Aravind

I’ve been reading the Vedas a lot recently, and what’s stood out is how it doubles as an encyclopedia as well as a religious text. Astronomy, medicine, mathematics, metallurgy, linguistics, are all woven through hymns and rituals as one body of knowledge. Simply calling it “religious” forces it into a Western category that didn’t have the apparatus to recognize what it actually was. It’s closer to a tradition of formalized epistemology in which metaphysics, observation, and language form one continuous inquiry, which as a result led Indian civilization to develop along a fundamentally different path because of it. You can see the effect most clearly in the sciences. Around 600 BCE, the Vedic record describes a surgical procedure that matches modern rhinoplasty and is still foundational to reconstructive surgery today. Centuries before Western Europe stopped treating eclipses as supernatural, Indian scholars had calculated the circumference of the earth within 0.2% and explained eclipses as shadows. Centuries before Plato and Aristotle rejected atomism, the Vedic tradition already held that matter is composed of indivisible particles combining into binary and triatomic compounds, transformable by heat. The first formal rules for zero and negative arithmetic appear in the Vedas, along with infinite-series derivations of π, sine, and cosine centuries before Newton and Leibniz. The interesting question is how did they get so much right, so early? My best guess is language. The Vedic tradition is unique compared to other oral traditions as it demanded letter-perfect oral transmission across generations. Around 500 BCE, scholars composed a generative grammar of Sanskrit called Panini so rigorous it anticipates Backus-Naur form, the notation that defines programming languages today, by 2,500 years. Sanskrit is recursive, rule-based, and built to minimize ambiguity. It reads more like mathematics than English. When you think in a language built like that, the precision of the language becomes the precision of your reasoning. The West didn’t formalize this until much later. Kant argued our categories of understanding shape what we can know, Wittgenstein wrote that the limits of language are the limits of one’s world, and Kripke showed that naming doesn’t just describe things, it constitutes what they mean and how we can reason about them. All three touch the same insight which is that thought is downstream of language. The Vedic tradition operated on that insight thousands of years earlier. To the point that they built a whole language first and used it to think clearly about everything else after. I find that all really fascinating.

But my eyes are toward you, O God, my Lord; in you I seek refuge - Psalm 141:8

For investors in Indian markets: Short-term capital gains tax (stocks held <1 year) went from 15% to 20% two years ago. Long-term capital gains tax (held >1 year) went from 10% to 12.5% two years ago. And FIIs outflow since then: 2025: Record ₹1.66 lakh crore net - the highest annual FII outflow ever recorded in Indian markets. 2026: ₹1.51 lakh crore net just until April 2026. Just a 2% increase matters a lot if you are an FII investing billions. FIIs invest in India because of high growth opportunities, but a depreciating rupee and an increase in taxes means they may move out their capital. And FIIs definitely move their capital when they sense global issues may drag India's growth. We are already seeing this. This causes more stresses to India's economy, currency, and companies. Even if futures and options keep their increases in STT (for various reasons it can be argued to make sense), for capital gains from equities, this increase in tax definitely needs to be reconsidered by GoI. An idea I propose is the increases in taxes can be applied (some other way) only for FIIs, and only when they are taking out the capital from the country. Not sure how it can be implemented, or if it is even practical. If not, the increases in CGT must be reconsidered, and reverted for at least the time being, to incentivize FIIs and DIs in investing in India's growth story.