Rajesh Jain

Over the past few days, many friends and colleagues sent me a link to an X post by Parimal. It told the IndiaWorld story. [And also this on LinkedIn from Akash.]

I have written about IndiaWorld in my book and discussed it in many interviews. But Parimal’s account is perhaps the best and most succinct one I have come across. We have never met or spoken, and yet he got the essentials right: the stock data arriving on floppy disks, the cricket scores keyed in by hand from the TV broadcast, the road trip back from a temple in Rajasthan when Bhavana and I came up with the idea of separate Indian-named sites. His knack for storytelling shows up wonderfully in the post.

Reading it brought back many memories from a life I had lived three decades ago.

IndiaWorld came after multiple failures in my early entrepreneurial career. Until then, I had known only failure. I had spent more than 18 months on Image Workbench and had just a couple of orders to show for it. Bhavana and I had just had an arranged marriage and barely knew each other. My confidence was at its lowest point. IndiaWorld was not just another venture; in many ways, it was my last chance to prove to myself that I could build something that worked.

It was a huge challenge. We were the first with India-centric portals, but I was addressing an audience of NRIs spread across the world rather than people I could meet locally. It was an entirely bootstrapped operation. After the first year, we also had well-funded competitors. There was no margin for error. There were many landmines to be negotiated, and a single mistake could be fatal.

Some of those moments come back vividly. I sent nearly 100 letters to publishers asking for free content. Only a handful said yes, but those few built the foundation. Then there was the domain crisis. I watched two years of work and our early-mover advantage wash away, and I sat numb at home, unable to see a way out. It was Bhavana who suggested we go to a temple. That was the first time I asked God for help. There were also my many attempts to raise money, every one of which failed. At the time, each rejection felt like a verdict. Only later did I see that the lack of capital forced us to be profitable, and that profitability is perhaps why the ending happened at all.

And yet Bhavana and I managed it, with our team. Bhavana did far more than support me from the sidelines. She was in the thick of it, even writing movie reviews for the site. The team grew to 20, and the thirteen sites became daily habits for Indians around the world.

The ending, of course, was surreal. It was something I could never have imagined in those years of failure. I still remember what Bhavana told me the day after the deal: that we should think of ourselves as custodians of God’s money, and that there was a purpose for it which I had to figure out.

One line in Parimal’s post stayed with me. He wrote that today’s startup mythology has almost no living memory of that version of the Indian internet. He is right. For many of my colleagues at Netcore, IndiaWorld is a story they have heard, not a time they lived through. For me, it is still very much a lived memory.

Even today, when I am in a challenging situation (and there are many), I ask myself, “How would the Rajesh of IndiaWorld have reacted?” I think I know the answer. He would have closed the door that wasn’t working, without much sentiment. He would have looked for the one move that mattered, the crux. He would have read every customer email himself. And because he had so little to lose, he was rarely afraid.

Of course, I am not the same person, and the world is very different. The internet then was a blank page; today, AI is rewriting the page we thought was already written. But some learnings carry forward and are timeless.

Thanks, Parimal and Akash, for taking me back, for a brief time, to a period in my life that I can never forget. We rarely get to hear our own story told back to us by a stranger. When it happens, it reminds us that the past is not really behind us. It is the ground we still stand on.

Also see: Life Notes #53: The 1990s, Life Notes #65: Yeses Matter, Not the Nos, My Life System #56: Crisis and Crux – 1, My Life System #30: Religion and God

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.

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.

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!

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.