Amit's Blog

The modern liberal arts project, conceived as the ultimate engine for democratic resilience and civic agility, has collapsed under the weight of its own institutional arrogance and financial extraction. Over the last eighty years, a model that promised to teach societies how to think morphed into an insular, self-perpetuating loop of abstract critique. By replacing the dangerous pursuit of objective truth with an obsessive focus on systemic deconstruction, the Western university model systematically engineered its own economic and social obsolescence. The seminar room is quiet now, The ancient text unread, A high-priced cage where scholars bow, And view the world with dread. As advanced democracies and emerging superpowers face a volatile global landscape defined by weaponized interdependence, industrial warfare, and algorithmic displacement, they are ruthlessly abandoning the generalist. From the tech corridors of Silicon Valley to the state-directed polytechnics of China, Russia,...

The Great B2B Mirage: How Private Equity and Mutual Funds Engineered the IndiaMART Capital Trap The trajectory of IndiaMART InterMESH Ltd. from its July 2019 IPO to mid-2026 exposes the modern tech ecosystem's most cynical playbook: the systematic transfer of risk from private venture capital to unsuspecting public retail investors. While early backers like Intel Capital and WestBridge Capital extracted lucrative annualized returns of up to 32.5%, public market investors have been left holding a stagnant, low-yielding utility asset. Masquerading as a hyper-scaling e-commerce disruptor, IndiaMART is fundamentally a high-churn online classifieds directory boxed in by the structural realities of India’s fragmented micro-MSME sector. Institutional mutual funds—driven by asset scarcity and momentum-chasing FOMO—ignored glaring architectural bottlenecks, actively colluding with valuation hype to provide late-stage private equity with a golden exit. The resulting seven-year public mar...

When Ledgers Topple Thrones: The Rise and Fall of the Rothschilds of India In the 18th century, a family of Jain bankers from Rajasthan built a financial empire so vast that their personal wealth reportedly exceeded the entire British economy. The Jagat Seths—meaning "Bankers of the World"—functioned as the living heartbeat of the Mughal Empire, moving revenues across 1,200 miles without shipping a single coin, controlling the imperial mint, and deciding which Nawabs would live and which would die. Yet within seven years of their greatest triumph—orchestrating the overthrow of Bengal's ruler at the Battle of Plassey—the dynasty lay shattered. Their executioners were not foreign invaders but the very British clients they had helped empower. This is the story of how an invisible grid of credit, trust, and information proved more powerful than armies, and how extreme specialization became the gravest vulnerability when the rules of the game changed overnight. ...