What makes India Unique – by Sajith Pai
Welcome to the seventy-sixth edition of ‘3-2-1 by Story Rules‘.
A newsletter recommending good examples of storytelling across:
- 3 tweets
- 2 articles, and
- 1 long-form content piece
Let’s dive in.
𝕏 3 Tweets of the week
Simple but powerful chart. You could be in the last place with half the race already run… and yet come out the winner!
Also LOVED the headline above the chart.
Pity the poor history professors!
The publications have perished, the star still stands tall.
📄 2 Articles of the week
In a week of bleak sports news, this was an inspiring write-up about Rohit Sharma – a modern-day great.
Andrew uses a nice number-contrast (between Rohit’s highest ODI score of 264 and the last ODI being his 265th appearance in the format):
Eighteen years into his ODI career, though, our guy is set to cross into uncharted territory. Ever since he played his first ODI his stats sheet has always shown a higher number under “high score” than “matches played”. Ten years since setting the kind of record that people credibly contend may never be broken, Rohit is about to go past 264.
Andrew then contrasts Rohit’s earlier approach (which brought him – literally – tons of dividends) and his newfound one:
Other batters merely “get in” on a track. Rohit embeds himself inside an opposition attack like the alien from Alien and feeds until he is half the size of the spaceship and they are withering husks.
Not lately, though. The more recent Rohit, in ODIs at least, is a highly-skilled DGAF figure – somebody who has seen it all, fought battles in all kinds of games there are to fight battles in, and picked the corner of ODI cricket he wants to shake up. Rohit has become predominantly a powerplay aggressor.
The irony – keeping up with the week’s depressing sports theme, India lost or tied all one-day matches with Sri Lanka, despite Rohit shining in each of them using his new approach.
If the T20 WC win was the nation’s pride, Vinesh was the nation’s heartbreak.
An errant 100 grams crushed the hopes of a nation and the dreams of a lifetime.
Vinesh Phogat has won before. Vinesh has lost before. Her wins have been glorious and joyful, her defeats have been painful and heartbreaking, and they have always been public.
Her victories, her fights with the system have always been followed by millions. Her lowest moments have also come in front of prying eyes.
However, her most devastating defeat took place on a weighing scale at 7:30 in the morning in a nondescript room next to a training hall at the Olympic Athletes Village in Paris.
The details are brutal and scary.
Talk to any wrestler during their career, and especially after it, and they will tell you what they hated the most was the unavoidable weight cut on the night before a competition. ‘Wazan todna’ they call it and that’s exactly what it is –breaking weight.
They might look like physical specimens, but the process of cutting weight is downright dangerous. No small number of wrestlers deal with organ damage from dehydration. Diuretics are commonly used.
This is what she underwent before her semi-final bout:
The night before her first day of competition, the procedure was textbook. Military campaigns have been planned out with less precision. Her water intake went down to zero. She worked out on an Exercycle in her sauna suit. When she grew tired, she sat inside a sauna, squeezing out the most adamant drops of water. Then, when her energy returned, she returned to the cycle. It was brutal but it worked.
On the day of the weigh-in, when Vinesh stood on the scales, the numbers read 49.90. Her skin stretched like paper against her muscles, her eyes were sunken, and her veins were arid. She could barely walk but she had earned the right to compete.
We all know what happened before the final.
Vinesh didn’t sleep all through last night. She was on the treadmill for six hours and in the sauna for another three. She didn’t consume a bite of food or drink a drop of water. Every few hours, she stood on a weighing scale. The numbers were getting smaller but not fast enough. In desperation, her coaches trimmed the elastic in the bottom of her costume. They thought of chopping her hair and then did it.
But the scale didn’t budge.
I hope we move to a world where no one has to endure this level of torture to wear a piece of metal around their neck
🎧 1 long-form listen of the week
a. ‘Sajith Pai – Unpacking India’ on the Making Markets podcast with Eric Golden
I know, I know. I had featured a Sajith Pai episode on the Indian economy with Shruti Rajagpoalan in this newsletter around 4 weeks back. But I am sharing this episode too, because:
- They are different. The earlier one was focused on the Indus Valley Annual Report, while this one is on the Indian economy and business ecosystem in general
- It is Sajith Pai, and you’ll expectedly get a ton of valuable insights hearing him speak
In the conversation, Sajith ‘explains’ India to a slightly wide-eyed American, so some of it is not news for us. But the insights are useful.
For instance, this one about the race to scale, resulting in duopolies in many sectors, and the Mexico, Brazil comparison:
If you look at India, it’s some country where very quickly, things collapse into a duopoly. And you see this consistent pattern in India, e-commerce, Amazon and Flipkart, payments, Google Pay and PhonePe, Uber and Ola on ride share, food ordering, Zomato and Swiggy. It’s consistent, and that’s a pattern.
And compare it to, for example, Mexico or Brazil in e-commerce. The biggest e-commerce platform in Brazil is, I don’t think, more than 30%. You’ll notice this trend. And I think there’s powerful reasons for it. It’s a complicated country to make the economics work. You fundamentally need scale, and there’s a race to scale. And whoever wins scale has the best unit economics to drive, say, a lot of business.
India being the 51st state of US:
I like to think of India as a parallel to Israel, which is sort of the 51st state of the U.S. when it comes to B2B. I’d like to think of India consumers potentially the 51st state of the U.S. when it comes to B2C, and I’m beginning to see that. The reason is in all the cities in India, the large population, especially the younger folks, growing up with completely Western attitudes. They watch all the Western stuff. Their daughters watch Friends. And they watch a lot of soaps.
In the B2B space, many firms are realising that selling to the US is easier:
It’s very common to find Indians who say, “Hey, I’m building for the U.S. from day zero.” And they may be focusing on the technology for which — for example, there just may not be enough appetite for that in India. And it’s very hard to get people to pay for software in India, it’s changing, whereas in the U.S., it’s so much easier.
For example, one of my Indian batch mates, Pranay, who now lives in New York, founded a company called Fractal Analytics. It’s a large company with $200 million revenue in place. He used to say that in India, you have seven to eight meetings. They make you come to the office. Different people meet you. And then finally, you may get an unpaid pilot.
In the U.S., you send out to them two mails. You sometimes get back a mail. They’ll do a 30-minute call. Then they call you to the office. And he says, “If I get called to the office, 75% is done.” The country where there isn’t enough time to waste, it’s a country which understands what’s the benefit.
That’s all from this week’s edition.
Photo by Diana Polekhina on Unsplash
