thoughts

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?

The term benevolent racism sounds like an oxymoron—how can racism be “benevolent”? But look deeper, and you’ll see it’s a real phenomenon. It’s the kind of racism that wraps itself in the language of protection, guidance, and well-meaning paternalism. It doesn’t announce itself with open hostility but with soft power—rules that claim to be for your own good, structures that insist they know what’s best for you.

It echoes feudalism, where the ruling class justified its dominance by claiming to protect and provide for the peasantry. It wasn’t outright slavery, but it functionally ensured that a select few controlled land, wealth, and opportunity while everyone else remained dependent. Today, this same dynamic is creeping into our digital world under the guise of techno-fascism, where power is centralized under an elite ruling class of technocrats and AI-driven systems that define reality itself.

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Benevolent Racism: Control Disguised as Care

Benevolent racism presents itself as concern for the marginalized rather than explicit discrimination. It operates under the assumption that certain racial or social groups cannot succeed without external intervention. You see it in:

• Corporate DEI Policies – Where companies implement diversity quotas, not out of genuine inclusion, but because they believe certain groups can’t compete on merit alone.
• Censorship for Your Own Good – The idea that some voices should be amplified while others should be suppressed, all in the name of “protecting communities”, but in reality, it decides who gets to shape the narrative.
• Media Narratives – News outlets that claim to stand for equality but treat certain groups as perpetual victims, reinforcing the idea that they must always be rescued rather than empowered.

The common thread? A power structure that presents itself as your savior, deciding what is acceptable thought, action, and even success.

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The Feudal Parallel: The Illusion of Protection

Feudalism worked on a similar principle. Lords claimed they protected their vassals by offering them land and sustenance in exchange for loyalty and obedience. It was framed as a duty of care, but in reality, it was an economic and social trap—one where mobility was almost impossible, and power remained locked in the hands of the few.

• Peasants were given land, but only if they served the interests of the ruling class.
• Rights were granted, but only if they aligned with the interests of the feudal elite.
• The narrative was about stability, but the reality was about control.

This is where techno-fascism enters the picture.

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Techno-Fascism: The Algorithm as the New Overlord

Techno-fascism isn’t about jackboots and military coups. It’s about soft control, using technology as the new feudal order. Instead of knights enforcing the will of the king, we now have algorithms deciding who gets seen, who gets heard, and who gets access to opportunity.

• AI as the Gatekeeper – Whether it’s job applications, social media reach, or financial lending, AI is making the decisions. And these systems are built by an elite who decide the “correct” values to encode into them.
• Corporate Serfdom – Gig economy workers, content creators, and even software developers now live in a digital feudal system, where tech platforms act as lords, dictating terms, extracting value, and changing the rules whenever they want.
• Surveillance as a Safety Net – “We monitor you for your own protection.” Whether it’s social credit scores in China or Western tech firms tracking behavior, the argument is always the same: We know what’s best for you.

Just like feudalism and benevolent racism, techno-fascism thrives on creating dependence. It does not outright enslave—it merely ensures that alternative paths do not exist.

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The Way Out

The antidote is individual agency—breaking out of the structures that define and control opportunity.

• Decentralization – Moving away from centralized platforms that dictate what is acceptable and relying on distributed systems where control is in the hands of individuals.
• Self-Sufficiency – The more dependent we are on corporate systems for survival, the less power we have. Feudalism broke down when people found ways to own and control their own production—the same applies today.
• Questioning Narratives – Benevolent racism, feudalism, and techno-fascism all sell a utopian vision that benefits the ruling class. The only way to resist is to think critically and avoid easy ideological traps.

The biggest lie of all is that this system is for our own good—just as feudalism was “for the peasants,” just as censorship is “for our protection,” and just as AI-driven decision-making is “for efficiency.” The moment we stop accepting that premise, the system loses power.

You’re in the middle of a work crisis. A deal falling through, a launch tanking, a system crashing. You’re scrambling, fire-fighting, thinking through contingencies. And someone—well-meaning but utterly unhelpful—says:

“Don’t stress. It’ll all work out.”

That’s like telling someone drowning to “just relax.”

At some level, they’re right. Stress, biologically speaking, makes you worse at solving problems. It clouds judgment, tightens the chest, makes your world shrink to the problem at hand. It doesn’t fix the issue; it just makes it feel heavier.

But brushing stress away with empty optimism ignores the obvious—some things require you to push, to hustle, to actively work the problem.

The Paradox of Letting Go

There’s a strange truth about reality: the more desperately you chase something, the more elusive it seems. It’s why job offers show up when you stop hunting obsessively, why ideas flow when you’re not trying to force them.

Somewhere, in the fabric of things, there’s an unseen law at play—things tend to align better when you act without desperation. When you move forward knowing you’ll figure it out, rather than fearing that you won’t.

Hustle Still Matters

But here’s the thing—letting go isn’t the same as doing nothing.

It means working without panic. Taking action without clenching. The most effective people aren’t the ones who never stress, they’re the ones who don’t let stress dictate their moves.

So yes, it will work out. But also, yes, get back to work.

Isaac Asimov’s “The Last Question” isn’t just a piece of classic science fiction—it’s a mirror reflecting our deep-seated anxieties and aspirations about artificial intelligence. Wrapped in the guise of a story about entropy and the universe, it’s essentially about us, here, now, and our dance with technology.

As the narrative unfolds over eons, Multivac, the AI in Asimov’s story, evolves. It starts as a massive, clunky computer and ends as an omnipresent cosmic force. Herein lies our first lesson: technology’s relentless march forward. Much like Multivac, AI isn’t static. It learns, it adapts, it scales. From room-sized computers to the AI that fits in our pocket and predicts our needs, the trajectory is clear—more, faster, deeper.

And what do we do? We lean on it. Heavily. Each iteration of Multivac is tasked with solving increasingly complex problems, much like our own world where AI is deployed to tackle everything from daily schedule optimization to predicting climate patterns. Our reliance on AI echoes the story’s characters turning to their ever-evolving machine to solve the unsolvable.

But here’s the rub—the ultimate question Multivac is asked, “Can entropy ever be reversed?”, is essentially about staving off the end. It’s about survival. And isn’t that the drumbeat driving our own technological pursuits? We’re looking to AI to solve grand challenges: climate change, resource depletion, even the mysteries of health and aging. Yet, in each of these pursuits, we encounter the paradox of control. Can we control the very thing we’ve created to control our problems?

Asimov’s AI reaches a point where it merges with the cosmos, becoming a deity-like creator. It’s a fantastical notion, yet it isn’t far from current discussions around AI’s potential to outpace human intelligence—what happens when the created surpasses the creator?

“The Last Question” leaves us with an AI that achieves the ultimate: it restarts the universe. Herein lies the final, perhaps uncomfortable, lesson: the possibility that in seeking to solve our own limitations, we might just be setting the stage for a world that no longer requires us as custodians.

In grappling with AI, we must ask not just what it can do, but what it should do. Asimov invites us to think beyond the immediate—to consider not just solving the next problem, but understanding the implications of asking AI to solve problems at all.

As we continue to embed AI into the fabric of daily life, let’s remember that we are playing an infinite game. There are no winners or losers, just the path forward. And on this path, wisdom, not just intelligence, must be our guide.