The City That Breaks You, and the Rage That Fizzles Out by Sunday

Dear Insighter,

It doesn’t matter if you pay your taxes on time, vote in every election, follow every rule, queue patiently at signals, and never throw trash on the tracks. The city of dreams will exhaust you anyway. It will find a way to remind you that your citizenship is conditional, your safety provisional, your grief measurable in government circulars and compensation tables.

You can do everything right, and still, a slab of concrete from an under-construction metro will find its way to your head while you’re walking to work, waiting for a bus, scrolling on your phone, or simply existing in a city that treats construction as a contact sport and public safety as an optional suggestion.

This week, a parapet segment from the under-construction Metro Line 4 collapsed onto LBS Marg in Mulund. One person died. Three were injured. The MMRDA arrested officials, imposed ₹50 million on the contractor and ₹10 million on consultants, and ordered “special intensive safety inspections”, as though safety was supposed to be optional until someone was crushed.

The compensation to the victim’s family? ₹500,000.

Read that again. The state collects ten times more from those responsible than it gives to those destroyed.

As the MMRDA’s preliminary assessment puts it, the incident “appears to have occurred due to negligence”. Appears to have. As though negligence materialises spontaneously, like humidity in July, rather than being engineered into systems where penalties are priced into project costs and human life is treated as an actuarial variable.

But here's the thing: we rage, but never enough. We rage in the moment, when the photos are fresh and the news anchors are furious and the hashtags are trending. Then the weekend arrives, and somewhere between the vada pav and the 8:04 local, we move on. The city demands our attention so relentlessly—the commute, the rent, the relentless hustle—that we have no emotional bandwidth left for sustained anger. We're too tired to stay furious.

The Mulund incident isn't even an outlier. It's a pattern. In October 2025, a bank employee who had started work just a week earlier, was walking a few metres from her house in Jogeshwari when a concrete block from an under-construction redevelopment project fell on her head. Dead on arrival at HBT Hospital. In November, a 42-year olf supervisor inspecting work on Mumbai Metro 9, lost his balance and fell from a platform. Safety lapses, said the internal inquiry. In August, a 20-year old was travelling in an autorickshaw when a 20mm iron rod from a Metro 5 construction site pierced his head. He survived, which is more than can be said for the 17 people who took shelter from the rain under a billboard in Ghatkopar in May 2024, only to have 120 feet of illegally constructed hoarding collapse on them. The billboard was 120x120 feet. The maximum permitted size is 40x40. But permits, like safety, are optional when you know the fine is just the cost of doing business.

Each time: arrests, penalties, statements, amnesia. Within a weekend, it's someone else's tragedy.

Perhaps this is why Duvvuri Subbarao's reflections on crisis management, in his multi-series conversation with Manoj Rane, resonate beyond central banking. Subbarao took charge at the RBI in September 2008, days before Lehman collapsed. He talks about ring-fencing Lehman's Indian operations, about signalling preparedness, about managing markets under extreme uncertainty. But what stays with you is his description of the taper tantrum in 2013, when the rupee depreciated sharply and India was grouped among the "fragile five". Exchange-rate crises, he explains, are fundamentally different from inflation shocks. Real-time decision-making becomes unavoidable. Communication itself becomes a policy tool—powerful, but risky.

Consider India’s US trade deal, which R. Gurumurthy dissects. On paper, it looks asymmetric, even lopsided. Critics call it diplomatic surrender. Gurumurthy calls it something else: pragmatic statecraft conducted under binding constraints. When the US is your largest market and capital source, walking away is not defiance. It is self-harm.

G. Chandrashekhar, in his interview with Krishnadevan V, shows how agriculture bears the cost: soybean oil concessions, DDGS disputes, Trump’s pressure driven by a $45 billion surplus. His warning on the EU deal—carbon borders, quality gaps, petroleum distortions—reveals how “free trade” often arrives with hidden compliance tolls.

Professor Arpita Mukherjee, joining Rajesh Mahapatra to connect the dots in India's trade arc, weighs potential gains against WTO compliance and US protectionism. We're forging strategic agreements with everyone while hoping the geopolitical dynamics don't shift beneath our feet.

Meanwhile, the IT sector is seeing its own reckoning. Krishnadevan V reports that about ₹5.7 trillion evaporated from the sector in eight trading sessions, with the Nifty IT index down 19%. The market is trying to price an existential trade: if AI can do more of the tasks that Indian IT built its empire on, what happens to the people?

Dhananjay Sinha puts numbers to the pain: the NIFTY IT index has declined 25%, erasing more than ₹9 trillion in market capitalisation. Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal urges investors to treat the correction as a buying opportunity, envisioning the sector scaling towards $1 trillion by the mid-2030s, powered by AI, hyperscale data centres, and indigenous 6G capabilities. But as Sinha notes, the sector's past was built on scale. Its future will depend on differentiation.

TK Arun asks whether the AI panic is itself artificial. Sure, Anthropic's Claude model can now perform routine software development functions. Sure, a small logistics firm claimed its AI platform allowed it to increase turnover without increasing headcount. But as Arun points out, panic and greed drive markets anywhere. AI will destroy some jobs, but it will create many new ones that don't exist at present, if past technology changes are any guide.

And for TCS, as Krishnadevan V shows, this isn’t just operational. It’s existential. Nearly 80% of Tata Sons’ dividends flow from one company. N. Chandrasekaran’s intervention signals that technology transition is now balance-sheet risk. Hands-off governance is becoming hands-on survival.

Which brings us to tax holidays for data centres, and TK Arun's titled takedown: "We Don't Need No Data-Centre Coddling". Here's the kicker: if Google sets up a wholly-owned data centre in India, it gets no tax holiday. If it buys services from a notified Indian-owned data centre provider—Adani, Ambani, Tata—it gets the holiday, provided it uses an Indian reseller. What value does this reseller bring?

That capital could retrain workers, fund AI adoption, build manufacturing intelligence. Instead, it lubricates political ecosystems.

Ajay Srivastava’s Bangladesh analysis shows where asymmetry leads: compliance obligations, limited gains, strategic regret. Saibal Dasgupta’s reading of Dhaka’s elections offers cautious hope, if governance resists polarisation.

Closer to home, our banking system is quietly undergoing shifts that might matter more than the headlines suggest. Mint Owl's meditation on SBI captures something essential about the elephant that compounds when banking is boring. Sticky deposits, steady leadership, and trust—that old-fashioned thing—give SBI a structural funding advantage that no amount of fintech flash can replicate. In moments of uncertainty, depositors don't migrate to the most aggressive lender. They move toward the institution they believe will safeguard their money. Time and again, SBI has been that institution.

K. Srinivasa Rao explains the risk-based deposit insurance framework kicking in from April 1, 2026. Banks will no longer be charged a uniform fee for existing. Their insurance costs will now depend on how strong their capital is, how clean their books are, how seriously they treat regulation. Those that manage risk well pay less. Those that don't pay more. Belated, but necessary.

But liquidity needs capital. Gurumurthy reminds us that market-making without balance sheets is theatre. Quotes without warehousing are illusions. Rahul Ghosh calls this India’s missing power. Without deep bond markets, capital flees during stress. Financial infrastructure determines geopolitical gravity.

Krishnadevan V adds a behavioural twist: SEBI chairman Tuhin Kanta Pandey recently noted that about 15% of Indians recognise cryptocurrency as an investment product, compared with roughly 10% who recognise corporate bonds. The gap isn't about sophistication; it's about how retail participation is formed. Crypto platforms are engineered around immediacy, feedback, social validation. Bond markets still communicate through institutional language, periodic disclosures, and slower interfaces that prioritise certainty over engagement.

Indra Chourasia examines SEBI’s F&O rules. Nine out of ten traders lose. Yet speculation persists. Regulation adds friction. It doesn’t build literacy. DV Ramana’s Tiger Global analysis shows substance defeating form. Treaty shopping is dying. Capital must align with reality.

Amol Baxi reviews India's latest IBC amendments, which tighten timelines, improve governance, and clarify disputed interpretations. But the task ahead, Baxi notes, is building durable institutions that intervene while businesses are still salvageable, before considerable value has been eroded.

Rajesh Kumar walks us through India's new CPI series, rebased to 2024 from 2012. The food weight declines sharply—"food & beverages" now accounts for 36.75% of CPI, compared with 45.86% in the old series. The basket expands from 299 weighted items to 358. The revision strengthens the credibility and relevance of India's inflation statistics, ensuring monetary and fiscal policy are guided by a price measure that reflects how households actually consume today.

Dev Chandrasekhar reports on Mahindra's ₹150 billion investment in Maharashtra, a structural shift toward mega-integrated hubs that blur the lines between tractors, SUVs, and electric vehicles. And in a piece that quietly upends assumptions about where value accrues, Krishnadevan V notes that used-car platform CarTrade now earns margins closer to a software platform than an industrial manufacturer—roughly 37%, compared with mid-single digits for Maruti Suzuki. The automotive ecosystem is evolving toward a dual structure where factories ensure supply while transaction platforms capture a growing share of value from exchange and financing.

Meanwhile, Hindustan Unilever's restructuring exposes execution strain. Krishnadevan V dissects the numbers: 4% volume growth that the market shrugged at, EBITDA margins contracting despite gross margin expansion, staff costs jumping 28%. When a market leader sacrifices pricing to defend volumes, it signals that competitive intensity has exceeded pricing power. The question is whether "better" means competitive or just less weak.

And finally, R. Gurumurthy raises a question that cuts to the bone of India's financialised healthcare system: who gets to decide what healthcare you deserve? In reality, it's about who controls clinical truth—doctors, hospitals, insurers, or regulators. Neither side should be the final arbiter, Gurumurthy argues. That role belongs to independent clinical institutions, accountable regulators, transparent governance.

Which brings us back to Mulund. Back to the other mishaps that become news archives. Back to the question of who decides what safety you deserve, what life is worth, what negligence costs. The MMRDA blames the contractor. The contractor blames the sub-contractor. The sub-contractor probably blames the labour. And somewhere in this infinite regress of responsibility, we lose track of the dead.

This city exhausts you. It breaks you slowly, not with one catastrophic event but with a thousand small betrayals: a collapsing parapet here, a falling rod there, a compensation package that values your life at less than the fine imposed on the people who ended it. And yet we stay. We learn to walk under construction sites with one eye on the sky, because what's the alternative? Where would you go that doesn't have its own version of this story?

Perhaps this is what Subbarao meant when he described crisis management as real-time decision-making under extreme uncertainty. We're all crisis managers now, navigating a city that tests our capacity for sustained outrage. The question is whether we can hold onto our rage long enough to demand something better, or whether we'll keep moving on by Sunday, leaving the dead to their ₹500,000 and the contractors to their cost of doing business.

Until next time, keep one eye on the sky.

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