Be More Ambitious, Fail More
Not being ambitious in 2026, and not letting that ambition grow as the models get better, is to commit the sin of sloth.
Doer of random things, diver of weird rabbit holes, sharer of fascinating things. Hi, I’m Bhuvan.
By day I work at Zerodha on markets, data and curation. The rest of the time I write long essays that few people read, build small websites nobody asked for and keep short notes on whatever caught my eye.
01WritingAll 41 essays
02Notes and linksAll 472 notes
The resource nationalism view of politics
Brazil, which is oil-rich and holds the world’s second-largest reserves of rare earth minerals, is the only big country in South America not governed by a right-wing leader, with Lula largely seen as China-friendly.…
Jorge Luis Borges 🗣️
Jim O’Shaunessy always shares some interesting quotes. “Don’t talk unless you can improve the silence.” “Reality is not always probable, or likely.” “The original is unfaithful to the translation.” “Nothing is built on…
· x.com
Lots of interesting papers
This is a great tweet, and the replies are filled with lots and lots of interesting papers. If I only had another lifetime to go through all of the papers and then blog about them here.
Wild, Wild Times
Interesting. Anthropic just launched Claude Duet in research preview, and I’d been wondering when Claude would get into the agent space. Grok Bot, Meta’s Muse, and OpenAI’s Dots seem to be pretty popular, and all…
· ineteconomics.org
Thank you, Perry
I woke up to the news that the great Perry Mehrling has passed away. He was 67. I was shocked. It feels unfair that all the cool and awesome people keep getting taken away while assholes still roam free on Earth. Perry…
· x.com
The real change India needs
The real change India needs is for people to clean up after themselves and to maintain things. We’ll go a long way if we just maintain what’s already built. A cult of preservation and maintenance is underrated. Building…
03BuildingAll 13 projects
Seneca’s Letters
All 124 letters to Lucilius, one at a time
seneca.ink
Hope & Despair
Is the world getting better or worse?
hopeanddespair.world
Let Me Walk
Bengaluru’s broken footpaths, on the record
letmefuckingwalk.com Paper LanternsLetters and speeches from the public domainCollectionsWhole books of letters, read in orderAksharaRare Indian books, rescued from bad scansThis Indian LifeHow India lives, one number at a timeLife in IndiaHow most Indians live, followed slowlyMeasure of IndiaThe latest official figures, explainedTipsheetIndian markets at a glanceSoochiAn index for people working on public problemsSmallwebA reading room for the unhurried webFrom the Dumpster FireThings worth saving before they burn
04Collaborators wanted
I build all of this alone, on evenings and weekends. Come and build some of it with me.
Every one of these needs more hands than mine. A few places to start:
- Readers of Kannada, Tamil, Hindi or Sanskrit to proof old books
- People who know where rare Indian books and letters are hiding
- Designers and developers who like small, careful websites
05NowUpdated
It’s been a minute since I updated this page. Partly that’s because I seem to have come down with a full-blown case of vibe-coding psychosis. I’ve been working on everything I’m passionate about all at once, with Claude Code and Codex playing genie and granting every wish.
Project Akshara has taken a bit of a backseat, but I plan to get back to it in the coming days and weeks. Meanwhile, here’s what I’ve been actively working on:
- This Indian Life: sourced charts and plain-language explainers about how India lives.
- Measure of India: a sister project of This Indian Life, covering India’s economy in numbers.
- Tipsheet: my attempt at building the go-to portal for markets data.
- Let Me Fucking Walk: a small project I started because I was sick and tired of the lack of proper footpaths in Bangalore.
- Soochi: a simple directory of tools and datasets for people working on public problems, public policy, research and so on.
So yes, lots of public-data work lately. That’s what I’ve been up to.
— B.
06On the shelfBooks
2025 Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do MattersBrian Klaas
2025 Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for MortalsOliver Burkeman
2025 Liberalism and Its DiscontentsFrancis Fukuyama