Desilting the Veeranam

 Southern India is facing a serious water crisis, TN included. But the problem is not only inadequate rainfall. Every monsoon, enormous volumes of Cauvery floodwater rush downstream and eventually into the sea because we lack sufficient storage to capture it. We then face scarcity when the dry months arrive.

Veeranam Lake is a striking example of this failure.

More than a thousand years ago, the Cholas understood that water security meant storing water when it was abundant. Between 907 and 955 AD, under Prince Rajaditya Chola, they created a vast reservoir extending up to 16 kilometres to capture and store the erratic flows of the Cauvery system. They achieved this without modern machinery or engineering technology.

Today, we are allowing that achievement to deteriorate. Veeranam's original capacity was *1,465 million cubic feet (mcft), and nearly one-third is estimated to have been lost to accumulated silt. Restoring that lost capacity should be treated not as routine maintenance, but as *critical water-security infrastructure.

There is also an opportunity to make the project serve several purposes at once. The millions of tonnes of material removed from the lake could, after appropriate testing and treatment, be used for suitable highway embankment and slope applications in the major road projects underway in Cuddalore and neighbouring districts. This would reduce the need to source earth elsewhere while restoring the lake.

MGNREGA can add another dimension. Alongside mechanical desilting, suitable labour-intensive restoration work could provide employment to thousands of rural workers while rebuilding a vital community asset. Welfare expenditure would thus become productive infrastructure investment.

The opportunity is therefore much bigger than desilting a lake: water security, rural employment and infrastructure development can be addressed through one coordinated programme.

Veeranam has already waited long enough. Parts of it were addressed decades ago under the New Veeranam Project, but continued silt accumulation has steadily reduced its capacity. Every year of delay means less storage and greater risk. The machinery exists. The workforce exists. The road projects and government schemes exist. What is needed is the administrative will to connect them.

The Cholas built Veeranam a thousand years ago because they understood that water security could not be left to chance. We should at least have the wisdom to restore what they built.

The Billionaire’s back-yard retreat

 From rockets to Mars and the deep star-map,

To taking a long afternoon garden nap.

No more Neuralink or satellite beams -

Just selling organic sambar-vada dreams.

The boardrooms are silent, the Twitter-wars cease,

I’m trading my stocks for some "piece of the peace."

Instead of a Tesla that drives on its own,

I’ll drive a slow TVS50 through the harvest zone.

I’ll sing a few songs to a gathering crowd,

While selling my onions and feeling quite proud.

Forget the high tech and the cold Martian soil,

I’ll just watch my pot of filter coffee boil.

The Comfort of Being Poor, Cheaply

 There is a small ritual that plays out at most Indian dinner tables when the conversation turns to the economy. Someone quotes the nominal GDP per capita — a little under $2,700 — and a discomfort settles over the room. Then someone else offers the corrective: in PPP terms it's nearer $11,700. The room relaxes. Someone mentions that a haircut here costs what a coffee costs in London. Conversation moves on to cricket.

I have sat through that ritual more times than I can count, and I have come to think it is one of the more comforting untruths we tell ourselves — not a lie, since both numbers are correct, but a sleight of hand in which we choose the story that flatters us.

PPP was never meant to be a balm. It answers a narrow question: how much can a given income buy inside the country where it is earned? By that yardstick, an autorickshaw ride in Chennai or a plate of idlis at a Udupi restaurant will always look absurdly cheap next to their equivalents in Zurich, because they are priced in Indian wages and consumed entirely within India's borders. None of that is fiction.

The trouble starts the moment an Indian family looks up from the dosa and wants something the world, not the neighbourhood, has to sell them. A laptop. A semester abroad. A cardiac stent made in Minnesota. At that point the comforting PPP number quietly leaves the room, because Lenovo and Boeing do not accept payment in purchasing-power-adjusted rupees. They want dollars, at the going rate — closer to $2,700 a year than $11,700.

I think of an old colleague, an engineer with two decades of solid experience, who once did the arithmetic on sending his daughter to a decent state university in America. By any local measure he was comfortably middle class — the kind of household PPP statistics are designed to flatter. But tuition abroad was priced in the other economy entirely, the one where his rupee bought exactly what a currency converter said and not a paisa more. He didn't complain that India was poor. He simply adjusted his ambitions to what his income, translated honestly into dollars, could reach. Multiply him by several hundred million households making the same silent adjustment, and you have a more honest picture of where the country stands than any PPP table offers.

This isn't an argument against PPP. Economists need it, particularly in an economy where a great many transactions — a haircut, a maid's wage, a bus fare — never cross a border at all. These are non-tradables, priced by local conditions, and it is precisely because India remains a low-wage economy that they stay cheap. The affordability we celebrate and the poverty we'd rather not dwell on are two readings of the same fact.

What we haven't reckoned with is that this affordability has a shelf life on aspiration. It works beautifully right up to the point where middle-class life wants to touch the global economy — a foreign degree, a decent camera, a retirement fund not hostage to the rupee. At that boundary, the far less flattering nominal figure reasserts itself as the only one that matters. Every economy that made the leap from poor to rich — South Korea within a working lifetime — did so not by making imported goods cheap for its citizens, but by making its citizens rich enough in hard currency to afford them at world prices.

Which is the more useful question for India to ask, not at the finance ministry but at the dinner table where this argument usually gets settled in the corrective's favour: not "how much can a hundred rupees buy here," which we already answer too well for our own comfort, but "how many dollars can an Indian actually earn." That number is unglamorous and considerably harder to move than a statistical adjustment.

The dosa, for what it's worth, should stay cheap. There's no case for making ordinary Indian life expensive in the name of national pride. The case is for making sure the people eating it can also buy the laptop, or send the child abroad, without financial vertigo — not because these things got cheaper, but because they got richer. Until then, I'd treat any dinner-table cheer over the $11,700 PPP number the way I treat a currency's forward premium — real enough as a number, but not something you can actually spend.

From a Professional Platform to a Pimping Platform

 

There was a time — not even that long ago — when LinkedIn meant something. It was the one corner of the internet where you could reasonably expect a conversation to stay on the rails: a recommendation from a former manager, a genuine job lead, a thoughtful post about an industry shift. It was boring, sure. But boring in the way a well-run institution is boring. You trusted it precisely because it didn't try too hard to entertain you.

That LinkedIn is gone. What's left is a platform in visible, accelerating decay — and it didn't happen all at once. It happened in stages, each one a little more embarrassing than the last.

Stage One: The Ad Creep

It started innocently enough. Sponsored posts, a "Promoted" tag here and there. Companies pushing their own PR under the guise of "thought leadership." Annoying, but tolerable — every platform monetizes eventually, and at least the ads were roughly adjacent to professional life.

Stage Two: The Personal Brand Industrial Complex

Then came the influencer-ification of professional identity. Suddenly every third post was a humble-brag dressed up as a lesson: "I got fired. Here's what it taught me about leadership." The line-break-heavy, fake-vulnerable, engagement-bait post became its own genre. Recommendations stopped meaning "I worked with this person and they were good" and started meaning "I owe this person a favor and LinkedIn rewards mutual back-scratching."

Stage Three: The Op-Ed Takeover

Somewhere along the way, people decided LinkedIn was also the place to relitigate every social and political controversy of the week — entirely unmoored from any professional context. A platform built on job titles and endorsements became a soapbox for opinions that had nothing to do with anyone's actual work. Professional credibility got diluted into just another algorithm-chasing performance of having takes.

Stage Four: The Culture War Spillover

From there it was a short walk to full-blown political theatre. Posts about elections, ideology, and grievance politics — the exact content people once went to LinkedIn to avoid — now regularly outperform actual industry insight in the feed. The platform's entire value proposition was that it wasn't Twitter. It has since worked very hard to become Twitter, just with worse jokes and a "connect" button.

Stage Five: The Final Indignity — Sponsored Matchmaking

And now, the coup de grâce. LinkedIn InMail — a feature built for recruiters and business development — has become a delivery mechanism for dating and matchmaking pitches. A "Sponsored" message shows up in your professional inbox asking, apologetically dressed in corporate language, whether you're "single and open to finding a life partner." The pretext is thin: someone "came across your profile" and thought your "professional background" made you a good match — not for a job, not for a client, but for a spouse.

It's a small moment, but it's a telling one. It shows a platform that has fully surrendered the one thing that made it distinct: context. LinkedIn no longer seems to care what kind of attention it monetizes, as long as it monetizes something. Your resume, your work history, your professional photo — all of it is now just targeting data for whatever ad category is willing to pay for it that week, romance included.

The Common Thread

Every one of these stages has the same shape: a boundary that used to matter — professional vs. personal, informational vs. promotional, workplace vs. everything else — quietly dissolved because dissolving it was good for engagement and good for revenue. Each individual step looked defensible. The cumulative effect is a platform that has forgotten what it was for.

LinkedIn didn't become a bad product by accident. It became a bad product by optimizing, one small compromise at a time, for attention over trust. The tragedy is that trust was the entire product.