Technical Aspects.

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[gandhiks]

The Frog Who Mistook the Feed for the Firmament: A Sociology of the Digital Kupamanduk

TL;DR

Social media and doomscrolling are breeding a new species of Kupamanduk — the ancient Sanskrit "frog in the well" who mistakes his little puddle for the cosmos — except the modern well is a smartphone and its walls are an algorithm that curates reality to your reflection.

The sociology is real: from Eli Pariser's filter bubbles and C. Thi Nguyen's echo chambers to McLuhan's "medium is the message," Herbert Simon's "poverty of attention," and validated psychology showing doomscrolling erodes wellbeing through psychological distress — we have engineered wells that are cozier, deeper, and harder to climb out of than any Vishnu Sharma imagined.

The leap out is not a digital detox fad but a deliberate re-widening of the world: seek friction, court disagreement offline, meet the ocean-frog, and treat your attention as the scarce, sacred resource it is.

Key Findings

The Kupamanduka parable is not merely a cute children's tale; across Indian, Chinese (Zhuangzi's 井底之蛙), and Greek (Plato's cave) traditions, it is humanity's oldest warning about epistemic confinement — mistaking the boundary of your experience for the boundary of the world.

Modern platforms manufacture that confinement at industrial scale. The filter bubble omits; the echo chamber actively discredits outsiders. These are distinct pathologies requiring distinct cures, and the second is far harder to escape.

The infinite scroll — a small 2006 design choice — turned the well into a bottomless one. Its own inventor compares it to "behavioral cocaine."

Doomscrolling has a measurable psychological cost: it is associated with anxiety, depression and diminished life satisfaction, with distress acting as the mediating mechanism.

India is a particularly instructive well: enormous usage, "WhatsApp University" misinformation, and a rich indigenous vocabulary (the Kupamanduk itself) for naming the problem.

Details

I. A conversation at Kamla Mills

It began, as many good arguments do, over a sumptuous lunch. A few of us — engineer and the finance types, the sort who can argue about controller architectures and Advaita Vedanta in the same breath — were sitting at Kamla Mills in Mumbai, that reclaimed textile-mill compound where the looms have been replaced by laptops and the only spinning now is of narratives. Someone lamented that a few that we met recently had a "Kupamanduk" like world view. And someone else said the word that would not leave me alone: Kupamanduk - and made me reflect when had I exhibited that behaviour

The frog in the well. Kupa, a well; manduka, a frog. In Sanskrit, the kūpamaṇḍūka is the creature who has spent his whole life at the bottom of a well and therefore concludes, with magnificent and unshakeable confidence, that the well is the world — that the coin of sky visible above him is the entire heavens, and that no ocean could possibly be bigger than his beloved puddle. It is one of the oldest insults in the Indian intellectual arsenal, a pejorative for the parochial, the smug, the intellectually waterlogged.

And sitting there, watching a dozen professionals thumb-scroll through a dozen private universes, it struck me: we have not abolished the frog. We have upgraded his well. We have given it WiFi (or better 5G).

II. The classical croak: what the ancients knew

The image is startlingly universal, which tells you it is pointing at something true about the human animal. In the Indian tradition the Kupamanduka-nyaya — "the logic of the frog in the well" — became a standard philosophical shorthand for the fallacy of measuring the infinite with the yardstick of your own tiny experience. The most famous retelling comes from Swami Vivekananda, who opened at the 1893 Parliament of the World's Religions with a version of it, describing a well-frog who, told of the sea, hops from one side of his well to the other and demands to know, "Is it as big as this?" — and, hearing that the ocean is vaster still, concludes his visitor is simply a liar. Vivekananda's punchline was devastating: "I am a Hindu. I am sitting in my own little well and thinking that the whole world is my little well. The Christian sits in his little well… The Mohammedan sits in his little well…" Everyone, he warned, mistakes his well for the world.

Cross the Himalayas and you find the frog's Chinese cousin. In the Zhuangzi, the fourth-century-BCE Taoist classic, the jǐng dǐ zhī wā (井底之蛙) — "the frog at the bottom of the well" — brags to a turtle from the Eastern Sea about his splendid domicile, only to be silenced when the turtle describes an ocean so vast that no drought can lower it and no flood can raise it. "A frog in a well," Zhuangzi writes, "cannot be talked with about the sea — he is confined to his own narrow space."

Sail west and the frog becomes a prisoner. Plato's allegory of the cave, in Republic Book VII, chains men so they see only shadows flickering on a wall and, knowing nothing else, take the shadows for reality. When one prisoner escapes and returns to report the sun, the others think him deranged. The well, the cave, the puddle: three civilisations, one insight. Confinement is comfortable, and enlightenment is unwelcome to those who have grown to love their shadows.

Here is the twist the ancients could not foresee. Their frog was trapped by nature — he simply had no way out of the well. Our frog is trapped by design. Someone built his well, someone deepened it, and someone is paid handsomely to keep him croaking at the bottom.

III. The well got WiFi: the medium is the marsh

Marshall McLuhan told us, in Understanding Media (1964), that "the medium is the message" — that the form of a communication technology reshapes us far more profoundly than any particular content it carries. The light bulb, he noted, has no "content" at all, yet it utterly restructured human life by abolishing the night. The message of a medium, he wrote, is "the change of scale or pace or pattern" it introduces into human affairs.

Apply this to the smartphone and the point becomes uncomfortable. We obsess over what is on our feeds — the outrage, the news, the cat videos — but the deeper transformation is the well-shape of the medium itself: a small, glowing, bottomless aperture through which the entire world is filtered down to a single, vertically-scrolling column sized precisely for one frog. The medium is not merely the message. The medium is the marsh.

And the marsh is personalised. In 2011, the activist Eli Pariser gave this its enduring name: the filter bubble. "Your filter bubble," he wrote, "is your own personal, unique universe of information that you live in online… But you don't decide what gets in — and more importantly, you don't see what gets edited out." This is the crucial upgrade over the classical well. The old frog at least knew the walls were there. The digital frog's walls are invisible, adaptive, and flattering — they are made of his own reflection. Pariser's warning was that "a world constructed from the familiar is the world in which there's nothing to learn."

IV. The algorithm as well-digger

Who dug the well deeper? Consider the humble infinite scroll. In 2006, an interface designer named Aza Raskin, frustrated by the clicking required to move between pages of search results, invented a feature that simply loaded more content forever, so the user never hit a bottom. It was elegant. It was frictionless. It was, in Raskin's own later, guilt-stricken words, like "taking behavioral cocaine and just sprinkling it all over your interface." "If you don't give your brain time to catch up with your impulses," he explained, "you just keep scrolling." Raskin now works to undo the very compulsion he helped create.

The infinite scroll is captology in action — the term coined by Stanford's B.J. Fogg for the study of "computers as persuasive technologies." Combine an endless trough with a variable reward schedule (you never know whether the next flick will bring a delight or a dud, which is precisely the psychology of the slot machine) and you have converted a well into a Skinner box. The frog no longer needs to be chained. He stays because the well keeps promising, with each downward flick, that the ocean might be just one more scroll away.

Herbert Simon saw the endgame in 1971, before any of this existed: "A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention." In an age of infinite content, attention — not information — is the scarce resource, and Tim Wu has chronicled in The Attention Merchants how a century-old industry of "attention merchants," running from the 1830s penny press to Google and Facebook, exists to harvest and resell it. The well, it turns out, is not free real estate. You are not the customer sitting in it. You are the crop being farmed.

V. The croak chamber: echoes in the well

Wells have wonderful acoustics. Croak into one and it croaks right back, amplified, and you may be forgiven for thinking the whole world agrees with you. This is the echo chamber, and the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen has done us the great service of distinguishing it from its quieter cousin.

An epistemic bubble, Nguyen argues, is a structure that merely omits — relevant voices are left out, often accidentally, through the ordinary sorting of algorithmic curation and like-minded friendship. An echo chamber is nastier: it actively discredits outside voices, so that "members… have been brought to systematically distrust all outside sources." The distinction matters enormously, because the cures differ. A bubble can be popped by simply letting new evidence in. But shove contrary evidence at someone in an echo chamber and it may reinforce the walls, because the chamber has pre-loaded them to treat every outside fact as enemy propaganda. As Nguyen puts it: "In epistemic bubbles, other voices are not heard; in echo chambers, other voices are actively undermined."

The sociological consequence is polarisation, and it is now measurable with unusual precision. In a preregistered 10-day field experiment published in Science (Piccardi et al., 27 November 2025), researchers used a browser extension to re-rank the feeds of 1,256 participants on X during the 2024 US campaign, either amplifying or suppressing content expressing antidemocratic attitudes and partisan animosity. The effect was striking: decreasing or increasing exposure "shifted out-party partisan animosity by more than 2 points on a 100-point feeling thermometer" — a shift the authors note is "comparable in size to 3 years of change in United States affective polarization." The well, in other words, does not merely keep the frog ignorant. Turn one dial on its walls and you can measurably teach him to hate the frogs in the other wells.

There is a specifically Indian dialect of this croaking, and its name is WhatsApp University — the affectionate-turned-alarming term (popularised by journalist Ravish Kumar) for the torrent of misinformation forwarded through the country's most-used app. It is where an uncle's political certainties, a doctored image, and a fabricated historical "fact" all graduate with honours. During Indian elections it has become a weaponised medium: in a study of thousands of public political WhatsApp groups before the 2019 general election, MIT researchers Kiran Garimella and Dean Eckles (Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review, 2020) found that "around 13% of shared images are known misinformation," with images taken out of context the single largest category.

VI. Staring at the dark water: the doomscroll

Now peer at what the frog stares at. Increasingly, it is the dark water at the bottom of the well: catastrophe, crisis, outrage — the endless bad news of the doomscroll.

The word itself is young. It first surfaced on Twitter in October 2018 (from a user with the handle "Callamitys") and was popularised during the early COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 by Quartz global-finance reporter Karen K. Ho, whose nightly tweets begged followers to "stop doomscrolling" and go to bed; Merriam-Webster, after tracking it for three years, formally admitted it to the dictionary in 2023. But the behaviour is ancient, rooted in what psychologists call negativity bias — the tendency, catalogued by Roy Baumeister and colleagues (2001), to attend to, remember, and be moved by bad news far more than good. That bias once helped our ancestors spot the predator at the waterhole. On an infinite feed engineered to exploit it, the same instinct becomes a trap: the bad things scream while the good things whisper, and we keep scrolling toward the scream.

And it costs us. Satici, Gocet Tekin, Deniz and Satici (Applied Research in Quality of Life, 2023) developed and validated a Doomscrolling Scale across three studies (N = 378, 419 and 460), finding the habit significantly associated with psychological distress, fear of missing out, social-media addiction and the big-five personality traits — and, crucially, that psychological distress mediates the relationship between doomscrolling and lower life satisfaction, mental wellbeing and harmony in life. Earlier work by Sharma, Lee and Johnson (2022), who built the first such scale, found doomscrolling correlated positively with neuroticism and negativity bias and negatively with conscientiousness and positive affect. Indian researchers have documented the same dynamic: a team at NIMHANS, Bengaluru (Anand et al., Perspectives in Psychiatric Care, 2022) described how "doomsurfing and doomscrolling" mediated psychological distress during the COVID-19 lockdown. The frog, staring into the dark water, does not just fail to see the sky. He begins to drown in what he sees.

VII. The parasocial pond and the collapse of context

Two more features of the modern well deserve a croak. First, the frog is not alone — or rather, he feels he is not alone. He has developed intimate bonds with personae he will never meet: the influencer, the streamer, the anchor. Sociologists Donald Horton and Richard Wohl named this in 1956 — the parasocial relationship, an "intimacy at a distance," a one-sided friendship the media figure does not know exists. Social media has supercharged it. The frog's closest confidants are now reflections cast on the water by people performing for millions.

Second, all the frog's worlds have collapsed into one. The researcher danah boyd (building on Erving Goffman and Joshua Meyrowitz) described context collapse — the way social platforms flatten your distinct audiences (family, colleagues, school friends, strangers) into a single undifferentiated blob, so that every utterance must somehow address everyone at once. In life we are fluent code-switchers, speaking one way at a wedding and another at work. In the well, there is only one register, one audience, one flattened context — and the anxiety of performing to all of them simultaneously.

VIII. The ocean-frog's visit: encountering genuine difference

In every version of the parable, salvation arrives as a visitor. The Panchatantra and Vivekananda give us the frog from the sea who falls into the well; Zhuangzi gives us the turtle from the Eastern Sea; Plato gives us the freed prisoner returning to the cave. The cure for the well has always been the same: contact with something genuinely, irreducibly other — an ocean-frog who cannot be algorithmically filtered to match your priors.

This is the sociological heart of the matter. Émile Durkheim taught that societies are held together by bonds of solidarity, and that when those bonds fray, individuals fall into anomie — a normlessness, a disconnection from the shared world. The well is an anomie machine. It offers the sensation of connection (the likes, the follows, the parasocial warmth) while dissolving the actual, frictional, face-to-face solidarity that comes from encountering people who are not you and whom you cannot swipe away. The ocean-frog is inconvenient. He disagrees. He smells of a bigger world. And that is exactly why he is the cure.

Recommendations

If you suspect you have become a Kupamanduk — and if you have read this far on a screen, the odds are you have at least one foot in the water — here is a staged leap out, from easiest to most demanding.

Stage 1: Drain a little water (this week). Attack the medium, not just the message, because McLuhan was right that the shape matters more than the content. Kill the infinite scroll where you can: turn on grayscale, delete the app from the phone and use only the browser version (the friction is the point), and set a hard "no-scroll" hour after waking and before sleep — the two windows the doomscrollers of 2020 were being begged to protect. Benchmark that should change your behaviour: if your daily screen-time report is climbing rather than falling month over month, escalate to Stage 2.

Stage 2: Deliberately import an ocean-frog (this month). Because a mere epistemic bubble pops on contact with new evidence, actively seed your feed with intelligent voices you disagree with, and read one long-form source that does not share your priors each week. Crucially, notice whether you can engage that view or whether you feel a reflexive urge to discredit its source entirely. That reaction is your diagnostic: if you find yourself distrusting the messenger rather than weighing the message, you are not in a bubble but an echo chamber, and mere exposure will not save you — you will need Stage 3.

Stage 3: Leave the well (this quarter and forever). Rebuild the frictional, offline solidarity the well erodes. Have the disagreement in person, where a human face makes contempt harder. Join something analog — a sport, a sabha, a book club, a temple committee, a volunteer group — where the other members were not selected by an engagement algorithm. Treat your attention as the scarce, sacred resource Herbert Simon warned it was, and spend it as deliberately as you spend money. The goal is not to smash the smartphone; it is to make sure the smartphone is a window you occasionally look through, not the well you live at the bottom of.

For parents, educators and institutions: the antidote to WhatsApp University is genuine media literacy taught early — the skill of asking "who dug this well, and who profits from my staying in it?" This is a civic project, not merely a personal one.

Caveats

The frog is a metaphor, not a diagnosis. Social media also connects the isolated, builds movements, and lets ocean-frogs find each other across continents. The well can have a door; the danger is forgetting the door exists.

Causation is genuinely contested. Much doomscrolling and polarisation research is cross-sectional and self-reported, meaning we often cannot cleanly separate "screens make us anxious" from "anxious people reach for screens." The strongest experimental evidence — such as the Science re-ranking study — is very recent and still accumulating. I have tried to flag where findings are correlational rather than causal.

The infinite-scroll origin story is contested. While Aza Raskin is widely credited and has publicly expressed regret, at least one account attributes an earlier patent to a Microsoft image-search team; the cultural point — that a frictionless design choice had vast unintended behavioural consequences — stands regardless of who holds the patent.

India-specific quantitative data is thinner than the global literature, and some of it comes from smaller regional journals; the vivid concept of the Kupamanduk is on far firmer footing than any single Indian usage statistic.

Beware the sermon from the escaped prisoner. Plato's freed captive returned to the cave and was thought a fool. An essay warning against wells, read on a phone, is itself a shadow on the wall. The only real leap is the one you make when you put the screen down.

[gandhiks]

Reflected Power — on capital, towns, and the things that cannot be rushed

part of ongoing series on Maxwell, Marx & Smith

I was twenty, on a chartered train crossing India in the dark, being shown factories the way pilgrims are shown temples. At every stop someone stood up and said a number — we employ this many people, we have been here this many years, our first year we lost money. Nobody ever said our valuation. That word hadn't been invented for us yet.

I've spent the fifteen years since watching capital get allocated well and badly, and I've come to think the whole difference is a physics problem the engineers already solved and the financiers keep forgetting.

the mountain

As a student I was sent to the Tehri dam — 260 metres of rock across a Himalayan river, sitting on a fault line, built to survive an earthquake that hasn't happened yet. My mentors were two Russian engineers, the tail end of a Soviet team that came in the 1980s. They drew before they computed. They treated a safety factor as a moral position.

Here's what Tehri teaches you. A preliminary survey was done in 1961. Power came in 2006. Forty-five years — longer than a career, longer than any fund could ever hold it. The men who ordered the survey were dead before the turbines turned.

You cannot rush a thing like that. It has a time constant, and the time constant is the only number that ever really matters. The Russian money that helped build it arrived because a state visit needed something to sign, and it left when the USSR dissolved — walking out for reasons that had nothing to do with the dam, because it had never really been matched to the dam in the first place. What stayed loyal was the rock, the river, and the obligation.

That's the whole thesis: capital allocated for reasons unrelated to the work will leave for reasons unrelated to the work.

maxwell's rule, borrowed

In transmission-line theory, if the source isn't matched to the load, the power you send doesn't vanish. A fraction reflects — comes straight back at the amplifier that sent it. Push a fast, high-gain loop onto a slow system and you don't get speed. You get ringing, then instability, then a broken amplifier.

The years 2020–2022 were the fastest, highest-gain money ever aimed at the real economy. Raise in a fortnight, deploy in a month. But the actual load — customer habits, supply chains, trust — moves in years. So the loop rang. And when a source can't match a load, the industry doesn't slow the money down. It manufactures a fake load it can deliver into: gross merchandise value instead of revenue, discounts instead of demand, cohorts shown at month three because month twenty-four would tell the truth. The subsidy is the matching network. Switch it off and the reflection arrives.

I was inside some of that, at OYO, at the height of it. Extraordinary people, a real problem, honest work — and, behind us, the largest liquidity experiment in history looking for somewhere to land. It felt like momentum. Momentum is lovely from the inside. There's no moment where a bell rings. That's the trap and I have a lot of tenderness for anyone who walked into it, because I did too.

smith, actually read

Everyone quotes The Wealth of Nations and skips the book Smith wrote first, about sympathy and the impartial spectator you can't out-clever. He never split markets from morals — we did that and put his name on it.

And he called all of this in 1776. On money managed by people it doesn't belong to, he said "negligence and profusion" always creep in — a perfect description of capital three layers deep in other people's pockets. On the price of capital, he understood it selects who gets it: set it wrong and you don't fund more things, you fund different people. And in the moral book there's the man cursed with ambition who sacrifices his peace for a trinket — not a knock on enterprise, a knock on the story enterprise tells about itself.

Jamsetji Tata never read a word of it and got all three right. Rejected by London financiers, he raised his steel money at home in 1907 — the public subscription filled in three weeks, ordinary people bringing small amounts. He had the idea in 1882 and died in 1904; the first ingot rolled in 1912. And before there was any steel, in 1908, he built the hospital. Wide streets, playing fields, temples and mosques and churches — a city, specified in a letter years ahead of the furnace. Not charity. A source deliberately built to wait thirty years, because the load needed thirty years.

The towns are the point. Bhilai, Rourkela, Durgapur — foreign money and foreign engineers who all went home within a few years. The towns stayed. That's what durable capital leaves behind.

who pays, and when

The most important thing Tehri taught me came fifteen years after it started generating.

The reservoir couldn't be filled to full level until 2021 — not because of geology or turbines, but because the resettlement of the families displaced by the water hadn't been finished, and the state wouldn't allow it. Whole communities had been moved; the rehabilitation was substantial but imperfect, and until the debt to those people was settled the asset was simply not allowed to run at capacity.

The social debt was the rate-limiting step on the physics.

I've never found a cleaner statement of the whole idea. You can treat the people as an externality if you like. The asset will decline to perform until you've paid them. There's a strange justice in that — the engineering itself refuses to let you skip the human part.

The same arithmetic, faster, is what a down round does to an employee: the founder keeps control and a salary, the fund writes it to zero against three other winners, and the person who took a pay cut for options holds a piece of paper worth nothing. Except here, unlike at Tehri, nothing in the system forces anyone to settle that debt first.

slow is the return

Then I spent years inside a company building engine controls — the small unglamorous computers that must not be wrong at forty degrees, at altitude, under vibration. And there is no month where that graph goes vertical. You win a customer and then you wait two years for the revenue. When something breaks in the field you send a person on a bus with a box.

It was the best thing I ever did, and here's why: it was matched. The money that came in had a horizon shaped like the work. And I'd tell anyone choosing where to spend their thirties — the patient version compounds and the flashy version doesn't. Not because patient people are better. Because patient work is impedance-matched, and flashy work is buying its matching network on credit.

Sridhar Vembu is the living proof it's a choice, not a sector. Zoho — bootstrapped, no venture capital, never listed, a billion dollars of revenue, run from a village near Tenkasi where he built a campus and a school that trains rural kids with no degree. Read his logic and Jamsetji's 1902 letter and they're the same document: put the good work where the multiplier lands on people with nowhere else to earn, and accept that it takes twenty-five years. Zerodha did it in finance, bootstrapped and profitable. DMart did it in retail — eight quiet years, then hundreds of stores.

Slow isn't the price of the returns. Slow is the return.

sanand

If I had one image for all of it: a field in Gujarat.

Tata's Nano plant moved there in 2008 after the land fight at Singur collapsed — built in fourteen months. The Nano itself failed, honestly and completely, a real product the market just didn't want. But the town didn't fail. Ford came and went; Tata took the plant back. And in 2026 a $2.75 billion semiconductor facility opened on the very same soil — India's first under the chip mission, thousands of jobs.

Farmland → a failed little car → memory chips, in under twenty years, and the place never emptied out. Because the durable asset was never the product. It was the ecosystem around it — the graded land, the power, the water, the trained hands, the supplier who moved his shop, the school that got better because teachers could afford to stay. Capital put there doesn't evaporate when the thesis changes. The next thesis inherits it.

The whole current build-out — the fabs at Dholera, the chip town planned in Assam for forty thousand workers, thirty thousand people (mostly women, mostly first jobs) hired near Bangalore — is being sited on exactly that century-old logic. And the space startups flying real rockets are behaving more like Tata than like the flameouts, because a launch is the most honest event in commerce. Nothing to fake.

three questions

I'm not a philosopher. I'm an engineer who learned finance, and I've ended up with three tests I run on everything:

Does the money reach the work? Not the story — the actual asset, the plant, the people, the lab.

Does it survive one full cycle with no new cheque? The honest ones go quiet and do arithmetic. The others start talking about momentum.

Who benefits, and where? In a district, for a generation — or in a metro, once, at exit? Tenkasi or a term sheet. Sanand or a shopping mall on the bones of a mill.

I got a front-row seat mostly by luck. A train at twenty. A mountain and two Russian engineers at twenty-one. A monetary experiment I mistook for momentum. A company that took years to become obvious. And now, watching capital come back to atoms — to fabs and rockets and things with mass — knowing it'll be misallocated again, because it always is, and that some of it will build towns anyway.

The mountain doesn't care what you called the round. It just tells you, eventually and without malice, whether the thing you were shouting into could absorb what you sent.

For a while we were shouting into a mismatch and calling the echo growth. The good news is that the echo fades, the rock remains, and the people who build for the load are still, quietly, building.

Longform posted here - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/reflected-power-kunjan-gandhi-dshde/

[gandhiks]

The Long Wiring Diagram: How Fifteen Years of Rural Electrification Led to the PFC–REC Merger

June 30, 2026

An insider's note on why a back-office consolidation in New Delhi is, quietly, one of the most consequential power-sector reforms of the decade.

There is a particular smell to a village substation that has just been energised for the first time — hot transformer oil, fresh concrete, and the faint ozone of a system finally carrying load. Early in my career, my job was to make that moment possible from the other end of the telephone line. At Gram Power — the company that is now Polaris Grids — I spent a great deal of time liaising with government departments to secure financing for rural electrification projects. If you have ever sat across a table from a desk officer trying to reconcile a state DISCOM's working-capital headroom against a sanction from one lender while a parallel grant flowed from another, you will understand why the news out of New Delhi this month felt personal to me.

On 10 June 2026, the President of India approved the amalgamation of REC Limited — the erstwhile Rural Electrification Corporation — into Power Finance Corporation. On 28 June, the boards of both companies cleared the scheme of merger, fixing a share-exchange ratio of 88 PFC shares for every 100 REC shares, and setting a proposed effective date of 1 April 2027. The combined entity will carry a loan book north of ₹11 lakh crore. The headlines have called it a "power financing giant." The market, characteristically, shrugged — both stocks dipped on the news, because consolidation of a parent and its own subsidiary is not, on paper, a transformational event.

I want to argue that it is more interesting than the share price suggests — and to do that, you have to walk back through about fifteen years of how India actually paid for keeping the lights on.

Two lenders, one job, and a slow collision

For most of their history, PFC and REC were siblings who pretended not to be related. REC, born in 1969, was the rural specialist — its mandate was the village, the feeder, the last mile. PFC, the Maharatna, was the heavyweight financier of generation, transmission, and the broader power economy. In practice their loan books had been converging for years. When the great electrification "big push" of the last decade arrived, both institutions were standing in the same doorway.

Consider the schemes themselves, because each one is a chapter in this story:

Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Gram Jyoti Yojana (DDUGJY), 2014. The village-electrification workhorse. Roughly 60% of eligible project cost came as a central grant; the balance was raised by DISCOMs and borrowed from financial institutions — and the financial institution doing much of that rural lending was REC. By April 2018 the government could declare every inhabited village electrified.

Ujwal DISCOM Assurance Yojana (UDAY), 2015. This is the one that bent the whole sector's balance sheet. UDAY was a debt-restructuring plan for distribution companies sitting on something like ₹4.3 lakh crore of legacy debt. It put PFC and REC squarely in the role of sector paramedics — and it imposed a working-capital lending cap (25% of the previous year's revenues) that anyone financing DISCOMs at the time learned to recite in their sleep.

Saubhagya (Pradhan Mantri Sahaj Bijli Har Ghar Yojana), 2017. The shift from the village to the household. The funding was a tripartite braid — 60% central grant, 10% DISCOM contribution, and 30% as low-interest loans from "REC or PFC." That little word or is the whole problem in miniature. Two government lenders, identical instruments, overlapping geographies, and a project officer somewhere deciding which letterhead the sanction would arrive on.

I lived inside that or. When you are trying to assemble a financing stack for a rural project, the duplication is not abstract — it is two due-diligence processes, two appraisal timelines, two sets of covenants, two relationship managers, sometimes for the same DISCOM exposure. The system worked, and it electrified hundreds of millions of households, which is a genuine civilisational achievement. But it carried friction that a single counterparty would not.

The 2019 marriage of convenience

The first formal collision came not from power-sector logic but from the fiscal calendar. In December 2018, the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs gave in-principle approval for PFC to acquire the government's stake in REC. By March 2019, PFC had wired ₹14,500 crore to the exchequer for the government's 52.63% holding, at ₹139.50 a share — and, not incidentally, helped the government close in on an ₹80,000 crore disinvestment target for the year.

That deal made REC a subsidiary of PFC. But it stopped there. For seven years we had the odd spectacle of a parent and a subsidiary, both government companies, both lending into the same sector, both raising debt in the same markets, often competing for the same paper — held together by a shareholding line on a balance sheet but operating as two distinct institutions with two distinct treasuries.

COVID, and the moment the case became undeniable

If 2019 created the structure, 2020 exposed why it needed finishing. When the pandemic hit, DISCOM liquidity evaporated, and the government leaned on exactly these two lenders to push roughly ₹90,000 crore (later expanded) into the distribution sector against state guarantees. To make that possible, the Cabinet had to grant PFC and REC a one-time relaxation of the very UDAY working-capital cap that had governed their lending.

Sit with that for a moment. To respond to a crisis, the government had to separately instruct two of its own institutions, and separately relax the same rule for each. Anyone watching the plumbing could see the inefficiency. The two entities were already functioning as one policy instrument; they simply were not organised as one.

From "holding company" to one institution

The years since have been the consolidation of consolidation. The Revamped Distribution Sector Scheme (RDSS) succeeded UDAY, smart metering became the watchword, and the renewable-energy build-out turned both lenders increasingly into infrastructure financiers rather than narrow power-sector NBFCs. The rural-vs-rest distinction that once justified two separate institutions had quietly dissolved.

The final push was fiscal and explicit. In the Union Budget this year, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman named the goal directly: to achieve scale and improve efficiency in public-sector NBFCs, restructure PFC and REC. The board approvals followed on 16 May, the President's assent on 10 June, and the merger scheme — under Sections 230–232 of the Companies Act — on 28 June. Statutory hurdles remain: shareholder and creditor nods, regulatory clearances, and the binding condition that the merged entity must remain a government company with the state retaining majority control. Single-borrower exposure limits at banks lending to the combined giant will need attention. None of this is trivial. But the direction is set.

Why I welcome it — and the caveat I would add

Here is my honest position, informed by having worked both sides of this fence. I welcome this merger for two reasons.

First, efficiency in the financing of rural infrastructure is not a back-office nicety — it is the difference between a project reaching financial close in one monsoon season or three. A single counterparty with one appraisal process, one treasury, and one balance sheet removes a category of friction I personally spent years navigating. Lower borrowing costs for a ₹11 lakh crore entity, if the credit ratings cooperate, flow downstream to the DISCOMs and ultimately to the tariff.

Second — and this is the part that excites the engineer in me more than the financier — cleaner public financing creates room for more market-oriented, pure-engineering companies to solve the actual problem. When the capital plumbing is efficient and predictable, the competitive advantage shifts back to the people building better feeders, smarter meters, and more reliable last-mile systems. That is precisely the space where companies like the one we came up in operate. A government that finances well, rather than financing twice, is a government that lets engineering win on its merits.

My caveat is the one every veteran of this sector should voice: consolidation of lenders does not fix the underlying patient. The DISCOMs remain the structural drag — aggregate technical and commercial losses are still stubbornly high, the cost-tariff gap persists, and a merged super-lender can refinance that problem more elegantly without solving it. A bigger balance sheet is a better tool, not a cure. The reform that matters next is at the distribution end, where the losses actually live.

But tools matter. After fifteen years of two institutions doing one job, financing the same villages from two letterheads and being separately instructed through every crisis, India is finally building a single, scaled, market-credible instrument for the power sector. For those of us who once chased sanctions across two desks to light up one substation, that is worth welcoming.

The transformer oil still smells the same. The wiring diagram behind it just got a great deal simpler. (Originally published here - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/long-wiring-diagram-how-fifteen-years-rural-led-pfcrec-kunjan-gandhi-g1yac/)

[gandhiks]

On Values & Valuation

Since the time I remember I started to think of organization building principles, circa. 2009; I always believed that culture is the hardest thing to build, articulate and imbibe. And as a people-leader, that's the only thing that you can influence. Over the 11-odd years of working in 3 different organizations, I have observed that great cultures out-last great products. It is somewhat articulated in the book "Built to Last" by Collins, Poras - concept of (A) Clock Builders vs Time Tellers & (B) Preserve Core & Stimulate Progress.

The org-wide cultures are even more difficult to articulate because true genesis of a culture is tens and thousands of instance-response pairs which occur on an everyday basis between individuals or small groups (say of 10 or less) which shape up the culture of an organization which is may be 20-individuals strong (my first company); 200-to-2000-individuals strong (my second company) and 400-individuals strong say my current workplace. More recently I started reading & applying principles of Appreciative Inquiry (AI) - which posits that an organization is not a problem to be solved but a work in progress, shaped by communication and interactions on a daily basis. That's the AI which will be useful in time to come I think. It's hard for people from engineering pedigree to think that there is no tangible problem to be solved and that there is no real closure to org-building. That's the hard part, Physics, ah! that's simpler to solve for. ---

Here is an expression of culture articulation based on my observations, adapted from the culture book of the organization I work for and what I took away from it. Creative - It is an extremely crucial quality to have when you're attempting to make a mark and the market/world at large says "you're actually not needed" at first once you think it's the only quality one requires to build an organization - create something, be creative. What's behind this quality, "emotional involvement" - you can not create something worthwhile if you do not think of it all the time and keep acting on it - waking, eating, sleeping - and ideally one should enjoy this process. Ambitious - Being ambitious is needed because it's not just about you but also about others - Ambition, or positive ambition is not for everyone, you can not have the whole organization display equal ambition - yet at some point of time everyone exhibits it and there is no sequence or phase to it, being ambitious is the most abstract of all values. Your why, drives your ambition. Good Judge - This is my favorite. I often read about Judges who decide on many important matters and am a student of jurisprudence - and the number one insight about being a good judge is - extreme isolation. You have to maintain distance to exercise good judgement. You can not be emotionally involved and be a good judge. It is hard to be creative and a good judge at the same time - creativity is kid like, judgementalism is adult like. Diligent - This is making sure that your work output is free of avoidable errors - this is simple - you need to care about your work - else you'd not/never be diligent. This, according to me is a basic value to work anywhere in a team/group of people. Relentless - This one is my second favorite, if you are ambitious for a phase of your work life and are diligent, you will become relentless because the system around you will motivate you to not relent. Sometimes this acts as a contrast to being a good judge. Sense of Urgency - I recently had a classic discussion with my colleague on this, he said bluntly, that "One needs a sense of urgency when no one is putting pressure, when someone is demanding something, everyone will act with sense of urgency" this is an important virtue to have. You will have a sense of urgency if you are creative, ambitious. Customer Focus - This is pretty obvious, shun noise and get things done for your internal or external customer. This is your reason to be in an org. you're serving some customer; with something that they value and may give you what you want in return. Ethical - Knowing what's black and white from what appears as gray and acting in accordance. Accountable - Pretty basic, no need to elaborate much. Aligned - Being aligned to a well articulated mission/vision and need to balance with being reasonably accommodative. Respect for Individual - Not being disrespectful and not tolerating disrespect. Reasonably Accommodative - Being a voice of reason and accepting voices of reasons - irrespective of age, religion, or any other form of social identity. --- In a smaller time-frame you'd get to display 2-4 values at best, and in longer time-frames you'd get to display 4-6 at best. ---- The number two quality which defines a potential leader is the ability of her/him being a good judge. This has been a theme in my recent past, there have been many instances which when I now reflect, makes me confident of being a good judge; the price, social distancing (remember COVID). This comes second to only other quality, of a potent leader, providing energy to a system. I recently applied some of this virtues to decide the school for my kid's admission - the one which displayed a good ethos and showed promise. Based on this, the next blog will talk about valuation, say in 6-months, the other theme of study I have undertaken in the recent past; that's based on good judgement and alignment! Let me know what you, the humble reader of my blog, think of these concepts?

[gandhiks]

What is means to be a BITSian - my reflections as BITS turns 60 & I turn 11yo BITSian

2008B5A3***G, I predominantly lived in AH2-236 doing some notorious activities in the room and samaj seva (read: Nirmaan) in areas around the campus and I fell in love with Physics plus a few more during the 4 years I spent in Goa.

Through my time at BITS; I had realised that it's an echo chamber, like many places can be, so out of choice and because of some natural circumstances; immediately after graduation I developed a 90% non-BITSian friend circle. I did not come from a biz family nor did I have family wealth to take the kinds of risks I took upon graduation. I worked in a place called Upli Babhan for a company established in Berkeley, HQ-ed in Jaipur. There I happened to meet Yash (& family), Jacob, Anay, Sudeep, Vicky, Naresh, Abhay, Ashok, Ranjeet, Shivraj - and more and Puja, Fenella, Catherine, Meredith, Alok ji, Tanmay ji, Vasundhara Raje ji, Dushyant Singh ji and many more noteworthy people.

Then due to some uncontrolled chaos which I was a bit young to fathom, I left the job and took a couple of months off at home finally deciding to join a fast growing enterprise founded by the only Indian Thiel Fellow. At that time I had read all about Peter Theil and the PayPal mafia and Elon Musk was not that big a name. But I knew that someone who is a Theil Fellow must be smart and holds the potential to build a great biz.

That was my 2-year MBA. I worked with management consultants and Ivy League grads and high energy entrepreneurs, sharp with Excel, Data, PPTs, Structure and what not. Often times I was outsmarted. But many noticed my energy and hustle. One smart chap who scored 100% in CAT commented, "What you lack in smartness, you cover up by your hard work." I made some lifelong friends there, all non-BITSians who are doing phenomenal work.

Moving on, I left the job in 2017 to be closer to home, in Mumbai.

A close friend, mentioned to me that folks at SEDEMAC are doing something good, you'd like it here.

So I applied to SEDEMAC, for some exploratory work on IoT which was an epic buzz word then. By now I knew a thing or two about the corporate world, high-growth, product building and importantly my own strengths - what I can and can not do. So I decided that I have to build a team who can compliment my skill sets. I started calling my friends again. Then I got connected with Rajdeep and we had discussion I shared my thoughts and he must have thought "Reasonable lagta hain" so he came along and we started working on a demonstrator - and then Sudeep joined in and subsequently there was a full team working on it. It was a privilege and a dream come true because I always wanted to build a tech-hardware product - I had nothing but some imagination and wild impractical ideas.

Intertwined to all these, I got married and had a daughter; COVID hit and many other things happened. As luck would have it, was able to broker a $100M transaction in course leading upto a year ago to today, sans IB. Leave aside startups shutting shops, IPOs floundering, here was an island who was able to close $100M without much external help. There is merit in competing with large guys, makes you large in case you succeed or leaves you a mature person.

How is all of this related to BITS? Journey of each BITSian is fodder for not just BITSians but others to see and adapt from; it's a species survival mechanism. Each one who makes to BITS learns competitive capitalism and its place in the society. Sans public support, one learn to stand on their own and respect others who have.

One thing which has worked for me so far is that I never worked with BITSians; because I always wanted to save myself from echo chamber. As friends, I always told my fellow BITSians that stay away from BITSians for a while upon graduation, learn to stand on your own, be independent. That's how you add something to your alma mater. Like all universities, especially universities dependent on itself for financing its means it is an important role of it's alumni to win some bread on their own and give back. Think about why BITS was incepted? What was the founding thought? And every once every 10 yrs ask if you have contributed. Today, BITS is 60 yrs old, only 16 years younger to our elder brother the IITs but we are a part of the process which competes with institutes who 150 years old and much more prosperous.

Happy Sweet 60 BITS!

[gandhiks]

Probability is 1

The probability of an event occurring in the future is always 1. A value less than 1 signifies our ignorance.

As provocative as this statement may sound, let me reason with you like I did with Partha Bhattacharya & let you decide for yourself if it is a useful perspective for you to look at things in the future.

What if my event is defined as "the event where X never happens"? That too is 1. X was never supposed to happen P(X) = 0.

The claim here is that any & all events in the future are deterministic and knowable.

In classic probability theory, A and A' are known as complementary events if one of them happening is defined as the event of the other one not happening in that case if we apply classic probability axioms -

One can prove that P(A) & P(A') can not be 1 simultaneously.

Yes, true. The claim is that "for events of the future, its not the uncertainty of that event happening that causes its probability to become less than 1, its our lack of knowledge that makes it so".

Let me give you an example -

Say you put an hand in a box full of red and blue balls in a 1:1 ratio and you pick red

Your chances of picking red was 1 and blue was 0. You just didn't know that before hand and hence you may have said 50%

As a counter, you may argue that - 1 is defined in probability as P(R|R) and the second one which is 50% is P(R). First is called conditional and second is called marginal. Conditionals have lower entropy than marginal, yes. Although there are notions in probability like "almost surely" and "infinitely often" they do not match my initial claim of the probability of occurrence to be a solid, definite 1 or 0.

Think about this, increasing the amount of information does change the probability of an event of occurring. P(X) = 1% whereas P(X|Y) can be 50% and P(X|Y,Z) can be 90% and P(X|X) = 1.

Think about it in another way, if I ask you to calculate the probability any event in your past, you'd be confused for a while but always come back with an answer of "1". P(X|X) = 1. Probability of X given X is 1.

This is not to say or claim that anything can happen in future. In fact its quite the opposite. It is not to say that probability of some outcome never happening is 0. There will be scores of events about the future in your mind all of which has non-0 and non-1 probability numbers associated with it - if you increase the amount of information you have about any of these events you'll inch closer to near "1" or "0" values about it happening.

There are two ways to think about events of the future, "(fully) deterministic and knowable" and "indeterministic and unknowable". Numerically both of them are represented in the same way but they imply drastically different things.

If you think, that the events are deterministic & knowable, you'd shift to an internal locus and try finding new information about those events of interest and finding their "1" or "0" values. But if you think later is of use then you'd relegate outcomes to an unreliable component of "chance" & claim "I think there is a 50% chance of that happening".

Both 1 & 0 are states of complete knowledge & there are pretty good theories on what are the theoretical limits of ignorance. Generally ignorance is maximized at p= 1/K where K is cardinality of the event space.

I'll rest mathematics here and draw you attention to how thinking about events of the future in above perspectives be useful to you in all avenues that you'd like to apply it to. If you chose to think that "Well that event is going to happen for sure, I just don't know about it?" you'll exert effort in developing more knowledge about it. (this statement is same as saying "That event is not going to happen for sure, I just don't know enough about it?") rather than resting at "That's probably going to happen with a 50% chance". Try this experiment & share what's different?

All of this also has an interesting branch on "predictability of data" and why some data streams can not be compressed, but that's for a different day.

My invitation here is to chose to think about events in the future as deterministic and knowable rather than indeterministic and unknowable and see how it changes your locus of action on things of importance (and keep on ruminating in 2X2 of determinism and knowledge ).

Further reading:

Information Theory: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory

12 Virtues of Rationality: https://www.yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues ("That which can be destroyed by the truth should be." — P.C. Hodgell - one of my all time favorites)

Richard Hamming's Lectures : https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2FF649D0C4407B30

[gandhiks]

t > COVID-19 (A year on)

(Continued from https://gandhiks.tumblr.com/post/613766496367312896/t-covid-19) 

Its been more than a year since the pandemic took the shape of a pandemic from a localized outbreak. Since March 2020 - I along with many of my fellow world citizens have been living life measured by "2 week phases". Each of these 2 week phases was surrounded by thoughts like - "Ok, today 10,000 people in my country have COVID - so they will be better in 2 weeks and may be others will understand and stop the spread", "Ok so my neighbor has COVID, so in 2 weeks they too shall recover, so better be extra cautious", "Ok, now that the cases are at all time low, in 2 weeks we will know if that really is the true picture", "Ok now that all ICU beds are full, lets hope that they become empty in 2 weeks and no one catches serious COVID in my friends and family till then" - This almost reminds me of Sunny Doel's famous dialogue - "Tareek Pe Tareekh". 

In the early phase of the pandemic initial thoughts & conversations with friends where around the lines of "what can we do to be more useful - should we develop indigenous ventilators, some health checking tools?" (these thoughts were based on the fact that I work with a Electronic Hardware specialist firm with good design & mammoth manufacturing capability). We later realized that making anything related to healthcare will require years of permission seeking and expertise building. So that wave of thought of being useful in current situation subsided. All we could do is to carry ourselves with positive outlook at the virtual work meetings and stay home, protected so that we do not increase the national case load. That phase of compromise - where I felt generally useless to do anything to help aid COVID relief - lasted from May 2020 till about February 2021. 

Since March 2021 the situation had turned horrific & frankly speaking paralytic. The invisible enemy of sorts had waged a full blown assault on many cities, towns & even rural areas of India. My extended family had a few cases of COVID in April and they required hospitalization and oxygen (not ICU, mercifully). The amounts of calls and messages each of my family members made to get them a oxygenated beds reminded us of how fragile we are - as a system - in front of the virus. Luckily, or as "Karma" would have it, both candidates got beds - recovered well and are back home since about "2 weeks"!

Amidst all these, I and many others kept on hearing & seeing stories like - shortage of injections, ICU Beds, Oxygen, medicines, online media filled with people's CT Chest Scans (with disastrous CORAD Scores), high values of CRP reports just floating around everywhere for help - not to mention daily newspaper headlines painting a scary caseload & death growth picture every day for about "2 weeks" since ~21 of April to ~7 of May. 

Many outrages blamed the government, many the people at large for violating the norms, some blamed the vaccine manufacturers for not getting the vaccine out on time. 

A few interesting questions were posed during these debates - one which stuck me out right, is how much money should we donate where? As taxpaying citizens we already give ~30-40% of our yearly income to the Government which by logic invests them in making public health infrastructure, schools, roads & defending the country. The country also services its debt which it had taken to accelerate such developmental project. Its really a question worthy of thinking for all taxpayers of India. Answers to that questions will ultimately lead you to holding accountability for shortages of any kind faced during the pandemic. 

You will also realize like I did, that the Indian system thrives on shortages. If there is a shortage, people will hoard, hoarding gives rise to black market, black market busting gives police right to raid, raiding leads to money give & take (corruption), money ultimately reaches the "babus" who created shortages in the first place by faulty regulations. 

It genuinely crossed my mind, like it would have for many tax payers, to leave India and pay taxes elsewhere where the systems are more efficient. People are more responsible and Governments show ample accountability. 

On the other hand, if I think about it, situation like this was expected in dense, large country like India. Its just that because of early lockdown the peak was delayed. In that context we were not completely successful in flattening any curve, but we did manage to delay the peak by a year or so. 

Amidst all the debate, I can hope that the following things will happen A: the polity of the Indian state will become mature - both citizens and the public officials. B: citizens having seen & heard the horrors of the pandemic, start behaving more responsibly & C: citizens of the world acknowledge and appreciate the magnanimity of "a" global crisis and buck up and respond to “the” other impending global crisis - climate change. 

Which brings me to the concluding thought chain of the piece - The initial uselessness which I felt when confronted with the initial phase of this pandemic has led me to formulate a rule of thumb. We as humanity are confronted with multiple global enemies. Biological, military, social & environmental. Each enemy requires a force of good to fight against it. Like a military aggression is defended by a military specialist group, a biological enemy defended by doctors & health care professionals (like the current pandemic). The next and ongoing theater of defense will be environmental and we will need people with social & engineering specialty to defend against it. 

Hence, its best to align ourselves to aid these defenses in some way. By aligning, I mean either channel our professional career in that direction & / or tune our habits in that direction. If that's not done, you will risk feeling pretty useless at the peak of such attacks or worst you would be actually indirectly aiding such enemies of humanity.  

[gandhiks]

t > COVID-19

Preamble

As on March 27th 2020 — n-COV-2019 has affected 0.007% of Global Population and as with all exponential things, its hard to imagine where this ends and how — even if we know the estimates from renowned “Epidemiologists”.

If you turn this around, 99.993% of us are unaffected & ~2.3B of us are in “lock-down” to prevent the spread. That’s 32% of the Global Population is under lock-down.

Its the first time that Baby Boomers, Generation X, Millennials & Generation Z are experiencing a pandemic. Last one was the 1918 Spanish Flu which wiped out a large percent of Global Population.

I’ve taken the aid of hopeless & impatient optimists to act during & after the pandemic.

Exhibit A: Bill Gates’ Archival View of the next Epidemic during Ebola Times

Exhibit B: Bill Gates’ long discussion on what we can we best do now — in light n-COV-2019

Exhibit C: Naval Ravikant’s Tweet on his hope on a new kind of Politics

If you spend some time (~1hr) listening to Bill Gates, and combine the numbers above, you’ll realize that once the Corona Battle is Won, a bigger & longer war lies at “t” > n-COV-19. So this article is for all those ~2.3B warriors staying back home to prepare for “that” longer war because believe it or not we just have < 3 months to prepare for “the long war”. My hope is that we will win the novel-Corona Battle in less than 3 months.

Anti Social Anxiety

Perhaps its the first time in cognizable memory that we (as a generation) are looking at a common phenomenon for long enough to understand it. Its pretty stressful for us to do that because almost all of us are trained in the past decade by “extra” personalized content, more than required “choices” in almost everything and being in “constant touch” with more people than we possibly can. The equations of our economics were being re-written on those very matrices which had made all of above possible.

BAM! the novel-Corona breaks that chain.

I am amazed how this possible Black Swan impacts the agenda of future set by Yuval Noah Harari not so long ago in his book Homo Deus. Off the point.

So, the Anti Social Anxiety will be the anxious impact of post novel-Corona Economic Scenario & how the world looks at more bigger long term problems like “Climate Change” & “Combating Cancer” which is and will impact far more people that n-CoV-19 can ever do.

Experts on the subject, estimate that it will cost us ~US$3 to US$5 Trillion or even more globally — that’s about 5% to 7% of Global GDP. As with exponentials, large numbers are pretty hard to comprehend.

Watch out for “measured Globalization” and “shrill Geo-Political Narratives” getting intensified in near future.

What new Systems can build to re-structure Economics & make it

pro-science  

pro-environment (Combat Climate Change) and

pro-health (respond well to public health issues — viz Pandemics, Cancer etc) ?

Hope

One insight into the novel-Corona Pandemic is that it makes it clear how small things affect large systems and cause disruption. If you turn that around, its critical for us ~2.3B fighting this skirmish of Corona from our homes to think through how we will respond to the “longer” war that lies ahead of us with small acts in our daily lives.

The curve is already too flattened on adverse effects of Global Economic Structure, Cancer & Climate Change for any one of us to realize its true impact. Think critically & plan & prepare well during the spare time you may have during the lock-down.

The overarching hope is that the novel-Corona battle creates some sort of Global Hyper Alignment on fighting the Economic, Health & Climate wars with firm resolve.

Actions

In myopic time-frames its best for us, the educated folklore to salvage and save what needs to be saved and re-build what needs to be re-built.

Education & Generation Alpha — take some time out to educate the next generation about the right problems to be solved and how to stay Hyper Aligned. Help them make up for lost school / college days.

Save the Aligned Company — if you feel that the organization you work with makes positive contribution to the pro-climate, pro-health Planetary Goal, offer to work more than expected, offer to get paid less than expected in order to save the institute that you work for. Good Founders & Managers will feel as much or greater stress of this situation on whether to save the company or whether to lay off, make it easy on them.

Re-assess & further strengthen all your current strengths, skills and social capital — use them well to do point #1 & #2.

In not so myopic time-frames / long term actions

Preventive Healthcare — induct exercise & good nutrition so that we’re always in a useful state for overall society.

Frugality — in all our habits, avoid over-consumption & over-stimulation and hence overspending!

Develop Judgement on separating black & white from the gray. Good Problems to solve versus not so good problems (which are essentially a time-suck). Invest more & more of our strength, skills & social capital on Good Problems then.

Conclusion

The idea is to continue this conversation on “What After”, “What’s the best” and “What If” in light of novel-Corona. Inviting you to suggest better, sharper and concrete actions to the fellow readers to prepare well for the post-Corona War!

[gandhiks]

The Determinate Optimism for India’s Energy Future

It’s been more than a year since I blogged last - its tough to keep blogging discipline - I must admit. So here I am, back with experiences, which will make up for the missed blogging time.

I’d like to write today about the kind of futuristic, frugal & bold experiments happening in the technology hotbeds of India, some of which I was a part of, others, may be in future.

First, about smart meters developed for India - 'Energy access' was the primary topic around which the years 2013-2014-2015 of my life were spent. Gram Power scaled to more than double operating size in FY 14-15 as compared to the previous year. More than anything which was achieved in technology progress and number of villages electrified, it did introduce fresh thinking amongst the topmost energy policy makers of India. GP’s smart meters with seamless payment integrations are sure to change quickly changing the lives of the first time users of electricity & lives of people residing in remote grid connected areas too. These meters are extremely frugal in design and are tested in some of the worst geographies suited to deploy energy meters. The electricity distribution companies providing energy to the rural customers are going to reap rich benefits incorporating GP’s technology into their operations. Electricity is secretly becoming simpler, for all of us.

One more experience I can share is of the time when I fortuitously landed on the 23rd floor of Westin, Mumbai to stay there for a week in July - with awe inspiring view of north & west Mumbai. There are quite a few rooftops which had deployed solar PV or solar water heater. I was elated, momentarily. Momentarily because, a vast majority of them are still without a solar array. I was uncomfortable at the sight of those naked rooftops, I started thinking why can’t someone just provide them with a thick linen of a solar arrays? Its blatantly, vulgar to my eye - to have a rooftop not covered with solar array. There are obvious environmental advantages added to which, there are financial benefits to the private power distribution companies providing power to Mumbai. This observation lets us to the Axiom #1 for rooftop solar - “Any rooftop which is not covered with solar array, is publicly naked and hence vulgar. One must in all attempts provide them with cover of thick solar blanket!” If you stay either in Mumbai, Delhi, Banglore, Kolkata, Chennai or some of the state capitals, you’ll not know the extent of such vulgarity; but travel hinterlands - you’ll very well realise why I’m calling naked rooftops - ‘vulgar’. Rural and peri-urban parts of India, including the burgeoning city of Gurgaon is facing high amounts of power deficits. There are reasons to ponder about that. But don't worry, this is soon to change - especially when Mr. Modi has upped India's solar target to 100 GW by 2022 - its a moonshot given current deployments of over 4 GW. Oorjan Cleantech founded by Roli Gupta is a bold attempt for achieving fast paced solar rooftop deployments in India. They are building some amazing products to facilitate rapid deployments of solar in India. I am lucky to have been associated with them since its inception - have had some super exciting discussions with Roli since I moved to Mumbai early in May.  

The third and the most exciting developments, is the fresh & futuristic attempt at designing electric vehicles for India, this will definitely capture the imagination of many technology enthusiasts especially since Tesla has made it big in the US, Europe & now China. I’m awed by the bold attempts of Elon Musk. The States aside, EVs in India have travelled a long way since REVA was launched by Chetan Maini in 1994. He is a man of superb vision, but for a bunch of reasons the product did not find a resounding acceptability. Technology has dramatically developed since then, the most important of all is the drop in Lithium based battery prices! There is renewed confidence in Indian hardware capabilities and fresh thought to solutions catering to Indian conditions, next generation bikes are soon to make way into the Indian roads. These bikes come loaded with a lot more than a neat battery pack - they come with Android-like OS, which is a huge leap in connected devices paradigm. The bike will be able to tell you directions, parking spots, charging stations and all popular destinations once you hit the roads. In case when you just want to go out and are not sure where to go - this bike will soon be able to tell you a place suited to your taste - you just need to hit the road with it. I recently visited Ather Energy, the company building these smart electric vehicles in Bangalore - met Tarun, Swapnil & their team - I was pleasantly surprised to see a large team working in full swing to launch smart e-bikes on Indian roads. Tarun's vision and enthusiasm was infectious as we discussed the future of EVs over lunch. I'm confident that the team will meet with resounding success in years to come.

Fourth observation - pertaining to energy efficiency, is my friends’ Kunal, Ravi & Shatruddha’s SwitchKit. They’re building a connected platform for energy management, which integrates with a host of communication systems, found very widely in urban & peri-urban households across the world. They’ve started off with integration of lighting products onto this platform and are soon to expand to other appliances. If alternate generation is one end of the spectra in cleantech, efficiency is the other, we just can’t ignore this aspect. After all, one unit or energy saved on the consumption end equals roughly six units worth of energy saved on the generation side - all the transmission losses & generation efficiency taken into account. Estimates suggest that if we can take efficiency efforts seriously - a third of India’s energy demands of future can be negated. Which implies, that by changing current grade appliances to more efficient ones, we will not need to commission power plants amounting to 1/3 of the total estimated capacity in future. Massive savings. Experts also argue that global efforts towards efficiency should take priority over scaling up generation for the very same reason. This change is going to be hardest of all, since it requires massive participation from end users of energy. It requires them to be very conscious when they buy the products they use. Hence, Switchkit and likes form an important piece in the puzzle.

Ultimately, I cannot help but weave in concepts from Peter Theil’s class notes on energy and use the term ‘determinate optimism’ to sum up this essay. With these bold, frugal and futuristic attempts in India coupled with billions in anticipated funding, I have a strong reason to believe that India will not develop along the lines of China or the US, the process will be much more cleaner. I reasonably understand that getting there is going to be challenging - there are operational & political challenges to getting there and it also requires a lot of hard work. Yet, just imagine a world filled with these technologies, nearly ubiquitous, especially in the South Asian sub-continent you’ll wake a happy person tomorrow.  

[gandhiks]

Open-sourcing Micro Grids.

To put it succinctly, it's pretty interesting how the world of computer science, web, software and general programming has benefited from the  open source community. Students of computer science learnt faster about code style, code quality and documentation directly by seeing the code and softwares designed by greats of software.

Observation #1: One of the reasons the computer science & the software industry has seen great scale is because of availability of young skilled human resources in a very short time. This skilled human resource owes a great deal of their learning to the open source community, they got better and smarter at writing code building on the code written by experts and learning from the code written by them. (Thanks Anay for making me realize this!)

  I'll ask you to hold your thoughts on computer science for a bit and take you to the world of energy access and micro-grids!   I have been working with Gram Power since more than 7 months now, we're primarily into the designing and making smart energy meters, but the core innovation of the company lies in the way these smart meters are used. In places where there is no energy access (the remote rural areas) we commission solar micro grids, to each of our consumers we provide these smart meters (with pre-paid payment facility) where the villagers can purchase power like they purchase mobile talk-time or daily stock of onions or potatoes. Rs. 5 a day, or 10 a day or 20 a day. This brings a whole new meaning to operational sustainability of these micro grids. The costs of operation and maintenance of the physical infrastructure is taken care of by these small payments.  Brilliant idea! The key challenge which confronts us and the world now is how to use this idea to solve the problem of energy access in the whole world? Or atleast rest of India?    The sheer magnitude of the problem is so huge, in India, globally that one Gram Power or any one company or even 10's of companies put together will not be able to solve it in the next 5 years.But we need to solve it in the next 5 years, and we need to solve it soon. How can we be indifferent with a huge portion of our population having no access to power since the invention of power? Electricity means a century worth of progress from them.   So we need more companies commissioning micro grids, more people thinking about energy access not only because the magnitude of problem is huge, but also because it takes a lot of capital and nuanced understanding of the community in order to operate the microgrid successfully.    Here's where my imagination comes into play - how about we have 100's of  entrepreneurs/ leaders throughout the country who can erect and operate microgrids, (notice: I am talking about micro grids, not smart micro grids) because its easier to learn how to commission micro grids, we (Gram Power) can help them make smart.  

So the big idea is to open source micro grids, a platform by the people already thinking about and doing things to solve the energy access problem through micro grids to educate and inspire 100's more. A direct analogy from my Observation #1. It will be a one-stop-shop for anyone who wants to do it acquire the skills and know-how on how to do it. Things like what kind of entity to form? What kind of support to get? How to build an initial small team? Most importantly how to technically design the plant? Find the right suppliers? Test the supplies? here's the Biggie - how to raise funds?  how to execute the project flawlessly? and operate it afterwards!

  That's it, that's the idea -

open source micro grids to give rise to a lot more entrepreneurs and leaders - scale up the idea. I think with this shared knowledge and focused goals the problem of energy access is soon to be gone.

  I'll leave you with the idea for now I'll get back with the far reaching implications of it in the next part of this Idea-log!

[explore-blog]

The sciences are the “how,” and the humanities are the “why” — why are we here, why do we believe in the things we believe in. I don’t think you can have the “how” without the “why.”

George Lucas in defense of the humanities (via explore-blog)

[gandhiks]

Digging Deep!

This post shall pretty much do the task of explaining the title of my blog, "Technical Aspects". One great thing that separates innovators from non-innovators is their ability to know a concept so well that they are able to apply it in an absurdly improbable way.

Knowing a concept is one thing and applying it is another. We must be aware of the difference between external learning as well as internal learning. External learning is knowing where as internalizing it is applying. It may sound abstract, so here are some examples -

 A few days ago, my father put a status message on Facebook saying something like this "Why is Facebook wall flooded with good thoughts but reality still remains ugly?" this triggered a thought chain. Well, most of us, read good thoughts and let them pass by without stopping them and thinking about it. We don't quite get the context or the depth of those quotes. It may sound and look impressive and may be present a better picture of world but nothing is changing by readin them. Its only when we internalize a quote and apply it in real life the effects could be seen. The difference is in knowing technical aspects of the quote and conceptual aspects of the same.

Its believed that best coders are the ones who are fastest at Google-ing,  while that may be true I believe the best designers are not ones who are fastest at Google-ing. World has enough good coders, but the rarity is in finding good designers - thats the difference I am talking about.

And its for the same reasons I find blogs dangerous. And main-stream media. And all the things which provide less or incomplete information and formation of wrong insights.

Hence the name of this blog. A medium to dig deep in a topic. Getting hands dirty in application of a concept rather than sitting and admiring the beauty of it. For information is everywhere and insight is so rare. 

[gandhiks]

The Power of tomorrow.

The most fascinating thing [I believe] about inventions of 20th century is the invention of the internet. And networks.

You can create data on a Laptop, Weighing-Scale, GPS trackers, Refrigerators. Virtually you can produce data on any electronic device and transfer it to any other electronic device via Internet. This had revolutionized the way we communicate. Fiber optic cables, wires, satellites  Wi-Fi, and device all work in unison. This machinery is able to transfer data generated at one place to a place where its demanded from. 

I recently came across a story in my networking class taught by none other than my friend Manoj, here on a book for ICND Page# 36(or Book page 8). The story is entitled "The Flintstones Network: The First Computer Network?" Where the author tries to explain the way in which the first networks were built. Fred Flintstones is a business owner and asks his daughter Pebbles to build a system that's able to transmit files between computers in his office.

Fred says and I quote 

I want the workers to be able to take their PCs with them and just have to plug the computer into a wall socket so that they can send and receive files from the new office to which they moved. I want this network thing to be like the electrical power thing your boyfriend, Bamm-Bamm, created for us last year—a plug in the wall near every desk, and if you plug in, you are on the network.

Pebbles then goes on to draw inspiration from her Electrical Engineer boyfriend and creates the first computer network. All the hubs, switches and routers thus invented have created a beautiful 7 layered thing which we now call the Internet.

Now, if we can abstract this a little bit, we can draw inspiration from the present Internet and re-imagine the power grid of tomorrow. Like, internet transmits the data, the grid of tomorrow must be able to transmit power. Like data can be generated from any source from mobile to giant machines, power can be generated from any source from tiny solar to giant nuclear power plants and all these could be seamlessly integrated. Like servers store data, batteries could store energy. So much automation and so much control. 

This could well be a flick of my imagination or a inspiration from the Flintstones story. The technical challenges are humongous. Questions like Who will take care of demand-supply mismatch? Data once created can be reproduced/duplicated while power cannot. But, having said that, I firmly believe that something like this can be tried. With the invention of first IP bulb, things are looking to change. If knowledge of history can give you the ability to understand the present, the imagination and vision of tomorrow shall give you the power to invent your tomorrow.

I would like to conclude by saying that, what internet is doing to the data of today, the smart/intelligent/modern/upgraded(insert any adjective) Grid of tomorrow must aspire to do to the power of tomorrow.

[gandhiks]

What does Energy Policy look like?

Policy Documents are, to put in simple terms guidelines for future. The Executive branch of a Government is mainly responsible for drafting such papers. Generally, its done in consultation with academia and experts of the field. 

Coming to Energy policy, there are massive resources over the internet where you can have access to policy documents, comparisons, analysis, Wikipedia pages and so on. (Some cited at the end.)

Its a daunting task for a person through go through policy papers - so here is a list of significant questions that you should seek answers to while reading policy document.

Is it a country, state or a town policy you are looking at?

What Government agencies are involved and what are their powers?

What does it say about generation? Does it subsidize renewables ar tax the conventional? Is it compulsory that some percent of generation must come from renewables by some year?

Who owns T&D in the area?

Does it encourage private business?

When does it expire?

Have the planners kept in mind the long term objectives(25-30 years)?

I assume, the list is longer. But its a starter for those of us willing to look at policy documents objectively. 

Here are some references -

The Gujarat State Wind Power Policy 2009

The Gujarat State Solar Power Policy 2009

The California State Energy Policy Report 2013

Policy Drafting Toolkit - UCD

Guide to writing Policy & Procedure documents - UCSC

Wikipedia pages on Energy policy

District Level policy making Handbook - CEC & CCC.

[gandhiks]

The Attitude of Bhagirath.

Once upon a time in ancient India lived a great King named Bhagirath. He was one of the forefather's of Lord Ram and ardent follower of Lord Shiv. 

As mythology has it - he brought River Ganga to Earth from Heavens. River Ganga, believed sacred in India, provided ample water, energized a civilization and benefitted millions.

That was in ancient times. Thousands of years ago. A story hard to believe  by a scientific brain. But, the rationale behind the story is worth an inspiration. A human, through his perseverance bringing something to the planet that benefitted millions. 

We need Bhagiraths today, technology is the "Ganga" of modern times and there are billions who can potentially benefit with benign use of it. We need them also to bridge a gap. A gap between a possible theoretical awesome world and the practical one.

[gandhiks]

Patient Funding.

In a world where energy companies are struggling to generate impressive returns on investment, I believe a funding model experimented by Kristina Johnson, is worth taking a look at. She is a former undersecretary of Energy in US and here's what she has to argue.

You know entrepreneurship in the energy sector is - well it's critically important and I really encourage it. It's a - it doesn't fit exactly into any previous model, if you will, and in my view. So you can look at sort of a traditional VC model that's been extremely successful in IT and biotech. And in the energy space, it's harder because as I mentioned before it takes a long time to develop some of these technologies and a long time to migrate from one energy use to another. So I think that what we need is a new model which is patient capital. It's actually a model that I'm thinking about exploring with the venture that I have; where you have an opportunity to have a mix of investments and things that will have a near-term pay-off to keep your investors at least happy. Happy investors are a good thing, I'm sure that must be a principle in EPI. At the same time, when you have time to invest and then create the kind of change that you can see happen almost immediately in some of the IT revolution. So I think that's different, I think that really you need capital investment more in the 10 to 15 years, rather than the 5 to 10 years. And so finding sources of capital that are patient I think is really important as one thing. It's also in some sense a very conservative industry. 

[gandhiks]

Why History is Important & where not to get stuck.

I have been deeply fascinated by post-independence Indian Political history, currently I am viewing it through L K Advani's lenses "My Country My Life". It explains so many things in today's landscape about Indian Politics with arguments which are much more sensible than put forward by Indian Media. I guess, knowledge of History, true knowledge of it, helps us explain present.

The place where history fails is in predicting the future, computer-scientist Alan Kay said, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." Millions of mega-bytes of data of the past will not help in predicting the data of future. Using History and only History to create future, saps our creativity. Using old ways to solve today's problems shall only lead to disappointments!

We cannot use old ways of doing business solve problem of energy crisis, nor can we use old form of governance to deliver to expectation of masses.