Essays · 10 articles
Every technology revolution follows the same pattern — it creates enormous wealth and enormous misery, rarely for the same people. These essays trace that move from the first granary to AI: who takes, who pays, and who fights back. They are the long-form companion to the book Captured.
Behind the euphemisms — ‘restructuring’, ‘skill mismatch’, ‘bench rationalisation’ — a familiar machine is running. Here’s what’s actually happening to Indian IT jobs, and what history says comes next.
The honest answer isn’t ‘yes’ or ‘no’. It’s that technology has always created wealth and misery at the same time — and rarely for the same people. Here’s how to read your own odds.
‘The cloud’ sounds weightless. It isn’t. It is a physical thing that drinks water and electricity — increasingly from Indian aquifers and grids. Here’s the bill nobody printed on the invoice.
‘Luddite’ became an insult meaning ‘afraid of technology’. The real Luddites weren’t afraid of machines at all. They were asking the one question the AI age keeps dodging.
India built the most impressive digital public infrastructure on earth — cheap, fast, inclusive. That is exactly why the quiet part deserves attention: it is also the largest behavioural ledger ever assembled.
A word coined by an ex-finance-minister is suddenly everywhere. Strip the jargon and technofeudalism describes something you already live inside: paying rent, in data and attention, to landlords you never chose.
You are not the customer, and you are not quite the product either. You’re the raw material. Here’s how your attention became something to be mined, refined and sold — and how to take some of it back.
For one year, hundreds of thousands of farmers camped on Delhi’s borders and refused to go home. Then the most powerful government in a generation backed down. Here’s how — and what it teaches an age told that AI is ‘inevitable’.
If the machines take the work, the pitch goes, just pay everyone a floor to live on. It’s a serious idea worth taking seriously — including the part its champions skip: a cheque doesn’t change who owns the machine.
Gig workers have total dependence on the platform and no ownership of it. What if the drivers owned the app? India has already run this playbook once — with milk.