Amit's Blog

How Multi-Century Data, Behavioral Genetics, and Institutional Economics Are Overhauling Our Understanding of Class, Merit, and Opportunity For a century, democratic capitalism sold us a comforting fairytale: work hard, play by the rules, and your kids can climb to the top. Modern evidence just incinerated that script. Multi-century surname datasets tracking 500+ years of probate records, polygenic score models, and wealth-to-growth ratio analytics ($r > g$) reveal that true social mobility isn't a swift ladder—it’s a glacial creep. Family advantage takes up to twenty generations to fade. Whether through compounding dynastic wealth, elite social cartels, or assortative genetic mating, class power is overwhelmingly inherited. Meritocracy isn't broken; it’s an elaborate illusion engineered to make systemic aristocratic persistence look earned. The myth of the self-made individual is one of the most successful marketing campaigns in human history. We are routinely told that...

A Comprehensive (and Slightly Unhinged) Guide to the Recurring Anomalies That Make Financial Experts Question Their Life Choices Let us begin with a confession. The stock market, despite what your well-tailored mutual fund manager would have you believe, is not a rational machine. It is not a finely tuned engine of economic efficiency. It is, in fact, a chaotic carnival of human delusion, calendar-based superstition, and the occasional software glitch—all dressed up in a three-piece suit and pretending to be serious. As one trader recently put it, “The market is weird. Stocks are swinging about as though there’s a full-blown crisis, while the S&P 500 is just 2% from its high.” Weird, indeed. But weird in ways so predictable that academics have spent decades cataloguing them. These are the stock market anomalies—recurring patterns that make a complete mockery of the Efficient Market Hypothesis, which, as Warren Buffett once dryly observed, would leave him “a bum on the str...

Why Kailash Became Sacred While the Karakoram Remained Peripheral (3 of 3) This is the third of a three-part series exploring the Indian Himalaya as five distinct worlds rather than a single homogeneous region. The series examines how Garhwal, Kumaon, Himachal, Kashmir, and Ladakh—though connected by the same mountain system—differ profoundly in geology, climate, ecology, history, and sacred geography. The first blog established the fundamental differences between these regions. The second blog traced the evolution of sacred geography from the Vedic period to the present. This blog explores the paradox of why Kailash became a sacred destination while the Karakoram, with its even more spectacular peaks, remained peripheral, and synthesises the three forces that shaped Himalayan sacredness: hydrology, mobility, and cosmology. Imagine two mountains. One is Kailash, rising in relative isolation from the Tibetan Plateau. Its shape is almost symmetrical, like a pyramid carved...

How Rivers, Memory, and Pilgrimage Made Garhwal the Spiritual Axis of Hindu India (2 of 3) This is the second of a three-part series exploring the Indian Himalaya as five distinct worlds rather than a single homogeneous region. The series examines how Garhwal, Kumaon, Himachal, Kashmir, and Ladakh—though connected by the same mountain system—differ profoundly in geology, climate, ecology, history, and sacred geography. The first blog established the fundamental differences between these regions. This blog traces the evolution of sacred geography from the Vedic period to the present, explaining why Garhwal became the supreme sacred landscape of Hindu India. The third blog explores the paradox of why Kailash became sacred while the Karakoram remained peripheral, and synthesises the forces that shaped Himalayan sacredness. Imagine a Kerala pilgrim in the twelfth century. He has walked for months, crossed rivers, climbed passes, and survived bandits and disease. His destina...

How Geography, Climate, and History Forged Five Distinct Mountain Civilizations (1 of 3) This is the first of a three-part series exploring the Indian Himalaya as five distinct worlds rather than a single homogeneous region. The series examines how Garhwal, Kumaon, Himachal, Kashmir, and Ladakh—though connected by the same mountain system—differ profoundly in geology, climate, ecology, history, and sacred geography. This introductory blog establishes the fundamental differences between these regions. The second blog traces the evolution of sacred geography from the Vedic period to the present. The third blog explores the paradox of why Kailash became sacred while the Karakoram remained peripheral, and synthesizes the forces that shaped Himalayan sacredness. A Garhwali priest stands at Gangotri, chanting Sanskrit verses as he offers prayers to the Ganga's source. His voice carries across the snow, and he tells you the river descends from Shiva's matted locks. Two...

Born of Theory, Shaped by Performance The Vidushaka is not a historical figure but a dramatic archetype, codified in the Nāṭyaśāstra, the seminal Sanskrit text on dramaturgy attributed to Bharata Muni and dated between 200 BCE and 200 CE. Yet even this foundational text, which outlines every aspect of theatrical practice from gesture to costume, remains curiously silent on the Vidushaka's origins. As scholar G. K. Bhat observes, "the origin of the character is shrouded in mystery". Bhat challenges the prevailing theory that the Vidushaka emerged from the Mahāvrata ritual—a Vedic ceremony featuring a dialogue of coarse abuse between a Brahmin student and a prostitute. "I am not fully in favour of this hypothesis of religious origin," Bhat writes, "though there is no doubt in my mind that Sanskrit drama was nurtured and developed under strong religious impulse and influence. Religious influence and religious origin are two different things." Instead,...