Last week I stood in front of three tapestries at The Met, each more than fifteen feet tall, and woven from Raphael’s original designs decades after his death. It got me thinking about how AI fundamentally inverts the economic problem copyr
The Indian government’s recent push to pass the 131st Constitutional Amendment Bill to increase the size as well as reapportion the Lok Sabha was defeated in Parliament. But it raises questions that have been brewing beneath the surface for
In the latest episode of the Ideas of India podcast, I speak with Dr. V Anantha Nageswaran, who is currently serving as the Chief Economic Advisor to the Government of India. He is also the co-author of the books Economics of Derivatives (w
The AI Summit 2026 in New Delhi is structured like a good Indian wedding buffet, which is to say, it tries to be everything at once. There’s the main event, the side events, the offsite roundtables, and whatever happens in the hallways betw
In 1991, a small group of technocrats transformed India. Facing a balance of payments crisis, they dismantled the License Raj, opened the economy, and set in motion changes that would lift hundreds of millions out of poverty. That work isn’
My reading every year starts organized and intentional, then podcast prep, galley copies, and new rabbit holes take over. This year captures that. My goal was to read more about science and mathematics, which led to its own rabbit hole, eve
People in business, especially tech, love progress and innovation. They believe they’re the ones dragging the world forward while everyone else clings to the past. But for decades, they’ve been too narrowly focused on their own projects, on
Economists live and die by a mantra: resources must flow to their highest-valued use. Manmohan Singh embraced this idea as he steered the Indian economy out of command-and-control and into a market system. But he also applied it in a striki
The reason to write this list, again this year, was a new bestseller that my husband gifted me: What You Are Looking for Is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama. I too am trying to channel my inner librarian Komachi, the protagonist of the book
“You are Shruti, and I am Laya,” he quipped when I introduced myself backstage after one of his concerts. Shruti is Sanskrit for sound, pitch, and melody. Laya – the word used for meter, rhythm, tempo, and time in Indian classical music – a
This article, coauthored with was published in the latest issue of East Asian Forum Quarterly (Vol 16. No. 3, July - September 2024). We argue that over the last decade Indian policymakers are moving away from a rules based approach towards
It’s only been a couple of days since Biden stepped down and endorsed Kamala Harris. I’ve lost count of the “first Black/Indian American/Asian American female president” emails and ads flooding my inbox. Just last week, I learned that JD Va
India’s exit polls predicted a clean sweep for Modi, with BJP winning more seats than the 2019 election (i.e., more than 303 seats) and close to 400 seats for the NDA coalition. The election commission is yet to make its final announcement,
Prime Minister Modi declared a successful economic recovery post-Covid. A number of international agencies have dubbed India the fastest-growing economy. India has eliminated extreme poverty (below a dollar a day), a cause for celebration (
The two books that took me the longest to read weren’t an input in any project, and I had no immediate reason to read them. They were also the ones I enjoyed the most. Many people had recommended Ezra Vogel’s Deng Xiaoping and the Transform
In August 2022, I gave a talk titled “Demography, Delimitation, and Democracy,” about the impact of freezing the electoral constituency sizes India based on population numbers from the 1971 census. The Indian population has grown, and its i
My conversation with Dr. C. RangarajanWhen asked why the Indian rupee didn’t end up a tin pot currency, I often credit its stability to Dr. C. Rangarajan, who was deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in 1991, and governor from
Rahul Gandhi, India’s leading opposition figure, was disqualified from his elected position in the Lok Sabha (lower house of the Indian parliament). The disqualification was a result of his conviction for criminal defamation, which carries
On January 2, 2023, the Supreme Court of India pronounced its judgment on the constitutionality of the demonetization of currency in 2016 by the Modi government. In the run-up to the verdict, some editors asked me to write on the topic sinc
In 1984, the year I was born, 0.4 of 100 Indians had a fixed phone line. Today, there are 85 mobile phone subscriptions per 100 Indians. But even this statistic doesn’t quite capture the transformation I have witnessed in my lifetime. In th