Daybreak

The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day just broke India's box office records back to back — and PVR Inox's stock jumped almost 20% in the process. It looks like proof that Indian audiences are finally back in theatres. But that's not all. The real story runs through just 34 IMAX screens, a decade-old trade deal that quietly expired, and a geopolitical rift thousands of miles away that has nothi...

From platforms like Cred, Zerodha, and Groww integrating AI assistants, to Sebi-registered advisors now using AI to generate personalised investment recommendations, the shift is already underway. And with nearly 140 million investors and fewer than a thousand registered advisors to serve them, the math alone might make AI advice not just convenient, but necessary. Tune in. **This episode was firs...

On a hot Thursday evening in Delhi, people are queuing outside India's first Olive Garden. Some found it on Instagram. Others wandered over from the business park next door. Almost all have waited at least half an hour. Bharti Group wants 10 Olive Gardens in three years, and 125 total restaurants — more than double what it runs today. Indians are dining out more than ever, and serious money is fol...

Six months on, the answer has shifted. A US-Israeli war against Iran hit an already fragile stock market. Gold cooled, silver crashed, and real estate stayed flat, pushing investors toward fixed income for want of better returns.  So we put the same question to the same five experts, four Sebi-registered advisers and a private wealth manager. Their consensus on diversification holds, but the reaso...

If you Google "paisa de do", dozens of near-identical websites appear. Some, offering cash in 15 minutes. The interest rate on some of these loans is 600% per annum and the lenders are RBI-licensed. One borrower started with a Rs 75,000 loan. Within five months, he was paying Rs 6 lakh a month across eight different loan apps just to stay afloat. The Ken's Mutasim Khan found 25 such NBFCs, some re...

Zepto nearly doubled its revenue in a year, processes more orders than Swiggy Instamart, and has raised over 2.5 billion dollars from private investors.  But when it filed to go public, India's largest mutual funds said they'd value it at less than half of what private investors had in it's last fundraise. The IPO is now delayed by two quarters. The cash reserves are falling. And six players are c...

For generations, Indian families have shared the financial responsibility of ageing. Parents invested in their children through education, weddings and first homes, often expecting that support to come full circle in later life. But the economics behind that arrangement are changing. India is ageing rapidly but also living longer. The number of people over 60 expected to more than double by 2050 e...

Amit was a computer science student who used to have a loan, a plan, and a flight to Canada. But then the college his visa depended on was derecognised. And an NBFC called Credila ended up with a Rs 20 lakh problem. Amit's story is becoming an industry pattern. Canada has cut active student volume by over 50%. The US and UK are tightening too. Study-abroad applications are down 25 to 30%, and the...

India is the world's top sunflower oil buyer, and Black Sea attacks have sent it hunting across South America. Shipments from Russia and Ukraine are running weeks late, and prices are climbing. The substitutes are squeezed too. Indonesia is diverting more palm oil into biodiesel, and China's record soybean buying keeps the soy complex tight. A weak monsoon has thinned India's harvest.  But the cou...

Assam is enduring some of its worst flooding in years, with the death toll inching to a hundred and lakhs affected. It is also happens to be the state that recently landed India's first chip assembly plant, a ₹27,000 crore Tata facility, and the centrepiece of Japan's growing push into the Northeast. The plant itself is light on water. But the deeper ecosystem Assam is chasing, chemicals and the r...

Last Tuesday, Trump announced 100% tariffs on generic medicines imported into the US. By Wednesday, Indian pharma stocks were already falling even though the tariff doesn't take effect for two years. Trump wants import companies to reshore their manufacturing to the US so that the country can secure life-saving medication in the event of global supply chain disruptions. India supplies nearly 50% o...

Burger King India is one of the country's better-run quick-service chains. Gross margins are at record highs, restaurant-level profits have doubled, and the burger chain has posted five straight quarters of same-store-sales growth. So why does its stock sit close to where it listed six years ago? Part of the answer is Indonesia, where an old acquisition keeps bleeding cash. The rest is the new own...

When Accenture employees in Pune walked into their appraisal meetings in May, they expected the routine conversations. Instead, they found out things would be done differently this year. They did get their full salary hike. But not the way it was done up until now. Half went into the base salary. The other half arrived as a lump sum in June. On paper, nothing was lost. In practice, though, every f...

In September 2022, Bengaluru's worst urban floods in recent memory swallowed the Outer Ring Road, including areas like Bellandur, Marathahalli, Mahadevapura, while the metro's Blue Line was under active construction through the same corridor. Three years later, the metro corporation still wasn't in the room when the city held its monsoon preparedness meeting. It was never invited. Weeks after that...

No coffee chain in India is clearly profitable. Third Wave Coffee, which lost 110 crore rupees in FY24 with nearly 70% of its stores in the red, is trying to change that with cake. Its new sub-brand, Third Rush, has put around 200 dessert items on the menu, with plans for 50 cafes by year-end. CEO Rajat Luthra, former head of KFC India, has already pared the losses. The dessert margins clear 50% a...

OpenAI's own research found that its heaviest users were also its loneliest and most emotionally dependent. The top 10% kept triggering classifiers built to detect unhealthy attachment. The response was to build a screenless AI companion designed to live in your home, learn your habits, access your emails, and get harder to let go of over time. Meta, meanwhile, is selling AI glasses with Kylie Jen...

From airports to cricket broadcasts, India’s family conglomerates keep turning up everywhere. According to the 2024 Barclays-Hurun report, one family’s wealth alone equals nearly one-tenth of everything India produces in a year. India is running a version of the economic playbook that South Korea and Indonesia once ran — protect your conglomerates and let them do the building. South Korea came thr...

If you search "diabetes blood sugar level" on Google, the AI overview gives you a number. The number is wrong, the source is a hospital website, and the article on that website was written by AI. This is the loop: AI writes flawed medical content for hospital websites, AI search tools treat it as authoritative, and the final result is patients make health decisions based on it. An audit of nearly...

Tenants across India's six biggest metros have handed landlords Rs 1.26 trillion in security deposits, a new NoBroker study estimates. Around $15 billion of tenant money, refundable in name, sits in landlords' accounts earning interest for people it does not belong to. In this episode, host Snigdha Sharma ask what a deposit actually costs a renter, and arrives at a number: nearly a month's rent, e...

Cred just reported its first profitable quarter. Meta invested 8,500 crore rupees. And Kunal Shah walked out the door. Eight years of questions about Cred's business model ended the moment it finally had answers. The design-first, exclusivity-obsessed fintech that rewarded creditworthy Indians with gold credit cards now makes most of its money from lending — the same way every other UPI app does....

Netflix built its empire on one idea: watch what you want, when you want, all at once. Now it's losing viewers to YouTube, struggling to bring audiences back for season two, and internally discussing always-on live channels and ad bundles you can't skip. Which is to say: it's considering becoming cable TV. The irony is that while Netflix is scrambling for answers in the US, India may already have...

In October last year, a ship owned by Adani Ports slowed to less than one knot near Malta. It held that position for over seven days, directly above the cables linking Malta to Sicily. It was no accident.  India's largest private port operator has quietly built a fleet of more than a hundred vessels across 12 countries. Their job is servicing the world's offshore energy infrastructure. The busines...

In April, India made AI education mandatory across 28,000 CBSE schools, giving them 90 days to comply. Most had already finalised their academic calendars for the year. Some schools were ready. Others scrambled. A few found that the harder problem wasn't the teachers — it was the students. At one Hyderabad school already using an AI learning tool, kids were  From 2029, AI becomes a compulsory boar...

Naresh drives for Rapido. When his phone died, so did his income — for seven days, until he could borrow enough to replace it. Until 2024, India's biggest consumer lenders had turned that exact vulnerability into a recovery tool. Miss an EMI, lose your phone. It worked so well that smartphone lending grew from 1% to nearly 40% of consumer borrowing in three years.  Then the RBI banned it.  Lending...

Last week, the government ordered Apple and Google to pull at least three battery management system or BMS apps that were being used to switch off e-rickshaws mid-road. If you've been on Instagram, you've seen the videos. A prankster opens the app, taps a switch, and a passing e-rickshaw just dies. It works because the cheap lithium batteries these vehicles run on often ship from China with their...