Humans, AI, and the Singularity

September 13, 2026 Leave a comment

For decades, artificial intelligence (AI) belonged to the margins of intellectual conversation in India. It appeared occasionally in science fiction paperbacks, in obscure academic journals, and in the late-night philosophical arguments of university students who spent more time debating the future than preparing for exams. Today AI has escaped the lab and entered dining table conversations. Hardly a day passes without newspapers carrying stories about machine learning, humanoid robots, generative AI, autonomous weapons, AI tutors, AI doctors, AI girlfriends, AI layoffs, or the looming question of whether machines may someday surpass human intelligence altogether.

I read these reports with fascination and a peculiar sense of déjà vu. They take me back more than thirty years, to conversations I had as a young student with my peers and professors about singularity, machine consciousness, and the possibility that intelligence itself might eventually become independent of biology. Back then, those conversations were treated as the eccentricities of a teenager. Most people dismissed them as fantasy, a youthful obsession fed by too much science fiction and too little realism. However, today many of the same questions have escaped philosophy departments and entered boardrooms, parliaments, military doctrines, and ordinary households.

Over the years, I discovered that very few people took such conversations seriously. In fact, until now, I have met only two individuals who shared similar views with genuine conviction: a young computer scientist then in his twenties, and a CEO of a major technology company then in his sixties, around 2010. One represented the restless optimism of a generation growing up with intelligent machines, and the other carried the hard-earned realism of someone who had spent decades building technology at scale. Despite the difference in age and experience, both sensed the same thing, that humanity may be approaching a transition far larger than another technological cycle.

The idea of technological singularity was always unsettling because it challenged one of humanity’s oldest assumptions that intelligence is uniquely human and therefore naturally tied to human control. The singularity hypothesis suggested something far more radical that technological systems could eventually improve themselves at a pace beyond human comprehension, producing an intelligence that exceeds human cognitive capability. At the time, in 1993-96, even discussing such ideas in India invited amused smiles. We were a country still grappling with unreliable electricity, landline waiting lists, and typewriters in government offices. To talk about self-improving machines in that era sounded absurdly premature.

But history has a habit of moving slowly for decades and then suddenly all at once. The internet changed how humans accessed information, and smartphones changed how humans interacted with information. AI now threatens to change what information itself means. This is not another technological wave comparable to social media or e-commerce, but it can potentially bring a civilizational shift. The printing press democratised knowledge, electricity mechanised labour, and the internet connected humanity. I think AI may redefine cognition itself. That is why the current AI moment feels fundamentally different. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and other emerging systems are doing something historically unprecedented as they are beginning to perform tasks once considered exclusively intellectual. They write essays, generate code, compose music, summarise legal documents, diagnose diseases, create artwork, conduct research, and converse with startling fluency. 

Many critics comfort themselves by pointing out AI’s current flaws, as it hallucinates, lacks emotional depth, and cannot truly ‘understand.’ But this criticism misses the larger pattern of technological evolution. Early automobiles were unreliable and slower than horses on rough roads. Technologies mature exponentially while human intuition remains linear. We judge the future by the limitations of the present, forgetting how quickly those limitations disappear.

This is why singularity debates no longer feel theoretical. The unsettling part is not that AI can already imitate human capabilities; instead, it is the speed at which it is improving. Systems that seemed miraculous two years ago already appear primitive today. The interval between breakthrough and obsolescence is shrinking dramatically. Humanity is accustomed to gradual adaptation, and it seems that AI may deny us that luxury.

The greatest immediate threat from AI may not be killer robots, instead, it may prove to be social destabilisation. Human societies are built on meaning, and not only economics. Work is not only about income; it is also about identity, dignity, and social relevance. What happens when millions discover that cognitive labour, which was once considered secure from automation, is no longer uniquely valuable? For decades, developing countries like India viewed knowledge work as the path to upward mobility. Entire generations were told to study harder because intellectual labour was future-proof. But AI is beginning to challenge precisely that very foundational assumption.

Industrial automation disrupted blue-collar work first, and AI may disrupt white-collar work next. Lawyers, designers, coders, writers, analysts, accountants, customer support executives, and even educators are already witnessing AI-assisted transformation. Some roles will evolve, others may disappear entirely, and new professions will emerge. But transitions of this magnitude are never painless. History celebrates innovation retrospectively while ignoring the generations displaced during the process.

India possesses one of the world’s youngest populations and also has one of the largest digital workforces. AI could dramatically increase productivity and democratize access to education, healthcare, governance, and entrepreneurship. Rural women entrepreneurs, local language interfaces, AI-powered agricultural advisory systems, and intelligent public services could transform development outcomes. Yet AI could simultaneously intensify inequality if access, ownership, and benefits remain concentrated among a small technological elite.

Technology itself is never neutral, and it reflects the priorities of those who build and deploy it. This is where India’s conversation on AI remains surprisingly shallow. Much of our discussion still focuses on whether AI will make us globally competitive. The urgent questions are political: who controls AI infrastructure? Whose languages does AI understand? Whose biases does it inherit? Which jobs become expendable? Who captures the economic gains? What happens to human agency in societies increasingly mediated by algorithms?

The deeper issue is that AI is forcing humanity to confront uncomfortable truths about itself. For centuries, intelligence has formed the basis of human exceptionalism. We accepted that machines could outperform us physically because intellect remained our final frontier. But if machines begin outperforming humans cognitively in many domains, our understanding of value may fundamentally change. Perhaps that is why AI discussions evoke such emotional intensity. 

Every technological revolution reshapes not only economies but human psychology. Industrialisation changed family structures, television changed attention spans, and social media altered social validation itself. AI may reshape cognition, creativity, and even interpersonal relationships in ways we barely understand. Already, many people interact more comfortably with algorithms than with neighbours. And yet, despite these anxieties, I remain cautiously optimistic. Not because AI will automatically produce a better world, but because humanity has repeatedly demonstrated an extraordinary capacity for adaptation. The printing press triggered religious wars and political upheaval before enabling mass literacy. Electricity displaced industries before creating entirely new economies. The internet generated misinformation and addiction but also democratized knowledge and communication on an unprecedented scale.

AI, too, will produce both liberation and disruption. We are entering an era where ethical frameworks, governance systems, educational models,  and labour structures designed for the industrial age may no longer suffice. Yet our political systems remain trapped in short electoral cycles while technological acceleration operates exponentially. This mismatch worries me more than the machines.

Thirty years ago, singularity debates felt abstract because technological reality lagged far behind imagination. Today, imagination struggles to keep pace with reality, and that shift alone should humble us. Human civilisation may be approaching one of its most consequential transitions since the Industrial Revolution, yet our collective response often oscillates between hype and distraction.

Perhaps the most important question is not whether AI will surpass human intelligence, but the more important question is whether humanity can develop the wisdom necessary to coexist with technologies more powerful than any we have previously created. Intelligence without wisdom is dangerous, whether biological or artificial. And maybe that is the defining feature of our age. For the first time in history, humanity is no longer merely imagining intelligent machines; we are living alongside their early forms. The distance between science fiction and social reality has collapsed dramatically within a single generation. The singularity may still be decades away, or perhaps it may never arrive in the dramatic form as futurists have predicted. But one thing is certain that AI is no longer a peripheral technological development. It is becoming the central force shaping economics, politics, labour, warfare, creativity, and perhaps eventually even human identity itself. The question is no longer whether AI will change civilisation, but whether civilisation is prepared for what AI may become.

(The cover image is generated using AI)

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Invisible Entrepreneurs

September 7, 2026 Leave a comment

Across rural India and much of the developing world, millions of women wake up before dawn, manage households, tend to livestock, cultivate small plots of land, process food, stitch garments, rear poultry, trade locally, and keep families economically afloat through a variety of income generating activities. Despite their relentless productivity, most of this work does not count as ‘business’ in policy frameworks, financial systems, or even social imagination. These women are workers, contributors, and risk takers, but are rarely recognised as entrepreneurs. Their labour remains invisible, undervalued, and structurally excluded from the very systems meant to promote enterprise and growth.

The invisibility of rural women entrepreneurs is not accidental. It is the outcome of deeply entrenched economic definitions, gender norms, institutional biases, and measurement failures that collectively erase women’s work from formal recognition. To understand why rural women’s enterprises remain unseen, one must look beyond individual capability or ambition and examine how ‘business’ itself is defined, counted, and legitimised.

Entrepreneurship has a narrow and exclusionary definition. In mainstream economics, a business is typically imagined as a registered entity, operating from a distinct workspace, producing for markets beyond the household, employing labour, and generating measurable profits. This definition immediately excludes most rural women, whose enterprises are often home-based, seasonal, informal, and interwoven with domestic responsibilities. When a woman processes grains, sells homemade snacks, stitches clothes for neighbours, weaves handloom products, or rears goats for periodic sale, her work is seen as an extension of household duty rather than economic activity. The fact that it generates income is treated as incidental, not central.

This conceptual blindness is further reinforced by national accounting systems. Gross Domestic Product calculations and labour force surveys systematically undervalue or exclude unpaid and semi-paid work. Women’s labour in family farms, household enterprises, and informal trade is often categorised as ‘assisting’rather than ‘ownership’ work. Even when women contribute substantial labour and decision-making, land titles, business ownership, and enterprise registration are typically in men’s names. As a result, women disappear statistically, even when they are economically indispensable.

Social norms further deepen this invisibility, as in many rural societies, men are perceived as breadwinners and women as caregivers, regardless of actual income contribution in the households. When a man sells produce in the market, he is seen as doing business. When a woman does the same, it is often framed as ‘helping’ the family. Earnings generated by women are frequently pooled into household income, while men’s earnings are recognised as individual contribution. This asymmetry strips women of entrepreneurial identity and reinforces the idea that their work lacks independent economic value.

The location of women’s work also plays a critical role in its invisibility. Because women’s enterprises are commonly home-based, they blur the line between productive and reproductive labour. The home, traditionally associated with unpaid care work, becomes a site where economic activity is rendered invisible simply because it does not conform to spatial norms of business. While a shop has legitimacy, a kitchen does not; a workshop is considered productive, but a courtyard is not. This spatial bias penalises women whose mobility is restricted by safety concerns, social norms, accessibility, or caregiving responsibilities.

Most rural women operate outside formal regulatory frameworks, not as their choice but by necessity. Registration processes are complex, documentation-heavy, and poorly aligned with women’s realities. Limited literacy, lack of identity documents, absence of land titles, and dependence on male family members make formalisation difficult. Formal financial institutions, in turn, rely on formal registration to extend business credit, insurance, and market linkages. This creates a vicious cycle, where women remain informal because systems exclude them, and systems exclude them because they remain informal.

Despite extensive evidence that women are reliable borrowers and effective managers of small enterprises, rural women face disproportionate barriers to credit and access to formal business financing. Collateral requirements favour land and property ownership, which women rarely possess. Credit histories are tied to formal transactions that women are excluded from. Even microfinance, often celebrated as a solution, has limits. Loans are frequently used for household consumption rather than enterprise expansion, and women bear repayment responsibility without gaining corresponding control over assets or profits. Financial inclusion without entrepreneurial recognition risks turning women into financial intermediaries rather than empowered business owners.

Rural women tend to operate at the lowest end of value chains, engaged in production rather than aggregation, branding, or marketing. They sell in local haats (markets), through informal networks, or to middlemen who capture most of the value. Because their scale is small and operations fragmented, their economic contribution is dismissed as marginal. Yet, collectively, these micro-enterprises form the backbone of rural economies, sustaining food systems, crafts, services, and local trade.

The development sector itself has played an ambivalent role in reinforcing invisibility. Programs targeting rural women often frame entrepreneurship as a social development or empowerment intervention rather than a serious economic strategy. Women are encouraged to ‘supplement’ household income, and not to build scalable enterprises. Training focuses on skills rather than markets, confidence rather than capital, participation rather than profit. While these interventions have value, they inadvertently reinforce the idea that women’s enterprises are secondary and subsistence-oriented and not engines of growth.

Most measurement surveys and impact assessments rely on indicators that fail to capture women’s economic realities. Metrics such as revenue, employment generation, or formal registration overlook non-monetary contributions, seasonal income, risk mitigation, and household-level decision making. Women’s enterprises are often judged against male norms of entrepreneurship, setting them up to appear less productive or ambitious, when in fact they operate under entirely different constraints. When women’s work is not recognised as business, they are excluded from policy support, denied access to finance, overlooked in market development initiatives, and marginalised in economic planning. This exclusion perpetuates gender gaps in income, assets, and agency. It also represents a massive loss to economies that fail to harness the full potential of half their population.

There is growing evidence that recognising and supporting rural women entrepreneurs yields significant economic and social returns. Studies show that women are more likely to reinvest earnings in nutrition, education, and health, creating intergenerational benefits. Women-led enterprises contribute to local resilience, especially in contexts of climate stress, migration, and economic shocks. Yet, without recognition, these benefits remain undervalued and underleveraged. Changing this reality requires a fundamental shift in how entrepreneurship is conceptualised and operationalised. Definitions of business must expand to include informal, home-based, and collective enterprises. Economic contribution should be measured not only by scale and formality, but by sustainability, resilience, and impact. Data systems must be redesigned to capture women’s work accurately, including unpaid and semi-paid labour, joint ownership, and household enterprises.

Institutional reforms are needed to lower barriers to formalisation without penalising informality. Simplified registration, group-based enterprises, and recognition of alternative forms of collateral can help bring women into formal systems on their own terms. Financial products must be tailored to women’s enterprise cycles, risk profiles, and asset constraints. Credit should be linked to capacity building, market access, and asset ownership, not just repayment discipline. Market interventions must move beyond production to address value chains holistically. Supporting aggregation, branding, digital access, and collective bargaining can help women capture greater value. Technology, if designed with women’s realities in mind, can play a transformative role by reducing mobility constraints and expanding market reach. However, as experience shows, access alone is insufficient without confidence, trust, and institutional support.

Finally, social norms must be confronted directly, as recognition is not only a technical issue but a cultural one. When communities, families, and institutions begin to see women as entrepreneurs rather than helpers, power dynamics shift. Legal recognition, public visibility, and role models matter, and so does language. Calling women ‘business owners’ instead of beneficiaries is a political act, and not just semantics. Invisibility is not a natural state, and is produced through choices about what counts, who counts, and whose work is valued. Rural women have always been entrepreneurs in practice, even if not in name. Making their work visible is not about charity or inclusion alone, but it is about economic realism. Until rural women’s enterprises are recognised, measured, and supported as legitimate businesses, development efforts will continue to underestimate both the problem and the potential.

If this essay made you reflect on rural development, women’s entrepreneurship and human potential, subscribe to my blog for one new article in your inbox every week. It’s free!

(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the views or opinions of any organisation, foundation, CSR, non-profit or others.)

The cover image is generated using AI

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Why are we always mentally tired

August 31, 2026 Leave a comment

There was a time when exhaustion was easier to identify. We worked long hours in physically demanding jobs, worked on farms under harsh weather, commuted through polluted industrial cities, or managed households without modern conveniences. Fatigue had a visible cause as the body had been pushed beyond its limits. Sleep was recovery; weekends were respite, and holidays meant genuine distance from work. Today, however, many of us wake up after a full night’s sleep, scroll through our phones before even leaving bed, drink expensive coffee, attend meetings from climate controlled offices, or increasingly, from the comfort of our homes and still feel mentally drained before the day has properly begun. While we are physically more comfortable than many generations before us, yet psychologically exhausted. We automate chores, outsource tasks, order meals at the tap of a screen, and have technologies that promise convenience at every turn. Yet an unshakable sense of mental fatigue persists. Somewhere between smartphones, hyper-connectivity, and the rise of productivity culture, rest stopped feeling restorative.

A major reason for this exhaustion is that much of modern work no longer looks like traditional labour. We may not be lifting heavy loads or working on factory floors, but our minds are constantly occupied by invisible labour. A typical day now involves hundreds of micro-decisions and mental calculations involving responding to emails, interpreting workplace messages, deciding whether to switch jobs, managing finances, maintaining health routines, learning new technologies, and staying professionally relevant in rapidly changing industries. Many white collar jobs are dominated by meetings, presentations, reporting systems, compliance paperwork, and endless communication loops that often create the feeling of working without producing anything tangible. Alongside this is the emotional labour of being perpetually available, maintaining workplace diplomacy, projecting enthusiasm on video calls, and managing social expectations. In India, this mental burden is often amplified by family structures and social pressures. A young professional in Bengaluru may simultaneously be managing a demanding job, financially supporting parents in Patna, paying off loans, and navigating expectations around marriage, property ownership, and children. The body may be still, but the mind rarely is.

Even rest has become strangely performative, as vacations are often curated for social media validation rather than genuine relaxation. People travel to scenic destinations only to spend significant time documenting the experience for Instagram. Meditation is increasingly packaged through apps that track streaks and productivity gains. Fitness devices convert sleep into measurable targets, making even rest feel like another metric to optimise. Reading books is replaced by listening to productivity podcasts at double speed. Leisure activities are routinely reframed as self-improvement exercises. Walking becomes hitting step goals, journaling becomes building mindfulness habits, and hobbies are often transformed into side hustles. Modern capitalism has shown an extraordinary ability to monetise downtime, and as a result many people return from vacations with travel fatigue, feeling as though they need another break to recover from their carefully curated break.

The smartphone has also fundamentally altered our relationship with boredom, and not for the better. For much of human history, boredom created opportunities for reflection and mental wandering. Waiting in line, sitting on a train, or standing at a bus stop often meant observing the world, thinking deeply, or simply letting the mind drift. Today, every idle moment is quickly filled by digital stimulation. We scroll while commuting, eating, waiting, and even during conversations. Notifications constantly interrupt our attention, creating an environment where our minds rarely experience stillness. Yet creativity, emotional processing, and deeper thinking often emerge during periods of mental quiet. Instead of such quiet, we are constantly consuming fragmented information like news updates, memes, political outrage, financial advice, celebrity gossip, and global crises, often within the span of a few minutes. The human brain was not designed to process wedding photos, economic anxieties, climate disasters, and viral dance videos in one endless stream.

The internet promised access to unlimited knowledge, but it also dramatically expanded the scale of social comparison. Earlier generations often compared themselves to neighbours, colleagues, or extended family members. Today, individuals compare their lives with influencers, entrepreneurs, celebrities, and strangers from across the globe. Social media ensures there is always someone younger, wealthier, more attractive, more successful, or apparently more fulfilled. This constant comparison fuels status anxiety. In India, where rapid economic mobility has transformed aspirations, this pressure can feel particularly intense. First-generation professionals moving from smaller towns to cities like Gurugram, Mumbai, or Hyderabad often carry the hopes of entire families. Success is rarely individual, as it is tied to broader expectations of upward mobility, making failure feel heavier and rest feel undeserved.

At the same time, many of the traditional institutions that once helped people cope with stress have weakened. Extended families are often geographically scattered. Friends have become fragmented, and neighbours frequently remain strangers. Young professionals frequently relocate for work, often living far from families and familiar support systems. Global cities create opportunity, but they can also intensify loneliness. Humans are deeply social beings, and managing life’s uncertainties without strong support systems creates an additional cognitive burden. Many people now seek connection through dating apps, therapy apps, social media, and digital entertainment that often provide temporary distraction but not necessarily meaningful belonging.

Technology has undoubtedly made life more convenient, but convenience should not be mistaken for ease. Ordering food online may save time, but it also introduces endless choices and decision fatigue. Streaming platforms eliminate the inconvenience of physical rentals but replace it with endless scrolling. Remote work reduces commuting but often erases boundaries between personal and professional life. Every convenience creates new layers of management. Earlier generations often had fewer options, which sometimes meant less mental clutter. Deciding what to eat for dinner today can involve navigating dietary preferences, delivery costs, health concerns, discount codes, and the occasional emotional justification that ordering biryani is a valid response to a difficult day, which, to be fair, it often is.

Perhaps most significantly, modern life is shaped by persistent uncertainty. Questions about job security, artificial intelligence, housing affordability, climate change, political instability, and retirement savings create a low-grade but constant sense of anxiety. These concerns are not abstract. Rising temperatures in Delhi, layoffs in technology sectors in Bengaluru, inflation affecting families in London and Lagos, and geopolitical instability all contribute to a sense that the future feels increasingly fragile. The human brain struggles with prolonged uncertainty, often interpreting it as a threat that demands constant vigilance.

The solutions to this exhaustion are unlikely to be found in another productivity hack or expensive wellness trend. What helps is often remarkably simple, like protecting boredom, taking walks without constant digital stimulation, nurturing relationships where no performance is required, setting boundaries with work, reducing unnecessary commitments, and accepting that not every aspect of life needs optimisation. Mental exhaustion is not always a sign of personal failure or poor discipline. In many cases, it is a rational response to systems designed to capture attention, maximise productivity, and blur the boundaries between labour and leisure. In a world that celebrates endless ambition, constant growth, and relentless hustle, perhaps the real skill of the future is learning how to preserve attention and protect mental stillness. It may involve resisting the urge to monetise every hobby, declining unnecessary busyness, and reclaiming genuine rest without guilt. In an era defined by noise, speed, and infinite demands on our attention, uninterrupted mental peace may be one of the rarest forms of luxury available and increasingly, one of the most necessary.

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The missing business case for ending Tuberculosis

August 24, 2026 Leave a comment

Tuberculosis (TB) presents one of the most enduring paradoxes in global health. It is preventable, diagnosable, and curable, yet it remains among the world’s deadliest infectious diseases. Every year, millions of people fall ill, and more than a million lose their lives to a disease that medicine has known how to treat for decades. The burden is concentrated overwhelmingly in the Global South, particularly in countries such as India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, and the Philippines. Yet despite this enormous human and economic cost, TB continues to attract only a fraction of the funding mobilised for many other global health challenges. The question is not whether TB is a public health emergency, but rather why a disease with such a high burden struggles to attract sustained investment.

The answer lies less in epidemiology and more in economics. Global health financing is often driven by a combination of political attention, public visibility, strategic interests, and commercial incentives. Diseases that threaten wealthier populations, generate public fear, or offer lucrative opportunities for innovation tend to attract substantial resources. Tuberculosis does none of these particularly well. It is largely a disease of poverty, affecting populations with limited political influence and weak purchasing power. As a result, the market signals that typically drive investment remain weak, even when the social need is overwhelming.

This disconnect is evident in the global financing landscape. Governments meeting at the United Nations High-Level Meeting on Tuberculosis in 2023 committed to mobilising US$22 billion annually for TB prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and care by 2027, alongside US$5 billion annually for research and development. Yet current financing remains far below these ambitions. Many high-burden countries continue to face significant resource shortages, and funding gaps persist across national TB programmes. Research funding is even more constrained. Global investment in tuberculosis research remains only a fraction of what experts estimate is necessary to develop better diagnostics, shorter treatment regimens, and more effective vaccines. The world has repeatedly declared its intention to end TB, but its financial commitments suggest otherwise.

A major reason for this shortfall is the narrow donor base supporting the global TB response. Unlike some other health sectors that benefit from a broad coalition of governments, foundations, corporations, and private investors, TB relies heavily on a small number of actors. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria (GFTAM) remains the largest external financier of TB programmes worldwide. A handful of bilateral donors and philanthropic organisations account for much of the remaining support. Outside this relatively small circle, engagement is limited. Family foundations, corporate social responsibility programmes, impact investors, and development finance institutions have yet to embrace tuberculosis as a priority issue at scale.

This concentration of funding creates vulnerability. Any reduction in donor commitments, shifts in geopolitical priorities, or fiscal pressures in donor countries can quickly undermine progress. Recent debates around development assistance budgets and declining aid commitments have highlighted the fragility of the current model. The reality is that the global TB response rests on a financial foundation that is both narrow and uncertain.

The deeper challenge, however, is that tuberculosis has never been successfully positioned as an investment opportunity. Unlike cancer therapies, medical technologies, or chronic disease management solutions, TB offers limited prospects for commercial returns. The populations most affected are often served by publicly funded health systems or donor-supported programmes. Pharmaceutical companies face uncertain revenue streams, while investors struggle to identify scalable business models capable of generating attractive financial returns. In a world increasingly shaped by market logic, tuberculosis suffers from a lack of investability.

Yet this perception obscures a much larger economic reality. Tuberculosis may be one of the highest-return investments available in international development. The disease primarily affects people during their most productive years, reducing labour force participation, household earnings, and economic mobility. Children leave school to care for sick relatives. Communities lose workers, caregivers, and local leaders. The economic impact extends far beyond health systems, affecting productivity, human capital formation, and long-term development outcomes. Every case prevented and every patient cured generates benefits that ripple across households, communities, and economies.

The problem is that these returns are largely social rather than financial. The benefits accrue to governments, employers, families, and society as a whole rather than to any single investor. Economists describe this as a classic market failure. The social return on investment is extraordinarily high, but the private return remains relatively low. As a consequence, the market underinvests in solutions despite their obvious public value.

This is precisely why tuberculosis requires a different financing narrative. For decades, the disease has been framed primarily as a public health challenge. While this framing is accurate, it is insufficient. Tuberculosis should also be understood as a development challenge, a labour market challenge, and a human capital challenge. Countries across Asia and Africa are investing heavily in education, skills, entrepreneurship, and economic growth to capitalise on their demographic dividends. Yet the continued prevalence of tuberculosis silently erodes these investments by reducing productivity and weakening workforce participation.

Reframing TB as an economic issue rather than solely a health issue could unlock new sources of capital. Development finance institutions could view TB investments as essential components of economic resilience. Corporate CSR programs could recognise tuberculosis as a workforce and community development issue. Family offices and philanthropists interested in inclusive growth could support interventions that strengthen human capital among vulnerable populations. Impact investors could explore opportunities in diagnostics, digital adherence technologies, and community-based healthcare delivery. Innovative financing mechanisms, including blended finance and outcome-based funding, could help bridge the gap between social value and financial participation.

Such approaches would not replace traditional public health financing, nor should they. Governments must remain the primary funders of national TB responses. However, relying solely on governments, multilateral agencies, and a handful of foundations is unlikely to generate the scale of resources required to end the epidemic. The financing ecosystem must expand, and that expansion will only occur if the narrative changes.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of tuberculosis is that its persistence is no longer primarily a scientific problem. The tools to diagnose and cure the disease already exist, and innovations are emerging. What remains missing is sufficient investment and political commitment to deploy these solutions at scale. In an age that celebrates technological breakthroughs and billion-dollar innovation ecosystems, the continued burden of a curable disease reflects not a failure of medicine but a failure of financing.The global community has largely treated tuberculosis as a charitable cause. It is time to recognise it as an investment in human productivity, economic resilience, and social stability. Until funders, policymakers, and investors view tuberculosis through this broader lens, the gap between disease burden and financial commitment will persist. The missing business case for ending tuberculosis is not a lack of evidence that the returns are absent.

(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the views or opinions of any organisation, foundation, CSR, non-profit or others.)

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First Published on LinkedIn: 26 June 2026

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Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

August 17, 2026 Leave a comment

Author: Gabrielle Zevin | 476 Pages | Genre: Fiction | Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group | Year: 2022 | My Rating: 9/10

“What is a game?” Marx said. “It’s tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It’s the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever“
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time; 
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, 
Signifying nothing.

This famous passage is a soliloquy spoken by the title character in William Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth (Act 5, Scene 5)

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin is a novel about two friends who make video games together, but to describe it merely as a story about gaming would be as misleading as describing Moby-Dick as a novel about whale hunting. Zevin’s masterpiece is an exploration of creativity, friendship, ambition, grief, identity, and the fragile ways in which human beings love one another without always knowing how to express that love.

When I first picked up the novel, I expected an engaging literary story set against the backdrop of the video game industry. A few chapters later, I realised that the games were merely the canvas. Zevin was painting the extraordinary complexity of human relationships and the strange ways in which we create worlds, both real and imaginary, to survive the one we inhabit. Zevin understands that every act of creation, whether writing a novel, composing music, designing a game, or building a company, is an attempt to answer one of humanity’s oldest questions: how do we leave something meaningful behind? The medium, in this case video games, becomes almost incidental. The real story is about people trying to make worlds because they often struggle to inhabit the one they have been given.

The story follows two childhood friends and extraordinarily gifted individuals, Sam Masur and Sadie Green, whose lives become intertwined through collaboration, separation, misunderstanding, and extraordinary creative success. Their relationship defies easy categorisation, as they are not conventional lovers or just friends. They are collaborators, rivals, emotional anchors, and occasionally strangers to one another. Zevin refuses to reduce their bond into the familiar romantic template that dominates contemporary fiction. Instead, she asks a more difficult question, that can two people become the defining relationship in each other’s lives without ever fitting into society’s conventional definitions of love? That question becomes the emotional centre of the novel.

Reading their story reminded me that the people who influence us most are not always those we fall in love with. Sometimes they are the ones who challenge us intellectually, provoke us creatively, infuriate us endlessly and yet remain impossible to erase from our lives. Some relationships cannot be explained because they are not meant to fit into conventional categories. They simply exist, shaping us in ways we understand only in retrospect.

Having spent much of my own professional life designing programmes, developing products and trying to build ideas into reality, I found these sections deeply familiar. Every creator knows the strange mixture of excitement and insecurity that accompanies making something new. You begin with certainty. Halfway through, you become convinced the entire idea is flawed. Then, somehow, persistence carries you to the finish line. Creation is less an act of inspiration than an act of endurance. That may be why the novel resonated so deeply with me. It understands that building anything worthwhile, whether a business, a social movement, a novel or even a meaningful life, is emotionally expensive. Every achievement extracts a cost that outsiders rarely notice.

Popular culture often celebrates the myth of the solitary genius—the lone inventor, the brilliant artist, the visionary entrepreneur. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow dismantles that myth. Great creations emerge not only from talent but from friction where ideas are challenged, egos bruised, compromises negotiated, and failures endured. Sam and Sadie create remarkable games because they disagree passionately. 

The novel treats video games as an art form deserving the same intellectual seriousness traditionally reserved for literature, cinema, or painting. This is perhaps the novel’s most refreshing contribution. Too often, games are dismissed as entertainment or escapism, but Zevin recognises that games are narrative architecture. They are spaces where people rehearse choices, explore identities, confront loss, and imagine alternative futures. The novel argues that games possess a unique emotional power because they require participation. Unlike readers or film audiences, players make decisions. They fail, they try again, they persist, and in that sense, games resemble life more closely than almost any other artistic medium.

Another remarkable strength of the novel is its understanding of friendship. Contemporary fiction often privileges romance as the highest form of intimacy. Friendships frequently exist only to support romantic plots. Zevin reverses that hierarchy and makes friendship the central emotional relationship, possessing every complexity usually reserved for marriage or romance. Sam and Sadie hurt one another in ways that only deeply significant people can. Their conflicts rarely emerge from malice. Instead, they arise from silence, assumptions, pride, and emotional immaturity. Zevin understands that relationships often fail not because people stop caring but because they become incapable of communicating what they most need to say.

The supporting characters deserve equal appreciation, particularly Marx Watanabe, whose warmth and emotional intelligence provide a necessary counterbalance to Sam and Sadie’s intensity. Marx embodies generosity without becoming sentimental. He possesses the rare gift of seeing people as they are rather than as they wish to appear. In many ways, he becomes the novel’s emotional conscience.

What impressed me most was the novel’s refusal to produce heroes or villains. Every major character behaves selfishly at times and generously at others. They make admirable decisions alongside regrettable ones. Zevin understands that adulthood rarely consists of moral certainty. Instead, it is an ongoing negotiation between personal ambition and responsibility toward others. Relationships remain ambiguous because real relationships often are. Love does not always seek possession. Friendship does not always remain stable. Success does not guarantee happiness. Closure, when it arrives, is partial rather than complete.

By the final page, I realised that the book’s most profound insight had very little to do with technology or gaming. It was about the people who make us more creative, more courageous and more ourselves. The greatest masterpieces we produce are rarely individual achievements. They emerge from conversations, collaborations, disagreements and relationships that leave permanent fingerprints on our lives.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow deserves its reputation as one of the finest contemporary literary novels not because it speaks to gamers but because it speaks to anyone who has ever created something, lost someone, pursued an impossible ambition, or struggled to articulate love in all its imperfect forms. Gabrielle Zevin has written a novel that is intellectually stimulating, emotionally devastating, and quietly hopeful. Long after finishing the novel, I found myself thinking that the most important creations in our lives are often not the products we build, but the relationships that make those creations possible. Everything else is temporary. The worlds we imagine together, however, continue to echo, tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.

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Manu Mayank

Thinking Beyond the Obvious

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