s entry into the World Trade Organization. China shock 2.0 was the cleantech wave of solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles. China shock 3.0 has been the diffusion of Chinese digital technology, from ecommerce to recent AI models. China shock 4.0, now on the horizon, will be quite different. It will be based not only on the export of Chinese technology but on China’s approach to innovation as a national project.”

Life Notes #79: GAMS Bali and Bangkok

In the space of a month, I travelled for two of our customer events: the Global Agentic Marketing Summit in Bali (for our South-East Asian customers) and in Bangkok (for our Indian customers). The name has changed over the years — from Hashout to MGS (Martech Global Summit) to GAMS. [See Life Notes #66: MGS Colombo and Life Notes #21: MarTech Global Summit.]

The names themselves tell the story of our industry. Hashout was about email and engagement. MGS was about the whole martech stack, and about going global. GAMS is about agents doing the work that marketers until recently did by hand. Three names in a few years is not restlessness about branding — it is the rate at which the ground under marketing is moving. I am curious what we will be calling it two summits from now.

I like these events because of the interaction with customers (and prospects) in a relaxed setting, and the opportunity they give me to share my thinking on martech on the opening day. I typically start working on my deck a few weeks in advance, bringing together the latest thinking from my blog essays and showcasing the new product thinking at Netcore. This time, I tried a new approach to the presentation: instead of the standard PPT, I decided to do HTML. Over the past few months, I have moved away from the static deck to one that’s more interactive. I can click and show within a slide, and it’s so much easier to make and edit with Claude.

The intimate nature of these events is great for relationship building. I did 9 1:1 meetings in Bangkok, which helped me understand the marketer’s lens much better. This is a time of change as AI and agents transform CRM and retention marketing. The drudgery of marketing is being replaced by a new excitement — the ability to build deeper and better relationships which can deliver profitable growth and eliminate the AdWaste caused by reacquisition.

The other aspect of these events that I like is the travel. Of late, my US visits have gone down (in fact, none for the past 2 years), so the long flights which I relish for deep thinking and reading have not been happening. Bali was an overnight flight to Singapore, and then a 2.5-hour flight onwards. (The return was via Singapore for a brief vacation with family.) For Bangkok, I chose the afternoon flight so I got 4+ hours of contiguous time to think, read, and write.

Both summits ended with the same thing: people lingering. Long after the last session — in the lobby, at dinner, at the breakfast table the next morning — marketers who could have got the whole deck by email were still there, talking. We spent two days discussing how agents will handle the millions of conversations a brand has with its customers. And then we proved, without meaning to, that the conversations which matter most are still the ones you have in person.

Thinks 2085

NYTimes: “Wars are a crucible that very often exposes changes in the physics of the world around us — who has power, who doesn’t have power and how power is being wielded. Nothing better captures the new power equation produced by this war than Trump’s unhinged and obscene rant at the Iranian leadership for not bending to his bombs. This new physics of war is equally present in the conflicts between Ukraine and Russia, Hezbollah and Israel, Hamas and Israel and the Houthis and everyone else. My summary of this new dynamic is that the small can now act really big, really accurately and really inexpensively. And while the big can also act really small, really accurately, it is far more expensive for them to do that while bearing the burden of vast legacy arms systems. The net advantage, for the moment, seems to be to the small.”

SaaStr: “If I were running CS at a B2B company right now, I’d stop treating usage as the primary signal and start asking a different set of questions about every account. How many jobs do we do for this customer? An account that uses you for one narrow workflow is more exposed than an account with lower total usage across five workflows, whatever the seat count says. Single-job accounts get absorbed first. Is this customer building? If your champion is spending their week in Replit, Claude, or Lovable, they are one conversation away from an agent offering to do your job instead. That’s how our sponsor pages, our heat mapping, and our staff meeting all got rebuilt in the last month. Can our data get out and our agents get in? Marketo is deprecating the API we needed and we’d have blown through the rate limits in an hour, which made them unusable for us regardless of features. Agent-hostile architecture is a churn cause on its own now.”

Mint: “As AI gets embedded in the operating fabric of organizations, acquiring a competitive advantage will depend less on building systems than on deciding which systems must be built. Companies that consistently discard weak assumptions before they become expensive commitments are likely to fare better, as would those that reward sceptics who ask inconvenient questions as readily as they reward engineers who deliver working models. While understanding grows abundant, judgement is becoming scarce. This is the reality businesses must confront.”

FT: “K-Pop fans, meme pages, political theorists and occultists devote themselves to creating the world they would like to see. This begins with an understanding of how ideas now spread. Our music, language, aesthetics and politics all emerge from amorphous pockets of algorithmic space — and they can all be manipulated.”

Life Notes #78: Vande Bharat

I recently had the opportunity to take the Ahmedabad–Jodhpur Vande Bharat from its starting point at Sabarmati to Falna. A distance of 280 kms, covered in 200 minutes. I have taken the Vande Bharat in the past between Mumbai and Surat/Ahmedabad, so this was not a new experience. But I am still enthralled by breezing through the Indian countryside at a speed almost 50% faster than other trains or the road. The ride to Falna was excellent: good food, spacious and non-smelly toilets, well-lit compartments, and absolutely punctual.

When I was young, we used to go to Rajasthan very often. My father had a marble factory in Abu Road, so there was a mandatory visit at least once a year. At that time, we would take the overnight train from Mumbai to Ahmedabad on broad gauge, and then a metre-gauge train from Ahmedabad to Abu Road (either the Delhi Mail or the Ranakpur Express, if my memory serves me right). Including the transfer at Ahmedabad, the journey would take about 14 hours for 700 kilometres. What the Vande Bharat now covers in a single morning once took the better part of a day and a night – distance, in those years, was measured in nights rather than in minutes. Ahmedabad junction was a bustling interchange – so many platforms, so many trains coming and going.

This time, I got down at Abu Road (en route to Falna) and spent a few minutes on the platform. So many memories came flooding by. The platform itself seemed to be the same, and yet it all seemed so different. I remember we used to walk from our factory to the station daily to buy the English newspaper. And then sometimes I would just sit on the platform and watch the trains come and go.

The open train windows have now been replaced by glass. The train speed ensures the outside whizzes past in a blur. The small private compartment (“first class”) has been replaced with a noisy space shared with 77 other people. Mobiles ringing (or singing with music), babies crying, the passageway busy with the constant flow of train staff serving food – at times, it was all too distracting. The train journeys I remember and perhaps long for had a quiet charm to them of an older India that has now moved on to modernity. Now, like life itself, it’s all about “business” and speed, and getting from Point A to B, without the time, , as W.H. Davies put it, to “stand and stare.” And yet the nostalgia, I know, is mine alone. Somewhere in that compartment was a child for whom a train is exactly this – sealed, swift, food served at the seat – and who, thirty years from now, will perhaps miss it as much as I miss the metre gauge.

Also see: Life Notes #68: A Retro Train Ride

Thinks 2084

NYTimes: “Whether a productivity boom ends well depends on whether government holds society together while it happens, sustaining a sense of fairness and shared destiny. When wealth concentrates and disaffection spreads, booms end badly. Look no further than the rise of Communism and fascism after the Industrial Revolution, or the populist backlash to globalization we are living through now. Much is unknown about exactly how A.I. disruption will play out. But the potential is huge. Our internal Bridgewater analysis suggests that 18 percent of current American jobs could be displaced by A.I. in the next five years. And even though some new jobs will be created — particularly those where human relationships are integral to the value of the work, like nursing or hospitality — disruption from the societal transition is extremely likely regardless. Governments must act before the inevitable backlash fully arrives at this A.I.-driven labor displacement, not after.”

FT and Standard Chartered Business Book of the Year Award 2026 — the longlist: “The longlist for 2026, the 22nd edition of the prestigious award, is again rich with explorations of the transformative impact of technology, and its 15 titles fit into three broad groups: business and power, business and innovation, and business and society.”

Crunchbase: “Ryan Ziegler, general partner at Edison Partners, told Crunchbase News via email that while funding in physical AI has historically been concentrated in robotics and humanoids, defense, and foundational models, he sees the opportunity as much broader. Physical AI, in his view, represents the convergence of software, hardware, sensors and IoT, and services across a wide variety of real-world applications. What is changing, according to Ziegler, is AI’s ability to process data from those systems at such a scale and speed to generate useful operational insights, while the underlying hardware becomes cheaper and more accessible. “Even our mobile phones now have LIDAR scanners on them,” he noted, “democratizing the ability to map objects and spaces.””

NYTimes: “Chatbots are pushing us toward a post-human Internet..In matters of work, school and even romance, we turn to A.I. chatbots. But what happens when the bots begin talking to one another?”