Kartikeya Agarwal

USE YOUR PRIVILEGES to your advantage People who have resources, should use them to the max. Have a spare shop? Use it as warehouse Have great network? Use it If you have looks, use your Physical charm Have father’s money? Use it Do not ever feel bad about using any advantage bcz nobody is going to give you any medal for being too frugal or being the self taught warrior Outcomes matter. Focus on them only. P.S- Your intentions should be crystal clear & not for ulterior motives or scamming someone

Rahul Gandhi’s Economic Model leaves Himachal Pradesh broke and bankrupt! In a rare first, Himachal Pradesh CM Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu has presented a reduced State Budget of ₹54,928 cr for 2026-27 (vs ₹58,514 cr in 2025-26), a cut of ₹3,586 cr due to severe fiscal crisis because of voodoo economic policies prescribed by ‘economist’ Rahul Gandhi. Sukhu has taken eye candy headline-generating measures to deal with the looming crisis. These include a 50% pay cut for the CM and 20-30% cuts for Ministers and top officers.

“The National security paradigm has moved to H1. And where are we stuck? We are stuck with L1. L1 is a disease and it has to go” — @Gen_RajShukla We are talking about doing away with L1 & bringing bureaucratic reform even in 2026.🤦‍♂️

@GauravGupta_RE @ZenoRealty What’s the current price?

A Residence Reserved for the Kings of Noida! • 5 BHK Triplex Penthouse • 11,300 Sqft • Private Pool & Terrace • Possession Next Year • Only 8 in the Entire Project Exclusive Mandate by @ZenoRealty DM to claim one Soon these Trophy Assets will trade north of 50 Cr

@sanjaylangval Words are seductive; that’s why it’s crucial to focus on the numbers.

Content and storytelling >>> fundamentals / valuations is peak Substack! If your investment thesis needs a Breaking Bad analogy, you’re not analysing the business, you’re writing fiction. The "TSMC of Niche Pharma" is down 60% from the post and 33% since quoting Walter White.

Game selection is more important than playing skill. If you are the world’s second worst poker player but the game you select to play is against the world’s worst poker player, you are going to come out ahead. From the outside it looks like two chimpanzees playing poker but one is always coming out ahead. As the military saying goes: if you find yourself in a fair fight, you have not planned your mission properly. And when you are responsible for other people’s lives or capital it is your duty to fight unfair fights, preferably against morons.

@curiosweetie Backward in name, forward in opportunities. They're maximizing for opportunities!

There should be active tracking of total assets of every judge and government employee.

6 YEARS: FROM COVID TO IRAN TIME FOR SOME PAINFUL TRUTHS 🚨 Six turbulent years from Covid to the Ladakh standoff to Ukraine war to Trump’s tariff offensive to the current Iran war have exposed a hard truth. India remains dangerously dependent on the world for things a serious power should control at home. Energy first, since that’s on everyone’s mind right now. India imports about 85% of its crude oil and roughly 50% of its natural gas. We depend heavily on overseas supply chains for critical minerals like lithium, cobalt and nickel that will power the next generation of batteries and energy systems. Any disruption anywhere from the Strait of Hormuz to sanctions on major producers immediately ripples through LPG prices, electricity costs and inflation. The current LPG anxiety during the Iran war is just the latest reminder of how exposed we are. Defence is worse. Despite decades of rhetoric about indigenisation, India still imports roughly 45 to 50% of its major weapons systems, making it one of the world’s largest arms importers, if not the largest. During the Ladakh standoff with China (which is still on) the country had to rush through emergency purchases of munitions, drones, artillery shells and winter gear because either we don’t make those items or domestic capacity could not surge quickly enough. A country facing two nuclear adversaries should never have to scramble for weapons in the middle of a military standoff. Pharmaceuticals reveal another uncomfortable truth. India is known as the pharmacy of the world, yet around 70% of our active pharmaceutical ingredients come from outside, including China. During Covid this vulnerability became obvious as India scrambled for oxygen, PPE kits, ventilators and key medical inputs. Technology dependence is the most alarming of all. More than 90% of advanced semiconductors are imported, most high end AI chips and servers are foreign made, and critical digital hardware depends almost entirely on global supply chains. In an era where AI will define both economic power and military capability, this is a profound strategic vulnerability. Add fertiliser precursors, rare earths, electronics components, solar modules and specialised machine tools and the list becomes even longer. Each time the world experiences a shock (Ukraine, Iran, Azerbaijan, Covid) whether it is a pandemic, sanctions on Russia, a war in West Asia or rising great power tensions India is forced into code red emergency management mode. The uncomfortable reality is that true strategic autonomy requires historically painful decisions. Building domestic capacity in energy, weapons, pharmaceuticals, semiconductors and AI will demand huge investment, long term industrial policy, and years of political risk. It may mean accepting higher costs and slower returns in the short term in order to build resilience for the long term. But India’s election to election political cycle rewards short term thinking. No government wants to take decisions that may, beyond a point, take a decade to pay off. The decisions these crises compel from a country like India will mean a total dismantlement of our politics as we know it today. It will mean a generation of turning the country on its head. Yet the alternative is worse. As things stand India remains structurally vulnerable. A country that has to scramble every time the world shakes cannot claim true strategic autonomy. From COVID to Iran, the last six years have made that painfully clear.

Every finance person genuinly needs to watch this episode from season 3 of Industry:

UGC data shows 378 complaints of caste-discrimination - meaning 0.00087% of total enrolled students. UGC rule prejudge the GC as oppressor & SC/ST/OBC as oppressed category & negates the process of natural justice. Must read article by @TVMohandasPai @venkatr74

@MithraInvictus @DidiRitambhara All those supporting UGC type regulations should first sacrifice their own sisters, mothers, daughters and wives at the altar of the Bhimtas. Time to put your honour where your mouth is!

Precisely. With all due respect, people like @didiritambhara should read this and try to understand. People with no kids aren't stakeholders, but should still give it a thought. People will abandon any political movement, however noble, if the stakes are against their children.

@MithraInvictus @RakeshK32229480 Absolutely! Nothing should be more normal than trying to make our cities more livable

This is for the Faridabad intern guy @RakeshK32229480 I just found your account. If you need any free legal assistance in Delhi NCR, just DM or tag. You are doing a yeoman's service to the nation, we stand with you, we need more like you. (Also guys please follow & support him)

@MithraInvictus It’s classic system dynamics at play. The Centre is different from the State, the State is different from a region, and a region is different from a constituency and so on..

Yogi Adityanath is everything that Narendra Modi used to be, and some more.

@MithraInvictus Both ain’t happening lmao!

People will again blame the court for it & call for vague judicial reforms. Well, courts are BOUND to follow the law. If people really want a solution, ask for: 1. Better laws in such matters, both penal & procedural—from your politicians. 2. Better prosecution—from the govt.

In every incident of communal lynching of Hindus, Delhi Police's entire focus is to declare the incident as non-communal, and in the process, they dilute the chargesheet and book the murderers under lighter charges (e.g. BNS 105) Delhi Police is worse than Bengal Police.

Rushdie never really got over his inferiority-complex wrt Sir Naipaul. Latter saw Vijayanagara as the last defence of old Hindu Civilisation. Rushdie wrote 'Victory-City' as a repudiation of that Naipaulian vision. Rushdie divorced Turko-Persian-Mongol Imperialism from its religious-identity aspect and portrayed Vijayanagara as a Deccan Wakanda, reducing its military strategic sophistication to some girlboss doing abracadabra at the helm. Lol. As I always say, Hindus and Muslims are 2 distinct nations. 2 Nation Theory was right. Even Atheists of a Muslim background like Rushdie and Hindu Atheists like Naipaul have totally incompatible understandings of history. 99% of Hindus see themselves as belonging to 'A Wounded Civilisation'. The Naipaulian Narrative is the consensus view.

@MithraInvictus Our runway is anyway very limited in a potential Bheem/Green republic.

About time a new non-Congressi non-BJP third party emerges that acts solely as a vote-katua for General category interests. Best case scenario: we get to play kingmakers & sway policy like other votebanks. Worst case scenario, we go down but take along everyone in Bhim Republic.

The Game has changed in the last one week. The way things are going with Iran-US and the fluid environment we’re in it’s impossible to predict how macros play out and where they will be in next one month. It’s no longer a straightforward if-then cause-effect environment. There are way too many variables at play that interact with each other in ways that no one fully understands. Any action now can prove counter productive. The instinct to do something - to trade, to reposition, to anticipate - is exactly what gets people in trouble in environments like this. Because when everything is interacting with everything else, conviction on direction can be a trap. One tweet, one phone call and story changes instantly. It’s no longer a game of intelligence. It’s a game of patience now.

Years ago, as a youngin, a mentor of mine told me that Goldman Sachs had a concept called "the person vs the seat". He explained it: if you look at a person and you put him on a seat at your firm, is it the seat making the money or is it the individual? Think about one aspect of the seat, which is the deal flow. Is the flow coming to the seat because it is Goldman, or is it coming to the person? As human chimpanzees, we have a tendency to think we are the ones who are doing all the work and getting the job done (self attribution bias and other highly comical biases), but very often, we are just sitting in a really good seat. What if we leave? Will we still have all that flow? Could we even replicate the flow? How about the other benefits of the seat? I think there are several lessons to this. a) make the seat very powerful, as @johnarnold explains in a part of the pod below. What are the conditions you can create at the seat level to make it powerful? b) the persons who are valuable are the ones who augment and preferably multiply the value of the seat. Those are the ones that you make a partner. c) The "seat" is the reason why if a person leaves a firm, bc he has done well there and then goes to the next shop and does not have the same performance. Very common. By the way, on John Arnold. a) John just went to China, and he shared on X a recap of his trip. Must read. It complements very well the pod that @bgurley did with @altcap on China. (Go read Gurley's book!) John is on the board of META now and check out how good the board is. Would love to be a fly on the wall on this one. Must be business learning on steroids. b) An interesting event in market history is Centaurus' run-in with Amaranth. Worth taking a look at that. c) his other pods are also worth a listen. Im consistently amazed at the quality of @patrick_oshag pods and also his questions. Crazy that we have access to these now. When I was starting out, Id have paid a small fortune to listen to this.