Ruchi

As I walked around San Francisco with rampant homelessness and open drug use, I thought to myself that this was the logical culmination of full-tilt liberalism and capitalism, with nothing to moderate either.

Read the full column at the link in the bio (!)

I dont think people fully appreciate how much of a nation's sense of purpose is derived from its politics. You just cannot have wide-ranging idealism in a country if its political class is seen to be self-serving, corrupt or divisive. Politics is the fountainhead of it all

Alok Sama (former Softbank) clearly spells out that international investors invest in India for its consumer economy, not to spur deep tech innovation.

We shld calibrate our expectations accordingly

Investing in homegrown innovation is the job of Indians & Govt. #startups

There could be a 10-foot wide path but most men in India cannot be bothered to move a little to put some comfortable distance as they pass you

Whether workers and ordinary people gravitate towards the Right or liberalism is really how each articulates its agenda. Onus on liberalism to find an agenda - and articulation - that appeals to a mass audience. This contestation is the very essence of democracy

The unspooling is scary but the populist revolt also partly heartening & democratic. You jst can't dismiss large numbers of people chiding them for not understanding some esoteric theory. Not just growth, distribution matters & workers know whn their lives arent getting better

#tariffs #jobs #trump

India has the largest youth population in the world. I write that what we owe our young is not just welfare or opportunity but meaning - but that our leadership - technocratic and political - is failing to do so. Read the full piece on my substack: rgupta.substack.com

Has anyone calculated what percent of manufacturing jobs were lost to global outsourcing vs to automation? Even if the US tariffs the heck out of every country with a bilateral trade deficit & does increase domestic manufacturing, how many JOBS will get created? #Trump #China

This morning replacement domestic help, said she's been working here for 20 years. As she was washing utensils. Tinge of bragging (!) about her reliability perhaps

Her whole life went washing other people's utensils. Almost broke my heart. Have thought about it couple times since

Most people are so much a product of their circumstances and available options, that you really can't know them. We think we know people because most people live fairly routine and circumscribed lives not necessarily because there's a strong compass directing their choices

We know it of course, but still pretty wild, how personalised hard state institutional power really is

The Covid lab leak denouement is wild.

One aspect of the decline of liberalism is liberalism taken too far, in terms of individuality and relativity.

The other is that liberal establishment hasn't been "liberal" leading to pervasive decline in institutional credibility

What is this business of 👍 tapbacks? Find quite annoying.

Have perversely started doing it too.

What is that phrase, we become what we despise. None can escape social media's homogenising influence

All Of Me Sidney Bechet · The Fabulous Sidney Bechet · Song · 2000

How to transform your morning coffee into the opening montage of a Woody Allen movie 💕

open.spotify.com/track/4sHMm4...

There's a structural critique of gender power relations & then there are interpersonal relations. While the two are related, the lens of the former applied wholesale on the latter on individual issues often feels unnecessarily antagonistic, even counterproductive #womensempowerment

Women's Day brings forth much commentary on women's empowerment & gender relations. Much of it is needed and welcome but sometimes the discourse around "women's empowerment" when it moves seamlessly between structural & interpersonal, privileged and unprivileged seems bit blunt.

Laughed multiple times while reading this report, esp Trump telling the reporter at the end, "you're just a troublemaker ".

To paraphrase DT: this would have been great television.

Growing - and perhaps overdue - backlash against liberal proceduralism. Challenge to reimagine liberalism with its emphasis on institutions without losing its politics

Husbands take oath on behalf of their sarpanch wives in Chhattisgarh. I have mixed feelings about the commentary / response around this panch pati phenomenon, efforts to stop this should be constructive not exclusionary #WomensDay

Find it exasperating to watch long videos to learn something since - for completeness sake - the video must necessarily meander through a whole bunch of primary stuff. Reading has so much more agency, allowing one to skip over as much or as little as one knows

I wonder if young people realise the immense harm they are doing to themselves with their over reliance on Chatgpt etc for their work. It's one thing to use these apps for busy work - but increasingly it seems to be supplanting thinking itself

So much of sophistication is about exposure but for most people in India, exposure is limited to second-hand spectatorship instead of actual experience. Results in a lot of stilted behavior

His work defied easy categorization other than to say it was his own. Hence, the descriptor “Lynchian.”

Any country should do its best to limit flight of skilled labour, without coercion of course.

Arguments about racism and bigotry aside, H-1B represents brain drain from India. We should focus on how to keep our skilled workers invested in the country in the long-term

Between Belonging and Thinking: Thoughts on the Year Past rgupta.substack.com/p/between-be...

Palpable sense of intellectual stasis in Indian politics and industry. Formalisation, infrastructure, bigness, big-budget driven distribution, IDing, mapping, cash transfer etc are not "ideas" but dominate almost all discussions

Merci, Gisele Pelicot

Politics, necessarily has an element of theatre and rhetoric, given the imperative for mass communication.

But this session has been too much theatre.

Interviewing young people for public policy positions and a shocking number, incl from "good" institutions, don't seem to read the news or even know basic things like the name of RS Chairman (who's also perennially in the news)