दिवाली की चमक

ये चमक ये दमक, फूलवन मा महक,

अब तो हर बात रक़म से है,

जिस दौलत के पीछे जग भागे,

वो खेल तो सारे भ्रम से है।

सिक्कों की खनक में डूबा जग,

हर रिश्ते का अब मोल यहाँ,

जज़्बात बिकें बाज़ारों में,

पैसा ही बस अनमोल यहाँ।

ये सुबह की दौड़, ये शाम की होड़,

बस जेबें भरने के ग़म से है,

ये चमक ये दमक, फूलवन मा महक,

अब तो हर बात रक़म से है।

मैं खड़ा किनारे देख रहा,

इस भागती दुनिया का मेला,

सब बेच के अपना चैन सुकून,

हर शख्स यहाँ कितना अकेला।

ना पाने की धुन, बस दिल में सुकून,

मेरा नाता मेरे मन से है,

ये चमक ये दमक, फूलवन मा महक,

अब तो हर बात रक़म से है।

रिश्तो के सारांश

वो नदी थी, वापस मुड़ी नहीं,

और मैं पहाड़ था, आगे बढ़ा नहीं।

वो सब कुछ समेट कर ले गई,

और मैं अपनी जगह से हिला नहीं।

वो अपने रास्ते में बहती रही,

मैं अपनी जगह खड़ा रहा।

उसे सफ़र की जल्दी थी,

मुझे उसे रोकने की उम्मीद...

वो हर मोड़ पर मुझसे दूर होती गई,

और मैं हर मोड़ पर उसे देखता रहा।

कुछ रिश्ते भी पहाड़ और नदी जैसे होते हैं,

एक ठहर जाता है... दूसरा बहता चला जाता है।

 कभी-कभी मैं लिख लेता हूं दिल के तारछेड़ लेता हूं जिंदगी यूं ही कट जाएगी इसलिए मैं कभी-कभीलख लेता हूं दिल की तमन्ना कागज पर लिख लेता हूं।

UPI Is Bigger Than a Payment App: Why India's Digital Infrastructure Is About Strategic Independence

When people ask why India should move from a completely free UPI model toward a system where the companies building and operating the payment ecosystem can actually earn money, they often look at it only from the perspective of a transaction fee.

I think we should look at the larger picture.

UPI is not merely a payment product. It is strategic digital infrastructure.

For years, companies such as Pine Labs, Paytm and PhonePe have built technology, merchant networks, QR infrastructure and payment devices around digital payments.

The broader ecosystem has supported payment networks including Visa, Mastercard, American Express, RuPay and UPI.

The important question is:

Who ultimately owns the rails through which a country's payments flow, and who has the economic incentive to keep building and exporting those rails?

The problem with making critical infrastructure economically unsustainable

UPI was deliberately made extremely inexpensive for consumers and merchants.

That helped India achieve enormous scale.

But infrastructure also has to be maintained, upgraded, secured and expanded.

If the companies operating the ecosystem cannot generate sustainable revenue from it, they have to depend on other sources of income, investor capital, adjacent businesses or government support.

That is not necessarily a sustainable model for something that has become critical national infrastructure.

This is why the current change in UPI economics is significant.

What are the UPI charges now?

As of 22 September 2026, UPI remains free for individuals.

From 15 October 2026, a new Merchant Discount Rate, or MDR, will apply to specified merchant transactions above ₹2,000:

UPI transaction| MDR position

Person-to-person payments| ₹0

Merchant payment up to ₹2,000| ₹0

Eligible merchant payment above ₹2,000| 0.4% MDR

MDR on transactions of ₹75,000 or more| Capped at ₹300

Small merchants covered by the zero-MDR framework| ₹0

Certain essential sectors above ₹2,000| ₹5 flat MDR

Capital-market transactions| 0.02%, capped at ₹300

Importantly, this is not a charge that consumers will pay separately. The MDR operates within the merchant payment ecosystem and is distributed among participating banks, payment service providers and UPI application providers. Person-to-person transactions remain completely free, while payments to merchants up to ₹2,000 also remain free. The Government says approximately 96% of P2M transactions will remain unaffected.

So the headline should not be:

"India is charging people for UPI."

The more accurate description is:

India is beginning to create a sustainable economic model for part of its UPI infrastructure.

And that is strategically important.

RuPay already gives us an example

There is another Indian payment network that is important to this discussion: RuPay.

RuPay is India's domestic card network, developed by NPCI.

It was created so that India would have its own card-payment infrastructure rather than relying entirely on international networks such as Visa and Mastercard.

RuPay has its own payment economics, including interchange and other ecosystem arrangements. NPCI documentation, for example, explicitly refers to RuPay interchange charges and payment-service-provider/app-provider economics.

At the same time, India has deliberately maintained zero MDR for RuPay debit-card transactions under its policy framework.

This distinction matters.

Zero MDR does not mean zero cost.

It means the policy has chosen not to impose that particular merchant charge on specified transactions.

The network still requires technology, cybersecurity, processing infrastructure, banks, switches, settlement systems and continuous investment.

UPI is now confronting the same fundamental question:

How do you keep a strategic payment network affordable while also making the ecosystem sustainable enough to keep investing in it?

Why the economics matter

Companies such as Pine Labs, Paytm and PhonePe have invested heavily in payment technology and merchant infrastructure.

If the ecosystem develops a sustainable commercial model, Indian companies have a stronger economic incentive to invest in:

• Better payment technology

• Cybersecurity

• Fraud prevention

• Artificial intelligence

• Merchant infrastructure

• Payment hardware

• International expansion

• Cross-border payments

• Interoperability with foreign payment systems

This changes the proposition completely.

Instead of UPI being merely an Indian domestic payment system, India could increasingly export payment infrastructure and expertise.

Why the Russia and Iran examples matter

The events involving Russia and Iran demonstrate why financial infrastructure can become a strategic issue.

In March 2022, Visa and Mastercard suspended operations in Russia. Russian-issued cards stopped working outside Russia and foreign-issued Visa and Mastercard cards stopped working within Russia.

Iran provides an even longer-running example.

Iranian banks have faced restrictions on access to international financial infrastructure, including disconnection from SWIFT during the sanctions regime.

The lesson is not about whether one agrees or disagrees with those sanctions.

The lesson is much simpler:

Control over financial infrastructure can create geopolitical leverage.

If a country's economy depends completely on financial infrastructure controlled outside the country, geopolitical decisions made elsewhere can potentially affect its ability to transact internationally.

That is why payment sovereignty matters.

India already has independent domestic financial infrastructure

India has not built just one payment system.

We have:

NEFT

RTGS

UPI

RuPay

These systems serve different purposes.

NEFT provides electronic fund transfers, while RTGS provides real-time settlement, particularly for high-value transactions.

The important point is that India has its own domestic financial infrastructure.

We do not need SWIFT to move money from one Indian bank account to another through the domestic banking system.

This does not mean NEFT or RTGS have "replaced SWIFT". SWIFT is primarily a global financial messaging network, whereas NEFT and RTGS are Indian payment and settlement systems.

For international transactions, Indian banks still participate in the global correspondent-banking and messaging ecosystem.

But having strong domestic infrastructure gives India an important foundation.

And the next logical question is:

Can these capabilities become increasingly interconnected with payment systems outside India?

From domestic infrastructure to international infrastructure

UPI has already begun moving beyond India's borders.

NPCI has developed UPI Global Acceptance and international UPI linkages, allowing Indian payment technology to be used in participating overseas markets.

That is only the beginning.

The long-term possibility is much larger.

Imagine a world in which Indian payment infrastructure connects with payment systems in other countries.

India does not necessarily need to replace Visa, Mastercard or SWIFT.

It needs to ensure that there are alternatives and choices.

That is how strategic resilience works.

And this is where BRICS becomes interesting

BRICS has expanded considerably.

As of 2026, BRICS has 11 full members:

Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, with Indonesia as the eleventh member.

Together, these countries represent approximately 49.5% of the world's population, 40% of global GDP and 26% of global trade, according to the Government of India.

Now imagine greater interoperability between the payment systems of these countries.

Not necessarily a single BRICS currency.

Not necessarily one payment application.

But interconnected national payment systems that allow countries to conduct more bilateral trade and settlement using their own currencies and payment infrastructure.

China has already built the Cross-Border Interbank Payment System, or CIPS, for international RMB clearing and settlement.

Russia has developed its own financial messaging and payment infrastructure.

India has UPI, RuPay, NEFT and RTGS.

Other BRICS members have their own financial systems.

The strategic possibility is therefore not difficult to understand:

National payment systems can increasingly become interconnected.

If that happens, countries could potentially reduce their dependence on any single external financial network for at least some categories of cross-border transactions.

This is not something that will happen overnight.

There are major issues involving currency convertibility, regulation, liquidity, settlement, trust, cybersecurity and interoperability.

But strategically, the direction makes sense.

China understood this too

China's CIPS is an important example.

CIPS provides clearing and settlement services for cross-border RMB transactions.

It is not completely disconnected from SWIFT and still interacts with the international financial messaging ecosystem.

But China has deliberately built its own infrastructure and expanded its capacity.

The principle is simple:

Do not wait for a crisis before building an alternative.

Build the alternative first.

That is precisely the kind of strategic thinking India should follow.

Now consider navigation

The same philosophy can be seen in another area: satellite navigation.

The United States has GPS.

Russia has GLONASS.

China has BeiDou.

The European Union has Galileo.

Japan has QZSS.

India has NavIC — Navigation with Indian Constellation.

ISRO describes NavIC as an independent, stand-alone Indian navigation satellite system. Unlike GPS, which is operated by the United States, NavIC is under the control of the Government of India and provides an independent navigation capability over India and the surrounding region.

Kargil and the lesson of dependence

The Kargil War provides an important historical context.

During the 1999 conflict, India faced restrictions on access to certain GPS information that could have assisted military operations.

The experience contributed to India's recognition of the strategic importance of having an independent satellite-navigation capability.

The important point is not simply whether one describes this as America "switching off GPS".

The deeper lesson is:

A country should not depend entirely on another country's technology for a critical national capability.

A nation has permanent interest not permanent friends. This is reality of today's world yesterday world and the world that is coming it was there during Mahabharat or Ramayan, it's there in Arthashastra the famous book by Chanakya

India subsequently developed NavIC.

And today NavIC is not simply a military technology.

It has civilian and strategic applications across the country.

NavIC is useful far beyond defence

NavIC is designed to support:

• Land navigation

• Maritime navigation

• Aviation

• Vehicle tracking

• Fleet management

• Timing and synchronisation

• Telecommunications

• Surveying and mapping

• Fishing vessels

• Transportation

• Disaster management

ISRO specifically identifies disaster management as one of NavIC's applications.

The Government has also highlighted applications such as real-time train tracking, fishing-vessel communication and location systems for public and commercial vehicles, alongside secure navigation services.

Think about a major cyclone, flood or other disaster.

Communication networks may be disrupted.

Roads may become inaccessible.

Power infrastructure may fail.

Emergency teams need accurate positioning.

Relief vehicles need navigation.

Search-and-rescue teams need location information.

Ships and aircraft need reliable navigation.

Having an indigenous satellite-navigation capability gives India an additional layer of resilience that it controls itself.

That is strategic infrastructure.

The same principle applies to payments

This is why UPI, RuPay, NEFT, RTGS and NavIC should be looked at as part of a much larger philosophy.

The objective is not to isolate India from the world.

It is exactly the opposite.

The objective is to make India capable of participating in the world while having alternatives when circumstances demand them.

Use Visa.

Use Mastercard.

Use SWIFT.

Trade in dollars.

Trade in euros.

Trade in yuan.

Trade in rupees.

There is nothing wrong with using international systems.

But simultaneously build Indian alternatives.

Because having an alternative gives you resilience.

From "Made in India" to "Used by the World"

This is ultimately the larger opportunity.

India did not build UPI merely so Indians could scan QR codes faster.

India built a payment architecture at enormous scale.

India built RuPay.

India built NEFT and RTGS.

India built NavIC.

These are examples of the same underlying philosophy:

Build critical capabilities at home.

Make them affordable and scalable.

Allow Indian companies to participate economically in their growth.

And eventually take those capabilities to the world.

If Indian payment companies can earn sustainable revenue from payment infrastructure, they can invest more in technology, cybersecurity and international expansion.

If other countries adopt Indian payment technology, India moves from being merely a user of global infrastructure to becoming a provider of global infrastructure.

That is a profound economic opportunity.

This is not about isolation

Building UPI is not anti-American.

Building NavIC is not anti-American.

Building RuPay is not anti-Visa.

Building domestic financial infrastructure is not anti-SWIFT.

China building CIPS does not automatically mean China wants to disconnect itself from the global financial system.

These are examples of countries developing strategic capabilities of their own.

A country as large as India cannot reasonably want complete dependence on infrastructure controlled elsewhere.

The objective should be straightforward:

Use the world's infrastructure where it makes sense, but build enough of our own infrastructure that we always have alternatives.

That is what NEFT and RTGS provide domestically.

That is what UPI provides in real-time retail payments.

That is what RuPay provides in card payments.

That is what NavIC provides in satellite navigation.

And potentially, over time, an internationally interoperable Indian payment network could provide the same strategic resilience in cross-border finance.

The debate over UPI charges should therefore not be reduced to the cost of one transaction.

The bigger question is:

Do we want India merely to use global digital infrastructure, or do we want India to build infrastructure that the world uses?

If the answer is the latter, then sustainable economics matter.

The objective is not to make UPI expensive.

The objective is to make Indian payment infrastructure sustainable enough to grow.

Because strategic independence does not mean isolation.

It means having choices.

And this is strategic growth not anything else.

जन्मदिन a Friendzone or Breadcrumbing poem

जनमदिन पर तुम्हें क्या तोहफ़ा भेजूं,

सुलगती बात या ख़ामोश दुआ भेजूं।

मुझे मालूम है शायद तुम्हारी हद अलग होगी,

मगर इस दिल की धड़कन को मैं कैसे बे-पता भेजूं?

कभी लगता है जैसे तुम मुझे अपना समझती हो,

हँसी में खोलकर बातें मुझे सब कुछ बताती हो,

मगर जब बात दिल की आँख तक आने को होती है,

बड़ी मासूमियत से सिर्फ़ एक 'अच्छा सखा' कहती हो।

इसी दोराहे पे खड़ा हूँ कि आगे बढ़ूँ या ठहर जाऊँ,

तुम्हारी दोस्ती थामूँ या ख़ुद से भी मुकर जाऊँ?

डराता है ये डर मुझको कहीं सब छूट न जाए,

कि इज़हार-ए-मोहब्बत में बना रिश्ता न टूट जाए।

दुआ बस ये कि खिलते रहें चेहरे के ये रंग तुम्हारे,

सदा सजते रहें आँगन में सब ख़्वाब तुम्हारे।

मुकद्दर जो भी तय कर ले हमारी दास्तान का कल,

मगर हर साल लौटें ज़िन्दगी में ये हसीं पल।

जनमदिन की ढेरों शुभकामनाएँ।

चलते चलते मरे जीवन में....

अब अकेले चलने की आदत हो गई है,

इस मोड़ पर अब ठहरने की फुर्सत नहीं है।

खामोशी ने थाम लिया है हाथ मेरा,

अब किसी से कुछ कहने की चाहत नहीं है।

कदम खुद-ब-खुद आगे बढ़ते जाते हैं,

पुराने निशानों को पीछे छोड़ते जाते हैं।

सफर लंबा है मगर कोई शिकायत नहीं,

बस चुपचाप आगे बढ़ते जाने की आदत सी हो गई है।

 My version of Cafe Mushafir and the love story that started in Madars Club Chennai from Chdadripet to Attapur

#cafemusafir #heartbreak #growingup #lovestory

               https://www.instagram.com/reel/Dbh8kIyNfQ7/?igsh=MXM3aGRyejJ2Ynp3bQ==

The Guru Who Saw Me Before I Saw Myself

Shri Chandan Singh Pawar Pawar Saab to all of us who both feared and adored him in equal, confusing measure and, in the wider constellation of school memory, the formidable presence of Shri S. K. Gupta, the legendary principal of Birla Vidya Mandir, Nainital, whose very footsteps in a corridor had the uncanny effect of transforming even the most irrepressible adolescent into a model of sudden, suspicious virtue.

Guru Brahma, Guru Vishnu, Guru Devo Maheshwara,

Guru Sakshat Parabrahma, Tasmai Shri Gurave Namah.

Guru Brahma Guru Vishnu…

He was not simply a teacher.

He was, if I may borrow a slightly more elaborate register than my usual conversational restraint permits, the quiet architect of a life I had not yet imagined, and certainly not applied for in any known admission form of destiny.

When I entered Tagore House as student Folio No. 513, I was not the person most people know today. I was painfully introverted. Crowds drained me as though they were elaborate Victorian contraptions designed specifically for the extraction of social energy. Conversation, unless it involved books or trees or silence, felt like an unnecessary expenditure of breath. I was, in essence, a young hermit who had somehow been misfiled into a boarding school through what can only be described as a clerical misunderstanding of cosmic proportions and in this case of a certain SK Singh my father's bosom buddy whose overreaching presense in my life has both been a blessing and curse depending on my day and sense of injustice that I feel that day. 

Had you told anyone then that this boy would one day speak to audiences, conduct meetings, debate complex ideas, and hold forth on matters ranging from the philosophical to the absurdly practical, they would have smiled with the indulgent disbelief usually reserved for optimistic railway timetables and weather forecasts promising “light showers” in Nainital.

Except one man.

Pawar Saab saw something in me that I, in my own rather limited self-assessment, had not yet been formally introduced to.

Instead of allowing me to dissolve quietly into the comforting anonymity of institutional wallpaper, he sometimes gently, sometimes with the strategic firmness of a man who knew exactly what he was doing pulled me into the foreground of school life. I was made to deliver the Thought for the Day, read the news in morning assembly, and even recite the Sanskrit prayer before lunch, a ritual I approached with the enthusiasm of a man being asked to perform open-heart surgery with a butter knife and believe me the pain at time was the same except that there was no anaesthesia given to the patient that is me. The Gods of course chose to ignore my prayers to have an earthquak or lighting strike the mess but as is their wonet to almost all of my prayers this too was ignored. God you see is like a  bureaucrat with a large amount of pending files on which the general note is only seen and disregard. The fellow might have gone to the hollowed Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy Of Administration Charleville estate, Mussoorie and learnt the art of doing nothing there.

I resisted, of course. I complained. I negotiated. I attempted, on at least two occasions, tactical invisibility.

It did not work.

Pawar Saab, with quiet amusement and the patience of someone who had seen every possible variety of adolescent rebellion, appointed Satya Bhaiya, the house prefect, to “keep an eye” on me. Satya Bhaiya, in turn, had the relentless efficiency of a well-trained English bulldog and the moral seriousness of a Victorian headmaster. After that, resistance was no longer a strategy; it was merely a memory.

As a junior student, I had the peculiar privilege of sharing the stage with Shri S. K. Gupta, whose intellectual presence could reduce an entire hall of students to attentive silence. He made me the master of ceremonies for house functions, and, with what I now recognise as a mixture of encouragement and controlled provocation, pushed me into debates and public speaking.

He loved it when I argued with him.

And I, in my youthful audacity, obliged often with great passion and very little sense of self-preservation only to find my arguments dismantled with surgical calm and a faint, almost paternal amusement.

Every assignment terrified me.

Every opportunity stretched me.

Every experience, in retrospect, was not an event but an elegant act of quiet transformation, conducted without announcement, applause, or even the courtesy of warning.

And yet, what I remember most vividly is not discipline, but curiosity.

Many teachers, understandably anxious about academic order, regard curiosity outside the syllabus as a mildly dangerous indulgence. Pawar Saab belonged to that rare and enlightened species who did not confuse curiosity with disobedience. He never stopped me from reading newspapers, magazines, or library books. He never restricted my intellectual wandering, because he understood something profoundly simple: education is not a closed room, but an open window through which the world insists on entering.

He allowed curiosity to breathe.

He allowed thought to expand.

He allowed a boy to become, slowly and almost imperceptibly, a thinker.

I was, by no reasonable metric, a perfect student.

I made mistakes.

I was occasionally rude.

I complained with the enthusiasm of a professional grievance collector.

And yes, I even cheated in exams, an episode I recall now with a mixture of embarrassment and reluctant admiration for my own theatrical incompetence. He knew. Of course he knew. But he never made it a public spectacle, never reduced it to humiliation, and never allowed it to become anything other than a lesson quietly absorbed.

He corrected me without discarding me.

He guided me without diminishing me.

He believed in me with a certainty that I, at the time, did not deserve, but was nevertheless fortunate enough to receive.

Looking back, I realise that what seemed like small acts of discipline were, in fact, tectonic shifts disguised as routine school life.

Today, people often assume I have always been an extrovert. A colleague once told me he could not imagine me as anything else.

He never knew that the happiest version of me was a boy lying under a tree with a book, a sandwich, a pillow, and a bedsheet sitting above the fabled Birla tanki looking at Nainital below mentioned an arrangement so idyllic it would have made even P. G. Wodehouse pause mid sentence and smile in quiet approval.

That boy still exists.

Pawar Saab simply taught him how to speak without losing his silence.

Last year, we lost him to a heart attack.

And yet, “lost” feels like an inadequate verb for a man like him, as though language itself has failed to keep pace with the enormity of absence. His passing was not merely an event; it was a quiet rearrangement of the emotional furniture of those who knew him.

Even now, I find it difficult to believe he is gone in any final sense. There are people who leave this world, and there are those who, rather inconveniently for our understanding of closure, refuse to leave it entirely.

Their lessons continue.

Their voice continues.

Their presence, in some inexplicable way, continues.

Pawar Saab belongs unmistakably to the second category.

To Shri Chandan Singh Pawar Pawar Saab thank you.

Thank you for your faith, which you dispensed so casually and yet so profoundly.

Thank you for your affection, which rarely needed words.

Thank you for your discipline, which never felt like cruelty.

Thank you for your worry, which continued long after we had grown into adults, as though we were still your responsibility in some cosmic register of care.

I may have resisted you.

I may have misunderstood you.

I may even have, at times, resented the pressure of your expectations.

But today, with the clarity that only time and loss can confer, I understand.

Those expectations were not burdens.

They were scaffolding for a life I had not yet learned to build.

The greatest teachers are not remembered merely for what they taught.

They are remembered for the slightly improbable, often astonishing human beings their students became in spite of themselves.

On this Guru Purnima, I bow my head in gratitude to the man who saw me before I saw myself.

And now, in his absence, I find myself not merely remembering him, but missing him in a way that feels almost physical like a familiar voice that has just stepped out of the room, leaving behind an echo that refuses to fade.

Thank you, Guruji.

If there is any measure of life beyond this one, I hope it records, somewhere in its quiet ledgers, that I tried imperfectly, but sincerely to become worthy of your faith. As for you at evening like ever day you would be lighting a diya in front of your father photo say a prayer and then continue in the journey called life. Some people live in memories long after they are gone. So does the resplendent Chandan Singh Pawar Guruji and house Master Tagore House Birla Viday Mandir Nainital! 

Of Gurus, Fellow Travellers and a Well-Spent Weekend

There are weekends when one intends to accomplish something productive. Organise the study, answer neglected emails, perhaps even persuade the wardrobe that shirts do not belong on chairs. Instead, one watches two series and convinces oneself that this too is education. I have become remarkably good at this form of self-deception.

The first was Adarsh Vidyalaya on Amazon Prime Video.

One approaches it expecting another school drama. Schools, after all, are favourite hunting grounds for scriptwriters. What one discovers instead is a gentle reminder that our education system often mistakes information for education. Buildings become grander, syllabi become thicker, and examinations become increasingly inventive, but none of these things has ever produced a remarkable human being.

Teachers do.

Or, to be more precise, Gurus do.

There is an important difference. A teacher completes the syllabus. A Guru quietly rewrites the student. Years later, one forgets trigonometry, chemical formulae, and perhaps even the capital of Kazakhstan, but one never forgets the man or woman who first convinced us that we were capable of becoming something better than we imagined.

Then there is Cafe Musafir on Netflix.

Kay Kay Menon has arrived at that delightful stage in an actor's life where he appears to have stopped acting altogether. He merely exists, and the camera faithfully records it. His silences have become more eloquent than many actors' speeches.

The series reminded me of those of us who have spent years living away from family. Strange cities have an odd habit of lending you temporary families. A colleague becomes a brother, a neighbour becomes an aunt, a tea stall becomes a drawing room, and a café becomes the place where friendships and relationships quietly begin.

Equally quietly, some of them end.

People arrive without invitation, rearrange your life with astonishing efficiency, and depart just as you begin to believe they have always belonged there. I have long suspected there should be a railway timetable for such people. It would save everyone a good deal of emotional confusion.

Such, however, is life. It rarely consults us before altering the cast.

One series reminded me that a Guru can change the course of a life.

The other reminded me that fellow travellers can do precisely the same thing.

I recommend both. Preferably with a cup of tea and sufficient time. Or, if you are feeling slightly more adventurous, make yourself some garlic bread, add a generous helping of mature Cheddar cheese, and enjoy it with a bunch of grapes—my favourite meal. Use sourdough if you really want to do it properly. Above all, resist the temptation to check your office email. It has an uncanny habit of waiting patiently until Monday.

From Taxila to Audits: How a Colonial System Tried to Turn Genius Into Bookkeeping

 In 1907, an 18-year-old Indian government accountant named C.V. Raman sat in a finance office in Calcutta balancing ledgers. That same year, he published a paper in Nature titled Newton's Rings in Polarised Light, politely pointing out a serious error in standard physics textbooks based on Isaac Newton's optical theories.

He had no formal university lab, no research grant, and no funding. The British colonial administration had decided his best use was auditing government expenditures by day. Years later, working nights at a modest local institute, he discovered the Raman Effect and won the 1930 Nobel Prize in Physics.

The ironic part is not just that an accountant corrected Newton. It is that a bureaucratic machine designed to produce obedient clerks failed to stop him.

The Systematic De-skilling of an Empire

To understand why a world-class scientific mind was auditing expense receipts in 1907, look at what the colonial education system was designed to do.

Centuries earlier, the Indian subcontinent was home to global centers of learning like Nalanda and Taxila. These were residential universities drawing scholars across Asia, teaching astronomy, medicine, mathematics, and philosophy. This was the intellectual ecosystem that produced figures like Aryabhata, who calculated the Earth's circumference and concept of zero, and Sushruta, the ancient surgeon who detailed rhinoplasty and complex surgical tools millennia ago.

When colonial rule took root, those institutional structures were systematically dismantled and replaced. Lord Macaulay explicitly outlined the goal in his 1835 Minute on Education: build a class of people Indian in blood and color, but British in taste, opinions, and intellect, tailor-made to serve as mid-level administrators.

• The goal was not discovery; it was documentation.

• The goal was not innovation; it was obedience.

• Higher research facilities were virtually non-existent for Indians.

A civilization that mapped planetary motion was reduced to training generations to file paperwork for foreign masters.

The Legacy We Still Carry

C.V. Raman won his Nobel Prize not because of the colonial education system, but in spite of it. He had to treat his government day job as an interruption and his nighttime physics research as his real work.

The dark humor in all of this is that the clerk-producing machinery was so efficient, its echoes still linger today. Millions of students chase safe corporate ledgers while ancient intellectual legacies sit as mere footnotes in history books. Raman proved that you can force a genius into bookkeeping, but you cannot stop him from looking at the light. Yet the Raj rules over us still; we carry out the saab's orders, dutifully running the same old engine.

• The Factory of Clerks: Designed centuries ago to churn out obedient administrators rather than independent thinkers, the system still operates like a conveyor belt, producing compliance instead of curiosity.

• Quotas as Permanent Fixes: What was meant as a temporary socio-political remedy has turned into a permanent fixture, used to manage numbers while primary learning and foundational quality collapse in the background.

• The Unmentioned Price: High-pressure academic ecosystems push young minds into corners where failure feels absolute, yet the resulting suicides are quietly absorbed into administrative noise as isolated incidents rather than systemic defects.

• Policy Over Life: By prioritizing rigid institutional mechanics over actual student well-being, the machinery claims to build equity while indifferently consuming the very lives it promises to lift.

Riding the White Horse: Do Our Folk Deities Disprove the Aryan Invasion Theory?

I was recently watching the Tamil movie Karuppu, a gripping story centered around Vettai Karuppu he legendary God of Justice, also known as Karuppannaswamy. In the local traditions, he is revered as a fierce, protective manifestation of Shiva.

As I watched, a striking parallel hit me.

Deep in the northern peaks of the Himalayas, the Kumaon region of Uttarakhand worships Golu Devta. He, too, is considered an incarnation of Shiva (specifically Bhairav). He, too, is universally hailed as the supreme "God of Justice" to whom devotees write literal petitions. And remarkably, just like Karuppannaswamy, Golu Devta is traditionally depicted riding a divine white horse, galloping across the land to deliver swift, uncorrupted justice to the innocent.

Here is where it gets fascinating. For decades, conventional history textbooks heavily propagated the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT), drawing a rigid cultural divide between a "Vedic/Aryan North" and a "Dravidian South."

However, look at the nature of these two deities. According to the foundational definitions used by the proponents of the invasion theory themselves, both Karuppannaswamy and Golu Devta belong to: Folk and Non-Vedic Roots: Neither deity originates from mainstream, Sanskritized Vedic literature. Instead, both emerge from indigenous oral histories, tribal roots, and local clan lineages (Kula Deivam or Kula Devta).

If the North and the South were populated by entirely distinct, conflicting ancient races as the old theory claimed, how do we explain the exact same folk archetype evolving independently in both places? How do two completely different landscapes share an identical, non-Vedic deity who rides the exact same mount to serve the exact same cosmic purpose?

When you combine these deep spiritual parallels with modern archaeological findings such as the mapping of the ancient Saraswati River basin, which proves that the cradle of Indian civilization never experienced a sudden, violent rupture the old "invasion" narrative completely crumbles.

Instead of a history defined by invasion and division, our folk traditions tell a completely different story. They prove that India's spiritual unity wasn't just built from the top down through mainstream texts; it was already deeply woven into the soil, riding a white horse from the southern plains all the way to the Himalayan peaks. 

तन्हा सफ़र

अकेली, राह अकेली,

चलता जाए ये मुसाफ़िर मन।

ज़िंदगी एक काली रात है,

पर इंतज़ार में सुबह का क्षण।

मौत भी आएगी एक दिन,

खोल के द्वार उस उजाले का।

तन्हा चलना है तब तक,

तारों तले, अंधियारे का।