From Roman elections and medieval prejudice to forgotten gods and discarded science, everyday words preserve the hidden histories, beliefs and biases of vanished worlds.
R. Gurumurthy
Via WikiCommons
Purple toothpaste, black charcoal fairness creams, tea that evicts calories—Indian advertising has stopped selling products and started selling deficiencies. One tiny asterisk knows the truth. Meet advertising's most honest, most ignored employee.
Kalyani Srinath
Istock.com
We claim to admire character, merit and substance. Yet give us a famous surname, a foreign degree or a photograph with the right person, and our principles suddenly become negotiable.
Srinath Sridharan
We have always lived with contradictions. But somewhere along the way, we seem to have lost the old discomfort of being caught behaving differently from what we preach.
Two friends who never stopped texting. Two doctors who kept hope alive. Two chants repeated in the dark. This is what it takes to survive uncertainty—and come out the other side.
Mamdani, Gandhi, and Modi show that if the goal is to build credibility and repair trust, leadership communication can't be determined by personality. It must diagnose which wound, in which room, requires which honesty.
Kirti Tarang Pande
Intelligence can explain our mistakes. Wisdom begins when we stop defending them, question ourselves, and learn to change.
In India’s desperate search for protein, a generation raised on social media is paying a premium to rediscover what its own kitchens have known for centuries
iStock.com
The American Civil War redirected cotton supplies to India, triggering a speculative frenzy in Bombay that transformed the city yet ended in catastrophic collapse.
Aadya Tyagi
In a world of stars, scores and rankings, family labels remain the most durable, least transparent and least open to appeal.
Krishnadevan V
The RBI calls it a consumption boom. A psychologist calls it a reference-point shift. The former reads as official macro optimism. The latter sees a generation flexing luxury to compensate for a future that´s priced permanently out of reach. History has a name for this pattern: the fall of Rome.
The finest chapters of our lives were often written by circumstances that never consulted us. The human question is - Are we still leaving enough room for serendipity?
istock.com
The Indian dining table once brought families together. Today, it holds laptops, deliveries and leftovers—while conversations increasingly happen somewhere else.
The meal may be sealed, spotless and trackable. The reusable bag carrying it home remains food delivery’s least visible hygiene blind spot.
We have never reached destinations more efficiently. Yet somewhere between landmarks and location pins, we may have stopped truly knowing the cities we live in.
Institutions that continue treating dissent as a traditional top-down affair are responding to today's protests with yesterday's interface.
AI Generated
Why do Indian protests still end with leaders being carried to police vans? A wry look at colonial symbolism in the age of social media.
inc.in
Human beings have never been easier to find. Yet somewhere along the way, constant connectivity has quietly changed what freedom, trust and even courtesy now mean.
India keeps redefining what proves identity. Every new document arrives as the final answer, only to leave citizens with a thicker file and a thinner sense of assurance.
Wikimedia Commons
Every successful business today competes by eliminating waiting. But as technology accelerates life, are we quietly losing the patience, anticipation and resilience that only waiting once taught us?
Vivek Kaul is a writer and an economic commentator.
Michael Patra is an economist and former RBI Deputy Governor.
Dr Subbarao is a former governor of RBI
Arvind Mayaram, former Finance Secretary, is Chairman of the Institute of Development Studies, Jaipur.
Dr Ashima Goyal is an Economist, Ex MPC Member.
Ajay Srivastava is the founder of the Global Trade Research Initiative.
Abheek is an Independent Economist and the Former Chief Economist at HDFC Bank.
Vijay Singh Chauhan, a former IRS official, is a Senior Visiting Fellow at ICPP, Ashoka University
Gurumurthy is an ex-central banker who handled markets, and later, financial stability for RBI.
Gaura is Chief Economist at IDFC First Bank.
Sharmila Kantha is an industrial policy specialist and author.
Lt Gen Hasnain is Governor, Bihar, and Former Commander of Chinar Corps.
Dhananjay, a D-School alum, is CEO and Co-Head of Equities at Systematix Group.
Ex-civil servant Chavaly held key Railways, Finance roles; specialises in infra & PPPs
Srinath is an author, corporate advisor, and independent director on corporate boards.
Amitabh Tiwari tracks politics with a strategic eye