India’s countless gifts to the world include the quiet revolution of Buddhism, the invention of zero, and the moral stubbornness of Gandhi. Lofty contributions, civilisational milestones.
And yet, there is one more offering (once imported, now equally at home on railway platforms and in corporate offices) — humbler, crispier, and far more universally effective.
The samosa.

It may not liberate the soul like the Buddha, nor reshape mathematics like zero, nor mobilise millions like Gandhi. But it can make you round like a zero, momentarily zen like a monk, and patient enough to wait your turn — much like Gandhi himself — as you track the circulating tray through the room.

I have seen it work its quiet diplomacy. In meetings with the Chairman of NABARD, I’ve heard him say, “Are bhai, in logon ke liye chai samosa to la do,” and the room instantly softens; shoulders relax. The grilling leads to conversations as the air thickens with the perfume of fried maida, aloo and the sharp twang of green chilli. From boardrooms to village-level gatherings, from senior officers to SHG women, all eyes light up at the smell of something hot and familiar — the effect is identical. Steam rises, tension lowers.

Idli may be the healthy snack of India — disciplined, restrained, almost virtuous. The samosa, on the other hand, is guilt-laden fulfilment. It is indulgent, unapologetic, and deeply satisfying. It can fuel a labourer through a hard morning or sit comfortably beside the Board member of a 125-billion-dollar AIFI.

It’s also an unexpected link between my wife and my work.
She remembers an FPO fondly because “Wahan ke samosa best hote hain.”

There are few things in this country that travel so effortlessly across class, language, and designation. The samosa does. It asks for nothing but a little chutney and a moment of pause.

In a land of philosophies and five-year plans, sometimes what truly binds us is a triangular aloo goodness — crisp shell giving way to spiced softness, dipped in sharp tamarind chutney or cooling mint, shared over steaming chai — delivering, in one modest bite, the small, perfect fulfilment we all secretly crave as the real work begins.

Quantitative sense of Art
This brings me to the problem statement – literature and its valuations are fogged by fuzzy rating networks. The inherent subjectivity in reviews makes objective analysis an extremely uphill task.
As readers, we are unavoidably subjective. We can usually tell a bad piece apart from a good one but the comparison between A Thousand Splendid Suns and Kite Runner – both are rated 4.3/5 on goodreads – might not be as straightforward for most readers. We are not great at saying this is 9.1/10 vs that one is 8.9/10 in any reliable or consistent way.
Still, even fiction seems to follow patterns – some bell curve of quality and preference. The ability to tell works apart matters a lot to readers who want to invest their time carefully.
That’s how the idea of developing performance-risk parameters for literature began to take shape in my head.
Goodreads gives us an average rating, but it doesn’t tell us why Shakespeare survives while many of his contemporaries don’t.
Why does the world mostly remember War and Peace and Anna Karenina, while much of Tolstoy’s other work stays in the background?
Why is Hamlet still being reimagined (400+ adaptations), while The Tempest (~100 adaptations), with all its drama and the supernatural, finds fewer takers?
What is the underlying beta of Hamlet powering it ahead of its peers? Did the additional risk of patricide as a theme give it a bit of extra “Sortino” — more reward for the risk it took?
In my head, an author starts to look a bit like a fund manager — choosing themes, styles and risks in a way that tries to earn more “memory” and meaning from readers than their peers.

Time – Monetising the Asset
Time is the biggest asset we have. What if we treated the hours we spend reading as an investment, and thought of the “returns” in terms of experience, surprise, insight, or whatever our personal satisfaction metrics are?
In a world of paid promotions and algorithmic manipulation, blindly trusting reviews feels risky. What if, before reading those subjective opinions, I could feed a book into an algorithm and get a few objective-looking indicators about it?
In finance, we obsess about:
• Return – gain over time
• Risk – volatility of return against additional risks taken
• Diversification – Asset classes to cover when chasing both returns and safety
In literature, we could think of:
• Return – Impact through sales, reprints, adaptations, citations, personal resonance etc.
• Risk – Volatility across the career, attempts at risqué notions – landing flat vs spectacular additions
• Diversification – We remember Shakespeare for his plays but maybe it was his sonnets which brought him income, or early fame

None of this is about replacing human reading or critique. The decision to select a Mutual Fund is entirely subjective, but a dashboard helps me make an informed decision. Similarly, the next time I have to invest my time, I’d be glad to have a pre-set filtering through a dashboard, before I proceed to subjective assessment and critique.

These are just the working notes of a reader who works on systems building and is trained in Mathematics and Engineering.

If you work with books, data or both, I’d love to hear
• How would you define “return” on a book
• What would risk look like for you – reader, writer, publisher?

As we travelled from the ruby-cheeked Garhwalis of the hills to the caramel hues of western UP, melting slowly into the cocoa tones of Bihar and Bengal, the colours of people shifted with the changing tones of the earth. It’s these subtle transformations — of soil, crops, and skin along the grey miles of the highway.

The hills are blue.

Not the eager turquoise of the skies, but the solemn depth of navies and emerald shadows that meet your eyes as they sweep across the rising terrain. The greens of nearby fields surrender to blue, before yielding to the white and grey of snow-capped peaks. Up here, the idea of rivers is still nascent. Instead, it’s the streams — or gadera, as we call them —tumbling down the steep slopes with gusto and thunder of a toddler discovering a new musical instrument gifted by an affectionate uncle.

Rishikesh welcomed us with still-under-reconstruction Lakshman Jhula straddling the river, as the ten-foot-wide gadera leaking from the Gangotri glacier’s base finally begins to resemble the river that feeds a civilisation and a half. The gusty, rock-ridden stream of the hills carves banks instead of finding ways around stones.

A few kilometres on, hill soil watered by streams and snow gives way to the thirsty plains of UP, with man-made canals keeping the river’s promise. Across the horizon rise dozens of Qutub Minars — until you realise they are brick kilns.

By the time we approach the first expressway near Meerut comes a rude awakening — the pungent, putrid smell of sugar mills. The soil turns yellow and loose, dotted with endless thickets of sugarcane — the Doab’s green glutton drinking more water than the river can spare. The stalks stand tall with the clout of cash, nourished by a web of canals built, mended, and extended over centuries — from Mughals to Modi.

The parched land slowly begins to soften, helped by the stronger and longer monsoon eastwards — from Awadh to Purvanchal and beyond, into Bihar. The bustling Himalayan streams tamed as canals give way to all-encompassing rivers and countless ponds of eastern India, cash driven sugarcane deepens into emerald shimmer of subsistence paddy.

While UP is the story of irrigated pale greens — post Bhagalpur, the landscape transforms. The land becomes a chequerboard of ponds and fields, with the sight of mighty Ganga overpowering everything, swallowing horizon and colour alike as the sun sets over her distant banks near Farakka. The sojourn into Bihar and Bengal was an encounter with richness — not the kind measured in storeys or cars, but in water and green, the primal human wealth. The sheer scale of water outshines the greens of the Western Ghats; the broad rivers feel like inland seas, as if one were driving beside the backwaters of Kerala.

What began as a journey to see Ganga at her widest —realised at Farakka — turned deeper. It was a revelation — a land washed in the darkest of greens, with rivers stretching like sea before surrendering to the ocean, while feeding three rice crops a year. This was Bengal — water is not a resource to ponder, but an abundant presence seeking channels for expression. In Bengal, even the moti boondein striking the windshield make the wiper work that much harder.

Strolling through the back channels of a para in Kolkata, I came upon a two-sided faucet — a novelty I hadn’t seen before. Both taps were open, water gushing freely, unchecked, reminding me of the hill gadera that knows only to run, unrestrained by barrages or gates.

The locals nearby were absorbed in a game of carrom, unbothered by the small river across the road. A short conversation revealed that this was the usual “water-timing”; the tap was government-owned, and no one worried about the waste. They spoke, with pride, of how the roads are watered daily to settle dust, and even more generously in summer. The sheer presence of the water told its own story — the riches of a place where managing abundance becomes an ordeal.

By the time I reached Pauri, Bengal’s abundance already felt distant. The clock on the car dashboard read 1 a.m. — the weary end of a 4000 km travelogue with Ganga. The murmur of local gadera near my home reminded me of the river’s many faces — the first definition at Devprayag, the sacred beginning at Rishikesh, the gargantuan river at Buxar quietly carrying its story of betrayal, the wide dariya at Murshidabad still waiting, four centuries on, for a bridge to make its ends meet, and the dipping sun at Farakka, where the Ganga shimmered like a canvas painted in molten gold.

From glacier to stream to canal to floodplain and eventually the delta, the Ganga shifts but never stalls nor retreats — defying ice, rocks, barrages, and ghats. In her flow, the plains reveal the truth: to live is to master the river’s art, to flow through the land you call home.

Uttar Pradesh, the political behemoth that has given India half its Prime Ministers, drives as if its people — not the PM — run the republic. The roads are a free-for-all, right of way an optional myth. A Bolero driving on the wrong side or a motorcycle leaping from the divider ahead — the official drive anthem of UP. The people are loud, impatient, always in a hurry—as if your rule-following delays the PM’s meeting with the Block Pramukh. Numerous Expressways and National Highways have given wings to their cars; they seem to run less on petrol, and more on an (un)healthy mix of ego, impatience, and horn blasts.

Bihar, on the other hand, contrary to its usual image, is a beacon of decency on the road. Respect for life — and another’s right to the road — seems ingrained, perhaps born of hardship or the simple prudence of letting a bigger vehicle pass — a humility missing just across the border in UP. Signals are rare, and even the national highways often lacked dividers. Some dividers, unbelievably, double as home for cattle — complete with fodder, thatched roofs, and the calm indifference of animals to traffic. Yet with all the people and animals around, you felt safe — and so did your tongue, even for a back seat housing parents. The ride wasn’t cushioned or speedy, but it was relaxed — every turn met with a smile, not a scowl, and the locals guiding you in the sweetest Hindi imaginable.

Bengal, unlike its western cousins, feels like another country — if not for the incessant honking reminding you of your Indian passport. At every village junction, yellow police barriers — half-closed, half-open — stand as quiet reminders that speed has a social cost. They don’t block; they persuade. Each crossing cost twenty seconds — fifteen minutes in all — but I can’t imagine how many lives those small delays would have saved. It’s the most visible sign of Bengal’s socialist soul, still alive outside Kolkata’s limits and the political lingo, working quietly for Bengal’s people and villages. Here, the highway has empathy built into its design, as pleasant a surprise as any I’ve known.

Kolkata deepens the contrast. For once, drivers trust the rules and their fellows — a rare form of faith in our country. Red means stop, yellow means wait, and people actually do. There’s no random lurching into wrong lanes, no bikes cutting across from nowhere. Average speeds stay higher precisely because chaos has been replaced by trust. It’s not discipline enforced; it’s courtesy inherited. The honking, though, stays consistent; it isn’t the menace of UP or Haryana — it’s communication in honks. The Bengali driver — ever the bhadralok, perpetually conversant — won’t miss the chance to announce himself. He honks, signals, and politely insists, then retreats when you don’t oblige. Ever so gentle, ever so argumentative. That’s the Bengal we know.

UP is the king of expressways. All that population and those eighty seats in the Lok Sabha ensure that the funding is there to be seen — crisscrossing the state through Meerut, Yamuna, Agra-Lucknow, and Purvanchal expressways. Each reflects the urge of UP and the power of its populace. Yet, the further east you move, the thinner the traffic grows — until an almost empty Purvanchal expressway welcomes speed devils.

Bihar is the story of struggle, as one might expect. Getting out of Bhagalpur we met a jam — not much unlike the mighty Bangalore’s — where fifteen kilometres took two hours to cross, thanks to ongoing but unplanned Vikas. The village roads in Bihar were stories in themselves, with potholes and the road merging into one. Border villages of UP didn’t have the same feeling of treading on the moon’s surface, but the craters were larger, in tune with the population.

Bengal, neither here nor there, no expressways. But the roads stayed true to their character, village roads with occasional potholes weren’t exactly welcoming, yet the dangerous monsters of UP, Bihar shrunk to small puddles here. The NHs missing the urgency and cacophony of UP, were, sober and utilitarian — built to let you cruise at hundreds but not drift into the daze of 140kph.

Driving through these three behemoths showed me that they may all drink from the same Ganga — and her tributaries — yet the tongues and minds she quenches think differently. From the boastful, chaotic UP, to the humble, persevering Bihar, to Bengal’s loud yet courteous roads, the sugarcane fields turn to paddy, and each state check post unveils a new India — each weaving its own story of chaos, humility, and courtesy along her shared roads.

What began as a drive with the Ganga, slowly turned into a sojourn across the living history of UP, Bihar and Bengal. India’s roads, its flavours, its rhythms and the people who make up the Republic itself. Somewhere between the punctured tyre near the ancient Mundeshwari temple — said to be India’s oldest — and the first glimpse of Chandauli’s Panchayat Gate, the road stopped being a grey guide for exploration and became a mirror to the people and systems of India.

The punctured tyre near Mundeshwari began haunting us as the sun sank into the windscreen, slurping energy out of me in slow gulps. Each passing shanty fuelled my craving for that unhealthy dose of caffeine in a bottle of Sting — for something cold and sharp to keep me awake. But the roadside offerings were meagre: food cooked at home sold at sheds. No heating, no fridge in sight for miles — not quite the place where my Italy-returned wife would risk a meal.

We kept scanning every kasba for that pink-bottled jolt, but the absence of commerce in rural Bihar made every kilometre harder. An hour stuck behind a Bhabhua visarjan procession became an irritating saving grace — the drums, lights and laughter shaking off my drowsiness. Even that crowd, with all its energy and likely intoxication, caused less chaos than a Dehradun traffic jam. Bihar’s anarchy, I realised, still carries discipline—and a respect for life.

A few minutes later, the welcome arch of Chandauli Jila Panchayat appeared, flanked by smiling portraits of Yogi and the local representative. And there it was: a chilled Sting, a Thums Up, and the option of Classic Milds over chhoti Gold. The land hadn’t changed—the rice-fed potbellies, the emerald fields, the numerous ponds —but the cycles had turned to bikes. The difference between Chandauli and Bhabhua was the same as that between Lucknow and Patna — a few hundred kilometres between two power centres.

While this was the return leg, my first encounter with the changing face of enterprise had come earlier—within a mere fifty kilometres spanning Bihar, Jharkhand, and Bengal. The stride through Bihar felt like a quiet sorrow — a people deserving as any, held back by caste, politics and propaganda. As we stumbled off the dusty Bihar roads dodging the cattle on highway into Jharkhand, a dairy advertisement appeared, followed by a freshly painted Krishi Vigyan Kendra board welcoming us into Sahibganj district. Growth wasn’t visible yet, but the signs of effort popped up like saplings after rain.

The short foray into Jharkhand soon gave way to Bengal — announced not by billboards, but a field full of boys chasing a football. Ah, unmistakable Bengal—the land that prizes play over profit, prefers intellect to industry. Uttar Pradesh, with its political clout and money, powers ahead in its Boleros and Fortuners; Bihar, with its strong muscles and sharp minds, pedals toward sustenance; Jharkhand is still learning to stand. But Bengal moves differently, driven by its quiet faith in conversation, liquor tea, and the enduring intoxication of ideas. As I caught sight of an old lady walking in blouseless sari, her red and white shakapola gleaming with pride,my thoughts turned to Bengal’s poor — as destitute as their neighbours — yet somehow chasing a higher rung of Maslow’s ladder. Is mental satisfaction achievable without material prosperity?

In those stretches across four states, the story of effort, ambition, and imagination of India had played before my eyes — revealing the nation not as one Republic, but a mosaic of many — thriving within its shared history and living constitution. Somewhere during those miles, I found the purpose of my trip — a discovery of India!

Not read through numbers or speeches, but felt through its roads, its people, the systems – a living conversation on the road with We, the people.

Hours 12 ago, a village full of life
Nestled in the first valley of Ganga
Slept a blossom-afternoon seance,
Listening to the murmur of the river.
Blessed by clouds entering home,
It lived its rhythm — foothills of Gangotri,
Stamped with  the footprints of commercialisation.

The countless homestays, glitzy stairs to Gartang,
Millions of hearts, from the metros —
seeking solace, and reels.
Smooth all-weather roads
carrying wheels of HR, UP, MP.

Back in the summer of ’12
my twenty-fifth year of sun and miles.
A family halted their Bolero at Dharali
To offer a lift — unasked, precious.
Another summer — 2023,
I returned again, just a night’s halt.
Dharali lit under starlight and smoky lamps,
Adequate homestays, curvy roads and black gold of hills.

And now, tonight, as silence breaks,
I sit and sift through years gone —
Thirteen, then two — both alive in me.
Did that family from ’12 find higher ground?
Did the homestay with warmth and dhal
Withstand the tide that swallowed it all?

We have many ghost villages.
But this one —
This one died screaming.

The whole nation saw it
On screens and phones.
But some did not see it —
They had to live it.

Scrambling barefoot over gravel and sludge,
A lonely soul, urged by voices on the hill,
Crawled, staggered, ran,
To live out the nightmare — alive.

I heard whistles from nearby hills —
“Bhag! Bhag!! Betaaa!!” — unseen screams,
Not commands, but prayers.
No expectation — only desperate hope
As Bhagirathi rose
With the fury of Tandav.

The land of Shiva cried,
Ruing its dreams
As cars and hotels
Washed away houses and chulhe —
the last warmth of kitchens now gone.

The river rose, not in rage, but in memory.
She has been here — creator of billion tales, million years.
But in just the last twenty, the party turned plague.
Lives she fed and loved for centuries
were joined by gluttonous greed,
growing in concrete.

She tried to find her way
through the jungle of hotels —
the check-in smiles on the grabbed river.
Forgot did she her own path.
And the water, hurried,
poured where she never meant.

For she is mother —
never meant to hurt.
Only a tired, wounded soul
staggering through wounds of JCB.
She brings death and ruin, yes —
but the credit…
all is due, her murderers.

The river will always flow —
sometimes dry, sometimes deadly.
It is not for us to tame her,
even if that’s what Nehru once dreamed.
And dare we grab her valleys,
as we do, egged on by greed.

The answers don’t lie
in posting IAS, IPS after the deaths.
No special committees will cleanse the silt.
No footnotes in reports
will explain away the drowned.

The reasons are not hidden in books.
The blame needs no investigation.
Because, as someone sang
long before the embankments rose —
the fury, the forgetting, the flood —
They are blowing in the wind.

The answers, again, will not arrive
from voices echoing inside Innovas.
The truth lives in the last old hut.
Boundaries are known
to those closest to the soil.
Zoning laws are for cities —
in the hills,
only the wrath of the Devta commands sanctity.

Can we stop?
How do we stop?
Where do we stop?

The river shall never stop.

His childhood brought the story of gold stolen
And the resultant guilt, tears of his father
Harishchandra echoed in his veins
And a young Gujju crossed the seas
Fear he did not, loss of religion
For his was a life to explore
Kicked off first class, decreed by his skin

Every step he took towards Dandi
Was a nail white in the coffin of Raj
Sat he did, clad in dhoti, with the King George
More regal in truth than robes could muster
For his was a life
Beyond giving a damn

He spun the wheel and choked an empire
Fasted for life, had his fill of love
Wrote to Hitler, read Tolstoy, held salt in his palm
But even the demigod couldn’t fast away bullets
A Ram did burn Gandhi in the fire of division

He taught us Ahimsa, he taught Gram Swaraj
But you, postmodern, can’t bear the slap
Take to court or brawl in scuffle, you would
Talk he did of Gram Swaraj
But who do you seek to serve in ghost villages?
The march to Dandi didn’t die that day
What of the women seeking life
What of the deer, uprooted by bulldozers in HCU?
What of the chant of “Hey Ram” wearing the boots of hate?

O, you postmodern seeker
Look to combine ahimsa with deterrence
For, you are no Gandhi
You, have to convince, if you can’t move
Your tale can’t be his
It’s the journey of you
For you, the one who shall go, Beyond..

Words gone missing, remaining truth
A human, mortal that I am
Even the great Achilles had heels
Look me through the prism of heart

Who would ever be blameless
When it was Plato, defended slavery
A human, mortal that I am
Born to fall and get up

In the spirit of human
The sins of times variable
Judge me for the me in me
Not the one you do see

Awaiting the rising of rainbow
Until it was per the ‘dreamers’
Till we decry sinner with the sin
Judge me for the me in me

In the village remote
just above the sight, a crow flies
Down below, the mighty land,
the mournful chicken in a coop lies

“Stop complaining!” said the owner,
“Who told you a chicken to be?
You got wings and yet you don’t fly,
like the crow so proud and free?”

Boulders tiny, stacked so light,
you could never brush aside
O my Donna, not your life
Be the crow, so smart and snide

Chicken are stopped and slaughtered,
never knowing the reason why.
But whoever treasures freedom,
like the crow, has learned to fly.

PS : Inspired from this amazingly beautiful song by the indomitable Joan Beaz

Playwright could extract a pound flesh
Novelist great might wring Great Expectations
Story we read of Magi’s gift most beautiful
Great, nonetheless, were just the tales of us

Shruti, the treasure of hindus
Illiad, Odyssey, identity of civilisations
Dante and divine beginning
Chaucher the father with canterburry

Nobel 29% only gained for poetry
Story of literature, but never else began
Its a poem that gives you wings
Mankind’s divine tool to concieve

Burden rich of character development
Pressure of finding ending binding
The hook to move to Act next
Novel, Story, or in a Play mighty

Flight of poem needed no hook
For No One is a poem best told
For No way is a poem’s best way
For a poem may not tell you all
For a poem will vary its layers
The tale of a poem can never be told
For a poem is the one only ‘you’ live