The Watcher’s Guide to a World That Won’t Sit Still

Dear Insighter, 

There’s a theory about dreams that says the sleeping brain isn’t replaying the day so much as editing it. Sorting signal from noise. Stitching together fragments that didn’t make sense while awake. Consciousness clocks off; pattern recognition clocks in. Lately, I’ve wondered whether that function has been quietly outsourced, not to the subconscious, but to algorithms. What gets consolidated isn’t what we notice. It’s what the feed decides deserves attention.

Which is where wallflowers come in. Are you an observer or a doer? I’ve never been sure which is worse. I tend to sit in corners, bars, restaurants, rooms, listening. A woman on the phone narrates domestic choreography into the void: “Nahi, woh kapde waise hi chhodna… aadhe ghante mein aa rahi hoon (No, leave those clothes as it is…I am back in 30 minutes).” Delegation, urgency, urban life compressed into one sentence. Nearby, two men stress-sipping beers over laptops judge two women who ask to change tables because they think they heard a mouse. The absurdity isn’t the mouse. It’s the judgement. Grown men terrified of deadlines mocking someone else’s fear.

Watching reveals things that are easy to miss when you’re busy doing. How hierarchy leaks into conversation. How anxiety shows up in posture. But there’s a trap here. Observe long enough and you risk becoming a spectator to your own time, cataloguing dysfunction instead of confronting it.

That drift is everywhere. Michael Debabrata Patra’s requiem for reading captures it best. Reading, the original act of sustained attention, is retreating fast. In India, readership among children fell 8.8% in a single year to just over a third. The trend is global. What remains is polarised: a small cohort reading more than ever, and a growing majority opting out entirely. Publishing survives because intensive readers subsidise disengagement. But Patra’s concern is civilisational, not commercial. A demographic dividend built without comprehension produces workers, not thinkers.

The same mismatch between rhetoric and reality plays out spatially. Srinath Sridharan reminds us that cities generate nearly two-thirds of India’s GDP but operate with municipal finances worth barely 1% of it. Property tax remains under-collected, own revenues weak, dependence on transfers chronic. Cities drive growth yet lack fiscal agency, engines running on fumes. Unsurprisingly, Akshi Chawla finds urban labour markets fraying beneath headline comfort. Overall unemployment stays below 5%, but urban joblessness is rising, especially for youth and women. Nearly one in four young urban women actively seeking work cannot find it.

Work exists, but its direction is telling. TK Arun flags a quiet brain drain inside India’s plush Global Capability Centres. They lease space, hire lakhs, generate exports, and quietly transfer intellectual property abroad. India produces a thin layer of genuinely employable STEM graduates each year. An increasing share ends up building someone else’s strategic future. It is good for salaries and tax receipts, but bad for technological autonomy. The erosion is gradual, comfortable, and therefore ignored, a pattern R. Gurumurthy would recognise.

Gurumurthy calls it malignant normality: the process by which institutions learn to treat danger as routine. He applies it to the casual intimidation of the US Federal Reserve, but the idea travels well. Credit bureaus, once neutral utilities, now function as unelected gatekeepers of economic citizenship, he observes. A proprietary score decides who borrows, rents, belongs. These entities are lightly governed despite system-wide influence. Private power accumulates not with drama, but with dashboards.

V. Thiagarajan explains that RBI’s buy-sell dollar-rupee swaps are repeatedly misread as currency signals when they are, in fact, liquidity tools. The mechanics are dull; the narratives seductive. Markets prefer intent stories to plumbing and misprice accordingly.

The same appetite for flattering narratives explains December’s eye-popping ₹6.3 trillion credit surge, which Dhananjay Sinha dissects as seasonal distortion rather than revival. Credit pulled forward is not credit created. Sustainable expansion needs private capex, not calendar effects masquerading as momentum.

Even growth that looks inclusive often isn’t. Amitrajeet A. Batabyal’s research on intra-household consumption shows men command over half of household resources, women barely a third. Urbanisation worsens the gap. Per-man and per-child spending jumps sharply in cities; per-woman expenditure barely moves. Growth amplifies inequality behind closed doors, even as aggregate numbers improve.

G. Chandrashekhar’s examination of millets shows record output, global conferences, generous publicity, and stubbornly inferior farm returns. Shree Anna is celebrated everywhere except where it matters: on farmers’ balance sheets and household plates.

Dev Chandrasekhar finds similar tension in Indian Oil’s green pivot. Massive capital commitments face uncertain economics. Green hydrogen remains far costlier than alternatives. Refining margins that fund transition are cyclical. If profits persist, green bets destroy value. If margins collapse, there is no capital left to transform.

Sharmila Chavaly’s warning on shipbuilding echoes this theme. India’s subsidy-heavy push risks replaying decades-old playbooks while global shipbuilding reorganises around geopolitics, technology and consolidation. The opportunity lies in niches and partnerships, not scale for its own sake.

External constraints tighten the screws. Trump’s Iran tariffs, as Chandrashekhar notes, force India into cold arithmetic. A $130 billion US relationship outweighs a $1.7 billion Iran one. Strategy bows to exposure. Krishnadevan V’s conversation with Manoj Shenoy underlines why this matters for investors. Geopolitics is no longer background noise. It is the signal reshaping capital flows across equities, bonds and gold.

Regulatory credibility is tested as well. The brief appearance of ICICI Lombard’s draft results on a WhatsApp Status is not trivial. Unpublished information leaked casually signals a culture problem, not a compliance gap. SEBI’s response will indicate whether information discipline is ornamental or enforced in the mediums where information now actually moves.

Insurance reform poses a larger test, writes Krishnadevan. Granting IRDAI statutory power to cap commissions strikes at incentives that quietly tax policyholders. For years, scale was rewarded even when value was not. The real reform is not higher FDI. It is whether insurers are finally forced to sell protection rather than payouts.

And then there is the bond market. Yield Scribe argues the Union Budget’s real challenge is not the headline deficit but managing a ₹30.5 trillion supply pipeline, with states now central to the yield equation. Fiscal credibility depends less on ambition than on recognising where the stress truly sits.

Taken together, the pattern is harder to ignore. Attention is thinning, normality increasingly distorted, and private power quietly accumulating. Cities remain under-financed. Talent is misdirected. Inequality is internalised. Observers notice everything. Systems correct little.

Maybe the choice isn’t between observing and doing. Maybe it lies somewhere messier, between noticing and deciding what to live with. Dreams consolidate memory by deciding what matters. Algorithms do that for us now. The harder task is reclaiming that function.

The danger of the wallflower isn’t detachment. It’s mistaking noticing for participation. Realising something is off is easy. Knowing what, if anything, to do about it is harder.

Phynix

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