There is a panipuri-wala near my house who is often watching a cricket match on his phone while serving us panipuri. He somehow manages to keep one eye on the match and the other on dunking our puris into the pani before dropping them into our bowls. It is another kind of sport!

We often end up discussing the match. He has strong opinions about players, captains, selections and, occasionally, my opinions. Oddly enough, he is often the first person I think of when people ask me about sports-tech.

I have spent the last few years building a sports-tech company, and the more I get into the industry, the more I realise how loosely we use the term. A device that measures an athlete’s movement is sports-tech. A computer-vision system that analyses that movement is sports-tech. So is software that helps an academy manage hundreds of athletes. And technology that identifies talent or schedules a league or scores a match or helps a referee make a decision or produces a broadcast or allows a fan to interact with a match.

These are very different businesses solving very different problems. Of course, the common denominator is sport. And that makes sports-tech quite unlike many other technology sectors. It sits at the intersection of hardware, software, AI, data, media, entertainment, health, commerce and social tech.

SportsTechX tracked more than 7,000 active sports-tech startups globally in its 2025 report, including more than 350 from India. It ranked India third globally by number of sports-tech startups and second in cumulative sports-tech investment since 2020.

The opportunity in India

The richest sporting organisations in the US and Europe have a very different problem from a football academy in India. While they can afford sophisticated tracking, performance analytics, medical teams and data scientists, we may have a coach, a few hundred children and a phone. The technology required by Saudi Arabia, which is building new sporting properties, venues and events at remarkable speed, is different again. And in much of Africa, South Asia and other emerging sporting markets, the problem may simply be that the technology available to the richest sporting organisations is too expensive to be useful.

India is an interesting case. We have enormous gaps in talent identification, athlete development, sporting infrastructure, data and governance. But we have become rather good at building technology for scale, constraint and complexity.

And, well, those three things are not exactly in short supply in sport. Take performance technology. Elite sport is extraordinarily sophisticated now. It now knows almost everything about an athlete except perhaps what they had for breakfast. Well, give it a few years. Now, what happens when it is a young 14-year-old athlete? What happens when a coach has 60 children to look after? What happens when the academy cannot afford a room full of analysts? Could the phone camera already sitting in someone’s pocket become the data-collection device? Could AI extract enough information from ordinary video to make useful coaching and talent-identification tools available to thousands of athletes who would otherwise never have access to them?

Talk to anyone associated with football in India and they will tell you how data scarcity, fragmented systems and limited infrastructure are significant constraints, while also pointing towards lower-cost AI and mobile-based approaches as part of the solution. This, to me, is a far more interesting sports-tech opportunity than simply trying to build another expensive piece of equipment for an elite athlete.

A lot of sport still happens without leaving behind a useful digital record. A child plays for an academy. A tournament takes place. Someone has the scores. Someone else has photographs. A coach remembers how the child played. A year later, much of it is gone. There is no sporting memory. And without sporting memory, how do we identify talent? How do we measure development? How does a player become visible to someone who wasn’t there?

There is an enormous opportunity to build the digital infrastructure that sits underneath sport. For an academy. A school. A local club. A district tournament. An emerging league.

A club management system that connects athletes, coaches, parents, fixtures, video and payments. A league platform that manages registration, scheduling, scoring and rankings, while also creating a digital community around the competition. A system that allows an athlete’s journey to be recorded from the time they enter an academy until they reache whatever level they are capable of reaching. Well, these may not sound as exciting as an AI robot coach, but perhaps they are more important. Because the sporting world is mostly not the top 1%. It is everyone underneath. And technology for that part of sport is still surprisingly inadequate.

Then there is broadcasting. We are accustomed to watching sport because someone has decided that a particular event is important enough to spend money producing it. But there are thousands of tournaments and competitions that never get broadcast. A women’s competition. A junior tournament. A local football league. A school championship. What happens when cameras, computer vision and AI make it possible to produce a watchable broadcast at a fraction of the traditional cost? The question then changes from How do we broadcast the IPL better? to How do we make the next 100,000 sporting events watchable?

India is already very good at the first problem. JioStar’s IPL operation in 2026 ran more than 25 simultaneous feeds across 12 languages, and the season ultimately crossed 1.2 billion cumulative reach. It is now taking some of the technology developed in India into international sport, including AI translation work for the Bundesliga. That suggests a transition from technology for Indian sport to technology built in India for sport elsewhere.

Fan technology

And then there is the fan. This is also the part of sports-tech I know best. We started Fanoz with a fairly simple observation: watching sport was not a passive activity. Fans were predicting, commenting, comparing, checking statistics, playing games and arguing with friends while the match was on.

Fantasy sports demonstrated how powerful that behaviour could become in India. The regulatory environment has since changed fundamentally, and online money games are now prohibited. But the underlying desire to participate in sport has not disappeared. It has simply become more interesting. What if a fan could predict without betting? Compete without putting money down? Earn recognition for knowing the sport? Follow a player. Join a community. Take part in a challenge. Vote. Ask questions. Receive a reward from a team or brand.

The big lesson from fantasy sports was not that Indians liked fantasy sports. It was that, for a fan, watching was not enough.

Fandom does not start and end with a match. This simple observation has shaped much of our thinking at Fanoz. We started by building for the live match but increasingly found ourselves asking what happens before the first ball is bowled and long after the last one. Because if the relationship between a fan and a sport lasts all year, why should the technology only show up on match day? Thus came our terrific trinity: SELECT, PREDICT and RECALL, covering the match day and beyond. In Fanoz 2.0, we are working on solutions for every sports entity with an IP that longs for a direct relationship with the fan.

Somewhere along the way, we realised we were trying to solve a much larger problem. How do you use technology to help every participant in the sporting ecosystem build a stronger relationship with the sport, whether they are an athlete, a coach, a league, a broadcaster or a fan?

The global opportunity for India

That is India’s opportunity. We can build technology for the athlete who does not yet have a performance department. For the academy that does not have a technology team. For the league that does not have a digital infrastructure. For the broadcaster that wants to make a small competition commercially viable. For the federation that needs to stop losing its data every time an administrator changes. For the fan who wants to do more than watch.

And perhaps this is where India’s constraints become an advantage. We know how to build for the phone. We know how to build for millions of users. We know how to build for different languages. We know how to make complicated systems work with relatively little. We know how to build for people who cannot pay a fortune for technology. The world of sport is going to need all of that.

The Gulf is building sporting ecosystems. Emerging markets have sporting talent but limited infrastructure. European clubs have thousands of academies and community teams beneath their elite layer. Even the richest sporting markets have a long tail of organisations that cannot afford the technology available to their biggest clubs.

Maybe India’s opportunity is not to build the world’s most sophisticated sports technology. Maybe it is to build technology that makes sophistication accessible.

The next time I stop for panipuri, Nand ji, the panipuri-wala, will probably have another match playing on his phone. We will disagree about a captain. He will tell me somebody should have been dropped. I will pretend to know better. Somewhere in between, he will serve another customer without taking his eyes off the screen.

And I will probably find myself thinking again. We spend a lot of time talking about sports technology as though it belongs to elite athletes, billion-dollar leagues and AI companies. But perhaps its real test is much simpler. Can it make sport richer, fairer and more accessible for everyone else? If India can answer that question well, I suspect we will build far more than sports-tech for India. We will build sports-tech for the world.

This piece was earlier published on LinkedIn. This was written in the run-up to the IAMGAME event in August 2026.

And, oh, that beginning is fantastic! The comparison with Covid! “I didn’t see that coming!” Relatable, right? But this write-up needs a little critique. So, here it is.

(Written by AI, prompted by me)

– -

We’ll examine three deeper layers:

1. Is this deliberate acceleration strategy?

2. Is this pre-AGI positioning behavior?

3. Is this frontier-psychology contagion?

And then we’ll examine what would falsify his worldview.

⸻

Layer 1: Is This Deliberate Acceleration Strategy?

There’s a long tradition in tech of “narrative acceleration.”

When you:

• Emphasize inevitability

• Emphasize speed

• Emphasize displacement

• Frame adoption as survival

You accelerate adoption.

And accelerated adoption does three things:

1. Increases revenue for frontier companies

2. Attracts capital

3. Creates self-fulfilling momentum

There’s a feedback loop:

Belief → Investment → Capability → Belief

The COVID analogy is particularly potent because it frames:

“If you ignore this, you will regret it.”

That’s behavioral economics 101: loss aversion.

Even if the author doesn’t consciously think “I am accelerating the curve,” the effect of the essay is:

• Push people toward paid subscriptions.

• Push people to experiment aggressively.

• Push companies to allocate budget.

• Push executives to fear being behind.

That is acceleration.

Now ask a deeper question:

If frontier AI labs benefit from widespread fear-driven adoption, would it be irrational for ecosystem players to amplify urgency?

No.

That doesn’t mean conspiracy. It means incentive alignment.

⸻

Layer 2: Pre-AGI Positioning Behavior

There’s a subtle pattern in frontier tech when insiders believe a major inflection is near.

They begin positioning themselves as:

• Interpreters of the moment

• Guides to the transition

• Early prophets

Because if AGI (or near-AGI) actually arrives:

• Attention consolidates around trusted interpreters.

• Narrative leaders gain influence.

• Influence converts to capital, partnerships, advisory roles.

Notice how the essay does three things simultaneously:

1. Establishes insider access.

2. Frames the moment as historic.

3. Offers himself as a translator.

That’s strategic positioning in a paradigm shift.

Even if subconscious.

When technological discontinuities occur, the people who were publicly “right early” gain disproportionate status.

There is enormous upside in being the person who warned everyone before it became obvious.

The risk? Being dramatically wrong.

So this kind of public manifesto suggests he assigns high probability to continued acceleration.

⸻

Layer 3: Frontier Capability Shock

Now the psychological possibility.

When you operate at the edge of capability curves, you experience discontinuities earlier than the broader population.

If your daily workflow suddenly shifts from:

“AI assists me”

to

“AI replaces most of my execution”

your brain interprets that as a phase change.

Phase changes feel exponential even when they aren’t.

And here’s the critical psychological trap:

Humans extrapolate from personal domain shock to civilizational transformation.

But local maxima exist.

It is possible that:

• Coding assistance is approaching saturation.

• Task-length benchmarks are rising.

• But reliability plateaus.

• Or compute scaling slows.

• Or regulatory friction increases.

From inside the curve, it’s hard to perceive macro friction.

From outside, it’s hard to perceive micro capability.

That gap creates narrative polarization.

⸻

The Intelligence Explosion Assumption

This is the most consequential part of the essay.

The implicit claim:

AI → helps build AI → faster AI → runaway loop.

But for a true intelligence explosion, several conditions must hold:

1. AI meaningfully outperforms human researchers in novel scientific insight.

2. It autonomously identifies new architectures.

3. It improves its own training process.

4. Hardware scaling continues.

5. Energy constraints don’t bottleneck.

6. Alignment constraints don’t cap capability.

7. Governments don’t intervene.

8. Economic shocks don’t disrupt funding.

That’s a long chain.

Even one weak link bends the curve.

Intelligence explosion is not impossible.

But it is a multi-variable system.

The essay compresses it into a smooth exponential projection.

Real systems rarely behave that cleanly.

⸻

Economic Displacement vs Capability

This is the biggest conceptual jump in the essay.

Capability growth ≠ labor displacement rate.

There are mediating layers:

• Organizational redesign

• Trust and liability

• Cultural resistance

• Customer expectations

• Legal accountability

• Procurement cycles

• Risk tolerance

Even if AI can perform 80% of tasks in a job:

Firms don’t automatically eliminate 80% of workers.

They often:

• Freeze hiring

• Increase productivity

• Reallocate labor

• Increase output

• Expand services

Displacement is political and economic, not purely technical.

⸻

There’s Also Narrative Competition Inside AI

Within the AI ecosystem, there are competing camps:

1. Gradualists: productivity augmentation.

2. Accelerationists: imminent superintelligence.

3. Skeptics: scaling limits and diminishing returns.

4. Alignment-focused risk thinkers.

The essay aligns strongly with accelerationist framing.

Even if he doesn’t explicitly adopt that label.

That framing is contagious in frontier circles.

When you talk daily to researchers who believe superhuman systems are near, that belief normalizes.

Social epistemology matters.

⸻

Is There Strategic Signaling to Investors?

Yes.

Essays like this:

• Signal conviction.

• Signal insider knowledge.

• Signal proximity to frontier labs.

• Signal thought leadership.

For founders and investors, that increases:

• Deal flow

• Capital access

• Influence

Conviction is currency in venture ecosystems.

Measured caution rarely goes viral.

Bold inevitability does.

⸻

What Would Falsify His Thesis?

This is crucial.

If within 12 – 24 months:

• Task-length benchmarks stall.

• Coding quality plateaus.

• Model improvements slow despite larger training runs.

• AI-assisted AI research shows diminishing returns.

• Compute scaling hits cost barriers.

• Regulatory frameworks slow deployment.

• White-collar hiring remains stable.

• Productivity gains show marginal, not exponential returns.

Then his curve is bending.

If instead:

• Autonomous agents reliably execute multi-week projects.

• AI publishes novel scientific breakthroughs independently.

• Large enterprises reduce white-collar staff significantly.

• GDP productivity spikes sharply.

• AI-generated research surpasses top human labs.

Then his projection strengthens.

We don’t yet have decisive evidence either way.

⸻

The Deeper Question: Why Now?

Why this tone in 2026?

Possibilities:

1. Models crossed a qualitative threshold in internal use.

2. Competition between labs intensified.

3. Investor capital is flowing aggressively.

4. Compute scaling remains strong.

5. Insider sentiment shifted from “impressive” to “structurally transformative.”

When insider sentiment shifts, public narrative often follows.

But insider sentiment has overshot before in tech history.

⸻

The Core Tension

There are two competing truths:

Truth A:

The capabilities are undeniably advancing at historically unusual speed.

Truth B:

Technological systems often slow when complexity increases.

The essay assumes Truth A dominates.

A sober analysis must keep both live.

⸻

My (AI’s, on my prompts) Deep Assessment

He likely:

• Believes what he wrote.

• Feels urgency.

• Has financial alignment.

• Is positioned to benefit from acceleration.

• Is extrapolating from frontier experience.

• Is underweighting systemic friction.

The essay is not deception.

It is high-conviction extrapolation under uncertainty.

The risk isn’t that he’s malicious.

The risk is epistemic overconfidence during steep curves.

That has happened repeatedly in technological revolutions.

Sometimes the overconfidence was justified.

Sometimes it wasn’t.

We are still inside the experiment.

(Written by AI, prompted by me)

The debate on equal pay in cricket isn’t a clash between emotion and economics. It’s about who gets to define what ‘rational’ means.

In his Economic Times article “Robbing Peter to Pay Mary: The Real Debate Behind Equal Pay in Cricket” (November 5, 2025), Lloyd Mathias argues that the BCCI’s decision to pay India’s women cricketers the same match fees as the men’s team is politically correct but economically flawed.

Women’s cricket earns less, he says, so equal pay distorts market logic and risks creating “unsustainable” models. It sounds like hard-headed realism. It isn’t. It is an argument that quietly assumes the game has always been fair, and then uses numbers produced by that unfairness as proof.

The article was published in the same week that India’s women lifted the 2025 World Cup, a victory that reignited pride, visibility and debate. Instead of celebrating what the moment revealed about the potential of women’s cricket, the article used it to argue that BCCI’s equal-pay policy was an “emotional” gesture out of step with market logic. But if anything, the World Cup win proved the opposite: that performance has long outpaced the platform offered to it.

This isn’t just about cricket. It’s about how we let “economics” decide whose excellence counts.

What BCCI’s Equal Pay Actually Does, and Doesn’t

Let’s start with the facts. In 2022, BCCI equalised match fees for men and women representing India:

• Tests: ₹15 lakh per match
• ODIs: ₹6 lakh
• T20Is: ₹3 lakh

On this narrow metric, yes, a woman playing an India ODI now earns the same match fee as a man. But the rest of the pay structure is very far from equal:

Add to this:

• Men play roughly 45–50 internationals a year.
• Women play roughly 25–30.

So even with identical match fees, women’s annual earnings are a fraction of the men’s. What India has today is not equal pay. It is equal pay per match layered on unequal contracts and unequal access to matches. Parity is the headline; asymmetry is the business model. Any honest debate can only start by admitting this.

Myth 1: “The Market Has Decided”

The ET article’s core claim is simple: in a free market, pay follows performance and revenue. Men draw bigger crowds and more money, therefore they deserve more.

This assumes a free market that does not exist. Cricket, especially in India, is not some neutral arena where demand magically expresses itself. BCCI is the market-maker. It decides:

• how many women’s matches are scheduled,
• when they are played (prime time or weekday afternoon),
• whether they get a standalone window or are buried under men’s fixtures,
• how much marketing money backs them.

For years, India’s women’s cricket often played unseen. In early 2018, their entire tour of South Africa went untelevised — no broadcast, no stream. It wasn’t an exception; it was how the system worked. The scoreboard kept ticking, the cameras simply never showed up. That wasn’t the invisible hand of the market at work; it was a very visible hand turning the lights off.

When visibility is rationed, performance becomes a rigged contest. If one runner is held back at the start and then we time the race, the stopwatch can’t tell us who’s faster. But those reading the stopwatch will still call the result fair. That’s how inequality gets mistaken for efficiency.

Myth 2: “This Is an Unsustainable Subsidy”

The second pillar of the argument is that equal pay is fiscally dangerous, that it forces cricket to “rob Peter to pay Mary”.

Here are the actual numbers:

• IPL media rights (2023–27): ₹48,390 crore
• WPL media rights (2023–27): ₹951 crore (~₹7 crore per match — the highest debut value for any women’s league in the world)
• BCCI total revenue FY24: ~ ₹9,742 crore
• BCCI reserves: > ₹20,000 crore

The additional cost of giving women the same match fees as men is an almost negligible slice of that pie, well under 0.5% of annual revenue.

Meanwhile, cross-subsidy is already baked into how Indian cricket works:

• IPL surpluses fund the Ranji Trophy, Duleep Trophy and age-group cricket, none of which are profit centres.
• Test cricket is also sustained by this model, protected not because it’s commercially dominant but because it represents cricket’s heritage and competitive depth.

No one calls this “robbing Rohit to pay Ranji”. It is recognised as what it is: portfolio strategy in a single ecosystem. The moment women enter the ledger, the same behaviour is suddenly rebranded as “subsidy” and “distortion”. The finances haven’t changed. Only the beneficiaries have.

Myth 3: “Revenue Proves Men Are Worth More”

The article cites tennis to justify market logic, claiming that in 2024 men’s world №1 Jannik Sinner earned $19.7 million while women’s №1 Aryna Sabalenka earned $9.7 million.

That comparison misleads. These totals bundle dozens of tournaments, appearance fees and bonuses across unequal tours. The ATP calendar still offers more high-purse events, bigger draws and greater exposure. Comparing annual earnings is not proof of “market preference”; it’s proof of unequal opportunity.

At tennis’s shared stage — the four Grand Slams — men and women have received identical prize money in every round for over a decade. This was a policy decision, not a by-product of revenue, and the sport has continued to grow with it.

Revenue is not an objective measure of worth; it reflects three things:

· Visibility: how often you’re seen,

· Investment: how much is spent telling your story,

· Legacy: how long you’ve been given a platform.

Women’s cricket has been denied all three for decades.

The tennis numbers don’t show that men generate more value; they show that access generates value. When structure and visibility are equal, the gap narrows. When they aren’t, inequality disguises itself as economics.

Myth 4: “If Cricket Does This, Smaller Sports Will Suffer”

The article warns that equal pay in cricket could spark a chain reaction: if women in other sports demand parity, smaller federations might collapse. That sounds cautious; it’s actually evasive.

The cost of equal match fees is less than 0.5 % of BCCI’s annual revenue. To use smaller sports as a shield is disingenuous; the richest board in the world is not bound by the constraints of the poorest.

Parity isn’t a decree; it’s a direction. Smaller sports can scale it over time according to their economics and priorities. When arguments for the richest board in the world hide behind the struggles of poorer federations to defend inequality, can it be called prudence? It’s just policy dressed up as principle.

Pay Parity Needs Play Parity

Near the end, the ET article offers a sentence that almost everyone across sport, business and gender equity would agree with:

“True equity isn’t about matching pay slips. It’s about matching opportunities.”

Exactly.
And that is precisely where the structure is still rigged. Women’s teams:

• play fewer internationals,
• are given fewer Tests (India’s women’s team has played just 41 Test matches since their debut in 1976. Mithali Raj appeared in only 12 of them over a 23-year career, and Smriti Mandhana has featured in just 7 so far. In the same period, India’s men have played nearly 600 Tests. The gap is not merely numerical— it is generational, structural and cultural.)
• get less bilateral cricket,
• and fight harder for standalone prime-time windows.

That means:

• fewer match fees,
• fewer chances to build star power,
• fewer high-pressure moments sponsors want to associate with.

In any labour market, opportunity is part of pay. If one group is offered half the work, the fact that their “rate” is equal does not prove fairness. It proves how easy it is to make a number look fair while keeping power unchanged.

Equal pay without equal play is a tidy equation sitting on top of a crooked system.

What Smart Business Actually Does

For anyone who runs a business, the question is simple:
If one product line:

• has the fastest audience growth,
• launched with the highest first-year media-rights valuation in its category, and
• sits in the slipstream of a global trend (brands actively seeking women’s sports),

would you starve it just because the legacy product is still bigger?

That is exactly the position of women’s cricket today. Viewership in India has grown well over 30% year-on-year. The WPL’s debut season broke digital and urban TV records. Global sponsors are carving out dedicated budgets for women’s leagues. This isn’t corporate charity; it’s a high-growth vertical trapped in yesterday’s mental model.

Equal match fees are not a feel-good giveaway. They are:

• a signal to talent (“this path is viable”),
• a commitment to broadcasters (“this property is here to stay”),
• and a nudge to sponsors (“get in now, while it’s undervalued”).

That’s not sentimentality. That’s long-term positioning. Good businesses don’t wait for a market to be “big enough” before investing; they invest so that it becomes big enough.

Equal Pay as Strategy, Not Sentiment

Beneath all the charts and metaphors lies one quiet belief: that whatever the market pays today is what people are truly “worth”. But markets are not moral arbiters; they are mirrors of power. If one side of the mirror was dimmed for decades, its reflection will be smaller. That doesn’t mean it deserves to stay small. It means someone kept the lights low.

BCCI’s equal-match-fee decision is one small but important act of turning those lights up. It forces the institution to treat women’s cricket as a core asset, not a side project funded out of guilt. Equal pay doesn’t distort the market; it corrects for years of underexposure and then asks the market to finally do its job on level terms.

India’s women did not win the 2025 World Cup because equality was handed to them; they won in a system only just beginning to acknowledge their worth. Equalising match fees is not “robbing Peter to pay Mary”. Peter has been drawing interest on Mary’s invisibility for years. This is not theft; it is repayment and intelligent reinvestment in cricket’s next engine of growth.

For sports administrators, business leaders and anyone who cares about gender equity, the choice is not between emotion and economics. It is between:

• old economics that protects yesterday’s hierarchy, and
• modern economics that builds tomorrow’s market.

Equal pay is not the enemy of the market. It’s the moment the market is finally told to grow up.

The interesting thing to note here is that Indian fantasy sports platforms are not on Google’s Playstore. Yeah, look up Dream11 there. You won’t find it. Why though?

Let’s look at how the fantasy format functions. Gamers pay to participate in contests. A prize pool gets created. The fantasy platform takes from it a commission of 15–20%. The rest, 80–85% is distributed among the winners. The platform also expects and encourages gamers to submit multiple entries in a contest, thereby seeking multiple contributions. Typically, the higher the investment (=entries), the higher the chances of winning. Huge monetary rewards announced by fantasy platforms are akin to the announcement of lottery rewards.

Now, this is precisely why those ads you see during IPL matches conclude with a disclaimer: This game involves an element of financial risk and may be addictive. Please play responsibly and at your own risk.

This disclaimer has been mandated by the Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) for advertisements relating to online gaming, fantasy sports, etc.

So, why are Dream11 and its slightly less-popular cousins not on the biggest Android app store, the Google Playstore? The aforementioned risk keeps these apps away from Google. Yes, Google does not allow pay-and-play platforms in India. What about the iOS app though? Apple has no such qualms.

So, how does PlayCKC exist on the Google PlayStore?

PlayCKC brings in two gaming formats to the sports fan. One is called PlayCKC PREDICT and the other is called PlayCKC SELECT. PlayCKC offers both gaming formats FREE. Yes, it’s not pay-and-play but all free-to-play for the Android users accessing the app via Google’s Playstore. PlayCKC’s iOS version on Apple’s App Store has both free as well as real-money versions. The Android real-money gaming version is available on PlayCKC’s website.

But what does a free game get the gamers?

Loads. PlayCKC has been created for sports fans, not lottery enthusiasts. Gamers earn nanyas (in-game currency) on PlayCKC which they redeem against Amazon Pay gift cards or other popular gift cards and vouchers. There are real rewards on fans’ real-world behaviour. More on the gaming formats soon.

[*₹1,94,04,37,50,000 = $2.5 billion | FICCI-EY report: The Indian fantasy sports industry to touch $2.5 billion in 2022.]

Why Indian Fantasy Platforms Are Not on Google Playstore | But PlayCKC is was originally published in PlayCKC on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Can a business, an organisation,or an initiative do without Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube etc.? Can we browse the internet without getting every movement getting tracked? Do we know how to browse the internet without Google? Can we have a meaningful conversation without whataboutery, trolling and oneupmanship? Can AI really stop fake news? Can we move beyond the vanity metrics of likes and follows? Can we really exist without being on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube? Is this really a cause? Does it really matter? At LoudST, we are raising these questions and trying to answer those? What do you think? Can we survive outside of these platforms?

LoudST: A preview

To be or to beat?

“Yet another social media app! They are creating a need when there is none,” were my thoughts when I first learnt of LoudST (pronounced Loudest).

What does today’s social media not do? Very little. There is this platform to parade talent, mediocre or otherwise, as well as an opportunity for some to experience the legendary fifteen-minutes-of-fame phenomenon, query resolution is available from amateurs and professionals alike, access to the famous is as feasible as access to family, venting is easy, voyeurism and stalking are enabled to immense satisfaction, jealousy too is induced in good measure with “happening” updates. Professional networks have been alive and kicking. What are those behind LoudST possibly thinking?

We, the people, today

I ask LoudST founders the thinking behind the app. Before I get into the details of what I learnt, I must confess that their conviction about the app made me pause and think about the times we live in.

Times, they are a-changin’?

We live in anxious times. So much is happening. Opinions are like an accessory today, gaudily visible on people’s sleeves. We wear opinions, rebuke, offense and defense outwardly. We wear identities too. And our times require us to oblige into creating content in the form of statuses, comments, opinions, or in the paucity of time and thoughts, share borrowed content, with or without perusal.

So, why be LoudST?

As we create content almost mandatorily and network superficially, are we causing ourselves more dissatisfaction and triggering more anxiety? Have we created more chaos and confusion? At this time, probably we are seeing through the hollowness of “happy” updates on Facebook or Instagram. Subhash Chandra, one of the four LoudST founders, tells me we are at the beginning of a trend change, as we call out the pretend happiness on display and seek more meaning in life. He assures me that there indeed is a drifting change as is evident in people seeking respect more than portraying success on such platforms. “One can see people exploring hobbies; there is an increase in charities from middle class groups,” he offers.

Is it really a big deal?

Subhash further suggests that people want to move from talk to action. He is not indicating activism, not yet. He suggests organising something as simple as a skaters’ meeting. Swapnil Manish, another co-founder, cites the example of football/cricket fans getting together in a pub to watch a match. Aren’t these being done already, I wonder. In limited groups, they tell me. What else do they mean by action though? LoudST, they tell me, provides a ground for people to collaborate, in ways no other tool enables at the moment. Swapnil presents the proposition of the platform: discuss, engage, transform. He says that LoudST is primarily a discussion platform that enables structured and democratic discussions with an outcome: a conclusion that is likely to be followed by an action as more people engage with the tool. Finally I hit upon the disruption this tool proposes to bring. Conclusion! Have we ever seen one in the cacophony of comments in social media? Swapnil agrees, “The supposed debates and discourses are carried in the comments section everywhere, offering us no conclusion and rarely leaving us more aware.” LoudST stands to offer a platform to netizens to discuss a topic of their interest and take away from such a discussion. LoudST, I learn, will offer metrics around the demographics in a discussion and neatly segregate the points for and against a topic. This is new, I agree.

I soon realize that LoudST founders are thinkers and are not wary of voicing their opinions. Sanket Khemuka, the third co-founder and techie of the quartet, quipped at one point, “They (the other three) talk so much that they wanted to build a platform to talk.”

Amitabh Tiwary, the fourth co-founder, says they are tapping into the psyche of people being smart influencers. He explains, “…the psyche of being able to play a role in public policy and governance on things that matter to us and concern our daily lives.”

In or out?

Debates today, the team states, are limited to TV studios. Amitabh reiterates, “The common citizen today has little scope for participation in aspects of public life. Topics of debate and participants are the TV channel’s prerogative. There is a burning and growing desire in citizens to discuss and influence action in all aspects concerning their lives — education, healthcare, economy, civic issues.” I understand now. The narrative of our times, in spite of the social media, is in the hands of a few; original content is rarely triggered by the regular citizen. LoudST is talking about democracy in a new way. Is this too revolutionary though? Perhaps, as I gather from Subhash’s words, “We are massifying activism.”

Silly or smart?

I wonder where LoudST stands amidst the current social media stalwarts. I ask if LoudST will displace people from other platforms. Sanket declares it will not. “We are not a personal content platform, people on LoudST will not displace people from platforms such as Facebook.”

Too much is happening at the moment. In technology, economics, climate. Socially, while some things are changing at a snail’s pace, other things are exasperatedly trying to catch up with everything else. Change is no longer constant, it is accelerating. The rate of change in the world of technology, economics, climate and society is overwhelming and might outrun our capability to adapt. Playing catch-up with linear growth is difficult, this here, right now, is exponential.

Only time will tell if LoudST is an incremental growth element, if at all, or riding on the exponential growth curve, the potential of which we cannot fathom.

LoudST on Facebook, LoudST on LinkedIn

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com on November 3, 2017.

Why

Years ago, still a kid, I knew I would not want to carry another surname on entering (mandatory) matrimony. And I didn’t. I continued to carry my maiden name just as my spouse did. It was fair. A few years later, when bringing a child into the world, I knew it would not be fair any longer if our child carried her/his father’s maiden/family name. My spouse and I discussed it a few times and we found a simple solution: our child would not carry a family name — neither his nor mine; we agreed on a different last name very soon.

My daughter’s name is bereft of baggage. Her name does not endorse either of the patriarch and the matriarch way of living. Her second name is also devoid of another kind of identity: the caste identity. Which, I have come to discover, is a big deal. Still. Even after all the education, development and conversations.

I have also come to realise that I have been blind to my privileges in the society. The only inequality and injustice that I noticed was by virtue of my gender, the less privileged one. Yes, I knew and saw all other kinds of inequality and injustice, but my faculties did not allow me to really feel those.

My name has been my identity. It was not only the equality cause that ensured that I kept my maiden name but also the fact that I would cease to identify myself if my name underwent any change. However, today, as I write this, I am driven by something else: addressing the subtle inequalities and distractions for justice.

Beginning now, I am dropping my surname, which was also my father’s. As I was thinking of doing this, I also feared if losing his surname after having lost him in flesh and blood would bother me emotionally. Turns out it doesn’t. A mere surname does not prolong his existence in our lives: I have his blood in me.

My Choices

For all practical purposes, one needs a last name to survive. I have had a colleague with no last name and she had to repeat her first name as the last name in all legal documents. Also, in the times of search engines, I cannot possibly afford to not have a last name.

From entertaining the possibility of taking either or both the first names of parents to recalling characters in my favourite books, I perused several options last night (a few minutes after I decided to drop my surname). However, nothing beckoned. So, here I am, deciding to go with XYZ as my last name until I find one that calls out to me.

I am beginning with changing my name for all social purposes and on all social platforms. This is easy. By the end of this year, I should have found my last name and thereafter should change it in all legal documents. I have definitely added a task that is both gigantic and inconvenient to my 2017 to-do list.

My first name may still give away my religious identity (my namesakes are from other faiths too though). Soon though (may be in a few centuries from now), the world will appreciate faith too being a choice and not an identity delegated at birth. And names would just be what they are meant to be — a means to address another.

Addendum

My mother, a 75-year old lawyer, has always carried her maiden name and my father’s family name, a trend in today’s times. The first woman lawyer in her hometown, the second in the whole of Bihar, she must have been one valiant lady.

My daughter, a three-year old, will go on to define the rules of her life in a few years, hopefully being happier and more righteous than us.

I am between the two, and I believe they are better than me in every which way. I am making an effort to evolve.

I believe these words by Vera Nazarian resonate with most of us. Is this true? Yes. Is this how the world feels? No.

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Twenty four years ago, the day the foundation of my house in Dhanbad was being laid, my young-and-naive eyes opened up to an interesting fact: women labour came cheaper. While I cannot recall the exact difference in wages, I remember it was significant.

Is this distinction limited to the worker class?

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Once, 25 years ago, on-board a state-run bus in a remote village in West Bengal, our family was looking for a seat for my 65-year old ailing uncle. The women occupying the ‘reserved for women’ seats refused to part with theirs. One of them offered a seat to my then 48-year-old mom who insisted that the seat be offered to her brother who needed it more. How preposterous was the suggestion that a woman’s seat be given to a man? He travelled standing. Exactly 55 years ago, my mom had travelled with her family on the same route. When her fragile 60-year old father did not get a seat because of the reserved-for-women seats, the 18-year old took a seat and travelled the stretch with her petite, pale dad on her lap.

Are literal and figurative reservations the solution?

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I was 12 when I first realised that the world was different for women and men. I came back home, violated and distraught, after the first unpleasant encounter that most women go through every day. Besides lending a patient ear and a padded shoulder, my mom offered me a bitter but probably the most useful advice of my life. She said, “This is not going to be the last such experience. These are the things that you have to brave against if you want to move forward. It is not going to be easy.”

Should we really be setting the same expectations for our future generations?

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It was the first day of a series of exams. I had reached the exam venue early and saw hundreds of children, some anxious, some relaxed. I was 19. And this was the beginning of my life in a way. All of us fidgeted till the inside gate of the exam centre was opened. With no regard to rules or logic, everyone rushed to make an entry through the narrow, one-person gate. Crowds are unkind to both the meek and the mighty. And thus there it was. Another bad experience. Identifying the perpetrators was impossible. And it was not the time either. This was a test. And I had another one to take on paper. Within minutes, I was at my designated seat, sharpening pencils and arranging pens. In a couple of months, I found out that I was among the toppers. Of course, I had passed another test with flying colours, the results of which were not published anywhere.

Is it really a level playing field?

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When I stay late at work, the sense of urgency to close a discussion shows only on my face. My male colleagues would probably get judged if they were to indicate that they needed to be home to attend to a two-year old or an ailing relative. I have it easy, some would say. Wouldn’t it be just though if they and I are treated the same? Wouldn’t it be great if my husband could excuse himself early from his meeting, without guilt or judgement, so that his wife wouldn’t need kid-glove treatment and could stay late at work?

Isn’t it time organizations focus on family-oriented policies and not women-oriented ones?

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Decades ago, a now elderly cousin of mine took up his wife’s name as his second name and established a media house in Canada in her name. While a Kareena Kapoor Khan and an Aishwarya Rai Bachchan are widely accepted and praised today for the perceived balance of traditional and modern values, I wonder what kind of a response Umesh Vijaya’s gesture invited in the early ’80s. Many women I know who disapprove of taking their husband’s family name often cite the excuse of paperwork to resist the change. They fail to do much though when it comes to their offspring’s surname that is conventionally the father’s.

Isn’t it time we question subtle inequality?

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A friend of mine, a very promising journalist and writer, moved to the US when his wife, a nurse, landed a good job there. It has been ten years since that move. I find people around me roll their eyes in disbelief on hearing this. Such exceptions are not accepted without a hint of judgement. Look who wears the pants in the house.

Isn’t it time we move on from societal stereotypes?

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Early in my career, a few days apart, I came across two amusing observations by my colleagues. The first was about a lady manager. Her ambition and toughness were attributed to her having been widowed early and being childless. And then there was a man — a colleague’s husband — who left his job to pursue his passion of painting. Our colleague was in the family way, and her husband became the subject of scrutiny and was labelled irresponsible.

Men colleagues of mine have tremendous societal pressure to succeed. My men friends have often been subjected to the #LikeAGirl rebuke when they become emotional, take a break, or not take up certain responsibilities. Women colleagues of mine have the pressure of being a superwoman — super mom, super cook, super host, super employee, and super boss. And even if they were to succeed, very rarely do they get treated with warmth. We know about the negative correlation of success and likeability when it comes to women. A Harvard Business School’s experiment called Heidi and Howard tells how ingrained it is in us to judge harshly a successful woman.

On one hand, we offer pedestals to the devis of the earth or indulge them with kid-glove treatment. On the other, there are constant reminders of what a perfect woman is — obedient and balanced.

If we want a level playing field for our sons and daughters, let us create a fuss about gender equality. Let us make our children aware that they all are #differentbutequal.