Arvind's Newsletter-weekend edition

1.Tata airlines witness a 20% increase in overall seat capacity in CY24

The Tatas have collectively increased their aggregate airlines seat capacity across domestic and international markets by an impressive 20 per cent, going from 64.03 million in calendar year (CY) 2023 to 76.72 million in the current CY, according to data shared by the group that controls Air India in which Vistara has been merged recently. The Tatas also run Air India Express in which Air Asia India has been merged. 

According to data from the Tatas, the group has seen its aggregate domestic passenger seat capacity go up by 19 per cent from 45.88 million in CY23 to 54.76 million in CY24. This accounts for an over 28 per cent of the total aggregate domestic seat capacity across airlines. In CY23, it accounted for 25 per cent of aggregate capacity of all airlines.

In the international skies too, the Tatas have made an impressive increase in their seat capacity, which is up by 21 per cent from 18.15 million in CY23 to 21.96 million in CY24.

Yet the home truth is that in the domestic skies, despite the sharp increase in capacity, the Tatas have still a long way to go even to reach half of the seat capacity of rival IndiGo. According to Cirium, the world’s most trusted source of aviation analytics, the group will end the year with 119 million seats, a growth of over 9 per cent over last year, despite the high customer base.

2.India’s new chess world champion is the youngest in the game’s history. 

Indian prodigy Gukesh Dommaraju, 18, defeated China’s Ding Liren in the final round of a best-of-14 competition. The win caps a remarkable rise by Gukesh, who became a grandmaster at 12 and is the first Indian to win since 2007.

The teen was a “locked vault of emotions” during the championship, The Indian Express wrote, spending the weekslong competition in Singapore “unlike most people from his generation… with bare minimum social media and internet usage.”

Gukesh’s singular focus belies the fraught backdrop to this year’s competition: Russian players were banned, while high-profile Norwegian grandmaster Magnus Carlsen said he was too bored to compete. But legendary chess player Viswanathan Anand asked D. Gukesh to ignore those questioning the standard of the World Championship title showdown, saying criticism always comes with success.

3.Indian Stocks To Outperform EMs In 2025 As Slowdown To Be Short-Lived: Morgan Stanley
Indian stock market will continue to beat its emerging peers in the upcoming year as the recent slowdown is "transient" with more domestic inflows, creating a never-before-seen virtuous cycle, according to Morgan Stanley.

Rich valuations of the domestic stocks are supported by strong terminal growth, the earnings cycle and India's low beta, Ridham Desai and Nayant Parekh, analysts at Morgan Stanley.

The bull market was underpinned by a focus on macro stability sourced in inflation-targeting, fiscal consolidation and the declining oil intensity of the economy, the note said. "This consequent fall in inflation volatility has made growth more predictable, resulting in a fall in India’s equity market beta and a rise in equity valuations." 

Fiscal consolidation is creating space for private borrowing and spending to fuel the next leg of earnings growth, analysts in the global brokerage said. And this will "put a lid on inflation and its volatility".

4.Google’s new Project Astra could be generative AI’s killer app

Google DeepMind has announced an impressive grab bag of new products and prototypes that may just let it seize back its lead in the race to turn generative artificial intelligence into a mass-market concern. 

Top billing goes to Gemini 2.0—the latest iteration of Google DeepMind’s family of multimodal large language models, now redesigned around the ability to control agents—and a new version of Project Astra, the experimental everything app that the company teased at Google I/O in May.

The margins between top-end models like Gemini 2.0 and those from rival labs like OpenAI and Anthropic are now slim. These days, advances in large language models are less about how good they are and more about what you can do with them. And that’s where agents come in. 

MIT Technology Review got to try out Astra in a closed-door live demo last week. It gave us a hint at what’s to come. Find out more in the full story.

5.Google has also unveiled a new headset and smart glasses OS in partnership with Samsung

Android XR gives wearers hands-free control thanks to the firm’s Gemini chatbot. 

Google is teaming up with Samsung to take on Meta and Apple in the resurgent market for smart glasses and virtual-reality headsets, almost a decade after suspending consumer sales of its controversial Google Glass device.

Next year, Samsung will release the first device based on a new version of Google’s Android smartphone operating system that has been customised for headsets and glasses, which the Alphabet-owned internet group described as the “next generation of computing”.

The collaboration on the device — codenamed “Project Moohan” — between Google and Samsung, whose alliance in Android smartphones 15 years ago created the first serious competitor to the iPhone, comes 10 months after Apple launched its Vision Pro headset.

However, despite being Apple’s boldest launch into a new product category since the iPhone, the high-priced Vision Pro has struggled to attract consumers with sales estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands.

Meanwhile Meta’s Ray-Ban-branded smart glasses have become a surprise hit. The device, produced in partnership with eyewear giant EssilorLuxottica, combines cameras with a virtual audio assistant in a lightweight frame. Google said it planned to make its new Android XR system available for makers of smart glasses as well as virtual- and augmented-reality headsets.

6.Time names Donald Trump person of the year 2024.

 "He will also see just how far the nation is willing to let him go. If he succeeds, he could reshape the country. Along the way, he risks tearing down the constitutional norms and institutions that have seen America’s great experiment in democracy through 2 1⁄2 centuries."

7.The Gilded Age of Medicine Is Here

What happens when major public hospitals are turned into private practices owned by private equity? A lot of complications for the patient says Dhruv Khullar in The New Yorker.

"A study published in JAMA found that, after hospitals were acquired by private-equity firms, Medicare patients were more likely to suffer falls and contract bloodstream infections; another study found that if private equity acquired a nursing home its residents became eleven per cent more likely to die.

Although private-equity firms often argue that they infuse hospitals with capital, a recent analysis found that hospital assets tend to decrease after acquisition. Yet P.E. now oversees nearly a third of staffing in U.S. emergency departments and owns more than four hundred and fifty hospitals. In some of them, patients were 'forced to sleep in hallways, and doctors who spoke out were threatened with termination.'"

8.End Game in Ukraine as Russia launched a new air attack on Ukraine’s energy facilities, the 11th such assault this year. 

No matter who won the presidential election, the war in Ukraine was likely to end next year. Both Ukraine and Russia are running out of troops and struggling to call up more young men for the front lines. That reality always meant that 2025 would be a year of negotiations.

Donald Trump’s victory will hasten those peace talks. During the campaign, Trump promised to end the war in Ukraine even before his inauguration. Maybe that was a bit of exaggeration. But it’s clear he wants negotiations to begin soon.

That’s bad news for Ukraine. Russian forces are advancing in the east. They’ve also reclaimed some of the Russian territory that Ukraine captured this past summer. Ukraine still has weapons, but its troops are spread thin. Intelligence agencies think it will run out of soldiers soon.

Ukrainian officials insist they are ready to keep fighting. But Republicans are loath to approve more aid for Ukraine, and Kyiv knows that without substantially more aid combat will end soon.

Does Europe have the political will, and the defence industrial might, to replace the United States? At a NATO summit before the election, allies devised a plan to Trump-proof logistical support for Ukraine.

Biden administration officials, however, doubt that Europe can step up. The economic might of the dollar allows Washington to run huge budget deficits to pay for defence. That’s something Europe cannot do. Once American support disappears, it will be hard for Europe to muster the munitions or the funding at a level that can keep Ukraine in the fight.

9.Saudi Arabia was this week confirmed as the host nation of the 2034 men’s football World Cup. 

Six countries across three continents will host the 2030 FIFA men's World Cup, while Saudi Arabia is set to be the tournament's lone host in 2034. A majority of 200 regional soccer federations approved the unopposed bids at Congress, though FIFA has faced criticism for an allegedly obscure bidding process. 

Three opening matches in 2030—the centenary of the event—will be played in Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay (the site of the first World Cup), before moving play to Spain, Portugal, and Morocco. It marks the first time a North African country will host a World Cup match and will be the first such event to take place on more than one continent. 

Saudi which was lone bidder for 2034 World Cup, views sports as a central plank of its economic diversification: The kingdom is planning to spend $2.7 billion on upgrading and constructing new sporting facilities through to 2028, and will host the AFC Asian Cup in 2027 and the Asian Winter Games in 2029. (Football legend Cristiano Ronaldo, who plays in Saudi Arabia’s domestic soccer league, posted on X: “After what I’ve seen, I’m more convinced that 2034 will be the best World Cup ever.”) 

10.From doctor to brutal dictator: the rise and fall of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad

An interesting profile of the ousted dictator, Bashar al- Assad in the The Guardian.

“On the face of it at least, the Bashar al-Assad of 2002 presented a starkly different figure from the brutal autocrat he would become, presiding over a fragile state founded on torture, imprisonment and industrial murder.

He had been president then for just two years, succeeding his father, Hafez, whose own name was a byword for brutality.

For a while the gawky former ophthalmologist, who had studied medicine in London and later married a British-Syrian wife, Asma, an investment banker at JP Morgan, was keen to show the world that Syria, under his leadership, could follow a different path.

Reaching out to the west, he pursued a public relations campaign to show the young Assad family as somehow ordinary despite the palaces and the ever visible apparatus of repression.

Suggesting some uncertainty, Bashar was curious about how Syria was seen in the world, floating possibilities for a change, including a reset in the relationship between Damascus and Israel.

It was a constructed iteration of the Assads – highlighting Asma’s much-vaunted “charitable” works and Bashar’s brief embrace by the west – that nodded to an ambition to transform Hafez’s Syria into something more like a version of Jordan’s paternalistic royal family. More manicured. Certainly more PR-savvy. A dictatorship all the same.

Twenty-two years later Bashar is gone, swept out of power by an offshoot of al-Qaida. And with the dramatic ending of the half-century of Assad rule, a key section of the map of the Middle East has been utterly redrawn.”

11.How the new Syria might succeed or fail; The Economist
AFTER 53 YEARS in power, the house of Assad left behind nothing but ruin, corruption and misery. As rebels advanced into Damascus on December 8th, the regime’s army melted into the air—it had run out of reasons to fight for Bashar al-Assad. Later, Syrians impoverished by his rule gawped at his abandoned palaces. Broken people emerged blinking from his prisons; some could no longer remember their own names.

Now that Mr Assad has fled to Moscow, the question is where will liberation lead. In a part of the world plagued by ethnic violence and religious strife, many fear the worst. The Arab spring in 2010-12 taught that countries which topple their dictators often end up being fought over or dominated by men who are no less despotic. That is all the more reason to wish and work for something better in Syria.

There is no denying that many forces are conspiring to drag the country into further bloodshed. Syria is a mosaic of peoples and faiths carved out of the Ottoman empire. They have never lived side by side in a stable democracy. The Assads belong to the Alawite minority, which makes up about 10-15% of the population. For decades, they imposed a broadly secular settlement on Syrian society using violence.

Syria’s people have many reasons to seek vengeance. After 13 years of civil war in a country crammed with weapons, some factions will want to settle scores; so will some bad and dangerous men just released from prison. Under the Assads’ henchmen, many of them Alawite and Shia, Sunnis suffered acts of heinous cruelty, including being gassed by chlorine and a nerve agent.

Syria’s new powerbrokers are hardly men of peace. Take the dominant faction in the recent advance. Until 2016 Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) was known as Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda. Its founder, Ahmad al-Sharaa, had fought the Americans as a member of Islamic State (IS) in Iraq under the nom de guerre Abu Muhammad al-Jolani. HTS and Mr Sharaa swear they have left those days behind. If, amid the chaos, such groups set out to impose rigid Islamic rule, foreign countries, possibly including the United Arab Emirates, will bankroll other groups to take up arms against them.

Indeed, some of those foreign countries are already fighting in Syria to advance their own interests. In the north, Turkey’s proxies are clashing with Kurds who want autonomous rule. In central Syria, America is bombing IS camps, for fear the group will rekindle its jihad. Israel has destroyed military equipment and chemical weapons—and encroached deeper into the Golan Heights, occupying more Syrian territory.

With so much strife, no wonder many share a fatalistic belief that Syria is doomed to collapse into civil war once again. If it does so, they rightly warn, it will export refugees, jihadists and instability beyond the Middle East and into Europe.

But despair is not a policy. At the least, the Assads’ fall is a repudiation of Iran and Russia, two stokers of global chaos. And witness the jubilation in Syria this week: a nation exhausted by war could yet choose the long road towards peace.

The essential condition for Syria to be stable is that it needs a tolerant and inclusive government. The hard-learned lesson from the years of war is that no single group can dominate without resorting to repression. Even most of the Sunni majority do not want to be ruled by fundamentalists.

The daunting task of attempting to forge a new political settlement out of a fractured country could well fall to Mr Sharaa. As ruler of Idlib, a rebel province in the north, he ran a competent government that nodded at religious pluralism and oversaw a successful economy. However, although he has distanced himself from more radical groups and courted the West, Mr Sharaa has become increasingly autocratic, and had taken to purging rivals and imprisoning opponents.

His interim national government, announced this week, is exclusively made up of HTS loyalists. Because it is laying claim to a dysfunctional state, competence and order will go a long way. Yet if Mr Sharaa attempts to run Syria permanently as a giant Idlib—a Sunni fief dominated by HTS—he will fail. Syria will remain divided between feuding warlords, many of them mini-dictators in their own right.

Syria will also fail if it becomes an arena for the rivalries of outside powers. It is more likely to prosper if it is left alone. And only if it prospers will millions of refugees choose to return home. That is especially important for Turkey, which is weary of the 3m Syrians living there. As a backer of HTS, it will be hoping for contracts in a thriving country. Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, should also understand that the best way to weaken calls for Kurdish self-rule is to create a Syria where the Kurds and other minorities have a voice.

The world may not like HTS, but to sabotage the creation of a stable government would risk the poison spreading to Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon. America and Saudi Arabia should therefore prevail upon Israel, Turkey and the UAE not to ruin Syria’s chances. If Mr Sharaa emerges as a plausible national leader, the West should be prepared to speedily remove its designation of HTS as a terrorist group.

The new Syria has one great gift: it can be rid of Iran and Russia. They spent tens of billions of dollars to keep Mr Assad in power, but the tyrants in Tehran and Moscow proved no more able to sustain despotism in a country that had rejected its despot than the West was able to sustain democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan. Russia has failed to realise its imperial ambitions—a message that will echo in the Caucasus and Central Asia. In little over a year, Iran has seen its proxies defeated in Gaza, Lebanon and now Syria. Its benighted influence in the Middle East has shrunk dramatically, possibly opening space for negotiations with the incoming Trump administration.

Much will go wrong in a traumatised place like Syria. The effort to rebuild the country is bound to entail a struggle for influence. Its strongmen will need reserves of courage, foresight and wisdom that they have yet to reveal. But before writing off the future, pause for a moment and share Syrians’ joy at bringing down a tyrannical dynasty.

12.Babygirl to Gladiator II and Conclave: The 20 best films of 2024

BBC film critics Nicholas Barber and Caryn James pick their highlights of the year, including an erotic thriller with a twist, an intimate papal drama and the return of a swords-and-sandals epic.