The World Is Playing Off-Key, but Someone Always Finds the Raga

Dear Insighter,

There is something music does to the air. Not recorded music, the kind that exists in a file, perfectly mixed and mastered, its edges sanded smooth. I mean live music, the kind that breathes, wobbles, risks going wrong, and sometimes goes magnificently right. The kind where you can see the sweat and the concentration and the slight lean of a bassist who knows exactly when to leave space. I caught Advaita, an Indian-fusion rock band, this weekend, and it reminded me of something I had been forgetting.

Eight musicians on stage, and the first thing I noticed was how unassuming they looked. No theatrics, no stadium entrance, just people sitting down with their instruments as though they had been mid-conversation and simply let you in. I had never watched them live before. The classical vocalist opened his mouth and I involuntarily closed my eyes. That is involuntary. Your body makes the call before your brain catches up, because it recognises something that bypasses the usual processing: pure, unhurried sound.

The English vocalist, who doubles as the acoustic guitarist, carries traces of Steven Wilson in the bones of what he makes, but stands entirely on his own when it matters. The bassist did what the best bassists always do: made you feel his absence the moment you imagined him gone. The drummer, tucked behind glass, possibly to keep the sound from eating the room alive, could not have been tighter if you had set him to a metronome and then removed it because it was slowing him down.

Then the tabla player. I had been watching him all evening, this contained presence, and when his solo came it was the kind of thing that makes a room collectively forget it had been breathing. He also picked up a tambourine, and something that chimed like a gajra caught in wind. The flutist added not melody but depth, that particular kind of depth that makes you feel the piece has a floor you had not previously located. The keyboardist, ever smiling and engrossed, was clearly the connective tissue: not the conductor, not the loudest voice, but the one everyone seemed to be listening for. The electric guitarist formed the base of it all, the dark soil everything else grew from, the kind that keeps the energy alive.

Watching them, I had a thought I am not sure I can fully defend but will offer anyway. Indian classical instruments feel physically closer to their musicians. A tabla player is not behind the instrument or above it, their hands are in it, fingers reading the skin the way a doctor reads a pulse. The flute requires breath, which is to say, requires the inside of a person. The sarangi, if you have ever seen one played, is practically held in an embrace; it is no accident that it sounds like it is grieving something personal. The veena rests against the player’s shoulder and chest, the sitar demands the whole posture of the body to hold it.

This is not a value judgement. It is a quality of intimacy. The music is not produced at a distance, it is lived through contact. There is less distance between intention and sound. Whether this theory fully holds is debatable, but in that moment it felt true.

The classical vocalist kept tune with his thumb and fingers, counting through each raga’s architecture even as he battled a cold that lesser performers would have used as an exit. Not once did it show in what mattered. In a seated gig, they had most of the room nodding, tapping, clapping, the kind of unselfconscious physical response that a person cannot fake and an audience cannot coordinate.

How extraordinary it is that humans can still make this. We are, by many available metrics, in the middle of a sustained effort to undo much of what we have built. Wars in West Asia are disrupting everything from crude oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz to the price of urea.

The West Asia conflict is, at its core, a story of physical scarcity working its way through an interconnected world. Yield Scribe puts it with clarity: molecules are either present or they are not. Benzene, essential to plastics and pharmaceuticals, has risen 40% since the conflict began, even in China, which holds 1.2 billion barrels of crude inventory. Urea runs on natural gas, and when that goes missing, so does the nitrogen that feeds crops.

And the bill migrates into fiscal balances, corporate margins, or the current account.

This migration is what Dhananjay Sinha maps in his analysis of India’s deferred fuel price reset. Kotak Institutional Equities has flagged a case for raising petrol and diesel prices by ₹25–28 per litre, while oil marketing companies are absorbing losses of nearly ₹270 billion monthly. The government has pushed the decision down the road, a sensible political move that is also a macroeconomic compression.

State finances are beginning to reflect the strain. Gaura Sen Gupta shows deficits widening to 3.6% of GSDP, with slowing tax growth and rising bond supply. V Thiagarajan notes that global capital has shifted from rewarding relative attractiveness to demanding absolute credibility.

The BasisPoint Groupthink reading of the MPC minutes captures the tension. The framework is clean: treat the shock as temporary, respond only if second-round effects emerge. The problem is that this is not a neat shock. It cuts across energy, trade routes and financial conditions simultaneously.

G Chandrashekhar argues that Indonesia’s B50 biodiesel narrative has stirred palm oil prices more than fundamentals justify. As production exceeds consumption, anxiety seems to be doing the work.

Srinath Sridharan's piece on India's Bharat Maritime Insurance Pool makes the case that insurance is not a financial service but a form of strategic infrastructure. Historically, control over insurance markets has translated into influence over trade flows.

K Srinivasa Rao sees opportunity in allowing NBFCs to expand without prior approval, but flags the need for stronger controls. Rabi N Mishra adds that lighter supervision has historically preceded instability.

T Bijoy Idicheriah’s Unusual Banks series shows what happens when definitions drift. IDBI Bank is classified as a private sector bank by the RBI, yet the government and LIC together hold nearly 95% of it. The classification was changed while the underlying conditions were not. J&K Bank tells a structurally similar story: 59.4% held by the union territories of J&K and Ladakh, effectively under central government control, yet classified as private, and operating under a legacy dispensation that exempts it from promoter shareholding caps that every other private bank must respect. State Bank of Sikkim is perhaps the most extreme case: an institution that operated outside the RBI's jurisdiction for decades, reportedly brought under its purview in 2021, yet whose website still describes it as an autonomous state body.

Paytm Payments Bank sits in a fourth category of its own. The RBI barred it from onboarding new customers in January 2024, following persistent non-compliance and material supervisory concerns. The licence remained active, and operations have been effectively frozen.

Michael Debabrata Patra zooms out to ask whether digitalisation is truly delivering on its transformative promise. Nearly 80% of adults globally now hold a bank or financial institution account, up from 74% in 2021. And yet, Patra notes, digital financial tools may be fostering short-term stability at the expense of long-term climate vulnerability, bolstering immediate coping while not enabling the deep-seated, systemic changes needed for genuine resilience.

Sharmila Chavaly reports Andhra Pradesh granting Google a power distribution licence for a large data centre. It is bold, but incomplete. Details on enforcement, infrastructure and resource use remain unclear.

Shilpashree Venkatesh adds the ecological cost. India’s cities are expanding rapidly, but at the expense of resilience. Heat stress is already reducing productivity and income.

In the corporate world, Dev Chandrasekhar shows how Reliance has crossed a quiet threshold. Consumer businesses now contribute more than energy, with Jio Platforms emerging as the largest profit pool. Infosys presents a subtler shift. Growth is slowing, hiring is contracting, and while AI positioning is strong, disclosure is limited. The question is whether pricing power holds.

Dhananjay Sinha points to pressure in value fashion, where expansion is masking weak same-store growth. Nilanjan Banik observes a shift in mobility platforms towards subscription models, with policy yet to catch up.

Then there’s the political tension. Amitabh Tiwari shows Tamil Nadu’s election hinging on direct contests and small swings. In West Bengal, over five million voters have been removed, altering the electoral base itself.

Bobby Ghosh argues that Trump’s madman theory is aimed at domestic audiences, even as consequences spill outward. TK Arun notes that Trump's reposting of a MAGA podcast describing India as a "hellhole" is not merely the opinion of a man named Savage. When a sitting president amplifies it, it becomes a slur.

And just like that, the music continues to play. Advaita played a seated gig and had the room head-banging. What connects the Strait of Hormuz to a tabla solo, a voter list to a groundwater table, a suspended licence to a keyboardist quietly cueing eight musicians into coherence is not neat theory. It is the recognition that systems rarely behave the way frameworks expect them to.

And yet, coherence is still possible. Not because the noise disappears, but because someone shapes it.

Until next time, making sense of the spaces between the notes.

Phynix

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