3 days ago
Bulls to Blu-Smart: Mint's finest narrative journalism so far this year
Six years ago, I interviewed Isabelle Hasleder, a horse whisperer from Chennai. She helps business leaders communicate with, and understand, horses. A bit of 'horse quotient', she told me, could make people from the corporate world emotionally intelligent.
We can learn immensely from other animals, too, as my colleague Sayantan Bera realized. You are certain to be endowed with 'bull quotient' if you read his profile of Anmol, a big bull that has fathered over 25,000 calves! He goes for morning walks, takes oil massages, eats cashews, almonds, apples, milk and eggs. The rich diet gives his coat an attractive shine, making him photogenic.
This profile, an unusual one, is one of over 100 long reads Mint published in the first half of 2025. Our in-depth reportage mostly chronicles the rise and fall of businesses, and the people leading them. They also narrate the tale of ordinary people, those who get caught in a loop of greed because of the fear of missing out.
For instance, in March, our ace market writer, Abhishek Mukherjee, and Sashind Ningthoukhongjam narrated the tale of newbie investors getting a dose of reality:
Delhi-based insurance sector executive Prateek Verma, 37, says the biggest change his wife has noticed in him over the past few months is that he has become 'weirdly philosophical'.
Can this be attributed to the joys of matrimony?
The markets are a great leveller. Perhaps no corporation knows this better than HDFC Bank. For nearly four years, until a year ago, HDFC Bank's stock did not make any money for its investors. But things have started to change. In April, the bank's market valuation crossed ₹ 15 trillion, a landmark so far achieved only by Reliance Industries and Tata Consultancy Services. T. Surendar's in-depth analysis revolved around whether HDFC Bank can now shake up the pecking order of top global banks.
Reliance Industries, meanwhile, is shaking up the business of soft drinks, and a new cola war is on the horizon. Soumya Gupta, who writes on consumer businesses, invoked nostalgia. Remember the Campa Cola ad from 1983, which featured Salman Khan? It positioned Campa Cola as the drink of choice for the cool, urban rich. They sang in English and partied at sea.
Forty years later, everything has changed. Campa Cola is now just 'Campa'. The party boats in the ads have made way for traditional festivals, desi Indian sounds, and cheering cricket stadiums, with ordinary people sharing plastic bottles of Campa to the tagline 'Naye India Ka Apna Thanda'.
This nationalist rebranding appears to have worked, the story tells us, with supporting data.
Not all is well at Tata Consultancy Services, India's largest IT exporter. In fact, 2025-26 could be the company's most challenging year ever. N. Chandrasekaran, the Tata Sons chairman, once turbocharged the IT company as its CEO. In a move reminiscent of Nandan Nilekani returning to rescue Infosys, Chandra has now stepped in to fix things. Varun Sood, our ace investigative reporter, writes on the confusion within the company. The story ends with a billion-dollar question, just starting to do the rounds. You can't miss it.
Yet another investigation by Sood focused on two companies, one public, the second one private.
Blu-Smart, the private business, once emerged as the third alternative in the ride hailing business, which is dominated by Uber and Ola. It became my go-to cab service for airport trips. The electric cabs were clean, silent and the drivers very well behaved and disciplined. Even on the fast Noida-Greater Noida Expressway, they refused to drive at over 60 km an hour (scary when everyone else is going at 100 km/hr), which would violate company policy. And then, all of a sudden, the business spectacularly blew up.
The problems began at the publicly listed Gensol Engineering Ltd. Sood reviewed financial statements and spoke to many executives to piece together a fascinating account of how Gensol's balance sheet was used to build Blu-Smart's business. A governance puzzle, in short.
A third Mint investigation dived into the world of 'glowing' e-commerce reviews. Many of them are fake, written to manipulate you into buying. To understand the inner workings of this underground network, Shadma Shaikh, who writes on the app economy and digital culture, spent days observing messages being exchanged over nine Telegram and four WhatsApp groups. She found these groups to be hotspots, places where several key players in the network collaborated to manipulate product ratings.
Samiksha Goel, who writes on startups, investigated the workings of Astrotalk, an astrology app. The company claims to have over 41,000 astrologers on its platform, consulting with more than 450,000 daily users. However, Astrotalk's relationship with astrologers has begun to fray.
Mint's conversations with about 15 astrologers, five of whom have left the platform, revealed that in the last few months, Astrotalk has been pushing them to keep customers engaged longer, linking their incomes to their ability to have extended conversations.
'It's like a call centre now and not so much an astrology platform," said one astrologer.
Despite being in an occupation involving predictions, they had all failed to foresee the unfortunate turn of events.
Rich parents, meanwhile, want to cement their child's future. And they foresee an ivy league education as the starting point. But where and when do you begin preparing the kid?
In January 2022, a class nine student from a school in Gurugram met a counsellor seeking guidance on how to get into a top college in the US to study medicine. After laying the groundwork in the first year, the counsellor asked the student to shadow a doctor when she was in class 10. For a reason: the student needed to get up close and personal with blood, guts, warts and faecal matter to understand if these were the sort of delights she wanted to deal with on a daily basis over her career.
Devina Sengupta, who writes on workplaces and education, came up with this engrossing narrative on the rigour a student goes through to gain admission into an elite college. Don't miss an underlying commentary— on how upper-middle-class parents in India think.
A well educated workforce, one that can re-skill and up-skill fast, works for Indian manufacturing, currently in the middle of a disruption because of artificial intelligence (AI).
But the factory of the future isn't just built from steel, sensors, and AI—it's shaped by how thoughtfully we balance human potential and machine precision, Pankaj Mishra writes in this fascinating piece on Wipro. The company is testing a new model: 'Factories that think, workers who adapt, and automation built not to replace humans but to help them excel'.
Yet another story that dived deep into the possibilities of human potential came from N. Madhavan, who writes on the macro-economy. His story, on how Tamil Nadu's government wooed Nike, Crocs, Puma and Adidas, narrates the tale of industrialization spreading to the state's hinterland. That has empowered people from districts previously ignored in India's manufacturing map, particularly women, like never before.
And finally, I would like to draw your attention to the obsession with weight-loss, which is fuelling a drug market worth billions of dollars. Oprah Winfrey and Elon Musk have endorsed them. And though Indian celebrities haven't yet admitted to their use, the mystery slimming of Bollywood filmmaker Karan Johar and TV talk show host Kapil Sharma have drawn comparisons. T. Surendar and Jessica Jani recently wrote on the drama unfolding in 'GLP-1 drugs'—a high stakes patent battle, the rush for generic brands, coming price wars, and a long list of companies who could benefit from the weight-loss gold rush.
There are other terrific long stories this compilation doesn't cover. Do check them out. They all provide what clickbait news does not and cannot—narrative journalism, in-depth reportage and data blended with analysis of top issues from the world of business and technology.
