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Vandana Vasudevan
Stories written by In a new book, women share experiences of using ride-hailing services and bike taxis in South Asia An excerpt from 'OTP Please!: Online Buyers, Sellers and Gig Workers in South Asia' by Vandana Vasudevan. Vandana Vasudevan · 11 minutes ago Memories from a trip to the Israel border: At the crossroads of conflict, quietly the river flows Biblical sites and barbed wire and soldiers guarding the Israel-Jordan border is how I remember a visit from the winter of 2011. Vandana Vasudevan · Oct 14, 2023 · 09:00 am
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Business Standard
2 days ago
- Business
- Business Standard
Best of BS Opinion: In a swirl of crises, who still holds the torch?
There's something surreal about watching the Olympic flame being passed hand to hand, unwavering, even as torrential rain pelts down or gusts of wind try to snuff it out. That torch — symbolising effort, endurance and fragile hope — has to stay alight. And so, often, do we. In a world where each week feels like a relay of upheavals, someone somewhere must clutch the torch. Whether it's a policymaker braving backlash, a pilot navigating public doubt, or a seller trying to keep the algorithm from crushing them. The flame must travel on, however stormy the route. Let's dive in. Private banks are gripping the torch with white-knuckled resolve. As unsecured loans and agri lending turn slippery, Axis and Yes Bank have already stumbled, reporting sharp slippages. Yet the system-wide burn remains faint, for now. As our first editorial notes, the deeper tremor lies in a subtle credit pivot: with big corporations increasingly tapping capital markets, banks may soon be stuck with the riskier borrowers. More risk, fewer returns, while households pile on debt and liquidity flows unchecked. The flame flickers, but regulators must keep it upright. NITI Aayog, meanwhile, is navigating geopolitical gusts. As our second editorial argues, it has recommended letting Chinese firms buy up to 24 per cent in Indian companies without extra clearances. A torchy move, given the fraught 2020 border standoff, but also a pragmatic one. With India's trade deficit with China peaking and FDI flows from Beijing still negligible, this could signal a new openness — though the risks, influence-wise, remain very real. Carrying the flame into darker terrain is A K Bhattacharya, who dissects the troubling investigation into the Ahmedabad Dreamliner crash. The AAIB's hasty, error-ridden probe, minus a Dreamliner pilot no less, has dented public trust. Global scrutiny, aviation opacity, Gujarat's political sensitivity—it's a storm of scrutiny. Yet in this downpour, the need for transparency and technical reform shines brighter than ever. And Kaushik Das writes of a rare weather shift: inflation has dipped to 2.1 per cent, offering momentary relief. But economists urge restraint — torch-bearing is not torch-throwing. The RBI must resist aggressive rate cuts, lest inflation re-ignites with renewed ferocity. Finally, in OTP Please! Online Buyers, Sellers and Gig Workers in South Asia, reviewed by Chintan Girish Modi, Vandana Vasudevan captures the lonely resilience of gig workers and small sellers trying to stay visible, solvent, and sane in a platform-controlled storm. Their struggles of data dominance, algorithmic suppression, and vanishing autonomy are stories of endurance, often in silence. Stay tuned!
The Wire
03-07-2025
- Business
- The Wire
A Culture of Excess? What the Ease of Food Delivery Has Done to Our Eating Habits
Excerpted from OTP Please!: Online Buyers, Sellers and Gig Workers in South Asia by Vandana Vasudevan. Growing up in Mussoorie, smoking was an occasional, furtive indulgence for Aarav Tiwari, a twenty-eight-year-old lawyer in the Supreme Court. He would join his friends at a local paan shop and puff away, secure in the knowledge that their parents had no idea about their antics. Even in law school, about five or six years ago, he would only light up by walking to the corner shop and getting a smoke. Vandana Vasudevan OTP Please!: Online Buyers, Sellers and Gig Workers in South Asia Penguin Random House India, 2025 When he is at the court, he doesn't carry a packet. He has a deal with the paan shop around the corner, where he has paid the panwallah for twenty cigarettes in advance. Every time he goes and smokes one or two, the pan wallah sends him a message on WhatsApp to record how many cigarettes are down, and when it is zero, Aarav renews the deal. 'This helps me restrict my smokes because I have to make an effort to go down and buy a cigarette. If I had a packet, I would pull it out and light up.' But at home, when he orders through a quick commerce app, one can't order separate sticks, so it is always a complete packet. How would he have managed the late-night cravings for a cigarette without the apps? 'Well, if the delivery system was not there and I had a craving for a smoke at midnight, I guess I would have just turned over and slept. Of course, I wouldn't leave home and start searching for cigarettes at that hour. It would be too much of an effort.' There's a moment's pause, and he admits, 'Obviously, one smokes more, I guess. Because it has become so readily accessible.' In a sub-Reddit group of Gurugram, a young man seeks help to escape the grip that food delivery apps seem to have on him: I am a working male. I'm addicted to ordering food from Zomato & Swiggy. I have been trying to quit/keep it in check for 2 years now but to no avail. I order in almost daily even though I live with my parents and food is cooked at home. Sometimes twice a day. The ordering experience has become too smooth imo [in my opinion]. Fixing a meal for yourself takes effort, and the bland taste of home-cooked food, as compared to the junk that I order, also doesn't help. The repercussions are multi-pronged. This is affecting my physical, mental as well as financial health. I have tried a lot of things like uninstalling the apps, not renewing gold (membership), and eating before I'm hungry, but I end up coming back. I'm still trying. There must be others dealing with the same issue. Please share tips. Sub-Reddit groups of different Indian cities have threads by young working folks worried about health and high prices of ordering restaurant food but unable or unwilling to cook. A woman in Bengaluru living in a co-living arrangement without amenities or time to cook is sick of ordering healthy food on Zomato. She asks for recommendations for a meal service that will supply mainly salads. A man in Chandigarh is worried and seeks suggestions for newer restaurants in the city to break the ennui he feels because of frequent ordering. With delivery at one's fingertips, it is accessible for children who have grown up with mobiles since they were toddlers. During the pandemic, Zomato sent an email targeted at children titled 'Hey, parents not letting you order?' encouraging kids to order food secretly. The mail helpfully provided a cheat sheet to the kids to convince their parents to let them order. One of the tips was that kids should patiently wait until their parents fell asleep, then sneak in the order and enjoy it in their room quietly. The marketing campaign was roundly criticized for encouraging children to be sneaky and secretive. The campaign went live in August 2020 when no vaccine was in sight. Parents were angry that in their hurry to pick up the order and run in before being spotted, kids were liable to be negligent about the usual precautionary measures of sanitizing the packaging surfaces. Prof. R.S. Khare, a pioneering sociocultural anthropologist and a professor emeritus at the University of Virginia, now eighty-seven, has written about how moderation is a fundamental gastronomic principle of the Indic civilization. Portion control was inbuilt as it was impossible to have too much of so many dishes. Dietary balance was embedded in the ideal of niyamita ahara or a regulated meal. Overeating was both morally undesirable and personally harmful. Fasts were a way to control meals among Hindus, Jains and Buddhists. A Buddhist monk can eat only the amount necessary to sustain life. A Jain monk is not to be bothered with taste or any aspect of the food except that it is edible and available. From there to a whole nation ordering enough biryanis in 2023 via Zomato to fill eight Qutub Minars, as the company humorously noted that year, we have indeed come a long way.
