Arvind's Newsletter

1.Bajaj Auto to acquire Austrian motorcycle maker KTM in ₹7,765 crore deal: Economic Times

Bajaj Auto is set to take control of Austrian motorcycle manufacturer KTM in a deal valued at ₹800 million (₹7,800 crore), the Rajiv Bajaj-led company said in an exchange filing, marking its transition from minority investor to majority stakeholder. The Pune-based motorcycle and three-wheeler maker began its partnership with KTM in 2007, initially with a 14.5% stake.

Bajaj Auto, which currently has a 37.5% holding indirectly, co-develops and manufactures KTM bikes at its Chakan facility. These are sold in India and exported to 80 countries. The move is part of a comprehensive strategy to revive KTM’s operations and reposition the brand for global growth, the company said in the statement.

2.CPPIB's India portfolio touches $22 billion in FY25: Mint

The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB), operating as CPP Investments, saw its India portfolio touch a record C$30 billion (about $22.7 billion) in net assets in 2024-25, showed its latest annual report.

Its key investments of the fiscal year were $100 million (C$137 million) in private equity fund Kedaara Capital's new fund and an undisclosed amount in venture capital firm Accel’s eighth fund.

It also infused $100 million (C$137 million) alongside PE firm PAG for about a 14% stake in the combined entity of Manjushree Technopack and Pravesha.

It invested another $100 million (C$137 million) alongside EQT Private Capital Asia for a 5% stake in Perficient Inc., $8 million (C$11 million) in edtech startup Eruditus, and nearly $244 million (C$335 million) in National Highways Infra Trust. 

3.Covid Effect: A decline in Indian Life Expectancy: E&PW

An editorial in the Economic & Political Weekly highlights some recent data about India that ought to have us all concerned. People in the country are expected to live an average 69.8 years, based on records from 2017 to 2021. It reveals something unusual has happened: for the first time in over 30 years, life expectancy has gone down—by 0.2 years. The drop is mostly due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused more deaths than usual, especially among men and in cities.

“However, the disparities between the changes in life expectancy across 22 major states are much more substantial. The numbers show that while the total life expectancy fell in 17 states, it remained stagnant or continued to improve in the remaining five states. The states where the life expectancy levels fell faster than the national average included Punjab (1.2 years), Haryana (1 year), and Delhi (0.9 year) in the north, Gujarat (0.6 year) in the east, Chhattisgarh (0.5 year) in the centre and Tamil Nadu (0.4 year) in the south. It is to be noted that, except for Chhattisgarh, all the other states have fairly higher urban populations.

4.US Bans Harvard From Enrolling Foreigners, Forcing Transfers: Bloomberg

The Trump Administration escalated its fight with Harvard University by ordering the institution to stop enrolling international student, saying its leaders allowed protests to create an “unsafe campus environment.” 

Current foreign students—almost 27% of the university’s population—must transfer or lose their legal status, authorities said. The move deals a fresh blow to the school, months after the government froze billions of dollars of federal funding. Harvard called the latest action unlawful and said it’s “working quickly to provide guidance and support.”

The fallout from the Trump administration’s blocking Harvard University from enrolling international students is growing, with thousands of students thrown in limbo. Both the suddenness and timing of the move — after acceptance letters for the fall term have been sent out and transfer applications to other schools are closed — left current and future attendees struggling to figure out what to do next. “I've been crying a lot,” said Marie Chantel Montas, a third-year Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University from the Dominican Republic. “My program is extremely specific. I don't know if I can find another university that would take me.” 

Harvard University has sued Donald Trump’s administration for a second time, after the Department of Homeland Security barred the university from enrolling international students.  The lawsuit marks an escalation in the battle between the elite institution and the administration. Harvard president Alan Garber said in a letter on Friday that the university had filed a complaint, and a motion for a temporary restraining order would follow. 

5.Artificial intelligence-powered startups in South Korea and Japan are reshaping the countries’ legal industries: Nikkei

Services range from connecting clients and suitable lawyers, to reviewing contracts and drafting documents: The head of one South Korean law firm told Nikkei that he was using AI to analyze cases, which a human lawyer would charge $3,500 a month for, but getting “the same or even better service” for 1/30th the cost. A Japanese legal tech executive said lawyers spend four hours a day reviewing contracts, but that AI could reduce that time by 80%. Not everyone is pleased: South Korean law is dominated by a few large firms, and the country’s bar association has called AI client-matching services “illegal brokering.”

6.Trump threatens Apple with 25% tariff on iPhones: Financial Times

President Donald Trump has threatened Apple with a 25 per cent tariff on iPhones unless the company shifts production of its best-selling product to the US, escalating a stand-off with chief executive Tim Cook.

Cook said this month that Indian factories would supply the “majority” of iPhones sold in the US in the coming months, as Apple tries to avoid the tariffs on Chinese-made goods imposed by Trump as part of his trade war.

“I have long ago informed Tim Cook of Apple that I expect their iPhone’s that will be sold in the United States of America will be manufactured and built in the United States, not India, or anyplace else,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post on Friday.

“If that is not the case, a Tariff of at least 25% must be paid by Apple to the U.S.”

7.Apple Plans Glasses for 2026 as Part of AI Push, Nixes Watch With Camera: Mark Gurman of Bloomberg

Apple is aiming to release smart glasses by the end of next year, which will have cameras, microphones, and speakers, and will be able to analyse the external world and take requests via Siri.

The company has shelved plans for a smartwatch with a built-in camera that can analyse its surroundings, but is still working on AirPods  cameras.

Apple's ultimate goal is to release a pair of spectacles with augmented reality, which uses displays and other technology to superimpose digital content on views of the real world, but those remain years away.

8.AI startup Anthropic releases next version of its flagship chatbot, Claude 4: The Verge

Anthropic has introduced Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4, its latest generation of hybrid-reasoning AI models optimised for coding tasks and solving complex problems.

Claude Opus 4 is Anthropic’s most powerful AI model to date, according to the company’s announcement, and capable of working continuously on long-running tasks for “several hours.” In customer tests, Anthropic said that Opus 4 performed autonomously for seven hours, significantly expanding the possibilities for AI agents.

The company also described its new flagship as the “best coding model in the world,” with Anthropic’s benchmarks showing that Opus 4 outperformed Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, Open AI’s o3 reasoning and GPT-4.1 models in coding tasks and using “tools” like web search.

Claude Sonnet 4 is a more affordable and efficiency-focused model that’s better suited to general tasks, which supersedes the 3.7 Sonnet model released in February. Anthropic says Sonnet 4 delivers “superior coding and reasoning” while providing more precise responses. The company adds that both models are 65 percent less likely to take shortcuts and loopholes to complete tasks compared to 3.7 Sonnet and they’re better at storing key information for long-term tasks when developers provide Claude with local file access. See also see ranking of AI models below.

9.NASA announced plans to get robot passenger aircraft flying in US airspace by the end of the decade: Electrek

The space agency has worked with Boeing subsidiary Wisk Aero, which builds all-electric planes, on autonomous aircraft since 2020.

A renewed partnership will see the pair develop regulations and guidelines for robot aircraft, and hope to get agreements for autonomous flights by 2030.

Several air taxi companies are already working on autonomous flights, and China has already granted two companies approval for flying passenger drones.

10.How to be a great thinker: Simon Kuper in Financial Times

Most people are getting dumber. Largely because of the smartphone, we’re in an era of declining attention spans, reading skills, numeracy and verbal reasoning. How to buck the trend? I’ve charted seven intellectual habits of the best thinkers. True, these people exist in a different league from the rest of us. To use an analogy from computing, their high processing power allows them to crunch vast amounts of data from multiple domains. In other words, they have intellectual overcapacity. Still, we can learn from their methods. These can sound obvious, but few people live by them.

Read books. A book is still the best technology to convey the nuanced complexity of the world. That complexity is a check on pure ideology. People who want to simplify the world will prefer online conspiracy theories. 

 Don’t use screens much. That frees time for books and creates more interstitial moments when the mind is left unoccupied, has freedom to roam and makes new connections. Darwin, Nietzsche and Kant experienced these moments on walks. The biochemist Jennifer Doudna says she gets insights when “out weeding my tomato plants” or while asleep.  

Do your own work, not the world’s. The best thinkers don’t waste much time maximising their income or climbing hierarchies. Doudna left Berkeley to lead discovery research at biotech company Genentech. She lasted two months there. Needing full scientific freedom, she returned to Berkeley, where she ended up winning the chemistry Nobel Prize for co-inventing the gene-editing tool Crispr.

Be multidisciplinary. Prewar Vienna produced thinkers including Freud, Hayek, Kurt Gödel and the irreducible polymath John von Neumann. The structure of the city’s university helped. Most subjects were taught within the faculties of either law or philosophy. That blurred boundaries between disciplines, writes Richard Cockett in Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World. “There were no arbitrary divisions between ‘science’ and ‘humanities’ — all was ‘philosophy’, in its purest sense, the study of fundamental questions.” 

Hayek, for instance, “trained at home as a botanist to a quasi-professional level; he then graduated in law, received a doctorate in political science from the university, but . . . spent most of his time there studying psychology, all before becoming a revered economist.”

Breaking through silos goes against the set-up of modern academia. It also requires unprecedented processing power, given how much knowledge has accumulated in each field. But insights from one discipline can still revolutionise another. The psychologist Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for economics for his findings on human irrationality. 

Be an empiricist who values ideas. During the second world war, Isaiah Berlin was first secretary at the British embassy in Washington. His weekly reports on the American political situation were brilliant empirical accounts of the world as it was. They mesmerised Winston Churchill, who was desperate to meet Berlin. (Due to a mix-up, Churchill invited Irving Berlin for lunch instead. The composer was baffled to be asked by Churchill himself, “When do you think the European war will end?”)

In March 1944, Isaiah Berlin returned from Washington to London on a bomber plane. He had to wear an oxygen mask all flight, wasn’t allowed to sleep for fear he would suffocate, and couldn’t read as there was no light. “One was therefore reduced to a most terrible thing,” he recalled, “to having to think — and I had to think for about seven or eight hours in this bomber.” During this long interstitial moment, Berlin decided to become an historian of ideas. He ended up writing the classic essays The Hedgehog and the Fox and Two Concepts of Liberty. 

Always assume you might be wrong. Mediocre thinkers prefer to confirm their initial assumptions. This “confirmation bias” stops them reaching new or deeper insights. By contrast, Darwin was always composing arguments against his own theories. 

Keep learning from everyone. Only mediocrities boast as adults about where they went to university aged 18. They imagine that intelligence is innate and static. In fact, people become more or less intelligent through life, depending on how hard they think. The best thinkers are always learning from others, no matter how young or low-status. I remember being at a dinner table where the two people who talked least and listened hardest were the two Nobel laureates.