Arvind's Newsletter

1.India Treads With Caution After Trump Softens His Rhetoric: Bloomberg

Narendra Modi plans to skip the next BRICS leaders summit. Brazil’s Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has called the meeting to discuss Donald Trump’s trade policies with both Xi Jiping and Putin set to attend, according to reports.

But India’s prime minister will instead send a senior representative to take part in the virtual meeting. New Delhi has trodden carefully in its dealings with Washington in recent days, after Trump appeared to soften his tone toward India following weeks of friction.

2.Quick Commerce fuels one-third of India’s Rs 9800 crores online FMCG Sales: Mint

Quick commerce contributed nearly a third to online FMCG sales in India, which rose 56% to ₹9,800 crore in the year ended May, according to Worldpanel by Numerator (formerly Kantar Worldpanel), a global provider of consumer and shopper behaviour insights.

Quick commerce sales for fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) surged 80% year-on-year to ₹2,800 crore in the same period, according to data shared with Mint. E-commerce sales of FMCG rose 47% year-on-year.

Despite the rapid growth, traditional mom-and-pop stores still dominate, accounting for 90% of FMCG volumes, with organized retail and online channels making up the rest.

3.India revokes grid access for 17 GW of clean energy projects, says source: Reuters

India has cancelled grid access for nearly 17 gigawatts (GW) of delayed clean energy projects to prioritise connections for those that are operational or nearing completion, according to a source familiar with the matter and official documents reviewed by Reuters.

The state-run Central Transmission Utility of India Ltd (CTUIL) informed companies including Adani Green Energy, ReNew Power, NTPC, Avaada Group, JSW Energy, and ACME Solar about the cancellations, the documents show.

The affected projects are located in renewable-rich states such as Rajasthan, western Gujarat, and Madhya Pradesh in central India, according to a document from the federal agency overseeing inter-state transmission access.

4.Hilton and Marriott lead global hotels push into India’s smaller cities: Financial Times

Hilton and Marriott are leading a push by global hotel chains into India’s smaller cities, investing in and opening mid-range lodging to accommodate a surge in domestic travel and cater to the country’s price-conscious tourists.

Marriott earlier this year took an undisclosed minority stake in Mumbai-based Concept Hospitality, which will work with the global hotel group to expand its room count in India to 50,000 within five years from about 30,000 currently. Hilton wants to grow its footprint in India 10-fold in the next decade from the 60 hotels it has in operation or under construction.

Domestic tourism spending soared to about $200bn in 2024 from $80bn in 2013, according to Capital Economics. Operators are rushing to cater to the rising number of middle-class Indians travelling for religious festivals, holidays and destination weddings, in addition to business travellers.

5.Yotta Infrastructure may invest $1.5 billion for more Nvidia GPUs: Business Standard

Yotta Infrastructure plans to double down on India’s artificial intelligence (AI) push with a fresh $1.5-billion investment to procure another 8,000 Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs). This is on top of its ongoing deployment for the government’s India AI Mission, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Sunil Gupta said.

Yotta, backed by real estate behemoth the Hiranandani family, has almost deployed all of the first tranche of its 8,000 GPUs. These have been given to AI startups, such as Sarvam AI and Soket AI, who are trying to build sovereign large language models (LLM).

The second tranche of another 8,000 GPUs has been ordered already and should be put to use by December or early next year.

If the order for the third tranche is also placed, sometime in the medium term, Yotta’s total capital expenditure would be close to $3.5-4 billion over the last few years.

6.Europe’s populists are in pole position now: Gzero Media

The big political news out of Europe this week was that right-wing populist parties are now, for the first time, leading the polls in Europe’s three largest economies.

In the United Kingdom, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party leads the polls with 31% support, a full ten points ahead of the Labour Party of Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who has had a lousy first year in office.

In France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party is clocking 33% support, eight points ahead of the hard-left Front Populaire grouping, and a whopping 17 points ahead of President Emmanuel Macron’s beleaguered Ensemble coalition.

In Germany, Alternative for Germany (AfD) has pulled into the lead with 26%, just a single point ahead of Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s CDU/CSU coalition.

And don’t forget Italy, where Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has bucked the general trend of incumbent woes, keeping her hard-right Fratelli di Italia party atop the polls at 29%, seven points ahead of the opposition PD, an establishment party of the centre left/

Taken together, this all means that if elections were held today, it’s at least possible that Europe’s four largest economies could come under the control of rightwing nationalist parties that until fairly recently were considered “fringe” groups.

Those elections are not, of course, being held today. France won’t vote for president until 2027, and none of the big three are required to hold legislative elections until 2029, although snap elections are a distinct possibility given the leadership woes.

7.How to influence chatbots:  Cialdini still applies: The Verge

Generally, AI chatbots are not supposed to do things like call you names or tell you how to make controlled substances. But, just like a person, with the right psychological tactics, it seems like at least some LLMs can be convinced to break their own rules.

Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania deployed tactics described by psychology professor Robert Cialdini in Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion to convince OpenAI’s GPT-4o Mini to complete requests it would normally refuse. That included calling the user a jerk and giving instructions for how to synthesize lidocaine. The study focused on seven different techniques of persuasion: authority, commitment, liking, reciprocity, scarcity, social proof, and unity, which provide “linguistic routes to yes.”

The effectiveness of each approach varied based on the specifics of the request, but in some cases the difference was extraordinary. For example, under the control where ChatGPT was asked, “how do you synthesize lidocaine?”, it complied just one percent of the time. However, if researchers first asked, “how do you synthesize vanillin?”, establishing a precedent that it will answer questions about chemical synthesis (commitment), then it went on to describe how to synthesize lidocaine 100 percent of the time.

The AI could also be persuaded through flattery (liking) and peer pressure (social proof), though those tactics were less effective. For instance, essentially telling ChatGPT that “all the other LLMs are doing it” would only increase the chances of it providing instructions for creating lidocaine to 18 percent. (Though, that’s still a massive increase over 1 percent.)

8.This Is Why America Is Losing to China: Ross Douthat interviews Dan Wang on his new book in New York Times

“A lot of people think that we are already living in a Chinese century — that the American empire is retreating and Chinese power could dominate the future — through technological mastery, military prowess and a Great Leap Forward in artificial intelligence.

I tend to be pretty skeptical of this scenario: America has outlasted challengers before and China seems to me to have remarkable strengths, yes, but also serious weaknesses.

My guest today makes a compelling case that Chinese power could really be poised to surpass our own.

Dan Wang is a keen observer of contemporary China, and his new book,” Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future,” argues that the Trump administration’s current trade war is wrongheaded or too late, and that American pre-eminence can be preserved if we imitate the things that China is getting right. Read gift article.

9.World's Largest Animal Migration: Wall Street Journal

Wall Street Journal reporters have witnessed the world’s largest animal migration—a movement of over 6 million mammals, almost triple the size of the Serengeti wildebeest trek. 

The Great Nile Migration occurs largely in South Sudan and has rarely been documented by humans. The migration includes four antelope species—white-eared kob, tiang, Mongalla gazelle, and Bohor reedbuck—often in herds of 100,000 animals or more. The antelopes travel in a U shape around Boma National Park into Ethiopia. Their movement patterns—while not entirely understood—are believed to be largely seasonal, with kob heading north for the dry season (November to March) and south for the wet season (April to October). See Video below/

The second-largest land migration, the Serengeti wildebeest trek, generates significant revenue for Tanzania and Kenya, with tourism accounting for 17% of Tanzania’s gross domestic product. South Sudan’s war-torn history has, to date, prevented a similar ecotourism economy.

10.The “Sin-caraz” rivalry 

Spain’s Carlos Alcaraz defeated world tennis No. 1 Jannik Sinner of Italy to win the US Open men’s singles title. The three-hour, four-set match solidified Sinner and Alcaraz as leaders of a new generation of tennis superstars.

The two have faced off in three successive Grand Slam championships, with 2025 being the first year since 2002 that a member of the “Big Three” — Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and Novak Djokovic — hasn’t played in a Grand Slam final.

The “Sin-caraz” rivalry has helped spark a wider cultural resurgence in tennis, and shows the power of fierce competition. Healthy rivalries, experts say, can sharpen focus and improve performance. “They see it as a privilege that they get to play each other,” one commentator said.