I have been writing regularly as those of you who follow me on twitter / linkedin are aware, but I have been a tad lazy in not updating this website with the links. So here goes.
For Arre, for their special on India’s 71st Independence Day, I predicted what India would look like in 2089, another 71 years hence. I made three predictions: one each about society, tech & politics. Predictions usually turn out wrong, embarrassingly so, but they do make for interesting debates. And as someone remarked on twitter, when you do predict, it is best to predict for at least 71 years ahead. That way when things go wrong, who cares?
From 1947 to 2089: What will India look like in another 71 years?
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For FactorDaily, I wrote a piece on why formerly asset-lean platforms such as Oyo, Airbnb, Netflix etc., which unbundled the stack are now bundling it back to go full-stack. And how the new full stack bundle is different and better thanks to the mobile layer.
Transition of the platforms: Everything new is old again
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For business newspaper Mint, I wrote a reverse pitch. This is a regular column where investors from venture capital capital firms pitch ideas that they would like to see entrepreneurs work on. My piece looked at solving for frictions around employability.
A three-point reverse pitch for edtech startups from Blume Ventures
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(4) I am writing a regular monthly column for New Indian Express. It appears in the Voices section of their Sunday magazine. The column is called Indo-Angliana, and it looks at issues and concerns from the prism of Indo-Anglians (https://sajithpai.com/miscellany/indias-newest-fastest-growing-caste/), essentially people like us who speak and think predominantly in English, and who dominate India’s markets, media and minds.
I have written two pieces thus far. The first one, for the mid-October issue, was on the #MeToo movement which was at its peak in India then. In that I explored how men and women have viewed consent differently, women seeing consent as granular, each act independent of the other, while men saw it more akin to a continuum or a sliding scale, interpreting consent along it for their convenience.
Gender faultlines and granularity of consent
My second piece, this month, is on a trend I call meritshifting, where Indo-Anglians are changing the definition of merit from purely objective terms (success in an entrance test or class XII scores) to subjective / holistic assessments. This makes sense, for while many of us benefitted from objective merit and got into IITs/IIMs and peer institutions, now it is too tough for our kids who go to IB/IGCSE schools, do not do rote learning, are too soft etc, and are hence getting locked out of elite academic institutions. No problem, says the higher education market, and we see the rise of new age ‘subjective’ merit assessing institutions such as Ashoka, OP Jindal, Krea etc.
Defining merit in ways it suits us
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There should possibly be one more soon in Mint, exploring the hyperlocal news space. Will update this site once it appears.