Hi, I’m Bhuvan.This is my commonplace book.

Hyperpolitics

Hyperpolitics is what came next: intense politicisation, with neither institutional roots nor ambitions. “On the surface,” Jäger writes, “the Black Lives Matter protests would seem to have little in common with the mob that stormed the Capitol in January 2021. Morally, they are worlds apart … Organisationally, however, these movements exhibit a striking set of similarities: fleeting in duration, they maintain no membership…

China and global imbalances

A country that suppresses household consumption while simultaneously facing a collapse of property investment will run persistent current-account surpluses and will, other things equal, have a weak currency. A country with insufficient private savings and unsustainably large fiscal deficits will run persistent current-account deficits and will, other things equal, have a strong real exchange rate against other other…

Visualizing trade flows and tariffs

Cool site to visualize tariffs, sanctions, and global trade deals. https://portolan.cc/ https://x.com/i/status/2081473121953911112

Inequality stats

Lots of new inequality statistics from the World Bank's PIP on Our World in Data: .png>) Inequality statistics are heavily contested and rightly so, but read the right way, they still have some use.

We're all goldfishes

I’m feeling it right now. I had to set a timer for 15 minute on my computer and block all distractions to write this. If I didn’t force myself to focus I would easily get distracted by something after few minutes. Even when I’m doing things that I’ve been waiting to do it, I still feel the urge to do something else. I don’t know how and when this happened. During the last few years I was always studying, working, and doing…

Disenchated generation

The WhatsApp uncles and aunties generation that have seen the benefits of the two decades after liberalisation are content with their “settled” lives, their garba in Vietnam and their misguided belief about India’s standing going up in the world because of this government. But the reality confronting the Insta generation is that their future isn’t as rosy and the correcting and disciplining mechanism of the political system…

Perspectives on the student protests

Governments find such protests much harder to confront because there is no obvious ideological counter-narrative. One can’t simply invoke nationalism or accuse every dissatisfied student of serving foreign interests when the grievance concerns administrative failure. The usual political vocabulary becomes ineffective. More importantly, governments are generally better equipped to deal with identifiable opponents than of…