My breath was already heavy, my strides uneven. It wasn’t meant to be like this. I had been running medium distance—between 5 and 10 kilometres—for years. A tall, muscular man tapped on my shoulder, saying something to the effect of, “chin up, smaller strides.” It was kind, timely, and the right running advice. The run got easier, but only for a fleeting moment before I looked up and across from the road and saw the Thiruvanmiyur MRTS station, and next to it the left turn towards home. Then it started to hurt.

It was 5:30am on a Sunday morning. My bed was a 15-20 minute light walk away. No one would know if I snuck out. To my friends, I could cherrypick any excuse: wasn’t feeling well, hurt myself, overslept etc etc. I could get myself some nice ginger lemon tea in the morning, watch football later.

At this point, I wish I had an inspirational moment to share. Like, the playlist serving up Europe’s The Final Countdown, and when the intro synths hit, I felt like Sylvester Stallone in a boxing gym. Or some generic Kobe Bryant quote about quitters being losers. Nah. All I got was the milestone board for 5 kilometres. There were sixteen agonising kilometres still ahead of me. But that board gave my video game-conditioned brain a slightly more hopeful signal: 25% completed.

I took out my phone. On the night before, while strategising for the race, I broke the distance into four full passes of Shine On You Crazy Diamond (both tracks), with two-minute walks to recuperate in between. Give or take another 5-10 minutes for exhaustion, and I’d still finish within my 2:15 target.

So, huffing and panting, I gave myself one more pass of Shine On. If the run went south, I’d take the next left home. If not, I would be halfway through the race anyway.

Thing is, I kept tricking myself to find an excuse to stay on track because I had trained bloody hard for this race. I hadn’t missed a day of strength or cardio in weeks. I played intense five-a-side football twice a week. In the week leading up, I had abstained from kebabs and chocolates.1 Part of me didn’t want all of that to result to an abandoned race. That would suck.

I then ran the best half hour lap of my life. It wasn’t all that quick; I stuck to my race pace of ~10kmph. But my form, breath, energy levels were exactly where I had wanted them to be. Heart rate was at a nice 140ish. The sky wasn’t dark anymore, but a faint shade of white with little specks of orange. The easy chill of dawn was mixing with sweat to form a balm on the body. And, by the final saxophone solo of the song, I had crossed the 10km milestone.

The rest of the race was not nearly as floaty. It was painful and exhausting, often making me question the life decisions I had taken to end up here, miserable on a weekend morning. But the progress bar kept moving rightwards, so I clung on.

The medal collection booth was inside a resort on the East Coast Road. Next to it, heaving bodies laid strewn across a lawn like breathless grasshoppers. I found myself a spot and sat down. And this sensation of great relief and pride washed over me. Relief because I didn’t have to run again for many hours and days, or maybe ever; pride because I had emerged on the other side of something I didn’t think I was capable of.2 At different points of later runs—most memorably, through a forest incline in Yercaud—remembering that small stretch between the Kasturbha Nagar and Thiruvanmiyur stations helped me push through.

Why am I telling you all this? Because, lately, many have questioned whether that was me posing for camera or truly feeling those feelings. I mean, not me specifically, but people.

This past week, our Twitter and Instagram timelines have been flooded with pictures from Hyrox Bengaluru. I read through a lot of captions, to get a sense of the people attending this monstrosity of a fitness event. Many were first timers, many others pushed for personal bests. Some finished it all alone, some with partners. And, without exception, the expression on their faces at the finishing arc was pure joy and gratification. That beaming smile, with or without a phone camera staring at you, is a 24-carat organic emotion.

Am I happy for them? God, no. I am jealous. For the uninitiated, let me quickly run you through Hyrox’s format. Hyrox is a “hybrid” race, broken up as eight repetitions of 1 km runs and a workout station.

The first workout station is the SkiErg, where you pull two cables for 1000 metres. Then you run a kilometre and walk into the sled push—shoving a weighted sled across a synthetic floor for fifty metres. Another kilometre of running, followed by the sled pull. Another kilometre of running. Then eighty metres of burpee broad jumps—the most diabolical exercise known to humanity, the result of a cocaine addict finishing a push up and saying, “this ain’t enough, brev.” Another kilometre of running, if your legs are still working, that is. Then comes the rowing machine where you have to pull one kilometre. If done well, this is your recovery station. One kilometre of running. Then you lift two kettlebells, 24kgs each, and walk for two hundred metres. You place them down and join the runners for yet another kilometre. By this time, start evaluating your life insurance payouts. Because, awaiting you, at the end of this run, are sandbag lunges. Lunges toast your quadriceps anyway. Imagine lunging with weights after your quads are basically thin strips of lactic acid. Anyhow, endure you will. Beyond the lunges is another kilometre of turf. The final station is called wall balls—appropriately named, a hundred repetitions of squatting with a medicine ball and hurling it at a target a metre or so above your head.

Over the last couple of days, since the conclusion of the event, there’s been a tangential discourse about Hyrox. Some have called it a performative event, done only for Instagram dope.

Firstly, WHO THE FUCK ENDURES THIS FOR INSTAGRAM, MAN?

Okay, deep breath taken, let’s dig. What is performative behaviour? A loose definition would be to perform something for external validation. Yes? For instance, attending a concert with your camera out, just to show people you were there, instead of losing yourself to the music. A truly pathetic way to live, but hey, it’s apparently popular.3

Similarly, AI art is performative because there is no rigour of studying the subject you’re claiming to own. You just want an artist’s tag without the work. An authoritarian head of state claiming to be pro-women when his party used the bill as a fig leaf on a more harmful bill? Performative.

But, book clubs and fitness events are... a good thing? Because—and I say this without partaking in either—even if you’re doing it for the serotonin hit of social validation, there is a net positive impact on your life. Reading and fitness will never be harmful. Sure, if you aren’t careful, you might end up reading self-help nonsense and vomiting your bile on LinkedIn, but you’re still sitting through a full book! Maybe, one day, you’ll choose Amitava Kumar over Ankur Warikoo.

Yesterday, I saw pictures of a lady, clearly fifty-plus, who battled anxiety and social stigma to show up for Hyrox. She reached the finish line running. Someone did those burpees while bound to a wheelchair. There were middle-aged cancer survivors and septuagenarians at the podium. A friend, who now owns two Hyrox medals, has been training at a specialised gym for the last year.

The landing page of Hyrox says it’s for everyone. It is good copy. Truth is—getting to the starting lines of these events takes months of work. That path goes through long-term fitness and nutrition discipline. Rare are the nacho-munchers who can just wake up and nail a long run.4

And boy, does India need some good habits. According to the 2024 WHO Physical Activity Factsheet for India, nearly half of the adult population (49.4%) is physically inactive, failing to meet the global recommended levels of at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity or 75 minutes of vigorous activity per week. Nearly 50% of at-home protein intake in India is derived from cereals, such as rice and wheat. These grains are considered low-quality protein sources due to their incomplete amino acid profiles and poor digestibility.5

A population that moves too little and eats too little of what it should desperately requires fitness to be packaged as fashionable.

Subscribe now

The bandwagon effect is a psychological pattern where people do something simply because others are doing so, often driven by the desire to conform. How often do we do this, with food, travel, and movies? Hell, I watched Gangs of Wasseypur after everyone around me started raving about it. Goa’s entire tourism industry today is funded by the bandwagon effect triggered by Dil Chahta Hai.

Not all of it ends well, of course. I recently ate at a popular pizza place and needed palette cleansers after. Hyrox, too, has its critics, amongst them some learned fitness coaches. But the critique is about the intensity of the exercises, not the idea of the event itself. Most, if not all, will egg you on to develop the strength and then give it a proper shot. Screw abs, the post-run sweat is what it’s about, they all say.

At the half marathon in Chennai, all those years back, someone with a prosthetic leg crossed me. And, I’ll admit, I’m a horrible person and it was a bit of an ego-blow, but it was also truly, very inspiring. I wondered how much he must’ve trained to even get here. I tried finding him after the race for a high-five, but to no avail. Maybe this was his first such run too, maybe not. But, we both had wrecked our Sunday morning to chase a stupid, enormous feeling.

I’ve seen teenage superstars aplenty. I have faint memories of staying up past midnight and watching Michael Owen wiggle past two, maybe three, Argentina defenders in ‘98. Yuvraj Singh against Australia is a memory I’ll never forget. Wayne Rooney then, at 18, setting alight the European Championships. Messi, somewhere between 18 and 19, moving like an eel on the rain-soaked London mud, leaving Chelsea’s hard-bodied defenders slapping thin air.

But, 15? Isn’t that the age for discovering if you’re any good at all? Not everyone can be Ian Thorpe, Michael Phelps, or Simone Biles.

I have heard stories of Tendulkar at 15, disappointed for not making the India squad for a tour to the West Indies—at the time, the scariest trip in cricket. The selectors were convinced about his talent, but wanted to protect him. He was adamant he didn’t need any protection. Mithali Raj was a newspaper headline at 14, for making it to the brink of India’s World Cup squad. But I didn’t watch them bloom.

Last year, when Vaibhav Sooryavanshi hit Shardul Thakur and Aavesh Khan for sixes within ten minutes of starting life under the bright floodlights, I was astonished by his audacity. When he scored that 35-ball century against a bowling lineup of Rashid Khan, Mohammed Siraj, Prasidh Krishna, and Ishant Sharma, I was in a cafe, standing because one couldn’t watch this stuff sitting down.

This February, he hit 175 in 80 balls at the Under-19 World Cup final. Ex-cricketers from England and Australia were cooing on their podcasts. Some wanted him catapulted into the senior team, age be damned. Except, he was still below the age threshold for playing senior cricket for India.

He passed it one day before the first match of IPL 2026. Sooryavanshi’s turn came on Monday evening. His first six was a slog, a full-forced heave, the kind that’s become staple in the early overs of a T20 innings. It travelled far into the ground seating, but we’ve seen enough of that, even from this kid, that it didn’t evoke exclamation. His second six—a ferocious cut off a delivery that most batters leave in Test cricket, block in ODIs, and dab for singles in T20s—had Dale Steyn hooting in the commentary box. Steyn has watched enough cricket to know the wheat from the chaff. Sooryavanshi had played that shot with an arched back, weight going backwards, and yet, the ball flew off his bat into the digital hoardings. He was doing all this to Matt Henry, one of the world’s leading fast bowlers.

52 off 17 would be the only talking point on our social media timelines if that knock came off Virat Kohli’s bat. We’d be talking up his fitness, experience, and hitting range. That knock, by a 15-year-old kid, after all we’ve seen from him over the last 12-15 months, is beginning to say things I’m not sure I’m ready to hear just yet.

I’m scared of having that conversation. But if such a day comes when I’m left with no choice but to acknowledge it, I’ll recall the time when he hit that six off Shardul, when he made Rashid look clueless, and laugh at myself for not having the audacity he did.

🎼 Score

Last week, while trawling through Twitter’s muck, I found this rare lotus floating around. It’s a clip from a movie many of us can recite in our sleep—the dinosaur reveal from Jurassic Park.

I want to talk about John Williams’ background score in this scene, but before that, watch this clip in full. We’ll come back.

Alright, now. What does Steven Spielberg’s camera show us? The first twenty seconds catch Dr. Alan Grant in shock. He stands up in the jeep and takes off his sunglasses, his eyes widening, as Dr. Ellie Grant is reading from a notebook.

Notice how the score is a series of ominous low notes, question marks without a resolving cadence. The shrill, quick clarinet lines behind the cello give the music a layer of subconscious chaos.

Dr. Ellie gets her head turned around the twentieth second, and the strings swell into a wide, chordal line. It’s Williams telling you that whatever these two scientists are seeing, it’s of massive scale.

Next: 00:24 - 00:40. The brachiosaurus is revealed, walking in heavy, earth-moving steps a few metres to the right of the jeep. The background music moves into an emotional and uplifting mood. But, notice how the strings play long, stable lines and there is nothing too loud jumping out just yet. Usually, major reveals like this are prime spots for introducing something heavy or expansive. Maybe a soaring brass melody or some percussion. All things considered, this is a pretty explosive moment.

So, why doesn’t the music go nuts here? Because Jurassic Park isn’t a movie about dinosaurs, but humans navigating their presence amongst themselves. The two doctors are spellbound. This, right here, is the object of their lifelong obsession, something they’ve only traced on paper, something they’ve never even considered seeing alive, walking in front of them. They are gasping, unable to find words. Williams’ score moves with them.

Next: 00:40 - 00:50. “It’s... it’s a dinosaur.” Dr. Alan finally finds his voice, and you hear the horns slide in with the first pass of the unforgettable melody. We’re here and it’s glorious.

Dr. Malcolm offers his sagely commentary from the jeep: “You did it, you crazy son of a bitch, you did it!” The melody plays once more, the harmony is building, but still in steps instead of leaps. And then, when Dr. Grant starts talking, in rushed words scrambling to come out of his mouth, you hear the melody soaring, every repeat richer and higher. The tempo goes up a notch; the violins are playing at a high pitch, with flutes contouring their trembling voice.

The crescendo lands with the brachiosaurus’ front feet. After a few mellow seconds, the music swells again when Dr. Hammond confirms that they also have a T-Rex in their compound.

The next page-turn comes when Dr. Grant looks to his left and sees a herd of dinosaurs walking through a pond. This frame is the high point of the movie, and, to be honest, the entire Jurassic Park franchise. The score also reaches its highest pitch, the entire soprano and tenor section of the orchestra—the high instruments—playing the melody line and its closest harmony. If the score was an opera group, this would be the moment where the lead singer truly lets fly.

Here’s a trivia: John Williams won the Oscar for the Best Background Score in 1993. But he won it for Schindler’s List. He wasn’t even nominated for Jurassic Park. 🤷

🔖 Bookmarks

Some things that caught my eye over the past week. And a podcast episode.

• Imagine growing up as a kid of revolutionary parents who declared a war against the government. Imagine spending your childhood constantly on the run, having your identity changed, your friends left behind. Zayd Ahers Dohrn was born “underground”, and grew up underground. Here’s his story.

• Anand Vasu speaks to Mohammad Kheir—co-founder of the Alsama Project, which provides education to refugees in West Asia. Within the project exists a cricket programme with more than 800 players and 30 coaches.

• Kenneth Ho, a Hong Kong-based pilot, has a Pokemon card collection worth more than $1.5 million. That collection is now an investment he’s looking forward to encash.

• Here’s one for the writing nerds. has been re-reading and discussing VS Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival on A Public Space. The newsletters focus on Naipaul’s prose, style, and storytelling.

Finally, I joined the folks at BhaJaPod for an episode last week. We discussed scientific temperament, some famous podcasts and famous hosts, and the abyss intellectual discourse in India finds itself in.

Subscribe now

That’s all from this edition of The Jukebox. See you soon!

This was J’s response to me introducing myself the first time I met him. We were at a dimly-lit house party in South Delhi. Punjabi pop remixed with hip-hop beats played through bass amplifiers that only Delhi dudes truly like or endure. A bartender had been hired to serve alcohol from behind a makeshift booth.

J, at the time, was dating my very close friend, S. And S, sweetheart that she is, had spoken about all her friends to J. But, his father?

“He just wrapped up an ultra marathon in the Nilgiri hills, I think Yercaud.”

“Oh, how cool!”

“Yeah, that was his recovery run after the Antarctica Ice Marathon.”

“...”

“...”

“...what?”

And that was my evening done. Every other conversation through that party wafted past me without touch because I couldn’t get over those words.

At the time, I was training for the Ladakh Half Marathon. Without any hyperbole, I considered it amongst the coolest and more physically challenging locations to run in. To register, one had to show proof of a recent nationally-recognised half marathon finished within three hours.

I knew tougher runs existed, of course. I had read about Mauro Prosperi getting lost in the Sahara for nine and a half days. Similarly, I knew about the Great Wall of China run and the Badwater 135 through the appropriately-named Death Valley. I had not, even while slingshotting my imagination to come up with unlikely routes, thought of a sequence of words with Antarctica and marathon near each other.

That night, tipsy from a few too many cocktails and the unavoidable, party-ending shot of vodka, I flipped open my laptop and began looking. And I couldn’t take my eyes off.

On a later conversation with J, I pressed him for his father’s notes about the race. Amongst the many other things he described, much of it a story of visually acclimatising to the continent, I remember, “the lungs freeze when you walk. You’re inhaling ice.” I could feel my gut just cramping. It was an insane thing to even attempt, especially for someone who grew up in the temperate climate of Delhi and Bombay. Then I found out that he had run marathons in every continent bar one. Some people are just wired differently, I guess.

In the last week, triggered by this story about Nathan Martin’s incredible finish at the Los Angeles Marathon, I went back to Google Images for pictures from wild marathons. There are three that came to mind, immediately, for their unique physical challenges.

Marathon des Sables Legendary

A 250 kilometre run through the Sahara desert, where competitors have to carry their entire kit from start to end. This year’s race—the 40th edition of the event—starts next week.

Silk Route Ultra

A 122km run passing through a section of the erstwhile Silk Route. The run begins in Kyagar Village in Ladakh’s Nubra Valley, touches Khardung La—one the highest motorable roads in the world—and finishes at the Leh Market, where you can either pass out or treat yourself to some life-affirming hibiscus tea.

Marathon du Médoc

A full length marathon (42.2 kms) through France’s Bordeaux region. The point isn’t the run, though. It’s the 30+ vineyards the route passes through, and the cheese tasting stations en route. If you’re able to finish a marathon with all that in your body, you deserve a thick medal. One author called it the world’s longest, booziest race.

🥬 Leafy Edibles

Taking a hard left from wine and cheese, Works In Progress has an essay about the history, journey, and influence of brassica oleracea, or the wild cabbage. The story is quite amazing. Most vegetables evolve with time, into versions that retain many characteristics from their ancestors. Not this guy.

The secret to their evolution is in their genomic structure. “Ancient wild cabbages underwent a process called polyploidy. Humans are diploid, meaning that we usually have two copies of each of our 23 chromosomes. Many cabbage varieties are triploid or even more complex.”

The Works in Progress Newsletter

How an unappetizing shrub became dozens of different vegetables

Alex Wakeman explains how centuries of selective breeding turned a single wild weed into everything from broccoli to Brussels sprouts…

Read more

2 months ago · 104 likes · 6 comments · Works in Progress

This essay links to another about the history of the modern tomato, which took me to this report: CRISPR builds a big tomato that’s actually sweet.

“Editing techniques that insert foreign DNA have also been developed further, notably leading to the creation of a purple tomato containing snapdragon flower DNA. The fruit contains three times as many antioxidants as the typical tomato..”

Wild things are happening in food science, while we sip our whey protein-infused matcha.

🚇 Underground Network

Somewhere deep within Reddit, I found this absolutely insane visualisation of the underground fungal network between 67 trees.

❄️ Winter Variables

If you’re born in Delhi or Gurgaon, you’re 31 times more likely than anyone else to spend your life’s savings on a Mahindra Thar. I made that up. But, you won’t be surprised if the actual number is somewhere near that mark. Where you’re born has a disproportionate influence on your chance at success, especially if we’re talking winter olympics.

🪐 The Planets

Last Sunday, during my biweekly trip to Church Street’s bookstores, I walked upstairs from Bookworm’s sprawling ground floor to The Antiquarian—their wooden, air-conditioned room for rare classics and their original, sometimes signed, editions. There I found a vinyl of Gustav Holst’s The Planets.

The Planets is a seven-track orchestral suite composed somewhere in the early 1900s. Each planet is given character and shades, almost humanised, and then turned into its own track. The orchestration wasn’t technically novel, but the usage of traditional instruments was.

In the first movement of Mars, you’ll hear a clicky, wooden sound hovering above the beating timpani and staccato strings. That’s two cellos, played col legno—the technique of hitting the strings with the wooden stick instead of gently caressed with the hair.

Oh, and, once you’re done with the first couple of minutes of Mars, listen closely to the background rhythm in Star Wars’ famous theme Imperial March.

This is, of course, not a shade on John Williams. He’s a genius. You’ll not find too many composers from his time who weren’t influenced by Holst or Wagner. For aspiring music composers, especially those with an interest in classical music, The Planets has always been mandatory study material. No other collection of music illustrates the foundational principles of good orchestration so thoroughly.

That’s all from this edition of The Jukebox. See you soon!

Subscribe now

Brig. Madan Lal Kheterpal opens his wallet at a dinner table in Lahore. He is eighty years old and his fingers move slowly across a monochrome photograph. He pauses at the two boys in the frame, his children. One of them is fifty; the other, he says, his voice breaking, will always be 21.

The man sitting across from him is Brig. Jaan Mohammed Nisar, retired commander, current chief in the Pakistani Army intelligence, and younger to Kheterpal by a few decades. Nisar had pulled many strings to arrange Kheterpal’s visit to his home, a move that befuddled his family and bosses both. The year is 2001, the smoke from Kargil still circles the air, and yet, Nisar takes down pictures hung on his drawing room wall and replaces them with a large framed photograph of a young Indian soldier and several cricket posters.

Ikkis is, in some ways, a movie about war and Bollywood loves the sound of that. Roughly a third of the top ten highest grossing Hindi films from the last decade have a running theme of armed conflict. Most times, it is national defence; other times, communal pride.

But all war movies here follow a similar emotional brief—stir the blood, swell the chest, send the audience into the parking lot feeling victorious. India’s most recent mega hit, already preparing for its second instalment, is a death metal album of a film that leaves your ears aching by the time it ends. Dhurandhar was 2025’s biggest Bollywood movie. The second biggest was Chhava—a story about the Sambhaji Maharaj defending the Maratha Empire against Aurangzeb’s invading, murderous Mughals. Its theatre run left many broken screens and torn seats across the country, such was the intensity of angst it stoked amongst a passionate audience.

If the theory about cinema reflecting a nation’s mood holds any truth, there is now an evident pleasure India takes in violence. At a broader level, one saw the proof of this bloodlust during India’s most recent armed conflict—Operation Sindoor. News anchors called rumoured strikes on Karachi in the breathless cadence of cricket commentary; social media was alight and frothing with the prospect of dead Pakistanis. For most of India today, war is a Netflix show.

At a micro level, the proof is on every street. Consider three events from just this month alone: Tarun Kumar, a 26-year-old from Uttam Nagar in Delhi, was beaten to death on Holi because a water balloon fell from his balcony onto a woman from a higher social community. A week or so back, during the Men’s T20 World Cup final, a speech-impaired kid in Bihar was killed because he mistakenly cheered for the wrong wicket. At the time of publication of this essay, television channels are carrying interviews of Uttam Nagar residents threatening to play Blood Holi on the day of Eid.

Into this India came a film in which an eighty-year-old Indian veteran sits in the home of a Pakistani intelligence officer and says, on the first night of his visit, when asked why he didn’t bring his family: “You too are my family.”

His son, 2nd Lt. Arun Kheterpal, 17th Poona Horse, is the central character of this film. Arun is an energetic cadet airdropped to the Battle of Basantar during the 1971 War. Throughout the first act, we see Arun’s sparkling eyes and boyish grin every time he’s on duty. His face lights up when he stands in front of the Centurion tank, drinking in the prospect of going into battle seated inside it. Later, his dejection when the war reaches ceasefire, robbing him of the chance for more rides in that tank, more territory conquered. And by the end, when he surges forward for one last skirmish, we see the boy becoming a soldier as Pakistani tanks close around him in a circle. Out goes the babyface, and in comes the clenched jaw, dirt marks on his face, and the percussion from automatic machine guns.

As much as Ikkis is Arun’s story, it’s also the story of his father seeking closure from losing a son who had his entire life in front of him, and whose profession, he knows only too well, pushed him inside that tank. And it is the story of the man across the dinner table, who has spent years carrying the thing he needs to tell, the entire film a journey of him finding the nerve to say it.

When was the last time you saw a Bollywood war movie that knew the gravity of war?

In 1997, on the fiftieth anniversary of Indian independence, JP Dutta released Border. The film highlights a different strand of the 1971 War, zooming in on the Battle of Longewala, in which 120 Indian soldiers held off a Pakistani tank regiment rolling through the Rajasthan desert at night. The film never leaves the frontline, from beginning to end valourising the Indian armed forces, but while acknowledging a war’s toll on the soldiers and their people.

Dharamvir Singh is the son of a martyred soldier. His mother lost her eyesight from the shock of losing her husband. When Dharamvir leaves his village for the front, he leaves behind a partner, waiting for a life together. Bhairon Singh walks away from his newly wed wife on the morning after their wedding night. Mathura Das leaves to tend to his cancer-stricken wife, then turns around midway and comes back to the regiment.

Dharamvir, Bhairon, and Mathura all die that night. As do many, many others, across both sides of the border. Loss is the single, immutable truth of all wars.

Border ends twice. Once when the Indian MiG jets rain bombs on the Pakistani tanks, forcing their regiment to retreat and effectively winning India the Battle of Longewala. And once, after all is done, after the sound is muted, when the camera pans wide and you see lifeless bodies strewn across the desert sands. The song playing in that scene, ‘Mere Dushman, Mere Bhai, Mere Hamsaaye’—translating to my enemy, my brother, my shadow—underlines what the movie has been trying to say all along.

Francois Truffaut once said there was no such thing as an anti-war film. The camera makes a spectacle of what it shows, he argued. You can’t film a battle and make it ugly enough that someone in the audience won’t find it thrilling. Spielberg disagreed. Every good war movie, he said, is an anti-war movie.

Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan begins and ends with death. The sea turning red at the Omaha Beach from young men chopped down before we can see their faces; then, Captain Miller slumped against a wall, bleeding out, asking the boy he saved to earn the life. Everything between those two frames shows you the cost of combat. The more you watch the movie, the more you realise that Normandy is the setting for that story, not the story itself.

About an hour into Ikkis, as Brig. Kheterpal is regaling Brig. Nisaar’s family with stories, he falls quiet and arrives at the question the film is written around: “I don’t know what is true—the friendships and warmth I have just experienced, the shared culture I’m familiar with, or the bullets and shrapnel flying across borders?” At the end of that sequence, when Brig. Nisaar uses the word “dushman” (enemy) to refer to opposition, Brig. Kheterpal intercepts with, “What enemy?”

The relationship between the two brigadiers forms the moral spine of the story, of humanity holding its ground against nation-state conflict.

There is a scene near the end of Border where Maj. Kuldip Singh Chandpuri tends to an injured Pakistani soldier, asks him about his family back home, gives him water, and tells him he will be treated like a soldier. It is a small scene, almost throwaway, and it would be radical if it were to be shot today—the suggestion that the man on the other side of the gun is not a concept but a person.

Ikkis reaches its emotional crescendo with its penultimate sequence. Brig. Nisaar takes Brig. Kheterpal to the spot where his son breathed his last, and reveals, looking into his eyes, that he fired the shell that killed Arun. There are no tears, no soaring monologues, just silence. Then, the 80-year-old turns to his younger colleague, a calm smile settling on his face, and says, “The wounds of war never heal. But one day, someone digs up old wounds again, and we go back to the start. Again, and again, and again. That’s how it is, and that’s how it will continue to be. No one knows for how long. It will stop when we stop it.”

As the final credits roll on Ikkis, we are given photographs and text about the Battle of Basantar and the 1971 War. The makers leave us with one number—the casualties of 1971. But, instead of filtering for the familiar crest, their number includes casualties from both sides of the border.

Subscribe now

At the R Premadasa Stadium in Colombo, I met Nuwan. He wore a mid-2000s Sri Lanka jersey, no name on the back, heat-printed logos fraying from two decades of washing. Nuwan saw my India shirt and immediately reminded me about the 1997 Test match, at the ground where we stood, when Sri Lanka scored 952 runs in one inning. Straight for the jugular. He followed that with a hearty laugh and a tap on my shoulders. The tap landed a bit heavy. Nuwan was short and portly, but the jersey fit him snugly, lining the ridge of his shoulders down to the curve of his side deltoids. His biceps creased the sleeve. There was something very past-athlete about him.

He used to be a club cricketer, but not much good by his own words. He played a few seasons as a floating middle-order bat, shepherding the tempo like his great hero Arjuna Ranatunga. Time caught up with him. His lack of explosive instincts was compounded by a rickety knee, and soon, he was getting in the lineup only thanks to charity.

These days, Nuwan spends half his year in Colombo and half at home in Negombo, which he was adamant I visit next time. He had a specific month in mind too: March.

Why March? Sri Lanka rarely hosts cricket in March, so if he didn’t mean the cricket season of July-August, surely winter was the best time in an island country? “No, come for the Blues derby. You know what it is?”

I did, not from any personal familiarity, but from text—Shehan Karunatilaka’s Chinaman and the many essays about Sri Lankan cricket I’ve read over the years.

The Derby is the annual cricket match between Royal College and St. Thomas College in Colombo. If you’re a talented young cricketer in Sri Lanka, there’s a high chance you’ll play this game. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, turn up every year, giving it the gravitas of an international contest. At times, the noise here is greater than what you might expect at a Test match. The Blues rivalry goes back more than 100 years, played through civil wars and pandemics. Nothing comes in its way.

Pratyush Sinha from Cricbuzz has written a wonderful essay on Ramesh Abeywickrama, the current Co-Chairman of the Royal-Thomian Joint Match Organising Committee.

Here’s a small excerpt to give you a hint of the significance of this game.

“It was a bubble before a bubble,” he says of the years from 2007 to 2009, as Sri Lanka’s decades-long civil war reached its final and most violent phase. “People know the SSC as this historic cricket ground. But those three years, we had anti-aircraft guns inside the premises. Metal gates everywhere. Armed personnel. You could see rifles. It wasn’t just cricket.”

Security was tightened further because the families of the President and Prime Minister were often in attendance at the Big Match. Spectators were ferried in buses arranged by the organisers, each one checked before anyone boarded. “A bomb can explode in the bus too, right?” Abeywickrama says. “So we had to think of everything.”

School rivalries can be intense. For thirteen and fourteen-year-olds they are the realest thing in the world, their replica of what the famous ones do on television. I remember walking into elocution and debate contests sizing up my opponents, stretching my arms and legs as I waited in the gallery, as if I was going to finish my three-minute sermon on planting trees and immediately hit them with a two-footed tackle. With that information, do the math on the kilojoules of power I—to be honest, all of us—emitted before inter-house or school matches. It was madness.

In London, home of the Tradition Is Gospel™ cult, kids from Eton and Harrow have been playing an annual cricket match at Lord’s for nearly 220 years. This one year, a streaming platform broadcast the whole match. The playing area was substantially smaller than an international game—the boundary ropes were pulled in and the pitch was laid out on a narrow strip at a couple of long hops’ distance from the stands. One bloke bowled a searing yorker, dismantling the stumps, and his shrill celebration was the only audible sound through the broadcast. The camera panned wide to show a pale and blank Lord’s, just the way it would look on a winter morning when cricket shifts eastwards.

A few hours after this is published, I’ll be on a flight to Mumbai. The cricket match I am going for will not involve any school kids, but hopefully, over the following couple of days, I can squeeze out a morning at Shivaji Park or Azad Maidan, and watch cricket consume the youth of an entire city.

The Giles Shield and Harris Shield finals have also been on my bucket list. I first read about them in a Sachin Tendulkar biography, sometime in the ‘90s. School cricket is the first chapter in Tendulkar’s myth. Scour through a library in Mumbai, and you’ll find newspaper reports of a skinny boy from Sharadashram Vidyamandir lighting up Giles and Harris Shield games.

In the 1988 Harris Shield semifinal, Tendulkar took strike alongside Vinod Kambli. Tendulkar was fifteen; Kambli, sixteen. 664 runs later, their names had been inscribed into the Guinness Book of World Records.

Think of any Mumbai cricketer, and he would’ve played these matches. Scouts from across the city sit in canopied tents. Local reporters beeline near the boundary ropes, hoping to catch the first scent of the next Mumbai or India cricketer.

School cricket in Mumbai—and evidently, Sri Lanka—is a great reminder of why this sport comes to us with our DNA. And why, like some writers have observed, cricket in the subcontinent is neither sport nor religion, it’s a condition.

📖 Reading List

• A New Yorker essay on why some people are able to function on very little sleep. As someone who doesn’t sleep all that well—between five and seven hours every night—this was fascinating. Of course, the author doesn’t advocate less sleep, but finds a few people who sleep four-ish hours every night, and their alertness is not affected at all.

• 21-year-old Texan high jumper Osawese Agbonkonkon is currently writing his second science fiction book. The book is part of a series called “Psychic Suit”, where characters are blessed with psychic powers, and as they navigate life, find themselves at forked roads in the moral wood.

• This report on DNS censorship in India. The data is filtered by internet service providers and websites. You’ll be surprised by some of the names.

• This essay. Deepa Anappara navigates the death of her sister, and imminent divorce, and sets off for the Himalayas.

• It’s been a bleak period for the world, not least India. Here’s a screenshot from a terribly disturbing event in Rajouri, the details of which are too gory to be explained.

  

🎵 Earworm

A full concert by the big beautiful bald head that was responsible for the background score of Arrival.

Subscribe now

That’s all from this edition of The Jukebox. See you soon!

This week, let’s start with a football match.

First, the set up. A masked man in a canary yellow shirt started dribbling with a football from his own goal-line. There was no goalkeeper behind him, no forward to pass the ball to. Beneath his shirt, jet black leggings extended into his boots; above, a balaclava that concealed everything but his eyes. He had the physique of a footballer and the vibe of a DC Comics villain.

The turf was a shade of artificial green, clearly machine-made, suited for television lighting, no grass or earth beneath it. The playing area was a rectangle, like football pitches go, but about one-quarter the size of an actual pitch. Just behind the sidelines, photographers stood with wildlife lenses and iPhones. Beyond them, tucked in at a small pass’ distance, the crowd, most of them with upright hands holding their phones.

Our man dribbled about eight yards, and shot towards the opposite goal. The ball skimmed the inside of the left post and nestled into the bottom corner. The shot of a professional. On the other side stood a less athletic man in a different kit. He picked the ball from his net, dribbled, and took a wild swing of his right foot. That shot ended twenty rows into the seating area.

Masked Man one, Joe nil.

This “match” happened on November 3rd, 2025, at the Copper Box Arena in East London. The masked man in yellow was The Mystery Player for a team called NDL FC in Season 2, Matchday 2 of Baller League UK.

What is Baller League?

Baller League is a celebrity franchise competition. Conceived in Germany, its first matches were live-streamed from a repurposed aeroplane hangar in Cologne. The craze has since spread like wildfire to UK and, soon, Miami.

Every match is played six-a-side on a futsal-sized court, fifteen minutes per half. Then, in the final three minutes of each half, the rules are altered according to a spinwheel. Goalkeepers may suddenly be forbidden from using their hands; the match may shrink to three-a-side; or a long-range strike may count double. The rulebook is intentionally designed for content.

Felix Starck, the league’s founder and chief executive, is a filmmaker and entrepreneur who once ran a production company in Mallorca. He created Baller League as an answer to the question: what if audiences want something other than what we’ve been selling them?

“Sport is no longer as easy as just saying ‘look, we’re here now, come and watch us,’” said Starck here. “That’s just not how sport works any more.”

The teams are managed by YouTubers, TV celebrities, and retired footballers trying their hand at new content. In the UK, the league president is KSI—a man who first became famous for playing FIFA on camera and has since become a boxer, a musician, and a seller of energy drinks. When the league launches in Miami in early 2026, its team owners will include Ronaldinho, Usain Bolt, Odell Beckham Jr, and iShowSpeed—a 21-year-old streamer with more YouTube subscribers than Yanni, Celine Dion, and Adele put together.

Matches are streamed for free on Twitch and YouTube. The first season drew north of three million spectators per matchday.

Funds

While Starck is the biggest shareholder, other co-founders include Mats Hummels and Lukas Podolski—former Germany internationals and World Cup winners. Having this kind of weight helps with pulling in names and funds.

Baller League raised a seed round of €7.6 million in the summer of 2024. Last year, they raised €23 million for the Series A round. They’re now expanding in USA and the Middle East. Dedicated arenas are in the works.

Narrative

One decision that strikes me as both brave and telling was their pitch to streaming platforms instead of TV. With the kind of names they have on their roster, it would’ve been fairly easy to aim for a prime time slot. Instead, they’ve positioned themselves as a different product from football—think FIFA Street vs FIFA in the video game market. It’s a shrewd call. YouTube and Twitch has enough of an engaged, burgeoning audience that traditional media doesn’t always reach.

Tennis tried something like this, about a decade back, with International Premier Tennis League (IPTL). Weird teams, weirder rules. Twice, the touring caravan stopped over at Delhi. The second time, the organisers managed to get Roger Federer play Rafael Nadal in a singles match. Think of it. The rivlary of 21st century tennis, in the middle of New Delhi, inside an indoor stadium with no history of hosting tennis of this scale, in front of a crowd that kept shouting, “Chak de fatte, Roger!” Of course I was there.

But, I digress. IPTL shut down after three seasons.

The most popular sports don’t like change. Even today, more than two decades after its inception, nearly eighteen years after all doubts about its potential were blown to smithereens by the bat of Brendon McCullum, you’ll hear ex-cricketers and commentators insulting T20 cricket. In the same way that many people in the 1970s called ODI cricket an obscene indulgence.

T20 is, in fact, one of the smartest structural innovations in popular sport in a generation. No other sport has been brave enough to mess with its conventions so brazenly. That the format eventually attracted a capitalist appetite so ferocious that it now threatens to devour the entire calendar is a different conversation. The format itself is dramatic, viewer friendly, and democratises an otherwise very, very complex sport.

I suspect Baller League will attract some of that spit. The money and attention within it will draw more athletes, which will bring more spotlight and louder criticism. But as long as the product maintains its distance from the real thing—which, I feel, there is a good chance of, given the density of ex-footballers in management and leadership positions—football will be fine.

It will, however, give us a hint about people’s appetite for something different, something a lot more fun and chaotic without the dense overheads of tradition and culture.

🥷 Theft

The India AI Impact Summit, held last week at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi, was meant to announce the country’s arrival as a serious player in artificial intelligence. Over twenty heads of state flew down to the capital. Startups and founders from across India scrambled for floor space inside the main hall.

Young, small-sized teams were working on problems between predicting cardiac arrest to wearables that transcribe offline conversations. By all accounts, it was a creditable show of Indian enterprise.

But, on Day 2, we got the belle of the ball: a robot dog.

You probably know how the rest of the movie went. Its name was Orion. Galgotias University, a private institution based in Uttar Pradesh, presented it as their own creation. India’s IT Minister, Ashwini Vaishnaw, a keen social media user, shared the footage on social media, praising “Bharat’s sovereign models.”

It took mere hours for the veil to fall. Orion was actually Unitree Go2—a commercial Chinese product, available online for roughly $2000. Attention brought embarrassment, which, in turn, brought television interviews and shame. By the following afternoon, the ministry had cut power to the Galgotias stall and asked the university to leave. Vaishnaw deleted his tweet.

The rest of the fiasco followed an all-too-familiar plot—Indian entity takes a blow to its pride, tries to justify theft, then throws the easiest target under the bus, and eventually, forcibly, apologises.

But Galgotia, credit to their defiance, did not stop there. They have gone on a disaster management overdrive. First came the full page ads, on the day after leaving the summit. Then came the reels. And then, the coup de grace—a full, unironic, rap song by their student community.

Two things about this spectacle are especially rich. The first is Galgotias’ defence that the act of passing off a Chinese product as their own was, in some sense, an exercise in student empowerment and innovation. Second, someone got angry because someone else stole their work and repurposed it without credit. This happened at an AI summit. Incredible stuff.

Lastly, Chinese companies are dealing with an internal theft epidemic themselves.

A few months back, I was made aware—completely against my will—of a kind of doll called Labubu. I admire the writer of that article deeply, so I read through it, and immediately felt the transition to uncledom.

This BBC report explains that the name Labubu means nothing. It just belongs to a character in “The Monsters” toy series created by Hong Kong-born artist Kasing Lung.

Lung collaborated with Chinese toy company Pop Mart in 2019. And, boom! Labubu grew from niche toy to a global fixation. Rihanna was photographed carrying one, as was Dua Lipa. At Wimbledon last year, Urvashi Rautela showed up to the Centre Court with four of them.

Pop Mart’s current valuation is around $40  billion. And they have a problem. Because, according to this recent Economist article, factories around the country are churning out knock-offs known as “Lafufus”.

Worse still, there are cheaper variants called “Lagogo,” “Lababa,” and—I promise I’m not making this up—“Lapoopoo”.

One toy manufacturer in Dongguan, Guangdong, told CNN that at peak demand in July, it sold 150,000 to 160,000 fake Labubu toys, pulling in profits of up to 2 million yuan ($278,000). Last year, Chinese courts prosecuted 21,404 people for producing and selling counterfeit and substandard goods.

Theft and forgery, of course, have a history that predates Jesus Christ himself. There are records of bronze and silver theft in Egypt in 1129 BCE. It’s the oldest recurring pattern in collective human behaviour—when something accrues high value, someone will try to make it their own.

Theft of intellectual property is quite on-brand for 2026. An evolving pattern in this AI tsunami is the obsession with performance instead of craft. It is symbolised best, perhaps, by the mainstreaming of AI art. Last year, the Mumbai AI Film Festival drew representatives from Netflix India, Google, and many of India’s biggest film production houses. Many of the festival’s champions argued that AI makes filmmaking accessible; its detractors—among them Guillermo del Toro, who told NPR he’d “rather die” than use AI—were cast as gatekeepers. Cannes now has a category for AI films. BAFTAs an Oscars will inevitably follow.

That stayed on my mind a lot longer than the Galgotias nonsense.

AI music, similarly, is proliferating across YouTube and Spotify. Digital media platforms are willingly pushing AI prose, those endless stacks of, “this wasn’t hunger, but the quiet arithmetic of the intestines.” No sentence means anything.

Merriam-Webster’s 2025 Word of The Year was ‘slop’—defined as digital content of low quality, produced in quantity by means of artificial intelligence. Brian Phillips wrote an essay on this phenomenon, but these lines are worth highlighting and saving.

“The idea of integrity is antithetical to slop. So is the idea that purpose, need, or ambition can exist outside the realms of power and money. The worldview that produces slop is one in which only a sucker would make something for the love of making it. Slop is a radical extension of both the corporate cost-cutting impulse and the impulse in media and entertainment to chase the lowest common denominator. It encodes the belief that no one needs more, no one wants better, speed and convenience are all that matter, truth and beauty are fake.”

🌸 Bloom

Lastly, I want to speak about flowers.

Across from my window, there are three large trees. The one right in front is a rain tree (albizia saman). It’s a beautiful, wide, leafy thing. The width of its umbrella-like canopy takes up mine and the next building’s balcony. V-shaped nested branches curve outwards from a trunk that is formidable but not intimidatingly wide.

Next to it are two pink trumpet (tabebuia rosea) trees, currently in partial bloom. Every morning, I step out with a cup of coffee to check out the many strands of pink sprawled on a bed of green. I’ve tried clicking pictures, but I neither have the photography skills nor the camera to do the sight any justice.

Bangalore is currently in pink trumpet season. Of course, this being Bangalore, someone found coordinate data and geotagged every pink trumpet tree in the city.

Someone else has built a tracker, where you can filter trees by their state of bloom. Oh, the joy of seeing technology used well.

Subscribe now

On the theme of picking things from other markets and calling it your own, let’s play a small quiz. In 1973, two of India’s most accomplished singers gave their voices to a song—we’ll call it X—in a Bollywood movie. Composed by another luminary, that beautiful song is a family evening and karaoke hit till date.

However, four years prior, Dutch-Bulgarian singer Bojoura had released this track below. Listen to it, identify X, and let me know in the comments. :)

That’s all from this edition. See you in the next one!

Lucy might be the quietest person I know. She speaks at a volume that requires you to lean in, avoids eye contact, and in any group larger than, say, three, she folds into herself. Ordering dinner with Lucy is a five-round negotiation in which she concedes nothing, not even a preference for rice over roti.

A couple of weeks back, I was at Lucy’s with three of our common friends, when she hit me with a diss. A vicious, piercing gaali built with perfect composition—a family member, a metal object, and an action that shouldn’t involve either of those two. Many of my batchmates from Delhi NCR’s premier educational institution would be proud. I hadn’t heard anything like this in the last decade that I’ve spent in southern India. And out of nowhere, this church-going Goan child, who’s barely ever said ‘fuck’, had fired a slingshot from five yards. There was, of course, silence in the room.

I hadn’t done much wrong apart from denying her a trade. We had been playing a board game for nearly three hours, Lucy was close to winning, and I was stalling—hoping that if the game stretched long enough, frustration would curdle into bad decisions, and I’d wiggle something out of the mess. Neither of us won, which probably warranted a second hit, but she let that go.

Monopoly and UNO can make people snap, but if you want to see real, deep, tectonic rage, get four people around a board of Catan.

📜 The Rules

For the uninitiated, a quick run-through of Catan’s rules.

The game starts with four settlers on an uninhabited island, and the goal is to build the most successful colony. The island is 19 hexagonal tiles, each producing a resource—forests give wood, hills give brick, mountains give ore, fields give grain, pastures give wool. For your turn, you throw two six-sided dice. The sum determines which tiles are in play.

And this is where Catan’s design becomes interesting: because the resources are unevenly distributed, no one can build anything alone. You have to trade. The table is an unregulated marketplace and players barter freely with each other.

The value of a resource is entirely dependent on the table’s current scarcity. In the early rounds, wood and brick are priceless currencies of expansion; by the late game, they are worthless, replaced by the hunger for ore and grain to upgrade cities.

So, effectively, your ability to anticipate and beat hoarding trends determines how well you go in the game.

There, too, is a potential banana peel. Looming over a board’s economy is the “Robber,” a black token activated whenever a ‘7’ is rolled—statistically the most probable outcome. When the Robber strikes, production halts on the blockaded tile, and any player hoarding more than seven cards must discard half their hand. The rich must pay higher taxes and all that.

📈 The Numbers

I first played Catan back in 2015. We had to look up the rules on the internet—most of us hadn’t even heard of this game. It had obviously grown since. During the pandemic, apps and websites propped up where players could log in and play a full game, trade et al included. I didn’t know Catan had become an industry behemoth.

As of 2024, Catan had sold over 40 million units worldwide and been translated into more than 40 languages. Three decades after a German dental technician named Klaus Teuber first designed it in his basement, Catan is one of the most popular board games in the world, only trailing Monopoly amongst the best sellers.

In 2024 alone, Catan sold 5.4 million units, generating approximately $162 million in revenue. It has even spawned video game adaptations and a world championship.

According to this report, the global board games market is now valued at somewhere around $13 billion. That is significantly more than the entire box office collection in USA in 2024. Habsro Inc. and Mattel Inc.—names you have read behind Monopoly and UNO boxes, repsectively—own the largest share of the market. And they’re perpetually expanding their reach. Monopoly now has officially licensed variants like Monopoly: Pokemon Edition and Monopoly: Game of Thrones.

Then there is the indie market. In 2024, Kickstarter board game projects raised $185.4 million, while Gamefound generated another $62.7 million. These are numbers of a growing, commercially muscular industry.

All of this is music to my ears. I love board games. I remember a period in Delhi, when we’d gather every weekend at my friend’s for a night of Ludo, UNO, and Monopoly. Most weekends involved at least a few hours around a game board, which meant carrying a stack of boxes.

Then, sometime in 2016, I stepped into a tiny coffee shop in Chennai to find one shelf with Monopoly, Scrabble, and Risk boxes. That shop, sandwiched between gigantic fast food restaurants overlooking the Besant Nagar Beach and the Bay of Bengal, was a minor discovery.

🛖 The Cafés

Now, board game cafés have mushroomed across India’s metros—three within ten kilometres of where I live in Bangalore, about a dozen scattered across Chennai, and a bunch in Delhi and Mumbai, each part of a buzzing “scene.” You’d be surprised to see the crowd—it’s not just us geriatric millennials. Gen-Z, in fact, leads the market at 38% of the player base.

This tracks. A few months ago, while reporting a piece on how matcha was having its black coffee moment, I spoke with the founder of a well-known coffee company. Both of us were convinced that this vile, grassy drink was more than just a fad. Gen-Z, he told me, doesn’t drink the way millennials or boomers did. Often, they don’t even want alcohol. Matcha has managed to catch their imagination—both as this fashionable product and as an alternative beverage, the kind of which India has never really tasted before.

It’s an evolving pattern, of the generation we sometimes box as too shallow actively breaking out of stereotypes. The same demographic that floods Instagram with dance reels and elaborate #GRWM exhibitions is also developing a fatigue of the phone screen.

Board games are benefitting from this. The tactile nature of the components—the weight of a poker chip, the snap of a card, the thud of dice—offers a sensory richness smooth glass screens just cannot. The industry has responded by doubling down on table presence. Modern games feature high-quality miniatures, hand-drawn cards, and multi-layered player boards. An official variant of Monopoly comes with credit cards and an electronic bank.

“Modern adulthood runs on chronic alert — notifications, deadlines, hyperproductivity,” says Dr Shilpi Chanda, a mental health professional, in this article. “But in a board game, time slows. Play becomes unscheduled joy.”

At a time when art, and life itself, is getting locked in a room with AI models, a board game is a refreshing getaway, where the scuffles and arguments are real, as is the thrill of rolling the dice on a Monopoly board and finding out you’re about to own a property on Mayfair. Or, in my case, the thrill of watching the quietest person in the room tell you exactly where to shove your cards.

🥮 Dessert Corner

A brief list of stories I loved reading this week.

• Over the last month or so, The Washington Post have let go of more than 300 journalists, a lot of whom covered sports, arts, and books. Becca Rothfeld writes for The New Yorker about what the demolition of the book reviews section means.

• Samreen Razzaqui writes about how the Afghanistan men’s cricket team, unable to ever play a “home” game, carry their homes with them. Come for the sabz chai, stay for the shoutout to Mazaar.

• Neha Varmani lays out the archived history of Sohan Halwa.

Subscribe now

This year marks half a century since Stevie Wonder released this groovy beauty. That Hohner D6 clavinet still sounds so fresh and crisp. Stevie Wonder was also an innovator with sound, like Jon Lord and Ray Manzarek. I guess all great keyboardists are, at some level. SW routed his clavinet through a rig of guitar pedals, just to make it fizz and dance like an electric guitar. You’ll hear the clavinet in both its shades in this album.

That’s all from this edition of The Jukebox. See you soon!

Last month, The Economist published a crisp essay on the astonishing rise of the bagel, tracing its journey from what the magazine called a “niche Jewish bread in the 1960s” to a five-billion-dollar global market in 2025.

The trajectory is remarkable and, in its way, deeply American: an immigrant food, gradually stripped of its origins and brought to the supermarket aisle, where it sits in plastic bags beside the English muffins and the hamburger buns. The bagel has travelled too. I have eaten bagels in Delhi, in shops barely wider than a doorframe, wedged into alleys behind Mughal-era forts.

The essay got me thinking about another bread I notice at just about every café in Bangalore and Delhi: the sourdough. A good sourdough is worth jostling through morning work traffic for. If you’ve had a poached egg on avocado spread on a slice of sourdough, with chilli oil drizzled on top, you know what I’m talking about.

The first three search results on Google for the popularity of sourdough are: “Sourdough is having a moment.. again”, “Why is everyone suddenly obsessed with sourdough”, and a video titled, “Why is sourdough bread so popular”. So I went digging.

The discovery of sourdough was a happy accident. In Ancient Egypt, someone left a mixture of flour and water exposed to open air, allowing lactic acid bacteria to do its thing. Once baked, the resulting loaf was lighter, more flavourful, and substantially more digestible than the dense and coarse flatbreads of the era.

The Romans went one step further. They used fermentation starters derived from grape juice and wheat bran. The acidification—the “sour” in sourdough—was essential for preservation.

But for centuries, it was very much a niche curiosity, like the bagel.

In the mid-2000s, we were introduced to the term “gluten-free.” Industrial bread was demonised to the point where many bakeries started holding only long-fermented loaves. *drum roll, big brass chords, pulsing violins* Enter, the sourdough.

Its commercial success was a function of two chemical signatures:

• While sourdough is not gluten-free, it is widely considered “gluten-friendly” or “low-gluten.”

• Sourdough fermentation significantly alters the glycemic response of bread, thus making it a better option for pre-diabetic and diabetic consumers, and those generally careful about their gut health.

You remember reading the word “artisanal bread” at bakeries? Yes, that was mostly sourdough.

The Covid pandemic amplified its profile. Bakeries suffered from frozen supply chains and locked-in consumers had to adapt. They tried to make sourdough at home, didn’t always succeed, and turned to ordering in. Et, voila!

The numbers aren’t quite bagel yet, but the sourdough is climbing on the list of non-industrial bread. The market for sourdough is valued at approximately $4bn, with projections suggesting a surge to nearly $6.5bn by the mid-2030s.

🤖 Real is Artificial

The most insane news from last week is about a social media platform for AI agents, by AI agents, where AI agents speak to each other and bitch about their human commandeers.

While reading early SciFi, or even Asimov’s Foundation, I did not once think I’d have to write that sentence.

Either way, we’re here. Anthropic is raising $20bn—you read that right—in a few days. Claude Code is all over the internet. Your life, as you know it, stands on the doorstep of complete automation.

I have a brief reading list, two articles which zoom from the hype and focus on the foundations of mass AI.

• A neuroscience professor writes about consciousness and AI.

• An incredible Asimov Press article on what it takes to emulate a brain—human or mouse—inside a computer.

In the middle of this brain fog, I stumbled onto this. Andre Agassi has partnered with IBM to launch an AI platform. Again, a sentence that I wish was SciFi but it is not.

According to this article, “The as-yet-unnamed platform, which will live under the witty banner of Agassi Intelligence, includes a website and app that will be available internationally. The website will launch sometime this spring with a staggered roll-out of e-commerce (tennis racquets, paddles, sports nutrition, etc.), a personalized racquet/paddle recommender, and the AI coaching model.”

“AI-recommended creatine” will soon be a completely normal response to, “What did you have today?”

📍Mapping the Maps

Taking a hard left from AI to things people did, when the world was less equipped, let’s talk about maps.

One of the coolest books I read last year was Mapmatics. The author manages to simplify the idea of maps—and cartography, in general—while also nourishing the reader with history and context behind how the world is drawn.

It’s well known that all 2D maps are essentially wrong. Mapmatics goes one further and points out the insane ways in which cartography and geometry was treated when the world had fewer tools.

“Columbus decided to pick and choose his data to make the Earth as small as possible and the Indies as near as possible. In the end, he chose the estimate of the ninth-century Arab geographers who found the Earth’s circumference to be equal to 20,400 Arabic miles, each mile about 2,164 metres long. This would make 44,146 kilometres, which was close to today’s value, but way too large a number for Columbus’s taste. So, he took the figure of 20,400 but claimed the unit to be not the Arabic but the Roman mile, which was equal to 1,480 metres – making the Earth’s circumference only about 30,192 kilometres.”

I have been looking forward to The Web Beneath The Waves—Samanth Subramanian’s book on underwater cables that connect the world. It’s already out in the US and EU, hopefully soon in India too. Here’s an excerpt.

Or, check out the opening paragraph from this article: “On January 15, 2022, the island nation of Tonga lost its internet connection to the rest of the world. The eruption of a nearby underwater volcano severed the lone undersea internet cable connecting Tonga to Fiji. It took nearly five weeks for the cable to be repaired and for Tongans to regain high-speed connections.”

If maps and visualisations fascinate you, this site is the place to be. For example, check out this visualisation of all rocket launches between 1957-2020.

💹 Well Deserved

Last week, Royal Challengers Bengaluru won the Women’s Premier League for the second consecutive season. On the night of the final, captain Smriti Mandhana was majestic. She finished the tournament as the leading run-scorer.

This is a lovely article on how her already-ridiculous career has translated at the endorsement market.

The economic spike was inevitable after Mandhana’s success in the Women’s Premier League and the World Cup win last November. This article is timely also for the contrast it illustrates with what Mandhana and co. get at home.

This week, the BCCI announced the central contracts for both the men’s and women’s teams. And while you see buckets like Grade A and Grade B, like for the men, the fine print here is that the highest grade in the women’s pool is lower than the lowest grade in the men’s pool. In other news, the sun is hot and water is wet.

Subscribe now

That’s all from this edition. See you soon!

Every Wednesday evening, I will share a stream of thoughts and links from rabbitholes I fell into over the past week. These topics can range from the history of galawati kebab to a new movie. Never mind the reader, even this writer doesn’t know what might catch his fancy. Hence the name.

This week, we start with rare musical instruments.

🪈 Preserved Language

Bhiklya Ladkya Dhinda is a 92-year-old member of the Warli tribal community in Maharashtra. The Warli are historically agrarian, with a near-religious reverence for nature, wildlife, and the elements.

For seven decades, Dhinda has been the sole practitioner of a musical instrument that exists almost nowhere else on Earth: the Tarpa. In Dhinda’s family, the lineage of the Tarpa stretches back three generations, or 150 years.

On January 26th this year, Bhiklya Ladkya Dhinda was awarded the Padma Shri—India’s highest civilian honour.

The Tarpa itself is an aerophone, sometimes described as a hornpipe or a single-reed wind instrument with a reservoir. Fun fact—it is constructed entirely from locally sourced, biodegradable forest produce.

Playing the Tarpa demands endurance. The player must sustain high breath pressure to keep the stiff bamboo reeds vibrating. The instrument, Dhinda explains, is “lifeless like a stone” until breath animates it. The Warli believe you give the instrument prana: breath as life force. To play the Tarpa is to transfer a bit of yourself into it.

The Tarpa is strictly seasonal. It is the instrument of the Kharif harvest, played from September, at harvest time, until Diwali in October or November. Playing the Tarpa outside this window—especially in summer—is traditionally forbidden. The Warli believe its sound has the power to summon the harvest spirits and the rains.

The dance that accompanies the Tarpa is often performed to please Ann Dev—the God of Food. The dancers move across the fields, their rhythmic stomps simultaneously working the crops and blessing the ground beneath them.

💎 Some Other Rare Instruments:

• The Yazh (India)

• The Manguaré (Amazon Basin)

• The Tonkori (Japan)

• The Qeej (Vietnam)

• The Odi (Uganda)

🧑‍🚀 Name on the Moon

This weekend, NASA are scheduled to launch their Artemis II mission—the first crewed mission to the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972. The mission will carry four astronauts on a 10-day journey.

Artemis II is groundbreaking for several reasons, most specifically:

• Firsts: Victor Glover will become the first person of color, Christina Koch the first woman, and Jeremy Hansen the first non-American to leave low Earth orbit and travel around the Moon.

• Distance: The flight will take the crew farther from Earth than any previous human mission, before reentering Earth’s atmosphere at a record speed of approximately 25,000 mph.

This mission is also part of NASA’s preparation for Artemis III (targeted for 2028), which will land astronauts near the Moon’s south pole. Which makes this a good time to truly appreciate what ISRO achieved with the Chandrayaan.

But! There’s another cool thing. NASA are inviting you to register and <checks notes> send your name to the moon. Should you sign up, your name will be added to an SSD card and beamed to the sparkling dot in the sky.

Scouring the internet, I found this incredible list of things we’ve sent to space before. We’re talking dinosaur bones, wristwatches, an Andy Warhol painting—because why not—and the Olympic torch, amongst many other things.

Speaking of things that have been sent to space, remember Laika? Evidently, a total of 32 monkeys have flown in space, including rhesus macaques, squirrel monkeys and pig-tailed monkeys. In 1972, five mice nicknamed Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum, and Phooey orbited the Moon a record 75 times aboard command module America as part of the Apollo 17 mission.

🔖 Bookmark

Most books talk about people. Some books talk about the country at large. Rahul Bhattacharya’s Railsong does both.

At the centre of the story is Charulata Chitol, a three-year-old child in a fictional railway town called Bhombalpur. The book starts with Charu telling her father, a railwayman, “I want to count people.” And so, she begins a journey that forms the spine of Bhattacharya’s novel.

The background motifs form a mosaic of a young India. Charu’s life collides with the crushing railway strike of 1974, the slow modernisation of a nation growing into its bones, and a breathing, heaving Bombay.

And then there’s the prose. Bhattacharya has this incredible ability, almost Naipaul-esque, to dress a scene in precisely the correct shades. There is a page where he describes a railway station down to the flaky rust on its beams and the length of the wire on which the fans are suspended; and there are pages where the story moves like a train at full gallop.

If you haven’t read Bhattacharya’s work yet, by all means, start with Railsong. But you could also start with either of his two other books, or this essay, or this, or this, or maybe this one. Or text me and I’ll make you a Rahul Bhattacharya playlist.

Subscribe now

Before I go, here’s a playlist of Amazigh Blues—a form of blues music played in the Sahara desert. That second track, Koya Blues, is a banger.

That’s all from this edition of The Jukebox. See you soon.

Every Wednesday evening, I will share a stream of thoughts and links from rabbitholes I fell into over the past week. These topics can range from the history of galawati kebab to a new movie. Never mind the reader, even this writer doesn’t know what might catch his fancy. Hence the name.

There’s plenty to talk about. Like, finding out that the tobacco industry in India is wilding. Or, stumbling upon this article, about how the smell from palak paneer landed an Indian student INR 1.8 crores in legal fees. As a Bengali who knows the stench of dried fish—shutki maach, specifically—I know what my next move is.

But this week, we’ll start with sport itself, because no amount of money made from palak paneer can top the insanity from the big story.

Subscribe now

⛰️ Selfie at The Spire

On 25th January, 2026, Alex Honnold clicked a new selfie. He stood atop the Taipei 101—the world’s eleventh-tallest building—in a red t-shirt and grey trainers, his hands white with chalk, and chalk patches on his clothes, as if he was just wrapping up the weekend’s rock-climbing getaway with his friends. And there he got himself a new picture.

The Taipei 101 is 1667-foot tall (508 metres), and hasn’t been climbed since 2004. Alex Honnold climbed it in 1 hour and 31 minutes with bare hands, without ropes or safety gear. I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right. It’s not normal. It’s barely even human.

Nine years back, Honnold had climbed El Capitan the same way. It was the first time anyone climbed a complete route on that wall, from base to summit, entirely free solo—no rope, no harness, no protective gear. That climb was filmed by Jimmy Chin, a celebrated mountaineer himself, and catapulted Honnold to celebrity status.

How does he do it?

Nautilus Magazine did a now-famous profile on him, from which one passage revealed the margins such climbers work with.

“On the hardest parts of some climbing routes, his fingers will have no more contact with the rock than most people have with the touchscreens of their phones, while his toes press down on edges as thin as sticks of gum.”

The amygdala is the human brain’s threat detector. The immediate response to Honnold climbing the El Capitan was that maybe his amygdala doesn’t fire at all. In other words, the guy doesn’t feel fear.

It isn’t true. He just feels fear differently. That Nautilus article is probably the best explainer on how unique his brain is.

The entire Taipei 101 climb was streamed on Netflix. Camera-mounted helicopters whizzed around Honnold like flies as he stretched and twisted to find pencil edge-width grips to lift himself from. It was hard not to feel sick.

Netflix paid him $500,000 for the climb. Half a million sounds incredibly low for the world’s best, and most celebrated, climber risking their life on a 500-metre skyscraper. Joe Pompliano explains here why it was a calculated bet.

For a long time, I thought Honnold was probably the only madman doing such a thing. And while the scale of what he’s achieved defies sense, there are about a dozen or so similarly-fearless climbers who have scaled mountains and skyscrapers without safety gear.

Internet searches led me to a man called The French Spiderman and a base jumper and wingsuit flyer who also happens to be a free soloist. No biggie.

I have a feeling Tom Cruise is keeping track of all this. The first scene of Mission Impossible II has him free-soloing the Dead Horse Point in Utah and, at one point, hanging by one arm 2000-feet up.

Is there a person better suited to a Mission Impossible movie than Alex Honnold?

The most fitting part of Honnold’s climb was his mostly-Tool playlist. It is extremely Alex Honnold territory to climb one of the world’s tallest buildings while listening to music that is usually played at the peak of psychedelic trips.

🗡️ The Two Edges of Fame

Then there is this story.

Former Everton FC star and longtime Major League Soccer coach Adrian Heath was once offered a Saudi-club job. Through a trusted UK-based agent, he had detailed conversations on salary, staff, housing and healthcare. References in Saudi football checked out.

He flew to Tangier, expecting to meet the club owner. Instead, two men met him with flowers, drove him away from the main roads, and took him to a small, smoky apartment in a rough harbour town. There, he was told that the coaching job does not exist. They demanded a six‑figure ransom, threatened his family, and put a blade to his throat.

No more spoilers. Read it in full.

Heath’s story is harrowing, but in a perverse way, it reminded me of Alfredo di Stéfano. One of the finest players in football history, Di Stéfano was kidnapped in Caracas, Venezuela by the Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN) to attract publicity for their campaign against government corruption.

The kidnappers reportedly told him, “We do not have anything against you; we are doing this only so the press pays us attention. The government forbids the newspapers to talk about the FALN. You are going to stay with us a few hours, and then we will bring you back. We do not want to hurt you.”

After 56 hours, he was released unharmed. One of the kidnappers later said they targeted him because of his fame, stating, “his prestige and fame in Real Madrid helped us get media attention.”

Perhaps the most infamous, and darkest case, is of Andres Escobar. Five days after Colombia’s elimination from the 1994 World Cup, Escobar, just twenty-seven years old, was shot six times in a Medellín parking lot. It was reported that the killer shouted “¡Gol!” after every shot, his punishment to Escobar for scoring an own goal in a game that ended 0-1 and sealed Colombia’s exit.

🐕 Dogs Are Great

Taking a hard left into a brighter alley, here’s a podcast on how having pets has a positive impact on longevity.

I found this study, which states: “A study of over 2,400 cat owners found that cat owners were significantly less at-risk of dying due to CVD, including stroke and heart attack, compared to non-owners during a 20-year follow-up.”

“Similar stress buffering effects of pet ownership have also been found in dog owners and pet owners in general. A systematic review focused on the impact of pets on their owners found that the presence of pets can effectively reduce stress-related parameters, such as heart rate and blood pressure, among owners.”

Then there’s this research that evaluates cardiovascular diseases with respect to pet ownership, and finds positive results. Cats, especially, seem to return great numbers.

This study finds that a pet companion increases life satisfaction by 3 to 4 points on a scale of 1 to 7.

🗺️ Track Your Word

Lastly, I found Wanderword, where you can trace the entire etymology of a word.

The creator has gone on a run of making addictive mini apps. His latest, Starweave, maps exoplanets with their distance from Earth, along with the telescope and the observatory used to track it.

Subscribe now

That’s all from this edition of The Jukebox. See you soon.