February 2025

We have a habit of confusing solutions with symptoms.

More urbanization is not a solution. It is a response to a deeper problem—one we refuse to acknowledge.

The argument is always the same: “We need to create new cities because the old ones are overburdened.” Bengaluru is choking? Let’s carve out new states and build more urban centers. The logic seems sound—until you realize it’s just kicking the can down the road.

A prominent economist recently suggested that splitting large states could lead to the rise of new urban centers. His reasoning? When a new state is formed, a new capital needs to be built, creating instant political and economic focus. The idea isn’t entirely wrong—it has worked before.

But here’s the real question:

Why do we think urbanization is the only path forward?

Bengaluru’s Problem Is Not a Lack of Cities

Bengaluru isn’t struggling because India has too few cities. It’s struggling because it was never designed for the load it’s carrying today.

Roads built for a few lakh vehicles now bear millions. Public transport remains inadequate. Water and air quality decline, while real estate prices push out the very people who power the city.

And yet, the solution being offered isn’t to fix Bengaluru—it’s to build another Bengaluru somewhere else and hope it doesn’t meet the same fate.

Why Do People Leave Their Homes?

Why does a farmer leave his village?
Why does a small-town shopkeeper migrate?

Not because they crave skyscrapers and congestion—but because opportunities have been vacuumed out of where they live.

We create deserts and then complain that people are rushing to the last remaining oasis.

It’s not that villages and small towns are unsustainable. It’s that we’ve let them decay. The rush toward urbanization isn’t happening because people prefer city life—it’s happening because they have no real alternative.

Fix What Exists, Don’t Abandon It

Instead of building more cities, why not focus on making where people already live more viable?

• Decentralized opportunity: Let the work move to people, not the people to work. Tech has made it possible—policy needs to catch up.
• Better governance in cities AND towns: Bengaluru isn’t struggling because it lacks funding—it’s struggling because its management is inefficient. Smaller places don’t even get that chance.
• Infrastructure investment where it’s needed most: Power, water, roads, schools, and hospitals shouldn’t be urban luxuries.

Yes, creating new capitals can redistribute some economic activity. But if the foundation is weak, all we are doing is building taller structures on top of cracks.

India doesn’t need more urban agglomerations. It needs to make life possible outside them.

Because the best cities in the world aren’t the ones people are forced to live in—they’re the ones people choose to stay in.

Think about that.

A crisis is not what trends on Twitter. It is not what dominates TV debates. It is not what fuels the morning outrage at chai stalls. A crisis is what quietly erodes life, shortens breath, and dismantles the future while no one notices.

In 2025, India is a nation obsessed with crises of convenience. The Delhi elections. Religious debates. Political grandstanding. Things that keep us occupied but do not necessarily keep us alive.

And yet, the real crisis—the one that should terrify every single person—goes unnoticed. The air that clogs lungs, the water that carries unseen death, and the food that poisons slowly. Life expectancy is falling. There is no seasonal alert for malaria or typhoid. No mass warnings. No structured public response. We don’t even have the data.

Instead, we bicker about symbols, slogans, and statues. Things that will not make a difference when the lungs collapse under the weight of PM2.5. When the water flowing through taps carries disease. When the food on the plate is laced with chemicals and microplastics.

We argue about elections. About who is in power and who should be. As if oxygen respects party lines. As if an EVM can filter toxins from groundwater. As if voting can purify vegetables soaked in pesticides banned elsewhere in the world.

If the news channels ran hourly updates on how many people are being hospitalized due to air pollution, if every monsoon came with real-time data on malaria outbreaks, if food contamination was reported with the same intensity as celebrity weddings—perhaps we’d care.

But these are slow-moving crises. They don’t scream. They whisper. Until one day, they don’t.

That is how the real crisis wins. By staying silent while we keep shouting.

For years, we’ve been stuck in the same debate.

Top-down vs. bottom-up.
Centralized control vs. grassroots empowerment.
Policy vs. practice.

Governments, institutions, and businesses love top-down approaches. Set the rules, define the structure, and expect execution to follow.

Communities, innovators, and activists swear by bottom-up. Let the people decide, adapt, and grow solutions organically.

Both seem right. Both seem incomplete.

Because the real world doesn’t work in one direction.

The Linkage Problem: Seeing the Whitespaces

The problem isn’t about choosing one over the other. It’s about the gap between them—the whitespace where neither approach fully operates.

Top-down decisions are made in boardrooms and policy offices. The execution happens miles away, on the ground, where conditions are unpredictable. The policy looks great—until reality pushes back.

Bottom-up solutions emerge from necessity. They work in small pockets, with deep local insight. But they struggle to scale, getting lost in the noise of scattered efforts.

One designs the system.
The other executes within it.
But who makes sure the system actually works?

This is where whitespace thinking comes in—identifying the blind spots where policies fail to land and local efforts fail to connect.

What happens in between a directive being issued and a farmer actually changing their practice?
What happens between an afforestation target and trees actually surviving five years?
What happens in between funding allocation and real impact on the ground?

That in-between space—the missing feedback loop—is where real change happens.

Enter Systems Thinking

Systems thinking doesn’t ask: Which approach is better?
It asks: How do these pieces fit together?

It focuses on:

• Interconnections. How does policy adapt to local realities? How do grassroots innovations inform better policies?
• Feedback loops. Not just execution, but real-time learning. What worked? What failed? What needs to change?
• Whitespace mapping. Seeing where top-down structures and bottom-up movements fail to connect—and designing ways to bridge them.
• Adaptive structures. Plans that shift based on ground data, rather than fixed, rigid strategies.

Beyond Either-Or Thinking

Top-down and bottom-up aren’t competing ideas. They are two perspectives on the same challenge.

The key is to see the whitespace in between and fill it in—not with more directives, not with more isolated experiments, but with a system that connects them.

Want to fix climate resilience? Agriculture reform? Animal welfare? You don’t choose one approach. You build a system that allows them to work together.

The best solutions aren’t designed at the top or grown at the bottom.

They emerge where the two meet.

Entrepreneurship is a bet on yourself.

You take the risk. You push through failure. You repeat.

But love? Love has different rules. And when it doesn’t work, it doesn’t just hurt—it rewires you.

If you already love yourself, you frame rejection as fuel. She didn’t see my value? No problem. I’ll build something so undeniable that the world will. Scorned lovers have built empires on this mindset. It works.

But if you’re wired to be agreeable, to seek validation, love failure is dangerous. If she didn’t choose me, maybe I’m not worth choosing. That seed of doubt is subtle. It doesn’t show up in boardrooms or investor calls, but it lingers. If I wasn’t good enough for love, am I good enough for the market?

And when things get hard—as they always do—that whisper of self-doubt gets louder.

Jordan Peterson says suffering without meaning is the worst kind of suffering. He’s right.

Being rejected makes you resentful. Bitter. Angry. But none of that builds.

What builds is the next thing. A new goal, a new chase, a new frame.

Love, like success, isn’t a destination. It’s a moving target.

And if you must suffer, suffer in a way that makes you better.

Most people aren’t actually afraid of being alone.

They’re afraid of what they’ll find when they get there.

Sit in a quiet room. No phone, no music, no notifications. Just you and your mind. How long until the discomfort sets in? Five minutes? Two?

That’s because solitude isn’t peace—it’s exposure. It’s a forced meeting with the self you spend all day avoiding. The regrets, the half-truths, the small betrayals of who you wanted to be versus who you’ve become.

Jung knew this. He called it individuation—the process of becoming whole. But wholeness isn’t just adding the good parts; it’s integrating the ugly, the shadow, the pieces you pretend don’t exist. And solitude? It shoves all of that in your face.

That’s why most people escape. They fill the silence with noise, the stillness with motion. Because if they stop, they might have to ask: Am I actually living my own life, or just a version of it that’s easy to tolerate?

Solitude will break you. It will strip away the personas you’ve spent years curating.

But on the other side? Clarity. Strength. Authenticity.

The cost of solitude is discomfort.

The cost of avoiding it is never really knowing yourself.

Your choice.

In India, food is more than sustenance—it’s culture, emotion, and business. From roadside chaat to lavish thalis, food is woven into daily life. Yet, for a country that prides itself on its culinary richness, food hygiene remains a persistent, systemic problem.

Why?

It’s tempting to look at one-off causes—lack of regulation, street food culture, or poverty—but the real answer lies in an interplay of incentives, behaviors, and institutional weaknesses. Let’s break it down.

1. The Illusion of Regulation

The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) exists, and its regulations are well-documented. Yet, a large percentage of food businesses operate without any oversight. Enforcement is lax, inspections are rare, and bribery can make violations disappear.

For a small food vendor or restaurant, compliance is costly—hygienic practices require money, training, and effort. When the risk of being caught is low and the cost of hygiene is high, the rational choice for many is to cut corners.

This is a classic case of broken incentives: when following the rules is more expensive than ignoring them, people will ignore them.

2. A Culture That Normalizes Risk

Indians love street food. And why not? It’s cheap, delicious, and deeply ingrained in the way we experience food. But there’s an underlying problem: people assume food safety is someone else’s responsibility—either the vendor’s or the government’s.

The reality? Most street vendors:

• Reuse oil repeatedly, creating carcinogens.
• Use untreated water, leading to bacterial contamination.
• Handle money and food interchangeably, transferring germs.

Yet, people eat without question. In fact, a stomach ache after eating golgappas is often dismissed as “just part of the experience.”

This brings us to the perception gap: In countries with stricter hygiene standards, a foodborne illness would cause outrage. In India, it’s shrugged off.

3. Adulteration: When Business Trumps Ethics

Food adulteration in India is an industry in itself. Milk with detergent, artificial colors in sweets, chemical-ripened fruits, synthetic paneer—the list goes on.

Why does this happen?

1. Profit maximization – adulterated food is cheaper to produce.
2. Weak consequences – even when caught, penalties are minimal.
3. Low consumer awareness – many people don’t know what to check for.

When cheating the system is easier than playing fair, businesses will exploit the loopholes.

4. The Water Crisis That No One Talks About

Contaminated water is a silent villain in India’s food hygiene crisis. Many vendors and restaurants use untreated groundwater or municipal water that carries bacteria, heavy metals, and industrial waste.

Even the best-prepared food can be unsafe if the water used to cook or wash it is contaminated. But unlike visibly dirty surroundings, water contamination is invisible—making it a bigger and harder-to-solve problem.

5. The Economy of Cheap Food

Hygiene is expensive.

For a small food vendor:

• Buying fresh ingredients daily increases costs.
• Proper cold storage requires reliable electricity and investment.
• Paying for licenses, inspections, and staff training adds more expenses.

The alternative? Lower quality ingredients, improper storage, and shortcuts in hygiene. When the customer base prioritizes price over quality, vendors respond accordingly.

Cheap food comes at a hidden cost: foodborne diseases. Typhoid, jaundice, diarrhea, and food poisoning are common but preventable—if hygiene were a priority.

6. The Environmental Factor: A Seasonal Disaster

India’s climate plays a role too. The monsoon season creates stagnant water, which becomes a breeding ground for bacteria. Hot summers accelerate food spoilage. Humidity encourages mold and fungal growth.

In many parts of the country, these environmental challenges make hygiene maintenance even harder—especially when businesses lack refrigeration or proper waste disposal.

Fixing the Problem: Is There a Way Forward?

There’s no silver bullet, but some systemic changes can make a difference:

1. Stricter enforcement of FSSAI standards – Surprise inspections and real penalties.
2. Consumer awareness – Teaching people how to identify unhygienic food.
3. Vendor training – Simple hygiene protocols can go a long way.
4. Technology integration – QR codes for food traceability, AI-based monitoring.
5. Better supply chains – Ensuring food is stored and transported safely.
6. Stronger laws on adulteration – Make food fraud a high-risk, low-reward crime.

A Change in Mindset

Most importantly, there needs to be a cultural shift in how food safety is perceived. In India, we often tolerate risk until it becomes personal—until a family member gets food poisoning or a child falls sick.

That’s when hygiene becomes a concern.

But by then, it’s too late.

Until we demand hygiene as a fundamental right, not a privilege, the problem will persist. Because in the end, businesses, governments, and vendors respond to what people accept—not just what laws dictate.

The real question is: How much risk are we willing to keep ignoring?