The Morning Brief

Are music labels about to dictate the terms of Indian cinema? What began as strategic investments—Saregama's ₹325 crore stake in Sanjay Leela Bhansali Productions and Universal Music's acquisition of 30.8% in Excel Entertainment—has sparked questions about consolidation, control, and the future of India's entertainment ecosystem. In this episode of The Morning Brief, host Anirban Chowd...

India's precious metals explosion defies gravity as equities stumble. While the Nifty crawls at 10.5% and bleeds 4% this year, gold has rocketed from $2,700 to over $5,000. Silver from $28 to $100. That's a 200% surge in twelve months. Geopolitical chaos, tariff wars, and safe-haven demand are fueling this unprecedented rally. In this episode, host Kairavi Lukka talks to Naveen Mathur, Director -...

Qure.ai is transforming routine medical imaging into early disease detection at unprecedented scale. Processing nearly 1,000 patients per hour across 105 countries, the startup has made preliminary radiology reports at India’s AIIMS and CMC Vellore AI-powered often flagging diseases physicians weren’t even looking for. In this conversation, Vikas Dandekar speaks with Prashant Warier Co...

In this episode of ET@Davos, ET’s Sruthijith KK speaks to Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind and Nobel Laureate 2024, on the future of AI. The chess prodigy-turned scientist-turned-AI pioneer explains how DeepMind balances frontier research with a billion-user scale. Hassabis says Google’s Apple partnership followed direct model comparisons where Gemini prevailed; China is now only...

In this episode, ET's Executive Editor Sruthijith KK sits down with AI pioneer Andrew Ng, Founder of DeepLearning. AI, for a critical conversation on India's tech future. Ng delivers a stark warning: the nation's massive IT services industry faces existential disruption. While dismissing AGI hype as overblown, he insists AI-powered upskilling isn't optional—it's survival. Ng challenges CEOs...

India's most trusted rocket, the PSLV, has experienced something unprecedented: back-to-back failures in May 2025 and January 2026, both involving mysterious third-stage anomalies. With a 92% success rate built over three decades, these consecutive setbacks mark uncharted territory for ISRO. Host Anirban Chowdhury speaks to TOI’s space journalist Chethan Kumar to break down the technical fai...

Iran's current crisis isn't just another protest cycle, it's a convergence of systemic failures. A decades-old illusion of invincibility crumbled when US-Israeli bombs struck its nuclear facilities. Tehran's water crisis last autumn exposed the regime's inability to provide basic necessities, igniting rage that economic sanctions and 40-50% inflation had already primed. What began as bread-and-but...

India assumes the BRICS chair amid profound contradiction. What began as an emerging economies coalition has become an unwieldy 10-nation bloc including Gulf states, Egypt, and Ethiopia bound more by grievance than vision. Host Anirban Chowdhury speaks with Alicia García-Herrero, chief economist at Natixis, and former BRICS Sherpa Sanjay Bhattacharya to explore whether BRICS can deliver tan...

Silicon Valley is experiencing its biggest platform shift in decades, but beneath the frenzy lies a brutal correction in progress. An early-stage AI investor reveals the uncomfortable truths emerging from the epicenter of the boom. Host Swathi Moorthy talks to Apoorva Pandhi, Managing Director of Zetta Venture Partners about why the honeymoon is over. What began as wild experimentation now faces m...

India's quick service restaurant sector witnessed a seismic shift as Devyani International and Sapphire Foods merged to create the country's largest listed QSR platform with over 3,000 stores and consolidated revenue exceeding ₹7,800 crore. The deal brings KFC and Pizza Hut operations under one franchisee, promising annual synergies of ₹210-225 crore and positioning the entity as a formidable chal...

Suzlon Energy controls a third of India's wind market, but co-founder and vice chairman Girish Tanti isn't celebrating. In this conversation with host Anirban Chowdhury, he confronts hard questions: Why has India tapped only 4% of its wind potential despite three decades of operations? Can the sector scale from 6 gigawatts annually to the 10+ needed to meet 2030 targets? And will promised AI data...

Five years after a splashy IPO and amid a bruising market reset, Sridhar Ramaswamy is steering Snowflake through a defining moment for enterprise technology: the AI transition. In this episode, hosts Samidha Sharma and Pranav Mukul talk to Snowflake’s CEO and former Google advertising chief to cut through the hype around artificial intelligence and focus on where the real value lies. Ramaswa...

India’s gig economy is at an inflection point. Sold as a model of flexibility and scale, it now finds itself under scrutiny as workers protest shrinking pay, rising pressure, and the absence of basic protections. This episode examines the deeper tensions powering India’s convenience economy between flexibility and dignity, efficiency and responsibility. At one end is a labour market fl...

What does it really take to break into the world’s most selective startup accelerator? In this episode, host Swathi Moorthy speaks with Ankit Gupta, General Partner at Y Combinator, about how AI is rapidly eroding traditional advantages in entrepreneurship. Gupta explains why a growing share of YC startups, nearly 80–90% are now AI-led, and how coding agents are enabling younger, first...

On January 3rd, 2026, Delta Force stormed Nicolás Maduro's compound in Caracas in Operation Absolute Resolve. Within hours, the Venezuelan president was shackled aboard the USS Iwo Jima, bound for Guantanamo Bay. Trump announced America would "run" Venezuela indefinitely. The prize? The world's largest oil reserves—303 billion barrels sitting beneath a nation producing less than a mil...

Generation Z has divorced legacy brands. From fashion to food, skincare to supplements, young Indians are abandoning household names for Instagram-born startups their parents have never heard of. Zara feels too expensive and repetitive. H&M lacks uniqueness. Traditional brands feel inauthentic and mass-produced. But this isn't about price alone. It's about trust, personalization, and meaning....

Arvind Jain couldn't find his own company's data at Rubrik. So in 2019 before ChatGPT, before the AI boom, he built Glean, the first enterprise generative AI company. Now they're doubling past $100M ARR with 1,100 employees and watching tech giants copy their playbook. But Jain admits his biggest mistake: being too conservative. "We should have gone much bigger, much faster," he says, crediting hi...

Mumbai finally has its second airport — a long-awaited addition that could reshape how India’s busiest aviation market moves. Beyond the terminal and runway, it signals the scale of Adani’s airport ambitions. In just a few years, the group has built a network of eight airports, and in FY25 its airport business turned profitable with ₹9,276 crore in revenue, ₹4,350 crore in EBITDA...

Global trade is entering a more complicated phase. It is no longer outpacing global GDP, and the ideas that once drove seamless globalization are increasingly under pressure. In this episode, host Anirban Chowdhury speaks with Tobias Meyer, CEO of DHL Group, to cut through the rhetoric around “deglobalization” and focus on what is actually happening to trade flows and supply chains. Ra...

In 2025, the Indian rupee has quietly become Asia’s worst-performing currency but the real impact isn’t just on trading screens, it’s inside Indian homes. From higher cooking oil prices and costlier foreign education to travel bills and shrinking savings returns, rupee volatility is reshaping middle-class finances in ways few anticipate. Why is the currency weakening despite stro...

Half your milk comes from animals grazing on land the government calls wasteland. The mutton in your biryani? Same story. We're talking ₹1.3 lakh crore annually 5% of India's GDP built on ecosystems we've systematically mislabeled as worthless since the British needed a tax category for "land we can't monetize. Now we're converting these "wastelands" into solar farms at scale without asking the mi...

What does it take to build and scale a remote-first company across borders, regulations, and cultures? In this episode, host Himanshi Lohchab talks to Alex Bouaziz, co-founder and CEO of Deel, on how the company grew from a startup idea into a global HR and payroll platform operating in over 150 countries. Bouaziz reflects on early pivots, lessons from Y Combinator, and the idea of founder–p...

India’s nuclear energy framework is set for its most consequential reset in decades with the passage of the Shanti Bill. In this episode, host Anirban Chowdhury speaks to ET’s executive editor, politics Pranab Dhal Samanta and Anubhuti Vishnoi to unpack what the new law changes and why it matters now. The discussion traces India’s long nuclear journey: from staying outside the No...

As the global pharmaceutical industry enters a period of profound transition, this episode of Corner Office Conversation examines what lies ahead. Hosts Vikas Dandekar and Teena Thacker talk to Stefan Oelrich, Head of the Pharmaceuticals Division at Bayer AG, about the forces reshaping drug discovery and access from trade tensions and shifting innovation hubs to the promise and uncertainty of cell...

Why do small businesses still wait months to be paid, even when the law says 45 days? In this episode of The Morning Brief, we examine one of the most persistent stress points in India’s MSME ecosystem: delayed payments. Host Anirban Chowdhury speaks with Basant Kaur, Country Head of C2FO and Ramesh Dharmaji Senior advisor of the Global Alliance of Mass Entrepreneurship (GAME) to unpack why...