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The Illusion of Understanding

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We live in a world where we know how to use more things than we actually understand. We drive cars without knowing much about their engines, use smartphones without understanding how they communicate and trust countless systems that quietly make our everyday lives possible. Familiarity gives us confidence, and somewhere along the way, we begin to mistake that confidence for understanding. Psychologists have a name for this, the Illusion of Explanatory Depth. In a study published in 2002, researchers Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil found that people often believed they understood everyday things, such as bicycles, toilets and zippers, much better than they actually did. When asked to explain precisely how these worked, their confidence dropped. It turns out that knowing what something does is very different from understanding how it works. What happens when this illusion extends beyond individuals, to decisions made by entire societies? In 2016, voters across the UK chose to leave the E...
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Two Londons

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There are cities we visit, and then there are cities we have already visited long before we ever arrive. I had known London through books, films, music and stories long before I stood on its streets. Jeffrey Archer had taken me through one London, James Bond had shown me another. Cinema and books had populated the city with characters, conspiracies, adventures and possibilities. So when I finally began walking through the city, places that had existed in my imagination for years acquired coordinates. Mile End and Bow Road were not just street names, King’s Cross was not simply a railway station. The real city kept unexpectedly colliding with the city I had carried around in my head! As days passed, another London began revealing itself; not the one of fiction, but that of history. The city that once stood at the centre of an empire upon which the sun famously never set. Now that is a difficult history to look at through the romantic lens of grandeur alone. The British Empire was built ...
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Floppy Disks to AirDrop: The Inflation of Adaptation

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I am turning 40 soon. It is not the number itself that makes me take a little pause, but what it represents. Growing up in India and watching constant transformations all around, it feels like I've spent most part of my life adapting to a world that seems to keep updating its operating system! The world I knew as a child had fewer choices, less connectivity and a much more local way of living. Over the decades, opportunities have expanded, technology has become accessible at an extraordinary scale and we have a deeply connected global economy and digital world today. I guess what is distinctive about my generation is that we remember the before and the after. We have a comparative memory, and understand that today's convenience was not always a given, as we watched and contributed to it being built. But something else has changed along the way, the social contract around work and careers. There was once a fairly straightforward proposition: get a good education, earn a degree, ...
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Witness to Innovation

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I once stood beneath an apple tree where Isaac Newton had watched a fruit fall, and gravity became a force that shaped the world. I've been in the classroom in Princeton where Albert Einstein once taught, feeling the chalkboard where the universe was explained in equations. I've sat in the room where Thomas Edison's patents were written, been to the lab from where Alexander Graham Bell made the first ever telephone call, and walked the paths around the CERN particle accelerator in Geneva where Stephen Hawking has traversed. I was even present when Elon Musk unveiled his human spaceflight plans at a conference in Adelaide.  As I look back on these moments and experiences, I am struck less by the physical spaces themselves and more by the meaning of having been there.  Through work, travel and a fair measure of good fortune, I have found myself moving between countries, institutions, labs, conferences and conversations that I could scarcely have imagined at the start of my ca...
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Live and Let By

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It was a long day of meetings and discussions at the conference. I returned to my AirBnb, hung my coat in a hanger, sat and bent down to undo my shoes. A searing pain shot through from my lower back through every inch of my whole back. So intense that my scream of pain got stuck somewhere mid-throat, I choked and my vision blacked out for a second.  For the past month and a half, I've been traveling around multiple cities for work meetings. Not more than a couple of days in a same bed, working out of cafes, airports and trains, walking a lot with a heavy backpack, and sitting long hours on the most un-ergonomic chairs or seats.  Like many entrepreneurs, I've convinced myself that discomfort is merely the price of progress. After all, businesses do not grow by themselves! A packed schedule after an overnight journey, stretching from breakfast meetings through day-long discussions into late-night emails ? Bring it on, it’s just part of the job!  But unfortunately, the body ...
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Beyond the Glamour: Travel Realities

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In today’s world, travel is heavily romanticized. Social media feeds are filled with stunning landscapes, exotic destinations and thrilling adventures, painting a picture of a traveler's life as one of constant wonder. As someone who gets asked, “Where are you?” more than, “How are you?” on phone calls, I can attest that the reality is more nuanced. While my journeys do take me to amazing places and occasions, whether witnessing the Northern Lights in the Arctic, watching a cricket match in Dubai, or exploring stunning landscapes of Canada or Australia, these experiences are mostly intertwined with work. It requires a lot of planning to weave my personal interests around work obligations, making every trip a major balancing act. It’s never about ticking off destinations or checking items off a bucket list for me. More often, my trips are driven by necessity; they are always accompanied by sudden meetings across time zones, conference schedules, and long unplanned stays for forging ...
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Innovation without Adaptation : The Bazball Business

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When the English cricket team embraced Bazball under Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum, it closely resembled what often happens when a struggling company brings in a new leader to shake things up. A classic example is Apple in the late 1990s. When Steve Jobs returned, Apple was fearful, slow and close to irrelevance. Jobs simplified everything, removed hesitation and encouraged boldness. The early iMacs were colorful, unconventional, and energizing. Importantly, that phase wasn’t about perfection, it was about restoring belief. Bazball did the same for England; after years of tentative, joyless cricket, Stokes and McCullum told players to stop worrying about consequences and simply play. Confidence returned, players expressed themselves and results followed quickly. Like Apple’s revival, the initial success was real and deserved.  However, many turnarounds fail when the corrective idea becomes absolute truth, rather than a temporary remedy. This happened at Uber after its explosive e...
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