It's been a rough year, but I am still here! I was laid off from my job over a year ago. They moved my operation center to India and I haven't been able to find a job since. In my last attempt, I went through 3 rounds of interviews for a Systems Engineer position. The recruiter informed me I was the best candidate by far. 2 weeks and some days after the third interview I was told I didn't get the position. And that was just this week. At this moment is when I have decided that I need to pursue something I am passionate about. I want to create my own animation studio. I have written several short stories that I want to bring to life and some music videos I'd need to purchase rights to, to use the music for, but I need help! I promise my ideas are worth the investment, especially if you enjoy anime! Please donate to my fundraiser below. Please share if you can. By supporting my fundraiser, you’re helping bring my short stories to life and launching me into a new career I’ve dreamed about since I was young, while still providing for my family. Thank you for believing in me and being part of this journey.

I welcomed Prime Minister @narendramodi to Abu Dhabi for talks aimed at further strengthening the deeply rooted ties between our nations and peoples. The UAE and India share a longstanding strategic and economic partnership, and our discussions today focused on ways to advance cooperation in priority sectors including energy and technology. Together, we remain committed to driving lasting progress for our countries and promoting peace and stability throughout the region and the world.

Landed in Nice. In addition to Nice, this France visit includes programmes in Evian and Paris. There will be bilateral and multilateral engagements, which will be aimed at improving India’s friendships with key developmental partners. I look forward to meeting President Macron tomorrow and to being at ‘Bharat Innovates.’ @EmmanuelMacron @BharatInnov2026

The *Assam Prohibition of Polygamy Bill, 2025* marks a significant legal reform aimed at regulating and prohibiting polygamous marriages in the state. Under the proposed law, anyone entering into a polygamous marriage could face *up to seven years of imprisonment, reflecting the government's commitment to strengthening marital laws and promoting accountability. The bill also proposes a **stricter punishment of up to ten years in prison* for individuals who intentionally conceal the existence of a living spouse while entering into another marriage. Recently passed by the Assam Assembly, the legislation has sparked widespread discussion across the country. Supporters view it as an important step toward ensuring greater transparency in marriage, protecting the rights and dignity of women, and promoting legal consistency. They argue that the bill reinforces the principle of equality before the law and encourages responsible marital practices. At the same time, the legislation has also generated debate, with some raising questions about its implications for personal laws and individual freedoms. As with many major legal reforms, the bill is expected to remain a subject of public, legal, and constitutional discussion in the coming months. Regardless of differing opinions, the Assam government's move represents a notable development in the ongoing conversation about family law reforms, women's rights, and legal accountability in India. The long-term impact of the legislation will ultimately depend on its implementation and any judicial review that may follow.

I ran across this video a few days ago and couldn’t stop watching it. It’s about something ordinary & boring, a plastic gas lighter. But it changes how one thinks about manufacturing. That lighter in so many of our homes, holds pressurised gas. It has over 30 microscopic parts, has to pass international safety codes, & travel 10,000 miles by sea, & the total cost of doing all that, materials, labour, freight, every middleman along the way, comes to fifteen U.S cents. So how does anyone make money on this? Turns out almost the entire world’s supply comes from one place: a county called Shaodong, in China’s Hunan province. It wasn’t always there. But today, Shaodong has 114 lighter-related companies packed into the place & between them they source more than 200 different components from each other, all within a 20-kilometre radius. They supply something like seventy percent of the world’s disposable lighters. And the industry alone employs over 80,000 people locally. Nobody there is winning on cheap labour anymore. They’re winning by shaving a thousandth of a cent off the thickness of a plastic wall, or redesigning a base so a few thousand more units fit into the same shipping container. It took my thoughts back to an old professor of mine, Michael Porter. His 1980 book, Competitive Strategy, is still the 1st book most MBAs read, the one that gave the world the Five Forces and basically invented modern strategic thinking. But there’s a quieter piece of his work, on industrial clusters, that never got nearly the same attention, and it is the one that explains exactly what is happening in Shaodong. His argument was that nations and regions rarely win because of cheap inputs. They win when rival firms and specialist suppliers crowd into the same small geography for long enough that they keep pushing each other past what any one of them could manage alone. He found it in the Swiss watchmaking towns of the Jura, in the German printing press industry and in Italy’s ceramic tile and footwear districts (interestingly, it’s the SAME blueprint which built Morbi, in Gujarat, into the world’s second-largest ceramic cluster, now outproducing Italy by volume. I have posted before, about Morbi) None of these started out as giants. The neighbourhood made them giants. Which is exactly why it’s so relevant to India’s climb up the global manufacturing table I’ve also attached a slide with this post that I saw recently and which shows us breaking into the top 5 manufacturing globally. (A quick reference check told me that we may not have overtaken Korea yet, but the trajectory’s clear) That climb has happened on the back of scale: bigger plants, bigger parks, more FDI. I should declare an interest here, because the Mahindra Group set up 2 of India’s first integrated, plug-and-play business cities, in Chennai in 2002 & Jaipur in 2006. Both have been extremely successful. Chennai’s business zone alone today employs 45,000 people.. But I admit that we need to think differently. A park brings in investors and hands them a ready plot, power, water & roads A cluster is a completely different animal: hundreds of small, specialised suppliers, each obsessed with doing a tiny thing better than anyone else, feeding off each other’s presence for years until no outsider can compete with the whole. I think that’s the work ahead of us now. Not just more factories, and not just more parks. Policymakers & developers like us need to start consciously pulling as many of the inputs and resources a sector needs, the toolmakers, the component suppliers, the testing labs, the logistics specialists, into the same neighbourhood. Shaodong and Morbi both got there by accident, one town stumbling onto a way to shave a thousandth of a cent off a lighter wall, the other discovering it had the clay and, later, the gas pipeline for tiles. We don’t have the luxury of waiting for accidents anymore. We need to do it on purpose

Indie game Meccha Chameleon has reached more than 130,000 players at the same time on Steam and sold 1 million copies in just four days. The game has a simple idea: players hide by painting themselves to match the background. Many AAA games wish to reach these numbers of a small indie game.