Business Standard on premiumisation: “Perhaps the real luxury now is the freedom to be ordinary: To drink water without knowing its birthplace, eat a cookie without being briefed on its terroir, and use detergent without caring which botanical miracle has gone into it. A biscuit need not be handcrafted; water does not need a biography; and maavadu pickle certainly does not need a founder’s story, a tasting note or a website explaining its journey from farm to jar. It can sit in its reused Horlicks bottle, tasting exactly as it always has. There is something wonderfully subversive about that now: To make, buy or eat something simply because it is good, without elevating it, curating it or giving it a backstory. Not everything needs to be premium. Some things were perfectly fine before we started fixing them.”
Caroline Webb: At its heart, leadership is about enabling a group of people to achieve more together than they could on their own. You’re definitely addressing problems, and chasing opportunities—but you’re doing it with and through your colleagues. So even when you’re doing very technical work, good leaders are always thinking about how to bring the best out of others. Over the years, I’ve seen how understanding the human mind makes that easier. For example, once leaders understand that people’s brains are more likely to notice and process things that match what they’re already thinking about, they get less flummoxed by situations where they or their team have missed something “obvious”, and more adept at getting everyone to step back and see all the angles.”
WSJ: “For Mr. Damasio, “consciousness is a biological process that allows organisms equipped with a nervous system to discover their own existence and the existence of a surrounding universe.” This deceptively simple formulation is premised on an important distinction between sensing and perceiving. Many plants and basic organisms can sense things in their environments and change their behaviors accordingly, but this does not require them to have an awareness of their selves. A thermostat or a motion-activated switch has no consciousness, and so merely senses rather than perceives. Mr. Damasio brings this point home in a brisk tearing-apart of the fashionable claim that plants—especially trees—are conscious. Talk of “plant sentience,” he argues, confounds sensing with sentience, which is generally taken to be synonymous with consciousness. Another important distinction is between intelligence and consciousness. Intelligence is a contested term, but Mr. Damasio seems to use the word to signal an ability to solve problems without reliance on rote procedures. He is happy to call ChatGPT intelligent without conceding that it is conscious: How could it be, when it has no feelings, no central nervous system?”
Business Standard: “Ask what is powering the strongest parts of the global economy in 2026, and you keep getting the same answer. In America, it is AI capital expenditure. Investment in computers, data centres and networking infrastructure reached about 1.5 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) in the first quarter of 2026, up sharply from a year earlier. The AI-related portion alone is estimated at about 0.8 per cent of GDP. In that quarter, investment in computer equipment and software contributed more than half of GDP growth. At points last year, some economists reckoned that AI-related investment was adding more to American growth than all consumer spending combined.”
