Every autumn, North India relives the night Ayodhya lit its lamps for Ram. He had spent fourteen years in exile and fought a war in Lanka to recover his wife. The city filled its streets with oil and wick to light his way home. Sita walked beside him on that road, yet the festival gives her almost nothing to say. Her story continues in the Uttara Kanda, the last book of Valmiki’s Ramayan, after the lamps have gone out. The people of Ayodhya begin to whisper about the months she spent as Ravan’s captive, and Ram, anxious for his name as king, sends her back into the forest while she is carrying his children.

Diwali remembers the homecoming and saves the second exile for another season. That’s where Anamika’s novel begins.

The title comes from Tulsidas, whose sixteenth-century “Ramcharitmanas” gave Hindi-speaking India its household Ramayan. In the Sundar Kand, Ravan comes to the grove where he holds Sita captive and presses her to yield. She answers him with a blade of grass held up between them. “तृन धरि ओट कहति बैदेही,” Tulsidas writes, which means that Vaidehi speaks with a blade of grass as her screen. Generations of readers have taken the gesture as modesty, a married woman declining to face a strange man directly.

Anamika and her translator, Nishtha Gautam, read the gesture the other way round. In Gautam’s note the grass shields Ravan from Sita, who holds the power to nurture and the power to destroy, and it reminds him that he can keep her captive without ever reaching her. Sita, she writes, grows like grass and wears down the pride of “monumental masculinity.” The image comes naturally to a poet who named one of her collections “Doob-Dhan,” after the grass and rice of household blessings. In most accounts of Indian womanhood, a veil hides a woman from the world. Sita’s veil keeps its most powerful king at a distance of her choosing.

The book borrows the Ramayan’s architecture and fills it with another voice. It runs to three volumes divided into seven kaands. The first volume, “Secret Correspondence,” is a book of letters between Sita and Ram and between Sita and her sons, Luv and Kush. Valmiki, the sage who shelters her in his hermitage, urges her to write so that her voice can stand level with her husband’s. The middle volume, “Sitayan,” moves through the familiar episodes from her childhood in Mithila to the war in Lanka, though its attention keeps drifting from the battlefield to the inner lives of women and the textures of daily life. “Uttarayan,” the last volume, follows her after Ayodhya and ends with her return to the earth that bore her.

Gautam’s English keeps the original’s many tongues in view. Sita goes by Vandevi, Janaki and Siya, and the prose moves among Hindi, Maithili and Sanskrit in a way that reminds the reader how many communities have claimed her. At Jaipur, Gautam said that if Anamika comes from Sita’s land, she herself comes from Radha’s, and that the book needed its shringar, its adornment, because readers forget that Sita was a lover first.

Anamika’s Sita begins as a foundling, turned up from a furrow by King Janak’s plough, and she reads that origin as a release from caste. She chooses the forest when Ram is exiled, and the book lets her own the choice. Her failings are her own too. Compassion and a hunger for beauty draw her towards the golden deer that Ravan sends as bait, and Anamika treats the wish as a real flaw with real consequences. The book asks us to understand the abduction as abuse and Sita as its survivor, a frame that makes the later trial by fire harder to accept as a test of virtue.

After Ayodhya she becomes a scholar and a single mother who runs a school in the forest. Her pupils include her sons and the children of Adivasi and Rakshasa families. She sees education as the way out of cycles of revenge, and she understands Ram Rajya, the ideal kingdom, as a pursuit that has to keep changing as its people learn. “I’ve never followed anyone blindly, not even Rama,” she says, in a sentence that carries the whole character. The washerwoman who doubts Sita’s chastity still appears, and Anamika gives the crisis an unfamiliar turn when Ram, uncertain of his own moral fitness, announces that he will step down from the throne. Women whom the epic kept at its margins return with voices of their own, among them Sunayana, Sita’s mother, and Mandodari, Ravan’s queen.

Anamika calls the book’s politics an integrated feminism, or deshaj feminism, a feminism grown from local soil. It treats men as capable of change and invites them to become feminists themselves. Her Sita spends much of her energy freeing men from the hyper-masculinity their societies demand of them. In her author’s note Anamika laments that faith and Marxism alike have slid from dialogue into one-upmanship, and her publishers present the book as an answer to the political weaponising of the Ramayan.

At Jaipur, Anamika said she had modelled this Sita on women who fight for their rights. If men looked at the world through a mother’s eyes, she argued, they would feel less need to fight one another. Gautam described a moment in which Sita tells Ravan that she has spent her life teaching Ram to treat her as an equal and has no energy left to teach him. Anamika also resists giving the story a tidy, on-demand ending, which leaves readers room to argue with her. Gautam turned that argument back on the audience. “Is that a lens or a veil that we are imposing on her?” she asked.

Sita has been talking back for a long time. In sixteenth-century Bengal the poet Chandrabati composed a Ramayan centred on Sita’s sorrows, a rare premodern telling by a woman, and left it unfinished. The Telugu writer Volga imagined Sita finding a life of her own beyond Ram in “The Liberation of Sita,” and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni handed her the narration in “The Forest of Enchantments.” Amish Tripathi recast her as a warrior princess of Mithila, while Tilottoma Misra’s “Sita’s Voice in the Assamese Ramayana” presents a rebellious, angry Sita who challenges Ram’s definition of a wife’s dharma. A. K. Ramanujan made the multiplicity itself his subject in the essay “Three Hundred Ramayanas,” and Delhi University’s decision in 2011 to drop it from a syllabus showed how much that multiplicity can still unsettle people. Anamika enters this crowded company with a particular temperament. Her Sita argues without contempt, and she expects the men around her to grow.

A Sita who carries learning into the forest belongs to a long and uncomfortable tradition of benevolent instruction, and a feminism built on motherhood risks narrowing the women it means to free. Anamika’s wager is that the forest school can become a place where the teacher also learns, and each reader has to decide whether the final volume earns that turn.

In Valmiki’s telling, Sita’s life ends with a second test. Summoned back to Ram’s court to swear her purity before the assembled kingdom, she calls on her mother, the Earth, to receive her if she has been faithful, and the ground opens. Anamika keeps the return to the earth, and her book closes in a faith that the universe will find its own balance.

The lamps lit at Diwali are made of that same earth. Each diya is a pinch of clay shaped by hand, filled with oil and set out to guide someone home. As the wicks catch this year, it seems right to remember the woman who walked into Ayodhya beside the prince and later walked back into the ground. Anamika’s Sita asks the festival for attention and little else. She has kept her blade of grass between herself and power for more than four centuries of telling, and she is still speaking from behind it.

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The early days

The idea took shape around 2017, while both founders were building a Hyperloop pod as students. Awais remembers how few Indian companies worked in space then. TeamIndus had reached the final of the Google Lunar XPRIZE and raised about half of the roughly ₹450 crore its lunar lander and rover needed, a shortfall Awais puts down to Indian capital being too thin for a mission with no clear commercial return. Bellatrix Aerospace, founded in 2015, was building propulsion systems, and Dhruva Space, founded in 2012, had gone quiet for a while.

Abroad, the picture looked very different. SpaceX had found its rhythm, and Planet Labs, Rocket Lab, BlackSky and Capella Space had shown that private firms could build and operate satellites. Kshitij points to February 2018, when Falcon Heavy flew and SpaceX landed its side boosters, as the moment reusable launch and falling launch costs became real. For Awais, a visit to SpaceX turned out to be transformational. He wanted to work in space for the rest of his life.

The founders chose to build for the world from the start. Communications already had Starlink and demanded far more capital, so they looked at Earth observation, which had moved from optical to multispectral imaging and then to synthetic aperture radar. Hyperspectral imaging was the missing step. Space agencies had flown hyperspectral instruments for science, yet no company sold the data commercially. Awais wrote to about 30 potential customers over LinkedIn and email, picking people quoted in news stories and press releases, and almost all of them said they would buy such data. Most were relying on drones, which limited how much ground they could cover.

Earning trust

I asked how two young founders with little funding persuaded customers to take them seriously. Awais credits clarity. A few rudimentary news stories had appeared from their Hyperloop days and from a planned entry to the IBM Watson AI XPRIZE, but he doubts customers ever read them. What worked was telling each prospect exactly which satellites Pixxel planned to build, what problem the data would solve for them, and what Pixxel wanted in return.

The vision has held up remarkably well. Awais says the 2019 pre-seed deck already described analytics, satellite manufacturing and the constellation size Pixxel still targets today. Timelines have stretched by a year or two in places, partly because of COVID and supply chains, and partly because space hardware takes time when you are building things that have never existed.

Pixxel now sells three things. Kshitij explains that the demo satellites tested the core scientific assumption, hyperspectral imaging in a compact form, at the lowest possible cost, and the team learnt to make usable products from them before calibrating all six Firefly satellites in 2025. Aurora, which the company began building in 2020 and 2021, lets customers task satellites, buy archive imagery, visualise data and build their own indices from hundreds of spectral bands. Awais adds that AI now lets a non-specialist type a request, run an algorithm on an image and get a report explained in plain language. The third line is the missions business, for which Pixxel has modularised roughly 80 to 90 percent of its satellite components.

Setbacks

Pixxel’s first satellite, Anand, was due to launch on ISRO’s PSLV in February 2021. A day or two before shipping, final tests showed that components from one vendor had failed. ISRO, then chaired by K. Sivan, offered extra days, but replacing long-lead parts meant six to eight months of further work, and Pixxel had to withdraw from the launch.

I framed this as a question of legitimacy, the term management scholars use for how ventures win and keep the support of those who matter to them. Awais pushed back on the word. In his experience, customers and investors treat a delay as a disappointment and still see the company as credible. Employees understand that setbacks come with the business, investors know they are funding hardware, and early customers had already seen delays from other satellite data suppliers. Pixxel responded by explaining to each group why the delay happened and what it was doing about it. A month later it commissioned a second satellite, Shakuntala, to spread the risk across two spacecraft. Shakuntala launched on SpaceX’s Transporter-4 in April 2022 and Anand on PSLV-C54 that November, and both sent down data.

Kshitij names a second hard moment, the no-go call in 2024 that delayed the Firefly constellation by six months. It was expensive and stressful, and it changed the constellation’s trajectory. The satellites now image regularly, and he sees the decision as proof that the team could admit when something was falling short.

Crawl, walk, launch

The first three Firefly satellites launched on SpaceX’s Transporter-12 from Vandenberg Space Force Base on 14 January 2025, in the early hours of 15 January in India. The other three followed on SpaceX’s NAOS mission in August 2025, and each founder attended one of the two launches at Vandenberg. Kshitij recalls three years of work coming together, a team buzzing with optimism, and a clear rise in employee satisfaction scores. Awais describes a launch as the line that divides every space company’s history into before and after. For SpaceX that line came with its fourth Falcon 1 flight, which preceded a NASA contract worth more than a billion dollars. Pixxel won no such contract the next morning, but the launch brought relief and fresh motivation, for the team and for the families who had backed them when few people in India knew what a space company was.

Customers gave a different kind of confidence. Awais singles out a Fortune 500 company that signed with Pixxel when the startup was two or three years old, for a service it had yet to deliver. Government contracts mattered even more. The US National Reconnaissance Office awarded Pixxel a five-year hyperspectral contract in 2023 and a further contract in May 2026, NASA selected it for its Commercial SmallSat Data Acquisition programme in 2024, and in June 2024 Pixxel signed the Ministry of Defence’s 350th iDEX contract to build miniaturised satellites for the Indian Air Force. For Awais, the world’s largest space spender buying from a company built largely by Indians, for data it could find nowhere else, proved the work would have impact.

Competition, policy and procurement

Awais sees a different set of competitors for each business. In hyperspectral data the field is global, with two or three serious rivals, and Pixxel’s edge comes from designing its own camera, the critical part of the technology, where most competitors contract theirs out. He puts it simply, saying a company cannot be world-beating in technology unless it owns its tech stack. In Indian satellite manufacturing, Pixxel has launched nine satellites, and he says the nearest rival has launched one smaller and less capable satellite.

The founders agree that policy has changed a great deal since 2019. The Union Cabinet approved IN-SPACe in June 2020, the government opened space to foreign direct investment, and, according to the founders, IN-SPACe now funds early-stage projects with around ₹1 crore each. The founders count more than 400 space companies in India today, spread beyond Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Chennai to Ahmedabad, Delhi and Nagpur. Regulatory risk is lower and funding is easier to reach, though more competition means a founder’s story has to resonate with funders.

Procurement has moved more slowly. Awais describes L1 bidding, where the lowest qualifying bid wins, as squeezing Indian suppliers to near-zero margins, a different problem from the cost-plus contracting that inflated costs in the US. He would prefer critical contracts to reward the best combination of technical ability and cost. On manufacturing, he argues that a country of India’s size and ambition must design and build strategic technologies such as satellites, rockets, missiles and fighter jets at home, and that ISRO’s decades of work give private companies a supply chain to build on. Pixxel builds its own satellites in India because it is cheaper there, and it plans some work in the US and Europe for its global business.

Ambition

Awais leads everything outward facing, including fundraising, commercial work, analytics, legal and finance. Kshitij leads the space team, from mission engineering and payloads to production and image processing, and describes his role as keeping the gears turning. Senior leaders run finance, people and the US-based commercial organisation. The founders say their only real arguments are over satellite names. After a few years of trial and error, they enter difficult conversations focused on solving the problem and leave the question of fault aside.

The Series C funds the next phase. Kshitij’s target is more than 50 satellites a quarter by late 2028 or early 2029, from new factories in India, Europe and the US. Pixxel plans to add sensing modalities beyond hyperspectral within a couple of years and hopes to win a role in Artemis or Gaganyaan within three to four. Awais sees the playground widening from Earth to the Moon, Mars and the asteroid belt.

I closed by asking whether astronauts still matter even though a chunk of what they do fairly straightforward to automate. Awais recalled Shubhanshu Shukla visiting Pixxel’s office, after which everyone came away energised. Kshitij argued that exploration is incomplete without humans, citing Nikolai Fyodorov’s Philosophy of the Common Task and the idea, made famous by Fyodorov’s admirer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, that Earth is humanity’s cradle and that a civilisation must one day leave it.

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Today’s featured novel offers a rather grim picture of automation and technology in our lives. Instead of jumping to a conclusion, it might be worth your while to explore the similarities and differences. Remember this is from 1909.

E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops

Vashti lives in a small, hexagonal room underground. There are no windows or lamps, but the room has light and fresh air. Robots bring her food, music and a bed. An armchair carries her across the floor. Through a screen, she speaks to thousands of acquaintances and delivers lectures on music. She rarely has any reason to leave.

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Room. A word that can mean four walls and a door, but also an opportunity: room to think, room to work, room to become someone. Virginia Woolf’s life involved the struggle to secure all three. She grew up in a house full of books, while her brothers went to Cambridge and she was educated mainly at home. Later, she helped make a Bloomsbury drawing room a gathering place for writers and artists, and a dining room in Richmond a printing workshop.

Rooms recur in her titles, too. A Room of One’s Own makes private space a condition of creative freedom. But an earlier novel gives us a room with someone’s name attached and makes us wonder how much that name tells us.

Today’s review is of Jacob’s Room, published in 1922. It follows Jacob Flanders from a Cornish beach to Cambridge, London and Greece, and on to his death in the First World War. Woolf keeps him at the edge of every scene. We meet him through the people who notice him, the rooms he leaves untidy and the things he carries.

There is barely a plot and almost no access to Jacob’s mind. The reader builds a life from loosely stitched scenes and passing impressions, and it is hard going at first. Jacob himself is dull company, and some chapters drift. The book endures because the drift is deliberate. It shows a life the way the people around it see one, and it marks Woolf’s move from the neat, well-made novel to something messier and closer to real experience.

Before the reviews appeared, Woolf wrote in her diary, “Neither of us knows what the public will think. There is no doubt in my mind that I have found how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice; & that interests me so that I can go ahead without praise.”

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The Maurice R. Greenberg World Fellows Program is a four-month, full-time residential program for leaders with demonstrated impact based out of Yale’s International Leadership Center and housed within the Jackson School of Global Affairs.

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The Anthropic Fellows Program is designed to foster AI research and engineering talent. They provide funding and mentorship to promising technical talent - regardless of previous experience.

Fellows primarily use external infrastructure (e.g. open-source models, public APIs) to work on project aligned with their research priorities, with the goal of producing a public output (e.g. a paper submission). In one of their earlier cohorts, over 80% of fellows produced papers. They run multiple cohorts of Fellows each year and review applications on a rolling basis.

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Multi-dimensional careers are full of adventures and possibilities. Dodgson also wrote on logic and voting systems, was ordained a deacon, became one of the finest amateur photographers of the Victorian era, and invented word puzzles such as Doublets. He belongs to a long line of people whose best work came from a discipline different from the one they trained in. Samuel Morse was a successful portrait painter before he helped develop the electric telegraph and the code that bears his name. Alexander Borodin spent his career as a research chemist in St Petersburg and composed the opera Prince Igor in his spare hours. Anton Chekhov practised medicine while writing the stories and plays that reshaped the short story and modern drama. Vladimir Nabokov studied blue butterflies so closely between novels that DNA research confirmed his theory of their evolution more than thirty years after his death. The Hollywood actress Hedy Lamarr co-invented, with the composer George Antheil, a frequency-hopping system during the Second World War that anticipated the technology behind Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. In each case, expertise in one field gave its owner an unusual vantage point on another. Dodgson’s logic supplied Wonderland’s paradoxes, and his love of puzzles its wordplay.

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Around midnight on Saturday, I stumbled into a restaurant called Fitzgerald. For a brief moment, I thought of doing the responsible thing and heading back to my hotel. Thankfully, better sense prevailed. The most popular item on the menu was “à la Montaigne”, named after one of my favorite philosophers, who was always reluctant about philosophizing.

I was alone so I thought it best to enjoy “à la Montaigne” with my Kindle highlights of his essay “Of husbanding your will”, in which Montaigne looks back on his years as mayor of Bordeaux. Its advice, in modern office language, is to do a good job, but not too good a job.

For anyone who takes their work seriously, this is blasphemous. Not doing too good a job is the kind of language associated with slackers. This raises the question whether Montaigne was really asking us to do a good enough job to not get fired and coast along?

In 1581, while travelling in Italy, Montaigne learnt that Bordeaux had elected him mayor. He tried to decline. Henri III then wrote to him in person, telling him to take up the post without delay. Montaigne relented but set strict norms around what to expect from him. His father had held the same office, and Montaigne remembered him in old age, agitated by public business, neglecting his home, his health and very nearly his life. Montaigne would be sorry, he told them, to let their affairs take hold of him that way.

His principle was to lend yourself to others, and give yourself only to yourself. Most professions, he wrote, are a kind of theatre. We should play our part properly while remembering that it is a borrowed role. Le maire et Montaigne ont toujours été deux. The mayor and Montaigne were always two separate people.

Montaigne was mayor during the Wars of Religion and believed that a mayor who treated every city dispute as a personal attack would make poor decisions. A city at war needed someone who could stay calm under pressure and take reasonable decisions.

Some critics called his time as mayor unremarkable. Montaigne replied that a city that kept calm through a civil war gave people little to remark on. The graver charge came in 1585. Plague reached Bordeaux in the final weeks of his second term, and Montaigne chose to remain outside the city. Critics have held it against him ever since, claiming that distance from one’s work can harden into distance from one’s duty.

Even so, the advice holds up. Montaigne took the job seriously and kept enough distance to see it clearly. He protested unfair taxes on Bordeaux, hosted Henri of Navarre at his château to keep talks between Catholics and Protestants alive, and worked with the king’s governor to secure the city’s defences when the Catholic League plotted to seize Bordeaux.

None of this means Montaigne was an ideal mayor or that his principles should be emulated by all of us. His essay is simply a useful reminder that suffering or sacrificing for work is not a form of virtue. Even extreme workaholics can learn a ton from Montaigne if they take his advice seriously, not literally.

Essentially, he argues that a healthy distance between what we work on and who we are is helpful. If what we work on and who we are are the same, Montaigne suggests that objectivity, happiness, and composure become elusive. For some, the gamble is worth it. For others, it is not.

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George Edward Moore joined Trinity College, Cambridge, intending to study classics, before being drawn increasingly toward philosophy. Cambridge at the end of the nineteenth century was a fertile place for such a conversion. Moore met Bertrand Russell, joined the Cambridge Apostles, a secretive society of the university’s sharpest young minds, and found himself immersed in arguments about ethics, knowledge, metaphysics, and th purpose of life.

The first half of Principia Ethica is an argument against the attempt to define goodness in terms of some other property. Some philosophers identified ‘good’ with pleasure. Others connected it with desire, happiness, evolutionary development, or what was supposedly “natural” for human beings. Moore believed all of these theories confused two different questions. We can discover that something gives us pleasure and still sensibly ask whether that pleasure is good.

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Blaise Pascal once wrote that all our unhappiness stems from our inability to sit quietly in a room. He wrote those words near the end of his brief and remarkable life. At 19, he designed a calculating machine to help his father, a royal tax official in Rouen.In the summer of 1654, he exchanged letters with Pierre de Fermat about how to divide the stakes of a game of chance interrupted before its end, a correspondence now counted among the founding documents of probability theory. That November, on the night of the 23rd, from about half past ten until about half past midnight, something happened to him that he recorded on a piece of paper.

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The source of their conviction was a set of claims connecting Covid-19 with the introduction of 5G mobile technology. The claims varied as they circulated. One version held that electromagnetic radiation weakened the immune system and thereby increased susceptibility to the virus. Another attributed symptoms associated with Covid-19 to 5G itself. Still others incorporated pharmaceutical companies, governments, technology firms and international organisations into increasingly elaborate accounts of what was taking place. The precise theory could change from one telling to another while the underlying suspicion remained intact.

A respiratory disease and a telecommunications technology don’t have much in common. Somehow they entered the same imaginative universe. Within that universe, implausible and somewhat funny rationales became the ultimate source of truth. For a number of people, that account became sufficiently compelling to justify vandalism.

Before anyone can believe a conspiracy theory, somebody has to construct it. Its constituent elements have to be selected from the vast quantity of information available in the world; relationships have to be established among them; agents and motives have to be assigned; coincidences have to acquire significance; and the resulting account has to become intelligible to other people. The” theory” can shape the architecture of belief.

The internet has transformed the scale and speed at which this construction can occur. A person confronted by an unsettling event can offer an interpretation to thousands of strangers within minutes. Those strangers can add examples, retrieve older controversies, identify possible culprits, produce images and diagrams, introduce analogies, and connect the event to grievances that predate it. Search engines and social platforms make enormous archives of material available for this work. This results in a peculiar form of collective inquiry in which explanation develops through successive acts of association.

This process forms the subject of Ctrl+Alt+Doubt: Decoding the Language of Online Conspiracy Talk, by the management scholars Hayagreeva Rao and Henrich R. Greve. Psychologists have examined the cognitive dispositions associated with conspiracy theories and the attraction of intentional explanations during periods of uncertainty. Political scientists and sociologists have studied institutional distrust, polarisation and social identity. Scholars of digital media have investigated recommendation systems, echo chambers and the rapid circulation of misleading information. Rao and Greve bring language to the foreground. They ask how conspiracy theories are made through conversations.

Analysis of conspiracy theories often begins once they have been fully formed. Researchers ask who believes it, which demographic characteristics correlate with belief, how exposure affects acceptance, and which interventions might correct the underlying misperception. Rao and Greve move upstream, towards the period in which the conspiracy theory is in its nascency, when seemingly implausible theories are floated on the internet.

They call one element of this process “distributed doubt”. The phrase describes a social condition in which uncertainty is shared, elaborated and organised through interaction. A participant in an online forum may be pulled in through a nagging doubt. Why did this happen here? Why did an institution change its guidance? Why does this photograph contain an apparent anomaly? Another participant offers an explanation. A third remembers a similar claim from several years earlier. Someone identifies a possible beneficiary. Someone else gives the suspected actor a motive. Through repetition and elaboration, a collection of observations begins to acquire causal form.

Rao and Greve use the concept of bricolage to describe this work of construction. The term, associated most famously with the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, evokes the activity of making something from materials already at hand. Conspiracy theorising proceeds in a similar fashion. People confronting an unfamiliar crisis draw upon familiar cultural materials: memories of previous scandals, suspicions about powerful institutions, established political narratives, fragments of scientific vocabulary, religious imagery, stories about elites, and earlier conspiracy theories. Novel explanations arise through new combinations of existing elements.

Covid-19 offered fertile conditions for such bricolage. The pandemic combined profound uncertainty with enormous personal consequences. Citizens had to make decisions about risk while confronting an unfamiliar pathogen whose behaviour scientists themselves were still learning to understand. Meanwhile, millions of people experienced the crisis through screens, often while physically separated from the institutions and communities through which uncertainty had traditionally been mediated.

Under these conditions, explanation itself became a form of social activity. The significance of language becomes clearer here. Words organise relationships among otherwise disconnected phenomena. Repeated associations can place concepts in semantic proximity: “5G” beside “radiation”, “radiation” beside “illness”, “illness” beside “Covid”. Other terms introduce agency: “government”, “pharmaceutical companies”, “globalists”, “cover-up”. As these associations recur, they furnish a vocabulary through which subsequent events can be interpreted. A new piece of information enters an environment already structured by previous connections.

Rao and Greve describe this consequence through the idea of a “semantic cascade”. Conspiracy theories can become connected through linguistic and conceptual proximity. Acceptance of one set of associations supplies materials for interpreting another. A person already accustomed to understanding institutions through a vocabulary of concealment and manipulation has a ready-made framework when the next crisis arrives.

This helps explain a striking feature of contemporary conspiracy culture: its capacity for combination. The boundaries between theories are porous. Narratives concerning vaccines can intersect with suspicions about technology companies; suspicions about technology companies can merge with ideas about government surveillance; those ideas can connect with older accounts of international organisations or financial elites. Each connection enlarges the explanatory system while preserving a recognisable grammar of hidden agency.

The word “grammar” is useful because the content of conspiracy theories changes much faster than their underlying forms. A claim can be repeated, modified and connected to another claim at great speed. Hashtags create temporary publics around particular vocabularies. Images can detach themselves from their original contexts and acquire new meanings. Automated accounts can amplify particular formulations. Influential participants can supply language that thousands of others subsequently adopt.

Rao and Greve are particularly interested in these linguistic traces because they make the formation of collective belief empirically observable. Online conversation leaves a record of words appearing together, associations strengthening over time and vocabularies migrating between communities. They use these records to study conspiracy talk surrounding Covid-19 and the Black Lives Matter protests, examining how patterns of language reveal the emergence and diffusion of conspiratorial explanations.

Knowing how "5G" came to sit beside "radiation" tells us little about why the pairing gripped one reader hard enough to send him toward the mast, lighter in hand. Those who set the fires had probably encountered nothing resembling a theory. They slowly acquired a vocabulary, learned a new language, co-created meaning (which seemed “rational” to them), found a community to participate in vandalism together.

Conspiracy theories have many more revelatory elements. Tune in to find out.

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In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel argues that our sense of who we are depends on recognition by others. We cannot establish our identities on our own because many things that matter to us exist only in relation to others. We can think and desire in isolation, but we cannot be respected, humiliated, trusted, ignored, admired, or treated as equals in isolation. To understand ourselves as people whose choices and claims matter, we need others to acknowledge us as such

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By most conventional measures of success, Stoner’s life appears unremarkable. Born to poor farmers in rural Missouri in 1891, he is sent to university to study agriculture, encounters English literature almost accidentally, and abandons the soil for the classroom. He marries Edith, with whom he develops an increasingly miserable relationship; has one daughter, Grace, whom he loves but gradually loses; and publishes a single scholarly book of modest consequence. In middle age, he discovers profound love in an affair with a younger scholar, only to relinquish it under institutional pressure. An academic dispute damages his career. He grows old, becomes ill, retires, and dies. He never becomes famous or wealthy, and the university to which he devotes his entire adult life doesn’t bother to remember him.

Yet, over roughly three hundred pages, Williams makes this apparently inconsequential life feel deeply meaningful and relatable. When Stoner first appeared, it received respectful reviews but negligible sales, and its rediscovery came decades later, particularly after a 2006 New York Review Books reissue and an extraordinary revival among European readers. A largely forgotten novel about a largely forgotten professor gradually became a modern classic.

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Also check out our episode with Turkish Astronaut Tuva Atasever

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The captain, Ahab, has something else in mind. On a previous voyage, a massive white sperm whale known as Moby Dick destroyed Ahab’s boat and sheared off his leg. In the novel, Ahab returns to the sea intending to find that particular whale and seek his revenge.

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How India is Reshaping Space Exploration

Four days after the Mangalyaan spacecraft reached Mars on September 24, 2014, The New York Times ran an editorial cartoon illustrating a turbaned farmer standing at the door with a cow. He held a newspaper announcing India’s Mars mission. On the other side sat two men in suits beneath a sign reading “Elite Space Club.” The cartoon was widely criticized, and the newspaper eventually apologized, but I wonder whether the outrage was because the cartoon was derogatory or because it was partially true? Perhaps both? Anyway, outrage doesn’t convert skeptics into believers. Progress does.

In July this year, India became the third nation, after the United States and China, whose private sector successfully launched a rocket into orbit. When Skyroot Aerospace’s Vikram-1 reached orbit on its first attempt, it proved that India’s long tradition of frugal engineering largely enabled by the state had begun to evolve into a thriving commercial space ecosystem.

For most of its history, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) was the architect, designer, launcher, and operator of the country’s space ambitions. That changed around 2020, when the government opened the sector to private players and created IN-SPACe as a single-window authoriser. The Indian Space Policy of 2023 and expanded room for foreign investment in 2024 accelerated the shift, enabling hundreds of startups to pursue bolder missions.

Crucially, ISRO didn’t step aside; it stepped into a new role as enabler and catalyst. Skyroot’s first-stage solid motor was cast and tested at ISRO’s Sriharikota facilities, and its upper-stage liquid engine at a state test facility. This was a private rocket flown with serious mentorship and operational support from the state, which is exactly what the reforms were designed to produce. The results are showing up in the numbers: 285 space startups have now raised $871 million. Funding is still concentrated among leaders like Skyroot, Pixxel, and AgniKul, but the emergence of late-stage growth rounds signals an ecosystem maturing from early-stage R&D toward commercial-scale operation. India’s space sector now counts 285 startups that have raised $871 million in capital. While funding remains concentrated, with top players like Skyroot, Pixxel, and AgniKul , leading the charge, the emergence of late-stage growth rounds signals an ecosystem transitioning from early-stage R&D to commercial-scale operation.

Harvard Business School professor Tarun Khanna calls India’s space sector a masterclass in frugal, entrepreneurial problem-solving. With national R&D spending under 1% of GDP, ISRO and its private partners have turned severe constraints into a spur for creative, iterative experimentation. But Khanna argues that long-term leadership will hinge on a harder challenge, navigating a strategic trilemma between deep-space scientific missions, domestic socio-economic needs, and global commercialization.

So far, the signs look encouraging. Perhaps The New York Times will want to run a new cartoon, one about the Indian way of democratizing space. India is among the fastest-growing free-market economies in the world, but much of the foundational work in its space sector happened when the country’s GDP was less than a quarter of what it is today. Those consistent efforts are now yielding results, and that is good news for much of the developing world. Space exploration has long been heralded as an effort for all of humanity, and that can’t manifest if it is dominated by a handful of countries and companies. Unlocking the $1.8 trillion economic potential identified by the World Economic Forum will take far more product, policy, and process innovation. By opening its doors to private innovation, transforming the role of its national space agency, and staying consistent toward long-term goals, India has carved out a model others can follow. It has democratized technology and, more importantly, ambition, giving moonshots a fighting chance the world over.

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Khalil Gibran was born in 1883 in Bsharri, a town in present-day northern Lebanon, and emigrated as a child to Boston. He wrote in both Arabic and English and belonged to the mahjar, the diaspora generation of Arab writers who reshaped modern Arabic literature from outside the Arab world. This dual position produced a divided reception that persists to this day. In English, Gibran is read as a writer of popular devotional verse held at arm’s length by serious critics; in Arabic, he is treated as an innovator who helped move the tradition toward a freer, more romantic idiom.

The Prophet is a collection of twenty-six prose poems held within a minimal narrative frame. Almustafa, a man who has lived twelve years in the city of Orphalese, prepares to board the ship that will return him home. Before he departs, people ask him to speak on the subjects that compose a life, and he addresses each in turn.

A woman with a baby at her breast asks Almustafa to speak about children. Gibran says that children arrive through the parent but do not originate in the parent. They belong to a future the parent will never enter. The parent may provide love and care but under no circumstances should try to control how the child thinks. The parent is a bow, the child a living arrow, and God the archer who bends the bow and sends the arrow forward. Independence of thought is a key construct of Gibran’s framing of the parent-child relationship. You will find that successful parents in the 21st century do this rather well.

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Anyone who has been in love will find both comfort and shock with Gibran’s framing.

Love has no other desire but to fulfil

itself.

But if you love and must needs have

desires, let these be your desires:

To melt and be like a running brook

that sings its melody to the night.

To know the pain of too much tenderness.

To be wounded by your own under-

standing of love;

And to bleed willingly and joyfully.

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Bulgakov trained as a physician in Kyiv, then abandoned medicine for literature during the Russian Civil War. Through the 1920s he wrote plays and stories that Soviet critics savaged for their irreverence toward the new order. The state banned his work from the stage, blocked his exit from the country, and reduced him to poverty. In 1930, desperate, he wrote directly to Stalin asking either to be allowed to work or to be allowed to leave. Stalin telephoned him personally and arranged him a job at the Moscow Art Theatre, which kept him alive while keeping him leashed. Bulgakov wrote The Master and Margarita in these conditions, a man composing his masterpiece in secret while the government that controlled his livelihood watched him closely. He poured his whole predicament into the manuscript, and every joke in it carries the pressure of that captivity.

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Himanshu Gulati entered Norwegian politics at 17, left medical school after a single semester and, by 25, was serving in government.

His family had imagined a different career. The son of Indian immigrants and a member of a family of doctors, Gulati had grown up with medicine as the familiar professional path. Politics offered uncertainty, public scrutiny and a far less conventional future.

Norway’s political system gave him an early point of entry. The country’s major parties operate youth organisations that allow teenagers and young adults to develop political arguments, build networks and assume genuine organisational responsibility.

For Gulati, that structure became a route from youthful conviction to national office. After leading his party’s youth wing, he joined the government formed following Norway’s 2013 election. He served first as a deputy minister of justice and later in the prime minister’s office, attending cabinet meetings for three years. At 29, he was elected to Parliament.

In this episode of the Network Capital podcast, Gulati reflects on that accelerated political education and on the demands facing a small but strategically important European country. The discussion moves from the mechanics of parliamentary life to immigration, war, energy and the changing balance of power among Europe, the United States, China and India.

Politics Beyond a Predetermined Path

Gulati’s rise followed an unusual sequence. Many politicians establish themselves as legislators before moving into executive government. He began near the centre of executive power and later entered Parliament.

That reversal shaped his understanding of ambition. His years observing cabinet government gave him an early view of senior political authority. Today, he places greater emphasis on using his position effectively than on pursuing a grander title.

Parliament offers a different form of influence. A legislator can pursue individual cases, meet businesses and constituents, propose legislation, question ministers and participate in public debate. For a politician interested in foreign affairs, the role also brings sustained contact with diplomats, allies and international institutions.

The working day is correspondingly varied. It may begin with a party meeting, continue in the parliamentary chamber and then move through meetings with delegations, constituents or industry representatives. The evening may end in a television studio.

“You really don’t have one job,” Gulati said. “You have five different jobs.”

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Immigration, Opportunity and Integration

Gulati describes his own experience as evidence of what he calls the “Norwegian dream”: the proposition that effort and determination can carry greater weight than family origin.

He sees his Indian heritage as a political advantage, offering additional networks and a wider field of reference. His career, he suggested, demonstrates the openness of Norwegian institutions to people of different ethnic and religious backgrounds.

His account also turns towards the practical demands of integration.

Norway, like several other European countries, has faced unemployment, welfare dependency, parallel communities and the overrepresentation of some immigrant groups in crime statistics, he said. He divides integration into two broad tests: economic participation and commitment to the civic values of the wider society.

The first concerns whether newcomers are able and encouraged to work, earn a living and contribute as taxpayers. The second concerns principles including gender equality, democratic participation and resistance to political extremism.

Gulati argues that generous welfare systems can weaken incentives to enter employment when long-term benefits become a viable substitute for work. His view belongs to a wider European debate about the design of social support and its influence on participation in the labour market.

His preferred immigration system would draw a clearer distinction between humanitarian assistance and labour migration. Europe, he said, has often treated immigration primarily as a means of helping people in danger. He favours providing more support to refugees closer to their home regions while making migration into Europe more responsive to labour shortages and skills.

The argument leads to difficult practical and moral questions. Governments must decide how to measure successful integration, how much time displaced people require to acquire skills and what obligations wealthy states owe to those who need sustained support.

The conversation presents immigration as a debate about welfare, national identity, civic values and political trust.

Foreign Policy After Predictability

Gulati serves as deputy chairman of the Norwegian Parliament’s committee on foreign affairs and defence. His portfolio places him at the intersection of several crises that have transformed Europe’s strategic assumptions.

He describes the current period as one in which longstanding alliances remain essential while foreign policy becomes more explicitly interest-driven. Countries that once organised partnerships mainly around shared values may increasingly cooperate with governments whose immediate strategic interests align with their own.

For Norway, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation remains the foundation of national security. The United States remains indispensable to that alliance, even as changes in political rhetoric and policy require careful European navigation.

Gulati argues that European governments should preserve their relationship with Washington while expressing their differences clearly. In his view, the partnership rests on decades of shared security interests and continues to hold central importance.

The war in Ukraine has reinforced the importance of collective defence. Gulati characterises Russia’s invasion as unprovoked and argues that supporting Ukraine represents both a moral obligation and a matter of European security. A Russian victory, he warned, could encourage further conflict.

He also expresses hope for a negotiated end to the war, an outcome that would require compromise and sustained diplomatic pressure. He expects that military and economic pressure may eventually bring Russia towards talks.

Energy as Security

Few countries embody the overlap among economics, energy and geopolitics as clearly as Norway.

As a major supplier of natural gas to Europe, Norway has acquired greater strategic importance since the disruption of Russian energy supplies. Gulati argues that energy policy now belongs at the centre of national strategy. It affects household costs, industrial competitiveness, political stability and security.

Governments that struggle to provide reliable and affordable energy can face protests and deep political instability. Energy, in his formulation, is also foreign policy and security policy.

The same convergence appears in defence. Norway is committing substantial resources to military spending, research and modernisation, according to Gulati. The war in Ukraine has exposed the importance of drones and other relatively inexpensive technologies capable of transforming the battlefield. Military planners must invest in new weapons as well as protection against them.

Modern warfare also changes the experience of individual soldiers, who may now be observed and targeted by small unmanned systems at close range.

India’s Expanding Role

He presents India as both an economic opportunity and an increasingly confident geopolitical actor. For European countries facing slower growth, India offers a vast market, a growing economy and potential partnerships in fields including green technology, seafood and industrial development.

He also draws a contrast between Western attitudes towards India and China. European and American cooperation with China has often been accompanied by concerns about intellectual property, security and intelligence gathering. Partnerships with India, he argues, tend to inspire greater strategic confidence.

That confidence, in his view, rests on more than commerce. India’s democratic system and its relationships with Western countries make collaboration appear politically durable, even when negotiations prove difficult or interests diverge.

Norway’s population of roughly 5.5 million gives the relationship a distinctive scale. The country possesses specialised expertise, capital and technology that could support India’s development while opening new markets for Norwegian businesses.

Gulati points to green technology, energy, seafood and industrial partnerships as areas of particular promise.

Office and Leadership

Near the end of the conversation, Gulati is asked whether he imagines becoming prime minister.

He redirects the discussion from office to leadership. The more consequential distinction, he suggests, lies between holding a position and creating meaningful change.

Political systems are designed to produce stability, compromise and continuity. Those qualities protect democracies from impulsive decisions. They can also make ambitious reform painstakingly slow. Politicians may enter government promising transformation and then discover that institutions define the pace and scope of action.

Gulati’s stated aspiration centres on retaining the ability to challenge those institutional boundaries.

The tension is an old one. Democracies need leaders capable of changing systems and institutions capable of preserving stability. Gulati’s career, from a youth party to the prime minister’s office and then Parliament, has given him an unusually close view of both forces.

In an age of war, migration disputes and unstable alliances, that tension may define his political future and Europe’s wider direction.

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Before you read, make sure to check out his masterclass on inflection points in careers.

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In late 2016, Byju Raveendran appeared to be on top of the world. His edtech startup had just raised a reported $50 million from Facebook’s founder and top-tier venture capital firms, even though the app had only 250,000 subscribers at the time. In an interview that year, Raveendran made his vision clear: learning in India was “driven by fear of exams,” a one-size-fits-all system that smartphones would help him “disrupt.” He returned to the word again and again over the years- Byju’s had “positively disrupted our own segment,” it would “disrupt university degree courses through online.”

The diagnosis was not wrong. Enrolment in Indian schools has risen steadily since independence, but less than 45% of fifth-graders in public schools can read a text meant for second-graders. Towns like Kota have become factory floors for entrance-exam preparation, with over a hundred thousand students a year joining full-time coaching institutes. Nearly a third of all Indian students use private tutoring of some kind. As the head of the Prime Minister’s Scientific Advisory Council once put it, India has “an examination system but not an education system.”

For a while, Byju’s seemed to be winning by the startup world’s preferred metric. By the end of 2021, it had raised more than $5 billion, was valued at over $20 billion, and had become one of the world’s most valuable startups, with over 100 million registered users. Its logo was on the Indian cricket team’s shirts. Shah Rukh Khan fronted its advertisements.

But look at what the company actually became. In April 2021, Byju’s spent nearly a billion dollars acquiring Aakash, a 33-year-old chain of brick-and-mortar IIT and medical coaching centres- the very heart of the exam-prep culture Raveendran had set out to disrupt. The following year, Byju’s announced 500 physical tuition centres of its own, aiming to enrol a million students. Meanwhile, investigations into its sales practices found marketing agents signing lower-income parents up for loans they did not understand- an analysis of 110 consumer complaints found nearly half were unaware they had taken on debt- and sales associates reporting that they were coached to suggest to parents that their children were falling behind. In six years, a startup that promised to end fear-driven, exam-obsessed education had become a multibillion-dollar empire of test prep and after-school tuition, powered by the same anxieties it claimed to cure.

During my doctoral research on India’s startup ecosystem- through interviews with venture capitalists and founders, and close reading of the industry’s advertisements, websites and public statements- I came to see Byju’s not as an aberration but as an illustration. The interesting question about disruption is rarely whether a company is innovative. It is: disrupting what, exactly? And who benefits from the claim?

The word has a respectable intellectual lineage. The economist Joseph Schumpeter described capitalism as a process of “creative destruction,” in which innovative newcomers destroy complacent incumbents. Clayton Christensen’s “disruptive innovation” gave the idea its modern business-school gloss. But as the literary scholar Adrian Daub has observed, disruption in the startup sense has drifted a long way from these roots. Schumpeter imagined large companies being destroyed. Today’s startups claim to be disrupting entire industries, human habits, even sectors- like small local businesses or public education- that have far less money and power than the startups themselves. The rhetoric creates a strange inversion: heavily capitalised, elite-networked companies get to play David, while fragmented, often precarious industries are cast as Goliath.

Consider how Indian venture capital presents itself. Sequoia Capital’s “Ethos” page celebrates “the underdogs… the outsiders… the defiant.” The Indian Venture Capital Association’s advocacy literature announces the end of the era when success required “generational wealth” or “a privileged network,” hailing the rise of “Meritocratic Capital for the New India.” This is a moral claim, not just a commercial one: startups and their funders present themselves as correcting an unfair economy, replacing privilege with merit and stagnation with competition.

The reality sits awkwardly beside the rhetoric. Ola Cabs launched to acclaim as the solution to India’s “notorious” autorickshaw drivers. But surveys at the time found the average Mumbai autorickshaw driver earned about 9,295 rupees a month- roughly $120- before paying for fuel and permits. Ola, meanwhile, had raised over $600 million and was valued at $7 billion. Which of these is the entrenched incumbent, and which the scrappy underdog?

And the destination of the journey is rarely more competition. The economics of venture capital demand that a few investments produce enormous returns to pay for the many that fail, which pushes funds towards “winner take all” markets- platforms where scale begets scale and the leader becomes nearly impossible to dislodge. Peter Thiel says openly that he looks for future monopolies. Founders are coached to build “moats” against rivals. One VC I interviewed spoke admiringly of markets where a company must “pour money into marketing and user acquisition before somebody else captures the turf.” When American lawmakers investigated Amazon, Google, Apple and Facebook in 2020, their report reached for a telling comparison: these former underdog startups had become “the kinds of monopolies we last saw in the era of oil barons and railroad tycoons.” The disruptors, given time and enough capital, become precisely the thing they promised to disrupt.

There is a second, subtler gap between rhetoric and practice. Startups routinely claim to be disrupting human bias and inefficiency itself- replacing gut feel with data, instinct with algorithms, the fallible body with the quantified self. Yet the institution that selects and funds these startups runs almost entirely on gut. In my interviews, VCs described their process not in the language of data science but of intuition and romance. One explained that he looked for “the kind of guy who would crawl through broken glass to deliver,” a judgment based on a “rough sense” that “this guy is good, this space is interesting.” Another compared the whole process to dating: “You don’t really know how good or bad the person is going to be unless you spend some time with them. On the first date, you are both the best people around.” The industry that promises to algorithmize the world allocates billions through chemistry, charisma and hunch- the most human process imaginable.

None of this means the status quo deserves defending. Indian education genuinely fails millions of children; plenty of industries genuinely serve customers badly. Some things should be disrupted. But that is exactly why the rhetoric deserves scrutiny rather than applause. “Disruption” is not a neutral description of what a company does; it is a story that does work. It casts the startup as a moral actor before it has done anything, makes its growth seem like a public service, recruits employees and investors into a mission rather than a business, and renders the costs- indebted parents, displaced workers, consolidated markets- as the regrettable but inevitable price of progress.

The language has already escaped the startup world. Politicians style themselves as disruptors of old party machines. NGOs promise to disrupt development. Self-help books urge you to disrupt yourself. The more universal the word becomes, the more useful the question underneath it: what precisely is being disrupted, is it really as powerful as the story suggests, and who ends up holding the power when the disruption is done? In the case of Byju’s, the answer is uncomfortably clear. The fear of exams was never disrupted. It was acquired, rebranded, and sold back to us- this time with a Bollywood star in the advertisements.

P.S. You will enjoy this debate between Dhruva and Utkarsh.

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