स्तम्भ Stambh. The column.

A position taken quickly. Weekly, short, dated.

• Join Before the Design Freezes — Europe’s joint sixth-generation fighter collapsed in June. France will now build its own and the UK, Italy and Japan are open to new partners. India should keep AMCA on track and join one as a co-developer while the drawings are still wet. After that the only seat left is an observer’s. 25 October 2026
• Second Place, Ten Years Late — I put down deposits on two Tesla Model 3s in 2016. Neither came. Ten years on Tesla is second among India’s luxury electric cars. It has learnt to price for India and to build for Indian families. It has not yet learnt to make anything here. 25 October 2026
• Thorium Is the Key. Build Everything Else Now. — India sits on the largest thorium reserves on earth and has just lit the reactor that leads to them. That is the long game. The short game is solar with storage, hydro, wind and the factories that make them, built fast enough to beat 2070 and to answer Europe’s carbon tax on our terms. 23 October 2026
• Why the iPhone Duo Costs ₹3 Lakh in India — Apple’s first foldable is $1,999 in America and ₹2,99,900 here. Customs duty, the social welfare surcharge and GST explain most of the gap. Why a founder might still be right to buy one. 22 October 2026
• Two WhatsApp Accounts. One Phone. Now on iPhone Too. — The second phone in your pocket can go back in the drawer. WhatsApp now keeps two accounts logged in at once in its own app, on Android and now on the iPhone. How to set it up, what stays separate and what it means for a business that runs on WhatsApp. 19 October 2026
• Tesla Built a Flying Car Before It Built the Roadster — On 15 October a Tesla Roadster drove up a ramp, hung upside down, flew and landed on its wheels. The car was promised for 2020. It is now promised for 2028. What a demonstration buys and what only delivery can. 17 October 2026
• AI Slop = AI Flop? — Half the new articles on the web are now written by machines. The search engines and the answer engines still quote humans. The tool is not the problem. Having nothing to say is. 17 October 2026
• The Phone Is the Easy Part — Smartphones are now India’s largest export, and three in four of them are iPhones. That is a real achievement and the easy half of one. What India builds next is the part inside the phone, and that is where a founder should be looking. 11 October 2026
• Choose the Narrow Pass — What a film about Thermopylae, a law drama built on a lie and a comedy about a compression startup teach a founder about strategy. Pick the ground where numbers stop counting. Guard the path you were told nobody uses. Know which launch to stop. 11 October 2026
• The Most Powerful Person on Earth Should Be a Crown, Not a Clown — A peace prize he did not win. A lake he renamed. A strait he annexed on a map with a typo. A war he scheduled around an election. A satire on the loudest office in the world, aimed up, and at every founder who confuses noise with authority. 11 October 2026
• The Omnipotent Machine Asked Me to Prove I Was Human — Every age builds its own Maya. Ours ships with a status page, a monthly plan and a box that says I am not a robot. A satire, aimed up, with one hand on my own keyboard. 9 October 2026
• Nightingale Kept a Ledger — The most famous nurse in history is remembered for a lamp. What changed the British Army was a table of deaths and a diagram nobody could argue with. The hospital that counts its outcomes beats the one that describes them. 23 September 2026
• Ask How Many Times — One question separates the surgeon you want from the one you were given, and it works on lawyers, agencies and founders too. The rule I use and the number that made me use it. 2 September 2026
• The Visa Is the First Appointment — Three in four foreign patients who come to India come from one neighbour, and in 2024 India showed what happens to a hospital when a visa becomes a weapon. The medical visa is the cheapest diplomacy the country has. 26 August 2026
• The Discount Is a Confession — India’s largest export industry was built on being cheaper per hour. The next cheaper country is a machine. What a services firm is actually saying when it leads with the price. 12 August 2026
• The Chettiars Ran a Network Before the Word — In 1930 one community from a dry corner of Tamil Nadu had offices in 217 towns across Burma under one standard and one rate. Then it lost everything. The column that cuts against me. 5 August 2026
• The Partner You See Twice a Year — A network runs on people you do not sit with. Here is how one man keeps faith with eight of them, and the three habits that have held when nothing else did. 15 July 2026
• Eight Cities, Eight Rulebooks — A national market was promised in 2017. A firm that works in eight states still obeys eight versions of the law. The compliance load is the quiet tax on every Indian network. 8 July 2026
• Seven Crore Firms and No Firm of Firms — India has registered more enterprises than most countries have adults. It has registered almost nothing that joins them. 24 June 2026
• Pataliputra Wrote the First Timetable — Kautilya divided a king’s day and night into sixteen blocks and wrote down what went in each. He got the architecture right and the sleep wrong. We have done the reverse. 17 June 2026
• Ten Minutes Before the Day Gets a Vote — Anything you leave for the evening you have given to the evening. How one person actually keeps a condition, with the only habit study worth quoting. 27 May 2026
• A Ten-Hour Day Is a Rule. Say Who Pays for It. — Telangana made the ten-hour working day legal in July 2025 and called it ease of doing business. The week did not get longer. The evening got shorter. 20 May 2026
• Seventy Hours Is a Capacity Confession — When a founder asks his people for seventy hours he is telling you something about his company and nothing about his people. 6 May 2026