2010, New Delhi, I was driving home late one night around 1 AM after a family gathering.
I stopped at a red traffic light in Green Park. There were no other vehicles around, just our car.
Suddenly, a BMW pulled up behind us and started honking aggressively, demanding that we drive through the red light.
I pointed to the signal and stayed put.
The driver got out, dressed in a suit, hurled abuses at me, and ordered me to move. When I refused, and picked up my phone, he banged on my window. Eventually he backed off, got back in his car, and sped away by cutting across in front of me. I drove off when the signal turned green.
This is the reality of India, even today: owning a big car, a big house, or having formal education is no guarantee of basic civility, class, or moral character.
This was just one of many road rage incidents in New Delhi/NCR, I experienced before I finally decided to pack my bags and leave the country.
A truly civilized society is one where people follow the law even when no one is watching, and do what is right without needing supervision.
When I moved to Singapore, this is exactly what I saw, people naturally did the right thing. The same held true when I later moved to Europe.
Regarding the recent dancing incident at the airport, many people defended it by saying, “The authorities didn’t have a problem, so why do you?” That’s exactly where they miss the point.
You never know who is sitting on the same flight, someone mourning the loss of a loved one, a person who just received a cancer diagnosis, a parent who lost a child, or someone who just lost their job. When you show such insensitivity in shared public spaces and don’t care about other people’s emotional state, that’s where a society fails.
People often abuse me for raising these issues and quickly brush them aside by saying, “Every country has problems.”
That’s true, every country does have its issues.
But the scale is vastly different. Other countries have 99% civility and 1% assholes. In India, it feels like 99% assholes and 1% civility.
Yes, I agree that no country is perfect, but the proportions make all the difference.
To those who defend such behavior and treat every public place like their personal living room: fuck off.
China light years ahead, record unemployment, slowing growth, Rupee set to touch 100, record pollution, growing inequality, women unsafe- but all okay as long as I get to wave this flag, insult another religion and make fellow citizens feel unsafe.
“La libertà non consiste nel fare ciò che ci piace, ma nell’avere il diritto di fare ciò che dobbiamo”.
Il 2 aprile 2005 ci lasciava Giovanni Paolo II. È il Papa con cui sono cresciuta.
Ho avuto la fortuna di incontrarlo, e una cosa mi è rimasta impressa più di tutte: il suo sguardo. E quella forza tranquilla di chi sa indicare una strada senza imporla.
In fondo, quello che ha insegnato è molto semplice quanto potente: la libertà non è scegliere ciò che conviene, o ciò che è più comodo. È avere il coraggio di fare ciò che si ritiene giusto. Anche quando costa. Anche quando non è la strada più facile. È un insegnamento che torna, ogni volta che bisogna tenere la rotta. Con serietà, senza scorciatoie.
A distanza di 21 anni, il suo esempio continua a parlare. Non solo nella fede, ma nel modo in cui affrontiamo le sfide di oggi, con ancora più di coraggio e più responsabilità.
@JamesMartinSJ Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon her. May her soul and the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen ✝️
One of the lesser-known things about stock brokers is that most brokers don't actually own their entire tech stack. There's usually a third-party vendor providing the core order management system (OMS) and risk management system (RMS). Think of OMS/RMS as being similar to the core banking systems that Infosys or Oracle provides for banks.
The OMS/RMS is basically the heart of a broking operation. If this breaks, trading stops. Vendors in our business include Omennest, Kambala, 63 Moons, Rupeeseed, etc. OmneNest, which we use has about a 70 market share.
Many brokers are trying to build this tech in-house. We've been working on it for almost four years now. It's extremely hard and complex. More importantly, it involves taking serious risks with your business during the transition. You're migrating live client positions while ensuring nothing breaks. One mistake and you could have trades going wrong, margin calculations failing, or clients unable to exit positions.
Constant regulatory changes make this even harder because they need to be incorporated into the system, and each change is a potential breaking point.
I think it's much easier for a broker starting from scratch to build their own OMS/RMS than for one that already has established size and scale. When you have lakhs of clients trading daily, you're essentially rebuilding the plane while flying it.
Also, it's hard to make tough decisions about important things like this when the incentives aren't aligned. For almost every business using vendors, the debate is: Why bother with the time, effort, and risk to business continuity when no one really cares if you're running the complete tech stack or not? Clients don't ask. And vendor costs haven't caught up with the phenomenal growth in brokers over the last five years either, so the immediate financial case isn't obvious.
The Subtle Art of Overeating Politely
A hotel’s complimentary buffet breakfast is the closest thing to a polite catastrophe . At 6:30 a.m., grown adults who normally need three alarms to wake up are already hovering outside the restaurant door like it’s a flash sale. The moment it opens, civilisation leaves the room . People surge forward with the desperation of a species that fears the poori might run away.
The continental section sits there, lonely, untouched. Croissants looking depressed, bread slices drying in the AC because the true desi minimalists walk past them like past bad memories. Bread and eggs? Why again? They station themselves at the dosa counter with the same intensity that they used for land disputes.
Meanwhile the Full-Hog Overachievers begin their day’s construction work: plate upon plate stacked with paratha touching pasta touching pineapple touching ideological confusion. They aren’t here to eat; they are here to economically punish the hotel for daring to include breakfast in the tariff. A subset of them say “ nothing is good” before they go for a second helping. Another guest drinks nine cups of masala chai and wonders aloud why his BP is rising. The rest of us know.
Then come the Protein Bros, those majestic creatures whose arms enter the buffet three seconds before the rest of their body. They demand fourteen egg whites and bargain like they’re at Chickpet. One bro even pours whey powder into sambar, declaring it a fusion dish. The chef’s soul quietly exits his body.
Nearby, a diabetic guest requests a strict egg-white omelette while simultaneously dual-wielding mango and pineapple juice like nutritional nunchucks. Their glucose meter files for voluntary retirement. And just when the buffet thinks it has seen enough, the rich sleepers float in at 11:20 a.m.Breakfast long gone, even the toaster unplugged. But time, to them, is a rumour. They demand pancakes from the void, and hotel staff obey with the resignation of civil servants during budget season. The order a la carte..
The business traveller meanwhile is on Day four and has a serving of toast–fried egg–coffee déjà vu. He pockets bananas like he’s smuggling state secrets, sips coffee with dead eyes, and silently wonders when he last felt joy. Children, on the other hand, are pure chaos wrapped in sugar.They are charging at waffles, drowning them in chocolate syrup, and rejecting anything that looks remotely like nutrition. The hotel staff steps aside as they sprint past, muffins in both hands like victorious gladiators. Their moms are trying to feed them something they detest. The dads overlook this event…
Uncles are the true apex predators: poori, dosa soaked in ghee, pongal the size of a meteor, five cups of chai, and then the inevitable announcement “I eat very light these days.”
Fitness Moms interrogate the buffet like they’re cracking a terror cell: “Which oil? Which farm? What breed of almond?” And after all this detective work, they consume three papaya cubes and radiate smug wellness.
Foreign tourists wander around in innocent confusion, eating idli with jam, mixing chutney with muesli, sipping sambar like broth until suddenly their tongue goes numb and they realise India has entered their bloodstream.
The lonely cereal guy sits surrounded by 800 calories of joy and chooses cornflakes anyway, crunching like he’s punishing himself for existing.
Somewhere, an influencer couple rearranges that poori for 40 minutes, taking photos from all angles. By the time they finish, the poori has the emotional stability of a punctured balloon. Nearby, professional buffet looters stuff muffins into handbags, slip bread rolls into jacket pockets, and walk out rustling like walking vegetable markets.
And through all of this, someone always makes an impossible request from masala cornflakes, gluten-free poha to a sugar-free gulab jamun while the staff stares into the horizon questioning every life choice.
A complimentary buffet breakfast is not nourishment. It is revenge, it is childhood trauma, it is class struggle, it is comedy, it is tragedy, it is a deeply personal confrontation with carbs.
It is the Olympics of Paisa Vasool. And after the dust settles, after the plates are cleared, after the last banana is smuggled away, everyone makes the same bold declaration:
“Tomorrow, I’ll eat light.”
And of course, as we leave, all of us are already telling the same lie to ourselves, the oldest lie in the history of complimentary breakfasts:
Tomorrow, we’ll behave better.
Tomorrow arrives.
We won’t.
But it’s sweet that we believe it.