March 2025

In a society where the “Claim Chain” keeps tightening its grip on the average citizen, the latest addition is here—don’t pay your traffic e-challan, and your driving licence could be suspended or even confiscated.

The new rules, as reported, are firm. You delay paying fines for three months? Suspension. Rack up three red-light violations or “dangerous driving” charges in a year? Say goodbye to your licence for a while. If that wasn’t enough, repeat offenders may find their insurance premiums skyrocketing—because, of course, even the private sector must now join in the enforcement orchestra.

Let’s pause for a moment, not to contest the need for road safety or accountability, but to observe the direction of flow in the claim chain. Because this is not about traffic violations alone. This is part of a larger design—a persistent escalation of responsibilities on citizens while the state quietly absconds from its own.

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The Citizen Must Comply

Update your phone number. Keep your address current. Watch your mailbox for digital notices. Respond in 30 days. Pay in 90. Follow up if you want to contest. Log into the portal. Confirm your compliance. Again.

And if you don’t?
We’ll presume you’re guilty. Suspend your licence. Stop your insurance renewal. Block your registration. Automate the punishment, remove discretion, and call it “smart governance.”

All this while assuming the digital infrastructure is flawless. It isn’t. Faulty challans, late alerts, dead numbers, unverified data—they’re all part of the system. But the burden to fix all of it? Squarely on you, the citizen.

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The Government Must… What Exactly?

While citizens are being algorithmically nudged and penalized, what happens on the government’s side? Are potholes disappearing with the same urgency? Are traffic signals synchronized? Is pedestrian infrastructure improving? Are we getting safer, better monitored roads—or just better monitored citizens?

Nope. Because that’s where the chain stops. The government side of this claim chain is weak, rusted, and often, simply missing.

Instead of a parallel escalation in public accountability, we get opacity and bureaucracy. The state enforces withoutreciprocation. It demands without delivering. It penalizes citizens for inefficiencies while normalizing its own. Worse, when someone does question the imbalance, they risk being labelled anti-national, obstructionist, or worse—”urban Naxal.”

This is the new social contract: You obey, while we watch. You comply, while we disengage. You’re a “good citizen” only so long as you do not ask why the system is broken, or how the ones in power are held accountable.

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The Flavor of the Season: Silent Obedience

Questioning the state has been steadily reframed—from a duty of citizenship to an act of dissent. And the flavors change with seasons: If you question policies, you’re political. If you critique inefficiencies, you’re elitist. If you resist digital overreach, you’re paranoid. But if you comply, quietly, you are “progressive” and “law-abiding.”

The result? A deeply asymmetrical ecosystem where the citizen is hyper-visible and hyper-accountable, while the state wears the cloak of benevolent invisibility.

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The Invisible Backbone of Responsibility

In the earlier post on the Claim Chain, we spoke about how systems, when not rooted in mutual responsibility, become extractive. This is that chain in action. A relentless loop of demands, backed by penalties, automated alerts, and increasingly digital systems that remove nuance and empathy.

This is not an argument against rules, but for reciprocity.

The citizen shouldn’t be the only one pulling the weight of compliance while the state coasts on slogans and surveillance. It is time we asked: Where is the state’s end of the contract?
Because a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

And right now, the link that should bear the heaviest load—the state’s accountability—is the one that has gone missing.

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Until we fix that, the Claim Chain will keep growing. But it will remain one-sided.

And that, ironically, may be the most dangerous violation of all.

In The Wise King, Kahlil Gibran tells the story of a ruler who, upon seeing his people turn mad from a bewitched well, chooses to drink from the same source. Not because he believes in madness, but because he understands something deeper: leadership is not always about being right—sometimes it’s about being aligned.

This story has haunted me since I first read it. Because in the world of startups, especially in the messy middle where vision collides with market chaos, founders often find themselves in the same position as the king—rational, isolated, and on the verge of irrelevance.

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Founders Who Don’t Drink the Kool-Aid

We’ve all seen it.

The founder who builds a product that’s technically elegant but spiritually disconnected from the customer.

The visionary CEO who can recite unit economics with precision but winces at the slang their community uses.

The startup that hires “local teams” to build for “local markets,” but still makes all decisions from a high-rise conference room in a different timezone.

These founders are like Gibran’s king—wise, maybe. But increasingly alone.

And when you’re the only one drinking from a different well, everyone else thinks you’re mad.

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But Why Drink the Kool-Aid?

Because in startups, alignment sometimes matters more than accuracy.

Markets have moods. Cultures have codes. Teams have collective mythologies. If you want to lead people, you must first belong to them.

Drinking the Kool-Aid doesn’t mean abandoning your principles. It doesn’t mean you lose your edge, or your grip on reality.

It means you step into the narrative that your market believes in—at least for long enough to earn trust, build rapport, and then slowly introduce your own clarity.

It’s easy to be the lone rational voice in a sea of hype.

It’s much harder—and much braver—to enter the hype, live it, breathe it, and then steer it toward something truer.

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“Madness” as a Strategy

Startups feel mad from the outside.

Who in their right mind tries to build a new social app, launch a niche SaaS tool, or teach ancient astrology through a modern mobile app?

But that’s the trick: you must first suspend disbelief to create belief.

You must believe in your customers more than they believe in themselves. You must echo their frustrations before you fix them. You must share their dreams before you reshape them.

That’s what it means to drink from the well.

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The Best Founders Are Bilingual

They speak vision to investors, code to engineers, design to users, and emotion to their teams.

But fluency doesn’t come from observation. It comes from immersion.

If you’re building a product for small-town India, and you’re still thinking in Silicon Valley metaphors—you’re the king outside the circle.

If you’re selling to creators but can’t name a meme that’s trending this week—you’re building blind.

If you’re hiring Gen Z marketers but scoff at TikTok—you’re already lost the room.

You don’t have to stay mad forever.

But you do have to walk through the madness, if you want to lead people out of it.

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Final Sip

When founders refuse to drink from the communal well, they may preserve their clarity—but they lose their connection.

And when they drink too much, they forget why they started.

The art, then, is to drink just enough.

To taste the madness. To understand the myth. To laugh with your market, cry with your users, obsess with your team.

And then, from within the shared madness, build something worth believing in.

Because once the king drank, the city rejoiced—not because truth had returned, but because unity had.

Sometimes, that’s what leadership demands.

A golden goblet.

And a willingness to sip.

I. The Cult of the Narrative

There’s a quiet tyranny spreading. And it wears the robe of creativity.

It tells you: “Everything is a story.”
Your breakfast. Your startup. Your dog’s haircut.
Your mild inconvenience at the airport lounge.
All of it—content waiting to be carved into a narrative.

But not everything is a story.
And certainly, not everything needs to be told.

In the last two decades, we’ve gone from understanding the power of storytelling to becoming slaves to the performance of it.

Marketing gurus declared: “People don’t buy products. They buy stories.”

And so we bought the idea.
Founders rehearsed it.
Influencers perfected it.
Life became a pitch deck. A carousel. A reel.

“Your brand needs a story.”
“Your life needs a story.”
“Your marriage needs a story.”

But maybe—just maybe—it doesn’t.

Maybe your product is simply useful.
Maybe your day was just uneventful.
Maybe your thoughts don’t need a hero’s journey—just a little quiet.

Sometimes, silence carries more meaning than an entire script.

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II. Narcissism, Ring Lights & Echo Chambers

The problem isn’t stories.
The problem is the belief that you are always the main character.

That everything must be interpreted through the lens of your experience.
That the world is waiting, hungry, for your opinion. Your caption. Your curated take.

So we bend reality to fit the script.
We frame suffering, joy, and grief not through introspection, but through presentation.
We carry ring lights into our living rooms, mining moments for content.
We respond to global tragedies not as citizens—but as protagonists in a never-ending reel.

A flood halfway across the world? “How does this affect my story?”
A political shift? “Here’s how I feel—and how you should too.”
A gruesome relationship crime? “Ugh, be aware guys. Luckily, me and my partner are doing amazing!”

This isn’t storytelling.
This is performance art masquerading as vulnerability.

We’ve confused vulnerability with exposure.
We’ve started trading privacy for dopamine.
Grief becomes content.
A child’s laughter, a funeral’s silence, a lover’s argument—nothing is off limits if it feeds the algorithm.

And it’s seeding something darker:
Echo chambers built on tightly scripted identities.
Narratives so polished, we stop hearing anything that doesn’t fit the arc.

Because stories are sticky.
Once you craft one, you defend it.
Facts bend. Nuance disappears. Curiosity dies.

We’re not telling stories anymore.
We’re performing roles—over and over.

And what happens when everyone’s narrating, but no one’s listening?

We end up in a room full of echoes.
Each voice louder, but none of it landing.

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III. What If We Let It Be?

There’s a quiet scene in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.
Sean Penn’s character finally spots the elusive snow leopard—but doesn’t take the photo.

“Sometimes I don’t. If I like a moment… I mean, me, personally… I don’t like the distraction of the camera. I just want to stay in it.”

Then he smiles.

“Beautiful things don’t ask for attention.”

Maybe that’s the whole point.

What if we didn’t narrate everything?
What if we let moments pass—unrecorded, unposted, unpolished?
What if we stopped chasing stories, and started living them—quietly?

Let life be messy. Unframed. Uncaptioned.

Not every seed becomes a tree.
Not every anecdote is a parable.
Not every story is a story.

And maybe… that’s the story worth telling.

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*(inspired by Kahlil Gibran’s The Two Hermits)

In a lot of cultures, especially Indian, work often suffers not because we lack talent or opportunity, but because we insist on breaking the bowl.

We say we’re here to build—something enduring, something true.
We say we’re in it together.
Two brothers. Two co-founders. Two cousins. A father and his daughters.

And then, one day, the silence breaks:
“This cannot go on.”
“Let us divide our possessions.”

Because it’s not enough to build.
We must own.
We must win.

So we fight.
In boardrooms, in WhatsApp groups, in silence.
In courtrooms where lawyers feed on legacy.
In the streets, when egos spill into rage.
Sometimes through gangs and hits—because business becomes blood.
And always, always in the media—leaked emails, planted stories, reputations shredded for sport.

We break what we built.
Not because it stopped working,
But because we stopped trusting.

One wants fairness.
The other offers peace.
Neither is willing to bow.

So the bowl must be broken.
Even if it feeds neither.

India doesn’t suffer from a lack of enterprise.
It suffers from too much inheritance and too little surrender.

From businesses treated like crowns, not causes.
From successions decided by surname, not soul.
From egos too fragile to take a step back—
Men who won’t follow women.
Women who won’t yield to women.
Teams that fracture because someone had to be right.

The real damage isn’t in the court cases.
It’s in the factories that fall silent.
In the teams that scatter.
In the vendors who get caught in the crossfire, bills unpaid and trust betrayed.
In the promising careers quietly abandoned—because the vision turned toxic.
In the customers who move on, confused but certain they deserve better.

We don’t need better contracts.
We need better character.

The bowl is always more useful when it’s whole.
But wholeness asks something difficult.
It asks that we let go.

Not because we must lose.
But because something greater wants to live.

In our last article, we talked about how to take advice—why we resist it, and what separates those who benefit from it from those who ignore it. But let’s go a step further.

What if people never even acknowledge they need advice in the first place?

There’s an unspoken rule in many cultures (India included) that admitting you’re bad at something is worse than actually being bad at it.

This is why bluffing, posturing, and empty confidence dominate in so many professional and social spaces. There’s a deep-seated belief that incompetence is a moral failing, rather than a simple gap in knowledge. And when people feel ashamed to admit their weaknesses, they don’t improve—because they never get the help they need.

Why This Happens

Some of this is cultural. Studies like the Hofstede Index show that countries with high power distance (India, China, much of Latin America) tend to equate knowledge with authority. If you admit you don’t know something, you lose face. In contrast, countries with lower power distance (the Netherlands, Sweden, Australia) have a more open culture around trial, failure, and learning.

In India, this plays out in a few obvious ways:

• Job interviews: Candidates would rather bluff through an answer than say, “I don’t know, but I can learn.”
• Corporate culture: Many managers would rather give bad instructions than ask their team for better solutions.
• Entrepreneurship: Startups burn money pretending they “know” the market instead of running real experiments.
• Education: Students are afraid to ask questions in class for fear of looking dumb.

The Cost of Pretending

When people can’t admit what they don’t know, they:

• Make avoidable mistakes that could be fixed with one honest conversation
• Stagnate because they never ask for help
• Create a culture of mediocrity, where bad work is defended instead of improved

Worse, it turns incompetence into something permanent. If you pretend to be good at something for long enough, you stop feeling the need to get better.

How to Fix This

1. Normalize “I don’t know.” It’s the first step to learning.
2. Encourage questions. The best workplaces (and countries) reward curiosity, not punish it.
3. Separate identity from skill. Being bad at something doesn’t mean you’re bad as a person. It just means you haven’t put in the work yet.

Great cultures—and great people—are built on the ability to say, “I don’t know, but I want to learn.”

So, where do you need to get better?

We are taught how to give advice. To pontificate, to sound wise, to share experiences. But we are rarely taught how to take advice.

And yet, the ability to take advice—really take it—is what separates those who grow from those who stay stuck.

In India, advice flows like chai at a railway station. Unsolicited, abundant, and often, well-intentioned. From the uncle at the tea stall who insists the stock market is rigged, to the aunt who guarantees that turmeric milk will fix everything. Advice is free, and everyone’s an expert.

But how do you separate signal from noise?

The Four Types of Advice Givers

1. The Well-Wisher: Parents, elders, close friends. They mean well, but their advice is often driven by fear. “Play it safe.” “Stick to what works.” They want to protect you.
2. The Armchair Expert: Someone who has never done what you’re trying to do but has strong opinions anyway. “Startups are risky.” “No one makes money in creative fields.” Smile and nod, but don’t internalize.
3. The Practitioner: Someone who has done what you are trying to do. Their advice is practical, often unglamorous. “Make a prototype first.” “Test before you scale.” This is gold—listen carefully.
4. The Hidden Agenda Advisor: The salesperson disguised as a mentor. The consultant who subtly nudges you towards their paid service. Recognize their bias before you act on their words.

How to Absorb Advice Without Drowning in It

1. Filter Ruthlessly – Just because someone is older, richer, or louder doesn’t mean they are right. Ask: Has this person walked the path I want to walk?
2. Seek Contradictory Views – If everyone around you agrees, you’re in an echo chamber. The best advice often challenges your assumptions.
3. Don’t Outsource Thinking – No one can decide for you. Advice is input, not a command. Take what serves you, leave the rest.
4. Look for Patterns – If multiple trusted people say the same thing, pay attention. If it’s just one loud voice, take it with a pinch of salt.

The Indian Dilemma

In our culture, refusing advice is almost offensive. “Beta, why don’t you do an MBA?” “Government job is the safest.” We are conditioned to equate advice with wisdom, and wisdom with age.

But growth requires discernment. Taking advice is a skill, not a duty.

The best advice isn’t the most common. It’s the most useful. And recognizing that difference? That’s a rare skill indeed.

aka why your complaint matters only when it gets likes

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There’s a breed of work that makes noise, and there’s a breed that makes progress. The problem is: we’ve confused the two.

In India, especially in the government sector, we’ve developed a strange and dangerous addiction — publicity-as-performance. Work isn’t work anymore unless it’s tweetable.

Let me tell you a little secret: the Railways doesn’t want your complaint — it wants your tweet. File something on the portal? Lost. Email someone? Ignored. But quote-tweet the Minister with a shaky video of a dirty train and boom — a swarm of action. Sometimes even a call. Once in a while, a staffer will sidle up to you and suggest you follow the Railway Minister on Twitter. “Sir, bas ek follow kar lo. Kaam ho jayega.”

We have replaced accountability with algorithms.

A Minister — elected by millions — is more bothered about engagement metrics on a US-based social media platform than metrics of trains arriving on time. Bureaucrats who once served in silence now position themselves like influencers, crafting threads about their “vision” while files gather dust. If your complaint doesn’t trend, it doesn’t matter. If your contribution doesn’t shine on stage, it didn’t happen.

This is not governance. This is governance theater.

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Let’s talk incentives.
Why does this happen?

Because we’ve built a reward system that celebrates headlines over hard work. Awards over outcomes. PR over payment.

In project after project, private firms, small vendors, and on-ground workers do the heavy lifting — but when it’s time for credit, it flows uphill. The IAS officer takes the stage. The Minister gives a quote. The rest wait for months — sometimes years — to be paid. Some never are.

But God forbid they tweet about it — it’ll “harm the image” of the department.

The same image the department burns crores to preserve on hoardings and half-page ads that say “Your complaint was resolved!”

We’re watching an entire system become hollowed out by the idea that only visible work matters. That the goal of public service is not service, but likes.

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You see this everywhere now.

• Roads that get laid right before a minister’s visit and break down weeks later.
• Swachh Bharat selfies with trash pushed just out of frame.
• Police solving crimes only after videos go viral.
• School inspections only when there’s a photo op.

It’s not that these people don’t know how to work. It’s that working quietly is no longer rewarded.

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But here’s the rub.

The best work often looks boring. It shows up daily. It doesn’t tweet. It builds systems that work without needing to be seen working. And when those people — the ones who really make things move — are sidelined, mocked, or robbed of credit and compensation, the entire engine stalls.

We don’t need flashy saviors.
We need invisible systems that don’t break.
We need boring, consistent, under-the-radar work that delivers without fanfare.

And we need to stop worshipping the gong-bangers who show up only when the cameras do.

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So next time you see a bureaucrat go viral, ask:
Who actually did the work?
Who got paid?
Who got forgotten?

And if the answer is: “The one who tweeted the loudest,”
You’ll know exactly what’s broken.