Nitish Reddy

There is something deeply impressive about how India handles logistics at scale. I recently renewed my Indian passport and along with it my German residence permit which is tied to my passport. It took me 30 days to get an appointment at the Indian Embassy. Once I got the appointment and submitted my documents in Berlin it took around 6 weeks to get back a new passport This involved coordinating with the passport office in Kolkata and the local police- the police had to physically verify the address of my permanent residence in Kolkata. Also, passports are not printed at the Embassy. They are printed in India and then flown to embassies around the world. This entire international affair with cross border movement of physical documents was done in 6 weeks. In contrast, it took me 6 weeks to just get an appointment at the Foreigner’s office (Ausländerbehorde) in Berlin. And just the printing of the new card will take around 8 weeks, all of which will be done within the city. I know a lot of stuff doesn’t work, but sometimes I cannot help but be amazed at how vast and sprawling our democracy, both literally and metaphorically, is and it is somehow still not falling apart.

Last one on this topic, and I have been holding this in myself for a while. For centuries, class divides kept the labor of the poor invisible to the rich. Factory workers toiled behind walls, farmers in distant fields, domestic help in backrooms. The wealthy consumed the fruits of that labor without ever seeing the faces or the fatigue behind it. No direct encounter, no personal guilt. The gig economy shattered that invisibility, at unprecedented scale. Suddenly, the poor aren't hidden away. They're at your doorstep: the delivery partner handing over your ₹1000+ biryani, late-night groceries, or quick-commerce essentials. You see them in the rain, heat, traffic, often on borrowed bikes, working 8–10 hours for earnings that give them sustenance. You see their exhaustion, their polite smile masking frustration with life in general. This is the first time in history at this scale that the working class and consuming class interact face-to-face, transaction after transaction. And that discomfort with our own selves is why we are uncomfortable about the gig economy. We want these people to look our part, so that the guilt we feel while taking orders from them feels less. We aren't just debating economics. We are confronting guilt. That ₹800 order might equal their entire day's earnings after fuel, bike rent, and app cuts. We tip awkwardly, or avoid eye contact, because the inequality is no longer abstract. It's personal. Pre-gig era, the rich could enjoy luxury without moral discomfort. Labor was out of sight. Now, every doorbell ring is a reminder of systemic inequality. That's why debates explode. It's not just policy. It's emotional reckoning. Some defend the system (“they choose it”), others demand change (“this isn't progress, its exploitation”). And here’s the uncomfortable twist: the unsaid ask of clumsy ‘solutions’ isn’t dignity. It is about returning to invisibility. Ban gig work and you don’t solve inequality. You remove livelihoods. These jobs don’t magically reappear as formal, protected employment the next day. They disappear, or they get pushed back into the informal economy where there are even fewer protections and even less accountability. Over-regulate it until the model breaks, and you achieve the same outcome through paperwork instead of slogans: the work evaporates, prices rise, demand collapses, and the people we claim to protect are the first to lose income. And then what happens? The rich get their old comfort back. Convenience returns without faces. Guilt dissolves. We go back to clean abstractions and moral posturing from a distance. The poor don’t become safer, they become invisible again: back in cash economies, back in backrooms, back in shadows where regulation rarely reaches and dignity isn’t even debated. The gig economy just exposed the reality of inequality to the people who previously had the luxury of not seeing it. The doorbell is not the problem. The question is what we do after opening the door. Visibility is the price of progress. We can either use this discomfort to build something better (which we keep doing continuously as delivery partners are our backbone), or we can ban and over-regulate our way back into ignorance. One of those choices improves lives. The other simply helps the consuming class feel virtuous in the dark.

Most advanced chips of 2nm (used in AI servers, drones, mobile phones) to be designed/ developed by Arm in India. 🇮🇳

India lacks a functioning concept of conflict of interest in governance. The father is pushing ethanol blending as aggressive national policy, while the son’s company reaps extraordinary profits after entering the ethanol sector. In any mature democracy, the father would have stepped down the moment his son joined a business tied to his ministry, to simply avoid the appearance of impropriety. Even if both are entirely honest, the optics are damning. Yet there is no uproar: the opposition stays silent since their own leaders’ companies benefit from the ethanol boom, and ordinary citizens who raise questions can simply be dismissed as oil-lobby trolls. A sad state of affairs!