Arvind's Newsletter

This issue of newsletter focuses on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

1.Israel has ordered a “complete siege” of Gaza and mobilised 300,000 reservists two days after an unprecedented attack by Hamas.

The Hamas assault was likened to “Israel’s 9/11,” leaving more than 1,100 people dead on both sides, and spurring anger in Israel over the authorities’ failure to anticipate the operation: Hamas undertook years of subterfuge, training its members while convincing Israel’s leadership it did not want a fight, Reuters reported

Hamas’s victory “might prove Pyrrhic” by provoking a brutal Israeli response, Natan Sachs wrote in The Atlantic, while Israel may trigger further instability and prove the maxim that “powerful states sometimes win on the battlefield and still lose politically,”Stephen M. Walt noted in Foreign Policy.

The regional implications are enormous: Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite faction that fought a brutal war against Israel in 2006, exchanged rocket and artillery fire with Israel, sparking fears of a two-front conflict. The Arab League and Qatar blamed Israel, while a long-anticipated Israel-Saudi peace deal was put in doubt. Iran, meanwhile, was at the center of the issue, with The Wall Street Journal citing anonymous sources to report that Tehran worked with Hamas for months to plan the attack, though US officials have not confirmed such a link.

“A fully multipolar world has emerged, and people are belatedly realising that multipolarity involves quite a bit of chaos,” Noah Smith wrote in his Substack newsletter on Saturday.

Even with the rise of multipolarity, the U.S. remains the world’s most powerful country, with a unique ability to forge alliances and peace. In the Middle East, the Trump administration persuaded Israel and four other countries — the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco — to sign unprecedented diplomatic agreements, known as the Abraham Accords. In recent months, the Biden administration has made progress toward an even more ambitious deal, between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Hamas attacked Israel in part to undermine an Israeli-Saudi deal, many experts believe. Such a deal could isolate Iran, Hamas’s patron, and could lead to an infusion of Saudi money for the Palestinian Authority, a more moderate group than Hamas (as Tom Friedman explains in his New York Times column). But if the recent Hamas attacks lead Israel to reduce the Gaza Strip to rubble in response, Saudi Arabia will have a hard time agreeing to any treaty.

2.Good Leaders are Great Storytellers — 6 Tips for Telling Stories That Resonate

Storytelling isn’t just the domain of content creators, marketers or PR pros. The ability to tell stories that inform, persuade or inspire supercharges every part of company building. Founders pitching the next big startup idea need to nail the narrative that compels investors to care. Sales reps leading demos have to create scripts that win customers, and recruiters need to tailor their company pitches to close stellar candidates.

Stories aren’t just for external audiences, either. Structuring an All-Hands agenda requires telling the story of the company’s progress. When you’re presenting a strategic plan, you’re laying out the story of the company’s future. From making a case for promotion in a performance review, to conveying a shared vision for a project, every operator in every function benefits from being able to communicate ideas that connect people.

3. Morgan Housel on Paying Attention

Francis Crick, who discovered the double helix structure of DNA, was once asked what it takes to win the Nobel Prize. He responded: “Oh it’s very simple. My secret had been I know what to ignore.”

The best reading strategy I’ve come across is the idea of a wide funnel and tight filter. Be willing to read anything that looks even a little interesting, but abandon it quickly and without mercy if it’s not working for you.

Be choosy about what you let into your attic.

A few other things I’ve found helpful in choosing what to pay attention to:

When reading an article, book, or report, ask, “Will I still care about this in a year?”

Five years? Ten?

Most of the time you’ll realize you won’t care about whatever you’re reading in a week. It’s newsy – maybe it’s interesting, but it has an expiration date.

There are two types of knowledge: Expiring and permanent.

Permanent knowledge tends to be principles and frameworks that help you make sense of expiring information

Read on

4.Millets-The Golden Seed

S Sivakumar, group head of ITC’s agri and IT businesses, and Chef Sanjeev Kapoor offer us insights on how to get started with millets and a starter kit of easy recipes, in an article for Founding Fuel’s Good Life column.

Millets, often called nutri-cereals, are among the oldest foods known to humans. They are resilient crops that grow in rain-fed areas, don’t require much fertiliser or the kind of care most other crops do and are packed with most of the nutrients required for normal functioning of the human body according to the ICAR-Indian Institute of Millets Research.

They lost ground (literally) to wheat and rice after the Green Revolution, but now things have come full circle as the world becomes cognizant of not only the need for food security, but also nutritional security to fight hidden hunger (there’s food, but it's not necessarily giving people the right nutrition.)

Millets are smart foods — nearly organic (since they grow in hardy/arid environments and don’t require much fertiliser), and with good nutritional content. They are rich in iron, zinc, folic acid, calcium, magnesium and dietary fibre and can help overcome some of the biggest nutritional and health problems such as hypertension, high cholesterol and diabetes.

But how do you start incorporating them in your diet? Read on