February 2025

There’s a reason why some of the best engineering blogs in the world come from places like Silicon Valley and not from India. It’s not a lack of talent. It’s not even a lack of great work being done. It’s a lack of detailing.

Detailing is not about writing long documents. It’s about structured thinking. It’s about knowing why something was done, not just how. It’s about the invisible threads that hold everything together—the kind that make an ordinary piece of work extraordinary.

In India, work often happens at speed. “Jugaad” is a celebrated virtue. We find shortcuts. We make things work. But we don’t always go back and ask, is this the best way to do it? Is this sustainable? Will someone else understand this five years later?

And so, documentation is weak. Decision-making processes are opaque. Engineering blogs don’t emerge because the thought process never got recorded in the first place. The ideas never crystallized into something teachable.

Great work is never just the output. It’s the thinking that led to it. The debugging. The lessons. The iteration.

The best engineering teams in the world don’t just write code. They write why the code exists the way it does. They document failures. They structure their knowledge. They understand that future decisions depend on today’s clarity.

This is why angels are in the details. Because real impact comes not from making something work today, but from making something understandable, repeatable, and scalable for tomorrow.

It’s not about copying Silicon Valley. It’s about learning to think better.

Language isn’t just about communication—it’s how we make sense of the world. The words we choose shape how we think, how we solve problems, and how we make decisions.

When language is sloppy, thinking is sloppy. And sloppy thinking leads to bad choices.

Take paneer. Most Indians call it “cottage cheese,” but it’s not. Cottage cheese is soft, crumbly, and has a tangy taste due to the way it’s curdled and drained. Paneer, on the other hand, is firm, non-fermented, and doesn’t melt when heated. The wrong label confuses not just translations but entire culinary expectations. Similarly, Indian “curd” isn’t the same as “yogurt”—one is made by adding a starter culture from previous batches, while the other is made using standardized bacterial strains. Small linguistic shortcuts lead to big culinary misunderstandings.

Another take- For years, most Indians thought basil and tulsi were the same. Both belong to the Lamiaceae family, both are green and fragrant, and both are used in different traditions. But their properties, flavors, and uses couldn’t be more different. Tulsi has a sharp, peppery, almost medicinal taste—perfect for herbal teas and ayurvedic remedies. Basil, with its sweet, slightly anise-like notes, belongs in pesto, pasta, and Caprese salads. Confusing them isn’t just a botanical mistake—it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of their purpose.

This isn’t just about food.

Look at the startup craze in India. Everyone with an idea calls themselves a “startup founder,” even when they’re just launching another café, another clothing brand, or another generic tech service. A startup is meant to solve a problem with innovation and scalability. If you’re copying an existing business model without a new angle, you’re not a startup—you’re a small business. There’s nothing wrong with that, but using the wrong word creates an illusion of disruption where none exists.

In tech, “AI startup” is the buzzword of the decade. But most of these companies aren’t building AI—they’re just wrapping OpenAI’s GPT into a chatbot and calling it a product. There’s a difference between developing foundational AI models and integrating an existing API into an interface. Confusing the two is like calling a local dropshipping business an “e-commerce innovator.” The language inflates reality, but the market always catches up.

Or take the way we glorify jugaad as innovation. Jugaad is a clever workaround—a temporary fix. Innovation, on the other hand, is a structured, scalable, and sustainable solution. Strapping a diesel engine onto a cart to create a makeshift jugaad gaadi is clever. But it’s not the same as designing a vehicle that’s fuel-efficient, road-safe, and scalable. In business, mistaking jugaad for innovation leads to short-term thinking—quick fixes that don’t solve the root problem. A patchwork business model isn’t innovation; it’s a delay tactic. And eventually, the market catches up.

Say It Right or Think It Wrong

Language is a scalpel, not a hammer. The more precise your vocabulary, the sharper your thinking. And the sharper your thinking, the better your ability to navigate, solve problems, and make a real impact.

Like any map, the accuracy of your words determines the success of your journey. Get the words right, and the world makes sense. Get them wrong, and you’re lost before you’ve even begun.

It’s not about semantics. It’s about survival.

There comes a point in life where everything you’ve been taught about effort, struggle, and success begins to unravel.

For years, you believed in the grind. That working harder meant achieving more. That success was a mountain to be climbed, one grueling step at a time. That if you weren’t chasing something, you were losing.

But what if you weren’t meant to chase?

What if the very act of pursuit was the thing keeping what you wanted just out of reach?

We’ve been conditioned to believe that effort is the currency of success. That sweat, struggle, and stress are necessary ingredients for achievement. But every now and then, you meet someone who defies the equation. The person who moves through life with ease, who attracts opportunities instead of hunting them down, who somehow always lands on their feet, no matter how uncertain the ground beneath them.

What do they know that you don’t?

Maybe they understand that the world isn’t moved by struggle—it’s moved by certainty.

When you know something is yours, you stop reaching for it. And paradoxically, that’s when it arrives.

The wealth, the relationships, the opportunities—they were never meant to be chased. They were meant to be claimed.

But that’s the hardest part.

Because it requires unlearning everything you’ve been told.

It requires sitting in the quiet discomfort of doing nothing, while your mind screams that you should be doing something. It requires breaking free from the addiction to effort, the belief that movement equals progress, that action equals outcome.

And in that stillness, something shifts.

The opportunities that once felt like they were slipping through your fingers start appearing effortlessly. The people you were trying to convince start coming to you. The things you were running after start running toward you.

Not because you forced them to. But because you finally made space for them.

This isn’t a call to laziness. It’s a call to alignment.

To stop acting from a place of lack.

To stop seeking what you already have.

To step into the knowing that what is meant for you is already yours.

And then, to watch as the world rearranges itself accordingly.

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Five-minute deliveries. Ultra-fast groceries. Instant gratification on steroids.

It started with 10-minute deliveries, but that wasn’t enough. Now, dark stores and hyper-funded startups are chasing five.

And soon? They won’t even wait for you to place an order.

With predictive analytics, they’ll anticipate your impulses before you do. A rider will already be outside your house, holding a basket of what their algorithm foresaw you needing—a chocolate bar, an energy drink, a late-night snack you didn’t even plan for.

At that point, are you making choices? Or are they being made for you?

The Price of Speed

This isn’t just about convenience. It’s about the cost—on every level.

• The Planet: Extra bikes, more packaging, more fuel burned—because god forbid you wait 15 minutes for bread. The climate crisis isn’t just about oil giants and coal plants. It’s about our inability to wait.
• The Riders: Racing through traffic, breaking signals, risking their lives—so you can order ice cream impulsively. The gig economy disguised as progress.
• Your Own Mind: No friction, no second thoughts, just tap, buy, regret later. The more effortless the impulse, the less control you have over your own choices.

The VC-Fueled Madness

But let’s talk about the real reason this insanity exists. VC money, drunk on growth-at-any-cost thinking.

• Dark stores funded like tech unicorns, burning millions so your LTV (lifetime value) increases before their IPO.
• Oversubsidizing orders, throwing free delivery and cashback at you—not to help you, but to trap you into a habit that doesn’t make sense.
• Creating artificial demand, turning groceries into impulse buys instead of planned essentials.

This isn’t a business model. It’s a scam wrapped in speed.

An Indian Obsession

No other country does this.

• The US? Europe? China? Their rapid deliveries still follow rational limits. Even Amazon’s same-day delivery comes with a cutoff.
• But in India, no one is questioning how irrational, inefficient, and unsustainable this entire model is.
• No regulator, no consumer watchdogs, no mainstream outrage—just another billion-dollar company selling speed while wrecking everything else in the process.

Rewiring Mental Pathways, Inverting Value Systems

The worst part? It’s changing how we think.

• Rewiring our mental pathways to crave speed over substance, convenience over control.
• Inverting value systems where waiting is seen as inefficiency, patience as outdated, and impulse as a virtue.

When the norm becomes “I want it NOW,” we lose the ability to work for anything that takes time. Discipline shrinks. Perspective fades. Long-term thinking disappears.

And that has consequences far beyond groceries.

The Death of Impulse Control

Impulse control is what separates smart decisions from regretful ones. The ability to delay gratification is the foundation of long-term success.

• It’s the difference between investing vs. mindless spending.
• Eating with intention vs. ordering just because it’s easy.
• Thinking deeply vs. reacting without pause.

These ultra-fast deliveries are killing this muscle. They remove friction, they remove reflection, they remove thought.

And when everything is instant, nothing is intentional.

The Future We’re Racing Towards

Today, it’s five-minute groceries. Tomorrow, it’s pre-loaded shopping baskets delivered before you even feel the craving. A world where no one waits, no one thinks, and everything is impulse-driven.

The one thing that will never be delivered in five minutes? A meaningful life.

The best things take time.

Maybe it’s time to slow down.

Kahlil Gibran, in his short piece “The Fox,” tells of a fox who, observing its elongated shadow at sunrise, boldly decides to pursue a camel for lunch. As the sun climbs higher, the fox’s shadow shrinks in the midday light—and its ambitions shrink with it, settling for a mere mouse. This little parable, though brief, is filled with timeless insight for anyone setting out on an entrepreneurial journey.

It’s easy to be like the sunrise fox. In the beginning of a new venture, you stand tall with exciting possibilities. You picture yourself dominating the industry, leaping over obstacles, and landing that giant metaphorical camel. But when the day matures, the bright sun reminds you that aspirations must contend with realities: budgets might be smaller than you expected, market acceptance is rarely immediate, and the work can be more daunting than the dream. Suddenly, it’s all too tempting to chase something far less grand.

Yet the tension between grand ambition and grounded awareness isn’t a flaw; it’s the spark that drives growth. There’s nothing wrong with desiring the camel if you remember that every successful expedition requires careful planning and occasional recalibration. You need to do the research, gather feedback from the market, then dare to refine your vision again and again—resisting that knee-jerk urge to shrink your dreams to the size of your disappointments.

In the end, the moral is simple: You can acknowledge the shrinking shadow without letting it define your aspirations. Keep aiming high while staying attentive to the changing light. If your first steps lead you to something smaller than expected, see it as an opportunity to learn, adapt, and grow. Entrepreneurship, at its best, balances the soaring idealism of morning with the clear-eyed realism of midday—and when both are respected, even a fox can dream of camels.

Most people think entrepreneurship is about being in the right circles. Attending events, making connections, networking with the “right people.” And while relationships matter, what actually builds businesses isn’t what happens in social settings—it’s what happens when you’re alone.

This ties directly into Comfort and Entrepreneurship—the moment people get a taste of success, they seek validation through comfort and socializing rather than going deeper into the work. But entrepreneurship doesn’t reward those who constantly seek distraction. It rewards those who embrace solitude.

Some businesses require alone time. Some ideas don’t come in a brainstorming session with friends. Some strategies don’t get built in WhatsApp groups.

Real innovation happens in silence, away from distractions, where the mind has space to connect dots others don’t even see.

But many people avoid this. They crave social interaction, always needing to be around people, filling their days with meetings, lunches, and collaborations that feel productive but don’t actually move the needle. They confuse busyness with progress.

The ones who make it? They embrace the solitude. They know that real work happens in long, uninterrupted stretches. They are comfortable stepping away from the noise, shutting off notifications, and spending time in deep focus.

It’s not glamorous. It’s not fun. And that’s why so few people do it.

If you’re constantly surrounded by people, always checking messages, always available—you’re not really working. You’re just managing impressions.

The best founders disappear for a while. They go into the zone, build something meaningful, and then emerge with results.

If you struggle with this, maybe it’s time to rethink your approach. Real work requires solitude.

For a deeper dive into this, read: Solitude Will Break You (And That’s the Point).

There’s something unsettling about a scarecrow. It stands tall in a field, commanding respect, inspiring fear. But at its core, it is nothing—just straw and old clothes held together by the illusion of presence.

Kahlil Gibran’s short piece The Scarecrow from The Madman captures this paradox perfectly. The scarecrow declares, “The joy of scaring is a deep and lasting one, and I never tire of it.” But when the narrator agrees, the scarecrow delivers the punchline:

“Only those who are stuffed with straw can know it.”

And just like that, fear, power, and emptiness collapse into one.

The Hollow Enjoy Fear

The scarecrow enjoys his work—scaring away birds that never touch him, never challenge him. He thrives on the illusion of power. And yet, his statement cuts deeper: Only those who are hollow inside can truly take joy in making others afraid.

Think about the figures who have ruled through fear. The bullies, the tyrants, the manipulative bosses. They bask in the power of intimidation, but what happens when you look closer?

Inside, they are empty.

Real strength does not come from making others fear you. It comes from within. And the ones who rely on fear? They are, like the scarecrow, stuffed with straw—mere figures of presence, nothing more.

Fear is Temporary

A year passes. The scarecrow still stands in the field. But now, two crows are building a nest under his hat.

The same birds he once frightened now see him as harmless. The illusion has faded.

And isn’t that always the case? Fear does not last. The people who once cowered learn to see through the act. The leaders who ruled through terror find themselves ignored. The bosses who controlled through intimidation wake up one day to an office that no longer listens.

Fear works—until it doesn’t.

The Final Question

When the scarecrow loses his power, he does not move. He does not fight. He simply stands. A philosopher, no longer a tyrant.

Which raises the real question:

When fear fades—who are you without it?

For those who rule by presence alone, the answer is simple: nothing.