Category: General Thinking
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Thoughtless Education
When I joined engineering, I thought that I would learn how to make things. I would learn how to engineer! Create that which never existed. My first year in engineering was spent relearning what I had already learnt over the past two years. More equations, formulae and ZERO application. As the years progressed, a depressing…
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Poverty Line
Two years ago, I read a book by Hans Rosling called Factfulness. It professes to show how the world is a lot better today than it has ever been. Bill Gates heavily recommended this book. 🙄 Hans takes a lot of trouble to find data that shows that the world is getting better every moment…
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Looking Forward
You can drive a car looking at the rearview mirror, the outcome would not be one that you are going to be pleased with. We all lose things in life. Often at that moment, it seems like the hardest thing to go through. You might fail an exam; you may sink your business; you may…
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Social Contract
It was in the mid-1700s that Benjamin Franklin proposed that a firefighter service be established in Philadelphia. This was unique to the city at the time and was paid for eventually by the residents of the city. To overcome the occurrence of weather-related fires, Franklin also invented a device that saved a lot of lives…
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Just Imagine
Just imagine, if you were to go back to 2010, tapping a slab of glass a few times and expecting a cab to appear would have seemed like magic. It is commonplace and normal today. Just imagine, if you were to go back to 1990, sitting and home and clicking a pointing device and accessing…
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Brave
The times these days require one to be brave. To visit a supermarket nearby; to work outside; to just run an errand; you need to be brave. The pandemic has caused that kind of fear in the hearts and minds of people. But this blog is not about that. Sometimes you discover something and want…
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Two Steps Forward One Step Back
When people write history, they like to smoothen the curve and make it seem like a constant journey from one milestone to the next. But history is, if anything, really messy. It is a process of attempting to move forward while repeatedly falling back only to find your way again. Between 1800 and 1900, many…
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Reimagine
In the year 1940, Alcoa came with the portmanteau by blending the terms Imagination and Engineering to create the term Imagineering. Disney took up the term in 1962 and called its Research and Development wing – Walt Disney Imagineering. The idea was to imagine something that did not exist and then to turn it into…
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2016 : FoodTech :: 2020 : EduTech
In 2016, there was an explosion of food-tech startups. These were not really food-tech. Frankly, there has never been much food-tech in India. What was deemed food-tech was just food delivery startups. It also happened to be a time when more and more wealthy Indians were getting involved in investing. Having seen Flipkart come from…
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Should Startups Worry or Should Reliance?
Reliance has raised more capital in the 2 months than all of the startup eco-system did in 2019. Indian startups raised a “record-breaking” USD 14.5 Billion in 2019! Many investors and founders across many industries are worried about what might be possible with that kind of capital in their war chest. I think it is…