Inklings

For Janmashtami, Prakash Anna penned a piece on the twelve Mahājanas of the Bhāgavatam — the ones Yamarāja himself says know the way. Sree looks for each of the twelve in an ordinary week: the connector, the one who holds the poison in his throat, the child who teaches the parent, the auditor who keeps the ledger.

A Delhivery truck on the highway with two different number plates — one on the truck, one on the trailer. Our first instinct was that someone was cheating. Thirty seconds of curiosity said otherwise.

Ten days of Onam open with a pookalam. My mother is past seventy-five, unwell — and still the first one up, getting the house, the pooja room and the kitchen ready. On Mahabali, a three-state family, and loving a complicated mother.

A brass Krishna gifted by a business partner's mother, a table found in a shop that was closing, a pooja that turned into a prāṇa-pratiṣṭhā — and Rani, who says hi to Krishna before anything else each morning.

Madhya Pradesh has no birth claim on me — it arrived through marriage, through two close friendships, through a 1912 map on a hotel wall, through my son's questions. My tradition has a word for accounts that stay open across lifetimes.

Twenty-five years ago I noticed that programming languages carry cultural identities — PHP's come-as-you-are welcome, Python's strict grammar, Ruby's Japanese craftsmanship. Meeting the AI models now, I'm standing in the same moment again.

A thirty-minute conversation put me in touch with something deep about my own humility — how quickly I judge, and how someone else's journey deserves to be seen through their lens, not mine.

Adam Grant's Wharton team found the thing predicting return-to-office mandates wasn't productivity — it was ego. A LinkedIn thread sharpened it into a mirror: am I designing work for output, or just to reassure myself that work is happening?

A PE recruiter's post — "felt like a consultant, not an operator" — gave me words for why many Indian companies flinch at consultants and trust only a full-time badge. Then it turned the lens on my own working life, where the badge was always the wrong thing to read.

Anthropic says Claude now writes more than 80% of its own code, and names the next step: recursive self-improvement. I'd felt the shape of this in my own work for months without a word for it — exhilaration and unease, side by side.

Daniel Pink lists sixteen skills every functional adult should know. I watched it as a leader of people — and the list of how to be a grown-up turned out to be almost the same list as how to lead. Nobody taught me either.

My default is action — get it done, reward the doing. Sitting with a quieter dimension inspired by Chandra, the moon, and taught by my sister: how do I become a better nurturer, of myself and the people around me?

The world rewards being the best when everyone is watching. Yogi wisdom asks the opposite — can you be number one when the only person watching is you?

An Airbnb PM writes a love letter to the Google Chrome team about all-blue tab icons. A Google PM replies with the perfect comeback. Two brands, on each other's side, in public.

Speak only when you feel that your words are better than your silence.

When I look at myself — or at someone else — am I seeing a bundle of problems, or am I seeing potential? Naming the shadow, and asking whether the other lens can be practised.

A family, six lakh rupees, and an MCA decision I can't yet give. My instinct, the question I put to my network, and the advice converging from what came back — a page I'll keep updating.

Years ago Vikram told me we learn in layers. Venky calls it the power of compounding. Watching Claude connect the small tools I built over many years, I'm finally learning both — through AI system architecture.

As I think about AI, it's not about tools or process. As a leader, my thought to execution speed is now in minutes and hours, not weeks or months. That's the real shift IMO.

Playing a founder in a senior compensation conversation taught me something: operational stability is table stakes. The hook was never the salary. It was the story.

Peliqan is operational context infrastructure for AI agents — a cache, transformation, and inference layer that sits between Claude and your live business systems. I'm working out what that gap actually is.