I have written a novel. It's out on Kindle. The link is in the first reply to this post. Here's the synopsis: The Forest Had Pied Pipers tells the story of three young men who, on a lark, go long distance cycling, from their sleepy university campus in Midnapore, India to the nearest beach town a 100 miles away. The novel is set in 2003. Unbeknownst to them, the terrain was Maoist country. The boys are taken hostage. The captives eventually get over the shock of imprisonment, and must get around to planning their escape. In charge of the Naxal camp is a veteran; in fact, a one time associate of Charu Majumdar himself. The old man, who has returned to the life of a revolutionary after decades in exile, finds a kindred spirit in the boys. The boys can talk Dylan, Joan Baez, and know about the Summer of Love. They remind him of what used to be, of what could have been. The boys befriend the captor, and know that freedom, if it ever comes, would require securing the captor’s trust. It’s a complex, high stakes sleight of hand with low margin of error. Meanwhile, Jane Tharakan, girlfriend to one of the young men, knocks on every door to bring the boys back home. In doing so she learns a few hard lessons on how narratives work, the bureaucratic apparatus, and the limits of human empathy. The Forest had Pied Pipers is an escape story, and a story of young love. The book also finds occasion to ask whether communism is indeed interred forever. To help you decide whether the novel is worth your time, I have built WIX site full of excepts and quotes, and the full text of the first chapter. (link in the second replybelow this post). Due to epub software issues, a few typos refuse to die despite tedious manual editing. Please forgive those. Many thanks to my accomplices - Somak Chaudhary, the genius illustrator, my editor, the brilliant Jashodhara Chakraborti (a more ardent bibliophile you will not meet), who greatly improved everything, and my relentless copy editor, the hawkeyed Dolanchapa Dey. I have a made a site for the book, which has excerpts, quotes, and the first chapter. The link is in the second comment. Hope you read the book! Thank you.

Places are either rich or interesting. America is - fascinatingly - both. It's the land of startup exits, VPs and SVPs. It's where people of flesh and blood leverage synergies, have skill issues, look for low hanging fruits, circle back, and wonder if colleagues have enough bandwidth. It's also the land of The New Yorker Magazine, Elvis, Bob Dylan, Sylvester Stallone, and David Foster Wallace. The first time I stepped on US soil, it was a lovely day outside Logan Airport. Folks were nice and kind - to an obvious stranger, to an obviously clueless stranger. The country is built for effective conversations between strangers. Delhi - but at country scale. Later that week I lazed around in a Double Tree Hilton room somewhere around Lexington, commuted to my workplace in Cambridge, had dinner at The Cheesecake Factory, and had the kind of dreams only jet lag can give you - something involving Penny and Phoebe, a reshuffling in my head of all the Americana I had picked up over an entire Indian adolescence and youth. It's the land of batshit plenty, from the eggs at breakfast, to the suburban homes in Lexington, to the music room at work and the ice cream truck that rolled up outside the cafeteria. I finally understood why my American colleagues reacted to my very modest contributions with words like 'super' and 'fantastic'. America was the land of superlatives. 'Good' wouldn't do. It had to be 'super'. A week later I found myself in NYC. New York is possibly humanity's peak. If you hang out long enough at the breakfast spot right across Penn Station you can spot every human archetype walk by. Elegant all American woman walking her dogs. A man so tall he bends at the waist a bit and holds his chest as if to stop his torso from falling, a young man hawking the standup comedy lineup that evening, a homeless vet dragging his worldly possessions in a cart, and of course men in suits leveraging synergies. The subway is curiously ramshackle. The ride is straight out of a dream, like you have entered the Taxi Driver universe. That's the thing with the US. Americana is so sublime, and reigns so supreme in the realm of ideas, that when your foot hits real American soil, you can't see the brownstones as they are, but as they are refracted by the Martin Scorsese lens. Happy 250th. Stay awesome America. You are the wellspring of hope. Never change.

dost, refund?

where's my refund? It's been two weeks.

bhai, refund?

The world is about to find out what Third Wave coffee and thought dreams about agentic AI ultimately rests on. Life as we know it is predicated on crude and naphtha. Everything else is like the nut milk or the latte art. Not substantive without the espresso shot. The diesel in your car, the liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) that makes cooking possible without frying the lungs of the person cooking, the kids' toys that litter your floor, the powder that makes your pill, the plastic wrapper around all the little things you bought the past week, and the fertilizers that wring out 2,800 calories on average from the ecosystem for 8 billion people - everything comes from oil refineries and petrochemical plants. It's the Atlas holding up civilization. And Atlas just shrugged. "I don't know man, you'll just don't seem to care. Imma bounce." Well, we do have to care now. Industrial civilization has been around for two centuries (Adam Smith wrote Origin of Wealth in 1776). Global supply chains in their current form have been around since 1945. The dollar-denominated global economy since roughly 1971, with Bretton Woods, and its supposed 'rules-based world order' establishing its dominance over the next four decades. Home to a fifth of humanity, China, joined the global capitalist system in 1978. India, home to another fifth, did so in 1991. Underpinning the above is a set of values long assumed to be universal, known by labels that are hotly contested. A whole lot of isms, each with armies of true believer, fully convinced of their own moral superiority. But speaking in a purely practical sense the current global systems rests on the universality of certain values. Value #1. Material prosperity trumps all other considerations. As long as we have more trinkets and air miles, nothing else matters. The world's primary sport is watching 'numbers go up'. Anything is bearable, as long as 'numbers go up'. Value #2. Like capital, labor, i.e. people are fungible. A human can be modeled purely in terms of economic value. Labor, like capital, finds its optimal location. Our species has transcended its tribal roots. Alongside, these values were certain certainties. The dollar shall always reign. The global supply chain shall remain open. NATO is a fact, like the sun and the moon. And the refineries and petrochemical plants will keep doing what they do. Our exquisite lives, full of craft coffee, 'outcome-based pricing', 'agentic CRM', 'strategic reboots', and something known as 'cross-functional collaboration', were predicated on a few supposed self evident truths that no longer hold. Might be a good time to dig out those mechanical/chemical/metallurgy textbooks long locked in our parents' homes. Digital is out. Naphtha is in. You shouldn't, but one can touch naphtha.