Arun Sivaramakrishnan

Desperation is not consent: Why Deepinder Goyal gets it royally wrong Deepinder Goyal’s defence of the gig economy follows a familiar corporate script: selective statistics, convenient averages, and a steady shifting of responsibility – from platform to partner, from company to consumer, and finally to society itself. By continuing to live in The Camellias, one might hallucinate that the air in Gurugram is clean. But anyone who has looked out of their window knows that it isn’t, and is choking those on the street below. India’s gig economy undoubtedly delivers speed, scale, and convenience. But it also systematically transfers risk – unstable incomes, capital costs, safety hazards, and job insecurity – onto workers with the least bargaining power. History is unambiguous on this point. From factories in industrial England to the cotton plantations of the US to platform companies of today, markets and capitalists rarely correct power imbalances on their own. They require scrutiny, regulation, and pressure from outside their system. Treating desperation as choice and churn as flexibility may work in investor presentation decks, but it does not make the system fair. The real question is not whether the gig economy creates work, but whether it creates work that is economically viable once risk, costs, and churn, are honestly accounted for. That’s the long story cut very long. newslaundry.com/2026/01/03/whe… My essay in @newslaundry. The best piece I have written this year 🤣

The Bangalore twitter ecosystem is magical.. True story.. 1. I ranted on Twitter about the wait times and horrible experience at hospitals in Bangalore. 2. Someone on this app told me about Superhealth, founded by Varun 3. I DMed Varun. He responded kindly without knowing the agenda 4. Met Varun. We spoke for 90 mins. He explained the concept, gave me a tour. Spoke about his plan, his ambition and why this is a personal mission for him. His passion shines through. Everything is crafted with love and detail. Got goosebumps 5. I booked an appointment for 10 am today. The attendant parked my car. The concierge helped me find the doctor. I met the doctor at 10 am sharp 🤯 6. Doc prescribed an ultrasound. I got the preciption on WhatsApp.. At 10:10 the doctor's attendant booked the ultrasound for me and explained the next steps. 🤯🤯 No running across departments. The hospital took responsibility - doc will see reports and the hospital will contact me to discuss if anything needs to be done. I will get report in my mailbox and whatapp WHAAAT? Really? Yes.. 🤯🤯🤯🤯 6. I couldn't do the ultrasound today.. So booked me for next Thursday. 7. Then asked if there is anything else they can help with. I said, well I do have an eye issue that has been bothering me but I never had a chance to meet a doc Concierge says - " Let me check with the opthalmologist. If he can see you" WHAAAAAAT??? 🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯 8. Unfortunately no ophthalmologist slots available today ( Doctor is very popular) So booked the slot right before my ultrasound next Thursday. He already knew my next appointment time and offered the slot before that. Because seamless data flows across departments 🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯 9. By design hospital has no printers, because, we are in 2025 :)) 10. They have great coffee. Everything- the flooring, the lighting ,the food, the beds, the waiting area, the lounge .. Everything is designed patient first. I was done by 10:15 . I swear it took me longer to find parking in Sakra hospital. Thanks Varun for building this❤️ More power to you and Superhealth. May you succeed beyond your wildest expectations ❤️ Try Superhealth I hope more hospitals learn and follow suit. PS: I wanted a photo with a logo/name but they don't have one because they want the space to feel like 'home' 🤯🤯🫡🫡🫡🫡❤️❤️❤️

With @WalmartinIndia Foundation’s support, #Vrutti’s COP is enabling 13 #NGOs to help #FPOs expand to new markets. Through workshops, peer learning & collaboration, partners are building trust, sharing resources & forging buyer/finance links—driving #resilience nationwide.

What is rare about Virat-Anushka is their defiant expression of love and acknowledgment of each other as the ultimate guardian, supporter, protector, and friend. In a country where husband-wife jokes are aplenty and marriage is considered that 'ladoo jo khaye woh pachtaye and jo na khaye woh bhi pachtaye', they have quietly redefined what it can look like to be married. A lot of the credit goes to Virat for putting her in the front when she could've easily been a supporter in the back. But he always gives her due for his victories. In the midst of his biggest achievements, his relationship stands out even bigger because he makes it to be like that. I am calling him out for this because nobody would've blinked an eye if he didn't. All interviews, all public sentiment could've easily been 'how lucky his wife is' to be married to him, but he gives her so much importance that everybody thinks how lucky they both are and how important they both are to each other's journeys.

Dashboards are the corporate opium of the data age. One glance at a rainbow of realtime charts convinces leaders they are steering the ship, yet most dashboards say more about font choices than about reality. We stare at vanity metrics that jiggle on cue, mistaking motion for evidence. It is comfort porn disguised as insight. The trouble begins when teams optimize for what is easy to track rather than what truly matters. Clicks beat comprehension, daily active users overshadow durable value, and a red spike at 3 p.m. sparks Slack hysteria even when revenue never budges. The dashboard becomes a theater of control, complete with applause lights, while customers quietly churn. Decision-making decays next. People defer to the screen instead of judgment. If the graph looks stable, urgency dies. If it dips, we spin up a task force before asking whether the dip matters. Strategy shrinks to whatever fits in a line chart. The company’s story turns into a broken stock ticker, scrolling but saying nothing. The antidote is brutal focus. Start by naming the single metric that predicts long-term health. Give it a clear owner. Hide every other graph for a month. Meet weekly to ask one question: “Did we move the number in a way that compounds?” If the answer is no, change the work, not the colors of the chart. Data should illuminate, not anesthetize. Treat dashboards like radiation: useful in controlled doses, fatal in constant exposure.

An excellent exposé of the idea of ‘merit’ by Satish Deshpande. It doesn’t get simpler than this.

Every year UPSC exam brings a heartwarming story to the forefront. This is Birdev. A always smiling and positive boy from Kolhapur, Maharashtra. He came to know about his UPSC result while he was shepherding the family sheep. The family gathered around for his felicitation where they live. His father does not know much about the civil service examinations. But he knows that his son is bright and hard-working. Birdev spent his childhood shepherding the family sheep in the hills and studying under the open sky. The boy who used to study on the school veranda because there was no pucca house to study in, now clears the UPSC exam. Feel fortunate that I witnessed his UPSC journey in Pune. Congratulations Birdev. AIR 551. #UPSC #upscresults

@lymanstoneky @AskPerplexity why is there a thin vertical strip of high fertility? And why does it map so close to a time zone boundary?!

Fertility around the country.

the internet drowned us in abundance, tricking us into believing humans are just collections of traits we can mix & match, like customizing a video game character. but real people don’t come in pieces. every strength, every flaw, every quirk is part of a delicate, non-negotiable trade-off, an evolutionary balancing act, not an a la carte menu. somewhere along the way, we forgot that in hiring, in friendship, in other types of relationships. we started treating people like algorithms, optimizing for the best combination, blind to the fact that nature doesn’t deal in isolated virtues. the brilliance comes with the madness, the charm with the cunning, the discipline with the rigidity. you simply can’t just carve out the parts you like. humans aren’t necessarily designed, they’re emergent & that’s actually quite beautiful.

mba’s are middlemen of the mind—architects of ppt decks that delegate actual value creation to others. their entire skill set revolves around synthesizing work other people do & presenting it. in an optimal market, this is pure deadweight. real work—building, coding, designing, selling—requires tangible outputs. mba’s specialize in abstraction, which means they’re perfectly positioned to be replaced by ai. also the zirp era created this glut of managerial types bc cheap money propped up bloated orgs, but now those roles are getting axed since efficiency is back in vogue. hiring an mba rn feels like buying a fax machine in the smartphone era.

"There's a certain kind of person who's attracted to a shallow, exacting kind of moral purity, and who demonstrates his purity by attacking anyone who breaks the rules" Great essay, as always, by @paulg "The Origins of Wokeness" paulgraham.com/woke.html

Something that stood out on a podcast. One of the biggest gifts we can give the youngs in our life. Alain de Botton on 20VC.

Good day to spread the meaning of Pyrrhic victory. A Pyrrhic victory is a victory that inflicts such a devastating toll on the victor that it is tantamount to defeat.

Youngest MP in Parliament is a Dalit woman and mother of two. This is a win at so many levels.

The poor have saved the country from falling further into the abyss.

The whole world gets RGB skies with northern lights. Meanwhile, Mumbai at 4pm: (This is a color image).

NotebookLM is going to be an absolutely killer. Can't wait for India launch

This is just beautiful. Till now, Singapore Airlines has the best video, but this is a different level. Sigh! I wish the new logo/identity of Air India also captured this colour and vibrancy.

Ended up going to the @iihsin library in Bangalore a few days ago. I know I *shouldn't* be surprised, but the fact that I could just enter, sit and start working in an air-conditioned, comfortable, well-lit space without paying A DIME caught me completely off guard. (1/4)